Blood and Sand Page 16

  The quiet is deafening. It rings in my ear, the one not full of blood. I can’t stay here. I crawl. I endeavor to do it quietly, but I have no idea if I’m successful or not.

  A loud bang. A hole sends up dust from the floor where I just was.

  You gotta give it to Jones. He’s no quitter.

  I keep moving. I make it to the laundry room. I make it past the laundry room, while Jones continues to fire. His rounds mark my progress almost exactly. So does a long line of blood, smeared by my hands and knees.

  My eyes are rolling. My thoughts are scattering. My fingers are searching, finding, and pulling a zipper with as little noise as possible. I’m going to throw up. I can’t, not now. I’m trying to zero in on my hands, the book of matches I’m holding. I wonder if I can strike one silently.

  No, is the answer. I get it alight, and a new hole in the wall shoots plaster powder three inches from my left ear. A second hole appears, closer. I feel the breeze of it. But I’m throwing the match, watching it twirl end-over-end. I hear the squeak of a rat before bright orange flames bloom from the hole in the stairs.

  I dig deep. Gunshots and Jones’s strange, airy screams chase me out of the building. I stagger into the yard, dialing. Next I know, I’m not holding my phone anymore. I must have dropped it. I hope the call went through. I don’t go back for it; I can’t stop — if I stop, I won’t be able to start again. I know this, I feel this. I arrive where the van was parked that night, and I blunder on, toward the huge, gothic emptiness of the church. Its chimes are silent now, but those eight notes sing on in my head, through the voice of a traumatized child who couldn’t communicate what she knew any other way.

  “I’ve got her, Lani,” I say.

  But do I? Last time I looked this place over, I saw no point of entry.

  Multiple points of entry are occurring to me now, vividly, because of my shock, because of my blood, because of the rain, because of the fire racing through the apartment building behind me, eating the place alive. It’s beautiful. It’s a beautiful example of how everything is a point of entry if you’re willing to walk through fire.

  Polly didn’t have to go that far. She was stumbling around like I am, like a wounded animal, and she saw something, some gap.

  There’s nothing like desperation to reveal what you missed the first time. Lightning strikes so close that I smell ozone, and I see a sliver of space in one of the boarded windows. It’s tiny. It’s so tiny that I would move on, but there’s a minuscule stain where the lights leaks through. It’s the brick-brown color of dried blood.

  I go to it, intent on pushing on it. I fall into it instead — but hey, that works. Two boards clatter in. The space will be tight. I hike myself onto the windowsill, feed a leg through. Then the other one, and what was supposed to be a cat-like entrance becomes another tumble. But again, effective.

  “Polly?” I say, from where I’m balled on the floor.

  I’m in the sanctuary. It’s deep black dark. Lightning strikes, bathing the room in silver, showing me a hundred pews lined up like dead soldiers, an altar with a drippy mass of candle stubs, and a cross reaching for heaven.

  “Polly?” I say again, getting up. A rocket takes off in my head. I’m blind for a few seconds this time. I bumble toward the candles, taking out my matches. “Polly, if you can hear me, my name’s Beth. I’m not one of the bad guys. I’m not here to hurt you; I’m here to help. So if you can talk, please say where you are, okay? Say where you are, and this will all be over.” I’m lighting wicks as I deliver this speech, thinking what a liar I am, thinking how her grandmother’s dead and her belongings are burning to ash as I speak. I turn around when I’ve got a good two-dozen candles blazing, ready to start combing this place for any sign of where she might be, when I see somebody across from me. I scream and jump a mile.

  But it’s a mirror. There’s a door with a full-length mirror to one side of the altar, so the preacher can check his white hat or whatever before he comes onstage. In it, I look like a zombie. Not a fresh one — more like the invasion hit six months ago and I’ve been shambling around ramming into things ever since. The left side of my head is matted with blood, and it’s still bleeding. I’m woozy. A nap sounds amazing. A nap is starting to sound, in fact, rather non-negotiable.

  I look up at the cross and negotiate. “Five minutes?”

