Cold Midnight Read online

  56

  KYLIE CHECKED HER WATCH FOR THE EIGHT-MILLIONTH time. Thirty minutes had passed since Chase called. He must have hit traffic.

  The security guard pacing the dining-room floor, hand on the butt of his gun, paused to give her a sympathetic smile. He looked no older than twenty, with sandy brown hair, sky-blue eyes and a deep, dark tan. Chase had introduced him three days ago as Brian. “He’ll be here soon,” Brian said.

  She returned his smile as she folded her nervous hands on the table. She’d tried Chase’s cell phone five minutes ago, and it had rung until she got voice mail. He must be in a dead zone, she thought. Relax. Take a breath.

  “Thank you for . . . protecting me,” she said, and almost winced. But he was. He’d insisted she sit in the only room in the house that had no windows, while he paced back and forth between the entrance to the kitchen and the arched doorway that led to the living room.

  “It’s no problem, ma’am.”

  If she hadn’t been so freaked about Sam, she might have felt old at the “ma’am.” Instead, she searched for something to say, to ease the anxiety that kept trying to grow behind her eyes. “Are you from this area?” She guessed Boston from his accent.

  “No, ma’am. I’m from outside Portland, Maine.”

  “Ah. It’s cold there.” Duh. God, she was bad at this when she was distracted.

  Brian smiled at her again and nodded. “A lot colder than here. The beach here is a lot more fun.” He flashed her a devilish grin. “Especially at spring break.”

  She laughed. A heartbreaker. He actually reminded her some of Chase when they trained together.

  Come on, Chase, where the hell are you? She reached for the cell phone on the table. “I’m going to try him again.”

  She pressed redial and held the phone to her ear, surprised when she heard the phone ring in the living room. “He’s here,” she said and jumped to her feet just as the guard, hand tightening on his weapon, turned toward the arched door and blocked her from racing into the other room.

  She started to demand he get out of the way, but then his body jerked and he reeled back into her, the violent force of his body slamming her back against the dining room table. She landed on the floor beside him, ribs smarting where she’d hit the table’s edge, and stared at the dark stain spreading over the front of his white security-guard shirt. He gazed at her with dazed eyes the color of a storm-darkening sky. His lips moved as he tried to say something, and a thick stream of blood trickled out of the side of his mouth.

  “No!” Kylie shouted, and scrambled to her knees to grab his limp hand.

  His eyes started to roll back, and she jostled his hand and arm. “Don’t do that, Brian. Stay with me.”

  “Kylie.”

  She shook her head at Sam’s voice, wanting to deny what had just happened, refusing to look up and acknowledge him, acknowledge that Chase had been right. Right now, though, all she could process was that Sam had shot Brian, and blood already saturated the security guard’s shirt. She needed to stop the bleeding, needed to help him.

  But before she could place her hands over the bullet wound, his body went deathly still, and his fingers slackened between hers. Too late. Oh, God, she’d let shock waste too much time. And now it was too late.

  She’d known him for three days, but a fierce grief nearly blinded her. That bastard Sam killed Brian. A sweet security guard with his whole life in front of him. Who lived far away from home and loved the beach and pronounced “car” as “cah” and “drawer” as “draw.”

  “Kylie.”

  She coached herself to keep a clear head. Chase would be here any minute. All she had to do was stall. All she had to do was keep her eye on the ball.

  Raising her head, she met Sam’s eyes and hoped all the hate she felt at that moment didn’t shine through. The expression on his face—cold determination—chilled her almost as much as where he aimed his gun. Her right knee.

  “I need you to get up,” he said evenly. “If you want to keep all that hardware in your knee working, I’d advise you to do as I say. Nice and easy.”

  She pushed herself to her feet, hoping her wobbly legs would support her. Hurry, Chase, hurry. But then it hit her that she’d heard his cell phone ring earlier—

  Her heart jolted as her gaze locked on Sam’s. “Where’s Chase?”

  “You don’t need to worry about that right now.” He gestured with the gun. “Turn around.”

