“Hi, Honor!” the girl chirped.
The next thing Honor understood, just as she was opening her mouth to ask why Judi was there and where Debbie was: the girl’s hands were covered in blood.
Honor closed her mouth and tried to understand more, as fast as she could.
Sitting beside that closed laptop was a pearl-handled .38. The gun Debbie kept for protection. She kept it either in her purse or in the top right desk drawer. Loaded.
There was blood on the wall behind Debbie’s desk—a burst almost floral in shape, a scarlet chrysanthemum, then a smear tapering downward. More than blood in that burst, and in that smear.
Her heart clattering wildly, Honor followed the path of the smear and saw Debbie’s dyed strawberry blonde hair, stained with vivid red.
“Oh, Judi,” Honor gasped, trying not to scream. “What did you do?”
“I fixed everything,” the girl answered, her voice full of enthusiasm and entirely devoid of humanity.
Chapter Eleven
Honor reached carefully back for the door handle—but then a soft, weak, desperate sound came from the floor. A moan. Debbie was alive.
Judi’s smile disappeared at once, and she grabbed the gun and pointed it at the floor behind the desk. At Debbie.
“NO!” Honor shouted and leapt forward. “DON’T!”
Pausing, Judi turned back to Honor. She re-aimed the gun, pointing it instead at Honor’s chest. “I’m fixing things, Honor. I’m making them the way they should be.”
She had to keep the girl talking, keep her attention away from Debbie. “What”—her voice cracked, and she paused and forced steadiness into it—“do you mean, honey?”
“You said I couldn’t work here because you already had Debbie. Now you don’t. Now you need a helper, and I need a job. See? I fixed it.”
The girl was truly insane. And Honor had turned her loose on the world. On Debbie.
A skitter of movement caught the bottom of Honor’s vision, and she tried to see without moving her eyes. Debbie’s hand—she was reaching, stretching …
The panic button. In the floor. They’d had it installed with the alarm system, and another under Honor’s desk, too—something they could activate with a foot. She was trying to reach it. She’d been shot in the head—God, there was so much blood!—and yet she was conscious and trying to get them out of this.
Honor focused all her attention on Judi and all her will on staying as calm as she could. “Well, let’s talk about that. Do you have the skills for the job?” Satisfied that her tone was something close to normal and conversational, Honor took a step toward the desk, to the side away from Debbie.
Judi held her aim on Honor. “What skills do I need?”
“Typing. A legal practice makes a lot of documents, and they all have to be typed up. Can you type?”
“Like, on a computer?”
“Yes.” She took another step, and her knees quivered. All the muscles below her waist wanted to give up. Right now, she understood why people wet themselves when they were afraid. “The gun is making me nervous, Judi. Can you put it down while we talk about the job? This can be your interview.”
Judi’s eyes narrowed. “You think you’re tricking me, but I’m not dumb like people think.” She turned and aimed the gun at a low angle—pointing it at Debbie again. Before Honor could react at all, Judi fired, and a spray of blood plumed up.
Honor screamed.
When the girl turned back to her, red droplets covered her face. She smiled, and blood from her lips smeared over her teeth like cheap lipstick.
When that image occurred to her—blood like lipstick—Honor’s sense broke, and her body gave up. The strap of her bag slid off her shoulder, and the bag landed on the the floor with a soft thud. She dropped the box and paper bag she’d still been holding—cupcakes and a pretty knickknack, innocent treats of a world that was gone—and she folded to the floor.
“What have you done? Oh my God, what have you done?”
That ghastly grin became a scowl instead. “I don’t like you talkin’ to me like that. I just did what you said. You said I needed a job to get my life started. I tried to do it the way Marguerite wanted, but she wanted me to be a slave, just like Daddy did. I want to be with you, but you said Debbie had my place. Sometimes, you just got to take things into your own hands. Now I can be here, and get my life started. Like you said.”
