Dangerous Secrets

Twelve

Parker’s Ridge

November 21

Late Monday morning, Nick rapped his knuckles on the steel door of the van.

He was in a foul mood. He’d spent the past three hours overseeing the company that put in a top-of-the-line security system at the Prewitt mansion. The company was a good one, but the salesman had tried to snow the elderly, confused judge with unnecessary bells and whistles.

It made him so goddamned angry. The instant a human becomes weak, the wolves come out to prey. He remembered reading in a book a Roman saying—man is wolf to man. Well, that just about summed up humankind.

It got to him, every fucking time, how the strong preyed on the weak. Jake would have died in the orphanage, either from the beatings or sheer neglect, if he hadn’t been there.

Nick made it his life work to stand between the weak, the young, and the old and that section of humankind that was born without a heart. That saw other humans the way the butcher sees the pig. Useful, but only when slaughtered.

He’d fought them in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Indonesia. And now he was fighting them here at home. These aliens in human bodies.

But no matter how hard he fought, no matter how many he took down, there were always more and more and more of them. The supply never ended.

Nick was so familiar with the type he could smell it—the alien who would cut you up for parts as soon as look at you.

Nick could actually watch the thought processes of the slick company salesman who drove out with the workmen. Maybe he was from the area and knew the family name. Or maybe he recognized the address. Whatever, he spent an entire morning tagging along, just for a shot at the judge, alone.

Nick came back into the house to see old Judge Prewitt with a pen in his mottled, shaking hand, about to sign an inch-thick sheaf of papers. And scumbag watching over him, greed and anticipation on his plump, vicious face.

Five minutes later, the fuckhead was scurrying out the door, red faced and empty-handed.

So Nick was in a piss-poor mood by the time he made it out of town to the surveillance van. Not to mention that he was already missing Charity, which was a first. Iceman never missed anyone, ever.

Di Stefano opened the back door of the van and beckoned him in. The instant Nick stepped in, he was assailed by the smell of male sweat, dirty laundry, stale pizza, and farts. One deep breath and he was choking.

Three days in Charity’s company and already he was spoiled.

“Jesus.” He batted the air in front of him. “What the hell do you guys eat all day, beans? It’s enough to make a man pass out. We don’t need weapons. We should get Worontzoff’s goons out here and gas ’em.”

Alexei was, as usual, sitting on a chair, hunched forward, those huge, heavy earphones on his head. He lifted a hand in greeting, then bent his head again in concentration.

“Wow, listen to the gentleman here. Lah-di-da. Excuuuuuse us.” Di Stefano rolled his eyes. “Not all of us are playing the part of billionaire businessmen, Iceman. Some of us are actually working. We’ve been here all weekend, haven’t left the van once. So get off my case.”

“Don’t give me that shit. I’ve been on the clock, too. All weekend.”

“Oh yeah?” Di Stefano gave him a sideways glance. “I’ll just bet. I saw the photos. Real hardship duty. So, tell me,” he said casually, picking up his can of diet Coke, “she’s such a pretty little thing. How is she in the sack? I’ll bet—”

Di Stefano didn’t get a chance to say anything else because he was slammed up against the van’s bulkhead with Nick’s arm across his windpipe, pressing hard, the can of Coke rolling, forgotten, on the floor of the van.

“Jesus, Iceman!” Alexei scrambled to Nick’s side and starting pulling uselessly at his arm. “Let go, you’ll kill him. Let go, man! What the fuck are you thinking?”

He wasn’t thinking. Nick didn’t have any thoughts in his head at all, only a bright red storm of rage, drowning out everything else.

Di Stefano was turning purple, arms flailing, trying to club Nick on the side of the head, trying to kick him away. Di Stefano had been trained in self-defense—he was a cop, after all—but he had nothing like Nick’s training. Nick had spent ten years being trained by the best to kill.

Ordinarily, Di Stefano would be dead. Nick knew precisely how to do it. Colonel Merle had spent a whole month on chokeholds and Nick was an expert. Smash the hyoid bone and in a second the adversary goes down like a felled bull.

But something was starting to penetrate, past the wall of staticky noise in his head. Alexei’s voice. It was only the voice that stopped him. Alexei had no muscles at all, and though he was pulling at Nick’s arm, he could just as well have been patting him.

Nick stared into Di Stefano’s bulging eyes and loosened his hold. Half a second later, he stepped back, dropping his arm.

Di Stefano fell to his knees, head hanging, wheezing to get air into his suffering lungs. “You. Miserable. Fuck,” he gasped, getting a word out every ten seconds. He rubbed his neck, red and raw looking.

