Dark of Night (17 page)

“Oh, fuck,” Nash breathed—he obviously saw where this was going.

“In the brouhaha, Dave manages to call 9-1-1,” Jules continued, “and the skinhead runs when he hears the approaching sirens. He's gone by the time the black-and-whites show up. There's just Dave, with that knife in his hand, bleeding. But then one of the cops discovers another body—this one's dead, his throat slit. And oh yeah, it's good old Barney Delarow.”

Nash didn't say a word, but Tess reached over and took his hand.

“Next to the body is a knife which, natch, bears both Delarow's prints and Dave's blood. As for Dave's knife? It's mostly clean, but there are trace amounts of Delarow's blood and, uh, well, trust me on this—it's clearly the murder weapon.”

“Someone's trying to frame Dave,” Nash deduced.

“Or Dave's lying and there never was a skinhead,” Jules felt compelled to point out.

“Why would Dave lie?” Nash asked.

“You tell me.”

“He wouldn't.” Nash was certain. “For one thing, he doesn't know my name was Santucci.”

“You're sure of that?” Jules asked.

“Yes.”

“If Dave slit Delarow's throat,” Tess argued, “wouldn't he have been covered with his blood?”

“Not necessarily,” Nash answered her. “There are ways that… You don't want to know.”

“Yeah,” Tess said snappishly, releasing Nash's hand, “actually, Jimmy, I
do
want to—” She cut herself off, shaking her head in disgust.

And Jules found himself wishing he had access to the Bureau's vast array of departments. Particularly counseling and mental health services. If he had, he would have recommended some hard-core couples counseling. He knew—firsthand—what it was like to love someone who kept secrets and told lies. Before he'd met and married Robin, he'd spent too many years trying to maintain a relationship with a man who hadn't included honesty among his top values. That had sucked, but even so, it had taken Jules years to recognize that he deserved better.

It was entirely possible that Tess was nearing that breaking point. Which meant that unless Nash wised up and found some serious religion, so to speak, their relationship was circling the drain. Which was a freaking shame, because it was beyond obvious that they loved each other more than life itself.

Jules didn't know Nash well enough to provide the necessary ass-kicking. Of course, when it came to kicking … He made a mental note to ask Sam to pop in and talk to Jimmy, privately. For someone who wore cowboy boots and meant it, Sam was remarkably sensitive and almost freakishly astute.

“Is this something the people who were after you might do?” Jules asked Nash now. “Try to shake you out of the tree by going after your friends?”

Nash nodded. “Yeah. This sounds like them. Someone needs to call Decker and give him a warning. If they went after Dave … Deck could be next.”

“I tried calling Decker's sat phone,” Jules told them. “But got bumped to voice mail. I didn't want to leave a message, even on a secure line—”

“Message,” Tess said. “Let's back up a second and really think about the message they were sending—I mean, if this really is the Agency's black ops department trying to shake you loose.” She turned from Nash to address Jules. “We did that DNA test, so we've got to assume they know we're looking for them. But now they're also trying to figure out if it's possible that Jimmy's still alive. Because really? What if he
had
died, and someone went through his things and found that bloodstained shirt? What if they found other evidence—records or, I don't know, a list of names of people he'd … contacted or… You know …”

“Deleted,” Nash interjected. “Just say what you mean.”

Tess laughed at the irony of that, but didn't let it slow her down. Jules knew what she was heading for, and it was a freaking great idea.

“You could set up an FBI investigation,” she told Jules.

“Of me?” Nash asked. “If I'm already dead, there's no—”

“Of me,” Tess interrupted. “And Decker, too. The FBI could investigate to see if we were somehow involved in whatever crimes Jimmy committed.”

Because without the Agency's authority, the jobs Nash had done
would
have been crimes.

“The subtext of
that
message,” Jules said, “being
yes, Nash really is dead.
It gives us an additional opportunity—to see if I get a call from Max, my boss, saying
he
got a call from someone at the Agency, asking him to let the entire case drop.”

