Fables & Felonies

by Nellie K Neves

  Unless you’re me.

  I wasn’t in the mood for his little mysteries.

  “What are you trying to say? I’m too tired to deal with cryptic.”

  “When are you going to start living?”

  My laugh started small, but grew as I considered his words. Maybe it was the adrenaline still in my veins, maybe sleep deprivation, or total mental break down, but I couldn’t stop laughing.

  “Living?” I asked between bouts of laughter. “Start living? How much more alive can I be? I was just rescued from a burning building after a rapist set it on fire!” I couldn’t stop there, it was all still too ridiculous. “A month ago I was trapped in a cult in the back woods of the Cascade mountains. I stopped a madman from shooting someone in the head by sacrificing my own life.” It still kept coming. “The summer before that, I nearly fell in love with a psychopath who then decided to bleed me for his own insane science experiment. I don’t think I’ll survive much more living, Jack!”

  His face remained unchanged, unfazed by my somewhat delusional tirade. It was as if he were waiting for a bus to come, waiting for Lindy to calm down.

  “I still have a wannabe cartel and a shipment of drugs to deal with while juggling the fact that a man I nearly loved once upon a time is wrongfully in jail for killing possibly the only human being he has ever loved. My only contact who could help me is a cop, and he might be dirty, so that’s an exciting turn of events for me as well. So, no, it’s not Thailand or Kuala Lampur, but it’s what I’ve got.” Still nothing, still unchanged. “Today might be a new day, but it’s looking an awful lot like yesterday and the day before that.”

  He watched me, his skin wrinkled, gray hair mussed, tapping his index finger against his cane.

  Waiting.

  “Nothing about your MS in that little diatribe?” he asked.

  “I can,” I offered. “Trust me, the little monster in my brain has done plenty of living as well.”

  Jack’s left eyebrow twitched once. He pursed his lips. “Just interesting, that’s all. You keep your MS separate from your life, as if you have two lives that run parallel.”

  “Do you want me to kick my feet up?” I asked. “Lean back on the couch and let you shrink me, oh MS master?”

  “No,” he said slowly. “I think if you did that you’d be asleep in moments. I’d rather you stay awake.”

  “Fine,” I snapped, “then tell me how I’m not living.”

  I figured I’d won. There was no way around the exciting life I’d laid out for him. No, I didn’t travel, but life didn’t get much more exciting than mine.

  Even then, Jack managed to prove me wrong with just one word.

  “Ryder.”

  A single shot right to my engine.

  “What about Ryder?” I asked. “How do you even know his name?”

  Jack shrugged with only his mouth. “Your mother likes to talk. I feel pretty caught up.”

  “You don’t know anything,” I snapped before I remembered he’d just saved my life. “It’s complicated.”

  “Oh, I know the physical parts are complicated, distance, memory loss, injury, but I’m not talking about any of that. That will all work out somehow. It always does.”

  “What then?” I asked. “What else is there?”

  With the tip of his index finger he tapped his temple. “All this up here. That’s all that matters anyway.” He pressed on, possibly because the only feedback I was willing to give him was a stiff glare, or maybe he would have gone on no matter what I said. “You’re scared. You’re scared to give yourself up to it.”

  “To what?”

  “To love. To him.”

  My eyelids slipped closed, cool like aloe on a burn. My breath was still not normal, my heart was still recovering from near death and he wanted to dive into my deepest issues?

  “I love him. I told him that. He just can’t remember.”

  “There is a difference between loving someone, and falling in love with them. You love Ryder, sure, but you refuse to fall. You need the escape hatch.”

  Both his eyebrows rose to challenge me to prove him wrong. I wasn’t in the mood to debate. Miles to go before I slept and all that old business.

  My groan ended in coughing as I tried to dispel more of the smoke from my lungs. Jack was more than willing to wait.

  “You think,” I said, clearing my throat, “I’m scared that he’ll leave me?”

