A Drive-By Wedding. Terese Ramin

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СКАЧАТЬ if they were going to spend any time together—if she was going to help him help the toddler—she’d need a name for both of them.

      “Okay.” For the second time she offered the man in the front seat a clipped nod. “I won’t do this for you, but I’ll help him. Understood?”

      Allyn thought she saw him swallow a grin of relief. “Got it.”

      “Don’t get cocky,” she advised him. “Nobody’s home free.”

      Astounded, he glanced over his shoulder at her. “Don’t get cocky?” he asked. “Who are you? Who the hell do you think planned this expedition? Cocky, my left little toe. I get cocky, all three of us get killed.”

      This could involve all three of them getting killed? Allyn refused to gulp. “As long as we understand each other,” she said—with a great deal more serenity than she felt. But heck, he didn’t need to know that. “And by the way?”

      “What?”

      “I don’t think you planned this expedition at all well. In fact, I think your planning stinks. The shape this baby is in stinks. Literally. We need to get him cleaned up and find out what’s wrong with him.”

      “I saw an opportunity, I grabbed it,” he told her—a trifle huffily, truth be known. “I intend to get Sasha cleaned up and to a doctor as soon as we’re out of the city and I can find someone who’ll accept cash for silence.” He paused. Then, “I suppose you’d have planned things better?”

      “Well, I wouldn’t offer cash for silence, that’s for sure,” she said tartly. “Says you’ve got something to hide. No.” She shook her head. “I’d go to someone I trusted and—”

      “No.” Refusal was flat and unnegotiable. “Last time I did that my baby sister was killed.”

      Killed? Startled, she looked at the mirror, trying to see his face. His gaze remained resolutely on the road in front of them, telling her everything and nothing. “Oh, so you thought kidnapping a perfect stranger would be safer for both your emotional psyche and the stranger?” Her hold on the baby—Sasha, was that what he’d said?—tightened involuntarily, and for the first time a thin cry erupted from the child. She looked at him; his eyes remained closed, but there was some movement in the thin frame, the flop of an arm, the fisting of a hand. She loosened her grip slightly and cuddled him closer, bundled the blanket more securely around him. “I don’t think so.”

      “Neither do I.” Denial was savage. “That’s why I have the gun and I’m not letting either you or Sasha out of my sight. I need to figure out who to trust who won’t either get killed or turn on me, and how to let you go safely.”

      Silence was abrupt and complete. At the fringes of their concentration on each other and the moment, cracks in the pavement thudded beneath the car’s tires; intermittent traffic whooshed and receded. Allyn broke the silence first.

      “I’m sorry about your sister,” she said.

      “Me, too,” he agreed tightly. “So,” he asked when the moment had passed. “Any other better ideas than the ones I’ve got?”

      Sarcasm fairly dripped from the question. But there were things he didn’t know about her, either. Like the story behind the beginning of her mother’s relationship with her stepfather. She thought of how her mother and Gabriel had pretended to be lovers, pretended to know each other well in order to hide him in plain sight.

      About how pretense had become reality.

      She shook the thought away. Or rather, she almost shook it away. Something in it didn’t want to leave. “We should probably exchange names,” she suggested. “Make it look like we know each other. Then maybe you should tell me who’s out to kill you—and why, don’t leave that out—and therefore by default me and…did you call him Sasha?”

      The grin came this time before he could stop it, wry—and a mite sardonic. “Yeah, I did. That’s what his mother called him when she sold him to her dealer. I was there. Jeth Levoie. Special Investigator for the Tucson prosecutor’s office.”

      “Tucson, Arizona?”

      “Yeah. You want some ID?”

      She ignored the irony in favor of keeping her wits from deserting her. Daughters’ lives were not supposed to parallel their mothers’, they really weren’t. But here was hers apparently paralleling the single deciding event that had happened seven years ago in Alice’s right down to the finding a man at the side of the road and the you-just-happenedto-be-there-and-I’m-from-out-of-town-and-need-your-help coincidence of it. “Please.”

      Muttering something about her being a piece of work, Jeth rummaged around in his bag until he found the flat leather case that contained both his picture identification and his badge and tossed it to her. Allyn inspected it carefully, trying not to let her face betray her while her heart thudded hard against her ribs and her breath went short. Unless it was an elaborate fake—and really, since she’d had her nose stuck in her books and lab work for the best parts of the past seven years, how would she know?—he really was Jeth Levoie out of the Tucson prosecutor’s office.

      She flipped the case into the front seat. “Allyn Meyers,” she said. “You’re a long way out of your jurisdiction, Jeth Levoie.”

      “Hopefully not for long,” he said grimly. “And anyway—” he slanted a glance over his shoulder at her, giving her another glimpse of a profile she’d have really enjoyed looking at and meeting, getting to know and perhaps flaunting at Becky under other circumstances “—what do you know about jurisdictions?”

      She made a face. The subject was at least as distasteful to her as being kidnapped by him. Or rather, actually, as often as she’d heard Gabriel fume over the subject of “co-operative efforts between the jurisdictions,” it was more disagreeable than being abducted by Jeth Levoie. “More than enough to fill a thimble, but not much more. Enough to know that Tucson and Baltimore are a long way apart, and I don’t just mean geographically. So what are you doing here?”

      “Exchange program. Nobody knows me here. Same with the guy they sent to Nogales to work undercover in my place down there. You know anything about the Russian Mafia?”

      “No.” Thank God. Or maybe not, since it appeared she was about to learn more than she ever wanted to about it.

      “What about drug cartels?”

      Allyn felt herself blanch. “This is about drug cartels?”

      Jeth nodded unhappily. “Yeah, indirectly. Mostly it’s about territory. The Colombians have it, the Russians want it. There’s a war on. Sasha’s mama stuck him in the middle of it. Her ex is with the Russians. Courts gave her full custody in the divorce, but Daddy wants his heir. Her addiction of choice is Colombian cocaine. Her dealer found out who Sasha’s daddy was, sold the information to his source, who instructed him to offer Mama a deal. Sasha in exchange for clearing up the debt from her habit and a few days’ worth of highs. She took it. Sasha’s a hostage. His daddy’s supposed to trade for him, but everything goes kerflooey, and my guys tell me to get Sasha out. Only then I’m told they’ll be the ones exchanging Sasha to the highest bidder for information. I tell ’em no way I can live with that, I’ve seen the shape the kid’s in, so they pull me.”

      “But you didn’t stay pulled,” Allyn said.

      “No.”

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