Find Her (Detective D.D. Warren #8)(109)

But how to provoke him? Crazily enough, he seemed to have come to like me. Lindy might be his homicidal partner, but I was his audience. A man liked an audience.

In the morning, I would refuse to climb back into the rig. I would scream. I would scream and scream and scream. Then he’d have to shoot me, if only to shut me up.

In the morning.


*

I NEVER GOT MY CHANCE. At dawn, just as I was starting to open my eyes, a loud explosion came from the window. Shattering glass. The sound of gunfire. Then a hissing cloud of . . .

Jacob running out of the bathroom, shirt still untucked. He had a towel in his hands. He slapped it, wet and dripping, around my lower face. I didn’t understand, not him, not the hissing gas, not the shouts from outside.

Jacob raced to the other bed. Coughing, hacking. I watched his eyes swell, tears streaming down his face, snot flooding from his nose. His hand under the pillow pulling out his gun.

I remained sitting, mesmerized behind my dripping face mask as the door of the motel room flew open and black-clad men poured into the room.

Jacob falling to his knees. Moaning. Groaning. Sobbing pitifully. He stared straight at me, reaching out with his hand.

Offering me his gun.

So I took it. Hefted its weight, felt its heaviness.

While black-clad men continued to stream in and yell words I couldn’t compute.

This wasn’t about them. This had never been about them.

This was about Jacob and me.

His lips were moving. He was begging me to shoot him. No, he was ordering me to shoot him. Just do it. Pull the trigger.

The black-clad men came to a halt. They stood all around us. They didn’t seem to know what to do.

Because of me, I realized. Because I was holding a gun and they didn’t know what to expect. No doubt they had instructions to shoot Jacob, his murderous ways having finally caught up with him.

But me? No one knew what to do about me.

For the first time in four hundred and seventy-two days, I was the one holding the gun. I was the one in power.

“Do it,” Jacob commanded. “Pull the fucking trigger. I ain’t ever going back, so come on now. End it. Put us both out of our misery.”

Then, when I still didn’t move: “Hell, save a bullet for yourself. Why not? Once they hear what you’ve done, think they’ll take it easy on you? Think you’re really any different than me?”

I knew what he was saying. I understood completely.

“You’ll never get over me. You’ll never forget. I’ll always be inside your head. Every night you wake up, you’ll reach for me. Every time you drive down a highway, you’ll look for me. Any man you’ll meet, you’ll wish he was as tough as me. There’s no coming back. So just pull the trigger. Fucking end it.”

He was right, I thought. But he was wrong.

I was not who I was, and yet I wasn’t who he wanted me to be.

My mother. Stiff clothes, silver fox charm. My mother begging to see me.

“I’m sorry,” I said. But I wasn’t talking to Jacob. I was talking to my mother, who had no idea she was about to get exactly what she’d wished for, which, if memory served, was a kind of ancient curse.

I placed the gun against the top of Jacob’s head. Then I leaned down and I whispered in his ear:

“I’m not going to die. I’m going to stay alive. And someday, when I’m strong enough and skilled enough, I’m going to head to Florida. I’m going to track down Lindy, and then, I’m going to kill her. There will be nothing of you left, Jacob. You, your daughter, the ‘strong ones.’ I will kill you both, and it will be all your fault; you never should’ve snatched me from that beach.”

His eyes widened. A look of fear, not for himself but for his precious Lindy.

“I will never think of you again,” I promised, swore, lied.

Then I pulled the trigger.

A fine mist. Blood and brains in my hair. The men in black surging forward.

I won, I thought.

I lost, I already understood.

Then a woman was standing there. “Flora, it’s okay. Flora, Flora! My name is SAC Kimberly Quincy. I’m here to take you home.”

I felt sorry for her because I already understood that the Flora everyone once knew and loved would never be going home again.

There was simply me.

And I didn’t even know who that was anymore.





Chapter 42


BY THE TIME D.D. ARRIVED AT TONIC, the nightclub was in full swing. Music so loud the blacked-out walls vibrated with the beat of the bass. A dance floor crowded with writhing bodies. Strobing blue lights casting everything into a surreal glow of moving parts.

D.D. cut through the line outside by virtue of her badge, then worked her way around the outskirts of the dance floor until she came to the hall leading to the manager’s office. Sure enough, Jocelyne Ethier sat inside wearing the same black top and black slacks from earlier. Except she was not alone. Across from her sat Keynes.

D.D. drew up short. And not because the victim specialist had finally traded in his trademark suit for some ridiculously expensive designer jeans, but because there was no good reason for Keynes to be here. As in, what the hell? As in, what was he once again not telling her?

“Evening,” she drawled from the doorway.

Ethier looked up, pale face shuttered, which only heightened D.D.’s tension.