by Ninie Hammon
“Going home to the family Thanksgiving celebration this weekend,” Fletch said.
Fletch’s family was wealthy, old money, who Brice admired for their willingness to accept the shortcomings of their only son — and Fletch’s limited mental capacity was a shortcoming alright — and be grateful for his strong points. Grateful that he was a genuinely good man, an exceptional law enforcement officer, and even if he didn’t make the law review at Harvard like the sons of their friends, he had already been decorated twice for valor since he joined the Kavanaugh County Sheriff’s Department and was, in reality, Sheriff McGreggor’s most valued deputy.
“Don’t eat too much and I’ll see you Monday.”
When Fletcher closed the door, the room was silent. The whole building was quiet, of course. All the offices in the courthouse, where the sheriff’s department took up most of the first floor, were closed.
Brice didn’t have to come in today, but he hadn’t shown up to get any work done, at least none that mattered to Kavanaugh County. Just work that mattered to him.
“Don’t keep us in suspense,” T.J. said. “Spill. I can tell by the greenish tint of your face you got something to report.”
The three had arranged to meet here today after a hasty conference on Bailey’s porch yesterday evening. A con-flab called in response to the staggering revelation at their Thanksgiving celebration yesterday that the man who had shot Bailey’s … husband, who had separated her from her little girl and landed her in the Witness Protection Program, was standing in the background of the group picture they’d taken at Bailey’s birthday celebration on Halloween.
Brice had had the roughest time with the “shot her husband” part. He and the others knew she’d been keeping her past a secret and had figured out — duh! — that her bogus name and identity had been produced in WITSEC.
But somehow, whenever Brice allowed himself to speculate on what her past had been, and that wasn’t often, he’d never put a man into the picture. Stupid. Ridiculous when you looked at the woman. How in the world would a woman like that stay single? Still, he’d never allowed his mind to go there, and when she’d said the h-word yesterday — husband — it had taken all Brice’s self-control not to let dismay show on his face.
Standing outside in the chilly air last night on Bailey’s porch, the three of them had agreed without even discussing it that they needed to find out more than Bailey seemed to know about the man whose sudden appearance back in the United States had changed Bailey’s life in an eye blink.
He had told the other two that he’d see what he could find out about the Mikhailov dude in the picture and had sent them a text this morning that he had news.
“Wasn’t hard to find out about the guy.” Brice leaned back in his chair, reached for the cup of cold coffee on his desk, coffee that had tasted like battery acid when it was hot, and just kept talking instead. There was a burning sensation in his belly that he knew didn’t have anything to do with the coffee, but he reached into his desk drawer and took out a packet of antacid tablets and popped a couple into his mouth.
“That bad, was it?” T.J. indicated the mints.
“Worse than a couple of Tums tablets can fix.”
Brice felt cold, and could hear the ice in his voice.
“He’s what Bailey said he was -- a monster in a human being suit.”
“Most everybody I’ve run into in the Russian mafia flunked ‘plays well with others’ in elementary school.”
“Who did you call?” Dobbs asked.
“I had a list of people to contact, but I found out everything I needed to know from the first one. Our very own beloved FBI Agent Haruto Nakamura.”
That brought a smile to T.J., though he and Dobbs had only met the man briefly when they were giving their statements about what had happened at The Cedars three months before. Statements about the nightmare spiders’ lair that had been created by a diminutive first-grade teacher, whose split personality had turned her into a killer.
“Helpful, was he?”
“Very, as a matter of fact.”
Actually, Brice had called the man’s Pittsburgh office expecting to leave a message. He didn’t think Nakamura would be working the day after Thanksgiving. But he had answered his own phone, had replied tersely that he was “on a case,” and Brice figured he had probably been sleeping his office, if he’d been sleeping at all, from the moment he’d been assigned the case. That’s what he’d done in Kavanaugh County after he was called in to investigate the kidnapping of one child and ended up finding the bodies of three others, and Brice had almost died in the effort.
“I told him what I was looking for and he didn’t want to know why. An hour later he emailed me a whole file, with an equally Nakamura-blunt note at the top in his customary understatement.”
It said: “I understand Mr. Mikhailov is an extremely dangerous individual.”
The next part — from a man like Nakamura — had taken Brice’s breath away. Nakamura had added, “Be careful.”
Brice handed the two men printouts of what Nakamura had sent to him, let them scan through it.
T.J. ran his finger down the list. “Assault, assault with a deadly weapon, assault with intent to kill, attempted murder, murder, manslaughter, kidnapping. Not a flavor of homicide he ain’t sampled.”
“This rap sheet goes back thirty-five years,” Brice said. “But he’s always a bridesmaid, never a bride — only gets charged, never convicted. Half a dozen RICO charges, too, that came up snake-eyes.”
“And RICO is …?” Dobbs asked.
“Stands for Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act,” T.J. said.
“You’re a sucker for acronyms.”
“It’s a federal law that gives bigger sentences to perps whose crimes was ‘a part of an ongoing criminal enterprise.’”
“I can see why the feds want this guy so bad,” Brice said, then dropped the printed sheets on his desk. “And along comes Bailey, the goose that laid the golden egg.”
