Writing on the Wall

by Jenna Rae

  “Because we can,” Orrin breathed hotly into her ear. “We always get away with it too. You know we do. You’re either a sheep or a wolf, and you, my sweet little Lolly, are a sheep.”

  Lola shook her head. “No!” She thought she’d yelled, but it came out as barely a whisper.

  Orrin’s laugh filled her head, and it was what she’d always thought of as his ugly laugh, the annoying chuckle of the superior know-it-all.

  Lola was angry. Not angry, she thought. “Pissed off.”

  James’s grip loosened slightly as he shifted.

  His gaze flicked over her dismissively and went back to Del.

  He doesn’t consider me a threat, Lola realized. They all see me as a sheep. As someone who can be bossed around and shot and knifed and crushed and worked and pushed around like furniture. She was starting to hyperventilate and forced her breathing to slow.

  “I’m not a sheep.” She glared at Del.

  James shook her. “The grownups are talking, sweetheart,” he said, and then he laughed. It was Orrin’s laugh, that ugly, derisive sound that she hated.

  Orrin—no, not Orrin, James, Christopher James. Who was The Creep. Who had attacked her and killed her poor, innocent kitties. Who thought he could do whatever he wanted because he was a wolf and she was a sheep. He was talking with Del. They were talking about her, talking about her like she was, as he’d implied, a helpless child whose fate would be decided by others. Del clearly agreed. And Tom did, too. They all ignored her and acted like she was just a helpless, useless child.

  “I’m not a child,” she whispered, and they all ignored her.

  James’s knife was inches away from her throat, and that was scary, but her rage made the knife seem less like a danger and more like an insult. Lola didn’t think about what she was doing. She jutted out her chin and bit James on the fleshy thumb pad of his palm. There was a moment when she almost let go. He tasted very, very bad, and she realized that she was tasting his flesh and his blood. She fought a wave of nausea, but it faded when she thought about how he’d held her mouth against his pants. It was better to taste the bad man’s blood than his pants. Plus, it was satisfying, the way he screamed and dropped the knife and tried uselessly to pull away.

  Who’s the sheep now? She held on with dogged determination, and she was not a victim but an animal with strong, sharp teeth that were clamped on his helpless flesh and not letting go. Who’s the bitch now, bad man? He screamed again, and she smiled, feeling his blood drip from her lips as she continued to clamp down.

  ***

  Del felt like she was moving in slow motion, like they all were. James wasn’t the only one who was startled when the victim suddenly bit his hand. Del couldn’t quite process that, but she did see the knife drop, and that was the important part. James screamed like he was on fire, and Del lunged forward.

  Del reached for the victim as James’s knees buckled and he pulled her down with him. At the same time, Phan lunged forward in a back alley tackle: his forearm hit James in the throat, and his knee hit him in the groin. James, already off balance, fell backward with the victim. Del grabbed her and pulled hard to get her to let go with her teeth.

  “Let go. Come on, it’s okay.”

  But she held on. Blood streamed from between her lips, and her eyes were glazed. Del shook her, yelled at her face, tried to pull at her jaw. But she wouldn’t let go. Del changed tactics.

  “Good job, little darlin’,” she said in her daddy’s drawl, “you did real good, honey. Now you can let go, okay? All right. Honey, can you do that for me, please?”

  ***

  Lola was stunned. She was thrown sideways. She felt her throat burning as she scraped air into her lungs in quick, desperate gulps. She was sore and nauseous and laughing and crying. Her knee hurt. Her throat hurt. Her head hurt. Her lips really hurt a lot. Her teeth had clamped of their own accord on the bad guy and wouldn’t let go. If she let go, then James was right. If she let go, then she was a child and helpless and a victim. And Orrin would have been right all along. She didn’t think she could let go if she wanted to. Her mouth tasted like blood, and she was aware of how gross that was but still couldn’t let go.

