Kitabı oku: «The Bluest Eyes in Texas», sayfa 3
“I’ll let you know as they come to mind.” She tucked the covers under her chin, making a tight little cocoon for herself, then plumped the pillow under her head. It would be best to end the conversation right there, to close her eyes and pretend to sleep until she actually drifted off. She doubted he would object.
But she didn’t close her eyes or let things drop. “Those scars on your back…did your parents give you those?”
This time there was nothing light about his chuckle. “The only thing they ever gave me that mattered.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Yeah. Sure.”
She couldn’t take offense at his dismissal. An apology was such a little thing, and coming from a stranger, it meant nothing. Nothing could make right what his parents had done to him, except possibly knowing that they would suffer for it in hell.
She listened to his steady breathing for a while. With anyone else, she would take it as a sign he was asleep. With him, assuming anything was likely to prove that trite old saying about making an ass of you and me.
As the bedside clock rolled over to eleven, Bailey was convinced she would never fall asleep, but the next time she glanced at it for confirmation, it read six thirty-three. She was about to turn over and snooze again when her gaze slid past the clock to the other bed. Logan was dressed in jeans and a dark T-shirt, his jaw was freshly shaved, his hair was damp from his shower and he was watching the morning news with the volume muted.
There was something incredibly disconcerting about the fact that he’d been up and about while she’d lain sleeping, dead to the world. It made her feel vulnerable, although clearly he hadn’t disturbed her. She’d slept through whatever noise he might have made, and her little cocoon was tucked as securely as it had been last night. More importantly—she thrust her hand under the pillow, searching until her fingers closed around cool metal—he hadn’t retrieved his keys and abandoned her.
Although she would have sworn she’d made no noise and no movement other than opening her eyes and locating the keys, he knew she was awake. Without glancing in her direction, he asked, “Are you planning to lie there all day? ’Cause I’m leaving in half an hour.”
Slowly she sat up, keeping the covers around her. “I need to take a shower.”
“Then get moving.”
Maybe he had zero modesty, but she did—and no robe either. “Couldn’t you wait outside?”
Finally he turned his head to look at her. His expression was as dry as the desert in August. “I saw you get into bed last night. Unless your panties shrank during the night, there’s not going to be anything new to see this morning.”
Scowling at him, she maneuvered the bedspread free of the other covers, then wrapped it around her before awkwardly rising from the bed. It took an effort, but she managed to make it as far as the bathroom door with her suitcase and tote bag before shedding the cover and disappearing inside. She locked the door, scooted her bags up against it, then tossed the car keys on top.
When she came out a short while later, showered, shampooed and shaved, he was sprawled in the same position, with the volume turned up on the television. He gave no sign of noticing her except to say, “You’ve got nine minutes.”
Brush her teeth, dry her hair, fix it, put on makeup and re-pack in nine minutes? Yeah, right. Even at her quickest, she needed a minimum of fifteen minutes before she would be ready to walk out the door.
She brushed her teeth first, then shoved yesterday’s clothes into an outside pocket of the suitcase. She was just finishing her makeup when Logan’s reflection appeared in the mirror. He came too close, reached around and patted her pockets to locate his keys in the right one. He was wiggling his fingers into the tight space when she spun around, slapping at his hand. “Hey! Stop that!”
He didn’t, of course. “Time’s up. I’m outta here.”
She used one of her self-defense moves, grabbing his hand, putting pressure on the sensitive spot, bending it back. He didn’t let out a squeal like the last guy she’d done it to and he didn’t back off—the last guy had dropped to one knee—but he did stop probing in her pocket.
“I’m ready,” she said in a warning tone.
His gaze flickered to her hair, still wet and combed straight back from her face. She neither wanted nor needed his confirmation that it wasn’t a flattering style, but she could take care of that in the car.
“Just grab my suitcase,” she went on in the same voice, “and I’ll be right behind you.”
“Grab your own suitcase, lady. I’m not your servant.” He yanked his hand free, snatched up his duffle and headed for the door.
Gritting her teeth, Bailey shoved everything but a comb into the tote bag, then rummaged inside for an elastic band and some gold clips. Feeling like a pack mule, she hauled her stuff to the car outside and, smiling the phoniest polite smile she could manage, handed him the keys.
“Are we stopping for breakfast?” she asked as they settled in their respective seats.
