Darkling I Listen (3 page)

*

Mitsy Dillman slouched in the seat of her rusty, powder blue
'68 Impala. She gazed through the windshield at Brandon Carlyle standing on the front porch of his uncle's house. It was a fair distance from where she had parked her car in the bushes just off the rutted tractor path that followed the perimeter of Henry Carlyle's five-hundred-acre farm, but she could tell he hadn't changed a whole hell of a lot since she'd last parked the old Impala here—seventeen years ago to the day. In fact, she still had the little calendar tucked away in the glove compartment with the date circled in red Magic Marker. Except, she didn't need no calendar to remind her of this anniversary. No sir. For the last seventeen years on October 20 she crawled out of bed and vowed that one day she would get even with Mr. Big Shot Brandon Carlyle.

Mitsy checked out her reflection in the rearview mirror. Damn, but she was lookin' crazier by the hour. Hormones, the doctors told her. Get used to it. She wasn't a spring chick any longer. Well, maybe it was hormones and maybe it wasn't. Maybe it was one of those chemical imbalance things that drove people to eat Prozac and Serzone like they were M&Ms.
Except
there were occasions when the medications had the opposite effect and drove the patient haywire—least that's what her brother said. They ran through post offices and school yards, blowing people away with semiautomatics, like the one resting on the car seat beside her, tucked under her denim skirt in case she was pulled over for a traffic violation. She sure as hell didn't want the la-di-da sheriff discovering she was packing heat, as the jerk liked to call it—thought he was freaking Dirty Harry just 'cause he carried a gun and wore a stupid badge.

Her brother, Jack Dillman, had always thought he was God's gift to women just because he could throw a stupid football. Oh, if the girls could only have seen him at home, whimpering every time their stepdaddy took a swing at him. It was only natural that after a linebacker seriously
herniated
Jack's spinal disk he became a cop. A badge and a gun made him feel powerful and restored the self-confidence that their mother's husband had taken from him. He was Big Dick Dillman, the Almighty and All-knowing … at least until Brandon Carlyle dropped into Ticky Creek on his infrequent sabbaticals from La La Land. Then Jack's self-esteem shriveled up to the size of a walnut. Christ, Jack hated Brandon Carlyle with a passion. But then, so did she.

Mitsy was a whore. She wasn't proud of it, but she accepted it. At least she was a pretty whore, not like some she knew who took pride in advertising the fact by wearing cheap, tacky clothes and layers of caked makeup. One thing for certain, she had never sat at home alone on Friday and Saturday nights during high school. Hell, it was nothing for her to have two or three dates a night. She had the horny sons of bitches taking numbers.

She had willingly spread her legs for the first time on her thirteenth birthday. Paul Gordon, seventeen, backup quarterback for the Ticky Creek Crusaders. She'd crawled out her bedroom window and met him where the railroad tracks intersected with
Pike Road
. He'd picked her up in his daddy's brand-new Ford truck and taken her for a spin out to the quarry. Once parked, it had taken him only ten minutes to talk her out of her cotton panties. He'd been clumsy. And scared. She'd had to remind him three times that if he didn't diddle a little with her first, to sort of get her juices flowing, it wasn't gonna be very pleasurable for either of them.

Paul had actually had the audacity to act shocked that a thirteen-year-old knew anything about diddling. He'd laughed and wanted to know just how long she'd been putting out; she'd thought about confessing it had been since the first time her drunk stepdaddy had slithered under her sheets in the middle of the night—she would have been about nine—but decided against saying anything. Even in the best of moods her stepdaddy was meaner than a timber rattler. If some bug-eyed social worker banged on their door, he wouldn't have stopped thrashing Mitsy for a week. Eventually, she had come to the conclusion that if she was gonna put out on a regular basis, it might as well be on her terms, and to someone who didn't smell like sour Schlitz and hot tamales.

She'd known Brandon Carlyle for most of her life; he was only one year older than her, the same age as her brother Jack. Their parents had attended
Sam
Houston
High School
together. Cara Stacy and John Carlyle had been those disgustingly beautiful and pop'lar people every other kid in school both idolized and hated. Most beautiful. Most handsome. Most pop'lar. Most likely. They'd started going steady their sophomore year, John hoping for a baseball scholarship and Cara thinking she would eventually win Miss
America
and find her way to
Hollywood
. But thanks to a leaky condom in their senior year, Cara wound up pregnant and John was forced to forgo baseball for a job at the local lumber mill to provide for his wife and son.

But
Brandon
had barely soiled his first diaper before Cara up and deserted husband and son for
Tinsel
Town
. John and Brandon moved in with Henry and Bernice. (Cara's mother, her only living parent, had died six months before.) That situation rocked along until John got crushed to death four years later, under a pile of falling pine tree trunks. Cara, already somewhat successful in commercials and bit parts in soap operas, swooped into Ticky Creek and confiscated her son before Henry and Bernice could change out of their funeral clothes.

