Black Widow

by Breton, Laurie

  She strode to the front door, undid the locks, and flung it open. Barefoot, she marched across the grass and stopped at his open window. “What the hell are you doing?” she said.

  He just looked at her. “I wish to Christ I knew,” he said.

  She folded her arms over her breasts. “A civilized person would come to the door.”

  “Nobody ever accused me of being civilized.”

  “Well? Are you coming in or not? Because I’m going back inside, and I’m locking that door behind me. And once it’s locked, nobody gets in. Not you, not Jesus Christ Almighty. So it’s up to you.”

  Without another word, she turned and marched back across the grass.

  Behind her, the Blazer’s door screeked open. She stomped up onto the porch and into the house, past Elvis, who stood with ears pricked, his watchful gaze following DiSalvo’s approach. Kathryn picked up her glass of iced tea and took a long, slow swallow, then set it down and leaned against the kitchen counter with her arms crossed.

  “Hey, dog. How goes the battle?”

  Elvis sniffed DiSalvo’s outstretched hand and wiggled his rump. Nick stood fiddling with the lock on the door while she tapped a foot in impatience. “You have precisely five minutes,” she said, “to tell me why you’re here. And then I’m booting your ass out the door.”

  He looked at her with those melted-chocolate eyes. “You’re a hard woman, Kathryn McAllister. Did prison do that to you?”

  “Five minutes, DiSalvo. You’re wasting time.”

  He moved slowly toward her, so slowly that her heart rate, already too rapid, doubled. He stopped a half-inch away from her, so close his body heat tangled with hers and battled for supremacy. She tried to back away, but the counter held her fast. With his gaze locked on hers, he picked up her glass of iced tea and downed it in a single long draught. She watched in fascination as his Adam’s apple moved up and down. He set down the empty glass and rested his hands on the counter, one on either side of her. “I came here tonight,” he said, “to find out just what it is that’s going on between us.”

  She wet her lips. “Nothing,” she said. “Nothing’s going on between us.”

  “The hell it isn’t! Because of you, I’ve been running around for the last ten days with my head up my ass. Before you showed up, my life was simple. Uncomplicated. Boring as hell. And I liked it that way!”

  “Sounds like a personal problem to me.”

  He towered over her, so close she could feel him, could taste him, was inhaling him with every breath. “It’s damn personal,” he said.

  She thrust her chin forward. “Are you trying to intimidate me, DiSalvo?”

  Impossible as it seemed, he moved closer. “Yeah,” he said. “I am.”

  “It’s working,” she said, wondering if that was really a tremble she heard in her own voice.

  “I don’t want you,” he said, leaning over her, forcing her to bend backward over the sink. “Do you hear me?”

  “I hear you. But maybe we should record it. For posterity.”

  “You’re nothing but trouble, do you understand? You’re a goddamn pain in the ass, and I don’t want you!”

  She had a microsecond to wonder how long she’d been clinging with both fists to his cotton shirt before his mouth came down on hers and she disintegrated. Heat, raging, roaring, sucked all the oxygen from her lungs. Her hands twisted and tangled involuntarily, destroying the material of his shirt as his kiss destroyed her, their tongues fighting a sinuous and glorious battle at the molten center of the universe. She’d waited ten days for him, a lifetime, and now she wanted all of him. She tugged at the shirt, yanked it free from his belt, sought the hot, damp flesh beneath. His stomach was rock-hard, his chest a forest of crisp hair that she explored with frantic and curious fingers.

  His mouth left hers, and she gasped for air. Hands tangled in her hair, he tugged her head back, baring her neck to him, and ran his tongue down the long column of flesh to the vee of her robe. “Nick,” she gasped as he continued along the curve of one breast. Her fingers fumbled clumsily with his belt buckle. She found the thick swelling beneath his zipper and stroked it. He groaned and drove his hips hard against hers. Trembling, she arched against him, cradled him, her hips restless in their desire to find that remembered rhythm.

  And his pager went off.

  They both froze. He raised his head to look at her, and his eyes were wild. Cursing violently, he released her to turn off the incessant shrilling of the pager. Running a hand through his hair, he picked up the telephone and viciously punched in a series of numbers. “DiSalvo,” he barked.

