Retribution Read online

  “Come on, Max,” he heard Kitty the Mermaid say.

  Back in the wonderful water again. Kitty pulled him past penguins and other mermaids until she reached a quieter spot in the grotto. Then she pressed her bare torso to his chest and kissed him. She tasted the same as he remembered, sweet and sour like tart candy, though that might have been his imagination.

  Max pushed her away. “I can’t.”

  “I see you’re busy,” Max heard Lucien say behind Kitty. “Too bad. Next time.”

  Max nudged Kitty aside, but didn’t see Lucien. She cupped his head in her hands and forced him to look at her. Her face had changed.

  “Val?” he said to the redhead pressed against him. “Wh—what’s happening?”

  Val stroked the back of his neck, and his whole body responded like the first time he’d ever touched a woman. His hands trembled.

  “You have to trust me,” Val said with Kitty’s voice.

  She pulled him in for a kiss, and this time he couldn’t resist. He kissed her back, drinking in her essence with a hunger that had gnawed at him for eight months. Every part of him wanted her, needed her, ached for her to fill the hole he’d been dumping drugs down and patching over with paper-thin promises to leave the past behind. He’d tried. He couldn’t.

  A guttural moan escaped from deep in his chest. “Valentine.” He kissed her neck, her shoulder; ran his hands along her soft breasts, silky back, plump behind. “Don’t leave me again.” He dropped to his knees and kissed her between her legs, savoring her taste, kissing away the pain her ability caused her, the wedge it drove between them.

  “I see you’re busy,” Max heard Lucien say behind Val. “Too bad. Next time.”

  He stopped kissing Val and turned his head in time to see Lucien swimming away with three other penguins. Max squinted at his back. Hadn’t Lucien already swum by and said those exact words?

  He looked up at Val—and saw her pregnant belly. He gasped—How? When? Was it his? Of course it was his. A miracle child—the product they’d been pushed together to create, something neither of them wanted. But it made him smile. He put a hand on her belly and stood.

  “Is it a boy or a gir—” The smile wiped off his face when he looked at her and saw Abby, face a mask of fury as tears flowed down her face. You bastard. You said you loved me.

  “I’m sorry, Abby. I’m so sorry.” His voice choked up. “I didn’t mean to hurt you. I don’t know what I’m doing.”

  She grabbed his wrist with a strength he didn’t know she was capable of. “Max, snap out of it,” she said with Kitty’s voice.

  “I love you. I’m sure I do. I promise. You’re perfect. Any normal man would want you. I don’t deserve you—”

  “Stop it. We need to get out of here.”

  The walls around him burst into flames. Max cried out as tendrils of fire licked the ceiling and radiated a heat that seared his hair and burned his eyes. He spun in circles but couldn’t find the exit. Penguins gawked at him as the inferno closed in.

  “Swim away!” he yelled at the stupid birds, but they didn’t move.

  He tried to run, but everywhere he turned, there was only fire. He dropped to his knees as smoke filled his lungs and skin peeled off his face. His flesh cooked on his bones. He began to scream.

  Max felt a sharp pain behind his head, then nothing.

  Chapter Twelve

  Facing the foot of Sten’s bed, Val lay on her stomach as she drew what she’d seen in her notebook. Margaret in the water again, a newly paved two-lane road nearby, a yield sign. The Space Needle across a body of water. Same stuff as her first vision. She tapped her pencil on the paper and sighed. Even if she managed to figure out where Margaret’s body would wash up, it would bring her no closer to discovering Margaret’s present location, where she was hopefully still alive. She needed to see where Margaret would be murdered or, better yet, who would murder her.

  As Val took a sip from a beer can—Sten only had the cheap stuff, but it would do—she heard him scoff from behind her. She craned her head to look at him, kitty-cornered on the bed from her, sitting naked with his back propped against the headboard. His skin, naturally a shade darker than hers from whatever heritage he refused to talk about, glistened with a fine sheen of sweat. The lean muscles cutting across his fit body made up the same soldier physique she’d wanted to fuck all night back in her Army days. At least she could take comfort in the fact that she could do a lot worse than Sten—physically anyway.

