The Kill Radius

by Nichole Christoff

“Of course.”

  He turned his face away from me and glared out the driver’s-side window.

  “I don’t know that there’s any of course about it.”

  “Hey,” I said softly. “I love you. Our disagreement doesn’t change that.”

  Barrett looked at me then, the gleam in his eye bittersweet. “We had more than a disagreement, Jamie. We had a complete disconnect regarding how we fit into each other’s lives.”

  “No. We had a moment where we realized we don’t see eye to eye on labels like long-term and commitment. We’ll figure it out.”

  But we wouldn’t figure it out by morning; I was sure of that.

  And so was Barrett, even if he didn’t want to say so.

  “I’ll walk you to your room,” he announced.

  My room. Not our room. The shift in his thinking sent sadness cascading through me.

  “I can find my own way.” I held my head high. “I’ll call you when I get home.”

  But when I got out of Barrett’s truck, he got out, too. He escorted me into the hotel. He ushered me onto an elevator and to an upper floor, all the way to the room.

  We might’ve been complete strangers for all the conversation that went on between us—and the awkwardness that felt like a third party. In a hurry to put an end to such uneasiness, I opened my handbag and dug through it to retrieve my key. But I didn’t find what I was looking for.

  “What’s wrong?” Barrett asked.

  “My room key’s missing.”

  I knew I’d had it earlier. I’d seen it when I’d dragged the elastic band from my hair and dropped it in the bag. The key had been there then.

  At least, I thought it had.

  Barrett pulled his wallet from his hip pocket. He extracted his own key card. He tapped it to the card reader and the bolt of the electronic lock retracted.

  Barrett leaned close to me. He reached past me. He opened the bedroom door.

  “You might need this,” he said, “before you check out in the morning.”

  I glanced down. The key card lay on Barrett’s palm. I looked up. His chocolate-brown eyes brimmed with sentiments he wasn’t about to express. But Corinne’s words returned to me—loud and clear—and I heard the wisdom in them.

  If you truly love him, don’t give up on him.

  For anything.

  Right there, right then, I decided I wasn’t going to give up. I wasn’t worried about words and I didn’t care about plans. Those things were changeable. But one thing wasn’t. I truly loved Adam Barrett and that fact would remain.

  Firm in that knowledge, I stepped close to him. I wrapped a hand around the nape of his neck. I drew his face to mine—and I laid one hell of a kiss on his lips.

  But this wasn’t a good-night kiss.

  It was a stay-the-night kiss.

  And Barrett got the message.

  Chapter 24

  Barrett returned my kiss with the ferocity of a man who’d been frustrated for far too long. He clutched me to him, and in two tripping steps, we moved into the bedroom. Barrett kicked the door shut behind us.

  With eager fingers, I struggled with the buttons of his crisp oxford shirt in the dark. Barrett let go of me long enough to shirk his leather jacket. It fell to the floor in a heap. I kicked off the hateful high heels I’d worn just to look the part at Hunch Nevis’s casino, stripped off the little evening bag that crossed my body, and let it land where it would. And then Barrett’s hands were on me again.

  Past the sheer curtains cloaking the window, the lights of Beauville’s marina shimmered like a shower of stars. Their pale goodness illuminated a path straight to the bed. Barrett sat on the foot of it, gripped my hips, and pulled me to him. He gazed up at me. I saw desire glimmering in his eyes and I felt like a queen.

  I sank a knee into the bedspread beside him. Barrett’s hand hooked the hollow behind my opposite knee. He guided me into his lap and I straddled him, cowgirl style.

  The hardest part of him pressed against the hottest part of me. I shifted and Barrett groaned, low and deep. And I thought I’d go crazy if we didn’t get out of our clothes.

  Barrett’s patience, too, ran out. He reached back to grab the yoke of his half-buttoned shirt. He hauled it over his head, threw it on the floor. I seized the tail of his belt and tugged it free of his trousers. I fought with the buckle, my hands shaking with excitement and nerves.

  Barrett twisted. He turned. He tipped me onto my back on the bed. His mouth was on my lips, on my throat, on the curve of my collarbone. Pleasure hummed through me and I closed my eyes. I opened them again—and saw a shadow slipping across the glittering backdrop of the city’s lights.

