Even if he was still drunk.
He spread his arms out. “C’mon, guys. That car’s all I got. Everything I own’s in there.”
The thug’s smile stretched even farther across his face, like it was trying to cut his head in two. “No, no, maricón. That mierda’s mine. Comprendes? Mine.”
His partner had slipped around to Joshua’s side, clearly thinking that all of their victim’s attention was riveted on the guy with the knife. As the sidekick sidled in closer, Joshua leapt across the space separating them, landing on the man’s instep with all of his weight, causing him to howl in pain. At the same time, he swung his elbow around at the car thief’s face, clocking him with all of the momentum of the jump forward. His opponent collapsed to the ground, swearing a blue streak in rapid Spanish.
But alcohol had dulled both Joshua’s senses and his reaction time. A hot, searing slash of pain carved its way across his exposed left side as Manuel, the guy with the knife, darted in to help his friend. Joshua danced back, adrenaline and alcohol fighting in his body for dominance. The hand that he had pressed to his side came away wet and sticky. He stumbled and fell to one knee.
Manuel lashed out with one of his heavy work boots, catching Joshua in the head. His eyesight exploded into flashing points of light. He dimly felt his face make contact with the asphalt, every nerve ending in his skull ablaze.
A face leaned in close to his. The smell of stale cigarettes wafted into Joshua’s nostrils as Manuel breathed on him.
“You should have walked away, cabrón. I told you. That car is mine.”
“Please,” Joshua managed to croak.
Another stomp, and he felt the impact on the right side of his chest. The pain was distant now, his vision tunneling in on him.
“Hey, gringo. What is it with you?” the voice droned on in his ear, the Mexican accent giving an almost pleasant lilt to the speech. “You can see you’re beat, but you fight anyways. Estás loco?”
Estás loco? Are you crazy? Joshua felt something bubbling up inside of him. Something that tugged at his broken rib, making him wince. But it didn’t go away. It grew stronger and stronger, bursting out of him in waves that brought nothing but pain.
He was laughing.
“Puta madre,” Manuel muttered, backing away and grabbing his friend by the shoulder. “Vámonos. Ese gringo está chingada.”
Estás loco? Are you crazy? The words played over and over in his head while he lay in the street, giggling.
Yes, he thought to himself. Yes, I am.
CHAPTER 3
As putrid as Manhattan was, it didn’t take long for Sariah to discover that she liked Queens far less. At least Manhattan had some charm to it. But this neighborhood was just row after row of sardine-packed apartment buildings.
Sariah had booked a hotel room in Queens after tracking down the PO Box she’d been given to a tiny business crammed in on the lower level of an apartment complex. Boxes Etc. It was closed, but she idled and double-parked in her rental car, watching the door to see if maybe someone was there working the night shift. She might get lucky.
But it was late. Close to eleven. She knew she was grasping at straws, but wasn’t sure what else to do. Cruising down the streets in a grid-like pattern, Sariah kept moving until she gave up around an hour later.
Pulling into the parking lot behind the Clarion Hotel, Sariah checked the schedule for the train back down to DC. Even without Joshua, she should go back on time. They had to get started, or new victims would start piling up before they could even begin.
Maybe she would even manage to get some sleep in. She wanted to be able to hit the ground running once she got back to Washington and met up with Had, and right now she was pretty wiped out. The combination of the oppressive heat, the stress of finding Joshua and then the subsequent emotional argument had left her feeling like she’d been flattened out by a steamroller.
She heaved a sigh. This entire trip had been such a colossal waste of time and energy. Her boss had warned her that convincing Joshua to rejoin the team might not be easy. That had turned out to be the understatement of the year.
He had walked away. And Sariah had let him go. Sort of. Yeah, she had tried to track him down afterward, but her efforts had been less than inspired, and she knew it. This was her first major case, and already she was blowing it.
There was a part of her that wanted to call Agent Tanner up and throw in the towel. To say that the whole thing had been a mistake, and maybe he should find another agent to put on the case.
