Skin and Bone

by TA Moore

  “Lieutenant Frome, pull the deputies back to the perimeter,” Javi instructed as he touched his ear. “That’s an order. We don’t want anyone to get hurt.”

  He didn’t expect Frome to obey. The voice in his ear confirmed that he’d been right. “The deputies will hold position until you give the signal.”

  “Good.” Javi tucked the flashlight into the strap of his vest and held up both empty hands. “There we go. Now I’ve listened to you, so maybe you could put the gun away.”

  It would have been too easy if he had. Instead he just moved the gun down to rest in the notch of her collarbone. Galloway pursed her lips around a carefully relieved sigh.

  “Dr. Galloway,” Javi said as he caught her eye. “Catherine, are you hurt?”

  The gun poked her in the throat again.

  A reminder. She closed her eyes and licked her lips.

  “I’m fine,” she repeated carefully. She flicked her eyes down, and when Javi followed them, she peeled her fingers away from her side for a second. Blood oozed from a deep divot cut out over her hip. Black stippled her T-shirt where blood hadn’t soaked in to cover it. The wound didn’t look immediately life-threatening, but it didn’t look good either. Galloway squeezed her fingers back down again. Her voice was low and steady, almost hypnotically calm. “I don’t think he wants to hurt anyone.”

  “I’m sure he doesn’t. This is all just some sort of misunderstanding.” Javi tilted his head to catch the attacker’s wandered attention. “My name’s Special Agent Javi Merlo. You can call me Javi.”

  Strands of Galloway’s pale hair, the dishwater blonde leeched to white under the shadows and flashlight, caught on the attacker’s chapped lips as he panted.

  “Get me to introduce us, establish social… expectations,” he said with a ragged laugh that turned into a cough. “Basic programming. That what the Feds are teaching you now? Pathetic.”

  No, Javi affirmed to himself, not a stupid man.

  “So you know what’s going on,” Javi said. “I still need something to call you.”

  The man blinked hard, and the point of the knife scratched over Galloway’s throat. She pinched her lips together and closed her eyes.

  “You don’t need to… to… call me anything. I know what you’re doing. Friends, that’s what you need, and I still have ’em. Still have some fucking friends. Still. And they told me. They told me what you’re trying to do to me. I did what I was told, goddammit.”

  He tightened his arm around Galloway’s throat as he ranted. His teeth, behind the rough lips and matted beard, were stained with disuse but straight as good dentistry could buy. The drawl of Cloister’s voice murmured in Javi’s ear, “I know, that matches the description of a lot of homeless men.”

  “Andrew,” Javi said. “Andrew Macintosh right?”

  For a second the man focused. Life on the streets—booze and grief, hot sun and cold nights—had worn away the smug smirking lawyer from the party photo, but the sudden sharpness on his face conjured him again.

  “You’re the one, then,” Andrew said. “I did what I was told. I sent everything I was asked to. Why… why did you do this? What did I do? I did my job, that’s all. It was my fucking job. I never made anyone do shit. Never. Never!”

  He shoved Galloway to the side—she gave a startled yelp as she hit the door and slid to the ground—and lurched toward Javi. He jabbed the gun at the air like a pointer.

  “If you want me dead, do it,” Andrew yelled, spit in stretched, clotted strings at the side of his mouth. “You got everything else, you fucker!”

  He lunged at Javi, quicker than he looked, and fired wildly. The recoil jerked Andrew’s arm up violently and threw off his aim. The bullet hit Javi’s Kevlar at an angle, just above the FBI logo, and skidded up to scrape over his shoulder. It hurt with a hot, dull sting like a burn, so it probably wasn’t serious.

  Javi ignored the ache of it and grabbed Andrew’s wrist. He dug his fingers in on the pressure points and twisted to lock the arm. It should have put Andrew down on his knees to avoid a dislocated elbow. Instead Andrew let the joint pop with a crackle of cartilage and tendon that reminded Javi queasily of a chicken leg and let the gun slip through his fingers as he threw himself forward. He drove his shoulder into Javi’s stomach, just under his breastbone, and they staggered backward.

  “Merlo?” Frome demanded in Javi’s ear. “Now?”

