Dying for Her: A Companion Novel (Dying for a Living Book 3) (20 page)

Saturday, April 5, 2003

C
oming around the side of the house, I stopped at the first window with light. My sigh was probably audible to the Boston detective as well as myself. Jackson was alive. She wasn’t in great shape. She kneeled on the floor at Chaplain’s feet without any sign of reverence. Her face was swollen on one side and her bandaged left shoulder was red with blood. But why beat on her? Then I heard Chaplain, loud, angry and at the top of his voice, screaming.

“What are you?” he asked. When she didn’t answer, he hit her again. When she looked as equally unmoved, he shoved a blade against her face. “Tell me what you are or I’m going to carve up your fucking face until you don’t look like anything.”

Then I saw Sullivan. He was just a shadow in the corner of the room, unseen by the others. He didn’t stay there long. When he appeared behind Jackson, Chaplain and his buffoons jumped back in surprise. Before they could recover from the shock, Jackson and Sullivan were gone. I blinked, and it was like they hadn’t been in the house at all.

Chaplain was howling, turning angrily in a circle as if he expected to see them there and discover the nature of the trick. But he didn’t find them. He found us. His gaze fixed on mine through the window.

“Shit,” I said and turned toward Smith. “We’ve got to go.”

Smith was frozen, staring through the window like a twelve year old at a titty show.

I shook him. “You know better, pull yourself together detective.”

He didn’t pull himself together. Instead he raised his gun and pointed it at me.

Shit
, I thought, but I never said it. Rough hands grabbed onto the back of my leather jacket, followed by a heartbeat of darkness. Then my feet connected with the brick walkway of the park. The first thing I saw was Jackson sitting in the shadows on a bench, her gun in her hand.

“What took you so long?” she asked me.

“I had to spring him from jail,” Sullivan said.

“No time for explanations,” I said to her. “Are you OK?”

She stood as if to make her point but her legs were shaky. “I’ll live.”

“Good. We need to get the detective and the girls.”

“I’ll take the back and you—”

“No,” Sullivan said, interrupting our plans. “I got you out. You can’t go back in.”

“My reputation won’t be worth shit unless Chaplain’s head is on a slab. We have to go in, and we have to kill him.”

“And save the girls,” Jackson added.

“You’re both insane.”

“Are you going to help or not?” I asked him. He considered this, looking from her to me and back.

He ran a hand through his hair and puffed out his cheeks in frustration. Then stepped forward. “Whatever you do, don’t let go.”

3 Days

I
pull up at Jackson’s house and see the dim light coming through the kitchen window. I knew she wouldn’t stay in the hospital unless they shackled her to the bed. I’ve never known her to follow doctor’s orders.

My phone rings, and I decide to take the call in my car before going in to check on Jackson.

“Yeah,” I grumble into the receiver.

“Brinkley,” Gideon says. “What interesting friends you have.”

“I don’t have a lot of time,” I tell him.

“Three days,” he intercedes, the anger is there but not as raw as it was when I first gave him the news. “I’ll get to the point then.”

“Thank you.”

“Alice Gallagher has paired up with Jeremiah Johnson. He is very wealthy through his marriage to a pharmaceutical heiress, Tamara Henderson. Apart from this marriage, it seems he has no real source of income. Yet he could fund the Israeli Army for the rest of his life. The pharmaceutical company, Develacor has investments in everything you can think of: household products, technology, weapons development, and of course, pharmaceuticals.”

“So he uses his wife’s money to fund a little, what, operation?”

“Not little at all.” Gideon laughs. “He has over 100,000 employees. Nearly as many as Microsoft.”

“What the hell is he doing with them?”

“Surveillance and search and rescue mostly. They are watching everything.”

“What does Alice have to do with all of this?”

“She is a recent recruit. It seems that she was only picked up late last year to do small search and rescue missions for his local outfit. That outfit is run by his second-in-command and one of his earliest recruits, Nicole Tamsin. Jeremiah appears to have recruited her shortly after her domestic partner was brutally murdered.”

