Working Stiff tr-1

by Rachel Caine

  The Fairview logo was small and discreet, but he was right; it was visible to anybody who really looked. Bryn, who’d finally gotten feeling back in her arms and legs, started to unlock the driver’s-side door.

  McCallister took the keys from her. “No. I’m driving.” She didn’t feel able to argue the point. It felt good to let someone else take charge, at least for the moment. Maybe the protocols are kicking in again. But she didn’t think so. It was just shock, and the drugged exhaustion that followed extreme emotional stress.

  “Is it safe for you to do this?” she asked in a remote, tired voice as he piloted the van back toward Fairview. “What if he’s watching?”

  “He probably is. And yes, it’s risky. But you go through staff quickly at the assistant level, so new faces aren’t unusual. I’ll keep my head down.” He glanced her way. “You still with me, Bryn?”

  “Yes.” She could hardly keep her eyes open, but when she tried to let them drift closed, she saw jolts of images. Ants. Maggots. Flesh. Eyes. “I think I need a drink.”

  He laughed softly, and a little shakily. “That, Miss Davis, is a vast understatement. There has never been a single moment in my life when I more needed a drink, and I wasn’t the one—” Holding the saw, Bryn finished silently. He let it go. “I heard your sister is staying with you.”

  “I thought you’d be angry.”

  “I was. It seems a little beside the point right now.”

  “Annie’s okay,” Bryn murmured drowsily. “She’s just a kid; that’s all. And we push her too hard.”

  “We?”

  “The fam. Especially Mom, and my sister Grace. Grace is kind of a bitch. Not as bad as George, though.”

  “George is a girl?”

  “George is a pissy little bitch of a man. He’s not gay, which is too bad; he’d be a lot more fun that way. He’s just a jerk. He runs a pharmacy in—” Her brain finally caught up to her mouth. “You already know all this. I told you all about them, in the car.”

  McCallister shrugged. “I like hearing you talk about them.”

  “Remember Kyle?”

  “The one who’s three years into a fifteen-year sentence for armed robbery?”

  “Kyle is still more fun than George.”

  “Ouch.”

  Her brain was waking up. Small talk, it seemed, did wonders. “Anyway, Annie just wanted some space, so I’m letting her stay a few days. It’s not a big deal, and I won’t tell her a thing.”

  “She’s a walking, talking security breach, and you should have run it by me, but what’s done is done. I’m just concerned for your safety.”

  “From Annie? She grew up wanting to be a fairy princess. She’s not exactly dangerous.”

  “That’s what I’m concerned about.”

  She couldn’t work that out, tired as she felt, so she let it lie. “You got me to talk about my family,” she said. “But you never return the favor.”

  He glanced over at her, frowning, and shook his head. “It’s not the time, Bryn.”

  “Come on. Humor me.” She needed something else in her head besides … that. Besides the smell, the insects, the desperation in Violetta’s eyes. The rasp of the saw. “Tell me about your brother.”

  “I can’t.” He paused, then let out a sound—not a laugh, more of a sigh. “Can’t. That doesn’t sound right either, considering … it’s just words. All right, if you really want to know. Jamie was … different. My parents couldn’t see it. He was a charmer, but he was cold inside. A sociopath with no real empathy or connection to anyone else. Including me. And I was his favorite target.”

  “You.”

  He shrugged. “I learned to cope. I had to. Jamie’s little games were often meant to maim or kill. I couldn’t complain; when I tried, he blamed it all on me, said that I was the bully. They believed it.”

  “My God.”

  “By eighteen, I wasn’t going to let it go on anymore. I went to my father, but he didn’t want to hear it. So I left. I went straight into the marines, enlisted as fast as I could, and got the hell away from the whole family.”

  “You told me Jamie … died.”

