by Dan Stout
Myris kicked the aunt’s handgun a safe distance away and instructed her to get to her knees. The woman who’d just shot my partner looked at me with tears running down her face.
“I didn’t know it was you,” she said. “I didn’t know, I didn’t know.”
Myris restrained her and I focused on Ajax. He was bleeding from the arm, but there was a gouge on the vest beneath his armpit. The armor had saved him from a chest wound, ricocheting the bullet sideways, where it buried itself into the meat of his interior upper arm. The danger in that area was a wound to the brachial artery. If that was hit, we’d have to stop the wound or he’d bleed out before the ambulance arrived.
There’s some mystery to bullet wounds. A shot to the arm may wound without critical injury, while another a few inches to the side can tear open an artery, leading to massive blood loss and near certain death. So many little things determine a projectile’s path and the damage it does.
Jax had lost a fair amount of blood, but it didn’t show the pressurized squirting that would have indicated an arterial breech. I was very happy to see my partner was one of the lucky ones.
Jermaine Bell, however, was not. His aunt continued to sob, staring at her nephew as she lay on her side, hands cuffed behind her back. Myris’s shot had struck him in the neck, and much of the blood sprayed on the wall was his. That’s when I became aware of the warm dampness on my face. Something rolled down between my eyes, clinging to the edge of my nose and refusing to fall to the floor.
Disgusted, I swiped an arm across my face and looked down. My shirtsleeve was red with the boy’s castoff blood.
“Myris, what’d you come through in the back of the building?”
“Small kitchen. Stairs to the second level.”
“Give me a hand,” I said. Myris and I each grabbed an arm and lifted Nina Bell to her feet before the spreading puddle of her nephew’s blood reached her. We marched her back to the kitchenette. I sat her down at a small table that was covered with a faded yellow and orange flower print tablecloth. She slumped in the chair, sobbing silently. I grabbed a dishtowel from beside the sink.
“Cuff her to something that won’t move,” I said. “Make sure there’s no knives or anything else that can be used as a weapon near her. Watch her. Keep your ears open, and if you hear anyone else moving, you yell like our lives depend on it.”
“I got it. Hemingway’ll have that ambulance here in no time.”
I ran back to Ajax. His eyes were squeezed tight. Still bleeding, but not so much that I was panicked. I needed to put pressure on the wound, though. Folding the towel, I shoved it in his armpit. He cried out.
“Squeeze on that,” I said. “Keep the pressure strong. You’re going to be fine.”
I looked at him for a response, but his eyes were still shut.
“You ever been shot before, college boy?”
He shook his head.
“Alright, listen. Right now, you’re more scared than wounded. We’re getting an ambulance, and you’re gonna get attention. But you’re stabilized. Do you understand me?”
His nostrils flared as he took deep breaths.
“Do you understand me?”
Jax’s eyes snapped open, gold-flecked brown sparking with anger. “Yes, you asshole.”
“Attaboy, College. Just hold tight.”
20
WHEN THE AMBULANCE WAS GONE and Ajax was headed to the hospital, I walked back into the kitchen.
On the floor by the cabinets, hands cuffed around the soldered metal of the under-sink plumbing, Nina Bell sat staring at nothing. All the cleaning materials kept under the sink had been pulled out and tossed onto the countertop. Myris was nothing if not thorough. I unlocked the cuffs and helped her to a kitchen chair. She rubbed her wrists and stayed silent, eyes on the floor. I looked down and saw bloody footprints across the linoleum. Tracked in by me, judging by the size. I pulled over another chair and sat close, but not too close. I didn’t want to intimidate her, but I wanted her to know that I was there.
“Tell me about it, Nina.” I leaned in, echoing her words from when we’d last spoke. “What happened before it all went to shit?”
She sucked in a ragged breath.
“The night before you came and talked to me about Tara and the kids,” she said, “I heard tapping at my window. I flipped on the outside light and there he was, soaking wet and shivering.”
“Your nephew.”
She nodded. “Jermaine.” She said his name with such sorrow. I remembered photo albums spread across her couch, a makeshift memorial as she mourned her family.
“He wouldn’t—” Her lip quivered. The stress and adrenaline of the shooting had evaporated, leaving her on the edge of breaking down. I gave her as much time as she needed to start over. “He wouldn’t tell me what happened. Just that he was in danger. He said the people he worked for were after him. That they’d killed Tara and the kids.”
“What people? Who did he work for?”
“Doctors.”
A voice spoke from behind me, dripping with disbelief. “Doctors?”
Myris and Hemingway stood in the door, staring at the woman who’d shot Ajax. Their rage practically rippled across the room.
“Why would doctors kill his family?” I said, pulling Nina’s attention back to me.
“It took a long time to get him to tell me anything. And when he did, it didn’t always—” She grimaced. “They did something to him. To his head.”
“Where?” I asked. “A hospital? A lab?”
“I don’t know.” She chewed her lip. “He said some of the equipment had a drill company logo on it.”
“Which one?”
She shook her head. “It was all bits and pieces. He’d wake up on the couch, screaming, still sweaty from nightmares, talking about a scar-faced doctor injecting him with rainbows. But it always felt like . . .”
