Page 83 of The Undead

“Who?” he asked blandly. She sighed.

“The ones you’ve been taking payoffs from, idiot. The Big Guys.”

“They know everything about everybody,” he answered, and she remembered a younger, happier Nick with his arm around a little girl who seemed so energetic she fidgeted with joy. Laurie was going to be a beauty, once she grew out of her gawky stage. She was the only thing Nick had, other than his job and his partner. “They never said anything about threatening her, if that’s what you mean.”

“But you understood it.”

Nick didn’t have to answer. He shrugged.

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I just did.”

“You thought that you couldn’t trust me because I wasn’t living on the edge of the poverty line.” Maggie shook her head and rubbed her aching cheekbones with chilled fingers. The smell of grilling cheeseburgers and bubbling fries drifted over to her from behind the counter, and her stomach clenched. After tonight, she figured, she’d never eat again. “That’s the shittiest excuse I’ve ever heard, Nick, and you know it.”

“I couldn’t trust you because I know you. You’re compulsive, man. You grab onto something and you don’t let go, no matter what, no matter how it costs. And you never would have looked the other way, am I right? Well?” Nick’s look was pleading. She shrugged. “Right. So where does that leave us?”

“On opposite sides.”

“Yeah,” he agreed, and his face closed up again. Playtime was over. “Okay, back to number three. Here’s my number three, Maggie. I get my ass covered by some guys who owe me favors—”

“You buy them off with threats and blood money—”

“—and if you keep your mouth shut about Angelo, I keep my mouth shut about what I saw tonight at your house. Unless you want every cop in this city out looking for somebody who’s supposed to be dead, I suggest you think seriously about option number three, honey” Nick leaned back and watched her. Maggie felt her guts knot up. The coffee had been a bad idea, very bad.

“I suggest you get a reality check,” she said smoothly. “Nobody’s going to believe you, you know.”

“They’ll believe there’s a couple of dead guys back at your house and one of them has no fucking blood in his body. They’ll believe that good ol’ Mike has flipped his precious yuppie cap. Won’t be the first time one of the White Rock Social Club turned up nasty, you know.” Nick grinned, and flicked a pellet of Styrofoam off the table into an imaginary goal. “Next thing you know, you and me, we’ll be in theNational Enquirer, have a guest shot onUnsolved Mysteriesor something. And poor old Mike will be a lab rat, if he lives so long.”

“You fuck,” she breathed. He stopped grinning.

“Don’t push me, Maggie, and we won’t have to get this ugly. I do love you, you know. I always have.”

“Yeah, sure, the signs were unmistakable. I should have known you cared when you were busy screwing me over for a few extra bucks,” Maggie sneered. “By the way, Nick, how the hell do you propose to get your big bad friends to back off now that a couple of them happened to burn up with my house?”

He blinked. Maggie resisted the urge to slap him and scream at him; it wouldn’t have done a blessed bit of good, and she was too damn tired.

The counter children were watching them like an episode ofYoung and the Restless.A fry alarm beeped urgently, and all of them jumped and scurried even before they saw Maggie looking.

“Swear to God, baby, I won’t let them hurt you. All you have to do is say you’ll stay with me,” he said soothingly. She had to resist another urge, this one to laugh.

“They’ll kill you, Nick,” she said slowly and patiently, as if she were training a dog. He leaned forward; under the table he put his hands on her knees. She felt the heat through her pants. “You’ve already said they think I’m too dangerous. What makes you think you can convince them any different because I’m in your bed?”

“I’ll take care of you,” he repeated earnestly. He didn’t have a plan, he had a hard-on. “Please believe me, I can bring them around. They’ll back off. I know they will.”

What a shithead, Maggie thought in disgust. They were going to bag him too, just to make sure he didn’t get cold sweats over Angelo’s murder—or hers. There was no possibility, none, that anybody was going to back off on the whole thing. They’d threatened his own kid, for God’s sake, and even that hadn’t made any impression on him. It was incredible that Nick could still cling to his little fiction of being in control of the fox he’d let in the henhouse.

Nick and Rebecca Foster. God, what a pair.

“You’re not going to turn yourself in,” she said to him, just to get matters clear. He shook his head, never looking away from her. He was serious, all right. “You want me to help you cover your ass.”

“In return for covering yours,” he pointed out. Maggie bared her teeth at him.

“Gee, thanks for the help, Nick. With friends like you, I don’t need to have any worries about the state of my morality?

He sat and waited for her answer.

She gave it. And felt filthy and degraded, but safer.

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