“Had a chat with a detective down in Miami. Interesting man named Costello.”
The Sheriff waited a beat to see if I’d recognize the name. I didn’t, but that didn’t mean much. I’d bumped into a lot of cops over the years. A regrettably small handful of them recognized when they were out of their depth.
When it became obvious I wasn’t going to react to the name, the sheriff continued. “According to him, the police down there would like to talk with you.”
“Good talk or bad talk?”
“A couple days ago, it was a bad talk. Now, they think you’re a witness or possibly a victim of gang violence.”
I nodded. That was as close to the truth as they were ever going to get, at least in an official capacity. “So no BOLOs or arrest warrants? No extradition in my immediate future?”
“Doesn’t seem that way.”
“Small favors.”
Barnes stood and gave me a pensive look. “You still planning on leaving?”
“As soon as the doc okays me to go.”
Barnes nodded. “Good. Not interested in seeing any,” he threw up some finger quotes, “‘gang violence’ here.”
“Me either, believe it or not.”
Chapter 6
The doctor told me that they planned on releasing me later that day, which was a relief. My roomie, who I never actually saw, but who made his or her presence known with the relentless extreme right-wing “news” channel, was not someone I would miss. They took me off the constant oxygen and I was surprised by how even simple tasks left me a little short of breath. They’d warned me it would be that way for a while, but I was used to my body working well most of the time. They also warned me not to fly for a few weeks, since the pressurized cabin conditions would exacerbate my breathing trouble. I shrugged and said I wouldn’t. I’m a ground traveler by nature.
Around noon, a nurse pushed an old man in a wheelchair into my room. She parked him next to my bed and said she’d be back shortly to collect him. The old man regarded me with rheumy, gray eyes. His face was deeply lined, with dark pouches under his eyes, and reminded me of a Burgkmair woodcut I’d once seen of Jacob Fugger. He didn’t say anything right at first, just peered at me, as if trying to remember something important.
“Hello,” I said, when the silence started to bother me.
“Hello,” he replied.
His voice was still strong, with only a hint of the quavering that afflicts the voices of the elderly. He held out a hand toward me and I took it. He pumped my hand a few times and let go.
“I wanted to meet you,” he said. “I wanted to thank you for you what you did.” He paused, and took a few labored breaths. “As much as you can thank a man who saves the lives of your entire family.”
The old man was no longer just “the old man,” but Paul, the old man I’d dragged out of a fire. I’d hoped to avoid meeting him and his granddaughter, but I smiled and shook my head.
“No thanks are necessary. Just glad I could help.”
“If you need something,” he persisted, “money…”
I held up a hand. “Really, it’s not necessary. I’ve got insurance for this kind of thing.”
I was grateful that I’d been traveling as Adrian Hartworth. Of the various identities I had, Hartworth was the closest to being real. He had a social security number—someone’s social security number, anyway—bank accounts, health insurance and a permanent address. Most of my dozen or so identities were throwaways. I could use them briefly, a few days if I needed to, but then they needed to die. I’d paid a lot of money for Hartworth to cover exactly these kinds of situations.
Paul looked at me, unsatisfied. I supposed he was old enough to feel beholden to a sense of honor that had gone out of style around the time bellbottoms came into style. I needed to mollify him somehow. Let him do something for me or, at the least, let him feel like he might be able to do something for me someday to balance the scales.
“If I do wind up needing something,” I offered, “you’ll be my first call.”
The resistance faded out of his expression and he nodded. “Seems fair.”
I wanted him off that track, so I asked the obvious question. “How’s your granddaughter?”
“Alive. Thanks to you.”
“She going to be alright?”
“Docs say she’s past the worst of it. They want to keep her a while yet.”
“Better safe than sorry.”
“She wants to meet you,” said Paul.
I pushed away a mental groan. I didn’t want to meet the girl. I hadn’t wanted to meet her grandfather. I just wanted to get out of the miserable little town that had caused me nothing but trouble and pain. The old man wouldn’t understand it, though. Normal people never did, and I couldn’t explain it.
