A Wife's Secret (A Pax Arrington Mystery Book 4)

by Elle Gray

  “Drop the gun and we’ll talk about it,” I fire back.

  “I said, let him—”

  “I heard what you said and I’m telling you that if you don’t drop that gun, I’m going to break your partner’s neck. Now, drop it and kick it away.”

  The man doesn’t move for a moment. I’m starting to grow convinced he’s going to call my bluff and make me kill his partner to prove my point. Of course, if I do that, I have no more human shield and I’ll wind up with a bullet in my face. The moment of silence stretches out for almost a full minute, the tension in the room growing thicker by the second.

  “All right,” he finally relents.

  He puts his gun down and kicks it across the room, but I hold onto his friend, not quite sure what I’m going to do now.

  “I dropped my gun. Let him go now,” the man says.

  “Who are you working for?” I demand.

  The man smirks at me. “You really don’t know nothin’, do you?”

  “I know proper grammar. That still counts for something,” I taunt him. “Aside from that, pretend I don’t know anything. Tell me who you’re working for?”

  The man’s expression darkens, and he glares at me. I see his jaw flexing and with that square jaw of his working, he looks like he could chew through rock.

  “Man, you are in deeper than you know. You’re in way over your head,” he says.

  “Wouldn’t be the first time and I’m sure it won’t be the last.”

  “Oh, it very well could be the last,” he quips.

  The man in my grasp is squirming and writhing. I can see his face growing purple as I keep applying pressure to get him to stop moving. Knowing I might choke him out if I’m not careful, I ease the pressure enough for him to get some air, still making sure to hold him tight enough to remain in control.

  “You’re gonna kill him,” the first man says. “Turn him loose already.”

  “Yeah, I do that, you pull your backup piece and shoot me. I’m not really in the mood to get shot today, so we’re going to have to come to an understanding,” I reply.

  “Fine. Let’s talk this out. We’re reasonable men here. Let’s come to an understanding,” he states evenly.

  “Reasonable? You busted in here ready to kill me.”

  “Mr. Arrington, we came chargin’ in here like we did because you’re a dangerous man. We weren’t intendin’ to kill you, we just weren’t real keen on the idea of you gettin’ the drop on us the way you did our friends in the garage,” he tells me. “You did a number on them and we wasn’t goin’ to let you do that to us. We ain’t goin’ out that way.”

  “Yeah, how are your friends doing anyway?” I ask.

  He smirks. “Tommy had a brain bleed. Seems he took a hard kick to the head that fractured his skull,” he says. “Bill’s got a busted wing and a concussion. Both of ‘em are gonna be out of action for a bit.”

  “Yeah, that’s too bad. Sorry about that,” I say without a hint of genuine contrition in my voice. “But, if they hadn’t tried to kill me, none of that would have been necessary.”

  “You have got the most paranoid persecution complex I’ve ever seen, man,” he says. “Ain’t nobody tryin’ to kill you. We just didn’t want to end up like Tommy and Bobby.”

  “Those guns you’re carrying suggest otherwise.”

  “All we want is what your wife dug up on our employer.”

  “And who might your employer be?”

  “That’s classified, Mr. Arrington.”

  “That’s crap. You’re not in the military—at least, you’re not anymore. You’re mercs,” I counter. “You’re not bound by law from telling me who you’re working for.”

  “We signed NDAs.”

  The statement is so absurd, I burst out laughing. That was a mistake, because the man in my arms takes advantage of my temporary distraction and makes me pay for it. He drives his head back, slamming it into my face, igniting a flash of intense pain. I taste the blood in my mouth and feel it streaming out of my nose. I already know I’ll be very lucky if I come out of this without a matched set of black eyes. Of course, I’ll be very lucky if I come out of this at all.

  They obviously didn’t expect me to recover from the blow so quickly, because the man I’d been holding scrambles for his gun, and as he bends down to retrieve it, I deliver a soccer-style kick to his face. His head snaps back and he drops like a sack of dirty laundry. Blood spills from his nose and mouth, and for a brief moment, I fear I killed the guy. But then he groans, and I let out a silent breath of relief that is very short-lived.

