RUN NO MORE
© 2004 Catherine Mulvany

UNEDITED COPY
Prologue

August 1972
Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Ian MacPherson lowered himself through the skylight of the Sodré mansion like a spider on a dragline. He tried to ignore the twinge in his gut—a warning that something was off-kilter. Or perhaps nothing more than his ulcer flaring up. Damned if he knew which.

That’s what happened when one approached thirty. The instincts faded. The reflexes slowed. The mind played tricks. Wasn’t that why he’d retired to Tahiti six months ago? Wasn’t that why, if not for Alex Farrell, he’d be there now, practicing his French on one of Papeete’s exotic beauties?

Ian paused for a moment and the silence enveloped him. Most old buildings expressed themselves in creaks and groans and sighs. This one was mute, its still air heavy with the sickly scent of dying flowers. His gut gave another twinge.

Ignoring it, he resumed his descent.

Halfway down his headlamp died, and inky darkness swallowed him whole. His heart lurched. Damn it, he’d checked the equipment. Double-checked it.

“Cat? You all right?”

Ian glanced up to see his former apprentice’s head and shoulders silhouetted against an oval of star-smeared sky. “I’m fine, but this wretched headlamp’s giving me fits.” No sooner had he uttered the words than the light blinked on.

“Seems to be working now,” Alex said. “Maybe a short?”

“Most likely.” Ian’s mind embraced the logic of Alex’s explanation, but his gut wasn’t convinced.

Again he resumed his descent and moments later spotted the target, a stone known as Milagre—the Miracle. His twinge blossomed into a full-blown ache. They’d been had, by God. No one in his right mind would pay them a million for this rock.

In a glass case positioned under the skylight lay a tourmaline. Granted, it was an enormous tourmaline, half again the size of a man’s fist and a rich ruby red, but a tourmaline all the same. Cut, polished, and mounted, it might have fetched six figures. Perhaps. Uncut and hung like an amulet from a heavy gold chain, it was worth a quarter that at most.

So why had the owner refused to sell? And, more to the point, why had the L.A. producer who’d tried to buy it financed its theft?

Ian swiveled in a semicircle. Roughly fifty feet square and almost as high, the vaulted space seemed even larger. Aside from the tourmaline, the room held only seven statues—crude, garishly painted plaster figures representing the orixás or deities of Macumba, the local version of voodoo. Spaced at five-foot intervals, they formed a protective circle around the stone.

Was the tourmaline a religious icon? If so, that would explain why the owner had refused to sell, if not why a Hollywood producer would be so determined to possess it. Perhaps Afro-Brazilian fetish cults were the latest L.A. craze. After all, these were the people who built multimillion-dollar mansions on major fault lines. Fools, yes. But rich fools. Ergo, if Alex’s client was willing to pay an astronomical sum for the stone, his rationale was irrelevant. And no reason for alarm.

Ian used a diamond-edged blade to score a circle in the glass case’s domed lid, then attached a suction cup before tapping the incised curve with a small rubber mallet. A half dozen faint tinks echoed in the silence. The glass circle broke free.

“Hurry,” Alex said. “The guard’s due back in five minutes.”

“Relax. We’ve plenty of time.” Ian slipped the glass circle into his pocket, secured his tools, then reached for the stone. Even through his glove, it felt warm. He jerked his hand from the case with a muffled exclamation.

“What’s wrong?” Alex said.

“Nothing.” He’d slashed his wrist on the sharp glass edge. Blood welled from the cut, but it wasn’t deep, an annoyance rather than a handicap. His own fault for being so damned suggestible. The warmth of the stone had been an illusion. Just as it was an illusion that the seven plaster deities were crowding closer in the darkness.

Danger. He could smell it in the musty air, taste it as a metallic sourness at the back of his throat. The silence pressed on him, a tangible weight that made it hard to breathe, harder yet to think.

He caught a flicker of movement from the corner of his eye and whipped around.

Nothing. No one. Except those damned plaster idols. Bedecked with beads and flower petals, they should have looked ridiculous. Instead, they looked menacing.

He took a deep breath.

“Four minutes,” Alex whispered.

Which meant the guard might check in sometime between now and dawn. He’d yet to meet the South American who stuck to a rigid schedule.

Focus. Ignore the guard and Alex, too. All you have to do is grab the stone. He stared at the tourmaline. God help him, his skin crawled at the thought of touching it again.

He caught another flutter of movement in his peripheral vision and spun around to face a sword-wielding figure, its face frozen in a permanent snarl. The statue’s fierce eyes glittered like bits of polished onyx. Had the warrior always been a few inches closer to Milagre than the other orixás? As Ian watched, a single white petal detached itself from the cluster bunched at the god’s shoulder and drifted to the floor.

Get out!

Ian wasn’t sure if the voice reverberating through his head originated from an outside source or was the product of his own fear. Not that it mattered. Good advice was good advice.

This time he was careful not to touch Milagre itself. Instead, he threaded the heavy gold chain between his fingers and lifted the tourmaline from the case. A faint vibration thrummed in his ears like the hum of an electrical power line. Hair rose along the back of his neck. His fingers tingled.

Just your imagination, he told himself. He yanked on the rigging to signal Alex.

“Christ, what took you so long?” Alex pulled him toward the roof in jerky increments. “Did you get the rock?”

