Dream of Danger (A Brown and De Luca Novella) (5 page)

Suddenly there was an earsplitting gunshot and the guy jerked forward, landing right on me, knocking me flat onto my back. And then he just laid there, bleeding all over me.

A second later he was dragged off. Mason flopped him onto his back, checked for a pulse, shook his head, then took my hands and pulled me to my feet. “When you take a prisoner, you always pat him down for weapons. You always secure him with cuffs. Rope. A belt. Duct tape. Whatever you can find. And you never,
never
turn your back on him.”

“Got it. Where the hell did that gun come from?”

“Always carry a spare weapon.”

“I’m gonna need to write all this down.”

He smiled softly, hands on my shoulders now. “You okay?” He started brushing twigs off my back and out of my hair, eyeballing the blood on my jacket. The worry in his eyes was real, and it hit me where I lived. He really cared about me.

“It’s his blood, not mine,” I said, my voice all gruff and gritty. “And yes, I’m okay. You?”

“I think I need my head examined. Hurts like a bitch.”

“You’ve needed that for a while now, so it’s as good a time as any.” I looked at his head, then his eyes, worrying his skull was fractured or he’d die or something, and thinking how much I’d hate that. “Thanks for saving my life,” I said. “Again.”

“Thanks for saving
mine.
Again.”

He stared into my eyes for a long minute. I thought he was going to kiss me. But then that shuffling sound came again, and we both turned to see Amy, hog-tied with tape over her mouth, moving inchworm style into Krm th our line of sight.

“Amy!” I let go of Mason and ran to her, then hugged the shit out of her before I even began untying her.

Chapter Eight

At seven forty-five on Thanksgiving night, we delivered Amy, safe and sound, into the bosom of her family. Her mom had held off on serving dinner until she arrived. Amy was bruised from fighting nonstop with her abductors but only a little worse for wear. And fear. The second man had been dropped off shortly after they’d taken her at knifepoint from the side of the road. Mason thought her abductors had probably done something to her tire at that gas station, when one of them had been out of camera range for a while. The guy who’d taken Amy to the hotel had been waiting for something. Or someone. He’d called her Venora once, then got all kinds of pissed off when she said her name was Amy. Otherwise, we had no clues. But we’d keep digging.

Meanwhile Amy was safe and, technically, home in time for dinner, just as I’d promised.

So Mason and I sat at a food-laden table with cranberry-scented tapers burning between us as the turkey was passed around. And I knew, now that Amy was safe, that we were going to have a hard time keeping our hands off each other on the way home. And I knew, too, that it was no better an idea now than it had been before.

I walked him to his Monte Carlo with dessert still on my breath.

The clouds had cleared. It was the starriest night I had ever seen. Literally. He turned around and leaned back against the driver’s side, crossed his arms over his chest and gazed up at the sky.

“You’re staying the night here, aren’t you?”

My damn heart hurt. “Amy asked me to. I think it’s for the best, don’t you?”

“You mean because if you ride home with me we’re gonna wind up having sex again?”

“That’s a clinical way to put it.”

“How do you want me to put it?”

I heaved a giant sigh, then leaned back against the car beside him. Like him, I looked at the stars. “We can’t work together and keep our hands off each other.”

“No, probably not,” he conceded.

“So you get why there’s no point in me applying as some kind of consultant.”

“I get it.” He turned sideways. I did, too. “Doesn’t mean I like it.”

“I just need time.”

He put his hands on my shoulders. I put mine on his waist. “I know you do,” he said. “So do I.”

“So we agree, then.” He pulled me right up against his chest, and I felt like a peanut butter cup on a sunny dashboard. “We’re not ready yet.”

“No, we’re not.” I tipped my head up and closed my eyes.

“Not just yet,” he whispered, warm breath on my lips.

He kissed me. It was heaven and hell all wrapped into one. I told myself to take my time. Three months I’d had my sight back, give or take. Three months he’d been his mother’s only son, his nephews’ surrogate father and the cop who’d hidden the suicide note-slash-confession of the most notorious serial killer ever to hit Broome County. His brother.

We needed time.

He pulled his mouth from mine. I felt like crying. “You’re no good for me, Detective. You make me feel like some kind of hormonal teenager.”

“It’s mutual.” He took my chin in his hand. “Happy Thanksgiving, Rache.”

“You, too, Mason.”

And then he got into his car, started it up and drove away.

I stood there looking at the horizon long after it had swallowed him up.

“Hey, Rachel!” Amy called from somewhere near the front porch. I couldn’t look away from the last spot I’d seen that ugly Monte Carlo’s ass end. In another second or two she was standing next to me, anyway. “That Thanksgiving you were secretly wishing for just...happened. Did you notice that?”

“It sorta did, didn’t it?”

She nodded. “It’s almost like some of that stuff you write about is actually true.”

I shrugged, noncommittal. I was feeling something new tonight. Something small and deep, like a seed just starting to split open. I didn’t want to stop feeling it to focus on anything else.

“Well, either way,” she said, turning and heading back to the house, “maybe you’d better start visualizing the Christmas you’d like. You know. Just in case.”

* * * * *

Celebrate Christmas with
Rachel and Mason
in
WAKE TO DARKNESS,
the next novel from
New York Times
best-selling author
Maggie Shayne,
available in December
wherever Harlequin MIRA books are sold.

Keep reading for an excerpt from
SLEEP WITH THE LIGHTS ON
by Maggie Shayne.

