It’s a poor imitation of Club Valkyrie, Jin’s previous favorite haunt, but ever since I outright refused to step into another den of hyper-rich hyper-modders, Jin has taken to choosing random, independently owned drinking establishments. He pulls up the city map on his Ocom, types in club or bar or pub in the search box, and heads to whichever one is closest to his location at the time. It’s partially out of laziness—Jin doesn’t care enough about what he drinks to bother with finding places that offer high-quality brews—and it’s partially out of spite. For my refusal to partake in our “usual” happy hours like I used to when I worked at the IBI.
But mostly, it’s out of pure and utter need.
Every day the calendar ticks that much closer to the one-year anniversary of the Jericho Bombing, Jin feels compelled to add one more beer or shot or vodka tonic to his daily alcohol intake. I blame the media. Jin was fine until World News 8 ran a story four weeks back that compared a recent terrorist attack in Beijing to the near-disaster in Jericho last year. I was sitting on the couch with Jin in his apartment when it hit. It took him two minutes of staring, white-faced and open-mouthed, before he leapt up and ran to the bathroom to purge the popcorn we’d been eating. It took two more days for his once dormant nightmares to start recurring again.
They haven’t stopped since.
I suspect they will, after the doomed date passes, and Jin can bury his raw emotions in Christmas cheer. Until then, however, I have to be a vigilant keeper. Lest Jin Connors embroil himself in a bitter bar brawl while drunk off his ass.
Like he does tonight.
When I first walk into Reno’s Bar, I squeeze my way through a narrow hall that smells like marijuana, past a het-sex couple who proposition me for a bondage threesome, a same-sex couple making out on top of a fold-out table straining under the weight of two full-grown men, and an androgynous modder with hair the color of midday sun, who tries to peddle a box full of heroin syringes that look like they were salvaged from the floor of a morgue.
Classy digs, Jin.
The main room sports a raised platform that overlooks the “dance floor,” where the drunken patrons sway back and forth to the music, offbeat. I scan the tables for Jin, who usually sits alone and broods by staring into his emptied glasses, like the beer-ringed bottoms are portals into the darkest corners of his soul. In a way, I suppose they are. But no one in the history of man has ever solved their problems by glaring at them through beer goggles, so the gesture is kind of pointless.
I find Jin, but he’s not alone. He sits at the largest table in the room, across from a man with biceps the size of my head. The man’s skin is covered in tattoos, poisonous bugs and snakes and stripper silhouettes and at least four symbols I recognize from my brief stint on a case with Organized Crime during my first month at the IBI. On the table between Jin and the man who could crush his skull with one meaty fist is a row of shot glasses. Fifteen in all. And half of them are empty.
Next to Jin rests three empty beer mugs as well, and the glow on his brown face, made red as blood under the pink dance floor lights, fills in a picture I’d rather leave undefined. After reaching tipsy status, Jin either had the bright idea to challenge the murderous motherfucker sitting in his vicinity to a drinking battle, or the murderous motherfucker sitting in his vicinity got the idea he could score a few gambling bucks off the skinny guy drinking way too much for his bodyweight. Either way, Jin made a deal with the devil, and it’s about to bite him in the ass.
Not because he’s going to lose a pot of money to a gang member who’s probably been to prison.
But because he’s going to win that money, and the burly man with a short fuse (who’s about to lose his hard-earned cash to a guy at the bottom-rung weight class) is going to throw a bitch fit when Jin downs the rest of his shots like he’s drinking straight tap water.
I hurry my way across the floor, weaving around women with hair dyed neon shades (the latest fad), shirtless men with nipple piercings (an outdated fad), and someone with eye implants that rotate through every color of the rainbow (not a fad at all, just odd). Once, someone hip thrusts into my back, and I stumble away from the dancing crowd and smack chest-first into an occupied table. The woman who was dozing on the tabletop stirs, blinks at me, yawns, and then falls asleep again. I rub the sore line across my sternum, swear under my breath, and keep on toward Jin.
But the crowd obstructs my path at every twist and turn, and by the time I push through to the other side, the dominos are already falling.
