by Jamie Quaid
To my utter startlement, the compact flamed on like a meteor. Or maybe that was just what it looked like to me.
The plastic case hit Dane square between the eyes, causing him to stumble sideways. Andre’s bullet merely grazed his shoulder, but the derringer went off at an awkward angle. The senator grabbed his forehead as if my little missile had blinded him, then stared incredulously at blood blooming on his immaculate white shirt. Off-balance, he slipped and fell on his protective bootie and went down.
What, exactly, had I done, if anything? The riot erupting around me didn’t give me time to think. Headset had regained his popgun and was fighting his way toward the door.
Andre wore the expressionless visage of an automaton bent on murder, like the Terminator. He’d shot at a U.S. senator—and instead of being horrified, he retained his Special Ops face. That he wasn’t spraying the room with cover fire, but instead stood over me, willing to shoot again without a thought for himself, was inhuman.
I still wouldn’t let him go to prison for me.
Not knowing if we’d killed the senator, I pulled together my fried brain cells and visualized the remaining goons in a distant African prison. They needed to be taught a lesson. Did I have to say it aloud? How? “Let the big bad bullies be bullied by real animals,” I shouted. If coherence counted, I’d lost the battle.
A siren followed my insane declaration. The goons looked at each other, then dived through the window. Bill was so startled, he barely had time to smash his bludgeon against their muscled rears as they fled.
Well, that had been anticlimactic after imagining African prisons. Had I expected them to vanish like genies into bottles? Got that wrong, if so.
Only the bad senator remained, sprawled across the floor with blood pumping from his chest and a stunned, vacant look on his handsome face.
I looked at Andre and his gun, ready to take down a squadron of goons, and not a target in sight.
“Not dramatic, are we?” I asked, but I sounded awestruck instead of sarcastic as I pressed a hand to my bleeding ear. I’d come that close to dying.
Still looking grim, Andre lowered his weapon. Schwartz was on his phone and racing out the door after the fleeing baddies. Bill kind of looked blankly at the crumpled senator on the floor before taking out a handkerchief and attempting to apply it to Vanderventer’s chest wound.
Milo appeared from nowhere to lick my face. I was crying. And shaking. Rather than fight my fear, I curled him in my arms and wept into his fur. I think I might always associate the stench of kimchi with gore and death. I was trying hard not to hurl up my guts. I couldn’t look at Vanderventer.
We had killed a senator. I needed to visualize us somewhere safe but I was too stunned to think of consequences. Maybe I could take full responsibility. After all, I’d thrown a fireball. Like the police would believe that. Even I didn’t know what I’d done. Story of my life.
Finally shifting out of Terminator stance, Andre kneeled down to help me up. He didn’t complain when I collapsed into his arms and wept incoherently instead, blabbering about Sarah and Milo and Max and African prisons until he probably thought me insane—not at all my lawyerly self.
“It’s okay, Clancy,” he kept saying, rocking me back and forth as Milo escaped to prowl the room. “It’s okay. Everything’s going to be okay. I may wring your neck, but thanks to your cat, everyone is fine.”
His threats calmed me more than any other reassurance could. I could feel the hard muscle beneath his silk shirt, trusted his strength, but didn’t trust myself. I had no business being attracted to a man who made his own laws. But he’d been here when I needed him, and that was so precious that I couldn’t let him go just yet. He sounded strangely distant, as if trying to separate himself from the scene, but he didn’t shove me away. For that, I was grateful.
“Milo?” I questioned through my sobs, trying not to wipe my nose on his pretty shirt, but I’d already smeared it with blood.
“Yeah, when I found your weird cat wandering around the storage unit without you, I knew there was trouble.”
Remembering his voice mail, I punched his arm and struggled to break away. He wouldn’t let me.
“I told you where I was going!” I probably hiccupped more than shouted. “I tried to reach you. Don’t go blaming me because you weren’t answering your phone.”
