Kick (The Jenkins Cycle Book 1) (31 page)

Getting the belt underneath Nate so I could wrap it around his chest would mean I’d have to come dangerously close to touching him. Carefully, I ran the belt beneath Nate’s arms—first the right, then the left—then I tucked the middle part beneath his neck as far as it would go. I took both ends and slid the belt beneath him, shimmying back and forth until it was directly beneath the wound. After that, I threaded the belt through the buckle and cinched it tight enough to stop the free flow of blood, yet loose enough to let him breath.

Nate groaned, and his eyelids fluttered open briefly before closing again. It was hard to believe he was still alive. I knew if he had any hope of staying that way he needed to get to a hospital.

Assuming Erika immediately found the confession tape, I calculated how long it’d take her to get back from Rob’s house. I now realized why she’d left me alone after cuffing me to the bed. In order to make it look as believable as possible—this idea of Rob, the murderous brother—she couldn’t have phoned him to change their original plans. She needed everyone’s telephone records clear of anything that could trip up her story. With no way of contacting Rob by phone, her only recourse had been to drive there and physically knock on his door.

There and back in thirty minutes, so, fifteen minutes to Rob’s and fifteen minutes back, tops. And I’d already wasted a good five minutes bandaging Nate and figuring out elementary math problems.

I bit my lip and swore. Then I grabbed Nate’s cell phone off the little stand by the front door and hit “Send” through the fabric of Nate’s socks. Despite it being well after one in the morning, a familiar voice picked up on the third ring and said, “Dan, is that you? Is everything ok?”

“Yeah, it’s me. And no, everything sucks.”

“You sound different. What happened?”

“I need your help.”

As quickly as I could, I told him the situation. To his credit he didn’t interrupt me. In fact, he was so quiet, on one occasion I found myself asking, “Minister? Are you still there?”

“Yes I am, go on.”

When I finished, the minister said, “This is terrible. Why didn’t you listen to me and keep your hands to yourself? I just can’t believe it. I mean, I believe you—I just don’t want to. You say Nate’s still alive?”

“Yeah, but I need you to call 911 and get an ambulance and the police over here right now.”

“Why can’t you call them yourself?” he said. “Not that I mind helping, you understand. But you’re already there.”

Shaking my head, I said, “I can’t do that. The guy whose body I’m in is totally innocent, just like Nate. It seems the Great, uh—
God
—has thrown a monkey wrench into the way this usually works.”

The minister said, “I’ll call them now. What else should I do?”

“Look, your number was the last number that called Nate. He’s up in the bedroom, delirious—alive, last I checked. I’m going to find the key, get those cuffs off him and put the phone beside him. The story will be he hit the last number that called him. When you dial 911—from your house—make sure to say Erika and Rob tried to kill Nate for his money and then Erika shot Rob. Got all that?”

“Yes, I think so.”

“Great. And listen, if you can, drive over to the house after you talk to them. If I miss her at Rob’s she’ll be returning here to finish the job. I don’t
think
she’s armed anymore—she left both guns on the floor in Nate’s room, but rule nothing out. I don’t know how long it’ll take for the cops to get here so be extra careful.”

“Don’t worry about that,” the minister said, his voice hardening with steely resolve. “You just do what you have to do. If she tries anything I’ll shoot the bitch with
my
gun.”

I wanted to laugh, this priest sounding like Tony Soprano.

“Oh, jeez, hey,” I said, “One more thing. This one’s pretty important.”

“What’s that?”

“When the cops show up, you can’t mention the handcuffs under any circumstances. I’m taking them with me. There’s no way Nate could have called you, chained up.”

“Right, good thinking, I won’t say anything.”

Sighing with relief, I said, “Great. Thank you. Be careful.”

“You too.”

After we hung up, I took the phone back upstairs and placed it next to Nate. Then I rooted around Erika’s pink trunk looking for the key. It didn’t take long before I found it—it was exactly like the one that had unlocked Jill’s cuffs.

Still wearing hand socks, I unlocked the cuffs from his wrists and then the headboard. His wrists were slightly red and indented from pressing so long against the metal, but they’d clear up in a few minutes.

