But Melanie was too involved in her self-indulgent funk to respond to his pep talk. She clutched the headphones attached to the laptop to her ears, connecting her to the audio coming through Rosa Ranieri’s phone.
“You know what happens if we fuck up, right?” she quavered.
“Melanie, this is not useful right now—”
“King will Level Ten us. And we will dig our own graves and slash our own fucking throats.” Her voice was shrill. “Because he hates us, now.” Her voice dissolved. “He just h-h-hates usn>
Hobart glanced at her, dismayed. She’d been his podmate since babyhood, and he knew her weak points like his own. When she was stressed, she moped. She’d hidden her depressive tendencies from King in the testing cycles, but she couldn’t hide them from her podmates.
The situation was critical. They’d barely slept in the three days they’d been ensconced at Cray’s Cove. Steele’s home was impregnable without an army to assail it, and there was no sneaking up on it by stealth, either. They had to wait for an opening, chewing their knuckles while the clock ticked, feeling King’s disapproval like a cold fog curling all around them. They tried to get some sleep, spelling each other for half-hour naps from time to time, but they mostly relied on the pickup drugs.
The car that had left a couple hours before, full of McCloud wives, had been the first opening, but they’d been unable to take advantage of it, with King’s imperative of stealth and guile. King should have sent them a dozen agents for backup. They could have stopped the car, killed the young man, taken the women and the baby hostage, and had a strong card to play. But no. They were being punished with an impossible task. But just maybe, that impossible task had now become possible.
The electrifying news they collected from Rosa Ranieri’s cell gave them no time to prepare, to plan. Tam Steele was rushing to the hospital emergency room. Lily Parr was with them. It was never going to get any better than this—if they were brilliant, and quick as a snake.
If. He glanced over at Melanie’s wet eyes and trembling mouth. Damn. That was a big if, with Mel in such bad shape. He wished he could call King and get him to give Melanie a Level Five pick-me-up like the one King had done for him. He’d taken care not to tell Mel about that. She was shaky enough already. “Take your patch, Mel,” he ordered. “You need it. I already took mine, before we left the hotel.”
“We’ll slit our own throats,” Mel moaned. “We may as well have gotten gassed with the other shredders, back on cull day. It would have been better to end it then. Instead of busting our asses, for years, for nothing. For him to just hate us. I can’t stand it. I just can’t—”
“Put on your fucking patch!” Hobart yelled. The car screeched to a stop at the red light just in time. “Get yourself together!”
Mel fumbled for the Calitran-M. Hobart watched until he ascertained that the little red dot was affixed to her inner wrist.
“You’re wrecked, Mel,” he said. “We’re changing the plan. I’ll be the nurse. You be the drunk.”
“Bad idea.” Mel’s voice no longer wobbled. “Rosa Ranieri talked to me for a half hour in the baby store. She liked me. She’ll have a positive reaction when she sees a nurse she knows. Instant trust, in a box. Plus, you’ve done your face, and I haven’t.”
She was right. He didn’t like it, but at least Mel was sharpening up. Hobart glanced at himself in the rearview. Not bad, for a rush job. He’d dyed his hair, reshaped his eyebrows, and shaved a new hairline days ago. He’d put a straggling dark wig and a ski cap over that for the first act of their improvised melodrama. With brown contact lenses, a jaw prosthesis, cheek padding and the goatee, Rosa Ranieri would never recognize him. She’d had eyes for only the babies and Mel anyhow.
So back to the original plan, such as it was. He stuck his hand into his pocket, fingered the glass-framed photograph he’d swiped from the desk in the office of the hotel manager, the tiny bottles of Jack Daniels he’d taken from the hotel minibar. They’d brainstormed madly in those last, fumbling seconds. Neither was satisfied with the plan, which was filled with uncontrollable variables. Too damn bad. They had counted minutes to execute it. They had to just go for it. Everything was at stake. Their lives, on the top of the list.
“You do know that if the nurse on duty in there is a man, we’re fucked, right?” he said. “It’ll be too late to switch roles. And if there are too many people on the nursing or the administrative staff? Or if someone sees us too soon? Or raises the alarm?”
She gave him a look. “We’re fucked anyhow, Hobart,” she said. “You know that. We have nothing to lose anymore.”
