Jesse (16 page)

There’d been a popping sound. She’d not
looked around very hard because there were always noises going on around the
building. Drills were humming, music blaring and even, on occasion, more often
than she’d thought, yelling at each other. Patty yelled out that it was shots
and Joey still hadn’t understood. When she saw Patty fall—

“She’s dead. Patty is dead, isn’t she?” Jesse
nodded. “I wanted to get away. I didn’t even try to save her I was so afraid. Then
when something hit my leg I fell off the ladder and hit my…the next thing I
knew someone…I think it was Royce, was screaming at me to open my eyes. He’d…I
think he covered up Patty with his suit coat and he was shielding me with his
body. Why would he do that?”

“He’s a great person with a huge heart. Did
you hear anything else, love? Anyone speaking before you and Patty were shot?” He
held her hand while she tried to remember.

“No. Nothing.” She closed her eyes and
drifted away a little until she remembered something silly. “I was seeing
things then. I thought I saw that weird bitch your mom knows. The one from the
fire.”

~~~

Jess sat there for several seconds. Sondra
was there. He’d known that the woman was hiding out and with good reason, but
to try and kill Josephine? He looked up when Royce and Kasey came in the door. Without
saying a word he walked to his brother and pulled him into a huge hug. Royce
held him back and it was a few minutes before they broke apart.

“She told me that you protected her. When
you came upon the scene, she said you’d thrown your…Christ, I’m in love.” Jesse
sat down hard and took several deep breaths.

“I love you too, moron. And if you mean
you love Joey, then, duh. Anyone with half a brain could see that. You always
were a little slow.” Royce pushed his head between his legs and held him there.
“Stay put. You still look like death warmed over.”

Jesse stayed. Not that he had much of a
choice, but he did feel wobbly. He heard Kasey giggle and glared at the floor
before speaking.

“Please don’t be fooling around while
I’m sitting like this. You’ve no idea what my mind it making up listening to
you two.” He pushed against Royce’s hand. “Let me up, dickhead. I’m fine.”

He heard Royce mumble something about
him being ungrateful, but let it slide. He looked over at Josephine still
sleeping and spoke to his brother and sister-in-law. “She remembers. I wanted
to help her, but she did it on her own.” He looked at Daniel and Curtis as they
walked in. “She said she thought she saw Sondra there. She called her the weird
bitch that mom knows, but—”

“I’ll have you know that I know plenty
of weird bitches. Which one are you referring to now?” They all stood up when
their mother entered the room. After each of them kissed her, including Kasey
and Kylie when she came in behind her, Jesse continued his update.

“She said she thought she imagined that woman
from the fire. There was only you and Sondra there, so she must have meant
her.” Jesse paused when Josephine stirred slightly. “Why would she want to
shoot her? She saved the woman’s life.”

“Because she knows too much.” They all
stared at Kylie when she spoke. “Think about it. You said yourself that Sondra
told Joey that you were dead. You also said that she tried to kill her in the
fire. I mean, remember what her throat looked like?”

Jesse shuddered. There were still faint
bruises around her neck. Reaching out, he took Josephine’s hand in his and
nodded. “Okay. So she tries to kill off her in the hopes of what? Resuming her
normal life? Come on, she can’t be that stupid. Why on earth would she even
think that was a possibility?”

Agent Levy, the agent from their offices,
walked in just as Jesse asked. He grinned and handed a file to him. As Jesse
opened it up he was struck first by the man’s impeccable timing and the fact
that he was now sharing information with them that he’d not wanted to before. Jesse
asked him why the change of heart.

“I need her help. And I figure the best
way to get it is to let you all in on what we know. For whatever her reason,
your girlfriend is the key to catching the woman responsible. And it’s not just
the buildings that Miss Foster was in.” Agent Levy took the last seat and
looked around the room. “This room is bugged. And a few of my agents are acting
as nurses and doctors. There is one on every shift. The doctor that you have
looking after Miss Foster is the best we have.”

