She gasped, and Ash’s heart leapt.
“Cleo?” he whispered.
She drew in a ragged breath and blinked her eyes open. Her gaze focused on Ash. “The spider,” she gasped, looking scared.
“Don’t try to move.”
“I saw it,” she insisted. “I was wrong, Ash.”
“Shh. It’s okay.”
“The curse,” she said. “It’s real.”
Goosebumps ran up Ash’s arms.
“It’s real,” she repeated.
“I know.”
She glanced around and winced in pain. “Oh, God, Ash, did you trash my Jeep, too?”
“I know, I am so sorry. I’ll make it up to you.” He cradled her face in his hands, smiling like a madman through sudden tears. “You’re going to be okay. I love you.”
She drew in a breath to answer, but he never heard it. Rough hands seized him from behind. Dragged him away from Cleo.
He tried to fight them off, but there were too many, and they were too strong. They forced him face-down onto the glass-salted road.
Patent-leather shoes and crisply ironed slacks walked up and stopped. A bald black man lifted up his creases and squatted down in front of him. “I’m Special Agent Graves, FBI,” he said, looking immensely satisfied. “And you are under arrest.”
Chapter Thirty-one
Alive
Ash tried to get comfortable in the hard plastic chair, but it wasn’t designed for that. The bleak white walls closed in around him, leaving barely enough space for the table and the empty chair opposite him. There were no windows, unless you counted the one-way mirror built into the door.
Across from him, FBI Special Agent Graves stood with perfect posture. He wore a spotless blue suit, immaculately tailored. The dark brown skin of his shaved head shone in the harsh light.
“All right,” Graves said, scanning his folder full of notes. “We’re going to go over this one last time.”
“No.”
Graves’s gaze shot up over the top of the file folder and drilled into Ash. “Excuse me?”
“Let me talk to Cleo first. I need to know she’s okay.”
“That’s out of the question.”
“Guess we’ll just have to agree to disagree.” Ash tried to stretch his aching arms, but the handcuffs anchoring him to the table effectively killed that idea.
Graves slapped the files down on the table and leaned across them. “You can ask for her as many times as you want. The answer still won’t change.”
Ash feigned indifference. “Then at least you can send somebody to check on my dog.”
“Your dog?”
Ash hunched up his shoulders in a guilty shrug. “I left him with a bowl of water. But sooner or later, the poor guy’s going to get hungry.”
Graves gave him a steady glare. “That reminds me. I need to get a statement from the motorcycle rider we brought in by ambulance. Oh, wait, I can’t. He’s unconscious in the ICU.”
Ash stared down at the table, suddenly feeling like the scum of the earth. “Is he going to be okay?”
Graves sighed. “Unfortunately, yes. Believe me, it wouldn’t break my heart to get you for vehicular homicide, on top of everything else.”
“Technically, that would be Andres who hit him. I just sort of, you know, swerved around him.”
Graves carefully closed his folder and settled into the other chair, looking Ash over. “Just so we’re clear, I am going to make sure you go away for a very long time.”
“Look, if you’re trying to put on some kind of good cop, bad cop kind of vibe, you might want to bring Cleo in here to balance things out. Works better that way.”
“You’re not seeing Cleo ever again.”
“Well, I don’t know if I was officially ‘seeing’ her to begin with. We’re sort of hanging out, getting reacquainted. We’re still a ways from dinner and a movie.”
Graves raised one eyebrow. “You seem to think this is some kind of joke.”
“No, of course not. This is all very serious. You, sir, are very serious.” Ash leaned closer and sniffed. “Is that Chanel you’re wearing?”
Graves sat as still as a rock, completely unruffled. “I still don’t know what Cleo ever saw in you. You’re a liar, a thief, and a killer.”
“Hey, I—” Ash thought about it. “I have never killed anybody.”
Graves looked at him the way a cat might look at a mouse trapped under its paw. “All that matters to me is keeping Cleo safe from you. That means making sure you’re put away someplace safe, and not coming back to her.”