Nick sat in one of the two chairs in the van, then bounced right back up again, as if the dingy off-white plastic chair had pneumatic springs. He couldn’t sit, he was too wound up. Even his breathing was speeded up.

Jesus.

He was buzzing with nervous energy and had to force himself to stand still.

It wasn’t like him. They called him Iceman not because he didn’t have emotions. He had them, in spades. It’s just that he’d honed his self-control since he was two years old and realized that fighting back against an eight-year-old was suicide. He could always put aside the inner man on the job.

Clocking Di Stefano was just insane. He could hardly believe he’d done it. He felt ashamed. Sort of. Except that if Di Stefano made another suggestive comment about Charity, he’d put him in a chokehold again, which probably meant that he wasn’t that sorry.

Di Stefano was standing now, glaring at him, rubbing his neck angrily. “What the fuck was that about?”

Nick looked him straight in the eye. Di Stefano was a teammate. In the army, you defended your teammates with your life, whether you liked them or not. Nick liked Di Stefano, a lot. It’s just that he had to learn what the new rule was.

“Here’s the way it works. From this moment on, Charity Ames is eighty years old, with four chins and warts. You never mention sex and her name in the same sentence, ever again. She is officially sexless. I hope that’s clear.” He turned to Alexei. “That includes you.”

Wide-eyed, Alexei mimed zipping his mouth shut. Nick speared Di Stefano with a hard gaze. “Clear?”

“Absolutely.” Di Stefano shook his head, as if to clear it. “And I have a new rule, too. You ever pull that stunt again, and I’ll take you down.”

Nick bared his teeth. “You can try,” he said softly.

Alexei stepped between them, hands up in a time-out gesture. “Hey guys, stop locking antlers. The smell of testosterone is overriding the farts. Let’s just settle down—”

A faint buzz sounded from Alexei’s headset and he dived for the console, switching on the sound from the speakers. It was the phone, ringing. Worontzoff picked up on the second ring.

“Hello.” His voice was deep and calm.

“Hello, Vassily. How are you?” Charity. Charity was calling the motherfucker. Nick froze, every cell in his body dedicated to listening to the call.

“I am fine, my dear. Did you have an enjoyable weekend?”

“Yes.” Nick could almost feel her blush through twenty miles of wire. “Yes, I did, actually. Um … a very nice weekend. Vassily, I was wondering…”

“Yes, my dear?”

“You know your musical soirée on Thursday?”

“Ah, the soirée. Samuel Cha on the cello. It will be exquisite. We arranged the playlist just the other day. And I asked him to include Elgar’s Cello Concerto in E minor, because I know it’s your favorite.”

“Oh, Vassily—” Charity’s voice turned warm and affectionate. Nick clenched his fists. It was the tone she used when she whispered in his ear while he was in her. “You remembered! I do so love that concerto, thank you. I’m going to love hearing Mr. Cha play it.”

“My pleasure, my dear. It will be very enjoyable listening to it with you.”

“Yes, indeed. Speaking of which, um, Vassily…”

“Yes, my dear?”

Listening hard, Nick could detect an oily undertone, as if Worontzoff knew what was coming. Like a villain in a movie inviting the heroine into his den. Yesssss, my dear?

“Um, I know that you don’t like to invite more than thirty people to your soirées, Vassily—”

“Quite right. Too many people ruin the acoustics of the room. Chamber music was composed exactly for that—for chambers. Most chamber music was written in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries for a court. Never for general consumption. With a royal family and perhaps some courtiers in attendance, no more.”

“Well, I’m certainly not royalty. But what I wanted to ask you was, may I bring a friend along? He’s a busy man and I don’t even know if he’d be free, but if he is, could I invite him? I wanted to ask you first before broaching it to him.”

“A friend? You want to bring a friend? To my soirée?”

Could Charity hear the dead, frozen tone in Worontzoff’s voice? Nick could. He heard the instant morph from avuncular intellectual to dangerous mobster. Every hair on Nick’s body stood on end and his pulse raced. This was one of the most dangerous men on the planet and Charity had just angered him.

Shit, tell him to forget about it. Say it was just a silly thought. Come on, Charity, let it go. I’ll find another way to get into that damned house. Just stay out of this guy’s way and out of the way of his anger.

He bit his back teeth, hard. Looked at professionally, this was a stroke of good luck, in a job that had all too few of them. This is what he’d been angling for all along. What he’d engineered the meet with Charity for. Ostensibly, what he’d been fucking her for.

It was the job. Just the job. Getting into Scumbag Central.

