Page 6 of Hotter than Wildfire

People didn’t know how to think laterally.

Eve had an agent, and this agent had a name. Roddy Fisher. Lived in Seattle. Roddy Fisher was going to be very very sorry he’d ever taken on Eve as a client.

Montez clicked on the intercom and ordered his personal jet to be ready, with a flight plan filed for Seattle.

Coronado Shores

San Diego

April 2

He relived it over and over again in his nightmares. Crissy always ended up a smashed little body and he always awoke drenched in sweat, heart pounding. Even when he came back himself from Syria a smashed body courtesy of an Syrian RPG, he dreamed of his little sister, dead at five. Murdered by a monster.

Harry rose, naked, and went out onto the small, deep balcony that gave out onto the Pacific. Some nights he went down in the dark and took an hour-long swim.

In the beginning, when he was still halfway dead, barely able to walk and it wasn’t at all clear if he’d ever be anything more than a pathetic cripple—well, on those nights, he’d been tempted to gimp his way down to the beach and simply swim out to his limit, out past where he could never come back, and just sink beneath the waves.

It was frightening as hell that the thought was so fucking appealing.

And that was when he discovered that his brothers, who lived in the same building on Coronado Shores, took turns staying awake to make sure he didn’t do just that.

For the first months, they took away his weapons, too. He’d screamed insults at them, but both Sam and Mike were strong-willed and had rocks for heads. He’d been given his guns back when they were sure he was out of the suicide zone.

That was when he’d taken up drinking, getting quietly blitzed night after night. They let him. It takes a lot of time and effort to drink yourself to death, and Harry simply couldn’t do it. He hated waking up hungover, dry-mouthed, head pounding, staggering to the bathroom to vomit a thin gruel of beer and whiskey, unanchored by any food because he had no appetite at all.

He’d disgusted even himself.

Finally, he decided that if he was going to have to live—because his fucking brothers wouldn’t fucking let him die—he might as well become strong again. So Sam and Mike had recruited Bjorn, the Norwegian Nazi, and had helped him set up a fully equipped gym in his spare room and for months he exercised at night until his muscles ached, until he’d sweated out every drop of moisture in his body, until he was so exhausted he couldn’t think.

Sleep didn’t come, but at least there were no images in his head.

But now he was back in shape. Simple weights or the treadmill couldn’t take him out of himself, so he’d found another crutch.

He went back into his living room and sank on the couch. His living room—his entire home—was like his life. High tech and empty. He had state of the art gym equipment, work station and entertainment center. The rest was emptiness. A bed and a desk and a couch.

His stereo set was top of the line Bose and he selected his new drug, put on his headset and stretched out on the couch. The first strains of a beautiful voice arrived and it was like that first shot of heroin must be for a junkie.

Ahhh…

Eve. She’d become super famous these past three months, but Harry had been hooked from the first song he’d ever heard her sing, when she was still unknown, a jazzy cover of Stand by Me.

Her voice was utter magic. After the first notes, Harry was taken right out of himself, taken away to somewhere else, a better place. A place where men didn’t kill little girls. Where RPGs from men who’d whip a woman to death if they could hear the sounds of her shoes on the floor didn’t blow you up. Where you didn’t long for the peace of death.

Eve had a smoky, velvety voice, clear as a bell, perfectly attuned to each song. She could do it all—rousing rock, smoldering jazz, tender ballads. There was nothing she couldn’t do, so perfectly that you couldn’t ever imagine the song being sung any other way, even when you’d heard it a thousand times before by a thousand other singers.

Half her songs were covers, for which she recorded the definitive version, no other singer need apply. The other half, he’d been astonished to read on the minimal blurb, were composed by her. And though it wasn’t stated anywhere, he also had the feeling that she played keyboard for some of the simple ballads.

It was all very mysterious. Maybe even a marketing ploy. If it was, it was brilliant because the net was alive with a thousand iterations of who is she? while fans flocked to buy her music. She got tens of millions of hits on Youtube, though the only images were sunsets, the sea, trees swaying in the wind.

Because no one knew who she was.

There were no photographs, she’d never been interviewed, had never given a concert. Identity top secret.

The online tabloids went wild.

They said she was black, white, beautiful, ugly beyond words, old, young…Harry didn’t give a fuck. She could have been a 300 pound hippopotamus with seven chins for all he cared. All he knew was that when he put on one of her songs and his headset, the world—and him with it—simply went away.

Who is Eve? was a tabloid staple. Entire sections of People and US Weekly were devoted to smoking out her identity. According to the National Enquirer she was the president’s secret love child. Or George Clooney’s. Or the Pope’s. Depending on the week. Harry was just waiting for Eve to be a space alien.