0758215630 (R) (29 page)

“Then perhaps you no longer wish to work with such a despicable example of his sex? If so, I’ll happily release you from further obligation.”
And your ability to breathe.

She stopped rubbing her wrist, turned her back on him, and walked toward the bathroom. Once there, she faced him. “We’re in this together, Braid, so don’t get any fancy ideas about going ahead on your own.” She smiled, her lips warping under the effort. “You arrive on that plane without me—and Phyllis Worth is a dead woman.”

Cold snaked over Q’s neck and shoulders. “What are you talking about?”

She ignored him, dipped into the bathroom briefly, and came out tying a robe around her slim waist.

“It means Charity and I have a retirement plan, and it means the four million you promised that idiot Castor has just been doubled—or Charity kills Phyllis Worth.”

Q stared at her, every survival instinct he possessed quivering to alert. Now that he had April’s name, it didn’t matter if the Worth woman was killed, but Q wanted things done his way, with exactitude. He did not want April finding Worth dead and going on the run. He wanted them in one place—and all of them dead within the next twenty- four hours. He processed possibilities, quickly decided that if the insane woman in front of him thought Phyllis Worth was her leverage—and that would keep her alive until the others arrived—he’d leave her to think just that.

He molded his face to impassive, walked past her, and retrieved a robe. “Do I even want to know how you came into possession of that four million dollar figure?”

“You’re not the only man with an itch.” She met his eyes, smirked. “I told you in my report that Castor hired a hooker—I just neglected to mention it was me.” Her expression turned to disgust. “The hardest five hundred bucks I ever earned. That man gave new meaning to the word pig.” She walked to the granite bar. A sink was inset there, and she ran herself a glass of water and took a long drink. Folding her arms across her chest, she leaned against the counter. “You really should be more discerning in your choice of colleagues, Q. The man was damn near salivating over the ‘four mil’ he was about to get from, as he said, a guy so rich—and with so much to lose—he was the ripest pick he’d had in years. Of course, Charity and I already knew that much.”

Q lifted a brow. “Aren’t you clever.”

“Yes, we are. We’ve had you pegged as our sugar daddy ever since Victor gave us to you for that job last year. We had to work on Victor to get the details—but the old fool did love two in a bed. You must remember that?” She took another sip of water. “He put your net worth at a billion plus. He was always exact about numbers, as you know, so I assume he was correct?”

Quinlan said nothing. He had no intention of validating her data, either sexual or financial.

“Sad about Victor, really,” Mercy went on. “We had some good things going. A couple of well-paying married senators, some local politicians. Charity and I set them up, Victor did the rest.”

“Where was Castor while this was going on?”

“Sidelined. We never met the jerk. Victor was phasing him out, taking the business in a new direction, developing a more sophisticated clientele. A ‘cleaner business,’ he said. The kind of business where Castor’s kneecapping and bone-breaking skills were no longer required. Victor liked the industrial espionage thing—like what Charity and I did for you to get that SEC data you were so hot after a year or so ago.”

“Victor recommended you highly,” Q said, his tone deliberately flat, his words unhurried.

“I’ll bet.” She shook her head. “Not much to it though. Give a high profile married CEO some head, snap a few pictures—suggest a little chat with the wife and kids . . . You know how it goes.” She shrugged. “Not exactly brain surgery.”

“And not enough financial return for your efforts, I assume.” Victor wasn’t known to be generous. “So you decided to do some freelancing.”

“Very good, Braid. And very right. Charity and I had been planning on doing our own thing for a while, even before Castor did his number on Victor. Because if there was one thing Victor had, it was connections.” She eyed him. “It was those connections that had us, uh, offering our services to Victor in the first place. You in particular.” She smiled. It was ugly.

Q let her go on.

“Those journals of his? Hell, if you knew how to work them, they were a freakin’ gold mine. We wanted them.”

“And Castor got them all.”

“Yes. For a few days there, we figured we were shut out,” she said. “Then we heard he was heading for you—the biggest whale in Victor’s ocean.”

“You learned that how?”

“Charity. Damn that girl is good. She picked up Castor in a bar.” She lifted a careless shoulder. “Wannabe players like Henry are the easiest of all, small pricks and big egos with mouths to match. Hell, even then he was going on about
his
Q.”

