Bell looked at him with sad eyes. The color of her rich Asian skin had drained to a jaundiced yellow. “I love you, Josh,” she whispered.
“I know you do.” Josh honestly believed she did and though he didn’t return that love, this wasn’t the time to be brutally honest with her. She was dying and he wasn’t going to give her cause to curse his name with her dying breath, even after all she’d done to him. He had possessed feelings for her once.
Josh’s eyes flicked between her face and the wooden knife handle poking out from her chest, disconcerted by its movement. The handle shifted back and forth with the weak breaths she took. He found it hard to concentrate on Bell with the knife moving in time with her breathing, as if the blade were part of her body.
Should he remove the knife or leave it? Josh didn’t know what was best, but watching Bell die wasn’t the answer.
“I’ll get help,” he said.
He went to get up, but Bell snapped a grip on his arm with a strength that terrified him. He looked at her bloody hand on his wrist. He sneered as the fluid squeezed out either side of her palm and between her fingers. Her bloodstained handprint on his forearm was his first physical contact with the stabbing. Up until then, he’d been a witness to the wound, but the
blood on his arm made him part of it, tainted him by its contact.
“No. I want you to stay. I want you to be near me,”
Bell said.
Josh hesitated. He nodded to her and shifted from a crouch to kneel beside her, so he was better positioned to comfort her. As his knees dipped into the blood, he felt its lukewarm heat soaking through the fabric of his jeans. He clasped a hand over hers and squeezed out a thin smile.
He wanted to tell her everything was going to be
okay, the doctors would sort her out, but the lies didn’t come. Instead, he watched Bell die, the blood slipping from her punctured body taking her life with its flow.
“Josh,” she called. She didn’t look at him, but directly ahead into the dark of the living room.
“Yes, Bell?” Josh couldn’t take his eyes off her, not out of lust, which he once held for her, but out of a bizarre compulsion to see this woman die.
“I’m so sorry, Josh.”
“It’s a bit late to be sorry. We’ve done what we have done and there’s nothing we can do to change that.”
“I’m sorry about what I did.”
“I know you are.” He slipped an arm around her,
and being careful not to push the knife any further into her, he half-hugged her.
Bell coughed and flecks of blood speckled her mouth and chin and landed on Josh’s face. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you.”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“I need to tell you.”
“Only if you have to, but it doesn’t matter now.”
“I’m HIV positive.”
A blow, as powerful as the one to the back of his head, slammed him. His arm trembled around Bell’s shoulders in shock. He stared at the pool at his feet, teeming with the killer virus. It was invisible to the human eye, but it was there. He was kneeling in poison.
This woman’s blood had the most devastating disease of the last thirty years. He’d had unprotected sex with this woman.
Am I infected? Is Kate infected? Abby? His thoughts scared him. The ramifications of his possible contraction of HIV were horrific. His death sentence would be the death sentence of the people he loved.
“I was diagnosed in San Diego. I was never going to tell you, but…” Her final words trailed off before she finished them.
He held another dead woman in his arms. He withdrew his arm from around her and got to his feet. His
shoes made sticking noises on the vinyl. He turned to leave.
“I’d prefer if you stayed for a while, Josh.”
CHAPTER THIRTY
James Mitchell stepped out from the shadows, a gun in his hand. “A murdered woman and that blood all over you. That wasn’t very smart, was it now?”
“I suppose you killed her,” Josh said.
Josh wasn’t only angry with Mitchell for killing
Bell, but with himself. It had never occurred to him that Mitchell was at the core of this carnage, but it should have.
“Why did you kill her?”
“Because I need her for this.” Mitchell waved the gun in the direction of the slaughter. “To make your murder more convincing. It would be totally understandable if your blackmailing ex-mistress confessed
your sins to the TV news and your wife, driving you to kill her in a fit of rage. Makes total sense. Don’t you think?”
“How did you know her?”
“Oh, Bell and I have become, or I should say had become, good friends. We had a lot in common—you, for
instance.” Mitchell jabbed the gun at Josh. “She was pissed at you for dumping her. A lot of unresolved issues there.”
“And you call that resolved?” Josh pointed at Bell’s corpse.
“You could say that. You two certainly had a touching farewell.” Mitchell cut Josh off before he asked another question. “What I need before we go any further
is for your fingerprints to be on that knife handle. Then I can get all this wrapped up.”
“What if I don’t?” Josh asked. It was a feeble attempt at resistance, nothing more than a schoolyard
boast lacking any power or muscle to support it.
“I’ll shoot you, drag you over there and stick your hand on the knife.”
Josh studied the floor. It wasn’t much of a choice.
The killer would shoot him anyway. It was just a matter of when. He could either make the hit man’s job
easy or difficult.
“Why did you kill Jenks?”
Mitchell laughed and shook his head like he’d heard an old joke for the hundredth time. “That wasn’t his real name. He was a competitor of mine employed to do my job. Career infighting—you know how it is.”
Josh didn’t. He had no concept of what internal conflicts were encountered in the professional killing industry.
Nor did he want to.
Mitchell’s tone turned cold. “And I’ll be damned if one of my contracts will be taken away from me.
That’s why I killed Jenks. You were lucky you got away, otherwise both of you would have made it on the six o’clock news.”
Josh had guessed right about Mitchell’s intent to kill him along with Jenks, and it still made his gut churn.
Another realization did little to help settle his troubled stomach. If he hadn’t fled the derelict factories, Bell wouldn’t be dead. There would have been no reason to kill her. She’d been a bitch, but she hadn’t deserved to die so violently. Was his life more valuable than Bell’s?
Was it better he lived and she died? Only if he lived through this night and stopped Mitchell from killing anyone else. It was also the only way he could ever forgive himself for Mark Keegan and Margaret Macey’s
deaths. Josh couldn’t let himself be the victim tonight.
“I don’t see your fingerprints on that knife yet,”
Mitchell said.
“So, who’s your employer—Pinnacle Investments?”
“Yes.”
Bob was right. Josh smiled.
“Happy that you know?” Mitchell asked.
“Yeah. It makes sense of all this,” Josh said.
Mitchell indicated Bell with the gun. “So can we get on?”
“Sure,” Josh said, “I just needed to know.”
He turned his back on the killer and faced Bell. He hoped that Mitchell didn’t shoot him in the back of the head before he had the chance to do anything. He took a deep breath before he stepped into the bloody mess to grab the knife in Bell’s chest. He gripped the blade with his right hand. The wooden handle felt comfortable in his grasp. It was the sight of the knife buried up to the hilt in his ex-mistress that was uncomfortable.