She knew it was Jack’s blood.
Her hands shook. Her knee buckled out of place, slid to the side, and her hands fell to the ground. The parking lot was gritty beneath her fingers. Slowly, she reached forward.
She was tall, standing, the wind ripping into her face and her hands. There was a grin on her face – Jack’s face – he was talking to someone. There was a glare in her eyes. Too bright. It was a man. His smile was wide – bright-toothed. Familiar to her. His jacket was old black leather, jeans just as beat up and torn.
“Sure,” Jack was saying, Sandra playing catch-up.
“Thank you. Really.” The speaker looked down, head turned. His hair was dark, shaggy cut hanging just over his ears. His side-eyed gaze was just as dark. “They said the tow truck will take half an hour to get here. I’d rather not wait, you know?”
Sandra felt her cheeks stretch, her teeth show, grinning. “I know what I’m doing. I used to be a mech—”
The world went black and Sandra cried out, hands going to the back of her head. Danny was at her side, kneeling now, hand on her arm. “What was it?” Her fingers combed through her hair, looking for blood, but there was just Jack’s. There. At her knees.
One person for distraction. Another from behind.
“What was it?” Danny asked again, urgency making her look up. She thought her eyes told the whole story because Danny stood, so fast that Sandra was sure she’d blacked out, lost seconds. But she was still on her knees, still holding herself upright, and Danny’s jaw was tight, anger burning bright and deep.
“Someone saw something,” he said and Sandra didn’t envy whoever he got hold of first; his fists looked ready to fly. “It was right here. They saw something.”
Sandra’s knees creaked as she got to her feet. Her head felt wooly. There was no blood on the back of her head, but she’d felt the hit all the same. “I’ll check around back,” she said when Danny made a move toward the restaurant’s front door. He nodded, went inside, and Sandra used the nearest car to prop herself up, leaving a sweaty handprint behind.
As soon as she could stand straight, Sandra snuck a look around back. There were no windows on the right edge of the building, just a rough expanse of stucco and two great big garbage bins. There was a metal door further back. A sandy-haired man in an apron smoked a cigarette there.
She startled him when she got close. Or maybe it was the cigarette burning his hand that startled him.
There was a smear of red high on the thigh of his jeans.
If Danny were there, he would’ve thrown a punch, gotten the man down to the ground, hooked a leg and held him there, made him talk until they found out where they’d taken Jack. What they had done. Why.
Sandra went for his balls.
Then she gripped the back of his neck as he went down.
And got nothing.
A sound came out of her, frustrated and high, but all he did was wheeze, turn a bit on his side and curl up with his eyes closed.
Sandra kicked him once more, made sure he wasn’t going to get up, and then went to find Danny.
~
“Where is he?”
Daniel’s mask was in place. His knife, too. It was a good thing there’d been no windows behind the restaurant – though Sandra assumed everyone there would suspect them anyway. They’d put up too much of a fuss to escape notice. And now, with Fred Phyllis missing (or so his license said), someone would come looking.
They wouldn’t be found, of course.
Sandra had gone back, gotten the car, moved it, taken everything out of the motel room and left the key behind. They were in the woods behind the restaurant. Far enough away that the car wouldn’t be seen.
Far enough Fred wouldn’t be heard, either.
“Where,” Danny said, “is my brother?”
Fred spit blood. There was a bruise on his temple from where Danny had knocked him out. He was having trouble tracking and kept tugging against the ropes holding him tied to the tree. He wasn’t feeling it yet, but he would. Sandra had felt rope burns enough to know.
“Where is he?” Danny snarled.
Show your belly, Sandra thought. Fred shook his head and sneered.
Danny hadn’t hurt him yet, not any more than it had taken to get the man somewhere they could question him, but Sandra didn’t expect that to last long. Fred snarled, strained against the restraints, saying “Fuck you,” and “I ain’t telling you nothing,” saying a lot without ever saying anything at all.
Daniel picked up his knife, circled the man, kept his voice deep down low. “You tell me what I want to know.”
