Night Sun

by Tom Barber

  Brooks had dropped his keys and shiv, the headbutt having cracked two of his teeth and sending pain radiating through his skull, but now he had two free hands. He stepped in when Archer tried to swing the sock again and lifted the smaller man into a bearhug. The sheer power of the giant convict’s arms was immense and he squeezed so hard Archer thought his back was going to break, the weighted sock falling to the floor; unable to breathe and hearing the sound of some of his ribs cracking, he lunged forward and bit into Brooks’ face as hard as he could, feeling his teeth break the flesh.

  Brooks yelled and let Archer go, blood now leaking down his face. Billy however, had just caught Marquez with a hard punch and one shot was all it had taken. Archer saw she’d been knocked out cold and was now slumped on the floor, defenseless, her bloodied shirt sticking to the magazines taped underneath in that attempt to protect her vital organs. As Brooks rushed Archer again and this time dumped him hard to the floor, the NYPD detective saw Billy grab Marquez by the hair and pull her head back, the bandage from her hotel room fall still in place, his shiv in the other hand to cut open her throat from ear to ear. No words were being spoken, the silence highlighting the primal savagery more than anything else could possibly have done. This was just about killing.

  But then the weighted sock was picked up and swung by another hand. It swept through the air so hard the end of the fabric stretched out almost another half a length, and when it connected, the impact shattered Billy’s skull and killed him instantly. Brooks was too intent on killing Archer to notice and was now astride him trapping the NYPD cop with all three hundred pounds of his weight. Archer was trying to use every grappling technique he’d ever learned to escape being pinned, but was too weakened from blood-loss and the sheer size and weight of his assailant for anything to work.

  Brooks scooped up his shiv from the floor, and as he grabbed Archer’s collar with his other hand, glanced to his right and saw his brother’s dead body.

  He twisted slightly and looked up.

  Nicky Reyes was the one holding the sock.

  In that second of hesitation, with no other weapon within reach, Archer realized he actually wasn’t unarmed. The shiv from where the Latino had stabbed him in the corridor was still buried in the side of his thigh. He brought his leg up just as Brooks turned back, but his hand slipped off the grip. As the huge man brought down his blade to slit Archer’s throat, no chance of going shallow as he had with that laundry truck driver, Archer lunged for the handle again.

  This time he got it.

  And just like with Brooks’ youngest brother Craig on the bridge, he beat Brooks with speed. He pulled out the sharpened screwdriver from his own leg then in one smooth movement, slammed it deep into the giant man’s neck as hard as he could.

  He left the shiv buried there as Brooks’ eyes bulged in shock and terror. The giant Gatlin fugitive swayed and seemed as if he was still going to try and cut Archer. But then he toppled sideways, clutching at his neck; in the slipperiness of the blood, Archer managed to get out from under and push himself back to his feet. The oldest Loughlin slumped beside his brother’s body and stared up at the NYPD cop in shock, fighting for breath, before his eyes eventually dulled and his face went slack.

  Then, as shouting and alarms continued to sound around the county jail, Sam Archer and Nicky Reyes were left looking at each other. Nicky standing with the weighted sock in his hand, Archer now unarmed. Nicky immediately recognized the man in front of him from the shootout at the robbery in Cleveland on Saturday morning. And although he didn’t know who he was, except that the guy must be a cop judging from the blood-stained badge on his hip, Nicky also realized this guy and the woman lying unconscious on the floor were most likely the pair who’d been trying to help and keep him alive in here.

  As the two men continued to weigh each other up, details he’d learned over the past few days of Nicky Reyes’ life returned to Archer; his rough childhood, the premature death of both his parents. Given twelve years in federal prison for saving Kat’s life. Breaking out six days before his release to try and save her again.

  Neither man moved as two inmates ran into the chow hall behind them, saw the bloody scene and immediately took off.

  But then Nicky’s gaze lowered to the floor.

  To the set of keys that had been dropped in the fight and were now resting near Archer’s foot.