  But then Del was there, and she was nice and was trying to gentle her like she was a wild animal. Or, Lola thought, an out- of-control child.

  “I’m not a child,” she said, glaring at Del. James’s hand went away, and Lola watched as Tom handcuffed him.

  Del put her hands up in a gesture of surrender. “I know that.” She sounded surprised.

  “Do you understand what I’m saying?”

  “Yes,” Del said, but Lola wasn’t so sure.

  “I don’t think you get it at all. I really don’t.” Her words were mushy.

  “Hey,” Del said, “you’re the one who got the bad guy.”

  Del smiled, and she saw the victim consider whether or not to believe her. Then she nodded and made a face and was Lola again.

  Del rubbed her thumbs gently on Lola’s reddened wrists. They’d bruise and would hurt in a day or two, but for now they were probably numb. Lola pulled her hands away.

  She was still feeling riled up, touchy. Her mouth was still covered with blood, and she absently swiped at it with the back of her hand, smearing blood on her hand and across her face.

  Del wanted to clean off the blood—was James carrying anything Lola could catch? HIV? Hepatitis? She’d have to get the doctors to test for everything.

  “Are you dizzy? Can you see okay?”

  “Del?” Was she real? Lola was feeling strange. Her mouth tasted very, very bad, and she gagged.

  “Let’s get you to the hospital.”

  Del sounded strange.

  “Are you okay? Did the bad man hurt you?” She pressed her face against Del’s, feeling her breathing and listening for her heartbeat. Del was shaking, but she was breathing. She was alive. The bad man hadn’t killed her.

  She tried to explain things to Del. He had two first names, and he was from the FBI. He wanted money from Orrin, but she didn’t have it. Could she please have some water? She had a dream, and there was a roller coaster, and Del flew away. That’s why it was important to come here. She was babbling, she could tell. But she didn’t know how to stop.

  As Del held Lola there on the floor of the kitchen, listening to Phan read a cuffed James his rights while Lola mumbled incoherently, she felt tears on her face. Were they hers or Lola’s? She should be calling it in. She should do any of the ten things that needed to be done now. But instead she sat and watched Phan and felt Lola shake and cry and breathe and be alive.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Del walked into the station and found Phan sitting in her chair. He held a cup of coffee out to her and smiled at her surprise.

  “I see you finally found something you’re good at.”

  He rolled his eyes and tossed a file at her. “Kiss my ass.”

  So things were okay between them, even though she was a dipshit and had lost her focus. Mostly because everything turned out okay. The victim was alive, the bad guy was in a box, and nobody had gotten killed, seriously hurt, written up or suspended.

  Thank God. Every time she’d closed her eyes to sleep, all she had been able to see was Lola’s face, drawn and white, her eyes wide and dark with fear, and James holding that ugly knife. At the time Del had mostly blocked out Lola’s face and replaced it with a cardboard cutout of a victim’s face. But her mind had recorded it for later, obviously.

  Thanks a lot. I really needed to remember that forever. It had been luck, not skill, that had saved them. And that wasn’t good enough. If she’d listened to Lola and gotten her in to work with a sketch artist again she’d have recognized James, and he’d never have gotten close to Lola again. If she’d put it together faster. If she’d done a dozen things smarter, better. Phan had been a rock. She’d thanked him a dozen times, and he’d finally told her to shut up and stop acting like a goddamn girl.

  Dominguez had managed to track
down Davis, but the Feebs were making noises about taking the collar. They seemed pretty smug, according to Dominguez. They weren’t sharing, but he thought maybe they had a line on the money. Del didn’t care. What did it matter? The money was beside the point. Didn’t anybody understand that?

  Del looked over at Phan and saw that he had a picture of his little girl on the desk. When had he put that there? Did it mean he wanted to be her partner, long term? She stopped, hands immobile, staring at the photo of pretty little Kaylee Phan in a plum-colored dress and a silk flower over one ear and a wide smile that showed a mouthful of braces. She saw Phan watching her and went back to work. Don’t make a big deal out of it, she told herself. Don’t act like a “goddamn girl” and say something about it. But she smiled a little when he wasn’t looking.