Cara Stacy Carlyle had proven that a woman with looks and a smidgeon of talent could escape
Ticky Creek
,
Texas
, and find success in
Hollywood
. Folks in Ticky Creek had often suggested that Mitsy was just as pretty as Cara Carlyle. At least they had during her high school days. And it was in this very spot, in the backseat of this very car, that Brandon himself had told her she had what it takes to make it in
Hollywood
—he would even introduce her to his agent. In the blink of an eye, she'd decided, with her legs wrapped around his thrusting hips and her eyes fixed on the overhead car lamp—their one and only fornication before he left the next day to make the movie that would ultimately win him an Oscar—that Brandon Carlyle was gonna be her ticket out of Podunkville.

At the time, of course, she didn't realize that she was already two months' pregnant. Father unknown; could have been any one of a half-dozen Ticky Creek bastards, including her stepfather. Didn't matter. She figured what Brandon Carlyle didn't know wouldn't hurt him; she'd pass the kid off as his. Except she hadn't counted on Cara. The Wicked Witch of the West Coast streaked in on her broom and bought her mother off with enough money to finance an abortion, a divorce, and, at least for her mother,
a relocation
to
Tampa
,
Florida
, where she married some mobile home salesman three months later. Both were killed in a car wreck on their way to Disney World during their honeymoon.

Good riddance, Mitsy thought as she watched old Henry Carlyle mount the porch steps and speak to his nephew. Her mother deserved it, allowing her husband to diddle around with her daughter. She deserved it for hauling her seventeen-year-old daughter to some filthy local quack to rip a fetus out with something that looked like ice tongs, leaving her insides so screwed up she was useless for having babies.

Dragging the gun into her lap, Mitsy watched Henry disappear into the house. She felt sick again, like all the times over all the years she thought about his screwing her in the Impala's backseat. Funny that she'd never been bothered by all the other men, breathing and drooling and rutting on her. She just lay back and let them have it. But she'd actually felt something for
Brandon
. He'd made her feel special. Took her on dates, bought her presents. Opened the car door for her like she was a real lady. Told her she was too pretty to be wasted on Ticky Creek. And she'd believed him. Every goddamn word. Every smile.

Then he'd dumped her.

Smashed her fantasies.

Made her feel for the first time like she was dog shit on the bottom of somebody's shoe, while he went on to win the Academy Award and dance until dawn with Princess Diana.

"Son of a bitch," she said through her teeth, and slammed the steering wheel with her fist.

«
^
»

C
ome on, sweet baby. My God, you're incredible. Turn those
baby blues this direction, Sugar. Oh, mama, I can't believe it. That's good. Give me that infamous Carlyle sneer now. Let's see some attitude.

Alyson James shimmied a little farther out on the pine limb and refocused the lens of her Nikon on Brandon Carlyle's face as he stood on the porch, looking like a building storm cloud. Her heart hammered. Her breath lodged in her throat, making her face feel hot. She could visualize her editor's face when she slapped these up close and personals on his desk.

But that wasn't the best part. She would let him get all worked up, face sweating, horse teeth bared in a smile that made him look like a braying jackass, then she would inform him that he could kiss her patootie; she had already sold the photos to
People
and the story to
Entertainment Tonight.
Oh, sweet Mary, God must love her after all, to have dumped this slice of good luck in her lap, same as He had eight years before, when she had broken the first story of Brandon Carlyle's love affair with the bottle.

She had simply been at the right place at the right time, snooping around the LAPD at three in the morning, and witnessed for herself the laughing cops hauling Carlyle's skunked tush in—all making light of the fact that they'd picked him up for the third time in as many months. Something had soured a little in her stomach at the sight of him barely able to stand up, bending over and puking up on the cop's shiny shoes. Not that she was totally surprised. She was well acquainted with actors and how the realities of their lives were usually a far cry from what their adoring fans perceived. She'd been married to an actor herself at the time. Steve Farrington. Egomaniac.

She often wondered, and even worried, if, when snapping that photograph of Brandon Carlyle puking up his guts, his wrists handcuffed behind him, and the cops laughing their butts off, she had somehow been trying to get even with Farrington by humiliating Carlyle. After all, it was a way of showing the world that their godlike icons were no better than the sleaziest deadbeat drunks sleeping off their hangovers under bridges. The story had won her a job at the country's leading tabloid, the
Galaxy Gazette.

And Carlyle's life had gone to hell.

Disintegrated.

And even though her peers had convinced her that Carlyle's life and career had already been on the skids, deep in the night the nagging thought plagued her that maybe they were wrong.

