Blood and Fire (15 page)
Authors: Shannon Mckenna
Tags: #Fiction, #Romance, #Suspense, #Action & Adventure, #Contemporary
She shook her head. “Don’t ask me to trust you, because I can’t. It’s nothing personal, I swear to God. I just don’t have the equipment.”
“You don’t have a choice,” he said.
It was true, she realized. She’d put herself smack-dab in someone’s else’s power. Alone in a cabin in the armpit of the universe, with a guy who could pick her up and twirl her on his pinkie if he felt like it. But there was no reasoning with her urge to micromanage.
“They’ll be listening to the McClouds,” she said stubbornly.
“The phone calls will be encrypted,” he repeated. “These people run a security company, Lily. They’re ex-military, ex-special forces, ex-everything. Plus, they were raised by a paranoid survivalist freak with global conspiracy theories.” He blinked. “You know, your kind of guy.”
She bristled. “Smart-ass.”
He got back to work. Lily stared at dust motes dancing in the beam of light that sliced through the window, determined to stay alert.
Next thing she knew, the smell of coffee and frying onions was dragging her out of sleep. She forced herself up onto her elbow, trying not to wince. The shoulder hurt, a lot. The room was warm. The angle of the light had changed, moved up the wall.
Bruno stood over a gas range, stirring onions that sizzled in a cast-iron skillet. They smelled amazing. He looked different. A fresh black sweatshirt. Wet, clean hair, no bloodstains. He looked yummy.
She rubbed her eyes. “Hey.”
He gave her a smile that would bend metal with its sheer charm load. “Water’s hot in the shower tank. You like steak?”
“Wow.” Her stomach rumbled. She hadn’t been able to afford anything with that much protein in it since D-day, and rarely enough before that, either. The rich scent made her dizzy. “Where did all this food come from?”
“Aaro got some groceries for us, in Bingen. I call it ten minutes to sit-down. Can you shower in that time?”
“I’ll try.” She got to her feet, took the battered terrycloth bathrobe he offered her, and closeted herself in the miniscule bathroom.
The shower was heaven. She stayed under until it turned tepid, then chilly, then glacial. It took that much scrubbing to get the makeup off. But afterward, the face in the mirror was her own. Not Mata Hari. Or the mascara-smeared hell-hag.
When she came out, the table was set for two and loaded with fragrant, steaming food. “Sit,” he said.
She was intensely conscious of her nudity under the damp terrycloth. “Shouldn’t I dress?”
“The room’s warm. And the food’s hot. And it’s just me.”
True enough. She sat down and dug in. The steak was pan seared, pink and juicy and melting, and heaped with caramelized onions. He’d done cheesy buttered noodles, some sort of long pasta with frilly edges, dripping and rich. A heap of peppery coleslaw. Slices of hothouse tomatoes. Crisp, warty sour pickles. Fresh sourdough bread to sop up drippings. Mmm. He kept refilling her plate. She kept eating.
“I’d offer you a beer, but it’s not a great idea,” he said. “It would take the starch out of you for the hike. So it’s water, for now.”
“That’s OK,” she said. “I don’t drink.”
“Oh?” He buttered a hunk of his bread. “Not ever, or not now?”
“Not ever.” She looked down, wishing she hadn’t said anything.
“Any reason for that?”
“Does there have to be?”
His shrug was elaborately casual. “You’re the one who was flapping it in front of my face.”
She sighed. It was relevant, she supposed, in a painful, oblique sort of way, so whatever. “My dad was an alcoholic, and a junkie.”
He took it in, his face impassive. “This would be the father who—”
“Yes. The father who was murdered six weeks ago, by those guys who attacked us, I assume. Or whatever organization hired them.”
“Ah.” He got up, rummaged on the shelves. He found a plastic box and knelt in front of her, pushing the robe open over her knees.
She shrank away. “What the hell are you doing?”
“Disinfecting the scrapes on your legs. While I do that, you talk.”
“I’ll do it myself! Just give me the stuff! I can take care of it!”
