Dangerous Secrets

Eight

Parker’s Ridge

November 19

Nick followed Charity back to her house, staring at the back of her car as if he could will her to stop, get out, and let him get behind the goddamned wheel.

He hated this. Why couldn’t she have just left the car where it was? He’d dropped hints aplenty, had even contemplated an order, but though she stated her wishes in the softest voice possible, Charity was like a rock. She just lifted that pointed little chin of hers and that was that. She wanted her car and she was going with him or without him to get it. In this weather, without him wasn’t an option, so with gritted teeth he’d driven her to her car near the library and was following her home.

That the weather had worsened—the roads were slick with ice and sleet—was a condition that Charity had totally ignored. Nick had to clutch the steering wheel hard to keep from shooting out in front of Charity and forcing her to slow down.

Unexpectedly, his classy little librarian liked speed. That was fine, but not on a day like this and not when he suspected she couldn’t quite handle her car. It slid when she braked and took corners. His jaws clenched each time.

He longingly eyed the cell phone on the passenger seat. He could call her and tell her to slow down. Make it seem like he couldn’t keep up, which was ridiculous for anyone who knew him. There wasn’t a vehicle in the world he couldn’t drive, as fast as he wanted, in any kind of weather. He was a qualified combat driver instructor and was one of the best.

His cell phone buzzed. Not Charity. Nick smiled when he saw the display. Jacob Weiss, his best friend. He switched his cell phone to speakerphone mode.

“Hey, Jake. Howzit hangin’?” It was their usual greeting and was usually answered in unprintable ways.

“Hey big guy, guess what? I did it!” Jake was too excited to engage in their usual banter. Nick could hear it in his voice. “Yee-hah! Or hoo-ah! Or whatever it is you military types say. I did it!”

Nick rolled his eyes. At any given moment, Jake was accomplishing a bazillion different things, not least accumulating more money than a third world country. “It” could have been buying Microsoft, doubling the income of a Saudi prince or single-handedly raising the world price of gold. Jake was one of the prime financial geniuses of the world. That wasn’t Nick’s opinion, it was Bloomberg’s.

Whatever “it” was, though, it had Jake in a state.

“Great. Glad to hear it.” Jake couldn’t see Nick’s shrug but he could probably hear it in his voice. Nick just wasn’t that into money, to Jake’s everlasting sorrow. “What did you do? Buy Corsica?”

“No, though I did purchase a resort…never mind. Listen, you remember those Russian bonds I told you about?” Jake waited while Nick processed. Should he lie and say of course he remembered? Jake was smart as a whip. He knew when Nick was lying. No, wait…Nick remembered something. Vaguely.

Jake didn’t let the thought gel. “If you had a decent cell phone instead of that crap POS you use, you’d see me rolling my eyes. I talked to you about investing in Russian bonds six months ago. I talked to you for two hours, Nick. Your head’s hard but it can’t be that hard.”

Oh yeah. Nick had taken an afternoon off from being a scumbag gopher for the Gonzalez clan and had gone to see Jake and his family. Being with Jake and Marja was like breathing in cool, clean air, except when Jake talked money, which is when Nick zoned out.

“I sort of remember. You thought it would be a good deal, right?”

“It turned out to be an excellent deal, thank you. Paid off four to one. I wasn’t expecting that until next spring, but by God, I’m looking at the e-mail right now.”

Nick, instead, was watching Charity’s back fender. Was that a wobble? Goddamn it, if she was having trouble holding the road, he was going to signal her to stop and have her come back to his car. They could leave hers there and he’d pick it up as soon as the weather cleared. He watched carefully as she rounded a corner, finally letting out a pent-up breath. Okay. She’d taken that one smoothly. But damn, her tires weren’t suited to this weather. He’d taken a good look before she got into her car and had to bite his lips not to say anything.

“What? What was that?” Jake had said something, something he was excited about. Nick gave him half his attention, the other half focused like a laser beam on Charity in front of him.

Bonds were infinitely less important to him than making sure Charity didn’t crash.

“If you’d been listening,” Jake said, in an exaggeratedly patient tone, “you’d have heard me the first time. But I’ll repeat. Do you remember when I told you I’d make you a millionaire? And you gave me all your money?”

Nick smiled. Good old Jake. “Yeah.”

