Accomplice (17 page)

Noah closed his eyes and seemed to be muttering to
himself. He shook his head once. Twice.

Jessica glanced from Brandon to Noah and back
again. The difference in their postures was striking. Noah’s shoulders looked
relaxed, holding himself still, though she was sure every muscle in his body
was ready for action. Brandon’s head whipped from side to side, looking
frantically from face to face, and then gazing longingly at the copse of trees
half a mile away. He looked back at her, pleadingly. She looked away.

“Let me go, Cutlass. Once the woman is gone, the
money will be mine, and I will make it worth your while.” Brandon’s voice was
higher pitched, whiny.

“You won’t get a penny, you dumbass. We traced the
sale of both potassium chloride and pancuronium bromide that killed Charles
Kingsbury back to you. You may not be the one who administered the lethal dose,
but you paid for it.”

Jessica’s heart constricted. Charles had been
murdered. By his own son.

Brandon’s mouth opened and closed again. When he
spoke, his voice was a croak. “He wanted to die. He asked me to help him die.”

For a handful of moments, the silence of the park
nearly overwhelmed Jessica. She could hear the harsh breathing, the breeze
rustling stubby grass. Her own heartbeat echoing in her ears.

Noah seemed to gather his wits again, and his chin
notched higher. “There’s a few holes in your plot, Cutlass. Or maybe I should
call them witnesses.”

“Who them?” Cutlass nodded his head at Earlin and
his three men.

“No, him,” said Noah jerked his head at Kingsbury.
Jessica’s son-in-law whirled and took off at a dead sprint. He was fast, faster
than she would have guessed as he disappeared beyond the SUV back towards the
road.

“Arturo, if you please,” said Cutlass.

The Cuban raised his gun.

Noah dived towards Arturo, shouting something that
was lost as the world exploded in a cloud of dust and gunfire.

Fear had kept Jessica frozen for so long during
the exchange that the sound of gunshots shocked her out of her stupor. She took
advantage of the distraction to dive to the ground and roll back towards
Earlin’s legs.

Thing One saw the chaos and started firing wildly
over Cutlass’s head. A crack sounded, and the thug tumbled toward the ground
between her and Cutlass, his gun falling from his hands.

Cutlass started after her, but the fallen man
kicked at Cutlass’s legs, sending him to the ground.

With her arms still bound behind her, her balance
was bad, and Jess fell face first into the dust in her scramble for her feet.
Someone grabbed her by one ankle, and she kicked as hard as she could, but she
couldn’t shake the hand.

Cutlass cursed has her free foot caught him in the
eye. “You’ll pay for that.”

“You first, boss man.” Earlin loomed over the top
of Cutlass and fired.

The grip on her ankle went slack, and Jessica ran,
crouching, toward the only shelter she could see: the van. It rode low to the
ground and the metal parts pulled at her clothing and arms as she squirmed
under, through a muddy splotch of something that smelled like oil.

She looked backwards, but didn’t see Noah. Earlin
lay in the dirt, a dark stain pooling from his head. Somewhere guns still fired
and dust and smoke hung in the air.

She found her feet and scrambled, crouched down,
around the back of the van. Metallic pings rocked the vehicle and one of the
tires blew. She crouched behind one of the oversized wheels, coughing around
her gag as still more guns fired, louder and more regularly than before.

An arm snaked around her shoulders and she tried
to shove it away as the throbbing of the gunfire grew even louder.

“Shh.” It was Noah, gripping his gun and with a
trickle of blood dripping down over one ear. “The cavalry is here.”

The gunfire wasn’t gunfire at all. It was the beat
of helicopter blades.

Jessica woke to the rhythmic beeping of a heart
rate monitor and smelled the familiar scent of hospital soap, like roses
steeped in bleach. Her stomach clenched as the memories of Charles in his last
hours washed over her. How he faded before her eyes. How quiet the room had
sounded with all of his equipment off. No more heartbeat. No more IV. No more
Charles.

She blinked. The beeping and soap smell were still
there, and there was a strange pressure in her left arm. An IV. She was the one
in the hospital. Dimly she noticed the rhythm of the beeping speed up as she
mentally counted her limbs, her fingers. Beneath a scratchy white sheet, she
appeared whole, though her head pounded worse than the day after a tequila
bender.

