Double Cross [2] (21 page)

“So I finish with her or I’m a Jarvis?”

He twists his scarf around his neck. “That’s about it. If she’s not rolling and ready to hand over to Vesuvius on Monday, you’re out.”

“You won’t!” It’s like he’s changed into a different person.

“I’ll do anything to be free and stay free. Anything. You’d do well to remember that.” He crosses the room and leaves, shutting the door quietly behind him.

He wouldn’t.

But actually, he’s always chosen his freedom over everything and everyone. I stare at the door, rigid with resentment. He’s just made my decision for me. Because I’m his minion. I no longer rule my life.

After all these months, it’s still as outrageous and stunning as when I first discovered it. I think about what
Shelby always says:
There is no such thing as freedom, Justine. Only prison walls that forever change shape.
Her way of making me feel better. Not exactly effective.

I move to the window just in time to see him emerge from the lobby below, walking proud. He heads up the sidewalk, gets into his old Dodge, and slams the door. The sound penetrates through my closed window and into my chest.

I wait for the roar of the engine, the white puffs out the tailpipe. Nothing. A minute. Another.

In spite of my anger, I don’t like that he’s just sitting there. Doesn’t he realize he’s exposing himself to the Dorks? Their eyeglasses can pick up the highcap blur through a car window, and he knows it! He needs to get indoors, behind a wall.

I look around for the bodyguards, but all I see is the swirling snow. And then this weird little question emerges out of the night sky of my mind: was that threat Packard’s way of freeing me?

I adjust my posture, as if to get used to this new thought. The threat did free me from having to make the hard choice. Was that why he did it?

After a tense ten minutes, he starts up the car and zooms off.

S
UMMER
. M
ONGOLIAN
D
ELITES
. I kiss Packard, and something shifts in me, relaxes in me. A warm glow flows through my heart—relief, heat. I smooth my palms over his muscular back, enjoying the warmth of his skin, smiling into his yummy lips. I want to kiss him and taste him everywhere, and I’ll never get enough of him, because he makes me feel alive.

I eat him up a little bit, pull him into me. He groans, and his passion turns me on like crazy. Breath harder and faster now, my shoulder blades thunk against the wall. I love his happiness—I can feel it as strongly as my own, and I let him overwhelm me with hard kisses that glow inside me. Warm lips on my neck, my ear. He whispers my name. I grab his hair, pull him to me. God, I love him. I want to spread out under him and wrap around him at the same time. He presses into me, and we move together and it’s heaven, consuming each other. I just want to roll with him and be happy and free with him. Everything is right when we’re free to love each other.

Packard.

I roll over, thrumming with happiness, wanting to stay in that fragile, bright love, wanting the spell to last. I slide my hand over the cool, smooth pillow, and I realize I’m not at the restaurant; I’m in my bedroom.

I sit up.

Love? Packard? No! Happiness, okay. Intense happiness. Aliveness. A kind of freedom. But
love
?

Is this Ez, messing with my memory? Can she do that? I try to think what Packard said.

Shit!
Was Packard inside my mind that whole time? Did he experience that dream memory from my point of view? Feel what I felt?

Of course he did. I felt his fear and guilt in the school stairwell plain as day. I rub my temples. Was it even real? Did I believe I loved him then?

I stare out my bedroom window at bare, cold tree branches. I’d brought myself to forgive him during that kiss. Maybe I felt fleeting love, and maybe Ez found it and blew it up big. She didn’t bother dredging up what happened after the kiss, of course. Where he refused to apologize for making me his minion. If there was any seedling of love there, he killed it with that.

Fine. Let him make it into whatever he wants, and let him go ahead and brandish it at me and try to manipulate me with it. I’ll tell him that’s what he killed.
Anything you felt in the dream is just a memory of what you killed!
I’ll say.

Still, the idea of facing him mortifies me.

Five-thirty in the morning. There will be no more sleeping now.

I go back over the dream, which was like a memory, but more. It felt like being there. And made me totally horny.

One wool sock lies on the floor next to my nightstand. I grab it and tiptoe around the cold floor looking for a match, body still humming with crazy craving for Packard and an intense desire to help Ez. I feel this outpouring of affection for Ez and I just want to be free to help her.

I freeze, clutching the wool sock. Help Ez?
What the hell?

Coffee. I stumble to the dark kitchen and start up my coffeemaker; then I go find the other warm sock and my jeans and a Midcity Warhawks jersey and put it all on, as though being fully clothed will buy me distance from the dream. And then I get a very bad feeling. I race to my dresser and scatter through scarves and jewelry on top of it and, with a great sigh of relief, I find my descrambler bracelet where I left it.

Later, at my kitchen table, I click through my messages. Nothing from Otto. Nothing, nothing, nothing, I ignore a voice mail from Shelby and reread Otto’s old text message.

at mayoral conference, recharging and revitalizing. need solitude w all that has happened. will talk when I return.

I find myself smiling at his use of the word revitalizing.
Recharging and revitalizing.
It’s a unique Otto usage—I don’t think it’s quite right, but it makes me like it all the more. This is what’s real now: me and Otto.

Packard seemed surprised that Otto had gone to the mayoral conference. It’s true that Otto isn’t a conference type, and he hadn’t seen the sense of going to it earlier, but I can understand him going now. He probably has new bodyguards and drivers to get used to, and there’s the cranial stress of the prisoners, the emotional stress of the Dorks, and of course, the blow of my keeping him in the dark. Who could blame him for wanting to recharge and revitalize?

Knowing Otto, he’ll duck most of the events and stay in his hotel room. Thanks to this force-field power, he can reinforce any room to achieve the kind of silence you can usually get only on a mountaintop. He can sit in silence like that for hours, and then he emerges full of
energy.
The cone of silence
, I once jokingly called it, like in
Get Smart.
He’d enjoyed me likening it to that.

