Nowhere to Run Read online

  “You claim that your relationship with Delmore is casual,” Bell commented. She glanced up at Emily, with one eyebrow elevated in an expression of disbelief.

  “It’s more than a claim,” Emily said, keeping her voice at its usual controlled calmness. But her blood pressure was rising, and she was long past the point of merely being annoyed. “It’s a fact. And I fail to see exactly how that question pertains to my suspicions that Alex is bringing cocaine into the country.”

  Bell sat back in her seat. She tapped her fingers on the table as she studied Emily carefully. “We’re asking these questions because we’re trying to figure out what you’re doing here,” the police lieutenant finally said. “These are serious accusations you’re making. We need to be sure you’re not a jilted lover, or someone out for revenge. For all we know, you’re psychotic. For all we know, you’ve never even met the man, and—”

  “Do I look crazy?” Emily asked.

  Bell shrugged. “Believe me, honey, it takes all kinds.”

  Emily leaned forward. “I’m here, Lieutenant, because I teach high school in the seventh district.”

  Bell actually looked surprised.

  “I assume you’re familiar with that part of the city,” Emily said.

  The seventh district was in the part of St. Simone located on the wrong side of the proverbial tracks. There were guns and crime and drugs in the poverty-stricken seventh district, and those guns and crime and drugs didn’t stay politely outside the high school doors. Emily had seen students arrested at gunpoint in the corridors of her school. She’d seen students sick and shaking from withdrawal, desperate to get their hands on more of the drugs that would temporarily ease their pain. She’d had students, mere children themselves, bring their babies into class with them, unable to afford day-care. She’d seen empty seats, desks made suddenly vacant because some kid had overdosed on crack and died the night before.

  “I know what crack does to people—especially to children,” she told Lieutenant Bell. “If Alex is selling drugs, he needs to be stopped. I refuse to just sit by and do nothing.”

  “And you think he is selling drugs,” Bell said.

  “How else can you explain what I overheard?” Emily asked.

  “She correctly identified Vincent Marino from a photo lineup,” Salazar murmured to Bell.

  “Marino doesn’t exactly keep a low profile,” Bell replied, with a shrug of her narrow shoulders. “Any number of people could ID him.”

  “Still, it’s worth checking out,” the detective said. “I have to wonder what Vincent Marino—a man nicknamed ‘the Shark’—is doing on Mr. Delmore’s guest list. Someone is bringing drugs into town. We have been trying to trace the source for years. Maybe it’s Alexander Delmore. Maybe not. But we won’t know if we don’t at least investigate.”

  Bell was shaking her head. “It would take months to set up that kind of investigation,” she said. “Months, and more money than it would be worth spending on a wild-goose chase. No, I don’t think so.”

  Bell pushed back her chair, about to stand up and leave.

  But Salazar caught her arm. “Wait, Lieutenant. I have an idea,” he said. “Look at Ms. Marshall’s eyes. They are the same shade of blue as Diego’s.”

  Bell looked pointedly at her watch. “Is there a reason you’re telling me this, Detective?”

  “I say we get Diego to go undercover as Ms. Marshall’s…I don’t know…brother, I guess. With those eyes, they look like they could maybe be related,” he said. “And if Ms. Marshall keeps on seeing Delmore, she can get him to take her on another one of those floating parties, and Diego, playing the part of her big brother, can tag along. Then he can check this guy out.” He glanced at Emily. “Diego is my partner,” he said. “He’s the best in St. Simone. And probably all of Florida, too.”

  Bell was silent.

  Salazar continued. “Provided Ms. Marshall is willing to cooperate—and I think, from what she has told me, she is—we have got a quick and easy way to pull off this investigation. If Delmore is smuggling drugs, wham—we nail him. If he’s not, we pull out, and no one ever needs to know we suspected him in the first place.”

  Bell’s flinty gray eyes flicked over to Emily. “Are you willing to cooperate?” she asked. “Are you willing to put up with one of my detectives moving into your apartment for a week or two, posing as your brother?”

