As the wolf stalked around, dazed, the door of the main building opened, and Agent McKinnon strutted out, gun drawn. “What’s going on here?” Her bark demanded answers.
I let out a breath of relief and started to call her, but Levi’s hand held me like an anchor to the earth. Then, she fired. A shot to the flank and the wolf went down. My own legs went numb and folded beneath me. No chance of getting up now. I stopped breathing, stopped looking, when McKinnon aimed again. This time, after, he made no sound.
“Clare! Clare Bronwyn! It’s Agent McKinnon.” Just like that, her tone became concerned and imploring. “Are you in there?”
“Clare can’t come out right now,” Cullen announced, stepping from the truck’s backside, an assault rifle in his hand. He pointed it at McKinnon. She pointed hers back. “She’s a little tied up, as they say. But what do you care? Clare didn’t want to believe it when I told her, but I know what you’ve been up to.” He waved his free hand wildly, gesturing to the chaos around him. “The game you’ve been running. And now, you’re here to kill us both, aren’t you?”
McKinnon didn’t answer him. “Clare, it’s going to be okay. I’ve got backup on the way.”
“I’ll bet you do. More of Ramirez’s scraps sent here to do your dirty work.”
When McKinnon spoke again, her bark had bite. “Here’s the problem with being a criminal, Cutthroat. When you finally decide to speak the truth, nobody believes you. And before you can convince them, you’re already dead.”
“I believe him.” Levi advanced toward them, his own gun aimed at McKinnon. In the other hand, he waved the top-secret pages like a flag of surrender. “I believe you shared classified information with the EME to help them smuggle cocaine across the Mexican border. I believe you used Rodney Taylor’s business as a front for illegal activity. And I’m guessing you might have known about his penchant for little girls. Is that what you held over him? Is that how you convinced him to sell his soul?”
“Officer Beckett—can I still call you that? You’re one to talk, dragging your sister into your pathetic little daddy detective story. Here’s a hint: It wasn’t Colonel Mustard in the ballroom with a candlestick. And as much as I’d like to pin it on Cutthroat, he didn’t have the cojones to fight back in prison. Not like that. Clare had him all soft and googly-eyed. But later on, he took the credit for it. Just like I knew he would. And who could blame him after the good doctor left him high and dry?”
My mother emerged then, and I gasped. Not tied, not gagged, not handcuffed. Free to do whatever she pleased. And her hands, bright red with somebody’s blood. On the ground at her feet, the dead NF’s rifle. I willed her to look at it. “Snip told me,” she said instead. “Twenty years ago, he’d told me Dumas saw something that spooked him. I thought he meant me and Cullen. I thought Cullen got jealous and … ” She hung her head, and I wanted to run to her. But I didn’t dare move.
“It’s always about you, isn’t it, Clare?” McKinnon chuckled to herself, but her grip stayed taut, finger poised on the trigger. “Dumas saw a drop go down in the kitchen. The EME don’t leave loose ends like that dangling for long. Bonner knew. That double-dealing low life had been running drugs with the NF and the EME for years. He sent his little kiss-ass, Briggs, to make sure it all went down without a hitch. I’d figured it out before the ink dried on your letter of resignation. You can’t blame me for taking advantage of his stupidity. And you, so predictable running away like that. Then. Now. But you couldn’t leave it alone, could you? You had to come here and muck it all up for me. You know, Cullen cried like a baby when we arrested him that day, halfway to your car. This time you and your daughter—his daughter—get to watch him die.”
Until then, I’d been convinced of my own invisibility. But now, exposed, I felt like a pawn on a chessboard. I wobbled to my feet to claim my place, to show I wouldn’t be sacrificed. Not for her.
In a slow-motion second, the whole game changed. Pieces shifted. The chessboard tumbled and cracked in two. McKinnon fired first, dropping Levi with a shot to his arm. He cried out and rolled onto his side. I lunged toward him, but he waved me back. Already dashing for the cab of the truck, Cullen shot back at McKinnon, narrowly missing. He shouted at my mother as he ran.
“Let’s go, Clare!” It sounded like an order, but my mother just stood there, her face indecipherable. “Get in.”
