Dying by the Hour (A Jesse Sullivan Novel Book 2) (20 page)

I can’t remember the last time someone made me breakfast, and in my own kitchen no less. And
bacon
. Jesse is vegetarian. Frying up bacon would never happen.

Nikki hesitates when she sees my face. “Too much?”

“No.”

“Because some people would panic at the sight of someone in their kitchen, dirtying their dishes.”

“I’m okay,” I say. I climb into a kitchen chair and raise the empty drink glass she put beside my place setting. I wave it around just a little. “Excusez-moi, garcon! Je voudrais du jus d'orange s'il vous plait.”

Nikki grins and pulls a carton of orange juice from the fridge.

“Parlez-vous français?” I ask and steady my glass for her.

“No,” she laughs. “But I understood ‘juice orange’ so I could guess. Do
you
speak French?”

“I took two years in college,” I say. “But my pronunciation is terrible.”

“I have to ask,” Nikki says, transferring bacon from the pan to my plate. “Is there such a thing as a dog fairy?”

I arch an eyebrow.

“Because I swear that when we went to bed there was no dog. And now—” she points her spatula at the snuffling monster begging at her feet. Winston never looks so rapt and alert as he does at mealtimes. “—there’s this.”

“Oh!” I say. “Yeah, Jesse stopped by.”

“Oh. Was that before or after we—”

“Before,” I say.

Her shoulders relax. “Does he have a name? Or shall I just continue to call him Pug which is what I’ve been doing all morning.”

“His name is Winston,” I say. Winston cranes his neck my way and waddles over expectantly. I scratch him behind his ears. “Yes, that’s your name.”

“Are pugs usually that—big?” Nikki brings her plate to the table and sits down opposite me. I fill out my plate with the toast and eggs on the table.

“He might be a little spoiled,” I say, opening the butter. “But look at that face.”

“I see it,” she says. Then she looks up at me. “So why did Jesse bring him?”

I search her words for any tension, but find nothing. Either she is OK with Jesse or she’s a very good actress. It is too soon to tell. “She’s helping Gloria with a missing person case. They might be gone for a couple of days.”

“A lot of people are going missing lately,” Nikki says.

“About 2,300 are reported missing every day. About 661,000 a year,” I say. “But most of them will be resolved. Last year there were only about 2000 unresolved cases.”

“Is this statistical regurgitation supposed to comfort me?” Nikki asks. “Because it really isn’t.”

“Sorry.” I shove some butter toast into my mouth. “I’ve got a thing for memorizing numbers.”

“Good with numbers and French,” she says. “What else? You went to college.”

“For a little while. I was pre-law. I wanted to practice law with my brother. But I never finished.”

“Why?” Nikki asks, folding her bacon and egg up in her toast and eating it like a sandwich. “You’re definitely smart enough.”

I blush. “Thanks. I dropped out when I found out Jesse was alive. I left school and moved down here to help her. I don’t regret it.”

At the same time our phones go off, vibrating against the table beside our plates.

“This can’t be good,” Nikki says. “Jeremiah says it is an emergency.”

We dress quickly and make it to the safehouse in record time. As we pull up outside Nikki rakes a comb through her hair before pulling it up into a ponytail.

“We probably shouldn’t mention. Not that I’m ashamed,” she says. “But I don’t want him to think we’ve lost focus.”

Before I can say anything, she is already jogging toward the building and pulling open the big doors. But we haven’t even reached the landing when we hear Jeremiah screaming at the top of his lungs.

I slow down as Nikki turns to give me a weary glance. When we open the door Parish sits where he always sits, in front of the monitors. But he isn’t looking at the screens just now. His eyes are fixed on Jeremiah pacing the middle of the big room.

“What’s happened?” I ask.

Parish makes a warning gesture as if to save me from something but he isn’t quick enough.

“Do you see this?” Jeremiah yells at me. He takes a step aside and jabs a finger at the three black body bags lined up in the floor of the apartment.

