High Crimes (31 page)

“Claire, babe,” he said. His eyes were sad, his face anguished. “I shouldn’t have done that. I’m sorry. I just need you to listen to me.”

She punched out a few numbers, then realized she hadn’t pressed the power button.

“Sweetie,” he said, and leaned over toward her. He swatted the cell phone out of her hands. It clattered against the tile floor. “Listen. We can be a family again. Put the past behind you. Put it behind you. Think of Annie.”

Weeping, unable to focus her eyes, she slunk across the kitchen floor and grabbed the cell phone; he came at her again, kicked it out of her hand.

Pain knifed up her arm. She scrambled to her feet, tried to stumble toward the door, but he blocked her way.

“Understand, Claire, that if you force me to, I’ll just disappear again. I’ve done it before, I can do it again. You know it.” His tone was reasonable, calm, in control. The same way he reassured her about problems around the house he’d take care of, a toilet that wouldn’t stop flushing, a lamp that had burned out, a mouse in the kitchen. “I want you to think of Annie. Think of what’s best for her.”

“Let me go,” she said. “You son of a bitch.”

“I know you’ll do the right thing. I’d never,
ever
do anything to harm my little dolly if I didn’t absolutely have to. Never. But I want you to keep in mind that everything in the world that’s precious to you—your sister, your daughter … You can never be sure. I’ll disappear, and you might not even recognize me, and you and your sister and your daughter will never be safe.” She stared at him in horror, realizing that this was no idle threat, that he meant this. That he would indeed take from her the most precious thing in the world if he had to. Because he was incapable of feeling guilt or remorse. He could do it easily. She shivered again.

“That’s a special kind of hell, always having to worry like that,” he said. “You don’t want that. Believe me.”

The doorbell rang, two chimes that echoed like carillon bells. She squeezed past him and ran to open the door.

Behind her, she could hear the chuff of his pants as he came after her. She opened the door, only then realizing how fast her heart was beating.

The pistol looked tiny in Devereaux’s massive hand.

“Didn’t I tell you to block your caller ID?” Devereaux said. “I get a call, a hangup, and it’s your number. I hate hangups. What’s going on?”

“Everything’s fine,” Tom said. “Everything’s under control.”

Devereaux looked at Claire questioningly. “What’s up, Claire?”

Claire stared at him, her eyes desperate. “Ray,” she said.

And suddenly there was a series of explosions from somewhere behind Devereaux,
one-two-three-four
, and the front of his white shirt was stained blood-red. Claire screamed. Tom’s body coiled, his eyes alert. Devereaux groaned, grabbed his immense gut, then toppled forward and hit the floor. A great whoosh of air escaped his lungs, like an anguished sigh.

Screaming, she threw herself to the floor next to him, cradled his head. Saw he was alive but feeble with pain. Bright-red blood seeped down the front of his shirt.

Now she saw, entering the front door, Colonel James Hernandez, holding a large pistol. Hernandez was dressed in jeans and a sweatshirt.

“Hey, Ronny, buddy,” Hernandez said. “Just like old times, huh?’”

Tom’s stance relaxed. “Fuck
you
, old times,” he said. “What did you have to go and testify about that dog stuff for, Jimbo? And that torture shit.”

Hernandez entered the foyer. “Come on, bud,” he said. “You knew Lentini’s fake tape would get the case thrown out. You never had anything to worry about, no matter what I said. I just didn’t want them going after
me
. And where’s my thank-you? I just saved your life.” He held up his left palm and Tom gave him a high-five.

“Like I saved yours in Nicaragua, Jimmy,” Tom said, with a grin.

Claire looked up, watched them in disbelief.

“Jimmy, you deal with the fat fuck here. Get this mess cleaned up. Claire and I have some business to discuss. Then you better get out of here. You’ve got a lot of people looking for you.” He put an arm around Hernandez. “That stunt with the jeep out in Maryland—you almost got my wife here killed. That was stupid. I needed her.”

“That wasn’t me,” Hernandez said. “Maybe some other Special Forces guys, but not—”

A sudden movement. A glint of light off Devereaux’s gun as his hand suddenly moved and a bullet exploded in Hernandez’s head. Hernandez sagged to his feet, quite obviously dead.

Tom spun around, startled by the gunfire, and, when he saw what had happened, he lunged toward his dead comrade.

At that moment, Claire felt something cold and hard nudge her, and realized that Devereaux was pressing his pistol into her right hand.

Tom saw the gun in her hand. He shook his head in disgust. “Sorry, Claire,” he said. His voice was flat, taunting. “No one’s here to help you now.”

She hesitated, looked back at him as if through fog. Her mouth moved but she could not speak.

She raised the pistol, getting to her feet as she did so. She could barely get her fingers around the grip to reach the trigger. Using both hands to steady it, she aimed at Tom’s chest.

Suddenly Tom reached down, grabbed Hernandez’s pistol, swept it upward until it was pointing at her. He smiled sweetly. His face transformed back into that of the wonderful man she had loved. “You don’t want to hurt me,” he said.

She shuddered. Her eyes would not focus.

His smile slowly faded. He was his old self—his new self? “You don’t know how to use that thing,” he said.

“We’ll see,” she said.

He watched her intently, then pulled the trigger.

There was a click.

She saw the realization in his eyes that the gun was out of bullets, that Hernandez had fired the last four rounds. He dropped the gun to the foyer floor and looked around, obviously searching for something to use in its place.

“Stop right there, Tom,” she said.

“You’re not going to fire that,” he said, his eyes still roaming the foyer. “You’re a lawyer. You work within the system. You play by the rules.” His body seemed to be coiling again. “I know you’ll do the right thing. For Annie.”

