Double Cross [2] (6 page)

J
IMMY STOPS THE TOWN CAR
on my modest, well-lit block of cheerful storefronts and eateries tucked below brick apartments. We say good night and I get out in front of Mr. K.’s jewelry shop window, with its row of empty, black velvet necks. I pull open the door on the far side of Mr. K.’s and enter the tiny tiled entrance area.

Three flights of stairs later, I’m at my door. Even as I unlock it, I sense him. Sure enough he’s in there, waiting on my couch like a bad guy in a B movie.

“You are so pathetic,” I say.

He puts aside his newspaper and crosses his legs. He’s wearing beat-up jeans I know well, particularly a rip in the thigh. I used to fantasize about sliding my hand in there.

“How’s Covian?” Packard asks. “I got the report.”

“Vitals looked strong. Otto’s there now.” I kick off my shoes, switching them for my fuzzy slippers from the closet. When I look up, his eyes are twinkling. “What?”

“Your slippers.”

I look down at my beloved bunny slippers, only one ear between the two of them. “What about them?” I ask, defensive. I never go around in front of people with my bunny slippers. Even Otto has never seen my bunny slippers.

“I like them,” he says.

I roll my eyes, but actually it makes me feel good. “Anything else?”

“That’s what I want to know. All I got was the official report. Can you tell me anything they kept out of it?”

“Otto thought one of them wore eyeglasses. Sort of squarish brown frames.”

“Eyeglasses,” Packard says. “Another victim thought that.”

“Same old thing otherwise—three guys in hoodies. They went for Covian first. And Otto’s shoulder was grazed—he’s fine, in case you’re wondering.” I walk around my little counter to get a glass of orange juice.

“He’s not fine. The Dorks know he’s a highcap now.”

“No way. There’s no way they recognized him.” I come around with a glass for Packard. “Here, even though you don’t deserve it for breaking in.” As he reaches out for it I catch the glint of his blue metal chain bracelet—his friend Diesel’s bracelet, actually. Diesel died in one of Otto’s makeshift prisons. When Packard put on Diesel’s bracelet last summer, he said he wouldn’t take it off until he strangled his nemesis with his bare hands. That’s never sat right with me. Packard’s a highly imaginative criminal, but he’s no killer.

“Why wouldn’t they have recognized Otto?” he asks.

“Because he was wearing sunglasses and no hat when they came at us. It’s weird—even just when he takes off his beret, nobody thinks it’s him. It’s this disguise we use. People never see through it.”

Packard grunts.

I sit across from him, steadfastly not looking at the torn area of his jeans. It’s strange to have him there, legs crossed, arm slung over the couch back—not so much sitting in it as completing it, as if the couch has been waiting for him.

“He’s upset about Covian,” I say. “He feels responsible. He’s thinking about letting people know highcaps
are the targets, not humans, and maybe even coming out as a highcap himself—”

Packard cuts me off. “He won’t do that.”

“He sounded like he might. He’s pretty upset.”

“He won’t come out.”

“Well, you weren’t there.”

“I don’t need to have been there, Justine, to tell you what Otto will and won’t do.”

“You can’t predict everything about a person from seeing their psychology.”

“Yes. I can. It’s simple pattern recognition. Otto will do what he needs to do to stay in control.”

“You don’t know that.”

Packard smirks.

“Unfortunately, Packard, pretending you’re a psychic won’t make you a psychic.”

“Seeing psychology is better than being a psychic,” he says.

“Are we done?”

“You, for instance.” He sits back. “One of the things about you is your tendency to insulate people from the reality of who you are. You hide the hard things. The things you think people won’t like.”

“I am so tired of your pop psychology insights. Maybe it works on the thugs and thieves you live off of—”

Packard turns his gaze on me. It’s not that he wasn’t looking at me before, of course, but it’s different suddenly—like his gaze is burning a laser dot into my forehead. “Remember how you hid all those truths of your life from Cubby? Not just being a disillusionist, but all kinds of things.”

