Into the Fire - Anne Stuart [92]
She didn’t make any effort to quiet her movements as she opened the door to the garage. The stairs were narrow and dark, not unlike the stairs in Dillon’s place, but these were cold, unheated. If there were dead rats they’d be frozen solid.
The stairs creaked beneath her, but there was no sound from upstairs. She kept climbing, her heart hammering, until she came to the door at the top.
She could knock, of course, but that seemed stupid. Instead she just reached out and turned the doorknob, pushing the door open.
“Looking for ghosts, Jamie?” Nate asked from his seat by the window, a shotgun across his lap. “You found one.”
21
Dillon reached in his pocket for his cigarettes and came up empty. Which reminded him of Mouse, and why there were no cigarettes there, and he bit off a savage curse.
After ten years he hadn’t lost his touch. He could still drive faster and better than almost anyone on the road, avoiding police and speed traps, weaving in and out of traffic so fast he could have been a ghost. It helped having the old Bel Air. For all its anonymous appearance, it was a monster underneath the hood, and he’d tuned it to a state of near perfection. He was gone before people even noticed him on the highway, chewing up the miles in a blur of speed.
He could even use his lack of cigarettes to focus on his goal. That nervous energy was focused straight ahead, on the Dungeon, and he drummed his fingers on the steering wheel, whistling beneath his breath.
Jamie had had a twenty-four-hour head start, but she probably wouldn’t have driven faster than sixty-five in the Cadillac. It could go one hundred and twenty, easy, but she’d be nervous of such a big car, and besides, the road conditions hadn’t been ideal.
Whereas he could average ninety, going over a hundred when no one was around. He knew how to avoid construction, and he didn’t stop for anything more than gas. Jamie would have spent the night on the road—she hadn’t had a decent night’s sleep since he’d first put his hands on her, and she’d be exhausted, both physically and emotionally. He could catch up.
He didn’t need sleep, he didn’t need food, he didn’t need a damned thing. Nothing but Jamie.
Keeping her alive, he amended. The snow had slowed to lazy flurries, and he ignored it. He could drive on glare ice if he had to, he knew his way around spinouts, but at least there were regular tires on the car, with real treads, instead of almost tread-less racing tires. He sped through the miles, tapping on the steering wheel, humming tunelessly to the whine of the tires, the purr of the engine.
He couldn’t even begin to think how this was going to end. MacPherson shouldn’t be able to track the wreck of the Volvo—Dillon hadn’t spent years in a chop shop for nothing. And if Mouser had any kind of history, it was from long ago, from a previous life. There’d be nothing to tie the dead body to Cooperstown, Wisconsin.
No, MacPherson might suspect, but he wouldn’t be able to trace the Volvo back to him. Mouser had always said he wanted to be cremated, and that’s what Dillon had done for him.
He was counting on Nate being true to form. Jamie was incidental—a means to an end. It wouldn’t give Nate any satisfaction to kill Jamie before Dillon got there. He’d lose any advantage—if Jamie was dead there would be nothing to stop Dillon from killing him with his bare hands.
Then again, that might be exactly what Nate wanted. To make Dillon so crazed with anger that he’d be an easy mark. Because either Nate was going to kill him, or he was going to kill Nate. They both knew that. Maybe they’d always known it. Their relationship had always been so enmeshed, and Nate wasn’t someone who let go easily.
He’d figured it out long ago—he’d never been particularly stupid, despite the asshole things he’d done as a kid. He knew that Nate had an obsessive relationship