Come Hell or High Desire (14 page)

Chapter Nineteen

Tuesday, 1:28 a.m.

The world had gone crazy in forty-eight hours. Sloane had just pulled into her parking
lot when she’d heard of Zack’s escape on the radio. Now, her windshield wipers slapped
at the rain, sending it flying as quickly as it landed. The black tourmaline seemed
to burn a hole in her jeans pocket. Somehow, she’d gone from easygoing business owner
to card-carrying psychic freak show whose boyfriend had a price on his head.

Not that said fugitive would consider himself her boyfriend.

Not that Sloane No-Strings-Attached Swift had ever called any other man her boyfriend
before.

Awesome.
She’d clearly lost touch with reality sometime around seven o’clock Sunday morning.

“Where are you when I need you, Tori?” She gunned it southbound on University Street.
Shouldn’t need to worry about getting pulled over. All available law enforcement was
on a man-hunt for Zack.

The only way to help him was to find out who’d killed Dallan O’Neill. How was she
supposed to do that?
CSI
groupie she was not. She was more of a
Modern Family
kind of girl, but she doubted any witty one-liners would score her re-entry to Ann’s
condo. Especially since the investigators were still on site. No, there was no way
she’d get into Ann’s.

So, time to see Colette O’Neill. She was willing to bet her livelihood that the put-together
society wife knew something about her husband’s illicit activities.

The rambling, brick rectory was set so far back from the church proper that Sloane
normally wouldn’t have seen it at this time of night. Yet, as she approached the five
block campus, not only was the rectory ablaze with light, the church was as well.
Cars filled the parking lot like it was broad daylight on a Sunday morning.

She parked and ran through the rain into the church. A tall, trim woman in matching
green slacks and pumps approached her, her thin lips pursing in a web of vertical
lines as she quickly assessed Sloane from head to toe.

Yeah, soaked shorts, frayed sweatshirt, and sexed-up espadrilles weren’t exactly proper
church attire.
Too bad.

The woman apparently came to the same conclusion for she continued forward as though
she’d never faltered, her arms outstretched. “Come dear. I’ll find you a towel. We
have sandwiches in the fellowship hall. I’m Betty.” The older woman led Sloane down
the hallway toward a growing crescendo of noise. “Can you imagine? Dear Lord, it’s
a sorry world.” Betty tucked Sloane in line with the others who’d come to eat, gossip,
and offer support amid the scandal.

Sloane turned to find Betty already melting into the crowd. There had to be a least
fifty people in the room. Sloane checked her watch, feeling uneasy.
One-thirty-five a.m.
At this time of night, how had all these people found out about a murder that had
happened less than three hours ago? It hadn’t been on TV. Police scanners? The radio?
Seriously, had they organized a phone chain? And why were they all
here?

The line ahead of Sloane fractured and Colette walked through, a modern day Moses
parting the Red Sea, her face a fascinating display of beautiful sorrow. Sloane had
never seen anyone’s sadness so poignantly lovely. This lass apparently didn’t have
the ugly-cries in her.

Sloane approached Colette amid her entourage of veteran church ladies. Before they
could circle the wagons around her, Sloane reached out and touched Colette’s starched
white shirt sleeve. Her perfectly made-up eyes tracked slowly to Sloane’s face. Something
in those blue depths made her snatch her hand away.

“Excuse me, Mrs. O’Neill. I am deeply sorry to hear the news about your husband. Might
I have a word with you in private?”

A veteran church lady in beige bounced her apple belly in front of Colette. “Who are
you? If you’re with the media—”

Colette patted the woman’s arm. “It’s okay, Edith. This is Miss Swift. She’s a friend
of the poor, unfortunate Ann Samuel.” Edith gasped and looked at Sloane with intermingled
horror and interest. Colette brought a hand to her face, her diamond ring glittering
under the harsh fluorescent lights. “Oh dear, please tell me the body they discovered
at the river isn’t hers?”

A knife twisted in Sloane’s gut. “No. I’m here because…” She looked at the assembled
crowd and wanted to scream. “I know this is a horrendous time for you, but please,
I need to talk to you. In private.”

