Two Weeks' Notice tr-2

by Rachel Caine

  He was a tall young man, and he looked athletic, but when she spotted him sitting in the chair, he looked…unstrung, like a discarded puppet. He looked up vaguely when she stopped in front of him and said, “Mr. Lindell?” in her gentlest voice. “I’m Bryn Davis. Why don’t we go into my office.”

  “Are my mom and dad here?” he asked, still seated. “Can I see them?”

  “Please, come with me,” she said, and the persuasive, understanding tone worked; it got him up and moving with her. As she shut the door, he looked around her office with blank incomprehension, and she guided him to one of the two small sofas, with the table in the middle. She’d learned her lessons from the old owner, Lincoln Fairview, well; there were tissues in a wooden box on the table, and a trash can tucked discreetly just where a visitor would expect. All her materials were ready—pens, forms, iPad with photographs of options. She sat young Mr. Lindell down, fetched him hot coffee when he indicated he might drink some, and otherwise just listened as he talked for a while. He didn’t, thankfully, return to his request to see his parents; that was something she wanted to avoid at all costs.

  “They said at the hospital it was instantaneous,” Mr. Lindell said. “That they never even knew.”

  It most likely wasn’t true, but Bryn wouldn’t have said so. Not to him, not at a time like this. “I know it was very quick,” she said. “I’m so sorry, Mr. Lindell.”

  “Eric,” he corrected softly. “I’m Eric. I want—I want to be sure I do this right, but I don’t know how. I’ve never—I’ve never even been to a funeral before. When my grandfather died, I was a freshman in college, and I couldn’t get back in time for the services.…” He seemed very pale, and much younger than Bryn had initially thought. “What happens now? What do I do?”

  “Do you have any other family members who want to be involved?” Bryn asked. She felt sorry for him, for the vacant suffering in his face. He was maybe twenty, she realized—much younger than her, in every way. She’d gone into the army and seen death and brutality; the worst this man had seen might have been a drunken fistfight at a frat party.

  Eric shook his head. “My sister’s off in Thailand on some kind of hiking trip. I can’t even reach her. It’s just me.” He suddenly took in a gasp of air and said, “I need help. I can’t do this. I can’t.”

  It was like a cry, and Bryn reached out and took his hand in hers. Instinct. It stilled some of her own pain that still boiled inside. “I know,” she said. “And I’ll help you through this.”

  It was the best part, she thought, of doing this job—seeing the relief in the eyes of those who sat on this couch, knowing they weren’t going through it alone.

  In the end, she undercharged him for the funeral, because it just…hurt to do anything else.

  The work did help, Bryn discovered when Eric Lindell finally left, paperwork in a folder for him to keep. It had been a long session, almost two hours, and the funeral home was quiet when she walked him out to his car. He seemed calmer now, and steadier, and as he was opening the car door, his cell phone rang.

  His sister, calling from Thailand. Bryn watched him from the indoor window as he talked, and cried, and finally drove away.

  Suddenly, she wanted to be back at the McCallister estate, with Patrick. Life is short. She was reminded of that every single day, here. I need to decide what to do about Kleiman, she thought. It was a thorny sort of administrative case—William hadn’t made a complaint, and Kleiman had taken the reprimand for Lucy’s complaint without too much grandstanding. Hard to dismiss her without incurring some kind of lawsuit, given the facts in hand.

  Maybe she’ll quit, Bryn thought. That would be a nice solution for everyone—voluntary departure. And maybe pigs will fly. You don’t ever get off that easily, do you?

  No. No, she didn’t.

  It was the work of a moment to pack up the laptop and thumb drive, then another five to check the doors and windows of the building and set the alarm before exiting. She was locking up when her cell phone sounded, and she juggled it along with the keys. “Hello?”

  “Bryn? Hi, this is Carl. I was—I was checking in to see when you were planning on having that support group meeting. I’d really like to be there, if possible.”

  Crap. She hadn’t thought about the support group at all for days. “I don’t know, Carl. Let me make some calls and see if I can set something up. Have you spoken with your wife yet?”

