Side by Side (31 page)

83

All day Sunday Winter had been at FBI HQ being debriefed. It had rained off and on all that day, which had suited Sean’s dark mood. Monday turned out to be warm and the sun worked hard to dry up the ground left spongy by the rain. Winter told Sean that morning that he had invited Alexa for lunch, which meant Sean was scrambling to get it prepared. Winter and Hank had taken Rush, Faith Ann, and Olivia to the grocery store in Concord for some things Sean needed to finish the meal. She was busy in the kitchen when she heard a vehicle pulling up out front.

Sean went to the door and saw Alexa approaching the porch. “You’re early. Winter isn’t back yet,” she said, trying not to sound curt. She seriously doubted that Alexa’s appearance while she was alone was accidental. “I’ve got some wine in the fridge.”

“I wanted to talk to you alone,” Alexa said.

Sean led Alexa to the kitchen and stood until Alexa sat at the table.

“I wanted you to know that I am truly sorry I put Winter in harm’s way.”

“He’s forgiven you, I guess I can, too,” Sean told her as she sat across from Alexa. “It turned out all right. The Dockerys are safe. Bryce is where he belongs for the time being.”

“He is.”

“But Winter is sure he won’t be for long. I mean, we all know how the weasels deal.”

“All’s well that ends well,” Alexa said softly.

Sean got up, went to the refrigerator, took out a bottle of wine, and removed the cork. She took a pair of wineglasses from the counter and poured them full of white wine. She handed Alexa one and, taking hers, sat.

“I guess your sister is up a creek.”

“That’s her own doing. She approached me a while back assuming I was like she is. They needed me to get to Judge Fondren in order to keep the FBI from getting involved. I thought it was going to be an extortion of some sort until the kidnapping. I never would have let that happen. Then I had to figure out a way to get the Dockerys free, but I knew my sister’s men were going to be watching me every minute. They have miniature cameras, all sorts of devices. I knew Winter was my only hope. I insisted on bringing him in because I told Antonia I couldn’t do it alone since not having a capable partner would invite too much official skepticism. My people thought it was a good idea and I convinced Antonia that Winter wasn’t the man whose reputation he carried. I told her he was burned out, fat and happy, suffering from an old wound, and gun-shy. I said he would back up my story to enhance his own reputation. Precio—my sister agreed and convinced the others. Only I knew it was a lie.”

“Why did your sister think you’d go along?” Sean said.

“She’s heard me complain for years about the Bureau. I bitched and complained around her, even though it wasn’t how I felt. I guess I vented to make her feel like she’d done better than I had, made better choices. After she approached me with this, and I realized that she was dead serious, I went straight to my director. Antonia was vague, keeping me on a strict need-to-know on everything. I went undercover as a coconspirator, joining Antonia’s plot.”

“Still, she is your sister.”

“I’ll always love her because she is my only blood relative, but she’s twisted,” Alexa said evenly. “All hell’s breaking loose at the Pentagon this morning with people trying to cover their butts, or running for cover. Antonia claims she hooked her star to the side trying to catch the men involved in the arms dealing, playing both sides against the middle. Maybe she is telling the truth, and was getting Bryce out as part of some sting, maybe not. Not my problem. Max Randall claims that the agent Bryce murdered wasn’t the only undercover plant. He says he was, too, working deep cover with Homeland Security. But no matter what the truth is, Antonia and Randall planned the kidnapping, and they were going to sacrifice the Dockerys—either to get Bryce off, or to make a far bigger case against the Russian Mafia who were going to buy the weapons.”

“What do you think?” Sean asked.

“Who was really doing what on which agenda doesn’t make any difference to me. Based on Antonia’s ability to survive, she may just play the right angles and get off light. But even if by some miracle she avoids prison, her military career is over.”

“So what do you do now?”

“I’ll stay with the Bureau. It’s my only family now,” Alexa said. She took a swallow of the wine and nodded her appreciation of the vintage.

Sean felt a pang of sorrow for Alexa. The idea of being married to a job, of having only fellow agents for relatives, was sad.

“That isn’t why I came early, Sean, what I wanted to say to you. It’s hard for me . . .”