Him, a millionaire? He could sooner sprout wings and fly. He never worried about money management. He spent very little and the rest just sat in a bank, gathering dust.

In exasperation, Jake made him take everything out and give it to him. It wasn’t peanuts, not for Nick, anyway. Nick had banked his entire salary while in Afghanistan, where he whooped it up on stale water and field MREs, there being absolutely no place to spend it. And again, his salary had accumulated while he was with the Gonzalez clan, and he’d handed that over to Jake, too.

Yeah, Nick remembered. A hundred fifty thou. More or less everything he had in the world and probably what Jake made in a minute. “You lose that for me?”

“No, I just told you! Weren’t you listening? I put your money in Russian bonds and Hong Kong gold futures. The Russian bonds just quadrupled and Hong Kong gold went through the roof. You were highly leveraged there for a while, I’m not afraid to say….” Nick frowned. Charity was driving way too fast again. He zoned back in to what Jake was saying. “…and I got you in and out of an Indian IPO fast, you came out smelling like a rose. In fact, as of right now…” Nick could hear a computer keyboard clacking, “your net worth is $1,003,000. Congratulations, Nick. You are now a millionaire. I just more than quintupled your investment, my man. Jesus, I’m good. I’m a god. Wait a second, while I do a little victory dance.”

Nick heard tapping sounds and smiled. Jake had undergone the last of eleven operations over the past ten years to straighten out his spine and being able to walk without pain and move quickly were both huge victories.

Wait a minute.

“Whoa.” Nick finally focused on what Jake was saying. “Hit rewind, would you? What was that again? I thought I heard you say that—”

“That you’re a millionaire. Rich, big guy, you’re rich. Absolutely. Welcome to the club.” Jake laughed. Actually, Jake was a billionaire, many times over, but Nick appreciated the thought. The Millionaires’ Club.

“Jesus.” Nick took a deep breath, then another. “Jesus, I’m rich.” His mind whirled. “I’m rich.” He gave a breathless laugh.

“Yep. Don’t spend it all in one place. Tell me I’m good.”

“You’re a genius,” Nick said, meaning every word.

“Damn straight.” Jake laughed again.

Nick swallowed. He flashed on the first time he’d seen Jake.

He’d been eleven and looked sixteen and Jake had been nine and looked five. Jake had suddenly appeared in the orphanage, a shell-shocked, whey-faced odd-looking little boy with a crooked back and toothpick legs. His family had emigrated from Israel the year before and his parents had just died in a freak accident. There were no other family members the state knew of, and they couldn’t immediately find a family willing to take on a cripple, so he’d been dumped in the orphanage, where he was immediate prey.

He barely spoke English, was badly underdeveloped, and scoliosis had turned his back into a huge crooked S. The death of his parents had traumatized him so much he couldn’t talk.

It had been like dumping a crippled guppy with a BEAT ME UP sign pinned to its fin into a tank of piranhas. Five minutes after arriving, Jake was bleeding.

Nick had been outside shooting hoops when he saw the biggest bullies in the orphanage kicking something small and white on the ground. A minute later, he was pulling the fuckers off, breaking an arm and a nose and was carrying an unconscious Jake to the dispensary. He’d weighed nothing.

The dispensary, necessary by law, was staffed by an indifferent nurse Nick suspected was dealing pain-killers. She had no desire to look Jake over and did so only when Nick got right up into her face.

She patched Jake up and Nick made sure he was around Jake most of the time and that everyone knew messing with Jake meant messing with him. Jake was prey but Nick wasn’t. Nobody fucked with him or with those he protected.

For the next few years, Nick had a pale, silent shadow. Jake never spoke, hardly ate, and could sleep only if Nick was in the same room.

They bounced from foster home to foster home. The first time Nick was dumped in a foster home, the social worker refused to place Jake in the same home. The social worker, an obese lady with a honeyed southern accent and mean eyes, raked in 10 percent of the take from the foster homes she placed kids in.

She wanted to split them up. Jake was to go to a home that specialized in mentally and physically handicapped children. There was a 50 percent bonus for those kids. Nick had heard tales about that home that made his skin prickle. Two kids had died there over the past couple of years.

Nick pushed the social worker against a wall with a knife to her side and told her he’d cut out her kidney if Jake didn’t go with him. They were never separated after that.

