Maximum Exposure (13 page)

This gay thing was getting to him. It didn’t matter that another few weeks was all he was looking at before Operation Bebé Bust came to an end. He wanted out of the closet and into Jodi Fontaine’s bed now. Not later. Now. Her office. Her pool. It wasn’t enough. He’d been a fool to think having a taste of her would hold him.

She’d called him on Monday. Several times. Even after promising him that what contact they’d had thus far would be the end of it. Her messages had said it was urgent that they talk ASAP. Yeah, right.

He hadn’t called her back. He hadn’t even dialed her number and hung up before being connected. He’d picked up the phone every day, sure, but he’d stuck to his end of their bargain. And he’d tried his goddamnedest not to think about seeing Tomás Bebé at her complex.

Bebé’s following him wasn’t worth wasting time thinking about. But Bebé getting to him through Jodi…Roman glanced at his watch. He had time to call before Tomás arrived with Friday’s scheduled delivery. If Jodi picked up, he’d know that his ignoring her hadn’t put her in more danger than she was already in from his fucking her.

He signaled to Carmen to watch the floor and headed upstairs. Livia was out with the photographer, taking the pictures Jodi had told him about. He nodded to Penny as he walked past her office, then picked up the phone on his desk and dialed Jodi’s private line at Downtown Blue.

When he got her voice mail the first time, he hung up and dialed again. The third time he got the receptionist. “Ms. Fontaine isn’t in today. May someone else help you?”

“Do you know where she is?” he asked more brusquely than he’d intended.

“I’m sorry, sir. We don’t divulge personal information. Would you like Ms. Fontaine’s voice mail?”

“No, I’ll try her at home.”

“Thank you, sir. Good—”

“Wait, please.” What was the receptionist’s name? He’d met her last Thursday. “Uh, Stephanie?”

“Yes?”

“This is Roland Green. We met last week. I was with Jodi at Noir Purrfection?”

“Yes, I remember,” she said, warming to the point of cooing. “How are you?”

“I’m good,” he assured her. “But before I bother Jodi at home, do you know if she’s there? If she’s sick and might be sleeping, I don’t want to disturb her. I guess she’s turned off her cell.”

“She’s home, yes, but she should be taking calls.”

“Is she all right?” he pressed.

“She will be. She walked to Starbucks Monday morning and fell, twisting her back. I guess she caught her heel or something. The doctor ordered her off her feet for the rest of the week.”

Was that all that had happened? That was what she called urgent? “She called several times Monday afternoon, but I’m just now getting back to her. I’ll give her house phone a call.”

“I’m sure she’ll be glad to hear from you. She was pretty shook up after the fall. It didn’t seem to hit her until later in the day how badly she’d been hurt.”

That was curious. “How so?”

“Well,” Stephanie began, sounding as if she was settling in for a long story. “I didn’t notice her limping or anything when she got back, or even when she went out to check something about her car. But when she told Dustin she was going to the doctor, she could hardly walk.”

“Poor thing,” he said, his gut twitching.

“And there were huge scrapes on both of her knees. I was on the phone when she brought in our breakfast, which must be why I didn’t see all the blood before.”

Or maybe it wasn’t there before.

“Anyway,” Stephanie went on. “Tell her we miss her and are thinking about her. Dustin hasn’t been himself since she’s been gone. Like it’s his fault she fell, which is ridiculous. She went to Starbucks by herself.”

Where anyone could have seen her, threatened her. He said his good-byes and slammed down the phone, assuring Penny he was fine when she called out to ask. He had to make sure Jodi was okay before Tomás showed up. Carmen would have to cover the floor.
Fuck the job.

He told Penny he was taking his lunch hour early, which she duly marked on his time card, and he told Carmen he’d be back, and that her boyfriend was not to leave before
Roland
had given his okay and signed off on the boxes Tomás brought.

