Nightwatcher (5 page)

“He’s twenty-four.”

“That’s how old I am, exactly. He seems younger. How do you know his age?”

“He told me once. Like I care.”

“Well, in any case . . .” Allison shrugged. “I can’t imagine him hurting a fly. He seems harmless.”

“Okay, maybe he’s not a thief. But harmless? The way he was looking at us . . .” Kristina shuddered again.

“Not us—
you
.”

True. For some reason, Jerry didn’t appear to be the least bit interested in Allison, who happens to be a drop-dead-gorgeous blue-eyed blonde.

No, he seemed fixated on Kristina—continually sneaking glances at her as he crouched in front of the washing machine, then falling all over himself to retrieve a rolling quarter she dropped.

Yes, he always acts utterly smitten when she sees him around the building—which is much more often than she’d like. It’s almost as if he’s lying in wait for her . . .

The way you lie in wait for Mack?

She weighs the risk of running into Jerry if she goes downstairs right now against the risk of not seeing Mack for another twenty-four hours.

Easy decision.

Kristina hurries over to the full-length mirror.

Checking her reflection, she tosses aside the tweed suit jacket she wore to her temp job and unbuttons the second button of the white blouse beneath. After a moment’s hesitation, she also daringly unbuttons the third, for optimum cleavage.

Hmm—still a little frumpy. She makes a mental note to take her knee-length skirt to a tailor to be shortened after this wearing. The suit is a couple of seasons old, but it’s still decent, and Allison mentioned yesterday that miniskirts are back in style. Kristina has great legs, a dancer’s legs. Why not show them off?

She does a quick makeup touch-up and dabs perfume behind each ear. Then she spreads her fingers and rakes them from her scalp to the ends of her curly, shoulder-length dark hair, tousling it just enough to look bedroom sexy, but not bed-head messy.

There. Good to go.

She slips her feet into a pair of pumps and hurries for the door, glancing at her watch. Perfect timing.

She hurriedly descends four flights of steps to the first floor, opens the door from the stairwell . . .

And literally crashes into the bulky, imposing figure of Jerry.

Kristina wobbles on her feet. Jerry puts his hands on her upper arms to steady her. Her nostrils twitch at the ripe scent of his sweat.

“Sorry!” he says.

“It’s okay.”

She’s no longer wobbling, but he doesn’t move his hands. She looks pointedly down at them. His fingernails are dirty. His grip is unpleasantly strong.

She flinches.

He gets the hint.

Removing his hands, he shoves them into the pockets of his jeans. A lot of young guys are wearing their pants baggy, ragged, and low lately—a trendy nod to gangsta rap—but Kristina knows Jerry isn’t making a fashion statement.

No, with him, it’s classic, clueless-handyman butt crack.

Between that and his breath—which is bad, no surprise there—it’s all she can do to hold back a shudder. Especially when she sees him take in her deliberately displayed décolletage.

That’s not for you! That’s for Mack!

Beneath his blond crew cut, Jerry’s plump face is flushed. “Kristina . . .”

He knows her first name?

Maybe that shouldn’t be surprising, but somehow, it is. Or at least, the sound of it on his lips. Surprising, and repulsive.

“Are you busy?”

“
Busy?
”

“Yeah. I thought . . .” His hands push deeper into his pockets, his shoulders hunching toward his jowls. He licks his lips and a strand of saliva stretches between them until he speaks again. “I thought—I mean if you aren’t busy—then maybe I thought—I mean, I did think—that you could . . . that maybe we . . .”

Dear God, no. No, no, no.

She’s shaking her head, but he doesn’t seem to get it; he keeps right on fumbling his way through an invitation of some sort.

“If you like cake, I thought . . . Do you like cake? I do. I love it. And we could . . . I could—”

“I’m sorry, I can’t,” she blurts. “Sorry.”

He stares at her, eyes wide, jaw hanging.

“Look.” She tries to brush past him. “I’m really busy and—”

“If you’re busy,” he blurts, stepping into her path, “we can—”

We?
This time, she doesn’t even try to hold back the shudder.

“Thanks, but I can’t. No. No.”