  “By the time I came home, eight years had passed. I think he was truly surprised. He fully expected me to die in the line of duty.” McCallister’s eyes were unfocused now, looking into something far away and not at all pleasant. “He was out on his own by then, with his own house out in the country. I came back from deployment and intended to just stop in and try to mend fences with him, as much as possible. But when I got here, he was … He’d found a new hobby. One that suited his personality.” He swallowed, a visible bob of his Adam’s apple above his collar. His hands gripped the steering wheel a little too tightly. “I found out later that he’d made a business of it, but I didn’t know that at the time. I just knew that when I went looking for him, I found him upstairs in one of the rooms with cameras and a victim. I shot him. I had to, to save her life.”

  “What was he—”

  “No,” he said. “Don’t make me tell you. Please. We’ve had enough today” He let the silence fall for a moment before he continued. “I’m not sorry I killed him. I’m just sorry that I let him walk away when I was eighteen. It would have saved lives if I hadn’t been … weak.” He smiled, but it looked painful and false. “My mother was already gone by then. My father passed on soon after that, thinking I was a murderer. Thinking that I’d set Jamie up and killed him in cold blood. I was written out of the estate, of course. I didn’t really mind.”

  Bryn thought about her own family, with all its problems and squabbles; she might not totally love many of her siblings, but at least they weren’t sociopaths. And, although he wasn’t saying it outright, murderers. It brought back the haunting question of what had happened to Sharon, all those years ago. Maybe she ran into another McCallister. The wrong McCallister.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m sorry for making you tell me that.”

  “No,” he said. “No, you needed to hear it. And I guess I needed to say it, too. It’s all right. Now it’s done.”

  McCallister drove in silence the rest of the way, parked the van, and walked with her into the mortuary through the back entrance. He kept his shoulders hunched and his hands in his pockets. It was as much cover as possible, but she still felt an uncomfortable, probably imaginary weight of eyes on them until they were safely inside.

  Joe and Doreen weren’t back yet from the hospital run, so Bryn took McCallister directly to her office, locked the door, and opened up a locked drawer in her desk. She set up six miniature bottles of liquor: Scotch for McCallister, vodka for herself.

  “Did you raid the minibar somewhere?” he asked, but didn’t turn down the tiny servings. He unscrewed the first and downed it in two gulps, then opened the second.

  “Certainly not at the Hallmark Motor Court Inn.”

  That got her a shadow of a smile. He saluted her with the bottle, downed it, and sat down. She concentrated on the soothing fire of her vodka as it slipped over her tongue, down her throat, clearing away the taste of rot and despair. Somehow, she managed to drink her third before McCallister had properly started his, but then, as he hadn’t quite said, she’d been holding the saw.

  “So,” she said, and leaned her head back against the leather of the chair. “Did you sleep with your boss?” Silence. She opened her eyes just a slit. McCallister continued sipping his Scotch without comment. “You’re really not going to tell me.”

  “Is this the question that comes to your mind right now?”

  “Evidently it is.” She was starting to feel numbed again, but in a slightly better way.

  “Do you have any more of these?” He held up the liquor mini. She opened the drawer, pulled out two more, and pitched him one. “This is bourbon.”

  “You’re really going to complain?”

  He upended it while she sucked down her fourth vodka. This one was lemon-flavored. Nice. “If I say yes, what does it matter to you?”

  “It d
oesn’t.” It did. It did, and he knew it, the bastard. Why it mattered to her was a mystery she didn’t care to explore at the moment; her emotions were confused, raw, and horribly tangled. “Was it good?”

  “With her? Not likely.”

  She almost choked on her drink. “So you did do it.”

  “I didn’t say I did. If such a thing had happened, for which there is no evidence and no admission, now or ever, then it would not have been a good time. Just … maintenance.”

  “Of your low reputation and your alibi.”

  His lips twisted into a brief, unhappy grimace. “Something like that.” McCallister got weirdly funny and precise when he drank. If he felt anything like Bryn, he had to be at least slightly tipsy. Overcompensating, probably. “It’s not all fun and games in my business.”

  She had a nauseating flashback, and suddenly she realized that she reeked of dead flesh; it had soaked into her clothes, her skin, her hair. The whole office stank with it.

