Violet Darger | Book 8 | Countdown To Midnight

by Vargus, L. T.

  She swallowed. Felt a lump the size of a golf ball shift in her throat.

  Something brushed against the small of her back. She turned. Expected to find Loshak.

  Instead she saw Alvarez there. Just behind her. Eyes looking impossibly wide through the dull glazing of the visor.

  The edge of the living room came into view in stages. First she saw the wood beam of the lintel hung over the doorway to the left, a dark line that seemed to float there, growing thicker and darker as the haze seemed to clear in the space around her. Then she saw the wall around it, the flat surface solidifying all at once.

  Fitch’s back took shape then. He was turning toward the doorway, legs wide, staying low. Darger sped up to close the gap between them.

  Her heart thudded in her ears as they wheeled around the corner to the hallway, something distant in the sound of her pulse. A little hollow and uneven, like a partially flat tire wobbling along.

  She knew that she must be going into shock, but what good did knowing that do her? She kept going.

  The bathroom doorway should be just ahead. Should be. But a single step into the hallway was enough to see that it wasn’t. Not anymore.

  Sun shone down from the gaping wound in the roof above. A beam of light about six feet in diameter. It glinted on tendrils of swirling gray. Illuminated the damage in eerie light half-obscured by the smoke.

  The walls where the doorway used to be were gone. Obliterated. Splintered lumber remained. Studs and plates. A sticklike frame Darger could see right through. A skeleton of what once was.

  Some of the studs were gone entirely. Blown out or fragmented to bits. Others were fractured and blackened, large chunks missing.

  She tilted her head upward to take in the damage above. More tattered lumber framed the hole torn in the roof, splintery bits forming a ragged edge where the explosion had sheared off the rafters above, damaged everything around the breach.

  It was hard to envision the blast tearing upward and outward. Big enough to burst the high ceiling above.

  Fitch kept moving forward, and she tried to keep up on numb legs. Blinking hard. Reminding herself to breathe, air hissing through the mask.

  Fitch stopped short then. Head facing downward. Boots squeaking on the glossy wood floor.

  Darger looked down to see what he was looking at.

  The hole in the floor gaped back at her, a black hole leading down into the dark of the basement. This was an angry wound, bigger than the one in the roof. Charred wood formed the edge. Broken bits like toothpicks sticking out everywhere.

  She stared into the void. Tried to make it make sense to her eyes, to her mind.

  A bulk to her right caught her eye then. Made her turn her head that way in slow motion.

  The dark shape sprawled. Draped over the remaining lumber where a wall used to be, the studs forming bars that probably helped hold him there, feet hanging over the edge of that hole into the basement.

  She swallowed again. Felt that golf ball bobbing in the back of her throat.

  Dobbins’ helmeted head seemed to hang by a sinew. Laying all wrong on the blackened floor. Almost like it had been positioned next to the shoulders instead of on them, no longer truly part of the body.

  Red misted the inside of the helmet’s visor. The bright color stippling the safety glass. A vivid hue that stood out from all the drab shades of the smoke and debris around it. Angry red. Violent red. Almost glowing.

  Blood had wept down the front of the blast suit. The wetness faintly visible through the chalky dust that had rained down on him, on everything. Chunks of tile and drywall littered the floor all around. Coated the dead body in white powder that looked like flour.

  No one spoke. They just stood and stared.

  And then Alvarez burst into tears. Nose wrinkling. Mouth curling. Cheeks contorting. Inconsolable.

  He stumbled forward. Dropped to his knees next to the body. Buried his face in his hands.

  The whimpers spilling out of him didn’t sound like those of a hardened CIRG agent. They didn’t sound like a grown man’s sounds at all.

  Alvarez wept like a child.

  CHAPTER 54

  While a horde of crime scene techs flocked to the scene to process and search and catalog all that had happened, Darger and Loshak rode the fifteen miles to the nearest airport, ready to make the quick jump back to the city via helicopter. They sat in the back of a police cruiser. Quiet.