Frowning, Edith placed her hand on the ledge of her stomach. “Look here, miss, you
should have the good sense not to barge in here in Mrs. O’Neill’s time of grieving.”

Colette wiped at her tears without smudging her make-up. “It’s all right. I need to
help if I can. It’s what Dallan would want me to do. Please excuse us.”

Sloane followed Colette into a darkened room. The door shut with a soft click. In
less time than it took for her eyes to adjust, Colette had switched on a delicate
swan-shaped lamp. In the soft light, she stood framed in front of a life-sized oil
painting depicting Jesus in The Divine Mercy.

“What do you want with me?” Colette’s pretense of sorrow was suddenly gone.

Sloane’s stomach turned over. “I am so sorry about your husband.”

“So you said. But why are you here?”

Sloane pressed her palms together in front of her body. “I have reason to believe
Dallan and Ann were having an affair. I’d like to know if you can give me any information
that might help us find her.”

“How do you know she wasn’t already baked by the side of the river?”

Sloane shivered at her rancor. Colette hadn’t even flinched at the admission of her
husband’s adultery. Sloane felt the urge to bolt. The black tourmaline in her pocket
warmed her. “The victim isn’t Ann. How long were they involved?”

“Who knows? Dallan’s always had any number of women. I know nothing of Ann.”

“But you knew they were involved.”

Colette threw her hands up. “Anyone could see how she made such a fool of herself
over him. She’s a child playing a dangerous game.” She moved to stand behind the finely
carved mahogany desk. She looked down at its smooth surface, unmarred by even a single
stack of papers. With the pink toile parson’s chair and voluminous silk curtains,
the space looked like a designer showroom.

Sloane’s skin crawled, but she waited. Colette’s hand clasped a crystal paperweight
until her knuckles stretched taut. Sloane’s mind started to strum, blue and white
lights pulsing in her peripheral vision.

Oh my God, it’s the missing Swarovski rhino!

How did it get here? Did Ann bring it, or had Dallan? She nearly asked the question
out loud—but what if Colette retaliated and destroyed it?
Bide your time.
Maybe she could salvage things with Benjamin, after all.

When Colette finally spoke, she had an edge that cut through the hazy blue in Sloane’s
mind. “If I were you, I’d keep my nose out of everyone’s dirty laundry. Dallan’s dead.
I don’t know why, but that selfish son of a bitch ruined my life!”

Veins stood out in Colette’s temples, and she seemed to have forgotten that she wasn’t
alone as she banged the crystal rhino against the desk. Sloane nearly fainted.

“So much for the big congregation in California. He couldn’t keep it in his pants,
but I never thought he’d get someone pregnant. He told me he’d fix it. He
told
me.”

Sloane’s skin felt like it was floating over a stormy sea. “How did you learn about
the pregnancy?”

“My trouble-shooter.”

Oh Lord, someone else?
“Who?”

But Colette only laughed until she burst into tears. Real ones this time.

It wasn’t pretty.

Knowing she wouldn’t get any more answers from her, Sloane felt in her pocket for
the black tourmaline, rubbing her thumb across the smooth surface of the rock. She
cast her eyes around the room and edged toward the desk. Colette had collapsed in
her chair, lost in a world of stolen dreams and failed aspirations.

Maybe she wouldn’t notice.

Now or never.
This is for you, Tori
.

Sloane heaved an exaggerated sigh and clumsily reached toward the tissue box on a
small side table, overturning a hand-painted cloche bell jar in the process. Colette
lunged toward the glass, but it smashed to pieces. Colette kneeled on the floor, her
purple pencil skirt nearly splitting at the seams.

“You idiot! That was an eighteenth century French masterpiece! Get out! And stay away
from me!”

Without another word, Sloane slipped from the room, the vision of Colette on the floor
gathering the shattered pieces of the cloche in her arms like a mother cradling her
child. It was more honest emotion than her performance over her husband’s murder for
her parishioners.

Something was very wrong here.

Sloane sprinted from the building like it was the seat of evil, the Swarovski crystal
heavy and ominous in her pocket.

Chapter Twenty

So this is what prey feels like.
Zack’s eyes swept the alleyway looking for moving shadows as he killed the El Camino’s
headlights. Samuel’s Construction headquarters was in the building two blocks north,
but he didn’t dare park and enter through the front doors. There’d be at least one
unmarked police vehicle staking out his building.

