Chapter 37 Jagg
JAGG
Ifollowed Sunny down the bridgeway to the small dock at the end. Aside from the beam of moonlight down the center, the lake was as black as ink. The air had cooled, and the stars seemed even brighter by the water.
I watched her walk, slowly, her gaze fixed straight ahead.
I would have followed her into the water if she jumped. The woman was like a drug to me. More than pills or booze had ever been.
“It’s beautiful out here.”
“Yes,” I said, my eyes locked on hers as I met her at the end.
The water danced below us, lapping against the posts.
She sipped her beer, then rested her elbows on the railing and looked into the water below. Sadness, the weight of the evening, washed over her face.
“I’m sorry about your house,” I said.
“I’ll repaint. The furniture can be replaced. I’ll fix it back.” Like I always do. She didn’t say it, but I knew that’s what she was thinking.
“I’ll help.”
She looked at me. “I don’t understand why you’re helping me so much.”
I looked away. I knew exactly why I was helping her so much, but God help me, I didn’t want to acknowledge it. I wasn’t ready. Wasn’t fucking ready.
“Do you go this far with every one of your cases?” She asked, and I knew the question was loaded.
“Do you think me kissing you was part of the investigation?”
She shrugged, looked out to the water.
I lightly grabbed her chin and turned her face to me.
“Would that have bothered you?” Loaded, perhaps more so than hers.
“Why don’t you just call me a liar about the third person so everyone can move on? Say that I killed the pastor’s son in self-defense and close the case. The town can move on…” Her eyes locked on mine, her chin lifted. “And so can you.”
“Listen, Sunny, I kissed you because I wanted to. Was it smart? No. Do I regret it? Absolutely not. But I want to make one thing clear. I wasn’t manipulating you and don’t insinuate otherwise.
If you don’t want me to do it again, tell me.
Tell me.” My fingertips tightened around her chin. “Tell me not to do it again.”
She stared at me, wide eyes searching my face.
“Tell me,” I ground my teeth. “Dammit tell me not to touch you again.”
“I’m not worth it, Jagg,” she whispered.
Colson’s warning about losing my job echoed through my head, followed by Haddix’s warning about her powers of seduction to get what she wanted.
And the way I seemed to stumble since the day I met her.
Yet while I should have been reminding myself that my past experiences told me that no woman was worth it, I found myself wondering why she thought she wasn’t.
Sunny had more emotional baggage than she led on.
Possibly more than I did.
She jerked her chin away, her face suddenly hard like granite.
“I want to cut the bullshit, Jagg. I want to know what you know about my attack, exactly what you know about Kenzo and why you’ve taken it upon yourself to be my bodyguard.”
“I will once you tell me about what happened in Dallas. It’s time to talk, Sunny. Tell me about Kenzo Rees.”
A minute ticked by before, finally, she began.
“We started dating in high school. Kenzo was popular, the definition of a jock. Football, basketball, baseball, he did it all. A popular guy. A bit of a bad boy. We went through the trials and tribulations of any young relationship, on and off, on and off. … Looking back, he showed signs of aggression back then.”
“Like what?”
“He started getting in regular fistfights, things like that. Started falling behind in school and sports. I remember he was really possessive of me. Abnormally so. I also remember he was really hard on his family dog… it’s silly that I remember that, but I do.
He was mean to the poor thing. It was like he was showing his dominance to something that couldn’t fight back.
I broke up with him over it once. Should’ve never gone back. ” She looked down.
“Don’t dwell on that. That kind of thinking is unproductive.”
“I know. You’re right.” She took a deep breath. “Anyway, after graduation, we went to the same college and that’s when things started to really change.”
“What changed?”
“Kenzo.”
“How?”
“Drugs. He started hanging out with the wrong crowd, so to speak. I tried to pull him away from them which just made him cling tighter it seemed. I did everything I could, but he just got… darker and darker. It happened so slowly that I kept thinking it was just a phase. It wasn’t.
We started drifting. I almost broke up with him two days before it happened.
” Her hand trembled as she took a shallow sip of beer.
I didn’t ask any questions. Just listened.
“It was my twenty-first birthday. We were at a party at one of my friend’s houses. His ‘new’ friends showed up and it started to get wild. He left the party for a bit. I know now that it was to get high.”
The kid had taken enough coke to kill a horse, but she didn’t need to know that I knew that from reading the report.
“When he came back, he accused someone of flirting with me. He pushed the guy around but was eventually pulled off of him. I remember the feeling I got then, the churning in my stomach. Looking back, it was almost as if my body was telling me to run. I told him I wanted to go home. We caught a ride to my townhouse, where the argument got worse.” She looked down and began picking at a thread on her shorts.
“I’ll never forget the moment he hit me.
The shock of it. I was stunned. It was funny, I didn’t feel the pain or blood running down my chin.
I was just so shocked. I didn’t fight back.
” She looked at me, self-disgust evident on her face. “Can you believe that?”
“I can. Most women who experience their first physical abuse don’t fight back, for the very reason you just said. The shock of it.”
“I remember the look in his eyes after he hit me. It was like they flared, bulged out of his head. Like he liked it. Like a switch was flipped… and that look made me more scared than the fact that he’d hit me.”
Blood lust. My grip around my beer tightened as my pulse skyrocketed.
I squeezed my other hand into a fist and curled my toes in an effort to dispel the rage bubbling up.
This wasn’t about me, or the fact that I wanted nothing more than to sprint to my car, find the bastard and slam his head into the fender until the thing cracked open.
This was about her.
I needed to be there for her.
“After that, everything became a blur. He punched me, over and over. I remember hearing the pop as my nose broke. I tried to run then, and that’s when he pushed me into the bathroom and bounced my head off the mirror, and then…”
She went silent, still, every muscle in her body tense.
