Did something happen to her?
I did a quick sweep of the room. By choosing our hotels at random, I would have forced any pursuers we had to spread themselves thinly. They would be so busy trying to cover their own asses that they would have no time to do any real damage. I hoped.
There were no bugs. No cameras. At least none that I could find. If there were any, they'd been placed by an expert with far more experience than me.
Since Callaghan could easily afford the best of the best this was not much comfort.
I cracked open the blinds with a finger, studying the streets below. I'd been keeping an eye on the cars as our taxi sped us to our destination — none of the vehicles below looked familiar.
I let the blinds close with a snap and tried to take that as a good sign. We fucking needed one.
“I'll be right back,” Christina said. I whipped my head up to look at her. “I'm going to the convenience store across the street to get some things.”
I considered telling her to stay put. Checked the idea a second later. I'd dragged her on a plane. Ordered her around. Brought her here. If I put her on too short a leash, she'd dig in her heels and pull.
I didn't need that shit.
“Whatever you want,” I said. “You need money?”
There was a brief pause that told me she had been expecting more of a fight. “No.”
“Don't be long,” I told her.
Her eyes narrowed. She opened her mouth, then seemed to reconsider. “I won't.”
Then there was a click and she was gone.
I sat back in the armchair and leaned down to open the mini bar. “Fuck me with a rusty chainsaw,” I muttered, unscrewing the top of a beer with a fistful of my t-shirt and taking a long, hard swig.
It was bitter. Just like me.
I set it down on the end table, leaving a wet ring. There was a memo pad with the hotel's crest, and a pen. I stared at them blankly, then turned and studied my phone, turning it over in my hands.
The silences persisted.
This isn't good.
Had something happened to her? I had no way of knowing. Not unless she got back to me.
Or if she shows up on the evening news.
I eyed the television warily.
I'd seen myself on prime time television before, reviled, painted as a garden-variety psychotic with the morals of a serial killer. A wanted man. The truth was more complicated than that, but newscasts are easier to swallow if they're bite-sized and simple.
The door opened and Christina entered the room with some rustling plastic bags.
“Are you hungry? I got food.”
“No.” I held up my beer. “I'm fine.”
Her face fell. “That's not a meal.”
“What are you? My wife?”
I regretted the words the instant they were out of my mouth. Not just because of the cruelty behind them, but because they touched upon things I could not have. Things that I couldn't even let myself think about. Ever.
Christina took a step back from me, flushing. “You haven't eaten a goddamn thing since we got on that plane. You're running on fumes.”
“Danger doesn't sleep,” I pointed out. “You think the bad guys out there care if we're exhausted? You really think they'll go, oh, you're fucking tired? Well, excuse us then, we'll just stick our thumbs up our asses while you nap it out for nine hours?”
“Please,” she said. “I hate seeing you this way. You need to rest. To eat. If you let yourself get sick because you're too proud to take care of the essentials then you're doing half the work for them.”
She let out a shaky, ragged breath.
“Please.”
I sighed. Fuck. She was right.
“You're right.”
It was like a string had been cut, letting all the tension out of her shoulders. “I — what?”
“You're right. I'll take you out. We'll eat out.”
She held up the bags. “But I got food — ”
“I know.” I closed my eyes. “I know. Tomorrow. We'll go out tomorrow. Wherever you want. I promise.” The leather creaked as I got up. “Thank you for getting the food, but I'm really not hungry now.”
I could feel her eyes on me.
What are you? My wife?
Why had I said that?
Why had I fucking said that?
My head throbbed, the bitter taste of the ale lingering in the back of my throat like day-old vomit.
“You eat your dinner,” I said, quickly shucking off the rumpled clothes I'd been wearing on the airplane. I felt too hot. Too constricted. “I'm going to get some shut-eye.”
Her eyes were like hooks pulling at my skin.
What are you doing to me, sweetheart?
What are you doing?
“Don't worry about waking me.”
