RoxannesPirate Page 22

  Her ankles were released.

  The devil’s voice cried out, “What are you doing?”

  Her arms were tugged free and her body was lifted and thrown against a broad shoulder. “I do my fucking in private! You’ll get her back when I’m through!”

  She risked a glance. Things swirled around her—a Persian rug, a marble floor, zebra patterns and gilded swans. She shut her eyes but the cyclone continued under her closed lids. Make it stop spinning!

  “We’re out the door.”

  Cold air on her face, but it did nothing to dampen the blaze in her body.

  “Almost to the car. If there’s shooting, you’re safer in the trunk.”

  “Look at me, Roxanne.”

  She tried but the pain was excruciating. She squeezed her eyelids shut and moaned.

  “You’re burning up! What did that bastard give you? Hold on, Roxanne. Hold on!”

  The lid closed and she was buried in blessed blackness. A white hand reached out of the blackness. A woman sobbed and pleaded. “Tell him! Tell him!”

  Roxanne shrank from the woman’s terrible white face.

  Don’t bury me here! Don’t leave me with her!

  She screamed and pounded her fist against the lid of the coffin, but she was buried in earth and the earth twisted and turned, throwing her from side to side.

  Angels lifted the coffin lid. Angels pulled her sobbing from the grave. She vomited up black earth. The inferno raged. Her flesh was melting. Angels screamed around her.

  “Where’s that fucking ambulance!”

  “You fucking cocksucker! How dare you risk a civilian!”

  “Fuck that! We got that motherfucker loud and clear!”

  “Blake’s filing the complaint but he’s apeshit!”

  Sirens blared. Galaxies exploded in her skull.

  “Querida, hold on! I will not lose you. I will not lose you!”

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Roxanne woke to a sunlit room. She faced a large window with ugly blinds through which she saw a long, black tar roof with a tall brick building rising up at the end. She turned slightly in the bed. An intravenous tube was taped to her arm and a thin plastic tube ran up to a bag of clear fluid on a metal stand next to her bed.

  A dark-skinned woman with long braided hair studied a computer monitor on a cart at the foot of Roxanne’s bed. She was wearing a green nurse’s top. She glanced at Roxanne.

  “Good morning, darling. It’s good to see you awake on this beautiful morning.” The woman had a soft Caribbean accent. “You’ll be pleased to hear I’ve got orders to remove your IV. Do you know where you are?”

  “The hospital.”

  “You’re in the Longhill Medical Center, under my excellent care.” The nurse tilted her head and smiled. “And under the protection of two FBI agents sitting in the hallway getting in the way of staff.”

  She removed the bandage and needle from Roxanne’s arm. As she worked, she asked Roxanne her full name, her age, her address, where she worked, whether she had any pets and the names of her family members. She seemed satisfied that Roxanne’s memory was functioning properly.

  “You certainly made a grand entrance into the emergency room,” the nurse said. “I heard all about it. FBI agents were swarming all around and this tall, sexy guy was screaming at the doctor in charge. He’s been at your side most of the time. I understand you’re a hero.”

  “I have to go to the bathroom.” Roxanne moved her legs to the side of the bed.

  “I’ll help. You’re likely to be a little unsteady after being in bed so long.”

  “Overnight?”

  “No, darling. You were brought in Saturday afternoon. It’s Monday morning.”

  Roxanne rose to her feet.

  “How do you feel?”

  “Fine.”

  “Any dizziness? Headache? Pain?”

  Roxanne shook her head. “No.”

  “Very good,” the nurse said. Still, she held Roxanne’s elbow all the way to the bathroom.

  Roxanne looked at her reflection. She was pale and there were dark smudges under her eyes, but otherwise she looked normal. She sat on the toilet and urinated. No problem there. The fire that had scoured her body was gone. She stood and washed her hands. They were bruised and sore. There were cuts on her knuckles. She remembered pounding on the lid of the coffin.

  Not a coffin. The trunk of a car.