“Jeremiah, what’s going on?” Nikki asks.

“I sent a unit to pick up a child.
One
child
we had located in Athens.”

Jeremiah’s face shifts violently as he storms toward me.

“Don’t,” Parish says. He stands from his station and steps between me and Jeremiah.

Jeremiah is forced to switch direction and goes straight for the body bag. He rips the middle one open to reveal the corpse of a child, paler than white with blue lips. It’s a little boy, no older than seven. His shirt is covered in blood with part of his skull missing. Nikki makes a sound beside me and I realize that low groaning I hear is me. I cover my mouth with my hand.

Jeremiah drops the dead child without ceremony, his little head cracking against the floor.

“You want to be merciful,” he screams. “But they’ll show us no mercy. None whatsoever!”

“Stop yelling at her,” Nikki warns. “This isn’t her fault.”

“If you would have just talked to Jesse, this child could be alive now.”

“
Could
be,” Nikki adds. “Jesse isn’t a catch-all.”

“She’s the best at what she does! And she’s his weakness. We need her and this one,” Jeremiah stabs a finger at Ally. “This one—”

“Jerry,” Parish says. “Come on, man.”

He tears open the second then third bag. He lifts them up for me to admire like deer kills in hunting season. “Look at them. Look at them.”

I point my eyes in the general direction but I don’t see much through the glimmer of tears. Only shining reflective light.

“This is what mercy gets you,” he hisses. “This is what mercy looks like.”

“That’s enough,” Nikki says. She grabs me by the arm and pulls me toward the door.

“You can’t be half in!” Jeremiah yells before Nikki can get the door closed between us, blessedly locking us out into the hallway.

We stand in the bright white hallway outside the apartment. I can still hear Parish’s and Jeremiah’s angry exchange but not the specific words.

“Asshole,” Nikki says. She clamps my shoulders. “Are you okay?”

I’m shaking. I’m blinking away the tears and trying to breathe. “The little boy. The way he
shook
him at me.”

“We’re leaving,” she said.

“I need to tell him what I found out about the missing people,” I say, but I’m shaking. I’m shaking and I don’t think I can look at Jeremiah again.

“What about them?” she asks. So I tell her what my search turned up and that Caldwell isn’t taking people with NRD, but their replacements.

“I’ll tell him,” she says. “Get in the car and I’ll be right back.”

“He’s going to kill her,” I whisper, thinking of his captive.

“He’s a hot-head but he’ll get it under control.”

“What do I do?” I ask.

You can’t be half in.
Do my attempts to protect Jesse make me “half-in”? If I really want to keep her safe do I—but how do I do that and keep her out of the way?

Nikki thinks I’m still talking about Jeremiah and the bodies. “You had nothing to do with that.”

No, I didn’t pull the trigger. But that doesn’t mean I’m guilt free. Am I so focused on protecting Jesse that I’m getting others killed?

And if I am—am I okay with that?

The little boy’s white face and pale lips says
no
. I’m not okay. But if it comes down to Jesse or a stranger—I don’t know.

I don’t know what I’m willing to do.

Jesse

I
don’t go see my boyfriend before we skip town because I know Lane will be so grumpy about all this. Instead I send him a text. Of course he doesn’t respond, even my cute heart and kiss-kiss emoticons do not move him.

It only takes a few hours to get to Heath, a small town in Ohio and apparently Liza’s hangout. It seems this commercial strip is the big deal: a cluster of businesses, restaurants and stores crowding the four-lane highway.

We find a nice hotel in the middle of this main drag and pull off. I check us in because Gloria isn’t great with people. They give us a room on the third floor, which we find after searching the wall-scuffed hallway the color of rotting fruit and slip my key card into C307.

The room is a standard double suite. Two beds, a single bath. A big window against the far wall with the curtains open to let in light. A TV sits on an average-looking stand across from the beds and a set of drawers for clothing beneath it. On the opposite side of the TV is a desk, complete with a couple of monogrammed pins and some paper.

