Tom continued, oblivious to my moment of distraction. “At least now we know we don’t know this shooter. Or what he’ll do next. We may not have much time, and until Olivia gets hard evidence or he takes another—makes another move—common sense is all we’ve got. Even then—” He trailed into considering the serious impossibilities in our situation and let go of my shoulders. After a long pause, he started up talking again as if he hadn’t noticed he’d stopped. Shell-shock is real.
“The new guy is not Tito. Maybe he’s the Anti-Tito. But at least we now know he can send a message that’s not a body.” He stopped himself again.
“And that bullet wasn’t angry. Or vengeful. It was clean and controlled. Not much fun though—”
I slipped my arms around Tom, pulled him back to me, rested my face in his chest, feeling his heartbeat—rapid—and soaking up his body’s warmth—warm.
“So this one is not as—He’s not as off the rails as Tito.”
“Not as off the rails, Allie,” Otis agreed. “Not crazy out-for-revenge like Tito. ‘Man was a forest fire. We can hope this person is at least not—” He sighed. “But from what little you heard from Gloria before he killed her—and if he didn’t kill Gloria, I can’t imagine who did. My money’s on him—From what we’ve seen, he’s is ruthless and always on target. Cold. And steady about it. Serious skills and training—”
“A hired gun, Otis?”
“Trained for it. To the core. Only maybe not hired at all if Tito wasn’t his boss. I’m thinking freelance. Self-employed. He’s the kind that won’t kill unless he gets the order, but once he gets the order, hard to stop. I’m afraid he’s giving himself all the orders now.”
A last big chunk of glass fell out of the greenhouse ceiling.
Everybody jumped.
Damn.
I watched Otis turn around and notice the refrigerator door. Still hanging open. He closed the door.
“This requires a new kind of careful.”
Chapter Twenty-Five
9:25 p.m.
Alrighty.
We were in a peculiar state of mind, Tom and me.
Slouched side-by-side on the wide, cushy, leather couch in Tom’s office, tired, but not yet sleepy, frazzled but not still terrified. In the limbo between the “Ghost of Danger Past” and our fresh, new, less-defined, but no less unsettling, “Harbinger of Danger Future.” Not yet talking about unthinkable fresh hells.
In between. On the edge. At the brink. Not good.
“You ever go to Cedar Point, Tom?”
“Geez, Allie. You are so—No. I bet somebody, somewhere, offers amusement park experiences for ‘Daredevils with Disabilities,’ but that’s not me. Why do you ask?”
“Because I’m thinking about a ride they had out there.”
“Because?”
“Stick with me for a minute. I’m trying to describe to you the nature of my current level of anxiety.”
“On the continuum from ‘Snoopy Bounce’ to ‘Millennium Force’?”
“Yeah. It’s the ten. The Mach Ten. You’re sure you’ve never been there?”
“I’m blind, Allie. Not ignorant of popular culture, and I’m fascinated to learn where you’re going with this.”
“VertiGO! All caps ‘GO!’ With an exclamation point.”
“Vertigo? A ride? Never heard of it.”
“Before your time. A giant sling shot, designed to sling you almost three hundred feet into the sky. Then fling you back to the ground. You could choose whether it flipped you over on your face on the way down. I rode it. Once. Flipped over.”
“And?”
“I did not have time to wet my pants. That’s the happy part. But I’ve never forgotten the moment at the top when it flipped and I saw the ground—It was a heartbeat, Tom, but—”
He nodded. “Eternity. I’ve had a moment or two like that. Several with you—” A smile touched the corner of his mouth. “And that’s you tonight, Alice Jane? Three hundred feet up, flipped over and frozen in an eternity of fear. Staring down a long fall?”
Bingo.
“Uh huh. Thanks for not laughing. That’s what I’m feeling right now. All that. And helpless too. The ride strapped you in but didn’t clamp you tight. Let you fly around. Jiggle. Wobble. Feel the panic.”
I reminded myself, once again, of the No Crying Rule of amateur detective procedure.
