That Touch of Ink

by Vallere, Diane

  And then he saw the James Madison I taped to the glass.

  THIRTY-THREE

  I dropped to the floor and crawled over piles of paper to the exit. I stood up and stepped onto the oriental carpet in the hallway. The double doors to the apartment complex stood to my left. Keycard access would keep me from entering. I ran to the parking lot on my right, my fingers wrapped around Brad’s gun.

  I got outside and raced for the street. I heard footsteps behind me. I turned around and raised Brad’s pistol with my handcuffed hands. Harry was ten feet away. He held a gun.

  I pulled the trigger on the gun I held. It clicked. I pulled it again and again. Click. Click. No bullets. Brad’s gun wasn’t loaded.

  Harry smiled, the face of a deranged man who just recognized his own luck. He slowly raised his own gun and aimed at me. Nasty approached him from behind. She threw her arms around his arms. His gun went off. I screamed as a flash of heat tore through my upper arm.

  “Madison!” yelled Tex, diving toward me. He knocked me to the macadam. More shots were fired, shots I didn’t feel.

  I squeezed my eyes shut, scared by the weight of Tex’s body on top of mine, scared by the fact that he wasn’t moving, scared by the silence surrounding us. I couldn’t breathe, and my arm felt like it had been stung by a thousand bees. I opened my eyes and stared at the clear, cerulean sky.

  The faint sound of sirens hinted that the worst was over. Two ambulances pulled into the parking lot, and I realized that the world had not gone silent, but that my hearing had been affected by the shots of the gun.

  I tipped my head up and looked at the building. Nasty had handcuffed Harry and was walking him toward her patrol car. I lay back down and closed my eyes a second time.

  Tex moved, slowly. He put a hand on either side of me and raised himself into a half-push-up.

  “This is not how I pictured this moment,” he said and rolled off. Blood covered his jeans and my green pants. He lay back on the ground and closed his eyes. I was only minimally comforted by the rise and fall of his chest.

  A sea of people appeared to help. I felt woozy and couldn’t make out faces, names, or sounds. Paramedics moved Tex onto a gurney and rolled him into the back of an ambulance. Someone unlocked the handcuffs still around my wrists. A man dressed only in white tended to my arm. I didn’t want to look at it. I already knew I’d been shot.

  I didn’t need to know the details of the wound. I tried to stand, but dizziness made it near-impossible. Someone thrust a wheelchair under me. Despite my hatred for the metal contraption, I collapsed into it, like a marionette whose strings were no longer being pulled. I felt a needle in my arm and I melted into sleep.

  “Looks like we’re both members of the injured below the waist club now,” said a familiar voice.

  I opened my eyes and looked directly at Tex. I’d been sleeping in a chair in the waiting room outside of Emergency. My arm was in a white sling. It was bandaged and stiff. Tex was in a wheelchair in front of me. I didn’t like what was familiar about the scenario, and I didn’t like what was new.

  “What happened?” I asked.

  “We got shot.”

  “Both of us?” The details were cloudy in my mind. I looked at the ceiling and replayed the memories that had been filling my dreams. “That’s not what I remember. Harry had a gun. Nasty surprised him. The gun went off.”

  “And shot us.”

  “No, shot me. Then you—”

  Tex raised an eyebrow.

  “Then you—” I tried again. Then you jumped in front of me to protect me and got shot in the process. I couldn’t finish the sentence.

  “And then I did my job,” he said.

  “You got shot because of me.”

  He shrugged. “All in a day’s work.”

  “You know this is going to change the way I see you.”

  “How’s that?” he asked. His face hinted at nothing.

  It was a crossroads for Tex and me. There was no way I could see him as the playboy like I once had, but I knew him too well to adopt hero worship. Here was a chance for us to start fresh and rewrite the basis of our relationship. I took a couple of seconds before responding.

  “For starters, until you’re out of that wheelchair, I’ll be looking down.”

  He shook his head and smiled. There was a purplish bruise by his right eye and a cut over his brow that was held shut by two small butterfly Band-aids.

  “Harry Delbert killed Philip Shayne, didn’t he?”

  Tex nodded. “Harry Delbert’s locked up now, and he’ll stay that way for a long time.”

  “Do you understand what it was all about?”

  He shook his head slightly. “I don’t know the details of what happened in Pennsylvania. I do know that Delbert and Shayne tracked Mr. Turlington to Dallas. He had something they wanted.”

  Mr. Turlington. Tex’s formality established a barrier. I tensed up, wondering if I could talk about Brad in calm, formal terms.

  “The James Madison bill.”

  “It would seem so.”

  “Brad said they were holed up at Paper Trail,” I said. “Harry and Philip forced Stanley Mann to authenticate counterfeit bills so they could sell them to collectors.”

  “That’s where the Secret Service came in.”

  “But this was a whole different kind of counterfeit scheme. They weren’t passing fakes, they were selling fakes. It’s not like a collector was going to do anything with the bill other than save it or display it.”

  “Still, the Secret Service has jurisdiction over counterfeiting crimes—doesn’t matter what they were planning to do with the money they made. Spend it or sell it, either way it’s a federal felony. They probably could have gotten away with it if they didn’t get greedy.”