  The pain that rips through my arm is intense and it pushes me to the edge of consciousness. It feels like a furrow of fire erupted beneath my skin and raced through the muscles in my forearm. A split second later, the sharp crack of the shot reaches my ears and I look up to see the first guy standing there with his weapon trained on me, a thin tendril of smoke rising from the barrel. I look down at my left forearm to see the deep crimson spot on my shirt quickly spreading. A moment later, blood is dripping from my arm onto the floor beneath my feet.

  My blood.

  “It didn’t have to be this way, Mr. Arrington. Nobody had to be hurt here today,” he says.

  “No?” I ask, pointing to the gun in his hand. “You have a funny way of telling a guy you’d like to talk.”

  “These were for our protection.”

  “Yeah, all right,” I say. “We’ll have to agree to disagree.”

  “If you say so. But now you’ve gone and messed everythin’ up. It didn’t have to be this way,” he snaps. “I understand now why they said it’d be better just to put you down on sight. I told them I wasn’t gonna do it. But you’re a troublemaker, Mr. Arrington.”

  I shrug. I can’t really refute that. I know exactly where this is headed though. It’s where it was headed before they burst into the room—to my death. A flash of pain grips me and I clamp my hand over the bullet wound in my arm. The blood is spattering the floor beneath me, and I grit my teeth, trying to shut out the pain.

  “All we want are those papers and the contents of the files,” he goes on. “Our employer also wants the copies your wife left in the safety deposit box for you.”

  “Yeah, see, she left those to me, so you don’t really have any claim to them. You don’t have claim to any of this.”

  “Regardless, we’ll be needin’ those as well.”

  “Yeah, good luck with that. You’ll never get them,” I snap. “Ever.”

  “We’ll see about that.”

  I’m in the middle of formulating a plan to get out of this mess when I feel a large, meaty paw grip my ankle. I look down to see the man I put down alive and well again. His eyes burn with a rage that looks hotter than the sun and he swings his heavy sledgehammer of a fist into the back of my knee. Hard.

  “Oh crap,” I mutter as I feel myself topping backward.

  “Stand down, Mikey,” orders the man holding the gun.

  The ground rushes up to meet me and I land heavily on my backside. The man is on me in an instant. He wraps his big hands around my neck and starts to squeeze, his face a mask of dark, twisted rage. Can’t say I blame him. What’s good for the goose is good for the gander, I suppose. But I’m not going to just give up. I wriggle and writhe, trying to break his grip on me, but my momentum is harshly blunted when he drives his knee into my side, driving the air from my lungs.

  “Gonna kill you,” he growls.

  “Ease up, Mikey,” the other guy calls. “Get off him. We need him.”

  Mikey ignores him and keeps trying to choke the life out of me. His technique is sloppy, though, and as he leans forward, he lets go of my good arm. As if my arm were a spring-loaded cannon, I drive my fist forward and pop him square in the face, making his eyes water instantly. A torrential spray of blood spills from his nose and splashes on my face. I squeeze my mouth shut and buck the guy off me as the man with the southern accent closes the distance between us. He leans forward, the barrel of h
is weapon coming toward my head.

  I move quicker than he does and have my hand around his wrist in the blink of an eye. I wrench it backward and he yelps loudly as he drops the gun. Mikey comes storming in, throwing a vicious haymaker that I just barely dance away from. But dodging the blow meant I had to let go of the other guy’s wrist and he scrambles backward. Mikey rounds on me—and catches my foot in his midsection. The air is driven from his lungs in a loud “oomph,” and he staggers backward, crashing into the whiteboard. I watch as papers and dry erase pens scatter everywhere as he goes down hard on his backside.

  The man with the southern accent is already in motion and coming at me with a knife. The point of his blade slices along the front of my shirt, opening a small furrow along my stomach. There’s a sharp pinch of pain and I feel the warm flow of blood spilling down my body, but I know it’s not serious, so I spin and throw my good elbow backward. It connects with his jaw with a hard jolt and a burst of pain in my arm. He staggers backward, clamping his hands over his mouth as my vision starts to waver. My body is one big collection of aches and pains right now and I feel like I’m teetering on the edge of consciousness.