  Barrett and I were not alone.

  “Hey!”

  That single word made it out of my mouth before the shadow snatched something blocky from the far nightstand. In cop mode now, Barrett rolled off of me and onto his feet. He positioned himself between me and the threat.

  “Stop!” he commanded.

  But the intruder didn’t.

  He swung at Barrett, connected in a crunch of shattering plastic. Barrett grunted. He fell to his knees.

  The assailant wrenched open the door to the hall. Light silhouetted him as it speared through the room. And as he ran away.

  I scrabbled for the switch on the bedside lamp. I flicked it on in a heartbeat. The room’s fancy alarm clock lay in a thousand pieces on the carpet, and Barrett knelt there, too.

  I grabbed Barrett’s wrist, tried to look into his face. “Are you all right?”

  He nodded, one hand clapped to his eye. He planted that hand on the bed’s oyster linens, pushed himself to his feet. And left a bloody print behind.

  “You’re hurt,” I said, but Barrett didn’t listen.

  Bleeding and shirtless, he bolted after the guy who’d attacked him.

  The hotel’s fire alarm began to shriek. Ignoring it, I reached the hall in time to see Barrett barrel into the stairwell. I pounded after him, hit the bar across the emergency exit at a run. The sound of heavy soles echoed off of every surface. Leaning over the handrail, I caught a glimpse of Barrett below and thundered after him.

  Guests, frightened by the fire bell, flooded onto the stairs. But I couldn’t let them slow me down. The intruder had already attacked Barrett and I knew he wouldn’t hesitate to hurt him again—or to assault someone else.

  Threading my way through the crowded stairwell, I earned more than one angry look. But I kept pushing forward until I reached the lobby. There, people hustled every which way. Parents herded their children outside. Couples clung to one another’s hands and ran. Even individuals made tracks for the exit. If our guy was among them, he was beyond detection now—and acknowledging as much left a bitter taste in my mouth.

  Worse yet, I didn’t see Barrett in the mix and that worried me. Barefoot, I climbed onto a coffee table in the middle of a seating cluster, scanned the lobby for him. Through the hotel’s glass atrium, I spied fire engines as they roared into the parking lot. And then there was Barrett, alongside the hotel’s night manager, on their way to intercept the firefighters—and I breathed a sigh of relief.

  Once the panic had subsided, the night manager joined Barrett and me in my room, as an EMT tended to the nasty gash over Barrett’s left eye and a pair of uniformed cops took our statements. She told us that the building had never been on fire, and that the intruder had triggered the alarm when he opened the emergency exit to flee down the stairs. Security cameras proved as much, but the video they took would be next to useless because the guy had worn long sleeves, gloves, a baseball cap, and glasses. In short, he looked like half the men along Mississippi’s Gulf Coast. And he hadn’t left us with any way to track him down.

  Barrett, on the other hand, had left a trail of blood all the way to the lobby. Head wounds tend to bleed like a son of a bitch and the cut in Barrett’s brow had gushed. Barrett didn’t need stitches, however, and I was glad for that. The EMT butterflied the wound, declared that Barrett would live,
and began to pack up his gear. And that’s when Marc Sandoval sauntered into the room.

  Chucking his chin at the bandages on Barrett’s face, Marc said, “That’s quite a look for you.”

  Barrett spared Marc a sidelong glance.

  “What’re you doing here?” I demanded.

  Marc answered with one of his cocky grins. “The Drug Enforcement Agency has eyes and ears everywhere.”

  I wasn’t so sure everywhere would normally include this hotel, but I had no doubt Marc had put in a word at the desk days ago, and tonight, flashed his DEA shield at the cops in the hall, the manager, and every last member of her staff who’d retreated to the corridor in order to come check up on me.

  “How about you take your eyes and ears and hit the road?” Barrett said.

  “Boy,” Marc replied. “That knock on the head hasn’t done much for your disposition.”

  Barrett rose to his feet, looked Marc square in the eye—and I intervened.

  “Thanks for stopping by,” I told him. “I’m sorry we interrupted your evening.”