Cullen clung to the side mirror, ready to hoist himself into the driver’s seat. Ready to drive straight through the fence to freedom. But something pinned him, tethered him to my mother, and wouldn’t let him go. Time stilled, and I wondered if he would dissolve to sand like the old parable, unable to pry his eyes from the past.
From behind him, McKinnon lined up her shot. “Watch out!” I yelled, the words expelling themselves from a place I couldn’t name. And then, in the instant it took for a firefly to flicker and go out, my mother—Clare Keely—picked up the rifle and fired. And McKinnon fell.
The truck started to move, to pick up steam again, with Cullen imploring my mother. Practically begging. She watched him go, the same way she’d watch me leave her in the fall. Partly unwilling, partly unable to stop the inevitable.
Next to her, Levi propped himself onto his elbow and clutched his wound. His eyes narrowed with focus, Cullen fading from his sights. Not exactly the way he must’ve imagined it ending, but his forearm twitched with life, with a motive, of its own—to settle the score or to uphold the law, even now, I can’t be sure which—and he aimed for the tires.
Gently, my mother took his arm in her hands and lowered it, speaking a word so hushed I couldn’t quite make it out. Still, that word—whatever it was—broke him a little. And saved him. His face crumpled. “Don’t.” If I had to guess, that’s what she said.
january 17, 1997
Two pink lines. Two. Pink. Lines. Clare crouched over the toilet, dry heaving. She’d already thrown up breakfast. Four days in a row. Still, her stomach clenched and contracted with a life of its own, and she imagined an alien creature fighting its way out. Taking parts of her with it.
“Are you alright in there, Clare-Bear?” Lizzie’s voice came from right outside the door, sending Clare into a panic. She wrapped the white stick in tissue paper and shoved it to the bottom of the trash can. For a split second, she was sixteen again until she literally slapped herself out of it.
“Fine. It must’ve been that sushi I ate last night.” At least she sounded normal. Or close enough.
“I told you.” Lizzie chuckled. “Raw fish is for sea lions. You are not a sea lion. Remember that time you had sushi before mid-terms?” Clare couldn’t hear Lizzie anymore. Through the thick stench of nausea, her brain rattled with dates. Thanksgiving, Christmas, and all the weeks in between. The encyclopedia told her morning sickness was common around week six. I had sex with Neal at Thanksgiving. That’s almost eight weeks. And Briggs? Decemberish. The other possibility—she didn’t let herself think it. But it squatted in the back of her mind like an unwelcome visitor.
She stared at herself in the mirror. Her right cheek flaming from her own vicious strike, she pinched the other to bring it back to life. This is what you deserve. She grabbed the packet of pills she’d been popping since Neal took her to Planned Parenthood in grad school—someday you won’t need those, he’d always said—and chucked it across the room. It landed in the shower, skittering across the tub’s bottom. How could you be so stupid? Those little white pills, smaller than a penny. That’s what you counted on?
“Are you sure you’re okay?” Not for the first time since Cullen had been arrested, Lizzie sounded a little afraid of her. Having sex with a serial killer does that to people, she’d realized. And Lizzie still hadn’t asked. Not one question. She’d taken the scraps Clare fed her and been satisfied.
“Remind me to never eat raw fish again.” Forcing a laugh, Clare opened the door. “Unless I come back as a sea lion.”
“Noted.” Lizzie flopped onto the sofa and sighed. “So I guess you’re officially unemployed now.” She gestured to the letter on the countertop. The envelope freshly stamped and addressed to the Board of Psychology.
Clare tried to hide her surprise at seeing a glimpse of the old, joking Lizzie. “Defrocked is more like it. It turns out crazy people shouldn’t be shrinks.”
“I guess so.” And just like that, the old Lizzie vanished. Clare wanted her back, needed her back. Something in her empty stomach moved, twisted. Like tiny fingers squeezing the very last drop, and she thought about bolting for the bathroom. But she inhaled slowly, and it passed.
“The FBI wants me to testify against Clive.” She called him that on purpose, trying to get a rise. “Fitzawhozit does too.” Or at least he’d said so in the message he’d left on her machine. Clare had been too afraid to pick up. Too afraid to face him now that he knew he’d been right about her.
“Hmph.”
