by Barry Lyga
“Me?”
But Hughes was already out the door, barking for a car.
It had rained the evening before, then paused. As Hughes pulled up to U-STORE-IT-ALL, the rain—of course—decided to pick up again.
There was an ambulance parked near the gate into the facility, as well as several NYPD cruisers. A uniformed cop in an NYPD poncho hustled over to Hughes as soon as he got out of the car and introduced herself.
“Finley. Natalie Finley. Ambo arrived about a half hour ago. When the EMTs got to the security desk, they saw the dead guard and called it in.” Officer Finley chewed at her bottom lip. “Detective, I know there’s supposed to be a hurt kid in there, but I didn’t think—given the circumstances and all—that I should let the EMTs inside. I don’t—”
“You did the right thing, Finley. Show me the guard.”
Finley walked him over to the glassed-in guard booth.
Within, the guard was slumped over toward the speaking grille set in his window. His tie dangled through the little slot where patrons could pass money or keys. Hughes could imagine it step-by-step, after years of homicide work—someone had goaded or tricked the guard into leaning forward. Just enough. And then that someone reached through, grabbed the tie…
Pulled hard enough and long enough to cut off the oxygen to the brain. To knock the guy out. And then kept it up.
He went over to the gate and ordered the assembled uniforms to man a perimeter and secure any other exits.
“Open the gate,” he ordered, and it rumbled open.
Jasper, what have you done?
Before he could enter, Finley came to his side. “I’m going with you,” she said.
Hughes shrugged and unholstered his sidearm. Finley, after a moment, did the same, and they stepped into U-STORE-IT-ALL.
A map on the wall just inside identified each building and its attendant units. They had no trouble making their way to unit 83F. They took their time, though, padding quietly through the corridors, weapons drawn, guiding each other around corners and through shadowy spots.
In the corridor outside unit 83F, Hughes spotted blood on the floor. The padlock to the unit was unlocked, hooked through the loop that held the door shut.
Finley gestured and Hughes nodded. He stood off to one side, his weapon up. Finley grasped the padlock.
Hughes nodded again.
Finley lifted the lock out of the loop silently, then placed it on the floor. Her weapon steady in one hand, she crouched down and used her free hand to fling the door upward into the ceiling. It rattled and screeched all the way.
Over the noise, Hughes boomed, “NYPD! POLICE! DON’T MOVE!”
The storage unit was lit from within by a lantern. A stench rolled out and Finley—not as accustomed to the smell of death—gagged, but (Hughes noted) she never let her weapon waver.
“Jesus Christ!” Hughes exclaimed. It was a bloodbath in there. Three bodies that he could see, with bloody drag tracks leading in and out and across the breadth of the unit.
He absorbed it all in an instant, with the practiced eye of a longtime homicide cop. There was Oliver Belsamo, propped up against a workbench, quite dead, his face and mouth a blasted eruption of gore.
And there. Ah, God. Poor Jennifer Morales. No wonder she hadn’t answered the calls. Damn it. Dead as dead could be, her life snuffed out in a crappy, filthy storage unit.
She deserved better.
Under Finley’s watchful eye, Hughes edged into the storage unit. The third body.
Jasper Dent.
Hughes stared for a long moment, and then Dent’s eyes fluttered open.
Rage flooded every muscle, every vessel, every cell of Hughes’s body. He had told Dent! He had warned him about taking the law into his own hands! Damn it, he had warned him in no uncertain terms, and here was Dent with a dead serial killer and a dead FBI agent.
Yeah. She deserved much, much better.
“However you want to play it,” Finley said quietly.
Hughes’s weapon was still up, aimed between Jasper Dent’s eyes. Those same eyes flickered to Morales’s body and then back to the barrel of the gun.
“Give me one good reason,” Hughes said, “why I shouldn’t put a bullet in you.”
Jasper said nothing. He licked his lips.
When he spoke, his voice was a dead croak, ripped from his throat.
“I can’t,” he said.
They stared at each other over the gun. The rest of the world—the storage unit, Finley, the bodies—went away. It was just the two of them. And the gun.