  “I think they did get away with it, at least for a while. That’s why I was told Brad’s video message was evidence to a crime in Pennsylvania, wasn’t it? And why Grant said I shouldn’t know as much as I do?”

  Tex nodded. “The one thing that made their whole plan work was your James Madison. It’s the only one that was real.”

  It started to make sense. “So if anybody ever called them on what they were doing, they could pull a switch and look legit.”

  “Yep. Too bad your—Mr. Turlington—had the romantic notion to send the real bill to you.”

  “How did Harry find out I had the real bill?”

  “I don’t think he knew at first. Mr—”

  “If you insist on calling me by my last name, you can drop the formalities when it comes to Brad.”

  Tex raised one eyebrow and continued. “Turlington had your business card. Not sure where he got it, but I imagine you have them around town. We think he was at Paper Trail earlier, before Philip Shayne was killed. Maybe he dropped your card. Once Harry found out about you, he figured he had Turlington’s soft spot.”

  “But Brad took me to the restaurant where Harry worked the night Philip Shayne was killed. Why would he do that?”

  “We already checked Harry’s schedule. He wasn’t supposed to be working that night. He needed an alibi, and the best he could come up with was to show up at work. Turlington knew about the restaurant because they’d met there before. He might have been planning to tell you the truth then. Would have made things easier if he did, but seeing Harry probably shut him up.”

  “So Harry left when I left and followed me home in the brown sedan.”

  “Seems that way.”

  “And he was the guy in the ski mask who took the briefcase from Brad’s trunk. Why didn’t he come after me then?”

  “You were the only one who knew where the real five thou was. Coming after you at that point wouldn’t have done anything other than draw attention to them. He needed you.”

  As I reasoned
out what I knew, I compared people to parts like I was casting a movie. Tex sat silent, allowing me the space to figure it all out for myself.

  “Harry was the one who jumped me outside of my studio.” My eyes moved around the interior of the waiting room, over framed paintings in shades of aqua, salmon, coral, and white. “They must have been at Paper Trail across the street from the bank. That’s how Brad got the brown sedan and took off with me. And Harry followed us on foot and shot Grant.”

  Tex nodded once.

  “So that’s it. It’s over?”

  “It’s over.”

  I wanted to believe what he said, but I knew it wasn’t over. Not by a long shot. I knew all too well that there was a strong possibility that I’d never know the extent of Brad’s involvement. If Brad had vanished a second time, it would never be over. I’d always wonder when or if he’d pop back up in my life. It was time for me to relegate him back to a small corner of my memory, to start pretending that he hadn’t violated my trust and confidence a second time.

  The doctor approached us from a long narrow hallway.

  “Are you going to explain the money?” he asked me.

  “What money? I don’t have any money,” I said.

  “That’s not exactly true,” the doctor said.

  Tex looked up at him, and I tipped my head to the side, confused.

  “We had to remove your clothes to give you a physical, make sure there were no internal injuries,” the doctor continued. “When we stripped you, we found something interesting.”

  I remembered the sandwich baggies taped to my midsection. “The James Madisons.”

  I looked at Tex, not sure how much he knew about that. He didn’t look surprised, but he didn’t look happy.

  “Where are they?” I asked.

  “Grant Bonneville has them now.”

  “All of them?”

  “We don’t know. Nobody knows how many there are.”

  It made sense. “How long are they going to keep you here?”

  “With any luck I’ll be out later today.”

  “How are you getting home?”

  “I’ll work it out.” Tex spun himself backward and raised his hands. “What? This is the perfect opportunity for me to abuse my power. I’ll get a rookie to drive me around Dallas for a while.”

  A man in blue scrubs approached us. “Are you his ride?”

  “No. Actually, I don’t have a ride myself.”

  “Yes, you do,” said Tex. “There’s an officer waiting out front. She knows where you live. When you’re ready to leave, she’ll take you home.”

  “It’s not—” I stopped. I assumed he meant Nasty but refrained from saying so. She’d been rude and hostile toward me, but she’d also saved Stanley Mann’s life and reunited him with his dog. Acknowledging I didn’t like her would mean more than it should.

  “Fine. I guess I’m ready to go.” I stood from the plastic chair and walked to the exit.

  “Hey, Night,” Tex called behind me. I stopped walking and slowly looked over my shoulder. “Don’t freak out on me, okay?”

  I turned away from him and walked out the door. The sun was bright. I shielded my eyes and scanned the parking lot for a police cruiser amidst the small army of ambulances. I saw none. What I did see was my nosy neighbor, Mrs. Young, leaning against the back of her minivan.

  “I knew you had to come out sooner or later,” she said.

  She stepped away from the car and adjusted her tweed blazer. I saw a holster under her jacket and the butt end of a gun before she pulled the jacket shut.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  “NO!” I screamed. She reached inside her blazer and I turned around, heading for the entrance. Tex, in his wheelchair, blocked my path.

  “She’s been watching my apartment—she’s going to kill us!”

