Level 26

by Anthony E. Zuiker

  So they’d gone and promoted Sqweegel to a new level. Probably what he wanted all along.

  There was no scale for what Dark had endured over the past two years.

  Dark suddenly hurled his cell phone so hard against the stone patio that it shattered into dozens of pieces.

  Inside the house, Max and Henry began to bark. The noise had frightened them. There was another sound behind Dark—the sliding of the glass balcony door one flight up.

  Sibby looked down at him.

  “Baby? Are you okay? What was that?”

  Dammit. That was stupid. Stupid for letting it reach him again.

  Within a few moments Sibby was down in the backyard with Steve, sitting across from him on their small white brick chimney. She hadn’t seen him like this since their earliest days together—the days when his demons were still very much with him, and he seemed utterly defeated.

  Sibby had learned to tread carefully then, and she did the same now. You don’t go pushing a man who’s already on the edge. You have to coax him back before you can understand.

  “You want to talk about it?” she asked.

  “It’s nothing,” Steve said. “Just got carried away. Reception on the beach sucks.”

  “Who were you trying to call?”

  “Nobody important.”

  “Okay. It’s late. Why don’t you come to bed?”

  “In a little while. I promise.”

  Sibby thought back to their early days together, and how she quickly learned that there was only one thing that could soothe the pain, even if was just for a little while. The one thing that drove away the demons and brought him back to life.

  She moved her legs slowly, and noticed Steve was watching her carefully. The front of her silk nightgown swelled with her pregnant belly, but he couldn’t take his eyes off a single square inch of her body. The move was all hers. He was waiting for her to make it.

  Sibby knew he loved this, what it did to him. This was what Steve needed now, to take his mind away from the pain.

  Even if it was only temporary.

  To observe sexual tension, log into LEVEL26.com and enter the code: sibby

  chapter 22

  Everything about Sibby—her touch, her taste, her smell, the very sight of her body—was stronger than any narcotic Dark had ever encountered. She knew exactly how to bring him back to earth. And somehow, she’d sensed what he desperately needed.

  Their breathing hadn’t slowed yet. There was nothing to say. No need to speak at all.

  Finally, Sibby whispered in his ear, “Come to bed.”

  Despite everything, Dark wasn’t tired. He was restless. Still thinking about his conversation earlier that evening. Still thinking about Sqweegel. He couldn’t get those images out of his skull. The splats of blood on those pale white legs. The razored fabric of her nightgown. The crying in the corner of the room….

  Sibby touched the side of his face.

  “Hey,” she said. “Talk to me.”

  That was the problem with drugs, wasn’t it? They were designed for the moment. And in that single moment they could make the pain disappear. But only for a moment. And then the newfound calm was quickly replaced by an ache for that moment again—a desperate need to scramble back up it. Wracking your brain for a way to remain there forever…or at least for just a few more seconds.

  Dark kissed her. She rested her head on his shoulder. After a while they left the yard and climbed into bed, lying on top of the sheets and letting the cool ocean air wash over their bodies, wicking away the sweat. Their hands touched, knuckles to knuckles at first.

  Then Sibby wrapped her hand around Dark’s and squeezed gently. You could smell the salt in the air and the remnants of the candles Sibby had been burning earlier.

  Then the house phone rang.

  It was strange to hear it at this hour—strange to hear it at all, in fact. Most calls went right to their cell phones. Sibby had wanted to get rid of the landline, but Dark had insisted they keep it. Cell phones ran out of power. Towers could be knocked out of commission by something as simple as a light tremor.

  The phone rang again.

  “I’ll get it,” Sibby said softly.

  “No, no. I will.”

  Dark sighed, reached across his pregnant wife, and picked up the receiver from its cradle.

  “Just ten minutes,” Riggins said. “Ten minutes and I go away forever.”

  “Dammit, Riggins.”

  “I wouldn’t ask if it weren’t important. You took the USB drive. I know you’ve probably watched it by now.”

