The Devil’s Share (25 page)

“No work involved?”

“No.”

“That's good. I've been hoping you'd take some R&R. Happy to help. What did you have in mind?”

“I don't know. Europe, maybe. I've never been there. I've always wondered what Paris was like.”

“You'll love it. Monique can set that up for you, four-star all the way.”

“No,” she said. “An apartment maybe, something simple. A place I can live for a while without attracting attention.”

“How long were you thinking?”

“I'm not sure. A couple months maybe, then I'll decide. If I get bored before that, I'll come home, figure something else out.”

“I'm glad to hear you talking this way. That you're giving some other things a rest.”

“I might make a trip to Texas first. Let him know what's going on.”

“My advice? Make it a quick one. Don't get distracted, change your mind about going away.”

“We'll see how it plays.”

“Give him my best,” Rathka said. “And tell him we haven't given up.”

“He knows that. But I'll tell him anyway.”

“Let me look into these other issues, get back to you. I have a friend, a publisher, who knows Paris like she was born there. I'm sure we can come up with something that'll work for you, something off the tourist path.”

“Thanks.”

“In the meantime, you should come by the office. Monique'll make you an espresso. I'll show you the latest pictures of the twins. They just turned eight.”

“Maybe I will,” she said.

*   *   *

The faces came to her that night, as she knew they would. Struggling to sleep, the Lunesta not working, she'd see them again. A man with his throat torn open by buckshot. A blood-spattered silver cross. Sandoval in a ditch, eyes dull, looking up at the night sky, his life draining into the dirt beneath him. Then the desert again. The snapping of rifle bolts. Four men facedown, motionless.

Too much blood this time, too much pain. And none of it worth it.

When the bedside clock said five
A.M.
, she gave up, took a bottle of wine out on the deck. She poured a glass, sat on the steps, arms wrapped around herself, listening to the wind and the water.

Home again, she thought. A different world. A different life.

Dawn was breaking, a red sun rising over the ocean, when she went back inside, carrying the glass and the empty bottle. She slept then, sprawled atop the sheets in sweats and T-shirt, the Glock on the nightstand, pale light coming through the windows. She didn't dream.

 

TWENTY-SIX

She woke at noon, her mouth dry, washed down two aspirin with a full bottle of water. They barely touched her headache.

Most of what was in the refrigerator had gone bad while she'd been away. She threw out almost everything, made a list of what she'd need at the store. Then she dropped the rental off at an agency office in Ocean Township, took a cab home, got her own leased Ford out of the garage she kept two blocks from her house. At the post office, she went though two weeks of mail. Utility bills, junk mail solicitations, and two business envelopes from Rathka's office.

She threw away the junk, opened the letters at a side counter. Each had a check for fifteen thousand, yields from various investments. She'd deposit each in a separate bank.

The afternoon was already turning gray, clouds moving in. At the grocery store, she replaced what she'd thrown away, paused at the entrance to the adjoining liquor store. Her head still ached, but she knew she'd have to drink again tonight if she hoped to sleep.

She bought a bottle of Medoc, told herself she'd only have a glass. Knew she was fooling herself. This would grow to be a problem if she let it.

Back at the house, she put on a red and black Puma tracksuit, did the mile run along the inlet and into Belmar, then back, panting and nauseous all the way. But her head had begun to clear, and by the time she reached the house she had sweated most of the alcohol out of her system.

The wind was picking up outside, rattling the windows, slicing whitecaps on the inlet. She wasn't hungry, but knew she would feel better with something in her stomach. For dinner, she cooked a hamburger steak, microwave french fries. She ate standing at the kitchen counter, looked over at the bottle of wine on the table. A glass or two afterward, that would be it.

The air was thick with humidity, and there was a deep ache in her hip. She found two pain pills left in a bottle in the medicine cabinet and took one with a palmful of water from the faucet.

