by Neliza Drew
Standing wasn’t where I was strongest. I wrapped my injured leg around his, tangled him and toppled him backward. His head bounced off the deck, my elbow came down into his sternum.
He tried to lift the gun. I grabbed his hand and torqued his wrist. His finger, jammed inside the trigger guard, squeezed off a wild shot. His finger broke. I pulled, off-balance, and fell back, the gun still in my grip.
The muscle in my thigh stretched as I fell. Agony-induced nausea roiled my system and I fought the urge to black out.
Vince pulled himself out from under me, placed a hand on my naked thigh, his thumb over the exit wound.
I spun the pistol in my hands and got the deadly end of it pointing at him.
He jammed his thumb into the hole.
I screamed and pulled the trigger.
Chapter fifty-eight
The urge to vomit hit again, but when I tried, I failed.
I managed to drag myself out from under Vince before the pill started taking effect. It had been maybe five minutes, no more, but the adrenaline rush could have accelerated it. Or, maybe it wasn’t the pill making me feel woozy and drunk, but rather the blood loss and overwhelming agony.
The boat had a flare gun mounted to the wall with the instruments. I changed channels on the radio until I heard voices. What sounded like the local rescue squad responding to a traffic accident near Otway.
Otway. Downeast. I was so far from a hospital. Maybe as far as Jimmy had been.
I hit the talk button. “Help? Please. Help.”
No answer.
“If you can hear me and you know Craig Silvano, please go find him. Please save him if you can. He’s been shot.”
“Ma’am, who is this? Come back.”
“I’m on a boat. I think Craig was in the yard. With a deputy.” My eyes felt heavy. “I don’t know where I am. Eric Wright might own the place. Or Vince Zellner.”
I hobbled outside the cabin and fired the flare. I needed to get to a road, flag someone down. I needed to find help before I passed out.
I drank the coffee and made small talk while the bill arrived. He smiled too much, encouraged me to finish the coffee before we left. Made small talk about sports with the waiter.
I stumbled off the boat and onto the dock, narrowly avoiding landing in the water instead. My legs gave out. I pulled off a tattered piece of shirt and tied it around my leg. Used the wooden slats to pull myself forward. Found a broken piece of pottery and gripped it as I pulled myself along the grass.
My coordination failed. My vision blurred. My eyelids drooped for longer and longer. Every time I snapped back, I dragged the filthy ceramic along the inside of my forearm. The pain brought me back, but briefly. I decided not to think about the effect the blood loss was having.
I reached the cop car in the driveway on the verge of consciousness. I knew I wouldn’t remember more than flashes later.
The dash color in the car.
The street sign near the restaurant.
The texture of the couch.
The look on Ryan’s face.
My ruined fingers pawed at Craig’s neck, begging the universe for a pulse. “You have to be okay,” I whispered to him. “If I’m still moving, you have to be okay.”
Murphy lay next to him, cloudy eyes staring sightlessly at the cloudy sky. His gun still at his side with his phone. I pulled the phone loose and pressed the emergency button. Put my head on Craig’s pelvis while I waiting for an answer.
“Officer down.” I set the phone next to me and let my eyes slide closed.
Chapter fifty-nine
Tuesday, February 14
I don’t believe in miracles. Miracles are for people who overcome near-fatal diseases. Miracles are for kids who think some deity’s helping Santa deliver gifts. Miracles are unicorn poop.
They’re also waking up after being shot and left for dead — again. It’s probable I should start believing in miracles, or at least unicorn poop. Maybe after more surgery and rehab to relearn using parts that worked fine before. Maybe after the nightmares passed.
I woke with tubes sticking out of my nose, my throat, my hand.
Nik sat on an orange plastic chair staring at me. She looked like she’d been there awhile. I wanted to ask her if Lane was okay, if she was really there.
She stood. “You still can’t talk. Tomorrow maybe. Tomorrow’s Wednesday.”
I nodded.
“I won’t yell at you until you can yell back.” She pointed at the contraptions.
I nodded.
“Does it hurt?”
Everything everywhere hurt, but I didn’t want to tell Nik that. I shook my head slightly.
“Liar.” She wrung her hands and scrunched her face. “They were sure you wouldn’t make it. You didn’t for a minute.” She looked mad about it. “Stubborn.”
I nodded.
“How? Davis, how did…?” She mashed her lips together.
I had the same question. How, indeed.
“Tom’s nice.”
I nodded again. My eyelids felt heavy.
Nik stood. “I can’t do this right now. I just can’t.” She left.
I fell asleep.
• • • • •
My hands didn’t work so great because of the bandages and splints, one on my left pinky finger and one on my right thumb. I pulled off as many bandages and I could using my teeth. My face hurt. My hands hurt. My hands I could stare at, see the hurt. Stitches crisscrossed old scars and I could guess where they’d later tingle or register only numbness or pressure.
My left arm was fitted with casts and hinges such that it looked like I’d stolen it from a fifties robot. I didn’t remember breaking it.
Cindy, the physical therapist I’d insulted the day before, popped in while I was staring at the mess of surgical tape and stitches around the GSW. I was thinking it was pretty in a grotesque sort of way, all the different colors and patterns.
