Exception to the Rule Read online

  “Look,” Sleek said, even as he lost his fight with gravity and slipped an inch down the banister, headed for the floor. “We don’t have to take this any further. We’ll go. I don’t even know who you are—”

  “Your mistake.” Kimmer found Brad standing in the middle of the hallway. The entire population of the dining room was crowded around the hall entry, eyes wide, faces pale and set with fear even as they realized the moment was over. “Brad, do you have some rope? Or say, how about some barbed wire?”

  “Rope,” he said faintly, and then straightened and cleared his throat. “I’ll get some rope.”

  Sleek was on the floor by the time he returned, patted down for weapons and rendered as harmless as he was going to get. His blood puddled on the floor, and Kimmer had acquired a dishtowel to jam into his ragged wounds and a bath towel to soak up the blood. The B&B customers still huddled at the end of the hallway, but Angie had developed a stubborn jut to her chin and had not entirely retreated from bringing in the towels, even though she obviously didn’t know what she should do next.

  Kimmer put the Colt in Brad’s shaking hands and quite deliberately positioned them so the barrel pointed directly at Sleek. “He knows better than to move,” she told him. “He’ll only bleed faster.”

  Then she tucked the .38 away and made short work of Bulky. As she jerked the last knot tight, not sparing Bulky’s injured wrist, she straightened and glanced at Sleek. “How’d you find this place?”

  “Get real.” Tied, Bulky still had a mean sneer.

  “I’m real enough.”

  “No kidding!” Brad blurted. “You told us you were Carolyne’s friend.”

  Kimmer gave him a little smile. “I am. I’m just a kick-ass friend.”

  From the end of the hall came unmistakable if shaky murmurs of agreement.

  Kimmer turned back to Sleek; his head had rolled back against the wainscoting that ran along the base of the stairs. “Look, the sooner you talk to me, the sooner I can run to a neighbor’s and call 911 so you can stop bleeding to death. I stayed away from your femoral artery, but I think I could just about put my fist into each of those holes, so…” She tapped an impatient foot, arms crossed. Then on second thought she took the Colt back from Brad just so he could let go of it. “Besides, I figure it this way—you two have lost. You have no chance at Carolyne. None. The more you tell me, the better I’ll be able to stop everyone else who comes after her. Otherwise, you take the chance that one of your competitors could succeed.”

  Brad stepped forward, clearly more comfortable without the pistol in his hand—bold enough, in fact, to let some of his anger come through. “And just what the hell was Carolyne working on, anyway? She seemed so quiet.”

  “Computer things,” Kimmer answered absently, watching Sleek. Sleek, in turn, eyed Brad. Kimmer got the hint. “Brad, would you mind grabbing my purse for me? It’s hanging off the back of the chair where I was sitting.”

  If he realized she was getting rid of him, he didn’t show it. He sent a glare at each of the goonboys and stalked down the hall. Kimmer didn’t blame him for the anger; this intrusion on his peaceful, homey business would cause ripples for far longer than it would take to scrub the blood from the hardwood floor and replace the long, braided oval floor runner. She crouched by Sleek. “I want to know how you found this place. And you might as well start talking. Aside from dragging you outside to keep from messing up this hallway, I’m not going anywhere until I have what I want—and until I go make that call for help, you’re just going to keep bleeding.”

  “Someone here must have a cell phone,” Sleek said, gasping a little. “And none of them will have your attitude. Who the hell are you, lady?”

  Kimmer gave him a tight little smile. “I’m Carolyne’s insurance, and if you want to know the truth, this is a lightweight job as far as I’m concerned. You’re in over your head—but wait, you must already realize that.” She prodded his leg, evoking a hiss of pain. At the end of the hallway, she heard someone hit the floor in a clunk of a faint. Cries of dismay followed, and then everyone talking at once, instructions to one another regarding water, cold cloths, put her feet up…

  Good. They’d quit thinking about the sensible thing to do, which was for one of them to run off and call for help without waiting for Kimmer to do it. She said, “Do they look like the cell-phone type? Any of them? Besides, they’re busy. And Brad will be back any moment, if he can get past them.”

