Black On Black (Quentin Black Mystery #3)

by JC Andrijeski

  I didn’t even say anything.

  I was still watching his face when he pulled my mouth down to his.

  He kissed me tentatively at first... then, after a bare few seconds, roughly. His hand tightened, clenching in my wet hair. Heat flared off him not long after we started, an intensity that hit at my muscles and joints, rising as he deepened the kiss, pulling me flush with his lap. He used his tongue and lips differently that time, more intimately somehow, almost like he was drinking from me... an inexorable pull that stole my breath.

  Too much lived there. Enough that I should have been worried.

  More worried, I mean.

  Longing lived there. Desire. That strange pain-that-wasn’t-really-pain. Possessiveness. Emotions more subtle and better shielded from my mind. What might have been memory. I felt him wanting me... wanting me almost violently, briefly letting himself feel the depth of that want. I felt grief there, too, what might have been regret.

  I don’t have better words for any of it.

  It all sounds so inadequate to me now.

  He wanted something from me, the kind of want only tangentially related to sex. His arms, his hands, every part of him pulled on me for that thing he wanted. I could feel him desperate for whatever it was. At the same time, I could tell he believed he’d never get it.

  The realization broke his heart on some level.

  Or maybe it just threw him into denial. Maybe even resentment, although that resentment didn’t feel aimed at me.

  I don’t know how long we kissed like that.

  I don’t even remember how it ended, or what we did immediately after.

  Ate breakfast maybe. Talked.

  I do know the manilla envelope remained on the floor when we left the room. I know when I went back to look for it, maybe an hour later, it had disappeared.

  Most of all, I know that later that day, Black was gone.

  Black was gone, and I wasn’t to see him again for a long time.

  Four

  FEBRUARY

  Three months later

  7 PM, Pacific Coast Time

  San Francisco, California

  HANG ON A second, doc...

  It was late where he was. Or early, depending on how you looked at it.

  Early morning hours, I guessed. Maybe only a few hours before dawn.

  I tracked each detail obsessively, looking for clues.

  I’d spent weeks after he left trying to figure out where he was exactly, taking any hint he gave me, any glimpse of his surroundings, any breath of presence or snapshot of the buildings or people he walked through or beside.

  I still paid attention to every flicker of detail, no matter how small.

  I’d watched him in meetings in high-ceilinged rooms. I’d watched him on the street, snowflakes melting as they touched the skin of his face and lips. I’d seen him on bridges, lying in beds, sitting on couches and in leather chairs. I’d seen him in coffee shops, in restaurants. I’d seen him with other people.

  So far, at least––I hadn’t seen him screwing any of them, though.

  He’d gotten offers. Lots and lots of offers.

  Of course, I had no idea how much he hid from me.

  I knew he sat on a windowsill now in a darkened apartment, staring down at a cobblestone street. I glimpsed flickers of awareness around him as he checked for others watching this particular stretch of dark road. I felt him looking for open windows, using his mind to scan for stray thoughts and presences. I felt the low hum of his own mind in the background, his attempts to distract me as he focused down on a green-painted door damaged by water and wind.

  He couldn’t keep me out anymore though. Not like before.

  Something had changed between us.

  I had no idea what that thing was.

  Our minds were tangled together in ways I couldn’t explain to myself––or to him, although I hadn’t really tried to do either. I didn’t talk to him about it. I didn’t want him to know really, since I suspected he might just use that information to find some new way to shut me out.

  I felt his heart beat in his chest.

  I felt him slow his breathing. I saw clouds of vapor as he exhaled through the open window.

  It was cold. Not snowing, but cold. His gloved fingers were almost numb.

  He repositioned his arms, squinting through the scope as he stared down on a dark street. He’d been given a time to be here, an exact location. They’d been precise.

  Even now, as he checked his watch, noting just how precise they’d been, I felt him wonder fleetingly how they could have possibly known he would need to be in a place like this at this particular time. Downstairs in that building, people shot up heroin and fucked prostitutes. I felt the thought create a ripple of pain in him and fought not to react to that, too––not to take it personally. Really, if anything, it was a good sign.

  I had to hope that his hair-trigger reactions to pretty much anything to do with sex stemmed mostly from the fact that he wasn’t getting any.

  He’d agreed to this job. It wasn’t the first one he’d agreed to.

  Of course, it was a leap of faith that they’d been telling him the truth about this person, about what he was. But all of the research Black had done on his own confirmed the basic facts.

  The guy liked to watch women killed.

  He didn’t like it to be prostitutes either, so he paid to have them kidnapped prior to their torture and death. Most were poor girls, immigrants. Dark eyes, dark hair, olive skin. Some were from Eastern Europe, but increasingly, they were from the south.

  He got off on watching them beaten to death.

  Black grimaced, reminding himself this was a time-limited thing.

  It was a job. But it was temporary.

  In the meantime, he could try to do a little good. Get one more sadistic psychopath off the streets. In the end it was only six months of his life. They owned his ass for six months.

  He repeated that to himself. Reassured himself.

  I kept my thoughts quiet, a glass mirror in the background.

