Cassidy Jones and the Seventh Attendant (Cassidy Jones Adventures, Book Three) (12 page)

I emerged from the alley into a street bustling with activity and flung the mugger toward an oncoming police car. Lights flashing, siren blaring, the police car screeched to a halt and the mugger hit the hood, tumbling over it with the switchblade still gripped in his hand.

I jammed the cell phone between my teeth and took a flying leap at the nearest building, catching a windowsill on the second floor. I scaled the protruding bricks as swiftly as a spider scurrying up a wall and heaved myself over the ledge and onto the roof. Pausing to catch my breath, I spat the phone into my hand and looked down. A small crowd had gathered below to gape at me.

The dazed mugger, sprawled atop the police car, dropped his switchblade, which clattered across the hood and onto the asphalt. The officer in the passenger’s seat stared up at me with a radio microphone to his mouth, but his lips weren’t moving, as if he were at a loss about how to call in what he had just witnessed.

Turning away from the street, I grabbed my head and demanded it to
think
. I had to get hold of myself. I forced air into my lungs and released my breath slowly while I looked around. It occurred to me that I was only a few buildings away from O’Shea Bail Bonds.

I hit speed dial on my phone.

“Where are you?” Emery answered, sounding breathless. The silence and echo in the background suggested he was now indoors.

“Good—you’re in Riley’s building,” I deduced, oddly proud that I had control over myself again. My voice even sounded calm. “Change of plans. Go to her office and open the window. I’ll be coming in from the roof.”

Emery didn’t ask questions or disconnect the call. I listened to him as he hoofed it up the stairs while I sped across rooftops, leapt over an alley, and landed on the roof of O’Shea Bail Bonds. Amazingly, being shot hadn’t affected my strength and speed. The adrenaline coursing through my veins likely didn’t hurt, either.

A window opened, and I hung my head over the edge of the roof. Emery’s head poked out. He craned his neck to peer up, and boy, did he ever look stressed.

“I’m coming down the drainpipe,” I said, tapping the drainpipe conveniently located alongside the window.

Emery gripped it and shook. “It’s safe. Come down,” he called up.

I lowered myself over the edge of the roof and shimmied down the drainpipe four floors. Emery grabbed my waist and hauled me in.

“I’m so sorry,” he whispered, embracing me quickly before pushing me out at arm’s length so he could survey the damage. He had a difficult time mastering his expression.

Finally he cleared his throat. “I have an idea how to remove these,” he said, sounding calmer than he looked. “Lie down on the sofa.”

As I did this, he headed to the storage closet. “Take the costume off. Do you need help?”

“No, I can do it.” I was beginning to feel uncomfortable. His clinical tone bothered me, as did the fact that he hadn’t made eye contact with me since seeing my stomach.
He’s just overwhelmed,
I surmised. I wiggled out of the costume, which came off easily enough, being all shot up and torn.

I rested my head on the sofa’s arm and lifted the torn tank top from my midsection.

“What a mess,” I declared so Emery could hear me in the storage room. I felt strangely detached, as if observing someone else’s stomach. The lack of pain probably contributed to my emotional disconnect. My skin was still rock-hard and almost completely numb. “Weird that my skin is still hard. Maybe it will be until the bullets are out. I counted eighteen.”

“His magazine held twenty rounds.” Emery emerged from the closet, holding a toolbox. “He didn’t miss.”

The bitterness in his voice took me aback. What would Emery do if he knew his father had shot me?

He can’t know, for now
.

“You’ve been struck in the collarbone and the chest, over your heart.” Emery spoke through his teeth, not even attempting to mask his anger any longer.

I glanced down to see that he was right. A bullet stuck out an eighth of an inch from my collarbone, and there was another bloody hole over my right breast. Odd that I hadn’t noticed, especially a bullet imbedded in bone. The area throbbed mildly, but other than that, I didn’t feel a thing.

Emery shoved the coffee table aside, pulled up a chair, and sat down to evaluate the task before him. With a heavy sigh, he flipped open the toolbox lid and selected pliers.

I gulped.

“Cassidy, I’m going to poke you with the pliers. Tell me what you feel.”

“Not really much of anything. It’ll be fine. Go for it.” I reassured him with a smile. This appeared to bother him.

