I shot out of the tube and landed on something big and warm and solid. Calahan was on his back, on a pile of rubble, and I was lying face-down on him. I knew we needed to move: we were still way too close to the building. But I was done. Every part of me ached and throbbed and I was so utterly exhausted, I couldn’t even lift my head.
Running footsteps, coming around the corner of the building. A muttered curse in a voice I thought I recognized. Then Calahan’s body started to move, with me on it. We’d slid twenty feet before I finally managed to look up.
Alison. She was dragging us clear. “Keep going,” I rasped. “Building’s going to—”
A wall of sound and force smacked into us, knocking Alison on her ass. I saw our shadows for a second, a false sun of red and orange lighting us up from behind. Alison scrambled to her feet and dragged us even faster as debris began to rain down around us. Then there was a rumble that turned into a deafening roar as the building collapsed. A cloud of dust blew over us and Alison finally staggered to a stop, panting.
Calahan groaned. I took his face between my hands and slapped at his cheeks. “Sam? Sam?”
Those gorgeous blue eyes opened and blinked up at the two of us. “What happened?”
I let myself collapse on his chest and just lay there. “I saved your life,” I mumbled. “It was awesome.” I stayed there for a moment, just enjoying the feel of him. Then I remembered something and lifted myself up just enough to punch him in the arm.
“Ow! What was that for?!”
“That was for that sacrifice yourself to save me bullshit,” I told him. “Don’t ever do that again!”
And then I leaned down and kissed him long and hard. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Alison grinning.
“And what was that for?” he asked when we came up for air.
“Same thing.”
56
Yolanda
CARRIE TOOK one look at us and said that our debrief could wait until tomorrow, and that we should get ourselves to the hospital. We didn’t argue.
The emergency room was packed and we had to wait in chairs to be seen. Every so often, I’d look across and find Calahan gazing at me, determined and urgent. He’d draw in his breath, then glance at the people surrounding us, scowl and go silent. There was something he needed to say, something we needed to be alone for. I gulped.
When the doctor finally saw us, we discovered we’d gotten off lightly. We’d both picked up some bruises—Calahan several more than me—and some superficial burns, and Calahan had a mild concussion, but we were otherwise okay.
When the doctor told him how lucky he’d been, Calahan rubbed at the lump on his scalp and grinned. “I got a hard head.” But as soon as the doctor moved away, he was back to gazing at me. All that stubborn, determined focus he applied to his cases was one hundred percent focused on me.
He drove me home and, as we pulled into my apartment building’s garage, it hit me: no wheelchair. It was like a physical ache, like I’d lost a part of me. Calahan came around to my side, stooped, and held his arms out. I hesitated. This wasn’t like in the chemical factory. That had been an emergency. I wasn’t sure how I felt about—
He looked me in the eye and nodded firmly.
I tentatively reached up and put an arm around his neck. A big hand slid palm-up under my thighs and hooked under my butt. He leaned in and—
Suddenly, I was flying, lifted effortlessly, and cradled close, my body pressed against his. And it didn’t feel like he was treating me like a child. I didn’t feel weak, or helpless.
He brushed a lock of hair off my face. “Hey you,” he rumbled.
“Hey you.” It came out as a tight little whisper. One arm was hooked around his neck, my hand on his back, and I was suddenly aware of the hot solidness of him, the muscles under my fingers. Without willing it, my other hand went to his bicep, tracing the shape of it through his suit, feeling how hard it had gone as he hefted me. I looked around the garage. “What now?” I asked. “I mean...how long can you hold me?”
“As long as you need me to.” And then he was walking to the elevator and I was rocking against his chest, cradled protectively to his big pecs in a way that made me want to cuddle in even closer.
So I did. And it felt amazing. Why didn’t I do this sooner?
Because I’d never met anyone I trusted this much, before.
He carried me all the way up in the elevator, all the way into my apartment. There, he set me gently down on the couch. And then he knelt down in front of me and took my hands in his.
