Come Hell or High Desire

by Misty Dietz

  “You idiot! That was an eighteenth century French masterpiece! Get out! And stay away from me!”

  Without another word, Sloane slipped from the room, the vision of Colette on the floor gathering the shattered pieces of the cloche in her arms like a mother cradling her child. It was more honest emotion than her performance over her husband’s murder for her parishioners.

  Something was very wrong here.

  Sloane sprinted from the building like it was the seat of evil, the Swarovski crystal heavy and ominous in her pocket.

  Chapter Twenty

  So this is what prey feels like. Zack’s eyes swept the alleyway looking for moving shadows as he killed the El Camino’s headlights. Samuel’s Construction headquarters was in the building two blocks north, but he didn’t dare park and enter through the front doors. There’d be at least one unmarked police vehicle staking out his building.

  Thank God there was a hidden underground passageway built a century ago when the company’s three-story building had been a hotel.

  He’d never forget the first time John had taken him through the tunnel that led from the mechanical room in the Samuel’s building to the back of a Chinese restaurant two blocks away. John had won the decrepit hotel in a poker game nearly twenty years ago. He’d purchased the Chinese restaurant only three years later.

  And so the passageway belonged to him.

  John had crowed like a teenage prankster as they’d descended into the dark bowels of the city, regaling Zack with sordid stories of the tunnel’s past. The labyrinth consisted of a main passageway with several offshoots that, once upon a time, had led to nicely-appointed, private rooms used for security, gambling, drinking, and whoring in Prohibition days by thrill-seekers, visiting dignitaries, mob bosses, and upper-class snobs with the right amount of coin. There was a ridiculously small, secret elevator behind John’s bookcase paneling as well, but he’d rebuffed all of John’s coaxing to stuff himself into that death hole.

  John had been so proud to own such a seedy piece of history.

  A few years back, a writer had asked to see the tunnel, but John told her it had been destroyed during the building’s remodel.

  Of course it hadn’t.

  John had loved the secrecy of it. And though he’d never admit it, the romance of it. He told Zack someday he’d be glad to have it.

  Yep.

  Zack slipped from the car and unlocked the restaurant’s heavy steel door. Inside, sweet and spicy scents made his stomach clench even though he’d eaten the half sandwich Archie had sent with him. He ran through the kitchen toward the cleaning closet. Soft light filtered through the narrow window above a row of hooks that held a broom, mops, and heavy linen tablecloths that hung like teepees in front of the hidden passageway door.

  Running his hand along a high ledge searching for a flashlight, he knocked a broom against a tin bucket, the clatter exploding in the small space. He froze, half expecting flood lights and armed officers to jump him from the outer room.

  Four seconds.

  Nothing but the hum of appliances.

  Eight seconds.

  Drunken laughter in the alley.

  Ten.

  The drilling bass of the nightclub half a block away, its door propped open to reduce interior pollution.

  Or offer a quick escape for the under-aged.

  Twenty.

  Flashlight in hand, he pulled back the tablecloths to reveal a wooden pocket door that concealed a small reinforced steel door and vault lock. He slid the wood aside and bent down to shine the flashlight on the lock. Thirty-eight, thirty-two, thirty-eight. He smiled, remembering John’s ideal woman’s curves.

  The miniature door squeaked open to expose a dim stairwell barely wide enough for a man’s shoulders. With a hiss, he brought an arm across his face to shield the dank basement odor that blitzed him with memories.

  He was suddenly eleven years old.

  “Please, don’t make me stay down there again.” His throat ached with a cough that never went away. Sudden heat across his cheek, the force of his mother’s slap spinning him toward the opposite wall. He staggered to remain upright, trying to get his eyes to focus, but he slid down the peeling yellow wallpaper with its tiny purple flowers. He focused on the flowers when another fit of coughing rattled his chest and sent an arrow of pain from his jaw to his eye sockets.

  The flower petals looked so soft. He wished he could shrink down and wrap himself in them.

