Obsession (46 page)

As she crept down the next few steps in Nick’s wake, her gaze swept everything she could see: floor, walls, furniture. Nothing seemed out of place. Still, the invisible tension she could sense in the air screamed
danger
. The sharp smell of recently fired weapons made her nostrils flare.

Near the bottom of the stairs, Nick hesitated for no more than a split second, sucking in air, his eyes fastened on the living-room doorway. From a few steps above him it was possible to see a little way into the living room—and what Jenna saw made her heart turn over.

Resting limply on the deep reds and blues of the Oriental rug was the lower third of a slim, tanned leg—and a slender foot in a pale green slipper. The hall wall concealed the rest of her, but Jenna knew without a doubt that it was Katharine.

Was she dead? The leg didn’t move.

Jenna’s breath left her body in an audible hiss.

“Shh,” Nick whispered, throwing a quick glance back at her.

She nodded.

He stepped off the last riser into the downstairs hall, pulling her after him. As her feet touched the floor, Jenna got a better look into the living room. Katharine lay sprawled on her side in front of the couch, her eyes open and staring, a bullet hole neat and round as a dime in the middle of her forehead. The edges of it were black, with just the tiniest dark red center. The blood pooling beneath her cheek seemed to come from the back of her head.

Jenna suddenly went dizzy. Her stomach turned inside out. She felt her knees start to buckle. Her grip tightened on Nick’s hand, and he swung around to look at her . . .

Just as a gun exploded and a bullet smacked into the wall beside them in a trajectory that, if he hadn’t moved precisely when he did, would have sent it rocketing through his head. Jenna shrieked and jumped, and both she and Nick reflexively ducked. Her heart thundered like a herd of wild horses. Her eyes were wide and wild as she looked all around. The taste of fear was sour in her mouth.

“Keep your head down,” Nick screamed, putting himself between her and the living-room doorway and snapping off two quick shots—
bam! bam!—
at the shooter. Jenna got a quick glimpse of a man dressed all in black with a black watch cap on his head, leaping from one side of the living-room doorway to the other, moving so fast that he was scarcely more than a dark blur. There was a cry—had the man been hit?—and then in response to a gesture from Nick, she was racing straight toward the front door with Nick right behind her, running for her life, fueled by a tremendous burst of adrenaline that rushed through her veins like speed. A glance showed her that Nick was watching their backs, covering their exit, trying desperately to see everything at once. Out of the corner of her eye she got a glimpse of most of the living room, and there was Mary, too, sprawled on the floor several feet from Katharine. She was unmoving, but Jenna couldn’t see her face and it was impossible to tell if she was dead.

Then her focus snapped forward again as she leaped for the front door.

Just as her hand closed around the cool brass knob and she turned it and yanked it toward her—
please, God, let there not be some kind of fancy dead bolt that
keeps the door from opening
—another gun boomed and, behind her, Nick let out a cry.

Her blood seemed to freeze.

“Are you hit?” she cried, twisting frantically to look at him as she pulled the door wide. He was turned away from her, facing back the way they had come, firing at a black-clad man who ducked back into the living room as Jenna spotted him.

“Run for the car.”
It was just loud enough for her to hear, uttered as Nick pushed her out the door, and she obediently bolted across the small front porch, threw herself down the steps, and raced around the corner of the house toward where they had left the old Ford by the garage, thankful for the darkness that swallowed her and Nick so that they were no longer such obvious targets. She was breathing like a marathon runner, feet pounding over the grass and hard ruts of the drive, heart pounding faster than her feet. The men inside could be anywhere now—they weren’t just going to let them go—and she glanced fearfully all around as she reached the back bumper of the car.

Nick was farther away than he should be. That was what her glance around showed her. He was about thirty feet back, a black hunched shape in the darkness, lurching as he ran, and she realized with a sick twist of her stomach that she had been right, he was hit, he had to be if he was moving like that.

She was just turning back to go to him, to help him, when a hand grabbed her arm, snatching her off-balance, yanking her sideways.

She screamed like a siren even as she stumbled into a solid warm body and an arm fastened like a vice around her waist.

