The Innocent: A Vanessa Michael Munroe Novel (7 page)

“I spotted you at the airport,” she said, and he chuffed.

In the full light of the moon she noted the way the months had left their mark. There were a few more wrinkles around his eyes and a three-inch sliver that traced from the base of his left ear across his jaw. She touched his face, ever so slightly, to tilt it away for a better view.

“I took a hit of shrapnel,” he said. “I’m one scar closer to catching
up with you.” There was a longer silence and finally Bradford said, “Why didn’t you say something and save me the hassle of playing surveillant?”

“And ruin the illusion of Logan’s little”—Munroe paused and finger quoted the air—“intervention?”

“He’s concerned—says you’re medicating.”

“Yeah, I am. But not for the reasons he thinks.”

“Should I be worried?” he said.

She shifted forward, elbows to knees, face to the darkness. “Maybe.” And then in the silence she struggled to find words that would adequately explain the veritable nightmare the land of dreams had become.

“Does it have anything to do with Africa?” he asked.

She glanced back toward him. “Who knows,” she said. “I’m sure it didn’t help.” She turned again to face the darkness and, with half-shut eyes, said, “I’ve made my peace, Miles. I can’t rewrite the past no matter how much I wish I could, and nothing I could have done would have changed anything.”

She was quiet for a long while, and if Bradford wished to hurry her, he gave no indication of it.

“It started about a month and a half ago,” she said. “Began as the occasional really bad dream and progressed into full-fledged violence. While I’m asleep, I have no awareness of what’s going on, I only see the destruction after I’ve woken.” She paused, turned toward him again. “It’s bad enough to have a death on my hands when I’m awake,” she said, “but now it can happen in my sleep. I don’t trust myself, I have no way to control it, and so I knock myself out.” She shifted back to staring at the dark. “I can only go so many days without sleep before I start to break down,” she said. “Damned if I do, damned if I don’t.”

“Have you seen a doctor? At least gotten a proper prescription?”

She cut a glance in his direction. “We’ve already had
that
conversation.”

It had been at their first meeting, a discussion about the value of psychiatric evaluations after Munroe had learned that Bradford was
the one responsible for pulling together the research on her past on behalf of her employer.

She let the weight of her words settle and said, “Has Logan told you about the favor he’s asked—his reason for bringing me here?”

“He hasn’t. I’d assumed he got you here for your own sake.”

“He wants me to make a trip to South America,” she said, “to infiltrate some bad guys and steal his childhood friend’s daughter back home.”

Bradford said nothing and Munroe remained silent, allowing him to piece together the extent of Logan’s altruism. Bradford let out an audible sigh and with a protective edge said, “Where in South America? Is this thing drug cartel related?”

“Argentina,” she said. “Not drug related, religion related. It’s kidnapping, it’s complicated, and probably the right thing to do. Truth is, even though the reasons behind it are sound, it’s a crapshoot, and if anyone but Logan had asked, I’d have already said no.”

“If you knew this,” he said, “why did you come to New York?”

“I have my reasons.”

“Noah?”

She nodded, although truthfully Noah was only part of it.

“Will you be going back to Morocco?” Bradford asked.

“I don’t know,” she said.

He was quiet, and Munroe knew that as much as he wanted to pry, he wouldn’t. In time, perhaps, there would be reason to bare her soul, expose the pain, to put into words what Bradford already instinctively knew. But not now.

After a pause, Bradford said, “Besides the lack of sleep and the drugs, how are you really?”

She shrugged. “Messed in the head as ever—you saw what happened last night.”

“Some of it,” he said. “I lost you around a corner, and by the time I caught up with you there was one dead guy at your feet and another limping away.”

“It happened fast,” she said. “Sadistic fucks.”

“Defending yourself isn’t messed in the head,” he said.

She turned to him. “Isn’t it? No one makes me walk the streets at two in the morning. I don’t have to lurk in the dark alleys, or the lonely trails, just waiting for trouble to invite me to play.” She looked out toward the path they’d taken to the bench. “What’s the difference,” she said, “between seeking out a victim and playing the victim, knowing that predators will seek me out?”