  The emergency lighting was flashing on and off, casting the two men’s shadows onto the wall beside them. A riot response team and armed back-up would be here any second, but Nicky still made no attempt to go for the keys, his eyes going back to Archer’s. The sound of prisoners’ shouts continued to echo as more blood was spilled elsewhere in the county jail, the cameras off which meant nothing was currently being recorded.

  After a long moment, instead of reaching down to pick up the keys, Archer gave Nicky a slight nod. Over the years, the Gatlin fugitive had been conditioned to hide any emotion, but that small movement caught him completely by surprise.

  For a brief moment, his expression lightened.

  Then Archer turned his back on Nicky and went to check on Marquez who was starting to regain consciousness. As he shifted her against the wall just behind them, the blood loss from the open wound on his leg was increasing now the shank was gone, and he found himself joining her on the floor as the room began to spin, clamping a hand to his thigh to try and stem the flow.

  He looked at the battle scene in front of them as they sat side by side, hearing the sound of doors opening and shouts from a riot squad breaching the facility.

  Apart from the bodies of the two inmates and the Loughlin brothers, he and Lisa were alone again.

  Nicky Reyes and the keys were gone.

  FIFTY TWO

  A week later in Pepper Pike, Ohio, Blair O’Mara was with her daughter Alaina in their kitchen. Alaina had her cell phone in her hands, constantly refreshing the homepage for new headlines.

  ‘He’s one man,’ she said to her mother in frustration. ‘There are what, hundreds of thousands of cops in this country? How can’t they find him?’

  ‘Stop worrying about it. He’s not going to come here.’

  ‘He can’t get away with this. With what he did. He breaks out from prison twice? Are you kidding me?’

  ‘He’ll end up making a mistake. They always do. People don’t survive out there on their own.’

  ‘Most people, maybe.’ Blair didn’t answer and watched as her daughter rose and snatched her jacket from a hook near the front door. ‘I’m going out.’ Alaina slammed the door behind her and continuing to check her phone, walked off down the street, cutting into a nearby coffee shop a couple of minutes later. She was a regular, turning up around the same time every day, the money and business her mother had inherited from Thomas O’Mara ensuring she didn’t have to work for a living, so her time was her own. She ordered at the counter then took a seat, looking at her phone once again while she waited for her drink.

  She willed Nicky, wherever he was, to make the mistake that would get him caught. Kat had always had a thing for the guy, but Alaina had taken against him almost from the first moment she’d met the teenage boy when he’d shown up at their old house, that initial dislike bolstered when she’d found out where he and his father lived, confirming him as trash in her eyes. Her dislike of Nicky had only increased when she’d never caught him checking her out or given her the chance to rebuff his advances. In fact, he’d pretty much ignored her, which to a popular girl used to being the center of attention was unforgiveable; she’d told herself it was because he knew she was way out of his league but deep down, knew it was because he was totally disinterested in her. His attention was all for her junkie stepsister.

  The waitress brought Alaina’s coffee over and moved away to start clearing and wiping down some other tables. ‘Never give you enough, do they?’ a voice said to her right, and Alaina realized the speaker was talking to her.

  She looked up and saw a brown-haired man in a sports
jacket, shirt and loose tie sitting at another table nearby. He had the day’s newspaper spread out in front of him, a mug in his hand.

  ‘Enough what?’

  He nodded at a pack of Domino she was picking up. ‘Sugar.’ She gave him a look that should have told him she wasn’t interested in anything he had to say, and tore open the packet to pour the contents into her coffee. But it seemed the guy wasn’t perceptive or just chose to ignore the signal. He folded up his paper. ‘My wife keeps a dispenser at home, same shape as the salt-shaker. Learned my lesson to check.’

  ‘How interesting,’ she said, making her boredom clear. But the man wasn’t deterred and kept looking at her. Alaina was about to pick up her coffee and move to another table when the guy lifted his paper and what she saw caught her by surprise; underneath was something she recognized. It was the yearbook from Cleveland Catholic High, the year printed on the front the same that she’d graduated. Beside the book was a police badge too. Both kept her in her seat as her eyes flicked back up to the man’s face.

