Sweetheart (23 page)

The kid’s eyebrows shot together and then he reached up with his left hand and touched the ear, wincing as he did. He lowered his hand and looked at it, the streak of blood evident on his fingertips. “Gross,” he said.

“Do you have any plans tonight?” Archie asked the kid, imagining the hours of interrogation the kid faced at Henry’s hands.

“No,” the kid said.

Archie walked away, toward the door that led to the kitchen, away from Henry, away from Debbie, away from everything. “Good.”

T
he last person Archie expected to find on the other side of the door to the alley was Susan Ward. She glanced up from where she was standing, next to a green Dumpster, snapped the cigarette from between her lips, and said hello, as if she weren’t surprised to see him at all. For a long second Archie was confused. Then he saw past her, farther up the alley, where the brake lights of a silver Jaguar hovered in the dusk, like sleepy, sinister eyes.

“Are you okay?” Archie asked Susan.

Susan ashed her cigarette in a large restaurant-sized can that had once held stewed tomatoes, but now held the ashes of a thousand smoke breaks. “Yeah. This is the only fucking place I can smoke.” She gestured to the side of the Dumpster, which reeked of spoiled food. “Watch the urine.”

The fact that Susan was there was a coincidence. Dizzy from relief, Archie stumbled, and had to reach out and grab on to the Dumpster to catch himself.

“Yikes, drink much?” said Susan. She smiled, red lipstick on her teeth, and sucked in another lungful of tobacco smoke. Cigarette butts lay everywhere on the concrete below, like matchsticks dropped in a children’s game. Cigarette butts were excellent sources of DNA.

“Give me one,” Archie said.

Susan hesitated. “Seriously?”

Archie held out a hand. It was shaking slightly, but not enough for anyone but him to notice. Susan pulled a cigarette out of her yellow pack and handed it to him.

“Have you ever been a smoker?” she asked.

Archie took her black plastic lighter and lit the cigarette and inhaled. The smoke burned his lungs, but he didn’t cough. He glanced over to where the Jaguar still idled up ahead, its engine almost silent. It was the only good car the British had ever built. “Nope,” he said. “Tried a few times. Never took. I remember the first one, though. That’s always the one you remember. First cigarette. First kiss. First corpse in a park.”

Susan raised her eyebrows. “O-kay.” She was wearing black leggings, brown boots, a T-shirt advertising a band that Archie didn’t recognize, and a hooded sweatshirt, and her turquoise hair was up in pigtails. “Hey,” she said. “I know I just gave it to you, but I need that box of notes from the Castle story back.”

Her request barely registered. Archie had other things on his mind. “I’ve got to go,” Archie said.

Susan glanced back at the scratched fire door that led into the kitchen. “Where’s Henry?”

“They’ll be fine,” Archie said more to himself than to Susan. He took a few steps toward the car and then turned around and looked at Susan and smiled and dropped the cigarette.

“Archie?” he heard Susan call, her voice rising a pitch.

He kept walking toward the car. When he reached it, he turned back again. He opened the passenger side door. Susan stood with her hands on her hips, head cocked to one side. Between them, the cigarette he had dropped glowed orange on the pavement. He hadn’t stepped on it, hadn’t ground it out. He hadn’t wanted to risk ruining their chance of getting his DNA off it.

He didn’t wave goodbye to Susan. It seemed too ghoulish. Instead he just turned away from her, and moving steadily, gently, climbed into the car.

The nausea had lifted now and he was almost relieved, certain that this was the best plan. Besides, the cigarette would help them later.

If they had to identify a body.

The car moved instantly.

He felt her hand on his upper thigh before he heard her voice. “Hello, darling,” she said.

He looked over at her. Her blond hair was tied back at her neck, her left hand was at twelve o’clock on the wheel. She was ravishing and terrifying and strangely full of life. If it worked, it would be worth it. If not, well, what the hell.

“Hello, Gretchen,” he said.

T
he dashboard of the Jag was a walnut veneer, so shiny Archie could see his reflection in it. It was blurry and he looked away from his haggard face.

“Take the bullets out of your weapon and the battery off your phone and toss them out the window,” Gretchen said. Her voice was glass, mellifluous, like music.

