Deadly Desires

by Ann Christopher

  “You’re damn right I do.”

  “A thousand apologies. What can I show you?”

  Thankfully, she’d done some research a while back.

  “A Glock,” she told him. “Isn’t that the gun that most law enforcement officials use?” Dexter Brady, who’d developed the annoying habit of sneaking into her thoughts when she least expected it, tiptoed into her brain and waved hello. Brady had a Glock, if she wasn’t mistaken, and there was something comforting about having the same model that he relied upon. “I want a Glock. Forty caliber, right? Semiautomatic?”

  Joe’s smile widened with unmistakable respect. “You didn’t tell me you were a player. I have a couple of them right here to show you. Now this one—”

  He reached for a deadly black model with sharp edges that looked as though it could kill a person who simply stared at it too hard. It said 36 on the side, but a memory was coming back to her.

  “No,” she said. “Isn’t the thirty-nine the most powerful? I want the thirty-nine.”

  “You’ve got good taste.”

  “And I’ll need magazines, bullets ... the whole deal.”

  “You got it. Will you be taking target practice?”

  He handed the pistol to her, and she took it. It was solid, but not as heavy as she’d expected. Cool. Comforting, as twisted as that sounded, because this gun, once she learned to use it properly, might just be the thing that saved her life one day.

  “Target practice? Absolutely.”

  “And did you want to apply for a permit today?”

  “Permit? Hang on. I don’t need to apply for a permit to buy the gun today—”

  “No, no—the concealed carry permit.”

  Oh, thank God. The sudden alarm loosened its hold on her, letting her breathe again. In Ohio, she already knew, you didn’t need to register or anything to buy a gun. If you woke up that morning, yawned, stretched, and decided, hmmm ... I think I’d like a forty-five to put under my pillow, you could get one that day. As long as you were eighteen or older, weren’t a felon, and had the money to pay for it, you were pretty much good.

  Strange how life worked, though. Married to a drug kingpin and she didn’t like guns. Her whole life up until now, she’d been pro-gun control and thought members of the NRA and their ilk were crazed fanatics whose stance on gun ownership was outrageous and dangerous.

  Now she thought they were freaking geniuses.

  “Yeah. Do you have the paperwork for that? Because I want to keep the gun with me all the time.”

  “No problem. How will you be paying today?”

  That brought a smile to her face. This little weapons purchase was going to cost an arm and a leg, and she wasn’t planning to tap into her meager savings to f i-nance it. No way. For this one special purchase, where there was no need for secrecy, she thought it was only appropriate that the money from Kareem’s illustrious illegal activities be used.

  So she pulled out the platinum card that he’d given her, prayed the feds hadn’t somehow suspended the account since Kareem’s arrest, and imagined, with great pleasure, the look on Kareem’s face when he reviewed the bill and saw the charges from Joe’s Gun World.

  “I think I’ll charge it,” she said.

  The shocked disbelief was like a Plexiglas shield that protected Kareem Gregory from his surroundings and the proceedings. Sitting in the same uncomfortable-ass chair at the same table, in the same wood-paneled federal courtroom, with the same lineup of lawyers and judge (Roberta Shelton) that he’d had during his trial a few days ago was like taking an all-expenses-paid, first-class trip into The Twilight Zone, and wasn’t that a bitch?

  Yesterday—and it was just yesterday, even though it felt like ten lifetimes plus a million years ago—a jury acquitted him of money-laundering charges in this very same courtroom. He’d walked out of here as a triumphant and free man, with his entire life before him, and all the trouble behind him.

  Now here he was again.

  Again.

  Once again, he was not free to go where he wanted to go or do what he wanted to do. Once again, he’d spent the night locked up, surrounded by the snores, yells, cries, and farts of other men, rather than in the luxurious comfort of his own bed. Once again, he’d trusted the wrong person and paid for it with a knife right through his heart. Which meant that, once again, he’d have to make someone pay for his or her crimes against him.

  If they let him out on bond, that was.

