Wired (3 page)

I realized immediately that even if I could have run faster, he would have caught me. I stopped short under a street lamp—if anything else happened, this would make it easier for someone to witness from one of the apartments. Mason closed the distance between us as if it were nothing. As he came up to me, in the glare of the light the brutality of the fistfight really registered; those were raw cuts and bruises on his face, a real swelling over his eye. Somehow, I'd expected him to look fine. That he wasn't fine made what had just happened all the more frightening, all the more real.

“Can I give you a ride home?” he asked.

“No.”

“I'll walk you home then.”

“No.”

Mason fell into step next to me. “You're probably wondering what all this is about. Me showing up like this . . .”

I stopped abruptly and turned on him. “I don't believe in coincidences.”

He managed a tight smile. “I don't either.”

I started walking again. He stayed right with me. “Are you stalking me, Mason?” I half-joked.

“Who said that to you?”

“What?” His response was not what I'd expected.

“Did somebody tell you I was stalking you?” I looked over at him and he wasn't smiling. “That's really not funny. Kaysar likes to use that one.”

My stomach plunged. What the hell was going on? “Kaysar?”

“The man I was fighting. Leonardo Kaysar. He's very dangerous—no, listen to me.
Listen
to me.”

I was already walking again.

“Leonardo Kaysar is trying to . . . get to you, and I'm trying to stop him.”

“ ‘Get to me.' Uh-huh.” I was still walking.

“I've been following your situation for a long time, and things have finally come to a head.”

I put on the brakes. “Following my situation, or following me? How did either of you know I was going to be at the 7-Eleven tonight?”

“He's a dangerous man, Rox,” Mason repeated, blatantly skirting the question. “A very dangerous man.”

“Mason.”

“Yes?”

“You're freaking me out. If there's some kind of bet involved, tell me what it is and I'll help you win. If there's some kind of joke, tell me what it is and I'll help you make them laugh without the joke having to be on me. But stop this. For old times' sake, okay? You have to stop this. It's very, very scary.”

I'd backed up to allow for a nice, big amount of room between myself and Mason, and if he so much as put a pinkie into my personal space, I was going to go berserker all over his ass. Well, that's what I liked to think I was capable of, anyway.

Mason didn't move.

I turned and tried to pick up my pace again, but exhaustion hit me hard. Mason followed me home in silence. I considered pretending another place was mine, but he'd lived here for a couple of years, so he already knew the address.

It was a two-story condo in a complex with a bunch of other condos. The place was given to me by my parents as compensation for marrying into new families and never contacting me again, and I'd lived there forever. And while there were walkways and stairs in the complex that I was certain I knew better than Mason, he'd already made it apparent I wouldn't be able to outrun him.

At the top of the steps up to my place, I froze. The dumbest thing I could possibly do would be to open my door and give him an opportunity to overpower me. Once we were both inside, I would have no escape. I had to get rid of him.

“I know what you're thinking,” he said.

I raised an eyebrow. I didn't know what to think. How could he possibly know?

Mason hesitated, as if he were testing words on his tongue before saying them out loud. “Look, this is very complicated. The most important thing for you to understand right now is that you're in trouble. You have something Kaysar wants.”

“What does he want?”

“Your future.”

I didn't say anything. He didn't say anything. The phrase just hung in the air waiting for a laugh. Neither of us laughed. Mason stood there, his head tilted, waiting for his dramatic proclamation to impress me in some way.

My chest tightened. “You jerk! This
is
a joke, isn't it? It's a
joke
.” The only thing worse than being attacked for real was being attacked and the butt of somebody's joke.

Mason looked at me impatiently. “Kind of an elaborate gag, don't you think?”

“You and your
colossally stupid
practical jokes. This one is really out of line. You're trying to humiliate me or scare me, and either way it's a nasty thing. I don't know why you'd do this to me after all these years.” Choking with the effort of holding back tears, I was barely coherent when I spit, “Good-bye, Mason.”

