Deadly Secrets

by Ann Christopher

  There was almost nothing left of him.

  Although she’d never paid much attention to him as a person, other than to consider what he could do for her case against Kareem and, by extension, what her case against Kareem could do for her career, she’d noted his handsomeness. His expressive brown eyes and dark skin. His height and athletic build.

  His ridiculous sexiness.

  None of that was visible now, when he seemed like nothing more than a ghost stubbornly clinging to his former body. Now only the ashen skin, pale as dust, the blood-streaked clothes, hands, face, neck and side and the dull and fixed gaze stood as testaments to the fact that a healthy man had once been here.

  That man was probably gone forever.

  After a shuddering breath and a swift mental slap upside the head, Jayne sprang into action.

  “Randolph,” she said crisply, gripping his forearm. Oh, God. Dried blood had flaked on his skin, which was the temperature of refrigerated chicken. She leaned over him so he could see her. “I know you’re in there. Talk to me, man.”

  Randolph blinked. Made an indistinct noise.

  “Over here. Can you focus for me? It’s Jayne.”

  Another blink. A vague frown. The slight turn of his head in her direction.

  She turned his head the rest of the way. His black hair was surprisingly soft, a short and razor-edged cap that seemed to be his only uninjured part.

  Their gazes connected. His eyes were sunken. Blank. Just as she was beginning to doubt she could reach him, she saw a flicker of recognition that gave her hope.

  “No need to play possum, Randolph. I didn’t come to indict you or anything.”

  He blinked again.

  One corner of his mouth twitched, generating a wild surge of relief inside her.

  “Th…” He licked his colorless lips. “Thirsty.”

  “No kidding.” She squeezed his arm again. “You’ve lost a few pints, from what I can tell. I’m afraid to give you any water, though. They’re probably going to take you right into surgery.” She eyeballed his side. “But I’m thinking that any water you drink will just leak right out onto the floor.”

  Another mouth twitch, this time accompanied by crinkling at the outer corners of his eyes.

  She felt lightheaded with relief.

  “Help’s on the way, so you hang in here with me, okay? The EMTs should be here any second.” She looked to the front door, but couldn’t hear the sirens. “I thought I heard them a minute ago, but there must be some other emergency nearby.”

  This news extinguished that fragile gleam of light in his eyes.

  He shook his head. “No help.”

  “No help? You’ll die without it, Randolph.”

  “Good,” he said on a faint sigh, closing his eyes.

  “Do you have a head injury I should know about?”

  He opened his eyes again, and there was such infinite sadness there that meeting his gaze was like staring into a record of every bad thing that had ever happened in the history of humanity.

  “Don’t…don’t deserve help. Better this way.”

  Oh, that again. Jayne tightened her grip on his arm, starting to get seriously pissed off.

  “Let me tell you something, you self-pitying jackass,” she snapped. “You don’t get to decide whether you get help or not. You don’t get to check out. I came all the way up here to close out your case, so you have a whole new chance to be a normal person and screw up your life in normal ways like all the rest of us do. I sacrificed my Saturday morning when I could be at IHOP eating pancakes. I’m kneeling in your blood right now, and my white pants are ruined. I called the EMTs. They’re going to take you to the hospital, where you’ll get fixed up and be fine, and you should be grateful for the chance. None of this whining bullshit. My brother died of leukemia when he was fourteen, and he’d have killed to be in your shoes, you ungrateful SOB. Screw you. Oh, and in case you feel like you haven’t paid your debt to society? If you’ve been lying here like this, suffering all night, then trust me, you’ve paid your debts. You are debt-free.”

  Kerry, who’d been watching her with a renewed focus and intensity that made her realize there was more left to him than she’d thought, took a long, serrated breath.

  “You…scare me, Jayne,” he said in his thready voice.

  She smothered a quick grin. “Good.”

  They eyed each other warily.

  “You’re a person,” he said.

