by Ted Dekker
My objective was to live. And to get out. Through that door behind him and out into the street. Everything had happened so quickly. Danny wouldn’t know to come to my rescue, not yet, not before it was too late.
I lowered my hands. “Okay. The truth.” There was a closet with a sliding door to my left, like the one I’d had at the Staybridge Suites. “Okay, so I’m not with Bourque. You’re right, he didn’t send me. That was just a cover, and okay, so it didn’t work.”
He just grinned at me. My mind started to settle.
“But I know about Simon Redding, right? You have to ask yourself how I know he’s dead.”
I waited for him to respond, because I realized I had just made a very good point. Could I just tell him the truth? What would Danny think about that? What did it matter? My life was at stake here, I had no doubt about that.
“Nobody said he was dead,” Darby said.
“I did. He’s missing and Bourque’s probably freaking out, thinking his number one man’s gone to the feds. Right?”
“Just talk.”
He wasn’t going to let me take control of the conversation. I let my shoulders relax and took a step forward to ease the tension, but my heart was pounding and my palms were wet with sweat.
“We were lovers,” I said. “Jonathan and me. No one knew. We met in New York and I followed him out here.”
Darby didn’t object. The idea was probably totally unsurprising to him. Why not? Jonathan likely had a dozen lovers stashed in a dozen different cities.
“But he crossed me,” I said. “He treated me like dirt. So I stole some money from him, and that set him off.”
I stopped, refusing to continue until Darby engaged me. Get them talking, Danny said. The more they talk, the more they hear themselves. The more they hear themselves, the less they focus on you.
“You stole from Bourque,” Darby said doubtfully.
“I did. Why else would he send Simon Redding after me?”
The man shrugged as if to say, A hundred reasons. He gave only one. “To get rid of the evidence. No one steals from Bourque.”
“Exactly. But I did. And I still have the cash to prove it.” Talk to me, you freaking dog.
“That so, huh? How much?”
“Enough.”
“How much?” he snapped.
“Put the gun down,” I said. “Quit acting like I’m some kind of thug who’s going to shoot you in the gut. I’m just a little skank without a gun.”
He hesitated, then his lips twitched and he lowered the gun. “You got balls, I’ll give you that. How much?”
“Three hundred thousand dollars,” I said. “In cash. Hundred-dollar bills.”
“You stole three hundred thousand dollars from Jonathan Bourque,” he said, still doubtful.
“When he found out, he sent Simon Redding to kill me. I know that because Redding tried. Instead, I killed him.”
“Is that so? You killed Simon Redding.” He said it, but the words came out more like a question.
“And I cut up his body and threw it in the ocean,” I said. What did it matter? They would never find the parts anyway.
He eyed me, trying to decide if he should pay any attention to my claim. This was good. In less than five minutes I’d gone from lying on the bed to making him think twice, and I took courage from my victory.
I took two steps closer and continued. “I have the money, all of it. But I don’t care about the money. I want the freak who ruined my life, and I’m willing to pay for it.”
Darby scoffed. “You’re nuts.”
“Maybe. But you have to think about your options. I came here to check you out. I had to know whether you could get close to Bourque, and whether you would rather make some serious money or end up dead like Redding.”
“Even if you did kill Redding like you say, you’re in my house now.”
“If you kill me, you’ll never see the money. Worse, Jonathan Bourque will have you killed when he learns that Redding’s dead. He won’t leave you around to tell what you know. You have enough information to bury him.”
There were probably holes in my hobbled logic, but I was thinking on my feet and making him think long and hard. Even in that state of fear I imagined that I was pretty good at this.
“You don’t have a clue what I know,” he said. “This is all crazy.”
“Maybe. Maybe not. Why would a pretty little thing like me come waltzing up to your door at night? I’ll tell you: because I need your help and I know that you’re in trouble. Tell me you don’t know that Bourque’s behind the hits you’ve made for Redding.”
A slight tic bothered his right eye. He said nothing. I stepped closer, now only four paces away from him.
I spoke in a soft, sincere voice. “Please, Darby, you have to help me. You can have all of it. I just want Bourque dead. And you know he’s going to shut you up eventually. He knows you know about him. He can’t let that go.”
“That’s not the way it works,” he said.
The anger I felt toward this man suddenly raged to the surface. “No? Then tell me, you stupid thug! How does it work?”
“His reach is longer than you realize, honey.” His use of that endearment made me cringe. “Even if I did kill him, which I wouldn’t—not for any price—I would end up dead or worse. He’s got his end covered. You, on the other hand, are already dead. Just a matter of time.”
“That’s what Redding said.”
“Simon Redding’s no Jonathan Bourque.”
A chill snaked down my spine.
“So here’s what’s gonna happen. First I’m going to hurt you pretty bad.” His gun came up slowly and his grin was back. “You’re going to tell me where the money is. We’re going to get it. And then maybe, if you’re real nice to me, I might let you go.”
My confidence was derailed. I began thinking about that closet again. It had two overlapping sliding doors.
“Get on the bed,” he said, motioning with the gun.
“Do you know anything about a hit on a man named Lamont?” I asked.