  “I—No. Not yet. Maybe if you would go with me to talk to her—I mean, having someone else there would be good, wouldn’t it?”

  Only for Carl. His wife would probably find it intimidating and terrifying, given the situation. But that depended on her, and him. “I’ll call you back,” she promised. “Are you having any other issues right now?”

  “I can’t sleep,” he said. “At all. I try, but I just lay there and think. I can’t shut my brain off. It’s like the nanites are making me do it. Did you ever feel like that? That they’re making you do things you don’t want to do?”

  That was alarming, she thought, and leaned against the pillar. “Like what specifically?”

  “I don’t know. Turn the car one direction instead of another. Think about—doing bad things.” He sounded positively strange now. “Nobody tested this stuff. They tested it on us. How do we know it’s not changing us, not making us dangerous? Do you know? Does anybody?”

  All of a sudden, Carl sounded like the darkest voices of her id coming out of the depths, and it was spooky. She’d wondered these things herself from time to time; it was easy to fall into despair in this situation and imagine every random thing that happened as a symptom of a nonexistent disease. The deadly thing was that if Carl convinced himself he wasn’t in control, what would he do? What couldn’t he do?

  “Are you thinking about hurting yourself? Hurting someone else?” She was not qualified for this, she thought in a sudden, angry fit of despair; no one had trained her, given her a diploma in how to manage dead people’s fears. Not even her own.

  His hesitation made her nervous, but then he said, “No, not really. I’m just—I think a lot, and that must be the nanites, right? That they’re working too hard or something?”

  “Carl, that’s why we have the group—because by talking out these things, we find out that what we’re feeling isn’t so strange or uncommon, okay? I’ve had the same sensations, the same thoughts. You can’t get better if you don’t reach out to people, and I’m glad you called me about it. If you feel that there’s something wrong, I want you to call the Pharmadene hotline and report it. They can check you out immediately. Understand?”

  “Yeah.” He sounded better, a little. Calmer. “Yeah, I forgot about the hotline. Sorry.”

  “It’s all right. You’re anxious, and that’s really pretty normal.” She laughed, a little sadly. “As far as normal exists for us, anymore.”

  “Okay. Thanks for saying that you’ve had these thoughts, too. I thought—I thought I was out there in the dark, you know? On my own?”

  “I know,” she said. “If you need me, call back. I’ll be here.”

  He hung up after a polite decompression moment of good-night wishes, and Bryn closed the call and took a deep breath. It wasn’t the first time she’d had the same conversation. All of them fell down the rabbit hole sooner or later; not everybody was able to climb out.

  When I get home, I’ll get the group schedule, she promised herself. She knew how important it was for people to stick together, talk, connect.

  Exactly what Pharmadene and the government didn’t want them to do, of course. But screw that.

  Bryn walked through the gardens, breathing in the roses and the rich, damp smell of earth, and was almost sorry when she reached the parking lot. Her car was parked next to two of the limousines, and she headed in that direction, half her mind on what she needed to do when she reached the estate. Show Patrick the vids. That was the first thing. He’d have some perspective on it, some insight she didn’t. And she needed him to share
this with her, help her process that helpless feeling of fear.

  That was just about the time that she became aware that something was wrong out here in the darkness beyond the glow of the garden’s lights.

  Bryn felt that indefinable prickle at the back of her neck. Ambush. That was an instinct that never really went away, even after taking off the uniform…the feeling that a predator was watching you, waiting for a chance to strike.

  She wished for a gun, but the fact was, she hadn’t come entirely unarmed. As she walked on, Bryn fumbled in her purse as if searching for her keys and closed fingers around the solid weight of a collapsible riot baton that accounted for about half the weight of the bag. She thought about her cell phone, but she’d already dropped it back in its pocket, and even if she managed to dial 911, it wouldn’t help; any possible fight would be over—in her favor or against it—before help could arrive.

  She felt a breath of air, something moving behind her, and lunged forward into a roll, yanking the baton out of her purse and flicking it out to full extension as she came back to her feet. The purse smacked to the pavement, and in the orange glow of sunset over the ocean, she saw two men dressed in plain clothes—jeans, work shirts, no identifying marks—who were wearing ski masks. They fanned out immediately, trying to work angles; she kicked the purse under the car to prevent it from fouling her footing and backed up between the car and the limousine on the other side.

