Guilty Pleasures (39 page)

“You’ve got five minutes,” the officer said very quietly. “But I didn’t tell you you could go in there.”

Nasty left at once. Running, registering the protest in his ankle, he hugged scrubby bushes on two vacant lots to the right of the Loders’ house. He made his way rapidly to an unkempt hedge bordering the property.

Dusty fell in behind him. “What d’you think?”

“I don’t believe what I think,” he said moving again, skirting the hedge to come at the house from the back. He’d be expected to walk up to the front door and ask to be taken prisoner.

“What’s that mean?” Dusty could still move out when he had to. “Tell me.”

“I think I’ve heard Jennifer Loder’s voice before.”

“Revelation. You know you’ve talked to her.”

“Not here. Somewhere where she whispered. I think she was in Bogota. I think she was there when I got shot. She
could be the one who told me they were waiting for me—right before I went into the open and whammo. Out to pasture, here
I
come.”

“Nah.”

“I kept getting snatches of something. In the past few weeks. Since I met Polly. In the bookshop it happened. And a couple of other times. It was her. Always her. I know it now. There’s a light in that co
rn
er room.”

“One at the front, too,” Dusty said.

They flattened against rough siding, bent low, and slipped rapi
dly to stand beneath the lit corn
er windows. Cautiously, Nasty straightened until his head cleared the level of the sill. There was a gap between the drapes.

He edged forward. A narrow slice of the room inside had the quality of too few parts of a jigsaw. At first he couldn’t tell what went where. A bed. White light directed on the bed. He went a little closer. On the bed, a body swathed in a sheet, the sheet fastened with a belt at the bundle’s waist. He couldn’t see farther down than that.

It could be Polly. He quelled the urge to raise the Sauer and blast his way in through the window. Around the shrouded head, a strip of something had been tied, rammed in the mouth, and tied. A gag. You didn’t gag a dead man—or woman.

Movement.

Into his view came the back of a man. Naked. He took another backward step. In front of him stood a diver.

Nasty froze.
Diver.
Jennifer Loder in a wet suit. She held a gun. Nasty recognized a Glock 19 and didn’t envy the man who was feeling its cold barrel in a very sensitive spot.

Jack Spinnel. The naked guy’s head was equally naked, almost more so as it shone with sweat.

The Loder woman was in charge, and her attention was splintered. Nasty ducked and ran on to the co
rn
er, turned, and came to a door with a window. Inside was darkness. Without hesitation, he worked the lock. An easy number. At least the hinges were oiled. Dusty came in behind him and closed the
door carefully. Lives had been lost over lesser mistakes than letting a breeze slam a door.

The room they sought was only feet away. Voices came from inside. Jennifer Loder mocked and taunted Jack. Jack didn’t whimper, or beg—Nasty liked him for that. He did take foolish risks. Calling an enemy with a gun an ugly cow might be a fatal mistake.

“You’re going to get yours, Jackie boy,” Jennifer said. “I was going to wait for Ferrito and let him watch the whole thing, but I think we’ll have a quickie little number before he rings the old bell.

“Uncover pretty Polly’s eyes. Hurry up. That’s it. Carefully, does it. Okay, children, here goes. Jack gets to hump ugly Jennie with the lights on—and with an audience. If he can get the pathetic little bugger up. Oh, yeah! Look, violence turns him on.”

Nasty knew the sounds he heard were of Jennifer getting out of the suit. “Wait here,” he whispered against Dusty’s ear. “I’m going in.” He might blow it, but he couldn’t wait for a better chance. Struggling out of the wet suit would impair her balance, and her concentration.

“You always said you wanted to do it with the light on, Jack, but you didn’t really. You were glad you never had to look at me.”

“You didn’t want me to look at you,” Jack said. “You know you’re ugly.”

The man had a death wish.

Beneath Nasty’s weight, the door burst inward and parted company with its hinges. It fell across the foot of the bed. He vaulted to his left and crouched, the Sauer braced.

“Shit!” Jennifer Loder tried to tear the wet suit completely off with her feet. She still held the Glock. “You move and she dies.” The gun was aimed at the bed where he saw Polly’s eyes looking at him through a rent in the sheet.

Polly shook her head at him, shook it wildly from side to side.
Without warning, Jack moved. He lowered his head and ran, roaring, into Jennifer.

Nasty went for the Glock.

