by Brian Fuller
A few steps ahead, the door she guessed led to the alleyway out back waited slightly ajar. Naked feet slapping the floor, she barreled at it with every bit of speed and determination she could muster.
She let loose another blast of Glorious Presence as a red wave enveloped her from behind. Two torchers in one place! Her mind pulled at her, trying to drag her into more dark memories fueled by Goldbow ditching her. She fought the dark vision trying to take the stage of her mind. The sense of abandonment and worthlessness pounded her self-esteem with such a crippling force that only the impact with the exit door yanked her free.
The door gave way, and she stumbled and fell facedown into the littered alleyway behind the Mash. The skimpy dress provided no protection against the broken pavement, which bit into and peeled away the flesh on her hands and knees. No matter. Such superficial wounds could be ignored, but the wounded heart pounding the pulpit of her emotions preached a powerful sermon of surrender.
Stay where you are, it said. They will come and finish you. Perhaps in a third life you can find some peace.
But no. She pushed herself up from the ground. She would live. She would survive, if for no other reason than the opportunity to make Goldbow regret what he had done.
The crash of falling pans in the kitchen behind her reminded her of the imminent danger. She darted toward the empty street to her left.
Now outside the Dreads’ constricting noose, she could make good her escape. With any luck, a patrolling cop would pick her up and she could unload a sob story so damning it would put Stu’s business interests in severe jeopardy. Of course, if the Michael Fire Team actually did show up, Stu would be nothing more than an empty suit filled with dust.
The com came to life again. “Cassandra! Talk to me. Tell me where you are. Michaels will be on site in eight.”
She turned out of the alley and onto the street as the Dreads piled out the door behind her. The sidewalk made for good running, the soft skin of her feet gripping the rough concrete and propelling her forward with a speed she doubted the Dreads could match. A single bullet in the right spot could still take her down, but the odds were in her favor now. Dreads and Ash Angels could run forever, so the victory always went to the hare, never the tortoise—and she ran like a track star.
“Cassie! C’mon, sweetheart. Let me know you’re okay.”
Sweetheart. Said like he meant it, too. “I’m clear,” she barked. “And we’re over. Tell Archus Magdelene I’m out.”
“Cassie—”
She ripped the tiny com from its secluded place in her ear canal. With a powerful downward throw, she smashed it against the concrete whipping past beneath her churning feet.
With the dawn, all the breaks and scrapes and bullet holes would heal in an instant, but the return of morning would not mend her heart. Broken hearts were like puzzles: put them together enough times and you start losing pieces.
Chapter 1
Trace
Even to Trace, the source of his anxiety was ridiculous: Terissa’s little black dress. The one she’d had to shimmy and cram her voluptuous body into. The one she’d worn when they dated because it drove him crazy. The dress that made infrequent cameos after they married. The dress that disappeared into retirement in the wilderness of her overstuffed closet a year after that.
Until a week ago.
She’d worn the dress when she went out with her friends last Saturday. It was the dress she wore now as she primped herself for the company party while humming “Love Shack” so loudly he could hear it from across the hall. It was a party she didn’t need to look so good for.
Trace shoved the nagging thoughts away. Before him on a worn card table awaited mounds of puzzle pieces. Something about a thousand-piece puzzle silenced the dark ruminations shooting suffocating tendrils through his mind. Whether trying to forget the horrible scenes of war or the stress of college, a pile of nearly indistinguishable puzzle pieces could drown out his anxieties and sometimes managed to shut them up altogether.
In a well-worn procedure, he scanned for and separated out the edge pieces, tossing those that belonged with one another in coordinated piles around the blue tabletop. In the mindless tedium of sorting and testing, rejecting and connecting, came peace.
Terissa, his wife of three years, thought him crazy sometimes. She called him OCD, but he wouldn’t admit to her that finishing a puzzle felt like an obsessive need. She griped about the card table’s trashy presence in the color-coordinated, expensively furnished home she’d paid for. As a concession, he’d dragged his puzzle operation into his cramped office and shut the door.
