Smokescreen Read Online Free Page B

“Whatever you want, whoever you’re here to find, you’re only causing trouble for the rest of us. We’ve got to survive here. When the bullets fly, they don’t exactly have laser-guidance systems.”
    “Well, isn’t that fancy talk for a lady of the night.”
    She would have kicked him in the knee if it wouldn’t have stopped their halting progress. “You jerk! Every time you show up here, you mess with the balance. The peace. All that lurking? That camera? You think anyone here likes that?”
    “Every time?” he said, and his look turned sharp. “You act as though we’ve met before this evening.”
    She looked twice at him that time, and didn’t like the speculation in his eye.
    Doesn’t matter. Just get him out of here.
    “As if I would remember,” she snapped at him, giving him another little shove. “You all look the same to me. Now will you just get the hell out of here before we all pay for your interference?”
    The explosion came without warning. The noise, the light, the huge hand smacking her down just as the pavement came up to meet her. The night turned inside out, swallowed them, and spat them out again.
    The pavement smelled faintly like aftershave.
    But only, Sam realized, because while her knees and palms still stung from impact, she lay crookedly over her annoying interloper, spanning the hard muscle of his back. Impact. Ringing ears. Dark whirling world with the glow of fire in the corner of her eye.
    The van.
    No, what used to be the van. Bomb. Flames licked into the night, someone’s car alarm went off in what seemed like the distance but who could tell with ears still recoiling in shock. Bomb. Okay, she still had a brain cell or two at work. She did a quick repair to her guise, hunting for the image in her head, absorbing herself in it. There’d been a bomb, and it had been more than a little pop-off of a warning. Any closer, and she would have been more than stunned. She’d have been—
    He wasn’t moving yet.
    Was he even breathing? Surely he hadn’t hit the ground that hard, even if she had landed on top of him—
    “Sam!” A low voice in the night—or what seemed like a low voice. The Captain! Sam pushed herself away from the man beneath her and quickly dropped her guise. She never showed her exact personas to the Captain; she never showed them to anyone. They knew she was on the job, they knew she had an uncanny ability to blend in. That’s all they needed to know.
    “Over here,” Sam answered, and she thought she pitched her voice correctly. She pushed herself off the pavement, resting her hand on the black-clad back beneath her just long enough to reassure herself he did indeed breathe. Just stunned, she hoped, from the double whammy of being hit by asphalt from the front and by Sam from the back. She climbed painfully to her feet and met the Captain in the tree-shadowed edge of the yard not far away.
    “You’re okay?” the Captain asked, her hard mouth set in a thin line.
    “Okay enough.” Sam nodded at the new pavement decoration. “I’ll say the same for him in a moment or two.”
    “Good. Then get him out of here. Get both of you out of here. There’s no way to avoid official attention this time, and you can’t afford it. I can’t afford for you to have it, either—if we have to move the primary house on short notice, I’ll need you lurking around on watch as much as possible, can’t have you on anyone’s list.” She rubbed her forehead; she’d probably had a headache even before the van went sky-high. “That bastard must have tracked us down—but he’s got to know she’s not here. He’s just putting us on notice.”
    Sam looked at her abraded palms and frowned. No amount of Nu-Skin would handle this one. “This guy’s not in on it,” she said, the words coming out before she even truly thought about it.
    “I don’t think so either.” The Captain looked over at the man, who’d come around enough to mutter a bleary, succinct and