“Go back to Alice,” I say. “What could she be doing that is pissing Caldwell off?”

“Jeremiah targets many of Caldwell’s operations. For example, Caldwell has over fifty people locked in a basement of this farmhouse outside Minooka and is doing some kind of experiment on them. Jeremiah is very close to finding and uncovering this operation.”

“How can you possibly know that?” I ask him, but a mention of the farmhouse sends a shiver down my spine. Was it the farmhouse from Jackson’s drawing? Well, I guess I’ll find out soon enough, won’t I?

“Three may keep a secret if two of them are dead,” says Gideon. “Everyone talks.”

The light through Jackson’s window dims and I realize she’s just shut a door or gone into another room. “So Alice probably joined Jeremiah hoping to take a proactive approach to the cells that have been hunting and murdering Necronites. I don’t blame her. She was stabbed.”

“That is what I suspect,” Gideon says. “But it would seem he was very happy to have her.”

“What do you mean?”

“My informant tells me that Jeremiah sees Alice as a means for recruiting Jesse. If that is true, one must ask the question, what does Jeremiah know about Jesse and what does he want with her?”

“Good fucking questions,” I say and at the mention of Jesse, my mind comes alive. “Listen, I want to know more about Alice and Jeremiah, but I need you to work on something else. Jesse has been taken. Find out where Caldwell is hiding her. I want to get her back.”

“You only have three days,” he says.

My chest clenches. I may not have time to find Jesse. Hell, I may never see the kid again.

“Just do your best.”

“Of course,” he says, his voice full of tenderness.

I end the call and climb the dark concrete steps into Jackson’s house before he can get too sappy on me.

The upstairs is dark and quiet. I move through the shadows of the cool living room into the still kitchen. Pale moonlight filters through the lace curtain, spilling over the sink and oven. I see the light beneath the door and know Jackson is probably down there drawing her ass off.

Sure enough, as I descend the stairs, she doesn’t even look up at me.

“Jackson?”

She doesn’t turn around.

“Hey,” I say and come up behind her. The furious scratch of her pen against the page sounds brutal in this cramped dark space.

I put a hand on her shoulder but she doesn’t respond. So I lean around to get a good look at her face.

A thin stream of blood is coming from her left nostril and hitting the page in front of her. She’s dragged her lead through it once or twice, giving certain lines a macabre burst of red.

“Shit,” I say, and tilt her head back to look into her eyes. They are fully dilated and do not react to the overhead light shining into them. “Damn it.”

I yank the notebook away from her and pull the pencil out of her hand. Then I slap her cheeks lightly. “Come on,” I say. “Snap out of it.”

She reaches for the pencil and paper again but I shove them farther away.

“No.” I shake her. “Stop,
stop
.”

Her eyes begin to focus. “I need to finish.”

“No,” I tell her.

“I need to—”

“No.” I gesture toward her busted face and wrapped shoulder. “Look at you. How many times have you busted that shoulder?”

She ignores my question.

“I have to find Jesse. He has her. You know that, right? He has her,” she says.

“We’ll get her back.” I’m trying for optimism.

Then I see it, the clump of fabric Jackson clutches in her left hand. It looks like she’s been wringing the hell out of it as she drew.

“What is that?”

“Nothing,” she says and childishly tries to hide it from me.

I reach down and wrench it from her grip. She cries out as I have obviously hurt some wounded part of her. I feel like a bastard.

“I’m sorry,” I say and open up the fabric. I blink once or twice before realizing I’m looking at a shirt with the front blasted open by a gunshot. It’s soaked in blood. I know this shirt.

“Jesus Christ,” I say.

“He’s killed her,” she says.

I look way from Jesse’s shirt. “How did you get this?”

