Intrepid_A Vigilantes Novel

by Keri Lake

  Jo’s eyes tracked me, as I rounded her bed and took a seat on the chair beside her.

  One more glance assured me the nurse wouldn’t be coming in anytime soon, with her head propped back on a pillow, mouth gaping around the snores heard over whatever TV show still played on the TV. I turned my attention back to Jo, who silently studied my face, her mind perhaps locked in some other time, some other place.

  Sitting forward and resting my elbows on my knees, I rubbed my hands together, formulating what I wanted to say to her.

  Her thin, frail hand lying beside her on the bed had become slightly more wrinkled than the firm hands that’d pinched her sons ear whenever he’d done something wrong, or held my face in their palms while Jo told me how handsome and important I’d be someday.

  I set mine over hers, feeling as if I could crush them in one squeeze. “I knew who you were the moment I saw you.” Dipping my head, I spoke low, just above a whisper, but well below the snores in the adjacent room. “I’ll bet you recognized me, too. Must feel like you’re trapped inside a box, looking out a small hole at a world who doesn’t know you’re in there.”

  Soft skin slipped past my thumb as I rubbed her hand. “I remember … you were the only one who believed me about Fox and Gideon.” My jaw tightened at the memory of hearing her sob into the phone, when I’d worked up the nerve to call her sometime after my father had died. “But you said you needed closure. And I guess I do, too.”

  Another glance toward the other room gave me a small reprieve from her blank stare, the void in her consciousness incapable of understanding a word I was about to confess.

  “See, there’s something I never told you. I wanted to, but I was afraid. For years. I refused to tell anyone else the truth. I started to believe they were really monsters. That they could hear me. They watched me. And they’d just keep taking and taking and taking.” A frown pinched my forehead, and I blinked away the tears welling in my eyes. I focused on the back of her palm, the way my thumb slid over the ridge of loose skin on her knuckles. “I was there the night they shot Eli. I heard it through the wall.”

  A quick glance up nearly killed my drive to go on, as her naturally rheumy eyes continued to watch me. “It was quick. He didn’t suffer in death. But they … they made me help. They made me help hide his body afterward. They were going to kill me next, but I needed to live. I needed to make sure somebody knew what really happened to him. I didn’t want his death to be buried in silence.” I rested my head on my outstretched arm, taking a minute to settle my mind.

  Even if I knew she couldn’t tell me how much she hated me, how much she wished it were me instead of Eli, I could feel it. I could feel it everywhere inside of me, crushing my lungs, stabbing my heart, roiling in my stomach.

  I sniffed and quietly cleared my throat, keeping my eyes from hers. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you.” A tug in my chest threatened to break, but I swallowed it back. “I’m sorry I couldn’t put those murdering pieces of shit away for you.”

  Taking long breaths, I stared at her hand clutched beneath mine, and a black poison filled my lungs with the suffocating cloud of hate. “But I wanted you to know. I’ve made them pay. All of them will pay. Eye for an eye.”

  Movement beneath my hand sliced through my thoughts, and Jo lifted her hand from the bed, trembling as she set it atop of mine. I dragged my gaze to her eyes, and caught sight of a tear sliding down her cheek.

  There were three moments in my life that I’d been broken. When I’d been forced to push my best friend into a wood chipper. When the police came to the hospital, to tell me my father had been killed in a fire.

  The third was right then.

  Fighting to hold back tears, I pushed to my feet until standing over her, and bent forward to place a kiss to her forehead. When I stood back, I noticed a picture on the collage behind her—one tucked behind two others, of a dark-haired kid and a towhead blond. Smiling, I removed it from its sticky hold and stared down at the picture of Eli and me. Couldn’t have been more than twelve in the picture, so innocent and young.

  Could I have even imagined back then what would happen to me in just a couple short years?

  Could I have even fathomed in that moment how horrifically my best friend would’ve died?

  I tucked the picture into my pocket and lifted the duffle bag onto the nightstand beside the bed. Patting Jo’s hand one more time, I crossed the room to the window. I heard her faint whimper, as I exited her room.

