Vengeance (13 page)

“Mmm, yeah,” he moaned, thrusting himself down her throat.

From the corner of her eye, Kitty saw Norman look back and forth between Gino and the door.
Come on, Norman. Take the bait.

“This is what men do, Norm,” Gino said.

Successfully browbeaten, Norman slipped off his trench coat and sharp suit tailored to make his massive figure seem distinguished until he stood naked and wild-eyed, desperate. He approached Kitty from behind, and she had the surreal sensation that she was about to be mauled by a bear. Her lips still around Gino's cock, Norman hitched up her hips and entered her. He pumped, more determined than enthusiastic.

Gino pulled away from Kitty and moved to Norman's rear, then slid himself into Norman. Norman grunted, and she felt him enlarge in her with each thrust from Gino until his bear-sized cock filled her up nicely. His thick fingers dug into her hips as the three of them moved together in one continuous piece of hot, sweaty flesh.

This
was
fun. Max should run from the law more often. Kitty chanced a glance at her coat and winked for the camera hidden inside it. She could only hope Mayor Brest turned out to be this good of a time, too, when she paid him a visit.

V
al bit her lip as she stared down at her white knight, a cheap piece of horse-shaped plastic half the size of her thumb. She surveyed the tiny chessboard where it sat in the middle of the bed, sandwiched between her and Max.

“So I could move the knight here, or here, right?” she asked Max, pointing at different squares on the board. She'd only played chess a handful of times in her life, but their limited options for entertainment forced her to revisit the game.

“Yes.” He drummed his fingers against his cheek, his head propped on one arm while he sat cross-legged, eyes half open.

“But I could move the queen here, too?”

“You could.”

“Or the bishop here?”

He sighed. “Yes.”

Val could tell he worked hard not to roll his eyes. He'd sworn he wasn't a chess fan, either, but of course he knew all the rules and could even rattle off popular strategies involving openings and gambits. It seemed his mental faculties had returned in full despite his beat-down, though he still couldn't remember chunks of the day shortly before and after the attack, nor could he recall the damn name of the accountant who was somehow involved.

She hesitated for a few more seconds, then lifted the knight and moved it to a new square. “There!” She beamed at her cleverness.

For a moment Max chewed on his thumb, something she'd learned he did a lot when he was thinking hard. She almost grabbed his thumb to stop his fidgeting, but instead laced her own fingers together. If she took his hand, she wasn't sure she would let go. The last thing she needed was another spontaneous roll in the hay she'd probably regret the moment her vision cleared.

It'd been hard not to give in to desire when they spent every waking moment together, as well as slept in the same bed at night. Each day it got harder. But she had to resist. She couldn't get distracted from her goal—find Robby's killer and bring that person to justice. Whatever she felt for Max had to wait.

After a few seconds of intense concentration, he relaxed, slid off the bed, and sat down at the pockmarked table covered with their food supply—mostly bags of chips and beef jerky. He grabbed a bottle of water and aspirin and threw some pills in his mouth. The old chair groaned when he leaned back and sipped water as he stared out the window through a break in the curtains.

“What are you doing?” Val asked. “It's your turn.”

He shrugged. “I'll win in seven moves.”

“Seriously?” Val shook her head. “This is why I wanted to play Go Fish.”

“I
would
play Go Fish if you didn't cheat all the time.”

“It's called strategic thinking.” She dumped the pieces back into the Cracker-Jack-size box they'd come in and folded the chessboard in half. She'd need to look up a way to cheat at chess next time she got a chance.

Watching him gaze out the window—slouching in oversized jeans and a gray T-shirt, a ray of early afternoon sun playing through his shiny black hair—he reminded her of an indoor cat that mewled each time a car drove by. For six days they'd been holed up in the hotel room, waiting for Stacey to call Val with a meet-up time for Dean. Max got a little bit better each day, until the swelling in his face was gone and only the bruises remained, black rings around his eyes and jawbone and streaks across his chest. He was almost recognizable, which could be a problem for them when they finally got the go from Stacey. No media outlet had mentioned that Max was injured, so no one would be looking for a black-and-blue version of the Carressa heir. Seemed Sten left out of his police report the part where he almost beat Max to death.

