The Kill Radius

by Nichole Christoff

Due to Marc’s advance planning, my own voice sounded an octave lower than it normally did and it crackled with a metallic heat. I touched a hand to my throat, felt the device that made this possible snugged against my larynx. My turtleneck and overalls covered the stiff frame that circled my neck to hold it in place.

  “Eddie,” I said, “you’ve been keeping secrets.”

  Eddie squirmed in his chair.

  “Tell me the truth and you can go see Shirley.”

  “What, uh, what do you want to know?”

  “Who paid you to bomb the Lady Luck?”

  On his chair, Eddie began to sway.

  “I don’t…I don’t know what you mean.”

  Behind him, in the semidarkness, Marc slammed a splintered two-by-four against the steel handrail of the industrial steps leading to a loft space high above us. The crack and ring of the impact could’ve been the roof caving in. And Eddie jumped at the sound.

  “Tell me,” I rasped, “who paid you.”

  “A guy.” Eddie’s voice was way too high. “Just some guy.”

  He was lying, of course.

  “Did this same guy send you to break into a house Saturday night?”

  “No, no.”

  Marc applied a crowbar to the handrail, dragging iron along steel. The screech of it curdled my blood. Eddie, too, cringed against his restraints.

  I said, “There was a woman in that house. She was eight months pregnant. And now she’s gone. Where is she?”

  “I don’t…I don’t…”

  “Eddie…,” I threatened, and let menace linger in my tone.

  “He said it would be an easy job!” Eddie blurted. “All I had to do was leave the satchel on the riverboat and get the hell out of there. But that dick partner of Ray Walther was there! He was hassling Monique. She’d always been good to me, Monique.”

  “So you were good to her. You got her off the riverboat.”

  “Vern didn’t want to let her in the skiff. But she’d always been good to me.”

  Vern. The name flashed through me like heat lightning. I knew Vern. He’d tried to flail the skin from Bran’s hide in that tobacco barn. And Hunch Nevis was the one who gave Vern his orders.

  Apparently, he gave Eddie his orders, too.

  And if Hunch Nevis had taken Corinne…The implications nearly turned my stomach inside out. Why he’d do such a thing, I didn’t know. I only knew I had to find her. I had to bring her home.

  I said, “Nevis sent you after the pregnant woman, but you didn’t get your hands on her until last night. Where is she, Eddie?”

  “I don’t know! I went the first time. I was just supposed to scare her and she saw me on the deck. But I didn’t go back!”

  “Where is she now? Where did Vern take her?”

  “I can’t tell you,” Eddie wailed, “what I don’t know…”

  “You do know,” I said, “and you will tell.”

  But a sudden hammering on the far side of the building had both Eddie and me falling silent. For a second, it sounded as if a giant were pounding the plumbing with a sledgehammer. But as the staccato beats reverberated through the building, I realized that was no sledgehammer.

  It was a battering ram.

  “We’ve got company,” Marc announced, the device at his own throat turning his words into sizzling bacon.

  And Marc was right. Only law enforcement would attack with that kind of equipment. Sure as shootin’, they’d take Eddie away from me. They’d arrest me for my own wrongs. They’d arrest Marc, too.

  And we’d never find out where Nevis had taken Corinne.

  Desperation—and the terror that I’d fail Ray and Corinne—drove me to do what I did next. Stepping into the ring of light, I snatched a flat-head screwdriver from the tools arrayed in front of Eddie. Shivering in his chair, he looked up at me, eyes wide. Tears glimmered in those eyes and he whimpered as if he were certain I was a demon sent to drag him straight to hell. And maybe that was my intention.

  I fisted a gloved hand in his hair, shoved his head back to expose his chin. I crammed the point of the screwdriver into the soft spot beneath Eddie’s jaw. And while the feds hammered away on the warehouse door, I delivered my ultimatum.

  “Tell me what I want to know, Eddie, or I’ll cut your tongue out by its roots.”

  “Hey.” Marc appeared beside me in the circle of light. His hand closed over my wrist.

  I elbowed him away. I wouldn’t let him intervene. Not with Corinne’s life at stake. I pressed the point of the driver into Eddie’s flesh. And drew a bead of blood.

