Out of Nowhere Read online

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  A Selection of Titles by Susan Dunlap The Darcy Lott Series

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Acknowledgments

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  A Selection of Titles by Susan Dunlap The Darcy Lott Series

  A SINGLE EYE

  HUNGRY GHOSTS

  CIVIL TWILIGHT

  POWER SLIDE

  NO FOOTPRINTS

  SWITCHBACK *

  OUT OF NOWHERE *

  * available from Severn House

  OUT OF NOWHERE

  Susan Dunlap

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  This first world edition published 2016

  in Great Britain and the USA by

  SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD of

  19 Cedar Road, Sutton, Surrey, England, SM2 5DA.

  Trade paperback edition first published 2016 in Great

  Britain and the USA by SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD.

  eBook edition first published in 2016 by Severn House Digital

  an imprint of Severn House Publishers Limited

  Copyright © 2016 by Susan Dunlap.

  The right of Susan Dunlap to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988.

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library

  ISBN-13: 978-0-7278-8601-9 (cased)

  ISBN-13: 978-1-84751-723-4 (trade paper)

  ISBN-13: 978-1-78010-784-4 (e-book)

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents

  are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Except where actual historical events and characters are being described

  for the storyline of this novel, all situations in this publication are

  fictitious and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead,

  business establishments, events or locales is purely coincidental.

  This ebook produced by

  Palimpsest Book Production Limited, Falkirk,

  Stirlingshire, Scotland.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I am grateful to writers Linda Grant and Gillian Roberts for their careful reading and good suggestions at the time when giving them is the hardest.

  Thanks once again to stuntwoman/stunt coordinator Carolyn Day for her willingness to share her expertise.

  As always, many thanks to my superb literary agent, Dominick Abel.

  ONE

  Another time I might have wondered why my favorite brother was so keen to meet me halfway out on Pier 39. But when I got his text I was just glad to blow off energy with the run. And eager, as always, to see him.

  I whipped out of my room in the Zen Center, ignoring the ominous sky, and took off.

  The first shower spit down on me ten minutes later. I could have gone back for a slicker.

  I hate going back.

  A minute later it was raining. I could have slowed down and watched my step.

  I hate slowing down.

  Most of all I hate waiting. My last movie gig didn’t end well. A stunt double/stunt coordinator linked to disaster is what Hollywood superstitions are made of. I’d be waiting a while for the next call.

  Get over yourself! Zen teachings might say. What they do say is, Do the next thing. So I’d been taking stretch classes, weight classes, practicing tightrope and slack wire walking, teaching my brother, Mike, camera work, and being surprised at what he had picked up in his two decades away. We’d shot a couple of wire-work promos that I’ll send out after enough time has passed. It was like when we were teenagers, me doing the stunts, him manning the camera and keeping an eye out for cops or family, whoever’s rules we might be trespassing. We never got caught.

  By the time I hit the slippery boards of Pier 39, San Francisco’s big tourist attraction, tourists were flooding toward the street. The rain had washed away the pier’s jugglers, acrobats and magicians. Shopkeepers were huddling behind closed doors or pulling down grates. The pier was nearly empty. I was soaked and shivering and hoping to spot Mike in the doorway of a nice warm bar.

  Even so, I almost missed my brother.

  ‘Omigod, Mike. You look awful.’

  Another time he would have snarked, ‘Thanks.’ Now he didn’t expend the effort. He looked like just thinking was a strain, like balancing on his two feet was hard. My brother, who hated slowing down as much as I did, who never considered going back.

  ‘What happened to you?’

  A gust slammed into the pier. Bay water shot across the wooden walk. A garbage can tottered, crashed down on its side, and rolled. An ill-anchored sunglasses cart had broken loose, flinging colored plastic like confetti. It had nearly hit me as I’d run toward this miserable spot Mike had chosen. The wind was yanking my hair from the rubber band and snapping red strands in my face. His hair, shorter, swirled like maple leaves on a tree.

  I tried to think how long it had been since I’d seen him. Two weeks? Three? My tall, buff brother who never missed a morning run? How could he have crumbled to this? I reached a palm toward his forehead. ‘Are you sick?’

  He almost smiled. ‘If I was sick, I wouldn’t have called you.’

  True enough. We’ve got a sister who’s a doctor. I let my hand drop to his shoulder. ‘But you did. So? What’s going on with you? Tell me. Trust me.’

  I do trust … hung on his lips. But he caught himself. I gave him points for that. I was asking a lot. He’d spent twenty years looking over his shoulder.

  ‘I don’t … I’d tell you if I could. I’m not scamming you. I don’t know why this is happening.’

  ‘Why what is happening?’

