Dying for a Living (A Jesse Sullivan Novel)

by Shrum, Kory M.

  $100,000. Where would I get that money? “I told you, there is paperwork. Ask Ally. She’ll have it. And you shouldn’t doubt Brinkley.”

  “Don’t you?” he asked.

  I hesitated, which I’m sure was real convincing.

  “No.”

  “When was the last time you spoke to your handler?”

  “We tried to call him just before Eve’s replacement, but he didn’t answer.” Because this is a test. This whole big mess is a test.

  “Then I find it interesting that you do not doubt him,” Garrison said. He gestured at the length of me stretched in bed. “Here you lie in a hospital bed, wounded. You almost died and yet your handler isn’t even here to check on you. Don’t you find that strange?”

  Please let this be a test. “He isn’t here?”

  “Did you think he was?” he asked, curious.

  “I thought he was in the hall or something.” I really did.

  Garrison pulled a business card from his back pocket and shoved it in my hand. I could barely lift my arm to take it.

  “Until we clear this up, you are suspended. You are no longer authorized to commit -replacements, but you may continue your other duties. You are not to leave the area and you are strongly advised to contact us the moment you hear from Agent Brinkley.”

  “What? Why?” The heart monitor beside me wailed again. I have to talk to Brinkley if these guys were going to investigate me. We needed to get our stories straight about Eddie and Rachel.

  “If you are telling the truth,” he began and he stood to announce his departure. “If he really gave you this replacement and he isn’t here to verify your safety, you should assume he is the one who wants you dead.”

  Chapter 6

  Dr. Stanley York removed the stethoscope buds from his ears. I liked Dr. York with his snow-white hair, bright eyes and thin smile. Unlike other doctors, he made me feel like a person, not a test subject.

  The blood pressure cuff’s Velcro made a ripping noise as he pulled it free. “The blood we’ve drawn shows no abnormalities. It’s been properly re-oxygenated and is flowing just fine. The calcium in your muscles has stabilized, but you can expect the usual soreness. Your body temp and blood pressure are still a little low, but they’ll come up.”

  Ally entered my ICU with one of those paper cups from the cafeteria.

  “Does that mean I can leave?” I asked him. After a restless night, I was so done with this hospital. I wanted to be at home, in pajamas, remote in hand, sweet and salty snacks before me in assorted bowls. I wanted Winston too, curled up and warm in my lap.

  “Yes, you are free to go, but you’ll need to return for the psychiatric evaluation,” he reminded me and placed a butterscotch candy in my hand. “And I am serious about getting some rest.”

  Ally helped me put on some scrubs because my clothes had been destroyed in the Eve fiasco. And I’d lost the red Nike sneaker I’d been favoring lately. Over the scrubs, I fastened my black wool coat and eased into the wheelchair Ally offered. Ally still wore her usual red, A-Line coat and pushed her hair behind her ears before taking hold of my chair.

  “I hope you’re ready for this.”

  “Ready for what?” I tried to make myself comfortable in the chair but it just wasn’t happening with the rigor mortis.

  No explanations from Ally could have prepared me for what I saw when I went through those automated doors leading to the parking lot. Camera flashes and microphones were everywhere. I mean, someone actually hit me when they thrust their device into my face.

  “Oww.” I rubbed my cheek gingerly. “Watch it.”

  “Ms. Sullivan—” a reported interjected. “Is it true a woman by the name of Eve Hildebrand tried to murder you?” She was older, maybe fifty, with teased hair piled on top of her head and a rasp to her voice as if she smoked two packs a day.

  “Yes,” I said.

  Ally pinched my shoulders and I squeaked. “I don’t think you should answer questions until you talk to a lawyer.” Convenient since Ally’s older brother was a lawyer.

  The reporter leaned closer, followed by another round of blinking flashes. Her henchman’s camera lens zoomed open like an insectile eye beside her, inspecting me.

  “Was she working alone or did she have accomplices?” someone shouted.

  “Well, there was this guy—” I began but Ally pinched me again. “Oww.”

