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      “You must mean Annabelle,” Kit said, her voice warm and sultry. “She’s working out fine. A little shy, but the customers seem to like her. She’s a fast learner and very eager to please. She should be here in a few minutes.”

      “Send her up to the penthouse when she gets there,” he said, already anticipating the feel of the pretty, young girl beneath him. “And Kit, get someone else to take her shift tonight. She’s going to be busy.”

      After hanging up the phone, he reached for his glass and started toward the bedroom adjoining his office to wait for Annabelle. But his gaze fell on Elisabeth’s photo again. He lifted his glass in a mock salute. “It won’t be long now, darling,” he whispered before downing the remainder of the whiskey. He would use Sullivan to find her, and once he had her and the disk back, he’d see to it that she never dared to defy him again.

      As for Sullivan, the man was in need of a lesson in respect—which he personally intended to deliver.

      “According to the APB on him, his name is Bill ‘The Bull’ Dozier and he’s wanted in three states for robbery, rape and murder,” the broad-shouldered state trooper told Michael.

      Michael took in the scene before him—the flashing lights of the police cars and ambulance, the brightly lit front of the all-night store advertising drinks, food and gas, the dark, lonely stretch of road with cops and paramedics at a crime scene. He couldn’t help feeling a sense of déjà vu. When he saw three curiosity seekers make their way over to the storefront to look inside, he had to fight the itch to tell them to stay clear and to let the cops do their jobs. But he was no longer a cop, he reminded himself. He was a bystander and a witness.

      “Man, he is one big mother,” the trooper said as two Florida state police exited the convenience store with the bald, tattooed piece of scum. Michael had interrupted him in the middle of raping the store’s female clerk.

      “Yeah. But you know what they say. The bigger they come, the harder they fall.” But this one hadn’t gone down easy, Michael admitted. It had taken him more than a dozen vicious blows and two bullets to finally bring the man down. And even with two slugs in him, shackled and bleeding, the guy was still able to walk out of the store to the second ambulance that had been called to the scene. As Michael watched him being loaded into the ambulance, he thought of the terrified young woman whom he’d rescued a short time ago. Remembering her battered face and the way her clothes had been torn from her body, he clenched his bruised fingers into a fist and wished he could ram it down the monster’s throat. “How’s the girl?”

      “Alive, thanks to you. She’s lucky you came along when you did. According to his rap sheet, he took a knife to the last woman when he was finished. A remote spot like this and this late at night, chances are no one would have found her for hours.”

      “That’s probably what he was counting on,” Michael said. And if he hadn’t been so determined to make it back to Miami tonight, he never would have pulled off the interstate and come to the all-night store in the middle of nowhere in search of a jolt of caffeine to keep him awake. For the first time in the four days since his temper had caused him to mouth off to Webster and blow off what was a once-in-a-lifetime fee of a million bucks, Michael cut himself some slack. Had he taken Webster’s job instead of tracking down the deadbeat who’d wiped out a widow’s savings, he wouldn’t have been here to save the girl. If he were a man who believed in such things as fate, he might even think that something besides the need for coffee had made him choose this particular exit on this particular night.

      But if he’d learned nothing else since seeing his partner die before his eyes five years ago, he’d learned that he, and he alone, was responsible for his choices.

      “Like I said, she was lucky you decided to stop for coffee.”

      But he doubted the woman was feeling particularly lucky at the moment. “What did the paramedics say? She going to be okay?”

      “He did a number on her with his fists, but nothing that shouldn’t heal eventually.”

      Maybe physically she would heal, Michael thought. Mentally, it would be another story. She’d probably carry the scars for the rest of her life. “She had a picture of a baby propped up by her cash register.”

      “Yeah, the local police say she had a little girl about six months ago. Apparently her husband got laid off from his job, and she decided to go back to work to help out. She took the graveyard shift because it paid more money and allowed her to be home with her baby during the day. Poor kid only started working here about two weeks ago.”

      “Too bad I didn’t put a bullet between his eyes and saved the state, and her, the trouble of going through a trial.”

      “You won’t get an argument from anybody here on that one,” the trooper told him. “That cut by your eye looks pretty nasty. You might want to have the paramedics take a look at it until you can get to a hospital.”

      Michael tested the tender spot with his fingertips and when they came away bloody, he pressed a handkerchief to the wound. “It’s just a scratch,” Michael informed him. As it was, he’d probably be tied up for hours while the cops took his statement and filled out the paperwork. The last thing he wanted to do was get bogged down with even more red tape by going to the hospital.

      “Suit yourself. But I’m going to need you to come down to the station and make a statement about what went down here tonight.”

      “I know the drill,” Michael told him.

      “Yeah? I thought you private dicks did your best to avoid dealing with the law.”

      “I was a cop for twelve years before I decided to go out on my own,” Michael informed him.

      “Here in Florida?”

      “Texas,” Michael told him, eager to end the conversation. Rehashing his career as a police detective wasn’t high on his list of priorities—especially at one in the morning. He also didn’t want to remember how his own stupidity had caused the bust he and Pete had worked on for months to fall apart. Stupidity that had cost his partner his life and his father his pride. Not to mention the black mark on the entire Houston Police Department.

      “Good thing the perp didn’t know that or you’d have a lot more than that gash on your head.”

      “Let me guess. He’s a cop-hater.”

      The trooper nodded. “Word is he did a real number on the two prison guards he escaped from last month. According to the reports, one of them may lose an eye and the other one is still in a body cast.”

      Michael had no trouble believing it. As a fourth-generation cop, he’d heard plenty of stories about cop-haters and had encountered his fair share of them during his years with the Houston P.D. One look at the monster-size guy with the gold teeth and the ugly scar down one side of his face would have been enough to set off alarms in most cops. But it had been the lack of emotion in the man’s dark eyes that should have told the fools at the prison just how dangerous the guy was. He’d seen that look before. And each time he had, he’d been faced with a cold-blooded killer without a conscience, without a soul.

      A long black sedan pulled into the busy parking lot. A tall man in a dark suit with a cap of silver hair exited the vehicle and sought out the officer in charge.

      “Wonder who that is?” the trooper remarked.

      “His СКАЧАТЬ