It’s here that I get a very bad feeling.

“You have the same sort of relationship with Otto. Which is why, even though this bit about the dream invader conferencing our sleeping minds together is something
Otto would desperately want to know, you couldn’t bring yourself to tell him.”

A guess, but of course he’s right. I feel the heat rush to my face.

“Fear. Guilt. It’s inevitable with you,” he continues. “You feel responsible for her compromising us in the first place, and you feel guilty about the feelings you still have for me—feelings that might be reinvigorated in the dream memories—and you think he can’t handle that.”

“His friend was just shot, for Chrissake.”

“Waiting for the right time, are you? Or maybe you’re just hoping the problem goes away so you’ll never have to tell him, because you need to be perfect for him. Because you’re worried that the real you will disappoint him.”

This is like a shot to my gut, but I gaze at the ceiling as I sip my juice, pretending boredom.

“You’d be right, of course. Reality always disappoints Otto,” Packard continues.

“Yeah, it does disappoint him, because he has a vision for something better, and he’s working tirelessly to make it come true.”

Packard smirks. “With the help of me doing his dirty work. And by extension, you and everyone else. It’s our darkness that makes Otto’s brightness possible.”

“Why am I even talking to you? I didn’t invite you here.”

“The information about the glasses is good. That’ll help.”

“Tons of people wear glasses like that.”

“I’ve got psychics moving through the city looking for anybody whose thoughts they can’t read. Glasses helps narrow it down.” He rests his arm along the back of the couch. “He’s going to want to know. About our little secret.”

“You better not tell him. It’s for me to tell him.” I’m thinking of Otto’s hatred of being kept in the dark. I should tell him.

He smiles. “Fine.”

I squint suspiciously. “Or maybe you
want
me to tell Otto about the dream invasion thing. Maybe that’s what this is all about.”

He raises his eyebrows. “The plot thickens.”

“Screw you.”

His eyes sparkle. “In your dreams. Sort of. We didn’t quite get to that, as I recall.”

“Not even in the same ballpark.”

“Not that same ballpark at all,” he says. “A kiss with the right person simply can’t be compared to the drudgery of sleeping with the wrong one over and over.”

I don’t correct his assumption that Otto and I are sleeping together.

“Not the same,” he says. “Not at all.”

I put down my OJ and stand. “You think you’re charging up that memory? Is that what you think? You are going to be so sorry when I dream about my experience of eating chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream yesterday. Now
that
was exciting. It’s time for you to leave.” I go and hold the door open for him.

“I’m sure I’ll enjoy having that ice cream with you.” This in a tone like it’ll be really fun, in a dirty way.

I feel my face heat up. I hate it. I feel like I’m betraying Otto.

He comes nearer, his smile mischievous. “I can’t wait to be inside you for it. I think it will be delicious.”

Just like that, I lift my hand and I slap him. The high, loud sound startles me. His eyes widen.

The insides of my fingers sting, and my heart beats like crazy. I’ve never slapped anybody. I didn’t know I had it in me.

“I’m with Otto,” I say. “I’m committed to him.”
Packard’s right cheek is slightly pink, I notice with some surprise. “Do you have no sense of decency?”

He pauses, seems to think about this, then turns and walks out the door.

I slam it behind him.

A
DIM, ENCLOSED STAIRWELL
—wide, with a metal banister up the center, and graffiti all over the cement block walls.
What is this place? Why is it familiar?
My heart pounds out of my chest as I breathe in mold and pigeon dung. Down below is the silent opening. It used to be a row of doors. One still hangs crookedly by a hinge, more decoration than door, with smashed chicken-wire glass still in it. Beyond, tall grasses sway in the moonlight.

With my bare foot I feel for the first crater in the cold stone steps. It’s like walking on badly damaged teeth, but I know the good places to step, and I move down easily to crouch near the broken doors.

I’m on hyperalert, and I don’t know why. It’s as though I’m trapped inside a fierce river current of unfamiliar thoughts and feelings, and they’re all about protecting this place.