Ash tried to shake that one off, but it hit home, and he could tell Graves knew it.
“As far as dinner and a movie,” Graves added, “leave that up to me. You can trust that when this is all over, I’ll make sure we drink a toast to your memory.” He paused, and the barest ghost of a smirk passed across his face.
It took Ash a few moments to piece together what Graves was saying. But even then, he wasn’t sure he’d heard right. “Wait. Are you honestly trying to tell me that you and Cleo . . .”
Graves cocked his head as if he was waiting for Ash to finish. “You don’t want to come right out and say it, do you? You don’t want to believe it. Deep down inside, you think Cleo’s been carrying around some kind of torch for you all these years. Well, I hate to burst that particular bubble. But the truth is, she never mentioned your name until you came back to town, not even once.”
Ash swallowed down the bitter taste that rose up inside him and forced himself to laugh instead. “Oh, that’s a good one. Really, it is.”
“I’m glad.” Graves gathered up his folder and stood. “Because I’m the one walking out of here a free man. Something you’ll never do again. I’ll let you meditate on that for a while.”
He left, and suddenly Ash had nothing to occupy him except his thoughts.
Cleo, bloodied, slumped over the steering wheel.
The exact moment when he thought he’d lost her forever.
The glass on the road. The sirens. He replayed the crash over and over in his mind, like a film segment endlessly looping, and he couldn’t turn it off. No matter how hard he tried.
*
Cleo sat with the hospital bed fully raised and the tray swiveled across her lap. She carefully built a tower of Jell-O, one square at a time, with a plastic spork. The ruby-red cubes reached a sort of critical mass, then slid and toppled across her plate. “Crash,” she muttered to herself.
Just then, Snyder whisked into the room, her face creased with worry. Cleo’s supervisor was fiftyish and well put together, with sharply cropped blonde hair that would have looked white if she’d had any trace of color in her face. She looked Cleo up and down, her critical expression never changing. “You doing okay?”
“Just peachy. Thinking from now on maybe I’ll take the bus.”
Snyder bent and gave her an awkward hug, her arms bony but surprisingly strong. When she straightened up, she shifted from one foot to the other, like she didn’t know what to do with herself. “Just talked to the doctor. Concussion, short and sweet. You’re fine.”
“Yeah, that’s how I would characterize it.” It took an effort not to touch the goose egg on her head. “How’s Ash?”
“In custody.”
“I really need to talk to him.”
Snyder froze for a moment, which for her meant a fierce internal debate. “I’ll arrange it,” she said finally. “You need anything else?”
“Yeah. My badge would be nice.”
Snyder folded her arms. “Can’t play the sympathy card on me. Won’t work. I need you home and resting ASAP.”
“Of course not. Wouldn’t want me to actually apprehend Andres or anything.”
“Graves tells me he found the body of one of Andres’s men, Ramiro. Took one in the head, nine-millimeter subsonic. Is that what you’re talking about?”
“Among other things.”
Snyder rocked back on one heel. “Can we prove it was A
ndres who fired the shot, and not Ash? We know Ash had possession of the gun.”
Cleo couldn’t hide her surprise. “Tell me you’re kidding me. Even if you believe Ash really pulled the trigger—which he didn’t—tell me you’re not going to just ignore Andres.”
“No. We’ll find him. Red-light camera caught his license plate.”
“Which he might swap out for a stolen one.”
“Even if he does. The man’s driving a Trans Am with a giant gold bird on the hood,” Snyder said. “Doesn’t exactly fly under the radar.”
“That only matters if he stays in town. Which he won’t.”
“You know something I don’t, Garnett?”
That was an opening too good to resist, but somehow Cleo managed. “From the outside, Andres seems unstable and sloppy, but that’s a dangerous assumption. He has a plan. Look, nobody knows him like I do.”
“Might need a medical degree for that. The guy sounds clinical to me.”
“He makes a twisted kind of sense. Trust me, I’ve studied him. I can’t read his mind, but I can tell you what he’s going to do next.”
