Paradise Falls (41 page)

“Why?”

“Your shoulder.”

He shrugged, and immediately winced. “Just a flesh wound.”

Jennifer rolled her eyes. She’d started to catch on to the way half the things he said were little in-jokes like that. She was not going to laugh. Not for a Monty Python reference.

She was not laughing at all.

Might as well give up. Jennifer sat down at the kitchen table and watched him cook. On edge, all she could think about was some substitute in her classroom, trying to conduct her lessons. In her domain, her place of power, where she was supposed to be in control. The school would probably call their go-to sub, Mr. Kleinfelter (the kids called him Mister HeineyFelter when he was out of earshot, or sometimes when he wasn’t) for the first week or so until the district could hire a long-term substitute to take over her position.

A few days ago, Howard Unger showed up and informed her that when school resumed on Monday, her services would not be required. Elliot pushed the school board to review her contract on moral grounds- for moving in with Jacob. There would be a hearing at some point, and Jennifer would have to sit next to Jacob in front of whoever showed up at the meeting (probably half the town) while the catty school board members tossed her career back and forth like kittens with a dead mouse. Not that it mattered. She had a billionaire boyfriend with a vigilante secret identity.

Yet, she always wanted to be a teacher. Always.

“You’re upset,” said Jacob.

“Yeah,” she said. “It’s Monday morning,” a yawn bubbled out of her throat, “and I’m not at work.”

On the other hand, she’d be upset, maybe even more upset, if she went. Sooner or later there would be the empty seat where Krystal used to plop down and grin at her, waiting for the lesson to begin. Jennifer would have to sit her at her desk and see that empty chair. Krystal would not be popping up before the ringing of the first bell to pester her, or clinging after school, trying to hang out. Jennifer folded her hands in her lap and looked down at the table. She was not going to cry. Jacob, damn him, appeared at her side. Even barefoot on the tiles he was utterly silent when he moved.

He set a plate of pancakes in front of her, and brushed a stray lock of hair away from her face.

“You okay?”

“No,” she said, thickly. “I’m not.”

Next to the pancakes, he plunked down a container of chalky protein gloop. Jennifer scrunched her nose at it.

“Where’s yours?” she said, as he sat down opposite her, with only a cup of protein shake for himself.

“I made them for you.”

Jennifer propped her chin on her hand and looked at him. He was banged up. Fading bruises on his face, especially around his nose, bandages all over his chest, back, and sides. She had a feeling he was only wearing the sling to mollify her and if it was up to him, he’d be in the damn basement doing backflips or something. Humming to himself, Jacob cut off thick pats of butter and plopped them on her pancakes, without asking. Jennifer watched them melt and skid across the top, across the flaky crust.

“I didn’t ask for butter.”

“You’re having butter. Butter is life. Butter is love.”

She sighed, knowing not to fight him anymore on her diet, and cut into the pancakes. They
were
good. They even made the protein glop almost tolerable. She took a long pull, choked it down and slapped it on the table.

“Does it really have to have oatmeal in it?”

“You don’t get enough fiber.”

She narrowed her eyes at him. “That’s not your business.”

“If you get to tell me not to pick at my scabs, I get to tell you to eat more fiber.”

Jennifer huffed and sat up.

“They’re not scabs, Jacob. You got
stabbed
.”

“Just a little bit. You won’t let me fuss over
your
cut.”

Jennifer rubbed the side of her face. The stitches were still covered over with a bandage. There was nothing to do about it. It wouldn’t be so bad as Jacob’s, but she was going to have a scar down the side of her face from just behind her left eye to her chin, where Blondie-slash-Michael’s knife cut her open. It was only by luck that he didn’t cut her throat, by intent or accident.

That was right before Jacob killed him.

Jennifer felt a little sick, but she kept eating.

“You’re brooding,” said Jacob.

“You should talk.” Jennifer snapped.

“Then I wouldn’t be able to brood as efficiently. What’s wrong?”

“Everything,” she sighed, and took another bite. She spoke through her food. “I can’t… all that
stuff
we did last week. You killed somebody.”

To protect me
, she almost added. She looked up at him.

“He made his decision. I gave him a chance.”