A well-known, high-dollar actress had been quoted soon after Carlyle's release from prison, as the press was buzzing about his demons and whether or not his time in the slammer had mellowed him: "The public doesn't see the ugly stuff that comes along with our business, and that's the kind of stuff that breaks us down…
No matter how much you pay some hospital or doctor, they can't fix you. You have to figure it out for yourself, life is weird and messy, and you get through it. Brandon Carlyle is getting through it the best way he can. We're all pulling for him. We love you, Brandon, and miss you."

Brandon Carlyle had decided to get through the weird and messy stuff following his parole from prison by disappearing to
Ticky Creek
,
Texas
. Population five thousand.

At first, she'd refused to believe her cousin Sally. Brandon Carlyle living in Ticky Creek? Armpit of the deep
East Texas
pine woods? No way! The man Sally saw eating a cheeseburger and beer-batter onion rings at the Dime A Cup Café might have looked like Brandon Carlyle—as if anyone could look like the gorgeous god of Tinsel Town—but there was no possible way Carlyle would have buried himself in this logging mill town, no matter how badly he wanted to avoid press speculation. Carlyle was bright lights, big city. Party girls with gigantic breasts and sparkling smiles.

The Nikon whirred and clicked as Alyson zoomed in closer on Carlyle's face. He was pissed, all right. Big time. Positively smoldering, blue eyes slightly narrowed, mouth thinned, shoulders squared, and hands rammed into his faded jeans pockets like he was doing his best to refrain from choking someone.

"Always the bad boy, huh, Carlyle?" she said softly. "Always looking for a fight."

Closer … the lens sucked his image up into her face.

A niggling of discomfort fluttered in her stomach as she acknowledged the dark smudges below his eyes. And maybe he had grown a bit more gaunt and rawboned. No pretty boy, this. He was starting to look a little like a Joe Bob truck driver, hard and mean. Once, when hearing he had been hauled into jail on suspicion of murder, she'd refused to believe it. Carlyle might have been a brawler when he drank too much or got pissed off with the paparazzi, but he wasn't a cold-blooded killer. And when it came to women, he was a lover, not a killer … or a rapist, as the District Attorney had charged.

For weeks, a spellbound country had watched the shocking and horrifying story unfold. The funeral of the porn queen Emerald Marcella had held the television audience rapt. The entourage of instantly recognized attorneys marching in and out of the courts had refreshed memories of the O. J. Simpson case. The country had learned that
America
's heartthrob had been hauled in several times before the tragic accident that had taken Marcella's life, mostly for DUI and public intoxication. Twice he'd been ordered to undergo treatment at the Betty Ford Clinic. He'd spent thirty days in
County
Jail
for assaulting a director who'd fired him. And the day after Princess Diana had been killed, he'd been arrested for attempting to run down the paparazzi outside his
Malibu
home, but since no one had been hurt, the charges had been dropped.

No doubt about it, the face filling her camera lens now belonged on a mug shot displayed on
America
's
Most
Wanted.
Maybe he had finally gone over the edge. Maybe he had lost all control over his temper and turned on Emerald Marcella, raped her, and then, in an attempt to hide his crime, sent her nude body through a guardrail in his Ferrari. The coroner had declared that the crash had killed her. But he'd also testified that she had participated, or been subjected to, very rough sex a short time before her death.
Brandon
's skin had been found under her fingernails. Upon examination of his person, his face, chest, stomach, and thighs showed evidence of scratches.

A basset hound began to bay and run down the drive in Alyson's direction. She buried herself deeper in the pine needles, wincing as they dug into the back of her neck.

Carlyle stepped from the porch and started down the drive in pursuit of the barking hound.

Alyson did her best to shimmy her way back toward the tree trunk. The limb on which she balanced sagged and popped. She held her breath.

The dog ran to the high, pike-topped iron fence and proceeded to howl again. He'd spotted the car she'd parked just off the road, partially in a ditch, mostly hidden by a clump of cattails.

"Rufous, heel!" Carlyle shouted, stopping short when he saw the red rental car. He took a few steps backward, his expression turning from annoyance at the dog to sudden concern. His gaze swept the grounds as a woman bounced from the house, waving a cell phone in the air. Carlyle shouted for her to call nine-one-one and began backing up the driveway while the red-haired woman with highly painted cheeks and white shoes began babbling into the phone.

The tree branch creaked and groaned. This was
not
going to be her finest hour, Alyson thought, her panic mounting. Then again, it was probably no more than she deserved. It was just this kind of stunt that had turned Carlyle into a lunatic who would drive his car into a dozen photographers, scattering bodies across the lawn as if they were bowling pins. She wanted to crawl into her car and skulk back to her room at the Pine Tree Lodge.

