“Hey,” I said gently, “hey, brother…”
Rudy has one real eye and one glass. Another souvenir of violence that came his way during our time at the DMS. Another unfair mark on a good and decent man. Both eyes look real, and I swear both were filled with a pain born of the awareness of what had happened.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “God, Rudy, I’m so sorry.”
He started to shake his head, then winced as the bruised muscles and tendons in his neck protested. He hissed. A tear gathered in the corner of his good eye and fell down past his cheek and ear before melting into the foam of the cervical collar.
“J-Joe…,” he breathed, his voice weak and faint.
“I’m here, Rudy.”
“Joe… that… that wasn’t me….”
“I know, Rude, it’s all—”
“No,” he said with more force. Circe stood up and he saw her, his eyes ticking back and forth between us. “No… that was not me.”
“I know,” I said.
It wasn’t him, of that I was certain. But who — or what — was it?
The pain of his injuries — physical and psychic — began to scream at him. Circe called the nurse and they added something to his IV and Rudy went down into darkness. Like a coward, like a fool who knows nothing, I left him there and went out into the bright sunshine of a day whose rules I had utterly failed to grasp.
CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE
“Why did you do it?”
Senior DMS field agent Captain Allison Craft asked the question for the fiftieth time. Maybe the hundredth. She’d lost count. The man in the chair, Mr. Nathan Cross, said the same thing he’d said each of those times.
“I don’t know.”
They were in an interview room at the Central District building. Captain Craft, topkick of Rimfire Team, the DMS field office in Milwaukee, had commandeered the room and the prisoner. Craft had flashed Homeland credentials and Aunt Sallie had cleared the red tape. The police, who were seldom generous when it came to sharing their prisoners or yielding jurisdiction, seemed happy to let this case go up the food chain. There were seventeen dead at Bristol Labs, and virtually everyone else employed there was either in the hospital — many critical — or in cells. Only a few had escaped without going crazy. Jerry Spencer, the DMS forensics chief, had brought in his team and it was clear that a powerful hallucinogen had been introduced to the staff, likely through the coffee and tea urns. Tests were being conducted, but the nature of the drugs used to cause the outbreak held less critical importance than what Cross had stolen from the lab and sent flying off on a drone.
The drone had been found two miles away in a field near the entrance to the highway. There was nothing in the metal container bolted to its undercarriage.
“Why did you do this?” demanded Craft, who was both scared and frustrated.
Nate Cross sat there, shocked, horrified, tears and snot running down his face, skin blanched white, cuffed hands trembling with a palsy born of realization of what he had done.
“God… God…,” he said, his words tumbling out, lips shiny with spit, “… I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know….”
He could describe some of what had happened, and Craft was confused because the man seemed to want to help. He was desperate to help, but there were huge gaps in his memory.
“It was like I was watching it,” said Cross. “Like it wasn’t me. I could feel it… see it. All of it. But it wasn’t me doing it. I swear to God.”
“You’re going to have to do a whole lot better than that,” snarled Craft. “Do you want to see the video again? Do you want to see what you did? I’ll show it to you again.”
“No!” he wailed, and he looked from her to Davis, her partner, and back again. Sobbing, pleading, begging them to believe what he was saying. “Please, God… it wasn’t me. I swear to God Jesus it wasn’t me.”
Craft’s phone rang. She glanced at the display. “Auntie,” she said.
“Go ahead,” said Davis. “I got this.”
Craft stepped out into the hall to take the call. “He’s holding to it,” she said into the phone. “We’ve been at it for hours and he hasn’t budged. And, I don’t think he’s feeding us a line. Something happened to him and—”
“Listen to me, girl,” said Aunt Sallie in a voice that could blister paint, “you put on your big girl panties and go get me some answers. I’m going to call you back in one hour and I want to hear something useful, do you hear me, sweetcheeks?”
“I—”
The line went dead.
“Bitch,” breathed Craft, resisting the urge to drop her phone and stomp on it. The interview room door was closed and she stood for a moment glaring at it, willing the situation inside to be different than what she’d left a moment ago. She took a breath, squared her shoulders, and reached for the knob.
That was when she heard the gunshot.
Through the door it was a muffled pok.
“Oh, shit,” she cried and tore the door open, drawing her own gun, fearing what had happened. Fearing that Cross had somehow gotten free and…
She froze in the doorway. Nathan Cross sat there with his head thrown back, mouth open, eyes staring up at the ceiling. There was a small black hole above the bridge of his nose. Behind him the wall was splashed with bright red that was speckled with bits of gray and knots of hair.
Phil Davis stood beside Cross’s chair, his Sig Sauer in his hand.
“Jesus Christ, Phil… what have you done?”
Davis turned to her and smiled. “Sorry, Phil’s not here at the moment,” he said. And he shot Allison Craft twice in the face.
He was still smiling when he put the hot barrel under his own chin and blew the top of his head off.
CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR
I’d left my car with the valet people with orders to keep the engine running and air-conditioning up high. Ghost sat in the front passenger seat, head erect, brown eyes watching me, and there was a weird spark of suspicion in his eyes. He even bent to sniff me when I slid behind the wheel. He made a noncommittal huff sound.
“The fuck’s with you?” I demanded.
Ghost flinched back from the severity of my tone and I immediately felt bad. The dog was scared and confused. Maybe it was the smell of the hospital. Maybe it was the stink of my own fear and shame. Either way I had no reason to bark at him. So I twisted in my seat and bent close to press my forehead against his. We do that. Junie calls it a mind kiss. For me it’s a pure animal thing, a communication between members of the same pack. Only this time Ghost pulled back. He turned and looked out the window as if I wasn’t there. Or, as if he was looking for his real pack leader. I stroked his fur but he did not respond at all. It made me strangely sad and disconnected. I put the car in gear, pulled out of the parking lot, and began heading back to the Pier.