Head to Head (24 page)

“If he’ll give me a chance, I can explain.”

“I gotta get your gun and badge. I’m sorry, Claire.”

For a single moment, I couldn’t believe it was happening; then I thought,
Well, why not? Everything else is falling apart. It’s a temporary thing,
I told myself then,
paid leave until he hears my side of the story. That’s not too bad. He’ll reinstate me.
Where was all that female bravado when I needed it? I stood up and walked to where I’d left my bag on the bar. I got out my badge and tossed it to him.

“Man, I feel two inches tall,” he said as I reached under my tan linen blazer, pulled the Glock out of my shoulder holster, and handed it over. I felt completely naked. I hadn’t gone anywhere unarmed since I’d left California the first time.

“This’ll blow over,” he said. “Charlie’s furious with you, but you know him. He gets over things after he’s had time to think. Once he gets you in to explain what went down, he’ll change his mind about this.”

“Yeah, let me know when he cools down, and I’ll come in and talk to him.”

Bud nodded and paused a minute, but there wasn’t much else to say, so he left, but I’d be damned if I’d cry. I’d quit crying a long time ago, hadn’t felt anything in a long time, but I was feeling something now.

“Bud told me, Claire. I’m sorry.”

Black was back, standing in the doorway and watching me. He was always watching me, as if I were a ticking time bomb, for God’s sake. I had a feeling he was on the right track this time. I found myself wanting to collapse in his arms and quickly nixed that idea. Yeah, right, that’d make me feel great. “I’m okay. I’ve gotten through a lot worse than this. This is nothing.”

“I know you have. You’ve proven yourself to be a strong woman.”

I waited for him to ask me if I wanted to talk about it. I knew it was just a matter of time before he played doctor with me. Maybe I wanted him to insist on it; maybe I wanted my head to be probed and examined and analyzed. Maybe I didn’t know what to do, or say, or feel. Maybe I was crazy.

“Let me know if you need anything,” he said after a few moments of uncomfortable silence. “I’ll be down the hall, in my office.”

Once, just outside Gulfport, Mississippi, on the highway that ran along the Gulf of Mexico, Brat was almost pulled over by a highway patrolman. But the brown Crown Victoria with blue flashing lights went ahead of them, speeding off after a black Cadillac that had passed them going eighty miles an hour. Brat never exceeded the speed limit; the new woman and the mother didn’t like to speed. So they drove slowly and carefully along, and once, Brat took a job in a funeral home to help with the embalming. The funeral director was amazed at the skill Brat showed at such a young age and paid well, although the three of them didn’t really need any more money. It was fun being around dead people in cold rooms again, like a family reunion, and once, Brat stole a black lady out of her coffin right before it was locked up for burial. The mother and the blond-haired woman were pleased to have a new friend.

Finally, Brat found the next person he was looking for. It was on a big lake, and the young man was dressed in a white T-shirt and swimming trunks and was fishing on the bank. Brat had followed him from his house and lay belly-down in the bushes, watching and swatting at gnats. When the young man stripped off his shirt and jumped in the water, Brat made sure that he couldn’t see how Brat eased into the water, too. The young man was a pretty good swimmer, but Brat was strong, too. The water felt cold against Brat’s naked body, and the cleaver was heavy as Brat came up behind the young man chosen to die.

The young man never saw Brat because he swam with his head down in the water, and it was easy for Brat to come up behind him and bring the cleaver down hard enough against his bare back to sever his spinal cord. The body twitched and floundered and bled, but Brat dragged it back to shore, hacked it up, and put all the pieces in a blue rolling Samsonite suitcase he’d bought the day before at Kmart. That was the day Brat realized it wasn’t as messy to kill in the water, because there was no need to clean up. The liquid heat dissipated, and Brat felt good about this latest accomplishment. Their little family was growing by leaps and bounds. Now there was a brother, too.

The next day Brat burned some parts of the young man’s body and reported into work at the funeral home.