“Hence your little sales call on me.”

“A calculated risk that you’d need discreet assistance when Castor showed his ugly mug.” She looked at her nails, the gesture irritatingly casual. “Charity and I? We plan ahead.”

“And had it failed? Had I not called on you?”

She smiled. “Rather a moot point, Q—because you did call us, didn’t you?”

Q was tired of circling her cache of knowledge, and enraged by her supercilious attitude, but he needed to evaluate his risk, and to do that he needed to know everything she knew. “What did Henry Castor tell you about Phyllis Worth?” Waiting for her answer, he tensed.

“Enough for us to know, she isn’t your main target— which by the way, you confirmed by not authorizing an easy kill.” She paused. “She’s a lead. A very important lead. And you want her alive.”

Q’s stomach tightened, but he didn’t respond; he waited. Mercy pushed away from the granite counter, came to stand in his face. “Castor said all he had to do for his four mil was find one ‘growed up’ little girl. It doesn’t take more than putting two and two together to know Phyllis Worth knows where that ‘girl’ is. What we don’t know is why she’s so important.”

He stilled the choler and oily panic roiling in his stomach, even though it oozed like a running sore, and maintained his silence.

When he didn’t answer, she laughed. “Not that it matters, because I’m sure Phyllis Worth, with the appropriate coercion, will give us the information we need. And if there’s one thing we learned from Victor it was the power of information.”

“Which means your plan is to attach yourself to me— until you have what you need.”
Then suck at my financial resources for as long as it suits you.
It was exactly what Q had expected.

“Got it in one, baby.” She looked at the silver watch on her wrist. “We should get going.” Again her lips formed a maddening smirk. “Our private plane awaits.” She ran her finger down his bare chest exposed between the gaping lapels of the robe. “You live well, Q. Charity and I are very much looking forward to doing the same. And from what I hear that mansion of yours has plenty of room.” She eyed him head to toe. “And the sex wouldn’t be bad either.”

Dear God, was she serious?
The woman sickened him. “I could kill you here, now. Save myself a lot of trouble— and money.”

“You do that, and my sister wreaks her own brand of havoc on Phyllis Worth—and after she’s done with her, Q, she’ll do you.” She snickered. “It’s a sister thing, you know.”

He watched her disappear into the bathroom and forced his mind to cool, to level out. He stood still, breathing slowly, deeply, but his lungs seemed encased in iron bands. His mind was slow to accept a loss of power, temporarily unable to identify solutions. He continued to breathe.

He heard the sound of the shower—the sound of singing.

Rage surged, billowing through his chest like thick scudding clouds and causing his body to quiver and chill. The all-powerful Quinlan Braid clenched his fists at his sides, worked to tamp his wrath into a dark hard place.

Morning light cut sharply through the open drapes, and the room grew brighter. Q turned his face to the sun’s unstoppable power, took another, deeper breath, and let it go.

I have grown soft. Grown old. Grown sloppy.
All truths that burned him as a torch would burn.

In his prime he would never have found himself in a situation he didn’t control. He’d been careless and what had it brought him?
Parasites:
Mercy and her sister. But no matter. He was here to challenge himself, to feel, to recapture the essence of what he once was. A killer. A taker of lives.

They thought him trapped, impotent, a hostage to his own criminal past. They were wrong. He’d kill them all: The Worth women, the son, the sisters, and everyone else who threatened him. And he’d kill them perfectly. And enjoy every second of the bloodletting.

But to ensure that outcome, he’d need some assistance. He picked up the phone.

There were only four people on the Cessna unloading at Tofino’s airport. Joe and April were two of them.

April came down the plane’s metal steps carrying a blue carpetbag with everything she needed for what she assumed—and prayed—would be a short stay. Joe slung a soft brown leather duffel over his shoulder and followed her down. On the tarmac, he reached for her bag. “Here. Let me take that.”

“No, it’s fine. I never pack more than I can carry.” In a like move to his, she hoisted her bag to her shoulder and headed toward a graveled area behind a barbed-wire fence. She guessed the fence was either the airport’s stab at security or its way of keeping the wildlife off the runways. If there was any kind of terminal, she didn’t see it, only a couple of smallish trailer-type buildings representing local airlines.

