“Jess?” he asked.
“Hey,” she replied, trying to sound glib, confident. “Just running out to meet Jacob.”
“Oh,” he said, but he could read the fear on her face. And Deuce was on all of their minds. He spotted the bag, a bag that someplace in the back of his mind he realized he had not seen her with before. Jessie was a regular kind of gal. Once she liked a bag, she carried it all the time. Like those Converse Chucks or the brown embroidered boots. She was a creature of favorites. Quickly Steve put two and two together. His expression turned to stone.
“The fuck you are,” he said quietly, hands still in his pockets.
Jessie was speechless. She tried to walk by him but Steve thrust out a hand and grabbed her arm, roughly.
“Ow,” she whined, unable to meet his eyes.
“I’m going with you,” he said.
She pouted, her eyes glistening with fear, flicking from ice to instant liquid pools of blue. “No.”
“Does Matt know? Jess?”
“Yeah. He’s already set up. He’s got Dan and Ulysses around somewhere too. He’s making Charles wait at home. Dee’s away. Chicago, I think. ” She closed her eyes. Damn. If Deuce still has the place bugged…she knew Matt had swept it more than once, and they never let contractors in, so the chances of new bugs in the condo were slim. But still…Deuce was a wily man.
“Are you lying to me?”
She jumped, yanking her arm away. “No! I swear. Call Matt yourself and ask him!”
She met his steely gaze then. “Stephen, if you are in my car with me, or make me late, this will be even worse than it’s already going to be. Please let me go.”
At that, his eyes softened. “Be careful, Jessie.” She could see how sorely afraid he was. But she was, too. She decided to lighten the heavy mood suddenly threatening to choke them.
“No, I’m going to fuck him around and try to slit his throat instead. On the off chance that I can overpower the asshole. Jesus, Steve.”
He let her go then, and Jessie waited one more second before she started to move away. But suddenly he grabbed her again and pulled her close.
“I fucking mean it,” he demanded brusquely. “Be careful.”
She wrestled her way out of his grasp. “Look, some shit’s gotta go down, Steve. You know that. I want…I need…a map. I gotta go along with Deuce tonite if I want that map.”
Steve was quiet. “What map, Jessie?” He cocked his head, questioning.
She swallowed. “A map. Or some kind of direction, from Deuce. To where Sandy is. His remains, I mean. What’s left, at least.” Her voice faded.
Looking away, Steve sighed. So. Shit was indeed going to go down. His heart ached for Jessie.
She touched his elbow. “It's not like it’s the first time I’ve done this.”
Emitting a slow pffffttt as he attempted to control the fireball in his stomach, Steve shoved his hands in his pockets again and stared aimlessly out of the large window. A seaplane was floating over Burrard Inlet. He wished he could bundle Jessie up and put her on that plane and take her away to somewhere safe. The small Scottish flat flitted across his mind. Jessie’s actions after Jonathon’s birthday party that awful summer suddenly made so much more sense with Deuce’s threats hanging tangibly in the air.
Jessie kissed him on the cheek and breathed in her friend’s warm – albeit frightened - aura. “Look Steve, if Deuce loses it like he did…” she gulped, remembering the beating from the last time she saw Deuce, “…like he did before, then Matt and his gang will be at the door in seconds. It won’t go down as badly as before. It can’t. There’s a limit. Once a certain line is crossed Matt will move in.”
Steve looked back at her. His green eyes transitioned to a dark golden as he beheld her in his steady gaze. He was thinking about the ‘certain line’ she’d referred to, and exactly what that would mean for her. “Jessie…” Then he lost his momentum. What was there to say that could possibly help on a night such as this?
“It’s not exactly rape,” she whispered. “Not if I go along with it. Is it, Steve?”
He closed his eyes and exhaled slowly.
Jessie squeezed him back, this good friend she loved dearly, and then she turned away, walked purposefully into the elevator and pushed the button. Steve watched her go, a menacing glare masking the fear that had settled across his face. He followed a few steps behind her before she disappeared behind the sliding door and was swifted down to the underground parking garage. Downstairs, Jessie lowered herself into the Mustang, pausing before turning the key. East Hastings, here I come, she thought, wondering what kind of mood McCall would be in that night.