“I don’t eat breakfast.”
She did, but she wasn’t about to insist on it. If he wanted to be inconsiderate, let him. Eventually they would have to stop for gas, and when they did, she would stock up on munchies to get her through the quirks of his schedule.
The morning air was cool enough that they didn’t need the windows down more than a few inches, so she took advantage of the relative calm to French braid her hair. It was a job best done by someone else, in front of a mirror and not in the confines of a small car, but at last she was satisfied with the results, at least from the front. She couldn’t see how the back looked and decided it didn’t matter.
“You could just cut it,” Logan said when she was finally finished.
“Or, gee, you could have given me five minutes to dry it.”
He shrugged. “Thirty minutes is plenty of time to shower and make yourself presentable. It’s not as if you were ugly to start.”
Her gaze narrowed as she looked at him, then she offered a simpering smile. “Why, thank you for that gracious compliment, Mr. Marshall.”
Wonder of wonders, he actually shifted uncomfortably and color darkened his face. “I wasn’t offering a compliment—just stating the facts.”
She dropped the comb in her purse, then tilted her head back. It was a lovely morning. She’d slept well; her store of patience wasn’t dribbling away like sand in an hourglass—yet—and she’d made Logan Marshall blush. Things were going so well at the moment that she might even make an effort to be sociable.
Another wonder—the same thought had apparently occurred to Logan, because before she could think of anything to say, he spoke. “How’d you wind up with a name like Bailey?”
“Hey, Bailey is a perfectly respectable name.”
“Yeah, generally a perfectly respectable last name or man’s name.”
“Logan is generally a last name, too.” So was Brady, for that matter.
“Logan’s a family name.”
“So is Bailey…sort of.” When he glanced her way, she shrugged. “When my mother got pregnant the first time, she knew exactly what she was going to name her son—Lee Aubrey Madison the third. But she had a daughter, so she named her Neely. I came next and got Bailey. Then there’s Hallie and Kylie.”
“Good thing she stopped before she got to Holly, Molly and Polly.”
“At least if we all had to be lees, we got unusual lees.” Without pausing, she went right on. “You said Logan’s a family name. Whose?”
“It’s my paternal grandmother’s maiden name.”
“And Brady is…your maternal grandmother’s maiden name?”
His only response was the tightening of his fingers on the steering wheel. “Where do the other lees live?”
“Neely’s in Heartbreak, Oklahoma. She’s a lawyer and her husband’s the county sheriff. Hallie’s in Buffalo Plains, about twenty miles away. She’s a stay-at-home mom and her husband is—” she caught his warning breath “—not open to discussion. And Kylie lives in Dallas, where she’s happily single and breaking hearts every day.”
“Why didn’t you call her last night?”
“Oh, I don’t think that would have been a good idea. She would have asked a lot of questions and she’s not nearly as tactful as I am.” Besides, Kylie would have wanted to do something, and Bailey never could have relaxed with Logan out of her sight. The rat likely carried an extra set of keys to the car and would have been long gone before she returned.
“You’re the tactful one.” His words were heavy with doubt.
“No, actually I’m the smart one. People labeled us when we were kids to help keep us straight. Neely’s the determined one, Hallie’s the popular one, Kylie’s the pretty one, and I’m the smart one.”
“And the hardheaded one,” he muttered.
“Oh, we’re all pretty hardheaded,” she said easily. “Besides, you’ve got no room to talk. You’re about as stubborn as they come.”
He treated her to a dry, sarcastic smile and repeated her earlier words to her. “Thank you for that gracious compliment.”
“Hey, I told you I’d pass on any impressions as they came to mind.” She kicked off her shoes, propped one foot in the narrow space between window glass and door frame, then pressed the stereo on button. “Let’s see if we can agree on good music.”
Chapter 3
They couldn’t.
She liked country; he liked rock. She could listen to classical; he’d rather have a root canal without anesthesia. She couldn’t stand techno; he wasn’t about to sit through unending hours of jazz.
The radio went back off and stayed that way.
“God, does this state never end?” she groused. It was mid-afternoon, and the temperature had risen a few degrees past comfortable about sixty miles back. She looked cranky, and Logan felt it.
“Nope, it goes on forever. When I left home, it took me six months to get from Marshall City to Pineville.”