  She ran through the events she could remember as if she were sorting a deck of playing cards—here hallucination, here reality. She had gone to Murkley with a plan to get his confession. Carlos was there. He wanted to punish her for spying on him. He was angry that he had been forced into settling the case with Rivera. He’d told her to trust him. She should have hated him. Instead, she’d wanted him. He beat her then rescued her. He seemed to be working with the FBI. She had been ill.

  She loosened the ties of her hospital gown and turned her back to the mirror, twisting her neck to look at the reflection of her back. There were red marks crisscrossing her back and buttocks.

  Why do I feel as if all this happened to someone else?

  The nurse was waiting for her.

  “I’d like to get dressed in my own clothes. If I have any.”

  “Your personal items are in your closet, but you’ll have to wait to get dressed. The doctor will be in later this morning. She’ll let you know when you can go home. Until then, you have to stay in the hospital gown. But I’ll bring you a robe.”

  Roxanne sat in a chair next to her bed. The nurse brought her breakfast. “The sooner you eat, the sooner you go home.”

  “I brought you some decent coffee.” Carlos stood in the door to the room. His white shirt was rumpled under his dark suit. His face was pale above the stubble of his beard, but his dark eyes were bright.

  Roxanne’s emotions surged and collided. She pulled the robe across her chest. “Hello, Carlos.”

  He put the cardboard cup of coffee on her tray and bent to kiss her, a gentle kiss on the cheek. She wanted to wrap her arms around his neck and hold him tight—she wanted to push him far away.

  He pulled up a chair and sat across the table from her.

  “You look beautiful, Roxanne. Absolutely beautiful.” He smiled. “Go on, eat. We have a lot to celebrate. Murkley is under arrest. He’s scratching and spitting, but we’ve got him, thanks to you.”

  Roxanne leaned back in her chair and crossed her arms over her chest. “How long have you been with the FBI?”

  “I’m not with the FBI. I serve the United States government in another capacity.”

  “CIA?”

  “Close enough. But I wasn’t working in an official capacity in the Murkley case. That would have been improper. This was strictly an FBI investigation.”

  “Tell me from the beginning.”

  “I’ll tell you if you eat.”

  She dropped her hands to the tray table and picked up the coffee he’d brought her. She took a tiny sip.

  “Is it good? I wanted to bring you toast, but the toaster in the cafeteria was broken.” He reached out to take her left hand.

  She pulled her hand away before he could touch it and brought it to her chest.

  He winced. His hand still hovered above the table. He dropped it.

  “Tell me.”

  “The beginning goes way back to when I was a young boy in boarding school. I was lonely and shy. Spencer Marshall was my first and best friend. We stayed close through college and then he met Elspeth.”

  “You didn’t like her.”

  “She tried to seduce me. Not once. Several times. She had no loyalty. No honor. I pulled away from Spencer’s friendship. He slid into addiction. After he and Elspeth broke up, I tried to help him, but I had my own problems.”

  “Running your father’s business.”

  “Actually, it was my mother’s work that consumed me.” He paused. “A week after I learned about my parents’ death, my mother’s friend told me that my mother was an intelligence of
ficer for the CIA. My parents had been murdered when their car exploded. She needed my help to find the assassins. That was the start of my intelligence career. When you told me about your anger at being your father’s agent of vengeance, I understood. I too had been angry with my parents for forcing me into a role I didn’t want. But I got over that anger. I’m good at what I do in both my professions.”

  She shut her eyes. I don’t know this man at all. She opened her eyes. He was looking into her face with a look of such longing she had to drop her gaze to the yellow curds of scrambled eggs on her untouched breakfast tray.

  “Spencer was the one constant in my life. He was there for me after Marit. I thought he’d finally crawled out from that bitter legacy of addiction. I was happy to work with him, happy to give him the support he needed. And then Elspeth came back and he stepped off a cliff. Everything that happened was because he wanted to impress her enough to leave her husband.”

  She looked up at him. “You blame her for the disaster?”

  “I blame myself. I told Spencer the truth about Elspeth. I knew she couldn’t be trusted. He chose not to believe me. He brought in Rivera. I disliked the man from the beginning. I should have done some digging then, but I didn’t. Spencer told me I was jealous because the day after Ines met Rivera she left me.”

