Chapter 28
TWENTY-EIGHT
GABE
Gabe peered out the Charger’s back passenger window at his house, which looked normal.
Nothing he could see clearly screamed break-in, the front door wasn’t hanging open, and no visible window shades were hanging by a thread.
Foxy and his brother had been there for him, which was frightening, but they’d failed and were in custody. Gabe took a deep breath.
“Give me fifteen minutes.” This was Heartstone Island. With no traffic, the hospital was less than a forty-minute drive, and Gabe could take a quick shower when he had to.
He desperately needed to see Casey in the flesh, but need wasn’t a strong enough word. Need inferred something a person could possibly go without. Casey was Gabe’s sine qua non, his grounding wire. And he’d only just found him; he wasn’t ready to go without.
Knute shut off the engine. “We’ll wait out here.”
“Are you sure?” Gabe asked, frowning.
“Yep,” Elton replied.
Elton twisted to look between the seats at Gabe. The glint in his eye told Gabe not to ask any more fucking questions.
On the drive over from the Sheriff’s Office, they’d all argued over Gabe driving on his own or all of them going to the hospital together.
“We’re family, Gabriel,” Elton finally pointed out.
That had been the kicker, and Gabe knew he’d lost. Now, Knute caught his eye in the rearview mirror and nodded grimly. Somehow, another family member had been added in the last two days.
He elbowed the car door open and climbed out. “Be right back.”
Humming something close to Love Cats by The Cure, Gabe bent down to retrieve the spare key out of the fake rock cleverly hidden next to the front stairs.
The goons hadn’t found it, which he thought was funny.
A tsunami of exhaustion flowed over him; his body wanted him to take a nap.
Straightening, he walked up to the door, leaving the empty key-hider on the porch railing.
Inside, Gabe stripped off the sweatshirt he’d slept in and draped it across the back of the couch before heading upstairs.
For the first time in thirty or so years, he was taking a shower before having a cup of coffee.
Between using his body to forcibly stop Foxy from hurting Nicole and sitting too long in the drafty TCSO interview room, he needed to feel clean.
The hot water streaming onto his scalp and across his bare skin had never felt as good as it did today. Gabe stood under the spray longer than strictly necessary, endangering his estimation of a mere fifteen minutes.
“Fine.”
Turning off the water, he toweled dry as quickly as possible and donned fresh clothes, including a t-shirt of Casey’s emblazoned with the words, I’m not lost, I’m a park ranger.
It wasn’t until he was on his way back downstairs that it occurred to him that Keith had not greeted him. He’d missed her breakfast time, so the complaint department should have been working overtime.
“Keith! Breakfast,” Gabe called out, rounding the corner at the bottom of the stairs, then he came to a halt.
Elton and Knute were seated next to each other at the dining room table and staring at him.
“Uh, hi, guys? I told you I’d be fast. Still need coffee though. Hey, did you see Keith when you came in?”
They seemed—strange, and neither responded to his greeting. Elton’s eyebrows lifted marginally, while Knute’s eyes widened and he flicked them to his left. Neither opened their mouths.
“What’s going on?” Gabe asked, concerned now. Was one of them ill? “Did something happen?”
“Hello,” a strange voice said from the living room. “Gabriel Karne, I presume.”
Gabe slowly pivoted to face the speaker.
He was a tall man, possibly in his sixties, with dark hair.
A face like an anvil, Heidi would’ve said.
Until this exact minute, Gabe had never understood what she’d meant by that.
A mean-looking gun was pointed toward Elton and Knute.
He didn’t have to ask the stranger’s name.
This was Mikal Petyr in the flesh.
The man was extraordinarily handsome: cheekbones that could cut glass, gleaming straight black hair that touched the collar of his dress shirt and was just slightly silvered at the temples, a jawline that looked like you could crack walnuts on it.
It was his eyes that made him ugly. Flat, like those that Gabe had seen in pictures of sharks.
“Mikal Petyr, at your service.” The man gave Gabe a once-over that he found incredibly creepy. He was gonna need to take another shower. “I must say, your mother was a beautiful woman. You have her bone structure, you know.”
“No.” Gabe’s stomach roiled.
“Oh, yes. We were… friendly back in the day. Such a lovely, vibrant woman, she always claimed my full attention. She was the one who got away. But”—he nodded toward two men at the table—“I caught up with her later, hiding in plain sight. And then she disappeared again. Forever.” Mikal shook his head like he was sad.
