Hotter Than Wildfire

by Lisa Marie Rice

  “Rod?” Harry’s mom stood in the doorway, unsteady. Her eyes were glassy. “What’s all the commotion?”

  Harry had never been able to figure it out. His mom lived like a junkie—was a junkie, though it hurt his heart to admit it, because despite everything he loved her—but she spoke like a real lady.

  The monster stopped, turned slowly around, thought processes almost painfully clear.

  He smiled, baring his rotted teeth. “Your shitty son. He’s hiding stuff from me, and I want it. He’s got some money hidden somewhere, just for himself. What the fuck does he care about us? About our needs? All he cares about is the little brat.”

  Harry’s mom was trying to process this through the fog in her head. “Harry?” she said slowly. She looked around the bare room. “Hiding something? What? Where?”

  The monster seemed to swell with rage as he advanced on Harry’s mom.

  “You bitch, I’ll bet you’re in cahoots with him. All three of you, it’s a conspiracy, you’re robbing me and keeping me from what’s mine!” His voice rose to a raw cry. “You three think you’re so much better than me! Snooty bastards, I’ll show you!”

  Harry’s mom frowned. “Hey, Rod, there’s no need to—”

  “And you’re the worst of all, you cunt!” he roared, and swung the bat straight at her head.

  The crack was loud in the room as Harry’s mom crumpled to the floor, bright red staining her long blond hair. She lay still, a pool of red gathering around her head.

  “You bastard!” Harry’s head filled with rage. “You killed her! You killed my mom!”

  Rod stood for a moment, mouth open, the rotted teeth of a methhead like dark tree stumps. Harry jumped him, fists flying. He’d been fighting since he was five, and though he had no training, he knew what he was doing. The first blows took Rod by surprise, then he shook his head and bellowed with rage.

  With one backhanded blow, he slammed Harry against the wall, knocking him off his feet. Harry blacked out for just a second and came to just as Rod, screaming, brought the bat down hard on his legs. Harry cried out as his bones crunched.

  Pain shot through Harry, so intense he nearly passed out again. He fought to remain conscious with everything in him, ignoring the ferocity of the pain, because Rod had straightened, knowing Harry was out of commission, and now was advancing on Crissy, step by step, screaming words Harry couldn’t understand.

  Crissy pressed against the wall, shaking, as she watched him approach with huge, terrified eyes.

  Harry shook with rage. Rod had killed his mom. Fuckhead wasn’t going to get Crissy, too. No way.

  Harry tried to stand, but he collapsed in fiery agony. There was no way—both legs were broken, jeans already soaked with blood. A shard of bone had broken through the skin and stuck out from his left thigh, piercing his jeans. His hand scrabbled for his only hope as Crissy darted away from Rod’s big, hairy paws swinging that bat.

  Under the mattress was Fuckhead’s cell, which he used to make his deals. Harry had stolen it from him a couple of days ago. Some instinct had told him he’d be needing a way to call for help.

  Rod was screaming now, completely out of control, lunging for Crissy, who kept slithering out of his grasp. Hands trembling, fumbling in fear, Harry punched 9-1-1 and quickly gave the address. Rod’s bellows could be heard in the background.

  “Hurry,” he whispered.

  He was about to black out from the pain and had to grit his teeth to remain conscious.

  Rod’s huge hand caught Crissy by the arm and Harry nearly threw up when he heard the sharp crack of her small bone breaking.

  “Harry!” Crissy screamed, terrified eyes meeting his, and he pulled himself over to her by his arms, moving as fast as he could.

  But it wasn’t fast enough.

  Rod picked Crissy up as if she were the Barbie he’d held a few moments ago and slammed her against the wall. Blood spattered as Crissy’s tiny body crumpled to the ground.

  “You son of a bitch!” Harry screamed as his hand found the bat Rod had dropped. He swung it with all his strength against Fuckhead’s kneecap and heard the sharp crack of his knee exploding.

  Rod went down like a felled bull and Harry was all over him, swinging the bat against his head again and again until Rod’s face was a mask of mushy red tissue that bore no resemblance to a human face.

  Panting, Harry threw the bat away and pulled himself with his arms over to Crissy, ignoring the fiery pain as he scraped his way across the floor. He gathered up her limp little body, holding her against him, smoothing out her soft golden hair. He wept, the sound raw in the room.

