“Carole Michaels,” I said in as much of an authoritative voice as I could manage tied to a bed.
She stiffened but didn’t look up.
“Carole,” I said firmly. “Where is Andy?”
She’d called him Andy the last time I had seen her; in Sweet Hell. He’d been going by the name Andrew Falkner at the time. One of many aliases. In her fragile mental state, she wouldn’t recognise the name Rhys Kyle Weston.
“He’s coming,” she said and started to rock her body.
She’d done that too when I’d last tried to rescue her. It had been a trap on that occasion as well — fucking gas bombs.
“He’s coming,” she said again and again and again.
“Carole, it’s all right, Monkey,” Damon said softly. “It’s all right. We’ll get out of here.”
I appreciated the sentiment, but it wasn’t in the slightest accurate.
“He’s coming,” she murmured, whimpering now.
“Carole,” Damon breathed, sounding heartbroken.
I couldn’t imagine what it was like for him to see her like this and not be able to reach her.
“Damon,” I said carefully. He blinked his eyes but met my gaze.
“This is his stage,” I told him. “The only defence we have is our shell. Shore it up. Give him nothing. He feeds off emotions. Chaos. Destruction. Give him none of that. We won’t win by doing what he expects of us.”
Damon shook his head, battling demons only he could see and feel and hear. I waited for him to get himself under some form of control. And then I watched as he sucked in a steadying breath and pulled on the persona he used when battling a fire.
Fighting flames was rather like fighting an unpredictable opponent, I thought. There were rules, but if you lost concentration, for even a split second, there were dire consequences. When Damon suited up for a house fire, he wore protective clothes; masks, heat reflective jackets, helmets, gloves etc. But he also kept a firm eye on his surroundings, a solid grasp on the position of the fire in relation to his team members, an awareness that went beyond the next step, the next flash flame, or the next backdraft.
He pulled on that persona now as I felt ice thread through my veins.
“Ready?” I said a few seconds later.
“Fuck yes.”
I smiled. “RHYS KYLE WESTON!” I shouted. “SHOW YOURSELF.”
Carole whimpered and curled herself around Stretch’s body. I wondered briefly how long she’d been in this room with him. How long she’d been fixing him up after Weston had him beaten.
“YOUR FRIENDS AT THE DEPARTMENT MISS YOU, RHYS,” I shouted.
Nothing stirred if you didn’t count Carole’s trembling.
“RHYS!” I shouted, and the door suddenly opened.
Trevor Jones stood in the opening, and if I hadn’t been wearing my Ice Queen mask, I would have shown how much his presence hurt. I knew he wasn’t here of his own volition. I knew part of him was fighting it, but Weston’s control was still apparent. I knew he wasn’t the officer I respected, and it wasn’t his fault.
But still, it hurt.
“Keen,” he said. “Shut up.” There was no cowboy hat or toothpick. He was dressed in his familiar jeans and checked shirt, but that was where the resemblance ended. “If you don’t want to end up like him,” he nodded at Stretch, “then keep your mouth shut.”
“Where’s Weston, Trevor?” I asked.
He took a menacing step into the room.
My heart thumped. It ached. My throat burned. I swallowed past the pain and kept my eyes on Trevor.
“He’s coming,” he said, and it was so eerily similar to Carole’s statement that I almost flinched. But my father had taught me better than that.
I stared icily at Trevor and said, “I know about Mary.”
I didn’t offer an apology. I didn’t say I was sorry for his loss. Nothing I said would mean a thing to a man who had lost the love of his life and was now in debt to a psychopathic murderer.
He took three long strides into the room to reach the side of my bed and growled, “Don’t you say her name!”
I stared at him; refusing to show any weakness. Underneath the façade of fury he wore was a broken man. And I didn’t think he’d been broken entirely by Mary’s passing. Weston had done this.
“You’ll be out,” I said to him. “Out of the Force. There’s no going back from this, Jones.”