  She didn’t speak.

  Neither of them moved toward her yet. They were assessing her position, and finding it tactically sound. After a few seconds they exchanged a glance, and one of them reached down to his belt and tugged free a stun gun, the kind that shot out darts. She gasped and dropped flat, rolled under the limo, and slapped her hands down to halt her momentum, then squirmed and rolled toward the tail of the long vehicle. She slithered out just as the man with the stun gun knelt down to peer underneath. He was temporarily distant from his friend, and she scrambled to her feet, lunged around between the cars, and hit him hard enough on the back of the head to knock him forehead-first into the metal of the limo door. He left a sizable dent.

  He dropped, and she kicked the stun gun under the vehicle.

  The second attacker stared at her for a second, figured his chances of getting to the stun gun, and backed up instead. She held the baton ready. The guy she’d put down wasn’t unconscious, just immobile. If the second one had a gun, the fight was over.…

  He didn’t. He did, however, have a knife. It was a nice one, matte finish combat model, and he obviously knew a thing or two about how to use it.

  Bryn felt a bit underdressed. And wished she hadn’t gone with the heels for the office. Cargo pants and boots would have been…better. She considered for a second, then kicked off her shoes to stand barefooted and backed away. He moved forward, taking the bait, and stepped over his supine, weakly moving friend. For just an instant, he was off-balance and wrong-footed.

  She instantly sprinted around the limo, up through the gardens, and shattered the glass window inset in the front door.

  Lights blazed on, and alarms began to shriek.

  She stood there, balanced on the balls of her feet, as the knife man stumbled to a halt a few feet away. “Five-minutes-or-less response,” she said. “You think you can get me, subdue me, get your friend, retrieve the stun gun, and be out of here by then? Because I’m going to make it hard.”

  Out on the road, a passing truck slowed down, drawn by the lights and sirens. Others would be calling in alarms.

  And he knew it.

  He pointed his knife at her in a catch-you-later motion, backpedaled, and scooped up his woozy friend. The friend had the car keys, which delayed them further.

  They left the stun gun and ran for a nondescript black sedan parked out on the side of the road, almost hidden in the shadows of the hill.

  Two and a half minutes, and they were gone in a smoking shriek of tires.

  Bryn kept the baton out. She was shaking too hard to put it away, and she badly wanted to sit down. Instead, she stayed on guard, tense as a guitar string, until the first flashing lights appeared below, and sirens climbed up to meet her.

  Then she sat down on one of the ornate decorative cast-iron benches, collapsed the baton, put it down beside her, and tried to draw in a breath that didn’t shake. They might have been robbers, she told herself. Or garden-variety perverts. Serial killers. Any of that was preferable to what she thought they were really after. She couldn’t stop the visions: strapped down on a gurney, shot, shoveled into a furnace as her flesh and muscle sizzled off her bones, and screaming and screaming.…

  “Ma’am?”

  She’d somehow lost track of time, and the adrenaline that burst into her bloodstream made her shoot to her feet and simultaneously flick the baton out to its full, most dangerous reach before sanity kicked in, and she realized that she was planning to hit a police officer standing there with his hand on the butt of his pistol.

  Bryn dropped the baton and raised her hands over her head. “Sorry,” she said, or tried to say, just as the shouts of down on the ground, down on the ground! deafened her, and one of the cops grabbed her, shoved her face down, and held her there as he kicked the baton away.

  Well, she’d earned that. And as the cuffs snapped on her wrists, she didn’t struggle in any way.

  In ten minutes, she told them her story, and in twenty, the police had found her purse and the stun gun both under the limo, just where she’d left them. They also found a dent in the limo’s passenger door where one of her attackers had banged his forehead, and some blood drops. And her shoes.

  It still took another hour for the necessary repetitive interviews and paperwork.

  “Sorry about that,” said the patrolman as he removed the restraints from her wrists. “Your security consultant is here to look at the damage to the building. We’ve verified your identity, Ms. Davis. Next time, leave the baton on the ground when the police show up, okay? Wouldn’t want any misunderstandings.”

