by Dan Stout
* * *
At the corner pay phone I called back the number on the page. I immediately recognized the voice on the other end. It was Simon.
“Carter.” His burbling voice was hushed and excited. “Can you meet? You’ll wanna hear what I got for you.”
“You know, I really don’t.” My legs ached, my lower back was a mess of knotted muscle, and I had to get home to the bottle I’d just bought. “Tonight I don’t want to hear anything.”
“You told me to call if anyone mouthed off about Squibs.”
My pulse picked up.
“What did you hear?” I said.
“Can you meet me in person?”
“I’ll be at the Hey-Hey in twenty minutes.”
“No.”
“Then where?”
“I don’t know.” There was the sound of drunken yelling in the background, and he had to raise his voice. “Look, come to the neighborhood. I’ll page you when I can talk more.”
There was a click, and Simon was gone.
Back in my car, I started the engine and glanced at the paper-bag-wrapped bottle in the passenger seat. Truly, liquor was my copilot.
* * *
In the Borderlands I found a parking spot near a phone a few blocks from the Hey-Hey. The candies immediately made my Hasam as an unmarked unit, and gave me a wide berth. I thrummed my fingers on the steering wheel while I waited for Simon’s page. That’s when the bottle started calling my name. I was in no condition to resist.
I needed a swig and a piss, and the last thing I wanted was someone spotting me boozing on the curb. I took the bottle and the flask down the alley and stepped behind a dumpster. No such thing as being too careful. One more bad headline and I’d be directing traffic for the rest of the case. And if that happened Talena was going to get hung out to dry. No one was gonna hurt that kid on my watch.
I positioned myself to make sure I could keep an eye on the car, then relieved myself on the side of the dumpster. Finished with that task, I opened the bottle and breathed in the sweet nectar of mediocre liquor. I unscrewed the cap from the flask, and thumbed it back on its hinge. Even the hinge worked well. I gave a mental “thank you” to Harlan. I still hoped to parade him out of his building in handcuffs one day, but I appreciated the gift. Carefully I filled the flask with the whiskey, then chucked the empty bottle into the dumpster.
I gave the flask a jiggle, glad to hear the welcome slosh of spirits against metal. Before I took a swig, I glanced back at the street. A familiar figure was storming up to my car. With a sigh of regret I tucked the flask back into my jacket, the contents still untasted.
Of course it was Talena.
By the time I got to the mouth of the alley she was pounding on the window and peering in, as if I were hiding inside. Maybe she thought I was cowering in the backseat.
“Hey.”
She spun at the sound of my voice.
“Oh, you son of a bitch!”
“Talena—”
“You son of a bitch! I can’t believe you.”
A few people stopped to stare, so I pulled back my coat to reveal my badge. And my shoulder holster. They moved on.
I looked back to Talena.
“Look, you got this all wrong,” I said.
“The Hells I do. It’s all over the papers. You finally went too far. You got tired of dancing on that line and set up some poor SOB and now you got caught, and you . . . you . . .” She waved her hand, trying to put words to her anger and disappointment.
“No. I’m trying to protect someone from getting a frame job.”
“You are not,” she hissed. “You’re manipulating things for your own self-interest like you always have and always will.”
“I’m not.”
She held up her hands and coated her words with sarcasm. “Oh, that’s right. You’re actually defending the downtrodden. And who’s this poor innocent you’re dying to protect? You’re about to tell me it’s some houseful of widows and orphans, just to make things that much more believable, right?”
“You.”
She paused. “What?”
“You’re the suspect, Talena. They want to pin the Haberdine murder, the Bell-Asandro killings, the whole damn thing on you.” I jammed my hands into my pockets. “And your activist friends. But mostly you. I tried to tell you at your apartment. You need to get out of town.”
She got quiet. I was afraid that maybe I’d have been better off telling her everything from the start. Then the clouds moved across her face.
“You’re too much. You’re too damn much, Carter. You get me to give up information to you, then you frame an innocent man—”
“Flanagan’s not innocent,” I said, though not with the conviction I would’ve had two days earlier.
“And then you have the balls to say you’re doing it to protect me. Me!” She slapped her chest and stared at me. My stomach felt like I was in free fall.
“I at least thought,” she said, “you respected my intelligence enough to not lie to me about me.”
“Talena, you were at the site of the murder.”
Talena bit her lip and shook her head. “That’s not enough—”
“That’s fact one.” I talked over her. “Fact two. You blackmail johns with threats to ruin their reputations. A Squib politician has way more to lose in terms of reputation than most johns. He would have been desperate.”
She was still shaking her head, but she’d stopped talking. For some reason that made me raise my voice even more. Louder than I should have, probably, but I didn’t care anymore.
“Fact number three: there’s an eyewitness who puts candies at the scene.”
“Who?”