“There’s a huge difference.”

She opened her mouth to say something and then stopped. This was another topic for another time. “How long are you in town?” she said.

“That depends,” he said. “How long are you in town?”

She let out an involuntary laugh. “You can’t be serious. Is Logan paying you?”

“Don’t be an ass, Michael. No, Logan’s not paying me.”

“What then?”

A pained look crossed his face. “You have to ask?”

She exhaled audibly, slowly, stretched back and stared up at the sky. “I apologize,” she said. “I know what being here for me costs you.” She turned toward him and then back to the night. “I truly appreciate it—more than you might ever know—I just don’t think it’ll do much good.”

“Maybe, maybe not,” he said. And then after another pause, “You know I respect you, right?”

She nodded.

“Good,” he said. “Because I think you’re insane to carry those knives while you’re impaired. You intend to medicate consciously and you’re trying to master the usage, but it’s like driving drunk, you think you’re in control and you’re not. Michael, you’re dangerous enough clean and weaponless.”

“I’m not off on some loony drug-induced binge,” she said.

“I understand that,” he said, “but we both know you don’t carry
those knives for self-defense—you don’t need them. Kill someone with your hands and you might have a plausible reason to escape jail for the rest of your life. With a knife, you’re screwed, and you know it. Why take the risk?”

Risk
. A word bandied about so easily by people who had no clue as to what risk really meant. From anyone else those words would have been trite and easy to brush aside, but this was the man who had saved her life, a man who knew the truest meaning of what it was to risk everything.

After another space of silence, she pulled three knives from their hidden places. Without ceremony, she placed them on his lap.

He reached for the blades and held them in his hands. “Would you also let me take the drugs away?” he said.

“If you can take the nightmares with them.”

He didn’t reply, and she let him have the silence. In time, perhaps he’d understand. She tilted her head back and looked east, where the sky had turned purple. She stood.

“I need to get back to the hotel,” she said. “Walk with me? You can stay in the suite if you like—it’ll be more comfortable than holding vigil on the street.”

“Don’t you have a full house?” he asked.

“It’s a big place,” she said, “but either way you’d stay with me.”

His brow furrowed, and, understanding the source of his confusion, Munroe hooked her arm in his and led him forward. “I’m trying, Miles,” she said, “really trying. If you want to help and I’m willing to allow it, then let’s do it right. Stay with me.”

The sun had fully risen by the time they returned to the hotel, and when Munroe opened the door Logan was striding toward it. His face held a mixture of anguish and relief, as if he’d been pacing until her return and expected that it would never come. Then he saw Miles.

Logan blanched and stopped short. Shock replaced everything else.

Miles nodded and Logan continued frozen for a half-second before turning speechless toward the television, then to Munroe, back to the TV, and to Munroe again.

Tiring of his indecision, Munroe said, “What is it, Logan?”

In a disjointed movement he motioned toward the television, which, now muted, flashed pictures of the local news. “An NYPD officer was murdered night before last,” he said. “This morning someone pulled the body out of a Dumpster.”

He stared at Munroe’s hands and arms, long since washed clean, and whispered, “Was that your doing?”

Mental dissonance filled her head. She couldn’t reconcile what Logan said with what she’d experienced.
Police officer
. Wordless, she turned her back to him and, with the world moving in slow motion, joined Miles in front of the TV.

The sound was still off and a breaking news banner streamed beneath a looped clip. She watched in silence, and after a moment Logan asked again, this time his question an accusing hiss. Munroe shifted away from the flat screen to face him and then, without a word, leaving him bewildered and panicked, turned and strode to her bedroom and closed the door.

She stood by the window, morning light reflecting onto her hands, and she gazed at the invisible macula of death that marked them. There was a quiet knock and the door opened. Bradford stuck his head inside the room and then, without waiting for a response, entered fully. He closed the door and walked over to her, staring out over the city.

“Did you leave evidence behind?” he asked.

She turned her eyes slowly to him and said, “Not that I know of.”

