There was something calming about sitting in the drive-through line of a Starbucks, Jack thought. You can’t go anywhere. You’re not required to try to move things along—because you can’t. You might as well just sit back and let it take the time it takes. That was so different from how he normally lived his life that he actually found a perverse pleasure in being trapped in the line.
Amidst the enforced serenity, Jack noticed that there was a thin pulse of unease throbbing in his shoulders. Like a lot of cops, he didn’t automatically dismiss hunches or gut feelings.
They’ve panned out too many times to ignore.
Whatever it was, this feeling that something wasn’t right was constantly, unobtrusively in the background. Like the omnipresent hum of an air conditioning unit.
When he paid for his stake-out munchies he glanced at his wristwatch. He’d been gone a little more than two hours. Mia didn’t have to answer her phone—and he fully expected she was still mad at him and wouldn’t—but he’d at least tell her what he was doing.
He pulled into an alcove in the parking lot but before he could text Mia an incoming phone call filled his screen.
Diane Burton calling.
He sighed and pushed Accept. Why not? Today was clearly his day to have every woman he ever cared about hate his guts. Bring it.
“Hey, Diane,” he said into the phone, eyeing his double shot latté next to him.
“Jack, I’m in trouble.”
His hand froze midair as he reached for his drink. She did not sound like herself.
“What’s going on?” he asked.
“I need you, Jack,” she said, her voice a bare whimper. “I just need you for one night…to talk. I swear to God if you don’t come, I’ll kill myself.” She broke down in sobs.
“Diane, Diane,” Burton said. “Don’t cry, sweetheart. I’ll come. Are you home?”
Crap. Was she serious? Should he call 911?
“You’ll come? Oh, Jack, I need you so desperately, I don’t think I can handle it. I swear to God, I don’t…” And the tears again.
“I’m on my way, Diane. Do not, I repeat, do not do anything stupid. Do you hear me?”
A sniffle from the other end of the phone. “Yes, Jack,” she said meekly.
“Stay on the phone with me until I get there, do you hear me?” He pulled out of the parking lot and headed in the opposite direction of Doraville.
“I’m so sorry to be so much trouble…”
“You’re not any trouble at all. I’m glad you called,” Burton said as he nicked the tail end of the yellow light and sped through the red to merge onto I-285. It was before rush hour but it was still packed and the flow of traffic was well over seventy miles an hour.
Suited him just fine.
“You still there, Diane? Stay with me, girl. Describe to me what you’re doing.”
Had she ever struck him as the type who might do something like this? As long as he’d known her, had she ever even hinted at being suicidal?
“I’m sitting here at the dining room table, the one you made for us when we were first married, and drinking wine. I’m drinking as much wine as I can drink.” She broke down into incoherent tears again.
“All right, sweetie, well, save some of that wine for me, okay? I’ll be there in less than five minutes. Drink water until I get there. Better yet, don’t go into the kitchen at all. Just sit tight.”
“I’m so sorry about what I did, Jack. So, so, so sorry.”
“What did you do, Diane?”
“With Tommy.”
Tommy?
“Tommy, our lawn boy. I have no idea what came over me. I was possessed is all I can say. He was so sweet and kind and I…and I…oh, I just want to die! I threw away my life. I threw it all away and now I just want to die!”
“Stop talking like that, Diane. You hear me? It would break my heart and you don’t want to do that to me, do you? Do you?”
“Would…would it really, Jack? Oh, my God, would you really care?”
Was this all bull? Was she really suicidal or was he going to pull up and find her in a towel holding a martini glass?
“I care enough to strangle you myself if you try to do something like that. I better not find any knives or crap like that when I get there. Just you and me, right, Diane?”
“Oh, Jack, you don’t know how long I’ve waited to hear you say that.”
He arrived five minutes later, slamming the car into park and bolting into her house—a twenty-year old traditional on a quiet Dunwoody street. Why she would choose to surround herself with tennis wives and families after they split up was a mystery to Jack. He was pretty sure, since he had to dodge four moms pushing strollers on the way here, that it probably had a hand in bringing about today’s hysterics.
His assessment of her condition wasn’t exactly the towel and the martini glass, but neither did he think she was in any danger of killing herself. She met him at the front door and he opened his arms. She fell into them and when he closed his arms around her, she snaked her hands up to his face and neck in a lover’s embrace. He used the opportunity to break her grip by picking her up and carrying her into the house and putting her on the couch.