  A numbness welled in Darger’s being. That dead muscle feeling of physical exhaustion intertwining with the trauma of Dobbins’ death. The sharpest edges of the tragedy somehow kept their distance for now. Like her fatigued mind couldn’t process the reality, held the worst of the hurt at arm’s length.

  In its place she felt the dull ache of the loss in a more general sense — the distant kind of sadness that seeps the life out of the world. Saps the joy. Drains the color. It left her hollow and faithless and alone. Apart from everyone else. Empty.

  Just her and the big nothing.

  Darger didn’t think. Didn’t move. Just stared out the window through halfway-opened eyes.

  Nothing in her head.

  The thick green vegetation of upstate New York smeared past on the side of the road. A pastoral scene that rolled on and on for miles. The pluming foliage here reminded her more of where she grew up than what she thought of when she thought New York.

  Her ears still rang. Piercing tones screaming from somewhere deep in the ear canals. Endless screeching. Pleading. Crying out for what?

  She’d sat that way — vacant and motionless — for about an hour when the thoughts finally came. Spiraling downward.

  Memories.

  Pain.

  Pictures of Dobbins opening in her head. Vivid images. Violent.

  His head mostly disconnected from the rest of him. Angled next to the shoulders. Dangling and strange. Helmeted. Crooked.

  The thin lines of sinew still attaching the skull to the torso. Shiny strands of meat and yellowed connective tissue. Fibrous. Slicked with sticky red.

  That red mist inside the visor. Blazing crimson contrasted with all the muted colors around them.

  That white powder dusted over the suit, over the body. Some impromptu funeral rite performed by the explosion.

  Death.

  Death.

  Her mind groped along the edges of Dobbins’ absence. Tried to fathom how this funny, vibrant person could just be gone like that.

  Here one second. Gone forever the next.

  It made no sense. He had a wife and kids. He was good at his job. What did he do to deserve this ending to his story? How could he soldier on through all those years only to be snuffed out in a flash?

  His whole life had led him to this. Only this. Each day another step toward the inevitable. The meaningless. The nothing.

  Big nothing.

  She pictured Alvarez again. Face cupped in his hands. Crying like a baby.

  And no one could help him. No one.

  Tears formed in Darger’s eyes. Further blurred that smear of green rushing past outside.

  But it wasn’t her loss. It wasn’t even Alvarez’s loss. She knew that, felt its importance on some deep level that might only be open to her just now, in the midst of the trauma.

  It was Dobbins’ loss. His life snuffed out while theirs would carry on.

  It didn’t belong to them. He didn’t belong to them. He never did.

  The water edged over the rims of her eyelids and drained down her cheeks.

  CHAPTER 55

  “It’s strange,” Loshak said, breaking the silence in the car. “The line between life and death is so hopelessly thin. Even in a job like ours, it stays impossible to fully grasp, impossible to wrap our heads around, impossible to accept. I can never… It’s somehow shocking every single time someone takes that step to the other side permanently.”

  He blinked a few times before he went on. Eyeballs swiveling around in their sockets. Piercing empty space.

  “We ar
e incapable of imagining how it will feel when they’re gone until it happens, you know?”

  Darger nodded. Looked out the window again.

  The air-conditioning suddenly made the car feel frigid. Cavernous. The chill seeped into Darger’s flesh.

  “In the weirdest way it gives me a kind of faith,” Loshak said. “You feel it only in times like these, I think — almost something spiritual. When someone is gone, you feel that loss so deeply, so powerfully. It almost seems primordial.

  “And it makes me think that we must all be connected somehow. This pain. This loss. It’s not just intellectual. There has to be something more there, some energy connection. Like what they talk about in quantum physics, that all energy is connected, that it cannot be created or destroyed.”

  He scrubbed his hand at his hair. Fluffed it up on his head.

  “I don’t know. I guess I feel something like that sometimes. Mostly when I sit in the quiet alone and contemplate losing someone.”