Jennifer shook her head. “He’s dead and Ellison isn’t. I don’t believe anything he said.” Her voice tightened. “He killed those kids. In cold blood. He’s not
human.
”

“There are many who live who deserve life, and many who live who deserve death.”
 

Jamming her fork into a slice of pancakes, she twisted them on her plate, scraping the surface, and glared at the protein shake.

“That’s not fair.”

“You’re right. It should be the other way around. I should have found a third option. A perfect solution. Just like I said, but it was you. If a stain on my soul is the price I pay to keep you safe, I pay it gladly.”

She gave him a side-eyed look and he shrugged.

“I just need to know we’re doing the right thing.”

“Ask them,” Jacob nodded.

Over the last three days, Jacob and his assistant Faisal cleared out the upstairs bedrooms, moving the barely-used office and the shrine he kept to his sister down to the basement. Of the twenty-three girls Jennifer and Jacob carried away from an illegal strip club and brothel, fourteen were currently under medical care for withdrawal from heroin and cocaine. In a hospital Jacob owned. The rest were staying here, sleeping upstairs except for the two in a sleeping bag in the living room, a pair of sisters named Hailey and Kelly.

“You never told me you
owned
a hospital,” she muttered.

“You never asked.”

“You haven’t told me what that thing under the tarp is, either.”

“We’ll get to it. Finish up your breakfast, honey.” He leaned in to kiss her forehead as she made a face. “It’s exercise time.”

The clock on the stove read four thirteen. It was exercise time. Jennifer finished her pancakes and her helping of gloop and followed him downstairs. Jacob wasn’t leaning on the wall, or limping, anymore. By the way he carried himself, she was starting to believe he could go without the sling if he wished to. Still, he was not going to try to exercise. She would not permit it. Her mind was made up. He set her to stretching while he went over something on the computer, and when she was warmed up, he started working her through the weights.

It was surprisingly pleasant. There was little talking, just quiet synergy as they predicted each other’s moves. By the time she was done lifting weights, she was achy and nearly exhausted, but he wouldn’t let her stop until she went through the forms, punching and kicking and snatching the air until she was out of breath. Then he was satisfied, nodding sagely. Jennifer stuck her tongue out at him and started her own addition to the routine.

First, she thew her weight onto her hands and held herself up right for as long as she could. When she was thirteen, before the bad dismount that ended any chance of her progressing in gymnastics, she could do handstand pushups. Now she satisfied herself with cartwheels and floor exercises and a few minutes on the rings Jacob had installed, hanging from the rafters.

By the time she finished she couldn’t stand up, and laid out on the mats, breathing hard. Jacob tossed a pair of handcuffs at her and she scooped them up and began fiddling with the lock.

She’d graduated from the cutaway version to real handcuffs in only three days. The little smile Jacob gave her when she first popped open the real pair was still fresh in her mind. She lay on the floor, not looking at them unless she had to, while she practiced shimming them open, sticking a little bit of metal into the mechanism to disengage the ratchet. She had to look every time but one. Jacob settled into his chair and took off his sling.

“Hey,” Jennifer said, annoyed.

“I’m just typing, relax. It takes all day if I have to do it one handed.”

“You’re not supposed to move your shoulder,” she gasped, still out of breath.

Jacob shot her a smirk and waved his hand at her.

“What are you doing?”

“Playing with my new toy. Remember how they took our phones back to the police station?”

“Yeah.”

She sat up, and wiped the sweat off her forehead with her sleeve. “Did they record something?”

“No, the batteries are dead. Before they ran out, I uploaded a program remotely to the phones. That program gave me access to the city network. Everything is all linked together- the wifi routers are connected to the main network and all the city departments share the same connection, just like all the buildings are hooked together.”

“What did you do?”

“I bugged all the phones first,” said Jacob. “I have them recording all their calls and uploading them to a server I control. I’m working on getting control of the security cameras and the lights. Somebody put a lot of money into the place. It’s all wired up, state of the art.”

“Probably kickbacks from James,” said Jennifer.

“Probably.”

Panting, she sat down next to him and wiped at her face again. Jacob kept watching her from the corner of her eye as she leaned forward and fiddled with the cuffs. They sprang open and she nearly dropped them before recovering.

“I’m going to spar with you tomorrow. I don’t need the sling.”

