Gia told herself she was standing here at the window to keep Vicky company—the poor child had been watching for an hour already—yet there was an undeniable sense of anticipation rising inside her. It wasn’t love. It couldn’t be love.
What was it, then?
Probably just a residue of feeling, like a smear on a window that hadn’t been properly wiped after spring cleaning. What else could she expect? It had been only two months since the breakup and her feelings for Jack until then had been intense, as if compensating for all that had been missing from her aborted marriage.
Jack is the one, she’d told herself. The forever one.
She didn’t want to think about that awful afternoon. She’d held the memory off all day, but now, with Jack due any minute, it all rushed back at her …
* * *
She was cleaning his apartment. A friendly gesture. He refused to hire a cleaning lady and usually did it himself. But to Gia’s mind, Jack’s household methods left much to be desired, so she decided to surprise him by giving the place a thorough going-over. She wanted to do something for him. He was always doing little things for her, yet he was so self-contained that she found it difficult to reciprocate. So she “borrowed” an extra key to his apartment and sneaked in one day when he was out.
She knew Jack as a gentle eccentric who worked at odd intervals and odd hours as a security consultant—whatever that was—and lived in a three-room apartment stuffed with such an odd assortment of junk that she had attacks of vertigo the first few times she visited him. His latest “neat stuff”—an original red and green Little Orphan Annie Ovaltine shake-up mug and an official Tom Corbett Space Cadet badge—lay on the round oak table. That was another thing about the apartment: the hideous old furniture. And he was crazy about movies—old movies, new movies, good movies, awful movies. He was the only man she’d ever known who did not have a bank or credit card. He had such an aversion to signing his name that he didn’t even have a checking account. He paid cash for everything.
The cleaning chores went smoothly until she found the loose panel at the rear of the base of the old oak secretary. She’d been polishing it with lemon oil to bring up the grain and make the wood glow. Jack loved oak and she was learning to love it, too—it had such character. The panel swung out as she touched it.
Something gleamed in the darkness within. Curious, she reached in and touched cool, oiled metal. She pulled the object out and started in surprise at its weight and malignant blue color. A pistol.
Well, lots of people in the city had guns. For protection. Nothing unusual about that.
She glanced back into the opening. There were other gleaming things within. She began to pull them out. As each gun was delivered from the hiding place, she fought the growing pang in the pit of her stomach, telling herself that Jack was probably just a collector. After all, no two of the dozen or so guns were alike. But what about the rest of the contents: the boxes of bullets, the daggers, brass knuckles, and other deadly-looking things she’d never seen before? Among the weapons were three driver’s licenses, and sundry other forms of identification, all with different names.
Her insides knotted as she sat and stared at the collection. She tried to tell herself they were things he needed for his work as a security consultant, but deep inside she knew that much of what lay before her was illegal. Even if he had permits for all the guns, there was no way the licenses could be legal.
Gia was still sitting there when he came back in from one of his mysterious errands. A shocked, guilty look ran over his face when he saw what she had found.
“Who are you?” she said, leaning away as he knelt beside her.
“I’m Jack. You know me.”
“Do I? I’m not even sure your name’s Jack anymore.” She could feel the terror growing within her. Her voice rose an octave. “Who are you and what do you do with all this?”
He gave her some garbled story about being a repairman of sorts who “fixes things.” For a fee he finds stolen property or evens scores for people when the police and the courts and all the various proper channels for redress have failed them.
“But all these guns and knives and things … they’re for hurting people!”
He nodded. “Sometimes it comes down to that.”
She had visions of him shooting someone, stabbing him, clubbing him to death. If someone else had told her this about the man she loved, she would have laughed and walked away. But the weapons lay in front of her. And Jack was telling her himself!
“Then you’re nothing but a hired thug!”
He reddened. “I work on my own terms—exclusively. And I don’t do anything to anybody that they haven’t already done to someone else. I was going to tell you when I thought—”
“But you hurt people!”
“Sometimes.”