Bradford reached forward, touched his thumb to her chin, and said, “Maybe taking this assignment would be a good thing.”

She leaned her head into his hand. “If those men really were police, there’s sure to be fallout, and I won’t run from my mistakes.”

“That would only be a side bonus,” he said. “God knows you’ve needed a break, and I’m sure you’ve kept busy, but have you considered that the extended downtime might be part of your problem?”

She turned again toward the window, to the ants and toys that crawled along the city streets. There was no doubt that she needed to work; it had been almost eight months since Mongomo, and the internal pressure was steadily building—a violent tension that could only be eased by the pure focus of an assignment. But this thing that Logan offered? This was a form of madness.

“Death follows me,” she said. “I can get the girl out, but I can’t guarantee that others won’t die, and one way or another, those people are all connected to Logan.” She turned again toward the window and the city streets. “Logan is blinded by desire and need, so much so that he’s ignoring the possibilities, ignoring the potential for”—she found Bradford’s eyes—“the potential for savagery.

“There’s something he’s not telling me,” she said. “He wants this far too badly for it to be as simple as what he’s explained.”

“But still, you go.”

She nodded. “I’m bracing for it and the many repercussions.”

Muted sounds of laughter filtered in from beyond the door, and they both turned toward it. “The rest of them are awake,” she said. “It’s time to play the game.”

She pulled an ankle-length dress off a hanger in the closet and said, “Excuse me for a moment,” and then stripped down, not caring if Bradford stared or averted his eyes, knowing he would want to do the former but do the latter.

Having shed the fatigues of the night and reverted once more to harmless and demure, she paused with her hand on the door handle.

“Coming?” she said.

Seeing her manner of dress, Bradford raised an eyebrow, and she grinned in reply, then closed her eyes, a brief flash in time while she shifted from one mode to the next. When she opened her eyes, she had become the girl who would walk out the door.

The four who had stayed the night had joined Logan in the living area, and as far as Munroe could tell, the lively discussion centered
on breakfasts of times past. The television had been switched off, and although Logan interacted little, he did well at masking the undercurrents of stress that had so recently played across his face.

Munroe entered the room with Bradford beside her, and as had happened the day before, the conversation hiccupped when a stranger joined the mix; it was not so much a closing of ranks as a concern that the newcomer might misunderstand what he’d heard.

With a mischievous grin Munroe introduced Bradford. “Soldier of fortune,” she said, “mercenary for hire, and sometimes my bodyguard.”

Hands were shaken, small talk made, and Gideon said to her, “The way Logan tells it, you shouldn’t need a bodyguard.”

His words, spoken lightly, held the undercurrent of challenge, and Munroe, finding no reason to defend or explain, turned from him. She reached for the phone intending to order room service for the group, and Gideon stopped her, hand to her shoulder.

Gideon was thirty-five and bore himself with the assurance of a man who had experienced hand-to-hand combat and lived to tell about it. At six-foot-four and 240 pounds, he held a six-inch, hundred-pound advantage, and by his behavior seemed to believe that Munroe, in her late twenties, light, lean, and innocent, would be easily schooled.

Munroe froze. The room went silent. Her vision faded, the world turned gray, and her mind ran a series of rapid calculations. In that moment of suspended time, she yearned for the catharsis and soothing relief of pain, for the exhilaration of spilled blood.

Logan should have warned Gideon; he should have known.

She’d taken on larger men and feared nothing of it. To strike was instinct; second nature. She could move with devastating speed, a frightful sense of crazy that bordered on true insanity and became, not shock-and-awe, but shock-then-die; a drive to kill that had been carved into her psyche one savage knife slice after another.

Standing straight, her back still to him, her voice low and monotone, she said, “Remove your hand.”

In minute calculations that reported back like echolocation, she
placed each person in the room and readied for what was to come. Bradford had stood up from the sofa and then stopped. Logan had stayed seated. Neither would dare move for fear of triggering a violent reaction. The others had remained where they were, and Gideon’s hand was still weighted on her shoulder.

Forcing down the urge to strike, her back still to him, she said, “I don’t want to hurt you.”