&nb
sp; Maggie’s eyes flew open. “How’d you know what I was thinking about?”
He grinned. “I know you better than you think, lady.”
“Am I that transparent?”
“No, I’m that good,” he said, reaching down beside his bed for his abandoned glass of whiskey. “I’ll tell you something else, Superwoman.”
She didn’t even bother to snap at him for the nickname. “What?” she demanded warily.
“I don’t think you’ll be abandoning me in Houston. I think we’ve got more in store for us than a three-day trek across the Southwest.”
“Oh, you do, do you?”
“Yup. And my instincts are seldom wrong.”
Maggie opened her mouth to protest, to announce that her instincts didn’t tell her any such thing. But she realized with a sudden rush of indecipherable emotions that her instincts agreed with his. Their journey together was far from over. And she wished she could figure out whether the idea pleased or worried her.
But right now she was too tired to worry about it. With the sound of her mother’s voice echoing in her ears, she willed herself into a deep, dreamless sleep.
five
She was awake in an instant. The harsh blue fluorescent light from the bathroom provided a glaring pool against the darkness of the motel room. She squinted at the flat, thin Rolex that was her one concession to yuppie-dom. It was 4 A.M., and something wasn’t right. The instincts that had been acting up for the past twenty-four hours, the instincts that she’d tried to ignore, that seemingly had been proven wrong, were now back in full force. And suddenly Maggie knew that the salesmen in the diner weren’t salesmen, and even if the teenage boys lurking outside their window were harmless, there were other eyes watching, eyes that weren’t quite so innocent.
She moved from her lumpy bed, edging next to Mack’s sleeping body, over to the curtained window that let in the murky glare of streetlights through the shiny, threadbare material. She pushed the drape to one side and peered out into the darkness, and then swore.
Their big white rental car was still sitting outside beneath the streetlamp. From her vantage point Maggie could see that at least two of its tires were slashed and very flat indeed. And on either side, like dark, evil sentries, sat anonymous black sedans, hemming in their only means of escape.
The sedans were empty, and there was no one in sight, but Maggie knew they couldn’t have gone very far. These people were frighteningly professional. She couldn’t imagine how they had found the two of them, but find them they had, and she was going to have to be even more inventive. She could see something running underneath the picture window and she couldn’t tell if it was a string that could be cut or a wire.
“What’s up?” Mack’s voice was a whisper of sound in her ear, and she jerked upright, slamming her head against his chin.
He didn’t say a word, though she could see it cost him a great deal of effort. “Someone’s here,” she mouthed back at him, barely a sound escaping her lips.
“Are you sure?”
“Look for yourself. But don’t open the door. I can’t be certain, but I think they’ve got a wire or a string leading from our door to wherever they’re hiding out. Probably in the room next door. All we have to do is open that door and they’ll be on us like fleas on a dog.”
“String sounds pretty basic to me. Aren’t the people we’re running from a little more into technology?”
“It’s basic but effective. Besides, maybe it’s a wire-tripped bomb. Would that satisfy your sense of propriety a little better?”
“What makes you think it isn’t?”
“They’ve got cars hemming ours in. All three cars would go up if that string trips a bomb, and I don’t think they’d be into needless waste. Not to mention all the noise it would make. I wouldn’t think our friends, whoever they are, would want to call attention to themselves. Even the Mafia frowns on too much publicity.”
“Unless it’s the CIA. They’ve got the power to cover up our explosion with a logical explanation and they wouldn’t give a damn how many cars they blew up. After all, our taxes would pay for it, and the government doesn’t give a damn how much things cost.”
“Don’t you think this is a ridiculous time to discuss government overspending?” she hissed.
Mack shrugged. “What else are we going to do? It doesn’t look as if we dare open that door.”
“We go out another way, of course.”
“What other way?”
“There’s a small window in the bathroom that’ll prove a tight squeeze. You might put some clothes on,” she added dryly, casting a seemingly disinterested glance at his body, clad only in a pair of navy-blue Jockey shorts. “But we won’t be able to take anything with us. Only what you can put in your pockets.”