Deadly Pursuit (7 page)

He clicked it on to the local news, crossed to the bathroom to start the water running in the shower in the hopes that it would be hot by this time tomorrow, and backtracked to the fridge for a Gatorade.

He’d just bent to reach for the Styrofoam clamshell filled with out-of-date lasagna from the diner—he’d brought it home last week, but it probably had another forty-eight hours or so before the bacteria really took hold—when he thought he heard something that made his heart stop and his blood run icy.

Had someone said Amara’s name?

Straightening, he let the refrigerator door slam shut and turned to watch the big-haired and shellacked anchor continue with her story. “Prominent local defense attorney Amara Clarke had a busy day yesterday,” she began, but that was all Jack heard because his carefully constructed world was dropping out from under his feet.

There, in the window over the anchor’s shoulder, was a grainy-ass black-and-white surveillance video that showed, among other things, the kind of close-up of Jack’s face that Kareem Gregory could have only dreamed of.

Stupefied, Jack watched until it went to commercial.

Then he picked up the remote, punched Rewind and watched it again.

Then he blinked, shook his head and tried to think.

Fuck.

He stood there for one more bewildered second before his training kicked in, and then he sprang to life because he knew this drill. He’d done it once before, in New Orleans, and he could do it again.

Ten minutes. He had ten minutes.

Dropping to his knees, he belly-crawled halfway under the bed and emerged with his huge black duffel, which was already filled with most of the things he would need: a prepaid cell phone, his backup weapon, the keys to his storage unit and extra car, which was housed in said storage unit, clothes, shoes, books.

Yeah, his life was a train wreck, but it’d have to get a damn sight worse before he’d leave
The Autobiography of Malcolm X
and
To Kill a Mockingbird
behind.

His hunting knife and sheath, which he’d strap to
his ankle. A wallet filled with cash and a selection of fake but convincing driver’s licenses in a variety of identities. Maps.

Straightening, he looked around at the rest of his pitiful belongings.

The bike was toast. Nothing he could do about that. Same with the TV.

Okay. What else?

The picture of Mama over on the nightstand. Snatching it up, he wrapped it in his underwear and found a secure place for it inside the duffel.

That was it.

Sad commentary on his life that it only took him thirty seconds to pack it all in a bag.

Of course this meant he’d never see Amara again.

Better for her, woe-is-me for him.

And J-Mart. He’d never see him again either. But he owed the old man a good-bye. It was the least he could do after all J-Mart had done for him: giving him a job, not asking any questions, offering a shoulder to lean on.

So he’d sneak into the diner—J-Mart was there right now, he knew, chopping romaine for salads and baking muffins for breakfast—and then he’d take off for parts unknown.

Again.

Once he got where he was going, he’d call the people he needed to call.

As he headed into the bathroom, he ignored the sickening ache of loss in the darkest pit of his belly. Loss? Get real. Amara had never been his, never would be his, and his disappearance from her life was the best thing that could ever happen to her—even though it felt like a crushing blow to him.

Jack’s simmering dread intensified as he crept through the alley to the diner’s back door and discovered it unlocked and ajar. J-Mart never kept the heavy metal fire door unlocked. And he was here somewhere because his gleaming black pickup was still parked by the Dumpster, the Ronald Reagan bobble head doll looking oddly forlorn in the rear window.

Something told Jack not to go inside. Pocketing the extra set of keys J-Mart had given him when he began working at the diner, Jack eyed the ancient Honda Accord that he’d retrieved from his storage locker and parked behind J-Mart’s truck. He should leave and call J-Mart from a phone booth in a day or two. That made the most sense and was the safest option.

Except that he couldn’t do it.

Pausing only to pull the forty-caliber Glock semi out of the waistband behind his back, Jack eased the door open a crack, slid inside and made it two steps before the smells slapped him in the face, nearly knocking him on his butt. Not the familiar savory scent of beef stew, the cinnamon-y fragrance of hot apple pie, or even the scorch of the microwave popcorn that J-Mart liked so well and occasionally burned.

No.

The coppery tang of blood leached into his nostrils and settled, heavy and unwelcome, on the back of his tongue. Above that was the unmistakable stench of shit. Above that was a sinus-clearing layer of ammonia. No, not ammonia. Piss.

