Racing the Devil (2 page)

Her hands trembled as she fumbled with the phone.

I laid my hand over hers. “Ignore it then.”

“I can’t.” She flipped open the front cover and held the phone to her ear. “Hello? Baby?”

I couldn’t make out the words, but I could hear him shouting from where I sat. She blinked back tears and listened, her whole body trembling. “No, sweetheart, I didn’t mean . . . I didn’t . . .”

I gave her three minutes. Then I took the phone away. “Back off, buddy,” I said into the speaker. “The lady wants to be left alone.” Then I hung up.

“Oh, God,” she said again. “He’s going to kill me.”

“You’re not thinking of going back to him?”

“No, no, you don’t understand. He’ll find me.” She flicked her tongue across her injured lip again and crossed her arms across her breasts. “What am I going to do?”

“The first thing you do is get a restraining order.”

With a sharp, bitter laugh, she gestured to her battered face. “I had a restraining order when he did this. For all the good it did.”

“I have friends on the force. I’ll check on it tomorrow. You’ll file charges.”

It wasn’t a question.

She gave a hitching sob. “I can’t . . . I don’t know . . . I mean, okay. Only . . . Will you stay with me? Tonight? You don’t know how he is.”

She was looking for a protector, not a lover, which was fine with me. Still, there were probably a million reasons to say no. I considered telling her I had a previous engagement and getting the hell out.

But there was no previous engagement.

“Why not?” I threw back the rest of my drink and pushed away from the table as the alcohol burned its way down my throat. “You want to take one car or two?”

“Let’s take yours.” She wiped at her eyes and forced another smile, revealing a smudge of cherry lipstick on one tooth. “He’ll be looking for mine.”

Since the parking lot was packed, I’d left my truck a little farther up the street. We walked past the antique boutique and the Tae Kwan Do school where I took lessons and occasionally taught. From there, it was less than a three-minute stroll to the strip mall where my black and silver Chevy Silverado sat glistening like a water bug beneath the streetlight.

“Nice wheels.” She ran a loving hand over the front fender. The diffused light of the parking lot softened the hard angles of her face and made her almost beautiful. “You okay to drive?”

“I’m okay.” I opened the passenger side door and she slid across the seat as I closed the door behind her. When I climbed behind the wheel, she wriggled into the hollow under my arm. Poked the bobblehead Batman on the dashboard and giggled. Her hair still smelled of cigarette smoke, but underneath that was a musky perfume that, combined with the whiskey I’d been drinking, made it hard to think clearly. I said, “I don’t even know your name.”

“It’s Heather.” Her fingers squeezed my knee, trailed up my thigh.

I closed my hand over hers. “You don’t have to do that.”

“Sssh.” She lifted her other hand and pressed the index finger to my lips. “I want to.”

Maybe she wanted more than a protector, after all. I had a feeling I was headed for a night of raw and meaningless sex that I should probably feel guilty about but didn’t.

“I’m Jared.” I tried to keep my voice steady as her hand continued its northerly migration. “Jared McKean.”

“I know. I asked the bartender. Jared McKean, Private Eye.” This time, her smile was wicked. “Or should I say, Private Dick?”

W
E STOPPED TO PICK UP
a bottle of sangria and a couple of wineglasses. Then she directed me to a seedy motel off Lebanon Road. Twenty-four hour porn, rentals by the night or by the hour.

Nothing classy about it, but that was just as well. Class would have been wasted on us.

By the time she slipped the electronic key into the slot and pushed the door open, I was lightheaded with alcohol and muzzy with lust. I like to think of myself as a fairly centered, thoughtful kind of guy, but by then my center had drifted considerably south.

I thought briefly of Maria and felt a pang of guilt. But hey, I wasn’t married anymore. I wasn’t even dating anyone. And it wasn’t like Maria wasn’t giving it up to old D.W., probably at that very moment. So what difference did it make if I had sex with someone I’d just met?

