by J L Aarne
“Like if he had given the two handguns to his sons. Like if he knew about it. Like anything as long as it was something they could use to nail his slippery ass to the wall.”
“You refused?”
Mercy shrugged. “I only ever met Lou once,” she said. “He’s a nice enough man. He told Ezra I had nice breeding hips, which yeah, is offensive, but he’s one of those guys. He can say shit like that and make it charming.”
“That must come in handy in his line of work,” Grace said.
“Oh, no doubt,” Mercy said. She drank the rest of her water and put the cup aside. Her throat was dry and her voice cracking a little from all the talking, but they were about done anyway. “Molina got off. Her lawyer made a case for Stockholm’s Syndrome and worked out some kind of deal with the DA for her to testify against me and Corey. Carl Marley testified on her behalf, which I’m sure helped. I think she has to see a shrink twice a week until she’s twenty-one or something like that.”
“That doesn’t bother you?” Grace asked. “Make you angry with her or resent it? You’re in here and she’s out there, free as if nothing had ever happened.”
Mercy gave a dismissive wave of her hand. “It was pretty much what I expected her to do. She was never stupid. I wouldn’t have liked her as much as I did if she was stupid.”
“Did you have any idea what was going on outside?” Grace asked. “What they were planning to do if you didn’t turn yourselves in?”
“At the time, no,” Mercy said. “I heard something about it later. They were trying to get in through the roof. Access the ventilation system and probably drop gas on us, though no one mentioned that part as far as I know. I don’t know how far they got. We never heard them up there. It doesn’t really matter now.”
Grace yawned and rubbed her forehead with her first two fingers, not like a headache was brewing, more like she was battling fatigue. “You know Jason Cobb later denied that Mark Tavish had any involvement with dog fighting? You got that wrong.”
Not long after that, Jason Cobb had blown his own head off in the living room of his trailer with one of his dad’s shotguns. Mercy wondered if Isaac had heard about that yet and what he thought if he had.
“We got a lot of things wrong, I imagine,” Mercy said.
“Henry Hutton goes on trial next month for the murder of Miles Kapinski,” Grace said. “I hear they intend to call you as a witness.”
Two and a half months after they took over the school, Henry Hutton had shot and killed Coach Kapinski in the teacher’s parking lot one morning before school started. He had called the sheriff’s office (where Don Rollins no longer worked) and reported it, then sat down on the curb beside the body and waited for them to show up and arrest him.
The coach had raped him in the hotel room where the basketball team was staying overnight while at an away game the year before. The last game Henry had played before dropping from the team. Mystery solved.
“Yeah. I don’t know why. I don’t know anything about it,” Mercy said. She smiled thinly. “Obviously, I wasn’t there.”
“As a character witness, perhaps,” Grace said. “Or to testify about his trauma. What you put him through.”
“Everyone processes things differently,” Mercy said. She was bored, but Grace was still wide awake and ready with more questions. “One person sees their dog hit by a car when they’re a little kid and they’re affected by it forever, it really fucks them up. They volunteer at animal shelters, donate to the ASPCA and have nightmares about it that are so bad they’re afraid to start their own family or go outside or answer the phone or whatever. Another one has the same thing happen to them and they move on, don’t even remember Sparky’s name. They have fifteen kids that they ignore and never look both ways before crossing the street. Are they compensating? Who knows. Who’s to say which reaction is the more normal one?”
Grace tapped her pen on the tabletop and frowned at Mercy.
“I read a lot,” Mercy explained. “Darcy lends me his psychology books.”
“You call Dr. Darcy ‘Darcy’?” Grace asked.
“Never to his face,” Mercy said. “That would be rude.”
“Why do you think Henry Hutton did what he did?” Grace asked.
Now she was wasting time, Mercy decided. “That’s a dumb question,” she said. “Don’t ask me dumb questions.”