Di Stefano high-fived Alexei, who was grinning. Mission accomplished. An elaborate ploy had paid off and a federal agent was just about to be introduced into the home of a suspected criminal.

“Vassily?” Charity’s soft voice came through the speakers. Hearing her voice made him ache, as if he’d taken a punch to the chest. Thank God she’d sensed something, though she misunderstood the reason. “Will this be a problem? Do you have too many guests coming? Because I could renounce my invitation, if you can’t fit everyone in.”

“No, no, my dear. Of course that won’t be necessary. I wouldn’t dream of not having you. Your enjoyment makes my evening. Your friend is very welcome, if he can make it. I trust he enjoys classical music?”

A startled silence. Nick realized that Charity had no idea whether he liked music or whether he was tone deaf. It simply hadn’t come up. Actually not much beyond his dick had come up over the weekend.

“Y-yes. Yes of course he does.”

She was such a lousy liar.

“Well, then, my dear,” Vassily said smoothly, “of course he can come. Any musical friend of yours is a friend of mine.”

Not in this lifetime, scumbag.

“Thank you, Vassily. I’ll see you on Thursday.”

“Yes, my dear. I’m looking forward to welcoming you.” Delicate pause. “Welcome you both.” Worontzoff waited until she hung up, then punched a button to close the connection.

Silence. Then an explosion of sound, a two-syllable word.

Nick looked over at Alexei. “What was that?”

“Pizdets,” Alexei said.

“Thank you, Alexei,” Di Stefano said, rolling his eyes. “So what does it mean?”

Alexei’s eyes gleamed. “Fuck.”

Charity put the library phone down thoughtfully, wondering whether she’d done a good thing or a bad thing.

Vassily hadn’t sounded pleased. At all. She knew his voices and this was his I Am Not Amused voice. He lived in a large home, a mansion, actually, and what he termed the Music Room was large. But he’d told her he didn’t want more than thirty people and he’d probably already invited as many people as he felt the room could comfortably hold. His soirées were catered and the caterers had probably already been told the exact number, as well.

Vassily was a charming man. He had enriched her life in so many ways, she couldn’t even begin to count them. However, Charity also recognized that the man had a dark side, a granite hardness to him that she sometimes saw people tripping over unexpectedly, like a rocky outcropping in a meadow. Part of that dark side was that he didn’t like being crossed, in any way.

She respected that, always. She’d inherited from her mother an ability to read people and from her father an ability to avoid antagonizing the difficult. Charity knew exactly when to keep her mouth shut, and she did.

With Vassily it was easier than with most people she dealt with and who tried her patience, like the mayor or old Mrs. Lawrence. However difficult he became, he had earned every wrinkle in his character, and he was entitled to that dark side of his.

Vassily never spoke of it, but his body spoke eloquently. His grotesquely scarred and shattered hands, with all the fingernails missing. A thin, deep scar running from his temple to his jawline, just missing his eye. An inability to lift his right arm higher than his chest. A limp that was exacerbated in the winter when it was damp. And when was it not damp in Vermont in winter?

Vassily was endlessly fascinating to everyone—he was, after all, one of the world’s greatest writers. A man who would be lionized in any of the world’s great cities, even though he had chosen, inexplicably, to bury himself in a small provincial town in Vermont.

No one could give him back his lost years and his ruined health, however. No matter how famous and rich he became, he had been through hell.

So Charity forgave Vassily everything—his moodiness, his harsh, granite core, his dark side. She had no right to judge him, and she didn’t.

Maybe she shouldn’t have asked if Nick could come with her. It appeared that it was a breach of Vassily etiquette. It’s just that with each passing day, she was more and more certain that Nick would soon move on. How many business opportunities could there be, after all, in the Green Mountain State, for an investor? Smart as he was, he was surely running them all down to the ground. And once he’d finished, what was there to keep him here?

Charity had no illusions about the two of them, as a couple. There was nothing here to tie Nick down. He had money, looks, health. A bachelor pad in Manhattan. Potent male charm. Charisma. He was a superb lover.

The world was his oyster.

There was no reason whatsoever for him to stick here with a small-town librarian who led a quiet life and was responsible for two elderly, frail relatives who tethered her as much as—perhaps more than—two small children would have.

Charity’s life was circumscribed, hemmed in on all sides. His was not. It was wide open.

So, he’d be going soon. He might even be gone by Thursday, and maybe she’d just humiliated herself in vain, asking Vassily for this favor for a man who wouldn’t even be here.

It was just that the thought of an evening without Nick, even one of Vassily’s musical soirées, which she ordinarily loved, was painful in the extreme. Which meant, of course, that she was in for a great deal of pain in the very near future.