Aldrich thought he’d recognized me in Newport. Yet he’d been uncertain so he’d snapped a shot with his cell phone, then called “this guy.” That was all Dougie knew—Aldrich called “this guy.” Aldrich was freaked out because he thought the woman in the pictures was from his past. Someone who could ruin his present. “This guy” then contacted Roland to hire a hitman to kill Nadia Stafford, if she was the same woman.
“Kill me and then what?” I asked. “Make me disappear?”
“The client offered extra if I could make it seem like a suicide. Otherwise you had to disappear.” He looked around the woods. “Which would have been easy out here. I could have done the suicide part, too, if I’d known you had a gun.”
“Real fucking tragedy,” Jack muttered.
The guy didn’t have the sense to look abashed. He just shifted again, struggling against the pain.
“Look, we’re on the same team,” Dougie said. “Clearly Roland had no idea the target was your girl. But now it’s all been straightened out and the job is over. I’ll drop it. As a professional courtesy.”
“Big of you.”
Jack hunkered down again, meeting Dougie’s gaze. Sweat streamed down the man’s face now as he audibly swallowed.
“What else you got?” Jack asked.
Dougie told him everything else. It wasn’t much, but his life was on the line. He gave his name as Mark Lewiston, from Cleveland, along with some other personal information that may or may not have been true. When he was done, Jack turned to me.
“Nadia? Take the dog. Start heading back.”
Scout had been sitting beside me, growing impatient, and was happy now to be moving again. As we walked away, I glanced back. Jack noticed me looking. He tensed, a muscle in his cheek twitching. He didn’t want me watching him kill a man. It didn’t matter if that was his job, or if we both knew it had to be done.
I turned away. The shot fired. I kept walking.
CHAPTER 19
A minute later, I heard Jack behind me. He didn’t catch up, even when I slowed. Finally, I glanced over my shoulder. He was maybe twenty feet away. He picked up his pace and was beside me in a few seconds.
“I’ll clean it up,” he said.
“I’ll help—”
“Don’t need to. My mess.”
“I’m going to help you, Jack.”
He gave me a sidelong glance. Seeing if I was okay with what just happened. I could say I was, but then it would seem as if his actions were indeed in question. They weren’t. When you kill people for a living, you accept the risk that this is how it will turn out.
“I’ll load tools into the truck while you go in for breakfast,” I said. “We should join the guests, too. It’ll look strange if we take off again too soon.”
“Yeah.”
More quiet walking. I glanced over. Jack was facing forward, muscles tight, gaze distant.
“Hey,” I said.
I brushed my hand against his. When he didn’t tense or pull away, I hooked my index finger around his and gave a gentle squeeze. I started to let go, but he held my hand there, fingers locked. We walked like that for another minute before he said, “I fucked up.”
“I hope you don’t mean about shooting that asshole. There’s no way we could take the chance he’d come back—after both of us this time.”
“Mean him coming after you. My mess.”
As his anger surged, his hand clenched mine, reflexively. When he realized, he loosened his hold, but didn’t let go.
He looked over at me. “You don’t care, do you?”
“About what?”
“That I almost got you killed. Biggest fucking error in judgment since—” He inhaled and shook his head. “I took you to that bar. My idea. We thought he made you. You were worried. I said it didn’t matter. I fucked up.”
“There was no way to expect Aldrich would recognize me—in disguise—after twenty years. No reason to panic when it seemed as if he did. Neither of us could have foreseen that he’d deal with it by hiring someone to kill me. We know, better than anyone, that it’s entirely possible to hire someone to fix problems that way. Yet we never saw it coming because it makes absolutely no sense.”
“Could have killed you.”
“And that’s never been a risk before?”
He made a noise in his throat.
“It’s a chance I take every time I accept a job. I didn’t get killed today, Jack. I didn’t come close. That wasn’t dumb luck. I’m careful. Damned careful.”
“I know.”
“Then you know that however bad you feel about this, I was never in any real danger.”
He had nothing to say to that.
Jack still had my hand when we got to the lodge. I don’t think either of us realized, until Emma came off the porch to greet us and stopped in her tracks.
We broke contact fast.
“Did we miss breakfast?” I called.
She shook her head and looked from me to Jack. He murmured, “Fuck,” under his breath.
“You’ve got time to wash up before you eat,” she said. “Not much, though, so you’d better step to it.”
She stayed at the bottom of the steps, drying her hands on a dish towel. As we reached her, she said, “John?”
“Hmmm?” Jack said.
“Can I have a word?”
“Sure.”
“I’ll be in the kitchen,” Emma said. She glanced at me, too quickly for me to read her expression, and then she headed up and inside.
“Fuck,” Jack muttered as the door closed behind her. “Feel like I’m sixteen. Got caught sneaking you out for the night.”
“Which isn’t like Emma at all. Hell, she practically shoves me at every guy who looks my way.”
He shrugged. “Different.”
“I’m sure she’s long past believing we’re actually related.”
“Not that. Age difference.”
“I doubt it,” I said. “But I’ll talk to her.”
“Nah. I will.”
“You don’t have to—”
“Got it,” he said and went into the house before I could argue.
Jack came out as I finished loading body-dump supplies into my old pickup. He was carrying a picnic basket and a thermos.
“Either you totally charmed her,” I said, “or we aren’t allowed to dine with civilized folks.”
“Wasn’t about that.”
“No?”
He waited for me to accompany him down to the dock. I turned on the heater in the gazebo as he set up breakfast inside.
“Emma heard the news about Aldrich.”
“His suicide?”
“Yeah. Said she was going to tell you and I offered to do it.”
“That saves me from finding the right look of shock. Thank you.” I poured coffee as he put out the plates.
“Emma said the papers are reporting that the suicide note was a confession. About Amy.”
“Which is good on all counts. He’s dead and she gets justice.”
“And you? Your justice? How’re you doing with that?”
“I think it still hasn’t entirely sunk in. It feels like it happened to someone else.” I lifted my hands. “Not that I’m claiming it did. I know what happened to me. It’s just not . . . sinking in.”
“You gonna talk to someone?”
“A therapist, you mean?” I shrugged. “Probably not. I had that after Amy died and after I shot Wayne Franco. I know it works for people, but I can’t talk to strangers. Which sounds utterly ridiculous to anyone who knows me.”
“It’s different. Personal.” He snagged my gaze. “You don’t do personal.”
I’m sure that if I did talk to a shrink, she’d tell me that my hyper-friendliness was a defense mechanism. If I’m open and extroverted, no one will notice that I don’t really say anything about myself. In my own way, I carry a Do Not Trespass sign as big as Jack’s. I’m just better at disguising it.