With Extreme Pleasure

by Alison Kent

  That meant he had to convince her that telling him what he wanted to know wasn’t going to hurt. Unfortunately, that was one thing even he didn’t believe.

  He’d listened to McKie’s version of events in the hospital cafeteria, but his head had been aching and he’d been too focused on Cady and that had been a long time ago.

  He knew more about her now, and now he needed more about what had happened. He needed facts so he wouldn’t make a wrong move, and he needed them from Cady.

  She sat across from him in the small restaurant whose ambience was not that far removed from McCluskey’s. It was like eating in the family room of somebody’s home. One that also served up country fare in country portions.

  None of the skinny small food city portions he’d bitched about to Simon and Micky every time they’d gone out to eat at one of the trendy posh locations his cousin’s wife had swore he had to experience.

  He’d sworn at the experience, but he didn’t think that’s what she’d had in mind. She’d called him names, insulted his taste, and then ordered him a second meal of real food delivered once they were home. She’d also sneaked more than a few bites off his and Simon’s plates.

  Watching Cady eat now, he couldn’t imagine her sitting still for a plate that arrived with two asparagus spears tied together with a string of red onion, a half dollar slice of grilled potato, and a lamb chop the size of his toe topped with cheese that smelled.

  She tucked into what he thought was her third waffle and caught him looking at her. “I’ll get a job one day, I swear. I’ll get a job and I’ll set up an automatic deduction from my check to pay you back for the food.”

  “It’s good to see you eat.”

  She stopped eating long enough to give him a look. “I’ve always been able to eat. I may not know when I turned into an oinker, but there’s nothing that gets in the way of my appetite.”

  This was where King kept silent.

  “Looking over my shoulder, grieving for Kevin, getting the crap beat out of my face…none of that has stopped me from eating, has it?” she asked, obviously a rhetorical question since she didn’t wait for him to respond. “Neither did the trial or getting booted from my house. You’re looking at a one woman eating machine.”

  “Tell me about the prank,” he said, propping one arm along the back of his side of the booth and thinking it best not to pussyfoot but to get it out there and over with, especially since she’d given him the opening.

  “What’s left to tell?” she said, dropping her fork against her plate, reaching for her cloth napkin. “What don’t you know? I thought Fitz had covered everything already.”

  “He gave me his version. I want to hear yours.”

  She’d wiped her mouth, and now tossed the napkin to the table. “I don’t know why. I’m sure they’re the same.”

  “Let me be the judge of that.” Fitz hadn’t been there. He had no way of knowing what Cady did, hadn’t experienced what she had, didn’t share her memories. Those were the things nagging at King, things he could only get from the source.

  “It’s not going to work, you know,” she said, slumping lower in her padded seat. “Talking about it is not going to make me feel any better about being so stupid.”

  “I know you want to take it all back, chère. And I know you know that you can’t. Talking about it may not make you feel any better, but that doesn’t mean it’s going to make you feel worse.” Was she buying any of this? Hell, was he buying any of this? “Besides, if you haven’t talked about it since the trial, it’s probably time.”

  She studied him for a minute at least, her eyes alert, her bruises fading from purple to green. “Get rid of it once and for all? Is that what you think will happen?”

  Enough with the psychobabble bullshit. “I don’t think anything. I just want to hear it.”

  “Fine.” She sat up straight, grabbed her fork, stabbed a square of waffle, and swirled it through a puddle of warm syrup opaque with melted butter. “It was my junior year. I was not exactly a joiner. I wasn’t some emo chick holed up in my room, but I did keep to myself. I wanted to get my degree and get on with my life. And here I am still trying to do that.”

  “You’re getting there.”

  He ignored her when she rolled her eyes. “My roommate, Edie Doyle, got into a big spat with this other chick, Stacia Ashton. She was president of a sorority that was very high profile, and kept giving Edie hell about parking her car in front of the sorority house when she went to the library. Edie was lazy. It was walk half a mile across campus, or park there, cut across their lawn, and hop the brick wall.”

  “Stacia was Nathan Tuzzi’s girlfriend.”

  Cady ate the bite of waffle she’d been toying with and nodded. “Edie was quiet on the surface. Underneath, she was something else. She hated Stacia and her friends, thought they were nothing but spoiled rich bitches. She was right, but that’s beside the point.

  “Anyhow, she came out one night after studying to find her car had been papered with pantiliners.” She fought a smile, tried not to laugh, failed. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t laugh. It’s not funny, but it is. Or it was. You’d have to know Edie to understand.”

  “Tell me about her.”

  “There’s not a whole lot to tell. Not only was she quiet and, well, homely, she was mortified that girls talked publicly about things like their periods, or waxing, or using vibrators, or which boys gave the best oral sex.”

  “She took the mascot for revenge.” It was the only thing he could think of to say, not really interested in hearing about the other things himself.

  A nod, and she cut into her waffle again. “She pulled all those pads off her car, intending to hand them to whoever answered the door. No one did. She tried it. It was open. She tossed the garbage to the floor, grabbed the Persian cat from the pedestal inside, and took off with it.”

