Sacred (22 page)

“Protection?”

She sighed. “I don’t know. Do you trust her?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because I don’t trust anyone except you.”

“Hey, that’s my line.”

“Yeah.” I smiled. “Sorry.”

She waved her hand at me. “Go ahead. Take it. What’s mine is yours.”

“Really?”

“Yeah,” she said and turned her face up toward mine. “Really,” she said softly.

“Feeling’s mutual,” I said.

Her hand disappeared in the steam for a moment, and then I felt it on my neck.

“How’s your shoulder?” she said.

“Tender. My hip, too.”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” she said. And then she bent to one knee and tugged up my shirt. When she kissed the skin around the bandage over my hip, her tongue felt electric.

I bent and wrapped my good arm around her waist. I lifted her off the floor, sat her on the sink, and kissed her as her legs curled around the back of mine and her sandals dropped to the floor. For at least five minutes, we barely came up for air. These last few months, I hadn’t just been hungry for her tongue, her lips, her taste—I’d been weak and light-headed from wanting.

“No matter how tired we are,” she said as my tongue found her neck, “we don’t stop this time until we both pass out.”

“Agreed,” I murmured.

Somewhere around four in the morning, we finally did pass out.

She fell asleep curled on my chest as my own eyelids fluttered. And I found myself wondering, just before I lost consciousness, how I could have thought—even for a second—that Desiree was the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen.

I looked down at Angie sleeping naked on my chest, at the scratches and swollen flesh on her face, and I knew that only now, at this exact moment and for the first time in my life, did I understand anything about beauty.

“Hi.”

I opened one eye and looked into the face of Desiree Stone.

“Hi,” she said again, her voice a whisper.

“Hi,” I said.

“You want coffee?” she said.

“Sure.”

“Sssh.” She put a finger to her lips.

I turned, saw Angie sleeping deeply beside me.

“It’s in the next room,” Desiree said and left.

I sat up in bed and took my watch off the dresser. Ten in the morning. I’d had six hours’ sleep, but it felt like about six minutes. The last time I’d slept before last night had been at least forty hours previous. But I guess I couldn’t sleep through the day.

Angie seemed to be giving it a good bid, though.

She was curled into the tight fetal ball I’d become accustomed to during her months on my living room floor. The sheet had risen up to her waist, and I reached over and pulled it back over her legs, tucked it in at the corner of the mattress.

She didn’t stir or so much as groan when I got off the bed. I put on jeans and a long-sleeved T-shirt as quietly as possible and headed toward the door
adjoining the suites, then stopped. I came back around to her side of the bed and knelt by her, touched her warm face with the palm of my hand, and kissed her lips lightly, breathed in her smell.

In the last thirty-two hours, I’d been shot at, been thrown from a speeding vehicle, had cracked my shoulder blade, had taken innumerable shards of glass into my flesh, had shot a man dead, had lost about a pint of blood, and had been subjected to twelve hours of hostile questioning in a sweltering cinder block box. Somehow, though, with Angie’s face warming my palm, I’d never felt better.

I found my sling on the floor by the bathroom, slipped my dead arm into it, and went next door.

The heavy dark curtains were drawn against the sun and only a small light on the nightstand provided any illumination. Desiree sat in an armchair by the nightstand, sipping coffee, and appeared to be naked.

“Miss Stone?”

“Come in. Call me Desiree.”

I squinted into the near darkness as she stood up, and that’s when I saw that she wore a French-cut bikini the color of roasted honeycomb, about a shade lighter than her flesh. Her hair was slicked back off her head as she came to me and placed a cup of coffee in my hand.

“I don’t know how you like it,” she said. “There’s cream and sugar on the counter.”

I flicked on another light, went to the kitchenette counter, found the cream and sugar beside the coffee maker.

“Went for a swim?” I came back over by her.

“Just to clear my head. It’s better than coffee really.”

It might have cleared her head, but it was making mine awful fuzzy.

She sat back in the chair, which, I noticed now, was protected from the dampness of her skin and bikini by the bathrobe she’d removed at some point while sitting in it.

She said, “Should I put this back on?”

“Whatever makes you most comfortable.” I sat on the side of the bed. “So, what’s up?”

“Hmm?” She glanced at her robe, but didn’t put it back on. She bent her knees, placed the soles of her feet on the edge of the bed.

“What’s up? You woke me for a reason, I assume.”

“I’m leaving in two hours.”

“For where?” I said.

“Boston.”

“I don’t think that makes a whole lot of sense.”

“I know.” She wiped at some perspiration on her upper lip. “But tomorrow night my father will be out of the house, and I have to get in there.”

“Why?”