“I’m genuinely interested in your answer,” Grace said. She yawned again and covered it with the back of her hand. She picked up her coffee and sipped it. It had to be cold, but she didn’t seem to mind. “It happened so close to the massacre. You don’t think there’s a connection?”
“Oh, probably,” Mercy said. “In his head, there was probably a connection. Personally—and this is just my opinion—I think he did it because Coach Kapinski fucked him in the ass without his permission.”
Grace sat back from the table quickly, almost recoiling from her. “I suppose you think he deserved it then?”
Mercy laughed. “Remember who you’re talking to. Of course he deserved it. Herny’ll be acquitted, too. Wait and see.”
“You want another cup of coffee, Miss Goode?” Adam asked.
“No, thank you,” Grace said. “I think we’re about done.”
She was pale and flustered, but she was excited, too. She had the material she had come for and then some. What Mercy had told her was likely enough to get her sanity reevaluated, maybe get her moved to a real prison with real bars where there were no orderly-slash-manservants named Adam and no pushover therapists to lend her books. If they could declare her sane, they would move her to a real bars-on-the-windows jail cell instead of this cushy little resort for the mentally defective, and best of all, Grace would get the credit for making it happen. Though Mercy had given her everything she could have asked for or dreamed of, she still didn’t like her very much. Mercy scared her.
Grace had also forgotten about the deal they had made before Mercy started talking. Mercy hadn’t.
“I do have one more question, Miss Hartwell,” Grace said.
Mercy raised an inquiring eyebrow at her.
“Do you know where Ezra and Isaac Banks are now?”
“How would I know that, Miss Goode? I don’t even have grounds privileges. Adam here goes everywhere I go.”
“You seem to know about many things you shouldn’t know about.”
Mercy nodded thoughtfully. “True. See, Adam’s a big talker,” she said.
Adam smiled and said nothing. His cell phone chimed and he took it out of his pocket to read a text and began typing a reply.
“You never wondered about Adam?” Mercy asked. “Just standing there while I talk, telling you all these things you’re going to use in your book, some of them things that could get me kicked out of this place. They’ll never let me go and they can’t execute me. Iowa hasn’t had capital punishment since 1965. I’m not stupid either; I daresay I’m the smartest person in this room, if not the entire building, so you know that I know. So, why would I be comfortable talking to you so openly with him listening in? Why would he let me keep talking without calling somebody?”
“He could have called someone when he stepped out to get my coffee,” Grace said.
She glanced anxiously between Mercy, Adam and the door Adam was leaning next to. Understanding dawned on her slowly, fighting its way through the strange drowsiness that wanted to overcome her to the surface. She looked between them and frowned. They were much too familiar with one another to be mere acquaintances. For him to be just an orderly and her only the patient he had to keep an eye on. She didn’t know what was going on, but Grace started to be afraid. She would never make it to the door behind her if she tried to run and Mercy rushed her. She would never be able to slip by Adam through the other one if he wouldn’t let her.
“Please, don’t kill me,” Grace said.
“Oh, knock it off. I’m not going to kill you, you ninny,” Mercy said. “You asked me about Ezra and Isaac. I don’t know where
Isaac is, but Ezra should be parking a van in front of the hospital right about now. That was the text a moment ago.”
“You can’t… He’ll be recognized!” Grace said, a hand fluttering to her throat. “He’s one of the most wanted men in the country. There’s no way you’ll get away with—”
“Yeah,” Mercy said, smirking. “That was a year ago. Besides, Dad’s a big time drug dealer with a lot of friends. Oh, and kids. Adam here’s his son.”
Lou also made his living moving things that were not supposed to exist from one place to another without being caught. He knew how to make a person disappear. It was probably a lot easier to make a person or even a handful of people disappear once than to make thousands of kilos of narcotics disappear and reappear over and over again without getting caught at it.
“Adam’s his son,” Grace repeated dumbly.
