Smokescreen by Meredith Fletcher and Vicki Hinze Doranna Durgin Read Free Book Online

defiant.
    Sam shot Jethro an instant look of accusation, a look brimming with fury.
    “Hey!” he said instantly. “I didn’t do this! When I need a hobby, I go for rugby, or I go for my bike.”
    Sam said nothing, her lips tight as she bent over the beaten woman.
    “Dammit, not every man who crosses your path is the kind of man who—”
    “Shut up.” Sam didn’t care how sharp and short herwords came out; she cared only that he shut up. “This isn’t about you right now. It’s about getting help for her. Do you have a cell phone?”
    “Yes,” he said, and to his credit he switched mental gears quickly enough. “But maybe we should just take her. To the hospital, I mean. It might be faster.”
    “Agreed,” she said. And they’d have a chance to talk to her…if she could talk at all. She quickly removed the tattered blankets, stuffing them into the shopping cart with the flip-flops. “This is Madonna?”
    “You caught that?” He shrugged when Sam glanced up, and nodded. “She answers to it, anyway.”
    So Sam spoke to her, and reassured her, and Madonna—when she got to her feet—turned out to be a plump young woman whose shoes and clothes were still decently new. She muttered constantly, twitching her head in motions that seemed ingrained, but her swollen lips made her words incomprehensible.
    “She told me about the house,” Jethro said, delaying them long enough to tuck the shopping cart away in a dark corner and to warn the silent lot that these were Madonna’s things. He came back to help Sam guide Madonna to the car. “She said the ladies at the shelter were nice to her when she didn’t know where to go, and that they got her into the underground. I gather her boyfriend wasn’t really a boyfriend after all, but someone looking to beat her down into prostitution.”
    Sam used the remote to unlock the doors to her battered Civic. “It doesn’t make sense. If she was in the underground, what the hell is she doing here?”
    Jethro carefully folded the woman down into the backseat and closed the door. “I didn’t get the impression she was very good at staying on her medicine. Andhow she’s just as happy living on the street as living everybody else’s life.”
    Sam slid into the driver’s seat, hands still tender on the wheel but nicely protected by the gloves. “The Captain’s runaways practically swear on their own lives that they’ll never reveal a single word about the underground. And then she covers her tracks by getting everyone out of the city ASAP. If they let anything slip, at least they won’t be in our backyard.” She started the car, glancing over at Jethro with a meaningful tilt to her head. “That means your sister is probably long gone.”
    Her words were sharp as an elbow jab, but he let them go for the matter at hand as he took the passenger seat and buckled himself in. “Well, this one never made it out of the city. And she was happy to talk to me. She’s quite concerned that I was separated from Lizbet. She told me enough to get me to the right street, where some very interesting individuals kept chasing me away.”
    From the backseat, the woman cried softly, “Won’t tell! Bad bad bad…”
    “You don’t have to tell,” Sam reassured her, glancing in the rearview mirror to find their battered informant curled up on the seat. She pulled away from the curb and onto the deserted night street. “We’re taking you to a hospital.”
    And by the time they got there, she hoped to have pried her own information from this woman. She’d feel like heartless scum in the process simply for questioning someone who needed nothing but comforting, but she’d do it anyway. Because this woman hadn’t been beaten by coincidence. Someone had come to her looking for the same information she’d given Jethro—and had been willing to beat the information out of her. Ifshe’d somehow told them more than she’d said to Jethro…
    Then everyone in the city network was already