Six months later, Brat killed the young man’s wife. She always drove her teenage girl to school every morning and then returned home and stayed in the little white house with the porch swing for the rest of the day by herself. Brat watched every day for a month from across a busy highway, in a parking lot of a McDonald’s restaurant. Then one day when it was raining hard and everyone was running for cover with newspapers over their heads or umbrellas, Brat ran into the backyard of the wife’s house. The back door was unlocked, and once he was inside, the sound of a radio playing was all he could hear. The hot river boiled up, higher and higher, and Brat could almost hear the mother and the sister and the brother saying, “She’s the one, she’s the one, kill her, kill her, we want her in our family.”

The lady was in the bathtub, just sitting there soaking, and Brat tiptoed up behind her and held her head under the water until she quit thrashing and splashing water all over the place. There was a razor on the edge of the tub, and Brat placed her hands under the water so the blood wouldn’t spurt up and took the sharp razor blade and made a cut so deep on her wrist that her hand flopped down. The water quickly turned red and looked like the river of fire inside Brat, and Brat watched it for a while, fascinated, weak with satiation from the heat burning inside. When someone came in the front door and called the lady’s name, panic surged, and Brat jumped up and fled out the back door into the pouring rain. Terrified of being caught, Brat drove quickly to the silver travel trailer. The others were disappointed that Brat hadn’t brought a new friend, but they understood and forgave Brat. There were lots of others out there just waiting for Brat to make friends with them.

Brat was eighteen.

After Bud left Cedar Bend with my badge and weapon, Nicholas Black saw fit to make himself scarce. Maybe that was because I immediately retreated to a big, quiet guest bedroom at the far end of the wing, as far away from him as I could possibly get, and shut the door. He could take hints with the best of them. In fact, I didn’t trust myself to be around him in my present mood. I’d been devastated before, lots of times, and I knew what I needed to do. Bury myself in a deep, dark hole and lick my wounds.

The chemistry between Black and me was alive and well, but it wasn’t going to jump into a higher gear just because I was down on my luck. Maybe some other time, some other place. But here, now, in the middle of a murder investigation with him, the suspect, and me, the detective, it had complicated everything and knocked me off the case.

So I lay on the bed and stared at the ceiling for a long time. I thought of my dead son, my dead husband, the dead woman who died while baby-sitting my son that awful night, my dead friend Freida Brandenberg, and lots of other dead people. I wished I was dead, too, for a while, until I got sick of my morbid thoughts and jumped out of the bed. I thought I’d learned to cope, but this time it was different. This time I couldn’t shut it down. Worse, I couldn’t let go of the anger forming into a hard, tight knot in my chest and eating away at my insides.

I stood inside a huge black marble-and-glass shower enclosure under almost scalding water for so long, my skin came out red and wrinkled. When I entered the bedroom again, a bunch of shiny black boxes were stacked on the bed, all with the raised gold Cedar Bend logo on the top. Inside the boxes, I found enough clothes to last me a month, all in my size, including a red silk gown and matching robe. Looked like Black was still playing caretaker. Somehow that made me angry and resentful, but hey, everything was making me angry and resentful.

I put on the silly red getup and burrowed into bed again. Where the hell were Black’s little white tranquilizers when I needed them? I ignored the big silver tray of fresh fruit and cheese and crusty bread someone had left on the bedside table. The same silent phantom who’d left the clothes, I suppose.

Black was being thoughtful, I guess, providing for all my needs but leaving me strictly alone to work through my problems. Which was exactly what I wanted, but maybe it wasn’t what I wanted. I didn’t know what I wanted, except not to think anymore.

By the time midnight announced itself on the bedside ebony-and-crystal clock, I was pacing the floor, my emotions in a jumble, my numbness turning into rage at everybody and everything.

I decided maybe I didn’t like being alone so much after all, so I opened the door and walked down the hall to Black’s private office. The door was open, a dim light coming from the lamp on his desk, where he was sitting and sorting through newspaper clippings. Clippings about me. I guess he was starting his own personal scrap-book with separate pages for every awful thing that had ever happened to me. I saw red and decided not to keep my feelings to myself.

“Well, well, let me guess. I bet all those newspapers are about little old me and my so sad life. Tell you what, you can quit snooping into my past on the sly. I’m here now in the flesh, in this cute little nightie you picked out, your latest head case reporting for duty.” Not very nice, but somehow it made me feel better.