  “Can you describe the man?” The reporters’ questions didn’t stop. They were shouting at me from so many directions that I had no idea who was saying what. “Were they working for an organization? Is this attack connected to the Church’s campaign against NRD?”

  “Shit,” Ally said as my wheelchair jerked to a halt. “Your wheelchair is stuck.”

  “Is this connected to the Atlanta murders?” someone shouted.

  “What Atlanta murders?” Ally asked, unable to help herself.

  I couldn’t hear the reporters’ answer over the sudden wail of police sirens. They weren’t in the distance either. They were practically on top of us. Then I glimpsed them through the shifting bodies of the crowd. Two police cars pulled up behind Ally’s and blocked her in. The press seemed unfazed by sudden police involvement, whereas I was totally freaked out by it. After Garrison’s you’ve broken the law speech I was certain they’d pulled up to arrest me.

  Worse, I wasn’t getting out of the wheelchair. Oh, I wanted to just get up and run at the sight of a big cop barreling toward me, parting the crowd like a modern day Moses, but that wasn’t going to happen. I understood this as I stared at his broad chest stretched tightly under his uniform. At least I had a crowd to testify to any police brutality.

  “Are you here to arrest her? On what charges?” The woman with the microphone asked.

  The cop extended his massive hand toward me and pulled me from the wheelchair as if I weighed but twenty pounds.

  “Oww, oww, oww. I’m really sore,” I pleaded.

  He didn’t answer me.

  “I can’t go to jail,” I said, now hanging over his shoulder. “I’m too cute. They’ll kill me!”

  Ass in the air, I was happy I traded the flimsy hospital gown for some scrub pants.

  He still didn’t say anything as he took his turn shouldering through the mass of reporters, while Ally protested my abduction like a banshee and remained hot on our heels. His partner opened the door for him as he shoved me into the backseat.

  “You didn’t read her rights,” Ally said. She grabbed the car door with one hand and refused to let him shut it. “You haven’t produced a warrant or a badge or anything that tells me what you’re doing is legal.”

  “Get in,” he said to her. Ally didn’t hesitate.

  With Ally and me in the car, the reporters had switched directions, now flooding the windows.

  “Gee-zus,” I muttered. Some reporters even ran from the crowd toward news vans or parked sedans. “They don’t give up do they?”

  As we pulled away, the tall black officer said something into the small walkie-talkie attached to his shoulder. Ally was back to business, her authorial voice in full swing. “Gentlemen, I expect you to explain how this isn’t kidnapping.”

  The white cop in the passenger seat turned around toward us. “I’m Officer Jeffers and this is Officer Gaul. We’ve been assigned to protect you.”

  “By whom?”

  “FBRD.” The officer’s lips tightened as if he wasn’t too happy about it.

  “Protect me or arrest me?” Because medicated stupor or no, I definitely remembered Garrison telling me he’d arrest me.

  “It’s okay.” Ally touched my arm lightly. “They’d have read your rights by now.”

  “Why couldn’t you explain instead of just hefting me out of the chair like a barbarian?”

  Gaul huffed under his breath. His eyes remained on the road. “It’s not my job to explain myself to you. My job is to make sure you don’t get your head blown off or chopped off or in any way damaged or severed from your body.”
<
br />   Wow. This guy was charming.

  Ally’s phone rang. “It’s Lane.” She flipped it open. “Hey. No, she’s fine. They’re escorting us home. I said she’s fine. Whatever.”

  “What’d he say?”

  “Your boyfriend,” she grumbled. I knew better than to show any emotion in the ‘pleased’ spectrum. “He said he’d come over as soon as he could.”

  “How long will you be, uh, escorting me?” I asked the police.

  “You are only under surveillance for your protection,” Jeffers replied. He lifted his cap up enough to show crooked teeth and a pointy nose. “Just until the second assailant is apprehended.”

  I assumed he meant the unknown man from the hotel room. Okay, I could deal with some official stalkers if that meant no more attempted decapitations.