  It wasn’t looking too good at the moment, but his boy Jacob Radcliffe was still on his feet and still swinging, so he wouldn’t count him out just yet.

  “My client has not been accused of a violent offense,” Jacob was saying to the judge. “He’s not a danger to society—”

  “Anyone in possession of two hundred fifty kilos is a threat to society,” interjected assistant US attorney Jayne Morrison, shooting Kareem a disgusted look, as though he’d just rolled through a field of cow shit. Government bitch. “And the presumption is that Mr. Gregory should be detained until trial.”

  Jacob didn’t bother to acknowledge this interruption. “He has strong family ties in the community, because his wife and mother are here—”

  That was only partially true. There was no need to inform the judge that Kira, his precious and most beloved wife (there was that bitterness again, threatening to choke him), had left last night, heading for parts unknown. Mama was still there, though. Glancing over his shoulder, he caught her eye and gave her a tiny wink. Sitting behind him, in the gallery, she perked up at this attention and smiled back, always waiting for the slightest sign that he needed something. Good old Mama.

  “—and he’s not a flight risk. He can surrender his passport, wear an anklet for monitoring, and submit to house arrest until the trial.”

  “Your honor,” Jayne began, swelling dramatically with outrage, but the judge held up a hand, stopping her.

  “I’m inclined to agree with Mr. Radcliffe.”

  “Your honor.” Jayne wasn’t acting now, was she? She looked seriously pissed, which made Kareem’s day. “This is a complete departure from—”

  Judge Shelton kept that one hand up and scribbled something on her pad with the other, looking as though she wanted to wrap this up and get on to the important part of her day. “I’ve made my decision, Ms. Morrison. The only thing we need to talk about now is the amount.”

  “One million,” Jane said flatly.

  This time it was Jacob’s turn for the outrage. “In a case like this, your honor—”

  “One million is appropriate.” Judge Shelton finished scribbling and gave everyone in the courtroom a last sweeping glance. “Is there anything else for this morning?”

  “No, your honor,” grumbled the lawyers, both of whom looked equally unhappy at this point, but Kareem didn’t care.

  He was going home.

  After that, they did the “all rise” thing while the judge left the courtroom, and Kareem was about to pat Jacob on the back for a job well done for once, when he got an unpleasant surprise.

  “What do you want, Special Agent?” Jacob glared at someone over Kareem’s shoulder. “I need to get my client processed so he can go home. We don’t have time for any of your threats or intimidation tactics this morning, so you’ll have to find someone else to pester.”

  Turning, Kareem discovered Brady standing there, right in his face. Kareem was always happy to play a little cat and mouse with the feds, especially when he’d just won a round against them, but today was different. He hadn’t had a chance to recover from his stunning reversal of fortune just yet, for one, and there was a crazy new light in Brady’s eyes since last night, for another.

  Brady was one of those cats who were easy to read. Everything was black or white with Brady, good or evil, Luke Skywalker or Darth Vader, them or us. There was no in between. Since Brady put himself firmly in the good guy column, he did things by the book. He generally didn’t break rules and he rarely colored outside the lines.

 
; Kareem got all that about Brady.

  What he didn’t get was the way Brady was looking at him now, all complete stillness, narrowed eyes, and slow murder, as though he’d said to hell with the justice system and decided to go rogue and deal with Kareem himself. As though he’d break every rule in the book and happily spend the rest of his life in prison for the privilege of gutting Kareem and dancing barefoot through his steaming innards on the floor.

  Staring into Brady’s face, Kareem again felt the hairs on the back of his neck stand at attention. This reaction gave him the kick in the ass he needed, because being afraid of anything really pissed him off. Time to turn on the bravado.

  “What’s up, Brady?” He flashed an insolent smile, although it didn’t come as easily as it normally did. “You miss me during the night?”

  Brady didn’t answer. Didn’t blink. Didn’t seem to breathe.

  Jacob, meanwhile, was springing into action. “Jayne?” he called, pointing at Brady. “You want to come over here and call off your attack dog? We really don’t need this right now.”