Her eyes swung up to mine. I patted the mattress beside me, giving her what I hoped was a reassuring look. From her expression, that seemed doubtful. I wasn't exactly the picture of comfort.
“Maybe I should sleep in the recliner,” she said.
I studied her without speaking, saw her eyes drop to my chest, then to the floor. She bit her lip.
“Stop that.”
She tensed. “I'm not doing anything.”
“You're a manipulative little shrew.”
I expected denial, but she surprised me as she so often did. “If I am,” she said, “I learned it from you.” She sat down in the chair I'd just vacated and began to eat. “Did you hear anything from Suraya?”
“No.”
She swallowed. “That's bad.”
“It sure as hell isn't good.” I eyed her with impatience. “Do you plan on coming to bed?”
With a smooth, practiced motion, she reached up to the lightswitch on her side of the room and snapped off the light. “Go to sleep, Michael.”
I must have been more exhausted than I thought. I slept solidly until 2 A.M., when the pressure of my bladder became too much to bear. I was no longer alone. Her soft, warm body was beside me. She smelled like spices, curry. Wonderful.
After draining the main vein, I went back to bed. But not before I looked at my phone — no new messages — and felt a bolt of real fear. We were in danger, both of us. And this time, I suspected that I might not be able to spare her from the worst of it.
Christina
We had lunch in a hole-in-the-wall style Chinese restaurant. The wontons were good but the bok choy hung limply in pools of grease.
I was exhausted. Michael spent all night on his phone or his laptop or both. Sleep had once again become a thing of the past, and it was beginning to take its toll on me.
A bell jangled at the front door signaling the arrival of another customer. He spoke to the waiter in a hushed voice, and they all seemed to look our way.
“What?” Michael said, turning his head.
The waiter seated the man at our table.
“Who the fuck are you?” Michael said.
“James Holland,” the man sneered, causing Michael to stiffen. “How very Bondian.”
Michael set down his chopsticks and cracked his knuckles. “What do you want?” he said, over the sound of popping joints. “Why are you here?”
“There's no need to make a scene,” the man said placidly, taking the chopsticks and using them to eat sweet and sour pork from my plate. “We can talk outside.”
He'll shoot us in the head outside. I looked at him caustically, trying to take everything in. Maybe he'd shoot us in the head here, too. Both his hands were out and empty but that didn't mean that he didn't have a gun secreted away somewhere.
His appearance was nondescript — light, long-sleeved button-down shirt (to hide tattoos?), jeans, slightly scuffed shoes. There was nothing to set him apart from the hundreds of thousands of men in L.A. And that, more than anything, made him suspicious.
“I have a car waiting,” the man continued. “The two of you will get inside without a fuss and then everything will go…very pleasantly.�
��
“I don't think you understand how this works.” Michael picked up one of the forks the restaurateurs had provided us with, weighing it in his hands. The polished metal gleamed under the lights as he pointed the prongs at the man. “If you have something to say to us, say it now.”
“I strongly urge you to reconsider.”
“Or what?”
“Someone could get hurt.”
Michael stiffened and the man nodded towards me. “It would be a shame if something happened to your friend, don't you think?” The man's hand moved, the vaguest gesture of a threat. “Accidents can be so easily avoided when one follows the rules.”
“I've never been much of a follower.”
“That is a pity, Mr. Holland,” said the man.
“Yes.” Michael bared his teeth. “For you.”
The man's arm twitched, but Michael moved like a serpent. Blood spattered the table cloth and my arm as Michael drove the fork into the palm of the man's hand, pinning him to the tabletop.
For a moment, I sat frozen, rooted in horror at the sight of so much blood gushing from the man's lacerated palm. “Oh, God,” I choked. Maybe Los Angeles is out of the reach of even the angels it's named for.
The restaurant owners were cursing and screaming in Chinese as we rushed for the door. The man tried to stop us, but Michael pushed him aside as if he weighed nothing. True to the man's threat, there was a car outside and he must have gotten word that something went wrong because the driver's door was open and he was standing outside with a gun.
