Another thing I can’t stand: people who turn all their statements into questions.
I sip my coffee, fighting the urge to snarl. “Yes?”
She soldiers on, undaunted by my unfriendliness. “Well, now, we’re a new board, and we want to get off on the right foot—a good start, you know? I think you’ll agree that the last board was a little bit lax. Letting people leave their trash cans out on the curb for an hour longer than they should per the bylaws, things like that.”
“Okay.”
My one-word responses don’t seem to be getting through to her. “Anyhoo, I’m sorry to bother you so early in the morning, but I have to get to work, as I’m sure you do too”—another blinding smile is flashed, a we’re-all-in-this-together-aren’t-we smile—“and I’m coming by to ask you for a little favor.”
“Really? What’s that?”
“Well, now, one of the bylaws states that vehicles need to be parked inside the garage. Leaving them out on the driveways everywhere is so unsightly, don’t you agree? So if you could just start parking your car inside each night, we’d really appreciate it. Okay?” She ends with her biggest, most beaming smile yet.
I lean forward and look at my driveway. Yep, there’s my car. I lean back again and sip from my coffee, staring at Darleen, who’s waiting for a response.
I decide to be polite. This woman means no harm, I’m sure. She’s asked nicely enough, and not once did her eyes widen at the sight of the scars on my face or flick with disapproval to my state of disarray.
“Listen, Darleen. I work for the FBI. There are times when I need to leave immediately, times when, quite literally, ten or twenty seconds can make a difference. So I’m more comfortable parking my car in the driveway. I’m sure you can understand.”
She nods, smiles again. “Of course I can—and how interesting! Our very own FBI agent! But I’m afraid a bylaw is a bylaw, and you’ll have to park inside. I appreciate your cooperation, I really do.”
The smile remains, but something in the quality of it has changed. I have misjudged this woman. There’s more steel than vapor behind that smile and those eyes, along with a touch of ugly busybodyness.
Cool. I can play this game, too!
I smile at her, nice and wide. I take a sip from my cup, wink, and say, “It’s never going to happen.” Then I close the door in her face.
I walk back over to the table, where Tommy and Bonnie are laying out plates of waffles and eggs and bacon. I have a warm, happy feeling in my stomach.
“Can’t say that was well handled,” Tommy remarks.
“Maybe not. But come on. Someone’s going to try to tell me I need to park my car inside my garage?” I shake my head. “I don’t think so.”
“I happen to agree,” he says, smiling, “but I know her type. You just started a war.”
I grab a slice of bacon and bite off a piece, grinning at him. “Well, one of two things will happen in that instance. Either I’ll beat her into submission, or you’ll go and smooth things over with the HOA for me. If they’re all women, you’ll have them eating out of your hand in no time.”
“Manipulative,” Bonnie observes.
“Realistic,” I assert.
She giggles, and I follow suit. Tommy shakes his head and sighs, but I know he’s happy too. Nothing like some suburban politics to make us all feel, well, normal.
Normal’s hard for this family.
“Will Kirby be coming today?” Bonnie asks me.
Last night, we’d discussed what was going on. I’d agonized over what to tell her and had decided, in the end, on full disclosure. I thought Bonnie could handle it, and I was right. She took it in stride, asking few questions and accepting both the necessity and wisdom of a bodyguard.
“You’ll call her and tell her where to meet you,” Tommy says to me. “After you brief her, she’ll park herself near Bonnie’s school.”
“So that’s a yes, honey,” I say. “You ready for that?”
She shrugs. “Kirby’s cool. And I guess she’ll try to stay out of sight, right?”
“Do you want her to?”
She struggles with something. “I like Kirby, but … it’s hard enough fitting in at school sometimes, you know? If she can stay back a little, that’d be great.”
I kiss her on the top of her head, saddened by her struggles to assimilate, gladdened that she cares. “I’ll tell her.”
“Don’t worry,” Tommy says. “She’ll only get close if something’s happening.”
“Didn’t you say there’d be some other guy too?” she asks. I nod. “Kirby can’t watch you 24/7 by herself. Do we know who that’s going to be?” I ask Tommy.
