Baby stays silent. I moan in my dream, and my eyes fly open. I wake up to the black, and then I force myself to fall back asleep.
Unreality is a better world than here.
One more day passes before he appears again. The lights blind me, and he stuns and drugs me. I fall into nothing and wake up facing Dali. The table, it seems, can be upended to a vertical position. Dali regards me, wearing his ski mask and jacket and hiking boots.
“It seems you were right, after all. They keep hunting me, number 35. They’re very tenacious.”
I don’t say anything. I’m too afraid.
“You’re becoming a liability to my operation. I’m going to need to get rid of you.”
“No, please,” I croak. My throat has almost closed in terror.
“I’m not going to perform the procedure on you, number 35.”
The relief I feel is so deep, so physical, that I almost lose control of my bladder. I’d rather die than have my baby in that state, I realize. Leo was right.
“You’re going to kill me?” I ask.
“No. I’m going to release you.”
Confusion. As with Heather Hollister, this is a deviation. I’m grateful for it, but it makes no sense. “Why?”
“I’m going to take one thing to remember you by, number 35,” he continues, ignoring my question. “It won’t prevent you from doing what you do, but it will serve as a last example to you and others: Hunt me, and I punish.”
He’d had his hands behind his back. He brings them into view now. They are gloved, and the right one holds a knife. He says nothing else. He moves to the side and cuts off the little finger of my right hand, below the first knuckle, in a single motion.
I scream instantly and do not stop. I begin to faint, no help necessary this time, and I see it again, that physical feature I had noted days ago but was unable to articulate. I realize what it is just before unconsciousness claims me again, a welcome brother.
“Someone call 911.”
“What happened to her?”
“God, did you see her face?”
“Forget her face—what happened to her finger?”
The voices rise and fall, as the drugs inside me rise and fall, as the pain in my finger rises and falls, as the ocean pounds the shore on that Hawaiian beach somewhere, rise and fall, rise and fall. The permanencies of this world carry on regardless of what happens to humanity. The sun shines, the moon glows, the world turns.
I am on concrete. My mouth is so dry it feels filled with dust. I am surrounded by strangers with cell phones and worried eyes.
I find a woman who looks like my mother, and I reach my arms out to her.
“Please.” It’s all I can manage.
She hesitates and then comes to me and pulls me close. She’s not my mother, but then again, no one is.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
Bonnie bursts into the hospital room. That’s the only way to describe it. The door bursts open and she seems to fly across the room into my arms. She’s sobbing. “Mama-Smoky!”
Her whole body shakes. I draw her close to me, inhaling the scent of her hair as I press my lips to the top of her head. “I’m okay, honey. I’m okay.”
And I was, for what that was worth. Dali had dropped me nude on a sidewalk near Hollywood Boulevard. The woman who looked like my mother turned me over to the paramedics, and the ambulance screamed as I drifted in and out of consciousness. My finger needed surgery, but I refused general anesthesia because of my baby, despite of the doctor’s assurances. The work on the bone was painful, but I took it. The doctors thought I was insane, but they couldn’t budge me, and in the end, when Tommy saw that I was never going to give in, he stood with me against them.
The baby, I was assured, was still there, still alive. I hadn’t been worried, not really. I had the sense of it inside me, that faint consciousness, now silent, that I’d spoken to so often. I knew all that was delusion and dream, but still, I was convinced I would have known if my baby was gone.
Strangely, the thing that’s left me feeling most violated is not the loss of part of my finger or the few new scars on my back. It’s that Dali shaved my head before depositing me on the sidewalk at noon.
Well, aside from Leo, of course. But I’m not ready to think about that. No, sir. That’s a deep, dark ocean, waiting to suck me in and drag me down.
“I’m sorry you had to wait, baby,” I whisper to Bonnie. “I wasn’t ready to be seen.”
She nods into my chest. She understands. Of course she does. Tommy takes a seat by the bed and stares out the window at the early April sky. He’s been very, very quiet since my return. I can’t seem to get a sense of him.
