Shadow Hand Read online

  If only she’d gotten more information out of Bridget. But Bridget had been just arriving in Boston. She didn’t know the territory. She only knew the usual way things went—and what happened to girls who didn’t do well enough. Truck stops. Not even a room, just the back of a beat-up van.

  Ash had seen plenty of truck stops in Montana, had stopped at some for a quick meal, a restroom, coffee to keep her awake while she drove. Had there been vans there in the shadows between trucks where anonymous men waited in line for their turn to hand over their money, climb in, and come out fifteen minutes later fumbling to zip up their pants and fasten their belts? Maybe. Probably.

  A wave of rage and nausea swept her as she lay awake one very early morning. She should hit the road, roar through every truck stop in America, an avenging angel smashing the vans and scouring the predatory filth from the face of the earth.

  Full daylight brought unwelcome logic. How many truck stops? You and what army? But she had a couple of days between shifts at the bar, so she rented a car and drove north on the highway into New Hampshire, figuring she’d travel until dusk and then look for trouble. Surely there wouldn’t be any action before then.

  She stopped for a bite at a major rest area shortly after noon, automatically scanning the separate lot where trucks parked, but not expecting to see anything out of the ordinary. In fact, the old pick-up truck fitted with a camper top between two twelve-wheelers looked so ordinary that she wouldn’t have thought much about it if the guy leaning against its back hadn’t looked like such a scumbag, and hadn’t peered into her car with a suggestive smirk as she went slowly by. The smirk vanished as soon as he saw, she assumed, that she wasn’t a man.

  Ash parked and walked back. By the time she reached the camper he was shifting nervously.

  “Lookin’ for somethin’?” Then, with an attempt at a grin, “You a cop?”

  She let just a hint of Montana cowboy accent through. “Nope. Not me. Far’s you can get from a cop.” Which was true enough, in its way.

  He looked her over slowly, a practiced leer emerging. “So, you lookin’ for something?”

  “Depends on what you got in there.” She made the camper shake a little from five feet away. At the faint sound of a whimper from inside, she yanked the tailgate open, making its owner stumble forward, and before he could turn to shut it she saw a tangle of brownish hair, a startlingly young, scared face, and a slight body wrapped in a blanket.

  The guy squealed as he felt himself lifted high against the side of the neighboring twelve-wheeler and pinned there by an invisible force.

  It was all Ash could do to keep from slamming him against the big truck again and again until he was just a sack of splintered bones and slushy flesh, but she had to get information, something that might let her save more than one poor girl. “Where’d you get her? Who do you know in the business?”

  “Nobody! I dunno!” He drummed his heels against the metal. She shook him hard. “Just…just this dude…he come by and passed ‘er along to me for a hundred bucks. Said she was worth more but tried too hard to run away.”

  “Not enough.” She turned him upside down. “How’d he know you’d buy?”

  “I might…might’a told another dude I was lookin’, you know, over a beer or somethin’.”

  She flipped him again and slammed him against the truck’s side, but she was pretty sure he didn’t know anything else. Who’d trust somebody like him enough to let him identify them? The girl might know more.

  “C’mon out, honey,” she called, and then was almost bowled over by the blanket-wrapped form tumbling out over the tailgate, picking herself up, and dashing away with a bundle of clothing clutched under one arm and a metal box under the other.

  Ash was so startled she didn’t try to grab the kid before she was out of sight among the trucks. She even let the guy drop, but when he scrambled up and yelled, “The bitch got the cashbox!” she picked him up again, shoved him roughly inside his own camper, and slammed the tailgate shut. Then she turned his whole rig upside down, bounced it hard, and suddenly realized that the commotion had attracted the attention of a couple of drivers returning from lunch.

  Ash channeled her steely-eyed military persona, close enough to pass as a policewoman. “Move along, guys. Official business.”

  They shrugged and moved along, looking back a time or two. They’d have some story to tell when they hit the road, which might even do some good if they knew what had been for sale in the pick-up. But by now it was too late for her to find the young girl who had bolted, although she tried. At least the kid had had the presence of mind to take the cashbox, so maybe she’d make out okay. Small comfort.