  Javi hit the bumper of a Mercedes and slid off. He rolled onto the ground with Andrew in a tangle of arms, legs, and strangled, furious curse words. Andrew flailed at him with swollen-knuckled fists and knees.

  “They’re gone. They’re dead. I won’t tell anyone. I never told anyone. I knew they wouldn’t believe me. They never believed me,” Andrew ranted incoherently, his breath foul and chemical sharp. He grabbed a handful of Javi’s hair and tried to smack his skull into the ground. “Why’d you hurt her? My Jessie. She didn’t do fuck to you. It was me. I did it. I don’t know what, but I did it! Me. Not her.”

  Javi braced his arm under Andrew’s jaw and pushed him back. He could feel his gun under his hip, but if he drew it, he’d have to shoot. Andrew Macintosh was never the sort of man to back down, not in court or in a fight, and if he was willing to punch through a broken elbow, that hadn’t changed.

  A wildly aimed knee caught Javi in the gut. He grunted, the taste of bile in the back of his throat, and twisted to throw Andrew off him.

  “Macintosh….” Javi rolled to his feet and kicked the gun under one of the cars. Last time Macintosh saw Janet, she still went by Tommy. He thought it was his wife who came looking for him. “She’s not dead. She’s upstairs in the hospital. That’s why Dr. Galloway was here. She’s here to help her.”

  Sweat stood out in greasy droplets on Andrew’s face as he struggled onto his knees. He shook his head, matted gray hair wild as it unraveled around his face.

  “Lies,” he spat. “You told me to lie. You lie. Lies and lies. You told me that you’d send them home—fair trade is no theft, you said, show me you love them—and then you said it wasn’t enough. You told me they were dead, and now you tell me they’re alive. My boys. My Jessie.”

  He threw a wild punch at Javi and missed by an inch as Javi dodged. At some point in the scuffle, Javi had caught Andrew in the nose, and blood dripped down into his beard.

  “Is Galloway out of danger?” Frome hectored in Javi’s ear. “Can I send the deputies in?”

  “Not yet,” Javi said.

  “I couldn’t do it,” Andrew said. He sniffed wetly and wiped his arm over his face. “I couldn’t fucking kill her, okay? Please. Please. I tried. I’ll give the rest of the money. You can have it. Just don’t hurt my boys too. I killed them for you already, I told them, I deserved it. Just… kill me.”

  He pulled something out of his pocket, clenched the weight and glitter of metal in his fist, and went for Javi again. The punch was a wild haymaker. If it connected, it would have taken Javi’s jaw off, but there wasn’t much chance of that.

  Javi sidestepped the punch and moved forward to jab a short, hard punch in under Andrew’s ribs. There was no flesh to absorb the punch, just bone and wiry muscle. The breath whoofed out of Andrew on a sour grunt, and he doubled over with a retch. Javi grabbed the back of his shirt and shoved him facedown onto the hood of the car. Tears and snot smeared over the paintwork as Andrew wailed in brutal despair.

  “She’s here,” Javi said. He wiped sweat off his lips onto his shoulder and leaned down to brace his arm against Andrew’s bony shoulders. The smell that came off Andrew was thick, sour-liquor sweat and old dirt. “Andrew, listen to me. She’s here. You can see her. If you calm down and listen to me.”

  Galloway had crawled away from the fight. She sat a few cars down, back braced against the high wall of a Land Rover tire. Her arm was folded tight across her stomach, with her fingers digging down into the meat of her hip. She looked pale, but in the dimly lit garage, Javi couldn’t tell if it was more than usual.

 
“I don’t think he can,” she said, her voice still eerily calm. “His eyes are dilated, his pulse is elevated, and he shouldn’t have been able to use that arm. He took something before he came here, to work up the courage to kill me.”

  Andrew thumped his head against the hood of the car to make it ring like a bell. He kicked at Javi’s legs. “I didn’t want to,” he said. “They called me. They told me what I had to do. Same number. Same voice. Same number. Same lies. Send the money, kill the doctor, save your kids. Save your Jessie.”

  Javi reluctantly cuffed him—the plastic strips dug into dirty, swollen wrists—and pulled him off the car. Once he sobered up, maybe he could talk.

