Part 21 (2/2)
Smiling, Archer looked at his watch. ”Time to go.”
”Where?”
”The airport.” He handed over a small cloth purse. ”Your California driver's license and credit cards are inside if anyone wants ID at the gate.”
She blinked. ”Gate. As in airplane?”
”Yeah. We're going to Darwin.”
”Why?”
”Because when they don't find our names on a flight out of Broome, they'll a.s.sume we drove to Derby, so they'll look for us there.”
”Who will be looking for us?”
”Should be interesting to find out.”
”Is that why we're going? Just to find out if anyone follows?”
”No.”
Hannah dug in her heels and stopped. ”I can't just walk away from Pearl Cove and have a little holiday.”
”That's what everyone thinks.”
”Except you,” she retorted. ”I don't know what you think at all.”
”I think we'll be dead in two days one week max if we stay in Pearl Cove.”
A chill went over her that the sun couldn't touch. She looked at his face, hoping he was making a bleak joke. Nothing she saw rea.s.sured her. Without the beard, the harsh beauty of his face was fully revealed: angular, balanced, strong, unflinching, framed in darkness. His eyes were clear and remote, reflecting the torrid sky. And like the sun, his eyes were relentless. The man who had laughed with her, teased her, loved her, was gone as though he had never existed.
”Very soon Flynn, Chang, and whoever else has bought in to the game will have had enough time to ransack what's left of Pearl Cove,” Archer said calmly. ”When they come up empty, they'll have to admit that the secret to the black rainbows isn't in the ruins. That's when they'll come after you.”
”But I don't know!”
”I'm sure they'll believe you, eventually. Unfortunately, by then you'll know too much about who killed Len, who has been creaming Len's pearls, and who has been laundering pearls through him. You'll be a liability who is known to enjoy diving. Alone. If they're feeling kind, they'll let you die that way. If not, they'll simply feed you to the sharks.”
Hannah opened her mouth to speak. Nothing came out but a hoa.r.s.e sound.
His expression gentled. He brushed the backs of his fingers down her cheek. ”Don't worry, sweetheart. I'm taking you to a safe place.”
She heard what he didn't say. ”What about you?”
”I'm a big boy.” He glanced at his watch. They were cutting it fine. ”When we get on the plane, don't talk about anything that has to do with pearls.”
”I thought you said we would be safe.”
”I'm working on it.”
Darwin had paved streets, more people, bigger buildings, and the same climate as Broome. The gunmetal sky promised rain; the inhabitants prayed for it as a temporary relief from the merciless seasonal buildup of heat and humidity. The clothes in the store windows and on the pedestrians were a decade or two more fas.h.i.+onable than Broome's. Despite the punis.h.i.+ng climate, people darted from building to building with a purpose greater than merely getting in out of the heat. Darwin didn't have the pace of Seattle, much less of Manhattan or Tokyo, but the beat of life was faster here than Broome's no-worries-mate indolence.
Archer looked in the window of a jewelry store, but it wasn't the Australian pink and green diamonds that held his eye, or even the silky, l.u.s.trous Australian pearls in every shade from moon white to midnight black. What interested him was the store's thick plate gla.s.s. It made a decent mirror, which meant that he didn't have to crane his neck to check for followers.
The street behind them was busy enough so that he and Hannah didn't stand out, yet not crowded enough to make a tail's life easy. Archer was eighty percent certain that someone had followed them from the airport. April Joy's man, probably. As the person who supplied the tickets, pa.s.sports, and clothes, she was the only one who would have a clear idea who to look for and where to look for them.
”See anything, er, darling?” Hannah asked. She didn't know what else to call Archer, because his real name didn't match his present ID.
”Just some pretty jewelry.”
She let out a long sigh. ”Good. Could we go to our hotel or wherever we're staying?”
He smiled slightly. ”Tired?”
”Hungry, too.” She glanced around furtively. ”And this wig itches like fire ants.”
He looked at his watch, took her arm, and headed for one of the rundown bars he had noticed during a taxi ride along the waterfront. If anyone followed them, Archer couldn't pick the shadow out of the pack of normal citizens.
”Here,” he said.
She glanced at the dirty neon lights flas.h.i.+ng dim messages about beer and fun. ”I'm not sure I'm this hungry,”
”We're not here to eat.”
”Small comfort,” she muttered.
She followed him into the dim bar. It was surprisingly full of people. Most of them had the look of serious drinkers seriously intent on maintaining an alcohol haze. The air-conditioning wasn't up to the demands of sweat and cigarettes.
”I've smelled better oyster dumps,” Hannah said under her breath.
Archer didn't argue. He just kept taking her deeper into the barroom. He caught a server's eye, held up two fingers, and pointed toward an empty booth. As soon as the server brought two beers, he paid, left a tip on the table, and kept on watching for new customers coming in the door.
Sipping her beer, Hannah looked around the bar with a combination of disbelief and sympathy. Disbelief that anyone would choose to spend time in such a hole, and sympathy that they had no more appealing choices.
The three women sitting together at the bar were especially hard for her to watch. Their hair was dyed, lacquered, and hadn't been combed for too long. They smoked constantly, squinting through eyes that had seen too much, none of it good. Their mouths were painted on in bright, hard colors. So were their clothes.
When a man walked up, squeezed one of them low on her hip, and held up a twenty-dollar bill, the women glanced among themselves as though deciding whose cigarette break was over and who was still off duty. Finally the woman with the biggest hair tossed her cigarette on a mound of dead and dying b.u.t.ts and strolled toward the door at the back of the bar. The man followed, already reaching into his fly.
Hannah looked at the tired bubbles that barely covered the top of her mud-colored beer, but it wasn't the beer she was seeing. It was the past, when a young girl had taken one look at Len McGarry and decided that he was her knight in s.h.i.+ning armor, come to rescue her from the green dragon of the rain forest. And no matter how much the voice in the center of herself warned, Not this man, she simply ignored it.
Len was the first western man she had met in three years who wasn't a Catholic priest, married, or old enough to be her grandfather. It was Len's wildness that drew her. It was his laughter that convinced her. It was determination to escape the green h.e.l.l that made her endure the first uncomfortable bouts of s.e.x. It was her own s.e.xuality that finally ignited, surprising Len even more than it surprised her.
She decided to make Len hers, and to h.e.l.l with the consequences and the voice whispering inside her, Not this man. Surely nothing could be worse than eating monkey parts stewed over a sullen fire.
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