“You’re not my responsibility. Mrs. Gregory.”
Stunned, she sat there with paralyzed limbs and listened to him slide out of his booth. Then she heard the flick and flutter of what was probably a bill as he left it on the table. Finally, heavy footsteps trailed off toward the front of the restaurant and he was gone.
And she was alone. Again. Still. Always.
Seconds passed. She stared at her gooey hamburger. She thought about the efforts she’d made to become a worthwhile person even if she was a drug kingpin’s wife, the studying she’d done and the nursing degree that was almost hers. She thought about the secret bank account that was in her name alone and the pitiful remnants of her spending money that she’d managed to save in it because Kareem gave her only a little cash and encouraged her to shop with his platinum card so he could track her spending and keep her short leash in his firm grip.
She thought about how she’d landed herself in this situation in the first place by being the dumbest and most desperate nineteen-year-old who’d ever walked the face of the earth, and how she had no intention of spending the rest of her no-doubt short life paying for that mistake.
Most of all, she thought about how far she’d come and how much farther she had to go, and how she could get there—she knew it—if only someone would help her, just a little.
And then she got mad.
Snatching up her purse and jacket, she tossed her own bill on the table and raced out into the parking lot. It took point-two seconds to spot Brady, who was sitting three spaces down in an idling and unmarked black sedan that screamed federal agent to anyone who cared to notice.
He didn’t see her because he had his head bent low over his phone, checking e-mail or some such.
Kira threw caution to the wind. If Kareem had someone following her today, she was pretty much screwed, but at the moment she was screwed no matter how she looked at it. So she marched up to his car, jerked the passenger side door open—what kind of self-respecting law enforcement official left his door unlocked?—and climbed inside.
Brady gaped while she dropped her stuff on the floor and pulled on her seat belt.
“Drive,” she barked.
“Fuck,” he said, and drove.
Funny thing about hospitals: they were all the same.
Every last one of them smelled of alcohol and fear, industrial strength bleachy cleaners and death. The personnel all wore Crocs in every twisted color under the neon rainbow and smiled those quiet smiles of concerned comfort when they knew damn well that they were going off to break in a few minutes and you’d still be stuck in the plastic chair in the waiting area, hanging on until you got word that your loved one was going to live or die. The fluorescent overhead lights, colored tape on the pristine linoleum floors and buzzing activity at nurses’ stations universally scared him to death.
Oh, yeah. Jack and hospitals went way back.
Resting his elbows on his knees and his head in his hands, Jack tried not to think, which was hard since he had a whole brain full of fucked-up shit to consider.
Like how his whole No More Collateral Damage rule had been shot to hell.
Like how Amara had been shot saving his life and he, true to form, hadn’t protected her worth a damn.
Like how he was pretty sure he’d have to take the elevator up a couple flights to the psych floor and check himself in for a permanent stay if she …
He’d vomited, which was pretty funny.
Not right away. He’d held off during the race to the hospital in the back of the ambulance, when he held Amara’s hand and told her she’d be okay. He’d been through that drill before, so he did a real good job of sounding convincing. Then he held off until they wheeled Amara down the hall and into the exam room. He even managed to wait until the doctor came back out and told them she’d need surgery to patch the hole.
And then he calmly went to the nurses’ station and asked where the nearest bathroom was. Following the red tape on the fucking floor, he located the men’s room and an empty stall.
Whereupon he puked his guts out for, oh, about ten minutes or so.
Then he pounded his forehead against the plastic door six or eight times—yeah, that’d hurt—and sobbed quietly until he puked again.
Now here he was, waiting, her smell still on his skin, and he didn’t know if he could struggle through one more second of life and then face another second after that.
He heard footsteps and then someone appeared in his peripheral vision and sat in the chair next to him. It wasn’t the doctor, so he didn’t give a shit who it was and didn’t bother looking.
“How’re you doing?”
Mateo. Jack didn’t answer.
Silence for a few minutes.
