Blood on the Tracks (34 page)

“You knew Rhodes was coming into town,” I went on. “You knew he’d be the first person the police looked at. Having Whip throw down those beads was just a lucky break.”

Tell me to go fuck myself, Nik.

Nik said, “A man—”
wheeze
“does—”
wheeze
“what he has to.”

His confession struck with such force that had the words been physical, they would have ripped skin, smashed bone, crushed organs. They would have killed me.

“It’s not true,” I said. I’d gone mad, and Nik was humoring me.

He faltered. Righted himself. “She threw her life away. On those hobos. Would have thrown his away, too.”

“You
loved
her,” I cried.

“Had to choose. Between a lawyer and a waitress. Between a son and a niece.”

“And she loved you.” Just as I always had. Loved you beyond reason.

The lights behind Nik swelled like a trio of rising suns. Now I could hear the steady thrum of the train wheels, feel the vibration beneath my feet. The world disappearing in an onrush of steel.

“Keep moving.” His voice held the first metal-bright thread of panic.

Nik had never let anything stand in his path. Not the jungles in ’Nam. Not the Viet Cong sniper who had shredded his leg. Not Gentry’s attempt to join the skinheads, nor my sudden orphaning. And I’d loved him for it.

Ten feet along, Nik went down on one knee. His other foot dropped between the ties. As he fell, Gentry’s ankles slipped from his hands.

“Keep going,” he told me.

The light grew brighter. The wheels thundered.

Gritting my teeth against the pain, against the weight, I walked. Gentry’s feet bounced and dragged along the ties, his heels catching between the spaces so that each time I had to yank him free.

When I looked up again, Nik had gained his knees.

“Nik!” I shouted.

“You and I are just alike, Sydney Rose. Damaged.” He got one foot under him. Then the other. Came to a crouch. “But strong as hell, too. We do what we have to.”

I reached the end of the bridge, hauled Gentry to the side. When I looked again, Nik was back on his knees. His shadow stretched across the ties.

I put everything I had in my voice. “Nik! Come on!”

The lights of the train formed a supernova, filling the horizon.

I stepped back toward the bridge. “You told me. Never leave a fallen soldier behind.”

The engineer saw Nik and sounded his horn. The brakes gave a wailing cry, a high drilling sound like a thousand voices calling in pain.

“Unless they’ve gone bad,” Nik said.

Or I think that’s what he said. Metal shrieked around the curve of the bridge. Sparks boiled under the wheels as if the train was on fire. I threw myself off the tracks and covered Gentry’s body with my own, wrapping my arms around him and squeezing my eyes shut as the train hurtled past, tugging at us with its slipstream.

The pain in my chest burst into flame, burning everything.

The end of the world.

C
HAPTER
28

Cops and soldiers. We have a moral code that is too limited for what we face in the street or on the battlefield. Serve and protect. Defend with honor, courage, and commitment.

But the lines aren’t clearly drawn. The bad guys don’t wear signs. And all of us are only human.

—
Sydney Parnell. Personal journal.

I spent three weeks in the hospital. The blows to my chest had caused an arrhythmia in the upper chamber of my heart, which the docs thought would resolve on its own if they could get everything else fixed. I had two broken ribs, numerous lacerations, some serious, and a handful of hairline fractures, including one in my skull. My patellar tendon was shredded, my left bicep torn. So while I healed, the docs kept me afloat on a sea of artificial calm. Probably a good thing, since around me the world had erupted in a flurry of investigations, accusations, turf battles, and finger-pointing.

Throughout the days and weeks after Cohen pulled Gentry and me off that hill, the sheriff and a team of forensics experts spent long hours sorting through the dead. The last body recovered by the forensics team was the skeleton of Jazmine Brown, her bones sifted so deep into the soil at the bottom of Devil’s Gulch that she would likely never have been found if Elise hadn’t started the investigation. The team found nine other bodies in the gorge, as yet unidentified. All were disarticulated, gnawed and scattered by scavengers. One they thought might belong to a hunter—a man who’d stumbled upon the other bodies and been condemned to join them.

No one could accuse Whip and his gang of sitting idle.

The sheriff counted twelve recently deceased in the camp and on and around the bridge. They added that body count to the men Nik and I had killed at The Pint and Pecker and told me we’d done a good job. A bang-up job, I think the sheriff said, his tongue not obviously in his cheek. As if we’d done nothing more than clean up a rattler den. An internal investigation by Denver Pacific Continental cleared both Nik and me of any wrongdoing. Now it was up to the Colorado Bureau of Investigations and the DA’s office to decide my fate. Cohen told me not to worry about it, and I didn’t. Whatever the legal system decided about our actions, Nik would never face any sort of earthly trial. And I had done what I had to do.

