by Neliza Drew
The Monte Carlo hit her going maybe fifty or sixty, slid on the ice and took the bumper off a Ford.
I ran faster until I could no longer feel my legs. I bit my lip until I tasted blood and tried to slow my pace.
She was thinner, bonier, shorter. The impact broke her back, her pelvis, ribs. Her shirt caught on the bent grill. Dragged her. Blood. Snow. Red on white.
I crawled, moving myself forward with the few unbroken parts that remained able. I clawed at pavement under the snow. I shoved with my toes. I left a streak of dirty snow leading into the woods that bordered the parking lot.
There was nothing I could do. I knew if he found me, he’d kill me. I wasn’t sure I cared, but my body worked on reflex. Instinct.
The car carrying the Marines turned sharply and followed. Their catcalls turned ugly and their car screeched to a stop in a driveway ahead.
I forced myself back to the present. Didn’t seem like much of a fight, three trained killers against a glorified secretary.
And yet, my body was still convinced of its own survival. It would do what it had to until it couldn’t anymore. Like it had done before.
I could see him through the foliage. He stepped out and glanced at the damage to the car. He played with the slide on his gun the way he’d seen guys do on TV. I knew he did it to bolster himself and scare me. It still worked.
I pushed myself off the trail and rolled down a small embankment into the dried branches.
The driver put down his window. Leered.
I stopped. Waited.
In the car, the backseat passenger argued with the driver. He got out, dragged the driver out of the car. “What the hell are you doing?”
“You think she’s gonna report us? Get real. She’s out here, same as us.”
I was easy prey. Familiar territory. A place I’d taken myself too many times.
I rolled myself behind a rotting log, just past the reach of the high beams. I’d left a trail. If he looked, he’d find me. And I was in no shape to keep moving. The adrenaline had run out and the queasy pain had moved in.
He hung at the edge of the bushes, the wooded area between the buildings and parking lots. He had on the wrong shoes for the steep path in the snow. “If you come out now, I’ll make it fast.”
“Come on, we just want to talk.” The driver staggered a little.
I shook my head. “I got nothing to say.”
I kept myself quiet. Still.
He fired blindly, halfway through his rounds before one finally found me.
My legs shifted, hands crossing my chest in a concealed combat stance, intending to just look cold in the night air. Adrenaline automatically solved my exhaustion problem, but I knew that would be short-lived and then I’d crash hard.
The driver laughed. “Scared, tough girl?”
When the gun clicked dry, I lay behind a rotting log, bullets in my thigh and the base of my skull, not far from my ear — the last of which had passed through copious amounts of twisted arm and broken shoulder and part of a tree. Burning inside. Cold outside, creeping in.
“What do you want?” I glared at him without losing sight of the other two.
“What do you think?”
“Come on, man.” The passenger tried to pull him back to the car. The guy in the front seat appeared to have passed out.
“Let’s not do this. You’re drunk. You should go home.” I kept my voice even.
“Think you’re so tough.” He lunged a few steps and threw up. Beer and Jägermeister from the smell of it.
I glanced at the other one; the taller, more sober one. “Take him home.”
“It’s not safe out here alone.” He smiled.
“Is that why you travel in packs?”
“For what’s it’s worth, I’m sorry. We’re not all like that. You can report him, you know. If your CO has questions…” He shrugged.
I wondered what made him think I was one of them.
• • • • •
After they’d driven away, I made it another block before the adrenaline crash and exhaustion merged into a wall of aches and nausea. I threw up bile and walked the half-mile back to the motel where I sat on the bed and pulled off my smelly shoes and checked for blisters.
I’d done worse.
Chapter twenty-seven
The sun shone through the cracks in the curtains. My wounds had turned shades of purple and blue and brown and most of my muscles were on strike. I dry swallowed a couple of aspirin from the bottle I’d bought the day before and evaluated my options. After another shower, I pulled on a pair of dark jeans, a long-sleeve knit top with scooped neck that hid none of the scar on my collarbone, and my leather jacket. With a pair of small earrings and black boots, I looked nearly normal, which was as good as I was going to get.
I traded Mabel’s car for a rental at the airport and wiped hers clean.
On the way back, I called Craig’s father’s A/C repair shop. Craig’s smooth voice answered. As soon as he heard my voice, he said, “Look, Davis, maybe you’re right. Maybe old times should be left where they are.”
“Craig, I’m, well, I’m sorry.”
“You’re dying, right? This is a prank.”
“I deserve that.”
“Oh, wow. You’re serious.”
“You’re right. I shouldn’t have said that. I shouldn’t have kept so many secrets.”
“Davis, what happened?”
I was quiet for a long time. “I have to learn to stop running. I have to start telling. And I should have started years ago.”
“Okay?” He still sounded like he thought I’d lost it. At least he didn’t think I was dead.
“Do you want to meet for dinner tonight?”
“Uh, what? Okay.” He cleared his throat. “Look, I have a job down to Harker’s Island this afternoon, so how ’bout we meet at Clawson’s around eight. You know it? Probably not. Beaufort waterfront. It’s quaint. Tourists like it. Locals like it.”
“Sounds good. See you there.”