  Fingernails scraped at his skull, a fist yanking him upright by his hair. “Yer momma wants you downstairs, that’s where you’ll go, you pussy wimp.”

  His mouth worked as he looked up at his mother, but he couldn’t get anything past his lips besides a mortifying squeak.

  Save me. Please don’t do this. Please love me.

  Her gaunt frame turned away. Her boyfriend, who always brought the white powder they snorted, laughed. “Ya ain’t got no daddy, but at least ya got me to show ya how to be a man.”

  The boyfriend began dragging him by the hair to the downstairs door.

  Something in Zack snapped. A volcanic heat surged through his body, throwing off his dogging weakness and ever-present chill. He lashed out at the wiry man, legs kicking, arms swinging. He landed several hits, but the cokehead didn’t even seem to feel them. When they got to the doorway, Zack spread-eagled his legs, fingers curling around the sliver-riddled door jam.

  Sweat broke out all over his body and his muscles locked as he scrutinized the wet darkness below him. “Don’t wanna go down there! Don’t make me go. I’ll do anything! Please!”

  He looked over his shoulder in time to see the fist. As the blow landed he went flying, weightless for an instant above the cinderblock stairs.

  He woke, shaking, nauseous, in the darkness, small feet with tiny claws running over an exposed ankle. He swallowed his scream, knowing it would be pointless. He bent over and vomited bitter bile.

  Two hunger-filled days later, the gruff, eccentric woman with the wild white hair across the street had finally turned his mother in. As an adult, Zack realized she’d frequently hired him to mow her lawn so she could keep tabs on him. He’d thought she was lonely. His mother thought she was senile, but had been grateful for the cash.

  The crazy old woman had been his angel.

  After a short stint in the hospital, social workers put him in a foster home where he probably would’ve been better off, but at the time, he’d wanted nothing to do with any of them. The unknowns lurking in tidy houses were far scarier than life on the streets where he had Archie to keep him company.

  Christ, he was cold. Bitter cold straight to his marrow.

  Zack now ran a shaking hand over his face and tried to supplant John’s grizzled, beloved features across the desolate landscape of what should have been his childhood.

  Come on, son. Put one foot right in front t’other. Before you know it, you’ve come clear across the barren land. But you gotta start with that first step. He could almost feel John’s bear paw clap him on the shoulder the way it always had when he needed a bit of encouragement.

  John’s tunnel. John’s tunnel. John’s been through here. He’d be okay.

  Zack descended two steps and pulled the door shut behind him with a sickening clank. Once he reached the lower landing, there was more room. Yet his torso burned as he sprinted. The flashlight’s beam bounced off the muted gray concrete, highlighting cobwebs, rubble, and detritus left behind by industrious rodents. The faster he ran, the more time slowed. The only sound in the tomblike silence…

  His heartbeat.

  Zack didn’t bother wiping the clammy sweat from his face as he rounded the last bend before the passageway drew up into the opposite staircase. Almost there. He shuddered as he passed three narrow storage doors inset in the tunnel. Two of them were crisscrossed with cobwebs. Gooseflesh broke out on his body.

  Hurry. Gotta find Ann.

  And her baby.

  He stumbled on the stairs, his breath ragged.
>
  Don’t run from your past. We all have our demons. Face ’em with yer God-given grit. How else you gonna get whole? How many times had he heard John’s lecture? It hadn’t meant much until this moment. John, help me now. The flashlight shook as he tried to remember the code for the door. A combination of Ann’s birth month and day, plus one other number.

  What the hell was it? He sucked air into his nostrils and tried again.

  Hurry.

  His skin tingled on the back of his neck. He spun the dial forward, back, forward.

  No good.

  Mother of God. The tunnel was closing in on him.

  Chest so tight. Can’t breathe.

  Hurry.

  A sound—a moan—wound around him. His own? His stomach pitched and tumbled. He was going to vomit.

  Out. Need out. Help me!

  He fist flew up to pound on the door.

