by Tracy Clark
“Hey,” she called out.
I turned my head. She blasted me with pepper spray. “Son of a bitch.” My eyes clamped shut, stinging unbearably. I staggered back from the stairs, my face on fire. The howl I emitted was partly from pain and partly from outrage.
“Down on the ground,” she ordered.
My eyes flooded over with toxic tears, and my nose began to run like Niagara Falls. The stairwell began to spin like a child’s top. From below me came the sound of a crazy cackle. It was Fleece gloating.
“Better luck next time, PI Raines. I’ll tell the boss you said hello.”
The sound of the stairwell door slamming shut behind him echoed in my ears, along with the blare of security alarms. I coughed uncontrollably, the pepper spray coating my throat with chemical fire. “He’s . . . gone!” I croaked, unable to see, to focus, to breathe. I knew not to rub my eyes. That would only spread things around. Instead I stood there stinging, burning, blinded, wanting to strangle something, someone. I could smell the spray on my skin, on my clothes, in my hair.
A hulking silhouette descended the stairs. I couldn’t see detail, only a giant moving mass, but I knew it was Flabby Guard. He’d finally caught up. All I could do was stand there and blink and drip and whimper. Fleece was gone. I’d had him. “Good job, Lynch,” Flabby huffed.
“You’re . . . idiots.” The coughing started then, and I slid to the floor. “Do you know . . . what you just did?”
“Quiet,” Tiny Guard ordered.
I thought, ‘quiet my ass,’ but couldn’t say it.
The stairwell door flew open. I peered through a flood of tears to see the cop from Yancy’s room bursting through it. Had it really taken him that long to find us? “That’s her,” he said, his breathing ragged.
It hurt to breathe. The spray was in my lungs, gnawing at them.
“We got her,” Tiny Guard boasted, reholstering the pepper spray. I squinted up at her, barely seeing her, but even Stevie Wonder couldn’t have missed the self-satisfied grin on her gnome-like face. She looked as though she’d caught Public Enemy No. 1 and wanted to take full credit for it.
“I’ll take it from here,” the cop said. “She just killed a guy on eight.”
Chapter 31
I shook my head, hoping to clear it. What did I just hear him say? I killed a guy? “Wait. What?” I croaked out between coughs. “Are you out of your mind?”
“I got you running out of a room with a dead guy in it,” the cop said. “Let’s go.”
Up until then, all I could think about was Fleece. How I had him, and how now I didn’t. How he knew my name, and how he all but flipped me the bird on his way out the door. This was a new wrinkle, a new worry. I didn’t think it possible for me to get any angrier than I already had been. I was wrong.
One of the three grabbed me by the arm and marched me out the door, me straining against the hold, my lungs as dry as tobacco leaves. Quiet? They weren’t going to get quiet. They weren’t going to get easy either. I’d had him. I’d come as close as I’d ever been to finding out who killed Pop. Maybe it was Fleece, maybe not, but I’d never know now, thanks to these three. And Yancy was gone. I promised him I’d keep him safe, and I didn’t. His death was another heavy stone in my pocket, another spent life I’d have the burden of carrying with me till forever. No, quiet was the last thing I was going to be.
* * *
The security office was about the size of a large broom closet, and I paced around it, fuming. The guards were gone. Spray and go, that’s how they rolled. The jowly cop, too, had quietly melted away somewhere. They left me here, in the closet, the door locked from the outside. I was a prisoner, for all intents and purposes. I could still smell the pepper spray, taste it on my tongue. It stuck to my skin like a film of sticky goop. I wanted it off me, and I wanted out. I wanted to smash something, anything, into a million pieces. My head throbbed and my mouth was dry. I would have killed for a glass of ice-cold water.
I thought about Yancy. Would he end up in some potter’s field somewhere? Was there anyone out there who even gave a damn? I told him he’d be safe with me. He wasn’t. I’d promised Jimmy Pick the same. What was wrong with me? I massaged my forehead trying to loosen the headache’s hold. Everything ached. I felt like shit and probably looked it, too. Fleece’s cackling echoed in my head. The door opened, and I reeled around ready for a fight, but it was only Ben.