He opened his mouth, but she shushed him. “Sssshhh, they’re talking.” She concentrated, pressing the headphones to her ears. “Val Janos is giving the driver directions to turn left up Trevitt Grade,” she said. “We’re still ahead. By about four minutes. There it is.”
Water sprayed wide in a brown arc as Hobart accelerated through the puddle outside the hospital parking lot. He parked. He and Melanie looked at each other and linked hands, squeezing hard.
They leaped out of the car and headed toward the entrance.
Bruno tried calling Aaro for the fifth time. Still busy.
Everyone was on edge since Edie’s phone call to Kev about Tam’s emergency run to Rosaline Creek. Kev and Sean were the worst, being not just worried and tense, but angry, too.
“I cannot believe it,” Sean repeated. “It’s hypocritical. After the shit she gives me for taking risks? And off she goes, running back to Endicott Falls, today? Like, what the fuck?”
“To be fair,” Bruno pointed out. “You ran off to shoot people and blow shit up. She went home to go back to work at her bookstore.”
“What difference does the nature of the errand make, if there are killers out there?” The SUV swerved, hydroplaning on the oily asphalt.
Bruno cowered back into his seat. “Ah, yeah. Whatever, man. Just drive the car.”
Kev sat next to him, likewise grim, since his lady, too, had committed the unspeakable crime of driving back to Seattle with Liv, Miles, and Sveti. Davy and Connor both looked complacent, their own lady wives being safely at home in Seattle with assorted offspring.
Bruno was nervous. It had been painful enough to leave Lily in Tam’s fortress. Now she was a sitting duck in a hospital emergency room. The timing of this catastrophe was so bad. Meteorsflying-out-of-the-sky-to-hit-you-on-the-head bad. Bad with surgical precision.
“Aaro’s with her,” Davy said, reading his mind. “Aaro’s no idiot.”
Bruno declined to comment, not being personally convinced of that yet. Then Kev’s cell phone buzzed. His brother stared at it, puzzled.
“I don’t know this number,” he said. “Never seen it before.”
“Things are too strange not to answer it,” Bruno said. “Pick it up.”
Kev shrugged, clicked the button. “Yeah? . . . Yes, I am . . . ah. I see. How did you get this number? . . . Oh.” He turned, gave Bruno a look that made his stomach turn to gelid slush. “Yeah, he is here,” he said reluctantly, after a long, painful pause.
Kev passed him the phone. “For you,” he said. “Detective Petrie.”
Bruno winced and held it his ear. “Hey, Petrie. What’s up?”
“I can’t believe you have the nerve to ask that, you son of a bitch.”
Bruno was taken aback. “What? You’re pissed because I didn’t come in for questioning? I told you, man. I was running for my life. Still am. That’s the only reason I blew you off. Don’t take it personally.”
“Blew me off? You think this is something personal? That I got my feelings hurt? That takes self-absorbed to a whole new level. You’re wanted for triple homicide, Ranieri, and that’s just for starters. I got the warrant signed two days ago. It’s in the Law Enforcement data system, the NCIC database. We are after your ass. Just so you know.”
Bruno jerked upright. “It was self-defense. I told you.”
“Was it self-defense to turn you
r phone off for five days, too?”
Bruno rubbed his eyes. “You’ve been trying to call me?”
Petrie made a derisive sound. “So where were you?”
Bruno paused. “I was out digging up skeletons from my past.”
“Ah. How nice for you. Sounds like good exercise.”
“Oh, it was,” Bruno assured him.
“Got a whole closet full of those, do you?”
“Pretty much,” Bruno admitted.
“No cell coverage out there in skeleton country?”
“Nope,” Bruno said.
“Well, then, I’ve got a few more for your collection. I arranged for genetic testing, for those bodies from the crime scene outside the diner. I also had the cadaver of Aaro’s little friend tested, since he was so emphatic about her being involved, and the guy who shot himself on Wygant, the one I mistook for you. I got those samples fast-tracked, and compared to the sample of your DNA that we had in our database, as well as whatever bodily fluid of yours that the criminalists scraped off the crime scene—blood, vomit, what have you. And I got some preliminary results back today.”