“Hiya, babe,” a hideously familiar voice said in her ear, and she didn’t even have to cast a quick, terrified glance over her shoulder to know that it was Ed. Her nails dug into his arm—it was useless, he was wearing a jacket—and she struggled desperately until she felt the hard jab of a gun being shoved into her side. She gasped and went still. “Keep fighting me, and I’ll blow you in two.”

He meant it, she knew. His arm tightened around her waist. The gun dug into her rib cage so hard that it was painful.

“Let her go, Barnes,” Nick yelled.

“Drop it,” Ed snapped over her head to Nick, who she saw had stopped dead and had his gun aimed at Ed’s head, which was the only part of him she wasn’t shielding. The gun ground viciously into her side, and she made a tiny pained sound and tried to lean away from it without success. “I guarantee you I can kill her before you can kill me.”

Jenna’s skin prickled as cold sweat broke out all over her body. Her heart was in her throat. She could scarcely breathe.

“You’d still be dead,” Nick said.

Ed chuckled. Horrified, Jenna saw why. Dark shapes were creeping up behind Nick, at least half a dozen of them, bent low like some hideous nocturnal beasts bringing death closer with every silent step.

“Nick, behind you!” she screamed.

Even as he whirled, the night exploded around her.

She dropped like a stone, screaming, as the hold on her waist was suddenly released, sprawling on a combination of hardened earth and soft grass. Her ears rang. Stars burst in front of her eyes. A terrible smell—gunpowder and something else—assaulted her nostrils.

The good news was that she was pretty sure she was still alive.

“Jesus Christ.” It was Nick’s voice, tight with fear. She blinked, clearing away the stars, and saw that he was beside her, on his knees, one shoulder hunched in a way that she knew wasn’t good, his gun nowhere in sight. His hand—only one hand—was on her side, feeling around her rib cage where the gun had been pressed, checking for injury.

Jenna sucked in air. A glance behind her revealed the shadowy outline of Ed’s body sprawled on its back on the grass. Some of the dark shapes—men, of course—were clustered around him. She averted her gaze, not wanting to see more.

“I’m all right,” she said, sitting up. “He didn’t shoot me. You were too fast.”

“It wasn’t me who shot Barnes.” Nick sank back on his haunches, and she could see the long shudder that shook him. “I wouldn’t have taken that chance for anything in this life.”

“I shot him,” a voice said out of the dark. Jenna looked up to see a tall, stocky man looming up out of the shadows behind Nick and felt her heart start to pound again. Was he friend or foe? “Vicious bastard deserved to die.”

“Yo, Keith,” Nick said, glancing back over his shoulder at the newcomer. “What the hell took you so long?”

Then he swayed. As Jenna reached for him, he collapsed in her arms.

29

When Nick woke up, he was in the back of an ambulance. The light was dim but it was still too bright for his eyes, so he opened them only a slit. The ambulance wasn’t moving, and he guessed it was still parked outside the safe house, probably because they were waiting to load someone in beside him. He hoped it was Mary, hoped she had survived. He lay on a stretcher with his shirt off, still wearing his pants but with a sheet covering him to the armpits and a lot of white gauze wrapped around his shoulder. The wound wasn’t fatal, but it hurt like hell.

Keith was sitting beside him. His square-jawed face was paler than usual, and there was a sorrowful look in his eyes.

“Where’s Jenna?” Nick asked. He didn’t like having her out of his sight. He’d aged a thousand years in those moments after he had realized that Barnes had his gun pressed to her side. He knew as well as Barnes did that he wouldn’t have been able to kill the other man before Barnes could get a shot off. But putting down his weapon wouldn’t have helped, either. If Keith and his posse hadn’t shown up when they did, Jenna would have died. He would have died, too, but the thought didn’t bother him nearly so much.

He’d realized over the course of this really harrowing night that in Jenna, he’d found the love of his life.

“She’s inside. The paramedics are checking her out.”

It took Nick to the end of that exchange to register that Keith was holding a black Beretta, its slender barrel elongated with a silencer.

This was not good news. His heart kicked up a notch.

“You planning to kill me, too?” he asked conversationally.

Keith stiffened, then smiled at him. It was a small, sad smile.