  The thought was not at all appealing. Emily’s apartment was tiny, with only one bedroom. But if she needed to do this to help catch Alex…She lifted her chin. “As long as your detective is willing to sleep on my couch and share the bathroom,” she said.

  “And what about the risk?” Bell asked. “If Alexander Delmore is responsible for bringing shipments of cocaine into the country, he could be an extremely dangerous man.”

  “I think it’s worth the risk,” Emily said.

  The door opened, and Salazar broke into a wide grin. “Hey!” he said. “Diego! Just the guy we were talking about….”

  Emily turned to get a look at the man Salazar thought so highly of, and froze.

  His name wasn’t Diego. It was James. James Keegan.

  For the first time in over seven years, Emily Marshall was face-to-face with Police Detective James Keegan.

  “Ms. Marshall, meet Detective Keegan,” Salazar said.

  But of course. Diego was Spanish for James.

  “Emily?” Jim said, his voice hardly more than a whisper.

  Emily tried valiantly to regain her composure. But it was hard. It was terribly hard. He was standing there, staring at her as if he couldn’t believe his own eyes.

  His brown hair was shaggy and long—longer than it had been seven years ago, when he was a newly recruited detective on the Tampa police force. His hair was long enough to pull back into a ponytail at the nape of his neck, but he wore it down around his shoulders. It gleamed, thick and wavy, in the overhead light. And soft. Emily couldn’t help but remember how incredibly soft his hair was to touch.

  His face was instantly familiar, yet there were visible changes. His nose was still crooked, his lips still full, his mouth still generous. But his cheekbones were a little more pronounced, adding a ruggedness and maturity to his face that hadn’t been there before. The crow’s-feet and laughter lines around his eyes and mouth had gotten deeper.

  His deep blue eyes, though, were exactly the same. They still seemed to sparkle and burn with life and heat. And they still were shadowed by some inner darkness his quick, easy grin couldn’t hide.

  She’d forgotten how big he was. At six foot four, he seemed to fill the room. His shoulders were broad underneath the thin cotton of his T-shirt, and the muscles in his arms stretched the sleeves. His faded blue jeans were the new, loose-fitting kind, and they somehow seemed to emphasize his lean, muscular physique. Emily wondered if he still ran five miles every day, rain or shine.

  She exhaled noisily, realizing she’d been holding her breath. “What are you doing here?” she asked.

  “I transferred down from Tampa, about three years ago,” Jim said. His deep voice was still husky. And he still hadn’t lost that slight trace of a New York accent. “What are you doing here?”

  Jim Keegan had been living in St. Simone for three years. Emily had trouble catching her breath again. Only chance had kept her from running into him before this. St. Simone wasn’t that big….

  She was silent as Salazar quickly sketched out his plan, realizing with a sudden icy shaft of fear that James Keegan was the man they’d all been talking about. James Keegan was the man who would be posing as her brother. He was the man who would come and live in her apartment for a week or two.

  No way. There was no way on earth she’d ever agree to that. She couldn’t even handle seeing him for a minute or two. No way could she put up with him for two whole weeks.

  “No way,” Jim Keegan was saying, shaking his head. “It wouldn’t work.”

  “Are you kidding, man?” Salazar said. “It’s a great way to gain Del
more’s confidence.”

  “And it would provide Ms. Marshall with round-the-clock protection,” Lieutenant Bell pointed out.

  “May I speak to you, Lieutenant?” Jim asked. He opened the door. “Out in the hall?”

  He glanced briefly at Emily as Lieutenant Bell pushed back her chair and stood up, and Emily knew that Jim Keegan didn’t want to spend the next two weeks with her any more than she wanted to spend the next two weeks with him.

  Jim politely held the door open for his boss, not daring to look back at Emily again. Damn it to hell, what was she doing here in St. Simone? He’d been so sure that she’d returned to her parents’ home in Connecticut after she finished her four years at the University of Tampa. Whenever he thought about her—and, damn it, he tried hard not to make a habit of it—he imagined her happily married to some well-mannered business suit, living somewhere in New England.