  “Call Brinkley,” I told Ally. Both of the officers cut their eyes at each other. If Ally noticed their ears perk up, she pretended not to. “Nevermind, I’ll do it.”

  I took her phone and called him myself. It might’ve been a risk talking to him in front of the cops, but I wanted to know where the hell he was. But I got a recorded message repeating Brinkley’s number back to me. Irritated, I tossed the phone back to her.

  Then I realized I didn’t recognize any of these side streets.

  “Are either of you members of the Church?” I asked. Ally looked up from the digital planner she’d been rearranging with furious taps on the touch screen.

  Officer Jeffers smiled. “Don’t worry, Ms. Sullivan. The FBRD screened us for any conflicts of interest that would put your safety at risk.”

  “That doesn’t answer my question,” I said.

  “Just because the Church is united, don’t go lumping us all in one basket, okay?”

  “Fair enough,” Ally said on my behalf before I could bitch about being reprimanded like a child. I was pretty sure I had every right to be cautious at this point.

  Gaul caught me staring at the back of his head and glared at me through the rearview mirror. “Maybe you’d prefer I lead the press straight to your house?”

  Eventually, my trust was rewarded because I did recognize the roads once we crossed Harding Place. We passed a Waffle House reeking of sweet syrup and fried goodness. My stomach growled. It would be interesting to see if I could eat with my neck wound. It hurt now just to swallow my own spit. They’d given me a prescription for painkillers that I was going to need—no question.

  Just before the back door locks and the scent of leather drove me into a claustrophobic mania, we were home. The cops got out of the car slowly, looking around the neighborhood before letting us out of the backseat.

  “I’ll get the door.” Ally moved out of the way. “Then we’ll get you into the bath.” She understood that every moment that I wasn’t in hot water or on a massage table added to my misery.

  Ally’s keys jangled in the door, creaked open and then our little group filed into the foyer. Several clicks from her heels echoed over the hardwood before she kicked her shoes off. The cops didn’t take off their shoes, but that was okay. At least they wiped their feet on the rug. My one salvaged blue sneaker hit the floor with a thud.

  Officer Jeffers stopped me on the stairs. “I’d prefer you wait outside until we search the house.”

  “I’m cold,” I said, quietly. Now that I was finally home and felt kind of safe, my adrenaline crashed. I broke into shivers.

  “Check the bathroom,” Ally told Gaul.

  “It can wait,” he said.

  “No,” Ally said, flatly. “She needs hot water.”

  He stared at us coldly as if he considered refusing the request. Lucky for me, Officer Jeffers followed and took the lead at the top of the stairs. “Which way is the bathroom?”

  Ally nodded toward the master bedroom on the right. Then, we waited for a long moment before he reappeared in the doorway.

  “Go ahead,” he said to us. “But don’t leave her alone.”

  By the time the bathroom door closed behind me, I could barely move.

  “Do you need help getting in?” she said, rolling up her sleeves before I could answer.

  I had a hard time pulling the shirt over my head. My back and shoulder muscles didn’t want to flex that way. Or at least they wouldn’t for a few hours still, and I hesitated to let Ally help me. When I didn’t move, her hands went to her hips and she tilted her head sympathetically to one side.

  “I promise I won’t look at the scar,” she said, because I’d already cradled my chest bashfully. Ally’s seen it all, sure, but seeing it in full daylight and at night under my covers was different.

  Reluctantly, I let her undress me. She slipped her arms under mine and helped me into the water. She flinched at the sight of my bruises, and she must’ve seen my insecurity from a mile away.

  “Before you even ask, no, you’re not disfigured. No, you’re not a freak. Yes, I think you’re beautiful. It just upsets me that she hurt you.”

  “We do this a lot, huh?” I asked.

  Her smile was patient as she checked the water temperature herself, by trailing her fingers over its surface. She added bath soap and bubble mix. “Get in.”

  I slid down into the water and immediately felt a hundred times better. My muscles, thirsty for the heat, drank it down. Even after each of my muscles relaxed, one-by-one, I couldn’t stop frowning.

  Ally put a clump of bubbles on my nose. “Don’t worry, okay. It’ll work out.”

