“This is serious. It all started when she had a nightmare last night. She was fighting some guy in her dream. When I asked her about it this morning, she said she didn’t remember any of it, had no idea who she might’ve been struggling with.”
“Maybe she doesn’t. Do you always remember your dreams? I sure don’t.”
“I know but...” Joshua sighed. “I thought she was lying, that’s all.”
“She could’ve been. She might not have wanted to talk about it, ’cause it would dredge up bad memories.”
“I guess so.”
“All I know is, everyone has secrets, some of ’em good, some of ’em bad,” Eddie said. “You haven’t told Rachel
everything
about yourself, right?”
“I’ve told her the most important stuff about me.”
“All of it?” Eddie’s gaze was keen. “Every deep, dark secret?”
“I don’t have any deep, dark secrets.”
“Maybe you don’t. But some folks do, dawg. Some people have been through some rough shit in their lives—shit they don’t want to tell anyone, including a spouse. You’ve gotta respect that.”
“You think I’m overreacting?”
“Nah, I think you’re just starting to learn what being married is all about. You can’t sweat every little detail about your wife. She’s not gonna be perfect, just like you aren’t perfect. But you’ve gotta love her anyway for who she is, overall.”
“I guess I’ll let it go.”
“Rachel’s a great woman. You two have a good thing going. You’ll hit a rough patch every now and then, like most married folk do...but there’s no sense in rocking the boat without having a good reason.”
“Let’s hope I never have a reason, then,” Joshua said.
“Nah, man,” Eddie said sagely, shaking his head. “You’re gonna have a reason one day, trust me. But you better hope that when you have one, that boat doesn’t sink.”
8
Sitting in the ice-box cold Chevy around the corner from the house, Dexter used his prepaid cell to call Javier at an agreed-upon number. He answered on the second ring.
“Yo,” Javier said. “Wassup, boss?”
“It’s gone.”
“Huh? What’s gone?”
“My money.”
“What?” Javier nearly shouted.
“All of it. Gone.”
“Jesus fucking Christ. Where’d you put it, man?” Javier sounded genuinely shocked. He would be. He hadn’t
stolen the cash. He was loyal.
“It was in the house,” Dexter said. “In a floor safe in the
kitchen. It’s all gone.”
“Fuck.” Javier made a grunt of disgust.
When Dexter had gotten convicted, Javier had offered to
store the money for him until he either was released, or broke
out.
I’ve got it under control,
Dexter had told him. Besides,
if IAD had opened an investigation into their narc squad activities—always a possibility—not even Javier, as trustworthy
and cunning as he was, could have guaranteed the safety of
Dexter’s savings. The floor safe had served perfectly for a
decade.
“She took it,” Dexter said. “Probably hired a locksmith to
crack the lock, paid him by sucking his dick.”
“You told her about it?”
“Use your motherfuckin’ head, man. I didn’t tell her shit.” “I didn’t think you did. She musta peeped it some kinda
way, took it when you got sent downstate. How fucked up.
Jesus.”
Dexter clenched his gloved hand into a fist. It was worse
than fucked up. It was, as the saying went, FUBAR—fucked
up beyond all recognition.
The secret stash that he’d built represented ten years of
backbreaking, dirty police work. Bribes from suspects. Underthe-table payments from hip-hop stars who toured in the city
and wanted dependable security from an off-duty cop. Loot
he and the other narc cops scored from shaking down drug
dealers. Money they earned from stealing cocaine from evidence rooms, replacing it with Bisquick, and reselling the
product on the street to the highest bidder.
His rationale for accumulating the money was simple:
The system was rife with corruption, from the courts all the
way down to the beat cop on the corner, and he was going to
get his, by any means necessary. His long-dead dad, a smalltime hustler and pimp in his day, had lectured him about how
to acquire anything you desired. You couldn’t just do your
job and expect that because you were a nice, honest guy,
you’d get the raise you deserved. No, if you wanted something—money, women, power, anything—you had to do
what real men had been doing since time immemorial. You had to take it.
It was why he’d become a cop, and not a hood like his old
DON’T EVER TELL 59
man. Dad had always been running from the law, always coughing up payments to cops so he could stay in business. Dexter didn’t want to be the guy on the run paying bribes. He wanted to be on the receiving end of all those sweet fringe benefits—using his badge and any amount of force necessary to take whatever he wanted.
Turned out he was damned good at it. Thanks to his leadership, Javier and the other members of the old team would retire from the CPD with a helluva lot more to fall back on than a cop’s pension. With incarceration jamming up his own retirement plans, he’d intended, upon his escape, to use the money to fund his exodus overseas. Many African nations lacked an extradition treaty with the United States, and in such a country, the sum he had earned would have allowed him to live like a sultan.
