Before Dawn (11 page)

The rough voice pulled her back. “Not there.”

Noelle was glad of the darkness as warmth flooded her cheeks.

“Is it just your side?”

“Mainly.”

“Are you going to let me check it out?”

“Are you a nurse or a doctor or a paramedic?”

She drew back as if attacked by a kitten. Her lips thinned. “No, but I do know basic first aid. Or do you think sheer macho willpower will take care of your injury?”

A rough sound rumbled from his chest. “I’m sorry.” Very gingerly, very slowly, he moved his hands away from his left side and said, “Here.”

Carefully, Noelle scooted down so she could better examine the wound. She pulled the black T-shirt from his jeans and peeled it up. A blade had sliced through the leather jacket and the T-shirt and left a long cut that wasn’t as deep as she’d feared. But it wasn’t as shallow as she’d hoped.

“We should get you to a hospital. You need stitches.”

The only response she got was an indecipherable grunt. She assumed it was a sound of protest.

She sighed. “Shouldn’t I call the police?”

He growled a very decisive negative.

“What is this aversion you have to the police? Is it cops in general or just the NYPD?”

“No,” he repeated more firmly.

“Why not? Your tax dollars pay for their services.” A thought occurred to her. “Uh, you do pay taxes, right?”

He slanted a narrow glance at her. “Yes.”

“You don’t remember what happened?”

Confusion swamped her features. “What happened when?”

Jake lifted a brow, his expression sardonic. “When you were attempting to enter this cabin,” he reminded her dryly. Then, with emphasis, he added, “Illegally.”

The confusion didn’t disappear.

“As in, without the owner’s consent.”

“But…” Her voice trailed off as realization dawned. “Oh God.” She squeezed her eyes shut and sucked in a breath. “That can’t be right.”

He mentally crossed out amnesia and drawled very sarcastically, “Oh, it’s very right. I assure you, Katarzyna Delaney.”

Her eyes flew open at his harsh, humorless tone, or maybe it was his pronunciation of her name. KAHT-ah-ZHEE-nah. Perhaps she wasn’t used to people who didn’t butcher her name on the first attempt. Luckily, he’d had plenty of practice with non-Anglicized names. All part and parcel of his previous job.

“My cabin has the bullet hole and the bullet from your weapon to prove it.” Even with the faint Southern accent softening his words, they still had bite.

His captive looked as if she hoped the bed would open up and put her out of her misery. “
Your
cabin?” Her lashes lowered as she bit down on the corner of her lip. “That can’t be right,” she murmured, more to herself than to him.

“Technically, it’s my cousin’s.”

Her eyes flew to his. “Your cousin’s? Who’s your cousin?”

He eyed her warily. “I’m the one who should be asking the questions.”

Frustration crossed her features. “Just tell me if your cousin is Ella Willis.”

“Ella Willis,” Jake echoed, neither confirming nor denying her statement.

“A close friend,” Katarzyna explained hurriedly. “She offered me the use of her cabin for the next two weeks. Her husband is my lieutenant.”

Jake stared at her. She looked earnest enough, but the people in his world lied for a living. He dismissed the police ID—those could be forged. And Ella knew he was here. She wouldn’t have offered the cabin to someone else without warning him first.

“Listen, you have to believe me. Please.”

There was only one way to settle this. He crossed the room, snatched the cell phone lying on top of the highboy, flipped it open and powered it on. The reception wasn’t great and he had to move to the window before a single bar appeared in the upper left-hand corner of the screen. He punched in ten digits and waited. The third ring was cut short.

“Hello?” a voice mumbled sleepily.

“Ella, it’s Jake.”

He heard sheets rustling and imagined Ella was pushing herself into a sitting position.

“What’s wrong?” his cousin demanded, all traces of sleepiness gone from her voice.

“I’m at the cabin and I have an unexpected guest. She claims you sent her.”

Ella took the telephone away from her ear and murmured something he couldn’t make out. He assumed she was telling her husband to go back to sleep. Then she sighed into the telephone, confirming his worst suspicion. “Is she a tall, good-looking redhead?”

It was his turn to sigh. “Yes.”

“Answers to Katarzyna Delaney?”

Another affirmative.

“Yes, I sent her.”

He muttered an expletive, cast a hard look at the woman handcuffed to his bed—who was unashamedly listening to his conversation—and would’ve stalked from the room had he not been worried about the cellular reception. He settled for turning his back on the bed and the woman bound to it.

“You could’ve warned me.”

“Yes, I could have,” Ella agreed in a disconcertingly reasonable tone, “if you hadn’t shut off your cell phone. Sometimes you take that whole loner thing too far. It’s not healthy. Ted Kaczynski was a loner.”

A low growl rumbled from his chest.

Ella blew out a breath. “You can get mad at me and yell at me all you want, but don’t take your temper out on Katarzyna. She’s been through enough.” When the growl didn’t cease, she added, “She needed to get away for a bit, so I offered her the cabin.”

“While I’m still here,” he pointed out between gritted teeth.

“So?” she drawled, using that careless tone of voice that always set off warning bells in his head. After a beat, she said, “She’s attractive. You’re available.”

He was glad his interfering cousin wasn’t in the same room because he might’ve strangled her. Then her husband would’ve arrested him. It wasn’t worth the hassle.

Still, his voice lowered dangerously, as much to keep his captive from listening in as from temper. “Are you setting me up?”