He bent down and slapped my face. It stung and brought tears to my eyes, but it hadn’t been at full force. And he hadn’t used a closed fist which I thought perhaps had been used repeatedly on Stretch.
Trevor was still in there.
He met my eyes, but there was no hidden message there. Perhaps this room had more cameras in it than I suspected.
“Where’s Weston?” I said with a small smirk. If he was watching, let him see me playing with his new toy.
Trevor punched me in the stomach.
I gasped for breath as Damon shouted something and Carole whimpered loudly. It took a good minute for me to catch my breath and blink the tears away but when I did, Trevor was still looming over me, a wild look to his eyes that I thought might be the end for all of us.
He was fighting it, I could tell. But it wasn’t working.
I panted through the residual pain and said the first thing I could think of, which happened to be a repeat of what Ava had used on Cawfield back at CIB. Latin is not my forte, and I might have got it wrong, so I said it again.
But when that didn’t work, I moved on to one of the other phrases Ava had used that hadn’t worked on Cawfield. I’d made it to the third one when the door swung open, and Weston entered.
I couldn’t tell if the third Latin phrase had worked because Weston walked over and shoved Trevor out of the way and reached down and wrapped his fingers around my throat.
He squeezed just enough to let me know my life was in his hands.
I stared up at the man we’d been chasing for what felt like an eternity. He didn’t look anything special. He wasn’t exotic like Ava or statuesque like Charlie. He was ordinary looking, but when he spoke, his voice was that of an angel.
“You should know better, Detective,” he said softly.
He leaned down, hovering his lips above my face, and let me see directly into his soul.
There was a coldness in his eyes that defied even my father’s. An iciness that seeped out of his pores and washed over my body. I felt my skin pebble in tiny goosebumps. I felt my heartbeat skitter. Fight and flight reflexes kicked in. He smiled, and I almost peed the bed.
Which, in a very inappropriate way, made me laugh.
He cocked his head at me and said, “I might keep you. I’ve tired of the other.”
My eyes flicked across the room to Carole. She was hugging Stretch as if he could somehow protect her in his unconscious state. For the first time, I saw genuine fear in her eyes.
Damon whispered something to her. Undoubtedly reassurance. But I couldn’t have Weston turning his attention to him, so I said, “You can go fuck yourself, Rhys.”
As far as taunts went, it wasn’t my best. But it did the trick. He squeezed my neck harder and watched me struggle for breath with a detached look.
And then Trevor hit him over the back with a stool.
For a brief second, I thought I was saved. But the lack of restriction on my windpipe was the only saving grace because Weston was a well trained special agent. And a stool to the back was nothing to the likes of him. He had Trevor knocked out and on the floor in a few swift, controlled, and precise movements that I could barely track through my tear-filled gaze.
He stood up to full height and straightened his clothes again.
“He has been trouble from the start,” he said conversationally.
“That’s what you get for fucking with police detective’s heads,” I told him in a rasping voice. I desperately wanted to rub my throat.
He smiled at me and picked up the stool Trevor had used to hit him, then bro
ught it close enough to the side of my bed to make me feel threatened. He sat down and crossed his legs elegantly at the knee.
“There is a little known fact to the human condition, Detective,” he murmured. “It must never be devoid of heartache. We suffer with abandon. We willingly wrap ourselves around lost causes. We throw our hearts into love affairs doomed from the beginning. And we are never truly surprised when they fail.”
“OK,” I said slowly.
“His wife’s death was a foregone conclusion. He knew it. He just wanted to suffer for a little longer. Why? Because we thrive in the suffering. We live to be broken.”
“Are you broken, Rhys?”
He smiled. “I am their salvation.”
“What you’re doing is wrong,” I told him.
“Have you visited your psychologist lately, Detective?”
“What have you got on him?” I asked, wanting to keep him talking. I had no idea how it would help, but making the Crazy keep talking always worked in the movies and I was out of procedures to follow at this stage of the game.
