Abandoned: A Thriller (47 page)

I am on concrete. My mouth is so dry it feels filled with dust. I am surrounded by strangers with cell phones and worried eyes.

I find a woman who looks like my mother, and I reach my arms out to her.

“Please.” It’s all I can manage.

She hesitates and then comes to me and pulls me close. She’s not my mother, but then again, no one is.

Bonnie bursts into the hospital room. That’s the only way to describe it. The door bursts open and she seems to fly across the room into my arms. She’s sobbing. “Mama-Smoky!”

Her whole body shakes. I draw her close to me, inhaling the scent of her hair as I press my lips to the top of her head. “I’m okay, honey. I’m okay.”

And I was, for what that was worth. Dali had dropped me nude on a sidewalk near Hollywood Boulevard. The woman who looked like my mother turned me over to the paramedics, and the ambulance screamed as I drifted in and out of consciousness. My finger needed surgery, but I refused general anesthesia because of my baby, despite of the doctor’s assurances. The work on the bone was painful, but I took it. The doctors thought I was insane, but they couldn’t budge me, and in the end, when Tommy saw that I was never going to give in, he stood with me against them.

The baby, I was assured, was still there, still alive. I hadn’t been worried, not really. I had the sense of it inside me, that faint consciousness, now silent, that I’d spoken to so often. I knew all that was delusion and
dream, but still, I was convinced I would have known if my baby was gone.

Strangely, the thing that’s left me feeling most violated is not the loss of part of my finger or the few new scars on my back. It’s that Dali shaved my head before depositing me on the sidewalk at noon.

Well, aside from Leo, of course. But I’m not ready to think about that. No, sir. That’s a deep, dark ocean, waiting to suck me in and drag me down.

“I’m sorry you had to wait, baby,” I whisper to Bonnie. “I wasn’t ready to be seen.”

She nods into my chest. She understands. Of course she does. Tommy takes a seat by the bed and stares out the window at the early April sky. He’s been very, very quiet since my return. I can’t seem to get a sense of him.

The FBI and the LAPD had turned the city upside down looking for me. There were no turf wars, no complaints about overtime. Everyone pitched in because every cop knows the truth: It could always be you. Dali had been right about that, even if he’d been wrong about the response.

My own team, I’m told, barely slept. They were run by a grim AD Jones, who’d had a short fuse and yelled more than he spoke.

They found nothing. I don’t blame them for this, but it doesn’t help my nightmares. The same thought keeps coming to me when I’m alone: If Dali hadn’t let me go, I’d still be there.

In the dark.

A week after being found, I leave the hospital. It’s against doctors’ advice, but they’re not too pushy about it. I get the idea that it’s more a cover-your-ass kind of thing than actual medical concern. I was a high-profile pregnant FBI agent who’d been the victim of torture and amputation. They’d probably thought they’d hang high if something went wrong.

“You sure about this?” Tommy asks, after helping me into the car. Bonnie sits in the back, watchful and silent.

“I have to start doing something, Tommy, or I’m going to lose it. Take me home, and then take me to work.”

Leo had been the final straw. I visited him yesterday. He lay on his
bed, eyes staring at nothing. He was being fed by a tube. Various automated indignities dealt with his bodily functions. I met his girlfriend. “Hi,” she said to me. “I’m Christa.”

I didn’t know what to say, but I recognized what she needed. I opened my arms and took her in.

She let me have some time by myself with Leo. I stared down at him, crushed by numbness and self-loathing and a sense of being filthy, which I couldn’t seem to get rid of. “I’m so sorry, Leo,” I said. It was all I could come up with. What was I supposed to say? I’d traded him for myself and my child, and he’d never even known it. He’d probably gone to his oblivion still thinking I was a friend to be trusted. I leaned over to kiss his forehead. It was warm and dry, like living paper. “I’m going to find him and I’m going to kill him, Leo. I promise.”

I walked out remembering the other promise too, the one Leo had dragged from me.

We get home and enter. It feels surreal. No, that’s not right. It feels unreal. The cell is still more palpable to me than this. It renews my hatred.

“Want some coffee?” Bonnie asks, watching me. I recognize this kind of behavior from the time after my assault by Sands. She’s worried that I’ll fall apart right in front of her. Who knows? Maybe I will.

“That’d be wonderful, babe. I haven’t had coffee in a month.”

Her eyes darken a bit at this reference, and I regret it immediately. She braves a smile of assent and goes off to brew the pot. Tommy stands by a window again. Staring off at something I can’t see.

I wish I could reach him. The distance isn’t cold, it isn’t like that. He is here. I feel his love. But there’s some part of him that is in an elsewhere place.

“Tommy? Did you get the ibuprofen?”

He jolts back to the here and now, chagrined. “Sorry, yeah. I got it this morning. Be right back.” He jogs up the stairs.

“Here’s the coffee, Mama-Smoky,” Bonnie says, bringing it to me. I accept and sip. “Heavenly,” I say to her.

And it is.

Tommy reappears with a bottle of Advil. The doctors had offered me Percocet, but I declined because of the baby. I don’t even like taking the ibuprofen, but the pain is just too constant and gnawing.

“How many?” he asks.

“Two.”

He opens the bottle and gives me the pills. “You want water?”

“I’ll drink them with the coffee.”

I pop them and sip my coffee. It won’t help much, but that’s okay. I welcome a little bit of pain. It keeps my mind on my goal. Killing Dali. “You hungry?” he asks.

