Money To Burn (33 page)

I don’t know what I expected the two men to do next. Clearly, they were deep in the eight-ball they’d bought from their dealer and planning to party the night away. But they were my only lead and so I waited. I took some footage of Jake and his redhead through the window to test Bobby’s camera, then killed some time wondering if there could be a connection between Tom Nash and drugs. Who knows what he was using in his laboratory? Maybe Jake Talbot had gotten high one night and run out of fairy dust, prompting him to break into Tom’s lab and eventually leading to disaster? No theory is too farfetched when drugs are involved. I’ve heard junkies boast about punching out their grandmothers for a fistful of change.

About fifteen minutes after I took up my spot across the street, Cosgrove and his brunette left the bar by the front door. They staggered down the sidewalk toward his Porsche in the kind of boozy embrace that people with a shred of dignity are embarrassed to discover they’ve indulged in once they sober up.

Now that the two drug buddies were splitting up, I was faced with a dilemma. I decided to stay put on Jake’s tail for a very scientific reason: I hated him more. He was still standing near the rear door, shielding the redhead from the rest of the bar with his body. Her head was starting to droop now and the beer mug in her hand was dipping lower and lower toward the floor. If Jake didn’t make his move soon, he’d be better off nipping next door to the funeral home for a more responsive partner.

He made his move. The back door of the Loop opened and he steered the redhead outside by her elbow. She promptly bounced off a street lamp into the gutter. Jake caught her on the way down and hoisted her back aloft, then guided her toward a red Miata parked at the curb. Its top was down, revealing a leather interior. He probably had hundreds of them lined up in his garage like Matchbox cars, for those pesky times when his Lamborghini quit on him.

He poured the girl into the passenger seat, then leapt over the driver’s side door—proving he was a hell of a lot more sober than she was—and roared away down Main Street. I jogged after him, reached my rental car near Down Under and hopped inside, still keeping an eye on his tail lights. He was at least three blocks ahead, but I caught up with him at the corner of Ninth Street and Main. I expected him to turn left and head toward his family compound, but he turned right on red and roared down Ninth Street like a jet about to take off from a runway. A few blocks later he turned left and I cut through the parking lot of George’s Garage restaurant just in time to see him zoom down the entrance ramp for 1-85. If I didn’t know better, I’d say he knew he was being followed.

With the top down on his Miata, he was easy to spot among the more staid Buicks and Chevys clogging the highway. I dropped in a few cars behind him as he slowed for a construction lane, confident that he had no way of knowing that I had exchanged my Porsche for an Escort. He sped north past Durham, heading for Raleigh via Highway 70. I eased back a few cars and relied on the stop-and-start traffic to keep him within easy spotting distance.

A few miles later, he turned right abruptly and wound back into a patch of overdeveloped land that was clogged with the ubiquitous brick apartment complexes popular with students and the transient Triangle crowd.

When he turned into one of the smaller apartment complexes, I pulled my car over onto the shoulder of the main entrance road and waited until he had parked and helped the nearly incapacitated redhead from the car. If she lived in the complex, I was surprised she’d been coherent enough to tell him.

I left my car where it was and crept into a row of redwood bushes, keeping low to the ground and occasionally raising my head to check on their progress.

The redhead’s legs buckled beneath her, and every time Jake got her to stand up, her knees wobbled then turned inward and she collapsed again. By the time he reached the concrete entrance stairwell, he had her by the shoulders and was practically dragging her up the steeply inclined brick walkway. I hid behind the Miata as he took a set of keys from his pocket, then unlocked the door of a first-floor apartment. He looped his arms under her shoulders and heaved her inside, her head lolling back and her body limp.

I didn’t like the smell of it at all. None of it fit. She was too drunk to talk, so why had Jake taken her here? She was also too drunk to drive, so maybe it was her car and maybe those were her keys. But she had seemed nearly comatose from the time she’d laid ce sunk to dher head back in the passenger seat and I had witnessed no talking or communication between them so far.

What the hell was he up to?