“We got the shooter through the belly. Turns out she was a cute little thing with a GIVE PEACE A CHANCE sweatshirt on. Funny, huh? She had a stolen car with enough firepower in it to kill two or three hundred people and a GPS setup that looked like it came straight from the CIA. Anyway, Kareem’ll have to find someone else to do the shooting from now on. She’s dead.”
Fascinating.
“We searched Amara’s stuff. She had a little pen-sized GPS tracker in her coat pocket. We figure that’s how the shooter found you at the motel.”
Again—fascinating.
Who cared about the whys and wherefores at a moment like this? Amara was shot. Debriefing the circumstances wasn’t going to make her any less shot.
Then he thought about the moving force behind all this violence and jerked his head up with a bitter fury strong enough to tear this whole hospital apart.
“And how’s our friend Kareem?” Jack asked. “Safe at home in his million-dollar mansion with his beautiful wife getting ready for his retrial with another top-notch lawyer?”
“Last I heard, yeah.”
If he’d had any contents left in his stomach, Jack would’ve vomited again.
Kareem was still free and sitting in the lap of luxury because his fast-talking lawyer, who was nothing more than a prostitute in disguise, selling his wares to anyone able to pay without regard to the moral implications of what he did, had won him a new trial on procedural grounds.
Despite all his team’s hard work and sacrifices—and there’d been plenty, both personal and professional—the most dangerous drug kingpin Jack had ever encountered in his career was roaming the streets again, free to continue selling drugs, expand his evil empire, murder people and generally contaminate everything that came within the gravitational pull of his malevolent life—and all because of procedural grounds.
Renewed agitation had Jack jumping to his feet to pacing, which was difficult in the tight row between chairs. Luckily the waiting area was deserted and there was no one nearby to complain about Jack’s relentless cursing. After a minute he wore himself out and collapsed back in that torture rack of a chair.
Mateo took another stab at conversation. “Sooo … Amara. She seems like the compliant type.”
An unexpected snort of laughter contracted Jack’s ribs, but this was no time for jokes, not when Amara’s safety was still at issue. “She needs to be protected when she gets out of here.” Jack hoped none of his feelings for Amara showed on his face because he really wasn’t up for an interrogation right now. “I don’t want Kareem going after her again, trying to get to me. Once the retrial begins and he can get a clear shot at me, I figure she’ll be safe to go back home and resume her life. Until then, I’ll need to look out for her because she doesn’t have a family.”
“Huh,” Mateo said. “You gonna let her go?”
Trying to look bewildered and pissed off by such a random question, Jack glared. No way was he in the mood for twenty questions. “What the hell are you talking about?”
The good thing about Mateo was that even if he didn’t always keep his big mouth shut, he generally knew when to back off, like now. “Huh,” he said again.
Jack shot him a final glare, just to put a lid on the subject—forever—when a
woman in blue scrubs walked up. Jack teetered on the edge of cardiac arrest, but then she smiled and he nearly passed out with relief.
“Which one of you is Jack? She’s asking for Jack.”
Chapter 14
Down the street and around the corner they went, a muscle in Dexter’s tight jaw ticking down the time remaining before he unleashed the full might of his undoubtedly explosive temper on her. After about two minutes, he pulled into an alley between two brick apartment buildings, parked behind a Dumpster and cut the engine.
His eyes were hot and cold at the same time, full of a flashing fury. His nostrils flared and his lips sneered. And despite all her internal pep talks about being brave, she cowered in her seat, afraid of this man in an unidentifiable way that was entirely different from the way she was afraid of her husband.
In all her desperation to recruit someone to her side, to balance the scales a little because Kareem had all the money, the personnel and the weapons and she had nothing, she’d forgotten that Dexter Brady was a man. At least fifteen years older than her, he was big and strong but not infallible or impenetrable, as she’d thought, with flesh and blood feelings that she’d never in a million years thought she could tap into.
“What the hell do you want, Mrs. Gregory?” he roared.
