Covet fa-1

by J. R. Ward

  He was definitely the type who had to have the best.

  As they pulled up to the house, Jim's truck was the only one left, and he was ready to jump out at it before the Explorer rolled to a stop. “Thanks for the ride,” he shouted.

  “What?” Adrian went for the volume and turned it all the way down. “What you say?”

  In the acoustic vacuum, Jim's ears rang like church bells, and he resisted the urge to try to shake the vibration out of his skull by slamming his forehead into the dashboard. “I said, thanks for the ride.”

  “No problem.” Adrian nodded at the F-150. “You okay to drive?”

  “Yeah.”

  After he got out, he and Eddie pounded knuckles, and then he walked over to his truck. As he went, his right hand searched out the pocket of the shirt the hospital had given him. No Marlboros. Damn it. But come on, like coffin nails were going to be a parting gift when you pulled out of St. Francis?

  While Adrian and Eddie waited for him, he filled his cigaretteless hand with his keys and unlocked his—

  A flash of movement by the back tire caught his eye.

  Jim looked down as the dog he'd shared his lunch with limped out from under the security of the transmission system.

  “Oh…no.” Jim shook his head. “Listen, I told you…”

  There was the sound of a car window going down and then Adrian's voice: “He likes you.”

  The mutt did that curled-sit thing and stared up at Jim.

  Shit. “That turkey I gave you sucked. You have to know that.”

  “If you're hungry, everything tastes good,” Adrian cut in.

  Jim glanced over his shoulder. “Why are you still here? No offense.”

  Adrian laughed. “None taken. Later.”

  The Explorer reversed, its tires crunching over the cold ground, its headlights swinging around and hitting the half-done house before sweeping across the cleared acreage and the river beyond. As the illumination headed off down the lane, Jim's eyes adjusted in the darkness, and the mansion presented itself as a jagged beast, the enclosed first floor its belly, the ragged second story framing its thorned head, the scattered piles of stacked brush and logs the bones of its victims. Its arrival had consumed the peninsula, and the more it gathered strength, the more it would dominate the landscape.

  God…you were going to be able to see it for miles in all directions, from land and water and sky. It was a real temple to greed, a monument to everything Vin diPietro had obtained in his life—which made Jim willing to bet that the guy had come from nothing. People who had money inherited old houses this size; they didn't build them.

  Man, derailing diPietro from this shit was going to be a hard sell. Very hard. And somehow, the threat of eternal damnation just didn't seem like enough of a motivator. Guy like this wasn't going to believe in life in the hereafter. No fucking way.

  As a cold wind rolled across the property, Jim looked back down at the dog.

  The thing seemed to be waiting for an invitation. And prepared to sit it out for eternity. “My apartment's a pit,” Jim said as they stared at each other. “About on a level with that sandwich. You come with me and it ain't no lap-of-luxury gig.”

  The dog pawed at the air as if a roof and four walls were all it was looking for. “You sure about this?” More with the pawing. “Okay. Fine.”

  Jim unlocked the cab's door and bent down to pick up the thing, hoping he'd read the conversation correctly and wasn't going to lose the tip of a finger. All was cool, though. The dog just lifted its butt and gave its body up to the palm that encircled its belly.

  “Damn, we need to put some weight on you, boy.”

  Jim settled the animal on the passenger seat and got behind the wheel. The truck started up quick, and he turned the blowers off so that the little guy didn't catch a chill.

  Flipping his headlights on, he eased the engine into gear and followed the path Adrian and Eddie had forged, turning around and going out the lane. When he got to Route 15IN, he hit the left-hand blinker and—

  The dog ducked under his arm and sat in his lap.

  Jim glanced down at the animal's boxy head and realized he had nothing to feed the thing. Or himself.

  “You want more turkey, dog? I can hit the Citgo on the way home.” The thing wagged not only its tail, but its entire bony butt.

  “Okay. That's what we'll do.” Jim hit the gas and eased out of diPietro's driveway, his free hand stroking the dog's back. “Ah, just one thing…any chance you're housebroken?”

  Chapter 8

  Darkness brought with it, among many blessings, the benefit of prevalent shadow. Which made it far more useful than daylight.

  As the man sat behind the wheel of the taxi, he knew that both he and his vehicle were invisible to the one he watched. She couldn't see him. She did not know he was there or that he had taken pictures of her or that he had been trailing her for weeks. And this confirmed the power he had over her.

  Through the bars on her window, he watched her as she sat on the couch with the boy. He couldn't see them clearly, as there was a gauze curtain in the way, but he recognized the shapes of them, the larger and the smaller, nestled close together on the sofa in the living room.

  He'd made it his business to learn her schedule. During the week, she schooled the boy until three in the afternoon, whereupon on Mondays through Thursdays she took him to the YMCA for his swimming and basketball lessons. While the boy was at the facility, she never left him—whether he was in the pool or on the court, she was perpetually seated on the benches where the children left their warm-ups and their little bags. When the boy was finished, she waited right outside the locker room for him, and after he got changed, she drove him straight home.