  She obeyed, closing her eyes against the sight of Brian on the floor, trying to close her heart to the possibility that Sam had done the same to Chase. But she failed—Chase could already be dead—and black spots splattered across her vision like paintball bullets striking a target. No. Oh, God. No, no, no.

  “Hands behind your back.”

  She didn’t ignore the command. She just couldn’t follow it as her brain focused on one thing and one thing only. “What did you do to Chase?”

  Sam seized her right wrist and jerked it behind her, followed by her left, where he bound them tightly together with plastic restraints. By the time it occurred to her that he’d had to holster his weapon to do that, he’d grabbed hold of the back of a dining-room chair with one hand, and steering her with the other, dragged it into the kitchen.

  After situating the chair in the middle of the kitchen, he forced her around so that her back was to the seat, as if preparing to sit, and walked behind her. He grasped her bound wrists and drew them up and back. Her shoulders protested the unnatural position, and she bowed forward with a pained gasp.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Just relax and work with me.”

  He pulled her back by the wrists until the backs of her knees hit the edge of the chair’s seat, and she had no choice but to sit. When she did, her arms were draped over the chair’s back, and she realized his intent. With even minimal movement restricted, getting up, especially quickly, would be next to impossible. There would be no way for her to charge him or otherwise try to disarm him.

  He didn’t glance her way as he started going through cabinets, searching for something with desperate determination. Sweat had plastered his green cotton polo to his sculpted back.

  “Finally,” he muttered as he withdrew a bottle of Jim Beam left behind by a previous renter. About four inches of whiskey sloshed around in the bottle as he spun off the top and tipped it back for a long swig, his hand visibly shaking.

  Kylie, watching his throat work as he gulped the cheap bourbon, tested the security of the plastic straps around her wrists. So tight that slipping free wasn’t an option, and she wasn’t strong enough to break them.

  With less than an inch of booze left in the bottle, Sam dragged the back of his hand through the sweat dampening his flushed brow. “Almost there,” he murmured, eyes red and watering. “Just hang on.”

  Almost where? Oh, God, what had he done to Chase? “Where is he, Sam? Where is Chase?”

  He slammed the bottle onto the counter. “Just shut up.”

  She tensed when he pulled the gun out of his holster and aimed it at her. “I should have killed you back then. We wouldn’t be here now if I’d just gotten it over with. But that pussy Mark ran away, and I had to stop him before he could rat me out.”

  Full realization clicked, like a whoosh of flame in her face, singeing and airless. “You were one of them,” she whispered. “Ten years ago . . . you . . .”

  Turning his back to her, he set the gun on the counter, within easy reach, and stared down at the oven as though trying to figure out how it worked.

  “Why?” she asked faintly.

  “Don’t talk to me.”

  But she had to do something . . . stall him, distract him, convince him that whatever he had planned was a very bad idea. She couldn’t just sit here and let the growing fear take over, let Sam do . . . whatever he was going to do . . .

  “I’m sure you had a good reason, Sam, so I want to understand. Please help me to understand.”

  He gave his hea
d a curt shake without looking at her. “Stop talking to me like you give a shit. You’ve never cared about me.”

  “Of course I care about you. We’re friends.”

  “Friends!” He whirled around and advanced on her, his fingers curled into claws in front of him, like he wanted to grab her by the throat and throttle her. “You were never my fucking friend.”

  If she could have backed away, she would have. This furious, red-faced Sam screaming in her face frightened her more than the gun. “I . . . what . . . I don’t know what . . .” She trailed off and said the only thing she thought might help: “I’m sorry.”

  He pivoted away from her, lowering those clawlike hands to his sides and making fists as he took three strides back toward his weapon on the counter. But when he got there, instead of the gun, he snatched up the whiskey bottle and hurled it at the wall.

  Kylie closed her eyes, thinking he’d take his frustration out on her next. When nothing happened, she opened her eyes to see that he had his head tilted back, the heels of his hands pressed to his temples as though trying to hold in something that was burrowing its way out of his skull. The man was coming apart right in front of her.

  And she knew without a doubt that when he finished—or maybe during—he was going to kill her.

  “Where’s Chase, Sam?” she asked, trying to inject strength into her trembling voice. “What did you do to him?”

