by G. M. Ford
Teddy read his mind. “There’s no fucking this up,” he said. “You know how he feels about this. Something goes wrong, it’s our ass on the line here.”
Apparently Harvin agreed. His face was stone as he brought the phone to his ear.
Teddy turned away and walked back across the room. He spoke to Gus.
“Mom and the kids gonna be ready to go on time?” he asked.
Gus nodded. “Mom’s off her meds,” he grumbled. “The move’s got her big-time squirrely. She’s not sure she can handle it behind her meds, so she stopped taking them a couple days ago.” Sensing an impending admonition, Gus held up a restraining hand the size of a waffle iron. “We’ll be ready,” he promised as he moved toward the door.
“Did they tell you where we’re taking them?” Grace asked.
Her mother’s wheelchair was located directly behind the driver’s seat, locked onto the lift platform so she wouldn’t go rolling all over the place.
“Hardwig. That’s all they told me,” Eve said. “A duplex, someplace over by the Garden County line, so we can put the girls in separate school districts. Gus is staying in the other unit, until we’re sure everything’s okay.”
Grace frowned. “Hardwig. What’s that—twenty miles from here?”
“Closer to thirty, I think.”
“Not very far.”
“Better than here,” Eve said with conviction. “Coaltown’s no place for kids.”
“Coaltown’s no place for anybody, but at least it’s safe,” Grace said.
“We’re working on getting something permanent together for them, but Indra says it could be a couple of months. In the meantime, the kids can go back to school, so they won’t get behind. Cassie says the little one . . .”
“Tessa,” Grace filled in.
“I understand she has . . .” Eve hesitated, searching for the correct phrase.
Grace saved her the trouble. “Maddy covers for her,” she said. “That’s why Cassie’s so worried about splitting them up.”
“We leave them together, they’ll be easier for Royster’s people to find. You’ve got to figure they’re running computer searches for every school district in the area, trying to find a pair of sisters who registered recently.” Eve reached down into her wheelchair, pulled up a thick blue folder, and held it up so Grace could see it in the rearview mirror. “We’ve got all new paperwork for them. Absolutely bona fide. School records. Everything. All they’ve got to do is remember their new names.”
Grace made a wry face. “Gus has had them practicing,” she said. “Maddy’s fine. Tessa . . .” Grace pulled a hand from the steering wheel and waggled it. “Tessa needs a little work.”
“Indra says you’ve got a very serious inquiry on the website.”
“She told me,” Grace said.
“No interest?”
A long silence ensued, before Grace said, “You know Mom, I’m starting to wonder about this so-called gift of mine.”
“It’s a gift from God,” Eve said.
Grace barked out a short, dry laugh. “Don’t start the God stuff with me, Mom. You’re about as religious as Scotch Tape.”
“Think about it though, honey. If it weren’t for your gift, you and I wouldn’t be riding along having this conversation.”
“Wish it were that simple,” Grace said. “But, unfortunately, it turns out to be way more complicated than that. These people emerge into a whole new universe. The people they left behind have gone on with their lives. Found new lovers. Learned to cope without them. It never occurred to me that bringing someone back to this world could be every bit as painful and upsetting as losing them had been in the first place. I probably should have thought of it, but I didn’t.”
Another silence. Eve watched the ancient buildings slide by the van window. She recognized the street. They were very nearly at their destination.
“Indra says the family is offering a cool million bucks,” Eve said. “We can help a lot of women with that kind of money.”
Ah—the money. It always came back to the money, didn’t it? Grace hated that. It made even “doing the right thing” somehow feel shoddy. They’d been naive when they’d first started, imagining an endless supply of concerned women clamoring to help save other women from violence. The line, however, was yet to form. Turned out that shielding the innocent from the inadequacies of the court system didn’t come cheap. Even with Mr. K’s patronage, it wouldn’t be possible without a substantial internal cash flow, which, as far as Eve was concerned, was where Grace came into it. Nothing like a little motherly guilt to grease the skids either.