“No. She just said she had someone good.”
“I’ll make sure she introduces him to you,” I tell Bonnie. After she introduces him to me. “Time for you to go, babe. Don’t miss your bus.”
She rolls her eyes. “I never miss my bus.” She gives me a hug, goes over and gives Tommy a hug, grabs her backpack, and heads out the door with a final “Bye!”
I stare at the door once it’s closed and I sigh. “You know the hugs are going to stop soon, right?” I ask Tommy, a little wistfully.
“Surprised they haven’t stopped already,” he says.
I scowl at his back. “Not helpful.” He says nothing, but for some reason I get the sense that he’s smiling. No one takes me seriously around here. “I’m going to take my shower,” I say, flouncing off in high color.
Some mornings it’s nice to play the princess. Almost comforting.
I’m enjoying the usual heavenly morning spray, eyes closed, when Tommy opens the shower door and appears naked next to me in the rising steam. He wraps his arms around me and hugs me to him. The contact is exquisite. The smell of apricot scrub hangs in the air.
“Do we have time?” he asks, a low rumble in my ear that makes me shiver.
I turn around, grabbing him in a way that makes him shiver too. “Does that answer your question?”
He lifts me up, something that I never fail to find incredibly sexy. He grabs my ass and hoists me off the floor. I wrap my legs around his waist and we kiss while the water runs down our faces.
“Do you think we’ll still be doing this in our sixties?” I ask him.
“As long as my back holds out,” he murmurs, covering my neck with distracting kisses.
I giggle at his answer, but that dies away soon enough. Desire and laughter are kissing cousins, but they don’t belong in the same room together.
CHAPTER TWENTY
I walk into the hospital feeling refreshed and alert. It has been quite a morning, between the director’s phone call and HOA Darleen, but coffee, hugs from my daughter, and some satisfying last-minute shower sex have lifted my spirits considerably.
Alan and Burns are waiting at reception. Alan’s chatting with Kirby, who I’d called and asked to meet me. There’s another man standing off to the side. He’s thin and bald and watchful. He’s listening to everything without participating in any of it, and something about him makes me certain that this is Kirby’s second man. He seems mild enough on the surface, but I smell “predator.”
Kirby spots me first and flashes one of those über-white beach-bunny grins. “Hey, boss woman!”
I smile as I walk up to them. “Hi, Kirby. Alan, Detective Burns.”
Kirby frowns, cocks her head, and peers at me. “Hmmmmm,” she says.
“What?”
“You have that freshly fucked look.” She sidles up next to me and bumps me with a hip. “Did someone get lucky this morning?”
I’m mortified to find that I’m blushing. For his part, Alan smiles. Burns watches it all, fascinated. “None of your beeswax. Can I talk to you outside?”
She winks. “Sure thing. Come on, Raymond,” she says to the thin, bald man. “Time to go to work.”
Raymond doesn’t respond, but I get the idea he’ll follow. “I’ll be right back,” I tell Alan and Burns.
The three of us exit thro
ugh the automatic doors. The sky above is covered in clouds. It’s a gloomy morning, though that could change by noon.
“Smoky, this is Raymond,” Kirby says, introducing us.
“Pleased to meet you,” I say, not really meaning it.
Raymond doesn’t speak, but he nods. Barely. He has green eyes. They contain a faraway look that I don’t like.
“Raymond and I did some work together down in Central America,” Kirby says. “He’s got great instincts, and I trust him.”
I don’t, but I let it go.
“Bonnie had some concerns,” I say. I tell her about our conversation at breakfast.
“Jeez,” Kirby says, somehow pouting and rolling her eyes at the same time. “You’d think having a bodyguard would be, like, a status symbol for a kid or something. But, hey, no problema. We’ll keep back unless we gotta kill someone, right, Raymond?”
Raymond nods, still wordless. I decide I’ve had enough of his menacing-silence act.
“I need to hear your voice,” I say to him. “If you’re going to guard my daughter, I need to hear your voice.”