  He lowered his hands and stared at them as if he’d never seen them before. “I killed him. I killed my partner.”

  Her head went light, and she fought off the slow, sickening spin, unable to think over the roar in her ears. Chase was dead. Chase was dead. But then she shook her head, refused to believe it. “No. You’re lying. You didn’t kill him.”

  Sam pierced her with a dark look. “I have no reason to lie. Not anymore.”

  “I don’t believe you.” She wouldn’t. Couldn’t. She would sense it if Chase were dead, would somehow know.

  “I left the Explorer running in the garage and closed the garage door. He was cuffed inside, with no hope of escape. He went to sleep, Kylie. And he won’t wake up. Ever.”

  No, she thought. No. Eye on the ball. Focus. Breathe. She swallowed the rush of grief. “Why? Just tell me why.”

  “It’s your fault,” he said, calm again. “I tried everything to send you running back to LA, everything to stop this moment from coming. I don’t want to be this person, this . . . this . . . bad person. But it’s coming at me like a freight train, and no matter how hard I try, no matter what I do, I can’t get off the tracks. And it’s your fault!”

  He lunged forward and backhanded her hard enough to tip the chair onto its back legs. When it slammed back to all fours, Kylie’s body snapped forward, held in place by the restraints, and she sat with her head slumped down, quiet and still, fighting the black dizzy spin of pain reverberating inside her skull.

  Don’t pass out. Do not pass out.

  The salty, metallic taste of blood in her mouth focused her, and she started to raise her head, to face the monster who killed the only man she’d ever loved. She’d make him pay. Somehow. Some way.

  But she froze at the cold, hard pressure of metal against the top of her head, followed by the unmistakable, heart-stopping slide and click of a cocking gun.

  “I should have brought a gun that day,” Sam said. “We wouldn’t be here now if I’d had the balls. But all I really wanted to do was take something important from you, something you cared about, just like you took something from me.”

  She didn’t move, didn’t breathe. Sweat trickled between her breasts, gathered on the tip of her nose. She needed to spit out the blood gathering in her mouth but didn’t dare. Instead, she swallowed it and the encroaching terror.

  “I’m sorry, Sam, but I don’t know what you’re talking about. I don’t remember you.”

  “You know how incredibly offensive that is? You changed the course of my life, and you don’t even remember doing it.”

  “What did I do? Please tell me what I did.”

  “Patti Robinson.”

  Kylie closed her eyes against the sting of tears and perspiration. Oh, God, Chase.

  Okay, think, focus. Patti Robinson . . . yes, one of three other girls she and Trisha had hung out with in high school. The five of them had been inseparable. More regret: She’d lost touch with all but Trisha when she fled for LA.

  The barrel of Sam’s gun dug into her scalp. “Don’t tell me you don’t remember Patti.”

  “Of course I remember Patti,” she said quickly. “She was one of my closest friends.”

  “I asked her out. On a date. I bet you don’t remember that.”

  Kylie cycled through memories scattered by two swings of a baseball bat. She vaguely remembered a conversation with Patti about a guy who’d been busted for . . . something. Kylie had advised her not to go out with him alone. Had that been Sam?

  “You talked her out of it,” Sam said, every word getting a bitter twist. “Said I wasn’t good enough for her, that I was beneath you and your popular friends.”

  Kylie shook her head, heard the scrape of her hair against the gun’s tip. “That’s not what I said—”

  “She ditched me,” Sam cut in. “Ditched me, made me look like an idiot to my friends. Because you had your nose stuck up so high in the air no one else was considered worthy. You had everything, everything, handed to you. You hung out with cheerleaders and football players and could have gone out with any guy you wanted. Kendall Falls worshipped at your feet. The world revolves around people like you. And me? I had nothing. I was just a dumb skinny kid with zits who got caught smoking pot in the bathroom. The one thing I wanted, the one thing that could have made my world livable—a girl as sweet and special as Patti—you took away from me without a second thought.”

  As he adjusted his grip on the gun, Kylie squeezed her eyes closed. “Sam, please—”

  “Look at me.”

