by Alice Orr
Katherine turned away from the admission desk and the woman with the frosty expression. She tried to turn away from her painful thoughts, as well. As much as possible, she kept her mind away from the past and the hard, heartbreaking scenes that had happened in places like this. Now, she could feel all of those memories threatening to surge up inside her with the force of a flood powerful enough to drown her in its depths. That was why she didn’t object at first when Vic, who had finished with the interrogation at the hospital desk, took her by the arm and steered her back through the automatic sliding doors, out of the emergency room and toward the parking lot.
“Where are we going?” she had the presence of mind to ask at last, as the chilly night air snapped her back to some semblance of sensibility.
“We have to get out of here.”
She tried to stop her forward movement by planting her feet solidly beneath her, but Vic kept on pulling her along. He was too strong to resist. Even the deep-treaded, hard-rubber soles of her hiking boots couldn’t sustain a foothold against his obvious determination.
“I have to stay with Megan,” she protested, continuing to resist despite the futility of her efforts.
“There’s nothing you can do for her now. I’ve given them as much information as she gave me. I don’t think she knows any more than that. I told the admitting nurse to call the center in the morning for the health-insurance details. She said they would do that. Now, it’s up to the doctors.”
“I can’t just leave Megan here,” Katherine said, her voice loud enough that a couple on their way out of the lot turned to look.
Vic stopped and turned to Katherine, putting an arm around her shoulders, acting every inch the concerned husband trying to calm a distressed wife. For a moment, Katherine let her thoughts linger on that fantasy.
“You have to listen to me,” he said in a tone so serious, even desperate, that she couldn’t help but do what he asked.
“I’m listening,” she said.
“I told that nurse exactly what Megan told me, that she was attacked, hit on the head, by somebody waiting in the dark inside your apartment. What do you think is going to happen next?”
Katherine stared up at him as he leaned down toward her with fierce intensity in his dark eyes. She wasn’t quite sure what he was asking. The hospital was still having its effect on her senses.
“I don’t know what you mean,” she said.
“I mean that in very quick time this place is going to be knee-deep in cops. I just reported a case of criminal assault. The law says the hospital has to call in the police. We shouldn’t be here when they come.”
“Why not?”
Katherine was suddenly aware of questions about Vic crowding through the haze of her confused thoughts and troubled emotions. What was there about contact with the police that upset him so much that he seemed willing to do just about anything to avoid it?
He leaned closer. “I’ve been putting a lot of things together about what’s been happening to you and to the Bellaway kids these past few days. I’ve got a strong suspicion we could be up against some very bad guys here.”
He’d lowered his voice, as if to prevent anyone else listening in. She could hear the urgency in his words, but she didn’t exactly understand what he was saying.
“What kind of very bad guys?” she asked.
“The kind that don’t like to leave loose ends around when it comes to the police being involved.”
“Are you talking about street gangs?”
The center had its share of problems with gang activity, and the situation had been escalating over the past year. Still, she couldn’t think what gangs might have to do with all of this.
“Not the kind of gangs you’re talking about,” Vic said.
Why was he being so mysterious? “What other kind of gangs are there?” she asked with mounting exasperation. “Are you talking about mobsters or something like that?”
She’d meant that as sarcasm, but the way Vic was staring down at her now suggested she’d accidentally hit upon close to what he considered the truth.
“You’ve got to be joking,” she said.
“I’ve never been more serious in my life.”
Katherine was about to laugh and scoff some more, but something in his eyes kept her from doing that.
“Mobsters may not be exactly the right way to put it,” he said. “Let’s just say I’ve got reason to believe these are some extremely dangerous people who will do whatever they have to do to get what they want.”
“Vic, what is going on here?”
“What is going on is that we have to get in your car and leave this place before the cops arrive. Otherwise, there could be real trouble, and it just may end up getting those two kids hurt even worse than has happened to them already.”
Katherine stared back at him. She had no doubt he believed the things he was saying. She could feel the strength of that belief in his grip on her arms, but it all sounded so fantastic to her. She didn’t know what to think.
“You have to trust me,” he said, leaning so close she could feel the warmth of his breath on her cheek. “I know this may come across to you as crazy talk, but it isn’t. Believe me, there’s a lot more to it than that.”
She sighed and stopped resisting his hold on her.
“All right. I’ll believe you,” she said, “but only this one time, and you’ll have to prove to me that what you’re saying is true.”
“Sure, sure,” he said. “Now we’ve got to get out of here while we still can.”
He was already pulling her along again toward her car, and, no matter how skeptical she might be about what he had just told her, she was following.
