Night Passenger

by David Stanley

  The air in the bedroom was saturated by the smell of her body, her soaps, and her perfume. The mixture was intoxicating. He glanced toward the bed. The covers were all messed up, and the pillow still had the impression of her head on it. She’d got up in a hurry, just like she’d said. All the same, her note could easily have asked him to wait in the lobby or the bar. There was no reason for him to be here unless she wanted it. Unless there was something she could only do here and not in public. As he approached the window, he saw her reflected on the glass. She’d turned to watch him leave. Her shoulders had sagged and her arms hung down by her sides. The hair on the back of his neck stood on end. He’d seen something private, something real. If she really was playing him, she was one of the best.

  He slid open the balcony door and stepped out into the cool air.

  The view was amazing, he could look out across the beach, the wharf, and the deep blue water of Monterey Bay. He leaned against the railing and looked down at the people on the beach below. The summer season had been and gone but there were still people down there. Perhaps some of them, like Jocelyn, had been brought here by the shoot-out. There was still a sizable media presence in town, all waiting for the next shoe to drop; all of them sensing the story wasn’t over. He suspected they wouldn’t have much longer to wait.

  Jocelyn came out onto the balcony and leaned against the rail.

  “Hey,” she said.

  “Hey,” he said back, still looking out over the bay.

  “My hideous body is all covered up if you want to come back inside.”

  He nodded slowly, not knowing if she was even watching him.

  “Thank god. I thought for sure my breakfast was going to come back up.”

  She laughed and punched him on the arm. “Bastard!”

  Thorne smiled. He sensed they had a similar sense of humor. He turned to look at her and saw almost exactly what he expected. She was wearing high heels, navy slacks and a loose white blouse. It was what she wore on camera; smart, professional. Her hair was still down, however, and it was a lot longer than he expected. She wore it so it was directed down one side of her neck, with the ends stopping above her heart. Thorne moved as though to pass behind her on the narrow balcony. She turned with him, so they were facing one another. He stopped and put his fingertips on the rail on either side of her. A light touch. If she didn’t like it, she could brush past him. Intimate, but not controlling. Jocelyn looked up into his eyes, uncertain. Her back was arched, her ass pressed against the guardrail. Her eyes sparkled again. The two of them were closer than at any time before. She was wearing the perfume. It filled his nose with every breath and if he closed his eyes, it would be easy to let himself believe he was with Kate. She could see the desire in his eyes, he wasn’t hiding it anymore. He thought she’d been playing a game with him when he arrived, but he wasn’t so sure anymore.

  “You said that you had something I needed to see.”

  “Yes.”

  He glanced down, at her body, then back up.

  “Did I already see it?”

  She smiled. “No, something else. But you’re not going to like it.”

  “I see,” he said. “Are we going to stop being friends?”

  “Maybe.”

  He gazed at her, as if memorizing every detail. She had an angelic face, with a delicate bone structure and a rounded chin. Her mouth looked like a ribbon tied into a bow and he longed to kiss it. On impulse, he raised his left hand and slid it down under the collar of her blouse and let it rest on the bare skin of her shoulder, up near her neck. She took a deep breath, her eyes dancing nervously. This crossed the line. This wasn’t in the same time zone as the line. His thumb rested just above her collarbone, near her carotid artery. He felt the acceleration of her heart. He couldn’t tell if she was excited, or afraid. Sometimes, the two were the same. It would be the simplest thing in the world for him to tip her over the rail. One sharp push. The fall would kill her, but would take less than two seconds. She’d be confused, disorientated; she might hit the ground before she realized what happened. It would be clean, painless.

  They could look for Roger Thornhill all they liked, they’d never find him.

  “You’ve started to grow on me, Coop. I’d hate if I never saw you again.”

  “That’s not the impression you gave me back there.”

  “All right, let’s you and me start over. We’ll go inside and you can tell me what this is all about, then we’ll take it from there.”

  “Fine, but you got the wrong idea about me, Thorne.”

  “Shhh, don’t spoil it.”

  He got a flash of the goofball smile again, before she got it under control. She wanted to be serious, because she was about to brace him with something difficult. Playful Coop was being parked now that it was time to get to business. He understood that, he’d done much the same when he’d channeled some of his fictional character’s traits during both the robbery attempt, and the shoot-out. Jake Vasco feared nothing. He followed her back into the bedroom. The music was no longer playing. She sat in the chair she’d used before and opened a laptop that lay on the desk in front of her. It was a top of the line MacBook Pro, a distant cousin of his own laptop. A document was open on screen and she hurriedly closed it before he could see what it said. It looked like one of his scripts for Night Passenger: a fat double-spaced column in the middle of the page. Perhaps her next news report.

  She glanced over her shoulder at him.

  “Okay, this all starts with that security footage.”

  “I don’t want to look at that,” he said.

  She raised an eyebrow. “You’ve never watched it before?”

  “I’ve seen it more times than I want to, I’m sure everyone has.”

  “I need to play it, Chris. If you like, I can mute the sound.”

