by Rachel Caine
Smoke hung heavy in the air, acrid, burning Jazz’s eyes as she blinked and coughed. Well, it’s certainly one of the fastest firefights I’ve ever been in.
She focused on the glittering cascade of castoff on the ground. There must have been fifty shells, maybe more. Some were still rolling. The whole garage reverberated with the sounds of war.
“Shit!” Lucia was suddenly beside her, pale and furious, black eyes wide. She was staring at the ramp, and the gun was still in her hand. Tiny little thing. Ladylike.
“You need a bigger gun,” Jazz said, and laughed. It didn’t sound right. Lucia looked down at her, and stopped breathing. “What?”
Lucia went down on one knee, never mind the expensive pantsuit, and put the gun on the ground to flip Jazz over on her back. “Hey!” Jazz protested, but everything felt odd, didn’t it? Strange and liquid and…
Lucia pressed both hands to her side, pushing so hard Jazz couldn’t breathe.
“You’re going to be all right,” Lucia said. “Jazz. You’re going to be all right.”
Oh, shit, Jazz thought numbly, and saw the blood flooding over Lucia’s hands.
She fumbled in her coat pocket, got her cell phone, and dialed 911 to report her own shooting.
Lucia was right, although Jazz didn’t think it had been an actual diagnosis. Sometimes optimism worked out. The bullet had passed through her side and caught a few minor blood vessels, missed her liver and kidneys, and come out the other side. The doctor—way too young to be a surgeon, in Jazz’s painkiller-altered opinion—was cheerful about it. “Seen lots worse,” he told her, patting her hand. “I have three guys downstairs who had an argument in a bar who wish they were you, I promise.”
“How long am I going to be stuck here?” she asked. She hated hospitals. Hated the stiff, starchy sheets, the smell of disinfectant, the clean doctors. Hated the idea that she was lying in a bed that had probably seen more dead people than that kid in The Sixth Sense. Emergency rooms always smelled like blood and vomit, no matter how carefully they were scrubbed. “If I’m all stitched up…” She eased a leg over the side of the bed. And almost passed out. Ow. He grabbed it and moved it back.
“You’re here overnight,” he said. “And there are some police who want to talk to you. They’re already talking to your friend.”
Jazz had figured that. She could safely guess that what Lucia was saying was the truth, just not the whole truth. The two of them had been to the lawyers’ offices to consult about a partnership agreement. They’d been jumped by persons unknown. Case closed. Jazz figured she could leverage being shot to keep her statement short and sweet. If she had any luck at all, maybe she wouldn’t know the cops, and this would be…
Behind the doctor, the big wood door eased open, and a slightly built guy in a cheap suit looked in. He had rough-cut spiked hair and cold dark blue eyes and a rubbery mouth that looked as if it might smile or smirk or scream at a moment’s notice.
He looked at her as if she might be a corpse ready for autopsy, nothing but clinical interest.
Apparently, luck was not on her side. God, she really didn’t feel well enough for this.
“Stewart,” she said with a noticeable lack of warmth. He blinked at her. “You going to skulk or come in?”
“Skulk,” he said. “How you doin’, Jazz?” He had a Bronx accent, usually stressed for effect, and she felt a familiar weary surge of dislike. Poser. She’d known him for nearly five years, and she’d never liked him one minute of that time.
“Shot,” she replied shortly.
“Yeah, so I hear. Doc, can I…?” He gestured from himself to Jazz. The doctor shrugged, stuck his hands in his lab-coat pockets and sauntered out. Stewart—Kenneth Stewart, not that she’d ever called him by his first name or ever intended to—pulled up a chrome-and-plastic chair next to her bed and sat down. He poked the IV bag with a fingertip and didn’t look at her as he said, “So. Long time no see.”
“Yeah.” She didn’t want small talk. Her head hurt, and her side was starting to really ache. She suspected the painkillers were more Motrin than morphine. “You already talked to my friend?” She didn’t give him the name. If Lucia wanted to go undercover, she wasn’t about to blow it for her.
