by Joe McKinney
Chelsea paused there. When Kelly tried to speak, Chelsea waved her off with a sharp flourish of her hand. “What are you going to say, Kelly? That you get it? That you grok me? You don’t. You don’t have a fucking clue. How many times have you been raped?”
“What?” Kelly said, totally taken aback.
“You heard me. How many times?”
“Well . . . I’ve never . . .”
“Great,” Chelsea said. “Come back to me when it becomes a nightly occurrence. And then come back to me a second time when you wake from the dream, only to discover that it’s happening all over again.”
She stared at both of them, challenging either of them to say something, anything.
When neither did, she waved a hand at them and said, “Fine. Fuck you. I’m going to sleep.”
Then, without another word, she walked over to a corner of the room, sat down, curled into a ball, and started to cry.
“Jesus,” Jacob said.
“Yeah, that’s not gonna help,” said Kelly.
“I didn’t . . . I didn’t even . . .”
“I didn’t, either,” Kelly said. “Nobody would have.”
“I’ve dealt with rape cases before. I’ve even talked to little girls about the things their uncles or their cousins did, but I haven’t ever . . .” Jacob threw up his hands. “What was I supposed to say?”
“I don’t know.”
She took his hands in hers and looked into his eyes. In that moment, Jacob saw the past—the glorious, unambiguous past—and at once his future, an uncertain desert with only the vaguest promise of life somewhere in the distance.
Unless it was a mirage.
He squeezed her hand. “Kelly, I . . . I’ve never been very good at this stuff. Talking to her, I felt like I didn’t have the first fucking clue about what to do. I feel like I spend most of my life that way.”
“Me, too,” she said, and managed a chuckle.
He didn’t even smile, though. “No, you don’t.”
“What?”
“You don’t feel like you’re lost. You’re you. You’ve got all this shit figured out. You’re not like the rest of us. You never have been.”
“That’s not true.”
“Isn’t it? I watched you growing up. I knew you were special even before you did.”
Kelly shook her head in confusion, even though she didn’t pull her hands away from his.
“There’s no shame in it, Kelly. You’ve got life figured out. That’s a good thing.”
“Jacob, that’s not true. Don’t be cruel.”
That surprised him. “Cruel? Kelly, I’m not trying to be . . .”
“I know,” she said. She took her hands away from his. “It just feels cruel, because I know it’s not true.”
“Kelly, I know you. Don’t you know that? I know you.”
She turned away with a sour look on her face, like he’d gone below the belt.
“And I don’t mean know you that way. I mean, I know you like we used to talk. I used to spend hours listening to you, Kelly. I know you. I know what’s going on in that head of yours, somewhere.”
“You do, huh?”
“Yeah, I do.”
“Tell me then.”
So, she’d laid down the challenge. She wanted to talk, but she wanted him to earn it. Jacob didn’t even hesitate. “You used to love me, but now you hate me. You blame me for Barry’s death. You do, don’t you?”
She said nothing.
“Well? Go on, tell me if it isn’t true.”
To his great surprise, she said, “It isn’t.”
Jacob said nothing in reply. He was too stunned.
“I don’t hate you, Jacob. I know I said I did, but I didn’t mean it.”
She waited. “Nothing? That means nothing to you?”
“It does,” he said. He reached for something to say, anything, but there was nothing there. “Kelly, I . . .”
“Jacob,” she said. “You’re a good man.”
“Oh God,” he said. He knew what that meant. The good man line, the kiss of death. He’d been hoping . . . he hadn’t let himself realize it until now, but all along he’d been hoping that the old feelings between them would rekindle.
But, of course, her husband of twelve years was dead now just three months.
He hadn’t read Hamlet since grade school, and he’d barely understood half of it even then, but he did remember the line about a marriage following hard upon a funeral. The thought of being that guy, of being Claudius, disgusted him.
And when it came to Kelly, his mind never tolerated disgust.
She was worth more than that.
