by Rachel Caine
“We’ve lost him,” Manny finally said. “He’s a ghost.”
“No, he’s here, he’s got to be here,” Lucia said. “Back up.”
Manny hit the brakes, shifted gears, and glided the giant SUV backward into shade. A narrow alley stretched on the left. At the end of it was a dilapidated tin shed, some forgotten warehouse that had clearly missed a demolition notice or two.
Jazz saw it first. “Paint.” She pointed to the corner of the alley. There was a fresh-looking scrape on the brick there, and a glitter of electric blue.
“I can’t fit the Hummer down there,” Manny said.
Jazz released her seat belt, popped the door and jumped down, drawing her gun before her feet hit the ground. “Stay here,” she said. Lucia slid out after her.
“Wait!” Manny looked scared out of his mind again, the cool, calm stunt driver entirely gone. “Look in the back. Get whatever you need.”
Lucia sent a questioning look at Jazz, who shrugged and led the way around to the rear of the vehicle. She swung open the gate, and…
Wow.
“Manny,” she said slowly, “someday, we’ve really got to talk about how that therapy thing is going.”
She reached over the racked shotgun, the assault rifle, and the assorted handguns to grab two flak vests, standard black. She handed one to Lucia, who looked it over, eyebrows climbing higher.
“FBI standard issue,” she said. “Only these don’t have insignia. I’m guessing Manny’s friends with the supplier.”
They got into the body armor quickly, sealing the Velcro as they went. Behind them, Jazz heard the snap of locks engaging on the SUV. Manny probably had some kind of stunning electrical field on the damn thing, too. She didn’t put much past him, at this point.
Lucia had taken the shotgun. Jazz stuck with her pistol. Together, they moved slowly down the alley, covering each other, keeping focused on the closed double doors on the tin shack at the end of the alley.
“Careful,” Lucia murmured.
“Screw careful. This guy knows he’s been popped, and he’ll kill her as soon as he has the chance.” Jazz moved faster, reached the end of the alley and paused, looking both ways around the corner.
It was deserted. If the cops were on the way, they’d be late. She remembered what Simms and the Society had said about Actors and Leads. Most of the cops clearly didn’t qualify. They wouldn’t affect events, whatever transpired.
It was up to the two of them, and the guy in the shed.
And just maybe, the little girl.
She ran across the open space, light-footed, and put her back against the tin wall, careful not to make any noise. Lucia followed and mimed walking around back. Jazz nodded.
She counted to ten, took a deep breath and used one foot to kick the sliding door on her right. It slid open easily, rattling like a tin can full of marbles; if he hadn’t heard that, he had to be deaf or dead. She waited for any gunfire, heard nothing, and ducked low and around the corner, darted immediately into shadow.
The inside of the place was dark, cool and apparently deserted. No sign of Lucia, either. Jazz held her breath, listening, moving silently across the open concrete floor and constantly checking the shadows for anything that might give her a warning.
She was starting to think that they’d been wrong when she caught a glint of chrome in the far shadows, and heard the ticking of a cooling engine.
And then, very faintly, the muffled whisper of a child’s sob.
She froze, listening, trying to locate the source, but the place was an echo chamber, a terrifying trap of a place, and she just knew that she was looking the wrong way, that he was behind her, creeping up…
She spun, unable to resist the feeling, and brought the gun up. Saw a shape move and nearly fired before she saw a gleam of highlights on long, dark hair and knew she’d nearly shot Lucia.
Lucia put a finger to her lips, half in shadow, and motioned Jazz to the right. She disappeared into the left-hand shadows.
Jazz had only gone three steps when she heard a man’s curse, a child’s full-throated scream and the patter of feet, all coming from off to the left on the other side of the parked car. Something lunged out of the dark, small and ferocious; Jazz reached out, got a handful of sweater and swung the kid around into her arms. She picked her up and backed up fast. She felt the girl’s breath hot against her face, tears dripping onto her skin, got a mouthful of curly brown hair and jerked her head out of the way to try to see what was going on.