In her condo above, Steve counted to ten before calling Matt.
“Tell me where you are or I’ll bust your balls,” he demanded angrily. “Although I’m thinking I might just do that anyway. I’m getting a little fucking tired of goddamn secrets.”
He sped downtown in his small sports car while Jessie took a few extra turns and listened to Joe Kelly on iTunes in an attempt to relax before the nauseating meeting. Soon Steve was in Matt’s undercover vehicle, an older black Honda CRV, which was parked down the road from Arnie’s place. They watched Jessie arrive, a grey hoodie pulled up over her head. She leaned against Arnie’s building, silently wishing Arnie himself would saunter down the sidewalk towards her. She sang quietly, hoping Matt could hear her. Steve felt a jolt when he recognized the tune. Of course – it was Josh’s Song. What else would she sing to give her strength for this crazy night with a known psychopath?
Deuce wasn’t long. He didn’t get out of his vehicle, but waved Jessie in instead. He did not speak to her on the way to his apartment. He was completely focused on the task at hand, which was to avoid any followers. Matt was cautious - he and his team managed to keep the Fusion in view yet they stayed quite a distance back. He had also instructed Jessie to make an occasional identifying remark to help them find her in the event the GPS stitched into her bag failed.
Deuce pulled up to a low building in Burnaby, near Charlie’s place. Jessie’s heart was pounding – was he trying to tell her something? Had he hurt Charlie? Jane? This game was unbearable.
“Inside,” Deuce demanded tersely.
He parked the car in front of the building and in they went. The place was better furnished than Deuce’s last haunt. On the second floor facing the street, it had a new brown sofa, sixties style with a low back, and a big screen television. The rooms were all larger, painted in attractive bright colors. The living room was a soft peachy orange, which enhanced the lowering sun’s glow, giving a warmth to the room which Jessie neither expected nor cherished, since her purpose there was hollow and frigid.
“Deuce,” she said, finding her voice. “You surprise me. I always kind of took you for a black and white kinda guy.” She said that last bit with a little sideways dance as she tried to lighten his mood a little. “I like how the sun makes this place seem bigger.”
He had been looking out of the window, twisting his head left and right in search of followers, but at Jessie’s remark he finally turned to face her. He hadn’t spotted Matt or Dan’s vehicles. Matt was wise enough to stay out of sight until it got dark. But he and his counterparts were close by, and Dan had managed to eyeball Jessie getting out of the car and entering the building with Deuce, so they knew where she was, even without the GPS. Her comment about the sun gave them a good idea which apartment she was in – it would have to be one of only two on the second floor that faced the street.
“Well, my dear,” Deuce said, eyeing her with pleasure. “You are looking pretty good, I must say. Glad you’ve turned your hair back into that reddish brown color. The purple didn’t really suit you.”
In the CRV outside, Matt and Steve shuddered as chills tingled down their spines.
Jessie’s face fell.
“What? You think I haven’t been watching you all this time? What do you take me for, Jessie? An amateur?”
“We have to end
this, Deuce,” she said, not wanting to waste time. She took the tactic she and Matt had practiced. “I know you are a reasonable man. And I have a life to live. Besides,” she added with an optimism she didn’t feel, “I know how many women are waiting in line for you. In fact I’m surprised you haven’t found someone over the past few years.”
“Jessie, Jessie, Jessie,” Deuce droned, waving a hand to encourage her to sit after opening her bag and swiping a hand through to ensure she hadn’t done something stupid like bring a pistol along. “You know there is only one woman for me.”
Praying he wouldn’t detect the presence of the carefully concealed tech, she sank onto the couch, remembering at the last second to set the bag beside her with its hidden bug facing Deuce to allow easy pick-up of his voice.
He sat stiffly across from her in a matching new chair. Deuce spread his arms out on the sides so that he resembled the famous statue of Abraham Lincoln Jessie saw in a photo somewhere, the one where he sat with his legs a foot or two apart, long hands hanging over the arms of the chair. It was weird to have liberty-loving Lincoln cross her mind where Deuce, a die-hard southerner, was concerned. Jessie shook her head to clear the strange image from her mind on this bizarre night.
