The Darkest Joy (30 page)

A clunk distracts her and she lowers her blade as her eyes stay on me. It’s not like I can go anywhere: I can feel the plastic zip ties that bind my wrists digging into the soft flesh of my arm.

A knock comes at the door and I pray, so hard I swear God hears me. Until I hear the body drop.

There’s no saving me unless it’s by my own hand.

Lacey comes back into the dark, soft room she has me in. I don’t know where I am, though it seems familiar somehow. I move my cheek against the side of something fuzzy. I can smell the sea but that’s normal in a coastal town. There are no windows, but a vague ambient light slithers at the edges, teasing me with its nearness. The lack of light disorients me, making time seem surreal, suspended.

Lacey comes into focus and lifts an object and I flinch, knowing she’ll hit me with it.

Instead, she gives a soft chuckle. I look closely and see the ivory of the handle.

Jake’s cane.

Oh no
, my mind wails,
another casualty of knowing me
. That old man has never hurt anyone.

“Don’t cry, Brookie.” She brushes my tears away tenderly and I shy from her touch. “What doesn’t kill us makes us stronger, right?”

No.
It only makes us wish for death
, I think. But I say nothing.

My eyes follow her progress as she turns the walking stick to put it away and I see a tuft of pewter hair on the cane tip, the blood holding it to the worn surface like glue, very red against the cream.

A rage like a slow-burning fire slides through me and I instantly recognize what it is.

Hatred.

I
take the steps two at a time, banging on the huge sliding metal barn doors of Tucker’s shop, the echo of my fist reverberating and shattering the silence of the day. He’s a tinker by profession: people need him when their pipes are frozen underground in winter and when their engine block needs an overhaul in summer. He’s a modern-day Grizzly Adams . . . of indeterminate age and a true Alaskan man: part MacGyver, part outdoorsman, and all hard living. You’d think someone like him wouldn’t do high-tech but that is Tucker’s best hidden skill.

He’d known about Brooke for a while, encouraging me to find out for myself, not a gossiper. Tucker had also warned her off me. And to his credit, for what he knew of me, it was warranted.

Not anymore. Her abduction by a deeply deranged killer has necessitated every person on her side. I’m acutely aware that time is against us.

Tucker slides the door open, a quizzical expression on his face. He barely has time to assimilate my frantic presence as I burst through the door.

“What’s going on?” he asks, calm as a priest, his dark eyes traveling from my disheveled hair to my dirty boots. Looking for a reason in the madness. He doesn’t know the half of it, but he will.

“Brooke’s in trouble.”

His eyes meet mine. “What kind of trouble?” He sets the socket wrench down.

“The murderer’s got her.”

Surprise blanks his former expression even as thunder begins to consume it. He stands still for a moment, his contemplative expression darkening.

We look at each other.

“The Feds are here, they’ve enlisted the help of locals to start a ground search.” I don’t say that the locals are whoever I think will help—Clearwater has given me that much latitude at least.

Tucker sighs, and I can see the wheels of his brain turning. He’ll have to make sense of Brooke being in danger and the unbelievable component of Lacey’s deadly involvement. I hope he does it fast; time is our enemy. “Do they know who?” he asks after a lengthy pause.

Thank God, I can’t have him floundering on me now. I nod. “Lacey Colbert.”

Tucker’s features burst like a lightbulb into a slide of surprise. His brows rise then fall in anger. “That blonde Evan wanted to . . .” He lets the sentence go unfinished.

We stare at each other and he sucks in a breath. “No fucking way,” he says in disbelief, even as he reads the ready knowledge of Evan’s death in my expression. I put that on a faraway mental shelf for analysis later. My friend’s death I can grieve over when I have the luxury of time. Brooke has no time.

“Yeah,” I answer quietly, regret and sadness thick in my voice.

“Fuck.” Tucker hadn’t known Evan well, but they’d shared beers; they were Alaskan. And there are few enough of us that, in principle, that’s all that matters. We fight for our own. We just do. There’s a wildness here that is embraced, which is absent in other place—us against everyone else.