“There’s no signal at the storage place,” he protested. “I had to go out to the street to get your message. I thought you were studying, damn you! I wouldn’t have known you’d gone anywhere if it hadn’t been for Milo raising such a racket. He took us to Sarah first.”
Schwartz returned, and men in blue filled the room. The ubiquitous medics were swarming. I wasn’t leaving Andre’s arms anytime soon, so I ignored them while they worked over the senator. Tomorrow’s papers would be gloriously gory.
“Sarah,” I wept. “I didn’t know they’d kill a chimpanzee!”
“They didn’t. She’s alive. Don’t ask. Just play nice for Schwartz’s pals, okay? Or should we have you sedated so you don’t have to talk at all?” Andre still held me, scowling protectively anytime anyone official hovered. Since the cops thought he was calming a hysteric, they left us alone.
“I may have sent the spooks to Africa,” I whispered. “Is Vanderventer dead?”
He cast a glance toward the corner. “They’re working on him. That ninja compact trick was pretty good. If I’d known you could do that, I wouldn’t have tried to take him down. We’d better put our stories together. This could turn ugly.”
If they really looked, they’d find Andre’s bullets in the wall. I was pretty certain it was likewise a derringer bullet in Dane. Maybe he would live. Ugly wasn’t even close if he did. I shivered.
“He paid those goons to cut Max’s brakes,” I murmured, trying to keep it together. Milo climbed on top of me, fighting with Andre’s arm to crawl closer. I shifted position so he could curl up against my chest. His rumble of satisfaction was almost as good as Andre’s strength. “He was going to kill me for those boxes. Did you find anything useful?”
“Lab experiments. Accident reports. Test rats doing the conga for all I know. Paddy would have to interpret, and I don’t think we can trust his competency. I don’t want anyone not from the Zone looking at them.”
I nodded. “Don’t tell anyone where they are. That’s Zone business.” I’d have to tell Jane they were gone, just in case she asked. Whatever was in them had caused too many deaths to risk innocents.
Andre looked startled, then grim. “Got it. If anyone mentions them, we just figure the bikers probably burned them.”
I wanted my compact back, but when a cop carefully sealed it into a Baggie, I could see it was no more than a molten lump. I didn’t think they’d be taking fingerprints off that anytime soon. I needed to go home and talk to Max in the mirror. I hoped he was still in my mirror, because I was feeling pretty bereft right now. I needed more reassurance than Andre could give me that I’d done the right thing, even though I wasn’t entirely certain what I’d actually done.
“You came to my rescue,” I whispered. “It was self-defense. We can all swear to that.”
He nodded, but he continued to look grim as he surrendered me to the medics.
There wasn’t much they could do except take a blood sample for drugs and plaster my ear. I winced, and not just because I’d been an inch away from death. I wondered what they’d find in my blood besides whatever the spooks had used to silence me. Surely medics wouldn’t test DNA, right?
Even though all Baltimore officialdom had arrived to cover the scandal of a senator in a shoot-out, Schwartz had been the first on the scene, and he took charge. In his best officious Nazi stance, Leo pulled out his notebook and droned on about receiving a report of screams emanating from a vacant apartment. He’d been in the area hunting for a missing person and intervened when unauthorized personnel attempted to break in the door.
I was really starting to like Schwartz’s creative writing talen
ts. Under his presentation, Andre’s weapon of mass destruction belonged to the men holding me hostage. Andre had merely grabbed it to defend his missing employee, who’d yet again been mugged for his cash deposit.
The insurance company was so going to kick Andre’s ass if they had to cover one more fraudulent deposit. I struggled to protest, but Andre pinched me into silence. After all he’d done, I couldn’t argue over invisible money. It at least lent some credibility to my kidnapping, however infinitesimal.
“And the senator?” an officer with lots of pretty badges adorning his chest asked suspiciously.
Schwartz looked at me. His talent for lying only went so far.
I don’t know what made me do it. The same instinct that had told me to fling my compact was the only excuse I had for what I said next. I still didn’t have evidence a court would accept that Dane had ordered Max killed.