  ‘How well did you know a kid called Kyle Choh, Alaina?’ the man asked.

  The question and the use of her name took her completely by surprise. Off-balance, it took her a moment to answer. ‘We went to high school together. I don’t really remember. Hung out in different groups.’

  ‘He remembers you. Said you bought some benzodiazepines from him just after you graduated. Told us his father was a chemist, so Kyle would go to the pharmacy and sneak supplies without his father being any the wiser. Sold the pills to the kids at school, right? Well, he did before his father noticed the discrepancies in his pharmacy records and his son ended up getting caught. Fessed to all of it to try and avoid going to prison.’

  ‘Kyle never sold me a thing. I don’t do drugs. Didn’t back then, either.’

  ‘He’s got no reason to lie.’

  ‘He asked me out on a date a couple times and I said no. Obviously he never got over it. Guess this is his way of getting back at me.’

  ‘See, Kyle told us he sold you one pill bottle, but then you went back to him for more before he got caught,’ another voice said, and Alaina turned. A second man had taken a seat at a table the other side of her, this guy younger and with a darker complexion. He had a Cleveland PD badge and gun too. Both were on his hip. ‘Hit him back up another half dozen times. That’s a serious amount of pills for someone who says she never popped one. And you don’t look like the type who’d waste your time playing dealer. So where’d they all go?’

  ‘My stepsister probably stole them. Heard the name Katherine O’Mara? If you haven’t, check the news from the past two weeks.’ Alaina stared at this second cop arrogantly to show she wasn’t intimidated, but he saw a flicker of fear in her eyes.

  She’d realized she might have just slipped up.

  ‘So you bought six full pill bottles and just had them sitting around the house?’ Richie said, rising and taking a seat directly across from her. Glick brought his chair over too, so they were both at the table. ‘Even though you didn’t want them for yourself? Doesn’t that strike you as odd?’

  ‘Kat’s rehab counsellor said your stepsister started hallucinating when she was getting off the pills before she started her sentence at ORW,’ Glick continued, before Alaina could answer. ‘She was screaming your name a lot. Doc asked her afterwards if she could remember why. Kat told him you were the first one to give her a pill. Limited dose though, just to get her through. Senior year stress and losing her father? Being a high-strung girl already, she must’ve been a nervous wreck.’

  Silence.

  ‘I worked a case once where a woman was poisoning her kid,’ Richie told Alaina. ‘When I took a closer look at this, I thought your mom was responsible for doing something to Kat. Crushing up pills and hiding them in her food or drink. Kind of thing you’d do with an unsuspecting pet dog, right, to get it to take its medication? From what I heard, Kat was in a pretty bad way around the time you all graduated. Father gone, the guy she was falling in love with sent down for twelve years for saving her life after some asshole who happened to have a gun in his waistband tried to choke her to death at a party. And no guarantee her guy would survive in prison, considering where he was sent. You lived in the same house and had money Kat’s father left you; I don’t think he’d have been quite as generous if he’d known what you planned to do with it. Or the kind of person you really are. Do you?’

  Alaina remained totally silent.

  ‘We’ve been trying to work out why you did what we’re pretty sure you did. Jealousy? Greed? Because her father stuck around in her life and yours didn’t? Whatever it was, I figure you thought if Kat was gone too, your mom would inherit the girl’s probably very significant share of Thomas’ estate. That would make it much easier for you to access it. You couldn’t kill her without attracting suspicion, so you thought the next best thing would be to get her addicted to something destructive. She was already suffering bad from depression, so it wouldn’t have taken much, right? And you weren’t in any hurry.’

  ‘Around that time was when your stepsister developed the benzo addiction,’ Glick continued. ‘But she never pointed the finger at you. Only thing she ever told her counsellor was that you gave her that small dose early on and that you had them to help you sleep. We checked your medical records and found that was a lie. You were never prescribed benzos. We called PD from Orange County in Indiana too to check out your mom a while ago, but then we got them back on the phone again yesterday. Wanting to know more about your biological father.’

