Could that something have been the shock of the crime he just committed? It could have been. It was very unlikely, but not impossible.
As the facts came to light, the killings, the theft, the trail of evidence, I grew sicker and sadder, and I stayed away from the investigation. There wasn’t anything I could usefully add.
‘I know this man and it just doesn’t seem like something he would do,’ was the kind of thing that people said in old cop shows. But if I said it to a colleague, they’d report it and recommend me for a psych evaluation.
But I did stay informed about the crimes, and about the investigation. And I was sure that he didn’t do it. Don’t ask me how, but I knew. That’s all I’ll say about it.
All the time he that was inside, I requested visits. He refused every time.
He would have gotten ten to fifteen at least if the barrel of his gun hadn’t gone missing from the evidence locker. He probably knew that, but I couldn’t ever be sure, obviously.
Just as I’d feared, when Damian Crane, my SAC, caught wind of me taking an interest in Horse’s case, he called me into his office.
He sat on the corner of his desk. For him, that was shockingly informal. The equivalent of Crane ‘relaxing’ would probably involve him undoing a button on his suit coat.
He peered down at me. I felt like I needed somewhere to hide but I tried not to show it.
“Agent Cross, you have no reason to be pursuing that case. You should know that it could look bad on your file. Now, if there’s something you need some clarification on, or if you have unresolved issues that you’re having difficulty in coming to terms with, well, maybe I can offer some help.”
There wasn’t anything I could tell him. Certainly nothing that wouldn’t get me straight into a disciplinary hearing at the very least.
He moved a little closer.
“It isn’t known outside this office, Agent Cross, but I am aware that you had some…” he paused. His face was stone. I couldn’t read anything about what he was turning over in his mind. “I believe it’s possible,” he said, “that you met with the prisoner on the night before his arrest.”
My poker face had to work hard not to react to that. I hadn’t told anyone about that night. Not at the time, or in the months afterwards. Crane hadn’t ever mentioned it before. I wondered where the hell this was leading.
“The case was simple enough, wasn’t it? Robbery double homicide? The stolen goods weren’t recovered but that my not be so surprising.” He reached behind him and lifted a folder from the desk.
“Do you imagine some connection between the felon and our investigation here?” He flicked a look up at me, like he already had his answer, like it didn’t matter.
“The case at hand is likely to be entering a very difficult phase and you’re going to need to give it your full attention, Agent Cross. Your mind will have to be clear and very focussed.” Now he skewered me with a long, hard, searching stare.
“I need to know that you have your mind right, Agent Cross. If you need it, I can arrange for some counseling for you. Privately. Not a Bureau doctor. You can have complete confidentiality. If you need it.” His head tilted as his eyes bored harder into mine.
Crane’s lip tightened. “You only have to say. Whatever this investigation needs, Vesper, I’m going to make sure that it gets it.” He sprang off the desk and bent to put his face in front of mine. I controlled my breathing carefully.
He spoke quietly. “Tell me what you need, Vesper.” And he waited. “If it turns out that you did need something and you neglected to say it,” his eyes narrowed, “That would be on you. If you’re withholding something from me, Agent Cross, now is your best time to say.” He straightened up. “It could be your last chance, too.”
I had my reasons for keeping up my interest in Horse. Some of them were definitely professional. And some were distinctly not.
While he was in jail, I thought that him refusing to see me, however much it made me ache, would help the memory to fade. The press of his hot breath in the darkness. The sudden rise in my scent as my hips lifted to his mouth. The press of his lips against my petals. The point of his tongue as it flicked around my buzzing clit. The flutter of my pussy around his impossibly long tongue.
In bed, alone, every night, I read and read. I read reports, I read history, I read economic theory. Anything that would make my eyelids close. Still when I shut off the light, exhausted, the memory was waiting. The weight of him as he rose onto me. The tender force as he opened me and broke in. The clenching spasms in my thighs as I welcomed him, like a girl, late at night when the house is asleep, letting in a burglar, just to see what would happen.
I don’t think I got a decent night’s sleep in all those five long years.
WO DAYS OUT of jail and the idea of finding that woman still burned hot at the front of my mind. My muscles ached for it. A taste in the back of my throat drove me after it. Now wasn’t the time to think about it, but waiting in middle of nowhere, out in the cold and dark, crouched behind a rusting shipping container, I had nothing but time on my hands and not too much else to be thinking about.
While I’d been inside, the world had really changed. It was like the same movie but shot by a different director. Cars had gotten smoother and rounder. They mostly looked kinda ugly to me. Even more people seemed to drive vans and big-ass SUVs, and smaller cars were smaller than ever. Cell phones had doubled in size and everybody on the street was looking down as they walked, stabbing at a screen.