  Zaaaack…

  His arm froze mid-air as her voice whispered through his mind. Her rich vanilla scent as real in his nose as when she’d lain so exquisitely in his arms. He looked behind him, the flashlight’s beam illuminating only the time-worn concrete walls. He was still alone.

  Yet, not.

  Sloane.

  Somehow she’d crossed the distance between them. Touched him. His shoulders slumped, his head dipped. The flashlight shone down on his work boots.

  He imagined the velvet of her cheek, her parted lips and haunting eyes as she’d made love to him. A new warmth spread through every muscle, every cell of his body. His heartbeat slowed. The awful tightness in his chest unwound.

  He raised the flashlight to the dial. Six, twenty, nine.

  The door swung open. He switched off the flashlight and turned back to face the yawning tunnel. He saw himself as a boy—angry, vulnerable, sad—in the shadows cast by the weak light filtering through the single mechanical room window.

  In the next heartbeat, he tasted a burgeoning liberation from all of it.

  Ironic. But there it was.

  The first blush of emancipation from the sting of his childhood while in flight from the local authorities.

  Shit.

  But they hadn’t caught him.

  Yet.

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Cool air wrapped around Zack when he stepped into the hallway outside the mechanical room. The hall opened into the comfortable lobby of Samuel��s Construction, where hand-blown glass sculptures by local artists graced marble tables. Tables that usually held trays of homemade goodies for the constant flow of laborers, architects, subcontractors, and developers, most of whom were greeted by name by Ann.

  Zack skirted around the furniture, staying away from the glass entryway, and ran to the other side of the building and up the stairwell. He shivered when he entered John’s spacious office. He’d kept everything intact since the last time his mentor had sat there eleven months and five days ago. Papers still poked out of the token junk drawer John had kept; otherwise the office radiated order and simplicity. Like the man himself.

  Zack couldn’t help running his hand across the top of the supple chair as he moved toward the vault at the back of the room, the lingering scents of leather and tobacco greeting him like a welcome home. If only you were still here.

  His head dipped and he pinched the bridge of his nose. Money. Get the cash and go. He dialed the third combination John had made him memorize so many years ago. At least this one he’d used before, though not as often as he probably should’ve.

  The vault door opened soundlessly, and he slipped inside, leaving the door open a sliver behind him. The darkness was nearly complete, only this time, the proximity to John’s office made him feel cocooned instead of suffocated.

  Stepping forward to reach out for the string that turned on the single hanging light bulb, he bumped into a large stack of boxes, upending them to the sound of rushing papers. Cursing, he grasped at air until he found the cord and gave a light tug.

  Hell’s bells. Take the time to shove all the papers back in the box or leave it? How would he want the cops to find it? It would probably take a cache of dynamite to open the vault, but maybe they had some other way of opening it.

  He knelt and began stuffing the papers back into the box. Invoices. He’d never seen them before, but then he’d always spent the least amount of time on the back office side of the business. He enjoyed being in the field with the subcontractors. Couldn’t stomach too much desk work.

  Which was probably why the business was tanking.

  He paused, reading one of the papers. The invoicing company was a bodyguard service. He dug through the pile, discovering security system invoices as well. There had to be a hundred statements dating back two decades.

  His stomach rolled over. Ann had had her twentieth birthday two months ago. She would’ve been a tiny baby when these invoices were prepared. Why would John hire a bodyguard and security services for her? He’d always been super protective of her, but damn. This bordered on obsessive. Remarkably out of character for John. Why hadn’t he ever told him?

  A blue folder marked “IMPORTANT” lay on the bottom of the box. Inside were an unlabeled CD and an old newspaper clipping of an opera singer who’d been recruited by NDSU to teach in its Fine Arts department for a year.

  Zack scanned the newsprint for a date, but it had been clipped off. The dark-haired beauty on the page faced the camera as though she knew it loved her. A shudder raced through him. Wide eyes, narrow nose, a tiny cleft in her chin. This woman was Ann all over again except for the wide, full lips. Under her picture was the name Serena Galasso.

