Nate writhed in pain, blood soaking his pant leg and the floor beneath him. My knife stuck out from the tissue behind his knee, dead in the center.
“Jesus,” Bo said, “good aim.”
I heard someone laughing, and realized it was me.
TWENTY-EIGHT
The entire thing had gone down in twenty-three minutes. It felt like at least a hundred times that long, but American Electric Power reported that the electricity, which had gone out in the general downtown area owing to a blown transformer, was restored after only twenty-three minutes, thanks to the swift response from its team.
“I call bullshit on that,” Sanko said, turning off the television in the small kitchenette near the homicide unit. “Twenty-three minutes. If that’s true, then how the hell is it after five a.m. already?”
“Time flies,” Tom said, “when you’re doing paperwork.” He tapped a pen on his report and continued to not look at me, which was what he had been doing since we got here. The interrogation rooms were all full—Bo, Vincent Pomp, and Simon, who had been treated and released for the wound where Nate’s second-to-last bullet had merely grazed his forearm. I was just a pesky witness, more or less; I didn’t rate a proper interrogation room. Nate, meanwhile, was in the hospital. The same hospital as three of his other victims: Arthur, Derek, and Catherine. There was maybe something poetic about that, or maybe there wasn’t. And Leila was, like Pomp had said, long gone. By the time the cops were able to touch base with the bus line, her Detroit-bound coach had already stopped in Marion and Leila had already cut and run. The driver remembered the pretty woman with her arm in a sling, but he had no idea where she went. So for now, she’d gotten away with her part in the whole thing.
For now.
It all could’ve turned out worse, but it sure as hell could’ve turned out better.
I picked up another stale cruller from the box on the table. Fresh from us to you! it told me. I wasn’t so sure about that. But I shoved half of it in my mouth anyway.
Sanko rolled his eyes. “You two and the crullers. Disgusting.”
“Why does everyone rag on crullers?” I said. I held up the remaining half of mine. “Right?”
Tom’s eyes flicked up briefly but didn’t meet mine. He just bit into his doughnut and frowned. “Christ, how old are these?” He pitched the rest of it into the trash and went back to his report.
I slumped in my chair and polished off the rest of my cruller. I wanted to ask how much longer it would be before I was allowed to leave, but I was sort of afraid that Tom would say eternity and throw me in jail forever based on the degree of fondness he was exhibiting for me at the moment.
Sanko pushed his chair back from the table and picked up the doughnut box. “I’m going in search of better options,” he said, tossing the box in the trash on his way out of the room.
“I had no idea cops were so discerning about doughnuts,” I said mildly.
Tom stopped writing for a second but still didn’t look over at me. “Yes, we have highly refined palates from years of putting up with bullshit from civilians.”
“Hey. Look at me.”
He still wouldn’t.
“Can we stop with this fight? Please?”
Finally he looked up. His warm brown eyes were tired and strained and not all that warm. “You can’t ignore every single thing I say, and then act like you have no idea what I’m pissed about, Roxane. Do you remember last night at your mom’s? How I set that aside to help you out, no questions asked? And then you turned around and did the exact same thing again, except it was worse this time, and I just—I’ve been doing this for, what, seventeen years? And I’ve been in a lot of situations that weren’t great, and felt a lot of different ways when I was in them. I have never felt like I did last night.” He pushed away from the table and walked to the sink, arms folded over his chest. “Like I was powerless, nothing I could do. Because you put yourself right in the middle of a thing that you knew was bad, on purpose, and there was a chance, a really big fucking chance, honestly, that you weren’t getting out of it.”
It was the most he’d said to me in the last six months, and he wasn’t done yet. He sat back down across from me and said, “I asked you to stay at the hospital. You told me that you would. But then you followed three pretty bad guys to a fucking bus station, looking for two other bad guys? And when that didn’t put you into harm’s way enough, you went right into ground zero of the whole thing.”
“Isn’t it to my credit that I didn’t go into the parking garage?”