  Jayne paused while packing up her briefcase, looked over, saw Brady, and rolled her eyes. “Everything okay over there, Dexter?”

  “It’s okay,” Kareem told her. “My friend Brady has something on his mind, don’t you, Brady?”

  A muscle now ticked in Brady’s jaw, adding to the whole bat-shit crazy effect. He seemed incapable of answering, which was Kareem’s cue to twist the knife a little deeper.

  “Did you hear my good news, Brady? I’m going home. It’ll be nice to sleep in my own bed again. Relax. Maybe have a little wine. Feel free to drop by and visit.”

  Something shifted in Brady’s expression. It was too dark to be humor, but it loosened him up enough to talk. “You go on home, Kareem. I figure if we give you enough rope, you’ll hang yourself one day.”

  “Brady,” Kareem chided, “you know me better than that.”

  This time Brady did smile, only it wasn’t a smile. It was a demon’s leer, or maybe an invitation to hell. It chilled Kareem’s blood. And then Brady eased closer, mouthing the words so that only Kareem could hear before he turned and left the courtroom, letting the door ease shut behind him with a gentle whoosh.

  “I think I’m going to have to kill you one day, Kareem.”

  Chapter 8

  Outside on the courthouse steps, Dexter pulled out his phone and called Kira, driven by that same primal urge that kept tightening its fingers around his neck in a choke hold.

  Warn Kira, protect Kira—especially once she left the hospital.

  Keep Kira safe.

  She answered on the third ring. “Brady?”

  “Hey. Where you at?”

  “I’m just ... ah, running some errands. When can I pick up Max?”

  “Later.”

  “Did he do okay last night?”

  What was up with her and that dog? Did they not have more pressing issues to be worried about? “Yeah. Fine. He slept on the end of my bed. Ate a bowl of Cheerios with milk for breakfast. He was sleeping like a baby when I left this morning.”

  “Cheerios?”

  “Listen. I don’t have all day for this. I just left the detention hearing. Kareem got bounced on bond.”

  Silence, for a long time. “I figured. So he’s going home?”

  “Yeah.” Brady hung his head, cowed by a nasty emotion: shame. He was ashamed of himself for not killing Kareem back there in the courtroom when he had the chance. It would have been illegal, yeah, but not immoral. More along the lines of a priest exorcising a demon. He was, further, ashamed of the federal government, of which he was a representative, for letting that monster walk free. Most of all, he was ashamed for not protecting Kira when she asked for help, and anticipating more shame, because even now, he didn’t know if he could keep her safe. “He got home confinement. Ankle bracelet. I’m ... sorry.”

  “It’s not your fault.” She sounded brisk now, downright chipper. “I don’t blame you.”

  Well, that was great because he blamed himself enough for sixty or seventy people already. “I need to get back to the office right now, but I can meet—”

  “It’s okay,” she said. “I’ll catch up with you later.”

  Now wait just one minute. There was a note in her voice that didn’t match up with breaking events as he understood them. What the hell was going on? And why was this feeling of dread swelling like a mushroom cloud inside his chest? “Where are you?”

  “I’ve got something to take care of,” she said.

  She could do this, Kira told herself.

  It was dark now, and that primal fear of monsters in the shadows did nothing to boost her bravery level, which was hovering at around zero percent. Plus, the temperature had dropped, and the cold was inside her bones, systematically converting every molecule in her body into ice cubes. Headache and trauma contributed to her lingering exhaustion, and the bottom line was that she didn’t want to do this.

  Tomorrow was another day, right? Nothing stopped her from walking that half a mile back down the road to where she’d hidden her car on a private lane. She could pick up Max, drive back to the motel, take a hot shower, and spend the rest of the night curled under the blankets in the fetal position.

  Except that that would make her a coward. She was many unpleasant things, but a coward wasn’t one of them. And she wasn’t going to put herself through this whole agonizing routine again tomorrow.

