Dark of Night

by Suzanne Brockmann

  “As for right now? As I make this sauce, I'm enjoying a visit with my Uncle Walt, who loved me like the kind of father I'm trying to be to my kids. I might complain about having to cook, but it's only because I enjoy complaining—and because it makes Alyssa laugh. After this, I'm gonna fire up the grill, and while our dinner cooks—and it's gonna smell amazing—Ash and I are gonna take a swim in that pool. Then we're gonna eat. Walt was a genius and dinner will be a religious experience. Count on it. Oh, and sunset's going to be a gorgeous show tonight—I'm looking forward to that, too. Then it's bathtime for Ash, then storytime. It's Lys's turn to read, and the sound of her voice is… It just washes over you—it's even better than the barbecue.

  “And then? After my beautiful son is finally asleep, I'm going to spend some time alone with my wife, which, appropriately enough, follows the pattern and will be about a million times better than listening to her read aloud. And, yeah, maybe later tonight, while I'm asleep, some of that hurt and ugliness that I know is out there in the world is going to creep inside of my head, but I also know that if I have a nightmare? I'll wake up and Alyssa will be there. And if I need to, we'll talk it through, and it'll fade away. So if it hurts, it only hurts for a very, very short while.”

  Sam finally fell quiet, the sound of his knife against the cutting board making a rhythmic thunking sound in the otherwise silent room.

  Ash had latched onto his own tiny little thumb and was sucking it with enthusiasm.

  So Jimmy cleared his throat. “You, uh, really tell Alyssa everything?”

  “Hell, no,” Sam said, putting down the blade and scooping his chopped tomatoes up and into a nearby bowl. “That shit's hard, although it does get easier. Each time you tell her something that you're afraid is gonna make you less of a hero in her eyes, but she looks at you like you've given her diamonds… ? That's a good thing. So yeah, it does get a little easier, but it's never gonna be a cakewalk. Remember the magic words of step two: This is hard for me. I'm gonna need your help. And don't be afraid to use sex as a reward. For you, I mean. You can go point-blank if you want. Hey, sweet thing, here's my Big Happy List of Slightly Untraditional Yearnings. I really love you and want to move our relationship to the next level and talk about things that are … hard for me to talk about. I'm gonna need your help, and maybe a little incentive, so if you could just glance over the list and let me know how you feel about maybe trying number six. After we talk, of course, because see, I'm a little afraid that I might cry, and, well, number six will definitely cheer me up after …”

  Jimmy laughed. “I don't think anything's ever been hard for you, Star-rett.”

  “That's because I've embraced the fact that step two leads not just to step three and the Big Happy List, but also to step four. Which is sit back and laugh your ass off as you enjoy the sometimes crazy but always interesting ride.”

  “What do you do about the nightmares on the nights Alyssa's not home?” Jimmy asked. “How do you deal with knowing that the next time her helicopter goes down, she might not come back? Not ever?”

  Sam picked up his knife and began chopping again. “You enjoy today,” he said quietly. “You live your life—right now. If you fill your heart with love, there's not a lot of room left for fear.” He smiled. “That sage bit of advice is a direct quote from my Uncle Walt.”

  “I didn't have an Uncle Walt,” Jimmy admitted. His father figure had been cut from a different mold entirely.

  “Most people didn't,” Sam agreed. “But you've got Tess. For now, anyway. The choice is yours—are you going to do the work you need to do to keep her, or are you going to let her walk away?”

  It was the photos that pushed Dave over the edge.

  The sight of the man who'd attacked him—identified as Liam Smith from County Cork, Ireland—with part of his face and the back of his head blown off, lying on the table in the morgue, didn't perturb him even half as much.

  Sophia had to squint through her eyelashes and even turn away—it was that awful a sight. But Dave moved closer to the dead man.

  “That's him,” he told FBI agent Joe Hirabayashi. The two men's voices faded into an indistinct rumble as Sophia found a bench in the hallway and sat, just breathing, with her eyes closed and her head between her knees.

  And then Dave was back, his hand warm on her shoulder as he painfully lowered himself down to sit beside her. “I'm so sorry.”