  “The night’s still young. Did the guy take anything?”

  “Not a thing.”

  “Local PD figures Jamie and I walked into an attempted burglary,” Barrett explained.

  “Good,” Marc said, “because I got concerned that Nevis’s men might’ve tracked you down, babe.”

  “Hunch Nevis?” Barrett frowned at me. “Why would he come after you?”

  “You know him?” I asked.

  “He owns a bar outside of town, and a few other things. The post commander declared his place off-limits to all military personnel.”

  Well, during my visit, I was pretty certain I’d seen some soldiers frittering away their paychecks there.

  But I kept that bit of trivia to myself.

  Barrett repeated his question. “Why would Nevis come after you, Jamie?”

  “Because that bar he owns is really an illegal gambling house and I found out about it when I made sure his goons didn’t put a dent in Bran Laurent this morning. Plus, I took a little self-guided tour of the place tonight.”

  “What?”

  Barrett’s outburst prompted the cops to stick their heads into the room, but as we were all still in one piece and not at each other’s throats, they went about their business. I went on to tell Barrett about my encounter with Bran in the tobacco barn across from Hunch Nevis’s casino. I told him about Bran’s claim that he’d seen Eddie Jepson there—and that he’d suggested I could be the one who laid hands on the single thing Ray couldn’t get for himself: Nevis’s gotcha list.

  “I didn’t get the list,” I admitted, “and I didn’t see hide nor hair of Eddie. But I did run into Monique Wells. She blew the whistle on me and, um, things got a little sticky after that.”

  “Did it occur to you to report any of this,” Barrett demanded, “to Beauville law enforcement, or the feds, or even to me?”

  “Report what?” I retorted. “That some sleazy private eye told me a tall tale in the hopes I’d snoop through a trash collector’s mansion? That’s a waste of everybody’s time, Barrett.”

  “You need to let others be the judge of that. And you need to be careful. What if Eddie Jepson had been there? What if sticky had turned to deadly?”

  “It’s all right,” Marc interjected. “I went with her.”

  Barrett’s face shuttered.

  And I wanted to throttle Marc for opening his mouth.

  Now I couldn’t tell what Barrett was thinking and I had no idea what he was feeling. To make matters worse, I had no idea if Marc had chosen to stir this particular pot on purpose. If he had, it was a dirty trick designed to call me out and undermine Barrett’s trust in me.

  But maybe Marc spoke from complete openness and honesty. In which case, I was telling lies by omission once again. Guilt whispered in my ear. It suggested that lying to the man I loved was exactly what I’d been doing. Had I intended to protect him from worry—or had I intended to insulate myself?

  Before I could figure that out, the night manager rejoined us. “Ms. Sinclair? Your new room is ready.”

  Barrett shook his head. “Another room a few doors down isn’t good enough.”

  Concern rippled across the manager’s face, though whether it was over my well-being or over a potential lawsuit, I didn’t know. Still, I tried to placate her. And to quiet Barrett.

  “Whoever the intruder was and whoever he works for, he won’t come back tonight.”

  “You don’t know that,” Marc said.

  “Come with me,” Barrett suggested, “back to the post.”

  I shook my head.

  I could take care of myself.

  “Then I’ll stay with you here,” Barrett said. “I’ll keep you safe.”

  “I’ll be all right,” I told him, “but you should go. Get some rest. I promise I’ll call you tomorrow. Marc, I’ll call you, too.”

  Marc glanced from Barrett to me and back again—and a smile curled at the corner of his mouth.

  “I’m five minutes away, babe. Remember that.”

  I nodded. I herded the guys out the door. And then I packed my meager bag.

  The manager herself offered to carry my suitcase to my new digs on a different floor. Her assistant and a bellhop stood ready to lead the way. I gathered up my handbag, then moved to grab the gorgeous vase of lilies Barrett had sent to me.

  As my hand closed around the throat of the vase, it hit me. The police had banked on the incident being an attempted burglary. And without proof to the contrary, Barrett and I had believed that, too. But while it was true that my personal belongings had gone untouched, my clothes in the closet had been undisturbed, and the safe in the wall had remained unopened, we’d all been wrong. This hadn’t been an attempted burglary. It had been a successful one. Because Ray’s casebooks—which I’d left lying next to the lilies—were gone.