Jin downs the last shot, flips his glass, and slams it on the table. Triumph stretches across his face as a skewed, drunken grin. “Well, how about that, buddy? Looks like I win.”
The burly gang man has tequila dribbling down his chin, and when he lifts his hand to grab the remaining shot glass, his fingers fall short, closing around air. He blinks at the row of glasses before him, face contorted in confusion, all deep lines and creases. His teeth, filed to points, poke out from beneath a forming sneer as he slowly recognizes he is not the victor in what was supposed to be a simple challenge. “The hell? You cheat me, asshole?”
Jin raises his hands. “No way, man. I won fair and square.” Every word slurs together, and Jin’s torso wobbles back and forth with the effort of speaking. “All fifteen down.”
The gang man glances at Jin’s glasses and then at his own again. “Don’t think so. You’re too skinny to out-drink me. You’d be on the floor throwing up if you’d drunk that much. You cheated. Slipped the drink out when I wasn’t looking.”
Fine cracks form in Jin’s over-confident drunk demeanor. “You were always looking. And you saw me drink every single shot. Now stop stalling and pay me what you owe, unless you want me to announce to the whole bar you’re a sore loser and a deal breaker.”
Yeah, Jin. That was the right thing to say.
The gang man flips his shit—and by that, I mean he flips the entire hundred pound table over with a loud, bellowing growl. Shot glasses shatter on the hardwood floor, shards bouncing into a crowd of largely shoeless dancers, who shriek and recoil from the skin-piercing debris. They stumble into one another, pushing and shoving, and in the span of four seconds, the entire crowd becomes a riot of flailing limbs and fleeing, sweaty bodies. People who trip are trampled. People who run are forced into the walls hard enough to break bones and tear skin. And at the epicenter is Jin, still seated, in front of the space where the table used to be, gazing up in fear at the man about to disfigure his face.
The gang man cocks back a meaty fist to swing at Jin with maximum velocity. A punch hard enough to crack his skull and shatter his jaw and crush his eye socket. Enough to send him to the ER in an air evac copter. My heart seizes up at the mental image of Jin lying broken on a dirty bar floor, and my limbs move before my brain registers the intention.
I rip one of the tall chairs out from underneath a table, dart forward, drop to a crouch, spin around in a complete circle to increase my momentum, and slam the heavy metal legs of the chair into the gang man’s back. The impact knocks him off balance just as he launches his fist at Jin, and his hand connects with the plaster of the wall—and goes straight through. His knees buckle from pain, and he gasps out a string of swears.
Before he can recover, I clamp my hand around Jin’s wrist, haul him from his seat, and tug him toward the exit. “Adem?” he murmurs, feet slipping and sliding on the glass-speckled floor. “What’re you doing here?”
“Saving you from an untimely death apparently.” I lug him harder, faster, and he almost takes a spill, but my knee in his gut saves him from a face-plant. “What the hell were you thinking, challenging a guy like that?”
“I—”
“Oh, right. You weren’t thinking. You were drinking.”
We reach the door to the cramped hallway and plow through a group of drunken former dancers stumbling around from wall to wall, trying to keep their balance. Jin’s hand slides into my own, fingers weakly grasping at my skin. “I can think while I drink,�
�� he says, low enough for me to miss half the words, but I don’t because I’m listening to every syllable he utters in a way I only can while furious with him.
“No, you can’t, Jin. No one can think straight doped up on that much alcohol. And this time, your poor judgment almost got you killed.” I jerk him to the left to avoid the androgynous modder standing in the middle of the hallway, eying the doorway to the main room like it’s an odd sore spewing pus. (Someone tapped a few too many syringes, methinks.) “If you keep this up, Jin, you’re going to fall off the edge into a pit I can’t save you from. Cut back.”
We barrel through the front door, up the steps, and onto the cool and quiet street. Jin wrenches his hand free of my grip and backs away from me, wavering on his feet. “Or what, Adem? Huh? What’ll you do if I keep drinking more and more until I drown myself into a coma? You going to break off contact? You going to end our friendship? You going to walk away while I commit slow suicide? You going to leave me to stew in self-hatred you caused with your own carelessness? You going to make me suffer alone for your own fucking mistakes?”
