Mary's Child Read online

  So much to say, nowhere to begin, Hallie thought

  Then start anywhere. In her memory, Joe’s voice was a husky whisper against her thoughts, a childhood bloodbrother promise between them that whatever they said went no further, put no dents in any of the aspects of their relationship: friends and partners; onetime neighbors and long-ago lovers; biological father and surrogate vessel to the implanted seed that had taken root and flourished in Hallie’s womb. You can say anything to me.

  Anything.

  She sucked air, spat out the hardest question she’d ever asked anyone. “What are you doing here?”

  She didn’t ask nicely.

  He responded in kind, snapping, “I may be in town, but I didn’t come to see you, and I sure as hell didn’t come here to screw up your status quo. Circumstances forced me to change my mind.”

  “You left the living to sleep with the dead. You think this is what Mary would have wanted, Joe?”

  “I don’t think Mary wanted to die, Hallie. I think she wanted to be here with our baby. You think she’d want you to keep Maura from me now?”

  “The boys told you her name.” Her voice was flat and unsteady, sidetracking him from a question she couldn’t bring herself to answer honestly, if at all. She didn’t intend to tell him more about the baby than she had to.

  His jaw worked. “You weren’t even going to tell me that. You didn’t want me to know.”

  She ducked away from his gaze for a moment, guilty as charged, then raised her eyes to view him straight on. “No.”

  For a mere instant no hard-case bounty hunter stood before her, simply the old Joe whose emotions were as uncaged and easy for her to read as Miranda rights. “For God’s sake, why, Hallie?” The outburst was spontaneous, bewildered.

  A piece of his old self awakened for the first time in a year, Hallie guessed sadly. And he looked like the dated suit didn’t fit the new frame very well at all.

  “Have you found her killer, Joe?” she asked, instead of answering. Hating the steadiness of her voice. Hating the questions she had to ask because she no longer knew who he was. “Is that why you came back? You found him and you killed him?”

  Hating the fact that she no longer knew what he was capable of.

  His mouth tightened into his beard; he looked away. Not with guilt, she realized, but failure.

  Her jaw clenched and cracked, locking on tension, disappointment and anger. “You’re still after him, aren’t you?”

  He didn’t answer. She felt color drain, then rise in her cheeks. She’d damn him to hell if she wasn’t pretty sure he’d damned himself there already.

  “You still think you can find him and bring him down by yourself. Is that what the shield on your jacket’s for, Joe? Running down bail jumpers not only gives you traveling money, but the paperwork and a legal excuse if, say, maybe the wrong guy gets in the line of your fire?”

  He looked at her finally. “Shut up, Hallie.” His voice was soft, hard, full of meaning.

  She ignored him. Getting a rise out of him, finding out he still had some...scruples left was what she wanted, after all. “This way, you can say you were on a heavy case, you thought this was the right body. Turns out it wasn’t, but before you had a chance to work that out between you, he fired on you, you returned fire, he’s dead—”

  He took a step toward her. “Shut up.”

  She lifted her chin, challenging him, and kept on talking. “Oh, and by the by, Cuyahoga County’s got a warrant on him for killing an ex-dep’s wife. You got that anonymous gun stashed someplace, Joe? The one you can wrap his hand around after you shoot—”

  He closed the distance between them, caught her face in a painful grip, brought his down to it. “I said shut the—” He bit off the expletive. His fingers burned where they held her. His spirit burned from the things she’d said, from the loathing he saw in her eyes. His body simply burned.

  For her.

  He was too angry to let her go, too unwilling to allow desire to dictate his actions. He held on, fought the reflection of himself he saw in her eyes, and burned.

  “Just shut up, Hallie. You don’t know anything about it.”

  “Neither do you if you haven’t caught him after a year.” She yanked her chin out of his hand but didn’t back up, didn’t allow herself to look away, however much she wanted to.

  Told herself not to feel the frisson of anticipation and fear something in his touch engendered.

