Kill Me Again (26 page)

“She risked her life to spend the last several days with you,” Bruce said.

“Yeah, but she left me when she found out I was sent to kill her.”

“But you weren't. What I told you before was the
truth. I
am
your boss at the Bureau, and you
weren't
sent to kill her.”

“She doesn't know that.”

Bruce shrugged. “Women are strange creatures, Adam. They tend to believe what they want to believe about a man. Especially one they've fucked a few times. You
have
fucked her, haven't you?”

Adam didn't answer, but he hoped the man could read the warning in his gaze.

“Yeah, you've fucked her. You make it good for her? The way females confuse orgasms with undying love could really work to your benefit here. So did you get her off a few times? Go down on her?”

“You're over the line, pal.”

“What are you gonna do? Hit me? You're bound for glory, buddy.” Then Bruce rolled his eyes. “I don't need you to answer. If you did her right, she'll be here.” Then he smiled. “Hell, if you went down on her, she'll be here loaded for bear.”

“It's a shame you kept on running your mouth, Bruce,” Adam said. “Up until just now I was considering letting you walk away from this alive. But now—hell, you're a dead man. You just don't know it yet.”

“You're the dead man, my friend. And it's a crying shame.” Bruce sighed, shaking his head slowly. “Frankly, you should have been in the ground by now. Why the hell didn't I know you had a freaking steel plate in your head?”

Adam shrugged as best he could, considering he was
handcuffed to the chair. “Guess you didn't read my file thoroughly enough. It's in there.”

“You're right. I didn't read it very well at all. Boring shit, most of it. Desert Storm. All the fucking medals and accolades. And then your
tragic
death in battle. Not enough left of your body to send home for burial.”

“I never should have gone along with it.”

“Why not? You've saved a lot of lives, Adam. Done a lot of good for your country. You should be proud, if you're into that sort of thing. Me, I'm out for number one. Always have been. Took the job because there was no limit to the money I could make. But enough of that. I'm not going to be one of those eggheads who confesses everything to the condemned prisoner, only to have it come back and bite him in the ass later on.”

“Maybe you're just realizing that you've been underestimating me all along and I'm the one who's going to come out of this in one piece. Not you.”

Bruce seemed to pause, to freeze and to pale, but it was all so subtle and so quick—like the flicker of a lightning bug in the night, there and gone in a heartbeat—that Adam couldn't be certain he had reacted at all.

“You know that already, don't you, Bruce?”

“I've got the guns. You're trussed up like a Christmas goose. I'm not worried.”

“You're a desk jockey. I'm in the field. You don't stand a chance here, and you really should have figured that out before you got involved.” He shrugged. “So who is
it, hmm? Who's paying you to get the disks and take Olivia and me out?”

“None of your business.”

“Come on, I want to know who's killing me before I check out for good. Is it Senator Gainsboro?” And he saw it. A quick blink, nothing more. “That's it, isn't it? It's the senator.”

“Afraid not,” said a female voice from the other side of the room. Heels clicked as she moved forward, out of the shadows and into the meager light offered by the battery-powered lamps Bruce had brought.

She was a leggy brunette with a body to die for and a face so perfect it seemed almost false. Like the kind of face you would see in a wax museum or on a department-store mannequin. Hair in a knot, not one strand out of place, suit tailored to fit like a second skin, with its pencil-straight skirt skimming her knees and the short jacket nipped in at the waist. Black suit. Black shoes. Black hose. She looked as if she'd just come from a funeral.

“Corinne, what the hell are you doing here?”

She shot Bruce a look that would have wilted lettuce. “You want to say my name again, or do you think he got it the first time?”

Adam said, “No need. I got it. Fascinating to meet you, Mrs. Gainsboro. You're the only aspiring first lady I've ever met.” Then he shrugged. “At least that I remember. Not that you'll ever get beyond the aspiring stage. I mean, really, your husband's fat and bald. They don't
elect unattractive men to the White House anymore, or hadn't you noticed?”

She shot him a scowl. “You let me worry about that.”

“Right, I'm sure you've got it covered. Obviously you have a great plastic surgeon on retainer.”

“The best,” she said with a lift of her brows. “All I need are those disks.”

