Once and Always Read online

  His hand tightened against her hips, and she immediately realized her mistake. She pressed her hands against his chest. “Needs your information.”

  One of his hands left her bottom as he set her gently back on her feet. “Why?”

  She was silent.

  “Why, May?”

  She shook her head, still recovering but determined that she wasn’t going to talk anymore. This whole night had been a very bad idea.

  She felt his fingers threading her hair. “I’d love to kiss you right now, but I have the feeling it’d be a while before you talked to me again if I did. That right?”

  She nodded vigorously, her face still hidden.

  “Then why don’t I get your coat? That snow’s not getting any thinner on the ground, and I’d like it if you made it home tonight.”

  Grown-up women didn’t hide forever, even if they might’ve had a rather intimate encounter in the middle of a bar dance floor. Maisa took a deep breath and raised her head, hoping she wasn’t as flushed and sweaty as she felt. “Okay.”

  His wide mouth curved and he bent to brush it against her temple. “That there doesn’t count as a kiss. I just want you to know.”

  “I know,” she said. “And it doesn’t matter anyway.” She pulled away from him and stood on her own. It felt a bit like peeling a layer of skin off, but she did it anyway. “I doubt I’ll be seeing you again this trip up.”

  He frowned at that. “Look, May…”

  She aimed a smile in his general direction. “I’d better be going, remember? Roads will only be getting worse.”

  She turned without waiting for his reply and strode to the table where she’d left her jacket. She didn’t stop for more than a few words with the ladies sitting there, and then she was pulling the door open.

  The snow hit her with an icy blast, and if there’d been any lingering haziness, it was blown clean away. Sam West wasn’t a viable option.

  Maisa made a mental note to herself: Stay away from the man.

  Chapter Seven

  “That looked like it went well,” Doc said as Sam slid back into his seat.

  Sam didn’t bother replying. Partly because he was trying to sit comfortably with a hard-on trapped in his jeans, partly because there really wasn’t anything to say to Doc. One moment May had been all soft sweetness in his arms, the next she’d blown him off.

  He sighed and wished he’d stopped for another beer before sitting down again.

  “What’d she want?” Doc asked. No one had ever said the old man wasn’t sharp.

  Sam looked at him a beat, then reached over and snagged Doc’s glass of beer, draining the last of the Schell’s. It was warm. “She wanted to know about the guy wrecked his car in front of us this afternoon.”

  Doc grunted. “The driver of your wreck say anything about Old George?”

  “Nope. When I told him he’d need to stay the night to see his car fixed—a rental, by the way—he didn’t say anything about George. Which you think he would’ve, if he knew him.” Sam shrugged. “I even took May by her uncle’s place and no peep out of the back.”

  “What do you mean, you took Maisa?”

  “Her car stalled when I pulled it over.”

  Doc grunted at that, frowning at his beer. “You get the driver’s name?”

  “Ilya Kasyanov.”

  “You had time to run him through the system?”

  “Yup.”

  “And?”

  Sam shrugged. “Nothing. Lives in Las Vegas, has no priors on him.”

  “He work at a casino?”

  “Nope. He’s a private accountant of some kind.”

  Doc leaned forward. “If he’s so innocent, then why’d Maisa Burnsey ask about him?”

  “You know damn well May isn’t involved in anything illegal.”

  “Do I?”

  “George may—or may not—have ties to the mafiya, but May sure as hell doesn’t,” Sam drawled, eyes narrowed. “Seems kinda wrong to hold a person’s relatives against them.”

  “Is it? Aw, I know all that PC crap”—Doc swatted the PC crap with his hand—“but really, a woman’s family means a lot. A man doesn’t just marry the woman, he marries her family, her friends. Do you even know who Maisa Burnsey’s friends are?”

  Sam didn’t, so he ignored that. “Who said anything about marriage?”

  Doc gave him the Idiot Look. “Son, I know damn well when a man’s got the bit between his teeth. You just made a damned-fool spectacle of yourself on the dance floor. I think Dylan was taking notes. You’ve been chasing Maisa Burnsey for months now. If that woman ever stands still long enough, you’ll have the ring on her finger and a rented powder blue tux on so fast she won’t even have time to plan the goddamned flower arrangements.”