Was he… grieving?
Yet another reason Heidi Karne had avoided Heartstone like there was an ongoing plague outbreak. Mikal Petyr. He oozed bad vibes and calamitous fallout.
Unexpectedly, Gabe was struck by a thought, one so random, so preposterous that he knew it had to be true. It was almost as if his mother was in the room with him, at last truly speaking from beyond the grave.
He.
Mikal Petyr was the he Heidi had circled in the notebook-journals she’d saved and left Gabe as part of her legacy. Circled with a heart and later vigorously crossed out. Gabe glanced at Elton again. Did he know anything about Mikal other than what Knute had told them? Gabe thought not.
Mikal Petyr had been another threat Heidi had fled from, possibly to protect the one adult who’d protected her without asking for anything in return. Because Elton was the real deal, a human who cared about other humans.
“So?” Gabe replied. “So what? BFD. You knew my mom. That and ten cents won’t buy you a cup of coffee these days. Speaking of which, I need some. Anyone else?”
Over his life, Gabe had learned that Big Bad Men were put off their stride when people refused to acknowledge them as such, another life lesson Heidi had drummed into him during his childhood.
And he wanted Petyr’s attention off Elton and Knute and onto him.
Only not really—having Petyr’s attention was fucking disturbing.
“You wanna talk about Heidi? Put down that gun and come into the kitchen. Seriously, why are you here, in my house, uninvited?”
Mikal did not put the gun down. In fact, he waggled it a bit more vigorously in Gabe’s direction. Shit. He hated it when creeps didn’t react how he wanted them to.
“I believe I would have waited a very long time for you to extend an invitation.”
Gabe shrugged. “Not wrong about that.”
“So, you know who I am? Your mother talked about me, I imagine.”
“Honestly, the name doesn’t ring a bell.”
Gabe exchanged a glance with Elton. Knute released a quiet huff.
“Sit.” The gun waved around again.
Whatever this complete psycho had in mind, Gabe wasn’t helping him out by sitting down at the table so he could shoot all the little ducks in a row.
When possible, Gabe preferred nonviolent solutions to his problems, keeping the decibels of the situation low.
This guy clearly went directly to eleven.
“I prefer standing. Why don’t you share with the class what you came here to talk about?”
“You sound like your mother too. I like it.” Mikal smiled. It wasn’t reassuring.
A creepy stalker type as well as probably a golf-club-wielding murderer. Gabe had a feeling his assumption wasn’t off the mark.
Nice. The man made his skin crawl. Literally.
Not a nice person at all, Chance. Watch your back.
“She did what she could with what she had to work with.” Gabe shrugged. “I happen to think she did a pretty good job.”
“It should have been me,” Petyr said.
“Ah, well, them’s the breaks, huh? We don’t always get what we want.”
“But you see, Mr. Karne, I do. Eventually.” He smiled. It didn’t reach his eyes, didn’t come close.
“Great. Great, that’s wonderful, good for you.
Next subject. What did Roy Wilson have to do with you?
” Gabe asked, scrambling to figure out this man’s endgame.
And please, he didn’t want to associate his mother’s memory with this monster.
What did Petyr want? Why had he forced Elton and Knute into the house?
“Was Roy a relation, like your sidekicks, Nikolai and Ivan?” He needed Mikal to keep talking, to stall him as long as possible.
“Since you’ve asked so nicely, Roy’s mother was my aunt. A lovely woman, but spineless. Roy wasn’t particularly smart, but he was useful.”
“Ah.” Things were starting to click, to make a bizarre sort of sense. “I imagine it’s been handy to have a Petyr with a different family name doing the lord’s work. So I’m not sure why you felt the need to beat his head in.”
Elton coughed and Knute cleared his throat. If they wanted him to stop talking, that wasn’t going to happen.
That mouth of yours has always been your strongest weapon, Chance.
“Good reasoning, Mr. Karne. My poor cousin made a deadly mistake. Like your mother, I also used the tool available to me. That is all you need to know.”
“So, you’re here in my house because why? I’ve had a really long fucking week, and it’s only fucking Wednesday.”
Elton shifted in his chair like he was uncomfortable.
“I am enjoying how much you are like your mother, Mr. Karne. Or can I call you Gabe? After all, we could be related if the world had gone the right way. Heidi was a feisty one, and the apple didn’t fall far from the tree.” The smile that followed was greasy.
The man was talking about his mother again. Horrifying. Gabe wished he could vomit on command.