Jeffery Deaver - The Coffin Dancer

But tonight was different. Rhyme was distracted. She didn’t mind him ornery – which was good because he was ornery a lot. But she didn’t like him being elsewhere. She sat on the edge of the bed.

He began to say what he’d apparently asked her here for. “Sachs… Lon told me. About what happened at the airport.”

She shrugged.

“There’s nothing you could’ve done except gotten yourself killed. You did the right thing, going for cover. He fired one for range and would’ve gotten you with the second shot.”

“I had two, three seconds. I could’ve hit him. I know I could’ve.”

“Don’t be reckless, Sachs. That bomb -”

The fervent look in her eyes silenced him. “I want to get him, whatever it takes. And I have a feeling you want to get him just as much. I think you’d take chances too.” She added with cryptic significance, “Maybe you are taking chances.”

This had a greater reaction than she’d expected. He blinked, looked away. But he said nothing else, sipped his scotch.

On impulse, she asked, “Can I ask something? If you don’t want me to you can tell me to clam up.”

“Come on, Sachs. We’ve got secrets, you and me? I don’t think so.”

Eyes on the floor, she said, “I remember once I was telling you about Nick. How I felt about him and so on. How what happened between us was so hard.”

He nodded.

“And I asked you if you’d felt that way about anyone, maybe your wife. And you said yes, but not Elaine.” She looked up at him.

He recovered fast, though not fast enough. And she realized she’d blown cold air on an exposed nerve.

“I remember,” he answered.

“Who was she? Look, if you don’t want to talk about it…”

“I don’t mind. Her name was Claire. Claire Trilling. How’s that for a last name?”

“Probably put up with the same crap in school I had to. Amelia Sex. Amelia Sucks… How’d you meet her?”

“Well…” He laughed at his own reluctance to continue. “In the department.”

“She was a cop?” Sachs was surprised.

“Yep.”

“What happened?”

“It was a… difficult relationship.” Rhyme shook his head ruefully. “I was married, she was married. Just not to each other.”

“Kids?”

“She had a daughter.”

“So you broke up?”

“It wouldn’t have worked, Sachs. Oh, Blaine and I were destined to get divorced – or kill each other. It was only a matter of time. But Claire… she was worried about her daughter – about her husband taking the little girl if she got divorced. She didn’t love him, but he was a good man. Loved the girl a lot.”

“You meet her?”

“The daughter? Yes.”

“You ever see her now? Claire?”

“No. That was the past. She’s not on the force anymore.”

“You broke up after your accident?”

“No, no, before.”

“She knows you were hurt, though, right?”

“No,” Rhyme said after another hesitation.

“Why didn’t you tell her?”

A pause. “There were reasons… Funny you bring her up. Haven’t thought about her for years.”

He offered a casual smile and Sachs felt the pain course through her – actual pain like the blow that left the bruise in the shape of the Show Me State. Because what he was saying was a lie. Oh, he’d been thinking about this woman. Sachs didn’t believe in woman’s intuition but she did believe in cop’s intuition; she’d walked a beat for far too long to discount insights like these. She knew Rhyme’d been thinking about Ms. Trilling.

Her feelings were ridiculous, of course. She had no patience for jealousy. Hadn’t been jealous of Nick’s job – he was undercover and spent weeks on the street. Hadn’t been jealous of the hookers and blond ornaments he’d drink with on assignments.

And beyond jealousy, what could she possibly hope for with Rhyme? She’d talked about him to her mother many times. And the cagey old woman would usually say something like “It’s good to be nice to a cripple like that.”

Which just about summed up all that their relationship should be. All that it could be.

It was more than ridiculous.

But jealous she was. And it wasn’t of Claire.

It was of Percey Clay.

Sachs couldn’t forget how they’d looked together when she’d seen them sitting next to each other in his room, earlier today.

More scotch. Thinking of the nights she and Rhyme had spent here, talking about cases, drinking this very good liquor.

Oh, great. Now I’m maudlin. That’s a mature feeling. I’m gonna group a cluster right in its chest and kill it dead.

But instead she offered the sentiment a little more liquor.

Percey wasn’t an attractive woman, but that meant nothing; it had taken Sachs all of one week at Chantelle, the modeling agency on Madison Avenue where she’d worked for several years, to understand the fallacy of the beautiful. Men love to look at gorgeous women, but nothing intimidates them more.

“You want another hit?” she asked.

“No,” he said.

Without thinking now, she reclined, laid her head on his pillow. It was funny how we adjust to things, she thought. Rhyme couldn’t, of course, pull her to his chest and slip his arm around her. But the comparable gesture was his tilting his head to hers. In this way they’d fallen asleep a number of times.

Tonight, though, she sensed a stiffness, a caution.

She felt she was losing him. And all she could think about was trying to be closer. As close as possible.

Sachs had once confided with her friend Amy, her goddaughter’s mother, about Rhyme, about her feelings for him. The woman had wondered what the attraction was and speculated, “Maybe it’s that, you know, he can’t move. He’s a man but he doesn’t have any control over you. Maybe that’s a turn-on.”

But Sachs knew it was just the opposite. The turn-on was that he was a man who had complete control, despite the fact he couldn’t move.

Fragments of his words floated past as he spoke about Claire, then about the Dancer. She tilted her head back and looked at his thin lips.

Her hands started roving.

He couldn’t feel, of course, but he could see her perfect fingers with their damaged nails slide over his chest, down his smooth body. Thom exercised him daily with a passive range of motion exercises and though Rhyme wasn’t muscular he had a body of a young man. It was as if the aging process had stopped the day of the accident.

“Sachs?”

Her hand moved lower.

Her breathing was coming faster now. She tugged the blanket down. Thom had dressed Rhyme in a T-shirt. She tugged it up, moved her hands over his chest. Then she pulled her own shirt off, unhooked her bra, pressed her flushed skin against his pallid. She expected it to be cold but it wasn’t. It was hotter than hers. She rubbed harder.

She kissed him once on the cheek, then the corner of the mouth, then squarely on the mouth.

“Sachs, no… Listen to me. No.”

But she didn’t listen.

She’d never told Rhyme, but some months ago she’d bought a book called The Disabled Lover. Sachs was surprised to learn that even quadriplegics can make love and father children. A man’s perplexing organ literally has a mind of its own and severing the spinal cord eliminates only one type of stimulus. Handicapped men were capable of perfectly normal erections. True, he’d have no sensation, but – for her part – the physical thrill was only a part of the event, often a minor part. It was the closeness that counted; that was a high that a million phony movie orgasms would never approach. She suspected that Rhyme might feel the same way.

She kissed him again. Harder.