Longsford just shrugged. “I owe this man, after his many attempts to interfere with my life.”
“I don’t think he gave a damn about your life,” Karin said. She let Dave settle back into place and as clichéd as it was, put his head on her knees rather than see it rest on the hard, dirty floor. The immediate warmth of his blood soaked her jeans; her fingers, as she withdrew them, gleamed wetly. She wiped them on her jacket and glared up at Longsford. “If you hit him hard enough to kill him, the authorities won’t ever leave you alone. His brother Owen won’t leave you alone. But you probably don’t know about Owen, do you? Runs an international investigative agency? Plays with all the big boys? The feebs might be limited to pursuing you in the States, but Owen will find you wherever you go.”
Longsford appeared unimpressed. “I believe we were discussing your identity.”
Karin stared down at Dave’s golden hair, now smeared with clotty blood. She trailed her fingers down his cheek, and his eyes finally fluttered open. They weren’t anywhere near focused, and whatever he’d intended to say came out in an unintelligible grunt. “It’s okay,” she told him, though she could see he knew it wasn’t even close. She told Longsford, “Ellen was my sister. She died a year ago and I’ve been living in her name. And you can blame yourself for all this. If you hadn’t sent your errand boys down to fetch me no matter what, I’d have shrugged off Dave’s visit. But instead…” She paused, looked down to find Dave listening, struggling but understanding. He’d hear everything she had to say, as long as he didn’t pass out again. She said it anyway. “Instead, you intrigued me, and I came with him.”
The slightest of frowns etched Dave’s forehead. “Karin—”
“You should have known better,” she told him, and leaned over to plant a gentle kiss on unresponsive lips. “You really should have.”
Longsford drank it in, a control-freak alert to games of power. “You’re Karin,” he said. “You’re the sister who stayed behind with Daddy Gregg.”
“Not anymore. Dave thinks I came with him to help corner you—and in a way I did. But only because I think we can be of benefit to one another.” Okay, so it wouldn’t hold up under scrutiny. She was only buying time here. A little room to maneuver.
“Karin—” Dave again, and this time he made the effort to get up; she easily kept him down, just a hand on his chest. Still, she felt the tension in his body. Knew that he wanted to roll over, to claw his way to his feet and change everything he saw and heard.
Of course, he’d fall flat on his face if he tried.
Longsford snorted, but only to hide a sudden gleam of fascination, one that made Karin go cold and sick inside. She’d just pushed his buttons…she’d turned herself into an enigma. Into a challenge.
Into something worth controlling.
“Look,” she said bluntly. “I came for the boy so I could get your attention. Really get your attention. I’ve done that, don’t you think? And what you need to know now is that we’re both killers. You and I.”
He laughed outright. “You couldn’t even pull the trigger on that gun.”
She scowled. “It’s not my gun.” Where was the damned thing, anyway? She spotted it, finally, under the wooden stairs. Well out of her reach. “Lady scammers don’t use guns, Longsford. We’re better than that. When I killed that old couple, I did it with gas. Uncoupled their gas dryer when they thought I was in the bathroom, left a pretty scented candle burning as a gift. They just got too curious about exactly when their investments would find a return.”
“And mine?” Longsford asked, taking the news about the elderly couple in stride. “Would it ever have found a return?”
Karin shrugged. “That’s something you might learn if you decide to take me on. It was meant to bring me to your attention, and it did.”
“Take you on.” Longsford’s eyes suddenly looked flat and mean again.
“You put me in charge of your investments and I’ll make you more money than you ever dreamed. We’ve already got each other’s fail-safe, don’t we? You have your secrets, I have mine. It makes this a no-risk situation.”
“There’s the money,” he pointed out.
She grinned, all cocky confidence and ignoring the buildup of bruises and battering and the throbbing shriek of her wrist. “No risk there. Not if it’s in my hands. I don’t lose money—I make and take it.”
He snorted.
