Kill Me Again (19 page)

“Then you'll come out and face him. But only if there's no other choice. Agreed?”

She nodded. “God, my stomach is churning. It feels like an acid factory in there.”

“It'll be over soon.” He opened his door and got out. She got out, as well, then leaned back in and stroked Freddy. “I'm sorry, boy. It might not be safe. Will you be okay?”

He pawed at the door and whined.

She kissed his nose and put the window down about halfway. Too small an opening for Freddy to get through, but plenty wide enough for him to stick his head out and fresh air to go wafting in for him. “We won't be long, I promise.” She took a deep, steadying breath. “I hope.”

She took the disks out of the glove compartment, where they were stored in a plastic zipper bag, then straightened, closed the car door and handed them to her mystery lover. “You'll need these.”

He took them and nodded toward the barn, which was about halfway between the Expedition and the pond, where the partying kids were beginning to send curious looks in their direction. “Hide just inside the barn, but be careful. It looks like it could come down any minute. Just get out of sight. Don't poke around in there.”

“Okay.”

She held his eyes and hesitated. God, she felt bad. Had she made a terrible mistake in talking to Bryan?

“Go on. He could be here any minute.”

“Okay.” Impulsively, she leaned up and pressed her mouth to his. He was stiff at first, barely reacting, but then, just as she started to pull away, his arms snapped around her waist and he bent over her, deepening the kiss, turning it into something…incredible. Something that belonged at the end of a Bogie and Bacall flick.

When he lifted his head, she was breathless, her heart was racing, and her eyes were filling with hot tears. Dammit.

He slid the gun he'd taken from her purse into the back of her jeans. He already had his own in the same spot.

Turning, she ran to the crumbling barn and found a suitable hiding place just beyond its broken door. She ducked inside and was immediately startled by motion. Silent flight—something huge. She crouched low as it soared over her head, her mind imagining a giant vampire bat or something equally awful, but it landed on a beam, and she peered up at it. The ghost-face of a barn
owl blinked back at her, startlingly creepy-looking, but in truth, perfectly harmless.

She sighed in relief and crouched near the door again, peering outside into the night. She had a perfect view of Aaron—she had to stop thinking of him by that name, dammit. She wondered if she should tell him that he wasn't Aaron Westhaven. He had a right to know.

But she had a feeling he already did. He'd been saying so from the start, hadn't he?

He'd walked away from the SUV and was sitting on a tree stump a few yards off the trail toward the barn. By going to the other wall and ducking down to look out through a gap between the boards, she could also see the party going on several hundred feet to the left.

A few minutes later a black Lincoln Navigator pulled in from the road. It bumped over the path and stopped right beside the barn. All four of its doors opened, and men spilled out. She held her breath as she counted them. Four, including Tommy. They were almost an hour early. And at least three of them had guns.

“Holy shit!”

She jumped and ran to the side wall, bending to look out through the broken boards. She saw two teenagers hunkered down behind a gnarled apple tree whose limbs curved upward and then bowed nearly to the ground, partially concealing them. It was heavy with tiny green apples and thick with leaves. Good cover as they hid from the men outside, but her oughtview of them was unobstructed. And she knew one of them.

Sam Overton, Carrie's son. And his companion was Kyle, the same boy who'd been joyriding with him that fateful day in Professor Mallory's SUV.

“They have guns,” she heard Sam say.

“Yeah, and that other car, that's old man Mallory's! Didn't your mom have Prof Dupree take it to her place?”

“Mmm-hmm, and I heard she's been sorta missing ever since. So's that dude we found in the ditch. Mom's worried. The cops are, too.”

“Yeah, well, I don't see her. But I think that's the guy right there.”

“Yeah, that's him, all right,” Sam confirmed. “But who are those other guys?”

“Looks like the freakin' Mafia.”

“Something's going down here, dude.”

“Think we oughtta call the cops?” Kyle asked.

“Again? My mother's going to have a stroke this time.” Sam lowered his head, shook it. “Let's get a closer look.”

