Titles originally published under the name Brian Harper:
Shiver (1992; e-book 2011)
Shudder (1994)
Shatter (1995)
Deadly Pursuit (1996)
Blind Pursuit (1997; e-book 2011)
Mortal Pursuit (1998; e-book 2010)
Titles published under the name Michael Prescott:
Comes the Dark (1999)
Stealing Faces (1999; e-book 2011)
The Shadow Hunter (2000; e-book 2012)
Last Breath (2002; e-book 2011)
Next Victim (2002; e-book 2010)
In Dark Places (2004; e-book 2010)
Dangerous Games (2005; e-book 2010)
Mortal Faults (2006; e-book 2011)
Final Sins (2007; e-book 2012)
Riptide (2010; e-book and print-on-demand)
The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
Text copyright © 2012 by Douglas Borton
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Published by Thomas & Mercer
P.O. Box 400818
Las Vegas, NV 89140
ISBN-13: 9781612183145
ISBN-10: 161218314X
In memory of my mother
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Acknowledgments
About the Author
SWANN sat at a corner table, dressed to be invisible, as he always was on a night when there was killing to be done.
Pulse of hip-hop, flash of bling. Sweaty dancers jerking to the antic beat. A hundred shouted conversations, all going unheard. Most of the patrons were young and stoned. The girls underfed, the boys wiry and hard, showing off piercings, shaved heads, elaborate tats.
He sat away from the dance floor, a glass of melting ice near his hand. No one joined him; he projected an aura that deterred company. He wore a tan jacket over a black T-shirt. A functional outfit, nondescript. No one would look at him or remember him. No one knew that he was on the job, and his job was death.
Swann had a long acquaintance with death. He had taken many lives, for many reasons, and sometimes for not much of a reason at all. The way the world worked, you could suffer, or you could make others suffer. Only a saint or a crazy man—he didn’t see much difference—would choose the first alternative.
Swann understood one rule in life, and it was not the Golden Rule.
Know what you want and take it.
He shifted in his chair, tightening his biceps and forearms, enjoying the clench of corded muscle. His body was lean and tough like boiled leather, crisscrossed with ropes of scar tissue. He’d taken a bullet once, been nicked by many blades, but he still had all his parts.
He felt fine. A good hump always left him calm and alert. Only fools practiced celibacy before a big game, and tonight he was playing the biggest game of his life.
Earlier this evening he’d found a whore and brought her to his motel room. The room was a grimy hole, like a thousand others he had known. Pungent odors hung in the stale air. The rug was tracked with wear and stained with unidentifiable spills. The TV got a handful of satellite channels and a decent variety of pay-per-view porn. A mouse lived in the walls; he heard it at night when he lay in bed. It made scrabbling sounds, a small, scurrying thing.
He’d been in worse places. Before long he would be someplace better.
The whore was businesslike and thorough. Only once did she flinch and pull away—when she saw the snake.
As a general rule, he was careful not to give himself any identifying marks. The snake was an exception. It had cost him a lot of pain, because it was inked on the shaft of his cock, a jet-black python that arched and elongated when he got hard. He’d acquired it in a tat parlor in Nogales after gulping enough Viagra to remain erect throughout the application. Later he’d bought a woman and broken in his newly tricked-out equipment. Snaked her, you could say.
Since that day, many women had the met the snake, but none had ever asked what it meant to him. He’d long since stopped expecting the question. People were incurious. They shuffled through life with blinkered eyes, brought every kind of misery on themselves, and never knew how or why. The sleepwalkers, the shambling dead.
Swann wasn’t one of them. He was wide awake. He avoided alcohol and heavy meals, drank a great deal of coffee and supplemented it with Adderall and Provigil, brain-boosting meds. He used breath control and mnemonic tricks.
If there was a science of alertness, Swann was its test subject. He was determined never to relax, never to fall into lethargy and complacency. To always be one step, two steps, three steps ahead.
In the kingdom of the blind, the one-eyed man was king. And Jack Swann had both eyes open.
His phone vibrated against his thigh. He knew who it was before answering. Just two people had this number, and only one would be calling tonight.
Impatiently, he listened to the voice on the other end, pressing the phone close to his ear. “I told you,” he interrupted, “it’s going down. Just chill.”
He closed the phone. His employer sounded worried. He ought to be. Things weren’t going to work out precisely as agreed.
He stared across the nightclub at the slim, gyrating figure who was, as always, the center of attention. Looking at her, he saw his destiny.
A peculiar thought for him. He didn’t believe in portents. Didn’t believe in anything he couldn’t touch, couldn’t see. A realist, he despised all superstitions.
Even so, every time he saw the girl on the dance floor, Swann felt a quickening of his pulse, a tightening in his groin.
Know what you want and take it.
Soon.
KATE Malick thought of her as Wednesday’s child.
