Touch of Betrayal, A

by Charles, L. J

  THIRTEEN

  Tension crackled and mixed with the scent of the dead guy’s fresh-spilled blood, a nauseating odor that would forever taint my grandfather’s house. My fault. If I’d let the professionals deal with this… No. It wouldn’t have made a difference. Searching for my grandfather, Millie, and Harlan might have led the killer here, but he would have been looking for Kahuna Aukele anyway.

  Speculation was getting me nowhere fast. Shallow breaths dulled my senses, but underneath the fog a potent combination of despair and rage had knotted deep in the pit of my stomach. I sucked in a deliberate breath, staying silent, waiting for the explosion.

  “You know him, Harlan?” Pierce’s words were easy, relaxed, possibly deadly.

  “Stop pointing that gun at us, Pierce. There’s been enough blood shed.”

  He winked.

  I barely managed to suppress a blast of hateful words, managed to swallow the nasty taste of death, and then turned to face Harlan. My heart squeezed tight in my chest. He’d been the one who picked me up when I fell out of my tree house, who held my two-wheeler before I learned to balance, and who had always been there when my parents traveled. And now he stood in front of me, tired, bleeding, and his eyes full of a sadness that aged him by ten years. I ached with the need to cry, and a scream slowly spiraled its way toward my throat. I touched Harlan’s hand, avoiding fingertip contact. “How bad is it? Who was that guy? Why did he shoot you?”

  Valid questions, all of them, but I wanted the answers to come from Harlan rather than my fingertips. It was a matter of respect.

  Harlan stepped away from me, not responding. His mouth tightened and fear flashed behind his eyes.

  I inhaled a deep breath, blew it out with a heavy dose of exasperation.

  Although Pierce was the one holding the gun, there was no way he would ever shoot Harlan. That made the dead guy guilty, but it didn’t tell me a thing about who sent him, or why he’d shot a harmless gardener who’d spent his entire life tending my parents’ property. Then again, I had no clue what Harlan had been like before my parents hired him.

  A .9mm Sig rested on the floor two inches from the dead guy’s right hand. Which was probably why Pierce shot him.

  I recognized the weapon, had considered buying one when I purchased my .380, but it had more kick than I was comfortable with. Still, it was a solid weapon and free for the taking. Since Hawaiian gun laws required a waiting period between the purchase of a weapon and being allowed to take it home, and I wasn’t in the mood to wait for legalities, I eyed the gun with intent to confiscate.

  Harlan must have picked up on my vibe, because he gave me a shaky smile, and then wrapped his good arm around me, holding me back. “I’m just fine, Miz Everly. This old arm will heal on up in no time.”

  Pierce had tucked his weapon at the small of his back, and was leaning over the dead guy, going through his pockets. “Huh,” he said under his breath.

  “Huh, what? I want to know what thoughts are lurking under that grunt, Pierce. This is my family.” I slipped away from Harlan’s hold, and quickly bent down to grab the .9mm before Pierce worked his way around to the right side of the DB.

  He gave me a pointed glare, and for a second I was tempted to hand the gun over. Instead, I checked the magazine, and then slipped it into my shorts pocket. The images that came with it? Those I shoved into my mental filing cabinet for later.

  I turned my back on Pierce, and closed my eyes, sucking in a moment of quiet before I faced Harlan. “And you. Strip off your shirt so I can check out that wound.”

  He went to work on the buttons, so I squared off with Kahuna Aukele. “What’s going on? I want some damn good answers from one of you in the next few minutes. Grandfather, do you have a first aid kit of some kind so I can bandage Harlan before we take him to the hospital?”

  Pierce looked up from checking out the DB. “No hospital.”

  Adrenaline pumped into my veins. “What do you mean, no hospital? He’s shot. Probably should have stitches, and—”

  “They’ll find him in a public building. Kill him.”

  “Who, Pierce? Exactly who are we talking about here?” Terror unfurled in my chest.

  He pulled his phone out of his pocket and punched in some numbers, then met my angry stare. “I don’t know, Belisama. That’s the problem.”