  Her stomach was still somewhere in the vicinity of her tonsils, her body aflame, her breath coming in hard, racking gasps. “What?” he said. Then, “Jesus Christ al-fucking-mighty.”

  It was amazing to watch, his instantaneous transformation from man to cop. He began frantically checking his pockets for a pen and paper. She produced one from the kitchen drawer and he took it without speaking and began writing. “Yeah. Uh huh. Where? Yeah. Have you called the coroner yet? Good. Give me fifteen minutes. I have to make a couple of calls first.”

  He hung up the phone. With his back to her, he unzipped his pants, tucked in his shirt, and zipped them back up. Buckled the belt she’d unbuckled just moments earlier. “Nick?” she said.

  When he turned back around, his face was blank, emotionless, professional. The face of a stranger. “Two kids out coon hunting just found Wanita Crumley’s body in a cornfield,” he said. “Somebody put a bullet in the back of her head.”

  The cold was like being dunked into a vat of ice water. She began trembling violently. “Oh, God,” she said. ‘Oh god oh god oh god.”

  He grasped her by both arms and shook her. “Stop it!” he said. “Don’t you dare to go to pieces on me now!”

  “It’s my fault!” she said. “It’s because of me. She called me yesterday and said she had some information for me about Michael’s murder. We were supposed to meet tonight out at the lake. She never showed up. Christ, DiSalvo, somebody killed her because of me!”

  He closed both eyes. “When are you going to listen to me?” he said violently. “You have to stop playing detective! That’s my job!”

  “She had little kids, Nick.”

  “She was a stupid woman who got mixed up in something she had no business being mixed up in, and she paid for it with her life.” His voice softened. “It’s not your fault.”

  Kathryn closed her eyes and sighed. “I know,” she said softly.

  He brushed the back of his knuckles against her cheek. “You okay?”

  “I’ve been better.”

  He drew her into his arms, and she lay her head against his chest. Still holding her, he dialed the phone. “Caroline,” he said, “it’s Nick. Look, I have an emergency. I don’t know how long I’ll be. It could be all night. Do you think you could go downstairs and stay with Janine? Thanks, kid, you’re a peach.”

  He broke the connection and dialed again. She clung to him, soothed by the steady beating of his heart. “Hi, sweetheart,” he said, “it’s Daddy. I just got an emergency call. I don’t know when I’ll be able to get home, so I called Caroline and asked her to come down and stay with you tonight. I’m really sorry. Yeah. Yeah, I love you, too, baby.”

  He hung up the phone, released her, and began moving toward the door. “You’re to lock your doors,” he said, digging in his pocket for his car keys, “and keep ‘em locked. Do you understand?”

  “Yes.”

  Still moving, still not looking at her, he said, “You don’t open the damn door for anybody but me. I don’t care if it’s your freaking grandmother. Only me. Understand?”

  “Only you,” she said.

  He paused, hand on the doorknob, to look at her. “You see anything suspicious, I’m talking a goddamn squirrel running across your lawn, you call and have me paged.”

  She nodded silently. He opened the door and stepped through it. “Nick,” she said.

/>   He paused, looked back at her. “Be careful,” she said.

  He came back through the door, swept her into his arms, and kissed her hard and long. “I’ll come back,” he said, “afterward. If that’s what you want.”

  Her fingers tightened on his shirt sleeve. “Yes,” she said. “Come back.”

  He kissed her again, gently this time. “Lock the door behind me,” he said.

  And he was gone.

  Both of Elba’s police cruisers were at the scene, as well as the county ambulance and the coroner’s private vehicle, all of them with lights flashing. He pulled up behind the coroner, left his blue dash light running, and climbed out of his vehicle.

  He passed a group of wide-eyed gawkers, nodded to a couple of pasty-faced teenage boys accompanied by a brace of hunting dogs that were surprisingly silent. He stepped over the crime scene tape that Bucky had put up and edged closer to where the county coroner, David Ellsworth, still in his flannel pajamas and robe, was hunched over the body. “Doc,” he said.

  “DiSalvo,” Ellsworth acknowledged.

  Nick looked up at the sky. Above his head, the Milky Way was clearly visible. “Nice night for a murder,” he said pleasantly.

