CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Tisha Harter sat in the huge recreation room staring at the game that was unfolding on an enormous video screen.

Guns were blazing, and explosions were going off all around her. Bad guys were popping up all over the place. Usually, Tisha had no problem handling the whole bunch of them.

But today, Tisha couldn’t do anything more than fumble with the remote buttons. With an impatient groan, she gave up and logged out of the game.

For a moment, she just sat there and glared at her tightly bandaged right hand. Two of her fingers were wrapped together and her hand was covered with a foam support that extended all the way over her wrist.

She put down the remote and reached with her other hand for the glass of bourbon she’d poured for herself. She took a swallow, then grumbled aloud …

“That evil bastard.”

She wasn’t thinking about any of the villains in the game. She wasn’t thinking about the nurse who had bandaged the hand, either.

She was thinking about her husband.

Edwin had broken her pinky finger just yesterday in one of his increasingly frequent outbursts of sadistic cruelty. He’d made her scream, which of course he enjoyed. He liked to inflict pain on people, especially on her. He’d been keeping her pretty bruised up lately, although until now he’d been careful not to leave any marks that couldn’t be hidden by her clothing.

This was different—the first bone he’d actually broken. The live-in nurse who spent most of her time taking care of Edwin had set Tisha’s finger and bandaged it. She’d told Tisha that it would have to stay in its splint for another four weeks.

She looked at the other wrist, with the gold bracelet he had bought after inflicting this latest wound. He always bought her nice things after doing bad things to her. It wasn’t his way of apologizing—he never apologized to anybody. It was more of a transaction—his way of reimbursing her for services rendered, for allowing him to hurt her.

She used to almost think the nice trinkets were worth the pain, but things had gotten worse since he’d retired.

Why do I put up with it? she wondered.

She was no weakling herself. In her short life, Tisha had endured more than her share of hard knocks, and she liked to think of herself as being as tough as nails. She could fight back when Edwin got into one of his spells—and sometimes she did. But it always backfired. Edwin would call his blindly loyal security people to restrain her and lock her up somewhere until she calmed down. Not a single person in the house would ever come to her defense. They all did exactly whatever he ordered them to.

And now …

Four weeks! she thought miserably.

She wouldn’t be able to leave the house that whole time, since no one outside the mansion could be allowed see her injury. Normally, her freedom to go out and do as she liked was the one thing in life that still belonged to her—a precious liberty she took advantage of as often as she could.

She smiled a little as she thought …

If only Edwin knew the kind of stuff I do when I’m away.

But now she was stuck right here, and she was going to be bored stiff for four whole weeks—especially now that she couldn’t even take out her aggression by playing this damned game.

None of this was what she’d expected when she’d married Edwin four years ago.

She’d gone to unscrupulous lengths to land him. She’d been just twenty-one years old at the time, working as a bartender in one of the country clubs he’d belonged to.

She’d known Edwin to be her wealthiest patron. She also knew that his wife, Claudia, was an invalid in the last stages of cancer. So even while serving him drinks, Tisha had moved in on him with what she liked to think of as entrepreneurial zeal. Between watching TV and observing the women at the club, she’d learned to present herself in public in perfectly appropriate ways, but she also offered him youth, energy, and beauty.

He hadn’t known, of course, about her checkered past, especially her run-ins with the law. He still didn’t know about all that, and Tisha never intended to tell him.

It had been easy to seduce him, then keep an affair going until the wife died.

Edwin had proposed to Tisha the very day after Claudia’s death, and they were married in a private ceremony just a few days later.

Everything had gone right on schedule as far as Tisha was concerned.

But since then, her hopes had been dashed.

Taking another swallow of whiskey, she wondered …

When the hell is he going to die?

One of the reasons she’d targeted him for marriage in the first place was that he’d already had three heart attacks. Everybody knew that he loathed exercise and avoided anything resembling a healthy diet.

In fact, the staff of the country club where she’d worked had kept a betting pool going about when the old bastard was going to croak.

And that was what Tisha had been counting on. She’d made sure that he rewrote his will to cut out his three sons, leaving her as his only heir.

Whenever he died, she’d inherit a spectacular fortune.

These days his blood pressure was terrible, and so were his cholesterol levels. But he just kept right on living. The worst part of it was, he attributed his longevity to having Tisha in his life.

“You’re a tonic,” he often told her. “You keep me young.”

Whenever he said that, she wanted to hit him with her fists.

In fact, she wished she could hit him right now.

And why shouldn’t she?

She could find him, wherever he was in the house, and sucker punch him right in the face.

So what if she got punished for it?

In fact …

… why shouldn’t she do something a whole lot worse?

She was feeling bitter enough right now not to give a damn about any consequences.

As her anger climbed up as a bitter taste in her mouth, she thought …

He’s got no idea the kinds of things I’ve done.

He’s got no idea what I’m capable of.

*

Edwin Gray Harter was wandering the hallways of his mansion looking at his vast collection of fine paintings—Picassos, Kandinskys, Braques, Klees, Pollocks, and other works. Combined, those paintings were worth several fortunes.

After all these years he was finally asking himself …

Do I even like this stuff?

All this modernism—he didn’t even feel as though he understood most of it.

After all, his dead wife, Claudia, had been the art lover, not him.