  Sam chuckled at that, but it had an edge. “Yeah, well, doesn’t look like she’ll be standing still anytime soon.”

  “Just as well.” Doc paused to take a swig of his beer. “I know you’re not from Coot Lake originally, but you belong here, Sam. People like you. Heck, even Becky likes you, and you know that woman is harder’n stone. If you—”

  “Doc…,” Sam began, hoping to forestall the usual lecture from the police chief.

  But Doc leaned forward, suddenly intent. “No, damn it, Sam, just listen a minute.”

  Sam frowned but inclined his head.

  Doc blew out a breath. “I know I’m a stubborn old bastard, seems like I’ll stick around forever, but my blood pressure’s high and my cholesterol is all to shit.”

  Sam knit his brows, worried. This was the first he’d heard of any problem with Doc’s health.

  “No”—Doc held up his palms—“I’m not sayin’ I’m going to keel over anytime soon. My dad lived into his eighties and managed to drive Mom and us kids near around the bend before he finally gave in and kicked the bucket. I’m just saying that sometime I’m going to have to be replaced. Hell, I’d like to retire someday. Do some fishing on a weekday, maybe take some old gal dancin’.”

  A corner of Sam’s mouth lifted. “Some old gal like Becky?”

  Doc shook his head, though his own mouth was twitching. “I’m not speaking out of turn.”

  “Don’t suppose you have to.” Sam glanced out of the corner of his eye at Becky’s table. She was trying too hard not to look at them. He’d always thought Becky’d be up for it if Doc ever made his move.

  “Don’t suppose I do.” Doc sighed again and turned serious. “But Sam, my point is you have the potential to help this town. To be more than a patrol cop.”

  “I like being a patrol cop,” Sam said, easy, twirling the neck of the empty Sam Adams.

  “Catching speeders up on 52?” Doc cocked an eyebrow. “That really what you want to be doing for the rest of your life?”

  “What if it is?”

  Doc lowered his head like an old bull and hit him, stubborn and dangerous. “I don’t know what happened over there in Afghanistan, but whatever it was wasn’t worth you giving up the rest of your life.”

  Sam jerked his chin up, refusing to acknowledge the hit. His former army career was something he didn’t want to think about or discuss—with Doc or anyone else.

  Slowly he set his bottle of beer down.

  “Don’t give me that look,” Doc snapped. “I know something happened. You still smiled when you got back, but you’d lost your drive. Lost your focus. You gotta get it back, Sam. I miss the boy I knew when your dad brought you to visit.”

  “That was twenty years ago,” Sam said, flat.

  Doc and his dad had been in Vietnam together, but while Doc had gotten out as soon as his tour was over, Dad had been career army. It’d just been him and Dad growing up—his mom had left the family when Sam had been little. They’d lived all over, he and Dad, both in the U.S. and abroad, but at least once a year they’d come visit Doc and go fishing for crappies. Doc had taught him how to put his first worm on a hook. When Sam was eighteen, he’d gone into the army. Figured he’d have the same life as hi
s old man—live and die the army—because that was just what his father had done: had a full career, made colonel, retired, and dropped dead of a heart attack not a month later. Wasn’t a bad life. He was hoping for the same—maybe with a longer retirement.

  Except it hadn’t worked out that way.

  “Doesn’t matter,” Doc said. “You were the same, boy and man, until that third tour in Afghanistan.”

  Sam was quiet. There was no way he was going to talk about this with Doc.

  The police chief must’ve understood him. He brushed Afghanistan and all its horror away with a wave of his hand. “All you need is a couple of classes up at the university over in Morris and you’ll have your degree. I can recommend you for assistant chief of police, and then when—”

  Sam was already shaking his head, getting kind of angry now. Doc just wouldn’t stop pushing. “I’m not going to do that.”

  Doc stared, shoulders bunched, eyes narrow, and slowly pulled his lips in. “Damn it, son—”

  “And I’m not your son,” Sam said, hard.

  Doc broke their stare first, looking away, and for a moment Sam felt a soul-deep regret. He hated this, hated arguing with Doc, hated disappointing the old man. But it was better than the alternative.

