Date with the Devil (Crimson Romance)

by Jessica Starre

  Her throat tightened and she had to stare down at the tablecloth for a moment. This was not about her. She knew how she felt but she didn’t know what Connie was really thinking or feeling. Some people acted very convincingly like they cared but they didn’t. Others could be torn up inside but you’d never know it from their outward behavior.

  “It must be terrible,” she said, knowing she was going to take advantage of his weakness. She was here to do a job but she hated it, not to mention herself, at this moment. “You seem to have some good friends, though. Like Kevin.”

  “Kevin.” He spat out the name.

  “He seemed so considerate.” She didn’t gag as she said it. There. Perfect example of not being able to tell what a person was really thinking or feeling.

  Connie paused and took a sip of water. “He’s — well, he’s always creeping around, you know? And he doesn’t like me and he told Elene some terrible things about me. And then he acts like he’s a good friend of mine.”

  Maybe to your face. But not behind your back.

  “He would always go off on the strangest things,” Connie said. “You know, the statues in the church? He talks to them.”

  I think they talk back, she thought but didn’t say. She just gave him her sympathetic look.

  “I told her not to do it,” he said, staring into the empty whiskey glass.

  “Not to do what?”

  “Spend so much time at the church. She was always doing for other people.”

  “She was always generous,” Victoria said, knowing she couldn’t go too far wrong saying that about a person who was dead. Connie wasn’t going to contradict her or tell her that she remembered wrong.

  “But she had a husband and son to take care of,” he said. “Why wasn’t that enough?”

  “People like to feel useful,” she remarked, straightening a little in her chair. “How much time did she spend there?” Maybe she’d been on the right track from the first and Elene was having an affair that Connie had discovered.

  “Seemed as if she was there every day,” he said. “But I suppose it was a couple of times a week. I told her people would talk if she spent time too much with that priest alone. She told me I was overreacting.”

  “People do talk,” she said noncommittally.

  Connie sipped his drink and nodded. “I was afraid our friends would wonder why she was spending all her time there and not at home, like there might be something wrong at home.”

  And was there? she wanted to ask but didn’t because she didn’t want to put him on the defensive from the start. Plenty of time for making him defensive later. God, she disliked this part.

  “Did Father Theoctisus have a — reputation?” she asked. “Is that why you were concerned?”

  Connie watched her for a long moment, as if deciding if he could trust her. “They say he was carrying on an affair with that housekeeper of his,” he said. The thought seemed to anger him.

  “Really?” she said, trying to indicate that she was willing to listen but not that she lived for malicious gossip.

  The tension in his body increased and then he said, “I didn’t want my wife around someone who’d do that. You never know, do you? What will happen, I mean. Anyone can be seduced from the path of righteousness.”

  Wasn’t that the truth.

  “I suppose so,” she said, as if she herself didn’t prove the point.

  Connie nodded sharply in agreement. “I should have killed the bastard myself.”

  • • •

  “So Connie’s still at the top of your list of suspects?” Michael asked that evening as they made their way to the subway station in Chinatown. He had picked up a lead regarding Donald Young’s bolt hole, but it had turned out to belong to a somewhat younger, more Asian-looking Donald Young. She wished they hadn’t had to visit Chinatown because the streets were so empty this time of night. She’d forgotten that. Except for light traffic and the occasional hurrying figure, they were alone.

  “‘I should have killed the bastard myself’?” she repeated.

  “‘I should have’ isn’t the same as ‘I did,’” he argued. She knew he liked Donald for the crime. Law enforcement types always figured you were guilty if you ran, but people like Victoria knew life was a little more complicated than that. She’d told him about her conversation with Connie, and he’d told her the very helpful information that Vlad had a son studying at Julliard. Do not make me an accessory to a felony, he’d growled after he’d shared that welcome tidbit. And now they were playing a round of “Guess Whodunnit?”