“Rough splice,” he said.

After a moment of incomprehension I looked with complete disgust at the cut on his forehead and replied, “You'll live.”

“Hey, you liked those jokes. I mean, you pretended you didn't but that was part of our thing. You know. We had a . . . a thing. It was funny, those jokes and gags and stuff. You thought it was funny.”

“There was no ‘thing,' and I don't remember whether it was funny or not. What I'm saying is, it's not funny
now
.”

“Oh, there was a thing,” Mason said suggestively.

“It was just you looking for attention.”

“Maybe it was me looking for attention from
you
,” he tossed out.

I didn't know what to say. All I knew was that there was nothing funny about any of this now, and I wanted him out of here. I widened my eyes and said, “Oh, shit. I dropped my wallet.”

He turned and looked down the stairway, then
took a couple of steps away, exactly as I'd hoped, at which point I ran over, jammed the key into my door, launched myself inside my place, and slammed it shut.

A second later his shoulder hit the door with a dull smack. “Give me a break!” he shouted through the wood, in between pounding it with his fist. “What kind of joke involves two guys beating the crap out of each other like that, over a girl one of them doesn't know and the other one hasn't spoken to in over four years?”

A really bad one. He was right. It didn't make much sense. I waited for something more from him. Something to justify the real punches and real bruises and very real men grabbing at me and trying to prevent me from running away.

“Roxanne,” Mason said, the effort to remain calm obvious in his voice. “It's not some game we're playing here. It's
not
a joke.”

Stop saying that. If it's not a joke or a game . . . what is it?

My knees gave out and I slid to the floor, holding my breath while I carefully leaned in and pressed my ear against the door. I huddled in a ball of quivering flesh and bone while Mason called my name a couple more times until someone across the way opened a door and told him to shut the hell up. Mason swore and mumbled something, and the door vibrated as if he'd stepped closer.

I held still. Something metal scraped against the wood. Some kind of tool? His gun? Or maybe nothing more than a zipper.

“You're going to have to open this door at some point, Rox,” he said quietly. “You know you want to.”

I did want to. Part of me, at least. Mason had always lived a big, bold life, whether he was simply giving himself the run of my apartment or making big, blowsy plans for himself and my roommate Louise. When I wasn't busy envying her for it, I guess I was busy admiring him. He was too thick to see it—or at least I hoped he was. Otherwise, I'd be as mortified now as I was terrified. The thing was, it didn't really surprise me that he was running around town in some kind of lethal skirmish with an Englishman ripped out of one of the spy novels I loved to read; what surprised me was that I was suddenly running around with him.

A soft thump reverberated against the door, and I could imagine Mason's palms right up against mine on the other side. Breathlessly, I stared at my hands, slowly splaying my fingers as I knelt on the ground.

What do you want from me?
I wondered.

“I'm going to back off, okay? Give you a chance to settle. Leo's gotta go deal with that arm and . . . stuff . . . so I don't want you to worry. I'll come back tomorrow,” Mason said. His voice was low and level. He knew I was right there. He knew I was close enough to hear, and his words were strangely intimate, divided and huddled though we were.

“You're going to have to open your mind, Roxanne,” he finally said, and then he struck the door hard as he stood up.

I flinched, my heart pounding. But there wasn't anything more, nothing besides the sound of footsteps
fading. I stumbled to my feet and fled upstairs, barricading myself in my bedroom with a chair that I knew couldn't possibly do any good.

No, I didn't understand what the hell had just happened. I didn't have a clue what Mason Merrick was trying to pull off or what his motives could possibly be; I'd cut him off at every pass. Now he'd left me alone, as I'd asked him to, and it was a solitary confinement with which I was all too familiar.

Open my mind, open the door
, he'd said. I'd be a liar if I denied that part of me was glad he was coming back.

I remember flipping through the phonebook for the nonemergency police line and getting a busy signal. I remember hanging up and not bothering to try again. I remember getting under the covers with my clothes on and wrapping myself in the enormous down comforter spilling over the sides of my bed.