Chapter Sixteen
Katherine didn’t even pay lip service to a protest against Vic coming along with her this time. She didn’t know what to think about his claims of archvillains being involved in the frightening events of this week. Whatever level villains they might be, she now understood without question how stupid it would be to risk running into them on her own. She let Vic drive her car back to her place. No matter how stubborn she might be about self-reliance, even she had to admit that the hospital experience had her too unsettled to be safe on the road right now. Besides, she was deeply tired. Still, she didn’t intend to sleep at her apartment. She was only stopping there to pick up some things. She’d decided that even before Vic found the note. She was on the phone to the hospital at the time.
“The emergency room nurse says Megan is conscious. She has a mild concussion, so they’re keeping her there a couple of days for observation and to do some tests, but they think she’ll be okay after she gets some rest.”
Katherine had called out most of that from the bedroom where she’d used the telephone to contact the hospital and was now packing a suit bag. When Vic didn’t answer, she walked back into the living room. She guessed what he was holding in his hands as soon as she saw it. The note looked a lot like the one she’d found on her mantelpiece the night before. What he had on his hands was something more of a mystery to her. He was wearing black leather gloves. She’d seen him bare-handed more than once outdoors in these past, very cold days. Yet here he was in her overheated living room with gloves on.
He must have noticed the direction of her stare because he said, “I don’t want to contaminate the crime scene.”
Katherine didn’t like to think of her living room in such terms, but the dark stain that didn’t fit the pattern of her carpet made the truth of his words all too unavoidable. She also didn’t like to think about how readily Vic’s mind appeared to work like a criminal’s, or maybe a lawman’s. She grabbed at that straw.
“Were you ever in law enforcement?” she asked.
He was examining the note when she said that. He looked up at her with a look in his eyes that she wasn’t sure how to interpret. Then he flung his head back and laughed. The sound was a relief after the tension of the evening. Too bad the moment didn’t last.
“Me
, a cop?” he said when he had finished laughing. “Not hardly.”
There it was again, his utter disdain for the police. What was that all about? She wished she was more certain she really wanted to know the answer to that question.
“Speaking of cops, they should be here soon,” Vic said. “If Megan’s conscious, they’re probably talking to her right now, or maybe they’re already on their way to check out where she got attacked. We need to make ourselves scarce.”
“I don’t know if that’s the right thing to do.”
Actually, she was certain it was not.
“Katherine, it’s like I said back at the hospital. You have to trust me on this one.”
Vic was staring at her as earnestly as he had back in the hospital parking lot. She could feel his eyes working their influence over her. She wondered how hard she should resist. Part of her didn’t want to resist at all. She knew from the way his gaze made her insides quiver that the part of her advising nonresistance didn’t necessarily include her brain.
“Do you have a place to stay?” he asked.
She wished his question didn’t arouse in her a sudden pang of disappointment that he hadn’t immediately suggested she sleep at his place again. Of course, after what she’d as much as accused him of this morning, she shouldn’t be surprised.
“I called a hotel after I called the hospital,” she said.
She didn’t have any close friends in Albany other than Megan. Katherine’s time here had been spent mostly working. That was the way she’d chosen to heal the wounds left by Daniel’s death. There’d been little time or inclination on her part for making friends. Perhaps Vic understood that because he didn’t comment further.
“Which hotel did you call?” was all he asked.
“The Omni,” she said. “It’s the only one I know.”
She’d stayed there when she’d come from Chicago to interview for the job at the Arbor Hill Center.
“Sounds good,” Vic said with a nod. “Let’s get going. I’ll follow you down there in my car.”
Once more, she didn’t object to his offer. She also didn’t object to his urging that they hurry their departure. This place where she had once felt so comfortable and at home was not either of those things for her right now. She couldn’t keep her eyes from straying to the stain on the carpet or a chill from shivering up her spine when she did.
“Just one thing before we go,” she said. “I want to read the note.”
“Sure,” Vic said. “I found it up here over the fireplace.”
He gestured toward the mantelpiece as she reached for the paper in his hand.
“Don’t touch it. I don’t think the cops will find any prints, but you don’t want yours messing the thing up anyway.”
Again, he was talking like a person who knew a lot about crime. Katherine would have liked to tell herself that was probably because he watched a lot of detective shows on television, but somehow she couldn’t imagine such an action-oriented man spending much time in front of a TV set. She moved close enough to him to read the note he was holding by its edges in his gloved fingers. She couldn’t mistake the way her throat tightened just from standing next to him. Maybe some of that was because of what she’d been thinking about his troubling attitude toward the police. Nonetheless, she was honest enough with herself to admit that the anxiety Vic made her feel didn’t all have to do with his obvious knowledge of things criminal. She forced herself to focus on the paper he held in his hand.
“We warned you once. You should have listened,” it said.
“What do they mean?” she sucked in a scared breath. This note struck her as being as sinister as the last one. She was grateful she hadn’t brought Sprite home with her, and glad she’d decided not to stay here herself.
