Hard Target (13 page)

“It’s all right if you cry.”

And that was all it took. Just like that, he cracked her wide open and she fell apart in his arms. Torso jerking, eyes squeezed too tight for the tears to pass her lids, she endured great, racking sobs that tore through her chest but never made the journey past her vocal chords. A sense of loss and sorrow she hadn’t known since her mother’s disappearance…no, since her breakup with Simon…created a black well of emotion so deep, so impenetrably dark, she didn’t know if sunlight still existed in the universe.

“Breathe,” Simon whispered. “It’s okay. I’ve got you. Just breathe.”

At his command, her throat opened and her lungs expanded on great gulps of air. In out, in out. Too fast to be anything but hyperventilation. Tears rolled freely now, soaking her face, dribbling down her chin and neck to the arm Simon banded around her chest. Then she began to babble. Words like
can’t
and
my only home
and
alone
flew from her lips in an unintelligible jumble, cluttering the air like so much emotional refuse. Simon rocked her gently and kissed the top of her head after each of his
I knows
and
I’ve got yous
danced across her consciousness. Little bright points of hope formed from his voice, resuscitating the core of strength she carried within her. Reigniting its flame and breathing it gently back to life. After awhile they both sat, silent. She, sniffing, he, lightly caressing the bare skin of her arm with his knuckles.

“Thank you.” Her voice struck her as loud in the nearly silent room.

The lack of refrigerator hum to cushion the distant sounds of traffic seemed odd. Naked almost. As if her apartment needed a new wardrobe to cover its vulnerable skin and bones.

Simon kissed the top of her head. “Want me to kill whoever it was?”

“Yes.” The answer surprised her, but didn’t seem to faze Simon.

“Done.”

“Not really, but yes,” she amended.

“I know.”

She twisted in his arms to look at him. The concern etched in the downward pull of his lips—the frown so foreign on his normally laughing features—told her he’d truly been present during her breakdown. She still meant something to him?

“But you would’ve?” She knew the answer but needed to hear it.

He cupped her cheek, then bent to brush his lips gently against hers. Lifting his head, he appeared so serious she wondered if she’d ever seen him laugh at all. “Nobody hurts the people I care about.”

“Let’s go to my office,” she said on impulse.

His frown deepened into little waves across his brow. “Why?”

“I’m going to get you your old laptop. And figure out who did this to my place.”

“Thanks, Alex, but I don’t need it.” Expression shuttering, Simon pushed himself from the bed and crossed the room to lean against the wall.

Anger and frustration began to make themselves known below the surface of her skin, bubbling up from the pit in her abdomen, which had seemed so cold and void only minutes before. “But I want to—”

“I already know I didn’t do it.”

She knew that now, but some sadistic part of her kept a tight rein on that information. Fear of being close to him again, of the potential for losing him once she truly let him in, clamped down on her ability to speak.

“You still don’t believe me?” Affect flat, Simon crossed his arms over his torso and kicked one foot up to rest on the wall behind him.

Alex blinked and looked away. Her silence went on too long and she felt the moment his anger snapped to life. An electric current connecting him to her from five feet away, the emotion crackled over her skin in tendrils of sensation.

She heard Simon’s foot hit the floor. “You know what, Alex?”

“What?” Fingers digging into the edge of the mattress, conscience calling her the worst kind of coward, she finally raised her eyes.

“We’re done.” Simon made a sweeping gesture with his arm that seemed to punch through her gut though it came nowhere near her. “Clean up your own mess. And tell the Bureau to come get me. I’m not interested in this job with you. Or any other.”

The slam of the door and ensuing silence kicked over her remaining stores of panic. Alex shot off the bed and raced out of the apartment. Already a half block away, strides long and angry, Simon walked with his head down and his hands jammed in his pockets. When a black sedan rolled up behind him, Alex yelled after him. Looking toward her, he noticed the car. With a gaze so cold it tinged her skin with frostbite across the distance, he yanked open the car door and got inside.

The sedan tires barely paused long enough for Simon to gain admittance before the car sped off again. Expecting to find Gibbons inside, Simon frowned in bemusement to have the rear compartment to himself. Automatic locks thumped inside the doors.

“Where are we going?” he asked the driver.

The man cracked a neck as wide as his shoulders, but didn’t so much as glance in the rearview mirror.

“All right then,” Simon muttered and settled himself into the seat.

Wherever they headed, he hoped he found Max Gibbons at the end of the road because he had a few items to rearrange on the man’s face before he got down to the business of telling him exactly how he intended to string him up if he ever dared threaten his sister again. Implicitly or explicitly.

Getting his bearings, knowing he needed an escape plan should the man in the front decide to pull a gun and try to dump him in the East River, Simon forced himself to put Gibbons…and Alex…out of his mind.

The thickness of the window glass as well as the quality of the tint said it was security glass. Bulletproof. The seat behind him didn’t appear to open to the trunk. If he managed to get to the front seat, however, and jam the vehicle into reverse he might buy time to kick open the passenger door and escape.

Knowing better than to leave any avenue unexplored, he took in the floor where a supermarket bag lay. Max never gave presents. This couldn’t be good. Feeling more contrary than normal, he ignored the bag. After six blocks and two red lights, the driver finally glanced in the mirror. Simon raised his brows.

“Open it.” The baritone command vibrated Simon’s chest wall from four feet away.

“Steroids are illegal you know.”

The man’s already squinty eyes narrowed until there was almost nothing left. “So’s murder. Hasn’t stopped me yet.”

Not bothering to dignify the threat with a response, Simon took his glasses from his pocket and slid them on. Opening the e-reader app on his phone, he figured he might be able to get in fifty or sixty pages before they reached wherever they were going.

“Open it,” the man said again when they’d become ensnared in a hopeless tangle of traffic.