The apartment complex was quiet. It was past one and most of the residents were already in bed. I looked around, saw no one, and crept toward the building, scrambling up a crumbling red dirt hill to get there.

The apartment was built on the side of a steep hill that had been planted with Bermuda grass in a futile attempt to keep it from eroding. Though the entrance was level with the top of the hill, the rest of the apartment extended over the slope, so that the windows were higher than normal above the ground. I could tell lights were being turned on inside the apartment, but could not see above the window ledge into the rooms.

I stretched as high as I could and touched the rough surface of a concrete window ledge, then dug my fingers in and tried to pull myself up. I managed to claw my way up to eye level and found myself staring into a bedroom through a ten-inch gap in the curtains. The lights were on, but I did not see either Jake Talbot or his companion. I

pulled myself up further and rested on my elbows, my legs dangling in the air, listening to water running in a nearby bathroom. Maybe he was trying to revive the redhead.

Unfortunately, I also heard car engines. A pair of vans turned into the entrance road of the complex. I couldn’t afford to be caught dangling from a windowsill—how the hell would I explain that to the cops?—so I dropped to safety and landed in some prickly holly bushes. Ouch. Whatever happened to good old boxwoods? I crouched behind the stiff curtain of leaves, waiting as the two vehicles crawled past, speed bumps making them cautious. Neither turned into the parking lot nearest me and when they were gone, I sat in the darkness below the window, trying to come up with a plan. Above me, I could hear voices coming from the bedroom.

“Lemme go,” a high voice mumbled before lapsing into gibberish.

Jake Talbot laughed and I heard a crash. Someone had fallen into furniture.

“Stop it!” the female voice said, this time more sharply. There was a slap and then silence, then laughter from Jake, followed by more crashing sounds.

Okay. I am into game playing as much as the next sex fiend, but I know consensual sex when I hear it—and this didn’t sound like some friendly romp between friends. It sounded perilously close to rape.

I pulled the miniature video camera from my back pocket and clamped it between my teeth, then jumped up and gripped the windowsill with my fingertips, slowly pulling myself upward unt clf nd clampedil I could get an elbow onto the concrete ledge. I balanced there long enough to take the camera from my mouth with my free hand and position it between the curtains. I pressed the record button and angled the lens into the room at a bed pushed against the wall opposite from the window. I scraped my elbow badly trying to sustain my weight, then once again fell to the ground, this time avoiding holly bushes in lieu of a patch of monkey grass and cedar chips. It was an improvement. I looked around for a tree to climb and saw nothing but a few anemic crepe myrtles, no higher than my shoulders. Cheap landscaping bastards.

Above me, I could hear Jake laughing. The sound made the hair on my arms stand on end. It was a quiet giggle, so steady it was almost a hum. The man sounded loopy—and absolutely ecstatic. “There, that’s perfect,” he was saying happily. “Ooops. That way, I think. Here, let me help you.”

There was a thud and I was sure the girl had fallen off the bed. Jake burst into laughter but this was followed by the sound of glass breaking. Jake swore and I heard another slap. The girl gave a pathetic squeak, as if she had no energy left for a scream.

Okay. That was enough for me. It was maddening being able to listen, but unable to see. Maybe they were best buddies and did this every Monday night, but I didn’t think so. I wasn’t sure what the penalty was for coitus interruptus between two consenting parties but I knew what the penalty was for a raped woman: a lifetime of wondering “What did I do wrong?”

I tore up the hill toward the apartment entrance, rounded the corner and gathered speed just before I hit the cheap hollow core door with my right shoulder. The lock tore away in a chunk of wood and I tumbled inside, banging my head on the narrow hallway wall. I scrambled to my feet and dashed toward the bedroom, wishing that I had my gun with me.

I found Jake Talbot standing above the naked redhead, a Polaroid camera pointing down at her motionless body. He was so zoned out he had not even noticed the front door being battered down. He was peeling off his underwear with his free hand and he froze, half-naked, turned toward the door when I entered the bedroom at full speed.

