Baddest Bad Boys(14)

“It’s not Danny,” she said. “It’s someone called Mendez.”

Constance Mendez, the colleague who was covering for him. She wouldn’t call him without a good reason. He strode to the door, grabbed the phone out of Robin’s outstretched hand, and hit Talk. “Yeah?”

“Amendola. Sorry to bug you, but I thought you’d want to know this.” Her usually crisp voice sounded subdued. “Geddes is dead.”

Of all things to feel at a piece of news like that, a stab of irrational fear was the most inappropriate he could think of. “Huh?”

“He sucked down a bunch of hand gel in the bathroom,” she said. “Happened this afternoon. Took him a while to die. I just found out.”

His stomach lurched. He tasted bile. “Thanks for letting me know.”

“Maybe, uh…this will help you relax?”

“Don’t hold your breath,” he said. “Later, Mendez.”

He broke the connection, stared down at the phone for a minute, and thumbed the thing definitively off. No more calls. He was done.

Here it was, another opportunity to feel finality, closure. Geddes was cold meat in the prison morgue. You couldn’t get any more final than that. Right? He searched his soul for that finished feeling. He didn’t find it.

Robin had put on the sweatshirt again. She crossed her arms over her chest. “Bad news?” she asked.

He opened his mouth to tell her it was none of her business. “The guy I just put in jail,” he blurted. “Son of a bitch just committed suicide. He found a way to off himself after just a few days in the joint.”

She bit her lip and gazed at him, big-eyed, like she wanted to say something, but was afraid to let it out. “And, ah…this is bad?”

“Too easy!” He was breathing hard. “Too f*cking easy. The bastard deserved to have his extremities pulled off by tractor trailers! He deserved to be some tattooed Nazi sadist’s bitch! Not a half gallon of f*cking hand gel, and off he drifts to f*cking never-never land! Fuck that!” He punctuated that by punching the closest pine tree.

Shit. The bastard was covered with rough bark. What a dickhead.

Robin grabbed his shaking fist, and looked at it, murmuring softly at his bloody knuckles. She took his wrist and tugged. He followed her into the cabin, feeling docile and thick. And unbelievably stupid.

She led him to the sink and washed his hand, then rummaged in the cupboards for cotton balls, ointment, bandaids. Then she sat him down, spread his hand out on a clean dish towel. Dabbed and tweezed, smeared him with ointment, wrapped bandaids around each lacerated knuckle. When she was done, she lifted his hand, kissed it. Something twisted in his chest, unstable and dangerous. He pulled his hand back.

Robin sighed, and bent over the fridge. She pulled out two more beers, popped them open, set one before him. He took a grateful pull.

The silence was thick. He was intensely embarrassed, about the wild oral sex, his insane rudeness, the flagrant tree abuse. All of it.

“I don’t think I’ve ever heard you keep your mouth shut for this long at one time since I’ve known you,” he said, just to say something.

Robin propped her face in her hand, tracing designs on the fog of condensation on her beer bottle. Her eyes were thoughtful.

“Usually I ham it up, clown around,” she said. “My way of dealing with scary stuff is to make a joke of it, make people laugh. But I can’t make fun of something like this.”

He shook with bitter laughter. “Oh, you’d be surprised what we can make fun of.”

“Sure. You’re a cop. But it would be inappropriate from me to try it. It’s outside my scope. I’m just sorry this happened.”

He acknowledged her words with a brusque nod.

“Who was this guy?” she asked. “What did he do?”

“You don’t want to know,” he said brusquely.

“Um, actually, I do.” Her voice was quietly stubborn.

He gulped his beer. “He liked to kill young women. Slowly.”

“The Egg Man?”

He looked up at her, startled. “You know about him?”

“I watch the news. You’re right. He didn’t deserve an easy death.”

Robin ventured to lay her hand on top of his battered one, barely touching it. She stared down at it as if she were willing the lacerations to heal. The warmth of her soft fingers felt good. More than good.

He pulled his hand out from under hers. “You should get some sleep,” he said gruffly. “It’s getting late.”

She put her hand back. “The only bed fit to sleep in is the sofa bed in the living room,” she said. “I checked the bedrooms. In one room, there was a leak over the bed. The mattress is molded slop. And in the other, some mammal clawed through the wall and had a litter on the mattress. So, ah, I’ll just take the sofa cushions and sleep on the floor.”

“No,” he said promptly. “Don’t be ridiculous.”

“Hey. Get real. You’re the one who’s been chasing serial killers,” Robin argued. “And I came up here uninvited. Besides—”

“Shut up, Robin. You’re taking the bed. Go get the sleeping bags.”

She scurried off. He went into the living room and wrestled the couch into position. Robin came back with pillows and sleeping bags. She offered him one of each, without looking at him. He’d stung her into silence.