by Tara Wylde
Carol takes the note from the guard’s hand and examines it herself.
“What makes a man do something like this?” she asks, then looks up at us. “I’m not being rhetorical. I really want to know. You never see women do this kind of thing.”
Jason shrugs. “Can any of us really know why other people do anything? All I know is I’m glad we no longer have to worry about him.”
Guard Two hangs up the room phone. “Police and ambulance have been dispatched,” he says. “ETA is about ten minutes.” He looks down at the floor, sees the splash of brain tissue and blood there and turns a pale shade of green.
I lean in close to Xander and run a hand along the nape of his neck. I want to take his pain away but I know there’s nothing I can do to help him. It makes my heart ache to see him like this.
“Penny for your thoughts,” I whisper in his ear.
He turns to face me and the look in his eyes could freeze lava.
“Why the hell didn’t you follow my orders?” he growls.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
XANDER
Tina’s eyes are wide and shimmering with dancing tears.
Shit.
I didn’t mean for that to sound so harsh, but I keep replaying that handful of seconds over and over in my mind, when the guy’s gun was waving around the room, when all I could think of was Tina’s broken body crashing to the floor.
If he’d pulled the trigger in her direction, I… I don’t know what I would have done. And I hate feeling like that, like I’m not in control.
“I’m sorry,” she whispers. “I – I heard a shot…”
“So you came running out to where the gun was?” I say evenly. “Good plan.”
Stop it, Xander! She’s not a soldier, for Christ’s sake!
I’ve been in countless dangerous situations before, but never one where someone I truly cared about was at risk. I’ve always been able to wind down within a few minutes after combat is over, but the adrenaline rushing through my system has barely slowed down.
I can still taste the acrid tang of copper in my mouth.
Carol appears beside Tina and takes her by the shoulders.
“Come on, darling,” she coos. “Xander is… dealing with some things right now. Let’s just let him be for a minute, okay?”
She flashes me a concerned look as she walks Tina over to the kitchen. I can’t tell if she’s worried about how I am or what I might do.
Now Jason is beside me, checking out my shoulder.
“Whoa,” he says. “That looks… kind of awful.”
I glance down at the man in the floor. “You should see the other guy,” I say.
He follows my gaze down. “Yeah,” he breathes. “Jesus. I mean – Jesus.”
“Guess we don’t have to worry about the stalker anymore. Looks like I’m out of a job.”
“I suppose so. We’ll pay you the full amount, of course. That’s in your contract.”
Carol looks up from tending to Tina. “What are you talking about?” she says. “Xander is under contract until the end of the tour. That’s Saturday in New York.”
Jason shrugs. “What’s the point now?”
“The point, Jason, is that Tina Quinn and Xander Tate are an item.” She glances at Tina, who looks miserable. “At least in the eyes of her fans. I don’t want to jeopardize that. Besides, when the news gets out that Xander saved Tina from a stalker and took a bullet for her – it will be huge.”
Jason suddenly rounds on her. I’ve never seen him so angry.
“Do you ever think of anything other than money?” he snaps. “Like the fact that Tina could have been killed? Or that Xander here might have a permanent disability from his injury?”
“I’m fine,” I mutter, discomfited by the attention.
“See?” Carol says. “He’s fine. I told you.”
“I hope you don’t mind if we let the medical people determine that,” Jason says.
Carol scowls and waves an arm at the dude on the floor. “This… person wouldn’t have harmed Tina. He was here to kill himself, and anyone else around, but not her.”
“You don’t know that,” I say, piping up properly for the first time. “Just because he wrote something on a piece of paper doesn’t mean he was going to do what he said he would. As far as I’m concerned, Tina was in real danger.”
“Enough!” Tina yells. Her eyes are blazing, her hands balled into fists. “Would everyone please stop talking like I’m not in the room?”
Carol flinches at the outburst. “You’re absolutely right, dear,” she soothes, patting Tina’s hand. I wonder if she actually cares or if she’s worried she’ll somehow lose her meal ticket. Probably a little bit of both.
“I’m confused and I’m scared and I’m angry,” Tina says. She looks me in the eye. “And I don’t know what to think right now.”
The cops choose that time to come bursting into the room, hands on their weapons.
“Chicago PD!” one of them shouts. Suddenly the place is awash in black jackets..
“What happened here?” one of them, a tall man with a crew-cut and a neck like a bull’s, asks as the other gives me the once over.
I use my good hand to point to the floor. “That guy shot me, then shot himself.”
“It’s true,” says Jason. “I’m a witness.”
“So am I,” Tina adds wearily.
The big guy, who’s obviously in charge of the scene, looks at them, then at me, then at the guy on the floor. As he does this, three EMS people come rushing through the door.
“All right,” the cop says, cocking a thumb in my direction. “Once we get this guy looked at, we’re all going down to the station to figure this out.”
Chapter Twenty-Nine
TINA
“How many times do I have to tell you the same thing?”
It’s almost 2 a.m., I’m exhausted, and I’m on my fourth retelling of what I saw tonight. The officer who’s taking my statement is nice, and I know she’s got a job to do, but this is getting ridiculous. Hell, it’s way past just ridiculous.