“Friend?” he repeated blankly. Poked the IV bag again, then rang a fingernail off the screen of the heart monitor. “Oh, yeah. Luz something. Hermann’s talking to her. Pretty girl. I think I got the short straw.”
“Me, too.” Not that Stewart’s partner Hermann was any great prize, either. “I want another detective. I’m not talking to you.”
“Fuck you, Callender.” It wasn’t a casual, off-the-cuff insult between friends. This was a gut-deep venting of feelings, and she felt the menace behind it.
“Same to you, Stewart.” A hot pulse of fury along her spine. Her hand curled into a tight fist, and relaxed. Much as she wanted to kick his punk ass, there was no way she could do it dressed in a backless gown with a through-and-through bullet hole in her side.
“So, did anything happen to you I need to know about?” Stewart asked in a bored tone.
“This is how you conduct an investigation?”
“It is when I know the witness is a lying bitch who wouldn’t know the truth if it bit her in the—where were you shot exactly?”
“See my previous fuck you comment. Fine, if we’re done, get the hell out. I don’t want to look at your ugly face anymore.”
Without looking at her, he reached over and put his hand on her side. Over the bandages. “Does it hurt?”
She didn’t move. Those twilight-blue eyes—on anybody else they might have been pretty—focused on her face, and his mouth stretched into a vindictive grin. He patted her bullet wound. Not gently. She bit the inside of her mouth to keep from wincing.
“Want to hear my theory?” Stewart wasn’t moving his hand. “I think some of McCarthy’s drug-dealing asshole buddies decided to send him a message by putting a few caps in his ex-partner. It was a classic drive-by hit, you know. Big dark pimp car, full auto spray. You’re just lucky, is all. But then, you get lucky a lot, don’t you? I’ve never seen anybody as lucky as you.”
He pressed harder. Jazz knew she was going pale, but she didn’t look away from his stare.
“Maybe if you’d tell the truth,” Stewart said, “you’d quit being a target. This isn’t the first trouble you’ve gotten into, since you turned in your shield. Is it?”
One attempted firebombing of her apartment, which had failed when the glass bottle full of gasoline hadn’t shattered on impact, and she’d been able to scramble over and drag the burning rag out of the mouth of it. She could still smell the bitter tang of the gas, the smoky, oily cloth. No prints on the bottle, according to police forensics. She still wished she’d taken it to Manny. She was pretty sure he’d have come up with something to trace it back to Stewart.
She’d also been jumped coming out of a bar downtown. Two guys with knives. If she hadn’t been drunk, she’d have had them, but even so, she’d managed to put them on the run. No good description, though. She’d always wondered if the small one had been Stewart himself.
“I hear that you were just minding your own business and this car rolled up on you. You fired six shots back, your friend fired four, and the car took off. That correct?”
“Don’t know. Count the shells.”
“Oh, we will.” He nodded. “And Jazz? If I catch you in a lie, you’re mine.”
He squeezed this time. Hard. Fingers digging into her stitched-up side.
She couldn’t keep from gasping, but she didn’t just lie there for it, which was what he must have expected. She came straight up in bed and stiff-armed the heel of her hand into his nose.
Pop.
Stewart’s head snapped back, and he fell off his chair, rolled to his knees and staggered back to his feet. He caught himself with a hand on an IV stand, which rolled, and for a happy second she thought he might go down again. No such luck. He felt his nose with his other ha
nd, sniffed, and glared at her.
No blood. Too bad. She’d been hoping for a broken nose, at least.
“Sorry,” she said. “Reflex.”
He didn’t say anything, just stared at her for a burning second, then turned and walked out of the room. The door slammed hard behind him.
Jazz let out a long breath and closed her eyes. Her forehead felt damp, and now that the crisis was over, she was shaking. And sick to her stomach. She pushed the button for on-demand morphine.
Just what she didn’t need. A bullet in her side, no partnership agreement, and a closer acquaintance with Kenneth Stewart.
Lucia came back twenty minutes later, looking not exactly grim but definitely tense. She took the chair that Stewart had dragged close, gave Jazz a long look, and said, “I don’t like this.”
“Hospitals? Hey, I’m not a fan of them, either. And I think I have more reason to bitch about it.”
