by Harper Allen
“Tam!”
Even as McQueen shouted out her name his arms were around her, and he was diving from the landing into space, his body shielding hers. They hit the steps halfway down with a crashing jar and then they were tumbling down the rest of the stairs.
Tamara barely noticed. Her stricken gaze was fixed on the ball of fire that was rushing down the stairwell toward them.
They hit the bottom of the stairs, and immediately Stone was on his feet again. She caught an instant glimpse of his face, bloodied and grim as he scooped her up, pulled open the door to the street, and took a last desperate leap.
The pavement smashed up to meet them. His body still around hers, McQueen kept rolling, like a paratrooper making a dangerous landing. The ball of fire raced out of the doorway and across the sidewalk, and heat slammed into her like a wall. She tasted oil and dirt and asphalt, and then, blessedly, cool air flooding her lungs. She felt them stop rolling.
“Tam, honey, are you okay? Say something, baby!” Blood ran from the gash at his hairline into his left eye as he lifted his head. His gaze was dark with fear. “Talk to me, honey.”
“I—I’m okay. But you, Stone…” She took in the graze on his forehead, the bracketing of pain around his mouth.
“I’m fine,” he said tersely. “Dammit, you could have been killed. How could I have put you in danger like that? I should have known he had some insane plan in mind.”
Abruptly he gathered her to him again, as if he was afraid of letting her go. “I lost you once, baby. I found you and I lost you all in one night. When I walked away from you, I knew I’d just destroyed anything I might have had with you. I swore if I ever got another chance I’d never lose you again, but when I saw that maniac reaching for that switch I—”
“What do you mean, you found me and lost me in one night?” Tamara looked up into his face. “What night are you talking—”
She froze. Her gaze widened. She tried to take a breath and found she couldn’t.
“It was you.”
The words felt torn from her. She saw brilliant pain flicker behind his eyes, heard him start to say something, and suddenly a terrible fury poured through her, burning away everything she’d thought was real, everything she’d thought she’d known about him. She put her trembling hands against his chest and shoved herself away.
“It was you, wasn’t it? The night of my wedding, the most shameful night of my life, it was you,” she rasped. Behind him the flames engulfed the begrimed storefront, and the display window shattered into blades of falling glass. She could feel every one of them piercing her heart.
“You were the stranger, weren’t you, McQueen?” she whispered hoarsely. “You were the stranger I slept with that night!”
Chapter Seventeen
“He’s gone,” she said out loud, not looking at Pangor as he ran past her to the door looking for his beloved McQueen. “He’s gone and he won’t be back, so it’s no good looking for him.”
It was funny, she thought, sitting down at the kitchen table. The stupid cat had spent his life distrusting people and avoiding affection. Then a big man with a loud voice and rough manners had crashed into his sealed-off little world and the animal had fallen for him just like that.
“Stupid cat,” she said dully. “Stupid woman.”
As she’d gotten stiffly to her feet outside what had only moments earlier been Pascoe’s apartment he’d grasped her arm to help her, and she’d fixed him with a flat stare.
“Don’t touch me, McQueen. I don’t want your hands on me,” she’d said. “We’d better get out of here.”
Without looking to see if he was following her, she started walking to the car. Soon one of Robert Pascoe’s fires would again have a contingent of firefighters pitting themselves against the blaze, she thought. This time it would be his own charred body that was pulled from the ruins. Hers might have been found there, too, except for McQueen.
He’d saved her. He’d destroyed her.
“You’re wanted for arson. The last place you want to be found is in the vicinity of a fire,” she said tonelessly, pulling her keys from her pocket. “Tell me where you want me to drop you.”
“I’ll drive you home.” He took the keys from her. “I can call a cab from your place.”
“No, McQueen.” As he opened the passenger door for her she shook her head. “I owe you a lift. But I want you out of my sight as soon as possible.”
He closed his eyes, as if from a blow. Then he opened them, and the past three days disappeared. He was the man standing at the window again, the man who’d reached rock bottom and was still going down.
