Blood Game, page 20
She found herself watching them—older couples, a young family, what appeared to be several older students, bottles of water and rain gear tied to their backpacks. Again she wondered, was Brother Thomas's killer among them?
Then the overhead display lit up with the arrival information for that next train to Paris.
James pushed away from the wall where he'd been standing. He wrapped a hand around her arm and pulled her close as the other passengers made their way to the platform.
“Stay close,” he told her as his hand tightened.
They might have been any other couple returning from holiday as they stepped out onto the platform under the covered awning. But she saw the way he checked out everything and everyone as they boarded the sleek silver-and-blue passenger car, quick glances in both directions, equally quick glance back at the rail station and the parking area beyond.
The rail car was only half full, twin rows of double seats lining both sides with baggage racks overhead filled with an assortment of backpacks, overnight bags, a child's stroller, and the usual collection of jackets, coats, and umbrellas.
They took two seats at the rear of the car, and again she was aware of the way he scanned everything as he had at the inn that first night, then again at the abbey.
When she would have taken the second seat next to the window, he shook his head and indicated the aisle seat. She was running on raw nerves and was about to ask what the hell difference it made which seat she took when he leaned over her.
“Take the aisle seat. I'll take the other across the way.”
“You're giving orders now?” What the hell difference did it make?
The look he gave her said enough.
“Fine.”
She took the aisle seat in the last row. He eased down into the one across from her.
The other passengers settled back into their seats as the train slowly left the station, then gathered speed. Some took out their phones or a book to read, conversations in either French or English over the low hum of the train, and the faint scent of cigarette smoke as someone lit up in spite of the posted signs against smoking.
Others dozed, with over two hours before they reached Paris. As the lights dimmed in the car, James stood and motioned for her to follow. He guided her to the rear of the car.
The bathroom was the size of a closet with a basin, toilet, drop-down changing table, and a narrow bench seat. It was empty. He pulled her inside, slid the pocket door closed and set the lock, then sat down on the narrow bench seat.
He opened the front of his jacket. The lower half of his sweatshirt was soaked with blood. He removed the towel the tour driver had given them, and dropped it into the waste container.
“I'll need your help.”
The way he said it—matter of fact—he might have been ordering a coffee or directions to a restaurant. He reached around and pulled the tail of the sweatshirt from the waistband of his jeans.
“The exit wound will be the worst of it.”
Her experience with wounds was limited to scrapes and bruises when she'd taken a header off a bicycle as a child, or an occasional cut from a knife in the kitchen at her apartment—not bullet wounds.
He looked up as she hesitated, saw the expression on her face.
“I'll walk you through it. Can you hold it together?”
She nodded.
“You'll need wet paper towels to clean the wound, then more to make a bandage.”
She pulled paper towels from the dispenser and soaked them with water at the basin, then wrung them out and handed them to him. He cleaned the wound where the bullet had entered.
“You'll need more for the exit wound.”
The wound was low at his side, only a few inches apart from the wound at the front, but almost twice the size, the edges ragged.
She had seen him without a shirt at the apartment in London and that impressive tattoo, but hadn't seen the patchwork of scars—old wounds, at least a dozen of them, all about the same size with several on the back of his shoulder, with that long scar barely healed from recent surgeries.
Shrapnel?
She brushed a finger across the ridge of one of those small scars, and a memory, sharp and painful, swept back over her as if it were yesterday—her brother's casket had been sealed, the wounds horrific from the attack, they were told, and not something they wanted to see.
Her father had insisted, sending her back to the front of the chapel at Arlington. He said nothing when he finally joined her, his face a mask that said everything he refused to tell her.
“Are you all right?”
She forced herself past the memory. “I got it.”
A knock at the door of the bathroom brought her back, jarring her back into the world of reality. This was real...the blood was real...
“You'll have to wait!” she called out, not even recognizing her own voice.
“Slow it down,” James told her. “Take a deep breath.”
She nodded, then wet more paper towels. Her hands shook as she carefully cleaned the wound, wiping away the blood.
“Is it still bleeding?”
“A little.”
He heard it in her voice, the same as it was in London after the attack at the nightclub, holding on.
“You'll need to make another bandage. And something to hold both in place.” Or he would just keep bleeding and sooner or later someone was going to notice.
She folded a couple more paper towels into a square pad, then pulled the scarf from around her neck.
“Hold this,” she told him as she slipped the scarf over the bandage and wrapped it around his waist, then over the bandage low at his back.
“God dammit!” she swore, her fingers clumsy.
“I can take it from here,” James told her. He grabbed both ends of the scarf and tied it off, then pulled the tail of his sweatshirt down over it.
She took dragged a hand through her hair as another knock, more persistent this time, came at the door.
“Fuck!” she swore. “Une minute!”
