Off the Edge (The Associates) (9 page)

Or more, the dark parts of him had gotten off, stumbling around that little village in shock, lying in one of the tents they’d put up for survivors, completely alone in the world. Lost. Grieving. Unable to process what he’d seen. Unable to understand why some terrorist had to kill so many innocent people.

They’d
 told him that the man responsible, the elusive terrorist Mero, would never be arrested. Nobody knew who he was.

Soon after, he’d
 learned that the police had a voice recording of Mero claiming responsibility. They couldn’t do anything with it, somebody explained. Nobody could identify a person from a phone message.

Well,
somebody
could. Given enough time, enough determination.

Everything changed in that moment. He adopted his hated middle name, Macmillan, and turned his attention to hunting and killing Mero, short for
Merodeador
. The Spanish word for marauder. He would end Mero. Never again would Mero make a family suffer.

Macmillan began his search by studying recent papers on Mexican regionalisms. He created possible geographical profiles—where Mero might be from, where Mero might be living, where he might have attended school. 

Eventually he turned to the man himself. 
The recording showed Mero to be a stylish, charismatic speaker who displayed many unique language tics. For one, he pronounced words beginning with
S
with great stress and duration, producing the fricative with an intensity that was unusual even for a Mexican. Macmillan recognized it as the kind of thing followers would tend to pick up, and he knew he could track the hyper-fricative
S
backwards, almost like a virus; he’d written papers on that very subject. Another helpful clue: an oddball bit of slang, the word
sumisimo
, which Mero used as a lexical intensifier, like the English word
very
.
Sumisimo
had occurred in none of Macmillan’s Internet corpus searches, suggesting it was unique to Mero’s peer group.

He moved from village to village, mixing with the people, hunting with his ears. Now and then he’d hear something and plot it on a map.

It was a slow process, but Macmillan had nothing but time and vengeance. Five months in, he was finding more of the markers. The clusters got thicker. He was closing in. He started to hear
sumisimo
and the hyper-fricative
S
more often. Soon he was able to identify ground-zero for them both, a little village at the edge of the jungle, a place of concrete-block homes, piles of dirt, and one roadside stand with a dusty red Coca-Cola awning.

From there it was a waiting game. 

Mero’s voice had a specific boomy quality and he had an unusual way of pronouncing the O sound—produced slightly forward in the mouth, unlike most Spanish speakers. Or most English speakers, for that matter.

Finally, in a rough little bar a mile up the road, he located and recorded Mero himself, a grizzly 50-something man with wide cheeks and tiny glasses. He knew it was Mero the instant he heard him, but he liked to be thorough, so he took it back to his truck and ran it through software, comparing the recordings.

Bingo.

As soon as he had Mero’s identity, he wrote letters to every authority and newspaper he could think of, detailing his search and revealing the terrorist’s true name and whereabouts, just in case he didn’t succeed in killing Mero. He dropped them in the public mailbox and went to the little roadside stand with the Coca-Cola awning to wait for nightfall and work up the courage to shoot a man. He didn’t plan to survive.

It was after he ordered his second Coke that he became sleepy. So sleepy. The next thing he knew, he was lying in a cage in Merodeador’s jungle compound.

Every day after that, Mero’s men would drag him from the cage and try to beat the name of the snitch out of him—they didn’t believe a man could be tracked off language alone.

And every night, Macmillan would dream of killing Mero. He felt sure Mero himself would come to beat him one day. Macmillan suspected his best weapon against Mero would be his teeth. He visualized going for the man’s jugular and the larynx. It seemed a poetic way for a linguist to kill, sinking his teeth through the voice box, severing the vocal cords, forever stilling their vibration. This was what his PhD had come to.

It was during those beatings that he began to really analyze the way the different guards spoke, the way they produced their words, and he found that it helped him handle the pain of beatings. The more he analyzed, the less he felt. Anything could be chopped up into words, phonemes, sounds.

“Here we are.” Laney stopped in front of a door in the third floor hallway. The noise, smells, and lack of carpeting suggested to Macmillan that this was a staff-only wing.