His voice grows louder with each question. The word mistakes is a scream that echoes through the empty street.
Something twists in my chest, and I freeze, mouth open. No sounds emerge.
Jin huffs and puffs, sweat drying on his skin as he paces around in an uneven circle. Then he seems to realize what exactly he just said to me, and the rage in his face crumbles to low-grade horror. “Crap. Adem, I didn’t mean that.”
I swallow the lead balloon lodged in my throat. “Yeah, you did.”
“No. No. I didn’t. Jericho wasn’t your fault. Not at all.”
The winter air bites at my exposed face, chapped lips cracking as I smile. “Yes, it was. And there’s no point in denying it. You’re right. I’ll never abandon you, no matter how much you drink. Because your drinking is a direct result of my fuckups, and so every time you take a sip, it’s my responsibility. To pull you back from the edge of oblivion. To hold your shoulders while you vomit up your nightmares. To watch you while you sleep and make sure you don’t stop breathing. All my responsibility.”
Jin gulps, his eyes watery. From impending tears or intoxication I can’t tell. “Adem, please don’t…” The request dies on his lips, and he pulls his unbuttoned coat tighter around his frame, shivering. “My car is parked in a garage down the street. We should go. It’s getting late.”
“It is.”
He inches closer to me. “Did you, uh, eat the dinner I left you?”
“Not yet. I worked late, and then I had a clandestine meeting with Briggs, who gifted me even more work. And then, based on his subtle warning, I came here to pick your drunk ass up.”
A ruckus in the hall beneath us, and the drunken gang man appears in the doorway below, seething, face puffed up and crimson like a bull about to charge. But he’s too unbalanced to make it up the steps. He slips on a patch of ice and smacks his head against the bricks. Doesn’t recover. Lies there, drooling, groaning, down for the count. Someone will scrape him off the ground, a wad of tattooed gum, and haul him to a drunk tank or a local urgent care at some point tonight. Before he freezes.
It won’t be me. I don’t care.
Jin hangs his head in shame, tears clinging to his lower lids, and whimpers out, “I’m sorry.”
I flip up my collar to stave off the wind and shrug. “I know. You always are.”
Chapter Six
Dynara Chamberlain breaks my nose for the sixteenth time in three weeks. And I’m pretty sure I have a near-death experience.
She kicks my legs out from underneath me, wraps her muscled arms around my waist, and flips my flailing body over her head, releasing me mid-rotation. I’m moving so fast the fluorescent ceiling lights blur into a swirl of blue-white glow, and my face smacks the workout mat before I can even register the approach of the stained gray cushion. My nose cracks in half, the angle of impact shoving the lower portion out of alignment.
Blood spurts out onto the mat. Pain flares across my face. Static buzzes through my brain.
For a moment, I see nothing except a narrow tunnel of hazy light, and every TV show cliché Jin subjects me to on a regular basis comes back to haunt me. Don’t go into the light! It’s not your time! Then my vision returns to a wobbly version of its usual self, and I thank the old gods my life hasn’t quite sunk to soap opera levels…yet.
(Although I will admit “the events” of last night got pretty damn close.)
Dynara sighs from somewhere behind me, and from somewhere behind her, a group of people snicker under their breath. I don’t attempt to move for a full minute, knowing from my repeated experience in the field of nose breaking that dizziness will deck me again before I can get to my feet. The first go around, I tried to stand up over and over, and I fell thirteen times before Dynara told me to lie my dumb ass down.
When my vision finally clears, I force my arms under my heaving chest and push myself into a sitting position, trying to ignore the steady stream of blood flowing down my face and neck. I can taste the copper tang.
Dynara saunters toward me, carefully stepping around the red pool on the mat, and tosses me a dirty cloth someone must have left on the benches against the back wall. I grab it and stuff it under my nostrils, wincing at the ache in my nose. I don’t dare meet Dynara’s disapproving gaze, but I can feel it trying to burn a hole into my skull.
