Sacred (Kenzie & Gennaro 3)

I love you. Completely.

Desiree    

By the time Jay reached the Ambassador, Price had checked out.

He stood in the parking lot, looking up at the U-shaped balcony that ran along the wall on the second floor, and that’s when the Jamaican housekeeper began to scream.

Jay ran up the stairs and saw the woman bent at the waist and screaming outside Price’s room. He stepped around her and looked through the open door.

Desiree’s corpse sat on the floor between the TV and the minifridge. The first thing Jay noticed was that the fingers and thumbs of both her hands had been severed at the joints.

Blood dripped from what remained of her chin onto Jay’s LSU sweatshirt.

Desiree’s face was a shattered hole, pulverized by a shotgun blast fired from less than ten feet. Her honey hair, which Jay had shampooed himself the previous night, was matted with blood and speckled with brain tissue.

From far, far away, it seemed to Jay, he heard the sound of screaming. And the hum of several air conditioners, thousands going at once it seemed in this cheap motel, trying to pour cool air into the hellish heat of these cinder block cells, until the sound was like a swarm of bees in his ears.

23

“So, I tracked down Price at a motel just up the street from here.” Jay rubbed his eyes with his fists. “I got the room next door to him. Cheap walls. I sat with my head against the wall an entire day listening to him over there in his room. Maybe, I dunno, I was listening for sounds of regret, weeping, anguish, anything. But he just watched TV and drank all day. Then he called for a hooker. Less than forty-eight hours after he shot Desiree in the face and cut off her fingers, the prick orders up a woman like takeout.”

Jay lit another cigarette, stared at the flame for a moment.

“After the hooker left, I went over to his room. We had some words and I pushed him around a little bit. I was hoping he’d grab a weapon, and whatta ya know? He did. A six-inch switchblade. Fucking pimp’s knife. Good thing he pulled it, though. Made what I did next look like self-defense. Sort of.”

Jay turned his worn face toward the window, looked out as the rain let up just a bit. When he spoke again, his voice was flat and souless:

“I cut a smile through his abdomen from hip to hip, held his chin tight and made him look me in the eyes as his large intestine spilled out onto the floor.”

He shrugged. “I think Desiree’s memory was owed that.”

It was probably seventy-five degrees outside, but the air in the diner felt colder than slate in a mortuary.

“So what are you going to do now, Jay?” Angie said.

He smiled the smile of a ghost. “I’m going back to Boston, and I’m going to open up Trevor Stone, too.”

“And then what, spend the rest of your life in jail?”

He looked at me. “I don’t care. If the fates so decide, fine. Patrick, you get one shot at love, that’s if you’re very lucky. Well, I was very lucky. Forty-one years old, I fall in love with a woman nearly half my age for two weeks. And she dies. And, okay, the world’s a tough place. You get something good, sooner or later you’ll get served up something really bad just to even up the scales.” He patted the tabletop in a quick drumbeat. “Fine. I accept that. Don’t like it, but I accept it. The scales have evened up for me. Now I’m going to even them up for Trevor.”

“Jay,” Angie said. “It’d be a suicide mission.”

He shrugged. “Tough shit. He dies. Besides, you think he hasn’t already put a hit out on me? I know too much. The moment I broke off daily contact with him from here, I signed my death warrant. Why do you think he sent Clifton and Cushing with you guys?” He closed his eyes, sighed audibly. “Nope. That’s it. The fucker eats a bullet.”

“He’ll be dead in five months.”

Another shrug. “Not soon enough for me.”

“What about the law?” Angie said. “You can testify he paid you to kill his daughter.”

“Good idea, Ange. Case should reach trial maybe only six or seven months after he’s already died.” He dropped several bills on the check. “I’m taking that old piece of shit out. This week. Slowly and painfully.” He smiled. “Any questions?”

Most of Jay’s things were still in an efficiency unit he’d rented when he’d first arrived at the Ukumbak Apartments in downtown St. Petersburg. He was going to swing by, grab his stuff, and hit the road, planes being too undependable, airports too easily watched. Without sleep or any other preparation, he was going to drive twenty-four hours straight up the eastern seaboard, which would put him in Marblehead by two-thirty in the morning. There, he planned to break into Trevor Stone’s house and torture the old man to death.

“Hell of a plan,” I said as we bolted from the steps of the diner and ran toward our cars in the pelting rain.

“You like it? Just something I came up with.”

Angie and I, having no other options that we could conceive of, decided to follow Jay back to Massachusetts. Maybe we could keep discussing it at rest stops and gas stations, either talk Jay out of it or come up with a more sane solution to his problem. The Celica we’d rented from Elite Motors—the same place Jay had rented his 3000 GT—we’d send back on an Amtrak, have them send the bill to Trevor. Dead or alive, he could afford it.

The Weeble would discover we were gone sooner or later, and fly back home with his laptop and his tiny eyes, and figure out a way to explain to Trevor how he’d lost us. Cushing, I assumed, would climb back into his coffin until he was needed again.

“He’s crazy,” Angie said as we followed Jay’s taillights toward the highway.

“Jay?”

She nodded. “He thinks he fell in love with Desiree in two weeks, but that’s bullshit.”

“Why?”

“How many people—adult people—do you know who fall in love in two weeks?”

“Doesn’t mean it can’t happen,” I said.

“Maybe. But I think he fell in love with Desiree even before he met her. The beautiful girl who sat alone in the parks, waiting for a savior. It’s what all guys want.”

“A beautiful girl who sits alone in parks?”

She nodded. “Waiting to be saved.”

Up ahead, Jay turned onto a ramp leading onto 275 North, his small red taillights blurring in the rain.

“Possibly true,” I said. “Possibly. But whatever the case, if you got involved with someone for a short time, under intense circumstances, and then that person was taken from you, shot in the face—you’d become obsessed, too.”