“That was the plan.”
“Instead I’m lying in wait for you, Max.” His mouth moved into a smile, a grotesque grin in the dark.
Had she misunderstood the dream, gotten the time wrong? Whatever the case, she was screwed. “So what’s this place?”
His head moved, she assumed to encompass the warehouse surroundings. “A client’s conveniently isolated property, Max. I always have an eye for potential uses when I take on someone new.”
“What are we here for?” Duh. She asked anyway.
He took hold of her arm and pulled her into the darkness, the gun scant centimeters from her cheek. “My dear sweet Max, you know why I’m here. To rid myself of a two-year-old thorn in my side.” When she said nothing, he added, “Waiting for Dennis.”
“Dennis?”
“Your husband’s killer, Dennis Martin.”
Max blinked, a strange sensation tearing up through her middle. His name was Bootman. Dennis Martin didn’t fit. Bootman, after all the things he’d done, shouldn’t have such an ordinary name.
“That was the one who pulled the trigger, wasn’t it, Max? Not our friends with the scar or the tattoo.”
“So he’s still alive.”
“We have a meeting in...” His wrist tilted, so did the gun, grazing her cheek with cold metal. “Two hours. He’ll show an hour early though, thinking he can trick me.” He grinned again, all white teeth. “Which is why, Max, I’m here an hour before that.”
He pushed her down onto a crate and squatted before her, the gun level with her stomach. She held her jacket up, making sure her own gun in the pocket didn’t bang against the wood. “I was going to kill him and leave your gun.” He waggled the thing in her face. “On his chest, I think.”
“It’s a stolen gun. The police won’t be able to trace it back to me.”
He glanced down. “Now why would you have a stolen gun, Max?”
Ah, he hadn’t caught onto the filed serial numbers. “So they couldn’t trace it to me when I killed you with it.”
He laughed. “Then it’s good your arrival has given me a better idea, Max.”
A flashlight lay on the crate beside her. He leaned forward, switched it on, and aimed it at her thigh. It was enough to see his face by. His gaze traveled the length of her, the high heels, the black tights, and the skirt with its long slit. A smile grew, lifting one corner of his mouth higher than the other. “I’m going to let you do the honors, my love.”
If he expected a reaction, he got none. Perhaps she was beyond feeling. Her hands lay clasped in her lap, near the opening of her pocket and over Witt’s gun, ready for Bud’s slightest lapse.
He went on. “Do you know what he said when I paid him the second half of the paltry sum it took to kill your Cameron?”
That peculiar sensation again, as if a chasm had opened up through her middle and split her in two. She didn’t have to ask him to finish. He’d tell her because he wanted her to hear, wanted to watch her reaction.
“His boots were soaked with blood. He laughed and said he’d never wash it off. To remind him of what a good piece of ass you were, Max.” Bud raised a brow. “And to remind him of the kill.”
Did people like this deserve to live? Did society want them walking around free? Bootman. Bud. What was the difference?
“It’s you I’m interested in. BJ.” She made it a separate sentence, a separate comment.
The flashlight lit his face from below, leaving shadows across the planes of his cheeks, his upper lip, and his brow. “I offered you the truth so often, Max. You should have taken it before we came to this.”
“I wasn’t willing to pay the price.”
“The price is higher now, Max.”
“Before it was sex, now it’s my life, is that it?” Even if she had to pay with her life, this man would die.
“The outcome is determined. You did that when you refused me and went to Michigan. You should have let it alone, Max.”
“Like Cameron should have let it alone when he found you during the Walter Spring case.”
He gave the softest of snorts. “It was never my intention to harm him, Max. But he recognized me.” He raised his shoulders, then let them drop. Max’s gaze centered on the shifting of the gun. “I knew he’d never let it go.”
Cameron never let anything go. “So he had to go.”
Bud smiled whimsically. In the filtered light of the flashlight, he resembled a satyr. “He’d become a liability. But my method was deficient. I should have known it would come back to haunt me. But I was in a rush, no time to plan.” He lowered the gun and tapped her knee with it. “If I’d had time, I would have chosen you as the instrument, Max.”