Still reading, Simon asked, “Why?”

Not many sounds were as distinctive and instantaneously attention riveting as a slide racking on a gun. Simon froze, index finger hovering over his screen as he stared down the barrel of Alex’s Bureau-issued firearm.

“Open it.”

Finding himself suddenly very curious as to the contents, Simon leaned forward slowly and lifted the featherlight bag between his thumb and index finger. Brown paper crinkled as he widened the top. “This better not contain someone’s body part, or we’re going to have words.”

The gun remained pointed at his head.

He glanced inside the bag and saw…three white envelopes? Meeting the driver’s beady expression he wondered if it might be possible for the man to miss at such close range. No. Odds were definitely in the goon’s favor. Simon withdrew the envelopes.

In bold, black marker on the front of each were the words
DO NOT OPEN
.

“What am I supposed to do instead? Eat them?” he asked, wondering if he’d fallen into a Manhattan gangster version of
Alice in Wonderland
.

“Turn them over. Then pick one to take with you.”

Knowing the information was a veritable soliloquy for this guy, Simon flipped the first envelope. It read,
WITH ME
. Traffic began to move again. His escort put the gun away and returned his attention to the road. The second envelope read,
AGAINST ME
, and the third,
UNDECIDED
. Well it was nice of them to give him three choices, he supposed, even knowing he really had no choice at all. This wasn’t Gibbons’ style, which meant the car and driver headed toward a meeting with Downing. Since he wanted to leave the party in something other than a body bag, he saw the
WITH ME
envelope as his best chance for survival.

The driver pulled the car up to a high-rise on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. The initials
JD
covered the space above the entryway to eight stories up. If Simon hadn’t already figured out where he headed, he might’ve welcomed the clue. As it was, the personal monogram struck him as beyond arrogant and past ridiculous. Alex would’ve agreed. Dark eyes laughing at him, mouth set in a serious line, she’d have made an acerbic comment that prompted his wit. At one time, the exchange would’ve left them both laughing until they couldn’t breathe.

Stepping into the building’s black marble lobby, Simon pushed thoughts of Alex aside in favor of dealing with the immediate crisis. He still didn’t know what he’d say to Downing. Or if anything might convince the man of a loyalty Simon didn’t actually feel. In these types of situations he usually found he thought better on his feet. He focused on the details of his surroundings. The lobby rose six stories, palatial enough to contain a full waterfall. Its gushing torrents cascaded down a black marble slab to land in a gold-lined pool. An attendant greeted him from behind the polished sweep of an identical marble counter. “Mr. Downing is expecting you. Jessica will accompany you upstairs.”

A woman arrived wearing gold-tipped heels and a red dress. She so resembled a stereotype from a spy film that Simon had to bite down on the urge to ask her if she had
pussy galore
.

“Right this way, Dr. Jakes,” she said.

Simon noted she wore a gold collar secured with a little
JD
. He wondered if the deep-seated need to label everything within his circle of control came from a childhood marred by a mother with a Sharpie fetish.

“Did he brand you too?” Simon asked.

The woman’s gold nails paused over the security pin pad in the elevator. She blinked at him from door’s mirrored surface. “Sorry?”

“A brand. You’re his property, right?”

Jessica flushed, not with mortification, but with pride. “Yes. I’m his. But he hasn’t branded me. Yet.”

Simon leaned against the rear wall and memorized the security code the woman finished entering. Twenty digits were generally his limit. This code had twelve. Piece of cake.

The car skyrocketed toward the seventieth floor and, Simon assumed, the penthouse. When they swished open, he and his escort stepped into a long hallway branching both to the right and straight ahead. Oriental carpeting cushioned their footfalls as they went straight. He caught a glimpse of a study to the right. Third door down. Large tapestry on the wall. Probably concealed a safe. Another elevator to his left, just outside an industrial kitchen. For service staff?

What an odd layout for a penthouse. “Where are we?”

The woman paused outside a door more ornate than the rest. “Mr. Downing’s private offices.”

Surprised she’d answered, he tried pumping her for more information. “Thanks. I thought we were meeting at his penthouse.”

“Oh no. I don’t have the code for his private quarters.” Jessica tugged her bottom lip between her teeth before confiding in hushed tones, “Though I’m allowed upstairs when summoned.”

So, Downing’s condo was upstairs? Simon bit his tongue to keep from calling her the best security leak he’d ever met. “How does he summon you?”

The woman jumped as if shocked and put a hand to her neck. “Like that.”

She pushed open the double doors. A room with a mahogany conference table likely as long as Downing’s impression of his own physical endowments stretched from the door to a bank of windows. Simon could see his own building across Central Park glinting in the sunlight. A beacon. He wanted to go home. Read. Sleep. Eat rat poison. Anything but be here with the megalomaniac standing in front of him. If the cut and material of John Downing’s suit failed to convey his status and power, then the grape-sized diamond-and-platinum cufflinks did the trick. Nobody would mistake this man’s worth. Or his Napoleon complex. For a long minute Simon stood motionless, staring at his host from across the room.

“Dr. Jakes, welcome.” Downing held out a hand.

Simon somehow crossed the distance between them and performed the required social niceties without punching the guy in the face.

“Excuse Jessica. She’s still in training.” Downing caressed Jessica’s naked arm, as if in possession. Neck craned, she peered adoringly into her master’s pale-blue eyes. Sensual lips and waves of thick, blond hair should have marked the man as handsome, but even impeccably cut hair and a nose too perfect to be natural couldn’t disguise the dank evil that had overtaken this man’s soul.

Downing smiled softly at Jessica, then cupped her cheek with one hand and backhanded her with the other. Simon automatically went for a weapon he didn’t have. Jessica stumbled from the room.