Just in time to see a muzzle flash. Not a shotgun, a handgun.
She heard a body hit the floor and metal clatter.
Lucia. Lucia was down.
Get the kid out. Get the kid out first.
Jazz ran backward, gasping for breath, keeping her gun trained on the spot where the muzzle flash had briefly lit up the shadows, nearly tripped over a pipe, and managed to somehow get her balance back without falling full-length. At the door, she set the girl down and crouched next to her.
“What’s your name, honey?” she asked. She spared one second to glance into her face, into honey-colored eyes and a heart-shaped face, tanned golden by summer.
“Marla,” the girl said. “He—he tried to hurt me.”
“I know, Marla, but he’s not going to do it again. Now, you see that big black truck at the end of the alley? My friend Manny’s in it. When I let go, you run as fast as you can straight for Manny and get into the truck, all right? I’ll be behind you in a minute.”
Marla nodded, tears streaming down her cheeks. Jazz reached up and wiped some away, managed a fast smile, and pushed her gently out the door.
“Run,” she said.
The kid pelted for the SUV.
Jazz was just turning back to the darkness when she heard a man’s voice whisper, “You can’t do this. Nobody can stop me. They told me, nobody can stop me.”
And then her chest exploded in pain.
She fell back, unable to breathe, waves of red-hot agony sliding over her, trying to pull her down into the dark, and she couldn’t breathe, couldn’t speak, couldn’t do anything.
He came out of the dark, a dull shadow, gray, colorless. Too small a man to be making so much of a difference in the world.
She couldn’t breathe.
He raised the gun, sighted on her, then shook his head and whipped it up, taking aim at Marla, who was running down the alley.
I told her to run. I told her to do that. She remembered Simms saying, Everything you do matters.
She couldn’t fucking breathe. Her whole body felt numbed, destroyed by the impact in her chest.
Kevlar. He shot you in the vest. You’re fine, you’re just fine.
Something was very wrong.
Her heart.
She couldn’t feel her heartbeat.
Everything was going dark.
She saw a blinding flash of blue-white light, like a spotlight. An intense glare bright enough to make her want to close her eyes, but she had no control over that anymore, no control over anything, and there was so much silence inside of her.
Simms. Simms was staring at her, and he was saying, Everything you do matters, Jasmine.
She couldn’t breathe.
The light got brighter. Brighter. Overwhelming and burning, like lightning, like lightning racing along her nerves.
Listen.
Everything you do…
A single hard jerk in her chest. A thud.
Everything you do, Jasmine…
Her heart beat a second time. A third. She raised the gun. She didn’t even know how she managed it, because she couldn’t feel her arm, couldn’t feel anything but disorientation and pain and fear, but then her gun was up and she was looking into the face of a killer as his eyes widened.
Everything you do matters.
I know that, she told Simms.
And she fired.
Chapter 10
“O w,” Jazz whispered. “Don’t make me laugh, okay? It hurts to laugh.”
Bord
en, his arm swathed in approximately a mummy’s worth of bandages, smiled at her and shook his head. “No, I’m completely serious. You and Mooch are all moved in. Manny said he’d give you the alarm code the next time he drops by, because he can’t trust it to anybody else.”
“Not you?”
“I’m guessing especially not me.”
Jazz, propped up on two pillows, squinted at the morning sunlight and pulled her hospital gown away from her neck to take a look at the spectacular bruising. It looked better than it had yesterday, the blacks turning a sickly dark blue-green, the reds fading. But still.
Colorful.
“Manny for a roommate,” she said sadly. “My life is really not turning out the way I’d hoped, Counselor. I think I might have been better off drinking my future away at Sol’s.”
He didn’t smile at that one. He leaned forward and captured her hand in his, rubbed a thumb over the scraped and bruised knuckles, and said, “If you’d done that, at least three more people would be dead right now. Including me and Marla.” Marla had dropped by earlier with her mother, a very pregnant, very scared lady who’d still been prone to dissolve into tears over the near tragedy.
