Wicked Game (22 page)

Becca shook that thought aside. Certainly until the ashes had cooled and the fire investigators had done their job, no one would know. And maybe Scott was wrong. Maybe Glenn wasn’t inside. She sent up a silent prayer as she pushed the speed limit down the dark, deserted streets.

Only when she was nearing Blue Note did the traffic snarl. She arrived to a blast of red and white flashing strobes from several fire trucks, their hoses arcing cascades of water on a brilliant orange and yellow fire that lit up the black night and sent choking smoke and heat at ever-growing clusters of bystanders, forcing them to wrap more fully in their jackets and robes and turn protective shoulders to the scene. The police force had barricades erected and the crowd was forced back several blocks.

Becca parked in the empty lot of a bank nearly five blocks away, then walked quickly toward the inferno. Television crews had arrived, vans parked near the barricade, helicopters circling overhead, reporters with microphones and cameramen in tow.

The noise was deafening. Over the roar of fire and hiss from the water spouting over the flames, firemen shouted and people stood talking. She found Hudson with one of the firemen who stood near a ladder truck, his eyes on the scene.

Narrowing her own eyes against the dense smoke, she headed their way, only to be stopped by a policeman and told to wait. Hudson, too, was pushed behind the barricade and he found Becca waiting. His jaw was set, his eyes dark, and Becca knew as he approached that the worst had happened, their fear for Glenn was realized.

She felt ill. “It’s true, isn’t it?”

Hudson nodded and ran a protective arm around Becca’s shoulders, tucking her to his side, which made her want to bury her face into his chest. The warmth of him brought memories circling just beneath her conscious thought, memories of making love to him. It felt ghoulish to be so intent upon her own internal thoughts with such a spectacle around them. A wall of heat burned over her right shoulder.

“What about Glenn?” she asked.

“They found someone inside. It was too late. No ID yet, but…”

“Dear God,” she whispered.

He told her he’d gotten the information from one of the firemen—Dave. They knew each other slightly, she learned later, so Hudson was offered up some information that he might not have otherwise gleaned.

Dave remained at the fire truck staring at the still-raging flames.

Hudson pulled Becca away from the barrier, deeper into the crowd, and she could feel the relief from the searing heat almost instantly, her hot cheeks cooling in the frigid night air.

“How could this have happened?” she asked, her throat dry and tasting of the soot that filled the air.

Through the crowd she saw Scott, who had spotted Hudson. He walked briskly toward them, his bald head shining in the fire’s hot light. He looked haggard and wild-eyed. Shocked. “The whole place,” he said. “The whole place. Jesus, all gone…and…Glenn…he was drunk.”

“You saw him?” Hudson asked.

“Earlier. Drinking in his office. He must have gone home…he must have…” He looked around himself. “But Gia…she’s hysterical.”

“Is she here?” Becca asked.

He put a hand to his head. “Oh, my God.”

They followed his look. Gia Stafford was being held up by a fireman who’d just caught her as she started to fall. She was crying, pulling at her hair, a down jacket covering her shoulders and torso while the hem of her nightgown dragged in the water from the fire hoses.

“They found a body, Scott,” Hudson said. “Dead.”

“No…” He shook his head, unable to take it in.

The crowd had edged closer, and one of the other firemen barked at them to get back. Hudson and Becca stood near a neighboring building and watched in silence for a while as Scott staggered away. They stayed long minutes, immobilized, mesmerized. Becca’s eyes strayed often to Gia, who softly blubbered and clung to anyone who came within reach of her arms.

It seemed to take forever before the flames came under control and the building became a smoking, stinking hulk with areas that glowed inside like yellow eyes in a twisted, blackened mess.

“You people need to leave,” one of the firemen stated grimly to the group as a whole. “Right now.”

Hudson suddenly inhaled a sharp breath.

“What?” Becca looked up at him.

“I think they’re bringing a body out. That’s why they want the crowd to disperse.”

Becca glanced past him to a stretcher being carried by two grimy firemen. A black tarp covered the contents but a charred appendage slipped out. A blackened arm.

She turned away in horror as the odor of seared human flesh made her gag.

“Come on,” Hudson said, “I’ll take you home.”