The FBI and the LAPD had turned the city upside down looking for me. There were no turf wars, no complaints about overtime. Everyone pitched in because every cop knows the truth: It could always be you. Dali had been right about that, even if he’d been wrong about the response.
My own team, I’m told, barely slept. They were run by a grim AD Jones, who’d had a short fuse and yelled more than he spoke.
They found nothing. I don’t blame them for this, but it doesn’t help my nightmares. The same thought keeps coming to me when I’m alone: If Dali hadn’t let me go, I’d still be there.
In the dark.
A week after being found, I leave the hospital. It’s against doctors’ advice, but they’re not too pushy about it. I get the idea that it’s more a cover-your-ass kind of thing than actual medical concern. I was a high-profile pregnant FBI agent who’d been the victim of torture and amputation. They’d probably thought they’d hang high if something went wrong.
“You sure about this?” Tommy asks, after helping me into the car. Bonnie sits in the back, watchful and silent.
“I have to start doing something, Tommy, or I’m going to lose it. Take me home, and then take me to work.”
Leo had been the final straw. I visited him yesterday. He lay on his bed, eyes staring at nothing. He was being fed by a tube. Various automated indignities dealt with his bodily functions. I met his girlfriend. “Hi,” she said to me. “I’m Christa.”
I didn’t know what to say, but I recognized what she needed. I opened my arms and took her in.
She let me have some time by myself with Leo. I stared down at him, crushed by numbness and self-loathing and a sense of being filthy, which I couldn’t seem to get rid of. “I’m so sorry, Leo,” I said. It was all I could come up with. What was I supposed to say? I’d traded him for myself and my child, and he’d never even known it. He’d probably gone to his oblivion still thinking I was a friend to be trusted. I leaned over to kiss his forehead. It was warm and dry, like living paper. “I’m going to find him and I’m going to kill him, Leo. I promise.”
I walked out remembering the other promise too, the one Leo had dragged from me.
We get home and enter. It feels surreal. No, that’s not right. It feels unreal. The cell is still more palpable to me than this. It renews my hatred.
“Want some coffee?” Bonnie asks, watching me. I recognize this kind of behavior from the time after my assault by Sands. She’s worried that I’ll fall apart right in front of her. Who knows? Maybe I will.
“That’d be wonderful, babe. I haven’t had coffee in a month.”
Her eyes darken a bit at this reference, and I regret it immediately. She braves a smile of assent and goes off to brew the pot. Tommy stands by a window again. Staring off at something I can’t see.
I wish I could reach him. The distance isn’t cold, it isn’t like that. He is here. I feel his love. But there’s some part of him that is in an elsewhere place.
“Tommy? Did you get the ibuprofen?”
He jolts back to the here and now, chagrined. “Sorry, yeah. I got it this morning. Be right back.” He jogs up the stairs.
“Here’s the coffee, Mama-Smoky,” Bonnie says, bringing it to me. I accept and sip. “Heavenly,” I say to her.
And it is.
Tommy reappears
with a bottle of Advil. The doctors had offered me Percocet, but I declined because of the baby. I don’t even like taking the ibuprofen, but the pain is just too constant and gnawing.
“How many?” he asks.
“Two.”
He opens the bottle and gives me the pills. “You want water?”
“I’ll drink them with the coffee.”
I pop them and sip my coffee. It won’t help much, but that’s okay. I welcome a little bit of pain. It keeps my mind on my goal. Killing Dali. “You hungry?” he asks.
“No, I ate at the hospital. The old line about hospital food is kind of becoming a myth. I had a few good meals there.”
He nods but says nothing. He gazes off again. The distance widens. I stand up, coffee in my hand.
“Come upstairs with me, Tommy. Help me get dressed.”
“So, what’s going on?” I ask him, after closing the door.
“What do you mean?”