  “I think I might be coming down with something,” she said. “I'm usually tougher than that.”

  “You shouldn't have to be.” As usual, he was ready to take the blame. “I should've—”

  “Do we need to wait here?” she interrupted him. “Or can we go?”

  “We can go,” Dave told her, as he helped her up. Or maybe she helped him. It was hard to tell which of them was steadier on their feet. “Yashi's going to keep me updated with any intel they find on Smith. He had a driver's license, but it's doubtful he lives at his listed address. Although, you never know.”

  “Does he have a connection to Anise Turiano?” she asked, aware that the woman's name was enough to make the muscles in Dave's arm tense.

  “Not that we know of,” he answered her evenly as he held open the door that led to the tiny alleyway parking area. “But we don't know much yet—aside from the fact that he's wanted in both the UK and Russia, as well as here in the States. He's got no apparent connection to anyone named Santucci, either. Although there's something up with that. Something Yashi's not telling me, which is …” Dave froze. And said a string of eyebrow-raising words that she'd never heard him so much as whisper before—certainly not in that particular order. “Sophia, get back inside.”

  The lot was empty. Nothing moved in the cold, gray, late-morning light. But then she saw it, too. A white packet, about the length and width of a paperback novel, had been placed on the windshield of their rental car, held in place by one of the wipers.

  “Now.” Dave's words were a command, not a request, and he turned to open the door, to push her back into the building.

  She wouldn't let go of him. “Not without you.” She raised her voice, calling down the corridor, “Yashi! Joe! We need help!”

  The FBI agent was one of the slowest-talking, least excitable men that Sophia had ever met. He must've had a resting pulse rate of fourteen, yet he now came running down the hall, quite possibly breaking the record for the twenty-yard dash, his sidearm already drawn as she pulled Dave back inside with her.

  “There's something on the windshield of our car,” she told Yashi, right over Dave, who was saying, “Yashi's not going out there—it could be a bomb!”

  “Get back, away from the window,” Yashi ordered, as Dave broke Sophia's hold on him and moved, nearly as quickly as Yashi had, not back, but toward the door.

  “Dave!” Sophia and Yashi called his name in unison, but he didn't so much as break stride.

  He went out the door first, as Yashi ordered Sophia, “Stay here,” and followed.

  “Dave, what is wrong with you?” Sophia shouted.

  Through the glass door, she could see Dave quickly scanning the buildings that overlooked the alley, his gaze tracing the rooftops as he searched for a shooter and happily—she could tell from his body language— didn't find one. It was then he focused his attention on the white packet, slowing as he approached.

  “Stay back,” he ordered Yashi, who was several steps behind him.

  “If it was a bomb,” Yashi countered in a voice that held only a hint of his usual I'm so bored lethargy, “it'd be under the car, not in plain sight like that. It's gotta be a message.”

  Yashi tried to move past Dave as Sophia stepped through the door and onto the top step of the platform that led to the driveway.

  “Get inside, God damn it!” Dave roared at her, even as he beat Yashi to the packet and snatched it up before the FBI agent could. “Are both of you crazy?”

  “It's photos,” Yashi called to Sophia. “It's a packet of pictures.”

  Whateve
r they were photos of, Dave got even more grim as he glanced through them. Yashi tried to take them, but Dave kept the packet out of the other man's reach and view, then headed purposefully toward Sophia. “Get,” he said. “Inside. Now.”

  She got, but only because he was coming back into the building, too. In fact, she held the door for him, which made him even angrier with her. If that was possible. Of course, she was pretty angry with him, too.

  “If you thought it was a bomb, the correct procedure is to call the bomb squad and—”

  Dave ignored her completely as he turned to Yashi, who again was right behind him. “We need a room with privacy.” His voice was clipped, his eyes hard, his face that of a stranger as he took Sophia's arm none too gently. “And we need it now.”

  “If I tell you to do something,” Dave told Sophia, his voice harsh and a little too loud even in his own ears, as Yashi closed the door to the interrogation room behind him, leaving to try to book them on the next available flight to California, “you do it. You don't ask why. You don't argue. You obey.”

