The Keeper of Bees ARC

by Gregory Ashe

  “I don’t think you did. Did you see anyone you recognized? Did you notice anything unusual?”

  “No. I’ve been thinking about this non-stop. It’s pretty much the only thing I do besides sob and beg and go crazy.”

  “What happened next, then? What do you remember next?”

  “Being here. Being cold and wet and terrified. I had no idea where I was. I found the door, and I hammered on it and shouted. It felt like I did that for a day. Hours, anyway. And nobody came. Nobody came. And then I kind of . . . I don’t know, I went crazy, I guess. I’ve been talking to myself. I lose track of time. I thought I’d been here a week. When I saw that first camera, I begged. Just begged him to let me go. I said stuff, such fucking humiliating stuff. And then I got so mad I was going to break it, only it came right off the wall when I grabbed it. And then it all felt kind of surreal, like, fake cameras, fake everything. I swear to God I’m dissociating. I swear to God.”

  “Fake cameras?”

  “Yeah.” Nico took the camera from Somers and turned it. “This is totally fake.”

  “You mean—”

  “I mean fake. This isn’t recording anything. It’s not transmitting anywhere.”

  “It looks real,” Somers said, taking back the camera and studying it. Even up close, even with Nico’s assurances, it still looked real. “That was a stupid way to mount it, especially in a place like this with high humidity, but I think it’s real.”

  “Which one of us spends every summer in front of cameras?” Nico said, but he had a tiny smile when Somers looked at him. “It’s not real. I think the asshole just put them here to . . . to mess with us.”

  Somers didn’t say anything.

  “Oh my God,” Nico said with a laugh. “You don’t believe me.”

  “It’s not that I don’t—”

  “It’s ok. I mean, I’d like to think you’d trust my expertise, but come here. I’ll show you.”

  Instead of leading Somers into the darkness of the sub-basement, though, he took Somers back to the entrance and pointed above the door. A bouquet of grenades hung there; they had escaped Somers’s notice because they were hung high and in the shadows.

  “Jesus Christ, Nico, don’t—”

  Nico grabbed a grenade and yanked. A pin came loose.

  Somers grabbed the younger man, barreling for the doorway, when he felt the bundle of grenades slap against his back. A hollow, plastic slap.

  Nico grinned and held out the pin.

  “Holy shit,” Somers said.

  “I told you.”

  “Holy shit,” Somers said, sagging against the limestone. “I think I just shat myself.”

  “If you’d listened—”

  Somers fixed him with a glare.

  “Ok,” Nico said, holding up both hands, the pin still hanging from one finger. “I will explain in advance next time.”

  Fake cameras. Fake explosives. It almost had a haunted house feel. More importantly, though, it felt familiar, and he was trying to figure out where he had experienced this before. Mikey Grames and the Haverford? No, not quite, although the Haverford had been a nightmare warren of traps and dead ends. Where, then?

  “I’m going to check out those other cameras,” Somers said. “And see if there’s another exit.”

  Nico caught his arm; he was staring at the ground. “Don’t—don’t leave me here, please. I honestly think I will bash my brains out if I have to be alone again.”

  “Yeah,” Somers said. “Ok.”

  Nico’s hand slid down, and he laced his fingers through Somers’s. He looked up, his eyes pleading.

  Somers grinned and squeezed once.

  “Don’t you dare tell Emery about this,” Nico said.

  “I was going to suggest the same thing.”

  “I’m serious, John-Henry. Not a word.”

  “I kind of think I’m the one with more to worry about.”

  Nico sniffed. “You don’t understand anything, then.”

  Rather than engage with that, Somers turned and moved deeper into the sub-basement. The ceiling brushed the top of his head, and from time to time he’d bump an uneven spot on the stone, so he had to hunch slightly, and an ache was already building in his lower back. The farther he moved into the basement, the more he relied on touch, until he could see nothing ahead of him except the flashing red lights of fake cameras. His steps slowed, and he felt ahead with his feet, not trusting the slight irregularities in the flooring. When he reached the opening to one of the cells that divided up the space, it was like falling: he had nothing to hold on to, nothing to guide him except those blinking red lights, and he’d stumble those few steps, hand slapping the air, until he caught hold of the wall again. He knew, at a distant level, that this was panicked behavior, but that part of him was so far off that it didn’t matter. The only thing that was real was Nico’s hand in his, and Nico’s other hand like a patch of sunlight on his shoulder.

