I pounded on it with my fist. “Catherine!” I shouted as I squinted through the sheer curtain behind the pane of glass in the door. I didn’t see anything, or hear anything, but she didn’t come to the door this time. Tom was right behind me, about to say something. But I was already grabbing a waterlogged daisy in a small, dense pot, which I chucked through the glass in the door so that I could reach in to unlock the deadbolt.
“Okay, stop. Roxane.” Tom grabbed my arm and stepped in front of me, his own weapon drawn now too.
The alarm on the wall was silent. It should have been pealing. If it was still armed, that is. Catherine had armed it when I left. Tom started down the hallway, calling, “Police, is anyone here?”
I wanted to throw up. My thoughts were blaring static. I didn’t even know what I was afraid had happened.
But something had, because Catherine would’ve opened the door otherwise.
We went through the lower level, and found nothing. Heard nothing. A pizza box was on the kitchen counter, one slice missing. Two plates beside it, untouched. Two napkins. Catherine’s phone. An empty cardboard sleeve once containing twelve cans of grapefruit fizzy water was balanced on the lid of the kitchen trash can. A single can of the fizzy water was on the counter.
I looked at the can, the plates, the pizza. She would’ve had to disarm the security system to open the door for the delivery guy. Then she set it down, got out plates, a single beverage. Because there was only one can left in the box? I opened the fridge, saw an open space where the box had been, and then I bolted to the garage.
Catherine was on her side on the oil-stained concrete, an ugly gash at her temple. My stomach turned inside out as I dropped to my knees beside her. “Tom,” I yelled, “I found her. Garage. She needs help.”
She moaned softly as I felt along her jaw for a pulse, which was faint but steady. She turned her face toward my hand. A lump was forming at the edge of her eyebrow, purple and angry, bisected by a wide swath of broken skin that ran past her hairline, and there was blood dripping from her nose. “I’m so sorry,” I whispered. “I’m so, so sorry. Just hang in there.” I pulled my phone out but my fingers had gone numb, uncooperative. It skittered out of my hands and across the concrete. Tom dashed into the garage and collected the phone off the floor.
“Is she breathing?” he said, his voice low and serious, his face bathed in the glow of my phone as he dialed.
“Yes. Her pulse is like sixty and faint. Her car is gone, too.”
He hit the garage-door button on the wall, and the door slowly ratcheted up. He paced outside, speaking urgently into the phone. I stayed where I was, my hand clutching Catherine’s, willing her to clutch back.
* * *
At some point, Ed Sanko decided he liked me, or at least didn’t hate my guts anymore. He sat next to me in the waiting area of Grant’s ER and listened to my story again, not calling me Veronica Mars even once. Not that it really mattered, since I’d obviously let him call me anything he wanted if it meant the universe would take back what was happening.
As if the universe had ever worked that way.
Catherine had been wheeled away for a CAT scan, and for the last thirty minutes, detectives and uniforms had been traipsing in and out of the waiting area as a plan was formulated. There was a warrant in the works for Leila’s apartment, for the security-camera data for Catherine’s house; there was an APB on the Cadillac, and on Catherine’s stolen car as well; there were patrols at the airport. Sanko and I were making a list of places Leila might be. She was hurt—which maybe narrowed her options—though it was hard to say how bad the gunshot wound really was; her weak-voiced listlessness could’ve easily been an act.
Sanko was saying, “So can you think of anywhere else she might go, any place she might have mentioned? Family?”
“Vincent Pomp,” I said, “she is or was involved with him. And I don’t know about family. She speaks with an accent, not sure where she’s from.”
“What about Nate Harlow?”
“She ratted him out,” I said, “I can’t imagine she’s with him.”
Tom, who was pacing back and forth by the elevator, said, “Humor us.”
“Nate lived with her, with Leila. His mother is the only other associate I know about, and he’s obviously not with her.”
“Marin’s associates, then.”
I shook my head.