  In the distance sirens sounded, the last thing he heard before the blackness took him.

  Chapter 1

  Prineville, Georgia

  Twenty years later

  April 2

  Gerald Montez paced his study as he listened to the track on the CD. The song was beautiful, though Gerald didn’t give a shit about that. Beethoven, the Beatles—it was all the same to him.

  But this song…oh yes. It was important to him.

  “Turning a Blind Eye,” by Eve. No last name. Just Eve. Like Madonna or Cher.

  He’d read some online reviews of the track. There were lots of them. This Eve woman took up an inordinate amount of Internet time and space, because no one could figure out who she was.

  Her vocals are warm and smooth, perfectly balanced by the acoustic instruments—guitar and muted trumpet. She folds in the notes, one by one, at times forging a melancholy exoticism with extensive quotes from fourteenth-century Mediterranean music and an overlay of Monk. Brilliant.

  Gerald had no idea what the fuck that was about. All he knew was who sang it.

  Eve. Mystery woman.

  Only not so much.

  Because though the jacket blurb said the mystery singer Eve had written the song, he had heard another woman humming it a year ago.

  She hadn’t even known he was there. She’d been humming some tune Gerald hadn’t recognized but did realize was pretty. Humming and singing as she worked at the computer in her office. She hummed the body of the song, and the refrain was turning a blind eye.

  Gerald remembered the scene very clearly because that’s what he did. He noticed things and remembered things. He’d built a fucking empire because he noticed things and remembered things.

  So he’d been guaranteed to remember that song. Not only that, but he’d been absolutely blown away by the fact that it had been Ellen humming and singing. Who knew?

  Ellen. Uptight, straitlaced, buttoned-down, dependable Ellen, who kept her looks under wraps and was a fabulous accountant. Bookkeeper. Oh yeah, she had a degree in accounting, but basically she kept his books, so she was his bookkeeper. She kept them very well. Too well.

  Staid, earnest, demure Ellen had these throaty, sexy sounds coming out of her mouth. Sounds he couldn’t even begin to imagine her making. Sounds that made him look twice at her as a woman. And that’s when he discovered she’d been hiding her light under a bushel.

  Most women worked on themselves like crazy. Inch-thick makeup, plastic bags of silicone pumping up their boobs, high heels, short skirts, hair out to here…half the time when Gerald woke up next to a woman he’d fucked he realized that she wasn’t a looker at all, she just knew how to apply paint.

  Man, taking a second or third look at Ellen—serious, workaholic Ellen, whose clothes usually covered her neck to toe—he could see that she was a fucking looker—the real deal. If she bothered, she’d be turning heads. Obviously, she didn’t want to turn heads, she wanted to keep books.

  When he realized that she was starting to dig in to how he first made his money, he knew he’d have to fire her or kill her. Or…marry her.

  That thought had shocked him.

  It was her voice that did it. Gerald liked his women savvy and sexy and not too bright. He liked his sex rough. Even after realizing how beautiful Ellen really was, he hadn’t wanted to fuck her.

  But that
woman singing…oh yeah. She was fuckable. There was a sexiness, a swing there, that just said I’m fabulous in the sack. So un-Ellen-like he’d actually checked her desktop to see if she had an iPod with speakers on. But no, that fuckable chick was Ellen.

  Ellen, in bed. She might actually be teachable. What she was in the sack wasn’t that important, though, because the world was full of women who loved rich men, and he was very, very rich.

  What was important was having a presentable wife when he went to Washington to negotiate contracts. All those assholes who counted in Washington were big on “family values” even though they themselves had hotties of both sexes on the side.

  Yeah—demure CPA wife with a soft voice. Perfect.

  So he’d started his campaign to get her into his bed, something that usually took about five minutes. Maybe half an hour, tops.

  He’d been absolutely astounded when he realized it wasn’t working. She just wasn’t interested.

  What the fuck?

  He was rich, good-looking, powerful. He had women crawling up his pants. Was she a lesbo? But he had two men follow her around and she didn’t have women lovers, didn’t have male lovers, didn’t have anything. She worked, went home, watched some TV, read, went to bed early, got up early and started all over again.

