Every Deadly Kiss

by Steven James

  Blake hadn’t heard about it before, but in a city with this much violence it was hardly newsworthy, especially since it hadn’t gone off.

  Taking into account the background of the man in question, the grenade made sense.

  He’d always shown an interest in them, even when he was a boy.

  Those and the blades.

  “Grenades and blades. Grenades and blades. Grenades and blades, blades, blades.”

  The rhyme of death that he’d started chanting when he was only seven.

  Blake still had the scar on his arm where the boy had used the box cutter on him.

  “All in fun,” he’d said. “Just a game. Just a game, game, game.”

  ________

  Though Mannie tipped the scales at over three hundred fifty pounds, he moved as deftly and quietly as a lynx and Blake didn’t realize he’d even entered the room until the light shifted and his friend’s behemoth shadow draped over the desk from behind him.

  “What are you thinking?” Mannie asked.

  “Considering Fayed’s connections to Dearborn and this recent unsuccessful grenade attack in Detroit, it might be time to pack our things. Perhaps we can kill two birds with one stone.”

  “Fayed and Dylan.”

  “Yes.”

  “But not kill.”

  “Not Dylan. No.”

  Blake and Mannie’s fake identities were good, but still, to avoid unwanted encounters, they only used public transportation when absolutely necessary. Otherwise, they took the Cessna Citation Sovereign. It’d been registered in Canada, a common technique for avoiding some of the FAA’s oversight. It also made those occasionally necessary border crossings less obtrusive.

  “Should I contact the pilot?” Mannie asked.

  “Yes. Tell him we leave first thing in the morning.”

  20

  Back in my motel room, I checked to see if I’d received any messages from dispatch or any updates on Canyon’s condition.

  Nothing.

  I hoped that tonight, at least for the boy, no news was good news.

  As it turned out, Jamika’s Lexus was parked three blocks down from Runyon Street in an abandoned garage. Both the house and car were being processed. Officers were speaking with the three people who had texted her last: “Sis,” “Hank,” and “Bennie.” Although, as it turned out, none were relatives.

  Ralph sent me a note that NSA had identified a text from someone tipping off Blake that we were going to raid that house this morning. That’s what’d allowed him to slip away while the task force’s focus was on that specific neighborhood. No word yet on who’d tipped him off, though only the Joint Task Force members and DeYoung knew when we were going to be there. Gaviola, who’d gotten the original intel, was working with Torres to pinpoint who it might have come from.

  I texted Ralph back: Anything more on the Russian bioweapons scientist?

  He replied: Still checking. This guy’s identity is buried deep and they’re having a tough time translating his handwriting. He used some sort of code or shorthand. We’ve been able to make out a connection to Boko Haram and a reference to a date when they abducted some schoolgirls. Looking into it.

  While setting the phone down, I noticed that the previous text had been that one from Sharyn right after I arrived in Detroit: her message informing me that another body had been found.

  Seeing her again today had been tougher than I thought it would be and, considering the recent bumps in the road Christie and I had been experiencing, it made me ask those “what if” questions.

  What if I hadn’t broken things off all those years ago?

  What if life hadn’t waited so long to bring us together again?

  What if . . . ?

  Our brief hug when she first met me at the airport spoke volumes, even though we hadn’t exchanged a word.

  I loved being with Christie, but the fact that she had a teenage daughter made things complicated. I’d never been a dad, didn’t exactly see myself as a father figure, and, since it’d just been the two of them for so long, I wasn’t really sure how I would fit into their lives moving forward from here.

  The future was a topic that Christie and I hadn’t talked through nearly as much as we should have. And now, Sharyn had reappeared from my past and stepped right into the middle of all that uncertainty.

  Sometimes the passage of time makes it hard to reestablish the same degree of closeness or trust with our friends from the past. Interests change. Habits shift. Religious beliefs, political views—they all evolve. Most friendships are for a time. I think that’s natural.

  But some relationships seem impervious to time. Even if years pass between your encounters with each other, somehow you’re able to pick up right where you left off.

  Same level of trust.

  Same familiarity. Same intimacy.

  And here, with Sharyn, that’s already how it felt.

  The decision to break up hadn’t been mutual.

  It’d all been my choice.

  Eight years ago I’d anticipated that after we left the Academy, life would take us in different directions, and I’d wanted to make that transition easier for us both.

  As it turned out, it hadn’t necessarily made things easier, but it had certainly made them simpler.

  For a while.

  A long while.

  Until today.

  Truthfully, I’d been hoping that more of an awkwardness would have crept in between us—maybe the weight of the years, or the festering of old wounds, or the avalanching consequences of misunderstandings, those phantoms from the past that follow us everywhere.

  But we had no old wounds that I knew of, and any misunderstandings—at least from my end—had evaporated, and were, by now, long forgotten.

  No lurking grudges.

  No lingering regrets for things unsaid.

