Working Stiff tr-1

by Rachel Caine

  “Just a few minutes,” he assured her, and closed the door. She listened, but couldn’t hear a thing … and then she heard his footsteps on the stairs leading down to the basement.

  I really need to get out of here. Whatever the hell was going on, it wasn’t her business. Not at all. In fact, Bryn decided then and there that she was officially quitting. She could get another job, and she could get it at some big-city mortuary where there were lots of people coming and going.

  Someplace sane.

  She was heading for the door when the bell rang, and a new person came in the front. Bryn ducked into the shadows, holding her breath, and a man and woman she didn’t know walked into the foyer. The woman didn’t look well; she was sweating, trembling, and had to be supported as she moved. Terminally ill? Maybe a late-night consultation?

  The couple went straight for the basement stairs. Bryn frowned, watching them, and then looked at the front door. It was like Grand Central; one more bell ringing wouldn’t matter now, right? And she could just run. Run like hell, flag down a car, get out of here …

  Except now she was curious. Deeply curious. Was Fideli right? Were they running some kind of drug lab down there? Fairview had talked about how trade had fallen off. She supposed he’d do almost anything to keep the family business going.

  She walked over to the basement door and eased it open a crack. Just to listen. The problem was, although she could hear voices, they weren’t very loud, and she missed more than half of what was being said.

  She came out onto the landing.

  Down a couple of steps, very quietly.

  Then all the way down, drawn by what the voices were saying.

  “… need it!” a man’s voice was saying. Not Freddy or Mr. Fairview, or even Joe … She was hearing the man who’d come in with the sick lady, Bryn guessed. “I know that’s not the amount we agreed on, but it’s all we have; please, she needs the shot right now….”

  “This isn’t a charity hospital, Mr. Jones,” Mr. Fairview’s voice said, rich with regret and sympathy. “I’m afraid that miracles are, by their very definition, rare—and rare means expensive. The terms were spelled out for you clearly, weren’t they? Ten thousand up front, and five hundred dollars cash per shot?”

  “I can get it for you; it’s just … it’s thirty-five hundred a week….”

  “Thirty-five hundred a week to keep your beloved wife alive,” Mr. Fairview said. “I have to believe that you value her life more than the money, sir. And I must urge you to act quickly. She’s clearly missed at least one dose, possibly two, and she is looking very distressed. After four days, the skin begins to slip; muscles loosen. It’s a very nasty process.”

  Bryn couldn’t quite believe what she was hearing. Joe Fideli had been right: her boss was selling drugs—bad ones. And they were extorting money from sick, desperate people.

  It was horrible.

  “I’m very sorry,” Mr. Fairview continued. “But I really must have cash in hand before I can give her the shot. This was made clear to you from the very beginning.”

  “I lost my job,” the man said. It sounded like he was crying. “I can’t … We already had to give up our house. I can’t afford to pay you this much. Please. Please don’t let her die! We’ve got kids!”

  There was a second of silence. “I’m afraid that even though we talked about this, you still don’t understand. She’s dead, Mr. Jones. We haven’t made her living. I explained to you that you were simply delaying the inevitable dissolution, and now it appears that the inevitable is upon you.”

  Not only were they selling some hard-core drug; they were bilking people. How could Fairview possibly be telling people he was bringing back the dead? Who’d believe that? Maybe the drug induced some kind of coma, then woke up the addicts…. It didn’t really matter. Bryn felt deeply sickened. She’d been trained to help people in their darkest, worst moments, and this was an obscene, horrible perversion of what she’d believed. A betrayal of the worst kind.

  She turned to go back up the steps, but a shadow blocked her path at the top of the stairs. She had a moment of déjà vu, but it wasn’t Joe Fideli.

  It was, unfortunately, Freddy Watson.

  He descended the stairs faster than she could scramble backward, and grabbed her by the arm in a crushing grip. She tried to knee him in the groin, but he was obviously an old hand at that one; her patella caught the meaty part of his thigh instead, and then he was shoving her off balance, turning her, and locking his arm around her throat. She tried to stamp on his feet, but her Payless heels weren’t that sturdy. He just laughed in her ear and dragged her, off balance, through the double doors into the prep room.

