Deadly Pursuit (33 page)

And then, for the first time in years, she began to cry in great hiccuping sobs that burned her throat. They doubled her over and ripped her apart, but they kept erupting with the force of an angry Hawaiian volcano.

Kira.
She swiped her eyes and swallowed her nausea.
Help Kira. Call the police.

No—don’t call the police because Kareem is already in trouble.

Go in there, Wanda.

Yes. That was what she should do. Raising her hand, she knocked, but they were three pitiful little soundless knocks with no hope against the noises coming out of the room.

She reached for the knob, praying for it to be unlocked and for the courage to open the door and walk inside, but God only saw fit to answer half her prayer: it was unlocked, all right, but Wanda was too gutless to go in there and see exactly what kind of monster she’d raised.

She was still wavering when, abruptly, it was over.

Kareem finished his business and said a few low words to Kira, who answered back. Then the door swung open and Wanda scurried back as if there was any possible way she could disappear or hide what she’d been doing.

Kareem came out.

His pants were zipped but unbuttoned, his belt unbuckled, and there was an insistent bulge there that a mother should never see. Sweat shone on his face.

His eyes …

Wanda shrank against the wall and wondered for one terrified second if Kareem would hurt her because a man with that kind of look in his eyes was capable of anything. Those eyes were glittering and wild with an edge of ruthlessness so hard it could pound granite to dust. Worst of all, those eyes gleamed with grim satisfaction.

Their gazes met and held, and Wanda knew she was looking into the face of the devil.

“I told you to stay away from this room, Mama.”

There was no inflection in his voice. No embarrassment, no emotion whatsoever. They might have been discussing the weather.
I told you not to go out in the rain without your umbrella, Mama.

In no particular hurry, he passed by and went to his room, leaving Wanda to tend to her daughter-in-law.

“My mother,” Jack murmured. “Where should I start?”

They were in the bed now, naked and twined, and Amara had one sleek leg slung over his hip, so he didn’t give them much time for talking, but they’d give it a shot for now.

Other than testifying in court today, he hadn’t talked about his mother in forever and barely allowed himself to think of her. The probability of collapsing to the floor and crying like a baby was just too high. But this one time, with Amara, it might be okay.

“What do you most remember about her?”

That was easy. “She smelled like Johnson’s Baby Powder.”

“What do you most miss?”

Jesus. Maybe he wouldn’t get through this conversation after all. “Everything.”

With a low croon of sympathy, Amara cupped his face and brought it down for a forehead kiss. That felt pretty good, so he shifted around so he could lower his head and rest it on her breasts.

They gathered each other closer and held tighter.

“Tell me what happened to her.”

Jack blinked against the hot burn in his eyes and pretended it was dust and exhaustion rather than tears. “She was a teacher. She worked hard every day of her life. She loved me. She loved my father, even though he had a needle stuck in his arm most of the time. She tried to get us to love each other. We never did.”

“Maybe you—”

“No,” he said firmly. “We never did.”

Amara didn’t like that. He could feel it in the subtle new tension in her muscles. Thank God she let it drop, though. He wasn’t up for a debate on all the possible hidden ways his father had showed his love over the years.

“He wanted me to be a doctor,” he continued. “I probably had a subconscious desire to be like him—well, like the old him, anyway. The one in all the pictures on the mantel, with the uniform on. So I joined the Marines.”

He paused because his throat was getting tighter, his voice hoarser, and those tears sure weren’t showing any signs of evaporating.

“About three years after my father died, she retired. She’d been looking forward to it. Two days after we arrested Gregory, I flew to Memphis for this big dinner they were planning for her. And I—”

Jesus. He couldn’t do this.

Amara’s soothing hands stroked over his back. “And you what?”

Breathe, Jack. Breathe. A memory can’t kill you.

“And I went to her house and I knew something was wrong. She was there, on the floor in the kitchen.” He swallowed. “Shot in the head.” He tried to swallow again but, man, that lump in his throat just wasn’t going anywhere. “She was still alive.”

“Oh, my God.”

“So, you know … I called the police and got her to the hospital, where they said—big surprise—that there was nothing they could do for her. So I held her hand and she died.”