  Then he remembered Agnes’s gossip about John and the “high-fallutin’ opera singer.”

  He grabbed the vault phone and dialed Archie. No answer. He prayed he hadn’t sent Twyla into early labor with his visit. He left a message asking Archie to probe the bodyguard and security companies to see what he could dig up on them.

  “What are you doing here?”

  Zack jumped, crumpling the newspaper clipping in his hands and pointed outside the vault. “Turn the lights off!”

  Ross quickly moved out of the vault to turn off the lights in John’s office. When he came back inside his eyebrows slanted downward. “What the hell, Zack?”

  His face was pale. “Shit, Ross. It’s after two in the morning. Why are you still here?” Zack inserted the newspaper, two invoices, and the unlabeled CD into a zippered bank pouch and pushed to his feet.

  “In case you forgot, the amusement park is opening later today. I was just making sure everything is in order. Then I thought I heard something fall in here. What’s going on?”

  Zack spread his arms wide to scoop up the rest of the invoices, then shoved them back into the box and replaced the lid. “John ever talk to you about security for Ann?”

  “No, never.”

  Zack held up the single remaining invoice he clutched. “Twenty years of protection billed to John’s personal address, not the business. You know anything about that?”

  He saw confusion cross Ross’s pale face momentarily before it was replaced by a sort of stunned awareness. “Oh shit, Ann is really missing?”

  Ross looked at him with stricken eyes, and Zack felt a blow of pain more than physical this time. Something worse.

  Failure. Loss.

  We’ll find her. Come to me, Zack.

  Sloane again. How did she talk in his head like that? On cue. He didn’t understand it. But he felt the pull of her, all the same. He wanted to go to her, fill her body and lose himself in her passion. But that would leave him no closer to finding answers about Ann.

  And would only drag her further into danger.

  He turned away from Ross and moved to the cash box in the back shadows of the vault, mentally picturing a wall to keep Sloane out of his head.

  “I’ve worked for you and John for more than four years now, and you won’t trust me? I care about Ann, too.”

  Zack didn’t turn around. “It’s not that. I don’t want to give you any i
nformation that might suck you into this quagmire. I’m going to find Ann. And no matter what the media reports, just so you know, I haven’t killed anyone.”

  Both men fell silent. Zack pushed a bundle of bills into the zippered pouch with the other items, then shut the cash box.

  “I wish I knew something—anything—that might help you, but—” Ross stopped suddenly, and Zack swung around, his entire body on alert.

  “But what?”

  Ross rumpled his sandy blond hair. His eyes scanned the room as though looking for a way out. “Last week, Ann was talking on the phone after hours when I was in the conference room preparing for a meeting. She didn’t know I was there. And she was upset. She told whomever it was that she loved him and that they could work it out. She asked him to come over for supper. He apparently declined.”

  Zack scrubbed both hands down his face. “Okay, so what did you do?”

  “What could I do? Reveal myself to comfort her? She would have been mortified. So I stayed in the conference room until I knew she’d left for the day. She’s been especially unhappy ever since.”

  “Any idea who she might have been talking to?” Zack asked, though he knew it must have been O’Neill.

  “No. But several times in the last couple of weeks, I’ve seen her in the parking lot after work talking to a man in a white car. I guess I only noticed because she’s usually so solitary.”

  Clearly Zack wasn’t the only one in the office to realize Ann wasn’t into the dating scene. “How did she seem to you?”

  “Giddy mostly, except for once. The last time, I think, she seemed worried,” Ross said.

  “When was that?”

  “Earlier this week. Maybe Tuesday.”

  “Were they fighting?” Zack asked.

  “Well, she wasn’t smiling. She was gesturing with her hands, like people do when they’re upset. I couldn’t see the man’s face. He has tinted windows. It looked like a Lexus.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me sooner?”

  Ross narrowed his eyes at Zack’s sharp tone. “It was none of my business.”