T. Bunn - Drummer in the Dark

She joined the line of dejected mothers and lovers trudging through security. Jackie could not help but look up as she passed beneath the first line of chain link and razor wire. The unblemished sky did not so much beckon as mock her every step, saying in those blue-blue depths that she was as imprisoned as anyone inside. She handed her driver’s license to the gatehouse security guard, endured the pat-down, and almost vomited as she spoke Shane’s name.

She took a seat beside two heavy-set women smoking and talking in Spanish. Jackie leaned her head against the coarse brick wall and fought for control.

At the beginning of their relationship, Shane had been all polish and allure and chiseled good looks. He was a master at enticement. Shane could fool anybody for a couple of hours. Which was how she had been won over, that and the fact that her brother had introduced them. Shane had started off easy, keeping their meetings brief enough for him to hide his deeper nature, until she was well and truly trapped. Then he had revealed his other side. The menace. The terror.

Over the course of their eight months together, he had driven away all her friends. He’d throw fury fits when she attempted to go anywhere without him. Steadily he had peeled away all protection she might find in others, even throwing Preston out of his apartment one night. The only person he had welcomed or felt comfortable around was Jackie’s mother. Which should have been all the warning she needed. But by the time their kinship was revealed, Jackie was already snared.

Gradually she had been stripped by his acid tongue and pent-up venom, reduced to a trembling mass too spineless to leave. Before that, she had never understood how a woman could become trapped by a man known to be dangerous. Now, she ached for them all. Toward the end she had become unsure of her own identity, uncertain of whether there was enough of herself left to leave for.

In truth, Shane had never intended to marry her. Early on he had used marriage as another lure. But only when she began to nurse Preston, and he sensed she had found a way back to a life without him, did he pressure her. In the end Jackie had left him, not for herself, but for Preston. No one should be forced to die alone-that was the litany she kept repeating to herself as she escaped late one night, her brother bundled into the back seat, everything she owned packed into two suitcases in the trunk. She took an apartment under a false name, paying cash out of Preston’s dwindling reserves, and kept what was left under his sweat-stained mattress. She lived out those terror-filled days with a stun gun charged and armed at her side, breathing easy only when she learned that Shane had problems all his own. The news had been good for a few final laughs before her brother left her all alone.

“Jackie Havilland?”

“That’s me.”

The guard was black and huge. “This way.”

But she had trouble rising. The air was gone from where she sat, and strength as well. The two ladies beside her turned and smiled with the bitter memory of their own such times. Jackie used both hands and clawed her way up. Once standing, nausea rose in a violent wave. She rested her head against the wall.

The guard rumbled, “Lady, nobody is pushing you down this path.”

She rolled around and winced as her shoulder wound came into contact with the wall. “It’s high time I killed these old ghosts.”

One of the women grinned up at her, a gold incisor sparkling in the sunlight. “You might feel like a train wreck going in. But you clean his clock good, you’ll come out floating on air.”

When the guard was certain she could make it, he turned and led her across the path to the lockdown. Jackie focused on his broad back so as not to see where she was going. The guard moved lightly as a dancing bear, the keys marking time. “We don’t usually restrain folks here. But you say the word, I’ll put a shackle on the man.”

Jackie said nothing. The guard grunted his acceptance and pushed through the door into a long hall of concrete and industrial gray. He pointed her toward an empty table. “I’m stationed right over there where I can watch the whole thing. You hear what I’m saying?”

The room was sixty feet long and forty wide, yet held less than a dozen groups clustered around tables set far apart from one another. Jackie sat and remembered how Preston had excitedly prepped her for that first meeting with Shane. A genuine showstopper was how Preston had described him, the guy most likely to become the next senior trader among Hayek’s currency team. That was before Shane had been caught double-dipping.

On tense market days, currency trades flipped as fast as ten to twelve times an hour. Shane had bounced certain trades through a Jamaican bank, flipped them once for himself, then reinserted them back into the day’s flow. All went smooth as silk until one day the market had gone against him in a very bad way. Shane had tanked, come up so dry he had been forced to dip further. And further still. Which was why he had been caught out.

Hayek had stripped away everything Shane possessed-the cars, the bonds, the pension fund, the house. Everything. Then Shane had taken the fall for felonious embezzling and been sentenced to twelve years. As far as Jackie was concerned, the verdict had been a very bright spot in an otherwise dismal time.

“Jackie?”

She was not ready. No matter how much she had prepped herself, she was not prepared. Shane slipped into the seat opposite her. “I don’t believe this.”

She swallowed and forced the gorge out of her throat. Swallowed again.

“You came. You really. .” He looked the same, rapier sharp and virile. Fourteen months of prison had paled his skin and thinned his hair. But his looks were still arresting. “I wrote you three times after I saw the light.”

“I got the first.” She found her voice with strangled effort. “Tore it to shreds.”

“Don’t blame you.” The real difference was in his eyes. “You’re looking good. Great, in fact.”

“Save it.” Having him this close left her wishing she could scrub off her own hide. Strip away everything he had ruined with his touch. “I’m here because I want to go after Hayek.”

Shane froze just as his denim-clad elbows touched the table. “What?”

“You heard me. Hayek is hurting friends of mine. I want some leverage. Somebody with access.”

For the first time, Shane showed a hint of the other side. She saw the familiar tightening around his eyes, the skin drawn back by the rage he kept so well hidden. Then it vanished. There and gone in less than a breath. But it was enough to transport her back to the terror hours, caught and trapped and hopeless.

Shane glanced about the room. Whispered, “Hayek.”

She pulled herself back from the verge of screaming wrath. Locked it down with an effort that had her trembling from knees to voice. “I need an insider with confidential access.”

Shane seemed to be speaking to somebody else. “I don’t know if I should get involved in this.”

“You’re already involved.”

Shane nodded slowly, the savage side utterly gone, a strange soft light back in his eyes. “You’re right. I can’t do this for myself. But I can for you. I owe you, don’t I.”

She forced herself to sit there, her hands clenched below the table, her jaw so tight her teeth felt cemented together.

“There were two of us working the scam. I needed a partner to move the funds unseen.” He lowered his voice. “Guy by the name of Eric Driscoll.”

“Another trader?”

“He was then. I never ratted on him. I claimed I did it all on my own. Far as I know, Eric’s still there, climbing the ladder, pulling down the big bucks.” He smiled thinly. “Man with a lot to lose. You tell him I said that.”