He studied his boss, someone he admired the way he would admire something pretty and dangerous to stand too close to. Clayton knew that if he was neck deep in quicksand, and if she didn’t need him alive, she’d watch him go under without altering her facial expression. She was also every bit as beautiful as she was conniving, and she was the most manipulative job of work he’d ever worked with. Clayton was glad he was on her side in this, because being on the other side was not an attractive alternative. You could ask anybody who’d ever gotten in this woman’s way-if you could find them. She’d come up the ranks from an MP grunt into a position of authority within Military Intelligence like she’d been shot there from a cannon.
This Bryce business had the potential to turn very ugly. Clayton hadn’t wanted Alexa to bring Winter Massey into this, but there hadn’t been any way he could stop her since the FBI agent was now the key to the thing smelling right after the dust settled.
“I always said Massey would be trouble,” Clayton told the woman.
“That need not concern you,” she said. “I made the decision, which was mine to make.”
“Massey’s reputation isn’t what it is because anyone can control him. You should never ever mix emotion-especially not revenge-with business. And this is very delicate business with a fortune at stake.”
“I know what’s at stake here,” she hissed. “I know Massey a lot better than you do.”
Clayton shrugged. He had no choice but to go with the flow, to follow orders. He knew that either he would make a fortune with this woman, or he would be a dead man.
He couldn’t help but wonder how anyone could have ever called her “Precious.” Major Antonia Keen was about as precious as an iceberg.
34
Drenched in sweat, Lucy Dockery listened.
The trailer door burst open and a familiar figure entered. Heart pounding, Lucy froze in the doorway of the bedroom, holding Elijah to her. Her heart skipped a beat and she felt a hollow burn of acid churning in her gut. It wasn’t the woman.
“Wail, hail,” Scaly-hands called, smiling at her across the twenty feet that separated them. “You’re up and about, I see. I reckon Dixie ain’t back yet.” He took off his wet cotton duster and tossed it over the cold potbelly stove. His eyes were locked on her, his tongue darting in and out from the crack between rows of yellow teeth. He rubbed his hands together as he appraised her.
“You are a perty sight in that nightgown. A perty sight indeed.”
Lucy stood frozen, studying the man whose greedy eyes were broadcasting that his ugly mind was cobbling together something horrible. This hideous monster, driven by a lust that smoldered in a vile and focused anger, wanted her. If she’d found a weapon, now would be when to use it, but the only thing between him and her was Elijah, who clung to his mother like a terrified monkey.
“She’s coming back,” Lucy told him. As frightening as the thought of the big woman was, Lucy prayed that she would come. If Dixie couldn’t prevent him from doing what he wanted to do to her, probably no one could. He hadn’t hurt her before and she believed that was only because Dixie had been in the trailer.
“Why don’t you shuck off those panties?” he said, moving closer.
“Please,” Lucy said weakly. “Not in front of my baby.” She felt a wave of self-revulsion for using Elijah as a shield, and she wished she could somehow kill the man. She could kill him.
“Why not? Ain’t like he’ll remember it. People doing what nature wants them to ain’t bad for kids. Hell, I grew up seeing people doing the dirty deed.” His smile turned her blood to ice.
“Please?” she begged, trembling. “Please don’t do this.”
“Come out here,” he ordered. “Less you want me to come in there where it’s nice and dark.” He stared down at her legs as she came into the kitchen. She saw that he liked the fact that she was afraid. She also saw something that looked like splattered blood on his shirt and on his hands and neck.
Reaching out suddenly, he peeled Elijah off Lucy, held the screaming child up in the air by his arm, opened the bathroom door, and plopped the child down on the floor beside the toilet. Elijah howled. Scaly-hands closed the door as the baby tried to stand.
Lucy sprang at the man’s powerful shoulders and reached around to scratch out his eyes. He elbowed Lucy in the jaw, sending her sprawling, her head bouncing against the refrigerator door.
As he approached, Lucy scuttled back against the bedroom doorjamb.
“You rich gals all like it rough,” he said. “You get off on big old boys treating you like two-dollar whores. You need what Buck’s got, honey. And Buck’s got a whole lot of what you need.”
As he talked he unbuckled his belt. As he came toward her he pulled it free and wrapped it once around his fist so it would stay in place while he used it on her.
I can take it, Lucy thought. I can take whatever he can do, and I will get on the other side of this, for Elijah’s sake.
A six-letter word for being scared witless.
T-E-R-R-O-R
She closed her eyes, drew herself into a ball, and clenched her teeth, waiting.
35
Some neighborhoods lend themselves to surveillance. Click Smoot’s wasn’t one of them. On Click’s block, a sidewalk ran only on his side of the street, while the front lawns on the other side sloped up to the home sites from the naked curb.
Click lived at the tail end of a narrow street in a sleepy Charlotte neighborhood, so there was no through traffic to speak of. Here, except when someone had visitors, cars were parked in the garages or driveways. The houses had been built in the 1960s on land that was probably inexpensive. The homes took up no more than a quarter of their well-kept lots, and most of the homes contained young, upwardly mobile couples-with or without children-or older people who had lived there a long time. Winter had seen a thousand neighborhoods like it and knew that the residents might not be on first-name terms, but they would be aware of each other to the point where two strangers sitting in the only parked car on the street were going to be noticed. He also knew that when somebody here called the cops, they came.
If the cops showed up, Winter and Alexa were upright citizens, and there was no law against legitimate citizens sitting in a car talking, or contemplating real estate, or checking the amount of traffic the street saw, or waiting for the Rapture. There was no curfew for white-bread people in white-bread suburban neighborhoods. The problem was that Click would be as likely to notice them here as anyone else. And if the cops pulled up and asked questions, Alexa might end up showing her badge, and the cops might be friendly enough with Click’s family to warn him. They couldn’t take that chance.
The house two up and across the street from Click’s had a steep driveway and a lot of toys in the yard. A Plymouth minivan and a Volvo sedan were shoulder to shoulder at the top of the incline. That driveway seemed the most advantageous spot from which to watch the front of Click’s house.
Winter parked behind the Volvo, the vehicle nearest to the wall of shrubbery, and Alexa parked beside him. They walked to the door and he rang the bell. A tall man in his early thirties opened the door and, when he saw that the people standing on his porch were strangers, dialed down his smile. Somewhere behind him small children were making dinnertime-is-over racket.
“Yes?” he asked.
Alexa held up her badge and his smile vanished behind a cloud of confusion.
“I’m FBI Special Agent Alexa Keen.”
“What’s the trouble?” he asked.
“No trouble,” she said.
“It isn’t every day the FBI shows up at my door.” His smile was making an effort to come back.