She saw his snake eyes a light on something. She followed his line of sight, saw it was a small marble sculpture on the hall table, and as he suddenly darted forward toward the table, she inhaled, then breathed out noisily. She shuddered. “You’re right,” she said, and she pulled the trigger. The gun recoiled backward, almost flew from her hand. A bright strawberry of blood appeared on his white shirt at the center of his chest. He sagged to the floor and emitted a horrible, low, animallike sound. She aimed again, and fired. The bullet exploded in his chest. His eyes stared, unseeing, and she knew he was dead.

Her hands began to tremble first, then her shoulders. Her entire body shook violently. She too slumped to the floor.

A great sob welled up in the back of her throat. The floodgates had opened, and the sobs had broken loose and were coming in powerful waves.

She saw that she was kneeling in a pool of Tom’s blood, seeping from the wounds in his chest. The fine gray wool of her skirt darkened as the stain spread.

In the distance the wail of sirens grew steadily louder. She caught a sulfurous waft of cordite, then the smell of blood, pungent and metallic, and as she cried she thought of Annie, who’d been no less trusting than she, whose life would never be the same, and yet, at the same moment, for the first time, she felt at peace.

Read on for an excerpt from Joseph Finder’s next book

BURIED SECRETS

Coming soon in hardcover from

St. Martin’s Press

Alexa stirred
and shifted in her bed.

It was the throbbing in her forehead that had awakened her, a rhythmic pulsing that had steadily grown stronger and stronger, tugging her into consciousness.

Knife-stabs of pain pierced the backs of her eyeballs.

It felt like someone was pounding an ice pick into the top of her skull and had just broken through the fragile shell, sending cracks throughout the lobes of her brain right behind her forehead.

Her mouth was terribly dry. Her tongue cleaved to the roof of her mouth. She tried to swallow.

Where was she?

She couldn’t see anything
.

The darkness was absolute. She wondered whether she’d gone blind.

But maybe she was dreaming.

It didn’t feel like a dream, though. She remembered … drinking at Slammer with Taylor Armstrong. Something about her iPhone. Laughing about something. Everything else was blurry, clouded.

She had no recollection of how she’d gotten home, to her dad’s house, how she’d ended up in her bed with the shades drawn.

She inhaled a strange musty odor. Unfamiliar.
Was
she at home in bed? It didn’t smell like her room in the Manchester house. The sheets didn’t have that fabric-softener fragrance she liked.

Had she crashed at someone’s house? Not Taylor’s, she didn’t think. Her house smelled like lemon furniture polish, and her sheets were always too crisp. But where else could she be? She had no memory of … of
anything
, really, after laughing with Taylor about something on her iPhone …

She only knew that she was sleeping on top of a bed. No sheets covering her. They must have slid off her during the night. She preferred being under a sheet, even on the hottest days when there wasn’t any air conditioning. Like that awful year at Marston-Lee in Colorado, where there was no air conditioning in the summer and they made you sleep in bunk beds and she had to bribe her bitch of a roommate for the top one. The bottom bunk made her feel trapped and anxious.

Her hands were at her sides. She fluttered her fingers, feeling for the hem of a sheet, and then the back of her right hand brushed against something smooth yet solid. With her fingertips she felt some kind of satiny material over something hard, like the slatted wooden safety rails on the sides of her bunk bed at Marston-Lee that kept you from falling out of bed and crashing to the floor.

Was she back at Marston-Lee, or just dreaming that she was?

Yet if she were dreaming, would she have such an incredible headache?

She knew she was awake. She just knew it.

But she could still see nothing. Total perfect darkness, not even a glimmer of light.

She could smell the stale air and feel the soft yielding mattress below her and felt the soft pajamas on her legs … her fingertips scuttled over the soft fabric on her thighs, which didn’t feel like the sweatpants she usually wore to bed. She was wearing something different. Not sweatpants, not pajamas. Like hospital scrubs, maybe?

Was she in a hospital?

Had she gotten hurt, maybe been in an accident?

The ice pick was driving deeper and deeper into the gray matter of her brain, and the pain was indescribable, and she just wanted to roll over and put a pillow over her head. She raised her knees to gently torque her body and flip over, slowly and gently so her head didn’t crack apart …

And her knees hit something.

Something hard.

Startled, she lifted her head, almost an involuntary reflex, and her forehead and the bridge of her nose collided with something hard, too.

Both hands flew outward, striking hard walls. A few inches on either side. Her knees came up again, maybe three inches, and once again they struck a solid wall.

No.

Fingers skittering up the sides and then the top, satin-covered walls barely three inches from her lips.

Even before her brain was able to make sense of it, some animal instinct within her realized, with a dread that crept over her and turned her numb and ice-cold.

She was in a box.

She could touch the end of the box with her toes.

She started breathing fast. Short, panicked gasps. Unable to get any air into her lungs.

Her heart raced.

She shuddered, but the shuddering didn’t stop.

She gasped for air, but couldn’t get more than a few inches of air into the very top of her lungs.

She tried to sit up but her forehead struck the ceiling once again. Couldn’t move. Couldn’t change positions.

She panted faster and faster, heart juddering, sweat breaking out all over her body, hot and cold at the same time.

This couldn’t be real. She
had
to be in some kind of nightmare: the worst nightmare she’d ever had. Trapped in a box. Like a …

Satin lining. Walls of wood, maybe steel.

Like being in a coffin.

Her hands twitched, kept knocking against the hard walls, as she gasped over and over again: “
No
 …
no
 …
no
…”

She’d forgotten all about her headache.

That light-headed feeling that accompanied the hardness in her stomach and the coldness throughout her body, which she always felt before she passed out.

And she was gone.