Parker And The Gypsy

“I wasn’t making fun of you.”

“Then what do you call this?” Sara raised a trembling finger to her bruised lips.

“I was kissing you.” A shade of irritation crept into Mike’s voice. “You can’t go feeling up a guy’s aura and not expect him to react.”

“That wasn’t the sort of reaction you were supposed to—Oh, never mind.” Sara bent down to retrieve her purse from the carpet, gathering up the tattered remains of her dignity, as well. By the time she straightened, she managed to face Mike with some degree of calm.

“I’m sorry you’re such an unhappy man, Mr. Parker. But that doesn’t give you the right to mock and hurt other people.”

“I’m not unhappy, just hung over. So if you don’t mind, close the door quietly on your way out.”

“I’ll go,” Sara said. “But that doesn’t change anything. You’re a miserable and lonely man with a very disturbed aura, full of bitterness and a pain that’s as old as—as your wound.”

“Wound?” Mike scowled at her. “What wound?”

Sara blinked as she realized the words she’d just blurted out. She stared at Mike and suddenly an image came to her of Mike’s bare chest in all its glorious detail—hard-sculpted muscle from the flat plane of his stomach to the broad reach of his shoulders, smooth skin as bronzed and warm as sunlight. Except for—

“You—you have a scar on your left shoulder,” Sara said haltingly.

Mike’s eyes widened. “What have you got, X-ray vision or something?”

“N-no.” Sara flushed, feeling as if she’d been caught sneaking peeks at Mike naked in his shower. “I told you I was psychic, didn’t I? Sometimes these perceptions just come to me. That scar on your shoulder goes as deep as your soul, Mike Parker. It was made by something cold...something sharp.” Sara shivered. “A knife perhaps? With a long—”

“Enough, already,” Mike snarled, breaking her concentration. “Who the hell put you up to this?”

“Put me up to—Why, no one. I don’t know what you mean.”

“Either some jerk with a warped sense of humor sent you here to yank my chain or else you really are one total spook. Either way, I want you out of my office. Now!”

Sara took a hasty step back at Mike’s menacing approach. “I’m sorry if I’ve upset you, but I assure you no one sent me. I came to you because I honestly needed your help, Mr. Parker. What am I supposed to do about finding John Patrick? If you won’t take the case, could you at least—”

“Out!”

Before Sara could say another word, she found herself being roughly shoved into the tiny outer office. Mike slammed the door closed between them with a bang that was both loud and final.

“Recommend another detective?” Sara finished weakly, realizing she was addressing dead silence. She sensed that Mike Parker had just closed more doors than the one to his office. Any extrasensory perceptions she’d been having about Mike had ceased as abruptly as a phone line being disconnected.

Which was probably just as well. She’d definitely struck some kind of nerve when she’d started to probe into the mysteries of the scar on his shoulder. She’d never meant for that to happen. She tried not to invade the privacy of anyone’s personal life or thoughts unless invited to do so. But she hadn’t been able to help herself in Mike’s case.

The vision had caught her completely unaware. It had been as exhilarating and frightening as standing on the brink of some dark chasm, unable to see what lay at the bottom, but watching a ray of light slowly starting to stretch downward. Even if Mike hadn’t stopped her, Sara would have snatched herself back. Beneath his teasing wise-guy manner, she sensed something dark and disturbing about the man. She didn’t want a closer look at the secrets of his mind...or his body.

“You didn’t come here today to do a psychic reading or to be mentally undressing Mike Parker,” she reminded herself. “You came here to hire a detective.”

And in that she had just failed miserably.

Sara stole another look at Mike’s closed door and issued a long sigh of frustration and disappointment.

“So what am I supposed to do now?” she murmured, sagging down dispiritedly into the office’s sole waiting chair. On the secretary’s desk, the phone console burred softly, the incoming call light blinking off and on. Between throwing paying customers out of his office and ignoring his phone calls, Sara wondered how Mike Parker managed to stay in business.

She thought of reaching for the battered telephone directory she saw perched on the corner of the absent Rosa’s desk, thumbing through it for the listing of another private detective, but after her failure with Mike, she couldn’t seem to summon up the heart to do so.

She had been just so blasted convinced that Mike would be the man to help her find Mamie’s lost son. She’d already tried everything she could think of, even going so far as to insert an ad in the newspaper, asking that anyone with information on Mamie or John Patrick contact her at once. When Sara had met with no response, the sympathetic Mrs. Jenkins had suggested she hire Mike Parker, the old lady showing her the glowing article written about the man.

Sara had come to Atlantic City with high hopes, expecting to find a man with the wisdom of Sherlock Holmes, the dapperness of Hercule Poirot and the sophistication of Nick Charles all rolled into one.

