Blood and Roses (Holly Jennings Thriller) (9 page)

Saying yes had been the best decision she ever made.

The right decision.

And now, in this moment with Brendan, his every touch, kiss, whisper in her ear did indeed take her mind off her work. It didn’t take long for Holly to remember that she was still a woman with needs and also very much in love with Brendan.

After their lovemaking, lying in his arms, she felt protected and completely loved. These moments had become too few and far between as of late, and she thought about how she needed to pay attention—more attention—to her family and to her love for this man.

She sat up and gazed down at him. “I really do love you very much.”

Brendan stroked the curve of her cheekbone. “I know, and I love you.”

Holly put her head down on Brendan’s chest and sighed, knowing that soon enough she would have to get up and dress before the girls came in. Life as a parent. He kissed the top of her head and as she closed her eyes, taking it all in—the serenity and the comfort—her phone rang. And she recognized the ringtone: the Pink Panther theme song. Chad’s.

“Ah, really?” Brendan knew Chad’s ringtone as well, and he also knew that if her partner was calling at this time of night, then it wasn’t a social call.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I am.”

“No, no. It’s your job. I understand.”

He said the words, but Holly recognized the terseness in his voice. Job or not, she was afraid Brendan was becoming irritated again at competing for her attention. “What’s up?” she asked as she answered the phone and sat up.

“I’ve been doing some research on that racing form today. First, the date the horse El Chicano won that race in Arlington was last year. September eleventh. I don’t know if that is a coincidence, but we can’t discount it.”

“Of course not. You said that was first. What else?”

“The horse’s name, El Chicano. I didn’t get too far with that, as you can imagine. Got a lot on a band by that name, though.”

“Okay.” Holly shifted uneasily.

“It ties in to what I think I found from the note on the back of the form,” he said. “The note read,
In the Mouth of Madness
, which is the name of a movie created by John Carpenter. A horror movie, to be exact.”

“I’m following.”

“Yeah, well, John Carpenter used the song ‘We’ve Only Just Begun’ in the movie. The song by the duo Richard and Karen Carpenter. No relation, but he did use their song. You know the song, don’t you? ‘We’ve Only Just Begun’?”

“I do.” She didn’t add that the reason she remembered was because that song had been her wedding song with Jack.

“The group El Chicano made a rendition of that song as well.”

Holly sucked in a deep breath, her brain going right where Chad had been leading. “I get it. Oh my God.
We
have only just begun,” she uttered the words. “We may be looking for two killers, not one.”

13

Bradley Quentin was a good guy gone bad. He knew that was how many would think of him, but it was far from the truth. Quentin was a good guy. Always had been. Always would be. Quentin knew right from wrong. He knew he’d been wrongly discharged from the military. He had once been so high that the president would have had to look up to him.

That’s how high.

And one little mistake. One little mistake sent them all into a tailspin. So much so, they discharged him and did not even listen to the intel he had. Did not care. Did not believe him.

Quentin knew the truth. He knew the facts on the ground and was prepared to use that knowledge to make the situation right. He knew the intel, and he was prepared to use it and make it right. He had begun masterminding this thing four years ago, shortly after they had “let him go.”

It all began at a horse race at Gulfstream Park while he was enjoying some R & R in Hallandale Beach. In reality, it had all begun long before that, when he’d come back from the Middle East and changed his name from Darren to Quentin (he had a thing for Tarantino films), and changed his complete identity. Fortunately for him, he knew some good plastic surgeons in places like Brazil, and he knew how to become someone he had not been before.

It had to be done that way. No matter what the government had assured him with their
we won’t rock the boat, if you don’t rock the boat
rhetoric, Quentin knew that he trusted no one and no entity. His former employers would come after him eventually, because they knew just as well as he did that sooner or later he would rock the boat.