  “You told me you were happy to be rid of her.”

  “I was, but everything for Spencer was colored by his obsession with Elspeth.” He looked at the tray, picked up a teaspoon and began to turn it rapidly. “I left Spencer on his own. I had more pressing concerns that kept me busy for months. Eventually, I heard rumors about some nasty business in Florida. Spencer was deep in the hole Murkley had dug for him. He was using, running drugs for Murkley, laundering money. I told him I was coming to see him and I would help him get out of the mess. But I was too late.”

  “You were the one who found him. You were the one who called the ambulance.”

  He nodded. “But I’d taught Spencer some tricks over the years. He had a recording device hidden in a pen. Murkley missed it. I heard their final conversation.”

  She understood now what had happened. “That’s what Elspeth heard from the closet—Spencer telling his story for you.” She sighed. “Did you know about Elspeth?”

  “Her fingerprints were in the closet. It wasn’t hard to trace her movements. She was cowardly and disloyal to the end.”

  “Not completely cowardly. She sent you the flowchart. You thought enough of it to keep it with your papers.”

  “I kept her chart to remind me of how I’d failed my friend.” He drew another deep breath. Exhaled. “I won’t bore you with the details of the investigation. Our goal was to get me close to Murkley. I was fortunate that Hector Rivera was a greedy, stupid man.”

  He dropped the spoon and leaned back in his chair. “I think Rivera actually believed Murkley could make the resort happen.”

  “Rivera was innocent?”

  “Hardly. He did plenty of foul things for Murkley, but he’d put his own money into the project. He knew he couldn’t get it back from Murkley, so he decided to get it back from me. The lawsuit he filed against me was the last straw as far as Murkley was concerned. From that point, he wrote Rivera off. He needed a new partner and I was conveniently ready to assume the role.”

  “I’m surprised he trusted you. He knew you were Spencer’s friend.”

  “That’s where Ines proved useful. I told her I blamed Rivera for the project’s failure and Spencer’s death. I let her know I was in financial trouble. She relayed the message to Murkley. He was cautious but eventually he reached out to me.” He leaned forward. “That’s where you came in.”

  His face softened. Again Roxanne had to look away. She covered the plate of eggs with the plastic cover.

  “I knew from the minute you walked up to me in the hotel club that you’d been sent to spy on me. I let you seduce me. I needed to find out who’d sent you. If Rivera sent you, that was annoying. If it was Murkley, that was far more troubling. I’d already told Ines about the flowchart. I’d told her that I thought it had come from Rivera and I didn’t trust anything that man told me. But if Murkley had sent you, that meant he didn’t completely trust me. I started my research on you the morning you left me, but I hadn’t found out much. When I saw you in your office, I was genuinely surprised. I stole your laptop, hoping to find out who sent you, but also to get the message to your boss, whoever he was, that I was stupid. Murkley doesn’t surround himself with brilliant men. He prefers stupid ones. They’re easier for him to control.” He gave a dry laugh. “My investigative team didn’t appreciate my plan. Especially when Blake found out you were involved.”

  His voice changed, deepened. His words came slower. She kept her gaze on the dotted pattern of her robe. “Then a miracle happened. I found out you’d told me the truth. I foolishly decided I was entitled to some happiness. We had that weekend, and I did a really stupid thing. I fell in love with you.”

  She would not look at him.

  “Blake, of course, was not happy to see us together. He doesn’t like me much. I’m afraid the feeling is mutual.”

  She looked up at him. “Why didn’t you tell me the truth when I told you about my father?”

  “I couldn’t jeopardize the investigation. But for the first time I was scared for you. I hoped my promise to help you would keep you away from Murkley. I didn’t know Murkley would kill Rivera so quickly and so openly. He used to be more devious than that. And then you saw that video.” He smiled but he looked tense. “Proof that even skilled strategy is no match for bad luck. Blake was convinced he’d set you straight, but I knew better. When I heard about Elspeth’s suicide, I knew you would do something foolish. Ines told me Murkley didn’t trust you. I knew what happens to people he doesn’t trust. They tend to disappear.”