She waits for him to retreat, perhaps hanging his head in defeat.

But he stands there in front of her, looking at her, his gray eyes shadowed.

Kristina shrugs and starts to step around him.

Jerry holds his ground.

Unsure whether to be infuriated or frightened, she casts her gaze at the ceiling and says, “Excuse me. I need to get my mail.”

Still, he doesn’t move.

How dare he? He’s just standing here, blocking her way.

“If you don’t move,” she says levelly, “I’m going to call the cops and have you arrested.”

Without another word, Jerry steps aside.

Shaken, Kristina walks down the corridor toward the vestibule, eyes focused straight ahead.

But she can feel him standing there staring after her, and it’s giving her the creeps.

Just before she enters the vestibule, she impulsively lifts her right arm and raises her middle finger.

“Jerk,” she mutters, flipping him off without looking back to see if he’s still watching.

Something tells her that he is.

Chapter Two

“Y
ou’re late, Mack.”

“I know. Sorry.” He tosses his keys on the table just inside the apartment door.

Flicking on the light, he spots Carrie across the room on the couch, her arms wrapped around her knees. She’s wearing a black suit and sheer pantyhose; no shoes. Her long brown hair looks stringy, as though it got soaked in the rain.

It isn’t unusual to find her just sitting there, brooding. She does that a lot; always has.

But tonight, her black leather pumps are lying right here by the door, as though she kicked them off on her way in. Her red trench coat is draped over a chair at the dining table.

The old Carrie would never dream of putting damp fabric on polished wood; before she sat down, she would have hung it up, and placed her shoes neatly on the shelf in her half of the closet. She would have towel-dried her wet hair and brushed it.

“Did you go someplace after work?” asks the new Carrie, with a hint of suspicion.

“I stopped off for a beer with Ben,” Mack lies, and turns on another lamp to dispel the rainy evening gloom. “Why are you sitting here in the dark?”

“It wasn’t dark when I sat down.”

“Well, it is now.”

“Well, I guess I didn’t notice.”

Mack digests that as he sits on a chair to untie his black dress shoes.

“Are you okay?” he asks reluctantly, knowing she wants him to, knowing he has to, knowing the answer.

“Not really. Are you?”

He shrugs and stands up again, shoes in hand. His socks are damp from wading through gutter rivers.

“Maybe it’ll happen next month,” he tells Carrie, starting toward her, thinking that if he can just touch her—hug her—it’ll be better between them.

“That’s so easy for you to say,” she snaps, stopping him in his tracks. “You’re not the one who had to give up coffee and wine and sushi and cigarettes—”

“Yes, I did! I quit smoking with you!”

“But you didn’t have to. You chose to.”

Right. Because they were a team, and he was showing her support, and anyway, it was a nasty habit he never should have started. But back in his advertising agency days, pretty much everyone in the bullpen smoked—at work, and in the bars where they went to decompress after long days and nights on the job.

“You don’t have to give up coffee and wine and sushi forever,” he reminds Carrie, but she talks over him.

“—and you’re not the one who has to shoot yourself full of hormones, or have raging headaches because of them, or go to the doctor’s office once a month to be injected with test tube sperm, or sit around waiting to see if you’ll start bleeding fourteen days later or not.”

“No,” he says quietly. “I’m not the one who has to do any of that.”

He’s just the one who has to supply the test tube sperm at the doctor’s office—an experience he can’t help but find humiliating.

“Can’t I just, uh, do it at home and then bring it into the office?” he asked Dr. Hammond early on.

“Theoretically, Mr. MacKenna, that’s possible,” she told him, “but there’s a very small window of time when the semen is viable. How long does it take you to get here from home?”

“By subway? About an hour, give or take . . . and by car, depending on traffic . . .”

Too long, as it turned out.

When you live in lower Manhattan and the clinic is up in Washington Heights, there’s only one way to produce a semen sample: walk past the knowing medical staff into the little room stocked with outdated dirty magazines and porn videos and—thank God—a sturdy lock on the door.

Medical mission or not, the former Irish Catholic altar boy in him can’t help but feel vaguely guilty and embarrassed.