  Took off and left evidence of her guilt behind. King imagined the rich bitches weren’t happy to have to clean up their mess. But Tuzzi…he would’ve been the most unhappy of all to find his product gone.

  “She asked you to hide it?”

  “Yeah, I have no idea why I took it home except having it around the dorm room would make it easy to find. And I guess I felt sorry for Edie.”

  Cady grew pensive, and still, her eyes on her plate as she finished. “It didn’t seem such a bad thing to do, helping her out, after the way they’d humiliated her. Shows what I know, right?”

  And this time when she laid down her fork, King didn’t think she’d be picking it up again.

  Thirty-seven

  Cady paced the small kitchen while King plugged in and booted up her laptop. She’d put away the few things they’d bought—coffee, cream, and sugar; eggs, bacon, and milk; two big potatoes to bake along with butter and sour cream; and the steaks King had chosen for their dinner.

  After breakfast in Rosingsville, the small town where her grandmother had kept a post office box for years, they’d stopped for the groceries. It was clear from the reception they’d received at both the diner and the store that word was out—someone was at the Kowalski house.

  Cady figured it was best to have King stop at Denton Hardware before they started the drive to the farm. James Denton, the store’s owner, had agreed to look after the place after Josephine’s death. Cady ran inside to let him know she and King were using the place for a few days.

  It hadn’t occurred to her until talking to him that her parents could very well have told him she was no longer allowed access to the property. Fortunately, they hadn’t. He’d been nothing but pleased to see her, and equally pleased to hear she’d found the place in good shape.

  Once she and King finished their errands and were back on the road, she realized the trip to Rosingsville was the first time in ages she hadn’t been treated like a pariah by people who had known her in the past.

  It gave her hope that she could make a new life for herself away from the place where her old one had fallen apart—or she could do s
o as long as she closed this final chapter with a big fat “the end” to Nathan Tuzzi.

  Whether or not that happened might actually hinge on information she’d had with her all this time—information she’d never dreamed was anything more than Kevin’s unfinished term papers or article drafts.

  She wanted to kick her own ass for not having the guts to dig into what he’d given her. But reaching back into that time of her life wasn’t something that came easily. Those good years spent as a family only reminded her how bad things had been since, how much she missed Kevin, how if she hadn’t been so stupid…

  “I believe we have struck the mother lode,” King said, blowing a long low whistle that cut into her thoughts. “If only Fitzwilliam McKie were here to celebrate the moment.”

  “What is it?” she asked from across the room. She did not want to know. She did not want to see. Asking from a distance was a compromise.

  King was still looking at the computer screen, paging through Word documents, toggling windows to scroll down Excel spreadsheets. “It’s sure not term papers or news articles. At least not any articles he’d finished. I’m thinking he was compiling research to write the big one that would get him noticed by editors other than those on campus.”

  “Research on what?” She did not want to know. She did not want to see. She did not want to be reminded of what she’d lost or that she’d done nothing with Kevin’s gift.

  “Come over here and look,” King said, holding up a hand and gesturing her close.

  “No.”

  He turned then. “No?”

  “Just tell me.” She shook her head briskly. “I don’t want to see.”

  “Cady, this is what you’ve wanted to happen for eight years. This is what you need to rip Tuzzi a new one. Kevin had the information all along. Buyers, suppliers, transactions. Phone numbers. Bank accounts. Names and addresses. This is Tuzzi’s network right here. Top to bottom.”

  She heard what he was saying, but she still didn’t want to see. She still didn’t want to know. And now she couldn’t move. So why if she couldn’t move was she crumpling to the floor?

  Thirty-eight

  The sun was just setting when King headed out to the garage. He pulled the chain hanging from the overhead socket and the single bulb above popped on.

  He stood there for a moment between the old riding mower and the brand new Hummer H3, as if caught between his world and Cady’s, when up until now he’d been thinking their worlds were one and the same.

  Realizing this little side trip of an adventure was coming to an end had changed that. At least he assumed it was coming to an end. All they had to do was let McKie know what they’d found in Kevin’s files.

  So far, neither one of them had made the move to do anything of the sort.

  He’d come out here to make sure the supplies in the back end of the SUV were secure and make room for the rest of their things since it looked like they’d be packing up soon.

  And Cady, well, she’d retreated to the safety of the bathroom’s big claw foot tub, supposedly for quiet time to let what they’d discovered about Kevin sink in.

  It was pretty obvious neither one of them was ready to face the fact that once they made contact with McKie, things between them wouldn’t continue on as they’d been.

  They wouldn’t have any simple reason to stay together.

  From here on, things got hard.

  As he opened the back of the Hummer, King found himself shaking his head. Cady’d had it in her possession for years. The smoking gun needed to squash Tuzzi’s network like a bug. He still couldn’t believe it.

  He imagined she was having a hard time believing it, too. Realizing that if she’d looked at what Kevin had given her, instead of shying away because of the hurt, she would never have become one of Tuzzi’s victims.

  He’d tried to tell her not to beat herself up, but she hadn’t wanted to listen to anything he said. He didn’t blame her. Not really. All the stuff going on in her head? She had to work it out for herself.