  So what was she doing here in Florida? And what the hell was she doing dating a well-known playboy like Alexander Delmore?

  And—God!—how had she managed to become even more beautiful in the past seven years?

  She’d been eighteen when they first met—and eighteen when they’d said good-bye.

  She’d been a college student. A freshman, a lousy freshman, at the University of Tampa, with waves of long reddish-brown hair that fell down past her shoulders and blue eyes he was convinced were the color of heaven. Her heart-shaped face had been soft-looking, and she’d had full, beautiful lips that were usually curved upward into a smile. She’d looked exactly like what she was—a nice young girl. Too nice. And way too young. And, God, how he’d loved her….

  Lieutenant Bell’s raspy voice interrupted Keegan’s thoughts. “Was there something you wanted to discuss, Detective?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “You’ve got to find someone else to take this case. I can’t do it.”

  “Can’t?” Bell said.

  “I was once involved with Emily Marshall,” he said bluntly. No use beating around the bush. “I’m sorry, Lieutenant, but there’s no way I can play house with this woman.”

  “Involved,” Lieutenant Bell repeated. “Intimately, I assume, or this wouldn’t be an issue.”

  The muscles in his jaw tightened. “It was a long time ago,” he said.

  “Who dumped whom?”

  “I was the one who broke it off,” Jim said. “She was just a kid, and—”

  “Spare me the sordid details,” Lieutenant Bell said, “and just tell me if you think she’s here right now because of you.”

  It took Jim a solid ten seconds to understand what she was suggesting. “You mean, do I think she’s concocted this story about Delmore because…”

  “She wants to get your attention?” Bell finished for him. She watched him, waiting for an answer.

  He shook his head. “No. You saw the look on her face when she recognized me,” he said. “She was surprised as hell.”

  She’d been so surprised, she forgot to hide the hurt that still glimmered in her eyes—hurt from the way he’d treated her all those years ago. God, he could still close his eyes and see her standing outside that University Boulevard bar, shock and pain and disbelief on her sweet face.

  “Besides,” he said, shaking his head slightly to banish the image from his mind, “what happened between us—it was over seven years ago.”

  “Good,” said the lieutenant. “Then you shouldn’t have any problem working with her on this case, right, Keegan?”

  She started back toward the interview room.

  “Lieutenant,” Jim said, “give me a break here. Please.”

  Lieutenant Bell turned back to face him, crossing her arms. “You and your partner are the only detectives available right now, and I suspect that Alexander Delmore won’t buy into believing that Felipe Salazar is Ms. Marshall’s brother,” she said. “If you tell me you’re still emotionally involved with this woman, I will have you removed from this investigation. But that will mean waiting a number of weeks before another detective is available. And that means there will be a number of weeks that Ms. Marshall is out there, by herself, with a man she suspects is running drugs.” She pinned Jim with her stern gaze. “I am not keen on the idea of Emily Marshall being a part of this investigation in the first place, but Detective Salazar is right. If we start immediately, we can get this done quickly and easily. And then Ms. Marshall will be out of your hair, Detective.”

  She was watching him closely, and Jim knew that she was unerringly reading the tension in his shoulders, neck and jaw. The idea of Emily being in danger was making him crazy. God, it was even worse than the picture that kept flashing in his head of Emily together with her new boyfriend, Alexander Delmore….

  “Now,” Lieutenant Bell said. “Are you telling me that you are still emotionally involved?”

  Emotionally involved? No way. Impossible. Not after seven years. Yeah, sure, he’d thought about Emily Marshall now and then, but that didn’t mean he was emotionally involved. And yeah, sure, seeing her again was a real surprise, so it was only natural that he should feel so off balance. And add to that the amazing fact that she was still so damned pretty. He’d always thought that imagination and memory tended to exaggerate things, that he’d somehow built up his memory of her until he remembered her as some staggeringly gorgeous woman. But she was even more beautiful than he’d remembered.

  But so what? He still found her attractive. Big deal. That didn’t mean he was emotionally involved.