A sound. I freeze. A crack—somebody or something stepped on a branch. I stay quiet as a ghost. Treetops rustle. Night birds call and whir. Another branch crack, and the rustle of wings.

A coon.

I breathe. Relief.
Nobody’s coming
. I turn to go back up the steps. Back upstairs where it’s warm. I picture shoes around a small fire. Food in cans.

Halfway back up the steps, something in the wall catches my eye—a new crack, jutting down like dark lightning through bright graffiti.

Alarm. Guilt. Heart pounding out of my chest.
No, not there.

I scrabble across; sharp pain in my heel. Glass. I’ll get it out later. I have to see.

The next thing I see is a hand—my hand, but not my hand—holding a lighter up to the crack, though it’s more like a crevice; you could shove an apple in there. Breath, coming too fast. Closer now. I press an eye to the gap, thumb working the lighter’s rough metal circle until a flame brings heat to my cheek, my eye, and light to the inside.

Bile rises into my throat when I see the ends of three dead, leathery fingers sticking right out of the broken wall into the gap, that seems a mile wide now. One has a creepy curved nail. Another has its fingernail hanging by a hair. The last is exposed to the knuckle, with no fingernail. No—the fingernail is embedded in the other side of the crack. I can’t breathe. My throat won’t work at all. I’ve dropped the lighter and I’m stuffing dead leaves and gravel in there. Anything to block it up.

I wake up gasping, coughing, neck thick with panic, eyes watering.

I put my hand over my chest, hoping to calm my heart, which is thumping dangerously hard.

Just a dream.

The red numbers of my clock come into view: 3:34 a.m. I tell myself that I’m not there—I’m here.

Here.

I breathe deep, nightshirt clinging cold to my spine, trying to shake the horrible image out of my mind. Fingers. I don’t want to go back. There’s a body in there.

I rub my face. I’ve never had a nightmare like that—so strange, yet horrifyingly real and familiar. It was so clear,
and it moved almost in real time, not dreamtime. I picture the hand holding the lighter. Its knuckled shape reminds me of Packard’s hand, except this hand was smoother and smaller.

And then it hits me: it
was
Packard’s hand—young Packard’s hand. And the dream was Packard’s memory. It had to be! But who were those bodies? There were more—I knew that somehow. Or he did.

I think about the old abandoned school where he and Otto lived with other cast-off kids. I feel sure that’s what that place was; it had the feel of grade-school architecture. The chicken-wire glass, that was the safety glass schools used to use.

I feel cold. How did bodies get into the walls? It’s like a horror movie.

I get up and pad out to the kitchen in my clammy T-shirt, switching on every lamp I pass. At the sink I gulp down a glass of water, staring out the window at the market across the street, long green awning hiding its dark interior from my third-floor view, shuttered shops on either side. The dream lives in me still, its tendrils of dread reaching through to my nerves.

All that wariness and alarm. Bodies entombed in the walls, like secrets. Young Packard stuffing leaves and stones in to hide them. Something bad happens when they come out—and they do eventually come out. I knew that, too, when I was inside the dream.

A paranoid impulse makes me flip off the nearby lamp, feeling far too visible from the street. God, I’m still half trapped in the feeling of that dream. A creak from the direction of my bedroom—I freeze. No, it’s nothing. Dreams can’t come alive.

It’s
nothing
!

But telling myself this doesn’t help, and there is no way I’m going back into the bedroom now. Instead, I creep
around to the sitting area on the other side of the kitchen, flop down on the couch, grab my phone, and call Shelby.

In addition to being my best friend, Shelby is also a disillusionist; her darkly enchanting despair about the pointlessness of life and the impossibility of happiness pulls targets into severe downward spirals. She’s also fun to have drinks with.

Voice mail.
Damn
. I leave a message for her to call me and then I click off. She’d come over in a second if she knew I needed her. I throw the phone onto the cushion beside me. I could go over there except I’m feeling way too paranoid to venture outside.