Authors: Rebecca Drake
She’d never seen him in uniform. When she’d photographed him with his wife and stillborn son he’d been wearing street clothes. Hard to believe that had been barely over a month ago. It felt like another century. He said, “I’ve got to arrest you.”
“It’s a mistake,” she said. “I didn’t hurt my daughter.”
“It’s my job.” He’d reached behind him for the cuffs on his belt.
“You offered to help me, do you remember?”
Clearly he did, he was already shaking his head. “That was different.”
“You said if I ever needed anything—I need something now.”
“This isn’t a traffic ticket—you’re wanted for murder.”
“I didn’t do it. I couldn’t. You know me. You and your wife, both. Do you really think I’d hurt a child? After the pain of losing one?”
He had the handcuffs in one hand, the gun in the other, but he stood there, obviously wavering. “It’s not up to me to determine whether you’re telling the truth—I’ve got a job to do.”
“I have to find my daughter. If I’m locked up, I can’t find her.”
“I’m sorry.” He took a step toward her, holding out the cuffs. She took a small step back.
“Please. I’m begging you to let me go. You said if I ever needed anything. Anything at all.”
There was a long moment where they stood there simply staring at each other. Then he sighed and his arm dropped to his side. He jerked his head toward the door. “Go. I never saw you.”
“Thank you, thank you so much.”
But he’d already turned, pushing through the doors back the way she’d come. Jill ran down the steps and out of the hospital before he changed his mind.
DAY TWENTY-THREE
The old man groaned loudly, writhing on the ground, clearly unable to get up. Bea dropped the shears and stepped out from behind the shed door. Avery stared dumbstruck at the blood gushing from the old man’s leg. The bullet had hit an artery; it would be over very quickly.
The old man’s rheumy eyes widened as he looked up at Bea standing over him. “Help me!” It sounded like a gargle. She examined him dispassionately; she’d seen plenty of gunshot wounds in Florida, though most of the victims had been younger. She bent down and reached toward his leg, pulling the gun out from underneath him and cleaning it off in the snow before slipping it in her coat pocket. The man tried to touch her, but Bea stepped out of reach. There was nothing she could do to stanch the bleeding in time to save him.
Avery looked from the man to Bea, eyes round and wide with shock. “If you’d been good and stayed home you wouldn’t have had to see that,” Bea said. She took the child’s hand and dragged her away, back through the woods up the hill. The child resisted her pull, digging her heels into the snowy ground and crying. “C’mon,” Bea said, jerking her along. “You shouldn’t be out here; it’s too cold to be out here without a coat.” When the child still dragged, she hauled her into her arms, ignoring the pain in her chest and the child’s wriggling, hiking as fast as she could up the hillside with Cosmo running after her.
They would have to leave even sooner than she’d planned. Someone had to have heard the gunshot. They’d find the man and the police would come swarming over the hillside like ants. They would find her and the child and everything she’d worked for would be lost. Avery was a dead weight in her arms. As they reached the beginning of their own driveway, Bea put the child down for a moment. Avery promptly ran, scrambling back down the way they’d come. Bea’s temper flared. “Get back here!”
She ran after the child, stumbling in the snow, her hand reaching out as she fell, hard, but managing to grab the child’s ankle and drag her back. The girl cried, but Bea slapped a hand over her mouth to muffle her. “It’s okay,” she crooned, trying to hold the struggling child against her chest. “Everything will be okay.”
She’d said the same thing to her daughter when she was little, soothing her when someone had said something mean or she’d gotten a bad grade on a test. Just one of the many lies that parents told kids. Because it wasn’t going to be okay, it was going to go on being miserable most of the time. The most you could hope for were the occasional glimmers of happiness.
Avery bent her head and bit Bea on the finger. She shrieked. This child was nothing like her daughter—Annie would never have acted this way. Bea pried the girl’s mouth off her hand. “Stop it, you little brat!” Her finger was bleeding and she felt in her jacket pocket for a tissue to wrap it in, but her hand closed on the gun instead. She realized she shouldn’t have taken it. All she’d thought was it might be useful, but if she’d left it lying there beside the man then the police would assume it was all just an unfortunate accident. She had to go back down and leave it by him, but not now, not with the child. She had to get her home, fast, before anyone saw them.