“The Victorian Village house, maybe,” I said. “It’s empty, except for the antiques. But she knows that I know about the house. Unless she’d try to sell something for cash.”
“Sell something, at this hour?”
Tom, still pacing, said, “There’s a twenty-four-hour pawn shop on the west side.”
Sanko shook his head, but I held up a hand. “Pawn shop,” I said, nodding. “She might go to Arthur’s house. For money. Well, Bitcoin slips, whatever you call them. I found a bunch of them in Marin’s stuff, and Leila asked me about it, offhand.” Like she was fishing for information, now that I thought about it. I sighed.
“What does that have to do with pawn shops?” Tom said, while Sanko muttered something about Bitcoin.
“Bitcoin ATMs. They’re—it’s—I can explain Bitcoin to you another time, but it’s like digital cash, untraceable. Marin had a pile of Bitcoin serial numbers in her nightstand, I guess her and Nate’s share of the loot, and anyone can use those to get cash out of a Bitcoin ATM, which you can find in places like pawn shops.” I was holding Catherine’s black leather purse, and I squeezed it to my chest. “So that’s my best guess, Arthur’s place.”
Tom and Sanko looked at each other. “Worth a try, I guess,” Tom said.
I stood up. “Can I come?”
Both detectives said, in unison, “No.”
“But you don’t know where it is.”
“We can find it,” Tom said, “and you should stay here for when she wakes up.”
They left, Tom promising to call me from Sanko’s phone if anything developed. I knew he was right—Catherine would be scared when she woke up, and I didn’t want her to be alone—but I also wanted to watch someone slap handcuffs onto Nate and Leila more than I’d wanted anything in recent memory. I took up Tom’s beat by the elevator and paced the yellowing linoleum. Other things I wanted, in no particular order:
A drink
A hug
A time machine
There were none of the above on offer in the Grant ER.
I sat back down and called my brother.
“She’s asleep,” Andrew said. “I got her to take a Valium.”
“Will you stay with her?”
After a pause, he said, “She’s asleep.”
“Andrew.”
“Matt’s still here.”
“If you leave, Matt will sit on the edge of her bed so that he can be the first thing she sees when she wakes up, and he’ll immediately remind her of what a fuckup I am. Please, stay with her. He’ll get sick of you and leave eventually.”
“You’re not a fuckup.”
“I appreciate the sentiment, but let’s be clear: This is my fault.”
Andrew sighed. “That guy, Vega, he said things would be okay. And, I mean, when do cops ever say that? So he was probably lying, I guess. But there are things she can do—there are options.”
“But Andrew, she was terrified. Because of me, because of this, whatever this mess is. My fault. Don’t argue with me about it.”
“Fine. It’s your fault.”
“Thank you.”
“Does that make you feel better?”
“Not at all.”
We listened to each other breathe for a few seconds. “I’m gonna go,” I said finally. “Please stay with her.”
“Okay.”
“Promise me.”
“Okay, I promise.”
I sat back down, was too restless for sitting, and got up again. Finally, the elevator doors opened and an orderly wheeled Catherine out. She was awake, her green eyes wide and scared.
“You’re here,” she whispered.
I followed her gurney down the short hallway to the curtained-off corner that constituted her room for the moment. The orderly gave me a dirty look but said, “Dr. Sethy will be in shortly.”
I put Catherine’s bag on the foot of her bed and leaned down to kiss her cheek. “I am so sorry this happened,” I said. “The one time I think maybe you aren’t going to hurt me, and then I turn around and hurt you.”
She grabbed my hand. “You were right about her. Not honest.”
“Not that right,” I said, “because I left you with her like it was nothing.” I nodded at her head. “What happened?”
“I went out to the garage to get a drink,” she said, “and then there was this man there, behind me.”
I stared at her. “A man.”
She nodded, wincing.
“Young, old, what kind of man?”
“Young. Blond. He hit me, with a gun. He took my car.”
“What—how? How did he find your house?” I said, though this was not a question Catherine could answer. “Where was Leila in all of this?”