“Kareem?” she whispered.

“Who else? You think it was a coincidence that she was shot a couple days after he threatened me?”

“But, Jack—it wasn’t your fault.”

Hah. Funny. “Whose fault was it, Angel Eyes? The boogeyman’s?”

“But—”

“So that’s why you shouldn’t have been in the courthouse today. It’s too dangerous. I don’t want Kareem to figure out what you mean to me.”

Beneath his fingers, he felt her lungs expand and catch as she held her breath. “And what do I mean to you?”

Did she think he wasn’t going to say it after he’d just told her every other secret he had? Raising his head, he looked her straight in the eye. “Everything.”

Kira had never thought there was a unit of time longer than forever, but apparently there was. That was how long it took for Kareem to finish with her.

At last he pulled free. At last he took his hands offher.
At last her knees gave out and she fell to the floor in a heap.

An unnatural silence stretched out, filling the room between them. She dialed her anger back a notch and breathed deep and dried her face because Kareem had had enough satisfaction for one night and he didn’t need the additional thrill of seeing her tears.

When she was ready, she pressed her palms to the dresser and heaved herself up. Pain shrieked at her, starting in her lower half and shooting out of her torn scalp, but there was time enough for pain later. Now she had to face Kareem and let him know he hadn’t won. Wincing, turning, she hitched up her chin and stared him in the face.

Unsmiling, he raised one eyebrow and waited.

“Where’s my dog?”

He stared at her. She thought she detected surprise, but they were so good at this poker-faced cat-and-mouse dance, she and Kareem, that it was hard to know what he was thinking. And of course you could never know what a sociopath was thinking.

“Max ran away when I took him out for his walk.” Kareem shrugged as he lied and pulled a
what can you do?
face. “I called him, but …”

Translation: he let Max out of the house in the sub-freezing cold and/or drove him somewhere and kicked him out of the car. She knew it. Add that to the growing list of reasons she hated Kareem.

He stepped closer, his expression so icy it dropped the temperature of the room into the negative digits. “Now I have a question for you, my loving, trustworthy, loyal wife.”

Something was trickling down her inner thighs now, dripping to her ankles and the floor, and she
wrapped her dress closer, covering her nakedness while she waited for the accusation that was surely coming.

“Who do you suppose tipped the feds off about my warehouse over on Muirwood?”

Kira froze.

“They raided it this afternoon. Did you know that? Guess what they found?”

Kira kept her mouth shut, praying they’d found a thousand kilos of heroin and arrested Kareem on charges that could put him away for consecutive lifetimes with no possibility of parole. But then he smiled with genuine amusement and the brief surge of hope she’d felt shriveled to dust.

“They found an empty warehouse.”

No.

If ever in her life her poker face slipped, it was then. Because she understood it all in that one moment, and Kareem had won everything. It was a trap—the whole scene this morning, the paper, the ad, his reaction. All of it had been a test of her loyalty and she’d failed in the worst possible way.

Ironic, wasn’t it? The man who’d claimed entrapment had entrapped her. The circle of life was in full effect, wasn’t it? Now he’d taken her dog, her body and her hope. She didn’t have one damn thing left.

“The thing you need to understand, baby,” he said, smoothing her cheek with the gentle touch that had brought her so much ecstasy over the years, and she was so stunned that she couldn’t even move away, “is that Kareem Gregory always wins. The feds have got nothing on me and there’s nothing you can tell them about me. I’m going to be acquitted and then my life will go on as usual.” He paused to run his thumb over
her bottom lip and press a soft kiss to her mouth. “And you will be my wife until the day you die.”

Finished with her at last, he turned and walked out. “I’m sorry it has to be like this between us.”

Yeah. She was feeling pretty sorry herself right now.

Jack was asleep.

He’d put his head on her chest and they’d talked. Then his voice slowed and eventually tapered off altogether. Now she heard the even and unmistakable deep breathing of a man sleeping like a baby.

What a beautiful sound.