But again, it was only a part. There was another, much larger, and much more arrogant portion of Sariah that was almost glad that former agent Wright would not be joining them. He was the one with all of the expertise concerning this killer. Sariah wanted to be in charge.
Man, she was a piece of work.
Walking through the lobby, Sariah nodded at the night attendant behind the desk. He nodded in return, seemed about to speak, but then must have thought better of it. Maybe attendants in New York hotels learned better than to start up idle chitchat with their patrons. New Yorkers weren’t known for their warm fuzzies.
The elevator deposited her on the third floor, and she pulled out her key card as she moved down the hall toward her room. As she approached, she noticed a crumpled form on the ground.
It was Joshua.
“Hey there,” he grimaced up at her, his mouth swollen and lopsided. “Miss me?” Bruising covered half of the side of his face, but that wasn’t the worst of it. Blood had seeped through his shirt along the left side of his body. The strange thing was, he was holding his right side, wincing a little every time he drew breath.
“What…?” she asked, waving at his state.
“Got mugged.” At Sariah’s reaction, he looked like he started to give a shrug and then thought better of it. “It’s New York. It happens.”
“But how did you—?”
“Find you?” the former agent cut her off. “I told you. If you knew what you were doing, you wouldn’t have to ask.”
She resisted the sudden impulse to kick him. “Fine. Don’t tell me the how. Be an asshole. But what about the why?”
It was a long moment before he responded. “They didn’t just jump me. It was grand theft auto, as well.”
“Yeah, okay. Fine,” Sariah replied. “But you made your way here. Why didn’t you just go home? You made it more than clear you didn’t want anything to do with me.”
A longer pause. Long enough that she started wondering if maybe Joshua had passed out on her. Finally, he sighed, grimacing as he held his right side.
“Maybe grand theft domicile would be a better explanation of what happened.”
Grand theft…? It took a second, but finally the light began to dawn on Sariah. “You were living in your car.” Now all of the fruitless searching for his place of residence started to make sense. “But I checked car registrations, too. Nothing popped. I just figured it was New York, and you didn’t have one.”
“Registered it under an alias… a legal one, though, so you would’ve found it if you’d looked closer. Sloppy.”
By now, Sariah had realized that the former agent was trying to get a rise out of her, so she ignored his comment. Besides, he was right. She had been conducting the search as she would for any normal citizen, not someone who wanted to hide. If she’d thought of him as a criminal, she might have found him much sooner. She glanced down at him, taking in once more just how messed up he was.
“We need to get you to a hospital.”
“No!” he fired back, gasping as he sat up. “No hospitals.”
She stiffened, thinking for a moment that it was due to his family that had been killed. But they had been put through a wood chipper. There would have been no hospitals involved.
“Why? You’re bleeding, and it looks like you might have a bruised or broken rib. The swelling on the side of your face is bad enough that you could have a concussion, and you overall just look like shit. Come on. At lea
st to get some pain meds.”
“Alcohol’s my drug of choice,” Joshua muttered back. “And hospitals are germ-infested death traps.”
Oh. He was one of those. “How very nineteenth century of you. You do know they sanitize everything, right?”
“Um, super bacteria? Flesh-eating viruses? No. Thank you.” He groaned as he pushed himself up from the ground, using his left arm. “I just need to clean myself up and I’ll get out of your hair.” He glanced at her head. “What there is of it.”
“You should talk,” Sariah replied. Much as she thought he should be in an emergency room right now, she figured she could at least take a look. If it was too bad, she’d insist. He wasn’t in much of a place to put up a lot of resistance.
Keying open the lock, she pushed the door open and gestured for Joshua to precede her. He shuffled his way past her, and she thumbed the light on as she entered behind him. The former agent took an immediate right into the bathroom to the side, stripping off his shirt as he moved. For someone who seemed bent on self-destruction, Joshua was in pretty good shape. Sariah wondered how much of his total calorie intake was just from the liquor.