That made her look at him—something she’d avoided doing after they’d gone through the entire radio dial, AM and FM, three times without finding anything to agree on. He’d been happy being ignored and he’d done a good job ignoring her in return, though he had stopped for lunch when he heard her stomach growling.
“You were fifteen,” she commented. “Where did you go?”
Vaguely he wished he hadn’t mentioned that last part. The last time he’d talked in any detail about running away had been to Sam and Ella, right after he’d gotten caught stealing food from their crops.
But he’d opened the subject, and nearly twenty years had gone by, and none of it really mattered anymore. “I hitched rides to Dallas and stayed there a while, until I realized I hadn’t gone far enough.” He’d been doing okay. He’d hooked up with some other homeless kids, and they had shown him the ins and outs of living on the street. He’d gone hungry a lot, and home had been a ratty mattress in an abandoned building, but it had been a better life than he’d ever known living in the family mansion in Marshall City.
Then one day he and his buddies had been hanging out downtown, picking pockets, looking for trouble, and he’d seen a familiar face. Business trips to Dallas weren’t unusual for his father; he’d just never thought he could possibly run into him in a city of that size.
That afternoon he’d headed east, intending to keep moving until he’d reached the Atlantic Ocean. He’d made it only so far as Pineville. A few years later, when he hadn’t needed to run, he hadn’t stopped at the ocean. Germany, Korea, Afghanistan, Iraq…
“What made you stop in Pineville?” Bailey asked.
“My last ride let me off there. I was headed east, but he’d turned north before I realized it. He let me out at the Jensens’ road. I was hungry, so I decided a little alfresco dining would be nice and I got caught.” He shrugged as if that was the end of the story.
“Most people who catch someone stealing from them don’t invite him into their homes and make him a part of their families.”
“No,” he agreed quietly. “Most people don’t.”
“They must have been very special.”
They’d never been able to have a family of their own—not that they hadn’t tried. Ella had miscarried four times, and the one baby who’d made it to term had died three days after birth. That was when she’d accepted that God intended her to mother other people’s children, and she’d done it with a vengeance. Everyone in town had regarded her as the mother or grandmother they’d always wanted.
“Is there any doubt that Pete MacGregor killed them?”
“None.”
“Is there any proof?”
Logan felt the tension growing inside him. It was always there, and had been for nearly a year, but sometimes it was so strong he could feel it hum. This was one of those times. He gripped the steering wheel tighter, ground his jaws together and answered in carefully controlled words. “I left that morning to go to a doctor’s appointment. The only people at the farm were Sam, Ella and Mac. When I got back that afternoon, I found Sam’s body in front of the barn and Ella’s on the kitchen floor. The farm truck was missing, and so was Mac. Who do you think killed them?”
“He could have been a victim, too.”
“Right. Someone breaks in, kills an eighty-year-old couple and leaves them where they fall, but they dispose of the body of the young, six-foot-tall, two-hundred-pound man who was staying with them.”
“Maybe he was taken hostage.”
“Okay. You’re a burglar. You break in to a place and you think you might need a hostage to ensure your escape. You have a choice between two frail little eighty-year-olds and a twenty-something, six-foot-tall, two-hundred-pound soldier. Which one are you gonna choose?”
“I’m just considering the possibilities.” She laid her hand on his arm, and the muscles clenched even more. A glance at the speedometer showed the needle hovering between ninety and ninety-five. With a deep breath, he eased off on the pedal until the speed dropped back to the legal limit. Then he shrugged off her touch. She didn’t look offended or rebuffed or really much of anything but thoughtful.
“Where are we headed?” he asked to break the silence. So far she’d given him simple directions—get on the interstate and keep going west.
“To the border.”
“There’s a hell of a lot of border. Where in particular?”
“I’ll tell you when to turn.”
He didn’t like being in the dark. If he’d learned anything in the Army, it was how to lead. He’d held a hell of a lot of responsibility, especially in the war, and he’d lived up to it. It rubbed him the wrong way to now be denied even the most basic of information.
Not that she didn’t have a good reason for withholding it.
“You have any reason to believe Mac has anything to do with this brother of his?”
She propped her bare feet on the dash, wiggling her toes for a minute before letting them relax. Her skin was pale gold, her nails were painted crimson and a silver band encircled the second toe on her left foot. A matching chain around her ankle was just visible under the hem of her jeans leg.