“I had him,” I croaked before he could speak. My eyes felt as though someone had poured a bucket of sand in them.
“What the hell?” he asked, bewilderment blanketing his face. “I get you in here on the sly to talk to Gantt, and all hell breaks loose? I said meet me at the nurses’ station. I get up there, alarms are blasting, he’s dead, and you’re hauling ass all over the hospital.”
“The guy was coming out of Yancy’s room. Your cop sure in hell wasn’t going to chase after him.”
“So you figured you’d do Pierce’s job for him, that it?”
“He was off the door. Down the hall. He’s a hack. He’s less than a hack. He’s . . .” I searched for a word, but my brain wouldn’t cooperate. “He’s a slug. You’re assigned to the door, you stick to the door. Simple.” I went back to pacing. It was a small office; my laps were short. “Yancy’s dead because of him. Maybe because of me, too. But he’d have stood a better chance if Pierce had done his friggin’ job!”
“Who the hell was the guy?”
“If I knew that, I wouldn’t have had to chase him. He runs right out the front door. Me? They tackle and cuff. Pierce didn’t stick, and don’t even get me started on Frick and Frack out there. I ID’d myself. All they had to do was reach out and grab him. Pepper spray? Really?”
I kicked over a roller chair. I wanted to pick it up and fling it across the room, but there was no across. I marked off the width of an inch or so with my thumb and index finger. “That’s how close I was. I had the son of a bitch!”
Ben scrubbed his hands over his face and sighed. “Done venting?”
“Then they lock me in here.”
“Can you at least sit? Watching you storm around in a tight little circle like that is making me nauseous.”
I plopped down in the chair and reached for the cold compress the ER nurses had given me to cool down my burning skin. I pressed it to my face and waited for relief to set in, my head suddenly too heavy for my neck. I’d coughed myself dry and sounded like a lounge singer after a midnight set.
“I was so close. I had his wallet in my hands. He’s on the security cameras—on the floor, in the lobby. There has to be a good shot of his face.”
“We’re pulling video now. We’ll get him.” Ben studied me. “What happened to your clothes?”
I sneered and pointed to the clear plastic bag I’d pitched against a wall. My befouled clothing was inside. The pepper spray had eaten into every thread of fabric. I looked ridiculous in the green hospital scrubs they gave me to wear home, or jail, depending on where I was headed, but even they felt like burlap against my raw skin.
“It took me almost a year to break in those jeans. They were my favorite pair. I’ll never get that smell out.” I stood to pace again. “I’m sending this hospital a bill.”
Ben snuffled. “Good luck with that. Right now? They’re bucking for putting you in a cell.”
I spun around to face him, my eyes narrowed. “Me in a cell?”
“Pierce says he found you standing over Gantt, the pillow in your hands. Nurses saw you running out of the room.”
“Why would I kill Yancy and then hit the call button, bringing staff running right toward me?”
“I also talked to the guards and the doctors in the stairwell you scared the piss out of. All of them witnessed a piece of this thing. Now I need your side. Start to finish, from the pillow all the way to the pepper spray. And make it good. I’ve got CPD brass snapping at my skivvies, Farraday fanning the flames, and hospital suits wagging incident reports in my face.”
I gave it to
him straight—every kick, every slam, every tumble. The closer I got to the pepper spray, the angrier I got. When I was through talking, I slammed the compress down on the desk. All the cold had gone out of it anyway.
“He was right there. And you know what they did?”
“They grabbed you up instead?”
“Right! They grabbed me up instead!”
“And you’re sure he said ‘the Boss,’ like a title, and not ‘Boss,’ like a name?”
“There’s nothing wrong with my ears, Ben. He knew my name. He knew what I did for a living. He killed Yancy to shut him up. He had to be the shooter in the park, the one who killed the guy wearing Yancy’s jacket. He rousted the others looking for Yancy. He has to be one of the wolves. It fits.”
Ben shook his head. “Maybe, maybe not. It sounds logical, all of it, but it’s not exactly rock-solid evidence. One thing’s for sure, though, this thing is getting messier by the minute.”
I began to pace again, running it through, searching for light where there didn’t seem to be any. “What about the stuff out of his wallet?”