  My reflexes are slow, and I only register the massive fist heading in my direction at the last second. I turn, but it catches me on the side of my head and drops me instantly. As I go down though, I hear the crackle of gunfire and the sound of a man grunting. The floor shakes beneath me as the man who’d punched me crashes down on his gut, his head turned toward me. Blood spills from his mouth and his eyes are wide open. He’s staring at me without actually seeing me. Mikey’s got that far off, glazed over stare of death I’ve seen too many times in my life.

  Beyond the man on the ground next to me, I can see the other guy sitting down, his back pressed to the wall. His head is tilted to the side, his expression fixed, his eyes wide and unseeing. The front of his black shirt glistens as the sunlight streaming in through the windows glints off the blood splattered all over him.

  Every square inch of my body hurts—some of those square inches hurting more than others—but I’m fine. Relatively speaking. I take a few heavy breaths as the adrenaline slowly wanes, and then I remember the bullet wound dripping from my arm. Right. Maybe not fine.

  I groan as I roll over and sit up to see two men in dark suits wearing dark glasses standing before me, weapons in hand. They part as another man steps between them. He’s tall, with dark hair, a warm olive-colored complexion, and has dark, almond-shaped eyes. He’s lean and fit and seems very light on his feet. He moves with a dancer’s grace, almost gliding instead of walking. His face is unlined and smooth, but he’s got the gravitas about him that can only be gained through hard-fought experience, which tells me he’s older than I think.

  The sunlight flowing in through the windows glints off the metallic silver suit he’s wearing. Beneath the jacket is a black shirt and a pink tie. A matching pink square peeks out of his jacket pocket and his outfit is topped off by a pair of silver shoes. The man cuts quite a striking and flamboyant figure, which tells me exactly who this is.

  “Huan Zhao,” I say, my voice barely a whisper.

  “Please. Call me Fish,” he smiles. “All my friends do.”

  As I sit there staring at him, clutching my wounded arm, darkness creeps in at the edges of my vision. I start to feel dizzy, and then I slump backward, rapping my head on the floor as the darkness consumes me entirely and my entire world goes black.

  Fifteen

  Dr. Bai Xu’s Animal Clinic; Chinatown-International District, Seattle

  My eyes flutter, then open—and immediately close again at the harshness of the fluorescent lights above me. I try again, more slowly this time, and find myself sitting upright in a hospital bed. Everything is hazy and I can’t see much beyond my own two hands. But as I look around, it’s obvious I’m not in a hospital. Not exactly, anyway. I mean, I’m in a hospital bed and I’ve got an IV in one arm and a tightly wound bandage around the other. The ache in my arm has been dulled, which tells me I’m on some very good drugs—getting shot tends to hurt like hell.

  I can hear the soft beeping of an EKG machine beside me and feel the leads attached to my chest, but the smell is all wrong. Instead of the acrid smell of disinfectants, I smell… wet dog. As my vision begins to clear, I can see the room is dull and kind of dingy. The walls are all roughly painted concrete, and the space isn’t more than eight by eight. It looks more like a prison cell than anything, and in the distance, I hear the muffled sound of dogs barking wildly.

  “Welcome back, Mr. Arrington.”

  The voice is lightly accented, and when I whip my head to the right, I see him sitting in a chair against the wall, cloaked by the dim shadows in the room. He gets to his feet and seems to glide across the room, stopping beside my bed. As he looks at me with an almost predatory smile on his face, the events that landed me here begin to cycle through my mind.

  “It’s nice to finally meet you, Mr. Arrington. Agent Wilder does go on about you, so it’s nice to have a face to put with the name,” Fish says.