“Down,” Michael said, just as he began to fire. He yanked me behind a pile of filthy trashcans in the alley next to the restaurant. The bags held meat scraps and had been sitting under the hot Los Angeles sun all day. Something wet and rancid soaked into my jeans and I bit my lip to keep from moaning in disgust. The heat only exacerbated the odor.
Michael glanced around, then grabbed me by the arm. We ran down the alley with the man with the gun in hot pursuit. The alley came to a dead end with a barbed wire fence. On the other side was a busy street. Michael cursed and said, “Get on my shoulders. We're going to jump it.”
“But the man — ”
“He won't risk any stray bullets. Cops are coming.”
It was true. I realized I could hear sirens in the distance, growing louder.
I got on Michael's shoulders and took off my coat, wrapping it around my hands as I gripped the wire-topped fence to swing myself over. The barbed wire shredded my coat and also my hands, and I hit the sidewalk hard enough that my bones vibrated unpleasantly with the force of impact.
Michael didn't have a coat. He tugged off his shirt, looping the material around his hands. The fabric was thinner than my jacket had been, and his hands were more lacerated than mine. He hit the ground with the litheness of a cat, although I could see sweat shining on his back. He was breathing fast from the run, but then, so was I.
“Come on,” he said, “let's get out of here.”
We walked fast, staying on busy streets. Ordinarily, I think a girl in dirt-stained pants walking hand in hand with a shirtless man with the build of an action hero might have turned some heads. And we did get some second looks, but nowhere near as many as we would have gotten in the small suburb where I grew up.
“It never fucking ends,” Michael said.
“How did they find us?” I gasped.
He shook his head. “I don't know. They shouldn't have been able to. Not so soon.”
A light clicked in my head. “The transmitter. Suraya's transmitter. They must have been able to intercept one of the signals she'd sent out. They could have rewired it, and done a reverse-trace. They could have found us with your phone.”
“It was supposed to be untraceable.”
“Nothing is untraceable,” I pointed out. “Even the government gets hacked. If they'd found the device, they could have rewired it. Not easily, but if you have the right men and women, and the leisure of time, anything is possible.”
He pulled out his phone. And then, before I could stop him, threw it out into the street. Someone honked. I didn't hear the smash as it was crushed under the tires of a silver Lexus going way too fast.
“That won't help,” I said belatedly.
“Made me feel better,” he said, deadpan.
I remembered how he'd destroyed the phone in that remote mountain cabin, back when he'd been holding me hostage. He'd had a temper, even then.
“Do you have a spare?”
“I'll buy one.”
Two teenage girls, both Asian, glanced at Michael and giggled. Sweat glistened on his skin, catching on the ridges of his abs. He looked — I swallowed — memorable. One looked me up and down, and gave me an odd little smile. It could have been approval, or jealousy. I couldn't tell, but it made me uneasy.
How many other people had looked at us like that, branding us into their memory? Michael was not an easy man to forget and I — well, I did not exactly fade into the woodwork, either. Especially not when I was smeared with dirt and smelled like a dumpster.
“I think we ought to buy new clothes, first.”
Michael seemed to realize for the first time that he wasn't wearing a shirt, and barked a laugh that made several people look over. He glanced around, and his face sobered as he realized how much attention he was drawing. I almost wished he hadn't; his laugh had been wonderfully awkward — and was all the more endearing because of it. Oh, Michael.
Michael picked an innocuous skate shop and bought a new t-shirt for himself, and some loose sweatpants for me, and two baseball caps for the both of us. They let us wear the clothes out of the store, even removing the price tags for us.
Yes, there was something to be said about the anonymity of the city — and the benefits of paying in cash. I counted out my change quickly, before shoving it into my front pocket. Cash ran out so quickly, though, and we couldn't afford to leave a paper trail. Not now.
“So Adrian officially knows where we are.”