  34

  Sera

  Sera, I need you to get over here right now.” Lilia’s voice had a nervous wobble that set my teeth on edge.

  Even though I’d spent most of the day crying in bed, I scrambled to my feet and threw on some clothes. “Is everything okay? What’s going on?”

  “I can’t …. I don’t want to say it over the phone.” She lowered her voice, but kept the intensity tuned up. “I think someone broke into the apartment!”

  “Did you call the police?”

  “No …” Her response had an open-ended feel, and I waited for her to finish, but she didn’t.

  “No? So, Jo’s okay? You’re okay? Nothing was stolen?”

  “Everyone’s okay. And no, nothing was stolen. In fact … just … come over as soon as you can.”

  “I’ll be there in fifteen.” Not even bothering to wipe the smeared mascara from my eyes, or brush my teeth, I slammed through the apartment door, and bypassed the elevator for the stairwell.

  The fifteen-minute drive felt like thirty as I wracked my brain, trying to figure out what the hell could’ve been so damn secretive she couldn’t tell me over the phone.

  When I arrived at the apartment, Lilia shuffled me inside, peering down the hallway, before she closed the door after me.

  “Did you decide to open a meth lab, or something?” I asked, scanning for any sign of a break-in. “What’s with all the paranoia?”

  From the kitchen counter, she lifted a black bag, its zipper open around the bundles of bills stacked inside, right up to the brim of it.

  “Holy shit. You’re selling meth. Look, I said I’d figure something out—”

  “Somebody left this. I found it on Jo’s nightstand this morning.” She lifted one of the stacks from inside—all hundred dollar bills. “Sera, this is … this is enough to keep us going for a couple years! There’s gotta be over a hundred thousand dollars in here.”

  “Lilia, thieves don’t leave money, they take it. This isn’t Robin Hood. Someone broke in and forgot to take their loot with them. I guarantee they’re coming back.” My body froze at that. “Which means we have to get Jo out of here.” Rushing past her, I entered Jo’s bedroom, where she lay with a smile on her face. “What’s up with her smile?” I called out to Lilia, and peeked around the corner to catch her stuffing the stacks of cash she’d begun to count back into the bag.

  “I don’t know. I found her like that. She’s been smiling all morning.”

  With careful steps, I searched Jo’s small space, eyes peeled for anything that looked out of place. Everything sat neat and perfect, as always, including Jo. Huffing, I closed the cracked window and locked it, shaking my head. “You can’t leave the window open at night! This is Detroit, not Bloomfield.”

  “And this is our home, not a prison. She likes the fresh air.”

  Perplexed, I sat down beside Jo on the bed and pushed the hair from her face. “I wish you could talk. At least tell me what the smile’s all about.”

  She turned toward the sound of my voice, but didn’t show any sign of understanding.

  Still stumped, I turned away from her, and a flash of something caught my eye. No, not something. The absence of something. The collage on the wall behind her was missing a picture.

  “Hey!” I called out to Lilia, rolling my eyes as she shuffled about in the other room, likely trying to count the cash again. “Did you take the picture from the wall?”

  “What picture?” Lilia appeared at the doorway, and I stared at the empt
y spot of cork, trying to remember which picture had been tacked there.

  The board had lived at Joanne’s old place, a collage she’d put together years back, and when I’d moved her to the new apartment, I merely hung it as it was up on her wall, hoping she’d find it a comfort. Every time I’d come over, I’d seen the damn thing, but for some reason, I couldn’t remember which picture had once been there.

  “That one? It was a …. Eli and some kid. A boy. Looked about his age.”

  As she talked, a string of thought filtered through my brain and struck like a baseball bat to my skull.

  Eli’s friend.

  I gulped and slid my gaze to Lilia. “I need to use your computer.”

  “Is everything okay?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Elijah Trombley had gone missing on October 21st of 2009. His mother had suspected he’d snuck out of the house with his best friend, to roam the Packard Plant just up the street from them, as he’d done so many times before. Of course, she hadn’t known that for sure until later that night, when she went to check on the boys and couldn’t find them anywhere. Earlier that afternoon had been the last she’d seen her son.

