Karen Robards

by Obsession

  “You people are always threatening me,” Katharine burst out. “I’m putting my life on the line here, and you’re still always threatening me. Why do you suppose I downloaded that in the first place? To make sure the fucking FBI lived up to its end of the fucking bargain.” She glared at Nick, then flounced into a different positionon the couch, hunching an elegant shoulder at him and staring determinedly at the dark TV. “You can all go to hell.”

  “I’m going to go plug this into the computer in the office upstairs,” Nick said to Katharine’s averted face. “Is there anything you want to tell me before I watch it?”

  “Go fuck yourself,” Katharine said without looking at him.

  Nick’s lips tightened, and he and Mary exchanged silent glances. Then he turned without another word and headed for the stairs. Katharine picked up the remotefrom the table where Nick had left it and turned the TV back on. “I’d like my ring back, by the way,” she said, stretching her hand, palm out, toward Jenna.

  “Oh. Sure.” Jenna glanced down at the big sapphire ring, pulled it from her finger, and crossed the room to drop it in Katharine’s palm.

  “And the earrings,” Katharine said without looking at her. Jenna complied. Katharine glanced at the baubles in her hand, closed her fist around them, and thrust them into the pocket of her robe. Ignoring Jenna completely, she focused on the TV.

  Jenna retreated toward the door.

  “Want to watch Letterman?” Mary asked Jenna wryly.

  Jenna shook her head. What she wanted to do was follow Nick. On her way out of the living room, she saw Muffy, who’d been keeping a very low profile since stalking away from them in the kitchen, emerge from behind the couch. She brushed against Katharine’s ankles,and Katharine shoved her away with an impatient foot.

  “Fucking cat,” Katharine said.

  Watching herself behave badly was not, Jenna discovered,a pleasant experience, so she headed up the stairs after Nick.

  He was in the smaller, guest bedroom, which, she discovered,looked nothing like the guest bedroom in her—no, whoops, Katharine’s—town house. This one had been outfitted as an office, with a state-of-the-art computer system. The door was open, so she walked on in.

  Nick was standing in front of the monitor, leaning over a little, hands gripping the back of the chair that was pushed beneath the desk in front of him so hard that his knuckles showed white. She couldn’t see what was playing on the monitor, but she could see his reaction.He was still as stone as he watched it. It didn’t even look like he was breathing.

  She was just about to say something to him when, from downstairs, a woman’s shrill, obviously terrified scream sent every tiny hair on her body catapulting upright.

  The scream was followed by an explosion of gunfire.

  28

  Nick and she whipped around as one, staring stupefiedat the open bedroom door. Beyond it, they could see nothing but empty hallway. But still, menace hung in the air as tangibly as smoke.

  “Run, Katharine,” Mary bellowed.

  More gunfire.

  Another horrifying scream from downstairs sent Jenna’s pulse rate skyrocketing.

  “No! Please, n—” a woman cried. Jenna was almost sure the voice was Katharine’s.

  The pop of a single shot interrupted.

  Jenna’s heart gave a great leap. Her stomach turned inside out. A cold chill snaked down her spine. It was impossible not to realize what had just happened: Katharine—possibly Katharine and Mary—had just been shot. The silence was ominous. If Mary was alive, wouldn’t she be returning fire? Unless she was hiding, or being held at gunpoint …

  In any case, the assailants were still in the house.

  “Jesus.” There was stark, cold fear in Nick’s voice. He moved swiftly to the bedroom door, his gun in his hand, his feet almost noiseless on the hardwood floor. His face wore the harsh, hard-eyed expression of the governmentagent that he was.

  He looked back at her, beckoning her urgently to join him. Heart pounding, Jenna did. He touched his fingerto his lips, then put his mouth close to her ear and whispered, “I’ve got to go do what I can to help Mary, and I can’t leave you behind. Whatever happens, stay as close to me as possible. Do what I tell you, when I tell you.”