Gloria puts her sketchbook on the desk, claiming it for herself. Only then does she toss her bag on the foot of the bed, closest to the door. “Home Sweet Home.”

I crack a smile at her joke. It’s good to encourage her. Not that I value social skills highly myself. For the most part, people are just weird and exhausting. But I think things would be easier for Gloria if she, you know, knew how to talk to
any
one.

“It’s like we’re roomies,” I say. I curl into my bed careful not to touch the top cover too much. Ally has told me some horror stories about the top cover of hotel beds. Lots of bugs and body fluids.

Gloria opens her sketchbook, pausing over the pencil sketches before settling on a particular sketch. Turning the book toward me, she looks up. “You need to be here around 1:00PM.”

I recognize Liza Miller from the earlier sketches, but the area surrounding her is unclear. It looks like a shopping center. The squat bundle of stores is oddly disharmonious though uniform in appearance: a hair salon, a sandwich shop, a coffee shop, electronic store and crafts store. Liza is on the sidewalk, pinned between the parking lot and shadowed cars and storefronts. She looks about ready to step into one of the stores, but it’s unclear which one.

“Why 1:00PM?” I know better than to question whether or not it is today. Gloria has been exactly right on the day, a million times. But I know hours are difficult to pinpoint.

“The light,” she says. “It’s afternoon in these pictures.”

“So what you’re really saying is I should be there by noon, and be prepared to be there all damn day.”

She shrugs.

“All right.” I open my backpack and fish out fresh clothes and a toothbrush. “What will you be doing?”

“Drawing,” she says. “I’m working on what’s next.”

“So what should I say?” I ask, turning my back to change my shirt. My jeans are okay. “Seen any good murders lately?”

Gloria grimaces. “Just don’t use the zed word.”

“Zed?”

“Have you seen the movie Shaun of the Dead?” she asks.

“Oh yeah,” I say and realize she’s making a joke. Two in one day! I’m so proud of her. “So nothing like ‘I’m a zombie. You’re a zombie! Zombie high five!”

Gloria throws her coffee back like a shot of whiskey. Damn. “I don’t know what you should say. Be charming. You’re charming.”

I laugh. “You’re the only one who thinks so.”

“Just do your best,” she says.

“Okay, Mom,” I say and close myself up in the bathroom.

It doesn’t take me long to make myself presentable. I only washed my face, added deodorant and brushed my hair. Add a good tooth scrubbing and I’m a brand new girl.

It isn’t quite noon when I slip from the room. Gloria is already at the desk sketching in her wide-eyed creepy remote viewer stare.

It only takes me a few minutes to find the cluster of stores from Gloria’s picture. It helps that Heath is tiny and everything is centered on this one strip. I park across from the storefront and look up at the trio: coffee shop, sandwich shop and hair salon. The crafts store and electronics store are a little farther back. I seriously doubt Liza wants to knit herself a scarf while on the run, so my guess is she will probably go into the electronics store or coffee shop. Given my problem with electronics, I really hope she just needs some java.

I see Liza.

She is short like me, with crazy curls and a pale complexion. In the cool autumn sun, she looks like she’s just crawled out from under a rock and rejoined the living. Maybe it’s her super dark hair that’s doing nothing for her complexion. Who knows? I’m not a beauty consultant by any means.

Because I don’t want to be creeper, I pretend to take a phone call. I laugh a lot. My imaginary friend is
hilarious.
After a particularly boisterous laugh, she glances up as she continues toward me on the sidewalk. I hold her gaze for a moment and laugh again. I’m still laughing when she enters the coffee shop.

I wait for a few minutes, until I see Liza take a seat by the large store front window with a coffee cup in her hand. Only then, once she is snuggled up with her drink and I’m certain she won’t bolt, do I enter. I walk up to the counter, still on my phone with my imaginary friend. “Okay girl, I need some java. T-T-Y-L.”