“No, Jesus Christ, are you hearing me at all? It’s like you want to punish people for caring about you, and that is so many kinds of fucked up, Roxane. And all of this, every last bit of it was pointless. Because Ungless, who is apparently more important to you than your mom, or Catherine, or me—he’s still guilty.” He flipped his notebook closed as if that was the end of it. “You can go, we’re good.”
“Hold on, I don’t think you can say we’re good after that,” I said, leaning onto my forearms on the table, so stunned by what he had just said that I couldn’t even respond to the part that mattered. “After all of this craziness, you still think Marin is dead because of a lover’s quarrel?”
He looked at me with something like disbelief. “Do you have another theory of what happened to her?”
“Um,” I said, because I didn’t really, other than the fact that Nate was obviously nuts, “how about the guy who killed two people that we know of and tried to kill three others? Four, counting Agnes.”
“You heard what he said in the dark.”
“Right, and Nate Harlow is completely rational and trustworthy.”
He got up from the table again. “We found his prints on shell casings from the scene.”
“Nate’s? Great. He’s your guy. What’s the problem?”
“Arthur Ungless’s fingerprints. Casings. From Hunter Avenue.”
“No.”
“No, what? You’re telling me what we did or didn’t find now?”
“That’s impossible.”
“How so?”
“He—no. He wouldn’t.”
“His fingerprints were at the scene. That’s concrete. Direct evidence. Not only that, but he remains the only one with a coherent motive here anyway.”
I shook my head but didn’t say anything right away. If all of this—what had happened to Catherine, to my mother, to my car, to me—came to pass because I couldn’t believe that hapless old Arthur could ever hurt anyone, I was done. I’d enroll in dental hygienist college after all.
Tom added, “If you have any other ideas, I’m all ears.”
* * *
When I came out of the police station, I looked around at the street for a second, not at all sure where my vehicle was. Then I remembered I had the ketchup-scented rental car, and that it was at my mother’s house on the north side. I decided to walk over to the hospital—maybe it would clear my head. The sky was that kind of orangey pink that looks pretty like a sunset but really means trouble, at least according to the sailors. The air was dry for the moment, though, and faintly cool. Rush-hour traffic was starting up downtown, the drivers sleepy-eyed and oblivious to the fact that a few hours earlier, the scene of their daily commutes had been a hostage situation.
I walked east on Long Street, past the YMCA and a series of boarded-up storefronts and the exposed pit of earth where they were building more overpriced condos that no one would buy, or another parking garage that we didn’t need. I tried walking fast, but my body wasn’t cooperating. I wasn’t angry at Tom like I had been the other day—I was just bewildered.
Because he was probably right.
There was no benefit in caring about me.
No one had benefited from even knowing me lately, including Arthur, who maybe didn’t deserve my help anyway. I still couldn’t picture him shooting his pretty fiancée, not even after discovering the extent of her deceit. But I couldn’t ignore the fingerprints. I probably shouldn’t have igno
red the gun in the first place. The gun he owned and claimed not to know the whereabouts of.
Maybe it really had been stolen. By a random thief who then used it to murder Arthur’s fiancée twenty years later.
I sighed. Hoof prints, horses. If Tom was just telling me about this case, I’d easily say that Arthur was guilty. A no-brainer. But I’d met him, and I thought that meant something. That my instincts told me he was a good guy who’d never hurt Marin.
But my instincts had also told me that Leila was trustworthy enough to leave alone with Catherine.
So maybe my instincts weren’t worth shit.
Catherine was asleep when I got to her room. I stood in the doorway for a while, watching her breathe out and in, out and in. Her head was tipped to one side and I could see the patch of skin where her hair had been shaved, the wound thick with spiky black stitches. A heinous bruise had bloomed behind her ear, across her temple, around her eye. I wanted to throw up and for a second I thought I would. But I swallowed a few times and my stomach calmed to a regular old sinking sense of dread.
