Double Cross [2] (29 page)

I go over and open the little box where I kept my descrambler. Gone. I look at Simon, who goes rigid.

“Something wrong?” Sara asks. “You guys notice something?”

“It’s impossible to tell,” I say. “They messed everything up.”

“Do you have that bracelet of mine you took?” Simon asks hoarsely.

“That’s still in my car. Under the passenger seat,” I say. “Here.” I toss him the keys and he takes off.

“What’s going on?” Sara asks.

“He’s worried about his valuable bracelet,” I say.

Sara and Al are suspicious. They think something’s up, and there are more questions, some repeats, and then I catch sight of Shelby and Avery coming up the hall. A uniformed officer won’t let them through, because my bedroom is a crime scene.

I go to join them in the living room.

Shelby wraps an arm around my shoulder, and I tell her what happened. Avery stands next to her, monitoring the cops with his intense gray eyes, running his hand through his nut-brown hair.

“They took my descrambler,” I whisper to Shelby.

“I know. We saw Simon going out. He thinks they wish to kill Ez. Under command of Stuart. We must go.”

“I’m coming, too.” I tell Sara that we’re heading out for a bite. She and Al are suspicious, and they don’t want me to leave, but they can’t make me stay. I take their business cards, promising I’ll come down to the station and make a statement later. I grab a sweater and jeans from my laundry basket and quickly change in the bathroom.

In a harrowing display of multitasking, Shelby explains the Ez situation to Avery while driving at crazy speeds to the Sapphire Sunset, which unfortunately involves taking the tangle. She leaves the Otto aspect out of it.

I watch out the window; the lights of the city stream
by as her car careens around one turnpike after another. I think about Ez, alone in that booth. Sleepwalkers trying to get in.

“Highcaps victimizing highcaps,” Avery says. “I don’t know what to think about that.”

“Sometimes we don’t know what to think about it either,” I say. “But this one’s obviously innocent. And those sleepwalkers are going to …” I tighten my grip on the door handle. “How did they know I had a descrambler?”

“Perhaps Simon’s questioning of old witnesses led Stu to you,” Shelby says as she barrels down a ramp. “Perhaps they spied on Ez and saw you breach the field.”

“There are always people lurking around that booth,” I say. “It would’ve been easy to eavesdrop. Could Stu have people watching her?”

“Man who commands sleepwalking cannibals can make people do many things, I think,” Shelby says.

The street in front of the Sapphire Sunset is brightly lit and quiet. The building itself looks quiet, too. Even sleepy.

Shelby pulls up behind Simon’s black beater and we hop out. There’s still dirty snow around the sides of the building, and Avery spots the footprints.

We follow him around and down the steep, dark, slippery side of the building. You can see the lake beyond the rooftops, moonlight in the waves. My stomach wound feels wet, but at least I’m not freaking about my head.

Around in back we find a small window—the men’s bathroom?—that’s been thoroughly mauled. The bars are bent willy-nilly, likely through a combination of the blowtorch and the sledgehammer, and the glass is gone, aside from bloody shards around the edge.

“These nuts don’t fool around,” Avery says, knocking the last of the glass away with a piece of cardboard. He goes first, stepping up on an orange milk crate Shelby found.

“Once you’re in, you want to go out to the bar area and turn right,” I tell him as he scrambles in. “Take the stairs up to the kind of balcony catwalk thing!” I whisper loudly.

“We’re right behind,” Shelby says as he disappears.

I help Shelby through. “I like that he didn’t tell us to stay here and wait,” I tell her as I hoist myself over the ledge. It hurts when I use my stomach muscles. Did she bite a muscle? Should I have gone to the ER?

“Avery does not believe in infantilizing women,” Shelby informs me.

Thumps overhead. We rush out the bathroom into the dim piano bar, rounding tables and chairs to get to the stairs. A thud, and a woman’s moan. I take the stairs two at a time.

Up top outside the coat check booth, Avery’s trying to shake off the two sleepwalking women, whose faces are attached to each of his arms; it’s like they’re human barnacles, clinging, biting. I rush over and grab the one woman’s long brown hair and pull, which takes her mouth off Avery at least. Shelby jabs the other with the stun gun and she collapses, then Avery and I hold the other woman still while Shelby zaps her. The one who bit me.

