Tami Hoag - Deeper Than the Dead

“What did you mean when you told Janet Crane if you were going to be a part of the community?” she asked.

“Presently she thinks I’m a businessman looking to relocate here,” he explained. “I had her show me a piece of property today.”

“No wonder she was so happy to see you.”

“You think she’s just after my money? I’m crushed.”

“You should be relieved she doesn’t want to hang you upside down in her lair and deposit her eggs in you.”

Vince chuckled a little under his breath. “She’s a case study.”

“Not what I prefer to call her, but whatever.” She sipped at her wine, growing serious. “What’s going on here, Vince? Last week this was Ozzie and Harriet-ville. Now you think there are two killers operating here?”

“It looks that way.”

She shook her head. “Things like this don’t happen here.”

“But they do, honey,” he said quietly, reaching a hand out to stroke the back of her head. Her hair was like silk. “They happen everywhere.”

“I feel like I’ve been looking at this lovely jewel box garden all these years only to find out there are snakes in the grass.”

“This too shall pass,” Vince said. “These cases will be solved and closed. There are still more good guys than bad guys.”

She smiled to herself, not a happy smile, as she turned the stem of her glass back and forth between her fingers. The wine swirled gracefully against the sides of the glass, glowing like liquefied rubies in the amber light.

“I said that to Tommy today: This too shall pass.”

Vince shifted a little closer to her. Close enough that he could rest his hand on her shoulder in a reassuring touch. “You’ll get him back, Anne. He doesn’t have a lot of stability in his family life with that piece of work for a mother. He needs you.”

She nodded, but didn’t look convinced. She didn’t want to talk about it anymore or the emotions would come back, and she had no doubt had it with feeling upset and vulnerable. She was a person who kept her emotions as neat and tidy as she kept her house, he suspected. And she probably did that because she hadn’t had total stability in her own life as a child. That explained her emotional tie to Tommy Crane. She looked at the little boy through the eyes of the little girl she had been.

The idea of her as a lonely little girl made him want to scoop her up in his arms and hold her close, make her feel safe.

She looked at him from the corner of her eyes. “So tell me about you. All I know is you work for the FBI, and you’re on the fresh side.”

He smiled. “Me? I’m an old cop from Chicago. I come from a big, loud Italian family. I have an ex-wife and two daughters-Amy and Emily.”

“How old?”

“Fifteen and seventeen.” He leaned a little closer, like he was going to tell her a secret. “And I’m forty-eight, and it doesn’t matter.”

Even in the soft porch light, he could see her blush and smile nervously. “And I’m twenty-eight, and I met you yesterday.”

“Yes. And tomorrow, either one of us could be hit by a bus. Life is unpredictable, honey. We should live every day like it might be our last.”

As if he needed a reminder of the truth of that statement, a small explosion took place in his brain, like an electrical circuit shorting out spectacularly. His breath caught in his throat and he had to bend over and put his head in his hands.

Anne was beside him instantly, her hand on his back. “Are you all right? Vince? What is it?”

“Headache,” he said tightly. “Wow.”

“Is there something I can do? An ice pack? Aspirin?”

“I’ll be fine.”

He breathed slowly and shallowly through his mouth, willing off the nausea that was sure to come, and the next wave of pain that was sure to come after that. Damn bullet. Damn bad timing.

“You don’t look fine.”

“Just give me a minute,” he said, rubbing his fingers back through his hair, massaging his scalp in an attempt to relieve some of the tension.

“Is it a migraine?” Anne asked anxiously. “You shouldn’t be drinking red wine.”

“It’s a bullet,” he said, relaxing as the pain ebbed away. A wave of weakness washed over him in its wake. He leaned back against the cushions and turned his head to look at her.

She looked confused. “I beg your pardon?”

“It’s a bullet,” he repeated. “Last winter I became a crime statistic. A junkie trying to rob me, shot me in the head.”

“Oh my God!”

“Most of the bullet is still in there. Lucky for me I never used that part of my brain anyway.”

“You have a bullet in your head,” she said, as if hearing it from her own lips would somehow help her make sense of it. “How can that be? Shouldn’t you be dead?”

“Yep. I should be,” he said. “But I’m not. Instead, I’m just a guy with a headache, and I get to go on living.”

“They can’t take it out?”

“Not without turning me into a drooling vegetable.”

“But what will happen with it in there?”

He shrugged. “Don’t know. There aren’t a lot of cases to study, as you might imagine. So far the worst side effect is the pain. It comes and goes. It’s nothing I can’t handle. The point is I should have died that night.

“I have a very different perspective on life now. Now, I look around me, I see what I want, I’m going to make it happen. There is no someday. We have here, now.

“I spent a lot of years buried in my career-not that I don’t love it-but I put off a lot of stuff I shouldn’t have, assuming there would be time for it later. I regret that,” he admitted. “I lost my marriage. I know my daughters like I’m a distant uncle, not their father.

“I won’t live like that anymore. You shouldn’t either,” he said. “You’ve got twenty years on me. You can skip a lot of mistakes.”

She sat facing him, one leg curled up on the sofa, the other foot on the floor. She had put on a thick sweater to ward off the chill of the evening. She wrapped it around herself now as she met his gaze, her dark eyes full of sadness.

“My mother was forty-six when she died,” she said quietly. “I never thought she would be gone so soon. I always assumed my father would go before her, and I would have her all to myself for a long, long time… I always believed she would be there for my wedding, for my children, for me… And then she was gone. Just like that.”

“Life is what happens while we’re making other plans,” Vince said.

Even from a distance, he could feel the ache in her heart. He reached out for her and whispered, “Come here.”

She came to him deliberately. Coming to him, not running from her feelings. Vince took her in his arms and lowered his mouth to hers. He kissed her to offer comfort, to distract her from sad memories, to fill a lonely corner of her heart.

He kissed her slowly, deeply, savoring the taste of wine on her tongue, drinking in the feeling of her body against his. She melted into him, surrendered willingly, accepted what he had to give her, and gave back in return.

Gradually comfort gave way to desire, distraction to sharp focus and keen awareness.

Vince stroked her hair back from her face, his big hand taking in the delicate lines of her cheek, her jaw, her throat. Her breath shuddered softly as his lips followed the same path.

Her sweater fell open and his fingers found the buttons of her blouse, loosing them one by one. She gasped as his hand cupped her breast and his thumb brushed across the nipple, and gasped again as he closed his lips around the tight bud of flesh.

Anne lifted her hips to let him draw down her jeans and moaned his name as he gently opened her legs, settled his mouth against her, and kissed deeply the most feminine part of her. Her hands tangled in his hair, holding him to her, then tugging him back up to share the taste of her on his lips.