Page 130 of My Heart Still Beats
“I’m not kidding you. That pretty woman you’ve got in there with you? I happen to know someone—and it’s not my brother—who wants her out of the picture. Someone who’s willing to pay me a lot. So if you don’t meet me, I’m going make sure that happens.”
This time I don’t hold back. I lunge toward him, reach forward to grab his collar, but then think better of it once more.
It’s Sunday afternoon in downtown Boston. Certainly not as busy as it would be on a weekday, but there are lots of witnesses nonetheless.
“You leave her out of this.” My jaw is clenched, my whole body throbbing with the need to mutilate this fucking bastard.
Dirk chuckles coldly. “I thought that might get to you. I’ve been watching you for the past couple weeks, and my brother was watching you in Jamaica. Seems you’ve been paying a lot of attention to a gorgeous young woman. So I did some digging, and I found out a certain man is out on bail for reckless endangerment and rape.”
“She has a restraining order. He goes near her, he goes back to jail.”
“She may have a restraining order, but that won’t stop him. Because you see, I filled his head with some…information.”
“You mean lies?”
“Does it matter?”
I look at the card in my hand. “Fine. I’ll fucking be there.”
“Good. See you in an hour.” He walks away, the human tooth still dangling around his neck.
Before I head back to the Plaza, the first thing I do is call my security company to get someone on Tessa right away. Then I do a quick internet search.
“Fuck,” I say out loud.
DNAcanbe extracted from a tooth. In fact, dental tissues such as enamel, dentin, pulp, and cementum have the advantage of being resistant to physical and environmental degradation and are an excellent source of DNA. I still don’t believe the tooth belongs to that escaped convict, but damn… If I’m wrong…
I head back into the restaurant. I’ve got to put on my game face.
“Is everything okay?” Tessa asks. “You were gone a while.”
“Just a business deal that’s driving me slowly insane.” I pull out my wallet and throw enough to cover our brunch plus a generous tip onto the table, trying to still my racing heart. “But I have some bad news. I have to go to work this afternoon. I won’t be able to take you to the zoo after all.”
The crestfallen look on her face breaks my heart.
“I’m so sorry.”
“It’s okay. I understand. Maybe I’ll…”
“You want me to take you back to your mom’s?”
She shakes her head. “No, I can’t keep crawling back to my parents’ house. It’s not the same now, anyway, with my father gone.”
“I know, but it’s only been a week, Tessa. If you need more time with your mom—”
She holds up her hand. “I don’t. I’m okay, Ben. Just take me back to my place, and we’ll do the zoo another time.”
“You can count on that.”
…
I instruct Sherlock to take Tessa home. No way am I having him drive to this place. This is between Dirk and me, and he has no idea of the kind of security I have watching me at all times.
However, I turn off my security for this.
This is something I don’t want anyone to know about. And if my security team—who I trust implicitly, of course—finds out I’m meeting with Dirk, that means more people will know, and I don’t want that.
The address is for a warehouse on the south side of town, eerily close to the warehouse where our crime took place fifteen years ago.
