The Kept Woman (Will Trent 8)

‘No you’re not.’ Will towered over him. ‘Move, or I’ll move you.’

‘Is this about before with your girlfriend? Mistress? Whatever?’ Collier smirked. ‘Lookit, dude, you should’a told me you were seeing her. Handle it like a man.’

‘You’re right.’ Will reared back his fist and punched him in the side of the head—not just for Sara, but for being an asshole and being in the way.

Collier’s hands went up a second too late. The blow was harder than Will intended, or maybe Collier was just one of those guys who couldn’t take a punch. His eyes rolled back in his head. His mouth fished open. He dropped like a sack of shit thrown from wherever it is you throw sacks of shit from, knocked out cold before he hit the floor.

Will experienced five seconds of sheer bliss before he came back to his senses. He looked down at his hand, startled by his own sudden act of violence. He flexed his fingers. The skin had broken over two of his knuckles. Trickles of blood slid down his wrist. For a moment he found himself wondering if the hand had acted of its own accord, some kind of possession he couldn’t control. This wasn’t him. He didn’t just haul off and punch people, even people like Collier, who deserved it.

This was Angie’s real power over Will: she brought out the very worst in him.

Will untucked his shirt. He wiped the blood off his hand. He tucked the shirt back in. He leaned down. He grabbed Collier by the shoulders and propped him up in the doorway. Then he walked across the hall and continued searching for Angie.

Another office. Another desk. Another overturned bookshelf. A shopping cart with an old IBM Selectric. He turned around. There was a metal cabinet by the door. Every other office seemed to have one. Six feet tall. Three feet wide. Eighteen inches deep. Unlike the others, the doors were closed.

Will wiped the sweat off his palms. He wrapped his fingers around the handle. He tried to turn the latch. Rust kept it from moving. He put his shoulder into it, practically lifting the cabinet off the floor. There was a loud pop. The door squealed open.

Empty.

She might hide in a cabinet. Angie liked dark places. Places where she could see you but you couldn’t see her. The basement at the children’s home was her favorite retreat. Someone had dragged a futon downstairs and laid it on the cold brick floor. Kids would smoke down there. Do other things. Mrs Flannigan, the lady who ran the home, couldn’t handle the stairs. Her knees were old. She carried a lot of weight. She had no idea what was going on down there. Or maybe she did. Maybe she understood that physical comforts were all they had to offer each other.

Will took out his handkerchief. He wiped the back of his neck.

He would never forget being down in the basement with Angie. His first time. He wasn’t shaking so much as vibrating with excitement and fear and dread that he would do it wrong or too soon or backward and she would laugh at him and he would have to kill himself.

Angie was three years older than Will. She’d done a lot of things with a lot of boys, some other things with a lot of men, not always her choice, but the fact was that she knew what she was doing and he did not.

Just the touch of her hands made him shiver. He was clumsy. He forgot things, like how to unbutton his own pants. At that point in his life, the only people who had ever touched Will were either hurting him or stitching him up. He couldn’t help himself. He started crying. Really crying. Not like the hot tears streaming down his face when his nose was broken or when he cut open his own arm with a straight razor.

Big, gulping, humiliating sobs.

Angie hadn’t laughed at him. She had held him. Her arms around his back. Her legs wrapped with his. Will hadn’t known what to do with his hands. He had never been held before. He had never been physically close to another human being. They had stayed in the basement for hours, Angie holding him, kissing him, showing him what to do. She had promised to never let Will go, but the truth was that things between them were never the same. She could never look at him again without seeing him as broken.

The next time Will had felt that close to a woman was almost thirty years later.

‘Trent!’ Collier was at the end of the hall, bobbing like a Weeble Wobble. He winced as his fingers touched his ear. Blood streaked down the side of his face and neck.

Will returned his handkerchief to his pocket. He pushed open another door, searched another room.

Angie, he kept thinking. Where are you hiding?

There was no use calling for her, because he knew that she would not want to be found. Angie was a wild animal. She did not show weakness. She slinked away to lick her wounds in private. Will had always known that when her time came, she would go off somewhere and die on her own. The same as the woman who’d raised her.

Or at least tried to raise her.

Angie was not even ten years old when Deidre Polaski injected her final not-fatal-enough overdose of heroin. The woman had spent the next thirty-four years in a vegetative coma inside a state-run hospice facility. Angie had once told Will that she wasn’t sure which was worse: living with Deidre’s pimp or living at the children’s home.

‘Trent!’ Collier braced his hands against the wall. Spit drooled out of his mouth. ‘Jesus Christ. What the fuck did you hit me with, a sledgehammer?’

Will struggled against his guilt, forcing himself not to apologize. He pushed open the next door. He felt his stomach clench as his eyes scanned what was left of the bathroom. The floor had rotted through. Broken toilets, sinks and pipes had crashed to the level below.

There was another metal storage cabinet on the other side of the hole. Doors closed. Could Angie be inside? Would she cling to the wall, edging her way to the other side of the room so she could close herself off and wait to die?

Collier said, ‘You’re not going in there.’ He stood behind Will, his hand covering his bloody ear. ‘No kidding, man. You’ll fall to your death.’

Will took out his handkerchief and handed it to him.

Collier hissed a curse as he put the cloth to his ear. ‘That cabinet’s a foot wide, dude. How thin is this chick?’

‘She could fit in there.’

‘Sitting down?’

Will imagined Angie sitting in the cabinet. Eyes closed. Listening.

Collier said, ‘Okay, this chick is hurt, all right? Real bad. She has all these other rooms to choose from, but this is the one she goes into, the one with the giant hole in it. How’s she even gonna get over there?’

He had a point. Angie wasn’t athletic. She hated sweat.

Will turned around. He went into the bathroom across the hall.

Again Collier watched him from the doorway, arms folded, leaning against the jamb. ‘They told me you were a stubborn prick.’

Will kicked open a stall door.

‘I guess you got your ass handed to you by the good doctor?’

‘Shut up.’ Will heard the echo of Sara saying the same two words a few hours ago. He’d never seen her that mad before.

Collier said, ‘What’s your secret, man? I mean, no offense, but Brad Pitt you ain’t.’

Will grabbed Collier’s shirt and moved him out of the way.

Angie wasn’t on this floor. Six more to go. Will headed toward the stairs and started the climb to the next level. Was he doing this the wrong way? Should he have started at the top floor instead of the bottom? Was there an attic in this place? A top-floor C-suite with a panoramic view?