From his coat pocket, he pulled a sealed evidence bag with bits of paper in it. “It doesn’t look like much, but we’ll look it over.”
I reached for the bag, he yanked it back. “Cop eyes only. We got it.”
“Then what about the stuff from Pop’s diary and Bible? The initials, the numbers I told you about? Neither Lillian Gibson or George Cummings have called me back. That could be important. And don’t forget my father could be hooked up in all of this. He had motive.”
Ben rolled his eyes. “Now you’re fingering your own father? That’s it. This is the end of the road for you on this.”
“What?”
“You heard me. I’ve said it before. Hell, everybody’s said it before. But you are absolutely stepping off this case, right here and right now.”
I sputtered, unable to find words.
Ben held up a hand to ward off comment. “You moved the needle on this, no doubt. You tossed us some promising leads, found witnesses we missed. Great. But you’ve also been shot at, your office has been tossed, and two guys have tried to kill you. Besides, the department’s close to going after your license, and Farraday’s beating the drum loud and long on that.”
“They can have it.”
“Really? They can have it? C’mon, Cass, get your head in the game!”
“You know why I can’t stop.”
“I know it’s personal. I know you’ve got a stake in how it shakes out, but from here on out, the loop doesn’t include you. This bag, whatever we get from this Fleece character, it’s all CPD.”
“There’s nothing legally keeping me from pursuing this, and you know it!”
“Legally? Not until you cross the line, which frankly you’ve done like a billion times since this whole thing began. Trust me, there’s nothing more you can do on this solo.” He stared at me. “And I know that look. You’re thinking you’re going to damn well do as you please, and I’m going to be put in the positon of having to cuff you and take you in, and I don’t want any part of that. So take pity on my blood pressure and just go home, will ya?”
I heaved out the monster of all sighs, and chucked the tepid compress into the trash bin. I’d get nowhere arguing with him. He made sense. If our positions were reversed I’d say the same, but there was no way he was getting what he wanted. Surely somewhere deep within him, Ben knew that. He had to at least know me that well. “Where’s my gun?”
Ben’s eyebrows lifted warily. “Why? You plan on using it?”
“I’m going home. I want my gun.”
“Now that’s the first sensible thing you’ve said in days. I got it from the head of security. Fletcher. I knew you’d ask for it.” He pulled my gun out of his pocket and handed it to me. “But no way are those scrubs going to hold it.”
I looked around the small room, found a roll of duct tape and tore off a few strips. I taped the gun to my calf and pulled the leg of the scrubs down over it. Ben stood watching, his mouth wide open in disbelief.
He shook his head. “That’s just wrong on so many levels.”
“It’s what I’ve got, all right? I’ll worry about the aesthetics later.” I headed for the door. “This door better be open when I pull on it, or I’m filing the mother of all lawsuits.” I turned the knob. The door opened. “Know that’s right,” I muttered.
“Cass, I’m serious now.”
I headed for the elevator. “Don’t follow me. I’m done talking to you.”
“Type A personality. Textbook case.”
My eyes narrowed dangerously. “I’m flattered to know you’ve taken time to deconstruct my personality so completely.”
Ben adjusted his belt, ignored the sarcasm. “I rode with you for five years. Shit presents itself.”
I punched the button for the elevator more times than I needed to. I was in a hurry to get free of the hospital, and quite frankly, of Ben. Standing silently in the elevator car, Ben beside me, waiting for the doors to close, I caught sight of the two guards who took me down in the stairwell. They were holding up a wall at the other end of the hall. The doors began to close, but I reached out and held them open, glaring at the guards. They stared back at me with the same intensity.
“Nice day’s work,” I yelled. “What’ll you do tomorrow? Hold the door open while some guy steals babies from the maternity ward?” I held up my bag of clothes. “And these are going to cost you. Favorite jeans. Pepper spray. Ruined.” I pointed an angry finger at Tiny Guard. “The bill’s coming to you personally, Half Pint!”
Fuming, she started toward the elevator. I took that as a declaration of war and moved to step off the elevator to meet her, but Ben grabbed me up by the waist, loosening my hands off the doors, which then closed with a quiet whoosh. When he put me down, I reeled on him.