A fierce feeling of protectiveness pulsed in her veins as she stroked his head. Those clowns out there better be quiet. That was all she could think. If anyone flushed that loud toilet or did the slightest thing to—

Outside the bedroom window came the sudden
thud-thud-thudding
of something coming closer, growing louder. Not the quiet footfalls of their two outside guards as they made the rounds through the night, circling the perimeter. Uh-uh. This was the sudden violent sound of something bad.

Oh, shit.

Her sudden jerk of fear woke Jack up with a start, or maybe the approaching unidentifiable danger did it for him. Whatever it was, he was suddenly wide awake, sitting upright and reaching for his gun on
the nightstand, a warrior heading off to battle at a moment’s notice.

Down below, men were shouting now, their voices raised with alarm.

Jack jumped out of bed, yanked his underwear on and tossed her his T-shirt.

She was just pulling it on when they heard the reverberating crash, as though a million full-length mirrors had dropped from the Empire State Building.

For one uncomprehending moment, they stared across the bed at each other.

Had … had someone just thrown something through the bay window in the living room?

And then Sammy’s high-pitched screams rose through the night and the most unwelcome smell in the world hit their nostrils:

The sharp, head-rushing fumes of gasoline.

There was a noise behind her, and for one terrible moment Kira thought that Kareem had come back. Standing upright but still hanging on to the dresser because her spongy knees wouldn’t support a flea right now, she looked in the mirror and saw her mother-in-law in the doorway, staring at Kira with an awful mixture of pity and shock on her face.

Wanda. Just the picker-upper she needed right now.

Kira’s first instinct was to fake a smile and act like she and Kareem had just had a little spat, but her reflection looked so bad that that would be impossible.

Her hair was wrecked and the spot on her crown alternately stung and ached. Mascara streaked down her face in twin strips of tarry black. Her lipstick was smudged up to her nose and down to her chin. Her
dress was gaping open again, her underwear ripped. And the bodily fluid that continued to trickle down her legs was, she now saw, blood. It had dripped onto the floor in a growing puddle that would never come out of the expensive oatmeal Berber, no matter how much scrubbing she did.

The only thing Kira could do at the moment was pull the halves of her dress together and tie the belt, so that’s what she did.

The women’s eyes met in the mirror and Wanda started to cry.

Kira knew how she felt, but now wasn’t the time.

“You need to go to the emergency room, Baby Girl.”

Wanda’s use of an endearment was so startling that Kira gaped for a minute, words sticking in her throat. Wanda had never used a nickname for her, and if she’d been so inclined, the choice probably would have been
bitch
rather than
baby girl.

“No,” Kira said. “I need to find my dog.”

“Your dog?” Now it was Wanda’s turn to be speechless. She hurried inside the room, turned Kira to face her and gripped her shoulders. “You could call the police—”

“The police?” Wanda hadn’t meant it as a joke, but damn, it sure was funny. Raw, hysterical laughter shot out of Kira’s mouth, projecting ugliness in every direction. Wanda tightened her grip on Kira, supporting her. “Great idea, Wanda. The feds can’t keep Kareem in jail, but I’m sure the local police will solve all my problems with a domestic violence charge. And while I’m at it, I’ll get a restraining order, too. That’ll scare Kareem.”

The laughter continued until Wanda shook Kira,
and then the hysteria took over. There was something about seeing concern in this woman’s eyes and feeling a motherly touch from Wanda, of all people, that was more than Kira could handle tonight.

“What do you need?” Wanda asked, and that was when Kira burst into tears.

Hating herself for it, she sobbed for five seconds and rested her head on Wanda’s shoulder. Wanda smelled like comfort—like powder-freshness, flowers and rain. Kira wanted to stay there forever, but staying there wouldn’t bring Max back.

“I need to put my clothes on and go find my dog.”

Wanda was aghast as Kira pulled away and rummaged in a drawer for some jeans.

“You can’t go out in the cold in the middle of the night looking for that dog, Kira. You can barely walk.”

“That’s what I’m doing,” Kira said flatly. “You can’t stop me.”

After a long look and a frustrated sigh, Wanda seemed to decide that there was no talking Kira out of this decision. “I’ll help you. Let me get my shoes.”