She was aiming the Ruger.
She was squeezing the trigger.
A gunshot rang out.
For a split second, I thought it hit me. Yet I felt no pain, no bullet tearing into flesh, and the way Mia fell and jerked backward made it obvious what had happened —even before I slammed into her myself.
The shot had come from behind me.
Mia and I bounced off the wall, Mia so fragile she collapsed like cardboard against the solid weight of me. We tumbled to the floor, the Ruger clattering alongside of us. I dived for it, thinking she might make another play for it, but when I got it in my sweaty hand and spun back to look at her, I saw that Mia was done making plays. Maybe for good.
She was on her back. The bloodstain in the middle of her pink pajama top wasn't all that big, no larger than a blooming rose, but it was a bright and angry color of red. She clutched it with both hands. She moaned, so she wasn't dead, but by the anguished sound of it, she wasn't far from it.
The gunshot—who had fired? I glanced at Jak, and sure enough, she was the one holding a handgun. Not just any handgun. I knew it right off: a Colt Python .357. Dad's gun. The one I'd been forced to sell at the pawnshop to make ends meet.
She was still pointing the thing at Mia with a laser-like intensity, all business, but she did manage to shrug.
"Bought it back," she explained. "I was going to give it to you as a Christmas present."
I set aside my surprise for now. Mia coughed up some blood, holding herself tightly. I realized this wasn't over, not yet. If she managed to get over her shock, she could still project as Gath and do some real damage.
It was time to do what I'd come to do, what I knew I would have to do all along.
I took the glasses out of my pocket, those thick black frames hiding the gold underneath, and slipped them over Mia's eyes before she quite realized what was happening. The Gold is the Thing that Steals the Sight. I prayed my theory was right.
She glared up at me, pupils flaring wide and dark. The hate was so palpable that I felt a little queasy just looking at her. Or was I queasy because of what I was planning to do? When she reached for the glasses with her crimson fingers, I grabbed her arms and pinned them to the floor. She was so insubstantial it was like holding rolled-up tissue paper. There was nothing to her. She couldn't have weighed more than seventy pounds, tops.
Even so, she jerked and convulsed, trying to shake me free, trying to shake off the glasses. She might have succeeded, too, if she had more strength, but the gunshot had drained the energy right out of her. The fight lasted no more than ten seconds before she sagged, defeated and breathing hard, glaring up at me with all the rage she could muster.
"You—you can't keep me like this forever," she said. "Eventually you'll have to let me go. I'll get you then. I will!"
I didn't say anything. There was no need. She saw the look on my face, saw my intention, and all that spite and spittle was instantly replaced by a kind of cloying self-pity. She gagged and coughed up more blood, then shook her head violently, as if she could shake away not only the pain and the wound itself, but the hard truth that had settled between us, not to be denied.
"No, no, no," she whined. "No, not like this. The police—I hear them out there. They're coming. They won't let me die. An ambulance. They'll call an ambulance. This isn't—this isn't how it's supposed to go."
"How is it supposed to go?" I asked her.
"I win! I'm supposed to win! This is just—just the beginning. You can't do this to me. I had a plan! I had—"
Her voice grew thick, forcing her to hack up more blood. I wondered about the police. Why hadn't they burst into the room yet? Then, even as I asked myself the question, I heard an officer bellowing over a microphone for whoever was inside to come out with hands raised. So that was it. Because of the gunfire, the cops were proceeding with caution. Mia tried to call to them, ironically, to cry for help, but all she managed was to raise her head a few inches off the hardwood and spit out a cloud of blood. A few specks landed on the glasses, red pinpricks on the big lenses.
"It won't work," she said. "When I'm on the other side—"
"We'll see," I said.
"Please," she said. "Please, I don't want to die."
"Who does?"
"Killing me won't make a difference. There are others. There are others who will come for Olivia."
"You're lying."
"You can't do this. You're not—not that sort of person."
"Maybe I am."