  He frowned at an issue of The Economist in his lap. “What the hell, Netanyahu?” he said to the magazine’s glossy pages. “Ben-Gurion would’ve never misread the political landscape that badly.” Sten tossed the magazine on the floor, then pulled a cigarette from a pack on his nightstand. With the flick of a cheap lighter, he fired it up and took a long drag. “Cracked the case yet, Colombo?” Smoke curled out his mouth and vanished into the ceiling.

  He liked to smoke after sex; Val remembered that from her Army days. Had he known what her “low blood sugar issue” really was back then, but never said anything? He knew a lot of things he pretended to be ignorant about, she now realized.

  Val pushed a bead of sweat out of her eye. She touched the beer can to her cheek; the metal was already warm. Damn. Air-conditioning wasn’t high on Sten’s list of priorities, apparently. “Do you know a guy named Ginger?” she asked him.

  “Negative.”

  “What about a club called the Blue Serpent?”

  He paused for a moment, like he considered how to answer her question. He did that a lot. “No.”

  “Are you lying?”

  He chuckled. “What’s there to lie about?”

  She shook her head and finished the beer in one long gulp, letting the can drop to the ground. The buzz, and the sex, were a nice relief from the horrible day. All her days were horrible lately. “How can you live with yourself, being such a shitty cop?”

  “That’s your baseless opinion. Last year I won Gruff the Crime Dog’s Seattle Public Protector of the Month award twice in a row.”

  Val pointed at her notebook. “This girl’s been kidnapped. She and…other women have been raped, and you just sit there and do nothing.”

  “I’m helping you now, aren’t I?”

  That was sort of true. He’d obliged her midnight booty call, knowing full well she only used him for a vision she hoped would give her another angle to pursue in her investigation. Better Sten than alone, or with Stacey—she’d never again risk their friendship that way. Val despised Sten as a person, but he offered sex she could control, and he got her off every time. She preferred not to think about the psychological implications.

  “Why are you helping me? Did Delilah or Northwalk order you to?”

  He snickered. “Hell no.”

  “Then why?”

  Sten put an arm behind his head and leaned back. He puffed on his cigarette in quiet contemplation for a few seconds, staring at his useless ceiling fan as it pushed warm air around. “Say you know the future—hypothetically speaking, bear with me—and you want to prevent something from happening. But once you’ve seen it happen, you can’t change it because now it’s your past and the past has already happened. Schrödinger’s cat and all that.”

  Max had talked about something like that before. The fact that Sten and Max shared similar deep thoughts about the universe shocked her. There really were a lot of things she didn’t know about her enemy-with-benefits. “Okay…”

  “But—hold the phone!—there happens to be one person on the entire planet who, through a fluke of biology and maybe some divine intervention, or maybe the opposite of divine intervention, can change the future after it’s been seen. Now you can manipulate that person to change the past for you.”

  “So you’re saying you want me to change something about the future.”

  “No.”

  “Then what the hell are you talking about?”

  He sighed like he dealt with an idiot child. “What I want is for you
to always be available when I call.”

  She laughed. Was he kidding? She could never tell with him. “You mean you want me to drop everything and come to you whenever you feel like it?”

  “Yes.” He snuffed out his cigarette in an ashtray. “Do you want my help or not?”

  “Will you help me take down Delilah and Northwalk?”

  “I’d love to, but the timing’s not right. Trust me, I’ve been working on that little project for a long time. You’ll have to accept my many other skills.”

  Val held his gaze for a long moment, his dark eyes as enigmatic as ever. She tried to get a read on his true intentions. Sten would be a valuable ally. He had access to Delilah, knew more about the strange conspiracy involving Max and Val than they did, and had police resources at his disposal. On the other hand, he’d brutally murdered at least one person she knew of, might have killed her fiancée, tried to kill Val, and almost killed Max twice. She had absolutely no reason to trust him—other than desperation.