  Jesus, marrying her would be like marrying a nun. Still, who cared? All he had to do was throw her a fuck now and again; it wouldn’t have to interfere with his sex life. Have her pop a few kids. Then they wouldn’t be able to say anything at the fucking Pentagon about where they were spending their money.

  He’d been starting to work it all out in his head when the cunt up and disappeared after talking at a company party with one of his men, who’d been shitfaced. Arlen Miller, who’d talked too much about Iraq and had paid the price.

  And then Ellen was in the wind. Gone for a whole fucking year in which he sweated that she was spilling her guts to the FBI.

  You don’t cross Montez. That was a rule. Because if you do, Montez will hit back so hard they’ll be finding pieces of you for the next ten years.

  Now he had her. Ellen—bland, pretty Ellen Palmer, who didn’t even wear lipstick, for Christ’s sake—was Eve, whose voice was sex on a stick.

  Eve’s identity was this big mystery everyone got off on. Who knew who she was, yada yada. No personal info on the CDs, no website—the recordings were in the name of a company that had shell after shell around it. Something Ellen would know how to do in her sleep.

  People didn’t know how to think laterally.

  Eve had an agent, and this agent had a name: Roddy Fisher. Lived in Seattle. Roddy Fisher was going to be very, very sorry he’d ever taken on Eve as a client.

  Montez clicked on the intercom and ordered his personal jet to be ready, with a flight plan filed for Seattle.

  Coronado Shores

  San Diego

  He relived it over and over again in his nightmares. Crissy always ended up a smashed little body and he always awoke drenched in sweat, heart pounding. Even when he came back himself from Afghanistan with a smashed body courtesy of an Afghani RPG, he dreamed of his little sister, dead at five. Murdered by a monster.

  Harry rose, naked, and went out onto the small, deep balcony that gave out onto the Pacific. Some nights he went down in the dark and took an hour-long swim.

  In the beginning, when he was still halfway dead, barely able to walk and not at all sure if he’d ever be anything more than a pathetic cripple—well, on those nights, he’d been tempted to gimp his way down to the beach and simply swim out to his limit, out past where he could never come back, and just sink beneath the waves.

  It was frightening as hell that the thought was so fucking appealing.

  And that was when he discovered that his brothers, who lived in the same building on Coronado Shores, took turns staying awake to make sure he didn’t do just that.

  For the first months, they took away his weapons, too. He’d screamed insults at them, but both Sam and Mike were strong-willed and had rocks for heads. He’d been given his guns back when they were sure he was out of the suicide zone.

  That was when he’d taken up drinking, getting quietly blitzed night after night. They let him. It takes a lot of time and effort to drink yourself to death, and Harry simply couldn’t do it. He hated waking up hungover, dry-mouthed, head pounding, staggering to the bathroom to vomit a thin gruel of beer and whiskey, unanchored by any food because he had no appetite at all.

  He’d disgusted even himself.

  Finally, he decided that if he was going to have to live—because his fucking brothers wouldn’t fucking let him die—he might as well become strong again. So Sam and Mike had recruited Bjorn, the Norwegian Nazi, and had helped him set up a fully equipped gym in his spare room, and for months he exercised at night until his muscles ached, until he’d sweated out every drop of moisture in his body, until he was so exhausted he couldn’t think.

  Sleep didn’t come, but at least there were no images in his head.

  But now he was back in shape. Simple weights or the treadmill couldn’t take him out of himself, so he’d found another crutch.

  He went back into his living room and sank on the couch. His living room—his entire home—was like his life: high tech and empty. He had state-of-the-art gym equipment, work station and entertainment center. The rest was emptiness. A bed and a desk and a couch.

  His stereo set was top-of-the-line Bose, and he slipped his new drug into the slot, put on his headset and stretched out on the couch. The first strains of a beautiful voice arrived and it was like that first shot of heroin must be for a junkie.

  Ahhh…

  Eve. She’d become super-famous these past three months, but Harry had been hooked from the first song he’d ever heard her sing, when she was still unknown, a jazzy cover of “Stand by Me.”