  Chapter 25

  In a different room, on a different floor, in the same hotel where I’d intended to finally spend a romantic weekend with Lieutenant Colonel Adam Barrett, I slept alone, worn out from worry and sheer exhaustion. In the wee hours of the night, hulking men hunted me in my dreams, intent on reaching into my soul with their supernatural claws to rip out Ray’s notebooks that I’d somehow hidden there. Close to dawn, those shadowy men caught up with me.

  I jerked awake in the middle of a nightmare, sweat-soaked and shaking. That’s when my new cellphone, on the pillow beside me, chimed. Bleary-eyed, I fumbled for the thing, managed to get it in the vicinity of my mouth.

  “Hello?” I mumbled.

  The garbled sound of heavy traffic met my ear. And in the long pause that followed, I nearly hung up. But a soft voice stopped me.

  “Is this…is this Jamie Sinclair?”

  I sat bolt upright, shoving the twisted sheets off of me.

  “Yes. Who might you be?”

  “I want you to know I didn’t know what Hunch’s men were going to do to you.”

  Monique Wells.

  “It’s all right,” I told her, even though it wasn’t. “A friend of mine persuaded them to change their minds.”

  In the silence that followed, I could tell Monique didn’t quite believe me.

  “I wasn’t going to call you,” she admitted.

  “What changed your mind?”

  “My friend Jackie. That’s Sable to you. She said you wanted to talk to me, and…well, after what happened with those men, I thought maybe I owed you.”

  She didn’t owe me anything. Not really. But if she wanted to talk, there might be plenty she could tell me about Eddie Jepson, Hunch Nevis, and the bombing that had killed forty-one people onboard that ill-fated riverboat.

  “Where are you?” I asked. “I’ll come see you right now.”

  “I…I need some money. Before we talk. To get out of town.”

  “All right. I’ll bring five hundred dollars to you.”

  Monique didn’t haggle over the amount.

  And that mea
nt she was desperate to get anything she could.

  “Okay,” she said, “but you’ve got to come alone. And you’ve got to promise you won’t tell anyone you saw me.”

  “I can do that. We’ll meet right now. Name the place and I’ll bring the cash.”

  Nineteen minutes later, the gray light of predawn found me standing in the place of Monique’s choosing, a smelly side street cutting through the heart of Beauville’s cannery row. At my back, trucks chugged past on the main drag, spewing diesel fumes and delivering the morning’s catch from the docks to the processing plants that fronted the thoroughfare. Seagulls, looking for lost fish and leftovers, screamed overhead. One bird lighted on a lamppost, turned his beady eye toward me in case I had the guts of a grouper stuffed in my pockets, and found me wanting.

  I couldn’t say I blamed him.

  As far as I was concerned, everything was in short supply that morning, including time for some basic reconnaissance. The schedule Monique had laid out hadn’t allowed me to reach the street much before our meeting. Maybe she’d planned it that way.

  Or maybe someone else had.

  Monique, Ray had said, occasionally turned tricks for Hunch Nevis, but what if she was open to doing other jobs for him, too? It was entirely possible he’d found out my true identity and that she’d set me up at his request—and that his goons would descend on me at any moment. Just in case, I stuck near the intersection where the quiet street met the busier one. And I calmly weighed the ambush possibilities the place presented.

  On my left and on my right, the crumbling brick façades of prewar factories flanked the tired roadway, leaving no room for sidewalks. A truck or SUV would be wide enough to block the street completely. One at each end of the glorified alley would cut off my escape route entirely.

  Weathered wood doors interrupted the brick at irregular intervals, but I doubted if they’d help me get out in a pinch. None of them looked as if they’d been opened in eons. I certainly wouldn’t be able to duck through one if things got dicey.

  I was still weighing exit strategies in my mind when Monique appeared at the far end of the side street. She breezed around the corner like a boss, then halted in the middle of the pockmarked asphalt. With her hands shoved deep into the pockets of a petal-pink rain slicker, she gazed at me expectantly.