But, like usual, it was Kelly who came to the rescue. She grabbed his swollen and bloodied hands in hers and squeezed them to her breast. “Jacob, I don’t hate you. I did, but that was only me being crazy. Barry had just died. He’d died defending me. And then everyone else. It was all too much. I had to lash out, and I lashed out at you.”
“Kelly, I . . .”
“You don’t understand.” It wasn’t a question. “How can men use that line like a weapon? I’ll never get that. You say that, and it puts it all back on me to explain.”
Jacob had no idea what she was talking about, but he knew he loved her. He knew his hands in hers felt right. He knew his hands against her breast felt right.
“Jacob, you went to all the parties Barry and I threw, right? You saw all the booze, all the drinking?”
He nodded.
“The two of us,” Kelly said, shaking her head, “made the best bathtub gin in the whole town.”
“That’s true,” he said.
“Yeah. It was. I don’t know if you ever picked up on it, Jacob, but I was drunk all the time back then. Barry was, too. We were fucking wasted every time we stepped outside of our house. There were mornings I’d wake up and put down a mason jar of gin for breakfast. I’ve been sober these last few weeks, but believe me, Jacob, it hasn’t been by choice. It’s been torture.”
Jacob listened without really understanding. The cop in him heard “alcoholic” and put her in a box in one corner of his understanding, but the seventeen-year-old kid in him, the one who saw her as a girl on the verge of womanhood, who had tasted her sweat on her nipples, felt lost.
“Jacob, we fought all the time. I mean all the time. Sometimes it got bad.”
“You mean he hit you?”
She nodded.
“Oh shit, Kelly. Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Because you would have done what, Jacob? Beat the fuck out of him?”
“Probably, yeah.”
She shook her head and turned away.
“What?” he said. “You know I would have.”
“Yeah, I know, and that’s the deal here. Jacob, the thing with you is that you look at every problem you see like it’s a nail, and you’ve got the world’s only hammer.”
“What? What in the hell does that mean?”
“Jacob, don’t yell at me.”
“I’m not . . .” He stopped for a second, took a breath, and tried again. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to yell. It’s just, sometimes, I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“It’s a Mark Twain quote. ‘To a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail.’ ”
“What is that even supposed to mean?”
“Jacob, it’s just an expression.”
“Yeah, but what does it mean? What are you saying?”
“I’m not saying anything about you, Jacob. For God’s sake, it’s not about you. It’s about me.”
Jacob held up his hands like he was asking for alms. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m not trying to be stupid. I just don’t understand you sometimes. First I’m the bad guy and then it’s all about you. Just tell me what I’m supposed to do here and I’ll do it.”
“Nothing, Jacob. Look, I’m trying to tell you that my marriage was ending. I mean, even before we left Arbella. Barry and I, we were done. Except that neither of us wanted to
admit it. I kept telling myself that going on this expedition together was going to be the thing that jump-started us. You know, the thing that put us back on the rails? Instead he got . . . he died. And I was left with all this crap in my head that I can’t sort out.”
There was more she wanted to say, but she was crying now, and Jacob did the only thing he knew how to do in situations like this. He pulled her close to his chest and hugged her and let her soak his shirt with her tears.
But only for a moment.
He pushed her to arm’s length and turned away.
“I’m sorry,” she said, and hastily wiped the tears from her cheeks.
“Kelly, hush.”
He saw her take her hands away from her face and stare at him indignantly. He pushed past her. His attention was focused on the pair of gloves Jordan Anson had left on the desk where he and Brooks had argued earlier.
He walked over to the table where they lay and took a moment to stare at them.
“Jacob, what is it?”
He didn’t acknowledge her. Instead, he scooped up the gloves and headed toward the other side of the room, where Brooks and Anson were talking.
“Jacob, what is it?”
“Proof,” he said.
He advanced on the two men. Anson saw him coming halfway across the room and pulled his weapon. He didn’t point it at Jacob, but he definitely had it at the ready.