Archie turned to her. His heart was pounding, adrenaline pulsing through his body. It was nice. It made him feel high. “That’s littering,” he said.

Gretchen smiled sweetly. He had missed looking at her. She was thirty-four but seemed both younger and older somehow. The flawless skin. The perfect features. It was like looking at a painting in a museum after you’d only seen the postcard; the print in his memory could never live up to the original. “The police looking for you will find them by morning,” she said.

He took his phone out of his pocket, popped the back off, and removed the flat blue battery, and then lifted his gun out of his holster and let the bullets fall gently from the chamber into one hand. Gretchen pushed a button somewhere and his window slid open and he held his hand out the window and let the bullets and the battery fall to the street. The bullets bounced, snapping against the cement.

Gretchen turned left off the park blocks toward the river. “Nice car,” Archie said.

“I had some money set aside,” she said. “In another name.” She moved her hand slightly up his thigh. It was only a millimeter, but it felt farther. “Look in the glove compartment,” she said.

He opened the car’s slick glove box. Inside were five large amber prescription bottles of pills.

“Remove the pills,” she said. “And put your gun and phone inside. There’s water in the cup holder.”

Archie followed her instructions. The gun and the phone were useless now anyway. He picked up the bottle of water next to his left knee in the car’s cup holder and unscrewed the cap. Then he opened one of the pill bottles. Even in the dim light of the car, he knew what they were, the shape and feel of the pills. He tapped four out of the bottle and then swallowed them with water.

She picked up three little yellow pills from the car’s change drawer and handed them to him.

“What are they?” he asked. They were on Bill Naito Parkway now, heading south. The river was to their left. In the seventies there had been a freeway adjacent to the river, but they’d decided to tear it down and build a park that stretched the length of downtown at the water’s edge.

“We have a long drive ahead of us,” Gretchen said.

She didn’t want him to see where they were going. That was a good sign. If she had been planning on killing him right away, it wouldn’t have mattered.

“Am I going to wake up strapped to a gurney?” he asked.

“No.”

He put the pills on his tongue. They were bitter. But not like the Vicodin. It was a different taste. He took another swallow of water to wash it from his mouth.

“I’ve missed you, darling,” Gretchen said.

Archie smiled and leaned his head on the side window and watched as they pulled onto I-5 headed south. “Yeah,” he said.

W
hat kind of car was it?” Henry said.

Susan fumbled for another cigarette, her hands trembling. Henry had burst out of the alley door, a moment after the silver car had disappeared. And had been yelling at her ever since.

“I told you,” Susan said. “It was silver.” She thought about paint, picturing the paint samples her mother brought home and tacked to various walls for years while she decided. “But not blue silver; not glacier or metallic; not neutral.” She searched her mind for any further explanation, wanting to help any way she could. “It was silver with a splash of gray, like that silk blouse with the French-cut sleeves I sometimes wear. Expensive silver. Platinum.” Then it came to her. “A shade lighter than the Macbook Pro.”

Henry did not seem to appreciate her efforts at specificity. The veins in his forehead pulsed. “Was it a new car?”

“Yes?” Susan said. He was making her nervous. She looked at her pack of cigarettes. Only two left. Crap, why couldn’t she pay better attention to things?

Henry put a hand on her arm, so she looked up at him. “Was it an American car? A sedan? Did it have a license plate? Bumper stickers? How many taillights?”

Susan felt her eyes fill with tears. “I don’t know.” She lit her cigarette. Behind Henry, across the alley, Susan could see Debbie standing at the door to the kitchen. The two cops who had been on rotation upstairs stood with her. Three patrol cars had already arrived, filling the darkening alley with flashing lights.

“You’re a reporter, for Christ’s sake,” Henry said.

“I don’t know about cars,” Susan said. She took a strangled breath, followed by a drag on her burning cigarette. “I know about clothes and music and agritainment.”

“Agritainment?” Henry said.

“I did a story on it,” Susan explained.

Henry closed his eyes. “What did he say?”

They’d been over this. “I told you, he said, ‘They’ll be fine,’ that’s it,” Susan said.

“Fuck,” Henry said loudly.

