by Sophia Gray
That reminded her: Robert’s house was torched. Maybe he can stay with me, she thought. She didn’t have a lot of room, ever since she had to move into this cheap piece of shit apartment after her ex, Mark, had cleaned out her bank accounts a year ago. But still, it would be good for Robert to have somebody to watch over him. He had nobody left, probably because he spent his youth riding bikes and drinking with Satan’s Blazes instead of starting a family. Abby couldn’t get a handle on her feelings when it came to the MC. On the one hand, Jagger had saved Robert’s life, and he was the only one other than Abby that seemed to give a shit. But on the other, it looked like all the MC members had abandoned Robert in his old age, letting him decay on his own. Then to top it all off, Jagger had asked her to lie for him.
Abby had to stop and think about who Jagger really was. Was he a gorgeous man who fought to save lives, who seemed just as invested in keeping people safe and healthy as Abby was? Or was he an unstable lunatic just trying to con her into believing something that wasn’t real?
Before she could get a firm grip on her train of thought, the phone rang, the shrill sound causing her to jump in the tub and send water splattering over the side. “Jesus, fuck,” she muttered to herself, slicking the hair back from her face so she could more clearly see the name on the caller ID: Unknown.
Abby hesitated for a moment. She usually didn’t take calls from numbers she didn’t recognize, but she felt the hairs on the back of her neck stand up, anxiety rising in her stomach like an expanding balloon. Her finger slipped down and accepted the call without even thinking about it. “Hello?” she answered, pressing the cell phone up to her ear.
“He’s dead,” a male voice said on the other end. The words made her heart sink into her torso, and it took her a long moment before she realized that it was Jagger’s voice speaking to her.
“Who?” Abby asked, even though she already knew the answer, her body trembling in preparation, waiting for the knife to pierce her heart.
“Bobby,” Jagger said. “He’s gone.”
“I don’t— What— What?” she stuttered, standing up in the tub and reaching over the side to grab a towel and started wiping her body down. “No, there must be some mistake. Robert was fine an hour ago. What could have happened? I don’t get it.”
“Neither do I,” Jagger said at the other end, and she could detect deep sadness in the way he sighed into the phone. “But it’s real. I went back to the hospital and saw his body. It’s him, Abby.”
Abby was silent, staring at herself in the mirror as she listened to Jagger’s breathing through the phone. The rhythm of it almost calmed her, so she tried to match it, breathing in when he inhaled and out when he exhaled, trying to get her heart to stop pounding in her chest. It was no use. She approached the mirror, staring at the way the water ran down her legs and arms, thin little transparent trickles that followed the lines of her body before dropping down onto the bathmat beneath her feet. “I can’t believe it,” she murmured, more to herself than to Jagger. In fact, she’d almost forgotten that she was holding a phone at all.
“Neither can I,” Jagger said with a humorless laugh. “He was fine, you know? He was totally fine.”
“Yeah,” Abby replied, but her brain was distant, almost switched-off. She felt like her skin was buzzing. Her entire body, including her mind, was consumed by this one sensation that rendered her numb. She kept staring at herself in the mirror. Her hair hung down in long wet flat strips. She looked completely deflated, as worn-out as she felt.
I fucked it up. I fucked Robert up. I failed him. I killed him. I’m so weak. I’m so weak. I’m so weak, she thought to herself, her anti-mantra returning to her with the familiarity of an old friend. She used to repeatedly say that to herself, especially years ago when she was stuck in a hospital bed, wasting away to nothing. Stop it! Abby inwardly shouted at herself, setting her jaw as she continued to look in her reflection. You’re only weak if you say you are, so fucking stop it. You need to be tough. You need to be strong. You need to hold it together. For Robert. For all your patients, dead and alive.
“Did they… Did the doctors say what happened?” Abby asked, finally tearing her eyes away from her own pale, drawn reflection to stare at the wet mat on the floor.
“They’re going to do an autopsy,” Jagger explained. “Usually they wouldn’t, given his age and diagnosis, but they don’t know what happened. So…you know, we might find out over the next few days.”
Abby nodded, forgetting that Jagger couldn’t see her over the phone. “Do you think that something…?” She sighed, her lungs aching with the effort that it took to breathe as hard as she was. She couldn’t believe she was about to suggest this, but she couldn’t help it. She had to say it, or it would just haunt her, staying in her mind like all the other things she said to torture herself. And Abby couldn’t afford another dark thing living inside her brain. She just couldn’t. She had to get it out, forcing the words to her lips as quickly as she could. “Do you think somebody did something to him, to hurt him?” To kill him? Abby thought.
“I…” Jagger was quiet for a moment, his breath filling Abby’s ear again. “I think so.”