Noah sat nearby in a recliner. Stubble roughened
his cheeks and his eyes were rimmed in black. At the sight of him, she exhaled.
Memories of the past few days flooded back, of the terror she experienced at
the thought of losing her own life or costing him his. She gulped and pushed
herself upright and the needle jabbing in her arm brought her back to her
senses.

The worst of the nightmare was over.

“You don’t look so good.” Her words came out in a
croak.

He quirked a half smile and stood to grab
something off a nearby tray. “Here. Drink.”

Jess accepted a Styrofoam cup full of water and
sipped it, letting the cool water dampen her sticky lips and tongue. She tried
taking a bigger swallow, and the cold nearly burned her throat.

“Slow down, there’s more where that came from. You
have a few nasty bruises and the doctor said you were dehydrated. But
otherwise, you’re okay.” Noah stood so close, his hands hanging awkwardly at
his sides, fingers clenching and unclenching.

She looked up, slowly. His shoes and jeans looked
spotlessly clean, as did the white t-shirt underneath a Chico State sweatshirt.
Above that, he looked haggard and drawn. His brown eyes had a haunted look and
his hair stood up at odd angles as though he had slept on it funny. She glanced
at the recliner. “How long have we been here? Where are we, exactly?”

He glanced over his shoulder toward the door.
“County Hospital. You’ve been out a little over forty-eight hours.”

She opened her mouth, but before she could say
anything else, he knelt next to her and took her hand. His fingertips were
cold, but his lips were warm and soft as he pressed a kiss to her knuckles. His
raked his eyes over her as though they were trying to memorize every detail. “I
know you have a lot of questions, but those will have to wait. I promised that
I would let them talk to you as soon as you woke up. Otherwise, they wouldn’t
have let me sit with you.”

Jessica’s stomach clenched as the door to her room
opened and in walked a nurse trailed by Tony, wearing his customary linen suit
jacket. Noah let go of her fingers and stood. Jess looked from her bodyguard to
Noah and back again as the men exchanged formal nods. The tension in the room
was palpable.

The nurse busied himself clicking buttons on the
heart monitor and IV pump, then swiped a thermometer over Jessica’s forehead.
He made a few notations in the charting computer but said very little before he
hurried out, followed closely by Noah.

Jess watched him leave with his shoulders held
stiff and square. He didn’t glance backwards as the door closed softly behind
him. “Tony, why are you here?”

Tony reached into his suit pocket and withdrew a
slim leather wallet.

Jessica felt the blood drain out her face as she
glanced at the badge inside. CIA.

“I think it’s time we both had a long talk, Mrs. Kingsbury.”

***

Noah paced the hallway between Jessica’s room and
the nurse’s station. The rooms were all empty except for hers and a
plainclothes CIA agent stood guard at the shuttered doors that connected the
wing to the rest of the hospital.

“How long is this going to take?”

The guard gave him a sympathetic look, but only
shrugged. Noah sat down on a wood-framed couch and ran his fingers through his
hair.

After what felt like hours, the door opened and
the guard admitted a thin man wearing delicate rimmed glasses and a sour
expression. The man looked vaguely familiar, but it wasn’t until Noah heard his
name that he remembered. Leon Norrell. Jessica’s lawyer. And her husband’s
before that. Norrell didn’t spare a glance for Noah as he strode straight to Jessica’s
door.

Noah flipped through months-old magazines. He
counted tiles on the floor. He crumpled up the subscription cards that he
ripped out of the old magazines and practiced making baskets with a nearby
trashcan. He earned himself dirty looks from the nurse at the station, and more
indifference from the guards.

“Grayson.”

The word jarred Noah out of a doze after he’d
finally stopped fidgeting so darned much that his body remembered how little
sleep it had the previous week. It was Tony, barking from the door to Jessica’s
room.

“Yeah?”

“Get in here now.” Tony held the door to Jessica’s
room, and shut it firmly after him, leaving the three of them alone in the
room. Norrell must have left while Noah slept.

 “Noah, Tony told me everything that happened.
Thank you. You risked your life to save me.” She kept her eyes glued to the
sheet that covered her lap.

“It’s nothing.” He started to take a step forward,
to take one of Jessica’s hands. Tony’s arm smacked him in the chest and held
him still.

