Obsession

by ROBARDS, KAREN

  “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.”

  Keith stood up suddenly, bending a little in the close confines of the ambulance. Nick’s heart gave a great leap. Adrenaline flooded his veins. This was it, he knew. The moment where he was going to either do or die.

  “Look, I’ve got to go. I’m sorry, Nick.” Keith leveled the gun. The flicker in his eyes gave Nick a microsecond of warning. He sensed rather than saw Keith’s finger tighten on the trigger.

  Summoning every last reserve of strength he had, he hurled himself off the stretcher and onto Keith just as the bullet smacked into the pillow his head had just vacated. Keith went down like a falling tree, tangled in the sheet, pinned by Nick’s weight. The Beretta went sailing to the ambulance floor with a clatter.

  Two fast, hard punches to the jaw, and Keith was knocked cold. Then Nick yelled for help.

  While he waited for it to arrive, he looked down at Keith’s unconscious face and said, “That’s for Allie, you son of a bitch.”

  One week later, Nick was at home, in the small second bedroom he used as an office, sprinkling food into the fishbowl. He’d had to move it, because Bill and Ted had a pair of new housemates. They were fine with Jenna—actually, they seemed to like her almost as much as Nick himself did—but they didn’t seem to think much of the cat. Muffy, who’d been adopted by Jenna in the aftermath of Katharine’s death—Mary, fortunately, had survived—didn’t seem to get the whole idea that since the fish had been there first, they should be treated with respect. Until Nick had wised up and moved them to his office, which had a door that he kept carefully closed, Muffy had passed her days sitting on the kitchen counter by the fishbowl, eyeing Bill and Ted with covetous eyes.

  It just hadn’t worked for the fish.

  “Nick,” Jenna called from the living room. “We need to hurry. We’re going to be late.”

  To pick up her father. He was being released today. For the next couple of days, the old man would be rooming with the fish. Just until other arrangements could be made. Nick had to admit, he wasn’t all that thrilled about having Mike Hill as a prospective father-in -law—oh, yeah, he’d popped the question, done the thing right, gotten down on one knee, the whole bit—but it was a small price to pay for getting Jenna for keeps.

  “Nick,” Jenna called.

  “Coming.”

  He eased his jacket on—his shoulder was still in a sling—and as he did so the small framed photo that sat on his desk beside the fishbowl caught his eye. The shot was maybe thirty years old, and it showed him as a gap-toothed kid with his ponytailed big sister standing behind him, her arms wrapped around his thin shoulders, her chin resting on the top of his blond head. They were both smiling into the camera, happy that day. Nick looked at Allie, the big sister who had loved and mothered him until she couldn’t anymore, and carefully tucked that image of her deep inside his heart. Then he turned and walked out of the office, carefully closing the door behind him. Next week he would be back at work, and life would start to get back to normal, or as normal as it was possible to get with the addition of three new family members. Call it the new normal. Anyway, he would be busy putting together a case against Keith and wrapping up the case against Barnes and filling out paperwork and working his ass off to catch bad guys and doing the hundred and one things that he typically did.

  Including that old faithful: keeping the world safe for Bill and Ted.

  Read on for a preview of Karen Robards’s next novel,

  GUILTY

  Available now from G. P. Putnam’s Sons

  August 1994

  "Where the sweet hell do you think you’re going?”

  Just after midnight on a steamy Friday in Baltimore, fifteen-year-old Katrina Kominski was halfway down the fire escape of the run-down brick apartment building where she had lived for the past seven months when the bellow from above froze her in her tracks.

  Busted, she thought, because what she was doing was sneaking out after being grounded for the weekend.

  Clutching the peeling black metal rail and casting a scared glance up, she discovered her foster mother leaning out the fourth-floor window above her, fat cheeks jiggling, pink curlers bobbing, tent-size pink housecoat zipped up to her cow-like neck. Behind her she could see two of the other girls—Mrs. Coleman took in only girls; right now she had five in the three-bedroom apartment—crowding around. Twelve-year-old LaTonya looked scared. Sixteen-year-old Natalie looked smug.

  Jealous witch had probably told.

  “Out,” she yelled back. The response was pure bravado, because down below her friends were watching. Inside, where no one could see, her stomach knotted in fear. Her heart pounded.

  Should she go back, or . . . ?

  “Come on, Kat!” Jason Winter—the to-die-for-cute boy she was crazy about—yelled up to her. She looked down in terrible indecision. He was at the wheel of his beat-up blue Camaro, which was idling in the alley below. It was crammed with kids; her best friend, Leah Oscar, had her head stuck out the rear window on the driver’s side, yelling, “Come on,” to her along with Jason, while making urgent get-down-here-yesterday motions. A kid with black, curly hair—Mario Castellanos, one of Jason’s good friends—had his head out the front passenger window, his hands cupped around his mouth as he yelled insults at Mrs. Coleman, who was now raining abuse down on Kat’s head.

  “Look out!” Leah shrieked, pointing at something above Kat. Jason yelled something, too, and a couple of the other kids stuck their heads out the car windows as they screamed warnings, but Kat was already looking up again, and what she saw sent her heart leaping into her throat.