“Jacob,” said Jennifer, putting a growl in her voice.

“I’ll be fine. If I start bleeding again you can just patch me up.”

Jennifer rolled her eyes.

“We’ve got less than four days before this fundraiser, we need to hit that lawyer’s office, and I’m hoping we can find one of these trucks. I think we have a lead, there. Time to talk to Ellison.”

“Ugh,” said Jennifer.

“I want to get some rest, first. Just rest my eyes. The screens give me fatigue.”

“Right,” said Jennifer. “Come on.”

This time he did lean on the wall on the way up. Jennifer put her hand on his back on one of the few places that wasn’t a bandaged cut or a sour yellow bruise. Jacob grunted as he reached the top of the stairs, and Jennifer closed the door. He was clearly in pain by the time he finished winding his way up the main stair to the bedrooms. Jennifer walked him all the way back to the bed, and made sure he was actually lying down before she went into the bathroom and began filling the deep soaking tub with hot water. Every muscle was a network of aches and fatigue and the floor exercises made her ankle throb.

Before she took off her clothes, she locked the door, but her hand hesitated on the knob for a moment.

A tiny little part of her almost twisted the lock back and left the door open. Maybe he would forget, be a little groggy when he woke up and just walk in announced while she was in the tub. Still, she locked it.

Sinking into the water, Jennifer sighed. The heat drank the fatigue from her joints.

Sparring with her. Right.

She’d almost done that a few days earlier. It wasn’t a fight, just a demonstration. He asked her to kick him in the face and when she did he yanked her right off her feet and threw her off balance. He could have thrown her across the room if he’d liked to, but instead he took her by the waist, like a dancer, and dipped her.

The shocking thing was, she wasn’t afraid. This made almost a week she’d been sleeping with him, or at least sharing a bed. The last few nights she’d slept with bare legs, something she rarely did even when she slept on her own, and there was no clutching terror in her chest when she woke up in the night, no gripping fear in her throat when she felt skin on her skin or an arm around her shoulders.
His
arm. The fear was still there but it was quiet, subdued. The more time she spent with him like that, the more she began to think about
other
things.

She’d never tried but the once, and it left her a crying wreck that slept on the floor of the honeymoon suite until they left and went home to the duplex.

Her ring gripped her finger, tight as ever. The wedding band that secured her to Franklin in sickness and in health.

Until death do you part.

A splash as her hand dropped beneath the water. She tugged on the ring but it wouldn’t come loose. Never came loose, even if she lost weight. She’d tried that and dropped two or three pounds before she got so sick she had to eat again and still the ring wouldn’t budge. She could rationalize it all she wanted. Jennifer was a terrible wife who never showed her husband any affection and now she…

She opened her eyes and looked up at the ceiling. That nasty little voice wasn’t her. It sounded a lot like her mother.

Flexing her fingers, she found them all pruny and got out of the tub, standing on the bath mat to stretch. Shivering from the cold, she wrapped herself up in a fluffy robe and sat for a while, letting herself adjust to the chill air. Jacob kept the air conditioning cranked. As much as she was shivering, she felt warm. Thinking about him had that effect on her.

After changing into another long t-shirt, she let her hair down and climbed into the bed.

Jacob’s eye popped open.

“You’re shivering.”

“It’s like a fridge in here.”

Awkwardly in his sling, he sat up and grabbed the sheets and blankets and tucked them up over her shoulder.

“Since we’re stranded, we’ll have to warm each other with our body heat.”

That joke was not worthy of the grin on Jennifer’s face. She wriggled across the bed and tucked up against him.

“Yowch!” Jacob cried, “Your feet are freezing.”

Jennifer frowned.

“I didn’t say stop,” said Jacob.

2.

Ellison Carlyle sat in the corner booth of Pearl’s Diner, at the far end from the door. It was a two hour drive from Paradise Falls to Manheim, on the outskirts of Lancaster. Jacob chose the location and time carefully. Jennifer sat with him in the front seat of another of his drop cars, an old Buick this time. She was decked out in a baggy polo shirt and slacks, which she wore over her triweave vest and leggings. Jacob had a compression wrap around his shoulder and his own vest under his shirt. Honestly, he’d rather have been in bed.