Sea Swept (2 page)

Martine gave that famous head toss again. “You’re more interested in a silly fax than me. Than this.” With an expert hand, she tugged the dress down, wiggling free of it like a snake shedding skin.

Cameron decided whatever she’d paid for that body, it had been worth every penny. “No, believe me, baby, I’m not. This’ll just take a second.” He ripped the envelope open before he could give in to the urge to ball it up, toss it over his shoulder, and dive headlong into all that female glory.

Then he read the message and his world, his life, his heart stopped.

“Oh, Jesus. Goddamn.” All the wine cheerfully consumed throughout the evening swam giddily in his head, churned in his stomach, turned his knees to water. He had to lean back against the door to steady himself before reading it again.

Cam, damn it, why haven’t you returned a call? We’ve been trying to reach you for hours. Dad’s in the hospital. It’s bad, as bad as it gets. No time for details. We’re losing him fast. Hurry. Phillip.

Cameron lifted a hand—one that had held the wheel of dozens of boats, planes, cars that raced, one that could show a woman shuddery glimpses of heaven. And the hand shook as he dragged it through his hair.

“I have to go home.”

“You are home.” Martine decided to give him another chance and stepped forward to rub her body over his.

“No, I have to go.” He nudged her aside and headed for the phone. “You have to go. I need to make some calls.”

“You think you can tell me to go?”

“Sorry. Rain check.” His mind just wouldn’t engage. Absently he pulled bills out of his pocket with one hand, picked up the phone with the other. “Cab fare,” he said, forgetting she was booked in the same hotel.

“Pig!” Naked and furious, she launched herself at him. If he had been steady, he’d have dodged the blow. But the slap connected, and the quick swipe. His ears rang, his cheek stung, and his patience snapped.

Cameron simply locked his arms around her, revolted when she took that as a sexual overture, and carted her to the door. He took the time to scoop up her dress, then tossed both the woman and the silk into the hall.

Her shriek rattled the teeth in his head as he threw the bolt. “I’ll kill you. You pig! You bastard! I’ll kill you for this. Who do you think you are? You’re nothing! Nothing!”

He left Martine screaming and pounding at the door and went into the bedroom to throw a few necessities into a bag.

It looked like luck had just taken the nastiest of turns.

C
AM CALLED in markers, pulled strings, begged favors, and threw money in a dozen directions. Hooking transportation from Monaco to Maryland’s Eastern Shore at one o’clock in the morning wasn’t an easy matter.

He drove to Nice, bulleting down the winding coastal highway to a small airstrip where a friend had agreed to fly him to Paris—for the nominal fee of a thousand American dollars. In Paris he chartered a plane, for half again the going rate, and spent the hours over the Atlantic in a blur of fatigue and gnawing fear.

He arrived at Washington Dulles Airport in Virginia at just after six
A
.
M
. eastern standard time. The rental car was waiting, so he began the drive to the Chesapeake Bay in the dark chill of predawn.

By the time he hit the bridge crossing the bay, the sun was up and bright, sparkling off the water, glinting off boats already out for the day’s catch. Cam had spent a good part of his life sailing on the bay, on the rivers and inlets of this part of the world. The man he was racing to see had shown him much more than port and starboard.
Whatever he had, whatever he’d done that he could take pride in, he owed to Raymond Quinn.

He’d been thirteen and racing toward hell when Ray and Stella Quinn had plucked him out of the system. His juvenile record was already a textbook study of the roots of the career criminal.

Robbery, breaking and entering, underage drinking, truancy, assault, vandalism, malicious mischief. He’d done as he’d pleased and even then had often enjoyed long runs of luck where he hadn’t been caught. But the luckiest moment of his life had been being caught.

Thirteen years old, skinny as a rail and still wearing the bruises from the last beating his father had administered. They’d been out of beer. What was a father to do?

On that hot summer night with the blood still drying on his face, Cam had promised himself he was never going back to that run-down trailer, to that life, to the man the system kept tossing him back to. He was going somewhere, anywhere. Maybe California, maybe Mexico.