  They fell quiet again after that. Listened to the tires hum on the asphalt, thumping every few seconds as they rode over a freshly patched seam, ribbons of black tar that still looked wet.

  The rhythm of the white noise drew Darger out into a daze again. Eyes staring out at nothing. All thoughts fleeing her head once more. She drifted in the emptiness. Weightless. Untethered from this car, from this world.

  Floating.

  Her phone shrieked, startling her enough that she jumped a little. The ensuing jolt of adrenaline vanquished the daze she’d been in. The phone rang again, buzzed against her hip in her pocket.

  She fished it out. Checked the display. It was Fitch. She swiped to answer it.

  “Fitch. What’s up?”

  His voice sounded raspy in her ear. Cold and serious.

  “He’s still alive.”

  What? Darger squinted, her tired mind trying to process this sentence.

  Still alive? He couldn’t be. She’d seen him up close. Watched them zip the body bag closed.

  The image of Dobbins flared in her head again. Posed among the skeletal lumber of the shattered walls. Head hanging by sinewy cords. Inside of his visor stained red.

  Her lips fumbled for words. Tongue stuck against the roof of her mouth.

  Finally she said, “Who?”

  “The bomber. He just posted a video on the internet. Tyler Huxley is alive.”

  CHAPTER 56

  Darger’s mind reeled. Thoughts flickering through her head like a slot machine whirring. Blinking. Spinning confusion.

  She still held the phone in front of her face. Stared at the reflection of her open mouth there in the blank screen. Fitch had just hung up.

  The mirror image of her teeth moved then. Mouth closing and opening. Lips popping. Throat clicking. But no words came out.

  “What is it?” Loshak said.

  His eyebrows scrunched down until they disappeared behind his sunglasses.

  “Tyler Huxley is alive.”

  Darger replayed the conversation out loud. Voice soft. Everything distant. The world around her in a soft focus now. Strange and cold and quiet. The whole thing almost felt like an out-of-body experience.

  And then before her conscious mind could catch up to what she was doing, she thumbed to the browser on her phone. Searched for the video. Opened it. Loshak leaned over to watch as well.

  A masked face appeared on the screen. One of those creepy plague masks with the long black beak and beady eyes staring straight into the camera. He was still. Immobile to an eerie degree.

  He sat before a wooden desktop. Hands moving now to lift something there, whatever it was crinkling off-screen.

  He held a copy of today’s New York Post up to the camera — the utterly gigantic headline read in blood-red text, Bomber Rips Through New York!

  Then he set the newspaper down. Held still for another few heartbeats. Chest just barely shifting along with his breaths. The frame utterly motionless save for a prism-like light glittering on the plain white wall in the background.

  His hands rose finally. Gripped the sides of the false face.

  He peeled the black latex away. That long beak buckling and rippling at his touch. Hair and skin spilling free.

  And there he was. Tyler Huxley. His face on her screen. Coming out from behind the mask.

  Smiling. Giddy. A twinkle in his eye.

  Goose bumps rippled over her skin, a breath rasping into her.

  What the fuck?

  He spoke then, but she couldn’t focus on the words. Her mind flashed to the corpse in the basement of the run-down apartment. That skinny body draped over the floor. That stump of jaw where the face had been.

  She closed her eyes. Took a breath. Focused all of her willpower on listening now, paying attention. She opened her eyes.

  She pushed the little arrow to restart the video, turning up the volume to hear his words.

  This wasn’t over yet.

  CHAPTER 57

  Loshak hit the space bar on his laptop, and the video played again. They’d watched it at least two dozen times since they’d gotten back to their hotel, after watching it more than twice that many times in the helicopter that shuttled them back to the city.

  Darger lay back on the bed, the comforter scratchy where it touched the skin on the back of her neck. Her hair was still wet from a quick shower, one that washed away that billowing dust from the Mancini mansion, brought a clean feeling to her skin, but somehow provided little relief given the circumstances. It was weird to see the beige spiral going down the drain, the physical remnants of the explosion washed away from her being, though the emotional effects never could be.