“There was something he wasn’t telling you.”
“Yeah.” She blinked, as if she’d confused herself. “No. It was like there was something he wasn’t telling himself.” She looked at me, then at Myris and Hemingway.
“I’ve just—” Nina rubbed her shoulders, hands trembling. A self-embrace to help her focus. “I’ve known him since he was a baby,” she said. “I looked at him and it broke my heart. All I could think about was all the times I’d held him when he cried, or took him to the movies.” She turned to me. “You can’t know what it’s like. Even if a kid’s not yours, when you know them all their life you want to protect them.”
“I know,” I said, and did my best not to think of Talena.
“He was terrified. He couldn’t even bear to look at photos of Tara and the kids. When I got out my photo albums he just started shaking and sweating. Poor kid.”
A bitter taste rose in the back of my mouth. Realization was setting in.
“Was he using?” I asked.
Nina closed her eyes. “For years. Runs in the family, I guess.” She attempted a smile, the weary half grin of someone who knew the weight of addiction. “It’s why he still came to see me even after he and his folks stopped talking. He knew I understood.”
“Was he selling?”
“Not drugs. Jermaine was . . .” She stared at the kitchen table, hands rubbing like cricket legs. “He was selling himself.”
A discarded candy. Like Haberdine’s spirit had told us to look for. I flashed back to Talena on the street, walking away from me and calling out to a teenage boy. I tried to picture his face but it wouldn’t come into focus.
So instead I focused on the woman in front of me.
“You said he came to you the night that your sister and her family were killed.”
She nodded. That was the same night Haberdine had been torn to pieces.
“And he was wet?” I urged her on. I needed to understand the timing. “Wa
ter was dripping off of him?”
She hesitated. “No. It was . . . I don’t know.”
“You said soaking.”
“He was wet, all right?” Nina wrinkled her nose. “He smelled like salt water.”
I remembered the thick odor of brine in her apartment, the salt water taffy air fresheners over her entry vent that I now realized were camouflage.
“He was there when I talked to you.” I jabbed an angry finger at her. As if anything I did could make her feel worse. “You lied to me.”
She was almost too exhausted to nod. “He said no cops. Never any cops. He said the doctor had cops working for him.” Her eyes were empty of anything except honesty. “I had to save my nephew.”
“By shooting a cop!” Myris snarled from across the room. Nina Bell flinched, casting her eyes down and hunching her shoulders protectively.
I held my hands up, and spoke in as calm a voice as I could muster.
“Just relax. Nina, take your time. Let’s back up.” I reestablished eye contact, kept my distance. “Tell me everything you can about the people Jermaine was working for. When did he start?”
“About six months ago,” Nina said. “Jermaine said he’d found honest work. Not sex stuff. Said he was working for a doctor. Doing studies.”
“Studies.” I leaned forward. “Where?”
“I don’t know. Some lab. He told me they started giving him stuff that’d trip him out and record his reactions. Things to eat, things to smell, aerosol sprays . . . all kinds of stuff. He said it was a crazy high. Bad, but good. Too good, you know?”
“That’s why he always went back,” I said. Whoever had done this had selected their victim with care.
Nina’s lips tightened. “They shot him up with something and had him wandering the ice plains. They told him it was a treasure hunt. The kind of lie you tell a little kid when you want their help finding your car keys, you know?”
“What were they really doing?” I asked.
Shaking her head, she said, “No idea. But it got worse. They put him in a gas mask, breathing in that smoke, or steam, or whatever. He said it made him violent. He had animal bites all over him. They had him fighting dogs. Dogs!” She opened her fists, and I caught glimpses of the dark half moons she’d dug into her palms. “Who does that to a kid?”
I didn’t say anything. Even Myris and Hemingway were silent.
She hesitated. “It scared me so bad to hear him tell about it. They used to ask him weird questions. About politics, about what he wanted to do for the city.” She pulled back a lip in disgust. “Like the city ever did anything for him, besides chew him up and spit him out.”
Nina swallowed. “There was one other guy he talked about. A Mollenkampi. Big, scary. Like the Mount itself was walking around. Jermaine was terrified of that guy.”
“So when you fired at us . . .”
“I saw him through the curtain. The biting mouth, the things . . .” She waved at her face, where mandibles might sit if she were Mollenkampi. “Thought he was coming for Jermaine. To finish what he started with the rest of my family.”
Shortcuts and side roads. She’d thought she was saving her last living family member.
Nina rocked back and forth, hugging herself, hair matted with blood and in tangles around her.
“The man you shot isn’t big,” I said.
“He looked big to me.” It was the first thing she’d said with real anger. “He looked big when he sat out there in his damn car and watched us, like we were bugs under glass. And when we heard him break in the front door . . .” She let out a long exhale through clenched teeth. “We hid.”
“When you heard us yell ‘police’?”
She brought her palms to her cheeks and pressed in, making her eyes look even more hollow. “I thought it was a lie. To make us come out.” She looked over my shoulder at Myris and Hemingway, pleading her case.