It didn’t matter. If Dane wasn’t dead, I wanted his punishment to be private, painful, and long-term, and I wanted to be the one to choose the sentence. I didn’t want him buying his way off with expensive lawyers. So again, with malicious forethought, I lied.
“The senator is my boyfriend’s cousin. We were on the phone when I was mugged. He tried to rescue me, and those goons that got away shot him, with his own gun!” I started weeping again. Flimsy story needed more work, but tears were always a good cover-up. “Then they told him to bring money and not call the police! It could have been an assassination attempt,” I cried, ingeniously, adding, “Detective Schwartz saved us both!”
Call me anyone’s bitch, would they? I’d make putty of the boys in blue.
A cop saving a senator made a lovely promo op. The bigwig officer nodded in approval, jotting notes of his own. Schwartz looked a trifle startled but didn’t correct me. I was learning to manipulate cops as well as the media. If I didn’t go to hell for twisting the Universe to my whims, I would go for prevarication of the highest degree.
I was seriously starting to believe in fiery depths. That compact thing had scared the wits out of me. Yeah, I’d used the compact as a ninja star and startled a senator into shooting himself, but the hellish flame-on? Never once occurred to me. I wanted to believe that Max had grown so furious, he’d turned into some kind of flaming superpower to take his cousin down.
I would start believing in witches and zombies soon.
“I want to take her home,” Andre said with that air of authority he commanded too well when he wanted. “Detective Schwartz knows where to find us. We’d rather keep this out of the media, if at all possible. The senator’s family doesn’t need any more grief right now.”
The police captain hummed thoughtfully.
I hugged Andre and let him help me up while I still snuggled Milo in my arms. The family of senators could keep lots of things hushed up, and that was just the way we liked it.
The Zone’s secrets would remain in the Zone.
32
Andre was looking pretty gray around the edges by the time we got to my glorious Victorian apartment. He had that transparent look he’d had after the bar incident, but he still wanted to come in with me. I simply couldn’t invite him in while Max lingered. Dropping Milo inside the apartment, I kissed Andre at the door.
And almost instantly regretted my decision to keep him out. The man held me as if he really meant it, as if my almost dying had shaken him. Or turned him on, which would be perversely like him. Damn, his kiss was sweet and fervent, and I wanted so much more that I stomped on his foot and shoved him into the hall.
His pained look had little to do with my running shoes stomping his Italian loafers. “You shouldn’t be alone, Clancy,” he warned. “You shouldn’t even be here. Come back to my dad’s place.”
“Finals. Tomorrow.” I ached in a thousand places and simply wanted sleep, but I’d blown my study time. I needed to satisfy my driving urge to see Max; then I could hit the books. Hours, mere hours from finishing school. Focus, I could do—now that the drugs were out of my system. No man was going to stand in my way. “Tell me again Sarah is okay.”
“Sarah has a hole in her upper arm and a terrified vet bandaging her. She shifted on him. I sent Ernesto to bring her home. I’m posting the invisible kid at your door if you won’t come home with me.”
“Give Tim a bed,” I said curtly. “Don’t go getting ideas, Andre. I’m taking that test tomorrow, then we’ll talk.”
He nodded acceptance, although even through his gray weariness, the gleam in his eye said he had schemes of his own. Andre would always have schemes of his own. Whether they matched mine remained to be seen.
I rushed back to the bedroom the instant Andre left. I waited in front of the cracked mirror, rubbing its shattered glass, desperately needing to talk to Max.
He didn’t show. That was the reason I’d damned him to hell in the first place—he was never there when I needed him.
I cried, I shouted, I smacked the glass, splintering more pieces to the dresser. No Max.
It was almost like losing him all over again. I fell on the bed, weeping, and didn’t hear Tim arrive until he pounded frantically on my front door, which had Mrs. Bodine shouting worriedly from her window below. Her frantic cries caused me to struggle out of the covers, wipe my eyes, and end my pity party. I opened the door for Tim, and he let in movers with a two-cushion foldout sofa from Andre. Tim watched me warily, but even while wearing my sandals, he was my pal. I wasn’t going to bite off his head for helping.
