There was cash in the wallet, enough to make a nice thick bulk, some credit cards, and a driver’s license. Looking back and forth between him and the wallet, she saw that the Virginia license did indeed say Morgan Yancy. The Morgan Yancy in the photograph looked much healthier than the one sitting in her driveway. The face had the hard, sculpted look of a man who kept himself in peak physical shape-not a handsome face, but definitely a masculine one. Brown hair-check. Blue eyes-check; she was close enough to see that. They were a particularly striking shade of blue, fierce and icy, as if an eagle had been born blue-eyed. Six-foot-two, check. Two hundred thirty pounds? No way in hell. He was at least thirty, forty pounds shy of what the license said, which explained why his clothes hung on him like shapeless bags.
On the plus side, the ill-fitting clothes were clean and in good shape, nothing fancy, just jeans and boots and a flannel shirt. On the not-so-plus side, Ted Bundy had been clean-cut and nicely dressed, so that didn’t prove anything.
Tricks barked again.
He retrieved the cell phone from the dashboard and tossed it to her; startled, she juggled the wallet and made a one-handed catch of the phone that she considered nothing short of miraculous, given that she’d never played any kind of sports. She should have let it drop in the dirt. Who threw cell phones around? “Call him,” he said, leaning his head back against the seat and closing his eyes again. He was breathing kind of heavily.
“I don’t know his number.”
“It’s the only number programmed into that phone.”
Well, wasn’t that all special and spy-ish? And useless, because-“I haven’t talked to him in seventeen years. I wouldn’t recognize his voice.” Besides, she didn’t want to hear Axel’s voice again-ever.
“So work it out.” The guy didn’t open his eyes. “Maybe he knows something about you that no one else does.”
He was taking a lot for granted, she thought with resentment, a complete stranger showing up uninvited and evidently expecting her to take care of him. Or maybe he was at the end of his endurance and didn’t have the energy to move on down the road. From the way he looked, she had to reluctantly go with that last conclusion.
Damn it. She didn’t want to get hooked into anything, but at the same time she didn’t see how she could send him away when he was incapable of going.
She took a few more cautious steps away from him, just in case he was faking and tried to charge her while she was distracted by the phone. She didn’t think so, but yeah, she was cautious-and suspicious. Looking back and forth between him and the phone, she examined it; it was a cheap dumb phone, keypad instead of a touch screen. She pressed the call button and put the phone to her ear.
There was some unusual clicking. She waited and was beginning to think the call hadn’t gone through when there was another click and a man’s voice said, “Yes.”
She said, “Who is this?”
“Nice to talk to you, too.” The voice was male, mature, and no way in hell could she tell if it belonged to her former stepbrother.
“Sorry,” she said briskly. “You won’t be talking to me a second longer unless you tell me something that identifies you.”
He snickered. “One word: stripes.”
Dismayed, she shook her head. Even if “stripes” hadn’t verified his identity to her, the adolescent snicker would have. She was caught: this was indubitably Axel MacNamara. No one else, not even her mother, had known that when Bo was thirteen, for some unknown reason she had decided having tiger stripes on her legs would be cool and make her stand out in a crowd. In retrospect, she could only wonder at herself, but maybe being thirteen was answer enough.
She had painted stripes of sunblock on her legs, then lain out in the sun. The resulting effect had made her look as if she had a skin disease. The only remedy then had been to paint the tanned portions of her legs with sunblock-which had taken a long time, which was why Axel, the stepbrother from hell, had caught her at it-and try to tan the pale stripes to their surrounding color. That had ended up being the summer she never wore shorts.
“Okay,” she said grudgingly. “I know who you are. What the hell do you think you’re doing, sending a stranger here and expecting me to-”
“Cut the dramatics,” he said with the cool disdain that had always set her teeth on edge. “Even I wouldn’t have sent anyone dangerous. Let me amend that: he isn’t dangerous to you. He needs a secure place to recuperate until I can handle a delicate situation. I don’t know how long it will take.”
“So I’m just supposed to house a stranger for an unspecified length of time?” She cast a weather eye at the stranger in question. His eyes were still closed. He was still sitting mostly upright, but she wasn’t at all certain he was conscious.
“Yes. Feed him and do his laundry, too, because he sure as hell isn’t up to it.”
She could feel her blood pressure rising and was seized by the urge to bang her head against something. Axel had always affected her that way. “What makes you think I would ever do you a favor?” she asked furiously.
“I don’t. That’s why I’m offering you a hundred thousand smackeroos, tax free, to do this. All you have to do is say the word and the money is yours.”
She stilled. Her heart rate, her breathing-everything seemed to slow. A hundred thousand-a hundred thousand. It wasn’t a fortune, but it was a great big turnaround in her financial situation. Though that amount wouldn’t pay off the house, it would knock a sizable hole in the loan, give her more breathing room, and relieve a great deal of stress. She was making do now, her head was above water, but she’d like better than simply making do.
Then she took a deep breath and forced herself back into the real world, rather than jumping headlong at what seemed like a great deal. She no longer leaped before she looked. “Uh huh. Exactly how would it be tax free? Paid under the counter? You do know the IRS tracks every deposit that’s more than ten grand, right? Whatever crooked thing you’re into, I don’t want any part of it. And is it true he got shot?” Now that she thought about it, she couldn’t believe she hadn’t reacted to that tidbit of information when Morgan Yancy had said that. Only now was the outlandishness of it hitting her.
“Yeah,” the stranger said wearily from the front seat of the Tahoe. “I got shot.” At least that proved he was still conscious.
“In the chest,” Axel said in her ear. “Damn near killed him. He coded twice. Look, he can’t go back to his place because we don’t know who targeted him or why. He isn’t in any shape to look after himself right now anyway, but I had to get him out of the system in a hurry and to a place where no one will look for him. On the other hand, I’d like to keep him fairly close by. Your place is perfect on both counts.”
Bo shook her head, in denial of everything he was saying. “You do know you’re on a cell phone, right? And that it’s likely being monitored?”
“These cells aren’t. They’re encrypted, the calls were bounced around and they’re burner phones anyway.” He paused, then said, “You’ll actually be paid enough to cover the income tax on the hundred thou. Don’t worry, you won’t be audited because of it. Come on, yes or no.”
She didn’t want to make an immediate decision. The worst financial mistake of her life had come from her leaping before she looked. “I need to think it over.”
“Sorry. It’s now or never. Like I said, these phones won’t be used again, and it’s too dangerous to contact me by normal means.”