  Careful. She was so very careful—except for the fact that the rhythms of her life never changed: Every night except Sundays, she made the boy dinner at six; then the babysitter showed up at eight o'clock and she took off, going to St. Patrick's either for confession or prayer group. After which she went to that godforsaken club.

  He hadn't been inside the Iron Mask yet, but that was going to change tonight. His plan was to trail her for hours while she worked as a waitress or a bartender or whatever she was, learning more about her and how she lived. God was in the details, as they said, and he needed to know everything.

  Glancing into the rearview mirror, he fussed with the wig and the mustache he was using as a disguise. They weren't sophisticated, but they hid his features well enough, and he needed them for a variety of reasons.

  Plus he relished the feeling he got when he was invisible to her; the thrill of watching her when she was unaware of it was downright sexual.

  At seven forty, a sedan pulled up in front of the house and an African-American woman got out. She was one of three babysitters he'd seen this week, and after following one of them home and seeing where she went the next morning, he'd learned they all came from a social service called the Caldwell Center for Single Mothers.

  Ten minutes after the sitter went inside, the garage door trundled up and he ducked lower in his seat—because two could play at the extra safe game.

  Seven fifty. Right on time.

  His woman backed out into the driveway and waited as the door shut tight, as if she were worried that one of these times it wouldn't make it all the way down. When it was finished doing its thing, her red brake lights went out and the car reversed into the street and took off.

  He started the cab and was just putting it in gear when the dispatcher's voice broke through the silence. “One forty—where are you, one forty? One forty, we need your goddamn car back.”

  No way, he thought. He didn't have time to drop off the cab and catch up with her. St. Patrick's would be the next stop, and by the time he checked out of work, she'd be done at the church.

  “One forty? Goddamn you—”

  He curled up a fist, prepared to punch the radio into silence and it was hard to tame his temper. Always had been. But he reminded himself that he
would have to return the taxi at some point, and busted equipment meant he'd have to deal with the dispatcher.

  He had to avoid conflicts because they never ended well for him or the other person. That much he'd learned.

  And he had big plans.

  “Coming in now,” he said into the receiver.

  He'd just have to see her at the club, even though he felt cheated because he'd miss her at St. Pat's.

  * * *

  Marie-Terese sat in the basement of St. Patrick's Cathedral in a plastic chair that made her butt hurt. To her left was a mother of five who always cradled her Bible in the crook of her arm like it was a baby. To her right was a guy who must have been a mechanic: His palms were clean, but there was always a black line beneath each of his fingernails.

  There were twelve other people in the circle and one empty chair, and she knew everybody in the room as well as the person who was missing tonight. After having listened to them all go on about their lives for the past couple of months, she could recite the names of their husbands and wives and children, if they had them, knew the critical events that had shaped their pasts, and had insight into the darkest corners of their inner closets.

  She'd been going to the prayer group since September, and she'd found out about it from a notice posted on the church bulletin board: The Bible in Daily Life, Tuesdays and Fridays, 8p.m.

  Tonight's discussion was on the book of Job, and the extrapolations were obvious: Everyone was talking about the vast struggles they were dealing with, and how they were certain that their faith would be rewarded and God would see them through to a prosperous future—as long as they kept believing.

  Marie-Terese didn't say anything. She never did.

  Unlike when she went to confession, down here in the basement she was looking to do something other than talk. The thing was, there was no other place in her life where she could be around normal-ish people. She certainly wasn't finding them at the club, and outside of work, she had no friends, no family, no anyone.

  So every week she came here and sat in this circle and tried to connect in some small way to the rest of the planet. As it was now, she felt like she was on a distant shore, staring across a raging river at the Land of the Worried Well, and it wasn't that she begrudged or belittled them. On the contrary, she tried to take strength from being in their company, thinking that maybe if she breathed the same air they did, and drank the same coffee, and listened to their stories…maybe someday she would live among them once again.

  As a result, these meetings weren't a religious thing to her, and unlike the fecund mother hen next to her with the obvious Bible, Marie-Terese's Good Book stayed in her purse. Heck, she brought it only in case someone asked her where it was and it was a good thing it was only the size of a palm.

  With a frown, she tried to remember where she'd picked it up. It had been somewhere south of the Mason-Dixon, in a convenience store…Georgia? Alabama? She'd been on the trail of her ex-husband and had needed something, anything to get her through the days and nights without losing her mind.

  That was what, three years ago?

  Seemed like three minutes and three millennia at the same time.

  God, those horrible months. She'd known getting away from Mark was going to be awful, but she'd had no idea how bad it would really get.

  After he'd beaten her up and abducted Robbie, she'd spent two nights in the hospital getting over what he'd done to her, and then she'd found a private investigator and headed after them. It had taken all of that May, June, and July to locate her son, and she still to this day had no clue how she'd gotten through those horrible weeks.

  Funny, she hadn't had her faith back then and things had still worked out, the miracle she had been praying for being granted even though she hadn't really believed in who she was asking things of. Clearly, all the entreaties had worked, though, and she could remember with total clarity the sight of the Pi's black Navigator pulling up to the Motel 6 she'd been staying in. Robbie had opened the SUV's door and stepped into the Florida sunshine, and she had meant to run toward him, but her knees had failed. Sinking down onto the sidewalk, she had held her arms out as she'd wept.

