Where Evil Waits (8 page)

S
ASHA BROUGHT
M
EGAN HOME;
he was glowing on the inside. So close now.

He propped Megan’s body in the corner of her stall, snapped a couple of pictures of her to send to Kara later, then fell onto the cot in the tack room. He woke in what seemed like a blink of the eye, patted the floor for his iPhone, and lit the screen: 7:32. Less than three hours of sleep, but that was okay. The hardest work was done. Now it was just a matter of burying Megan before she got hard to handle, before she went stiff or started crawling with insects or smelling.

He rolled off the mattress and opened the door, letting the sun pour in, then crossed the lobby of the stable to use the bathroom. When he came out he looked around. It never got old, seeing what he’d built: The arena, equipped with jumps and clean-raked footing that even Willis Montgomery would have admired, all of it climate-controlled. A restroom off the lobby area, tiled and decorated like one found in a nice restaurant, except that it also had a shower. A tack room the size of a motel suite, which, in fact, Sasha had taken over as his bedroom ever since the structure was completed.

And eight stalls, each with rough-hewn pine for the walls and the finest flooring money could buy: a deep layer of gravel covered by a thick stall skin, topped off with eight inches of coarse sawdust for the horses’ bedding.

Of course, there were no horses in these stalls. There was something much better.

He closed his eyes, imagining the look on Kara’s face when he brought her here. How many nights had he lulled himself to sleep thinking about retribution? How many years had he been locked in prison with nothing but dreams of showing the mighty Kara Montgomery just what he was capable of? Of fucking her and punishing her and killing her for all that she’d cost him? And yet, ironically, it was during those same years that he had discovered something much better than a good fuck to give her.

He’d discovered the truth and it had set him free.

It would kill Kara.

He showered, rummaged through a box in the tack room for a granola bar to keep him going until breakfast, and switched on a TV in the corner. He didn’t expect anyone to know that Megan Kessler was missing yet; it had only been a few hours. But he liked following the news about Penny Wolff and Louie Guil—

Assistant District Attorney Kara Chandler, presumed dead overnight in a tragic boat explosion…

Sasha spun toward the television. He blinked, dread clutching at his throat.

This wasn’t possible. He listened harder, trying to replay the words already passed and at the same time make sense of the new ones coming from the reporter’s mouth. Explosion. Missing. Boat. Presumed dead.

But Kara couldn’t be dead. He wasn’t finished with her. When Kara Chandler died, it would be by Sasha’s hand.
He had the weapon. He had the practice. He’d set everything up. He would reveal the truth, watch it knock the light from Kara’s eyes, then choke the life from her lungs with the barbed wire garrote he’d fashioned in her honor. It would be his retribution. His glory.

The story ended. Panic took hold and he grabbed the remote, frantically clicking through channels. He found a repeat of the same story on another station, watched it, then found a third.

No way.
No fucking way.
She couldn’t have done this to him. Bitch.

Beads of perspiration popped up from his flesh. He paced, the television newscasters summarily unconcerned that he wanted to hear more,
needed
to hear more. On every channel, they moved on—showed a few shots of authorities picking up pieces of the boat and dragging the river, a photo of Kara and her kid, and gave a brief biography of who she was. And then, as if there were anything else in the world that mattered, they moved on.

Fuck them all.

His breaths came short. This was impossible. He’d sent her a text message of Louie Guilford just hours ago from the bridge. She’d received it—he knew she had. He’d
felt
it… lying there on a mattress in a stable he’d built for her, he’d sensed that she got the text, and he’d drifted to sleep with her horror filling his dreams. She had to be terrified. She had to have figured it out by now. After her husband’s sunglasses and Guilford’s death and all those gifts… After his threats to her son and the picture of Penny Wolff. She had to have been smart enough to realize he had something planned for
her—

Sasha stopped, a thought pinging in the back of his mind. Wait, that was it. She
did
have to know. He’d taken
care to be cryptic early on, keeping his distance while doing what was necessary to build this precious stable and prepare for her arrival. But by now, she had to know.

And just when she caught on, she and her kid went missing in a boat explosion? Dead?

I don’t think so.

A sneer rose up and Sasha moved through a few more channels, caught the end of one last local report. No bodies. No plans. No explanation. She and the kid were just gone.

Sanity squeezed in, one drop at a time. That bitch. How dare she try to hide from him? This was
his
plan. She had no right trying to change the outcome.

Rage threatened, but arrogance won out. Kara may be smart, but not as smart as Sasha. She couldn’t defy him. She couldn’t elude him.

