High Tide Read online

  She had to give it to him: he could drive. He wasn’t reckless, and she doubted if he even once exceeded the speed limit, but he moved in and out of traffic with quick efficiency. He wove the car down side streets in residential areas, always with his eyes on all three mirrors as he watched to see if anyone was following them. She didn’t ask him if he had a place for them to go because she was afraid that he would have a negative answer.

  Once he mumbled something.

  “What?!” she asked in fear.

  “Redheaded woodpecker,” he said. “Rare in this area.”

  Given their circumstances, she could only blink at this remark.

  After about forty minutes he pulled the sun visor down and removed a little black remote control, pushed a red button and the next minute they glided into a garage and the door closed behind them. “Come on,” he said without looking at her, then disappeared inside a door, leaving her in the car.

  Slowly, Fiona got out of the car, her backpack on her shoulder. When she stepped through the door, she was in a small kitchen, very plain, clean, but with a feeling that no one actually used it. She could hear a voice through the doorway. Cautiously, she stepped into a living room that had a white Berber carpet and black leather furniture. There were three big watercolors of local Florida scenes on the walls. Hotel rooms were more personal than this place.

  Ace was sitting on the couch talking into a telephone.

  Fiona thought that she should put her finger on the button and cut him off, but she didn’t. Common sense overrode her fear. If the police didn’t know where they were, why did she have to fear a telephone tap?

  “You have the names?” Ace was saying. “Right.” “Yes, I understand.” “Yeah, here at Joe’s.” “No, I’ll stay here as long as I can.” “Yes, she’s here with me.”

  At that Ace leaned back against the couch and looked at Fiona sitting on the matching black leather chair. “No, no, of course not,” he said into the phone, then smiled. “She’s as tall as me, so she’s wearing my clothes.”

  At that Fiona sat upright and glared at him.

  The reply of the person on the other end made him smile broader. “Yeah, okay, tell her not to worry, I have it under control. I’ll wait for your fax.” He paused. “Yeah, okay, and you too.”

  When he put down the receiver, Fiona was still glaring at him, but he ignored her. “Are you hungry? I’m not sure what there is to eat here.”

  Fiona came off the couch in one motion and planted herself in front of him. “I want to know what’s going on. What do you have under control? Where are we? Who were you calling, and what was so funny about your … about these clothes? Except that I’m sick of them, that is.”

  He was wrong, she thought, he was at least two inches taller than she was. They’d be equal if she had on heels, but in the old tennis shoes, she had to look up to him, ever so slightly, but she was looking up.

  As he often did, he ignored her; he stepped around her and went into the kitchen. Fiona was inches behind him, so close in fact that he almost hit her in the face with the freezer door of the side-by-side.

  “Ah, here we have a variety of frozen grease. So what’s your poison?” He held up two packages—one of eggs wrapped around ham and another of eggs wrapped around cheese.

  She took a deep breath. “I want to know what’s going on,” she said as calmly as she could. “I am wanted for murder. The newspaper—”

  “No, we are wanted for murder.” He’d put the frozen packages back into the freezer and was now looking in the cupboards. “You know how to make pancakes?”

  At that Fiona put her arms straight down to her sides, her hands in fists, opened her mouth, and let out a scream.

  Ace had his hand over her mouth before she’d let an ounce of air escape her lungs. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” he demanded. “If someone heard you, they might investigate.” Slowly, he removed his hand and nodded toward the countertop in the kitchen. “Now sit down while I make breakfast.”

  She didn’t move. “So help me, if you don’t tell me what’s going on, I’ll scream my head off.”

  “You really do have trouble with anger, don’t you? Have you thought of seeing a counselor?”

  At that Fiona opened her mouth again, but this time he didn’t move. Instead, he just looked at her speculatively.

  Closing her mouth, Fiona narrowed her eyes at him. “So why aren’t we at the police station, Mr. Do-Gooder? Just hours ago you were telling me that I couldn’t be a fugitive from justice, that I had to turn myself over to the police. But now that you’re also accused, we’re hiding.”

  “You want blueberries in your pancakes?”

  “I want some answers!” she shouted at him.

  “All right,” he said, “but sit while you ask me what you want to know.”

  “No,” she said calmly as she took a seat on a barstool on the far side of the counter, “I don’t play that game. I don’t beg you for information. You start talking.”

  “I guess it would be too much to ask that you would cook while I explain.”

  Fiona gave a snort of derision. She had no idea how to turn on a stove, much less make food with one of the things.

  “Thought not. All right, as you know, Eric killed Roy Hudson last night so we—”

  “Wait a minute,” Fiona said slowly, her hands on either side of her head. “I thought you believed that I killed the man.”

  Ace was at the stove, his back to her, but he turned around, a look of astonishment on his face. “How could you have killed a man twice your size?”

  “This is not funny,” she said, “and I don’t appreciate your levity.”

  “Okay,” he said with a sigh as he turned back to the griddle on the stove. “I had to get you out of there last night, so I pretended to Eric that I believed you were the killer. For all I knew he had a couple of stowaways on the boat ready to attack us.” He placed the first stack of pancakes in front of her.

  Since it was more than she usually ate in two days, she got up, found another plate, then lifted all but one of the pancakes and put them on the empty plate. During this she was thinking about what he was saying and doing her best to remember all that had happened last night.

  “But later when we were alone, why did you keep saying that you thought I was a murderer?”

  “To keep you angry so you wouldn’t think about what had just happened.” He had a spatula laden with yet more pancakes. “Is that all you’re eating?”

  “Yeah,” she said with a cold look at him. “We unwomanly women don’t eat too much.” But the pancakes were quite good.

  He put two more on her plate, put three pats of butter on each pancake, then slathered the whole stack in syrup.

  “You were going to turn me in to the police,” she said as she looked at the pancakes and decided to take just one more bite.

  “Protective custody. Seemed to me that Eric had it in for you. Or maybe it was just that you were the weaker of the two of us.” At that he held up his hands as though to prevent her attacking him for his non-p.c. reply, and she saw that the backs of his hands were deeply scratched. It must have been painful for him to drive.

  “I’m sorry,” she mumbled, her mouth full, her eyes on her plate, her face red in memory of his holding her in the shower.

  “What did you say? I couldn’t hear you.” He cupped his hand to his ear.

  “I said that you had no right to treat me as though I were a child. You could have told me what was going on,” she said loudly.

  “Right. Before or after you went into shock over finding a bleeding corpse on top of you?”

  At that Fiona pushed her now-empty plate away. “So what now? Where are we, by the way?”

  “This house belongs to a friend of mine. It’s my getaway when he’s not here and I’ve had too much of …” When he paused, Fiona got the impression that he didn’t want to reveal too much about himself. “Anyway, no one in Florida knows about this place, so we won’t b