  My only answer is that I don’t pass out. I grope down to the pews. Spider webs and bloated bibles are all I find in a dozen rows. I take a quick pause; looking back and forth is making my dizziness worse. I pick a point on the floor and blink hard at it, trying to steady myself.

  “Hard day at the office?”

  I don’t startle. It’s as if I expected that voice.

  “Yeah,” I say, raising my head with a pleasant smile. “It’s been a killer.”

  Tuttle stands by the window, wet but not soaked, grinning but not amused. He’s holding his gun flush to his side. “Sorry to hear that.”

  “Why do I think you’re not sorry at all?”

  “You don’t sound surprised,” he says, taking a step toward the aisle. “When did you figure it out?”

  I’ve been wondering that myself for the past twenty or so seconds. And I’m proud to report, in spite of a gunshot wound to the head, I’ve figured it out. “Poker chip.”

  “What’s — Fell, get your hands away from you coat. Get ‘em up, now.” He raises the gun.

  I obey, curling my fingers around the jacket’s cuffs like the sleeves are too long.

  “What’s that mean?” Tuttle says. “Poker chip?”

  “What, you want some constructive criticism on your villainy before you shoot me?”

  “I’m not the villain here.”

  “No?” We’re shadowing each other. He takes a step forward, I take one back. He steps into the aisle, I reverse down a row of pews. “You’re gonna have to spell that out for me,” I say. “I’ve got a pretty bad headache.”

  “I’m not a bad guy, Fell. I just like nice things.” It’s unnerving; he still sounds like the silly neighbor at the barbecue with the best, most inoffensive joke you’ve ever heard. But I think of his locked coffee cabinet, his special grounds and mugs. His stuff, which must be kept safe and separate because it’s only his. “I met some people who help me pay for those things. Every once in a while, they need me to do them a favor, that’s all. They called me a half-hour ago and said their guy might need an assist. I’m guessing he’s about medium-well by now; that fire went up fast. And I’m gonna need you to quit moving.”

  “If I do that, I’ll pass out and you won’t get to shoot me. And let’s be real, you’ve been itching to see what that feels like, haven’t you?” I’m stepping into the side aisle. It’s cramped and close. There’s a spiral staircase that twists up and up — the bell-tower. I check to make sure I don’t back into the twisting iron rails. Lightning flashes.

  There are bloody shoe-prints on every stair. Kid-sized. The blood is dry, days old.

  “What are you doing in here?” Tuttle says, managing to look around without taking his eyes off me. “You don’t come across as the religious type.”

  “I don’t know. Shelter from the storm, I guess.” I’m walking sideways, away from the belltower, toward the back of the church.

  Tuttle’s mirroring me, moving back up the aisle. The candlelight makes his eyes black. “I’m not the villain here.”

  “No. You’re just the whore.”

  He smirks, bringing his other hand to the gun, steadying his aim. “Tell me what I did wrong. How did you know?”

  “So you can continue to be an effective helper for the mob?”

  “Tell me!” His voice rings through the sanctuary.

  I swear I hear a scared hitch of breath from high above. Be quiet, Polly. For a little while longer, please be quiet.

  “You called Lani a poker chip,” I say. “When I saw you at the storage place. I hadn’t worked out Gus’s plan yet. Nobody had. So how would you know she was a pawn in all t
his instead of the real deal?”

  “That’s pretty slick. Too slick. ‘Poker chip’ could refer to Polly, too.”

  “Not as neatly. And there was the DOT footage. You were so quick to point out that first day how you had a buddy in forensics. It’s an easy jump to assume you’ve got buddies all over the place.” I don’t let him explore this for too long. It’s weak logic, and we’re running out of pews to stand between us. “Speaking of too slick, you wiped off Hattie’s eyebrows.”

  He shrugs. “My boss — the one that pays cash — he wanted the brass to think Hattie washed up there. I was in plainclothes and I stayed out of Laughlin’s sight, so that kept me off the report. I flashed my badge to get the coroner’s assistants to let me ride along, and yeah, being in the water all night would’ve dissolved the makeup. I hit it with some hand sanitizer.”

  “Too clever by half, Officer.”

