Kill Me Again, page 14
“We’re not in the middle. We’re on the edge. And it was easy. One pan, quick cleanup, minimal fuss and lots of protein. We’ll need it. Eat up.”
She tilted her head, studying him, her belly full though her plate still was, too. “You really have done this before.”
“I must have. And despite what I said yesterday, often, I think. It feels as natural as breathing.”
She rose, set her plate on the ground and said, “Come and get it, Freddy.”
The dog would have smiled if he could. Instead he just hurried to the plate and cleaned it in about three seconds and two gulps. Olivia returned to her seat to sip her coffee. And as she did, she studied Aaron. He seemed to be avoiding her eyes this morning as he tucked into his breakfast with relish and apparent haste.
“So what’s the plan?” she asked.
He paused to look at her as he took time to swallow his most recent bite. “You still think your ex sent that guy to your house?”
“I do.”
“Even though there are other names and faces on those disks?”
She nodded. “None of those others would know I had the disks, much less where to find me. Of course, I still don’t know how Tommy figured that out, either.” She lowered her eyes then. “I don’t like thinking about him.”
“I don’t imagine you do. But if he’s found you, and he’s sent someone to kill you—”
Her head shot up fast and she interrupted. “Kill me? We don’t know that. Maybe he just sent that guy to get the disks. We can’t be sure he was going to do any more than that.” She blinked. “Can we?”
He hesitated a moment, his eyes holding hers, probing them. Then he looked away as he said, “No, probably not.”
“So we’re going to call him. He always has one listed number.”
“Uh-huh, and what are we going to say to him?”
“I’m not saying anything. You’re going to talk to him.”
“Yeah, you said that. I’m just not sure what I’m supposed to say when I do.”
“I’ve been thinking about that,” Olivia said. “The thing is, we don’t know for sure it was him who sent that guy. So what if it wasn’t? It’s a slim chance, yes, but a chance all the same. So what if it wasn’t him? Maybe he doesn’t know I’m alive. If I call him, I give that away, and that’s the last thing I want to do.”
“Okay, that makes sense.”
“So you call, you feel him out, try to figure out how much he knows about me.”
“Yes, you said that, too. What I don’t know is how. What do I say to him?”
“Tell him you’re…working for someone who has some disks that belong to him, and that you want to return them. See what he says.”
“And…if he already knows you’re alive?”
She lowered her head. “I’m fairly sure he does. I feel it in my bones that he’s behind all of this. Maybe if he does know, he’ll agree to leave me in peace in exchange for those damn disks.”
She looked at Aaron, waiting for his reaction. He seemed deep in thought, but finally, he said, “And you expect a man like him to keep his word?”
“I could always tell when he was lying.”
He shook his head. “It’s a lousy plan.”
“It’s the only plan we’ve got,” she said. “So it’ll have to be good enough. Unless you have a better one.”
“I don’t.” He sighed, looked into his cup, then tossed the remaining coffee into the fire. “All right, then. Let’s break camp, pack up our gear and get out of here.”
She frowned. “But where will we stay tonight?”
“Not here. Never the same place twice, Olivia. Not if you don’t want to be found.”
“Oh.” She watched him as he rinsed his now-empty plate and mug in a bucket of water he must have brought up from the lake. He emptied and cleaned the coffeepot, too, then packed everything away. Taking the hint, she finished her coffee and got to work helping him.
An hour later, the tent, the sleeping bags, the folding chairs, the pan and the lantern were stowed away, as well, all rolled into impossibly small bundles and tied onto the rack on top of the SUV, leaving plenty of room for Freddy in the back.
As Aaron drove, he handed Olivia one of the cell phones they’d purchased. Prepaid, untraceable. He’d said that they would use one for a day or two, then toss it and use the other one. She figured she would be able to check on things at home that way, too. She really wanted to call Bryan and find out how the investigation was going. Had they figured out yet who had tried to kill Aaron, and why? Would it be safe for him to return with her to Shadow Falls once she got Tommy off her back?