Black looked surprised to see me. Then he looked wary and for good cause. Maybe it was the scowl all over my face, which said I might be going to kill him. No gracious mood anywhere in sight. I guess he decided to ignore my sarcasm, because he remained quite calm.

“I hope you’re feeling better now.”

“Oh yeah, I’m much better now. Now it just feels like somebody ran over me with a cement truck. How do you feel, Doctor? Is your blood pumping hard with professional glee now that you know what a basket case I am?”

He stood up. Frowned, concerned, but that didn’t stop his eyes from dropping down to the plunging front of the sexy little number I had on. “Have you eaten anything today?” Maybe he was just looking at my empty stomach.

“For some reason, I lost my appetite. Wonder why? You’re the shrink. Why don’t you tell me?”

“You’ve been through a lot. You need to eat. Why don’t we go down to the kitchen and see what we can find?”

“What, Doctor? You don’t want to stick your pins in me?” I waited a beat to see what he’d say. He said nothing, and that made me even angrier, as did the cautious way he was looking at me, like I had a bomb strapped on under my slinky attire. Somehow I knew I was taking my frustration and pain and anger out on him, even that it wasn’t fair, but I couldn’t help it. I needed to jump on somebody, and he was the closest, I guess. Hell, he could take it; he was a psychiatrist. “Let’s see, where should we begin? What should I do first? Lie down on the
dreaded
couch, maybe? Or should I go over these nice little inkblots you hang around your office to help you spot the crazies?”

I turned to the wall where the framed inkblots were displayed and contemplated them, tilting my head and placing a forefinger under my chin. Sometimes I could get obnoxious down to an art form. “Wow, these are just fascinatin’, Doctor Black.”

Black said nothing again, which annoyed me some more.

I said, “Maybe we should finish what we started on the dock. Everybody in the whole US of A thinks we’re having an affair. Maybe we shouldn’t disappoint them.”

“Is that what you really want?” he asked quietly. Man, now he was tiptoeing around me like I was a split personality or something. Maybe that’s what he thought, that this latest catastrophe in my life had sent me plunging headfirst over the edge, and I had turned into my uncivil, unpleasant alter ego. Maybe he had a straitjacket hidden under his desk, just in case I went nuts.

I didn’t answer his question, because I wasn’t sure that’s what I really wanted, wasn’t sure why I’d just asked him to make love to me except that I just wanted him to do something to make me quit hurting inside.

He crossed the room until he was a few feet away and stood staring at me. He stuffed his hands in his pockets and said, “I’m not sure this is the best time for that. But I’m here for you. I’ll help you any way I can…we don’t have to jump into bed to make you feel better.”

I stared at him for an instant and felt pretty damn humiliated by his polite rejection. I hid all that with an uncaring, unaffected, huh-uh-I’m-perfectly-in-control little laugh. I clamped my teeth and shoved my fingers through my damp, uncombed hair. “Well, Doctor, I should’ve known you’d turn me down flat. It’s just been that kinda day.”

Again, he was silent. Again, I was pissed. I guess I needed somebody to hold on to, and he was balking, wanting to analyze me instead. Maybe I could go down on the dock and pick up Tyler.

“Why don’t you tell me exactly what went down that night with you and your husband and Harve? The newspaper clippings aren’t very detailed.”

“They always seemed plenty detailed to me.”

But the question brought awful pictures back into my mind of my little Zack lying lifelessly in my arms, of Harve on life support. I shut out those images and perched on the back of a white divan, where he could get a better glimpse of the lacy, low-cut gown underneath the red robe. He obliged me by glancing at my cleavage, then looked at me with a question in his eyes that asked why I was baiting him, and I wondered the same thing. It wasn’t my style. Well, maybe it was sometimes. I felt out of control of myself, and I was so angry inside that I couldn’t stop with the attitude.

He sat down in a big leather armchair and crossed his long legs, the picture of serene, controlled manhood.

“If you’re so interested in my story, maybe I ought to just set up house here with you and let you play Freud games all day and all night. Is that what you had in mind? Maybe I could be the star in your next book, huh, Doctor Black? What do you say?”