But this Friday evening, the tedious drudgery of the puzzle failed him. What plagued him demanded an audience, and no quagmire of puzzle pieces could stifle that need. The company party had come. He got to go. Had to go.
Terissa worked as a paralegal at Goutre and Hudgins Law Offices. They held a biannual bash at one of the principal partner’s opulent homes or at some resort, spouses invited. He and Terissa had attended together each year since they’d married. This would be their sixth, the first at Elian Goutre’s place. Since employees high and low on the org chart could attend, the soiree often felt like an uncomfortable mix of high-society snobbery and frat-house romp. Terissa kept her bearings in both seas. Trace felt like an island in the middle, hoping the sky wouldn’t cloud up.
“Ready!” she announced enthusiastically from the doorway, startling him.
He turned and took her in. Terissa’s mother was Hispanic, her father Caucasian, the mix producing a stunning woman. Curves. Curly, dark hair. Smoldering, dark complexion. Big, beautiful eyes the color of cocoa. And all of that shoved into a dress too far up her leg and too far down her chest.
His guy friends never missed an opportunity to remind him of his good luck. His parents warned him that if he ever screwed up his marriage, they would kill him. Her friends told him he didn’t deserve her. Every guy he knew, his brother included, flirted with her mercilessly. Before their marriage, it felt like a competition he was winning. A competition he had won. After they married, that same flirting (which he thought would go extinct) by the exact same people (who should have known better) wore on him. He knew that every man with a crazy-beautiful wife had to endure the long glances and boyish smiles of other men, but when she returned some of those glances and smiles, he found himself grinding his teeth.
As Trace admired Terissa’s sexy pose at the doorway, his natural feelings of desire stalled, a nauseating worry rising in their place.
“You okay, Trace?” she asked, face registering a pale stain of concern. “I’ll just go alone if you want. I know you hate these things.”
He tossed the puzzle pieces in his fist to the table and stood. “Wouldn’t miss it.”
“Really, babe. If you don’t want to go, I can wing it without you tonight.”
He pushed past her and made for the garage. She continued her attempts to dissuade him until he cranked the engine on her nice black Acura and put it in reverse. She didn’t understand that every argument she produced against his going only persuaded him that he must go. And if her arguments didn’t do the trick, the nervous foot bouncing of her crossed, slender legs and her alternately agitated and anticipatory expressions nailed his resolve home. He had to go to this party, dread of lawyers be damned.
Their destination was fifteen minutes away. After a quick drive on a state highway, they turned down a small county lane leading into the wilderness. The dense foliage of Missouri woods hovered over the road, dimming the light of the late summer evening.
“Are you even going the speed limit?” Terissa asked.
He wasn’t.
The humming of the smooth six-cylinder engine and the pop melodies on the radio filled the void in their muted, inconsequential conversation as they neared their swanky destination.
Elian Goutre, the founder of Goutre and Hudgins, lived in a lakeside mansion in the wooded hills, a mansion now full of people with law degrees.
&
nbsp; To alleviate the gnawing anxiety twisting his gut, Trace focused on the winding drive. To his right, the sparkling waters of the lake tantalized him, emerging and disappearing from view between the trees. Boats played on the sunset shimmer, the blue expanse embraced by a wall of thriving trees. Trace wished he could be alone with her out on the water. Just the two of them.
All Terissa could say was, “Almost there!”
Enormous oaks and hickories nearly obscured Elian’s house from the road, but the redbrick wall and golden address plaque confirmed they had arrived. Trace slowed and parked on the street by the low brick wall that encircled the property. The cobbled circular drive directly in front of the house was filled with a mix of expensive and affordable cars that foreshadowed the composition of the guests inside.
Terissa popped out of the Acura without waiting for him to open the door for her.
“Let’s go. We’re late.”
He trailed her to the massive door he suspected was designed to belittle solicitors. After they stopped on the porch, Terissa reached over and loosened his red tie, undoing the top button of his light-blue shirt. “You need to relax, Trace. You look like you’re going to a job interview.”
