Vengeance (9 page)

A
fter Max fled the office, Val dumped everything from the safe into a wire-rimmed wastebasket and carried it back to the guest house. She figured Max might be uncomfortable spending time in the same room where his father died, but she hadn't expected a full-on freak-out. Things must've been worse between Max and his father than he'd let on. She hadn't pressed him on exactly how he and his father had used Max's ability to get rich…Suffice it to say she couldn't think of any healthy scenarios.

At the guest house, she found Max bent over his kitchen sink, fumbling with a bottle of aspirin. He wrested the cap off and a cascade of white capsules clinked against the stainless steel basin. He scooped up a handful and shoved them in his mouth, then snatched a bottle of Scotch from the adjacent liquor cabinet to wash them down. She watched without moving as he stomped like the Tasmanian devil from the kitchen to a reading nook next to his mountain of books and dumped the contents of his briefcase onto the ground.

“Are you…” Val stammered. “Can I—”

“Did you get what you needed?” he said in a matter-of-fact voice that utterly failed to bring calm to the rest of his body. He picked up a lighter and a silver cigarette case from the pile his briefcase had thrown up. Val recognized the small box as the one she'd seen in Max's office at the Red Raven, the one that held his marijuana cigarettes.

“I don't know.” Val nodded at the wastebasket in her arms. “I need to look through this stuff.”

Max held the joint with the same hand that clutched the bottle of Scotch while he tried to guide the lighter with the other, but his hands shook too badly to mate the flame with the cigarette.

“Even if your dad's stash doesn't pan out, I promise you I'll get to the bottom of this—”

“
Fuck!
” Max threw the lighter and joint to the ground, having given up on trying to light it. He walked back to the kitchen, threw open a cabinet door above the kitchen sink, and pulled out a bottle of prescription something. Sleeping pills? Opioids?

Val's eyes widened.
He wouldn't
… She tensed, ready to wrestle the bottle away from him if he tried to down the whole thing, but he only swallowed two pills and tossed the rest back in the cabinet. Then he moved to his bed and lay down, back propped against the headboard, still clutching the liquor bottle. He squeezed his eyes shut, chest heaving while he tried to catch his breath.

So this was what happened when he lost control of his emotions. Jesus, no wonder he worked so hard to keep them in check. How could she help him? She might be able to offer him comfort if she understood where his extreme anxiety came from, but all she knew was some aspect of it included a deep loathing of his father. Val preferred to work through her pain alone, internally. In that, she guessed they were similar. She'd give him space, but she had nowhere to go. All she could do was stand uselessly in the doorway.

“I get migraines,” he said after a minute of silence, eyes still closed. “I can't think when they happen.”

Val walked to the bed and sat cross-legged next to him, putting the wastebasket down at the foot. She took the Scotch bottle from him and drank a mouthful, wincing at its potency. He didn't skimp on the good stuff.

“Do you want a back rub?” she asked him.

He let out a dry chuckle. “No, thanks. One thing might lead to another, God forbid.”

They passed the bottle back and forth until dusk turned to night, and only the soft light from his bedside lamp kept the house from complete darkness. Val's body felt wrapped in a warm blanket, and she almost let her head drop onto Max's shoulder before an image of Robby popped into her mind's eye and caused her to catch herself. She retrieved the wastebasket from the floor and dumped the papers into her lap, leaving the money and gun in the basket. Combing through the pile, she held each one up to the light and scanned for anything that might be relevant.

“What happened to your sister?” Max asked, his body finally relaxed and slouched against the headboard.

Val didn't stop looking through the papers. “When we were in high school, she got drunk at a party and was raped. Someone took a video of it on their phone and sent it to a bunch of other people until the entire school had it. The cops did nothing, as usual—they said it was a ‘community matter.' So she killed herself. And you already said you're sorry, so you don't have to say it again.”

He turned his head toward her, eyes dark pools in the dim light. “Was the guy ever punished?”