Thank God there was a hidden underground passageway built a century ago when the company’s
three-story building had been a hotel.

He’d never forget the first time John had taken him through the tunnel that led from
the mechanical room in the Samuel’s building to the back of a Chinese restaurant two
blocks away. John had won the decrepit hotel in a poker game nearly twenty years ago.
He’d purchased the Chinese restaurant only three years later.

And so the passageway belonged to him.

John had crowed like a teenage prankster as they’d descended into the dark bowels
of the city, regaling Zack with sordid stories of the tunnel’s past. The labyrinth
consisted of a main passageway with several offshoots that, once upon a time, had
led to nicely-appointed, private rooms used for security, gambling, drinking, and
whoring in Prohibition days by thrill-seekers, visiting dignitaries, mob bosses, and
upper-class snobs with the right amount of coin. There was a ridiculously small, secret
elevator behind John’s bookcase paneling as well, but he’d rebuffed all of John’s
coaxing to stuff himself into that death hole.

John had been so proud to own such a seedy piece of history.

A few years back, a writer had asked to see the tunnel, but John told her it had been
destroyed during the building’s remodel.

Of course it hadn’t.

John had loved the secrecy of it. And though he’d never admit it, the romance of it.
He told Zack someday he’d be glad to have it.

Yep.

Zack slipped from the car and unlocked the restaurant’s heavy steel door. Inside,
sweet and spicy scents made his stomach clench even though he’d eaten the half sandwich
Archie had sent with him. He ran through the kitchen toward the cleaning closet. Soft
light filtered through the narrow window above a row of hooks that held a broom, mops,
and heavy linen tablecloths that hung like teepees in front of the hidden passageway
door.

Running his hand along a high ledge searching for a flashlight, he knocked a broom
against a tin bucket, the clatter exploding in the small space. He froze, half expecting
flood lights and armed officers to jump him from the outer room.

Four seconds.

Nothing but the hum of appliances.

Eight seconds.

Drunken laughter in the alley.

Ten.

The drilling bass of the nightclub half a block away, its door propped open to reduce
interior pollution.

Or offer a quick escape for the under-aged.

Twenty.

Flashlight in hand, he pulled back the tablecloths to reveal a wooden pocket door
that concealed a small reinforced steel door and vault lock. He slid the wood aside
and bent down to shine the flashlight on the lock.
Thirty-eight, thirty-two, thirty-eight.
He smiled, remembering John’s ideal woman’s curves.

The miniature door squeaked open to expose a dim stairwell barely wide enough for
a man’s shoulders. With a hiss, he brought an arm across his face to shield the dank
basement odor that blitzed him with memories.

He was suddenly eleven years old.

“Please, don’t make me stay down there again.” His throat ached with a cough that
never went away. Sudden heat across his cheek, the force of his mother’s slap spinning
him toward the opposite wall. He staggered to remain upright, trying to get his eyes
to focus, but he slid down the peeling yellow wallpaper with its tiny purple flowers.
He focused on the flowers when another fit of coughing rattled his chest and sent
an arrow of pain from his jaw to his eye sockets.

The flower petals looked so soft. He wished he could shrink down and wrap himself
in them.

Fingernails scraped at his skull, a fist yanking him upright by his hair. “Yer momma
wants you downstairs, that’s where you’ll go, you pussy wimp.”

His mouth worked as he looked up at his mother, but he couldn’t get anything past
his lips besides a mortifying squeak.

Save me. Please don
’
t do this. Please love me.

Her gaunt frame turned away. Her boyfriend, who always brought the white powder they
snorted, laughed. “Ya ain’t got no daddy, but at least ya got me to show ya how to
be a man.”

The boyfriend began dragging him by the hair to the downstairs door.

Something in Zack snapped. A volcanic heat surged through his body, throwing off his
dogging weakness and ever-present chill. He lashed out at the wiry man, legs kicking,
arms swinging. He landed several hits, but the cokehead didn’t even seem to feel them.
When they got to the doorway, Zack spread-eagled his legs, fingers curling around
the sliver-riddled door jam.