And he was rocking it now. His official plan started taking form that day in Florida. He hadn’t expected the ideas to come from there. Who would have? He’d been invited to the races by some blonde bimbo he’d met at a bar the night before. She’d given good head and had some serious cash. He wasn’t short on money. Not even close. But coming from money, he liked to hang around other people with money, when he hung around people. Most people—in fact,
all
people—were assholes and cretins. But he was still a human being. Money + blonde + a blow job. That was worth a day at the races. And then his brain started to spin when he heard the name Farooq and the name of a horse. Sheikh Farooq was the owner. Farooq was one of the world’s
peacemakers
. What a joke! He couldn’t ditch the blonde fast enough.

He raced back to his hotel, turned on his laptop, and could not believe he had forgotten some of the details of the sheikh’s life, especially the one about him owning racehorses and those horses being his passion. And that is when things started to really take shape.

That was when Quentin knew that he would have to find himself a partner. One fucked-up partner. It took some time. But that was okay. Quentin was a patient man. In his line of work, patience really mattered.

What that poor bastard who liked to call himself Joque didn’t know was that there was no equality in their relationship. This was no partnership. Let the guy believe they were equal. Let the guy
believe whatever he wanted, as long as he carried out Quentin’s orders.

Quentin sat down behind his desk at Bradley Security Systems. He had turned his bad fortune from being “let go” by the US government into something good, something profitable, and into something that would work to not only his benefit, but to the benefit of mankind.

And, his boy, Joque, was going to carry out the perfect plan.

14

O’Leary scribbled on his legal pad, then squinted at the computer screen. Things were a little blurry. He probably shouldn’t have had that last rum and Coke. The first couple got his mind going, the last couple turned his brain to mush, and he didn’t want that. His career as a jockey was on the downhill slope, but he was doing something now that maybe he should have done a decade ago.

He got up and turned down the radio on his kitchen counter inside his small apartment. O’Leary knew he’d had a fall from grace. He’d once owned a sweet condo at the beach in Santa Monica and a nice house out in Lexington. He’d driven some great cars, worn some expensive clothes, lived the rock-star lifestyle there for a bit. Then a few years ago, after the horse Nobody’s Business had a bad accident on the track and one of the jocks in the race wound up living out his days in a wheelchair, trainers lost faith in O’Leary. Owners lost faith in him.

Worst of all…he lost faith in himself.

He glanced at the bottle of rum next to the radio and thought about it.

No.

He wasn’t going there again. There was something pushing him toward something better, toward a course of action he’d long delayed. Maybe it was his crash from fame, maybe it was Elena accepting his invite for coffee.

Or, maybe, it was time to do the right thing and expose what he figured were certain to be lies.

He knew that if he had looked into the lies of the past when he was riding high, he would have never enjoyed the career he’d had in racing. It would have been over a lot sooner than it had been. He would have been ostracized.

Had it been the right choice?

He didn’t know, and he also didn’t know if what he was chasing now was the truth, but he had positive suspicions.

Twelve years ago.

Twelve years ago, O’Leary was at the peak of his game. Elena was his girl. He was in the winner’s circle more often than not.

His home base was in Lexington, but he was all over the country on horses. And he’d ridden a horse trained by Geremiah Laugherty, who was starting to make a name for himself, but there was word that Laugherty liked women and gambling as much as he enjoyed training horses. And at times, O’Leary questioned the man’s training practices. But he was training winners, and O’Leary had won some races on this horse named Dirty Games. How ironic, that colt’s name.

The horse was owned by Marvin Tieg, who had just barely gotten on the map in Hollywood. Back then, Tieg was putting as much cash as he could into producing whatever he could. He started out with a money-making slasher film and things went on from there.

The problem was that Tieg had a habit of spending money faster than he could recoup it. He and Laugherty seemed to go hand in hand in that department. Tieg had bought himself a string of horses and a decent estate in Versailles, Kentucky.

Tieg also liked to buy people, and when Hollywood (which is what O’Leary called him) came to town and started spreading the cash around wining and dining folks, no one complained. O’Leary certainly didn’t.

This horse, Dirty Games, was a real nice horse that was winning and had a real nice future in front of him. Tieg had some great animals at his place that were insured to the hilt. Millions of dollars in insurance money.

