by J. R. Ward
A cold sweat broke out all over Anne’s body, as she realized that, if what Moose was saying was true . . . Danny had fucked her the night after he’d done the bride-to-be. And the same thing must have been happening now that she had been hooking up with him again.
Safe sex my ass, she thought.
“Why did you marry her?” she blurted.
When what she really wanted to ask was, Why did I fall for that bullshit?
“I almost didn’t. But she called me that morning in tears. She said she loved me. I never told her what I’d seen. All I cared about was that she wanted to marry me. She wanted to be with me—not him. She picked me—not him. Moose won over the great Danny Maguire. Finally.”
Anne focused on Moose properly and got a good look at what was behind his hard partying, his linebacker persona, his brash frat-boy car freak: as he sat beside her, he was a slightly overweight, going-on-pudgy wannabe trying to keep up with the cool kids, the pick-me! instead of the leader, the wingman instead of the stud.
“I’ve tried to make her happy. I swear, Anne.” His anxious eyes bored into her like he was giving testimony in court. “I did everything I could, but it’s never enough. She’s never happy—and it’s because the truth is, I didn’t win. She married me for the same reason I had to tell you about him. Danny’s toxic for women. Deandra knew that he wouldn’t ever settle down with her, and so I was second prize. You gotta know that he uses women, Anne. He’s a bad guy.”
Looking away, Anne seriously considered pivoting to the trash bin next to her and throwing up.
“Don’t think you’re different,” Moose said. “I guess that’s what I’m really saying. We all saw him flirt with you when you were on the crew. We used to have bets on how long it was going to take for him to fuck you because any woman he’s ever wanted he’s got. But you armed-length’d him, and that just kept him interested in you. He focused on you because he couldn’t get you. And then there was the fire. Now, you’re back and I don’t know what you’re doing with him for sure, but I have a feeling it’s the same thing he’s doing to my wife.”
Anne opened her mouth. Closed it.
“I know he crashed at your place last night. You’re telling me he slept on your couch?” Moose got up and stretched. “I can’t go in that restaurant and eat. I want to vomit.”
That makes two of us, she thought.
“When it came out at the stationhouse this morning, I nearly killed him,” Moose said. “Well, first I nearly killed her. Then I went after him. I was told to take some time to collect myself, and after I did, I called you. I’m not telling you this to take something away from him or some shit. I’m fucking done with him. I just don’t want you to be made a fool of like I’ve been. And I’m guessing by that expression on your face that you feel the way I do right now, like a sucker.”
Anne glanced down to duck his stare, and as she looked at her prosthesis, she actually thought, for a split second, that this was much, much worse than losing her hand.
Because this meant she couldn’t judge reality at all.
chapter
48
Three texts had come in throughout the day to Anne’s phone. The first was a picture of her and Danny leaving her house in the morning with Soot—which as she looked at it again was the last thing she wanted to see for so many reasons. The second was three words: I see you. The third was a picture of her coming out of her brother’s stationhouse.
All had been sent from that Gmail account.
And okay, fine, Danny had reached out, too, but she’d refused to acknowledge him.
Sitting back in her office chair, she looked out the window behind her desk. Darkness had fallen, and she didn’t want to go down to the parking lot to her car. But at least Safelite had come and repaired the front windshield after she had driven the thing over here this morning. And it was the height of gallows humor, she supposed, to reassure herself that they could always come again.
If she got shot at a second time, for example.
But that wasn’t the only thing she was thinking about—and it was a sad testament to the magnitude of Danny’s snow job that, even in a situation where her life could be in danger, she was wasting any time on him.
When her phone rang, she jumped, but then she saw who it was. Answering it, she said, “Jack. I was just going to call you for an update—”
“Our good friend Ollie Popper killed himself in jail about an hour ago.”
Anne sat forward. “He’s dead?”
“They found him hanging in the shower from a loop made of bed sheet.”
“Shit.”
“Interestingly enough, the video monitoring camera had something put over it.”
She frowned. “So it wasn’t suicide?”
“Doesn’t look like it in my opinion. They’re going over the body with a fine-toothed comb, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they found nothing. Danny’s staying with you, right?”
“Ah, no. He’s not.”
“Oh, that’s right, he’s on shift.”
She let that one stand. The last thing she needed was the SWAT team showing up as a character reference for a man they only knew in that macho brothers-in-arms way of first responders.
“You want me to come over with a couple of my boys?” Jack said.
An image of large, muscled, tattooed men in tactical gear sleeping like lions in a zoo on the floor of her living room almost made her smile.
“Nah, I’m okay. I’m not afraid.”
“You get any more calls?”
“No.”
“And how many texts,” Jack said wryly.
God, the guy was like a bloodhound when it came to voice inflection changes. “Three. One was a picture of me leaving my brother’s stationhouse.”
“I don’t like this, Anne.”
“I’m going home with a bunch of work and I’m staying indoors with everything locked and the drapes drawn. I also live in a neighborhood full of people who can hear me scream.”