“No—I’ve got my car—”

Gia’s cries became shrieking wails and two of the firemen hustled her away from the scene though she clawed at them, desperately trying to stay.

“Mr. Walker?”

They both turned to see Detective McNally approaching them, his face grim.
Not now. For God’s sake, not now!
Couldn’t the damned cop just leave them alone? Becca looked away, aching inside. She wanted to make love to Hudson. She wanted to fuse her body with his and push all this away. She felt like shrieking and crying but she had no energy. Instead emotions churned inside her stomach and chest, and she squeezed her eyes shut.

Beyond her cocoon she could hear Hudson talking to Mac about the fire, could feel his voice in his chest as her face was pressed close to his torso. It was an exchange of information between the two men. The body was still unidentified but from the wristwatch on its arm, recognized by Scott, it appeared to be Glenn’s. No one moved to tell Gia, who was being kept away from the grisly view. Becca felt her stomach heave and she kept its contents intact by pure force of will.

And then a wave came over her. That same inundating sensation that preceded a vision. She clung to Hudson for all she was worth.

“Becca?” he asked, glancing down at her.

“I’m…”

Falling
, she meant to say, but it wasn’t possible. She crumpled limply in his arms and only his strength kept her from hitting the wet pavement in a heap. Inside her head Becca could see a room. An office of some sort. She reached out one of her own hands and saw she was holding pieces of paper. A white card of some sort and a blue envelope. Words swam into her view, blurry and indistinct. Watery. Squiggles that weren’t words, but maybe were if she could only read them. She saw that it was someone’s name, written in an uneven hand: Glenn.

When she turned the card over she squinted as if she needed glasses and slowly the squiggles turned into words, the words into sentences.

What are little boys made of? Frogs and snails and puppy dogs’ tails.

That’s what little boys are made of.

Her heart clutched.

Jessie’s rhyme!
Jessie’s taunt. As Becca gazed at the note, the edges began to blacken and curl and suddenly the words burst into flame. She let go of the fiery note, her fingers singed, smoke filling her nostrils, choking her.

“Jessie!” she cried out. “Jessie!”

Holding her, Hudson froze.

Jessie?

What the hell was Becca saying? Hudson nearly missed the fact that her legs had given way, but he caught her as she collapsed. A dead weight that he had to grab hard or she would fall to the ground.

What the hell? Why had she cried out Jessie’s name? He held her tightly, half dragging, half carrying her away from the smothering smoke and the ear-deadening rush of water and engines.

“Becca,” he whispered, tamping down his alarm as she had turned pale as death. He should have never let her come to the scene. He should have stopped her somehow. Forced her to stay home. Never called her.

But he’d wanted to see her again. From the first second he’d spied her in Blue Note two weeks earlier, he was right back to those days in high school when thoughts of her had consumed him, when he’d felt the guilt of wanting her company more than his own girlfriend’s, when he’d wanted to hold her to him, press himself into her, make love until they were both senseless and sated with passion. He wanted to be with Becca. Wanted to breathe in her scent and bury himself inside her. He’d always wanted to.

“She okay?” Scott asked from thirty feet away, but his face was turned toward the disaster of the fire.

Hudson didn’t answer. Becca was breathing. Breathing hard, actually, as if she were running. He could feel the rapid pounding of her heart against his own. It was like she was in some kind of trance, but it was an active one. She was no passive participant in whatever was going on.

“Becca?”

He was holding her close, but he’d tilted her head back so it was resting in his hand. Her lips quivered and she tried to speak. There was rapid eye movement behind her lids. He was both scared and energized. Vaguely he remembered something from the past—some distant rumor about Becca Ryan fainting and speaking gibberish. He could recall tight knots of high school girls looking at her and snickering. Not Jessie, who, though she’d been jealous of Becca, had not treated her like an outsider. But then Jessie had felt like one, too, sometimes. And not Tamara, who was Becca’s friend, and he didn’t think Renee was part of it. But Evangeline…? Maybe it was just his own feelings about her, but he felt certain she’d been an instigator, one of the finger-pointers eager to slur someone else because her own self-image was so fragile and weak.

“Jessie…” Becca murmured again, and the hairs on the back of Hudson’s neck rose.