It was crazy, of course. Crazy to look at her with pity—the girl who had it all. The movie star, the tabloid idol. Twenty-one years old, with an estimated worth of fifteen million dollars. She owned a four-million-dollar condo in West Hollywood’s Sierra Towers. She rode a chauffeured limousine to A-list parties in Malibu and Bel Air. She vacationed in St. Tropez, bumming rides on private jets bec
ause she wouldn’t fly commercial. No one could feel sorry for her.
Even so, Kate found the words of the old nursery rhyme running through her head whenever her thoughts turned to Chelsea Brewer.
Wednesday’s child is full of woe…
“We need to talk about your daughter,” Kate said. She sat on an angular divan, her long legs crossed like the blades of a folding instrument, hands clasped in her lap as she leaned forward into a wedge of lamplight. She owned a dozen copies of the same outfit and wore it always. Double-breasted Michael Kors jacket and skirt. All of it black, jet black, like her boots, her hair.
Sam and Victoria Brewer watched her from matching Eames chairs set wide apart.
“I don’t see what could possibly be so urgent,” Victoria said. “Whatever it is, it could have waited until tomorrow, I’m sure.”
“I’m afraid not. Something happened tonight. About an hour ago, at eight o’clock, a member of Chelsea’s entourage got sick.”
“That hardly sounds like a critical matter.”
“I mean she got sick from an overdose. She mixed alcohol and drugs. Grange called the EMTs, and then he called me.”
Like a physical sensation, the memory came back—the high-speed drive through Hollywood, ending in the alley behind the club…
Her car door slamming as she looked around at the sodden squalor, a line of dump bins overspilling plastic garbage bags, one bag split open, its contents bleeding out, and a tide of black insects sweeping over the hill of plastic to gorge themselves on filth. Ahead, a small tableau, three figures posed against the wall, one seated on the asphalt, slumping forward, while another leaned down and the third looked on. The seated figure was a girl, shaking as if to an internal metronome, her high heels beating a ragged tattoo on the pavement. The man leaning over her was Chelsea’s bodyguard, Grange, and the onlooker was Chelsea herself. No paramedics. No ambulance.
“Where the hell are the EMTs?” Kate yelled, and Grange glanced up, his broad face red with worry and strain.
“On their way,” he said.
“What happened to her?”
“She took something.”
“Took what?”
“Nobody knows. Or at least”—he flicked a glance at Chelsea—“nobody’s saying.”
Kate knelt by the girl, looked her over in the gleam of Grange’s pocket flash. She was in her early twenties, or possibly younger and partying with a fake ID. Her pretty face was ashen, and her eyes were jumping everywhere without taking anything in.
“Her name?” Kate asked.
“I don’t know.”
“Chelsea must know. She’s Chelsea’s friend, right?”
“Chelsea’s in no condition,” Grange said simply.
Kate spared a moment to look at Chelsea Brewer, and she saw the vacancy in the girl’s expression. Nobody home.
Victoria’s voice drilled into the memory: “Was Chelsea involved?”
Kate blinked. “Of course she was involved. It was one of her friends—”
“No, I mean was she involved officially? Is this going to get into the media? Police reports?”
“Oh. I see.”
She did see, and she couldn’t even blame Mrs. Brewer for asking, when the same question had occurred to her as soon as she had arrived.
Bending over the girl, trying to think, balancing needs and priorities. The ambulance would come, bringing with it the paparazzi gathered out front. And there would be police, and if the name Chelsea Brewer were mentioned, there would be media, too—if not here, then at the hospital…
She took a breath and looked at Grange. “All right. I’ll stay with this one till the paramedics get here. You take Chelsea back inside. We need…we need to keep her out of this.”
Even as she said it, she felt guilty for caring about Chelsea’s reputation, her image, when another girl’s life was at risk.
“No,” she said now, in the civilized quiet of the Brewers’ living room, “we shielded her. Though that may have been a mistake.”
Victoria’s eyebrow arched. “A mistake?”
“It might be better for your daughter if the news did get out. It might help wake her up.”
“That doesn’t make any sense,” Victoria said. She was a small, rail-thin woman, her features masklike after too many facelifts. “Chelsea is perfectly capable of taking care of herself.”
Kate felt a stab of anger push through the armor plating of her self-control. “Do you really think so?” she asked evenly.
She wished Victoria could have seen her daughter’s face as Grange had led her away, that empty face and those unseeing eyes. Eyes of glass, doll’s eyes…
Then she was gone and Kate was alone with the nameless girl. She touched the girl’s neck, finding the carotid artery, feeling a rapid, fluttery pulse. When she looked at the girl’s face again, she saw the eyelids sliding shut as the pupils rolled up in the sockets.
“No,” she snapped. “Stay with me.” She grabbed the girl by the shoulders, shaking her weightless body. “Come on, stay with me!”