She leaned forward, her breasts pressing against her knees. “I have things in that house.”

“Things worth dying over?” I sipped my coffee, if only so the inside of the cup would give me something to look at.

“Things my mother gave me. Sentimental things.”

“And when he dies,” I said, “I’m sure they’ll still be there. Get them then.”

She shook her head. “By the time he dies, what I’m going to get might not be there anymore. One quick trip into the house on a night I know he’ll be away, and I’m free.”

“How do you know he’ll be away?”

“Tomorrow is the night of the annual stockholders’ meeting of his biggest company, Consolidated Petro
leum. They hold it every year at the Harvard Club Room at One Federal. Same date, same time, rain or shine.”

“Why would he go? He’s not going to be able to make it next year.”

She leaned back, placed her coffee cup on the nightstand. “You don’t understand my father yet, do you?”

“No, Miss Stone, I guess I don’t.”

She nodded, used an index finger to absently wipe at a bead of water sliding down her left calf. “My father doesn’t honestly think he’s going to die. And if he does, he’s going to use every resource he has left to buy himself immortality. He’s the chief stockholder in over twenty corporations. The hard copy of his diversified portfolio for his United States interests alone is thicker than the phone book for Mexico City.”

“That’s some serious thick,” I said.

Something flashed through her jade eyes for a moment, something incensed. Then it was gone.

“Yes,” she said with a soft smile. “It is. His final months will be spent making sure each and every corporation allocates funds for something in his name—a library, a research lab, a public park, what have you.”

“And if he dies, how’s he going to make sure all this immortality-making gets done?”

“Danny,” she said.

“Danny?” I said.

Her lips parted slightly and she reached for her coffee cup. “Daniel Griffin, my father’s personal attorney.”

“Ah,” I said. “Even I’ve heard of him.”

“About the only attorney more powerful than your own, Patrick.”

It was the first time I’d heard my name pass from her lips. It had a disconcertingly sweet effect, like a warm hand pressed to my heart.

“How do you know who my attorney is?”

“Jay talked about you once.”

“Really?”

“For almost an hour one night. He looked on you like you were a little brother he’d never had. He said you were the only person in the world he truly trusted. He said if anything ever happened to him, I was to come to you.”

I had a flash of Jay sitting across from me at Ambrosia on Huntington, the last time we’d seen each other socially, and he was laughing, a heavy Scotch glass half filled with gin held up in his manicured hand, his perfectly coiffed hair darkening one side of the glass, exuding the confidence of a man who couldn’t remember the last time he’d second-guessed himself. Then I had another flash of him being carried from Tampa Bay, his skin puffy and bleached white, his eyes closed, looking no older than fourteen.

“I loved Jay,” I said, and the moment the words left my mouth, I didn’t know why I’d said them. Maybe it was true. Or maybe, I was trying to see what Desiree’s reaction would be.

“So did I,” she said and closed her eyes. When she opened them, they were wet. “And he loved you. He said you were worthy of trust. That all sorts of people, from every walk of life, trusted you completely. That’s when he told me Cheswick Hartman worked pro bono for you.”

“So what do you want from me, Miss Stone?”

“Desiree,” she said. “Please.”

“Desiree,” I said.

“I want you to, I guess, watch my back tomorrow night. Julian should be with my father when he goes to One Federal, but just in case anything goes wrong.”

“You know how to bypass the alarm system?”

“Unless he’s changed it, and I doubt that. He’s not expecting me to try something this suicidal.”

“And these…heirlooms,” I said for lack of a better word, “they’re worth the risk?”

She leaned forward again, grasped her ankles in her hands. “My mother wrote a memoir shortly before she died. A memoir of her girlhood in Guatemala, stories about her mother and father, her brothers and sisters, a whole part of my family I never met and never heard about. The memoir ends the day my father came to town. There’s nothing in it of any great importance, but she gave it to me not long before she died. I hid it, and it’s become unbearable to think of it still lying in that house, waiting to be found. And if my father finds it, he’ll destroy it. And then the last piece of my mother that I have left will die, too.” She met my eyes. “Will you help me, Patrick?”

I thought of the mother. Inez. Bought at fourteen by a man who thought anything was for sale. And unfortunately, he was usually proven right. What kind of life had she had in that big house with that crazed megalomaniac?

One in which, I guess, her only refuge was in taking pen to paper and writing about the life she’d led before that man had come and taken her away. And who to share her most precious inner world with? Her daughter, of course, as trapped and soiled by Trevor as she was.

“Please,” Desiree said. “Will you help me?”

“Sure,” I said.

She reached across and took my hand. “Thank you.”

“Don’t mention it.”

