Margo’s exotic face darkened. “That son of a bitch. I know you aren’t supposed to speak ill of the dead, but if you ask me, he got what he deserved. If he’d treated Sarah with a modem of respect, things might have been different.”
Tucker cast about in his mind and settled on modicum. Yeah—a modicum of respect.
“But he didn’t,” Margo continued, oblivious of having misspoken. “Oh, he was charming enough—Sarah’s a sucker for charm—but he sure as hell backed off fast enough when she got hurt. He made a pass at me while she was in the hospital. Can you believe that?” She shot Tucker a fierce look. “Poor Sarah, lying there with a head injury and the doctors shaking their heads because they don’t know if she’ll ever come out of it, and that bastard’s leering and pinching me on the ass!”
Tucker just stopped himself from commenting that he could understand that other man’s urge, base though it had certainly been; as complimentary as he meant the words to be, he was both old enough and wise enough to know she wouldn’t appreciate them. “But things really changed when Sarah got out of the hospital?” he asked instead.
“With David, you mean?” Margo nodded. “Oh, yeah. Well, before that, really. When she predicted the nurse would have her baby. And the hotel fire, she predicted that in front of a bunch of us, David included. He thought she was crazy when she said it’d happen. Then, when it did—he really thought she was crazy.”
“And it scared him?”
“I’ll say. But before he could come up with a halfway decent excuse to break it off with her, she saw his future. He lasted about a week with Sarah worrying about railroad crossings, then bolted for California so fast you’d have thought his ass was on fire.”
“And died out there—at a railroad crossing.”
“I didn’t grieve for him. But Sarah nearly fell apart. For weeks, she wouldn’t even leave her house, wouldn’t talk to anybody except me—and hardly to me.” Margo frowned a little as she finished the eighth and final egg and turned the burner off, then plugged in the toaster and reached for the loaf of bread on the counter. “I don’t know if she would have come out of it, except that the visions—I mean the waking nightmares—stopped for a while. It gave her a chance to get her bearings, I guess.”
“And when the—waking nightmares came back?”
Margo shook her head. “Well, either they didn’t come very often, or she didn’t tell me about all of them, because I only know about a few. Mostly minor things—except for that serial killer out in San Francisco. That one really freaked her out.” She paused for a moment or so, then added soberly, “But she’s been awfully quiet these last months. Awfully quiet.”
Tucker drew a breath and said, “You’re afraid of her too. Aren’t you?”
She looked at him, those brilliant eyes darkened, and said shakily, “Oh, I’m afraid. But not of her. I’m afraid of what she can see. Because she saw my future. And she won’t tell me what it is.”
The morning sun was halfway to its noon position, and long shadows stretched from the west side of the building in downtown Richmond. A tall woman with short and rather spiky blond hair stood motionless on the balcony, virtually invisible in the shadows and among tall potted plants. She cursed absently as a palm frond stirred by the breeze waved in front of her binoculars, shifted her weight just a bit, then went still again as her field of vision cleared. Her attention was fixed on the rather shabby hotel across the street, and a particular room a floor below her own fifth-floor vantage point.
The drapes at that window had not been drawn, and a generous percentage of the room was visible to her.
Careless. Duran must be losing his touch.
Two men were in the room. She would have given a lot to know what they discussed as they sat so casually across from each other. But there had been no time to plant listening devices, and from her angle, it was impossible even to make an attempt at lip-reading—a skill she had worked very hard to acquire.
She lowered the binoculars, lips pressed so tightly together there was no hint of softness there, and vivid green eyes furious. “Damn,” she whispered. “Damn, damn, damn.”
She eased back through the balcony doors into the apartment she had—so to speak—sublet and bent over a lovely Regency desk. The former occupant’s work had been unceremoniously shoved aside, and an open laptop sat in the center of the pretty floral blotter.
“Jeez, enough with the plant motif,” she muttered, momentarily distracted as she glanced around at the very pretty, very feminine, and very floral bedroom in which she stood. Frilly was hardly Murphy’s style. Barely suppressing a shudder, she fixed her attention on the screen of the laptop.