Double Cross [2] (33 page)

I close my eyes, trying to collect myself. A hand on my shoulder. “Justine,” Otto whispers.

“Uh,” I say.

“Oh, God, thank God,” Otto says.

“I think I was shot.”

“Where?” Francis kneels down beside Otto.

“The chest,” I say weakly.

Francis says, “You weren’t shot.”

“Oh.” I turn enough to look up at him, and then Otto. “Am I covered with—”

“Stay still,” Otto whispers. “Urine is actually very sterile and germ-free.”

“Uh!” I sit up only to see Deena, lying there dead, eyes open. “Oh, God.” I turn away, covering my mouth. The other Dorks are dead, too. And the mercenary with the shark’s tooth necklace.

Otto rests a hand on my shoulder. “You’re okay. You’re safe.”

When I look at him, it seems like all the warmth is gone out of his eyes. “Have they been … Are you okay?”

“I will be,” he says darkly.

I nod. The mercenary with the braid is on the phone. Francis eyes Otto. “You know we can’t keep you out of it, buddy.” They invent a story about the Dorks luring us here and we all memorize it.

“What on earth possessed you to bring Justine?” Otto says to Francis.

“She figured it out,” Rondo says. “We were humoring her. We didn’t think—”

“I knew it,” I say.

“You’re lucky we brought live ammo,” Rondo says.

I spy a sweatshirt hanging over a chair. I get up and Otto helps. “I have to …” I point.

Otto understands. “Go. Hurry.” Sirens in the distance.

In the bathroom I try to keep my mind empty of thought as I peel off my blood-and-urine-soaked shirt and drop it on the floor. I eye the shower, then force myself to put on the sweatshirt. My jeans are sodden, too, I realize with horror. But the pain in my chest has lessened.

I stumble back out to the main room. Otto extends an arm and I go to him, somewhat automatically. It feels good to be snug at his side.

“Are you sure you’re okay?”

“I sustained quite an impact when they took me.” He lowers his voice. “Several. At times I was convinced I had a vein star pin leak behind my eye, though it would’ve manifested by now …” He trails off. Clearly he’s been thinking about this extensively. “I
am
feeling faint.”

“You’ve been held captive for days. Have you eaten?”

“Barely.”

It’s here I notice that the blood on his neck is actually a wound. “Shit! Is that a big gash?”

“Yeah, but it stopped bleeding,” he says, quite casually. “And I think my arm is broken. I can’t move it.”

“Otto!”

“It’s okay,” he says. “I’m safe. I just need my cap.”

“We have to find it,” I say.

He turns to me. “How did you know?”

“The dream,” I say. “The Goyce dream.” I explain about my gut feeling, and drugging Packard, and the cursive.

Otto holds me more tightly with his good arm. “When that cretin pulled you in the door …” He looks around. “I still don’t know how this deteriorated so dramatically. The way the Dorks spooked.”

I concentrate on straightening the sweatshirt, which bears the name of a hotel in Florida. When I look up, he’s regarding me strangely. I touch the sticky side of his face. “If only you could look in a mirror. You are so bloody.” I give him a sly smile. “The cameras will love it.”

“You figured it out,” he says, gazing into my eyes. “You knew.”

Time was, Otto looking at me like that would have thrilled me.

The sound of sirens closing in spurs him into action. Using only his right arm—his left arm hangs immobile—he rips the antihighcap glasses off each of the Dorks and throws them onto the floor, then he grabs two pairs off the counter and tosses them down. Then he gestures at me.

At first I don’t know what he means, but then I realize.

“Oh, sure.” I take my glasses off and toss them onto the floor with the others, and Otto stomps them all with his boot, smashes them to smithereens, then kicks the pieces around to blend with the general mess of the house. “Never again,” he says with a ferocity that surprises me. “Never again.”