Yes, Mack knows it pales, in the grand scheme of things, next to everything his wife has endured as a precursor to—God willing—nine months of pregnancy and childbirth. He knows because Carrie minced no words in telling him, the one time he dared to complain to her.

“Are you freaking
kidding
me? You’re actually complaining to
me
about jacking off into a cup?”

Clearly, he wasn’t allowed to voice his distaste for the process; his feelings didn’t matter. To Carrie, he was, apparently, an insignificant participant.

“Anyway,” she ranted on, “I know you resent me for the move downtown, but you went along with it, so—”

“I don’t resent you. I wanted to make your commute shorter.”

”You’re thinking that if we had stayed where we were, the clinic would have been right around the corner.”

Maybe he was thinking that. But it was beside the point.

He’d embraced the idea of moving downtown—anything to make Carrie happy—and she was the one who’d done all the legwork, choosing the neighborhood, the old brick building, the apartment itself. She said it really did make her life easier—the convenience factor, anyway.

And what about my life?

By far, the most difficult part of this whole process—from where he sits—is putting up with Carrie’s mercurial moods, one of the many unpleasant side effects the doctor had warned them about. Apparently, the fertility drugs can cause everything from nausea to psychosis—with a whole range of symptoms in between.

“You might find yourself touchier than usual,” Dr. Hammond warned Carrie on that long-ago day in the office.

Touchy? Touchy
would be a pleasure.
Touchy
would be the old Carrie on an ordinary good day.

Lately, it’s hard to remember that he was ever drawn to his wife’s strong-willed assertiveness. Hard to remember, for that matter, that she ever smiled, or laughed, or showed affection, or told him how much she loves and needs him . . .

She used to do those things, though. Not often, by any means—but she did. There was always a vulnerable side to her, carefully shielded from the rest of the world by a steely veneer. She’s been through a lot in her life. She doesn’t choose to let many people in.

Back when he first fell in love with her, Mack was touched—and honored, on some level—that he was the one she chose. The only one who got to know the real Carrie. The old Carrie. As well as anyone would ever know her, anyway.

But lately, she’s gone missing. Lately, Mack finds himself wanting to scream at the fire-breathing creature that shares his apartment,
Who are you and what have you done with my wife?

“Look, it’s all temporary,” he reminds her—and himself—now. “It’s all going to be worth it. I promise.”

There was a time when she’d have nodded her agreement, or at least greeted his words with silent acceptance.

Carrie glares at him. “How can you make a promise like that? It’s not working, and you know it.”

“Give it time.”

“How much more time do I have to give?”

“As much as it—”

“I can’t take it,” she cuts in. “I just can’t. I can’t take it.”

Trust me—neither can I
.

“Don’t you want to be a mother?”

Mack’s question—the one she once would have answered readily, affirmatively—is greeted with ominous silence.

Don’t you dare change your mind, Carrie.

Don’t you dare forget how badly we want children.

If only she were willing to go a different route—a surrogate, or adoption . . .

But she vetoed both those options months ago. She would prefer to conceive and carry a baby, and the doctor told her it’s physically possible, so she refuses to consider other options. That’s Carrie. Present a challenge, and she’ll see it through to the death.

Meanwhile, all this tension is killing Mack.

Killing
them
.

There was a time last year, after they’d eloped, when—as much as he wants children—he might have considered himself and Carrie a family of two.

Now she’s been pulling away—and okay, he’ll admit it: so has he, his nerves are dangerously frayed by her moods and the uncertainty of their future. The bond between them seems to be growing more taut with every passing day. Something has to give, or it’s going to snap.

What’s going to snap, Mack?
Carrie demanded when he warned her just the other day.
The bond? Or you?

He didn’t reply. He didn’t know.

“Carrie,” he says, looking directly at her, “do you want a baby, or not?”

This time, she answers the question. “No,” she says flatly, “I don’t. Not at this price.”

So there it is. That’s it. It’s not going to happen.

Hadn’t he realized, deep down inside, that this was coming? Hadn’t he been preparing for this moment in the back of his mind? Hadn’t he thought of all the things he was going to say to convince her to change her mind?