“But there’s no proof,” Abby said reflexively. She had hoped he would shoot her down, prove her wrong, take the worry from her mind. She wanted to be mistaken. She wanted to dismiss the thought and mourn Robert like she would any of her other patients who died a natural death. On the other end of the phone, Abby could hear Jagger click his teeth, probably in impatience at her stubbornness.
“There’s no proof yet,” Jagger said, stressing the last word. “But the autopsy report will come out, and we’ll see if someone poisoned him or did anything else to get rid of him.”
“Do you think that maybe somebody was trying to put him out of his misery or something? A girl I used to know at work got fired for something like that, a couple of years ago,” Abby suggested, imagining the nurse from the hospital doing something to make sure Robert passed quickly rather than suffering gradually.
“I think,” Jagger began slowly like he was choosing his words carefully. “That Robert posed a problem for somebody. If that was the case, they needed to get rid of him to protect themselves.”
“The man in the suit?” Abby suggested, thinking back to what Robert had said to them before falling asleep. Pain clutched Abby’s heart as she thought about the last time she saw him, the way he peacefully shut his eyes and breathed. There was no way his death was natural. It didn’t make sense.
“Yeah, or someone connected to him, maybe,” Jagger said with a sigh. “I don’t know. I don’t know anything. I wish I could say it was the man in the suit, but maybe, just maybe it was somebody else entirely. Perhaps somebody that thought Robert might have seen him when he really didn’t.”
“Or it could have been a ‘her’,” Abby suggested, picturing a woman pouring gasoline and lighting a match on top of Robert’s body.
“Right. There’s no way of knowing,” Jagger said, and Abby could hear the frustration in his voice. “I’m fucking stuck. I don’t know what to do.”
“We could go to the hospital, ask around, see if anybody saw anything suspicious,” Abby suggested, feeling energy return to her body. She continued to towel off, rubbing the soft terry cloth material over her naked limbs and torso before dropping it on the floor and walking into the main room of her studio apartment to get clothes out of her dresser.
“We?” Jagger asked in a whisper that caused Abby’s hairs to stand up on the back of her neck.
“Yeah, um, you know, we’re the only ones who saw Robert before he died, and can attest that he was okay before, you know, it happened,” Abby replied softly, not wanting to say the words too loudly. It was as if she verbalized the truth of the situation, that Robert was dead, it would suddenly become all too real. If she held back from saying it out loud, she could avoid the finality of it, at least for the moment. She knew it wasn’t a healthy approach, but it was the best she could do w
hile still holding onto her sanity.
“You’re right,” Jagger said slowly. “Um, so when do you want to go? Now?”
Abby was tempted to say yes immediately, but then she groaned a little in realization of how late it was. “I have to go to work in six hours,” she said, staring at her unmade bed, blankets still messy from the previous night.
“Tomorrow then?” Jagger suggested. “Tomorrow night, we’ll go and see if we can talk to the nurses and doctors there.”
Abby felt nervous, anxiety mounting inside of her as she considered what she was agreeing to. “I can go by myself,” she suggested. “You don’t need to come with me.”
“It’s dangerous,” Jagger argued back. "You shouldn’t go on your own. Somebody who works at the hospital could be involved, or worse. You need backup. You need me.”
Abby sighed deeply, her pulse pounding painfully in her throat as she forced out the following words. “You know, no offense, but I don’t even know you. Like, at all. I know nothing about you.”
“You know I give a shit,” Jagger said without hesitation as if he were expecting that response. “That should be enough.”
“It’s not,” Abby argued. “I’d rather go by myself, okay? I’ll handle it, and I’ll let you know what I find out. Trust me, it’ll go over easier if it’s just a nurse poking around. They’ll think I work there. I’ll be able to hear shit on my own that I wouldn’t be able to find out if you’re hanging around,” she explained. It was barely half the reason she didn’t want to go with him. She just didn’t trust the guy, no matter how sincere he seemed. There was something off about him. Of course, Abby thought that about most people these days, especially men. It was hard to know who could be trusted, so it was easiest not to trust anybody except her patients.
There was a long pause where Abby only heard silence, not even the sound of Jagger’s breathing. She wondered if he’d hung up on her, but then a second later he spoke again. “Okay.”
“All right,” she said, struggling into a pair of sweatpants using only one hand. “I gotta go, okay? I’m going to hang up now.”
“One last thing,” Jagger hurried to say, the urgency in his voice causing Abby to drop the shirt she was putting on over her head down onto the bed, her entire body and mind focused on what he was about to say. “Have you… given any thought to what I suggested before? About what you might have seen earlier tonight?”
Abby swallowed thickly. Should she just lie, for Robert’s sake? He would have done it for her. She knew that without a doubt in her mind. Robert would have done anything for her. That was the type of man he was, strong even at his most fragile. Something was still holding her back, keeping her from feeling comfortable enough to lie. “I don’t know,” she answered honestly. “I have to think about it.”