Tattoos had appeared on the arms, legs, necks and faces of about half the girls in New York, and someone had gone around one night and slashed one or both of the knees of every girl’s skinny jeans. Skateboards and rollerblades had failed to disappear and every street corner and subway car burbled with more Eastern European languages that I couldn’t identify.
Otherwise, the thing that really changed was that every girl I saw, especially the beautiful ones, made me think of her. And not in the way that I wanted to be thinking of her. Damnit.
First things first, I needed money. I got a couple of disposable phones and pre-paid cards. There was only one source of work I knew that I could call on and be sure of something lucrative and fast. Maybe legal, maybe not. It didn’t matter. The more edgy the better the money. I found a diner with some quiet booths at the back and I called El Guapo.
That’s what got me out the following cold and damp night. Out onto an unlit and deserted scrap of forgotten New Jersey shoreline.
There was no moon. The sky and the river were inky blue black. The hazy, multi-colored glow of Manhattan across the water seemed very far away. This felt like an outpost in the wasteland. Jagged and angular dark shapes were all that made up the landscape here. Giant smashed jaws and teeth, long abandoned under layers of dirt. It was strange there was no sign of feral wildlife. Foxes, crows, rats, there were no dogs even, as far as I saw. If they were here then they were so unused to human visitors that they stayed hidden.
Waiting is a skill. They taught it to us in Special Ops. You have to keep your mind alert, but in a way that you aren’t distracted. You have to be ready but not tense. Otherwise, when the time comes you could be tired. Staying ‘fresh’ was key. I always excelled on those modules that pushed hard and taught us to keep going beyond the point of exhaustion. The discipline to do nothing, I always found that a lot tougher. Staying alert but still, relaxed but ready. It didn’t matter how many times I did it or for how long, it never got any easier.
I froze and my attention snapped to focus. A distant rumble. A vehicle rolled up to the far gate. Lights off. There was a glow from inside the car when the door opened. I caught a flicker of a man’s silhouette. His head was shaved and he wore a carefully trimmed black beard. That was Salazar. A dark leather jacket and I saw the blue jeans and Caterpillar boots as he stepped out.
He opened the gate, drove in, and then stepped out to close it again. Each time he stepped out of the car, he closed the door behind him, so the inside
light went off, I figured. Man, this is one nervy motherfucker. The man got back in the car, flashing the light again. Dumb, too, I thought. A flashing light is more of a signal than a steady one. Either way, he should have just taken the bulb out, instead of fucking around.
The fact that El Guapo sent me out here meant there was plenty of good reason for the man to be paranoid. If he took that much trouble opening and closing the gate, what other idiot precautions would he have made to protect himself?
What kind of a drug dealer drove out to his stash on a disused lot by the side of an old dock in the dead of night, for chrissakes? Maybe he always wanted to grow up and be a cartoon villain or something. Most of the drug dealers that I’d come across or worked with either used a storage place or they frightened some poor innocent sap to hold the stash for them.
There was a Ukrainian back in the day. I rode shotgun with him, even though there was never the slightest whiff of any trouble. He used indoor parking lots. He kept an ugly brown sedan with loud yellow and orange stickers that said ‘Honk for Jesus’ and shit like that. It would need a car thief with a tragic overdose of self-loathing to even think about stealing that heap.
The Uke had made the trunk super-secure and locked his coke in a strongbox, bolted right into the frame of the car. He parked the car different places. Always kept a goofy looking knitted beanie hat in the glove box to wear when he drove the car too. For some reason he looked like a completely different guy when he put it on.
The guy paid me to ride along, trusted me enough that a couple of times he gave me the keys, told me where to find the car, and where to move it to. Between men outside of the law it’s a rare thing, that kind of trust. In my experience, people who trusted you easily were trustworthy themselves. People who constantly suspected you were stealing from them? They were the ones who would rob a blind man without a thought.
One time, I heard the Ukrainian tell a guy, “Trust is the most valuable commodity in this business. You spend it once, there’s no refund.” That was a guy who’d cheated him. I thought he was going to ask me to rough the kid up, but he did a pretty bang up job himself.
El Guapo had told me where and when to find Sal. That’s the reason I was freezing my nuts out here on this deserted riverfront lot. “It’s his secret place. Nobody knows about it. He’s going to feel completely safe and he won’t be expecting anyone.”
I didn’t ask him the fucking obvious question because it was too fucking obvious, but it rang in my head all the way out here. If it’s so secret, how the fuck did El Guapo know about it?
That wasn’t it, though. That wasn’t what bothered me. What made the back of my neck prickle was the feeling that I got stepping out onto this wide expanse of darkness. Even two hours early, long before Sal was due, when I walked onto that place, I got a sense of something bad. Like someone was waiting here already.
