Chasing Venus (32 page)

“Then I ran after
Bigelow.”
 
He remembered the clack
of his heels on the pavement, the thumping of his heart, the cold weight of his
service revolver in his hand.
 
He
didn’t know, even now, if it had been adrenaline that propelled him or
testosterone run amok.
 
He’d handled
the situation like a TV cop, chasing an armed suspect on his own, without
backup.
 
Yet this had been a
real-life crime, not a Hollywood chase scene.
 
Meaning there was no second take.
 
“It didn’t take long for Bigelow to make
a mistake and run into an alley.
 
I
realized later there was a tall fence at the rear of it but he must have felt
he didn’t have enough of a lead over me to scramble up and over.”

“So he felt trapped.”

And he reacted like a
trapped animal will.
 
By attacking.

Reid shut his eyes.
 
The scene spooled out in his
memory.
 
Reid, unable to see Bigelow
in the pitch-black bowel of the alley.
 
Going on the highest alert, immediately throwing his body back against
the shadowy wall, knowing he’d be backlit otherwise, a perfect target.
 
Suddenly a shot from Bigelow,
ricocheting uselessly off the pavement, booming like a sonic blast through the
near-empty neighborhood.
 
Bigelow,
invisible, shouting from the black depths.
 
Who the fuck are you?
 
Leave me the fuck alone if you know
what’s good for you!

“He fired a shot,” Reid
said, “that didn’t hit anything.
 
But Donna must have heard it from the truck.
 
She must have thought I was down.”

Out of the corner of
his eye, Reid saw Annie raise her hands to her face.

His lips continued to
move as if of their own volition.
 
“She showed up at the mouth of the alley, calling my name.”
 
Reid!
 
Reid!
 
He could still hear her voice,
quavering, frightened.
 
“She just
stood there, staring down the alley and calling.
 
It was as if she was frozen.
 
I don’t know if she couldn’t see me or
what.
 
I screamed at her to get
back, go back to the truck, but she didn’t move, I don’t know if she couldn’t
move—”

He stopped.
 
Annie’s hand grasped his own.
 
Her skin was warm but he felt cold, so
cold, frozen himself.

“And then Bigelow fired
again.
 
And this time—”

This time he hit
her.
 
It was as if he had taken dead
aim.
 
He hit her square in the
chest.
 
She collapsed backward onto
the sidewalk, her blond hair splayed like a halo, her blue eyes wide and
surprised, her life’s blood blooming like a red rose over her heart.
 
His name was the last word she ever
spoke.
 
She had died fast, so
fast.
 
A lifetime snuffed out like a
bubble on a pond.
 
Sometimes Reid
tried to convince himself she perished so quickly that she hadn’t suffered.
 
Other times, when he was driven by a
morbid desire to wallow in pain, he told himself that she had felt a torment
not even he could imagine.

“Bigelow got
away.”
 
His own voice sounded small,
and distant.
 
“He climbed over the
fence.
 
I didn’t even try to stop
him.”

“He didn’t matter
anymore.”

“No.”
 
He paused, then, “Nothing did.”

*

Annie pushed away her
bowl of soup, untouched.
 
She
wondered why she could have wanted to know how Donna died.
 
It was unfathomably horrible.
 
And that Reid had to go on after that,
wake up every morning, live his life …

She couldn’t
speak.
 
She could do nothing more
than hold his hand.
 
The touch of
him was proof that he was there, physically there, but he might have been a
galaxy away, adrift in a horror beyond comprehension.
 
That seemed never to end.

He turned toward
her.
 
His blue eyes were dead at
that moment, as were the words he spoke.
 
“I can’t forgive myself.
 
I
put her in the situation that killed her.”

“You tried to protect
her.”

“I should never have
let her get close to that kind of evil.”

Words he’d spoken to
her earlier that night repeated themselves in her memory.
 
All
I’m saying is that I cannot protect you if you insist on doing what I tell you
not to do.
 
That’s what Donna
had done, though Annie was sure she had felt she had no choice.
 
Yet now Annie understood why Reid got so
angry when she took unnecessary risks.
 
No wonder he always imagined the worst possible outcome: he’d seen it
happen.

“Reid, you shouldn’t
blame yourself like this.
 
You
couldn’t have known.”

“I should have known.”

“Life doesn’t work that
way.
 
We can’t know in advance what
will happen.
 
Nor can we make people
do the things we ask them to.”

He turned away.
 
“I have played the If Only game so many
times.
 
If only we hadn’t stopped to
buy ice cream.
 
If only we’d gone to
a different store.
 
If only we’d
been two minutes later.”
 
He
stopped.
 
What he didn’t say hung in
the air.
 
If only Donna had stayed in the truck.

“She was trying to protect
you, you know.
 
She was afraid you’d
been shot.”

“And it killed her.”

“Did you ever stop to
think that it might have been
you
who’d died otherwise?
 
Bigelow might
have hit you.
 
Or he might have shot
you, too, so you wouldn’t be a witness to Donna’s shooting.
 
It might have ended differently but even
more tragically.”

He said nothing.
 
Annie had the idea he believed it would
have been only his due to die that night.
 
After all, Reid would reason, he was the one who made the mistake, so he
should be the one to pay for it.

Annie couldn’t find it
within herself to agree.
 
She felt a
pang deep in her soul imagining a world without Reid Gardner in it.
 
It shocked her how desolate that landscape
appeared.
 
And yet only weeks before
she had never met the man, never seen his face.