But once again, the bitch was going to try to rob him of his freedom. He didn’t doubt that she, and not someone else, had discovered the money. She’d never been loyal to him, and where there was smoke, there was fire.
“I was going to track her down anyway before I left,” Dexter said. “Now she’s given me all the more reason to find her ass.”
“Explains how she vanished into thin air like she did,”
Javier said. “She had your loot backing her.”
“With one point seven mil, I’d say the bitch could go just
about anywhere she fucking well pleases.”
“One point seven? That much?” Javier whistled. “You
need any funds in the interim, man? Something to tide you
over?”
“No more favors. I’ll handle it.”
“What’s your plan then?”
“Everyone who helped her get away...everyone she
loves,” Dexter said, “I’m going to fucking kill them. It’s a
simple matter of respect, wouldn’t you say?”
“Yeah, man.” Javier paused. “But what about her?” “What do you think I’m going to do to her?” Dexter said. “I...I guess I don’t wanna know, boss.”
“The bitch better have my money—down to the last dol-
lar. After she gives it to me, I’m gonna make her wish her
mama had used the fucking coat hanger.”
9
That evening at home, Rachel cooked dinner. She was an excellent cook, and Joshua loved to observe her at work. As he sat at the dinette table, skimming the newspaper, he watched her.
Dressed in a flannel shirt, lounge pants, and slippers, she flitted around the kitchen like a hummingbird around a flower garden, adding a sprinkle of spices here, tasting the sauce there, all the while singing in a soft, soothing voice. Under normal circumstances, she derived great pleasure from cooking, and that night, she seemed to be in an especially buoyant mood.
It puzzled him. Earlier, he’d been convinced that she was keeping something important from him, and he’d planned to watch her closely at dinner, just to be sure nothing was wrong. Eddie had advised him to let it go, and he wanted to—but he couldn’t. Not while the uneasiness lingered in his gut like an undigested meal.
“Dinner’s ready,” Rachel said, taking silverware out of the drawer. “Go wash up, baby.”
He pushed away from the table. He nearly knocked over the chair, and caught it before it hit the floor. Coco, who’d been resting nearby, scurried away and hid between Rachel’s legs.
“Sorry, Coco,” he said. “Scared you half to death, didn’t I?” He glanced at Rachel, habitually expecting a rebuke for his clumsiness, but she only smiled—a smile of unconditional love and infinite patience. Not the smile of a woman who nursed deception in her heart.
Maybe his suspicions were totally off-base. There was a pleasant evening ahead—good food, lively conversation, perhaps tender lovemaking—and it seemed foolish to spoil it by dwelling on theories of how she might be deceiving him.
Eddie was right. He needed to let it go.
When he returned to the kitchen after washing his hands, Rachel was setting dinner on the table: shrimp scampi over linguine, sautéed zucchini, and garlic bread. Coco followed at her heels, waiting for a morsel to drop.
“Need any help?” he asked.
“You could turn on some music, light a few candles.”
“Special occasion?”
“Maybe.”
He turned on the satellite radio system and tuned it to one of their favorite R&B channels. Then he got two candles out of a cabinet, placed them inside the frosted glass hurricane lamps on the table, and carefully lit them.
They often drank wine with dinner. But after Rachel dimmed the recessed lights, she took a bottle of sparkling white grape juice out of the refrigerator.
“You mind doing the honors?” She handed the bottle to him. “I would’ve gotten champagne, but...”
“We
are
celebrating something.” Sitting, he twisted off the cap and filled the two wine goblets on the table.
“We’re celebrating us,” she said.
DON’T EVER TELL 63
“Us?”
“Us finding each other. Falling in love. Getting married. Being happy. Do we need a special occasion to celebrate those things?”
“Not at all.”
They bowed their heads and said grace. Then they heaped their plates with food and began to eat.
“This looks delicious.” He spun linguine around his fork and speared a shrimp. “My mom’s a good cook, but she can’t touch you.”
“Please, don’t ever say that around her. She hates me enough as it is.”
He winced. His mom had been nasty toward Rachel from the beginning, considered her a corrupting influence on him. He had never understood why his mother felt that way toward her, but there was much that he would never understand about his mom.
“Hate is a pretty strong word,” he said.
“How about ‘intense dislike’? She has an intense dislike for me. She thinks I stole her precious little baby away from her, to corrupt him.”
“She’s a little overly protective, that’s all.”
“A little?”
He laughed. “Okay, she gets out of control, sometimes, I admit. But she means well. She’ll grow to love you in time.”