  Fun and games.

  Violetta Sammons’s disconnected head rolling free.

  The rasp of the saw vibrating in her hand.

  The vodka rushed up on her, and Bryn barely made it to her trash can before she threw up. Between the convulsions, she gasped for breath and sobbed, and McCallister came around the desk and silently handed her tissues, then helped her back into her chair as she covered her face and tried to muffle her wild, uncontrollable sobs.

  He stroked her hair, very softly. He didn’t say a thing.

  Finally, she was able to shut it off, just enough to gather her voice together. “I have to shower,” she said. Her voice was uneven and broken, but he nodded as he looked down at her. “Sorry.”

  “Don’t be,” he said. “I’ll be there after you’re done.”

  She grabbed another set of clothes and went into the locker room at the end of the hall; Riley was in there, changing into jeans and a comfortable sweatshirt with her hair still clinging damply to her face. She looked up, surprised, as Bryn dumped her stuff on the bench.

  “Everything okay?”

  Bryn didn’t want to talk, but she had to try. “Bad one,” she managed to say. “Major decomposition.”

  Riley nodded and opened her locker. She tossed Bryn a bottle. “Try this,” she said. “Best I’ve found. Use it four times, you should be okay.”

  Bryn didn’t even wait to thank her. The urge to get clean was so overpowering that even after she was standing in the hot spray, soaping herself from head to toe, she couldn’t stop gasping and shaking from the pressure. Two passes with the shampoo and she still felt filthy. By the third she was calming down, and by the fourth she felt almost normal. Her skin tingled from the scrubbing, but that was a good thing; the greasy, horrible stench seemed to have finally rubbed off.

  Bryn threw her old clothes into the incineration biohazard bag and dressed in the clean ones, dried her hair, and was just finishing when there was a knock on the locker room door, and McCallister looked in.

  He looked rough—pallid, with dark circles beneath his eyes. He’d stripped off his coat and tie and unfastened the top button of his shirt. “All right if I come in?” he asked, and she suddenly felt very selfish for taking up the shower for so long.

  “It’s all yours,” she said.

  He nodded thanks and opened a locker—Joe Fideli’s—and took out a pair of blue jeans and a clean white T-shirt. “We’re about the same size,” he said. “At least I won’t look like I’m going for gangster style.”

  She passed him Riley’s shampoo. “Four passes,” she said. “It works.”

  He smiled, faintly, and said, “Good.”

  He was already stripping off his clothes before she closed the door, and in those fast, ruthless motions, she sensed that McCallister, too, was on the edge of losing control.

  She let him do it in private.

  Back in her office, Bryn turned on music, something soft and soothing, and nibbled some crackers to settle her still-restless stomach. Her skin and clothes smelled clean and fresh, but it was hard not to imagine the ghost of that stench still hanging around. She cleaned out the trash can, then used disinfectant spray around her chair and on her shoes. Probably too much.

  Finally, she sat down and closed her eyes.

  A soft chime made her open them again.

  She had e-mail.

  Oh, God. She’d actually forgotten all about it.

  Sitting in her in-box was a new message from one of those throwaway account services, with the ominous moniker of deadman. There was no subject line, and the message was just an address and a time of day—ten p.m.

  McCallister came back, still glistening with drops from the shower, and saw from her expression that something was up.

  She mutely spun her computer around and showed him. He leaned over the desk to read it. “Can your tech wizards trace that?” she asked.

  “Probably not, but we’ll try it. That is the e-mail equivalent of a burner phone, and if he’s got any sense at all, he hid his IP address through a randomizer.” McCallister already had his cell out and was dialing.

  “Don’t you need my account password?”

  “Already have it,” he said, and got up to turn his back and talk to his resources.

  Proof, once again, that there was nothing secret in her life anymore. Nothing sacred. She’d expected to feel some sense of burning betrayal, but instead, she felt … tired. And, weirdly, a little reassured.