“You wanted to tell me you’re in love with my husband,” Sean said, getting it out in the open. She had known it the night before, when she’d watched Alexa’s face as she hugged Winter.

“He doesn’t know, does he?” Alexa asked.

“He’s never said so. Most men are fairly dim when it comes to that sort of thing. Why didn’t you ever tell him?”

Alexa set her glass down and folded her hands. “I was confused. I had a rough childhood.”

“Winter told me about it. Some. Enough, anyway. That you were sexually and physically abused.”

Alexa studied Sean’s eyes, nodding. “Okay. Well, in my mind, love and sex were direct opposites. Sex was a weapon that had been used against me, and it did all the destructive things to me we all know about from television shows. After I left home for college, I spent a lot of time in therapy. I finally decided that if I could get past that, I could get there with Winter. I believed that he could help me heal.” Alexa blushed. “You know, he kissed me once, and I freaked out. I was going to talk to Winter when I was home one summer. I even brought Eleanor with me for moral support. She didn’t know that, of course. Sean, I could tell Winter anything, but saying that I loved him that way was different. . . .”

“I understand,” Sean said honestly. “Winter told me what you said in the store that night. He said that Eleanor had figured out what you did. That you were as in love with Winter as anybody could be. She believed that you knew that she would be a perfect woman for Winter. She was sure you had stepped aside because you loved him that much. But sacrificing him must have broken your heart.”

“In a good way, Sean.” Tears glittered in Alexa’s eyes. “Seeing them so happy was a wonderful thing. I loved them both. I still do.”

“I wish I had met Eleanor,” Sean said.

“You would have liked her and she would have liked you. Sean, it’s important that you know I’m not a threat to you. Winter could never love me the way he loves you or he loved Eleanor. And I could never be the lover and partner for him that Eleanor was or that you are.”

Sean nodded. She understood. “I appreciate your honesty, and I can see why you’re so special to Winter. How could I resent anybody who knows and loves Massey? Alexa, I hope you and I can be friends, and I hope you will always be in our lives. And you should think of us as your family.”

Sean hugged Alexa. When they broke the embrace, Alexa started crying again and had to wipe her eyes. Then she laughed and held her glass up.

“To the Masseys,” she said.

Sean touched her glass to Alexa’s.

Winter pulled up out front and he honked twice.

There were loud footsteps on the porch, the front door swung open, and the old farmhouse filled up with the rich sounds of a family coming home.

If you enjoyed
John Ramsey Miller’s electrifying
Side by Side,
you won’t want
to miss any of his crime novels.
Look for
Inside Out
and
Upside Down,
both featuring
U.S. Marshal Winter Massey, and
for
The Last Family
at your
favorite bookseller’s.

And read on for an exciting early
look at the next thriller from
John Ramsey Miller,
Too Far Gone,
coming soon from Dell.

TOO FAR GONE

by

John Ramsey Miller

TOO FAR GONE

An Alexa Keen Novel by
John Ramsey Miller

1

New Orleans, Louisiana, 1976

Crashing thunder woke the four-year-old.

She lay still, taking deep breaths, huddling with the teddy bear as the storm’s fury assaulted her ears. Running bolts of lightning slashed the black sky.

Wind blasted the rain hard against the window’s panes.

The massive oak tree outside flailed its branches—like furious arms reaching out for the lace curtains.

She clenched shut her eyes.

“There’s nothing to fear,”
her mother had said on other stormy nights.
“You’re perfectly safe in your bed, Casey.”

Each dazzling flash made the familiar objects in her room both strange and malevolent. The stuffed animals perched on the window box instantly became monstrous shadows against the shadowy wall.

She listened for some sound to let her know if her parents were awake and perhaps moving around somewhere in the house.
They will come tell me it’s all right.

The bedroom door was cracked open, the hallway a dark and endless tunnel.

“BAM!” A shutter on a nearby window, suddenly unhooked, slapped at the side of the house like an angry fist against a door. “BAM! BAM! BAM!”

She pushed back the covers, slid off the mattress, and shot to the door, thinking of the safe, warm nest between her parents in their bed.

Throwing open her door, she ran across the hallway to her parents’ bedroom, clutching the bear to her chest.
They won’t be mad.
She turned the knob and slowly crept into the bedroom, where lightning illuminated the crumpled bedding.