“Shhh.” He batted her hands away. “Let me.”
Lily stared down at the top of his dark head and fished around for a starting point. “Well, my name is Lily Parr, not Torrance,” she began. “I guess I’ll start when my dad fell apart. I was ten. Which would have made it 1993.”
His eyes flicked up when she mentioned the year that his mother had died. “Fell apart how?”
She clenched her teeth as he swabbed with the alcohol-soaked wad of cotton. “Like I said, he started drinking heavily. Then he started in on the opiates. Heroin, mostly, I think, although one white powder looks pretty much like another to me. Ouch, goddamnit, that hurts!”
“Hold still.” He leaned in with the tweezers. “There’s grit in here.”
She hissed and cursed as he tortured her with tweezers. He was unmoved, intent upon his task. “What work did he do?” he asked.
“He was a fertility specialist,” she said. “A researcher, in IVF technology. He got early retirement not long after his breakdown. He was barely fifty, but he got a pension. A good one, but not generous enough to fund a drug habit. I started swiping the checks before he saw them. I paid the bills so they wouldn’t turn off the lights, the gas. So we could eat. Not that he was that interested in food anymore.”
He nodded, frowning in concentration as he taped gauze over her knees. His eyes flicked up, waiting while she struggled for words.
It sounded so sad, and flat, when she laid the facts out. Howard’s string of suicide attempts. The decision to commit him to an institution. The search for the perfect clinic that would keep him alive. And then, that last, awful visit. Howard’s cryptic warning, and his message, about Magda Ranieri and her son. The mysterious thing that needed to be locked, whatever it might be. Miriam’s interruption.
Then the call from Dr. Stark, and Howard’s so-called suicide. And the guys waiting outside Nina’s apartment with knives. And that was it.
It wasn’t enough for him. She could feel that in the air. Strongly.
“I tried to research you, while I was on the run,” she told him. “I tried to find out more about the nurse, Miriam Vargas, too, but she seemed to check out. At least, I found records of her going to nursing school in Baltimore. I tried to find out more about Magda, but I got nowhere with that. Just statistics, the newspaper articles, he obit. The only next step was to talk to you. So, um. I made my way here.”
He placed his big, warm hands gently over her knees. The soothing warmth felt good, over the stings and scrapes and booboos.
So, at last. Here it was. The question that had been burning in her mind for six weeks. The one she’d almost given up hope of asking.
“Do you have any information?” she asked. “Any insights?”
He met her eyes. Her heart tumbled, thudded, three stories down.
“Babe, I haven’t got a fucking clue,” he said.
She shivered and tugged the robe tighter. “But I . . . didn’t you—”
“It was exactly like I told you,” he said. “I didn’t misrepresent what happened at all. My mamma was killed. It was a banal incident of domestic violence. She had really bad taste in men. She didn’t give me instructions to lock anything. She didn’t give me anything, or tell me anything. She put me on a bus to Portland one night to keep me from getting killed. That’s all there is to that story.”
Lily nodded. Her throat was too tight to speak.
Bruno went on. “The only big question is why she didn’t climb on that bus with me. That’s what I will never understand.”
She brightened. “Well, maybe that’s it. Maybe this is the answer to that question. If we could figure out what she was—”
“No.” His voice cut her off. “Don’t do it, Lily.”
“Do what? I’m just speculating—”
“Don’t speculate,” he said. “Don’t try and lay your crazy agenda over what happened to my mamma. It won’t hold the weight.”
Oh, shit. She’d hit a nerve. She backpedaled, nervously. “Bruno, I’m only trying to—”
“There is no mystery to solve. I faced that, a long time ago. It was bad enough the first time. I’m not going back to do it again.”
She twisted her hands in the damp terrycloth and tried to face it.
“So, looks like you tracked me down and lured me into your honeyed trap for nothing,” he said, after a while. “I’m sorry I don’t have any better recompense to offer you for all that effort.”
She bristled. “What do you mean by that?”
