Harm's Way Read online

  HARM’S WAY

  An Ellora’s Cave publication, November 2003

  Ellora’s Cave Publishing, Inc.

  PO Box 787

  Hudson, OH 44236-0787

  ISBN MS Reader (LIT) ISBN # 1-84360-670-4

  Other available formats (no ISBNs are assigned):

  Adobe (PDF), Rocketbook (RB), Mobipocket (PRC) & HTML

  HARM’S WAY © 2003 ELIZABETH STEWART

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part without permission.

  This book is a work of fiction and any resemblance to persons living or dead, or places, events or locales is purely coincidental. They are productions of the authors’ imaginations and used fictitiously.

  Edited by MARTHA PUNCHES.

  Cover art by SCOTT CARPENTER.

  HARM’S WAY

  By ELIZABETH STEWART

  Chapter One

  “The End.”

  “Well?”

  The woman let the final page of the manuscript fall shut and looked across her large, glass-topped desk.

  “Beautiful,” she whispered. “Just beautiful.” She dabbed at her red eyes with the remnants of a wadded tissue, honked once and deposited it in the wastebasket behind her.

  “I’m glad you approve, Sheila,” the woman on the other side laughed. “I worried about this one.”

  “I’m sure,” Sheila grinned, tapping the pages in front of her with a perfectly manicured crimson fingernail. “You always do, although why is beyond me.”

  “Because I’m a writer and we’re all basically insecure.”

  “Well having published all six of your previous books, I can say without fear of contradiction that this is the best one yet. You’ve really outdone yourself, Ellie.”

  “Thanks.”

  “I mean it,” she insisted. “Not only is Jill a strong heroine and Ted to die for as a hero, but the story itself is so tender…so romantic.” The grin got bigger and a malicious gleam appeared in her hazel eyes. “Not to mention it’s so hot I thought I’d singe my eyebrows off by the third chapter.”

  “Well, you keep telling me sex sells.”

  “Lord, Ellie,” Sheila rolled her eyes, “this will fly out of the stores by itself. We’ll have to print it on asbestos and slap an ‘extremely flammable’ warning on the cover. Maybe we should give away a certificate for a free gallon of ice water with every purchase.”

  “I think you’re getting a little carried away,” Elgin joked.

  “I mean it, El. That part where Jill and Ted are stuck in traffic on the Brooklyn Bridge in that limo and he’s giving her oral sex and the cop car pulls up on the passenger side…I thought I’d wet my pants, literally. When they sneak away for a quickie while they’re touring that redwood forest with his family and end up in a hollow tree… And don’t even get me started about the bearskin rug in front of the fireplace at the ski lodge. Trust me, no one who reads this book will ever think of chocolate dipped strawberries and champagne the same way again.”

  “You know Gillian Shelby’s readers always expect something out of the ordinary.”

  “Well they’re going to get it,” Sheila agreed emphatically, “in spades. From the first read, I’d say we ought to be able to get this out for the Christmas trade. With A World of Surprise out this summer, it’ll be a sure double winner.

  “Which reminds me. We’re launching World with all the hype Fantasy Publishing can drum up and then we’ll sit back and wait for all those women on summer vacation to trample themselves getting to the bookstores. In fact, I want to arrange a short book signing tour for you to hit some of the vacation resorts.”

  “Uh-unh,” Elgin shook her head. “This summer I’ve promised myself three full months at the retreat. Rest and recuperate. No television, radio, newspapers, computers or writing. Period.”

  “You’ve been saying that since you bought that forest shack,” Sheila shot back. “And in the three years you’ve owned it, as far as I know, you’ve spent exactly four weekends up there. Let’s face it, El. You’re a city girl and a writer. Three whole months of fresh air and no e-mail and they’ll have to cart you away with a butterfly net.”

  “Fine,” she sniffed. “But when you can’t find me from the first of June to Labor Day, don’t bother to look ‘cause you can’t find this place unless I give you directions and that’s not going to happen.”

  “Just make sure you’re around for the re-writes on this one. And give me an outline on your next project, ASAP.”