I read his text over again. Just recharging and revitalizing, and then he’ll be back. And I’m a resourceful person; I’ll find a way to make things right. I will not fail him again.

I click to Shelby’s message, and I’m annoyed to learn she won’t be riding with Simon and me. She’s going to take the bus into work. Great. The commute had been a convenient meeting time for us—and today, of course, I could really use a buffer, considering how badly Simon and I left things. Stun-gunning and taking his stuff and all that.

I pull up in front of his place at eight sharp. It’s an ugly 1970s fake Colonial apartment complex just west of Mongolian Delites—not the best area. At all. Simon saunters out in another ridiculous accountant outfit. This one involves a bow tie and argyle vest, and he totes a bright yellow-and-green lunch cooler along with his briefcase.

He flops into the passenger seat, slamming the door. “Got another one.” He flips a chunk of black hair out of his eyes and looks straight ahead.

I pull away from the curb. “Another what?”

“Highcap.”

“Killed?”

He nods. He still won’t look at me. “Where’s Shelby?”

“Took the bus. How’s Ez?” I ask him.

“Good,” he says.

After an uncomfortable silence, I say, “Put your seat belt on.”

Instead of putting it on, Simon turns to me. “We need to move. We’re drugging him today.”

“No,” I say. “Drugging him is our last resort. We agreed.”

“We’re not getting anywhere.”

“We’ve been there one day,” I say.

“Don’t need to taste much to know it’s cottage cheese.” He sits back, and his hair falls over his eyes.

“We’re not drugging him today. If it doesn’t work, we’re screwed.”

“What if it
does
work? And we get the flash drive copied and all our answers sooner?”

“What if we get the flash drive copied and it’s unusable, but in the meantime, he freaks out and destroys all the records and warns his customers?”

Simon sighs. “Little Miss Fear-’n’-stuff.”

“It’s called being
prudent
.” I look over. “Really, Simon, like you’re so concerned over highcap deaths. Do you
want
Avery to freak out? Is that your angle?”

“If I wanted him to freak out, he’d be freaking out.”

I look over at him. “Put on your goddamn seat belt.”

He clomps his feet up on the dash in defiance of my order. “I have other things to do besides sit in that office. Like investigate the truth about Ez, not that you care. Did you know I’ve now identified
four
interviewees from Ez’s case who have missing persons’ reports out on them? I have a pal in the cop shop who ran it. The former interviewees went missing at different times.
Four
people. You know what the odds of that are? Very slim. And what connects them? They all had knowledge of Ez’s case. They were all people who could corroborate her story or not. At the time of the investigation, they said she was making up the relationship with that Stuart Dailey guy. But you know, time has a funny way of eroding people’s will to keep up a lie. I think Mr. Stuart Dailey knows that.”

I feel cold.

“Would you like to hear my theory?”

“Are you going to put your seat belt on?”

“No.” Simon adjusts his bow tie. “I think ol’ Stuart’s back in the cannibal business, but
he’s smarter than ever. He’s not leaving gored corpses around for the authorities to find. As for victims, why not go for the very people who could put him away for the crime three years ago? Bet he’d send a few cannibals to eat Ez if he knew she was still around. And think about it—if the authorities believed him when he said he didn’t know her, they wouldn’t have deemed it necessary to send Sophia to revise his memory to make him think he saw her off to Brazil or whatever they did with her other friends. Though, even if he did find out where she is, it’s not like his people could touch her. Anyway, I bet this time around he’s not even having his sleepwalkers file their teeth. You know, human teeth are perfectly fine flesh-ripping tools without being filed. He’s working totally under the radar.”

I watch the road bleakly.

“The whole thing practically screams she didn’t do it.”

“I think your cock screams she didn’t do it,” I say.

“I need time,” he says.

“It’s too late. She’s deepening her hold on us, and meanwhile, Packard’s announced that he’s going to cut me off if I don’t get zinging her and have her rolling in the next four days. For good.”

Simon looks over at me. “He said that?”

“Yes.”

“Well, how about if you tell him to fuck off?”

“Like you have?” I ask.

“He won’t let you turn into a Jarvis.”

“The man who has always chosen his freedom over other people? Over potential bloodbaths in the streets? Won’t let me turn into a Jarvis if I told him to fuck off? Really?”

Simon fingers the crease on his brown wool trousers. We’ve both heard Packard say it dozens of times—that he’d do anything to be free.
Anything.
Deep down, I don’t believe it, but I’ve called it wrong about Packard
so many times. I hit the tangle. “I have an idea,” Simon says. “Zing Avery.”

I almost hit a guard rail. “What?”

“Tell Packard to fuck off, and zing Avery.”

I give him a dirty look and almost miss my exit. “Right. The disillusionist version of Russian roulette. Why don’t
you
zing him?”

“Seriously, I think you could zing him safely,” Simon says. “I think he’d be compatible. Look how he washes his hands all the time, and did you see him taking antacids and shit at lunch? He’s obviously a hypochondriac.”

“I’m not zinging somebody Packard hasn’t cleared. I may as well pour liquid drain cleaner in my ear.”

“Look, remember how Packard used to say we’re compatible with maybe one out of seven random people? I think you have a
six
-out-of-seven chance of zinging Avery without blowback. And that would help us with this case. He’d be a little destabilized.”

“And only a one-in-seven chance of my turning into a Jarvis.”

“Come on, I’ll zing Avery, and
then
you zing him. It’ll be a rush.”

I look over at him. He’s jonesing to gamble, looking to take crazy risks. “How long since you’ve zinged?”

He ignores the question. “I’m tired of Packard telling me who to zing. I’m thinking of jumping ship. Maybe I’ll start today. Zinging Avery will be my first step to free-agenthood.”