I move into him. He takes me in his arms and hugs me close, careful of my finger. It feels good, but it also feels empty. I disengage a little, looking up at him. “I mean this. You’re here, I’m not arguing that. But you’re somewhere else too.”
He steps away gently. He tries to avert his eyes before I can see the struggle there.
“I …” He frowns. “I’m not used to having trouble with my words.”
I sit down on the bed, pat the space next to me. He follows my lead. I study his profile as he studies the wall.
“I’m trying to figure out how to get rid of all this anger, Smoky. I’m coming to the conclusion that the only solution is killing the man who took you away from us. That bothers me on some level, but maybe not as much as it should.” He shakes his head. “I’m not Kirby. If I cross this line, it might have consequences for me. That’s what’s on my mind.”
I reach over and take his hand. “I feel the same way. I’m just not conflicted about it.”
He looks at me—really looks at me—for what seems like the first time. “Why not? How’d you get there?”
“I got there because a man came into my home a few years ago and stole my life and my face. Not long after that, another man almost killed Callie, and that same man then took Bonnie and held her hostage while he watched me cut my face for him.” I grip his hand. “In spite of all that, do you know what lets me sleep at night? What gives me just a little bit of comfort?”
“No.”
“That both of those men are dead. That I killed them. That’s the penalty from now on, Tommy. Mess with my family and you die.”
“Even if it means murder?”
“Even if.”
It occurs to me that we could part ways right here. This could very well be a moral burden beyond Tommy’s ability to rationalize. He’s not the kind of man built to bend.
He raises my hand to his lips and kisses it. “I can live with that.”
Then he does the last thing I’d ever expect. He cries. It’s a soundless expression of grief, just tears pattering against my skin. It transfixes me. I feel as though I am witnessing something that shouldn’t be allowed by nature, like a black sun, or a child with a knife in his hand and a grin on his face.
It ends as quickly as it began. He kisses my hand again, dries his face with two swipes of his hand, and stands up.
“What do you want to wear?”
He helps me dress when I need help. He gets my backup gun from the gun safe. He finishes by presenting me with my cell phone.
“Dali left it with you, along with your FBI ID. The techs checked it. It’s clean.”
“Thanks.”
I look at myself in the mirror. My face crumples in dismay. “I’m ugly!”
He’s standing behind me, and he cups each side of my bald head with a calloused but loving palm. He kisses the very top of my head. “You’re alive. The hair will grow back. And you’re never ugly.” He steps away and checks his watch. “We should get moving. I’ll meet you downstairs.”
I’m left alone with my reflection. His words are both inadequate and more than I need. The dismay is visceral; it will always be the first thing I feel until the hair grows back, but Tommy’s words will follow in my mind and bring me comfort. That and the tears he cried for me, which I know we’ll never talk about again. They were a gift, something to treasure, something else to kill for.
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
“Honey-love!”
“Boss woman!”
“Smoky!”
Only James is silent, but his gaze lingers longer than usual. His version of a welcome, I suppose.
Alan’s arm is in a sling. Dali had been kind to him, just two bullets—one in the shoulder, one in the upper chest. Which leads me to wonder: kind to him, but not to me? Why? He knew Alan’s wounds weren’t fatal. Why tease me with the possibility?
“Not sure the chrome-dome look works for you, she-boss,” Kirby says, giving me a critical eye. “Too much fish-belly white.”
“Kirby,” Callie chides. Surreality—Callie preventing someone from giving me a hard time.
“Relax, Callie,” I say. “I’m not that fragile.”
Not while the lights are on, at least.
“Well,” Callie says.
Kirby punches Callie’s arm. “She was worried about you, that’s all. Big old softy, just as I suspected.”
“Hit me again, and we’ll see how soft I am,” Callie sniffs, tossing her hair back.
Kirby grins. “That’s my cue. I had to say hi and watch the entrance. I’ll go check on my guys now.” She stops as she’s walking by me and gives me a bump with her hip. “Maybe we’ll start calling you Nine-Finger Barrett, boss lady. Whatcha think?” She is out the door before I can offer a reply.