“I think we’re good,” she says, shutting off the digital recorder on the table in front of me. “Mr. Lane and Ms. Ridley should be finishing up right about now, too. We need to make sure we have all the facts.”
“What about Xander Tate?” I ask. I haven’t seen him since the officers separated us we arrived at the station two hours ago.
“Mr. Tate is – a special case,” she says. “He’s talking with my captain.”
“A special case? What does that mean?”
She smiles. “I’m not at liberty to say, ma’am. You’re free to go, but we ask that you don’t leave town until we notify you otherwise.”
As I step out into the common area, I see Carol and Jason sitting in white molded plastic chairs, sipping coffee out of Styrofoam cups. I don’t see Xander anywhere.
Jason puts a hand on my arm. “Are you all right?”
“I’m fine,” I say. “Do you know why Xander is talking to the captain?”
Carol shakes her head. “I’m sure there’s a perfectly good reason,” she says. Her expression makes me wonder if she knows more than she’s telling. Or maybe we’re all just tired.
“Well, I’ll stay here and wait for him,” I say, taking a seat. “You two can go back to the hotel.”
Jason looks uncomfortable as he sits down next to me.
“Tina,” he says. “About Xander…”
“What about him?”
“Well, he did say back at the hotel that he wanted out of his contract.”
“That’s not going to happen,” says Carol. “Period.”
I think about the last words Xander said to me in the hotel. I’ve never seen him like that, so cold. And before that, the last thing he said when we were in bed, before everything went to shit: “I don’t know.”
Nothing more.
I don’t know, either. I don’t know anything anymore.
Suddenly a door to my ri
ght opens as a uniformed cop walks out of an office. Inside the room I see Xander sitting across a desk from a middle-aged man in a suit. They’re talking. Xander looks towards the door and our eyes meet for two seconds before the man in the suit gets up and closes the door.
I won’t cry now. I’ve shed enough tears tonight.
“Let’s go back to the hotel,” I say. My voice sounds flat to my own ears. “Xander can take care of himself. I guess it’s what he does best.”
Chapter Thirty
XANDER
“Sorry to make you wait so long, son,” Capt. Mason says as the door latches behind him.
“We just got word from the Naval Special Warfare Unit in Virginia. It wasn’t easy, but we managed to wake up someone who could confirm your status.”
“Sir,” I say automatically.
It’s second nature when I’m around someone in authority. My mind is on Tina and the look in her eyes. I know whatever credit I bought by taking down her stalker, I’ve fucked up.
Bad.
“Before we proceed, I just want you to know how much we appreciate your service. We’ve got a number of veterans on the job here in Chicago PD.”
“Thank you, sir.”
He flips through some papers in front of him and extracts one from the pile. “So you confronted the deceased in the main area of the suite before he shot himself?”
“Yes sir. I was in the master bedroom with Miss Quinn when I heard someone gaining access to the front door of the suite. I left the bed and moved to the door; that’s when I realized he was behind it. I kicked it down and landed on top of him.”
The captain’s eyebrows go up. “You kicked a hotel door off its hinges.”
I shrug with my good shoulder.
“Well, then. And at what point did the .38 come into play?”
“Within the first minute. He drew it in the dark. I first had visual contact when Jason entered the suite and turned on the lights.”
“That’s Jason Lane?”
I nod. “His room is down the hall. He heard the commotion and came in.”
“I see. So you struggled against the assailant and he got off a round?” He points to my bandaged shoulder.
“Yes sir. Then Tina – Ms. Quinn – entered from the master bedroom. The assailant pointed the weapon at all three of us in turn. I finally managed to get him on the floor, where he proceeded to put the gun under his chin and fire.”
Mason leans back in his chair and flips through some more of the papers. My shoulder throbs as the shot of Demerol the EMTs gave me starts to wear off. I’m too proud to say anything, but I kind of wish I hadn’t protested so loudly when they told me I needed to go to the hospital.
“Did the guy say anything during all of this? I mean, I know we have his note, but was there anything verbal?”
I frown, trying to remember his exact words. “ ‘I can’t do this.’ He said it twice, first in the dark, then after Jason turned on the lights.”
“Huh. What do you think he meant by it?”
I shake my head. I can’t speculate on what someone else is thinking. I can’t even answer a simple question from the woman I love.
“He didn’t have a problem firing at me or killing himself,” I say. “The note said that was what he came there to do.”
At that moment, the door opens again and the head uniformed cop from the scene – Roth, I think he said his name was – enters with his own stack of papers.
“Thought you’d want to see this, sir,” he says, handing them to Mason. “They’ve ID’d our body and I’ve got the medical examiner’s initial findings.”
“So who was he?”
“Name’s Curtis Downey, forty-nine, no fixed address. He’s been busted a dozen times over the past ten years for petty theft, trespassing, public intoxication. From all accounts, he’s pretty much homeless.”
That’s not what I expected. Why would someone like that be obsessed with an up-and-coming pop singer? And how? He’s hardly the kind of guy to be addicted to his Instagram timeline, after all…
The captain leans forward in his chair. “What the hell?” he says.