  “So you told Ines you wanted to punish me.”

  He nodded. “Murkley was pleased to give me the opportunity. I had no idea he’d poison you, but I suspected something was wrong when he let me take you away so easily. I think his plan was that you’d die while I was having sex with you. He would have used your death as a club to keep me in check.”

  For a moment she couldn’t breathe. How could I have been so stupid to pit myself against that devil? “How did he do it? I didn’t drink or eat anything in his house.”

  “Remember how he boasted about his daturas? Every part of a datura is poisonous. We think he used some datura toxin in the lubricant Ines used when she examined you. We got you to the hospital just in time. For a moment, I thought…” His voice broke.

  Roxanne knit her fingers together. She stared at her hands.

  “You got him, Roxanne. You brought him down. For three months we’d been working on an elaborate plan to get him and you got him to confess to Rivera’s murder.”

  “How did you hide a recording device?”

  “I didn’t have a recording device. I had a transmitter.” He tapped his thumb on the table.

  The bruise under his thumbnail was gone. Roxanne understood. That’s where he’d hid the transmitter.

  “Our team was stationed in a house not far away. They caught his confession loud and clear.”

  Her eyes fixed on her knuckles. “They must have heard everything else too.”

  She heard his intake of breath but did not look at him. “I had to be convincing. Murkley would have killed us both if he’d doubted me. I didn’t want to hurt you.” He stopped. “I was terrified he’d kill you. I didn’t know what else to do.”

  “I wanted you. Even when you were beating me, I wanted you.”

  “You were drugged. You weren’t in your right mind.”

  “I am now.” She took a deep breath and risked looking at him. His forehead was wrinkled, his lips pressed together, as if he was expecting a blow. She gave it to him. “We aren’t good for each other, Carlos.”

  His eyes widened. He opened his mouth to speak.

  There was a knock on the door. It open
ed slightly. “Hey, Roxy, it’s Evan Blake. Can I come in?”

  Carlos sat upright.

  “Come in, Evan,” Roxanne said.

  Evan ignored Carlos. He took Roxanne’s hand and squeezed it.

  “You gave us quite a scare, Roxy. Quite a scare. How’s this for irony? Paul stopped by to see Jill when I called to tell her you’d been taken ill assisting an investigation. He was the one who called your mother.”

  Mom! She must have been frantic.

  “She had terrific problems getting a flight out to see you but Paul’s picking her up at the airport now. She knows you’re out of danger. Paul was a real trooper, relaying messages back and forth. He’s the kind of guy you need in a crisis.”

  She squeezed his hand. “I’ll call my mother. I’ll call Paul. I’ll call Jill. Thank you, Evan.”

  “God, Roxanne, don’t thank me. If I’d thought you’d put yourself at such a risk, I’d have locked you up in my office.”

  Carlos stood. “But you didn’t.” His hands were balled into fists.

  “Don’t give me your shit, Delgado.” Evan’s face took on the red tinge. “You almost killed her.”

  “I saved her.”

  “I know what you did.”

  Carlos’ eyes narrowed, his face darkened. Roxanne was afraid he would strike out with his fists.

  “You better make damn sure you don’t blow your case against that bastard, Blake, because if you do, I won’t ever let you forget it.”

  Roxanne pushed her chair back and stood. “Look, Evan, I know you’ve got a lot on your plate right now. Go. Lock up the bad guys. I’m fine.”

  He hesitated.

  “Really, Evan. Please go.”

  “If you need anything, Roxy, you call me.”

  “I will.” She accepted his hug.

  She watched the door shut behind him.

  “I haven’t taken any time off in a long while,” Carlos said quietly. “We’ll take a vacation and go anywhere you want—Tuscany, Costa Rica, Spain. Anywhere you want.”

  She stared at the closed door. “I don’t want to be with you.”

  “You don’t mean that.” His voice was tight with pain.