by J. R. Ward
Going over to Tony’s car, she texted him to let him know that, in fact, she hadn’t totaled his vehicle—and that she was going to treat him to lunch tomorrow as well as pick him up at eight thirty on her way in to the newsroom.
And then she crossed her coat around herself and settled back against her colleague’s front bumper.
Immediately, she stiffened again and glanced behind her. Nothing but streetlamps on the far edges of the motel’s fat parking lot. No masher sneaking up on her, no one at all, as a matter of fact.
So why the hell did she think she was being watched?
Massaging her temples, she wondered if Matthias’s paranoia wasn’t rubbing off on her. Or maybe it was more like what had happened on that bed had scrambled her brain.
Say what you would about his not remembering much, that man sure as hell knew what to do with his mouth…
On some level, she couldn’t believe that it had happened. She’d never been into casual hookups, even in college—but if Matthias hadn’t stopped them, she just might have let things go to their natural, naked conclusion.
Shocker. Especially as she knew she’d go there again.
If she ever got the chance.
Frozen in the Marriott’s basement corridor, with Jim Heron going blanket all over him, Matthias felt like a boxer. And not as in Muhammad Ali or George Foreman. As in their schlub sparring partners, the guys who the real fighters worked over at the gym before they punched the crap out of people worthy of their skills: Gun empty and by his thigh, rib cage panting, head swimming, he was beat to shit with all that running, and running into things. He didn’t think he’d been hit, however.
Someone had. The smell of fresh blood wafted down to them, and there was a dripping sound that suggested a pipe had a leak in it—and it probably wasn’t something tied to the hotel’s water system.
“Stay here,” Jim ordered.
Like he was a girl? “Fuck you.”
Together, they marched down toward the incapacitated shooter, with Jim in front because he could go a little faster.
Just inside the doors they’d busted through, a man in black, tight-fitting clothes lay flat on his back, eyes fixed and dilated on the afterlife. His throat had been sliced right under the jawline, the arteries and veins not nicked, but split clean apart.
“Messy,” Matthias muttered, glancing around and wondering about cleanup—and who in the hell their savior had been.
As he considered the pros and cons of various corporeal disposal techniques, he was dimly aware that he was totally unfazed by the death, the body, the violence of having nearly been gunned down: this was just business as usual, nothing but the practicalities of not wanting the police involved weighing on his mind.
This was how he’d lived, he thought. This was his zone.
Leaning into his cane, he lowered himself to his haunches, one knee cracking like a tree branch. “Do you have a car?”
“Not with me, but I can handle this. Do me a favor and—”
Matthias started working the body over, patting it down, peeling off extra ammo, a knife, another gun.
“Okaaaaay,” Jim said dryly. “I’m going to step outside and see if we’re clear.”
“So you don’t know who our Good Samaritan was, either.”
“Nope.”
The steel door squeaked again when Jim opened it, and for a split second, Matthias was paralyzed with fear, the terror freezing his body from his heart to his heels. Eyes bouncing around, he sought the shadows in the dark corridor, expecting them to jump out and glom onto him.
Nothing moved.
Muttering under his breath, he refocused and yanked up the man’s shirt. Kevlar vest had at least one slug in it—so he and Jim hadn’t wasted all their lead. No cell phone. And assuming Jim didn’t walk out into a bullet shower, it would appear that there was no one waiting in the wings to back this soldier up.
Sitting back, Matthias assessed the steel doors. In the center, around the locking mechanism, there was a scorched blast mark from where the now-dead attacker had blown the shit apart with some kind of a pocket bomb—
In a sudden burst, Matthias remembered his own hands on a detonator, saw himself fingering an IED with a vertical focus. He had prepared the thing for himself, the combination of electronics and blast potential a carefully constructed exit strategy….
Jim was wrong. He hadn’t hated himself or what he’d become. He’d just gotten exhausted with being who he was.