“No, I don’t like that they knew where to find us.” She wasn’t talking about the hospitals, or even Stewart. “I’ve been watching for tails. So have you.”
“So we missed one. Or they’ve got some high-tech tracking bug on us.” She remembered Borden, walking into Sol’s Bar without any reason to be there. That still bothered her.
“No, I’ve swept us and the car for bugs,” Lucia said, and combed sleek silky hair back from her face in a distracted motion. “Nothing. There’s no way they’ve retasked a satellite just to follow us around, so if they’re not doing line-of-sight surveillance, then they shouldn’t know where we are. And if they were doing line-of-sight, we should have spotted them.”
“Unless they’re good.”
“More than just good. I’m good.” Lucia definitely looked stressed, as if she felt responsible for Jazz lying here, leaking fluids. “Those cops—I take it not friends of yours?—aren’t investigating, they’re filling out paperwork.”
“It’s Stewart,” Jazz said, and stared up at the ceiling. It was blank, white, and noninspirational. “He helped put McCarthy away. He’s been gunning for me ever since. No, actually, I take that back. He’s never liked me. He’s just actively started hating me since the whole thing with Ben.”
Lucia paused in the act of tying her hair back with a businesslike black elastic band. No scrunchies or decorations for her. She looked different with her hair back. Harder. Jazz approved. “About McCarthy…” Lucia began.
“No.”
“You don’t think we should discuss that?”
“No, we’re not talking about Ben, or his case, or whether or not he’s guilty, or what he has to do with this because I guarantee you, he’s got nothing to do with it. He’s in prison, Lucia. Let’s leave him out of this.”
Lucia didn’t answer that, just finished wrapping her hair in the elastic with a snap. “I called your sister, told her you’d been in an accident.”
“Oh, no.” Jazz sighed. “What did Molly say?”
Lucia avoided her eyes. “She was concerned. She said she’d tell your dad.”
“I bet. I’ll expect a cheap floral arrangement delivered to the wrong address next week.”
“She’s not that bad.”
“Bullshit.”
“Manny wanted to visit, but—”
“He’s got a thing about hospitals. Manny has a thing about everything.”
“He did some good work for us, looking into the Cross Society.”
“And?”
Lucia shrugged. “On paper, it’s legit. He came up with a few flags—not so much red lights as yellow. Max Simms, for one. He may be in prison, but it’s likely he’s still got some influence.” She fell silent. The moment stretched, long and awkward.
Jazz though longingly of on-demand morphine.
“You should go,” Jazz said. “I’m sorry to have kept you hanging around. You’ve got a life to get back to.”
“Planes leave all the time.” Lucia shrugged. “I’m not going if it means you end up lying unprotected in a hospital bed and the cops aren’t going to put out any effort to find out who shot you. And shot at me, by the way. I take that kind of thing personally.”
The look in her eyes was usually accompanied by shooting back, Jazz figured. Or, at the very least, grievous bodily harm.
“So you’re sticking around,” Jazz said. A tight knot in the area of her chest eased a little.
“For a while. Until you get back on your feet, anyway. Also, I’m going to wake up some sources and see what they can find out for me. I don’t like the way any of this is playing out.”
She started to get up. Jazz stopped her with an outstretched hand. “Wait. Listen, you need to be careful, all right? You’re not from around here. If you disappear…”
Lucia gave her an uncomplicated smile. “If I disappear, chica, your cop friends are going to have a lot more trouble than they ever bargained for, because the kind of people who’ll come looking for me won’t take a shrug for an answer. And they don’t ask nicely.” She stood up, gazing down at her. “Also…I’m not that easy to make vanish.”
“I get that.” Jazz found herself smiling back. “Hey. Thank you.”
“That’s what partners are for,” Lucia said, and reached down to retrieve her sleek black oversize purse. She pulled out a large flat envelope and placed it gently on Jazz’s stomach. There was a pen clipped to it. “I signed,” she said. “It’s up to you whether or not you want to.”
Jazz stared at the envelope, frowning. “Why’d you change your mind?”