With some effort and continual sidelong glances to make sure he didn’t detect pain on my face, he managed to remove the first bullet. The sensation was similar to having a tooth extracted from gums numbed with Novocain. I felt a slight pulling and discomfort, but nothing more.

“One down.” Emery released the bullet into a mug on the coffee table. It made a rattling sound as it hit the ceramic bottom. “Nineteen more to go.”

Now that he knew he wasn’t causing me pain, Emery got into a rhythm, using necessary force when need be to extract the bullets. Watching him, one would think he was pulling nails from a board. As he worked, he explained what had happened after he’d tripped the alarm.

“The alarm caught the gunman off guard,” Emery explained, not realizing he was talking about his dad. “If it hadn’t, this would be much worse than what we’re dealing with now. Unfortunately, everything in the Queen Kiya exhibit, after you were shot, is on film. The looping feed stopped when the alarm came on. But the footage will be limited in the rest of the museum. I didn’t want to tell you this at the time, but the cameras lost visual—”

“You mean they turned off?” I asked, recalling the hooded man. Our brief encounter had been so surreal that I would have chalked him up to a figment of my imagination if it hadn’t been for his distinct scent. The memory of it was so strong I could smell him all over again.

“They lost visual,” Emery repeated. “I don’t know if they were turned off.”

“Maybe the cameras were torn down?”

Emery stopped working to scrutinize me. “Who else was there?”

“Good question,” I said and shared what had happened.

“You say he leapt off the balcony?”

“Yes, very gracefully. Almost like he flew.”

“Hmm,” was Emery’s unsatisfactory response before he went back to removing bullets.

I scowled, wondering if he thought I’d hallucinated the hooded man, but I didn’t feel like talking about it anymore, so I changed the subject. “What happened when the police got to the museum?”

“Nothing. There was no one to arrest.” Emery dropped another bullet in the mug. “The thieves escaped.”

“That sucks.” I carefully suppressed my mixed feelings. Mr. Phillips
should
be behind bars, but for Emery’s sake, I was glad he wasn’t. “And they have the crown?”

“They do.”

I
so
wanted to kick myself. How could I have let them get away
?
“I’m a failure. A complete and utter failure.”

“You are noble and courageous,” Emery countered, grimacing. By the sensation, I guessed he was digging at another bullet. “Your only fault is unquestioning trust. I failed
you,
with arrogance and short-sightedness.”

I hated it when Emery was hard on himself. “How were you supposed to know a commando team would break into the Denny?” I challenged, and rushed on before he could rip on himself some more. “We need to find Moreau and the microchip.”

“First I need to find out
who
Moreau is, which I should have done before putting a flimsy plan into action and risking my friend’s life.” He produced the bullet he’d been after, covered in fresh blood. Sweat beaded on his forehead.

“Whose life was at risk? Obviously not mine.” I motioned to my midsection, glancing down at my stomach. The wound from the bullet Emery had just extracted was already closing up, healing. The only evidence of the other bullets were small, red rings of blood. The flesh in the center of each ring was healthy and whole. “Holy cow, I’m a freak!”

“You are not, and stop trying to make me feel better.” Emery frowned as he clamped onto the next bullet.

The extractions went smoothly until bullet 19, the one in my collarbone, and removing it was not without pain. Who would have thought bones had so many nerve endings? By the time Emery finally worked it out, sweat was dripping down his face, soaking his shirt collar and the hair on the back of his neck.

“That was challenging,” he admitted, adding the bullet to his collection. He deflated in his chair.

I huffed out the breath I’d been holding. “That hurt like—you know what.”

“I’m sorry,” Emery said, and I knew he meant for more than the pain. He stared wearily at the hand I held over my heart. “Let’s get it over with. Take off your shirt.”

“Excuse me?”

“I have to remove the last bullet. Take off your shirt.”

“No!”

“Cassidy, this is not a big deal. I don’t care.”

“Well, I do.” I flipped out my hand. “Pliers.”

“As you wish.” Emery placed the pliers in my hand and turned around in the chair to give me privacy.

The only thing to be said about bullet 20 was that bullet 19 lost its title of Most Challenging
.