“All you need is a good divorce lawyer—or you will soon. Unless the senator is in on this?”

She ignored him, turning to face Bruce. And Adam saw something else then. The way Bruce's face changed when he looked at her. The man was hot for her. Maybe more than that, given the way she responded to that look with a secretive little smile.

“You're banging her, aren't you?” Adam demanded.

Bruce gaped, and “Corinne” went white, her eyes widening.

“Wait, I just got another snippet of my memory back, Bruce. You told me you were Secret Service before you joined the Bureau. You must have met on the job, right? What were you doing? Working for her husband? That's certainly playing with fire.”

The other man smiled just a little. “You can say that again.”

She smiled, too, and the two of them met in the middle of the room with a steamy embrace and an even steamier kiss that left Adam almost embarrassed for them. Ruthless, that was what she was. And far more dangerous
than Bruce at his worst. Adam sensed it right to his gut. He'd thought he had a shot before. Now, though…now he might just be in trouble here.

O
livia made the trip in twenty minutes. She was proud that she'd become so familiar with the back roads of her chosen hometown.

Hometown.
The word stopped her, because she'd never thought of Shadow Falls that way before. It had been her haven, and sometimes her prison, but she'd never thought of it as her home. And yet that was what it had become.

It felt good to have a home.

Freddy nuzzled her neck from behind, reminding her of her mission, and she nodded and stroked his nose. “Yeah, we're here. Now you're going to be a very good dog for me, Freddy. You're going to listen to me and obey without hesitation. Right?”

Not waiting for an answer, because she already knew what it would be, she wrenched open the door and climbed down to the grassy ground. She'd pulled the SUV off the road fifty yards from the abandoned cheese factory, in a small tangle of woods. She tucked the keys
into the lowest crotch of the tree nearest the driver's-side headlight, making a mental note so she could find them again quickly, and kept on walking. Freddy trotted close beside her, keeping pace, his entire body tense and alert. He knew something was up. The dog was damn near psychic, and he wouldn't have missed the adrenaline surge in his favorite person. She was pumped. Scared shitless, but feeling strong. Empowered. She was taking her life into her own hands, living it on her own terms, for the very first time since she'd escaped Tommy. For once she was doing what she wanted to do, rather than making the choice less likely to expose her secret past. To hell with her secret past. And she wasn't doing this for Adam, either. To hell with him, too. She was doing this to put the past behind her, to cut through the chains that had bound her to it for so long. Forget Prince Charming.

She was rescuing herself.

And so she picked her way through the tangles and the briars until the cinder-block building came into sight. Rusted metal tic-tac-toe frames hung in the window openings, all of them devoid of glass. Faint traces of red paint that had once spelled out the unimaginative name of the one-time business now clung in bits that would soon be too faded to make out. Weeds had overtaken what had once been a driveway and small parking lot.

It took several moments of crouching contemplation for her to pick out the faint light emanating from one of the windows near the back. She decided to approach
from the front, instead. Ducking back into the woods, Freddy at her side, she took a path that gave the factory a wide berth until it angled around to the front of the building and a hatchway door set into the ground like a storm cellar door in an old farmhouse.

Inside, a set of stairs would lead from the basement up to the main part of the factory. And that was where she was going. She clutched the soft furry nape of Freddy's neck. “You ready, boy?”

She glanced down and saw his stance, and she nearly jumped in surprise. He was rigid, leaning slightly forward, making his chest seem wider than it had ever looked before. His ears were cocked, and the fur along the ridge of his spine was standing stiff and erect, like a razorback's. She'd
never
seen his fur do that before.

“Just take it easy, Freddy. Listen to me. Listen.”

He looked up at her, and even she was amazed at the intelligence and understanding she saw in those brown eyes.

“Listen to me, okay?” She gave him a squeeze. “We're going to run, Freddy. Run!” And she dashed toward the angled door, her only cover the night itself, unlike Freddy, whose brindle markings made him nearly invisible in the dark as he loped along beside her.

They reached the hatchway door, and she stopped, crouching low and whispering, “Freddy, sit,” as she gave him the matching hand signal.

He sat right at her side almost before she'd finished telling him to. She hugged his neck and whispered,
“Good dog.
Good dog,
Freddy. Now
stay,
” accompanied by another hand signal. She looked for a lock and saw none, so she clasped the edge of the wooden door and pulled upward.