Oh, if only if were that easy.
• • • • •
The phone rang as I slipped it in the front of my purse. Tom. I started to pull off the road before I answered. Up ahead I saw a sign for a coffee shop. Perfect.
“Got a guy I want you to talk to.”
“Okay.” I parked and jogged across the street.
“Retired officer. Lives in Morehead.”
“Morehead?”
“Down from Raleigh. Staying at his sister’s.”
“And you know him because…?”
“He called me.”
“You know the person who shot at me claimed to be a cop.”
“Wasn’t this guy. Rubelli worked a task force with his CO about ten years back. Says the guy’s good people.” He rattled off an address that I dutifully copied on a stray receipt as I leaned on the stair railing. “Told him you’d stop by early afternoon. Don’t make me a liar.”
As he hung up, another call came through. A local number, but one that didn’t look familiar. “Hello?”
“Is this Davis Groves?” He spoke low, his voice altered by the connection, but I still recognized it.
“Eric Wright.”
“Sh, not so loud. What if someone hears you?”
I tilted my head at the phone like I often did with Charley. “What’s going on?”
“I can’t talk on the phone. Just stop calling me. Leave me alone.”
He hung up and left me staring out at the shrimp boats at the end of the street. “What the ever-loving hell?”
• • • • •
Everyone else at the coffee shop had sense to stay inside where it was cozy and warm. I wanted privacy so I retreated to the porch.
I knew from going through Lane’s papers that most of her friends were dead, except the mystery runaways. Overdoses, car accidents, suicide. Since I had to assume the police had her phone, I had no way of figuring out whom else she’d talked to unless Tom’s hacker buddy could get
her call list. Besides Sylvia and Rex, the only three left were Amber, her brother, Brad, and a Kelly. Amber had an address just east of Cape Carteret.
I called Amber’s number and waited while it rang six times before a bored-sounding teenager told me to leave a message. I hung up and redialed. On the third attempt, the bored teen actually answered.
“I don’t want any.” She hung up.
I called back and immediately got voicemail.
“Amber, my name is Davis Groves. I’m Lane’s sister. We need to talk.”
I sat down at a picnic table outside the shop to sip my brew.
After a few minutes I tried again. The chill in the air rapidly cooled my coffee. By the time it reached tepid, she answered again.
“Hi, Amber.”
“Who are you? Really?” Her voice was somewhere between tough and cautious. I recognized the tone and the false bravado.
“Davis Groves.”
“She’s dead. Try again.”
That was getting old. “Amber, tell me about Allister Connolly.”
“Go away.” She hung up.
I finished my coffee in a long swig and wondered where Amber had been when Charley’s car hit a deer.
Chapter twenty-eight
I found myself at the stoplight in Cape Carteret, specifically in the far right lane even though the fastest way to Newport would have been going straight. I’d turned on the blinker without thinking about it. I told myself it was because I missed the ocean, but that was a lie. It wasn’t like I’d grown up near the water, though I did find something like peace in my daily runs along Fort Lauderdale beach.
No, I knew Atlantic Beach and Eric’s “dingbatter” house sat at the other end of Bogue Banks and that was exactly the direction I’d pointed the rental sedan.
When faced with other people’s problems, I was perfectly capable of being methodical and reasonable and quietly researching answers until everything was solved. When facing my own problems, however, I had a lifelong tendency to behave irrationally, violently, and ridiculously. Lane’s problem felt too much like my own.
I was running on too little sleep and too many bad memories. So, of course, I was primed to do something stupendously asinine, incredibly stupid, probably uncalled for, potentially illegal, and in all likelihood dangerous.
Eric and I had developed a mutual respect and hatred of each other that I had a difficult time figuring out, let alone explaining. He hadn’t gone to high school with Jackie and me. He’d lived on the other end of the county so he’d gone to the other Carteret, with their blue and gold and us in our red and blue. Jackie had met him in English 101 and had been smitten from the beginning. He had that effect and he knew it. He used it. They’d become an easy item if an uneasy couple.
From the first time I’d met him, I’d known he was damaged. I never knew how, but somewhere in his eyes was the same pain I kept buried in mine and his efforts to play the regular guy seemed as forced as mine.
He was a baseball player, good-looking, always surrounded by superficial friends and his shadow, Vince. Her mother loved him from day one. He was like that. Such a charmer he even knew the right words to say to a housebound zealot. Jackie’d accused me of being jealous: of her, of him, of what they had. Maybe a little. Mostly, I worried no one else saw the wolf in the snappy clothing, but maybe more so I was worried I was imagining things that weren’t there.
I tried to enjoy the scenery.
Emerald Isle, Salter Path, Pine Knoll Shores — all beautiful little beach towns in summer, full of tourists with sunburned skin carrying lawn chairs and skim boards. In winter, the beach houses sat quiet, some still boarded up from hurricane season. Clouds hung heavy. A misty rain started just east of the Emerald Isle high-rise bridge and shrouded me until Pine Knoll Shores. Occasional glimpses of the ocean between houses and dunes revealed it angry, a dull grayish green dotted with white caps. Certainly not the flat turquoise water I’d grown used to further south.