  He sighed, then nodded. She clicked on the browser icon and Chrome opened with the page already on it. There was an image frozen on screen of him from above, lying on the ground with his head in Lauren’s lap. A large amount of blood covered his clothing and more still had pooled on the asphalt beneath them. It was difficult to believe from looking at this image that he wasn’t dead and he found it hard to look at himself this way. He knew this was the last frame of the video, it wasn’t where she’d chosen to stop it. She clicked the mute key, then hit replay. It was the same thing they kept showing on TV, he could describe it in his sleep. Around the one third’s mark, she pressed pause and looked at him.

  “The video has five different camera angles. Four of them are mall security, but not this one,” she said, pressing the screen. The colors shifted under her fingernail, desperate to escape. “This one is different, it comes from the dash cam of a vehicle in the parking lot. Only a single instance from this camera appears, this one right here.”

  “So what?”

  “Well,” she said, “I assumed whoever made this video was somehow involved with the official security staff at the mall. I mean, how else would they get this footage?”

  Thorne nodded. The extra angle, combined with the access to the official security feeds created a problem.

  “A cop,” he said. “The same one who had the dash cam.”

  “Bingo.”

  He sat heavily on the end of her bed.

  “You’re telling me there was a goddam cop there the entire time, and he did nothing to help me? He just sat in his car and filmed it?”

  “Yeah, I didn’t think you’d like that. For what it’s worth, he didn’t do nothing. He called in backup; he called in the helicopter. You’d certainly be dead without him.”

  Thorne rubbed the back of his neck in frustration. The cop would’ve been on the other side of Blake and the others, there would've been nowhere for them to hide. Cabot hadn’t mentioned anything about this man, either to him, or in any press conference. It was probably a source of embarrassment that this officer sat it out inside his car, while a civilian had stepped up and saved the day. Thorne took a deep breath and le
t it out slowly. The cop would have shot at him too, there would’ve been no way for him to tell them all apart. He would have looked like just another shooter, and the one that had Lauren.

  “A cop was there and he uploaded this to the internet. So what?”

  “Actually he didn’t, his son did. I contacted him through his username dimebag69. He was more than willing to meet up when I explained who I was.”

  “I’m sure. Did he get the same routine I got with the robe?”

  Her face seemed to collapse.

  “I guess I deserve that, but no he didn’t.”

  He’d hurt her feelings and it surprised him how bad he felt.

  “Hey,” he said. “I’m sorry, okay? Please carry on.”

  She nodded. “I met this kid in Starbucks. His real name is Angelo Caruso. He was all worked up about the footage. At the time, the clip had been watched over 300 million times and he hadn’t received a cent of advertising money. He claimed Google stole it, citing a breach of their terms and conditions. He was bummed out, he thought he had a Zapruder movie on his hands. I let him go on about it for several minutes before I steered him back to the content of the video.

  “I told him I was interested in seeing the entirety of the footage from the dash cam, I didn’t need the other feeds. He admitted it wasn’t a great angle or he would've used more of it. Sensing blood in the water and feeling a little sorry for him, I said I’d buy the footage off him for $200. It was all the money I had with me. Anyway, his eyes lit up. It wasn’t the type of money he’d hoped for, but it was better than nothing. I made him sign a network release form to tie him in and make it a legal contract. I wanted the exclusive, I said, so if the footage turned up elsewhere he could expect to find himself in court. He didn’t care, he thought he was selling me a lemon. He transferred the footage onto my thumb drive right there in Starbucks, then took the money and ran. Almost literally.”

  Thorne couldn’t see where this was going, or where it connected to him. There had to be something from this angle that the other cameras had missed. Not being part of the mall’s security system, Cabot and his deputies hadn't seen it. They’d look at the original, unedited recordings, not this clip. Was it possible that they didn’t know about the dash cam footage? He glanced at the view counter and saw it was now at 630 million. He blinked. The number had almost doubled since he’d last looked. People couldn’t get enough of him being shot.

  “All right,” he said. “Show me.”

  “It’s easy to miss, I don’t blame the kid for not seeing it. You’re going to want to come closer than that.”

  He got up off the bed and looked around. There were no other chairs. He stood behind her and leaned down close, so that he was looking over her shoulder. Again her perfume entered his nose, his lungs. It was making him crazy. She minimized her browser and played the dash cam video that was sitting in a window underneath. There was no preceding movement of the vehicle getting into position, the footage started from the same angle they’d already seen. He watched it all unfold once again. It seemed the same, and he could see why the kid hadn’t used much of it. The angle was low, and faced a little too far to the left. Additionally, there were several static marks that were probably squashed bugs on the vehicle’s windshield.

  The clip ended and he shook his head.

  “I didn’t see it,” he said.

  “I told you. Let me play it again. This time, don’t look at what you’re doing, look at what happens behind you.”