Or was someone still lurking, waiting to end his life?
She looked at the phone, licked her dry lips, felt her stomach churn.
“As soon as you get a signal,” Aaron said, “go ahead and try to find your ex’s number. Then we’ll place that call.”
She nodded jerkily and watched for the telltale bars to appear on the phone’s tiny screen. As soon as they did, she dialed, her heart in her throat. It felt as if she were standing face-to-face with the most terrifying part of her past. Tommy Skinner loomed in her vision like a giant monster, even though she knew she herself had built him up into that beast in her mind over time. She’d allowed her fear of him to give him power over her. And that fear, she realized now, had never gone away. It had been lurking, living and growing inside her, getting bigger all the time she’d been living her quiet, anonymous lie of a life. It had kept her from really living just as surely as Tommy himself had tried to. It had been waiting, that fear. Waiting for this very moment, this very day. In her soul, Tommy was Godzilla, and she didn’t stand a chance against him.
She never really had.
But maybe, just maybe, with Aaron’s help, she would find that she could beat him at last. Maybe she could conquer the monster of her nightmares. She was finally going to face Tommy Skinner once and for all.
She just hoped she would be alive when it was all over.
Bryan had phoned the publishing house three times before 9:00 a.m. His calls were returned at 9:15, finally, and he thought he would shout in relief when he answered the phone on his desk and heard a voice say, “This is Cynthia Rayne, executive editor at Obsidian Press, for Officer Bryan Kendall.”
“This is Kendall,” he said quickly. “Thank you for returning my calls, Ms. Rayne. We’ve had a…an incident here in Shadow Falls, Vermont, that I believe involves one of your authors. However, we have yet to verify his identity.”
The woman was silent for a long moment. Then she said, “Are you saying one of my authors is dead?”
Bryan could have kicked himself. “No, no. Just that he has no ID and a head injury that has…impacted his memory. However, since he was due to speak here in town, scheduled to arrive the very day he was, uh, injured, we’re fairly sure who he is. We just need to be certain.”
The woman said, “I see,” but she didn’t sound as if she saw at all. “So who do you think he is?”
“Aaron Westhaven.”
There was a sound on the other end. Kind of a choking sputter, as if the woman had been drinking something and had just spewed it all over the phone.
“Ms. Rayne, are you all right?”
She cleared her throat. “Describe this author, would you?”
“Sure. He’s about six-one, very fit, as if he works out regularly, dark hair and eyes, no beard or—”
“It’s not Aaron Westhaven,” she said. “I’m sorry, but it’s not.”
“How can you be so sure? I mean, I could fax you a photo or—”
“Officer Kendall, I can’t tell you why I’m so sure, but I am.”
“Ma’am, I’m sorry to be pushy, but this is a police investigation. This man was shot, so—I’m afraid you’re going to have to tell me how you can be so sure he’s not Aaron Westhaven.”
She sighed. He heard fingernails drumming near the phone. Then she said, “I need your vow that you will never repeat it to anyone. Ever. Can you guarantee me that?”
He thinned his lips. “Of course I can,” he lied, knowing full well he would have to share whatever information she imparted with Chief Mac, and possibly with Olivia, as well. The Feds—well, fuck them. They weren’t sharing with him, so he wasn’t going to share with them. Besides, they probably already knew.
“Aaron Westhaven is really Erin Westhaven,” she said. “E-R-I-N. She is a woman.”
“What?”
The editor on the other end of the phone sighed heavily. “It’s our most well-guarded secret, Officer Kendall. It’s why Westhaven never does public appearances anywhere, and why she never would have agreed to speak in some small town in Vermont. Someone has been playing you people.”
“But…I don’t understand. Why?” Inside his mind, though, his brain was telling him that it didn’t freaking matter why. The guy wasn’t Westhaven. And whoever he was, he was with Olivia, and that wasn’t good. It couldn’t be good.