“That didn’t matter when your window got shot.”
“They’re just trying to scare me.”
“Wonder if that’s what Ollie Popper thought as they hung him up by the throat from a pipe. In a prison. With a hundred guards around.”
* * *
So much for a slow day, Danny thought as he sat down with the crew for dinner: Four box alarms, two car crashes, a kid who got his head stuck between the iron bars of that fence over at the cemetery, and Moose losing his ever-loving mind. The only good news was that at least for once Danny hadn’t been the one being a hothead and getting suspended.
It was early, though.
Taking out his phone, he checked to see if Anne had called him back. Texted him back. Anything, anything—nope.
Fuck.
Pushing his plate of reheated ribs and room-temperature slaw away, he pondered the effort involved in having a cigarette outside. Around the table, the other men were resolutely looking at their plates, the clinking of silverware the only sound in the room.
The last time they’d had a meal like this was after the Patriots lost to the Eagles in the Super Bowl.
He got up and took his plate to the trash, scraping off the food and putting the thing into the dishwasher. Then he left out the back door and lit up. The night was cold and he was just in his NBFD T-shirt and work pants, but he didn’t feel a thing.
After trying Anne again, he decided, Fuck it.
Calling a number out of his contacts, he put the phone to his ear. “Jack. Wassup.”
“My man. I just talked to your girl.”
“Anne?” He frowned. “She answered her phone?”
“Yup. I had news to share. That suspect she questioned yesterday was found dead in the communal shower. I told her she needed to have you over at her house again tonight, but you’re on shift.”
“Yeah. On shift. Listen, could you do me a favor? Could you schedule some drive-bys of her house tonight?”
“I’m doing one better. Tw
o of my boys who’re off duty volunteered to stake out her house. They’re each doing a four-hour shift, the first starting at ten.”
Danny exhaled. “Thank you. That’s awesome.”
“We take care of our own, Dannyboy. And I told her to call me if she needs anything. I guess that asshole with the unknown number is still texting her.”
“Yeah.”
There was a pause. “I don’t usually say this, Danny, but if there’s any way you could talk to her about backing off Ripkin, it might be a good idea. This is not to say that she can’t handle herself or that justice doesn’t need to be served. But there are a lot of bodies around anything that threatens that asshole in his ivory tower in Boston. I don’t want her to be the next one floating in the ocean or buried in a landfill.”
“Neither do I.”
After they hung up, he stared at the phone. And called her one more time. He didn’t think she was going to answer—and she didn’t.
As voicemail kicked in, he cleared his throat. “So I’m guessing by the fact that you’ll talk to Jack and not me that Moose called you about the drama this morning between him and Deandra. I just want—look, it’s got nothing to do with me. Deandra was just shooting her mouth off about shit because she was pissed off about money. I really hope you’ll call me so we can talk things over. I love you, Anne. I wanted to tell you in person this morning, but I lost my nerve. I really . . . I love you and we were headed in a good direction. I want to keep going like that, for the rest of my life. Anyway, call me. Please.”
Ending the connection, he stared at his phone until the lock screen came on. Then he looked at it some more.
When it stayed black, he didn’t know what he expected—
Bullshit. He’d thought she’d listen to the message and call him back and tell him she loved him and agree that Moose was in a bad relationship with a bad woman and it was all just a misunderstanding.
Putting the cell phone back in his pocket, he smoked and thought of the nightmare that had woken him in Anne’s bed.
It had been him back at that apartment where the old lady had been gutted. He had walked into the room, taken a look at the mutilated body, and started to throw up.
And then everything had morphed and he had been the one with hands and feet tied, screaming as a shadowy perpetrator had cut him open and removed his internal organs.
Pretty fucking horrific stuff. And yet that had been a party compared to what he was feeling right now, stuck at the stationhouse while what little glimpse of a good life he’d had dimmed and then disappeared into the night as if it had never existed.
He was going to fucking kill Moose.
chapter
49
Anne sat back on her sofa and closed her eyes. It was going on ten o’clock and she was surrounded by printouts of reports on those warehouse fires, the papers like the snow cover of winter, a December of documents on the floor, the coffee table, the cushions.
Except for where Soot was curled up next to her.
She had been going over the same information for the last two hours and nothing was sticking anymore. Good distraction, though. It had gotten her through the dead zone between dinner and bedtime.
“You want to go out one last time?”
Soot knew the cue and obligingly got off his spot. The jingle of his collar was a welcome accompaniment as they went to the back door and she turned off the security system with her remote.
Before she stepped outside, she took the nine-millimeter handgun she’d left on the corner of her desk with her.
The night was cold and dry, and the moon overhead was bright and clear. She took comfort that her neighbors were all home, their lights on, their bodies moving in and out of windows as the whole neighborhood settled for the rest of the evening.
Soot was efficient. No sniffing around. No investigating foreign scents on the wind or the bushes or the browning grass.