  I’d ceased to feel guilty for eavesdropping on where he was... what he was doing... even what he was thinking. I wasn’t doing it to invade his privacy. I wasn’t even doing it because both of us had gotten possessive enough for it be outright alarming at times. In all, my watching him had very little to do with the fact that he and I were more or less dating––if you could call it dating, given how things stood between us.

  I wasn’t spying on him to be controlling.

  I was worried about him.

  When the slight-framed blond man emerged from the stained green door at the bottom of an ancient apartment building on a narrow, cobblestone alleyway, the second hand on Black’s watch had just ticked onto the top part of the minute.

  Oh-three-hundred and fifty-three... precisely.

  I felt him try to push me further out of his immediate consciousness, right before he switched his attention back to the earpiece he wore.

  “That him?” he said only.

  He felt the person on the other end checking.

  He didn’t ask how they verified his target, but I felt him wonder about that, too. Were they seer? If so, he couldn’t feel it on them. For all he knew, they had a drone hovering overhead. For all he knew, involving him at all was utterly redundant.

  Either way, Black knew he had the right person. He would never pull a trigger without knowing exactly who or what waited at the other end of his gun.

  He also knew the final word wasn’t up to him.

  “Target confirmed. Engage when ready.”

  Black’s his jaw tightened, but again, he didn’t ask.

  The first clear line he had, he took.

  The kickback from the rifle pushed his shoulder and body back. He compensated with a precision that awed me, moving slightly on his seat on the wooden sill even as he kept his firing line utterly still. He had another bullet chambered by the bolt before he’d looked back through the scope to assess the resu
lts of the first shot.

  “Direct hit,” the voice said through the earpiece. “Nicely done, Mr. Black.”

  Black kept the gun aimed at the body now bleeding out on the icy sidewalk.

  “Insurance?” he queried.

  He’d learned to ask. They didn’t want him to take a piss without their okay.

  There was another silence, then the voice rose.

  “No,” it said. “First shot was fatal. You can go, Mr. Black. In fact, I was just advised to tell you to leave now. The body has been seen by another party. Authorities are being notified as we speak. You’ll be shielded from here, but if additional measures are required to keep yourself from being ID’d, I am told you may use them at your discretion...”

  Black didn’t bother to answer.

  He knew exactly who the “other party” was that the man in his earpiece referred to.

  Ian Stone had been hunting Black the same as Black had been hunting him. Cat and mouse, wolf and rabbit––they switched roles hourly, daily, sometimes by the minute.

  Lowering the gun, Black slid out of view of the window.

  He dropped to the floor, immediately disassembling the rifle and putting the pieces in the long case that lay on the thin, olive-green carpet. Again, he worked with a speed and an efficiency that fascinated me. He already had most of those pieces back in their foam molds inside the case when he reached up to turn off the headset, then shifted the direction of his consciousness back towards me.

  You still there, Miri? he sent.

  I’d learned to play dumb. It probably should have made me nervous, just how good I was getting at playing the oblivious girlfriend. Then again, I’d been trained to use whatever I had when circumstances demanded it.

  Do I even want to know what that was? I let my thoughts hold a faint edge.

  I felt Black sigh.

  I tried to give him opportunities to tell me things, to open up to me about where he was, what he was doing, how he really felt. I tried to keep an open line between us, in case he changed his mind... in case he needed me like that.

  So far he hadn’t. Not once.

  I felt the shame there, even now, lingering in the background like smoke. In the foreground, I felt him thinking quietly that he needed to get better about blocking me. I felt him thinking I was too much in his light now for him to be sloppy about holding that line. He couldn’t afford to be half-assed about partitioning his thoughts, not while he was here.

  When he didn’t answer, I pressed him again.

  What are you doing right now, Black? That time, I let him feel more of my real feelings. Concern bled through my thoughts and I felt it disarm him, making his jaw clench. You must know I’m worried about you...

  Fighting back his reaction, he sent me a pulse of reassurance. Just some work for a client, he sent back, and more or less truthfully. I know you’re sick of hearing this, but I really can’t tell you any more than that right now, Miri. I would if I could.

  What client? I sent. Who? Can you tell me that much at least?

  You already know who.

  Black...

  I’m not quite as dumb as you think either, baby.

  I started to protest, but felt him smile.

  He sent me a pulse of heat.

  When I reacted sharply, my light flaring into his, he pulled back, clenching his jaw a second time. I felt his own pain worsen. I felt a denser want there, keening upwards, nearly violent before he brought it back under control. I felt him thinking about sex. Images flickered there... wanting. The job made it worse. The stress. He wanted the comfort. He wanted the comfort and the connection. Hell, he wanted the physical outlet.

  He didn’t know how much more of this he could take.

  I remained quiet, just outside the wall he’d thrown up between us.

  I hadn’t reacted like that on purpose, much less done it to hurt him, but I still felt guilty. I honestly couldn’t help it anymore. Whatever kept us so tightly bound together now––whatever made it so easy to hear his thoughts and the voices that lingered around him––that same thing also made me want him so badly at times I could barely control myself. When I was this tangled in his mind, I had to do everything in my power not to pull on him.

  I felt him missing me.