T
HE GROUP OF US
spend a whirlwind afternoon in the hospital, getting X-rayed, poked, and palpated by doctors, and questioned by cops. Francis reinjured his bullet wound and has to go in for surgery. Otto gets a cast. A doctor examines my cannibal bite, and after that, a volunteer lets me choose clothes from their free bin to replace my bloody, piss-smelling stuff. I select a long printed skirt, a hoodie sweater, and pair of blue Keds high-tops, but all I really want is a five-hour-long bath and my own things around me. And I want to talk to Shelby, but she still isn’t answering. Probably with Avery. I’ve never seen two people take to each other like that.

Most of all, I want to be alone and think. I can’t think surrounded by all these people. But I have to wait for Otto and Rondo; there are the reporters outside the hospital entrance, and we’re going to make our escape from them together. Apparently, the national and tabloid press got hold of the mayoral hostage situation.

When the cast is on, Otto goes out and makes a statement to the reporters. They still don’t leave, so Rondo helps Otto and me slip out the back.

Soon enough, we discover that there are reporters camped out in front of all three of our homes, and one following us. Rondo does some fancy driving and suddenly we’re checking into the Royal Arms, a grand old
five-star hotel on the lakefront. One room for Rondo, and one for Otto and me.

Otto and me. And suddenly we’re heading up in the lavish elevator.

After all that time I spent feeling sad about having lost him, it feels strange to be with him.

As soon as we get into the room I wander to the window and look down. Cars stream back and forth; exhaust billows up. Across the street, the lakefront parklands stretch out as far as the eye can see—a trashy tundra of frozen dirt, leafless trees, and boarded-up concession stands. In the distance, you can just make out the line of giant boulders defining the shore like jagged teeth, and beyond, the endless black of the lake.

“Hungry?” Otto says.

I spin around. “Famished!”

Otto’s on the bed, half propped up. His arm is casted almost to his shoulder, he’s bruised everywhere, and the alarmingly deep gash in his neck is heavily bandaged—two more centimeters over and he would’ve bled to death, the doctors said. I have this thought that he’s probably too injured and medicated to have sex, and then I feel guilty for being relieved about that.

We order half the room service menu, and then Otto calls Sophia. He wants her to sneak over with a beret as soon as she’s finished with what’s probably turning out to be the busiest day of her life as mayor’s assistant and press secretary. I take a long-overdue shower while Otto makes some phone calls.

The food’s being delivered when I come out in a fluffy hotel bathrobe. It’s only dinnertime, but it seems like midnight.

I give the room service waiter a nice tip and pull the cart in next to the bed. One by one I lift the silver tops off the plates. Grilled fish sandwiches, fingerling potatoes, gnocchi, warm rosemary bread, a selection of fruits
and cheeses, and numerous chocolates. There’s also a Scotch on the rocks for Otto and a decanter of white wine for me.

“Yum,” I say, unfolding a bed tray for Otto.

“You don’t have to baby me,” he says.

“You were tied to a chair for three days, and you have like nineteen injuries. You are going to lounge in bed while you eat. And I’m helping you.”

He relents and I start fixing him a plate. They’d wanted to keep Otto overnight, but he’d promised to have a private nurse with him. Me.

Standing there next to his bed while we waited for his discharge papers, I’d reminded him that I’m nowhere near being a nurse and never will be—something he continues to refuse to accept. I also reminded him that the neck is superclose to the brain—it seems like an infection could travel there pretty fast. We debated this: Otto believes proximity doesn’t have anything to do with it, and that an infection could travel anywhere fast. We both really wanted to ask the nurse, but they were already unhappy enough about his leaving.

I butter a piece of bread for him, eyeing the bandage. It was a big chance to take, leaving the hospital. I show him. “Enough?”

“You are so good to me,” he says.

I set the buttered bread on his plate. “Maybe I just don’t want crumbs in the sheets,” I say, trying to keep things light.

He gets his serious look. “I missed you. The whole time they held me, I imagined something like this. A kind of daydream. Being away with you.”

“Bet you didn’t have broken bones and a neck gash in it,” I joke.

“No,” he says, clearly not feeling jokey.