“I know you do, honey.”
As they pulled away from the curb she saw the fire trucks approaching, the crews already bracing themselves. She said a silent prayer for their safety, as she always did, and then she spoke, her voice too loud.
“Would you ever have told me?”
“I kept telling myself I would.” McQueen turned the car onto another street. “I hope I would have been man enough to.”
“What was it like, McQueen?” There was nothing but detached curiosity in her tone. “Was it every blue-movie fantasy come true—the jilted bride, still dressed in white, with you as the randy stud giving her the wedding night she might have missed out on? Too bad I was so damn drunk most of it was a blur.” Her perilous detachment cracked slightly. “You bastard. You saw me at my most vulnerable, and you moved in on me.”
“It was your vulnerability I never could make myself forget,” he said harshly, his gaze on the traffic ahead and his hands tight on the wheel. “Your vulnerability and your pain. Everything I did that night was wrong, Tamara, but it wasn’t for any of the reasons you think. You sat down at my table in that bar. I looked at you…and just like that I needed to take everything bad away for you.”
Ahead of them was a red light. “I needed to take it away for myself, too,” he added emotionlessly. “I’d gone to the last of the funerals that day. I’d watched them lower Burke’s casket into the ground and then I’d found the nearest bar and started drinking. But that doesn’t justify anything I did.”
He’d been to Donna Burke’s funeral that day. That had been the day he’d handed in his resignation and started down the self-destructive road that had nearly torn him apart. Just for a moment a thin sliver of understanding broke through her own pain. She hated herself for her weakness immediately.
“Even if it did, it doesn’t stretch over seven years. You knew who I was as soon as you saw me in that rooming house. You knew who I was when you came to my bed last night.”
Her voice had risen. “You knew who I was. You knew I didn’t know who you were.”
“I thought I’d been given a second chance with you,” he said, almost to himself. “The one unforgivable action,” he added huskily. “I thought I might be able to balance it. I thought I might be able to make you love me.”
She stared at him in angry disbelief. “That’s just it, McQueen—you did. That’s what tears at me so! I did fall in love with you, dammit!”
“No, honey.” The light ahead of them was still red, and he reached for the door handle. “I think you came real close, but one vital part of you held back. I told you once you couldn’t trust anyone enough to fall in love with them, and for a while I thought it was because of the way you’d been betrayed by Claudia. But it’s not that.”
He opened the door. He stepped out of the car. He glanced at the neon sign over a nearby bar, and looked back at her as she slid across the seat and behind the wheel.
“You were expecting something like this all along. That’s why you never said the words.”
She looked up at him, startled. Before she knew what he intended to do his hand went around the back of her neck and he brought his mouth to hers in a hard kiss. Just as swiftly he released her.
“That’s why you never told me you loved me,” he said softly.
He’d closed the car door behind him and had strode across the stree
t to the sidewalk without looking back. As the light had turned green she’d accelerated from the intersection, her eyes staring sightlessly ahead of her.
“Of course I told him,” she said to the empty kitchen. “I must have.”
He’d told her. He’d told her when she’d been lying in his arms. He’d told her all through the night, sometimes gasping the words out just before he came, sometimes whispering them into her ear as he held her. She’d woken this morning to find him watching her, and it had been the first thing he’d murmured as she’d opened her eyes.
I want it to be like it never happened. I want you to remember this as the first time you were ever with a man, because I already think of you as the first and only woman for me.
He’d told her that, too, she thought, clenching her hands in her lap. And she’d told him that the past could be changed.
One or both of them had been lying. It didn’t matter who and it didn’t matter if they’d been lying to each other or themselves. It had happened. The past couldn’t be changed. She’d trusted him, and he’d betrayed that trust in the most complete way imaginable.
She needed to phone Uncle Jack and tell him what they’d learned, Tamara thought, getting stiffly from the chair and walking over to the phone. She needed to sever the last link between her and the man she wanted to forget.