I rolled passed Eric’s house like I belonged. It was a three-story wooden structure on stilts that sat midway the street about a sixteenth of a mile from the ocean. There weren’t any cars in his driveway, and since there was no carport, it seemed likely no one was home. Most of the houses on his street looked abandoned for the season.
I scoped the neighbors for signs of life — cars, open curtains, soccer moms, minivans, balls left in the yard, footprints. My thievery as a kid had never really extended to breaking into houses for monetary gain, but that didn’t mean we hadn’t done it for other reasons. I’d also met enough criminals only too happy to share their thoughts on target casing.
I found little evidence of life forms inhabiting most of the houses on his street aside from a sign proclaiming the house next door as Ned and Nancy’s Vacation Paradise, where the lawn was littered with Little Tyke cars and plastic animals. A silver minivan was parked in the driveway, cartoons visible on the TV through the front window. Didn’t look much like paradise to me.
I drove around to the street behind his, where none of the houses looked inhabited. I parked in the public-access beach lot at the end of the street and walked back, hands in pockets, hood up like I was just a cold local out for a walk. No one tried to stop me as I slipped along the fence line separating Eric’s property from Vacation Paradise. His yard was mostly sand and sparsely populated with half-dead yucca and sea oats.
Wooden stairs, a minor upgrade from a loft ladder in a camp cabin, led up to the second-floor door. Too long and high for me to sneak up. I glanced around again before walking across the yard and up the stairs as if I belonged. My lock picks were at home where they belonged, assuming one had a reason to own such a thing other than having a cat burglar neighbor who kept trying to teach me his former trade.
Eric apparently wasn’t afraid of break-ins, though, because his back door didn’t even have a deadbolt and the lock popped easily with a little finesse and a pair of safety pins from the tags on my new clothes. Okay, I may have hip-checked it, too.
The back door opened into a laundry room. Aside from the fact Eric seemed to own no soap or fabric softener, it was fairly standard, with an inexpensive washer and dryer. No muddy axes. No piles of suspiciously bloody clothes. No written confessions. No vats of acid or body parts. Just rarely used appliances.
Inside, I found the air still cold enough to need my jacket. From where I stood, I could see straight through the kitchen pass-through to the living room. A lamp near the front window was still on, but otherwise the place looked and felt deserted. A large TV surrounded by electronics and whatnot took up one wall. No books, no movies, nothing personal. Like the place was for show. The fridge held a sack of condiments and a bottle of fifteen-dollar Chardonnay. I pulled the cork out and sniffed, got a nose full of vinegar. Two glasses still sat on the counter, the residue at the bottom no longer even syrupy.
Off the living room I found a staircase, carpeted in the sort of mind-numbing beige common to new construction. The kind that caught dirt easily and still had enough pile to show impressions. What looked like a pair of large boot prints had tamped the carpet down on their way out; I used the impressions to go up.
The hallway upstairs looked more like a suburban house than a beach cottage, with narrow drywall hallways and closed doors. Windows had been placed at either end, facing the street in the front and the back of another house to the rear. Everything white with just a hint of beige.
All the rooms had windows designed to take advantage of ocean views on one side and Intracoastal views on the other. On the right sat an office, a bathroom, and a small bedroom furnished with a cheap futon. On the left, a master bedroom with its own bathroom, a closet full of linens, and a spiral staircase up to the final floor, which housed nothing but cardboard boxes and stacks of old, dirty campaign signs.
I headed back down to the office. My phone vibrated as I checked out the credenza, wall shelves, and desktop as best I could in my winter gloves.
I flipped it open. “Yeah?”
>
“If you have to whisper, I know you’re up to no good.” Tom.
“Just a bit of recon.”
“You broke in.”
I didn’t answer because I was busy trying to figure out his screensaver password. If Tom hadn’t been on the line, I had almost just enough chutzpah to call Eric and ask for it.
Password. Wright. Eric. Seahawks. Baseball. Menhaden. Jackie.
The screen came to life and I found myself staring a photo of a dead teenager.
“When you’re done breaking the law, I have something you might find interesting.”
I hung up and stuck the phone back in my pocket, feeling queasy.
She had been laid out on black sheets in a small wooden space without windows. A nearby shelf, like the kind in a cabin, was covered with powders and needles, but the thing that stuck out, literally, was the knife protruding from the center of her small, naked chest, right under a large tattoo obscured by blood.
I forced myself to look closer, but I saw none of the signs that the drugs had been her idea. No tell-tell tracks, no skin-popping marks, no dust in the blood around her nose. What she did have was considerable bruising around her upper arms, on the inside of her thighs, across her face. The kind of bruising I not only recognized, but knew from the color was at least a day older than the fatal knife wound.
I shivered and fought the urge to run out of the house, and out of the state.
Instead, I took a deep breath and looked at the rest of the screen. Email. He’d opened an attachment and found this. The email had been sent through a web-based service from an igotyou465. No name, nothing to identify it. Had I been savvier, I might have still gotten to the sender. As it was, my only clue was the subject line: MISTAKE.
I pulled out my phone and recalled the number Eric had called me from. After three rings, a gruff-voiced woman answered. “Capt’n’s Table.”