“Rhames?” he asked.
Underwood nodded. Jeffrey noticed that a pool of blood was collecting beneath him, thick and black in the dim light.
“Manny, he can’t do anything more to you.”
“You saw what he did to Samuels and his family. And they were friends once. Imagine what he’d do to my kids.”
Jeffrey watched as tears mingled with blood and traveled down Manny’s face. He reached for Jeffrey’s arm and gripped his wrist hard. “He knows everything. They’ll never be free. No matter where they go or how they try to hide. And he’ll wait until they think they’re safe, until they think he’s forgotten them or that he’s dead. And then he’ll move in and lay waste to their lives. That’s what he does.”
Jeffrey looked at Underwood’s eyes and saw that he was starting to get a dazed look. He wasn’t sure what to ask next.
“How did they know each other?”
“I don’t know. It was a long time ago; that was the rumor anyway. There was bad blood. No one knew what.” He was using all his strength to force the words out; it was painful to hear the horrible croaking of his voice.
“They worked together at Sandline?” asked Lydia.
Underwood didn’t say anything. He turned his eyes back to Jeff; his face was too ruined to read his expression.
“Do yourself a favor,” he said softly. “Stay out of it.”
Jeff nodded. Underwood’s eyes went blank then and he didn’t say anything else. Ever.
Thirty-Two
They brought the Kompressor to a stop in front of Lily Samuels’ apartment building and idled.
“We shouldn’t be here. What if we’re wrong?” said Lydia anxiously.
“Well, then. We’re wrong.”
“We need more evidence before we bring this to them. Right now we just have our hunches, the damaged memory of an injured police officer and the word of a man who was being slowly tortured to death,” said Lydia. “Lily’s fragile, just barely able to accept that her brother is gone. If we bring this to her and then it turns out that we’ve made another wrong assumption, we’ll be hurting someone who doesn’t need any more hurt in her life.”
“So what are you suggesting?”
“Let’s go home, regroup, and try to corroborate some of this info.”
“How?”
“I don’t know,” she said with a sigh.
“Why would Underwood lie? He knew he was dying; that’s why he told us as much as he did.”
“Why does anyone lie, Jeffrey? Because they can.”
“Awfully cynical.”
“Just drive. Please.”
Before the elevator doors opened into their loft, they heard the television on inside. Jeffrey reached for his gun and Lydia quickly put her hand on his.
“Dax has a key, remember?”
Jeffrey rested his hand on the Glock at his waist but didn’t draw the weapon. He’d given Dax a key when he was charged with protecting Lydia from Jed McIntyre and never asked for it back. Dax hadn’t been up and around without their help much in the last year so he hadn’t had the need to let himself in recently. Still, it wasn’t good to make assumptions.
The doors opened but the apartment was dark except for the large flat-screen television in the living room. A huge dark form sat on the edge of the couch, feet up on the coffee table. An episode of
“What are you two looking so tense about? You said it was urgent, yeah?”
Lydia started to breathe again and wondered when she’d become so jumpy.
“Yeah,” she said, dropping her leather coat over one of the chairs and stepping down into the sunken living room. “It’s urgent.”
“Great,” he said. “Can we talk over pizza? I’m starved.”
She sat on the coffee table and looked at him, reached for the remote, and flipped the television off.
“This is what I’m thinking. I’m thinking all of this started a long time ago. I’m thinking Rhames and Samuels both worked for Sandline.”
The smile dropped from Dax’s face and he got that granite look, those flat eyes he got when she pushed too hard into his past.
“I think Rhames and not The New Day was trying to ruin Tim Samuels’ life. And I think he convinced Mickey to help him.”
Dax sat silent and Jeffrey came up behind him.
“What I don’t understand is what Tim Samuels did that could cause Rhames to hate him so much for so long, what could cause Mickey Samuels, the boy Tim raised like his own, to join forces with a psychopath and do all the awful things he’s done.”
“And you think I know the answer to that?”
“I think you know something about Sandline. And if you do, maybe you know something about what might have happened between those two.”
Dax got up and walked toward the window on the other side of the television. He drew in and released a breath.
“If I knew something that would help you, do you think I would keep it from you?”
“If you had to or thought you had to, yes,” she said to his back. “There are huge parts of your life we know nothing about.”
He nodded but kept his back to her. “And that’s probably not going to change. But I’m telling you the truth when I say that I don’t know anything about this situation.”
Lydia sighed and leaned back on the couch. She looked at the familiar form of their friend and thought he seemed like a stranger. She didn’t think he would lie to her but she realized she didn’t know for sure. And she wondered what that meant about their relationship. Can you trust someone who chooses what he reveals about himself? Can there be a true friendship with someone who hides huge parts of his life? Lydia didn’t know. She felt a strange sadness, an odd distance from him as he came to sit across from her on the low, stout cocktail table.
“What I can tell you is that no one talks about Sandline. Everything about them, including whatever you’ve done for them, is classified. You violate that agreement and they burn your life down-not just your life, but the life of anyone you’ve told.”
“If that’s true, then I don’t know where to go from here.”
He shook his head and looked at the floor. “I don’t know what to tell you.”
“There’s only one place we can go, I think,” said Jeffrey.
“Grimm, right?” said Lydia, leaning forward looking at Dax. “How do we find him?”
Dax smiled. But the smile was cool and didn’t reach his eyes. “You’ll never see Grimm again.”
“There’s only one person who knows what links Rhames and Tim Samuels,” said Jeffrey, coming to sit beside her. “There’s only one person who might know the secret that would cause Mickey to turn against his stepfather like this, destroying his whole family in the process.”
Lydia rubbed the tension from her neck. “Monica Samuels,” she said. “She wouldn’t tell us before.”
“Let’s try again,” said Jeffrey.
