Slow Burn by Rachel Caine

Author:Rachel Caine
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2022-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eighteen

Martin

He’d known by the sixth overhead that it wasn’t going to work, and from that moment on it had been a hell of long, long silences, fumbling explanations, bored faces. Not only had he not convinced them, he’d unconvinced himself. Martin sat in the empty room with the lights blazing, picking up one over-head, dropping it, picking up another. They were spread out like playing cards. A losing hand.

Nobody had even bothered to take his handouts. They littered the table like the sad aftermath of a parade. He scraped four or five together, but they slipped out of his hands and spilled over the edge to the floor.

He put his head in his hands and rocked back and forth, back and forth. His chair squeaked in faint protest. Had he been right? Had he ever been right?

Watch me, Daddy. Watch me.

He sat straight up with a sharp gasp and saw Adrian Carling standing in the doorway. She walked in and picked up one of his handouts, flipped pages.

“How did it go?”

A laugh choked him.

“What did you tell them?” he asked. His voice sounded ragged, like his fingernails. “About me?”

She studied the handout as if she’d never seen it before. After a moment she looked up absently.

“I told them about Suzanne. About Sally.” She raised a finger to her temple and made a small telling circle. “They drew their own conclusions about your competency.”

The shocking thing was that he wasn’t even surprised, not really. He couldn’t remember what she’d felt like, last night; couldn’t remember anything about it except a haunting feeling of loss. She’d arranged that. Not even tornadoes happened by accident around her.

“Aren’t you going to call me a bitch?” she asked. He shook his head. “Why not? I am, you know.”

He bent and scooped up his overheads from the floor and began painstakingly ordering them. He was missing number six, the point at which everything had gone so fatally wrong. Maybe it had burned up in the heat of his disappointment.

She handed it to him. He took it and ordered the corners of the stack, slipped the plastic pages into a white folder.

“Martin,” she said. He was tempted to look up and conquered it by staring at a whorl of wood on the table. “I warned you.”

He nodded. His reflection, faint as a ghost, nodded back.

“I had to do it. You were too close to right, and just too far wrong. I have new information.” She shuffled papers and slid a photograph across the table to him. In it, a swarthy-looking man smiled genially. He was wearing a white sweater and white shorts, carrying a tennis racquet. “His name is Fathi el Haddiz. We think he’s here in the United States to make a deal for something involving your dichlorhyradine.”

“Why don’t you ask him?” Martin asked quietly. Carling’s hand formed into a fist and slammed down on top of el Haddiz’s picture.

“How stupid do you imagine I am? I’d love to, if we knew where the hell he was.

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