“You’re alive.” I was truly sobbing now, unable to chase away the image of him falling to his knees. “How are you alive?”
He leaned away from me and unbuttoned his shirt at the top. A bulletproof vest covered his torso, and there were two ragged marks where Simon’s bullets had hit him.
“Oh my God.” I leaned my forehead on his shoulder, oblivious to the cold. “I thought you were gone.”
“Well, I already knew he aims for the chest.”
We smiled at each other in the freezing water. All around us, things were burning. The yacht was overturned, half of its hull splintered. Deck cushions floated by on fire. A miniature bottle of vodka bobbed in the choppy water.
“Nice shot,” I said.
“You trusted me.”
“Of course I did.”
He pulled out his knife, bringing it up through the water, then ducked below to cut the ties around my legs. The handcuffs fell off a moment later—he’d picked the locks. I let them sink.
“Where’s the speedboat?”
He gestured toward a burning hunk of yacht decking to our right. It had centerpunched the smaller boat and cracked the hull in two.
“That’s unfortunate,” I said.
“Come on. We’ve only got a few more minutes in this water before we both get hypothermia.”
I kicked for the dock, relieved to be able to use my limbs again. As we swam, more fragments of the boat surfaced, shattered plexiglass hull fragments and splintered teak decking. Then Simon’s body bobbed up amid the wreckage. I couldn’t look—I didn’t want to know if he’d died from the explosion or drowned. I didn’t want to see if fire had made a wreck of his face.
“You don’t need to see,” Jackson said.
“But what should we do?”
“Leave him.” His voice was hard. “We don’t owe him anything.”
* * *
We spent the night on Alcatraz.
I felt like I deserved a T-shirt.
After we pulled ourselves, dripping, exhausted and freezing, onto the dock, we broke into the guest bathrooms near the gift shop and cleaned up as best we could. It was the first time I’d seen myself since this whole ordeal started, and it was worse than I’d imagined. My hair was a frizzy disaster, and my clothes made me look like a reject from a zombie movie casting call.
We met back outside, neither of us looking that much better. Jackson took off his own shirt—one of his ubiquitous striped button-ups, now made more interesting by bullet holes—and wrapped me in it. It did a fair job of covering the bloodstains, and it was dry. He must have used his power to warm it. He stood in his thin white T-shirt in the cold, rubbing my arms through the fabric while a slow, gentle warmth bloomed all over my skin. He was drying my jeans and socks.
“Thank you,” I said, but he was looking at the blood on my shirt.
“It’s not mine,” I said, knowing he wanted to ask. “It’s Paulie’s.”
Jackson closed his eyes. “I should have wondered what happened to him. I was so focused on finding you.”
“Simon killed him.” I told him the whole gruesome story, including the part about Bridget. “I feel responsible. I kept neutralizing him...I should have seen how dependent he was getting.”
Jackson’s hands tightened on my shoulders. “No. This was not your fault.”
“I’m still sorry.”
“I know. I’m sorry too.”
Jackson’s cell phone was waterlogged beyond repair, and mine was still back at the cabin. No one knew where we were. Jackson had taken Simon seriously when he’d said he’d kill me if anyone else showed up.
“Marooned on a prison island no one’s ever escaped.” He looked over the dark, choppy water.
“Someone will come looking for us eventually, right?”
“I think our best bet is the morning tourist ferry.”
We decided to spend the night in the old prison cafeteria. It wasn’t warm, exactly, but it was protected from the worst of the wind. We huddled together under the prop blanket from my former cell, and eventually I fell asleep against Jackson’s warm, broad chest to the sound of the water and the creaks and groans of the old building.
I didn’t know whether he’d slept, but when the sound of footsteps and clanging metal woke me, he was already awake.
“Park rangers,” he said. “We should get out of sight.”