  She nodded. He gripped her hand. Then he stepped silently out into the hall, leading with his gun, moving quickly toward the top of the stairs. Jenna followed him, her fingers entwined with his, trying to move as quickly and quietly as she could on legs that had gone all rubbery.She was breathing too fast, she realized, and her pulse raced. As they reached the top of the stairs, there was still no one in sight. The only sound from below was a faint explosion of laughter from the TV.

  Straining her ears, she tried to listen for the telltale sounds of someone in the house. Between the TV and her own pulse thundering in her ears, she picked up on nothing. But she was absolutely sure that she hadn’t heard the sound of anyone leaving the house, either.

  Was it possible that the shooters knew she and Nick were there? Could they be lying in wait for them downstairs?

  Jenna was horribly afraid the answer was yes.

  With a single glance back at her, Nick started down the stairs, still leading with his gun, still holding her hand. Her heart was thumping so hard now that it felt like a living creature trying to beat its way out of her chest. Every tiny creak of the stairs, every small scufflingsound from their shoes on the wood risers, made her breath catch. Her scalp prickled with tension. Her knees shook. Nick kept his back to the wall, and she tried to follow suit. She could tell from the way his head was moving that he was carefully scanning the area they were descending into. About halfway down, their heads cleared the upstairs landing and they were able to see more than just the rectangle of hallway directly beneath them: a tiny slice of the living room, the dark wooden floor that stretched to the front door and, going the other way, to the kitchen.

  As she crept down the next few steps in Nick’s wake, her gaze swept everything she could see: floor, walls, furniture. Nothing seemed out of place. Still, the invisibletension she could sense in the air screamed danger. The sharp smell of recently fired weapons made her nostrils flare.

  Near the bottom of the stairs, Nick hesitated for no more than a split second, sucking in air, his eyes fastened on the living-room doorway. From a few steps above him it was possible to see a little way into the living room— and what Jenna saw made her heart turn over.

  Resting limply on the deep reds and blues of the Orientalrug was the lower third of a slim, tanned leg—and a slender foot in a pale green slipper. The hall wall concealedthe rest of her, but Jenna knew without a doubt that it was Katharine.

  Was she dead? The leg didn’t move.

  Jenna’s breath left her body in an audible hiss.

  “Shh,” Nick whispered, throwing a quick glance back at her.

  She nodded.

  He stepped off the last riser into the downstairs hall, pulling her after him. As her feet touched the floor, Jenna got a better look into the living room. Katharine lay sprawled on her side in front of the couch, her eyes open and staring, a bullet hole neat and round as a dime in the middle of her forehead. The edges of it were black, with just the tiniest dark red center. The blood pooling beneath her cheek seemed to come from the back of her head.

  Exit wounds are always worse… .

  Jenna suddenly went dizzy. Her stomach turned insideout. She felt her knees start to buckle. Her grip tightened on Nick’s hand, and he swung around to look at her …

  Just as a gun exploded and a bullet smacked into the wall beside them in a trajectory that, if he hadn’t moved precisely when he did, would have sent it rocketing through his head. Jenna shrieked and jumped, and both she and Nick reflexively ducked. Her heart thundered like a herd of wild horses. Her eyes were wide and wild as she looked all around. The taste of fear was sour in her mouth.

  “Keep your head down,” Nick screamed, putting himself between her and the living-room doorway and snap
ping off two quick shots—bam! bam!—at the shooter. Jenna got a quick glimpse of a man dressed all in black with a black watch cap on his head, leaping from one side of the living-room doorway to the other, moving so fast that he was scarcely more than a dark blur. There was a cry—had the man been hit?—and then in response to a gesture from Nick, she was racing straight toward the front door with Nick right behind her, running for her life, fueled by a tremendous burst of adrenaline that rushed through her veins like speed. A glance showed her that Nick was watching their backs, covering their exit, trying desperately to see everything at once. Out of the corner of her eye she got a glimpse of most of the living room, and there was Mary, too, sprawled on the floor several feet from Katharine. She was unmoving, but Jenna couldn’t see her face and it was impossible to tell if she was dead.

  Then her focus snapped forward again as she leaped for the front door.

  Just as her hand closed around the cool brass knob and she turned it and yanked it toward her—please, God, let there not be some kind of fancy dead bolt that keeps the door from opening—another gun boomed and, behind her, Nick let out a cry.