  “Tell me,” I warned him, “where Nevis took the pregnant woman.”

  With an acrid odor and dark stain, Eddie wet himself. I drove the point deeper. And Eddie’s tongue curled in his mouth like it had a mind of its own.

  “I can’t tell you,” he whimpered, “what I don’t know.”

  Chapter 29

  With the clatter of sheet metal, the door in the distance gave way. A shaft of light speared through the dim warehouse. Boots hammered on the dusty floor.

  “Federal agent! Drop your weapon!”

  Marc clapped his hands to the top of his head. Eddie fell limp in his chair. A slim figure in riot gear skirted the ring of light. She aimed a flashlight and a gun at me big enough to blast me in half. Unless I missed my guess, she was April Callahan.

  And she wasn’t alone.

  Barrett stepped past her. He took one look at the unconscious Eddie bound to the chair and slapped a hand to the body camera he wore pinned to his Kevlar vest. With the device blind and deaf, he jabbed a finger in Marc’s visored face.

  “Get her out of here. Now.”

  I glanced at Callahan, but she didn’t object; she was already on the radio strapped to her shoulder.

  “Victim is in custody. Building is clear. Repeat: building is clear.”

  Marc didn’t stand around to discuss the finer points of Barrett’s procedure or the law. He grabbed my hand and towed me—screwdriver and all—toward the near end of the warehouse. But I wasn’t sure I wanted to go.

  “Nevis has got Corinne!” I called over my shoulder to Barrett. With the device at my throat, my voice sounded alien even to myself. “We’ve got to get her back!”

  “Go!” Barrett bellowed.

  With a firm tug, Marc jerked me over a threshold and into a run-down office. He slammed the flimsy door behind us, threw the deadbolt as if the space had been locked up since time began. Marc didn’t bother to barricade us in, however—and there didn’t appear to be any other way out.

  He rolled a wobbly desk chair out of the way, kicked a cheap throw rug aside. In the middle of the office’s floor was a trapdoor. How Marc had known about it, I had no clue, but he grabbed the iron ring countersunk into the trap and hauled it open.

  A rickety ladder descended through the darkness. I lost sight of the rungs after a few feet, heard the lapping of waves below. I could smell the saltiness of the sea and the stink of dead fish and low tide—and I knew this was the only way to safety.

  Marc stripped off his helmet and ripped the voice scrambler from his neck. He dropped them both through the opening. Before they splashed down, Marc was already unzipping his coveralls and stepping out of his boots. Together, these garments were evidence that we’d been up to no good. They had to go, so Marc kicked them into the hole, too.

  I followed his example, starting with the screwdriver. I got rid of everything except my street clothes and my nitrile gloves. Once my things had followed Marc’s into Davy Jones’s Locker, he handed me a small waterproof bag attached to a long strap. Marc got busy sealing his cellphone and a key card into his own. I did the same, securing my glasses and my cell, and when he wrapped his bag’s strap around his torso and stashed it in his shirt, I imitated him.

  Marc climbed through the hole in the floor. I knelt beside the opening, peered into the blurry darkness. The crown of Marc’s head was already gone.

  I slung a leg into the hole, found a rung with my stocking f
oot. The ladder was slippery where high tide had deposited kelp and other creatures on the rungs, and I was afraid the frail wood would give way at any second. But I kept going, pausing only to pull the trap shut over us and seal us in the watery darkness.

  At the bottom of the climb, Marc was waiting for me. Not on the ladder, however. He was already in the water. He reached up, caught me around the waist, and steadied me as I let go of the rungs. I plunged into the choppy surf.

  The water was cold as only the Gulf in February can be. When I broke the surface, salt mist stung my eyes and my teeth began to chatter. And I knew neither Marc nor I could survive in this water long: Hypothermia would kill us if drowning didn’t.

  Marc took hold of my hand, drew me away from the ladder. “If you can’t swim, babe, we’ve got a problem.”

  Well, we’d have bigger problems if we tried to return to the warehouse, and lots of them. On the floor over our heads, I heard the pounding of boots and the shouts of federal agents as they stormed through the building. I squinted at the purple horizon licking at the underside of the warehouse, picked out the blue-white lights of the shoreline, and with long strokes, struck out to reach them.