  “She’s not going to kill us.” He put his hands out to my hips and slowly turned me around until I was facing her. “She’s a police officer,” he said.

  I looked at Mrs. Young. She held a badge, confirming what Tex had said. “To be fair, you were half-right,” she said. “Lieutenant Allen asked me to watch your apartment. But for the record, I’m not in on anything, and I’m not trying to kill you.”

  I turned back around and faced Tex. “You did this?”

  “Get in the car, Night. Officer Young will drive you home and explain everything.”

  I pushed the arms of Tex’s wheelchair backward. It rolled a couple of inches into the man in blue scrubs who had followed Tex outside.

  “This is so not over,” I said to him, pointing a finger in his face.

  “That’s what I’m counting on,” he said with a smile.

  If it wasn’t for my current lack of funds, I would have stormed past Mrs. Young to a waiting taxi, but at the moment I didn’t have any other choice. Reluctantly, I climbed into the car and sat next to her. I wanted to ask a thousand questions, but I didn’t want to admit the depths of my ignorance. She pulled out of the parking lot and drove about a mile down Gaston before she spoke.

  “You impressed me, Ms. Night.”

  “Why Ms. Night? You’ve called me Madison up till now.”

  “That was part of my cover as one of your neighbors. As a police officer, it’s policy for me to call you Ms. Night.”

  “Call me Madison.”

  “Only if you’ll call me Abby.”

  “Fine.”

  “You impressed me, Madison. Lt. Allen said you were a strong woman who could take care of yourself, and he was right.”

  “So why were you there?”

  “No offense, but he suspected your judgment might be clouded when it came to your ex-boyfriend.”

  “So I’ve been told.” I looked out the window at the passing trees. “The day I found you out front—you’d been waiting for me. Your application, everything—all made up.”

  “Yes.”

  “Tex set that up?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did Hudson know?”

  “Yes.”

  “And all of your questions, all those times you tried to look into my apartment, that was to keep an eye on Brad? When you showed up late that one night? And the times I heard a door open in the hallway but no one was there?”

  “Pretty much.”

  “All Tex’s idea?”

  She nodded. I was quiet until we stopped at a traffic light.

  “What about the times you asked me about Hudson?”

  “Let’s just say inquiring minds wanted to know your answers.” She smiled.

  I didn’t say anything for a couple of minutes. “He told you I owned the building, didn’t he?”

  She nodded again.

  “So I’m not really going to get a rent check from you.”

  “As it turns out, I really am in need of an apartment. Maybe we can work something out.”

  I accepted Abby’s newfound friendship while she parked the car and walked with me to the back of the building. She kept up polite chatter about superficial subjects that required little more than a nod, a smile, or some other vague acknowledgement that I was half-paying attention. I didn’t think she was fooled by my minimal attempts, but she seemed to appreciate the effort.

  I went straight to Effie’s apartment and knocked on the door. When she opened it, Rocky bounded out and stood up on his hind feet, paws in the air. I scooped him up, and he showered me with puppy dog kisses. I wrinkled my nose at the contact of his little pink tongue but didn’t pull away. I thought about what Mrs. Bonneville had said about puppy kisses. It was just Rocky and I again. Only this time it felt different.

  He put his paw on my upper arm by the bandage, and I flinched and repositioned him, cradling him in my other arm like a baby.

  “Looks like he
really missed you,” Effie said.

  “I don’t know who missed who more.”

  When we reached my apartment, I unlocked the door and set Rocky down on the floor. I scanned my living room. Planks of the hardwood floor stood like sentries propped against the wall, leaving a hole where the James Madison bills had been hidden. I didn’t bother returning the planks to the floor. I didn’t bother folding the blanket that had been tossed to the side of the sofa or picking up the pillow and sheets from the nights Brad had slept there.

  Instead, I went to the hall closet and pulled two vintage turquoise Samsonite suitcases trimmed in white from where they’d been stashed. I carried them to the bedroom and filled them with underwear, clothes, shoes, an overnight bag, puppy toys, blankets, my laptop and power source, books, pajamas.

  For the next day I wandered around, randomly adding my favorite things to the suitcase. It wasn’t a well-thought out plan or anything concrete, but I knew what I was doing. I was preparing to leave my building, and I was making sure I wouldn’t have to come back for a while.

  When the suitcases were stuffed, I clipped Rocky’s leash to his collar and started loading the car. After the second trip, I knocked on Abby’s door. The officer opened it a crack, recognized me, and held it open wide.

  “Madison,” she said as her eyes swept me and my loot. “Come in.”

  “No, thank you. I’m getting out of here. Right now, it’s too much. I’m taking what I can carry. Everything else is nobody’s business but mine. Here are my keys. Do what you gotta do.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “I’d rather not say.” I set my keys in her hand and walked away.

  “He’s going to ask, you know,” she said to my back.

  “I figured as much.”

  “Good luck, Madison.”

  I took a taxi to Thelma Johnson’s house. Only one person would think to look for me there. But Tex’s case was solved. He’d have no need to talk to me. On the other hand, if Brad was out there and wanted to find me, he’d never think to look there, and that was the space I needed.