  She stopped to admire a colorful silk kimono draped in the window of a corner store. She turned to respond when she heard the revving of a car engine, then the flat spit of a silenced pistol peppering the area with bullets. One whined into the brick wall next to her, sending painful shards slicing across her face just as she hit the ground, jamming her already injured elbow hard and painfully. She pulled the Beretta but the car and shooter were already gone, accelerating around the corner. She reholstered the gun, took a deep steadying breath and climbed to her feet. She heard Michael muttering “damn damn damn” in a monotonous tone. She realized he’d been nailed and dropped to her knees next to him. Against his feeble protest, she rolled him over onto his back. He clutched his leg and curled himself into a ball as if that might stop the pain.

  “Damn,” she agreed, trying to assess the damage. He might have been wearing body armor, but that wouldn’t stop a bullet to the thigh. From what she could tell, not being a field medic, the bullet had missed the artery but that didn’t mean it wasn’t serious. She stripped off her jacket and wadded it against the wound. Michael grabbed her collar and pulled her close.

  “I always get shot when I’m with you. How come you never get shot?”

  “Reflexes,” she snapped. His blood stained her fingers red. Keeping pressure on the wound with one hand, she grabbed for her cell phone with the other and hit the “on” button.

  “No hospital.”

  “What is it with you and hospitals? You’re an adult, you can handle it.”

  “No,” he said. His blood-covered hand shot out to grab her wrist. “Shooting, gets reported, my boss finds out, I’m fired.”

  “He’ll fire you for getting shot?” she asked. “Maybe you need a new line of work.” But she understood his concerns. She tapped the phone against her teeth. What to do? Ignore his protest and call 9-1-1 anyway? Would that jeopardize their situation? She didn’t care about his getting fired. It might do him good. But she had her sister to consider and she didn’t want to make the wrong choice. Still, he was wounded beyond what her rudimentary first aid skills could repair. Of course, letting him bleed to death on the ground would solve one problem for her.

  Even as the thoughts passed through her mind, she knew she wouldn’t act on any of them. She considered for a moment and then the name came to her. She hesitated. It was from the life she’d left behind. If she asked for this favor, then she’d have to return the favor when it was called. She didn’t want to start this again. She wanted to go back to the Phoenix and teach Tae Kwon Do and Hapkido and how to kick men in the balls. If she had just kicked the right man in the balls at the beginning of all of this, she would never have had to come to this place.

  She closed her eyes against the sudden headache. Michael’s fingers clamped down on her arm.

  She dialed 4-1-1 and asked for her former friend Andrew Byofsky’s number. Andrew ran a legitimate dry cleaning business in Little Italy. Strike that. It appeared legitimate, but for all she knew it laundered cash along with dress shirts. In a moment, the operator connected her to the cleaners. She told the clerk who answered what she wanted and it didn’t take her long to run down Andrew’s cell phone number for her. It was very useful knowing the magic words: I’d like to hire him for something.

  “I�
�m taking care of it,” she reassured Michael, who had a death grip on her arm.

  When Andrew answered, she told him what she needed and where they were. After a stunned silence that eloquently expressed his surprise at hearing from her, he agreed to help her out of her present predicament. She had as much dirt on him as he had on her, but he thought the dirt would hurt him more than it would her. That was probably true. Her relationships with people in the business weren’t always based on mutual trust and affection.

  She hung up, then dragged Michael over to a step where they could sit together and she could keep watch for predators. She had one hand on his wound, and the other on the butt of her Beretta.

  In a few minutes, Andrew pulled to the curb in a Mercedes not his own. Jumping out, he glanced around at the empty streets, then motioned for them to get in the car. “Let’s go, let’s go,” he said. Victoria gave him a not wholly approving look and said, “He’s hit in the leg. I can’t drag him all the way over there. Give me a hand, will you?”

  “I hate this, I hate this,” Andrew said, dancing with impatience as they dragged Michael to the car and threw him in the backseat.