“Caldwell gave it to me. Told me that for hurting Micah, he’s shot her. He says he will kill her again unless I stop looking for her and stop helping you.”

“You should stop,” I tell her. “He could kill you.”

“No,” she says, desperately, turning her big eyes up to meet mine. “I have to find her. We’re almost out of time.”

We.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” I ask.

“I didn’t know he would take her—” she begins.

“No,” I say and crush the fabric in my fist. It isn’t until my hand comes away cool and wet that I realize the blood is fresh. He’s just killed her, just come and delivered this. Jesse probably hasn’t even healed and woken up yet—if she is going to. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

Her frown deepens and eyes furrow in a question.

“Don’t play dumb,” I tell her. “We don’t have time for it. Why didn’t you tell me you were going to die too?”

“I can’t see my own death,” she says.

“But you’ve seen something,” I say. “What is it?”

She looks like she might refuse me again, but then her shoulder slumps in its sling. She reaches out for the sketchbook I slid away and flips to the back.

It’s a drawing of Micah and Jackson locked arm and arm in the woods. Each one has a gun pressed to the other’s temple. Each one looks like they walked through hell to get there. When she moves the drawing aside, I see another nearly identical one laying beneath it. It seems Caldwell lied when he said he wasn’t a delivery boy.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” I ask her.

“It doesn’t matter. We have enough to worry about,” she says.

I grab her shoulder and she cries out. I apologize again and loosen my grip. “It matters to me, Jackson. You can’t go out there if you’re going to get yourself killed.”

She shrugs me off, her anger rearing up to its full height. “You’re one to talk. I’ve begged you for months not to go. Just to stay the hell away and live.”

“If he has Jesse and is killing her, you know the second we find out where she is, I have to go get her. I brought her into this shit when I recruited her. Everything that happens to her is on my head.”

“And everything that Micah does is on mine. I’m going.”

What could I say to that?

All of this started with Jackson, Caldwell, and me and I guess it should end that way.

“Fine,” I tell her and give her back Jesse’s shirt. “Find her.”

Saturday, April 5, 2003

S
ullivan dropped us on the other side of the front door. I recognized the foyer from my first visit to Chaplain’s, so I knew what part of the house we’d slipped into. The cracking wooden beams above were dilapidated with neglect. It was a total shit-hole. Or maybe everyone else saw a palace for all I knew. But all I saw were menacing shadows as we inched into the house toward the light ahead.

The folding chairs were in place, along with the velvet ropes. Someone had set the stage for us.

A rock formed in my gut.

The further we moved into the room with our guns at the ready, the more the bed came into view on the other side of the rope. Then I saw the girl.

Rachel Wright. I did what I always do when I find someone at long last. My mind runs through a checklist of features, comparing her to the photograph in my mind that I studied with such intensity.
Is it really her?
Some part of me asks. It didn’t help that her makeup was a mess, smeared all over her face in some kind of clown parody. She wore one of those white nightgowns I’d seen on the other girl, and I was starting to think it was some sick part of the performance. The chance to defile something so innocent was part of the appeal.

He doesn’t need the money or anything
, Smith had said.
He just does this because he enjoys it.
Just as he was enjoying the total destruction of my life and reputation.

Rachel was on her knees, with each of her hands curled into a fist beside her head, all of her straining forward against something that held her back. Her hair was long and uncombed.

She was opening and closing her mouth but no sound came out. Another step, and I realized she had a belt around her throat. The buckle caught the overhead light. Her wrists were also belted to the headboard behind her. I realized now that part of the reason her face was so red wasn’t the shitty makeup. She was straining too far forward. She was going to strangle herself if she didn’t stop.

“She’s the one you wanted,” a low voice said. I turned my gun in the direction of the voice and found Chaplain there. Smiling. It was a composed face. I wasn’t sure he was capable of such self-mastery, but then again, uncontrolled people do not make it very far in life. I tried to squeeze the trigger but my hand felt weak and useless.