Tess, the smarty-pants, was nodding. But she wasn't done. “Before we get ahead of ourselves, we also have to think about the message we send with our reaction to Dave's attack. Do we hunker down, and bring everyone into the safe house—Decker and Dave and Sophia and, God, Tom and Lindsey and everyone we've ever called
friend?
Because if we do that, if everyone we know suddenly vanishes, and
I'm
the scumbag who hired that skinhead to attack Dave? I'm thinking,
There we go. James Nash is definitely alive.
But if Jimmy really
were
dead? And Dave got attacked like this? Decker would be first in line to assist. And you know,
I'd
even come out of mourning to go to Boston, to help him.”

“Over my dead body,” Nash said.

“Yes, Jimmy,” Tess told him tartly. “Exactly. That's the point. And it's the message we want to give them. That you really are dead.”

Nash wasn't happy about that.

“There's another possibility here,” Jules pointed out before the man could argue with Tess. “And yes, it's likely that our adversaries are going to be watching closely to see what we do next. But it's also possible that they think Dave's in the loop—that he knows for sure if you're dead or alive. And if he did know you were alive, wouldn't it make sense for him to contact you? I think it's likely they're going to be watching Dave closely, too— to see what
he's
going to do next.”

Dave knew that his next move had to be to find the Irish man who'd stabbed him.

Providing that he
had
a next move. It was entirely likely that his discharge papers from the hospital—which according to the nurse, he'd have in hand in about thirty minutes—would allow Bill Connell to swoop down, arrest him, and take him into custody. And in a jail cell, Dave wouldn't be able to move very far at all.

Sophia was still sleeping in a horribly uncomfortable-looking chair across the room when another nurse came in to free him from his final IV bag. Dave sat up after the young man left the room, cautiously getting out of bed to test his still-wobbly legs and, yes, to use the privacy of the bathroom instead of that hideous urine jug.

He relieved himself without waking Sophia—or falling down and peeing on the wall—and on the way out of the bathroom, he poked his head into the hallway, to test the reaction of the guards. Much could be learned from their response to him—which could be anything from them drawing their weapons and shouting for him to back the hell up, to a nod and a polite request to stay in the room with a
please
and a
sir.

But Dave didn't anticipate the total non-reaction he received—on account of the guards being gone.

The guards were
gone.

He moved quickly, back into the room, on legs that weren't quite ready for moving faster than a slow shuffle. “Sophia, help me,” he said, and she snapped awake, leaping from the chair.

“What are you doing out of bed?”

She headed for the nurses’ call button, but he stopped her.

“We're getting out of here,” he told her. “Now. Where are my clothes?” The words weren't even halfway out of his mouth when he
opened a cabinet and saw them, folded neatly atop his shoes. They weren't the shirt and pants he'd been wearing last night—those had been ruined— but rather a pair of jeans and one of his polo shirts with a collar, a clean pair of briefs, and socks. Someone, probably Sophia, had gotten this out of the suitcase that was no doubt still in the trunk of their rental car—on account of their never making it to their hotel last night. He scooped the clothing into his arms. “Get your things. Let's go.
Now.
”

He didn't know whose snafu this was. But whether it was Bill Connell's, the local police chief's, or the individual uniformed officers who'd apparently left their post unattended, it didn't matter.

What mattered was that, for this brief, shining moment in time, Dave could walk out of this hospital, completely unchallenged.

He opened the door and, glory alleluia, the hall was still empty. The nurses’ station seemed to be off to the right. To the left was a long corridor—and a door marked AUTHORIZED ACCESS ONLY.

“This way.” Sophia brushed past him, taking his arm and leading him left, but she didn't take the mystery door. Instead she went down the hall and took another left and then another. She led him through a set of double doors and around another corner, this time to the right, finally ending at a bank of elevators. She pushed the down button as he juggled his shoes, trying to shake free his briefs, because the last thing he needed was to get picked up for indecent exposure.

There was a sign for stairs on a door across from the elevators, and Sophia pulled him toward it, not missing a beat as she scooped up the shoe he dropped.

And then, thank God, they were in the quiet isolation of the stairwell and she was helping him get dressed, efficiently but gently, careful not to bump his bandaged wound.

It was the first time since the attack that they'd had any kind of real privacy. In fact, it felt like the equivalent of a planetary alignment or the sighting of a comet—exceedingly rare and not likely to happen again in his lifetime. Especially since he fully expected the missing guards to come bursting into the stairwell at any moment.