  “Well, I guess I better find out, then.” The words popped out before I thought about them. I didn’t have a clue how trace the monsters attacking my family, but I’d find them. Oh, yeah. I’d find them.

  I whirled to face Harlan. He had his shirt off, and I got a clear look at the bullet wound. A two-inch gash ran along his upper arm, the edges ragged, but too bloody for me to get a good look without cleaning it first. Still, it wasn’t too bad. A graze, not a puncture. “It probably hurts a heck of a lot worse than it looks, but stitches would be good ’cause there’s a flap of skin that’s separated… I’ll wash it off and get a better look. I hope Grandfather has some antibiotic ointment, and I’m sorry I can’t stop babbling. Must be shock.”

  Pierce had stopped mumbling into his phone, stood, and touched Harlan on the shoulder. “What can you tell me?”

  Guess I wasn’t the only one who wanted answers.

  “Millie and me, we think it’s the same people who killed Miz Everly’s mama and daddy. Should have been done and over back then, but the government never stopped watching our girl, here.”

  An outraged hiss flew from my mouth. “You’ve known about this all my life and didn’t tell me? Warn me?”

  Harlan sagged. “Orders from your mama and daddy, Miz Everly. They built a layer of protection around you. Thought you’d be safer not ever knowing about the poison your mama discovered.”

  I inhaled deep and long to squash the pissed-off anger burning in my gut. “You can tell me all about it while I’m bandaging your arm.”

  It wasn’t Harlan’s fault I’d been kept out of the loop. Or Millie’s. I hoped.

  My grandfather came downstairs carrying a white plastic box with a red cross on top. “You should find everything you need in here,” he said, removing a tube of antibiotic from his pocket. He set it on top of the box and handed them to me.

  “Maybe one of us should just, you know, heal him.” It sounded like a good plan, since I had no idea how to put stitches in a person. Heck, I could barely mend a ripped hemline when I caught a heel in it. “I’m not good at sewing, Grandfather.”

  Aukele’s warm gaze held my attention. “It requires a lot of energy to heal, so best to use the gift in matters of more importance than a bullet graze.”

  I glanced around the empty room. “Is there a bathroom down here?”

  “Just behind the stairs. There’s clean towels—”

  “You can use the towels, Belisama, but give them to me when you’re done.”

  What could Pierce possibly want with bloody towels?

  He answered my silent question with a nod, and then added some words. “Have to be kept with the body.”

  Corpse disposal. Just an average, everyday, sort of activity that would eliminate all possibility of learning squat. “You can’t get rid of him before we know who he is, who hired him, and why he shot Harlan.”

  Pierce focused on me, blue eyes intense. “He’s a hired hit man, didn’t know who hired him, and he was after you. Harlan happened to be standing between him and his target.”

  “Right, then.” I didn’t press. It wasn’t the time.

  He stood, and nodded toward Harlan. “Let’s see it.”

  Harlan held out his arm with a resigned sigh.

  Pierce ran his fingers gently beneath the wound. “It doesn’t need stitches. There’ll be some butterfly bandages in that kit. Use them to hold the wound together, slap on a load of antibiotic ointment, and wrap it in gauze. Get it done now. We’re on borrowed time.”

  “And you know this, how?” My temper was running thin.

  His eyebrows flicked up. “M.D.”

  I groaned. “That
was bad even for you, Pierce.”

  His eyes twinkled before shadows chased the light away. Pierce had deftly avoided answering my real question. The one about borrowed time. But before I could ask again, Harlan took my hand and led me toward the stairs. Burning questions had me looking over my shoulder, following every move Pierce made as he bent over the dead guy again. He slipped something into his pocket just as Harlan flicked on the bathroom light.

  “’Preciate you doing this for me, Miz Everly,” he said holding his arm over the sink. “Now, I want you to get on that nice plane Mr. Pierce has and fly back home away from all this nonsense. Millie and me, we’ll take care of things here.”

  I touched the butt of the gun in my pocket. I was going to have to explore the images I’d shuffled into mental storage, but it wouldn’t do to give away all my secrets right away. Pierce had undoubtedly made the connection between my fingers and the gun, and would be hounding me for info. Soon. It’d be good to get my thoughts together before he started asking questions.