Grace wheeled the van into a narrow courtyard that, according to the peeling red and green sign, had once served as the loading dock for Fields and Sons Foundry.
She set the parking brake, got out and walked around to the sliding door. When she pushed the green button, the hydraulics seemed to shake themselves from sleep, as they slid the wheelchair out through the opening and then slowly lowered the platform to the ground.
Eve rolled herself out onto the uneven bricks. “I’ll go talk to Teddy,” she said. “Why don’t you go see how the girls are doing?”
“This blows goats,” Jerry Robbins said.
His partner Richie squirmed in the driver’s seat but didn’t reply. Way Richie figured it, they were damn lucky they hadn’t gotten fired. Getting spotted by the subject, arrested by the cops, and then needing to be bailed out by the legal department was just about as bad as you could screw up in the security business, so if still having a job meant doing shit work—well then, he’d do shit work for a while.
They had a straight shot down the alley, looking right at the east end of the Yale Street Bridge. Trucks, trucks, and more trucks, most of them hauling garbage. For the past five hours, they’d dutifully written down every plate and truck ID number.
The steel wool skies and a crazy, gusting wind made him glad they were inside the car. An icy northern weather system had blown in overnight. The alley swirled with airborne litter, bits of which ticked against the car windows like intermittent static.
Could have been worse, he supposed. Could have been working on foot, freezing their asses off someplace, so if the brass wanted to teach them a lesson about being sloppy, he was more than willing to put up with it.
Jerry leaned back and closed his eyes. Richie thought about mentioning that they were supposed to be doing surveillance, which worked way better if you had your eyes open, but decided to keep quiet. At least, if he was sleeping, he wasn’t bitching. Small blessings, Richie figured.
So, a couple of minutes later, when Richie spoke, it was more to himself than to Jerry. “I thought they didn’t wear those outfits anymore,” he said.
Jerry cracked an eye. The sight of a pair of old-fashioned nuns flapping up the alley in their direction brought him up straight in the seat. Stop slouching, Mr. Robbins.
God doesn’t like slouchers rang in his ears, as if the words had been trapped in some corner of his skull since childhood, waiting for the right moment to escape. Old habits died hard, he guessed. Old habits . . . ha ha . . . nun joke, he chortled as he straightened his tie.
With Cassie Royster, you never had to wonder. On good days, silence was her only enemy, as if some cosmic station manager had tasked her with making sure there was no dead air in the universe. If she ran out of things to say, she’d say things she’d just said about five minutes earlier, and then haul off and say them again five minutes after that, as if, if she didn’t maintain control of the conversation, she’d be stripped of her right to participate and thus be out of the loop for eternity.
Other days . . . other days, not so much. On those days, she always reminded Grace of that horrible Vietnam-era photograph of the little girl running naked down the middle of the road, screaming in agony. That’s how she seemed. Like she couldn’t wash off whatev
er fiery demons were, moment to moment, incinerating her soul.
Grace knocked tentatively on the bathroom door. Nothing. The vans were loaded. The girls were on board and ready to go. All they were waiting for was word from Teddy that the Yale Street Bridge was cleared. That and collecting Cassie Royster. Grace knocked again. Same result.
From forty yards away, Cassie Royster looked like a million other middle-aged women. When you got up close, though, a couple of things immediately caught the eye. First off, it didn’t take much imagination to see what a stunner she once had been. The big blue eyes and the good cheekbones. Even with a bit of middle-aged spread, she was nicely shaped and still rather attractive.
Second thing you picked up on was that she didn’t think so. That this was a person who wasn’t sure about much of anything, least of all about herself. A person who spent a lot of time worrying about what other people thought of her and whether or not she was going to prove capable of handling whatever came next in her life. Must be a terrible way to live, Grace had thought on several occasions.
Grace knocked again, then tried the door. The door swung inward.
The bathroom was empty. Grace called out, “Cassie?” No response, just the brittle echo of her voice against the tile. Grace peeked under the stall. Nobody home.