  At the higher level of gravity in his voice, her heart stuttered into a new, hyper pace, and she didn’t dare move, didn’t dare twitch as the ligaments and tendons in her arms began to cramp. Everything hurt. Her shoulders, her jaw. Her heart. Chase . . .

  “Look at me,” Sam said again, and tapped her head with the pistol. “I want to see your face when I blow your brains out.”

  She lifted her head slowly and met his crazed, red-rimmed eyes. She’d never known hate before. But here it was, and maybe, just maybe, she could understand what Sam must have felt ten years ago when Patti rejected him. This man took Chase away from her, and if she had a baseball bat and free hands, she wouldn’t hesitate to swing for the fences.

  “Step away from her, Sam.”

  At the quiet statement, Sam jerked around, toward the door leading into the dining room, where Chase leaned unsteadily against the door jamb.

  Kylie gasped, at first relieved beyond belief—he’s alive!—then horrified at how bleary-eyed he looked. Perspiration trickled down the sides of his flushed face, and blood bathed both of his wrists and hands. What the hell happened to him?

  Sam whipped back around and had the gun aimed at Kylie’s chest before anyone could draw another breath. “Don’t do anything stupid, Chase,” he said. “I mean it.”

  Chase held onto the frame of the door for support, blinking as though trying to focus. “Same goes.”

  Sam, having gotten a grip on his composure, cast him a grim look of approval. “So you were able to get free after all. What’d you do? Rip apart the interior?”

  “Something like that,” Chase said. “Takes longer to die by motor vehicle exhaust these days, remember? Catalytic converters.”

  “Looks to me like it wouldn’t have taken much longer,” Sam drawled.

  “I got lucky. Now put down the gun.”

  “No, thank you.”

  “Then point it at me, not at her.”

  “No,” Kylie said. Her stomach lurched at the thought of Sam, precariously balanced on a very narrow ledge of control,
aiming a loaded gun at Chase. “Don’t.”

  Chase didn’t acknowledge her plea, or her, actually, his attention laser-focused on his partner. “Sam, please. I’m on your side.”

  Sam’s laugh sounded like a psychotic cackle. “You’re on my side? Are you fucking serious?”

  “Whatever happened in the past, it’s the past. We can talk it out. What have you got to lose?”

  “Everything!” Sam shouted. “I’ve got everything to lose! Why the fuck do you think we’re here?”

  57

  CHASE STOOD STILL, TENSE AND WATCHFUL AS HIS carbon-monoxide-deadened senses began to sharpen and the roar of blood in his ears retreated. Chancing a glance at Kylie, he tried not to react to the terror sparking in her eyes or the blood on her mouth. Sam, the son of a bitch, had struck her. Chase would make him pay for that first.

  “Tell me what’s going on, Sam,” he said evenly. He’d always had a knack for sounding reasonable while the inside of his head threatened to disintegrate. “I’m sure we can work something out.”

  Sam’s jaw muscles flexed. “I’m going to have to kill you again.” His voice broke on the final words. “Christ, Chase, I don’t have a fucking choice.”

  “Tell me why, Sam. Tell me what went wrong.”

  Sam shifted his aim to Kylie’s head. “She. Came. Back,” he ground out, punctuating each word with a mimicked recoil of the gun.

  Chase’s stomach cartwheeled. Jesus! He cast a glance at Kylie, to try to calm her with a reassuring look. The strain of discomfort showed clearly on her face, creasing her forehead and shimmering her brow with perspiration. But instead of staring at Sam in abject terror, she watched Chase with pleading eyes. Her voice seemed to echo in his head when she mouthed: Be careful. Please be careful.

  Chase’s heart wrenched. Sam was pointing the gun at her, yet she feared for him. He couldn’t have loved her more.

  “I thought it’d be okay,” Sam said, voice wobbling all over the place, “until she decided to build that damn tennis center right there. Right where I buried all the evidence.”

  Kylie cast one last pleading glance at Chase before she shifted her rock-solid focus to Sam. “Tell us about Mark,” she said, as steady and calm as she’d been the day she walked out on the court for the Australian Open final. “What did he do wrong?”