I sat down in a chair against the wall of Catherine’s small room and looked at the whiteboard mounted next to the door. Discharge date: TBD. Today’s plans: Neuro-oto consult. MRI.
“Jesus,” I muttered.
I leaned against my hand, closed my eyes for just a second, and fell into a flat, dreamless sleep immediately.
I woke up when a nurse bustled into the room and checked Catherine’s vitals. “Your blood pressure is staying up, hon, which is great news. Can you tell me where you are?”
“The hospital,” Catherine mumbled, her voice hoarse.
“And do you know who the president of the United States is?”
“Unfortunately.”
The nurse laughed. “Okay, sister, back in a couple hours, okay?”
She shot me a smile as she left the room.
Catherine murmured to me, “Don’t go anywhere.”
I started to unfold myself from the chair and go to her side, but she dropped off to sleep again.
I leaned my head back against the wall. I thought I stayed awake, but when I heard Catherine’s voice again, the light in the room was different.
“Are you just going to sit over there like a weirdo?” she said.
“No. Hi. Good morning. Sorry.” I got up and moved to the edge of her bed. “I didn’t mean to fall asleep.”
“I’m sure the chair is incredibly comfortable.”
“I’m thinking of replacing my mattress with one. Catherine, I’m so sorry. I’m sorry that this happened, and I’m sorry I left you here last night—”
“Hey, stop. No.” She put her hand over mine on top of the thin blanket she lay under. “We aren’t doing that. I don’t want to talk about how very sorry you are.”
I nodded. That was fair enough. “How are you feeling?”
“You can probably guess.”
That was fair enough, too. “Do you need anything? What can I do? When do you get to go home?”
“They don’t know yet.” She gave a soft little sigh. “Please. Stop with the questions. Just sit with me.”
I nodded and kept quiet and held on to her hand.
Finally she said, “It’s not just the concussion.”
“What is it?”
“It’s called a temporal fracture? That’s the part of the skull over here.” She pointed at the deeply bruised area around her ear. “Um, so I guess my brain is now exposed to bacteria from my ear canal, which is cool.”
“Catherine—”
“Stop, stop,” Catherine said. She squeezed my hand. “Just listen. I’m supposed to stay calm, and so you have to also. Calm. Okay?”
I looked away and nodded, a white-hot anger poking my heart.
“I have to be on antibiotics, because of the, it’s called a CSF leak? A cerebrospinal fluid leak. And I’m having some trouble hearing right, from this ear. And vertigo like whoa. Which sounds bad, I know, but it might not be.”
I squeezed my eyes shut. None of this was fair, not least that I should’ve been comforting her, not the other way around. But I didn’t trust myself to speak yet.
“There’s an ear doctor who will come by at some point today and I’ll know more. Sometimes they have to do surgery, for this. Sometimes not. It can heal on its own too, without the surgery. If there aren’t complications, I could be out of here by tomorrow. The head, the brain, it’s apparently good at fixing itself. It’s smart, literally.”
I cleared my throat. “Especially yours.”
“Hopefully.”
I turned back to her and brought her hand to my mouth. “Whatever you need,” I said, “just name it. Even if what you want is for me to get the fuck away from you.”
She closed her eyes for a second and I was afraid she was going to say yes. But instead she whispered, “I never even got my orgasm, so no.”
I laughed a little bit. “Okay.”
“I want you to tell me my hair looks great.”
“It does, it really does. This is a good look for you. Very edgy.”
“I want you to say that it doesn’t matter if I look like this for months. They said it could be months before the bruises go away.”
“Catherine,” I said, “what matters is that you’re alive. It doesn’t matter what it looks like. But if you’re worried about not being your usual flawless self, we can get you a masquerade sort of mask. With feathers and everything. Cat ears, even.”
She gave me a small smile. “We.”
“If you want this to be a we situation, then yeah. We.”
Neither of us spoke for a bit, the silence punctuated by the beeping heart monitor she was attached to. “Do you think that maybe all along, the problem with us, it’s been that we do this?”