She could feel the cold stab of fear rising in her chest as she hurried back out into the main room and looked around. No Cassie Royster. She called again. Nothing. She raced around, checking the bedrooms and the kitchen, peering under beds and into closets. Nothing. She was gone.
Both apartments, as they called them, were built inside much larger buildings. The apartment where Grace and Eve lived was at the extreme southern end of the island, looking out over Strander Avenue from the Coaltown side of the river, housed in the same refurbished complex as the Biosystems corporate offices, although even a careful perusal of the building’s blueprints gave no hint of its presence.
This apartment had been custom built for the Women’s Transitional Center to use as a safe house for displaced families. All very chic and suburban, an oasis of good bedding, stainless steel, and granite, built inside a condemned hundred-year-old building. The whole thing welded directly to the freestanding elevator shaft. Completely self-contained and invisible from the street. The entire building could have collapsed around it without so much as rattling a knickknack. The only way in or out was by means of the freight elevator directly across from the apartment’s front door.
Grace’s heart rose to her throat as she imagined Cassie Royster stumbling around the dilapidated section of the building. She’d only seen it once. Back when Teddy had shown them the apartment for the first time. Looked like something out of a dreary Victorian novel. Parts of the exterior walls missing altogether, collapsed ceilings, four-story deadfalls where the floors had rotted away, an ankle-breaking collection of rusting machine parts and broken glass underfoot, the crunching of which was punctuated by the scrabbling scratch of unseen claws. Grace shuddered at the memory.
Grace pushed the elevator button. Then pushed it again. The ancient mechanism groaned piteously. The car began to rise. Seemed like it took an hour to get to her and another to get her back to ground level.
She hurried out to the courtyard. Gus was behind the wheel of the van. Her mother was in back with the girls. Gus picked it up right away. The big boy was positively prescient that way. Real sensitive as to what was going on around him.
He got out of the van, closing the door behind himself. Walked over close to Grace, so they wouldn’t have to shout. “Problem?”
“Cassie’s missing,” Grace said.
“Missing how?”
“She’s not in the apartment.”
Grace could practically see the wheels turning inside his head. He looked back toward the van. Grace read his mind. “Mom can handle the girls,” she said.
Gus turned away and began to whisper into his phone.
The nuns used their voluminous sleeves to protect their faces from the swirling airborne debris that filled the alley. They look like Muslim women, Jerry thought. Nothin’ showin’ but their eyes.
Jerry and Richie watched in amused wonder as the nuns split up, one of them heading for each side of the car. Richie pushed the button. The window began to descend. He forced a smile and leaned his head out.
He was about to speak to the approaching sister when a sudden flat sound hijacked his attention. Sounded like Jerry farted. He looked toward the passenger seat in stunned disbelief. We got a pair of serious-ass nuns walkin’ up to the car and this moron’s cuttin’ the cheese?
Took Richie’s central nervous system an extra couple of seconds to process the blossoming red flower spreading over the side of Jerry’s head. He watched in open-mouthed horror as his partner’s limp body began to slump in his direction.
Wasn’t till Jerry was heeled over as far as the seatbelt would permit that Richie noticed the neat little hole in the passenger-side window. The breath caught in his throat as he watched the flower’s petals begin to drop on the center console—rich, red droplets spreading over the leather like brain syrup.
He turned his head slowly back the other way. Seemingly in no hurry, almost as if some innate survival sense knew exactly where this exit led and wasn’t in any hurry to make the trip. He drew in an enormous breath, as if to shout, perhaps, or scream, or beg for his life. He still hadn’t decided which, when the bullet took out his front teeth and began banging around inside his skull. He fell forward onto the steering wheel. The horn began to blow. A tattooed hand reached in the window and pushed him over sideways. The horn stopped blaring. Except for the spreading red puddle, Richie and Jerry looked for all the world to be locked in a passionate embrace. Before walking off, the sister on the passenger side bowed her head slightly and made the sign of the cross.
