KENNICK: A Bad Boy Romance Novel (24 page)

“Unbelievable,” Jenner
shouted as Kim parked. “
Her
again?
See,
this
is why Kennick wants us to
stay. For
her.
I don't know how he
got Baba Surry to speak for him, but we all know that Volanis blood runs deep,
and it wouldn't take much to convince his cousin to make up something to
support his stupid ideas...”

The slamming of Kim's door
cut short Jenner's tirade; she looked with wide eyes at the gathered mass,
clearly surprised to see everyone in one place. But then her eyes met
Kennick's, and he saw so much inside her gaze that it nearly crippled his mind.

“They....it was...my God,”
she said, clearly trying to address the whole crowd but overwhelmed by being suddenly
in the spotlight. Kennick hopped from the stoop and pushed through the crowd
until he stood before her.

“What is it,” he murmured,
taking her arms in his hands. She seemed to gather strength from his grip, and
drew herself up, matching him stare for stare.

“Mayor Gunderson,” she said,
her voice only cracking slightly. “He did it. He killed them both.”

Chapter
Thirty-Eight

She could not stop shaking. After three hours with the
police, telling and re-telling her story, she was offered a ride to the
hospital, where she might be treated for shock. Refusing that, she was offered
a ride home, where she might drink some tea and try to get some sleep, and put
the day’s horrible events behind her. Refusing that as well, she accepted an
offer for a ride back to her car. Jimmy took her, and before letting her out,
told her things that he wasn’t allowed to tell her. Things that didn’t help the
shaking, but helped her try to begin to understand what she’d walked into that
late afternoon.

She sat behind the wheel of her car for a long time,
watching the dwindling numbers of cops and investigators and CSI-style forensic
teams loiter and then, finally, leave. She stared at the place she’d gone to
work every day for five years. Five days a week, for five years, she’d walked
through those ornate white doors and hustled joyfully towards the Mayor’s
office, where she said a cheery good morning to a hungover man who, she’d
believed, was utterly harmless.

How wrong she’d been.

How awfully, terribly wrong.

When she closed her eyes, she saw a carousel of
memories, the briefest of flashes. Mayor Gunderson smiling, drinking, raging at
Kennick in the bar. His face, growing longer and harder with each passing day.
Jessica biting her lip and shaking her head, and then Jessica smiling and
laughing at something Ricky said while she lay steaming plates onto the table.
Mayor Gunderson calling her Kimmy. The birthday cards, the Christmas cards, the
flowers on secretary’s day. Being the best boss she’d ever had.

The question she couldn’t escape, that she was sure no
one would be able to escape, was
why. Why
had Mayor Gunderson – Tom Gunderson, ex-cop, friend-to-all, Mayor three
times over – killed them? She wanted to believe it was for love, or honor, or
righteousness. If he killed them because he was a sick man, there would be some
forgiveness for not having seen it coming. But if he killed them because he
could,
because he was a cold-blooded
killer with no remorse…

The thought sent her to shaking again. How would
anyone ever know? She thought of Bob Talkee, who’d been friends with Mayor
Gunderson forever, and who’d dated Rhonda through high school. She thought of
Pastor Hendrix, whose righteousness was vile and who played golf with the Mayor
a few times a month when the weather was fair. Old friends from the force.

Did
they
know?
Had
they
suspected that their friend
played host to the heart of a killer?

But the answers were not going to come any swifter by
sitting in front of the Town Hall and white-knuckling her steering wheel to
keep her hands still. She looked at her phone, absently, and saw reams of
missed calls, mostly from Ricky and Tricia and Ed. She didn’t want their
questions, their comfort.

There was only one thing she wanted. And as night
finally fell, giving rest to the long summer’s day, she made her way there,
towards him.

What if
he’s already gone,
she thought in a panic, dropping her foot harder
against the gas. The way she’d felt that morning was like some distant memory,
but now she felt loss rising up to choke her in a new and spectacularly awful
way. She was losing everything, everything. In her addled brain, she imagined

Kim told Kennick about finding Mayor Gunderson in his
office, with the missing pages from the police report. She told him about what
he’d said, what she’d had to do to fight him off, her voice catching and breath
heaving as she relived those awful moments.

She told him about the police questioning, about how
Jimmy had pulled her aside at one point to tell her that they’d found traces of
hair in Mayor Gunderson’s car that they thought belonged to Jessica, that
they’d found other evidence on his person and in his office that was worth
making a case. A pretty strong case. He told her this as a friend, but also
because he knew that Kennick would want to know. He was breaking all sorts of
rules, but in a small town like Kingdom, rules were more like guidelines.

Kennick held her through it all, through her wailing
and tears.

