Free Now or Never by Elizabeth Adler

rest of the bad things in the secret place in her mind, where she had banished it. But it was still there.
It was still there
.
    Quickly, she turned on the bedside lamp, then the overhead lights, the bathroom lights and the closet. She ran through all the rooms, switching on every light, turning up every dimmer until the apartment blazed like a department store window at Christmas. She stared around, still trembling. There was no place for a ghost to hide now. She was in control again.
    She went back to the bedroom and took a suitcase from the closet. Hurriedly, she began to fill it. Just simple things—workout stuff, sweatshirts, sneakers.
    When she had finished, she looked at the bedside clock. It was two thirty. She would fax the spa in Tucson and tell them to expect her. That left three and a half hours to kill before she could call the airlines for a reservation on the earliest flight out. Three and a half hours before she could run away from Harry Jordan—and from her past.
    At the same time, two thirty A.M. , Harry was in the gym at the Moonlightin’ Club. He had played a lengthy game of basketball and then worked out for forty-five minutes. He gave one final heave on the 160-pound overhead lift of the Nautilus machine, held it, then lowered it smoothly back into place. Sweat trickled down his neck into his tangled dark chest hair.
    Watching him, Rossetti sighed. “I left a soft bed and awarm woman to come here and find you, Prof. What’s with you? You have dinner with Mallory Malone, and you don’t take calls anymore? You too good for us regular cops now, or what?”
    Harry toweled off the sweat. “I had a lot on my mind.”
    “Me too, remember? You were putting my career on the line tonight with Ms. Malone. You don’t show up, you don’t call—”
    Harry strode past him, heading for the showers. Rossetti followed.
    Harry stripped, turned on the shower, and stood under the spray, his head tilted back and his eyes closed.
    “What kind of excuse is that?” Rossetti complained. “You’ve got a lot on your mind. And I don’t, is that it? I thought it was the two of us—the two Musketeers—searching for a killer. I guess it’s the three Musketeers, now that Malone’s in charge.”
    Harry shook the water from his eyes and looked at the irate detective. “Wrong,” he said. “Mallory Malone declined to help us.”
    Rossetti’s long jaw dropped. “She did?”
    “She did.” Harry stepped from the shower and dried off. “She said there wasn’t enough information to build a TV program on. And that the photo-fit wasn’t accurate.”
    “And how the hell would she know?”
    Harry shrugged. He pulled on a pair of dark blue boxers and stepped into his Levi’s. “Maybe she’s got second sight, I don’t know. All I know is, she was hot to help and then she wasn’t.”
    Rossetti glared suspiciously at him. “You come on to her or what?”
    Harry laughed as he tucked in his shirt. “No, I did not make a pass at her. She is Ms. Frosty Freeze personified. Most of the time.”
    “What about the rest of the time?”
    Harry buttoned his shirt, thinking about it. “The restof the time she was kind of sparky but nice,” he said finally.
    “Nice?”
    “Yeah, you know, a nice girl. Woman,” he corrected himself, though now that he thought about it, there was something girlish under her career-woman facade. Perhaps it was the eyelashes. “She liked Squeeze.”
    Rossetti grinned. “The way to a guy’s heart—it works every time. ‘Love me, love my dog.’”
    “It didn’t quite get that far, Rossetti. Meanwhile, she pissed me off so bad, I had to come here and work it off. Otherwise I might have ended up punching someone.”
    “Frustration, huh?”
    Harry flung a weary arm across Rossetti’s elegantly tailored shoulders as they walked back through the gym to the lobby. The club was buzzing with people coming and going and the café area in the lobby was crowded. They grabbed some coffee, said