“When I saw you there that night beside Fitzy,” he continued, without distress. “I knew what you’d come for. Lucky for me, it wasn’t her night, or you would’ve made a big mess, wouldn’t you have? Dead cops are harder to get rid of than hemorrhoids.”

“Henry Chaplain, you’re under arrest for the—”

“—extensive number of crimes you know nothing about.” Chaplain laughed. “I’ve been in your head. I know what you know. Including what really happened to that little Afghani boy.”

My throat and mouth went dry. I realized someone was inching up beside me.

I whirled and saw Detective Smith was almost on Rachel. He had made it all the way to the bed while Chaplain rambled. I’d never been so unfocused before. The way Chaplain could snake eye you—it was dangerous.

“Get away from her, Smith,” I said, once I realized he wasn’t trying to save her. He had a different look in his eye as he wrapped his fist up in her hair. “Smith.”

Two men came through the dark doorway and I put a bullet in each of the guys before they could get close. “Smith!” I yelled again but he was too far gone. Whatever Chaplain was doing to him, it made him forget where he was.

“Goddamnit,” I said, and I tackled Smith to the ground. Angry and maybe even afraid, he fought back. He slammed a fist into my cheek and I reeled. I managed to get on top of him and pin him with my knees.

“I’m sorry,” I said to Smith, and then I hit him hard in the jaw, a knockout blow. He went limp. I checked his pulse. Of course I didn’t kill him, but I wanted to be sure.

Gunfire erupted in the room and I collapsed over Smith, covering my head. When I looked up, four more of Chaplain’s men lay dead on the floor beside the first two I shot.

“Who shot them?” I asked as Sullivan stepped into view, helping me off of Smith.

“He can’t manipulate her,” Sullivan said, nodding toward Jackson. Jackson had a gun pressed to Chaplain’s head. The guy was on his knees at her feet, execution style.

“If he bats an eyelash,” Sullivan added. “She’s going to shoot his ass. And I told him if he thinks he can escape, he is a moron. I’ll find him anywhere.”

I looked at the bodies on the floor. “If you keep calling your guys in here, they’re going to keep getting shot.”

Chaplain’s smile was tight. “What do you want?”

“I want you to tell me where the girls are.
All
of them. I want to arrest you for the murder of Fizz—Harry Fitzgerald and—” I stopped.

“It doesn’t matter what you want,” he spat. His curls bounced furiously and his whole body shook. I saw the veins in the side of his neck bulge as he spoke. “This is about what
I
want. It is always about what I want.”

The image of the boy, dying in my arms hit me with the force of a tank. My knees hit the floor. I clutched my head screaming. Then I heard the gun fire again and the images stopped. I was shaking, my hands still cradled in front of me as if I was holding Aziz. I wiped at my eyes with the back of my hands and then squeezed my knees. After a breath, I looked over to see Sullivan on his knees too, trying to draw deep lungfuls of air.

Jackson had her gun shoved into the side of Chaplain’s neck. “Next time, it’ll be your heart. Tell us where the girls are or I’ll shoot you again. Then I’ll tear this house apart myself.”

I saw the blood oozing from a hole in Chaplain’s gut. He was going to bleed out, but didn’t seem to care one bit. Chaplain was laughing.

Smith had come awake and was pulling himself up onto his feet. “He has NRD,” the detective said.

“How do you know?” I asked.

“Because he’s killed me once or twice himself, haven’t you, Detective?” Chaplain held the oozing hole in his side and chuckled. Well, I’m glad someone was having a good time.

Jackson moved her gun up six inches, repositioning the barrel against Chaplain’s temple. He stopped laughing.

“You can mind fuck us all day,” I told him. It was hard to look into his eyes. He was so goddamn angry you could almost see twin flames burning in those dark orbs. “But you can’t fool her.”

“Why?” Smith asked. He had undone the straps around Rachel’s throat and wrists. The girl collapsed onto the bed unconscious. “How are you immune?”