“Dude, they've got
guns.
”

“
Ssshhh!
They're talking!”

Olivia moved to the front of the barn again, sliding the gun from the back of her jeans, and crouched there to watch and listen—and pray.

 

“Thomas Skinner, I presume?” Adam, who was growing more and more used to thinking of himself by that name, spoke to the only newcomer who was not wielding
a handgun. Though he had no doubt the bastard had one on him. Or more than one.

“That's right. Where is she?”

He was a big guy, but not in a good way, Adam thought. He was bulky, and a lot of it was muscle, but there was excess fat, too, and he had that puffy, pasty-skinned look of a man who drank too much, smoked too much and ate too much. His hair was dirty-blond and brush-cut. He had a scar on his chin, and pale blue eyes that didn't look normal or natural in any way. And his raspy voice and yellow-stained teeth gave away his nicotine addiction as much as the smoky smell that clung to him like an aura.

“I decided not to bring her.”

“Oh,
you
decided? And you have that kind of pull with her?”

“I don't have any pull with her at all,” Adam said, deciding not to antagonize the man. “I've only known her a couple of days. I'm just helping out here.”

“You're not helping a damn thing. I came here hoping you'd see my point of view and figuring she'd show anyway. No Sarah, no deal.”

Adam shrugged. “Fine. I'll send the disks to CNN or something.”

“No skin off my ass, pal.” Tommy turned to walk a few steps away, then stopped and bellowed, “Sarah! You'd best get your ass out here, bitch, or I'm gonna have my guys kill your boyfriend.”

Adam rolled his eyes, turning and pretending he was
about to walk back to his SUV. But as he did, he passed near one of the thugs and easily swung behind the man, gripping him in a solid headlock with one arm and using his free hand to press his gun to the man's temple. “Drop your weapon, and I'm not asking twice.”

The other two men leveled their guns at him, but no one fired. They couldn't, not without hitting their cohort. The thug in Adam's grasp dropped his piece. It thudded to the grass. Adam nodded at the other two henchmen. “Now you. Come on, give 'em up or he gets it.”

“Do you think they care?” Skinner asked.

“Good point.” Adam aimed his gun at the boss, still using the henchman as a shield. “Give them up or
he
gets it,” he said.

Skinner held his gaze. The man was trying to read him, Adam knew. He kept his face expressionless, cold as ice, holding the other man's eyes without flinching or blinking. Let this bastard see that he meant business here.

“Okay,” Skinner said. “Okay, take it easy.”

“We agreed to meet. You and me,” Adam said.

“And Sarah,” Tommy countered.

“No, we never agreed to that. And these three weren't part of the deal, either. Lose 'em or I walk. And if I walk, you never see those disks.”

Tommy slanted a look at his men, then nodded, and they dropped their guns. Then Tommy looked back at Adam. “Now what?”

Adam let go of the man he held and gave him a shove
toward the others. “You three, take the Lincoln and go for a ride. You can pick up your boss in twenty minutes. Come back a minute early and I'll shoot him.”

The three looked at their boss.

He nodded. “Do it.”

They bent, reaching for their weapons.

“Uh-uh-uh,” Adam warned. “Leave 'em where they are and just go. You can get 'em when you come back.”

Eyes narrowed, they straightened and backed toward the car. Adam wondered if they had other guns in there. Maybe. Probably. But would they risk getting their employer shot? He didn't think so.

He felt a huge surge of relief when they started the Lincoln and drove away, but he tried real hard not to let it show. When they were out of sight, he faced Skinner again, but he still held a gun on the man. “How about you put your guns on the ground, as well? I know you've got some on you.”

“How about you just give me my fucking disks and show me where you've got her hidden? Huh?”

“Guns.”

“No.” Tommy turned. “Is she in the barn? Hey, Sarah, are you in there? I'm coming in. You might as well face me, woman, because this isn't happening until you do.”

Adam cocked his gun.

