Winner Take All (45 page)

Dale waited for Marcus in a bank built to resemble a Grecian tomb fronting Wilmington’s waterside. The bank manager was bug-eyed at the size of the banker’s check he had on his otherwise empty desk. Marcus could see the zeros all the way across the office as the manager’s assistant ushered him inside. He did not need to count them. He knew the amount and he knew what it meant.

“You’ve sold your house?”

Dale replied with the raspy baritone of a man whose voice was only the outermost sign of interior shredding. “How soon can Kirsten be ready to go?”

Marcus waved sharply at the banker, halting him from rising. “Dale, you have got to hear me out.”

“No, Marcus. I’m the one who’s talking here. You’re listening, you’re doing. You got that?”

“But—”

“Question one.” He paused to slide the arm of his jacket across his forehead and then sweep the crook of his elbow down over his face. “Is anything you’ve got to say going to bring my baby girl back to me
now
?”

“Maybe.”

Dale sent his fist crashing down upon the desk. The banker backed up a notch. “Maybe isn’t an option! Yes or no. Is my baby coming home because of what you have found?”

“I can’t guarantee you that. But—”

“No buts! No maybes, no tomorrows!” Dale kept his gaze leveled at the corner of the office, a grim focus as tight as the menacing crouch to his shoulders. He cocked his head at the check on the desk. The motion corded his neck muscles. “That’s everything I own, Marcus. Everything I’ve spent a lifetime putting together.”

“We’ve managed to speak with one of the burglars you caught.”

“That is ancient history.”

The fact that Dale heard him at all pushed Marcus forward. “They were after Celeste, Dale. They were paid to kidnap your child. It’s all tied in somehow. Erin’s return, Hamper Caisse, the trial, the attack on Kirsten, everything.”

Still he refused to lift his gaze. “So they won.”

“All we need is a little—”

“All
we
need? All we
need?
” Dale shook his head, a bull struggling to contain a red-flag rage. “Will you and Kirsten do this thing or not?”

“I think you’re making a terrible mistake.”

“That’s me. Dale Steadman, master of the perpetual blunder. Yes or no.”

“Yes, Dale. If you insist, I will act upon your behalf.”

The banker was so ready he could not get his hands to move fast enough, or keep the tremolo from his voice. “If you’ll just sign here for the receipt of this check, Mr. Glenwood. Thank you. May I see some identification that bears your signature? Fine. You understand that this is a banker’s check, and once you have signed this release, it is as good as cash.”

Marcus signed the triplicate forms, accepted back his driver’s license, then slipped the envelope and the check into his pocket. Five million dollars. He turned back to where Dale’s gaze bore a hole in the far corner and settled his hand upon Dale’s shoulder. Beneath the jacket was nothing save stone.

When he returned to the DA’s office, Hamper Caisse had still not arrived. Marcus placed the check in Wilma Blain’s evidence safe and went for a walk. Two blocks on and he was lost within an east Carolina realm. Pines and hardy scrubwoods formed uniform walls at either side of the road, a comforting enclosure that invited a peace and slower pace. Two blocks farther and he entered a neighborhood of time-washed houses and empty lots turned to neighborhood truck gardens. Dogs panted and watched his passage from shaded porches, reluctant to enter the heat. The sun filtered through the overhead limbs and turned the road into a shimmering silver-black river. Heat blistered the air.

He knew he should apply his mind to the pressures at hand. But the afternoon held room for little more than the sound of his footsteps and the unspoken bonding to this place and time. There was nothing that explained why even a day drenched in summer humidity could sparkle and shine, save for the fact that he belonged here. He was determined to accomplish the impossible in this contemporary world of fickle allegiances. Here he would stay, here he would breathe his last. There was only one more thing he would ask from life, or so it seemed at the time. One final wish, and he would ask nothing further. He stared into the heavens and let the sun heighten his single consuming desire to have a white-haired beauty walk this lane with him.

Which was why, when his phone rang and he heard Kirsten’s voice on the other end, the first words out of his mouth were “Marry me.”

“What?”

He stepped beneath a live oak and gripped the nearest branch with his free hand. “I’m surrounded by a billion pressures, and all I can think about is us. I love you so much it hurts to breathe. Marry me, Kirsten.”

“Marcus …” A pause, then, “Wait, wait, I have to sit down.”

Which is exactly what he did. Dressed in his business suit and sweating through his shirt and jacket both, he dropped down to the dusty curb. A dog meandered over and sniffed at him. There was some hound in the curious canine face, but no aggression. Which was good. Right then Marcus doubted he could have risen to flee a slavering Doberman.

When Kirsten spoke again, she had somehow managed to shed half her age, for it was a little girl’s voice which said, “Being away from you this time has become agony. But a wonderful pain just the same. Do you have any idea what I’m talking about?”

“Oh yes.”

“I am full of contradictions and contrary ways, Marcus. There is much about me that is very ugly. I am trapped by cages I have spent all my life constructing.”

“Does my love hold any hope of helping you? Does needing you so much …” He stopped, caught by the need to gasp. “Kirsten, I will spend a lifetime helping you be who you want to be.”

“This is one of your most remarkable traits,” she said. “Knowing which words carry the most exquisite agony.”

He waited, surrounded by golden light and a distant car’s murmur and the sound of his four-footed companion panting in nervous communion.

“All right.”

“What?”

“Yes, Marcus. I will marry you.”

The drenching relief left him unable to form a single word save “What?”

He could hear her smile. “You don’t believe me?”

“Kirsten …” His heart hammered so hard he knew his voice shook. “I never thought I’d hear you say those words.”

“I want to ask you to do something, Marcus.”

There was no reason for tears now. Or finding his vision clouding over until he could see nothing save a blur of time. “Anything.”