On a dwindling plane of reason in her mind, Honor had enough sense to know that her keening despair would only make Judi angry and put her at greater risk, but she couldn’t get control of herself. She kept seeing that horrible smile, the red smear over uneven teeth. And Debbie’s hand, lying flaccid on the carpet, a pool of blood seeping toward it. And the flower of blood and brains on the wall.
Debbie was dead. The one person at Bellamy White who’d believed in her, who’d risked her own career and financial well-being to join her, and Honor had gotten her killed.
“She has a son, Judi. She’s a single mom. He’s fifteen.”
“Oh.” She considered that, and then shrugged. “Oh well. Fifteen don’t need no mama.”
How long would she be trapped here with Judi? Until she finally got bored and shot her? Or no—wait. She had another appointment this afternoon. A new client. When would that innocent bystander walk into this mess? Honor managed to check her watch. Twenty minutes. If that new client walked through the door, she had no doubt Judi would shoot at once. Another person doomed because Honor had succeeded in getting this maniac free.
Overwhelmed by wailing terror, she dropped her head into her hands.
“Quit your caterwaulin’. You said you want to help me, but now it don’t look like you do. Now it looks like you been lyin about bein’ my friend.”
Taking in the deepest breath she could—oh God, she could smell Debbie’s blood, and more—Honor forced herself to find any calm anywhere she could. Her hand went to her throat, and when her fingertips grazed her grandmother’s pearls, her wails stopped. Her grandmother had given her the pearls on her high school graduation, with a long letter describing all the important events in her own life she’d worn them for. Grandma’s father had given her the pearls for her thirteenth birthday. A few years later, during World War II, he’d been killed by the Germans.
Grandma had thereafter become a spy in the French resistance; those pearls had been through a lot.
Honor had always felt as if her grandmother’s bravery and love had suffused each pearl. After her death, Honor could feel her spirit wrapped around her when she wore the necklace. She never did anything that required courage without her grandmother’s pearls at her throat.
When her fingers felt the satiny grain of the pearls now, Honor almost felt Grandma’s hands on her shoulders, offering her strength.
She looked up. “I am your friend, Judi. What do you want me to do?”
Before the psychopath answered, there was a sudden commotion on the parking lot. Three black SUVs had pulled up sharply before the windows.
Police vehicles. Arriving without siren or lights, but at speed.
Debbie must have managed to press the panic button.
Through the window, Honor watched officers in Kevlar climb from the trucks, drawing their weapons. One took an automatic rifle out. All they knew was that there was enough trouble for that button to have been activated. She wondered how they’d handle it—and how Judi would handle it as well.
“How’d you do it?” Judi asked—and she was closer than Honor expected. She’d stood and come around the desk while Honor watched the parking lot, and she had Debbie’s pistol aimed three inches from Honor’s eyes.
Honor held onto the pearls and their calm. “I didn’t do anything. You’ve seen me. I didn’t do anything.”
“Then how do they know?”
“I don’t know. Maybe somebody heard the shots and called.” That was likely, too—maybe more likely than poor Debbie reaching the button.
“I can’t go back to jail. I ai
n’t nobody’s prisoner no more.”
Before Honor could work out what she could or should do or say next, Judi pointed the gun at the window and fired.
The window, so recently painted with Honor’s name and profession, shattered around the bullet hole, making a growing, crackling web that glinted in the afternoon sun, and part of it fell away. As the glass crashed, the cops returned fire in a barrage. Honor screamed again and threw herself flat on the floor.
She saw nothing that happened next, but for an endless second, the air was full of thunder and rain and sharp sleet.
And then a man yelled “HOLD YOUR FIRE, GODDAMMIT,” and it was quiet.
Honor opened her eyes. Judi’s body, ripped open by bullets, lay two feet away. Her eyes were open, staring at her. She still breathed. As Honor lay there, shocked and numb, Judi smiled and said, “I fixed it.”
