Naughty Neighbor Part 7

"I don't care what you do with your clothes," Louisa told him, shoving her arms into her s.h.i.+rt. "I'm keeping mine on for the rest of my life, and I'm going to try very hard to forget this happened."

He shook his head. Women were such a puzzle...especially this woman. He debated apologizing, but discarded the idea. He didn't feel apologetic. He felt affectionate and proprietary. He also felt a tad insulted that Louisa wasn't responding in kind and wanted to forget the whole thing.

"Partic.i.p.ants are supposed to get mellow after almost making love. Where's your afterglow? Where's your sense of humor?"

"That wasn't almost making love. That was..." She searched for a word but couldn't come up with anything horrible enough. All the words that came to mind were shamefully exultant. In truth, it had been hands down the most exciting ten minutes of her life. It had been excruciatingly delicious. That didn't alter the fact that she was now mortally embarra.s.sed and disgusted with herself. "That was a conflagration," she finally said.

He smiled in agreement. It had indeed been a conflagration.

She tugged her navy cords over her hips. "It must have been the sparkling water. Maybe it was the moon. Is there a full moon out tonight?"

"This is insulting."

Louisa shrugged into her jacket. When she was fully clothed she turned and looked at him. His face was unreadable in the darkness, but she could see enough to know he wasn't smiling. His tone had become serious and chillingly quiet. Now he was mad, she realized. She supposed he had reason to be. Blaming her pa.s.sion on the moon wasn't flattering to him. It also wasn't true, but the truth wasn't something she wanted to face right now.

"I suppose physical attraction might have played a part."

"Uh-huh."

He didn't look appeased. She sighed and slouched in her seat. "What do you want from me, Streeter?"

"How about the truth?"

"I wouldn't tell you the truth if you beat me senseless. You could rip off my fingernails, dunk me in boiling oil, carve your initials on my forehead..."

He made a disgusted sound. "Stop. You're making me nauseous." He took the keys from the ignition and jerked his thumb at her door. "Out."

"I was only kidding about taking a cab," Louisa said. "You aren't going to make me take a cab, are you?"

"No. I'm going to make you look for a pig. I'd hate for you to have to write this night off as a complete loss."

There was a short patch of gra.s.s slanting away from the road. Beyond the gra.s.s was a birch stand. Pete set off into the birch stand, and Louisa scrambled to keep up. Beyond the birch stand was a brick-and-aluminum colonial on a quarter of an acre of mostly open lawn. The house seemed austere in the moonlight. Rectangles of light spilled onto the ground from downstairs windows.

Pete didn't care about the colonial. Pete was interested in the weathered rambler next door. Bucky Dunowski lived in the rambler. There was a big Ford pickup in Bucky's gravel drive, a Harley parked on the front porch, and a Union Jack hung from the sagging porch roof. A dog barked in the vicinity of the rambler.

"That's it," Louisa said. "I'm out of here."

Pete held fast to her. "The dog's chained, Wimpy."

"It isn't that I'm afraid," Louisa insisted. "It's just that I don't see any pigs. We may as well go home."

Someone shouted into the darkness for the dog to shut up, but the dog continued to bark. The back door to the rambler opened, the dog hurried inside, and the door slammed closed.

Pete pulled Louisa forward. "I thought this was important to you."

"That was before I decided to move to Montana."

"Where's your spirit of adventure? And what about outrage. Someone smashed your car windows. You've been fired, and there are clandestine activities afoot in the Senate chambers."

She dug her heels in halfway across the lawn. "My car is insured."

"That doesn't make this pig fiasco any less outrageous."

"This is outrageous," she said, flapping her arms. "I feel compelled to point out to you that it is not considered polite behavior to go sneaking around at night, peeking in people's windows."

He motioned for her to be quiet while he crept closer to the house. The muted sound of a television carried out to them. Beer cans and take-out cartons littered the ground around a garbage can on the back stoop. Bars of yellow light bordered either side of a shade drawn on a front window.