There was something…appealing about the sight. Something that made him think of those tiny little panties he’d picked up in her room back in Pineville. That made him wonder if she was that small all over, if she was wearing a similar bit of silk and lace right now, if she wore any other jewelry he couldn’t see.
Jeez, they were feet, he berated himself. Prettier than most, more decorated than most, but utilitarian just the same. Definitely no reason to be thinking in any way about sex.
Finally she looked his way, but with sunglasses covering half her face, he couldn’t read anything in her expression. “Are you looking for an explanation for his lies regarding his family? He didn’t know about the brother and therefore he didn’t lie when he said he didn’t have one?” She gave a shake of her head. “A couple years ago MacGregor got arrested for public drunk in the town where his brother lives. You think that was just coincidence?”
Of course it wasn’t. And it stood to reason that, being in trouble with the law again—in serious trouble—Mac would turn to his brother for help.
“And how did you find that out?” he asked sourly.
“I have my sources.”
“You got a cop friend to run a criminal history, didn’t you?” He didn’t need more of an answer than the pink staining her cheeks. “That’s illegal, you know.”
“Charlie’s Rule. The ends justify the means.”
“Who’s Charlie?”
“A guy I work with.” She said it so casually that Logan knew immediately there was more to the relationship than that. A guy she was adversarial with, was jealous of or was intimate with? A guy who’d seen those same tiny panties, only with her in them?
It didn’t matter to him. He’d never cared about anyone’s sex life but his own, which had been pretty much nonexistent in recent years. She could be sleeping with half the men in Memphis and he wouldn’t give a damn. Not as long as she kept her end of the bargain and helped him find Mac.
“What else did you find out about this brother?” He was scowling, he realized. Probably because the sun was low enough in the western sky to blind a man. So what if the visor blocked the worst of the glare and his sunglasses took care of the rest? It was still there, and he knew it.
“Señor Escobar is a rancher. He’s married and has two children.”
“And you’re going to help with him how?”
This time when she looked at him, she was smiling. “Despite his married status, Señor Escobar considers himself a ladies’ man. I consider myself a lady. We should have a great deal in common.”
Logan’s chest tightened until the only breaths he could take were shallow. Escobar might be a hundred and eighty degrees opposite from his brother…or he might be just as dangerous, maybe even more so. And she was planning to toy with him? “This is your great plan—flirt with the guy in the hopes that he’ll spill his brother’s whereabouts in the heat of passion?”
“I don’t intend to sleep with him,” she said haughtily. “Look, we can’t decide on any course of action until we get to town and see what’s what. Who knows? Escobar may not have anything to do with MacGregor. He may have zero interest in protecting a brother he may not be close to.”
That was logical. How much would he risk for Brady? Nowhere near as much as Brady had once risked for him.
“What about the law in this town? Are they honest, corrupt, incompetent or just inefficient?”
“I don’t know. But they did arrest MacGregor.”
“Public drunk isn’t a big deal,” he pointed out. Escobar might not have cared that his brother was inconvenienced and out a few hundred dollars for the fine, especially if Mac was guilty. But something bigger like desertion or murder, something that carried a bigger punishment than a night in jail and a fine, that he very well might care about.
“What does it matter if the cops are corrupt?” Bailey asked. “You can turn MacGregor over to the state cops or the state bureau of investigation or the Army or someone.”
She was right about his options. There were any number of agencies who would be more than happy to make an arrest on a double homicide. But the question mattered because he didn’t want to kill any cops, not even dirty ones, along with MacGregor.
“You are intending to turn him over,” she said tentatively when he offered no response.
He scowled at her. “I told you, I’m no murderer.” He had killed a lot of people, but not one who hadn’t been trying to kill him at the same time. If he needed the rationalization, he had no doubt Mac would try to kill him, too. But he wasn’t intending to rationalize his actions. His plan was simple: Mac was going to die.
One way or another—self-defense or cold-blooded murder—Logan was going to kill him.
The sun had long since set when they finally stopped for the night. Bailey, so tired she could hardly keep her eyes open, roused when Logan pulled up to the entrance of a motel a few hundred yards off the interstate in El Paso. As he went inside, she straightened in her seat, then looked around.
