The Sexiest Man Alive (31 page)

Perhaps spooked by the eerie surroundings, the gang members did one more cursory pass through the stones, then started back down the hill. When the last of them had left, Ben and Mazie let out their breath, stretched, and sat up, side to side, resting their backs against the mossy, loofah-rough headstone.

“Where’s Eddie taking Shayla?” Mazie whispered.

“To what Magenta insisted on calling ‘the rendezvous point.’ It’s a spot on the north side of the asylum property where there’s a break in the fence. That’s where Eddie and I broke in. Oh, and that’s where we found Muffin.”

“He’s okay? What a brave little guy—I bet he was going for help.”

“Muffin? Hah! He was barking at a chipmunk when we found him.”

Ben knew he ought to be coming up with self-defense plans—making a spear from cracked headstones or twisting vines into a garroting rope, but he couldn’t tear himself away from Mazie. He drew her against him, running his hands along her bare, goose-pimpled arms, smelling her hair.

“Look,” Mazie said, staring upside down at the headstone above them, reading the inscription. “They misspelled
angels
. And
thy
.”

“Cut-rate stone masons.”

“Poor Ida. Buried here all alone with a misspelled tombstone. No husband, no kids.”

“Do you want kids?” Ben asked.

“I think so.”

“Want to get started now?”

Mazie laughed deep in her throat, a kind of husky gurgle that went straight to Ben’s balls.

“We’re sitting on a grave, we’re being stalked by murderous gang members, and you’re thinking about
sex
?”

“You make it sound like that’s all I ever think about. I think about lots of things. Like for instance, like—”

His heart stammered
,
stopped
,
stuttered to life
.
Spit it out
,
chickenshit—if those morons shoot you in the next ten seconds
,
you’ll die knowing you at least said it
.

“—like—like—”

She whacked him on the back.

“—like, I love you, Mazie.”

There! It was finally out. He immediately felt better. It was like pregame nerves, when you thought you were going to throw up, but once you got into the game the jitters disappeared. He studied her face, trying to gauge her reaction. Pity? Revulsion? It looked mostly like shock.

“I—uhh—thought you knew that,” he said.

“How would I know that? You only said it that one time, and you never said it again.”

“Of course I love you. I loved you since the first time I saw you, in that courtroom. I even loved you when you told me I needed glasses. And when you rejected my fish. And when I thought you hated my guts. Why else would I risk my own neck to lead those slimeballs on a wild-goose chase, which was—I don’t want to say noble and self-sacrificing, but if the medal fits …”

Mazie sounded as though she was choking, trying to suppress a belly laugh.

“Go ahead and laugh,” Ben said, aware that he was making a fool of himself but not caring. “This is my version of a courtship ritual, Mazie—my mating dance. If this place weren’t filled with trigger-happy thugs, I’d run around in a circle flapping my arms and whooping.”

“Oh, stop—I’m getting a stitch in my side.” She was gasping.

“So all those heroics—don’t forget me flying to rescue you in a helicopter, pretty big-time romantic, huh?—don’t they seem to you evidence of a man who’s completely, insanely, batshit, head over heels …”

His mouth refused to stop. He just blundered on, not knowing what the next word to dribble off his lips would be. “… outrageously, stupidly, wildly in love? With you,” he finished, sweat popping on his brow.

But no—he wasn’t finished yet. The love thing was just the warm-up. Now for the question. The Big Question.
Breathe, you idiot
. “Will you marry me, Mazie?”

Not the most romantic spot. They were sprawled atop the grave of a maiden lady who’d died more than a hundred years ago and had been buried with a misspelled tombstone. As proposals went, though, it wasn’t the lamest. His best buddy back in Quebec had popped the question via a plane towing a banner above a baseball stadium and the name on the banner hadn’t been his girlfriend’s name. Bob Schultz, his cameraman buddy, had proposed to his girl atop a rooftop garden, after which he’d fainted and fallen off the roof. His stitches hadn’t come out until after the wedding.

Ben looked at Mazie, waiting for her answer, unsure what it would be, because with Mazie, you never knew.

“Ben, I—”

He waited, aware suddenly of all the reasons she was going to say no.

“I’ve got to pee,” she said.

“Not exactly the response I was looking for.”

“It’s your own fault,” she hissed. “For making me laugh so hard.”