This was becoming a nightmare! “What kind of thing is that to spend your life doing?”
“It’s my job.”
“Do you enjoy it when you hurt people?”
He looked away. And that was answer enough. She felt as if he’d shoved one of his knives into her heart.
“Are the police after you?”
“No,” he said with a certain amount of pride. “They don’t even know I exist. Neither does the state of New York nor the IRS nor the rest of the US government.”
Gia rose to her feet and hugged herself. She suddenly felt cold. She didn’t want to ask this question, but she had to.
“What about killing? Have you ever killed someone?”
“Gia…” He rose and stepped toward her but she backed away.
“Answer me, Jack! Have you ever killed someone?”
“It’s happened. But that doesn’t mean I make my living at it.”
She thought she was going to be sick. The man she loved was a murderer!
“But you’ve killed!”
“Only when there was no other way. Only when I had to.”
“You mean, only when they were going to kill you? Kill or be killed?”
Please say yes. Please!
He looked away again. “Sort of.”
The world seemed to come apart at the seams. With hysteria clutching at her, Gia began running. She ran for the door, ran down the stairs, ran for a cab that took her home where she huddled in a corner of her apartment listening to the phone ring and ring and ring. She took it off the hook when Vicky came home from school and had barely spoken to Jack since.
* * *
“Come away from the window now. I’ll tell you when he arrives.”
“No, Mommy! I want to see him!”
“All right, but when he gets here, I don’t want you running around and making a fuss. Just say hello to him nice and politely, then go out back to the playhouse. Understand?”
“Is that him?” Vicky started bouncing on her toes. “Is that him?”
Gia looked, then laughed and pulled on her daughter’s pigtails. “Not even close.”
Gia walked away from the window, then came back, resigned to standing and watching behind Vicky. Jack appeared to occupy a blind spot in Vicky’s unusually incisive assessment of people. But then, Jack had fooled Gia, too.
Jack fooled everyone, it seemed.
9
If Jack had his choice of any locale in Manhattan to live, he’d choose Sutton Square, the half block of ultra-high-priced real estate standing at the eastern tip of Fifty-eighth Street off Sutton Place, deadending at a low stone wall overlooking a sunken brick terrace with an unobstructed view of the East River. No high-rises, condos, or office buildings there, just neat four-story townhouses standing flush to the sidewalk, all brick-fronted, some with the brick bare, others painted pastel colors. Wooden shutters flanked the windows and the recessed front doors. Some of them even had backyards. A neighborhood of Bentleys and Rolls Royces, liveried chauffeurs and white-uniformed nannies. And one block to the north, looming over it all like some towering guardian, stood the graceful, surprisingly delicate-looking span of the Que
ensboro Bridge.
He remembered the place well. He’d been here before. He’d met Gia’s aunts while on that job for the UK Mission. They’d invited him to a small gathering at their home. He hadn’t wanted to go but Burkes had talked him into it. The evening had changed his life. He’d met Gia.
He heard a child’s voice shouting as he crossed Sutton Place.
“Jack-Jack-Jack!”
Dark braids flying and arms outstretched, a little slip of a girl with wide blue eyes and a missing front tooth came dashing out the front door and down the sidewalk. She leaped into the air with the reckless abandon of a seven-year-old who had not the slightest doubt she would be caught and lifted and swung around.
Which is exactly what Jack did. Then he hugged her against his chest as she clamped her spindly arms around his neck.
“Where you been, Jack?” she said into his ear. “Where you been all this time?”
Jack’s answer was blocked by a lump in his throat the size of an apple. Shocked by the intensity of feeling welling up in him, he could only squeeze her tighter.
Vicky!
All the time he’d spent missing Gia, never realizing how much he’d missed the little one. For the better part of a year he and Gia had been together, Jack had seen Vicky almost every day, becoming a prime focus of her boundless store of affection. Losing Vicky had contributed much more than he ever could have imagined to the emptiness inside him these past two months.
Love you, little girl.
