The Accidental Bodyguard

The mood in the library had grown as ugly and dangerous as the storm outside. The Morans were in that no-win situation so many people involved in litigation find themselves. They were wondering whom they disliked the most—their adversary, the family saint, or their own utterly ruthless but highly reputed attorney.

One minute Lucas was bursting out of the library doors into the foyer, intent on nothing except driving to San Antonio as fast as possible. In the next minute, Lucas felt as if he’d been sucked blindly into a cyclone and hurled into an entirely new reality in which an incredibly powerful force gripped him, body and soul. In which all his dark bitternesses miraculously dissolved. Even his fierce ambition to work solely for money was gone.

Unsuperstitious by nature, Lucas did not believe in psychic powers or ghosts. But this otherworldly experience was a very pleasurable feeling.

Dangerously pleasurable. Almost sexual, and dangerously familiar somehow.

All his life he’d been driven by anger and greed or by the quest for power.

And suddenly those drives were gone. What he really wanted was in this room.

He stopped in mid-stride. His huge body whirled; his searing gray eyes searched every niche and darkened corner of the hall.

The mysterious presence was very near. As he stood there, he continued to feel the weird, overpowering connection.

She was as afraid of this thing as he was.

She?

For no reason at all Lucas was reminded of the times he and his brother, Pete, had hidden together as children from the Indian slum bullies, not speaking to one another but each profoundly aware of the other.

“Hello?” Lucas’s deep querying drawl held a baffled note.

He held his breath. For the first time he noted how eerily quiet the foyer was. How the presence of death seemed to linger like an unwanted guest.

How the hall with its pale green wallpaper was heavy with the odor of roses past their prime. How these swollen blossoms, no doubt leftovers from Gertrude Moran’s memorial service, were massed everywhere—in vases, in Meissen.bowls. How several white petals had fallen onto the polished tabletops and floors. Holly had shown him the old lady’s rose garden and had told him she had loved roses.

Lucas’s senses were strangely heightened as he stood frozen outside the library doors, struggling to figure out what was happening to him. He inhaled the sicklysweet, funereal scent of the dying roses. He listened to each insistent tick of the vermeil clock.

The summer sunlight was fading. Much of the white and gilt furniture was cast in shadow. The threadbare Aubusson rug at his feet had a forest green border.

When he saw the closet with its door standing partially ajar, he felt strangely drawn to it. Oddly enough, when he stepped toward it, the connection was instantly broken. He was free.

All his old bitterness and cynicism immediately regained him.

He bolted out of the Moran mansion faster than before.

One (#ulink_0ada549a-5af3-52ab-92ec-03580f333c46)

“Kill!”

Sweet P.’s earsplitting voice blasted inside Lucas’s black Lincoln as he raced toward the hospital. The shrieks seemed to slice open his skull and shred the tender tissues of his inner ear as handily as a meat cleaver.

There should be a law against a three-year-old screaming in an automobile speeding sixty miles per hour on a freeway.

Just as there should be a law against a kid being up at five in the morning experimenting with her older cousin’s handcuffs.

Just as there should be a law against Peppin owning a pair of the damn things in the first place.

“You get off here,” Pete suddenly said as they were about to pass the exit ramp.

Tires screamed as Lucas swerved across two lanes onto the down ramp.

“Mommy! Carol!” Patti.yelled between sobs.

Too bad Mommy was out of town and Carol, her sitter, had called in sick.

Patti shook her hands violently, rattling the handcuffs.

Lucas’s temples thudded with equal violence.

It was Monday morning. Six o’clock to be exact. Lucas felt like hell. Usually he never dreamed, but last night a weird nightmare about a girl in trouble had kept him up most of the night. In the dream, he had loved the girl, and they’d been happy for a while. Then she’d been abducted, and he’d found himself alone in a misty landscape of death and stillness and ruin. At first he’d been terrified she was dead. Then she’d made a low moan, and he had known that if he didn’t save her, he would lose everything that mattered to him in the world. He’d tracked her through a maze of ruined slums only to find her and have her utter a final lowthroated cry and die as he lifted her into his arms. He’d bolted out of his bed, his body drenched in sweat, his heart racing, his sense of tragic loss so overwhelmingly profound he couldn’t sleep again.

