Gone Too Far (25 page)

And Max realized what it must have taken for Gina to come walking in here. To look Laronda in the eye and announce her name—just in case anyone hadn’t already recognized her.

She turned back to Max. “If you really are wasting taxpayers’ dollars stalking me for those reasons, you’re in an even worse
situation
than you think.”

“I’m sorry I’ve upset you,” Max said quietly. “But—”

“You have to take that call,” she finished for him. “Right. It’s been nice seeing you, Max. But I’ve got to confess, you look tired. Whoever she is, she’s not taking very good care of you.”

She caught the look that Jules flashed in Max’s direction, and she laughed. “I’m almost done. I’m going. I’m not going to flip out. I just want to say, don’t worry. I’m a week away from being out of your hair for an entire year. I’m leaving the country. Of course, you probably already know that, right?”

Max didn’t. “You’re . . . Going
where
?”

She was going out the door. “Good-bye, Max.”

“This is not a good time to be an American abroad.” He followed her to Laronda’s desk.

She didn’t look back.

Jules did.
I’ll find out where she’s going,
he mouthed to Max.

Laronda was watching him out of the corner of her eye—probably because he was gritting his teeth so hard little pieces of enamel were shooting out of his ass.

“Kelly Paoletti on line one,” she reminded him in a whisper.

Max went into his office to take the call, slamming his door behind him.

Calling her again, from his cell phone.

“Are you ready to surrender?” Alyssa asked.

“Hell, no.”

“Then I don’t want to hear it.” She hung up.

Her cell phone rang again. She opened it and silently put it to her ear.

“Hey,” Sam said. “I’m serious.”

“I am, too,” she countered. “I’m not going to play, Starrett. I’m not going to talk to you while you sit somewhere, watching me, jerking off.”

“Jesus, Locke, you really think I’m some kind of deviant, don’t you?” It was possible she’d actually offended him.

“I meant that figuratively.” She hadn’t. Not really. But she’d said it only because she was pissed off because the earliest this could end was tomorrow.

It was going to be one very long night, and she was tired of sitting here, in her car, near the Dumpster behind the Sunset Motel.

“I’m not going to lie and say that I haven’t done my share of thinking about you while I’m . . . self-entertaining,” he said, “but I’d
never
do that while you’re on the other end of the phone. God.”

Alyssa sighed. She supposed it was her fault this conversation had turned in this direction. “You know, I’m just not interested. I’m tired and I’m hungry and if you really want to talk to me, you can come sit right here, in this car with me.”

She hung up.

Her phone rang again.

“My father was a racist son of a bitch who used to beat the shit out of me just for being friends with Noah.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” Alyssa said, and hung up.

The phone rang.

“Of course, he used every excuse in the book to beat the shit out of me. After he died, I found this huge collection of child pornography in his house. And suddenly some of those beatings made a little more sense. You know, his belt against my bare ass . . .”

Oh, God! “You’re making that up just to keep me on the phone,” Alyssa accused him. But she couldn’t make herself hang up on him again.

“I wish,” he said, and there was something in his voice that made her heart go into her throat. Oh, Sam. “I was shocked when I saw it—his collection—because he was such a man’s man, you know? A rednecked good ol’ boy. But it was like, holy fuck, Pop. Some of that stuff he had made me sick to my stomach even just to glance at, and it was clear he’d, um . . .” Sam laughed in disgust. “He’d worn some of it out, if you know what I mean. Apparently dear old Dad was really into little boys. Who knew?”

“Why are you telling me this?” she asked even though she already knew the answer. He wanted to make it impossible for her to hang up the phone. This was Sam Starrett’s version of 1001 Arabian Nights.

“I want you to know me,” he told her quietly. “I want you to know why I get my back up when you imply that I’m a rednecked good ol’ boy—that I’m as narrow-minded as my father was. Because I’m not. You know what it was that I finally figured out tonight?” He didn’t wait for her to answer. “That Roger Starrett Senior was merely my sperm donor. My real father was my uncle Walt. Walter Gaines. I learned all I need to know about being the best father in the world from him. About fucking time I realized that, huh?”

Alyssa closed her eyes. She could tell from his voice that he was sitting, or maybe even lying down. She knew quite well that he wasn’t just using this conversation as a means to distract her while he slipped unnoticed into the Sunset Motel.

“With my biological father, love was conditional,” Sam continued. “If only I could get good grades, if only I could hit a home run, if only I could cut the lawn exactly the way he liked it cut. Of course I never could, and I finally stopped trying.