They are not here!

The bathroom was dark.

They have to be downstairs.

Casey hurried to find them. On the stairs, between the peals of thunder, she could hear loud noises below, like dogs barking, or seals at the zoo.

One hand on the banister, the other clutching the soft animal to her, the child slid down the wide staircase one step at a time. The noises stopped before she reached the first floor and the sudden silence scared her more than the sounds.

In the den, flashes formed into trapezoidal slivers by the windows lit the room eerily. The chair her father always sat in when he was in the room—it was vacant.
Not in here.

She padded off down the hallway toward the rear of the house.
Mommy? Daddy?

Casey saw a yellow band of light at the far end of the hallway under the swinging door to the kitchen and she ducked her head and ran for it. She imagined that something large was rushing at her in the darkness, something that would pounce at any second and sweep her up in its jaws like the lion on the television always did to the deer.

“Mommy!” she yelled out. “Mommy!”

Reaching, she pushed at it. Because it didn’t swing open but a tiny bit, her chest and her forehead struck it hard, and she whimpered at the pain. She fought to push it open, but it wouldn’t budge. In her panic she dropped the bear and slammed her hands against the wood, beating, beating, beating and hollering for her mother.

Little by little, as whatever was making it stay shut moved a little at a time, it opened just a bit. The kitchen lights poured out into the hallway through the growing crack.

Casey heard an odd sucking sound and a loud grunting.

Something warm and wet touched her toes, and she looked down to see a pool spreading from under the door to her feet. Her bear was lying there on the floor, his black eyes staring up hard at her as the puddle swallowed his head and his arms.

Casey pushed hard again.

The door swung in suddenly and Casey pitched headlong into the brilliantly lit kitchen.

She was lying facedown in the warm red liquid that was everywhere.

She looked around and found herself staring into her mother’s face. It was not at all the right face. So many boo-boos. She knew her father was there too, but she wouldn’t look at him. She closed her eyes tightly and screamed and screamed.

“STOP IT!” a voice boomed. “STOP IT RIGHT THIS MINUTE!”

Casey quit screaming. Turning, she saw two bare feet inches from her face and let her eyes follow the legs to the hem of a dress. Casey sat bolt upright and looked up into the eyes of a witch wearing a wet dress. The witch’s blond and crimson hair stuck out from her head like twisted garden vines. The unfamiliar face, smeared with red, smiled down at her. Two of her front teeth were missing. She knelt and put the cook’s meat-chopping thing down on the floor.

Casey couldn’t move. She stared at the bloody hands that reached out for her and she squeezed her eyes shut tight as the witch embraced her, pressing Casey’s cheek, now wet with tears she didn’t even know she was shedding, against her heaving chest.

“What a good baby girl you are to come find me,” the husky voice told her. “I was just getting ready to come get you.”

2

Thirty years later

Using her Mag-Lite to prevent tripping over fallen tree limbs in the dark, Special FBI Agent Alexa Keen followed the long string of crime-scene tape that had been placed by responding officers to form a trail to a Day-Glo–bordered trapezoid. At the end of the tape she entered the crime scene. The corpse appeared to be wrapped tightly in a rust-colored blanket—a covering Alexa realized was composed of tens of thousands of fire ants. As she squatted for a better look, the dead man’s lids suddenly opened and he stared out at her through eyes of wet obsidian. His mouth formed a silent, screaming circle.

Alexa jerked awake in the darkness and lay still, piecing the shards of reality together.
The hotel. New Orleans. Law enforcement seminar. Friday
. A real siren outside had clawed its way through the gossamer walls of her dream about a dead man she had seen only in photographs until his naked corpse had been discovered in the Tennessee woods two days after his family had paid a half-million-dollar ransom. Charles Tarlton had been one of her first cases—the first involving the murder of an abducted individual—and it played in the theater of her dreams with some frequency. As Alexa’s nightmares went, this one was hardly a two—a ten was being awakened by labored wheezing and lying frozen in terror as a pair of clammy hands explored her prepubescent body.

