by Laurel Dewey
“Who died?”
“One of my friends. Her name was Jaycee. She was a…” Lilith seemed suddenly embarrassed, “hooker.”
“Okay,” Jane said, nonchalantly.
Lilith chewed the flesh off her thumb. “I’m also a…hooker.”
“Hey, I’m not your priest. I don’t care what you do for a living.”
Lilith slightly relaxed. “Jaycee was new in town. Like less than a week. I never even knew her last name or where she came from. But she seemed real nice so we hung out.”
“How did Jaycee die?”
“I…um…had this guy ask me for a date. He was short. Like five six. And old. Like forty.”
“Forty? Yeah, that’s fuckin’ ancient.”
“Yeah. He had reddish gray hair. He drove up in a limo and I got in. There were two other guys in the back. Both were tall and thin and wore dark suits, thin black ties and had really red hair. I mean, like, fire red from hell, you know? And they had these piercing blue eyes, like glass almost. The guy on the left side had a weird bright crimson mark that covered most of the top of his right hand. It was like three inches long. It looked like he’d been in some kind of accident.”
“Did you get any names?”
“Not from the two guys sitting across from me. But the guy who seemed to be in charge said his name was Mr. Ramos. I’ve entertained four guys named Ramos and they all had dark hair, so that was kinda different. I told him it was extra for a threesome but he told me he didn’t want to do me. He wanted me to hook him up with Jaycee. He said he’d seen me with her. I told him to talk to Jaycee himself but he said he was nervous.”
“Nervous?” Jane questioned.
“Yeah. It didn’t make a lot of sense to me neither. I mean, trust me, this Ramos dude didn’t look like a guy who was scared of anything. But then I figured, maybe he didn’t want anyone seein’ him with a black girl—”
“Jaycee was black?”
“As black as the darkest night. Seriously, I never seen no one that black. So, he tells me that he’d pay me good money if I bring her to a certain motel outside of the city but to keep it on the down-low with her ‘cause he wanted to surprise her. He told me when he wanted to see her, the motel name and the room number. Told me there’d be a key waitin’ for me at the desk and to bring her upstairs. Then, I was to go back outside and one of the guys with red hair who was in the limo would give me my money.”
“None of this seemed a little freaky to you?”
“Oh, shit. Last week, I had a guy tell me to put on his mother’s dress and then he nursed on my tit while he made me sing ‘Three Blind Mice.’ It’s all freaky!”
Par for the course, Jane figured. “Go on,” Jane insisted.
“I needed the cash. So, I agreed. If I’d have known…” Lilith shook her head as her eyes welled up.
Jane put her hand on the girl’s arm. “What happened?”
“I did like he asked me to. I told Jaycee that there was this rich guy who wanted a date with only her. She was a little nervous but she liked the idea that someone thought she was special. So we drove down to the motel. And like Mr. Ramos said, the key was waitin’ at the front desk. Room 170—”
“170?” Jane repeated, noting that damn seventeen again.
“Yeah. I take her up there and we go into the room. There was a vase on a table filled with dozens of narcissus. They were beautiful. It made the room smell real sweet. But when we looked on the bed, there was a guy passed out but it wasn’t Mr. Ramos.”
“How do you know he was passed out?”
“’Cause we tried to wake him up but he was wasted. His eyes would open but nobody was home, you know?” Tears fell from Lilith’s eyes. “I should have never left her there. But she said she was okay. So, I walked out. I went downstairs and just like Mr. Ramos said, there was one of the red-haired guys from the limo…the one with the weird cherry mark on his hand? He handed me a fat envelope and told me to leave. I got in my car and drove home. That’s when I counted the money. I couldn’t believe it. Seventeen hundred bucks. I was rich.”
Jane had to check herself momentarily to make sure she wasn’t dreaming.
Lilith reached out to Jane. “But then…the next day, I watch the news and I hear about this dead working girl who they found cut up in a Limon motel…with her head split open…”
Jane was staggered. “Hang on. You’re talking about Harlan Kipple?”