Darby Gordon blinked. He wasn’t a blinker, I’d noticed that. He stared for long seconds without a break. But when I said my late husband’s name, he blinked, and I knew that this man had been involved in Lamont’s death.
I almost screamed and threw myself at him then. But that would have only gotten me killed. I managed to hang on to that realization.
“You’re sick,” I said. “You beat your kids, you molest your wife, you kill anyone for money without any thought about who might be left behind.”
He seemed surprised by my sudden outburst.
My fingernails were biting into my palms. I shoved a trembling finger at his face. “You’re a demon!” I screamed.
Darby Gordon’s face flushed red and twisted into a knot of rage. He made a grunting sound and started toward me.
Run!
The word filled my mind. I feinted to my right half a step, just enough to get him leaning that way, then I threw myself to my left. Toward the closet with its sliding doors.
I crashed into the door, grasped the frame and shoved it wide.
Plowed inside. Slammed it shut.
If he wanted me alive to mess me up, he would have to come in after me—I was counting on it. I would make my move then.
“You stupid, stupid…” Darby didn’t finish the insult, intent on opening the door.
But I was already at the other end, fumbling for a grip on the edge of the second sliding door. Hurry, hurry…
My nails caught the molding. God, help me. It was a sincere prayer I think.
The moment I heard him slide the first door, I shoved the one at my end of the closet open and bolted out into the bedroom. Darby was leaning into the closet with his gun arm leading, looking for me, just now realizing that I had exited the other end.
Now I was pushed by survival instincts, not anything as calculated as determination. I sprinted toward the door.
“Hey! Get back here!”
/>
I had no intention of complying. Darby hadn’t locked the bedroom door—his wife and children were no threat to their cruel master. He was a pig.
And I was a mongoose, streaking for the front door as fast as I could run. I got my hand on the knob as he spun into the living room.
“Hey!”
I threw the door wide, ducked out, and raced up his driveway. Was I going to make it?
But I was certain a bullet would slam into my back. I started to weave, like a drunken mongoose now.
Darby’s stocking feet padded on the concrete behind me.
I didn’t stop to look back, but ran to the corner and into the street, straight toward Danny’s car, fifty yards away. All the way, pumping my arms.
The lights on his car suddenly blazed. He’d seen me!
I reached it in a dozen more long steps and dived into the backseat, not wanting to run around the car.
“Go, go, go!”
Danny didn’t go. Not right away.
I stuck my head up over the seat and saw that Darby Gordon had stopped at the edge of his driveway and was staring at our lights.
“I take it things didn’t go as well as hoped,” Danny said.
Why wasn’t he driving? Then he was, in reverse, and I understood. As long as the glaring lights were in Darby’s eyes, he wouldn’t be able to identify the car or its driver. Danny hooked one arm behind the passenger seat and backed all the way to the intersection, swinging onto the crossing lane and then speeding away.
“Whooooeeee! Boy, that was close!”
My hands were still shaking, but I was elated. I’d made it. And I’d found out what we needed to find out, hadn’t I?
I threw my arms around Danny’s seat, leaned over and kissed him on the cheek. “Thank you. Thank you! Ha!”
“What did you do?” he said.
I wanted to jump up and down and cry for joy, but it occurred to me that this wasn’t what skilled vigilantes did in their getaway cars. So I took a deep breath, climbed into the front seat next to him, and told him.
“I got what we needed, Danny. I have proof.”
22
DANNY LISTENED TO Renee tell her tale. She had tricked Darby Gordon into confessing his involvement in her husband’s murder and then escaped after cleverly luring him into one end of a closet while she escaped out the other.
Her exuberance faded before they reached her hotel, replaced by a deep sorrow about the finality of Lamont’s death. She’d always assumed him dead, but now she believed she had firsthand confirmation of that fact, and it robbed her of the thrill.
Her descent into sorrow was so quick, in fact, that Danny didn’t have the heart to tell her he didn’t consider the mission successful. She’d done almost everything wrong and placed them both in far more danger than he was willing to accept.
Indeed, based on her terrifying tale—in which she’d surely avoided rape, torture, and death by the slimmest of margins—he was tempted to reconsider his commitment to help her become a version of himself.
It’s her, Danny. You are falling for her. She means too much to you.
He pulled his Chevy to a stop half a block from her hotel, thinking she should move again in a few days. Bourque would blanket the city with inquiries the moment he heard from Darby Gordon. For all they knew, the call had already been made.
“I could kill him, Danny,” she said bitterly, staring past the hood. He studied the fine lines of her jaw, pale now under the halogen streetlights. Her other cheek was red from Gordon’s blow. The thought of such a snake laying a hand on her was nearly too much to stomach. Such a delicate creature, so violently abused.
Danny had made his decision the moment he’d seen Renee’s cheek: He would return—perhaps tonight in the early hours, maybe tomorrow night—and he would kill Darby Gordon after assuring himself that Renee had judged his guilt correctly.
He would do it in part because the man qualified to pay that price. He would also do it because the man had abused Renee. You’ve fallen in love with her. You’re endangering her life and your mission.
He couldn’t quite admit these truths to himself. But he had to consider them, and he did, as he watched her in silence.