  “I was all settled down in my easy chair,” Ellsworth said, “getting ready to watch Casablanca on one of those fancy satellite stations. They don’t make movies like that anymore.”

  “Nope.” Nick knelt in the red Carolina soil and examined the body. Wanita was lying on her face, her hands tied behind her back, a single neat little hole drilled in the back of her head. “Thirty-eight,” he said, and Ellsworth grunted. “Hands tied together behind her back,” he observed, more to himself than to anyone else. “Single bullet wound to the back of the head. Execution style. Somebody wanted to teach her a lesson.”

  “That would be my guess.”

  “Any estimate yet on the time of death?”

  “Two, three hours, tops. Probably closer to three. Rigor mortis is already advancing quite nicely.”

  “Not much blood.”

  “Mmn. My guess is he did her somewhere else, then dumped her here.”

  “He?”

  Doc Ellsworth smiled. “Wanita’s no lightweight. It would take a strong man to heft her all the way out here and dump her in the middle of this cornfield.”

  “Official cause of death?”

  “We’ll save that for the autopsy. Preliminary cause of death, single bullet wound to the head, most likely a .38 caliber. Now can I go home?”

  “Thanks, Doc.” Nick patted the older man on the shoulder and went in search of Bucky.

  He found him stringing out more yellow crime scene tape. “Anything?” he asked his second-in-command. “Tire tracks, footprints, a piece of fucking lint someplace it doesn’t belong?”

  “We got a couple of good footprints, but they’ll most likely match up to the boots the kids are wearing. They were all over the crime scene. And the dogs, too.”

  “Peachy.” He looked past Bucky to where Officer Earl Martin was being reamed out by an older gentleman in faded jeans and a torn tee shirt. “Who’s the old guy giving Earl the business?”

  “That’s Wilford Austin, sir. He wants to know when we’ll be done tramplin’ his corn all to hell.”

  “Did you get a statement from him?”

  Bucky grinned. “I do believe that’s what Earl is attempting, even as we speak.”

  “What about the kids?”

  “This just might turn out to be their last coon huntin’ experience, Chief. Looks like they might’ve lost their taste for it.”

  “Where’s the photog?”

  “Drew Logan usually does it, but he’s gone to Talladega, to a family reunion, so Eddie Sheldon from the Gazette’s comin’ over, soon’s he can get his film loaded.”

  Nick ran both hands over his face. “Christ,” he said, “is there anybody around here who doesn’t do two or three different jobs?”

  “Small town, Chief. A man’s gotta eat. You might want to talk to the kids, sir. They’re lookin’ like they’d rather be somewhere else.”

  He spent fifteen minutes with Freddie Floyd and Billy Jo Wright, asking them to repeat again the stories they’d already told four or five times. “This is the last time,” he promised. “Then you can go home.”

  So they ran through their disjointed story again, both of them obviously repelled by the details but nevertheless excited by their status. Finding a dead body, especially one that had been recently murdered, was a rare event indeed in a town the size of Elba. People would be tossing their names about for the next twenty years, remembering them as those two boys that stumbled over Wanita Crumley’s body.

  “I lost my supper,” Freddie Floyd admitted. “I ain’t never seen no dead person before.”

  Nick patted the boy’s slender shoulders. “It’s normal. Nothing to be ashamed of. My first time, I tossed my cookies all over the sidewalk.”

  “Chief,” Bucky said, as the boys and their dogs headed for home, “we found this in her pocket. Looks like she was supposed to meet somebody. There’s a phone number. Think it might mean something?”

  Sixteen years as a cop had perfected his poker face. On the slip of paper Bucky held between gloved hands, next to Kathryn’s phone number, somebody had scribbled, Lake Alberta, 8:00 Friday.

  For the long moment in which he studied it, his entire past as a good cop passed in front of his eyes. One tiny slip of paper. One very tiny slip of paper that could easily disappear. And who would know the difference?

  Nick closed his eyes. Took a deep breath. “Bag it,” he said.

  Chapter Eight

  She was napping, but she awakened instantly when Nick pulled into the driveway with just his parking lights on. She glanced at her bedside clock and saw that it was nearly 2:30 in the morning. He shut off the Blazer and squawked open his door, and she hastily pulled on her robe and went downstairs to let him in.