But instead of the storybook detective she’d envisioned, Mike Parker was more like an older version of one of the Dead End Kids, lean and sexy in his formfitting jeans and T-shirt, street tough and smart mouthed.

Yet despite his disconcerting appearance and the less-than-successful look of his office, she could not rid herself of the impression that Mike was damned good at his job when he wanted to be. A shrewd intelligence lurked behind those lazy brown eyes, and the set of the man’s jaw had a bulldog tenacity about it. Sara had a feeling that he could have easily found Mamie’s missing son if he had cared enough to do so.

But even after one brief meeting with the man, Sara could sense that that would always be the trick with the cynical Mr. Parker—to make him care.

It was certainly quite beyond her abilities, she thought ruefully. Maybe she could have persuaded Mike to have taken the case if she had just presented it to him differently, as a simple missing-persons matter, told him nothing about ghosts or auras or psychic impressions.

There was only one problem with that. She was tired of pretending. She’d done it for far too many years, stifling the extraordinary perceptions that made her feel strange and different from everyone else, that frequently got her labeled as crazy, even by her own family.

It was only during the past year that Sara had finally developed the courage to face herself in the mirror and say, “My psychic abilities are as real and natural as the color of my eyes and the shape of my nose. I am not crazy.”

She certainly didn’t need a cynic like Mike Parker to chip away at her newfound confidence. Sara touched one hand to her mouth, still tender from the force of Mike’s kiss. Or to cause other disturbances of a less spiritual nature.

“No,” Sara resolved, forcing herself up from the chair. Setting her chin to a stubborn angle, she cast one last wistful look at the closed office door. “I will manage just fine without the services of Mr. Michael Parker.”

Mike lowered his office blinds and peered between the slats, watching as Sara emerged from the building, her gypsycolored skirt and golden tumble of curls a splash of color on the gray concrete of the pavement below.

Furtively observing her movements, Mike frowned, still not certain what he was expecting to see—Sara being met by one of those idiots from down at Boom Boom’s, to have a laugh over the good one they’d just put over on poor old Mike. Or perhaps someone more sinister from his past, melting out of the shadows to congratulate Sara on a performance well-done, the first phase in some elaborate revenge plot to drive Mike Parker round the bend.

“It’d be a real short trip, doll,” Mike muttered, at the same time chiding himself for letting his usual suspicious nature and imagination run away with him. He couldn’t make either of those scenarios he’d conjured up fit with the wide-eyed and earnest young woman he’d tossed out of his office.

Sara was doing nothing more sinister than pacing distractedly along the sidewalk, totally unaware of her surroundings, the obscene come-on gestures from the construction workers across the street or the interest she was drawing from a gang of street punks hanging out on the corner.

Mike’s office wasn’t exactly located at one of the swankier addresses in the city. He caught himself tensing, watching until Sara managed to hail herself a cab and was spirited safely away.

Not, he assured himself gruffly, because he cared in the least what happened to Little Miss Blue Eyes. He just wanted to make sure she was really gone. Mike let the blind fall back into place and turned away from the window with a dismissive shake of his head.

Now that he’d had a chance to calm down, he was pretty convinced that Sara had been acting all on her own, that she was nothing more than she seemed, a harmless kook, an angel with her halo screwed on a little too tight.

But she really had you going for a minute there, didn’t she, Parker? a voice inside him taunted. In more ways than one.

“The hell she did,” Mike growled, seeking to deny both the surge of attraction he’d felt for Sara and the fact that she’d managed to shake him. Not even in that one moment when she’d seemed to look straight through him, her blue eyes so clear and honest and searching?

No, not even then. But Mike did admit to an uncomfortable twinge. He had no objection to a woman trying to see through his clothes, but he didn’t want anyone probing deeper than that. There were places in the dark, murky backwaters of his mind even he didn’t want to go, memories he didn’t want dredged out into the light of day.

But Sara Holyfield was no mind reader—not even close. She was about as psychic as...as the wilted plant his secretary had insisted upon leaving on his windowsill to die.

All right, then. So how’d she know about your old wound?

Mike shrugged. A certain knack for perception and a few good hunches. Maybe Sara had even felt the outline of his scar when they had been locked in that clinch. His T-shirt was thin enough. And how’d she known about the knife? A lucky guess, that was all.

And as for all that stuff she’d spouted about him being such a miserable and bitter man... The lady was completely off the mark there. Hell, he was doing better now than he had in the two years since he’d quit his job at the police force. Business was good, at least good enough that he could now afford to have a secretary—when Rosa bothered to show up. And his divorce had become final last fall. He was a free man again, free to go out cruising for gorgeous honeys, free to get lucky every night if he wanted to.