His jaw got all tight and started flexing, and I thought I’d finally gotten to him, until he spoke, still calm, still pleasant. “I think you hide behind jokes and sarcasm like you’re doing right now, so you can bottle up all the real emotions you’re feeling. Then you feel nice and dead inside, just the way you like it. You’ve got defense mechanisms built on top of defense mechanisms until you can’t function like a normal person. I think you’ve made your job your whole life, because you won’t let anybody within two inches of your feelings. And now your job’s been pulled out from under you, and you feel alone and lonely and miserable and angry, but that’s the way you like it because you’re so full of survivor guilt, you think you deserve the bad things that happen to you.”

I didn’t like hearing any of that. “Here we go at long last: Super Psychiatrist flexes his muscles and heaves a five-cent diagnosis over his head. Bravo, Doctor.” I clapped my hands.

“That’s right. I am a psychiatrist, and that’s exactly what you need at the moment, whether you can admit it or not. You need to talk this out and let someone help you before it completely destroys you.”

“I’m not going to weep and rend my clothes, if that’s what you’re thinking. Sorry, been there, done that.”

He frowned. “Why don’t you just explain why we’re going through all this? You came down here to find me; you obviously want to talk about it.”

The fury inside me was building and I hated the way it felt. I hated the way I was acting. Why didn’t I just leave and go back to my room? Or just get dressed and go home? Maybe I should talk about it. Maybe it would put out the magma fire burning under my breastbone.

“Okay, what would you like to hear first about the worst night of my life? Would you like to hear how my ex-husband looked after my 9mm blew a hole through his chest? Or would you like to hear how the lady who was keeping my baby that night looked after my husband beat her to death with a baseball bat and kidnapped my baby?”

Black didn’t move a muscle, and our eyes held as my voice involuntarily dropped to a whisper. “Or how Harve looked hooked up on all those tubes and monitors at Cedar Sinai, with a bullet lodged in his spine? Or, most terrible of all, how Zackie, my little baby boy—”

I couldn’t go on, not about my son, and I felt my arms and legs begin to tremble. Sick inside, I clamped my eyes shut and wrapped my arms around my shoulders, my anger dying away. I tried to get hold of the pain that held me every day and every night when I thought of him lying limp and tiny in my arms, and of the way his blood soaked my uniform on the way to the hospital, his big blue eyes staring up at me, hurt and confused, until they closed forever.

I felt Black’s hand on my back, and I stiffened under his touch.

“Please, Claire, let me help you get through this.”

“You’ll never see me cry.” I don’t know why I always said that, but somehow it helped keep me dry-eyed and in control. “Nothing will ever make me cry again.” I shivered all over and felt cold, suddenly drained of anger and energy and even pain. “I’m just so tired, that’s all, tired of thinking about everything. Can you help me not to think about it? That’s what I need from you.”

He pulled me into his arms, and he felt strong and solid and like a haven to sink into. I put my arms around his waist and rested my cheek on his chest, then held him tightly, needing someone to cling to just for a little while. He stroked my hair and turned my face up and put his lips on my mouth, soft, tentative. My arms came up around his neck, and we kissed until it deepened into a release of our mutual emotion. Then the bad things came spiraling back into my head, and I pushed away.

Instantly, he dropped his grip on me and stepped back, giving me space. I kept my palms braced against his chest, separated but still connected. “I can’t do this,” I said. “People who love me end up dead, or hurt, or missing. I’m dangerous…You need to know that.”

“It’s already too late,” he said.

We stared at each other a long moment, and then I went back into his arms. After that, neither of us thought much about anything but the warm, naked skin under our mouths and hands, and I held on to him desperately throughout the heat and urgency of our lovemaking, as if he were my only lifeline to sanity.

Later in his bed, Black slept peacefully, his arms loosely around me. I lay awake, worried, but glad, too. Tonight we had made our relationship even more complicated than ever, but I’d opened up to him in a way I never had to anyone else, and it felt surprisingly good. The knot in my chest had loosened a little, and when Black turned in his sleep and pulled me closer, I closed my eyes and snuggled into his bare chest. Who knew, maybe he could help me come to terms with myself. Maybe tomorrow I might tell him about the horrible nightmare that was my life.