But he was intrigued. She’d seen the quick gleam of interest at the challenge of keeping her close by and under control. The thrill of doing it. The ability to thumb his nose at his mother…and all the while continue his own personal hobby.
Not that Karin had any illusions about the ultimate outcome. He’d play the game for a short while, just as he did with the boys. And when he failed to find that perfect, ultimate control, he’d kill her.
Supposing she gave him the chance.
Longsford nodded. “All right. Maybe we have a thing or two in common after all.” He looked up at the guy in the doorway. “All clear?”
“Yes, sir,” the errand boy said smartly.
“Fine. Kill Hunter, bring the boy, and we’ll go.”
“Uh-uh,” Karin told him. “He’s got nothing. He’s not going to remember this, he won’t have the boy or any evidence, and the feebs have already told him to take a hike. Just dump him somewhere. He’s already lost, Longsford. He’s not in your league.”
“And you are?” Amusement colored Longsford’s tone. His eyes had never looked more closely set.
Karin laughed. “You’ll have to find out, won’t you?” And she didn’t look down. She didn’t look to where Dave’s dazed expression broke through with hurt and betrayal, those piercing blue eyes still unable to focus but somehow perfectly able to convey his feelings.
He said, “God, Karin. This is what it was about? This?”
“You were the one who brought a wrecking ball through my life,” she told him, but she turned her face away from Longsford to hide the sudden shimmer of tears in her eyes. “I’m just doing what I have to. Always have, always will.”
This was a day in which he already believed she’d killed two old people. And if he believed that, it couldn’t be such a leap to believe she’d been using him all along.
All of it.
It wasn’t, she whispered silently to him. Don’t you even think it.
But Dave, concussed and bleeding and shocky, was in no shape to hear it.
She bent over him again, offering up a goodbye kiss. Even with his stubborn unresponsiveness, she imbued their contact with silent intent—lingering, persistent, adding a gentle touch of her tongue to his bottom lip. Trust me. Just this once. Trust me utterly. Until finally—finally—he kissed her back. Just a hint of response, still not quite believing her but at least aware something had gone unspoken. She drew back and rested her bloody finger on his lower lip, giving no sign she saw the new clarity in his gaze, not with Longsford’s eyes riveted upon the scene she created. “Fun while it lasted.”
“Take what you can get,” he said, his voice rough. But he was no longer merely a barely conscious body under her hand. Not vibrant, not unhurt…but not a limp rag doll, either. She chanced the very smallest lift of her chin, knowing it would tell him nothing but hoping to confirm the presence of those things unspoken.
Because she had no intention of going anywhere with the subhuman son of a bitch Longsford.
She removed Dave’s head from her lap, wincing when he set his mouth against pain. “You’ll be okay,” she said, as if she could feel so casual about his fate, and she tried to catch his gaze again but found he wasn’t focusing any longer.
But Longsford shifted impatiently, and something crashed beyond the freezers as the search for Atilio continued. No more time to send silent messages to a barely conscious man who wasn’t even certain of their alliance.
Now it starts. She made a show of wiping her hands free of Dave’s blood, and in the process pulled her jacket cuff over her good hand to protect i
t as she palmed glass onto the heavily cracked cast. Swift, decisive, no lingering. She stood, shook her shoulders out, and joined Longsford with a matter-of-fact demeanor, cocking her head to say your ball game…now what?
Interruption, that’s what. The errand boy came around the freezer and said with irritation, “There’s no sign of him.”
Longsford sent Karin a swift glare of impatience…possibly even disappointment. “I thought we were through playing games. Where is he?”
Karin applied a contemplative expression. “We-ell,” she said, drawing out the word until she gave a decisive shake of her head. She let him wait a moment longer, and said, “Nope. You can’t have him.”
His surprise was beauteous. It left him open to her attack, and she held nothing back as she shoved her handful of glass shards and splinters into his face, grinding her cast against his skin and crying out from the pain of her wrist, pushing until her hand skidded up over his eye and brow and then she wasn’t the only one bellowing.