  Her voice was utter magic. After the first notes, Harry was taken right out of himself, taken away to somewhere else, a better place. A place where men didn’t kill little girls. Where men who’d whip a woman to death if they could hear the sounds of her shoes on the floor didn’t try to blow you up with RPGs. Where you didn’t long for the peace of death.

  Eve had a smoky, velvety voice, clear as a bell, perfectly attuned to each song. She could do it all: rousing rock, smoldering jazz, tender ballads. There was nothing she couldn’t do so perfectly that you couldn’t ever imagine the song being sung any other way, even when you’d heard it a thousand times before by a thousand other singers.

  Half her songs were covers, for which she recorded the definitive version—no other singer need apply. The other half, he’d been astonished to read on the jacket blurb, were composed by her. And though it wasn’t stated anywhere, he also had the feeling that she played keyboard for some of the simple ballads.

  It was all very mysterious. Maybe even a marketing ploy. If it was, it was brilliant, because the Net was alive with a thousand iterations of who is she? while fans flocked to buy her CDs. She got tens of millions of hits on YouTube, though the only images were sunsets, the sea, trees swaying in the wind.

  Because no one knew who she was.

  There were no photographs, she’d never been interviewed, had never given a concert. Identity top secret.

  The online tabloids went wild.

  They said she was black, white, beautiful, ugly beyond words, old, young…Harry didn’t give a fuck. She could have been a three-hundred-pound hippopotamus with seven chins for all he cared. All he knew was that when he put on one of her CDs and his headset, the world—and him with it—simply went away.

  WHO IS EVE? was a tabloid staple. Entire sections of People and US Weekly were devoted to smoking out her identity. According to the National Enquirer she was Bill Clinton’s secret love child. Or George Clooney’s. Or the Pope’s. Depending on the week. Harry was just waiting for Eve to be a space alien.

  What the hell did he care?

  Harry lay back, closed his eyes and let her carry him away until t
he sky outside his living room windows went from black to pewter to pearl.

  At seven, he reluctantly slipped his headphones off and headed for the shower.

  Time to face another day.

  Seattle

  Roddy Fisher was thrown into the storage room by two of his men, McKenzie and Trey.

  Gerald Montez was sitting in a comfortable chair because he thought it might take a long time to beat some information out of the guy. But looking at the worm, he thought, Maybe not. Maybe they could get this done fast.

  Roddy Fisher, talent agent, was small and round and was already whimpering, though he hadn’t even been roughed up yet. All that was still to come.

  Montez was used to soldiers, men who’d been trained and trained hard to be tough, to resist. This guy was a soft target, the softest. Trendy clothes, manicured hands, no muscle definition at all. Gerald didn’t know what Fisher looked like yet, because his men had brought him in with a hood over his head. Interrogation 101—keep them disoriented. And scared.

  The guy was scared all right. He’d even pissed his pants.

  Fucking wuss.

  Montez signaled with his hand and a bright spotlight was switched on, leaving the rest of the storage room in darkness. One of his men whipped the hood off and Fisher screwed his eyes up against the thousand-watt light.

  Montez knew Fisher couldn’t see him, couldn’t see anything, actually, but still he kept his face blank, though he felt disgust. Fisher’s eyes were swollen shut from tears and snot ran down his face, making the duct tape over his mouth glisten. Nobody’d touched him, beyond bundling him into a car and putting a hood over his head, and just look at him. Already in meltdown.

  He hadn’t even seen Montez’s men behind him, standing ready beside a tray full of instruments that looked designed for carpentry work. Carpentry work on humans, to cut and pull and carve. And Fisher hadn’t noticed the tarpaulin under his chair to catch sweat, blood, DNA.

  Trey reached around and ripped the duct tape off Fisher’s mouth. Jesus, Fisher winced as the tape was torn away. What a freaking girl.

  “Oh God,” Fisher sniveled. His voice was high and whiny, warbling with bodily fluids. “Where am I? What do you want?” His eyebrows furrowed. “Money! That’s what you want! Take it, in my pants pocket.” In his excitement he forgot his hands were in restraints. He scrabbled for his pockets. Finally, he lifted one hip. “In here. I’ve got three credit cards, you’re welcome to all of them. I won’t report them as stolen. And I’ve got two thousand dollars in cash. Take it. Take everything.” His hopeful face lifted up into the light.