“Yeah. When they showed his photo on the TV, I realized he was the guy passed out on the bed.” She leaned closer to Jane. “He didn’t kill nobody! Guaranteed. He couldn’t lift his eyelid, let alone a knife! He didn’t even have a knife on him!”
“How do you know?”
“We wanted to check him out. See what his package looked like. We pulled back the covers. He was butt naked and there was no knife anywhere. Hand to God! Somebody set him up, just like I set up Jaycee!”
“Why Harlan?”
“How the fuck should I know? Bad shit happens to good people. But it’s been eatin’ at me ever since he got arrested and charged with murder. I couldn’t sleep.” She lowered her head. “I’ve never done nothin’ in my life that’s moral or good. And I figured maybe I could help him, you know? I didn’t tell nobody what I was plannin’ on doin’. I was goin’ to Denver this morning and I was gonna tell whoever would listen to my story what I did and what I saw. And if they couldn’t find who killed Jaycee, at least they could let that Kipple guy go free.”
Jane waited. “Okay…so why are you now headed the opposite direction from Denver?”
“Didn’t you hear what happened this mornin’?”
“No. I’ve been occupied.”
“It was all over the news. I saw it on the other bus when we were drivin’ to Denver. Harlan Kipple’s lawyer took him to a hospital to get his heart checked out. And he escaped!”
Jane quickly recalled the muted TV in the Quik Mart and Kipple’s face on the screen. “Wait a second. If someone is truly innocent, they don’t escape. They talk to their lawyer. They build their case—”
“Hey, I ain’t too smart, but this much I know: I don’t think he’s runnin’ from the cops,” Lilith said succinctly.
“Who’s he running from? Ramos?”
“Maybe. Harlan knows he didn’t kill Jaycee. He knows he was set up. Maybe he was threatened. Maybe he was supposed to die in that motel room? I’m sure as drugged up as he was, he doesn’t remember anything that happened in that room, but somewhere down deep,” she looked off to the side, lost in thought, “somehow he knows…in here?” She pointed to her heart. “Just like I know in that same place. It’s a knowing. I should have had a knowing when I took Jaycee up to that room. She’d be alive today.”
A million thoughts raced through Jane’s head. “This Ramos guy only wanted Jaycee. You said she was new in town so why did he choose her specifically?”
Lilith shrugged her shoulders. “I don’t know.”
“Why would Ramos want to kill her? And why set up Harlan Kipple for the hit?”
“Hey! Which one of us is the cop here? I don’t have a fuckin’ clue.” She moved closer to Jane. “But I do know one thing. I haven’t felt like I’ve been totally alone since I met Ramos in the back of that limo.”
“The red-haired guy in the black suit?” Lilith nodded apprehensively. “You think he’s following you?”
“I know he is. About a week ago, outside of my place, there was a black sedan and the driver’s window was cracked just enough that I could see red hair.” Lilith grabbed hard onto Jane’s jacket sleeve. “Whoever ‘they’ are, they gotta get rid of us who know about the murder. They took care of Harlan and got him in prison for it. But now that he’s jumped, they’re gonna go after him. I’m the only loose string left in this mess.” She let go of Jane’s arm. “I really did want to go to Denver and talk to a cop and make it righ
t for Harlan. And even though I chickened out, you’re a pretty good second choice right now.” Lilith turned to the window as if she sensed someone standing outside.
“What is it?”
“It’s weird. Even when I can’t see him, he’s in my head.”
“In your head?”
She clutched the sleeve of Jane’s leather jacket again. “Please don’t think I’m crazy when I say that! It’s the only way I can describe it. It’s like…he’s following me in my head.” Lilith tapped the center of her forehead. Her eyes pleaded with Jane. “I’m scared to death. Can you please help me?”
Jane felt for the kid. She believed everything she said. More questions beat around in Jane’s brain but her thought process was quickly hijacked by that overwhelming stench she smelled when she first got on the bus. Within seconds, Jane felt her gut seizing and ready to eject every last pine nut she’d ingested. She held her belly, trying to abate the nausea.
