The Switch (25 page)

"Famous neck rub, my ass," she muttered as she sprinkled body powder across her shoulders.

Suddenly her movements were arrested. Either her ears were playing tricks on her or she had heard a noise coming from another part of the house. She strained to listen. When the scratching sound came again, she traced it into the bedroom, where she realized that the ominous sound she'd heard

was only a tree limb moving against the window screen, driven by a rain-laden wind.

Courtesy of the FBI, she had a bad case of the jitters. And wasn't she entitled? She'd seen more blood in the last few days than she had seen in the rest of her life added together, first her sister's blood at the murder scene, then at Dale Gordon's spooky, squalid apartment.

She moved around her bedroom blowing out the candles that Jem had lit. They reminded her of that horrid place with its hideous altar, threadbare curtain separating the bathroom, and the sick individual who had lived there.

He had pictures, Lawson had said. Gordon had taken pictures of Gillian while she was at her most vulnerable at the Waters Clinic. It was too nauseating to think about. She broke out in gooseflesh and rubbed her arms through her robe.

Sleep, long desired and stubbornly elusive, wouldn't come tonight, either, if she didn't calm down, and the only way she was going to do that was to shut her mind off. Contrary to what she had told Jem, she had no intention of taking a sleeping pill. She didn't want to medicate herself, especially since Tobias would be here at nine o'clock tomorrow morning. That was one meeting for which she wanted to be sharp. He was coming for answers to questions. Little did he know that she had questions of her own.

Wine, she thought. Maybe it would relax her enough to sleep, but not leave her groggy in the morning. She and Jem hadn't emptied the bottle he'd served with dinner.

Leaving the lights off, she moved into the kitchen and took the bottle of wine from the refrigerator. As she was closing the door with her hip and reaching for a wineglass with her free hand, her back door crashed open.

At first all she saw was blood.

More blood.

CHAPTER 18

She closed the refrigerator door to extinguish the light and at the same time slammed the wine bottle against the countertop. California chardonnay and glass sprayed her and the floor.

She brandished the jagged bottleneck at the bloodied figure slumped against the doorjamb. "Get out of here or I'll hurt you. I'll call the police."

He stumbled inside. Blood trickled from a nasty cut on his cheekbone and another above his eye. The eye was swollen and discolored. "I don't recommend Lawson the wonder cop."

"Chief!"

She dropped the broken bottle and, heedless of the glass on the floor, rushed toward him. First she closed the door to keep the rain outside, then guided him into a chair at the kitchen table. "What happened to you? Were you in an accident?"

"Leave them off," he said as she reached for the light switch.

"Why?"

"Because I can't be sure that I wasn't followed here, and—"

"You drove?" He could barely stand.

"No. Witnesses packed me into a taxi. I had the driver drop me around the corner and walked the rest of the way." "Did you say witnesses? To what?"

"Later. No lights. If they're after me, they're very possibly after you, and with the light on, we make a better target."

"Target? For who? Who are `they'? What in the world are you talking about?"

During this disjointed conversation she had been searching for a dish towel. She had momentarily forgotten where they were kept, but she finally found the correct drawer and took out several. A piece of glass had taken root in her bare heel, but she didn't stop to tend it. Instead, she pressed the dish towel against Christopher Hart's bleeding cheekbone.

He winced as she applied pressure. "The son of a bitch reopened the cut Hennings gave me."

"What son of a bitch? Start at the beginning and catch me up. Who did this to you?"

"I was attacked outside a club on Greenville Avenue." "Attacked? Like a mugging? Did you report it to the police?"

"No."

"Why not?"

"Have you got a pain pill?"

"Uh..."

"Anything?"

"Wait here." Favoring the heel where the sliver of glass was embedded, she scurried from the kitchen.

In the bathroom, she frantically searched the shallow medicine cabinet, knocking several over-the-counter medications and outdated prescriptions into the sink. Finally she found what she was looking for.

When she turned with the bottle in her hand, Chief was standing in the open bathroom doorway, supporting himself with one bloody hand on the doorframe and holding the kitchen towel to his cheekbone with the other.

She shook a tablet into her palm. "Root canal. Last year."

"What is it?" When she told him, he nodded and pinched up the pill between two fingers. "I've taken it before. Also for dental work."

"It's a mild dosage, but I don't know whether or not this drug loses its potency like vitamins." She filled the toothbrush glass with tap water and passed it to him.

He swallowed the tablet and returned the glass to her. "Thanks."

"Take off your jacket and sit here." She lowered the commode lid. Shrugging off his leather jacket, he indicated the bright overhead light. "This is an interior room," she explained. "No one can see the light. But I need to see your face."

He sat down and angled his head back. The gash wasn't that long, but it was deep. "That needs stitches."

"Got a Band-Aid?"

"I think so."

"That'll do. Pour some stuff on it first."

"Are you sure? It could scar. I really think it needs—"

"Just ..." He motioned toward the open medicine cabinet. "It'll be fine."

There was a bottle of disinfectant in the medicine cabinet. She doused the gash with it, causing him to swear lavishly. "Do they teach you that language in astronaut school?" she asked.

"It's a required course."

"You must've passed with flying colors."

"Aced every test."

Once that wound was cleansed, she passed him a square of gauze soaked with the disinfectant. "For the cut above your eye. It doesn't look as bad, but it needs to be cleaned."

She determined that a plain adhesive bandage would be insufficient for the cut on his cheek, so she assembled the makings of one on the dressing table.