“Why?” she asked. “Why me, Deuce?”
“Because,” he responded heartily, “I’ve told you my family once owned plantations. Now we are nothing, but we still have our pride, Jessie. And me, well I built up a fortune again but still there is no praise from my family, from any of them - cousins, uncles, aunts, you name it. I need them to no longer see me as a failure.” He said it with a curvy little wave of his hand, almost in an effeminate manner. It was Deuce’s way of punctuating a ripe painful memory, one that could barely be spoken. He found as he said it he couldn’t look at Jessie at the same time. Just in case she believed it about him too - that he, Deuce McCall, was a failure.
Deuce continued. “Jessie…with you by my side maybe they will see me with new eyes. Not as a failure anymore. Someday you will start coming to parties with me. When I can trust you. You, my girl, are famous and beloved. Everyone loves you.”
“Ah,” she exhaled. “You’re wrong there, Deuce.” This was her chance to set Josh free. “Not everyone.”
In the car, Steve closed his eyes and lowered his head. God, what a card for her to have to play.
“Josh hates me now,” she murmured, so low Matt had to turn up the sound on his monitor.
Deuce watched her before responding. But she was a good actor – her face was a mask. “I doubt that,” he snarled, with a cynical half grin. “Although I have noted you are not fucking him. Poor little Jessie,” he whined in a high singsong voice that resonated low in her belly, making it clench painfully.
“It’s true,” she said, trying again. “He told me I am nothing. That I just hide behind my music. That I hurt people again and again.” That last part was a bit of a stretch but Jessie needed to believe Deuce would leave Josh alone. She whispered again, “I am nothing,” and the tears threatening her eyes were the real deal.
“Oh my dear,” Deuce said. “Don’t you see, Jessie? You are everything.”
A sharp intake of breath from Jessie accompanied that remark. That was exactly what she thought of Josh. She said it to herself time and again while sitting in the tub or driving with Matt in the Audi or even in the studio with Jacob working out a tune. The capacity for love which Deuce had for Jessie, warped as she thought it was, was as real to him as the love she felt for Josh. And, to Jessie, that was a horrifying thought because she knew she would do anything for Josh. Anything. Despite what he thought of her these days.
“Okay then,” she said, recovering her wits. “Let’s play this game then, Deuce. You tell me what you want. And then I tell you what I want. And then we get on with it.”
“Oh, upping the ante, are we Jessie? Getting a little bold now that you are screwing that Scottish musician? The Scots are bold sorts. Their William Wallace hero and all.” He waved his arm again in that weird way he had picked up over the last few years. “Plus their love of the drink. Makes them bold.”
“Jacob is American.”
“Worse! Americans who want to be Scots. Like those ordinary folks who decide they want to become Native Americans, doing the sweat lodges and having sweetgrass ceremonies and all that – you can’t be something you are not, Jessie.”
In other words, try me but I am not going to promise you anything.
“I will go along with you if you promise me one thing. I want to know where Sandy is buried.”
He was so shocked he almost fell out of the chair. “Why would you want to dredge that up now? That’s old news! And don’t even think about prosecuting me. Even if I told you where his body is, you know I still have power over you. I even invested in a shiny new knife.”
The snake, Steve thought, outside, chewing tensely on a fingernail. Bringing up the knife. What he himself would do if he could get his hands on Deuce’s knife, preferably with Deuce at close range.
At that, Deuce leveraged his stocky frame out of the low backed chair. Jessie noticed his hair was longer on the sides, although the top was indeed balding more noticeably now. His green eyes pierced her the way Josh’s brown eyes did, and Jacob’s baby blues, but their effect was astonishing, dark and sinister, devoid of humanity despite his claim of love.
Approaching Jessie, Deuce shrugged off the beige overcoat he wore over an expensively cut suit jacket, and let it slip to the floor. He stood across from her, his polished black dress shoes settling firmly into the Oriental rug, and loosened his jade green silk tie.