The cops who’d been by had been, if not tearfully grateful, at least cautiously pleased by the whole thing, and more than willing to accept the explanation she’d come up with as to how she, Manny and Lucia had come to intercept the killer. She figured there would be more questions, but nobody seemed too unhappy with her just now.
Not even Laskins, who’d called to gruffly inform her that the Society would be picking up the medical bills. Again.
“Hey,” Borden said, and leaned forward. “Rest. You look wiped out.” He pressed a warm kiss to her forehead, moved to her lips and brushed them very lightly with his own, and she felt a surge of lightning heat that had nothing to do with the painkillers pumping through her system. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”
“Hey. Counselor.”
He paused in the act of retrieving his jacket from the chair. He looked nearly back to normal. The cut on his forehead had been sutured, and his color was good. There’d be plastic surgery coming, for the skinned part of his arm, but he seemed to be dealing pretty well with that.
Better than she was, with the memory of his scream on the phone.
“You never told me how they got you.”
“I went outside,” he said. “I was going to get us coffee.”
“There’s coffee in the break room. You know that.”
He shrugged slightly. With his good arm. “I wanted to get you Starbucks. Kind of a joke.”
The smile melted her like butter. She watched him go, smiling, and shut her eyes to savor the warmth of the sunlight slanting over her face.
Naturally, the room didn’t stay quiet long. She heard the door swing open again, and cracked an eyelid. Lucia was moving slowly, but she was moving on her own, and dressed in street clothes instead of backless gowns. A distinct improvement, though it was, Jazz thought, the very first time she’d ever seen Lucia without full battle-dress makeup.
She looked young and very, very vulnerable. There was a livid purple bruise on her cheek where she’d hit the concrete in the shed after taking a bullet in her flak vest.
“Hey,” she said, and leaned against the wall as if she was either too cool or too exhausted to make it across the room to the visitor’s chair Borden had last occupied. “How are you feeling?”
“Like I took a double-barreled shotgun blast to the chest,” Jazz said. “By the way, remind me to send thank you notes to the Kevlar people.”
“You’re taking it easy, right? Cardiac bruising’s nothing to take lightly.”
“I’m fine,” Jazz assured her. “No exertion for me for at least two weeks before they let me out of here. And then I’m on light duty for a month, they say.”
Lucia nodded and tucked her glossy straight hair back behind an ear, then walked over and seated herself. “They said you could have died. Commotio cordis. Sudden noninvasive impact to the chest, disrupting the heart rhythm.”
“Yeah, well, I didn’t die,” Jazz said. She didn’t really want to talk about it, or about that moment when she’d felt her heart stop, or the light and the visions.
“You heard about the envelope they found at his house, right? The one postmarked yesterday morning?”
The killer—his name had been, prosaically, Dave Jennings—had never opened it. The police had, in their forensic analysis. It was a red envelope. It had said, on clean white paper that carried no logo or watermark of any kind, three words. Use head shots.
“Good thing he doesn’t check his mail,” Jazz said somberly.
“I think all this happened at the last minute,” Lucia said. “There was a voice mail on your cell phone telling you to check FedEx as soon as you got in, but it came while you were in the air.”
“Yeah, and I was a little busy panicking over the plane hurtling toward the ground,” Jazz said. “I’m guessing the people sending us the messages? Not Actors. At least, not Leads.”
“You think?” Lucia smiled slightly. “Presuming we buy any of this crap.”
“Presuming.”
Not that either of them would admit to it.
Jazz shook her head and let herself sink down on the pillows again. The world seemed soft-edged. Gentle. Quiet. Trees rustled outside of the hospital window and blended with the sound of turning pages as Lucia settled in with a book.
“Sleep,” she heard Lucia whisper, as her eyes drifted shut. “I’ll be here.”
