Burn Down the Night by M. O'Keefe Page A

Kennedy on the TV stand. I picked it up to see if it was heavier than the lamp, but it seemed hollow.
    Hollow plastic JFK statue.
    Florida. Definitely Florida.
    I eased around the corner, and stepped into the doorway of the kitchen just as Joan was turning toward me with a bowl of something hot and half a grilled cheese sandwich in her mouth.
    She caught sight of me and jumped. The sandwich fell in the soup—the soup nearly dropped to the floor, but she caught it in time and it splashed up over her hand and across her chest.
    “Holy shit!” she cried. “Max, what the hell—?”
    Something about the soup and the grilled cheese sandwich made my murder lamp seem ridiculous.
    She set the soup down and grabbed a towel from where it hung over the handle of the oven. I stepped closer.
    “You alone here?” I asked her.
    “You’re here,” she snapped, all peevish.
    That attitude wasn’t going to fly.
    I stepped closer, crowding her into the tiny corner of the galley kitchen. She looked up at me, registered my seriousness, and she got appropriately scared. Good. Finally something going the way it should.
    “We’re alone,” she breathed, her hands up as if to ward me off. “You shouldn’t be up.”
    “Where are we?”
    “Safe.”
    I laughed and stepped closer again. “Alone with you ain’t exactly safe. You got any bombs you’re planning on blowing up?”
    I was right up against her. The heat from the spilled soup across her belly was burning across my bare stomach, too. She breathed and I felt her tits against my chest.
    Oh, she didn’t like that, but I leaned in closer. Because this woman needed to be scared. Scared women don’t make up stories. They don’t lie. They were too scared to do anything but think about how to best make me happy.
    I had a lot of ideas about how she could make me happy.
    “Where are we?” I asked. She gave it a good effort, I could hand her that. She gave me some pissed-off eye contact, but I leaned in harder, bullying her with my size.
    “Fuck you, Max. I could take you with one kick to the bullet wound in your leg, so how about you back off.”
    I smiled at her, but shifted my leg away, because she wasn’t wrong.
    “Tell me where we are.”
    “Florida. Forty-five minutes outside of Tampa. It’s safe and we’ve got it for a week.”
    The smell of the soup and the grilled cheese was making me dizzy. My stomach growled against hers.
    “You’re hungry.”
    Joan wasn’t one of those pretty girls. Her cheeks were razor sharp, her green eyes hard as glass. Her mouth…well, her mouth was pretty when she wasn’t scowling at me.
    She was sexy as fuck, but hard. Maybe in another life, a couple of easier breaks in her story, and she could have been pretty. But she looked badass and capable. Nothing soft about her but her tits and her skin.
    All of which I was plenty interested in. Not so much at the moment, dizzy and with my leg screaming at me to get off it already. But I wasn’t letting her know that.
    I glanced down at the skin revealed by her tank top.
    She took a deep breath and her tits shimmied.
    I was hungry and weak and the world was spinning.
    “Sit down, you idiot.” She shoved at me and I snapped forward, my hand around her neck.
    “I don’t know what’s going on, Joan. But you ain’t the boss. Not anymore.”
    She tilted her head up, getting a better breath but also glaring at me with as much fuck you in her eyes as she could. I squeezed my fingers at her throat and the fuck you dimmed a little.
    “Do not fuck with me,” I said. “You got it?” I gave her a little shake when she tried to give me the silent treatment.
    “Yes. I get it.”
    “Good, now where are my clothes?”
    “What wasn’t ruined is in the wash,” she said, her voice a little strangled by my hand.
    “You have a car?”
    She nodded.
    Okay. All right. All of this I could work with. Some food. Some clean clothes, and I’d be out of here.
    “Look,” she whispered. “I know you’re