The blood spread into a crimson pool at her feet.
Serena did a double take. It was as if the woman had come from nowhere. She saw the blood and shouted, “Hey, are you okay? What happened?”
The woman ran away toward the trees.
“Stop! Wait!”
Serena took a couple of steps, then swayed, lost her balance, and nearly fell. She squeezed her head with both hands as if she could squeeze the vodka out of her skull like juice from an overripe lemon. Ahead of her, the woman’s hair flew, and her arms pumped as she disappeared down the short street. Serena shouted again — “Stop! I want to help!” — but the woman kept running without looking back. When she reached the trees, she plunged inside and disappeared.
Fighting her nausea, Serena followed in the darkness. She managed a stumbling half-run down the middle of the street. At the trees, she hesitated, seeing no sign of where the woman had entered the brush. She made her way forward through the weeds. The tree branches were still wet from the rain, and they soaked her clothes and covered her in damp leaves and scratched her face with sharp edges. She followed a rough trail. There was litter all over the ground: cans, bottles, cups, old tires, chunks of asphalt. On the other side of the trees, she came to a chain-link fence that surrounded the sprawling lot of the city’s street maintenance facility. There was no sign of the woman.
“Hello! Are you there? Where did you go?”
Getting no answer, Serena climbed the fence. The metal was slippery, and she struggled to keep a grip. At the top, she fell hard on the other side and landed in mud. She got up and wiped herself off and studied the deserted lot. Puddles made lakes across the gravel. Piles of crushed rock, black dirt, and road salt rose like mountains, some with weeds growing out of them. There were plows and yellow maintenance trucks parked everywhere and a giant tent like an aircraft hangar. If the woman was here, she had many places to hide.
Serena listened but heard nothing. She called, “I’m with the police. It’s okay. Where are you?”
Silence.
She walked out into the middle of the dark lot, but she was completely alone. There was no sign of the woman anywhere. Then it all caught up with her. Grief. Guilt. Alcohol. Loneliness. Unconsciousness came rippling toward her. She took two more steps, kicking up a cloud of silver dust, and made it as far as the slope of one of the heaps of crushed rock. Slowly, like a proud tree falling, her body slumped sideways to the ground.
Stride stared down at Serena. He felt his heart break. Her eyes were closed, her wet, dirty hair across her face, her clothes torn and muddy. While unconscious, she’d obviously vomited, and it was a good thing she wasn’t on her back because she could easily have choked to death. He squatted next to her and stroked her face with the back of his hand. She didn’t respond.
“Serena,” he said softly.
When she was quiet, he shook her shoulder gently. “Serena.”
Slowly, unhappily, she stirred. Her eyes fluttered. He watched her try to focus, and for a while, she didn’t seem to recognize him in the darkness. He helped her sit up, and she wrapped her arms around her knees and buried her face between them and said nothing for a while. He sat down next to her.
When awareness finally dawned on her, she looked up and took note of where they were, but she refused to meet his eyes.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
Stride didn’t need an apology. “How are you?”
“Okay except for the axe someone buried in my head.”
He gave a short, humorless laugh. “You scared the hell out of me.”
“I know.”
“What are you doing here?”
Serena seemed to remember something, and she tried to leap to her feet, but she fell back down against the rocks. He caught her and steadied her. “Take it easy. There’s no rush. You’re not ready to move yet.”
“There was a woman,” Serena said.
“A woman?”
“I saw her in the street. She was injured. Bloody. I followed her this way, but then I lost her.”
“Do you know who she was?” Stride asked.
“No, I have no idea—” Serena began, but then she stopped. Confusion crossed her face, and her brow furrowed. She shut her eyes, wincing at what seemed to be a stab of pain. “Actually, that’s not true. Now that I think about it, I recognized her face. I’d seen her before.”
“Do you know where?”
She shook her head. “No, I don’t remember. I can’t place her. But I definitely knew her face.”
“Was she hurt badly?”
“It looked that way. Blood was everywhere. I mean, it was pooling in the street at her feet. I think she’d been shot in the head.”
Stride frowned as he stared at her. “Shot in the head? But she was walking around?”
“I know it makes no sense.”
He let the silence stretch out. Then he said, “I didn’t see any evidence of someone else around here. Definitely not anyone who was injured. I didn’t see any blood on the street.”
“I didn’t imagine her, Jonny,” Serena said.
Stride didn’t challenge her, even though he was certain that she had imagined it. But for the moment, it didn’t matter.
“How did you find me?” she asked.
“I dialed your number. I heard the phone ringing beyond the trees.”
“You got my car keys from Jagger?”
He nodded. “I’ll have someone pick up the Mustang.”
“I suppose he told you — I drank. I drank a lot.”
“I think I would have figured that out,” Stride said.
She finally turned her head to look at him. She met his eyes, blinked, and looked away, but he took her chin and moved it back. Her face, her hair, was a mess. He leaned in and kissed her, tasting alcohol, sweat, mud, and vomit. She looked far away, lost, on a road that led nowhere. He had never seen Serena like this, and it worried him, because he didn’t know how to deal with it. He was used to her being fierce and fearless, not broken, not exposed. Even knowing that Samantha had always been her weak point, he hadn’t expected her mother’s death to knock her off her feet like this. All those years after Phoenix, after all the abuse, and Samantha could still manipulate her daughter from the grave.
He wanted to ask Serena how to help, but he didn’t think she knew, and he didn’t think she would ask him for help even if she did.
Her face was inches away. Her green eyes looked solemn and self-aware.
“I’m falling apart, Jonny.”
He pulled her head into his chest and put his arms around her. For now, that was all he could do. “I know.”
18
In the morning, at police headquarters, Serena found herself taken off the Gavin Webster case for good. She didn’t blame Maggie for benching her. A shower, fresh clothes, and mouthwash weren’t enough to cover the aftereffects of the night. When she studied herself in the bathroom mirror, she saw what she looked like. There were dark sleepless circles under her bloodshot eyes. Her face looked pale, almost cadaverous. The fluorescent lights made her squint, her head throbbing. She wasn’t drunk anymore, but she still felt drunk, as if the poison hadn’t left her blood.
Stride wanted her to go home, but Serena knew if she left the station, she would go straight back to the bar in West Duluth and ask Jagger to keep pouring drinks for her, until she’d recaptured the bliss of letting go. That was how it always went. There was never just one zero night. Somehow she had to find a ledge to grab onto, something that would stop her from falling any further.