  He didn’t say anything, he didn’t have to. We both knew it was true. Of course I was scared. A guy like Ryder believed in Ever After, and what if I didn’t have one and he finally cut out and left me mid-relapse. What would I do?

  It would destroy me.

  But Jack wasn’t so easy or so ready to give up.

  “Oh, I know that scares you, but the real fear is deeper.” I hung on his every word as he leaned forward. “You’re terrified he’ll stay.”

  My throat tightened, but it had nothing to do with the fire or the smoke. It was the executed jab from Jack’s statement that brought tears to my eyes and caused emotion to swell in my chest.

  Of course that was my deepest fear.

  What if Ryder gave up all of his best years to me, just to watch me fade into oblivion? RRMS develops into PPMS and there’s no stopping it at that point. One relapse into the next messy relapse. No telling where it would end.

  What if he stayed through the drool and the diapers, the live-in nurse and the inevitable end of bedridden uselessness? Could I look him in the eye at that point? Would I see love, or would I see a man who wished he could smother me in my sleep and end both our torment?

  Oh, that would be worse, so much worse.

  My teeth clamped over my bottom lip, tightening until it stung. “What do you know?” I asked Jack. “I don’t see anyone here with you. Who are you to lecture me on life and love?”

  The edge of his mouth curved up slowly, as if some unseen string pulled a little at a time.

  “I’ve been married twice, and I’ve had at least three women live with me. Don’t assume that because I’m alone now that I’ve always been. Oh no, Lindy, I have lived.”

  “So what?” I asked. “Did they all leave you?”

  With his left hand he flicked a finger at the table to my right. “There’s an album there, why don’t you open it up?”

  Reluctantly, I followed his command and pulled an album, about the size of a hard-bound book, from the coffee table. The cover cracked almost like radio static as I flipped the cover open. There on the first page was a much younger Jack, maybe twenty-five or so, standing next to a beautiful woman. Her dark skin made the white of her wedding dress practically glow. It wasn’t hard to see that they were in love.

  “That was Gladys,” Jack said, “my first wife. We were married eleven years before the cancer came. I stayed by her side to the bitter end. I didn’t need any nurse. I did everything for her, at least until it came to the hospice. She died in my arms, listening to me sing our wedding song as she went home to heaven to meet her mama.” Tears glistened in his eyes before two dropped and rolled over his cheek. “Never regretted a day of it.”

  I turned the pages, watching Gladys grow older, until she died at a young age of thirty. The pictures went back to Jack for a bit, exotic locations, vacation to the orient, and then a small Korean woman. I held up the album for him to see, but he already knew her name.

  “Jasmine,” he said. “My first girlfriend after Gladys. Took me three years to get up the nerve to talk to women again, and Jasmine didn’t even speak English.”

  She vanished quickly from the pages, and then another woman entered his life. “Ruby.” Her bright red hair and neon 1970s jumpsuits joined him in every picture.

  “Ruby and I had a lot of fun together,” Jack admitted. “I loved her, she loved me, but we never fell. It was never deep like I had with Gladys. I was diagnosed three years after we got together, and when the news came, she left.”

  My fingers traced over the woman who’d obviously brok
en his heart. There was no malice in her face, no way to anticipate her decision. How did I know it wouldn’t happen with Ryder?

  Jack appeared to read my thoughts because he added, “She wasn’t ready. I never faulted her for it. This can be a scary world to fall into. But we lived while we loved, and I don’t regret a thing.”

  There were others, Trix from Harlem, Macy from Virginia, and his second wife Melanie.

  “Mel was just about as perfect as they came, Lindy,” he said. “She understood my disease because she was a nurse. She planned to stick it out with me no matter what happened. We saw most of Britain together, then half of the Middle East. I was pretty sure no one had ever been as happy as I was when I was married to Mel.”

  “What happened?” I asked, unable to help myself from the mystery. My clothes stunk of smoke, my breathing felt raspy. I was pretty sure most of my hair was singed, but nothing mattered beyond his story.

  “Car accident. One day she didn’t come home.”

