The Queen pbf-5

by Steven James

  Her intuition was right. There was more, but it wouldn’t be wise to get into all that. I needed to do something to end this conversation, to rescue what little rapport I had left with my brother, to help, at least in a small way, salvage his relationship with Amber. Over the years I’ve found that sometimes when a lie serves a greater good it can be a gift.

  A lie.

  A gift.

  “I never cared for you like you did for me,” I said as convincingly as I could.

  She turned and looked at me, into me. “That’s not true.”

  No, it isn’t.

  No, it isn’t.

  You’re not a good liar, Pat.

  Telling the lie troubled me.

  The truth.

  The greater gift.

  Before I could edit them, rein them in, the words slipped out: “I ended things because Sean loved you.” Yes, it was true, but it wasn’t the whole truth. “And I didn’t want to hurt him, to-”

  “But so did you, right? You were in love with me too?”

  She seemed distraught, almost desperate to hear me say it, but I avoided answering her. “Amber, really, I think you need to leave.”

  “Just tell me if I was wrong all this time. Just tell me the truth.” She’d always been a woman unafraid to show her feelings, and her eyes were beginning to glisten. “Please.”

  “Yes, I did. I loved you.” With every question, every answer, I was digging myself deeper into a conversation I didn’t need to be in. I decided to try and wrap this up quickly. “I didn’t want Sean to get hurt. You either.”

  “You broke things off to protect me?”

  “Both of you.”

  She was crying now, and my heart broke to see it. If only I’d pulled away sooner five years ago, not let my feelings tug me farther than I needed to go.

  “Amber, please.”

  “Are you doing it again?”

  “What?”

  “Trying to protect me?”

  “We can’t-”

  “You left me because you loved me, because you wanted to protect me? Both me and Sean? That’s what you just said.”

  You did this to yourself, Pat. You shouldn’t have said anything!

  “I never stopped caring, Pat.” Her voice had become soft, broken. “Seeing you now… it’s…” Her words trailed off, and she turned to hide her tears. As a man I couldn’t just stand there and watch her hurt, watch her cry.

  You hurt her, Pat.

  You shouldn’t have told her any of this.

  “Come here.” So I took her in my arms, and she leaned into my embrace and she held me the way she used to, and as I was brushing a tear from her eye I heard a quick double-knock at the door, and just as I was pulling away from her, it swung open, and Lien-hua, the woman I loved, the one I was hoping to marry, appeared.

  43

  The moment blistered apart.

  “Lien-hua?” I quickly stepped back from Amber.

  She’s supposed to be in Cincinnati. Why is she here?

  She told you she was sending up a surprise.

  She told you Oh man.

  “Pat.” Lien-hua was looking from Amber to me and back to Amber. She entered the room, let the door close out the howling night behind her.

  “This isn’t what…” I started apologizing, wanted to apologize, but I couldn’t quite pinpoint what to apologize for. “This is Amber.” I took another step back so I could see both women at the same time. “Sean’s wife.”

  “Sean’s wife,” Lien-hua echoed softly.

  Turning to Amber, I said, “And this is Lien-my friend Lien-hua Jiang.”

  Your friend?!

  Amber slid away a stray tear that remained on her cheek. “I’ll go. I’m sorry.” She told Lien-hua, “I just came to talk. That was all. He was just trying to help.”

  “Okay,” Lien-hua replied, in a tone that was impossible to read.

  Amber collected her purse and headed for the door. Lien-hua stepped aside to let her through, but before Amber passed her, I realized it wouldn’t be safe for her to leave. “Wait. The roads.”

  “I made it over here.” Amber’s voice was strained with deep emotion. “I’ll be fine.”

  I fished out the key to the room I’d reserved for Tessa earlier in the day. “Tessa’s staying at your place. Take her room.” I hated having this conversation in front of Lien-hua.

  She shook her head. “I’ll be all right.”

  “No, they closed the county roads,” Lien-hua said. “State Patrol did. I had to ride with a trooper just to get over here.” Despite the awkwardness of the situation, I heard genuine concern for Amber’s welfare in her words.

  “If the county roads are closed,” I said, “you won’t make it home.”

  “I’m used to-”

  I held out the key to her. “Amber. For your own safety. Please.”

  After one final objection, she accepted it. “Room 104,” I told her. I left off mentioning the obvious: that it was the room right next door.

  She passed quietly out the door, into the storm, and then I was alone with Lien-hua, who stood by the bed and appraised me.

  And I, her.

  Asian elegance. Black hair with two curling strands that gracefully framed her face. A posture and grace that came from years of tai chi and competition kickboxing. A woman who was not only gorgeous and athletic but also had swift intelligence and deep perception, I’d fallen for her the first time I met her fifteen months ago. Since then we’d dated, faded apart, reconnected. Tried to make things work.

  Ups and downs.

  “How did you get a key to the room?” I asked lamely.

  “The manager gave me one when I told him I was your girlfriend and that I’d come to surprise you.”

  This was just not good.

  “The FBI credentials sealed the deal,” she added.