He doesn’t reply. He glances at Kirby and raises his eyebrows.
“Uhhh … awwwkward!” Kirby says. “Raymond can’t talk, babe. Someone tried to cut his throat a few years back. He lived, but his vocal cords are screwed.”
“Oh. Shit. Sorry, Raymond,” I manage. “Now I feel like a complete idiot.”
Raymond reaches inside his jacket. He comes out with a notepad and writes something down. He hands it over to me. I read:
DON’T WORRY ABOUT IT.
Then:
IF ANYONE COMES TO HURT HER, I’LL KILL THEM. GUARANTEED.
I hand the notebook back to him. It’s a strange reassurance, this promise of murder, and disturbingly comforting. “Fair enough,” I say. What else is there to say?
“Cool stuff,” Kirby says. “You have her school address?”
I’d written it down on a sheet of paper this morning. I give it to her.
“Raymond and I will go there now. We’ll do the first day together, get the lay of the land, and then we’ll figure out the best use of our time.” She smiles, dazzling me. “Righty-right?”
“Sounds good.”
“Right on!” she cries, lifting both hands, fingers configured in the universal horns salute of rock-and-roll lovers everywhere. They walk away like a spiritual Mutt and Jeff: the assassin who can’t talk and the one who talks too much. I watch them leave and then head back into the hospital. I reunite with Alan and Burns.
“Interesting crowd you hang with,” Burns observes. “Girl scared me, but at least she’s cute. The undertaker-looking guy just gave me the creepy-crawlies.”
“Me too,” I admit.
Hopefully the bad guys will feel the same.
Heather Hollister’s eye movements have slowed. They no longer dance over everything like a crack-addled ballerina, now they simply stare. She is lying on her back, arms folded over her stomach, staring at the white hospital ceiling. Her mouth is closed. Only the rise and fall of her chest and the occasional blink let us know she’s alive.
Burns stands just inside the room, staring at her. His mouth has fallen open, and his eyes are filled with a heartbreaking blend of raw hurt and exhausted spirit. I imagine he is seeing her at twelve, staring up at him with solemn eyes, telling him to catch the man who killed her daddy. It was a promise he’d been unable to keep, and things have gotten far, far worse.
He moves toward her bed. He finds a chair, and sits down next to her. His movements belong on a much older man. He reaches over and takes one of her hands in his. Alan and I stand back, watching, feeling like intruders at a funeral.
“Heather, honey, it’s Daryl Burns.” He squeezes her hand. “Can you hear me?”
I imagine the faintest twitch of her eye.
Burns sighs. “I guess I really let you down, honey. I’m sorry about that. One thing I can tell you, though, is we got that snake that called himself your husband. Douglas was up to his ears in this.”
This time I’m certain; I see the faintest tremor in the placid lake Heather’s become. Burns senses it as well. He cranes forward.
“You can hear me, can’t you? Come on, Heather. I know you’ve been through enough, God knows it’s more than anyone could handle, but you can’t stay locked away like this. We need you to help us get the man who did this to you.” He’s squeezing her hand, stroking it, and he looks more like a father to me than ever. “We need to get the bastard who cut off your beautiful hair, honey. Remember how you told me you had your dad’s hair?” His voice cracks. I think that Burns is an old-school man, raised in the tradition of hiding your tears, but he doesn’t even bother with an embarrassed glance back at us. He’s too humbled by his own pain to care.
The tremor passes over her now without stopping, like a pile of windblown leaves dancing in circles, aimless but vital and sometimes even beautiful. It’s a sign of life, however distorted, and Burns seizes on it as we watch.
“Heather? That’s it, honey. Come on back. I’m right here. It’s safe.”
She blinks a few times, then faster. Her cheek twitches. She turns to look at Burns, and it’s the motion of a skeleton turning on its own bones, like a creaky door. She opens her mouth and she laughs, a high, horrible cackle. It sends shivers down my spine. If birds were around to hear it, they’d fly off in terror.
