Deadly Secrets

by Ann Christopher

  “I need to get inside before I catch my death,” she said, eyeballing Kramer, who was sniffing her boots. “Is your dog friendly? I don’t like dogs. My daughter-in-law had a nasty little beagle.”

  “Him? Oh, that’s just Kramer. Say hi, Kramer.”

  Kramer sat, raised a paw, barked and looked to Henry.

  Henry slipped him a treat from his pocket.

  “Well. I guess Kramer’s okay.” The woman smiled, looking charmed, and watched Henry check the names on the buzzers. “Who are you here to see?”

  “Wanda Gregory,” he said brightly.

  Her expression turned wary. “I’m Wanda Gregory. And you are…?”

  “Of course! I should have seen the resemblance, ma’am.” He nodded somberly. “He looked just like you. Rest his soul.”

  Wanda looked stricken. “You knew my son?”

  “Where are my manners? My boss down in Miami was a colleague of Kareem’s. They worked closely together. He sent me up here to pay my respects. You can call me Henry.”

  And he extended his hand.

  34

  That night, after his shower and a good half-hour of pacing that did nothing to take the edge off his agitation, Kerry finally sank into a chair. He rubbed the top of his head hard enough to make his scalp peel away in strips, wishing he had the power to wipe away memories. Like the one of the girl—Brooklynne; her name was Brooklynne—dying on the clinic floor today. But when the memories stayed put, he refocused on the bottle of Jack standing in the middle of his table.

  Man, he wished he hadn’t stopped drinking.

  Other wishes, in no particular order?

  He wished he didn’t know what W-80 was or what it could do to people.

  He wished Jayne hadn’t been there today to see the whole ugly scene. She wasn’t a medical professional. She didn’t sign up to see people die right in front of her. Didn’t he and Jayne have enough difficulties to overcome without that?

  Most of all, he wished Kareem and that day would get the fuck out of his head. So he could stop remembering another day. Another bottle of Jack. Another emergency.

  He sat at the kitchen table in the dream apartment financed by Kareem’s drug money, nursing his second glass of Jack. His thoughts were full of the vague outlines of his plan to quit working for Kareem (Quit? Yeah, sure, right, whatever you say, man) once his failing grandmother died (Kareem’s kidney wasn’t keeping Death away like they’d all hoped) and he moved back to the West Coast. When he drank enough Jack and the edges of his logic got fuzzy enough, he could squint and almost see it work. The dots almost connected.

  Someone pounded on his door.

  It was Kareem.

  With a gaping neck wound dripping blood down his starched white shirt.

  Being held up between two goons the size of linebackers.

  “What the fuck?” Kerry cried.

  “I got shot,” Kareem said as they streamed inside.

  Cursing, Kerry grabbed a towel and came in for a closer look. Against all odds, Kareem had a nice through-and-through wound that had neither taken his head off nor severed an artery, although it may well have nicked something, because the blood kept coming even when Kerry pressed the towel hard to Kareem’s neck.

  Kareem yelped and clamped on to Kerry’s wrist with a bone-snapping grip. “Don’t let me die, man,” he said through gritted teeth.

  “I won’t. Hold this.” Kerry transferred the towel to Kareem, picked up his phone from the table and headed for his bedroom. “I’m getting my medical bag— Hold up. What’re you doing?”

  Goon #1 stepped directly in his path. “What’re you doing with the phone?”

  “I’m calling 9-1-1,” Kerry said, incredulous. “I don’t know why you brought him here instead of taking him to the ER.”

  “No police,” Kareem said. “No hospital. I’m not trying to answer a bunch of questions about how I got shot. You feel me?”

  “I feel you, but you also don’t want to die in my kitchen, K.J.,” Kerry said.

  Half-grin from Kareem. “You’re going to fix me up.”

  In a sign of just how deep Kerry’s powers of denial went (no one could ignore writing on the wall the way he could, boy), this news flash was like a lightning strike between his eyes.

  Kerry froze. “What the fuck are you talking about? This is an apartment. Not a hospital.”