  “Yeah, I’ll work it out. In jail. Or in an asylum.” When I exhaled the fluff of bubbles flew up and away from my face.

  She arched an eyebrow. “Why an asylum?”

  “They use us up and throw us in the nuthouse. Isn’t that how this goes?” And with good reason because something is wrong with me.

  She lathered up a wash cloth. “I gave Garrison the paperwork we had. There’s nothing else we can do except hope that he’s smart enough to figure it out.”

  “If that doesn’t work I’ll have to pay the $100,000. I just don’t have that kind of money unless I sell the house, and if I do, where will we live? Winston is too spoiled to rough it on the street.”

  Ally found my hand under the water. “Listen to me.”

  I stopped my rambling panic and met her eyes.

  “Everything will be okay. If the worst happens, you’ll sell your house. You can buy another house. You can survive jail. Neither of these cases are the end of the world or your life. And you know I’d never let anything happen to Winston.”

  I was having a hard time focusing on any subject for very long with the pulsing pain in my neck. I stared at the speckled white ceiling and heating vent. My mind wandered over the last few days without focusing on anything specific. To push back the pain, I told Ally everything Garrison said while she clean dried blood from under my fingernails with a little brush.

  “You never mentioned Rachel.”

  I let out a long, dramatic breath. I hated talking about Rachel but since it was important to the FBRD, then it must be related to my situation, right? Ally was smarter than me. Maybe she’d make some connection I’d missed.

  “When I first paired up with Brinkley, we worked in St. Louis. It had the highest crime rate in the country which was good because I needed the practice replacing people. I had this mentor, another one of Brinkley’s charges.”

  “What happened to her?”

  I wasn’t sure where to start the story. “Rachel was an awesome mentor. She’d replaced almost two hundred people. That’s a record high. People loved her and Brinkley wanted me to be just like her.” I took a breath because this was where the story got horrible. “One day I went over to her house to visit her after a replacement. I had brought her this huge bag of jellybeans because she loved them. Anyway, I knocked on her door like fifty times and she didn’t answer, so I got worried. I went in and found her in the living room, sitting in a circle of her own blood.”

  Ally gasped. “She killed herself?”

  “No,” I said and shook my
head. “She just used a knife to cut up her arms and hands. The she used her blood to draw a circle around herself, calling it a protective circle.”

  “Did you get the knife away from her?”

  “I tried. I asked her what was wrong, tried to get her to talk to me, but she just kept going on about angels telling her what to do and that she had to protect herself from the bad angels.”

  “So wait, what happened with the knife?” Ally asked, washing my hair.

  “This whole time she was sitting in her living room floor and sort of mumbling all this craziness. Then she finally looks up at me. Her eyes get really big—as if she didn’t look insane already, covered in her own blood. She starts screaming, ‘It’s you. You.”

  “What did you do?” she asked, hands still in my hair.

  “I screamed too because this naked, bloody girl is waving a knife around and trying to tackle me. I am ready to get the hell out of there but I drop the jellybeans and the bag bursts open. Now, I’m slipping and sliding all over the floor like a cartoon character or something. Then Brinkley shows up and saves the day.”

  Ally let out a breath. “How did he know you were in trouble?”

  “He was in the car. He was the one who had brought me over to see her. Apparently, when I screamed he heard me and came running. When he pulled her off of me, she just kept screaming, “She came from him! She came from him!”

  “Bizarre,” Ally said.

  “They blamed the number of death replacements she’d done, saying that 200 was bound to make her crazy. After she was institutionalized, Brinkley said we needed to leave. I didn’t object. St. Louis just wasn’t the same after Rachel got sick. The city was too dangerous. In St. Louis, most of my replacements were gun violence and accidents as opposed to here—where choking on a fried chicken bone is more common than finding a muzzle pressed to your head.”

  My thoughts had wandered and Ally brought me back with a gentle squeeze. “That won’t happen to you.”

  I looked up into her face.

  “You won’t go crazy, Jess,” she says. “We’re being careful.”