She’d been the one who had told him what was any good, the stuff he’d want to buy. Not that she’d approved of his purchases, as she’d often told him when she’d still been alive …

“It’s obscene.”

Edwin kept the whole collection in the rooms and hallways here in his own private wing—a part of the mansion that no people except his personal servants were allowed to enter except with his permission. Even Claudia had seldom been permitted to come here. Now the same was true of Tisha.

He smiled as he recalled what Claudia had often said …

“Those paintings ought to belong to the world. They ought to be in a museum for everyone to see. It’s all wasted on you. The whole thing is obscene.”

He’d never been able to make Claudia understand—the whole point of this collection was to have things that the world wanted, but that nobody else could have for the simple reason that Edwin owned them.

He stood now looking at an especially chaotic abstract.

He couldn’t even remember who the painter was, but for some reason right now he felt rather attracted to it, felt almost as though he could appreciate it.

The wild brushstrokes seemed to be deliberately meaningless …

Almost like my life.

A familiar bitterness was creeping over him.

Again he thought of the idealistic dreams of his youth. He’d betrayed those dreams over and over again. To make his fortune, he’d started with lucky investments in oil wells and Las Vegas casinos—and when luck hadn’t been on his side, money laundering and other dubious endeavors had always taken up the slack.

And now he’d been a billionaire so long that he could barely remember ever being anything else.

He got tired of looking at the painting and walked over to a window. He stood gazing out into the night at the lighted golf course that stretched far into the distance. He used to like that view, with its hint of affluence and privilege. He’d also liked playing golf, had enjoyed the wheeling and dealing that took place on the course as much as the game itself.

But his interest in golf had soured, like so much else.

And then there was Tisha …

Tisha had been his final acquisition, his attempt to jump-start his waning enthusiasm for life.

When people asked him why a man his age had married someone so young, he’d told them …

“When you choose a dog, what do you look for? A puppy! Who wants an old dog that’s already fixed in its ways? You want a puppy!”

He’d figured it would be the same with a wife. He could train her to be exactly what he wanted her to be. He hadn’t been able to do that with Claudia, who had been thirty when he married her, and who had always been too much her own person for his tastes.

But now, as it turned out, he hadn’t been able to do that with Tisha, either.

Some puppy, he thought.

Back when he’d known her as a bartender, she’d done a great con on him, presenting herself as cheerful and naïve and eager to please.

Not that she had completely fooled him. Naturally, he’d had her investigated, and he knew more about her dubious past than she realized. Still, he’d been taken in by that charming masquerade of hers, which had lasted until after she’d gotten him to rewrite his will. Then she started to reveal herself to be the vulgar piece of trailer trash she really was.

It was small wonder that he liked hurting her, liked hearing her yelp and scream in pain.

But he knew he’d gone too far by breaking her finger. Somehow, he sensed that she was going to get back at him for that.

She’d hated his guts for quite some time, of course. It didn’t really bother him to know that she wanted him dead.

It didn’t even bother him that she was already trying to kill him in her own subtle ways. He’d left her in complete command of his menu, and she made sure that he got daily toxic doses of fat and sugar and cholesterol—juicy red steaks and outlandishly sweet desserts.

The truth was, he didn’t much care. He enjoyed the rich and toxic food, and after three heart attacks, he didn’t figure he had much longer to live anyway.

And he wasn’t the least bit afraid of dying. In fact, he rather looked forward to it.

After all, what did he really have to live for?

As he stood there gazing out the window, he felt his muscles cramping and aching.

Getting old is for losers, he thought.

Fortunately, there was still one deeply satisfying pleasure left to him in life, a way to ease his physical pain. He went through his bedroom and into his vast bathroom, where the hot tub lay already steaming. He felt the water with his fingers.

Perfect.

He took off his glasses and removed his hearing aid, set them on the bathroom counter, and took off his clothes.

Then he turned on the hot tub’s massaging jets and climbed into the warm water.

He sighed and breathed slowly as relief flooded through his body.

As Edwin relaxed, he found himself slipping into reveries about the past, back when he’d been young and hadn’t yet made his fortune and wanted to be an inventor. He’d studied electronics and hoped to change the world with his ideas and innovations. Instead, the whole information revolution, the great new age of computers and communication, had completely passed him by while he’d been moving money around, never making or creating anything of any use at all.

That brilliant and talented young man he’d once been now seemed like someone else, a stranger that maybe he’d like to meet …

… but who wouldn’t like me very much.

Well, there was no point in getting nostalgic.

He knew he’d gotten exactly what he deserved in life, and he didn’t feel the least bit sorry for himself.

He closed his eyes and let himself fall under the soothing, hypnotic spell of the bubbling heat and the friendly rumbling of the hot tub.

Then suddenly …

A deep, piercing pain stabbed just below his ribcage.

Another heart attack, he thought as the pain exploded through his abdomen.

This one hurt much worse than the others had.

Then he felt a sudden pressure on his chest and his face slipped down into the water. Sharp stabbing pains struck all over his abdomen.

He opened his eyes, which stung from the chemicals in the water, and saw blood billowing in the hot tub’s bubbling water.

He waved one hand as though to wipe away the blood.

He tried to order the pain to stop, but coughed as water poured into his mouth.

Edwin Gray Harter’s consciousness faded away as he sank into warm water that was stained with his own blood.