He was unconcerned about his earlier failure to kill her, but it gnawed at him that he hadn’t been able to off Borrows yet. Still, setbacks were inevitable. He was a detail person, and this was a possibility he’d planned for. Besides, the woman’s movements would prove even more predictable in this state.
Best of all, it prolonged the hunt.
And the hunt was all there was.
So he didn’t mind waiting, sipping water from a bottle as he kept an eye on her through the rifle scope. She’d just been handed off to another policeman—a man in a suit sitting behind a desk, concern written all over his face—when a bulky, heavyset man in an overcoat— Classic detective, Konrad thought—strode into the office and began speaking to the desk officer with his arms crossed. He looked most displeased.
From what Konrad could tell, the police didn’t seem keen on releasing the woman until they were convinced she was out of danger, though it looked like this new policeman might be shaking things up.
Whatever.
Improvising wasn’t a problem. Neither was patience.
So he watched, and he waited.
Very patiently.
5
Julie had no idea who this guy in the trench coat was, and she couldn’t bring herself to care.
All she could think about was how she should feel perfectly safe right now, and yet she didn’t. As the two officers in this small room conferred quietly—some kind of jurisdictional dispute, from the sound of it—she was met with the growing sensation that all of the oxygen was very slowly being vacuumed from the room. It was growing steadily warmer, and her heart beat a little faster with each passing minute.
The young UCLA officer finally cleared his throat before smiling again at Julie, as both officers turned to face her. ‘‘This is Detective Drexel, and he’s going to be taking care of you and looking into your case, Ms. Saunders.’’
Julie carefully got to her feet. ‘‘I just want this to be over. I still can’t believe it. Can I go home?’’
Drexel smiled at her reassuringly—though his smile looked an awful lot like the face other people make when they’re in pain—as he hefted his considerable weight a step forward in her direction. ‘‘Very soon, I promise,’’ he attempted to soothe, but his voice was surprisingly nasal and scratchy for such a barrel-chested man. ‘‘I need to get your statement on record at my office downtown, which is between here and your house. I won’t delay you any longer than I have to.’’
Julie thought quietly to herself as Drexel ushered her from the room.
‘‘Could it be gang-related?’’ she asked.
‘‘I doubt it,’’ he replied casually, his hand steering her shoulder through the all-but-empty outer room and toward the front door. ‘‘Any of your students unhappy with their grades lately?’’
She offered a halfhearted chuckle. ‘‘Students are always unhappy with their grades, Detective.’’
‘‘Stop!’’ Grant screamed from the back seat of the cab.
They’d reached the street outside of the UCLA Police Department. Standing there on the curb in front of the building was a girl. The girl without shoes.
‘‘Wait right here!’’ Grant shouted, jumping from the cab.
‘‘Honey, I can’t park in the middle of the—’’ the driver called after him, but he ignored her and ran toward the station house.
Grant had just limped through the building’s front door, following the shoeless girl inside, when he stopped cold. The young woman was nowhere to be seen, but Julie was right in front of him, being escorted straight toward him from a hallway on the right. She came closer, into the lobby, and their eyes met from ten feet away. She didn’t recognize him, of course, but she held his gaze nonetheless. Perhaps it was Grant’s bloodied and battered appearance—which was far worse than hers—but there was a peculiar expression on her face as she gazed at him.
Her long black hair was matted, disheveled, and her face gaunt and weary. Bags drooped under her eyes. If Grant hadn’t known who she was, he might not have recognized her. A big man in a blue trench coat had his hand on her shoulder, directing her, but now was shifting his attention to Grant, suspicion unmistakable in his features.
Julie didn’t look away as they drew closer together from opposite corners of the lobby. Time slid into slow motion for Grant as they came close enough to touch one another. He couldn’t bring himself to speak, couldn’t think of what to say, how to explain his situation, his appearance, his fear for her life. What was there to say? What could possibly escape from his lips that wouldn’t sound like the ramblings of a crazy person?
Grant took a step toward them. The cop yanked Julie out of concern, and at the same moment glass exploded from the window to Grant’s immediate right. Julie’s bulky escort fell sharply to the ground, but Julie herself stopped cold exactly where she stood.
Grant’s breath caught in his throat.
It was as if Julie had been frozen and bolted into place, in mid-stride, her eyes still trained on him. She simply . . . paused for a long moment, before her eyes rolled up and her entire body went limp. She collapsed to the floor.
Grant snapped out of his reverie and dove to shield her body with his.
The police department had erupted into chaos, officers screaming and shouting. More shots rang out and some fled for cover and others ran out onto the street. The first officer to attempt an exit had been gunned down, and now his body lay just outside the door.
For the hundredth time that day, Grant’s thoughts returned to a single notion: Why is this happening to me?
The shooting paused, and Grant knew instinctively that the sniper—Konrad, no doubt—had stopped to reload. Depending on the model, there should be somewhere between five and twelve seconds before the shooting resumed.
Grant blinked.
How do I know that?
No time to figure it out now, Grant labored onto his haunches and threw Julie’s limp, unconscious form over his shoulder. With his new body, she felt almost weightless. He took off down the hallway she’d just emerged from, a corridor without windows that paralleled the street outside.