And so as the woman on the phone started going on about the different ways in which the general public and book critics the world over viewed emotional novels written by men versus those written by women, he tuned out almost entirely, managing to thank her when she broke off for a breath, assuring her the information was safe in his hands and hanging up.
And then he put his head in his hands, and whispered, “I’ve got to find Olivia. I’ve got to find a way to warn her.”
Adam. He was experimenting with thinking of himself by the name “Bruce” had called him.
He’d half hoped it would feel as foreign as “Aaron” had. Unfortunately, it felt right. It felt familiar, comfortable. It fit him to a T, like an old, worn-to-butter-soft baseball mitt. And that made him nervous—hell, it scared him to death—because he didn’t want to be Adam. Not if Adam was some kind of professional killer. And that was what he was starting to believe.
He’d had flashbacks. Visions. Snippets like a montage of clips from a faded old black-and-white film. He’d seen himself holding a gun. Firing a gun. He’d seen victims falling to the ground. He’d seen himself approaching their prone bodies as calmly and coolly as if he were taking a walk along the shore on a sunny afternoon.
And now this dream, in which he was being paid a million—a freaking million—to make Olivia Dupree disappear. Permanently.
He did not like where all this was leading, and though he tried to think of another explanation, he thought any logical person would draw the same conclusions he had. Though he wasn’t sure of that, and he would have loved to run it by Olivia and get her opinion. That, however, would mean admitting he might very well have been hired to murder her. And she probably wouldn’t react well to news like that. Particularly since she seemed to be harboring a bad case of hero worship for him.
Scratch that. Hero worship for the man she thought he was. The man he almost certainly was not.
She also had a serious case of the hots for the guy she believed him to be. At least, she did while under the influence.
And that, he thought as he drove and watched her gnawing her plump lower lip and watching her cell phone as if it were a time bomb, was the problem. It wasn’t that he didn’t want her. He did. Big-time. Probably had his first impure thought about her the first time he’d looked up and seen her standing over his hospital bed.
But he would be damned before he’d have sex with a woman who only wanted him because she thought he was someone else.
And that felt like a familiar mantra of his. Something he’d decided long ago. Maybe in his line of work he often went around pretending to be someone else. Like, not a killer, for instance.
“I’ve got a signal,” she said.
He pulled the car over in a safe spot. They were in the hills that overlooked Shadow Falls, probably too close for safety. He couldn’t see the village, but he had a clear view of the giant neon triple-scoop sign at Alley’s Ice Cream Parlour out on Old Route Six, which marked the “outskirts,” in his estimation. He really didn’t want to get too far away from town just yet. He needed answers, and those answers seemed to be there, in Shadow Falls.
“Okay, go ahead and place the call.”
Olivia met his eyes. Hers were full of fear. He recognized it and, instantly, a barrage of visions surged through his mind, as if a metaphorical floodgate had been opened. Countless sets of eyes, staring at him, all of them filled with that same look of fear. She feared her ex the way others feared him.
Damn. He’d been right not to sleep with her. It only would have blown up in his face later.
Not to mention that it would have made it harder than hell to do the job, dumb-ass.
The voice in his head was his own, and yet not. As Olivia dialed Information to ask if there was a listing for Thomas Skinner in Chicago, Adam analyzed what that voice had just said. As if there were any chance in hell he was actually going to kill the woman. He wasn’t. Hell, he couldn’t. He didn’t feel capable of putting a bullet into any innocent person, much less this one. And yet, that was what he’d done for a living up until someone had put a bullet into him.
Maybe not. Maybe there was some small chance he had this all wrong. Because damn, he didn’t feel capable of murder. He just didn’t.
And even if he had been once, he told himself, he wasn’t anymore. And there was no way on earth he was going to hurt Olivia Dupree. Even if his memory returned full-force tomorrow. Even if he found out that his worst suspicions about himself were true. Even if it turned out he was working for the worthless pile of garbage she’d run away from long ago. He wouldn’t—couldn’t—go back to that. He had…changed.