“But Uncle Walt, he was . . . unswerving in his love for me. He hated when I got into a fight, but he’d patch me up, and he’d give me a hug and he’d tell me how proud he was of me because he knew how hard I’d tried not to hit that other kid. I wish he was still alive so you could meet him.”

“Okay,” Alyssa said. “I’m talking to you. I didn’t hang up. You’ve won. Now please admit you’re making up that stuff about your father.”

Sam rattled off a phone number. She scrambled for her pen. “Five oh eight, what?”

He repeated it.

Area code 508 was outside of Boston. He’d once told her that was where his sister lived.

“It’s Lainey’s number,” he told her. “She was with me when we cleaned out Pop’s house. Call me back, okay?”

This time he was the one who cut the connection. Alyssa glanced at the clock on the dash. Almost 2100. It wasn’t too late to call. Of course, he could be bluffing. He didn’t really think she’d call his sister. Or did he? She dialed the number.

“Hello?” A man picked up.

“May I please speak to Elaine?”

“Who’s calling?”

“Alyssa Locke. I’m a . . . a friend of her brother’s.”

She waited while Sam’s brother-in-law put his hand over the telephone receiver and had a muffled conversation, probably with Elaine.

Then a woman’s voice. “Do you know where my brother is?” Elaine’s Texas drawl was slighter than Sam’s. She sounded a little like Holly Hunter.

“Florida,” Alyssa told her. “Probably somewhere in the Gainesville area.”

“Well, if you see him, will you tell him that the FBI is looking for him? Did you know that? There’s some kind of warrant or something out for him. Tell him his sister says to stop being an idiot, to turn himself in before someone gets hurt!”

“He’s aware of that,” Alyssa said. “And I am, too—I’m with the FBI myself. I doubt I’m going to see him, but I
have
been talking to him on the phone. If you want, I’ll pass along your message.”

“You’re
with
the—”

“I’ve been friends with Sam for a few years now,” Alyssa said. “We’ve been . . .” She cleared her throat. “Intimate at times and—”

“Oh, my gosh,” Elaine said. “You’re her, aren’t you? The one Ringo—Sam—told me about. He wouldn’t tell me your name. Just that there was this woman and . . . well. He said something about the FBI and . . . you’re her.”

“Yeah,” Alyssa said. Sam had told his older sister about her? “I guess so.”

“So now you’re back, messing with his head some more?”

Okay. Hostile witness. “I’m trying to talk him into turning himself in—just as you asked. I’ve been speaking to him on the phone,” she said again. “I’m doing the best I can in a bad situation. A terrible situation, if you want to know the truth. This is hard for me, too. Did your brother happen to mention that he stopped seeing me in order to marry Mary Lou?”

Elaine laughed her surprise. “No.”

“Yeah, well, ask him about
that
next time you see him.”

There was a pause, and then, “You’re not kidding, are you?”

“No,” Alyssa said.

Elaine was silent for longer this time.

“I’m on your side, Elaine. I really don’t want Sam to do something stupid and end up getting himself killed. So I need your help. I need to ask you about something that he just told me. It’s something you might not be too comfortable talking about, something about your father.”

“Oh, my gosh,” Elaine said. “He actually told you about Pop?”

“He said when the two of you were cleaning out his house, after your father died, that you found some pictures—”

“Pictures, videos, magazines. Enough to fill an entire trunk,” Elaine told her. “I can’t believe Ringo told you. Shoot, he won’t even talk to
me
about it. What did he say?”

“Just that he found the pictures and . . .” Oh, Sam. Alyssa closed her eyes. “Do you think there’s a chance that your father . . .?”

“Abused him sexually?” Elaine said the words that she couldn’t. “No. I know he didn’t. I mean, you should have seen Ringo’s face when we found that stuff. He was as stunned as I was. The first thing we did was look at each other and go, ‘Did Pop ever touch you when we were kids?’ But Pop never came near me, and Ringo told me the exact same thing.”

“And you believed him?” Alyssa asked.

“Yes,” Elaine said. “Although to be honest, in hindsight, knowing what we now know, I really do think Pop got off—really got off, you know, in an icky way—sexually, I mean—on beating the crap out of Roger. Ringo. He was Ringo back then—he started calling himself that around the time he went into eighth grade, although my father never called him that. But he was adamant about being Ringo. He refused to answer if someone called him Roger, which
really
pissed my father off. But the beatings stopped when Ringo got bigger—which happened kind of all at once, one summer. You know the way boys somehow just grow? To tell you the truth, I don’t know if Pop backed off because Ringo was big enough to start fighting back, or if it was because he wasn’t a little boy anymore, so Pop no longer got off on hitting him.”

“Oh, God,” Alyssa said.