  For both of us now, it was like an ongoing, physical ache.

  He’d come close to telling me that a few times, too.

  Close. But he hadn’t done it.

  I felt him thinking what a fucking coward he was with me still.

  The wall between us shifted, grew porous.

  I’ll tell you everything as soon as I can, he promised. I’m finishing this as fast as I can, Miri. I swear to the gods I am... I promise.

  I let him feel my skepticism.

  Not that he was lying about trying to get back to me.

  More that he was downplaying the danger he was in, as well as how bad things really were for him there.

  You’re really not going to tell me anything? I sent. Nothing about what you’re doing, or what this is really about... or why you agreed to it?

  Bringing down the lid of the case and fastening the metal clasps on either end before he spun the combination lock on the outside, locking the gun within, he sighed. I felt him struggle with a heavier feeling that wanted to take over his light.

  Shoving it aside, he shook his head, rising to his feet with the handle firmly grasped in his fingers.

  No, baby, he sent softly, weaving an apology into the words. ... I’m not.

  IT WAS FEBRUARY.

  It was a cold, windy, sometimes-rainy and sometimes-blue skies February, and I sat in an Italian restaurant on California street, my mushroom gnocchi with cream sauce growing colder by the minute. I hadn’t even touched it. It just sat there on a plate between my elbows, and now even the smell made my stomach roil with nausea.

  I bit my lip, fighting frustration as I stared at the man sitting across from me.

  We’d had this conversation before, he and I.

  Not these exact words.

  More, it was the whole gist of the conversation, which felt a lot too similar to a conversation I’d had with him in Bangkok a few months earlier. He’d refused to take me seriously in that conversation, too. He’d also refused to believe that Black was in danger.

  Just like that time in Bangkok, Kiko sat next to him, listening to us argue, her dark eyes probing as they scanned my face.

  “––Dex, please,” I said, holding up a hand as I cut him off. “I don’t need to hear all this. I’m not arguing protocol with you. Frankly, I don’t give a damn about the company’s operational protocols. I’m telling you, something is wrong. Something that falls outside of your damned protocol...” Biting my lip to keep from raising my voice more, I deliberately subdued it instead. “Aren’t you intelligence trained? Do you really need to list out protocols to shut me up? Or do you want to listen to what I’m saying and think for yourself?”

  Dex frowned, glancing at Kiko, who raised her eyebrows.

  The only thing noticeably different––in my mind, at least––between the conversation we were having now and the one we had in Bangkok were the clothes the three of us wore.

  Rather than a sundress and sandals, Kiko, a small-bodied but densely-muscled Japanese woman, wore form-fitting black pants and a black T-shirt, the basic uniform of Black’s team. She looked like what she was in that outfit––ex-military.

  Dex, the handsome, thirties-ish African-American man sitting next to her on the leather booth, wore a tailored, charcoal-colored suit, presumably because he’d been to see a client earlier that day, or would be seeing one after lunch. He looked significantly less military now than he had when I first met him in Bangkok, but I knew him as another of Black’s vets, and definitely one with an intelligence background, despite my jab.

  Like Bangkok, this meeting had been my idea.

  Like Bangkok, they’d been stonewalling me at every goddamned turn.

  Unlike Bangkok, I found I cared a
lot less about my previous “rules” around when to use my psychic ability on other people.

  Truthfully, I was struggling more every day with the emotional side of things, and that made this conversation a lot harder. I’d talked to my shrink about it––a sweet, ex-combat vet by the name of Roger who did trauma counseling for people who’d experienced violent ordeals. Nick insisted I go see someone when he finally heard the bare bones of the story around what happened to me in Bangkok.

  I hadn’t told Nick details, definitely not about the seer side of things, but he knew what Black’s employees knew––namely the part about me being abducted and held by a mercenary who worked for human traffickers out of Russia.

  Nick had been horrified, of course.

  Predictably, he’d also blamed Black.

  He immediately insisted I go see Roger as well, who did crisis counseling work for the police. And yes, Nick was right to pressure me to see someone professionally, although I fought him on it when he first brought it up.

  Roger seemed to think my new hyper-emotionality was a normal side-effect of the trauma, and ultimately a good sign I was working through things.

  Personally, I wasn’t so sure.

  I couldn’t tell Roger that though, or anyone else really... including the two people sitting across from me now.

  I’d asked them to meet me down here, at a small, family-owned Italian restaurant across the street from the office building on California Street. So far, it looked like I was completely wasting my time.

  “You’ve been talking to him more than us, doc.” Dex’s voice remained studiously casual, but I felt him watching me warily with his coffee-colored eyes. “I’m not sure what you expect us to do about it. If you want him to come home, tell him to come home.”

  I bit my lip, looking between the two of them.

  “Do you know who he’s working for right now?” I said.

  Silence. I sat back in my chair, forcing my expression still.

  “Do you?” I said.

  “No, doc,” Dex sighed. “And frankly, it’s none of our––”

  “––He’s working for Mr. Lucky.”

  Ignoring Dex’s annoyed scowl, I looked between them, noting recognition even as I used my psychic ability to read them to confirm the extent of it.