  Taking a deep breath for courage, she walked up the long drive to the Mediterranean style villa that she’d left a little less than twenty-four hours ago. The house where she’d lived as Mrs. Kareem Gregory, drug dealer’s wife. The house she’d hoped never to see again.

  Wow. The massive front door had already been replaced since overzealous DEA agents splintered it with a battering ram during the raid last night. That was Kareem for you. It would take more than a little thing like being arrested and detained to stop him from keeping his precious house in tip-top shape. Luckily for her, he’d kept the same locks, though, so that made things easy.

  Unlocking the door, she slipped inside the foyer of her beautiful prison. Only the bars, razor wire, and rifle towers were missing; God knew she’d had a warden. Back in the day, she’d foolishly thought of it as a house and treated it as such. There’d been decorators, trips to high-end furniture stores, and even several custom made pieces that’d cost an arm and a leg and several thousand dollars of Kareem’s hard-earned blood money.

  It had been her beloved sanctuary, the place where she thought nothing could touch her.

  Now she knew better.

  As usual, strategically placed lamps lit the way down the hall and into the great room, where she could hear the low murmur of voices ... male voices ... Kareem’s voice.

  Deep in the pit of her belly, that knot of fear twisted and pulsed.

  Another couple of silent steps closer, and Kareem’s cologne, the one she’d bought for him and loved, with warm, earthy notes of wood, mint, and basil, skimmed her nostrils. It was a private blend that she’d had made for him, and now it made her skin crawl with memories that he’d seared too deeply into her body for her to ever forget.

  You wanted this, Kira, didn’t you—

  No, Kareem! Stop! Please, please—

  Huh ? You like it hard, don’t you, baby? You’ve been asking for this, haven’t you?

  The fear spread to her knees, making them shake, and that pissed her off. He would not do this to her. She would not collapse to the floor in a heap. She would not go down like this.

  Pausing only long enough to take a deep breath, roll her shoulders a couple of times, and tip her head from side to side to work out some of the kinks, she strode into the room, making sure her footsteps were loud enough to startle.

  It worked. Kareem, who’d been sitting on the sofa in urgent conversation with Jacob Radcliffe, his lawyer, whipped his head around, realized it was her, and jumped to his feet as though he’d been launched from a catapult.

&
nbsp; Home incarceration did not, she knew, involve a ball and chain shackled around his legs and bolted to the floor. He probably had some sort of monitoring device attached to his ankle, which was currently hidden behind his creased and cuffed gray wool trousers. There were also no prison stripes, no guards, and no unidentifiable chow cooling on a compartmentalized metal tray.

  There was, in short, no sign that his life had changed one iota. She might have interrupted him enjoying his predinner glass of wine, and that really screwed with her head. He had raped her and she fled to a motel that probably attracted every bedbug in the area, but he got to live in his personal palace like a king? The DEA arrested and jailed him on major trafficking charges, but now he was back, wearing designer clothes and sleeping in a bed with feather pillows and sheets of the finest Egyptian cotton?

  Why wasn’t he chastened? What would it take for him to show humility? Why was it that nothing ever made so much as a dent in his armor of invincibility?

  “Kira.” The wide-eyed surprise in his expression didn’t take long to melt into smug satisfaction as he crossed over to her. “I knew you’d come back, baby. But this isn’t a good time for me.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that.” It took everything she had not to turn and run when he got too close. Instead, she held up a hand to stop him when he reached for her, enjoying the way her rejection made shadows darken his face. “But this is a good time for me. And what I have to say won’t take long.”

  He stilled. One corner of his mouth twitched, as though he was trying to work up a nonchalant smile, but it never came. “You’re not coming back?”

  “I told you. I’m never coming back.”

  That same side of his mouth moved again, this time with the hard curl of a sneer. His voice dropped, becoming rough and dangerous. “We settled that the other night. Maybe you need another lesson.”

  That was the thing, though. He had taught her a lesson. Just not the one he’d hoped. Hell, maybe she should thank him. This whole time she’d been living in fear, afraid to leave, afraid to stay, afraid of her own shadow, but now she got it: