Knight Errant Read online

  Once again in control of her wayward emotions, she put on shoes and socks, then tucked a wad of cash into her pocket. Kneeling on the floor, she reached inside the hidden compartment in the bottom of her backpack and pulled out a compact .22 Beretta. It was smaller than what she was used to, but a good little gun, especially easy to conceal. She tucked the clip-on holster inside her jeans at the small of her back, then pulled her shirt down to cover it as she left the apartment.

  Across the hall, she knocked at Carlucci’s door. He was waiting. They left the apartment and covered half the distance to Decatur before he broke the silence. His question picked up the conversation they’d begun in his apartment yesterday afternoon as naturally as if eighteen hours hadn’t passed since then.

  “Who did you leave behind in Atlanta?”

  “Nobody.” She had plenty of friends in the city—coworkers, neighbors, people she’d met here or there over the years. She never spent an evening alone unless she wanted to, never ate a meal alone unless it was her choice. Whatever she might want, all she had to do was pick up the phone and call, and someone would be waiting. But none of them would really miss her while she was gone, and when she left the city permanently, as was bound to happen with the job, she wouldn’t keep in touch with any of them.

  “Nobody, huh? Have you ever been married?”

  “Once. You can’t imagine how depressing it was to wake up the morning after and realize what a tremendous mistake I’d made.”

  “I don’t imagine it was much different from waking up my first morning in prison.”

  He was being polite—a quality she somehow hadn’t expected. There was no way she could compare her unhappiness with her marriage to his prison term. She had given up only a small part of her freedom—the rights to see other men and think only of herself—while he’d been locked up for five years in a cage that most people wouldn’t consider adequate for a dog. She’d been free to go where she wanted, to do what she wanted, to seek a divorce or try to make the marriage work, and she’d still had her job. Her work had gotten her through the tough parts—the realization that the marriage couldn’t work, the recriminations, the divorce.

  Five years later she had come close to repeating the same mistake, as close as two weeks before the scheduled ceremony. Maybe she’d just had two bouts of bad luck, or maybe it was some flaw in her character. Maybe she was one of those women that were often the subjects of psychobabble self-help books. Women Who Can’t Recognize a Loser Until It’s Too Late.

  Or maybe she’d just inherited the problem from her mother.

  “How long did it last?”

  “Four years.”

  “No kids?”

  “We were spared that,” she said, making her voice extra dry to hide the fact that she had wanted children. Her chances of having them were getting slimmer every day. At the end of this year she would turn forty. Her biological clock would turn into a high-speed countdown timer, and there wasn’t a likely candidate for fatherhood anywhere in sight.

  “Where’s the ex-husband?”

  “Last I heard, in Florida.”

  “What about friends?”

  Her shrug was careless. “I had some.”

  “Family?”

  “I had one of those, too.” They reached the end of Serenity and turned onto Decatur and toward the more recognizable, tourist-oriented part of the French Quarter. Tucking her hands into her pockets, she answered the questions he was sure to ask. “My father still lives in Savannah. I haven’t seen him in more than twenty years. I have an older brother whom I haven’t seen in twenty-five years. As for my mother...” She paused for a fortifying breath. “She’s dead. She died when I was fourteen.”

  “I’m sorry.” It was a perfunctory response, neither sincere nor insincere.

  “What about your family?” She already knew the bare bones of his background—that his mother hadn’t been married, that his father was listed as unknown on his birth certificate, that she’d abandoned him to the charity of the Catholic church that still stood, long empty and crumbling, on Divinity, one of the three main streets that made up the neighborhood of Serenity.

  “You mean there’s something the gossips actually left out?”

  “Maybe I just didn’t get to listen long enough. I do have to work, you know.”

