Boyfriend from Hell (Saturn's Daughters) Page 20

  Cora couldn’t fit all those boxes in a Mini Cooper. That left me one choice. I glared at my phone awhile before I punched in Andre’s number.

  • • •

  An anonymous white utility van pulled up at the bar an hour later. I was standing under the overhang, waiting out of the drizzle, Max’s boxes lined up along the wall, and Milo in my bag. The boys hadn’t thought it a wise idea to let strangers into their shed, which contained other cartons and crates besides Max’s. If these were the boxes the rapist had wanted, they might be hotter than stolen parts.

  Andre climbed out of the driver’s seat, looking cool and substantial again. He gave me a once-over to make certain I wasn’t freaking out or holding a gun on him and silently began lugging boxes to the back of the van. I grabbed what I could, and those of the guys still capable of walking straight helped. In a matter of minutes, Max’s life was inside Andre’s van. I was pretty certain Max would not be pleased.

  Really, though, it’s just not right for your boyfriend to be dead and still inside your head. It’s hard to move on like that, so we could both have been displeased, I supposed.

  There was just enough room in the van to roll the Harley into the back with the help of my guys. Andre watched silently. I had no idea if he was ready to blow up or just had nothing to say. At that point, I really didn’t care. My alternatives were shrinking with each passing hour. I was still thoroughly frustrated that I was wasting study time.

  I had goons gunning for me, a van load of potentially explosive material for which a man had died, a boyfriend in hell, and a life that was falling apart. I needed someone to talk with. Woo-woo Themis and Max weren’t helpful, and Max’s biker friends were limited in their understanding.

  Andre probably wouldn’t believe me, but he was the only other person who knew about the boxes. Who else could I turn to?

  I climbed into the passenger seat while he got behind the wheel. I checked on Milo, and he’d fallen asleep, looking all cute and kitteny and not in the least bobcat-like. Even my pet was weird.

  “Where to?” Andre asked without inflection.

  “Know an empty warehouse?” I slumped in the seat, as much from exhaustion as for concealment.

  He turned the ignition and backed out without answering.

  I got it. If I wouldn’t talk to him, he wouldn’t talk to me.

  I didn’t know why I was resisting Andre. He’d offered me a job, given me the Miata as a reward, come to my rescue with an AK-47 or the equivalent. He’d even mentioned the apartments and would have taken me to see one if I had asked. And he was here now, the only semi-sane person I could count on.

  Instinct continued to rebel against offering this man with so much power any part of me, but I just wasn’t seeing any choices here.

  “Max’s family owns part of Acme Chemical,” I said conversationally. “He was investigating his family business when he died. Those boxes contain his papers.”

  “Says who?” Andre demanded gruffly. “A bunch of stoned bikers?”

  Well, there was another reason I’d been stalling. I rolled my eyes and considered opening my compact, but having Max and Andre yelling at each other wasn’t conducive to my limited sanity.

  “Max trusted his friends,” I said calmly enough, trying to keep my weirdness to a minimum for the sake of rational communication. “Acme apparently hired corporate spies to record everything I’ve done since the funeral.”

  He snorted. “Hope you didn’t do anything too personal.”

  “My boyfriend is dead,” I reminded him. “Let’s not get too perverted. I’m trying to be careful here. If Acme was spying on me, then they were also spying on the Zone.”

  “Yeah, I gathered that. What I want to know is why.”

  Finally, he sounded as if he might be coming to life.

  “Because we’re weird?” I suggested. “Maybe we’re their own personal zoo or monkey experiment.”

  “Not until you blasted Max,” he reminded me.

  “I didn’t blast him!” I said, summoning righteous indignation. “His brakes were cut and his steering mechanism tampered with.”

  “Like tires go flat and sprinkler systems flood when you’re around?”

  Not going there. I’d been mad that day. Had my powers somehow cut Max’s brakes? I hadn’t asked for him to die, but if my powers were metaphorical and not literal, then damning him to hell pretty well included death. It was my turn to sit in silence, refusing to talk. Andre didn’t need to know that, did he?

