Page 126 of South of Nowhere

Acid in her eyes? No that pain was too much. But more important, he couldn’t disfigure her. It was her angelic appearance that made him obsessed.

Maybe there were blinding poisons. Or, wait…There’d been something on the news about a man who went blind because a baseball had hit him in the back of the head. The occipital portion of the brain. He would do some research into it. Yes, he liked that idea.

He could control a blind woman completely.

Then John Millwood froze.

There, in a patch of muddy earth were her prints. They were her shoe size—6½, which he knew because he’d bought her a dozen pairs of sexy high heels (which she rarely wore, bitch).

He followed them for a short distance but then they disappeared. As if she’d tried to obscure them.

Or someone had.

A lover…

Fury surged through him, then it dissipated.

He needed to focus.

And studying the ground carefully, he started forward once more after the love of his life.

55.

Waylon Foley was the first to admit he led a good life.

When he wasn’t running jobs like the one he was currently in the midst of, or hunting in Montana or Utah or, well, name your state, he spent much of his time in Key West, not far from Ernest Hemingway’s home, ever populated with tourists and six-toed cats.

He had a small villa looking in the direction of Cuba, which he’d been to—undercover—several times on assignments. Lots of palm trees, lots of rocks decorated his full acre—good sized for the neighborhood. Security was good. Electronics, of course, and a minder he hired from Miami. Rodrigo was a man of loyalty that went beyond compensation for the significant money Foley paid him. He would do little things like stop when on an errand and bring Foley a Cuban coffee and a guava pastry. All on his own.

The little things mattered in his life.

His Savage rifle.

Guava.

The blouses of military uniforms worn by former porn stars doing a damn fine job in a new role.

Beside him, Alisette Lark stirred.

Their liaison had been a mere twenty minutes but that was enough for him.

He had seen her in the uniform. He had thought of her thin, taut legs and round chest, and he had wanted her. Immediately.

But the instant it was over, like when he was married (well, often before it was over) he found himself thinking of the fields, the smell of gunpowder.

The blood.

His rifle.

Lark stretched. He smelled her. All the smells. Had she been satisfied?

It had seemed so. And Lark was not a woman to fake anything—unless it was a role she was playing, in a porn flick or for one of his jobs.

She lit a cigarette, despite the motel’s prohibition—a two-hundred-dollar fine—and she said, “I did what you asked. About coming on to her.”

“The disaster response girl.”

“Her, yeah. Dorion. But I didn’t ask her. I asked her brotherabouther. Colter. If she was seeing somebody. You were right—from the beginning. He’s the one we have to worry about.”

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