  Oh. Oh, okay, she got it. He’d only ever seen her as the enemy before. And she…

  “Yeah,” she said quietly. “You’re a person too, Randolph. And you’re not dying today, so don’t even think about it. Where the hell are those EMTs?”

  His lids fluttered closed, alarming her again. Here they were talking about nonsense, and she hadn’t even asked him the most important question:

  “Who did this to you, Randolph?”

  His lids snapped open again. “Kareem.”

  “Kareem’s dead,” she said, aghast.

  He shook his head.

  “But…” Jayne floundered, thinking of the gas explosion, the body matching Kareem’s description with the ankle monitor on it and, most of all, the positive dental ID from the coroner’s office. “How’s that possible? And where’s he been for the last six months?”

  “Miami.” Without warning, Kerry clamped on to her arm with surprising strength. “Protect Kira. Understand?”

  “Yeah,” she said quickly. “Hang on. Are those the sirens? Finally?”

  She ran to the door. An ambulance zoomed up the street with lights and sirens in full effect. She flagged it over. Within seconds, the thing was parked and two EMTs poured out, hurrying to grab their equipment and stretcher.

  “Careful, it’s a crime scene,” she said, lapsing into law enforcement officer mode. “Don’t touch anything. And he’s going to need a lot of blood, so you need to get the hospital on standby for that. Where are the police— Wait, is that them?”

  Another siren blared. A cop car sped around the corner and down the street.

  But Jayne didn’t have time for any of that. She didn’t want Randolph to think she’d abandoned him. She hurried back, making it to his side just behind the EMTs, who were spewing medical jargon back and forth.

  Randolph lay very still, with his eyes closed.

  “What’s his name?” the female EMT asked Jayne.

  “Kerry,” Jayne said, trying not to notice the way the woman was urgently pressing her stethoscope to Randolph’s chest, clearly trying to find a heartbeat.

  “Kerry, are you with us?” The woman abandoned the stethoscope and began chest compressions. “Kerry?”

  The male EMT got out the bright red portable AED machine and started sticking its pads to Kerry’s chest.

  Jayne watched, bewildered.

  But…

  Randolph couldn’t just…

  Not when help was here.

  “Randolph!” she shouted as she knelt by his head. “We just talked about this! I told you you’re not going to die from this! I told you, Randolph! Randolph—”

  “Is this your husband, ma’am?” asked the male EMT.

  “What? I… No,” Jayne said, pressing a hand to her forehead and trying to get over her disbelief. Randolph had just been talking to her, and she was not going to watch him die like this.

  “Do you know if he has any healthcare directives?” the female asked.

  Jayne stared at Randolph’s motionless face and tried to make those words work. “What?”

  “Would he want to be kept alive by extraordinary measures?”

  “Yes,” Jayne lied. “Yes, he would. Absolutely.”

  “Do you know how we can reach his next of kin, ma’am?”

  “Clear!” yelled the male EMT as he shocked Randolph, making his poor, battered body spasm.

  “Ma’am? Do you know his next of kin?”

  It was all Jayne could do not to faint. To vomit. To scream at God.

  She swallowed
hard. “I don’t know anything about this man at all.”

  10

  When the crowd of gawkers grew to about thirty people, Henry figured it was safe for him and Kramer to get out of the car and take a closer look. See what, if anything, he could learn that he didn’t already know. So he pulled his Phoenix Suns cap down over his forehead, grabbed the leash and walked as far as he could until the yellow crime scene tape, bystanders and a uniformed cop stopped him from getting any closer to the houseboat.

  Breezin’ was her name.

  She was a nice little boat, too, docked at a nice spot on the Ohio River. About five minutes from downtown Cincy, with the green hills of Kentucky on the other side.

  Breezin’ looked like a great spot for a barbecue with friends or a romantic date.

  She did not look like the place for a killing, unless she was the scene in one of the Agatha Christie novels Alice used to read before Alzheimer’s ran off with her mind. But a killing had happened there, all right, and the coroner’s office wheeled out the dead guy in the body bag to prove it.