The knife wound had looked worse with the shirt on, capturing all of the bleeding. With the garment removed, it looked like it was pretty shallow. The bigger issues were the possible concussion and broken rib.
“All right,” she said. “Let me take a look at your eyes and your rib first, then we’ll wash out that cut. Did you lose consciousness?”
Joshua shook his head, positioning himself below the bathroom light. Sariah looked into his eyes, which were a dark hazel with flecks of lighter green in them. They seemed to be equal and reactive.
“What about nausea? Headache? Loss of memory?” She went through the checklist, realizing that most of the symptoms would be indistinguishable from his drunkenness.
“No. Nothing. The pain in my head is all on the outside. I think I’m fine.”
“All right. Let’s take a look at your chest.” She placed her fingers along the rib were she saw a growing bruise. There was no movement of the bone, and he only pulled back when she touched the actual point of impact. Probably just cracked or bruised. Looked like they could avoid that trip to the ER.
Grabbing a washcloth and wetting it down, Sariah began to probe the wound on the other side. Joshua winced a bit as she cleaned it off, but made no other indication that she was doing anything that might be causing him any pain.
“Well, it would probably be good to have someone take a look at this,” she told him, “but it’s pretty shallow. I think we can just wash it out. I don’t have any Neosporin or iodine or anything, though.”
Grunting, Joshua moved over to the minibar. He opened it up and grabbed out a little miniature bottle of vodka, twisting the top off in one motion that made him grimace.
“Voilà. Alcohol. Cures all ills.”
* * *
Everything hurt.
There wasn’t a position Joshua could take that made it feel any better. His left side burned from the knife wound. His right side gave him a twinge every time he took a breath, although the pain was pretty localized. He didn’t think it was broken. His entire head felt like someone had trapped it in a C-clamp and started to tighten it.
He was messed up pretty bad.
Agent Cooper was still nosing around his wound, cleaning it out, making sure it was all ready for its vodka bath. Good thing he still felt a little drunk. This next part wasn’t going to be pleasant. He waited for the signal that she was ready to start the antiseptic process.
Without any warning, his side lit up like a bonfire. She had doused his entire wound in the vodka. No 'are you ready?' No 'here we go.' Nothing.
“Son of a bitch!” he swore.
“Well, nice to know you still have a pain response. I was starting to worry that you were a member of the walking dead.”
“So, a heads up was out of the question there?”
“Please,” the agent said. “This was the best way to go, and you know it. If I’d given you time to prepare, you would’ve tensed up and made it worse.”
Much as he wanted to disagree on principle, she was right. He grunted and grabbed his shirt off of the bathroom counter where he’d put it.
“Thanks for cleaning me up,” he mumbled while pulling his shirt on over his head, doing what he could to put some sincerity in his tone. He might not love the fact that she had come looking for him, but that was hardly her fault. And she had helped him out when he needed it.
“Wait. You’re leaving?”
“Uh, yeah.” He stopped and looked her over from head to toe and back up again. “Were you expecting something else? You’re not my type, but I could make an exception, I guess. I’m pretty beat up, though. You’ll have to be on top.” The words tasted like bile on his tongue as he spoke them, the pit in his gut yawning wide to swallow him up.
Agent Cooper stiffened, but then took a long moment to respond. “You can be an asshole all you want, Joshua, but it doesn’t change anything.”
“What do you mean?”
Looking as if she were groping for the words to use, she spoke in fits and starts. “I don’t want to judge you. I haven’t been through anything close to what you have. But you’re here.”
“No, I’m not. Not for long, anyway. I get my shirt on, that’s it. I’m out.”
“No, I don’t mean here,” the agent clarified. “I mean alive. Still breathing. Sure, you’re a mess, but anyone would be in your position.”
“My position? My position?” The pit yawned even wider, and Joshua poured all his vitriol into it. “Oh, you mean my family going through a wood chipper? That position?”