In the living room, she turned on the radio, opened the bottle of wine and got a glass from the cabinet. She sat on the couch, listened to a Handel concerto she recognized but couldn't name. With her third glass of wine, she felt the tension of the last few weeks starting to fall away.

She took the bottle and glass out onto the deck, left the sliding glass door open, sat on the steps, the music drifting out around her. Night now, but still warm, the air heavy. The houses on both sides of hers were dark. To the east, over the ocean, lightning pulsed on the horizon.

She drank wine, watched the oncoming storm. The wind grew stronger, water lapping rhythmically against her dock. She filled her glass again, saw the bottle was nearly empty.

So much for one glass, she thought. You need to get a handle on this before it gets bad.

The first raindrops came then, thick and warm. Call it a night, she thought, and start making some changes tomorrow.

The rain picked up, the thunder closer. She got up, tired and sore, carried the bottle and glass inside, shut the sliding door against the wind and the night.

*   *   *

The smell woke her. The scent of rain, of the sea, of night on the water. It pulled her out of a dream in which she was sinking into an immense darkness, trying to swim back to a surface miles above.

She opened her eyes. Rain drummed steadily on the roof, a lulling sound that had helped ease her into sleep. On the nightstand, the clock read three fifteen. The radio still played softly in the living room. She'd left it on when she'd fallen asleep.

She sat up, saw the figure by her bed, a blacker shadow in the darkness. She pushed away covers, reached for the Glock on the nightstand, knocked over the empty wine bottle there. Her hand closed around the gun, and she pointed it at the shadow, finger on the trigger. It felt wrong, the balance and weight off.

The nightstand lamp went on, and Hicks was sitting there, in a chair beside the bed, dripping wet. He held up the Glock's magazine so she could see it, put it on the nightstand. “You sleep sound.”

She squeezed the trigger. It depressed halfway, stopped.

“I took the round in the chamber, too,” he said. “Knew you'd have one there.”

Thunder in the distance. The rain on the roof grew louder. She kept the Glock steady.

“That alarm company ripped you off,” he said. “Once I got into your basement from outside, it only took about ten minutes to figure out how to override the whole thing. I were you, I'd ask for your money back.”

She slid away from him to the other side of the bed, the gun still up, untangled her legs from the covers.

“Door's right there,” he said. “Think you can make it?”

She came off the bed, stood. She wore sweatpants and a T-shirt. The hardwood floor was cold beneath her bare feet.

He picked up the bottle, set it back on the nightstand. “Drinking to forget? How's that working out for you?”

She stayed where she was, keeping the bed between them. She could use the Glock as a club if she had to, but from where he sat he blocked the open door. In the hallway beyond, she could see the gleam of wet footprints on the floor.

“See, that gun's just a hunk of metal now,” he said. “It's useless. But this”—he reached down into his boot, came up with a wood-handled ice pick—“is always loaded. It's as primitive as it gets. Silent, too.”

She thought of Sladden, the patchwork of holes in his flesh, the final entry wound at the base of his skull.

“How did you find me?” she said.

“Your friend in Kansas City. On one of his laptops he had a post box number and a zip code for you. The hard drive was password protected, but one of my guys cracked it. The entry was half-ass coded, and under a different name, but it wasn't hard to figure out.”

She took a step to the left. He watched her.

“Long odds, but it was worth a shot,” he said. “I drove all the way out here, found that post office. Tough part was the waiting. I sat in that parking lot across the street for three days, pissing into an iced-tea bottle, waiting for you to come along and check your mail. Not knowing if you ever would, or if you even lived around here anymore. I got lucky, I guess.”

“What do you want?”

“Not sure, exactly. If all I'd wanted was to kill you, I'd have done it while you were still asleep. Just pushed this thing through an ear canal and into your brain. You'd never know what hit you. It would have been easy for me that way. Easy for you, too.”

“Why didn't you?”

“I don't know. Maybe I just wanted to look into your eyes again, one last time.”

She thought about the .32 in its holster, clipped beneath the bed, only inches from his leg. But no way to reach it from here.

