Midnight Man

  “No, of course not.” Anyone following her? What a ludicrous idea. She started to shake her head then thought about it. She’d entered a new world, one in which she didn’t know the rules and had no survival instincts. In this new world, anything could happen. “I mean,” she corrected, looking at Bud and John, “maybe someone was, but I didn’t notice it. I probably wouldn’t. I guess I don’t think that way. But if anyone was following me, he had a very boring day. I met with a cloth importer, Cathy Lorenzetti, at nine o’clock in her office on Glisan. At ten I met with a colleague, Todd Armstrong, at his home. We had tea and discussed business. I spent the afternoon with a new client, going over the plans for the redecoration of her apartment. Not exactly the stuff thrillers are made of.”

  Bud absorbed this information, making careful notes. “I’m going to be needing addresses and phone numbers.” Suzanne gave them to him. “And you got home around when?”

  “Eight. It had been a long afternoon.” Very long, Suzanne thought. And tedious. “I was tired. I took a bath, had a light meal and turned in to bed.”

  “That would be around what time?” Bud asked. He was taking copious notes, though she couldn’t imagine she was saying anything of any importance.

  “Ten o’clock. I checked my watch and I remember hearing the grandfather clock—the one over there in the corner—chime ten.” Bud turned around to look where she pointed and nodded. “I read for about twenty minutes, then turned out the light. I might have dozed a little, off and on, but I was feeling restless.” Suzanne could almost feel John’s intense scrutiny beside her. He seemed to be listening to her with every cell in his body. Surely he must know he was a big reason she’d been unable to fall asleep. “Then I heard the clock chime midnight and I realized that I was having trouble falling asleep so maybe I should heat up some milk.”

  “You had to walk through this room to get to the kitchen, right?” Bud gestured with his head.

  “Yes. The house is a little odd in the layout because it was originally a factory. Industrial spaces are laid out quite differently from residential spaces. A residential space is divided up into day areas and night areas but this one isn’t. Essentially, my apartment is four large rooms, one after the other. My office first, the public space, and then the private spaces—the kitchen, the living room and the bedroom. The bedroom’s through there.” She pointed, shivering inwardly at the memory of huddling in fear in the closet. John’s hand tightened on hers.

  It was large and hard and callused. Suzanne suddenly had a very vivid sensory memory of the hard calluses on his fingertips brushing over her breasts, brushing lower. He’d opened her roughly before plunging inside her, the calluses on his hands grating very sensitive flesh…

  She turned and their eyes met and the breath left her body at the heat and power of those gunmetal dark eyes. He was remembering, too.

  “So,” Bud prodded, not looking up from his notes. “Let’s see if I got it straight. You can’t sleep, so you get up and go to the kitchen—“

  With difficulty, Suzanne wrenched her attention away from John. She struggled to concentrate. “Yes. Well, no. First I went to the window in my bedroom, just for a second. It was snowing, very lightly. I love it when it does that, just a few fat snowflakes falling down. It was what I call an aurora borealis night—you know, when the clouds are low enough to reflect the lights from downtown?”

  Bud nodded but John looked blank. Well, he wasn’t from Portland. Apparently he wasn’t from anywhere in particular. Though he must have spent some time in the south. There’d been a faint southern inflection in his voice, whispering in her ear as he thrust hard and fast inside her. She bit her lips. She couldn’t be thinking about this now.

  “Suzanne?” Bud was looking at her oddly. Thank God he wasn’t a mind reader. “Go on.”

  She couldn’t talk and think of John at the same time. She turned to look at Bud, like spot focusing while dancing. “So I was watching the lights reflected off the clouds when I realized that I was seeing other lights. Or rather a light. A focused one, flickering off the hedges. I watched it for a while, and couldn’t understand what it was.”

  Bud rose and gazed out the window, measuring, then looked back at John when he sat down again. “A flashlight,” he said.

  “From the office,” John confirmed.

  Suzanne looked from one to the other. “Yes, you’re right.” How annoying. It had taken her at least ten minutes peering outside the window, puzzled, to reach that conclusion. “So I decided to go check to see—“

  “Jesus, Suzanne,” Bud said, half rising out of his seat.

  “You fucking what?” John roared, outraged. His hand crushed hers in a hard grip. “You’re looking at the flashlight of an intruder and you fucking go check it out! What the hell’s the matter with you, lady?”

  Suzanne recoiled. It was the first time she’d heard him use what probably was a sailor’s vocabulary. She wasn’t used to being spoken to like that. She tried to jerk her hand out from his, but he held on tight. There was no breaking that grip, no getting away.

  She wanted to be indignant, to respond icily to both Bud and John—John especially—but the truth was they were right. She hadn’t thought her actions through. Like last night—no, like the night before last—when John had lectured her on what she needed to secure the building.

  Her mind simply didn’t run along those tracks.

  Bud was scowling heavily now. “That’s the dumbest thing I ever heard and I’ve heard a lot in my time. You realize you might have an intruder in the house and you amble on over to see what he’s doing?” His deep voice was heavy with disapproval as he wrote in his pad. “Do you realize how reckless that is?”