Still searching for a tissue, Bea reached into her other pocket and felt something hard and cylindrical. A spare syringe. Frank would have called it dumb luck, but it was nothing of the kind. She’d been prepared for any eventuality, just like she’d told him. She had no time to wonder at the dosage, no time to do this right. She jammed the needle through the sweater into the child’s arm, covering her yowl of pain. She held fast, staggering a bit, when the child went slack in her arms.
Bea trudged up the snow-covered gravel, so desperate to see the house that she didn’t notice the tire tracks. When she spotted the roofline the relief flooded her with energy. Until she reached the clearing and saw a familiar-looking SUV parked on the driveway.
* * *
There was no way out; police cars surrounded the hospital. Jill ducked behind a row of huge metal Dumpsters and fumbled through her pocket for David’s cell phone. Was it still working? The signal was faint, but there. She called Tania.
“Hello?” Tania sounded distracted, as if she’d been interrupted in the middle of something.
“It’s me, please don’t hang up.”
“Jill? I’m watching you on TV! They’re saying you escaped from police custody. Where are you? Whose phone is this?”
“It’s David’s. I’m in trouble—I need help.”
“No shit.”
“Please, Tania, I really need your help.”
“I’m not even talking to you, remember?”
“I know. I’m sorry, but I couldn’t think of who else to call.”
There was silence on the other end, but Jill could hear her breathing. “Please, I’m begging you. I’m outside, in the cold without a coat, hiding behind a Dumpster.”
A sigh and then finally, blessedly, Tania said, “I’m listening.”
“I need you to come get me.”
The great thing about Tania was that she didn’t insist on asking all the questions first. All she said was, “Where?”
Despite the cold, the trash bins still smelled. Jill switched hands, covering her nose with one and sticking the other in a lab-coat pocket, raising as high as a crouch every few minutes to stomp her feet in snow that seemed to turn gray as soon as it hit the ground.
Her life had definitely hit its lowest ebb: Hiding from the police, Sophia gone, maybe forever, and David. Was he dead? She kept seeing his bruised and waxy skin, kept hearing the sound of the monitor flatlining. Had he really hidden a knife in his car? Could he have hurt Sophia? But no, it was crazy, he couldn’t have hurt her like that, he loved their daughter as much as she did even if he was a lying son of a bitch. It must be some kind of police setup. Maybe they were trying to force a confession because they were already so convinced that she or David had killed their own child. Were they even considering any other suspects? What about Lyn Galpin?
That reminded Jill of what she’d been doing before she heard about David. She scrolled through the contacts on David’s phone, looking for anything that might lead her to Sophia. Jill had spent her life trying to live by the straight and narrow, always doing the right thing and playing by the rules when everybody else around her didn’t. Not anymore. She knew her daughter was alive. She knew it even if the police didn’t. If she’d followed the law, if she’d allowed them to handcuff and haul her off to jail, then no one would find Sophia.
There was no Lyn Galpin, no Lyn of any kind in David’s contacts. Damn, it was cold out. Where was Tania? It felt like Jill had been waiting forever. She tapped open David’s photos; maybe he took pictures of these women. The last photo he’d taken was a blurry shot of some woman taken through a window. Or was that a car door? Jill stood up and tried to get a better look at it.
The sound of a motor made her duck back down and shove the phone back in her pocket. Peering between two Dumpsters, eager to spot Tania’s ancient Honda Accord, she saw a motorcycle instead. Big and black, it came slowly down the asphalt, the driver completely obscured by black leather and a black-visored helmet. Jill held her breath as the bike stopped moving and the driver sat back and up in the seat, resting large gloved hands on his lap. Was he police? Jill breathed shallowly, trying not to inhale the fetid scents around her. Suddenly the guy pulled off his helmet and Jill could see that it wasn’t a cop at all, but a bearded man with a skull and crossbones tattooed on his neck: Leo.
She stepped out from between the Dumpsters and Leo rolled the bike her way. He grinned at her. “The cavalry’s here.”
“Where’s Tania?”
“She says cops are watching her place, so she gave me a call. She figures they won’t get to me for a while. Hop on.”