The girl, flopping passively under Kate’s hands, banged her head against the wall behind her. The impact startled her awake. Her eyes drifted into focus.
“That’s better,” Kate said. “Better. You stay alert, hear me?” But already the eyes were going away again. “Damn it, get up. Get up.”
Kate hooked her arms under the girl’s armpits and lifted her off the ground, balancing her on two tremulous legs. It wasn’t difficult. The girl weighed nothing at all. Anorexic, subsisting on a starvation diet, her rib cage nearly poking through her shirt.
“Walk. Walk it off. Come on.”
She made the girl walk. It was like dancing with a life-size marionette, a creature of strings and floppy limbs. Together, they made a circuit of the space between the trash bins, Kate guiding her, the girl’s shoes scraping asphalt.
Her head nodded again. Kate shook her back to consciousness.
“You’re not sleeping tonight,” she hissed, wishing she knew the girl’s name. Somehow it would be easier if she just knew her name. “You’re staying with me, and you’re going to be okay. You hear me? You’re going to be okay.”
No reaction, no twitch of interest from the pale face, the distant eyes.
“Is Chelsea all right now?” Victoria asked.
“Your daughter was never in any danger.” Kate waited for a question about Chelsea’s friend. When it didn’t come, she volunteered the information. “The other girl is expected to recover. They pumped her stomach in the ER.”
“Well,” Victoria said, “that’s fine, then.”
Another plunge of anger, this one deeper than the last. She felt like shaking Victoria Brewer as she had shaken the nameless girl in the alley. “It’s not fine,” she said. “Chelsea’s friend nearly died tonight. If the EMTs had arrived five minutes later, she might not have made it.”
Sam Brewer spoke for the first time. “And what does that have to do with us? It’s some other girl, some girl we don’t even know.”
“If Chelsea’s friends are doing drugs, you can bet Chelsea is, too.”
“That’s an outrageous accusation,” Victoria said. “Totally groundless.”
Kate blinked at her. “Mrs. Brewer, are you aware of how Chelsea spends her nights?”
“I don’t follow the tabloids, if that’s what you mean. She’s twenty-one. Of course she’s going to sow some wild oats.”
“Her bodyguard has seen things. He’s expressed his concerns to me.”
Sam crossed his muscular forearms, crowded with purple tats. “So now we’re supposed to worry about some glorified bouncer?”
“What I’m worried about,” Kate said, “is your daughter’s future.”
“She’s done okay for herself so far, don’t you think?” His casual wave encompassed the house, a Frank Lloyd Wright knockoff cantilevered over a chasm. Sunken living room, earth tones in the lavatories, oak paneling in the den—a seventies wet dream bought with Chelsea’s money
. Victoria served as her daughter’s agent and business manager and pocketed 25 percent.
The house was a temple to Chelsea’s stardom. Framed magazine covers, arranged in chronological sequence like the stations of the cross, charted her progress from girl next door to vixen to tramp. The point of no return: last year’s Maxim, Chelsea posing naked, a pair of long-stemmed roses concealing her nipples. “Little Chelsea, All Grown Up,” the cover said.
“Chelsea’s been partying all night,” Kate said, “every night. Often till dawn. She’s drinking and using. She has multiple sex partners—”
“For God’s sake.” Victoria drew a sharp breath. “So she likes doing the club scene. It doesn’t make her any less bankable.”
“That’s not what I—”
“Our publicist says it may even help her image. This is the age of the bad girl.”
“I don’t give a crap what her handlers say.” Kate hailed from New Jersey. She’d lost most of her accent, but a hint of it came out when she was pissed.
“Well, you should,” Victoria said airily. “It’s their business, not yours, to keep Chelsea on track.”
Kate wished she could get through. She felt she was shouting through a soundproofed wall. But where words didn’t work, a picture might.
“I want you to look at something.” She called up a bookmarked website on her cell phone and handed the phone to Chelsea’s mother. Victoria studied the shaky amateur video, then passed it back to Kate with a shrug.
“She’s young,” Victoria said. “She’s having a good time. There’s no law against it.”
Actually, there was a law against dancing topless in a public place. “It doesn’t worry you? This kind of behavior?”
“She’s a kid,” Sam said. “Why’ve you got a problem with that?” He and Victoria had been divorced for more than a decade, yet he remained a fixture in his ex-wife’s life, his presence in the household interrupted only by occasional stints in prison.
He glared at Kate, hating her with a career criminal’s instinctive animosity toward someone connected, however obliquely, with law enforcement.
Kate stared him down. “She’s not a kid anymore. She’s an adult, and she’s out of control.”
“Come now.” Victoria’s tongue clucked. “It’s perfectly normal to behave that way at Chelsea’s age. But you wouldn’t know about that, would you? When you were twenty-one, you were a nun.”
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