  A ripple of shock went through the crowd at the sight. A reporter speaking into her mic pointed over her shoulder and stepped aside so her cameraman could get a better shot. One suck-up even yanked his baseball cap off and pressed it to his heart, the kind of gesture that the guy would probably retract quick if he knew that the newly departed was the drug kingpin responsible for most of the horse that made its way into the Queen City.

  “Who is it?” someone called out.

  “We’re not releasing the name yet,” the uniform said.

  Henry sighed. If only he didn’t know who it was tucked up all nice inside the garment bag. If only he hadn’t seen Kareem Gregory follow his wife onto the boat and only the wife, now laid out on another stretcher with something going on with her leg, come back out alive.

  If only he didn’t have to pass this bad news along.

  “We got a call to make to the boss,” he told Kramer.

  Kramer growled.

  “Yeah, I hate the boss, too,” Henry said.

  More growling.

  Was it childish to teach the dog to growl when he heard the word boss? Yeah, but at his age and in his position, Henry took his jollies where he could get them. Tugging on the leash, he walked down to the far end of the row of boats and dialed the SOB’s number.

  “Hello, hello,” the Llama said on the first ring. “What’s the news?”

  “It’s bad. Your guy got himself offed by his ex-wife. Guess she wasn’t so glad to learn he was still alive.”

  Silence.

  Henry waited.

  Seething silence.

  Henry decided to rip the bandage off. “There’s more. Your guy offed his lieu last night. I, ah…I think that’s the end of his organization.”

  “Well, search his things.”

  “Already did, boss. The disk wasn’t in his hotel. I think he’s got it on him, which means that the police own it now. I’ve got nothing but dead ends here in Cincy. Might be time to call it a day.”

  In a sign of how naive Henry was—how criminally foolish—there was a part of him that actually breathed a sigh of relief. Actually entertained the hope that he could go home to Alice now, watch a Suns game or two and maybe even grill a steak on the patio.

  He should have known better.

  From the other end of the line came the sound of sipping and slurping. The quiet clink of china.

  And then the two-ton anvil landed on his head.

  “I’m afraid you’ll have to postpone your retirement for a bit longer, Henry. It’s time for you to implement Plan B. If we can’t find the disk with the W-80 formula on it, then we need to find the person who created the formula. You know what to do.”

  The line went dead.

  Henry lost his shit.

  Snarling, he threw the phone on the concrete and stomped it to jagged bits.

  11

  Kerry shifted restlessly, frowning as he tried to clear his throat. His body—or was it his mind?—was free-floating again, but there was nothing pleasant about it this time. He felt trapped and leaden. Vulnerable to any bad thing that might wander his way.

  Worst of all? Kareem was back, because he always came back.

  “What’s up, College?” he asked.

  Laughing, Kerry joined him on the front porch, where they hugged it out and Kareem surprised him by palming Kerry’s face and kissing his jaw.

  Kareem took off his impenetrable black sunglasses and gave him a once-over that noted Kerry’s red and white Denison College T-shirt and, probably, his guilty conscience. “You can’t stop and say hi? You forget where you came from, man?”

  No, actually.

  After being valedictorian and riding off to his ritzy-ass private school in a blaze of glory, Kerry had lost his scholarship. Hard as he’d tried, he didn’t blend with the smart middle-class kids. Didn’t fit in any more than a kangaroo fits in with a pod of whales. Oh, sure, a kangaroo could learn to swim and strap on flippers, but he couldn’t speak the lingo or make the big dives, because he hadn’t spent his whole life training to be a whale.

  That fucking ambitious kangaroo wasn’t fooling anybody.

  Neither was Kerry.

  Worst of all, for the first time in his life, there was no solace in the classroom. He wasn’t roll-out-of-bed, born-this-way smart any more. In college, the subjects armed themselves against him, lined up one by one (biology, physics, calculus, comparative literature and Colonel Organic Chemistry, their merciless leader), took aim at the dead center of his chest and threw down the gauntlet:

  You want this, bitch? You better come fight for it.