“She did tee this one up for ‘em, for a fact.”
“Get him, his son and two of his goons in one sweep — yeah, she teed it up alright. He’ll never see it coming, thinks he got rid of all the witnesses.”
“You two keep talking like they’ll all get the death penalty,” Dobbs said. “But this happened in Boston and Massachusetts is a state that outlawed that.”
“That’s where the feds come in. These guys won’t be tried in state courts, they’ll face federal charges and federal juries. And the feds can, and will, impose the death penalty in this case because it fits the statute.”
T.J. picked up the ball there. “The federal death penalty can be imposed if you commit murder with the intent to prevent testimony by a witness or a victim. That monster killed Aaron Cunningham and that homeless woman so’s they couldn’t testify about seein’ his son run that red light and kill that lady and her baby.”
“There’s something else I don’t get.” Dobbs literally scratched his head, covered in a thick shock of pure white hair. “If he doesn’t have any idea there’s a live witness out there, why did the Witness Protection Program keep moving Bailey around to all those different places? Why would they fear he’d find her if he wasn’t even looking?”
“If I had to guess, I’d bet those moves didn’t have anything to do with her and Mikhailov,” Brice said. “In the past few years, there’ve been security breaches all over the FBI. I broached the subject once with Nakamura and got shut down quick, but it’s happened to other federal agencies, too. If hackers got into their systems, they couldn’t take a chance that the locations of the witnesses they’ve got stashed all over who knows where had been exposed.”
“Like when the credit card company sends you a notice and says you have to change your password because your account’s been hacked,” Dobbs observed.
“Yeah, like that, ‘cept for Bailey — and I’m sure she ain’t the only one — it meant a lot more than comin’ up with nine digit
s, one capital, one lowercase, a number and a symbol. It meant uprooting and moving.”
“And they never told her why.” Brice thought about Bailey’s stories of marshals showing up in the middle of the night and whisking her off to somewhere she’d never been with a different identity. “Suddenly, she was somewhere new, being somebody new — no wonder after a while it got to her and …”
He didn’t finish. He didn’t have to, of course. They knew as well as he did, better than he did, actually, how she had spiraled down, hit rock bottom and then put Oscar into her brain.
Dobbs looked down at the papers. “So how does this involve us?” He must have seen the look that passed between T.J. and Brice. “It’s a police officer thing, right? I get it. You guys have this telepathy going on and the rest of us don’t—”
“It’s just we both know that soon’s they arrest these guys, Mikhailov will know there’s a live witness. When you charge somebody with murder, you got to name who it is you’s saying they killed. Soon as Mikhailov finds out the woman his goon shot and stuffed into the car wasn’t Jessie Cunningham … but everybody in Jessie’s life thinks she’s dead …”
“He’ll go looking for her.” Dobbs connected the dots.
“Under every rock and bush, scrape the gum off the bottoms of the picnic tables.”
“And the two of you aren’t convinced the feds can protect her when that happens.”
Again, Brice shot T.J. a look.
“Let’s just say we plan to hang around close.”
“Make sure them marshals dots all they i’s and crosses all they t’s.”
Chapter Seven
Sparklers.
Little kids on the Fourth of July, waving them in the air.
The light is pointed and looks like it’s sharp on both sides and jagged, tiny swords that burst off the fiery center, flash out into the air and vanish without so much as the sparkle of a soap bubble.
Not just one sparkler. A dozen. A hundred. A thousand. All exploding with pointy lights so bright you can’t look at them.
Or maybe it’s welding sparks. A cascade of them, like a waterfall flowing thick and full and then the light’s extinguished and it’s gone. Poof.
Static.
White noise.
The sound that is what no sound sounds like. The opposite of sound, if sound has an opposite, like dark is the opposite of light. But silence isn’t the opposite of sound. When there is no sound, there is the buzzing noise of static.
Sparkles and static. Like sparkles are maybe what static looks like, and static is what sparkles sound like. Bailey’s head is full to bursting with both of them.
But there’s something on the other side of it all. Images, a scene, feelings and thoughts that she could experience if it weren’t for the constant interference.
Images seen through a white mesh screen. Horror images. The flames of hell. Tongues of red and yellow, licking the air above them like a kid licks a lollipop.
Smoke. Thick white and black smoke rolls out ahead of the flames that are creeping toward her. The smell of burning fabric and melting plastic slap her a heartbeat before the heat from the flames.
She’s scared, oh so scared — the feelings muted by the static, music playing behind a closed door. You can catch some of the notes and a hint of the melody, but you can’t identify the song.
Dear holy God in heaven, don’t let the fire … don’t let me burn to death! That comes through loud and clear.
Her heart makes a loud crash with every beat. The rhythm of waves hammering the rocks on the shore. Pounding. Pounding! Then the rhythm speeds up, gets faster and faster. It’s a mortar slamming again and again into a pestle — pulverizing, hammering into dust what little courage there ever was in her heart.
The powder of it is as fine as talcum. The breath that explodes out of her lungs puffs it off into the air, fine white dust that dissipates, becomes motes that are incandescent, sparkling in the flickering light of the flames.