  I wanted to ask her about Cincinnati, how she got up here today, but a flight to Madison, St. Paul, or even Rhinelander would have been easy enough to arrange this morning. However, none of that mattered at the moment. She was here and so was I, and she’d walked in on me while I was in the arms of another woman.

  “Really,” I said, “you have to believe me, this wasn’t what it looked like, here with Amber.”

  Lien-hua chose not to reply.

  “She came to check on me.”

  And to ask you why you broke things off with “Margaret told me about everything that happened today. Now, honestly. Tell me. Are you all right? You’re on your feet, so you must be feeling-are you feeling better?”

  “I am, except my ankle is having a little bit of a rough time.”

  “You can sit down if you like.”

  “I’m all right.”

  “Really, Pat-”

  “I’m all right.”

  “You almost drowned. You could have died of hypothermia.”

  “I just need you to know that I’m okay and that nothing was happening in here, a minute ago.” Truthfully, my ankle was throbbing, and I did want to sit down, but I forced myself to stand.

  A small silence. “Why was Amber crying?”

  Not the question I wanted to answer.

  “Because…”

  Sometimes a lie is a gift.

  Always the truth is.

  All right. Everything out in the open.

  “Five years ago”-I finally did take a seat on the bed-“I met her when she was engaged to Sean. We connected. Neither Amber or I set out to, neither of us wanted to, but we…”

  “You had an affair?”

  “It didn’t end up going that far.” I hesitated, then added, “But it went farther than it should’ve.”

  She was quiet.

  This was even harder than I’d thought.

  “I couldn’t stand the thought of hurting my brother, so I broke things off, stopped seeing Amber, stopped calling her. I still feel terrible that the relationship ever got started in the first place. It was five years ago.”

  “You mentioned that.”
r />   I could think of nothing else to say.

  “Were you in love?”

  I gave her a tiny nod.

  “And is that what you told her tonight? That you still loved her?”

  “No. I told her I was with you. That whatever we had was over.”

  Profiler that she was, Lien-hua watched me, no doubt discerning as much from my pauses, body language, tone as she did from the words themselves.

  “Are you still in love with her, Pat?”

  “No,” I said, but even I could hear the tiny hitch in my voice, and I hated that it was there. I’d chosen Lien-hua. Chosen her! Words rang in my head, from some TV show or movie I might have seen sometime: Being in love with more than one person doesn’t mean you’re being unfaithful, choosing to pursue more than one person does.

  And I was pursuing Lien-hua.

  Lien-hua.

  A silence broad and deep. At last she said, “So that’s why she was crying? That’s it?”

  “She’s had problems with Sean.”

  “I see.”

  I stood once again, approached her. “I didn’t even know that they-”

  She held up a gentle hand to stop me. “She drove through a blizzard to meet you in your motel room to tell you this-that she and her husband are having problems?”

  “You have to believe me, Lien-hua-”

  “Please, Pat. Don’t tell me what I have to do.”

  I felt helpless. “Let me explain.”

  “I don’t think it’s me you need to explain things to. I think it’s your brother.” Her words were sharp but filled with a delicate kind of pain.

  Once again I started to respond, but she shook her head and said, “Pat, when you’re seeing someone, you set boundaries. You keep yourself from situations where you’re alone in a motel room at night with one of your former lovers.”

  She was right. Everything she’d just said was true.

  She opened the door to leave, letting a sharp blast of winter wind into the room. “I’m staying in 124 with Natasha.” Now her tone had taken on a remote and disheartening professionalism, just as it had in the days last spring when we’d drifted apart. The pain of hearing the coolness in her words struck me even more starkly than the chilled air rushing past her. “She told me that she was meeting with you and Jake in the lobby at 9:00 for a briefing. I’ll be there. Good night, Pat.”

  Come on, figure this out!

  But then she was leaving.

  “We can talk about this more tomorrow, okay?” I said. “Straighten everything out?”

  A small nod was the only response she gave me.

  And then she was gone.

  As I watched the door close, my initial thought was to go after her, but then I realized that pressing things at the moment would do more harm than good.

  I sank onto my bed.

  I tried to process what had just happened-the stirring of old feelings for Amber, our admissions of affection for each other, the look of pain in Lien-hua’s eyes when she found us in each other’s arms.

  Man, I’d screwed things up.

  I couldn’t help but think of the diamond engagement ring in the box in Denver, waiting to be offered to Lien-hua.

  What a mess.

  Regret swept over me, and for a while I just sat there and listened to the storm rage against the window, a frigid and angry wind pulsing through the night.

  Not only had Chekov escaped, not only had our one link to Basque gotten murdered, not only had Ellory and at least two members of the Pickron family been killed, but now two of the people who mattered most to me were hurting and it was all my fault.

  The wind rattled my windows, but it didn’t stop me from hearing, in the room next to me, Amber moving around, getting ready for bed.

  And all I could manage to do was sit there trying not to think about what had just happened, waiting for the night to become quiet enough for me to be able to rest.

  44

  As Tessa was washing up, she realized she’d forgotten one of her bags, the one containing her pajamas and the pills she was using to help her sleep, in Sean’s pickup.

  Great.

