Monarch Falls

by Lumen Reese

  “That's great news. Do you need officers to make the apprehension?”

  “No, we can handle it.”

  “Are you sure? I can send plainclothes detectives.”

  “I'm sure,” I insisted.

  “Alright. Be careful, Stella.”

  “Thanks. Bye.”

  But as I hung up I stared at the phone and turned over in my mind how gentle he was with my name. It had filled me with calm. I called Henry's phone next, and when he didn't answer, my calm flew. The second I had ended the call I went to dial again, but my phone rang, and I nearly dropped it fumbling to answer.

  “Hello, Henry?”

  “Yeah, it's me, calm down.”

  “Damn you!” I hissed.

  “Sorry, I couldn't find the phone in my bag. Everything is fine. We're in New York, Anna is with your people. I don't know where she goes from here, but she'll be fine. I met Joey. I guess I should have called you, you could have talked to him.”

  “No, that's okay,” I said. As much as I would like to hear Joey's voice, I was scared that if I got him on the phone I would end up telling him everything and begging him to come help, which I could not do. “You were right about Hatley.” She was on the phone with someone but her eyes lifted to mine and she smiled at me. “We're in Hearts. We're about to get our hands on one of the men Anna described for us. We found out the guy who runs shipping in Hearts was supplying him with drugs.”

  “Good work,” he grunted. “Be careful.”

  “It should be a piece of cake.”

  “Stay close to Hatley. If the train isn't delayed I'll be back at the crack of dawn.”

  “Call me when you get in. I don't care how early.”

  “You bet I will.”

  “And get some sleep on the train. Probably be a busy day tomorrow.”

  “Copy that,” he said, and though we had nothing else to say we both lingered on the line for a moment longer. “Alright. Take care of yourself. I'll see you soon. Bye.”

  “Bye.”

  Clark was reading through papers.

  I asked him, “Find anything?”

  “Nah.”

  “Pizza?”

  “Sure.”

  I looked at Hatley and she nodded her agreement.

  So we ordered a pizza and waited another hour for the club to open. Vincent had arranged the meeting, but wasn't sure when in the night this man would arrive. The name he used with Vincent was Andrew.

  The three of us were the first people in the club that night when the main lights went down and the more atmospheric lights went up, and the doors opened. We stationed Clark at the bar, with a view of all the rest of the club. He had orders to send Hatley and I each a message if our man walked in. Hatley and I stayed together at one of the tables in the VIP section, where we had a good view of the dance floor, and Vincent was in his office as people began to trickle in. Some of them brightly dressed, some of them sparkly, even more when the roaming lights fell on them.

  Most of the crowd was a blur of faces to me as the first two hours of the night rolled by. Three separate couples, two straight and one gay slipped into one or the other of the bathrooms and came out ten minutes later.

  It was hard to keep focused. Something was happening to me. The crowd and the music were making me feel nauseous and empty, and guilty, too. I was thinking about being sixteen again. I couldn't stop thinking about it, and there might as well have been hands all over me.

  I saw Corso only when he was within a few feet of me, climbing the steps to the VIP platform. My heart jumped and I made myself look away, though Hatley had already locked on him herself. One girl who already seemed drunk threw her arms around his neck, and being in the VIP section she was beautiful like the rest of our less dense crowd. Corso shrugged her off and came straight to me. My heart was pounding. I couldn't believe that he had found me, much less the surreal fear of him walking right up to our table.

  “Buy you a drink?” was all he said.

  Hatley draped an arm over my shoulders, which with my skin crawling the way it was, made me uncomfortable in a way touching her earlier in the day had not. She was looking at Corso suspiciously and I could see her other hand was in her bag, probably on her gun. “Move on, Slick. She's with me.”

  I knew I had to go with him. I knew I wouldn't fool Hatley with any lie and she wouldn't let me leave if I pretended he was a stranger. I took her soft hand and gently moved her arm from around me. “It's alright,” I said. “I should check in with Clark anyway.”

