her hanging upside down over a bathtub to come after me.”
She went pale. “He tortured a woman in front of you?”
Keep it straightforward, he told himself. Still, his voice wasn’t quite steady when he said, “He tortured and killed eight women in front of me. One of them was my mother.”
“Oh, Kit…”
“Don’t pity me,” he said angrily. “I helped him.”
“Helped him?” She searched his face, looking, he knew, for some sign that he’d lied to her.
He fell silent.
“I don’t believe it.” She was angry, too. Of course she was.
“Believe it,” he said in a tone that would allow no argument.
She frowned. “How?”
“What?”
“How did you help him?”
He reached for the tortoise, gripped it. “In a thousand ways.”
“Name one.”
His mind filled with images. He closed his eyes tightly.
She waited. Why didn’t she just give up? he wondered.
“Just believe me,” he said. It was a plea this time.
“This once, I don’t.”
He came to his feet. “You want to know, Meghan? You want to know? All right. I did whatever the hell he asked me to do. Anything. ‘Tie her up, Worm.’ ‘Take a picture of me with her, Worm.’ ‘You stay in that chair and watch, Worm.’ And I’d do it.”
“You were a child.”
“I didn’t act like one. Would you like to see the photographs of them being forced to kiss me? To hold me? I’d strip naked and sit on their laps. And he’d tell them where to put their hands. What to do to me. They hated it. They hated me. Even the one who understood-but he killed her just the same. All the others, all so scared of him, they couldn’t talk or cry or anything else. He’d take pictures of them and everything he made them do with me.”
“Kit-”
“And after they were dead, I helped him then, too. I buried them. I’d be shoveling dirt into a grave, and he’d be in his room, beating off while he was looking at those photos. Why didn’t I run away while he was in there with his pants around his ankles? A thousand times I could have escaped from him. Ten thousand.”
“You were a child.”
“I was old enough…” He sat down again, buried his face in his hands. He was surprised to feel the dampness on his face. When had he started crying?
“He beat you, didn’t he? The bruises in this photo-”
“So fucking what? I had been beaten before, and by bigger men than Jerome Naughton.”
“But he did more than use his fists, didn’t he? He terrorized you, day after day. He made you afraid to disobey him.”
He didn’t answer.
“Just tell me that when you were asked to do those things, you weren’t feeling afraid of him, that you would have done them if he wasn’t there-say that’s true, and I’ll blame you for your part in it.”
He opened his mouth to say it, just to get her to see how bad it was, how unclean he was. But he couldn’t.
He stood up, and she came to her feet as well. “I have to go,” he said.
“Wait-” she said, and blocked his way.
She was inches away from him. “Please let me leave,” he said. Physically, she was no match for him. He could have tossed her aside, martial arts training or no. He waited.
“I’ll let you leave. But first, promise me that you won’t start avoiding me now that you’ve told me this.”
“Meghan-”
“Promise.”
He looked up at the sky. God, he pleaded silently. God, help me.
“I promise,” he said, and moved past her into the house.
34
Los Angeles, California
Wednesday, May 21, 4:50 P.M.
Frederick Whitfield IV wondered when he had ever felt better. True, he had been barfing his guts out a few minutes ago, but now he was fine. Now he was great. That barfing business, well, nothing to be ashamed of there. A lot of people might not know it, but great actors tended to puke after giving their best performances. Athletes barfed a lot, too. He had a friend who ran marathons, and he said a lot of those runners would cross the finish line and two seconds later, they’d be delivering street pizza. Just a fact. Bodybuilders, too. Famous for upchucking after a tough workout.
And what a workout he had just had. Two of them, both of them pros!
Granted, the one had been in restraints inside a locked cell, a little dull-witted from drugs-but so what? He knew a lot of people who would have been afraid to go in there with a guy who had been a sniper.
Thanks to Frederick Whitfield IV, Mr. Sniper wasn’t going to have another chance to hide in bushes and kill people.
Cameron had told Frederick exactly how to do it. He had given him a gun and everything. Cameron was the best shot of any of them. So Frederick had been pleased when Cameron told him that he knew that there was only one other marksman in the whole group who could handle this. Since Cameron was going to be busy taking care of business in Palmdale, he said, he was depending on Frederick. Cameron usually made Frederick uncomfortable, but now Frederick was beginning to think they were going to get along better. Cameron was going to see that Frederick was no poseur-which is how he had made him feel in the past.
Everett had been talking to Morgan, but after Morgan left, he had taken Frederick aside and stressed that they were all depending on him. Project Nine failed or succeeded because of him. He was their assassin.
Well, he was going to join them at the rendezvous on Mulholland, where they’d get rid of the weapons and report a big green light for Project Nine. Thanks to Frederick Whitfield IV, all systems were go. He spent a few minutes while inching along the 405 freeway not noticing rush hour traffic, but in a beautiful dream, a dream in which Everett said, “Frederick, I just wanted to ask your opinion about something…”
He recalled with a little embarrassment his meeting with his lawyer this afternoon. But hell, he had to change his will anyway. Fuck if he was going to let his parents get a dime of his grandmother’s money. If she had wanted them to have it, she would have left it to them. Now that he had survived, he realized that he probably didn’t need to be so insistent about the appointment. One good thing about being stinking rich was, everyone made time for you. And a man facing death had to have his affairs in order. That was just the responsible thing to do.
He had been a little afraid this afternoon. He could admit that now. But he had shot that sniper just like Cameron told him to, in the left eye. And the guy had died, just like Cameron said he would.
Then Frederick had barfed, and that was probably a good thing, because when Ricky let him out, and he asked for a glass of water, it was a perfectly reasonable thing to do. And so while Ricky was handing him the water, he shot Ricky in the left eye, too, and it worked just as well that time. He could see that he had totally surprised Ricky. Some bodyguard he must have been.
Frederick barfed again after that, and then got the tapes and drove off. He had to go back, because he had forgotten to put a number on the sniper, and damned if that didn’t make him sick again, because he had to get the key off Ricky’s body, and then go in there with the mess the sniper had made, and smell his own puke in there with him, and let’s face it, he thought now, what kind of asshole wouldn’t get sick after something like that?
He took off his gloves as he drove, and stuffed them in his pocket. He was glad he hadn’t worn his complete
