by Sophia Gray
“Well, that’s that, I guess,” Abby finally muttered after a long moment of silence.
Jagger’s fingers itched with some urgent desire to do something, to pat her on the back or grab her shoulder and shake her out of her despair. “Hey,” He said softly, conscious that they were still in a restricted area with a possibility of someone overhearing them. “Hey, it’s not over yet. There’s still more to discover here.”
Abby shrugged a little, but the pain was evident on her face, her eyebrows looking like they were glued together as she frowned. “What the hell do we do now?”
“Square one,” Jagger said. “We’re no worse off than we were an hour ago. Somebody did this, and they left a clue somewhere. We’ll figure it out.”
“In time?” Abby said, finally looking up from the floor to meet Jagger’s eyes. “They could get away, leave the goddamn country for all we know if they think we’re on to them.”
“He,” Jagger corrected. “If he thinks we’re onto him.” Abby’s expression changed for a second, a mere glimmer of hope sliding across her face before fading away just as quickly. She got his point: They knew something about the perpetrator that they didn’t before. He was a man.
But Abby was still unconvinced, groaning a little beneath her breath as she rocked her body back and forth on the wall, painfully banging her lower back into the concrete over and over again. “So, we’ve reduced the search from everybody in the entire world to about half of it. That’s not a great start.”
“No,” Jagger agreed. “You’re right. But it’s something. It’s enough to keep going.” He paused, searching her face as he waited for her to answer him. “If you want to, keep going,” he added a moment later, his voice dropping to a whisper.
Abby remained silent, staring down at her own hands, which clasped together so tightly that her veins popped up like they were trying to escape from her grip.
“Okay,” Jagger said, seeking to keep his voice steady so that his disappointment didn’t show through. “I get it. Take care of yourself.” He turned and headed back down the stairs, but a second later he heard footsteps following him.
“Wait! Wait up!” Abby cried out behind him, going faster until she could grab his shoulder and push him back against the wall. “I’m in. I’m still in,” she said urgently.
Jagger couldn’t fight the smile that quickly spread across his face like wildfire. “Okay. Good. I’ll check in with the MC, see if anybody’s been in touch with Bobby recently. He hasn’t associated with the club in, like, a decade. Whoever targeted him must have been following us for a long time, or otherwise, they did a fuck-ton of research. That type of shit leaves a trail. It has to.”
“Can I come with you?” she asked as they began walking, this time at a reasonable pace, back down the steps, heading for the exit at the lowest level.
Jagger shook his head. “Not yet. Let me figure out how risky it is first.”
“It’s pretty fucking risky, Jagger,” Abby said. “I mean, a man is dead. I don’t think you’re going to find out it’s actually just a path of sunshine and rainbows and candy unicorns.”
“That’s a very specific image,” Jagger said with a laugh, smiling wider at the sight of a blush staining Abby’s cheeks. “But anyway, I think you should go home and get some rest. When was the last time you slept for more than five hours at a time?”
“Jesus, like six months, maybe,” Abby replied, but a small smile appeared on her face. It was as though she was so tired, and she no longer had the energy to be angry about it. “I’ve got a patient to see anyway.”
“Well, afterward, then. Go home. Sleep. You’ll need to be fully charged to help me out later,” Jagger said, opening the door for Abby as they walked into the parking garage.
Abby took a small wallet out of her back pocket and began rummaging around inside, searching for something. “My fucking metro card…” She muttered to herself.
“You’re taking the train home? Do you have a car?” He asked her.
“Used to,” Abby said. He waited for her to elaborate, but she didn’t offer any other information.
“Bad accident or something?” Jagger asked, genuinely curious.
Abby laughed a little, but the sound that left her mouth was humorless. It was bitter and hard. “You could say that, yeah.” Jagger just stared at her. Abby sighed deeply and just shook her head. “Don’t worry about it. I don’t have one anymore.”
Jagger sensed that it would be the wrong move to push her at this point, but his curiosity had been piqued. There were so many battle scars he knew were there but couldn’t see, so many stories to tell, and none of them seemed particularly happy. He wanted to open her head up and discover all her secrets, even if it was none of his business.
He was trying to come up with a smooth goodbye line when her phone rang, loud and shrill. “Jesus, that’s a fucking scary ringtone,” he said, plugging his ears.
“I need it to make sure I wake up in the morning,” Abby explained before pulling her phone out of her other pocket, her forehead wrinkling in confusion as she stared at the screen. “I don’t know this number…” she murmured before clicking a button on her phone and bringing it to her ear. “Hello?”
Jagger watched as her face changed, her eyes growing wide before she pulled the phone away from her ear and turned on the speakerphone. “You better back the fuck off,” a deep, gravelly voice said. “I’m warning you, cunt.” Then the line went dead. Jagger saw Abby’s fingers trembling as she put the phone back in her pocket.