There were three windows on the driveway side of the house where Pete and Louisa stood. The forward window was shaded and lit. The middle and back windows were dark with shades partially drawn.

Pete and Louisa squinted through the grime on the middle window. Enough ambient light spilled from the front room to make out a card table and folding chairs. A door opened to the back room, which Pete a.s.sumed was the kitchen. A wide arch connected the middle room with the front room.

A man slouched in a worn-out easy chair, his face illuminated by the flickering glow from the television. He was about six feet and stocky, dressed in jeans and a dark T-s.h.i.+rt. The arm facing Louisa and Pete was heavily tatooed. His hair was black, cut short. He had a large Band-Aid taped across the bridge of his nose and a bad bruise running the length of his cheek.

"Bet I know how he got that broken nose," Pete whispered.

"Obviously, you gave better than you got," Louisa said.

Peter grinned at the pride in her voice. There was hope for her. "I don't see any pigs."

"Not the four-legged kind," she said. She stepped back from the window and accidentally kicked a beer can. It skittered over packed dirt onto the gravel drive. Bucky lunged out of the easy chair, and a big black German shepherd materialized from somewhere in the house and flung himself, snarling and snapping, against the dining room window.

Pete grabbed Louisa's hand and took off across the neighboring lawn. They were running flat out when they heard two blasts from a shotgun. Rear lights went on in the colonial. The shepherd was baying behind them, and Pete glanced over his shoulder to see the dog closing in. Two more shotgun blasts peppered the ground to their right. They hit the birch stand just as the back door to the colonial was flung open and a rottweiler bounded out. There was a yelp followed by an awful racket that spun Pete around in his tracks.

Louisa held tight to Pete, gasping for breath. "What is it?"

"Looks to me like both houses let their dogs loose at the same time, and they've attacked each other."

Louisa peered out from the patch of trees. Two men had waded, kicking and swearing, into the melee. The dogs were untangled, and swearing gave way to accusations and to hand gestures. Suddenly, the rottweiler's owner stopped arguing and pointed toward the thicket where Pete and Louisa stood obscured in the shadows. Bucky shouldered his shotgun.

"Uh-oh," Pete said. He grabbed Louisa by the wrist and dragged her, full sprint, through the woods to the car. He shoved her inside, scrambled behind the wheel, and took off, spraying gravel behind him and laying a sixteenth of an inch of rubber on the blacktop.

They were past Frederick, Maryland, before Louisa was able to speak. Her heart was still pounding in her chest and perspiration trickled down her breastbone. She lay back in her seat, eyes closed, hand to her forehead. "Holy cow," she said.

Pete's mental exclamation was much stronger. If it hadn't been for the rottweiler, they'd be dog food right now. He was going to have to be more careful. He'd almost gotten Louisa killed. He needed to go home, pour himself a drink, and review the game plan.

Five more minutes of silence pa.s.sed. They were on Route 280, heading south. Louisa finally opened her eyes. "I'm not cut out for this. I'm a failure as a peeper."

"You just haven't had enough practice. You were doing great until you punted the beer can."

She studied him for a moment and realized he wasn't rattled by the chase. His voice was steady with a hint of humor. His hand was relaxed on the wheel. His cavalier att.i.tude piqued her interest. "How come I'm the only one sweating? Why aren't your hands shaking like mine?"

"I'm big and brave."

"This isn't the first time you've been shot at, is it?"

"h.e.l.l no," he said. "I used to drive the freeway to work."

"I'm serious."

He glanced over at her. "I wrote my first screenplay six years ago while I was recovering from a gunshot wound."

"Angry husband?"

"Angry drug runner. I was a South American correspondent for Reuters, and I was tagging along with some Special Forces guys who were supposed to blow up an airstrip in Colombia. I caught a bullet in the leg. It shattered the bone and pretty much ended my ability to tramp through the jungle."

Her eyebrows raised a half inch. "How long were you in South America working for Reuters?"