This young woman, if she somehow managed to live, could take away everything and everyone I cared about. No matter what she said to me now, I had no doubt that she would do it. No jail cell could stop her. When you had a rabid dog, you didn't coddle it; you didn't string it along hoping it would get better. You put it down. People often say it's the best thing for the dog, but that misses the point. It's no longer about what's good for the dog. It's about what's good for everybody else.
All of these thoughts flew through my mind in less than a second, and they were the feelings that accompanied me when I moved my hands from Mia's arms … to her neck.
And squeezed.
Behind me, Jak gasped. Even Olivia, in her dazed state, managed to breathe out a murmur of discontent. Mia clawed at my arms, but without her power, without the terrifying ability to become Victoria Gath, in the end Mia Irving was just a feeble kid who'd spent too much time lying in a hospital bed. Her survival instinct gave her an extra burst of strength, but her wound made it short-lived. Her mouth opened obscenely wide, trying for a breath I wouldn't let her have. Her eyes, behind those thick lenses, bulged grotesquely in their sockets.
I wasn't a killer, but I would kill when necessary. This was necessary, I kept telling myself.
My heart pounded so hard I thought it was someone banging on the walls. Mia convulsed a few times, but that was it. No last struggle. Her eyes rolled back in her head, then she was gone.
That moment, it may have lingered for a long time, but the creak of the front door downstairs snapped me back to the urgency of the present. I heard footsteps.
Police. A SWAT team, maybe.
I took my hands off Mia's neck. She didn't move, her eyes open and unseeing. I removed the glasses and slipped them back in my pocket. Nothing bad happened. No Victoria Gath. If she planned to do something, then she would do it right away, no doubt. Had we beaten her? I hoped so.
I heard footsteps on the stairs.
I turned quickly to Jak and Olivia. Behind them, still sitting in the alcove, Laura and John looked on passively as if nothing had happened all. Seeing this, I felt a terrible stab of sadness of what had been done to them, but I pushed the feeling from my mind to concentrate on saving the person they'd cared most about in the world.
"Listen," I said, "it's going to be bad. They're going to arrest us, but if there's blame, I'll take the fall. Jak, give me the gun. I'll say I—"
"No," Olivia said.
She spoke with an authority that hadn't been present until now. Whatever drugs had been coursing through her body were finally wearing off.
"What?" I said.
"They won't believe you."
"Doesn't matter. We don't have another—"
"We'll just leave."
"Huh? You don't understand. They—"
"They won't stop us."
"What?"
"They won't even see us. Come here."
"Olivia—"
"Now, now."
She extended her feeble hands to us. The cops were on the stairs, yelling to get on the floor with our hands on our heads. Had Olivia discovered some new power? God, I hoped so. Both Jak and I rushed to her side, and each of us grasped one hand. Olivia's fingers felt cold and clammy, but her grip was firm. She whispered for us to say nothing, just to follow her lead. That was all she managed to get out before cops in bulletproof vests trod cautiously into the room with their Glocks raised.
At first, they looked right at us. Both of them were middle-aged, hea
vyset guys with panic in their eyes, the kind who'd probably never had to discharge a firearm in the line of duty in their entire careers, and were, therefore, more than likely to shoot first and ask questions later. Their stares lingered for a few beats, long enough that I was sure they saw us, that whatever ruse Olivia was trying to pull wasn't working, but then they focused on Mia.
Still alert, Glocks sweeping left and right, they approached Mia's dead body, the blood from her wound pooling on the floor around her abdomen, a vivid crimson on the aged yellow wood. They didn't acknowledge our presence at all. One got down on his knees and felt for a pulse.
"Dead," he said.
"Where's the shooter?" the other cop said.
"Basement?"
"Maybe. We'll hear soon enough from Cobbs and Ryan. You think this is the one from the hospital?"
"Probably."
He pulled out his radio and called in the details. Olivia, still gripping our hands, nodded to us and rose unsteadily to her feet. We joined her. Still the cops didn't see us. With each of us keeping her balanced while we held her hands, we guided her out of the room. I glanced at her parents, but neither of them moved, their faces as blank and impassive as stone statues. We saw two more cops at the bottom of the landing, and saw two more emerging from a door of the kitchen that must lead to the basement. Nobody saw us, and everybody had the same piss-in-their-boots look about them, like they were ready to shoot a spider if one happened to scurry across their paths.
