Beautiful Lies (31 page)

“There’s another way out of this building,” I told him, and showed him the way to Zelda’s tunnel.

thirty-four

I was clever but not clever enough. We had made it east to Avenue C before we sensed rather than saw that we were being followed. The silent street around us seemed to darken with menace as we passed an abandoned lot filled with garbage, a burned-out car, some junkies huddled in a corner with a pipe glowing between them. I think we felt rather than heard the low rumble of the engine of a car that was following us without headlights. Jake took my hand and we started to run. We ran hard, expecting at any second to hear the sound of gunfire, but there was nothing. The only sound I heard was our footfalls and our breathing. The city seemed to draw a breath and hold it.

On Avenue D we turned the corner. We looked around and there was no one in sight. We ran up the front steps of a condemned apartment building and slipped through the triangle of space where someone had pushed back the piece of plywood that acted as the door. Inside, we peered through the window that was black with soot from some long-ago fire and saw a Lincoln Town Car come to a stop on the avenue. Men wearing ski masks emerged from the vehicle and I swear my heart almost stopped. I felt as if the city was an alien world where all the rules had changed. It was like
Escape from New York
or something, only there was no escape. Jake put his hand over my mouth against the cry of panic he must have sensed coming.

“Stay with me, Ridley. Stay calm, girl.”

I nodded and together we made our way through a ruined foyer that reeked of smoke. I pulled my shirt up over my nose to keep myself from breathing in the filthy air so I wouldn’t cough or sneeze. We passed a mustard couch that lay on its back beside a rusted file cabinet with no drawers. We started to climb a crumbling staircase that groaned in protest beneath our weight. On the next level, we again looked out the window and saw the men, four of them, walking the street looking for us, climbing front stoops, peering in windows.

The building was only three stories high, and at the top we could see that something from the roof had fallen through all the way to the bottom, leaving a gaping hole in the ceiling above us and in each floor below, so that we could clearly see the ground-floor entrance to the building from our perch on the third. We sat on the floor and Jake took out his gun, lay on his belly, and trained it on the door below us. We sat listening to the men call to one another on the street below us, and then everything went quiet. We waited. Then it started to rain. We were unprotected in the downpour.

“I’m so sorry,” he whispered after a few minutes. He looked up at me.

I shook my head. “You have nothing to be sorry for.”

“I did this to your life, Ridley.”

“No,” I said, shaking my head.

“Yes. If I hadn’t left that second note…if I had let this all go away for you, we wouldn’t be sitting here right now.”

I shook my head. There was no point in thinking like this; it was way too late. There was only moving forward now, hoping to survive this night.

I put my hand on his shoulder. “It was my choice to be here with you tonight. I chose.” And that was the truth. He nodded and I leaned in to kiss him. But then he was firing his gun at something behind me. The night fractured in a gale of light and thunder and we were falling.

I fell only one floor, but Jake went all the way down to the ground level. I heard his body hit the floor so hard, I felt it in my own bones. I think I had a split second of unconsciousness before the sound of voices brought me around.

“What the fuck? Where did they go?”

They’d come from the roof of another building, I realized.

“Watch out, you fucking moron, the floor’s not solid.” I heard a heavy thump and watched as more debris fell through the hole. I couldn’t see the men above me and hoped it meant that they couldn’t see me.

“Don’t fire until you see one of them, for Christ’s sake. This building is going to crumble like a pile of shit.”

I looked down to see Jake lying below me. He wasn’t moving and I felt a shock of fear and dread like I’d never felt before. I began to crawl when a white-hot pain in my leg rocketed through me, so intense, I held back vomit. I couldn’t see what was in my leg, only the tear in my pants and the sticky, hot, wet feeling of blood. There was something lodged in there and any movement made me want to scream. But my desire to get to Jake was greater than my physical pain and I dragged myself to the staircase, pulled myself up on the banister, and managed to make it to the bottom before they rained bullets on me again.

I pushed myself against the wall and watched the bullets shred the floor and walls around me. Jake lay still on the floor, unresponsive to the noise and the danger. I heard a heavy thud and a sudden crashing followed by a groan.

“Angelo! Are you all right?”