She must’ve thought I was thinking something else. She ambled closer, giving me a tentative smile. “It’s going to heal up just fine.” She didn’t even chastise me for ripping the hospital gown.
I nodded because that seemed like better than my usual responses. “When are we going to walk?”
“Well, you have a broken leg, quite a bit of muscle damage.” She smiled, changing gears. “I actually came by to see if we could reschedule for later. There’s an FBI agent wants to talk to you. Doc wants you to talk to the hospital psychiatrist first, make sure you’re up to it and all. Formality, I’m sure.”
“I don’t need a shrink.” My voice sounded gravely.
She kept the grin. “I don’t believe it was an option. The hospital feels it’s in the best interest of the patient in situations like this that we make sure your total well-being is considered.”
She sounded like a fucking brochure.
“Just what kind of ‘situation’ am I in?”
“We find that patients who almost die in surgery, patients who… Well, just that they need someone to talk to.” She pulled the blanket up to my chin, covering the wounds I’d been looking at.
I wanted to tell her it was fine. It was okay. I wanted to reassure her. I knew from experience with Nik that wasn’t likely.
“They did a kit.”
I nodded. “They won’t find anything.” That certainly wouldn’t help my defense.
“They found flunitrazepam — Rohypnol — in the tox screen.”
“I know.”
• • • • •
The hospital shrink was busy and young, likely fresh out of school and doing some sort of rotation before moving on to a private office in the suburbs. She wore khaki slacks and a tight pink sweater, from which she pulled loose brown hairs as she walked in.
I watched her open a manila folder, study the contents quickly and smile broadly. “I’m Sandy.”
Sandy. Cindy. Seriously? “Davis.”
“How are you feeling today?”
“Can we just cut to the chase?
I feel fine. I mean, mentally, fine. Physically, I feel like I got shot and beat up, but that’ll heal and then I’ll be fine.”
“You know if there’s anything you want to talk about, anything you tell me is completely confidential.”
“Just tell me what to sign.”
• • • • •
Tom opened the door with a blonde in tow. The blonde introduced herself as Special Agent Martha Stewart and dared me to laugh at that.
Laughing hurt, so I stuck to nodding.
“The boat offshore? You do that?”
“I need a lawyer?”
She shook her coif and looked like she needed a cigarette. “Don’t give me that. I have DNA, witnesses who saw you drag your ass onshore.”
I thought about telling her I could find witnesses who’d seen her bake a cake, but decided against it.
“Up to the prosecutor. You took away part of her payday killing Zellner and Wright.”
“I didn’t kill Wright.”
“So you admit to killing Zellner. Your gun killed both of them, you know.”
Tom buried his face in his hands. “I’m going to get Lawson.”
“I left a whole lot of DNA there, too, you want to go all CSI on me.” I glared at her even though my face was probably still too puffy to pull it off.
“There’s also a destroyed police car, a dead officer—”
“What about Craig Silvano?”
She mashed her already-lipless gums together.
“I’ll wait for that lawyer.”
“You know that just makes you look guilty.”
I stared at her, watched her fingers. “You planning to quit smoking?”
“Tanner Jackson. He worked the night shift at a packing plant.”
Rayford’s kid.
“You buried a knife in his carotid. Takes a lot of strength and a lot of hate to do that.”
“Or fear,” I said.
“Silvano’s alive. Awake. We’ll see if he backs your story.” She flicked an imaginary cigarette and left.
Chapter sixty
Thursday, March 16
Lawson got himself a team. The team set to work drafting things, getting evidence independently analyzed, asking me a lot of questions about what I did and didn’t do, why Charley’s house was a pile of ashes, why Wright’s body was in the ashes.
A plastic surgeon explained how he planned to repair my face — broken bones, lacerations, burns from the shot that tore a hole in my ear — and my leg and my hand. Again. He told me there was nothing he could do about the toe or the ear. I didn’t care.
Cindy kept my mind off all that by trying to keep me from pushing myself back into intensive care and convinced me to get my arm working again slowly instead of punching the wall until I broke something else.
The nurses ensured I weaned myself off the morphine slowly rather than my cold turkey plan of yanking all the tubes out as soon as the swelling went down enough to grasp stuff. They still couldn’t talk me into the pills. I spit them out, threw them away.
I needed to be in agony. I deserved it. And the physical torture almost kept the torment in my head and heart in check. Almost.
Nik wandered in and out, looking alternately forlorn and pissed. She sat on the bed. Most of what she said involved updates on Charley’s progress with rehab.
I said little, too. Lawson might keep me out of prison, but the best deal he’d been able to get for Lane had been twenty years. Part of that was my fault. I’d killed three of the people she might have testified against. Still, she’d killed Billy, whether she’d meant to or not. She’d helped kidnap Melissa Armstrong, which made her legally responsible for the girl’s death. She’d hurt too many others. She’d earned the time.
I missed her sentencing, but Nik said her eyes had looked dead.
“She won’t come out the way she went in.”
Nik wrung her hands. “Maybe that’s good.” She left before I could see her cry.
