Into the Fire (21 page)

She skirted the vast expanse of the ruins, glancing up at the broken tower. It looked like some dark, Gothic sentinel, warning her away. But she'd been ignoring warnings for the past week, why change now?

At first she thought she was imagining the light in the darkness. She squinted her eyes, but the snow and wind had picked up again, making it almost impossible for her to see more than a few feet in front of her.

She kept going in the same direction. A tree branch slapped her in the face, and she cried out in pain, the sound jarring in the stillness of the snow-shrouded forest.

She was being an idiot. It was cold, dark and miserable out there, and she'd been through enough in the last week. She started to turn back, when the wind shifted, and she saw the light clearly. And she moved forward, her hands clutching the flashlight.

What had the old man said? That someone had run a chop shop out here? If so, she'd found the place. The two-story wooden structure must have served as a garage once, and the upstairs probably
housed servants. The light came from the second floor, shining dully through the frosted window. And she knew she'd found what she'd been looking for. Answers.

She didn't make any effort to quiet her movements as she opened the door to the garage. The stairs were narrow and dark, not unlike the stairs in Dillon's place, but these were cold, unheated. If there were dead rats they'd be frozen solid.

The stairs creaked beneath her, but there was no sound from upstairs. She kept climbing, her heart hammering, until she came to the door at the top.

She could knock, of course, but that seemed stupid. Instead she just reached out and turned the doorknob, pushing the door open.

“Looking for ghosts, Jamie?” Nate asked from his seat by the window, a shotgun across his lap. “You found one.”

D
illon reached in his pocket for his cigarettes and came up empty. Which reminded him of Mouse, and why there were no cigarettes there, and he bit off a savage curse.

After ten years he hadn't lost his touch. He could still drive faster and better than almost anyone on the road, avoiding police and speed traps, weaving in and out of traffic so fast he could have been a ghost. It helped having the old Bel Air. For all its anonymous appearance, it was a monster underneath the hood, and he'd tuned it to a state of near perfection. He was gone before people even noticed him on the highway, chewing up the miles in a blur of speed.

He could even use his lack of cigarettes to focus on his goal. That nervous energy was focused straight ahead, on the Dungeon, and he drummed his fingers on the steering wheel, whistling beneath his breath.

Jamie had had a twenty-four-hour head start, but
she probably wouldn't have driven faster than sixty-five in the Cadillac. It could go one hundred and twenty, easy, but she'd be nervous of such a big car, and besides, the road conditions hadn't been ideal.

Whereas he could average ninety, going over a hundred when no one was around. He knew how to avoid construction, and he didn't stop for anything more than gas. Jamie would have spent the night on the road—she hadn't had a decent night's sleep since he'd first put his hands on her, and she'd be exhausted, both physically and emotionally. He could catch up.

He didn't need sleep, he didn't need food, he didn't need a damned thing. Nothing but Jamie.

Keeping her alive, he amended. The snow had slowed to lazy flurries, and he ignored it. He could drive on glare ice if he had to, he knew his way around spinouts, but at least there were regular tires on the car, with real treads, instead of almost tread-less racing tires. He sped through the miles, tapping on the steering wheel, humming tunelessly to the whine of the tires, the purr of the engine.

He couldn't even begin to think how this was going to end. MacPherson shouldn't be able to track the wreck of the Volvo—Dillon hadn't spent years in a chop shop for nothing. And if Mouser had any
kind of history, it was from long ago, from a previous life. There'd be nothing to tie the dead body to Cooperstown, Wisconsin.

No, MacPherson might suspect, but he wouldn't be able to trace the Volvo back to him. Mouser had always said he wanted to be cremated, and that's what Dillon had done for him.

He was counting on Nate being true to form. Jamie was incidental—a means to an end. It wouldn't give Nate any satisfaction to kill Jamie before Dillon got there. He'd lose any advantage—if Jamie was dead there would be nothing to stop Dillon from killing him with his bare hands.

Then again, that might be exactly what Nate wanted. To make Dillon so crazed with anger that he'd be an easy mark. Because either Nate was going to kill him, or he was going to kill Nate. They both knew that. Maybe they'd always known it. Their relationship had always been so enmeshed, and Nate wasn't someone who let go easily.

He'd figured it out long ago—he'd never been particularly stupid, despite the asshole things he'd done as a kid. He knew that Nate had an obsessive relationship with him. For all his never-ending lineup of girlfriends, he'd always seemed focused on Dillon. Wanting to know who
he
was screwing, who
he
wanted.