  His voice is soft and slightly accented. It’s cultured and refined, and if not for the shiny silver suit, I’d dare say he would fit right in with my former world—the world my parents and brother still inhabit. I doubt he’d have any trouble navigating the waters of the one percent—and in fact, would probably establish himself as the apex predator in that particular ocean. Though he outwardly appears to be a gentleman of means and culture, his eyes still carry a hard edge. I can still see the young and vicious fishmonger who cut a bloody swath through Seattle’s criminal underworld on his way to the top.

  “And she’s told me about you, Mr. Zhao,” I reply.

  He laughs slightly. “I can tell by your tone and that look in your eye that you don’t approve of our unorthodox friendship.”

  I shrug. “Blake’s a big girl. She can make her own decisions about who she associates with. But you should know I consider her one of my dearest friends, and if anything were to happen to her, I would take it very personally.”

  “Let us not waste time with pedestrian threats, Mr. Arrington. I find them so boring,” he brushes me off. “And please, let me assure you that I too, consider Agent Wilder to be a dear friend and I am very protective of those I care for. There is very little I would not do—or indeed, have not already done—to keep her safe.”

  As I look into his eyes and listen to his words, I find that I actually believe him. There’s a sincerity and authenticity in his voice that you can’t fake. Strange as it seems, I find myself comforted by the idea that this man, with his resources and influence, has Blake’s back. He can go places and do things somebody like me can’t. He exists in a world I can never enter.

  I nod. “I think we understand each other.”

  “That is good, Mr. Arrington. I am very glad to hear that,” he says. “And please believe me when I say that although you and I may never be friends in the way Agent Wilder and I are, we need not be enemies either. I believe there is much that we can do for one another.”

  “Such as?”

  He shrugs his shoulders. “I do not know right now, but I always have need of talented investigators like yourself,” he says. “Agent Wilder tells me you are second to none, including herself, in terms of investigative skill.”

  “I’m not sure about that. She’s as good as they come.”

  “True, but she is also bound by the oath of her office and the pesky laws of the land. You have no such restrictions.”

  “I may not have taken an oath, but I don’t break the law,” I reply.

  “No, you don’t. And that is admirable. But you have been known to bend it nearly to the point of breaking before,” he replies with a wide, wolfish grin.

  I can’t deny that because it’s true, but I have no idea how he would know that. I don’t believe for a moment that Blake would share my activities with him, which means he’s as well wired and connected in this city as I’ve been led to believe. He’s a man
with eyes and ears everywhere.

  “You operate in a gray area, Mr. Arrington. By design, I believe. You’re neither law enforcement nor private citizen,” he continues. “And in my line of work, I’ve found it prudent to have people in my orbit who believe there is very little that’s truly black and white in this world. People who are comfortable with operating in those gray areas. That is a description that fits you to the proverbial T, Mr. Arrington.”

  I look at him for a long moment, studying his features, trying to pick out his tells. But Fish is well-schooled in keeping his face blank. In wearing a mask of cool indifference and maintaining perfect control of his emotions. He could very well be standing there talking about throwing some work my way or plotting to cut my heart out of my chest and I wouldn’t be able to tell by his face or the tone of his voice.

  “You should know that I don’t work for anybody. Tried that with the SPD and it didn’t work out too well,” I say. “I doubt it’d work any better with you.”

  “I’m not talking about you working for me, Mr. Arrington. More of a strategic alliance.”

  “Strategic alliance?” I arch an eyebrow.

  “Quite so,” he replies. “As you might have heard, I’m going legit—”

  “Legit-ish,” I cut him off. “Don’t think I don’t know about the illicit gambling halls and brothels you’ve still got your fingers in.”

  A gentle smile curls his lips upward. “I see that, like me, you do your homework.”

  I nod. “Mostly so I could tell Blake and let her see who she was getting into bed with.”

  “Rest assured, she already knows. As far as my less than legal activities, I like to think they, too, exist in that gray area we spoke of,” he said.

  I laugh. “I sometimes like to think I could walk onto the Seahawks’ starting secondary. Me thinking that doesn’t make it approach reality though.”

  He looks at me for a long moment as if assessing me. Sizing me up against what he’s heard. A small smile plays across his lips, and he nods to himself as if coming to some internal decision.