“Because I don’t think it matters anymore whether I sign it or not. We’re in this together. Whoever these guys are, they’re not going to back off because we go our separate ways, and I don’t know about you, but I’d like to have somebody I trust at my back.” Lucia’s dark eyes were level and clear. “And if somebody’s going to shoot at me, I’d rather get paid for it.”
Jazz laughed. It hurt. She caught her breath, slid the paperwork out and thumbed through it to the last page.
Lucia’s signature was flowing and bold over her typed name. Jazz set pen to paper, hesitated a second, and then scratched out her own messy, jerky autograph.
The check was attached to the partnership agreement with a clip. Jazz took it off, turned it over and endorsed it, then handed it all back to Lucia. “Maybe you’d better handle the bank stuff,” she said.
“Yeah,” Lucia agreed quietly. “I will.”
In the silence after she was gone, Jazz went over all the ways that she’d just totally screwed up her life. There were dozens. Hundreds. Disaster stretched out in the distance, as certain as the Titanic and the iceberg.
What if it works? That was the scariest thought of all, strangely. What if it works out, and I don’t need to be a cop anymore? Because that was secretly what she’d always thought would happen. McCarthy would be vindicated. They’re return in triumph, conquering heroes. Life would pick up where it left off.
What if nothing’s the same?
That filled her with a kind of fear that had nothing to do with bullet wounds and drive-by shooters and people attacking her in bathrooms. Those things she could deal with. External threats.
But this…this was different. She’d just done something that would change her future.
She fell asleep still thinking about that, and reaching no conclusions as to whether or not it was a good thing.
Chapter 5
W hen she woke up, it was morning, and she had a visitor. For a cold second she thought it was Stewart sitting in the shadows watching her, and how creepy would that have been, to have that vulture staring at her in her sleep, but no, this was a tall shadow, kind of lanky.
“Hey, you’re awake,” said a low, warm voice, and the shadow scooted forward into the soft dawn light.
Lawyer Borden. He looked tired, and a damn sight more informal than at the office; she got a quick impression of blue jeans and a black V-necked knit shirt before she focused on his smile. Luminous, that smile. Like morning.
“You’re not allowed to g
et shot,” he continued. “It’s against the rules, you know.”
“Rules?” she asked, and blinked. She was feeling slow and had a ridiculously strong desire to run into the bathroom, take a shower and brush her teeth before continuing this conversation. Not that she was going to be running anywhere right now. Her side felt as if she’d been sucker-punched by a giant. Bullet holes were no laughing matter, even if no organs got perforated.
“Yeah, rules,” he said. He stood up and loomed over her, and for some reason, that felt good. Safe. She let her gaze slide down him, and had an instant appreciation for the way the black knit shirt hugged him. She had a sense-memory of soft skin, hard abdominal muscles fluttering under her touch as she’d checked him for broken ribs. Okay, that’s enough. Back off, Callender. Must be the drugs.
She dragged her focus back up to his face. “Why didn’t you tell us about Max Simms?”
Borden blinked. “Simms?”
“Founder of your little society. Serial killer.”
“Laskins told me to.” He paused. “I just—I knew you’d walk away. And I didn’t want you to walk away.”
Her breath caught, but it wasn’t pain this time. “Who says I don’t walk away now?”
“I don’t think you can. Walk.” He held up a hand to stop her response. “You might, but at least you’ve had time to look into things, think about it. If you go now—there’s nothing I can do.”
“We signed the agreement,” she said, apropos of exactly zero. But Borden just nodded, unsurprised. “Lucia gave you the papers?”
“Yeah, they should be filed tomorrow.”
“Shouldn’t you be doing that, instead of flying off into the buckle of the Bible Belt to loom over me?” Not that she minded the looming. But she wasn’t about to let him know it.
As if she’d reprimanded him, he sank back into the chair, but he reached out and captured her IV-punctured hand in his. “I did everything I needed to do and sent it on to Pansy. Special courier. It’ll be in her hands in about—” he checked his watch “—two hours, give or take. By the way, I’ve been asked to say that Mr. Laskins sends his regards, and your hospital bills are being taken care of.”