  He was not a fidgeter; he’d trained himself free of quirks and tics, to give no early warning. So, it didn’t surprise me that he stood utterly still a moment before answering me. ‘First, I got sideswiped crossing Columbus after work last week.’

  ‘A car hit you? Were you hurt?’

  ‘Hard on my jacket, but I was OK. Too dark to see the car. I figured bad driver.’

  I nodded. What anyone would think. What a number of pedestrians in this city should have thought sooner.

  �
��Same thing outside my place. Four days later. Before dawn. Going for my morning run. Car slammed into me in the crosswalk. Threw me against a trash can.’

  ‘Omigod! Were you—’

  ‘Injured? Not much. Bruises. Too dark to see more of the car than old, dark, probably four door.’ He conjured up a watery smile. ‘Figured bad driver. Good driver would have aimed better.’

  I grabbed his arms. We were both shaking. ‘Why?’

  ‘I don’t know!’

  ‘What have you done? I mean, to find out?’

  ‘Hit-and-run in the dark? No witnesses. It’s a dead end.’

  ‘Mike! You lived in the shadows for twenty years; this can’t be the first time you were targeted for something. What did you do then?’

  He stared at me like I’d missed the obvious. ‘I left.’

  Of course.

  ‘I had no ties. If things got bad, I moved on. Better for everyone. But … I can’t, not now.’

  I nodded. He’d been home less than a year after being missing all that time. He couldn’t leave again. Couldn’t do that to the rest of us in the family.

  I was the one who’d tracked him down, brought him home.

  Rain slashed our shoulders, our heads. Pier 39 was dead empty now. My brother and I stood shifting like boxers in the erratic protection of the shop fronts. Kiosk shutters rattled. Mike pulled me in farther under the overhang of a deserted sushi place, blocking the storm with his body. Like he had the time he took me on my first walk up Haight Street when I was ten and he fourteen. It was quieter here under the overhang, but we were no less exposed to view and he shot glances in both directions before speaking.

  ‘This is my problem, I need to—’

  ‘If it’s so dangerous, tell John.’

  ‘Yeah, right.’

  Which meant that Mike was into something he didn’t want to reveal to our older brother, the former cop. Didn’t want John to be conflicted. Or humiliated in front of his cop friends. Or feel he had to turn in his own brother. Or become an accessory.

  ‘Gary then,’ I shouted, the wind covering my panic. ‘Hire him. Attorney–client privilege. He grew up keeping secrets from John.’

  ‘Can’t. Look, if I knew where this would lead, I’d know what to do. If I tell them, they’ll be all over the place, probably making things worse. I hate involving even you. Especially you. If anything happened—’

  ‘It won’t. I can take care of myself.’ Better than you, apparently, but I didn’t say that.

  ‘I can handle this. Trust me.’

  Another time I would have nudged him and we’d have laughed at how much alike we sounded. Not surprising: we were the youngest of seven, him my protector since my first step. Now, I realized, things had flipped.

  You can handle this? So, why’d you call me? But I knew the answer. If I was frantic and all roads were dead ends, I’d have called him. ‘How long since you’ve slept?’

  ‘More than an hour? Couple days?’

  ‘Eaten?’

  He shrugged. I’d never seen him stumped before. He looked like his innards had been sucked out of him

  A seagull landed on the pier. Mike was gazing at it as if it held the answer. It did: Sitting duck.

  ‘You were almost killed—’

  He started to protest but caught himself. I gave him points for realizing the danger. For not making me put his precarious situation into words.

  ‘OK,’ I said, ‘here’s the plan. Don’t even go back to your apartment. Take them …’ I pulled out all the bills in my wallet and thrust them toward him. ‘Don’t argue. Get on the ferry to Larkspur—’

  ‘I—’

  ‘Give yourself a week to sleep, think straight, start playing offense.’

  ‘A week!’

  ‘OK, a couple days. You bounce back quick.’

  ‘I can handle—’

  ‘Get on the ferry. Disappear! That’s what you’re good at!’ It was a low blow. He’d taken the ferry when he’d vanished before. ‘Get a throwaway phone. Leave me a number on the zendo landline. Call my cell if you have to. OK?’

  He just stood, jacket shimmying in the wind.

  ‘Answer me this. I’m guessing not everything you did in the time you were gone was legal.’

  ‘Yeah, but feds don’t sideswipe you in the street.’

  ‘Not often, anyway.’ I nodded. ‘Who else would come after you?’

  ‘Geez, Darce, don’t you think I’ve asked myself that? At first I thought it could be connected with my building. They’re renovating the apartments, trying to harass tenants into leaving.’ He looked around, as if the doors of the closed shops might be eavesdropping. ‘Someone might have been trying to get in my apartment. I had the feeling, you know? But nothing was gone. No signs. Neighbors didn’t see anything. Maybe I was imagining it.’