He shook his head and scowled at the ground for a moment. Then he slowly looked up and I caught my breath when I saw the force of the emotion in his eyes.
“There’s some stuff you need to know,” he began. “Stuff I don’t tell anybody. I’ve been...scared.” He spat the word out in disgust. “Scared that if you knew, you wouldn’t want me. But when I nearly lost you, I realized...I need you in my life. You’re the most amazing woman I’ve ever met. And I can’t be with you, really with you, if I’m keeping this from you. So I need to tell you, and if you hate me, if you don’t want to see me again...then that’s how it is.”
I gaped down at him. Hate him? I could never hate him. But I nodded mutely.
He took another deep breath, preparing himself. And he told me.
57
Yolanda
“Five years ago,” he said, “I’m leaving work, walking to my car, when a guy in a dark suit steps out of the shadows and asks me to come with him. He shows me his badge and he’s Secret fucking Service. He takes me to an unmarked car and four hours later we’re driving through the back gate of the White House. The Secret Service sneak me in a side door and I’m shown straight into the Oval Office: all off the record, no one knows I’m there. And then they leave the room and in walks The President.”
I just stared at him.
“I knew Jake Matthews back when he was a senator,” said Calahan. “But we hadn’t talked since he became president. I had no clue why I was there. He sits me down, tells me I’m going to need a drink, and gives me a bourbon. Tells me he has this problem, something the previous president warned him about. A cult.”
I blinked. A cult?
He shook his head. “Not like any sort of cult you’ve heard of. No white robes, no UFOs. These people can full-on reprogram you: you forget about your friends, your family, you become utterly loyal to them. They’re smart, they’re well-organized and well-funded and no one knows exactly what they’re planning. And the reason they’ve flown under the radar for so long is that they’ve already recruited anyone who might try to go against them: police chiefs, judges, politicians...they can shut down any investigation that starts. Shut it down or worse. The President tells me that he’s already seen a DA and a woman from the State Department die in ‘accidents’ because they looked into the cult. He looks me in the eye and he tells me I could be next, if I investigate. But he knows they’ve already infiltrated the intelligence agencies. I’m the only one he knows he can trust.”
I nodded. I had no trouble imagining that part. If I didn’t know who I could trust, Calahan would be my first call.
Calahan looked at the floor. “I should have told him no. I should have walked away. He offered me that, encouraged it, even. But….”
“But you knew if you didn’t do it, no one else would,” I said quietly.
He looked me in the eye and nodded. “So I go back to New York and I start looking into it. Quietly, off the record. And soon, I realize I’m out of my depth. This thing is huge. At first, I think it’s going to be just a few hundred people but it’s more like thousands, spread all across the country. Six months in, I’m sitting in my apartment at two in the morning, cross-referencing phone records...and I realize my boss at the FBI is one of them. This was before Carrie, a guy called Fontana. A guy I’d known and respected for eight years.” He sighed and rubbed at his stubble. “That should have been enough. I should have dropped it. But because I’m a stupid son
-of-a-bitch, I kept going.”
Not stupid, I thought fiercely. I squeezed his hands and listened.
“I’d already been keeping my investigation under wraps but now I have to be even more careful. If my boss finds out what I’m doing, I’m dead. So I’m working FBI cases during the day, looking into the cult at night, coffee to keep me going and booze to let me sleep. I’m burning out. I know it’s only a matter of time until I make a mistake, until someone at the cult finds out I’m onto them. But I can’t quit.”
“So one night, it’s late, I’ve been staring at financial records for hours, trying to figure out how the cult moves its money, and I’m getting nowhere. I’m too wired to sleep so I head to a local bar. And they have a band on, some folk group, and...there’s this woman. Becky.”
I knew that I should feel jealous. But the grief in his eyes made that impossible.