“You killed her,” Jacob said to Anson, not even trying to hide his anger. He threw the gloves down on the table between them. “It was you.”
“Jacob, please,” Brooks said. “Now is not the time.”
“Look at the fucking gloves,” Jacob said.
Brooks just stared at him.
“Look at them!”
Before Anson could raise his gun, Jacob drew his and pointed it at Anson’s face.
Brooks stood over the table, looking at the gloves. They were black Kevlar, badly frayed, like the rest of Anson’s outfit. The knuckles were reinforced with armor, as were the backs of the hands and the tops of the fingers. But it was the underside of the fingers that had attracted Jacob’s eye, and it looked like Brooks had noticed, too.
The stitching that held the index and middle fingers together had come undone on the right hand. Both fingers had thick cords of stitching across the pads of the fingers, pulled out of place by God knows what.
“What are you talking about?” Anson said.
“Quiet,” Brooks said. The younger man turned on him, but Brooks just waved his objections away. He picked up the gloves and turned them over and over in his hands, his eyes tightly focused, but his mind clearly somewhere else.
Anson looked eerily calm about the whole thing. He even lowered his rifle.
“What in the hell is he talking about?” Anson said. “I haven’t killed anybody.”
“I said, be quiet!” Brooks said.
Without any warning at all, the older man lunged forward and yanked the pistol from Anson’s hand.
“Hey!” Anson said. “Les, what are you doing?”
“You killed her, didn’t you? Everything he said, it’s all true.”
The look on Brooks’s face was all the proof Jacob needed. He hadn’t trusted a word the man had said up to that moment, but he trusted the look of betrayal, of hurt, or confusion, and of rage that the man now wore. That was patently clear. And it said more than the man could ever put into words.
Jacob raised his other hand to the weapon, gripping it tightly in a Weaver’s stance. He looked down the length of the barrel at Anson and said, “I’ve done this twice before. Both times the men in your position chose to close their eyes. It’s up to you, though.”
Anson didn’t even acknowledge him. He turned to Brooks and tried to hold on to the icy calm that he’d mastered so easily up to that point. “What are you doing, Les?” he said. A line of sweat rolled down his cheek. “Answer me! What are you doing? It’s me, Les.”
Brooks shook his head, clearly at odds with what he was doing.
The gun stayed trained on Anson’s head, though; Jacob was glad to see that.
“Why did you do it?” Brooks said. “I loved her. I told you that. She was the whole reason I came here.”
Anson said nothing.
Jacob reached out and touched Brooks on the shoulder. With a nod, he waved him back. Then he turned his attention back to Anson. “You sent your men to kill Chelsea Walker. You used your position in the High Council to bury her father’s research and possibly doom the rest of your society to a future of senility. You gassed an entire region of this city, killing thousands. And you murdered Miriam Sayer with your bare hands. You, sir, are guilty.”
“Go fuck yourself,” Anson said. “I haven’t done a damn thing wrong.”
“My people have a Code. You’ve read it. I remember you mocking it. But know this: You have been found guilty of the crimes of corruption and murder, and those are crimes that threaten us all. You mocked my Code, but the Code is very clear on what I have to do right now.”
Jacob raised the pistol and tightened his grip. When he’d been forced to put Jerry Greider down, he’d been sick to his stomach. When he’d killed Nick, he’d felt only the emptiness that those who have been betrayed can feel. But now, looking down the barrel of his gun, Jacob felt nothing but conviction. Jordan Anson, more than any man he’d ever met, deserved to die.
“Spare me the platitudes,” Anson said. “Your Code is for primitives.” He turned to Brooks. “And you, what are you doing?”
“Don’t,” Brooks said.
“Don’t what?” Anson snapped back. “What are you doing, old man? You know me. You know what this is. You know what this all about.”
“I don’t care about the rest of it,” Brooks said. “The gas, the deception. I don’t care. But I loved her. I loved her!”