  Besides, what good would being emotionally involved do you, a little voice inside of him asked, with more than a slight trace of sarcasm. You dumped her, pal. It’s not likely she’ll come back for more.

  “Are you, Keegan? Are you emotionally involved?”

  “No,” Jim said, but his voice sounded unnaturally hoarse, unusually raspy.

  He hoped to God he wasn’t lying.

  CHAPTER THREE

  JAMES KEEGAN.

  Didn’t it figure that it had to be James Keegan?

  Ever since Emily had overheard Alex’s argument with Vincent Marino, ever since she’d first come to realize that the wealthy society man that she was starting to think of as her boyfriend might be a drug runner, she’d felt as if she were living in some kind of dream world.

  Last night on Alex’s sailboat, she’d numbly pretended that nothing was the slightest bit wrong. She’d smiled at Alex as he came up beside her on the main deck and draped his arm casually around her shoulders. She’d kept up a steady stream of conversation as he drove her home in his BMW after the sailboat returned to its yacht-club mooring. She’d even let him kiss her good-night the way he always did.

  It had been late—long after two in the morning—when she unlocked the door to her tiny apartment.

  She would have gone to the St. Simone police right away, but she’d suddenly gotten scared. What if Alex suspected that she’d overheard his conversation with Marino? What if he was watching her apartment that very moment? If he saw her leave in the middle of the night, and if he followed her to the police station, then he would know for sure that she knew he was involved in something rotten.

  So she had waited for morning, then showered and changed into her favorite pair of khaki shorts and the T-shirt that was on top in her T-shirt drawer.

  Morning had taken forever to come. The hours between three and five-thirty had seemed centuries long. But then, finally, it had been six and then seven o’clock. Cars had started moving on the street. People in her building had woken up. Emily had managed to wait until eight-thirty before she left her apartment.

  Talking to the police detectives had been just another unreal part of that horrible, weird dream.

  And then James Keegan had shown up.

  That had been the final bizarre touch to an already surreal experience. Boy, how many times had James Keegan appeared out of the blue in her dreams at night? Too many to count.

  She would be having some nice, friendly, soothing dream. She’d dream she was out shopping with Ca
rly, or having dinner with some of the other teachers from the high school. But then everything would shift, and Jim Keegan would suddenly be there. Sometimes he would just look at her, with that familiar hunger in his eyes. Sometimes he would touch her, the way he’d touched her that one weekend they’d shared, the weekend he’d made love to her. But sometimes she’d see him, not in his own bed, but in that horrible hospital bed, after he’d been shot, with all those awful tubes and wires connecting him to all kinds of monitors and respirators. She would beg him not to leave her, not to die, but he would never even open his eyes.

  Never, not even in Emily’s wildest dreams, had James ever gotten assigned by his boss to move into her apartment and pretend that he was her brother.

  And that made this funky real-life dream a true nightmare.

  She was trapped. Sure, she could say no, she didn’t want Jim to move in, she didn’t want him to invade her life again. Of course, that would leave Alexander Delmore free to bring as many kilos of cocaine as he wanted into the city.

  Emily stumbled on the rough blacktop of the parking lot outside of the police station. Brother, she was exhausted. And this nightmare was only beginning.

  The hot July sun beat down on her mercilessly as she fished in the pocket of her shorts for the keys to her car. She dropped the key ring twice before she realized there was a reason her hands were shaking and her vision was blurred.

  She was crying.

  She’d held up so well while the police asked all their questions. She hadn’t lost her temper even once—she had remained calm and cool, even when she felt insulted and embarrassed. And, most importantly, she hadn’t screamed hysterically when Jim Keegan walked into the room. She hadn’t burst into tears. She hadn’t even looked more than surprised.

  This must be a delayed reaction, she thought dazedly. She’d felt like crying ever since she’d found out that she had misjudged Alex so completely.

  Emily futilely wiped her eyes with the back of her hand and tried one more time to get the car key into the door’s lock. The lock popped up, and she opened the door. The inside of her car was hotter than Hades, but she got in anyway and started the engine. She opened all four of the power windows and cranked the air-conditioning.