  “All right, I apologize,” he finally said. “Sarah might intentionally kill someone, but you wouldn’t.”

  I sneaked a peek at his profile, but we were driving down dark roads and all I could see were his wide shoulders and his too-perfect nose. I wondered if Saturn had sons and if so, who Andre had killed to get that profile.

  “Sarah intentionally killed that guy today, and probably her husband and her mother, not that any of them were a great loss to the world,” I informed him. I hadn’t spent a lot of time philosophizing over vigilantism but I was a wannabe lawyer. I was pretty much on the side of judges and jury. Reluctantly, I concluded that Andre needed to know I was a loose cannon, for his own safety. “I just damned Max to hell, and he stupidly went.”

  Andre hit the brakes, but whether it was because he was nearing a stop sign or because of me, I couldn’t tell. I just waited stoically for his response. I had to feel my way through this one inch at a time.

  “You know for certain he went to hell?” he asked with interest.

  “I know he’s dead and his ghost is talking to me in mirrors. Don’t know if that qualifies as hell. I never sent anyone there before.”

  He pondered that for a moment. “You think you’re talking to Max in mirrors?”

  “Yeah.”

  Or going insane, but Andre was pretty astute. He’d have caught that, too.

  “Is he saying anything useful?”

  “He said to stay away from you and the Zone. That’s probably useful but not practical, especially since the asshole was using me to spy on the Zone before he died.”

  He glanced in my direction before asking, “You were mad at Max before his car crashed? That’s why you damned him?”

  “I thought he was going to kill me! You’d have done the same.”

  “And after you found out his brakes were cut, did you grieve?”

  I stared at him, trying to figure out where this was going. “Of course. I’m not made of stone. We had six good months together.”

  “So now you think he’s still alive and in a mirror?”

  I looked at him suspiciously. “I don’t know about alive.”

  “Denial,” he said flatly. “This is the stage of grief called denial. You’ll start bargaining with the mirror before long, promising to do better if he’ll just come back. And when he doesn’t, you’re going to really sink low.”

  “Not buying it,” I said firmly, although I knew I was skirting the truth. Was promising to track the guy who had almost killed the kids my way of bargaining with God? My way of promising to do better if only God would send Max back to me?

  I flipped open my compact. Max wasn’t coming in clearly, but I thought he looked wary. “I have your boxes in a truck. Where would you like me to take them?”

  “Dangerous,” he said inside my head. “Burn them.”

  “Nope, not burning them. Saturn’s daughter demands justice, remember? I’ll probably join you in purgatory if I don’t do my job.”

  “Justy, you’re a pain in the butt,” he said wearily. “Find the file on Vanderventer.”

  “And do what with it?” I asked, but he was gone again.

  Merely acknowledging my one-sided argument with a piece of glass with his usual snarky look of disbelief, Andre steered the van into an industrial storage area surrounded by chain-link fences. He punched a code into the gate, and it swung open to let him in. The man had more resources at his disposal than I wanted to consider.

  “Saturn’s daught
er?” he finally asked as he drove between corrugated tin buildings.

  “Long story. Max says there’s a file called Vanderventer in the boxes. Is that useful information?”

  “You already knew Vanderventer owns part of the chemical plant, didn’t you? No, that’s not proving anything except your overactive imagination.”

  “Then there’s not a lot more I can say. I don’t have time for investigating Vanderventer, Acme, or the Zone. My goal is to stay alive long enough to take finals. Everything else is optional.”

  “All right, I’ll accept that. Want me to go through those papers? Or put Frank on them?”

  I was torn. I really wanted to do it myself. But lives could be at stake if we didn’t know what was going down. I’d just wasted an entire evening hiding when I needed to be studying.

  “I’ll look at the Vanderventer file first,” I decided. “We’ll know better how to proceed after we find that.”

