Pete sighed. He didn’t want her foot to be amputated, but damned if he didn’t like looking at her with her leg hooked up onto the dashboard. “I’ll help you get loose, but we’ll have to do this again sometime,” he said, inching her foot through the opening in the wheel.

“When hell freezes over. This has been the most embarrassing night of my life. Let me get my clothes on, and then push me out the door. When you get home you can send a cab to come get me. I don’t ever want to see you again. I’m moving to Montana tomorrow. Maybe I’ll be a cowboy. Do they still have cowboys?” She searched under the seat. “I can’t find a sock.”

“Moving to Montana isn’t a good idea. You’d miss the air pollution, the traffic jams, the lines at the supermarket checkout. I think you should stay here. We could get married.”

“I don’t want to get married. The only thing I want to get is dressed. And I’m never taking my clothes off again. Not ever. Not even when I take a shower.”

He didn’t understand her embarrassment. It wasn’t as if they were strangers. They’d just almost made love. True, it hadn’t been exactly as he’d imagined their first lovemaking would be, but he thought it should count for something. Maybe that was the problem, he decided. They had gone too fast, been too frantic. They should try it again, slowly, with tender words and maddeningly gentle touches. He looked down at his jeans. He could do it. Watching her gather her clothes had reinspired him. She still hadn’t managed to get her shirt on. More inspiration.

She worked at untangling her bra from the gearshift, and her breasts jiggled with the effort. That tears it, Pete thought. A man could only take so much.

“I don’t want you to feel awkward,” he said, popping the top snap on his jeans. “The problem here is that I have too many clothes on, so I’ll take some off.”

“I don’t care what you do with your clothes,” Louisa told him, shoving her arms into her shirt. “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.

“Participants 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 embarrassed 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 passion 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 grass slanting away from the road. Beyond the grass 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 assumed 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-shirt. 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 passed. 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 attitude 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?”

“Hell 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 attitude. 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.