“She’s the singer. Complete opposite of me in every way. I’m this dumb flatfoot, up to his neck in the scum of society. And she’s light. Airy. She sings these amazing old songs, and it’s like she’s brought them back from some other place. Another world.” He sighed. “Am I making any kind of sense?”
I nodded. I could imagine her.
“From the first second I lay eyes on her….” Calahan shook his head. “Never known anything like it before or since. Not until I met you.”
I flushed.
“I stay there until they finish their set. Try to talk to her, but she disappears backstage. I basically become that band’s stalker, I go to every gig, even the ones way out of town, just to catch another glimpse of her. And finally, I ask her out. And—”
His voice suddenly broke. He was normally so strong, I wasn’t ready for it. When he restarted, it was like he was having to pull the words like from deep within himself, jagged metal from a wound. “And it’s good. She’s like the antidote to everything I see, at the FBI. She doesn’t have a cruel bone in her body, she wants to see the good in everyone.” He sighed. “See, what people don’t understand—” He broke off and glared at the floor. “What they don’t get—” He went quiet, his lips pressed into a tight line.
I squeezed his hands. Reassuring him that it was okay to say it.
“We were only together a few weeks,” he said. “But we spent just about every moment together. We’d both found—” He looked up at me. “It worked. I think we were….”
I nodded. I knew what he was saying. And I knew that now, I should be jealous. But I still couldn’t be, not knowing how this story ended.
“And right at the same time, I start to really make some progress with the cult. I identify a couple of senators, the CEO of a big company. I start to see how it fits together. But it’s getting harder and harder to keep my investigation under the radar. Someone’s going to get wind of it. I talk to the President again and he warns me off. Tells me it’s not worth it, he doesn’t want to lose me. But I’m too stubborn. Too proud. I keep going.”
“A few days later…” He closed his eyes, drew in his breath. When he spoke again, his voice was much slower. “I wake up. I’m lying there in bed and I’m in that warm, sleepy haze where you can’t really be bothered to do anything. Becky’s asleep next to me, her hair spread out across the pillow. And my mouth is kinda dry, and I can see the glass of water I always keep on the nightstand. But I can’t reach for it because Becky’s lying on my arm.” His voice slowed even more. “I lie there looking at it for a while, getting thirstier and thirstier. And finally, I decide I’m going to have to wake Becky up so I can grab it. I know she’ll be grumpy about it because she’s not a morning person but I figure I’ll make it up to her by making pancakes….”
He paused. His eyes opened.
And my stomach dropped through the floor because suddenly, I knew why he’d slowed down so much. He’d slowed down because he didn’t want to get to the end.
“So I shake her, just gently. I say Becky. But she doesn’t wake up. So I shake her again, and that’s when I feel how cold she is. I panic. I roll her onto her back so I can do CPR but her eyes are open and she’s just staring up at me.“
I could feel my eyes going hot. I’d known she was dead but not this. I couldn’t even imagine how it must have felt. And then I thought about how it must have been for him, holding me in his arms when I was having my bad trip, thinking he’d lost me, too. Oh God….
I couldn’t take it anymore. I dropped his hands, leaned forward, and pulled him into a hug. Kneeling, he was about the same height as me sitting and I cradled his head on my shoulder, his stubble rough against my cheek. He wrapped his arms around me and clutched me tight. But after just a few seconds, he pushed back from me, shaking his head.
My stomach flipped over. There’s more?
“I call it in,” said Calahan. “The paramedics arrive, then the cops. They can’t tell how she died, so it’s treated as suspicious. My apartment becomes a crime scene. You’d think I’d be used to it: hell, I know some of the cops who show up. But—”
I bit my lip. I could picture him sitting on his bed, answering question after question while they wheeled Becky’s body away, having to defend himself instead of being able to grieve.
