Night’s Landing

Twenty-Six

Juliet changed into her running clothes for her regular five-thirty-in-the-morning, three-mile run. Some days she did five or six miles, but at least five days a week, she did her minimum of three miles. Today was not a strength-training day. No sweating it out in the weight room later.

Thank God.

She stooped in front of her tropical fish tank and said goodbye to a rainbow-colored fish staring at her. Her brothers in Vermont had threatened to fry her fish. They thought she needed to do something about her social life, like get out of law enforcement. It was fine for them to be cops, but not her. And not a fed.

Cops and landscapers-an odd combination, but that was her family.

She took the stairs down to the lobby and said a cheerful hello to the doorman. In her next life, she wanted her own Upper West Side apartment in a building that had a doorman.

In this life, she couldn’t even afford an Upper West Side apartment with no doorman.

Her family didn’t have money. That was for damn sure.

She pushed open the glass front door and trotted down the steps to the street.

Crap.

She’d missed the part about rain in the forecast. She’d let herself get too preoccupied with Rob and with what Collins and his team of investigators weren’t telling her about the shooting. Were they going down blind alleys, barking up the wrong trees, going off on wild tangents? Hell if she knew. No question about it, it’d be easier for everyone if Hector Sanchez was their guy and he’d acted alone. She’d warned Collins not to go off half-cocked because the Dunnemores had missed their plane. Drama tended to follow them around. It would have been surprising, maybe, if they hadn’t missed their plane. Not that Collins had appreciated her advice.

And Nate. What was going on with him and the twin sister in Tennessee? There’d been nothing more on the anonymous letter.

At least nothing anyone had mentioned to Juliet. She was not assisting in the investigation. She was not doing anything anymore. Well, the parents would be arriving later today. That should take her off the hook. Time to get on with her own life.

She glanced up at the overcast sky. It was more of a misting rain than a real downpour. She sighed and jumped off the curb, heading across the street toward Riverside Drive and her regular route along the Hudson. She went at a light jog, warming up her muscles, letting her body get in sync with the idea that, yes, it was a running day, not a rest day. Once she reached Riverside, she’d stop and stretch a couple minutes before her three-mile run.

“Gotta keep up with the big boys,” she said half-aloud.

Rob was a triathlete; Nate was a mountainman. They both could run forever and kick ass with the best of them. They worked at it and so did she. Running, weights, boxing, tai chi, yoga, karate. She wasn’t an expert at any of them, but she figured they all helped.

A black car pulled off the curb and just missed running over her toes.

Irritated, Juliet resisted smacking its passenger window.

It came to an abrupt stop, the back door opening. Instinctively she jumped back-but she was too late. A dark-haired man shot out of the door, shoved a gun in her solar plexus and, using his free hand, jerked her into the back seat. She went sprawling over the smooth black leather and almost hit her head on the opposite door.

“Good,” the man said, settling in next to her. “You didn’t scream. You’d be dead now if you had.”

“I had that feeling.” Juliet sat up, her knee already swelling from where she’d banged it getting thrown into the car. It looked like one of the thousands of black Lincoln Town Cars the rich and the super-busy almost-rich hired to drive them around the city. “What do you want?”

“Information.”

The man had a slight, indefinable accent and sharp features. Juliet examined her knee. No blood. “What kind of information?”

“The Rob Dunnemore investigation.”

“Come on. I’m a lowly deputy marshal. Nobody tells me anything.”

He slapped her across the face. Hard. She had to stiffen her neck muscles to keep him from knocking her damn head off.

Her lip swelled almost immediately, and she tasted blood.

She didn’t say a word.

The man was going to get his information from her. Then he was going to kill her. The scenario was crystal clear to her.

“The other marshal,” he said. “Winter. Where is he?”

“I don’t know.”

He popped her another one on the mouth. “You will tell me what I want to know.”

His accent took some of the menace out of his words-she decided they’d have scared the hell out of her in his native language. But Juliet recognized her reaction for what it was. Bravado.

Let your fear work for you.

Who’d told her that? Her instructors at the academy? Her father?

The car had pulled into the morning rush-hour traffic. The driver was blond, older than the guy beside her in back. There was no one in the front passenger seat. Neither man wore a mask or a disguise. More bad news, since they obviously weren’t worried about her providing the police with their description.

Her door was unlocked.

This fact registered almost automatically-she wasn’t sure she’d even looked at the locks. It was as if she knew. This is your escape. This is what you have to do.

American car. These guys were foreign. Maybe they didn’t know how to lock up?

Just then the guy next to her realized his mistake. “The locks! Idiot!”

But Juliet was already making her move. In one swift, well-practiced maneuver, she pushed open the door of the moving car and hurled herself out.

She heard the guy in the back seat swear in another language. French? Italian? Not Spanish. She sort of knew Spanish.

She slammed onto the pavement and used her karate and tai chi skills to control her full-body roll even as she felt the pain tear through her.

Brakes screeched all around her.

She scrambled to her feet. A yellow cab came to a hard, crooked stop so close to her that she had to fall onto its hood to keep from ending up under it. Another car rear-ended it, and it was all she could do not to slide off the hood.

“You stupid, fucking bitch,” a man yelled out the window of another car.

She didn’t exactly blame him.

“Call the police,” Juliet told the cab driver, who was staring at her through the windshield, frozen behind the wheel. “Nine-one-one. Now. Tell them a federal officer’s been hurt. A U.S. marshal.”

The driver nodded, his hands shaking. “You shot?”

“No. Hurt.”

God, she couldn’t breathe.

Had she cracked a rib?

She felt a searing pain in her upper right thigh and glanced down as she eased off the hood of the cab.

Blood. Road rash. Nasty road rash.

A half-dozen other cars and cabs stopped. A young man identified himself as an E.R. nurse and asked if she needed help.

“Yes.” Juliet could feel him and another guy helping her off the hood. “Yes, I think I do. I’m a federal agent. The car I was in. Did you get its plate number?”

“No, ma’am. Please, try not to talk. Let’s have a look-”

“I’m okay. I need a car. I need to go after those assholes-”

“Ma’am. Please.”

They got her to the curb. She heard sirens. She saw a police officer. I’m fine…I’m fine. She didn’t know what she said aloud and what she only thought, but they all got the idea that she wasn’t going to let herself get strapped onto a gurney and stuck in any damn ambulance.

While she was still arguing, Joe Collins pulled up in his black G-man car. It was the first time he hadn’t looked amiable. “Get in the fucking ambulance,” he told her. “I’ll see you at the E.R.”

“You don’t give me orders-”

“I’m quoting your chief deputy. He’d said you’d be like this.”

He rolled up his window and drove off.

Juliet looked at the stunned E.R. nurse who’d helped her in the first moments after she’d leaped out of the car. “So. Okay. I guess I’ll get in the ambulance. But I’ll walk. No stretcher.”