I’m left alone now with my team. Somberness sets in. Kirby is liked, but she’s not one of us. Time for our true faces to come out.
“Too bad about the kid,” Alan offers.
Callie sighs. “Leo was turning into a good man.”
“We won’t give him justice by talking about it,” James says, razoring over us with an impatience that’s just a little too raw. I look at him and I catch what I think is a spark of grief in his eyes. There, then gone. “Let’s find the man who did this to him. You’re our best and newest witness. What can you tell us about him?”
I will tell you everything but the one thing, the thing I saw. Why? I don’t know yet. It’s a feeling, something whispering in my subconscious.
“We’re missing something about him, who he is,” I begin. “Contradictions. The car crashes. The fingerprints. Letting Heather Hollister and me walk. If we operate on the assumption that he’s pragmatism personified, then we have to assume that all of those things are purposeful, that they serve a higher aim. The other side of the argument would be that we got it all wrong to begin with.”
I tell them everything I can remember about my incarceration. I leave out the specifics of the sun-drenched meadow and the theological debates with my baby.
“Again,” James muses, “the sadism. Cutting your finger. It’s at odds.”
Alan shrugs. “Maybe not. What he does is pretty damn twisted. Maybe sadism is the altar he’s praying at after all, and the money motivation is just a smoke screen, a way of hiding the truth from everyone. Even himself.”
“Many of them do develop self-deception to an art form,” Callie says.
Except the ones who have no shame about what they are. Nothing I saw painted Dali in that light. He knows what he is, and he’s not worried about the next life.
“None of that is going to get us anywhere right now,” I say. “Let’s focus on what Leo told me. He thought Hollister was the one who tipped Dali off.”
“Sounds like we need to have a little private chat with Hollister,” Alan says.
“Leo also said that we should have a really good computer tech examine whatever server or servers Hollister used at his job. He said we might find something.”
James nods, thoughtful. “Perhaps Dali made a mistake.
It’s almost impossible not to leave any footprints in the digital age. Maybe he knew that and knew his only option was to hide it really, really well, by enlisting the aid of those who could.”
“I don’t follow.”
He waves me off. “Supposition. Let Callie and me get a tech on this. We’ll chase the warrants. You and Alan should go and interview Douglas Hollister.”
“Who died and made you boss?” Alan grouses.
“Am I wrong?”
“No, James,” I say. “It’s the correct division of labor. Let’s get on it.” My cell phone rings. “Barrett,” I answer.
“Who the hell cleared you to get back on the job?” AD Jones.
“That would be me, I guess, sir.”
“Too fucking soon, Smoky.”
“Sir—”
“Get your ass up here.”
I put the phone back into its holster. “I have to see the AD, Alan. I’ll meet you in the lobby.”
“Good luck,” he calls after me.
“Jesus Christ” are AD Jones’s first words when he sees me.
“Just me, sir,” I joke, taking a seat in one of his leather chairs.
He rose as I came through the door. He sits down now. He regards me long enough to make me feel uncomfortable.
“Take a picture, sir. It’ll last longer.”
I get a sour look. “All flippant bullshit aside, Agent, what are you doing back here? I read your debrief, what there was of it. You just finished four weeks of incarceration and torture, culminating in the partial amputation of your little finger. Not to mention that you’re balder than a billiard ball and pregnant to boot.”
“Thanks a lot for that, sir.” I’m losing my sense of humor about the hair loss.
He rubs his face with both hands. Sighs deeply. When he looks at me again, I see a man trying to get himself under control, to be reasonable. “You’re on mandatory leave, Smoky.”
“That won’t stop me, sir.”
Anger rises in his eyes. He tamps it down. “Why?”
“Because I’m not crazy now, but if I don’t work on getting him, I really will be. That’s the bottom-line answer.”
Abandoned: A Thriller Page 35