“Crap.” I gathered up the blanket and followed him out of a side door in the adjacent cell block. The wind was bitingly cold, and we waited on a small concrete pad just out of sight while the thud of footsteps and the click of light switches sounded in the empty room. I held my breath, sure we’d be discovered, but the footsteps faded.
“What now?” I whispered.
“We wait for the tourists.” Jackson grinned.
It took a little while—and the wind only grew colder—but eventually, I heard the unmistakable sound of a herd of tourists clomping and chattering through the cavernous space.
“There they are,” Jackson said. “Shall we join them?” As if we were meeting friends for brunch.
“I have been meaning to come here.”
“Well, now’s your chance. I think we have about thirty seconds to look like we belong with the group.”
I almost laughed. Jackson’s hair had a geography all its own. Mine was probably much worse. Our clothes were wrinkled and stiff with dried seawater. I didn’t want to contemplate how we smelled. I smiled.
“Ready?” I asked.
“Always.”
We left the blanket where it was and slipped back through the door. A man with a set of audio tour headphones gave us a disapproving look, but we ignored him and pretended to take in an informational plaque about infamous Alcatraz prisoners. When the group began to wander out again, we fell into step with them.
Back at the dock, a small swarm of Coast Guard boats told me that the night’s events had not gone unnoticed. But no one stopped us as we boarded the ferry and found seats in a corner. Once we were underway, Jackson bought coffees and pastries from the snack bar with a couple of still-damp bills.
“Your dad is probably worried out of his mind,” I said as I devoured my pastry.
“Probably,” Jackson said. “He’ll live.”
Despite his cavalier tone, James was the first person he called—collect, from what must have been the city’s last working pay phone—as soon as we got to dry land. James arrived so quickly, I thought he must have already been in his SUV, circling the city and looking for his son.
I sat in the back while Jackson explained what had happened. Everything was catching up to me. My entire body ached from all the times I’d fallen on hard floors. Every time I closed my eyes I saw blood. Paulie’s, Simon’s. I saw Bridget’s face and Jackson’s body on the dock. There were raw spots on my ankles and wrists, and even I could tell how badly I smelled. I wanted to go home, take a scalding shower and burn everything I was wearing. I wanted to eat something comforting, like Lionel’s chicken and dumplings or an entire batch of chocolate chip cookies. I wanted to read a funny romance novel and forget the past forty-eight hours ever happened. But I fell asleep in the back of the Escalade, my face slumped against the window.
When I woke up, I was in Jackson’s bed. Someone had brought me up here, changed my clothes. My hands were clean, and so were my legs. There were bandages on the raw spots around my ankles. I was ravenous.
From the sound of things, there was another council of war going on in the living room. I got out of bed and went out to the living room to find Jackson, James, Sebastian, Malik and Bridget all drinking coffee.
“Mina!” Bridget stood up so fast she spilled coffee on her hands. “You’re all right.”
I hugged her back. “You’re okay too.”
“She was half
way to Mexico by the time I caught up with her,” Malik said.
“I’m so sorry, Bridge. He was going to kill you if I didn’t do it.”
“No, no, no, it was all my fault. I should have known it was weird, him asking me to look for you like that. I never should have let him manipulate me like that.” Her voice grew uncharacteristically hard.
“The way I see it, you saved my life,” I said. “Who knows what Paulie would have done.”
Sebastian had been released that morning when the San Francisco Police Department had been unable to find any record whatsoever of a warrant for his arrest. He’d promised not to sue the officer who’d arrested him, and it was all smoothed over as a case of mistaken identity. But if Simon hadn’t already been dead, I had no doubt Sebastian would have killed him. It was odd to hear that many expletives come out of the mouth of a man who looked like an angel.
“By the way,” Sebastian said. “If anyone asks, you two are FBI.” He pointed at James and Jackson.
“Impressive,” James said.
“You owe me.”