“She was collateral damage, my friend,” Anson said as he reached under his left arm and pulled his body armor open.
“Stop!” Jacob shouted. He couldn’t see Anson’s hand, and that raised the hairs on the back of his head.
Anson reached into the folds of his armor and came out with a small silver cylinder about the size of a fountain pen.
“Stop!” Jacob shouted again. “Drop it!”
Anson still refused to look at him. “She was going to ruin us. You know that. What else was I supposed to do?”
Brooks looked like he was still trying to take it all in. He shook his head. “You killed her.”
Anson twisted one end of the cylinder in his hand. “Yeah, I’m afraid I did, old friend. But if you want to stay on top, sometimes you have to make the hard choices. Sorry about this.”
He tossed the cylinder into the center of the room, then bolted toward the door.
Jacob almost shot him, but it happened so quickly. Anson’s distraction had worked. Jacob lost just a moment, less than a second, watching the cylinder fly over his shoulder, and in that moment, Anson ran through the door and headed down the stairs. By the time Jacob realized what was happening, he didn’t have a shot.
“Grenade!” Brooks screamed.
For a moment, time stood still around Jacob. His brain registered the danger, but it was still sluggish. He was frozen from the realization that he was standing on top of a bomb, and still he couldn’t move. He saw Brooks running to the wall and flattening himself there. He saw the cylinder—the grenade—rolling across the floor. And beyond the grenade, Kelly, looking stricken.
It was the fear on Kelly’s face that made him move.
Even before he scooped it up he knew he couldn’t throw it through the window glass. It was too lightweight for that. He ran to the window instead and smashed it out with his elbow. He caught a quick glance at the street two stories below him, thick with zombies, and tossed the grenade into their midst.
The device exploded before he had a chance to get back from the window. The concussive blast hit so hard it shook the building and sent Jacob flying. Flat on his back, he blinked, and rolled out of the way
just as a section of the ceiling gave way and fell like a mudslide onto the floor.
His head ringing, Jacob climbed to his feet. The room was filled with swirling dust. There was a hole in the wall where the window had been, and the ceiling above it was black from the burn. Down below in the street, he could hear the zombie moans intensifying.
He looked around for Kelly. She’d been knocked to the ground, but she, too, was getting up. Slowly, painfully. She propped herself up on a desk and stayed there, blinking at the floor.
“Are you okay?” he asked her.
“Don’t touch me,” she said. “I’m kind of dizzy.”
He couldn’t see Brooks through the clouds of dust hanging in the room, but there was no time to check on him. He had to catch Anson before the man made it out of the building.
Jacob ran out of the room, looked left and then right. There were stairs at either end of the hall, and he couldn’t see Anson to tell which way he’d gone. So he did something that had served him well in foot chases in the past. He closed his eyes and tried to remember exactly what had happened as Anson threw the grenade and turned to run.
Left, he thought.
He ran for the metal door that led to the stairwell and threw it open. It slammed against the wall as he charged through and rounded the first landing.
Anson was standing at the base of the stairs, a pistol in his hand.
Jacob put on the brakes and backed up behind the wall just as Anson started to fire. The pop, pop, pop of small arms fire echoed through the stairwell as a small section of the wall next to his head exploded.
Jacob stared at the holes in the wall and thought: A gun. A real gun. Damn, this is going to suck.
He backed away from the corner and started to slowly move around it, leading with his gun, revealing a little bit of the stairwell at a time until he could see the base of the stairs.
Anson was gone. The stairs were empty.
Jacob had a choice. He could descend slowly, carefully, watching the opening at the foot of the stairs for some indication of what Anson was doing. The trouble was, that left him in a deadly funnel, a sitting duck as he slowly inched down the stairs. If Anson peeked into the stairwell and saw him framed there, nowhere to hide, nothing to use for cover, he could simply light him up. Throw enough rounds into a small space and you’re bound to hit something. That’s why they called it fish in a barrel.