“Do you want a back rub?” she asked him.
He let out a dry chuckle. “No, thanks. One thing might lead to another, God forbid.”
They passed the bottle back and forth until dusk turned to night, and only the soft light from his bedside lamp kept the house from complete darkness. Val’s body felt wrapped in a warm blanket, and she almost let her head drop onto Max’s shoulder before an image of Robby popped into her mind’s eye and caused her to catch herself. She retrieved the wastebasket from the floor and dumped the papers into her lap, leaving the money and gun in the basket. Combing through the pile, she held each one up to the light and scanned for anything that might be relevant.
“What happened to your sister?” Max asked, his body finally relaxed and slouched against the headboard.
Val didn’t stop looking through the papers. “When we were in high school, she got drunk at a party and was raped. Someone took a video of it on their phone and sent it to a bunch of other people until the entire school had it. The cops did nothing, as usual—they said it was a ‘community matter.’ So she killed herself. And you already said you’re sorry, so you don’t have to say it again.”
He turned his head toward her, eyes dark pools in the dim light. “Was the guy ever punished?”
“Sort of. Guys like that don’t stay out of trouble for long. He eventually went to prison for dealing drugs, not sexual assault. I saw a lot of that when I was in the military, too. Unchecked predators left to their own devices because when sex is involved, everyone wants to pretend like there’s this gray area where we can never really know what happened, so let’s just look the other way until it blows over. Somebody had to do something, though, so I decided I would do something. That’s why I started Valentine Investigations. I didn’t want what happened to my sister to happen to anyone else.” Val took a breath. “Anyway, that’s probably more than you wanted to know.”
Max’s eyes closed again and his head fell sideways onto her shoulder. Electricity tingled down her arm. There was Robby again, but the aroma of the shampoo Max used in his morning shower dulled the image, and she couldn’t convince herself to push the flesh-and-blood man away.
“It’s not more than I wanted to know,” he said. “Sometimes it feels like too much.”
“Yeah.” She rested her head against his. It fit nicely there. “Like the universe is against you.”
“Yeah.”
His dark hair tickled her cheek. An inch turn of her neck and she could kiss the top of his sweet-smelling scalp. If she hadn’t felt Robby’s eyes on her, maybe she would have.
“She was lucky to have a sister that cared. It’s too bad she didn’t realize it.”
“What’s too bad is that of all the future death I see, I didn’t see hers—the one that mattered the most to me. I mean, what kind of sick God thrusts this weird ability on us and then…” Val trailed off, distracted by an accounting slip in her hand with a familiar name on it. “Does Dean Price have any involvement with the financial side of Carressa Industries?”
Max lifted his head and opened his eyes to slits. “No.”
“His name is on this accounting slip.” She held it up for him. “Why would that be?”
He gave it a cursory glance through heavy lids as the mystery pills he’d taken worked their magic. “I don’t know.”
She sighed at his unhelpfulness. “Why did you hire the Bombay and Price law firm to represent you?”
“My father had them on retainer. Has for decades.”
“So why did your father originally hire Bombay and Price?”
“I think…my mother knew Dean Price from law school, and she introduced Dean to my father, before he got rich. That’s the story I heard. When my father started raking in the money, Bombay and Price was there for all his personal legal needs. How fortunate for them.” He deposited the bottle of Scotch in Val’s lap, then shimmied onto his back. “Can we talk about this tomorrow? I need to go to work in the morning.”
“But you’ll look into this account with Dean’s name on it, right?”
He waved a hand at her. “Sure.”
In other words, he’d do it to humor her. What a great team they made. Val took a moment to assess what she knew so far. Dean had been Lester’s business associate for decades. After Lester died, Chet came out of the woodwork with a claim of foul play involving Norman, at which point Robby was murdered to keep that information from getting out. She knew how Lester and Dean were connected, but how did Norman fit? Was the mayoral candidate connected to Lester through an affair with Lydia Carressa? Max seemed certain that wasn’t the case, though Val couldn’t rule it out. But why would Norman kill Lester now, when the affair ended decades ago? And why kill Robby instead of going straight to the source and killing Chet before he talked to Robby?