“I’m not holding my breath.” She chewed a piece of garlic toast. “But maybe she was right about the corrupting part. If she only knew what we did in the bedroom...”
He felt her foot slide under the cuff of his jeans and tease his calf. A warm, delicious rush of desire spread through his center.
“You must not want me to finish dinner,” he said.
“Sorry, I’m a bad girl.” She pulled her foot away, winked. “That’s how we messed around and got the first one.”
He was bringing the fork to his lips, but her remark made him pause.
“The first one?” he asked.
“When I said we were celebrating us, I meant it.” She set down her fork, drew in a deep breath. She blinked, and he saw tears welling in her eyes.
His heart whammed.
“Are you about to tell me...”
“I’m pregnant,” she said.
“Pregnant?”
“Yes,
pregnant.”
She was nodding, tears spilling down her cheeks. “I took an early pregnancy test this morning— twice to be sure—and it was positive. I’m pregnant with our baby, Josh. You’re going to be a daddy.”
10
Rachel’s announcement left Joshua buzzing for the rest of the evening. She was pregnant.
Pregnant
. He was going to be a father.
A father
.
They had not exactly been trying to conceive, but they hadn’t been trying to prevent it, either. Their attitude was that when the time was right, the baby would come. A child was a blessing from God. No one could entirely control the granting of a blessing.
He had an almost irrepressible urge to call everyone he knew and share the good news, but Rachel promised him to silence. She wanted to visit her OB-GYN and confirm the pregnancy with another test, to be absolutely sure. She also advised him that until she passed the first trimester, it would be unwise to tell the whole world about the baby, because in the early stages there was always the possibility of a miscarriage.
In the meantime, she wanted him to keep the news under wraps. He reluctantly agreed to her request, though walking around with the secret was going to drive him nuts. There was so much to think about, so much to plan ...he felt as if he were going to pop like a balloon.
I’m going to be a dad. I can’t believe it.
Although he and Eddie had talked about fatherhood often, it seemed incredible that he would soon join the club. He still felt like a big kid himself. To imagine being responsible for a child’s welfare, offering guidance, serving as an example of manhood. It was impossible to wrap his mind around the thought.
He had assumed he would be awake all night, riding high on excitement, but he wound up falling asleep shortly before midnight, exhausted, like a kid who’d eaten too much candy crashing after the sugar rush faded. Rachel climbed in bed, found a comfortable spot in his arms, and drifted asleep, too.
When he awoke sometime later that night, she was gone.
He glanced toward the bathroom. The door was shut, but blackness framed the doorway. She wasn’t in there.
He thought about the nightmare she’d had last night. What if she was sleepwalking this time, fleeing her mysterious dream villain?
It was a melodramatic idea—Rachel might have padded downstairs only to get a glass of water—but he couldn’t discount it. With her announcement of her pregnancy, he felt an instinctual drive to protect her from all harm. That included Rachel accidentally hurting herself while in the throes of a bad dream.
He put on his glasses. The clock read a quarter past three.
He shuffled into the hallway. It was dark. No light filtered up there from downstairs, which it would have if she were in the kitchen.
He was about to call her name, when he heard a clicking sound coming from the room at the end of the hallway. Rachel’s office.
DON’T EVER TELL 67
Quietly, he moved down the hall. The door was cracked open about an inch, giving him a narrow view.
Rachel sat before her desk, typing on her laptop. The silvery glow from the display was the only light source in the study, imbuing her face with a ghostly pallor.
What was she doing in here at a quarter past three o’clock in the morning?
He gazed at the screen. He could make out a few words. He leaned forward—and accidentally bumped against the door.
She whirled with a gasp.
“It’s only me,” he said.
She put her hand to her chest, sighed.
“You scared me.”
“I saw you’d gotten out of bed.” He stepped inside the room. “What are you doing up?”
“Oh, only reading about pregnancy and newborns.” She hit a button on the keyboard, closing the programs she had opened. “I’m so excited I can’t sleep. I figured as long as I was awake, I’d do some research.”
He wished there was sufficient light in the room to reveal her eyes, because he was positive that she was lying to him. He knew what he’d seen on the screen, and it had nothing to do with pregnancies and babies.
“When are you coming back to bed?” he asked.
“Right now, actually.” She switched off the computer. Within seconds, the display went black, and darkness fell over the room.
She brushed past him as she left the office. “Coming?”
He glanced at the blackened screen once more.
“Coming,” he finally said, and followed her to the bedroom.
Lying in bed together, Rachel cuddled against him. He stared at the dark ceiling, but didn’t close his eyes.
“Thinking about our baby?” she said.
“Yeah.”
And other things.
“Justin Anthony Moore,” she said.