I clench my hands into balls at my sides. “You got any brilliant ideas? Like where?” I ask.

Tucker’s eyes flick to mine then away as he palms the short beard on his chin. I wait in torturous silence, the two minutes he deliberates, I die inside. That internal clock ticking. Always ticking.

“You gone by old man Kashirin’s?” he asks, his brows popping in question.

“Not yet, you were closer.”

He nods, mind made up. “Let’s hit his place first. Call the Fed . . .” His brows rise again.

“Clearwater.”

He nods. “Tell him where we’re going.”

I feel my own question on my face and Tucker answers it. “Just in case Goldilocks whacks one of us, they’ll still be able to save Brooke.”

I lift up my shirt, the gun holster digging into my waistband, the cold butt of the handle warmed by my flesh.

Tucker shakes his head. “I don’t think that’ll help. This one wants to be up close and personal.”

I think about the article describing, in vivid detail, the knife work employed on the victims. I think of Brooke in Lacey’s tender care and adrenaline surges through my already beleaguered system.

I don’t need to be up close and personal with Lacey. If the opportunity presented itself . . . “I’m taking it. She doesn’t have the element of surprise anymore and every Fed in the state is looking for her.”

Tucker just stares, then finally he says, “She’s smart or she wouldn’t have gotten this far. The only advantage we have is we know Alaska like the backs of our hands. She doesn’t.”

“She’s a girl,” I say.

Tucker gives a grim laugh. “She’s a clever
murdering
girl that’s holding your girlfriend hostage,” he says as he restates the facts, his level stare locking with mine.

I rake my hand through my hair for the billionth time. “Let’s snag Jake. He’ll have an idea.”

I feel hopeless. Like nothing in the world can save Brooke. Then I think of her guarded trust and we race to Tucker’s Bronco, then roar toward the spit . . . toward Jake’s junk shack.

I set my feelings aside. One of us has to have hope.

I’ll scrape together enough for us both.

Lacey can’t take the one thing that’s made me live, each breath I take sweeter than the last.

I won’t allow it.

I peer through Jake’s grimy glass widows, the telltale glow of the laptop absent. I turn to Tucker. “Not here.” My hand drops
to my side and I want to sound a primal roar in frustration. I dig my cell out: no phone call or text back.
Shit
.

“Damn, man. That’s bad news.”

I nod in tense agreement. “Could’ve used his head on this.”

I stand still for a second, trying not to let panic overwhelm me. I can hear every second click by like I have a second timer going inside my head.

Tick-tock-tick-tock.

A sudden idea, as horrible as it is sweet, begins to form like a black cloud inside me, a dooming portent.

Tucker sees my face. “What?” he asks, stepping forward, his eyes scanning my face before I utter my suspicion.

“Fuck, I think I know where she is.”

Tucker rolls his eyes. “Spit it fucking out, Taylor.”

I spin away from him, sprinting to the Bronco. The sun plows into the windshield, breaking away in fragmented splinters of light that pierce my eyes, causing white dots to dance in my vision. My heart climbs into my throat and my body comes to life again, the fight-or-flight instinct kicking in.

It’s fight all the fucking way.

“Chance!” Tucker roars, his footsteps stomping behind me like a lumbering giant awakened from slumber.

I whip open his door and jump into the driver’s seat and put the still-running rig in gear, slamming the door with a slapped palm on the exterior.

“Don’t!” Tucker bellows from a car length away and I toss him my cell out the window.

He catches it smoothly. “Call Clearwater!” I yell over the rumble of the engine and I pull away in a spray of gravel.

I lean out the window screaming over my shoulder, “Marina!” Tucker scowls, punching his fingers through my cell as I travel the short distance to the marina.

I check the rearview mirror and see Tucker speaking heatedly into my cell. Then he disappears from sight and I head for
Life Is Chance
.