  Told herself not to see the wounds behind his eyes, not to understand his haunted search for peace, not to want to reach out a woman’s touch to comfort him.

  “Who is this guy, Joe?” She kept her voice and eyes steady, but it was work. “The freaking one-armed man?”

  “I don’t know who he is. Is that what you want to hear, Hallie?” He swung away from her, paced from the dining room to the adjoining playroom, putting distance between them again. Swung back because the distance made him restless. “That he leads me on and on and I can’t stop chasing.” He prowled back through the dining room and into the kitchen, wanting to be near her, needing to get away. “That I get this lead or that lead, but he’s always steps ahead of me, like he’s playing a game with me. And I can’t let go.” He battered a cupboard with a fist, and Hallie followed him into the kitchen, afraid he’d break a door.

  Afraid he’d break her heart.

  Remembering he’d already broken it.

  “Stop it, Joe.”

  “Perdóneme, Dios, but I can’t.” He slumped back against the kitchen counter, repeated in defeat, “I can’t.”

  For the first time she reached toward him in sympathy, empathy, pulling her hand back before compassion and touch got away from her. “I miss her, too, Joe.”

  He grimaced. “That’s part of the problem.” Again his jaw worked. He turned his back on her and leaned heavily over the counter, closed his eyes and told Hallie the first honest thing he’d said to himself in months: “I don’t.”

  Then he turned and stalked out of the kitchen into Hallie’s front hallway, past the basement door, the boot closet, the telephone table, the front staircase, the doorway that opened into the room that had been the parish office back when he and Hallie were growing up and her house had been the priest’s residence. He paused. His mother had brought him here once when he was seven and she’d caught him with his hands “down there,” and had assumed he must be playing with himself.

  “You must confess immediately,” she’d told him furiously in Spanish, while towing him up the walk. “You must tell the priest you were impure. If you were to die tonight, you must not go with this on your soul.”

  When his mother had explained that her son needed immediate confession, the priest had taken him into that room and sat Joe on one side of the screen while he took his place on the other. Joe had repeated the prayer he’d learned only that year, “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned...” and told Father Nelson exactly what his mother had told him to say: “I was impure.”

  It had seemed to Joe, the father’s voice had gotten loud and as furious as his mother’s at the admission, and he’d roared, “My child, do you understand that this is a mortal sin for which you could go to hell?”

  And though Joe hadn’t understood anything about anything of the kind, the frightened answer had squeaked out of him, “Yes.”

  Father Nelson had asked a second time—to make sure, Joe understood now—and when Joe had offered the same response, the father had lectured him for a moment, then let him go to say his penance—a decade of the rosary.

  But it was a long time before the guilt had faded, before he understood that you couldn’t sin if you didn’t know you had, if you didn’t understand what you’d done.

  Now was a different time, a different person, similar emotions: guilt and fear. This time, however, guilt and fear were joined by an understanding of the crime, the knowledge that he had, indeed, committed it.

  The front door stood in front of him, beckoning. He grabbed its tarnished bra
ss knob and yanked the door open as he had that long-ago night, snapped open the storm door and stepped onto the porch, looking only for escape. The wind skittered leaves along the sidewalk, grazed his face with a light drizzle mixed with snow. Behind him, the doors closed too loudly and he heard the thin cry that told him he’d wakened his daughter.

  Again.

  His fists clenched, his lip curled back in self-disgust. Damn. He just couldn’t seem to get it right, here.

  Better, then, to simply leave, he advised himself. Quit screwing up lives he’d left long ago before he made a bigger mess than when he’d begun.

  Right?

  Yes. He gave the semidarkness of late afternoon a clipped nod. Absolutely right.

  Caught with too many puzzles to solve, and too many emotions clouding them, Joe took the front steps two at a time, and ran for his truck.

  “Joe?”

  Hallie reached to stop him, wanting for the first time since he’d appeared on her porch to listen to what he had to say, but he moved too quickly; her fingers brushed air where his arm had been.

  “Joe, wait.”

