What was she supposed to say now? You can’t just have a conversation with a naked person—a naked man. She sank lower into the tub, trying to disappear below the bubbles. She silently cursed herself for not having thought to lock the door.
“Are you still there?” Brad asked.
“Yes.” But she wouldn’t be for long. She had to get out of the tub and back into her bathrobe. She had to cover up before he had a chance to see what she really looked like.
Her father’s dark stories invaded her thoughts. She knew where this was going, but Brad could have any girl he wanted—girls who at least would know what they were doing.
Nicki felt her chest thickening as the wild thoughts screamed though her brain.
She had to get out of here. Out of the bathroom, out of the hotel, out of this mess. She had to go somewhere. Anywhere. And this was the time.
Moving as quietly as she knew how, Nicki eased herself out of the tub, her body covered with a thick pelt of bubbles, and padded across the expanse of marble tile to lift the expensive terry cloth bathrobe off its hook and pull it on. If she hurried, she could get dressed and be out before Brad even knew that she was gone. She didn’t know where she’d go, but that was a problem for later.
As she opened the bathroom door, Brad slapped the shower off. “Hey, where are you going?” he asked.
She moved faster, leaving a trail of wet footprints on the lush carpet as she hurried across the master bedroom toward the bed, where she’d left her travel clothes from earlier today, the clothes that were really her. The ones that had nothing to do with anybody’s fantasies.
“What are you doing?”
She jumped at the sound of Brad’s voice and whirled to see him standing in the open doorway to the bathroom, soaking wet, with a towel wrapped around his waist.
Keeping one hand on the waistband of the towel, he moved toward her, the other arm outstretched. “Jesus, are you okay?” He was at her side in two seconds, and she jumped back, as if shot with electricity.
“No, please don’t,” she said.
“Why? What’s wrong?”
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m really so sorry.”
“For what? What’s wrong?”
“I can’t,” Nicki said.
“What happened?” Was she having some kind of an attack? Had he said something or done something—
He saw it in her eyes, and then he understood. He became aware of his near-nakedness. He eased away from her. “Oh. I invaded your space, didn’t I? I’m sorry.”
The look on Brad’s face was one that Nicki had never seen before. The confident, strutting raconteur now seemed like a little boy caught doing something bad in school. He hurried into the bathroom and reappeared a moment later wrapped in a robe identical to Nicki’s. His blond hair was still matted and dripping and Nicki noticed that he still had soapsuds clustered behind one ear. He still looked uneasy and apologetic, and this time when he approached, he kept his distance.
“Are you feeling okay?” he asked.
Nicki nodded, despite the tightening in her chest and the light-headedness. That would all pass. It always did.
“I’m really sorry,” Brad repeated.
She appreciated his words, but could see the confusion in his eyes still. He was sorry, but he had no idea what for. He thought it was for invading her space. How could she possibly make him understand? It was awkward. Neither of them knew where to look or what to say. Finally, she settled on his beautiful eyes. “Tell me why you’re doing this,” she said. “All of this. I mean, really. What’s in this for you?”
“I already told you,” he said. “I want an adventure. I thought this would be fun. A kick.”
Nicki tried to read his mind. “That’s only part of it. You could have any girl you wanted. Why me? Why hang out with a dying recovering anorexic?”
Brad wondered how in the world he was ever going to put it in words. “Can I sit on the bed?” he asked, stalling for time. “I promise I’ll keep my hands to myself.”
Nicki moved farther away. As he sat, his robe parted, exposing his thigh, but he quickly covered himself back up. “You want the whole story, right?” he said.
“I just want things to make sense.”
He gathered his thoughts, then took a deep breath. “Do you remember the day when I was edging the sidewalk out in front of the Bensons’ house and you brought me a glass of chocolate milk?”
For a second, Nicki thought that he was making fun of her, but then she knew better. “Vaguely,” she said.
“It was a hot, hot day, and Old Man Benson had me working like a mule. You just wandered up with a glass of chocolate milk.”