Loud gurgling, choking sounds jerked his attention to Polly. She writhed rocked her head to one side, bucked up and down.

She was choking. Her eyes turned repeatedly to her left. Nasty took a step toward her, and glanced to his right. Polly was warning him. He threw himself forward at the same second as Art Loder pulled his trigger. A silencer made sure his weapon produced only an almost innocent pop.

“Jen!” Loder’s mouth fell open. His eyes strained wide open. “Jen!”

Jennifer Loder had dropped to the floor. She lay on her face. She didn’t move.

Art Loder let go of a wolflike howl. His teeth bared he lined up on Nasty.

Dusty hadn’t lost his touch with his old Colt. A bloody mass blossomed over Loder’s shirt. His gun slipped slow motion, from his fingers. He buckled at the knees, and Nasty watched him die before he hit the ground.

Nasty looked at Dusty and pulled his knife from his forearm to cut the sheet away from Polly’s head.

She stopped him from taking the sheet all the way off. “Not dressed
,
” she croaked.

Nasty sank to the bed and pulled her into his arms. He felt the approach of silent men. The police would be on their way.

Grabbing up his pants, Jack Spinnel covered himself. Then he slid down the wall and sat, his head turned away, saying nothing.

“It wasn’t a man,” Nasty said to Dusty. “In Bogota. She called to me. Jennifer Loder. And she shot me.”

Dusty made his way between fallen bodies to sit at the foot of the bed. “You don’t know that. You can’t be sure, just because—”

“I can be sure,” Nasty interrupted. “I thought I’d killed him. Her.”

“You did. You knew you had. With the knife.”

“No.” He pointed to Jennifer Loder, to shocking red scars sweeping in a wide arc around a shoulder blade. “I know my
mark.”

“Well, we finally finished the job.” Dusty put his hand on Nasty’s shoulder. It was over.

Twenty-nine

O
ne each side of the bow, they leaned on the rail of the
April.
Early-morning mist floated inches above the water and curled up to all but obscure the dock.

A gull cried through the echoing almost day, and its cry broke somewhere out there, broke and faded.

“You ought to get some sleep,” Nasty said. He felt his separation from her.

“So should you.”

“I’m tough.”

“So am I.”

“You’re turning blue—and various other colors.”

“Don’t be rude.”

He chuckled and leaned out to peer into the clear water where it lapped at the boat’s hull. “I was only talking about the state of your bruises.” Backed by the veil of mist, the bowline reflected on the surface.

The blanket of moisture wrapped them in a damp chamber where sound issued and fell away as if it had never been.

“The doctor said you need to rest for a few days,” he told Polly.

“He also said I ought to be concussed. People with concussion shouldn’t be allowed to sleep.”

“He said you
ought
to be concussed, not that you were. You’ve been through hell, Polly. You need to give yourself a chance to get over what’s happened.”

She was quiet.

He looked at her. Coming to the
April
had been her idea. When the police had released them, she’d refused to go to her condominium, had declared that she’d only go there again to pack her things. And she’d said she would be looking for another place to live.

When they’d come aboard, with Polly wearing a sweater one of the policemen had produced, Nasty had told her to take whatever she wanted from his cabin. An ancient camouflage T-shirt in shades of green, brown, and beige had been what she chose. It sagged at the neck, flapped around her slim upper arms, and fell below her knees. It didn’t do a thing for the purple marks on her face.

“The shirt lends an air of mystery,” he told her.

“I like it because it’s yours.”

No snappy response came to mind.

“I hate to be repetitious, but I’m still jumpy.”

“It’s all over now. There’s no need to be jumpy.”

“That’s why I am,” she said. She put one sneaker on the other and rested her chin on folded arms atop the rai
l.
“It’s all over. I saw how you were last night. You did it all like
…
It was like going to the store is to me. You hold a gun the way I hold a purse. That was all natural to you. Most people’s minds would switch off. Yours gets clearer and clearer.”

“I seem to remember telling you—several hundred times— that I was trained to do those things.”

“You were different. Cold—I mean really cold.”

He had to smile. “Rather than just my usual cold?”

She turned her head and propped a cheek so she could look at him. “You aren’t cold. Not really. But you’re always going to think about the Navy as the best days of your life, aren’t you?”

“I’m going to think about it as some of the most challenging days of my life. And some of the days when I did what I was supposed to do and did it well. Any human being feels good about something like that.”