  “I’m sorry I was such an asshole to you.”

  Somers shushed him as he pulled the next camera down. They moved through the darkness from one flashing red beacon to the next, and Somers felt like he was drifting in outer space. The next camera. The next. The next. Until nothing red flashed ahead of them. They shuffled forward, with Somers running one hand through the air, and then his knuckles cracked against limestone and he swore.

  “Are you ok?”

  “Yeah, fine. I think we’re at the end of the line, though. Let’s see if they had fire exits back in the 1800s or whenever they built this.”

  Their two-man parade followed a spiral now, with Somers bumping up against the next wall when they found it, tracing it to its corner, and following the next wall. Moments later, he found the boards bolted into the limestone, their lengths securing a door and preventing it from opening.

  Nico’s breathing roughened. “We can’t get out, can we?”

  Somers ran his finger around the door. At the top, his fingers brushed another bouquet of grenades, plastic and cheap like the first ones. Then he moved the door itself, running his hands across the wood. Like the door at the other end of the sub-basement, it was splintered and warped, and he could feel its age in the rough surface. He yanked on the boards blocking the door and noticed the contrast: smooth, pressure-treated lumber. Another recent addition. His hands found the bolts, which were sunk into the wood. They were a big gauge, bigger than his thumb.

  “We can . . . we can break it down, right?” Nico said, his fingers digging into Somers’s shoulder now.

  “Maybe,” Somers said. “It’s hard to tell in the dark, but it feels pretty substantial.”

  “We can take the screws out then. Or the nails. Or whatever. We can just take them out.”

  “I can’t even get my fingers around the bolt; we’d need tools.”

  “Well, you’re supposed to be some kind of fucking super cop, so just fix it!”

  Somers squeezed Nico’s hand once. “Come on. There’s a little light by the other door; we’ll stay over there.”

  They reversed course, and now, with that patch of watery light ahead of them, their path through the sub-basement was short and easy. Once Somers’s oxford caught a discarded camera, and the plastic casing chittered across limestone. Otherwise, the only sound was Nico’s rough breathing; his fingers bit through the t-shirt, and Somers guessed Nico was holding on, desperately holding on, in more ways than one.

  When they got to the steep stairs that connected the sub-basement to the basement proper, Somers sat on a step, his back to the wall, the Glock on the next step up where he could reach it. Nico paced for a few minutes and then he dropped onto the next step down, his head rocking back against the wall.

  “It’s a little warmer over here,” Somers said. “Good thing they didn’t weather strip that door.”

  “We’re going to die, right?”

  “I’m not planning on it. Are you?”

  Nico said, “Fuck,” and th
en he put his face in his hands and said, “Fuck, fuck, fuck.”

  In the hazy light that came under the door, Somers saw the raw and bloody ends of Nico’s fingers. He thought of the days in the dark, the disorientation, the panic settling into terror, the complete lack of training or knowledge about what to do.

  He put an arm around Nico.

  Nico sobbed once into his hands.

  “You handled yourself really well,” Somers said, chafing Nico’s arm. “Most people would have been paralyzed, but you figured out the cameras were fake, you figured out the grenades were fake, you—hey, how’d you do that? With the grenades, I mean?”

  “I pulled one and tried to blow up the door.”

  Somers burst out laughing. He laughed so hard that he was shaking, and then he slid along the step, unable to keep himself upright. It wasn’t really that funny, but nerves and the tense exhaustion from the last few days had frayed his self-control, and now he couldn’t stop laughing. After a moment, Nico started laughing too, wiping his face as he cried and laughed and cried.

  Eventually, Somers settled. “That was a pretty fucking terrible idea,” Somers said, grinning. “But holy shit it took guts.”