But she was desperate.

And her only means of escaping future humiliation like this stood yonder in a tight white T-shirt and jeans that molded around his private parts like a lover's hand.
Brandon
was going to be her ticket to a legit job with a legit publication—one that didn't make her squirm in embarrassment when she was forced to confess who paid her a salary.

"Officer Cornwall is just down the road!" the woman called to Carlyle. "He's on his way."

Alyson rolled her eyes.
Great. Just great.

A bald man in overalls walked out on the front porch, a sandwich in one hand and what looked like a glass of iced tea in the other. "What the hell is all the hoopla about?" he shouted.

"It's probably nothing," the woman replied,
then
shouted at Carlyle, "Get back in the house until Officer Cornwall gets here. Don't be taking any chances, Mr. Brandon."

Baying now like a hound from hell, the basset dived into the underbrush, plowing like a tractor toward her tree. After a moment's hesitation, Carlyle followed, wading into the waist-high brush, his face becoming redder and angrier by the second.

Sirens whooped. Lights flashed as a Caprice cruiser came wheeling off the highway and up to the opening gate.

The hound howled and ran in circles directly beneath her.

The limb squeaked. Drooped.

Carlyle stumbled through the brush to where the dog was frantically digging at the base of the tree. He looked up. His eyes widened.

The limb snapped.

Carlyle ducked and rolled—too late. Her weight drove him to the ground, where he scrambled to knock aside the branch and grab a handful of her hair before she could recover from the impact. Suddenly he was over her, one knee digging into her stomach and pinning her to the ground, his teeth showing, eyes flashing,
fist
drawn back and prepared to smash her face to smithereens. She couldn't move or speak or breathe. She could only stare up into the man's furious expression and wonder desperately just how much plastic surgery was going to cost after he obliterated every bone in her face.

He didn't hit her, thank God, because he was a whole lot bigger and heavier and stronger than he'd looked from her precarious perch. And a whole lot better-looking, if that was possible.

"It's a goddamn woman," he snarled as the officer suddenly appeared over his shoulder, pointing a big gun at her and ordering Carlyle to back off and let him take over.

"Will somebody shut that dog up? It's giving me a headache!" the officer shouted.

The woman in white shoes and a flowered blouse whistled for the dog as Carlyle backed off, slowly, his eyes still locked on hers. She rubbed her head.

"Get the hell up," the officer ordered, wagging the gun at her. "Up. Up." He stepped back, lips pinched with nervousness.

Slowly, unsteadily, Alyson rolled to her hands and knees, managing to take a deep breath before climbing to her feet. Her camera. Oh, Christ. She glanced down at the Nikon, which lay partially ground into the dirt, and suddenly felt desperately sick. The lens had cost her four hundred and change.

Carlyle muttered something under his breath and reached for the camera. Flashes of him smashing equipment in the past rolled in her mind. "Don't hurt it," she managed in a dry voice.

He removed the film cartridge and flung the camera back at her. She caught it and gripped it to her chest like a baby as she looked back and forth between Carlyle and the officer, who continued to point his cannon at her.

"You want me to take her in?" the officer asked, sliding a glance toward
Brandon
.

He looked her up and down, wondering to himself how he could have mistaken her, in that first flash of anger, for a man. The hair, he supposed. Cut so short. Shorter than his. And perhaps her height, five-nine, or maybe ten. But the body sure as hell didn't belong to anything except a female. Tall, willowy, poured into a pair of tight blue denims, her breasts nicely filling out a T-shirt emblazoned "Texas Aggies." Despite the fall the shirt was tucked neatly into the jeans; her very small waist was accentuated by a sparkling multicolored belt with a sterling silver buckle. She sure as hell hadn't bought it at Wal-Mart.

"Right," he finally replied, still looking into her hazel eyes fringed by thick, black lashes. There was a scratch across her right cheekbone that was
beading,
and a smear of golden pine sap across her chin. "Take her in."

Those gray-green eyes widened, and color rushed over her face. "You're not serious." She gave a short, disbelieving laugh. "Look, I apologize. You took the film. I was going to talk with you the first chance I got, anyway. But you're too damn hard to get to—"

"Obviously not hard enough." He gave her a derisive grin and turned away.

"I have a proposition—"

"So does every other woman in the universe, Baby. Not interested."

"Not
that
kind of proposition!"

Pausing, he looked back. Long legs braced apart and her arms clutching her camera, she glared at him through her tousled fringe of dark bangs, her face red with indignation, her eyes wide with worry. This is where she would beg, no doubt. Turn on the tears. But she didn't beg, didn't cry. Raising her chin a notch, she told him with equal derision, "Not interested, Carlyle."