DAYBREAK: a gripping thriller full of suspense (Titan Trilogy Book 3) (18 page)

“I got a book from a cop while I was inside,” Brendan said. He and Sloane lay in bed together. Night had spread over the buildings outside, a haze holding the city lights in a greasy glow. “Remember Colinas?”

“Colinas?” She was burrowed in beside him, one arm draped over his bare chest. “Guy you were always talking to on the phone?”

“Yeah.”

“What was the book?”

“Called
The Great Divorce.
”

“Never heard of it.”

“By C.S. Lewis.”

“Isn’t he a religious guy?”

“He wrote
The Screwtape Letters
, a book that turned out to be a big part of the investigation into Rebecca Heilshorn’s murder.” He put his hands behind his head and stared up at the ceiling. “Rebecca had two daughters. One, I saved: Aldona. She’s back with her biological father. The other is Leah. She would be around six years old now. I think she’s with Heilshorn’s wife, Greta.”

“Greta sounds like a witch in a kid’s story.”

“Real-life version.”

Sloane shifted beneath the covers and propped herself up on an elbow, fans of her hair sliding across her forehead. She brushed it back and said, “So, wait a minute. Why did Colinas send you that book? What does it have to do with some little girl?”

“Well, she’s not just some little girl. You were in trouble once, and someone helped you.”

Sloane squinted, her expression severe, but her tone light. “You trying to pick a fight with me? After the first time we finally have nookie?”

Brendan laughed; it had just snuck out. Suddenly he felt like he and Sloane had been in a relationship for months. In a way, maybe they had. From a distance. She was frowning at him, angry he was laughing at her, and so he tucked his head to his chin and rolled into her playfully. She responded by hitting him on the shoulder and he cried out in mock pain. He stole a look at her and saw she was smiling. Then she became serious again.

“No, come on, tell me. What does a book have to do with Leah Heilshorn? What are you thinking?”

“I’m worried about Leah. I always have been.”

Still skeptical, scowling slightly, “How do you know where she is? Or, how does Colinas?”

“It’s not like he came out and told me. He marked a page in the book. It made me think about my past. And I think there might be a connection.”

“Oh. I see . . .”

He gave her a close look. “What?”

Her eyes seemed hard. “Let’s just say, hypothetically, now that you’re out, you go and find this girl. What are you going to do then?” Her eyebrow arched. “Play house? You think finding her is going to somehow absolve you? You can forgive yourself for what happened to them? To Angie and Gloria?”

He felt struck. To hear someone else say their names aloud — he couldn’t remember the last time that had happened. Years ago. A decade? Since the cops came to his house that night. Maybe in AA, maybe he’d spoken of them at some point sitting with Argon years ago in the group. He couldn’t remember.

He thought about it, like he’d thought about it for the past ten years, and more recently, over the interminable nights at Rikers Island. He remembered the evening that it happened, how he had stayed behind at the restaurant after the argument with Angie, staying to drink while his wife and daughter drove away. He’d told himself they were better off without him anyway.

She turned over, as if she was going to get out of the bed, and he reached out and grabbed her.

“Hey,” she called out, her forehead creasing with a scowl as she looked at his hand on her. He let go. He searched her face and she gradually softened. She eased back over to him, watching him, and then she curled back up beside him. “It wasn’t your fault. And it’s over.”

Brendan couldn’t look at her anymore. He stared up at the ceiling.

“Just tell me,” Sloane said. “Get it out and let it go. Once and for all.”

He waited. He thought of all the years struggling with the depression and the grief. Brendan took a deep breath, let it vent in a long sigh. Then he spoke.

He told Sloane how that night he’d finally drunk himself to the point where he wanted to leave the restaurant, grab a taxi, pick up more booze on the way home. He’d been convinced that he would be able to smooth everything over with Angie once he got there. Maybe she’d even have one with him. Gloria would be asleep, and he could coax out the old Angie. The one who would stay up with him all night, outrunning the dark right beside him, sitting there and listening to his theories with genuine interest and attraction. Angie, with her clear mind, who could distill what it took him an hour to express in a single moment, in one sentence.

Who had once told him that living with him was like living with a time bomb.

He’d ridden home in the taxi even thinking, in this fantasy scenario, that he’d be able to woo her into bed. They would talk, he would explain that having them leave the restaurant without him had been for the best — a wise decision, even.

But Angie hadn’t been there. His wife and daughter had never come home.

“After that night, after it happened, I left. I was away for a long time. When I came home, I still had the house. I remember I had to break in. The car was in the garage, four years of dust on it. But it started up, I got in it, and I sat there, the windows down. I’d never followed the investigation. I knew that it was a truck driver, supposedly awake for three days, half asleep at the wheel, who lost control and hit them.”

She propped her head up on an arm. “He went to prison, right?”

Brendan found it hard to meet her eyes. “He did. But he was out in thirty months.”

“Where were you?”

“I traveled. Stayed in the mid-west. I even made it to Laramie. I went there again after the Rebecca Heilshorn case. But the first time I was there, that’s where I was when I found out.”

“About his release.”

Brendan rolled over on his back and tucked his hands behind his head. He stared up at the ceiling. “Yeah. When I heard he was out.”

“And you went after him.”

Brendan was silent.

“Did you find him?”

Brendan didn’t answer. He couldn’t. Not right now. It was too much. His reunion with Sloane was something he’d been anticipating for months.

She got out of the bed. This time he didn’t stop her. She pulled at the sheet as she stood up, attempting to spool it around her. Brendan had to lift up his butt to free some of it. He looked at her body as she pulled on the blankets. Her ribs, her protruding hip bones, her small breasts and nipples, the color of raspberries.

