by Jen Blood
“You guys can come visit us in Maine anytime,” Diggs said. He seemed to be talking to the whole band. That was definitely their impression, anyway.
“Sure,” Danny said. “We could do a tour of New England.” His hand rested on Casey’s shoulder.
Of everyone, Casey was the one I worried about the most—for the obvious reason that, according to doctors, she was in for months of physical therapy and potential surgery before she was back on her feet. Beyond that, though, there was a weariness about her that I hadn’t seen when we first met. It was inevitable after what she’d been through, but I hoped that somehow she would make it through everything intact.
While Diggs was chatting with the boys, I pulled Casey aside and gave her my card again.
“If you need anything, this is how you can reach me. Even if it’s just to talk. Or bitch about dating a music geek.” She laughed at that. I smiled, then got serious. “If you have any problems with the dog, or anything else… Medical stuff with your leg, even—you can call me. My mother and her partner are both surgeons. If you feel like you’re not getting what you need down here, just pick up the phone.”
“I will,” she said with a nod. “Thank you.”
I thought of everything she had stacked against her: an abusive father, no money, two kids depending on her, and now the physical issues she’d be facing with her leg. Then, I thought of Mitch Cameron again. Right now, Casey was relying on her father’s crappy insurance to handle her medical bills. Which meant that added to all the other problems she had, she’d be fighting with insurance companies for at least the next year or so.
Whoever was in charge of J. Enterprises had seemingly limitless resources.
If no one else got it, Casey Clinton deserved a little justice in all this.
“I’ll be in touch,” I told her earnestly. She looked at me in surprise, clearly caught off guard at my intensity. “I don’t want you to worry about things, all right? There’ll be a lot coming at you, but you’re not alone in this. People will be looking out for you.”
“Uh…Okay.”
Good job, Solomon: Freak out the girl in the wheelchair. Well played. Diggs looked at me, nodding toward the car.
“You ready to go?”
I nodded. Definitely ready to go. We hugged the rest of the crew and then Diggs slipped his hand in mine as we headed for the car.
With our goodbyes behind us, Einstein hopped into the backseat without too much coaxing, then promptly settled his fuzzy chin in the back window with his mournful brown eyes on Grace. The retriever had reclaimed her place beside Casey, with Dougie and Willa at her feet. Grace looked at Stein once, then reached out and tentatively licked Willa’s face. The little girl giggled.
Diggs leaned in with his arm around my waist and his lips at my ear. “You really think Stein will make it without her?” he asked.
Grace lay down and offered her belly to the Clinton trio. “Honestly? I don’t think he has much choice.”
Einstein whimpered once, then circled in the backseat before he settled in for the ride. I was selfishly pleased I wouldn’t have to share him with another woman, but I chose not to acknowledge such pettiness.
I took the wheel for a change this time out, since Diggs was still under the weather. Once we hit the main stretch headed for Maine, I checked the rearview. Diggs followed my gaze.
“See anything?” he asked.
“No. I don’t really expect to, though,” I said, thinking of Cameron’s words to me. I’m not an ally in all this. Ally or not, I knew he was out there. And there was no doubt in my mind that we would be crossing paths again. “We’ll need to be careful now, you know. No more charging into the fray. We know they’re watching. Cameron already said he’ll kill you if we don’t stop.”
“So, we’ll be careful,” Diggs said. He squeezed my hand. “We just won’t back down this time.”
I expected him to turn on the radio once we were on our way, if only for a final fix of Crazy Jake Dooley. Instead, he settled in with his feet on the dashboard and looked at me speculatively.
“All right,” he said, serious as a heart attack. “You’ve put me off long enough. Let’s have it.”
“Let’s have what?”
“Your top twenty-four, Solomon. From the top.”
It was going to be a long ride home.
BEFORE THE AFTER
The Erin Solomon Mystery Series
Book 4
Jen Blood
Part I: Into the Black
Prologue
Footsteps.