And that had been—
The headache came on strong, like his brain had the equivalent of a muscle cramp, the pain wiping his cognitive slate clean, his memories blocked by the agony.
Shit, he wanted access to what was hidden, but he couldn’t afford to get stuck defenseless, and crouching over a stiff.
Glancing down into the face of the dead, he forced himself to pull out of the amnesia and note the color change in the guy’s skin, the ruddy complexion from exertion draining out and being replaced with an opaque gray. Tracking the death process, focusing on it and it alone, he dragged himself back to reality.
“Do I know you?” he asked the remains.
Part of him was convinced he did. The face was a young white guy’s, lean from lack of body fat, pale from lack of sun, as if he were used to working at night. Then again, how many millions of midtwenty Caucasians were out there?
No, he thought, he knew this kid from somewhere.
In fact, he had the sense he had chosen the son of a bitch.
Had he been in recruiting? For the military?
Jim came back into the corridor, shut the door, and leaned against it, crossing his arms over his chest and looking like he wanted to punch a wall.
“Are we clear?” Matthias demanded.
“Pretty much.”
Abruptly, he noticed the holes in Heron’s shirt. “Good thing you’re wearing a vest, too.”
“What?”
Matthias frowned. “You’ve been hit—”
All at once, his brain coughed up another piece of the past: he saw the pair of them in a stainless-steel room, a cold body on a slab between them, a gun up, a trigger getting pulled…at fucking Heron. By himself.
“I’ve shot you in a morgue,” Matthias breathed. “I’ve shot you…right in the chest.”
Perfect frickin’ timing, Jim thought as Matthias stared at him like he’d sprouted a horn in the middle of his forehead.
This was so not a good situation for that memory of his to come back online: Clearly, someone from XOps was on Matthias’s trail. It was the only logical explanation—although that wasn’t what was blendering his brain.
Devina had evidently saved their asses.
She had come, gone Ginsu, and left. And as the demon never did anything that didn’t benefit her, he had to wonder just how much a part of the game this assassination attempt had been. Maybe none—after all, if she wanted to influence Matthias at his crossroads, she needed him to be alive whenever that came.
And Jim had obviously not been doing a bang-up job of protecting the fucker.
“I shot you…” Matthias repeated.
Jim leveled a get-over-yourself stare. “You want a medal for it? I’ll buy you one off the Internet. But before you go all existential, that’s what they make bulletproof vests for, right?”
“You weren’t wearing one.” Matthias took off the sunglasses and narrowed his eyes. “And you aren’t now.”
“Okay, right, we’re in a public place with a dead body full of slugs that came from our guns. Do you honestly think it’s a good call to hang around and to chat?”
“I know him.” Matthias pointed to their attacker. “I just can’t place where.”
“Look, I’m going to take this trash out. If you’d be so kind as to take your motherfucking ass back to your hotel room—”
“Tell me. Or I’m not going anywhere.”
For a split second, Jim remembered oh, so clearly, why he’d always referred to the guy as Matthias the Fucker.
>
“Fine. You were his boss.”
“Just what kind of a boss was I?”
They did not have time for this. “Not one I liked, I’ll tell you that.”
“I was yours, too…wasn’t I.” When Jim didn’t say anything further, the guy bared his teeth. “Why the hell are you stringing me along. One way or the other, I’m going to put it together, and all you’re doing is pissing me off.”
Shit. There was a very real possibility the guy wouldn’t move, and Devina would come back—or nearly as bad, the cops or hotel security would turn up.
“Fine,” Jim said gruffly. “I’m afraid if you know, you’re going to end up in Hell. How’s that.”
Matthias recoiled. “You don’t look like a Jesus freak.”
“I’m not one. So can we cut the bullshitting and get moving?”
Matthias shuffled to his feet, hooked his cane over his shoulder, and went to the dead guy’s ankles. “You’re not dodging the question forever.”
“What the hell are you doing?”