  Even in the darkness, she could see the exhaustion on his face. He locked the door behind him and without speaking, she stepped into his arms.

  Warm. He felt so warm. They stood intertwined, heat melding with heat, bodies swaying gently in rhythm with their breathing. Nick buried his face in her hair and murmured, “You smell good.”

  He skimmed his mouth down her cheek, her jaw, the length of her neck, his hot breath raising goosebumps on sensitive flesh. She knotted her fists in his hair and let her head fall back in limp acquiescence as he loosened the belt to her robe and peeled it back. He sank gentle teeth into her shoulder, and white-hot desire shot through her. “Nick,” she said hoarsely. “Oh, Christ, Nick.”

  And the robe dropped to the floor.

  Tomorrow, she might regret this, but tonight there was no regret, no coherent thought at all, only sensation, only the touch, the taste, the scent of this man she’d been waiting to touch since the day she first walked into his office. There was a wildness in him that called to a corresponding wildness in her, a wildness she’d never known existed before today. As his mouth worried the soft flesh of her shoulder, she unbuttoned his shirt and tugged it free of his belt. He shrugged out of it, and it fell to the floor. Beneath it he was sleek and hard and muscled, exquisitely male. She inhaled his scent, tasted the tang of salt on his skin, knowing she’d never wanted anything in her life as much as she wanted Nick DiSalvo.

  “I didn’t intend to do this,” he said harshly. “I kept telling myself I had to stay away from you. But I couldn’t.” He ran his tongue down the swell of her breast, took the hard little peak into his mouth, and exquisite pleasure tore through her as his tongue circled and teased. Just when she was certain she would implode, he changed tactics, working his way back upward, toward her mouth. Hoarsely, he said, “I’m not an easy man, Kathryn.”

  Her heart thundered in her chest. Trembling violently, she said, “And I’m a hard woman.”

  “You can say that again.” He ran a hand down her back, slipped a single finger between her buttocks, advanced it until he rea
ched the hot, wet center of her. When he slipped it inside her, she nearly detonated. Near her ear, he rasped, “I’ve wanted you naked like this, McAllister, since the first day you walked into my office.”

  Her body no longer belonged to her. He had total control as she moved involuntarily against his hand. “DiSalvo,” she whispered. “Oh, God, Nick, don’t make me wait.”

  His kiss was savage, his tongue sleek against hers, sending shudders to the very pit of her stomach. With his free hand, he fumbled with his belt buckle. Still riding the glorious pleasure of that finger sliding in and out of her, she helped him, loosening his belt and shoving his clothing aside. Then he was free and she took him, thick and heavy and pendulous, in her hands.

  “Kat,” he said raggedly. “Jesus, Kat, it seems like I’ve been waiting forever for you to touch me like this.”

  This time, the kiss they shared was gentle, delicate. A surge of tenderness swelled inside her, frightening in its intensity, confusing in its significance. After four years in prison, tenderness wasn’t something she’d thought herself capable of. She could accept herself as a sexual creature, wanting, desiring, even needing. But caring for Nick DiSalvo was something else entirely.

  He knelt on the floor and hastily arranged her robe beneath him. Rocking back on his heels, he held out his hand. “Come here, Kat,” he said. “Come to me, baby.”

  Kathryn looked into those melted-chocolate eyes and forgot all uncertainty. Hooking both arms around his neck, she wrapped her legs around him, and his fingertips dug into her buttocks as he lowered her to his lap and drove that hot hardness up inside her.

  She cried out, locked her thighs around his waist, and rode him. He whispered hoarse and muffled words into her ear, but she couldn’t answer him, couldn’t draw in enough oxygen to speak. She clung to him, her face buried in his shoulder, lost in the white-hot heat that fused them together, gasping with each thrust of that rock-hard body. “Hang on,” he rasped, and took her to the floor beneath him.

  He was heavy on top of her, heavy and wet and shuddering and thoroughly, unequivocally male. She twined her fists in his hair and kissed him as they rocked together, both of them shuddering, both uttering harsh, breathy sounds of pleasure. Gasping to fill her overheated lungs with oxygen, she rolled and tumbled with him across the floor, slamming into an end table and sending it skidding across polished hardwood.