He shrugged, without meeting her eyes. “Just wondering if you regret having gone through with it.”
“With what?” she asked, apprehensively.
“Fucking me,” he said. “You know, now that you’ve discovered that the cupboard is bare. Does that kill the buzz?”
Oh, ouch. She got up and backed away from him. “Is it necessary to make me feel like a whore?”
“You said the word, not me.”
She tried to marshal her argument, but it kept slipping apart in her head like a wet paper bag. To her own ears, her story now sounded preposterous, ridiculous. A pack of overheated, disconnected lies.
“But what about what Howard said?” she asked. “Why would he mention you and your mother if there wasn’t a connection?”
“I’ve never heard of a guy named Howard Parr,” Bruno said.
“But why would they kill him, right after telling me if he—”
“Because they didn’t,” Bruno said. “By your own account, your father had severe mental health problems. Don’t ask me to rip my life apart based on the ramblings of a suicidal heroin junkie who’d been confined to a locked ward for, what, how many years now?”
“Almost six, when I add them all up,” she said. “But you don’t understand. I know he was murdered.”
He shook his head. She wanted to scream at him. To slap that sad, sad look off his face. “Face it, Lily,” he said quietly. “Get real.”
“Goddamnit, it is real! I knew him! He was terrified of blood! He would never have cut himself, not in a million years!”
“Depends on how much pain he was in,” Bruno said. “Maybe you can’t even imagine how bad it was. It might have been worth it to him to face his fear. He saw his opportunity, gritted his teeth, and took it.”
“No, it’s not possible. Not him.” She hid her face. It hurt, so bad, that he didn’t believe her. Even though she’d never really hoped that he would. She still felt so betrayed. Hurt to the depths of her being.
“Nobody knows better than me how much it hurts to swallow this down,” he said. “But sometimes stupid, random, bad things just happen. They have no meaning. There’s no mystery, no explanation. Just shit luck. I’ve accepted mine. I’m not going to redo the work I did.”
Lily kept shaking her head. She couldn’t stop shaking it.
“I’m very sorry about what happened to you,” he said. “It’s awful. Terrible. But it’s not connected to my mamma. Or to me.”
“Then how did they find me? They found me because they were watching you. Why would they if there’s no connection?”
“They found you because they found you.” His voice was harsher now. “You slipped up. It’s that shit luck again. You’ve had a stinking big dose of it. I understand your desire for company, but don’t pin your shit luck on me. I’ve already had my share.”
“Then why?” she yelled. “What the hell do they want with me?”
He just gazed at her, looking miserable and uncomfortable.
A horrible realization began to unfold. “Oh, my God.” Her belly clenched. She regretted having eaten so much. “You think I’m a liar?”
He stared into her eyes for a long moment. Trying to read her mind. “No,” he said softly. “I don’t think that. God help me, but I don’t.”
She pressed both arms against her belly. “Well, that’s good, at least. But then how do you justify . . .” Her voice trailed off, as it slowly, painfully sank in. “Ah. I see. So you think I’m crazy, right?”
His mouth was a flat, unhappy line. “I think you’re confused, and scared, and sleep deprived. And stressed to the fucking max.”
It was the truth, but his gentle tone and careful word choice were still offensive to her. “I see,” she said, bitterly. “So, I’m a couple cans short of a six-pack, right?”
Bruno dropped his face into his hands, shoulders slumped. “Fuck if I know,” he muttered. “But those killers are real.”
The silence was unbearably heavy. Lily straightened her shoulders. Time to suck it up and move on. “Fortunately for you, it’s no longer your problem.” She sidled past him to the bed, where he’d piled the shopping bags. “I apologize for wasting your time. And I’ll just, ah, get the hell out of your way now.”
“You can’t do that now, Lily,” he said.
“I’ll need the stuff you boughtumped clothes onto the bed, pawed through them. “I’ll reimburse you. What did Aaro say? Four hundred?” She rifled through the panties, picked out the least offensive of the lot. Peach lace. She pulled them on. Struggled into the jeans.
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