His dreams had been big even if his vision, courtesy of a blackened eye, was blurry. He had fifty-six dollars and some loose change, the clothes on his back, and a piss-poor attitude. What he needed, he decided, was transportation.

He copped a ride in the cargo car of a train heading out of Baltimore. He didn’t know where it was going and didn’t care as long as it was away. Huddled in the dark, his body weeping at every bump, he promised himself he’d kill or he’d die before he went back.

When he crept off the train, he smelled water and fish, and he wished to God he’d thought to grab some food somewhere. His stomach was screamingly empty. Dizzy and disoriented, he began to walk.

There wasn’t much there. A two-bit little town that had rolled up its streets for the night. Boats bumping at sagging docks. If his mind had been clear, he might have considered breaking into one of the shops that lined the
waterfront, but it didn’t occur to him until he had passed through town and found himself skirting a marsh.

The marsh’s shadows and sounds gave him the willies. The sun was beginning to break through the eastern sky, turning those muddy flats and that high, wet grass gold. A huge white bird rose up, making Cam’s heart skip. He’d never seen a heron before, and he thought it looked like something out of a book, a made-up one.

But the wings flashed, and the bird soared. For reasons he couldn’t name, he followed it along the edge of the marsh until it disappeared into thick trees.

He lost track of how far and what direction, but instinct told him to keep to a narrow country road where he could easily tuck himself into the high grass or behind a tree if a black-and-white cruised by.

He badly wanted to find shelter, somewhere he could curl up and sleep, sleep away the pangs of hunger and the greasy nausea. As the sun rose higher, the air grew thick with heat. His shirt stuck to his back; his feet began to weep.

He saw the car first, a glossy white ’Vette, all power and grace, sitting like a grand prize in the misty light of dawn. There was a pickup beside it, rusted, rugged and ridiculously rural beside the arrogant sophistication of the car.

Cam crouched down behind a lushly blooming hydrangea and studied it. Lusted after it.

The son of a bitch would get him to Mexico, all right, and anywhere else he wanted to go. Shit, the way a machine like that would move, he’d be halfway there before anybody knew it was gone.

He shifted, blinked hard to clear his wavering vision, and stared at the house. It always amazed him that people lived so neatly. In tidy houses with painted shutters, flowers and trimmed bushes in the yard. Rockers on the front porch, screens on the windows. The house seemed huge to him, a modern white palace with soft blue trim.

They’d be rich, he decided, as resentment ground in his
stomach along with hunger. They could afford fancy houses and fancy cars and fancy lives. And a part of him, a part nurtured by a man who lived on hate and Budweiser, wanted to destroy, to beat all the bushes flat, to break all the shiny windows and gouge the pretty painted wood to splinters.

He wanted to hurt them somehow for having everything while he had nothing. But as he rose, the bitter fury wavered into sick dizziness. He clamped down on it, clenching his teeth until they, too, ached, but his head cleared.

Let the rich bastards sleep, he thought. He’d just relieve them of the hot car. Wasn’t even locked, he noted and snorted at their ignorance as he eased the door open. One of the more useful skills his father had passed on to him was how to hot-wire a car quickly and quietly. Such a skill came in very handy when a man made the best part of his living selling stolen cars to chop shops.

Cam leaned in, shimmied under the wheel, and got to work.

“It takes balls to steal a man’s car right out of his own driveway.”

Before Cam could react, even so much as swear, a hand hooked into the back of his jeans and hauled him up and out. He swung out, and his bunched fist seemed to bounce off rock.

He got his first look at the Mighty Quinn. The man was huge, at least six-five and built like the offensive line of the Baltimore Colts. His face was weathered and wide, with a thick shock of blond hair that glinted with silver surrounding it. His eyes were piercingly blue and hotly annoyed.

Then they narrowed.

It didn’t take much to hold the boy in place. He couldn’t have weighed a hundred pounds, Quinn thought, if he’d fished the kid out of the bay. His face was filthy and badly battered. One eye was nearly swollen shut, while the other, dark slate gray, held a bitterness no child should feel.
There was blood dried on the mouth that managed to sneer despite it.