  He remained silent so long that she’d decided he wasn’t going to answer. Now there was a response that hadn’t occurred to her when she’d been on the receiving end of his questions. Maybe it was because she knew he’d been a lawyer, and lawyers naturally expected answers. Maybe it had more to do with her own job. Like a lawyer, she was accustomed to asking questions, not answering them. Maybe the novelty of the turnaround had prompted her to answer. Or maybe—

  “When I was in first grade, my mother got me up every morning, fixed oatmeal with brown sugar and orange juice for breakfast and walked me to school before she went to work. She was a maid at a hotel over on Bienville Street. She worked long hours for very little money.” Another silence. “One Wednesday morning, the second week of November, she got me up, fed me and told me to go to St. Jude’s after school. She kissed me and went off to work, and I never saw her again.”

  “What happened then?”

  “I lived at St. Jude’s off and on until I was eighteen.”

  “What about your mother’s family?”

  “Her mother died years before I was born. I never met her father.” His smile was cynical and dark. “Tomaso Carlucci was a God-fearing man who condemned sinners wherever he found them. He threw my mother out when he found out that she was pregnant, and he had nothing to do with her again.”

  “So she came here from... Where did they live?”

  “Here. New Orleans. About six miles across town.”

  They stopped to wait for a green light to cross a busy street, and she looked wide-eyed at him. “You lived six miles from your grandfather and never met him? They never asked him to take custody of you? You never confronted him when you were older?”

  “Why would I want to meet him? He turned his pregnant, eighteen-year-old daughter out on the street with no money, no place to go and no skills for a job. Why would I want to know someone like that?” He gave her an up-and-down look that was cynical, at best. “Why the shock that I never wanted to meet a man who, blood ties aside, is a stranger who means nothing to me? You just admitted that you haven’t seen your father in twenty years. Did you live with him?”

  “Until I was eighteen.”

  “Did he support you?”

  Her only answer was a raising of one brow.

  “He’s not a stranger. You know him. But you don’t have anything to do with him. Why?”

  The light had changed, and people were pushing around them to cross the street. Neither of them moved, though. They continued to stare at each other. His eyes were dark, his mouth thinned, and her nerves were taut. “I avoid him because I know. him.”

  “Oh, come on, he’s your father,” he mocked. “What could he have done to deserve the cold shoulder from his only daughter?”

  She looked away to see the light turn yellow and the crosswalk sign flashing Don’t Walk. She stepped off the curb anyway, looking back to answer before she darted across the street. “He killed my mother.”

  Chapter 2

  By the time Nicholas caught up with her, she was passing their destination. He dodged a tourist, caught Lainie’s arm and turned her to face him. There were a half-dozen questions he was about to ask, but the stubborn, defensive look on her face indicated that she expected as much. Instead he immediately released her. “You missed the store.”

  He saw the surprise in her eyes that he’d let the subject drop. Then her gaze shifted past him to the business one door back and, without a word, she walked back, pulled the door open and went inside.

  There was a very good reason he hadn’t pressed for more information regarding her mother’s death, and it had nothing to do with the fact that she obviously didn’t want to discus
s it. The simple truth was he didn’t care. As one child who’d grown up motherless to another, he could say he was sorry, but on a personal level, he just didn’t care. It meant nothing to him. She meant nothing to him. Hell, he didn’t know anything about her except that she was a problem he didn’t need...and she had those eyes. Pretty hazel eyes.

  Scowling, he retraced his steps to the entrance of Vieux Carré Antiques. It was in the middle of the block, a narrow storefront that extended all the way to the street behind, and every inch of its interior was packed. It smelled of dust, must and strong solvents and reminded him too strongly of St. Jude’s. In his time there, he had thoroughly explored the church and rectory, sometimes with Jamey, usually alone, and he had discovered all kinds of dusty, unused, unwelcoming places. Of course, the whole church had been unwelcoming to him. Father Francis hadn’t been much different from Tomaso. He had judged the sinner as well as the sin—and, in Nicholas’s case, the result of the sin. He had demanded retribution and penance and had offered precious little forgiveness in return.

  Although he saw Lainie one aisle over and forty feet down, he didn’t head in that direction. He wandered instead around the perimeter of the store, skimming over the merchandise stacked ceiling high. One man’s trash was another man’s treasure...rather, another woman’s treasure, he amended as he rounded a corner and nearly bumped into a shapely blonde kneeling there. Working on papers spread over the wood floor, she was applying stripper to a small table. She glanced up and smiled when she became aware of him. “Hi. Find anything you like?”