“His brother and I crossed paths in Christchurch once. He’d inadvertently stepped into a messy situation. I got him out of it and made sure I had enough evidence to sink him when it became useful to my cause.”
Hennessey’s brother was a professor of psychology at Canterbury University according to the file we had on the police shrink. A position that carried a certain amount of responsibility and power. Had Hennessey agreed to whatever Weston asked to protect his brother’s standing?
“You’re lying,” I said. Hennessey was too good to fall for that. Even for his brother.
Weston threw back his head and laughed. It was uncomfortably sexy. A man confident in his own world. Aware of his sexuality. I could see how Carole Michaels could have been caught by this spider sitting before me. If he lavished even an ounce of that charm on her when she’d been vulnerable, she would have been lost to anything Damon could have said to possibly warn her off him.
“Too true,” Weston said, wiping his eyes as if his laughter had caused him to weep.
The man was incapable of weeping.
He sobered. “His brother is being watched by an associate of mine in Christchurch and will be killed, along with several of his students who meet with him for study sessions each weekday afternoon.”
A death threat. An oldie but a goodie.
“Hennessey could have just warned him,” I said.
“Boom.”
“The police…”
“Big boom. Do you not believe me, Detective? Let me prove it to you.”
He pulled a cellphone out of his jacket pocket and swiped to activate a call.
“Do it,” he said and disconnected.
He sat back and stared at me. I said nothing. Was this supposed to convince me of his god-like status?
I am their salvation.
Long minutes later, he pulled his cellphone out again and swiped it a few times, bringing up whatever he wanted me to see. He turned the device around and let me focus on the small screen.
Breaking News! scrolled in front of my eyes. Explosion in Christchurch; near university.
A chill went down my spine, and it had nothing to do with my upbringing.
“You see,” he said, pocketing the cellphone. “He wisely believed me. But his cooperation is no longer needed.” He shrugged.
How many people had he just killed to prove a point?
“You won’t get away with this,” I said, shaking. I felt sick to my stomach. He’d caused that explosion because of me. Because I’d pushed him. He hadn’t batted an eyelash. No emotion whatsoever.
This man was ice personified, and it chilled me.
“I already have, Detective. What’s another explosion when you’re already chasing your tails at the first?”
He meant Angelo’s. We hadn’t found any evidence to tie Weston to it. Just a pattern of behaviour and a gut feeling he’d been trying to incapacitate me.
I struggled against the ties and glared at the man before me. He was going for urbane, sophisticated and devil-may-care. But underneath it all, I saw the Crazy.
“You think it’ll end here?” I asked him. “You think you’ll get away with this? You don’t know CIB, Weston. You don’t know me at all.”
He smiled chillingly. “On the contrary, Detective. I know people quite well. And I know this city. It’s mine, you see? From its streets, to its prisons, to its police. It’s all mine and there’s not a thing you can do about it.”
I tugged uselessly on the restraints.
“Surely you saw my reach,” he continued. “Mansfield for instance? I am everywhere, Detective. Everywhere.”
Greg Arnold Mansfield in Mount Eden Prison had summed it up perfectly. ‘I met him here.’
‘Here’ being everywhere.
I felt momentarily defeated. I felt entirely out of my depth.
This man was so evil, so omnipotent. I was strapped to a bed staring madness in the eye and it stared back unrepentant.
What the hell had our government been thinking when they created a monster like him?
Weston stood. Straightened his clothes. And said, “And now we must tie up loose ends. Starting with the Michaels Family part of this debacle.”
“You won’t hurt Carole,” I told him; quite desperately. But part of me was sure she was still his Achille’s heel.
“Detective,” Weston said with a Cheshire cat smile, “have you not been paying attention?”
Pay attention, Sport. Don't fucking fall asleep on the job.
I had been. I had been paying attention. And Weston could posture and preen all he liked, but Carole Michaels meant something.
“Andy,” Carole said, trembling like a leaf. She held her hands up to ward him off. It damn near fractured the ice I was using to protect me. “Andy, please, baby. No.”
