Page 96 of Dead Girl Running

“Did you try to kiss somebody else?” she asked.

“Ha.” He wore a leather holster strapped to his chest with the grip of his Beretta M9 protruding.

“Why didn’t you answer my text?”

“Last night, I lost my phone.”

She looked him over again. He had a fighting knife and a Ruger LCP .380 ultracompact resting on the end table close to his right hand. Somehow, he’d been involved in a fight. With Vincent Gilfilen? Against Vincent Gilfilen? “Tell me about last night.”

“After I left you—”

She went to the refrigerator and got them both bottles of water.

“—I stepped out of your house, and I couldn’t see any lights down at the dock, but the wind wasn’t blowing, the clouds were low and I could sure hear that big boat engine roaring toward shore.”

“You said you didn’t want to interfere, that that wasn’t going to help capture the Librarian.”

“I was tired of sitting around.” He accepted the bottle and pressed it to his black eye. “I needed some action. I was horny.”

She laughed. “Oh, Nils. You romantic devil.”

“Do you want to know what happened or not?”

She thought maybe she knew now, but she perched on a chair arm and got ready to listen.

“I couldn’t take the ATV. They make too much noise. So I started running, keeping my head down, doing bursts, zigzags, stopping suddenly. If the smugglers had some kind of night vision, I figured—confuse them.”

“Talk about luck. If they’d hadthermalnight vision—”

“Right. I know. They would have seen me. But they didn’t, so I managed to get to that give-everybody-the-finger tree and not get shot—I was pleased about that—and I stood there next to the trunk. One person was standing off to the side on a rock.”

“The Librarian.”

“He was directing the operation, so yes.” Nils held up one hand. “Before you ask, no, I couldn’t see him. It wasdark. Two guys carried a box up from the beach. Heavy box, took them both to lift it. No, I couldn’t identify them, either.”

“But you could see them.”

“I had my night vision by then, and I was wondering what the hell I was doing there, because this was a suicide mission. I had my pistol, but no doubt they had more firepower than I did and sooner or later they were going to look at me and register that I wasn’t a tree trunk and I was going to be dead.”

“Not so horny anymore?” Not that it wasn’t an appalling story, but he was obviously still alive, so she could make jokes.

“All of a sudden, the dude on the rock signaled, and the two with the box put it down and all three vanished into the stack of boulders like cockroaches in the light.”

“They spotted you? No, couldn’t have. They wouldn’t have vanished. They would have shot you.”

“Right. Something else was going on, but at that moment, I didn’t care what. The box was right there, and their ATV was right there, and I thought…make a little trouble.”

“What were youthinking?” Before he could answer, she gestured him to silence. “I know—you were horny and that precludes thinking.”

“I was thinking with the small brain. It happens. Damned good thing it did, too. I lugged the box over to the ATV, unhinged the seat, damned near ruptured a vertebra lifting it up and into the storage bin and dropped the seat over it right about the time the shouting started.” He watched her for a few moments. “You don’t want to say a word about what could have happened next, do you? You’re afraid to feed me information, lead the witness.”

“Correct.”

“I made a good choice when I picked you.”

His phrasing made her want to slap him. But right now, she wanted to slap a lot of people. Or shoot. Whatever. “Why did they disappear?”

“They’d spotted the resort’s security chief, Vince Gilfilen.”