  “Sheila Forbes,” Elgin pretended to grump, “you are nothing but a money-grubbing pimp preying on my fragile artistic nature for your own gain. You treat me like a literary vending machine.”

  “And you, Elgin Collier, AKA Gillian Shelby, are a hack, prostituting your God-given gift for words into piles of money. So if I’m a pimp, I guess we know what that makes you.”

  Both women laughed. They had this conversation often, in one form or another.

  “Well, I’ve got to be running along,” Elgin said, gathering up her purse and rising. “I’ve got a hundred things to do still and my e-mail’s probably backed up to New Jersey by now.”

  “I wish you wouldn’t go on-line like you do,” Sheila told her seriously. “There are an awful lot of weird people running around in cyberspace.”

  Elgin laughed, reached out and patted her friend’s arm. “I have news for you, Sheila, there are an awful lot of weird people running around in the so-called ‘real’ world too.”

  “I worry about you.”

  “You worry about Fantasy Publishing’s biggest asset.”

  “Only asset,” Sheila corrected, “but that’s not the point. You and I have been friends since way before we both started out in this whacko business. I sometimes wonder who’s crazier…you for trying to make a living writing, or me for trying to make a living publishing. I’d hate for anything to happen to you.”

  “Nothing’s going to happen to me,” Elgin assured her friend. “My e-mail is under my pen name and I never go on-line to chat except through the respectable writers’ boards and only at designated times. After all, one of the reasons readers buy my books is because I’ve tried to make Gillian Shelby accessible to them. Made her a friend. Someone they can care about. The Internet has been a big help there. Besides, I’m a big girl and I know how to take care of myself.”

  “All right. I’m taking your Magnus Opus home with me tonight so I can start hacking away at it with my little blue pencil. I should have the rough cut to you the first of next week.”

  “Good. Give my poor overworked fingers a chance to cool down.”

  “Yeah, well, I have no problem with your fingers cooling down. Just make sure nothing else does.”

  They laughed again and shared a hug.

  At the door, the two women paused and Sheila stared into Elgin’s face. “Promise me you’ll be careful,” she said seriously.

  “Always. Bye Sheila.”

  “Bye El.”

  *

  Elgin hated elevators, especially crowded ones like this, packed with eager souls escaping their cubicles for their mid-day hour’s parole. She didn’t have any particularly claustrophobic problems; small places had never bothered her. Something, though, about being in such close contact with other people, strangers, made her uneasy although she’d never been able to pinpoint exactly why. Perhaps its very irrationality made it all the more disconcerting.

  Stepping in, Elgin instantly found herself crammed backward, finally ending up in the center of the car. Carefully, she raised her briefcase to her chest and pulled her shoulder bag to her front, trying to make room for two burly executive types in matching black power suits. Jostling for position, one of them stepped momentarily on her toe, never glancing at her or offering
an apology.

  Jerk, she thought disdainfully, I wonder how you’d like a three-inch stiletto heel in your expensive Italian loafers? Accidentally, of course.

  As the elevator doors closed and the box continued down, something brushed against her ass. Automatically, she moved her body fractionally forward. There were obviously too many people in too little space. She felt a slight pressure then, like a hand laid lightly on the swell of her cheeks. Again, she shifted her position, but this time, the pressure remained.

  A moment of surprise morphed into a flicker of anger. Jeez, Louise, she sighed silently. Some guys were absolutely pathetic. I mean, what kind of a loser is reduced to copping a feel from a total stranger in a public elevator?

  But before she could turn around and confront anyone, the elevator shivered to a stop, the doors opened and she found herself pushed out into the lobby by a human tide making for the huge glass front doors and freedom.

  Just beyond the elevator doors she paused, turning in all directions looking for…for what, she suddenly wondered. Some stereotypical grinning, leering moron in a raincoat?

  The elevator emptied its cargo of perfectly ordinary-looking people, most not even glancing at her. Perhaps she’d been mistaken. Perhaps it hadn’t been anything more than a momentary, accidental contact.

