Her mouth tightened with annoyance and then her gaze slid to the bed again and she eyed the pillows. They were rather special; quilted cloth on the outside with a water bladder inside. The user filled them with water to reach the firmness they desired. A couple quarts made a soft pillow, three quarts made it medium, and five quarts made it firm. Nicole liked hers firm. She had five quarts in hers. That was more than a gallon of water. It weighed a good ten pounds, she would guess.
Moving up the bed, Nicole grabbed one of them, and headed out of the room through the sliding glass doors.
“You don’t remember me, do you?”
Jake’s eyes narrowed on the intruder’s wide unpleasant smile. His voice was deep and raspy, as if he spent a lot of time screaming at the top of his lungs. Jake had heard that voice before, but where didn’t come to him right away. It was recently though.
“You ruined everything. Stopped me from carrying out what I was put on this earth to do, and yet—barely a week later—you don’t even remember me,” the man said bitterly.
Jake eyed him warily. He’d been trying to get into the man’s thoughts to read and control him since entering the kitchen, but it was like trying to navigate the ocean in a fog with no compass or sonar . . . and there were monsters coming out of that fog, accompanied by agonized shrieks. The man wasn’t in his right mind. That was the only explanation. Jake had always heard that it was hard to the point of impossible for an immortal to read or control a crazy person. Now he understood why.
Jake opened his mouth to admit that, no, he didn’t recognize him, when he suddenly did.
“Ball-Cap Boy,” he murmured, recognizing him as the man who had intended to shoot the client he was suppose to protect, and who he’d tackled his last night on the job before meeting Marguerite for dinner. Tilting his head, he asked, “Why aren’t you in jail?”
Ball-Cap Boy gave a short laugh. “For what? I didn’t get the chance to do anything. All they could charge me with was the improper transportation of a registered weapon.”
“Registered?” Jake asked with a frown.
“Yes. You see, there’s a law that if you work in a remote wilderness area, where your life can be under threat by wild animals, you can get a special license to carry weapons, like rifles and handguns.”
“And you have one of those special licenses,” Jake guessed dryly. He now understood the old saying “crazy like a fox.” The bastard might be nuts, but he was smart too.
“Yes, sir, I do,” he said with a grin so wide it was almost painful to see. “That and a family with the resources to hire an excellent lawyer who is quick and very good. I was out within hours.”
Jake was really beginning to dislike this guy’s smile.
“Of course, it helped that the security tape showed you moving toward me before I even reached to adjust my gun so it was no longer digging into my ribs.” He smiled and offered, “Well, at least that’s what I told them I was doing.”
Jake didn’t respond to the comment. He was trying to decide what to do. The man had had a gun before and probably did now, no doubt tucked into the arms he presently had crossed. Jake wasn’t too concerned about being shot dead, that wasn’t a worry unless Ball-Cap Boy blew his head completely off, which would take a sawed-off shotgun or an equally powerful weapon, he was sure, and this man couldn’t be hiding one of those on his person. Jake suspected he had his handgun though, and while that wouldn’t blow his head off, it could incapacitate him temporarily and leave Nicole alone in the house and at the mercy of this nut. He didn’t want to risk that, so had to move carefully.
“It also helped that I told them that I’d run into you before,” Ball-Cap Boy continued conversationally. “When I was out on a date with your live-in girlfriend.” He grinned widely. “And that you’ve had it in for me ever since.”
Jake didn’t react on the outside, but inside he was mentally kicking himself. He often had dealings with the police on the job, and knew a good number of them by name. However, busy feeling sorry for himself as he’d been, and thinking himself a monster, Jake hadn’t encouraged any friendships since leaving California. So, while many of the officers had given some personal details about their lives in an offer of friendship, mentioning wives, girlfriends, or kids, Jake hadn’t responded in kind. As Dan had said in the elevator the day they’d encountered this man, he didn’t know a thing about him and had thought him without family. It would be the same with the police. Had he bothered to befriend the men he worked with and encountered on the job, they’d have known this man was lying about a live-in and hesitated to let him go to cause trouble again.