  The stairwell door flew open, and five armed deputies burst into the garage. Tancredi took in the scene with a quick look and lowered her gun.

  “Are you okay?” she asked. “What happened?”

  “I’m not quite sure,” Javi said. “But we’re going to find out.”

  Javi handed Macintosh over in Tancredi’s custody and went to check on Galloway. The ER doctors would have come to her, but she grimaced at the idea and insisted on being helped off the floor.

  “I’ll need stitches,” she said as Javi put his arm around her waist to help support her. “If he were serious about hurting me, I’d need a transfusion. Agent Merlo, was that Andrew Macintosh?”

  “I think so,” Javi said. “He seemed to think so.”

  Ahead of them, Tancredi pushed the stumbling Andrew up the ramp. He dragged his feet, and the manic intensity of earlier had dulled into a sort of dour placidity that weighed him down.

  Galloway stopped and turned to wave down one of the deputies. “The evidence box by my car, it’s relevant to a current case, so make sure it doesn’t leave your sight. I do not want chain of custody broken any more than it already has been.” The deputy nodded and ran to get the box. Meanwhile Galloway wiped the blood off her neck with the cuff of her shirt and looked up at Javi. “You were wrong.”

  That wasn’t what Javi wanted to hear. He frowned. “About what?”

  “I compared samples. That girl is not Tommy Macintosh,” she said. Her body listed into Javi’s as she squinted into the light at the top of the ramp. “I was going to recheck with a fresh sample from Janet, but I doubt the results would have changed. But if it was a wild goose chase, why would anyone try to….”

  Javi was still half-blind from the glare when the shot rang out, so he didn’t see so much as hear the brittle ping of the bullet against concrete. He swore and dragged Galloway back down into the garage. Ahead of them Tancredi cried out, startled more than hurt. Then she staggered and went down. Macintosh stumbled back but stayed on his feet.

  “Hold your fire!” Frome yelled, his voice cracked with anger. The press was yelling into cameras as they covered it, cameras twisted between the tableau on the ramp and the surrounding buildings. “Hold your goddamn fire.”

  “Shit.”

  Javi shoved Galloway at one of the deputies despite her protest and ran up the ramp to Tancredi. Blood poured out of a deep, jagged gash in her arm and puddled on the ramp under her. It wasn’t a bullet wound. Macintosh had a spray of blood up over his chest and across his face. He staggered backward and then turned to run into the garage, through the deputies who raced up to protect Tancredi.

  “What happened?” one of them demanded.

  Javi dragged off his tie and twisted the silk around Tancredi’s arm as a hurried, inadequate bandage. It soaked through quickly. “Was she shot?” another one asked. He scanned the road, gun up and steady in his hands. “Do we have a shooter?”

  In Javi’s ear Frome rattled off the same questions, almost verbatim.

  It was Tancredi who answered them. Her voice was thin and her lips colorless. She had the shocked, gray cast of someone who’d never been hurt badly before, at least not on purpose. “I don’t know.”

  On the concrete where Macintosh had stood lay a cheap orange utility knife in a puddle of blood. His hands had been free when he darted away.

  “Where’s Galloway?” Javi asked as he scrambled up.

  The deputy jerked his thumb over his shoulder. “She’s safe. We’re taking her straight up into the hospital—”

  Javi cursed under his breath. He pushed himself to his feet, drew his gun, and ran back into the garage. The deputy spluttered behind him, too distracted by the shot fired to realize what was happening.

  “Macintosh,” Javi yelled as he skidded to a stop at the bottom of the ramp. “Macintosh, stop. If you want to know what happened to your family—”

  Maybe if Javi had said something else, it would have worked. If he’d told Macintosh his lost child was upstairs, it might have made a difference… or not.

  Macintosh looked back once and then threw himself down and stretched his arm under a car. When he came up, he had a gun in his hand again and looked lost. His face was hollow and drawn under his matted hair.

  “Get Galloway out of here.” Javi barked the order as he edged forward, gun raised.

  The deputy with Galloway shoved her behind him and backed away from the scene.

  “I tried,” Macintosh said. “I did everything they said. Except this. Everything. It never worked.”

  Javi held his free hand out. “Macintosh, listen to me. You don’t want to do this. Give me the gun.”