  I stood and Hatley stood, too. She had to have placed his face with the sketches and put it together in her mind. “Stella, what the Hell.”

  “It's alright,” I said again. “I'm just going to the bar. I'm fine. You don't need to know about this...”

  She said nothing. Took her seat again. Corso and I stepped down off the platform and moved to the wall where it was less crowded.

  The place was a dull roar around us as I asked, “How did you find us?”

  “It's been a long day, Honey. I got here as soon as I could, asked around for Lance Flynn, checked another one the clubs he deals at first, and now I'm here. Is he here?”

  “There is no Lance Flynn,” I half-shouted back. “It's just Vincent Zucholi who does the real shipping for Hearts, he used the alias to branch out into the harder stuff and played up the turf war to jack up his prices.” We were huddled close, moving along the wall. A man with two drinks in hand stumbled very close to us, and Corso put out an arm. We kept moving and I finished, “He was selling drugs to one of the men Anna described. That man goes by Andrew and is coming to meet Vincent here sometime tonight.”

  Corso sighed, relieved. “Fantastic, Honey. Great job, I mean it. But you know what we have to do, now?”

  “What?”

  “You've gotta let me have him, Honey.”

  I stopped moving. He kept calling me that, Honey, his hand was on my back. I shrugged it off. “Jericho knows we're gonna get this guy. We'll interrogate him ourselves, he'll turn on his partners if we say we'll get him a lighter sentence, then we'll pass him on to the cops.”

  “You're forgetting the end game, Stella.” His voice was hard again. “We don't trust them.”

  “You don't,” I said.

  “That's right, I don't. If you want to bring me in, you keep following my lead, we'll save my sister together and then we'll do things however you'd like. For now you've gotta let me have him.”

  I clenched my teeth. I felt an angry shudder rack my body at the thought of what he was suggesting. “So I'm empty-handed. You and me were seen together, and you slipped through my hands again, and this guy slipped through my hands, too, only to turn up beaten like the priest did. I can't explain all that away! Jericho is going to know and he's going to fire me!”

  My head was spinning with the sickness the club was putting in me and with what he was asking me to do. To let him torture someone.

  “We've gotta take that chance. You're not thinking about the end game again. It's you and me going to get my sister, which means you'll have to roll the dice on pissing off your boss sooner or later. You'll have to run away with me-.” I scoffed and started to turn away but he caught my arm, turned me back toward him and took hold of both of my shoulders, and his hands on me made me flinch, but then he was kneading my shoulders with his fingers and rubbing comforting circles into my collar bones with both thumbs, and insisting, “-We are so close, Stella. This guy is one of them. I find out our next move right here, right now, and it might be our last.”

  “I can't,” I said. The pressure of his hands and the pattern he was tracing were drawing my mind out of the swirling torrent it was in; I wasn't dizzy anymore; my feet were on the ground.

  I had to make a choice, and I was so scared that my eyes began to pool, and I tried to think of what Joey would do, because what Stella would do was screw everything up. That was the only thing that I was sure of. But Joey was not there and there was no one else to make the decision. My
satchel was on my shoulder, and my hands were free, so I found my gun and held it tight. I hoped it would calm me but it only made me more unsure; of course I could not draw it on him; not if there was any other way. Corso noticed the movement and glanced down, then back up at me.

  I tried not to look at him as I blinked the tears away. He moved his hands from my shoulders and I gave a little jump, sure he was going to go for my hands, but he was cupping my face before I knew what had happened. Just cupping my face very softly and leaning in very close and speaking low over the pulsing music and chatter.

  “What's the most important thing?”

  My chest was locked up and I could barely mutter the words, “Saving the girls.”

  “I promise -Honey- I promise you we do that, if we do it my way.”