“So, just go in the grass.”

“It’s not as simple for females. Turn your back.”

“Mazie, I’m about to become your fiancé—I hope—it’s okay if I see you pee. Wait—don’t do anything until I check that the coast is clear. Notice how self-sacrificing I am here, risking my neck to make sure my woman is—”

“Shut up and turn around.”

“Wait—where are you going?” Ben said in alarm as Mazie scuttled away on hands and knees, dangerously exposing herself to lurking Skulls.

“I can’t pee on Ida’s grave.”

“She won’t care.”

“It’s disrespectful.”

He turned his head, heard a soft hiss, and turned back just in time to get a flash of her naked butt
—Thank you, God; now I can die happy
—before she pulled up her panties. Granny panties. Dear God, he loved them.

“What happened to your jeans?” he asked when she crawled back into his waiting arms.

“I had on a skirt.” She snuggled up against his chest, sending his heart rate spiking. “But it was practically glow-in-the-dark, so I ditched it.”

The night they’d nabbed her husband’s killer, Mazie had slithered out of her evening gown and run around in a bra and panty hose. When she’d been in the Miss Quail Hollow beauty pageant, she’d been reduced to wearing a bra and Bo Peep pantalets. He was planning to marry a woman who inevitably ended up running around in underwear.

Not that this was a bad thing. He kissed her neck. “Still on hold for an answer here.”

She shifted so that she was leaning on his chest, facing him. She gave him a light, teasing kiss on the lips. “I love you, too, Ben. I love you for the way you make me laugh even when I’m mad at you. And you really
are
noble and self-sacrificing and heroic and—I loved you even before you were the sexiest man alive.”

“Umm … we’re not going into that whole thing again, are we?” He kissed the soft, tender skin inside her elbow. “What about the getting married part?”

“I don’t know, Ben. Maybe we’re tripping on adrenaline. Maybe tomorrow—assuming we’re still alive—this won’t seem like such a great idea.”

“Yeah, it will. We can elope. Find a justice of peace who’ll forget about blood tests for an extra fifty bucks—”

“If you think for one minute that Marie-Claire Labeck is going to forgo her only son’s big, fat French-Canadian wedding, you don’t know your mother. She’ll drag you into a church by the heels.”

“You’re probably right,” he said gloomily, imagining his mother’s reaction if he phoned her with the news that they’d gone ahead and gotten married. How was it that Mazie understood his mother better than he did?

“Do you really want to get married?” Mazie asked, and her casual tone didn’t fool him; this was important to her.

“I want to wake up every morning with you next to me for the rest of my—”

His cell phone rang. The sound was loud and clear, because he had it set at maximum volume.

They stared at each other, horror-struck. Frantically Ben fumbled in his pocket, but the phone rang twice before he managed to shut it off.

Down at the bottom of the hill, someone shouted, and then the Skulls were pounding up the slope toward them.

One of the idiots started firing his gun, and Mazie and Ben flung themselves flat onto the grave as bullets peppered the tombstones. Suddenly one of the men howled in pain, probably hit by a ricocheting bullet. Abruptly the shooting stopped.

“Get off me,” Mazie whispered, because Ben had thrown himself on top of her body.

“Shh,” Ben said.

“Shh yourself. What’s happening?”

Peering out through the tall grass, Ben reported, “One of ’em’s down. There’s only two left.”

“Two? Are you sure?”

“Yeah. I think most of them slunk away a few minutes ago. Probably just wanted to save their own skins before the cops got here. Can you hear sirens?”

“Not with you squashing my head into the ground.”

He shifted his weight and then Mazie did hear them—sirens, getting louder by the second, the wails mingled with the deisel horn blasts of fire trucks.

Ben went rigid. “Two guys are coming this way—one of ’em’s real tall and one’s wearing a bandanna.”

“Reaper and Sonny.”

“I think we better move.”

Keeping low to the ground, Ben and Mazie slipped between gravestones until they’d reached the highest point in the cemetery, where the monuments were so ancient they were crumbling. They shrank into the shadows beneath Mortimer Dooley’s gravestone. From this vantage point they could look down on the scene below. The asylum building was visible, now fully engulfed in fire, flames shooting from the tower a hundred feet into the air, a beacon for miles around. Half a dozen police cars were parked on the road and more were arriving every second. They could see gang members racing their bikes toward the entrance gate in a mad scramble to escape. But something was blocking the gate—hard to tell at this distance, but Mazie thought it might be the giant SUV with Papa Yatt inside. It had crashed into the gates, creating a
blockade.

