by J. R. Ward
The Camry came to a stop with the lurching grace of a bull and she wheeled around at her son. “Are you okay?”
As she patted her hands over his chest, he nodded and slowly released his death grip on his seat belt. “I think…that light…was red.”
“It sure was.” She pushed her hair out of her face and looked through the front windshield.
The SUV's furious driver made eye contact, but as soon as the guy saw her face, the anger in him eased—which gave her an idea of how terrified she must appear. As he mouthed, Are you okay? she nodded, and he lifted his hand in a wave before driving off.
Marie-Terese needed a minute, however—so thank God the Camry had essentially parallel parked itself at the curb.
Well, on the curb.
In the rearview mirror, she saw a man getting out of a blue Subaru that had pulled over behind her. As he walked up, he pushed his glasses a little higher on his nose and tried to smooth his thinning blond hair in the brisk wind. She knew him, she realized…from prayer group meetings and from the previous evening at the confessionals.
She hit the window button, thinking she was surprised he approached. He seemed shy and almost never spoke at the meetings. Which she supposed put him in the same quiet tribe as her.
“Everyone all right?” he asked, bending down and putting his forearm on the roof.
“We are, but that was a close one.” She smiled up at him. “Nice of you to stop.”
“I was behind you, and I should have honked or something when I didn't see any brake lights as you came up to the intersection. Guess you were distracted. You okay, too, son?”
Robbie kept silent, his eyes locked downward and his hands in his lap. He was not one for making eye contact with men, and Marie-Terese had no interest in forcing him to.
“He's fine,” she said, resisting the urge to check him for injury again.
There was a long moment and then the man stepped back. “Guess you'll be on your way home then. Take care.”
“You, too, and thanks again for checking on us.”
“My pleasure. See you soon.”
As she put up her window, a squawking came from the floor at Robbie's feet. “The phone!” she said. “Oh, no, Trez…Robbie, could you get that?”
Robbie bent down and picked the thing up. Before he gave it to her, he asked grimly, “Would you like me to drive home?”
Marie-Terese nearly laughed, but what stopped her was the seriousness in his face. “I'll watch out better. Promise.”
“Okay. Mom.”
She patted his knee as she put the phone back to her ear. “Trez?”
“What the fuck was that!”
With a wince, she held the receiver away from her ear. “Ah…it was a red light that I didn't handle very well.” She checked every mirror on the car and all the windows before putting her blinker on. “But no one's hurt.”
As the blue Subaru went by, she waved at the driver. Paul…Peter…what was his name? “Jesus Christ…I nearly had a heart attack,” Trez muttered.
“What were you saying?” As if the near miss in traffic wasn't enough of a shocker.
“Why don't you call me back when you get home. I don't know how many stoplights there are between you and—”
“I'm paying attention now.” She pulled out slowly. “I swear.”
There was some male-oriented grumbling over the connection. Then: “Fine…here's the deal. The cops showed up here about a half hour ago, looking to talk to staff again, and you in particular. I guess they'd gone to your house and then tried to call you, and when they couldn't reach you, they headed over here. I don't know a lot, only that there's a footprint at both scenes that seems to suggest a link between the two attacks. The tread of a running shoe, I guess? I don't think I'm supposed to know this? by the way—it was just that two of the cops went outside for a smoke and they were passing some pics back and forth, and gee whiz, I picked up on the convo. Go. Fig.”
Marie-Terese's first thought was that Vin didn't wear sneakers—or at least he'd had on flat-soled loafers both nights.
Odd, wasn't it: Her main concern was whether or not Vin was involved, not that Mark was sending people after her from jail. The thing was, though, she'd run from her ex once before—and she could do it again. But the idea that she was falling for another violent man wasn't the kind of thing she could get away from so easily.
“Trez, do you have any idea when the…” She glanced over at Robbie, who was drawing shapes on his window with his fingertip. “Do you know when it happened? Last night?”
“After you left.”
So it couldn't have been Vin…
“Your man's in trouble, by the way.”
“Excuse me?”
“Vin diPietro. His face is all over the news. Guess his girlfriend ended up in the hospital, and she's saying he was the one who put her there.”
As the second round of drama hit, Marie-Terese took her foot off the gas and deliberately looked up as she came to an intersection. Green. Green means go, she told herself. Go means gas. She carefully eased her foot down and the Camry responded with all of the gusto of a ventilator patient.
“By any chance,” Trez murmured, “were the two of you together late last night around ten?”
“Yes.”
“Then take a deep breath. Because according to the news, that's when she said it all went down.”
Marie-Terese exhaled—but only briefly. “Oh, my God…what's he going to do?”
“He's out on bail already.”
“I can help him.” Although as soon as the words left her mouth, she wondered whether that was true. The last thing she needed was her face on the news: There was no way of knowing whether she'd been “safe” from Mark thus far because he was leaving her alone…or because people he'd sent after her just hadn't found her yet.
“Yeah, maybe you should try to stay out of it, though,” Trez said. “He's got cash and connections', and lies are always revealed in the end. In any event, can I tell the police you'll talk to them now?”