  That warm thing was back, from when he had held my wrists and my body tight against his in the rising platform below the shack in the Third Quarter. He wasn't touching me all over this time; just his sort of rough hands on my cheeks. His body was a full foot away but I was aware of it, could sort of feel its flatness across the divide. I was in his hands, a small, warm, alive thing, and he was waiting, hard and immovable.

  “Alright,” I said.

  He let me go. “Alright. I'll get you to your friend at the bar. When our guy shows up-.”

  “-He'll head for the office, in the back,” I said.

  “So I have to grab him before he gets anywhere near your girl up top, there. As soon as you see him, get to the fuse box, flip the switch for these disco lights. If anything goes wrong, if I have to get out quickly… I'll find you later.”

  “We passed a motel on the way here. The Blue Motel. We'll stay there.”

  “Okay, then,” he said, and putting a hand on my back, we started to push our way through the crowd to the bar.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  It was another hour before our man showed up. The crowd was so thick that he was still queuing in the lounge area by the door when I wiped my palms on my pants and slipped away from Clark, ducking low under people's raised arms and making it to the wall even as I heard Clark call after me. I opened the panel of the fuse box and traced a hand down the switches. They were a mix of on and off and though they were labeled I couldn't read them in the low light.

  My hands were shaking, but I palmed the switches and pressed them all off. At once the roaming lights went down, the music stopped and in the moment afterward the crowd's chatter turned into a chorus of disappointed and confused moans.

  I turned and scanned the room. I saw a single person cutting through the huddled masses of dark figures, dragging another behind him, heading for the back.

  Clark was shouting for me.

  I clung to the wall and moved fast and low. I lost sight of Corso and the other man once but nearly collided with them once we made the back wall. The lights were still down, Corso had an arm around the neck of the round-faced man from Anna's sketches, who was shorter and heavier set than him.

  He slammed a shoulder into the door of one of the bathrooms, knocking it open. It was dark inside but a couple were coming out of one of the stalls. Corso waved a hand at them, and I saw he held his gun.

  “Clear out!” he called, and they scurried for the door.

  I moved to follow him, but he gave the man he held a shove and sent him tumbling to the floor with a disgruntled cry. Then he rounded on me and put a hand out, pushing fingertips into the center of my chest and easing me back out of the doorway.

  “Stay back.”

  I didn't know what I was doing, but every bit of me was anxious not to leave his side. If I was going to let it happen, I wouldn't close my eyes to it. I wanted to know what he would know, as soon as he knew it. Or maybe I was fascinated. “I want to go with you-.”

  “Stella, get back! You don't need to see this, Honey...”

  We faced off and even in the low light I could see the sudden change of his face, how his eyes turned down at the corners. He was unsure, maybe even a bit ashamed, but then he looked set again. I backed off a step.

  “I'll watch the door,” I said.

  He reached out just to touch my arm for a second, then turned back inside and shut the door. When the lock clicked into place the dread settled in my stomach like an anchor. I was struck nauseous again.

  The lights went up in the club, not just the roaming multicolored lights but the track lighting that lit the place completely and made everyone simultaneously wince. I could see the VIP section and I could see that Hatley was no longer there. Scanning the crowd I saw neither her nor Clark, just a few hundred faces confused and irritated. The music was still thumping from disc jockey's booth above the VIP section.

  The first scream from behind me made me jump, my hand shot to my chest. I looked around, fearing someone would have heard but no one was paying attention to me. Another scream, longer, came a second later. The weight on my chest increased and my breaths left me faster than I could draw them in.

  When I heard a gunshot from inside and another, higher shriek, my hands went up to my ears and I pressed them there to block it out, gasping and hunching over, trying to stop the squirm of guilt in my guts. Nobody else noticed. But then I was still hearing the screams, whether they were real or not, longer, never stopping. I leaned back on the wall, my knees shook then gave out and I was sliding down to the floor, clutching at myself like I was in several pieces and trying to hold everything together.

  And no one would see me unless they were on the very edge of the crowd.