Goddammit, why did Robby have to die? She’d never stop until she got answers and justice for Robby. Never.
Val frowned at Max’s chest, rising and falling in the steady rhythm of a man slipping quickly into sleep. He didn’t care about the mayoral race, or Bombay and Price, or any other aspect of the conspiracy with his father possibly at its center. The only reason he was helping her was because he saw her in a vision. And maybe he felt a special connection with her because of their shared ability. She certainly felt a connection to him, however irrational it was for knowing him so short a time.
Val gathered the papers back into the wastebasket—setting aside the Dean Price accounting slip—and swung her legs off the side of the bed, ready to go back to the main house. She sat where she was for a moment, imagining the cold rooms and icy floor in contrast to the soothing warmth of Max’s home, of his body. She turned off the bedside lamp, slid back into bed, and lay on her side next to him.
“Why didn’t you look for me?” she whispered into the dark. “I stalked online message boards, went to weird fetish meetings, tolerated people thinking I was crazy, looking for you.”
Though she’d thought he was asleep, she felt the bed bounce as he turned over, then his warm breath on her face only a few inches away. “I couldn’t,” he whispered back. “My father was always watching. He monitored everything I did, all the time. And everybody knew me. I couldn’t blend in. I’m sorry.”
Tears gathered at the edges of her eyes. They’d lived in the same goddamn city their entire lives, could have helped each other figure out what was wrong with them, why they were different, felt a little less alone, and he was sorry he didn’t even try. Everything that could have been, all that lost time—
Something warm touched her face, and she realized it was his fingertips, skimming over her jaw like a feather, then across her lips, and her heart insisted this was their time, right here, right now, and if he’d kissed her, then she would’ve kissed him back and given him everything she was in a way she’d never done for anyone else. But in a heartbeat the moment passed and his hand fell away. Deep breaths against her face told her the pills and alcohol had finally forced him into sleep.
With the path of his fingers still warm on her skin, she rested her head against his chest, folded her body against his, and remembered what it was like to fall into another human being until, for that night anyway, the chaotic world retreated to a safe distance.
* * *
Val awoke to the swish of a razor blade, the tapping of the handle against porcelain, and running water trickling down the drain. For a moment she thought she’d had the most vivid dream of her life, and she’d open her eyes to find Robby getting ready for work, humming the theme song to whatever TV show he’d watched the night before. But the sheets felt thicker, smelled muskier, and the morning light warmed her from an unfamiliar angle. When she realized she was in Max’s house, listening to him shave, she wasn’t entirely unhappy about it.
She lifted her head and rubbed sleep out of her eyes. In the bathroom, Max splashed water on his freshly shaven face, a towel wrapped around his waist. He pulled the towel off and used it to pat his face dry. Val eyed the contours of
his glutes, how they sloped into his smooth back like rolling sand dunes. For a moment she imagined running her fingers along those soft hills, then swallowed back a knot made of shame. It wasn’t right she was so attracted to him. Robby had barely been gone a week, and she was already imagining what it might be like to touch another man. Seemed almost unnatural. Then again, both she and Max had some very unnatural qualities about them.
Val lay back down again and pretended to sleep as Max exited the bathroom and went about his morning routine, unaware that she watched him. Not that he’d care. She’d never met a guy so comfortable with his body. Though she supposed most people who looked like Max wouldn’t be shy about showing it off, either—or maybe it was only her he wasn’t bashful around.
He slipped on his underwear and socks, brushed his hair, and unwrapped a dry-cleaned suit from its plastic sheath. The cadence of his quiet movements lulled her into sleep again, until she felt the bed bow under his weight as he sat at the edge next to her, looping a blue-checkered silk tie into a knot around his neck.