Prologue

H
e watched the body sink in slow motion through the murky green water. Tears blurred his eyes, obstructing his view, but he wiped them away. He liked to watch. It was peaceful, the way the long tendrils of dark seaweed seemed to reach up for the bodies. Like they were waiting, eager to welcome them home. They parted, those tendrils, as the body sank deeper and then closed up again as its descent continued. Like the fingers of a loving hand, embracing them, wrapping them in the liquid softness of death. He liked to think of them resting at the bottom, sinking into the deep, soft mud. Peaceful. Easy. When the seaweed fingers returned to their former positions, reaching toward the surface, waving gently in the currents, it was as if they’d never even been there.

As if he’d never killed them.

When the last ripple faded and the water returned to green stillness, Eric backhanded the new tears from his face and snuffled hard. It was done. Again. But this was it, it was over. This would be the last time.

You say that every time. But you know better.

Yeah, it was true, he’d said it before. Every time, with every lanky, brown-eyed young man he bludgeoned to death with his favorite framing hammer. It wasn’t that he took any pleasure in killing them. It was just that he couldn’t help himself. When he saw them, he got this persistent itch in the back of his brain. And it would get worse and worse. You couldn’t scratch that itch from the outside. It was
inside
. It scratched and it scratched, a rat on a wall, working until it broke clean through.

That other one inside him.
He
was the killer. And once he got his rocks off beating them to death, he crawled back into his rat hole, leaving Eric to clean up the mess, to plaster over the hole and cover up the crime, and pretend there were no rats in his house at all.

What rats? I don’t hear any rats. Look at me, I’m just a normal guy. And yeah, my eyes are red, but not because I’ve been sobbing over the poor fucking bastard I just dumped into the lake. It’s probably allergies. There’s nothing wrong with me. I’m fine. Normal.

Scratch, scratch, scratch.

Nothing could make the scratching stop except killing. And it was getting so the rat demanded to be fed more and more often. It was growing, that rat. It was almost too big to stay behind the wall at all anymore.

But he told himself, as he always did, that was not the case.
He
was in charge, not the rat. He was patching that hole for the last time. He wouldn’t let the rodent chew through it again. Not again. He was done with this. He was not going to kill any more pretty, lanky young men with brown hair that hung a little too long. He could beat this. He knew he could.

Nodding hard, Eric dipped his oars into the green-brown water and pushed the boat into motion. The sun was rising now over the pine-forested eastern shoreline. It warmed the surface, drawing misty spirals and pillars upward from the water. They twisted higher, heading for the light like the spirits of Eric wal Vgn="cists beloved dead. He watched them rising, growing thinner, vanishing altogether, while he rowed in the opposite direction, west, toward the dock, the cabin.

A loon sang its heartbroken song. Tall black trees rose up out of the water without a leaf or a limb. Weak and rotting. Lily pads clustered thicker the closer he got to the shore, until it was as if he was rowing through a lake made of the waxy green leaves. There were lotus blossoms, too, mostly white, a few bright pink ones, just starting to open up as the sunbeams reached them. Bullfrogs croaked, and the birds in the forests surrounding the lake chorused louder and louder. Their morning choir. All around him, as the sun climbed higher, the Adirondack Mountains changed their character entirely. By night they were a dark world that seemed perfect for someone like him. A place where death and decay were just a normal part of the whole process, and where killing was everywhere. It was accepted. It was normal.

But when the sun took over, the mountains changed. The lake water that had been murky and green, sparkled and danced in the morning light. The forest came to life, no longer deep and foreboding, but green and lush, the ground beneath the trees, dappled in light and shadow.

He no longer fit, he with his rat-infested walls. And by the light of day it was always clear that he never really had.

He rowed the boat up to the long wooden dock. Today he hadn’t even taken a life preserver or any fishing gear, the way he usually did, figuring that would make him look normal if he were noticed by some fish-and-game officer. Not that he ever had been. The lake was isolated. He’d never seen anyone when he’d been out doing his grim work. This time he hadn’t even bothered to take those precautions. He’d just been eager to get it over with. To be done with it. That was how determined he was to stop killing. That was how sure he was that this would be the last time he would row out across Stillwater Lake in the predawn chill to lay a young man to rest at the bottom.

Looping the rope around a post, he climbed out of the boat, pulled himself up onto the old wooden dock, and realized that it was getting harder. He’d been putting on weight. His joints ached. Thirty-eight. He shouldn’t feel this bad at thirty-eight.

He walked toward the cabin, past the tire swing that dangled from the giant maple tree at the water’s edge. He and his kid brother used to swing out on that tire and try to see who could land farther out in the lake. He smiled as he remembered. They’d had a lot of fun here as kids. His own boys played the same game. Or used to. He hadn’t had the heart to bring them up here in a long, long time.

He’d polluted the water with the blood of his victims. He should have found a different place to put them to rest. Hell, he should have done a lot of things differently. But he was broken, and he didn’t know why. He only knew that he had to find a way to fix himself. To keep the rat sealed behind the wall, keep it there until this time it starved to death.

He walked past the cabin, not going inside. His pickup was parked in front. The hammer, already washed and dried, was hanging back in its spot in the toolshed. There was nothing more to do. And if he could just hold on to his willpower, there never would be. He got into his white F-150 and drove. He needed to be home with his family and to forget about this morning’s task. Forget, if he could, about all of those pretty, pretty boys.