He never should have told him about Jamie. But hell, he was seventeen and stoned out of his mind, and Nate was a master at getting useful information out of people.

He'd expected Nate to be furious, elder-brother protective when he found out Dillon had a wicked case of the hots for his then-fifteen-year-old cousin. Instead he'd been amused. And had taken to throwing them together, flaunting Jamie at Dillon's hungry eyes.

How many times had he kicked himself for that night? He'd known how Jamie felt about him—he knew the signs of a crush. He was a bad boy—a good-looking, fuck-it-all rebel—and girls loved him. It wasn't a surprise that Jamie would look at him surreptitiously, her gray eyes wide with virginal desire.

He'd been an idiot not to take her. Nate had thrown them together, and even if Dillon distrusted his motives, it still meant he could have had Jamie. And God knows, he'd wanted her so much it made him shake.

And he still did.

But he'd decided to be noble. She needed a jock, someone headed for Harvard. She needed her own kind, and he'd handed her over to a rapist.

And even worse, he'd seen the look of satisfac
tion in Nate's eyes when he'd taken his shattered cousin away.

He'd paid for that mistake. Not for beating Paul to a pulp, but for thinking Nate could be trusted. Nate had been the one to suggest Paul would be a good match for Jamie at her first wild party. That he'd look out for her. But Nate knew human nature better than any other human being on this earth, and knew exactly what kind of a bastard he had Dillon hand Jamie over to.

He hadn't been able to get out on bail, and the trial had gone quickly. In the end Nate had paid for a lawyer for him. He'd ended up with eighteen months, with time served taken into account, and he'd made it through. The only thing the lawyer couldn't fix was the felony conviction—the Jameson family was too powerful in Marshfield, Rhode Island, for that to happen.

Hell, it didn't matter. He didn't give a shit about voting, and he'd own a gun whether he was allowed to or not. He was off probation, self-employed, and he really didn't give a shit whether or not he could ever go into the army. What was past was past.

Except the past wasn't gone at all.

It was waiting for him.

He remembered the party at Dizzy's just after he got out of jail. Everyone was drunk out of their
minds, high on any chemical they could find, and by the small hours of the morning most people had paired up. He'd been too drunk and too apathetic to take advantage of the various offers sent his way, and he'd passed out on the sofa. When he woke up, a couple of hours later, half the people in the room were asleep, the other half were fucking.

Which didn't bother him—nobody seemed to have trouble with inhibitions, and he figured if they didn't care, neither did he. Until his gaze focused, and he saw Nate in a far corner, banging some girl from the back. Which would have been fine, except that while he humped her he was staring directly at Dillon, a fixed expression on his face.

After that Dillon began to notice small things. How Nate always tried to entice him into a threesome with whatever girl he was with at the time. The possessive attitude when other people were around. Ending up with a night at the Dungeon, when everyone had fallen asleep, and Dillon had come out of a drunken stupor to find Nate in bed with him, curled up tight, with one hand on his crotch, jerking himself off with the other.

He hadn't freaked. He'd simply pulled away, rolled out of bed. He had an erection himself—no wonder when an anonymous hand had been stroking him in his sleep—but Nate could see it, and he
redoubled his efforts, his eyes burning into Dillon's as he brought himself off.

Dillon shook his head slowly. “No, man. I love you like a brother, but…no.”

He turned around and walked out. It was midsummer, and he was barefoot and still half out of it. He was afraid Nate would come after him, but he didn't. The upstairs of the garage was dark and silent.

And Nate had never mentioned it. Hell, maybe he didn't even realize it had happened, maybe it meant nothing and Nate hadn't even realized he'd crawled into bed with his best friend and not the girl he was currently screwing. That's the way he wanted to play it, and Dillon was willing to let it go. If anything he felt guilty—guilty that he might have misled Nate. Guilty that he couldn't give Nate what he wanted, when Nate had given him so much. Saving his butt when he'd faced a fifteen-year prison sentence.

Of course, he hadn't realized at the time that Nate had actually wanted his butt.

He'd left the Dungeon a few months later, heading out with an old friend. He hadn't told Nate he was leaving—he didn't want a scene. He managed to drop off the face of the earth, or so he thought, until Nate showed up at the garage five years later.