If I said, “Hey, I want to blow off you and your grandkid because my dead girlfriend gave me a cryptic warning,” I’d find myself on an involuntary 72-hour psych hold. It’d be even longer if I wasn’t extra-nice and super-cooperative. I knew. I’d been through it before, when I was younger and less aggressively cynical about the narrowness of people’s minds. I did my best to smile for the man and nodded.
“I’ll swing by her room before I leave.”
“She’ll be thrilled,” said Paul.
“Oh, I doubt that. I’m not terribly interesting or dashing.”
Paul fixed me with his rheumy eyes and frowned. “You’re a piss-poor liar.”
I raised a bemused eyebrow. “No one’s said that to me in a very long time.”
“I’m old now, son. Means I get to say those impolite things most people keep inside. Fringe benefit.”
“Good to know. When’s that kick in? Sixty-five?”
Paul barked out a coughing laugh. “Seventy these days, I think.”
“I’ll mark the calendar.”
“You’re an odd duck, Mr. Hartworth.”
“How so?”
Paul took a few more of those labored breaths. “Call most men liars and they blow their tops. Not you.”
I shrugged. “We’re all liars about something. Not much advantage to getting all bent out of shape when someone says so.”
The old man blinked at me and then nodded. “Guess that’s true.”
The nurse came in to collect Paul.
I took a stab at the social niceties. “It was nice to meet you, Paul.”
“It was nice to meet you, Mr. Hartworth. Like I said, you need anything...”
“You’re my first call.”
A couple hours later, Patty came by with my overnight bag. I was grateful. I doubted there was any salvaging the suit I’d been wearing during my little fire-and-rescue impersonation. The hospital had returned my belt, wallet and shoes, which still smelled charred. Patty stepped out of the room, while I pulled on a pair of slacks and a blue button-down from the bag. I was careful not to brush the burn on my back more than necessary, but the motion aggravated the injury. It sent low, throbbing pulses of unhappiness to my brain. I wondered how bad it would hurt without painkillers.
I made a mental note to stop by the pharmacy and get my painkiller and antibiotic prescriptions filled. I had no interest in testing the upper limits of my pain threshold or chancing an infection. The drone of cable news filled the air again. I gritted my teeth and decided to get a look at my roomie, so I could put a face to the aggravation. I walked around the cloth divider and stopped short, icy spikes lodging in my stomach. The other bed in the room was empty.
I ran the memory back in my head. For a bare breath, the bed hadn’t been empty. There had been something in that bed. Maybe a someone, maybe not, but it was occupied. I didn’t like the feeling that phantom presence gave off. It was both coldly alien and, beneath the overt alien feeling, I sensed an acidic anger. Marcy’s warning to leave rose unbidden in my mind and I had to work hard not to turn on my heel, leave the hospital, and never look back. I forced myself to walk over to the stand next to the empty bed, pick up the remote, and turn off th
e talking head on the TV. The television snapped off and a wave of that acidic anger poured over me. I looked around the room, certain that I wasn’t alone, even if I couldn’t pinpoint the location of my invisible companion. This wasn’t my first rodeo with the unseen, and I issued forth with an ostentatious sniff of derision.
“Go fuck yourself,” I told the unseen presence.
I felt shock emanate from everywhere and nowhere, right before a box of tissues launched itself from the stand. The tissue box missile raced toward my face and I caught it, at a price. The dull throb in my back became a sharp stab and I couldn’t breathe for a second. God, I wondered, how bad was that burn? The sense of shock and alien anger faded from the room, leaving behind a vague smell of burnt leather. Or maybe that was just my shoes.
I put the tissues and remote back on the stand and snagged my overnight bag, more certain than ever that leaving was the right move or, all things being equal, the smart move. I didn’t owe the people in that town anything. Whatever was going on there, angry poltergeists of dead patients most likely, it wasn’t my problem. I stepped out of the room and didn’t look back, despite the feeling of being watched. Patty gave me a tight-eyed look.