Shortly after their marriage, they had picked out possible baby names for a boy, or a girl. Rachel had approached the task with an intensity that approached obsession, as if determining a name in advance somehow secured their child’s future.
“What if we have a girl?” he asked.
“We’re going to have a boy.”
“It’s way too early to tell, Rachel.”
“I don’t care about what the ultrasound might tell us. I know what I feel.”
“I only want a healthy baby. Boy or girl, it doesn’t matter to me.”
“A healthy baby...that’s what I want, too.” She was silent for a minute. “Love, do you ever think of going away?” “Going away?”
“You know, like having a sanctuary... from the world. Somewhere you could be totally safe... without a care at all.”
“Like a getaway or something?”
“Hmmm...like that.”
“To get away from who?”
“No one in particular. Life... the world. Just the four of us—you, me, Justin... the dog.”
“A secluded getaway would be nice,” he said. “Maybe we can buy one if we start playing the lottery.”
“Maybe...” Her voice had softened to a whisper.
“Where would you want it to be?”
“Somewhere that...no one...knows about . . .”
“Such as?”
She didn’t answer. Her breathing had deepened. She was drifting asleep.
He lay awake a while longer, mulling over their strange conversation and what he had seen on her computer screen, and eventually, he drifted to sleep, too.
He awoke at seven-thirty to find that Rachel had already left for work.
There was a note on the dresser, written in her elegant script:
Hey, sleepyhead. Will call with time for OB-GYN appt. Love, R.
At the mention of the doctor, giddiness bubbled through him all over again. But the memory of how Rachel had lied about her late-night Web research quickly put a damper on his excitement.
On his way downstairs to brew coffee, he paused at the threshold of her study. He pushed open the door.
The answers to his questions might reside on her computer. If he looked, Rachel would never know.
But he hesitated. He wasn’t one of those rude individuals who took malicious pleasure in digging through another’s belongings. His mother was nosy like that. He harbored bad memories of her rooting through his drawers and closets, looking for anything she could use to make his life miserable.
He turned away from the study and went downstairs. He brewed a pot of coffee. Tim had repaired his computer yesterday afternoon as promised, so he took the laptop to his office and started to work on some initial design ideas for a new client.
His office was located directly beneath Rachel’s study. Although it was surely his vivid graphic artist’s imagination at work, he thought he could sense her computer up there, tempting him to uncover its secrets.
Finally, he pushed out of the chair and strode upstairs, walking so fast that Coco, sleeping on the sofa in the family room, stirred awake and chased after him, curious about his urgent mission.
He rushed into Rachel’s study and punched the laptop’s power button.
The machine whirred, proceeding through the boot-up cycle. He sat in the desk chair, started to adjust the height to accommodate his legs, and stopped himself. If he neglected to readjust the chair, she would know he’d been in there.
Sweat coated his forehead. By doing this, he was crossing a line in their marriage, admitting to himself that he no longer trusted her, and there would be consequences to pay for his actions, if not to Rachel, then to his own conscience.
Coco had not entered the room. The little dog sat on her haunches on the threshold, and he swore that her bubbleeyed gaze was accusatory.
“I don’t have any choice,” he said to the dog, as if the animal would tattle on him. “I have to know what’s going on.”
The computer reached the Welcome screen. In a log-on box, the username field was populated by his wife’s first name, but the cursor blinked in the password field—which was empty.
He clicked the OK button, hoping that the system would grant him access without a password.
It beeped and flashed a pop-up message:
Please enter a password.
“Shit,” he said.
He drummed a tattoo on the desk. He glanced at Coco, typed the dog’s name, and hit Enter.
Incorrect password.
He typed his own name.
Incorrect password.
Rachel’s salon.
Incorrect password.
“Damn it, what is it then?”
He leaned backward, the chair springs squeaking. He looked around the study. Gazed at her collection of dog figurines sitting on a shelf, the novels and business texts that packed the bookcase, the photograph of a sun-splashed beach standing on the corner of the desk.
Hunched forward, he began to type in anything that came to mind, combinations of numbers and letters, her birth date, their anniversary, his own birth date, the name of her favorite restaurant....
None of them worked.
He spun away from the computer. His knee bumped against the desk and set a ballpoint pen rolling across the desktop. It dropped into a small trash can.
He reached inside the can to retrieve the pen. His fingers brushed across a crumpled piece of paper.
He pulled out the pen, and the paper. He unfurled the paper on his lap.
It was a print-out of a Web page. Unfortunately, the ink cartridge had run dry while printing the document; the text was so faint it was virtually unreadable.
He raised the page to the overhead light.
He could make out four words:
Illinois Department of Corrections.