At the Edge of the Sun (Maggie Bennett 3)

“Why? To give you a better chance of shooting me? No way, laddie. I’m staying put. You’re going to have to shoot a naked, unarmed man in the safety of his own bed. Let’s see if you can do it, eh? Come on, boy, you’ve got it in you. Think of Maury. Think of Holly’s mother. Think of Maeve, screaming and crying in the night …” His hand reached under the pillow once more, and Ian pulled the trigger.

It was timeless, it was instantaneous. Two sharp thwups, directly into the middle of Flynn’s naked chest. He opened his mouth, an expression of complete amazement on his handsome face, and then he slid down on the bed.

Within seconds he was lying in a pool of bloody water as the bed began to deflate. The bullets had gone directly through his body, into the plastic liner of the waterbed, and the empty husk that had once been Flynn was sinking. The pillow fell away from his arm as the bed collapsed in upon itself, and in Flynn’s dead, clutching hand was a 345 magnum.

Ian could feel the cold sweat pouring down his face. He didn’t for one moment realize they were tears. “We’d better get the hell out of here,” he said, his voice husky. He crossed to the bed, digging down to catch the handful of jewels lying beside Flynn. For one last moment he stared down at him, then turned back to Holly, handing her the jewels. He looked for horror, for condemnation in her eyes. Instead he saw only love and sorrow, and for a moment it unmanned him.

She smiled then, tucking the jewels in both pockets of her safari suit. “Let’s go.”

twenty

Someone was following her. In the empty halls of Cul de Sac someone was stalking Maggie as she tried to find Flynn’s suite of rooms. She reached behind her, taking the snub-nosed gun from her waistband and holding it carefully in one large, capable hand. For only a moment did she regret coming out alone into the night, then she dismissed it. She wasn’t going to let Randall have Flynn’s murder on his conscience. Her own was fairly clean—she could afford to add one execution to her list of sins.

If she made it at all. There were strange noises in the night. The cooling system made its own, monotonous hum. Then there were other noises, the muffled, sporadic sound of pumps and electric motors. It was almost as if she were being stalked by a robot, by something composed of mechanical parts and not human flesh and blood.

The very thought chilled her. Sybil’s melodramatic blood must run thicker in her veins than she’d thought. It wasn’t Darth Vader after her in the moonlit night, and it wasn’t something out of Stephen King or even Buck Rogers. Whoever was stalking her was alive and real and—

An arm snaked across her throat, a hand clamped down over the scream in her mouth, and she was hauled back against the very flesh and blood she was hoping for. It took her only a moment of sharply painful struggling before she recognized Randall’s unmistakable touch.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” he whispered in her ear, his voice furious.

“Argermphn,” she said, and he removed his hand from her mouth. “I was looking for Flynn,” she said again, her voice equally low. “Why were you creeping around after me? You scared me half to death with those weird noises.”

“I wasn’t making an

y weird noises,” Randall said. “And I wasn’t creeping around after you. I just got here.”

Maggie allowed herself one swift moment of panic. “Okay,” she said, once it had passed, “I must be paranoid. Where—”

They both heard it at the same time. The muffled thuds, two in a row, that might be champagne corks popping. Or might be a gun with a silencer.

“Shit,” Randall said succinctly, and took off down the hall with Maggie following. Suite 236J-5 was just around the corner, and Holly and Ian were just inside the door.

Ian looked deathly pale, and Holly looked equally shaken. “You’ve taken care of him?” Randall asked in a surprisingly gentle voice.

“I have,” Ian said after a moment. “Let’s get the hell out of here. I expect Lazarus may be on to us, and I don’t trust the man.”

“I think we’d better split up,” Maggie said.

“Good thinking,” Randall agreed. “The three of you go on ahead. I’ll cover things from this end and meet you—”

“You two take off,” Maggie interrupted firmly. “I think there’s at least one back entrance …”

“There are two,” Ian said, his voice only slightly hoarse. “I ran across them earlier. I think there’s a jeep there. We could all go.”

“The three of you—” Randall began again.

“Shut up, Randall,” Maggie said fiercely. “I’m not leaving you and that’s that. You two go on ahead and we’ll meet you later.”

“Where?” Holly demanded in a shaky voice.

“L.A., probably. Go on, now.”

She turned to Randall, expecting more arguments. He opened his mouth, then shut it again, glaring at her. Within moments Holly and Ian had vanished, leaving them alone in the doorway of Flynn’s suite.

“So why did we stay behind?” she asked in a conversational tone.

“You stayed behind because you’re a stubborn, infuriating woman,” Randall said. “I stayed behind because I want to make sure Flynn’s dead and because I have one other job to do.”