Behind her, somewhere close, Kat hears boots pounding on the frozen ground. Sharp, icy pellets of sleet sting her cheeks as she crouches in the brush, heart thundering.
They’re coming for her—there’s nowhere else to hide. No way to protect herself anymore.
No way to protect any of them.
There’s a ravine on the far side of the island; Kat remembers seeing it before. She runs for that, through groves of dying pine trees and over slick island trails, the ground blurring at her feet. Voices behind call to her, order her to stop, but she drives herself further. She has a bottle clutched in one hand, a knife in the other.
If she’s going to die, it sure as hell won’t be on their terms.
She thinks of Erin, suddenly: At Adam’s funeral, her pale face blank, her hand clutched in Diggs’. Mother and daughter barely spoke that day… Like it was Kat’s fault, somehow, that the Payson Church burned and Adam was weak and then, in the end, faked his own death and vanished without a word to his only daughter.
As if Kat could somehow change that reality, for either husband or child.
As if she could ever change a damn thing.
By the time she reaches the ravine, Kat can’t hear anyone on the path behind her. Can’t hear anything, really, beyond the pounding in her ears and the racing of her blood. The island is dark, the air cold and wet, but somehow in that mess she finds a path among rocks and the thin layer of slush now coating the ground. Head down, focused on every step, she makes it to the bottom.
And there, exactly as she’d feared, she finds them. Curled in close, silent and rotting and ended, they huddle together: Women and children she knew. A man she’d met years before.
“Kat! Come on out—you can’t hide from this,” the woman calls from somewhere close. “It’s time to stop running.”
Kat grinds her teeth and fights back fear and nausea and a marrow-deep weariness she’s been denying too long.
She lays down among the others, her head down, holding tight to the bottle…
And she waits.
Chapter One - Solomon
Two mostly empty plates sat on the coffee table in my mother’s house in Littlehope, Maine, set aside in favor of my laptop and a notebook filled with illegible notes. Tonight the house was unoccupied, since Kat and Maya—my mother and her girlfriend, respectively—were doing some kind of puffin-related project on an island up the coast. If puffins had been a passion of my mother’s in the past, she’d never shared it with me. Now, however, she was braving a late-season snowstorm to catalogue the damn things. Which meant that for the past few days, I’d had the dubious pleasure of returning to my hometown to keep the home fires burning in Kat’s absence.
Not that it was all bad, mind you.
At the moment, I was settled on the couch with Daniel Diggins, aka Diggs: rogue reporter, longtime best friend, and… Well, we were working on the third thing. He sat just behind me looking over my shoulder, his breath distractingly warm on my neck. My mutt, Einstein, lay on the floor with his chin on his paws, not remotely impressed with the seating arrangement.
“This makes no sense,” I said, nodding toward the computer screen. “I’ve done everything I can think of, and nothing’s working. What idiot decided to make encryption so freaking effective?”
It had been two weeks since Diggs had nearly been barbecued in a barely averted apocalypse in western Kentucky. Since then, most of our spare time had been devoted t
o trying to decrypt a memory card he had literally pried from someone’s cold, dead hand, just before the Smithfield College auditorium went up in flames.
So far, the whole decryption thing wasn’t going that well.
Diggs rested his chin on my shoulder, his hand sliding up my side as he studied the screen.
“What did Jesse say?”
I tried to focus on the question, rather than the fact that Diggs’ hand had come to rest just under my breast, his body distractingly warm behind me. With tremendous restraint, I removed said hand, set it back on his own leg, and scooted to the edge of the couch to retrieve my notes.
Jesse was a high school buddy of Diggs’ who’d moved back to the area a few years before. Once just as much a degenerate as the rest of Diggs’ old gang, now he was a semi-respectable family man… who happened to be a computer whiz consulting with the government on some of the most cutting-edge technologies in modern surveillance and national security.