The door swung open, hinges creaking and moaning in protest so loudly that Olivia flinched in a knee-jerk reaction. She crouched in the shadows, one arm around Freddy as she scanned the darkness, listening so hard her ears would have perked up like his if they could.

Crickets sang in chaotic harmony. The wind whispered through the leaves and young graceful limbs, still green enough to bend in greeting. A creature of some kind, a raccoon maybe, rustled in the brush nearby. But there was no sound of human footsteps. No muttering male voices, no guns being readied. Nothing.

Sighing in relief, she moved to the top of the dark opening and tugged the tiny flashlight from her pants' pocket, flicked it on and pointed it ahead of her. The beam illuminated a curtain of cobwebs, draping low over crumbling concrete steps that led down into a cinder-block basement. She patted her thigh, and Freddy leaped to her side, then sat at the top to let her go on ahead, as was his custom when they negotiated any staircase together.

Waving her hands to knock down cobwebs, then rubbing them together to wipe the sticky things away, she proceeded down the steps. When she reached the bottom, Freddy picked his way down to join her.

The cellar was huge, the same size as the factory floor
above, and musty, as if it had been holding the same air for a hundred years. It had a broken concrete floor, stacks of wooden crates filled with objects too dusty to identify, some pipes and knobs and not much else. But there was an ancient-looking wooden staircase at the far end, leading upward.

She crossed the basement, gesturing for Freddy to come with her and using her light to be sure nothing dangerous to either of them lay in their path—like broken glass or hairy spiders.

None appeared. She reached the foot of the staircase and paused, looking up. More cobwebs, but they'd been swept away recently, opening a clear path to the warped wooden door at the top. The top step was a small landing of sorts.

She shone her light on the wooden planks that served as stairs. Yes. The tread of a large shoe marred the dust on every one of them.

Turning, she caught Freddy's eye and signaled him to sit and stay. He obeyed the sit part. There was no telling how long the stay command would stick, she thought, as she made her way slowly, silently, up the stairs.

Every step was deliberate, careful. She lowered her weight onto each board gradually, bracing for a tell-tale creak that would give her away.

None did. And every few seconds she glanced back and repeated the stay signal, trying to keep Freddy where he was. He would be fine until she reached the top.
But once she got there, she didn't know what would happen.

It was time to find out. She took the final step, onto the platform at the top, right in front of the door, which looked in even worse shape up close than she'd thought from below. The landing squeaked a little as she stepped down onto it, and she froze, eyes widening, breath stopping in her chest, as she listened, waiting.

Nothing. No…wait, there was something. She leaned forward, pressing her ear against the door.

Voices. Male…and female, too? What the hell?

Swallowing hard, she put her hand on the doorknob, then turned it carefully and pushed the door slowly open. Just a bit. Just enough to peer through…and to realize she'd found the source of the light she'd seen from outside.

 

Adam's chair had been unceremoniously dragged into a small room off what had once been the main factory floor. He was surrounded by cinder-block walls, and the only door had a rusting old padlock on his side and a shiny new one on the other. He'd seen it in Bruce's hands, heard it snap closed after he'd been shoved inside.

The senator's faithless wife had wrapped a strip of duct tape around his head, covering his mouth and damn near over his nose, too. He'd had a moment of panic, but he could still breathe, thank God.

He humped and bumped the chair closer to the door, then managed to hunker down enough to try peering
through the keyhole, but he couldn't get the angle right. There was light shining under the door, though, so he tipped his chair over sideways, bracing for impact on the way. His shoulder hit hard, driving a grunt of pain out of him—pain that eased considerably as his mind processed the accompanying loud cracking sound as having come from the chair, not his arm.

Good. He shuffled his body, chair and all, until he could get his head up tight to the crack underneath the door. And then he could see, more or less. Bruce and his whore, from the hips down, at least, were moving around, always close. Then they stopped, and she whispered, “Bruce, get a load of this.”

Frowning, Adam shifted his attention in the direction both sets of feet were pointing. And then he saw it. A door, opening slowly
away
from them. Way too slowly for it just to be swinging in an errant breeze. Someone was clearly on the other side, getting ready to sneak in.