The wind howled. Spray from Lake Erie slapped the windows. accentuating the warm and cozy of our couch. Tom pulled me closer. “Come over here. I’ll hold you tight.” He grinned and whispered, “I could flip you over too, if you like.”
“I might like. Maybe later. Could be soon. Keep trying to cheer me up.”
“Honey, that is not all I’m trying to do.” He shifted closer, gathering me in. One hundred percent Tom. His body bypassed the chatter of my frantic mind and spoke directly to my body. He pulled me more into contact with his chest. “How’m I doing?” Another kiss. He still had not had a chance to shave. Too late now. I put both my hands on the roughness of his jaw and a current of heat arrowed through me.
Less talk, Alice Jane. More action.
I was tuned in to the Lee-Ann Channel, but now Tom was caught up in my story. He pulled away. “Hey. Did you ever get up the nerve to ride it again? I know you. Tenacious. Some might say stubborn.”
“I never had the chance. The first winter a windstorm took out one of the 365-foot posts. That was the end of it. So we’ll never know.”
I did feel better. Not cured. The turmoil of the last three days and my shock at how we’d swapped one deadly threat for another had fried my circuits. Tough to let it go. Even for a night. But I was willing to give it a try.
I inhaled the smell of leather and the signature goodness of Tom. “This is a nice…couch.”
He accepted my change of gears. “Otis picked it out. It’s supposed to match the feel and smell of Escalade leather, but he says it’s brown, not ‘Raven Black.’
“No special, evocative name? Plain brown? ‘Sparrow Brown?’”
“He didn’t say, and I don’t particularly care, but the smell is—new car.” He shifted us so we were lying, face-to-face, front to front. “Provocative.”
I inhaled.
Holy Whoa, girl.
Sure enough. I’d been too freaked out to notice the sensuosity of the couch aroma. At that moment, lying on leather with Tom, the part of my brain that controls the blurting of unfortunate information went straight to disengaged.
“Oh, yeah, Tom,” I murmured. “I am a new-car-smell addict. A guy I dated in high school would get to drive his dad’s new Buick on our dates sometimes—”
Uh huh. I remember that car.
A person can get conditioned to all kinds of stimuli from her formative years. That’s a euphemism. Rainy nights. Windows fogged up. A brand of cologne nobody wears anymore. A stray hand, here. Or there—A semester’s worth of teenage hormones and pent-up frustration saturated those memories. Mine even had their own soundtrack. *NSYNC’s hit album No Strings Attached was the only CD in Matt’s dad’s player those days, but it worked fine. At this moment a memory from that back seat was humming along. “It’s Gonna Be Me” was playing all over my body, and right here at my fingertips was Tom.
So profoundly Tom. So totally the Mr. Right I was saving myself for back then. My rational brain with all its terrors and inhibitions shut down. Tom’s too. I could tell. He was as susceptible as any guy to the distracting influence of sensual cues and hot, old memories. To about the tenth power. Being a human male, and therefore possibly jealous of Matt and his dad’s Century, Tom was a man with a backseat history of his own and something to prove.
Okay by me.
Lee Ann and I were in total agreement.
I let the sniper go and closed my mind to everything but Tom. Here in the backseat of—uh—the couch in
his office—I was lost, and Tom was an experienced and capable guide. He put his mouth on mine, and every inch of my body wanted to be his new best friend.
Another kiss.
“So,” he said.
“So?” Somehow I was not expecting a conversation.
“So. You and Mr. Buick. Fog up the windows some? He play a little background music for—inspiration?”
Damn.
“Yeah, well, *NSYNC, if you must know. You are devious.”
“I have an active imagination, and I was plenty young enough when you were in high school. Probably a senior when you were a sophomore? Vulnerable freshman, maybe. That would have been interesting. I had a car too, Miss Smith. And an extensive CD collection. You and me back then. Lordy. We could have—” He brushed one finger along my throat and down to my collarbone, planted a leisurely kiss right in that notch.