“I don’t know for sure, but we have to get out of here,” Vic said, as if he might have been tuned into her doubts. “This note is exactly what I’d expect from the kind of guys I’ve been telling you about, and they’ve got friends everywhere. You don’t want your name on some police blotter right now. It’s bad enough that they have your address and maybe know you took Megan to the hospital. We need to stall them for a while to keep them from getting any closer. That’ll give us enough time to figure out how much we should tell them.”
“Vic, I don’t like the sound of any of this.”
“I don’t like it either,” he said, and she could tell he meant it. “But it’s not just us we have to think about. We need to sit down and figure out what’s best for those two Bellaway kids. We’ve got to try to find Coyote, too. We may end up telling the cops everything, maybe not. If we stick around here much longer, we won’t have a choice.”
One thing he was saying struck Katherine as definitely true. She had to give herself some time to think.
“My bag is in the bedroom,” she said, then hurried to get it.
Minutes later they were out of the apartment and on their way down the stairs to the street. They’d left the note on the mantel and the door slightly ajar, just as it had all been when Katherine first arrived home earlier this evening. Vic assured her the police would find the marks a lock pick had made on her door latch, just as he had in his brief inspection. She wished it would be that easy for someone, including herself, to detect and analyze the markings all of this was making on her heart.
IT OCCURRED TO VIC that he was too tall a guy to be spending so much time on tiptoe, but that was what he had to do if he was going to stay around Katherine for any length of time. Five minutes into any conversation with her, he was bound to find himself up on his toes, picking through every sentence he said as if it were made of rusty nails and broken glass. One false step, and he could end up with gaping wounds, or at least in need of a tetanus shot, from tromping down too hard on the wrong spot. He wasn’t used to such delicate dancing. He wondered how long it would take for him to get so tired of the trouble it took that he wouldn’t care to bother anymore. He knew he wasn’t there yet. He only had to look at her and, all of a sudden, he was ready and willing to put up with almost anything as long as she’d let him stick around.
So, when she told him she intended to spend the night in a hotel, he didn’t make much comment in response. He knew exactly what he’d like to say, of course. His usual bulldozer self would have come right out with it, too, telling her how there was nothing in the world he’d rather do right now than join her in that hotel room for tonight and any other night she’d let him be there. Then, she’d take off at a run down Capitol Hill as fast as her hiking boots could carry her. In this weather, he’d be left with snowflakes on his face instead of egg, but it amounted to the same thing. That’s why he was keeping his mouth shut for this duration anyway.
He had managed to ask if he could follow her down here to the Omni in his car, making a point not to be pushy in the way he said it. Maybe that’s the reason she’d agreed without any fuss, or maybe the events of this evening had her so upset she didn’t want to be on her own just yet. He’d seen the way she looked in the hospital, with her eyes round and scared, darting from one end of the place to the other. He had put two and two together then, with what she’d told him about her stepson dying after a long illness. Hospitals must have pretty bad memories for her. He’d rushed her out of there partly because of that. He’d only talked about avoiding the cops because he didn’t want to make her even more uncomfortable by bringing up those bad memories of hers. Besides, what he’d said about the police was true.
However it had come about, he was happy to be here now, standing in the lobby of the hotel while the automatic door slid open and shut behind him at regular intervals, letting guests in and out on gusts of frigid night air. Katherine was at the registration desk. It would be more discreet of him not to go up there with her while she checked in. Discretion was something else he didn’t usually give much thought to, but she seemed to have him in unfamiliar territory in general. Like the fact that, despite all of what had been happening at the center to both of them an
d to people they cared about, the only thing Vic found himself able to focus on right now was the way wisps of Katherine’s hair fell forward across her cheek as she looked down to sign the hotel registration form.
“Can I carry this up for you?” he asked, when she’d walked back over to him with the small folder containing her room key card in her hand.
He was referring to the bag she’d left on the lobby floor next to him while she went to register. He’d seen her shake her head no to the bellman when he approached at the desk. Vic expected she’d respond to his offer in the same way.
“I’d appreciate that,” she said.
He was so stunned, that she had already walked away to the right, toward the elevators, before he grabbed her bag from the floor and hurried to catch up. He followed her past two lobby restaurants and the hotel gift shop into an open elevator car and watched as she pushed the button marked fourteen. They didn’t speak as the car rose or when the doors opened at the fourteenth floor and she checked the wall signs to find the direction of her room. He waited awkwardly behind her as she unlocked the door to her room. Awkwardness was another territory where he had spent very little time.
Vic hefted the suit carrier bag over the threshold into a long living room with a window the width of the wall at the opposite end. The curtains and drapes had been pulled aside to show the state capitol building on the crest of the hill across the way. Lights illuminated the steeply pitched roof peaks topped by metal spire points that had always made Vic think of something more native to Asia than this massive, gray granite building above the Hudson. The view was impressive all the same.
“This is quite a layout,” he said as he put the bag down inside the door, which had swung shut on its tight hinge springs when he let go of it.