  Emotion pricked at the softest parts of me, my nose, my throat, my eyes, and then formed a knot in my stomach I feared I might never untie. He’d lived it all. He had lived every one of my worst nightmares. Jack watched me close, carefully reading my thoughts before he spoke again.

  “You can live in fear of what might happen. You can build up your walls and keep everyone safe by keeping them out, but you’ll never live, Lindy. Is that really what you want? Do you want to leave behind a rash of solved cases, or do you want to show that you were never afraid of anything, least of all love?”

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  I watched the sun rise. Jack had gone to bed, maybe for the first time that night. I stayed on his couch with an afghan Gladys had knitted years before. The sandalwood smell was her perfume. Apparently, Jack still sprayed the blanket every now and then when he missed her.

  Was he right? Was I locking myself away from life? More importantly, from Ryder? Did I hide behind my job in order to keep myself from feeling?

  If so, I had to change.

  The new day dawned, and with it, a new Lindy. Terrified, scared out of her wits at the prospect of what was to come, but eager and ready because I knew I was ready to live.

  Chapter 19

  I left before Jack got up. After our late night or early morning conversation, I wasn’t ready to see him. I drove directly to the precinct. The desk sergeant yelled at me to stop, but I didn’t break stride.

  “Layton,” I shouted to get his attention, and inadvertently every other cops’ in the bullpen, “they tried to burn me alive last night. Is that enough evidence for you?”

  The desk sergeant and two other cops tried to take my arms to remove me, but I shook them off. Ranger headed my way, but I didn’t feel the need to hear his excuses.

  “Guys, stand down. She’s with me.”

  “Keep your CIs in check, Granger,” the older of the two officers snapped as he released my arms.

  CI? I glanced down at my soot covered clothes and skin and realized I probably did look like a CI, or criminal informant.

  “What happened, Lindy Belle?” Ranger put a hand on my shoulder. “I thought you were leaving.”

  I shoved him off me. “Don’t ‘Lindy Belle’ me. You think it’s a mistake that the day after I told you I was going to be at the shipment tonight that the two drug lords found me at home? You’re trying to tell me this was a coincidence?”

  His eyes widened until they were nearly disks. “You think I did this to you?”

  I shoved him with both my palms. “They tied me up. He was going to assault me, Ranger!”

  Curious eyes watched from all over the room. Ranger’s eyes darted around, searching for an escape, but no way was I going to afford him that privilege.

  The thought occurred to him all at once. “Your mom, is she okay?”

  “She’s fine,” I seethed. “No thanks to you.”

  Relief took him over, a complete whole-body sigh that told me he still loved her.

  “Lindy, you have to leave town. This is too dangerous. You’re in over your head.”

  “No,” I corrected him, “it’s you who’s in danger, Layton. I’ll be there tonight, and if you’re there as well, I’ll take you down with the rest of them. I don’t care who you used to be. Right now, it doesn’t look good for you.”

  I turned on my heel and pushed out the doors, Ranger yelling after me as I left. If I was right, then he had a choice to make. If I was wrong, maybe he’d finally turn it all over to Narcotics like I’d asked him to in the beginning.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  It took nearly half an hour to get in to see Amos. Orange wasn’t his color, but even more noticeable were the purple and blue bruises on his face. On a painting they would have been beautiful, a careful conglomeration of cool shades mottled with neutral yellows and browns. If his face was that beat up, I could only imagine the rest of him.

  The chains rattled as the guard locked him into the table. Once more I resisted the urge to tell him not to bother, but once again, I knew it would make no difference. They thought Amos was a killer, and perception was key.

  “Hey, Sparrow.” Amos wanted to say more, but pain kept him careful to move his jaw.

  “What happened to you?”

  He laughed and immediately regretted it. Agony gripped his features at even the slightest movement. “You should see the other guy.”

  “Are your ribs broken?”

  The skin between his eyebrows creased “Just cracked. They wrapped them to keep them steady.”

  “Who did this? And why you?”

  Amos sighed. “I’m not a killer. Guys in here can tell, I guess. If I’m not a killer, then I must be a snitch.”