Val stretched out on the bed and clicked on the TV. She watched a local news anchor prattle on about the five-day weather forecast through a permanent line of static that cut across the ancient screen.

She glanced at Max. “Your favorite movie about weather…
Go
.”

“
The Core.”

“Isn't that about astronauts who tunnel through the earth's crust to restart the core spinning?”

“Yeah, but space weather is critical to the plot.”

“Goddammit, Max, can you
not
be a total nerd for even five seconds?”

He chuckled, then winced and touched his cheek.

“Tooth hurt again?”

“Yeah. I think it's cracked.” His cheek bulged where he felt it with his tongue. “I hope they have decent dentists in prison.”

Val sat up. “Don't you dare start with that again,” she said in a voice sharp enough to kill their light conversation. She didn't know where his fatalist attitude came from, but he had no motivation to fight for his life as it had been before. When he wasn't talking about giving himself up to the murderous police, he badgered her to run away with him to Mexico or Fiji. Maybe he didn't want his old life back, but she did. “If I have to hear you whine one more time about how you should turn yourself in, then I just might let you do it. Your ‘woe-is-me' rich boy act was old from day one. I'm sorry a life with infinite money was so tragically hard for you, but do you really want to be raped in prison? Because look at you—that's what would happen.”

Max glared at her, and for a moment she thought her tirade had crossed a line. Then his gorgeous hazel eyes warmed and he gave her a half smile. “You're a hard woman.”

She couldn't tell if he was being sincere. Max excelled at masking his feelings—until they exploded to the surface.

She crossed her arms and looked away. “I know. I'm sorry.”

“You don't have many rich friends, do you?”

“I don't have
any
rich friends. Except you now, I guess.”

Were they friends? They hadn't done anything romantic together, but he felt like something…more. She was grateful he hadn't brought up using their abilities to track down Dean themselves. Despite her concern for his injuries and her love for Robby, she wasn't confident she could say no again.

“Almost all my friends are rich, by necessity. We run in the same circles. When all your friends are wealthy, you don't have to worry if someone is only with you because of your money.”

“So, say, in an alternate universe, if you had held some glitzy charity gala for war orphans and invited Robby and me, and we'd have met there and hit it off, you'd never ask me to hang with you, even as just a friend?”

“Probably not, if I only knew you casually. It wouldn't be anything personal.”

“Well, now you know what you would've been missing—constant insults and bad chess games.”

“Yep, now I know.”

Their eyes locked for what seemed like an eternity as the television droned in the background. God, she wanted to kiss him so badly. Even with his current injuries and ill-fitting clothes, he was still the handsomest man she'd ever met, as well as the smartest. The fact that she'd never have known him if she hadn't barged into his weird sex club one night seemed like a narrowly avoided tragedy.

Not for Robby.

Val looked away from Max, her cheeks flushed. The urges to jump into his arms and run away from him both seized her at the same time.

“Do you think your girlfriend's worried about you?” Val asked, her tone a hair too forced to sound natural.

“Kitty's still not my girlfriend. She never was. I haven't had a girlfriend in a long time…a really long time.”

“Does she know what you can do?”

“Yeah. I've told her anyway. I'm not sure she believes me. She might just think I'm crazy, like almost everyone else I've told.”

Val understood firsthand. She could count the number of people she'd told about her ability on one hand. Even fewer had believed her. “So you look into the future with her—for business?”

“Sometimes with Kitty. But”—he looked down at his feet—“mostly with just myself. No love life necessary. I don't need deep visions to get useful financial information. I always see the major stock exchanges, represented by certain strings of numbers. Then, based on the numbers clustered around those numbers, I can tell if they're going to be up or down, and by how much. It's pretty easy, actually. I don't even have to concentrate anymore.”

“I wish mine were more useful. I usually see a bunch of junk, and dead people. Robby helped, though.”

She played with a strand of her dull black hair. An ad for a nonpartisan science outreach event taking place at the Pacific Science Center tomorrow played through the silence that fell between them. Smiling children held up lab beakers while cartoon donkeys and elephants frolicked together against the backdrop of the Center's white arches. A political ad for Mayor Brest followed the spot. With the election less than two weeks away, every commercial break featured at least three of the damn things.