  Bulky said, “Just keep your mouth shut!”

  Kimmer could have hugged him. Well, maybe not quite, but close enough. For Sleek reacted predictably enough, snarling a curse at his companion. “I’m not dying for this!” He looked over at Kimmer, still crouching close, projecting a relaxed and in-charge attitude with every awareness of the Colt still in her grip, her wrist propped on her knee. He said, “A contact in Albany planted a bug on the target right before she left. Two of us tried to get her on the road—”

  “The gas-and-foo store, right?”

  He nodded, a bare brush of movement. “You know about that…we just took it from there. We’ve been checking all the small towns around here. Someone saw Carlsen at some big picnic here in town, and thought she was staying here.”

  “Did they happen to mention she has a bodyguard in the way of her big ex-spy cousin?” Kimmer asked. “Did you really think you’d get past him with all that doorway bluster?”

  Sleek shot her a sour look. “Him we were ready for.”

  Okay, then. That’s all she could expect to get from him; at this point she didn’t care whom he was working for, only that he and Bulky were not in fact new players in this game, but merely an extension of the goonboys she’d dealt with earlier. That still left only one unknown set of nasties—those who had followed her and bugged the Taurus.

  Not much of a comfort, given the truth of her earlier words to Sleek—others were sure to follow. And it didn’t matter that she wasn’t comfortable with the idea of working with Rio, that she didn’t have the crutch of her intuitive assessment to help her deal with him, or that she was all too aware that her old memories of this area had tangled with his charismatic and alluringly kind nature to make her every response to him suspect. She had to head for the camp, break cover and convince Rio to escort Carolyne back to Hunter. A Hunter safehouse was the only thing she’d trust at this point.

  She found herself staring at Sleek, and found him staring back with a suspicious frown. He didn’t think she’d follow through with her intent to help, she realized. As Brad arrived behind her, she set the gun carefully out of Sleek’s reach and grabbed his belt buckle, stripping the belt from the loops with a quick tug. “Everyone okay?”

  Brad put her backpack purse on the floor beside her. “I wouldn’t say that. But no one’s hurt.”

  “Good.” Kimmer gathered up the bloody towel, slipped the belt under Sleek’s thigh and jammed the towel in place, then cinched the belt tightly around the worst of the two close wounds. He cried out and Brad abruptly sat down to put his head on his knees, muttering, “Oh God, oh God, oh God.”

  By then she was done. “That should slow things a little.”

  Faint gratitude washed over Sleek’s face. Bulky snorted something crude in the background. Kimmer ignored him. She sat back on her heels, grabbed her purse and pulled out the camera, powering it up to take a quick series of images, several angles of both Sleek and Bulky. She had no doubt that the techs at Hunter would be perfectly capable of lip-reading Bulky’s reaction.

  Brad watched with a sick fascination, but she made no attempt to explain herself to him; at this point, let him speculate. He—and everyone here—already knew too much. She stood, lifting her coat from the coat rack that stood off to the side of the door. “I’m going to find somewhere to call 911.” Brad only nodded vaguely, and she said sharply, “Listen. You could get other people here asking questions. You should call 911 immediately if that happens—keep someone ready to do that. Get a cell phone, too. And if push comes to s
hove, just tell them everything you know. Carolyne and Rio will be long gone—you can’t hurt them with anything you say.”

  Or so she hoped.

  Chapter 9

  Kimmer called 911 on her cell phone as she headed down the walk to the dark parking area, confident in the secure nature of the Hunter-enhanced phone. As the sirens from the station on the other end of town rang their alarm, she pulled out onto the aptly named Maple Street and headed for her motel at a sedate pace. No one was likely to miss her in the hustle, and though she’d have to deal with the local law eventually, by the time they came for her she planned to be packed and gone.

  But first things first.