“All right,” he said. “I will try to remember where I buried the little bugger. I have to think about it.”
Which led Matt to wondering whether there were more Sandys out there in Deuce’s homemade graveyard or graveyards. He prayed there were not. It was getting dark. Matt took a chance and slowly pulled around the corner to a spot just down and across the road from the apartment building. Deuce did not close the curtain, and he had switched on a low yellow light that emanated a cozy warmth Matt knew Jessie would not be feeling here tonight.
“But you have to promise me, too,” Deuce was continuing, in the gravelly voice he considered seductive. He undid his belt and then unzipped his pants. Jessie felt tears stinging her eyes as she ached for the anonymity of the little Scottish pub. Why oh why oh why did she give in and come back to Vancouver? Oh yeah! Because of Josh in the end, really, over and above everything else. Because Katrine told her love was worth it and she ought to see whether there was still a chance with him. But now she knew there was not. And still she found herself in the clutches of Deuce the fuck McCall.
Deuce continued, “You have to promise me you will continue to meet me as before, only this time no running away. Because if you try to escape me again, Jessie, I will find you and beat you again and still kill the man you love. And I will this time, because then I will kill myself. Because, Jessie Wheeler,” he said as he took her hand, led her to the window and shoved her belly up against it so she was silhouetted there, “I cannot go through that agony again – the agony of,” he reached around and undid the button on her jeans, then pulled down the zipper, shoved the jeans down a ways and placed his hand inside her panties, lower and lower, “not knowing where you are again, of not having you again.” He leaned his face against her back, sighed with pleasure, and then tugged to lower the jeans further before slipping himself inside from behind, roughly, so Jessie cried out as the brutal rape from that hateful August night overpowered her mind.
Straddled against the window, Jessie knew Matt, Dan and likely Steve could see her, although her body was dark against the failing light. But she was backlit by the small yellow apartment fixture and so they watched, horrified, as McCall pulled her legs wider apart and then showed her who was boss. Jessie couldn’t help the tears then – what is this all for? Jacob only cares about the music these days, the dream, he calls it – I call it a fucking nightmare. Steve has S
ophie, Charlie has Jane, and Josh has…she couldn’t even allow herself to think further on that subject. But Jessie was strong, Matt said, they all said, and so she withstood it for what she told herself was one last time while outside Matt gripped Steve’s arm so tightly it left bruises. A wetness on Matt’s cheeks betrayed his firm resolve not to get too emotionally involved with this troubled woman, and Steve sobbed openly, trying to pull himself away from Matt.
And Jessie – well, just when the pain started to become unbearable, Deuce finished with a loud grunt. And then she was reminded of why she was really doing this, of why Matt let her do this, and why in the end it would all be worth it.
She was enduring this torture because she wanted the map to Sandy’s remains, and once it was in her possession she would go to Charleston and find him, and bury Sandy and Rachel together on some nice sunny hill overlooking the beach. And then someday they would all be together again, she and her two old Charleston friends, and fuck Deuce McCall, and fuck Josh, and fuck them all.
Deuce finally let her go, and then Jessie pulled up her jeans and wiped the tears off her cheeks before turning back to McCall, the old spite back along with the Grace Hanadarko character she relied on to get her through moments like these. Thank you Holly Hunter, she intoned to herself as she faced her adversary.
“Feel better, do we?” It was posed haughtily, as a question. Sarcastically. So what if Deuce’s family thought of him as a failure. Lots of people’s families thought they were failures. Jessie knew she was the biggest failure of all. At this moment, she could care less about Deuce and his so called troubles.
Deuce didn’t keep her any longer that night. He was on such a high thinking he had her back again he figured he ought not to scare her away. When he let Jessie out of his rented Fusion, he did not know she had just said her goodbyes to him.
She drove straight home. Shortly after, Matt in the CRV and Steve in his TT pulled in beside her in the dank underground garage, which suited her mood as well as her body, which she was damned tired of having used for other men’s warped pleasure and power trips. She slammed the door of the Mustang and limped towards the elevator without looking at the men, who followed close behind.
No Greater Love Page 33