“Yes—but have them wait with you.” The last thing she wanted was the cops in front of Robbie again, so the club was the place for her to meet them. “I'll call the babysitter right away.”
“One last thing.”
“Yes?”
“Even though you're out of the business now, a past like ours has a long reach, feel me? Please be careful of everyone around you, and when in doubt, call me. I don't want to alarm you, but I don't like these attacks happening to people who've been tied to you.”
Neither did she. “I will.”
“And if you need to leave Caldwell, I can help.”
“Thanks, Trez.” She hung up and looked at her son. “I'm going to have to go out for a little bit this afternoon.”
“Okay. Can Quinesha come?”
“I'll try to get her.” When they came to a stop at a light, Marie-Terese quickly punched in the babysitting service's number and hit send.
“Mom, who's 'him' who you wanna help?”
As the phone rang, she met her son's eyes. And didn't know what to say.
“Is he the reason you were smiling in church?”
She ended the call before it was picked up. “He's a friend of mine.”
“Oh.” Robbie picked at the crease in his khakis.
“He's just a friend.”
Robbie's brows pulled together. “I get scared sometimes.”
“About what.”
“People.”
Funny, so did she. “Not everyone is like your…” She didn't want to finish the sentence. “I don't want you to feel like everyone is bad and will hurt you. Most people are okay.”
Robbie seemed to mull this over. After a moment, he looked up at her. “But how do you tell the difference, Mom?”
Marie-Terese's heart stopped. God, there were times as a parent that words escaped you and your chest went hollow. “I don't have a good answer for that.”
As the light overhead turned green
and they headed forward, Robbie focused on the road ahead and she left a message for the babysitters. After she hung up, she hoped that he was staring out with such fixation because he was watching for traffic lights with her. But she didn't think it was that simple.
They were halfway home when she thought, Saul. That man from the prayer group's name was Saul.
* * *
When Jim got back from the Commodore, he pulled in front of his garage and got out. As he went up the stairs, Dog parted the drapes in the bay window with his head, and going by the way his ears were pricked and his face was doing a shimmy, it was clear that stubby tail was going fast as an airplane prop.
“Yup, I'm back, big guy.” Jim got his key ready as he came up to the door, but he paused before he put it into the shiny, spanking-new Schlage he'd installed after he'd moved in.
Looking over his shoulder, he focused on the dirt drive. A fresh set of tire tracks had marked up the partially frozen ground.
Someone had come and gone while he'd been out.
As Dog tap-danced with excitement on the other side of the door, Jim did a visual sweep around the landscape, and then looked down at the wooden stairs. Lot of muddy-ish footprints, all of which were dry and with a telltale Timberland tread—indicating they'd been made by him alone.
Which meant whoever it was had either wiped their feet off on the grass first or had hovered their asses up to his crib: He had a feeling they hadn't just pulled into his driveway, done a K-turn, and headed right back out.
Putting his palm to the small of his back, he unsheathed his knife and used his left hand to put the key to work.
Cracking the door amped up the tic-tic-tic'ing of Dog's paws on the bare floor…and also sent up a soft scraping noise.
Jim waited, sifting through the sounds of Dog's hello, searching for anything else. When there was nothing, he opened the door as sharply as he could without hurting Dog, and his eyes went around in a sweep.
No one was there, but as he stepped inside, he saw the cause of the tire tracks down below.
While Dog scampered around, Jim bent down and picked up a stiff manila envelope that was on the linoleum right under the mail slot. No name on the front. No return address. The thing weighed about as much as a book, and whatever was inside had a book feel to it, rectangular with clean edges.
“How'd you like to go out, big man?” he said to Dog while pointing to the great outdoors.
Dog trotted out with his telltale limp, and Jim waited at the door with the package in his hand as business was conducted on the fringe of bushes by the drive.
As he held on to Matthias the fucker's version of fruitcake, he had to convince his stomach not to issue evac orders to those two roast beef sandwiches Vin had made him.
See, this was the problem: Your head could decide all kinds of things, but that didn't mean your body was all jolly-jolly with the plan of the hour.
After Dog came up the stairs and through the door, he headed right for his bowl of water.
With a lightning lunge, Jim ditched the delivery and got there first, picking up the bowl, dumping it out, and washing the thing with soap. As he refilled it, his heart was beating in a grim, steady rhythm.
The thing was, the package was just slightly larger than the mail slot. So they had been in here. And although it was unlikely that they had poisoned Dog's water, the animal had somehow become family in the last three days, and that meant any margin of risk was unacceptable.
As Dog had his drink, Jim went over to the bed, sat down and grabbed the envelope. The minute Dog was finished, he limped over and hopped up as if he wanted to know what was in the package.
“You can't eat it,” Jim said. “But you could piss on it if you wanted to. I would definitely excuse the mess. Totally.”
Using his knife, he pierced the stiff, thick paper and opened a slit that stretched wide, pouching out and revealing…
A laptop the size of an old-school VHS tape.
He took the thing out and let Dog have a sniff-spection of it. Evidently, there was an approval, because Dog gave it a nudge and curled up with a yawn.