  “You said you had a bag,” Kareem said, grimacing against the pain. “Get your bag.”

  “My bag doesn’t have all the shit you’ll need, K.J. Painkillers. Antibiotics. This isn’t the kind of thing I can close with a few sutures—”

  “You’re going to have to.”

  “And you’ll probably need a plastic surgeon.”

  Kareem listened, with more and more of his soul leaking out of his perfectly blank expression until finally Kerry might have been talking to a marble statue for all the good it did.

  “Did you hear me?” Kerry asked. “You need a hospital, K.J. And I’m obligated to report this.”

  Long pause while Kareem stared him down. “Don’t make me tell you again.”

  Funny how that was the moment, when his battle was already long lost, when Kerry chose to make his last stand.

  “Fuck that,” he said, raising his phone to make the call.

  Kerry never quite understood what the signal was. A flick of Kareem’s finger, maybe, or a slight tip of his head in Kerry’s direction. All he knew was that one moment he was standing there, yammering about the moral code he’d already abandoned, and the next he was doubled up with pain, wheezing from the way Goon #1 had made like Muhammad Ali and punched his gut hard enough to fuse his belly button with his spine.

  Kerry started to drop.

  Goon #1 held him up.

  Goon #2 zoomed in to make like Rocky Balboa with Kerry’s face.

  Kerry got his hands up. His right hook (from boxing at the gym, not street fighting) connected with a torso, and his uppercut hit someone’s jaw and caused a satisfying grunt of pain.

  But when it was all over, Kerry was the one with the swollen eyes, crunched nose and filter-free view of his world. No more sugarcoated denial for him.

  He was fucked.

  He’d sold his soul to the wrong damn devil.

  The devil flapped a hand to stop the beating, but he could just as easily have sat there and watched his goons beat Kerry to death. Either way, Kerry was—and had been for a while now—at the mercy of someone with an abyss for a conscience.

  And the devil looked the same as he always had—just like Kareem, with no sign of a forked tongue or barbed tail to warn the criminally stupid.

  Like Kerry.

  “Hold him up.” Kareem heaved himself to his unsteady feet, keeping the towel pressed to his neck. “I want to talk to him.”

  Kerry tried—and failed—to jerk free.

  “Did you say you wanted to do the right thing?” Kareem asked with velvet-wrapped venom in his quiet voice. “You’re trying to lecture me when you’ve been laundering my drug money for months?”

  Kerry coughed some more. Spat out a mouthful of blood. Noted the date’s significance.

  That was the first time—after years of denials—that Kareem ever admitted he’d been distributing.

  Kareem eased closer until they were nose to nose.

  “You think you’re better than me, my brother?” Kareem asked softly. “You think that if you stick your head in the sand and ignore the tiger standing right in front of you, that the tiger goes away? Or maybe you think it stops being a tiger. Is that it?”

  Sudden blinding rage made Kerry stupid. Well, stupider. Snarling, he tried to jerk free and lunge for Kareem’s throat. It might be fun to see if he could kill Kareem by crushing his windpipe before the blood loss got him. Sure, he’d die for it, but why not die for a cause?

  But the goons held Kerry tight, and Kareem only laughed.

  “You’re mad at me? Why? Because I turned out to be exactly who you thought I was the whole time?”
>
  Pain made Kerry wince, but that soft, mocking laughter was a million times worse.

  “Be mad at yourself, man. If you weren’t so busy trying to get everything I already have, you wouldn’t be in this mess.”

  “I’m not trying to—”

  “You want clothes like mine. Shoes like mine. Cars and a crib like mine.” Kareem smirked. “You’d probably try to move in on Kira, too, if I turned my back for half a second. And you think you’re better than me? Just because I carry a pistol and you don’t? You’re a motherfucking fool, man. You’ve spent half your life trying to be me.”

  The goons snickered.

  “Fuck you,” Kerry said.

  “Here’s the thing,” Kareem said, his expression flattening out. “You’ll do what I say every time I say—because I own you. Understood? Your precious grandmother is only alive because she’s packing my kidney. You only have this nice apartment because my hard work paid for it, just like it paid for you to go to college when you were stupid enough to flunk out. So the next time you think you’re better than me because you’re a doctor who helps people? Just remember that drug money paid for your schooling. So you’ve killed as many people as you’ve helped.”