  Dark felt Sibby squeezing his hand a little harder now. A pleasantly cold blast of air washed over both of them. It would be nice to stay in this bed and not move for weeks. Not move until the baby was born. And then they could bring the baby back to this bed and lie here some more. Maybe until the baby was ready for college.

  It would be nice, but Dark knew it wasn’t going to happen.

  He asked, “Where?”

  “Same place as earlier.”

  “That diner’s got to be closed by now.”

  “So we’ll sit outside and enjoy the fine California night.”

  “It’s almost morning.”

  “Whatever.”

  Dark turned his head to face Sibby. He wanted to ask her to hang up the receiver and yank the cord from the wall mount. It didn’t matter if there was a slight tremor because there was no one they’d need to call right now. They were here together, and that was all that mattered.

  Instead he found himself telling Riggins, “Fine. I’ll be there.”

  chapter 23

  Here it was. Finally.

  The moment she’d dreaded ever since she met Steve. Funny to think she used made a joke of it back in their early days. Your last name is Dark, huh? she’d asked. So I’m guessing you’re one of those happy-go-lucky types.

  Steve Dark. She had no idea.

  It was a chance encounter in the liquor section at Vons in Santa Monica. The man who would become her husband had been piling his cart with booze—mostly whiskeys and scotches, along with some bottles of white and red wine. She assumed he was making a party run. Later she’d learn it was simply his weekly order.

  And catching him out in public was a freak occurrence as well. For the past few months he’d called his order in, had it delivered to his beat-up apartment in Venice. That night, though, a strange mood had struck him, and he’d decided to go shopping in person. It had been so long, Sibby learned later, there was actually a thick layer of dust on his car.

  Steve was a disheveled mess, but Sibby merely read it as I had a really late night, not I’ve lost myself for months in a death spiral of depression. Because despite the tousled bed head, the pale skin, the devil-may-care attitude toward personal hygiene…Steve was still a desperately handsome man. Enough to make her pause and try a dumb line—something she hadn’t done since college. She spoke to him because she knew she’d kick herself later if she didn’t.

  “So, when should I drop by?” she asked.

  He turned and blinked, unsure that she was actually addressing him. Unsure she wasn’t a ghost. Later, she would learn that it had literally been weeks since someone had spoken to him.

  “I’m sorry,” Steve said. “What did you say?”

  “Your party,” Sibby said, pointing to his cart. “When does it start? I see you’ve got a bottle of Cakebread in your basket, and it just so happens to be my favorite Chardonnay.”

  The next moment, Sibby remembered, was the longest moment in the world. Steve just stood there, staring at her, as if he were struggling to find the right words. He tried a smile, but it came up false. A little scary even. And in that small eternity, Sibby wondered what strange world she had tumbled into.

  What was she doing in Vons, talking to a strange handsome guy who looked like he hadn’t taken a shower in days? This could be Charles Manson, Jr., for all she knew.

  And then she had her hands tightly wrapped around the tacky plast
ic handle of the shopping cart and was ready to start pushing it down another aisle, any aisle, it didn’t matter, just so long as she was able to loop around the store once before abandoning the cart and leaving the store before he noticed—

  “Eight,” he said. “Tomorrow night.”

  Steve’s smile this time was the real thing. Sibby returned it, her grip on the handle loosening. He wrote down his address on the back page of a paperback novel she had in her purse—Faulkner’s Sanctuary.

  The next night she arrived and was only partly surprised to see a small bungalow with just one occupant—Steve himself. There were two place settings, mismatched, on a makeshift dining room table covered with something that looked suspiciously like a bedsheet.

  “Nobody could make it,” her future husband explained, a shy smile on his face.

  “If the Cakebread didn’t make it, I’m outta here,” she said, mock-serious.

  “After we met I went back and bought three more bottles.”

  He had, too.