Nate was still breathing—shallowly—but I’d take that any day over the alternative.

Bending over Rob’s body, I gingerly tipped him to the side and picked his wallet from his back pocket, then had a look at his driver’s license. He’d lived in Herndon, which agreed with my fifteen-minutes-away theory. I mentally consulted my maps and found what I was looking for. I’d get there in ten minutes, speeding and running red lights.

After a quick sweep of the room for anything incriminating, I left the house, got in Peter’s car, and backed onto the street. Then I set out for Rob’s house, going through the plan in my head and wondering who’d be foolish enough to fall for it.

I giggled.

Certainly not a college girl.

Wow, I needed to get a grip on things. Even with my perfect memory, it’s hard to navigate anywhere at night and I didn’t want to accidentally miss my exit. I turned right onto Frying Pan Road off Route 28, smiling a little at the tired irony that seemed to pursue me everywhere.

A red light, a right turn, and a long drive through a neighborhood loop brought me to a lit house with a silver Passat parked out front.

I parked behind it and watched the house. For the first time in years I wondered just how smart I really was. Was I like that infamous emperor and his see-through lingerie, about to discover I’d been filling the voids in my logic with the soothing balm of self-infatuation? Did I seriously think I had the right to risk Peter’s life on a gamble?

“I can’t just do nothing,” I said.

Who else might die in the next days, months or years if I simply walked away? Just as I started in on a new batch of rhetorical questions, the front door opened and Erika stormed out, covering the distance in no time at all.

“Why are you following me?” she said into the closed driver’s side window, her face pressed close, causing me to flinch.

“I’m not following you!”

“Bullshit, I saw you before! Driving from …”

She peered closely at me, her face a taut visage of desperation and rage. Then she turned and started back to the house.

I leapt from the car without thinking and said, “The tape’s not there. I already took it.”

That stopped her. She turned around, cocked her head and broke into that smile I remembered from when I’d first met her. Pretty beyond mere geometry, hair like California sunshine… her hand wrapped in a scarf to stanch the bleeding from her fingers, mangled in a lonely room where she’d condemned a good man to die.

Erika bopped her head toward the house.

“Why don’t you come in?” she said. “No need to involve the whole neighborhood in our business.”

I stepped around the car, walked up to her and said, “Sure, I’ll come in. But before I do, there’s something you should know.”

She just looked at me, waiting.

“You know all those movies where the guy with all the secrets says if you kill him the evidence gets mailed to the police?”

“No,” she said, lying for no good reason.

“Whatever, just know this: we made another tape. And to answer your next question, no, I don’t have it with me. It’s at my job, in a box where we set out the next day’s packages. I put it there on the way over. If I’m not there in the morning before FedEx arrives, it goes to the police.”

Frowning, Erika said, “You’re a liar.”

I stepped close to her, looked her in the eye and said, “I’m not a liar, Erika. I’m a little bit country and you’re a little bit Norwegian death metal.”

Her eyes grew so wide I thought they’d drop out and roll away.

“Oh, you’ve heard that one?” I said. “It’s from
The Matrix
. Rob didn’t trust you, so he asked me to bug the house and wire it with hidden cameras. That’s what I was doing during the bachelor party. Sure, I missed seeing the world famous Sweet ’N Low, but it looks like the extra caution was worth it. Rob was right about you.”

“What else did you see?”

“Um, you were on top, then he was on top, then he was behind you, then you tried to get behind him and he started giggling, then—”

“Enough, I get it,” she said. “Anything else? Tapes run out, batteries die. You better have more than homemade porn or you can forget any sort of deal.”

“I still have Rob’s tape,” I said. “And I have footage of him shooting Nate. In the side of his chest, to be precise, while Nate was chained to a bed with the fuzzy cuffs from your pink trunk. After you shot Rob in the face, you gloated for a bit about how you were going to kill Tim, and then ol’ Nate mistook your hand for a turkey pot pie. How’s that?”

Erika nodded slowly.

“You already watched the tape? What’s it been, thirty minutes?”

I hadn’t thought of that.

Recovering, I said, “I saw the live feed while it was taping. And I’ve got the original cassette that Rob made, don’t forget that.”

Erika’s expression went haughty and cold.