  “Fine.” Doc tipped his beer mug, swallowing the last of the glass before banging it back down again. “But you’d better stay away from Maisa Burnsey.”

  “Yeah,” Sam replied, feeling tired, “I’m not about to do that, either.”

  Chapter Eight

  Dzhaba Beridze, unaffectionately nicknamed “Jabba the Hutt,” leaned against the Mercedes SUV stopped by the side of the road and watched as Nicky walked toward him, silhouetted in the headlights of the SUV behind him. He exhaled a plume of Cuban cigarillo smoke. Nicky looked nervous. But then many of Jabba’s men were nervous around him.

  They had cause.

  Nicky stopped a cautious three feet away.

  Jabba flicked the stubble of ash from his cigarillo. “Well?”

  “Ilya Kasyanov was supposed to fly from Las Vegas to Minneapolis, Minnesota. He would’ve made a connection there to Amsterdam.”

  “But?”

  “There was a storm, sir. His plane was diverted to Fargo.”

  “Where the fuck is Fargo?”

  Nicky’s Adam’s apple bobbled in his thick throat. “North Dakota. Sir.”

  “And?”

  “He rented a car.”

  Jabba brought the cigarillo to his lips and drew acidic smoke into his mouth. It had been a wearying few days for him, beginning with his arrest by the mudak FBI. Fortunately, his incarceration had been short-lived due to the fact that the sole witness, a man named Anzori the Rat, had been found dead the next morning. Well, in truth, it was Anzori’s head and torso that had been found. The remainder of Anzori was missing. But the part of Anzori that was there had been rather creatively displayed: he’d been mounted on the hood of the car belonging to the FBI agents who had arrested Jabba. And in case anyone was confused about the message sent, Anzori’s tongue had been cut out and nailed to his forehead.

  It would have been a satisfactory ending to a disruptive incident were it not for the discovery that Jabba had made when he’d arrived back at his Las Vegas office. His accountant of over a decade, Ilya Kasyanov, had taken the opportunity of his arrest to open his safe and steal something very precious. This had been a surprise to Jabba. In all the years he had known Kasyanov, the accountant had been nothing but a coward. Apparently Kasyanov had been under the delusion that Jabba would be out of the way long enough for him to flee the country.

  Instead, he was in a car somewhere in the upper Midwest.

  Jabba opened his mouth and breathed smoke. Two other Mercedes SUVs were parked behind the one he leaned against. Dark shapes stood by the last SUV—Sasha, Rocky, and Ivan, waiting. None of the remaining seven men had bothered getting out of the trucks. Above, the Nebraska night sky was filled with stars.

  Nicky shifted nervously.

  Jabba’s gaze flicked to him. “You know where he is headed, yes?”

  Nicky started shaking.

  Jabba sighed wearily.

  Many, many years ago he had lived in Moscow in a flat so small there had been only room for a single, narrow bed. He had shared it with his mother, a woman who perhaps had been once pretty, though he did not remember her so. At night she brought home men and he’d go sit in the hallway, waiting and listening as they fucked her. When she’d earned enough or when she was simply too tired to go on, he would return to crawl into the stinking bed and lie beside her. One night the man with her had stabbed her and that was the end of his mother. Mama had worn a plastic pink heart around her neck on a cheap chain.

  Her murderer had taken it. Why, Jabba had never known. Certainly it was not worth pawning. Perhaps it had been merely a whim of her murderer. Why not? He’d already taken her sex and her life. Why not take her pink plastic heart as well?

  But Jabba had resented the theft. He did not like things being taken from him. And many, many years later, after he’d grown to manhood, after he’d found his mother’s murderer and made him bleed, after he’d become rich, and all around him feared him, then he’d acquired his own pink hearts.

  His were diamonds, not plastic. Perfectly matched pink diamonds, graduated for a necklace, the largest a full five carats. Diamonds that had been cut from the earth from the same mine in Russia. Men had died bringing them to the surface. Jabba liked to think of those deaths when he ran his diamonds through his fingers. The pink looked like blood dissolved in water.