  She hadn’t had a permanent partner in over three years, ever since Buchanan got hooked on prescription drugs after his second knee surgery. She’d called him on it, privately, threatened to turn him in when she realized that he was lit up on the job. But she didn’t do it. She couldn’t work with him knowing he was wrecked half the time, but she couldn’t rat on him, either. A county mountie had popped him for a DUI and she was off the hook. No one ever asked her about him. He went to rehab on the city’s dime, took a job upstate, and she was a pariah.

  Were they pissed because she didn’t turn him in, or because they thought she did? She couldn’t be sure. Nobody ever said anything to attack her. She just wasn’t invited to the bars and the barbecues and the softball games and the lunches. She was just not one of them anymore, and it had taken two long, lonely years for that to change. Then, just when everything had started to get normal again, when she wasn’t invisible anymore, she’d met Janet and became nobody again. So maybe now she wasn’t nobody anymore. Maybe. At least to Phan and Jones and a couple of the other guys.

  It was several hours before the mountain of paperwork associated with the case was almost finished, and by then it was a federal case and out of their hands. Captain Wonderbread got them a ringside seat for the last half of James’s intake interview.

  He looked like a prince on a throne, Del thought, watching him through the interview room mirror. Legs wide apart, hands on his knees—one hand was bandaged, and she chuckled at that. Phan flicked a glance at her and smiled. He had his hands in front of him, almost touching the glass that shielded them from James’s view. She had her arms folded over her chest. James twitched his bandaged hand, and Phan snorted.

  “Remind me not to mess with Lola,” he said, and somebody shushed him.

  “Women don’t steal money unless there’s a man driving them,” James was preaching to the agents in front of him in the tiny interrogation room. He explained how he’d found her online, searched her house, planted the cameras.

  “She’s definitely a crazy little bitch,” he said. “Talks to herself. Talks to Beckett.” He shook his head. “Cute, though.” He shifted, smiled. “Smells nice.”

  He looked at the mirror. Del knew that he couldn’t see her, but it looked like he was staring right at her. “Sexy, too. Soft in all the right places, right, Mason?”

  Del shook her head. He was still playing games.

  A Feeb was asking him something, but Del was watching James’s smile. He licked his lips, grinned like a dog in a henhouse.

  “The cat thing? Oh, shit, yeah.” He laughed. “No, hell no, that wasn’t something I planned. It just came to me.” His eyes were gleaming. He was flushed now, excited. Now he was aroused. He’d been playing at being turned on by Lola, then. He was turned on by violence, blood, fear. Del made a face as James went on to describe the experience of luring and torturing the animals in detail for several minutes, but Del only half listened.

  What was it about killing the animals that had twisted him and taken him off purpose? The feeling of cutting through flesh? The sound of it? The smell? Was the compulsion something he was programmed, genetically or however, to respond to? Was it, somehow, his fate? There was another unasked question—how many people thought they were normal until they stumbled over the one act of violence that would turn them on? Are we all potential sociopaths, just waiting to hit the right trigger? She walked out, ignoring James’s continuing monologue espousing the joys of animal torture. She didn’t need to hear any more. She realized Phan had followed her and exchanged grimaces with him.

  “Ridiculous,” Phan said. “Assholes cut him a deal to testify against Davis. So he gets away with everything. Not to mention he’ll probably end up living in the suburbs in some nice neighborhood full of unsuspecting families. And our tax dollars will pay for that!”

  Del shrugged. That part was out of her hands.

  “Come on, Mason—tell me it doesn’t piss you off.”

  She tried to find a way to explain. “I think he’s seriously fucked up in the head. I think he’s gonna maybe turn out to be a really dangerous guy. But he’s off Lola, at least for now, and I can’t do anything about what he does in the future. The thing I was worried about was if she caught something when she bit him. But she didn’t. So, the rest I can’t worry about.”