The other man stopped and turned to face him. “I
will
see her.”

“Tell me to my face. Did you send the thug who tore up her house?”

“Not directly, no.”

“Indirectly, then?”

Tommy tipped his head to one side, gave a noncommittal shrug.

“Explain,” Adam said.

The man sighed, clearly unused to being told what to do. But somehow Adam knew how to deal with his kind. It felt as if he'd done it before. Often. It was as familiar as breathing or combing his hair.

“Look, I didn't even care she took those disks in the beginning, you know? She only did it to protect the assholes who were on them.”

“Right. She knew the police would take your computer and disks when they searched the place. And she didn't see any reason to put your customers in jail along with you.”

Tommy nodded. “She trashed my hard drive, ripped it right out of the damn PC, and took all the disks I had for backup. But I didn't give a shit about that. I didn't need that information anyway.”

“Then why are you so desperate for it now?”

Tommy lifted his brows. “Have you seen who's on it?”

Adam shook his head, even though it was a bald-faced lie. “No.”

“Well, I'll tell you, there are some heavyweights on there. Maybe they were nobodies when they were buying
weed from me back in the day. But some of them have risen pretty damn high over the years. Public faces. If the info on those diskettes gets made public, their careers would, you'll pardon the pun, go up in smoke.” He laughed softly.

“So you want the disks so you can blackmail people?”

“Oh, I've already
been
blackmailing them.”

“How?” Adam asked. “How can you get people to pay for something you don't even have?”

“I don't. I get them to pay me to tell them who
does
have it.”

Adam shook his head slowly.

“I tell the rich bastards the disks exist. Then I tell them if they want to know where to find them, they'll have to pay for the information. They pay, and I give them fictional little Professor Dupree's home address.”

Adam felt the wind leave his sails. “So you've known about Olivia for how long?”

“My people tracked her down within two years after she supposedly died. She switched identities with her murdered roomie only a few weeks after she arrived in that hole-in-the-wall town. Did you know that?”

“No,” Adam lied. Why tell the man something he didn't already know? he thought.

“I couldn't do anything about it at the time, being incarcerated. By the time I got out, I no longer cared about revenge.”

“Bullshit. You've been taking revenge right along, just
doing it in a roundabout way,” Adam said. “How many people did you tell about her?”

Tommy shrugged. “Three or four.”

“How long ago?” Adam demanded.

“All within the last few months,” Tommy said, then shrugged. “I needed the money. The economic crunch hit me, too, you know.”

Not as hard as Adam would have liked to hit him, though. “Which of them sent that thug to her house?”

“How would I know?”

“I think you know. I think you know exactly who it was.”

Skinner shrugged. “Give me my disks and I guarantee it won't be a problem anymore.”

“No? You can guarantee me no one is going to try to harass her, hurt her, kill her? No one's going to go after her?”

“I can't guarantee you that. But if I let them know I'm the one with the goods on them—that she doesn't have the disks anymore—why would they bother?”

“In case she looked at the disks. They could kill her just for knowing what's on there.”

Skinner lifted his hands, palms up. “Nothin' I can do about that, though, is there? That's out of my hands. Hell, for all you or I know, there might be dozens of people jonesing to murder the traitorous bitch. Way beyond the handful I set onto her trail. Probably every guy she's ever fucked over.”

“You know what I'm asking you,” Adam said.

The other man sighed. “I'll make sure those who've been told she has the disks know that I have them now. And I won't mention her in any future dealings. Is that good enough?”

“And you won't go after her, either,” Adam added. “Or reveal her secret to anyone else—ever.”

Tommy shrugged. “I might agree to every last one of those terms—
if
she would show her freaking face and ask me herself.”

“That's not going to happen.”

The man shook his head slowly. “No Sarah, no deal.”

“I'm right here,” Olivia said, stepping slowly out of the barn. She met Adam's eyes briefly, sending some kind of message, but one he couldn't read. It seemed to be one of urgency. As if there were some reason to hurry things up.