“Fuck you,” Fred said again. He didn’t have that big of a vocabulary or much creativity. “You won’t do anything to me. You don’t have the balls.”
Daniel smiled and with his knife drew a long line of red through Freddy’s shirt.
Fred didn’t stay strong for long. He didn’t stay silent either. And Danny didn’t do much, but it was enough to make Sandra back up, get worried, get scared, because she hadn’t seen any of this but it felt like being at a precipice. And when they fell, there wouldn’t be any going back.
“Fuck man,” Fred said, and he had one more line of red, not hurt badly, but he was squealing all the same, so terrified that there were rings of white around his eyes. He wasn’t so tough at all and Sandra figured she should’ve known that. What kind of man hit someone from behind?
“I just did it for the cash. I wasn’t serious about the whole thing, I swear! He said he was getting back at some asshole for stealing his girl. I just dropped him, then went back inside. I don’t know where your brother is, okay? I don’t know!”
“It wasn’t serious?” Danny asked. His voice was extra quiet, skittering across Sandra’s nerves and sticking her hair up all over her neck. “You’ve got his blood on your pants.”
Fred didn’t know when to shut up, “Got it on my hands, too.”
Danny’s face went blank. And when they walked away, Fred Phyllis wasn’t dead, but it seemed like a close thing. Even if it wasn’t.
Really, Danny had barely touched him.
Sandra’s stare followed him all the way back to the car. Pine needles made their footsteps hushed. The wind cut deep. The air felt damp, the beginnings of rain. She was tempted to wipe a hand across her face, but she’d gotten mud on her fingers from the trees and the ground and the rope she’d helped loosen from Fred, telling him to count to five hundred before he made a move.
If you don’t, Danny had said, I’ll come back and you’ll dig your own grave.
She thought he was scared enough to listen.
Danny wouldn’t look at her. “I know,” he said when the car came into view. He’d been dangerously close.
“As long as you know,” she said.
The car had golden pine needles on the trunk. Tamarack trees, she thought. Autumn should’ve felt vivid, colorful, but everything here just felt old with decay.
Danny unlocked the car, got in; Sandra followed. They sat. Too long. But neither knew where to go. Jack was still missing and their life was in duffel bags, packed up in the back seat. She hadn’t dreamt a thing, and Danny’s fingers were seized permanently around the wheel, and Jack hadn’t had time to leave a clue.
The clock was counting down the seconds.
Sometimes, Sandra thought about the dream, about how it felt as though the world was waiting for them to fail.
“Drive,” she finally said. “Just drive.”
It was all they could do.
~
They returned to the motel.
Sandra was worried that Jack would phone. She was worried he’d gotten away and didn’t know where to find them.
Danny ran a hand over his face, swung the wheel and turned the car around. Checkout wasn’t until noon the next day.
Back at the room, Dann
y picked the lock. They found themselves back in their spots, one on the bed and the one in the rickety chair. The carpet was even more nauseating now. The room felt hot, stifling after being outside in the sharp breeze. The air was dead, smelling faintly of old cigarettes.
Eventually, Daniel went out to the car, brought in his bag with their guns stashed inside and sat down to clean them. He sharpened his knife, too, a grating rasp of the whetstone. His pointed look said she should clean her weapons as well, get ready, because they might be going off to war.
Sandra hadn’t touched her gun since she’d stopped thinking of shooting it. Shooting them. She didn’t look at it unless they made her. And they weren’t cruel enough to do that.
Rasp-rasp of the knife blade and Sandra burrowed into her shirt, into the jacket she still wore, hating the sound. Danny had cut Fred and Dan Murray had cut her. And now someone was probably cutting Jack.
“He’ll be fine,” Daniel said. It was all he ever seemed to say. Sandra wished she could believe it.
The knock at the door startled them both. Daniel palmed one gun, hid it against his leg and threw the corner of the blanket over the weapons on the bed. He half hid behind the frame as he answered – not in front of the door in case whoever it was had a gun like him.