He looked at her, saw her eyes were open, and smiled. “There’s a board of directors meeting today that I can’t miss. I need to make an appearance—instill confidence and all that. I’m afraid they’ll try to vote me out because of the suspicion around my father’s death, even though I’m the majority shareholder.” He tucked the tie into the breast of his charcoal vest and buttoned the cufflinks on his white dress shirt, then leaned toward her, an arm propping him up. A slight bouquet of mountain spring shower gel and bay rum aftershave wafted off him, a smell that matched the green and brown in his eyes. His lips were, oh, thirteen inches or so from hers, she guessed. Too far to reach while lying down, but if he came closer—
“Can you wait for me here until I get back?” he asked. Then added with a hint of desperation, “Please?”
“You expect me to twiddle my thumbs here all day? I could set up a meeting with Dean while you’re doing your work thing, twist his arm into talking.”
“The guys that killed Chet are still looking for you.” He picked up the accounting slip from the nightstand. “Let me ask around about this first, then we’ll regroup and decide our next move.”
“What am I supposed to do while you’re gone?”
“Go through my things, raid the fridge, pocket some valuables. Or read a book.”
“Reading is for nerds.”
“Watch porn on my computer, then. Fill it with viruses.”
She snickered. “Fine, I’ll wait here.” She nudged his thigh with her foot. “When are you coming back?”
Without seeming to notice what he was doing, Max took her bare foot in his hand and slid his thumb along her instep, sending shivers up her spine. “I’ll try to sneak out in the early afternoon. I need to meet with a couple of people, but it shouldn’t take long.”
He looked at her foot like he just noticed her flesh cupped in his hand, cleared his throat, and let it go. She almost grabbed his hand and begged him to stay, to touch her again like he’d just done while he told her everything there was to know about himself, that they’d worry about the accounting slip later, and—and what the hell was she thinking? Barrister and his cronies were killing innocent people for God knows what reason, and she was the only person standing between him and a powerful public office. Her goddamn libido could wait.
Max slipped on his suit jacket, followed by a black wool overcoat. On the back of a grocery receipt he scribbled something and handed it to her. “Here’s my cell phone number. Call me if you need anything.” He grabbed his briefcase as he walked out the door, its contents collected back inside sometime before she’d awoke.
Val heard him drive away in the high-rev engine of a rich-boy car, the kind she would’ve assumed he used to compensate for some deficiency if she didn’t know better. She pushed herself up and resolved to explore the main house, as she’d originally desired on her first night there. After she attended to her basic hygiene with the help of a spare toothbrush she found in the bathroom, she made herself a piece of toast and ate it over the sink. Through the glass of his cabinet doors she spotted the bottle of pills he’d desperately consumed the night before. She recognized the label as a medication for chronic anxiety, the kind her sister had been prescribed after the attack. Behind that bottle were more bottles, different drugs to treat anxiety, insomnia, depression, migraines. God, poor Max. Robby was right—the Carressa heir had some serious skeletons in his closet that he struggled to control. She felt a pang of sadness for him, then anger.
At least he didn’t get run down in the prime of his life.
Robby’s murder—that was the only reason she squatted in Max’s house, slept in his bed, put up with his erratic behavior. Max was undoubtedly an interesting guy, and they had something in common that maybe a handful of people in the entire world possessed, but in the end he was irrelevant to her ultimate goal—extracting justice for Robby. Even if she had to rip out her own heart and sacrifice it in the name of vengeance, she’d make those bastards pay. She’d failed to avenge her sister. She refused to fail Robby.
Val threw the rest of her toast away and marched back to the main house, ready to get to work. She spent more than three hours opening every drawer, ransacking every closet, opening every container, poking into every nook for other hidden stashes. As each room failed to yield any further clues and her frustration grew, she held out hope that the freezer, a popular hiding spot for crooks and alcoholics, would give her something, anything. Its innards hid nothing but a freezer-burned pint of ice cream.
