Afraid of the Dark - James Grippando [20]
“If I told you . . .”
“I know, I know: You’d have to kill me.”
“That’s the bad news,” she said, smiling coyly. “The good news is: Wait until I show you my preferred method of execution.”
“So you are going to tell me?”
“No. In your case, I punish the ignorant.”
“You mean innocent.”
“Keep arguing, Counselor, and you’re going to end up with a suspended sentence.” She closed the door with a hind kick, her eyes never leaving his. “I have to be back at noon.”
Jack glanced toward the bedroom, then back. “That doesn’t give us much time.”
“I’m going to take a quick shower,” she said. “How about you join me?”
“Hmm. Very tempting, honey. But there’s absolutely no way we’ll get out of there without having sex, and sex in that teeny-tiny shower stall rates right up there with sex on a coffee table. Alluring in theory, but what the hell’s the point when there’s a perfectly good mattress twenty feet away?”
“You’re such a putz.”
“It’s a gift. I’ll open some wine.”
She kissed him and went off to the bedroom. Jack found a bottle of red in the wine chiller. His collection was comprised mostly of gifts from clients, and this bottle of Betts & Scholl Hermitage Rouge was from Mr. Scholler himself—an old friend who’d had the good sense to listen to his wife and buy up declining apartment buildings on Miami Beach right before Miami Vice made art deco cool again. Timing was everything in life.
“Jack,” Andie sang out from the shower, “naked, sex-starved woman wants her wine.”
Luck didn’t hurt, either.
“Coming,” he said, a glass in each hand.
Theirs was not the perfect engagement, but Jack had given up on perfect long ago, right about the time he’d discovered that his first marriage was the perfect storm. A man didn’t ask an FBI agent to marry him and then tell her not to do her job. No more than Andie would tell Jack not to do his—with the exception of Jamal Wakefield. Andie had made it her business to tell Jack to stay away from him. More than anything else—more than the grief he’d caught for defending an accused terrorist, more than the emotional burden of a murder case involving a blind cop and a dead teenager—Andie’s decision to step on his wing tips was eating at Jack.
A billow of steam moistened his face as he entered the bathroom.
“Here you go,” he said as he opened the shower door. She was gorgeous even when shaving her legs.
Andie gave him a kiss, took a long sip of wine, and handed the glass back to him. Jack leaned against the wall, keeping an eye on the blurred beauty behind the foggy shower door. And he was still thinking about Jamal Wakefield. He just couldn’t let it go.
“So you really don’t want me to take that case, huh?”
The shower door opened a crack. She had shampoo in her hair and a look of incredulity on her face. “You want to talk about that now?”
She disappeared back into the shower, and Jack tasted the wine from his friend’s vineyard. Timing was everything, it reminded him, but for Jack, “no time like the present” was the general rule.
Probably why the wine is Betts & Scholl, not Betts & Swyteck.
“It just took me by surprise,” said Jack. “You’ve never tried to steer me away from a case before.”
The shower stopped. Jack handed her a bath towel, and Andie stepped out, wrapped in terry cloth. She towel-dried her newly blond hair and then stood before the mirror, speaking as she combed through the snarls.
“Jamal Wakefield is bad news,” she said.
“Well, what does that mean?” asked Jack.
“It means you should stay away from him.”
“That’s your opinion.”
“I’m trying to help you, Jack.”
“Help me what?”
She put down the comb, a little flabbergasted. “Okay, if you were to take this case, you’d find this out anyway. So let me tell you now. After McKenna Mays was murdered, the police got a warrant and seized her boyfriend’s computer.”
“What did they find?”
“Encrypted files.”
“So what?”
“Encrypted files from known terrorist organizations,” said Andie.
“And you know this because . . . ?”
“Because I have friends who don’t want to see you embarrass yourself.