Max drank from his water bottle, making loud gulps as if his throat had gone dry. “When was your wedding date scheduled?” he asked, wiping his mouth.

She frowned and pulled her knees to her chest. “We didn't have one.”

“How long were you engaged for?”

“About a year.”

“That's a long engagement with no date.”

“The timing was never right.”
For me.
“I don't think I'm the marrying type,” she mumbled.

I didn't really want to marry him.
The thought hit her like a stake to the heart. She loved Robby, she had no doubt about that.

But he wasn't the one.

So who
was
the one, then? Some guy she'd known for two weeks who had more skeletons in his closet than a Halloween party store? She willed herself not to look at Max, still slouching in his chair next to the window, picking the label off the water bottle, oblivious to his central role in the struggle she waged with herself. They'd spent too much time alone together. It clouded her judgment, made her feel something that wasn't there.

Val scowled when Barrister's face floated onto the TV. She stayed her hand from throwing something at the screen. She still didn't know how the bastard was connected to Lester. Max continued to claim he had no idea when she quizzed him on it, and he refused to entertain the possibility that Norman might have had an affair with his mother. Just talking about Lydia made him shut down, as if it caused him physical pain to unearth those memories. So she avoided the topic for his sake, though the question still gnawed at her.

Old hometown photos of Norman faded in and out of the television: a plump-cheeked boy in front of his childhood home, a smooth-faced kid in his junior Army ROTC uniform, a lanky teenager in short-shorts posing with his basketball team in the high school gym.
Norman Barrister: Hometown Hero. Change you can believe in!

“Seattle Lutheran High School,” Val muttered as a voice in the back of her head screamed something important but indistinct. “Robby went to Seattle Lutheran, too…”

And then she understood the voice.

…
just like his father!

Val sprang to her feet. “Dean and Norman went to the same high school!” she yelled into Max's stunned face. “That's how they know each other. They were schoolmates!”

“Um, okay. What does that mean in the grand scheme of things?”

“It means Dean has to be involved somehow. There's no way it's a coincidence they went to the same school.”

“Actually, there's a very good chance it could be—”

“We are two people who can honest-to-God
see the fucking future
. What are the chances that
anything
in our lives is a coincidence?”

Max raised an eyebrow. “So he killed his own son to keep him quiet?”

“Probably not. It must've been an unintended consequence. Or maybe Norman double-crossed him, and now he can't go to the police because he's in too deep. Or…or I don't know. But he's a goddamn liar. And he probably sicced the police on you because we were getting too close to the truth.”

“You sound paranoid.”

“Hell yes I'm paranoid! Haven't you been paying attention to all the insane shit that's happened to us? Your brain can't be
that
damaged.” She paced around the hotel room for a minute while Max watched her with cool eyes, though he said nothing. Val grabbed the burner phone off the nightstand. “
Come on
, Stacey.”

She nearly dropped the phone when it rang in her hand.

“Norman and Dean were high school classmates!” Val said to Stacey when she answered the phone.

“Okay,” Stacey said. “So what?”

“So Dean is definitely hiding something. And what the hell took you so long to call me back?”

“You told me you needed time for your slam piece to heal.”

Val glanced at Max and rolled her eyes. “Well?”

“I finally got in touch with Dean. It wasn't easy because he's been skipping work and disappearing for days at a time. I had to call Robby's sister to get a line on him. Josephine is worried about her dad, says he's not handling Robby's death well, that he's unraveling. Jo gave me Dean's phone number. When I talked to him, I told him that I wanted to meet to talk about setting up a scholarship for poor law students in Robby's name. He took the bait. Though he wants to meet at Robby's gravesite, for some reason. Today at six o'clock.”

“Okay, we can do that. We can make it.” Val started snatching clothes off the ground and throwing them into a pile. She nodded to Max; he stood and started to clean for their imminent departure.

“Val, you gotta be careful,” Stacey said. “Dean didn't sound well. He might give you up to the police, or do something crazy. And your faces are still all over the news. Someone could easily spot you when you come back to the city.”

“We'll take precautions.”

Stacey whispered, “And you don't know the truth about Max. He could have killed his father. He could turn on you.”