  Val scoffed at his offer. “Fuck you.”

  Sten smiled. “I’ll take that as a yes.” He pushed himself to his knees and crawled to where she still lay on her stomach at the opposite corner of his bed. He ran his hands up the backs of her bare thighs. “Let’s start now.”

  Val tried to slap him away, but as usual he ignored her physical threats. “I didn’t say yes.”

  He lay on top of her with his chest against her back, his weight pinning her down. She felt his hard cock rub against her backside as he gripped her forearms.

  “So say no,” he said.

  Sten wedged an arm underneath her chest and inched his hand down her belly until he’d reached between her legs. He slipped a couple of fingers into her and stroked her insides.

  “You’re…crazy,” Val said, her breath strained from his weight on her back and the fire he stoked with his hand. “I can’t agree to that.”

  “Then say no.”

  “I—” A moan escaped her lips before she could finish. Why did he have to be so good at this?

  Val closed her eyes as desire overwhelmed her senses. Sweat prickled across her arms and trickled down her back from where her and Sten’s bare skin pressed together.

  “You wanna find that girl?” he whispered into her ear.

  “Yes,” she breathed.

  “What’s her name?”

  “Margaret.”

  “Where was she last seen?”

  “A…bar, called…the Pana Sea.”

  One hand still stroking her, he reached down her back with the other and slipped a finger between her cheeks, into her opposite end. Val gasped at the sensation, a strange pleasure she hadn’t experienced in a long time.

  “Imagine you’re in the bar, the Pana Sea,” he said. “Imagine you’re with Margaret, having a drink.”

  She choked out a dry laugh. “You’re…my therapist now?”

  “I’m helping you. That’s our deal. So concentrate.”

  Before she could point out she hadn’t agreed to anything, she felt his manhood ease into her backside. Val yelped at the pressure, uncomfortable at first until her body relaxed and took him in. He moved in and out of her in slow thrusts while his hand stayed inside her, stroking her front in time with his hips. Jolts of electricity shot through her with each movement. She clutched his bedsheets and tried to catch her breath, her whole body on fire with pleasure and pain.

  “You’re in the bar with Margaret,” Sten said.

  “Uhhn…all right.”

  “You finish your drinks and leave the bar together.”

  “No,” Val said, panting. “She…left with a man named…Ginger.”

  “She leaves with Ginger. You follow them. Where do they go?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Yes you do.” His thrusts picked up speed and strength. “Believe that you do. Picture it. Be there with them, and then look ahead. Where do they go?”

  Val whimpered, the incredible sensation he rammed through her pushing away all rational thought. “I—I don’t know.”

  “Yes you do.” He wrapped his free hand around her throat and dug his fingers into her neck, not to choke her but to give himself a good grip so he could move into her as much as possible. The whole bed rocked along with his deep, powerful strokes, into her front and back. “Come on, Val. Look. Follow them. Hear the tires screech as they peel out of the parking lot. Smell the car exhaust in the air when they drive away. Feel the warm breeze in your hair while they cruise down the highway. Where do they go?”

  How did he expect her to concentrate on his words while he turned her inside out? Val could barely hear him over screams of ecstasy she couldn’t control, filling his tiny studio apartment.

  “Where does Margaret go?”

  Val let out a final throaty, desperate wail as lightning seized her whole body and she came—

  Margaret wears a hospital gown and walks in circles around a laboratory. She holds her arms straight out at her sides and takes large, exaggerated steps. Her mouth is seized in a manic grin, dark circles under her wide eyes.

  “I’m on the moon!” she says as she does laps around a metal table. “I’m weightless on the moon. On the moon. On the moon.”

  “Excellent,” Lucien says from where he stands in the corner, a white lab coat over his dress shirt. He writes something on a piece of paper attached to a clipboard. “Let’s try another one.”

  Blur.

  Margaret is strapped to a metal table. She struggles against bonds around her ankles and wrists while tears pour down her frantic face. Lucien stands over her, holding a syringe of bright red liquid. She looks away and sobs as he injects it into her neck. He drops the empty syringe on a metal tray and retrieves a crowbar from a lab bench.

