You're Next

He caught her wrist, lifted her arm gently so he could see the broken capillaries from when he’d grabbed her in the parking lot. ‘Did I do that?’

‘Brute.’ She twisted lazily in his grasp so the back of her wrist grazed his lips. ‘All protective like that, leaving your handprints on me. It was such a turnoff.’ Beneath the covers her foot found his calf.

Her touch brought a jolt of gratitude – even after stumbling through the past few days, he still got to spend the night in this bed with this woman.

He kissed the inner curve of her arm, delicately, where it was red. Her mouth found his, and they pushed up a little, propped on elbows, their lips joined. He shifted on top of her, stomach to stomach, both of them moving slowly, their exhaustion lending every touch and movement a dreamlike aspect. He moved into her, but she clenched with her arms and legs, held him still. Crossing her wrists behind his neck, her head hoisted a few inches off the mattress, she fixed her gaze on him and tilted her hips slowly, slowly, and he slid deeper until he stopped. She held him still again, perfectly still. He was up on his knees and hands, bearing his weight and most of hers, his arms trembling slightly.

‘I want you to look at me,’ she said. ‘All the way through.’

And he did.

After, she lay as she always did, on her back, one arm thrown across her sweaty bangs, her stomach pale in the alarm clock’s glow. He loved the faint ridge of scar tissue from her C-section, how it traced the pan of her hips, dividing erotic from merely sexy, a warrior’s mark of a body well used.

She held up her hand, the dull diamond of her engagement ring managing a sparkle. The new one had disappeared into the jewelry box as soon as they’d gotten home. ‘We’ve been married a decade, Wingate.’ Her teeth pinched a bite of swollen lip. ‘It doesn’t feel like ten years in any of the bad ways. But it feels like it in all the good ways.’

She curled into him, slinging a leg across his stomach, and he stroked her back, her skin still fever-hot. He pressed his lips to her damp forehead and held her until she was asleep.

Lying on his back, cooling beneath the overhead fan, he couldn’t linger in the aftermath. His mind kept returning to the confrontation at the Braemar Country Club, his shame at losing control that way, how his temper had ignited, how it had been right there like an old friend, like something atavistic. And the cold-sweat horror of Dodge’s mouth shaping a single word: Soon.

He got up, padded down the hall, and carried Kat, limp and dead-heavy in his arms, back to their bed. He tucked her in in his place and paused, surveying mother and daughter in idyllic calm. Something glinted over by the closet. His award.

He crossed and turned the plaque around so it faced the wall.

Then he killed the baby monitor, walked down to Kat’s room, and took up his post on the glider in the corner.

Soon, Dodge had promised.

Soon.

Chapter 16

Mike’s office, a modular-classroom-style prefab dropped in the middle of a dirt lot, had all the basics. Phone, fax, high-speed Internet. Aggressively competent gum-smacking ‘front-office girl,’ rounded out with high hair and bosom. Fire-sale desks shoved up against corkboard-covered walls, onto which were pinned various blueprints, permits, geological surveys, and Sears photos of family members. It was a humming little operation, twenty-five by thirty-eight feet of efficiency, the nuts and bolts behind the facades they constructed elsewhere.

Mike sat at his desk, massaging away an incipient migraine and pretending to review a bid for an insurance job. He’d been preoccupied all morning, adrift on sour thoughts. He couldn’t stop imagining William’s black-flecked lips, the reek of his gut breath, the way his face had appeared in the back window of the van, a disembodied head floating between the curtains. Then there was the image of that oil-stained polar bear, rocking in slow motion on the parking lot’s asphalt between Dodge’s massive feet.

He rose abruptly and headed for fresh air. Pacing the weeds of the yard, he tried Hank for the third time, and at last the PI picked up.

‘Want a distraction?’ Mike asked.

‘From dying?’ Hank said. ‘Whaddaya got?’

Mike told him about his run-in with Dodge and William and how oddly the sheriff’s deputies had acted back at the station.

‘Not much to go on,’ Hank said, ‘but I’ll nose around, see what I come up with.’

Unsatisfied, Mike headed back inside. Andres was at the copy machine, frustrated and pushing buttons indiscriminately. He came over, sat sideways at the edge of Mike’s desk, and gazed across the office at Sheila’s cleavage as she argued an insurance adjuster into telephonic submission. Andres clicked down on Mike’s desktop stapler with the heel of his hand a few times, just for fun. ‘A guy come by the site, asking about you.’

‘What do you mean, asking about me?’

‘When you around. When you at the office versus the jobs. That kind of stuff. Like he making conversation. Maybe he looking to hire you.’

Mike’s face grew hot. ‘What’d the guy look like?’

‘Dunno. Just a guy. Scruffy beard. Walk funny.’

Mike’s heartbeat vibrated in his ears. That headache, picking up steam. He tugged open the top desk drawer to grab some Tylenol. ‘What time was he-’ The question caught in his throat as he stared down into the drawer. His calendar was to the left. Because the drawer seam there had cracked, pushing up splinters, he always kept the calendar snug against the right side, the habit ossifying over the past few months.

‘Sheila?’ He waited until she covered the phone and looked over. ‘Did you need to go in my desk for anything this morning?’

She shook her head. He lifted the Tylenol bottle up, regarded it, then tossed it in the trash can. He rose abruptly, Andres observing him with puzzlement.

Mike crossed to the front door, swung it open, and crouched to study the dead bolt. He’d selected the Medeco himself for its six tumblers and the fact that it took a multidimensional key that was hard as hell to duplicate with a pick set. He’d learned this, of course, from Shep. But he’d also seen Shep get one open with a can of spray lubricant and a pull-handle trigger pick gun that, in Shep’s expert hands, could get the pin stacks to hop into alignment.

He hesitated a moment, almost fearful to know, then smeared a thumb across the keyhole. Sure enough, his print came away glistening with spray lubricant.

Someone had prepped this lock for a pick gun. Dodge or William.

Mike’s mouth had gone dry. Getting through a Medeco was professional-level stuff, a job worthy of Shep. Which meant their coming through Kat’s bedroom window wasn’t as far-fetched as Mike had been trying to convince himself.

Why would they break into his office?

‘Sheila,’ Mike said, his voice gruff even to his own ears. Everyone in the office, he realized, was staring at him, crouched there in the front doorway. ‘Can you tell when certain computer files were looked at?’

‘Sure, Mr Wingate.’ No matter how many times he told her to call him Mike, she insisted on addressing him formally. ‘There’s a “last accessed” time-stamp feature on most documents, though people usually never pay it any mind.’

He beckoned her to his desk, pulling out his chair for her. As he leaned over her shoulder, she clicked around, Andres looking on from the far side of the desk.

‘Was anything opened over the weekend?’ Mike asked.

‘I’m looking. But I have to go doc to doc. Anything in particular you want me to check?’

‘Green Valley,’ he said.

As she typed, Andres tilted his head and said to Mike, ‘Our files are all clean on that.’