“There are going to be a lot more questions.”

“Questions we can handle. I’d never have thought of Jennifer Loder. Not in that context. Every time I heard her voice I felt weird, but I didn’t make the connection.”

“What’ll they do to Jack?”

Nasty drew up his shoulders. “Hard to say. He could probably buy himself a lighter sentence if he sang about the things he knows. He’s going to do time. Possibly a lot of time.” Polly pushed her hands into her hair, sucked in a breath, and removed them again, much more carefully.

“Go lie down,” he urged her. “Sleep for a few hours. The police will want us again later. And your family will be clamoring to talk to you. Then there’ll be Bobby needing you.”

She straightened and backed up to sit, with a plop, on a hatch. “Festus dead. Belinda in jail. Jennifer and Art dead. Jack in jail. He only put the show on here to create a way to cover getting at you.”

Nasty stared at her thoughtfully. “And if you weren’t so irresistible, we might not be standing here today.”

Polly raised her head. “Jennifer Loder said that. In a way. How could they have imagined something like you and me?”

He smiled. “Ironic. Wonderfully ironic.” Irony that all but blew him away. “You saved me, sweetheart.”

“You saved us both,” she said.

They were silent for a long time before Nasty remembered to tell her, “Belinda bought that wet suit. The cops told me. She bought it from a shop in Bellevue—probably when Festus was already dead. Just to try to back up her story. She’s so nutty, she must have kept conv
incing herself there wasn’t any
thing going on other than the mischief she was causing.”

A dressing covered much of Polly’s left eyebrow. Another rested on her cheek. Sutures in a wound beneath her jaw showed dark against her unnaturally pallid skin.

“Please go to sleep,” Nasty said.

“I’m scared!”

The passion in her voice shook him.

“I’m afraid, Xavier. It’s over. All the stress, the fighting, the
looking over our shoulders. Like someone burst a balloon we blew up too tight. Was our loving part of that stress? For you? You want me to go below and sleep. It’s because you want to be alone, isn’t it? Alone to think about what it all means now?”

“Polly—”

“Don’t stop me. If I don’t say it, I’ll never have the nerve again. You aren’t happy being a partner in a dive shop. You need something else, and you’ll find it. Watching you last night, I knew you were never cut out to be a passive man.”

“I’m not passive.”

“I can sense how flat you feel. Everything’s changed, and you aren’t the same.” She pushed back her hair. In the clouded light her eyes were the palest of blues. “I won’t beg. I can’t let myself. But I am going to tell you what’s inside of me.” Her fist went to her breast.

He raised his hands and let them fall. “You’re afraid?”

“Yes. Afraid, and shaky, and kind of hollow. Empty. But I’m full, too. That’s absolutely a mad thing to say, but it’s true. I look at you and I can’t find a way to tell you everything I think.”

She was doing better than he was. “Try.”

Her hands came together in fists. “You wouldn’t think of trying to help me, would you?” The expansion of her lungs showed how shaky she was. “I’m in your way. You didn’t realize it before because you hadn’t come face-to-face with what you have to have in your life. Not really. You need excitement and
…
” Her voice drifted away.

Nasty swallowed. “And?”

“And I understand,” she told him, tipping up her chin and closing her eyes. “I wish you the best, my love. I wish you luck and happiness. But I’ll always love you.”

The hesitation, whatever had held him back, snapped. If he touched her, he might break her. The power of what he felt for her was stronger than any emotion he’d ever felt before. He took several steps toward her and turned his back.

“Oh, Xavier, you are so special.” She had never meant any
thing as much as she meant those words. “I hurt inside. Oh, I hurt. I have to tell you that because you’ve given me so much. I used to think I’d never love anyone—that I never could.”

“I’m afraid, too.”

She hugged herself. “You’ll know what you’re supposed to do soon. I just know you will. There are so few men like you—you’re very valuable, my friend.”

“I’m afraid of losing you, Polly.”

Words failed her. He’d said what she needed to hear, and sweet emotion stole her breath.

His spine was long and straight, his shoulders so broad. Standing in front of her with his powerful legs braced apart he seemed a rock, immovable, beyond damage.

