Joker Joker (The Deuces Wild Series Book 2)

by Irish Winters

  One glance in the mirror was enough to bring a tear to her eye. Tate was the kindest man she’d ever met, and he was right. She couldn’t eat the entire elephant of her brand-new life in one sitting. It would take time, maybe years, but by darn, this was her life and she meant to live it.

  Oh, look. A big cheesy grin hit the face of that woman staring back at her. Winslow leaned closer to her reflection and smiled wider than she had in a long time, her shoulders lifting. Laugh lines crinkled the corners of her eyes. How’d they get there?

  She hadn’t had much to laugh at for years, and she wasn’t much to look at. She had no distinguishing beauty to lay claim to. No long flowing locks that dripped sexy curls to her skinny butt, just a fairly bald head. No perky little nose and no freckles—unless the ones on her hands counted for something other than diagnosing arsenic poisoning. Her eyes were pretty enough, but the shadows beneath them had to go.

  But look at the sparkle in those big green eyes. And her lips were pink today, not gray. That was encouraging. She pinched them into a pout just to see what they’d look like when they were ready to kiss Tate. Cute!

  If she turned to the side, her profile looked, well, skinny and boney. Can’t hide that. No fat or flare on her body, as in anywhere. Not on her boobs, her butt, or her hips. Her ribs and hips jutted out like she’d stumbled out of a Russian gulag. Some women might want this look, but she’d be okay with a little more curve. Cleavage would be nice. A soft flare at her hips. Big enough boobs to fill out the wrinkles in her bra. Small things to make her look more like a woman than a boy.

  What Tate saw in her, she didn’t know. Had to be pity, but she didn’t think so, not the way his gaze heated when his eyes met hers. Not the way his nostrils flared or the way his pupils dilated, swallowing the dark brown irises when he drew close. Or how his fingers lingered on her skin when they didn’t have to. He seemed to like touching her.

  Winslow leaned over the edge of the sink, peering into her happy depths, because that was what she saw in the mirror. Herself. Happy. Maybe a little ugly at the moment, definitely a cue ball on a wobbly neck, but for the first time in her life, she had a future. Yes, things were going to be crazy tough for a while, but she could do it. She, Winslow Arizona Parrish, would be okay.

  Where have I heard that before?

  Another bathroom flashed to mind. Mint green tiles. A stainless-steel commode. A drain in the floor. A syringe coming at her like a bullet train. The cold hollow look in her mother’s eyes.

  Winslow touched her fingertips to her neck, fingering the spot where that wicked hypo had hit. A bruise marked it now like a target, the center dark, the outer-ring yellowish.

  “My mother thought she could kill you, Winslow,” she told her reflection firmly. Resolutely. Ready to face the world, her chin up. “What do you say about that?”

  Pride swelled within when that identical twin in the mirror answered, “Bullshit.”

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  “No go. I can’t locate her,” Isaiah reported to the Deuces Wild Team through their Bluetooth earpieces.

  It was early Monday morning as the Deuces Wild Team searched for Hattie Beauregard. They were back in their FBI uniforms of the day, black button-up shirts, matching black slacks, and black suit jackets. The day was chilly and the sun was barely up. Already Ky was in the air, winging west to handle the California op. Eden was preparing her team to stand ready at Bly’s clinic.

  Tate, Isaiah, and Tucker already had that all-important, give-it-up-or-die-trying talk with Dr. Bly down at the local precinct. Turned out he was more than willing to turn state’s evidence in exchange for a get-out-of-jail-free card. The man was smart enough to volunteer, not only where he’d thought Hattie’s current location was, but several other hangouts, all bars, that she was known to frequent when she was working at, what was it, her bogus spa job? After their fruitful interview, Tate and Isaiah split up and hit the road in two different vehicles.

  “Copy that,” Tucker replied from his vehicle with a terse sigh. “I’m not seeing her, either. Tate? Any luck?”

  “I came up empty here too.” Tate had taken the stretch between Maple and Land’s End, looking for Hattie, Ike, or Janice. The rats seemed to have fled the ship. D.C. Metro hadn’t spotted them, either.

  “Let’s head back,” Isaiah said. “I want us all prepared. We’ve got some details to iron out before the interview tonight.”