  Back on the road, Ash’s mind was a chaotic whirl. I should have killed him. It’s a good thing I didn’t kill him. Maybe I did. Murder gets so complicated! And then, over and over, I can’t do all this alone. Where’s Cleo?

  She drove all the rest of that day and through most of the night, checking out half a dozen truck stops without any more signs of sex trafficking, at least any she could recognize. It would make more sense to get to the sources, like the places where girls were kept between the pay-to-play parties Bridget had mentioned.

  She headed back to the Boston area, got some sleep, and by the next day had enough of a grip on herself to think about who might be able to help her. She was pretty sure she could trust Mags, up to a point, but not yet to the point of revealing her true self. If she even still had a true self.

  Back at work in the Galaxy Bar, Ash was getting plenty of offers for dates, some quite tempting, but so far she’d remained congenially apart. In the fourth week, on duty at Dyke Night at closing, she didn’t even turn around at first when she felt a tug on the flannel shirt she’d draped across her back, its sleeves tied around her neck. People were always claiming her attention.

  “Nice cape you’ve got there,” came a familiar voice. An oh-so-familiar voice. For a moment Ash didn’t dare look, in case she was imagining things. “Super outfit, too,” Cleo said. “Levis and white T-shirt. Classic. All it needs is a single black glove.”

  Ash waited a few beats to get herself under control. “Hey there, Cleo.” She turned, super cool, fighting the stupid grin splitting her face. “Come here often?”

  “Not lately. How about we go someplace else?”

  “I’m on duty here for…” Ash looked at her watch. “Twenty more minutes.” She felt dozens of eyes on them.

  “Go on.” Mags waved them toward the door. “It’s quiet enough tonight.” And to Cleo, “Welcome back, kid. I’ll catch you later.”

  They went.

  Chapter 7

  The first clinch was up against a tree around the next corner. Fortunately, it was one of those city-hardened trees that can take anything short of a direct hit by a delivery van, but the way the branches shook above them made Cleo wonder, briefly, whether it could take a hit by Ash. Then she had no time or breath for anything but Ash herself.

  Touch said it all, without words. Arms and hands gripped whatever they could reach, mouths found each other with a force as close to pain as pleasure. Ash pressed Cleo’s back into the rough bark at first, until Cleo swung around and did the pressing, figuring it was only fair. Finally they eased off, exploring each other with gentler touches in ways that weren’t suited to public viewing. Ash clutched Cleo’s hand, gasped, “C’mon!” and dragged her along the street.

  A second, briefer clinch came at the foot of the outside stairs leading up to Ash’s small furnished room. At the top of the stairs, though, with the door already opened from below, Ash paused. “You weren’t surprised at all to see me, were you? How come?”

  “I knew you were somewhere in Boston, so I’ve been making the rounds. Were you expecting me?”

  “Just hoping. I didn’t know where else to look.” Ash shook her head. “I’ve been such a damned idiot, thinking I could go it alone,
feeling like I’d been…chosen or something, special, given some great mission— Hey, wait a minute! How could you know I was in Boston?”

  “She told me.” Cleo was enjoying the hell out of Ash’s confusion. “C’mon, aren’t you going to invite me in?”

  Ash backed into the room and sat down heavily on the bed, which took up most of the space. A light switch clicked, and a stark overhead bulb went on without any apparent human intervention. “‘She’? The major? How did she know where I was?”

  Cleo pulled the only chair out from the folding table and straddled it, arms crossed on its back. “You mean my good pal Major Margaret McAllister? No, as far as I know she hasn’t tracked you. It was that other ‘She.’ The one in the desert. Your own personal goddess.”

  Ash’s mouth hung open for a second or two before she pulled herself together. “You’re telling me that Ishtar is your good pal now, too? The one who wanted to kill you?”