  “No, please,” she begs. “Not again.”

  He touches the crowbar to the middle of her forearm as way of aiming, then lifts the bar straight up.

  She writhes harder against her bonds. “NO!”

  With no emotion, he says, “Tell me what you feel.”

  He swings the crowbar down as Margaret screams.

  Blur.

  “You said you’d help me,” a tall redheaded man in a tuxedo says to Lucien as the Frenchman emerges from a dark room.

  Lucien takes a moment to shut the door behind him. A cypher lock clicks into place, securing the room. He straightens out the tie on his own tuxedo, then turns on the redhead. “I told you to wait. We can’t talk here.”

  “I’ve been waiting.” The redhead lifts his chin and folds his arms, but his fingers pick nervously at his sleeves. “I did what you asked. I want what you promised. Now.”

  The bonging of what sounds like a massive grandfather clock interrupts their argument.

  “Soon,” Lucien says. He nods toward wherever the bonging came from. “After.”

  Blur.

  Margaret, strapped to the metal table again. Now she wears a white cocktail dress, the one she’ll be wearing when she washes up dead on the beach. Lucien stands over her with a syringe of blue liquid.

  “Please let me go,” Margaret says, her words slurred like she’s already under the influence of another drug. “I won’t tell anyone.”

  Lucien cocks his head and smiles. “They always say that. I wonder if it’s ever worked.”

  He taps the syringe, then eases the needle into Margaret’s neck. “Our time has unfortunately been cut short. Thank you for your assistance. I will remember you as the most helpful one so far.”

  Val opened her eyes and the scene evaporated. Sten came into focus, lying on his back next to her, head hung halfway off the side of the bed. He smoked a cigarette and stared at the ceiling.

  Finally, she’d seen something useful. What in the world had Sten done to knock that piece of information loose? It’s not like she’d never had great sex before—Max still held the top spot—but she’d never been able to focus a vision that well.

  “Jesus, Sten,” she said, still short of breath. She felt weak and wet all over
, like she’d just stepped out of a hot shower after a brutal workout.

  He exhaled a long column of smoke. “You’re welcome.”

  “How the hell did you do that—”

  Val’s cell phone rang from inside her tote bag on Sten’s sad kitchenette table. A phone call at one thirty in the morning usually wasn’t the kind she wanted to ignore. With muscles like jelly, she pushed herself off the bed and retrieved her cell. Her eyes widened when Max’s face popped up on her caller ID.

  He was calling her? After how their last meeting ended? And why would he call at this time of night? Did he know where she was? He’d never forgive her if he found out, though he already hated her so it really didn’t matter. Nor was it any of his business, even if he did know.

  She glanced at Sten, still lying on his back as he enjoyed his cigarette. He’d closed his eyes, crossed his legs, and appeared uninterested in Val’s phone call—which probably meant he would listen to every word. Fucking Sten.

  Val turned away from him. Keeping her voice low, she answered the call. “Max?”

  “Val?” Max said. Club music thumped in the background.

  “Yeah.”

  “Is this Val?” His voice trembled as if he were on the verge of tears.

  “What’s wrong?” She’d only heard him this upset once before, when he’d confessed to killing his father in a fit of rage after years of abuse.

  For a few seconds she only heard his labored breathing. Then he spoke again, “Help me.”

  She immediately began gathering up her clothes, which she’d tossed at the foot of Sten’s bed. “Where are you?”

  “I don’t know. I was at a party, and then I was underwater, and then there was a house fire, and now there’s flashing lights, and…uh…I dunno…” His words slurred and he trailed off.

  She heard a thump, then rustling, as if his phone had dropped to the floor and been picked up again.

  A gruff voice replaced Max’s. “Your boyfriend’s fucked up, honey. He’s at the Green Door Nightclub. Come get his ass outta here.” He hung up.

  “Shit,” Val muttered. She rushed to throw on her clothes.