Slowly her eyes blinked open and she gazed at him dully for several seconds. Then she jerked in his arms as if pulled by a string.

“I’ve got you,” he said. “It’s all right. It’s okay.”

“I…I went out…” She wrapped her fingers in the lapels of his coat, clinging to him. Her eyes squeezed shut as if she were in pain.

“Are you all right?”

“Yes.” She swallowed hard, several times. “This…happens to me.”

“I know.”

She squinted an eye at him, her breath catching. “You know…that I had…a vision?”

“Vision, dream…loss of consciousness,” he said, relieved that she was coherent, her color returning. “You sure you’re okay?”

“Yes. But I saw something.”

“Jessie?”

She ripped herself from his grasp and stared at him. Then she looked around as if slowly remembering where she was and what was going on. “Jessie? No. I—why did you think so?”

“You said her name.”

“I spoke aloud?” That seemed to startle her and she suddenly looked pale enough to faint again.

“Let me drive you home.”

He thought she was going to argue with him, but she jerkily nodded, then lifted her hand to her forehead. “I get headaches,” she said.

“Where’s your car?”

“Uh—in a lot. Willamette Bank and Trust or something like that,” she said, trying to focus.

“I know where it is.”

He helped her to her car and then ensconced her in the passenger seat. She gave him her keys and he, after adjusting the seat away from the steering wheel, pulled out of the parking lot. “What about your truck?” she asked, her head resting on the passenger window. She still looked wan.

“It’ll still be here tomorrow.”

“I’m okay,” she said. “Truly.”

“Uh-huh.”

“This hasn’t happened in a long time, but now it’s…back.

They’re back.” She let out a long sigh, then yanked out the rubber band holding her hair away from her face.

“The visions?”

He hadn’t meant to sound dubious but he heard it in his own voice. She turned slowly to stare at him and her eyes seemed huge in the dim glow of the dashboard lights. He asked her for directions to her condo though he knew the general direction from the list of addresses and phone numbers they’d given each other at their meeting at Blue Note. Becca pointed out the way, lost in her own thoughts.

When he pulled into her parking spot and hurried around to help her from the car, she tried to wave him off. “I’m really okay. I can get by on my own power.”

“Humor me,” he said, clasping her hand because she looked like she would refuse any other support.

At the rear door of the condo he handed her back her keys and she slid one into the lock. As soon as the door pushed inward he heard the half growl, half bark of a dog. The black and white scruffy beast glared at him and stood stiffly. Becca bent down to him, grabbing him though he wanted to be the watchdog, cooing to him and massaging his ears while he glared at Hudson and kept growling.

“Hush, crazy puppy,” she said fondly.

“You’ve got a good watchdog there. He’s just being protective.”

Becca smiled. “Don’t make excuses for him until you know him better. He’s known to prejudge people.”

She headed straight to a cupboard and pulled out a bottle of white pills. “Aspirin,” she said. And then, as if anticipating what he would say next, she looked his way, her hazel eyes full of an anxiety she was trying hard to hide. “Sorry you had to see that. I’m—not a freak.”

“Nope.”

“Not a total one anyway.” She swallowed the pills, chasing them with water. Hudson wanted to fold her into his arms again and was about to reach for her when she placed the glass back firmly on the counter, drew a breath, turned to him.

“I used to have these visions when I was a kid. Into my teens. The visions. I hadn’t had one in years and then just recently—bam—they were back.”

“You don’t have to explain.”

“Sure I do.” She waved a hand dismissively, as if she wanted to brush away any and all of his lame protests. “My first one was of Jessie. A few weeks ago. I passed out at the mall. Right there near the food court! Fell down in front of a group of kids and really freaked them out. One of them took pictures of me on his cell phone.”

Hudson made a strangled sound of anger that encouraged Becca.

“Yeah, I know. The kids were reacting.”

“They were jerks. Uneducated morons.”

“I think I scared them half to death, but anyway it was Jessie. She said something to me and put her finger to her lips. She was standing at the edge of a cliff.”

He leaned a jean-clad hip against the kitchen counter while Ringo, in the doorway, still regarded the intruder with wary eyes. “These are different from the ones from your past?”