She lifted the receiver, realizing even as she did that she’d interrupted an incoming ring. With immediate certainty she knew it had to be him.
“Hello? Hello?”
It wasn’t McQueen. She closed her eyes. “Who’s this?”
The voice on the other end of the line sounded hesitant. “It’s Bill Trainor. Tamara?”
Her eyes flew open in shock. “What do you want, Trainor? If you’re looking for McQueen, he’s not here.”
“I know he’s not. We were at your house today, Tom Knopf and me, hoping we’d find him there.”
“You were at my house with the police.” It felt good to have an outlet for her rage. She went on, her voice a whiplash. “If you ever show up here again I’m calling the cops on you, get it?”
“I don’t blame you for being angry. We had no right to show up there. We had no right to go looking for McQueen at all, and that’s why I’m calling. Do you know where I can reach him? It—it’s important.”
About to lay into him again, she checked herself. There was something wrong here, she thought. The man sounded frightened.
“What do you mean, you had no right to go looking for him?”
She could almost see him on the other end of the line, brown eyes blinking in indecision behind the gold-rimmed glasses. When he finally answered her, his words came out in a rush.
“We’ve got nothing on him, not a single scrap of evidence tying him to that rooming house fire. But Knopf’s going to bring McQueen down, even if it means he has to manufacture a case. I’ve gone along with a lot of things, but this is where Tommy and I part ways.”
“Are you trying to tell me your partner intends to frame an innocent man?” She gripped the receiver more tightly. “Is he out of his mind?”
“He might be,” Trainor muttered. “God help me, I think he’s finally cracked. He’s hated McQueen since the Dazzlers fiasco—hell, I hated him, too, for what he made us look like.”
“Stone didn’t make you look incompetent,” she interrupted. “The two of you did that all by yourselves, from what I hear. But that’s old news, Trainor. What’s happened to suddenly make Knopf go off the deep end?”
“I don’t know.” Frustration bled into his voice. “But I think it’s because McQueen’s on the trail of Robert Pascoe again. I—I don’t think Knopf wants Pascoe caught.”
“I thought Knopf didn’t believe in Pascoe. I thought his theory was that McQueen created Pascoe as some kind of publicity-getting ploy.”
“That’s what he’s always said, and I believed him. Now I don’t. I think he knows there’s a real Robert Pascoe, and I think he’s afraid if Pascoe’s caught, he’ll talk. That’s why he wants McQueen stopped.”
“You think he’s been working with the arsonist all these years.” It was falling into place, Tamara thought, closing her eyes and remembering Harry Katz’s account. “You think he was Pascoe’s contact in the department.”
“I think he was more than that.” Trainor’s tone hardened. “I think he hired Pascoe to kill a man.”
“Dear God.” She braced herself against the kitchen counter. “Who did Knopf have killed?”
“I don’t know his name. It was way before my time, when Knopf was still a jakey. An investigator he looked up to got shafted by some hot-shot insurance dick and had to resign in disgrace. Knopf didn’t tell me any of this, but it’s no secret. Everyone who was around at the time knew how he felt about the man who’d brought his friend down.”
A dull roaring sound seemed to be filling her ears. It grew louder, until Trainor’s voice on the other end of the line was just a tiny buzz.
She’d known. She’d always known. When the beast had come rushing at the child she’d been then, she’d known she wasn’t alone when she’d escaped the fire and stood bewildered in the motel’s parking lot. She’d seen them, or the shapes of them—two men, each standing by their own car. They’d seen her, and one of them had laughed softly.
“Anyone ever tell you you’ve got hair like fire, little lady? Bet the other kids tease you about it, don’t they?”
She’d heard two car doors slam, and she’d fainted dead away.
She’d known. She’d blocked it out all these years.
“What else did Knopf say about the insurance investigator? What were his exact words, Trainor?” Her lips felt frozen, but at least the roaring sound had lessened a little.