Carmen hadn’t been happy with
Roland
disrespecting her boyfriend and doubting his competence, but she was more than happy to get him out of her face. And she’d always seemed to be such a nice girl. At least as nice as was possible, considering she lived with drug-dealing scum.

Friday prelunch traffic through the city wasn’t bad. He hit Jodi’s complex before noon. He parked, hurried to her door, and knocked. When she didn’t answer fast enough, he knocked again. He was reaching for his cell to call her when he heard the thwump of her dead bolt and the click of what he assumed was a second lock.

It wasn’t. She cracked the door, shoved the muzzle of a handgun through. “Who the hell are you?”

“Let me in. We’ll talk.”

“We’ll talk here.” She kept the gun trained on his chest, her finger on the trigger, the safety off. “Who are you, motherfucker? You’d better tell me now.”

He didn’t think she’d blow him away, but he wasn’t wearing a vest or his piece, and that didn’t leave him a lot of room to negotiate. He kept his voice low. “Roman Greyle.”

Her eyes were wide and watery; her face was pale. “That doesn’t tell me anything.”

“Let me come in. I’ll tell you all that I can.”

“You’ll tell me everything,” she snapped. “And you’ll do it now. From where you’re standing. Or I’ll drop you to the ground.”

He kept his hands where she could see them, kept his eyes on hers, kept his voice subdued. “You want the truth, you let me in. Or I walk away.”

He watched her waver, uncertainty causing her to blink, hesitation bringing the gun down a notch. Finally, she moved the foot bracing the door and backed into the room.

He walked inside, turned the dead bolt behind him, but that was all he did, staying where he was, not wanting to give her any reason to think twice about letting him in.

She waved the gun. “Start talking.”

He took a deep breath. “My name is Roman Greyle. I’m DEA. I’m undercover. Have been for a year. And my telling you that may have just fucked up everything I’ve been doing. Now, can you put the gun away before one of us gets hurt?”

She waited a second, then surrendered, securing the gun in a box at the top of her entryway’s coat closet, then heading for the kitchen, leaving him behind. He followed, keeping his distance and always a piece of furniture between them. Whatever had scared her, he didn’t want to make it worse.

She poured Diet Coke into a tall glass, added a healthy finger of rum. It wasn’t even noon, and she didn’t offer him the same, or so much as water. “What happened on Monday? When you went to Starbucks?”

She gave a bitter laugh. “Steph, right? Miss See All and Tell All?”

“I pressed. She was very professional. Now tell me what happened. And I don’t mean the story about you hurting your back and your knees when you fell.”

“But I did fall.” She’d been standing on the other side of the open counter that separated the kitchen from the dining nook, where he waited. She set her drink on the stove top and walked out. “I just didn’t do it on the way to Starbucks.”

He glanced at her knees, at the skin that had been scraped by something other than her office carpet. The wounds had scabbed over but still oozed blood from beneath a coating of clear ointment. “Your palms?”

“What about them?”

“You usually break a fall with your palms.”

She held them up. Not a scratch to be seen.

“And your elbows?”

She showed him both. Clean as a whistle.

“Your knees. Tell me. And about walking to Starbucks.”

She put her hands to her hips, stared at the floor, finally walked into the dining nook and pulled out a chair, pointing him to another. They both sat, Jodi wincing.

“I had a bit of a clash with Dustin Monday morning—”

“About?”

“You,” she told him, lifting one of her professionally shaped brows. Only then did he notice her lack of makeup and the bruiselike smudges under her eyes. “I was steaming when I left the gallery, and when this guy in a van at the curb asked me for directions, I was in the mood to tear into someone. Unfortunately, he tore into me first.”

Roman felt his temperature rise. “How so?”

“He grabbed my wrist—”

“What did he look like?”

She gave him a description that sounded a lot like Tomás, finishing with, “Are you done interrupting me?”

He nodded. It meant nothing. “Go on.”

“He told me to give you a message.”

