His father’s eyes burned with hatred. “What papers?”
“An accounting book, actually.”
“Where did you get something like that?”
“My mother left it to me.”
“Your mother’s been dead for twenty-six years. The statute of limitations has already run out on anything having to do with those accounts,” D’Amato said smugly.
“There’s no statute of limitations on murder,” Wyatt said.
D’Amato snorted. “I thought you said she left you an accounting book. What kind of numbers—”
“It’s a book accounting for the steps you took to solidify your position as head of the syndicate,” Wyatt said. “It details the men you had killed, or killed yourself, to become the boss.”
“If you really had a book like that, you would have used it before now.”
“I never had a reason before now to use it,” Wyatt said.
“What do you want?” D’Amato said, his face flushed with anger.
“I want you to stay away from my sons,” he said in a hard voice. “If you make another attempt to communicate with them—or with Mrs. Pendleton—for any reason whatsoever, you can be sure that book will find its way to the FBI.”
Wyatt heard the boys talking in the hallway and said, “Do we understand each other?”
“I could have you killed.”
Wyatt smiled. “I thought of that. If I die before you, the book goes to the FBI.”
“Get out. And take those brats with you.”
32
J.D. was in a shitload of trouble. He couldn’t believe he’d gotten caught by D’Amato’s brute of the week, Roberto. Not only that, but the idiot had detonated his roadside bomb, using up the last of the explosives he’d taken from his storage unit. After a blast like that, they were lucky to be alive.
Not that he was going to live much longer, if the brute kept up what he was doing. J.D. was tied to a chair in the middle of a warehouse filled with boxes of God knows what, close enough to the Gulf of Mexico that he could smell the stench of saltwater and oil from the tankers in port. He was bloodied and bruised, and the monster wasn’t even winded.
At least he still had his toenails and testicles.
To keep them, he’d had to admit that the smack was hidden under the floorboards of his car, which the idiot had left by the side of the county road near Shaw’s compound. He’d given up that information after about an hour and a half of pretty serious torture. He was kind of proud of lasting that long.
The brute had left him for a while to make the arrangements to retrieve his Lexus. J.D. had used the break to work on the ropes binding his wrists behind him. He was finally making some headway when the brute returned.
He wasn’t alone.
Dante D’Amato marched up to him and snarled, “You owe me twenty million dollars, you son of a bitch.”
“You got your white powder back. That should make us even,” J.D. whistled through his broken teeth.
“That doesn’t begin to make us even. That California crowd want their product back—and they want the profit they would have made from their product. You owe me another twenty million. And I plan to take it out of your hide.”
“Take it easy. I’m sure we can work something out.”
“Like your eyes out of your head?” D’Amato said malevolently.
The brute grabbed J.D.’s forehead from behind, and he saw the tip of a knife slide by his nose. “Hey! Hold up a minute!”
“He’s right, Roberto,” D’Amato said. “You should take off your jacket so it doesn’t get ruined.”
“Oh, shit,” J.D. muttered when the brute let go.
Roberto took off his suit jacket and laid it carefully on a nearby box, then began folding up the sleeves of his blue shirt.
J.D. squinted up at D’Amato through the slit in his puffy right eye—the left one was swollen completely closed—and said, “What put you in such a foul mood?”
“I just had dinner with those two brats of yours. Correction, those two brats my son got off your wife.”
J.D. saw red at the reminder of how he’d been duped by his wife. “You shoulda killed that bastard of yours when you had the chance!”
“Unfortunately for me, that’s out of the question now,” D’Amato said angrily. “Fortunately for me, I can vent all that pent-up hostility on you.”
“Whoa! Whoa, now!” J.D. hissed at the pain in his split lip, which had torn open when he’d yelled. He licked at the blood dripping down his chin and said, “We need to talk.”
“The time for talk is over.”
The brute set a tray of rusted metal instruments, creepy, horror-movie kinds of stuff, on a nearby wooden crate. “Which first, Mr. D’Amato?” he said. “The toenails? Or the testicles?”
“I still have that video,” J.D. babbled. “Of you doing something I shouldn’t talk about in front of the brute here. Send him away and I’ll tell you all about it.”
“You can’t accuse me from the grave,” D’Amato said.
“That video goes to the cops if I die,” J.D. threatened.
D’Amato crossed his arms over his chest and said, “Where is it?”
“I’d be an idiot to tell you.”
D’Amato turned to the brute and said, “Testicles.”
Roberto reached down to unbuckle J.D.’s belt, pulled it out of the loops, then unsnapped and unzipped his pants.
“Stop!” J.D. shrieked as the brute reached in and pulled out his pecker and balls. “I’ll give it to you. But I’ll have to take you there. It’s not anywhere I could give you directions.”
“Cut off his balls,” D’Amato said.
“All right, all right!” J.D. screamed. “I’ll tell you.”
“Start talking.”
“The truth is, I don’t know where it is. Wait!” J.D. said when Roberto hit the button on a switchblade. “I gave the phone to my sons. I told them to hide it and not to tell anyone where it was except me. They won’t, either. So you’ll need me to find that phone. Otherwise, those kids are going to grow up and use that phone to put you behind bars. Set me free and that phone is yours.”