Someone had made breakfast, and I helped myself to a plate while the conversation swirled around me. James was being tasked with rounding up the remaining dealers. Charlie had become highly cooperative once it was clear that was the only way he’d ever see daylight again, and we had everything from their home addresses to their mothers’ maiden names. But the drugs themselves were a different story.
Once everyone had eaten, we split up to search for Simon’s base of operations. Jackson and I drew his apartment. We spent most of the morning searching the place—a spacious two-bedroom in a gorgeous old Victorian—but all we found was his collection of high-end electronics and expensive furniture. No cash, no pills, no mad scientist lab.
Sebastian hadn’t turned up anything in a storage unit he was keeping, either. It was, surprisingly, full of the kinds of things most storage units contained, books and furniture and a barely used home treadmill. Our next stop was the speakeasy.
Four of us—Sebastian and Malik and Jackson and I—split up and searched the warren of tunnels connected to the underground bar. Jackson and I started in the main stockroom, peering behind the shelves and looking for anything out of place. It was as disorganized as ever, but it didn’t seem to be hiding any secrets. We left it behind and walked down the hallway.
There were half a dozen doors in the tunnel walls, and Jackson picked the locks on the ones that were secured. Most were old storage rooms, tangles of wires for the speakeasy’s convoluted and illegal electrical system, a hot water heater and, near the end of the tunnel, a huge room full of canned goods and dry rations, all from the fifties and covered in dust.
“Holy shit,” I said. “Has this all been sitting here that long?”
“Probably.” Jackson peered at a tin of baked beans, the label still bright. “Looks like it hasn’t been touched.”
“Ugh. Let’s keep it that way.”
We left the storeroom and walked back down the tunnel, but my hopes were pinned on Sebastian and Malik. If Simon had a supplier, it was going to be a lot harder to make sure we’d shut down the drug supply for good. We had enough pills from the stash in Conner’s safe deposit box to wean off everyone who’d gotten addicted—we didn’t need another wave of dealers.
I ran my hands along the wall as I went. We were in a cinderblock section, and I grew accustomed to the regular frequency of the blocks and the mortar between them. Otherwise, I would have missed it.
It was only a tiny gap, a kind of ledge where one cinderblock was higher than the other. I stopped and ran my fingers down to the floor. The crack was remarkably free of dust, and the gap was the same from block to block. I looked back at Jackson, who’d stopped to watch me. I put my shoulder against the raised section and shoved. It didn’t move. I backed up, considered the wall and shoved against the adjacent block.
The whole thing slid inward a quarter inch.
“Help me,” I said to Jackson, heart pounding with possibility. He was already getting to his knees in front of the spot.
“On three,” he said, and he counted. This time, when I shoved, the section of blocks moved inward, revealing a narrow hole in the tunnel wall. Jackson created a light orb and sent it bobbing into the space, illuminating cobwebbed corners and layers of dirt. In the dirt, though, were the imprints of many sets of shoes running in both directions.
“Pay dirt?” I said.
“Let’s find out.”
Jackson’s light preceded us as we ducked and waddled through the tunnel. It was a good thing I wasn’t prone to claustrophobia. It went on for several yards before it opened up into a larger room with enough space to stand. The entrance to the tunnel appeared to have been hacked out of the drywall inside. Jackson let the light blink out—the space was already brilliantly lit.
It took me several minutes to take in what I was seeing. The room was like a bizarre underground greenhouse. There were rows and rows of stunted bushes under rows and rows of buzzing lights. A system of plastic tubing ran beneath them in a web. The place must draw a mansion’s worth of electricity. It smelled of earth and mold and growing things, with a sharp chemical odor underneath.
“I’m going to get Seb,” Jackson said.
I nodded, still dumbstruck.
While I waited, I walked through the rows of plants and found a second room, a kind of makeshift lab set up on folding card tables. There were jugs labeled sulfuric, industrial size boxes of baking soda, rolls of mesh-like cloth, blenders, clear glass bottles in strange shapes. On one table sat a thing that looked like a meat slicer but turned out on closer inspection to be a pill press. He’d been extracting the stuff himself.
