All Jacked Up by Penny McCall Page A

with a grimace on his face. “You think she went back home?”
    “She tried to blow her house up—”
    “He tried to blow it up.”
    “If she was willing to let him, then she knows it’s suicide to go back there.”
    “So how’re we gonna find her?”
    “We’ll have to call him .”
    Carlo sat up, forgetting about his backside. “We can’t. He said not to call him until the job’s done.”
    But Danny was already dialing. “No choice,” he said while the phone rang in his ear. “Either we find Aubrey Sullivan and silence her or we’ll be the ones facing a silencer.”
    “Yeah, I know, and it’s all my fault.”
    Danny would have been saying that himself if he’d had any spit left in his mouth. As it was, when the connection went through and a woman’s voice answered, it took him two tries to get the name out. She put him on hold, and that called for countermeasures so the stammer didn’t escalate. He flipped out his pocket-knife and cut the plastic tie on the minibar, downing a bottle of no-name whiskey, then another.
    “Hey, gimme one of those.”
    “You drink, you talk.”
    Carlo put up both his hands and sidled back a couple of steps. “Talking don’t work so good for me.”
    “Now you figure it out.” For two cents Danny would’ve walked away and come back later to collect the body, but then he’d catch hell from his mother, who’d raised Carlo after the kid’s parents got caught in a turf war. It was a close call as to who Danny feared the most—
    “I told you not to call here until the job is finished.”
    Okay, not such a close call. “Uhhhh . . .” All the breath rushed out of Danny’s lungs and his rectum puckered tighter than a drawstring purse in the hands of a miser. “We, ahhhh . . .”
    “Failed.”
    “Well, uh, I wouldn’t put it that way, exactly. More like we were just . . . scoping out the situation.”
    “The situation slipped out of D.C. right under your nose. The woman is only a librarian.”
    “A pretty resourceful librarian.” And he was saddled with the human equivalent of a traffic jam, slow, stupid, and irritating as hell. Danny glanced over, watched as Carlo peeled his boxers halfway down and pointed his ass at the mirror so he could count the rock salt bruises. He was keeping track on his fingers.
    “She is simply headstrong,” the voice on the other end of the phone said, “always making the wrong choices.”
    “Not anymore. She’s not alone, and the guy she hooked up with seems to know what he’s doing.”
    “He does.”
    “And she’s not exactly the shrinking-violet type,” Danny said. She was more the shoot-first-and-ask-questions-later type. Thank God she didn’t carry a gun because she was pretty dangerous when she improvised. “We know what to expect now. When we catch up with them, things’ll turn out differently. We, uh, just wondered if you might, uh, know which direction they went.”
    There was silence from the other end of the line, the nail-biting kind of silence that came before the jury foreman speaks the verdict, and then, “I hear the Blue Ridge Parkway is nice this time of year.” The words were innocuous, pleasant even, but the tone was cold enough to chap Danny’s ear.
    “We won’t lose her again.”
    There was nothing but a click from the other end of the line, but it was a final sort of click, like the lid of a coffin settling gently closed.

chapter 8
    “THIS WAY,” JACK CALLED OVER HIS SHOULDER, STRIK ING out for the riverbank opposite the one with the homicidal pickup driver. He was wading out of the water before he looked back and saw Aubrey floating serenely off toward the edge of the waterfall, feet first, just the toes of her shoes, her face, and that damn pink leather backpack above the surface.
    He took one long wistful look at the nice, sunny dry land just steps away, then splashed back through the shallows and dove into near-freezing water. His momentum and a couple of breast-strokes took him to the