At last, Hughes said, “Goddamn it. That’s the one thing you could say to save your life.” And lowered his gun.
Part Two
Escape Routes
CHAPTER 14
Jazz opened his eyes to a hospital room. He swallowed and suffered a sensation not unlike gravel going down.
In movies and on TV shows, there was always a doctor or a nurse conveniently standing nearby when a patient woke up, but Jazz was alone. He considered getting up, but even the thought of it exhausted him. Sunlight streamed through the window. The rain had passed. Jazz wondered what day it was. How long he’d been asleep. Had they put him under?
His leg no longer hurt. He lifted the sheet covering him and peered down there. Billy’s sutures were gone, replaced by a similar, neat row of new ones. A tube jutted from his leg. A drain for infection, no doubt. Jazz also realized that he was hooked up to not one but two IV bags. Fluids and antibiotics, he guessed.
How long would he be laid up? Connie was in Billy’s hands. Mom was out there, somewhere. He couldn’t waste time in a hospital bed.
“He’s awake!”
Jazz hadn’t even heard the door open. A youngish man in a white lab coat who looked like he needed two or three nights of good sleep sauntered to the bedside, consulting an iPad. “How do you feel?”
“How long have I been out?” Jazz rasped, surprised by the grit in his voice.
“Someone’s got a pond’s worth of frogs in his throat!” the doctor exclaimed. Dr. Meskovich, according to the embroidery on his lapel. Jazz figured he wasn’t going to like Dr. Meskovich. He had little use for bedside manner.
Meskovich poured Jazz a glass of water from a jug on the bed’s rollaway tray. Jazz gulped it, then tried again.
“How long have I been out? Have the police caught Billy? Is—”
“Ease off, weary warrior.” Meskovich grinned in what Jazz found to be a thoroughly annoying fashion. “You had a hell of a night. Nice sutures, though. Do ’em yourself? If so, props to you. But you were just chock-full of infection, so we’re pumping you up with antibiotics, and you’ll need a script for them when you leave. You allergic to anything? Penicillin, maybe? Because we didn’t have any information when you came in, so we went safe and didn’t use any of the cillins, but I’d prefer to give you—”
Hell of a night. So maybe ten or twelve hours, then, since Hughes rescued him. Jazz figured the doctor would blather for a while and started tuning him out. He tried bending his left leg, and it seemed to work. Of course, he was probably pumped full of narcotics. If he’d been out only since the previous night, then Billy had had Connie for only a few hours. Which meant nothing—in a few hours, Billy could do things to Connie that could never be repaired. And how had he gotten ahold of her, anyway? The last time Jazz had spoken to her, she’d been in the Nod. And where was his mother? Billy had a picture of her, so he knew where she was. Oh, God—both of them in Billy’s hands. In ten or twelve hours, the things Billy could do to the two of them…
“—only in the OR for about an hour. Fortunately for you, the bullet missed the femur and the big blood vessels, so at the end of the day it was easier just to leave it in—”
That got his attention. “Wait a second. Did you say you left it in? It’s still in there?”
Dr. Meskovich nodded. “Sure. It’s not hurting anything. The body forms a protective cyst around it. You’re a young guy—there’ll be some pain
for a little while, but we can manage that. You’ll limp a bit, but that’ll go away, too, after some time.”
Jazz stared. He couldn’t believe it. “You’re never taking it out?”
“Trust me—there’s a better chance we’d do more damage poking around in there for it. It’s a little tiny thing, and it’s nestled close to stuff you don’t want me mangling. You’ll be fine. You have no idea how many bullets I’ve left in people, and they’re all still walking around. Makes for a fun story at airport security.”
It was official: Jazz hated Dr. Meskovich.
“How long am I going to be here?” Jazz asked. “I have things I need to do.”
“I hope one of them isn’t running a marathon.”
Jazz winced as he forced himself into a sitting position. “Look, I’m sure most of your patients appreciate this whole ironic-but-brutally-honest-smart-ass thing you’ve got going here, but I don’t have time for it. I need to talk to the cops. I need to make some phone calls. And I need to know how quickly I can get out of this place because it’s literally a matter of life and death.”