  With an internal shrug, Elgin joined the lunch crowd pouring out of the building and into the early April sunshine.

  Quickly, she crossed the crowded sidewalk toward the cabstand, glancing at her watch as she stopped. If she could catch a cab and the traffic wasn’t too horrendous, she could make it home, grab a salad on the terrace, and get in a couple of hours at the keyboard. After all, for a writer, one finished book simply meant the start of another.

  The start of another book.

  Elgin frowned and felt the familiar pang of every author’s worst nightmare in the pit of her stomach. That nagging, aching terror that tugged at a writer’s very soul. The lurking fear that all the words had been spent, used up. That this time, “The End” had truly been reached.

  She knew authors who seemed full and running over with an endless stream of new ideas. Always a work-in-progress (sometimes two or three at a time) and characters literally vying with each other for the writer’s time and attention.

  But for her, stories only seemed able to come one at a time and then, only after much anxious coaxing. The overwhelming delight she felt at the end of a book was always edged with the stark terror of those words, “So, what’s next?”

  “Hey!” someone shouted a few feet to her left.

  Several heads, including hers, turned at the sound.

  “Gimme money!”

  A street person, tall and skeletal, stuck a large, grungy, dilapidated plastic soda cup in the face of a well-dressed young man, slightly shorter but stockier than his own six-foot frame.

  “I…I don’t have any change,” he mumbled, turning his head and body a little.

  “Don’t gimme that shit!” the beggar screamed, his mop of matted, greasy brown hair moving reluctantly with the violent shaking of the thin skull. “A course you got money! Dressed real pretty,” he put a grimy, fingerless glove on the young man’s lapel. “Gonna eat a big lunch at some fancy place. You got lots a money…way more’n you need. Gimme some!”

  Gaunt cheeks flushed red, a spray of spittle flew out from the thin lips, a few droplets landing in the ragged whiskers clinging tenaciously to his pointed chin. Fire blazed out of dark brown, bloodshot eyes.

  Quickly, the young man stuck his hand in his right front pocket and emerged with a fist full of coins that he dropped into the cup. With the beggar eagerly examining his prize, the young man made a hasty escape.

  Elgin turned back to the street and anxiously scanned the traffic, hoping by sheer force of will to materialize a taxi. She’d lived in the city long enough to know that everyone around the man was evaporating as quickly and inconspicuously as possible and she wanted very much to do likewise.

  Her gaze traveled up and down the block but no cab.

  A ripple of apprehension fluttered in her stomach; not fear exactly, just a strong desire to avoid confrontation.

  With a last hopeless sweep of the traffic, Elgin decided to cross the street to the safety of the cabstand on the opposite corner.

  “Hey! You! Bitch!” she heard the angry shout almost in her ear. Instinctively, she gripped her briefcase more tightly, wrapped the fingers of her left hand around the strap of her shoulder bag and took a step.

  Instantly, he blocked her way, the stench of body odor, filthy clothes, and alcohol-soaked breath creating their own barrier. At five foot nine in her three-inch heels, she could almost look him in the eye, and with her weight of a hundred and thirty pounds, he probably didn’t outweigh her by more than about twenty pounds. He might be a street bully but she was not some frail, anorexic fashion model. In her thirty-six years, she’d learned to cover fear in many situations, even while shaking like a leaf inside.

  “Please get out of my way,” she told him calmly, his smell making breathing, let alone talking, almost impossible.

  “Gimme money, bitch!” The cup rattled so close under her nose she could feel the rough edge.

  Cold fear warmed a little with a tinge of anger. Elgin stared into his face, her black eyes empty.

  “I haven’t got any money,” she replied flatly. “Now if you’ll excuse me…”

  Stepping to the side, Elgin intended to go around him but he moved nimbly, blocking her once more. Leaning down, her whole view seemed taken up with him.

  “Gimme money, bitch!” he repeated, his rage bellowing out with a force that surprised her, shaking the confident facade.