"Almost four years."

"Covering drug runners, riots, and minor wars?"

He nodded.

"And you were shot at a lot?"

"Not a lot."

Looking at it in retrospect, he thought his chances of dying from a firefight back then had been considerably less than his chances of dying from alcohol poisoning.

It was hard to believe he'd achieved such success writing screenplays. His personal history wasn't exactly impressive. He'd been a lousy student with a rotten att.i.tude. He'd been caught stealing cars when he was eighteen and joined the army to avoid jail. He'd been the world's worst soldier, getting busted down for everything from insubordination to impersonating an officer. He'd started his newspaper career on the loading dock, sweated his way into the mail room, and farther up.

He'd made progress as a correspondent, because he was good, but he never followed the rules and was a thorn in everyone's side. People were willing to give him glowing recommendations with the hope that he'd move on to another job. He suspected his boss at Reuters had sent him to South America to get him out of the office.

Somewhere along the line, looking at life from the bottom of a bottle, he'd managed to grow up. And he'd discovered a code of ethics and a level of responsibility he could live with.

Louisa considered this latest piece of information. Reuters was a very respectable news service. She hadn't thought much about Pete's background up until now. Certainly, she hadn't envisioned him as a hard-edge journalist tagging after a bunch of mercenaries. Still, it seemed in keeping with his character, and she could easily imagine him with a three-day-old beard and filthy, sweaty clothes, tramping through the jungle, rooting out crime and corruption.

She was sure when he was a kid he'd never backed down from a dare, and as a journalist she thought he must have been as single-minded as a mongrel with a soup bone once he'd latched on to a story. That was why he was picking away at this pig thing, she thought. He had the instincts of a journalist. He knew when something was rotten. And he knew when there was a story out there, waiting to be told to the world.

The more she thought about it, the more exotic and heroic it seemed, and her life sounded dull in comparison. She'd lived all her life within the beltway. She'd barely traveled because she'd never had time for a vacation. She'd never seen a jungle or a desert or even the Pacific Ocean. In the past, she'd never much cared about seeing Kuala Lumpur or San Salvador or s.h.a.gai Fort, but suddenly she felt rabid with wanderl.u.s.t. She should broaden her horizons, she thought. She should see more of the world. Maybe she should get a job with the CIA or Cunard or join the Peace Corps.

She was on adrenaline overload, she acknowledged. She was romanticizing Pete Streeter, and she was grossly exaggerating her desire to trade modern plumbing for a glimpse of the Khyber Pa.s.s. Still, she felt exhilarated over the idea that, suddenly, there were all sorts of new options and exciting experiences available to her.

Pete went east on the beltway to Connecticut Avenue and then cut south. He wasn't sure if it was the best route, but it seemed the most straightforward. Louisa probably knew of a better road, but he didn't want to disturb her. She was lost in thought, chewing his last piece of gum for all she was worth.

Her cheeks were flushed, and her hair was wild and tangled. She was steamy from pa.s.sion and their run through the woods. She smelled like s.e.x and Juicy Fruit, and just sitting next to her made his heart race. She was primordial woman in a Porsche. She was beautiful and erotic and naively blind to the power she held over him.

He couldn't imagine what she was thinking, but the next morning she was going to wake up with her blood pressure back to normal and the pa.s.sion of the night hours behind her. She was going to be furious that she'd almost made it in a car, on the side of a road, with a man she'd only known for three days and thought was a notch below slug spit. He was going to keep his door locked and his sound system cranked up until she was done breaking things.

He left Connecticut Avenue with its neon-lit restaurants and twenty-four-hour traffic. A block off Connecticut on 27th Street, urban Was.h.i.+ngton was dark and quiet, settled in for the night behind locked doors. Globed streetlights dropped dim light over gray sidewalk and made the porch and shrub shadows seem black and deep.

Pete always felt comfortable here. There was a softness to 27th Street. It was unpretentious with its old-fas.h.i.+oned above-ground wires, rickety garages, and messy lawns. The residents were busy but not unfriendly.