Olivia kept going. She led us outside into the cold winter air, two other cops on radios by their Crown Victoria cruisers, red and blue lights flashing. Approaching sirens pierced the air, two more cruisers and a black SWAT van approaching from the west, tires kicking up dirty slush. Jak's rental van was still smashed against the fence, the twin's body on the ground where I'd last seen it. Over at the hospital, I saw even more red and blue lights bouncing off the brick walls. Half of Salem's law enforcement must have been present between the two locations.
"The van?" I whispered to Olivia.
She shook her head and led us east on Center Street, away from the pandemonium, past the house and along the sidewalk. People gawked from porches and windows. Some might have been ghosts, it was hard to tell. Olivia stumbled and, if not for us, would certainly have fallen. I saw one of the neighbors look at us a bit longer than the others, as if he saw us, shake his head as if trying to dismiss a crazy thought, and look away. Nobody else even glanced at us, but it was clear enough what was happening.
Her power to camouflage us was weakening.
If she passed out now, we'd certainly be caught. I looked at Jak and she nodded. The two of us lifted her so her feet were completely off the ground and ran for the next street. We turned right, out of view of most of the cops, and found ourselves in an old residential neighborhood, sidewalk on one side, gravel on the other, most of the houses single story with single-car garages.
The cops weren't on the street, but plenty of people were out and about to see what all the fuss was. We needed someplace to hide. A house? Too risky. Behind a hedge? Too exposed. I spotted an old Winnebago, one tire deflated, the hood spotted with rust, parked in the weeds next to the third house down, partly obscured by a giant, snow-coated laurel bush. That was it.
"Stay with us," I urged Olivia, all of us running for it.
The little yellow house was dark, no car in the driveway. I tried the motor home door. Unlocked, thank God. We clambered inside. It turned out that the outside, with all of its wear, was actually the most attractive feature. The carpet, what was left of it, was stained and threadbare, the daisy print wallpaper yellowed, peeling, and grease-stained. The place smelled of mold and dankness. Jak helped Olivia collapse into one of the bench seats in the cramped eating area, slumping against the metal wall. Over on Center Street, more sirens zoomed past. I thought of Alesha back there, alone and confused. I couldn't stay long.
"We need to get her to a hospital," I said.
"No, no," Olivia said, "I'm okay."
"Like hell you are," Jak said.
"I just … I need some rest. I'll—I'll be okay. Then you can take me to my dad."
Jak cringed. I'd wondered if Olivia had been told about John Ray's death. Now I knew the answer. Better to wait until she regained some strength.
"Do you think you both will be okay here for a while?" I asked.
Jak narrowed her eyes at me. "What are you talking about? You're not going back there, are you?"
Quickly, I explained what had happened to Alesha in Mia Irving's hospital room. "I can't leave her there," I said. "I don't know how much damage Mia—Gath—did to her. Plus the cops are going to come looking for me no matter what. They have an escaped prisoner's dead body in that house, but until they have a story, they're going to canvass the neighborhood looking for me. They don't know about Olivia. I can make up some kind of story so they don't go looking for her—at least for a while. Give you two time to find a better hiding place. Then we can meet up and figure out what to do next."
I saw the protest on Jak's face, saw her trying to formulate a rebuttal, but in the end she just shook her head. Like it or not, she knew I was right. Olivia, her eyes closed, didn't respond.
"Wait until it gets dark," I said to Jak. "Get her to a hotel room. There are some only a couple blocks from here. If she can do the thing she did before, maybe you can walk. If not, call a cab. You got cash?" I reached for my wallet.
"I've got enough," Jak said. "I've also got cards."
"Careful with the cards. They're going to trace that van to you. Once they do, they'll start monitoring your—"
"I said I had cards," Jak said, with a bit of a wry smile. "I didn't say they had my name on them."
"Oh."