She lowered the Glock. She could throw it, aim for his head, hope to stun him enough to get past him and through the door.

He stood up then, as if he knew what she was thinking, pushed the chair back. He wore a black field jacket over a dark crew-neck sweater, the chest bulky, the vest beneath showing through. He took the magazine from the nightstand, pocketed it.

“I guess I was looking for a little closure, too,” he said. “And maybe some revenge.”

“For Sandoval?”

“Who pulled the trigger on him? You or Chance?”

“Does it matter?”

“I guess not. Since when I'm done with you, I'll go find him as well. I'll square it, one way or another.”

“You didn't have to do what you did. None of us would have talked.”

“Couldn't take the chance. The old man wasn't too clear with me on numbers, but I'm guessing he stood to make a good twenty million on that deal. He promised me a nice piece of it. We didn't want someone fucking things up six months down the line, giving everybody up to get out of some other bullshit charge.”

“That wouldn't have happened.”

“There was only one way to make sure.”

“Didn't do him much good in the long run, though, did it?” she said. “I was out at the house. I saw what you did.”

He sighed. “Yeah, that was
regrettable,
as he might say. But our partnership was a losing proposition, for me at least. Even with all I did for him, he was never going to see me as anything but an employee. More I thought about it, more I realized it would never work out.”

She rounded the foot of the bed.

“If you think you can make it,” he said, “go for it.”

From this angle, she could see down the hallway to the living room. The vertical blinds over the sliding glass door were bunched together, pushed aside. Rain was sheeting against the glass. So that was the way he'd come in. He'd disabled the alarm, forced the lock, and she'd slept through it all.

“Another reason,” he said. “I figured you had some cash stashed here somewhere. A safe maybe. I got a little something from Emile. Not as much as I could have if I'd played it better, unfortunately. But sometimes you just have to cut your losses. So I could use a little more traveling money before I hit the road.”

“There's no cash here.”

“Maybe I'll just poke around a little anyway, find out.”

He took a pair of steel handcuffs from his jacket pocket, threw them on the bed. “Why don't you go ahead and put those on?”

“No chance.”

“I could make you.”

“You could try.”

He grinned at that, came around the bed fast. She threw the gun at his face, but he saw it coming, raised his left arm, knocked it aside. She lunged for the door, and he was on her before she reached it, his left arm around her throat.

They went through the open doorway together, his weight bringing them down hard in the hallway. The impact drove the breath out of her. She tried to push him away, and he swung atop her, the ice pick in his right hand. She went for his eyes.

“Stop it,” he said. He batted her hands away. “Just fucking stop it.”

He pressed the point of the ice pick to her cheek. She twisted away from it, got her right hand on his throat, plunged her thumb into the soft space beneath his Adam's apple. With her left hand, she caught his right wrist, tried to push the ice pick away from her face.

He knocked her hand from his throat, then pulled his right hand free of her grip. She jabbed at his eyes again, and he caught her throat with his left hand, lifted her head and drove it back down into the floor. Sparks flashed at the edge of her vision. He raised the ice pick high, his left hand still on her throat, pinning her.

“This what you want?” His voice was hoarse. “This the way you want it to go?”

She looked at his eyes, knew then he'd made his decision, knew what she had to do.

The ice pick flashed down. She raised her left hand, palm out. Felt the impact, and then the pain as the blade pierced her hand. The point came through the other side.

An electric shock ran up her arm. He looked at her hand, as if surprised by what he'd done. But she was already moving, squirming, swinging her hips out from under him. He let go of the ice pick, and this time she had the leverage, got her center of gravity up and over. She twisted atop him, drove her forehead into his nose, once, twice.

She scrambled off him, onto her feet, moving back toward the bedroom, dizzy. Without thinking, she pulled the ice pick from her hand, tossed it aside. Just numbness there now. She went through the bedroom door, and then his hand was around her ankle, and she was going down hard, face-first.