  He either didn’t hear, or he ignored her, strode away as quickly as he could. Much like, she thought, the day he’d walked away from her, the department, his life, after Mary had died.

  She rubbed a hand hard across her chest, trying to ease the ache in her heart, the trembling uncertainty of a future she’d only this morning thought she knew.

  Or at least understood.

  Too late and too slowly she turned to the hallway and put one foot in front of the other, letting momentum lengthen her stride before doubt could stop her. By the time she reached where he’d been, he was out the door, rushing away, and Maura was crying.

  She listened to the infant while she watched the shadowed hulk that was Maura’s father disappear into the prestreetlight dusk. After his disappearance she heard the heavy sound of a vehicle door slam, then silence.

  Upstairs, Maura hiccuped a couple of times and seemed to settle. Torn between pursuing the father farther and checking on his child, Hallie stood still for a moment, pondering the consequences of doing—or not doing—each. Then she sighed, put a hand on the staircase newel post and mounted the steps to check on Mary’s child.

  Chapter 4

  Duty. Honor.

  Contracts and promises.

  Blood, genes and debt.

  Together, all seven, like deadly sins carelessly committed, bound him to the child who whimpered upstairs, and the woman who’d borne and cared for her alone, even when he’d violated her trust.

  Fists gripped hard around the steering wheel, Joe sat in his truck in the deepening twilight, trying to sort through the hash Hallie had made of his brain. Dios, so many agendas to align, so many lives in balance.

  It had been so much easier to think, before he’d set foot inside his old department this afternoon expecting bygones to be forgiven, old trusts to be automatically picked up where they’d been left off.

  So much simpler to be, before he’d knocked on Hallie’s door.

  A life lived by the simple rules of numbness and survival was, after all, far less complicated than a life filled with people to whom he owed a certain responsibility; people who’d cared about him once upon a time.

  People who’d been as excited for him as he’d been himself the first time Mary had been pregnant, who’d shed tears and condolences with each subsequent loss; who’d rooted for them wholeheartedly when he, Mary and Hallie had made the decision to have Hallie try to carry their baby.

  Life had been far less complex when he’d lived only for himself, his lust for vengeance—he sucked air, expelled it in a self-derisive laugh. Jeez, was that only this morning?—dramatically less intricate before he’d seen Hallie and experienced that rush of desire that ran hotter than lust. Before he’d caught sight of his daughter.

  Before he’d known he couldn’t leave here without her.

  He ran a shaking hand through his beard, over his face, through his hair. Damn. What was he thinking? He didn’t know the first thing about caring for a baby—not by himself. The person he’d become in the last twelve months was hardly a fit parent, much less a role model. Not to mention the way he lived out of his truck and motel rooms more than half the time—heck, all the time, now that he thought about it. How the devil could he possibly reason that the life he led was any kind of life for a baby?

  For anybody, in fact, but himself?

  Freelance bounty hunters were an endangered breed, but “freelance” was the only life that allowed him to travel as he needed to. And he’d quickly gained a certain reputation as one of the best fugitive-retrieval experts available among bondsmen who stood to lose substantial sums of money on higher-profile clients who skipped. That was how he’d gotten this case with the missing kids. It wasn’t as though the FBI and local law enforcement weren’t involved; because of the wife’s murder and the hostage children, all the usual public-paid agencies were on the case. But because the guy was also a high-bond FTA—failure-to-appear—who’d missed his appointed court date, Joe had been hired by the bond agency to retrieve him before the bond was forfeit. And the simple statistical fact was that private retrieval agents apprehended a hefty eighty-seven percent of their targets, to police departments’ twenty-three percent. Bounty hunters were also legally able to cross lines in the pursuit of their duties that public servants could not.

  The way he saw it, he was duty-bound by the retrieval papers in his pocket to locate the man, enlisting aid from the local sheriff’s department to make sure the kids came out of the situation safely. All leads had led him back to Cuyahoga.

