Never Go Home (26 page)

I heard a
heavy sigh, looked back. April lay on the floor behind me.

“Jesus, April,”
I said.

If she knew I
was there, she didn’t show it. I checked her pulse. It was thready, weak, and
slow. Maybe fifteen beats per minute. Whatever her eyes stared at, it was
beyond this world. I moved my hand to her face. My fingertips brushed against
her soft skin, and warm blood. I closed her eyes as she let out her last
breath.

I heard
another cough.

“Stay back
there, Marcia,” I said.

If whoever
else was in there was in the position to do something, it would have happened
already. I remained cautious. I stood and walked toward the cells. I saw a man
on the floor. A pistol lay next to him. He held both hands over his stomach.
Blood trickled between his fingers.

“Why?” I
said.

Somehow he
managed to smile. I didn’t need an explanation after that.

Sasha stared
at the bald man in front of her like he’d stepped on her puppy.

“I’m telling
you, Operation Patheos does not exist now, nor did it ever exist. Someone is
feeding you a bunch of crap.”

“What do you
know about Marcia Stanton? And I’m not talking about the company line. You’re
the only one who knows more than I do around here. I want to know what you
know.”

He got up and
walked around his desk. He stuck his bald head into the hallway and then let
his door fall closed. He adjusted the blinds so that no one could see in.

Sasha waited,
staring out at the Thames. Two single sculls raced by. One had a full-length
lead over the other.

The man sat
down. He blocked her view. He cleared his throat, took off his glasses, held
them to his mouth, exhaled and cleaned them. He put them back on and stared at
her for a moment.

“What I’m
going to tell you can’t ever leave the walls of this office. Got that?”

She nodded.

He said,
“Prior to five years ago, we have no information about Marcia Stanton. She’s a
ghost.”

The man’s
eyes shifted to his left. He looked past me. His smile faded. He tried to
speak. No words came out.

“Jack, shoot
him,” Marcia said.

“He’s dying,”
I said. “And after what he did, I’d rather he suffer.”

The man
worked his lips open and shut. Blood trickled from the corners of his mouth.
His tongue was coated in crimson. “Vera,” the man said.

“Do it now,
Jack!” she said.

The man
shifted. He winced as he did so. He said, “Th…th…this is Jack? What are you
doing with him, Vera?”

He’d regained
some of his strength. Adrenaline, presumably. His hand dropped to the side and
found his pistol. He didn’t look at me. He kept his focus on her.

“Dammit,
Alessandro.”

It was Marcia
speaking, but the accent was American. It sounded like what I had heard at my
house in England. The voice she claimed was her half-sister’s.

“You couldn’t
pull this off successfully,” Marcia said. “And you couldn’t just die.”

I started to
turn toward her. I caught a brief flash as I did. Gunfire ripped through the room.
Instinctively, I dove toward the wall.

The bullet
hit Alessandro in the face. His head jerked back and racked the cell bars. He
remained motionless for a beat, then fell to the side. Blood pooled on the
floor around his stomach and his head. It crept beneath the cell bars, headed
in lines toward a drain in the rear of the room.

I rolled over
and got into a crouching position. I rose up an inch, caught sight of her. She
was close. She fired. It caught me in the left arm. I fell back again. The
phone Sasha had given me vibrated against my thigh. My cell rang in the other
pocket.

Marcia
appeared in front of me. She aimed the pistol in my direction. I cooled my
reaction. My right leg covered the M40.

“Who are
you?” I said.

She shrugged.
“It doesn’t matter, Jack.” She spoke with an American accent. She sounded like
she could have grown up on the other side of the state. “Things got messed up
beyond repair. This is the only way.”

She lifted
the gun. Her eyes watered over. She hesitated. Perhaps she felt some loyalty to
me. Maybe she didn’t want it to end this way. She cared.

I didn’t.

I inched my
hand over, grabbed the pistol under my leg, hiked it up an inch in her
direction and fired. The bullet collided with her shoulder. Her right side
jerked back. She didn’t let go of her weapon. She swung her arm forward and
fired blind. It hit the wall over my head. Shattered concrete poured down on me
like sand.

