Read Online A Dangerous Talent (An Alix London Mystery) by Aaron Elkins, Charlotte Elkins - Free Book Online Page A

solitary decompression might be more than was good for either of them. “Wait, what do you say we meet at three instead? The Georgia O’Keeffe Museum should be right around the corner—”
    “It is,” said Caitlin. “Well, a couple of blocks.”
    “Great. What do you say we spend a little time there before we go look at your painting, Chris?”
    “I’d like that, yes.”
    Caitlin plinked the bell on the desk, and in about two seconds a couple of bellmen materialized, one of them loading Chris’s bags (she’d brought three) onto a cart, and the other, younger one taking Alix’s single soft-sided suitcase outside and stowing it into the back of a pink golf cart with a fringed awning to match.
    “Climb in, I’ll drive you there. Easy to get lost if you haven’t been here before.”
    He was a chubby, friendly, rosy-cheeked kid (Tommy, his nameplate said) who looked as if he’d be more at home riding a tractor on a farm in Indiana than a gussied-up golf cart in Santa Fe. Clearly, he enjoyed zipping around in the cart, but as soon as he noticed that she was shivering, he let up on the accelerator.
    “It’s the elevation. Everybody thinks we’re, you know, warm, like Phoenix, but we’re not. We’re seven thousand feet here,” he said with pride. “It can get a lot colder than this. Where are you from?”
    “Me?” Not such an easy question, she thought, and took the simplest way out. “Seattle.” As good an answer as any.
    “They get a lot of rain there,” Tommy said sagely.
    “That they do,” she agreed.
    At the casita he hopped out. “I’m gonna get the fireplace going. Get you toasty in no time.”
    She followed him into the room, immediately liking the place: curving adobe walls, exposed viga-wood ceiling beams, an arched, kiva-type propane fireplace, Southwestern furnishings…Midway across the red tile floor, she stopped, her brow wrinkling. “Wait. Do you smell something?”
    Kneeling at the fireplace, poised to turn the switch to light the gas, he lifted his pug nose and sniffed. “Like something died?”
    “Like rotten eggs,” she declared. “Let’s get out of here. That smells like a propane leak. We need to go back to reception.”
    “Naw,” he said, “can’t be that.” His hand was still extended toward the switch. “Propane don’t have any smell. I know because—”
    “Tommy, stop! Don’t light that damn thing!” she yelled. “Let’s go!”
    He blinked and retracted his hand. “Yes ma’am. Um…you don’t want me to put your bag in the room?”
    Her answer was a vigorous, two-handed tug at his collar that jerked him to his feet. “Let’s go ! Now!”
    Back in the cart on their return to reception, calmer now and wondering if she’d overreacted, she said, “I’m sure it’s nothing, Tommy. It’s just, while you’re right, propane doesn’t have any smell—that’s exactly why they add an odorant to it, so you can tell when there’s a leak. When I lived in Italy, they used these awful little propane tanks they called bombalas , which was a good name for them, because if you weren’t careful—”
    A millisecond before she heard the tremendous explosion, she felt a sudden blast of heat on the back of her neck. Before she could make sense of it, the sound came, a huge detonation—no, a rapid series of detonations, like a string of Chinese firecrackers, only deeper, bigger, immensely more powerful.
    Stunned, Tommy stomped on the brake and they both spun around. They were in time to see the pieces—she recognized fragments of the wooden ceiling beams—on their way back down. The casita itself was a mass of sooty flames that spouted like geysers, windows broken out, door tumbling to the grass ten yards away, the roof, as far as they could tell, completely gone.
    “Holy mackerel,” Tommy said wanly. “If you didn’t…if you hadn’t…we coulda been…we woulda been…”
    “Yes, killed,” she said grimly. “Dead.”
    He nodded dumbly, staring at the