"Don't worry. I didn't steal them—at least, not from anyone directly. I've had them for my undercover work, you know, different identities. And don't worry about the van. I used a whole different identity for that one."
That wry smile turned into a big grin. I found myself smiling back, shaking my head at how this woman I loved could still manage to surprise me. Another time, I might have objected to her somewhat questionable approach to the law, but right now I was grateful she was exactly the person she was.
I leaned forward and kissed her.
It took her a second, surprised as she was, to respond in kind, but she eventually cupped her hands on both sides of my face and leaned into the kiss. There was more fear and fierceness in the kiss than passion, but the sparks were there just the same. Still, when I pulled away, there was a lot of uncertainty swimming in those big green eyes of hers, uncertainty that might be partly about my plan but seemed to be about something else altogether. I was about to ask her what was wrong when she patted my cheek.
"Go," she said.
Chapter 23
Jak didn't have to tell me twice. The longer I stayed there, the greater the chance that cops would knock on the motor home door. I didn't like leaving them, but it was the best plan we had. I just had to think of a story that would give Jak and Olivia a little time. We'd have to bring Olivia into the authorities soon enough. Mia's dying comment about there being others who would come for Olivia made me especially cautious. Had she been talking about someone specific, a silent partner we didn't know about, or was it just a general warning about what some people would do with the kind of power Olivia had? I didn't know, but I didn't want to find out just yet.
Leaving the motor home, I snuck around the laurel bush back to the street. An old woman leaning on a walker watched from her porch, eyeing me warily. Next to her, a young woman dressed in a nun's habit saw me, blanched, and fled through the closed screen door into the house. Good bet she was a ghost, at least. News would be spreading to the Department of Souls, too, of my involvement. It was going to get complicated. I thought about putting on the glasses, maybe keeping them on forever, but conflict avoidance probably wasn't the best use of their power.
The cops would know about my involvement with the O
livia Ray case, but they wouldn't know what the connection was to Mia Irving. Yet it wouldn't fly if I told them there was no connection at all, because they would soon connect the dead twin at River View Cemetery in Portland with the dead twin in Salem.
I decided the best course was to give them a partial version of the truth. I'd tell them that we'd had a tip that someone at OSH was pretending to be in a coma, and some men working with her had kidnapped Olivia Ray, though we didn't know why. Mia fled. I pursued her to the house. The van … That was tricky. I'd say another man was driving, and he intervened. I didn't know what happened to him. There was a shootout and Mia died.
And Olivia?
If she was there at all—the room upstairs, with the sleeping mat and the drugs, certainly suggested she was—she'd already fled the house. Maybe the van driver ran off with her. Maybe she was on her own. I didn't know. The whole thing was just as crazy to me as it was to them. I'd play dumb.
It wasn't much of a story, and it would certainly fall apart if they ever figured out that Jak had rented the van, but it would give us some time to figure out what to do. That was what we needed now. Time.
I rounded the corner onto Center Street. A dozen police cars, all their lights flashing, crowded around the house, traffic stopped in both directions, exhaust pipes pluming thick white smoke into the frigid air. What a mess. I wove my way through all the people lining the sidewalks, men and women, old and young, some obviously ghosts, some harder to tell. A few gawked, others ignored me. I kept walking until I came to a police officer, a young woman in a blue and gray uniform so trim and sharp it probably had never been washed.
"Sir," she said, "you need to stay back with the others."
"I'm Myron Vale," I told her. "I need to talk to whoever's in charge—now."
* * *
They didn't believe me.
I could see it on their faces. Gathered around a faux-mahogany table, in a first-floor conference room at the hospital, I relayed the whole crazy story to Sergeant Benson, the officer in charge at the scene, as well as a half-dozen other cops. And why should they believe me? It sounded nuts coming out of my mouth. Who had tipped me off about these coma patients? Why, exactly, did I flee the house? Where did I think Olivia went if she was in the house at all? They barked their questions at me in cold, rapid-fire fashion. I told them the tip was an anonymous call, and I shrugged my way through the rest of the questions, their expressions only becoming grimmer and more dubious.
The Ghost, the Girl, and the Gold Page 28