“So what do you want, half? I can do half. No negotiating—half is fair, so take it. Same deal as Rob.”

“Except I’m smarter than Rob, and shooting me means you go to jail. We clear?”

She started toward the house.

“Yeah, ok. But you’re bald and ugly, so no sex. Now let’s get inside.”

“Why am I going inside?”

“Oh come on,” Erika said, her tone suddenly playful. “Rob calls all the video he shoots ‘tape.’ It’s just a little memory stick in a camera. I’ll agree you’ve got a real tape of your own, and that’s good enough to keep me honest, but right now I have to find Rob’s camera and get back to the house—and I could use some help.”

I’d hoped to be done by now. Still, if I could keep her here a little longer, so much the better. In about ten minutes, I’d simply leave. Any longer would risk the police showing up.

“You got me,” I said. “You’re a smart cookie. All right, let’s go look for it.”

Together, we walked in, her leading the way. She motioned me past to shut the door and I got my first look at the house of Nate’s would-be killer.

Rob’s tastes hovered somewhere between minimalist neglect and contemporary sleaze, with screens for curtains and beer bottles littering the flat surfaces of the room like cheap pottery. Black leather furniture with built-in cup holders and too much entertainment equipment crowded the small living room, and an enormous weight set occupied the place where normal people usually have dinner. The walls were bare—and by that I mean the only feminine touch was a poster of a topless woman suffering from severe lower back pain.

When I turned to look at Erika… well yeah, she was pointing another damn gun at me. Just once, couldn’t it be nunchucks or brass knuckles?

“Where’s the tape, Mr.—I’m sorry, what did you say your name was?”

Chapter 34

“Call me Dan,” I said. “Hey, is that a Kimber 1911? That’s a crazy gun.”

“Great, another gun nut. It’s from Rob’s collection. Move over there.”

She motioned me deeper into the room.

I started to sit down on the couch, but stopped when she told me not to. I lifted my hands, palms up.

“The tape’s in the bin at my job, just like I said.”

“So where’s your job? If you tell me I’ll let you go. No reason to kill you if you don’t give me a reason.”

I said, “Also, if I die in Rob’s house then it complicates things. And with you being the last person alive—”

“—I become a suspect, sure,” she said. “But there’s something you don’t know.”

“You’re not left-handed?”

She ignored that.

“This is Rob’s gun, in his house. It’s not like he’ll be giving any interviews, will he? I’ll be a ‘person of interest,’ but not a serious one. So where do you work?”

“Hey, look,” I said. “You’re right. The tape’s not at my job. Making these kinds of videos—that’s my real job. Not exactly a nine-to-five thing. If you shoot me, they’ll search my house, find the video equipment and then start snooping—you know they will, that’s what they do. And I took a lot of video, not just from tonight.”

“Uh huh,” Erika said. “So let’s go to your house. I still have some time.”

“Actually,” I said, trying on Peter’s favorite opening, “that’s where you’re wrong. Those bodies will start to get stiff soon. Some detective’s going to use that to figure out the time of the murder.”

“It wasn’t murder,” she said. “It was self-defense.”

“Excellent, great, that’s the spirit—not too shabby, maybe add a few tears. But what do you think the cops will say when a double killing takes place and you’re off driving around running errands?”

“How will they know I was driving around?”

“Well, your car will still be hot, right? Probably the first thing they do when they show up is feel the hood—that’s standard police procedure. So that’s another half hour you don’t have, waiting for it to cool off.”

I had no idea if that was true, but that was a really big gun she was pointing at me.

Erika stood looking at me, appearing to think about it. I stood quiet and hoped she’d talk herself out of shooting me.

“Ten million,” she said.

“Come again?”

Oh, the money.

“I’m not giving you half,” Erika said. “What would you do with it, anyway?”

“I’d think of something.”

“It’s my money and I’m not giving half of it away. Take the ten million, it’s more than fair. You’ll never have to work again. You could move to an island and lay on the beach all day.”

“I’m afraid of skin cancer,” I said.

“Then fishing,” she said.

“And all that mercury? No thanks.”

Angry now, Erika pointed the gun even
more
at me, if that were possible.