Grace stayed close to the wall, trying to avoid the dark, rotting patches at the center of the floor. She called out “Cassie” as she moved deeper into the room. Occasionally she thought she heard other voices, on other floors, calling Cassie’s name. Gus had mustered a full-scale search party in under ten minutes. Everybody’d been assigned a floor to search and the hunt had begun.
She kept inching forward, moving past the last set of windows. Past the final shaft of dirty light throwing its likeness along the floor. Back toward the shadows where the light never ventured. “Cassie,” she called.
The room was immense. Some kind of long-ago heavy manufacturing plant. Overhead, a rusted set of rails ran the length of the space, supported at intervals by crossbeams resting on rough stone columns. What appeared to be a set of boxcar wheels were rusted in place at the near end. Here and there, loops of heavy chain drooped toward the floor like iron vines. Everything designed to support great weight. Grace imagined she could feel the tonnage pressing down on her as she moved along.
“Cassie,” she called again. The idea of Cassie Royster negotiating a landscape such as this filled Grace with terror. At best, the woman was inattentive. At worst, completely oblivious to her surroundings. Prone to fits of mindless fancy. Likely to dispense with the look and get right to the leap. Grace trembled as she slid forward.
The sound of movement pulled her attention to the back corner of the room. Down low. Red eyes—maybe a dozen of them—looking right at her. Her skin began to crawl as she inched closer. She stamped her foot and shouted. They held their ground.
She shuffled forward again. One of them got up on its hind legs and hissed at her. She shouted again. Nothing. She could see them now. Rodents the size of schnauzers, none of them the least bit impressed with Grace’s feeble attempts at intimidation.
She brought her foot down hard—onto thin air. She teetered for a long moment, scratching at the wall, seeking purchase—any purchase—but finding none.
Mickey Dolan caught the call on his way to the station house. Eight forty-five in the a.m., he was driving wi
th one hand, using a matchbook cover to pry a piece of breakfast sausage out from between his teeth, when the radio snapped, crackled, and popped. “One eighty-seven. Two. I repeat, two. Fourteen hundred block of Wentworth. Emergency services en route.” Pregnant pause and then the message started over. “One eighty-seven . . .”
Homicides. A double. Over by the riverfront. Normally, when they got a double, it was some kind of domestic beef. Usually a Mom and Pop. A shoot-the-wife-and-then-blow-your-own-brains-out-thus-eliminating-that-pesky-“go-to-prison” kind of thing. But not in that neighborhood. That neighborhood was wall-to-wall industrial. Nobody lived within twenty blocks of that end of Wentworth. Too dark and dank. No stores. No gas stations. No nothing. But, above all, way too close to Coaltown for anybody’s comfort.
Mickey zoomed over into the right-hand lane, hung a hard right onto Pulaski Street and put his foot into it. His hand instinctively reached for the siren, but he stopped himself. You never knew. The perps might still be around.
Took him four tire-squealing minutes to reach the scene. By that time, half a dozen police cruisers were strewn haphazardly about Wentworth Street, blocking the way. Pulsing red and white lights bounced around the bricks. The static crackle of unattended radios scratched at the morning air as Dolan stepped out of the car.
Down here, by the river, the air was cold and angry, seemingly blowing in all directions at once. Mickey turned up his collar and started hoofing it down the street.
A small army of uniforms was huddled around a black Lexus coupe, peering in the car windows like it was full of naked cheerleaders. As Dolan approached, one of the uniforms caught a glimpse of him and quickly started his way.
Mickey took out his gold shield and hung it around his neck. The long gold chain had belonged to his father. The uniform stopped walking.
“Waiting for the lab, Sergeant . . .” he said defensively as Mickey approached. Mickey didn’t recognize the guy. “Dolan,” Mickey filled in. “Sergeant Michael Dolan. Set a two-block perimeter around the scene. No one in. No one out. Call dispatch and get as many units as it takes, but seal this damn place off.”
