Before I Sleep (3 page)

The beer took the edge off her nerves, so she had another one. By the time she finished her sandwich, she was on her fourth. She wasn't used to drinking, though, and she was definitely beginning to feel rubbery.

Barney said something about a case he was working on, but she couldn't concentrate on it. Freed by the alcohol, her mind was determined to go in only one direction.

Finally she pushed back from the table. “I have to make a call.”

Barney nodded, then called the waitress to bring more wings.

Crossing the room seemed harder than usual, but Carissa didn't care. She found the pay phone near the rest rooms and punched in a number she hadn't dialed in five years.

Seamus was standing with his hands in dishwater when the phone rang. He reached for the dish towel immediately, figuring something important had come up in one of his cases. His beeper was on his belt, but turned off since he wasn't supposed to be on call tonight.

When he got to the living room, his dad was putting the receiver down beside the phone on the end table.

“For you,” Danny said.

Of course it was for him, Seamus thought. It was
his
phone. He shook himself as he reached for the receiver, trying to lose his irritable mood. Having Danny in the house wasn't helping.

“Rourke,” he said into the phone.

“Who was that who answered?”

He recognized the voice. How could he not? But what he didn't expect was the sinking sensation in the pit of his stomach and the way shock made him grip the phone until his fingers ached. It shouldn't rattle him like this, he thought. He listened to her every night on the radio. It shouldn't affect him at all to hear the voice. “My dad,” he said finally. “Hello, Carissa.”

“I didn't know you had a dad.”

“Most of us do.” He waited, wondering why the hell she would call him, but not wanting to ask. He didn't want to give her even that much.

“Yeah,” she said. “I guess most of us do.”

He picked up on her tone, on the slight slurring of her words. “Have you been drinking?” She never drank. That was one of the things that had attracted him to her in the first place.

“Just a… just a couple of beers.”

He heard noise in the background, figured she was out somewhere. “Don't drive yourself home,” he cautioned. “Call a cab.”

“I'll do what I damn well please.”

“Carey—”

She cut him off. “I'm not your problem anymore, Rourke.”

He felt the bite of an old impatience. “So why'd you call?”

She was silent for a long time. In the background, he could hear voices laughing and talking, and some sad country song wailing.

“Carey?” he said finally. “Why'd you call?”

“Did you hear?”

“Hear what?”

“The governor… the governor signed the death warrant for John Otis today.”

He let her words echo for a minute. They'd argued over this one until it had become the last straw in their relationship. The last straw among a hundred other straws they hadn't been able to weave together. “So?” he asked, forcing himself to be brutal. “That's not news. It was coming sooner or later.”

“Yeah.” She paused, and he could hear her draw a long shaky breath. “Yeah. We knew it was coming. So how does it feel, Seamus?”

“How does what feel?”

“How does it feel to know you're responsible for a man's death?”

Christ! If he could have gotten his hands on her just then, he might have shaken her until her teeth rattled. No, he wouldn't have. He never would have touched her. But, by God, he wanted to.

“I did my job,” he said flatly. “So did you.”

“Yeah.” She gave a strangled laugh. “Yeah, I did my job.”

“He killed his foster parents! He slashed them to death with a razor. He's getting exactly what he deserves.”

Her voice grew quiet. “Maybe. Maybe not. But I'll tell you one thing for sure, Seamus Rourke. It might as well be you and me flipping the switch on him in three weeks. So how does it feel to be an executioner?”

He closed his eyes, angry and not wanting to be angry. Hurting for her and not wanting to hurt. It should have been dead and buried by now, but her call was raising a zombie from the grave.

“Look, Carey,” he said finally, “the system did what the system does. You didn't hand down that death penalty. The jury did.”

“Yeah, right.”

“Carey, you need to get someone to drive you home.” He was more worried about her driving drunk than anything else, he realized. In this mood … “Carey?”

“Just mind your own damn business!” She snapped, and slammed the phone down.

He stood a minute listening to the dial tone, then hit the automatic callback code. A man's voice answered.

“Where's that phone located?” he asked.