  I’d just turned twelve the week before, and remembered watching the news, catching a picture of Eli and some other boy I hadn’t recognized. The reporter had asked for any information leading to the whereabouts of the two, and I remembered my stomach curling at the sight of my housekeeper’s son, a boy I’d grown quite fond of, staring back at me from the screen.

  For weeks, I’d passed out flyers everywhere, to my father’s dismay. He’d chided me every time we’d gone somewhere, and I’d posted one of the many Missing Persons flyers Jo had given me wherever it might catch someone’s attention. All over my school. At the mall. At dance. I didn’t care if Eli had gone missing in Detroit, miles away, somebody might’ve seen him. Recognized his face.

  I clicked on the search engine of Lilia’s laptop and typed in the headline that’d made his story stand out from all the other kids who’d gone missing in Detroit.

  Boy In A Box Murdered In Meth Home.

  “Whoa. What the hell?” The couch dipped as Lilia plopped down beside me. “What’s this?”

  “Jo’s son.”

  “That was her son?” The incredulous tone of her voice had me feeling bad for keeping it a secret for so long. It was a creepy story, and trying to find good help in Detroit wasn’t exactly easy. A story like that would’ve definitely raised some flags, so I’d told her Jo had a son who’d died, but left out the details.

  “He wasn’t literally found in a box. Kind of metaphorical. They’d found a box-cage-looking thing in some meth abuser’s house that contained a bunch of Eli’s hair and blood, but unfortunately his body was never found.”

  “Wow. I’ve been working here two years, and I’m just now finding out about this?”

  “I know, I’m sorry. Anyway, there was another kid, Eli’s friend. He was dumped in some field close by, all beaten up with signs of torture. He’d survived. They’d given him the same moniker, since he’d claimed to have been held prisoner in a box of some sort. And—”

  I clicked to enlarge the image on the screen, the one I’d originally seen on the news report almost ten years ago. Two side-by-side photos of Eli and another boy whose face might’ve changed dramatically over the years, but his eyes still carried the same piercing broodiness that left my heart pounding inside my chest.

  “Sera, what’s wrong? You look pale.”

  If Ty had a son, the boy on the screen would’ve been a spitting image of him. The strong masculine jaw hadn’t yet taken form, and his hair was much less groomed. To anyone who looked at Ty recently, the similarities might be subtle enough to miss, but I’d studied those eyes and those lips. I’d kissed them and stared into them as he made love to me. I, of all people, couldn’t deny the match.

  Jameson Cross.

  “Sera? Yo, earth to Sera!”

  I blew out a held breath and shook myself free of my musings. “I’m sorry. I was …. Hey, do we have any water?”

  “Yeah, sure. Hang on, I’ll grab one from the fridge.”

  “Thanks.” I remained in a trance, staring at Ty on the screen.

  Until I couldn’t look at him anymore.

  I clicked out of the image, and another caught my attention. A familiar face, though at first, I couldn’t place why. It was a sketch of two men, one of whom I’d seen somewhere. I clicked on it, pulling up a separate news report of two wanted men suspected of having murdered Eli. They were police sketches provided by the survivor.

  “Who are those two? The murderers?” Lilia set the bottled water onto the coffee table and took her place beside me once more.

  “They were suspects for a while. There was a manhunt for them as possible accomplices, but it was dropped soon after they’d arrested the meth junkie. Not sure why.”

  Where had I seen that face? The round features. I closed my eyes to a twinge of disgust churning in my stomach and flipped them open again.

  “Oh, God.”

  I typed wood chipper accident into the search bar, and the moment his face popped up on the screen, I clapped a hand over my mouth, tossing Lilia’s computer onto the couch beside me.

  Racing to the bathroom brought me skidding in front of the toilet, just in time to expel the miniscule amount of food I’d eaten that morning. For the next few minutes, I dry heaved.