“Saaaaafe …?” she croaks. Then the laughter again, but tears follow as well, cascading down her cheeks. Her face glitters in its pain, contorted by laughter that’s really just another form of screaming.
Burns gapes at it all, taken aback. He seems at a loss for what to do. He recovers quickly. His face sets into grim lines, but it’s contrived, a man pulling on a mask.
“Knock that shit off right now, Officer Hollister!” he barks. “Wherever you were, you’re not there now, and we need your help to catch the man who did this to you. Pull yourself together!”
It achieves the desired effect. The awful laughing stops. The tears roll on, staining the white bedsheets with water fingerprints. “D-Daryl …” she chokes. “I’m so so so fucked up. I’m sososososososo fucked up.” She grips his wrists with clutching, desperate hands. “Can you help me? I can’t get out of my head. Can you help me? Please?”
His true face again, a gelid, flash-frozen grimace of sorrow. He gets up onto the bed and gathers Heather into his arms. She writhes against him, alternately boneless and spastic.
Heather’s moans of despair draw the nurse into the room. She turns white at the quality of the shrieks and leaves. I guess she’s more comfortable with physical pain than spiritual.
Alan and I say nothing. We wait, watching without watching, a trick of respectful distance you learn after the third or fourth or fifth time you deliver the news of death to a loved one in their own home. They collapse into the reality and you become an intruder. You can’t leave, so you become a ghost instead. It’s a terrible talent.
Heather’s moans die down after a while. Burns continues to hold her as she quiets, patient with the gusts of grief that whip back up without warning. These become less and less frequent, turning into tremors, which crumble into sighs and, finally, silence.
We wait out the silence too. Comfort comes best in silence, in that wordless closeness only another human being can provide.
Eventually she lies back, and Burns takes his seat in the chair again.
“Better?” he asks.
She nods, then shrugs, then scratches her arm and her head. She’s a mess of constant motion. “I guess. Yes. Maybe. I don’t know.”
“Well, you’re talking again. That’s a start. Are you ready to talk about what happened?”
Her eyes widen. “I think so,” she says. Her right cheek twitches three times. “I’m scared, Daryl. Maybe it will help, though. I don’t know. I guess so.”
Listening to her reminds me of a conversation with a methamphetamine addict, except that Heather has been overdosed on terror
. Her fight-or-flight mechanism is set in the “on” position, and the switch is out of reach.
I know all about this feeling. About its constancy. After my rape, when I got home from the hospital, I couldn’t sleep for a week. It wasn’t just the pain of losing Matt and Alexa, I was also terrified. Every creak or wind moan got my heart racing. Adrenaline would spike through me at the sound of a car alarm. I wanted to crawl out of my own skin because it was on fire, but of course I couldn’t, I could only scream inside the burning house of me.
I walk forward, putting a hand on Burns’s shoulder. I make sure to face Heather, so she can see my scars.
“Hi, Heather. I’m Special Agent Smoky Barrett, with the FBI.”
Her eyes jitter over me, widening a little as they grope past the scars.
“What happened to you?” she asks. There’s a desperateness to the question that I understand: Tell me something worse than what happened to me. Please.
“A serial killer broke into my house. He raped me and tortured me with a knife. He tortured and murdered my husband and daughter in front of me.”
I don’t know if it’s worse than what she experienced or not. I don’t think you can qualify mental agony that way.
“What happened to the guy who did it?” A different kind of wanting laces her tone now.
“I shot him dead.”
She hoots in laughter. “Good!” She licks her lips and repeats this in a firmer voice. “Good.” Her eyes widen again. “Avery. Dylan. What about my boys? Can I see them?”
“We’ll deal with Avery and Dylan soon, I promise,” I answer, keeping my voice soothing, feeling traitorous and awful. “First, if you’re up for it, I’d like to talk about what happened to you, and especially anything you can tell us about the man who did it to you. Do you think you can do that?”
The twitching again, one, two, three. “I think so. Yes, I can do it. Where do you want me to start?” She scratches her skull a little too hard, leaving a livid red mark.
“How about the night you were abducted? What do you remember about that?”
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