Susan watched as Debbie broke away from the other cops and ran toward them. Debbie kept her hand over her mouth, like she was trying to keep a sob from escaping. “What’s going on, Henry?” Debbie said through the hand. “Is it her?”

Susan automatically lifted her cigarette out of Debbie’s proximity. Then glanced at it. “The cigarette,” Susan said. “He tossed his cigarette there.” She pointed to a spot ten feet down the alley.

Debbie shook her head. “Archie doesn’t smoke.”

Susan walked over to the spot where Archie had dropped the cigarette, followed by Henry and Debbie. Scanning the ground, Susan found it quickly, burned to the filter. She could still smell it.

Henry squatted, took a Ziploc bag out of his pocket, turned it inside out, and picked up the cigarette, turning the bag back so the cigarette was inside it.

“What’s happening?” Debbie asked.

Henry looked at the cigarette and rubbed his forehead with a big hand. “You moron,” he muttered. He looked up at Debbie. “Not you.” He rubbed at his face again. “Archie wanted us to have a DNA sample. But we don’t need one.” He sighed. “Because we have his spleen in a bottle of formaldehyde in an evidence room downtown.”

Debbie started to shake. “We were happy,” she said to no one in particular. “We loved each other.” She gasped and her shoulders jutted forward, and she lowered her hand from her mouth to Henry’s shoulder to steady herself.

“Oh, God,” she said to him. “What do I tell Ben and Sara?”

Henry didn’t answer.

“So what happens now?” asked Susan.

“We find them,” Henry said simply.

A patrol cop walked up, leading a young man in a white bus-boy’s jacket. “This kid says a blond woman told him to tell Sheridan to meet her here,” the cop said.

The busboy reached up and touched his left ear. “What’s up, dudes?”

Henry, who was still in a squatting position, looked up wearily. “What kind of car was she in?” he asked the busboy.

“A silver 2007 Jaguar XK coupe with chromed Sabre wheels,” the busboy said.

Henry turned to Susan. “See how easy that was?” he said.

S
usan took a swig of cold coffee out of the mug on her desk. It was six hours old and tasted like bark, but she didn’t care. She leaned back in her task chair. It was four
A.M.
and the fifth floor of the
Herald
was bustling. Rumor was that Howard Jenkins himself was in his office downstairs. Even the interns had come in. Gretchen Lowell taking off with Archie Sheridan? That was big news, and all the usual suspects wanted in on it. Never mind that there was a fire raging in Central Oregon, a small plane missing off the coast, and the usual collection of bad news. Gretchen sold papers so fast even Hearst himself would blush. The
Herald
hadn’t seen this much action since Archie Sheridan had been kidnapped. The first time. “Someone put more coffee on,” Susan said.

No one in the newspaper offices moved.

Susan wadded up a piece of paper and threw it at Derek, who sat surfing the Internet three desks over.

“Hey!” Derek said, rubbing his ear where she’d hit him.

“Put some more coffee on,” Susan said.

Derek got up and slumped off toward the break room.

Susan had been at the
Herald
all night. She had insisted that she be allowed to work, with the agreement that she’d return to lockdown to sleep. Gretchen Lowell was on the run. Susan was convinced that she was the last thing on the Beauty Killer’s mind. Bliss remained at the Arlington. She still felt endangered, she said. Susan was pretty sure she just liked the room service.

Susan sat at her computer. She had worn the
L
and the S off the keyboard and her palms had left permanent dirty prints on the laptop’s white hand rests. She had a PC desktop at the paper, but she didn’t use it. It was a Pentium II. Parker, who’d had as much seniority as anyone on the floor, had a Pentium III, and they were all just waiting for a tasteful moment to make a play for it.

The
Herald
had broken the story of Archie Sheridan’s disappearance on the Web site eight minutes before Charlene Wood had gone live in the alley. That was something at least. It was the longest Susan had gone without pestering Ian about the Castle story. Instead, she had written a longer personal account of the events in the alley. Ian liked to do that New
York Times
thing where the reporter always refers to himself in the third person, as in “According to this reporter the car in question was silver,” or “This reporter was outside smoking a cigarette and witnessed the event.”