“I know that Ringo’s more comfortable classifying Pop’s beatings as just plain physical abuse. I think he gives Pop more credit than he’s due for keeping his hands off of us—you know, for being strong enough not to do something he was really obviously pulled toward doing? But I also think Ringo knew all along—on some level—that the way Pop treated him was wrong, that there was something, I don’t know, sick to it, I guess. I mean, why the name changes? First Ringo and now he calls himself Sam? Who knows who he’ll be after he leaves the SEALs. I think he really didn’t want to be Roger, you know? He didn’t want to be that kid whose father treated him like that.” She paused. “It probably doesn’t help that Roger was Pop’s name, too.” Elaine laughed softly. “I still can’t believe he told you about this.”

“I can’t, either,” Alyssa said. “Thank you for being so candid.”

“Do you love him?” Elaine asked. Alyssa was silent, and Elaine laughed again. “Sorry. Not my business. Please tell him to be safe. Tell him to turn himself in. And tell him I love him.”

“I will.” Alyssa thanked her again and cut the connection.

Did she love him? Alyssa had so much bad history with Sam. She’d once been right on the verge of loving him more than she’d ever loved any man. But there was so much pain and hurt, so many stupid mistakes made. Could she really let herself get close to him again without bringing all that bad luggage with her? How could a relationship ever survive with all that excess weight?

In all honesty, she was afraid to get too close to Sam.

But Ringo—this Ringo she was hearing about, this former little boy who had been so naturally open-minded to seek out fatherly love from a black man despite the fact that his own father was a racist—Ringo, who had endured his father’s sadistic treatment to the point where he’d chosen to change his name, to become someone different . . . It wouldn’t be very hard at all to fall in love with
him
.

“I really blew it, didn’t I?”

She’d done really well in Max’s office—right up to the point where Max had ended the conversation. Tried to end the conversation. And then she’d lost the upper hand. God, she had a stomachache.

“Well, you’ve got him terrified,” Jules said with a laugh. “If it’s any consolation, I didn’t know Max was capable of feeling terror.”

She opened her eyes and looked at him. In the changing light from the streetlamps he looked too young to be an FBI agent. “How long have you worked with him?”

“A coupla years.” He was incredibly good looking. Like, total male perfection—to the point that he was prettier than she was. Of course, some people didn’t think she was pretty at all, with her giant nose that broadcast her Italian roots and a mouth that was too big for her face, which was remarkable since her face was pretty damn big. There wasn’t much of her that could be called petite. Her ears, maybe. Yeah, she had little, delicate, feminine ears. Which were nearly always covered by her hair.

“Were you with him in Kazbekistan?” she asked.

He glanced at her with eyes that were impossibly sensitive, eyes that were surrounded by thick dark lashes. “I was, but I wasn’t in the surveillance room when you were raped.”

Whoa. Someone who actually used the R-word. And without hesitating, flinching, or stuttering. The relief was remarkably intense.

“Thank you,” she said.

“It must suck, huh? The way people dance around it. And meanwhile the elephant in the corner of the room gets bigger and bigger. . . .”

“I love you,” Gina said. “Will you marry me?”

Jules laughed.

If he was perfect in repose, then with that smile he was perfection squared. And still, he didn’t hold a candle to Max. Max, with his crooked nose and lines of fatigue and those dark brown eyes that could see inside of her and touch her soul . . .

“I’m tempted,” Jules said, “if only to piss Max off.”

“Yeah, like he’d care.” Sending her home with this man—handsome, no wedding ring on his left hand, and far younger than Max—was a definite message to her.
Go play with someone your own age.

Jules gave her another glance. “Did you know that in K-stan he put his fist through the wall?”

She laughed.
“Max?”

He nodded. “Yeah. It was the night before the ca-ca hit the fan. He knew trouble was coming and he wanted to go in, take down the plane right then, but Washington said wait. It was a direct order, and he went apeshit, if you’ll pardon my French—but there’s really no better way to describe it. He completely lost it. Punched the wall.” He gave her another glance. “He does that sometimes.”

Max. Losing it. It was hard to imagine. Or was it?

“How can
I
make him lose it?”

“Sweetie, I think you probably came pretty damn close today.”

Close wasn’t good enough. She wanted . . . She wanted him in her life.

“Do you know his girlfriend?” Gina asked, bracing herself for information she really didn’t want to know. Max laughing and talking to someone else, with his arm around her shoulders, his eyes lit with that fire that burned inside of him, 24/7 . . .

For some reason Jules laughed at her question. “If he told you he’s got a girlfriend, he was using a liberal dose of hyperbole. He’s not seeing anyone right now. At least not in the traditional sense.”