  He shakes his head. “Only if the investigator who’s looking has nothing else to do. No life, no friends, nobody to go home to. Just this. Just the hunt.”

  “You got me.” I shrug too, to distract him from my thumb moving. “I’m a one-trick pony. But Tuttle?”

  We clear the last pew, twenty feet apart with no obstructions. “Yeah, Fell?”

  “It’s a hell of a trick.” My back-up knife is a three-incher. Any longer than that and it makes an obvious bulge by my wrist. It’s secured with a single snap that, when unsnapped, feeds the handle right into my hand. You wouldn’t think a blade that small would make much difference, especially against a policeman’s glock. But as with so many things, it’s not what you’ve got to throw so much as how hard and how accurately you throw it. Just ask Goliath.

  Tuttle fires, and I guess he misses or else I’ve lost the ability to feel pain. Unfortunately, I’ve also lost at least some of my ability to aim, because the knife buries itself in Tuttle’s thigh. He howls and bends over. I register this as I’m running at him. The barrel of his gun starts to rise, but I hit it with a hard forearm and hear it skid into the dark. Tuttle throws a hook, going for my head, but I block it and counter. I’m coming from underneath with an upper cut. Before I can land it, his knee catches me where my ribs are still sore. I groan and go slack, feeling all the fight leave me, feeling him shove me into a wall. I taste his breath in my face as he presses me immobile. He’s got my hands by my ears. His legs restrain mine perfectly, despite a flow of blood from his wound where the handle of my knife is still winking.

  “What would your sister say?” I ask him. “Or your nephew — the one you don’t swear in front of? What would they say if they could see you now?”

  He kisses me. It’s ugly, heavy on the tongue. “They’ll never see this. But he’ll go to a great college on his uncle’s dime. Unlike Polly.”

  I glare at him. “Don’t say her name.”

  “Why? She was garbage, Fell. She was gutter trash. Not even lottery money changes that.” He laughs, and I hear what lives under all his bonhomie: the cheerful ability to dismiss those who don’t matter, the glad willingness to take what he can, however he can. Sometimes goodness goes sour, like milk left too long in a fridge. Sometimes it was never there to begin with, but the person learned how to fake it. I can’t tell which way it was for Tuttle. I’m just sensing from his weight and his grip and his pressure all the things he’d love to do to me if he only had the time.

  He puts both my wrists in one of his hands, trailing his face down my chest so he can reach into an ankle holster. I wish it gave me an inch to struggle, but it doesn’t. “Tell me,” he says, slotting the gun under my chin, “what would have been the point of saving her? What’s the point when the kid is doomed anyway?”

  What fills me at that moment can’t be called fury. It’s something much more distilled, pure, and transcendent. And what I’m thinking of is Hattie. Hattie Turner, seventy years old, awakened one night by nefarious hands at the door.

  Hattie, who did not go gently into that good night.

  I’m pretty sure it goes against every doctor’s opinion ever, head-butting someone when you’ve currently got an exit wound in your face. But I do it anyway, and I advance on him too fast for him to recover. I bat his other gun away, the movement a detail, an afterthought. I jerk the knife from his leg and hear his pained squawk echo back from the ceiling. I move the knife to his chest, plant it, and give it a good twist.

  My voice comes out like low thunder. “The point is she gets a chance.”

  He’s fighting to speak, choking on shallow breaths. His pupils dilate and I smile into them, trying not to think about his nephew finding out that Uncle Jimmy’s dead. I think instead about that little boy growing up with a sociopath as his main male influence, and my smile stays nice and sincere, solid as time. Tuttle wants to argue with it. He wants to tell me, again, that he’s not the villain. It’s the only circumstance that’s ever made me believe in mind-reading, standing face-to-face with someone who’s on his way out of the world. It’s the ultimate in vulnerability and unguardedness, that moment. You can see their thoughts as clear as a digital picture. Tuttle’s tenacious; he draws in breath to explain it to me. But then he stays like that, and stays like that. I drop his inert body to the floor.

  I almost fall too, catching myself on a support beam that wobbles with my weight. I make my legs stiff. I totter to the pews. I look at that spiral staircase like it’s the last thing, the only real thing remaining, and I use all the many things I run into to get closer to it.