“Um, Roof's Place, man. You need to talk to somebody?”

“No thanks.”

He hung up and looked at his dad, who was watching a late-night movie. “I need to go give a ride to a friend,” he said. “I don't know when I'll be back.”

Danny looked at him and nodded. “Sure, son. Sure.” Then his bleary eyes jumped back to the TV set.

Seamus wanted to smash the set. He wanted to throw his father out. He wanted most of all not to see Carissa Stover again.

So he picked up his gun and badge and headed out. He wouldn't need the gun, but he was a cop. He never went anywhere without it. Besides, much as he hated his dad, he didn't want to have to deal with his suicide. One had been more than enough. Two would probably kill him.

And right now, he didn't trust any of the people in his life not to do something stupid.

C
HAPTER
2

22 Days

T
he steady rain had become a thunderstorm. Seamus drove down Thirty-fourth and watched red, pink, and blue lightning leap across the sky, watched the clouds glow from within in a dazzling array of colors. The Tampa Bay area was the lightning capital of the world, and late summer was the height of the display. There had been a time when he had loved the wild storms that often blew through. These days he hardly noticed them except as an inconvenience.

He drove into a patch of heavier rain, and not even at top speed could his wipers keep up. He slowed down and tried to restrain his irritation. He didn't want to think about what might happen to Carey if she tried to drive in this mess in her current state.

Cars and booze. They had turned his life into a living hell.

He reached Roof's Place at last and pulled into the parking lot, spraying water in every direction as he hit the flooded gutter and then a deep puddle. He was just wondering where to start looking for Carey when he saw her Jeep in the side lot. It was the same vehicle she'd bought when she'd worked at the State Attorney's Office. He pulled up behind it and parked so that if she managed to slip past him, she wouldn't be able to pull out.

Leaving his emergency flashers on, he climbed out into the downpour and felt water swirl around his ankles. Damn the woman anyway. She'd been nothing but a pain in the butt since he first set eyes on her.

He started to dart past her car to the protection of the roof overhang, when he caught sight of movement in the driver's seat. Pausing, he looked through the plastic window and saw Carey sitting at the wheel with her head tipped back and her eyes closed.

He rapped on the door, but she didn't respond. Muttering an oath, he tried the door and found it unlocked. He flung it open.

“Jesus Christ, woman!” he said. “Have you lost your mind? Sitting in an unlocked car in a dark parking lot this late at night?”

Her eyes fluttered open, and she mumbled something.

It was useless. He reached for her arm. “Come on. I'm taking you home.”

That seemed to wake her fully. Suddenly she was glaring at him. “No! Get lost, Rourke.”

With a huge effort of will, he reached for some shreds of patience. “I'm not leaving you here,” he said flatly. “If you don't get raped or robbed, you'll get busted.”

“Busted! I'm not doing anything wrong!”

“You're drunk and you're sitting in your car. Hey, you're the lawyer! You don't need
me
to tell you about being in actual physical control of a vehicle when you're drunk.”

“I only had a couple of beers!”

“That's what they all say.” He leaned toward her. “Look, here are your choices. You can climb into my car and let me take you home, or I can arrest you for DUI. Either way, you're not going anywhere alone, because I'm parked right behind you.”

She turned her head and recognized his aging gray Taurus. “Fuckin’ cop,” she said.

The Carey he knew hadn't done much swearing. That word coming out of her mouth shocked him a little. It was the alcohol, he reminded himself. But one thing for sure— he didn't like what he was seeing.

“Come on, Carey,” he said impatiently. “I'm getting soaked to the bone.”

She looked at him, then surprised him by touching the tip of his nose and wiping a raindrop from it. Then she laughed, a slightly hysterical sound. “You're all wet, Rourke.”

“At least I'm not drunk.”

“I'm not drunk!”

He looked away for a moment, reaching for another shred of patience. “Wanna take the Breathalyzer and see?”

That shut her up. She looked down at her hands and the keys in her lap. “I don't want to leave my car.”

“It'll be okay. You can get a cab in the morning and come back for it. Come on.”