Crashes from inside the coat check booth. I peer in to see Simon and the man in Spidey pajamas, both bloody, swinging at each other as they stagger through piles of coats and smashed furnishings. The sleepwalking man’s eyes look dead, and his movements are clumsy, but he’s an effective fighter all the same. I remember how impervious to pain he seemed when I kicked his face back in my bedroom.

Ez huddles in a corner, hugging her legs. Is she hurt?

Avery slams into the coat check room door with his right shoulder. “Is there a key?”

“Stop, you won’t get in,” I say. Blood on his left arm. Bitten.

“We have to try!” He bangs on.

“Stop!” Shelby grabs his shirt. “Is fielded,” she says. “Force field! Human flesh cannot pass through.”

“We need a descrambler.” I spy one on the floor inside the room and I slap the window. “Ez!” I call. “Ez! Can you hear me?”

She looks catatonic. The men fight on, just feet from her.

“There are two descramblers in there,” I say. Avery and Shelby peer in—I point out one descrambler near the door, the other under an overturned lamp. Spidey plows Simon into a wall, like a quarterback smashing up against a dummy.

I pound on the window. “Ez! We need your help. We need you to help us help Simon.”

She holds her stomach, rocking.

Simon and Spidey careen to the floor, knocking over a bookcase. Spidey is on top of Simon, punching him. Simon fumbles around with his hand, grabs an iron, and smashes it, point first, against the man’s ear. It stops him long enough for Simon to drive it into the man’s eye, and still the sleeping man won’t stop fighting. Spidey grabs the iron and they fight over the iron now. Blood is everywhere, but most of all on the man in Spidey pajamas.

“There has to be another way,” Avery says. “It’s a damn coat check booth. How do the coats get in?”

“There—” I point to the carousel. “And this gully for money. But no human flesh can pass.” The iron flies into a paneled wall. The man tries for a head butt; Simon slips the worst of it. “And because of the angle of the gully, we can’t fire our stun guns. There’s no straight shot.”

“Okay, okay.” Avery whips off his belt and kneels on the floor, seeming to disassemble it and reassemble it. Feverishly he builds a contraption that involves a lever,
a spring, a rubber stopper, and a bendy tube. His belt is some kind of James Bond weapon.

More crashes from inside.

Shelby screams. The man’s punching Simon, who looks awfully floppy. Ez stands and starts punching Spidey’s back.

Meanwhile, Avery’s added another section of tube to his thing. He stands and slides it under the little semicirclular holes in the window, along the gully.

“What is it?” I ask.

“Corner-shooting tranquilizer dart gun.” He aims. “Damn.”

Ez is in the way.

I feel something brush my legs just as Shelby screams.

“What?” Avery says, still aiming.

“We got it!” I haul the woman off Shelby’s leg. Shelby stuns her and she goes down. Shelby stares vacantly at her torn pants. A woman bit her. I know how she feels. I grab her stun gun and shock the other, just for prevention.

“You okay?”

“Yes,” Shelby says morosely.

A low moan from inside the coat check booth.

“Direct hit,” Avery says. I pop up and peer into the window. The man in pajamas lies on the floor. Simon grabs the descramblers, puts one in Ez’s hand, opens the door, and pulls her out of there.

Ez looks dazed. I wonder how much of it is her injury—she’s holding something bloody to her side—and how much is being out of that tiny room for the first time in years. She takes a deep breath and looks all around, then her legs give out. Simon catches her, but he’s not much better off.

The three of us help them to the floor—Simon leaning against the wall, Ez laid out prone. She’s got a bar towel. She’s been stanching her wounds with it.

“Justine, you’re a nurse,” she whispers. “Help me.”

I’m about to tell her I’m not, but I don’t want her to be even more upset, so I say, “Let’s take a look.” I peek under her towel. It’s so bloody, it’s hard to see. Do we need an ambulance?

“Did he get my intestines?” she asks.

Simon takes her hand as I examine the area.

She groans. The blood isn’t gushing as bad as I worried it might be. Even the worst of the three gashes doesn’t appear to go deep. It’s long, though, like the man tore a swath of flesh. “Looks like Simon stopped him before he could really dig in,” I say. “None of these wounds look deep. Still, we’ll get you to the hospital.” I nestle the towel back. I’ve never wished so badly that I was a real nurse, and that I could truly help her. “Luckily, human mouths aren’t as good at biting as a dog’s.”