Sweat broke out all over his body and his muscles locked as he scrutinized the wet
darkness below him. “Don’t wanna go down there! Don’t make me go. I’ll do anything!
Please!”

He looked over his shoulder in time to see the fist. As the blow landed he went flying,
weightless for an instant above the cinderblock stairs.

He woke, shaking, nauseous, in the darkness, small feet with tiny claws running over
an exposed ankle. He swallowed his scream, knowing it would be pointless. He bent
over and vomited bitter bile.

Two hunger-filled days later, the gruff, eccentric woman with the wild white hair
across the street had finally turned his mother in. As an adult, Zack realized she’d
frequently hired him to mow her lawn so she could keep tabs on him. He’d thought she
was lonely. His mother thought she was senile, but had been grateful for the cash.

The crazy old woman had been his angel.

After a short stint in the hospital, social workers put him in a foster home where
he probably would’ve been better off, but at the time, he’d wanted nothing to do with
any of them. The unknowns lurking in tidy houses were far scarier than life on the
streets where he had Archie to keep him company.

Christ, he was cold. Bitter cold straight to his marrow.

Zack now ran a shaking hand over his face and tried to supplant John’s grizzled, beloved
features across the desolate landscape of what should have been his childhood.

Come on, son. Put one foot right in front t’other. Before you know it, you’ve come
clear across the barren land. But you gotta start with that first step
. He could almost feel John’s bear paw clap him on the shoulder the way it always
had when he needed a bit of encouragement.

John’s tunnel. John’s tunnel. John’s been through here.
He’d be okay.

Zack descended two steps and pulled the door shut behind him with a sickening clank.
Once he reached the lower landing, there was more room. Yet his torso burned as he
sprinted. The flashlight’s beam bounced off the muted gray concrete, highlighting
cobwebs, rubble, and detritus left behind by industrious rodents. The faster he ran,
the more time slowed. The only sound in the tomblike silence…

His heartbeat.

Zack didn’t bother wiping the clammy sweat from his face as he rounded the last bend
before the passageway drew up into the opposite staircase.
Almost there.
He shuddered as he passed three narrow storage doors inset in the tunnel. Two of
them were crisscrossed with cobwebs. Gooseflesh broke out on his body.

Hurry. Gotta find Ann
.

And her baby
.

He stumbled on the stairs, his breath ragged.

Don’t run from your past. We all have our demons. Face ’em with yer God-given grit.
How else you gonna get whole?
How many times had he heard John’s lecture? It hadn’t meant much until this moment.
John, help me now
. The flashlight shook as he tried to remember the code for the door. A combination
of Ann’s birth month and day, plus one other number.

What the hell was it?
He sucked air into his nostrils and tried again.

Hurry
.

His skin tingled on the back of his neck. He spun the dial forward, back, forward.

No good.

Mother of God.
The tunnel was closing in on him.

Chest so tight. Can’t breathe.

Hurry
.

A sound—a moan—wound around him. His own? His stomach pitched and tumbled. He was
going to vomit.

Out. Need out. Help me!

He fist flew up to pound on the door.

Zaaaack
…

His arm froze mid-air as her voice whispered through his mind. Her rich vanilla scent
as real in his nose as when she’d lain so exquisitely in his arms. He looked behind
him, the flashlight’s beam illuminating only the time-worn concrete walls. He was
still alone.

Yet, not.

Sloane
.

Somehow she’d crossed the distance between them. Touched him. His shoulders slumped,
his head dipped. The flashlight shone down on his work boots.

He imagined the velvet of her cheek, her parted lips and haunting eyes as she’d made
love to him. A new warmth spread through every muscle, every cell of his body. His
heartbeat slowed. The awful tightness in his chest unwound.

He raised the flashlight to the dial.
Six, twenty, nine.

The door swung open. He switched off the flashlight and turned back to face the yawning
tunnel. He saw himself as a boy—angry, vulnerable, sad—in the shadows cast by the
weak light filtering through the single mechanical room window.

In the next heartbeat, he tasted a burgeoning liberation from all of it.

Ironic. But there it was.

The first blush of emancipation from the sting of his childhood while in flight from
the local authorities.

Shit
.

But they hadn’t caught him.

Yet.