Her body reminded him of Angie’s. Sloane had a scar running from her ribcage down to her pelvis which he hadn’t seen before. Angie hadn’t had any scars. She’d had skin the color of cream. Dark Italian eyes and hair, but light skin.

He’d actually thought he was going to get Angie into bed that night after the restaurant, when he’d showed up at the door with a bottle of vodka and a six-pack. Already ten drinks into the evening, swaying on his feet, grasping the doorknob to his home and turning it and finding it locked. Dark out now — it had still been light when they had left the restaurant — the hedges and trees jagged shapes, the insects buzzing and chirping in the grass. A locked door. No lights on. She’d locked up on him. She’d fucking locked his own house on him.

Enraged, he’d pounded on the door, rattling the windows, and lights had flipped on in the neighboring houses. Brendan standing there on his little suburban stoop, fishing around in his pocket for the keys, unable to find them, more furious as the minutes wore on, until finally he’d gotten the cops called on him when he’d turned and tossed his head back and screamed her name up at his house.

Angie
.

His cry echoed in his head now as Sloane, fully cocooned in the bed sheet, standing in a hotel room in New York City all these years later, looked down at him.

“I’m going to get in the shower,” she said, and walked off towards the bathroom, the sheet dragging along behind her like a bridal train.

She left him lying there in the bed. He was tired, everywhere he was tired. In his bones he was tired. But he also felt alive.

He closed his eyes. He forced out the other thoughts and replayed their lovemaking. His hands on her skin, the feel of her ribs, the supple skin, the sound of her voice when she came.

The man standing on the porch in Hawthorne, defeated, drunk, drinking from the vodka bottle when the cops showed up, not to arrest him for public intoxication or disturbing the peace, but to give him the news. To stand there — it had been a male cop and a female cop, exchanging looks with one another — and to tell him that the reason why his wife and child weren’t home was because they were on the Saw Mill Parkway inside a twisted mass of metal that the rescuers were now prying open.

That man was still there. A ruined man undeserving of the two of them in the first place, he was still there. He would always be there. But it was as if that man belonged to another life now. That man was in his place. The time now belonged to this Brendan, the one possibly in love with the woman running the shower in the bathroom. The one standing there, her perfect bare feet on the hard white tiles, equally white sheet draped around her slender scarred fame, sticking her hand in the beading water as it warmed. This miracle of a person, who hadn’t been meant for the world but yet was somehow still here, just like he was. He didn’t want to ruin that.

He settled back into the bed, listening to the shower. He thought he even heard her humming a tune in there, and he drifted off to sleep.

* * *

The knock at the door woke him.

He sat up, half-awake, groping for his gun on the nightstand. There was no gun; he didn’t have one any more. He cocked his head, listening — maybe he’d heard something else, like Sloane drop the shampoo bottle in the bathroom shower. But then it came again; someone was knocking on the hotel-room door.

He swung his legs out of the bed, his body lighting up with alarm, his skin breaking into gooseflesh. He found his pants on the floor between the bed and the wall, hooked a foot into the waist, and pulled them on. But he’d stood up too fast and his vision blurred. He lowered his head and hunched forward for a moment. He saw a plain white undershirt, pulled it over his head. Another rapping on the door,
knock knock knock
, soft but insistent. The shower continued to hiss in the bathroom; Sloane couldn’t hear anything.

Sloane
, he thought, both remembering the way they had messed up the bed he’d just climbed out of, and the self-possessed way she had entered the room an hour before. How she had come back into his life a different woman.

Brendan padded across the plush carpet to the door, and cautiously bent towards the keyhole.

A young man dressed in a hotel uniform was standing there. Despite the fact that it was the middle of the night, the employee looked as chipper as the front-desk clerks, standing at attention like a cadet at a military school, his face twitching as he practiced, no doubt, the apology he would offer for intruding at such an inappropriate hour.

Brendan put his hand on the knob, but didn’t turn. “Hello?”

From the other side of the door, slightly muffled, the employee said, “Sir, I’m very, very sorry to be disturbing you at this hour. There is an urgent message for you, and I explained that it is NOT our policy to disturb guests at such an hour for
any reason
. . .”

Brendan thought that the employee’s apologetic sermon was going to wake the whole floor. He reached for the bolt handle which he slid back with a click, realizing that despite the lack of sleep, he was still on a high; a high from being free, from being out, from being with Sloane.

It felt like being home.

He opened the door, the hotel employee’s lips flapping, head tilted, hands folded together in front of his business-causal ensemble. “. . . There was some confusion with your room, and so there was a slight delay . . . Oh, hello, sir, I’m so sorry to wake you.”

“It’s okay,” Brendan said. “What’s the message?”

“Sir, I went and got my manager, as I was saying. The woman said it was a very important matter. You understand, our policy isn’t to just disturb a guest.”

“I understand.”

“The manager said to take down the message and to bring it to you. The woman said she was an agent with the US Department of Justice.” The messenger glowed with something like reverence, or maybe pride that he was involved in such an important communication.

The water was still running in the bathroom, steam drifting out from the crack beneath the door. He saw this as he looked down, for some reason dreading what was going to come next. He’d no reason to suspect the worst, but, then, he had every reason to expect the worst. Because the worst was what kept happening.

“What is the message?”

“I wrote it down,” the employee repeated, and handed Brendan an envelope. His name was written on it in careful cursive, though misspelled.
Mr. Brandon Heely.

“Thank you,” he said, his head coming up. The employee stood there, and for some reason couldn’t meet Brendan’s eyes.
Do I tip or something
? But the kid seemed anxious to leave now that the task was done. He apologized again and wished Brendan goodnight and hurried off down the hallway.