In the last five years, I had a lot of time to check feelings like that. My senses had become sharpened so that I could tell when someone walked into a space behind him by a scent or a change in temperature. I knew when a patch of quiet had a different sound from the quiet before it.
I couldn’t place the source but something was not right about this place. I didn’t know what it was but I had learned enough not to dismiss the idea. Instincts were just the senses working overtime. Don’t let them do it for nothing.
Sometimes you feel the feathery brush of a pair of eyes on the back of your head. Sometimes it’s just you being jumpy or hypersensitive. And sometimes it’s a pair of eyes.
This time I was proud of myself. I even knew whose eyes they were. Not for the first time I wondered what it was made Vesper’s liquid brown eyes so beautiful, as she looked at me down the long barrel of her automatic.
It was too much of a stretch to believe that chance had run me into her now, less than thirty-six hours after I got out, and at what I was guessing had to be the scene of a crime. That raised my other question. Was this the scene of a crime that had just been committed, or one that was about to occur? Well, I found out soon enough.
The time before had got me hard time in Sing Sing. It seemed impossible that Vesper Cross had framed me, but there it was. Just goes to show, never trust a cop. Not that I had any choice at that point. If we hadn’t been together the night before, would she still have been there at that moment, that second when by rights I should have been chasing down the real culprit? Why had she even been there?
Two black helicopters rose above the dark horizon, moving fast in my direction. They flew low, angled down. At the same time, five SUVs bust through the perimeter fence, blasting their batteries of lamps. Elongated shadows swung and stretched in the vivid black and white dazzle.
“Funny,” I said, “I thought I’d be more pleased to see you.” My head turned back as I asked her, “All this for Salazar, a dime-a-dozen drug dealer?”
This was how it had been the last time we met. Her surprising me with a gun. I was starting to wonder if she really liked me.
“Keep still. Don’t turn around.”
Slowly I turned my head back to face forward again. “Are you going to take me out? Gang style pop then a cross-shot for insurance?”
“Horse, we’re the good guys. You always seemed to have trouble remembering that.”
“Five years in a cage for something I didn’t do, you’re right. My focus may have gotten out of whack.”
The lights and the cars surrounded Sal and men shouted at him from all sides as they ran towards him. He knelt in the middle of the flooding glare with his arms up aloft, trying to shield his eyes. Before the first helicopter was fully on the ground, a tall, gaunt man stepped out.
He had on a black suit, white shirt, a thin necktie and black shades. He looked slowly up at Sal then scanned the scene like he was making his entrance in a movie.
From the look of him it wouldn’t be a very nice movie. He was not the plucky boy who’s all heart who’s meant to get the girl. He’d be better cast as the guy who waits in every shadow to snap that plucky lad’s neck.
The tall man gave directions to two guys. They lifted Sal from under his armpits and dragged him into a concrete shed. Then he followed them in. I heard a faint smoky ‘pop’ as Vesper began to speak again. Instinct made me reach back.
“Don’t.” I heard her adjust her grip on her gun. Her voice was cool enough to trickle down my back. “If I had reason to suspect you were carrying a weapon,” she said, “I’d have to bring you in.”
“Could be interesting,” I made it sound casual.
“Could be a parole violation, too. Then you’d be straight back in Sing-Sing to finish the ten.”
I couldn’t be sure but I thought I heard a catch of real regret in her throat.
“If you wanted to leave, for instance,” she said, “Quietly and without a fuss, you might find a small launch tied up to a jetty by the far corner back there. Might be best to go south and around below Battery Park. Unless you were keen to meet my colleagues and the tactical group.”
“And my car?”
“I hope there isn’t a car near here that could be identified as belonging to you. But there isn’t, I’m pretty sure of it.”
There wasn’t. She was right about that.
All the time that I was locked up I kept the picture of her fresh in my mind, even while I tried to forget the night we spent together.
Late at night in the cell, memories of her would bob up in my mind. I tried to push them away and try to think about other girls. The hottest night I could remember, the two Gleason girls, dancers from an up-town, up-market club, I conjured the pictures of them. Identical twins, I thought about how hard my cock had strained and ached.
My eyelids drooped and I remembered the spark in Anna Gleason’s wicked brown eye as she peered back over her shoulder at me. The involuntary groan I made as her tiny tartan skirt rode up over her soft, round ass, hugged in virginal white cotton. Her panties looked innocent and fluffy, and at the same time filthy as they were s
o drenched they were see-through like cheap nylon. The fabric clung to her plump, shaved pussy lips, making me want to lick, suck and devour her.
Hunter: Perfect Revenge (Perfectly Book 3) Page 7