D’Amato walked aside with the brute. He might have thought he couldn’t be overheard, but his voice echoed off the mile-high ceiling, and despite a few punches to the head, J.D. could still hear him just fine.
“I’ll take care of getting the video from those kids,” D’Amato said. “You take this sack of shit somewhere and sit on him. I’ll call you when I get the phone. Then you kill him.”
33
“Sergeant McKinley, Dr. McKinley, I’m sorry to tell you that Ryan isn’t responding to chemotherapy. I think it’s time to consider a bone marrow transplant.”
The words hit Jack like bullets to the heart. He’d done as much reading as he could about his son’s illness over the past two months while Ryan had been in chemotherapy and asked Holly questions when there was something he didn’t understand. This was bad news, any way you cut it.
Holly could have quoted him statistics on their son’s recovery with a bone marrow transplant, but he’d refused to consider the numbers because he found them too depressing.
“I see from the paperwork you filled out when Ryan was admitted that there’s no sibling who could act as an HLA-matched donor,” the doctor said. “That’s unfortunate, but—”
“That’s not entirely accurate,” Holly interrupted.
Jack stared in confusion at his wife. Her eyes were lowered to her hands, which were threaded and clutched together in her lap. “Holly?”
“My husband and I have a grown daughter,” she told the doctor. “She was put up for adoption twenty-six years ago.”
Jack’s jaw dropped.
“Are you in touch with her?” the doctor asked. “Do you think she’d be willing to be tested as a bone marrow donor?”
Holly shot Jack a pleading look as she said, for the doctor’s benefit, “I know the name of the adoption agency that placed her. I haven’t be
en in contact with her since the day she was born.”
“Could you excuse us for a moment, Dr. Franzen,” Jack said through tight jaws.
“Yes, of course,” the young doctor said.
Jack waited until Franzen had left his office and the door had closed behind him. His throat ached. His eyes and his nose stung. “We had a baby, Holly? And you gave it away?”
Holly moaned and said, “I’m sorry, Jack.”
He was on his feet, standing over her, resisting the urge to grab her and shake her within an inch of her life. “Sorry?” he grated out. “Sorry? What happened to our kid, Holly?”
“I don’t know, Jack.”
“When did you get pregnant?”
“At the Fourth of July picnic.”
They’d taken a blanket and laid it out on the grass and made love while the annual Kountze fireworks display filled the sky with glorious colors and patterns. Their lovemaking was punctuated by explosions of sight and sound that matched the explosions going on between them. It had been a truly memorable night.
And they’d made a baby.
“When was she born?”
“Our little girl was born April 10. She was six pounds, three ounces. Tiny and delicate. She was nineteen inches long. She had all her fingers and toes.”
“You were pregnant when you broke up with me my senior year?”
She nodded miserably.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” he said in an agonized voice. He felt the flush of heat on his throat that he knew was a sign of anger.
She kept her head down. There was no defiance in her. “I did what I thought was best for the three of us.”
“It wasn’t best for me! And I doubt it was the best thing for our child.” He hesitated, then asked, “Is there anything else you can remember about her?”
She met his gaze and said, “She had chestnut hair like you. And green eyes like me.”
“Oh, God, Holly.” He covered his mouth to keep a sob from escaping. His chest hurt with the effort to keep all the pain he was feeling inside. He had a child out there somewhere in the world. A child he’d never known about. A child who might be hungry or hurt or alone.
“You never checked on her, Holly? You never tried to find out if she was all right?”
“No,” she said in a small voice.
“You better hope we can find her,” he said angrily. “You better hope she’s all right. You better hope we can talk her into giving her bone marrow to a perfect stranger—who just happens to be her brother. Because if we can’t, I’m going to blame you for making me lose two of my kids.”
Jack left the doctor’s office and found the physician outside, leaning against the hospital wall. “We’re going to try to locate our daughter,” he said. “We’ll let you know if—when—we find her, whether she’s willing to be a donor.”
“Let’s hope she’s a match,” the doctor said.
“Yeah.” Jack hadn’t even considered the possibility that their daughter wouldn’t be an HLA-matched sibling. But there was no sense borrowing trouble. First, they had to find her.
He felt like an animal in pain, incapable of expressing it, needing to howl and unable to make a sound. He needed—wanted—comfort. It surprised him that he thought first of laying his head in Holly’s lap and having her run her fingers through his hair. But he could hardly seek comfort from the very woman who’d betrayed him.
He was still standing in the hall when Holly left the doctor’s office. She looked shaky on her feet, like she might fall down if she didn’t sit down. She was nearly eight months pregnant with their child. Their third child.
“Come with me,” he said brusquely, taking her arm and heading for the elevator. He had to get her somewhere she could sit down, and there was a café downstairs.
“I’m sorry, Jack,” she said again.
He wasn’t going to forgive her. He wasn’t going to give her absolution. The crime against him was too great. The wrong was too deep and devastating. He had a daughter he’d never known. A grown woman now, if she’d survived all these years. He’d missed her entire life growing up.