Adam raised a hand in a brief wave, typing something else on his phone one-handed without looking up. He bore a slight resemblance to Ezra and Isaac, but not enough to be mistaken for either of them. He was thicker built, older, he had a stubble of beard along his jaw and his eyes were brown, not Lou Sallis’s cerulean blue like the Banks brothers’. His last name was Monroe, like his mother.
Grace got up from the table and started to back away. Quick, so quick it was hard to follow the movement, Adam pulled a gun and pointed it at her. His vague, disinterested expression disappeared and his eyes became sharp and cold. Grace halted and put up her hands. She swayed in place, her eyes falling shut, but going wide as she tried to keep them open.
“Sit back down, please,” Mercy said. “There’s enough sedative in that coffee you’ve been sipping to knock out a team of Clydesdales. I don’t know why you’re still conscious, but you’ll fall down in a minute if you don’t sit.”
“You drugged me?” Grace said faintly. She returned to the table and fell back into her seat.
“Adam drugged you,” Mercy said.
“You’re a monster,” Grace said breathlessly. “You’ll never… You’ll be caught. You’ll… They’ll send you to prison.”
“I know,” Mercy said. “Twenty-six dead and I got life sentences for almost all of them. To be served consecutively, of course. But that’s not going to happen, Miss Goode. That’s why you’re here.”
“Wh-What?” Grace said. “I don’t… What?”
Mercy rested her arms on the table and tapped her fingers. “You know something I told Mr. Brink when he came to interview me? He asked me a question. It never made it into his book and I don’t really understand why because I thought it would have been perfect, but I am not a writer.”
“What?” Grace asked. She blinked her eyes open and made herself focus on Mercy’s face. “What did he ask you?”
The woman was single-minded as hell, Mercy would give her that. It probably made her great at her job.
“He asked me if it was anything like shooting a deer,” she said. “If killing a person was like killing a deer to me.”
“Is it?” Grace asked.
“I don’t know,” Mercy said, standing up. “I’ve never killed a deer.”
“Don’t kill me,” Grace whispered. Her eyes rolled back in her head and she made a soft, huh sound as she exhaled and her head dropped forward. She was unconscious at last.
“Write a good book, Miss Goode,” she said. The recorder was still on in the middle of the table.
Mercy got up and went around the table to look down at her. Grace was nearly the same size as Mercy, which made her clothes perfect. She started to take Grace’s clothes off and Adam helped her.
“Sorry about this,” Mercy said, straightening the unconscious woman’s dress around her and smoothing it against her thighs. “I like you, Miss Goode. Not the best endorsement in the world I suppose, but I do. It really is nothing personal. I was going to ask you, but you would have said no. Welched on our little deal. It’s okay. It’s better this way, really.”
They left Grace sleeping at the table and exited the hospital through the front door. The sedative had been in the pot, so the nurses on duty and the security guard at the desk were knocked out as well. No one tried to stop them and the guards at the main entrance only glanced at Mercy and Adam as they walked out. They knew Adam on sight and they knew that a woman dressed in those clothes had come by two and a half hours earlier, that she was interviewing a patient, but they saw what they expected to see when they saw Mercy in those clothes instead of Grace.
The van was an old blue Plymouth Voyager and Ezra was behind the wheel. He had let his dark hair grow to shoulder length and he had two days of beard on his face and a tan. He was the most beautiful thing she had seen in ages. She got in the front and buckled her seat belt and Ezra was smiling at her, that calm, pleased smile of his. While Adam was getting in the back of the van, Mercy leaned over and kissed him just to feel that smile against her mouth.
It had been a long year.
“I’m not saying I love you or anything,” she whispered.
“But I think I like you a helluva lot,” Ezra finished for her with a low laugh.
“Uh, can we maybe get the fuck out of here and you two continue this when we’re someplace that doesn’t have extradition?” Adam said, poking his head between the seats to look between them. “Now would be good.”
They sat back and Ezra drove away. Mercy watched the hospital get smaller and smaller in the rearview mirror until they turned a corner and it was gone in a blink. She closed her eyes and sighed, tired in her bones, but with a deep, content satisfaction.