“We’re going to deal with this together—”
“No, we’re not—”
The sound of sirens cut the argument off, and they both looked at the door. With any luck, the cops would pass by, the volume finding a bell curve as the badges closed in and kept the fuck going—
Nope. Someone had seen something, heard something, and done the 911.
As a car screeched to a halt in the alley, Jim wanted to take the easy way out—just whammy Matthias into a trance, poof the stiff, and bend the mentals of the blue unis who were, at this very moment, getting out of their vehicles with flashlights. But the mind-meld shit was tough to do to more than one person at a time. And lighting the corpse on fire would tell the CPD exactly where they were.
Hopefully, those boys in blue would waste some time looking around the alley.
“Shut. It,” he barked as he grabbed Matthias around the middle, swung the guy up over his shoulder, and started to book it down the hall.
“Arrrrrreee y-y-you f-f-f-fucking k-kidding mmmmm-m-m-eee—”
The bitch session was cut short, either because Matthias swallowed his own tongue from the rough ride, or because a brain hemorrhage took over thanks to the paint mixing. But goddamn it, they made it to the end of the fifty-mile corridor, and this time, Jim didn’t have to hide his blasting the lock. Bursting through, he—
Oh, shit.
—ran right into the back of one of the hotel’s restaurants.
The good news was it appeared to be the facility used to serve breakfast and lunch out of; the place was a ghost town, the cook tops and stainless steel counters all cleaned up and battened for the off shift. Unfortunately, the B and E had set off the security alarm, and red lights were flashing in all the corners.
“This way,” Matthias said, pointing to a set of double doors with round window cutouts in them. “And put my ass down.”
Jim unloaded the guy and they took off again, passing by a stove as long as a football field and then a sink big enough to wash an elephant in. As they pounded across the red-tiled floor, Jim looked around for a control panel for the alarm system, some kind of motherboard, but of course they wouldn’t put it in the middle of all this Emeril Lagasse. Besides, even if he could disarm the thing, the signal had already been sent.
Busting through the pair of swingers, they went into an open layout of square tables set for hungry people who wouldn’t show up for toast and eggs for another seven hours—
On the far side, the tinted-glass walls that separated the eatery from the lobby were showing a trio of running people who had to be hotel security.
He and Matthias both looked to the left, where floor-to-ceiling drapes were drawn back to frame old-fashioned, double-hung windows.
No discussion. They gunned for the only exit they had a chance at. And to Matthias’s credit, he didn’t try to play hero when they got there; he pulled up short and let Jim unlock the switch and grab the brass handle on the base of the sill.
He put more than just his back into the lift. Tacking on a little mental juice as well, the window slid up with a crack! as if it were breaking free of having been painted in.
Twelve-foot drop onto pavement.
“Fuck,” Matthias said. “You’re going to have to catch me.”
“Roger that.”
With a coordinated surge, Jim was up and over and into the loose hands of gravity. He landed solid on his combat boots and held out his arms. Matthias’s exit was rougher, his legs hard to bend by the look of it, but the guy wasn’t stupid. He gripped the window and dragged it back into place behind him, even though his ass barely fit on the ledge.
As he let himself go and went into a free fall, his black windbreaker flapped out behind him uselessly, like a parachute with a bullet hole in it.
Jim caught his old boss with a grunt, keeping him from hitting the pavement.
“They found our friend,” Matthias said as he shoved free.
Sure enough, far down the side of the building, the cops had opened those double doors and entered the corridor, their flashlights shining out into the alley from time to time as if they were doing sweeps around the leaking assassin.
Time to get ghost.
Moving quietly and as quickly as they could, the two of them headed in the opposite direction. Unlike in XOps, backup was the name of the game when it came to the Caldwell Police Department, and sure enough, more sirens started to echo throughout the night.
A good fifty yards later, he and Matthias stopped at the other corner of the hotel, did a look-around, and then stepped out of the alley, calm as frozen water.