“Okay. Let me know if you change your mind,” Jagger said on the other end of the line, sounding a little disappointed. “Goodnight, Abby.” A second later, he hung up, leaving Abby in silence.
She groaned and collapsed on the bed, still not wearing a shirt. What the fuck am I going to do? Abby questioned herself. She knew she had no choice but to investigate what happened to Robert, that much was certain. Most likely they’ll find that he had a health issue that I didn’t know about, she thought. I missed something. That’s what it is. I just fucked something up, just like I always do, and now he’s dead. It won’t have anything to do with the firefighter’s crazy conspiracy. That can’t be real. It can’t be.
Jagger seemed so committed to the idea, so completely convinced. She had to admit that the pattern was suspicious. It wasn’t like he was pulling it out of nowhere, if he was telling her the truth, at the very least. Abby suddenly sat up and reached for her phone again, searching the Internet for news articles on local fires. She couldn’t find all ten previous fires, but a few reports mentioned that the victims had been members of a local motorcycle club. At least Jagger wasn’t making the whole thing up from scratch, she figured.
The problem was, Jagger seemed like he cared so much. That was what scared her. He seemed like he’d do anything, absolutely anything to find the person that was responsible for this. She didn’t know whether that was a good thing.
Abby stuffed her face in her pillow, willing the abyss of sleep to take her into its dark arms. It always scared her a little bit, sinking into that darkness. If only I had somebody to hold me, she thought wistfully before mentally slapping herself for having that kind of thought. Don’t be fucking weak. Be strong. Be tough. Be a goddamn grown-up.
But the words sounded weaker and weaker as she began to shake in the bed, clutching the blankets for warmth. She always shook like this, right before she fell asleep. Her ex used to make fun of her because it. Ever since she was in the hospital as a kid, she would shake uncontrollably in bed at night like she was vibrating with an energy that only came out when she was about to fall sleep.
She would have to find a way to harness that energy, use it to find the truth. For Robert. That was what mattered now.
Even still, Jagger’s face lingered behind her eyelids, wide and sincere and innocent-looking. If only she could tell whether he could be trusted. If only she knew what to do.
“Fuck it,” she muttered to herself, flipping over in bed to hug her pillow. “Tonight, I’m going to be fucking weak. So fucking sue me,” she grunted out loud, speaking to her inner voices, the ones that would torment her whenever she was soft. She expected them to yell back at her, to convince her to flip back over and stop hugging the damn pillow for comfort. Instead, they remained forgiving, quiet, barely protesting. As Jagger’s face loomed larger and clearer inside her mind, the voices grew more distant before fading away into nothing.
Something about Jagger’s face distracted her from her self-hatred. Something about him made her scared and safe at the same time. Just before she slipped off into sleep, one last thought crossed her mind, filling her with dread and excitement all at once.
I want to see him again, she thought, her heart stuttering in her chest as she squeezed the pillow closer to her body.
She tried to force the thought out of her mind, but it hovered over her like a dark cloud of confusion. She wanted to see him. She wanted him to be a good guy, a trustworthy guy, not somebody who was just ranting about a crazy theory that wasn’t true. She wanted to believe him.
Deep inside, she knew that she already did.
Chapter Two
Abby
Abby wasted two hours at the hospital the next evening, hanging around and waiting to see the nurse that was on duty the night before. But despite how hard Abby searched, she couldn’t seem to find her. “Hey, new girl!” one of the other nurses shouted after her. “Mind taking this food over to room thirty? I’ve got my hands full down the hall.”
“Sure,” Abby said, accepting the dinner tray and taking it over to the patient in room thirty. She should have just explained that she didn’t fucking work there, given that her masquerade hadn’t paid off at all after two hours of concentrated effort. Her brain wasn’t wired that way. She couldn’t refuse help to someone who needed it, even if it was only getting somebody’s dinner to them on time.
She had just delivered the food and was walking back out into the main hallway, heading in the direction of the hospital’s exit, when somebody grabbed her by the shoulder. Adrenaline flooded her entire body all at once. “What the fuck?” she asked as she turned around.
Jagger. Of course, it was. He pulled her into a corner next to a water fountain, looking over his shoulder to make sure that nobody was watching them.
“What are you doing here?” Abby hissed, her voice irritated and rude. “I told you not to come.”
“The autopsy report came in,” Jagger replied, his eyes still darting around rather than meeting hers.
“What does it say?” Abby whispered, surprised that the results had come back so quickly. The anger faded from her, slowly but surely, like water draining out of a sink.
“Nothing,” Jagge
r said. Abby just stared at him, her brows furrowed in frustration, wordlessly demanding that he elaborate. “The coroner didn’t find anything. They just, they said it was natural causes. I don’t know what they were looking for, but there’s nothing in the report that suggests he was murdered.”
“Except the fucking reality of the situation,” Abby spat in frustration, walking over to the nearest trash can and kicking it. There was instant regret as pain streaked throughout her toes.