Night Moves: Dream Man/After the Night (45 page)

“No,” someone said hoarsely, with horror in the tone. The crackle and roar of the flames almost drowned out the words. “Gray,
what are you doing here?”

Gray straightened slowly, pulling Faith up with him and automatically tucking her behind him. They were caught between two dangers, the fire at the back and the rifle in the hands of the man who had been his honorary uncle, and lifelong friend and advisor.

“No,” Alex moaned, his eyes white-edged with panic. He shook his head in denial of Gray’s presence. “I thought she was alone! I swear, Gray, I would never have put you in danger—”

The heat on Gray’s naked back was intense, scorching his skin. Deliberately he moved forward, never taking his eyes
away from Alex but desperate to get Faith away from that heat. He stopped as fits of coughing racked him. He could hear Faith coughing and gasping, and he kept a hard grasp on her arm, forcing her to stay shielded behind him.

Several ugly suspicions were crowding his mind, and all of them made him sick. When he could talk, he straightened and wiped his streaming eyes with a grimy hand. “You’re the one who’s been sending those notes, aren’t you?” he rasped, his voice so raw as to be almost unrecognizable. “And the cat—”

“No,” Alex denied, his voice filled with ludicrous indignation, under the circumstances. “I wouldn’t do something like that.”

“But you would set fire to a house and try to kill an innocent woman?” Gray asked coldly, the harshness of his voice making the words even more jarring.

“I hoped she would leave,” Alex replied in a frighteningly reasonable tone. “But nothing you did made her leave, and neither did the notes. I didn’t know what else to do. I couldn’t let her keep asking questions, and upsetting Noelle.”

Gray gave a rasping crack of laughter. “You didn’t care whether or not Mother was upset,” he snapped. “You were afraid she’d find out what happened to Dad!”

“That’s not true!” Alex said furiously. “I’ve always loved her! You know that!”

“Did you love her so much that you shot my father so you could have her?”

Gray bellowed the accusation at him, so infuriated by the danger to Faith and the realization that Alex had killed his father that it was all he could do to keep from leaping at Alex and strangling him with his bare hands. The only thing that held him back was the knowledge that, if he failed, Faith would die.

They still stood dangerously close to the burning house, the hellish light enveloping them in a red circle beyond which nothing else existed. Alex’s face twisted with pain. “I didn’t mean to!” he screamed. “I just wanted to stop him—he was going to divorce Noelle! The humiliation
would have killed her! I tried to make him see reason, but he was determined. My God, how could any man prefer that slut over your mother? I think he was crazy, he had to be.”

The irony of Alex calling Guy crazy wasn’t lost on Gray. Then, to his horror, Faith wrenched loose from his grasp and stepped out from the protection of his body. “So you shot him,” she said, her own voice so raspy, he could barely hear her over the roar of the hungry flames. “And told my mother that you’d say she’d done it if she ever said anything. There wasn’t any doubt who would be believed in this town, was there?”

Alex glared at her with such hatred and fury that the rifle trembled in his hands, and Gray reached out to pull her close. He wasn’t afraid for himself; Alex’s horror at having endangered him had been genuine. But Faith—oh, God, even now, Alex still intended to kill her. Gray could see it written plainly in his eyes.

“I didn’t mind your moving back,” Alex told her. “You didn’t have anything to do with what happened. But you wouldn’t keep your mouth shut, you kept asking questions, and you hired that old bastard to stick his nose into things—”

“Did you kill him, too?” she interrupted, her face twisting with rage.
“Did you?”

“I had to, you stupid bitch!” Alex howled, beside himself with fury. “He got too close . . . he asked me if Noelle had had any affairs . . . She wasn’t like that—”

“Did you dump his body in the lake, the way you did Guy’s?” Faith spat, her entire body quivering. But it wasn’t fear Gray felt running through her, it was absolute fury, a mirror of his own, and he had a sudden nightmare vision of her going for Alex herself. There wasn’t much Faith wouldn’t dare, when she had made up her mind to do it. She had deliberately tried to stir up a killer and bring him out into the open, even though she’d known she was putting herself at risk.

Her plan had worked like a dream, he thought viciously. Now if he could just keep her from getting killed. Holding her with bruising force, he jerked her behind him again, trusting that Alex wouldn’t shoot through him to get to her.
She immediately began twisting, fighting to get away from him.

Alex stared at them as they struggled, Faith trying to get away from Gray so he wouldn’t be hurt, and Gray desperately trying to hold her close for the same reason. Alex’s handsome face twisted. “Let her go! She isn’t worth it, Gray. I’ll take care of her, and everything can go on the way it was. She’s only a Devlin; no one will care. She’s ruined everything! Guy was my best friend, damn it! I loved him! But he was dead . . . I had to do something.”

“You could have turned yourself in,” Gray pointed out, trying to keep a reasonable tone in his voice as he finally wrapped his arms around Faith and crushed her in his embrace. If he could lull Alex, then get close enough to knock the barrel of the rifle upward . . . He was much stronger than the older man, he could subdue him. “If it was an accident, you wouldn’t have—”

“Oh, please. I
am
a lawyer, Gray. The charge would have been involuntary manslaughter, not murder, but I still would have done time.” Alex shook his head. “Noelle would never have spoken to me again . . . she wouldn’t associate with someone who had been in jail. I’m sorry, but it has to be this way.” Lifting the rifle, Alex sighted along the barrel, and Gray knew he was going to fire.