  “Andrew, you’re a member of a notorious Russian crime family,” she pointed out, slamming the door shut. “How can this possibly make you nervous?”

  “It’s not this,” he said, gesturing at Michael. “It’s you. You always bring trouble.”

  “I haven’t brought you trouble in years,” she said, outraged.

  “I know, and I thank you from the bottom of my heart. Now please make sure it’s another five, ten years before you bring me trouble again, okay?” he said, jumping behind the wheel of the car and slamming the door emphatically behind him. She barely had time to leap in on the passenger side before he had the car in gear and was on the way out of Chinatown.

  • • •

  The doctor wore her hair in dreadlocks, and spoke with a clipped British accent. She seemed unperturbed by the Beretta Victoria poked in her face when she showed up at the door of the sleazy tenement where Andrew had parked them. She had an enormous shoulder bag slung over her arm and she wore a dress that appeared to consist of dozens of thin shapeless layers. Her feet came equipped with thick black socks and Birkenstock sandals. Her face was gaunt, drawn, splotched with red veins. She might have been beautiful once but it was hard to tell now.

  Victoria took a cautious seat in a chair by the bed, the Beretta at the ready in case the doctor didn’t turn out to be who she was supposed to be. It wasn’t as if people were always turning into something else on her, but betrayal didn’t have to happen often to give you a twitch.

  The doctor barely glanced at Victoria as she went to work on the devil. Her hands shook as she rolled up her sleeves to keep them out of the blood but it wasn’t fear that made her tremble. From where she sat, Victoria could see the track marks on her arms. Leave it to Andrew to send a junkie to heal Michael.

  The doctor gave him a shot of something, possibly illicit, to sedate him, although he had fainted earlier in the proceedings. With a scalpel nicked from hard use, she dug the bullet out of his thigh, dropping it onto the floor. Blood dripped down the side of the bed.

  Then she doused his leg with an antiseptic liquid. Victoria assumed that was what it was, anyway. He screamed, although he vehemently denied that afterwards, admitting only to expressing his discomfort loudly. He pushed himself to a sitting position, then fell back against the pillows. The doctor stood out of the way, without comment, until he was done flailing about.

  Then she threaded a needle and drove it into his flesh. Victoria had to finish the job under direction, because the doctor’s bony fingers shook too hard for her to pull the needle through the flesh. She helped her put fresh sheets on the bed while Michael was still in it, a task they might teach in nursing school but which Victoria had never had occasion to learn before. The doctor stayed with him, taking his temperature and feeling his pulse, while Victoria bundled the bloody sheets into the incinerator.

  When she returned to the bedroom, the doctor was getting a little jumpy. Her hands had progressed to twitching spasmodically as she paced the carpet. The moment she saw Victoria return, she sprang toward her with a bottle of antibiotic tablets for Michael to take. He was asleep. The doctor made her getaway, which Victoria envied her.

  Her hand trembled when she touched Michael’s forehead. He didn’t seem too warm to the touch, although he always burned hotter than most. His breathing seemed even, his heartbeat normal.

  He opened one blue eye.

  “Is she gone?” he asked. “Leave the bullet in next time.” He tried to struggle to a sitting position, but the color drained from his face as he moved and he collapsed against the pillows.

  He needed a shave and his closed eyes looked bruised and swollen. If she weren’t careful, she was going to find herself feeling sorry for him. That was all she needed: sympathy for the devil. She had better nip those tender, sensitive feelings right in the bud. Forget sleeping in the armchair by the bed just to keep an eye on him. He would be fine without her babysitting him. You couldn’t kill him that easily. She found an extra blanket in the hall closet and went to curl up on the sofa.

  Only later, when she was about to drift off to sleep, did she realize that her Beretta was still sitting on the nightstand next to the bed where she’d left it when the junkie had asked her to finish sewing him up. She would sleep better with it close at hand, not just because of the fact of people shooting at them — she wasn’t sure which of them was the intended target although possibly it was both — but also because Andrew had found them a hideaway in one of the more flawed parts of town.