“Me?” Roman asked, barely able to cough out the word. Bebé was really trying to get to him through her?

“Yes, you. He said to tell you not to fuck up his stuff, or something like that.”

“Was it that, or was it something else?”

“It was that. Not to fuck up whatever it is you’re keeping for him.”

Bebé could have said that to Roman himself. He didn’t need Jodi to deliver the same message he’d already made clear. There was more. A dangerous more causing Jodi to meet visitors at the door with a gun.

“What else?”

She dropped her gaze to her lap, twisted her fingers together there, fingers with nails that were broken, their polish chipped away, her cuticles bitten. “Jodi? What did you do to your knees?”

After she blew out a long breath and swallowed, she told him. “When he drove off, I somehow thought to get his license plate. I was chanting the numbers, digging for something to write with when I realized they were my plates.”

What the fuck?
“Your plates?”

She nodded. “When I got back to the gallery, it took me half an hour to go out and check my car. That’s just not me,” she said, gesturing with one hand, then giving up, as if there was no way to explain.

She went on. “I don’t get scared. Not the way I was scared then. I tried to convince myself I’d remembered the numbers wrong, transposed a digit or something. I had to be making a mountain out of a molehill. I’d get outside and realize I was wrong.”

“But you weren’t.”

“No. I wasn’t. I couldn’t believe it. There was my car, sans plates.” She stopped, reached up and ran her hands through her tangled mane of hair, shook her head. “I had to get out of there, but after my row with Dustin, I needed a reason he would know wasn’t a lie. The only thing that came to mind was the doctor.”

Christ Almighty.
He’d gotten her into this. No one else. Him, Roman Greyle. “You scraped up your knees on purpose.”

Slowly, she straightened her legs, studied her handiwork. “They were already carpet burned, so I figured, what the hell? I banged them up on the pavement outside, then cleaned them up and said they weren’t bothering me so much, but my back was a mess. Dustin took one look and sent me home.”

And then she’d called and called and called. Told him she had to talk to him, that it was urgent, begged him to call her back. He hadn’t. He’d left her to face this alone.

“How did he know I’d be walking to Starbucks?” she asked.

“What?”

“The guy who took my plates. How did he know to take mine?”

“He was watching for you to leave. Hoping to catch you going out for lunch or whatever. And he took yours to do just what he did. Scare you into holing up and staying home.” And, as he said it, Roman knew he was missing something.

Taking her plates and having her deliver a message were child’s play. Neither one would get his target, get Roman, to react. “That’s still not everything, is it? He didn’t just want you to tell me not to fuck up.”

Her gaze came up sharply, her eyes slicing into his like twin switchblades, swift, unexpected. Deadly. “He said if you did fuck up, he’d deliver me to you packaged the same way.”

Silence. Dead silence. Paralyzed. Still. For a long moment, Roman couldn’t move; could only think of the shrink-wrapped bricks of heroin in the storeroom at Splash & Flambé; could only think of Jodi, in pieces, packaged the same way.

All of that took time to settle in, and then he wished it hadn’t. He launched to his feet, sending his chair hurtling across the floor to slam the wall, punching into the Sheetrock.

Jodi glanced around him at the damage, then slowly returned her gaze to his. “Are you going to tell me what that means? Or is it best if I don’t know?”

“I have to go,” he said and bolted for the door.

“That’s it?” She got up to follow, chasing him, yelping as her knees sent her stumbling. “You’re leaving me?”

Not just leaving. Leaving
me.
He turned, doing his best to hide the fury eating him alive, and cupped her face in his hands, making sure he had her attention. “Do not answer this door for anyone but me. Do not answer your phone, either line. Not even if my number shows on your caller ID.”

“Roman—”

He shook his head, cut her off, still hearing her saying his name. Christ, it sounded so good. So good. “Me or the cops. That’s it. I’ll be back tonight. Nothing’s going to happen between now and then.”