Bruno waited. “Well?” he prompted. “And?”
Petrie was silent. “You really don’t know? You have no idea?”
The slush inside Bruno’s belly hardened into ice. It was another one of those icebergs. Secrets, hanging huge below the surface of dark water. “Stop being coy. Were they in the system? Who are they?”
“No,” Petrie said. “We didn’t ID them. They’re John and Jane Does. Why don’t you help me ID them, Ranieri? Come on. Give it up.”
“Me? Why me? What are you hinting at? Out with it!”
The car had gone silent.
“They’re your brothers. And your sister,” Petrie said.
Bruno sat there. Mouth wide. A sledgehammer had thwacked into his thorax.
“What?” he choked out. “How? Who?”
“The girl. The suicided guy, on Wygant Street, the one who looks like you. And one of the three dead guys on the street. There’s this thing called the siblingship index. The stiffs share so much genetic material with you, the probability that they are your full brothers and sisters is overwhelming. Or double cousins. That is, if your mother’s sibling had offspring with your father’s sibling. The lab tech explained. It’s the number of genetic markers that match up.”
“My mother didn’t have any siblings,” Bruno said.
“Well, then. Back to scenario A. Full brothers and sisters, then.”
“But I don’t.” Bruno felt lost. “I can’t. Those people, the guys I fought—they were younger than me. Aaro’s girlfriend was in her early twenties. My mother’s been dead for eighteen years. I never knew who my father was. I was twelve when she died. She was nineteen when she had me. She didn’t have any other children. I would have noticed.”
“You think? That’s fascinating. The jury will eat it up. The story of your deprived single-parent childhood, how it led to the savage murders of your unacknowledged, unnoticed brothers and sister. Your defense lawyer will have lots to work with. The insanity plea will be cake.”
Bruno could think of nothing to say. His mouth worked.
“I hope I’ve given you something to think about. Thanks for keeping in touch, keeping me in the loop. You’re a real prince, Ranieri.”
“Petrie—”
“Just shut up, OK? I’m sick of your bullshit. Just shut up.”
Petrie hung up. The rain pounded on the windshield. The wipers did their fast squeaka-scrape, squeaka-scrape. Bruno stared at the phone as if it were a poisonous snake that had just bitten him.
“What is it, Bru?” Kev prodded, his voice cautious.
“Petrie,” Bruno said hoarsely. “The cop from Portland. There’s a warrant out, for my arrest. And he did genetic tests on those guys I, ah, fought, outside the diner. He says they’re my . . .” His voice caught on the word. “My siblings.”
Silence met his announcement. Every second of it burned like a lit fuse, crawling closer to that stick of dynamite that was himself.
“Jesus,” Sean murmured. “I thought our problems were weird.”
Kev twisted to stare at Bruno. “You know he’ll have my signal triangulated, right? He’ll pinpoint your location, if he hasn’t already.”
Bruno stared, still helpless.
“Why in God’s name did Julio give my number to a cop?” Kev muttered. “What was he thinking?” He turned to Bruno. “We’re barely a half hour from Cray’s Cove. Petrie is going to know that, real soon. There’s enough about all of us in the files for him to figure out where we’re going. You can’t go to Tam’s. You have to go a different direction.”
“They don’t know about Rosaline Creek,” Bruno argued.
“It’s just a matter of time,” Davy said. “Forget air travel. Get a car, get out of the state before the net falls.”
“Find that jewelry box, or you’ll be solving your mystery and conducting your love affair from inside a jail cell,” Kev finished.
“Manhunt?” Bruno stared around at them. “I can’t just disappear,” he protested. “I can’t do that to her! I have to see Lily!”
“No, you don’t.” Con’s voice was hard. “If you give a shit about her, you don’t. Man up. Do the hard thing. If nothing else, you’ll draw them away from her. And if she’s worth a damn at all, she’ll understand. We’ll look after her for you.”
Bruno’s whole body clamped like a fist around a scream of frustration. “Don’t give me your McCloud do-the-hard-thing macho bullshit,” he snarled. “I have to talk to her.”
He pulled up Aaro’s number again. The line was busy. Still. Jesus wept. Aaro was a pathological loner, so socially challenged, h seemed practically autistic, and all of a sudden, he’d decided to be chatty.