He glanced at his wife’s bent head. Oh, God, Holly. Why did you do it? Why didn’t you tell me?
But he knew why. She’d become a noted pediatric oncologist. Where would she be now if they’d stayed together and she’d kept the baby? She might not have finished high school. It was unlikely she would have gone to college, let alone medical school.
It was equally unlikely they’d still be married, he admitted. He’d been through some very rough times over the past twenty-six years. So why was he blaming her for the decision she’d made? Why hadn’t her choice been the right one for the three of them?
The elevator door opened and he gripped Holly’s arm to keep her upright. He was really afraid now that she might faint. “Do you need me to carry you?” He heard how angry he sounded and didn’t blame her for shaking her head.
Before he could say something less caustic, she murmured, “I can walk.”
But he felt sure that if he let go of her she’d fall. He kept a hand on her arm until they reached the café. He pulled out a chair, eased her into it and said, “Are you all right?”
She nodded dejectedly.
“How about some coffee?”
“I’d rather have bottled water.”
“Coming up.”
As he stood in line waiting to pay for her water and his coffee, Jack realized that it wasn’t giving up their child for adoption he objected to so much as the fact that Holly had unilaterally made the decision for both of them. It didn’t matter that she might have made the right choice, because he hadn’t been a part of it.
She was fourteen years old. Give her a break.
That was easier said than done.
He opened the bottle of water and handed it to Holly, then sat down across from her with his black coffee. “What’s the name of the adoption agency?”
“The Next Generation,” she said.
“Where are they?”
“Here in Houston.”
He called information and got the number, then had it automatically dialed. When someone answered he said, “I need to find a baby who was placed by your agency twenty-six years ago. How can I do that?”
He listened, then said, “What’s your address?” He wrote it down on a pad he kept with him and said, “Thank you.”
“What did they say?” Holly asked.
“We need to fill out some paperwork. They’ll check to see if our daughter has expressed an interest in finding us. Otherwise, they can’t release any information.”
“Oh, no.”
“I’m sure there must be some sort of exception for medical emergencies like this,” Jack said. “Some way for the agency to contact her and let her know we’re looking for her, at least.”
“That might take too long.”
“I’ve got other resources, Holly, if it comes to that. Do you want to come with me this afternoon?”
She nodded.
“Don’t you need to rest?”
“How can I rest when our son might die because of a decision I made when I was fourteen?”
“Go take your nap,” he said. “An hour more or less isn’t going to make a difference.”
“I don’t think I could sleep, Jack. Please, can’t we just go?”
He saw how frail she was. The past two months had been even harder on her than on him, because she’d spent more time with Ryan. He’d been away working a lot of the time.
D’Amato had told Jack he no longer needed his help locating J.D., which he didn’t think boded well for J.D.’s health. The remnants of an explosion of military munitions on Shaw’s property were evidence that J.D. had been there. But there were no signs of him.
Jack had noticed that Roberto hadn’t been around lately. He wondered if D’Amato was keeping J.D. prisoner somewhere, with Roberto as his guard. He wouldn’t put it past the wily mobster.
“All right, we’ll go now,” he said
to Holly. “But I’m taking you home afterward.”
She bit her lip rather than protest. She’d kept her word about working more regular hours, but she spent more time at the hospital anyway, visiting with Ryan.
Holly was silent during the ride to the adoption agency, and he realized she’d fallen asleep. He drove around for an extra fifteen minutes to make sure she got more rest. She woke with a start when he stopped the car in front of The Next Generation, which was located in a storefront in a run-down section of Houston. It didn’t look promising.
“Let’s hope they have computerized records,” he said to Holly as he parked the car out front. He felt fortunate they were still in business.
He helped Holly out of the car, noticing how big her belly was getting. He’d held her in his arms last night and felt the baby kick. And made love to her. He wondered what this newest ripple would do to their budding relationship.
He’d been falling back in love with his wife. And making love to her as often as she was willing, which was every time he asked. What was going to happen to them now?
He realized that was probably his call. In order for their marriage to survive, he had to pardon her. Could he absolve her? The answer came quickly and certainly.
What she did was unforgivable.
The woman behind the counter at The Next Generation had skin the color of cocoa, frizzy white hair that created a halo around her face, and enough wrinkles to be Jack’s great-grandmother. A pair of reading glasses hung from a beaded chain around her neck.
“You must be the gentleman who called,” she said.
“Yes, I called,” Jack confirmed.
“Name’s Shirlee. I put the forms together for you.” She handed Jack a stack of papers to fill out and said, “You could have done this on-line.”
“We have a bit of an emergency,” Jack said. “Our son is…dying of cancer,” he managed to finish. “He needs a bone marrow transplant. We’re hoping our grown daughter will agree to be a donor. We don’t know if she’s registered to find her parents or not. We’re hoping you can help us find out.”
Shirlee perched the reading glasses on the end of her nose, sat down in front of an older model computer and said, “What are the mother’s and father’s names?”
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