  And that was the night the sweet, slow mystery of Steve Dark began to unfold before her. He told her the bare bones up front—he had been a cop, a federal agent, but a case had gone horribly wrong, and he’d quit. It wasn’t until their fifth date that he’d mentioned he was adopted, and used to have a foster family, but they’d died in a horrible accident.

  And it wasn’t until after they were married by a justice of the peace that Sibby learned that the case that had gone horribly wrong and his foster family’s horrible accident were the same event.

  She knew the year following their death was a living hell.

  What was clear from the beginning, though, was that Steve never talked about—and from what she could gather, never even thought about—becoming a cop again. But now Sibby could tell something was different. Steve was a haunted man, but not like this. There was something specific nagging at him.

  Please don’t let it be the job, she thought. I can take anything but that. Because whatever happened to him in that job almost killed him, and I can take anything but losing him.

  “You seem like you’re living in the past today. Can you tell me what’s going on?”

  Steve was silent. But Sibby refused to let it go.

  “You’re being asked to do something, aren’t you?” she asked him.

  “Yes.”

  “By your old employers.”

  “Yes.”

  “What did you tell them?”

  “I told them no.”

  Sibby exhaled. She hadn’t realized she’d been holding her breath.

  “You did?”

  “My old boss, Tom Riggins, showed up this morning and asked me to come out of retirement. He’s very good at needling someone until he gets what he wants. You can’t ignore them. It’s never going to stop on their end. So I’m going to take care of it on mine.”

  Sibby looked at him, scanning for the smallest trace of a lie. She could usually tell, with the little things, like when he was covering up a birthday present or sparing her feelings. Steve had certain little tells.

  But she didn’t see any of them now.

  “Okay,” she said. “Take care of it. But come right back to me?”

  “Of course. Where else would I go?” He smiled, but Sibby could tell it was for her benefit.

  Steve stared at the ceiling for a few moments. Then he snatched up his keys from the coffee table, checked his watch, and left the house.

  Sibby looked down at her cell phone, resting on top of the comforter. The day had come full circle; she was alone in the house again. The only thing that would make this moment perfect, Sibby thought, was for a text to arrive.

  And then one did.

  chapter 24

  Santa Monica Pier

  3:30 A.M.

  Riggins watched Dark park his black Yukon in the lot next to the pier. Dark drove like he lived: in slow motion. Deliberately. Methodically. If you didn’t know better, you’d assume it was some old buzzard behind the wheel, cruising the Pacific Coast Highway like it was 1939, back when Santa Monica was a sleepy little beach town. But that’s just how Dark moved. He didn’t rush a goddamned thing.

  For once, Riggins was glad Dark was taking his time. The longer he took, the more he could enjoy his cigarette.

  The more time he had before he was killed. What was it now? He checked the official death countdown on the watch that had been a gift from his daughter:

  8:24:08…

  8:24:07…

  8:24:06…

  8:24:05…

  Somewhere out in the darkness behind Riggins—maybe near the children’s amusement rides? maybe the carousel? maybe even under the pier?—were Nellis and McGuire. And Riggins was sure they were checking their watches, too.

  Back at the Motel 6, the two Dark Arts operatives had refused a drink, as expected. But they’d listened to Riggins, anyway. They were, after all, professional men.

  “I suppose you’ve heard that Dark said no,” Riggins had said, sitting on the edge of his sagging bed.

  Buzz-cut Nellis nodded. McGuire made no movement whatsoever. Maybe he was thinking about his missing fingers.

  “But I’ve still got time on the clock left, and I haven’t played my best card. What I need is some space. Dark was one of our best ops. He made you in seconds, and he’s always had a big distrust of strangers. If I’m going to make this work, I need him to think we’re alone. That this is just between the two of us.”

  Nellis looked at him. “If you run, we’ll find you. And it’ll be a lot worse for you.”