“Yeah,” a voice with a thick New York accent responded. “I fell through the fucking floor.”

I used this distraction to make it to Jake before the bullets started to rain again.

thirty-five

“Six,” he whispers.

“What?”

“You have six bullets left.”

I nod to him and keep my eyes on the staircase. I’ve heard Zack’s voice, so I know he’s one of the men coming after us, and I just can’t get my head around this. He would kill us to keep his secret, then pretend to grieve at my funeral. This is the man my father wanted me to marry. My hands are shaking with pain and fear and rage. White lights have started to dance in front of my vision.

“We can make this right,” he calls, though I still can’t see him. I know they’re close; I can hear the stairs groaning. At the instant I see a leg, I fire and miss. The sound is so loud and the kickback so powerful that I let out a little scream of terror. My ears are ringing. When I look back, the leg is gone. Maybe I can hold them at bay for a while like this. Now there are five bullets and four men.

“Don’t waste the bullets on impossible shots,” Jake whispers. “Wait until you can shoot center mass. You’ll never hit otherwise.” I look over at him. He’s lying so still it seems as if he can’t move, and I can see he’s in so much pain.

“Ridley, please,” calls Zack. “It doesn’t have to end this way. My offer stands. You loved me once. Can’t you trust me now?”

I look at Jake and he looks at me. Jake puts a finger to his lips and points up. I can see the men above us with their guns pointed down. Zack is just trying to get me to talk so that the men know where to fire. I smile grimly and stay silent.

“Fuck it,” Zack says finally.

When they start shooting, I fire back. Their shots spit and bounce off the walls around us and one even hits the couch, but it doesn’t come through the frame. I keep waiting to feel metal pierce my skin. I can feel Jake trying to protect my body with his. The smell of gunpowder fills my nose, and my ears are ringing so loudly, everything else seems muffled. The situation takes on a nonreality and I am not as afraid as I should be. I think this must be what combat feels like, surreal, so terrifying that your mind’s ability to perceive danger and your capacity for fear diminish. With one of my shots, a man falls heavily to the floor with a groan, but there are three more and the shooting doesn’t seem to end. I aim with each remaining bullet as best I can, but soon the gun is empty and the other men are still firing on us. In the movies, I would have hit them all with my few bullets, but I learn that I’m not a very good shot. When the gun is empty, I drop it to the floor and cling to Jake, thinking we are going to die here tonight. And the one thing I can say for sure is that I don’t have any regrets. I’m glad he didn’t have to face this alone.

I close my eyes and think I’m dreaming when I hear the chopping blades of a helicopter and see the room flood with light.

“Drop your weapons!” roars the voice of God. “Get down on the ground and put your hands behind your heads.”

In the chaos of light and sound, the gunfire ceases. I can feel Jake’s arms strong around me, holding me.

“Ridley,” I hear God calling me. “Ridley Jones, are you okay? Are you down there?”

And from fear or pain or sheer relief everything goes black.

thirty-six

It’s like I said before. The universe doesn’t like secrets. It conspires to reveal the truth, to lead you to it. As easy as it might have been for me to accept Alexander Harriman’s deal and walk away, the universe just didn’t allow it. Harriman had said Project Rescue had grown into something Max couldn’t control. Turned out it had grown into something Alexander Harriman couldn’t control, either.

Closure. We all seek it. We seek the end of things and also the beginning of new things. Those things we can’t find closure on, they haunt us. They pop up in our dreams, they creep into our thoughts in idle moments, like a mind-bender that’s beyond our mental capacity, a mystery that just won’t be solved. I think about Teresa Stone, my biological mother, fighting to save her child and losing her life in the process. I think about Christian Luna with his thousand regrets and failed attempt at redemption. I think about Max, my father, and all the crimes he committed in his quest to heal himself through “helping” others. I think about all the rest of those parents, their children’s faces on the back of mailers and milk cartons. Those awful age-graduated composites, what they’d look like five, six, ten years after they’d gone missing, showing up in mailboxes, in cafeterias. Maybe some of those people deserved to lose their children, maybe some of them didn’t. But I’m willing to bet that for every Project Rescue baby out there, there’s a haunted soul. For Jessie, it was Christian Luna. For Charlie, it was Linda McNaughton.