Or at least, that’s what I told myself. Killing is never easy to justify.

During those drugged-out days, I spent a lot of time staring out my tenth-floor window, working hard to keep my mind empty. Some days I was fairly successful. Other days, Nik and the rest of the dead crowded so close it was all I could do to breathe.

But the doctors said I was making great progress. By the fifteenth day, I was off most of the drugs. On the sixteenth day, I took myself to the bathroom. Brushed my own teeth. The morning of the seventeenth day I started physical therapy. And on the evening of the eighteenth day of my stay, I turned on the television and watched for fifteen minutes before turning it off again.

On the nineteenth morning I woke with a clear head, as if someone had finally switched on the light.

A nurse was bustling around my bed, poking and prodding.

“Aren’t you bright-eyed and bushy-tailed today,” she said.

“You got coffee in this place?”

“Welcome back, honey. Your detective coming to see you today?” She was cranking up the head of my bed.

According to the hospital staff, Cohen had visited me every day. Even before I was conscious. Even while I was drugged out of my mind. Probably I was easier to take in that state.

“Can you fix my braid?”

She patted my hand and stuck a digital thermometer in my ear. “You look beautiful.”

“Maybe something to cover the bruises?”

She read a number off the thermometer, wrote it down. “You’re a lucky woman. Having a handsome detective and his handsome dog looking out for you.”

Clyde is
my
dog, I thought but did not say.
My
partner.

The nurse finished with me, patted my hand again, and left. A minute later, there was a knock on the half-open door, and Cohen walked in.

Or tried to. Clyde beat him to it then had to wait for the detective to lift him onto the bed. The nurses had been livid the first few times they’d come in and found a dog lying next to me, tangled among the tubes and wires. But Clyde wouldn’t take no. They’d finally thrown up their hands, moved the tubing, and laid out a blanket for him.

I rested my hand on Clyde’s head, felt the warmth of him, felt his strength pass through my skin in that wonderful osmosis we shared. Clyde opened his mouth and let his tongue hang down just about to the bed and watched me. He smiled like that every time I saw him. Judging by how much my face hurt, I was probably smiling, too.

“Fucking furball’s gonna break my back,” Cohen said, taking up his perch on the windowsill.

“You walking him every day?”

“Sure. Even though he barfed up a stolen steak on my rug.”

When Clyde took that shot for me, he suffered three broken ribs and a bruise that began where Whip’s bullet struck his shoulder and worked its way down almost to his tail. While Cohen and the police and deputies were swarming over the encampment, Clyde had hobbled through the mob to Cohen. Badly injured, in terrible pain, Clyde had nonetheless led Cohen up the trail and across the bridge to where Gentry and I lay unconscious. They had to medevac all three of us.

The nurses told me that when I learned Clyde was alive, I shoved a doctor hard enough to make her fall and tried to get off the gurney, rubber tubes and IVs be damned. I don’t remember it. But it’s still one of the best days of my life.

“How are things in the world of crime fighting?” I asked Cohen.

“Oh you know.” His eyes were as dark and tired as I remembered them. “Days are never long enough.”

“What are you wasting time here for, then?”

“Food’s free.”

“That’s graft.”

“More like perks.”

When Cohen first came to the hospital, I couldn’t look him in the eye. Not after what I’d done. Not with what I knew. But I came to realize that Cohen has monsters of his own. And if he suspected I knew more than I was sharing, he let it sit. He was plenty pissed about the papers I’d stolen. But he understood. He wasn’t going to stay away from me because of that.

Especially since, he said in a moment of pique, I’d solved his crime for him. He might need me again.

Now, as we did every day, we talked about idle things. Gossip about some of the dicks Cohen worked with. How good the coffee was at the shop a block from headquarters. Whether or not I’d flunk out of school this semester from missing so many classes.

Denver PD closed the book on the murder of Elise Hensley with the identification of her killer as Alfred Merkel. Melody Weber’s testimony, along with the fact of Tucker’s stolen hobo beads at the crime scene, the presence of several of Merkel’s hairs on Elise’s body, and Merkel’s possession of illegal prescription meds, helped convince Denver PD that they had their man. I didn’t know why Melody lied, although I figured it was her one chance to give Whip the finger. Detective Bandoni kept giving me the evil eye about all of it, but in the end he said justice had been served, one way or another, and he let it drop.

I don’t think Cohen bought it. I think the case remains open for him. But I also think he has no idea who her real killer was. And maybe not much inclination to pursue it.

