Free Breaking the Rules by Barbara Samuel, Ruth Wind Page B

have a choice.”
    “You’re a brave little mouse, Miss Mary,” he said, and there was a rumbling, almost painfully seductive note to his voice. “You seem so vulnerable, but you’ve done what you had to do. I don’t believe I’ve ever met a woman quite like you.”
    She touched the quivering leap in her belly, but couldn’t tear her gaze from the green waters of his eyes. Something flickered there, warm and approving. She felt herself flush and hurriedly lowered her head. “Not too many women carry around a braid, that’s for sure.”
    “That wasn’t what I meant.”
    “I know.” She picked up her hamburger. “Who was with him this morning?”
    “I guess the redhead is the one you’re running from?”
    “Brian Murphy. And I’d guess it was Vincent Paglio with him. A dark man with a pockmarked face?”
    “That’s the one.” He narrowed his eyes. “Who are they?”
    “What did they say on TV?” she countered, unwilling to say more than she had to.
    “I don’t remember,” he said with a hard edge.
    Mattie glanced up in surprise. His mouth was set in sharp lines, and his eyes had gone very, very cold. Suddenly, she wondered if she’d gone from the frying pan into the fire. “I didn’t ask for your help,” she said, wounded by his icy expression.
    “That’s true,” he said. “I guess you’d rather be a Jane Doe at the county coroner’s office right now, huh?”
    The terror of that bullet-riddled ride down the highway flooded back. “No,” she said. “I didn’t mean that.”
    “Well, then, why don’t we get this story out of the way? No tricks, honey. I’ve been burned before and I wouldn’t take kindly to having it happen again.”
    Carefully, she set aside her food and tucked her feet under her legs. She took a deep breath and opened the locked box in her mind. “Brian Murphy was my fiancé,” she said at last. “He used me as an alibi so he could kill three men. Or rather, he tried to use me as an alibi.”
    Zeke waited.
    Mattie went on, her words emotionless as she tried to keep her memories from overwhelming her. “He’d taken me out to dinner and we stopped at a party afterward. Something happened there, something that made him really angry. He made a couple of phone calls—one of them to Vince.”
    She closed her eyes. “I should have stayed at the party.”
    Silently, Zeke handed her the milk shake. She took a sip and gave him a brief history of the trucking firm and Brian’s successful bid to bring it back from the brink of ruin. “I know now that he was transporting something illegal—but I didn’t know that then.”
    “Drugs and guns,” Zeke said. “The guns are the big problem. The police found a truckload of AK47s in the warehouse.”
    Guns. Mattie thought of the strife tearing cities—including Kansas City—to pieces. “He used to talk about the gun problem like he really cared,” she said, and felt betrayed and stupid all over again.
    “Makes a nice smoke screen, right?”
    Mattie nodded cynically. “Anyway, that night he drove us over to the warehouse, said he just needed to check something and we’d go to my house. We went in and he made a couple more phone calls. I could tell he was just furious about some kind of shipment that had been waylaid.”
    She had begun to feel uneasy by then. The warehouse was dark and shadowy and felt somehow threatening. Dressed in a taffeta gown and high heels, Mattie didn’t want to sit down anywhere, so she paced the small office as Brian made his phone calls.
    “It started to bother me, that he wouldn’t say what was going on and that he was so angry. It was almost like he was afraid.”
    Three other men had shown up at the warehouse, men Mattie didn’t like. “Brian told me to drive his car to my house and he’d have someone give him a ride there in the morning to pick it up. I was tired and a little annoyed, so I did.”
    “You would have been his alibi,” Zeke said.
    “Exactly.” A hundred times, a