“We do what?”
“We say, Should we give it another try? We make a big deal about it. Yes, we are officially giving it another try. And that puts all this pressure on it, scares it away.”
I did not think the problem with us could be summed up so simply. But I said, “Maybe.” I watched her for a while, trying to make sense of everything. “So what do we—I mean, you and I, separately and independently, do now?”
“I am going to stay right here,” she said, “because I don’t have a choice. And you, hopefully, are going to go home and sleep. On a bed, not a chair. And when you wake up, go to my house and bring me a sketchbook and a real pillow because this thing is bullshit.”
I nodded, recalling the broken window, the potting soil all over her foyer. I needed to deal with both of those too. “Pillow, sketchbook. You got it. But I don’t need to sleep. I’m fine.”
“Lies.”
“Really.”
“No, I gave you the terms. I need you in one piece.”
I opened my mouth to comment on that but changed my mind. Maybe she was right. Maybe that was the problem with us. That every expression of a feeling or a connection was called out, highlighted, unpacked. Maybe just saying it was enough. I need you. “Okay.”
“I mean it.”
“Okay. Sleep, sketchbook, pillow.”
“And flowers.”
“And flowers,” I said.
I picked up her hand and kissed her knuckles. “Anything else?”
“You.”
“And me.” I stood up, realizing just then how tired I was; it tugged at my consciousness like an anchor. “See you soon.”
When I got to the doorway, she said, “Did you find them? Leila and the guy?”
“Him, we got,” I said.
I didn’t continue and she didn’t ask.
* * *
The thing I should’ve done was go home, like she asked me to. But as I pressed the down button for the elevator, I realized that Arthur’s room was only one floor up. He was the last person I wanted to see at the moment, but the only person who could tell me what I needed to know. I pushed the other button as well and both elevators—down and up—arrived at the same time, like an angel and a dev
il on my shoulders.
Arthur was playing cards with a young woman, strawberry-blond like him. The daughter, I assumed. “Hello,” I said.
They both looked up.
“Roxane!” Arthur said. His color was better, and he was partially sitting up in his adjustable bed. “This is my daughter, Charlotte. We just started another round of gin rummy, do you play? We can deal you in.”
“I can only stay a minute.” I folded my arms over my chest in an attempt to restrain myself from grabbing him by the shoulders and shaking him. Gin rummy, while Catherine was one floor down with a fractured skull. “Listen, Arthur, glad to see you’re doing better, but I need to talk to you. About the fingerprints on shell casings the cops found in the alley where Marin was shot.”
Charlotte frowned at me but didn’t say anything. Arthur’s eyebrows went up. “The what?”
“The thing I told you the cops found, when you insisted there was nothing to find. Your fingerprints. Are on the shell casings. How do you explain that?”
“No, this isn’t—no.” Arthur placed his cards facedown on the bedside table. “They’re lying. Or they made a mistake. I wasn’t there. I swear to you, I wasn’t there. I left the restaurant and went home. That’s all I did. You think I would lie to you? After all this?”
I just stared at him. I didn’t know what to believe anymore.
“You don’t—they don’t still think that I did something to her, do they? I would never—no. You know I didn’t, right? Please, I need you on my side.”
I swallowed thickly and avoided looking at him. It was suddenly very important that I get out of this hospital. “It’ll all be in my report,” I said. “I need to go.”
TWENTY-NINE
I took an Uber back to my mother’s street with the intention of getting right into my rental and going home, but I spotted her on the porch step with a paper cup of coffee and a cigarette.
And company.
Rafael Vega sat beside her on the step, coffee in hand as well. I noted with relief that he was wearing a different rumpled dress shirt today, meaning he hadn’t slept here, which might have bothered me for reasons I couldn’t entirely explain. I thought about ducking behind my rental car’s fender and waiting for however long it took for him to not be on the porch anymore. But my mother spotted me and smiled, giving me a little wave.
What You Want to See Page 24