Elise hadn’t come by since the night we entered the encampment, so it could be she too felt that justice, however winding, had been served.

I thought about her and Whip a lot during the long, still nights as I listened to the beeping of monitors, the swooshing steps of the nurses, the occasional cry down the hall. Merkel had gone down for the one thing he hadn’t done. And Nik had committed the worst sort of crime. He’d slaughtered a woman he loved, ripped her body apart to make it look like the crime of someone else’s passion. Or maybe, once he started with the knife, he didn’t know how to stop. Killing—in war or elsewhere—drives us mad. Death shoves its way into our nostrils and down our throats, filling us until there isn’t room for anything else.

Nik had held his war inside for forty years.

No wonder he couldn’t breathe.

In those long, quiet nights, I wondered about the dark things in my own future. The men I’d killed—first in Iraq, now in Colorado—had left marks on my heart. However justified the courts might rule it, killing is killing.

It does not leave us intact.

And now my silence let Nik get away with his crime. More than get away with it. Ellen Ann was keeping her grief at bay by raising money for a memorial fund to make sure no one forgot Nik Lasko’s heroism.

“You miss him,” Cohen said now, as if reading my mind.

“More than you know,” I answered. But it was for the Nik I thought I’d known. Not for what he’d become.

“He died saving his son.” Cohen looked at me as if waiting for some reaction.

But he’d tried this gambit before. I gave him nothing except a nod.

“Well.” He stood. “Guess I’d better get back to work before Bandoni sends a hit squad.”

“Wheel me up to see Gentry?”

Gentry had remained in ICU for two weeks before being upgraded to serious but stable and then to fair. He’d suffered a cranial compression fracture, a lacerated liver, a broken occipital bone, five broken ribs, and twenty-seven cigarette burns. His captors had done other things to him he wouldn’t talk about and that his doctor said were none of my business. The physical recovery would take weeks.

I worried there might not be enough time in the world to heal the internal scars.

Cohen parked my wheelchair at the nurses’ station on Gentry’s floor. He gave me a chaste peck on the cheek. Clyde slobbered on my lap until Cohen bodily hauled him away.

“Your friend is taking in some sunlight at the end of the hall,” the day nurse said.

Gentry’s wheelchair was parked close to the window. The nurse rolled me up next to him. She adjusted the blanket on Gentry’s lap, told us not to tire ourselves, and beat feet.

“They tell me you’re getting better,” I said.

He gave a slow, sad smile. “Rumor has it.”

“You’re looking good.”

“You too.”

Ah, the lies told to the hospitalized everywhere.

He returned his gaze to the window. “When are you going back to work?”

“Soon as they let me. ’Course, I’ll be at a desk for a while.” I fingered the brace on my knee. “What about you?”

“I don’t know. I’ve resigned from the law firm. I’m thinking I’ll start taking pro bono cases on my own. Or go to work for the public defender’s office.”

Outside, a bird hurtled past, flung by the March wind. It turned on its wing and swooped under the eaves.

Gentry shifted in his chair, sucked in his breath at the pain. “Your detective talked to me about Jazmine Brown.”

“What’d you tell him?”

“The truth. I didn’t hurt her, Sydney.”

“I know.”

“But I didn’t save her, either. I knew what those boys meant to do, and I stayed silent. It’s a hard thing to live with.”

“I understand that, too.”

After a while, his hand crept out from under the blanket and took mine. We sat that way as the sun faded and a winter chill took over the room. Spring was still a long way away.

On my twentieth day in the hospital, the ghost of the CIA spy, Richard Dalton, appeared.

I was furious with his intrusion. I’d half hoped that what I’d gone through had been payment enough to silence the dead. That after crowding me during my drug-hazed days, they would pack up and move out.

So when Dalton showed up, I picked up a vase of flowers and threw it at him.

A nurse came running, but Dalton just moved to stand by the window.

After an orderly had cleaned up the mess and I’d had some time to calm down, Dalton’s presence forced me to think about things that, frankly, scared the shit out of me.

I still had the Alpha and Sarge to deal with. Whatever they thought I had, they’d be back for it.

More importantly, there was Malik. The boy was somewhere in the US with the Alpha and Sarge sniffing for his trail like a pair of jackals. I’d failed him in Iraq. I wouldn’t fail him again. I had to find him before they did.

I pulled out Dougie’s ring, held it up to the sunlight where it swung and spun on its chain, a gyroscope of promise and loss.

Whatever the Alpha wanted, whenever Sarge came back, I’d do my best to be ready. Given the level of alarm around what had happened in Habbaniyah, I figured there was a house of cards somewhere just waiting for a good breath of air.

Something that, maybe, Malik and I could do together.