It occurred to him, as she unlocked her door, that she’d spend some time in the bathroom freshening up—women always did. He could have the contents of her computer downloaded to his thumb drive in under two minutes, depending on how fast her box booted up. And then get out of there. He needed to get out of there. She was pulling too much Peter out of him.

She let him into her room. “A little small, but they let me stay here for free,” she said.

“It’s nice.” It had been a hotel room once, but she’d personalized it with colorful fabrics and hats on the walls, and recording equipment all around. The lair of an artist.

She put her guitar in its case and leaned it against the wall. Her laptop, which was covered with shiny stickers, sat on the dresser. She turned to him, smiled nervously, then picked up a shirt and threw it over the chair.

“I didn’t expect anybody.”

“It’s okay.” It could be a pit of snakes for all he cared. His gaze fell on a scraggly plant in a coffee cup. Nothing but a stem and a cluster of leaves at the top.

She picked it up. “Amy needs water.”

“You name your plants?”

“Just this one. She was growing up from a crack outside the hotel. They would cut it down and she’d keep growing back. She just wanted to live. So, I pulled her out and put her here.”

Just a stupid plant,
he told himself, but it touched something painful in him, the idea of this plant coming up again and again after being cut down. Laney fighting to keep it alive. “Rescue plant,” he said.

She gazed up at him under dark brows, pink lips pursed. “Sounds a bit psycho when you put it like that.”

“No.” He went to her, drawn to her. Whatever that ex of hers Rolly had done, he hadn’t destroyed her spirit.

“Here. Wait there.” She thrust Amy into his hands, grabbed a plastic jug, and went to the bathroom, leaving him standing there.

Just a scraggly thing,
he thought as the sounds of the sink drifted out of the bathroom.
Hardly alive.

The click of plastic on the counter. Toilet lid.

Why should he feel all broken up about a plant? He’d been hunting the worst scum of humanity for years. He could kill them with his bare hands and enjoy a nice meal and a joke not an hour later, and now he felt emotional about a plant?

It was Laney. She engaged his lizard brain. No—she engaged his Peter brain, and that was worse; it made her as dangerous as any laser. And what the hell was he waiting for? She was in there freshening up; this was his chance! He set Amy down and went to the laptop.

Before he even could open it, the bathroom door creaked. He turned and pretended to be gazing out the window.
Damn
.

He was getting sloppy.

“I might bring her to the jungle.” She splashed in some water. “I should get a proper container, first off. A coffee cup doesn’t drain. I keep thinking I should drill a hole in the bottom.”

But she wouldn’t have a drill.

Her eyebrows drew together as she inspected the little plant. His eyes followed the line of her pale, smooth cheek down to her long, elegant neck, complete with a hard-drumming pulse. Her mind wasn’t only on the plant.

She set it next to the window. It would get sun in the morning. “Some rescuer I am.”

He needed a new plan. He needed not to touch her, but he would now. He went to her and smoothed back her lush dark hair. She closed her eyes as he pulled it aside to kiss that drumming pulse below the edge of her jaw. “You are exquisite,” he said.

“Exquisite sounds like a brooch or something. Something dainty.”

“No, you can be exquisite and valiant, too.”

He felt her cheek move. A smile. She seemed to like that.

“Now where were we?” She asked, pulling back. “I do believe you owe me a favorite place.”

His mood darkened with that. He didn’t want to play that game anymore—there was too much honesty in it. “I’m finished with favorite places,” he said.

“I’m not.”

She backed away. Before he knew it, she was standing on the bed. She liked to be onstage. Probably hated wearing the face-covering net she wore during her shows. It would cut off a full connection with her audience.

She pulled off her hat and threw it at him.

He caught it, wanting nothing more than to lose himself in her, to let the world melt away. A reckless impulse.

“And it’s my birthday, so…one more favorite place.” She reached around and began to unzip the back of her dress, eyes on him.

She gave him a nervous smile. He got that she was coasting on a heady mix of vulnerability and bravery, and that made her beautiful. And it made him wonder what she’d be like if some madman wasn’t forcing her to stay small and silent.