  She'd thought he was dead.

  Robbie had turned toward the choking sound…and the instant he'd seen her, he'd bolted across the distance as fast as he could go. As he'd slammed into her arms, his clothes had been dirty and his hair shaggy and he'd smelled like burnt macaroni and cheese. But he lived and breathed and was in her arms.

  He hadn't cried then, however. And he hadn't cried since.

  Hadn't spoken of his father or those three months, either. Even to the therapists she'd taken him to.

  Marie-Terese had assumed that the worst part of the experience had been not knowing whether the son she had birthed and loved was alive or not. His coming home was just another hell, though. She wanted to ask him if he was all right every minute of every day, but obviously she couldn't do that. And every once in a while, when she cracked and put the question out there, he just told her he was fine.

  He was not fine. Could not possibly be fine.

  The details the PI had been able to give her were sketchy. Her husband had taken Robbie across the country, going from rental car to rental car, and living off of a host of aliases and a massive cash stash. It had turned out that he'd kept a low profile for a couple of reasons—because it wasn't just Marie-Terese who'd been looking for him.

  And to keep Robbie from trying to escape, it was likely that Mark had bullied him. Which made her want to kill her ex-husband.

  After she'd gotten Robbie back and filed for divorce, she'd run as far away from where they'd lived as she could, surviving on money she'd taken from Mark and jewelry he'd bought her. Unfortunately, it hadn't been enough to live off of for long, not after the lawyers' fees, the Pi's bill, and the cost of reinventing herself.

  What she had ended up doing for money made her think about Job. She was willing to bet when the tide had turned against him he hadn't known what hit him: One minute he was fine and dandy; the next he'd been stripped of everything that had defined him and been taken so low that surely he'd thought of doing things to survive that once would have been incomprehensible.

  She was the same. She never would have seen this coming. Not the descent downward or the hard landing as she'd bottomed out and turned to prostitution.

  But she should have known better. Her ex had been shady from the start, a man with cash everywhere except in bank accounts. Where the hell had she thought the money came from? People who were in legitimate businesses had credit cards and debit cards and maybe a couple of twenties in their wallets. They didn't keep hundreds of thousands of dollars in Gucci briefcases hidden in the closets of their Las Vegas hotel suites.

  Of course, she hadn't known about all that in the beginning. When it had all started, she'd been too snowed by the presents and the dinners out and the plane rides. Only later had she started to question things, and by then it was too late: She had a son she loved and a husband she was terrified of, and that had shut her up quick.

  If she was brutally honest with herself, the mystery of Mark had been the true attraction in the beginning. The mystery and the fairy tale and the money.

  She had paid for that attraction. Dearly…

  The sound of chairs skidding across the floor brought her out of her own head. The meeting was over and the participants were standing up and doing the supportive huggy thing—which meant she needed to get out fast before she became entangled.

  It was one thing to listen to them; another to feel them against her.

  That she couldn't handle.

  Rising to her feet, she slung her bag onto her shoulder and beelined for the door. On the way out, she said some quick, detail-less things to the others, and as always, got those looks Christians bestowed on the less fortunate, all poor, dear girl.

  She had to wonder whether they would have been so generous with the support if they knew where she went and what she did after
these meetings. She wanted to believe it would have been no different. Couldn't help but doubt it, though.

  Out in the hall, there were others gathering for the next meeting of the night, which she'd heard was a Narcotics Anonymous group that had recently started congregating at St. Patrick's. Everyone was cordial, the two sets of troubled mingling as the room handoff occurred.

  Searching in her purse to find her car keys, she—

  Slammed into a wall of a man.

  “Oh, I'm so sorry!” She looked up, way up, into a pair of lion's eyes. “I, er…”

  “Easy, there.” The man steadied her and gave her a small, gentle smile. His hair was as spectacular as that yellow stare, all different kinds of colors that flowed onto his huge shoulders. “You okay?”

  “Ah…” She'd seen him before, not only out in the hallway but also at ZeroSum, and had marveled at his unreal looks, thinking maybe he was a model. And naturally, part of her worried that he knew what she did for a living, but he never seemed awkward with her or skeevy in the slightest.

  Besides, if he was attending NA, he had some demons of his own to confront.

  “Ma'am? Hello?”

  “Oh…God, sorry. Yes, I'm fine—I just really need to watch where I'm going.”

  With a smile back to him, she ducked into the stairwell, headed up to the cathedral's first floor and left through those big double doors in front. Out on the street, she hustled past the rows of cars that were parallel-parked and wished she'd gotten a better spot. Her Camry was down quite a way, and she was biting on her molars from the cold by the time she jumped in and started the ritual of getting the engine to turn over.

  “Come on…come on…”

  Finally she got a wheeze and a vroom and then she was doing an illegal U-turn over the double yellow line that ran down the middle of the street.

  Caught up in her own head, she failed to notice the pair of headlights that slipped into her wake…and stayed there.