“I couldn’t let them take him. He’s my family, I couldn’t let them . . .” She trailed off, staring again at the red footprints on linoleum, the marks I’d picked up while walking back and forth over the body of her nephew. Now he’d be going up the Mount with the rest of his family.
I didn’t have words to comfort her. Ajax might have found something to say, but he wasn’t around. Because this sad-faced woman had shot him. People will hurt anyone they need to in order to protect their family. Sometimes they’ll even destroy the thing they love in order to save it.
I pushed my thinning hair back and ignored the bitter taste that wouldn’t go away.
All the reflective surfaces in the Bell-Asandro home, covered so that the killer wouldn’t have to see himself do the unthinkable. The bodies carefully laid out, treated with near reverence. That wasn’t the act of a stranger killing for cash or pleasure. It was done by someone who destroyed for another reason.
“He did it to save them,” I said. “From people he thought would hurt them even worse.”
Nina stared at me, confused.
There was a snap of gum and Hemingway said, “That is bat-shit crazy.”
It took a moment longer to hit Nina.
“No,” she said. Her hands rose, covering her eyes, hiding her face. “No, no, no.”
I felt the puzzle pieces teeter on the brink, almost pulling together. I walked to the back door, opening it to air the place out—the butcher shop still smelled of those old traveling companions, gun smoke and blood. What could push a teenager into killing his own family? Was it the strange drug he’d been fed, or something else?
I remembered Ajax tapping the map of the city, showing the Bells’ home in relation to the Mount and to one of the more exclusive hotels in town. The scene of Haberdine’s murder had affected me, even walking in hours after the fact. If Jermaine had seen something like that it might have put him over the edge. Or if he’d done something like that . . .
But even if it was true, it didn’t really solve anything. Somebody had chaperoned him in and out. A strung-out candy wasn’t waltzing into the Eagle Crest on his own. Even if he tried, the fact that he wasn’t on any of the video surveillance meant that he’d had help from someone familiar with the hotel. Not to mention whoever had manipulated him into doing it. But all I had to go on were nightmare recollections of a scar-faced doctor and a giant Mollenkampi. There was still so much to unravel.
But right then, there was something else I had to do.
“Nina,” I said. She didn’t respond so I said it louder.
She looked up and I did my best to soften my voice.
“You shot a police officer.”
She nodded.
“I have to arrest you, do you understand?”
Fresh tears started their descent down her cheeks. They collected at her jawline, hesitated a moment, then dropped into a free fall, landing on the butcher’s floor, mingling with bloody footprints, remnants of her nephew or my partner.
“You didn’t know what you were doing but I can’t—” I wiped a hand across my face. “I have to take you in.”
She sobbed. I felt a pain in my chest, deep inside. To keep my sanity, I ignored it.
“Stand up and place your hands on top of your head.”
“I didn’t know. I didn’t know.”
I recited her rights, the words tumbling over my lips like the Traveler’s Prayer while I cuffed one hand, then the other, trying not to twist her arms as I moved them behind her back.
“Do you understand your rights?”
Snot and tears clogged her voice as she repeated, “I didn’t know.”
I sat her down on the chair as gently as I could, and looked over her head. The doorway was empty. Myris and Hemingway had already gone to tell the paddy wagon crew to come in and collect her. While no one was there to watch, I patted Nina on the shoulder, trying to comfort her in my own clumsy way.
Sometimes
it doesn’t feel good to catch the bad guys.
* * *
After I walked Nina Bell through booking, I sat down at my desk in the Bunker and started making phone calls. After those were done I checked the ribbon in the typewriter and started writing up the report. Myris came and stood by my desk, tapping her foot.
“I’m a bad typist, Myris. I don’t need you staring over my shoulder.”
“So get lost.”
I looked at her, waiting for her to explain. With an exaggerated sigh, she tapped her chest.
“I’ll do the report. I’m the one who took the kid down. I’ll need a statement from you, but I don’t need it now.” She walked toward her desk. “Go see your partner, old man.”
I blinked, unsure how to respond to an offer of help. Then I stood and grabbed my coat. “I don’t like the ‘old man’ thing, you know.”
“I know,” she yelled back without turning around.
* * *
At Wayfinder’s Hospital, my badge got me quick access to Ajax in the emergency room. I found him on a luxurious paper-draped examination table separated from other patients by eight feet and a curtain. He sat upright, shirt off, with white bandages wrapped around his arm.
The scaly head plating stopped at the back of his neck, the plates growing smaller and thinner until they blended with the olive complexion of his skin. Although the plates were only on his head, the brown and white spots returned along his collarbone and sternum, sweeping out to trace the lines of his rib cage. Or they should have. Currently they were obscured by dark bruising on his right side, where his vest had absorbed the bullet’s impact. The TPD vests were bulletproof, but getting shot is still akin to being hit in the ribs with a hammer. Ajax tensed with every twinge of pain, ropey muscles clenching. The kid was gristle, all sinew and lean muscle.
“No wonder you’re so fast,” I told him. “You don’t have any fat on you at all.” I jabbed my pencil eraser in the unwounded left side of his ribcage.
“Stop it!” He swiped at my hand but I pulled back faster than he could catch me. They clearly had him on painkillers.