She pushed the sleeves off her shoulders and let the dress fall down over her hips, revealing a pale, freckly belly and long legs clad. She wore only a pink lace bra and bikini panties now. And those knee-highs.

He forced himself to remain rooted.

“I believe you established a dress code earlier,” she said, stepping out of the dress.

“I did,” he whispered, cock raging against the confines of his slacks.
Don’t move. Keep control.

She narrowed her eyes. “Come ‘ere.” She mashed the words together in that Southern twang of hers. There was no word more perfect.
“Comere,”
she repeated making the c extra hard, extra sweet, extra dirty.

He couldn’t stand not touching her anymore. Like a sex-crazed zombie, he went to her, straight into her, not stopping until he had his arms clasped around her legs, face pressed into her crotch. Energy and potency rushed through his veins as he lifted her.

“Hey!”

He ignored her protests, laying her out on the bed. “I’m finishing for you,” he grated, undoing the clasp of her bra with uncharacteristically clumsy movements.

Peter movements.

He untangled it from her arms and pulled off her panties and stood over her, holding them, drinking in the sight of the light red curls between her legs. Her natural hair color. And the knee highs. She thought they were stockings. It was all he could do to not claw his clothes off and attack her.

“Happy now?” she asked, pulse drumming again in her neck. She ran a foot up his thigh.

“No,” he breathed. He’d begun the night as a high-functioning spy on an important mission and now he was a starving man who needed this woman more than his next breath.

Slowly, he pulled his glasses off, faking a level of cool he didn’t possess.

Her eyes darkened as he set them on the bedside table.

He would not be a slave to his emotions. He forced himself to unbutton his shirt casually. She crossed her legs, rubbing her panty-hose clad calves together. He found he could barely work his fingers. She knew about the knee-highs now. She was a little bit diabolical, and he loved that, too.

“Do you remember my plan?” he managed to say.

“Yes. And I think you should hurry up and
comere
.”

The delicious hard C. So diabolical. “What’s my plan?” Finally he had his buttons undone. He ripped off his shirt.

“To fuck me wearing only my socks,” she said. The word
fuck
fell awkwardly from her lips. He found he loved that, too.

With shaking hands, he stripped his T-shirt off his sweaty torso, control degrading. Sex was a tool, the price he’d pay for a few minutes alone with her computer. Nothing more.

Control.

He focused in on the word. The delivery.

“The unconvincing
fuck
,” he said. “You said it so easily before when you used it as an exclamation. But now that it means something, it’s not as easy.” His breath felt ragged. “The word doesn’t have the right life. Try again.”

She narrowed her eyes, going for vixeny. “To fuck me wearing only these.”

He shook his head. “Forced emphasis.” He knew she heard it, too.

“To fuck…”

“Few can do it. It’s the nature of the word.”

“Why? You’re a linguist. Tell me why I can’t say it convincingly.”

He was feeling less wild. Good. “When it’s a verb—
that
verb,” he began, discreetly removing his gun from his waistband and slipping it out of sight. He pulled off his pants and both ankle holsters, and finally his boxers. “When it’s a verb instead of an exclamation…when you say it as, what you might call an exclamation, it’s an empty word. But when you say it now as a verb…” He was babbling. Her eyes roved over his steel-hard cock and his breath heated in response. He was a furnace, a fire of need.

He forced himself to sit next to her, to touch her arm and nothing else. You never wanted to fuck when you were trembling with need. “When it’s a verb it contains more.” He slid his finger down her wrist.

She gazed at him warmly. “Like what?”

“Emotional charge, for one. It means a surrender of your body.” He fit his hand to hers. It was working; the switch to analysis was calming his rush of feeling. He took her hands and drew them over her head and smoothed her fingers around the newel posts on the headboard. She’d liked sitting on her hands. A whiff of immobilization.

She closed her eyes and drew up her shoulders. God, he could get lost in her.

He swallowed, focused. “It means I want to fuck you so long and strong…one word can’t contain that.” He slid his finger over the mound of her breast, skin was like silk.