Nicole frowned at the tone of voice, it was mocking and amused.
Moving close to the wall, she eased the last few feet to the kitchen doorway and snuck a quick peak into the room. Jake was standing a couple of feet inside the kitchen, with his back to her. The other man sat at the kitchen table, lounging sideways to the door in one chair, legs stretched out and crossed at the ankles on another. She could see that he wore jeans, and a leather bomber over a T-shirt. His body looked completely relaxed. She couldn’t say what his expression was, though, Jake’s body blocked his head from her view.
“It wasn’t for you,” Jake said grimly. “It was to air out the room.”
“Still,” the man said, and though Nicole couldn’t see him, she was pretty sure he was grinning as he added, “I appreciate it.”
Nicole eased back out of sight of the kitchen. She didn’t think the man could see her, but if Jake had moved just the smallest amount to the right he would have.
Shifting anxiously from foot to foot, she debated what to do. It seemed obvious to her that the man in the kitchen must be the one behind the hot-tub poisoning and the car accident. Nice, normal people simply didn’t saunter into just any open door in homes that weren’t theirs. What she didn’t understand was why Jake was asking questions instead of taking control of the man’s mind.
The obvious answer was that he couldn’t, and as far as she knew, that only happened with life mates or older immortals. Had an immortal been trying to kill her? And if so, why? For heaven’s sake, she hadn’t even known about immortals until this last week, and was pretty sure she hadn’t met any besides Marguerite and this crew.
“Who are you?” Jake’s voice sounded grim.
“You asked that already,” the other man pointed out lightly.
Nicole turned and slid back along the wall to her room. She had to help Jake, but how? She glanced to the sliding doors in her room. They led out to the deck, which wrapped around the back of the house and up the side to the sliding doors in the kitchen. If the doors were still open—
Nicole started toward the doors, but then paused before stepping out. She needed a weapon. Turning, she glanced around the bedroom, looking for something hefty, but it was a bedroom, for heaven’s sake, not a weapons locker. Her gaze slid from the bed to the television to the couch. There was nothing she could see that would be useful. There weren’t even any lamps in the room; wall sconces were set into the walls on either side of the couch, as well as the bed, to remove the necessity of lamps.
Her mouth tightened with annoyance and then her gaze slid to the bed again and she eyed the pillows. They were rather special; quilted cloth on the outside with a water bladder inside. The user filled them with water to reach the firmness they desired. A couple quarts made a soft pillow, three quarts made it medium, and five quarts made it firm. Nicole liked hers firm. She had five quarts in hers. That was more than a gallon of water. It weighed a good ten pounds, she would guess.
Moving up the bed, Nicole grabbed one of them, and headed out of the room through the sliding glass doors.
“You don’t remember me, do you?”
Jake’s eyes narrowed on the intruder’s wide unpleasant smile. His voice was deep and raspy, as if he spent a lot of time screaming at the top of his lungs. Jake had heard that voice before, but where didn’t come to him right away. It was recently though.
“You ruined everything. Stopped me from carrying out what I was put on this earth to do, and yet—barely a week later—you don’t even remember me,” the man said bitterly.
Jake eyed him warily. He’d been trying to get into the man’s thoughts to read and control him since entering the kitchen, but it was like trying to navigate the ocean in a fog with no compass or sonar . . . and there were monsters coming out of that fog, accompanied by agonized shrieks. The man wasn’t in his right mind. That was the only explanation. Jake had always heard that it was hard to the point of impossible for an immortal to read or control a crazy person. Now he understood why.
Jake opened his mouth to admit that, no, he didn’t recognize him, when he suddenly did.
“Ball-Cap Boy,” he murmured, recognizing him as the man who had intended to shoot the client he was suppose to protect, and who he’d tackled his last night on the job before meeting Marguerite for dinner. Tilting his head, he asked, “Why aren’t you in jail?”
Ball-Cap Boy gave a short laugh. “For what? I didn’t get the chance to do anything. All they could charge me with was the improper transportation of a registered weapon.”
“Registered?” Jake asked with a frown.
“Yes. You see, there’s a law that if you work in a remote wilderness area, where your life can be under threat by wild animals, you can get a special license to carry weapons, like rifles and handguns.”
“And you have one of those special licenses,” Jake guessed dryly. He now understood the old saying “crazy like a fox.” The bastard might be nuts, but he was smart too.
“Yes, sir, I do,” he said with a grin so wide it was almost painful to see. “That and a family with the resources to hire an excellent lawyer who is quick and very good. I was out within hours.”
Jake was really beginning to dislike this guy’s smile.
“Of course, it helped that the security tape showed you moving toward me before I even reached to adjust my gun so it was no longer digging into my ribs.” He smiled and offered, “Well, at least that’s what I told them I was doing.”
Jake didn’t respond to the comment. He was trying to decide what to do. The man had had a gun before and probably did now, no doubt tucked into the arms he presently had crossed. Jake wasn’t too concerned about being shot dead, that wasn’t a worry unless Ball-Cap Boy blew his head completely off, which would take a sawed-off shotgun or an equally powerful weapon, he was sure, and this man couldn’t be hiding one of those on his person. Jake suspected he had his handgun though, and while that wouldn’t blow his head off, it could incapacitate him temporarily and leave Nicole alone in the house and at the mercy of this nut. He didn’t want to risk that, so had to move carefully.
“It also helped that I told them that I’d run into you before,” Ball-Cap Boy continued conversationally. “When I was out on a date with your live-in girlfriend.” He grinned widely. “And that you’ve had it in for me ever since.”
Jake didn’t react on the outside, but inside he was mentally kicking himself. He often had dealings with the police on the job, and knew a good number of them by name. However, busy feeling sorry for himself as he’d been, and thinking himself a monster, Jake hadn’t encouraged any friendships since leaving California. So, while many of the officers had given some personal details about their lives in an offer of friendship, mentioning wives, girlfriends, or kids, Jake hadn’t responded in kind. As Dan had said in the elevator the day they’d encountered this man, he didn’t know a thing about him and had thought him without family. It would be the same with the police. Had he bothered to befriend the men he worked with and encountered on the job, they’d have known this man was lying about a live-in and hesitated to let him go to cause trouble again.
“How did you find me here?” Jake asked abruptly, turning his attention to the situation at hand. Self- flagellation was really a waste of time and useless in a situation like this. He could kick himself later.
“The angels led me to you.”
Jake was aware that his eyelids flickered at this claim, but all he said was, “Oh?”
“Hmmm.” The man nodded. “My lawyer wanted to talk after he got me released. He took me to a bar downtown and sat trying to convince me to let my parents help me, which translates to locking me up,” he added bitterly and began to rant. “They don’t believe the angels talk to me through the radio and that I have a purpose in this life. They think I’m crazy, that I’ve spent too much time alone up north and it’s affected me. That I need to take those stupid pills the doctor gave me again. But I’ll show them. They’ll understand when I carry out the charge I’ve been given. You screwed up the first service I was supposed to perform to make this a better world, and for a minute my faith was shaken. How could God allow that when I was doing his work? But when I saw you coming out of that restaurant across the street with that brunette, I knew the angels had led me there. I understood that the devil would, of course, not want me to carry out my mission, and that you and everyone you associate with are in league with him.”
Crazy as a loon, Jake thought grimly, but knew the brunette that Ball-Cap Boy had seen him with was Marguerite, when they’d left the restaurant where they’d dined together.