“Shit!” Val screamed and smashed a tray of ice on the floor. Great, now what? She could wait for Max to return, like she said she would, but she wasn’t confident that he’d come back with useful information, given his relative disinterest with the whole conspiracy. She could call Dean and ask him about the account, but a phone conversation was no substitute for a face-to-face conversation, where she could read his body language and he couldn’t hang up on her.
Val bit her lip. She needed to meet with Dean, the sooner the better. Just like she and Robby had tried to do with Chet, her best bet was to track Dean down where no one expected him to be, ambush him before he had time to develop a plausible lie, if he knew something worth lying about. God, she hoped he didn’t, for Robby’s sake.
Val returned to the guest house—promising herself she’d pay Max’s housekeepers to clean the massive mess she’d left behind—and took her clothes off. She paused at the edge of his bed, remembering his offer to “help” her have visions, that they were more powerful when experienced between two people who had the ability. She considered his offer again and dismissed it. She couldn’t. No matter how much she liked looking at him, the thought of tasting him scared her. Dirty John had been convenient and anonymous; Stacey, safe and familiar. Max was something more. If she’d met him under different circumstances, and she hadn’t been engaged to Robby…It was too soon.
She lay down on the bed, had a thought, and pulled open his nightstand drawer. Next to more books and a black zip-up bag sat a little bottle of personal lubrication.
“Thought so,” she said. No self-respecting person with prophetic orgasms would be caught without lube close by.
Val squeezed a glob on her hand—the self-warming kind. Nice. Manual stimulation wasn’t as efficient as her vibrator, but she’d perfected the technique through the years. She rubbed the lube between her legs, making slow circles across her clitoris as the wetness and artificial heat helped hone the sensation, like tuning a string that began at her privates and threaded through her belly and into her spine. She played that string and visualized her last moments with Robby, what he’d felt like inside her, his hands caressing her backside, her breasts.
“Robby,” she muttered as the string grew taut and resonated through her body, “where is your father? Show me Dean.” She exhaled, long and ragged, her insides liquid as every muscle in her body tensed at the cusp of climax. She writhed on Max’s bed and gripped his sheets, d
own feather duvet crinkling against her naked skin, the twin smells of his bath soap and aftershave still in the air—
A light rain trickles onto the pavement of an empty parking lot abutting a high-rise. Max walks outside through a metal door with “Carressa Industries: Deliveries Only” written on it in plain block letters, a “Closed for construction—use front entrance” sign taped underneath. Rain stains his expensive charcoal-colored three-piece suit and blue-checkered tie, but he doesn’t seem to care. His eyes are fixed straight ahead, on something across the parking lot. He takes a couple quick steps across the pavement.
“And where are you going?” Sten says.
Max freezes.
“Don’t you know that when you fight the law, the law wins? You should trust the Clash.”
Blur.
Max lies on the ground with his hands cuffed behind his back, blood streaked across his white dress shirt, face a pulpy mass of red. His eyes are open but glazed over.
“Temper, temper,” Sten says, kneeling over Max. He raises a collapsible baton over Max’s head and snaps it to its full length with the flick of his wrist. “How am I going to live with myself, knowing what I was forced to do in self-defense?” He swings the baton down.
Blur.
Max lies in a hospital bed, tubes protruding from his body. A machine beeps in the background. His face is waxen where it’s not covered in black bruises, his body limp, his eyes closed. A gas bag pushes air into his lungs.
“There was a lot of cranial hemorrhaging,” one doctor tells another at the foot of Max’s bed. “I’m not sure if he’ll wake up—”
The beep becomes a continuous, unbroken tone.
Val gasped and sat straight up after her vision cleared. Holy shit—she’d seen Max die.
She’d seen him die today.
She had to call him now. Val cast about his house for a landline phone; he didn’t have one. She threw her clothes on, sprinted to the main house, and grabbed the first telephone she saw—a cordless one perched atop the kitchen counter. She dialed Max’s cell number, and swore when she got his voice mail.
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