They’d had delays in both Seattle and Vancouver, so they’d arrived later than planned. The afternoon was heavily overcast, and a light carpet of leaves, early casualties of the coming fall, lay scattered across the gravel parking lot. The air held the salty scent of the ocean, but it was damp and still, and mist had gathered like a crowd of ghosts at the far end of the runway. “Aren’t the dog days of August supposed to be hot and humid?” April looked at the gloomy sky, shivered in her light jacket.

“Not here, obviously,” Joe said, also looking up. “I’ll get the car.” A Budget Rent-a-Car office, consisting of a blue and white portable building, maybe twelve feet long, was settled on the gravel receiving area on their right. There were cars parked beside it. “Wait here.”

“No problem. It doesn’t look as if there’s anywhere I could go, without being lost for months.” The airport was ringed by trees with mountains forming a distant backdrop. From the ground the trees looked like a tidy green fence, but April knew from looking out the window during their descent, the trees—and the ocean beyond them—went on forever. Ten feet into that dense forest, she’d be search-and-rescue fodder. What in God’s name Phylly was doing here was more of a mystery than ever. Feeling displaced, as if she’d touched down on another planet, it occurred to April, an avowed city girl, that other than a foray or two into the desert surrounding Las Vegas, this was as close to nature in the raw as she’d ever been. She wasn’t sure how she felt about it.

Joe gave her a concerned look. “You going to be okay?”

“All I need is Toto. I feel like Dorothy. You know . . . ‘not in Kansas anymore.’ The sooner these sneaker-clad feet see high heels and pavement again, the happier I’ll be.” The other couple from the plane, apparently met by friends, were already loaded into a giant Escalade and on their way.

While Joe was getting the car, April—feeling tense and oddly nervous—scanned the weedy, leaf-strewn parking area. Her attention was caught by two vehicles coming into the lot from the pitted road leading to the airport: One an older pickup, the other a dark blue Ford Explorer. A woman got out of the Explorer, reached back in to retrieve her bag, then fiddled with the visor. It looked as though she was trying to lodge something behind it. When she was done, she moved back from the car, and looked around the empty parking area. When her gaze connected with April’s, it lingered a moment before slipping away.

The woman was stunning, dark-haired, with pale, clear skin and a movie-star face. The kind of face so exceptional it brought second looks from men and women. Not too shabbily dressed, either. Although leathers weren’t April’s thing, the ones worn by this woman caught her eye. Maybe because they were of a cut, style, and quality more likely to be seen on Rodeo Drive or The Strip than in this remote northern rain forest.

“Set to go,” Joe came up beside her, waved a set of keys. He followed her gaze, and asked, “What’s so interesting?”

“Her,” April said, making the slightest possible gesture with her chin. “She’s beautiful, but kind of out of place here, don’t you think?”

Joe glanced in the direction she’d indicated. They both watched the woman get into the pickup truck. It had a sign on its side: Dario’s Motel and Resort.

“Probably a tourist,” Joe said. “The resorts around here bulge with them at this time of year. Plus there’s some pretty exclusive private getaways on the oceanfront.” He looked away. “Ready?”

She nodded, settled her bag more comfortably on her shoulder, and followed Joe to a gray Taurus sedan. They tossed their bags in the backseat.

Over the top of the car, before they got in, Joe said, “The guy at Budget was closing up, by the way, said there are no more scheduled flights until tomorrow. Some mechanical problems. Good for us, maybe not so good for whoever’s on our tail.”

“Unless they don’t use a scheduled flight.” She looked up, swore she heard a plane in the distance somewhere.

“Yeah, there’s always that.” Joe followed her gaze, looked to the sky then back to her. “Let’s go.”

Chapter 27

Joe drove, while April studied the map and pointed him in the right direction. Within forty minutes they were staring at a painted sign that said: Bristol. A narrow road lay in front of them, rimmed on both sides with giant cedar and hemlock, a low lying mist snaking around their bases. Through the trees on their left patches of roiling ocean were visible.

Before Joe could make the turn into the driveway, his cell phone rang. It was Julius. He pulled off to the side of the road and listened. “Good,” he finally said, adding, “How’s Cornie doing?” He nodded. “Also good. Thanks.” He clicked off.