  Suzanne refrained from rolling her eyes. “Well, that’s not quite what happened, so you don’t need to raise your voice. I went to investigate what the light source was. Not having yet reached the conclusion that I had an intruder in the house like some lightning-swift people I know.”

  Irony was lost on them. Bud was writing busily and John had released her hand to rise from the couch, gun in hand, and look outside the windows. He pulled back the curtains and peered intently out from first one window then the other. His broad shoulders blocked the entire window out. He stood watch for a moment, silent and motionless, then checked the door to the kitchen, the door to the bedroom. At each movement, he checked back at her as well, as if in the space of a few seconds she could disappear or someone could leap out from behind the couch to steal her away. He moved swiftly, silently, like a panther pacing the perimeter of a cage. When he returned to the couch, he placed the gun quietly back on the table, within reach. He placed his left arm again around the back of the couch, only this time he cupped her shoulder.

  “Did you switch on the lights?” Bud asked.

  “No,” Suzanne replied. She was suddenly struck by the idea that that might have saved her life. The intruder would have come after her immediately. “Good Lord, if I had—“ She couldn’t finish the sentence.

  “It would be your blood spatters the crime scene unit would be studying right now instead of his.” John finished the sentence for her, his grip almost painfully tight on her shoulder. There were pale lines of some strong emotion—anger?—around his mouth.

  Suzanne drew in a shocked breath. Her mind reeled at how close it had been. She remembered the intense feelings in the closet. How fiercely she wanted to live.

  So close. She’d come so close to dying. A movement of her fingers, a flick of the light switch, and it would have been over. The blood drained from her face as she thought of what the intruder’s gun could have done to her.

  Both Bud and John were watching her carefully. The low murmurs of the techs working the body drifted up. She felt foolish, and tired and completely out of her depth.

  “Go on,” Bud said finally.

  “Okay.” Suzanne bit her lip. “Okay, um, I walked through the living room, this room, and into the kitchen. I heard this noise. Like a—a thud. Like s
omeone bumping into furniture. That’s when I realized that it was someone bumping around. In my office. The door was ajar. I peeked around the door and I saw him.”

  “The man lying on the floor?”

  “I’m not too sure…I don’t think I could swear to that in court.” For the first time it occurred to Suzanne that she probably would be testifying in court. A murder had been

  committed in her home. In self-defense, to be sure, but it was still a murder. Or would that be manslaughter?

  John had come running to her rescue and had killed the man. Would there be legal consequences for him? He was just starting out in a new business. Had her problems reached out to blight his life?

  “I can swear that he was wearing a black leather jacket and tan pants exactly like what the dead man is wearing. He had a big gun with a barrel on the end of it. It looked like the silencers they show in the movies. He walked several times in front of the window and I could see him and the gun silhouetted against the light. But I didn’t get a good look at his face. He was stumbling around a lot, looking at his feet. He was finding it hard to orient himself in the room. It’s got an unusual layout, as I said, and it’s Feng Shui.”

  Bud’s pencil froze over the pad. John stopped his perusal of the room and turned to stare at her. The techs, two on their knees, looked up.

  “It’s…what?” Bud asked.

  “Feng Shui.” At their blank looks, she smiled. She’d taken lessons from Li Yung herself, who was Mandarin and who pronounced it ‘Fang Choi’. “You probably know it as Feng Shui.” Suzanne gave it the American pronunciation.

  Bud put his pencil down and pinched the bridge of his nose. “Honey,” he said, “you’re going to have to make sense. Help me out here. What’s—what was the word again?”

  “Two words. Feng Shui. It means ‘Wind and Water’.”

  Bud and John exchanged glances.

  “Your house is wind and water?” Bud asked, carefully.

  It was good to have something to smile about. “It’s the ancient Chinese art of decorating a space to make best use of energy flows. The Chinese believe energy flows in specific directions and you arrange furniture and objects to direct that flow in beneficial ways. But it also means that furniture and objects aren’t arranged in concentric boxes like in the West. The man found a footstool where he was expecting a chair, and a table where he was expecting nothing at all.”

  She might as well have been speaking Chinese. Bud looked at his techs, at John, then shrugged. “Okay. So you saw this guy stumbling around in the dark in your office, which is—“ he hesitated, “whatever. What did you do then?”

  “I went back through the rooms as quietly as I could and called John.”

  “Why John? Why not the police? Why not me?”

  Suzanne lifted a shoulder. ‘Why John’ was evident in every line of John’s big body, in the fiercely controlled grace of his every move. In the way he handled his gun, in the way his constant vigilance ensured nothing could surprise him. Why John was clear.

  John’s eyes were narrowed as he looked at her. She couldn’t breathe properly while he was staring at her so intently. His hard jaw was dark with black stubble. He’d been close shaven the night they’d had dinner together. Had had sex together. He was probably one of those men who needed to shave twice a day. The beard made him look even more disreputable, even more dangerous. The kind of man no one crossed.