“I worked with him for
years,
” she moaned, her hands shaking as
 
they closed around a cup of tea. “
Years,
Kennick. He was always so sweet.
He called me Kimmy. He called me…”

When she began to cry again, he lifted his jaw to the
top of her head and let her tears fall on his neck, stroking her hair. Finally,
she fell to a deep sleep, the sort of sleep that comes only when one has
experienced a shock and loss that Kim had felt that night.

And, as she slept, he watched her chest rise and fall,
her breath ragged through her stuffed-up nose. Her ruddy blonde locks spread across
his pillow, and he remembered how, earlier, in his frenzy, he’d found her hair
everywhere, and how it had tortured him. And he knew he wouldn’t leave her. He
couldn’t leave her. If all of this hadn’t happened, if the
kumpania
had decided to leave, he knew that he would have played
along until the last minute. And then he would have given it all up for her.
Baba Tayti’s words rang in his head.

And promise
that you will take this love, the love God is giving you so freely. You will
take it and treasure it. Treasure her. In treasuring her, you will treasure
yourself. And me. It is my only wish, Kennick. Kumpania be damned.

Watching her, he knew what his grandmother had meant.
She
was
his treasure, his gold at the
end of the rainbow. Without her, he’d be a poor man no matter how much money he
managed to make. As much as he thought, all this time, that he was helping to
repair her broken ego, it was work that indebted
him
to
her
in the end.
From her amazing strength, her ability to look all her worst fears in the eye
and spit, he gained strength of his own. Without her, he’d be a scarecrow, a
cheap imitation of the man she inspired him to be.

In that moment, he wanted to wake her and fill her and
claim her, to lodge himself firmly in her center and stay there until she had
his scent all over her, until anyone who looked at her would see who she
belonged to, who would take care of her. And vice versa. He wanted her name
tattooed on his heart, his tongue, his palms.

But he wouldn’t wake her from sleep. Instead, he
covered her and held her tight.

When Kim had been sleeping soundly for an hour,
Kennick slipped away. He found Cristov, Damon, and Mina in the kitchen of the
trailer, sharing a bottle of vodka between them. They wordlessly poured him a
glass and he sipped it, sliding into the booth beside his sister.

“She’s sleeping,” he said by way of response to the
unanswered question in the air. “For now, she’s sleeping. Had a hell of a
night.”

“We all have,” Mina said sympathetically. “Cristov and
Damon were telling me about the meeting…and about Jenner.”

“It makes me sick,” Cristov spat out, taking a
generous gulp of his vodka. ‘We should burn down
his
trailer.”

“And that’s why you’re not
rom baro,
” Damon offered with a gruff smile. Cristov stuck his tongue
out, but seemed to lack the energy to have a full-on fight. Mina was still
studying Kennick, her eyes probing.

“You couldn’t have left her, could you?” she asked,
mirroring the thoughts he’d only just been having. He shook his head.

“That’s alright,” Damon said, leaning in to catch his
brother’s eye. “If you’d stayed, we’d have stayed.”

“You couldn’t have,” Kennick protested, feeling
slightly sick about what he was admitting. He was admitting that he was putting
something else about the
kumpania.
As
rom baro,
that was a cardinal sin. “I
couldn’t have broken our clan up like that.”

Damon grunted his disagreement but kept silent. It was
Cristov who spoke up next.

“You gonna marry her?” he asked, a smile flitting
across his face. Kennick chuckled slightly, raising his eyes to the ceiling,
feeling like he had fought a war with love, and love had won. He was holding
his hands up. He was waving his white flag.

“Probably,” he said, shaking his head back and forth.
“Prob-a-fucking-ly.”

Epilogue

Kim clicked her tongue against her teeth and leaned
backward in the chair. It squeaked. Had it squeaked when Mayor Gunderson
occupied it? She didn’t know; she’d never sat in it then.

She had wanted to get a new chair, new desk, new
everything. She hated sitting in
his
chair,
writing on
his
desk, at
his
computer. But the town budget
wouldn’t accommodate luxuries like that. She would have bought them herself,
but there were so many other matters to attend to that the thought was
constantly slipping her mind. Now, as the chair squeaked again, she made a
mental note to buy a new one post haste.

It had been a month since Mayor Gunderson was rolled
out of his office on a stretcher, and three weeks since the Town Council had
appointed Kim as the interim Mayor, owing in large part to an impassioned
campaign by Ed Kerry and a flood of calls and letters from Kingdom’s citizenry,
all of which came as such a surprise to Kim that when she heard, she sat down
so hard she bruised her tailbone.

Tula’s prediction rang in her head whenever she
thought about how swiftly her life had changed. And, of course, Kennick’s
occasional bouts of “I told you so”-ing didn’t let her forget very easily.