  23

  I was still wearing Ernesto’s jacket against the chill of a spring night. At least the cheap polyester had finally dried. Sitting on the floor, grateful for my healthy legs, I leaned against the wall and flipped through the files in my lap while Milo fell asleep on top of my bag. If I really believed my legs had grown because I’d sent a rapist to hell, I’d have squirmed in discomfort, so I refused to believe it.

  I’d had no idea Max had been hiding all this crap. Why the hell hadn’t he kept computer files? Or at least a sane organizing system? All this time, I’d just assumed he didn’t use computers because he liked doing cash business to avoid taxes. Instead, he’d been spying on me and his whole family and, with a true paranoid flair, kept his files off the radar with paper. Paper that he could burn without leaving a trace. Paper that couldn’t be sorted without knowing his system.

  Andre was still unloading boxes, working up a sweat. I was feeling guilty about pressing my boss into hard labor. Now I would owe Andre, big-time, and I hated being obligated to anyone, especially to anyone in authority. I’d spent too many years as a loner to fully comprehend how payback worked, but I was pretty certain Andre wasn’t helping out of the goodness of his heart—although hard work looked good on him. I liked his sweaty, dusty forehead better than the smirk.

  The storage unit had fluorescents overhead, not exactly great for my weak vision. Finished with the first stack of files, I put my new legs to work and crawled among the boxes. I was wearing my geeky glasses and an overlarge coat—not exactly a sexy look. But Andre’s gaze was on my ass when he dropped a box nearby. I was still ticked that he didn’t believe I talked to Max.

  “Finals,” I said conversationally, distracting his attention while pawing through another box. “I have another exam at noon tomorrow. I’m reserving energy for that.”

  “No, you’re not. You’re releasing it by frying tires and drenching my damned club.” He flung down the last box and kicked it next to the wall.

  “You’d rather I’d gone quietly with the spooks?” I asked in incredulity, looking up from the box I’d just opened. Max’s handwriting and bad spelling were giving me a headache.

  “No, I’d rather you waited until Schwartz and I had time to gather forces before you started attacking them! They had guns. You didn’t!” Pretty Boy wasn’t looking so pretty in the green glare of overheads. He looked Hulk furious. Was it my imagination, or was he starting to fade around the edges again? Definitely my imagination. I preferred his Jim Garner cool to the irrational Hulk.

  “Okay, next time I’ll sit around and twiddle my thumbs in hopes someone better at beating up people will come along and save me. That totally works.” I kicked a box toward him. “Here, that one is labeled Acme. Take a look.”

  “If you shake a nut tree, nuts will fall out,” he said enigmatically, flipping through the files without much interest. “You should have let me take care of the Escalade.”

  “Andre, you so know that isn’t happening,” I retorted in a pitying tone. “I’ve never had anyone take care of me, even when I was a kid, and it ain’t happening now. I’m grateful for your help, don’t get me wrong. But if I can do it myself, I will. And just how can you be so damned certain I was responsible for your weak sprinkler system?” I asked, just to irritate him.

  “Because that’s what I do,” he replied. “I put two and two together and figure out where the threes are coming from. I’ve had years to perfect that talent, and I haven’t wasted it flooding bars. I’ve been watching you, waiting to see what you’ll become. Don’t underestimate me or any other Zone inhabitant. We have our uses.”

  “Should I ever pass the bar exam, I’ll remember that,” I said, not wanting to learn more for fear it would set my hair on fire. I was just happy to know he didn’t know what I was any more than I did. Digging through another box, I triumphantly removed a fat file labeled Vanderventer. “Got it. Let’s go home. I have a friend I’d like to look through the rest of these.”

  I didn’t know if Jane could afford the time, but at some point, someone had to follow Max’s lead.

  I was flipping through the file and didn’t hear Andre walk up behind me. He hauled me off the floor, swung me around, and hugged me so tight, I could feel the press of his shirt buttons against my boobs, although the damned file kind of got in the way. His hand crushed my head into his shoulder so I couldn’t read his expression.