“You all right? You look pale,” she said.
“Moved wrong. That burn made itself known,” I said.
She nodded. “Yeah, pain will do that to you. You ready to go?”
Christ in Heaven, yes! Please, please Deputy Patty, take me the hell away from here. Take me to my car and let me leave you all behind to deal with your own problems in your own way. At least, that’s what I wanted to say. I didn’t, though, as Paul’s rheumy eyes floated in my memory like elderly accusation.
“She’ll be thrilled,” he had said.
That girl had almost died, would have certainly died if I hadn’t happened to be driving by. Did I just “happen” to be driving by? Marcy had known something, maybe not the details, but known enough to warn me not to stop for gas. If I’d been driving by just a few minutes earlier, the fire wouldn’t have been big enough to alert my subconscious. I’d have long-since arrived in Seattle to make my periodic, covert check-in on my sister. If I could make the time to check in on my family, I could take the five minutes to check in on that possibly cursed teenager.
“I promised to stop in and say hello to Abby,” I conceded to the air.
“That’s a nice thing to do. I bet she’ll be thrilled.”
My head whipped toward Patty, who took a full step back from me.
“What?” She demanded, sounding equal parts disconcerted and angry at being disconcerted.
“Nothing,” I said, turning my face away. “Just odd. Paul said the same thing.”
“Well, sure, why wouldn’t she be thrilled? How often do you get to meet your own personal hero?”
I felt myself tense up as she used that word: hero. I could tell her that there weren’t any heroes, just disappointments waiting to happen, but I didn’t. She wouldn’t understand or, maybe, she would understand all too well. I decided that was knowledge about Patty I didn’t need.
“Do you know which room she’s in?”
“Yeah, I’ll go up with you. I’ve been meaning to stop by and say hi to her. Poor kid can’t seem to catch a break. I thought it might do her some good to see a friendly face, even if it is mine.”
I couldn’t resist. “Who wouldn’t be happy to see you, Deputy Michelson?”
I thought Patty might cry or punch me. I smiled to soften to the joke.
“Lead the way, Patty.”
Chapter 7
Patty took me up two floors to what, I discovered, was the ICU. I hesitated in the elevator. The last time I’d been in an ICU as a visitor, rather than a patient, was the night Marcy died. She’d been the victim of a car accident, just one of the faceless masses reported in the cold statistics issued by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration that year. I’d sat next to her bed for eight hours, hoping she would open her eyes in spite of the surgeon’s warning that she wouldn’t.
The trauma was extensive. That was the word the surgeon used, extensive, rather than something more telling and accurate, like apocalyptic, cataclysmic, or unholy. Only extraordinary good health and relative youth accounted for her surviving the initial accident, caused by an SUV recklessly entering the highway and sideswiping her little two-door coupe. The impact pushed her into another lane, where a Volvo, the world’s safest car, clipped her and spun Marcy’s car sideways back into her own lane.
If there had been less traffic or more room to maneuver, she might have survived even that, but a pickup with nowhere to go T-boned Marcy. Her car popped loose from the truck’s fender as the driver slammed on his brakes. The coupe skidded and then rolled down the highway, bouncing Marcy around like a rag doll, snapping bones and slamming her brain against the interior of her skull. It was anyone’s guess how much soft tissue damage was done.
By the time emergency services arrived on the scene, the SUV was, of course, long gone. According to the driver of the pickup, who had almost gotten run over in a mad dash to try to help Marcy, the SUV never even stopped. The police did a cursory search, but highway traffic cams weren’t as common then. The cops had nothing to go on. I was less hampered by pesky things like due process. Even then, I’d had some skills and contacts available to me that no self-respecting police department would employ, even if they believed in magic. I found the SUV. I found the driver. We had a very long, private, discussion.