When Nick was seventeen and Jake fifteen, some sociology students came to the foster home they were in at the time. The students were conducting a survey of children in foster homes who had spent time in an orphanage. The survey consisted of an IQ test, a Rorschach, and interviews. Jake refused to answer the questions and was silent when administered the Rorschach.

The IQ test was another story.

The survey team refused to believe the initial results and had Jake take the test again. And again. And again.

Each time, the survey group grew, until finally, a professor from MIT came and took Jake away.

Jake’s results were off the charts, particularly in math. Genius didn’t begin to describe it. From then on, foundations vied for the privilege of educating him. He had a masters in economics and in math by the time he was eighteen; a PhD in economics by twenty-one. By that time, too, he knew what he wanted. Money, and lots of it.

He had it, too, Nick thought in satisfaction. Piles of it. Tons. Boatloads of the stuff. Good for him. He’d earned every penny.

“You’re rich, now, buddy,” Jake said quietly. “So what are you going to do about it? No sense dying young when you’re rich, is there? Rich guys die of old age. In their beds. With a couple of hotties.”

Nick winced. Once, between missions, he’d gotten shit faced with Jake. Four men under his command had died and he saw their faces nightly in his dreams. Nightmares.

Jake had sat and listened quietly to him, nursing one drink to Nick’s ten until Nick had been rendered down to rock bottom. There had been nothing left in him, an exhausted, heartbroken mess of a man. And that was when he confessed to Jake that he was convinced he would die young.

After that, Jake refused to let it go, like a dog with a bone. He said he would make it his life’s work to get Nick out of the military. When Nick was wounded and resigned his commission, Jake bought a whole vineyard in Champagne to celebrate…and then got angry as hell when Nick joined the Unit and went undercover.

Suddenly, Jake’s voice roughened. “I’m not going to let you die young, Nick. I simply won’t allow it. You’re going die in your bed a rich old man and that’s that. Get used to it.”

He hung up.

Nick drove, concentrated on watching Charity in front of him and on what Jake had said.

Not dying young. Wow. Now there was a thought. Though come to think of it, he was thirty-two. Maybe he was too old to die young.

For the very first time in his life, Nick thought of the future. Not the immediate future, like making Delta or joining the Unit. No, the long term. Being forty and fifty and sixty. Christ, maybe seventy and eighty. The thought that he was going to die young was so ingrained in him that he had never given a thought to becoming middle-aged and then old. Wasn’t going to happen.

But—just suppose it did? Just suppose he lived. And he had money, to boot. Well, that changed things.

Suppose, like Jake insisted, he quit doing dangerous jobs and got married and settled down with a family?

Of course, it was easy for Jake to talk. He had the most beautiful wife in the world and three great kids. Marja was a stunning beauty. A platinum blonde, a head taller than Jake, a great mother, and a fantastic wife. Everyone assumed that with his billions, Jake had bought himself a trophy wife, but the truth was he had met Marja, a Swedish exchange student, while still studying and trying to survive on a grant at MIT. He and Marja were a love match.

It never even occurred to Nick that he could have that. Good thing, too, because he’d never met anyone he could feel about the way Jake felt about Marja.

But just suppose…he eyed the car in front of him, which Charity was driving just a little too fast for her ability and her tires. It was just like her—flares of unexpected fire under a soft, unassuming exterior.

Suppose he settled down? And just suppose he settled down with Charity? Living with that beautiful woman in that beautiful house in a pretty, peaceful town.

Nick waited for the feeling of constriction, of claustrophobia that always took him when he thought of settling down. It wasn’t coming.

Charity zipped down her street and pulled too fast into her driveway. Nick gritted his teeth and parked right on her back fender. If she wanted to get out again, she was going to have to ask him. And as far as he was concerned, she wasn’t getting her hands on another steering wheel until the weather cleared.

He was at her door before she could get out, hand outstretched. “You drive way too fast,” he complained. Damn, that sounded like a whine in his voice.

She laughed up in his face and poked him in the ribs. “And you drive way too slow. Boring. You might as well be driving a Fairlane instead of that beautiful car.”

Nick had worked as a development test driver for a car manufacturer one summer. Once he’d gotten a racing car up to 175 miles an hour on the straightaway.

He smiled down at her. “I guess I’ll just have to work on my driving skills.”