Dr. Meskovich pursed his lips and narrowed his sagging, baggy eyes. Jazz had miscalculated; he’d thought the blunt approach would cow the doctor, but instead it had just made him retreat into his own ego. Sleep-deprived people were tough to manipulate. You could never count on their reactions. “We need to keep you under observation for a while. You can probably leave tomorrow, but I advise against it.”
“Tomorrow’s too late. I need to go, like, ten minutes ago.”
“No.” As if Jazz didn’t understand the word, the doctor also shook his head firmly. “Not a chance. You need more IV fluids and antibiotics, and we’re not done draining the leg. Tomorrow. Not a second sooner.”
“Then at least let me talk to the police. The cop who brought me in—Hughes.”
Meskovich snorted and tucked his iPad under his arm. “I’m not your butler. I’m your doctor, and I saved your leg a few hours ago. You need to talk to people? Use the damn phone.” He spun and marched out of the room without a backward glance.
Good job, Jazz. You’ve alienated the guy who signs you out of this place.
He managed to rotate the bedside tray over his waist. In addition to the water jug and pitcher, there was a plastic bag containing his cell phone, wallet, and key chain. He fumbled the bag open and thumbed on the phone. A small part of him expected a message from Connie, even though he knew that wouldn’t be true, couldn’t be true.
Stay calm, Jazz. You’re no help to her if you get emotional and miss something.
It was true. But deep down, he knew a darker truth, that Connie was most likely beyond his ability to help. He had only one tiny glimmer of hope in that darkness: Billy’s history of never having killed a black woman. As his phone booted up, Jazz found himself silently praying that Billy had some kind of fetish about not murdering black women. That he couldn’t do it. As opposed to an equally likely possibility: His father had just been saving his first African American for someone truly special.
The phone’s screen lit up. His battery power was almost nil. A single text message floated on-screen.
Howie: in hospital. again. ok, though. call me
What the hell was going on? Connie was somehow in New York, and Howie was in the hospital again? Jazz had thought that by keeping Howie and Connie in the Nod he was protecting them, shielding them from Hershey and Belsamo and Billy. But he’d failed.
He’d failed everyone.
Everyone was right. Everyone who told me I was just a kid and shouldn’t be doing this stuff. Hughes tried to warn me off. G. William tried to warn me off. And I didn’t listen. I didn’t listen, and now Howie’s in the hospital and Connie probably—
He did not allow himself to finish the thought. He couldn’t.
He texted Howie back: hospital? you ok? you still there? what’s going on?
And then—even though he knew it was useless—he tried calling Connie. No text for her. He needed to hear her voice, even if it was just the outgoing message on her voice mail.
But before the phone even rang, a sound outside his door caught his attention. He canceled the call and tucked his phone under his pillow.
The door opened. Louis Hughes strode in, his mouth set in an unyielding line. Jazz thought of Hughes’s gun pointed at him. Of the murderous anguish in the homicide detective’s eyes.
I didn’t kill Morales, but I might as well have. I need to get Hughes back on my side. I need his resources to save Connie. And Mom. And when I find them, I’ll find Billy, too.
But while Jazz was thinking, Hughes snatched away the plastic bag of Jazz’s belongings. Before Jazz could protest, Hughes leaned over and snapped a handcuff around Jazz’s wrist and then around the bed’s railing.
“What the hell!” Jazz blurted out.
“You’re under arrest,” Hughes said, his lips turning up in a mirthless, satisfied smile.
Connie opened her eyes and saw—she couldn’t believe this, really truly couldn’t—her father nearby, slumped in a chair as if he’d been punched in the gut so many times he couldn’t even contemplate standing. He was unshaven, and his eyes were bloodshot and sunken deep into his face. But as her eyes fluttered open, he gasped and bolted upright.
“Oh, thank God!” He leaned over to her and took her hand, swallowing it up in both of his massive paws. “Thank God, thank God, thank God.” He was near tears, fighting them back with whatever energy remained from thanking God.