“Dear God in heaven, no! She’s sworn off relationships with men, so you’re safe. Besides, I don’t think anything permanent would work with you.” She paused. “I was thinking more along the lines of a fling.”

“Jesus Christ,” Jake muttered, running a hand down his face. “You’re pimping me out.”

“Damn it, Ethan,” Nick Markov muttered, trying to steady his drunken partner and keep him from falling flat on his face and doing permanent damage to it. “Your wife’s going to have my ass for this.”

Ethan Murtagh’s scowl bordered on a pout more suited to a two-year-old. “I can walk on my own two feet,” he said, his words only slightly slurred. He stumbled, nearly taking them both down.

Nick grunted and muttered, “Right.”

It was several frustrating moments before Nick managed to strap his partner into the passenger seat of the black SUV parked in front of the bar. Ethan had been, once again, trying to drink himself into a stupor. He didn’t handle disagreements with his significant other well. The current dispute was over the photographer who had shot his wife’s swimsuit spread the previous week in the Bahamas.

“You’d better hope Torie’s asleep when I get you home,” Nick said, getting behind the wheel.

A disgruntled sound came from the sprawled figure beside him. Nick answered with a grunt of his own as he pulled out. At almost one in the morning on a Wednesday night, it was relatively quiet in the Sixties on the Upper East Side, so it was a few short minutes before he was turning onto Fifth Avenue. Deciding it wouldn’t take long to get Ethan upstairs and into his nineteenth-floor condo, Nick stopped the SUV in front of the building, killed the engine and flipped down his visor to display his credentials. He released his seat belt buckle, then reached over for his partner’s. Ethan mumbled a protest, swatted at Nick’s helping hand and fumbled with the door handle. Suppressing the urge to roll his eyes, Nick grabbed a fistful of his partner’s jacket.

“Stay put,” Nick said. “You open that door, you’ll land on your pretty face and Torie will never forgive me.”

Ethan fell back in his seat, head tilted back, eyes closed. Satisfied, Nick opened his door, got out and made his way to the passenger side door. Ethan didn’t move when he pulled the door open. Nick silently groaned at the possibility of having to carry his less-than-petite partner upstairs.

Before Nick could reach for his semiconscious partner, small pebbles pinged the roof of the SUV and bounced off his head and the sidewalk. Frowning, he skimmed a hand over his hair and his gaze across the roof of his vehicle. The pebbles glittered faintly under the mellow glow of the streetlight.

Not pebbles. Glass shards.

Nick glanced up—and froze, his gaze transfixed by the body above him.

With a faint sense of incredulity, Nick stared, breath trapped in his lungs, as the blurred line of stark paleness grew larger and sharper as gravity closed the distance between its victim and the sidewalk. He couldn’t tear his eyes away from the white face seemingly directly above him. For timeless seconds, that was all he saw, but his mind filled in the rest with disturbing clarity. He saw the wide open mouth and the rounded eyes, filled with the horrifying knowledge of one’s own imminent death.

Nick was wrong about two things—the body wasn’t directly above him, and the ground wouldn’t stop its free fall.

It was directly above the SUV.

His own eyes widening at this realization, Nick fisted his hands in Ethan’s jacket, hauled his partner from the vehicle and jumped back, grunting when the edge of the door caught his shoulder. Ethan stumbled and both men went down hard as the body met metal.

The sickening thud was nearly drowned out by the explosive crunching of metal and shattering of glass as the SUV gave like an aluminum pie plate under the sudden force.

As the squeaky sound of the SUV’s shocks being tested beyond their limits mingled with the other sounds of destruction, Nick, his heart somewhere in the vicinity of his throat, found himself flat on the ground, face first, his head covered with his forearms. The damp, industrial scent of the sidewalk filled his nostrils as he took in the heavy, metallic clinking sounds as parts fell off the vehicle.

Nick opened his eyes, lifted his head and pushed to his feet. Without conscious thought, he withdrew his gun and turned around. He stood on the street, the worn handle of his Glock comfortable and familiar in his grip, and took in the remains of his SUV. The new hood ornament had slammed onto it with enough force to bend the front hood into an imperfect V, partially obscuring the body from Nick’s view. The windshield, torn from the top of its frame, was split in two down the middle. The jagged, incomplete halves—spider webs of shattered glass held together by the thin, inner layer of plastic laminate—disappeared inside the SUV’s dark interior.

Nick took a step closer, his mouth tightening as his gaze dropped. A stark face stared at him from the dashboard. Dark hair topped glassy, unseeing eyes, a bent nose and a mouth opened wide in a silent scream. Blood, thick and dark, seeped from the matted hair to pool on the leather. There was no need to check for a pulse.

“Jesus Christ.”

Ethan’s shocked whisper brought Nick’s attention around to him. His partner swayed for a moment, then slapped one hand against Nick’s shoulder to steady himself. Blood trickled down the left side of his forehead from a gash that disappeared into his hair. He was sobering up by the second as he stared at the body. Homicide detectives they might be, but they’ve never had a case fall on them literally.

Nick swiveled his gaze back to the front of his SUV and blinked, but the image before him didn’t waver.

The male body was a tangle of arms and legs bent at awkward angles nestled in the damaged hood of the SUV.

There was nothing that he could do.

Something heavy settled inside Nick, as it did every time he saw a body. Not bothering to shake off the feeling, he peered up the high-rise—and caught a flash of pale color on the top terrace.

The suicide just became a homicide.