He shoved Faith away, and charged Alex. He saw the rifle barrel track to the side, following Faith, and he plowed into Alex with more force than he had ever used playing football. The sharp crack of rifle fire split the night, and the hot casing hit his cheek as it ejected. He caught the rifle, shoving it upward as they hit the ground, but the impact broke his grip. With surprising speed Alex rolled away, springing to his feet and grabbing the rifle again. Gray got to his feet and began advancing on Alex. He didn’t dare glance at where Faith lay, couldn’t bear to see . . . The thought of losing her clawed at his gut with unbearable pain. Terror and rage combined in his chest, and Alex’s death was written on his stark features as he moved forward.

“Don’t,” he pleaded, backing away a few steps. “Gray, don’t make me shoot you, too—”

“You
bastard!”

The shriek came out of nowhere. Blinded by the fierce glare of the fire, Gray couldn’t see anything at first. Then Monica materialized out of the night, dressed head to toe in dark clothing that had cut down her visibility. His sister’s face was dead white, her dark eyes wild.

“You bastard!” she shrieked again, advancing on Alex like a Fury. The firelight gleamed on the barrel of the revolver in her hand. “All these years . . . you’ve been screwing me . . . pretending I was Mama . . . and you
killed my father!”

Maybe Alex saw her intention to fire in Monica’s eyes. Maybe he was simply startled by her appearance, her screaming attack. For whatever reason, he swung the rifle around toward her. Gray leaped for him again, a roar of protest on his lips, knowing he couldn’t reach him in time any more than he’d been able to a moment before.

Monica closed her eyes and fired.

Twenty

“T
he bastard,” Monica kept whispering in a drained, lifeless voice. “The bastard.”

Faith sat in a county patrol car with Monica, holding her when she cried, letting her talk as she would. The door on her side of the car had been left open, while the one on Monica’s side had been closed; a subtle splitting of hairs on the part of the parish law enforcement. Monica didn’t seem to care that the door beside her didn’t have any inside handles. She was in shock, shivering occasionally despite the heat of the night, added to that from the fire, and Sheriff McFane himself had carefully spread a blanket over her.

Faith stared out the open door, feeling more than a little numb herself. It had all happened so quickly . . . The house was gutted, a total loss. Alex had poured gasoline all around the house and tossed a match to it, intending that she be trapped inside with no clear way out. Had she somehow managed to get out, he had been waiting with a rifle. It would have been assumed that she’d been killed by whoever had been sending her the notes, and since he was innocent of that, he’d felt safe. But Gray had hidden his car behind the shed, and in the darkness Alex hadn’t seen it. When Gray had come stumbling out of the burning house, Alex’s careful
plans had been shattered. He had been shocked by Gray’s presence—Gray, whom he loved like a son. All they could do now was guess what Alex would have done, faced with that dilemma.

Her car, sitting so close to the house, was also a total loss. Without the key to crank the engine and pull it away, she had watched as a section of wall fell on it and set it afire. Gray’s Jaguar had been pulled away from the shed and now sat safely on the side of the road. The shed still stood, though. She stared at it through the smoke. Maybe she could sleep there, she thought with ghoulish humor.

Her small yard swarmed with people. The sheriff and his deputies, the volunteer firefighters, the fire medics, the coroner, the sightseers. God knows what so many people had been doing out that time of night, but an inordinate number of them had evidently followed all the flashing lights.

She watched Gray’s tall body, silhouetted against the dying blaze. He was talking to Sheriff McFane, a few yards away from Alex Chelette’s covered body. He was shirtless, his long hair flying around his bare shoulders, and even from here she could hear him coughing.

Her own throat felt like fire, and she could feel the stinging of several burns, on her hands and arms, her back, her legs. It hurt to cough, which didn’t stop her lungs from periodically trying to clear themselves, but all in all she felt lucky to be alive and in relatively good health.

“I’m sorry,” Monica said abruptly. She was staring straight ahead. “I sent the notes . . . I just wanted to scare you into leaving. I never would have—I’m sorry.”

Stunned, Faith sat back, then immediately straightened her sore back away from the seat. She started to say, “That’s all right,” then changed her mind. It wasn’t all right. She had been frightened, and sickened. She had known there was a killer out there. Monica hadn’t known, but that didn’t excuse her. She hadn’t killed the cat, but that didn’t excuse her either. So Faith said nothing, leaving Monica to find her own absolution.

Faith watched as a medic approached Gray and tried to get him to sit down, tried to put an oxygen mask on him.
Gray shook him off, gesturing angrily, and pointed him toward Faith.

“I’m going to tell them,” Monica said, still in that expressionless voice. “Gray and Michael. About the notes, and the cat. I won’t be arrested for shooting Alex . . . but I don’t deserve to go unpunished.”

Faith didn’t have time to respond. The medic brought his equipment over to the patrol car, and squatted in the open door. His penlight flashed in her eyes, making her blink. He took her pulse, checked the burns on her hands and arms, tried to put the oxygen mask on her. She pulled away. “Tell him,” she said, indicating Gray, “that I will when he does.”

The medic stared at her, then gave a little grin. “Yes, ma’am,” he said, and jauntily returned to his first reluctant patient.

Faith watched as he repeated what she’d said to Gray. Gray wheeled around to glare at her. She shrugged. Annoyed and frustrated, he grabbed the oxygen mask and with ill grace clapped it over his nose and mouth. He immediately began coughing again.

Because she had promised, she had to submit to treatment when it came her turn again. The medics agreed that her lung function was good, meaning that her smoke inhalation wasn’t critical. Her burns were mostly first-degree, with a few second-degree blisters on her back, and they wanted her to see Dr. Bogarde. Gray was in much the same shape. Both of them were extremely lucky.