She started to climb out, and he had to snatch at her keys so they didn't fall to the ground. She took an unsteady step toward his car, then reached out to brace herself against the side of the Jeep. He used the opportunity to grab her small handbag from the passenger seat and lock the car. Then he took her elbow in a steely grip and guided her around to the passenger side of the car. He buckled her in and slammed the door.

When he climbed into the driver's seat, the air-conditioning felt icy. He was nearly soaked to the bone, but so was Carey. He flipped the knob from cooling to heating, and was grateful when the warmth started to seep in.

She didn't say anything, and her head was tipped over toward the side window, so he thought she'd fallen asleep. Thank God for small favors, he thought as he pulled back out onto the street. Lightning streaked down from the sky, followed rapidly by a boom of thunder. The lights along the street flickered and went out, and the night was suddenly as dark as a tomb.

“You still living in the same place?” he asked, wondering if she would wake up enough to answer. If not, he could check her driver's license.

“No.”

So she was awake. “What's your address?”

“I've got a place in Feather Sound.”

All the way up there. He sighed. “I guess radio pays better than prosecuting.”

“Yeah, a whole lot better.” Her head rolled against the headrest, and she looked at him. “I always figured it was weird that you could spend seventy thousand dollars going to law school and only be worth twenty-five when you got out.”

“Nobody said working for the state was the way to get rich.”

She laughed again at that, but there was still that hysterical sound to it.

He let it go, hoping he got her home before she came apart. He took Thirty-eighth across to 1-275, figuring it was the fastest way to go, even at this time of night. He wondered if she was living with somebody now, and then wondered why he should even be interested.

Their relationship had been dead for five years, long enough that if it had been a body, it would be nothing but bleached bones. Of course, if you buried the body, it could last a lot longer. And maybe that's what he'd done with this mess with Carey. Maybe he'd buried it when he should have left it in the open and let the carrion animals pick it clean.

“Rourke?”

He wished she'd just go to sleep. “Yeah?”

“You killed somebody once you said.”

That was one of the things he'd always disliked about her, the way she would use things he told her to pick away at his defenses. It was like being cross-examined on the witness stand.

And right now he had the feeling that she was going to use that little bit of knowledge to open a doorway to hell.

“So?” he asked gruffly.

“How do you sleep at night?”

“Christ!” He slapped his hand against the steering wheel. “Jesus, Carey, the guy was shooting at me! How do I sleep at night? By remembering I'd be dead if I hadn't managed to kill him first!”

She was quiet again for a while, and he turned on the ramp for the interstate, hoping she'd get the message and just shut up.

She didn't. “Why are you so angry?”

He drew a long breath before he answered, trying to moderate his tone. “Oh, I don't know,” he said finally. “How about that I haven't had any sleep in thirty-six hours, that I ought to be in my bed right now catching up instead of being out in the middle of a stormy night rescuing a drunk ex-girlfriend who's suffering from some kind of existential angst.”

“You don't feel anything about John Otis?”

Christ. It wasn't going to go away. “Look, the guy was convicted of the brutal murders of two people. He deserves what he's getting.”

“But I don't think he did it.”

“There sure as hell wasn't any evidence that he didn't. And it wasn't your decision anyway. I collected evidence. You presented it in court. But it was the
jury
that convicted him. It was the
judge
that sentenced him.”

“That's an easy way to deny responsibihty.”

Yup. He hated her. He was sure of that now.

“People shouldn't get the death penalty in circumstantial cases.”

“Take it up with the legislature.”

“It was a lousy case, too. As thin as I've ever seen.”

He sighed, forcing himself to let go of the anger. “It wasn't thin. He'd done it before to his father. In exactly the same way. Then he had an argument with his foster parents, and they turn up slashed to death. You're not going to convince
me
that it was just a coincidence that his father and his foster parents were all slashed to death with a razor.”

She stirred, waving a hand as if she were trying to silence him. “You don't get it, Rourke. He killed his father to protect his brother. In all the years that bastard abused those two boys, Otis didn't kill him to protect himself. He did it to protect his brother. And that's a whole different thing from killing his foster parents over a stupid argument.”