After that discussion, my life as Jason Anderson ceased to exist. Six months later, with the assistance of a shadowy woman and most of Jason Anderson’s liquid assets, a man named Adrian Hartworth appeared. He had a name, bank accounts, even a credit and tax history, no doubt the result of some high-order hacking about which I asked no questions. Adrian Hartworth had never been to Seattle. He had never sat by the bedside of a dying woman named Marcy. He had most certainly never met a man named Jack Reed, who owned a big, black SUV with long scrapes down one side.
“Mr. Hartworth?” Patty asked, her hand holding open the elevator door.
I shook my head. “Sorry. Damn elevator music hypnotized me.”
I stepped off the elevator and followed Patty down the hall. She opened a door and stepped inside. I took a breath, tried my best to put on a smile, and followed her into the room. The girl lay on the bed with her right arm over the covers. Bandages wrapped that arm from mid-bicep most of the way to her wrist. Had she gotten burned? I couldn’t remember. It might have happened before I found her, though I doubted it. She was painfully thin. I wondered if she was being underfed, then I remembered the cancer. Unless her short, dark, hair was a stylistic choice, her chemo treatments weren’t long over. She looked like she was asleep, or very close to it.
Patty walked over and stood next to the bed, her expression grim and sad. I watched the deputy very consciously force that expression to change to a smile. I felt for her. It’s hard to see anyone in pain. Seeing someone that young in pain brutalized you in a special, not-soon-to-be-forgotten way. You anticipate pain and illness as an adult, as the cost of being an adult. You expected kids and teenagers to be exempt from that shit. When it doesn’t go down that way, it fills me with impotent anger.
“Abby,” said Patty in a quiet voice.
The girl opened her eyes and I saw painkiller incomprehension in them. She fought it off, forced her eyes to focus on the deputy. Abby gave the deputy a brave smile.
“Hi, Deputy Michelson,” said the girl with more cheer than she should have been able to muster.
“Hi Abby. How are you feeling?”
“I’m okay,” said Abby, getting the thousand yard stare of someone asked the same question so many times it had become a form of personal torture. “It’s better than chemo.”
“I’m sure it is. There’s someone here to see you, if you’re up for it.”
Abby’s eyes flickered over to me, cautious at first, and then she seemed to realize who I had to be. She gave me a million-watt
smile.
“You’re him, aren’t you?” she asked.
I walked over and smiled back at her. “I guess I must be.”
She pulled her left arm out from under the blanket and held her hand out to me. I took it in my own left hand, thinking she wanted to shake it. Instead, she squeezed my hand and then held it.
“Abby,” said Patty, “this is Adrian Hartworth.”
I’m not a natural psychic, but we’re all born with a little bit of it. The kind of low-level, hair standing up on the back of your neck stuff that alerts you to being observed, or intuiting that something you’re holding is bad news. It’s the kind of thing you can develop a little, with practice, and through repeated exposure to magical oddness and danger. I’d had plenty of both over the years and I bent all of my accumulated sixth sense on that girl. I didn’t know exactly what I was looking for, save that the nurse’s observation that Abby was somehow cursed stuck with me.
I think, maybe, I wanted to reassure myself that the girl was plain, normal unlucky. If she was just unlucky, with crap landing on her through unkind, cosmic coin-tosses that never went her way, my conscience would be clear when I drove away, never to look back. If she was cursed, it didn’t mean I couldn’t walk away, just that I would also do so knowingly. More often than not, there wasn’t anything you could do for the cursed. They often inherited those curses. The person who did the cursing was often long-dead and the conflict long-since passed out of family memory.
What my intuition gave me was confusing and contradictory. It simultaneously told me that there was absolutely nothing unnatural happening with the girl and that something dark was working on her. It reminded me of heating up mashed potatoes in a microwave, then taking a bite to find that the potatoes were both hot and cold, depending on what part of the plate your potatoes came from. Words drifted into my mind from some far plane of existence.
The Midnight Ground Page 4
