AllFreeNovel
Share Us
TEN
McLean, Virginia
Niema hit the alarm on the clock before it could go off, got up, and dressed in her running outfit, did her usual routine in the bathroom, and sauntered into the kitchen. As she expected, Medina was sitting at his usual place at the island bar, sipping coffee.
“Very funny,” he growled, and she laughed.
“Don’t pout. You got in anyway, didn’t you?”
“Yeah, but I had to climb in through the laundry-room window. Very undignified.”
And very silent, she thought; she was a light sleeper, but she hadn’t heard a thing. “I suppose you bypassed the alarm on the window, too.”
“No, I disabled the entire thing. Get one that works off infrared or motion, not contact.”
She scowled at him. The alarm system had set her back over a thousand bucks, and now he was proposing she spend another two thousand. “Why don’t I just do the same thing to all my windows and doors that I did to the back door? Low tech seems to work where high tech doesn’t.”
“Both would be good.” He grinned and lifted his cup in salute. “That was a good idea.”
“Low tech” was a good description of what she had done to her back door. She bought two ordinary hook and latch sets at a hardware store, installed the first one in the usual manner with the eye screwed into the frame while the hook was mounted on the door. Then she had turned the second one upside down, butted it up against the first one, and installed it with the eye screwed into the door and the hook mounted on the frame.
With only a single hook latched, anyone with a credit card, knife, or any other thin object could slip it in the crack and force the hook up, freeing it from the eye. With two hooks, one upside down, that method wouldn’t work. If you slid the credit card up from the bottom, you hit the upside down latch and pushed the hook into the eye, instead of out of it. If you came down from the top, you were pushing down on the upper latch, with the same results.
Of course, someone who was very strong or who had a battering ram could knock the door off its hinges, but that wasn’t a very quiet way of breaking and entering. She was inordinately pleased that her simple solution had stymied him.
When they left the house, instead of turning right, toward the park, Medina turned left.
“The park’s in the other direction,” Niema said as she caught up and fell into step beside him.
“We ran there yesterday.”
“Does this mean you never run the same route twice, or just that you’re easily bored?”
“Bored,” he said easily. “I have the attention span of a gnat”
“Liar.”
His only response was a grin, and they ran in silence then, down the deserted street. There were no stars visible overhead, and the weather felt damp, as if it might rain. Her forearms were a little sore from all that shooting the day before, but other than that she felt great. Her thigh muscles stretched as they ran, and she felt her blood begin to zing through her veins as her heartbeat increased.
They had been running for half an hour when a car turned a corner onto their street, heading straight for them. It was rolling slow, as if looking for something.
John looped his right arm around her waist and whirled her behind a tree. She bit back her instinctive cry and barely got her hands out to brace herself before he crushed her against the tree trunk, holding her there with the hard pressure of his body. She saw the dull glint of metal in his left hand. She held her breath and pressed her cheek even harder into the rough bark of the tree.
“Two men,” he said in an almost inaudible whisper, his breath stirring the hair at her temple. “They’re probably from the private agency Frank hired.”
“Probably? Don’t you know?”
“No, I don’t know your surveillance schedule, and they don’t know I’m here. They’re probably looking for you since you aren’t on your usual route.”
The thought of having a “surveillance schedule” was annoying. Equally annoying was the realization of how many times over the past few years cars had passed by her in the early morning hours and she hadn’t thought anything of it, except to watch, with a woman’s natural wariness, until the cars had turned the corner and disappeared. She had been so oblivious she was embarrassed. She should have been more alert.
The bark was scratching her cheek, and her breasts were being crushed. “Ease up,” she panted. “You’re squashing me.”
He moved about an inch, but it helped. He remained behind the tree until the car was a block away, then lifted himself away from her. She grunted as she pushed away from the tree. “If they’re ours, why don’t we just let them see us?”
He resumed his steady stride, and she took up her place beside him. “Because I’m not positive they’re ours, for one thing. For another, I don’t want them to see me, much less see me with you.”
“Some bodyguards they are anyway,” she grumbled, “letting you break into my house two mornings in a row.”