“Don’t you fucking touch her, you bastard!” Damon shouted. “I’ll kill you. I’ll fucking kill you if you touch her!”
I tested the restraints, but they held firm. I checked on Trevor, but he was still out cold. I scanned the room for something, anything that I could use. I saw nothing.
“I’m sure you believe that,” Weston said calmly, coolly to Damon; walking toward him and Carole and Stretch.
“Carole,” Damon said urgently. “Run, Monkey. Run. Get out of here. Run!”
“Andy?” Carole asked.
“Tsk, tsk,” the psychopath said. “Your work mate first, I think.”
He pulled a gun out and aimed it at Stretch.
“No!” Damon shouted.
“Weston,” I barked. “Lower your weapon!”
“Andy! No!”
Weston pulled the trigger right when Carole moved.
She threw herself at the gun, placing her body between the bullet and Stretch.
The sound of the pistol firing ricocheted around the room. Shouts and screaming ensued, but I thought I heard something else.
In amongst the chaos and heartache came the distant sound of shattering glass.
A physical manifestation of our broken hearts.
Chapter Thirty-Three
"Fear Is What Makes You A Good Detective. But Mindless Terror Kills."
The air in the room hung suspended as Carole Michaels slowly fell to the floor, blood blooming out of her chest. Damon was screaming; a heart-wrenching sound of distress and anger, rage and disbelief. I could barely think clearly for the shock of it. She’d thrown herself in front of the bullet to protect Stretch.
Had she broken her PSYOPS? Had Carl helped her? Had Stretch?
I looked at Weston, expecting to see some form of regret on his face. Carole was his Achille’s heel; I was sure of it. But he stood there, statue still, his features set in a mildly disinterested mask.
And then her body hit the floor.
Damon let out a cry of agony that will haunt me to the end of my days.
And Weston jerked.
His eyes traced over her body and a small
frown marred his otherwise perfectly ordinary looks.
Sound rushed back in, and I heard gunfire in the rest of the house. It was hard to tell, though, if it was being answered in kind. If it was the AOS, they would have announced themselves. Procedures even when they didn’t help. But no one shouted. Just the odd gunshot and then a high-pitched swish followed by a thump as a body hit the floor.
“Weston,” I said, trying to get his attention. “You killed her.”
It pained me to say it because Damon was beside himself with grief; pulling on his restraints, calling Carole’s name, interspersed with the nickname he’d given her when they were kids. It was breaking my heart, but I had to take advantage of the situation. Of Weston’s momentary show of weakness.
“You shot her in the chest, Weston. You killed her.”
He started shaking his head.
“She’s bleeding out on your floor. Can’t you see all the blood?”
He took a shaking step toward her. Damon kept howling his heartache.
“This is the beginning of the end, Weston,” I told him. “Even her god can’t save her now.”
He fell to his knees beside Carole’s body, a shaking hand reached out but didn’t touch.
“She’s dead, Weston,” I repeated. ”You did this. Some salvation you are.”
He reached forward and scooped Carole up in his arms, holding her to his chest. He stared at her. He wasn’t crying. He didn’t look bereft. His face was set in stone as if he felt nothing. Nothing at all. But I thought otherwise. I thought perhaps this was as much as the emotionless spook could feel. He was as good as breaking down in front of me, and there was nothing I could do about it.
The gunshots were getting fewer and fewer out in the house. An eery silence was spreading throughout the dwelling. I pulled on my restraints and stifled a growl. Damon was calling Carole’s name again and again and again. My big, tough fireman had crossed that line, fallen from the edge he’d perch upon for so long now. I wanted to reach out to him; I could do nothing strapped to the fucking bed.
I scanned the room, taking in Weston’s still form as he cradled Carole Michaels. Then my eyes landed on Trevor Jones. He was waking up.
A Lick Of Heat: H.E.A.T. Book Four Page 29