He smiled weakly. She looked like somebody else’s wife. She belonged in Elian’s sumptuous home constructed almost entirely of glass panels as if to say, “Look inside, everyone. All my stuff is better than your stuff.”
Trace came from a blue-collar military family where practicality and efficiency ruled the roost. Every time his father passed a house like Elian Goutre’s, he would say with a hint of disparagement, “I bet it costs a fortune to heat that place in the winter.” Trace and his brother Brandon would respond, “They can afford it, Dad.”
Trace grasped the tooled copper knob and pushed it open, feeling like a dwarf entering a giant’s lair. Not even the hint of a squeak. It swung inward in a stately fashion, and Terissa dove inside. The landing immediately forced one to go up or down. Everyone seemed to be up, and Terissa climbed the stairs while he heaved the door shut.
A chorus of “Terissa” rose and fell, too many bass voices in the choir for Trace’s liking. Sucking in a lungful of air, he braced himself. Not four years ago he’d been a Marine in a brutal firefight on an Afghani street. He had run headlong into it. Somehow, ascending the stairs in front of him now would have seemed more manageable if terrorists and insurgents waited at the top.
As it was, just out of sight over the lip of the last stair lounged a bunch of lawyer types, people who pulled words out of parts of the English language he had never visited or ever hoped to. Goutre, Hudgins, and their associates seemed like a bunch of golf-club buddies. Probably were. They had bright eyes and suave grins for the young ladies, but their caked-makeup, plastic-surgery wives had eyes on them.
Terissa would tell Trace about her bosses’ seduction attempts over dinner with the same levity she might lend to a story about cute puppies getting into clean laundry. Her raunchy tales stabbed him in the gut. Over and over. And gut wounds bled forever.
These thoughts discouraged him and spurred him forward at the same time, and with leaden legs, he ascended the stairs and joined the party. The decorator living room practically glowed under the light of a gaudy glass droplet chandelier of such dimensions Trace thought it must have been stolen from some upscale casino. It hung over the room like a cloud of light, blessing every expensive vase, obsidian frame, and polished wood end table with a glorious sheen. A pale, short Berber carpet accented several plush sofas upholstered with soft leather that probably did not come from a cow’s back, or if it did, it was a cow fed caviar and apricot juice. One entire wall between the living room and the dining area—too big to be called just a dining room—was two panes of thick glass etched with a clock as tall as he was. One could hardly miss the time: 8:53 p.m.
He grabbed a foreign beer and downed half of it before joining Terissa as she greeted her “girls” from the office. After a slate full of empty exchanges with the law firm peasantry, the girls inexorably drifted over to Simon Powell’s social circle as they had every time before. Simon was a young attorney, fresh from Stanford and the West—at least he still looked fresh after two years of slavery at Goutre and Hudgins. He had a tan that never faded and dressed beneath the rest of the party in an untucked, white button-down shirt and khaki shorts. Simon always seemed to pose himself as if at a photo shoot of a fashion magazine. His wife, Darcie Powell, stood meekly nearby. Terissa always complained about how jealous she was of Darcie’s petite figure, as if her own stunning body was somehow fat and inadequate. This made no sense to Trace whatsoever.
Darcie, a California beach blonde, was an outsider to the legal office crowd, a community college English teacher by trade. She wore a fetching red summer dress that tried to radiate an exuberance the wearer clearly didn’t feel.
Simon pecked Terissa on the cheek, his hand a little too low on her hip. Trace looked away, sipped the beer, and said hello to Darcie. He wondered why she always seemed so shy and diffident. Tonight she almost came off as hollow. Hadn’t she married every woman’s dream?
Done with Terissa, Simon shook Trace’s hand—a quick, noncommittal grasp. “How are the studies coming along, Trace? Terissa still paying that tuition for you?”
It was a humiliating barb Simon and half the office staff threw out at every party. Trace hated it to the point of strangulation. Terissa the sugar momma. Terissa the provider. Trace the mooch.