The gunfire and chaos continued behind him, but it faded as he made a left, and then a right. He found himself at another entrance on the far right side of the building. Outside, he gently lay Julie on the grass and felt her pulse.
Alive. He scanned her for wounds, found none. Grant hoisted her up again and carried her toward the front corner of the building.
Peeking cautiously around the brick, he spotted a handful of black-suited officers illuminated by streetlamps aiming, pointing, yelling, running, barking into radios. One of them seemed to have spotted where the gunshots were coming from.
Grant’s cab had vanished. He wanted to be angry, after all the money he’d given her, but what could he expect?
No transportation.
Cops everywhere.
And Konrad will start shooting again any second.
Now what?
Come on, you weird new reflexes! Kick in again and tell me what to do!
Grant ducked and pulled Julie farther away from the edge of the building as another shot was fired. He couldn’t tell where Konrad had aimed this time, but he felt the need to be even farther away from the target area, all the same. It sounded like he had switched to a semiautomatic.
The policemen preparing to enter the Gondo Center were pinned down. Every time one of the men in black got close to the building, more shots would ring out, sometimes connecting with a leg or an abdomen. One fell and pulled himself to safety. Another fell and did not move. Only a pair of policemen remained able to fight, but they were taking cover behind vehicles.
Running out of time. . . !
Approaching the building was a red Jeep with no side doors and its canvas top missing. The Jeep had stopped at the sight of the drama playing out in front of the police station, and Grant seized the opportunity.
He climbed into the vehicle’s passenger side, laid Julie across the b
ackseat, and muttered a ‘‘sorry’’ to the stunned young man in the driver’s seat as he kicked him out the other side. The boy rolled on the ground, but Grant didn’t wait to see what happened next. He dropped into the driver’s seat and gunned the engine.
He’d nearly made a clean getaway when the big cop in the blue trench coat burst through the front door and stopped in front of the car, his gun leveled at Grant’s head.
‘‘Let ’er go!’’ he shouted in a pinched voice, his free hand clutching his opposite shoulder, which was bleeding.
But Konrad chose that moment to start firing again, and the cop turned his attention to the faraway window and fired his pistol in that direction instead.
Grant swerved around the cop and immediately heard a shout of ‘‘Hold it!’’ from behind.
He didn’t.
Julie moaned again. She was waking up.
Daniel Cossick had seen some strange things in his life—stranger than most could claim—but there were no words for what he was seeing at this moment.
Midnight had come and gone, and he’d just tracked down the source of the second shimmer at last.
Stepping across fresh yellow police tape, he tentatively touched the knife that was wedged into the subway station column. It had dug all the way into the cement, stopped only by its hilt from going in any further.
The subway was far from empty at this time of night, but no one seemed to care that he was taking a closer look.
He was surprised the police hadn’t tried to remove the thing from the wall.
Or maybe they had, and couldn’t.
‘‘What is it? What do you see?’’ Lisa squawked eagerly in his ear, making him jump.
When he’d settled, he replied quietly, still examining the knife.
‘‘Exactly what we’re looking for. Something impossible.’’
Daniel took a step forward and leaned in close to the weapon, getting as close an impression of it as he could. It looked rather heavy. Probably at least nine inches in length, handle to razor-sharp tip. The hilt was solid and had a comfortable, form-fitted grip.
This was no pocket toy casually left behind. To whoever owned it, this was something of great value. It would not have been left here by choice.
Daniel knew there was little chance of removing it, but he couldn’t resist trying. He gripped it with gloved hands, and after glancing around the station to make sure no one was looking, gave it his best King Arthur tug. It was a pointless exercise.
‘‘What does that mean?’’ Lisa asked.
Daniel turned to see the other roped-off area on the opposite side of the tracks. Spots of dried blood were visible on the ground. He twisted to face the pillar in front of him once more.
‘‘It means the Threshold has been breached,’’ he answered somberly, stepping away from the column but never looking away from the knife. ‘‘And all bets are off.’’
6
Grant drove. For hours, much of the time not realizing where he was going.
He had no destination in mind; he just wanted to get Julie away from danger. Eventually he took the 405 to Rosa Parks and then headed east back to the glow of downtown. Traffic buzzed even this late but never bogged down. He almost took the exit back to his penthouse but dismissed it. It was too dangerous.
The stolen Jeep finally came to a stop almost of its own volition at a small park called Hollenbeck Lake. Sunrise was still an hour or two away and Grant tucked the Jeep as far from streetlamps as possible. His mind should’ve been whirling, trying to decide what to say to Julie when she fully came to, but exhaustion overtook him and he fell into a fitful sleep.
He roused, chilled, when a glint of dawn peeked off to the east.
Julie made groggy noises from the backseat, and Grant carefully scooped her up into his arms, struggling under the weight on his bad leg. Her pocketbook still drooped over one shoulder. He glanced around frantically and spotted a park bench at the edge of the lake.
Even at daybreak he was unsurprised to find a small handful of runners already there, circling the water. Fitness always came first in L.A.