  “You might put it that way.” Cleo wriggled to get more comfy. “I stopped by her lair on my way to be mustered out and get a flight to the States. The mine-buster squad I traveled with went along that same road, and they humored me when I said I’d lost something with sentimental value over in that wadi and wanted to take a few minutes to look for it. Good guys. We’d worked together for three months, and they’d all heard the story about when we hid there.

  “So we stopped for a lunch break, and I wandered alone over to the wadi and down to where our cave had been, pretty much all just rubble now. I could feel her anger right away, by the dust blowing into my eyes and the pebbles bouncing off my head, but I stood my ground, stripped naked, and yelled, more or less, ‘Look you, whatever you are, I’m a woman, and Ash needs me. If you know where she is, show me right now!’ After that we got along just fine.”

  Cleo stood, stretched, ambled over to the sink, and drew a glass of water. She drank it slowly, drew another, and nearly choked when the glass moved out of her hand and landed over on the table.

  “Sergeant Brown!” Ash snapped. “Finish your report! That’s an order!”

  “Yes, ma’am!” Cleo saluted and went back to the chair. “Since you ask so nicely. I don’t really know precisely what happened, but I had a vision right then, clear as anything, of an airplane window. It was like I was right there with you. I could see the ground through a space in the clouds. You were passing over the Connecticut River and the Holyoke Range and the Quabbin Reservoir. I’ve been on enough flights into Boston to recognize those landmarks. Could be our goddess didn’t know where in the world that was, but it was what she could see when she looked for you, so it was what she showed me.”

  Ash balanced at the very edge of the bed, leaning forward with her hands on her thighs as though about to spring up. “So that’s it? Without being high or anything? You expect me to believe you challenged her, and she told you where I was?”

  Cleo shifted uneasily, her bravado faltering. “I can’t swear it wasn’t just my imagination. And a whole lot of wishful thinking. But here I am, and here you are.”

  The tense expression on Ash’s face was unreadable. Cleo had always been able to sense her moods before, but not this time. She forged on. “Look, if she didn’t tell me, nobody did. Not the major, not anybody, if that’s what you’re thinking. As far as I know nobody else knows where you—we—are. Maybe it was just a lucky guess.”

  Ash’s tension visibly eased. “You were right about the plane. What I saw out the window.” She leaned back, arms braced behind her, and worked her modified cowboy boots off her feet. Then she swung her long legs onto the bed and stretched them out. Those legs in baggy camouflage fatigues had made Cleo’s pulse pound. In snug blue jeans they made her crotch damp, too.

  A smile flickered at the corner of Ash’s mouth. “I was experimenting with moving the clouds apart so I could see below, and wishing you could watch me doing it.”

  “Wow!” Cleo was appropriately awestruck. “Do you think you could make the clouds give rain?”

  “Always one step ahead of me! But there are too many factors involved in that besides movement. Besides, there’s the whole unintended consequences thing. What if I couldn’t make it stop?”

  “I dunno, you’ve always been so good at making things not stop.” Cleo wriggled in the chair again, this time with clear erotic intent. “I was kind of wondering, if it was a lucky guess that let me find you, just how lucky can I get?”

  “I’ll have to think about that.” Ash looked intently at the dusty Army boots Cleo still wore. Slowly and sensuously, the laces untied themselves. Cleo would never have believed bootlaces could be sexy, but they sure were now. She kicked off the boots.

  “You say you stripped for the goddess?” Ash was still five feet away.

  “Just my shirt and—ah!” Buttons rapidly unbuttoned themselves. Cleo felt, actually felt, Ash’s hand slide beneath her sports bra and cup her breast. She was still trying to process that sensation when her belt buckle unclasped and the zipper on her jeans slid down. She gasped as the invisible hand pushed its way under her boxers. “Ah! Uh, been getting a lot of practice, have you?”

  “Not like this,” Ash said, “except in dreams.”

  “Dreams? When? I had a dream…it was so real…”

  But “when” didn’t matter. “Now” was everything. She stood, shrugged off her shirt and bra, wriggled out of jeans and boxers, and made it to the bed and onto Ash in one leap. They rolled together, laughing and gasping, until Cleo paused on top. “I like to do things the old-fashioned way.” Her fingers got Ash’s shirt unbuttoned almost as fast as hers had been, made quick work of the rest, and then her skin moved against every inch of Ash she could manage while her mouth ranged from lips to throat to breast and back again.