“It’s not nothing. And I made sure I told them…”

He narrowed his eyes at her. Still, Jessica
plucked at the damned sheet and wouldn’t look up his way. “Told them what?”

“About everything that happened in Tennessee. I
made a bargain,” she started again. Again, her words sort of lost volume at the
end.

A knot formed in the pit of Noah’s gut. “What kind
of a bargain? I already gave my statement, Jessica. All of it. I told them that
I was the one who never turned you in. Made you think that you were under FBI
protection when you weren’t. There was no warrant out for you. You did nothing
wrong. If anyone needs to be making bargains here, it’s me.”

She shook her head. “You don’t understand.”

Noah clenched his hands into fists. He did
understand. If it weren’t for his own selfishness, she never would have left
LA. She never would have been kidnapped. Never would have been in any danger.
"The whole mess is my fault. If I had not screwed up the investigation,
then—“

She held up one hand to silence him. “Please. I
have to say something. Your investigation was right all along. I am guilty of
blackmail and extortion and money laundering and probably more charges that I
don’t even know how to pronounce.”

Noah’s heart clenched as Jessica’s words poured
out.

“Senator Wilson was sleeping with a man from our
catering staff. Arturo. I know because I helped arrange for them to meet. I
suggested to my husband that we photograph them and use it for blackmail. The
senator was married to someone I cared about. Tallie Wilson was a high school
guidance counselor before she got married. My counselor. She was always kind to
me. And that slime lied to her. That was the worst part for me—not that he lied
to the public or to the press. But that he cheated on her.

“When she figured out that something was wrong,
she came to me and begged me to save his reputation. So we took photos of me
and the Senator and leaked them to the press to make it look like he was
screwing me.”

Noah nodded, aggravated. “You told me all this.”

“But what I didn’t tell you was that the blackmail
kept going after that. He paid us in jewelry and gems and bits of gold and
other precious metals. I smuggled them out of the country in my luggage when I
went on vacation. I would have a jeweler make fake replicas in cheaper metals
and cubic zirconia.”

Noah leaned back against the concrete wall behind
him as she spoke. Her words echoed in his brain as he pictured the stacks of
paper clippings, the press releases, the paparazzi chasing her through Paris,
the Caribbean, South Africa. “Your husband put you up to it.”

She shook her head. “He didn’t trick me, if that’s
what you were hoping to hear. I knew full well what I was doing. And who I was
doing it to. It wasn’t just Wilson. There are plenty of powerful men who have
dirty little secrets they’d rather not reveal. And Charles and I found out as
many of those secrets as we could.”

“Mrs. Kingsbury has offered us a plea bargain,”
said Tony quietly. “No charges will be filed against you, Noah. I can’t stop
any internal investigations, but given what we know of Cutlass’s involvement,
your name will be cleared soon enough.”

Noah grunted in response. He stared at Jess. His
Jess. The woman he’d held in his arms. Laughed with. Loved. How much of that
had been a show, too? He directed his next words to Tony instead. “A confession
is hardly enough for a plea bargain. What kind of deal can you possibly make
with her now?”

“Let her finish.”

Noah crossed his arms over his chest and waited.
His gut felt like ice and he dreaded what she could possibly have left to say.

“Senator Wilson was doing more than sleeping with
a man. The recordings that Charles and I got of the two of them together show
them exchanging more than body fluids. He was selling state secrets to Cuba. Arturo
was a spy.”

Noah’s eyes snapped to Jess. For the first time
since he walked into the room, she met his gaze levelly. Her eyes begged him
for understanding.

“We have both halves of the necklace now. The one
that Brandon stole from my house and the one that I had given Tallie for
safekeeping. I know the password. This was my deal, Noah. I am turning over the
evidence against Wilson.”

“And make yourself a target for the rest of your
life.” He shook his head. “No wonder you tried to run. You’d be better off in
prison than with some Cuban spy trying to get revenge.”

Tony cleared his throat. “We have offered Mrs.
Kingsbury protective custody, at least until after the trial. We promise to
keep her safe.”

 “So that’s it, then. You are running away after
all?”

She backed away from his look and nodded. “That’s
all I ever wanted. A new life somewhere far away from here. Somewhere I can
just be a normal person with a normal life.”

Somewhere far away
. Far away from him.