Her thumb ran up the inside of my palm. “No,” she said. “Really. I mean it.”

“I do, too,” I said. “Don’t mention it. Really.”

“Are you and Miss Gennaro…?” she said. “I mean, have you been…for very long?”

I let the question hang in the ten inches of space between us.

Her hand dropped away from mine, and she smiled. “All the good ones are taken,” she said. “Of course.”

She leaned back in her chair and I held her gaze and she didn’t look away. For a full minute, we looked at each other in silence, and then her left eyebrow arched ever so slightly.

“Or are they?” she said.

“They are,” I said. “In fact, one of the last good ones, Desiree—”

“Yes?”

“Dropped off a bridge the other night.”

I stood up.

She crossed her legs at the ankles.

“Thanks for the coffee. How’re you getting to the airport?”

“I still have a car Jay rented for me. It’s due back at the downtown Budget tonight.”

“You want me to drive you and drop it off?”

“If you don’t mind,” she said, her eyes on her coffee cup.

“Get dressed. I’ll be back in a few minutes.”

Angie was still sleeping so deeply I knew the only alarm clock that could wake her would be a hand grenade. I left her a note, and Desiree and I went out to her rented Grand Am and she drove toward the airport.

It was another hot, sunny day. Same as every other one I’d seen since arriving. At around three, I’d learned from experience, it would rain for half an hour, and
things would cool for a bit, then the humidity would steam off the earth to follow the rain, and it would be brutal until sundown.

“About what happened back in the room,” Desiree said.

“Forget it,” I said.

“No. I loved Jay. I did. And I barely know you.”

“Right,” I said.

“But, maybe, I dunno…Are you aware of the pathology of many incest and sex abuse victims, Patrick?”

“Yeah, Desiree, I am. Which is why I said to forget it.”

We pulled onto the airport roadway and followed the red signs for the Delta terminal.

“Where’d you get your plane ticket?” I said.

“Jay. He bought two.”

“Jay was going along with this?”

She nodded. “He bought two,” she repeated.

“I heard you the first time, Desiree.”

She turned her head. “You could be back here in two days. Meanwhile, Miss Gennaro could get some sun, see the sights, relax.”

She pulled up at the Delta gate.

“Where do you want to meet us in Boston?” I said.

She stared out the window for a moment, her hands on the wheel, fingers tapping lightly, her breathing shallow. Then she rummaged through her purse, distracted, and reached in the back for a mid-sized black leather gym bag. She wore a baseball cap over her hair, turned backward, a pair of khaki shorts, and a man’s denim shirt, sleeves rolled up to her elbows. Nothing special, and she’d still put cricks in the necks of most men she passed on the way to her plane. As I sat there, the car seemed to shrink around us.

“Ahm, what did you ask me?” she said.

“Where and when tomorrow?”

“When are you arriving?”

“Probably tomorrow afternoon,” I said.

“Why don’t we meet in front of Jay’s condo building?” She got out of the car.

I climbed out, too, as she took another small bag from the trunk and closed it, gave me the keys.

“Jay’s building?”

“That’s where I’ll be lying low. He gave me a key, the password, the alarm code.”

“Okay,” I said. “What time?”

“Six.”

“Six it is.”

“Great. It’s a date.” She turned toward the doors. “Oh, I almost forgot, we have another date.”

“We do?”

She smiled, hoisted her bag onto her shoulder. “Yeah. Jay made me promise. April first.
Fail-Safe.
”

“Fail-Safe,”
I said as the temperature of my body dropped twenty degrees in the sweltering heat.

She nodded, her eyes crinkling against the sun. “He said if anything happened to him, I was supposed to keep you company this year. Hot dogs and Budweiser and Henry Fonda. Isn’t that the tradition?”

“That’s the tradition,” I said.

“Well, then it’s set. A done deal.”

“If Jay said so,” I said.

“He made me promise.” She smiled and gave me a little wave as the electronic doors opened behind her. “So it’s a date?”

“It’s a date,” I said, giving her my own little wave in return, beaming my best smile.

“See you tomorrow.” She walked into the airport,
and I watched through the glass as her ass swayed gently as she passed through a crowd of frat boys, and then turned down a corridor and disappeared.

The frat boys were still watching the space she’d occupied for all of three seconds as if it were blessed by God, and I was doing the same.

Get a good look, guys, I thought. That’s as close to flawless as some of you will ever encounter. Never, probably, was there a creature created who could match her spirit of relentless near-perfection.

Desiree. Even her name stirred the heart.

I stood by the car, smiling from ear to ear, probably looking like a complete idiot, when a baggage porter stopped in front of me and said, “You okay, man?”

“Fine,” I said.

“You lose something?”