  At the motel, Kimmer ran into her first snag…cleaning day. The maid had knocked her backup phone battery askew in the charger, and there was no telling when she’d get another chance to juice it up. Communication was apparently not meant to be taken for granted, as usual. She settled the battery into the charger to grab what minutes she could from it, and swiftly went through the familiar process of downloading the camera to the PDA and hooking the PDA up to the phone to send Hunter the goonboy photos. In the moments it took them to upload, she scooped her toiletries from the bathroom, gave her face a quick scrub and jammed her newly laundered clothes into the suitcase. Like Carolyne, she was paid up for the week; like Rio, she deliberately kept her departure quiet. Within moments she’d thrown her gear in the Taurus and headed out of town.

  Not until she reached the seedy little gas station by the side of the road did she pull over. The place looked dark enough—only a feeble light by the gas pumps, only a dim light inside the garage office itself—and this time she took advantage of the wide shoulder just beyond the station rather than the actual station lot. She cracked the window in spite of the cold evening air—keeping track of the sounds around her—cut all her lights and pulled out her cell phone.

  “I expected to hear from you before now,” Owen said by way of greeting.

  “Busy,” Kimmer told him. “Get the photos?”

  “Mmm.” His thoughtful response made her think he was looking at them as they spoke. “I note the presence of blood. Not to mention bad attitude.”

  “Bulky. Yeah. Not Mr. Manners. You think you can ID them?”

  “Eventually.” Owen’s fingers drummed against his desktop. “I’m not sure it’s crucial. We’ve already got indications that the area is compromised—there are at least two organizations, both freelance power players, gearing up to descend on the area. That’s on top of the two we know about.”

  “I figured we’d hit that point when I ran into these two tonight. If Rio hadn’t taken Carolyne elsewhere, things would have been a lot messier than those photos indicate.” Secure phone or not, Kimmer had limits to what she’d say.

  “They look quite messy enough,” Owen said. “I think it’s safe to say you’ve left your mark on Mill Springs.”

  Turnabout seems like fair play. Although of course it had been her own hometown of Munroville that had irreparably marked Kimmer, so perhaps not so fair after all. She gave it a dark thought or two as she watched a battered old Fury pull up to the feeble light at the gas pumps. Eventually, a dark shape ambled out to take the man’s money. Not the owner, for which she was just as glad. It was unfortunate that his little wide spot in the road was the only convenient place to pull over for miles.

  “Kimmer?”

  “I’m here,” she said quickly. “Hunter might want to do some follow-up at the B&B. And I think we need to reassess. Things are escalating beyond what Rio and I can handle, especially when he doesn’t know I’m even here. I want to do two things—”

  “Make open contact with Rio,” Owen guessed. “And get them out of there.”

  “Get them the hell out of here,” Kimmer responded in no uncertain terms. “Do you have an available safehouse?”

  “If you can convince them, absolutely.” His chair would never do anything so mundane as creak, but she heard him swivel to his sleek keyboard and monitor setup and knew he was checking locations. “France seems a little out of the way, but we’ve got one south of Buffalo. About four hours from there.”

  “Put my name on it,” she said. “And don’t be surprised if I drop out of sight—I’m going to have to turn the phone off. I’ve had a battery incident.”

  “Ah.” He had the tone that meant he was keeping a straight face. “I see.”

  “It wasn’t my fault!” Kimmer protested, knowing it was useless. “I’ll check for messages every chance I get. But I have the feeling things could move fast from here.” Or else stall out completely. If Rio bought her story and her plan for the safehouse, she thought he’d having them moving within the hour. If not…

  In his place, would she trust Carolyne’s safety to a woman whose coincidental presence turned out to be quite deliberate and who’d lied to them at every encounter, in the end turning out to be as much of a player as anyone else in this little drama?

  Not.

  Owen seemed to be following the same train of thought. “Good luck,” he said. “If you break them loose, head for Buffalo, get some distance and give me a call. I’ll have directions ready for you.”

  “Will do,” Kimmer said, faltering internally as she realized she’d set herself up to face just the situation she’d been trying to avoid. Rio. Working together with someone she couldn’t read. With her judgment knocked askew by the past.

  “Kimmer? Are you all right?”

  She might have even answered, if she hadn’t glanced up. She was almost glad for the distraction, and the immediate loosening of her tight throat. “Aw, dammit—” For her old friend had been lurking inside the station after all, and here he came.