If I had done as Harriman asked, the people responsible for that pain would have continued on with their days; people like Zack and Esme would continue making judgments and playing God with strangers’ lives, never having a moment of guilt or pain. But my life would have been populated with the ghosts of the people I’d failed to help, Jake chief among them.

Speaking of helping people, it was Gus Salvo who saved us that night in the condemned building. He’d had a tail on Angelo Numbruzio because of the shell casings they found at the scene of Christian Luna’s murder. When the cop watching Numbruzio discovered that he had contacted Zack and was headed for my building, Detective Salvo put the pieces together…a little on the slow side maybe, but just in time at least.

In the fall, Jake had broken his right leg and left arm and punctured his lung. He’d severely strained his back but all the vertebrae were intact. The bullet that had pierced my thigh had missed the major artery. It’s the little things, remember? A fraction of an inch and I wouldn’t be here to tell you what happened to us.

When I regained consciousness at St. Vincent’s Hospital, Gus Salvo was the first thing I saw. Not pretty, but better than a lot of things I’d seen recently.

“Where’s Jake?” I asked, my heart filling with panic, remembering the last moments we were together.

“He’s fine,” he said kindly. “Well, he’ll
be
fine.”

He pulled his chair close to me and held my hand. He told me the extent of Jake’s injuries and that he was within hopping distance of my hospital room.

“Don’t worry, Ridley. It’s all over now.”

I looked at him and knew it wasn’t true.

“Then why are you here, Detective Salvo?”

He sighed and looked past me. “I should wait till you’re feeling better, Ridley, I know that. But…”

“But?”

“I have to know where you come down on this. The men who chased you tonight are in custody. I believe that one of those men killed Christian Luna. Remember I told you about Angelo Numbruzio, how I was able to tie him to the shooting at the diner? We have him on a surveillance tape from the gun store in Florida that sold the assault rifle that killed Christian Luna.

“We can’t prosecute him without your testimony, not effectively. And if we move forward with it, everything about your past, about Project Rescue, is going to come out. I know you’re afraid for your family, but I have to tell you Zack and Esme Gray are making a deal with the DA. It’s all coming out, anyway.”

I didn’t say anything, just looked past him to the hallway. Alexander Harriman was dead. Obviously, the deal I had with him was not going to be honored by the people who killed him. They’d already tried to kill me. I knew I didn’t have any power to protect anyone any longer. Maybe I never did.

“I’ll testify, Detective Salvo. I’ll testify for Christian Luna. But I can’t testify about Project Rescue.” We looked at each other. “I can’t testify against Max or Esme.”

He nodded. “Ridley, you were only a baby. You shouldn’t have to testify if that comes to trial. You’re the
victim
in that case, not a witness.”

The fact hit home hard. Detective Salvo held my hand and let me cry. I cried for Teresa Stone. I cried for Christian Luna. I cried for Max. And, yes, I cried for all the pieces of myself that I had lost.

Later that night, I hobbled from my room trailing my morphine drip (which was probably the reason I was able to hobble at all) to find Jake. The duty nurse was helpful rather than mean and officious. She put me in a wheelchair and took me to him herself. He was groggy but lifted his good hand to me as soon as he saw me.

“You’re beautiful,” he said to me, his words slurring a bit. Doubtful. I could taste my own teeth.

“You’re high,” I said, and started to giggle. I was a little high myself, but through it I was starting to feel the dull throb of my leg.

His right leg and left arm were both in casts. His face was bruised, his muscular chest wrapped tight with bandages. I’d never seen anyone more gorgeous in my life.

“You should go back to bed,” he said, taking my hand.

“I will,” I said. “I just wanted you to know that you weren’t alone anymore. I’m with you.”

I kissed his hand then and he touched my face. He smiled and I could see one tear trapped in the corner of his eye, but he blinked away at it hard.

“I love you, Jake…or whatever your name is.”

He started to laugh and then groaned at the pain it caused. I stayed with him until he fell asleep, which wasn’t long. And then the nurse wheeled me back to my room.