“Was it bad or something?”
He laughed. “No, it wasn’t bad. It was delicious. It was the first time I’d ever tasted chocolate milk. You know, the kind out of the carton. I thought it was wonderful.”
Nicki’s jaw dropped. “I don’t believe that. You were fifteen.”
“Seventeen,” he corrected. “I’ve had it a thousand times since then, but that was a first.”
Nicki didn’t understand the connection. “So, this is all payback for a glass of milk.”
Brad’s ears turned red when he was embarrassed, and he could feel them heating up. “Maybe you can’t understand if you didn’t grow up in the system. You spend your whole life bouncing from one stranger’s house to another. You’re never part of a family, not really. I mean, if you happened to be there on Christmas, you’d get some presents, but they were like presents from the fire station or something. Sympathy presents. Every night, you sit at the dinner table and there’s this forced small talk about what the kids did at school and stuff, but you always knew that they endured your turn, waiting for the blood-kids to have their chance. Am I making any sense?”
Nicki said, “Not really.”
Brad shifted again on the bed. “By the time I got into the system, I was too old to be cute and cuddly. I was what, ten, eleven years old when my mom went to prison, and I was pissed. I wasn’t the kind of kid that people hurry to adopt. I pushed everybody away, and they were more than happy to stay away. Nobody cared about me, and I told myself that I liked it that way.”
“But I cared,” Nicki said, finally seeing the chocolate milk connection.
“Exactly.” Brad shifted uncomfortably on the bed. “You brought me that glass and you had that look in your face.”
“What was I, panting?” Nicki blushed.
“No.” Brad’s blush deepened. “Well, yeah, there was some of that, but there was more. It was a look I’d never seen before and it made me feel good.”
“That was a long time ago,” Nicki said.
“Not for me. Time kind of stops when you’re in jail.” As he spoke, he watched Nicki’s eyes, trying to read her reaction. What he saw was empathy.
“You still haven’t told me about any of that,” Nicki said.
Brad smiled. “You’re right.”
“But I want to hear.”
“No, you don’t.”
“Yes, I do. I’ll tell you if I need you to stop.”
Another deep breath, this one leaden with dread. “It’s ugly, Nicki. It’s embarrassing.”
“It’s who you are,” Nicki said. “That’s all I want. I just want to know who you are.”
* * *
Of the four Washington broadcast stations, three sent camera crews. For the better part of an hour, all Carter did was talk. By eleven-thirty, it was over.
The Michaels’s house was a standard 2,000-square-foot suburban colonial, not all that different than the one Carter called home. They put him up in Nathan’s room, having transferred its rightful owner to the floor of the little home office down the hall. “You don’t have to put him out of his room,” Carter said. “I can sleep on the sofa.”
“Don’t you worry about that,” Warren scoffed. “That boy can sleep standing up. Really, he doesn’t mind.”
As Carter lay atop Nathan’s bed staring at the
ceiling, he felt guilty about the wasted sacrifice. Who did he think he was kidding? There’d be no sleep for him. His imagination kept taking him to the conclusion of this adventure, and no matter how he cut it, he had a hard time devising a happy ending.
He racked his brain trying to find one last i to dot or t to cross. There had to be something they were forgetting to do, and whatever that something was, it was bound to be the one thing that would mean the difference between success and failure.
But what was it? What hadn’t they thought of? They’d gotten the pictures out to the media, they’d alerted all the police jurisdictions, they’d raised the awareness at all the transportation portals. What else was there?
Carter tried to think of a place that Nicki might want to go, but she’d never been to Virginia. Outside of seeing the sites in Washington, DC, what else was there? More to the point, what wasn’t there? He’d spoken to Chris Tu on the phone in the car, and his review of all the e-mails and chat logs revealed that Brad and Nicki talked about everything and every place under the sun, from the beaches to the mountains, from Paris to Hong Kong. But according to Chris, the beach theme seemed to carry a lot of weight. When Brad Ward was putting on his hard sell to come this way, he’d talked a lot about the beaches in the Southeast, and Nicki had seemed impressed. That rang true with Carter. Back when Nicki was healthy, she used to beg to go to the beach with her friends, but Carter would never allow it.