“Lose the sunglasses,” Jim said as he focused on the sidewalk ahead.
“Already did.”
Jim glanced over at his old boss. The man had his chin up and his eyes straight ahead. His lips were slightly parted and he was breathing like a freight train, but you wouldn’t know it if you weren’t looking for signs of hypoxia.
As far as anyone could tell, they were just two Joes out for a stroll, unconnected to any weirdness.
Jim had an absurd urge to tell his old boss that the bastard had done a good job. But that was ridiculous. They’d both been trained by the same drill sergeant, had spent years running exercises on evasive techniques side by side, had been through variations of this precise scenario.
By the time they entered the lobby, Matthias was breathing easy.
It went without saying that the guy would continue to stay at the Marriott. Now that an attempt had been made, and not just dead-ended, but with the involvement of gold badges, it made second tries trickier and riskier, at least for the next couple of days.
Besides, they’d been on a tour of the kitchen. Very professional.
Be a shame not to try the grub.
Mels’s tenacity paid off…in a sad way.
The news crews left after midnight, and then the cops started paring down. Even Monty left before she did. Finally, it was just the crime scene investigators, two detectives, and her good self.
The yellow line of police tape had gotten smaller and smaller as the staffing had been reduced and she had gotten closer and closer to the open door of the hotel room. So when it came time to remove the victim, she had a clear visual shot at the process. Two men went in with a black body bag, and because of the cramped nature of the bathroom the woman had been killed in, they had to put the thing flat on the carpet and carry her out to lay her in it.
That poor girl.
“Yeah, it’s terrible.”
Mels wheeled around, unaware she’d spoken out loud. A tall, scary-looking guy was behind her, your typical hard-ass with piercings in his face and a leather biker jacket. Except his expression carried a heartbreak on it that immediately changed her prejudicial opinion of him. He wasn’t focused on her; he was staring at the dead girl whose lifeless limbs were being arranged by her sides before a zipper disappeared her into black folds of thick plastic.
Mels turned back to the
scene. “I feel so sorry for her father.”
“You know him?”
“No. I can just imagine, though.” Then again, maybe the guy hadn’t given a crap about her and that was part of the reason she got hooked in the life? “It’s just…she was a baby once. There had to have been some innocence at some point.”
“You’d hope.”
Curiosity had her sizing him up again. “Are you a guest at the motel?”
“Just a bystander.” The man exhaled with a curious kind of defeat. “Man, I hate death.”
In that moment, Mels thought of her father for some reason. He’d been removed from the scene of that car crash in a bag, too—after he’d been cut out of the driver’s seat by the Jaws of Life.
Was he in Heaven? Looking down on them? Or was dying really just a lights-out kind of thing, like a car being turned off or a vacuum getting unplugged?
There was no afterlife for inanimate objects. So why did humans think that their fate was any different?
“Because it is different.”
She glanced over her shoulder and smiled awkwardly. “I didn’t mean to think out loud.”
“It’s okay.” The guy smiled a little. “And there’s nothing wrong with hoping that your dead are at peace or with having faith. It’s a good thing, actually.”
Mels refocused on the motel room, thinking it was weird to be having this candid conversation with a total stranger. “I just wish I knew for sure.”
“Ah, but you’re a reporter. You’d spill the secret.”
She laughed. “Like Heaven and Hell are privileged information?”
“You got it. Humans require two things to properly bond: scarcity and the unknown. If loved ones were around forever, you’d take them for granted, and if you knew for sure that you’d be reunited, you’d never miss them. It’s all part of the divine plan.”
So he was a religious nut. “Well, there you go.”
They moved back as the officers grasped the nylon handles of the bag and started walking the victim out. As the grim processional went by, Mels had a feeling why Dick had given her this assignment. Dead girl, grisly scene, mean streets of Caldwell, yada, yada, yada. He was just the kind of asshole to pay her back for shutting him down again.