Midnight Man (15 page)

committed in her home. In self-defense, to be sure, but it was still a murder. Or would that be manslaughter?

John had come running to her rescue and had killed the man. Would there be legal consequences for him? He was just starting out in a new business. Had her problems reached out to blight his life?

“I can swear that he was wearing a black leather jacket and tan pants exactly like what the dead man is wearing. He had a big gun with a barrel on the end of it. It looked like the silencers they show in the movies. He walked several times in front of the window and I could see him and the gun silhouetted against the light. But I didn’t get a good look at his face. He was stumbling around a lot, looking at his feet. He was finding it hard to orient himself in the room. It’s got an unusual layout, as I said, and it’s Feng Shui.”

Bud’s pencil froze over the pad. John stopped his perusal of the room and turned to stare at her. The techs, two on their knees, looked up.

“It’s…what?” Bud asked.

“Feng Shui.” At their blank looks, she smiled. She’d taken lessons from Li Yung herself, who was Mandarin and who pronounced it ‘Fang Choi’. “You probably know it as Feng Shui.” Suzanne gave it the American pronunciation.

Bud put his pencil down and pinched the bridge of his nose. “Honey,” he said, “you’re going to have to make sense. Help me out here. What’s—what was the word again?”

“Two words. Feng Shui. It means ‘Wind and Water’.”

Bud and John exchanged glances.

“Your house is wind and water?” Bud asked, carefully.

It was good to have something to smile about. “It’s the ancient Chinese art of decorating a space to make best use of energy flows. The Chinese believe energy flows in specific directions and you arrange furniture and objects to direct that flow in beneficial ways. But it also means that furniture and objects aren’t arranged in concentric boxes like in the West. The man found a footstool where he was expecting a chair, and a table where he was expecting nothing at all.”

She might as well have been speaking Chinese. Bud looked at his techs, at John, then shrugged. “Okay. So you saw this guy stumbling around in the dark in your office, which is—“ he hesitated, “whatever. What did you do then?”

“I went back through the rooms as quietly as I could and called John.”

“Why John? Why not the police? Why not me?”

Suzanne lifted a shoulder. ‘Why John’ was evident in every line of John’s big body, in the fiercely controlled grace of his every move. In the way he handled his gun, in the way his constant vigilance ensured nothing could surprise him. Why John was clear.

John’s eyes were narrowed as he looked at her. She couldn’t breathe properly while he was staring at her so intently. His hard jaw was dark with black stubble. He’d been close shaven the night they’d had dinner together. Had had sex together. He was probably one of those men who needed to shave twice a day. The beard made him look even more disreputable, even more dangerous. The kind of man no one crossed.

“I thought he might be close by,” she whispered. John had stopped his careful quartering of the room and was focused on her. She’d almost forgotten that feeling of being in the presence of a force of nature. Now, the focus of his intent gaze, she remembered. She remembered how alive she’d felt walking by his side, how every single person in the restaurant had faded into insignificance and how he filled her entire field of vision. She remembered the ferocity of his kisses, the power of his hands on her, his penis thrusting hot and hard inside her.

She also remembered that fierce moment in the closet, one of those defining moments in a person’s life. That moment the plane plunges, the car slides out of control, the earth shakes. That clear cool view of life as you might be dying.

In that moment, she’d wanted John Huntington by her side with every fiber of her being.

In that moment she’d known that he would come for her without question and that he would die for her.

In that moment, she knew that in some primal way, more a matter of blood and bone than mind and heart, she was his.

“I punched in the alarm code, like you told me,” she said to John. “Honest. I remember doing it when I came home. I don’t know how he got in.”

“Whoa.” Bud stared at John. He shook his head. “I don’t believe this. That guy got past your security? Tell me it’s not true. You’re slipping, Midnight Man.”

“Not my security,” John answered tightly. “I was going to install my system tomorrow. She had Interloc.”

“Okay.
Whew
. For a minute there I thought you’d lost your touch.” Bud scribbled some more then looked up. “What then, honey?”

Suzanne pushed her hair wearily out of her eyes. God, she was tired. She was on her second night without sleep. “I got in touch with John. Called him on my cell phone. He said he was a few blocks away. He said to lock the doors, and to go to my closet and wait.” Eyes closed, she remembered those moments, filled with panic and fear. “So I did.”

Bud turned. “John?”

His eyes were dark and cold. His voice even. “I got the call from Suzanne at seventeen minutes past midnight. She said she’d seen an intruder in the house, that he was armed. I was a few blocks away. I parked out of view of the building and proceeded to the front door. The alarm system and phone lines had been disabled. I entered the building—“

“Were you armed at the time?” Bud asked sharply.

John’s eyes glittered like ice. He just looked at Bud.

“Okay, okay.” Bud said. “With what?”

“Sig Sauer.”

“Why didn’t you use it?”

“In the end, I opted not to.” John shrugged a broad shoulder. “I thought he might be wearing body armor. Which he was. My weapon would have blown his face away. If his prints weren’t on file, we’d never know who he was. I used my K-Bar.”

Suzanne could just imagine the scene. The dark, silent room, John moving like a ghost, his big knife whipping through the air, the intruder clutching his throat, crumpling to the ground, wheezing uselessly for air while his blood pulsed and sprayed…

Bud sighed. He was sitting in male mode—legs spread wide, hands on knees, pen and pad dangling from one big hand. He sighed again, slapped his thighs and stood up.