  ‘Why would—’

  ‘No idea.’

  ‘What did you—’

  ‘I got a house-sit in the Haight for a week.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘I just moved my stuff. But unless I hide in the closet, that’s not going to make any difference. I’m not exactly invisible.’

  I smiled. My tall, red-headed brother. Women eyed him in the street. When we walked together, people actually stopped and stared. ‘Ex-lover, maybe?’

  ‘It’s been a slow winter.’

  ‘Ex-friends? Business associates? Maybe you offended a gang member? Or you saw something you shouldn’t have?’

  ‘I called friends and not-so-friends, checked places I used to work. If I didn’t have their numbers, I drove by. No one’s targeting Gary’s law office, or Hugo’s Stop and Nosh, or Jansen’s Burritos. Remember them?’

  ‘Gang? Something you saw or heard?’

  ‘Jeez, Darce, don’t you think I’ve considered all that? I’m just living my life, going to State, trying to get myself grounded in normality. You couldn’t be more boring and normal than me.’

  ‘Dig deeper.’

  ‘I dug. Really. Back off! If it was someone I shorted, or lied to about who I was, they’d write, they’d call, they’d threaten. There’s been none of that. No way for me to make it right, whatever “it” is. It’s like someone’s kidnapped me and left no ransom note.’

  Maybe he was right. Maybe he was too wasted to think deeply enough. He was working at capacity answering my questions. And yet I could see the slight easing in his shoulders, his jaw just a bit less tense now that it wasn’t just him alone in this.

  I pulled him close, him the last person I ever wanted to disappear again, kissed his chin like I did when that was all I could reach. ‘Go!’

  He hesitated, my always-on-top-of-things brother. He leaned in as if about to hug me hard, caught himself, glanced both ways along the pier.

  That frightened me more than anything he’d said.

  He reached in his pants pocket, handed me his keys, turned and was gone.

  It was all I could do not to run after him, to drag him back, to go with him on that ferry across the bay. For a wretched instant I knew for certain I would never see him again.

  But, of course, I would. I am the number one believer in Mike. But I am also his sister and childhood co-conspirator. So, I pulled out a black watch cap to cover my own red hair and I tailed him, half-running through the dusky rain, feet smacking on the empty wooden walkway of the pier. I eyed each closed shop, each passageway between them to the back of the pier, every one of the many, shadowy spots to wait and watch. Nothing moved, which meant nothing. If someone had followed him, time was on their side. Mike was moving fast, but not too quickly for anyone to catch him.

  The pier widened into a plaza and ended at Bay Street. I looked right.

  Nothing moved.

  I blurred my vision so only movement showed.

  There he was. By the ferry ticket kiosk. Just like he said!

  A naïve person would have smiled and left. Not I. I stepped into a doorway and watched my brother walk across the cement to the ramp, as casually as if th
e wind was not blowing rain sideways against him, and onto the waiting ferry.

  On board, he turned, let his eyes roam the city view like a tourist might. He paused almost infinitesimally when he spotted me, as he knew he would.

  A person who hadn’t leapt from boat to dock in a stunt that ended up getting cut in post-production might have left then.

  I waited till the ferry chugged out into the bay, till it almost disappeared behind the veil of rain and was halfway across the bay to Larkspur.

  If he had managed to get back to the dock, I would have been furious, but not surprised. Even wiped out as he was.

  My brother had handed me the keys but he hadn’t told me where he’d left the car. That said something about his state of mind.

  Mine, too.

  TWO

  It took me a full half-hour slogging up and down dusky streets to spot the old Honda Civic. The rain had stopped as if, its day’s work completed, it had clocked out. But the wind still held water. My running shoes squeaked on the wet sidewalks, sloshed in the crosswalks. I had the feeling someone was following me, but the couple times I snapped around to catch him, all I saw was blur, like there was a clear shower curtain hung around me.

  When I spotted the car, on Bay Street near Embarcadero, I didn’t even pause to check it out, but kept on around the corner, waited and peered back, hoping for a clear shot of the guy. In vain.

  Chances were I’d been listening to my ‘avoid-danger’ spiel more than Mike had. Still I circled the block, before sliding down onto the driver’s seat, wrapping myself in a huge old brown towel Mike had abandoned on the passenger side floor and checking the mirrors, the rearview, the driver’s side (the Honda came off the line before anyone thought of the passenger side), one nearly hanging off the ceiling above the rearview and, I discovered, two small round jobs glued up above the corners of the windshield. Mike’s additions. Glued in place since I was in here a month ago. The array let the driver see the blind spots, behind both side doors, and by the rear bumper – where an assailant would be poised to attack. Mike had been pulling out all stops.