“I can’t afford that.” Jesse looked at
Josephine, as did the rest of the room when she spoke. “I worked at the
construction site until the project that Wills had me do was finished. And now
that Patty is…is gone. I don’t have the money to pay even this hospital stay,
much less a doctor who is the best.”

Before Jesse could assure her that her
bills were not going to be an issue and neither was her lack of job, Agent Levy
beat him to it. He laid several sheets of paper on the little table and pointed
to them. “Those are full benefits for you. You help us get her or not, and
we’ll still pick up the tab. Without your help, so far we’d have nothing. Had
you not gone into that building to save perfect strangers we’d still be looking
into who was doing it and not why.” He pulled out another sheaf of papers. “That’s
a guarantee that the insurance companies are willing to pay. If you can help
them more by proving fraud then you’ll get a percentage of their savings. Could
be a bundle. This”—he pulled out a folder and laid it next to the other sheets—“is
a list of what we have verses what we think you can answer for us. Like I said,
with or without your help ,we’ll pay your hospital bills.”

“Why?”

Jesse frowned, as did Agent Levy. It was
obvious that neither of them understood her question.

“Why do you need my help? Don’t you have,
like, all kinds of equipment to get her? Or am I going to be your bait?”

Jesse waited for the agent to deny the
question. Waited for him to say, “No, we need you for something else.” Anything
else. But all he did was nod.

“No. Oh hell no. You are so not using
her for bait.” Jesse got up to pace, needing to work off his instant anger or
end up in jail because he killed an agent of the FBI. “I forbid it.”

Jesse heard Royce say, “Fuck” just as Josephine
sat up in bed. He had about half a second to realize his mistake, but it wasn’t
long enough for him to backtrack. He wasn’t sure that he would have, but it was
a moot point now. She was pissed.

“You forbid it? You do. Well hunky dory
for you, Mr. Hunter. I just don’t know how little old me made it in this big,
bad world without you telling me what I can and can’t do.” He didn’t like her
tone or what she was saying.

“Now Josephine—”

“Don’t you dare ‘now Josephine’ me, you
overgrown, pigheaded prick. I’ve been on my own longer than you’ve gone without
a designer suit. You forbid—do you have any idea what it was like living with
my grandmother, who told me every day what I could eat, who I could see? Too
fucking long. And now you want to come in here and make demands on—get out of
here. I mean it, get out or I’ll have…I’ll have that man shoot you in your
precious nuts.”

“Now see here. You can’t talk to him
like that. He is in lo—”

“If you finish that sentence, I will
have him shoot you too.” Royce might have said more, but Kasey was covering his
mouth with her hand. But Jesse wasn’t finished yet, not nearly so.

“I don’t think you’re seeing this for
what it could be,” he snapped. “She’s already shot and killed one person and
she won’t stop at just her either if she can. Is this about the money? Is that
why you’re thinking you need to do this stupid thing? Then I can tell you right
now that I have more than what they’re offering you.” Again, he knew he was
saying it all wrong. “I love you, Josephine, and I need to care for you.”

“You love me. I see, and you
need
to care for me because why, Jesse? I’m too stupid and too poor to make sound
decisions on my own because there’s money involved? Is that the opinion you
have of me? That I’m some sort of…what? Gold-digger?” Her voice was too calm,
and he felt pains in his heart. “I want you all to leave. I’m tired and I just
want to go to sleep.”

She rolled over and he watched his
family leave the room. Agent Levy was gathering up his paperwork when Jesse
started to sit near her bed.

“I don’t want you here either. I want to
be alone. Please just go home and leave me alone.”

“Please don’t do this. I might have said
some really stupid things, but it’s because I—”

“Go away. I’m begging you. Just go
away.” She turned off the light, plunging them into darkness. He moved to get
his jacket and looked at her again. She looked stiff and uninviting. He thought
before either of them said something else they might not mean, he’d better
leave. His mother was waiting in the hall for him.