The bedside clock had the time at five past twelve. Alexa slid her hand beneath the pillow beside her to feel the pommel grip of her Delta Dart, an eight-inch-long triangular-bladed weapon made of glass-reinforced nylon. It was always there in case she was ever again surprised by anyone climbing into her bed. The inexpensive dart’s edges were as dull as the point was sharp, and was strictly a stabbing weapon. Used correctly, it penetrated like a high-powered-rifle bullet. And Alexa Keen knew how to use it.

Except for her removing her shoes, Alexa was still dressed in the clothes she’d worn to dinner with two other special agents she’d never met before they checked into the Marriott. She always slept in her clothes when she was away from her own bed. She lay awake for several more minutes with her eyes closed—her mind shifting gears and speeding through a world of troubling thoughts. The most disturbing were of her sister, who was sitting in a military safe house, waiting to testify at a string of court-martial proceedings.

Beyond that stack of mind manure, Alexa’s mind started going through the cases she’d worked that had ended badly, wondering what she missed, how she should have done things differently. Everybody made mistakes, but when Alexa Keen made one, the consequences could be devastating and deadly.

Alexa’s life was one long stress test. She thrived on edge living—consuming gallons of coffee and running headlong through nights and days without meaningful sleep. She loved the atmospheric highs that success brought and she slogged her way out of the pit that failures brought. The job was her life. She read inside politics expertly, for doing so was a necessary evil: it often meant the difference between being relevant and sitting behind a desk in Fargo. She walked the walk—navigating the spiderweb red-tape bureaucracy—and talked Bureau-speak. This was the life she had freely chosen, and the other badges were almost the only family she had left. Alexa’s was a family headed by inflexible, often paranoid, and generally disapproving parent figures who were slow to reward and eager to punish—and a family where sibling rivalry was unrelenting and pitiless.

Alexa rose from the bed and crossed to the window. Opening the heavy curtains, she peered down through the rain-streaked glass at a wide-awake city. Twenty floors below, an ambulance attendant slammed the door of the vehicle whose siren had awakened her and she listened to its scream as it made its way toward Charity Hospital, which had the closest and best emergency room in the city. And New Orleans did its dead-level best to make sure it remained the busiest room in town.

Alexa Keen hadn’t yet found any place that felt like a comfort zone. She sometimes wondered if there was a nurturing place for her. She knew that home wasn’t a location, but most people sure seemed to be anchored to some geographic cradle. All through her life she had settled in superficially, learning the relevant streets in the cities she lived in, and developing preferences in stores and restaurants. In each city, there were people whose company she enjoyed. Her apartments were attractively decorated, but they might have been sets in a furniture showroom designed to give clients an idea of how a properly decorated place was supposed to look if you kept people out of it. The same framed art hung on the walls, the same sleek modern furniture always filled the space enclosed by the walls. No extraneous clutter. No plants to be watered. No pets to anchor her. Alexa’s telephone seldom rang and her mailbox collected only junk mail and bills. Her television set played strictly for information. Her sound system reflected her mood in shades of Billie Holiday, the Gypsy Kings, R.E.M., Green Day, the Beatles, or Elmore James.

The pedestrians down on the sidewalk—most of them tourists, she was sure—were hardly more than marks. Their wallets held the blood that powered the city’s real heart—the French Quarter, and now the casinos. Alexa had visited the Crescent City only on FBI business. It wasn’t her nature to spend her vacation time in places like New Orleans, San Francisco, Las Vegas, or Miami. When she had time to fritter away—her forced vacations—she hiked obscure trails, floated down rivers, camped where few other people wanted to be. She liked the beach, but only in the winter. She loved best being alone on the side of a mountain under a giant blue sky, sipping creek-chilled wine while sitting in the cool grass reading. Alexa didn’t like New Orleans. Once, some years earlier, while fighting her way down Bourbon Street on Fat Tuesday, chasing after a man who had just shot a pair of deputy U.S. marshals, she had caught a glimpse of what Hell must look and feel like.

During Mardi Gras, the Quarter was jam-packed with drunken hedonistic fools dancing to a tune of no-holds-barred wretched excess.

She also didn’t find New Orleans particularly inviting in the space between Fat Tuesdays. She didn’t find the blend of grinding poverty, wholesale crime, decaying structures, the crumbling infrastructure, the third-world corruption, or the decadence at all attractive.