Page 66 of The Maverick
Inside, behind it, the calculation had started.
The FBI was serious.
I'd known that since six in the morning yesterday. But the way they'd run a tail on me from her doorstep this morning—openly, in three vehicles, on a residential block, at a time of day when half the city was outside getting coffee—was a step past what they'd done at the hotel. The hotel had been a private message.We can come to you when you're alone.This was a public one.We can come to you when you're with somebody.
That second message had Rebecca Lynn's name on it, whether they knew it or not. Whether they'd cared who she was or just clocked her as a woman whose door I'd walked out of, the math from now on included her.
I didn't love that.
I was going to have to handle it.
There were a few moves available. The first was the obvious one—keep her out of it. Stay away from her until this thing settled, let her get on with her life and her playing and her ninety-four dollars, and come back when the air was clear. That was the responsible move. That was the move a serious man would make.
I wasn't going to make that move.
I'd made enough decisions in the last twenty-four hours to know which way I was about to keep deciding. I was not going to put a federal investigation between me and Rebecca Lynn at the exact moment I'd worked out that there was ameandRebecca Lynn.I was going to take her to dinner tonight on a balcony at the Palmetto Rose, and I was going to keep doing that, and the FBI was going to have to find a way to do their work around the fact of it.
Which meant I was going to need to get creative.
Which meant I was going to need a favor from Dominion Hall.
The woman behind the counter looked up.
"How does this look to you, sweetheart?"
She'd built me a thing about the size of a child's head, mostly cream, with a half dozen of the blushed-pink ones threaded through, tied with a ribbon that wasn't satin and wasn't burlap and was somewhere honest in between. A single long stem of something green with small yellow buds laid against the cream like punctuation.
"Ma'am, that is exactly right."
"I thought it might be."
"How much?"
"Sixty-five dollars."
I pulled out my wallet and put a hundred on the counter.
"Keep the change."
"Honey."
"You saved my life. I owe you."
She shook her head, smiling, and rang me out.
"You want me to deliver these?" she said. "I can have a girl run them anywhere in town in the next half-hour."
"I'll take them myself."
"Lucky girl."
"I'm the lucky one, ma'am. Have a good morning."
The bell rang again as I went out.
I stood on the sidewalk with sixty-five dollars' worth of cream and pink in my hand and the smell of Rebecca Lynn still on my collar and the FBI somewhere down a side street pretending they weren't there, and I thought, with the same cheerful clarity I'd been operating in all morning:
All right. Time to get to work.