He calmed and got out the iPhone—the one dedicated for his business with Kara. He resisted the urge to turn it on here and jumped in the Lexus. He drove, not sure where he was going, only certain that he didn’t dare let the GPS he was about to use start at the stable. He got into Atlanta where there would be plenty of towers, smiled at himself, and headed for a parking lot at Turner Field. He liked the irony of that.

When he was parked, he got out the phone and turned it on, then re-enabled the GPS.

Kara’s phone had a tracking program—he’d installed it himself. He’d been tracking her for months, and she had no idea, and her kid, too. All he’d needed was to have the phones in his hands for a few minutes to install the programs, and he managed that one afternoon at a Memorial Day party. No problem at all.

He waited while the phone found service, clicked
on the device he wanted to find, and watched the little bars light up as the satellite searched for Kara’s phone. Nothing.

His jaw clenched. What? He tried again. Nothing.

Fury rose in his gut, and he switched over to access Aidan’s tracker. A signal came up. His heart started beating again. Aidan’s phone was still alive, somewhere north of the city, near Blue Ridge. In the middle of fucking nowhere.

He frowned. It didn’t make sense that Kara’s phone wasn’t working but Aidan’s was, especially if they’d both been blown up in a boat explosion. He’d known she was smart, he’d known she was resourceful. But he hadn’t expected her to try to escape him by making people believe she was dead.

He set the phone on the dashboard where he could see the map.
Very good, Kara. Nice move, indeed.

But now it’s my turn.

L
UKE WATCHED
K
ARA COME
back into the kitchen. He didn’t react, but it was a damn close thing: golden tresses gone the way of dark pixie-punk, makeup that only exaggerated the jewel-tones of green and gold in her eyes, clothes that covered too little and yet left plenty to his imagination—and memory.

Christ, he couldn’t remember the last time he’d been intrigued by a woman. Attracted, yes, but
intrigued
? Women were plentiful creatures, entertaining enough in their own way, and he was gentleman enough to always lay down the ground rules of getting involved: no strings, no families, no investment. Easy come, easy go.

For the most part, it worked. The occasional woman had gotten her feelings hurt when the inevitable end rolled around, and once or twice he’d even been sorry himself. But he’d long ago accepted the fact that Luke Varón wasn’t the sort of man a woman took to meet Mom and Dad. He was dark and callous, driven by demons and immersed so deep in the life of the cartel that he’d occasionally, after some particularly heinous act, found himself with his back against an alley wall, panting, whispering his
true identity over and over again in a panic:
Lukas Mann, thirty-eight, Hopewell, Ohio. Mann. Luke Mann. Two wholesome parents in a wholesome town, a passel of siblings and a white picket fence…

The momentary reminder had never mattered. In a decade, he hadn’t seen his family for more than a couple weeks total—he hadn’t even made it home when his father died. There had been a few days last year when he was between the fall of the Rojàs cartel in Colombia and the rise of Collado’s takeover in Atlanta… a handful of short days when he’d gone back home, thinking he was finished with the underworld, used his own name and spent some time helping his brother, a sheriff, clean up a string of murders in their little hometown. He’d watched Nick let go of a grudge that had existed between the two of them for years, watched him fall in love, and he’d wondered, just for a moment, if he’d ever be in those shoes.

Then came the news: Collado had slipped through the cracks of the Rojàs takedown. How quickly Luke had been sucked back into the life, and spent the next several months setting up house in Atlanta—under Montiel’s wing. “Security,” they called him, a title that meant nothing and gave him access to everything.

He was Luke Varón this time. Hit man, breaker of legs, and murderer of dissidents. Terrorizer of young women and teenage boys.

Then again, he thought, looking at the young woman walking toward him just now, this one didn’t frighten all that easily. She came at him with her shoulders square and steel in her eyes.

“Here,” he said, pouring her a mug of coffee. He topped off his own from the same pot, slanting a grin. “So you won’t think I’m trying to poison you.”

She peered at him as if that’s exactly what she’d thought, then took the mug. “Why didn’t you kill him?” she asked. “Andrew.”

Luke met her eyes. He wanted to tell her that he wasn’t a cold-blooded killer, that he wouldn’t have hurt Andrew deliberately. But he was Luke Varón.

“I was incarcerated,” he said. “You knew that.”

She looked at him as if she’d hoped for a better answer, and for the first time he could remember, he regretted the ruse. The disappointment in her eyes cut into his soul.

Nothing he could do about that. He had to play on—at least until Collado was in custody. Maybe later…

Stop it.