“I asked him why he was gunning for McQueen, and at first he told me I didn’t need to know,” Trainor said grudgingly. “Then he muttered something like, ‘Let’s just say it all goes back to a nosy investigator who should’ve cut Harley a break instead of the guy he did.’ I don’t think he realized I knew what had happened to Perkins or to the insurance investigator who brought him down.”
But you don’t know who that insurance investigator was, do you? Tamara thought numbly. You don’t know that his wife and son were killed along with him, and you don’t know you’re talking to his daughter—the only one of his family who didn’t die in that fire.
“…ended up a damn hero and Harley’s remembered as a joke. If I’m right McQueen could get railroaded straight into an arson conviction. For God’s sake, half of the department suspected him seven years ago, and if Knopf takes the stand and swears that the evidence he’s trumped up against McQueen is solid no one’s going to give much weight to anything I say.” Trainor sounded strained. “Pascoe’s the only one who can clear McQueen. You tell your boyfriend he’d better catch his arsonist before Knopf catches him.”
“I’ll get word to him somehow. I don’t know how, but I’ll find a way to warn him. And Trainor—thanks.”
She’d stopped shaking, Tamara saw as she hung up the phone and immediately lifted the receiver again. She wasn’t shaking, but that only meant she’d imposed enough control over herself to keep functioning right now.
Or maybe that wasn’t true, either, she thought a split second later. Instead of calling Uncle Jack’s home she’d unconsciously punched in the number of his cell phone. Pressing her lips together in quick irritation, she hung up once more, but not before she’d heard the staccato burring sound that meant she’d connected and the call had gone through.
From somewhere in the house she heard a muffled ringing. It broke off abruptly.
The tiny hairs on the back of her neck rose. Very slowly, she replaced the receiver in the cradle. She turned.
Uncle Jack was standing in the shadows of the hallway. Frowning, he shoved his cell phone into his coat pocket.
“Hate these things,” he muttered to himself. He lifted his gaze to her frozen one. His face was devoid of expression.
“You know,
don’t you, punkin?” he said heavily.
“I know.” She wasn’t sure if the words had come out. She tried again. “I think I’ve always known it was you.”
“…other kids tease you about it, don’t they?” It had been the slimmer man who’d tossed the teasing words at her. But her gaze had been fixed on the bulkier of the two silhouettes. Even as she’d tried to choke out his name, his hands—the same hands that had bounced her on his knee at her parents’ house—flew to his face, as if he couldn’t bear to look at her or as if he didn’t want her to look at him. His shoulders had shaken, and that had frightened her enough that she changed her mind about calling out to him. Why wasn’t he running over to her, lifting her up, getting her to safety and then going back in for Mom and Dad and Mikey?
Uncle Jack was a fireman! He was a hero! Why was he getting into his car and driving away?
She knew why. She didn’t want to know.
Just before her terrified mind slid into unconsciousness, five-year-old Tamara King decided she wouldn’t ever let herself know….
Tamara opened her eyes. She darted a quick sideways glance at the phone, and Jack Foley sighed. His step was reluctant as he approached, but it didn’t falter.
“I can’t let you do it, punkin,” he said softly. “I never wanted to hurt you but you’ve left me no way out, Tammy.”
Her legs weren’t working right. He came closer, and now she could see that in his hand he had a wad of cotton cloth. She backed up against the counter and felt her feet slip on the small rag rug in front of the kitchen sink.
She struck her head hard on the steel edge of the sink as she went down. Her back against the lower cupboards and her legs splayed awkwardly in front of her on the floor, Tamara stared dazedly at Jack Foley’s face as he bent toward her, but for a moment it wasn’t him she was seeing at all.
“I didn’t tell you,” she whispered, her eyes wide with pain. “I never told you I loved you, did I, McQueen?”
One strong hand gripped her by the shoulder. The other pressed the chloroformed rag to her face. Darkness rushed in and her world went completely black.