“What do you think I should do?”
Clare watched Lizzie trying to decide what to say, how to say it. The same way Clare had measured her goodbye with Cullen. Eventually, Lizzie decided on saying nothing at all. Just a shrug of her shoulders.
“C’mon, Lizzie. I need your advice.”
“You’ll do whatever you want to anyway. So why don’t you just tell me? Save me the breath. What do you want to do?”
Her mouth gave the expected answer. Something about being wracked with confusion, not knowing which way to turn. But after Lizzie drove away, Clare pulled the atlas from her bookshelf and flipped it open. Texas. Then she closed her eyes and laid her finger on the map. Houston. Too big. She tried again. Bellwether. A small dot where nobody could find her. It would do. She laid her hand on her stomach, where the alien creature had quieted.
“It’s just you and me now.”
****
“It’s gonna hurt,” the man said, tentative, like she couldn’t handle it.
Clare nodded. Didn’t it always? She looked away from him and his Semper Fi tattoo, nearly hidden among all the others. It reminded her of Robocop. And that made her blood boil. McKinnon told her he’d been suspended for their control booth tryst, pending an investigation after those missing keys were recovered in Ramirez’s footlocker. But she hadn’t laid eyes on him since December. Since the morning after that shower when she’d left him clueless, asleep in her bed. Not that she cared one way or the other really—but him being ashamed of her, that rankled her like a pebble in her shoe. As if all of it came down to her. Her and her curse. Her and her demons. And maybe it did. Maybe Briggs was right to stay away from her.
That’s why she had to do this. To put the universe on notice. To remind herself. Clare was done with being a siren. Done with men altogether.
Leaning forward, she rested against the padded seat. The man shifted behind her, readying himself. Then, she felt his warm hand brush the hair from her neck, and she stifled a gasp. “The skin back here is real thin,” he said. “Sensitive. I just want you to be prepared for—”
“Just do it already.”
She closed her eyes and concentrated on the sound of the needle, but he kept talking. “Eye of Horus, huh?”
september 9, 1997
Clare felt bone tired, but she couldn’t sleep. Not yet. She was someone’s mother now. Again. The last nine months, she’d dreaded this day for more reasons than she could count. But it came down to one: She didn’t trust herself.
After the pain ripped her in two, and the baby cried for the first time—so loudly—Clare unraveled. She’d heard that sound before. Had silenced it with her own hands. A coldness spread through her, wilting her heart like the first frost. And when the nurse toweled the baby off and nestled her against Clare’s body, she’d thought, There’s been a mistake. This doesn’t belong to me. I don’t deserve her. But the nurse insisted, so Clare complied.
The baby squirmed against her, and Clare worried. She knows. She knows what I’ve done. I’m nobody’s mother. But the nurse told her the baby was just rooting for a warm place, so Clare held her tight, as snug as a thimble. She reminded herself she’d prepared for this. She’d done it right this time. Mostly.
It’s brave what you’re doing, Agent McKinnon had told Clare, when she’d called from a payphone at a roadside motel halfway to Texas. It doesn’t mean I agree, but our case is rock solid with or without you. And you’ve been punished enough. Clare hadn’t asked what she’d meant. There was plenty to choose from—the revoked license, the job termination, the personal humiliation, and the revelation McKinnon had uncovered, the link between Clare and Rodney. A few months after she’d left, Clare drove to Oklahoma just to mail McKinnon a sonogram photo, ignoring her warning to stay gone. No offense, Clare, but I don’t want to see your face again. Ever. She wouldn’t admit it to herself then, and even now she didn’t understand why, but she wanted Cullen to know.
“Samantha.” She tried out the name she’d picked. God heard. That’s what it meant. “Samantha Bronwyn.” They both had new names. The baby cried against her swollen breasts, and she soothed her with a soft pat, rocking her a little. “It’s okay.”
The nurse smiled at her, approving. And the edges of her heart began to thaw.
“Does she get those eyes from her father?”
Clare looked down at the baby’s face—so small and precious it made her worry. How could she ever keep her safe? “Her father died.”
As she expected, the nurse’s face crumpled, but Clare wondered if she saw right through her. “Oh, I’m so sorry.”