Longsford’s hands clapped to his face as he whirled away from her, and Karin didn’t linger, didn’t cradle her wrist to her chest or bend over it to curse her own pain. She dove for the stairs, reaching between the plain wooden steps to snag her gun—Dave’s gun—already knowing she’d have to choose between Diffie above her in the doorway and the guy at the freezer. Both were armed; neither would hesitate to shoot. Stretching, she fumbled her grip on the pistol, tugged it out by a fingerhold and scrambled for the wall beside the stairs to make herself an awkward target for Diffie. Damn fool woman. What made you think you could handle a gun?
Braced against the wall, she flinched at the impact of a bullet into the drywall beside her head. But she took a breath, held the Ruger out and sighted it as though it were a rifle, and reminded herself about that long trigger pull. Something plucked at her sleeve; she ignored that, too. She aimed low and took the shot.
The Ruger discharged with a strange double explosion, and her target flinched. The gun rose with the kickback and the second time she pulled the trigger, the sights rested on the man’s breastbone.
The second time she pulled the trigger, the man went down.
She whirled to take aim at the doorway, but only in time for her target to tumble down beside her, yet another body taking a fall on those stairs. A startled glance showed her Dave propped on his side and already sagging, eyes rolling back in his head. She leaped for him, catching him before he could clonk his head on that concrete. “Some guys are so predictable,” she told him tenderly, but there was none of it on her face as she looked up at Longsford. She cradled Dave to her with her forearm while holding her gun steady. “Changed my mind, Longsford,” she said, her voice loud enough to reach him over the sound of his own unending stream of curses. “Price was too high.”
One hand still pressed to his bleeding face, Longsford finally groped for his own gun. Only belatedly did he realize she had him covered, and even then he hesitated, hand still halfway to his weapon.
“Nope. Sorry. You lose,” she told him. “And let me tell you…you’re just gonna love prison. Total loss of control.” The guards would control every tiny little part of his life, and he would control…
Nothing.
Not even himself.
Most especially not himself.
She watched the realization cross his face. She watched as he took the full impact of the press, the courts…all before he even got to prison. He looked at her with his one working eye and he said, just as coldly as ever, “You’re wrong. I can control it all.”
She’d never seen that look before, but she knew it. Utterly calm, totally defiant…and totally in control. Ready to win by losing.
She knew, even as he snatched for the gun at his side, what he intended. But she couldn’t take the chance he wouldn’t change his mind—and change his aim. She pulled the trigger on a body shot even as he jammed the barrel of his little semiautomatic against his chin and blew off the top of his head.
The building stayed silent for a long moment, or maybe it was just the ringing of Karin’s head, providing silence for her. She lowered the gun, then deliberately set it down on the floor. No one else moved. Longsford, most certainly dead…the two errand boys not likely to survive. Dave, pale and sweaty and his eyelids fluttering as he tried and failed to pull himself out of unconsciousness. Damned hard blow he’d taken, and she needed to get him help. She patted her jacket, hunting the cell phone, and discovered she’d ground a good deal of glass into her hand at the edge of the cast. “Crap,” she muttered, but she found the phone and pulled it free. The call to 911 was short and sweet, and she ignored the operator’s request that she stay on the line. She folded the phone up and tucked it into Dave’s front jeans pocket, hooking a finger into his car keys while she was at it.
By then Atilio had crept out from hiding, and she gestured him over. She hated to leave him…but then, she hated to leave Dave, too.
It wasn’t like she could stay. If she hadn’t been a killer before, she could quite rightly carry that label now. She sat Atilio beside Dave and folded the kid’s small hand over Dave’s fingers. “Ayuda viene,” she told him. “Espera.” And then, a little frantic, “Don’t tell anyone I was here!”
She bent to kiss Dave again, willing him to remember the imprint of her lips.
And then she ran.