Callously leaving their wounded comrade moaning on the ground, Reaper and Sunny began hunting through the gravestones, carefully inspecting each grave. They were getting closer, their voices carrying clearly.

“I’m telling you—we can’t leave until we take care of the woman,” Sonny said querulously. “She can identify us as her kidnappers. You get nailed for kidnapping, they send you up for life. She’s got to be somewhere close by here—go check those grave markers over on the right—”

“Screw you, Sonny—you don’t get to tell me what to do.”

“Look—she was here!” Sonny bent over Ida Luckett’s grave. “The grass is all crushed.”

“Yeah, I see it.”

Peering out from behind Dooley’s tombstone, Mazie and Ben watched as Reaper, who was only a few yards away, suddenly swiveled, took aim, and shot Sonny in the back. Sonny fell without a sound, landing across Ida’s grave.

“I found out it was you that snitched out Tatum,” Reaper growled. “The cops catch you, you’d snitch me out, too, you little weasel. Good riddance to bad rubbish.”

Stunned at what they’d just witnessed, Ben and Mazie stared at each other, their faces clearly visible beneath a glowing sky. Reaper turned from Sonny’s body and began stalking through the gravestones, his face set, a man intent on finishing an unpleasant job.

“Ma-zie,” he called out in a high, mocking voice. “Ally ally in free. Come out, come out wherever you are.”

Mazie and Ben ducked back behind Dooley’s marker as Reaper moved closer. He passed the grave of Maude Pringell; he kicked over the headstone of Hiram Diefenbacher; he stomped through the tiger lilies surrounding the resting place of Ephraim Murdoch. Now he was only two yards away—in seconds he would be on them.

Labeck flung a chunk of chipped granite from Dooley’s crumbling gravestone. It pinged against the Murdoch grave, causing Reaper to whip around and fire off several fast shots. Ben exploded out from behind Dooley’s stone, launching himself at Reaper from behind, pinning his arms and getting a chokehold around his neck.

Oh, the idiot!
If Ben got himself killed, Mazie thought, she was never going to forgive him! Locked together, the two men lurched around like drunken Frankenstein monsters, Reaper
attempting to break Ben’s grip and bring his weapon up. Shifting his weight, Ben rammed Reaper against the Murdoch grave marker so hard that Mazie heard a bone break. Reaper screamed and the gun shot out of his hand. Mazie was after it in a flash, and if she’d been familiar with firearms, she might actually have threatened Reaper with it, but guns terrified her. Besides, her hands were shaking so much she was afraid she’d accidentally shoot Ben. She flung the deadly-looking thing into a distant patch of weeds.

Reaper plunged an elbow back and jabbed Ben in the ribs, effectively breaking his grip. Squirming around, he punched Ben in the side of the head, sending Ben reeling backward into Dooley’s headstone. Ben used the stone as a launching point, catapulting himself at Reaper with a vicious head butt that bounced the Skull into the Murdoch tombstone. Reaper’s head cracked against the granite and he slid down the marker, unconscious before he hit the ground.

Ben put a hand to his rapidly swelling cheekbone and looked to Mazie, grinning, expecting praise. “Impressive, eh?”

“What’s the matter with you?” Mazie blazed. “Jumping a guy with a gun! He could have killed you! You tell me you love me, you want to marry me, and the first thing you do is get yourself
killed
?”

“Mazie—hey.” He wrapped his arms around her shaking body, held her against him for a long moment. “I’m not dead, okay?”

“You’re so—reckless! I can’t stand to see you putting your life in danger!”

He kissed the top of her head. “How do you think I feel when you do it?”

“He
hit
you! Are you—”

“I hit him harder. Notice who’s knocked out here, Mazie.”

He sounded so pleased with himself, so cocky and macho and so … so typically Labeck! She wasn’t sure whether she wanted to kiss him, yell at him, or hand him a medal.

There was a distant
whap whap whap
sound that grew louder. They both instinctively ducked as a helicopter flew almost directly over their heads, a helicopter with FBI in white lettering on the sides. It was followed a moment later by a black helicopter with no insignia whatsoever.