I would have expected that night to be a sleepless one, but it wasn't. I slept deeply, easily, and when I awoke the next morning, I had the weirdest desire to do that
seize the day
thing everyone's always talking about.

I shed last night's clothes all over the hall where I'd left my tennis shoes, and headed for the room I used as my office to check my schedule. The room was pitch-black, with no windows to provide any light from the outside world. I ran my palm over the inside wall and flipped the switch, but the single bulb made a pretty sorry difference.

I turned my computer on and scanned the office while waiting for the machine to boot up. Bookshelves full of paperbacks lined the walls. Boxes
teetered in stacks piled all around. A hot plate and an electric teakettle sat atop a minirefrigerator tucked in the corner next to a chaise longue that commandeered the lion's share of the room.

I barely had space to walk around. The clutter, the towers of boxes, the dimness, the smallness of the room seemed to curl around me like a cocoon—not a bad thing, although oddly unfamiliar. I scanned the titles on the bookshelves and picked up one of the dog-eared novels. Clancy. I put it down and eyed some of the others. Fleming. Brown. A set of TV tieins for
Alias
. All of them I remembered reading. So this was definitely my collection. But . . .

In some way that I couldn't quite put my finger on, I was a stranger in my own home. In my own skin. All I could think was that the prior night had affected me on a much deeper level than I'd first imagined.

The whirring and clicking from my computer's booting hard drive eased up. I opened my calendar and, still standing in yesterday's bra and underwear, I scanned it. The entire month was blank save for two entries. A couple weeks ago I'd turned in a project. Today I was apparently supposed to go to the agency to discuss getting a new one. The rest of the dates were squares of plain gray before today and plain white after.

We had everything before us; we had nothing before us
.

My hands hovered over the keyboard. I stared down at them as though they were part of someone else's body. Then I ran for the shower.

I don't know why I moved so fast. I don't know what I expected would happen. Absolutely nothing
happened. I showered. I got out. I headed for the closet still drying myself off. I slung the wet towel over the doorknob. Nothing happened.

I pulled a clean pair of underwear and a bra from the top dresser drawer, even managed to laugh at myself a little. Until I opened the closet. It was filled with black. I pushed the hangers around. There must have been ten pairs of black jeans and twice that many black T-shirts of all shapes and necklines. There were a couple pairs of black sweats piled unceremoniously on the top shelf and one pretty cute jacket—all in black. Other than a single dress that was mostly black with some red satin detailing, there were absolutely no Saturday-night clothes—unless one included the incongruous presence of a barely-there pink negligée in that category. Assuming Saturday night went well, of course. No skirts and no other dresses. I looked down at the floor. I saw a second pair of black Converse Los exactly like the ones I'd pulled off in the hall, a pair of black flip-flops, a pair of black slippers, and a single shoe box with an illustration of ridiculously high heels on the side.

Slipping into a random selection of the black clothes, I stared down at the box. I didn't know what to worry about more: the fact that I had no memory of having a taste for such a limited palette or that I had no memory of a desire to wear shoes so tall they had the potential to put me in traction.

I flipped the lid off the box with my toe and immediately lurched backward, coming down funny on one of the slippers. My legs slipped out from under me and I hit the ground. I sat there propped up with my elbows behind me and just stared. Two admittedly
attractive black satin high heels nestled in the box, alongside a handful of bullets and a gun.

Huh?

I don't own a gun. I've never owned a gun. I don't even know anybody who owns a gun
.

Actually, the truth was that I couldn't even think of too many people I knew at all, which I suppose would reduce the number of guns likely to be owned.

There was something kind of dirty about the idea of a gun in my closet, something dirty and dangerous and scary about not knowing why it was there or how it got there. Mason? But I hadn't let him inside. Not that he was really the type who waited to be asked, but if he had put this here, when would he have had time to do it . . . and why the hell would he?