“Honestly?” I said. “He said like three things I understood, followed by forty-five minutes when I just smiled and nodded and tried not to look like an idiot.”
“I told you—you should have let me come.”
“Because your manly brain would be able to sort through all that techno-babble, whereas my lesser, pea-sized woman’s brain can barely handle anything more elaborate than a meatloaf recipe?”
“More or less,” he agreed. He kissed my neck; I elbowed him in the stomach. “Ow. Jesus—it was a joke, woman. First off, I would never trust you with a recipe of any kind, meatloaf or otherwise. And secondly: the only reason I might have been more effective is that I would have actually taken notes.”
“I took notes,” I said, picking up my battered notebook as proof.
Diggs took it from me, giving up on seduction for the moment. “The only thing I can even read here is ‘Hackers’ in capital letters and… I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt and say that’s a very bad rendering of the Washington Monument.”
“It’s the Eiffel Tower.”
“That’s what they all say.”
He tossed the notebook back on the coffee table. “We could just bring the card to Jesse—that would be a hell of a lot easier than explaining some hypothetical code that he never gets to see.”
“Are you nuts? He’s got a wife and two gorgeous kids—no way am I dragging him into this thing. We’ve got enough blood on our hands as it is. No. There has to be a way to do this on our own.”
He sighed. “Fine. You know, if I’d realized this was why you were inviting me, I might not have been so eager to come over.”
Einstein hopped up from his spot at our feet and loped into the other room, ears and tail up. Since Stein is forever chasing beasties invisible to the human eye and ear, I ignored him.
“What did you think I was inviting you over for?” I kept my eyes on the screen, very determinedly ignoring Diggs’ hand as it slid up my thigh.
“I know what I was hoping for. Your mom’s not home... We have the place all to ourselves. I bet if we put our heads together, we could think of some way to pass the time.”
“What are we, fifteen?” I asked. “If I was planning on seducing you, I would have chosen something a little sexier than my mother’s house and my best flannel pj’s.”
“Works for me.” He lowered his head to that spot between my neck and shoulder that tends to obliterate all reason for me.
“We’re grown ups, Diggs,” I said. It came out a little more Marilyn Monroe than I’d intended. I took a breath. “If we wanted a house to ourselves, we could go to yours—or my place in Portland, for that matter—any time.”
“And why haven’t we done that, again?”
At the moment, that reason eluded me. Since getting back from Kentucky, Diggs and I had been in kind of a holding pattern, for very good reasons. He was still recovering from that whole nearly-being-blown-up thing, for one. Then there was the fact that I’d just broken up with someone else. And, finally, Diggs and I had made the mutual decision that we were going to venture into the treacherous world of dating slowly, with eyes wide open.
All of which was a lot easier to keep in mind during the light of day with a few miles between us, when Diggs’ clever fingers weren’t creeping up my inner thigh. He pulled me back toward him, his legs spread so I was cradled between them.
This time, I didn’t push him away. “You should put the computer away. You work too hard,” he whispered, his breath hot on my neck. His teeth scraped my earlobe before he began to work his way down.
I tried to suppress a low moan, but gave up when his hands got in on the act. He found the hem of my t-shirt, the feel of his callused palms on my cool skin ultimately my undoing. When he puts his mind to it, Diggs is one persuasive son of a bitch.
I twisted backward to meet him, my eyes sinking shut when his lips met mine. Diggs lay back, pulling me on top of him in a single, fluid move. His hands moved under my shirt, up my back, his usually bright blue eyes now dark with desire.
Diggs is a powerful man: six feet tall, a lifelong athlete who spent his youth playing hard and living fast. At forty, he’s slowed down a little, but there’s still something slightly dangerous about him—some reckless passion that takes my breath away, forever keeps me guessing. I felt that power, that passion, as his hands spanned my back and pulled me closer.
“You said in Kentucky that you were going to sweep me off my feet,” I said breathlessly, my forehead tipped to his.