  Right now, I had a few of my own. “How’d you get here, Harlan? Where’s Millie?” I asked, running a washcloth under warm water. I wrung most of the water out and went to work patting the blood away from Harlan’s wound.

  “Millie, she’s safe with some old friends.”

  I held his gaze.

  “No one knows about them, and no one ever will. I’ve been stayin’ away to keep everyone off her trail. She’s doin’ well. Healing up right nice.”

  I applied a butterfly bandage to hold the wound closed, then smeared on a liberal amount of antibiotic just like Pierce had told me. “She knows how to create the poison, doesn’t she?”

  Harlan flinched. “My Millie, she read all the notes your mama had made over the years and had me searching the garden for everything that was necessary.”

  “And?” I wrapped several layers of gauze around his arm and secured it with tape.

  “Your mama had planted the components in obscure places, safe like, where they’d never come into contact with each other. Millie, she never actually made the poison, but she learned how.”

  He shuffled his feet. Damn, but he had to be hiding something. Backing away a few steps, I allowed the images I’d been storing while I worked on his arm to surface and fill the viewing screen in my head.

  “You’ve seen, then?” Harlan said. “I knew I couldn’t keep it from you, Miz Everly, but it sure isn’t anything I ever wanted to have to tell you.”

  The shakes started in my knees, and worked their way up as the images unrolled a sequence of events, my private, internal horror show. “You burned the house. The garden.”

  Harlan dipped his chin, tears glistening in his eyes. “Had to, Miz Everly. It was too dangerous to leave any trace of the plants around, not with them killing that government woman.”

  “She was killed and buried on my land before you blew up the house and burned the garden?” I demanded, needing to be absolutely sure.

  “Yes. Millie and me, we didn’t know until it was too late to help her.”

  I cradled his cheek with my palm, fingertips and all. “It’s okay, Harlan. You did the right thing. It hurts, but it was the only choice you had.” I let his pain seep into my heart, bonding us in a new and deeper way.

  He swiped the tears from his cheek with the back of his good hand, and gave me a shaky smile. “I’ll be going to stay with friends. Not with Millie, but someplace away from her. Have to keep her safe until this is over. You take care, Miz Everly, and let Mr. Pierce and Mr. Adam handle this.”

  I nodded, because arguing wouldn’t help Harlan. “Do you have a way to travel?”

  My grandfather came into the bathroom and cupped his hand over my shoulder. “I will care for Harlan, Granddaughter. You do what you must, and know that I’m close. Only a single thought separates us.”

  I hugged both of them. Hard. And then quick strides took me within inches of Pierce. “Who killed your agent friend?

  “I don’t know, Everly. But probably the same person who murdered your parents.” He reached for the gun in my pocket.

  I caught his hand, shoving him away. “I’m in this. I’m not going back to North Carolina until it’s settled, and I want to be armed.”

  He blinked, and then sighed. “You won’t use it. If you freeze, you’ll end up dead.”

  Pure, cold calm flooded my mind. “To save my family, I’ll use the weapon. What leads do you have on the killer?”

  Pierce stretched his neck, digging his fingers into the muscles. “My only lead is Mitchell Hunt.”

  FOURTEEN

  “Mitch,” I asked the empty basement, “how could you have done this?” The tremor in my voice was humiliating. Good thing Pierce had hustled my grandfather and Harlan outside, ’cause I definitely did not want any of them to find the slightest weakness in me. They’d form a posse to lock me up someplace safe. The protection thing was a serious flaw in the male psyche, and annoying. Oh, was it annoying.

  Pierce came up behind me, startled me, and my temper flashed. “Why aren’t you calling Adam to take care of this? It’s his job to deal with dead bodies, and you—I—we need to give law enforcement statements about what happened here. You killed a man, Pierce. No matter that it was to keep Harlan, Aukele, and me safe. You still killed him.”

  “Yeah. I did. I’ll tell Adam about it, but the body is gonna stay with my people until we don’t have any more questions. Wanted him alive, but whatever he had to say wasn’t worth Harlan’s life.”

