Stay Dead - [9]
Coming back to full wakefulness, Annie felt the cool blast of the aircon and she shivered, blinking, pulling the sheet over her body. She awoke to blackness, to an empty room, an empty bed. No Max. And now, as the dream ebbed away, as she came back to herself, she thought, No Constantine either.
Annie sat up, pushed her hair out of her eyes, clutched at her temples. Jesus, these dreams. Recently she’d had them over and over again. She was with Constantine – Constantine as he had been so long ago – they were happy, as they had been all those years ago. It was all so real, disturbingly real, and strange – and then she woke up and felt bereft, abandoned, as cold reality crept back in.
And now Max was gone too.
Annie hauled herself up in the bed, reached over, her eyes becoming accustomed to the darkness so that she could see outlines, discern dim shapes. She groped for and found the glass of water on the bedside table, took a sip, and tried not to think about all of it.
But she did.
She couldn’t help it. How could she not think about it?
Twenty-three years ago, it happened. Constantine had been her second husband. Way back then – believing Max to be dead following a gangland hit – she had married Constantine, and was pregnant with his child when it happened. The explosion. And after that? The dreams.
Ah God, those dreams!
At first they had not been sweet, happy dreams like those she was experiencing now. They had been hideous dreams, waking nightmares in which Constantine appeared before her in the night, wrecked, smouldering, dead and yet not dead, holding out his ruined arms to her. Those dreams had been terrifying. She had wondered if she was losing her mind.
Annie flicked on the bedside light. Light flooded the room and drove back the shadows. Nothing sinister here, she reassured herself, looking around and sternly getting a grip on her wayward imagination. There was no mouldering remnant of a man she had once loved, come back to haunt her.
And Max? What about him?
Annie frowned, her guts tightening with tension. Max was off in Europe on business. He’d taken off a week ago, without any real explanation. What business, he had refused to discuss with her, even though she had asked. He had just said he had stuff to do, and left.
Max was a law unto himself. He never explained, never apologized, never kept her in the loop. He had things to do, that was all he’d said, and he’d just… gone.
Leaving her here, alone.
Which was OK. She was fine on her own, usually. But not this time.
Because you think he’s having an affair, don’t you? You don’t think he’s doing business at all, you think he’s doing some tart.
It was true that Max had been cold, distant to her before he left. That had worried her. Usually, if Max had something to say to you, he’d say it to your face, get it off his chest. Not this time, though. This felt different. And now she wasn’t sleeping well, and she was having these fucking dreams. Somehow they made her feel almost that she was the unfaithful one. The one who cheated. The very thought made her frown, made a shaft of uneasiness pierce her gut, hard. She had lost Max once, but found him again, and she was so lucky to have done that, so incredibly lucky to have him back in her life after all they had been through. She knew it. She didn’t want to lose him again.
But these dreams.
They were so vivid, so colourful, so convincing in their reality, that when she was asleep she was actually there, once again. In her dreams she was once again Annie Carter-Barolli, a Mafia queen, cosseted and powerful, married to a man whose word was life and death, whose name struck fear in everyone on the streets of New York.
Sighing restlessly, Annie glanced at the alarm clock. Two in the morning, and she was wide awake. There was no chance she’d get back to sleep. She never did, not after one of the dreams. They churned her up, made her think: What the hell is this, have I got a problem here?
Do I need to see a shrink or something?
Around the time of the Montauk explosion, way back in the seventies, she knew she’d had some sort of a breakdown. Was her mind slipping out of her control again, was that what this was all about?
But everything was good now. She and Max were OK. Weren’t they? Her daughter Layla and Constantine’s son Alberto were cruising the Caribbean islands, touching base rarely, but they were fine. Layla contacted Annie and Max whenever she could, even sometimes arrived unannounced on the doorstep, much to their delight.
Yeah, everything’s fine, Annie told herself. But there was that niggling sense of trouble looming she couldn’t deny. The dreams. This feeling of something bubbling away under the surface, sending up noxious dirty little plops now and again to her brain – something bad. Max had been so cold to her recently, looking away from her, leaving her without a kiss, without even a single civil word.
Yeah, you need a shrink, she told herself, almost laughing at such self-indulgent weakness. She was Annie Carter, she was rock-solid, a strong and single-minded woman. So why was she letting her imagination run riot? Yes, she had secrets –