“Which is?”
“That depends on what I learn from Ash.”
Snyder froze again, unblinking, while she thought it over. “All right. You’re back in. If there’s any merit behind this, I want to see it fast.”
A flush of triumph thrilled through Cleo’s body.
“As soon as they release you, call me,” Snyder said. “I’ll have someone drive you.”
“I can drive myself, thanks.”
“And what about your car?”
“Oh. That.”
“I’ll get you a ride.” Snyder’s phone rang. She pulled it out and glanced at it, but didn’t answer. “Tell them to hurry up and process you out. I want you to charm some answers out of Ash before the Secret Service gets here.”
*
Prez leaned back in his office chair, which he’d had DMT drag over directly in front of the striped Torino, now parked safely back inside the warehouse. He sat and silently contemplated the wreckage.
Both front fenders were bashed in. The grille was shattered and half gone. The side looked like someone had attacked it with a chainsaw, exposing jagged lengths of gouged steel.
The Torino was completely and utterly ruined.
He raised his Schlitz can and found that it was empty. Moments later, DMT lumbered up and replaced it with a cold one, heavy by comparison.
“I killed it,” Prez said, catching DMT as he turned to leave.
He came back. “What’s that, Boss?”
“I could not let this car get away, get sold to some museum. Not when I had a chance to own it.” Prez held the beer, but didn’t drink it. “Piece of something from back in the day. Back when things were the way they’s suppose to be. And cause I held on so tight, now it’s gone.”
DMT folded his hands in front of him, listening.
Prez glanced up at him, then back at the ruined car. “You get to be my age, D, whole world has changed around you. Comes a time in a man’s life, he starts to forget what it was he was gonna do. What his life was suppose to be about.”
DMT nodded.
Prez turned in his chair slightly, so he could look up at DMT full in the face. “Don’t you ever lose sight of who you are. Hear me? Circumstances force you to make a change in your life, well all right then, you change. But don’t ever look back. You live your life the way it is, not the way you think it suppose to be.”
He searched DMT’s face for some kind of understanding, some indication that he’d heard. Mostly what he sensed was DMT’s loyalty and obedience, not wanting to let him down. But then DMT looked away into the distance, squinting just a little bit, and nodded.
Prez settled back in his chair, satisfied with that. In the lot outside, a truck honked. Prez could hear it loud enough that he knew a door was open somewhere. “D, check the doors, make sure they locked.”
“Yes, Boss.”
From somewhere down the hall, claws clicked on the concrete floor. A brown floppy-eared dog trotted in, some kind of mutt, maybe a Boxer mix.
Prez glanced up at DMT, who looked just as surprised as he was. Neither of them said anything. They watched the dog clatter through the room, stopping every so often to investigate a trash can or a chair, then moving on.
“Ash had a dog with him,” DMT said. “Looked like that.”
The dog came over and sniffed Prez with its cold nose.
He pulled away. “Whatever you lookin’ for, pooch, it ain’t here.”
The dog sat down on its haunches and panted. It seemed to feel right at home.
“Go on.” Prez waved his hand at it. “Get.” But the dog just sunk down, begging with its dark eyes.
Prez sighed and waved one finger in the air to DMT. “Suppose we ought to feed him somethin’.”
DMT headed for the kitchen. “Come on, pooch.”
The dog settled down at Prez’s ankles and stayed there. After a moment, Prez leaned down, wincing at the ache in his back, and petted him.
Chapter Thirty-two
Open Sesame
Ash had his head down on the cool white table top, staring at the scratches in its surface. His cheek was going numb. This airless room felt like the entirety of his existence, and anything that he had known before it was just a half-remembered dream. If only there was a way he could turn back the clock, fix all of the mistakes he’d made.
But there wasn’t. And he had to live with that.
By the time the door opened again, its mirror sending a square of reflected light streaking across the room, Ash felt too broken to even look up.
“Ash?” Cleo said softly.
