Darkness Before the Dawn (Maggie Bennett 2)

“Enough to see Bud Willis check out,” she said grimly.

For a while, it looked as if she’d miss that particular pleasure. He’d lapsed into a coma in the last hour, surfacing every now and then to call Maggie’s name, then sinking back. His vital signs were erratic and fading. The doctors looked grim.

“We’re not going to be able to save him,” the chief surgeon told them as they waited outside intensive care in the huge hospital complex. He shook his head in disgust. “We’re losing him.”

“It’s no great loss,” Maggie said coldly.

“Not true,” Jackson rumbled. “He knows a hell of a lot that he’s not telling.”

The surgeon turned to check the myriad tiny screens that were monitoring Willis’s fast-disappearing life. “You may as well go in. I don’t even know if he’ll regain consciousness, but he’s not going to get any better.”

Maggie headed for the door, but Jackson stayed where he was. She turned to give him a beseeching look. “Aren’t you coming in with me?”

He shook his head. “It’s something you need to face alone, Maggie. You’ve come this far. You can go all the way.”

She hesitated, her hand on the door. And then she entered the room.

The blue tile room was alive with the hum of machines, pumping fluids into Willis’s comatose body, draining them back out again, breathing for him, living for him. She looked at the dying man and felt nothing—no sorrow, no rage, no hatred, no regret. She looked at the shell of the evil man and felt absolutely nothing.

His eyelids flickered open, and his malevolent gaze moved unerringly to her still figure. “You came.” His voice was a whisper of sound, but she heard, understood.

“I came.” She refused to move any closer, just stood watching him out of impassive eyes.

“Wanted to see me die, didn’t you, sugarbuns?”

“Not particularly,” she said. “I would have been just as happy to stay on in Chicago for a few days instead of rushing back here.”

“I’ll make it worth your while,” he croaked, his eyes bright with malice. “Come closer, sweetcakes.”

“Drop dead, Willis.”

He laughed, a painful laugh. “I’ll do just that. I just have one little thing to tell you. A small little deathbed confession, to make my passing easier.”

“Why didn’t you tell Jackson? He could have passed the message along.”

“This is between you and me.” His breathing was hoarse and labored, and the machines were making erratic noises. “You have a good time screwing Randall?”

“Terrific,” she snapped. “Anything else?”

He grinned a semblance of his skeletal smile, and his bruised, bloodshot eyes were shining with glee. “I lied to you, sweetheart. I didn’t ice Pulaski for kicks.”

The lump of pain formed quickly, filling her stomach and heart and forcing the air from her lungs. “You didn’t?” she managed calmly. “You want to tell me why?”

“Randall. Randall Carter paid me twenty thousand dollars to kill Mack Pulaski.” He laughed, and the laughter turned into a choking cough. “Have a happy life, sugarbuns.” And the machines surrounding him stopped their noisy chirps and beeps and resolved into a lifeless hum.

“I don’t believe you.” Her voice came out a raw gasp of pain. But Bud Willis was beyond hearing. “I don’t believe you,” she repeated, reaching out to clutch at his shoulders in desperation. But his body was still and limp, and there was no way she could get the truth from him.

She stood very still as she felt her life drain out with his. As her heart screamed no, her brain, her wicked, cold, tormented brain said, quite possibly. And that possibility was more than she could bear.

She turned and walked past the crowd of medical technicians that rushed past her to labor over Willis’s still body. She walked past Jackson with unseeing eyes, down the hallway, and out into the steamy Washington night.

The thick velvet blackness of evening settled around her, smothering her in its inky stillness, matching the disbelieving emptiness in her heart. And she walked on, into the darkness, into the night.