“The victim. Thanks to our divination officer, the victim has implicated you or your friends in this whole mess. Now Flanagan’s got some bullshit alibi, and someone’s gotta go down for this thing. You’re this close”—I brought my finger and thumb to eye level—“to being specifically called out on this. I know you didn’t do it. But if we don’t make an arrest soon, then things like guilt and innocence are gonna get a lot more flexible.”
She blinked. I could see her work through it, attacking it from all angles. She figured it out fast. Probably faster than I would have in her place. She was a lot like her mom that way.
“Oh, Hells.” She turned away from me and sat on the hood of my car. I sat down next to her. We didn’t say anything for a while. The small crowd that had gathered drifted away with the end of the fireworks.
“I should’ve told you,” I said. “I tried to. But . . .” I stuck my hands into the pockets of my wrinkled suit. “I should’ve told you,” I repeated.
“Told me what? That I was the center of a conspiracy I don’t know anything about?”
“That’s kind of elevating your place in things . . .”
A ghost of a smile touched her lips. “No, that’s an accurate assessment. Center of a vast conspiracy.”
I seesawed my hand. “More like convenient patsy.”
She rubbed her temples then pulled back the skin around her eyes. Another habit of her mother’s. “I need a drink.”
Dammit. I fished into my overcoat and pulled out the flask.
“Here.”
Talena faked a laugh and took the flask from me. “Well, we have some things in common, right?” She took a long swig. I was happy to at least be able to give her something.
She made a face. “That stuff’s awful.”
“You have an immature palette.”
She took another drink. “So what do we do now?” She didn’t return the flask. I held in a sigh and let her keep it.
“You don’t do anything,” I said. “The lower your profile the better. You’re sure you don’t have anyone to alibi you for the Squib killing? Anyone you talked to that night?”
&nb
sp; She shook her head. “The only people I’d trust for it are involved with my work with the candies. From what you said, they’re all on the hot seat as well.”
“Yeah, but not as bad as you.”
“See? Vast conspiracy.” She drew a large circle in the air. “And there’s me.” She pointed. “In the center.”
“Okay, maybe it is all about you.”
“Damn straight.” She coughed and sipped at the whiskey.
I grunted. Plans to get her out of town started running unbidden through my head.
“So where’s your partner?”
“Jax?”
Talena cleared her throat. “Yeah. The cute one.”
I dragged a hand through my hair and pretended I hadn’t heard that. I searched for some way to change the topic and was saved by the buzz of my pager. It had to be Simon.
“Well, whoever is setting this up—” Talena coughed again. “They’ll have made a mistake.” She cleared her throat a second time.
“Oh yeah?” I stood up to get a better read on the buzzer’s display in the shine of the streetlight. Once I settled things with Talena I could call Simon back and arrange a meet-up.
“Just like the pimps and johns who think they’re untouchable. They start thinking they’re smarter than the rest of us.” She swallowed and took a wheezing breath.
I looked up from the pager.
“You okay, kid?”
She nodded, then shook her head “no” violently. I stuck the pager back in my pocket and felt her forehead. Talena kept wheezing. Her pupils were dilated and as I watched, her eyes rolled back into her head. The flask slipped from her hand and dropped to the street with a clatter. I grabbed Talena and dumped her into the passenger side of the car. I turned the ignition and floored it, sideswiping two cars as I merged into traffic, knowing that the nearest hospital was eight blocks away.
“Hang on, kid. Just hang on.”
I never glanced in the rearview, so I have no idea if I crushed the flask under a tire as I drove away, or just left it gleaming in the gutter behind us.
24
I WAS IN THE WAITING room of Wayfinder’s Hospital staring at the word “Emergency” printed on a fire alarm when Jax found me. It took the rookie a few tries to make me hear him. I realized he was there when he turned me around and shook me by the shoulder. I made an attempt to swat his hand away but he held on and I finally heard what he was saying.
“I need you to wake up, old man, because it’s all coming down around us right now.”
“What is?”
“The whole thing: the case, Flanagan, the embassy, the Squibs.”
He’d pulled me into the stairwell so we could speak with at least a light veneer of privacy. His back was to the door and I peered over his shoulder as we talked, watching through the glass pane of the door for any doctors who might appear with news of Talena.
“I about got Talena killed, Jax. I need to fix this.”
I told him what happened, from the confrontation with Harlan to rushing Talena to the hospital.
He took it all in calmly, adjusting the bandages on his right arm while he listened. When I was done he asked, “Where’s the flask?”
Jaw clenched, I shook my head. “I was kind of preoccupied.”
By now it’d likely been collected by a metal scrapper. I only hoped the liquor had drained out, and that a booze-desperate passerby wasn’t choking on the poisoned draft.
Ajax grunted. “We can at least request a patrol to swing by and look over the area.”
Even if we could find it, there was no link between it and Harlan other than my word. The flask was old enough to belong to my father, and was stamped with the logo of the rig my father used to work. It was filled with whiskey that I’d purchased myself that same day. No one would believe it wasn’t mine. If it’d been found in my apartment, no one would’ve questioned the cause of my death.