“The magnetite in my brain—” she began. She didn’t finish. Chaplain twisted her knee and she fell back. Her gun went off blasting a hole in the ceiling. Plaster and dust rained down on top of them as I leapt across the room. Sullivan grabbed Rachel and blinked out. Good. That was what I wanted, and I was glad for once that someone was listening to me.

When I rushed forward to help Jackson, I was hit again with the illusion. The weight of the boy in my arms, the way he rolled limply from one palm to another. He might have thought himself a man. But I knew better. Goddamnit, I knew better when I saw his little mouth part, but not for air. The crooked teeth shining between his dry, cracked lips.

I looked up from the boy in my arms and saw Smith. He was raising his gun to his mouth.

“No,” I said and dived forward. But I was having a hard time moving. My mind was flicking back and forth from the desert and Chaplain’s stage. I grabbed the gun out of Smith’s hand and bent the barrel back away from his face. It fired and shot out one of the cheap lamps by the bed. Sullivan popped up behind Smith.

“Take him,” I croaked and Sullivan blinked out. That left just me, Jackson and Chaplain.

But then they disappeared and I was in the desert of my mind again.

The boy had large, beautiful eyes the color of Jackson’s. Jackson. I turned in the sand and crawled back the way I came. I saw Chaplain and Jackson in the sand just beyond the boy’s dead body. They fought for the gun. Jackson had rolled him and was twisting his arm up behind his back. He cried out and the desert disappeared. My hand burned from sliding it along the wooden floor.

I blinked and something had changed.

Chaplain was fighting Jackson for her gun. He had her on her back and he was slowly pushing the muzzle up toward her face. It was almost at her chin when I descended on him. The same moment Sullivan reappeared.

I stomped on Chaplain’s leg and Sullivan grabbed ahold of his arm. One moment I saw Chaplain howling about his leg, the next, I saw those fiery dark eyes turned up toward mine.

The world fell away.

“No,” Sullivan yelled. I realized I had the gun in my hand and I’d pointed it at Jackson. Her eyes went wide. “No.”

I see a flashing red light. Goddamnit, are you going to wait until he gets to the fucking door?
I lifted the gun a little higher, because this time I could see it, a flashing red light on the front of Aziz’s vest.

Chaplain elbowed Sullivan hard in the face, knocking his head back. In that stolen moment, Chaplain stabbed him. Where had the knife come from? I didn’t know. Maybe he had it on him the whole time. Maybe he took it from Jackson. Furious, Sullivan ripped the knife from between his ribs and shoved it into Chaplain’s eye. Blood poured out of one man onto another and something happened.

My mind cleared. Jackson was no longer in the desert, wearing a flashing vest. The relief on her face when I lowered the gun was clear, but before I could apologize for scaring the hell out of her, someone screamed.

Someone screamed bloody murder.

Sullivan and Chaplain erupted in blue fire. I stumbled back away from the white hot heat of it, but wasn’t quick enough. Blisters formed along the back of my hand where I’d tried to shield my face from the light, and I knew part of my left cheek and ear had been exposed from the burning fire blooming there.

Hissing with pain, I tried to touch my seared flesh, but that only made it worse.

Sullivan clutched the side of his head and wailed. He stumbled back away from Chaplain who was clearly dead, his corpse charred to a husk. Sullivan disappeared. Then reappeared, still screaming and writhing. He took a couple of steps away from me and I saw his backside.

It was the first time I could ever remember seeing him from behind—his shoulders, jeans, head and that sandy blond hair. Something inside me clicked. But before I could get to him, grab ahold of him and see if he was all right, he was gone again. This time, he stayed gone.

Jackson, panting on the floor, looked up at me over the charred corpse. She had blisters along her right side, the side that had been too close to the blaze that had consumed Chaplain. She took a deep breath. “How do you feel now?”