“We’re afraid to believe our own luck, love,” he told her. “That’s it, isn’t it? We’ve had more than our share of the other and managed to make lives for ourselves. Lives that didn’t risk what matters most—the heart. Geez, I even know what that means now. But we found each other. And we loved each other—love each other. And we’re so damned afraid to believe it won’t get snatched away—like everything else we ever wanted this badly.”

Polly stood up and went to stand behind him. Very lightly, she leaned on him, rested a bruised cheek on his shoulder. “That’s it,” she murmured. “That’s what I feel.”

He put out a hand, palm up. “Me too, partner. If you decide you can
l
ive without me, I’ll jump in the lake.”

Polly brought her palm down on top of his. She smiled into his shirt. “Jump in the lake? So what? You can swim.”

“Wearing concrete boots.”

“If I know you, you could swim in those, too.”

“You have too much faith in me.”

“I could never do that.”

He pulled her around him until they were toe-to-toe. “Polly Crow, you’re my hero. I need you. I’m always going to need you.”

“Me, too. You’re my hero. And all the rest. You’re the quiet one, but you do words better than me.”

“Nah. I chew gum better than you, though.”

“I don’t chew gum.”

“See what I mean?”

She looked up into his face. “I wish you’d hold me.”

“Where?”

“Right here.”

“No, I mean what bits of you do I dare touch?”

Polly laughed. “Just be gentle with all my bits, please.”

“You hussy.” Bowing over her, holding both of her hands, he kissed her lips softly, for a long, long time.

She saw his eyes drift shut and closed her own. When he raised his head and sighed, she looked at him again, and said, “I’d like to be with you forever.”

“You will be. You don’t get any choice.”

“Will we be good at it? At being”—she wasn’t sure what she should say—“at being there for each other?”

“At marriage, you mean? We’re going to be great at it. Kiss me.”

Easy request. He held her, and her skin stung everywhere he touched. A great sting she’d put up with for approximately a lifetime—if she could guarantee a long life. “Are you sure you won’t suddenly come to and decide this is a bunch of sloppy nonsense?”

“Uh-uh.” Crossed around her waist, his hands tightened a fraction, drew her a fraction closer. “You’ve got to work at relationships. But if you want it badly enough, you do what it takes.”

“And you don’t go to sleep mad?” Polly said into his mouth. “Or walk away from an argument.”

“Or bear grudges.”

“We’re going to be so good at this.”

She framed his face. “You are so gorgeous, Xavier Ferrito. Inside and out. I want my son to have you to guide him.”

“Hey!” A deep frown drew his finely shaped brows together. “That’s right. We’re parents.”

“Yup. Take me, take my son.”

“Okay. Take me, take my cat.”

Tears threatened. “I’ve always been afraid to be too happy. I’m going to work at getting over that. Sometimes this marriage thing won’t be easy, but we’ll make it through.”

“Boy, you don’t know how to let go and let it happen, do you? But I think you did just agree to wash my dishes.”

“What!” Pushing on his chest, she leaned away from him. “Just a minute, here, buddy.”

His angelic smile was almost believable. “You’re going to like everything I do to you so much you’ll beg to wash my dishes.”

“We’ll love what we do to each other.” The humor went out of her eyes, replaced by a pledge.

Nasty understood that pledge. “I’m going to hold you to that, love.”

“I’ll hold you to it, too.”

“Promise you’ll trust me?”

“Always.”

“This is what the guy sings about.” He could only remember one line of the song, and it might not even fit so well. “The way you make me feel. Ten feet tall, or something. Bulletproof.”

“Don’t say that!” She swung him around and beat his chest with her fists. “Don’t you ever mention your name and bullets in the same breath again.”

“Okay. When?”

“Never.”

“No. When do we do it? The ‘M’ word? We ought to be able to tell Bobby when we see him.” He wasn’t above blackmail to get what he wanted. “That’ll be very soon, by the way.”

“Soon as you like, I guess.”

Exactly what he’d wanted to hear. “How about this afternoon?”

“How about as soon as we can do whatever we have to do first?”

“Put it there.” When she shook his hand he said, “We’ve got a bargain.”

Applause broke out behind him. He looked over his shoulder at three pairs of eyes peering from behind the open doors to the saloon.

Polly covered her face and leaned on Nasty. “They were spying
on us,” she said, laughing self-
consciously.

“No way,” Dusty announced. “Just me because I’m the oldest. Roman and Bobby didn’t get to look till I could tell them it was a done deal.”