“You okay?” Lilith asked, concerned.
“You seriously can’t smell that?” Jane asked, as her tongue began to tingle.
“No. I can’t. What’s goin’ on?”
Suddenly, Jane recognized the same muscular thickness press against her that she’d felt back at the Quik Mart. There was urgency in the air, a million pinpoint spikes of electrical energy erupting at once. Jane could swear she felt her ass being pushed out of her seat. A wave of nausea hit hard. She rested a reassuring hand on Lilith’s arm. “I’ll be right back. I’m gonna be sick,” she hurriedly said, grabbing her bag from the Quik Mart and booking it off the bus.
Jane tore into the nearby field with the dried stands of grass and large rocks. Ducking behind a sizeable boulder, she emptied every last ounce of her stomach contents onto the barren ground. As much as she used to get drunk and bear the consequences the next day, Jane never recalled being this sick, this fast. She tried to stand up but her knees gave out instantly. A strange ringing assaulted her ears, soft at first, then loud and unforgiving. For several moments, the world seemed to stop. She felt suspended in an unearthly cloak that protected her. When Jane emerged from that place, her head spun. She tried to stand up again, but she was forced back on her knees. The ground pulsed beneath her.
Still half outside of herself, she turned her head toward the frontage road and watched as the door on the black Anubus coach closed and the bus moved forward. Jane tried to yell and raise her arm but that damned heavy presence subdued her, preventing any sound from exiting her mouth. She watched helplessly as the bus rolled another hundred feet. Suddenly, a crimson flare detonated from the center of the undercarriage. Another ignition quickly burst in the rear followed by the final one in the front. In a millisecond, a cataclysmic, shock-and-awe explosion broke into the morning air as the bus blasted toward the sky. Shrapnel and blazing body parts rained down on the pavement, igniting small fires in the dried brush that skirted the road.
Jane covered her head and tucked her body as tightly as she could against the boulder. The hellish scene came to an uneasy rest within a minute. By then, a cluster of people ran out of the nearby depot and convenience store. The odd ringing in Jane’s ears vanished, replaced by the hysterical screams and warnings to “stay back” from the terrified spectators.
Jane smelled the same sickly stench that sent her off the bus and into the field. But this time, she connected to where she’d smelled it before. It was the stink of decomposing bodies that she’d unfortunately grown used to at homicide scenes. Her senses had been so dulled by the sickening odor that when the aroma was outside of its deathly orbit, she couldn’t pin it down. But crouching in that field with the burning chunks of debris smoldering against the human sacrifices, Jane realized that for some unknown reason, she sensed the tragedy before it happened. She even saw it in their faces—that ghostly, gray pallor that dwelled over the passengers minutes before their untimely death.
But there was something else. And that something still hovered to the side.
The small crowd of people moved around the debris field, some in shock, others calling on their cell phones for help. Jane grabbed her bag from the Quik Mart and warily stood up. A seat from the bus sat in the brush about twenty feet in front of her, engulfed in flames. Jane stared through the heat waves and spotted a black sedan parked across the highway, away from the wreckage. Leaning against the vehicle, was a tall, thin man in a dark suit with flaming red hair. His eyes, shaded with dark sunglasses, observed the scene with no emotion but appeared to vigilantly scrutinize the onlookers. Even from the distance between them, Jane noted the telltale, glaring, red mark on the guy’s right hand that Lilith had recounted. For a moment, Jane could almost feel his thoughts. It was crazy, she said to herself. But just as Lilith confessed to her, it felt as though he was trying to worm his way into Jane’s head. The hovering presence near her moved closer, offering an unspoken warning.
Death surrounded her. Reverberations of regret, terror and shock lingered in the blackened air as the discarnate souls struggled to make sense of the void between worlds. Jane snuck a suspicious eye toward the red-haired man. Oddly, at that moment, death felt like a safer option.
She withdrew her wallet from her jacket pocket, removing her driver’s license. Jane waited until the man turned, got into his black sedan and drove north on the frontage road. As she was programmed to do, she caught and memorized his license plate: AGA 171.
