Dirty Game
Adultery, murder and dangerous love collide in Jessie Keane’s gritty debut novel.For longer than she cares to remember Annie Bailey has lived in the shadow of her older sister Ruthie. Now Ruthie has her hands on Max Carter, the much feared head of the Carter family and a top class villain.Seducing Max wasn't a problem, but the guilt, shame and anger of rejection afterwards was.Thrown onto the streets Annie finds herself living with Celia, a wayward aunt with a shocking secret. As the months pass Annie's resourceful nature sees her mature and carve out a life for herself, albeit not legal. But if you play with fire, you can expect to get burned and her lavish new lifestyle and connections may be about to come crashing down around her.Annie has unwittingly placed herself between two rival gangs and upset too many people, and these kind of people don't forget. But as everyone knows, Annie Bailey is no ordinary woman.
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For Rebekah Kowalski Ming and Joan Hoyt Thank you
Table of Contents
CHAPTER 1
I WAS SITTING ON THE WINDOW SEAT OF OUR PENTHOUSE unit in Belltown Terrace when Mel came back from her run. Dripping with sweat, she nodded briefly on her way to the shower and left me in peace with my coffee cup and the online version of the New York Times crossword. Since it was Monday, I finished it within minutes and turned my attention to the spectacular Olympic Mountains view to the west.
It was June. After months of mostly gray days, summer had come early to western Washington. Often the hot weather holds off until after drowning out the Fourth of July fireworks. Not this year. It was only mid-June, and the online weather report said it might get all the way to the mid-eighties by late afternoon.
-People in other parts of the country might laugh at the idea of mid-eighties temperatures clocking in as a heat wave, but in Seattle, where the humidity is high and AC units are few, a long June afternoon of sun can be sweltering, especially since the sun doesn’t disappear from the sky until close to 10:00 P.M.
I remember those long miserable hot summer nights when I was a kid, when my mother—a single mother—and I lived in a second-story one-bedroom apartment in a blue-collar Seattle neighborhood called Ballard. We didn’t have AC and there was a bakery on the floor below us. Having a bakery and all those ovens running was great in the winter, but in the summer not so much. I would lie there on the couch in the living room, sleepless and miserable, hoping for a tiny breath of breeze to waft in through our lace curtains. It wasn’t until I was in high school and earning my own money by working as an usher in a local theater that I managed to give my mom a pair of fans for Mother’s Day—one for her and one for me. (At least I didn’t give her a baseball glove.)
I refilled my coffee cup and poured one for Mel. She grew up as an army brat. Evidently the base housing hot water heaters were often less than optimal. As a result she takes some of the fastest showers known to man. She collected her coffee from the kitchen and was back in the living room before the coffee came close to reaching drinking temperature. Wearing a silky robe that left nothing to the imagination and with a towel wrapped around her wet hair, she curled up at the opposite end of the window seat and joined me in examining the busy shipping traffic crisscrossing Elliott Bay.
A grain ship was slowly pulling away from the massive terminal at the bottom of Queen Anne Hill. Two ferries, one going and one coming, made their lumbering way to and from Bremerton or Bainbridge Island. They were large ships, but from our perch twenty-two stories up, they seemed like tiny toy boats. Over near West Seattle, a collection of barges was being assembled in advance of heading off to Alaska. Nearer at hand, a many-decked cruise ship had docked overnight, spilling a myriad of shopping-intent cruise enthusiasts into our Denny Regrade neighborhood.
“How was your run?” I asked.
“Hot and crowded,” Mel said. “Myrtle Edwards Park was teeming with runners off the cruise ships. I don’t like running in crowds. That’s why I don’t do marathons.”
I had another reason for not doing marathons—two of them, actually—my knees. Mel runs. I walk, or as she says, I “saunter.” Really, it’s more limping than anything else. I finally broke down and had surgery to remove my heel spurs, but then my knees went south. It’s hell getting old. I talked to Dr. Bliss, my GP, about the situation with my knees.
“Yes,” he said, “you’ll need knee replacement surgery eventually, but we’re not there yet.”
Obviously he was using the royal “we,” because if it was his knee situation instead of mine, I’m sure “we’d” have had it done by now.
I glanced at my watch. “We need to leave in about twenty, if we’re going to make it across the water before traffic stops up.”
Since we were sitting looking out at an expanse of water, it would be easy to think that’s the water I meant when I spoke to Mel, but it wasn’t. In Seattle, that term refers to several different bodies of water, depending on where you are at the time and where you’re going. In this case we were looking at Elliott Bay, which happens to be our water view, but we work on the other side of Lake Washington, in this instance, the “traffic” water in question. People who live on Lake Washington or on Lake Sammamish would have an entirely different take on the matter when they used the same two words. Context is everything.
“Okeydokey,” Mel said, hopping off the window seat. “Another refill?” she asked.
I gave her my coffee mug. She took it, went to the kitchen, filled it, and came back. She handed me the cup and gave me a quick kiss in the process. “I started a new pot for our travelers,” she said, then added, “Back in a flash.”