  He just hoped she’d remember he was here. That she would come to him when she was ready. She didn’t have to talk. She didn’t have to take off her clothes. He just wanted to hold her, to let her know he was here, that he’d be here for her as long as she needed him to be.

  He just wasn’t sure he was ready to tell her that he loved her.

  Love wasn’t an emotion he had real experience with. He loved his crawfish and sunshine. He loved his bayou country home. He loved his cousin, his cousin’s wife. He loved being able to do anything he wanted with his life. He loved that he had a life to do something with.

  But none of those loves had crawled into his chest, used a pick ax to carve a permanent spot, then sent out roots to choke and cling and suck his will from his bones.

  Not the most romantic way to describe what Cady had done, or at least what it felt like she’d done, but then he wasn’t much of a romance kinda guy. He just happened to be the one who had let her.

  The fact that he had was a big part of why things post-McKie weren’t going to be easy. The girl he’d thought about putting on a bus or into an airplane he now wanted to put in his truck. He wanted to buckle her in and lock the doors and tie her hands to keep her there.

  He just didn’t know if that’s where she wanted to be.

  He pushed that train of thought aside and retrieved the gun he’d stuffed in the coffee can of nails. He placed that one and his own on top of his sleeping bag, then dropped to his back with a flashlight, looking beneath the rear of his truck at the tires and suspension.

  Not that he’d driven this newest model far enough to wear the newness away, but he wasn’t one to hit the road unprepared. Tires, fluids, belts, and hoses. All had to be checked. And since they did, maybe while he was doing it he could figure out what to do about Cady.

  He was getting to his feet when he heard her walking around outside the rear of the garage. He tensed, then realized tensing wasn’t the way to make the conversation flow.

  And so he took a deep breath…and came to his second realization.

  The footsteps he heard did not belong to Cady. They were too heavy. Too hesitant.

  He knew from Cady that James Denton, the caretaker, had to shoo away the occasional trespasser—whether vagrants looking for shelter from the elements or kids looking for a little lovers’ lane action.

  He was in no mood to deal with either one.

  It was the cell phone buzzing like a mosquito that put him in a different mood altogether. This time when he tensed, he did so with good cause, straining to hear the conversation. He picked up a few words, two of them—Cady and alone—being the only ones that mattered.

  His trespasser was not a vagrant or a kid. It was someone who’d come after Cady. Someone who knew only the two of them were here, or else thought he was out of the picture and she was on her own.

  King froze, wanting to warn Cady but having no idea if he’d walk out of here and find one man armed with a cell phone, or several armed with more firepower than his two guns.

  Quietly, he reached for both weapons, tucked them into his waistband at his sides, leaving the tails of his work shirt hanging loose over them.

  Then he grabbed the Maglite he’d been using while under the SUV, and made his way along the far side of the Hummer to the shed’s wide open door.

  The voice had come from the back of the small building. King ducked into the darkness away from the lights spilling from the windows of the house.

  He gave his eyes a few seconds to adjust before he began creeping toward the spot where he hoped to find their unwanted visitor. And where he hoped to find him alone.

  Pressed to the back corner of the building, King held his breath, listening, the weight of the Maglite in his hand a different sort of comfort than the handguns at his sides, a weight that could also serve as a weapon.

  He moved just enough to peer down the back wall, and saw just the one guy he’d hoped for. The intruder hadn’t heard him, and K
ing understood why. The wind had picked up in his favor, whooshing through the trees surrounding the homestead, limbs scraping noisily against limbs.

  From his one-eyed vantage point, King could also see Cady through the kitchen window and the door he’d left open. Meaning the trespasser, busily texting on his phone, his gaze switching between the house and his cell, could see her, too.

  It was then King noticed the gym bag at the guy’s feet. He thought back to the first night he and Cady had shacked up in Jersey, and the explosion that had demolished his Hummer.

  Then he thought about suicide bombers strapping explosive vests to their chests. Or drivers with no intention of committing suicide slamming their Mustangs into tow trucks four times their size for the cause.

  The cause that was standing at the back door even now.

  He had to move.

  He stepped around the corner at the same time he brought up the Maglite and turned it on, aiming it into the trespasser’s eyes and blinding him. “Dude. Private property. No trespassing. You gonna try to convince me you didn’t see the signs?”

  The kid was too old to be, well, a kid. Late twenties, at least. The age he figured fit most of Tuzzi’s thugs.

  Cady’s age.

  Though pale, he was clean cut, looking like he spent his days at a desk on Wall Street, his lunch hour at the gym, his nights on the town. But he had another look. An anxious way of holding himself as if he hadn’t been able to shake the tension of being a bitch behind bars.

  King didn’t want to rouse the younger man’s suspicions by coming right out with his. Best to treat the guy as a local scouting a spot for a party and cut away his false confidence when on better footing himself.

  If this was who King thought, the one not the brains of any operation, that shouldn’t take long.

  “I saw them, yeah.” The kid looked at his texting screen. “But no one’s usually here…”

  “And somehow that makes ignoring them okay?” King flicked the light from the guy’s face to the bag near his feet. “You bring enough booze to share?”