I aimed and
squeezed the trigger. The powerful handgun jerked after the bullet left the
chamber. I almost dropped it.

It wouldn’t
have mattered if I did. A crimson bloom spread over her heart. She stared at me
for a second. Confusion, fear, pain. Life left her eyes before she hit the
floor.

I reached
into my left pocket with my right hand and grabbed the phone Sasha had given
me. There was a text message on it.

“Abort now!
She’s not who she says she is!”

I shook my
head as I shoved it into the other pocket. I grabbed my cell and pulled it out.
Before calling Sasha back, I glanced down at my left arm. The bullet had gone
through. There might be some muscle damage, but the bone was intact. It hurt
like hell to move my fingers. I’d worry about it soon enough.

Sasha
answered before the phone rang once.

“Jack? Oh my
God, are you OK?”

“I’m fine.” I
was aware I was speaking at close to the volume of a yell. “Marcia, or whatever
her name is, is dead. This guy here called her Vera. Maybe you can work with
that. I’ve got some other stuff. I’ll fill you in on that later. I need an
ambulance first.”

“Are you
hurt?”

“Flesh wound.
I’ll be all right.”

I dialed
emergency services. Then I got up and walked over to April.

She’d stopped
breathing. There was no pulse. Judging by the location of her wounds, there was
little that could have been done for her had she been inside the hospital when
the bullets hit her.

I sat beside
her, threaded one hand behind her neck and pulled her close to me. I should
have never left. I thought that by doing so, I’d draw the trouble away from
Crystal River. In the end, I let someone special die.

The door flung
open. Heavy footsteps echoed down the short hallway. I recognized her father as
he swung around the partition.

“April,” he
said. He looked at me, down at her. “Jack?”

I nodded. He
was a shell of the man he used to be.

“What
happened?” Tears streamed down his cheeks.

“It was meant
for me,” I said.

He stopped in
front of us, fell to his knees. His head shook shoulder to shoulder. “This is
my fault. This is my karma. She’s paid for my sins.”

I knew what
he was talking about, the incident on the water with April’s mother. I let it
go. It was between him and his family now.

The medics
came in a few minutes later. It didn’t take long for them to figure out
everyone but the former sheriff and I were the only ones alive. They led me out
of the office, leaving April’s father alone with her corpse. I wanted to look
back as we left. I couldn’t, though. There was a part of me that wanted to
remember that goofy little girl, with teeth that stuck out too far, and
freckles on her nose, asking me to dance with her one more time before I left.

That image
was ruined, though. In time I’d replace it with the woman I almost spent a
night with.

The ambulance
transported me to Clearwater. It was the closest hospital prepared to deal with
a gunshot wound. I insisted that it was only a scratch. The paramedics
appreciated my bravado, but decided against letting me walk.

Probably for
the better. Infections and all.

Sean left Deb,
Kelly and Dad behind and met me at the hospital. He’d taken them to Santa Rosa
Beach. They’d bought a condo there recently. No one knew about it. Not his
office. Not even Dad.

“So the
threat’s over?” Sean said.

“Yeah, for you
it is.”

“What about
you?”

I shook my
head. “I don’t know, Sean. My life is…complicated. There’s so much in my past.
There are people out there who might never stop trying to find me.”

“So what’ll you
do?”

I ignored the
question. I didn’t have an answer for it.

The doctor
entered the room with my discharge papers. There had been no substantial damage
to my arm. The stitches would need to come out in a couple weeks, but that
could be done anywhere.

Stares were
cast my way as we walked through the hospital. I glanced down. My shirt was
half white, half crimson. My arm was bandaged. They wanted to check my head,
but I refused. They noted that on the paperwork. Did it matter? Not really.

“Where to?”
Sean said when we got inside the Suburban.

“I need a
shower and a change of clothes. I suppose the airport after that.”

“Not planning
on staying around?”

“I think it’s
best that I don’t.”