“They’re jackleg amateurs!” I said.
“That’s right,” Ben said. “Get it all out.”
I squeezed my eyes shut and drew in a cleansing breath, but it came out as a hacking cough that doubled me over.
Chapter 32
I still couldn’t sleep, even though I was dead on my feet and ached and burned all over. The encounter at the hospital ate at me and wouldn’t let up, wouldn’t let me rest. The old lady in the wheelchair had been a deliberate diversion. It, and the pretty nurse called to help, had drawn the cop away from Yancy’s room; now Yancy was dead. I busied myself around the apartment in the wee hours, cleaning out my fridge again, sanitizing my counters, changing perfectly good light bulbs. Busy work. At one point, distracted, I picked up the phone to call Pop and talk things over with him, then remembered. How could I forget?
Before dawn, I went for a bike ride to clear my head of wolves and death and guilt for not being there for Yancy. Eventually, he’d have been able to tell me what I needed to know. That’s why he was dead. He’d heard too much, seen too much. How many more lives would slip through my fingers before this was over?
I rode up to the zoo and back, along the path, the lake my only companion. My legs were tired from my mad dash hours earlier, my arm, still recovering from the damage caused by Jimmy Pick’s bullet, throbbed under the strain of keeping the bike steady. I got back home as the sun was rising, fell into bed and finally slept without dreaming, exhaustion managing to keep even good memories of Pop at bay.
The sound of a gunshot startled me awake. There was no mistaking the sound. And it was close. Too close. I checked the clock next to the bed. It was noon. I’d slept like the dead for hours. The blood-curdling screams came next. Marie’s, then little Nate’s. I bounded out of bed, no shoes, just sweats and a T-shirt. I grabbed my gun off the bedside table and raced for the door, taking the stairs three flights down at a panicked sprint to the street. I yanked the outer door open and tumbled out into the front yard just as a brown sedan sped down the block and turned the corner, black exhaust from a rusty tailpipe trailing after it.
“Cass!”
&
nbsp; I reeled to find Marie and Nate huddled together in a small niche behind the front stoop. Their eyes hit mine, wide and petrified, their faces blanched of color, their bodies trembling. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. I stood there, stunned for a second. Surely this was a dream. This couldn’t be what it was. Not here. Not Little Nate. Not my home. Mrs. Vincent and Barb raced out the front door.
“Don’t! Go back!” I managed to croak out, holding them back with an outstretched arm. “Call 911.”
They disappeared quickly, panic hastening their steps. The street came alive behind me as my neighbors filed out of their apartments to gawk at the scene. I heard the low hum of activity, but paid it no heed. My focus was on the huddle: the little boy, his mother. There was no blood that I could see. Their eyes were glassy, fixed. They were in shock. I slid the gun into my waistband, then knelt down and gently tried to separate them, to make sure they were both uninjured, but Marie had a death grip on Nate and wouldn’t let go. I let her be. I stood watch instead, shielding them from the street and the onlookers, until the first squad car arrived. It was all I could do. I didn’t allow myself to think about what might have been. I couldn’t, not yet, or else I wouldn’t have been able to stand at all.
* * *
The paramedics checked them both out. There were no nicks or wounds, no physical ones anyway. I stood close by, silent, my body freezing, afraid to look away for fear their status would change.
“The car just rushed up and the window came down,” Marie told the officers. “And they shot. We ran. Thank goodness, the stairs were there. What if the stairs weren’t there?”
I stared at Nate. He was small for his age, just four, full of life and bubbles just yesterday. Today, he sat stone faced, distant, his breathing uneven, labored. He was scared out of his mind. I wanted to cry. Then I wanted to kill the devils inside the brown car. Nate had been four, now he was older somehow. Marie turned to me, her eyes beseeching mine, pleading for answers I didn’t have. She was angry, frightened, confused. “He shouted ‘Back off, Raines.’ That’s what he said. He wanted you, not us. We could have been . . .” She began to weep. Nate clenched his eyes shut and leaned his body against his mother for comfort, and the rest of my heart, the parts still intact, broke.