  Like what? As far as Tate knew, the schedule was already set. Channel Thirteen would hold their bogus interview with Dr. Bly live on the six o’clock news. Shawna Truborn knew to ask all the leading questions. Bly had been given a script to follow. The AMA conference would kick-off early Tuesday morning at John Hopkins. Tate only hoped Hattie would fall for Bly’s initial come-on. She needed to be behind bars by then.

  “Has anyone checked on our favorite girl today?” Tucker asked. “How’d her dialysis go?”

  “That was yesterday,” Tate replied. There was no way he’d disclose that he had breakfast with his favorite girl in her room earlier. “I’m on my way to see her now.”

  “Once this thing goes down, I want a guard on her around the clock. That means you, Tate.”

  “Copy that,” he acknowledged. There was nothing else he’d rather do.

  Only he didn’t get that far. He and Isaiah were on their way to Winslow’s room when Isaiah steered Tate to the left and said, “Step into my office,” at the Starbuck’s kiosk around the hall from Winslow’s room.

  “Now?” Tate asked. This had to be one of the details Isaiah wanted to iron out. “You want to do your test here?” Out in the open?

  “Sure. You can see her room from here. Besides, it’s not like I’m going to be sticking electrodes into your skull.” Isaiah dropped his gear bag beside one of the chairs, then grabbed a handful of paper napkins before he pulled out a chair from the nearest table. “Take a seat. It’ll only take a few minutes. Want a cup?”

  “Sure don’t.” Tate slouched into the molded plastic seat, then pushed back, balancing it on its rear legs. Then let’s get this over with. “What’s next? What do you want me to do?”

  “Pretty much nothing. Just close your eyes and take a deep breath.” Isaiah set the napkins between them. “Let your mind go where it wants. Take a break. Relax.”

  Tate crossed his arms over his chest, closed his eyes, and did as Isaiah requested. Instead of letting his mind go straight to Winslow, he focused on his boss. That ought to confuse Isaiah’s psychic probing.

  “There’s something about the number twelve,” he said softly.

  Here we go. More psychic mumbo jumbo. More cosmic realignment of the universe BS.

  “That’s how old you were when your life fell apart, Tate. Tucker’s son was twelve when his mother nearly got him killed. And I was twelve when I came home and found my mom on the floor and…” Tate’s eyes flicked open. Don’t say it. “…dying.”

  His chair fell to all four legs. Isaiah wasn’t looking at him any longer, just staring at his long, slender fingers, now intertwined, squeezing together on the tabletop. “Tucker knows a lot about me, but he doesn’t know this.”

  “What happened?” Tate dared ask, his palms flat to the table.

  Isaiah shrugged. “I was twelve,” he said that like it explained everything. “The world was a noisy place for a kid whose mind was suddenly hyper-aware of other people’s thoughts and problems. And I’m not talking about just hearing the kids at school or my parents at home, more like the world. Try waking up to that every morning. Hell, try sleeping through it at night. I didn’t know how to turn the volume down or how to set any filters. I couldn’t block them, like you do.”

  Which is why you think I’m psychic.

  Isaiah’s gaze slanted as if he’d heard what Tate hadn’t said out loud, damn him. “I sneaked out of my room that night for the first time in my life. I mean it. I didn’t do crap like that. I was one of those nerdy kids who followed rules. I did my homework right after school and I d
id chores for Mom. I was never in trouble. I never thought of disappointing her.”

  Figures. You seem the type.

  A slight chin nod was the only indication Isaiah was reading Tate. “But that night, I climbed out of my window to meet a friend for coffee, just to talk. When I got back, it was after two a.m. The house was dark and quiet.” Another sigh. “Some guy broke in while I was gone. Mom ran to my room, maybe for help, maybe to protect me. I’ll never know. She was on the floor between my bed and the window. In a pool of blood. Twelve times. He knifed her twelve times.”

  There was that number again...

  “I got to hold her hand while she breathed her last.” Isaiah swallowed so hard it seemed his Adam’s apple stuck in his throat for a moment. “Of all the people screaming in my head to be heard, morning, noon, and night, I never heard... her. Dad was always gone, and I should’ve been there for her. She was alone.”

  “You didn’t kill her.” Tate heard his heart reaching out to his friend.