  “I’m not planning on running,” Riggins said. “You can even hold my car keys if that makes you feel better. What am I gonna do, skip down to the ocean and try to swim out to Japan?”

  Nellis and McGuire agreed to give Riggins his space. But they would be nearby, somewhere they couldn’t be “made.”

  What Riggins didn’t tell his babysitters was that he had no intention of talking Dark into the job.

  Instead, what he wanted was to spend some of his last hours alive with his friend.

  Now Dark was approaching, taking the stairs up to the pier one at a time. Riggins enjoyed another hit from his cigarette and let the smoke flow out of his nose like he was a cartoon bull.

  “Dark,” Riggins said.

  Without warning, Dark smiled and snatched the butt away from him. He took a drag himself before flicking it over the side of the pier.

  “Lung cancer,” he said. “Number one killer of men.”

  Shit. Riggins had been looking forward to finishing it. He had eleven smokes left in his pack, and he refused to die until he’d savored every one of them.

  “Now you tell me.”

  “You thought the baby on the video would do it, didn’t you? Get me to come running back to Special Circs.”

  Riggins looked up at Dark, genuine surprise on his face. “Baby?”

  “Like you don’t know.”

  “Honest, I haven’t watched the thing. I was under strict orders to deliver it to you. Your eyes only.”

  “Stop bullshitting me. You’re the lead agent on this case. Since when are you not allowed to see case evidence?”

  “Now you’re starting to understand what I’ve been dealing with here. This isn’t just a criminal investigation anymore, Dark. It’s gotten political. International. We have D.C. types calling the shots, squeezing us, wondering why we’re not walking on fucking water and churning out loaves and fishes.”

  “That’s insane. You don’t squeeze and threaten your best agents to catch someone like Sqweegel. You give them resources.”

  “You want to call Norman Wycoff and tell him that? I’m sure he’d be happy to hear from you.”

  Dark said nothing. He felt far removed from Special Circs—but he also couldn’t imagine it under the thumb of the Defense Department. The world seemed to have embraced the absurd since he’d voluntarily taken himself out of it.

  “So what’s on that video?” Riggins said.

  chapter 25


  Dark swallowed, not really wanting to recall the images he’d seen just a few hours ago. But he began describing it in shorthand, anyway.

  “A young girl—maybe seventeen or eighteen,” Dark said. “Red hair, pale skin, freckled. She’s sleeping. No idea that Sqweegel’s under her bed, waiting for her to fall into a deeper sleep. Then he makes his move. Climbs over her.”

  Riggins shook his head. “Fuck.”

  “She wakes up in time to feel the first slice, which cuts through her blue cotton nightie. She fights back, but every time she lifts a hand he slashes through it. After a while, she stops lifting her hands. He really lays into her now, but he keeps looking over to the corner of the room.”

  “Why?”

  “It wasn’t clear at first. You’d think he’d be looking at the camera, if anything at all. But then I realize that he’s showing off for somebody in the room.”

  Riggins got it right away. “Oh, fuck. A baby?”

  “Strapped into his bouncy chair, which is the perfect vantage point to watch his mother get sliced to ribbons. Sitting there for God knows how long, crying to be held and fed. And that’s where it ends.”

  “Jesus.”

  The two men sat in silence for a while.

  Dark thought about the other details he’d gleaned from the video—the everyday objects that were now part of a grisly, blood-soaked tableau. The pink-flower-patterned comforter, soaked and stained red. The stuffed bear with a bow around its neck and flecks of dark crimson on its furry face. A small plastic dental pick, also streaked with blood. In some ways, they were just as hard to look at as the girl’s mutilated body. Taken from a safe, ordinary place and dropped down in the middle of a horror show.

  “I had no idea,” Riggins said.

  “Yeah, I’m sure you didn’t see it first,” Dark said. “If you’d seen it, I doubt you would have shown up here to make me watch, too. But that means someone above you thought they knew how to fuck with my head. Maybe they even know that Sibby is pregnant….”