Jim opened up the screen and hit the power button. Windows Vista loaded, and what do you know, when he went into the start menu and called up the Outlook that had been installed, he had an account. And his password was the same as his old one.
In the in-box, he found a welcome e-mail from Outlook Express, which he ignored, and two from a blank sender.
“God, Dog, every time I try to get out, they keep pulling me back in,” he said, not even attempting an impersonation of Al Pacino.
Jim opened the first e-mail and went right to its attachment—which turned out to be an Adobe file of…a personnel report that was a good fifteen pages long.
The picture in the upper left-hand corner was of a hard-ass Jim knew, and the details included the guy's last-known address, his vital stats, his clearances, his honors, and his deficiencies. As Jim scanned and absorbed the intel, he was mindful of the time clock in the lower portion of the screen. It had started at five minutes, and quickly was down to two, and when the three digits separated by a colon read 0:00, the attachment was cyberdust, as if it had never existed. The same outcome occurred, only immediately, if he tried to forward, print out, or save the file.
Matthias was sharp like that.
So thank fuck for photographic memory.
As for the report itself? On the surface, it appeared as if there were nothing out of the ordinary; it was just your garden-variety rundown on a black-ops guy who was like the e-file—nothing but ether until he disappeared entirely. Except then there were the telltale three letters at the end next to the word status.
mia.
Ah, so that was the assignment. In the military branch Jim had been in, there was no such thing as MIA. There was AD, OR, or PB: active duty, on reserve, or pine box—the last being a term of art used unofficially, of course. Jim was OR—which meant that technically he was liable to be called back in at any moment and had to go or the letters dead were going to appear next to his status. And the truth was, he'd had to blackmail Matthias the fucker to even get into the reserves—although given what he had on the guy, he should have been able to stay there. If he hadn't had to resell his soul.
Well…the assignment was clear-cut: Matthias wanted this man killed.
Jim quickly rescanned the report until he was certain he could close his eyes and read the text and see the picture on the backs of his eyelids. Then he watched the clock zero out and the thing disappear.
He opened the second e-mail. Another e-file to crack and another ticker in the bottom corner that was triggered when he did. This time he just had a picture of the guy, only now the face was battered, with a split in the forehead that had let loose a tidal wave of blood. He wasn't a victim, though. Hisknuckles were wrapped for fighting and there was red chicken wire behind his head and shoulders.
The image the solider was a scan of a flyer for an underground mixed-martial-arts fighting group. Area code was 617. Boston.
The name the soldier was going by was both cheesy as fuck and pretty goddamn accurate, assuming he hadn't changed: Fist. His real one was Isaac Rothe.
This file lasted only a hundred and eighty seconds, and Jim hung out, staring at that face. He'd seen it a number of times, on some occasions right beside him while they worked together.
Dog nuzzled his way into Jim's lap and curled up, putting his face on the keyboard.
Yup, Matthias wanted the guy dead because Isaac had bolted from the fold—so it was a standard job and standard rules applied. Which meant if Jim didn't do it, someone else would—and the chaser would be that Jim woke up dead in the morning, too.
Pretty damned simple.
Jim ran his hand down Dog's flank and worried about who would feed and care for the little guy if something bad happened. Shit, it was weird to have something to live for…but Jim just couldn't deal with the idea of the animal lost and alone, hungry and scared again.
Lotta cruel motherfuckers in the world who couldn't care less about a scruffy ugly-ass dog with a limp.
And yet the idea of killing Isaac was repugnant. God knew Jim had wanted out of the service bad, so he couldn't blame the guy for leaving: A life that was led in the gray borderlands between right and wrong, legal and illegal, was a hard one.
If only the idiot had had the sense not to do anything with a public presence, even an underground one.
Then again, they would have found him eventually. They always did— The twin sounds of Harley engines pulling up to the garage brought both his and Dog's heads around, and Dog immediately started wagging his tail as those growls silenced down below. As boots came up the stairs, the animal leaped off the bed and headed for the door. The knock was loud and it struck only once.
Dog paddled at the door, his excitement making him appear even scruffier than usual, and before the poor thing expired from ecstasy, Jim got up and walked over.
As he opened the door, he met Adrian's cool eyes. “What do you want?”
“We need to talk.”
Jim crossed his arms over his chest as Eddie knelt down and showed love to Dog. Given the way the animal reacted, it was hard to believe the bikers were playing on Devina's team, but just because they weren't pally-pally with her didn't mean they were legit: All Jim had to do was think of the shadows he hadn't seen and the confusion in Chuck the foreman's voice when he'd been asked about the pair.
Made a guy wonder just what the fuck was standing on his doorstep. “You two are liars,” Jim said. “So that makes talking kind of pointless, doesn't it.”
As Dog rolled over onto his back so Eddie could do some serious belly rubbing, Adrian shrugged. “We're angels, not saints. What do you want from us.”
“So you do know those four English whack jobs?”
“Yeah, we do.” Adrian glanced pointedly at the refrigerator. “Listen, this is going to be a long conversation. You mind beering us?”
“Do you exist?”
“Beer. Then talk.”
As Eddie got to his feet with Dog in his heavy arms, Jim held up his palm. “Why did you lie.”