  I’m the coin at the bottom of the funnel. I’m spinning and spinning, getting ready to drop on a pile of change. It’s a relief, the simplicity of following the spin up the spiral stairs, my footprints highlighting Polly’s in bright new red. And it’s a struggle, sure it is, to spin the opposite way that gravity wants to take me, but I don’t mind. Struggle is all I’ve ever done. It’s all I’m really good for. So when my legs go rubber with a dozen steps left, I climb the rest on all fours, hearing sirens or hearing my wish for sirens, seeing a door on a landing above me with a smeary handprint near the knob.

  It’s not a question of whether I’ll make it there. I don’t allow the question.

  I pull it open, and there she is. Ten yards from a bell as big as five of me, there she is. She’s delirious, not really conscious. She tries to hide from me by half-covering her face. I unzip my jacket, put it around her. I lie down, pull her to me. Her heart’s a jack-rabbit against mine. Mine is slowing. Going turtle.

  There’s a crash downstairs. A voice I know well crying my name. But it’s receding, because the car I’m riding in will go on forever, down a road that never ends. The sun’s a sweet burn on the bottoms of my feet. The heat of the passenger seat is a comfort, and the smell of perfume is subtle, not cloying at all. The farms on either side of the highway are thriving, the fields teeming, the barns in pristine condition, and there will be plenty for everyone once the harvest is over. There will be cold lemonade, fireworks, dancing, a big fire with marshmallows and s’mores, and I’ll twirl around and around in my pink summer dress until I’m so dizzy I have to fall on my hiney and laugh.

  That other life wasn’t real. The one where I was all on my own — it was nothing but a bad dream I had.

  I can wake up now.

  Chapter 22

  My dad once said to me, “Dane, you’ll know The One the second you meet her. You’ll take a single look at her and understand she’s yours.”

  He was wrong. The first time I saw Beth she was running down a suspect. I was part of a task force that was trying to take apart a human trafficking ring. Their base of operations was in Seattle at the time, but it was a very mobile organization, very efficient at making tracks. The mastermind behind the whole thing turned out to be a woman named Stella Rathjen. We knew that, we had her mug shot, but Stella disguised herself and pretended to be one of the sex slaves when we busted in and raided the way-station. Beth was the only one who didn’t fall for it. She grabbed Stella and tried to cuff her, all the rest of us standing gob-smacked
with our rifles on our shoulders and our gear making us sweat. When Stella took off, sprinting into a hallway we hadn’t secured, our SAC yelled at Beth not to follow. Beth didn’t listen. My position had a good angle on a barred window, and I saw first Stella, then Beth come charging out. Stella produced a gun from somewhere and turned, but Beth didn’t stop. She got low, like my coach taught us in football practice, and took Stella’s legs out.

  I thought: Jesus Christ, don’t ever let me get partnered with her.

  Jesus thought that was funny, I guess. We were paired because I can get along with anybody, and the higher-ups decided I might be able to tame her. It even worked for a while, but not because Beth calmed down. If anything, having a stable partnership made her even more daring, made her bend rules and duck jurisdiction so that our version of law enforcement became a kind of Cirque du Soleil act. I ran interference, made excuses for her, smoothed things over when she offended someone, which she did a lot.

  You couldn’t argue with her results. The big bosses liked to say that the reason she had such a hard time keeping a partner was because she was such a nightmare as a person, but that wasn’t it. Her partners kept getting promoted. That was no coincidence. Being saddled with Bethany Fell meant you were in for a year or two of working harder than you ever had in your life, but it also meant your solve rate would go through the roof and the person responsible would have no interest whatsoever in taking the credit.

  She didn’t want to manage people. She didn’t want a fancy title. She wanted to bring the kids home — and when she did, she’d watch them run to their parents and then she’d just get back in the car.

  I didn’t understand, not for a long time. It was my hand the fathers shook with tears in their eyes. It was me the mothers hugged without letting go of their sons and daughters. It was me our Assistant Director thanked and commended, because Beth hated meetings and rarely showed up.