Kelley Armstrong - Exit Strategy

I looked from one container to the other. “Requires cooking skills, doesn’t it? Maybe I’ll just stick with-”

“Sit down.” He grabbed the milk from the fridge.

“No, really, I wasn’t asking-”

“I know. Hand me that saucepan.”

I reached for a big copper pot hanging over the counter.

“No, the sauce-The little one.”

Jack moved to the stove and leaned down to turn it on. As I handed him the pot he turned sharp, nearly colliding with me.

“Here’s the-” I said. “Oh.”

He wasn’t wearing his biker-guy getup from earlier. Not surprising, given the hour, but it was only now, standing a few inches away under the harsh kitchen lights that I realized he wasn’t wearing a disguise at all. The dark brown eyes, the short, wavy black hair, it was what I’d seen all those nights at the lodge. Even his face was pretty much as I remembered…except for one thing.

When I’d first gotten off the plane and seen Jack’s biker disguise, I’d been impressed by the first-rate job he’d done with aging-the crow’s feet around the eyes, the lines around the mouth, the sun-weathered skin that changed him from a man in his thirties to one closing in on the half-century mark. Well…it hadn’t been makeup.

“You’re not wearing a disguise,” I blurted before I could stop myself.

“Neither are you.” He gave a half-shrug. “Seemed only fair.”

There was something expected here, some response-any response-to an action that couldn’t have been made lightly. I opened my mouth, hoping something intelligent would come out. When nothing did, I snapped it shut.

As I handed him the pot, I cursed myself. Was it too late to crawl back to bed?

Jack turned to stir the cocoa in and I found myself looking at the back of his head, noticing the silver mingled with the black. Why was I so shocked? If I’d been thinking logically, I’d have realized long ago that Jack couldn’t be anywhere near my age, not with his reputation.

“I need pants,” I said.

Jack turned and gave me the same “what?” look as when I’d asked about hot milk. Then he glanced down at my bare legs sticking out from under the oversized T-shirt I wore to bed.

“Sit,” he said. “I won’t look.”

I slithered to the table and busied myself refolding the newspaper. When Jack shoved the cocoa and sugar back into the pantry, I got up and returned them to the cupboard, in the same places they’d been, labels forward.

As I sat down again, the dogs padded into the kitchen. They glanced at Jack, then slipped around the table, Scotch stretching out at my feet, Ginger pushing her nose under my hand for a petting.

“Snuck out of Evelyn’s room.” Jack laid a mug at my elbow, then pulled out the chair beside mine. “You should get one. A dog. For the lodge.”

I shook my head. “I’d love to, but I have to consider my guests. I could get someone who’s allergic and they wouldn’t appreciate a house filled with dog dander.”

“You have dogs? Growing up?”

Another shake. “My mom loved cats. Personally, I can’t see the attraction. You feed them, pamper them, clean up their crap, and they still act like they’d be gone in a second if they got a better offer. Call me needy, but I want a pet that wants me back. I brought a puppy home once but…It didn’t go over too well, so we had to get rid of it.”

According to Brad, my mother had shipped the dog off to the pound while I was at school, though she’d told me it ran away.

“How about-?” I began, then stopped.

“How about me?” Jack said. “Pets, you mean?”

“Sorry, I didn’t mean to pry.”

“Wouldn’t ask anything I minded answering myself.” He stretched out his legs, earning a grunt from Scotch as he invaded her space. “Had barn cats. Don’t really count as pets. Found a dog once. Should say, my older brothers found it. Gave it to me.”

“That was nice of them.”

“I thought so. Till I realized they just wanted someone to do the work. Feed it. Brush it. Take the blame if it caused trouble. Dog played with all of us. Didn’t care who ‘owned’ it.”

I laughed. “Smart brothers.”

“Yeah.” He smiled, then went quiet, traced a finger around the circle his mug had left on the table. “Yeah, they were.” Jack swiped away the condensation mark with his hand, then waved at Ginger, who was still sucking up my attention. “No reason you can’t get a dog. Build a good outside kennel. You’re outside most of the time anyway.”

“I suppose.”

“Should have one. At least for protection. That caretaker you’ve got? He’s, what, seventy? Not much help. No security system. Fuck, I tried the front door once. Two a.m. Wasn’t even locked. Then there’s your jogging. You take a gun along?”

“Where I live-”

“Doesn’t matter. You need to be careful. Those deserted roads? I remember-” Jack shook his head. “Wouldn’t believe what guys can pull off.”

“Such as?”

He lifted his brows.

“Come on. You set up a story, now carry it through. You’ve still got”-I glanced in his mug-“half a cup left. Tell me half a cup’s worth of story and we’ll call it a night.”

And, to my surprise, he did.

He pecked at the keyboard with his index fingers. Slow but steady. His philosophy for all things, or so it had been…

What was the cliché? You can’t teach an old dog new tricks? Of course you could, so long as you provided the twin keys to change-motivation and desire. He’d never be a sixty-word-a-minute typist, but his two-fingered method suited his purposes just fine.

Five years ago he didn’t even know how to turn on a computer. But then someone showed him how useful a tool it could be and so, with motivation and desire, he’d taught himself how to use it. Now he couldn’t imagine how he’d survived all those years in the business without it.

There were places down there, deep in the Web, that most Internet-savvy criminals scorned and mocked. Places inhabited by interlopers in the criminal world. Wannabes-that’s the word they used these days. Computer geeks who set up shop in the underworld and tried desperately to be part of it.

He could picture them, caffeine-hyper beanpoles with bad skin and thick glasses, surrounded by pizza boxes and Coke cans, fingers flying across the keyboard, ferreting out every bit of underworld gossip and lore, endlessly searching for some tidbit that maybe, just maybe, would impress someone in the business, someone who’d seen dead bodies that weren’t just video game carnage. They lived in that hope, so they worked ceaselessly, improving their network of contacts, their data banks of information.

Ego being what it is, no success is a success unless it can be admired and envied by others. Lacking the audience they desired, these moles of the underground found another forum for their braggadocio. They talked to one another.

Tonight, as he sat in the Internet cafe, nursing a coffee, he’d prowled through three such chat rooms, ostensibly to get a heads-up on the investigation, hear the leaks, the rumors, the speculation. Perhaps, if he was being honest with himself, he’d admit to the thrill that came each time he saw his alter ego appear on the screen, each time someone typed the words “Helter Skelter killer.”

In one of the chat rooms they’d been debating some esoteric angle of the crimes, something about the randomness of good and evil. A doctoral dissertation in the making. He’d snorted, and glided from the chat room unnoticed. In the fourth one, though, he’d entered in the middle of a conversation that made his fingers freeze on the keys.

He read slowly, deciphering their cyber-shorthand as he went.

DRAGNSLAYR: …getting together and going after this guy.