  McCallister stayed on the phone a while longer, and she contemplated opening up another set of drinks, but that seemed less like a necessary safety valve and more like a crutch, at this point. Bryn shut and locked the drawer, and looked at the clock.

  It was coming up on six o‘clock.

  Four hours to get the money and deliver it to the address—or else what? Lose their potential chance at the supplier.

  If they did, Bryn had no doubt whatsoever that Irene Harte would pull the plug on the project, and her, with pleasure. It was that, as much as anything else, that made her step back from the comfort of the booze. I’m not giving you the excuse, she thought. Not you. You don’t get to kill me.

  But it wouldn’t be Harte, she realized. When it came to the end, it would come from the man pacing the floor on the other side of her office, talking quietly into his cell phone. He’d be the one told to withhold her drug, reduce her to that decayed, rotting shell. She’d be eaten alive. She’d beg for release until eventually the last of the nanites faded and died….

  Or until he dismembered her, out of sheer horrified mercy.

  No. He promised. He promised me he wouldn’t let that happen. She closed her eyes and took deep breaths and tried to think of something, anything less painful. He’d promised, and he’d meant it. He wouldn’t let her linger on and rot.

  McCallister finished the call. “I have a car and driver coming, and I’m on the way to pick up the money,” he said. “Joe is five minutes out. Stay here, and he’ll take you home. I’ll come by here at eight thirty to pick you up for the rendezvous.”

  She nodded. “Thank you.”

  “For what?” he asked, and she held his eyes until she saw that he knew. “I meant what I said, Bryn. I won’t let that happen.”

  “I know,” she said. “Thank you.” She stood up and hugged him. It was an impulse, and she didn’t mean anything by it except gratitude, until she was in his arms, and then … then it was something else entirely. “Tell me you didn’t sleep with her,” she whispered, very quietly.

  He didn’t ask what she was talking about. “I didn’t,” he said, and something brushed her forehead, very gently. It might have been a kiss. “Stay safe.”

  And then he was gone.

  Bryn arrived home at six thirty, feeling exhausted and not up for family drama of any kind. Luckily, she didn’t get any.

  The apartment was spotlessly clean, Mr. French was happy to see her, and the air smelled like rich Italian food.

  “Hey, sweetie!” Annie said brightly from the kitchen.
“Hope you’re hungry. I think I cooked enough pasta for the complex!”

  I can’t do this. Bryn dropped onto the sofa and covered her face with her hands. In a few seconds, she felt Annie’s weight settle in next to her, and her sister’s arm went around her shoulders. She didn’t look up.

  “Hey,” Annie said. “Hey, what did I say? You don’t like Italian anymore?”

  “It’s just …” For an extremely unsettling second, Bryn thought the dam might just collapse inside her. If she said anything, she’d say everything, everything that she’d promised to keep secret. And that would unburden her, but doom her sister. McCallister’s people were always listening, and someone was always listening to them. “It was a bad day. Really bad.”

  “Sorry, honey. Hey, does it have anything to do with the hottie who was here with you before?”

  “No! Why would you even assume that?” Bryn looked at her sister finally. Annie cocked an eyebrow and shrugged. “It’s not all about my love life. Or lack of one.”

  “I’m just saying, he’s hot.”

  “What about married did you not understand?”

  “There’s married and married, in my expert opinion.”

  “Expert?”

  “Honey, I work in a bar. I am an expert.”

  That was … a good point. Bryn let it pass. “It’s not about Joe, and it had nothing to do with … It was work. Bad day at work.”

  “Oh. So … it was disgusting, right?”

  “Very.”

  “I think I’d rather talk about your lack of a love life. Seriously, there isn’t anybody you’re interested in? Come on, Bryn. Humor me.”

  “Nobody,” she said, but then she sighed and shook her head. “He doesn’t care about me. Not that way.”

  “Is he male?”

  “Obviously.”

  “Is he straight?”

  “As far as I know.”

  “Then he cares, sweetie. You don’t have any idea how sexy you are, do you?”