“You sit,” he said. “I’ll make coffee.” When he spoke, his eyes fell on his Army Beretta M9 laying on the coffee table. He picked it up without a word and stuck it in the small of his back.
“Thank you so much for coming, Jack,” Diane said. Her makeup was intact and while it’s true she wasn’t wearing sweat pants, in her jeans and wool pullover, neither did she look like she was expecting to seduce someone either.
Once in the kitchen, he checked the gun. It was fully loaded with one in the chamber. Without emptying it, he returned it to his back belt and poured boiling water over instant coffee he’d scooped into two mugs. Glancing into the living room, he saw Diane was sitting quietly, waiting.
He brought two coffee mugs back to the couch and sat down next to her. He handed her one.
“We’re going to talk it out, Diane,” he said to her, wondering where in the hell he was channeling Oprah from. “And when you’re done. When you’ve said what you have to say, we’re going to be fine, you and me. Okay?”
Diane held her coffee mug with both hands and sniffled. “But we’ll still be finished,” she said.
He held her chin in his hand so she had to look at him. “We’re going to do this thing, Diane. Not so we can piece back together a broken, unhappy marriage but so we can both remember why we cared about each other.”
“I love you, Jack.”
“I love you, too, Diane. Okay? I always will.”
She took a long sip of her coffee. “I’m sorry I called all hysterical and said I was going to kill myself.”
“It’s my fault. We should have talked before now.”
She looked at him with a faint hint of a smile on her lips. “You did kind of drive me to do it. And then blindsiding me at the coffee shop a couple of days ago...”
“I know, I know. That was stupid and I’m sorry. Okay?” He patted her hand and put his coffee mug down. “But I have an important surveillance that I have to do tonight and if it was anything else I’d drop everything but there is a woman whose life is possibly in danger and now that I know that this woman’s life…” he touched her knee, “isn’t threatened, I can go attend to the other.”
“So many people need you, Jack.”
“I’m not blowing you off, Diane and I’m not leaving if I detect any hint that you’ll harm yourself if I go. But if you can handle it, I need to move this talk to another night when I can give it my all.”
She nodded and wiped her tears from her face. “I’ll be okay, Jack,” she said. “Now that I know you’ll come back to me and we’ll talk it all out.”
As he got up to leave, she grabbed his hand. “Jack, that thing I said to you when I was leaving the coffee shop.”
“About you and Dave?”
She nodded and looked at him and he realized she didn’t want to tell him but she also didn’t want any more lies between them. He hesitated and then took a long breath before he went to her and kissed her on top of her head. “It’s okay, Diane,” he said. “It’s over and done. Forget it. I have.”
“He…he asked about you…when we were together.”
The image of Dave came to mind and Burton worked hard to push it away. If he was going to forgive Diane, to get past what she did, he couldn’t do that remembering Dave, remembering why he hated him.
Why did I hate him?
As Diane stared up at him, her tears starting again, it suddenly occurred to Burton that sleeping with his wife aside—a crime Burton had been blissfully unaware of at the time—he still couldn’t put his finger on why he detested Kazmaroff.
“What did he ask you about?”
“Did I know why you hated him? He said he knew you did before he even opened his mouth so it wasn’t something he said or did…”
I always hated him. That’s true. I hated him from the beginning. How could that be?
Burton turned toward the door and when he did he spotted the framed photo on the mantel. A panoply of images came crashing through him as visceral and real as his ex-wife sitting on the couch watching him. Images of his last stint in Iraq. With the guys. The guys who had been more like brothers to him than his own siblings. Ketchum, Davey, Marley, Fatso and Grub.
And Beaner. The memory of the face of the young lieutenant from Boston came to Burton so swiftly that he felt his insides heave as if he were taking a ride too fast with too many sharp curves. He grabbed the back of the sofa to steady himself.
“Jack? Are you okay?”
Dear God how could he have erased that man from his memory? How is it possible to know someone for eighteen months, to live with them, laugh with them, care about them, love them—and then never call their faces or their names to mind for seven long years afterward?
“Jack, you’re scaring me.”
He turned and looked at Diane, the guilt and tears of her recent confession still wet on her face. Diane and Dave.
Holy. Crap.
His legs gave out and he sat down in the tub chair by the couch with a thump.
Dave and Beaner. That was it. He stared at the photo. How could he not have realized the similarities before?
Well, obviously on some level, he had.