At some point I called Matt. He asked how I was. I decided to give him a taste of the truth. “I don’t think we should see each other anymore.”
“Is it someone else? You met someone up there?” He was quiet for a moment. “I know I haven’t been the most attentive. I can do better.”
I swallowed. “I just remembered who I am is all.”
• • • • •
Eventually, the hospital discharged me. The various agencies told me not to go anywhere. I checked into a hotel across the intersection from the hospital, so I could get back easily for Cindy’s therapy, and tried not to go stir crazy. Nik got a room on one side, and spent most of her time on the phone with professors, doing online research, writing her thesis and an article on a nesting swallow.
I was lost in my own head. I replayed the things I’d done. I replayed the things done to me. I wallowed, without the booze and pills Charley used. I was trapped without my usual coping mechanisms and I was coming apart. For all his efforts when alive, I feared Zellner had finally broken me now that he was dead.
• • • • •
Nik knocked on the door, stood in the chill, arms wrapped around her, looking unsure and almost skittish.
I leaned against the open door.
She took my arm, looked at my hand. The stitches were gone, but the scars still looked like angry reddish purple lines. “Put on shoes.”
I looked around the room, not sure I owned shoes anymore. My duffel bag had been found in the rental car, but my boots were evidence. All I had were some fuzzy slippers from the hospital gift shop despite Cindy’s insistence I wear sneakers to PT.
Nik looked at them, looked my leg, the crutches leaning against the doorframe. “Come on. We’ll take the elevator.”
At the elevator, she looked up at me. “Run.”
“Excuse me?”
“Run, Davis. You’ve done it before. We’ve all done it. Just, this time, fake who you are. You’ve barely got any fingerprints left. Get a new identity. Go back to school. You’re young. Study astrophysics or something. Just go.”
She was crying, and seeing her tears, I couldn’t stop my own.
“Just go. I got you some clothes. In the car. I rented it under my name, but you can dump it like we used to. Steal another. Keep going until you’re clear.”
I shook my head.
“I know what you did. All of it. I’m sorry. Let me do this to make it up to you.”
“No. I ran alone once. I won’t do it again. They want me to do time, I’ll do time. You need me, I’ll figure out how to be there.”
She looked up at me, her eyes pleading. She was trying to tell me she’d been a big girl when I thought she wasn’t. That she wasn’t a vulnerable teenager or a drug addict. That she’d be okay if I split.
I shook my head, shuffled back to my room.
• • • • •
Lawson knocked the following afternoon. Agent Stewart was with him, looking pissed.
I left the door open and went back to sitting on the bed.
Lawson went directly to the windows and opened the blinds. Stewart stood in the doorway, hands on her hips, ready to pull her gun.
I gave her a look that I hope dared her, but wasn’t sure I pulled it off.
Finally, Lawson sat on a chair. “We have a deal. We’re waiting for the prosecutor. Normally, we’d do this at the office, but this is more convenient given the circumstances.” He gestured at my leg and off in the direction of the hospital.
Stewart glanced at me like she wanted to pinch my head off and chewed her gum harder.
The prosecutor was a middle-aged woman stuffed into a power suit like a sausage. She introduced herself in a rush and I promptly forgot her name, her exact title, and to say hi back. Instead, I stared out the newly opened blinds.
“The same gun shot a commissioner, a deputy, a volunteer EMT, and a suspected trafficker. You fired it, but so did the trafficker,” Sausage Woman said.
Lawson said, “They can’t tie you to Wright because Murphy already ha
d you and Silvano. Silvano stated Zellner had the Sig.”
I didn’t respond.
Lawson added, “They found some girls, younger than Lane, hanging out at Jackson’s house, shooting up. Watching TV. They heard it all. Ignored it. Turned up the TV.”
I kept staring out the window. The part of me that had lived my whole childhood outside the boundaries of normal and safe hoped they’d be okay. The part that had seen the look on Lane’s face, had really listened to Nik for the first time in a long time, wasn’t so sure.
“Ms. Groves, are you listening to me?”
“No.”
“Do you think maybe you should?”
I looked as far as her strained jacket buttons and shrugged. Shrugging still hurt, but for new reasons.
“Are you okay, Ms. Groves? Have you taken anything?”
“Just tell me what you came to tell me.”
Sausage Woman looked at Lawson. “You need to get your client some help.”
He looked at her like she was an idiot.
Stewart had taken to lounging on the wall, still ready to shoot me if necessary.
I was sick of all of them. Their self-righteous stares. The false concern. The tiptoeing like I was a dying toddler. “You know what? Fuck you. You want to arrest me? Do it. If not, spit it out and get out.”
Sausage Woman huffed and clasped her hands together just so. “I came to tell you we’re clearing you of any charges.”
I looked at the carpet. It seemed clean enough on the surface.
After the women left, Lawson pulled a chair across from me and sat. “She makes it sound generous, but they had no case. The evidence isn’t clear-cut. Our side brings up roofies and the fact that you were nearly naked when they found you, there’s no way a jury will convict you. Besides, your blood’s all over the trunk of the deputy’s car. No way that got there innocently.”
I looked up.