  “Yeah, well,” Nico said with a shrug. He was leaning his head back again, his eyes half closed. “The worst part has been not sleeping. I took a dump in one of those stupid cells, and that was pretty terrible, but the worst part is not being able to close my eyes. I keep thinking he’s going to get me if I fall asleep. I have never in my entire life been this tired.”

  “You can go to sleep now,” Somers said, applying light pressure until Nico rested his head against Somers’s side.

  Nico resisted for a moment, and then he settled against Somers, his breathing already evening out. “I am sorry,” he mumbled.

  “Yeah, well, I wasn’t exactly a prince either,” Somers said. But Nico was already asleep by then.

  Somers kept vigil in the flickering gray light that came under the door. Hours later, with Nico rumbling deep in sleep against him, he noticed a tiny hole in the wall above the door, and he started to wonder.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  JULY 6

  SATURDAY

  4:12 AM

  HAZARD WOKE TO THE alarm he had set on the phone. The screen also displayed several missed calls, all from the same unknown number, and a voicemail. He blinked blearily, processed the unfamiliar surroundings into the back bench of the Odyssey, and remembered that he had slept in the minivan. He was thirsty and had an overwhelming need to piss; the car smelled like a closed-up space with a man who needed a shower, with a hint of apple and cinnamon from the breakfast cereal Evie liked to munch on.

  He squeezed between the middle row of seats, let himself out of the van, and locked the doors. Then he jogged across the parking lot, thinking about the structure of transitional epithelial cells in the bladder, their remarkable ability to stretch, and the very real awareness that distracting himself was only going to work for a few more minutes because those poor epithelial cells had stretched to the point of rupturing. The sodium lamps in the parking lot hung a fluttering layer of light everywhere, dusty gray wings that wouldn’t stop trembling. It was another world, maybe, like that one in the show Somers had made him watch, with the child actors who were completely faking their knowledge of ham radios.

  Then he was passing into the lobby of Wahredua Regional, where the light was steady and low and golden, and he found the bathroom and peed for approximately an hour. It was actually forty-one seconds, almost double the average pee time of an adult male, and he allowed himself the exaggeration because he felt a flicker of pride.

  At the sink, he took his time washing up—face, hands, neck, even a few quick wipes under his arms. The rest of his day, after discovering Dulac and shooting Rasmussen, had been a series of protracted questionings, delays, and bureaucratic bullshit. By the time Riggle and Park had finished interrogating him—Riggle, in any case, still seemed to believe that Dulac and Somers were guilty, and Park’s opaque reactions told Hazard nothing helpful—Hazard had driven over to Wahredua Regional, only to spend hours being shuffled between nurses’ stations, administrative offices, and too-small chairs in busy hallways. By midnight, Hazard figured the staff was probably about to open their own off-Broadway show, they were so fucking good at tap dancing.

  Even Lela Mae, Hazard’s source inside the hospital, had proved only partially helpful; Hazard had called her personal number, demanding an update on Dulac, and she had disconnected before he could finish. An email from a burner address had come almost an hour later, but instead of the usual dossier of reports and charts, it was just a few lines of text:

  Serious but stable.

  ICU.

  Police.

  The first line was the most important; Hazard hadn’t been sure if Dulac would survive whatever Rasmussen had sedated him with. Those kinds of drugs, especially the heavy hitters, were easy to get wrong, and Rasmussen wasn’t a nurse anesthetist. After Hazard had gotten that information from Lela Mae, he had found the ICU and spotted one of Riggle’s new hires on the door. He had decided to give it a few hours, hoping someone he knew would take the post next, and gone to sleep in the van.

  Now, drying his face with paper towels, Hazard considered, his next step. If one of the new hires was still watching Dulac’s room, Hazard wouldn’t have a chance of getting in to talk to Dulac. And that was a problem because all of Hazard’s leads had hit a dead end. Somers was on the run, and God only knew if he was ok. The Keeper still had Mitchell and Nico. And Hazard had no clue what to do. Part of him recognized that this feeling of directionless uncertainty was partially due to exhaustion—his eyes were still grainy, and his jaw cracked as he yawned—but another part also knew that he was right about his situation: he might come up with a new plan, he might check traffic cameras in Golden City or spend a few days trawling the neighborhood around Mitchell’s apartment, but the truth was that he had used up his good leads, and anything else would be luck.