  Andrew blinked, and tears dripped down his face into his beard. “I don’t. I never did. All I wanted was my family. I told him that when he called, that I’d do anything to get them back, and he told me that he was glad—glad that I wanted something I could never get. I heard him shoot them, saw the bodies, smelled them. I know they’re gone, but when that man told me they were still alive… I believed him. So I told him I’d do anything, but I couldn’t. None of this was their fault. It was all mine.”

  “We can help you, Andrew. We can find your children.”

  “I never told anyone this. I was ashamed,” Andrew said placidly. “That man didn’t just want money. I could have gotten him more money. I could have begged, borrowed, or stolen it for my Jessie—my boys—but he wanted something else. He wanted me to kill myself. I said I’d do anything for my family, but I couldn’t do that. Not then.”

  Andrew pushed the gun up under his chin and pulled the trigger in one smooth, confident motion. The sharp pop of the gunshot echoed off the concrete walls, and Andrew’s brains speckled the car behind him.

  Javi gagged and took a step back. It had to have been instantaneous, but he could have sworn he saw a moment of relief bloom on Andrew’s face before his body collapsed like a puppet with its strings cut.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  THE COLOR on the TV was off. Frome, posed in full uniform on the steps of the hospital, looked as though he’d just been spray-tanned. He mouthed something to the assembled press. The sound on the TV was turned too low to know what it was, but Cloister would put money on something reassuring and possibly a lie.

  He reached up to switch it off—it was a replay anyhow since Frome had gone to the station an hour earlier—and turned back to the bed. Janet lay neat and tidy under the tightly tucked white sheets. There was a vase of flowers on the bedside table now—fat, force-grown roses that smelled thin and watery—and two untouched fashion magazines on the chair.

  Professor Belford had gone to the hotel, the nurse had told him in a carefully neutral tone. She’d be back later. Janet hadn’t gotten better or worse. “Stable” was the best the nurse would offer, but that was apparently good enough for hope.

  “I’m not even sure he’s your father,” Cloister said. His voice sounded too loud, too rough for the small, clean room. Too much time yelling at dogs and meth dealers, he supposed. But he recalled his mom’s rebuke to “remember your inside voice” from when he was a kid, so maybe it was just a Witte thing. He cleared his throat and tried again. “Or if you care. I just thought someone should tell you. No one’s seriously hurt. Except him, I guess. Tancredi was the worst, but the doctors don’t think there will be any
nerve damage.”

  Probably. If she was lucky.

  Cloister paused and shifted uncomfortably in place as he tried not to think about the doctor’s careful equivocation. His boots squeaked on the polished floor. On the bed Janet didn’t give any sign she’d heard him, not even an eyelash flicker.

  “You should probably know too that the working theory is that Andrew Macintosh was the one who attacked you the other night,” he said. “I don’t think he did, but it’s tidy, and I can’t prove otherwise yet. The gunshot that provided the distraction that let him get away was from one of our guns. Maybe someone saw that Macintosh had a knife, or they just twitched at the wrong moment, but no one has come forward to take the blame, so we don’t know. It would be a lot easier if you’d wake up and tell us what actually happened to you.”

  He knew she wouldn’t. People didn’t come out of comas to be helpful. He still caught himself as he held his breath to give her the chance.

  Nothing.

  “That’s okay,” Cloister said. “We can do it the hard way.”

  He left the light on as he walked out. If she did wake up, it shouldn’t be to the dark.

  BOURNEVILLE HALF crawled out of the window of the truck to greet him when he crossed the parking lot. She could tell that everyone was on edge, even if she didn’t know why. Cloister let her lick his face with her paws braced on his shoulders as he scratched under her cheeks and rubbed her ears.

  “I know,” he said as he fussed over her. “But Javi’s fine. Tancredi will be.”

  She snorted her opinion of that in his ear. Cloister supposed she could tell he didn’t entirely believe it. He turned his face into her neck, her thick fur rough against his face, and exhaled all the tension on a long, ragged sigh.

  It wouldn’t have made a difference if he’d been there. They wouldn’t have sent him and Bon in to an established hostage situation. There was too much of a chance it would make the attacker panic. He would probably have been up at the cars asking the general public and the press to stay back from the perimeter while it went down.