‘I’m hoping. Double or quits?’

She smiled teasingly. ‘You’re a sucker for punishment.’

This time he took it seriously, paying more attention to the table and a little less to her. He made a match of it but she still whipped his ass with two of his stripes left on the table. This time she allowed herself to crow a little, with a wide smirk. ‘Again?’

‘Hell, no! I won’t have enough cash on me to—’ He stopped himself, realizing what he’d been about to say and glanced round to make sure he hadn’t given her away.

She got it too. She leaned into him. ‘I don’t want your money,’ she said softly.

‘Why not?’

‘Because I like you.’

Tom finished his drink in a couple of slugs. ‘I bet you say that to all the boys.’

He might as well have slapped her. She blinked, then looked away from him, her face losing its soft charm and becoming smooth and blank. ‘Yeah. Whatever.’

‘What?’

‘Nothing.’ She rolled her cue across the baize and picked up her purse, then turned back to Tom with a bright smile, but her eyes were focused away from his now, somewhere just to the right of his face. ‘You want to go to the motel?’

Did he? All of a sudden he wasn’t sure.

‘Time is money, y’know?’ Her voice had an edge to it now and made him feel bad.

Guilty.

Christ, thought Tom, if he’d wanted this kind of mind-fuck before sex he might as well be married! He’d be damned if he was paying to have her go down on him with that blank, accusing look, like he’d just cut her housekeeping.

He wondered briefly how he’d insulted her – how it had gone from so good to so bad so fast – but he stopped himself making the effort. She wasn’t his girlfriend, for God’s sake. He didn’t owe her a dozen roses for being a dick. Being a dick was not only what he did best, but was his prerogative as a paying customer. It was his goddamned consumer right to be a dick!

Tom put down his cue and looked at her calmly. ‘You have a lot to learn about being a whore.’

The hard look in her eyes cracked apart and her face twisted with the effort she made not to cry, but as she walked out of the bar, he saw the tears spill down her cheeks.

Tom stared into his empty glass until he was sure she was gone, his neck burning with what he assumed must be anger.

14

CALSUPERIOR CARGO’S MAINTENANCE records were a mess. A disgrace. Tom sat on the cold concrete floor of their storage facility, surrounded by a half-dozen boxes filled with the Pride of Maine paperwork that had been brought here after the plane was scrapped, as was usual after the publication of the NTSB report.

His ass ached. He’d been here since nine forty-five a.m. and it was now … He checked his watch. It was now three fifty-six p.m. Shit. He hadn’t even found the FAA forms for the number-two engine yet. He’d found number one’s in the first box he’d examined, but Murphy’s Law decreed that that would be his only glimmer of hope the whole day long.

The thought of coming back tomorrow made him shudder. And the thought of not finding the paperwork at all made him feel sick. Not because missing paperwork was a bad thing. Missing paperwork could be a clue in itself. But if it wasn’t in the final box, he’d have to check the whole lot again much more carefully to make sure it really wasn’t there.

He unwound himself from the floor and groaned as his knees and back popped. He limped stiffly to the coffee machine and bought two cups of what was misleadingly described as espresso. He downed one instantly and took the other back to his temporary residence in the cardboard-and-paper city. He’d drunk twelve cups of this muck today and eaten nothing, and his stomach squealed in outrage to find itself awash with more bitter coffee-cum-sludge.

He sat down again and picked up another handful of random paperwork.

Tom had had some shitty days in the past year, but this was right up there. And, infuriatingly, he knew that it wasn’t just because he couldn’t find what he was seeking.

He’d woken up feeling miserable and empty. He’d made a stab at improving his mood by getting angry with Lucia. He’d tried his best to work himself into a bitter fury as he scraped dangerously at his stubble with a razor blade that needed replacing. But by the time he was showered, dressed and covered with bits of tissue paper, he felt even worse than he had before.

However hard he tried, the image that kept popping into his head was the hurt in her eyes – and the tears on her cheeks as she turned away.

It was too fucking bad! Why was he even thinking of her? He had a lot to worry about: the Pride of Maine; how he was going to worm his way back into air-crash investigations; his poker game; Ness.

He knew somewhere in the back of his mind that he was hoping the Pride of Maine would be his ticket back. There was something not right about it. The very fact that Lenny Munro was an asshole somehow lent credence to his gut feeling on that. And Pete LaBello couldn’t keep him out in the cold for ever. He knew Pete must be missing his skills on planes, and he wasn’t pulling his weight anywhere else right now. The pipelines and tankers of the western USA had been sound and non-flammable for a few days, for which Tom was grudgingly grateful. If he never saw another fifty-four-inch NS carbon-alloy pig receiver, it would be too soon.

He’d made a good start to his pro poker career. That was how he was trying to think of it, rather than as his slide towards the criminal underbelly. But he should take it more seriously. He should read some books, get some new angles, stay ahead of the game. That would impress Ness.

Ness.

He tingled at the thought of her. Impressing Ness would be a good thing in so many ways …

Anyway, it was challenging stuff and it was going to take all his concentration to keep those balls in the air. He had no time to waste on some weepy whore.

A bolt of guilt brought him full circle to Lucia.

Shit.

‘How’re you getting on, Mr Patrick?’

Tom looked up to see Mr Chirpy, who had turned out to be Lowell Dexter, a prissy-mouthed young man with foppish hair, trendy horn-rims and a suit so ugly and badly cut that Tom figured he must be heterosexual, despite compelling evidence to the contrary. ‘Like shit. You call this a filing system?’

Dexter pouted and his small eyes flashed angrily. ‘I called your office.’

Tom didn’t answer.

‘In DC?’

Tom pulled the last box towards him and opened the lid.

‘They say you’re not on an official investigation.’ Dexter’s tone was triumphant.

‘Oh, yeah?’

‘I spoke to a Mr Munro? He said you had no official sanction to do what you’re doing.’

‘Is that right?’ Tom flipped through the box, his practised eye running desperately down random dockets, hoping against hope …

‘Actually, what he said was, you’re a fucking asshole who’ll be working as a department-store Santa by Christmas.’

Tom snorted. He knew it was over – but he couldn’t stop searching for what his brain had decided suddenly to narrow the search down to: the fan disc. Disc. Disc. Disc. His eyes were like heat-seeking missiles homing in on those four letters in the hundreds of thousands of combinations in front of him on the pink, yellow and white papers.

‘So I’m gonna have to ask you to leave.’

‘Oh, yeah?’ Tom never even bothered looking at Dexter.