  “Until we know what you are and what you can do,” his voice rumbled against my ear, “you have to start thinking of yourself as a rare treasure needing constant protection. Got that?”

  His breath was warm in my hair, and I really enjoyed the masculine hardness pressed against my soft bits. I wanted to wriggle and test his arousal, but triumph only went so far. I didn’t want to be rare or protected.

  “You make me sound like a loggerhead turtle. I am not a protected species, or if I am, I want it to be a wolf or a tiger.” I shoved at his shoulders. He didn’t completely release me, but wary of my dangerous knees and feet, he let me keep a distance.

  “Talk to me after next week.” I relented when his breath against my ear gave me warm shivers. “I’ll be your golden lamb. Right now, I just want to study and finish school and keep out of sight. How am I supposed to do that?”

  He growled in a way that made my insides all weak and watery. He might not have been bulky-big like Max, but Andre had testosterone out the ears. And I responded to his embrace. I didn’t have to like it—especially if he was as warped as me. I wriggled some more, until he let me go.

  “If it takes bodyguards and Humvees, that’s what we’ll do,” he said. “You won’t like what you find in that Vanderventer file, so I want people with you twenty-four-seven. You have a hair trigger.”

  “Do not,” I argued, jerking away from him and marching for the door. “I just think faster than most people.”

  “You don’t think at all or you wouldn’t have stolen the Escalade! You really didn’t think those bums would take that lying down, did you?”

  “I got rid of them, didn’t I? And their nasty equipment as well. If they mean to follow me around, they might as well learn it will be a damned expensive operation.” I was proud of my accomplishment. The spies were the douche nozzles, not me.

  “Your damned expensive operation has practically put me out of business.” Andre pried open the warehouse door, checked outside, then pulled it back enough for me to slip out. “You’re a walking loaded weapon and someone needs to put a safety lock on you.”

  “That someone being you?” I asked scornfully. “Why don’t you waste your time trying to ‘figure out what I am’ while I go somewhere quiet and study?”

  In the ugly security lighting, I could see him debating his reply. His eyes burned like coals when he suppressed his fury. “You endanger anyone you’re around,” he concluded. “You’ve not only threatened the macho of dangerous men, but humiliated them badly in front of people they consider scum, and in the eyes of their bosses. They won’t be polite next time.”

  He opened the van door and
practically heaved me in. I hunkered down, scowling, knowing he was right. Over the years, I’d learned the psyches of bullies. That didn’t mean I paid attention to their messed-up heads or used what I knew to avoid them—hence the martial arts lessons—but I understood them. Their minds were fairly simple, after all; they wanted control and domination because, without it, they were terrified.

  Which meant the goons had to take me out to feel superior again. Would I ever get a break? Have a normal life sitting quietly behind a desk?

  I’d tried that these last few years. Hadn’t liked it much. I scowled some more.

  Andre slid into the driver’s seat and started the ignition. I thought about asking where we were going, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to know. I was still chewing on the very little information he’d fed me earlier. He put two and two together and figured out where the threes came from? So he observed and figured out the oddities in the Zone. And then he used them. Oddities like me. I could easily become another tool in his arsenal. That notion bothered me.

  • • •

  The van pulled up at the flower shop Andre owned on Edgewater. Silently, we locked up the van and got into the convertible parked there. He put the hood up. Tinted glass concealed us. I didn’t see any Lincolns or Escalades around, but the feeling of being watched never left me these days.

  “I’m trusting you, Clancy,” Andre said, almost angrily. “I don’t trust anyone, but you,” he muttered, and drove down a back street I didn’t recognize. “Something is happening with you that we haven’t seen in the Zone. Around here, good comes with bad, but mostly it’s shades of gray. I want to believe that you’re the good break we need. Which probably means I’ve finally gone over the edge like everyone else.”

  “Yeah, thanks for the vote of confidence,” I responded without enthusiasm. “If it helps, I don’t trust you any further than I can see you, either.”