  And how had Kerry risen to this challenge? Had he redoubled his efforts and tried harder over the year and a half that he’d been in school?

  No, he had not.

  Being a teenaged knucklehead, he’d majored in Jack Daniel’s 101.

  Now he was right back where he started from, with Kareem and their friends Yogi and Hector, only no one had ever thought those three would amount to much of anything, and certainly nothing good.

  If only he had a do-over. If only he’d spent more time in the library and taken advantage of the counseling service and the tutors.

  He was drowning in shame, bitterness and if-onlys.

  “Huh?” Kareem asked. “You forget about your people back home?”

  “No, man,” Kerry said with a guilty shuffle of his feet. “I just—”

  “What’re you doing here, Kareem Gregory?” Kerry’s grandmother barked as she came out to the porch.

  Kareem’s killer grin faded. “What’s up, Grandmama Ruth?”

  “I’ve heard rumors about you at church,” Ruth said. “That you’re selling dope. That that’s where your money and your flashy car come from, and not from any car detailing business. Are you denying it, boy?”

  Whoa.

  The allegation was a swift jab to Kerry’s solar plexus.

  “You’re like my second mother,” Kareem said, his voice choked. “You’re just going to believe some random rumor about me?”

  “I know you’re hardheaded and don’t always like to do things the right way.”

  Incredulous laugh from Kareem. “I can’t believe this. I’m working my butt off to build my business and take care of my mother, and this is what I get accused of? What’s a brother like me supposed to do? You know I don’t have the grades to get into college like Kerry. So I’ve been working twice as hard. You know what? I’m outta here.”

  “Wait, Kareem,” Ruth said. “Are you telling me it’s not true?”

  Kareem stared her in the face without a blink or a hesitation. “I’m telling you I could never do anything like that.”

  Kerry watched the proceedings in complete stupefaction, wondering if he should believe his eyes or the quiet but persistent voice in his head that told him Kareem was lying.

  He thought about Kareem’s episodes of bullying other kids during high school. The times he’d turned up with
large wads of cash and flimsy explanations about acquiring them. He thought about Kareem’s unexplained absences, his up-and-down moods, the kind that could swing between sweetness and light and blind rage in a blink, his easy charm, which worked equally well on kids, parents and teachers, and the time a neighbor’s yappingly annoying pet schnauzer had gone missing and Kareem had found it (“found” it?) in the gutter with its neck broken.

  A cold shiver rippled through Kerry’s body.

  Was Kareem capable of doing something this immoral and dangerous?

  Kerry groaned, trying to get comfortable. To breathe.

  “Dr. Randolph? Are you awake?”

  “You don’t know how relieved I am, Kareem,” Ruth said as she went back inside. “I’ve got enough drama with Kerry losing his scholarship. Now he’ll have to work and go to night school. I’m afraid he’s going to turn out just like his daddy.”

  In the perfect end to his life as a drunken loser, Kerry’s father, as everyone knew, had tried to climb a tree with his car when Kerry was four, taking Ruth’s daughter, Kerry’s mother, with him.

  Kareem stared at Kerry, a gleam in his eye.

  “I’ll loan you the money for college.”

  Kerry gaped at him, his heart skipping with excitement. “I couldn’t ask you to do that.”

  “I’m offering. You need to go back to your fancy private school. Get the best education.”

  Kerry couldn’t believe it. His grades weren’t scholarship material, but he was still passing and his advisor liked him. He’d bet he could get back in. “You can’t do that, man. It runs fifty or sixty large a year.”

  Kareem shrugged like this was loose change under sofa cushions.

  “I don’t know if I could pay you back.”

  “You’re my brother,” Kareem said, and there was that limpid honesty again.

  If you couldn’t rely on a guy this sincere, then humanity was in a shitload of trouble. “Well…”

  “And if you don’t have the money, we can work something out,” Kareem added softly.