The girl’s ethereally lovely face and voluptuous body had seemed branded into his soul. He’d gotten up and tried to sketch her on his legal notepad. Sleek and slim, she had that classy, rich-girl look magazine editors pay so dearly for. She had high cheekbones, a careless smile, yellow hair and sparkling blue eyes. He’d torn the sheet from the pad and thrown it away, only to sketch another.

Due in court at ten, Lucas had intended to be halfway to Corpus Christi by now. Instead Pete, Sweet P., the boys and he were rushing to the emergency room, where Pete was on call. Some girl had overdosed, and a doctor was needed STAT, medical jargon for fast. Gus, an emergency-room security guard, had volunteered to remove the handcuffs if Pete brought Sweet P. when he came.

Disaster had struck right after Lucas had loaded the luggage and boys into the Lincoln and Pete and Sweet P. had gotten into Pete’s Porsche. The Porsche wouldn’t start because someone had left an interior light on all night.

Someone had also removed Lucas’s jumper cables from his trunk. And that same mysterious someone had also lost the key to Peppin’s handcuffs. Thus, Lucas and the boys had to drive Pete and Sweet P. to the ER before they could head for home.

Why was Lucas even surprised? His personal life had been chaos ever since the boys had moved in. For starters, they must have dialed every nine-hundred number in America, because his phone bill had run into the thousands of dollars the first month they’d lived with him.

Lucas put on his right turn signal when he saw the blue neon sign for San Antonio City Memorial and swerved into the covered parking lot for the hospital’s emergency room. With a swoosh of tires and a squeal of brakes, Lucas stopped the big car too suddenly, startling Sweet P. into silence. Her watery blue eyes looked addled as she took in the blazing lights of the three ambulances and the squad car.

Lucas’s expression was grim as he lowered the automobile windows, cut the motor and gently gathered Sweet P. into his arms so Pete would be free to check his patient.

As he got out of the Lincoln with the squirming toddler, Lucas gave Peppin and Montague a steely glance. “You two be good.”

“No problem.” Peppin’s sassy grin was all braces. Huge mirrored sunglasses hid his mischievous eyes.

As always Montague, who resented authority, pretended to ignore him and kept his nose in a book entitled Psychic Vampires.

The emergency room was such a madhouse, Lucas forgot the boys. Apparently there’d been a fight at the jail. Three prisoners lay on stretchers. A man with hairy armpits and a potbelly wearing only gray Jockey shorts with worn-out elastic was standing outside a treatment room screaming drunkenly that doctors made too much money and he was going to get his lawyer if he didn’t get treated at once. In another room an obese woman was pointing to her right side, saying she hurt and that her doctor had spent a fortune on tests and that she was deathly allergic to some kind of pink medicine and that her medical records were in Tyler on microfilm if anybody cared about them. Six telephones buzzed constantly. Doctors were dictating orders to exhausted nurses.

In the confusion it took Lucas a while to find Gus. Meanwhile Sweet P. was so fascinated by the drunk and the fat lady, she stopped crying. Enthroned on the counter of the nurses’ station, she was having the time of her life. A plump redheaded nurse was feeding her pizza and candy and cola, which she gobbled greedily while Gus rummaged in a toolbox for the correct pair of bolt cutters.

“Now you hold still, little princess,” Gus said.

Suddenly Pete’s frantic voice erupted from an examining room down the hall.

“She’s gone!”

Lucas left Sweet P. with Gus and raced to the examining room, where an IV dangled over an empty gurney with blood-streaked sheets. Bloody footprints drunkenly crisscrossed the white-tiled floor.

“She has little feet,” Lucas whispered inanely, lifting a foot when he realized he was standing squarely on top of two toe prints.

Pete yelled, “Nurse!”