She leaned closer.
 
“The point is, you did the best you
could at the time.
 
That’s all any
of us can do.”

He pulled his hand away
and vigorously shook his head.
 
“No
way that was my best.”
 
His voice
was harsh.
 
“I was an arrogant
sonovabitch
.
 
I
thought I was invincible.
 
And Donna
paid for it.”

“Can you never forgive
yourself?”

“Why should I?”
 
He raised his eyes to hers.
 
“Donna lost her life.
 
I’ve still got everything.
 
My health, my family.
 
Christ, I’m famous now, and rich.
 
I’m a goddamn celebrity.”
 
His voice had risen.
 
“Why the hell should I forgive
myself?
 
How do I do her justice by
letting myself off the hook?”

“You’re not doing her
justice
this
way.
 
She loved you.
 
She would want you to be happy.
 
She wouldn’t want you to suffer for the
rest of your life because of one mistake, even if it was so costly.
 
Would she?
 
I don’t think so.”

“I don’t get why you’re
going so easy on me.”

Oh, I do
.
 
Annie looked
at Reid’s ravaged face and completely understood.
 
Understood what Donna must have
felt.
 
Understood what it was to
love this man.
 
Understood what it
was to want him to be happy.

She knew she had no
right to trade his life for Donna’s.
 
Yet she was grateful to the bottom of her soul that he had been the one
to walk out of that alley alive, that he had been the one given the chance to
go on.

Yes, she realized,
taking in every detail of Reid across the small pine table, it was too late for
her now.
 
Too late to hold back; too
late to think it through.
 
She’d
done it again, what she’d done in college with Philip, jumped headlong into the
chasm, plunged blindly into something she didn’t know the depths of.

He spoke again.
 
“I haven’t talked about this in a long
time.
 
Most people don’t want to
hear about it anymore.
 
Even my family.
 
They’ve run out of patience.
 
I’m supposed to have gotten over it
already.
 
Moved on.”

“They probably think
you’ve punished yourself enough.
 
They don’t want you to lose another day of your life reliving a past
you’ll never be able to change.”

Even as she mouthed the
words, she understood how self-serving they were.
 
She wanted him to move on as well, not
only for his sake but for hers.
 
She
wanted him to put the pain of his past in a box he opened only rarely, and to
live his life in the full light of the sun.
 
With her beside him.

Something inside her
made her push him again.
 
“Don’t you
want to live again, Reid?”
 
She kept
her voice soft and her eyes on those rough features of his, that stern mouth
and crooked nose and set jaw.
 
It
was the face of an intense man, a controlled man.
 
She wanted him to lose that control,
shake if off like a too heavy sweater.
 
She watched him take in her words.
 
She held her breath, and wondered if he grasped what she was really
asking.
 
What she was really
offering.

He said nothing.
 
After what seemed like forever, she rose
from the table.
 
She left everything
behind, as it was, and without conscious thought, knowing only that she was
sending Reid a signal she prayed he would answer, she walked away, into the
larger of the two bedrooms.

It was dark but for a
puddle of moonlight falling on the bed from the lone window.
 
She shed her clothes slowly,
methodically, abandoning them in a pile on the floor.
 
Her skin glowed silver in the moon’s
glow.
 
She slid her nude body between
the cool sheets, staying carefully on one side of the double bed.
 
Her head fell back against the pillow
but her eyes remained open.
 
Sleep
was far away, unwanted.
 
Like a
night creature, her every sense was alert, attuned to the merest whisper of movement
in the cabin.

Seconds later Reid
loomed in the doorway like an intruder, but one who had received the most
intimate of invitations.
 
His
outline—tall, broad-shouldered, rugged, male—nearly made her
shiver.
 
She waited, barely daring
to breathe, willing him to move a step nearer, then another, to intrude on her
in primal, base ways.
 
Her body
roused at the sight of him, the anticipation of him, the anticipation of what
she wanted him to do to her.
 
She
wanted his hands on her flesh, and his mouth, and his tongue …
 
Her nipples stiffened and a heaviness
settled between her legs.

He moved into the shaft
of moonlight.
 
It cut across his
face like a scar, slashing the ice-blue eyes, outlining the hard curve of his
mouth.
 
His eyes never left hers as
he shucked his own clothes with sharp movements.
 
She let her eyes roam him as he stood
there, taking in the sheer male power of him, the naked arousal, the muscled
strength she longed to feel pound within her.

He tore back the sheets
and climbed atop her, not hesitating for a second.
 
His body was a blunt weapon, sinewy,
strong, urgent.
 
His erection
pressed hard against her belly, a blatant instrument she couldn’t hold off for
long even if she wanted to.
 
His
mouth took possession of hers with a rough hunger she had never known before
and that stunned her with its power.
 
She had started this game but realized suddenly that no way was she
still in control of it.
 
She was
reduced to open arms, an open mouth, spread legs, a vessel waiting for his
penetration.
 
Wanting it.
 
Longing for it.
 
Nearly gasping for it.

His tongue was deep
inside her mouth.
 
She grasped his
head, angled herself to bring him in deeper still, to probe him as he probed
her.
 
His beard scraped against her fragile
skin.
 
Reid
, she thought, this is
Reid
.
 
She could scarcely believe it.
 
She thought now that on some level she
had wanted him from the moment she had met him, wanted the tall charismatic
stranger in the black leather jacket who commanded attention without doing a thing.
 
Then it might have been only a matter of
animal lust.
 
Now that was only a
part of it.