  But didn’t you say yes to coming here at least partly because you wanted to see her? Wasn’t that a factor, even just a little bit?

  Probing for motives.

  Never a good idea.

  To keep my thoughts from drifting toward her, I busied myself with unpacking, and when I came to the bottom of the suitcase, I found what Christie had left for me wrapped up in my favorite Marquette University T-shirt.

  A small, compact, folded-up umbrella.

  A reminder of the day we met.

  There in the gentle rain. There on that all-too-busy, all-too-lonely sidewalk of Sixth Avenue in New York City.

  Tonight, with all the activity and distraction after I landed, with the foot pursuit and the subsequent analysis of the crime scene, I’d forgotten to call and tell her that I’d arrived in Detroit. I could have smacked myself in the forehead.

  I checked the time.

  Already after eleven.

  Since she typically went to bed early, I texted instead of chancing waking her up with a call.

  I apologized and explained that the case had consumed me right off the bat, that the night had gotten away from me, and that I would talk with her in the morning. I ended by writing, I found the umbrella. Thanks :)

  Within a few minutes she responded, texting that she understood, and wishing me sweet dreams.

  You too, I replied, hitting enter before I realized what I’d written.

  Scarlett Farrow–I

  The Lake

  Scarlett liked being ten—well, actually, ten and a half.

  She’d practiced this scene a ton of times—but that didn’t really make it any easier.

  It was still kind of scary.

  And sad too.

  She shivered and wrapped the towel tighter around her shoulders. The lake was chilly, actually, cold. And she’d had to spend like an hour in it because this was the scene where Millie’s dad drowned when he was trying to save her, and he got his foot caugh
t in that fishing line, tangled up around the posts under the pier.

  So she had to pretend to drown.

  They’d had to reshoot it a bunch of times.

  Of course, she knew that none of this was real, that no one had actually died. It was only a movie. She was just playing a part.

  She knew those things in her head, but sometimes on the set when they were filming, or when she was sinking beneath the surface and gagging on all that gross lake water acting like she was drowning, it was hard to remember them. Because even when you’re just acting, those things are still happening to you. You can’t change it so they’re not.

  They always are.

  Now, her mom fussed over her, making sure her wet hair was right, so it would “look good for the camera.” Scarlett could smell the wine she’d been drinking all morning when she thought no one was looking. All the while, her dad stood over by the pier, joking with one of the actresses—the one he’d been spending a lot of time joking with lately.

  Then they all took their places.

  Before starting a scene, Scarlett always tried to remind herself of what’d just happened in the scene before. She thought of two things—why her character was sad, and what she would be doing to try to be happy again. She wasn’t sure if this was what you were supposed to do, but it seemed to help her get into the action better and to feel more of what Millie would’ve been feeling.

  Millie Evans was only eight, but the director told Scarlett that it was normal for actors to play the role of people who were younger than them. “Especially with kids,” he said. “Happens all the time.”

  Now in this scene, Millie’s dad had drowned in the lake behind their house, near where he did baptisms for the church where he was a pastor, and afterward the neighbors helped drag his body to the shore.

  To make herself cry like she thought Millie would have, Scarlett thought about that day last year when her cat got hit by the truck out in front of their house. She thought about how she’d been there when it happened and how Mr. Whiskers was alive and running toward her one second and then dead the next, how he became just a tangled mat of messy fur smeared with blood and squishy guts and white bones sticking out in all sorts of weird, scary ways. And she thought about how much she wanted to hug him, but how she knew that she couldn’t even go near him or she would start bawling or puking all over the place.

  So now, Scarlett thought of Mr. Whiskers and what it felt like to want to love and touch and hold someone, but also, at the same time, to want to run away, far away, to go as fast as you could to a safe place. And she thought of how Millie would feel all those things at once: love and fear and terrible, terrible sadness.

  For the scene, they used this sort of giant doll that looked just like the man in the movie who was playing Millie’s dad—except the doll was all pale and dead-looking. After they pulled it out of the water, she was supposed to walk over and touch its hand and then run away and start to cry and find her stuffed bunny and hug her tight.

  Millie’s dad’s sandals had come off in the water and his feet jutted up ugly and thick and still.

  His rubbery skin really did look like it was on someone who was dead, and it scared her.

  While they were shooting the scene, she kept reaching out but couldn’t get herself to actually touch it and they had to refilm it, until her dad—her real dad—got mad and asked the director to give him a minute with her.

  He knelt beside her and told her firmly that she was wasting everyone’s time.

  “I don’t want to do this anymore,” she told him.

  “Well, you have to finish the scene.”

  She folded her arms. “But I don’t want to.”

  “Afterward we’ll get some ice cream. How does that sound?”

  She was cold and wet from all the filming and it was like he didn’t even realize it. The last thing she wanted was ice cream. “No.”

  “Candy then.”

  The other people nearby had turned away and were talking quietly with each other and acting like they weren’t paying attention to her and her dad.