She puts her hands on her hips and groans. “See? This is what I’m talking about, you heading straight toward waste territory. Three weeks and not an ounce of progress. I knew your physical performance was pathetic, Adem, but this is absurd. You need to start improving—now—or you won’t pass the physical exam at the end of the year.”
“I’m aware.” The cloth muffles my voice.
“Are you? Because if you were taking this as seriously as you should be, I wouldn’t have body-slammed you in less time than I did last week.”
I clench the loose fabric of my workout pants and glance at the amused recruit group standing off to the side. One on one sparring is a biweekly occurrence in the EDPA training program, and the gaggle of new trainees that make up my basic combat class have had the pleasure of watching Dynara humiliate me in the first five minutes of every session.
“I’m taking it seriously. I’m just distracted today.” By Jin’s reckless behavior. By the way he shut his apartment door in my face and locked me out of his life for the first time since we met a year ago. By the gross sobbing I heard emanating through that door as I stood there in the hallway with my forehead pressed against it, trying to figure out how someone can fix the sort of mistake that causes a person, a good person, an innocent person irreparable psychological damage. By my past failures, haunting me. Jericho.
Dynara nudges my shin with her foot, snapping me out of my thoughts, and says, low-toned, “Well, you got to stop letting your personal life drama distract you from the more important tasks at hand.”
“How do you know…?” I bite my tongue. “You still have people spying on me?”
“Are you surprised? The most important assets always warrant semi-permanent tails. Got to make sure no other interested parties try to snatch you away, for good reasons or nefarious ones. Don’t want a repeat of the Brennian incident. Don’t want that man behind your old mentor making another grab at you.”
“I didn’t notice I was being followed.” I can usually pick out tails a mile away, their body language distinct as an acrid scent on the air.
“That’s the idea. I have my best guys on you.”
“Would those be guys employed by EDPA, or are they more of your shady past contacts, like Paolo?”
She smiles a rueful smile. “Not for you to know.”
“Sometimes I wonder if anything at EDPA is.”
“Don’t be so dramatic.” She snorts and dials up the volume of her voice again. “Get your head in the game, Adamend. EDPA doesn’t have any of that nepotism crap going on like they do at the IBI. You fail
your physical, we boot you out, no matter how good an echo maker you are. That or we assign you to administration, where you get to do paperwork and make phone calls all day. That sound like the kind of job you want?”
“No.”
Dynara tucks a loose strand of white hair back in its clip and crosses her arms. In her tight workout gear, she looks a little older than she normally does. Her high school sophomore face tops a flawless athlete’s body, lean muscles rippling over a petite frame. Her small chest has been flattened by a sports bra, and stretchy workout shorts hug her runner’s legs. She taps a calloused foot on the mat while she thinks of a solution to my predicament.
At last, she says, “I could get you an off-hours trainer. More work for you”—Just what I need!—“but it’s looking necessary at this point.”
“If you think more of this will help.”
“Well, you’re obviously not going to help yourself, with your noodle arms and pipe cleaner legs and near-asthmatic lung capacity.”
“Hey, now. I assure you that insults aren’t going to improve this situation.” A fresh stab of pain shoots through my nose.
“No, but they certainly make me feel better about my complete failure to whip your flabby ass into shape.” She rolls her eyes and points a thumb at the gym exit. “Now go get Cyril to patch you up, then grab yourself some lunch. I want you in the loading bay at two o’clock.”
“DuPont’s family?”
“They’re gathering at his townhouse. We’re going to interview them all there.”
“I have class at two o’clock. You want me to skip?”
“Oh, please.” She clicks her tongue. “Two o’clock is when you start your academic course block and participate in classes for which you have already memorized all the textbooks, taken all the quizzes and tests, written all the papers, and completed all the projects. The only reason you’re still sitting in those classes instead of doing something more productive with your time—and your mind—is because the EDPA educational brass hasn’t yet devised an appropriate system to accommodate someone with your particular talents.
Epitaphs (Echoes Book 2) Page 7