  Marc was a strong swimmer. Last October, I’d seen that firsthand when I’d accidentally interrupted him at his laps. As a result, he had the skills—and the body—to show for it, even in the rough waters of the Gulf.

  I, on the other hand, struggled to keep my head above water.

  I adopted a breaststroke, powered by a frog kick. But it didn’t take long until my shoulders screamed with fatigue even as my fingertips went numb. As cramps bit into my back and legs, I swallowed mouthful after mouthful of salt water. So, when the tide nudged me toward the long piling of a pier, I gratefully grabbed at it with weary arms, pulled myself into the shallows.

  At last, my feet touched the Gulf’s sandy shore. With Marc at my side, I dragged myself onto the beach and dropped into the sand to try to catch my breath. The coast was clear and the night was dark. Few stars twinkled overhead and fewer security lights lit docks and boathouses. Chances were small that we’d be seen, but we couldn’t stay hidden on the beach, because exhaustion and the cold night air had us shivering.

  Marc touched a hand to my shoulder. “Talk to me, babe.”

  “I’m all right. But we won’t be if we don’t get out of these wet clothes.”

  He hauled himself to his feet. “Come on. I know just the place.”

  I’d never been one for triathlons, and if jogging the ten blocks to Marc’s high-rise hotel after swimming through the rough surf didn’t qualify as part of one, it should have. I was sure we looked like drowned rats upon our arrival. The doorman, however, didn’t even raise an eyebrow as we squished across the lobby’s marble floor and into a brass-fitted elevator.

  I hoped he didn’t raise the alarm, either.

  “We should’ve gone to my hotel,” I muttered.

  “Maybe,” Marc confirmed, “but it takes a while to get a warrant. In the meantime, the feds can’t just walk in on us here.”

  “How do you figure?”

  “The jarhead doesn’t have a key to my room.”

  I blushed in spite of myself.

  Like mine, Marc’s room was a far cry from the one where we’d found Eddie. Beautiful furnishings with bent legs and pale upholstery reminded me of the coast’s French, Spanish, and English past. Eddie had had little more than a cot to call his own in that pathetic flophouse where we’d rousted him—and because of me, he had even less than that tonight.

  “There’re plenty of towels,” Marc said, ducking into the glass-tiled bathroom and snagging one for himself. “Grab a hot shower. I’ll find something for you to wear.”

  I nodded and did as I was bid. In the privacy of the bathroom, I shimmied out of my sodden things, unpacked the waterproof bag on the elegant vanity. My glasses had survived the trip and my phone had escaped immersion. It still worked just fine—but no one had called with good news or bad.

  I rushed through my shower, tried to focus on the warmth of the spray and the scent of the lather. I tried not to think about Corinne and her unborn baby. I tried not to think of Ray in his hospital bed. I tried not to think of Barrett, either, because thinking about these things wouldn’t do any good. It took action to get results, not thoughts. So most of all, I tried not to think about how I’d acted with Eddie Jepson.

  Stepping onto the bath mat, I hurried to dry, tucked a bath sheet around me like a short strapless dress until I could get into some clothes. Marc needed a hot shower to chase away the chill as much as I had, and I didn’t want him catching pneumonia because of me. I didn’t want him getting arrested, either, but that was a real possibility.

  My eyes stung with the notion. I pressed the heels of my hands to them. I wanted to blame the burn on the salt water, but that was just an excuse. When the tears came, I couldn’t stop them, and maybe that was best. All alone, with only my reflection in the steamy mirror to keep me company, I allowed myself to cry, horrified at what I’d done and ashamed of who I’d become.

  Unfortunately, Marc came looking for me. Too late, I heard him tapping on the door. He cracked it open without my say-so.

  “Jamie?”

  In an instant, Marc was at my side. He’d already stripped off his wet clothes and wrapped a towel around his trim waist. I tried not to notice his toned body, his bronzed skin, but he gathered me to him as I fought to look away and held me in his arms.

  “What’s wrong?” he whispered.