“You didn’t tell her before this that
you loved her, did you?”

He shook his head.

“I didn’t think so. So, in the heat of
the moment, in front of your entire family, you not only tell her that you’re
doing this because you think she’s a money-grubbing woman, you think that
blurting out you love her is going to make her melt for you.”

It wasn’t a question, but he answered
anyway. “No, ma’am. I’d only just figured out I loved her right before you guys
came in. But you have to know I’m right.”

She turned him around so that he faced
Josephine’s room. “And you being right is more important than what you made her
feel like when you said it. Oh, Jesse. I’m not sure you can fix this one. I
think she’s stronger than all of us put together.”

He felt her leave him. Heard the
elevator door swish open then ding closed. There were others around him;
nursing staff, doctors, and cleaning people, but he would swear that he’d never
felt so alone in his life. His mother was right. Being right did not make him
feel better about himself.

Chapter 15

Sondra was giddy. She’d watched the news
on the hotel television and had the little boy in the next room get her a
paper. The top story was how the local business woman, Patrice Patty’s Petal’s
Melbourne, had been murdered. They didn’t mention the bitch by name, but they
said that another woman had been critically injured during the shooting and
they were withholding details until next of kin could be notified.

She looked over at Clint and kicked him
hard in the ribs. He’d pissed her off last night, and now he was as dead a
Patty’s Petal’s. She doubted that as many people would mourn his death as they
it seemed they would Patty’s Petal’s, but then she was reasonably sure that
Patty’s Petal’s didn’t go to her boyfriend’s house smelling like sex and her
ex-husband. She kicked him again. Then said
Patty’s Petal’s
four more
times. It was like a rhyme, and she had fun with it.

It hadn’t taken much for her to kill Clint.
She knew he always had a knife in his boot and she knew that he had it razor
sharp too. Smiling, she thought of the fact that she’d given him good head, the
best she’d ever given to him, as she sliced the vein running along his upper
thigh. When he’d flinched at the pain, she’d swallowed his cock and had him
moaning again. When he was too weak to fight her she’d stabbed him three times.
Once in the dick and twice in the chest. Of course, she’d gone back afterwards
and cut his tiny weenie off him just because she could. It was harder, she
realized, to stab his dick than it had been to plunge the knife in his chest. She
liked his dick. Then she started rhyming Clintie Dickie over and over until the
news came back on.

Sondra watched the weather. Yeah, yeah,
it was going to get colder. Well, duh. It was winter time, people. She giggled
again when she thought of how ignorant people could be about winter. It was
like someone had said to her once, “Christmas snuck right up on me.” Really?
How did that happen? It came on the twenty-fifth of December every year. People
were idiots.

The next headline was about how a church
was giving out blankets again this year. Her firm had done that once. She’d
been in charge of the event that year and had bought the cheap blankets for
four bucks each and charged the company eight. She’d gone to Vegas with that
extra money and had a grand old time. She thought maybe that’s where she’d met
Clintie Dickie.

A commercial break made her angry and
she nearly threw her shoe at the thing. She didn’t have another television to
replace it with and she’d already gone out once today. She looked at her
purchases on the bed and thought she should get to wrapping Clintie Dickie up
before he became stinky winky.

When the news came back on she watched
the footage of the building again. There really wasn’t much to see, but she did
see Annamarie there in the background and a body bag. Leaning into the screen
she tried to see if that girl was there, Joey somebody, but all she could see
was police and other crime scene personnel. She wanted to see blood, damn it,
not yellow tape around it.

When the news finally went to another
story she continued to sit on the floor. Clintie Dickie had stained the floor
and now that he was gone she’d have to clean it up on her own. Moving to where
the man lay, she put her head on his back and closed her eyes. He was dead, of
course, but she was lonely and needed to talk to someone.