Whispers of Fate: The Mistresses of Fate, Book Two (19 page)

Tavey had the distant impression of well-worn comfortable furniture in varying shades of brown. They passed by one room with a bright neon bedspread and then they were in his room. The blinds were shut, but the morning light filtered in through the cracks.

He laid her down on the messy bed, coming down on top of her. He propped himself on his elbows.

“You are so pretty,” he told her simply, his eyes drifting over her face.

She smiled at him. “Not as pretty as you are.”

“Ugh.” He kissed her. “The last person that called me pretty got a punch in the mouth for the compliment.”

She kissed him back. “Are you gonna punch me?”

He levered himself off her. “I have a better idea. Take off your shirt.” He bent to remove his boots.

Tavey did, removing her shirt hastily and throwing it behind her. Her bra followed.

Tyler, who’d unbuckled his belt and unzipped his jeans, froze as his eyes fell on her breasts.

“Shit,” he said simply.

Tavey felt her nipples tighten and her skin flush.

She had the prettiest tits Tyler had ever seen. They weren’t big, but they were perfectly round with dark pinkish-brown nipples.

He didn’t remember deciding to let his jeans fall, he was just suddenly on top of her again, curling his tongue around one nipple and letting the taste of her fill his mouth, her gasps of pleasure fill his ears, and the feel of her, warm and firm and strong, sink into his flesh until she was firmly lodged beneath his skin.

Scrambling with his hands, he tore her panties aside and let his fingers dip gently into the dark sweet heat of her. She trembled as he felt her soft, slick petals. He sank one long finger inside her and had the pleasure of seeing her arch and moan.

Tavey, damnably polite, stubborn, proper Tavey was begging him with her body. Sweat slicked her skin and his, dampening his shirt. She was pulling at it, trying to get it over his head.

He stopped what he was doing and sat up long enough to rip it over his head and off, groaning himself as her long, delicate fingers ran down his chest.

“Damn, we should slow down,” he suggested even as he bent down again, kissing her cheek, her collarbone, her nipple. He took his mouth away and pinched the tip lightly, loving how her body jerked. He slid his hand down her rib cage and over her belly, skipping over the skirt that was still bunched around her hips.

“Are you protected,” he asked hoarsely, looking at the thatch of hair between her legs.

“Yes.” She moved her legs restlessly. “Please, Tyler. Touch me.”

He did, sliding both hands along the outside of her thighs and then between them, letting his knuckles brush the soft damp thatch of hair before dipping in between the folds, teasing her with feather-light touches.

The perfume of her arousal and his filled the air between them as he separated her gently with his fingers and moved the head of his shaft into position.

He slid just an inch inside, an inch, and he could already feel the warm, slick muscles of her gripping him.

“God,” he gasped. “You’re tight.”

Tavey couldn’t do more than moan. Tyler was above her, his muscled chest slick and heaving as he worked his way inside her. Tavey lifted toward him, wanting all of him now, between her legs, the hot hard length of him taking her.

When he was all the way inside, she wrapped her legs around him and squeezed, wanting to keep him inside her forever.

He gripped her hips and slid out, making her moan in protest, before sliding back inside with a long, steady thrust.

“Oh, God,” she gasped. “More. God, please.”

He gave her more, riding her with hard, steady thrusts, until she was moaning incoherently, her breath coming in harsh gasps. “Do it harder, please. Tyler.”

He did, struggling not to come as she gripped and squeezed him.

“God, please. Take it,” he urged her. “Take it, baby.”

She did, crying out as she came, shivering against him as he continued to thrust, his hips out of his control as he struggled to get closer, deeper. When he came, his vision went dark around the edges, and pleasure burst from him, wringing a shout from his throat.

He collapsed on her when he was done and for the moment there was nothing but their harsh breath, the smell of sweat and sex, and Tavey’s long, pleased chuckle.

“That is what I’ve been missing,” she said softly, and kissed his shoulder.

He looked at her, at her closed lids and the faint shadows beneath her eyes. He’d forgotten about her head, he realized. Her ankle as well.

“Are you all right? I forgot about your head.”

Tavey opened her eyes just enough to look at him.

“Tyler, I’ve never been better in my life.”

28

THEY STILL HADN’T
found it.

Circe and Rob had managed to shift most of the bricks from the fireplace into one corner of the room after half a day. Mark had pulled up the rope at one point and told Rob to throw him his car keys.