“You should have seen his wife.” Her jaw flexed. “How could anyone treat another human being like that? He’s an animal!”
“He is.” Danny turned his eyes to follow her blank stare. A slight drizzle had begun to fall. The forecast called for rain by the early hours. “Stay away from him. This wasn’t a good night for us, you have to realize that.”
She faced him, eyes wide. “What do you mean? I thought I did pretty good.”
“You did. But you almost didn’t, and that’s not acceptable.”
Her jaw dropped. “Not acceptable? I pulled it off, and all you can say is not acceptable?”
“Please, Renee, that’s how this business works. If you want to stay alive and—”
“I know, you’ve told me. No mistakes. Zero tolerance for errors, all that Bosnia wartime mumbo jumbo. Sorry, I didn’t mean it like that. I respect it, I do. But tonight I went in there and I came face-to-face with that scum and I got out alive. Not to mention I learned what we needed to know.”
“And that’s good, although he didn’t directly confess.”
“Sure he did, just not with words. I know a guilty man when I see one.”
“Regardless, you came too close to failure for my comfort. I don’t know what I would—”
“For your comfort? I’ve been dying ever since Lamont was killed! Tonight was the first time in three months I’ve lived, really lived! This isn’t just about staying alive to do it again, Danny. Not for me. It’s about doing what’s right. I’m going to kill the man who killed Lamont. I want to, I have to, I will. Period. I don’t care what it costs me!”
“Then at least care what it costs me,” he said.
She faced the windshield speckled with tiny drops of moisture. “Don’t worry, I won’t get you caught. I didn’t say a word about you.”
“That’s not what I’m talking about.”
“Then what?”
He hesitated, then said it plainly. “I don’t want to lose you.”
She looked at him, silent. Her face softened. Danny felt a knot gather in his throat and looked away, uneasy with his own emotions.
As much as he could no longer avoid his growing affection for Renee, he couldn’t displace a brooding sense that he was watching himself in her.
“I know what it’s like, Renee,” he said. “Losing someone precious to you is a harrowing thing, and it storms the emotions with a desperate need to set things right. What you’re feeling after losing Lamont, I’ve felt for years. I get it. It’s a beautiful thing in some respects. But it’s also crippling. I see you and I see a precious person who’s crippled by her own need to make things right. Like me.”
The car filled with silence, as if it had been poured in through the retracting sunroof. He could smell the leather-scented freshener. Renee’s deodorant, a musky antiperspirant she preferred to wear without any other perfume, hung softly in the air.
“You love me?” she said.
He didn’t know what to say.
“You love me, and the thought of losing me drives you crazy,” she said. Her hand rested on his knee. “I think that’s beautiful, Danny. I think I love you, too.”
Dear God, what am I doing? The knot in Danny’s throat had become a fist. The distress had come out of nowhere and swallowed him, and if not for her presence in the car, he would have let himself go.
But here with her now, he could only share so much of his own pain. His role was to bear her pain, not burden her with his—to give comfort, not take it, because it was more blessed to give than to receive.
“But you’re not going to lose me, Danny. I’m not going to let that happen. I just have to do this one thing. Okay?”
“There’s a fine line between the killers and us,” he said, finding his voice. “In the war I often w
ondered if I was as guilty as the enemy I killed. I don’t want to turn you into a beast, Renee. And I don’t want to lose you.”
After stretched silence, she leaned forward and kissed him lightly on his cheek. “That’s the sweetest thing you could say. When this is over, we should run away to a small house in the Swiss Alps and tell each other sweet things.”
He chuckled, in part because her spontaneity drew it out of him, in part because he was desperate to break the tension.
“Okay,” he said.
“Perfect, that’s our plan then. But you’ll have to give up being a priest first. I wouldn’t want to just sit around whispering and sipping hot chocolate.”
“No, that wouldn’t do.”
“I would be cleansing myself all day if all I did was drink sugar like that.”
She was trying to be funny, but her mention of cleansing struck Danny as odd. Just how deep did her obsessions reach?
“In the meantime,” he said, “please, stay out of sight. We should move you again in the next few days just to be safe. Bourque will—”
“Kiss me, Danny,” she whispered into his ear.
When he turned his head, she was right there, gazing at his eyes. He didn’t really intend to kiss her, but he did. He leaned forward and kissed her warm lips gently.
When he pulled back, her eyes were closed. They fluttered open and her lips parted in a soft, teasing smile.
“That was nice,” she said. Then she leaned forward and kissed him again. She took his jaw in her right hand, pulled his face into hers, and kissed him hungrily, deeply, with a passion that made his heart pound.
“I like you, Danny,” she said breathlessly. “I really do like you.” And then she flew out of the car and was gone.
I left Danny in his car and I felt triumphant and I might have skipped back to the hotel if it didn’t strike me as a silly thing to do. I had completed my first mission. I had entered the brood of vipers and come out without a bite, not counting the one slap.
And I had been kissed by Danny.
I really was falling in love, I was sure of it. We were finding meaning and love in each other. Becoming like one. See, that word triumphant was a word that Danny would have used. I was sounding a bit like him now.