Which was another good sign as far as she was concerned. If anyone was or had been around, she had to believe he’d notice.
Back in the house. Back with the locked door. Back on with the alarm.
She kept the gun with her as she considered going upstairs to bed. In the end, she stayed downstairs. She felt like that way, if someone tried to get in, she’d hear them better.
As she resumed her seat on the sofa, Soot did the same, and she put her hand on his warm flank, stroking his short, smooth fur. When he let out a deep sigh of relaxation, she envied him.
Picking up a random incident report, she tried to get her brain to connect the dots that were refusing to be linked. She had Ripkin. She had Ollie-no-longer-Popper. And then she had whoever had showed up at that warehouse with the trailer—which might have been Ollie or might not have been.
“When was he arrested?” she said out loud.
Back into the paperwork to find the file on Ollie. Nope. Not him. He had been in police custody the night that most recent warehouse fire had been set.
Damn it, she wished she had CCTV for those other burns. The key was the identity of that unknown third person with the truck and trailer. If she could find out who it was, maybe she could make the tie from Ollie to Ripkin. Before the latter had whoever it had been killed, that was.
She thought about Bob Burlington being found in the ocean. Jesus, she did not want that to be her.
As her phone rang, she braced herself as she picked the thing up to see who it was. If that unknown caller was back—
It was Danny.
“Goddamn it.”
She debated letting him go into voicemail again, but she wasn’t some coward to run from the confrontation forever. And he was just going to keep calling until he got off shift and showed up on her doorstep at eight in the morning.
“Hello,” she said.
“I didn’t think you were going to answer.”
“I’m busy.”
There was a pause. “I left you a voicemail.”
“I didn’t listen to it.”
“Did Moose get in touch with you?”
“Yes.” She put the paperwork aside. “Listen, we’re not going to do this, okay?”
“Do what.”
“Pretend. I don’t have time for it. Don’t call me anymore, don’t try to see me, and if you have a passing thought, some weeks or months from now that I might want to hear from you, I’m going ask you to replay this conversation in your mind. I am never going to want to set eyes on you again.”
“So you’ve made up your mind.”
“There was nothing to make up.”
She snagged the remote and turned on the TV across the room just so she could give herself a distraction from the drama.
“I didn’t fuck Deandra.”
“We all know that’s not true—although it was a surprise to learn from her husband that you had her the night before she walked down the aisle with him. Guess you took what you wanted from her and told her to beat it. At least for the honeymoon.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“I’m not going to go into it—”
“You better fucking explain yourself.”
Anne sat up stick straight. “Excuse me? What did you just say? You think I have to explain anything to you? Forget what happened between the two of us, I’m just another heart and a hole you played with while you were at work. But Moose was your best friend, Danny. For a decade. And on the night of his rehearsal dinner, when he went back to get his tux, he saw you and Deandra in your bedroom at the apartment. Even if Deandra was lying at the stationhouse this morning, which I don’t think she was, there was no hearsay involved with Moose seeing his future wife’s dress on your goddamn floor.”
“I didn’t fuck her that evening,” came the tight reply.
“Do you really expect me to believe that? Because I don’t. And damn it, you were with me the next night!” She wanted to throw her phone she was so pissed, but she managed to calm herself down. “I have to admit that your success rate speaks for itself.
You got me good. Two separate times. I’d give you a trophy, but in my current mood, I’d put it up your ass, and I am not going to jail for felony assault with this year’s Best Lying Sack of Shit award.”
“You got this all wrong.”
“Do I? Gaslighting much?” She took a deep breath. “Here’s the way I am going to view what happened between us. It was a movie that started as a comedy, segued awkwardly into a romance, and ended with Anthony Hopkins eating someone’s liver with fava beans and a fucking Chianti. I sat through it, enjoyed a couple of parts, but overall, I’m giving it a bad score on Rotten Tomatoes because the narrative didn’t ring true, the credible surprise was credible but no surprise at all, and the male lead was a one-dimensional sexual predator. Good-bye, Danny.”
chapter
50
Anne ended the call, put her phone down, and crossed her arms over her chest. She did not expect Danny to ring again. And he didn’t. Then again, the truth was out and there was nothing left for him to work with, no manipulations at his disposal, no wiggle room around reality. The thing with men like him—people like him—was they required instability and insecurity in their playing field.
Someone with both feet planted on the ground was not a good target.
She would never hear from him again. And he would, unfortunately, go on to find other women to consume, other marks to challenge himself with, other opportunities to exploit.
Just like her father.
Too bad scarlet letters were a thing of the past. She would have slapped one on him in a heartbeat with the A being for “ASSHOLE.” But at least she was on the other side now. Man, he’d gotten her going, though.
Focusing on the TV, she saw Cher getting out of a boxy yellow cab, red shoes on her feet, a shimmering black coat catching the light as she walked toward a gleaming fountain. And there was Nicolas Cage, turning . . . turning . . .