I concentrate on loading up my own plate, remarking at stupid length on how perfectly browned the potatoes
are. Then I prop up a pillow and settle in on my side, putting my concentration on my food.

I don’t know why I’m so ill at ease, so disconnected from Otto. Worse, I keep wondering if Packard’s woken up yet, and what he’s doing, and how he feels, and I keep mulling over what he told me, the outrageousness of what he did.

I’ve decided I should definitely wait to tell Otto about us disillusionists being free agents. The kidnapping experience was hard on him; I can’t say exactly how, just that he seems less than he was. Less warm, less lively, less Otto. The last thing he needs to know is that his prisoners—and therefore his mind—might be freed more slowly. Or not at all. Who knows what the other disillusionists will do? Who knows what I’ll do?

I shake the question out of my head, telling myself I’ll worry about it later. I’ve had two near-death experiences in the last forty-eight hours, and maybe three hours of sleep. I need to recuperate, too.

From the bed, the view out the window is this panorama of the starry sky, with a crescent moon. And I’m clean and warm, and the food is delicious. I shove another potato into my mouth and chew, staring at the moon. It looks fake, like something you’d see on a greeting card. I kind of hate it.

Otto talks about Deena’s plan. He thinks she wanted to gather highcaps in one place and kill them en masse, with herself as a suicide bomber.

“I couldn’t let that happen,” he says simply, taking my hand.

“It won’t,” I say. “We’re safe.”

He doesn’t answer this; he just gazes soulfully into my eyes. “Have I thanked you lately?”

I smile. “Yes. A lot.”

Just as Packard predicted, the rescue restored things; it was the grand gesture of faith that proved my commitment
to him once and for all. He trusts me again. We’re together again. It’s almost perfect. One tiny notch away from perfect.

That tiny notch means everything, though.

“I need to revitalize,” he says, letting me go to sip his Scotch.

“You want to be alone? To make your perfect cone of silence?”

“I can make a perfect cone of silence with you,” he says. “You’re like the beating of my own heart.”

I touch his arm, just above the cast, and smile. I should probably kiss him. Instead, I pull a green top off a strawberry and feed it to him. Our eyes meet. Does he sense that something’s wrong?

I pull the top off another strawberry and feed it to myself.

It’s not like I’m conflicted about Packard anymore. Clearly he’ll never stop duping me. How can I be with a man I can’t trust? I find myself wondering if he heard about the rescue.

Otto’s voice snaps me out of my reverie. “My sweet?”

I meet his gaze, feeling like he’s seeing through me. “Yes?”

“What thoughts?” he asks.

I grab another strawberry. “Just everything.”

He watches me for a spell. Then, “A woman died practically on top of you.”

“And cannibal sleepwalkers tried to eat me, too,” I say, and suddenly I just laugh. I can’t stop.

He stiffens. “What are you talking about?”

I pour another glass of wine. “It’s fine, I’m okay. Everything’s okay.” I settle back in and tell him the story of how the cannibals attacked me. I show him my bite and explain how Simon went back to reinterview the witnesses and found so many of them missing. That we suspect that Stu created new cannibals to kill them. We figured Stuart
learned about Simon’s investigation and followed him straight to Ez, and likely overheard something about the descrambler, maybe planted a bug, something. “He sent sleepwalkers after the descrambler so they could get in there and kill Ez. It was him all along. Last I checked, Simon and her are at the beach. Though they’re probably not now.”

He gets very quiet. I’m guessing he feels guilty about imprisoning Ez.

I say, “In a way, it’s lucky that you had her in such a high-security prison. It saved her in the end.”

He turns to me. “You had no right to free her.”

I sit up, not believing he could mean that. “What?”

“You shouldn’t have freed her.”

I look at him like he’s crazy. “She was innocent. She was hurt. She’d been attacked.”

“Justine.” He wears a serious expression, inky brows drawn together. “You can’t randomly decide that one of my prisoners is innocent and release her.”

“It was hardly random.”

“It wasn’t your call to make.”