“What did they say before you turned the speaker on?” Jagger asked without hesitation, his heart throbbing in his throat as the words repeated on a loop inside his head. You better back the fuck off. You better back the fuck off. You better back the fuck off.
“Uh, um,” Abby said before exhaling shakily. “Just that… they know I’ve been poking around the hospital, and I need to stop if I know what’s good for me.”
Jagger watched as Abby pulled her hair down from the tight ponytail on top of her head, her long waves cascading down around her chin. She pushed her fingers through her hair, tugging on it so hard it looked like she was intentionally hurting herself. Jagger’s hands itched to reach forward and pull hers down, to keep her from doing any harm to herself. He knew that it would be inappropriate to touch her at all, let alone in such an intimate manner.
“Shit,” Jagger finally said, at a loss for words to say. His heart was thumping incredibly hard inside of him, sending shaky vibrations throughout his entire body. He was fucking terrified, he realized in a vague, distant way. His brain and his body seemed removed from one another as his fear grew more and more intense. All he knew was that he wanted to crush Abby into his body, shield her until they were out of sight, invisible to all other people on the planet.
“Yeah. Shit,” Abby agreed, blowing out her breath. She seemed to recover before Jagger did, straightening up and clearing her throat as if nothing had happened. “Well. I guess teenagers have to have a hobby, too.”
“You think it was just a prank?” Jagger asked.
Abby shrugged. “It’s my best guess anyway. Right? That’s got to be what it is?” There was a desperate edge to her voice, so subtle that the casual observer would have never noticed it, but Jagger could hear it: The doubt. The uncertainty. The fear.
Jagger didn’t know what to say at first, but somehow, he knew that he couldn’t lie. It didn’t feel right, even if the point of it was to make her feel better. He couldn’t say anything other than the truth. “I don’t think so. It doesn’t make sense.”
“What do you mean?” Abby asked, her voice increasing in pitch with each syllable coming out a little squeakier than the next. Her terror was growing, and Jagger’s stomach sunk with guilt, but he pushed forward anyway.
“How would some random teenager know that you were hanging around the hospital? Even if you have a stalker or something, they wouldn’t know that you were here to do anything other than work. It’s got to b
e him, the man in the suit.”
Abby rubbed her bare arms before crossing them tightly, hugging herself against the cold of the parking garage. “It can’t be, right? How could the guy on the tape - how could he know that I was here? Unless…” She trailed off, staring down at the floor, but Jagger could see the terror in her eyes grow bigger and bigger.
“Unless…” Jagger continued. “Unless he was at the hospital today.”
Abby sucked in air, like she was about to leap underwater, and her face suddenly looked pinched, drawn-together like all her features were trying to hide. “So, you’re saying… that they might be here… now?”
Jagger swallowed thickly, trying to clear his throat so that none of the fear he was feeling could seep into his voice when he spoke. “Yeah. Yeah, I think so.”
“Fucking hell,” Abby muttered before breaking into a brisk walk, heading for the entrance of the parking garage. “Jesus Christ.”
“Slow down, wait, where are you going?” Jagger asked, beginning to jog a little to catch up with her. “Stop.” He grabbed her shoulders and pulled her back.
“What?” she demanded, her tone sharp and hard as she glared up at him.
“Just tell me where you’re going,” he said, keeping his hands on her shoulders but loosening his grip.
“Home, duh, where else am I going to go? I’ll have to cancel my appointment with my patient. I can’t lead anyone to their house. I need to get out of public right now. That’s the smart thing to do,” Abby said in a rush, looking over Jagger’s shoulders, trying to see if there were any dark figures waiting in the shadows to attack her.
“And, what, you’re going to take the bus? The train? Walk? It’s not safe, Abby,” Jagger said. Abby clicked her teeth and looked away from him. She couldn’t hide the fear that remained in her eyes. Jagger decided to push the issue some more. “It’s safer if you’re with somebody, somebody you can trust.”
“Yeah? And who’s that?” Abby said in a harsh tone, but a second later her façade melted, her hand coming up to rub her eyes furiously as if she were waking up from a long sleep. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I don’t mean to be a bitch. Or maybe I do, I don’t know. But it’s not right. I’m just - sorry. I don’t want to take it out on you. You’re just trying to help.” She looked back up at Jagger, her eyes wide and full of regret instead of fear. She looked beautiful still, but Jagger wished he could just see her smile again, see those eyes lit up and glowing rather than weighed down with worry.
“It’s okay,” Jagger said, slowing rubbing his thumbs in small circles on her shoulders, willing her tension to disappear. It appeared to work for a minute, as Abby’s eyes slid shut and she rocked back into his grasp, but then a moment later she shrugged out of his arms, stepping back away from him.
“I should go, I should…go sleep,” she said, rubbing her forehead and screwing her eyes shut. “I’m gonna fucking collapse soon if I don’t.”