Light spilled from everywhere—street lamps, neon signs, headlights—to dispel the night’s darkness. The area was typical for its location—fast-food restaurants, motels ranging from good to beyond seedy, bars, gas stations and convenience stores. This particular motel—not good, but not seedy—shared its parking lot with a two-pump station and a convenience store and its roof with an establishment identified in pink neon as Pepe’s Cantina. The vehicles on the motel side of the lot were mostly big rigs, on the cantina side, mostly pickups and nondescript sedans. Logan’s GTX stood out, while her car would have blended right in.
Logan returned with a key, hardly noticing that she was alert, and drove to the side lot away from Pepe’s. She’d passed the last two hundred miles in an exhaustion-induced fog, wanting desperately to stretch out somewhere and sleep. He’d shown no such interest, though, and damned if she was going to whine or plead for a break.
He parked in front of Room 17, hefted his duffel out of the trunk, then left her to retrieve her own bags and close the trunk. By the time she did so and made it to the sidewalk, he was already inside the room, turning on lights and lowering the temperature on the air conditioner.
The room was about as clean as she expected—she wouldn’t walk barefooted on the carpet, but crawling under the covers wouldn’t give her the willies. She dropped her bags on the bed farther from the door. Only the need for the bathroom and a slathering of moisturizer on her wind-burned skin kept her from joining them.
Feeling marginally better when she came out of the bathroom, Bailey grabbed her tote off the bed, set it on the counter next to the sink, then spun back around. Her suitcase was where she’d left it, Logan’s duffel was where he’d left it and the door was closed…but there was no sign of Logan. She reached the door in three strides and jerked it open. The GTX was still parked outside, but its owner was nowhere to be seen. Damnation! Where had he gone, what was he doing and why had she let him out of her sight?
Walking back into the room, she closed the door hard. The rush of air sent a piece of paper fluttering from the foot of the first bed onto the stained carpet. Gone to Pepe’s for a beer, it read in sharp, bold letters.
Great. Instead of crawling into bed and getting the sleep she craved, she was going to spend the next however long in a smoky, noisy bar drinking a beer she didn’t want just so she could keep an eye on the partner who didn’t want her. Wonderful.
“Lexy, I hope you appreciate this,” she muttered as she grabbed her purse and headed out the door.
Pepe’s Cantina didn’t disappoint. As bars went, she’d been in worse—Thelma’s immediately came to mind—but she’d seen plenty better. The lighting was too dim by half, the music too loud by half, the air too polluted to breathe. Before she’d gone ten feet inside the door, a niggling pain started in her forehead with the intention of becoming a full-blown headache.
After giving her eyes time to adjust to the low light, she scanned the crowd. There were a lot of men wearing cowboy hats, a lot of women with big hair. Everyone’s jeans were tight, their smiles bright, their moods cheery. They’d come out tonight with the goal of having a good time and, by God, they weren’t going to fail.
Except for the lone man standing at the bar. He leaned his elbows against the scarred wood, dangled a bottle in one hand and gazed at the couples on the dance floor with a nine-mile stare.
She made her way across the room, slid onto the stool next to him and ordered a beer before swiveling to face him and smiling brightly. “If you’d mentioned you wanted a beer, I would have walked over with you.”
“If I’d wanted you to come with me, I would have mentioned it.” He tilted the bottle to his mouth and took a healthy swallow. “I figured you’d be snoring away by now.”
“I don’t snore.”
“Of course you don’t. That was just a funny little rattle the car developed a hundred miles ago.”
She would have said she hadn’t slept in the car—tried to, wanted to, even drifted into a state of semiconsciousness, but never actually slept. But she didn’t argue the point with him. “Aren’t you tired?”
“Why would I be?”
“Because you drove over six hundred miles today.”
He glanced at her for a moment before twisting farther around to catch the bartender’s attention and order another beer. “Six hundred miles is nothing,” he said, then added, “However, six hundred miles with you…”
The bartender delivered both beers at once. Bailey took a sip of hers, cold and sour, and thought longingly about the bed awaiting her. If she offered a respite from her company in exchange for his car keys, would he agree? Maybe. Definitely, if he had a spare set of keys somewhere.
Turning the stool, she faced the dance floor, as Logan was doing, and took another small sip of beer. Without a doubt, he was the best-looking guy in the place, as well as the least approachable. Though the women gave him admiring looks, not one hit on him, asked him to dance or even did more than smile hesitantly on the way past.