“Get the fuck off her,” I said, grabbing his shoulders and flinging him against one wall. The camera bounced off the bedside table and its flash exploded. Jake slid to the floor, his mouth open in surprise. He’d been hoovering up so much white powder that tiny flakes wafted from his nose like snow. I ignored him and checked the girl. She had a pulse, but was unconscious. She was also completely naked and her vulnerability made her seem years younger than she probably was, though she could not have been more than nineteen or twenty.

“You miserable little prick,” I told Talbot as I wrapped the girl in a sheet. “You fucking little coward. Can’t handle a real woman, huh? You have to knock yours unconscious first?”

He stared at me, his eyes glittering with an intense brightness t c brbing hishat I knew was from way, way too much coke. People can get dangerous when they’re tanked up like that and I searched the room for a weapon. A bedside lamp had been knocked to the floor earlier and the light bulb broken. I kicked the shade and broken glass away from the stand, then unplugged the cord from the wall and wrapped part of it around one of my fists, drawing the remainder of it taut. I’d be able to loop it around his neck or jab him with the jagged base of the broken bulb if he tried to come after me.

He wasn’t coming after anyone. He leaned against the wall, mouth open, and stared at me. “I know you,” he stammered. “Who are you?”

“I’m your worst enemy,” I told him. “And I mean that sincerely. Your nightmare has just begun.” Yes, I sounded like a character in a B movie but, frankly, it was like being trapped in one.

He stared at me, mute, as I lifted the girl from the bed and slung her over one shoulder. She didn’t weigh more than a hundred pounds. After lifting Burly a couple nights before, the little redhead was nothing.

Talbot followed me to the front door in his underwear, perplexed and zoned-out. He gazed at the splintered wood sadly. “Where are you taking her?” he complained, as if I had just snatched his favorite toy from him.

I looked at him, standing there in his idiotic Calvin Klein briefs, eyes glistening, lips in a pout, his long nose quivering because he couldn’t have his way. And I lost it. Completely.

Every grudge I’d ever harbored against people who had money when I had none, exploded in me. Every guy I’d ever met who acted like he was too good to be seen with

me melded into one arrogant image: Jake Talbot. And every time I’d been pressured as a young, dumb kid into doing something I didn’t want to do with a man unfolded in my mind and converged in a single rush of adrenaline that ignited into violence.

I wanted to destroy the pathetic bastard before me.

I lashed out a foot, kicking upward. The weight of the redhead slowed me down a little—which probably saved Jake Talbot’s balls—but I hit him square on with all of my weight behind the kick. He screamed like I’d taken a chain saw to his leg, slammed back against the cheap hallway wall, then slumped to the floor, his hands clutched to his crotch as he began to howl.

A door across the hallway opened and a young black guy stuck his head out. “What the fuck’s going on?” he asked, taking in Talbot curled up on the floor and me, standing with what looked like a mummy slung over my shoulder.

“Just taking my little sister home,” I told him.

He shrugged and shut the door, happy to mind his own business. But his presence jolted me back to reality.

I wanted to kick the shit out of Jake Talbot. I wanted to kill him, in fact, and I had no doubt that I could—or that I would be doing the world a favor. Because I had a feeling the redhead wasn’t the first woman who’d ended up wrestling with him in her underwear. But it wasn’t up to me to be the judge and jury, at least not in this particular case.

And, to be perfectly truthful, while Randolph Talbot’s $25,000 hadn’t been enough to make me walk away from the murder of Thomas Nash, I guess it was enough to make me walk away from Jake Talbot before he was maimed for life.

After I reclaimed my camera from the windowsill, I drove the unconscious girl to Durham Regional Hospital. If she was overdosing on something, I didn’t want her on my conscience.

I staggered through the doors of the emergency room like Frankenstein bearing the little girl who had befriended him. A muscular attendant rushed to my rescue and took the unconscious girl from my arms. He was Native American, probably a Cherokee, and wore an enormous bear claw necklace around his thick neck. His hair was tied in a long black braid and he had an infinitely kind face. I felt as if a thousand pounds lifted from my shoulders when I saw him.