She said no more. After a few seconds of struggle, her breathing stopped. By then, the room was full of cops, and more guns were aimed at her. Somebody dragged her to her feet and handled her roughly, slapping, probing, searching for a weapon. But she couldn’t pull her eyes from Judi’s.
“Are you all right, ma’am?” she was asked. Honor tried to turn to the voice, but she couldn’t.
“Ma’am?” Fingers snapped before her face, and she blinked.
A large male cop in Kevlar stood at her side, gripping her shoulder, frowning fiercely at her—but with concern, she thought, not suspicion. “I’m all right,” she managed to say. “I think I’m okay.”
“I got a pulse! Get the paramedics in here!” a man shouted from across the room.
“A pulse? Debbie?” Honor pulled her arm from the cop and tried to go to her friend, but her legs gave out, and she fell—on top of Judi’s body.
She screamed again. And then she couldn’t stop.
*****
Honor didn’t know where her phone was. Without it, she couldn’t call Lizbet or Callie or Emily, the only people in Boise who’d come for her. She didn’t know their numbers. She’d never tried to memorize them or even recognize them—she’d just put their numbers in her phone’s contacts list right off. She was a victim of modern technology.
She was a victim.
No, Debbie was the victim. Honor was the catalyst. The cause.
They’d given her a sedative on scene, and it still had her brain in its grip. The horror of the day seemed to fill her completely and yet to be distant. Screaming inside a bell jar.
She stared down at her hands. Blood filled the edges of her nails and the creases of her knuckles. Judi’s blood. Debbie’s. A perhaps small bit that was her own; she’d sustained a few unimportant cuts from the shower of glass.
The forensics team had taken multiple samples from the blood on her body, little of it her own. They’d taken her clothes, her shoes, her grandmother’s pearls. Oh—that was where her phone was, of course. In her bag, with the cops. Everything was evidence; even her own body was evidence.
A brisk male voice said, “Knock knock,” and the curtain around her bed in the St. Luke’s ER drew back. The doctor assigned to her stepped into the dim space inside her curtain walls. “Okay, the detectives would like to interview you, but I’d like to bring a psychologist down first to talk to you.”
“I don’t need a psych eval. I’m okay.”
He crossed his arms and gave her an assessing look. “The paramedics reported that you were very agitated on scene.”
“And is that crazy? To be agitated in that situation?”
He smiled. “No, of course not. But it is a great trauma, and you don’t need to be crazy to benefit from talking to someone as you process it.”
“I don’t need to talk to a shrink. But I’m ready to talk to the cops.”
He came close and studied her eyes, pulling out his little light to check their responses. “Okay. If you’re really sure you’re ready for that.”
“I am. But … I need clothes.” She plucked at the hospital gown. “I don’t want to talk to them in this flimsy thing, and they took my clothes.”
“Can you ask a friend to bring you a change of clothes?”
Honor shook her head. All her friends kept their numbers unlisted, so she couldn’t even look them up. She was entirely on her own. In fact, how was she going to get home? Uber, she supposed.
Definitely not a limo.
The doctor—she tried to read the name embroidered on his white coat but couldn’t—stared hard at her again. Since he was obviously deciding whether she was clear-headed and stable enough to be trusted with herself, Honor made an effort to appear to be so.
Seemingly satisfied, he finally said, “I’ll have somebody bring in a set of scrubs and slippers for you. And I’m going to write you a script for Valium.” He patted Honor’s knee. “I’ll tell the detectives that you can speak to them now.”
“Okay. Doctor?”
“Yes?”
“My friend. Debbie Sallerton. Is she going to be okay?”
He glanced over his shoulder, at the closed curtain, and then turned back to her. “I shouldn’t talk to you about her status. We’re still looking for her son. But … I’m sorry. She didn’t make it.”
Honor covered her mouth with one hand and reached for the pearls she didn’t have with the other. She’d thought Debbie dead at least twice already today, and she’d been alive, despite her terrible injuries. Honor had clutched a flimsy thread of hope that she would survive.