  The little room had a single translucent, bar-covered window that d idn't do much in terms of providing natural light. Fluorescent bulbs hung in two upside-down trays from the ceiling. One of the bars was spasming, the light flickering on and off intermittently, which only added to Dave's growing headache.

  With pea-soup-green walls and a chipped industrial-tile floor, the room held little more than a scarred and pitted wooden table and two rickety chairs. There was an ancient sink with a decrepit faucet in the corner, a boxy metal paper-towel holder fused to the wall with that ugly-ass paint, a built-in bookshelf with a lone copy of the King James Bible.

  It was a grim and awful room, except it now also held Sophia, who could make the most wretched shithole a place of beauty, just by her ethereal presence.

  “Maybe you've forgotten,” she said, her own voice louder than usual, too, as she glared back at him, “but I don't work for you, so as far as that obey thing goes—”

  “No,” he agreed. “You don't. You're my fiancée. Your… perjurious statement is now—without a doubt—part of an official CIA report—”

  “Perjurious?” she repeated in disbelief, because, yeah, it was a pretty stupid word choice. She hadn't been under oath when she'd answered Bill Connell's questions.

  Still, Dave wasn't in the right place to admit that, or to slow down. “Which means that the entire world now knows that if they want to hurt me,” he continued, “and I'm talking really hurt me? All they have to do is go after you. So thanks a lot.”

  Her eyes filled with tears. “I was trying to … I didn't think …” She exhaled her frustration and started again. “I actually thought you'd like it if I …”

  “Threw me a bone?” he finished for her because he was so goddamned angry, but not really at her—he was angry at himself. Okay, he was pretty mad at her, too—for scaring the crap out of him. And, yeah, he was also mad at her because she'd given him everything he'd ever wanted and then some. Which meant that now he was going to know exactly what he was missing when he gave her up.

  And after seeing those photos, he knew damn well that he was going to have to give her up. God help him.

  “What is wrong with you?” she whispered. “You're mad at me?!”

  “What if there was a shooter on one of those rooftops,” he shot back at her, “but there you are—standing there, arguing with me because I'm not enough of an action hero for you—”

  “What?!”

  “—so you ignore what I say—”

  “I didn't ignore you! I didn't want you out there, either! You've already been injured, you're hardly …” She searched for the right word.

  So he supplied it for her. “Decker.”

  Again Sophia exhaled her frustration, yet at the same time, she wouldn't meet his gaze. “That's not what I was going to say.”

  His stomach twisted at her words. She didn't say that's not true. Because it was true. “Yeah, but it's what you meant. I'm not Decker. But if I were? Well, we both know that if mighty Decker had told you to do something, God knows you'd not only listen, you'd have done it.”

  “That is not fair,” she whispered, her eyes huge in a face that was lined and drawn. And still so beautiful, his very soul ached.

  “I know,” he admitted. God, he was a bastard, taking this out on her. This was his fault—all of it. He should have known, years ago, that this fiasco with Anise would follow him, wherever he went, forever and ever, amen. “I'm sorry.” He choked the words out. “I'm going to have to call him. Decker. To ask for help.”

  Yashi had thought that was a good idea, suggesting they return to San Diego as quickly as possible. And Sophia, too, lit up at the mention of Decker's name.

  “Good,” she said. “Dave, that's a good thing. Because we need help, if we're going to find—”

  He cut her off. “I have to put you someplace safe,” he told her, because they weren't going to do anything. He was. He'd started this all those years ago, and he was going to end it. Or die trying. “With someone I can trust. And I absolutely trust Decker.”

  That is, he trusted Decker to keep Sophia safe. It was what would happen when she and Decker were locked together, for days, in a secure hotel room, that Dave didn't trust. Or maybe he did. Maybe he knew too well what would happen in that kind of forced intimacy.

  They'd talk. And they'd talk. And they'd finally freaking talk—about all the things that mattered, the things that Sophia, for some reason, hadn't been able to talk about with anyone. They'd talk about the secrets that, in the darkest, loneliest, most fear-filled and jealous hours of the night, even when Sophia was sleeping beside him, Dave imagined that she was saving to whisper to Lawrence Decker.