“I thought that’s what I was doing.” There was a trace of the devil in his smile. When I rolled my eyes, he got marginally more serious. “I’m sweeping you off your feet when we go out this weekend. Tonight, we’re working.”
“I’m pretty sure there’s only one profession where what we’re doing right now qualifies as work.”
His hands shifted to my hips and he gave me a lazy, seductive grin as he arched up, hard and hot against me. My breath hitched. Rational thought faded to gray. “You’re right,” he said. “We should probably stop.”
Friggin’ tease.
“Not so fast, slick.” I leaned back down and kissed him again, harder this time, my tongue moving against his before we broke apart and he pushed my shirt up over my head.
That was about the time Einstein came tearing back into the room, a growl rumbling in his throat. The growl escalated to high-pitched barking as he bolted back into the kitchen.
“Should we check that out?” Diggs asked unhappily. His mouth was already moving with definite purpose along my neck, down to my collarbone.
“Mmm,” I murmured, though more in response to the feel of his knuckles moving over the sheer fabric of my bra than in answer to his question. Einstein kept barking. I closed my eyes and pretended he didn’t.
Diggs stopped working his magic. “I think we should check it out.”
“That’s a terrible idea,” I said. I moved back, though, since there were worse things in the world than Diggs and I being interrupted before we got our groove on. We had experienced almost all those ‘worse things’ over the course of the past year; I wasn’t taking any chances.
Diggs and I got up, his blond hair mussed and his torn jeans noticeably tighter. I wasn’t feeling all that put together myself, but my annoyance gave way to anxiety the longer Stein kept up the racket.
“You have your gun?” Diggs asked.
“Just a second.” I pulled my t-shirt back on, then went to an antique writer’s desk against the far wall, unlocked it, and yanked the top drawer open so hard I nearly pulled it off its runners. Inside was the Ruger LCR Diggs had purchased for me, despite my protests.
When I had it loaded and in hand, Diggs nodded. “Good. Now, go on upstairs and call Chris. I’ll grab Einstein and meet you there.”
“I’m not calling the sheriff until I know there’s actually something out there,” I said. Diggs frowned. I ignored him and crept toward the kitchen, where Stein was still barking. His nails clicked on the linoleum as he paced beside a picture
window looking out on my mother’s backyard.
It was just past midnight on a Thursday night in April, but at the moment the only thing I could see outside was snow. Because this was Maine, and in Maine you can’t actually count on spring until you’re well into summer, at which point you wake up and realize you’ve been gypped out of the whole damn season yet again.
While the snow was annoying, however, I didn’t consider it life threatening.
Einstein and Diggs weren’t so easily convinced. Stein pushed past me and continued to stare outside, all fifty pounds of scruffy white fur and terrier tenacity coiled tight. He’d finally canned the barking and returned to a continual menacing growl. Diggs stood beside me at the window, his own gun in hand.
I was just about to tell him we were being idiots when a shadow moved along the perimeter outside my mother’s garden shed, low to the ground and moving slowly. My heart rumbaed halfway up my throat. Einstein started barking again. I grabbed his collar and dragged him away from the window, back toward the living room.
I dimly registered the fact that Diggs had his phone out. “Get Einstein and go to the bedroom,” he said again, in that this-isn’t-a-debate voice he only seems driven to when I’m around.
“Only if you come with me,” I said.
A garbage can clattered out back. Einstein tore away from me, headed straight back to the window. I heard glass shatter outside.
I didn’t actually lose bladder control entirely, but we were on shaky ground for a few seconds.
Diggs was dialing the sheriff when the intruders finally stepped into the light and revealed themselves.
All three were fat, masked, and clearly looking for trouble.
“Diggs,” I said. He was on the line with Sheriff Finnegan, so I had to repeat his name a couple of times before he came back to me. “Call him off,” I said once he had. “We’ve got three masked bandits here, but I don’t think they’re armed.”