He didn’t. It was the manager or the kid of the manager, some snot-nosed boy barely out of his teens, annoyed at having to play messenger. Sandra wasn’t all that much older than him, but she felt aged by decades. The kid glared at Danny, didn’t know he had a gun so close to him, might have had more respect if he had.
He’d already be dead if her boys had gone the way of her dreams.
“You’ve got a message,” he said, face sporting a permanent scowl. “Your brother called. He left this.” He held out a paper with a messy scrawl of blue ink. “Said he’d be at this address. Come pick him up.” He turned around, returning to the office, and Danny shut the door, paper clutched tight in his hand.
“Not Jack.”
“Not Jack,” he agreed.
They packed up the guns, Sandra got her knife, and they locked the room all over again. “Still think he’s okay?” she asked.
This time Danny didn’t answer.
~
It was a house. It edged on an abandoned lot. There was a parking lot behind it, completely empty of cars and full of weeds and cracked asphalt, and nothing on the other side except the road that curved around. “Trap,” Danny said. They were the first words he’d spoken in half an hour and Sandra nodded, worrying the edge of her shirt between her fingers. They drove past, stuck behind a blue van with rusted fenders, and parked up the road next to an out-of-business dry-cleaner. Then they followed the sidewalk and Sandra wished there was a back alley to hide themselves in.
Whoever it was, he’d chosen well.
They stood at the fence and looked carefully. They couldn’t see movement. “What do we do?” Sandra asked, feeling lost. The boys had never taught her how to sneak up on an enemy. Lem hadn’t either. She felt like she was going to let them down.
Again, Danny didn’t answer. She took that to mean he didn’t know either. She felt like someone should have a plan.
They climbed the fence. Sandra’s jeans got ripped and she got a splinter in her thumb. Daniel was three steps ahead by the time she got herself free from the ragged planks. He headed for the side but there were bars on all the windows. They could see inside some of the rooms, curtains pulled wide. They were empty.
The front door was unlocked.
Danny looked over at her, flicked the safety off on his gun, and led her inside. The house was surprisingly normal. A little musty with a smell that reminded Sandra of the potpourri her mother had brought home once, a long time ago. Here, the smell was dispersed. Maybe from the open window. There was a breeze from somewhere – it swept the long hallway, rustling the thin curtains, pale light streaming inside. They met no one until they reached the kitchen.
It was the man from the parking lot.
He sat at the table sipping a cup of tea. The tablecloth was linen, a pale yellow. A tiny, elderly woman sat at his side. Her throat was slit. White hair stuck to the blood where the skin was paper thin, with a blue network of veins. Sandra swallowed and heard Danny cock his gun.
The dark haired man set down his teacup. Then he smiled at them.
“Finally,” he said. He wore good clothes. Not fancy, but crisp and clean. “I was afraid you didn’t get the message. Have a seat.”
They didn’t move.
“No?” If anything, his smile grew. He looked maybe Danny’s age. Maybe a bit older. When he looked up, eyes free from the shadows of his hair, Sandra found herself swallowing again.
His eyes were black, black as night, and she felt her heart stop.
Because she remembered a flicker-thought of her dream, of another black-eyed human. Someone who saw it all as a game.
You, she thought.
“That’s too bad.” He picked up his spoon, stirred his tea. “Pardon my reach, my dear.” He leaned forward to pull the sugar closer. He nudged the old woman’s shoulder and her neck wound gaped wide.
Danny followed him with his gun.
“Where’s my brother?” His voice didn’t even shake. Sandra was proud of him – she felt broken all to bits. Her nerves certainly weren’t steel. This wasn’t at all like her dream. It was a warped version. Everything was off-kilter.
The man frowned, spoon click-clinking against the side of the china cup. There were tiny pink roses and delicate ivy on the lip – daintily small in his large hands. “I hoped we could have a civilized conversation.”
“Where is he?”
“Straight to business.” The man raised the china in salute. “I like that.”