“They do an autopsy. Discover she had a heart attack: she must have had some condition she didn’t know about. I’m in pieces. I drink myself into a stupor. The next morning, I wake up...alone. And even with my hangover, I can feel that something’s not right, in my apartment. Drives me crazy, for hours, but I finally figure it out. My water glass is missing. I know it was on the nightstand because I reached for it, just before I found Becky dead. But it’s gone. I find it in the kitchen, washed up. Someone moved it, when the cops and the coroner were in my apartment. That makes no sense, you don’t move something in an active crime scene. Not unless you’re trying to cover something up.”
“I take a real good look at the nightstand and there are a couple of drops of something, some liquid that’s dripped there and dried. I scrape some off and give a sample to a buddy in the FBI lab, off the record. And you know what it was?” He took a deep, shaky breath. “Insulin, super-concentrated.” He looked me right in the eye. “Insulin will kill you, if you’re dosed with enough of it. Looks like a heart attack, if the coroner doesn’t know what to look for.”
“Someone poisoned her,” I breathed. “Who? Did you find out—”
I stopped. His eyes were shining with tears.
And suddenly, I got it. I understood the guilt that ate at him, every minute of every day. I understood the self-loathing in his voice, that night at the bar. I understood why he’d kept pushing me away. Oh Jesus, no….. The heat in my eyes started to spill over. I wanted to be wrong. “It wasn’t her they were trying to poison.”
“I’d gotten too close to the cult,” said Calahan. “I’d tipped them off, somehow. So they’d tried to get rid of me quietly. They snuck in, dosed my glass. But sometime in the night, Becky must have woken up, taken a swig from my water glass…. She died because I was too fucking stubborn to quit.”
“Sam....” I said, horrified. But before I could find the words, he went on.
“I couldn’t even tell anyone. I couldn’t tell them it was my fault because anyone I told about the cult would be at risk, too. I had to break the news to her parents, tell them I was her boyfriend and that she’d had a heart attack. They were...nice to me. Told me they were glad she’d found someone. And the whole time I’m sitting there wanting to scream at them that it’s my fault. It’s my fault your daughter’s dead!”
Silent tears began to roll down my cheeks. This was the reason for the cold cases in his apartment, for working himself into the ground. He thought he’d failed to protect her, so now he had to protect the whole city. “Sam—” I started. But again, he cut me off.
“And Carrie, and Alison, and Hailey, and everyone else I work with...I can’t tell them the truth because then they’ll be at risk. Everyone’s consoling me, trying to help me through it, but they don’t understand that I don’t deserve
any of it! I don’t deserve to feel good, or be happy, because I killed her!”
Oh God. None of his friends knew. So he’d never had anyone tell him—“Sam!”
He looked at me, his face contorted with anger and guilt.
“You didn’t kill her.” I wiped at my face but the tears wouldn’t stop coming. “They did. The cult.”
He shook his head. “I shouldn’t have gone after them. I don’t know when to quit.”
“Sam,” I said, “That’s what makes you, you. Do you remember what you told me, when we first met? There’s a woman in trouble and I’m not leaving until you help! That woman would be dead, now, if you knew when to quit. Clara McConnell, too. And Harry. What happened to Becky...nothing I can say can make that easier but it’s not on you.”
He glared at me. Those blue eyes drilled right to my core, searching for any hint of a lie.
But I stared right back at him, unafraid. Because I knew all he’d see was the truth.
“It’s not on you,” I said again. “It wasn’t your fault.”
He scowled at me, demanding that I back down. He wanted me to be lying because that would almost be easier. Torturing himself was what he knew.
But I held his gaze, tears running down my cheeks. I wasn’t going to let him carry this weight any more. “It wasn’t your fault,” I whispered.
And at last, I saw him crumble...and then break. It was like a dam giving way, years of pain finally released. He leaned forward and swept me up in his arms, crushing me to him. I locked my arms around his back and we held each other like that for a long time. I could feel his body gradually relax as the poison that had been inside him for so long was let out. He was still wounded. But now he could finally start to heal.
Hold Me in the Dark Page 24