The rooms themselves were obviously older than the speakeasy. The walls were crumbling plaster, and mold decorated the ceiling. But underneath the sheets of plastic tarp that lined the floor, I saw planks of golden hardwood flooring. Near the ceiling were the remains of decorative plaster molds, some crumbling, but some still intact. I peered behind a shelving unit stacked with glassware and found a mural painted right into the stucco.
“That son of a bitch.”
I looked up to see Sebastian, Malik and Jackson close behind him. He looked like he’d had some trouble getting through the narrow tunnel—his wings were covered in dust and cobwebs. And he looked furious.
“What was this place?” I said.
“It’s an original,” Sebastian said, his voice uncharacteristically soft. “This was one of the first real speakeasies in the city.” He put a hand flat on the wall. The rest of us were quiet, watching him, and then he exploded into action.
The table of plants closest to him went over with a crash. He ripped the irrigation system out like a lion tearing the entrails from a wildebeest. Water sprayed everywhere; soil and shattered plastic littered the floor. The next table went, and then the next. The lights went out as he tore extension cords out of outlets. There was silence for a moment, and Jackson conjured up an orb of light. It illuminated Sebastian, fuming and stone-still in the middle of the destruction.
“Burn it,” he said. “All of it.”
“Will do,” Jackson said.
* * *
After we’d cleaned up the remains of Simon’s drug operation, we went to the bar and drank some of Simon’s liquor. The speakeasy was closed—had been for days—and I didn’t like seeing it dark and lifeless.
“Who’s going to run this place now?” I asked.
“Interesting you should ask,” Sebastian said. He’d calmed down considerably since he’d lost it in Simon’s indoor garden. The bags of trash we’d hauled out of the place had seemed to cheer him up. We’d found a second entrance, probably the original, but it had caved in at some point, and the passage was blocked with crumbled cinder blocks and earth. We’d decided to leave it as it was.
Malik
leaned forward on the bar and rocked his glass of whiskey back and forth. “Simon didn’t exactly have a last will and testament. We’ve been talking...” he shot sideways glances at Seb and Jackson. “What about you?”
“Me?”
“I don’t see Jackson taking it over, and he’s the only other logical option.”
“But it should be you,” I said to Malik. “I don’t get it. You’ve been running this place—why not you?”
He grimaced and rubbed his shaved head. “That’s the thing—I got a new job. I’m presenting my thesis in December, and this local nonprofit wants to take me on to run their equal housing program. Lobbying and writing policy—all that stuff. Sheree’s got another year in her residency, and we’re thinking we want to stay. If we can swing it.” He tapped my shoulder. “Somebody’s gotta take this place over, and I think it should be you.”
“You’d have free rein,” Sebastian said. “I didn’t charge Simon rent, just fifteen percent of the profits.” I goggled at him, and he shrugged. “My job’s easier when there’s a place for shadowminds to congregate. Helps me keep tabs.” He smiled in his predatory way.
“I don’t know.” I looked around at the sea of bottles behind the bar, the bar gun, the CO2 canisters, the chest fridge stocked with beer. “This is a lot to take on.”
“Hello?” Malik said. “Haven’t you been running your uncle’s B&B since you were twelve or something?”
“That’s different.”
“It’s close enough.”
I looked at Jackson. He hadn’t spoken yet, but he was smiling.
“What do I have to lose?”
* * *
When I got back to Jackson’s place that night, there was a note on the coffee table that simply said Roof. Puzzled, I picked it up and set down my purse. I’d spent all day closeted with Malik and Sebastian, taking notes on things like standing liquor orders, electricity bills and who we knew on the San Francisco police force. It was going to be complicated.
I was going to love it.
Jackson and I had planned to have dinner—a celebration, he said, of my new business. So I picked up the note, walked out of the condo and took the stairs to the roof.
Broken Shadows Page 30