  Her blood seemed to freeze.

  “Are you hit?” she cried, twisting frantically to look at him as she pulled the door wide. He was turned away from her, facing back the way they had come, firing at a black-clad man who ducked back into the living room as Jenna spotted him.

  “Run for the car.” It was just loud enough for her to hear, uttered as Nick pushed her out the door, and she obediently bolted across the small front porch, threw herself down the steps, and raced around the corner of the house toward where they had left the old Ford by the garage, thankful for the darkness that swallowed her and Nick so that they were no longer such obvious targets.She was breathing like a marathon runner, feet pounding over the grass and hard ruts of the drive, heart pounding faster than her feet. The men inside could be anywhere now—they weren’t just going to let them go—and she glanced fearfully all around as she reached the back bumper of the car.

  Nick was farther away than he should be. That was what her glance around showed her. He was about thirty feet back, a black hunched shape in the darkness, lurching as he ran, and she realized with a sick twist of her stomach that she had been right, he was hit, he had to be if he was moving like that.

  She was just turning back to go to him, to help him, when a hand grabbed her arm, snatching her off-balance,yanking her sideways.

  Oh no …

  She screamed like a siren even as she stumbled into a solid warm body and an arm fastened like a vice around her waist.

  “Hiya, babe,” a hideously familiar voice said in her ear, and she didn’t even have to cast a quick, terrified glance over her shoulder to know that it was Ed. Her nails dug into his arm—it was useless, he was wearing a jacket—and she struggled desperately until she felt the hard jab of a gun being shoved into her side. She gasped and went still. “Keep fighting me, and I’ll blow you in two.”

  He meant it, she knew. His arm tightened around her waist. The gun dug into her rib cage so hard that it was painful.

  “Let her go, Barnes,” Nick yelled.

  “Drop it,” Ed snapped over her head to Nick, who she saw had stopped dead and had his gun aimed at Ed’s head, which was the only part of him she wasn’t shielding. The gun ground viciously into her side, and she made a tiny pained sound and tried to lean away from it without success. “I guarantee you I can kill her before you can kill me.”

  Jenna’s skin prickled as cold sweat broke out all over her body. Her heart was in her throat. She could scarcely breathe.

  “You’d still be dead,” Nick said.

  Ed chuckled. Horrified, Jenna saw why. Dark shapes were creeping up behind Nick, at least half a dozen of them, bent low like some hideous nocturnal beasts bringing death closer with every silent step.

  “Nick, behind you!” she screamed.

  Even as he whirled, the night exploded around her.

  She dropped like a stone, screaming, as the hold on her waist was suddenly released, sprawling on a combinationof hardened earth and soft grass. Her ears rang. Stars burst in front of her eyes. A terrible smell— gunpowder and something else—assaulted her nostrils.

  The good news was that she was pretty sure she was still alive.

  “Jesus Christ.” It was Nick’s voice, tight with fear. She blinked, clearing away the stars, and saw that he was beside her, on his knees, one shoulder hunched in a way that she knew wasn’t good, his gun nowhere in sight. His hand—only one hand—was on her side, feelingaround her rib cage where the gun had been pressed, checking for injury.

  Jenna sucked in air. A glance behind her revealed the shadowy outline of Ed’s body sprawled on its back on the grass. Some of the dark shapes—men, of course— were clustered around him. She averted her gaze, not wanting to see more.

  “I’m all right,” she said, sitting up. “He didn’t shoot me. You were too fast.”

  “It wasn’t me who shot Barnes.” Nick sank back on his haunches, and she could see the long shudder that shook him. “I wouldn’t have taken that chance for anythingin this life.”

  “I shot him,” a voice said out of the dark. Jenna looked up to see a tall, stocky man looming up out of the shadows behind Nick and felt her heart start to pound again. Was he friend or foe? “Vicious bastard deservedto die.”

  “Yo, Keith,” Nick said, glancing back over his shoulderat the newcomer. “What the hell took you so long?”

  Then he swayed. As Jenna reached for him, he collapsedin her arms.