Pity and anger stirred in him, but he kept his grip firm. This rabbit, he knew, would run.

“Looks like you came out on the wrong end of the tussle, son.”

“Get your fucking hands off me. I wasn’t doing nothing.”

Ray merely lifted a brow. “You were in my wife’s new car at just past seven on a Saturday morning.”

“I was just looking for some loose change. What’s the big fucking deal?”

“You don’t want to get in the habit of overusing the word ‘fuck’ as an adjective. You’ll miss the vast variety of its uses.”

The mildly tutorial tone was well over Cam’s head. “Look, Jack, I was just hoping for a couple bucks in quarters. You wouldn’t miss it.”

“No, but Stella would have dearly missed this car if you’d finished hot-wiring it. And my name isn’t Jack. It’s Ray. Now, the way I figure it you’ve got a couple of choices. Let’s outline number one: I haul your sorry butt into the house and call the cops. How do you feel about doing the next few years in a juvenile facility for badasses?”

Whatever color Cam had left in his face drained away. His empty stomach heaved, his palms suddenly covered in sweat. He couldn’t stand a cage. Was sure he would die in a cage. “I said I wasn’t stealing the goddamn car. It’s a four-speed. How the hell am I supposed to drive a four-speed?”

“Oh, I have a feeling you’d manage just fine.” Ray puffed out his cheeks, considered, blew out air. “Now, choice number two—”

“Ray! What are you doing out there with that boy?”

Ray glanced toward the porch, where a woman with wild red hair and a ratty blue robe stood with her hands on her hips.

“Just discussing some life choices. He was stealing your car.”

“Well, for heaven’s sake!”

“Somebody beat the crap out of him. Recently, I’d say.”

“Well.” Stella Quinn’s sigh could be heard clearly across the dewy green lawn. “Bring him in and I’ll take a look at him. Hell of a way to start the morning. Hell of a way. No, you get inside there, idiot dog. Fine one you are, never one bark when my car’s being stolen.”

“My wife, Stella.” Ray’s smile spread and glowed. “She just gave you choice number two. Hungry?”

The voice was buzzing in Cam’s head. A dog was barking in high, delighted yips from miles and miles away. Birds sang shrilly and much too close by. His skin went brutally hot, then brutally cold. And he went blind.

“Steady there, son. I’ll get you.”

He fell into the oily black and never heard Ray’s quiet oath.

When he woke, he was lying on a firm mattress in a room where the breeze ruffled the sheer curtains and carried in the scent of flowers and water. Humiliation and panic rose up in him. Even as he tried to sit up, hands held him down.

“Just lie still a minute.”

He saw the long, thin face of the woman who leaned over him, poking, prodding. There were thousands of gold freckles over it, which for some reason he found fascinating. Her eyes were dark green and frowning. Her mouth was set in a thin, serious line. She’d scraped back her hair, and she smelled faintly of dusting powder.

Cam realized abruptly that he’d been stripped down to his tattered Jockeys. The humiliation and panic exploded.

“Get the hell away from me.” His voice came out in a croak of terror, infuriating him.

“Relax now. Relax. I’m a doctor. Look at me.” Stella leaned her face closer. “Look at me now. Tell me your name.”

His heart thundered in his chest. “John.”

“Smith, I imagine,” she said dryly. “Well, if you have the presence of mind to lie, you’re not doing too badly.” She shined a light in his eyes, grunted. “I’d say you’ve got yourself a mild concussion. How many times have you passed out since you were beat up?”

“That was the first.” He felt himself coloring under her unblinking stare and struggled not to squirm. “I think. I’m not sure. I have to go.”

“Yes, you do. To the hospital.”

“No.” Terror gave him the strength to grab her arm before she could rise. If he ended up in the hospital, there would be questions. With questions came cops. With cops came the social workers. And somehow, before it was over, he’d end up back in that trailer that stank of stale beer and piss with a man who found his greatest relief in pounding on a boy half his size.