Connie’s voice sounded like a rough wind over a rocky beach to her. “You look terrible,” she told him.
He gaped at her. “I look terrible?” He bit his lip in regret as soon as it was out. With infinite slowness and tenderness, he stroked her forehead. Her cheek. Careful. As if avoiding something.
Something.
Oh. Oh. She remembered now.
Billy Dent. Cutting off her braid. Jan. Crashing through the window. Glass. Blood. The fall. The run.
“You’re in the hospital, baby. In New York.” The tears threatened again. She’d never seen her father on the brink of such emotion. “I came here as soon as the sheriff told me you disappeared from the plane. Your mother’s been beside herself, and Whiz is—”
“Dad, you’re crushing me.”
He eased off but wouldn’t let her go. “Oh, baby. We were so scared. I was a basket case on the flight. And then when I landed, they told me they’d found you. The doctors say you’re going to be okay. Your leg and your foot will get better, and after a while, you won’t even be able to see the scars.”
Connie pulled away from him and ran a fingertip over her face and neck. She felt padding, bandages, several intersecting rows of butterfly bandages.
I’m ugly. How am I going to be an actress when my face is cut to shreds?
“The scars will fade,” her father said, reading her thoughts. She suddenly felt incredibly close to him, suddenly needed him more than she’d needed him in the past several years. All their fights—about what she wanted to wear, the music she listened to, the white boy she dated—dissolved into meaninglessness. Her father was here. That was what mattered.
“What happened?” she asked him.
“That’s what we’re all wondering. You were found in some place called Clinton Hill. You were cut up and screaming and running. And someone saw you and called the police, but you’d passed out by the time they arrived.” He shivered. It was an almost frightening and violent spasm in such a big man. “Let me get the doctor; she can tell you more.”
He disentangled himself from her and left her alone. She probed her face some more, trying to assess the level of damage she’d done crashing through the window. Reminding herself that she was lucky to be alive and in possession of all her parts.
Still, she couldn’t help running her fingers along the bandages. There wasn’t a lot of demand for disfigured actresses in Hollywood or on Broadway. It was a tough enough road to walk as a black girl; now she had to be deformed, too?
He said it’ll heal. And maybe he wasn’t lying to you to spare your feelings.
She wanted to get out of bed and look in the bathroom mirror, but she couldn’t move. She realized that her left leg was suspended several inches above the bed. Multiple IV lines ran into her, and she was wired up to a monitor as well. She wasn’t going anywhere, not even to the bathroom. The thought of the bathroom made her wonder how she was supposed to relieve herself; an instant later, she discovered that she’d been catheterized. She felt a hot rush of shame for some reason she couldn’t identify, followed immediately by a sense of relief.
Dad returned just then with a spookily tall woman in a white coat. As she did with all tall women, Connie dipped her eyes down to check out the heels, only to find the woman wore flats. She was a million feet tall.
“This is Dr. Cullins,” Dad said. “She’s been taking care of you.”
“Hello, Conscience.” The words sent a spike into Connie’s heart, and all eyes in the room went to the monitor as the line leapt and beeped, then settled.
Hello, Conscience. The words spray-painted over the door to Billy Dent’s Apartment of Doom.
“Connie, please,” Connie whispered.
“Of course. I’m sorry. Your dad tells me you have some questions? Concerns?” Cullins was all business. She had a slight accent that Connie couldn’t identify, and for some reason, this was driving her nuts.
“The scars…” Dad said.
“Right.” Cullins sounded as though she couldn’t be bothered discussing something as trivial as Connie’s face. “The facial and neck lacerations were significant and numerous, but mostly superficial. We used butterflies instead of sutures, and I imagine within a few months, you won’t even see the scars. Anything that’s left over will be easily concealed with some base.”
Connie suddenly felt enormously superficial and enormously relieved at the same time.
“What about my leg?”
Cullins nodded approvingly, as though happy they’d moved on to something of substance. “You did some damage there, for sure.” She consulted her clipboard.