Two weeks later, on the day she was scheduled to leave the hospital, Jazz had a new visitor. Lucia was gone to get the car; Borden had disappeared for a meeting with some attorney or other to go over paperwork. Even Manny was MIA, although he’d dropped by to furtively provide her with the password to get into the loft. After some persuasion, she’d also gotten him to give her the new address rather than send it to the dead drop.
She supposed that meant he was improving. That, and the love bite on his neck that without a doubt must have come from the lips of Pansy Taylor. Who didn’t hate him.
She was getting her clothes together, heartily ready to get the hell out of the hospital, when the door opened behind her.
It was Kenneth Stewart.
The KCPD detective leaned against the closed door for a couple of seconds, staring at her, and crossed his arms. “You don’t look so bad,” he said. “Heard you took one in the chest.”
She tapped her breastbone lightly. “Flak vest.”
“Heard you damn near shot the face off a baby-raper.”
She didn’t answer that one. She wasn’t happy with that memory, even knowing who the man had been, what he’d done. Even knowing that firing that shot had allowed a beautiful little girl to return safe to her mother.
There was no way to avoid seeing it, over and over again, in her nightmares.
“Bet you think you’re the golden girl, don’t you?” Stewart asked, raising his eyebrows. He looked pale and doughy and unpleasantly shiny, as if he’d been jogging. His eyes were open wide, his pupils too small. She’d always wondered if he took drugs. He never quite looked right in the head to her.
“Is there a point you’re going to get to, or are you just here to kiss my ass?” she asked. She wished she had a gun, because Stewart made her feel the lack, but of course that wasn’t possible in the hospital. Though she strongly suspected Lucia was always packing.
Stewart pushed away from the door and came toward her. “What’s the crap I’m hearing about photos that show McCarthy across town at the time of the murders?”
“It’s not crap,” she said, and folded up a black hoodie before stuffing it in her canvas bag. “They’ve passed every test. My partner also found one of the guys in the pictures. He’s willing to testify to their authenticity.”
“It’s crap,” Stewart repeated. He was closer now. She could smell a sharp, metallic scent coming off him, like gun oil and sweat. “I know exactly where he was. Pump
ing rounds into the backs of the heads of three people.”
“Pictures say different.”
He was way too close. In her space, trying to get her to react, and boy, she wanted to. She wanted to slam her fist into his face, but she knew better, knew he was waiting for it and besides, she’d promised the doctor she’d be good.
“The pictures are fakes,” he said softly. “I’m going to prove it. McCarthy’s not getting off on this one. Not ever.”
She gave him a slow, liquid smile. “Evidence is going before the court next Tuesday,” she said. “It’s exculpatory. The conviction’s going to be vacated.”
Stewart’s eyes flared heat, then narrowed. “Maybe he doesn’t make it to Tuesday.”
She almost hit him. Almost reached for his throat.
She said nothing.
Behind him, the door opened, and Jazz looked over his shoulder to see Lucia standing there, tense and ready. “Jazz?” she asked.
“I’m fine,” she said. “Detective Stewart was just dropping off—what was it you were dropping off?”
“Congratulations,” he snapped, and turned and walked away, brushing past Lucia as if she wasn’t even there.
Jazz let out a slow breath, tilted her head and got a similar wide-eyed look from her partner.
“Well?” Lucia asked.
“I think we’d better go warn Ben,” Jazz said. “Just in case.”
Jazz hadn’t given it much thought, really, about how much time Lucia had spent in and around Ellsworth during the investigation. How many times she must have dropped in to talk to McCarthy.
But when they sat down at the table in the visitor’s area—no claustrophobic booths here, it was just open plain tables with preformed benches, much more accessible—and McCarthy walked in from the prisoner’s door, the first one of them he smiled at was Lucia, and that look…
That was a look Jazz had never seen in his eyes before.
She glanced sideways at Lucia, who was staring back, and caught the same glint.
Well, she thought blankly. Huh. That’s…interesting. She couldn’t decide if it was interesting-bad or interesting-good. McCarthy had always been her territory, more or less…not in a romantic sort of way, but in a proprietary sense, anyway. He’d been her partner. Her friend.