  She started the clip again. This time, he saw it immediately. He saw Foster rise up like a mountain behind him, huge and out of focus. His left hand across his gaping throat, slick with blood. The giant staggered toward his position with something shiny in his free hand. The screwdriver. A puff of red rose up out of his chest, then another. Foster collapsed backward and didn’t rise again. The clip continued to play, but he didn’t ask her to stop it, nor did he need to re-watch it to know who’d fired the shots.

  “From where I’m sitting, it looks like one of those guys saved you. The one in that Doors T-shirt. The same one you have that weird Point Break stand off with later on, where neither of you takes the shot. That part never made sense before, but now it’s starting to look like something else. Part of a pattern.”

  She was onto him. How long would it be before she had the full picture? Not too long, he suspected. Jocelyn Cooper was smart, and wasn’t constrained by procedure or jurisdiction like Cabot. He straightened up and walked over to the window. On it’s own, the footage wasn’t much. As far as investigators would be able to tell, the shots Blake had fired at Foster could be dismissed as accidental. In the military, it was known as friendly fire, or blue-on-blue. In a shoot-out like this, in a confined area, it wouldn’t be that surprising. He sensed, though, that there was more to come. If he went the wrong way with her now, she wouldn’t believe him when it mattered. He had to draw her out and see what else she knew.

  Without turning around he spoke again.

  “Why am I here? Are you coming after me?”

  “I’m giving you a chance I wouldn’t give other people. In case it isn’t obvious, I like you a lot. I have a huge respect for what you did and I have a lot personally invested in this story. You are the best thing that’s happened in news for a very long time, and I don’t want that to turn to shit the way everything always does. There is no limit where you could go with this, and I want to be part of that. I want a deal. Exclusives, now and forever. You’re worth more to me a hero than you are as a criminal.

  “I see you becoming a movie star, then maybe entering politics like your friend Ashcroft. You could be president yourself one day, you realize that? You have everything people want from a leader; a hero with a military background, good on camera, attractive, not to mention charisma out the wahoo. It’s all there for you. But here’s the thing. I know you know who this man is, you’re connected somehow. The only chance you have is to get out in front of this and control the story. If this comes out the wrong way, no one will to listen. Trust me, I know what I’m talking about.”

  He sighed. To hear her talk about him as a force for good depressed him. She didn’t know him at all. He turned to face her.

  “I know you mean well, but there’s no getting out in front of this. It’s not like announcing I smoked pot in college, or that I banged some intern on my office desk.”

  “You’ve got to give me more than that. What kind of journalist would I be if I backed away from a story? What’s your endgame here? Do you even have one? For whatever reason, Cabot hates you and wants to see you in prison. The man’s an idiot, but he’s motivated. If he’s digging in the right spot, even by accident, he might find something incriminating.”

  Thorne nodded. “That’s a chance I’m going to have to take.”

  He walked past her into the living area and picked up his jacket. Time to go. Jocelyn watched him silently from the bedroom. He’d given her nothing. She’d continue to investigate his link with Blake, but without knowing his name that would be difficult. Thorne put his jacket on then pulled down on the lapels so that it sat correctly across his broad shoulders.

  “Was the fire at your apartment really an accident?”

  Her question was like a knife in his heart.

  “I wish you hadn’t asked me that, Coop.”

  “It was payback for what happened at the mall, wasn’t it?”

  Anger flared within him. Forgetting his shoulder wound, he reached his right arm straight out and pointed at her.

  “Say that shit on-air and they’ll kill you.”

  Her eyes dropped to the floor. He thought he’d frightened her, but to his surprise she walked over, slid her hands in under his jacket, and held him tight. It felt good. Words could never compare with the power of touch. He allowed himself to accept it and after only a few seconds, felt no awkwardness. He listened to her breathing into his chest. Thorne supposed he'd just admitted knowing the people involved and that he was in some way to blame for what
happened to Kate. He'd grown strangely fond of Jocelyn in their short time together and he didn't want anything bad to happen to her. He drew back, out of their embrace. He’d been away too long already, he needed to get back to the mansion.

  “There’s only one solution to this, surely you can see that?”

  She studied his face closely.

  “You plan to kill all of them.”

  He nodded and she shrank away from him.

  “Did…did you kill the one in hospital?”

  “No, although I did go up there that day. I told myself I was only going to speak to him, but I doubt that’s what would’ve happened. Anyway, when I got there the place was surrounded by police cruisers and fire trucks. It was already done.” Thorne stopped. He was losing her. “These are very bad people, Coop. Do not judge me on this. I would never have killed that cop, surely you know that? You can see the difference.”

  “How many are left?”

  “Two.”

  “You think you can do that? Murder two people in cold blood? I don’t think that’s who you are. Before, you were defending the Ashcrofts. Your motives were pure. You put their safety above your own. You are a warrior, Thorne, not a serial killer.”

  He nodded. “You might be right about that.”

  “That’s why you can trust me,” she said. “I know you.”

  He wasn’t sure he followed that logic at all. To his mind, this made her more dangerous. If he failed to keep her sweet, she could pull the pin on him at any time. She was also forgetting something important. He might be no murderer, but he could defend himself when it came to it. He’d never had any problems doing that, not since he was a kid.