  And as for Deck's supposed relationship with Tess? Whatever it was right now, it couldn't possibly last. They might indeed have reached for each other, for comfort, to ease their mutual pain. Dave had seen it happen before. Two lonely, grief-stricken people, settling—in a way that was far different from how Sophia had settled for him.

  It was different because James Nash, may his soul rest in peace, would be with them, his spirit lingering, forever. So Decker and Tess would, eventually, drift apart. If they hadn't already begun to do so. Dave honestly d idn't know. He hadn't so much as spoken to either of them since the memorial service.

  “Put me … ?” Sophia interrupted his thoughts. It was clear she didn't like that any more than she'd liked obey. But then she glanced over at the packet of photographs that he'd tossed onto the table. “I'm not sure I want to know what's in there.”

  As she looked into his eyes, Dave knew that she was imagining that those pictures were far more provocative than they truly were—at least seemingly so. He could only guess what she was thinking. Maybe that the photos were of the two of them, being intimate. Or maybe they were of him, catching gonorrhea from Kathy-slash-Anise.

  Yeah, if someone had pictures of that, Dave absolutely wouldn't ask for doubles for his photo album. It was only recently, since he'd become Sophia's lover, that his memories of Kathy, laughing with him—in truth, her name was Anise and she was laughing at him—had finally begun to fade.

  And he liked it far better that way.

  Of course, maybe Sophia thought the photos in that packet were of him killing Anise, stepping back from the bloody mess as she grabbed the slit in her throat, gasping and gurgling, eyes staring, as her life slipped through her fingers. …

  Sophia had said she believed him, that she didn't think he'd wielded the knife that had taken Anise's life. But her doubt still shone through.

  “They're photos of you,” Dave told her, as he turned to the table to push them from the packet, being careful to spread them out on the rough wooden surface with a pen he carried in his pocket. He did that even though he knew there'd be no fingerprints on them, no DNA—nothing at all to identify whoever had put them on the rental car.

  She stepped closer, and he shifted to put the table between them as he
watched her face, her eyes. He saw her realization that these pictures had been taken just last night. She'd been shot standing in the hospital lobby, through the big glass windows, while she'd waited for Dave to get the car.

  She also knew—he could tell from her expression that she'd figured it out—that she could have been shot in a very different way. That camera could just as easily have been a sniper rifle. The photos were blurred slightly from the heavy rain, and taken from high above—no doubt from the roof of the building across the street.

  “It's probable these photos were taken by the person or persons who hired Liam Smith to kill Barney Delarow and attack me,” Dave told her.

  “What do they want?” she asked, her eyes almost crystal clear as she looked over at him.

  Dave shook his head. “If it were purely revenge, I'd already be lying next to Smith, here in the morgue.” Or, Jesus Christ, maybe Sophia would. “If they wanted me dead, I'd be dead by now.”

  “How can you be so blasé—” she started.

  “Because it's true. At the very least I'd still be in intensive care. If Smith had been told to kill me,” he told her, “he would have. He got the best of me, Soph. If he wanted to, he could have sliced me into pieces—” He cut himself off as she turned away, her movement sudden, as she rushed toward the sink in the corner.

  Damnit, he hadn't been thinking, and now she leaned over the chipped porcelain, eyes tightly closed, gripping the edges with knuckles that were white.

  Just as she'd done last night.

  Only this time it wasn't her bastard of a father who'd turned her stomach and made her physically ill—it was Dave.

  Good work.

  He touched her arm, her back, and she turned to look up at him, her eyes bright with unshed tears, her face almost shockingly pale. “I don't want this,” she said through clenched teeth, her voice shaking.

  “I know,” Dave whispered, feeling his own eyes fill with tears. “I'm so sorry. I thought it was over. I thought …” He had to look away, had to wipe his eyes with the heel of his hand. “I was fooling myself. I think, deep down, I always knew it was going to come back and haunt me and … I should have told you, right from the start.”