So, why Brookfield, Virginia? Why not go to Miami or Fort Lauderdale? Or Nag’s Head or Hilton Head or Myrtle Beach or Wilmington or Virginia Beach or Ocean City . . .
God, now that he thought about it, the list was virtually endless. For that matter, why wasn’t Carter on his way to one of those places?
Because he didn’t know for sure. He needed at least an inkling of where she might go. Otherwise, he’d merely be chasing shadows and hunches.
For the time being, he was powerless, completely neutered. And the clock continued to tick.
* * *
“They sent me up for murder.”
There, he’d said it out loud. Led with it, so that she could wrap her mind around the worst part first. She flinched, but she didn’t run.
“You know that I ran away from the shelter where they sent me, and from there, I never went back. I just stayed on the streets. I got to be a pretty good pickpocket, and you can always steal enough to live off of, but that shit’s really intense, know what I mean? You’re always having to come right up to someone and hope you don’t get caught. It’s fun. It’s a kick, but it gets to you after a while. Your nerves start to get raw, and when that happens, you’re doomed to get locked up.
“So I tried mule work for a while, carrying drug money back and forth, but that was even more intense. There are some crazy people into street drugs. Kill you just because it’s Thursday, or because they don’t like your name. That didn’t last for more than a couple of weeks for me. I’m not built for that.”
Nicki held up her hand to stem the flow of his words. “Did you ever think about just getting a regular job?”
“Sure, I thought about. I even tried it, but here’s the thing: I don’t have a high school diploma. What grades I got all sucked, and I didn’t know how to do anything. It all came down to economics. I could make five dollars an hour your way, or ten, twenty times that doing it my way.”
“But it was against the law,” Nicki protested. The comment drew an impatient look.
“You are your father’s daughter, aren’t you?” He made sure to smile so she wouldn’t take offense. “This legal/illegal shit is easy to talk about when you’ve got choices. For me, it was steal or starve.”
Brad cringed as he heard himself playing the role of victim. He could hear the voice of the prison psychologist lecturing about the need to take ownership of his actions, how life was all about the choices we make. Yeah, well, bite me.
“Anyway, I hooked up with two buddies—Jamal and Barry—and we, like, hung out and shit. When we needed something, we’d pick a place, scope it out for a while, and then we’d do our thing. You know, mostly it was just petty shoplifting crap, or maybe boosting a purse out of a car.”
“Or boosting the car itself,” Nicki offered.
Brad smiled. “Yeah, that, too, sometimes. It wasn’t any really serious stuff, but you know, it adds up over time. It was fun. I gotta tell you that much, it was a lot of fun.”
“You said you were arrested for murder.”
“I’m getting to that. One day, almost three years ago, we were taking down a gas station—you know, one of those places with the little grocery store attached? Anyway, I wasn’t taking much. I think I had maybe a package of Twinkies or something. So, when I’m on my way to the door, the guy behind the counter sees me, and he starts yellin’ and shit. ‘You there! You! Stop!’ So I stopped.
“But Barry, the idiot, brought a gun. He told the guy to stop shouting, but he just kept going on and on and on. So, Barry shot him. Right there. Right in the head. Jesus, blood flew everywhere, and the guy dropped to the floor, dead.”
Nicki’s jaw hung nearly to her chest. “So, what did you do?”
“What do you think we did? We ran. But the security cameras caught it all. I was arrested that night.”
“But you didn’t kill anybody.”
Brad allowed himself a bitter chuckle as he shook his head. “That’s not how it works. Because we were committing a crime when the shooting happened, all of us were guilty.”
“Of murder?”
“Of capital murder. That’s what they call it. Opens the door for the death penalty.”
“So, you were convicted.”