“He's toying with us,” Michael said. He was wearing an obnoxious t-shirt, the quote stretched tight over a chest that was no less impressive for being clothed. “This is how that bastard works. He fucking gets off on this cat-and-mouse shit. It's what he lives for.”
In the brief pause that followed, I fell into step with him. The sun was still bright and merciless, but I was walking in his shadow. “If that's the case, then why are we running?” I demanded, tilting my head to look up at him. “Why give him what he wants?”
“Because it's the only choice we have. I've known him a long time, sweetheart. A lot longer than you. You can't imagine what he's capable of. I've seen him do things — ” Michael broke off, glancing at The Ivy's facade. “He has no limits, because he has no conscience. There is no bargaining with him.”
That wasn't exactly true. He'd tried to bargain with me. If you could call it that.
“Then what are we supposed to do?”
A bellhop moved forward, offering assistance. Michael shrugged him off.
“Check out early. Go to another hotel.”
I shook my head and pulled open the door to our hotel room. “And then?”
I froze.
The door — it wasn't locked.
Michael swore, roughly, under his breath. “Wait here,” he said, before slipping into the room.
That was when I noticed the smell; it overpowered the carpet cleaner, seeping into the back of my nose, where it lingered like rot in the bottom of a dark, dank cellar.
“Oh God,” I choked. “What is that?” I sniffed discreetly at my clothing, wondering if it was the meat from the dumpster of the Chinese restaurant.
But no, this was so much stronger, and while it was similar, there was something about it…something that made my stomach turn.
Michael sniffed the air, and his face drained off all emotion. “I know this smell. It's decomposing flesh.”
“What?” I squawked, regretting it as my mouth filled with the noxious fumes. My voice
had been too loud, the door to the hall still open.
Michael glanced at it. “Close the door.”
I didn't want to do that; it would cut off the ventilation, shutting us in with the smell. Somehow, I made myself do it anyway, and I breathed through my mouth, trying to forget what I had learned back in biology class — that when you smell something, you're actually ingesting a little of it, too.
Don't you dare puke.
His calmness was unsettling, suggesting that he had dealt with situations like this before. I didn't dare ask what occasion he had to acquaint himself with such a smell. Given his history, some questions were best left unanswered. There were some sides to him that I never wanted to know.
Michael pulled out his knife and slipped into the bathroom, and light flooded the dark room in a little yellow square. I followed on tiptoe, scared to make a sound. As if by being silent enough, I could unmake everything happening. Be careful.
There was a body in the bath tub. It was so mutilated it took me a moment to recognize it as something that had been human. The stink of rot was stronger now, strips of flesh sloughing off to reveal the blackened mess beneath. There was a pool of fluid beneath the corpse that wasn't blood, and this time I did gag. I barely made it to the toilet.
Michael sucked in a breath, then let out the air through his teeth in a serpentine hiss. “Fuck,” he said, “who — ”
He took a step closer. If he wasn't careful, he'd smell like death for the rest of the day. I wasn't sure I would ever get this stink, this rot, out of my brain. It seemed like the type of smell that would creep up on you when you least expected it, leaving you doubled over by the memory.
Smell is the only sense that isn't mediated by the thalamus. It goes right through the memory pathways in the brain, which is why a simple scent, like baking bread or the smell of the earth after a day of rain, can bring such evocative memories — and why the smell of baby powder makes me want to run screaming from the room.
“Fucking Callaghan,” Michael said. He was standing over the body now, his eyes narrowed. I flinched, because it was as if he'd been reading my mind, but when I realized what he was really talking about I moved closer to stand reluctantly beside him.
Oh, it was terrible. The woman — it had been a woman, I saw that now, which made it worse, more personal — had been mutilated. Sunken holes where her eyes should have been, two raw, red circles where she used to have breasts. One of them was stuffed messily into her mouth. Her jaw had been dislocated.
Cease and Desist (The IMA Book 4) Page 16