  Kerry lunged again. Fuck it. They could either rip his arms out of their sockets or shoot him, but he would have the pleasure of choking the life out of this demon’s body.

  “Stop, Kerry,” Kareem said. “We don’t want to hurt you.”

  Kerry didn’t stop. “I’ll kill you, man!”

  Kareem sighed.

  And backhanded Kerry hard enough to make the sun explode behind his eyes.

  Dazed and limp, Kerry was only vaguely aware of what happened next.

  “Ease up,” Kareem said. The goons loosened their grip on Kerry. “This is my boy right here. Nothing better ever happen to him. You hear me?”

  The goons murmured.

  Kareem laid a gentle hand on Kerry’s shoulder. “I didn’t want to do you like that, man, but you got to listen to me. Got to. Don’t you worry, though. It’ll be all right.”

  With that, Kareem palmed Kerry’s face and kissed his cheek. Five minutes later, when Kerry’s vision cleared, he sutured Kareem’s neck instead of letting him bleed out. Because he was too much of a coward to pay the ultimate price for refusing to help him.

  And because he was a doctor who helped people.

  That was the night Kerry learned his place in the pecking order inside Kareem’s twisted universe.

  Another crossroads in his life, Kerry thought, checking back into the present. Another wrong choice. Another opportunity lost.

  He picked up the fifth of Jack. The bottle felt right in his hands. Comforting.

  His mouth watered for it.

  His soul wept with lust for the oblivion it could give him.

  Especially when he went to the sink and opened the bottle, catching a whiff.

  But drinking that shit wouldn’t bring Brooklynne back. He’d just remember her tomorrow instead of tonight, and the guilt would remain right where it was, sitting on his chest.

  So he poured it out and tried to forget he’d ever heard of W-80.

  His phone rang just as the last of the temptation flowed down the drain. He figured it was Katz wanting to debrief today’s events, but—

  “Jayne,” he said, his pulse skipping up to his throat as her picture resolved for a video chat. “I was just thinking about you. What’re you doing?”

  “Well, I’ve eaten my six-point roast beef sandwich with horseradish dinner and taken my shower—”

  Kerry noted, with keen interest, the top half of the silky blue robe she wore and the way it dipped into a deep and cleavage-baring V in the front. She’d washed off the little bit of makeup she wore, leaving her with a fresh-faced rosiness that made his skin heat.

  Her lips looked deliciously plump. Dewy.

  “—and now I’m wondering what’s going on over there.”

  “Not a damn thing. I’d kill for a roast beef sandwich, though. Thanks for bragging.”

  “You poor thing,” she said.

  “Your insincerity is noted. So how are you? Our lunch didn’t turn out like I’d planned.”

  “I’m fine,” she said, the sweetest sight for sore eyes ever. If he could figure out a way to bottle and sell the feeling he got when she looked at him like that, his bank account would be up in Mark Zuckerberg territory by the end of the week. “How are you is the question. You’re the one who lost a patient today.”

  Brooklynne’s dying face flashed back into his mind’s eye. Especially the way her features had slackened into peacefulness even as he and, ultimately, the EMTs had pounded on her chest with those useless compressions. Losing a patient always sucked. Losing Brooklynne sucked worse. He didn’t want to embed her tragedy any more deeply in his mind—or Jayne’s—by discussing it.

  “I’m fine.” He shrugged, the medical platitudes coming fast and thick now. “I did what I could. You can’t save everyone.”

  “Right,” she said. “What’s that eloquent phrase you use with me all the time? Oh, yeah. Bullshit.”

  He sighed. Thought it over.

  “Yeah, that was bullshit.”

  “Thank you.” Her expression softened. “I’m reaching out here.”

  “I appreciate that. A lot.”

  “Well, you don’t have to be all macho and silent. Maybe talking about it will help.”

  He hesitated.