Jill didn’t want to go anywhere with him, but she didn’t really have a choice. She’d started down this road and there was no going back. She swung a leg over the bike, trying not to touch Leo, but lost her balance and ended up forced to catch hold of his jacket, cold-numbed fingers slipping over thick leather. He reached a hand back to steady her and then lifted the flap of a saddlebag behind her, producing a sheepskin jacket. “Here, put this on.”
“Thanks.” It was too large and smelled like must and cigarettes, but it was warm.
“Nothing I like more than fucking with the police. You’re my old lady if we get stopped—that’s how I got past the fuckers. Said I was picking you up from work.” Leo grinned again at her and she managed a sickly smile in return, trying not to cough when he lit a cigarette pulled from an inside pocket. The lighter’s orange-blue flame quivered in the wind before he snapped it shut. He puffed away for a moment, glancing back at her through narrowed eyes with an irritating smirk before tossing the cigarette to the side. It sizzled as it hit the snow.
“Just one more thing,” he said, and leaned toward her. She reared back—she hadn’t seen him since she’d given his name to the police; was this offer of help really about getting revenge? But he only reached into the opposite saddlebag, his jacket raising as he did so and she caught a glimpse of blue and green, a tattooed snake that disappeared into his pants. “Gotta wear this, too.”
This
was a matching helmet, heavy on her head. “Okay, visors down while we get out of here. And you’d better hold on; we might have to outrun the cops—that’s why I brought the bike.”
For God’s sake, did the guy think he was starring in an action film? The motorcycle jerked to life, forcing Jill to lean against Leo, arms clasped around his waist as he sped back out the way he’d come. There were patrol cars blocking all traffic in and out of the hospital and two police officers stopping vehicles. Jill knew the visor blocked her face, but she felt exposed all the same. She clung to Leo, trying to look like she wanted to be touching him. The cop barely glanced at the motorcycle before waving it through.
Leo maintained a sedate speed until they’d gotten out of sight, and then he sped up. She pushed up her visor, shouting to be heard above the noise, “I need to go to the studio.”
He shook his head, pushing up his own visor. “No can do, the cops are there.”
It startled her to think of being tracked that way. She was officially a fugitive. She imagined her face on wanted posters. “Where are we headed, then?”
“My place.” He must have caught her expression in the side mirror because he grinned again. “Hey, no worries, it’s not like I live in a meth lab.”
Not exactly reassuring; Jill let her visor drop and held on.
It might not have been a meth lab, but Jill suspected that Leo’s house wasn’t exactly drug free. A row house on the border of Bloomfield and Garfield, it was a run-down brick building with metal awnings over the windows and a worn kitchen chair holding onto a parking spot on a congested backstreet rapidly filling with snow. A faded
BEWARE OF DOG
sign sat propped in the front window. Leo jerked to a stop and flicked back his visor. He saw Jill eyeing the sign and said, “The dog’s dead, we kept the sign to scare people.”
The dark front hall was narrow and smelled of pot and body odor. Leo kicked boots and a snowboard out of the path, calling, “Hey, asshole, get your shit out of the doorway.” He locked the door behind her, shutting out the snow, but there was no discernible difference between the temperature inside and out. Jill hugged the jacket around her and trailed after him. A sagging floral couch filled the cramped living room and another heavily tattooed young guy, impossibly skinny, sat in the middle of it completely engrossed in a game playing on the enormous flat screen wedged in front of a decorative fireplace. The couch appeared to be swallowing him.
“String, this is Jill, Jill this is String, a.k.a. the inconsiderate asshole who dumps all his shit around the house.” Leo waved his hand and the other guy made a grunting sound, his fingers moving on the controller. “He’s in sales,” Leo said and Jill wondered what
that
guy could possibly be selling. Leo led the way down the hall into a kitchen.
Every available surface appeared covered in something. Piles of books and unopened mail lay scattered across a small table and dirty dishes filled the sink. There was a heavy smell of grease, probably related to the open pizza box with two decaying slices sitting on top of the stove, or the two other empty boxes poking out of an open trash can.
Jill tried to focus on what to do next; she couldn’t stop shaking. She was officially on the lam; if she didn’t find Sophia she would be charged with murdering her own child. It was only a matter of time until the police found her, and with the evidence they’d trumped up there was no way that she and David wouldn’t be convicted. The court of public opinion and the media had already found them guilty.