  “Oh, sweetie.” Lilia knelt beside me, gathering my hair, and the soothing rub against my back helped calm my stomach. “Hey, I’ll have Tony come here tonight. If someone tries breaking in again, I’m sure they’ll think twice.” Lilia’s boyfriend worked as a bouncer for one of the clubs in Hamtramck. Violence was nothing new for him, and I happened to know the guy carried. Having him stay would definitely put my mind at ease. “I didn’t want to say anything, but you looked like hell when you walked in. Think you need to get some rest.”

  I flushed away the sour smell and nodded, accepting the bottle of water she handed to me. “I’m really not feeling good.”

  “Take tonight off. I’ve got Jo covered.”

  “I just feel bad.”

  “Don’t. I’m ordering a pizza with everyfuckingthing on it.”

  “Okay, but … don’t tell Tony about the money. Not yet. Not until we know for sure where it came from, okay?”

  “Deal. You sure you’re going to be okay?”

  “I don’t know. I just need to figure some things out.”

  35

  Sera

  I stared through the windshield at Ty’s Ducati parked out in front of his apartment building, still trying to wrap my head around the idea that I’d been seeing the wood chipper killer all that time while never knowing his true identity.

  My thoughts drifted back to the conversation I’d had, the one when Ty’d suggested the victim wasn’t actually a victim.

  Some people aren’t what they seem. How do you know the victim didn’t do something equally as horrific?

  Like pieces of a puzzle falling into place, small bits of Ty’s conversations came together, creating a terrifying picture, for which I had yet to learn my part.

  He’d killed that man, and after having seen the sketch, even slightly off in its features, there was no doubt in my mind. I glanced up to Ty’s apartment, dark and quiet, as if nobody were home, which had my eyes flickering to his bike.

  My head battled back and forth as I sat, contemplating my options.

  Should I go up there?

  No, you idiot. He’s a murderer.

  Maybe he committed suicide. He looked pretty shaken after he left the apartment.

  Of course he did, he probably wanted to kill you!

  All the conversations I’d had with him flooded my head in a mishmash of lies and truth.

  The one thought most troubling of all, though: had he been using me from the beginning?

  A click beside me startled my muscles, and I let out a squeal when the passenger door flew open. Like
an ass, I pressed the lock seconds too late, and Ty plopped down onto the seat beside me.

  Every nerve in my body flared, and I reached for the door handle, mentally preparing my muscles for the run of my life. Literally.

  “You’re a horrible stakeout.” His comment might’ve been funny, if I didn’t happen to be holding back a bladder full of pee. “So, why’re you here? The money?”

  “Y-y-you left it?”

  “C’mon, Sera.” His cheeks dimpled with a smile, as he rubbed his hands in his lap. “You’re smarter than that. You know I did. That’s why you’re here. I’m certain you’ve figured everything out by now.”

  “Your name isn’t Ty. You … you lied about that. It’s Jameson. Jameson Cross.”

  “Tyler is my middle name. So, not a total lie.”

  “You … k-k-killed that man. In the wood chipper.”

  “Yeah. That was me.” He sniffed, still rubbing his hands, and kept his gaze from mine. “You ever hear the sound of someone truly suffering? Not the shit on TV, or some fucking teenage sob story. I mean real human misery.”

  My finger curled around the door handle, trying not to make a spectacle as I took hold of it, readying myself.

  “The worst sound I ever heard was just before those bastards shot Eli.”

  “Bastard? The one you killed?”

  “The three I killed.”

  Dear God, he’d killed three men, probably all of them, if I had to guess, as horrific as the wood chipper incident. I swallowed a harsh gulp, slowly scooting myself away from him, in the event he tried to grab me as I escaped.

  “They cut out his tongue, so he couldn’t talk. All I heard all night was his pain-filled moans. And for his sake, I’d hoped they’d end it.” His jaw clenched, and he expelled a harsh breath, like he was holding back tears. Bending forward, he rubbed his skull, his whole body shaking. “He was my brother. Only one I had. And those cocksuckers tortured him to death.”