At that moment, she was studying some bids to finally
fix the streetlights on Tudor Street, a project that had stalled since budget
cuts gutted the town’s maintenance department. One particular flickering
streetlight overlooked the parking lot of Sid’s Diner, where Jessica Bainbridge
had breathed her last breathe. A memorial to the perky waitress who’d always
refilled the coffee in your mug before you had to ask now sat in the lot where
she’d always parked her car.

Bob Talkee would have hated that Kimberly James was
standing in as Mayor of Kingdom – and would likely remain in that position
until the next election, since no one seemed particularly inclined to wrench
the position away. He would have, but he had resigned his seat on the Town
Council and moved away from Kingdom altogether. Before he’d left, when the
Kingdom Times asked him about Mayor Gunderson, he’d sneered.

“I knew he was jealous,” he said. “He was always
asking Rhonda out behind my back. When she broke up with me, he was right there
with flowers and chocolates trying to get into her pants.”

Ricky told Kim how surprised she’d been when the man’s
face fell, his tone dropping low and mournful.

“If I’d known…I would have done something. I still
loved her even though she split with me. I still loved her even when she took
up with that gypsy. You know a man for fifty years, and you never think…you
never once think…”

He’d hung up after that, and as far as Kim knew, it
was the last words anyone in Kingdom heard from him.

Pastor Hendrix spent his days giving impassioned
speeches about wolves in sheep’s clothing, and continuing to wage moral war
over the gypsies, though Kim thought she detected a subtle defeat in his
shoulders when he took his time to speak at Town Council Meetings. And, his
wife left him.

Mayor Gunderson’s trial had been short and clean; the
hair in his car had, in fact, belonged to Jessica Bainbridge. His desk had
contained more evidence: some notes in his handwriting, probably written while
drunk, about why “it was for the good of the town.” Some old personal items
that had belonged to Rhonda. And, of course, his drunken confession, which was
inadmissible in court but which gave the police enough weight to force a
real
confession from him.

He would never see the sky outside of a prison again.

Kim wondered if that was supposed to make her happy.

It didn’t.

When she thought of it, she felt sad. Sadder than when
her father had died, even.

And when she felt sad, she would find Kennick and curl
herself beside him, laying her head on his chest and hearing the deep, strong,
real rumble of his heart. She would let her fingers play along the black ink
across his chest, her lips fall to his ribcage and land there with softening
kisses. He would run his hands through her hair and tell her stories. Wild,
fantastic, gypsy stories.

They hadn’t discussed marriage yet, but Kim would
accept him when they did. Already, they were fighting over whether to move into
a new trailer or have Kennick move into her apartment. It was a fight Kim knew
she would lose; and she didn’t mind, not really. She mostly liked the fighting
because when they made up, it was in bed.

They
did
need
a new place though, regardless of what sort of place it was. The Volanis
brothers’ trailer simply was not fit for four grown adults, two of whom could
get quite loud when the spirit took them (and oh how it took them!).

But first things first. The squeaky chair, and the
streetlight on Tudor Street. Later, Kim could fantasize about a double-wide
trailer that would be too large for just them, might someday be homey for a
family, some little green-eyed babies…

As Kim tried to keep her mind from drifting too far,
Jenner Surry was across town waiting for his phone to ring. He knew it would.
He’d made the call, left the message. And it was all just waiting now. He’d
never been particularly skilled at waiting, but he was willing to do it now.
Because this waiting was like being on line for your favorite ride at Disney
World. There’d be plenty to look at as you tapped your foot.

He was going to take the Volanis brothers down, one by
one. He’d failed to take Kennick down, but then he’d realized: it was a lot
easier to take out a big man by kicking him in the knees. Which had led him
straight to Cristov.

The phone buzzed but he let it buzz once more before
answering. No use in being over eager for something like this.

“Talk to me,” he said when he picked up.

“You’re the one who called
us,
” the voice on the other line said. “
You
talk to me.”

“Well, I heard you guys were interested in expanding
your consumer base,” Jenner said, not letting on that he was the slightest bit
intimidated. He’d have to learn not to let big voices shake him up. Not if he
was going to be
rom baro.
“And I
happen to know the town of Kingdom would be a
great
place to sling. I know who you’d want to talk to. All you’d
have to do is get rid of the current…eh, purveyors. And with my help, that
wouldn’t be hard.”

There was silence on the other end of the line.

“Alright,” the voice said, low and gruff. “Tell me
more.”

Jenner smiled. Outside, the dying summer day played a
cicada symphony. Jenner leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees.

“First, I’m going to tell you a couple things about
gypsies.”