  She didn’t like that. She wished they would stop him or at least make him listen to her.

  “I don’t want to do this anymore,” she repeated, this time loud enough for everyone there to hear.

  “We don’t always get what we want,” her dad said in her ear, in that hot angry way he talked sometimes.

  “You do,” she said, “’cause of all the money I make for you.”

  There. She’d said it. What she’d been thinking.

  He took her hand and tugged her toward the human doll.

  No one stopped him.

  “No!” she gasped.

  “Stop being a baby.”

  “I’m not!”

  And he made her touch its arm, not just its arm, but its face. She tried to make a fist but her dad forced her fingers to touch that cold, wet cheek.

  “Daddy, please—”

  “When they start filming again . . .” His voice reminded her of a snake, of something hissing and mean and ready to bite. “If you don’t touch it, I’ll make you kiss it.”

  She started crying. “Daddy!”

  “You understand me?”

  At last she nodded.

  He patted her on the shoulder like nothing bad had happened and stepped back, telling everyone that things were fine and that they could start filming again.

  By then she was crying and when the director saw that, he quickly signaled for his cameraman to start rolling.

  No one helped her.

  Maybe they’d just wanted to make her cry for real all along.

  Maybe that’s what they were trying to do.

  Scarlett’s fingers were trembling as she touched the hand of the doll, and then she quickly ran away and cried and cried, thinking of Mr. Whiskers and what her dad had just done.

  As she held Snowball, and the nice lady who was playing her mom—well, actually Millie’s mom—came and hugged them both, Scarlett let the tears, the real ones, squeeze from her eyes while those people with the cameras filmed it all and the director gave her a thumbs-up to tell her how good she was doing.

  Bones and fur and blood and the staring cold eyes of that giant dead doll.

  Her hand on its slimy, rubbery cheek.

  No, you can’t just separate what’s happening around you from what you’re feeling. No matter how much you tell yourself it isn’t real, in a way it is real—because you’re really there and those things really are happening. So, as Scarlett cried there at the lake, the tears weren’t all pretend.

  Cold and dark.

  The church wasn’t very big, more of a chapel, as the grown-ups called it, but it had a tall steeple that left a shadow on the ground that made everything seem even colder and darker than it already was.

  And after that day, dolls just made her way too sad because they made her think of Mr. Whiskers in the road. And more scared too, from remembering her dad yanking her over, closer to that thing, and making her touch its rubbery, wet skin.

  So she never played with a doll again, whether life-size or small enough to cradle like a baby in your arms. No. Not at all. Not ever again.

  PART 2

  Gas on

  the Flames

  Sometime between 1993 and 1995 the variola samples that had been stored in Moscow’s Research Institute for Viral Preparations since 1980 were transferred to the State Research Center of Virology and Biotechnology, alternately known as the Vector Institute, outside of Novosibirsk. My sources have confirmed that in time, however, in the aftermath of the fall of the Soviet Union, systemic breaches in security resulted in over half of the samples being reported “lost” or “missing,” which, for all intents and purposes, means they could currently be anywhere in the world being studied or utilized by extremist groups or hostile nation states.


  —FROM THE NEXT GREAT THREAT BY SALVADOR TIEGEN,

  2007, PAGE 291.

  21

  Thursday, August 2

  I rose early to slip in some exercise before the officers delivered the car to me at seven thirty.

  No fitness center at the motel, so before leaving for my run, I checked with the hospital to see how Canyon was doing. Beyond the fact that he was out of surgery and recovering, they didn’t have any specifics.

  At least he’d survived the night.

  One step at a time.

  ________

  Taking my phone with me to monitor any updates from Sharyn or the hospital, I ran past that stretch of closed businesses and the marijuana shop I’d seen last night. At first, my ankle plagued me from that less-than-graceful landing outside the house on Runyon Street when I improvised a way of exiting that second-story window, but it started to loosen up as I ran.

  Two blocks farther down, I caught sight of a park and headed toward it.

  Though already layered with humidity, because of Detroit’s proximity to Lake Erie and Lake St. Clair, the air was still relatively cool. Midsixties.

  A rickety, paint-flecked playground rising from the weeds had managed to stay intact through the years and seemed bonelike now, a somber, skeletal reminder of recesses and summer vacation, though it didn’t look like children had played here in a long time.

  After testing the strength of a rusted bar to make sure it could hold my weight, I started a max set of pull-ups.

  But I was wrong about the bar.

  Without warning, on number twenty-eight, it tore loose and I thudded to the ground, managing to tweak that same ankle again.

  With pull-ups out of the question, and not exactly thrilled about the prospect of running laps around the park on a nagging ankle, I settled for push-ups, ab work, and air squats.

  I went all at it.

  An intense workout usually helps me clear my head, and today was no different. The facts of the cases and the questions they birthed—both from the investigation in New York and the one here in Detroit—began to line up before me.