  “Surprise visitor,” he said, and it obviously was, to the three people standing there. Mr. and Mrs. Jones, and Mr. Fairview.

  Mr. Fairview looked wearily disgusted. “I left her upstairs. And, Freddy, I thought you were supposed to scare her off from snooping around down here.”

  “I did,” Freddy said. “I played the Big Bad Wolf as hard as I could, but she’s tougher than she looks. I caught her listening on the stairs.”

  “Really? What did you hear, Bryn?” Mr. Fairview asked.

  “Nothing,” she said, and tried to jam her elbow back into Freddy’s ribs. That worked well enough that he let up on the grip, and she slipped away and put the prep table between them. “He attacked me!”

  “Yes, well, he does have impulse-control issues,” Mr. Fairview said. “It’s the reason I can’t have him doing intakes. He doesn’t inspire confidence in others. And I don’t believe you, Bryn.”

  “You saw—”

  “Not about the attack; about what you overheard. You did hear something. The question is what, and how much you understand.”

  On the second prep table, Mr. Fairview had a leather case open, with a small bottle of some injectable drug nestled in padding, along with a syringe.

  Mr. Jones was taking advantage of Bryn’s entrance to edge closer and closer to it. Now he grabbed the case, ripped the cap off the syringe, and quickly filled the chamber from the vial of liquid.

  Mr. Fairview slapped it out of his hand. The syringe skittered across the floor, and Mr. Fairview stepped on it, cracking the plastic and leaving a wet smear on the tile floor as the drug leaked out.

  Then he took out a gun from a drawer next to him and aimed it at Mr. Jones’s chest, and pulled the trigger three times, the booms shockingly loud in the tiled room.

  Before Mr. Jones fell, Bryn bolted for the door. Freddy grabbed her and pressed her up against the wall just as Mr. Jones hit the tile floor, light already fading from his wide, surprised eyes. His wife cried out and dropped down next to him, but after a second of horrified staring, she scrabbled for the vial of the drug held loosely in his dead hand.

  Mr. Fairview scooped it neatly away. “Freddy,” he said. “Stop playing with the new girl and take care of all this mess, please.”

  “Yes, boss.” Freddy let go of Bryn and hit her. Hard. She saw darkness and flaming stars, and the world tilted sideways on her.

  Cold floor.

  By the time she got her eyes open again, Freddy was at the shelves. He yanked open a drawer and pulled out two body bags. Then, after a glance at Bryn, he added a third.

  He unrolled the first one on the floor, dragged Mr. Jones over, and zipped him inside.

  Bryn scrambled in slow motion to her feet, fought for balance, and staggered for the door, but Mr. Fairview was already there, and the sight of the gun made her slow and stop. She knew he’d shoot her.

  She’d already seen the proof.

  “How much do you know?” Fairview asked her. “Who are you working for?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about! Let me go!” Her heart was hammering. Fear screamed at her to stay still, but she knew fear was going to get her killed. She needed to go back to her training. She needed to think. She had no idea what had happened to Joe Fideli, but if he hadn’t already shown up, she had no reason to thi
nk he’d come riding to the rescue in time to save her now.

  Freddy finished zipping Mr. Jones into his storage bag, and then unrolled a second one. Bryn caught her breath as he grabbed Mrs. Jones by the arm and dragged her over onto the plastic. The woman slapped at him weakly, but she just couldn’t fight back.

  He was zipping her into the body bag, still alive.

  “No!” Bryn blurted, and lunged toward them to let the woman out. Freddy punched her, a true, no-holds-barred impact that sent another wave of blackness over her in a sticky, cold flood. She stayed upright somehow, and raised her fingers to her mouth. They came away bloody.

  And just like that, her training came back to her, like a ghost returning to her body. The fear went away and the pain got blocked. She altered her balance, wishing for body armor, for boots, for a knife and a gun and all the things she didn’t have. Then she let that fall away.

  She’d manage.

  Freddy’s eyes were cold and avid. “She’s not like you thought. Look at her. She’s a fighter.”

  “I can see that, Freddy.”

  “I’m going to have to kill her.”