He hadn’t truly known how much until this very instant. Over Vicky’s shoulder he could see Gia standing in the doorway of the house, her face grim. He spun away to hide the tears that had sprung into his eyes.
“You’re squeezing me awful tight, Jack.”
He put her down. “Yeah. Sorry, Vicks.”
He cleared his throat, pulled himself together, then grasped her hand and walked up to the front door and Gia.
She looked good. Hell, she looked great in that light blue T-shirt and jeans. Short blond hair—to call it blond was to say the sun was sort of bright: It gleamed, it glowed. Blue eyes like winter sky after all the snow clouds have blown east. A strong, full mouth capable of a wide, dazzling smile. High shoulders, high breasts, fair skin with high coloring along the cheeks. He still found it almost impossible to believe she was Italian.
10
Gia controlled her anger. She’d told Vicky not to make a fuss, but at the first sight of Jack crossing the street she’d been out the door and on her way before Gia could stop her. She wanted to punish Vicky for disobeying her, yet knew she wouldn’t. Vicky loved Jack.
He looked the same as ever. His brown hair was a little longer and he looked as if he’d lost a few pounds since she last saw him, but no major differences. Still the same vitality, making the very air around him seem to throb with life, the same feline grace to his movements, the same warm brown eyes, the same lopsided smile. The smile looked forced at the moment, and his face was flushed. He looked hot.
“Hello,” Jack said as he reached the top step. His voice was husky.
He leaned his face toward her. She wanted to pull away but affected sublime indifference instead. She would be cool. She would be detached. He no longer meant anything to her. She accepted a peck on the cheek.
“Come in,” she said, doing her best to sound businesslike. She felt she succeeded. But the brush of his lips against her cheek stirred old unwanted feelings and she knew her face was coloring. Damn him. She turned away. “Aunt Nellie’s waiting.”
“You’re looking well,” he said, staring at her. Vicky’s hand was still clasped in his own.
“Thank you. So are you.” She’d never felt this way before, but now that she knew the truth about Jack, the sight of him holding hands with her little girl made her skin crawl. She had to get Vicky away from him. “Honey, why don’t you go outside and play in your playhouse while Jack and I and Aunt Nellie talk about grown-up things.”
“I want to stay with Jack!”
Gia started to speak, but Jack raised a hand.
“First thing we do,” he said to Vicky as he guided her into the foyer, “is close the door behind us. This may be a ritzy neighborhood, but they still haven’t got around to air conditioning the street.” He shut the door, then squatted in front of her. “Listen, Vicks. Your mother’s right. We’ve got some grown-up stuff to discuss and we’ve got to get down to business. But I’ll let you know as soon as we’re through.”
“Can I show you the playhouse?”
“Sure.”
“Neat! And Ms. Jelliroll wants to meet you. I told her all about you.”
“Great. I want to meet her, too. But first”—he pointed to the breast pocket of his shirt—“see what’s in there.”
Vicky reached in and pulled out an orange ball of fur. “A Rascal!” she screeched. “Oh, neat!”
She kissed him and ran toward the back.
“Who or what is Ms. Jelliroll?” he asked Gia as he rose to his feet.
“A new doll,” Gia said as brusquely as she could manage. “Jack, I … I want you to stay away from her.”
Gia saw his eyes then and knew that she’d cut him deeply. But his mouth smiled.
“I haven’t molested a child all week.”
“That’s not what I mean—”
“I’m a bad influence, right?”
“We’ve been through this before and I don’t want to get going on it again. Vicky was very attached to you. She’s just getting used to not having you around anymore, and now you come back and I don’t want her to think things are going back to the way they were.”
“I’m not the one who walked out.”
“Doesn’t matter. The result was the same. She was hurt.”
“So was I.”
“Jack,” she sighed, feeling very tired, “this is a pointless conversation.”
“Not to me. Gia, I’m crazy about that kid. There was a time when I had hopes of being her father.”