  “So nice to have a bed,” she murmured against Ash’s ear.

  “Nicer than in Paris?” Ash flipped Cleo over and started nibbling down from her breasts to her belly.

  “Nothing could be nicer than Paris, but wherever we are now is always the best,” Cleo said, then yipped at a nip in a tender place. “Nothing could be better than now,” she went on between gasps, “even twisting around like pretzels in the…in the jeep when that was the only place we had… Oh!” She arched her hips into the pressure of Ash’s tongue, infuriatingly fleeting. Ash lifted her head and swung their bodies crossways on the mattress.

  “And the bed is wide enough for this,” Ash panted, rolling them together from its head to its foot and back again, over and over. The frantic pressure of body on body, hollow on curve on skin slippery with sweat and arousal, felt so good that it was hard to stop, until the hunger for even more intensity where it was needed most grew, and swelled, and couldn’t be denied.

  “Let me…” Cleo managed to raise up enough to press her face down into Ash’s belly, then moved up to her full breasts and went back and forth from one to the other, worshipping them with lips, tongue, even gentle teeth, feeding on the tantalizing swelling of their tips, until Ash moaned and thrashed and tugged Cleo’s head down between her thighs.

  Hands, tongue, lips, Cleo burrowed her whole face into that demanding heat, where every slick, sensitive inch pulsed with hunger for more, harder, harder, more, please! No drawing the pleasure out, as they used to do in the jeep, in the desert; it had been too long now to wait. Ash arched her hips, moving them to a demanding rhythm, and with Cleo’s fingers inside her and Cleo’s mouth impelling her clit to a frantic hardness, she screamed out her wordless triumph.

  Cleo stroked Ash with increasing gentleness as she floated down from that peak, her kisses light on Ash’s skin, keeping the brakes on her own need. But when Ash recovered enough for her breathing to slow, she flipped over and devoted herself to Cleo’s pleasure.

  The small breasts, so easily concealed, could tighten and swell and fill a lover’s mouth as enticingly as any other woman’s. Her taut buttocks were a perfect fit for Ash’s hands. She ra
ised Cleo’s hips, ran her own still-rigid breasts one by one along Cleo’s glistening folds, teasing as long as she dared, then responded to her lover’s desperate pleas with firm strokes of tongue and fingers and an even tighter hold on her buttocks. Cleo erupted in cries increasingly shrill, all control abandoned in ways she would never have allowed anyone but Ash to hear.

  “Shall I stop now, or not?” Ash said when Cleo could focus again.

  “Just…just hold me now.”

  So they held each other, breathing each other’s essence, until sweat and the lubrication of their pleasure cooled and they burrowed under the blankets. Cleo could feel the bond they’d had renewed, and strengthened. She could even sense what Ash was thinking while they were this close together, but some things still needed to be spoken out loud.

  “Cleo,” Ash murmured, “nothing is worth giving you up. Nothing. I was a fool. You, being with you, is the only thing that feels like home. Like being me.”

  “I know,” Cleo said sleepily. In a few minutes she roused, though, and said, “So what have you been up to? Saved any of the world yet?”

  Ash hesitated. “Maybe a little. Too damned little. I helped someone get away from the PsyCenter along with me, but I don’t know how she got along afterward. And coming into Boston I sort of saved just one sex-trafficked Irish teenager, but I guess I’ll never know for sure how things worked out for her. I sent her back to Dublin with enough cash to live on for a while, and felt relieved not to be responsible for her anymore. Some world-saving.”

  “Gotta start someplace, I guess. Sounds like you found a way to make enough to bankroll your world-saving mission. That’s progress.”

  Ash sighed. “Funny how you were talking about getting lucky. I’ve been hanging out in casinos a whole lot more than anybody should, and making a bundle without needing any help from luck.”