Let’s hope the name of my boat holds true . . . and that chance is on my side tonight.

I ninja-sprint down the gangplank like a silent ghost for the first time in my life. The steel grating is meant to make noise, but the tide is high so it’s not a climb, but almost horizontal—easy for once.

How many times have I shoved dollies full of two hundred pounds of fish up that thing? It’s strange to be empty-handed of my catch.

I reach the bottom, my gun naked in my hand. No one with any brains pulls a gun unless they’re willing to kill.

And I am willing.

I know that taking a life is a sin. A reduction in the sanctity of humanity’s precious tally. But for me, the choice is easy.

Brooke or Lacey.

Prodigy pianist whom I love or obsessed serial murderer?

Everywhere I look I’m greeted with bulging eyes and people who move out of my way, slowly backing up the way I’ve come.

Everyone wants to avoid a man who looks like I do at that moment: armed, brutal . . . purposeful.

No one wants that kind of attention turned on them.

I move to the last slip where my boat, the same boat that
used to be my folks’, gently rocks with the slight disturbance of the quiet harbor.

I know that a storm is coming.

Yet the sky is a cloudless blue, the fabled cool Alaskan weather on hiatus until further notice.

I move toward my boat, which Matt had just been cleaning not two hours ago, Lacey almost certainly using that window of time to stow Brooke. The gun is a familiar comfort in my grip, all those days at the shooting range coming full circle to give me what I need: confidence.

The confidence of a killer, driven by love.

My hand squeezes the handle of my weapon just as I round the corner of the bow and catch sight of Jake. A pool of blood like a halo of death surrounds his body.

And then Lacey steps out of the cabin, an entire half head taller than a stunned Brooke, whose vivid lavender gaze is a window to her terror. I read in her expression a resolute determination. And instinctively guess she might martyr herself for me, sacrificing herself because she feels like she must—some kind of convoluted redemption for her family’s death. If she weren’t, she’d put herself out of harm’s way. But that’s not Brooke’s design. Death irrevocably changes our life path and Brooke is the proof.

Fuck that
.

I can feel the Feds approach like a bitter taste in my throat.

I should wait.

Instead, I put my hand on the starboard side of the ship, pushing up and lifting off, the gun high in the air in my right hand for balance. I sail over the side of the vessel and land on my feet, my toes just inches from Jake’s blood.

I stare into Lacey’s eyes and see my death reflected back in them.

I watch Chance move down the wide-planked dock, his sea legs navigating the moving dock as fluidly as if those boards were rock steady. Chance’s bluish-green eyes blaze like cool fire from a face with a perpetual tan, his inky hair standing on end, and I know he’s combed it in frustration a hundred times since I’ve disappeared and I want to cry.

Chance deserves so much more. And Lacey deserves to die. I thought I’d be scared when this moment finally arrived, or maybe try to escape . . . but all I feel is a desperate sort of calm resolution. I know that she’ll never stop killing, that somehow I’m the catalyst for her behavior. I can’t ignore the deadness behind her eyes.

I thought I loved her.

But maybe I was just so desperate for a connection, loving how much she loved me, that I ignored what I didn’t wish to see. And now all I’m left with is hatred. If I have to die to save Chance, and ultimately others, I will.

I watch the muscles of Chance’s arm tense as he does a one-handed leap over the right side of the boat, hardly rocking it, and close my eyes against his natural grace, using an athleticism he’s not aware of. His left arm’s branded by ink, a gun like death in his fist.

“Well hi, lover,” Lacey says. As he moves to step forward she presses the knife deeper into my neck and I feel a drop of my
blood slide down like a heated trail of fire. It rolls between my breasts and my fear, my determination coalesce into a burning focus.

She can’t win. Somehow, I have to end this.

Chance’s Adam’s apple does a slow bob, those piercing eyes slicing her up like small razor blades. “Let her go, Lacey,” he says in a soft voice full of menace, but emboldened by resolve.