Bruno slunk down still deeper into the seat and just repeated the call, at ten-second intervals. Obsessively.
“No, no. With the pinkies. Work them into the outside bits . . . yeah, like that, and then . . . turn the whole thing inside out. Excellent!”
Rachel held up the correctly inverted Cat’s Cradle stretched out between her two hands, and beamed triumphantly. Lily grinned back, tickled that she’d remembered the sequence of knots she hadn’t done since fifth grade. She used to do Jacob’s Ladder, too, but that attempt had turned into a snarl of shoelace that had them both giggling.
They’d reached a small hospital on the outskirts of the next town in good time. Val had been out the door with Tam in his arms, loping toward the door of the Urgent Care entrance before Lily even got her seat belt unbuckled. By the time the rest of them had gotten Rachel’s shoes and jacket onto her and trooped inside, Tam and Val had long since disappeared into the ER’s inner sanctum.
And at that point, there was nothing left to do but find a row of benches, hunker down, and think of ways to keep Rachel occupied. They’d left in far too much of a hurry to think of toys, books, dolls, puzzles, or a fancy electronic device that would stream kids’ TV. Zia Rosa was no help, sitting there with her eyes squeezed shut, muttering prayers. Aaro was even less help, surprise, surprise. He paced around their benches like a chained wolf, muttering savagely into his cell. “. . . of course not . . . if you ladies hadn’t insisted on haring off to Seattle . . . oh, for Christ’s sake . . . nobody’s blaming anybody for anything! . . . Yeah, just get back here! We’re sure as hell not going anywhere . . .”
The floor show had been for her to devise, so Lily picked a lace out of her shoe and started teaching Rachel to play Cat’s Cradle.
Aaro was on the phone with Edie for the second time, trying to explain the fastest route to Rosaline Creek. It was clear from the tone of his voice that the stress level did not help their mutual comprehension one little bit. A nurse walked in, carrying a clipboard. She was a young, dark-haired woman in green scrubs, pretty in a fresh, scrubbed sort of way. She scanned the room with a thoughtful frown, and her eyes settled on them. “Are you the folks who came in with Tamara Steele?”<
br />
Aaro stopped pacing and snapped his phone shut. “Is she OK?”
The woman glanced down at her clipboard. “She’s stabilized,” she said, her voice careful. “We’re doing all we can.”
Rachel’s hands dropped into her lap, still tangled with her shoelace Cat’s Cradle. She burst into tears.
Lily pulled Rachel onto her lap. Tucked the curly black head under her chin so that waving fuzzy black fronds tickled her nose. “It’ll be OK,” she whispered to Rachel. Wanting so badly for it to be true.
But who better than she knew how untrue it could be? Rachel knew, too. All of them did, even Aaro. She didn’t know Aaro’s story, but she didn’t need to. She knew he had one. She could feel it, vibing off him. All of them knew about stories with bad endings.
Just then, Zia Rosa concluded her cycle of prayers and opened her eyes. They widened as she saw the nurse. “Ehi!” she burst out. “But you are the nice lady from the baby store! How are you?”
The nurse looked blank for a moment, and then her face lit up. “Oh, wow! Yes, it’s you! How ce to see you again! What a coincidence!”
“And how are little Hayden and little Phillip?” Zia’s face lit with a sentimental smile. “I met her at the baby store in the mall,” she explained to Lily. “With her twins. Boy and girl. Sweetest little bimbi, looked just like Bruno and Magda when they were little. My goodness, you didn’t say you were a nurse, too! You must be a busy woman!”
The nurse laughed. “I am. The twins are great. They’re with their dad, watching too much TV. We were visiting Jim’s parents when we met you at the mall, but we actually live here, in Craigsville Heights.”
Rachel slid off Lily’s lap. “Are you going to save Irina?” she asked.
The nurse looked down at her. “Excuse me, honey? Who’s Irina?”
“My little sister,” Rachel explained. “She’s inside Mamma.”
“Ah.” The woman stroked Rachel’s curly head. “We will do our very best for Irina, sweetheart.”
Zia Rosa peered at the laminated nametag that hung around the woman’s neck. “Sylvia Jerrold, LPN. I thought your name was Kate.”
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