Kissing the Key Witness. Jenna Ryan
grabbed her cell phone from her bag. Should she call 911 or Tal? After a quick debate, she went with the preferred option.
Did it even ring before he answered?
“Tal?”
“Stop running, Maya.”
“What? How do you know…?” With the phone pressed to her ear, and still heading for the hospital, she swung in a circle. “Where are you?”
The collision brought her up short. If his reflexes hadn’t been a split second quicker than hers, she’d have kneed him dead center.
“Right behind you,” Tal said from the depths of a long shadow. The hands that trapped her arms held her away from him just far enough to avoid injury. “You have really good aim, Dr. Santino.”
She exhaled on a shaky curse. “You have even better timing, Lieutenant Talbot.” Then she whirled. “Did you see him? The guy in the balaclava? He pushed me into the side of that truck.”
Tal followed her gaze and shook his head. “All I saw was you running across the lot.”
“Which I was doing because some thug dressed in black tried to have a football scrum with me.” As her heart rate slowed, she picked out the booth near the entrance. “And, of course, Eddie’s on a break.”
“Eddie being the parking attendant?” Tal seemed more interested in scanning the lot than in finding the missing man.
Maya worked on uncoiling the tension knots in her throat, an easy feat in theory, not quite so simple in practice, with Tal’s fingers still curled around her arms.
“I’m okay.” She gave a gentle pull. “Nothing but a headache and a few bruises. My wannabe linebacker’s probably in more pain right now than I am.”
Tal’s lips curved, though his eyes continued to probe the shadows. “Adam teach you how to kick?”
“Sorry to say it was my cousin Diego.”
“The one with the speech impediment?”
“That’s my cousin Jesus. Diego opens beer bottles by breaking their little glass necks and drinking from the splintered end. Shows how tough he is.” She managed a smile. “You can stop searching. The guy’s long gone. He didn’t get my purse or my medical bag. And don’t look at me like that, because if you think he was trying to push me into the truck, I promise you, he wasn’t.”
“I know.”
“I thought you might. Damn.” She let her head fall back. “All things considered, this has been a really pissy night. You’re going to tell me the attack was connected to Adam, aren’t you?”
The gray eyes that returned to her face revealed nothing—which was so typically Tal, she didn’t even bother to be irritated. “That’s the part I wasn’t going to tell you.”
He smelled really good. Maya had no idea why she noticed that, but there it was, together with his very dark, very long hair; a two-day growth of stubble; and the kind of lean, hollowed-out features that made females from nineteen to ninety hot, flustered and more than a little tingly inside.
Thankfully, experience had taught her how to offset desire. That plus an overdose of fear.
She gave Tal’s wrists a light tap. “Let go, Lieutenant. I’m not on the verge of collapse. Might sway a little after everything that’s happened today, but we’ve all been there, right?”
“Are you babbling?”
“Not really.” She resisted an urge to brush at his hair. “Babbling’s an avoidance technique I never quite mastered. What I’m doing is stalling.” Glancing away, she sighed, “What was Adam doing, Tal? What was he into that got him killed and me attacked? All I know is that it involves Orlando Perine.”
“A man whose company just donated five hundred K to your hospital fund.”
“Good PR for a straight corporate mogul, closer to blood money if McGraw’s take on him is right,” she noted.
“It is.”
She blew out a long breath. “Anything else I should know?”
“One thing.” Tal kept his eyes steady on hers. “Perine got married two weeks ago. Quietly and with only three people in attendance—the bride’s mother, her brother and her stepfather, who just happens to be our deputy chief of police.”
Chapter Three
He took her to a diner out on a disused two-lane highway that wound inland from the coast. Maya was so preoccupied, she barely noticed the beautiful sunrise, let alone the fifties-style Airstream structure.
Orlando Perine’s stepfather-in-law was the deputy police chief. If the situation hadn’t been so absurd, she would have laughed. She almost did, anyway, but that was either borderline hysteria or a brain so tired, it could no longer function. Since her eyes felt gritty and unfocused, she went with the latter.
A bell above the diner door jingled when Tal opened it. She smelled pancakes and, thank God, coffee as she preceded him inside.
“Okay, I’ll accept that I’m not dreaming, though I was really hoping that would be the case here. Adam’s gone, I’m in danger and Orlando Perine’s not entirely straight. I know that sounds clinical, Tal, but this really doesn’t want to sink in for me.”
“Breathe deep enough, long enough, and it will,” he replied.
“So you, what, infuse your resistant right hemisphere with so much oxygen that the vaguely surreal mutates into harsh reality? And we wonder why some people turn to drugs.”
“Good thing you’re not some people.”
“Always the flatterer. But I wouldn’t say no to a hit of caffeine.”
As she spoke, Maya finally noticed the retro booths, the long counter with its row of red swivel stools and the scattering of pink flamingo napkin holders.
Tal steered her toward a table in the back.
The counterman came over, filled two coffee cups without asking and winked at Tal. “Better than your usual companion, Lieutenant. This one’s a pinup.” He took an appreciative sniff. “Smells like tropical spice.”
After a hectic night in the E.R., Maya embraced the compliment. With her chin propped on her fist, she arched a brow at Tal. “Okay, what’s the story, Lieutenant? You didn’t bring me here so we could eat a healthy breakfast, and you’ve already dropped your bombshell. What’s left that falls within the parameters of cop facts a civilian can be told?”
“Not a bad question for someone who’s been up more than twenty-four hours.”
“Adrenaline’ll do that.” She scanned the diner, her eyes straying to the counterman, who was holding court by the stools. “What did your friend over there mean by ‘better than your usual companion’?”
A smile grazed Tal’s lips. “Caught that, huh? He meant Nate Hammond. You’ve met him. Grizzled, crusty, cantankerous. Short on words, long on experience. He worked vice and fraud in his day. Captain in both departments. He was offered a promotion but decided he’d rather retire. Überstress versus a fishing pole. We do coffee stops and poker when we can.”
A picture formed in Maya’s head of a no-nonsense cop with a whiskey-and-cigarette voice and the occasional, if you looked really close, twinkle in his eyes.
“He used to come to blackjack nights when Adam and I lived in North Miami. Carried a battered red thermos of whiskey masquerading as iced tea.”
“Only when he was off duty, and there was no masquerade. He just didn’t want to spring for a flask.”
Leaning forward on her arms, she said, “Talk to me, Tal. Tell me what’s going on, what happened and why. If that guy in the parking lot attacked me because