  I blinked, stunned to utter silence. It was probably the most information Pierce had ever shared with me about his…activities. “Okay, then. So you’re saying you have staff, medical people, forensic people, all that stuff at your beck and call?”

  He didn’t blink. “Yes. It’s not about having money, Everly, it’s about how you use it. I have to finish up here. Pick up some Chinese on the way back to A.J.’s, okay?”

  My stomach did a loud rumble. “Yeah, sure.” I had trouble catching up with his segue from being infinitely wealthy to take-out Chinese, but then moved on to my next burning question. “I can do that. How come Adam isn’t here with you?”

  “Wasn’t sure if they’d planned to hit both Aukele’s house and A.J.’s at the same time, so we split the detail.”

  Well, damn. If Annie, trained sniper and all-around super-spy, needed protection, this situation had rapidly deteriorated, and was pushing to the top of my Bad Day list. And that was saying a lot considering some of the uncomfortable moments in my past.

  I started for the stairs, stopped. “You want me to leave from the front or through the maze?”

  Pierce did a silent chuckle. “All the shit you get into, and when you finally ask my advice it’s about what door to use?”

  I jerked my shoulders in a couple quick shrugs. “Well, yeah. I don’t want to have to shoot anybody to get out of here. One DB a day is enough, doncha think?”

  “Front door is fine. It’d take too long to work your way out of that maze.”

  With a shrug, I started up the stairs. “It turned out to be effective protection for my grandfather. The dense vegetation forced the killer to use the front door and kept us safe. Mostly.” It was a true statement, but I conveniently left off the part about Pierce arriving just in time to shoot the intruder. Why give his already-solid ego another boost?

  “Un-huh. Get some cashew chicken.” He ignored my yes-master expression and started punching keys on his phone.

  I sprinted up the rest of the stairs, wanting to make my escape before Pierce had time to question me about handling the dead guy’s weapon. It was odd he’d let it go this long. And, yeah, not questioning me was a good thing, but those azure eyes didn’t miss much, and his brain usually worked faster than a super-computer.

  After a quick scan of the neighborhood, I slipped out the front door of Kahuna Aukele’s house and made for the Jeep. Annie’s truck was parked in front of it, answering my question about how Pierce got here.

  Since
he had a track record for planting locators on my person, I’d have to ask him if he tracked me with devices on the Jeep, in my handbag, or both. Not that he’d tell me, but if I asked stupid questions it kept him on his toes, and hopefully off kilter about how quickly my brain worked.

  Whether he shared the info or not, I had to find them, so that if I decided to go rogue, I’d be able to remove them quickly. For now, it would be best to leave all tracking devices in place and not give anyone grief about it. It was the sneaky thing to do.

  I started the Jeep and headed toward the main North Shore road that ran along the waterfront. When I came to the first lookout point, I parked and took a few minutes to absorb the view, the sound of the waves, and the scent of ocean.

  Two DBs in two days, added to my husband turning up with a shady past, had taken a toll on me. Not to mention being kidnapped and drugged. Just because the drugging had been inadvertently self-induced didn’t mean it was any less annoying. And the biggest question—aside from who killed my parents—how had I allowed my life to disintegrate so completely? Especially since I knew better.

  After the rocking-chair vision a while back—the one where I saw my little old lady future unless I made some serious life changes—I’d vowed to never return to a life of hermit-hood. But I had. And I’d used Mitch’s protectiveness as a convenient excuse.

  My stomach gave an unhealthy growl that was loud enough to interfere with my introspection, so I braced myself, dug in my pocket for my phone, and punched in Annie’s number.

  “You okay?” She sounded subdued.

  The hair on my neck tingled. Every other time I’d gone off in a huff to gather information, she’d blasted me immediately.

  “Yeah. I’m okay. Are you?”

  “Safe and secure. Since Sean isn’t here, Adam decided to stay. Not that I need protection, but with Maddie… Oh, and when we Skype tonight, I’m not telling Sean about this. He can’t leave the arson site, and he would. He’d put his us before his work. I wanted you to know so you don’t inadvertently mention it.”