  Marty Jones, Mrs. Coleman’s live-in boyfriend, had taken Mrs. Coleman’s place and was halfway out the window. Last time she’d seen him—about half an hour ago, when she had supposedly gone to bed in the small room she shared with Natalie and LaTonya—he’d been zonked out on the couch. Now here he came after her, barefoot, wearing his gray work pants and a wife-beater, which looked disgusting on his huge, hulking, hairy body. Like Mrs. Coleman, he was maybe in his mid-forties. Unlike Mrs. Coleman, he didn’t even pretend to like the girls she fostered for a living.

  Except in a creepy way. Like, he’d told Kat to call him Marty instead of Mr. Jones. And he was always trying to get her to sit on the couch next to him while he watched TV. And a couple of days ago he’d popped the lock on the bathroom door—he’d sworn it had been unlocked, but she knew better—and “accidentally” walked in on her when she was in the shower. And . . . well, there were lots of ands.

  Kat hated him. He’d been eyeing her since she had arrived from the group home where she had been sent after the last foster-care placement hadn’t worked out. Being a skinny, cute, blue-eyed blonde was not a good thing when the world you lived in was full of predatory men l
ike Marty Jones. Over the last couple of years, Kat had learned to recognize them at a glance, and to keep as far away from them as possible.

  Only it was getting harder and harder to keep away from Marty.

  “You better get your ass back up here right now!” Almost through the window now, Marty saw her looking up at him and shook his head threateningly at her. He held a baseball bat in one hand. As their eyes met through the open metalwork of the stairs, Kat’s stomach plummeted toward her red Dr. Scholl’s sandals. Time to face the truth: Marty scared the bejesus out of her. “Right now! You hear me, girl?”

  Oh, yeah. She did. And even as the weight of him emerging onto the top of the fire escape made the whole thing shiver warningly, she ran, hanging on to the rail, clattering down the remaining steps to the encouraging screams of her friends, heart pounding, sweating bullets all the way.

  If he caught her . . .

  “Hurry, Kat!” “He’s coming, he’s coming!” “Fat old fart, you gonna knock them stairs right off the building you don’t get off them!” “Kat, you gotta move!” “Jump for it!”

  “You better not run from me!” Marty yelled after her. “When I catch you, I’ll . . .”

  What he would do Kat never heard, because she jumped down the last two steps just then to land hard on her wooden soles on the cracked asphalt of the alley, and hands reached out of the Camaro’s door, which had opened in anticipation of her imminent arrival, to drag her inside. She half leaped and half was pulled in on top of a shifting mass of teenage bodies. The door was still partially open when, tires squealing, the Camaro peeled rubber out of there. It slammed shut, though whether from the force of the forward motion or because somebody reached out and grabbed it she couldn’t have said. As she struggled to sit up, Kat caught glimpses of long rows of brick walls broken up by cheap aluminum-framed windows and zigzagging fire escapes, and overflowing dumpsters and piles of trash that hadn’t quite made it into the dumpsters, and an odd person or two slinking through the dark as the headlights flashed over them.

  “That was so cool!” “Man, he almost caught her!” “Is that fat guy your dad?” “I thought he was gonna knock the whole fire escape down.” “You think they’re gonna call the cops?”

  “No, they won’t call the cops,” Kat replied to the last thing she heard as she wiggled her butt down between Leah and her boyfriend, Roger Friedkin, while Donna Bianco was squashed against the far window. With the four of them wedged into the backseat and Jason and Mario up front, the car was hot despite all the windows being rolled down, which was due to a broken air conditioner. It was too humid for jeans, which she was wearing because she didn’t possess any shorts, but she had teamed them with a red tank she’d “borrowed” from LaTonya so she wasn’t actually dying or anything. “If they did, the social workers would come and take me away, and they don’t want that. They need the money. I heard them talking about it.”

  “You gonna be okay when you go back there, Kitty-cat? ” Jason asked with the quiet concern that had first made her lose her heart to him. His eyes—blue as the waters of Chesapeake Bay—looked into hers through the rearview mirror. Her stomach fluttered in response.

  She nodded.

  “That fat old fart’s gonna whup your ass, Kitty-cat,” Mario chortled, turning so that he could look at her. He smirked at her. “I bet he’s gonna like it, too.”

  “Shut the hell up, why don’t you?” Jason punched his friend in the arm.

  “Ow!” Mario, glaring, covered the spot with his hand.

  “It’s okay,” Kat said to Jason. Then she looked at Mario. “Why don’t you go jerk off somewhere?”

  Mario gave her an ugly look in return, but something, probably the thought of incurring Jason’s further displeasure, kept his big mouth shut.

  Too late to erase the image he’d implanted in her mind, though.

  The thought of what her reception was going to be like when she returned to the apartment was already enough to make Kat want to puke. Realizing that she’d given Marty an excuse to lay his hands on her terrified her. Mario was right, although she hated him for saying it. If she went back, Marty would do something to hurt her and enjoy every minute of it. And she was as sure as it was possible to be that Mrs. Coleman wouldn’t object.