“I’m sorry,” the doctor said again and stepped away, closing the curtains between them.
Honor lay back on the gurney and curled onto her side. She could feel an ocean of tears swallowing her heart, but they wouldn’t reach her eyes.
*****
The detectives were gentle with her, and she answered their questions as completely as she could. The effects of the sedative had ebbed enough that her brain felt sharp, though her emotions were still dulled uncomfortably, stopped up in her chest.
Though they were gentle and professional, she could see in their eyes that they blamed her, and they were right to. She had won the case that had set Judith Jones free. Despite the shocking violence with which Judi had killed her father, Honor had argued that she should not be found guilty of murder because she had been horribly abused her entire life. She had argued that the killing was justified. That it was self-defense, though her father had been sleeping when Judi had gone for him.
She had argued for a verdict free of qualification. She had not argued mental disease or defect. And she had persuaded the jury to set the girl free.
Now Debbie was dead. Her son had lost his father to war years earlier; now he was an orphan.
And that was Honor’s fault.
When the detectives had finished and left her with a number to call if she remembered anything more, Honor sat on the gurney, waiting to be discharged, dressed in borrowed hospital scrubs, and stared at the blood on her hands.
The sound of a throat clearing just beyond the closed curtains. “Honor?”
She knew that voice, and it had no place here. Jumping off the gurney, she went to the curtain and drew it back.
Logan stood there. Logan Fucking Cahill.
“God, darlin’.” He reached for her, but she slapped his hand away.
Despite the strange quell of the sedative, Honor felt every emotion clamoring in the bell jar, all at once. Including all the emotions that made this man so confusing and impossible to leave behind. She wanted him here—and that was the worst of it. He was here, and she wasn’t alone, and she wanted to run into his arms and feel that safe comfort he’d given her before. The worry creasing his brow—worry for her—made pain rocket violently against the stifling jar of her chest, filling her nearly to bursting.
But he shouldn’t be here. How could he possibly have known what had happened?
“What are you doing here? How did you know I was here?” There was only one answer—he was stalking her somehow. He was no better than Tyler.
“I—”
“No! No, I—after that scene with the guy at your apartment, I was worried about you. I told you I was worried. I have a friend who has a friend with the Boise police, and I asked him to let me know if you had any trouble. I got word a couple hours ago.”
The people who actually cared about her didn’t even know yet, but this asshole was here, because he was stalking her, and she had to keep that understanding at the fore. He was stalking her. Intruding on her privacy. Forcing his will against hers.
“That’s stalking, you son of a bitch!” She lashed out, slamming her hands on his chest hard enough to make him take a step back. “Get the fuck out! Get out! Get away from me!”
He stepped back again, stumbling a little, as if the force of her words had been stronger than her actual blow. “I’m sorry. I was just worried.”
“Go away!”
“You have to leave, sir,” a nurse called, her voice clear and firm. “Right now. Let’s go.”
With a last look at Honor, Logan nodded and turned away.
*****
After her outburst at Logan, the doctor—Eisenwald, his name turned out to be—again pushed her to speak to a therapist, and this time he pressed the point hard enough that Honor finally conceded to accepting a referral, though she had no intention of using it. With that and the prescription and the usual snail’s pace of hospital discharges, it was another hour before she was finally free to go. She walked out of the ER examining room in saggy scrubs and flimsy slippers, and was halfway down the corridor before she remembered that she needed to call for an Uber.
Could you even call Uber? She’d only ever used the app on her phone. Maybe a regular cab, then.
She was standing at the open doorway of a small waiting room. Inside, there was a phone on a table near the door. Honor stepped into the room. In the far corner sat Jed, Debbie’s orphaned son, beside a man dressed in such a way that he was clearly the boy’s coach. Jed sat slack in the chair, slouched low, staring at some point far away from the hospital, deep in his own hell. His face was blotchy and wet with shed tears.
Someday (Sawtooth Mountains Stories Book 2) Page 14