  He left the bathroom and made his way back to the ICU. He had set his alarm for four in the morning because it was the time when most people let their guard down; even staff who regularly worked an overnight shift were starting to wind down, anticipating the end of work and a chance to go home and sleep. When he got to the hall with Dulac’s room, Hazard stopped, and he felt something that made him dizzy, made him blame the late night and the exhaustion and his half-asleep brain: he felt like the universe was aligning.

  Patrick Foley was the cop in the chair. The red-headed man was awake, sitting gingerly—doubtless still feeling, to some degree, the effects of the gut wound he had taken months before. He was leafing through something that Hazard guessed was a skin rag, Foley’s stock in trade for shift work like this. He didn’t look up as Hazard approached.

  “I’m going in there,” Hazard said.

  Foley’s hand stilled in the middle of turning a page; Hazard saw now that it was a hobbyist catalogue. Model airplanes.

  “Just turn around,” Foley said quietly, “and get back on the elevator. That’s what you’re going to do.”

  “I need to talk to him.”

  Foley took out a pen, circled something, and folded the corner of the page. “Hazard, I’m supposed to arrest you if you come up here poking around. I’m not trying to jam you up; I’m saying, walk those sweet cheeks out of here, and we’ll pretend this didn’t happen.”

  “It did happen, Foley. It is happening. All of this is happening. The Keeper is back, and he’s killing again. He has Mitchell. He has Nico. His accomplice had Dulac. And John is out there, and he’s in danger, because the Keeper framed him. Dulac is my last chance.” Hazard worked on the word for a moment before he finally managed to say, “Please?”

  Blowing out a breath, Foley marked his place with a pen and shut the catalogue.

  “Patrick, I am begging you. Please. I just need to talk to him. Nobody ever has to know.”

  “Y
ou’re the hero, right?”

  Hazard was too tired and too slow to respond.

  “That’s what this is about, isn’t it?” Foley said. “I get it, man. You’re badass. You and Somers, you’ve taken down some really serious shit in this town. So I get it: in your head, you’re the only one who can do this. But the FBI is on this case. You might think the rest of us are local yokels just picking hair out of our ass cracks, but this is the goddamn FBI we’re talking about. They’ve got this. They’ll find this son of a bitch, and they’ll make sure Somers comes out ok. He didn’t do the shit they’re saying; anybody knows him, knows that.”

  “You know that’s not true,” Hazard said. “Riggle can’t make up his mind if he thinks Wesley did it or if he thinks John and Dulac did. Park, on the other hand, is convinced John and Dulac were involved in the Keeper murders. You should have seen her face today after I found Dulac. She had this whole story—” Hazard could hear his voice thinning, tightening, all the emotions he normally kept locked down escaping now because he was exhausted, mentally and physically and emotionally. “She had this whole story about he was buying from Rasmussen, using recreationally, and it just got a little out of hand. She’s convinced he and John are part of this too. And she’s got the evidence to pin them to the board with it, Patrick, so please. I am not doing this for my ego. I am not doing this because I want to. I’m doing it because I love John and because . . . and because I don’t know who else will do it if I don’t.” He worked his jaw, and the final word was very small. “Please.”

  After a moment, Patrick flipped open the catalogue, grabbed his pen, and began chewing on the cap as he paged back and forth.

  Letting out a long breath, Hazard opened the door and stepped into Dulac’s room. It had the smells and sounds and even the lighting of a hospital room: disinfectant and the reminder that Dulac, like Hazard, probably needed a bath; Dulac’s low, whistling breath competing with machines that beeped and hummed; the glow of LED displays making little islands in the darkness. Hazard found the bedside lamp, turned it on, and touched Dulac’s shoulder.