I made a sound that sounded embarrassingly like begging. Even with my eyes shut, I could see his smile. That dimple.
“Yeah, Allie,” he said. “I’d give a million bucks for the time machine that would take me into that backseat with you for one night. I could have got lucky. Very. Lucky.”
“Don’t be so sure of yourself. Are you jealous? Am I supposed to be ashamed?”
“May I suggest turned on? I know I am.”
“Do you know how to get a girl out of her clothes in a limited space?”
“Watch me.”
His hands—I shut out a pang.
Not tonight. Dammit.
Agreed. Dammit.
His hands were magicians tonight. Matt should have been so talented. Too bad for him. In record time, the bodies of both of us were one hundred percent touch-accessible, and his mouth was back. Magnetic on mine. As was his skin. All of it.
I made the sound again, and he carried us into his rhythm, moving to melodies from our memories, until even my breathing matched itself to his. I followed the persistent, muffled throb of desire from the long past into this one overpowering moment.
Inside the circle of his arms, warm and close against him, I released my questions and fears, the voices inside me, with their incessant chanting about everything the past had brought and what the future might take away.
Whatever this was, it was enough.
Right here. Right now, Alice Jane.
* * *
Our satisfied bodies and souls were drifting away.
Tom put his mouth against my ear.
“Alice Jane,” he whispered. “It’s Gonna’ Be Me.”
“Thomas Bennington III. You can count on it.”
Chapter Twenty-Six
Euphemistically speaking, I was in a very relaxed state. I ought to have slipped from love into slumber in the time it took to whisper, “Good night.”
No.
I was missing my aforementioned clothes. I was chilly. I couldn’t reach the sumptuous throw, located a mile away, over the couch’s arm. My skin had fused to the leather, which made lots of squelchy leathery sounds when I tried to release myself from it. Tom was breathing slow and deep. Lee Ann had wandered off somewhere. As always.
I was on my own.
Alrighty. I peeled myself out of the back of our Buick and, after spreading the sumptuous throw over Tom and tenderly tucking it all around him, I headed for a bona fide bed.
Too bad. Our real bed was more comfortable but also a bust. Now that my body was no longer overruling my brain, I was free to start fretting again: Tito? Dead. Sniper? Sniping at us now. And so on. The message of Tito’s hands was too much to address head-on, so I’d sent it to the sub-basement of my mind. I could tell Tom had a sub-basement of his own.
I’d never comforted myself by saying, “Besides, we could all be dead soon anyway.” After today that seemed rational to me. I was flipped over and frozen in my “eternity of fear.” I gave up.
As I ditched the bedroom and any hope of sleep, I grabbed Tom’s roomy robe. A Christmas present from me, this robe cost $378 plus shipping. I liked it better than my own robe which cost $49 from Amazon and shipped free with Prime. The money for both robes came from our joint account which could absorb inconsequential purchases such as those with not so much as a blink. My own, former, not very active, bank account would almost certainly crash under the price of a pack of fuzzy socks.
Tom’s robe was crafted of three-ply cashmere from Nepalese goats. Guaranteed warm and soft, it sported a hood which created a shelter over my head, under which I felt inexplicably and, of course, foolishly safer. It was the luscious red of a fine wine from Burgundy, France. What’s more—and here was the main reason I stole it as often as I could—It smelled like Tom.
Oh, yeah.
Wrapped in Tom, I headed for the one room in the house I had not yet fully described to him. My dressing room. Every time I opened its door and walked into the loving embrace of its comfort and luxury, I could almost forgive the former lady of the house for being such a pretentious bore. Surely a woman who was this romantic couldn’t be all bad.
Everything was perfect, but the premier feature was a vintage chaise lounge, upholstered in rich, warm, red velvet. Margo—who was enraptured to the point of speechlessness when she saw it—had presented me with one of her vast, jewel-toned shawls to throw over it. The shawl snuggled warmly around me and my contraband robe on this miserable night, when, once again, hard little bits of freezing rain were ticking against the windows.