“Let me drive you home,” Jagger said. “If only for my peace of mind.”
Abby huffed out a laugh. “No, no, it’s okay. I’m a big girl. I can get home on my own.”
“Listen, I know you’re used to taking care of everything and everyone by yourself, but I can help. It’s dangerous here. Please, just let me give you a ride. I’ll leave you alone, once you’re home safe. Okay?”
Abby exhaled heavily, biting her lip a little as she stared up into Jagger’s eyes. “Okay,” she said softly, her voice so low that Jagger suspected she was embarrassed to agree to his offer.
He turned on his heel and gestured in the direction of his car, allowing Abby to follow a pace behind him so that they weren’t walking side by side. He got the sense that she was buzzing with anxiety and needed space around her body to diffuse the fear that naturally followed because of the threatening phone call.
After getting into Jagger’s truck, they pulled out of the hospital’s parking garage and out onto the main road. They were silent for a little while before Jagger coughed a little, puncturing the silence before speaking. “Um, so, where do I turn? To get to your place?”
Abby pointed physically before answering out loud. “Left at the next light.”
“You live far from here?” Jagger asked.
She shrugged. “It’s on the edge of town, but I don’t mind. My place is cheap. That’s all that matters.”
Jagger nodded a little. He wondered how somebody who seemed to work so much appeared to be so poor, but he figured it would be rude to ask so he didn’t. “My MC is stationed out in that direction anyway,” he said casually, trying to lighten up the mood.
“So, do you guys run drugs or what?” Abby asked bluntly a second later. Clearly, she was far less concerned with politeness than Jagger was. When he hesitated to answer, she spoke again. “Oh, right, you can’t tell a non-member. Okay, blink once for cocaine, twice for heroin.”
He laughed, the effort of it almost hurting his stomach. It had been so long since he felt genuinely amused. Abby was such a grumbly, stressed-out person; he wouldn’t have guessed that she was funny. “No, no, it’s nothing like that. We used to do stuff like that, like twenty, twenty-five years ago,” he said, rolling his eyes back in his head as he mentally calculated. “Years before I joined up, anyway.”
“So, what do you do, just drink and ride around and pat each other on the ass and stuff?” she asked, triggering another laugh out of Jagger’s throat.
“Basically,” he replied, the smile still stuck on his face as he followed Abby’s nonverbal instructions, taking several turns until he hit the highway.
“Male friendships are very intense, aren’t they?” she asked.
Jagger shrugged a little. “I guess. Not so much for me anymore,” he said without thinking. He hadn’t meant to introduce his personal relationships as a topic of conversation, but he slipped into it anyway, and Abby didn’t hesitate to grab onto it.
“What’s that mean? Are you growing distant with your brothers or something? Do you guys call each other brothers, by the way, or is that just a pop culture stereotype?”
Jagger laughed again, probably disproportionately loudly, but it just felt nice to be joking around for once. “Yes,” he replied.
“To which question?” Abby asked.
“Both, actually,” Jagger said, the smile slowly fading from his face. “I’ve been…You know, I’ve spent less time there, since I’ve been searching for this arsonist. Doesn’t leave me a lot of time to drink and hang out and flirt with women.”
“It’s hard to imagine you just flirting and hanging out,” Abby said, her voice barely above a murmur. He wondered if she was just thinking out loud.
Jagger took the next exit, slowing down as the car entered Abby’s quiet, almost bare neighborhood. “I guess I just don’t do stuff like that anymore.” I’m not the same person I was, Jagger thought, but he didn’t necessarily feel sad about it.
“Me neither,” Abby said softly, turning to stare out of the window as they approached the parking lot of her apartment building.
He was tempted to ask why, to ask what happened to her that changed everything. It couldn’t just be Bobby. She was the same person today as she had been yesterday. Something about her suggested a massive transformation as if there were long emotional stretch marks etched all over her personality, thick scars that silently told her story without delving into specifics. Something bad has happened to her, Jagger couldn’t help but think. Something awful. He wondered what she was like before, what kind of lighter, sweeter person she could have been. He guessed that version of Abby was gone forever, and if he asked where that person went, Abby probably wouldn’t answer. It wasn’t like he could blame her for it. Our current selves depend on our past ones staying dead. I wouldn’t want to wake up my younger self either, he thought. Better to just stay quiet. Better to stay dead.
Jagger parked as close to Abby’s apartment building as possible, getting out of his car before she did. He figured if he waited she would try to say goodbye and
get out of the car without him, and for some reason, he felt like he had to walk her to her door. Anything else would leave him unsatisfied. Maybe there was some part of him that just wanted to feel like a gentleman, but it felt more urgent than that. He walked up the front pathway a couple of paces ahead of Abby, scaling the steps up to her apartment number and waiting by the door as she caught up.
“Geez, are you training for a marathon or something?” Abby sarcastically asked as she removed a set of keys from the little pocket inside her wallet.