“I’m scared,” she said softly, lowering the phone from her ear.
She hadn’t written anything down, he noted. “Did you get the number?”
She nodded. “What if this goes badly, Aaron?” she asked, speaking softly, looking at him with huge eyes full of trust. “What if there’s no way to stop this chain of events until I’m dead?”
Tears welled up in her eyes as she voiced the question.
He ran a hand over her hair, then cupped her cheek. “I’m not going to let that happen, okay?”
She thinned her lips, lowered her eyes. Freddy leaned forward and licked the cheek Adam wasn’t touching, and that made Olivia smile. But when she lifted her eyes again, her face looked stricken. “Who’d take care of Freddy?”
“You will,” he said.
“But what if I’m not here?”
He started to tell her she would be, but she interrupted. “No, I don’t need reassurances that I’ll live through this, Aaron. We both know you can’t promise me that—if you did, it would be a lie, and I don’t ever want you to lie to me, okay? I just need to know Freddy will be okay if I don’t make it. Would you…would you take him? He really likes you.”
He stared at her for a long moment, and for some reason he couldn’t say yes. This was a promise he couldn’t make lightly. Something inside wouldn’t let him. Her words—about never wanting him to lie to her—burned like battery acid in his soul. He looked back at the giant of a dog, drew a deep breath.
“I don’t even know where I live. What if it’s an apartment in the city or something?”
“You live on a former Christmas tree farm somewhere in Washington State,” she told him. “Everyone knows that.”
“Yeah, well, what if I don’t?” He swallowed hard. “What if I’m not Aaron Westhaven after all?” She looked alarmed at that, so he went on quickly. “Or what if the charming Christmas tree farm in Washington is just a cover story I tell to keep the clamoring fans at bay?”
Her expression relaxed a little. “If it turns out you live in an apartment, I trust you to find a more suitable place to raise my dog. Or at the very least—and only if you have no choice—find someone else who would love him the way I do. I can’t bear the thought of Freddy ever being mistreated. Or even shouted at.”
He rolled his eyes. “Or even given a dirty look.”
“That, too,” she agreed.
He sighed, looking at the dog again. Freddy was staring back at him with his “eyebrows” raised and his brown eyes more pleading than he’d ever seen them. As if he knew exactly what was being discussed. The dog was practically a person.
“All right,” he said. “I’ll do it.”
She seemed surprised. “You will?”
“Yes. Now, will you please dial the number before you forget it?”
She pressed the numbers with her thumb and handed the phone to him before it even rang.
Adam held it to his ear, heard the voice mail’s generic recorded greeting, waited for the beep and then spoke. “I’m trying to reach Thomas Skinner,” he said. “He can call me back at this number for the next four hours. No longer. It’s in regard to several computer disks he lost sixteen years ago. I’ve found them and want to make arrangements for their return, under certain conditions. If he doesn’t return my call by noon today, they’ll go to the next highest bidder. Have a nice day.”
He clicked off and turned to see Olivia staring at him, wide-eyed.
“What?”
“You…you just sounded…different.”
“How?” he asked.
“I don’t know. Scary. Intimidating. And really confident, as if you have reason to be.”
“That’s pretty much the only way to approach a man like your ex, Olivia. He’s not going to respond to good manners and conversational chitchat. He deals with problems by sending someone to beat the hell out of people—or worse—not by talking them out.”
“It just…”
“It just what?”
She shook her head, staring at her hands in her lap. “I understand all the reasons for wanting to sound the way you did. I just didn’t expect it to be so…convincing. So…real.”
He sighed. Because she was right. It had come naturally to him. As naturally as disarming the burglar in her house. As naturally as taking steps to evade detection. As naturally as “never sleep with a mark,” the refrain that kept playing through his brain over and over again.