“Fuck?” he said, with what passed for a smile as he tossed the bloodied towel along with the paper towels into the bottom of the trash container, then pulled more from the dispenser and dropped them on top.
It wasn't that he'd never heard the word before. In his line of work it was usually part of any good conversation when things had a way of going sideways, which happened a lot, no matter how much planning had gone into the mission.
He just hadn't expected it from her—the polish, the designer clothes, the high-powered career, cool, always in control...almost always.
There was another knock and something in broken English about others needing the bathroom.
He stood and braced a hand against the wall of the bathroom. “I think you better open the door.”
The expression on the face of the woman on the other side of the door said it all—surprise, impatience, and then another comment in French—no translation needed.
He followed Kris from the small compartment, his body brushing hers in the narrow passage as the train swept around a curve. He leaned in.
“That was fantastic, dear,” he said, just loud enough for the woman to hear.
Kris looked at him as if he'd taken a hard right past sanity, then caught the look he gave her. She shook her head and would have stepped past him. He caught her against the opposite wall just outside the bathroom. His mouth brushed hers as he leaned in.
“There. Be a good girl now,” he said, just loud enough for anyone else to hear and with more far humor than he felt.
“Try to control yourself. This poor woman needs to use the facility.”
The poor woman said something that made mention about finding a hotel room, then slammed and latched the restroom door.
“If I wasn't afraid you'd start bleeding again...”
He slowly pushed away from her.
“I love it when you play rough.”
He was pale, a sheen of sweat at his forehead and looked as if he might go down at any second. She slipped an arm around his waist.
“Act like you've had too much to drink!” she whispered as she helped him back to his seat. He leaned in against her.
“It wouldn't taste nearly as good as you.”
It was after midnight when they pulled into the Gare de Montparnasse station, in Paris. He was awake, face drawn. But those dark eyes were alert.
They were the last to leave the train, stepping down from the car into the noise and chaos of the busy concourse even that late at night.
She was past exhaustion with no idea what the next step was supposed to be. One thing for certain, they couldn't just spend the night in the rail station.
They needed a place to stay. But the hotels she was familiar with were high profile, places she'd stayed with Cate on past book tours that had a way of drawing the media—the last thing they needed.
Marcus Aronson lived in Paris. His name had been on the list of calls Cate had made before the accident. But she had no idea where he lived, and was pretty certain he wouldn't appreciate late night visitors even if he was in the city. He traveled a great deal.
“Where are we going?”
James' hand closed around her upper arm as they walked toward ground transportation. He waived down an Uber driver and gave him an address.
“The friend of a friend.”
They passed familiar landmarks and monuments, skirted the river, then into the medieval streets of the Marais with its bars, restaurants, old-fashioned bread shops, and boutiques, an enclave much the same as it was three hundred years before.
He signaled the driver and had him pull in front of one of those old-fashioned bakeries.
La Patisserie sat mid-street among other old buildings, with stone steps just beyond the entrance at the side of the building that led to an upper floor landing.
The entrance was tucked back. There was no overhead light, only the faint glow of a red security light beside the door. There was no sound from inside the building, no ring-tone when he pressed the button, or indication that anyone was there.
A light eventually came on outside the entrance. The heavy steel door slowly opened. Dark eyes peered at them from an equally dark face. A fall of white hair framed delicate features.
“He said you might come here.”
“Innis,” James whispered as Kris looked over at him.
The door opened further. The girl was slender, wearing jeans, boots, and a turtleneck sweater. A sleek Belgian Malinois stood quietly beside her. But the body language was anything but quiet as the dog glanced up at the young woman.
She spoke to the dog in French and he sat down, not an animal Kris would want to encounter in a dark alley.
“I'm Daenerys.” The girl smiled. She glanced past them into the darkened street below, then opened the door further.
“Please, come in.”
CHAPTER
TWENTY-TWO
THE MARAIS, PARIS
The apartment over the bakery had been a private residence in the old section of Paris a few hundred years earlier, with several rooms, including what had once been a grand salon, with more rooms on the third floor at the top of a scarred wood staircase.
The private rooms were typical of the period with high ceilings, arched window casements, stone walls, and wood floors that reminded her of the residence Isabel Raveneau had lived in at Mont St. Michel.
The main salon was empty. An arched doorway led to what appeared to be a kitchen.
“Anthony will be back later,” the young woman explained as she turned down a wide hallway.
Like the Raveneau residence, the apartment smelled of old places—stone walls, the dull gleam of wood floors, the pervasive scent of candle wax over the centuries, and a fire in the hearth.
Daenerys stepped to the other side of a doorway at the end of the hallway, and pushed open the door to a bedchamber.
“There are blankets in the wardrobe, and you can turn on the gas in the fireplace. There is food in the kitchen. Do you need anything else?”