I wasn’t all that excited about the closets and built-in drawers. I didn’t arrange my outfits by color. They weren’t exactly outfits anyhow. I didn’t have the guts to wear the one or two with scary price tags and illustrious names. At the very least, they’d need to be dry cleaned. The serenity of that room—the chaise, the warm-scone color of the walls—not its organizational skills, soothed my soul. I had my own desk in here, and on it was a green-shaded lamp I’d downright stolen from my favorite room in the old house.
You can take the girl out of the kleptomania, but you can’t take the kleptomania out of the girl.
I trained with the best, Lee Ann.
I turned it on for both of us. The light was gentle, calming. Just the right amount of weak. My night terrors slithered back into their nasty little kingdom. I calmed myself more by reminding myself I’d been saving this room as a secret surprise for Tom ever since we’d moved in. Waiting for the right moment. Tom knew I had a dressing room with its own wine fridge and TV. I’d shown him those. But I’d skirted us around the red velvet chaise. Thinking about all that was soothing too. Mostly.
Too bad there was the TV, so handy, inside the also-vintage armoire that was the other major design focus of the room. Tonight the doors that usually hid it away were hanging open, and the remote was lying next to me on the chaise. Right where I’d carelessly left it a couple of nights before.
So I deserved what I got.
I clicked it on.
Channel 16.
Tom, Otis, and I referred to 16 as The Lisa Channel. I usually had to gag on their tacky, sensational junk and a lot of repetitive local commercials to get to her segments, but she was worth it. A real reporter. Always on the trail of her story. I knew she hadn’t yet realized her dreams of being a “nationally respected journalist,” but she persevered. If she had something for tonight, it’d probably be on after the opening and before the next round of mattress, used-car, and personal-injury-lawyer spots.
I settled in. I was trying to remember whether there might be an open bottle of wine in the handy in-room fridge, when the anchor said, “And just in. Breaking news.”
A banner that hollered Breaking News! slashed the screen.
“Investigative reporter, Lisa Cole, is at the scene of two recent shootings in University Circle with a new development in the story. Lisa?”
There she was. Our Lisa. Bundled up against the cold, but undaunted by the gusts assaulting her cute earmuf
fs and ruffling her blonde hair. Tiny drifts of sleet were collecting around the collar of the weather-impermeable L.L. Bean down jacket I knew she swore by. She was reporting from in front of the benches by the lagoon. In the background was the museum, its sweeping steps and iconic white marble façade misted to enchantment by the wintry mix.
I could see the poor, naked, bronze sculpture of The Thinker crouching out there too. Freezing his buns. Maybe trying to figure out who swiped his pants. Icons have it tough.
I shivered and tuned more in to what Lisa was saying. “—from the scene of the shooting, Wednesday night, of blind Cleveland entrepreneur, R. Kipling Ward, and of an unknown man early this morning, and also breaking news this evening of a note discovered in one of the galleries here at the Museum of Art. Police and Museum representatives have declined to comment on this note, and its specific content has not been made available at this time.”
My breath caught in mid-gasp. The camera zoomed to a close-up of Lisa’s face. Specks of sleet sparkled in her lashes. Money shot. She paused. Long. Opened her mouth to betray our friendship.
The scene cut back to the news desk guy whose face was now displaying a practiced mix of interest and urgency.
“Lisa. I have been given to understand, by a source I consider reliable, the note itself may have been intended as a message for Cleveland MondoMegaJackpot Millionaire, Tom Bennington III?”
Back to Lisa, shivering. The freezing wind, now teasing her hair out of the earmuffs and swirling it over her face. Game enough to nod and gaze defiantly into the camera. At me, I thought.
“We’re awaiting more details, Trent.”
A jolt of emotion smashed into me. I wanted to scream. I wanted to cry. Also kill. If Betrayed and Homicidal got married and had a daughter, that was me.
The camera zoomed to a close-up of Lisa’s wide-eyed intensity and cut back to the news-desk guy whose face now displayed superficial concern and ill-concealed delight. His face should break.
The Devil's Own Game Page 13