Jack gagged, knowing what he was about to find.

He crept down the hallway on silent feet even though he didn’t need to bother because the place was
empty. His senses would have been screaming at him if anyone was around, but the hair on his arms lay flat, telling him there were no intruders.

Not now, anyway.

The light was on in J-Mart’s office but Jack’s feet refused to go in there. Swiping at his eyes—
shit, God, SHIT
—he took a deep breath, flipped off the pistol’s safety, kicked the door all the way open, and scanned the room from the threshold.

J-Mart was lying face-up on the floor. What was left of him.

It wasn’t pretty. His glazed eyes were open with a tiny bloody hole between. His legs—both of them—were a mangled mess of tissue, cartilage and jagged bone below the knee. His mouth gaped and his tongue lolled.

Dead. No. Not just dead. Dead could mean died peacefully of heart failure in bed.

J-Mart had been tortured and slaughtered because of Jack.

With a wounded-animal roar, Jack let the pain come and helped it along by pounding his forehead against the wall hard enough to split the skin.

Jesus. Hadn’t he sworn there’d be no more collateral damage on account of him?

Another head pound. And another. Only when he felt the warm trickle of his own blood and the corresponding relief did he pull himself together and stop the pity party by sheer force of will.

Swiping his eyes again, he took a quick look around to see what else this scene could tell him. There was nothing other than what he already knew—this wasn’t a robbery gone bad. J-Mart’s watch was still on his arm,
the cash box still on his desk. Nothing whatsoever was out of place.

No—wait.

The file cabinet was open. J-Mart kept it locked. Jack’s employment records were in there, but big freaking deal. Jack had never put his real address on the paperwork and, even if he had, he’d just left his apartment, never to return.

Once he got back in that Accord, drove off and disappeared into the night, there was no way he could be traced, nothing to tie him to Mount Adams or anywhere. J-Mart was dead, but Jack was safe—for now, at least—and there was nothing and no one anyone could use to get to him.

Relieved and ashamed of himself for it, he turned to go.

Then he thought of Amara and the way he’d held her on camera, as though they were lovers and she meant the world to him, and the breath choked off in his lungs.

People did this for fun? And relaxation?

That was getting harder to believe by the second.

Amara eyed her stupid little knitting project with increasing irritation. On one end was an enormous ball of fuzzy-soft purple yarn, every inch of which she had personally and painstakingly unraveled from the skein. Why this was necessary, she had no idea. But the instructions said do it, so she’d done it. Then she’d “cast” one end of the yarn onto one of a pair of enormous wooden knitting needles that looked more like drumsticks than craft implements.

Now she was supposed to begin knitting the actual
scarf, which the lying bastards at the yarn manufacturer had claimed, on the back of the yarn wrapper, was a basic project.
Basic.
Yeah, sure. Basic for anyone with thirty years’ previous knitting experience.

Lowering the needles, she looked around her house and wondered how she’d survive for the full three weeks of her mandatory and unwelcome time off.

The blue and yellow pillows on the off-white Pottery Barn sofas and miscellaneous rattan chairs were fluffed and arranged because she was compulsively neat and used a cleaning service on a regular basis. The hardwood floors and rugs were immaculate, and so were the kitchen and the closets.

Putting the knitting aside, she clicked off the lamp on the side table nearest her and un-muted the TV so she could watch the Travel Channel, where they were doing a special on—she squinted at the screen so she could read the blurb at the bottom—Costa Rica. Perfect. She’d never been to Costa Rica or, frankly, anywhere, and, with any luck, the image of the lazy sway of palm trees would lull her to sleep sometime before dawn. She settled her head on the pillow at one end of the sofa, snuggled under her favorite angora throw, and tried to veg.

She hated vegging.

Still, she tried for ten seconds, until she heard … a sound.

Mute and indistinct, it was nothing describable, just … a sound.

Cocking her head, she listened and heard only the hiss of the ancient but exceedingly efficient radiator in her bedroom and … yeah, the gentle
ding-ding-DING, ding-ding-DING
of the brass bell wind chimes
outside her bedroom window, which sounded a little louder than they needed to.