  He looked at her a moment longer, debating, and then she saw him decide to believe her. He shrugged and headed for the door.

  “Hey, Phan,” she called. “Nice work.”

  “Yeah,” he said, not turning around. “I know.”

  She watched him, wishing she’d asked about his kid, found a way to cement the partnership, something.

  “See you Monday,” he called over his shoulder, and she nodded like it was nothing.

  “Not if I see you first.”

  His laugh followed him out the door.

  She left soon after that, fighting exactly the frustration Phan had expressed. To clear it away, all she had to do was picture James’s face when Lola clamped down on his hand and shook it like she was a ferocious little poodle. She laughed and started up her bike.

  ***

  Del had insisted that Lola stay with her, and Lola was grateful and glad. She wasn’t ready to face her own house, and she didn’t want to stay in another hotel, either. Del was working hard to make Lola feel welcome and normal and safe. She was being carefully kind and sweet and understanding. She spoke to her softly, moved slowly around her, and gave her plenty of space.

  It was making Lola crazy. She understood that Del was still thinking of her as a victim. That it would take time before she saw Lola as someone other than a hostage or a victim or a duty. That she was berating herself for letting that man get to her, for not believing her. She had to be mad at Lola for going to the house when she’d told her not to. She was probably repulsed by Lola’s marriage to Orrin and wasn’t sure if she even wanted to be friends, much less anything more.

  She only looked down the street at her own house once. Would she ever feel comfortable living there again? She couldn’t stay in Del’s guest room forever. She would have to face her fears sometime. Still, she turned away from the window and couldn’t make herself face a decision about the future. How had she looked to Del? Scared and weak and helpless. That was not the person she wanted Del to see when she looked at her. That was not the person she herself wanted to be.

  A careful, quiet, slow-moving and solicitous hostess was not the Del that Lola wanted to see and feel and know. It was the sleeping Del she wanted to know, the relaxed Del, laughing or eating pizza or jumping on a bed or just sitting quietly. The Del who had kissed her. She touched her fingers to her lips. But how well did she really know that Del? The house was the only clue in front of her, and she was almost afraid to see what it revealed.

  The house was smaller than Lola’s but had a similar layout. Del had mentioned once that she’d rebuilt practically the whole thing, and Lola wondered what her choices said about her. The wood floors were very dark. No throw rugs, no carpet anywhere. The minimal furniture was dark and utilitarian. Everything about the house was dark and cold and square. It looked like a monastery. No personal photos. No paintings. No plants. No throw pi
llows. No knickknacks.

  The whole house felt empty, as though no one lived there. Things were clean and organized, but there was somehow an air of neglect. The house felt cold, and this bothered Lola. Del was warm and passionate and funny and full of life, but none of that came across in her home. Del’s house seemed so lonely!

  Del brought home takeout, something spicy that Lola could only pick at. Del got a call and jumped up, almost knocking over a greasy container of noodles.

  “Uh, gotta go. Homicide. Don’t wait up,” Del said, and Lola could hear excitement in her voice. Now that Lola’s case had been solved, would Del lose interest in her? Had danger been the only thing between them?

  She said goodnight to Del and waited a moment, standing close to her, looking up at her, but Del just said goodnight and walked away. She was avoiding looking at Lola’s face. Lola tried to believe that it was because she didn’t want to see the bruises, but she knew it was more likely that Del wished Lola would go away and never come back.

  She wished she were brave enough to ask if Del liked her. But what if she said no? What if she said, Lola, you’re a nice person, but you were married to a man, and you’re old and fat and mousy and boring and stupid and a chicken who doesn’t know how to do anything right.

  Lola didn’t think that there was any real chance that Del would want to be with her, but she couldn’t help wanting to take a chance anyway. She felt like a third grader. “Check this box if you like me, this one if you don’t.” What if Del checked the “don’t” box? How could she not?