Grant placed Julie gently upon the bench, just as her eyes began to flutter open. He sat opposite her and steadied her, holding her upright.
She looks so tired . . .
Her eyes focused at last, and she screamed.
‘‘Listen to me, Julie—’’ he started, letting go of her.
‘‘Who are you! What—’’
‘‘Julie, listen! You know me! You know who I am!’’
She was in danger of hyperventilating, but she said nothing, both terror-filled eyes trained on him, taking in his bloodstained, battered appearance. ‘‘I—I do?’’
Grant was breathing rapidly, too, his thoughts coming faster than his tongue could handle. ‘‘I wish I could do this differently,’’ he spoke hurriedly. ‘‘But we don’t have time. We won’t be safe here for long.’’
Still she looked at him. He forced himself to breathe more slowly as he gazed into her eyes—those eyes he knew so well, so deep, the skin around them creased by long years of tears and laughter. What a life she’d led . . .
He was suddenly overcome with emotion, sitting next to her for the first time in years. And she looked at him with such intense fear.
He took one last, slow, unsteady breath.
‘‘Julie, I’m Collin. I’m your brother.’’
She stood up from the bench, and began backing away from him. Anguish filled her eyes.
She started to say something, but nothing came out. Instead, she just shook her head, unblinking.
Grant stood. ‘‘It’s the truth. I know you don’t recognize me—I don’t even recognize me—but I am the man you knew as Collin Boyd.’’
‘‘I’m calling the police right now,’’ she said. She pulled a tiny phone out of her pocketbook. She started to dial and turned and walked away from him.
Grant stood and swallowed. If he couldn’t convince her now, then they had no chance. There was no time for this. Konrad would be coming. What could he say that she would believe? One obvious thing came to mind, but he’d been avoiding that conversation for twenty-some years . . .
She was still moving away, nearing the shoreline.
There was no choice.
‘‘The day you left the orphanage,’’ he called out, ‘‘was the worst day of my life.’’
Grant had never spoken aloud these thoughts that had tumbled through his mind so many times. The gravity of the moment struck him just then, and his words came out slowly.
Julie stopped walking. Her fingers paused over the phone, but she didn’t face him.
‘‘You held me so tight before they took you,’’ he gasped, his throat full. ‘‘I was terrified when you let go. I tried not to show it. For you. I didn’t want to make it worse.’’ A tear built up in one eye, and then tumbled down his face. ‘‘I knew you felt bad. Maybe worse than I did. But I was petrified, Julie.’’
She stared off into the increasingly bright sky, blinking back tears of her own.
‘‘I never knew Mom. I barely remember Dad. You were the only family I had left.’’
‘‘This is cruel,’’ she said, shaking her head, still not looking at him.
‘‘You’re lying, you heard this—!’’
‘‘You begged your new parents,’’ he went on, barely able to choke back his own tears now. ‘‘—pleaded with them to take me—adopt me, too. But they live in Seattle and they could only take one of us.’’
She spun around, tears streaming down her cheeks. ‘‘I don’t believe you,’’ she shouted. ‘‘Collin lives in Glendale; he’s probably there right now. You can’t be him!’’
His gaze fell, too pained to meet her eyes. ‘‘The next time I saw you, four months had passed. Four months, Julie. You said you’d tried to visit sooner, that you asked them about it every day.’’ The tears were falling freely now. ‘‘But by then it was too late. You forgot about me.’’
‘‘That
’s not true! I could never—!’’
He sniffled and continued, ‘‘I know . . . now. I know. But I was lost without you.’’ His breaths came in heaves, and he finally raised his eyes again. ‘‘When you left at the end of that first visit—you whispered into my ear. Do you remember what you said?’’
She watched him warily, hopefully.
‘‘You told me that when we dream, we go to a special place where anything is possible. You said we would make this our—’’
‘‘Our safe house,’’ Julie whispered, finishing for him.
‘‘Where we could meet and play together every single night,’’ Grant concluded. ‘‘I went there every night in my sleep, or tried to . . . But even there you never came.’’
Julie’s phone fell to the ground.
Crying openly, a hand over her mouth, she walked back to him, staring into his eyes. She stood only inches from him, watching him. Wanting to believe, but dazed and confused. At last her expression softened. ‘‘You were always there in my dreams,’’ she said softly.
They both took choked breaths and then embraced hard, rocking back and forth, holding tight, as morning glowed gold and green all about them.
They never wanted to let go.
‘‘So what do we do about all this?’’ Julie asked. After he didn’t say anything, she prodded. ‘‘Collin?’’
They were back in the Jeep, and downtown L.A., unusually glossy and clear, beckoned them from dead ahead.
‘‘Grant.’’
‘‘What?’’ she asked, distractedly.
‘‘I’m still your brother, but I . . . I’m not Collin anymore. There’s too much . . . I can’t . . .’’ His voice, his entire manner had changed. He was focused and severe, but frustrated and tired, struggling for words. ‘‘My name is Grant.’’
‘‘All right, whatever.’’
Over the last hour at the park, Grant had filled her in on everything that had happened during the last twenty-four hours. All it had done was open a door to questions he couldn’t answer.
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