“Okay. Let’s take this down to the station house.” He gestured to the technicians. Two unfolded a gurney and lifted the dead man on to it. He spoke to them. “You guys got everything?” They nodded.

John put his hand to Suzanne’s elbow and helped her out of the couch. He held her thick quilted jacket. Suzanne fitted her arms into it and he lifted her hair at the back for her. His hands—heavy, warm, reassuring—lay on her shoulders while she zipped the jacket up. For just a second, Suzanne allowed herself to lean back against him a little, savoring the strength and steadiness of him.

John squeezed her shoulders gently, and then lifted his hands. “Get your things,” he said quietly.

She made a wide circle around the bloodstains on the floor and wheeled her little suitcase out. Bud lifted an eyebrow and John shook his head sharply. Don’t ask, his look said.

Oddly, John didn’t help her with the suitcase. It was on wheels, so it was easy for her to carry. Still, he seemed like the kind of man who wouldn’t let a woman carry anything.

Then he placed his left arm around her waist, picked up his big black gun and she understood. He wanted one hand on her and one hand on his weapon.

What an odd little procession they made as they trooped outside, Suzanne thought. Bud first, Suzanne and John together, then the techs with the body, two carrying the gurney, two flanking it. Suzanne stood just outside the door, blinking. Two more police cars had joined the others haphazardly parked along her street. Their lights were flashing and she could hear the squawk and hiss of the radio. Police officers milled around, their low voices muffled in the thick night air. They were already cordoning off the house with yellow police tape.

The light snowfall had left white patches on the ground. It wasn’t snowing now but the air felt heavy and damp. It would snow later, maybe at daybreak in a few hours. Suzanne lifted her head and breathed in deep, trying to dispel the smell of violent death. The oxygen helped clear her brain. She felt unreal, at the center of a scene she’d seen a thousand times on TV but never imagined would be part of her life.

She watched two technicians maneuver the gurney down the steps. The body, zipped up in a black plastic bag, shifted. One of the police officers reached out to brace it before it could slip off.

She’d never seen the dead man before. How strange that a perfect stranger should want her dead. He’d come to kill her. Instead, he was the one leaving her house in a body bag and she was standing right next to the man who’d killed him.

Suzanne looked up at John. His arm was tight around her waist, though he wasn’t looking at her. He wasn’t looking at anything, really. His gaze raked the street, up and down, not focusing on anything in particular, but Suzanne could tell he was intensely aware of his surroundings, of everything and everyone on her street. Then he turned to look at her and she felt caught in the beam of a searchlight. A muscle in his jaw jumped and he pulled her even more tightly toward him, turned slightly inwards, his gun hand free.

She stared up at him, her breath turning white in the cold, mingling with his.

Bud came up beside her and put a hand on her shoulder. “Okay, hon,” He said. “Get in the lead car and—“

“She’s coming with me.” John’s tone was non-negotiable as he spoke to Bud over her head. “I’ll drive her downtown. She’s not getting out of my sight. Not for a second.”

Bud stared at him and John glared back. Bud’s shoulders lifted. “Okay. It doesn’t make that much difference who drives her. We need to talk to you, too, anyway, as you can imagine. You know the address of headquarters?”

John nodded.

“Wait,” Suzanne said. “My house.” The intruder had broken her alarm system. Her building was vulnerable. “We can’t just leave it like this.”

John understood and squeezed her waist. “The police will post a guard. Nothing will happen to your house.” He speared Bud with a hard look. “Will it?”

Bud’s mouth lifted in a half smile. “Yeah, okay, sure. I can spare an agent, and of course we’re putting up police tape. No one will touch your house. You’ll find all your knickknacks when you get back, or Claire will have my head. It’ll still be Fong—” he hesitated.

“Feng Shui.” Suzanne tried to smile past her sadness. It wasn’t true. Her wonderful home, which she’d labored over and dreamed about and worked on, wasn’t Feng Shui any more, wasn’t in tune with wind and water. The harmony of her home had been broken, the energy shattered. Her refuge had been violated. She wondered if she would ever feel safe there again.

“Right. Whatever.” Bud watched the body being lifted up into a van, which had pulled up to the curb. “Let’s take this down to the stationhouse. We’ve got a long night ahead of us.” He looked up at the still-dark sky then down at his watch. It was three a.m. “Or morning. I’ll lead, John. You follow me.”

“This way to the car,” John murmured to her once they were outside the gate. He turned left and she pulled her suitcase behind her. She felt foolish with the wheels trundling along behind her. John hadn’t volunteered why he wanted her to pack a suitcase and she didn’t dare ask him. Not with him so intensely focused on their surroundings. Time enough for that later.

He was scanning the empty night sky, the dark buildings, the deserted streets. But there was nothing to see. It was so late not even the streetwalker twins were out. Or maybe they were in the St. Regis, plying their trade.

As they passed by the dilapidated hotel, she wondered where John’s Yukon was. He’d parked it out of sight, he said. Why couldn’t they take her car? It was working like a dream now, thanks to him.

Car. She slowed. They couldn’t take her car. She’d changed purses this evening and left her driver’s license, together with two charge cards, on her vanity table. That wasn’t good. Even if they posted an officer at the door, it wasn’t smart to keep documents and credit cards out in plain sight. Not to mention the fact that she’d probably need some form of ID at the police station. Suzanne turned back.

It happened all at once.

There was a coughing sound and she felt her cheek sting. Not even a second later John slammed into her, crushing her against the wall, knocking the breath out of her. She tried to get her breath back, to ask him what he was doing, but his broad back squeezed her, hard, against the wall.