Smokescreen Read Online Free PDF Page A

heartfelt word of badness. “He’s too…”
    “Nice,” Sam finished for her. “Doesn’t belong here and can’t even fake it. Somewhere he’s got a nice little house with a dog—golden retriever, wanna bet?—a little picket fence, a green lawn and a cat in the window. And maybe his mom lives with him.”
    The Captain’s tight mouth skewed into something resembling a smile. “ Nice. He’s after someone who came through here, remember that. But get him out of here all the same, and find out how he tracked us down.” She cocked her head. “Sirens. Move yourself, dammit. I’ve got panicked ladies to deal with.”
    Sam couldn’t hear the sirens. The explosion must have affected her hearing. Damn. But she didn’t doubt. She returned to the interloper and crouched down. Many parts of her body instantly suggested she would never rise from that position again, and she ignored them. She took the moment to turn herself back into her hooker self, and then she prodded his shoulder. “I know you’re in there,” she said. “Let’s go. We’ve got to get out of here.”
    He pushed himself to his hands and knees and looked over at her, his dazed expression making way for a trickle of anger. “What the hell—”
    “Holy freaking boom, ” she informed him. “That’s what the hell. Now let’s go.”
    “I don’t have anything to hide.” He put fingers to the darkness gleaming on his mustache and looked at the resulting smear of blood. “I’m not going anywhere. Maybe the cops can get some information about this place for me.”
    Sam bit back her exasperation. “Oh, really? You don’t think they’ll be interested in the way you’ve been hanging around here for days…or how you were hanging around by the van before it went up in itty-bitty pieces?”
    “What?” He frowned, not so much at her words but at what she guessed to be the discovery that his hearing was as affected as hers.
    “Or how about I tell them about the threats you’ve been making?” She was getting creative now.
    He heard enough of that to react strongly, sitting back on his heels to look at her. “I haven’t been—”
    She shrugged. “It’s all enough to put you on the wrong side of them. So come on. Run away now and you’re alive to come back and lurk another day.”
    He gave the house an odd, sad gaze. “I’m probably too late already. Madonna said the Captain didn’t keep people here for long.”
    Madonna. His informant. Sam needed to know more, so the Captain could change those things that had been compromised. She held out a sore hand. “Come on. Before they get here.”
    “I don’t hear anything.”
    Sam made a face at him. “Neither do I. But you better believe they’re on the way.”
    He must have. He rose unsteadily to his feet, smeared the blood under his nose around with his sleeve, and gestured at her to lead the way.
    Lead she did, grabbing his hand to pull him around not one corner but two, where she stashed him between a New Age herb shop and a Chinese take-out storefront. “Stay,” she told him, in the same commanding tones she might have used with his fictional golden retriever in his fictional picket fence-enclosed yard. He bristled—not that she could blame him—and she relented enough to add, “One of the Captain’s people wants to talk to you. That’s what you wanted, right?”
    After a hesitation, he nodded. A careful nod, one that meant his head probably still rang as much as hers. He leaned against the brick of the New Age shop and crossed his arms and raised an eyebrow at her, and she headed off to “get” his new keeper. Herself, of course. Shecouldn’t keep up the hooker guise, not and do what she needed this night. She needed something more flexible.
    Plain old Sam I Am.
    Well, almost. Because no one ever saw that part of her. But as close as anyone ever got.
    She took herself down the block to the run-down gas station across from the liquor store and let herself into the nasty little