  Under normal circumstances this was the sort of job he’d have taken to Hallie first: the she-bear in her was a formidable opponent where child hostages were concerned. And when it came right down to it, he wanted her help, needed it. The missing children needed it. But she’d seen him, he’d seen his daughter, and he hadn’t yet talked to anyone in his old squad about what had brought him here. They weren’t big on bounty hunters in general—bounty hunters were, after all, to public law enforcement what private outfits were to the post office—but now he knew why they were even less enthused about him in particular.

  He’d burned a lot of bridges when he left Cuyahoga; he hadn’t fully appreciated what that meant until now.

  He switched on the truck’s interior light and put his hand inside his jacket, withdrew the envelope filled with still pictures from his worst nightmares. The packet was warm, telling him his hands were cold, he noted without surprise. He’d stopped noticing things like heat and cold, hunger, pain and thirst a long time ago. Necessity and purpose alone made him eat and work out to maintain his strength; a lifetime full of women—his mother, his sisters, Mary—relentlessly reminded him to put on a jacket because November was not July.

  No matter how old you got, nor how much you thought you’d outgrown them, Joe knew there were certain things— like honor, debt, blood, genes and contracts—you never left behind. No matter how badly you might want to, nor how hard you tried.

  Honor bound him to his search for Mary’s killer—honor, that is, and the envelope of photos in his hands, the shoe box filled with Mary’s secrets that he kept hidden behind the seat.

  When he’d told Hallie—and himself—he no longer missed Mary, it was the truth. He wanted to miss her, but that part of him had moved on, lost in the part of him that lived only for whatever solace he might find in revenge. As far as Mary was concerned, though, he simply wanted her out of his head. And that made him feel guilty. To love and lose and move on so quickly... But the only way he was able to visualize her anymore was bloody and dead. Even when he looked at photographs of her from before she died, he found it impossible to remember her any other way. Lying on the pavement beside the Blazer, eyes wide and blank with death and surprise. Lying in the morgue, gray-blue and pale, bloodless and clean and personless. Grotesque snapshots among ghastly Polaroid photographs in the envelope he held.

/>   He breathed through his nose, slid the envelope back into his inside pocket without opening it and shut off the overhead light. He had, on the other hand, remembered Hallie in all her fearless vitality, her blunt opinions, her uncomplicated companionship. Missed her. Daily. Nightly. Missed her so badly that—

  Without warning the passenger door creaked and the overhead light came on.

  “Sh—” Startled, Joe lunged sideways out of possible danger, wound up on the floor beneath the dash. It was a tight fit.

  From her position in the doorway Hallie looked down at him, picked up a brown envelope from the passenger seat.

  “Looking for this?” she asked mildly.

  He swore something unprintable in Spanish, levered up and rolled himself back onto the seat with difficultly. “Damn it, Hallie. What the hell d’you think you’re doing?”

  She shrugged, showed him the weapon she’d hidden along the back of her right thigh. “Checkin’ on the strange vehicle parked across from my house. One of the neighbors called and said it’d been there awhile with a guy sittin’ in it who was maybe casing the neighborhood. Thought he might be some pervert lookin’ for kids out alone. Citizen Watch doesn’t like people they don’t know campin’ out in trucks around here.”

  “So you left my daughter alone in the house to come out here and see if some scumbag who mighta shot you was casing the area?” Adrenaline made him angry.

  “No.” Hallie shook her head, slid her weapon into the shoulder holster she wore. “I left the neighbor who called in the house with my daughter, and now I’m goin’ back in and send her home. And as far as getting shot’s concerned...” She lifted a shoulder, let it drop. “You didn’t even know I was here until I opened the door. I’m somebody else, that means you’re dead. You’re getting slow, Martinez.”

  Last word in, she slammed the door shut, rounded the front of the truck and started across the street. Joe slid out the driver’s door and went after her. Caught her in the middle of the road, grabbed her arm and swung her around. Brought his face down to hers. He’d be damned if she got the last word just because this time she was right.