Thirty minutes
later, we approached Crystal River. Sean bypassed the downtown area. He’d heard
that the Tampa Bay media had found its way up the coast and they were reporting
on all of the recent carnage.

Fifteen minutes
later Sean put on a pot of coffee and I was in the shower. The amount of
information I had to process was too great to deal with at that moment. The
lives that had been taken would haunt me. The worst part of it was that I had
no idea what I had done to Marcia, or whatever her name was, to draw her ire.
How had she gone from wanting me to protect her, to trying to kill me? Had it
been planned from the beginning? Or was it all one big coincidence?

I had a hard
time believing that anything in my life could be classified as such.

The water in
the shower turned from red to pink to clear over the course of ten minutes. I
cut the water, toweled off and put on a pair of Sean’s khaki cargo pants and a
t-shirt. Flip-flops completed the ensemble. It’d make me look like a tourist
later on, but at least I’d be comfortable on the plane.

Downstairs, we
each drank a cup of coffee. I took mine black. Sean added cream and a sugar
substitute. I tried to tell him those things were poison. He wouldn’t listen.

After that, we
left. He turned onto Suncoast, headed south. We neared town. Sean looked at me.

“Want to go
visit mom?”

“Sure.” There
were others there, too.

The church lot
was empty. Services had ended for the day. We got out of the Suburban and
headed toward the graveyard.

“You go ahead,
Sean. I’ll catch up.”

He walked one
way, and I another. I found Jessie’s freshly dug grave. Hers was the only grave
in the row. That’d change soon.

I knelt next to
the turned earth.

“Jessie, I
don’t know if you’re around or can hear this. If you are, you’re probably laughing
because you of all people know I’m the least likely to do something like this.
I want to say I’m sorry. I’m sorry for leaving when we were kids. I’m sorry for
not sticking it out when things got tough. I’m sorry for dragging you into the
Keller situation. I’m sorry for letting you go again. There’s so much I would
change if I could go back.”

A breeze blew
in from the gulf. It felt cool and tasted salty. I glanced up, out over the
water.

“You were one
of the most amazing women I ever knew, Jess. I guess I’ll see you around,
someday.”

I rose and
brushed the grass and dirt off my pants. Sean stood at the other end of the
cemetery. I headed his way, walking in between two rows of graves.

We stood next
to each other, staring at Mom’s grave.

“When’s the
last time you visited her?” he said.

“The day of her
funeral,” I said.

He nodded. We
both knew he was aware of that.

“Miss her?” he
said.

“Of course,” I
said.

“What do you
miss most?”

“The homemade
pizza she used to make. It was better than any of that crap we used to get in
Clearwater and Tampa.”

Sean smiled,
nodded. “Very true.” We were silent for a moment, then he added, “Want to go
visit her?”

I followed his
gaze toward Molly’s grave. It had been over a decade since I stood before it.
The guilt ate away at me. Not for failing to visit, but for coming up short
when she needed me most. I watched the man take her way and did nothing to stop
her.

Perhaps Sean
read my thoughts, because he said, “It’s not your fault, Jack. It never was.
You were twelve for Christ’s sake. What could you have done?”

“I could have
stopped him, Sean. I could have taken a knife and plunged it into the guy’s
stomach and yanked it up until he split into two.”

Sean took a
step back and turned toward me. “Is that why you live the life you do? Is it
some kind of way of avenging her death?”

I hadn’t ever
thought of it in those terms. I didn’t want to start now. “Come on, let’s go
say hi.”

We stood at
Molly’s grave for five minutes. Neither of us spoke. I said a lot in my head,
though. I recounted my life up to this point, and I asked her to be with me
until I returned.

It was a somber
walk back to the Suburban. The mood didn’t lighten during the drive to Tampa. I
had him stop at a bank in Clearwater. I had a safe deposit box there with an
identity I had never used.

When we reached
the airport, the path forked in two directions.

“Want me to
come in with you?” Sean said.

I pointed
toward the drop-off lane. “Go back to your family, Sean.”

He pulled up to
the curb and placed the shifter in park.