Jesamyn watched her friend and partner. He met her eyes for a second and then closed them, fell silent. She was about to say something when he went on.
“They were waiting there for me. I came in through the back. The door was unlocked, that should have been my first clue. Stern was in a La-Z-Boy, half asleep in front of the game.
“I walked right through his dining room and stood twenty feet away from him before he turned to look at me. He smiled. ‘Man, you are predictable,’ he said. But he looked stoned, I mean high as a kite. It was more like he was talking to someone he thought was a figment of his imagination than me, standing by his recliner with a gun in my hand. But there was something crazy in his eyes; I think now it was a warning. I moved in close to him until I was standing right over him. He smiled again.
“There was this deafening sound and his chest kind of exploded and splattered all over me. He died immediately with that crazy, stoned expression still on his face. He never even knew what hit him. There were two shots and they came from behind me, so I spun around and found a man as big as I am, a little taller even, slightly wider. He held a thirty-eight identical to my own in a gloved hand. I drew on him when I heard something behind me. I turned and there was another one.”
“Another what?”
“Another guy all in leather, bald, big. Like it was a uniform, some kind of look they were cultivating.
“He fired on me and I ran. I knew what they were trying to do. They wanted it to look like I broke into his house and that Stern and I shot each other. Case closed. They’re rid of me and they don’t have to worry about Stern either. Nice and neat.”
“We arrested one of them,” she said. “One of those men you saw.”
“Just now?”
“Yeah, I came to your place to get your porn,” she said with a smile. “And he came in after me.”
“You took him to the mat?”
“You bet your ass.”
“You’re a tough bitch, Detective Breslow.”
She smiled. “If I’d known he was such a bad shot, I wouldn’t have been so scared.”
“Bad shot?”
“Yeah, he fired at you and missed. You’re like the proverbial side of the barn.”
He coughed a little. “Who said he missed?”
“Oh, shit,” she said, leaning over the seat. “You’re shot?”
He nodded. “I was coming home to die like a wounded old grizzly,” he said with a smile. “But it was too crowded at my place. I thought I’d do it in the back of your car.”
“How bad is it?” she said, unzipping his jacket and seeing that the tee-shirt beneath was red with his blood.
“Not that bad, I don’t think. I think it went straight through.”
She looked at him more closely; he was fading, his lids lowering over eyes that seemed to be having trouble focusing. There was so much blood, she couldn’t see where the wound was. She saw that the waistband of his jeans was black with his blood. She quashed the rise of panic down hard. No time for that.
“Mateo Stenopolis,” she said loudly, pulling on his legs to get him to slide all the way down. She didn’t want him falling over during the mad dash she was about to make for the nearest hospital. “You stay with me.”
He looked at her and nodded weakly.
“Don’t make me pull out the kung fu,” she said when he said nothing. He raised his hands in a gesture of mock surrender, then winced at the movement.
“Jez,” he said, as she turned and threw the car into drive, roared onto the highway. “Just be careful.”
“Careful of what?” she said, pushing her foot heavily on the gas. “You worried about my driving?”
“The other one. You only got one of those guys. I think they travel in pairs.”
She thought of her vacant-eyed leather-clad assailant and wasn’t thrilled that he had a partner. Then she saw a pair of headlights behind her, square and bearing down quickly.
“Mount,” she said.
He didn’t answer and she looked up in her rearview mirror, saw only darkness in the backseat and the hot, high beams of the white van on her tail.
Lily felt like she could crumble to dust in Lydia’s arms, she was so fragile. She clung to Lydia like she was a buoy in the violent water of Lily’s life.
“Lily, my God,” she said. Agent Hunt stood behind them.
“This is the girl you were looking for?” he said.
“Yes,” she said. He nodded his acknowledgment and may have even smiled a little.
“She came wandering out of the New Day Farms about an hour before you. She’s been talking about an Agent Grimm, too. For someone who doesn’t exist, he sure does get around.”
Lily was shivering in her arms and Lydia held onto her tight as the girl began to sob.
“Please,” she said, appealing to the youthful humanity she saw in him. “Let me take her back to our hotel. I’ll tell you anything you want to know, just let me get her comfortable and safe.”
An hour later, Lydia, Jeffrey, and Lily were back in the hotel room with an escort waiting outside their door and Agent Hunt sitting at the table. Dax had not been released and no one would discuss his situation with either of them; Lydia was concerned… for a lot of reasons. She wasn’t sure how he had found them and led them out, or what would happen to him now. But she knew he could take care of himself; she’d worry about him after they’d talked to Lily, made sure she was safe from The New Day and returned her to her mother where she belonged.
“I did what you taught me to do. Only it worked a little too well,” she said with a slight laugh. She sat across from Agent Hunt, accepting a bottle of water from the minibar but nothing more.
Everything about her was changed. Where she’d been bright and exuberant, she was quiet and careful. Lily had always been the kind of girl who got excited by things, spoke quickly, moved her hands wildly, laughed easily. This girl was pale and thin as a slip of paper, speaking through lips that were cracked with dehydration, eyes that were dull and filled with grief. Her cloud of silky black curls that had always bounced around her face was gone; only the slightest stubble of her hair remained. She kept bringing a shaking hand up to it, feeling its texture. Lydia wanted to take her home so that she could be tucked in to bed and fed soup until she was feeling better. It was painful to watch her.
“So after your brother’s funeral you went up to Riverdale,” Lydia said. “To try to get into his head.”
She nodded. Swallowing the water seemed to cause her pain and Lydia remembered what Jeffrey had told her about the tubes he’d seen in the throats of New Day guests.
“I had the keys to his apartment. It didn’t take me long to figure out what he had been trying to do.”
“Did you know about the problems your stepfather was having with The New Day?” asked Jeffrey. Lydia glanced at him, realizing that Lily probably didn’t know Tim Samuels was dead. She figured that this wasn’t the right time and they weren’t the right people to tell her.
She shook her head. “No. I knew he and my mother were having problems. I suspected an affair, some asinine midlife crisis. But I didn’t know anything about The New Day.”
“Until?”
“Until after my brother’s alleged suicide.”
Lydia noticed Lily’s use of the word alleged, as if she still didn’t believe her brother had killed himself.
“So Mickey went there to try to help your stepfather?”
She shook her head slowly, like she still couldn’t believe it. “That’s the way it looked to me; like he’d gone up there for the express purpose of infiltrating The New Day, maybe hoping to expose them or find evidence that could get them to release their grip on Tim.”
“What did you find in your brother’s apartment that made you think that?” asked Jeffrey. His tone was kind and warm, but there was a slight wrinkle in his brow that Lydia recognized as the expression of his natural skepticism. She was with him; something felt off.