I didn’t know what to do or what to say to make it better. I unfisted my hand and placed it over hers. Although she was doing exactly what I’d asked of her, I wanted her to stop. I didn’t want to be the cause of any more of her pain.
“Sunny. It’s okay. You don’t have to—”
She pulled her hand away and sniffed. “No. I want to get this done. And then I don’t ever want to talk about it again.”
“Sunny—”
“And then he ripped out my fucking hair, Jagg. Chunk after chunk, he pinned my head against the sink and started ripping it out screaming racist bullshit and telling me he always hated my kinky hair. I remember that pain more than anything else. The fire when the strands ripped from my head. The throbbing pain after. It felt like someone had poured acid on my scalp and lit a match. That’s when I started crying.
He hadn’t only beaten me but was defiling me as well.
Ripping out my dignity. Then, he threw me down the stairs like I was worth nothing more than a rag doll.
I hate him, Jagg. I fucking hate him.” She turned to me, eyes wild, her jaw twitching with rage. “Do you know where he is?”
“I’m working on it.” My voice was also trembling now. “I’m working on it, Sunny.”
I knew that look. I’d seen it many times in my career. The need for justice and revenge, the beginning of a vigilante mission that, more often than not, landed the person in the morgue.
That would not be Sunny.
I would not allow it.
“He was at my house tonight,” she seethed.
“He is the one who destroyed my home. It makes too much sense with the dogs. He knew Athena and she’s the leader of the pack.
The other dogs would follow her reaction to anyone.
Hell, he was there when I adopted Athena from the vet two years before it happened.
” She blew out a breath and shook her head.
“My question is, why? Why come after me again?”
“Revenge. He blames you for everything.”
“How do you know this?”
I told her about the letters Rees had written in prison that the warden had told me about. The letters that never got sent. She wasn’t surprised.
“Why not just kill me, then? Wait for me to get home and put a bullet in my head? Or, hell, burn the house down? Kill the dogs?”
“Fear. He gets off on it. He got out of jail and he wants you to know it. He wants you to know that he knows where you live and is watching you. Wants you to know he’s coming for you. He wants you to fear him.”
“But how does this play into my attack at the park? We obviously know Kenzo wasn’t my attacker, because that was the pastor’s son. And it’s safe to assume he wasn’t the third person who ran up and saved my life and killed Griggs. Because why would he do that?”
“Truth?”
“Truth.”
“I don’t know, Sunny. But it’s no coincidence Rees was released from jail only a few days before you were attacked in the park. He’s been watching you, following you, knew you were at the park. He’s involved in your attack, there’s no question in my mind.”
I just had to find the connection between the pastor’s son and Rees. It was there, I felt in my gut.
“I know you think this all links with the Lieutenant’s death. Why?”
“You know that blue, four-door sedan you noticed parked across the street the night of your attack? It was also on camera at Lieutenant Seagrave’s shooting.”
“At Mystic Maven’s Art Shop?”
“Right. Whoever stole the Cedonia scrolls is the answer to all this.”
“The person people call the Black Bandit.”
“Where’d you hear that?”
She flashed me a seriously look. “You can’t step foot anywhere in this town without hearing the name.”
Damn gossip. “The question is…” I ran my hand over my chin. “Is Kenzo Rees the Black Bandit?”
A moment slid by as we watched the water.
Then, she asked, “Do you think the Black Bandit killed Seagrave?”
“There’s only one way to find out.”
“And when you find him?”
“He’ll wish he’d never been born.”
She popped her fist against the dock railing. “I hate him. Rees. I want to find him. Now. I want to end all this.” She looked at me, a new kind of fire blazing over those eyes now. “He’s got another thing coming, Jagger.”
“He does. But not by you.” I set down my beer and turned fully toward her. “You’ve got to promise me you’re not going to try to handle him yourself.”
She looked away.
“Sunny.” I jerked her chin toward me with a bit too much force, but I couldn’t help it.
A sudden desperation clawed at me. “Guys like him don’t back down.
It’s a pride thing. You push him too hard, he’ll kill you, Sunny.
He’ll call it revenge, but it will be to prove to himself that he’s better than you are.
I want you to look at me in my eyes, right now, and tell me you’re not going to be a sitting duck for him.
Be the strong woman I know you are. Avoid the fight. ”
She stared at me a moment, her face loaded with emotions. Then, the fire in her eyes slowly dissolved and was replaced with something that looked a lot like desperation.
“Back to my original question, Jagg. I want to know why you’re doing all this for me. Tell me. Tell me why—”
I stepped in closer, my voice low and ragged.
“Fine. You want the truth? Here it is. It’s taking every ounce of my energy not to throw you on the dock right now, rip that T-shirt from your body, destroy those tiny-ass shorts—that I’d never let another man see you in again—and lick the sweat from your neck and fuck you until you can’t remember your own name.
How’s that, Sunny? How’s that for cutting the bullshit? ”
She swallowed, her lips parting slightly, eyes shimmering with something between defiance and desire.
“And here’s the deal: I don’t want to just kiss you,” I said.
“I want to know you. I want to protect you. I want to be the one you call when you’re scared or angry or lost. You’ve taken up every space in my damn head since the second I saw you, and I hate it—because I don’t fully trust it yet.
I don’t fully trust you. And that scares the hell out of me. ”
I cupped her jaw, slowly tilting her face up to mine.
“But what scares me more?” I whispered, brushing my lips just shy of hers. “The thought of walking away.”
And then I kissed her—soft at first, reverent. When she leaned in, when she met me, opened to me, I deepened it—hungry, full of everything I’d been holding back.
Under the stars.
Under the pull of something bigger than either of us.
Under her spell.