The two of them were peas in the same pod. Not in looks so much but definitely in manner and the way they carried themselves. Both were arrogant and cavalier, both blond, both too cocky for their own good.
And in Beaner’s case—that would include every person in his platoon.
“I have to go,” he rasped out to Diane. “I’m sorry.” He got to his feet and stumbled to the door. He could feel her right behind him.
“Are you sure you’re alright to drive, Jack? Was it something I said? I don’t know why I had that old gun out. I wouldn’t have used it.”
“I know, Diane. And I’m fine.” He turned to her in the doorway. “I meant everything I said. We’re going to come out the other side as friends. Okay?” He touched her arm and rubbed it lightly. “Go to bed.”
She smiled sadly at him and nodded. “Same old Jack,” she said. “Always giving orders.”
It wasn’t Dave at all. It was never him.
Feeling a sense of clarity he hadn’t felt in years, he dialed Mia’s number as soon as he climbed in his car. The call went straight to voice mail. Fine, you can be as pissed at me as you want. He found Jess’s number and hit it as he pulled out onto Clairmont Road heading to I-285 and her house.
“Hello?”
“Hi, Jess, this is Jack Burton.”
“Why, hello, Jack. I’m glad you called.”
“I just wanted to let you know that I’ll be there in about fifteen minutes. I thought it was a good idea for Mia to spend the night there tonight.”
“Oh, lovely. I’ve missed the company, I must say. Although little Daisy does go a long way to making up for having a house full of people.”
Traffic began to slow a good mile before the exit off of I-285 to Peachtree Industrial. Burton saw a red tailed hawk circling high above and wondered what in the world he had spotted in the way of prey on a six-lane highway.
“Can you put Mia on for a sec?” he asked.
“Mia? She’s not here. I thought she was with you.”
The feeling that had been nagging him in the back of his mind came roaring to the front.
“I dropped her off at your place three hours ago,” he said tersely. “Is your car in the driveway?”
The phone went briefly silent and Burton had an image of Jess running to the front room, the phone clasped to her breast, to peer out the living room window.
“Yes, my car is still here,” she said gasping. “Is everything okay, Jack? Is Mia okay?”
Jack drove past the pummeled remains of someone’s family cat on the side of the road.
****
The thing that woke her was the cold. If not for that, Mia was sure she could have ignored everything else. The pain, the insistent, grinding ache in her shoulders. She came up, clawing and breathless, from the dark bliss of oblivion, urged relentlessly on by the biting cold that wouldn’t let go of her.
“Come on, babe,” a voice near her said. A blast of onions and apples accompanied the words. She opened her eyes to see his face close to hers.
Dave’s best friend.
“Wake all the way up, beautiful,” he said, his lips only inches from her face. “I need you awake for this.”
She didn’t want to be awake but her eyes widened as she looked over Keith’s shoulder into the darkness. Even moving her head that little bit shot a bolt of agony up through her arms and down her back.
She was chained with her arms over her head, her feet flat on the bare cement floor. When she jerked her arms to try to get them down, the pain cascaded down her back.
How long had she been here?
She looked wildly at Keith. “Help me,” she whispered, her voice wobbling with fear and the cold. A chill trickled across her stomach and looking down, she saw that she was wearing only her panties. She wrenched again at her arms held firmly by the cuffs over her head and twisted her head to try to see her surroundings.
“Help you?” he said, laughing, his face a cavern of bad breath and chipped teeth. “I put you here, beautiful. I’m going to help myself, is what I’m gonna do.”
“Why?” she gasped. “Why are you…why…”
“Why am I doing this?” He reached out and cupped both her chin with a hard hand. She recoiled and convulsed to escape him but he held her tight. “Why am I taking ownership of Dave’s little sis?” He dropped his hands and bent down. When he straightened back up, she saw that he held a small leather whip in his hands.
“Because I’ve always wanted to, that’s why,” he said, snapping the whip against his hand. “You know how long I’ve thought about this moment?” He leaned in close and when she turned her face away, he grabbed her chin and pulled her back to him. “Ever since the moment your brother broke my nose because I said you looked so fine.”
Mia closed her eyes and when she did, she felt her head spin as if the drug wasn’t done with her yet. She clenched her eyes tightly, hoping, praying she could force herself to pass out.
“No, you don’t, beautiful,” Keith said, slapping her face. “I need you awake for this part.”