Rob, grimacing, had obeyed. “It’s at the end of the service road.”

“I’ll be back with some food,” Mark had told them, sounding almost cheerful. “You children keep working.”

By the end of the day on Monday, Circe’s arms and back were shaking and sore, and Mark was no longer smiling.

They’d dug up the section of the floor where they’d hidden it, looking for the distinctive hard plastic of the suitcase they’d used. It wasn’t there.

“Maybe we’re remembering wrong?” Circe ventured.

Mark pointed the gun at her. “Maybe you didn’t just ‘take a little.’ ”

“I only took a little,” she promised. “A very little. I left the rest.” She didn’t mention that she’d come back for more and it hadn’t been there. Saw no reason to mention that. She was so tired she could barely make herself care about the gun in his hand. She didn’t know why he was pretending that he would shoot her. He would never shoot her. She was his wife.

That and two pennies will get you a piece of gum at the hardware store
, the voice argued.

When it was clear that neither Circe nor Rob could dig any longer without sleeping, Mark threw a pack that Rob had brought down into the hole. It contained two emergency survival blankets and some water. Mark had removed everything else.

Rob and Circe had lain down together, listening to Mark snoring above.

“What if Belle took it,” Rob whispered in her ear.

Circe didn’t like being this close to him. She wanted to be with her husband, not in a hole in the ground next to Rob.

“I don’t think so,” Circe whispered. “Last time I saw her, she begged me for money.”

“She’s a fucking druggie. She probably spent it on nose candy.”

Circe shrugged. “Why do you want it anyway?”

He gave a short, sharp laugh. “What the hell else have I got at this point? My wife took everything I had.”

Circe privately thought that if he’d wanted to stay out of jail, he should have paid his taxes, but she didn’t say so, not when she was lying on the ground next to the man with plenty of bricks nearby.

TUESDAY MORNING,
Mark brought them breakfast. Circe had tried to leave by way of the back stairs when he left them, but the wooden steps had long ago crumbled. They were trapped until Mark decided to lower the rope.

The basement smelled sharply of dusty leaves and urine, but there was nowhere else, not unless Mark let them out. The voice laughed.
He doesn’t seem inclined.

They ate McDonald’s breakfast sandwiches and continued digging. Mark had brought Circe a shovel so that she could help dig. They’d buried it only a foot or so deep, but since it hadn’t been where they’d left it, Mark was forcing them to dig in a grid with sections as big as the hard plastic suitcase had been, though they argued some about the dimensions.

“You know,” Rob suggested to Mark, pausing in his shoveling and leaning on the handle. He was looking up at Mark, his expression disgruntled. “This would go faster if you would help.”

Rob’s shirt was covered in sweat, the armholes a distinct yellowish color. He didn’t smell good, but neither did Circe. She’d started dreaming about her bathtub with her milk bath soak and her neck pillow. She was starting to think she would kill to sleep in a real bed.

“It will go faster if you shut up,” Mark countered, “and keep digging.”

“Why do you need it now?” Circe asked Mark, so tired she didn’t even remember thinking the question.

“What?”

“Why are you so desperate for the money?” she repeated more softly. “You don’t seem like you need it.”

“It’s five million dollars,” he pointed out like she was stupid. “You telling me you don’t want five million dollars,
Circe
?” he mocked. “Just think what you could do with your little store.”

Circe thought about it. Her store was actually doing really well. She’d taken only ten thousand, carefully hiking back to the old mill one day months after they’d buried it and agreed to disappear. She didn’t think five million dollars was worth the risk of getting caught by the police, or by the men from whom they’d stolen the money.

They hadn’t been nice men.

If the bodies the FBI found in the millpond were identified, they were going to be extremely unhappy men as well.

“What if we don’t find it?” she said, her voice so quiet, so small, that it sounded like it was coming from somewhere else, someone else entirely.

Mark looked thoughtful. “Then we find Gloria Belle, and we ask her a few questions.”

29

RAQUEL’S MOUTH TIGHTENED
as she watched her mother stumble out of the small house in Atlanta that Raquel had bought for her several years before. Belle’s blond wig was askew and unflattering against her dark skin, her short dress leaving little to the imagination.

Beside her, Burns watched and said nothing.
He’s good at that
, she thought, only a little snidely.