Even drunk, O’Leary remembered it all like yesterday because of what happened. And news of Tieg’s murder had dragged all his memories to the surface. He thought about Elena’s filly, Karma’s Revenge, and wondered if there was truly such a thing as karma. If so, was Tieg’s murder karma or was it revenge?

O’Leary didn’t know what to think at this point as he tried to compose all of his memories onto the notepad and computer.

Back in the day, when in Lexington, O’Leary had agreed to exercise some of Tieg’s horses. The pay to exercise horses wasn’t great considering the purses he was winning, but O’Leary knew enough at the time to understand that relationships in any business were what really counted. He figured that maintaining a good relationship with Hollywood could be to his advantage. He never imagined that it would take the twist that it did.

O’Leary started realizing that things weren’t so kosher after a few weeks had gone by and he hadn’t been paid.

He’d asked one of the grooms about it. A guy he had sort of befriended.

Ted Ivy.

Ted was an odd cat in some ways. But he seemed to really love the horses. He was good with them. Had good instincts.

But the others around Tieg’s place treated the poor guy shitty, so O’Leary took pity on him. They had shared some beers here and there and talked shit.

The day that everything changed at Tieg’s farm, O’Leary remembered handing Dirty Games—he had nicknamed him Sucio, meaning dirty in Spanish—over to Ivy, who put the horse in the wash rack and started rinsing him. “Want to wash Sucio up, man?”

Ivy nodded. “I got him. Love this horse. You’re a lucky bastard. He’s a real good boy.”

“That he is, and that I am.” O’Leary grabbed a couple of Coronas, which he’d noticed was Ivy’s drink of choice, from the stocked fridge in the barn office. He waited to give the guy the beer until he put the horse up. It was only noon, but the horses were done for the day, and neither Tieg nor Laugherty was in town.

A spring breeze blew through the aisle, carrying with it the scents of fresh-cut grass and earth. O’Leary handed Ivy the beer as he closed the horse up in the stall. “Oh man, I don’t know if I should take this now,” he’d said. “It’s only lunchtime and since Laugherty fired the security guards last week, I’m taking the night shift.”

O’Leary laughed. “Come on, no one is here to give you shit. I certainly won’t say a word. Take a nap in a bit and then you’ll be good as new.”

“Gershon is still here.”

“Who’s that?”

“The other guy who exercises the horses.”

“That pissant. Come on, Ivy, don’t worry about it. I’ll take the heat if there’s an issue.”

Ivy took the beer and smiled. “Thanks.”

They talked for a while about how great the horse was, and how Tieg had no idea of the caliber of animals inside his barn. And how Laugherty was kind of an asshole.

“I don’t like him very much,” Ivy said after sucking down the beer. O’Leary had been accommodating and grabbed two more from the office.

“He’s kind of brusque. I don’t think he’s always fair with the animals,” O’Leary commented.

Ivy nodded. “That bugs me. I seen him beat one or two around here.”

“Right.” O’Leary’s stomach tightened. He’d grown up around horses. His family had always had a backyard horse. And one thing he
knew was that although an animal needed to understand boundaries, it was very, very rare that one ever needed to be beaten. Beating was for a horse who aimed to kill you. Those horses were out there, for sure, but they were few and far between. And O’Leary’s take on that kind of horse was that it was far more humane to put a needle in his neck than beat the shit out of him and hope for the best.

As far as he was concerned, there was no need to beat any of the animals in Laugherty’s care.

“I don’t mean to get into anyone’s business, but have you been paid lately?”

Ivy shook his head. “No man. I haven’t been paid in almost two months.”

That had been longer than O’Leary had seen a check. He whistled. “No shit? What? Have you said anything?”

“Yeah. I got into it with Laugherty.”

“You did?”

“Yes. I did. He told me I was an ungrateful son of a bitch. He then got Tieg on the phone, who basically said that if I didn’t want the job, I could leave. They reminded me that I was living on the property.”