  “I thought he might be close by,” she whispered. John had stopped his careful quartering of the room and was focused on her. She’d almost forgotten that feeling of being in the presence of a force of nature. Now, the focus of his intent gaze, she remembered. She remembered how alive she’d felt walking by his side, how every single person in the restaurant had faded into insignificance and how he filled her entire field of vision. She remembered the ferocity of his kisses, the power of his hands on her, his penis thrusting hot and hard inside her.

  She also remembered that fierce moment in the closet, one of those defining moments in a person’s life. That moment the plane plunges, the car slides out of control, the earth shakes. That clear cool view of life as you might be dying.

  In that moment, she’d wanted John Huntington by her side with every fiber of her being.

  In that moment she’d known that he would come for her without question and that he would die for her.

  In that moment, she knew that in some primal way, more a matter of blood and bone than mind and heart, she was his.

  “I punched in the alarm code, like you told me,” she said to John. “Honest. I remember doing it when I came home. I don’t know how he got in.”

  “Whoa.” Bud stared at John. He shook his head. “I don’t believe this. That guy got past your security? Tell me it’s not true. You’re slipping, Midnight Man.”

  “Not my security,” John answered tightly. “I was going to install my system tomorrow. She had Interloc.”

  “Okay. Whew. For a minute there I thought you’d lost your touch.” Bud scribbled some more then looked up. “What then, honey?”

  Suzanne pushed her hair wearily out of her eyes. God, she was tired. She was on her second night without sleep. “I got in touch with John. Called him on my cell phone. He said he was a few blocks away. He said to lock the doors, and to go to my closet and wait.” Eyes closed, she remembered those moments, filled with panic and fear. “So I did.”

  Bud turned. “John?”

  His eyes were dark and cold. His voice even. “I got the call from Suzanne at seventeen minutes past midnight. She said she’d seen an intruder in the house, that he was armed. I was a few blocks away. I parked out of view of the building and proceeded to the front door. The alarm system and phone lines had been disabled. I entered the building—“

  “Were you armed at the time?” Bud asked sharply.

  John’s eyes glittered like ice. He just looked at Bud.

  “Okay, okay.” Bud said. “With what?”

  “Sig Sauer.”

  “Why didn’t you use it?”

  “In the end, I opted not to.” John shrugged a broad shoulder. “I thought he might be wearing body armor. Which he was. My weapon would have blown his face away. If his prints weren’t on file, we’d never know who he was. I used my K-Bar.”

  Suzanne could just imagine the scene. The dark, silent room, John moving like a ghost, his big knife whipping through the air, the intruder clutching his throat, crumpling to the ground, wheezing uselessly for air while his blood pulsed and sprayed…

  Bud sighed. He was sitting in male mode—legs spread wide, hands on knees, pen and pad dangling from one big hand. He sighed again, slapped his thighs and stood up.

  “Okay. Let’s take this down to the station house.” He gestured to the technicians. Two unfolded a gurney and lifted the dead man on to it. He spoke to them. “You guys got everything?” They nodded.

  John put his hand to Suzanne’s elbow and helped her out of the couch. He held her thick quilted jacket. Suzanne fitted her arms into it and he lifted her hair at the back for her. His hands—heavy, warm, reassuring—lay on her shoulders while she zipped the jacket up. For just a second, Suzanne allowed herself to lean back against him a little, savoring the strength and steadiness of him.

  John squeezed her shoulders gently, and then lifted his hands. “Get your things,” he said quietly.

  She made a wide circle around the bloodstains on the floor and wheeled her little suitcase out. Bud lifted an eyebrow and John shook his head sharply. Don’t ask, his look said.

  Oddly, John didn’t help her with the suitcase. It was on wheels, so it was easy for her to carry. Still, he seemed like the kind of man who wouldn’t let a woman carry anything.

  Then he placed his left arm around her waist, picked up his big black gun and she understood. He wanted one hand on her and one hand on his weapon.

  What an odd little procession they made as they trooped outside, Suzanne thought. Bud first, Suzanne and John together, then the techs with the bod
y, two carrying the gurney, two flanking it. Suzanne stood just outside the door, blinking. Two more police cars had joined the others haphazardly parked along her street. Their lights were flashing and she could hear the squawk and hiss of the radio. Police officers milled around, their low voices muffled in the thick night air. They were already cordoning off the house with yellow police tape.

  The light snowfall had left white patches on the ground. It wasn’t snowing now but the air felt heavy and damp. It would snow later, maybe at daybreak in a few hours. Suzanne lifted her head and breathed in deep, trying to dispel the smell of violent death. The oxygen helped clear her brain. She felt unreal, at the center of a scene she’d seen a thousand times on TV but never imagined would be part of her life.

  She watched two technicians maneuver the gurney down the steps. The body, zipped up in a black plastic bag, shifted. One of the police officers reached out to brace it before it could slip off.