It was late Tuesday afternoon, nearly three thirty. She’d worked most of the night trying to trap an online predator who was targeting twelve- to fourteen-year-olds in the Atlanta suburbs. He’d sexually assaulted one girl that they knew of, but the girl hadn’t been able to describe her attacker. Usually Raquel didn’t work with a specific target in mind, she just searched for predators in general, but she wanted to stop this guy before he hurt anyone else. She hadn’t been able to find him and had finally gone to bed around nine a.m., only to be woken up by a call from Brent around two.

She wasn’t sure why she’d agreed to help him with his mysterious problem. He hadn’t told her much about it, only that it involved her mother.

“How long has it been since you’ve seen the documentary?” Burns asked, keeping his eyes on Belle as she crossed the street.

They were crammed into his wreck of a Jeep since it was going to rain and Raquel hadn’t wanted to ride her bike home from the station.

“Since it came out,” she muttered. He’d tried to get her to go on film when he’d been making the documentary about her mother, the blues sensation of the eighties who’d crashed and burned spectacularly, but she’d refused, largely because she hated the mess her mother had become and didn’t really want to see it played out on screen.

She’d gone to see it, though, in a small artsy theater in Atlanta, by herself. He’d done a surprisingly accurate job, revealing her mother’s beauty, the glory of her voice, and, sadly, the weakness in her character. Raquel had learned things about her mother that she’d never known, that her grandmother had hidden from her.

He didn’t ask what she thought of it. She was glad. She didn’t know if she could explain her complex rush of emotion at the thought of that documentary. On one hand, she felt like he’d given her a gift, the gift of her mother. On the other hand, he’d exposed the shame of her mother’s addiction, her prostitution, to the entire world. The documentary had received critical acclaim, but at the time Raquel had felt like someone had ripped out her heart and stomped on it for a while.

“You should watch it again.”

“Why?” Raquel questioned.

“She talks about what it was like living in Fate, about the witch family, about the love of her life.”

Raquel struggled to remember. The scenes that stuck out in her mind were the ones where her mother used a dirty needle to inject meth into the veins of her delicate brown arms.

“What did she say?”

“Not a great deal that I put into the film. She was high at the time, damn near incomprehensible, so a lot of it was cut out.”

“You have the tapes handy?”

He nodded, still watching Belle pick her staggering way across the street, his normal expression of jovial goodwill stilled and silent.

“So what did you hear that made you want to make a documentary about Tavey’s family?”

He slid her a sly glance. “What if I told you that the documentary about the Collins family is only a piece of what I want to write?”

“I’d say that if Tavey finds out you’re not being totally honest, she’ll verbally flay you, kick you off her property, and sic her lawyers on you.”

He winced.
Lawyers.

“Are you going to tell her?”

She gave him an are-you-crazy look. “Of course I’m going to tell her.”

He scowled. “So I get no credit for my performance in bed?”

Raquel sniffed. “I’m pretty sure you’re in debt to me for the rest of my life.”

“Well, that’s true,” he agreed with a quick grin.

“So what else are you looking into?”

“Have you ever heard of a biker gang called the Warlocks?”

Raquel hadn’t done much work with gangs, but she’d started looking into who was into meth during the eighties after her conversation with Tavey and Chris. The Warlocks were a gang that had started in Pennsylvania and had gotten really big after the Vietnam War. In the eighties they’d aggressively expanded their base of operations from Philly down to Miami, using Atlanta as a stopover. They were primarily drug traffickers, mostly methamphetamines, but they’d moved into human trafficking as well, which was why Raquel had paid attention. Many of the girls who were trafficked were underage and often non-English speaking.

“I have,” she said simply, wondering where he was going with this.

“Belle talks about the gang. She describes ‘meeting the harpies’ in the woods, about how they cooked the drugs. The harpy is the symbol for the Warlocks. She talks about having sex with the bikers, about a deal worth a lot of money. She repeatedly mentions someone named Charlie.”

“Charlie Collins?”

“She did grow up with him.”

“He died in 1980. Are you saying they were involved with this gang way back then? That doesn’t make any sense. He was young, wealthy. How would he be involved with a bunch of drug-dealing bikers?”

He shrugged. “I found a connection between Abraham Jones and one of the gang leaders, Jessop Chance.”

“Old Abraham?”

He nodded. “They served together in the Vietnam War.”

“Did they?”

“They did.”

“So your story is about the Collins family and some hypothetical dark secret or about the biker gang and their activities?”