“Please. Help me.”
“Why should I trouble myself to save your pretty hide? When did you ever try to save anyone but yourself?”
Now wasn’t the time to lie, much as she wanted to. “Never.”
This truth, perversely, made him angrier, until his walnut skin glowed red and he ejected the words from his mouth as though from one of Kareem’s semiautomatic weapons. “Never. You never did, did you?”
Without waiting for her answer, he snatched up her left hand and waved it in her face, reminding her of the unforgettable. A diamond eternity band, ten carats total weight. Snuggled next to that, a flawless five-carat Asscher-cut diamond engagement ring worth a quarter of a million if it was worth a dime. She intended to take it to a discreet jeweler as soon as she left here and find out exactly because this ring was her only nest egg for when she finally left Kareem. Once, when she’d been too young and stupid to know better, this ring had been her most prized possession. Now she saw it for what it was: a beautiful symbol of Kareem’s ownership and her status as a mercenary who’d done anything for money and what she’d thought was security.
Or was she a plain vanilla prostitute?
Most days it all blurred together.
“Did you ever think where the money for your bling came from, Mrs. Gregory? Did you ever think about all the kids who were using and dying because of your husband’s illegal activities? Did you ever think of any of that while you were living in your million-dollar house and driving your Benz to church every Sunday?”
“Do you think you can accuse me worse than I can accuse myself?”
The righteous Dexter Brady didn’t like that. His eyes widened with unmistakable surprise and he flung her arm away, turning to his window, propping his elbow against it and staring out at the Dumpster. “Why should I help you?”
That deep voice was calm now, barely audible and back to its bored cadence, but Kira wasn’t fooled. She’d won. She knew it even if he didn’t. “We can help each other.”
“I don’t need your help,” he said to the window. “My boys ran a clean investigation. We got an indictment and a conviction. I’ll bring Jack back in, he’ll testify again, and we’ll get another conviction. Easy as pie. What are you going to do? Bake cookies for us to eat on the way home from the courthouse?”
“Kareem is still dealing, same as ever. I don’t think he’s even broken stride.”
“And you know this—how? Because he discussed his distribution network the other night in bed after he’d finished fucking you?”
She deserved that, yeah. But she didn’t like it.
“You don’t know what it’s like,” she cried. “I’m doing the best I can and I am trying to become a better person. I know the great and perfect Dexter Brady has never come down off his mountaintop long enough to mingle with us mortals and make a mistake, but try to understand what I’m going through.”
He stared at her. “You’re wrong about that. Being in this car with you is the biggest mistake I’ve ever made. Mrs. Gregory.”
There was something new and disquieting in his eyes now, something that wasn’t hostility or disgust and that gave her the courage to push him a little further.
“Kira,” she told him.
Mistake. She knew it even before he blinked and looked to the Dumpster … the dashboard clock … anything that wasn’t her.
“What proof do you have that he’s up to his old tricks?”
“None,” she admitted. “Not yet.”
“Brilliant.”
“Look. Kareem’s hired a whole new legal team and they might get him off this time. Don’t you want to have as much spaghetti to throw at the wall as possible to make sure some of it sticks? Or do you want to risk Kareem staying out on the streets forever?”
“What about you testifying against him in open court? You ready for that? And that’s assuming you can testify and Kareem’s lawyer doesn’t block you on account of the husband-wife privilege.”
“I’m ready to do anything that’ll get Kareem out of my life for once and for all.”
His jaw dropped in a gape and he whipped his head back around to face her. “You don’t get it, Mrs. Gregory. He’ll never be out of your life until one of you dies.”
Oh, she got it. “I’m not asking that much.”
He snorted. “And all you want in return—?”
“Is protection when it’s all over. A chance. Which is more than I’ve got now. Do we have a deal?”
“How are you planning to get said proof without getting killed in the process?”
“How the hell should I know? I’m making this up as I go. Do we have a deal?”