Flames!
Fire! It’s coming for her.
She tries to grab her fear, hold on tight or it will wiggle free and eat her alive on the inside like the flames will consume her on the outside. But she can’t grab her fear any more than she can quiet her heart or control her breathing.
There is no way to tame terror! No way to silence the scream that’s crawling up her throat on little rat feet, eager to leap out of her mouth. But she doesn’t have enough air in her lungs to scream.
The fire is coming. And it hurts!
It’s licking at her leg and it hurts!
Images grow bright behind the white skein of static and sparks. The images are blurred because her eyes cannot seem to focus. She is dizzy, the room’s spinning, flames in a circle all around, a lioness leaping through a ring of fire in a circus.
Her cheek is against something cold. A floor. She looks out across the floor where the fire is oozing toward her. Flames flowing inexorably along the floor toward her face. She sees double images. Then just one.
And she can’t turn away, is so tangled up in the huge skirt — all that fabric! — that she can’t move.
Her mind turns and bolts away, explodes with stored images like birds scared off the limbs of a tree, flying away in all directions.
The sound of a child giggling.
The smell of coming rain on damp wind.
A ballerina, balanced on one long leg as the other points at the ceiling.
Music.
Tickets for opening night of The Nutcracker.
The fire ignites the edge of one of the tickets — not in the real world where she is burning alive — but in her mind, where she is going insane. The ticket bursts into flame—
She finds the air to scream, a shrieking wail that shreds her vocal cords, but cannot express her agony. The flames have ignited her skirt and the fire takes it. She draws her legs up to her body, away from the flame, but seconds later pain consumes her leg and she tries to pull away but she is bound and can do nothing but scream and beg for death.
It hurts!
The liquid flame has reached a strand of her hair lying out in front of her face on the floor. The stench of singed hair and burning flesh. The flame travels lazily up the strand of hair, closer and closer to her face.
So hot!
The fire is so close that when she tries to look at it her eyes cross and her already blurred vision smears red and yellow and black and gray together. Her other leg is burning now, the whole dress has caught. Flames are moving up her body, so it doesn’t matter, nothing matters, life is agony, pain she never dreamed existed, beyond her capacity to express it with screams that are raking whispers up her ragged throat and out between her blistering lips.
She begs for the mercy of death. Pleads to die.
Now, please!
She breathes heat and flame into her mouth, down her throat to her lungs.
It hurts!
The world is filling with smoke. Not the churning black and white boiling up off the flames but a gray mist that obscures. She can see through it the flames eating up the world around her as if they were dancing ballerinas in the mist, making it swirl and eddy around them.
The world goes dark then, not because she has left it but because she has been blinded by the fire and can no longer see the flames devouring her. She tries to make some kind of noise, explode sound out into the inferno that is killing her, but she can control nothing anymore.
She can still feel the all-over agony, though. But that is graying out, too, as if it were melting into the mist. It is melting. She is melting.
She aches for black. Black will make the pain go away.
And then it does and she is no more.
Chapter Eight
Light grew behind Bailey’s closed eyelids.
It started as just light, but then it became a golden glow.
She didn’t actually will herself to open her eyes. She didn’t yet have will, voluntary control over her body or her thoughts. They were runni
ng on autopilot, programmed, she supposed, by some mysterious node on a complex strand of a single DNA module.
Open your eyes when you wake up.
That command was in there somewhere. You didn’t have to think about it, so it must be pre-programmed. You didn’t have to wake up from a restful night’s sleep and then think, “Okay, open your eyes now.” So it had to be automatic.
Then her eyes were open.
Bailey was looking at a ceiling somewhere.
Since there was no familiar ceiling tile, the one that had become her best friend when she woke up in the hospital after she put Oscar in her brain, she must not be in the hospital. Good. That’s where she wasn’t. But the understanding didn’t do much to narrow down the geography of where she was.
It came all at once. Not in pieces and bits but all at one time. Reality downloaded. As instantaneously as turning on a television and the show materialized.
Bailey was lying on the floor in her studio. Lying on the piece of plastic Brice had put under her easel because she had such a nasty habit of dropping paintbrushes onto the floor.
She hadn’t dropped these. She ducked her chin; this time she willed it and it was so. Lifting her hands up, she could see that she had paintbrushes in both hands. Then she did drop them in the scooting motion that propelled her off her back and to her feet, looking at a portrait on the easel.
It was a portrait with a table on the front, but very small, totally out of proportion. On the table was … not a bowl of fruit or even a vase of flowers. There was a butter dish and a sugar bowl and salt and pepper shakers.
Above the table was a window that took up the whole canvas.
Bailey turned and ran. Slipping and sliding in bare feet on the splattered paint on the floor, she bolted from the room, slamming the door behind her. Now, what was on the shelf by the door was a rubber ducky. A big one, bright yellow, that she’d spotted in the back of the attic when she’d been cleaning it for a garage sale that never happened. She had, however, snagged the duck and set it on the shelf in front of the studio door after the day she’d slammed the door so hard she’d knocked the ceramic London phone booth off and it had shattered on the floor.