  “I know that intellectually.” Isaiah tugged one of those napkins off the stack. Folding it, he swiped his eyes, then buried it inside his clenched fist. “She was lying on her stomach right beneath my window. I almost stepped on her. Blood was everywhere. On my bedroom wall. The ceiling. She’d scrawled a heart in the puddle next to her face. Three letters in the center. M. Y. I. Do you know what she was trying to tell me when she died?”

  “My Isaiah,” Tate breathed.

  “Yeah.” Isaiah grunted, nodding. “She loved me with her dying breath, but where was I? Out being reckless for the first time in my life. Drinking coffee. Chatting. Letting her deal with a murderer all by herself.”

  ‘I should have been there’ breathed between them like a living regret for the mothers they’d lost.

  “You were just a kid,” Tate offered. Didn’t that sound familiar?

  “True, that,” Isaiah murmured, his gaze on the table. “But not a day goes by that my soul doesn’t ache for one more day… one more chance… to have stayed home and saved her life.”

  Shit. I know what you mean. Exactly. What. You. Mean…

  Now Tate needed a napkin. Just one. Real men didn’t cry, they just got dust in their eyes. Must be something in the air. “Fucking number twelve,” he growled.

  Isaiah rapped the table with his knuckle. “Damnedest thing, huh. Life’s good until all of a sudden, it’s not.”

  “So this is your idea of a psychic test?”

  “I didn’t have one in mind,” Isaiah murmured, meeting Tate’s eyes. “I just wanted you to know that shit happens. Your dad walked away from his only kid instead of rebuilding his family, and that wasn’t right. He cheated you when he did that, and mine cheated me when he decided to save the world instead of hanging around and helping his only child survive the worst tragedy of his life. It was just as poor a choice, but in the long run, it doesn’t matter, Tate. We both lost everything the day we lost our moms, and that’s just the way it is.”

  Truer words.

  The elder Zaroyin’s attempt at turning military men and women into science fiction type drones had killed hundreds of volunteers before it ended, and it nearly destroyed Isaiah in the process. By the time Abraham Zaroyin came to his senses, Isaiah and Eden were both in the hands of his psychotic partners in crime, both slated to die. But that operation ended months ago.

  Tate drew in a deep breath. Never had he expected to find kinship with the diabolical Dr. Abraham Zaroyin’s only son, but there they were. Not ready to hug and sing Kumbaya, but leaning on each other like—brothers. Another hard swallow.

  Isaiah lifted his eyes. “So, teach me how to block Tucker and Eden. Some days they drive me crazy.” Isn’t that the truth?

  “You know how to block the world, but you can’t block Tucker?” Tate asked, puzzled. Isaiah was the rock star on the Deuces Wild Team.

  “That’s the problem. I can’t block anyone.” Isaiah crumpled the stack of napkins, his knuckles white. “I can read most people’s minds, but I can’t block shit. All I can do is filter the noise in my head a little bit, but not enough to turn the volume completely off. I need to know how you keep people like me out. What’s the key?”

  “So you’ve got migraines all the time.” Tate made that a statement. The clamor of too many people screaming, speaking, and crying in a guy’s head could drive him crazy. How long had Isaiah suffered with that racket. Fifteen years maybe? That was a damned long time to put up with everyone else’s pain, on top of his own.

  “You have no idea,” Isaiah muttered.

  “Actually, I do.” Tate remembered back to his worst nightmares and migraines, attributing both to grief instead of what might have been his psychic ability pushing through, like a weed in the frozen tundra that his heart had become. He’d been full of rage then, mad at his dad for being emotionally absent, mad at the world for—revolving—like nothing had happened when a woman as exquisite as his mother died. That was when he’d first started hating people.

  But one by one, he’d eliminated those voices, picturing the ghosts who made them—right before he lifted an imaginary fifty cal and blew them away. All of them. Figuratively.

  “Think blanks. Don’t project cozy images or mantras or all that BS. Make a pistol in your mind and shoot blanks at the voices. End them.” That was the only way he could describe it.

  “You kill them?”

  Tate shrugged. “Why not? They’re not real, and it’s not like I’m using live ammo.”

  “Do they bleed when you shoot them?”

  “Hell, no. I just want them to shut up. That’s why the blanks. They’re silence. I picture the voices. I line ’em up in my sights, and pop. I shoot them with silence and they turn to dust.”