Not in the . . . “Is he gay?”

Jules glanced at her. “That’s not what I meant. But no, he’s definitely not gay. You know, I really shouldn’t be talking about him.”

“What did you mean, then? By ‘not in the traditional sense’?”

Jules was silent.

“Please,” she said.

He sighed. “There
is
someone,” he told her. “She and Max have been circling each other for a few years now. It hasn’t gone anywhere and it’s not going to go anywhere because she works for him and Max doesn’t have it in him to break the rules like that, and I’m
not
going to tell you anything more because I hear myself saying this and it sounds like gossip and we don’t gossip about our coworkers and we especially don’t gossip about our boss. That’s kind of like gossiping about God. It’s just not done by anyone who wants to stay with him in the Garden of Eden. Which I do. Very much so.”

“People say he’s the best negotiator—”

“He’s the best, period,” Jules interrupted. “He’s brilliant, he’s fair, he’s loyal, he’s unstoppable. He practically lives in the office because he
cares
about what we do. He’s driven, not just by ambition but by conviction. He’s the best team leader I’ve ever worked with because he leads from the front. I would do anything to stay on his team. And I would do anything he asked me to do. Anything. Including die.”

He was actually serious.

They rode in silence for a while. But as they pulled up to a red light, Gina couldn’t keep her mouth shut. “Her name’s Alyssa, right?”

Jules looked at her, a blandness in his eyes. It was a case of too little reaction—he was working too hard to hide it, which meant there was definitely something to hide.

“You don’t need to answer that. I asked around about a year ago.” Gina had actually called the older sister of a friend. The sister worked in the Pentagon and had met Max Bhagat several times. Apparently, at the time, there was gossip raging about Max and someone named Alyssa. “Do you know her? You don’t have to say anything. Just nod. Yes or no.”

Jules just laughed as the light turned green.

Gina took that as a yes. “Is she really as amazing as people say?”

He rolled his eyes. “Look, if I tell you, will you tell me where you’re going overseas?”

Gina made a raspberry sound at that. “I can’t believe Max didn’t already have my full itinerary before I even made up my mind to buy the plane ticket.”

“Well, he doesn’t, but he
will
get it,” Jules told her. “It’ll just make it that much easier if you give me an idea of which hemisphere you’ll be visiting.”

“I’m not going to help him stalk me. If he wants to check up on me, he can do it the way normal people do—by calling me up and asking how I’m doing.”

“Max isn’t normal people,” Jules reminded her. “Which way here? Left or right?”

“Left.” Her motel was just down the road. “Then on the right hand side.”

He pulled into the parking lot, leaning forward to look at the place out of the front windshield. He didn’t say a word, but she knew what he was thinking as he saw that the access to the rooms were through sliding glass doors. To someone whose world was made up of terrorists and criminals, security here probably looked a little lax. Max, for sure, wasn’t going to be happy when Jules gave him his report. And Gina was certain that, after Jules returned to the FBI office, there
would
be a report.

He held out a business card. “I’m here if you need anything.”

She looked at him. He’d said he’d do anything Max asked. “
Any
thing?”

He held her gaze. “Sweetie, I’m adventurous and I like you very much. I could probably force myself to swing your way for a night and make it lots of fun for both of us, but I really doubt that’s what either one of us needs.”

Whoa. “You’re . . .” He was looking at her as if he were waiting for something. She said the word. “Gay.” Most people probably talked around it. And boy, did she know how that felt.

“Thank you.” It was no coincidence that he was echoing her very words to him. “Although my elephant is different than yours. Mine’s bright purple and I like to lead him around on a leash and introduce him to people by name.”

Gina nodded. “Well, this really sucks. Our marriage is going to need an awful lot of work.”

He laughed.

“Thanks for the lift.” She opened the car door, and he reached over and put his card in her hand, closing her fingers around it. “I’m not going to need that,” she told him.

“I was thinking that maybe you had a brother you could introduce me to.”

Gina laughed. “Yeah, I’ve got three, but you definitely don’t want to go near them.”

“You can’t be sure. The family’s often the last to know.” Jules got out of the car, too, and spoke to her over the top. “You know, Gina, there are places on the other side of the island that have internal access rooms. You know, like a real hotel? It’s much safer for a woman staying alone.”

She fished in her pocket for her key. “But I like this place. I’m feet from the beach, I can afford it without maxing out my credit card,
and
I’m perfectly safe. But you can tell Max that you tried your best to talk me out of staying here.” She unlocked her hotel room door, slid it open. “Good night.”

As she closed the door and then shut the curtains, he was still standing there. But a few minutes later, when she went out to take a walk on the beach, he was gone.