  Jabba stuck his cigarillo in his mouth and reached back to take the gun out of the waistband of his jeans.

  Nicky started to kneel, but had only bent one leg when Jabba pistol-whipped him across the face.

  Nicky fell backward into the frozen grass beside the road, his hands clutched to his face, blood streaming from between his fingers.

  Jabba tucked the gun back into his waistband and toed out his cigarillo.

  When he looked up, Ivan’s face was white and Sasha had his lips pursed. Sasha jerked his head at Ivan, who hurried over to help Nicky up.

  “This rental car, it will have the GPS. You will use your contacts to learn all you can about the GPS and the rental car, and then you will find the accountant,” Jabba said as he opened the door to the SUV he traveled in. He glanced back at Nicky. “Find him, or next time I will not be so sweet.”

  Chapter Nine

  DAY TWO

  Maisa woke shivering. She wasn’t a morning person even at the best of times, and having spent the night on the foldout bed in Dyadya’s couch she wasn’t particularly rested.

  And that didn’t even take into account that the cabin was freezing.

  “Turn up the heat!” she yelled, pulling the blanket over her head.

  There was no reply, which she didn’t even notice for a couple of minutes.

  The blanket tickled her nose. Maisa sighed in exasperation and peeked out from beneath her cave. The room was light, so it was morning, but she didn’t see Dyadya. The old man liked to rise practically at the crack of dawn, and usually he was up well before Maisa woke. She could easily see into the kitchen from the couch and it was empty—even the coffeemaker wasn’t on. Dyadya liked his hot tea, but he kept an old Mr. Coffee on the counter for when she came to visit.

  Maisa frowned. Maybe her uncle was beginning to take it easy as he aged. Or maybe he wasn’t feeling well.

  Vague worry made her wrap the blanket around her shoulders, put on her glasses, and get up. She yelped when her bare feet hit the cold floorboards. Swearing under her breath she tiptoed to the little bathroom next to the kitchen. Empty. She peeked in Dyadya’s bedroom. His bed was already neatly made. Huh. The cabin was tiny. All that was left was another bedroom that had long ago been turned into a storage area—boxes, old electronics, bric-a-brac piled to the ceiling. Even so, a quick look proved Dyadya wasn’t there. Her breath misted in front of her face as she stood there bla
nkly.

  It was really hard to think without coffee.

  A sudden pounding at the front door made Maisa jump, then she smiled in relief.

  “Did you lock yourself out?” she called as she pulled open the door.

  Powdery snow drifted across the threshold, pulled inward by the wake of the door. Outside everything had turned white—sky, ground, trees. Everything but Sam West, standing square on the thin concrete step, weight on one hip, hands shoved in the pockets of his parka, cowboy hat tilted over his eyes. Sam blazed in Technicolor.

  For a moment she simply stared, as if his sudden appearance had made every thought vanish from her brain.

  His electric blue eyes flicked up and down her body and she felt like every nerve had been zapped. Her brain kicked in, flailing in panic, and she was suddenly aware of two things. One, behind her, next to the foldout couch, was a suitcase that contained a fortune in diamonds. And two, she was wearing only a thin black sweater and pink panties under the blanket. Her pajamas had been in her suitcase—the one not holding diamonds.

  She wasn’t entirely sure which realization was the more disturbing.

  Maisa licked her lips. “What?” Her voice came out a raspy croak. Oh, lovely.

  “Good morning to you, too, May.” A slow smile curved the corner of his lips and her gaze fixated on it helplessly. Jesus. Did the man’s every move have to reek of sex?

  He stepped toward her and her eyes snapped up in alarm. “What? What?”

  “Mind if I come in?”

  Well of course she did, but she couldn’t figure out if it would be suspicious to deny him entry—or more suspicious to invite him in, given her antipathy. And as it turned out, it didn’t really matter anyway: Sam was advancing toward her, obviously intent on entering with or without her permission.

  She moved before he could touch her and wordlessly pulled the door open wider. Then she abandoned the door altogether and turned to walk back into the house. Not an admission of defeat—a strategic retreat.

  “George home?” She heard the door slam behind him. “I see his truck’s gone.”