The moment I dislodged bullet 20, my skin relaxed, returning to normal, and I dissolved into tears.

“Can I turn around?” Emery sounded distressed.

“No,” I sobbed, resituating my sports bra and tank. “O-k-kay. I-I’m d-decent.”

Emery moved to the sofa and pulled me into his arms. “Let it out,” he soothed, rubbing my heaving back. “You’ve experienced a lot of trauma. Plus, there’s the adrenaline. You know how these crashes go.”

I knew exactly what to expect from an adrenaline crash, but this was more than adrenaline. This was overwhelming guilt produced by an accumulation of lies and my failure to get the microchip. Why had I let a few bullets stop me, even from the zombie killer?

“I-I’m-m-m s-sorry.” I wept into Emery’s shirt. My apology encompassed all of my failures and deceptions.

“What on earth do you have to apologize for?” he chided. “Don’t worry. We’ll find the microchip.”

This made me cry even harder.

~~~

Once the waterworks had ended, Emery handed me my shoes and coat and assigned me the task of putting them on while he cleaned up after us. When everything was as we had found it, we caught a bus home.

On the bus, we kept to ourselves, coming down from our traumatizing evening and meditating on what had happened—or at least, that’s what I was doing. My thoughts had moved beyond being shot, because what was there to think about? I had been shot, the bullets had been removed, and I had healed—end of story. What I couldn’t get past was who had shot me and how I was going to deal with the situation at hand. Emery’s father was a thief and a killer, and he now had possession of biological weapon data. Put plainly, Mr. Phillips was the enemy.

How am I going to get that microchip back?
I asked myself for the millionth time while staring listlessly out the window.
When I do find it, then what? Turn Emery’s dad over to the authorities?
That would be the responsible thing to do. Question was, could I do the right thing at the risk of losing Emery?

Emery slipped his hand into mine, which had been flopped on my thigh like a wet noodle. Tears welled in my eyes. Keeping my face to the window, I squeezed his hand.
How am I going to tell him? How can I hurt him like that?
A homeless man curled up in a doorway caught my attention. Recognizing him, I sat straight up, horrified.

“What’s wrong?” Emery asked. He leaned forward so he could see out the window, too.

“It’s Joe.” I pressed my nose to the glass.

Salt-and-pepper dreadlocks peeked out from the dingy blanket that Joe wrapped around himself, his hands clutching the edge. The blanket didn’t quite make it around his lanky frame. Joe’s face looked miserable. A quick vision adjustment revealed that his brown skin had a purplish hue, indicating he was very cold. A violent shiver shook his body. “He’s freezing.”

“Joe has lived on the streets for a long time,” Emery said of my friend, whom he had never met.

I’d met Joe when he’d witnessed me scaling the Space Needle, and we’d been friends ever since, even though he didn’t know my name and had never seen my face.

“He’s fine,” Emery added.

“He is
not
fine,” I fired back, losing sight of Joe.

Joe had been wandering since being released from prison for manslaughter nearly twenty years ago. Denying himself the comfort of family, friends, and a home was a self-inflicted penance for the single punch that had killed his friend Theo. The fistfight that had ended in tragedy had been over a girl. Joe couldn’t even remember her name anymore.

“Joe is in his sixties and should not be out here,” I protested. “Why isn’t he at the shelter?”

Joe had promised me when I last saw him—on a cold, blustery night in early January—that he would spend nights in a local homeless shelter until spring.

“This is Joe’s choice,” Emery pointed out. “You can’t help someone who doesn’t want help.”

“We’ll see about that.” I glared at the street. This was another situation I would resolve.

I
would
find the microchip, and Joe
would
accept my help.

Ten

It’s Alive!

At 2:39 a.m., I dove through my bedroom window in my typical fashion, catching carpet and somersaulting. As I came to my feet, it didn’t surprise me to find Chazz sleeping in my bed, all snuggled up with my pillow decoy. He had gotten into a bad habit of crawling into my bed at night. Thankfully, he appeared to be quite unaware of the difference between me and a couple of pillows formed under the covers to look like me.

What am I going to do with you, Chazz?
I winced when the window squeaked on its tracks as I pulled it shut.
It’s freezing in here.