Karin took the Maxima. She hit a drugstore in the Freddie end of the city and picked up tweezers, a magnifying glass, a wrist brace, ibuprofen and first-aid supplies. Back at the hotel she cleaned herself up, popped four ibu, took a wistful sniff of Dave’s Cardhu flask and gingerly lowered herself onto the bed to ponder her totally questionable future.
She fell asleep.
When she woke, she drove to the shore in early-evening darkness and pulled out the phone Dave had left in the Maxima. She’d turned it off as soon as she found it, figuring it would be the latest thing…figuring it would have a GPS. Its directory put her straight through to Owen Hunter, who answered the phone with startling directness. “This must be Ellen.”
It gave Karin a pretty clear picture of just how much Dave hadn’t told his brother. “More or less,” she said, tired of games, not ready for explanations. “How’s Dave?”
“Why don’t you come and see?” Owen’s voice had a dark edge to it.
She caught the implications immediately. The invitation to come forward, the threat of it—and the fact that he was here with Dave. “You came,” she breathed. “God, is he okay?”
“I’ve got a lot of questions.”
Karin took a deep breath, biting her lip on hasty words. She managed to say evenly, “Dave never mentioned that you were a cruel man.”
Owen gave a short laugh. No humor there at all. “Hairline-skull fracture. His CAT scan was normal, but his neuro exam isn’t and he sure as hell isn’t all there. He’ll be hospitalized for a few days at best.”
Karin found she wasn’t breathing; she struggled with herself. When she finally drew air it was in a hiccup of a gasp, and she moved the phone away from her mouth, tucking it against her neck. That’s not fair. It’s not right. He was only ever trying to do his best to save those kids. She heard Owen’s voice only vaguely, but knew he wouldn’t wait forever. She held the phone up and said, “I’ll call back tomorrow.”
And the next day, and the next day. However long it took.
Chapter 20
Owen drove his all-too-sensible rented sedan down the dead-end street to the safe house, letting Dave sit in grateful silence. Owen had finally acknowledged that Dave wouldn’t discuss Karin’s role in the Longsford case. Not the newly gathered evidence; not the man’s death. None of it mattered so much anyway, given the small skeletons recovered from the graveyard beneath the broken concrete. And the second Ruger at the scene had been wiped clean; as skeptical as the feebs were about Dave’s claim to have had two guns, they couldn’t prove he hadn’t fired the weapon—not at the dead errand boy and not at Longsford.
He’d have to do someth
ing about Karin, but it wasn’t a decision he wanted to make while he still sometimes saw double and when he still wasn’t quite sure where his feet would end up at each step. Walking on land wasn’t supposed to feel like navigating heavy seas. “Give it time,” the doctors had all said. And meanwhile the world had gone on without him—tying up the legal ends to Longsford’s activities, ignorant of Karin’s role in the whole thing. Owen said the feebs had interviewed Dave. Evidently he’d said the right things.
“Earth to Dave.” Owen’s tone was light, but his hard-featured face was worried as he turned to Dave, the keys already out of the ignition and his seat belt released. Owen had gotten the Hunter nose, but little else of his features reflected those of his siblings. If Dave was the sleek potential clothes horse, Owen took up the other end of the spectrum. Fullback material. Always the responsible one, the compass for the Hunter world. Dave tried to remember when his older brother had given him that particular look, that worry.
“I’m here,” Dave said. “I’m okay. The doctors said so, remember?”
“Just…” Owen paused, also not a common thing. “Reconsider my suggestion to stay at the home place for a while, okay?”
For once, Dave was able to hear the genuine concern behind one of Owen’s suggestions. “I will,” he said. “I just have a thing or two to get straight in my head first. If you can give me a day or two—”
Owen nodded. “I’ll return the rental and we’ll drive your car back home.”
Dave snorted—carefully, because the dizziness still hit if he did anything too abruptly. “Which of us took that hit on the head? The car’s AWOL.”
In reply, Owen nodded toward the safe house.
Only then did Dave realize they were parked at the curb of the cul-de-sac. Only then did he realize there was already a car in the driveway. His car.
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