The sound of her own laugh was harsh and bitter in her ears. “Her real father hasn’t been heard from in a year and you wouldn’t be much of an improvement. Vicky needs a real person for a father. Someone who lives in the real world. Someone with a last name—do you even remember your last name? The one you were christened with? Jack, you … you don’t exist.”
He reached out and touched her arm. She felt her skin tingle.
“As real as you.”
“You know what I mean!” Gia said, pulling away. The words poured out of her. “What kind of a father could you be to anybody? And what kind of a husband?”
She was being hard on him, she knew, but he deserved it.
Jack’s face tightened. “Very well, Ms. DiLauro. Shall we get down to business? After all, I didn’t invite myself over.”
“Neither did I. It was Nellie’s idea. I was just the messenger. ‘Get that friend of yours, that Jack fellow, to help.’ I tried to tell her you were no longer a friend but she insisted. She remembered that you worked with Mr. Burkes.”
“That’s when we met.”
“And the long string of deceptions began. Mr. Burkes called you a ‘consultant’, a ‘troubleshooter.’”
Jack made a sour face. “But you came up with a better job description, didn’t you: ‘thug.’”
It jolted Gia to hear the pain in Jack’s voice as he said the word. Yes, she’d called him that the last time she’d seen him. She’d hurt him then and had been glad of it. But she wasn’t glad now to know he was still bleeding from it.
She turned away. “Nellie is waiting.”
11
With a mixture of pain and frustration roiling through him, Jack followed Gia down the hallway. For months he’d nurtured a faint hope that someday soon he would make her understand. As of now he knew with leaden certainty that it would never happen. She’d been a warm, passionate woman who’d loved him, and unwittingly he’d turned her to ice.
He studied the walnut paneling, the portraits on the walls, anything t
o keep from watching her as she walked ahead of him. Then they were through a pair of sliding doors and into the library. The dark paneling continued in from the hall, encircling lots of dark furniture, overstuffed velvet chairs with antimacassars on the arms, Persian rugs on the floor, impressionist paintings on the walls, a Sony Trinitron in the corner.
He’d met Gia in this room.
Aunt Nellie sat lost in a recliner by the cold fireplace. A chubby, white-haired woman in her late sixties in a long dark dress adorned with a small diamond brooch and a short string of pearls. A woman used to wealth and comfortable with it. At first glance she appeared depressed and shrunken, as if she were in mourning, or preparing for it. But as they entered she pumped herself up and arranged her face into a pleasant expression, putting on a smile that wiped away a good many of her years.
“Mr. Jeffers,” she said, rising. Her accent was thickly British. Not Hugh Grant British; more like a reedy Alfred Hitchcock. “So good of you to come.”
“Good to see you again, Mrs. Paton. But just call me Jack.”
“Only if you call me Nellie. Would you care for some tea?”
“Iced, if you don’t mind.”
“Not at all.” She rang a little bell on the end table next to her and a uniformed maid appeared. “Three iced teas, Eunice.”
The maid nodded and left. An uncomfortable silence followed in which Nellie seemed to be lost in thought.
“How can I help you, Nellie?”
“What?” She looked startled. “Oh, I’m terribly sorry. I was just thinking about my sister, Grace. As I’m sure Gia told you, she’s been gone for three days now … disappeared between Monday night and Tuesday”—she pronounced it Chewsday—“morning. The police have come and gone and found no evidence of foul play, and there’s been no demand for ransom. She is merely listed as a missing person, but I’m quite certain something has happened to her. I shan’t rest until I find her.”
Jack’s heart went out to her, and he wanted to help, but …
“I don’t do missing-persons work as a rule.”
“Yes, Gia did say something about this not being in your line”—Jack glanced at Gia but she avoided his gaze—“but I’m at my wits’ end. The police are no help. I’m sure that if we were back home we’d have more cooperation from Scotland Yard than we’ve had from the New York Police. They simply aren’t taking Grace’s disappearance seriously. I knew you and Gia were close and remembered Eddie Burkes mentioning that your assistance had proven invaluable at the Mission. Never would tell me what he needed you for, but he certainly seemed enthusiastic.”