“Where’s your dad sending us?” she asked.
“Where would you like to go?” Ezra asked.
“The Maldives sound nice.”
“They are.”
“You want to go to the Maldives with me?”
Ezra reached over with one hand and ran it over her hair, petting and gentle. “Sure. Let’s go there.”
Another car, a grey Honda, fell in behind the van and when Mercy opened her eyes and looked, she could just make out Isaac behind the wheel and Corey beside him. It was only a small, distant glimpse before they entered highway traffic, but it was the closest Mercy had been to her brother in a long time. Soon, she would be able to speak to him, to hug him again. It hurt how much she had missed them all, but it was over. Finally, it was over.
She asked herself a question then, one that she had carefully avoided answering up until now:
Was it worth it?
The answer came to her immediately, a soft slithering whisper in the dark behind her closed eyelids:
Yes. Yes, it was.
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Keep reading for a sneak peek at J.L. Aarne’s novel
Needle Freak
Phineas first appeared to Jack as a friend and he took him away from all the horrors of his childhood. No one could see Phineas except Jack though, and more and more as the years passed he seemed less like a friend and more like a demon. At sixteen Jack ran away from home and ended up living on the street. Out there, Jack learned just what lengths he would go to in order to survive.
Then he met Steve and Steve is a bad, bad man—one who drags Jack lower than even he imagined he could go. But that doesn't matter to Jack because he is stupidly, pathetically in love with him.
When Jack finally starts to pull his life together and puts all of that behind him, he reconnects with the brother he used to be so close to but hasn’t seen in fourteen years and with his sweet Grandma Chloe. He gets a real job and kicks the drugs. He even believes that he’s gotten away from Phineas at long last.
He couldn’t be more wrong and when Phineas returns to torment him, Jack becomes more desperate than ever to escape him. Jack’s secrets come out and threaten to destroy everything and a ghost from his past tracks him down and this time he may not survive. When it comes right down to it, Phineas might be a demon, but he’s one of Jack’s demons and Jack needs him if he’s going to make
it out alive.
Chapter 1
Jack sat on the bench outside their motel room and smoked while Steve fucked the dead girl. He knew the girl was dead because she had stopped making noise ten minutes ago. He knew Steve was fucking her because he could hear the bedsprings squeaking and the bed bumping the wall and Steve grunting and moaning. The walls of motels like the Last Chance were not thick or soundproofed. Jack had fucked a lot of men in sleazy motel rooms in places just like it over the years. Enough to know that if you could hear the crackheads fighting in the room next door, the crackheads could hear the john fucking you in the ass telling you what a dirty cock-slut you were.
The girl was some twenty-something chick from some state up north where Jack had never been. Her name was Emily, she said. She smiled a lot and she’d trusted him when he offered to give her a ride. It was only when Steve grabbed her and pulled her into the back of the car that she realized what was happening, but by then it was too late. He was already sticking the needle in the side of her neck and depressing the plunger.
Jack had one of those faces, Steve said. Not just pretty, but vulnerable. Broken. The kind of face that never belonged to people like Steve in the TV shows, movies and books about people like Steve. People, but especially women, Steve said, were stupid about a pretty face. In all the stories, the bad men were ugly. The bad men had rotting teeth and rancid breath, greasy hair, gnarled fingers, warts and scars and a feral gleam in their muddy eyes. Jared was getting old for a boy-whore and he liked heroin a little too much and it was starting to show, but he still looked like a china doll. He had a sweet smile and eyes the color of a tropical ocean and his dark hair was wavy and shiny and clean.
Emily wouldn’t have followed Steve to the car because, while Steve was an attractive man, he was big and he was nobody’s china doll. He looked mean.
Jack hated the sound of overworked bedsprings. He heard that sound in his nightmares. He hated the sound of Steve moaning on the other side of the wall. He sometimes imagined it in his ear, no wall to muffle it, the damp warmth of his breath on his neck and ghosting along his back.