“I plucked it from his display case myself,” I said. “Five’ll get you ten that he wiped his prints clean after setting it there.”
“The flask went straight from him to you, to Talena?”
I hesitated. “No. I left it in Gellica’s office. She was alone with it for maybe five minutes.”
It was clear where he was headed, and my anger boiled over even as he was saying, “So it could have been her.”
“What’s your theory?” I snarled. “She happened to have some spare poison lying around next to the stapler?”
His wounded arm was held tight by a sling, but he spread his other arm wide.
“And that’s less believable than the owner of the biggest oil conglomerate in the world poisoning you when he could’ve just paid someone to put a bullet in your head from a hundred yards out?”
I clutched my temples and squeezed my eyes shut, fighting to hold in the screams. I wanted a villain, a bad guy I could drag in—mission accomplished and time for a beer. I just wanted a single damn moment of black and white in a world of gray tones.
I took a ragged breath and brought myself under control. I didn’t want to say it, but this was why he’d been the first call I made after getting Talena to the hospital. I needed Ajax’s help now even more than before.
“Alright,” he said. “We’ll get there. For now, circle back to Harlan Cedrow. If he had the flask prepped for you, then he already knew where your dad worked.”
There was only one way I could see for Harlan to know that. I ran a trembling hand over my face and tried not to think of the look in Talena’s eyes while I drove her to the hospital.
“Gellica. She asked me about my family before I met with her boss.”
Jax paused, tugging at his collar with his free hand. “You think she’s working with him?”
“I don’t know. But there won’t be enough left of her or Harlan to piece back together when I’m done.” I pointed down the hallway. “An innocent girl is in there because of them. Because they tried to kill me. And I want to know if you’re going to have my back.”
He held my eyes, not looking away but not answering, either. Then I saw motion over his shoulder.
Through the wire mesh glass of the stairwell door I saw a young woman in scrubs looking around the waiting room. She wasn’t much older than Talena herself. Jax must have followed my gaze, because he backed away, and I walked in to talk to the doctor. I struggled to breathe as I approached her, my heart racing and vision tightening. When she smiled, it was one of the greatest moments of relief I have ever experienced. Doctors don’t usually smile before they tell you bad news.
* * *
It was still several hours before I was able to see her.
Outside Talena’s room the doctor looked at Jax and myself in turn.
“Five minutes,” she said. “She might be in and out of consciousness. Do not try to wake her. You can say her name and hold her hand, nothing else.” With that last bit of caution, we walked into Talena’s room.
Her color was wrong, far too pale, and the plastic tube that stretched into her nose and down her throat looked strange and unnatural. There was a small fortune’s worth of machinery hooked up to her, beeping affirmations of life at regular intervals. I refused to let myself think about how she’d pay for this when we finally got her out of there.
I sat down on the edge of her bed. Jax stood behind me, wearing his own bandages. Gently, I squeezed her forearm, trying not to see how much she looked like her mother in her last days. I focused on Talena, waiting to see if she would respond. The moment stretched on, and I wondered if I’d failed her one last time. Then Talena stirred, groaning like a kid who didn’t want to get up for school.
She opened a single eye and looked at Ajax, then me.
“Carter . . .” Her voice sounded strange with the tube down her nose.
“Hey, kiddo,” I said. “Don’t try to say anything. I just wanted you
to know we’re here.”
“Carter, yuhhr . . .”
“Shhh.” I patted her arm.
“. . . an asshole,” she said, and drifted back to sleep with a smile on her face.
* * *
I walked out of that room and Jax had to jog to catch up to me. I brushed his hand off my shoulder and kept walking. In the lobby I jabbed the elevator button and rounded on him.
“I know you’re hot,” he said. “But you can’t go gunning for Harlan Cedrow.”
I glared at him, waiting for the elevator to open.
“You don’t even know for sure he did it,” he said.
I hung my head. In Gellica’s office I’d defended Harlan, praised the man as a philanthropist. Because he’d helped someone I loved find some small respite from her pain, I’d blinded myself to the facts. I’d been a fool, and Talena had paid the price. I thumbed the elevator call button again, two quick jabs. Despite the evidence, despite the common sense that should have alerted me that something was wrong, I took the flask because I was grasping for a past that was dead and long buried.
Jax mistook my silence for disagreement.
“You don’t,” he said, almost pleading. “You told me yourself that Gellica had free access to the flask. She asked about your father. Who’s to say she didn’t do something to the flask itself?”
I slammed my fist into the call button, rattling the metal panel and sending pain dancing across my knuckles.
“It was Harlan!” I practically shouted. “I don’t know what he’s playing, but I’m ending all his bullshit. I don’t care about his money or his reputation or any other damn thing that gets in my way.” I was breathing fast, and I could feel the flush spreading across my face. I’d been running on fumes for days, and I could feel my legs wobble with fatigue as I demanded, “Are you with me?”
My partner took a long, slow breath and tried again.