Sneak And Rescue. Shirl Henke

      

      “You’re gonna get naked!” the club owner shrieked.

      Sam knew she was in trouble when the cheap velvet drapes separating the howling audience from the stage started to open. The music grew deafeningly loud. So did the roar of male anticipation out front.

      Now that she’d got the information she came for, she had to get the hell out of the building. Her hand closed around the exit door handle and she started to shove it open when a big paw grabbed a hunk of her hair and pulled her back.

      “I paid you to strip.”

      “How about you strip?” she yelled, applying pressure on the nerves at the base of his flabby bicep just above his elbow. He yelped in pain and released her. Sam waited for him to raise his left hand, but before she could act, a loaded bottle connected with the back of his skull and he collapsed.

      Sam looked up into her husband’s furious face, seeing his eyes sweep over her almost-naked body. “What the hell are you doing here?”

      For Matt Henke,

      My pop culture and music maven,

      besides being the world’s best son

       ABOUT THE AUTHOR

      Shirl Henke received her BA and MA in history from the University of Missouri and then worked at many different jobs, including running the circulation desk on a small daily, writing and editing “house organ” newspapers, administering a federal information programme for the elderly, and finally as a university instructor, teaching in four different departments.

      Ever since she was a child she read avidly, everything from Robert Heinlein’s sci-fi adventures to the big historical sagas of the 1970s and 1980s. She always had ideas for stories and sold her first novel to Warner Books in 1986. Within two years, she was able to quit her day job. Now she can’t imagine doing anything but writing for a living.

      She and her husband, Jim, share their cedar house in the woods with an utterly spoiled and very geriatric tomcat. As with writing, life without cats would be unimaginable. For therapy when she’s not at the computer, she cooks large dinners for their extended family, works in her garden and greenhouse and still reads avidly. When deadlines permit, she loves to travel. Visit Shirl on the web at www.shirlhenke.com.

      Sneak and Rescue

      SHIRL HENKE

       www.millsandboon.co.uk

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      ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

      Sam and Matt’s second adventure was even more fun to write than the first and I could not have done it without the able assistance of many people and organisations. Any mistakes or excess of “literary licence” are my own.

      The setting for this caper is the beautiful Miami metro area. I owe thanks once more to Detective Juan DelCastillo and the Miami-Dade Police Department for information about how my fictional homicide sergeant, William Patowski, might have conducted his investigation.

      For the fictionalised Space Quest, its fans and the wider universe where they boldly go, I received creative inspiration from my son, Matt Henke, and the Atlas Chapter of the real international organisation.

      I grew up listening to Elvis Presley’s music and there is only one “King.” But my Elvis Scruggs was pretty cool in his own way. I hope you think so, too. Who knows? He just might pop up in a future story. Let me know what you think: www.shirlhenke.com.

      Chapter 1

      “Quit hiding from me, you sneaky piece of junk!”

      Sam dug through the stacks of receipts and file folders, frantic as a starving squirrel looking for its winter cache of nuts. One heavy binder slid off the chair in front of her and toppled dead center onto the neat piles of checks and bank statements spread out on the carpet. With horror, she watched an hour’s worth of sorting flutter into its former chaos. Muttering a curse beneath her breath, she listened more carefully. The muffled chirp of the new cordless phone was coming from behind a tower of IRS pamphlets piled on the love seat next to the chair.

      “It used to be so much easier—just start at the jack and pull the phone through the rubble,” she muttered.

      Crawling on hands and knees to the sofa, she tossed aside manuals with print so fine she couldn’t read them with the magnification of the Hubble telescope. “Might’ve known it was the IRS’s fault,” she said, seizing the phone, which had been wedged behind a cushion.

      Just before the final ring set off her answering machine—if she’d remembered to reactivate it—Sam answered, “Ballanger Retrievals,” in her most professional voice. She pushed another stack of manuals onto the floor to create a narrow empty space where she could sit. The small sofa was so full of folders, pamphlets and papers that only the brown leather armrests were visible. Risking an avalanche that might bury her five-four frame if either side toppled, she gingerly leaned back, trying to catch her breath so she would not be huffing like an asthmatic marathon runner.

      “Ms. Samantha Ballanger, please,” a male voice with a clipped upper-class accent said, as if accustomed to instant acquiescence. She’d heard the type before.

      “This is Sam Ballanger.” If he expected her to have a private secretary to screen her calls, he was in for an unavoidable disappointment. After growing up poor in a big south Boston blue-collar family, Sam never wasted money on things she could do herself.

      “My name is Upton Winchester IV, Ms. Ballanger. I understand you find and return runaways…discreetly.”

      “Who referred my service to you, Mr. Winchester?” She always wanted to know her clients were legit and not wasting her time. Lots of wacko husbands who used their wives and kids for punching bags wanted her to haul the victims back. No dice. She’d seen too much when she’d worked as a paramedic and then a police officer after moving to Miami.

      There was a slight hesitation on the other end of the line. “I was referred by Jayson Page Layton. Jay and I golf together,” he replied, expecting her to be impressed.

      She was. Layton was a Bal Harbor real estate tycoon whose daughter had joined a religious cult and vanished into a commune in the Everglades a couple of years ago. Sam had literally wrestled an alligator while rescuing the poor kid from her nutcase captors, who’d been little more than child molesters and responsible for at least one dead cult member. That was Sergeant Will “Pat” Patowski’s take on it. He was her mentor at the Miami-Dade Police Department, where she had spent seven years as a police officer. The Kingdom Come “prophet” and his “deacons” were presently serving ten to life in the state pen at Raiford.

      “What seems to be the problem, Mr. Winchester?”

      “I’d rather not discuss the matter over the phone, Ms. Ballanger. Please come to my office at the Seascape Building, say—” he paused as if consulting his day-planner “—four this afternoon. Winchester, Grayson & Kent Accounting is on the fifteenth floor.”

      She