Olivia!

The two killers stood silently, probably smugly, watching and waiting. He saw Bruce move, twisting, his arm rising out of sight. When he lowered it again, there was a gun in his hand. And as Adam watched the door open farther, he saw Bruce raise that gun.

Adam tried to shout from behind the duct tape, but all that emerged were sounds too muffled to be heard. He strained aching muscles and thumped his head hard against the door. Three big bangs, and it hurt, but it made
them turn. He pressed his eye to the crack again and saw them turning his way.

“Dammit,” Bruce whispered. He must have signaled the woman to deal with it, because she strode toward the door, her pumps and black stockings blocking Adam's view of what was going on in the other room.

“Be quiet, Adam,” she whispered near the door. “It'll go better for her if you do as you're told. Trust me on this.”

He thumped the door again, pleased to see her jump. Then she moved to one side, as if she thought he might somehow be able to reach through that door and hurt her as badly as she deserved to be hurt.

“I mean it, Adam.”

He wasn't listening. He could see again, and what he saw had his full attention. The door opened a little more. Bruce had moved to stand directly behind it, one hand on the doorknob. Backing up a few steps, he lifted the gun, then yanked the door wide open.

Olivia came flying through, tripping on the door-sill. She slammed to the floor, the gun she'd been holding skidding away. She quickly kicked the door closed, making it look like an aftereffect of her fall, but Adam knew damn well it wasn't.

Freddy must be down there.

And then Bruce was on her, a knee in the middle of her back, a gun to her head. “Don't even think about moving,” he said.

“Who the hell are you? What do you want?”

“None of your business.” He gripped her by the hair and got up, pulling her up backward, and she whimpered at the pain in her scalp and gripped his hand with both of hers until she could get her feet underneath her and find her footing.

He must have released her hair then, because she stumbled a few steps away from him.

“Who are you?” Olivia demanded again. “Where is Adam?”

“Adam didn't think you'd come. I'm glad to see he was wrong. Did you bring the disks?”

“Of course I did. And I also left copies with my lawyer, who'll be forwarding them to the U.S. attorney general and the press if anything happens to me.”

“You didn't have time to do that.”

“I've had plenty of time to do that. I've had the disks for days, after all, while I've been running around with Adam.”

“And you copied them without him knowing?”

“You don't think I
trusted
him, do you?”

“You wouldn't be here if you didn't.”

“Bullshit. I'm here for me, not him. I want this over with—for myself. Understand?”

“Fine.” Corinne walked away from the closed door, her heels clicking on the concrete floor. “So we'll let you go and kill Adam, then. Leave the disks on your way out.”

Her bluff must have worked, because he heard Olivia
gasp. She collected herself quickly and said, “I didn't come here to leave without him.”

“I didn't think so.” Corinne shifted to face Bruce. “Kill them both.”

“That's what I said from the beginning,” he reminded her. Then he turned to Olivia. “The disks?”

She must have handed them over, Adam thought, judging from what he heard. Then she spoke.

“Go ahead and kill us,” she said. “The press and the attorney general will get every name and face in those files. Go ahead. The discs go out the minute I'm reported missing.”

“That gives me a good day, maybe even two, to go to your house, rifle through your papers until I find out who your lawyer is, go to
his
house, and shoot him between the eyes,” Bruce said. “Hell, even a desk jockey like me could do that in a couple of hours. You're making this too damn easy.”

He took her by the arm and marched her across the room toward Adam's door. Corinne hurried ahead of them, and he heard her playing with the padlock. He twisted and writhed, snaking his chair away from the door to save himself from being clocked in the chin with it.

He made it just in time. The door swung open, Olivia was shoved inside so hard she stumbled and fell, and then it slammed closed again. No one had even noticed him lying on the floor.

Olivia pushed herself up off the concrete and lifted
her head, so her hair curtained her face. Then, slowly, she looked to the side and spotted him lying there, staring at her.

He met her eyes, which filled with tears the second she looked back.

“Oh, my God, they beat the hell out of you.” She helped him right the chair. And then she smiled. She actually smiled. “Thank God, Adam. Thank God they beat the hell out of you.” She pressed her palms to either side of his face and kissed him square in the middle of the duct tape.