Free US Marshall 03 - The Rapids by Carla Neggers Page B

dinner. Our American friends are on their way back to The Hague. We’re not going to run into them.”
    “Would Rob Dunnemore have recognized you?”
    “The feds weren’t happy when I took off on them in May. I think they all had my picture tattooed on various body parts. Dunnemore was still recovering from the Central Park attack, but I lied to his sister. Told her I was a gardener.”
    “In other words he’d recognize you. You and U.S. federal law enforcement—”
    “We’re square. They’re not after me anymore.”
    “It’s difficult for me to believe anyone would take you for a gardener,” Raleigh said.
    Ethan grinned. “Why not?”
    They started off the bridge, the shadows long in the street with the waning light. “Our job is to keep more innocent people from being killed,” Raleigh said abruptly, then glanced at Ethan in that holier-than-thou way he sometimes had, despite the ancient, worn shirt, let-out pants and veins in his nose. “No matter how great our will or noble our cause, neither of us has the power to change the past.”
    Ethan laid on his west Texas accent, a contrast tothe erudite diplomat and economist who’d become his partner of convenience. “Sucks, doesn’t it?”
    “Yes, Major. It sucks very much.”
     
    Rob turned the Mini back over to Maggie at his hotel, waiting for her at the driver’s door before handing over the keys. “Don’t want to come in for a drink?”
    She shook her head. “Thanks, no.”
    “You could dump your car at your place and come back.”
    “It’s been a long day.”
    He smiled at her. “Dinner? A walk? Another bowl of soup?”
    That seemed to penetrate her obvious preoccupation. She almost laughed. “You’re very deceptive, Deputy Dunnemore. You have this easygoing facade, but underneath? Uh-uh. Not so easygoing at all. I’m going home and taking a shower and having a glass of wine.”
    “I’m not invited?”
    “Like I said, underneath the Southern charm is a very dangerous man. See you tomorrow.”
    She slid behind the wheel.
    Rob shut the door for her and leaned into the open window. “Maggie—”
    “I’m fine. I’m sorry about today. I know it’s not what you came here for.”
    Rob stepped back from the small car.
    A shower and a glass of wine. Did he believe her?
    He could understand her rationale for not bringing up her clandestine meeting at St. John’s Cathedral at the Den Bosch police station, before she even knew it would come off. But now that it had? Maggie had made no mention of going to the authorities.
    Rob thought he could understand that rationale, too. If she planned to tell anyone, it’d be without him.
    When he got to his room, he showered off the river smells, feeling the scar from his bullet wound under his fingers. Tom Kopac hadn’t had a chance. His killer must have been standing next to him, unrecognized or a friend? An acquaintance Kopac had never suspected of murderous intent? Had he known, at the last second, what was happening to him?
    Rob remembered almost nothing of the shooting in Central Park. The tulips. The miserable weather. So much of his life before and after the shooting was fuzzy, some of it gone forever, due to the trauma he’d endured—the loss of blood, the complications, the long recovery. For some reason, he vividly remembered the shock and determination on Nate Winter’s face as he’d dragged Rob, injured only seconds earlier, to cover behind a rock outcropping.
    But he couldn’t be sure the memory was real, not something he’d pasted together from accounts and descriptions he’d heard and read after the fact.
    He toweled off and put on shorts and a T-shirt, walking out into his room. His window was open,and he could hear a toddler squealing. When he glanced down at the street, he saw a towheaded little guy sitting in a child’s seat secured to the handlebars of his father’s bicycle. Neither wore a helmet. They pushed off, pedaling along on the quiet street on a pleasant summer