So Dave grabbed hold of the opportunity with both hands, jumping into the deep end of what should have been a delicately approached, one-toe-into-the-water-at-a-time topic.

“I caught the gonorrhea from oral sex,” he announced as she helped
him on with his jeans. “It was the only time we didn't use a condom. Kathy—Anise. And me.”

Sophia's response as she pushed him to sit on the stairs so she could put on his socks and guide his feet into his shoes?

She laughed.

And immediately apologized. “I'm sorry. It's just that… you said that last night
—oral sex—
and I had no idea what you meant. I was pretty sure it wasn't a request, because you were extremely upset—not to mention nearly unconscious—so …”

He caught her hand, forcing her to look into his eyes. “I didn't kill Anise Turiano, Soph. And I didn't—”

“Shhh.” She gently broke his hold on her to pull down his shirt and straighten his collar, as he fastened his belt. “We can talk about this later. Are you good for the stairs, or should we take the elevator?”

“I'm good,” he lied, starting down, leaning heavily on the banister. “I just wanted you to know—”

“Stop talking and move.”

Back when he and Sophia were in their “just friends” mode, he'd told her about the week he'd spent with Kathy-slash-Anise. He'd confessed that it had been his first-ever sexual experience—about time for a man already in his thirties—which had been hard enough to admit. The fact that he'd ended up catching an STD was icing on the embarrassment cake—and proof that life could be a real bitch.

But of course, life had then turned around and caught him completely off-guard by giving him Sophia, so, truly, how could he complain?

“I lied to the investigators,” he couldn't not tell her. “It's true. But mostly by omission—”

“It doesn't matter,” she told him, helping move past a door that was labeled
3RD
FLOOR.

“Yes it does,” he insisted.

“No,” she said, emphatically, “it doesn't.”

“It would've complicated things,” he told her as she continued to support him. They headed down to the second floor, and then the first. “I was treated anonymously, at a clinic, so there were no medical records. And it was a week between the time I thought she'd left me and her body was found, so … Her autopsy revealed that she had the disease, but by that time I was clean. And I know they tested me for it—I was in the hospital
with a punctured lung, courtesy of the same ex-KGB thugs who snuffed her. Although there was no hard proof of
that,
so …”

Dave's insistence that he'd never had unprotected sex with Anise Turi-ano, either before or, God, after her death was confirmed by his clean bill of health. He'd been dropped as the prime suspect—due to insubstantial evidence—although the agents in charge of the investigation remained convinced of his guilt and wrongdoing.

Sophia didn't say anything so Dave kept going. “And as far as Barney Delarow—”

She cut him off. “There's a taxi stand near the main entrance,” she said, “but they could be watching for us there. My gut is to get to the street and just keep moving, try to pick up a cab down toward … what is it? Cambridge Street?”

“No, Charles. Soph, please, if you have any questions at all, about anything—about Anise Turiano—I'll make sure you get the case file so you can—”

She stopped outside the door to the first floor and got right in his face. “David. We'll talk about this later. Can we walk through the lobby, please, without you shouting about all the murders you didn't commit? Let's keep this low-profile, all right?”

Dave gazed into the crystal blue of her eyes, searching for… something he didn't find. He honestly couldn't tell what she was thinking, and that made him feel sick. “What are you doing?” he whispered. “Helping me break out of here, when you don't even believe me?”

She turned away.

What he'd wanted—no,
needed—
for her to do was look him in the eye and say,
I believe you, Dave. I believe everything you say,
but instead she'd turned away.

“Yeah,” she said, and he realized that her cell phone had vibrated, and she was taking a phone call.

Great. It was probably Bill Connell himself, telling them that the stairwell was surrounded, and to come out with their hands up.

But then Sophia exhaled hard and said, “Oh, thank heaven,” and then, “ Uh-huh. Yes, wait, hang on, let me write down the address.” She pulled her notebook and pen from her handbag. “Albany Street,” she said. “Got it. No, the rental car has a GPS, so … We'll be there —probably in …” She glanced at her watch. “I want to say an hour, but it'll probably
be before then.” She laughed at something said by whoever was on the other end of the call. “See you then and … Thank you so,
so
much.” Snapping her phone shut, she put both it and her notebook back in her bag.