Hold up. Had she left the window open? Yeah. There was the cascading clatter of her wood blinds against the window. Now she’d have to get off her butt and close it.

Great.

Halfway down the hall, a prickle of … something … skittered up her spine.

She hesitated. She listened. And then she told herself she was being stupid.

Shaking off the silliness, she stepped into the carpeted blackness of her bedroom and identified the shadowy shapes looming on all sides: entertainment armoire, comfy chairs, desk and bed.

No boogeyman. Dummy.

The blinds clattered again, and she slid the sash closed, locked it, and peered through the slats at eye level to see if there were any other poor souls awake at this ungodly hour. There weren’t. Only the ghostly shapes of several enormous oaks lining the street, all of which seemed sinister tonight, close cousins of the evil tree from which the Headless Horseman had sprung in the Johnny Depp version of
Sleepy Hollow.

Too much coffee was the problem. That and no sleep for the last oh, say, four years. No more caffeine for her, starting tomorrow. And she needed to work harder on the whole sleep-relaxation thing. For now, she’d get some warm milk in a mug, top it off with two or three inches of Kahlúa, just to make it drinkable, and she’d be good to go.

Guided by the blue digital clock displays on the range and microwave, she walked back down to the kitchen and—

A slight movement registered with her peripheral vision, the fragmentation of a silent mass that was bigger and blacker than the darkness surrounding it.

The signal was still en route to her brain—
run!—
when a pair of arms circled her from behind, capturing her, and she screamed, struggling for her life.

The more Amara fought, the more trapped she became, as though the person holding her was the solid and vertical equivalent of quicksand, sticking to her and dragging her under to certain death.

She screamed. A hard hand clamped over her mouth.

She bit. Those digging fingers tightened, hurting.

She tried to free her useless arms from her sides. The living manacles embracing her in an immovable grip clenched, compressing her ribs.

She kicked out and was swung off her flailing feet.

Roaring with suppressed fear, growing desperation and a white-hot rage at being a crime victim in her own damn kitchen, she resorted to her only remaining weapon and jerked her head back—determined to knock out as many teeth as possible—and connected with someone’s nose with an audible and, she hoped, painful crunch.

“Christ.”

Ignoring the pinpoints of light blinking before her eyes and the ache that would soon be a goose egg on her scalp, she hung her head again and prepared for
another assault, but the intruder was ready for her this time and jerked away.

This led to overcompensation and a wild moment during which they staggered together, teetering between remaining upright and becoming victims of gravity.

Gravity won.

They hit the cold slate floor with a skull-jarring crash that was made worse because Amara had no hands free to catch herself and the man weighed a ton. His unforgiving body was every bit as hard as the tile beneath her belly and she gasped for breath even as she waited for her ribs to splinter.

And there was a new threat.

The unmistakable bulge of a fearsome package—flaccid now, yeah, but still fearsome—wedged against her butt, which was covered only by the insubstantial floss of a pair of thong panties and the negligible film of a cotton nightgown.

Oh, God.

Their minds seemed to be following the same path because Amara renewed her struggle, writhing and twisting, at the same time that the intruder tensed his muscles, tightening them to stone against which she had no prayer.

She screamed with frustration against his palm, the sound muffled and impotent, and then something extraordinary happened.

“Amara.” The crushing weight against her lessened and he shifted enough for her to suck in a strangled breath. “I’m not going to hurt you.”

The hoarse voice penetrated her panic and she froze with astonishment.

Wait a minute. She knew that voice.

“It’s Jack from the diner.”

“Juuck?” she asked into his hand.

“Yes.” She heard the relief in his voice. “I’m letting you go. Don’t hurt me, okay?”

She nodded.

His hand let go of her face and he braced atop her body in push-up position as though testing her newfound compliance. From there it took him an unaccountably long time to climb the rest of the way off her and she became aware, with excruciating sensitivity, of the cool air against her bare hips and butt, her spread thighs and single bent knee as she tried to get a toehold against the floor, the rasp of his pants against her legs, the flat hard lines of his belt buckle, his strength, his scent, the overpowering heat he generated.