“We’ll go shopping after I take my test tomorrow and collect my pay,” I promised. “Help yourself to the food.”
I had no interest in eating. I let Tim settle into his sofa in the front room, with a TV he’d retrieved from Julius’s house. I hadn’t realized I had cable. Leaving him to his reality shows, I locked myself into my bedroom with my books.
I fell asleep before dark and didn’t wake until dawn. I tried to call Max again, but my mirror reflected only my shadowed eyes and sallow complexion.
Max had told me that he wasn’t going anywhere until he’d nailed his killer.
Did that mean bringing down Dane had given him enough satisfaction to move on to a better place? Trying to believe that made me feel a tiny bit better, but not much, not yet. The wound was still raw, and my emotions were pretty out of control. I was going to blow my afternoon exam if my eyes kept leaking.
I showered, checked my bust, biceps, and behind to make certain I hadn’t developed any new assets that might mean Vanderventer had died, and dressed for school in my usual skirt and button-down and my new kitten heels. You’d have thought at least one of my fellow students would have noticed by now that I didn’t wear boots anymore, but nooooo, they’d all been too centered on their books. Law students.
I fixed eggs for Tim and still had time to put in an hour or two on my studies before someone pounded on my door.
I glanced over my shoulder and contemplated running for the balcony and sliding down a pole to make a break for it. Tim actually flickered out. Some bodyguard he made.
But I’d turned a page yesterday. I was no longer hiding. I stuck my chin out and yanked open the door.
More black suits stood outside. Before I could scream and start kicking, one held up a shiny badge. “Secret Service, ma’am. If you’ll come with us, we have a few questions.”
“No can do, gentlemen.” I stood firm against these intimidating figures of authority. I’d had quite enough of being bullied. If they tried to shove me down any stairs, I’d take them down with me. After what I’d seen and done, I wasn’t that terrified little girl any longer, thank you, Saturn.
“I have my final law exam this afternoon. I need to finish studying. I would be delighted to accommodate you this evening, after the exam.”
I couldn’t believe I was actually rejecting the Secret Service.
“This is a matter of national security,” the polite speaker insisted. “The senator has questions.”
Oh, hell. He was alive. Now I really would have to kill Vander
venter. I mean, really kill him. I was so not going to miss my final because he wanted Max’s damned boxes. “Planning on hauling me out at gunpoint?” I asked.
“He told us you’d give us trouble,” the first one said without concern. “He said to tell you that Max needs to talk to you.”
That shut me right up.
“Tim, tell Andre I’m leaving with these nice men,” I called to the empty room, grabbing my purse. Milo peered from his pillow at the window but didn’t attack, so I had to assume these guys were legit. “And then they’ll be dropping me at the school. I may need a ride home.”
The suits didn’t say anything about my plans for them or even my talking to an empty room. They merely escorted me down the stairs. Mrs. Bodine peered from her parlor, waving warily.
“Shall I tell that nice newspaper reporter friend of yours that you’re a hero?” she called sweetly.
Mrs. Bodine had a devious and evil mind, and I wasn’t entirely certain she’d be working in my favor if she called Jane and blasted my predicament all over the media. I waved back at her. “This isn’t about me, Mrs. Bodine. Detective Schwartz is my hero.”
The suits didn’t shove me impatiently or do any of those things Dane’s goons had done. I wasn’t even certain they were carrying weapons, and their black Lincoln Navigator wasn’t as badass as the Escalade.
“Nice wheels, guys,” I told them as they assisted me in with a helpful hand to my elbow.
We rode in tense silence to Bethesda and not to the D.C. hospital I’d sneaked into a few nights ago. Why would Dane Vanderventer say Max wanted to talk to me? If I found Max in Dane’s mirror, I was going to spew. I might move to Africa with the goons, providing they’d actually gone. I’d no idea what I’d accomplished in my drugged state.
Did I have time to kill a senator before taking my final?