“The trial didn’t even last a whole day. The prosecution showed the video, my jerk-off public defender made a speech, and I was sentenced to twenty-five-to-life. Just like that.” He snapped his fingers.
“Then, it was just like you see in the movies. They cuff your wrists to your waist, and your legs to each other, and then they put you on the bus to Hell. You can’t imagine anything as awful as the Michigan state prison. It was like being thrown into a damn lion’s den. Maximum security. Anyway, it took eight months to figure out how to get out of there, and I did.”
“How?”
He blushed. “You’re not going to believe it.”
“Tell me.”
“Well, you know, I built up all these fancy plans on how I was going to get out. I thought about tunnels, and I was always looking for a hole in the fence or something where I could slip through, but nothing ever came of any of those. The place was just too tight.”
“So, what did you do?”
“I hid in a laundry basket.”
Nicki gaped.
“Yep, the biggest cliché of all, and I just did it on a whim. Nobody was tending this laundry cart, so I climbed in under a bunch of dirty underwear and uniforms, and they rolled me right out into the truck.”
“They didn’t see you when they unloaded it?”
“They don’t unload it!” Brad laughed as he said it. “That was the biggest surprise of all. They just roll the cart into the back of the truck and drive off. How stupid is that?”
“What about security at the gate?”
“I heard the guard ask if they’d ever left the truck unattended, and the driver lied. It was amazing. After all that planning, all I had to do was lie down and they took me right out. That was five months ago.”
Nicki closed her eyes tightly as she tried to process it all. “So, you really are a fugitive.”
Another laugh. “Well, yeah.”
“I just—Wow.” She thought a moment more. “But you still haven’t told me—”
“Oh,” Brad interrupted, realizing that he’d never gotten to her question. “Through all the bad times in the joint, I swear to God, the image that I kept thinking about—the one that kept playing itself over and over again in my head—was of you and that stupid glass of milk. I know it sounds ridiculous, but that’s the God’s honest truth.”
Nicki giggled.
“I think you had a crush on me.”
Nicki’s shade of red went beyond mere blush, to something closer to scarlet.
Brad leaned a little closer to her on the bed. “I think you wanted me to kiss you, didn’t you?”
Nicki allowed herself to nod.
“Well, I wanted to kiss you, too.”
“That’s twisted,” Nicki teased. “I was only twelve.”
“You didn’t think you were twelve,” Brad laughed. “You thought you were twenty-three. But I kept my hands—and my lips—to myself.”
He moved a little closer, and Nicki leaned in to meet him.
“So, you actually thought of me?” she baited.
“Every night.”
“I probably don’t want to know the details.”
“I bet you can guess them.”
Nicki saw the contour of his erection growing under his robe and looked away. The fluttery feeling returned, but it was somehow different.
“Would you mind if I kissed you now?” Brad asked.
Nicki thought she said yes, but she wasn’t sure. This was the fantasy. Right here, this was it. The kiss she’d been waiting for her whole life.
Their lips touched. A rush of heat raced from her head to the farthest reaches of her fingers and toes. It was a gentle kiss—her first—not the sloppy, tongue-tangled mess that she’d seen in the hallways of school, but rather a light, beautiful thing, exactly as she’d always dreamed that a kiss from Brad would be. He cupped her face in his hands as their tongues touched, and Nicki found herself being lowered gently backward onto the still-made king-size bed.
Nicki’s mind reeled as her body surged with energy. She felt his hand move from her jaw, ever so gently tracing a line under her robe and toward her breast. She tensed.
“Relax,” he whispered.
Her robe started to pull away from her body, and she realized that he was going to see her. All of her. He’d see the ugly body and then he’d know the truth of the mistake he’d made asking her here.
“I want the lights off,” she said.
“But I want to see.”
“Please.”
Brad stood from the bed and glided to the light switch on the bedroom wall. He pressed it and the room went dark, save for the trapezoidal patch of light that spilled onto the carpet through the half-open bathroom door. Nicki watched as he walked back to her, a towering silhouette. He shrugged his shoulders and his bathrobe slipped away.
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