“In a plane crash.” So awful, no one could question it.
“What was his name?”
Samantha gazed up at her, eyes as blue as the sky after a Bellwether thunderstorm, and she couldn’t deny it. Not to herself. And, for now, that had to be enough. “Neal Barrington.”
chapter
thirty
clean up
Some trip, Bronwyn.” Ginny laughed as she leaned against me, the buzz of the hospital droning just outside her room. “I guess we hit all the hot spots, huh?”
“That’s an understatement.” I hugged Levi’s jacket tight to me, the sterile cold seeping into my bones, my letterman probably well on its way to taking up space in some FBI evidence locker.
“Is your mom … okay?” she asked. I shrugged, not sure how to answer.
“They took her to the station for questioning, after she got checked out. Physically, she’s fine, but she barely said two words in the ambulance ride over here. And she’s been acting like nothing has happened ever since.”
Ginny nodded, looking wiser than I’d ever seen her. Maybe it was the nineteen stitches in her cheek, five in her neck. “Go easy on her,” she said. “I can’t imagine what she went through with Cutthroat. That guy … what a sicko. You know, he told me how he knew about our trip.”
My stomach dropped, and I raised my eyebrows at her. “Apparently, his mother’s been keeping tabs on her granddaughter for years. And her granddaughter’s best friend. She saw my Facebook post.” Levi had been right. A serial killer and a mama’s boy. “Yep, the rotten apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.” I knew Ginny didn’t mean it that way. Still, I flinched, and she deflected. I let her. “You know, I really hope some clueless professor asks me what I did this summer. Because, I’m gonna—”
“Didn’t I warn you about getting yourself in trouble?” Levi interrupted from the doorway. His face half-smiling, half-pained, he moved slower than usual, his body draped in a hospital gown, his arm wrapped and secured in a sling.
“I thought you were speaking abstractly. You should’ve told me to watch out for kidnappers in airport bathrooms.”
“Clearly. I’ll try to be more specific next time.”
Ginny nudged me with her elbow, her cheeks puffed with pride, and I blushed in anticipation. “But, you really should be thanking me.�
�
“Oh yeah?”
“I am the queen of the elaborate setup, am I not?”
Levi winked at me. “You mean Detective Bronwyn, here? I guess she’s not that bad for a civilian.” His good arm slipped around my shoulders, and I leaned in to his warmth. He turned his head toward me, eyes twinkling. “As long as you remember which one of us was spot-on about McKinnon.”
“Oh, I remember,” I teased. “That was right after I found the folder that blew the case wide open. The one you were going to leave behind.”
“Alright, alright. It was a team effort. Bronwyn and Beckett,” Levi said. “See? I even put your name first.” Ginny awwed.
“So what’s next, Officer Beckett?” I asked.
“Just Levi,” he said. “A civilian like you. I think it’s time to surrender the badge.”
“You’re not going to fight it? After everything you did, I’m sure they’d reconsider. You brought down a major drug operation.”
“Accidentally.” Levi shrugged. “Besides, I’ve been thinking a lot about Plan B.” The corner of his mouth hinted at a smile. “The police force may be a little too by-the-book for James Dumas’ son. How does Private Detective Beckett sound?”
“Hot,” Ginny blurted, before I could answer.
I nodded. “Perfect. It’s perfect.”
****
I sat up straight, eye to eye with Agent Brennan. He’d been sent to clean up this mess—his words. “As you know, we’ve already talked with your mother and Officer Beckett about what happened at Green River Trucking. It’s quite a story, and we’d like to hear your version.”
I offered him an obligatory nod and started at the beginning. He hardly looked up from his notes, his hand working furiously until the end. Setting his pad of paper aside, he produced his best intimidating stare. “What happened to Agent McKinnon, Samantha?”
I relived it in my head. My mother’s face as she pulled the trigger, the determination there. The blood already on her hands—Rodney Taylor’s probably—staining them with guilt. But I knew what had to be done, even with my fury at her tightening my chest. I’d practiced in my head just like Levi told me to, just like a free throw, so it came out effortless, smooth as butter. “Cullen shot Agent McKinnon right before he drove away.”
Doctors of Darkness Boxed Set Page 32