  Fairview sighed. “I really can’t keep replacing people. It’s just impossible, the recruiting fees; you have no idea.”

  “So don’t replace her,” Freddy said. “Kill her and give her the shot. She’ll be just as reliable as I am, after. Bonus points—you get to have special fun with her, too.”

  Mr. Fairview smiled, but it looked bitter and pinched. “I hardly have enough to keep you fresh, plus our retail stock. You know that. And I still have Mr. Garcia to contend with, which is entirely your fault.”

  Garcia. That name rang a bell, something immediate…. They’d mentioned, during her hiring process, that she was replacing a man named Cesar Garcia, who’d left town.

  Maybe he hadn’t left town at all.

  “He’s nearly done.” Freddy shrugged. “It’s been five days since his last shot. He won’t last the night.”

  “Check him,” Mr. Fairview said. “I don’t want an unpleasant surprise.”

  Freddy opened up the walk-in refrigerator and wheeled out the other body that had been in the freezer, the one in the body bag. And Bryn, to her horror, heard that sound again.

  That scratching.

  Not rats. She could see the bag moving, very slowly.

  “Oh, God,” she whispered. She couldn’t seem to move as Freddy unzipped the body bag.

  The smell spread through the room, sickly sweet and foul, and from all appearances, what was in the body bag was at least several weeks dead and decomposing. Bryn was used to the stench, but what made her eyes widen and her throat close up was the fact that this corpse, this decomposing thing, was still moving. Not involuntary biological twitches. Real, directed movements.

  The lipless mouth opened, and air scraped out—not a scream, because the vocal cords were gone, but she understood.

  Deep inside, she knew it was a howl of utter horror.

  “Christ,” Freddy said in disgust. “He’s hanging on better than I’d expected. I may have to disassemble him.”

  “No,” Mr. Fairview said, and came to stand next to Freddy, looking down on the remains of Mr. Garcia … Bryn’s predecessor. “This is fine. We can document the progress, until he’s too far gone to be of any use to us. Five full days is the longest anyone’s lasted, right? Maybe he’ll go to six. Or Mrs. Jones will. I suppose we can give up any hope of a payday on her as well.”

  “What—” She hadn’t realized that she’d spoken until the word slipped out, and then it was too late. She’d drawn their attention.

  Bryn grabbed a scalpel from the tray of sterile instruments and menaced Freddy as he came her way. “Back off!” she said. “I’ll kill you, you son of a bitch.”

  He laughed. “Late to the party, Double Trouble. Fairview got me first.”

  She was fast, but he turned out to be faster, slapping the scalpel out of the way and slamming her face-first into the wall. Everything went vague, except for the pain, which remained cuttingly sharp, and then she was on the floor in a heap, watching her own blood crawl red over the tile. Just like Melissa.

  The voices came at her smeared and disembodied, from what seemed like a great distance.

  “Do you want to keep her?”

  “I’m not sure. Maybe. It’s a bother to set up her disappearance properly. Let’s do it and get her in storage. I’ll decide later, once we dispose of Mr. Jones.”

  Bryn felt herself being lifted, then settling into place on a stiff, cold surface.

  A preparation table.

  “No,” she whispered, and Mr. Fairview looked down on her with that distant, professional compassion she’d thought was so wonderful before. Adrenaline surged through her, and she tried to get up. He had leverage, and muscle, to keep her down.

  “Sorry it didn’t work out,” he said. “You really did have a lot of promise, Bryn. I hope you don’t take this personally.”

  He nodded to Freddy, and Freddy snapped on a pair of latex gloves, then lifted up a clear plastic bag.

  He put it over her head.

  Bryn involuntarily gasped, but the plastic filled her mouth and nose and blocked off her air. Freddy made sure of it by pressing his hand down over her face, and all her struggling didn’t make any difference at all. It seemed to take forever, and the panic was so extreme that it was painful, like needles in her skin. She was screaming, but the sound couldn’t get out. Her lungs ached, then hurt, then shrieked for air. God, it hurt. It hurt so badly.

  Then it all started to go softly gray at the edges, and the edges pushed in, and in, until it was all a hazy mist, and she couldn’t remember why she was fighting so hard, and it was all pain, all of it. Dying was supposed to be easier.