  Security consultant? She looked up and saw Patrick McCallister standing near another of the cops, chatting as if he didn’t have a care in the world. He smiled, traded a handshake with the man, clapped him on the back, and strolled their way. He stopped at the bottom of the steps and said to the cop, “Is Ms. Davis free to leave now?”

  “She’ll need to come to the station and sign the reports.”

  “Any injuries?” he asked—the cop, again, as if she weren’t even there.

  “Not a scratch,” the cop said. “Lucky lady. Two against one, both armed. Could have gone real bad for her.”

  “Lucky,” Pat agreed without any expression at all, and for the first time looked at her directly. “Very lucky.” He helped her to her feet. He’d brought her shoes over, and she stepped into them. Amazing, how much better she felt with footwear on—how much less vulnerable. “I’ll make sure she’s available for any additional interviews you need. Oh, and there’s a company on the way to replace the window, should be here any moment. Ms. Davis’s assistant director is on his way to supervise.”

  Joe Fideli. Bryn could imagine how much fun that conversation had been around his home dinner table.…Honey, sorry, I have to go back to the office; there’s an alarm going off. If his wife didn’t believe by now that he was having an affair, they must have the best marriage in the world.

  The cops didn’t speak to her again, or even look her way, now that she was someone else’s responsibility; she was relatively uninteresting in the course of the investigation, which of course wouldn’t go anywhere. They’d taken DNA samples from the blood drops, and maybe they’d get fingerprints from the stun gun, but it wouldn’t matter. These had been professionals.

  And she had indeed been very lucky.

  Patrick said nothing at all to her as he walked her over to his car. “You drove?” she said. “You’re not supposed to be using that arm for a couple of days. We can take my car and I can—”

  “Get in,” he said, and
opened the passenger door. His eyes met hers, and she swallowed all objections, slid into the seat, and fastened her seat belt as he walked around the back.

  Even when they were on the road, he maintained strict silence until she finally said, “Who called you?”

  “Joe,” he said. The word had an edge to it, like a thrown blade. “He gets an alert from the alarm on his cell. He knew I could get here faster.”

  Of course Joe got the alert; she knew that, as she’d helped set up the system. Her brain felt slow just now, and bruised from all the day’s stress, even though the nanites wouldn’t let it bruise. Would they? No damage. No damage to her at all; she walked away clean and unhurt.

  Every time.

  “Please pull over,” she said softly. Pat didn’t respond, and suddenly she let it out in a full-throated, panicked scream. “Pull over!”

  He steered to the shoulder of the road, and even before the tires had hissed to a stop, she’d popped her seat belt, thrown open her door, and stumbled out into the cool early evening. The stars glittered overhead in an unusually clear sky, and she stared up at them as she trembled and gasped for breath, feeling—she didn’t know what she was feeling, really, except it was overwhelming and painful, and it wouldn’t stop.

  Patrick’s voice said from behind her, “It’s okay.” He wasn’t angry anymore; he sounded concerned. “Bryn, you’re all right. Deep breaths. In through your nose, out through your mouth. Close your eyes.” He put his arms around her, using both of them, and after a second of leaning against him, concentrating on her breathing, she remembered one of them should have been in a sling and not being used like this. “Relax. Relax. The fight’s over now. Ease down.”

  “Sorry,” she said faintly. “I don’t know what happened.”

  “You were running on adrenaline even before this, and you overloaded.” His breath stirred her hair, and he kissed the side of her neck, very gently. “I’m speaking from experience when I tell you that you’ll be okay, but you can’t run hot all the time. Gear down.”

  Well, she was a machine, wasn’t she? Run by machines, anyway. The black humor of that tickled the back of her throat, threatening a laugh she couldn’t release because she knew it would sound like panic. Or screaming. Cars blurred by them on the road, blowing waves of cool air over them. Bryn’s hair ruffled in the wind like silk, and she closed her eyes, finally, and let that rushing sensation take over. Patrick’s body anchored her in place, and the wind stroked over her, soothed her, like the roar of the ocean.