“She told him not to touch me.”
“When?”
“After. After he hit me. Then they got in the car.”
“She went with him willingly.”
Another nod.
Jesus Christ, was any of Leila’s story true? I bit my lip so hard I tasted blood.
Catherine said, “My phone.”
“It’s right here,” I said, “do you want it? I can call someone for you—”
“No, no, she was using it. She was using my phone. She asked if she could use it to check her voice mail, since she didn’t have hers. I didn’t think … she only had it for a minute, maybe two. She didn’t even speak to anyone. Just listened.” She squeezed her eyes closed. “That was stupid, wasn’t it.”
“No, it wasn’t. You didn’t know. Can I look at the phone?”
She nodded again, her eyes still closed.
I took out the phone and clumsily clicked through its old-school menu. If she hadn’t talked to anyone, she’d probably texted Nate. But the inbox and the outbox were both completely empty, like she’d cleared them after she used the phone. I said, “Did she actually call her voice mail?”
“She called something. I heard a recording, and she pressed a bunch of buttons.”
I clicked to the recent-calls list, which she had not cleared. At 8:40, when I was sitting in my father’s office having a breakdown, she had called a single number, toll-free.
I used my own phone to call it.
“Hi,” a recorded voice told me, “thanks for calling Greyhound.”
* * *
I went out to the lobby and called Sanko’s number. “They’re togeth-er,” I said breathlessly once Tom was on the line, “Leila and Nate—”
“I know, one of Ungless’s neighbors saw them. They were here. Not long ago. The Worthington police were just getting here when we arrived, said they got a call about the alarm going off about fifteen minutes back. She bled all over the house. I checked the nightstand. Just a, um, some weed,” Tom said, apparently unwilling to say the word vibrator to me. “No paper slips. Do you know how much money we’re talking?”
“No idea. Marin stole thousands from Arthur. But who knows how much of that is left. Listen, I think they’re over at the bus station,” I said, and explained about Catherine’s phone. I glanced down the hallway, where she was being admitted for observation overnight since she had a concussion.
Visiting hours were long over.
“Stay where you are, Roxane,” Tom said, reading my mind. He muffled the phone against something while he spoke to someone else, and then a car door slammed. “Okay, I’m going to get someone from Patrol over there right away, and we’ll be there soon. Please, stay where you are.”
“But—”
“No. I’ll call you back.”
He hung up in my ear. I got up and started pacing again. The Greyhound station was a five-minute walk, maybe less. But what was I going to do—stage a citizen’s arrest? I kept pacing, telling myself I was doing a good job of not being reckless for a change. Back and forth across the linoleum. The doors slid open and people came in and went out and I stayed where I was.
Until, that is, I heard a voice behind me. A familiar one.
I spun around in time to see Vincent Pomp and his oldest son, Simon, hustling out of the elevator and toward the street doors, talking low. They must have been visiting Derek, I realized. Before too long, we could fill the entire hospital with victims of this mess. I pressed myself against a wall, but neither of them noticed me there. I went after them as far as the door vestibule but they were already getting into the backseat of the black Crown Vic. I watched its taillights head toward Town Street—toward the bus station. I called Sanko’s phone again, but no one answered this time.
“I just saw Vincent Pomp and his other son leaving the hospital, with some urgency,” I said into his voice mail. “They drove south on Sixth.” I bit my lip, trying to decide what else I should say. But there was nothing else, so I hung up as I ran down the steps outside the hospital. The night air was cool and wet, the pavement shiny in pools of light.
Stay where you are.
Pomp could have been heading home, to his office, to a bar. He wasn’t necessarily going to the bus station, was he? I folded my arms over my chest and tried to talk myself into staying.
Or maybe he was going to the bus station after all, and not because he needed a ride. He wanted to kill Nate Harlow for what Nate did to Tessa. Would a bunch of bystanders stop that kind of revenge?