“Studies are great,” Trace answered curtly. “Uncle Sam’s still paying the bills.”
Terissa folded her arms. “He just got an internship at Softronics Systems doing some . . . programming . . . or . . . what was it?”
“A system for collating micro-purchases from credit cards for aggregated submission to the processor,” Trace answered, hoping the jargon sounded sufficiently impressive. The legal guys knew big words, and he always felt like a walrus decked out in plate mail at these parties, clunky and slow.
“Sounds fascinating,” Simon replied, eyes communicating a private mirth to Terissa. Trace hit the beer can again. It was nearly gone. Already. How long could expensive, foreign beer keep him from doing or saying something he’d regret? Perhaps a domestic would be better.
“How about you, Darcie?” Trace said, shifting the conversation down a different track. Darcie was a normal person. Perhaps she could make him feel normal. “How are things going for you at the college?”
Terissa and Simon turned toward her, and she shifted uncomfortably. “They are going well, I guess. We get more of the disadvantaged and nontraditional students there, and it’s been rewarding to work with them.”
“And believe me,” Simon added, “they are a motley crew. I went to pick her up from her class one night and thought I had walked into an old Soviet prison. The building has these narrow hallways and low ceilings, and half the roof tiles are missing. I think our firm did an asbestos claim on the place a few years back. But her students. Wow. Febreeze, anyone?”
Terissa giggled and touched his shoulder. “You’re awful.”
Trace was out of beer.
“I’m going to hunt down another drink,” he announced.
“Well, don’t get lost, dear,” Terissa joked, ruffling his light brown hair like he was a five-year-old. “This house is huge.”
Darcie wore an odd, pained look as he left. He wondered what was eating at her and if it was the same monster eating at him. He exhaled and sought serenity in drink selection. Despite Terissa’s playful warning, the drinks were conveniently located in the dining area on the other side of the enormous clock, whose spindly hands crawled along at a palsied pace. An assortment of spirits in a variety of ice buckets awaited his choice, but he just stood there, an odd numbness freezing him in place. He glanced back through the transparent wall. Terissa and Simon were there, talking animatedly about something while a statuesque Darcie stared into space, eyes glazed-over, a hand clutching the elbow of her other arm.
“Trace money!
There you are, dude!” This was Dan. Trace had no idea what the guy did at Goutre and Hudgins, but the introduction of alcohol into his bloodstream instantly transformed him into white-boy-slim from the frat house. At least he was friendly despite his association with Simon.
Like his friend, Dan dressed more casually than most, in a T-shirt with a pair of average-looking blue slacks. He had a round, friendly face and dirty-blond hair.
“What’s up, Dan?”
“Just checkin’ out the ranch here. First party at Goutre’s place since I came on board. Have you seen the theater room? He’s got all the major consoles. It’s totally killer. Come on. I’ll show you. It’s got a wet bar and everything. Good stuff, too.”
Anything was better than hanging around Simon. “Just for a bit.”
Trace glanced back to find the scene with his wife unchanged and followed Dan down a curving staircase to the fanciest theater room he had ever seen. It had pristine white walls with a concave screen and domed roof, all of it professional and looking like not a single butt had planted itself in the brown leather chairs.
“Nice.”
“What’d I tell you, buddy,” Dan said. “Ain’t no skimpin’ at Goutre’s pad. And you gotta see this remote control. I mean, it’s like from the future of the future.”
“We probably shouldn’t be messing around down here uninvited. I should get back,” Trace said, turning to go.
Dan cut him off. “Hold up, there, dude. Just a quick demo. You have got to hear the speakers. Check the bar while I figure this out.”
What started as a quick demo turned into a few shots of tequila and a game of Halo.
Somewhere in the haze of subwoofer impacts and alcohol, it hit him. Wingman. Dan was Simon’s wingman. He had cleared him out of the playing field with the greased ease of a professional. Terror pushed Trace to his feet, and he walked out without a backward glance as Dan tried to reel him back in.