  For months she’d bugged Patrick to teach her how to pick locks until around Thanksgiving he finally gave in. Since then she’d gotten pretty good with residential doors and even handcuffs, but cars were not her specialty, and she definitely remembered Sean locking the truck before they came inside.

  So now, as quietly as she could, she eased downstairs, donned her jacket and boots, grabbed Sean’s truck keys from the keyboard beside the door, and went outside.

  The snow slashed at her, and she had to use one arm to shield her face as she trudged along the path to the driveway. Although the walkway had been shoveled earlier and was bordered by piles of snow nearly six feet deep, in the light from the porch she could see that the storm had formed deep drifts crisscrossing the pathway in front of her.

  She picked her way through them.

  Despite the ferocity of the storm, everything around her looked so white, so pure, and in a sense, remarkably innocent.

  A stark contrast to how she felt inside.

  Seven months ago, on the night it happened, she’d watched a man outside the back window of the home where she and Patrick were staying get shot and drop in the moonlight. Detective Cheyenne Warren, the woman who’d just fired the three shots at him, eased out the door, gun in hand, to see if he was alive or dead.

  Tessa remembered how terribly her heart was beating.

  Beating.

  Deep and chilled.

  Moments later, she’d heard another shot outside, then the wisp of a door opening and a swish of soft movement behind her. She turned, saw a man’s outline silhouetted against the moonlight seeping through the window behind him; his hand was raised high, something long and narrow in it.

  Before she could call out, he brought the object down, hard, against her forehead, sending her spinning to the floor. The world went filtering, black on black.

  A buzz inside her head.

  Then she was on the carpet and everything was fuzzy and spinning and alive with colors that weren’t colors at all.

  And then the man was pressing a knee against her chest and stuffing a gag into her mouth.

  Terror rising.

  The world became blurry as the ache in her forehead pounded through her, but she was aware of this much: the man dragging her down the hallway toward her room. And then, only a few moments later, she heard the porch door pound open and Patrick calling her name. She struggled to get free but couldn’t. The intruder yanked her to her feet and pressed a gun against her head. With his other hand he clung to a fistful of her hair.

  Patrick called again and she tried to shout to him, but beneath her gag she barely managed to make a sound.

  Then he was in the hallway, coming toward her, to help her, to save her.

  The man jerked her backward into a room, closed the thick oak door, and took off the gag.

  He demanded that Patrick tell her who was lying dead outside, threatening to kill her if he refused.

  Patrick had tried to buy time, but in the end he’d told her.

  Her father.

  It was her father who’d been shot.

  And when she heard the words, she screamed and Patrick used the moment to shoot at the lock and kick open the door, but the man was behind her, the gun against her temple once again. This time he held his finger over hers, which was pressed against the trigger.

  She knew she was going to die. She knew it, knew it, knew it, and reached across her chest, grabbed her elbow, and swung the gun backward.

  And squeezed the trigger just as Patrick fired at the man’s forehead. She felt the wet blowback of blood against the back of her neck as the bullets both found their mark and the man behind her died.

  Crumpled to the carpet.

  Then her ear was ringing and she was trembling, terrified, and Patrick was helping her outside and away from that house filled with so much darkness and de
ath.

  The hearing in her ear that was only inches from the gun never came back, and since that night Patrick had tried to reassure her that he was the one who’d killed the man; that it wasn’t her fault, that the gun in her hand had fired accidentally.

  He had tried to convince her of that.

  And had failed.

  Because she knew she’d pulled that trigger, had willed it, had planned it, had done it.

  And in the end she was glad she did.

  She’d lost her father that day, and somewhere between tilting the gun and shooting a man in the face, she’d lost herself.

  The snow whirlwinded around her, forcing her to turn up her collar all the way even before she reached the truck. As she tried to unlock the door she fumbled with the keys and ended up dropping them into the slope of snow at her feet.

  The wind bit at her.

  With her bare hands she began digging through the powder, looking for the keys.

  Remembering.

  Of course she’d mourned the loss of her father, but since she’d hardly known him, it was almost like mourning a stranger-someone you hear about on the news: a body was found in the park and you feel a wash of loss and concern, and then end up with only a vague sense of guilt that you don’t feel worse than you do.

  In the seven months since that night, she’d learned to forgive the woman who’d accidentally killed her dad.

  And over time, life had gone on.

  In a way.

  Because even as the sting of her father’s death had healed, the reality of what she’d done, the fact that she’d pulled the trigger and killed a person, weighed on her now more heavily than ever.

  She finally found the keys, unlocked the door, and went for her bag. As soon as she had it, she left the truck and started for the house again.

  She had them.

  The pills that would help her sleep.

  45

  Tessa reentered the house. Stomped the snow from her boots.

  Patrick didn’t know about the secret wound she carried.

  Almost immediately after the shooting she’d decided it was something she needed to work through on her own, but that hadn’t gone so well. She’d even tried seeing a psychiatrist a few times on Thursday afternoons, skipping her seventh-hour study period, bugging out of school and cruising over to the guy’s office before heading home, using the money she’d inherited from her dad to pay for it.