We squeezed inside the room, and Heather pushed me back against the door and pressed herself against me. Her tongue explored my mouth, flicked across my lips, and fluttered down my neck. Her breath was ragged with excitement, warm, and scented with beer. Her hands were everywhere.

I pulled away long enough to gasp, “You don’t have to do this. I’ll stay anyway.”

“Don’t,” she whispered. “I need . . .” Her voice trailed off.

I thought of Maria again and nodded.

I needed, too.

Let’s just say it took us a while to get to the sangria.

I remembered the condom, barely.

There is a kind of sex where two people have learned each other’s preferences and rhythms, where one person’s curves fit into the other person’s spaces like the pieces of a puzzle. It’s a slow, comfortable sex with a rightness and intensity, and it takes years of time and love to get there.

But there is another kind of sex, all animal ferocity and passion, sweat and thrust and howl and moan. Heartbeats pounding like primeval drums. Your body rises and she’s there to meet it, and you think she might devour you, and you wish she would. Heat. Shuddering. Her legs around you, and you feel each tremor of that drenched and pulsing place between her thighs.

Three guesses which we had.

Afterward, we lay entangled with each other and the sheets. The sweat cooled on our bodies, and the room smelled heavily of musk.

“Mmmm. That was nice.” She leaned over and planted a wet kiss firmly on my lips. “Wait here, and I’ll go get us a drink.” She peeled the condom from between my thighs, kissed the place where it had been, and swung her legs over the edge of the bed. “I’ll get rid of this on the way to the fridge.”

I watched as she padded to the wastebasket, then to the refrigerator. She was thinner than my ex-wife, with sharp, jutting hipbones and a small, flat behind. Her breasts were soft and pear-shaped, with long pink nipples that stood up like the ends of a big man’s thumbs. I could count her ribs and the vertebrae that ran like a knotted chain down the center of her back.

She had two tattoos in addition to the rose on her left breast. One was a circle of barbed wire and blue roses around her right ankle, the other a small yellow butterfly on her left shoulder. Her lipstick was smeared, and there were dark smudges in the hollows beneath her eyes where her mascara had run. Her hair was tousled, and since I was the one who had tousled it, I found it both erotic and endearing.

“Service with a smile,” she said, and held out a brimming wineglass. She slipped beneath the sheet and sipped her drink, holding it delicately, between two fingers and a thumb. “I know it’s not expensive, but I love sweet wine. Don’t you?”

I tipped my head noncommittally.

She brushed her fingers across my upper arm, where a thin white scar stood out against the skin. The pale hairs on my arms prickled.

“What happened here?” she asked.

“Vice squad. Undercover. Crackhead with a switchblade.”

“And this one?” Her index finger traced a short jagged scar a few inches to the right of my navel. At her touch, the muscles of my stomach jumped.

“Broken bottle.”

Her hand swept upward, palm flat against the hard contours of my abs. Her fingers tugged gently at the blond hairs on my chest, slid across my pectoral muscles, and came to rest beside the small round scar halfway between my armpit and my heart.

The one that had ended my marriage.

“And this?” she said. Just before her finger touched the puckered skin, I closed my hand around hers and said, “That one, I don’t talk about.”

“Ah.” After a moment, she cleared her throat, slipped her hand from beneath mine, and said, “So. What’s it like being a detective? It sounds exciting.”

“Sometimes.” I brushed my lips across the butterfly on her shoulder. “Mostly, it’s a lot of waiting.”

“Waiting?”

“Waiting for a cheating spouse to come out of a motel room. Waiting for a guy defrauding his insurance company to sneak out of his wheelchair and go dancing. Waiting for interviews. We talk to a lot of people. That’s about it.”

“You think about it being car chases and murder mysteries.”

“P.I.’s don’t do murder,” I said. “Once in a blue moon, if we’re hired by an attorney. But mostly, it’s missing persons, insurance fraud, personal injury claims, spousal misconduct . . . that’s the kind of stuff we do. We leave the homicides for the cops.”

She made a wry face. “Too bad. I think a murder would be interesting.”