  It sickened me that I hadn’t even thought of what Amos had been going through, as though he was safe locked away behind bars.

  “Plus, Hallie’s old boyfriend has friends in here. They don’t take kindly to me being the other lover.”

  “You know his name?” I asked, then kicked myself for not having a little more tact to ask him if he was okay, or safe, or any of the other normal human reactions I could have had.

  “I didn’t know his name ’til I got here. Hallie just called him B. Now his mates make sure I know it every day. Juan Balcazar. It has a real haunting ring to it, don’t it?”

  My eyes widened. “B?” The name from the notes, the club owner, the man who chained me in the night to torture and burn me alive, all the same man, all the same connection. I’d been stupid not to see it.

  “Yeah, B,” Amos said, not understanding my connection. He hadn’t been with me. He hadn’t read the journals. Amos had only seen her paranoia and attributed it to sneaking around behind her boyfriend’s back.

  I spent the next few minutes catching him up, telling him about Shane’s contacts and what we’d found, the connection to the club, the journal in Hallie’s apartment, the notes, and finally the fire. Amos didn’t interrupt and as suspected, his face barely betrayed his emotion, so much so that anyone else would have wondered if he’d known it all along. But I knew Amos, he was watching me, checking to be sure I was in my right mind, that I hadn’t jumped off the deep end into a tank of sharks.

  “Tonight,” I continued, “I’m going to meet the shipment. I’ll get pictures, proof that I can take to Narcotics, evidence that will connect them to the club, and then to the journal, and then to Hallie’s murder.”

  Amos had stopped watching me. His eyes had fallen to the table, focused only on the cuff that clipped him in place. Light faded in his eyes, like a dying sunset, or a candle at the base of its wick, flickering, once, twice, then gone.

  “Did you hear me? “ I asked. “I’m going to get you out of here.”

  His left eyebrow bobbed maybe a quarter inch, but that was the only inclination I had that he’d heard me.

  “Why Hallie?” he asked after another moment of silence. “I mean, it’s great that you’ve connected all this to Balcazar, but no one will throw out my case on what you’ve come up wit
h because they have me at the scene. They have neighbors who heard her arguing with me. Sure, they’re going to put B away, but you have nothing that will actually physically connect him to Hallie other than threatening notes.”

  “Aren’t those enough?” I asked, my voice far too strained. “You saw her, she was terrified.”

  “But what’s his motive?” Amos still hadn’t looked away from his cuffs. “She saw something, sure, but you said the last journal said B was going to forgive her and she was going to break it off with me. That’s just one more tile stacked against me.”

  He had always had a way of seeing more than I did. I chased the puzzle pieces, but Amos remembered to put them together as he went, staring at the larger picture for guidance. He was right. Without some sort of confession, I’d actually do more harm than good.

  “Remember the fable of the bull frog,” Amos cautioned. “Her young went to play in the pond and while they were there a colossal ox stumbled by for a bit to drink. His enormous hoof smashed the smallest and killed it without a second thought. The other babes went home to Mum and when she asked where the smallest had gone, they told her a gigantic monster had crushed him.”

  I heard the guard in the hall, distracted by someone else, granting us a few more moments before Amos would return to his cell and the torture I’d been unable to rescue him from. There was more we needed to say, more beyond this story that had to be talked about, but still he stared at his cuffs and maintained his monotone recitation.

  “She asked how big he was, and the wee frogs said huge. The mother puffed herself up and said, ‘This big?’ The children said, ‘Bigger!’ So the mum puffed herself more, to which they told her it still wasn’t enough. She puffed herself higher than she ever had before and said, “Certainly he wasn’t bigger than this?’”

  The door clicked and brought my head around. My heart sped because here we were wasting valuable time on stories when I needed him to help me plan my next move.

  “Her little babies assured her that the monster who had crushed her baby was indeed much larger.” Amos finally looked up, his eyes clear except for the pools of unexpected emotion. “Mum took one more breath and exploded.”