“You can’t let them go,” she says. “They won’t stop eating people.”

Simon strokes her hair from her forehead. “We won’t let them go,” he says.

Behind us, Shelby and Avery drag the unconscious women into the coat check booth—no easy feat with just two descramblers. From their discussion, it sounds like a math story problem—it takes two people to carry a person into a force-field prison, and a body has to be touching a descrambler to get through, and there are two to bring in, et cetera.

“Hurry up,” I say over my shoulder. We may not need an ambulance, but Ez and Simon both need attention—Simon possibly more than Ez. His face is grotesquely red and puffy, and blood from his mouth covers his chin and much of his neck.

“I couldn’t believe they finally got in,” Ez says.

Simon squeezes Ez’s hand. “What do you mean, finally?”

“They’ve come by a couple times this week. Late, around closing,” she says.

I’m shocked. “Like this? Sleepwalking?”

Simon hisses out a breath.

“Yeah,” she says. “I could tell they were … like that. The one good thing about being in there. See, Stu—my old boyfriend. Long story. He’s—”

“We know about Stu and you,” Simon says. “God, did I lead them to you?”

Ez gives him a hazy look. “You knew?”

“Yeah,” Simon says. “We’re disillusionists.”

“Dis—what?” She closes her eyes. “You’re sure he didn’t puncture one of my organs? Because I feel weird.”

“You need to get checked out,” I say. “But the good thing is that organs move around inside. Like marbles inside a water balloon.”

“Marbles inside a water balloon.” Ez says. “You always know how to explain things, Justine. You’re a good nurse.”

“I’m not really a nurse.” I pull off my coat and place it over her. “I’m sorry—I wasn’t honest with you. I’m not a nurse, and I don’t really think you have parasites, either.”

Her eyes fly open. “What?”

“I’m sorry,” I say. “I only pretended to be a nurse.”

“So I don’t have parasites?”

“Unlikely,” I say. “I was messing with your head.”

“She didn’t want to,” Simon says. “We get sent around to mess with people, but it’s over, because you didn’t do anything wrong. You’re innocent. You shouldn’t be penned up. I won’t let you get put back in there.”

Ez stares into Simon’s eyes. “You were sent to mess with my head?”

“He wasn’t,” I say. “I was. He was trying to help you.”

She looks so small suddenly. “I thought you were my friend. All bullshit, huh?”

“No—Ez—”

“At least I don’t have to go in your stupid dreams anymore. You and that guy.”

I touch her arm. “Wait! Did you unlink yet?”

“No.”

“Don’t do it yet,” I say.

Simon squints. “What the hell?”

“I need to revisit his dream. The one in that creepy stairwell again. Can you help me? I need to see that dream.”

“I can’t stir it up if the man won’t sleep,” Ez says.

I look at Avery’s contraption, sitting on the floor. “What if the man was tranquilized?”

“Forget it,” Ez says. “I hate being in him.”

“Please, one more time,” I say. “Tonight. Or, I guess it’s almost morning. Just, in the next couple hours. I have no right to ask, I know—”

Ez moves and winces. “Yeah, you don’t have a right.”

Simon watches me, a question in his puffy, beat-up face.

“There’s a clue to a kidnapping in that dream,” I say. “Maybe. It’s a hunch.”

Shelby and Avery shut the door on the sleepwalkers. Ez consents to keep the link and try to pull up the stairwell incident if Packard falls asleep again.

It’s decided that Shelby and Avery will take Ez and Simon to Midcity General, and they’re to stay together until Stu is located. Shelby’s going to tip off the cops on Stuart—with fervent instructions to wear gloves. Ez tells where to find a photo of Stu online to help the cops.

Before they’re gone, I ask Avery for one of the tranquilizer darts out of his dart gun. “You can take the whole gun,” he says.

“I just want the knockout stuff out of one of the darts,” I say.

He gives me one—it’s the tiniest dart I’ve ever seen, with a tiny pin nose. He shows me where to crack it
open to get the liquid out. Packard has to sleep for Ez to get access to the dream. I’ll have to sleep again, too. Can I?

It’s nearly five in the morning. I swing by an early opening coffee shop for two nice tall piping hot decafs. I put cream in one, and the contents of the tranquilizer in the other. One cow brown, one knockout black.