  Another scream, less horrible than the last. Or maybe I was just less shocked than I had been. My phone buzzed in my pocket. I thought about answering but knew I would not be able to speak. They would worry and I felt bad about that, but there was nothing to be done for it.

  No screaming, no sounds came from within the bathroom again. To my other side, a single girl went into the other bathroom.

  Then the door opened and Corso stepped out, wiping sweat from his forehead. I struggled to my feet.

  “That's it?”

  “That wasn't enough for you?” he asked in a low voice, and he wouldn't meet my eyes.

  “Stella!” I heard Hatley's voice and whipped around to see her pushing through the crowd.

  I gave Corso a shove toward the back exit in the opposite corner. He moved to the red door there and slipped out into a dark alley, while Hatley was left looking after him when she finally reached me.

  “Stella, god damn it!” she hissed, jerking me around by the arm to face her, which I suddenly found hard to do. “Are you alright?”

  “I'm fine,” I said.

  She could hear the lie in my voice. “What the Hell was that?”

  “That was the fugitive… getting us a new lead.”

  I nodded toward the still-closed bathroom door. She stepped past me and pushed it open, but recoiled immediately. “Jesus Christ.”

  I had been afraid to look, myself, but as the door swung closed I saw the man flat on his back on the white floor. There was a splash of blood coming off of his head and a growing pool around his knee. He was not moving, had to be unconscious. I flinched away from the awful reality of what I had just done, the guilt in me as immediate as if I had kneecapped him myself. At the same time it was unreal, something that happened in crime novels, when the mafia got their hands on the rat.

  Clark had climbed up into the VIP section, the crowd was growing louder with malcontent in the brightness. He spotted us and I could see the relief on his face. I had worried them both.

  Hatley's face was hard as she sized me up for a moment. “Where are we going, then?”

  “I'm sure he'll let us know,” I said.

  She sighed long and low. “You could have told me, you didn't have to scare me like that, Stella!”

  “I'm sorry...”

  “I don't know what's going to happen, now. You know this could be the end of this investigation of ours, don't you? There's a man bleeding on the floor in there, Stella. A man we were supposed to
catch.”

  “Well, we did catch him, technically.”

  She huffed, rolling her eyes away from me, wrapping her arms around her stomach as a little smile spread across her lips. “If you want to risk your reward for the sake of these missing girls, that's your business. I even respect it. But be careful. That man is dangerous, Stella.”

  I was forgiven. I tried to sound sure of myself. “I know what I'm doing.”

  *

  I took the others to the Blue Motel, late that night. An ambulance had been called for the man bleeding in the bathroom, and the Hearts police called to watch him and to take Vincent Zucholi into custody. A call was placed to Jericho but we had no answer, and so Hatley left a tentative message and said we would call again in the morning.

  We retired. Hatley seemed like she wanted to say something else as we stood in the doorways of two adjoining rooms, but then she just turned in with a quiet, “Good night.”

  And I went into my room as well. It was plain and small, with a queen bed taking up most of it, a television on a small dresser across, and a tiny bathroom in the back. I sat on the bed and could look out the window by leaning and poking a finger between the blinds. I waited like that for some time, with my eyes heavy. The buildings in the neighborhood were short and square, with single neon signs of different colors instead of the monotone unity of the bigger areas. A man was smoking outside a convenience store across the street.

  After maybe an hour I stepped out into the night, and felt an instant hum of city energy fill me up. Wonderland, like New York, had a sacred kind of feeling when it was empty. I could see stars.

  “There you are.”

  I did not jump; I had been listening and looking for him from the moment I shut the door. I walked to the end of the motel's corridor we were on, and he was sitting in a cheap patio set in the shadow of the two-story main complex. A small pool glowed blue nearby, a black gate wrapped around the courtyard.

  I pulled out a chair and sat, letting out a sigh as I did. My thighs, calves, and feet were sore.