  ‘Turns out he’s been a Xanax abuser for years,’ Richie said. ‘Same family of drugs. You knew very well how addictive and destructive they were. Kat was on the edge of the cliff, so you stepped up and gave her a good kick off the edge.’

  ‘So how’d I do that?’ she asked neutrally. She was still maintaining a dismissive, I can’t believe this bullshit expression, but the eyes didn’t lie. And the young woman’s were still telling the two detectives she was rattled.

  ‘Probably by mixing the contents of the pills into Kat’s food and drink,’ Glick replied. ‘Otherwise, where’d six bottles worth of benzos go, Alaina? Thomas and Kat’s maid Marija had been fired by that point too, so it’d be easy enough to slip it into her meals; slipping that crap into Kat’s portion to get her physically addicted without her knowing.’ Both detectives watched the color drain out of her.

  ‘She started spiraling once high school was over and Nicky Reyes had gone to prison,’ Richie said. ‘It was going to take a while, but you figured if she fell hard enough, you could get your mom to temporarily take control of the girl’s inheritance which would be a step towards making it permanent once she died. Kat ended up in prison too but she kicked the habit, unfortunately for you. She was getting better. Your plan was going up in smoke.’

  Glick opened a folder and laid down four photocopied documents with signatures at the base, spreading them out. ‘These are copies of signed confessions from four local managers in the city area from where the girl worked. They each say you paid them ten thousand dollars to fire Kat from the job and to stay quiet about it. That’s a lot of money but we checked; Thomas left you a hundred grand and I’m sure you get plenty coming your way from your mom too. You must’ve thought it was worth the outlay, right? Considering how much more you were expecting to get in the end? Like an investment.’

  ‘Sure Kat’s father would be real pleased to know how you used your inheritance,’ Richie continued. ‘And beside these four, other people who employed her told us you ran a campaign of badmouthing her to them. These guys ended up getting rid of her without you having to pay out. I guess the other four were harder to convince.’

  Then Glick reached into his pocket and withdrew a photo in an evidence bag. He placed it down in front of her.

  ‘Know how we got onto you? I found it when we went to visit Luke McCoy’s family. It was tucked into the kid’s yearbook in his room.’

  He tapped the photo as she
looked down at it silently. The untouched coffee in the mug in front of her was starting to go cold.

  ‘That’s you with Luke McCoy at his prom,’ Richie said. ‘You two dated for a while there, when he was a senior and you were a junior. Kyle told us all about that too. People missed that though, right? Too busy throwing the book at Nicky Reyes for killing Luke, the guy you’d persuaded to murder your stepsister at a house party. You convinced him to drug then kill her, didn’t you? Love-bombed him so hard he wasn’t thinking straight. I wonder what you promised him to get him to do that.’

  By now Alaina’s bravado had disappeared; she looked terrified, the two detectives’ plan to catch her off-guard working perfectly. ‘I learned something a long time ago, doing this job,’ Richie told her. ‘Crime scenes talk to you, but sometimes so quietly you almost miss it. This one was so spread out over the years and hundreds of miles, and it was shouting at me that your mother destroyed Kat’s life. But Blair had nothing to do with this, did she? She was totally unaware of everything you were doing. Thought Kat’s problems were all her own fault, probably because you’d convinced her. But in fact, her own daughter was responsible for all of it.’

  Alaina was clearly panicked but as the two detectives watched, she managed to pull herself together, her face readopting its habitual, bored expression. She shook her head before laughing briefly. ‘Nicky making clowns of all of you. Those robbers breaking into a truck and killing people with you guys too inept to catch them. Desperately fumbling around for anything to make sense of what happened, so now you come at me with…with this bullshit. I’m gonna see to it you’re both fired for harassment and slander.’ Her eyes dropped to the photocopies of the sworn statements. ‘I don’t know how you persuaded those guys to give you these fabrications; but if you’re lucky, maybe they might hire you both to work a fryer or sell wiper blade fluid when you’re out looking for a job.’