He turned her from him and she could see that they were in some kind of warehouse or underground room. The walls were cinder block studded with a few shelves of boxes. There was a small set of stairs that led to a landing and a door…
She heard the crack of the whip before she felt it and at first she didn’t recognize the scream that followed as hers. A trail of fire crawled across the back of her hip and bottom and she didn’t have time to react more before she heard the whip snap again. This time, she knew what to expect and she twisted her hips to avoid it. The whip caught her high on her waist and snaked down her bottom.
“You move around, girl, I’ll beat you anywhere I can hit you—your stomach, your face, your arms. Trust me, you’re gonna wanna take it on the butt. Fewer nerve endings there. Now hold still or I swear I’ll cut you to ribbons.”
Mia focused on the door and waited, willing herself to stand still. She looked at the door and imagined someone coming through it…any minute now…someone coming through it to help her, to save her.
Every lash stung worse than the last until she was sure he was hitting her harder with each stroke. She could hear him speaking to her but she closed her thoughts to what was happening in this cellar. All she could see was that door...
When she awoke, it was quiet and this time what awakened her was the pain in her shoulders. She staggered to her feet to relieve the agony of her shoulders carrying her weight and she gasped in pain as she did. She must not have been out very long and when she twisted around to see where Keith was, she heard the flush of a toilet behind the door at the top of the stairs.
Will I live through this? Does anyone know where I am? Have I been here for days or hours?
“Awake, I see,” Keith said as he opened the door and came down the stairs to her. “That drug I gave you is unpredictable. When you wouldn’t take it in the drink, I had to go to Plan B and I wasn’t sure you’d be awake enough for this. My God, you’re beautiful.” He stopped a few feet from her and seemed to be honestly appreciating what he saw.
Her arms were stretched out over her head, her face streaked with mascara, tears and sweat, her back a latticework of welts and bruises.
He took out his cellphone and snapped a picture of her, then walked behind her to take it from that angle.
“Yes, please,” Mia said hoarsely, her acceptance of her torture and death now vying with her anger and mounting hatred of this man. “Please make it as easy as possible for them to build the case against you.”
He studied the screen of his cell phone before looking up at her. “These’ll keep me warm on many a cold night,” he said, grinning. “And the best part? No one will ever know I have them, or what happened here. No, correction. The best part? Your buddy Burton will be on the hook for it.”
Mia tried to focus past her fear. Even helpless and almost certainly soon to be dead, as long as she could talk, she had some hope. But the pain, the remnant effects of the drug, and her own terror were all coming together to make it difficult to understand him.
“You think the cops will think Jack did this?” she said. Her lip was swollen from where he’d slapped her. “The cops need evidence to pin this on Jack.”
“Oh, they’ll have evidence…and something better,” Keith said, picking up the whip again from where he’d dropped it. “They’ll have your accusation.”
“Why would I accuse him? That’s mad.”
“You will because first, after being missing for two days, when you are finally found in Jack’s garage, battered and raped, and the police ask you what happened…wait for it…you won’t remember any of this.” He waved the whip to take in the confines of the small cement floored warehouse.
“I…I won’t remember?”
“That’s right, beautiful. I injected you with a very special concoction of Ecstasy and Kit-Kat or Ketamine.” He glanced at his wristwatch with a dramatic flourish.“I figure I have about two more hours before you fade out on me and become totally unresponsive. After that…” He shrugged. “You won’t remember a thing.”
She rattled the cuffs over her head, the anger building in her. “You think I won’t remember this? You’ll never get away with it.”
He leaned in close. “This ain’t my first rodeo, honey,” he said, squeezing her bottom until tears of pain sprang into her eyes. “You won’t remember a thing. I’ll call the tip in that I saw Burton carrying what looked like a rolled carpet into his garage and I’ll make sure he doesn’t have an alibi that’ll stand up for the time period. Then, I’m sure your lawyer, your mother and the rape counselors—I hear they’re very good—will all help convince you to testify against him.”
He released her and smiled. “And I’ll have my photos of our time together to enjoy again and again…until I arrange for a repeat performance which, trust me, beautiful, I will.”
Is this possible? He’s done this before? And nobody knows?
She shivered and gripped the ends of the chains that held her arms over her head. Two more hours, he said. Two more hours and then it’s over. I can last that long. Please God, let me last that long.
“Ready for round two, beautiful?” he said as he grinned and slapped the whip in his hand.