“Depends.” He was all business now. “You bring me something to get excited about, and we’ll talk. I’m not going to bat for you on the basis of all the great information you might bring me one day if your schedule permits. You want to be an informant, you need to inform me of something I don’t already know.”
“I’m on it,” she told him.
“Jack,” Amara said groggily.
She was in the curtained-off recovery area with all the tubes, IVs and monitors that went along with it. One of those ugly-ass speckled blue hospital gowns was visible above the white sheet, and she struggled with the oxygen thing in her nose while he crept closer.
He was forcibly reminded of another hospital, another patient, another outcome.
And yet this moment was almost more unbearable because her eyes were still clever and bright and her will strong—he could see it—and she was still Amara.
There was a real danger that he’d embarrass himself. Just drop to his knees and sob with relieved joy until there was no water left in his body. Swallowing hard, he worked on not doing that. “Hey, Bunny.”
Just as she pulled the cannula out of her nose, a nurse swooped in and replaced it.
Amara scowled. “Tell her I’m a lawyer, Jack. I can sue her for this.”
Jack snorted with something that was more laugh than sob but definitely a little of both. “You have no idea what you’re up against,” he told the nurse. “You should make it easy on yourself and let her take it out.”
The nurse didn’t look worried. “You need to tell Bunny here that I’ll cut her pain meds if she keeps it up.”
“There’s no need to get nasty,” Amara said.
Laughing, the nurse winked and bustled off.
And Amara held out her hand, the one with the IV line in it. “Come here.”
Jack hesitated. If she had any sense, she’d eject him immediately, and he almost felt it was his moral duty to tell her so. On the other hand, he would die if he didn’t touch her. Hurrying up, he took her hand and it was so soft, warm and alive that he lost
it. Pressing his lips to the back, tubes and all, he cried, with shaking shoulders and the whole humiliating deal.
“I’m sorry about Daisy,” she said.
“I’m sorry about you.”
“Hmmm.” Her lids drooped and he could tell he was losing her to the drugs. “Don’t worry. Next time I’m going to duck behind you. I’ve already decided.”
He laughed again and there was less cry in it this time.
“What time is it?”
“I have no idea,” he told her.
“Did you take a nap? You look tired.”
Was this a joke? He wasn’t the one with extra ventilation in his side. “I don’t sleep.”
She cracked her bleary eyes back open. “What does that mean, you don’t sleep?”
“I snooze. I catnap. I don’t sleep.”
“Why not?”
“Would you sleep if someone wanted you dead?”
“Good point. They’re letting me go in the morning,” Amara murmured, her eyes closing again.
“I know,” Jack said. “You’re coming with me.”
Nightmarish as dinner with Kareem was, with Kareem’s hand skimming her bare thighs under the table, making her hot and wet no matter how much she hated herself for it, Kira wished she could extend it. What would he do when they got home? What would she do? Open her arms and legs to welcome him back?
At this rate? Yeah, she probably would.
Because she was a slut.
On the ride home, her jumbled thoughts nearly overwhelmed her. Dexter Brady’s image flashed through her mind, a bolt out of nowhere that lingered when she wanted him gone. His features were harsh, unforgiving and utterly fascinating, and his fingers, unlike Kareem’s, were the plain, unbuffed but neatly trimmed and strong fingers of a man who worked rather than a man who lied, cheated, killed and primped.
Don’t think about him, Kira.
Until she found some evidence to use against Kareem, she had to focus on hanging on. Had to be as cunning and cold-blooded as her husband. Had to somehow keep him out of her bed, which was damn near impossible when her weak body wanted him there.
Something intangible had changed between them today and suddenly the rules were different and the stakes were higher. Her whole I need more time to rebuild the broken trust between us gambit was no longer working. He wanted her back, now, and she was so scared she could barely breathe. Every hour, minute, second and nanosecond of every single day of her miserable life, she was scared out of her freaking wits because an impatient Kareem Gregory was a dangerous man.
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