“Bandages,” Kris replied, shoving her hand back through her hair. “And something to disinfectant a wound.” She was pretty certain the crude bandage she'd made on the train needed to be changed.
There were no questions, not even a flicker of surprise.
Daenerys nodded. “I'll bring what you need.”
The door closed behind her.
Kris dropped her shoulder bag into the large wood chair as James eased out of his jacket.
“All the comforts of home.”
The furnishings were sparse, along the lines of early street-fare, but the sheets on the bed were clean under a thick comforter. It could have been on the floor and she wouldn't have cared.
“The friend of a friend?” Kris asked.
“Gamers,” he replied. “It's a tight community, and for now—safe.”
There was a knock at the door. Daenerys let herself in, carrying several items. She set a package of sterile bandages on the table along with surgical tape, disinfectant, and antibacterial salve. The Belgian Malinois waited just outside the doorway.
“Be prepared,” Kris recited the motto, at the array of medical supplies.
Daenerys shrugged. “Game nights,” she explained. “Things sometimes get, how shall we say...?” She searched for the right words.
“Too real?” Kris guessed.
Daenerys smiled as she turned toward the doorway. She called to Pax in French. He fell into step beside her.
“Let me know if you need anything else. There's ale and wine in the kitchen. The bathroom is down the hall,” she added.
“Game night,” Kris commented when Daenerys had gone. It was a whole other world.
She went to the basin and turned on the water. Her hands shook as she grabbed a hand towel from the shelf above the sink and soaked it in warm water in the basin. She squeezed water from the towel, and grabbed another dry one.
“Take off your sweatshirt.”
“It can wait.”
The look in her eyes stopped him. He pulled off the sweatshirt and sat at the edge of the bed.
“You know, sometimes you're a real pain in the ass.”
“Back at you on that one,” she snapped, in no mood for conversation.
Exhaustion along with everything that had happened since leaving Inverness had taken a toll. She didn't know what time it was, or even what day it was. It didn't matter. The only thing that mattered was that someone wanted them both dead...
She removed the scarf and let it drop to the floor. The blood had dried on the makeshift bandages. The wad of paper towels was stuck to the wound. It had entered low at his side just below his ribs, then exited low in front.
It eventually registered—the sound, that crazy, insane descent from the abbey, the way he held back sending her on ahead. The gunman had been behind them.
She started with the wound low on his back, just above the waist of his jeans. She soaked it, then slowly peeled it away. She tore open a sterile pad and soaked it with disinfectant, then pressed it against the wound.
“Hold this in place.”
“You're good at giving orders.”
She ignored him as she applied two more thick pads on top in case the wound started to bleed again, then tore off strips of tape and pressed them into place.
“Lean back so that I can get a look at the other wound.”
“I can take care of it from here,” he told her.
He caught that look again. He winced as he leaned back against the headboard of the bed.
He watched her face as she peeled away the blood-soaked bandage on his side where the bullet had exited—the reaction at the sight of the wound, the deep breath she took, then the way she forced herself past it.
There was a toughness beneath the surface. It came from somewhere, more than a few weeks of wilderness training.
“Tell me about your brother.”
She hesitated, then reached for packs of sterile pads and tore them open.
She frowned as she cut several strips of tape, pressing them over the edges of the bandage to hold it in place.
She said nothing, but the pain of that loss was there—in lines that appeared between those slender brows, the set of her mouth—still raw, an open wound that had yet to heal.
“Mark was four years older, a natural athlete—anything, everything.”
“Practice every day, all year long—football in the fall, basketball, baseball season. Sometimes they overlapped. He could have gone pro...but there were other things he wanted...”
The frown deepened. Other things that had taken him in another direction. The choices one made. Much like the choices he'd made.
Another memory brought a faint smile. “He coached me in soccer during high school before he left. I always suspected it was probably because of Jennifer Masters.”
“Ah,” he commented, shifting against the pain of the wound, the warmth in the room reminding him that neither of them had had much sleep the last two days.
“Ah, the real reason.”
There was that smile again. Another memory.
“He was such a pain in the ass. He knew all my friends. I couldn't go anywhere that he didn't know about it.”
“Looking out for you.” But she wouldn't have seen it that way, he thought, as the last twenty-four hours caught up with him.
She pressed several more pieces of tape into place. “When you're sixteen and some place you're not supposed to be, that your parents definitely wouldn't approve of, the last thing you want is your brother showing up and embarrassing the hell out of you.” She shook her head.
“We spent a lot of time in one of those all-night waffle houses, and talked about all sorts of things.” Her voice softened on another memory.
“He never told them about that.” She remembered the conversations, the arguments that had followed.
“Then, 9/11.”
He saw that flash of emotion, the slight hesitation, then she pressed another piece of tape into place.
“He was determined to go into the military. He felt it was important, he wanted to make a difference.” She smoothed the last strip of tape into place.
