Page 21 of Tightrope

Movement at the end of the hall startled her so badly she almost pulled the trigger in a reflexive action.

She whirled around in time to see a figure rushing toward the balcony doors.

Rage splashed through Amalie, acid-hot. It burned through fear and common sense alike. She had enough nightmares as it was—nightmares crafted by a real monster. Damned if she would let some two-bit burglar invade her new life and her dreams.

Gun clutched in both hands, she raced down the hallway toward the open French doors. As she watched, the fleeing figure vaulted over the balcony railing and disappeared.

She slammed to a halt on the balcony and looked down, searching the moon-splashed gardens.

A shadowy figure bolted from the cover of an orange tree and ran through the gardens, heading toward the gate at the rear of the villa.

She pulled the trigger again and again. The shoots boomed in the night. But she knew that she was too far away and the target was moving too fast. If she actually did manage to hit the intruder, it would be by sheer luck.

The running figure, evidently unscathed, disappeared around the corner of the villa.

Not my lucky night,Amalie thought.

She realized she was still peering down into the darkness. In the heat of the moment, she had been oblivious, but now that the fury wasdissipating reality returned, and with it her new fear of heights. True, she was only on the third floor of the big house, but it was a long way down to the ground. A fall from that height could easily break a person’s neck. The Hollywood psychic had died jumping off the roof.

The darkness down below started to blur into a mesmerizing dreamlike scene from one of her nightmares.

With a gasp, she turned away from the view. She paused briefly when her hand brushed across something on the railing. She did not need a flashlight to know that she had just found the knotted rope the intruder had used to descend into the garden.

She had to get to Hazel.

She ran back down the hall. In the shadows she saw Hazel’s crumpled form on the carpet. She reached inside the room and found the light switch. The glow spilled through the doorway, revealing the blood that matted Hazel’s gray hair.

“Hazel,” Amalie whispered.

She crouched and felt for a pulse with shaking fingers. Relief surged through her when she realized that Hazel was still alive.

Hazel’s eyes fluttered. She groaned.

Amalie hurried downstairs to call the police and an ambulance.

She waited until after Hazel was on her way to the hospital and the police had departed before she picked up the phone and dialed the number of the Burning Cove Hotel.

“Matthias Jones, please,” she said.

Chapter 11

The project had gone off the rails.

Once upon a time he had been a spy, a very good one. His instincts were still quite keen and they were telling him that he should walk away. In his experience, once things started to go wrong with one of his meticulously orchestrated plans, they rarely got back on track. A smart agent knew when to fold a hand and leave the table. He was nothing if not smart. He was a survivor.

But this project was different. This wasn’t about money—well, not entirely. It was about revenge. And that, he discovered, made it a lot harder to abandon.

Privately he thought of himself as Mr. Smith. He’d had a lot of other names over the years, including the one he’d been given at birth, but none of those names had seemed real for a very long time. It was his work under the code name Smith that had defined him, so he stuck with that identity, at least in his own mind.

Losing any sense of attachment to his original name was one of the side effects of living in the shadows for so many years, first as apatriotic spy for his country and now as a freelancer. He changed identities the way some men changed clothes. The skills required to stay alive in his world were not unlike those required of a successful actor. You had to be able to bury your old identity in order to adopt a new one.

He sat behind the wheel of the nondescript Ford and watched the front door of the run-down auto court cabin. The intruder had disappeared inside a short time ago.

Smith lit a cigarette and contemplated the intriguing events that he had just witnessed. He had been standing in the shadows just outside the high walls that surrounded the Hidden Beach Inn, trying to decide if it was worth taking the chance of breaking into the mansion to try to locate and search Pickwell’s room, when he’d seen the intruder arrive. The would-be burglar had broken the lock on the wrought iron gate at the rear of the big house and entered the premises via the conservatory door.

The problem with searching Pickwell’s room was locating it. The villa was a large mansion with three full floors of rooms. Yet the burglar had shown no hesitation about entering the villa.

Perhaps he knew exactly where he was going, or maybe not. Regardless, he had bungled the job and succeeded in awakening someone who had a gun. Sloppy work.

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