I closed my eyes, the image of her body brightening into focus in my mind.
Meanwhile, I was going to do—what—stay where I was?
TWENTY-SIX
I approached the bus station via Town Street, scanning the entrance for signs of any disturbance. Nothing—not yet—but also, there weren’t any cops in sight, just a cluster of taxi drivers outside the doors, smoking and chattering in rapid-fire Somali. Pomp’s Crown Vic was not among the cars parked at the curb. I doubled back to Fourth to check out the meter spots there, but I still didn’t see it, or Catherine’s car. I pushed into the station through the side doors and lingered briefly by the package service window—currently closed—while I looked over the people seated on benches in the long space of the terminal. It was about half full, quiet except for a television tuned to the Weather Channel.
No one looked familiar.
I walked the length of the terminal, past the ticketing desk, the vending machines, the bank of pay phones, the empty express-bus waiting area, and the café, where the smell of day-old hot dogs and coffee mingled with old cigarette smoke and diesel. A uniformed employee looked up at me, then back to her phone. I turned around and went back the opposite way, noticing a NO FIREARMS sign posted on one wall.
But I still didn’t see anyone—not Nate, not Leila, and not Vincent Pomp.
I ducked into the women’s restroom and found only an old lady washing out a plastic sandwich container at the sink. I took off my scarf and tied it around my waist to fully camouflage the gun holstered on my hip. As I turned to leave, I caught sight of my own reflection in the dirty, chipped mirror next to the door and hoped that the grim setting was contributing to how rough I looked.
The scarf wasn’t helping, and neither was the bruise at my throat.
I weaved my way through the ropes at the ticket counter and waited to be called up, which took nearly a minute despite the fact that no one was in line in front of me. The ticket agent looked like he hated everyone equally, and I was no exception. “Hi there,” I said, “I don’t need a ticket, I’m just trying to find my friends—we were supposed to meet up. Maybe you’ve seen them? Good-looking blond guy, cheekbones that could cut glass—”
“Haven’t you people heard of cell phones?” he said, cutting me off.
I looked at him.
“Your friend, he was here, asking if I’d seen yo
u. Dark-haired lady, no luggage, that’s you, right?”
I supposed that did sound like me. I nodded with mock relief. “Where did he go? And how long ago was that?”
“Ten, fifteen minutes,” he said. “And I don’t know where he went. To keep looking, probably.”
“What did you tell him? About if you’d seen me.”
“Lady, you just walked in here.”
“I know, I know.” He was losing his patience with me, so I hurried to finish. “But did he buy a ticket?”
“No. Now, if you don’t mind,” he added, pointing at the small line that had formed between the ropes.
“Right. Thank you.”
I went in the direction of the Fourth Street doors, giving the terminal another once-over. Still nothing. I paused at the restrooms again and stuck my head into the men’s, but it was empty.
So Nate was looking for Leila, and having enough trouble finding her that he asked the cranky ticket agent. Dark-haired lady, no luggage. Interesting distinction. Maybe Nate was carrying their luggage. She was injured, after all. But where had she gone? I’d been wrong about her at every turn so far, so it was hard to guess. I placed a hand on the top of my opposite shoulder and imagined the throbbing heat of a gunshot wound, the chemical buzz of Demerol. I could see her going into the restroom, to puke or to splash water on her face. Or maybe outside for some fresh air—the atmosphere inside the bus station wasn’t exactly invigorating. I started to push open the door, rearing back into the doorway when I spotted Pomp’s driver-slash-bodyguard standing on the sidewalk, meaty arms folded across his meatier chest, eyes on the street. He gave no indication that he’d noticed me, so I stood very still and waited until someone else came out of the station, noisily dragging a suitcase with a bum wheel. I slipped back into the station and made a beeline for the Town Street doors, catching sight of Pomp’s elder son milling around by the express-bus area.
Lightning flashed outside—a neon crack of it, followed by an electric whine and sudden murky darkness inside the bus station as the power went out.
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