His head snapped up so fast that a cramp shot through the tendons in his neck. She closed the door behind her, bringing a crisp gust of air conditioning into the room, scented with her perfume. She had an ugly, swollen bruise at the edge of her hairline, but despite that she smiled at him.
“Cleo.” He got to his feet, hunched a little bit by the handcuffs, and suddenly he was embarrassed to be there. “Are you okay?”
“I’m okay.” She came over to the table, and after an awkward moment, she put her arms around him and squeezed.
“I am so sorry,” he whispered in her ear.
“I know,” she whispered back.
“And not just about your car. Again. I promise, I will never ruin another car of yours. Really.”
She smiled, just a little, and sat down across from him. “So you talked to Graves?”
“Mr. Personality?” Ash put on a sour face as he sat. “Can’t wait to friend him on Facebook.”
“Ash, give him some credit. Graves is one of the good guys.”
“Really?” Ash pretended to reconsider his opinion. “Then what are the bad guys like?”
“Seriously, Ash?” Her smile froze around the edges. “None of this is anyone’s fault but yours. Who got you into this mess?”
He grimaced. “My dad. Originally.”
“No. You did. You’re the one who went after the spider. You got yourself tangled up in this. Out of greed.”
“Unlike you, who just pfft—” He turned his hands palm-up. “Just walked away from Andres without a care in the world. You’re a much better person than me, really.”
Her gaze turned darker. “That’s different. He killed my father.”
“Hmm. Lot of that going around.” Ash knew it wasn’t fair to say it like that, but he was mad enough to put it out there anyway.
She looked past him, at the far wall, shaking her head side to side. “I came down here to talk to you. Because I’m worried about you.”
“Then let’s stop pointing fingers and start figuring out how we’re going to find my brother.”
Cleo sat without moving for a long moment. When she spoke again, her voice was cool and detached. “Right now, we have to look at the reality of the situation.”
“Reality?” Ash said, louder than he meant to. He let out a qui
ck laugh. “The reality is my brother is a hostage, Andres is on the loose, and I’m stuck in here wasting time. What about you? What’s your plan to take on Andres?”
Her gaze was steady on his. “Andres is out of my hands now.”
“Oh, please.” He looked deep into her eyes, and what he saw there beneath the professional façade was the old familiar stubbornness he’d always known, tainted by something much darker. Much more dangerous. He leaned forward across the table, closer to her. “You can fool the FBI, Cleo. You can fool your partner Graves. But I know you. Like it or not, I know you better than anyone else on the planet.” He looked her over. “I remember in freshman year when Jessie Earwood cheated on you with what’s-her-name. The cheerleader.”
Cleo blinked. “Lacey Schiffman.”
Ash shrugged, trying to break the tension in the air. “Between you and me, I don’t know what he was thinking.”
“That was high school, Ash. What does Jessie Earwood have to do with anything?”
“Because he never did tell anybody where he got those two black eyes.” Ash looked her straight in the eye. “You’re trying to deny how much you want to bring down Andres. Trying to convince yourself the FBI will catch him. But that’s a mistake. Because after all this time, the law’s not going to back you up. And deep down, you’ve got to know that.”
“He’ll pay for his crimes.”
Ash shook his head. “You need to be the one tracking him down. But I’m not going to let you go after him alone, without me. That’s suicide.”
In a small voice, she said, “You’re stuck in here, Ash. What am I supposed to do?”
For the first time, Ash glimpsed a crack in her armor, and it sent a pain shooting straight through him. He reached out to take her hands, but the handcuffs prevented it. “We’re going to get him back. You and me, together. We make a good team, you know it and so do I.”
“No, Ash, no—”
“I’m your backup. I’m the only one you can trust.”
“I can never trust you again!” The words came out of her like a bolt of lightning, leaving him dumbfounded. “You left, Ash. You walked away. Just vanished. I never knew what happened, where you were, if you were okay. I didn’t even know you were alive until one day you just show up out of nowhere.”
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