She wasn’t so lucky. She’d managed to down maybe a third of her beer when a bear of a man walked right up to her, stopping a little too close and greeting her with a grin. “Hey, darlin’, wanna dance?”
He was very big, broad-shouldered and muscular. His beard was neatly trimmed, his long hair pulled into a ponytail. He wasn’t scary or even unattractive. He just roused zero interest in her. She smiled politely and said, “No, thank you.”
“Oh, come on. I’m good on the dance floor.”
“I’m not.”
He gave her a long look that started at her face and drifted its way down to her toes, and the grin widened. “Now I don’t believe that, sugar. Come on, let me show you how good you can be.”
“I appreciate the invitation, but—” He caught hold of her hand and was pulling, making her scramble to her feet to avoid falling into his arms. She caught her balance a short distance from Logan, then moved a few steps closer to him as she tugged to free her hand. “Really, my boyfriend doesn’t like for me to dance with other guys.”
The man’s gaze shifted from her to Logan, apparently sizing him up and finding him no threat—clear evidence that he’d had far too much to drink. “Aw, you don’t mind, do you, buddy?”
Logan’s smile was thin and amused. “No, not at all. Go on, sweetheart. You’ll enjoy it.”
Bailey shot him a killing look. “I wouldn’t think of leaving you here all alone, honey.”
“Nah, I don’t mind. Go ahead and take a spin around the dance floor. I’ll wait for you over there.” With his bottle, he gestured toward an empty booth along the far wall, then pushed away from the bar.
Wishing looks could kill, she watched him go, then turned her attention back to her admirer when he pulled on her hand. “What’s your name?”
Taking the question as a sign of surrender, the big guy smiled ear to ear. “Billy.”
“Well, Billy…” Stepping closer, she straightened his collar with her free hand, then brushed nonexistent lint from his shoulder. “If you don’t let go of me right now, I’m going to have to hurt you. Now, I don’t mind hurting you, but it’s just going to embarrass you in front of all your friends, and then you’re going to get pissed off with me and we’ll both go away thinking badly of each other. You don’t want that, do you?”
He gave her another of those long looks and finished it even more tickled by her words than when he’d started it. Ducking his head the necessary distance to bring his mouth close to her ear, he asked, “And just how do you think you’re gonna hurt me, sweet pea? You gonna do some kind of karate chop? Or maybe you got a nasty left hook? No, I know—you’ve got some kind of secret powers.”
Bailey sighed regretfully. “You really want to do this?”
“More than you can guess.”
Billy’s amusement grew with each moment that she considered her options. He had likely reached the conclusion that she’d merely been bluffing when she stomped her boot heel into his instep, kneed him in the groin, then kicked him across the backs of the knees, sending him crumpling to the floor in a groaning heap.
Crouching beside him, she bent to look into his face. “Satisfied, Billy?” she asked sarcastically before giving his shoulder a vigorous pat. “Don’t hold a grudge, will you?”
She ignored the curious looks as she straightened and crossed the dance floor to Logan’s booth. “Stand up,” she commanded, and to her surprise, he did. Taking a cue from his action that morning, she wriggled her fingers into the right front pocket of his jeans, searching for his keys, and he grabbed her wrist.
“What the hell are you doing?” he demanded, applying just enough pressure to keep her hand still. “You want it that bad, sweetheart, just ask.”
“Give me your keys. And your wallet.”
“And why would I do that?”
“Because I’m tired and disappointed in you and I want to go to bed.”
“Go to bed. I’m not stopping you.”
“I want your keys and your money and your weapons to make sure you’ll be here in the morning.” She was standing closer to him than she’d ever been, close enough to feel the heat and the tension coming off his body. Close enough to hear the hitch in his breathing. Close enough to see the faint surprise in his eyes as the denim of his jeans tightened across her hand.
She glanced down automatically, unable to see any sign of his arousal in the dim light but feeling it just the same. Heat warmed her face as she jerked her gaze up again. Her throat had suddenly gone dry, making it impossible for her to swallow, but she tried anyway. “L-let go, and I’ll pull m-my hand out.”
“Maybe in a minute,” he replied, his voice silky, steadier than hers had been. But he did let go, let her slide her fingers free and take a step back. A moment later he picked up her hand, laid his keys in her palm, then added the battered wallet from his hip pocket.