“No, I ate at the hospital. The old line about hospital food is kind of becoming a myth. I had a few good meals there.”

He nods but says nothing. He gazes off again. The distance widens. I stand up, coffee in my hand.

“Come upstairs with me, Tommy. Help me get dressed.”

“So, what’s going on?” I ask him, after closing the door.

“What do you mean?”

I move into him. He takes me in his arms and hugs me close, careful of my finger. It feels good, but it also feels empty. I disengage a little, looking up at him. “I mean this. You’re here, I’m not arguing that. But you’re somewhere else too.”

He steps away gently. He tries to avert his eyes before I can see the struggle there.

“I …” He frowns. “I’m not used to having trouble with my words.”

I sit down on the bed, pat the space next to me. He follows my lead. I study his profile as he studies the wall.

“I’m trying to figure out how to get rid of all this anger, Smoky. I’m coming to the conclusion that the only solution is killing the man who took you away from us. That bothers me on some level, but maybe not as much as it should.” He shakes his head. “I’m not Kirby. If I cross this line, it might have consequences for me. That’s what’s on my mind.”

I reach over and take his hand. “I feel the same way. I’m just not conflicted about it.”

He looks at me—really looks at me—for what seems like the first time. “Why not? How’d you get there?”

“I got there because a man came into my home a few years ago and stole my life and my face. Not long after that, another man almost killed Callie, and that same man then took Bonnie and held her hostage
while he watched me cut my face for him.” I grip his hand. “In spite of all that, do you know what lets me sleep at night? What gives me just a little bit of comfort?”

“No.”

“That both of those men are dead. That I killed them. That’s the penalty from now on, Tommy. Mess with my family and you die.”

“Even if it means murder?”

“Even if.”

It occurs to me that we could part ways right here. This could very well be a moral burden beyond Tommy’s ability to rationalize. He’s not the kind of man built to bend.

He raises my hand to his lips and kisses it. “I can live with that.”

Then he does the last thing I’d ever expect. He cries. It’s a soundless expression of grief, just tears pattering against my skin. It transfixes me. I feel as though I am witnessing something that shouldn’t be allowed by nature, like a black sun, or a child with a knife in his hand and a grin on his face.

It ends as quickly as it began. He kisses my hand again, dries his face with two swipes of his hand, and stands up.

“What do you want to wear?”

He helps me dress when I need help. He gets my backup gun from the gun safe. He finishes by presenting me with my cell phone.

“Dali left it with you, along with your FBI ID. The techs checked it. It’s clean.”

“Thanks.”

I look at myself in the mirror. My face crumples in dismay. “I’m ugly!”

He’s standing behind me, and he cups each side of my bald head with a calloused but loving palm. He kisses the very top of my head. “You’re alive. The hair will grow back. And you’re never ugly.” He steps away and checks his watch. “We should get moving. I’ll meet you downstairs.”

I’m left alone with my reflection. His words are both inadequate and more than I need. The dismay is visceral; it will always be the first thing I feel until the hair grows back, but Tommy’s words will follow in my mind and bring me comfort. That and the tears he cried for me, which I know we’ll never talk about again. They were a gift, something to treasure, something else to kill for.

“Honey-love!”

“Boss woman!”

“Smoky!”

Only James is silent, but his gaze lingers longer than usual. His version of a welcome, I suppose.

Alan’s arm is in a sling. Dali had been kind to him, just two bullets—one in the shoulder, one in the upper chest. Which leads me to wonder: kind to him, but not to me? Why? He knew Alan’s wounds weren’t fatal. Why tease me with the possibility?

“Not sure the chrome-dome look works for you, she-boss,” Kirby says, giving me a critical eye. “Too much fish-belly white.”

“Kirby,” Callie chides. Surreality—Callie preventing someone from giving me a hard time.

“Relax, Callie,” I say. “I’m not that fragile.”

Not while the lights are on, at least.

“Well,” Callie says.

Kirby punches Callie’s arm. “She was worried about you, that’s all. Big old softy, just as I suspected.”

“Hit me again, and we’ll see how soft I am,” Callie sniffs, tossing her hair back.

Kirby grins. “That’s my cue. I had to say hi and watch the entrance. I’ll go check on my guys now.” She stops as she’s walking by me and gives me a bump with her hip. “Maybe we’ll start calling you Nine-Finger Barrett, boss lady. Whatcha think?” She is out the door before I can offer a reply.

I’m left alone now with my team. Somberness sets in. Kirby is liked, but she’s not one of us. Time for our true faces to come out.

“Too bad about the kid,” Alan offers.

Callie sighs. “Leo was turning into a good man.”

“We won’t give him justice by talking about it,” James says, razoring over us with an impatience that’s just a little too raw. I look at him and I catch what I think is a spark of grief in his eyes. There, then gone. “Let’s find the man who did this to him. You’re our best and newest witness. What can you tell us about him?”

I will tell you everything but the one thing, the thing I saw. Why? I don’t know yet. It’s a feeling, something whispering in my subconscious.

“We’re missing something about him, who he is,” I begin. “Contradictions. The car crashes. The fingerprints. Letting Heather Hollister and me walk. If we operate on the assumption that he’s pragmatism personified, then we have to assume that all of those things are purposeful, that they serve a higher aim. The other side of the argument would be that we got it all wrong to begin with.”

I tell them everything I can remember about my incarceration. I leave out the specifics of the sun-drenched meadow and the theological debates with my baby.