Roth nods. “That’s what I figured you’d want to see, sir.”
Mason looks me in the eye. “According to this report, Downey had late-stage cirrhosis, the kind that can only come from years of hardcore drinking. If he hadn’t offed himself, he would have been dead within a month.”
“Maybe he wanted to go out in a blaze of glory?” Roth offers.
“I’ll pretend I didn’t hear that,” Mason says with a frown. He turns back to me. “There’s also the question of how Downey managed to get in. The Peninsula is a secure hotel; you have to have a key card to use the elevator.”
That hadn’t occurred to me. Rooms at the Peninsula start at five hundred bucks and night and go up like a rocket from there. How could a bum like Downey afford to get in?
Mason reads from the stack of papers for a few more seconds. His frown deepens and he looks up at me again.
“I’m looking through the statements from Ms. Quinn and Mr. Lane,” he says. “There’s something very wrong here.”
Chapter Thirty-One
TINA
Jason’s room is smaller than my suite, of course, but I can’t go back there. It’s a crime scene, after all.
I collapse on his sofa as soon as I’m through the door. Carol is already back in her room, probably asleep already. I don’t know exactly how old she is – and I would never ask her – but she’s probably my parents’ age.
My parents. I suppose I should call them before they see this on TV. But it’s late, and to be honest, I don’t want to talk to them.
Jason sighs. As always, he’s impeccably dressed, but at least he had the decency to undo his tie.
“Hell of a night, hey?” he says.
“Yeah,” I say. “Hell of a night. Hey, why were you still dressed so late? You should have been in bed when all this started. You need to stop working so hard.”
“Drink?” he asks, ignoring my question.
I nod.
Normally I would say no, but right now, I think I need one. Jason pours a couple of fingers of Grey Goose into a pair of hotel tumblers, drops in a few cubes from the ice bucket, and hands me one. I sip greedily, savoring the burn as it goes down my throat.
A few seconds later I can already feel the fuzzy warmth in my head as Jason sits next to me and sips his own drink. Suddenly my phone starts to warble and my heart skips a beat. I grab it from my purse and look at the number: it’s Xander.
I push the ignore call button. I can’t talk to talk to him right now. Tomorrow, maybe, but not now.
“What makes a person become so fixated on someone they don’t even know?” I say, hoping to distract myself.
Plus I’m genuinely curious, and still frightened as hell. Sure, this threat is over, but who knows if there’s someone else out there with the same thoughts? I feel like maybe if I understand what was going on in that guy’s mind, it’ll make it easier.
I don’t know.
Maybe that’s crazy.
Jason shrugs. “Why was John Hinkley Jr. so obsessed with Jodie Foster that he took a shot at Ronald Reagan? Who knows what goes in a sick brain like that?”
I take another sip of booze. I sure as hell don’t know what goes on inside a sick person’s head. I don’t even know what goes on in Xander’s head, and I sleep next to him.
Slept next to him.
I can feel myself starting to nod off. The exhaustion and the booze are combining to finally bring an end to this horrible night. Jason leans closer on the sofa.
“You’re welcome to my bed,” he whispers.
“I’m fine here,” I say, bringing my legs up on the cushions. “I don’t want to put you out.”
“You wouldn’t be.”
I close my eyes and feel the tug of sleep more strongly. My mind drifts to that night in L.A., when Xander first walked back into my life. Was it really less than two weeks ago? H
ow far away it seems.
Far away. Far away…
Far away.
My heart gives a kick-drum beat and suddenly I’m wide awake again. Far away.
“What’s the matter?” Jason asks as I sit bolt upright.
“Far away,” I say.
“I don’t understand.”
“This guy, whoever he is. He looked like a bum, the way he was dressed. Thrift store clothes, unshaven, smelled like a brewery.”
Jason frowns. “Yes. So?”
I lean forward and grab hold of his shoulders. “Don’t you get it? All of the previous letters were left backstage in Los Angeles. How the hell could he have travelled all the way from L.A. to Chicago?
“Even by bus, it would have been about two hundred and fifty dollars. And I don’t know how much guns cost, but I know they’re not cheap. He looked like he couldn’t even afford shoes.”
Jason’s eyes narrow. He looks at me silently for an uncomfortably long time. As he does, another question comes to mind.
“How did he get into my suite?” I ask, more to myself than to him. Even as the words come out of my mouth, the answer begins to take shape, and it turns my stomach to ice water.
On the coffee table, my phone starts to warble again. Caller ID says Chicago Police.
Jason sits back in the sofa and tents his long fingers under his chin.
“You ask a lot of questions that you probably shouldn’t,” he says.
Chapter Thirty-Two
TINA
My heart is hammering for the umpteenth time tonight, but I try to keep it out of my voice. Jason is still staring straight ahead, refusing to look at me.
“I’m sorry, Jason,” I say meekly. “You’re right, we should probably just go to sleep.”
He turns to face me, all the warmth gone from his eyes.
“You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” he says, a cold harshness to his voice like splintered flint.
“Because the sooner I fall asleep, the sooner you can run off and climb into bed with Mr. Xander Fucking Tate.”