“I worked homicide for seven years,” I said. “And believe me, murder isn’t interesting. It’s nothing but a waste.”

We moved on to other topics then. She told me about Ronnie, the soon-to-be ex-boyfriend.

“He seemed so sweet.” She wrapped one arm around her knees and held her sangria glass with the other hand. “Guess you never know, huh?”

“Guess not,” I said, though there had probably been signs.

“Here, hold this.” She handed me her glass and headed off to the bathroom.

When she came back, we had another glass of wine, made love again, and sometime after that I drifted into sleep, her body curled against mine like a Siamese cat’s. I woke up once, with my head spinning and my stomach roiling, realized it was still dark out, and sank back into a sleep too deep even for dreams.

MORNING. A SLIVER
of sunlight sliced through a gap in the curtains and seared through my eyelids, setting off a small nuclear explosion in my head. I scrabbled for the digital clock beside the bed and squinted at the readout: 10:45.

Great. I had to pick up my son, Paulie, at noon. I lay with my palms over my eyelids long enough to realize that my bladder was also on the brink of implosion. What a dilemma. If I got up, my skull might blow apart. If I stayed put, my bladder might burst. God. I clenched my teeth, pressed the palms of my hands to my temples, and stumbled into the bathroom to take a leak and inspect my tongue, which was coated with a white scum that looked and felt like dryer lint.

Heather was gone. She’d taken the wineglasses and the bottle of sangria. And on the table, she had left a note.

I’m sorry
, it said.

Shit. How could I have been so stupid?

I picked up my jeans. My belt hung from the loops, my cell phone still clipped to it. I checked my wallet. Everything was there. I felt for my keys. Still in the pocket.

So, sorry for what? For not saying goodbye? She hadn’t left a number, so I guessed we’d had a one-night stand.

Too bad. I wondered vaguely if she’d ever get away from Ronnie, and if she did, if I would ever know about it.

Then I told myself there was nothing worse than a maudlin, thirty-something single guy with a hangover. I’d gotten laid, and if the worst that could be said was that the lady liked her sex with no strings attached, who was I to try and complicate things?

Still feeling muzzy-headed, I showered, dressed, and went down to the lobby, where a pot of stale coffee and a pile of day-old bread and pastries masqueraded as a continental breakfast. I passed on the pastry and choked down a cup of coffee and a piece of dry toast. They calmed my churning stomach. While I ate, I skimmed a couple of sections of
The Tennessean
, which someone had left on the corner of the table.

There was an article on the legislation to remove the waiting period from handgun permits, a questionnaire for football fans, a story on the Society for Creative Anachronism, and a column on the RC and Moon Pie Festival in Bell Buckle, which was where I’d planned to take Paulie this afternoon.

According to the article, the festival had been a great success. I shook my head and read the article again.

Had been. As in, having already occurred. As in, something was terribly amiss.

I glanced at the header at the top of the page, and a hollow feeling settled in the pit of my stomach.

The header said
Sunday
. But I’d left the First Edition with Heather on Friday night. How the hell could it be Sunday?

Numb and disoriented, I scooped up the paper, and a headline on the front page of the local section caught my eye:
WOMAN SLAIN IN HOTEL ROOM. EX-POLICE OFFICER SOUGHT FOR QUESTIONING.

Ex-police officer. I’d lost touch with most of the guys I used to work with, but I still felt connected to the force. Once a cop, always a cop, as Maria used to say. I’d skimmed most of the other stories, but I read this one word for word.

The victim was Amanda Jean Hartwell, known to friends and family as Amy. The grainy photograph showed a smiling, bespectacled young woman. Her hair, a tumble of shoulder-length curls pulled back by two barrettes, was either light brown or dark blond. It was hard to tell from the black-and-white photo.

Her body, which had been shot and mutilated (no details), had been found at the Cedar Valley Motel in Hermitage. Survived by a husband (Calvin J. Hartwell), two daughters (Katrina E. and Tara D. Hartwell), and a sister (Valerie C. Shepherd).