“You found out,” he said. “I knew you would. I knew, from the minute you showed up at my house on the night Allie died, that we were going to end up like this. You’re an obsessive bastard, Nick.”

It was said in a chidingly affectionate manner that sent a chill racing down Nick’s spine.

“Barnes had your house bugged,” Nick said, and tried not to let the tensing of his muscles show. “Did you know that? That must have been how he knew he could target Allie. But it paid off for him in spades: He got you dragging her into your family room and hanging her from one of those overhead beams just like you were on
Candid Camera.”

“I know.” Keith’s jaw tensed. “That bitch Katharine Lawrence told me she’d found the video while she was snooping around for us, on one of Barnes’s computers. She downloaded it onto a thumb drive and told me she had it, taunted me with it, said she owned me. Bad move on her part. I sent some guys to get it back, but they screwed up. It wasn’t in her safe. I sent somebody back the next day to search for it again—of course, the dunderhead didn’t realize Katharine had already been replaced and tried to scare its whereabouts out of your girlfriend—but we never did find it. Out of curiosity, where was it?”

Nick smiled grimly. “On her cat. Attached to its collar. ”

Keith looked stunned. “You’re shitting me. I never would’ve found it.”

“Probably not.” While he had been talking, Nick had managed to surreptitiously unfasten the webbed straps that secured him to the stretcher. “You told Barnes about that apartment I rented for her, didn’t you? I knew it had to be you when those goons showed up, because you were the only one besides me who knew about it.”

“I had to,” Keith said. “Earlier today, Barnes got hold of a surveillance video of you with our little false Katharine, and after that he knew we were on to him. He came to see me about two hours ago, and threatened me with that damned video of what happened to Allie. I had to tell him about the apartment, and about this safe house.” Keith smiled a little. “What he didn’t know was that I outsmarted him: I was going to let him kill you, and Katharine, and then I was going to kill him. Problem solved.” He grimaced, and his eyes seemed to harden on Nick’s face. “Only he didn’t kill you, so now I’m going to have to do it.”

The gun moved a little, and Nick tensed.

“You don’t have to do this, Keith,” he said.

“Yeah, I do. You know I love you like a brother, man. I don’t want to kill you, but I know you: You’d never be able to just let this go. It’s come down to you or me, and since that’s the case, I got to go with me.” His jaw tightened. “Just so you know, Nick, I didn’t plan to kill Allie. She told me that someone was threatening to blackmail her over those damned drugs, and I snapped. I just couldn’t take it anymore. Always having to worry about where she was and what she was doing and whether or not anyone was going to find out. You have no idea what hell it was.”

Keith stood up suddenly, bending a little in the close confines of the ambulance. Nick’s heart gave a great leap. Adrenaline flooded his veins. This was it, he knew. The moment where he was going to either do or die.

“Look, I’ve got to go. I’m sorry, Nick.” Keith leveled the gun. The flicker in his eyes gave Nick a microsecond of warning. He sensed rather than saw Keith’s finger tighten on the trigger.

Summoning every last reserve of strength he had, he hurled himself off the stretcher and onto Keith just as the bullet smacked into the pillow his head had just vacated. Keith went down like a falling tree, tangled in the sheet, pinned by Nick’s weight. The Beretta went sailing to the ambulance floor with a clatter.

Two fast, hard punches to the jaw, and Keith was knocked cold. Then Nick yelled for help.

While he waited for it to arrive, he looked down at Keith’s unconscious face and said, “That’s for Allie, you son of a bitch.”

One week later, Nick was at home, in the small second bedroom he used as an office, sprinkling food into the fishbowl. He’d had to move it, because Bill and Ted had a pair of new housemates. They were fine with Jenna—actually, they seemed to like her almost as much as Nick himself did—but they didn’t seem to think much of the cat. Muffy, who’d been adopted by Jenna in the aftermath of Katharine’s death—Mary, fortunately, had survived—didn’t seem to get the whole idea that since the fish had been there first, they should be treated with respect. Until Nick had wised up and moved them to his office, which had a door that he kept carefully closed, Muffy had passed her days sitting on the kitchen counter by the fishbowl, eyeing Bill and Ted with covetous eyes.