  Her fists clenched. Her mouth dried up. Tears pricked at the backs of her eyes, although she’d die before she’d let any fall.

  I’ll worry about it later.

  “Hey, how about we get us some beer?” Mario yelled. He had to yell, because they were on the expressway now, speeding toward D.C., and with the wind rushing in through the open windows and the radio blaring and several conversations going on at once it was the only way to be heard. The big halogen lamps lighting the road from high overhead made it almost as bright as day inside the car. The Camaro was speeding, weaving in and out as it passed other cars and light trucks and a couple of big eighteen-wheelers that rattled like marbles in a tin can as the Camaro shot by.

  “Yeah!” “Beer! Woo-hoo!” “I could use a beer!” “None of that light stuff. I like my beer heavy!” “Let’s get us some beer!”

  Kat hated beer, but she said nothing.

  The Camaro swerved suddenly, and Kat clutched reflexively at Leah’s arm. From the blur outside the window she knew that they were off the expressway and flying down an exit ramp. Jason stomped the brake at the intersection at the bottom of the ramp and everybody was flung violently forward, with the four in the backseat nearly thrown onto the floor.

  As they picked themselves up and wedged themselves back into place, they all started laughing like what had just happened was the funniest thing ever.

  Kat, too, because they were her friends.

  As Jason swung the Camaro out onto a nearly deserted four-lane road crowded with closed retail establishments, Mario banged his fist on the dashboard and turned to look at the rest of them. “Anybody got any dinero?”

  “I got a dollar and . . . look at that, twenty-two cents.” “I got a buck.” “I got seventy-five cents.”

  “I . . . don’t have any money,” Kat said, when all eyes were on her after everyone else in the backseat had turned out their pockets. “I’m not thirsty anyway.”

  “That’s okay.” Jason looked at her through the mirror again. “I’ll spring for yours.”

  And he smiled at her.

  The hard little knot in Kat’s stomach eased.

  That late at night, even McDonald’s twin arches were turned off. The only things still open were gas stations and convenience stores. A Quik-Pik on the next corner was all lit up, and Kat assumed that was Jason’s destination.

  “Does somebody have an ID?” she asked, meaning a fake one, as the Camaro, still traveling too fast, bumped into the parking lot and slid to a stop beside one of the gas pumps. The parking lot was deserted. Through the glass windows, Kat could see a solitary clerk behind the cash register. It was a woman. She looked Hispanic, and young.

  “I do, but it don’t matter.” Mario grinned at her. “I can pass for twenty-one easy.”

  “His ID’s good, though,” Justin said. “Way better than mine.”

  Everybody piled out of the car and started walking toward the store.

  “I gotta pee,” Leah announced cheerfully, and looked at Kat. “You wanna come to the bathroom with me?”

  “Yeah,” Kat agreed, and the two of them broke off to head around the side of the building where a battered sign announced Restrooms. They had both finished and Kat was washing her hands while Leah, peering around her into the mirror, fluffed her hair, when they heard a series of staccato sounds from outside.

  Crack! Crack! Crack!

  “What the hell?” Leah gasped, whirling to look at the door, which had no lock.

  “It’s a gun.” Kat knew what gunfire sounded like. Mrs. Coleman’s government-subsidized apartment was actually one of the nicer places in which she had lived. The seven years she had spent with her mother were a blur of crack houses and abandoned buildings and t
he occasional homeless shelter. After that, she’d been passed around among relatives and friends until one day a social worker had come and taken her away. During that time, the sound of gunfire had been a nightly occurrence. For years she had slept huddled in corners listening to it, praying that a bullet wouldn’t find its way through the walls and into her flesh.

  “Oh, shit.” Leah ran for the door. Kat was right behind her, slowed a little by her cumbersome footwear. What they saw as they burst around the corner of the building was the rest of the gang bolting toward the Camaro like something bad was chasing them. They were screaming at one another, fighting about something, but Kat was too far away to understand the words. All she knew was that Jason looked scared to death—and Mario was holding a gun.

  Her breathing suspended. Her gut clenched.

  There was a man between her and Leah and the car. An older man, stocky and gray-haired, in what looked like a blue uniform. He was on his knees with his back to them. Leah flew past him without giving him so much as a glance. As Kat ran up behind him, he groaned and kind of toppled over on his side, then rolled onto his back. She saw that he was clutching his chest—and then she saw why and stopped in her tracks.

  Bright blood bubbled up between his fingers, which were pale and pudgy, spilling over them, pouring on the black asphalt that glistened faintly in the store’s reflected light. In a single lightning glance, she saw that there was a badge on his chest, gleaming silver, with a cheap plastic nametag below it. She wasn’t close enough to read the name.

  He’s been shot. She remembered the gun in Mario’s hands, and a chill ran through her.

  He saw her. She could tell he did, because his eyes flickered.

  “Help . . . me.”

  Oh, God. She dropped to her knees beside him, bent over him, looking at him in horror, frantic to do something, anything, moving his hands aside so that she could see the wound. Then her hands came down one on top of the other as she pressed desperately against the hole, trying to stem the flow of blood. It was warm. And slimy. There was a smell. A sickening, raw-meat kind of smell.