  Something crashed in the room, loud enough to penetrate even her fading senses, but she couldn’t make sense of it. Nothing made any sense. Everyone was yelling, and there was smoke, and fire, and the sharp pops of gunfire. Freddy’s chest exploded in a red mist, and he fell away. Blood splattered the bag over her eyes, and she couldn’t see anymore.

  None of it mattered as she gasped, and gasped, and the taste of plastic was the last thing she knew as the shadows slipped over her and drowned her.

  And it hurt, all the way to the very last scream of the last nerve.

  “Crap, crap, crap,” a voice whispered, from a very long distance away. “Goddamn it. Shit. Come on, Bryn. Come on back.”

  Someone was patting her face, which felt cold and clammy with moisture. She felt … numb. Cold to the bone. And oddly disconnected, as if she weren’t quite inside her own body.

  Then, with a harsh, electric snap, she was back, and everything woke up.

  Bryn’s body arched, and a scream raked its way up from her guts, out through her throat, and burst out of her mouth with so much force that she felt something tear inside of her. It didn’t even sound human, that scream: certainly nothing she could imagine coming out of her own body.

  And then the pain drowned her in a thick, stinging wave, and she knew why she was screaming.

  There was a murmur of voices, and she saw a glimpse of a face in the haloes of bright lights.

  Joe Fideli. He looked grim and sad, and he was holding her hand. “Relax,” he said. “I know it hurts. Just relax now. You’ll be okay.”

  She reached out, but it was too hard, too far, and whatever liquid they were injecting into her arm made her fall very far, very fast, into a hot, airless darkness.

  Waking up the second time was both easier and worse. Easier because she no longer felt all the pain and horror; worse because she didn’t know where she was. It was a featureless room, very clean. She was tucked in a narrow bed with rails, and there were portable medical monitors, cabinets—the usual hospital room accoutrements. Nothing else that she could see. She didn’t even have an IV in her arm, only an oxygen clamp on her fingertip. The place smelled of antiseptic.

  As she sat up to get a better look around, the door at th
e far end opened, and Joe Fideli came in. He was followed by another man Bryn didn’t know—younger than Joe, with black hair and brown eyes and skin a few shades darker than Bryn‘s. He was wearing a tailored black suit and a sober-looking tie, and both he and Joe had ID badges clipped onto their pockets.

  Joe’s face was very, very calm, blank, and bland, and from the first look at him, she knew she was in trouble.

  She just had no idea why, or how.

  “Hello,” Bryn said. The two men didn’t say a word. She wet her very dry lips. “Where am I? What happened?”

  Joe exchanged a look with the unknown man, then said, “You’re in a safe place.”

  “Safe …” That didn’t seem to make sense to her. There was no safe place. Not anymore.

  The other man, the one she didn’t know, walked forward, pulled up a single aluminum chair, and sat down next to her bedside. Close up, he was handsome in a quiet kind of way, and a little older than she’d thought—probably midthirties.

  “Your name is Bryn Davis,” he said. She nodded, waiting for him to offer his own. He didn’t. “What do you remember about what happened to you?”

  “I—” She stopped, because there was a black curtain between her and those memories, and she didn’t want to walk through it. She knew instinctively that it was there for a reason. “I’m not really sure. I remember going to work; there was a girl who killed herself—”

  “Yes,” the man agreed, without any emotional weight on the word at all. “Go on.”

  “I worked late. I met Mr. Fideli….” Bryn looked past her inquisitor to Joe, who was leaning against the wall by the door, still looking neutral and distant. He nodded at her. “And then I tried to leave, but Mr. Fairview took me back inside….”

  Her voice faded. Whatever had happened to her after that, before Joe Fideli had slapped her face to wake her up, she didn’t remember, or want to remember. It made her stomach churn with anxiety to think about it.

  “Something bad happened,” she whispered. “Something …”

  The man didn’t blink. “Yes,” he agreed again, exactly the way he’d agreed to her earlier statement. “Bryn, I need to know what you know about the business Mr. Fairview and Mr. Watson were running from the basement.”