  “Me, I think.”

  “No, there’s nothing wrong with you.”

  “Yes, there is. I kidnapped another person, Marc. I cut him when he wouldn’t tell me what I wanted to know. And I got you involved. You’re a DEA agent, for crying out loud. When April Callahan caught up with us, you could’ve lost your career because of me. Hell, you could still lose your career because of me.”

  “Shh, nothing bad is going to happen. I won’t let it happen.”

  “It’s too late. I’m the bad thing that happened to Eddie Jepson.” I pushed my way free of Marc’s embrace, tugged my towel a little higher on my chest. “I was going to dig that man’s tongue from his throat with a screwdriver because he didn’t tell me what I wanted to hear about Corinne.”

  “Believe me,” Marc said, “in his profession, Eddie has had a lot worse than you happen to him.”

  “But that doesn’t make what I did right! What if he was telling the truth, Marc? What if he wasn’t capable of telling me what I wanted to know?” My tears evaporated in the heat of my anger. “I made him fear for his life. That makes me no better than April Callahan and whatever shadow organization she works for.”

  “Babe, people like you and me do what we have to do to keep the rest of the world safe. Doing bad things isn’t who we are. It’s just what we have to do.”

  “I don’t know about that.”

  “You’re a good person,” Marc said.

  “I don’t know about that, either.”

  “Well, I do. And I know what you need.”

  “Yeah. Chocolate ice cream and a long visit with Corinne,” I mumbled.

  “Not exactly.”

  Marc scooped me up. He tossed me over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes. I clutched at my towel, trying to keep it in place.

  “Marc, put me down!”

  But Marc didn’t listen to me. He carried me from the bathroom into the bedroom and dropped me on the bed with a bounce. And then he dropped his towel.

  He wasn’t wearing a stitch under it.

  Chapter 30

  I dragged my attention along Marc’s beautiful body, determined to let my gaze linger nowhere but on his eyes. “Maybe we should talk about this.”

  “We’ve been talking.” Marc slid open the nightstand drawer. He reached inside, retrieved a box of condoms. He tossed them onto the tabletop. “The one thing you’ve never said to me is no.”

  I flushed all over. Because Marc was right. Whether he offered casual cockt
ails, passionate kisses, or even broke the law for my sake, I never told him no. Now, here we were with a fancy hotel bed between us. And no wasn’t exactly the first word on the tip of my tongue.

  On all fours, Marc crossed the coverlet to me. “Why is that, Jamie? Why haven’t you told me no?”

  I didn’t have an answer for him.

  I didn’t have an answer for myself, either.

  Clutching my towel a little closer, I scooted to the edge of the mattress. “Listen, if you’re saying I’ve been giving you the come-on and now’s the time I make good—”

  Before I could get my legs under me, Marc caught me around the waist. He pulled me backward, held me against his chest. “That’s not what I’m saying.”

  His breath was hot in my ear.

  And his hand was slow on my thigh.

  “I know you, babe. I know you’re not happy. You haven’t been happy this entire trip and I don’t like to see you unhappy.”

  “Then stop looking at me,” I snapped.

  “I can’t. I can’t stop thinking about you and I can’t stop caring about you, either. Why did you send him away?”

  “What?” Marc meant Barrett. And the change of subject startled me.

  “Last night,” Marc said. “After the burglary in your hotel room. He offered to stay. He offered to take you away. You said no on both counts. Why?”

  “I don’t know. And I don’t want to discuss this with you.”

  “Well, that’s all right.” Marc’s lips skimmed my bare shoulder. “I’d say we’ve done enough talking anyway.”

  “Barrett’s going to ask me to marry him,” I blurted.

  Marc froze. Against my skin, he murmured, “What will you tell him when he does?”

  That I’d been down that road? That it was a dead end? I’d been saying those things to Barrett all along. Not that he paid much mind. So where did that leave us? Was he a fool for sticking with me? Or was I cruel for not setting him free?

  To Marc, I said, “I don’t want to think about it.”

  “Then think about this.” Marc turned me to face him. He cupped my chin in his palm. “You have to know how I feel about you—and if you don’t, let me show you.”