“Sort of. Guys like that don't stay out of trouble for long. He eventually went to prison for dealing drugs, not sexual assault. I saw a lot of that when I was in the military, too. Unchecked predators left to their own devices because when sex is involved, everyone wants to pretend like there's this gray area where we can never really know what happened, so let's just look the other way until it blows over. Somebody had to do something, though, so I decided
I
would do something. That's why I started Valentine Investigations. I didn't want what happened to my sister to happen to anyone else.” Val took a breath. “Anyway, that's probably more than you wanted to know.”

Max's eyes closed again and his head fell sideways onto her shoulder. Electricity tingled down her arm. There was Robby again, but the aroma of the shampoo Max used in his morning shower dulled the image, and she couldn't convince herself to push the flesh-and-blood man away.

“It's not more than I wanted to know,” he said. “Sometimes it feels like too much.”

“Yeah.” She rested her head against his. It fit nicely there. “Like the universe is against you.”

“Yeah.”

His dark hair tickled her cheek. An inch turn of her neck and she could kiss the top of his sweet-smelling scalp. If she hadn't felt Robby's eyes on her, maybe she would have.

“She was lucky to have a sister that cared. It's too bad she didn't realize it.”

“What's too bad is that of all the future death I see, I didn't see hers—the one that mattered the most to me. I mean, what kind of sick God thrusts this weird ability on us and then…” Val trailed off, distracted by an accounting slip in her hand with a familiar name on it. “Does Dean Price have any involvement with the financial side of Carressa Industries?”

Max lifted his head and opened his eyes to slits. “No.”

“His name is on this accounting slip.” She held it up for him. “Why would that be?”

He gave it a cursory glance through heavy lids as the mystery pills he'd taken worked their magic. “I don't know.”

She sighed at his unhelpfulness. “Why did you hire the Bombay and Price law firm to represent you?”

“My father had them on retainer. Has for decades.”

“So why did your father originally hire Bombay and Price?”

“I think…my mother knew Dean Price from law school, and she introduced Dean to my father, before he got rich. That's the story I heard. When my father started raking in the money, Bombay and Price was there for all his personal legal needs. How fortunate for them.” He deposited the bottle of Scotch in Val's lap, then shimmied onto his back. “Can we talk about this tomorrow? I need to go to work in the morning.”

“But you'll look into this account with Dean's name on it, right?”

He waved a hand at her. “Sure.”

In other words, he'd do it to humor her. What a great team they made. Val took a moment to assess what she knew so far. Dean had been Lester's business associate for decades. After Lester died, Chet came out of the woodwork with a claim of foul play involving Norman, at which point Robby was murdered to keep that information from getting out. She knew how Lester and Dean were connected, but how did Norman fit? Was the mayoral candidate connected to Lester through an affair with Lydia Carressa? Max seemed certain that wasn't the case, though Val couldn't rule it out. But why would Norman kill Lester
now
, when the affair ended decades ago? And why kill Robby instead of going straight to the source and killing Chet before he talked to Robby?

Goddammit, why did Robby have to die? She'd never stop until she got answers and justice for Robby. Never.

Val frowned at Max's chest, rising and falling in the steady rhythm of a man slipping quickly into sleep. He didn't care about the mayoral race, or Bombay and Price, or any other aspect of the conspiracy with his father possibly at its center. The only reason he was helping her was because he saw her in a vision. And maybe he felt a special connection with her because of their shared ability. She certainly felt a connection to him, however irrational it was for knowing him so short a time.

Val gathered the papers back into the wastebasket—setting aside the Dean Price accounting slip—and swung her legs off the side of the bed, ready to go back to the main house. She sat where she was for a moment, imagining the cold rooms and icy floor in contrast to the soothing warmth of Max's home, of his body. She turned off the bedside lamp, slid back into bed, and lay on her side next to him.

“Why didn't you look for me?” she whispered into the dark. “I stalked online message boards, went to weird fetish meetings, tolerated people thinking I was crazy, looking for you.”