Her shoulders drooped and Luke’s heart went out to her. She was scared. She was hurting. She was exhausted. She was going to miss Louie Guilford’s funeral tomorrow, leaving a whole bunch of people in shock, grieving for her and Aidan. Her friend, Sally—Guilford’s wife—had been calling her phone since early morning. Luke wasn’t looking forward to telling her that.

“Is Austin sleeping?” he asked.

“Aust—” she started to ask, then closed her eyes as if she’d tasted something bitter.

“You should start using the name. And you are Krista. Get used to it.”

She lifted her chin, a gesture that reminded him of the gritty blonde he’d first met at the courthouse, not the jittery brunette who now stood holding a coffee mug so tight her knuckles were bloodless. She met his eyes with an unyielding gaze.

“What was my husband to you? Why would you go to all this trouble to find his killer?”

“Twenty thousand dollars.”

“Bullshit.”

He treated himself to a slow appraisal of her new look. “You look good as a brunette. Not that you didn’t look good as a bl—”

“Stop it.”

His gaze snagged on her breasts and he canted his head. “You should lose the bra. It doesn’t fit the new image.”

“Damn you. What do you know about Andrew?”

Luke leaned back against the counter. “Ben Archer thinks I’m here to head up a splinter of the Rojàs cartel.”

“Aren’t you?”

He ignored that. “Has it occurred to either of you: Why Atlanta?”

“Excuse me?”

“Why Atlanta? There are no Rojàs relatives here. It’s land-bound. It’s a major metropolitan area with a top-notch police force and a significant DEA-FBI presence. It’s not an easy headquarters.”

“Unless you have a front,” she suggested. “Say, something like Montiel Enterprises.”

He smiled. “I see Ben Archer has gotten you on board.”

“You came here only a year ago, on Montiel’s payroll. ‘Security specialist.’ And yet, you aren’t responsible for any of Montiel’s obvious security issues. You aren’t designing locks or camera systems, you aren’t a software guru, you aren’t even a bodyguard.”

“Perhaps I’m just so good at my job the police can’t see me doing it. Stealth Security.”

She wasn’t amused. “You can’t blame Ben for suspecting the worst. It’s what your history suggests.”

“Not to mention that busting up a drug ring headed up by a man everyone else thinks is a humanitarian would
put Archer in any elected seat he wants. But you still haven’t answered the original question: Why Atlanta? Gene Montiel wasn’t enough. There had to be someone else.”

She glared at him with eyes of steel, but her voice came out frayed. “Who?”

“Your husband.”

Gene Montiel watched
Good Day, Atlanta
with only half an eye, more interested in the sports section of the paper than in the human-interest stories that passed for television news these days. But all that changed when the name Andrew Chandler caught his ear.

His heart dropped and he set down his coffee mug, aiming the remote at an eighteen-inch television and bumping up the volume. The news was startling: Kara Chandler and her son, dead in a boat explosion.

He watched the report and his gut hollowed out. He didn’t know what it meant, but every instinct crackled along his nerves like a current. Collado was due to arrive within a day or two. The shipment was scheduled to be distributed within hours of its arrival near Savannah. And at the same time, Andrew Chandler’s family had suddenly been involved in a tragic accident?

Montiel rubbed a hand over his face. He’d come too far to let anything ruin this delivery now. Everything he’d worked for in life, everything that meant anything to him, was wrapped up in this deal with Collado. His businesses, his charity work, his reputation, his family. Even with Ben Archer breathing down his neck and threatening to ruin him, Montiel had so far managed to hang on. In only a few more days, he would be crowned the kingpin of one of the country’s most lucrative cocaine rings.

He couldn’t let anything stop that.

He shoved away from the table and opened his briefcase, pulling out a dedicated phone. He dialed, making contact with the only person he dared, even though he knew he shouldn’t be doing it.

“Goddamn it, why would you risk calling me like this?” the man snapped.

Montiel swallowed. He wasn’t accustomed to being the one who
took
orders, but knew that in this case, he needed to stay with the plan. “Have you seen the news this morning? About Andrew Chandler’s wife?”

“I’m watching it now,” he said. “Tragic.”

“That’s it? Tragic?”

“Well, what else would it be? You think I had something to do with it?”

“Tell me everything’s still all right. Everything is a go.”

“Everything’s still all right. Everything is a go.”

Montiel cursed. He didn’t like deals where he had to rely on others; he liked to handle details himself. That’s how he’d gotten as far in life as he had.

But for this, that wasn’t possible.

He blew out a breath. “You’d better not be jerking me around. This is too important.”

“I know how fucking important it is,” the man shot. “So, Gene—” His voice grew dark. “Don’t call me again.”