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“It’s bad. The guy who nabbed her this morning is a fucking maniac. All bullshit aside, I’m sorry to involve you, buddy. I didn’t know who else to call. I’m sorry to leave you on foot, too. But you can’t use my Jeep. It’s red, for Christ’s sake. It’s too recognizable. It would be the kiss of death.”
“It’s OK.” Miles’s look of stoic calm could only have been learned by studying Davy. “I’ll hitchhike. If I’m lucky, I’ll get back in time to swallow a couple raw eggs, and I’ll be in great shape to teach my first karate class. You’re checked in until tomorrow at eleven. I took three hundred out of the machine. Bought the stuff you wanted. Here’s the change.” He handed Sean a crumpled wad of bills, and a shopping bag. “The car’s gassed up. You want me to leave the Wrangler somewhere?”
Sean fished the keys out of his pocket and passed them over. “Dump it in the BiMart parking lot. Get away from it, fast. And Miles. Keep your head down. This never happened. You never saw me.”
“Don’t worry.” Miles’s gaze wandered over Sean’s blood-streaked face and torso. “You look like shit. Anybody good enough to do that kind of damage to you would run me over like a tank. I don’t want to die.”
“Good man,” Sean said. “Have you thought of a cover story?”
“I lent my car to Keira, the cute backup singer in the Howling Furballs,” Miles said. “The one with the pierced clit.”
Sean clapped him on the shoulder. “That’s my boy.” He stopped, eyes narrowing. “How’d you know that girl’s clit was pierced?”
Miles rolled his eyes and looked martyred. “She told me.”
Sean was cast down. “Oh. So you never, uh…”
“Nope,” Miles said dolefully. “Girls just tell me things. All kinds of crazy shit. It’s always, ‘Oh Miles, you’re such a great listener. I wish my asshole boyfriend was just like you, but all he wants from me is sex, sex, sex.’ It’s, like, the story of my life.”
“That sucks, buddy,” Sean said sympathetically.
“We’ve all got our crosses to bear. At least nobody tried to kill me today.” Miles pointed out philosophically. He stuck his hands in his pockets, rattling the Jeep’s keys. “I guess I’d better disappear. Let me know what’s going on, OK? This shit’s weirding me out, big-time.”
“I’ll be in touch,” Sean promised. Miles’s worried look made him want to bear-hug the kid and tousle his hair. He suppressed the impulse with difficulty. Miles was finally developing spine-stiffening machismo and male dignity. Sean didn’t want to impede the process.
Miles nodded politely to Liv. She nodded back. “Thanks for the shirt,” she murmured.
Sean unlocked the dead bolt for him. “You saved my ass.”
Miles gave him a quick grin. “Anytime.”
Sean watched the kid climb into the Jeep through a crack in the door, his stomach hollow. It was only two minutes on the strip mall to get to the BiMart parking lot, but he hated exposing his little buddy to the risk of attracting any attention from those murdering fuckheads. Miles was smart and talented, but a hopped up gorilla like T-Rex would smear him all over fifty yards of asphalt. Having Miles on his conscience, too…Christ, that would be the final nail in his coffin.
He shut the door, slammed the bolts and locks and chains home. The deed was done. No point stressing over it. He unzipped the duffel part of his kit bag that he’d dragged out of his truck, and rummaged through the jumble of spywear prototypes until he found a pair of squealers, Seth’s portable alarms to fix on the door and windows. They weren’t much, but they might give him that split second advantage that meant the difference between life and death. If everything went to shit.
Finished with that, he turned to find that Liv had dumped the contents of Miles’s bag onto the bed. First aid supplies, soap, shampoo, combs, a three-pack of white XXL T-shirts, all good. There was food, though he was still too buzzed to think of food. Granola bars, chocolate, sardines, Ritz crackers, pepper-jerked beef sticks, standard convenience store fare. Miles had thrown in a couple pairs of cheap sunglasses and some baseball caps. Great. That would help, with anonymity.
His gratefulness evaporated when Liv held the caps up for him to see. One had a cartoon female body wearing only a skimpy pink thong on her prominent ass, turning a seductive kitty-cat face over her shoulder. Pussy Kat was stitched above the bill in pink cursive letters.
The other one read simply Sex Machine in big, white letters.
That snide, smart-assed cretin.
Then Liv held up a package of condoms in her other hand. He actually blushed. “I did not tell him to buy those!”
“You didn’t have to,” she said. “He knows you well. What’s the Sean McCloud credo? The desire to get laid is the fuel that powers the universe?”
“I’m rearranging his teeth when I see him next,” Sean growled.
Judging from the look on Liv’s face, it looked like the screaming, pounding, wall-shaking fuck-fest had been indefinitely called off.
Just as well. The kiss had him on the verge of bursting into tears, begging her to love him forever. He hated to think of what extremes screwing her would have reduced him to. Particularly since she thought he was a fluff-brained gigolo that would pork anything with a pulse.
It made his face burn like a hot griddle.
The aftereffects of that kiss made him itchy and restless. He wanted to kick down doors, put his fists through walls. He should probably jack off in the shower, wrangle the savage beast down to reasonable proportions. Liv had been through enough this morning without having to do a whip-and-chair routine with his unruly dick.
He peeled off the filthy, bloodstained shirt, flung it on the floor. Bent down to pry off his shoes. He pulled out the Ruger, checked the cylinder out of habit. Still fully loaded. He cocked it, and placed it in Liv’s hands. She looked up at him, wide-eyed with alarm. “What’s this?”