  Though he doubted that she intended her simple question to come off as a come-on, it did. Her smile was sultry, her gaze beckoning, her voice low and smooth, like the rustle of bedsheets against skin. He was tempted to offer his own come-on, bluntly phrased and straight to the point. I think I like you. Show me to a bed and let’s find out. That was one sure way to find out if the invitation was deliberate. If sexy and sensual were just normal for her, she wouldn’t hesitate to set him straight. But if that was interest in her eyes... Hell, she wasn’t his type—if he even knew after so many years alone what his type was—but she was pretty, and if she were willing, he would certainly be able.

  With a faint smile and a shake of his head, he moved on. He’d been able for a little over two weeks now. For five years he had thought that was the first thing he would do when he walked through those doors: find a woman, any woman, and not come up for air for, oh, a month or so. In fact, he had spent his first evening of freedom in an Alabama bar with just that in mind. The place had been full of women pretty enough to make him notice and willing enough to tempt him, but when he’d gone to his room at the motel next door, he had gone alone. Back here in New Orleans, where he could pick up the phone and have his pick of women in a matter of minutes, he was still alone. He wasn’t sure what he was waiting for. He wanted sex, not a relationship, not even a meaningful experience. Just sex. All he needed was a warm body, and there were plenty of those around.

  But he was still waiting, and damned if he knew why.

  Turning another corner, he saw Lainie a few yards ahead, standing in front of a dresser, a thoughtful look on her face. He stopped a foot or so behind her and repeated the blonde’s question. “Find something you like?” He asked it without the same risk. It wasn’t likely she would offer a suggestive answer, wasn’t likely the thought of sharing a bed with him had ever entered her mind.

  Although now, damn his own thoughts, he might never get it out of his mind.

  “Yeah.” Her tone was absentminded as she studied the piece. “It looks kind of awful, but... I like marble.”

  The dresser was old, much abused but well made. It had four drawers, two on each side, a low shelf that joined them, an intricately shaped mirror and serpentine marble tops. The piece did look awful. It had been painted so many times that the cheval mirror was locked in place and the drawers no longer closed completely. The top layer of paint was white, and where it had flaked off, shades of green, brown and electric blue showed.

  Stepping around her, he flipped the price tag over. “Not a bad price if you don’t mind the paint or a lot of work.”

  She didn’t interrupt her inspection to reply. As long as she was preoccupied, he took the opportunity for a look of his own. She was dressed in jeans that fitted comfortably but not too snug and a heavy cotton polo shirt in bright yellow, and her hair... Well, hell, there was nothing different she could do with it. As short as it was, it lay one way, and that was it. Not many women had the bone structure to carry off such a severe cut—the pretty blonde back there didn’t—but the style flattered Lainie. It gave her a wide-eyed innocent look...but she was no innocent.

  She was tall, five-eight, maybe five-nine, and all curves—full breasts, narrow waist, rounded hips. Hers was the sort of body that enticed a man, that promised every pleasure known to man and delivered every wicked one.

  Damn, but it’d been a long time since he’d experienced that kind of wicked.

  Maybe that was what he wanted: not just sex, but great sex. Maybe he wanted that first time of breaking his abstinence streak to be truly memorable—wild, wicked, reckless, dangerous, damn-near-die-before-it-was-over sex. If so, he knew exactly who to call.

  And it wasn’t Lainie Farrell.

  Why did that knowledge disappoint him just a little?

  “All right,” she said, pulling him back from a thought he didn’t want to explore. “I’ll take it. Now I need a sofa.”

  She wandered away, and he followed her. By the time she finished, she’d bought the dresser, a sofa, a chair and a couple of small tables, all for under seventy-five dollars. After giving her address to the blonde, she led the way outside and they headed back toward Serenity. At the first stoplight—the same intersection where she’d dropped her bombshell about her mother, then slipped off—she turned an even gaze on him and dropped another. “Can I ask you something?”