It was the first of many visits. He was dealing, big time, and Dillon was working on his day-by-day sobriety, a fact which amused Nate. Nate's favorite occupation was to use in front of him, and try to entice him into using as well. He liked to mock twelve-step slogans in a singsong voice, and bring women back to the garage and do them in Dillon's bed.

He'd tolerated it, to prove to himself he could, and for old times' sake. Just because he was in recovery didn't mean he couldn't have compassion for someone as messed up as Nate. Someone who loved him, even if it wasn't the way Dillon wanted to be loved.

Mouser had tried to warn him. Nate and Mouser had hated each other at first sight, a shock, because Mouser didn't hate anybody. He'd tried to warn Dillon, but he hadn't listened. Until he heard about the girl.

There was no proof, of course. If he'd had even a shred of proof he'd have taken it to the police, despite his distrust of them.

Mouser had been the one to tell him, just the facts, and Dillon hadn't wanted to believe him. Hadn't wanted to believe that Nate had anything to do with the nude body of a thirteen-year-old girl,
found raped and murdered near Charles Street. Too damned close to the garage.

Any more than he'd wanted to believe that other girl's death had been an accident, back at the Dungeon. That was what had spurred him into leaving. He never knew her real name—she'd called herself Cheyenne but she looked more Scandinavian than Native American. She was strung out on any kind of drug she could find, any kind of man she could find, and she hung around the Dungeon like a camp follower. She'd been spending the last few weeks in Nate's bed when she disappeared. Her mutilated body had shown up in the woods by one of the standing towers. She'd obviously fallen, or been pushed, and her naked body was crushed by the stones she'd landed on. But it hadn't obliterated the knife marks.

Over the years he could remember other people, other disappearances that were never explained. Each one had seemed so random he hadn't connected them with anyone, but in hindsight he was sickened.

Nate had usually been too smart to mess with the wrong people. But he'd messed up on a drug deal in Chicago, he'd said when he arrived at the garage. Messed up badly. And men like Orval Johnson
didn't tolerate mistakes. If he couldn't have money he wanted blood.

And Dillon could no longer ignore the truth of just what Nate was. When Johnson's enforcer showed up three days later Dillon had let him into the house, told him where Nate was, and sat alone in the kitchen, listening while he beat Nate to death.

He could have left. It would have been the smart thing to do, but he'd figured it was some kind of penance. For not realizing what Nate was capable of. For not putting a stop to it himself.

And in the end, Nate hadn't died. He must have known Johnson would be coming after him. Must have known time was getting short.

He was smart enough to know that getting a fresh start was the only way to go. So why had he showed up at the garage months after his death? Or had he ever left in the first place?

He didn't want to think about it. He couldn't think about anything but driving, chewing up the highway miles. To get there in time.

 

If Jamie had had any sense she would have turned and run. Except she'd known this was what she'd find. This was what she'd come after. Answers.

“Nate,” she said, taking another step into the room, her voice broken.

He swiveled the gun around to point it directly at her chest. It was dark, it was a distance, but it looked like a gun that would manage to hit its target. And do impossible damage.

“Stay right there, precious,” he said, his voice mocking. “It's not that I don't trust you. There's nothing you can do to me at this point, but I don't like to get close to people.”

“If there's nothing I can do to you, why are you holding a gun on me?”

“Because there's a great deal I can do to you. When the time is right. Close the door, Jamie, and come on in. Haven't you got a word of welcome for your dead cousin?”

It was her last chance to run. She closed the door behind her. “Where have you been for the last three months?”

“Dead. Closer, sweetheart. I want to get a good look at you. I only managed to get peeps at you, when you were going down on my old buddy or when he was doing you from the back. Who would have thought my sweet, repressed little cousin could become such a whore?”

She'd already been cold, but his words drove the last bit of warmth from her body. “You watched?”

“I like to watch. You were getting quite inventive toward the end. But then, women never could
resist Killer. I've been watching him fuck for years now, and women do anything he wants them to. I could never figure out why he kept his hands off you back then, when he wanted you so much, but I guess he made up for lost time this week.”

“Nate…”

“I want you to come here, Jamie, and sit in the corner like a good girl. We're waiting for a visitor. I knew you'd get here first—you always were a clever little thing. Killer would have had to deal with Mouser's body first. He'd know this was a trap, but it would take him a while before he figured out you'd be the bait. So I figure he'll show up sometime in the next twenty-four-hours, and we'll just wait here for him.”