Though she'd thought he was asleep, she felt the bed bounce as he turned over, then his warm breath on her face only a few inches away. “I couldn't,” he whispered back. “My father was always watching. He monitored everything I did, all the time. And everybody knew me. I couldn't blend in. I'm sorry.”

Tears gathered at the edges of her eyes. They'd lived in the same goddamn city their entire lives, could have helped each other figure out what was wrong with them, why they were different, felt a little less alone, and
he was sorry
he didn't even try. Everything that could have been, all that lost time—

Something warm touched her face, and she realized it was his fingertips, skimming over her jaw like a feather, then across her lips, and her heart insisted
this
was their time, right here, right now, and if he'd kissed her, then she would've kissed him back and given him everything she was in a way she'd never done for anyone else. But in a heartbeat the moment passed and his hand fell away. Deep breaths against her face told her the pills and alcohol had finally forced him into sleep.

With the path of his fingers still warm on her skin, she rested her head against his chest, folded her body against his, and remembered what it was like to fall into another human being until, for that night anyway, the chaotic world retreated to a safe distance.

Val awoke to the swish of a razor blade, the tapping of the handle against porcelain, and running water trickling down the drain. For a moment she thought she'd had the most vivid dream of her life, and she'd open her eyes to find Robby getting ready for work, humming the theme song to whatever TV show he'd watched the night before. But the sheets felt thicker, smelled muskier, and the morning light warmed her from an unfamiliar angle. When she realized she was in Max's house, listening to him shave, she wasn't entirely unhappy about it.

She lifted her head and rubbed sleep out of her eyes. In the bathroom, Max splashed water on his freshly shaven face, a towel wrapped around his waist. He pulled the towel off and used it to pat his face dry. Val eyed the contours of his glutes, how they sloped into his smooth back like rolling sand dunes. For a moment she imagined running her fingers along those soft hills, then swallowed back a knot made of shame. It wasn't right she was so attracted to him. Robby had barely been gone a week, and she was already imagining what it might be like to touch another man. Seemed almost unnatural. Then again, both she and Max had some very unnatural qualities about them.

Val lay back down again and pretended to sleep as Max exited the bathroom and went about his morning routine, unaware that she watched him. Not that he'd care. She'd never met a guy so comfortable with his body. Though she supposed most people who looked like Max wouldn't be shy about showing it off, either—or maybe it was only her he wasn't bashful around.

He slipped on his underwear and socks, brushed his hair, and unwrapped a dry-cleaned suit from its plastic sheath. The cadence of his quiet movements lulled her into sleep again, until she felt the bed bow under his weight as he sat at the edge next to her, looping a blue-checkered silk tie into a knot around his neck.

He looked at her, saw her eyes were open, and smiled. “There's a board of directors meeting today that I can't miss. I need to make an appearance—instill confidence and all that. I'm afraid they'll try to vote me out because of the suspicion around my father's death, even though I'm the majority shareholder.” He tucked the tie into the breast of his charcoal vest and buttoned the cufflinks on his white dress shirt, then leaned toward her, an arm propping him up. A slight bouquet of mountain spring shower gel and bay rum aftershave wafted off him, a smell that matched the green and brown in his eyes. His lips were, oh, thirteen inches or so from hers, she guessed. Too far to reach while lying down, but if he came closer—

“Can you wait for me here until I get back?” he asked. Then added with a hint of desperation, “Please?”

“You expect me to twiddle my thumbs here all day? I could set up a meeting with Dean while you're doing your work thing, twist his arm into talking.”

“The guys that killed Chet are still looking for you.” He picked up the accounting slip from the nightstand. “Let me ask around about this first, then we'll regroup and decide our next move.”

“What am I supposed to do while you're gone?”

“Go through my things, raid the fridge, pocket some valuables. Or read a book.”

“Reading is for nerds.”

“Watch porn on my computer, then. Fill it with viruses.”