He shrugged. “I’m not sure yet, but there’s a story here somewhere. I can smell it.”

“I don’t see how you smell anything in this mess,” Raquel muttered, looking around at the cluttered Jeep. There were food wrappers, maps, blankets, camera equipment, various black laptop bags, and an ancient coffee mug with a smiley face sticker stuck to its side.

“You get used to it.”

“You’ll be cleaning it if you want my help,” she argued simply.

“I’ll clean it,” he agreed easily enough.

She turned and looked at him, her dark eyes frank and assessing. “Why do you want my help? Why do you want to write this story?”

He rubbed his forehead, mussing the thinning hair he had left. “My little sister, Jessica, ran away from home when she was about sixteen. We think she hitched her way down to my uncle George’s place—George Mills?”

Raquel nodded, indicating that she recognized the name.

“He said she came to visit in the summer of 1986 and stayed a day or two before taking off in the middle of the night with about two grand in cash and some jewelry that had been his wife’s. My mother got in touch with him the next day, but the police couldn’t find Jessica. No one’s ever found her.”

Raquel felt a brief sharp tug.
Summer.
She pushed the thought of her friend aside for the moment, focusing on Brent’s story.

“He didn’t think it was strange that she showed up by herself?”

Brent shrugged. “My uncle is strange.”

“So what makes you think she’s connected to these bikers?”

“When she arrived at the house, she was clearly high on something and sporting a tattoo on her chest, fist-size, that looked like some kind of bird. She said some new friends had helped her get it.”

“A harpy?” Raquel guessed.

Brent nodded. “I showed him a picture. He recognized it.”

Raquel looked back at the street; her mother had disappeared inside a house with boards covering the windows.

“And you think my mother knows something?”

He nodded. “And some of your family and friends.”

“And you want me to help you ask them?”

“Yes, that’s what I want.”

Raquel started to answer, but her attention was caught by a long black car pulling up to the curb in front of the house with the boarded-up windows. The driver was a slender black woman wearing a tailored green dress and low-heeled nude-colored shoes. Her gray hair was twisted into a tidy bun at the base of her neck. She opened a black umbrella and lifted it to cover her hair.

“Gramma,” Raquel whispered softly, forgetting that Brent was there.

She shoved the car door open and started to chase after her grandmother, but Brent caught her.

She shoved him, furious, blinking the rain out of her eyes. “What are you doing?”

He ignored her question, looking around briefly before tugging her to the side of the road, between two of the houses.

Raquel thought about breaking free. She could do it. Even from Ryan’s massive paws.

When they were mostly out of sight of the houses, he switched his grip so that he was holding her hand. “Come on, let’s listen in.”

He led her behind the row of houses, where an alley lined with weeds and trash cans provided an alternate entrance. Rain slipped over broken furniture and beat a steady tattoo on an old paint can, covering the sounds of their steps with a light but steady drumbeat.

He pulled her to the house where her mother had disappeared. Some of the windows on this side were intact, no boards covering them. Raquel shook him loose and took the lead, approaching stealthily, hoping his enormous self could follow just as quietly.

They reached the back window and Raquel heard her grandmother’s voice, but the window was above her head.

Brent’s hands circled her waist and lifted her, gently, steadily, up to the window. He was strong and his arms were steady.

“. . . going to tell her,” her grandmother said.

“What the fuck for?” Another voice. Raquel thought it might be her mother. The snap of a lighter being opened, she thought. The rain was slackening.

“Thought you didn’t want to break little miss’s heart,” Gloria Belle said snidely.

“It’s time. They’ve found some bodies out at that place. They’re going to find out.”

Belle was silent. The hiss of someone taking a long drag. A hacking cough.

“What you want me to do about it?” Belle’s sultry, songbird voice was rough, sullen.

“You could be in danger.”

Belle laughed, and it was rich and lush and full, which made the cough that followed even more disturbing. Several long seconds later, Belle’s voice croaked out, “Like you give a shit, Momma.”

“You’re wrong if you think I don’t, baby girl.”

“Yeah, well, I’m wrong a lot. If that’s all you want, give me my money and get out.”

“I’m going to tell her Charlie was alive all that time. I’m going to tell her about you and him, about the drugs. The police will come calling, honey. Don’t you think they won’t.”

There was the sound of glass on a table, like someone had stabbed out a cigarette and the ashtray has slid across it. “They aren’t the only ones.”