His house in Santa Barbara had privacy because of the exclusivity of the neighborhood. His Manhattan condo had privacy because the doorman strictly enforced it. 27th Street was a place where privacy needn't be guarded. Privacy occurred naturally on 27th Street through a lack of interest and a shortage of idle hours.

There was normality here, Pete thought. It was a place to raise children and grow old with grace. At least, it had been prior to the pig business.

Pete parked the car and followed Louisa to her door and into her apartment. He checked out each room, including the closets. He made sure the windows were locked and the back door secure. The following day the alarm system would be in place. For the night he'd have to hope for the best.

"It would be safer if we stayed together tonight," he said.

Louisa weighed the risk of being attacked in her sleep and decided she was safer taking her chances with the pig people. "I don't think that's a good idea."

"I'd sleep on the couch."

Louisa rolled her eyes.

"Unless you'd rather I slept in your bed..."

She felt the flush creeping up from her s.h.i.+rt collar. "I don't want to talk about it."

Pete grinned. He pulled her to him and kissed her long and hard. When he was done, he sighed in satisfaction. "Still hot for me, huh?"

He was right, of course, and that made it all the worse. "Out," Louisa said. "Out, out, out, out, out!"

He gave another sigh. This time it was clearly regret. He opened the front door and stood on the porch until he heard the lock click.

Louisa wasn't sure she wanted to get out of bed. It was morning, and the sun was s.h.i.+ning, and Was.h.i.+ngton was on the move without her. She had no place to go-no job, no future. Even if she had a place to go, she couldn't go there because she still hadn't gotten her car repaired.

The beaches of Belize no longer beckoned. Only one memory held vibrant in her mind. She'd almost done it with Pete Streeter in his Porsche. She buried her face in her pillow and screamed. She was a s.l.u.t, no doubt about it. Even worse, she was a dumb s.l.u.t. Getting involved with Pete Streeter was dumb and would bring her nothing but grief. She groaned. Who was she kidding. She already was involved.

Okay, what could she do about it? The only thing that came to mind was suicide. The more she thought about it, the more appealing it became. The method of death would have to be lingering and pathetic, she decided. She wanted to suffer. She wanted to be an object of pity. Guns were too gory. A knife would be too painful. Pills might make her throw up. She could drive off the Woodrow Wilson Bridge, but first she'd have to rent a car. Hanging didn't sound like fun. She didn't want her eyes to bulge out of her head. Starvation was the way to go, she finally concluded. She would simply lay in bed and waste away.

She went back to sleep and awoke again at nine-thirty. She was hungry, but she supposed she had to get used to it if she was going to starve to death. She was examining a crack in her ceiling when she heard someone pounding on her front door. Ignore it, she told herself, but the knocking was relentless. It intruded on her self-indulgent depression. She lurched out of bed and shoved her arms into her robe. She went to the front door and threw it open. It was Pete Streeter.

"Yes?"

He handed her the morning paper and a big white bakery bag and eased past her into her apartment. "I figured you'd be b.u.mmed out this morning, so I brought you some doughnuts."

She stared nonplussed at the bag. Here she was trying to kill herself, and Streeter had brought her doughnuts. d.a.m.n.

"So," she said, "what kind of doughnuts?"

"All kinds. I didn't know what you liked so I got four of everything."

"Boston creams?"

"Fresh made this morning. They're right on top so the icing doesn't get smeared."

Okay, she thought, she'd starve to death tomorrow. She had lots of time. There was no rush. She took a Boston cream and chomped off a big bite. Might as well make coffee since she wasn't going to do the suicide thing, she told herself. She padded into the kitchen and poured some coffee beans into a grinder.

Pete tagged along and slouched in a kitchen chair. Her hair was a mess and her robe was unbelted, revealing a flannel nightgown that would have discouraged a lesser man. He thought she looked great. "You sleep okay?" he asked.

"Yep."