  Owen grew still at his desk, totally focused on her. “Kimmer? Is that a serious ‘dammit’ or an annoyance ‘dammit’?”

  “It’s what we get for sending me down to this area,” Kimmer growled. “I’ll be in touch.” She flipped the cell closed and looked up to see Garage Boy. He leaned against the car, straight armed, in a way that might have been casual but wasn’t. Kimmer preempted his opening line. “Hi,” she said. “I don’t need gas this time. I just don’t like to use the cell while I’m driving and this was the only place to pull over.”

  “Yeah, I guess this place is convenient like that.” His voice carried the same aggression as his posture, and Kimmer scrambled to sort out the change.

  He’d been talking to Rio at the picnic.

  But what could Rio have possibly said—?

  It didn’t matter. She was on her way out. She’d grab up Rio and Carolyne on the way out and—

  Headlights approached, slowed. Mildly distracted, Garage Boy gave the car a wave; the headlights blinked and the car moved back up to speed. It was hard to see in the darkness, but Kimmer felt a frisson of unease and flipped her headlight on in time to wash across the rear of the vehicle.

  Typical rental car. Classy dark sedan, not usual for these roads.

  Whoop, whoop! Sound the suspicion alarm! Without thinking, Kimmer jumped out of the Taurus, trying to sight at least a partial plate—and then whirled around to look at Garage Boy. “Who were they?”

  He frowned, annoyance and lack of understanding combined. “What does it matter?”

  “They’re in a rental, but they knew you.”

  A shrug this time. “Like I said, what does it matter to you?”

  “Let’s just say it does.” Kimmer stood with the open door between them, tired of playing games.

  “Let’s just talk about this instead.” He looked just as belligerent as Kimmer felt. “Let’s talk about something that happened a dozen or so years ago.”

  “Let’s not.” Kimmer didn’t know what he was getting at and she didn’t care. He’d remembered her—that was clear enough—but he wasn’t part of her life now, whoever he was. He was from the past, no matter how hard it tried to claim her. She sat down in the car, slammed the door closed and reached for the—

  Keys. The missing keys.
/>   Garage Boy raised his hand to shoulder height and dangled those keys in a taunting way.

  “Are you crazy?” She grabbed for her phone. “How long do you think it’s going to take me to call 911?”

  “The important thing is how long it’ll take someone to get out here. I happen to know there’s a big rig flipped on the road out to Pixburg. They might send someone, but they aren’t getting here anytime soon.”

  Not to mention she’d left behind a big fat mess at Angelina’s. Or that she didn’t really want to involve herself with the local law enforcement, not now. Kimmer briefly rested her head on the steering wheel, barely refraining from beating her forehead against it, however gently. “Okay,” she said, “go ahead. Make your move.” Whatever it is, just make it. Just give me an excuse….

  “You don’t remember me.” It wasn’t a question.

  Kimmer eyed him, unable to stop herself from searching her memory one last time. Nothing but the faintly familiar character of his eyes and mouth.

  “I’ve changed, I’ll give you that. But then again, so have you. All fixed up like that—pretty haircut, nicer clothes…gotta shape on you now. And your face…had no idea they could take care of a birthmark like that. Me, I suppose I had more hair. And last I saw you I hadn’t quite hit my growing streak.” He frowned. “Or broke my nose yet, either, I suppose.”

  “Teeth?” Kimmer said faintly. Please. Make a move. Give me a reason….

  “Yeah, I lost one.” He stared at her, and his expression had turned cold in the darkness. “You still don’t get it, do you? Leo Stark. I’m Leo Stark.”

  Good God. Kimmer had entered hell and hadn’t even known it. Leo Stark had been six inches shorter, with wild yellow hair and an unbroken, blade-thin nose that went with the rest of his undeveloped body. A few years older than Kimmer, he hung around with her brothers. He took part in the many nasty pranks on her when she was younger, and those truly frightening moments as she got older and fended off constant threats and groping. Disbelieving, she said out loud, “They promised me to you.”