She skirted the burning wreckage until she came to a small spot in the grass that was untouched by the fire. There, she dropped her driver’s license, face-up, making sure it would be easily seen. Crossing onto the frontage road, Jane headed south, a dead woman walking into the abyss.
CHAPTER 3
Everything was different now.
Almost three hours ago, Jane left her house with a nervous stomach but a determined heart to seek out and find the one person she never knew existed. For now, that quest would be on the back burner. As she walked south down the gravel frontage road, she began to regret her knee-jerk decision to toss her driver’s license into the bus’s burning debris field. With her Mustang possibly long gone and a belief by whoever found her ID that she perished in the explosion, Jane suddenly realized what a fucked up mess she’d created.
She surreptitiously turned around several times while she walked, checking to see if she was being followed by that strange red-haired freak wearing the dark suit and sporting the scarlet mark on his hand. As she replayed in her mind the story Lilith told her and relived the targeted sabotage of the bus, it started to feel like a nightmare from which she couldn’t awaken. “Anubus,” she whispered to herself. Given the deadly circumstances, it was ominous that a bus line named after the Egyptian god that guided souls to the underworld was the flashpoint for murder. But the world was full of companies and landmarks with Greek, Roman or Egyptian names, all of which contained often disturbing connections.
The longer she walked and thought about what had occurred, the more questions she had. Lilith’s death was a hit, no doubt. And taking out an entire busload of innocent people was typical collateral damage to whomever ordered the job. Witnesses had to be killed. That much Jane understood. After her powerful and disturbing case two years prior when a Denver mob wreaked havoc on her personal and professional life, she was all too aware of the savagery of organized crime. But this felt different to Jane. The more she felt into the experience, the more extreme and atypical it became. This wasn’t about some whacked-out group intent on hunting black prostitutes just so they could slice them open and crush their skulls while setting up a truck driver for the kill. The sense Jane got was that whatever group was behind it all—Jaycee’s death, Harlan Kipple’s set up for her murder and the mass killing of the bus passengers—they weren’t amateurs and their ultimate goal was nefarious. But what was that ultimate goal and how many jagged rocks did Jane have to turn over in order to discover the answer?
An icy shiver interrupted Jane’s focu
sed thoughts. She wanted to chalk it up to the cold but she figured it was her body reacting to the reality of her situation. She was a blustery twenty-five miles from Colorado Springs. But that destination was useless now that she had sacrificed herself in the debris field. Her only job right now seemed to be lying low, just in case the red headed nutcase saw her or somehow knew she was still out there. But how in the hell could he know that, Jane thought to herself. She stayed as low as possible and out of sight and didn’t move from the scene until he drove away. Still, she couldn’t shake that eerie comment Lilith made to her on the bus about the disturbing fellow. “He’s following me in my head,” she confidentially told Jane. It sounded almost insane when she first heard it but now…now it crazily made sense. But if he knew, how did he know?
She turned around again, this time scanning the growing desolate area with precision. The cars zoomed by on the highway while the windswept western landscape to her left on the frontage road, bracketed by distant mountain ranges and vacant lots, stared back at Jane with an unforgiving glare. A wave of anger engulfed her. If she hadn’t gotten her car jacked, she’d be well on her way to New Mexico. Jane threw down the bag of water and pine nuts and viciously kicked the gravel beneath her feet hard with her roughout cowboy boot. She silently vowed that if she ever laid eyes on the asshole who stole her Mustang, she’d eviscerate him and enjoy every minute of it. But as soon as that thought crossed her mind, she sensed the same thick presence circling around her that she had felt back at the Quik Mart and on the Anubus. It was neither angelic nor evil, but it sure as hell was demanding, seemingly ushering her forward with unyielding determination. Jane grabbed the plastic bag and continued walking at a faster clip as the western topography grew more rural. Two hours passed and she figured she’d traversed about five miles. Thankfully, the noon sun was bright and warmed her face. And yet, she still had no idea where she was going or what she’d do when she got there.