St Kilda Consulting 02 - Innocent as Sin

rise.
    “So Bertone is leaning on you to do something illegal with his money, using the bank,” Rand said after a time. “It’s called laundering, and the feds hate it. Right so far?”
    Kayla didn’t bother to deny the obvious.
    Or confirm it.
    “What’s your stake in this?” she asked him.
    He hesitated.
    “No lies,” she said. “Remember?”
    Silence stretched in the kitchen as Rand watched Kayla stir sugar syrup until it came to a boil. When she turned off the burners beneath the pots, he went to the refrigerator and pulled out a bucket of ice cubes.
    “What are you doing?” she asked.
    He shoveled ice cubes into one of the pots until the syrup was cool.
    “We don’t have all night to wait,” he said as he tested the syrup. “You don’t want a silly hummer to burn its tongue, do you? You have to dilute the syrup anyway.”
    He tested the solution. Getting there. A few more cubes and it wouldn’t be a threat to the tender tongue of any hummingbird desperately clinging to a perch at the edge of the yard light.
    Kayla tilted her head and looked at him like a curious cat. “I was going to pull out my big feeders, but even the biggest will be cool long before morning.”
    Rand nodded. “That’s fine, but right now there’s a very hungry little guy needing to be fed. He’s waiting on a perch, hoping for a miracle to pull his feathered ass out of a crack.”
    “At this time of night?” she asked, startled. “Hummingbirds shut down at sunset.”
    “Unless they’re having a tough time on migration. Then they push too hard. The lucky ones find a yard feeder. The unlucky ones starve to death. Where are the feeders you want to use?”
    “Cupboard behind you.”
    She watched him take out a clean half-gallon feeder and fill it with cool, diluted syrup. Every movement was efficient, practiced. He might not be answering the question she’d asked, but he sure hadn’t lied about knowing how to feed hummingbirds.
    “You’ve done this a lot,” she said.
    “At the height of the season, I go through more than five pounds of sugar a day.”
    “Holy hell. You must be feeding hundreds and hundreds of the flying pigs.”
    “Easily. May and June are the big months. The birds are pretty well gone by the end of July.”
    “And they’re all rufous?” she asked, trying to imagine what it would be like to see clouds of flying bronze jewels feeding at once, flashing their crimson gorgets to warn off others.
    “Nearly all my birds are rufous. Nasty little heathens,” he said, smiling slightly, “but damn beautiful. They remind me that no matter how pretty, life is always a battle.”
    Kayla waited until Rand had topped off the last feeder with cool syrup before she asked, “Are you going to answer my question about why you’re helping me?”
    “Like you, not everything I know is mine to tell.” Rand screwed the feeding platform in place. “You already know the most important things.”
    “Which are?”
    “I want you alive and Bertone dead.”

28
    Dry Valley
Saturday
8:20 P.M. MST
    W hile they hung the feeders in the shelter of the ranch house porch, Kayla was silent, thinking about what Rand had said. Even before she stepped back from the first feeder, a hummingbird appeared on it. Ignoring the humans, he drank and drank and drank. After a few minutes of resting, the bird shook himself, fluffed his feathers, but stayed clamped to the perch.
    “He’ll drink at least once more,” Rand said quietly, “then he’ll head on out into the desert and bed down in a safer place.”
    “I’ve never seen a hummer come in at night like that.”
    “He’d have taken on a bobcat for that nectar. Being desperate does that to you.” He glanced at his watch. “Time to go.”
    “You’re sure I can’t go to my apartment?” Kayla asked. “The only packing boxes of clothes I left at the ranch are full of jeans and such.”
    “Jeans are good.”
    She followed him back into the bedroom, where she’d stacked full boxes for her next trip to the new apartment.
    “Which one?” he asked.
    “One? But—”
    “One.”
    “Hell.”
    “Don’t worry. There are a lot of Wal-Marts in Phoenix.”
    She rolled her eyes and picked up the box she’d marked ranch clothes. “Oh, well, this is Arizona, famous for casual wear.” She gave him a sidelong look. “Isn’t it?”
    “Are you asking me where you’re going from here?” Rand said, taking the box from her.
    “Clever of you to notice.”
    “Phoenix,”