  29

  When Nick woke up, he was in the back of an ambulance.The light was dim but it was still too bright for his eyes, so he opened them only a slit. The ambulance wasn’t moving, and he guessed it was still parked outside the safe house, probably because they were waiting to load someone in beside him. He hoped it was Mary, hoped she had survived. He lay on a stretcher with his shirt off, still wearing his pants but with a sheet covering him to the armpits and a lot of white gauze wrapped around his shoulder. The wound wasn’t fatal, but it hurt like hell.

  Keith was sitting beside him. His square-jawed face was paler than usual, and there was a sorrowful look in his eyes.

  “Where’s Jenna?” Nick asked. He didn’t like having her out of his sight. He’d aged a thousand years in those moments after he had realized that Barnes had his gun pressed to her side. He knew as well as Barnes did that he wouldn’t have been able to kill the other man before Barnes could get a shot off. But putting down his weapon wouldn’t have helped, either. If Keith and his posse hadn’t shown up when they did, Jenna would have died. He would have died, too, but the thought didn’t bother him nearly so much.

  He’d realized over the course of this really harrowing night that in Jenna, he’d found the love of his life.

  “She’s inside. The paramedics are checking her out.”

  It took Nick to the end of that exchange to register that Keith was holding a black Beretta, its slender barrelelongated with a silencer.

  This was not good news. His heart kicked up a notch.

  “You planning to kill me, too?” he asked conversationally.

  Keith stiffened, then smiled at him. It was a small, sad smile.

  “You found out,” he said. “I knew you would. I knew, from the minute you showed up at my house on the night Allie died, that we were going to end up like this. You’re an obsessive bastard, Nick.”

  It was said in a chidingly affectionate manner that sent a chill racing down Nick’s spine.

  “Barnes had your house bugged,” Nick said, and tried not to let the tensing of his muscles show. “Did you know that? That must have been how he knew he could target Allie. But it paid off for him in spades: He got you dragging her into your family room and hanging her from one of those overhead beams just like you were on Candid Camera.”

  “I know.” Keith’s jaw tensed. “That bitch Katharine Lawrence told me she’d found the video while she was snooping a
round for us, on one of Barnes’s computers. She downloaded it onto a thumb drive and told me she had it, taunted me with it, said she owned me. Bad move on her part. I sent some guys to get it back, but they screwed up. It wasn’t in her safe. I sent somebody back the next day to search for it again—of course, the dunderhead didn’t realize Katharine had already been replaced and tried to scare its whereabouts out of your girlfriend—but we never did find it. Out of curiosity, where was it?”

  Nick smiled grimly. “On her cat. Attached to its collar.”

  Keith looked stunned. “You’re shitting me. I never would’ve found it.”

  “Probably not.” While he had been talking, Nick had managed to surreptitiously unfasten the webbed straps that secured him to the stretcher. “You told Barnes about that apartment I rented for her, didn’t you? I knew it had to be you when those goons showed up, because you were the only one besides me who knew about it.”

  “I had to,” Keith said. “Earlier today, Barnes got hold of a surveillance video of you with our little false Katharine, and after that he knew we were on to him. He came to see me about two hours ago, and threatened me with that damned video of what happened to Allie. I had to tell him about the apartment, and about this safe house.” Keith smiled a little. “What he didn’t know was that I outsmarted him: I was going to let him kill you, and Katharine, and then I was going to kill him. Problem solved.” He grimaced, and his eyes seemed to harden on Nick’s face. “Only he didn’t kill you, so now I’m going to have to do it.”

  The gun moved a little, and Nick tensed.

  “You don’t have to do this, Keith,” he said.

  “Yeah, I do. You know I love you like a brother, man. I don’t want to kill you, but I know you: You’d never be able to just let this go. It’s come down to you or me, and since that’s the case, I got to go with me.” His jaw tightened.“Just so you know, Nick, I didn’t plan to kill Allie. She told me that someone was threatening to blackmail her over those damned drugs, and I snapped. I just couldn’t take it anymore. Always having to worry about where she was and what she was doing and whether or not anyone was going to find out. You have no idea what hell it was.”