  She closed her eyes and listened to the sounds of the video: that rustle of the moving newspaper again, the crinkling sounds having grown almost musical in their familiarity. Then came the scuffing sounds of the mask being pried free of his face. Finally came his voice.

  “Look who’s back from the dead. Truth is, I couldn’t die. My mission is too important.” He paused there for a big smile. “The bombings will slow — for now. But understand this… I’m just getting started.”

  The video ended, and Loshak clacked the space bar again.

  Darger sat up. Forced herself to watch again. She scrutinized something different every time. Focused on his lips for this pass — wormy red lips, chapped skin marking out the segments strangely. Disgustingly to be honest. They looked like they might wriggle off his face and squirm around on the sidewalk in the rain.

  The screen went black. Thumbs tapped the space bar.

  She watched Huxley’s eyes this time — dark pits for pupils, looked like he was in some state of arousal, possibly even on drugs. She heard snippets of the words as she watched, but these mostly stayed beneath her conscious mind now. His eyes flicked around in their sockets. Blinked twice. She looked for something in these details. Anything.

  The video replayed like that five more times. Darger and Loshak huddled over the laptop. Neither of them said anything. They just watched. Observed. Over and over. Some strange trance overtaking them. They still had a little over an hour until the emergency task force meeting. What else were they going to do?

  The details of the room behind Huxley started to intrigue Darger more and more. She took eight straight passes just looking at the top right quadrant of the screen, watching that little twinkle of silvery light dancing there as he put the newspaper down.

  “Here’s what I’m thinking,” Loshak said. His thumbs still worked the space bar even as he talked, not breaking the rhythm. “The fingerprints. His shoplifting arrest was only six or seven months ago, right?”

  Darger didn’t reply. Just stared at the screen.

  “He would have been well into the planning stage at that point. Well into setting all of this in motion. So the arrest was a setup. He found someone who looked enough like him. Probably paid the person to get caught shoplifting. Gave him his ID. Got those fingerprints — the wrong fingerprints — on the permanent record as Tyler Hu
xley.”

  Loshak stretched. Craned his neck up toward the ceiling.

  “Death is the perfect alibi, right? The perfect way to make sure no one is looking for you. The fingerprints made it airtight. Reminds me of this case I read about. A woman in Brooklyn got caught trying to kill this other woman who looked remarkably like her. They both had dark hair and spoke Russian. They were able to figure out that she had befriended her doppelganger, brought her a cheesecake laced with poison, and planned to steal her life — not just her identity. She was going to take her name, her apartment, her job. Just kill her off and slide into her life. I guess they looked that much alike.”

  Darger’s eyelids fluttered. She finally looked away from the screen.

  “So why is Huxley revealing that he’s still alive now?”

  Loshak ran his fingers through his hair again as he answered.

  “The same reason he announced his identity right out of the gate. He wants to take credit. That’s as much a motivation as any other aspect of the crimes, I think — making sure the world knows he did this, knows who he is, that his face is plastered on the front page of every newspaper. He couldn’t bear to do this anonymously. To hide in the shadows as an unknown Other like so many of the killers in the cases we work.” He chuckled a little to himself, a bitter laugh. “The whole world knows his name now, and that’s no accident. Despite all his talk, Tyler Huxley desperately wanted to be a celebrity all along.”

  They both fell quiet after that. Loshak offered to go get some coffees from the lobby.

  “It’ll be scorched by now,” Loshak said, face puckering as if imagining the bitter taste. “But on a certain level caffeine is caffeine. I’d set up an IV drip if I could, but until then, the scorched stuff will have to do.”

  “Who knows?” Darger said. “Maybe we’ll get lucky, and someone just made a fresh pot.”

  Darger’s eyes drifted back to the screen as Loshak ventured out into the hall, the door clicking shut behind him. Now she manned the space bar. Tapped it with a choppy sound.