  “Nothing’s stopped you yet.”

  “Is it true that Jimmy Falcone threatened to kill you if you came back to New Orleans?”

  Stiffening uncomfortably, he turned to watch the Sunday afternoon traffic. By rights, only three people should know about the threat: the man who’d made it, Jimmy; the man who’d delivered it to Nicholas while he was still in prison, Vince Cortese; and Nicholas himself. Nicholas hadn’t told anyone, but the U.S. Attorney knew. The FBI knew. People on Serenity knew. That meant Jimmy was talking, and if he was talking, it meant he was serious about the threat. Nicholas’s five years in prison wasn’t enough to satisfy him. He intended to make an example of Nicholas, to use him to show everyone else what happened when you crossed Jimmy Falcone.

  Smith Kendricks and Remy Sinclair had come to Alabama two days after Nicholas’s visit from Vince. They had advised him not to return to the city, and when he had insisted, they had offered him protection. All these years they’d been after Jimmy, and they still didn’t understand his one rule of business: nothing kept the old man from his goals. If he wanted Nicholas dead, it would happen. Maybe not right away, maybe not in six months or even six years. Hell, as warped as Falcone was, he would enjoy dragging it out. He would take great pleasure in keeping Nicholas wondering day after day, month after month, if this was the time he would die. It would double his enjoyment to give Nicholas time to adjust to life on the outside, to maybe find a job and a place to belong, maybe even someone to belong to, to lull him into thinking that the old man had forgotten him, to wait until he was in a position where he had something to lose and then strike.

  Would it disappoint Jimmy if he knew that Nicholas wasn’t anticipating the worst, that he didn’t look over his shoulder every time he went out for a familiar face or an unfamiliar threat? If he knew that Nicholas was never going to have anything more to lose than he had right now? If he knew that his target didn’t much care whether they killed him? If they killed him, they killed him. And if they didn’t...

  Sometimes he thought that would be the crueler of Jimmy’s
choices.

  “Yeah,” he said at last, settling his gaze on her. “He said something to that effect.”

  “So why did you come back?”

  “I didn’t have anyplace else to go.”

  “There’s a whole country out there.”

  “Not for me. This is my home.”

  “What if your presence here puts other people in danger—Jamey and Karen, Reid and Cassie?”

  You, he wanted to add. If anyone was in danger because of him, it was the neighbor five feet across the hall, the woman standing right beside him on a public street corner. Some of Jimmy’s best work had been done on public streets. But that was a big if. “This thing with Jimmy is personal. He’s not going to do something reckless like have his men open fire on a crowd of people hoping to get me. He’ll want to do the job himself. He usually does when it’s personal.”

  “You know his preferred methods of killing.” Her voice trembled just a bit, and there was a shade less color in her face than before. He regretted reminding her of exactly what he was.

  “I worked for him for ten years.” His words were clipped, his manner deliberately distancing. “I know.”

  “You helped him get away with murder, and then you betrayed him. Why?”

  Jolie Wade had asked that question. So had Smith Kendricks, Remy Sinclair and Vince Cortese. Nicholas had had only one answer, and he’d given it—part of it—five years ago to Jolie and Smith: because Falcone had killed someone. That was all he’d told them, but he suspected that they had guessed it was a woman. Jolie had known him so well—more intimately than any other woman but one—and Kendricks had just started looking at her exactly the way Nicholas used to look at Rena.

  Why? He could tell Lainie Farrell what he had never told anyone else. That he had decided one rainy night in Baton Rouge that he would bring down Jimmy Falcone or die trying. That he had deliberately cultivated clients in his practice that would catch Falcone’s attention. That the job with Falcone had been a vital part of his plan. That he had made a conscious decision to temporarily become everything he despised in order to destroy it. That he’d done things he wasn’t proud of, but in his mind, the end had justified the means. That, in effect, he had been undercover, pretending to be something he wasn’t in order to gather evidence to punish a major criminal.