  “Would it help if I told you how I feel?” she asked.

  Hell yeah it would help. “Go ahead.”

  “I’m a federal prosecutor,” she said after a beat or two, wiping her nose. “I handle drug cases all the time. I’m on task forces with the DEA. We see horrible new drugs hit the streets. All the time. They’re like roaches. They just keep coming.”

  He stilled, his entire being wrapping itself around whatever she was about to say next.

  “I’ve seen crime scene photos and I’ve met addicts and I’ve talked to their heartbroken families who try to pick up the pieces. I was arrogant enough to think I’d seen it all. I really thought I could deal with anything.”

  Her chin quivered. She pressed her lips together. Swallowed hard.

  “But I never understood a damn thing until today. I never had a clue about what I’m trying to stop.”

  “Now you do?”

  “Now I do. And you know what? It’s all worth it. All the long days at the office and the sleepless nights? All the office politics and the frustration and lack of a personal life? I’d do it all again in a heartbeat. If it stopped another Brooklynne from OD’ing with a bunch of strangers after being dumped by her so-called boyfriend? You’d better believe I’d do it all again.”

  Some of his admiration must have shone through. He didn’t want to run her off with his growing intensity but Jesus, it was getting harder and harder to keep his mouth shut and his feelings to himself.

  “What?” she demanded, cocking her head.

  I might be falling in love with you.

  Maybe I’ve already fallen.

  Kira’s rejection was a blow. Yours would be a knockout.

  It all sat on the tip of his tongue, waiting to be said. At the right time, which wasn’t now. Even so, locking it safely away where it wouldn’t embarrass either one of them felt like a crime against their budding relationship.

  “You’re special,” he finally said. “I can’t believe how special you are. No one else is like you.”

  She looked at him like he was crazy. “I’m not—”

  “Jayne. You have a pure heart and clear eyes. You see what’s right and wrong and you choose right, even when it’s hard. That makes you brave. And if you’re brave, you’re special.”

  She made a disbelieving sound and shook her head. “Aren’t you the person who did the right thing even though it could’ve gotten you thrown in prison? Even though it nearly got you killed? Doesn’t that make you brave?”

  Man, he hated to be the one to burst her bubble.
But he couldn’t stand there and let her paint him as Batman when he knew in his heart that he had much more in common with the Joker.

  “Nope,” he said quietly. “It makes me a guy with an elephant shovel trying to dig his way out of the shit.”

  “Kerry…”

  “Look.” He shrugged irritably at this additional reminder that he didn’t deserve Jayne. “Maybe I made the right choice in the end. You made the right choice in the beginning. That’s the difference. And if I had it to do all over again? I’d make the right choice up front. Because I knew there were Brooklynnes out there when I was laundering Kareem’s money. I pretended I didn’t, but I did. I pretended the money was a nice compensation, but it wasn’t. I pretended I didn’t have a conscience, but I did. If I had it to do all over again, I’d tell Kareem to go fuck himself right from jump, and if he killed me for it, so be it. What’s the big deal? I’ve been nearly dead. Living with that kind of guilt is worse.”

  Jayne flinched. “Don’t say that. It’s like you’re flirting with death again.”

  Sudden exhaustion forced him to lean against the counter. “I’m not—”

  “Hang on.” Leaning forward, she squinted at him. Her voice had a sharp new edge to it. “Is that an empty bottle of Jack Daniel’s?”

  He froze.

  “Behind you. You said you weren’t going to drink anymore.”

  He looked around and— Oh, shit.

  He turned back and discovered her looking at him with the exact horror with which she’d watch Brooklynne die earlier.

  Fuck.

  “I didn’t drink it,” he said quickly. “I poured it out.”

  Was that his voice? Sounding all shifty like that?

  He cleared his throat, took a deep breath and tried to tone it down a notch.

  “Jayne. I poured it out.”

  Fuck.

  Still shifty.

  Jayne wasn’t buying it either. She shook her head, and he’d swear he though he saw tears in her eyes.

  “You know what?” Her voice crept higher. “I don’t even know what I’m doing here. I can’t deal with this.”