“I—” The chain suddenly writhed like a snake in his hand, slithering through his grip. He made a wild grab for it and snagged the end of the chain with two fingers. The tourmaline swung in an arc, then smacked against bare skin at the pulse point in his wrist.

Dear God, not just warm. Hot.

Deep inside the gem, a tiny point of red light throbbed in concert with the frantic beat of his heart. He stared, mesmerized, unable to move or speak or think.

“Cat? Cat? What’s wrong?”

Alex’s urgent whisper broke the spell. Stretching as far as he could, Ian thrust the stone toward his apprentice. “Take it,” he said, mortified to hear the panic in his voice.

Alex reached down to pluck the gemstone from Ian’s grasp, seemingly oblivious to both Ian’s agitation and the heat radiating from the tourmaline. He studied it for a moment, then with a grunt of satisfaction tucked it into his knapsack.

Ian’s wrist still tingled. He glanced down and drew a sharp breath. Where seconds ago blood had welled from a narrow cut, the skin now stretched unblemished. “Bloody hell,” he said.

“Is there a problem?”

Ian stared at his apprentice. “Either I’m going mad, or there’s something damned peculiar about that tourmaline. Look at my wrist.”

“What about it?”

“I cut it trying to get Milagre out of the case.”

“Looks fine to me,” Alex said.

“My point exactly. The tourmaline touched my wrist and the cut healed as if by magic.”

Alex raised his eyebrows. “Magic?”

It did sound absurd, but it had happened. Hadn’t it?

“Magic?” Alex repeated.

“Never mind. Pull me up before the guard comes back.”

The light from Ian’s headlamp turned Alex’s features into the face of a stranger. “You steal for the thrill, don’t you?”

Ian welcomed the sudden rejuvenating spurt of irritation. “This is hardly the time or place to discuss motivation.”

“But it’s the rush you crave, right?”

Ian frowned. “I...yes. Don’t we all?”

“I get off on the danger, but for me, the excitement’s secondary.” Alex paused. “The money doesn’t mean a thing to you, Cat, but it does to me. Damn it, it does to me.”

Some odd quality in the tone of Alex’s voice set Ian’s nerves on edge. “You’re wasting time. Pull me up.”

Alex’s eyes glittered. “I don’t think so. Not this time.”

“No!” His lips formed the word even as Alex released the tension on the rigging with one quick jerk.

Untethered, he plunged toward the floor in a petrifying slow motion free fall, all flailing limbs and wide-eyed, gut-curdling terror.

Then pain, as fierce and red as the eye of the tourmaline, struck a sledgehammer blow to his spine. The marble pedestal had broken his fall and, oh God, from the feel of it, his back as well.

Chapter One

April 2004
Half Moon Bay, California

Ian MacPherson sat hunched in his wheelchair with a Colt Python .357 shoved in his mouth. Blowing his brains out would take care of his problems, but leaving Paulinho to deal with the resulting mess hardly seemed sporting. His ex-cellmate barely spoke English.

On the other hand, what did he have to live for besides revenge? A revenge that shimmered like a distant mirage forever beyond his grasp.

The kitchen lay deep in shadow, the only illumination a pale swath of moonlight admitted by the window over the sink and the eerie green glow of the digital clock on the microwave. Two thirty-seven.

How very appropriate, he thought in sour amusement, dying in the dead of the night. His finger tightened on the trigger.

The creak of the dog door distracted him. Not a particularly alarming noise...unless, of course, one didn’t own a dog.

He leveled the pistol at the plastic flap.

Thin and agile, a young woman squeezed through the narrow aperture, a penlight clenched between her teeth. He waited until she was all the way in, then said, “Burglary’s against the law.”

She gasped and dropped the light. It spun across the kitchen tiles, throwing weird, flickering shadows into every corner of the room, briefly illuminating in turn the cupboards, appliances, butcher block, and finally Ian with his revolver.

“Don’t shoot.” She got to her feet, extending her hands in surrender.

“Why not? It’s what one does to intruders.” He flipped on the overhead light, and she blinked in the sudden glare. With her odd monochrome coloring—skin and hair almost the same shade of pale honey beige—she reminded him of an old sepia print. Portrait of a waif. He wondered if the effect was calculated.

“All I was looking for was something to eat.” She met his gaze and her eyes captured his attention. Unusual eyes, a pale silvery gray ringed in black. Even more unusual, the expression in their depths—neither fright nor defiance, just a sad resignation, a sterile lifelessness.

Abused, he thought. She looked like someone who’d endured so much in the past that she was prepared now to suffer quite stoically whatever new horror presented itself. Even a crazy, gun-toting, gray-bearded cripple.

“Hunger seems an unlikely motive for breaking and entering.”

“Are you going to call the police?”

He studied her a moment in silence. “When did you last eat?”

“A truck driver bought me dinner yesterday. I didn’t stick around for breakfast.” She shifted her gaze to the toes of her ragged sneakers. “I don’t have any money, but I can pay you for the food the same way I paid the trucker.”

“You’d barter your body for a crust of bread?”

Her soulless eyes locked on his. “And count it a fair trade.”

Bitterness welled up, all but choking him. “Your sacrifice won’t be necessary.” He glanced down at his ruined body. “My injuries preclude it. I have minimal sensation below the waist.”

He was used to pitying looks and polite murmurs of, “I’m sorry.” But the dead-eyed girl drew a deep breath, then released it in a ragged sigh. “Some people have all the luck.”

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