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“I’ll go to the office and get it.”
“I’m not sure where I wrote it down. . . .” If I wrote it down, he thought and then wondered briefly where Kristina’s cell phone was. And her purse, for that matter.
“I’ll go see what I can find,” Sylvie said.
“Thanks.” He hung up, walked to the front door, steeling himself to see the face of Pauline Kirby or someone of her ilk as he threw the door open.
Instead, he was greeted by two detectives from the Seaside Police Department, both of them wiping snow off their shoes as the taller one said, “Mr. St. Cloud, I’m Detective Hamett from the Seaside Police Department, and this is my partner, Detective Evinrud. May we come inside?”
Owen DeWitt woke up with a crashing headache and the dry heaves. Par for the course after a long stretch at the Rib-I. He hung his head over the bathroom sink of his dingy apartment for several minutes, debating about whether to have a cigarette. He’d given up the habit, oh, about a million times, but he’d given it up for good again six weeks ago . . . sort of. Drinking and smoking just went together, and if he ever gave up the booze, which he had no goddamn intention of doing, he might actually be able to give up smoking, too.
His jittery stomach holding firm for the moment, he searched through the kitchen drawers with no success, even the one that was off the track and got stuck halfway out. He’d tossed all the cigs out, like that was going to do the trick. All it did was piss him off now that he had to make a trip to the store.
He was going to have to get a job, he told himself morosely. He’d about run through his savings, and those investments he’d made back in the heyday of his career . . . they were all for shit already.
If it weren’t for fucking Declan Bancroft and Bancroft Development, he’d still be flying high.
He found two tens in his wallet and thought he might have to make a trip to the ATM. There’d been a lot of those lately, and it scared him to think what he was going to do next. God. He’d had a career. A good one! And now he was a goddamn joke.
He needed a drink. The thought made his stomach seize and then relax. What time was it? He’d paid for a cab, rather than take a ride with the lady cop, which was just drunken stupidness, except she’d kinda worried him. He’d been a little too loose-lipped about Charlie, and that dude was fuckin’ scary. Cold, dead eyes and a smile to chill the marrow of your bones whenever that mask of his slipped.
Yup. He needed a drink. Bad. It must be almost noon or so.... Could be in the afternoon . . . and . . .
“Holy shit.” He’d opened the crappy curtains on his bedroom window, and there was goddamn snow everywhere. His car was a smooth white mound. “Damn.”
Could he risk driving in this stuff? Take a chance on a fender bender with some other idiot on the road? Hell, no. He was going to have to walk to the store. What a pisser.
Opening the door, he gazed across the parking lot’s blinding white blanket, but before he could step out, someone jumped in front of him and pushed him back inside.
“Hey!” He stumbled back in, and the door shut softly. “Charlie,” he said, alarmed.
“Hey, Owen,” he greeted him with a smile. He wore a black ski mask and a ski jacket.
“What the fuck are—” DeWitt inhaled sharply at the sudden pain and looked down to see the knife’s hilt sticking out just below his chest. “You stabbed me! You stabbed me!”
Charlie pushed him down, and DeWitt stumbled and fell to the floor. The knife’s blade was just below his breastbone. Charlie grabbed the hilt and began slicing upward with all his strength, his mean blue eyes staring at him hard. DeWitt tried to scream, but Charlie hand-chopped him in the throat. Terrible pain radiated outward, and DeWitt gurgled and gazed up at Charlie in stupefied shock and fear.
“Bye, Dimwit,” Charlie said with a smile, watching as the engineer’s eyes bugged.
DeWitt struggled to talk, but he just moved his jaw in his last moments, and Charlie stared into his withered soul, feeling as powerful as a titan. The light slowly dimmed in DeWitt’s eyes, and the man went limp, his stare fixed. Gone.
Quickly, Charlie yanked the knife back, wiped DeWitt’s blood on the engineer’s shirt, then stuffed the knife up the sleeve of his jacket. He pulled his ski mask down and cracked open the door. It was bright and cold outside, and no one was about.
He was so filled with good feelings that he stopped a moment, gathering his power, thinking about the voice that had challenged him. But not yet. There were still two others to take care of first. He sent his sexual power to both of them, the Bancroft man and the pregnant detective. Let them make of that what they would.
“I’m coming for you,” he whispered, then slipped out the door and down to the truck.
CHAPTER 21
Savvy lay in the bed, trying to nap. She’d thought she would fall into a dead sleep after cradling and breast-feeding her little son—Hale’s little son—but her dreams were dark and disturbingly sexual again, and now she was awake again and unable to stay still. She redressed in Kristina’s clothes, and guilt lay on her heart like a lead weight. Survivor’s guilt, for sure. But also her feelings for little Declan were crazy deep. She loved him like he was her own, and it was really, really difficult to remember that she had no claim on him whatsoever.
Her mind touched again on the swirling sexual thoughts that seemed to be invading her sleep. Was that normal? The worst of it was they seemed to be centered around Hale St. Cloud, and in a very dark, distant corner of her mind she recognized that she’d always found him attractive, in a kind of taboo, “never for you” kind of way. She’d never been worried that she would poach on her sister’s husband while Kristina was alive. It never would have happened. Savvy wasn’t made that way. But with her sister gone and this baby needing a mother, she was consumed with sexual thoughts about him that were downright X-rated.
“Stop it,” she told herself sternly. The last thing she needed was to complicate things for herself.
With a need to keep her mind on other things, she searched through her messenger bag for her phone, relieved when her hand closed over it. In one of her few coherent moment
s while she’d been waiting for rescue, she’d tucked it safely inside the bag. Its battery was on its last legs, however, and the charger was in her overnight bag, which was probably still in the Escape, as she hadn’t screamed for it like she had the messenger bag. Luckily, she had a spare charger at home.