  “Wow, I’ve heard silence was golden, but… really? It works?” Isaiah cocked his head, a curious sparkle in his eye. “Amazing. In effect, you reroute their psychic demands though…” Yada, yada. Yeah. Whatever. This was where Isaiah got borrrrrrring. He trailed off, his fingers tapping the tabletop. “Let me try. Project something at me. Go on, I know you can do it.”

  “It’d be damned nice if you’d shut up,” Tate projected without batting an eye.

  Isaiah grinned. “Well, did you?” His eyes lit up with glee. “You did! I did it!”

  Tate grunted at that no-brainer.

  “Yes, I blocked you!” Damned if Isaiah’s shoulders didn’t drop with relief while he blew out a deep sigh. “I’m saved. You have no idea what this means to me. You’ve got to teach Eden and Ky how to do this.”

  “Not Tucker?” Tate lifted an eyebrow.

  Isaiah’s face split wide with a toothy grin. “Not today. Soon. Maybe.”

  Interesting yet again.

  Isaiah leaned into the table, his black eyes intense. “I know you don’t think you belong on this team, but you do. You’re not a joke, Tate. You ever play cards?”

  “Solitaire,” Tate pushed at him psychically.

  A wide smile split Isaiah’s face. He shook his head, looking pleased with himself, then answered in kind. “It figures. You ever play poker?”

  Why answer? He already knew Tate avoided games.

  Isaiah interlocked his fingers, still smiling. “A joker’s a wild card, Tate,” he said out loud, “and that’s what you are. He doesn’t know it yet, but you’re Tucker’s secret weapon, not a joke. You can block other psychics, which makes you more valuable in any strategic power play. They’ll never see you coming. What other psychic skills are you keeping from us?”

  Did talking to animals count? “I’ll let you know when they show up,” Tate growled. One was enough.

  Chapter Thirty

  “Hi. I’m looking for Portia Meta,” Winslow said by way of introduction at the open hospital room door. “I’m Winslow Parrish. I saw her up in dialysis yesterday, and I was wondering if I could talk with her.”

  After her shower and a light breakfast of scrambled eggs and one slice of crispy bacon, Winslow had ventured out into her new world in her ne
w wardrobe, dragging an IV tree behind her with Breeze’s help. Except for her bare head, she looked cute in a waifish, they-just-let-me-out-of-the-asylum kind of way.

  She’d spotted Tate and another man at a table in the break area on her way out of the ward, but they seemed serious, so she hadn’t interrupted. Besides, her two appointed police chaperones followed at a respectable distance. That ought to keep Tate happy.

  “I’ll let you two talk,” Breeze said. “Call me when you’re ready to walk back to your room.”

  The dark-haired woman sitting with Portia nodded for Winslow to join her. “Come, come,” she said in perfect English, a kindly smile breaching her face as she lifted to her feet and offered her chair. “We would love to visit with you.”

  That was easy.

  “Oh, no, I’m fine. Please sit. I need to stand anyway. I need the exercise.”

  Portia offered a one-handed wave from her bed. “Hi, Winslow. How are you today?”

  “I’m fine, but is this your mother?” Winslow asked.

  “Yes, I am her mother. Ester,” the mother said, bobbing her head, but on her feet at the other side of Portia’s bed as if she wouldn’t think of sitting while Winslow stood. “Can I offer you something to eat or drink? If I were at home I would offer you baklava and chai, but here...”

  Winslow waved her kindness off. “No thanks, I’m the one who should’ve brought a gift for you. How long have you been in America?”

  “Since July. My husband works with your country’s Central Intelligence Agency. We are very happy to be here.”

  “You’re very brave,” Winslow said to Portia.

  Portia shrugged both shoulders and offered a quiet, “Meh.”

  “How long has she been sick?” Winslow needed to know.

  Ester ducked her head into her shoulders. “All of her life, but now here in America, we finally have hope for a transplant. So we wait.”

  “And we get to feel like a pincushion every day,” Portia added with a tired smile.

  Winslow cocked her head to look at the slender girl. Maybe twelve or thirteen, Portia Meta had long, black hair with no luster to it. Pulled back into a tight ponytail, it made her look more like a little boy as thin as she was. “Can I tell you a secret?” she asked Portia.