"Do you have a gun, Melina?"

The astonishing question came as she was cutting a strip of

adhesive tape off the roll. The metal spool fell from her hands, leaving her with a piece of white tape stuck to the pad of her finger. The spool swung like a pendulum. "Gun? Like a pistol?"

"Do you?"

"Why?

"Do you?"

"No."

"Finish up. We need to talk."

Working quickly, she dabbed both wounds with an antibiotic salve, then covered the one on his cheek with a gauze pad and tightly secured one side of it with tape. "It'll probably bleed through soon. I'll change it when it does."

It didn't occur to her to ask if he would be there long enough to need a bandage change, or how long he planned on staying, or why, following an attack, he'd chosen to come to her. It seemed a foregone conclusion that she and Chief were in this together—whatever
this
was—and that he was going to be around for a while. Which left her feeling both comforted and conversely unsettled.

Comforted because she welcomed having an ally, someone intelligent and self-controlled, someone who even when bruised and bleeding didn't panic but kept a cool head, and someone who shared her outrage, and possibly some of her guilt, over the murder.

Unsettled because that someone was Chief Hart, whose mere presence in a room caused a tingling awareness within her. When near, as now, he generated other, more embarrassing physical reactions. Like having unsteady fingers that had to try twice before successfully placing an additional strip of tape over the bandage.

This up close and personal, she became far too mindful of standing between his thighs, of bending close to his face, of nearly touching him, of wanting to.

When the tape was secured, she hastily withdrew her hands and stepped away from him. It was all she could do to keep herself from wiping her damp palms on her robe, or clutching the neck of it, or any such nervous gesture that might have signaled her silly, adolescent reaction to him.

"Try to keep some pressure on it," she said.

He stood up and surveyed her handiwork in the mirror, touching the bandage gingerly. "Thanks."

"What about your eye?"

"Maybe some ice."

"I'll be right back."

She hobbled into the kitchen again, tiptoeing around the larger pieces of broken glass and hoping she missed the smaller ones she couldn't see in the dark. His comment about being a target had made her paranoid; she kept the overhead light off. She quickly filled a Ziploc baggie with ice chips from the dispenser in the fridge door and wrapped it in one of the few remaining dish towels that wasn't bloodstained.

As soon as she reentered the bedroom, he said, "Here." He was sprawled in an easy chair in a dim corner of the room, one foot propped on the matching ottoman, the other still on the floor. His jacket was draped over his knee. He looked totally fatigued.

"You feel like hell, right?"

He grinned at her wryly as he reached for the makeshift ice pack and applied it to his eye. "I'd have to start feeling better to feel like hell."

She lifted the jacket off his knee and shook raindrops off it, then hung it on the doorknob. Turning back to him, she asked, "Do you want a towel for your hair?"

"It'll dry."

"Any other injuries not apparent? Bruised or broken ribs? Knot on the head? Concussion? Internal bleeding?" He shook his head. "Only what's visible."

"Shouldn't you go to the emergency room to make sure?" "You're tracking blood on your carpet."

Looking down, she saw the spots that marked her path out of the bedroom and back. "I stepped on a piece of glass."

"That's what you get for threatening me with that broken bottle."

"I didn't know it was you. Ordinarily visitors ring my front doorbell, not come crashing through the back door." "What about your foot?"

"The glass is still in my heel."

"Better see to it."

"But I want to hear
…"

He wasn't listening. He had closed his eyes. Maybe the pain pill was more potent than either of them thought. Or maybe he was simply exhausted.

In the bathroom, she sat down on the lid of the commode and propped her foot on her knee to examine her heel. The piece of glass was large enough to be visible, and she was able to extract it with tweezers. To be fair, she bathed the bleeding spot with the same antiseptic she'd used on Chief, and it stung like crazy. She covered the puncture with a Band-Aid.

Still favoring that foot, she went back into the bedroom. He was snoring softly. Quietly she sat down on the edge of the bed, near the spot where she had been sitting with Jem Hennings less than an hour ago. Much had happened in that brief period of time.

But out of all the surprises that had been sprung on her since bidding Jem good night—the sudden appearance of Christopher Hart, his being attacked, his injuries, his asking if she had a gun—the most incredible to her was that he could fall asleep and snore peacefully in the midst of a crisis.

For ten minutes she didn't move. She sat silently and watched him sleep. Then, as though programmed to wake up after sleeping exactly six hundred seconds, his eyes came
open. Seeing her, he smiled and whispered, "Hey." "Hey"

Extending a hand toward her, he drawled, "What are you doing way over there?"

"I—" Then, realizing his mistake, she smiled apologetically and reminded him softly, "I'm Melina."

He dropped his hand and, looking chagrined, shifted his position in the chair. He sat up straighter and pushed his fingers up through his hair. Irritably he said, "I knew that."

"For a second there, I don't think you did."

Declining to respond, he asked, "Did I doze off?"

"No, you went comatose."

"Sorry."

"You should try and get about eight more hours of it. Unless you think you have a concussion; then you should stay awake."

"I told you I don't have a concussion."

"Okay." After a short silence, she asked, "How'd you know where I live?"

"Lawson gave me the address. I sent flowers."

"Oh. I haven't read all the card enclosures yet. Thank you." "You're welcome."

He stared at the toe of his boot. The hems of his jeans were wet, she noticed, but the boots had kept his legs and feet dry. He seemed unconcerned about the drops of blood that had discolored the leather.

Finally he looked across at her. "How'd you know?" "What?"