“I’m sorry. I—”
“You’re an idiot,” Joshua sneered at her, feeding the growth of the chasm inside of him. “A moron. There’s no way you can go up against Humpty. He’ll eat you alive.”
“I know,” she fired back. “That’s why I need your help. You think I like the smell of alcohol and the verbal abuse? Had enough of that in my life, thank-you-very-much.”
“You have no idea what you’re doing.”
“Um. Again. I just said that. Making my point for me here.”
“No,” Joshua spit out. “I meant that you have no idea what kind of hell you’re unleashing. You’re not just risking yourself, you arrogant bitch.”
“Okay, so tell me. What’s so bad? What is it that I don’t know?”
“He’ll take it all. Everyone and everything that’s important to you. Your career, your friends, your family. He’ll come after your life.” He cut himself off, his voice ragged and unsteady.
But Agent Cooper was nodding. “I have nothing. My career’s a joke. No friends or family left. And I’m pretty sure I don’t have much of a life.” She smiled, but it looked more like a wince. “I’m the perfect fodder for this guy. And you know what?” Her eyes bored into his. “So are you.”
Joshua felt something crumple inside of him. All of the acid washed away and left him empty, scoured out, hollow. There was nothing left but a dull ache.
He slumped down onto the corner of the bed, his side giving him a twinge in protest. “You’re right,” he admitted. “But I can’t do what you’re asking.”
“Why not?” Her face was all angles and straight lines, her mouth a slash across her face. “You have nothing to lose.”
“You would think that, wouldn’t you?” Joshua asked. “You’d think that, but you would be wrong.”
“What’s left, Joshua?” Agent Cooper pulled a chair away from the desk and placed it facing him. She sat down, her eyes never leaving his. “You’ve lost everything. For hell’s sake, you just lost your car. That you were living in.”
Joshua snorted, the movement pulling at his side. “That? That’s nothing. It was a LeSabre.” He met her gaze, never blinking. “What I have left to lose is my guilt.”
Coop shook her head. “What do you mean? That doesn’t make any sense.”
Shiftin
g to try to relieve some of the pressure on his ribcage, he tried to explain. “Let’s say I go with you. We find the killer or we don’t. Doesn’t really matter.”
“How could that not matter?” she shot back, her tone sharp. “There are victims out there dying because of this man.”
“I’m not talking about that. You think you’re offering me a chance to get closure, or justice, or whatever the hell you want to call it.” He held up a hand to forestall her next statement. “But that’s not what you’re selling. You’re hawking redemption here. And I’m not buying.”
“But you—”
Joshua exploded, cutting her off. “I don’t deserve it! Can you understand that? They’re gone because of me. My life is a waste.”
“Then why don’t you end it?” The agent’s tone was direct, demanding.
“What?” Joshua asked, shocked for a moment out of his agony of self-pity.
“End it. Your life is so bad—kill yourself.” She motioned to him. “Whatever’s waiting for you on the other side can’t be as miserable as this.”
And there was the essence of the problem. It wasn’t that easy. “That’s the point. I suffer for them. Anything less would be a mockery.”
Agent Cooper held up her hands. “Yeah, I don’t get that at all. And maybe it would be best if I just gave up and let you walk out of here with my blessing.” She crossed her arms over her breasts, her chin jutting out in defiance. “But that’s not really my style.”
“Might want to rethink that, babe,” Joshua muttered.
Her frown tightened even further. “You think this is all about you and your pain. I’m telling you it’s not.”
“You don’t—” he started.
“I know,” Agent Cooper cut him off. It appeared her patience had run out. “I don’t have any right to say this, but I’m going to say it anyway. What you chose to do or not do affects other people. Your self-destruction isn’t just about you, you selfish prick.”
Joshua stared at her for a brief moment, nodded, then pushed himself up from the bed and crossed over to the minibar. Opening the door, he reached in and grabbed a handful of the tiny bottles of alcohol. He didn’t even look to see what he’d gotten.
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