  She crept into the bedroom so as not to wake Michael, lifted the Beretta from the nightstand, checked to make sure that the bullets were where she’d left them, then turned to look down at the sleeping man. She could shoot him now, as he snored in bed, and he’d never know what hit him.

  The drawback to this plan was then she would have a dead body on her hands with no convenient way to explain it. “I accidentally shot him as he lay helpless on the bed, officer,” did not seem likely to go down well.

  Still, she lifted the gun, sighted along the barrel. At this close range, there would be no way she could miss. She’d shoot him in the head, that went without saying. She could think of something to say to the cops — or she could disappear. She had a little money. She knew how to get more. Money was easy to make if you weren’t picky about the source. But she wanted him to apologize first, didn’t she? She wanted him to admit his betrayal and beg her forgiveness. She wanted him to admit he was up to no good even now, that he was an untrustworthy bastard —

  “Make up your mind,” he said. “The suspense is killing me.”

  She snapped the safety catch back on. Michael took a deep breath. He was just a man, after all. He was bone-deep and ancient and she did not believe for one moment that killing him would make him go away.

  “I thought you would come back to me,” he said.

  She closed her eyes. She didn’t understand him. She didn’t understand anything. He was wounded, helpless. If she left him here, he could not pursue her. Possibly he would get the message. It wouldn’t be up to her what happened to him next. She could just walk away. She’d do a deal with Vlad and ride off into the sunset. No one would blame her. Not many people would be standing here now.

  “It was a long time ago,” she said finally. But even she didn’t know what the hell that meant.

  Chapter 17

  In the morning, Michael was sleeping restlessly but not feverishly, so she left him where Andrew had parked them and set off in search of answers.

  What did she know? She knew that Nadine, the housekeeper, was dead, and she probably hadn’t murdered herself. There. The case was almost solved. She knew money had been embezzled from the church. She knew that money had shown up in the priest’s
bank account. She knew that Donald was suspected of embezzlement and that he had a gambling problem. She knew Donald was afraid to talk to her. Okay. Talk to Donald next. Where would she find him? He probably hadn’t returned home yet. She’d thoroughly spooked him.

  It was Sunday, around lunchtime. His wife and kids might be at church. Perhaps his elderly mother would be home. Maybe if she approached the old lady right, she would tell Victoria where he was or at least where he might run to.

  When she knocked on the door to his apartment, she thought for a moment no one was home. Then she heard the creak of floorboards as feet slowly shuffled toward her. She heard the bolt being drawn back. The door opened a crack. The chain was still on — not that a good shove wouldn’t have corrected that problem — and a beady black eye in a wizened face stared at her.

  “Hi,” she said, feeling inadequate to the eye. “I’m Victoria, one of Donald’s friends. I was hoping to talk to him for a minute.”

  The beady eye considered her for a while.

  “Aren’t you the girl who was here the other day?”

  “Yes,” she said, not pointing out that she was hardly a girl. To the old woman she was probably a little bitty slip of a thing.

  The old woman withdrew her beady eye, held up a finger, then shut the door and locked it. Victoria guessed she was supposed to wait. After a while, the old woman came back to the door, this time fumbling the chain off and opening it all the way. The old woman held a white leather purse in her hands.

  “How much does he owe?” she asked, working the clasp on the purse.

  “Fifty thousand dollars,” Victoria said gently. The old woman looked up at her and nodded. The amount did not seem to surprise her.

  “He hates asking me for money,” she said. “He gets into trouble and he doesn’t know what to do. He should just ask, but he wants to be responsible, you see. He wants to earn the money he lives on, but he — well, he’s weak,” she said, fluffy headed and slightly confused. “Donald is just — well, he’s like his father. He likes to play the ponies.” As she spoke, she took a check folder and pen out of her purse. Using the hall table as a writing surface, she laboriously started filling in the blanks.