  “I told you, I don’t have any money,” she continued, still trying to remain calm. “But if you don’t let me pass, I will start screaming, and with all the cell phones around here, someone’s going to call the police and I’ll have you in jail.”

  Glancing quickly around, he saw several people were slowing to gawk, many of them with phones at their ears, eyeing him suspiciously.

  But there was more to his rage than just her refusal to give him money. This was his corner; these were his marks. He knew those who gave freely, from real generosity. And those who gave from a guilt born of too much wealth paid for by others. Most caved in to his dirty, smelly intimidation. If he let this pretty woman, smaller than him, with short, almost boyish black curls and red lips walk away, how much of his power, his livelihood would go with her?

  Taking advantage of his momentary hesitation, Elgin took another hurried step and scooted by him. Just as she started to exhale with relief, fingers like a steel vise closed painfully around her left arm between her shoulder and her elbow and spun her backwards.

  “Come back here, bitch!” he roared, shaking her like a pit bull with a rag doll. “You give me my money or so help me God, I’m gonna break your skinny little arm!”

  Elgin never knew exactly what happened next or even how. Her mind filled with terror, pain, and a hysterical urge to run but almost by themselves, she felt her fingers clutch the handle of her briefcase, her arm raise and her whole body swing forward. As if aimed, the sharp corner of the case drove into the crotch of his baggy, filthy pants.

  Another roar erupted, this one of surprise and pain. Dropping to his knees and grabbing his injury, a torrent of obscenities mingled with howls of anguish.

  For an instant, Elgin stood there, dazed, even the pain in her arm driven temporarily out of her mind by fear and disorientation.

  Another figure appeared at her elbow. Flinching, she raised the case again.

  “Hey lady,” she heard a nervous voice beside her, “it’s all right. I’m on your side. I got my hack over here by the curb. I don’t think you wanna be here when Junior comes up for air.”

  *

  “Look at that,” Elgin fumed, waving her suit jacket in front of her, “just look at it!” Needlessly, she pointed to the greasy black smudge where her attacker’s big hand had
grabbed her and the open gash of shoulder seam.

  “As filthy and disgusting as he was, I don’t even want to think what this might be,” she snarled. “God knows, though, whatever it is, it’ll probably never come out.”

  “I can’t believe you’d even think about wearing it again,” the other woman replied, wrinkling her nose in disgust. “If I were you, I’d just call the Hazardous Materials Disposal Team and have it hauled away.”

  “Do you know how much I paid for this suit?”

  “Probably about ten books, retail.”

  “Ha, ha,” Elgin told her sarcastically.

  “I don’t understand why you just didn’t give the guy what he wanted. I mean, I can’t believe you’d risk your life with some crazed junkie street bum over a handful of change. Suppose he’d had a gun or a knife. Did you think of that?”

  “I don’t like being bullied.”

  “You mean if he’d been clean shaven, neatly pressed, sober and polite, you wouldn’t have been so stupid?”

  “I don’t consider standing up for myself to be stupid, thank you.”

  “Yeah, well, just be glad you’re explaining that to me and not St. Peter.”

  “Martha…”

  “No, I mean it,” she insisted emphatically. “You could have been killed over some pocket change. As it is, your arm looks like a purple tattoo of King Kong’s fingerprints. Instead of being so damned concerned about that stupid jacket, you should be in Dr. Mooney’s office right now. Or better yet, in a police station picking that vermin out of a line up.”

  “Oh yeah, there’s a great idea,” Elgin feigned agreement. “I have him arrested and some shyster lawyer finds out I’m a writer with more than ten bucks in the bank and the first thing you know, I’m being sued by that Bozo for damaging the family jewels. That’s five years of being mired down in legal hassles and six hundred-dollar an hour lawyers only to have my insurance company buy him off on the courthouse steps. That, of course, results in my liability insurance premiums being jacked up to roughly the budget of a Third World Country or being canceled altogether.”

  She shook her head. “Uh-uh. I have enough troubles without that. I took a couple of painkillers and I’ll stick to long-sleeve shirts for a few days so as not to offend your delicate sensibilities.”