“I want you to ask me in person.”

“Today.”

“In Wilmington.”

“What?”

“I have to come down.”

“Why? I mean, I want you to, but we have things to do.”

“I know. That’s why I’m coming. I’m checking out now. I’ll call you back in a while from the airport and tell you what’s happening. Right now I just want to put our work to one side and sit here. Just for a minute. Do you understand?”

H
E SAT AT A CORNER TABLE
of Level Five, a bar on the fifth floor of the old Masonic temple, now an upscale office complex. Across the street was another of those fire-baked-brick buildings. He could stare over the ledge at the dresses in the shop window. The elegant plastic dolls held their hands up to him, looking so fine he wouldn’t mind making time with one. Wilmington was a new place for him. The first time he’d ever been down was to rent the boat on the deal that went so totally wrong. Back then, he’d done his drinking at the Ice House, the last of the old waterfront dives. Sephus sipped at his twelve-year-old single malt and grinned at how wrong that deal had gone. Wrong as in flying him to Germany, first time he’d ever been farther afield than the gambling cruisers where he’d worked until they caught him ripping off passengers’ rooms. So wrong they’d also sent him to New York. Now that was one fine place. He could see himself spending a few days there, getting to know the local color, having himself a time. Once this deal was done and the money was cooking in his back pocket, he’d be on his way.

“Sir?” The sweet young dolly was probably a college student, she had that look. Chestnut hair in a ponytail, not a trace of makeup, perfect teeth, shining skin. “Would you like another scotch?”

Sephus leaned both elbows on the table, moving in as close as close could be. “Tell you what, dolly. How about you letting me have a taste of something I bet’s a whole lot sweeter’n what I got in this here glass.”

She caught a good strong whiff of him. It backed her up. No
surprise there. Her eyes skimmed down the fine duds he’d picked up in the Big Apple, landing on the jailhouse art on his knuckles. Sephus grinned up at her. “You like? Here, lemme show you something.” He undid one sleeve, rolled it back far enough to show the crimson lady dancing upon the daggers, the woman with snakes for hair and eyes of blue fire. “I got pictures on places you don’t even know how to name.”

The sweet young face hardened several notches. “Don’t bet on it, buster.”

Sephus watched her spin that ponytail in an arc and stalk away. That was the problem with your basic modern woman. No interest in living up to a guy’s fantasies.

As he pulled his sleeve back down, his eye was caught by a newer, moon-shaped scar. The white imprint where she had bitten him cut directly across the crimson woman’s neck, slick as a knife. Sephus Jones buttoned the sleeve and thought how sweet it was going to be, meeting up with that particular blond-haired fantasy again.

A pair of secretaries in their evening grab-me gear started to go for the table closest to him. The nearer one caught a whiff and did the backtracking. Sephus smiled and waved them away. He’d been wearing the signature scent so long he rarely even gave it any thought. It was something he’d started on in the third of his juvenile joints. Looking for a way to stand out, basically. Make a stand in a place where they did all they could to grind the boys down to nameless sameness. He’d stolen a bottle of the stuff when mopping down the guards’ shower room. Gotten a beating for it, then a scrub-down with wire brushes and two weeks solitary when he doused himself from head to toe. But they never found the bottle. He took to hiding away at shower times, waiting until he had trouble walking around in his own stinking skin, then applying the bottle like varnish. Which gained him some serious pain from the guards. Sephus raised his sleeve, took a slow drag. Twenty-three years and seven prisons later, those early beatings were still closer than yesterday. Which was why he kept to the habit. Far as he was concerned, the odor was as close as he could come to pure rage.

“Excuse me, sir.” The bartender hovering by his table was a college football heavy, all shoulders and clear eyes and about as dangerous as a TV commercial. “I’m going to have to ask you to leave.”

Sephus swiveled his chair about. Propped one steel-toed boot on the table. Cradled his drink with both hands. Showed the guy just how
worried he was. “Let me guess. Tight end. No, no, you swinging with the dolly there, it’s got to be king of the field. Am I right?”

“The drink’s on the house, sir. Please go.”

“See, I’m interested on account of how you plan on playing once I do a number on both your knees.”

The guy started to shift back, but eyes were on him now. “I don’t want any trouble.”

“Then you’re messing with the wrong table.” Sephus pointed with his chin to where the waitress was using the corner of the bar as a shield. “Scuttle on back over there and have your dolly bring me another round.”

The man he was here to meet chose that moment to scurry over and glare down at him. “This is the way you keep to a low profile? Shame!”

Sephus inspected this fat little German sausage squeezed into twill. And those glasses. And that accent. “Man, you were made to make me grin.”

“This is no smiling matter!” Reiner Klatz spun about and poked a finger into the quarterback’s chest. “You please go now.”

“Not until this gentleman has left the premises.”

“Yes, of course. He is going with me. You leave, he leaves. So simple.”

Sephus drained his glass, rose to his feet, and faced the quarterback. Just looked at him. Showed him what was there. Sephus Jones had a way with looks. Anybody did, they wanted to come out of the places he’d been in one piece. Just showed him a trace of the secrets. Usually he’d think one tight thought, just enough to ram the rage in hard. Like how he’d managed the guards’ beatings because they weren’t so bad, not really, compared to what he’d been through at home. Like that.

The quarterback was scared. But he stood his ground. Sephus had to give him that.

“No, no, this is too wrong.” The fat little German squeezed in between them and shoved Sephus back. “We are please to be going now.”

“Okay, Adolf. Anything you say.” He gave the dolly a smile and a wave, then said to the quarterback, “See you around.”

W
ILMA
B
LAIN
brought him a fresh coffee while they waited for Skyler Cummins to be brought up from the cells. “Everything all right?”