Danny shifted the gun, finger loose on the trigger.
“Now, don’t be hasty.” The man’s eyes flickered to the basement door – it had bright white wood paneling and a hook-latch screwed near the top. Their gazes followed and he laughed. “You didn’t think I’d keep him here, did you? I’m not quite that stupid.”
A muscle in Danny’s jaw ticked. “I can shoot you right now.”
“You’d never find your brother if you did.”
“Who said I’d kill you?”
The man had the audacity to laugh. “I like you.” That grin stretched with rows of pearly teeth and Sandra’s stomach filled with bile.
“Danny,” she tried, wishing he’d step back, closer to her. He’d been hovering inside the kitchen doorway, but he kept moving further into the room, leaving her standing there all alone. The black-eyed man gave her a look, like he could see right inside of her, through and through, and Sandra shuddered.
“He’s nearby,” he said. He pointed one finger and used it to push away the woman, who was sinking toward his shoulder. Then he stood. Danny’s gun hand jerked and Sandra wondered if his arm was getting tired. He didn’t say anything, even when the man stepped around him. At the table, the woman’s momentum finally pulled her off the chair. Her thin bones made an awful sound as she met the floor. Without flinching, the man continued to the kitchen door, so close that Sandra could see the pores on his face. The circulation in her fingers was cut off by her grip on the knife.
“Excuse me,” he said. His broad smile seemed sharper when directed at her. Sharp like his own blade. Sandra wondered where he kept it. His jeans were so tight the pockets were nearly painted on.
“You know,” he said, as she backed up, as far as she could without bumping into the wall or into Danny and still feeling too close, “you can’t keep changing things.”
He took a step past.
“Now I’ve got to fix it,” he said. “I don’t enjoy cleaning up your mistakes.”
Sandra knew her chills weren’t from the opened window. She remembered her dream, chasing this man – remembered running and following and watching
him kill everyone. It was too late; they were already tangled in his web.
“You weren’t hiding very hard,” the man said. “I recognized Jack. Oh, I didn’t know he was Jack at the time. One or the other.” He tipped one hand, body relaxed and tone so easy that they might’ve been talking about the weather. About something other than visions and deaths. “It took a bit, but he did talk.”
Now, Danny surged forward. He pointed his gun right at the back of the man’s head.
He wasn’t afraid.
“He’s still alive.”
“Why?” This time, Danny’s voice did shake. Sandra wasn’t sure he’d registered the black eyes, knew just how dangerous this man was.
“You weren’t supposed to be like this.” For a moment, the man’s smiled dimmed, seemed slightly discouraged. “We’ve all got our roles to play.” Then his smile returned, fake, never reaching his eyes, and he turned, facing sideways to keep an eye on them and the gun. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a small paper card. It had writing on it in blue pen. Sandra had been wrong, she realized. He did have blood on him. Just a smudge. There. On his thumb. He flicked the card at her. Jeremiah Epps, Sandra suddenly knew, even though the name wasn’t written. It was only an address. “You’ll become what you were meant to,” he said. “Just like your father.”
Danny’s finger moved on the trigger, eyes wide, but Jeremiah was backing down the hallway, flicking a finger at the scrawled address as he passed her. “Your brother’s one block away, in the basement.” He disappeared out the front door.
Chapter Twenty-Two
They found the warehouse. It was abandoned, full of garbage and crates and rats. They also found the basement. And they found Jack.
Danny stayed back with the gun, covering the door as Sandra broke forward, sliding to a stop on the cement. Awake, but bloody, Jack jerked when she knelt beside him. Sandra wasn’t sure if he saw her, or if he understood, but she talked, kept saying, “It’s us,” and “You’re okay,” and “We’ve got you,” as she unraveled the rope tying his feet, tried to get at the rope around his wrists, too. He was in the corner of the room and there wasn’t much space to work in. The rope was slick with blood – kept slipping from her fingers. Jack was gasping something, voice too slurred to make out.
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