Payback (5 page)

I reached out to stroke the old woman’s hair with my uninjured hand, and for the first time I realized my ring was gone. The ring Spence had bought me just hours before he… before he….

“His ring,” I said. “Was Spence buried with his ring?”

Mrs. Chang forced herself to look at me. Forced herself to bite back her tears. Just to get through this. Just to carry on.

“No, Tyler. He had no jewelry on him. Was there a ring? I don’t remember him wearing one.”

“Our wedding rings. They were….They were… new.”

“The police want to speak to you when you’re ready,” Mr. Chang said coldly into the windowpane, ripping me from my thoughts.
Freeing
me from my thoughts. From my growing anger.

“Yes. All right,” I muttered, staring at my ringless hand.

We had to let him go, baby. We had to let him go.
The words kept echoing through my head on an endless reel. Over and over and over again.

Spence was gone.

I closed my eyes, allowing my grief to sweep me away, and needing a place to hide where I could be alone, I pleaded for sleep.

Strangely enough, as if grief was another drug coursing through my IV, it came to release me. Sleep. Folded in its dark arms, I slid away from Spence’s memory, and even the memory of Franklin, poor Franklin. They were all gone from me now. Lost.

I was alone.

M
Y
LEGS
were weak, but it felt wonderful to walk. The cast hung heavy on my left arm, but that was okay. The nurse said it would come off in a couple of weeks.

The nurse was a man, perhaps my age or a little younger, with skin the color of soot and the brightest eyes and the whitest teeth I had ever seen on a human. He was always smiling.

With a laugh, he teased, “You’re lucky. You slept through most of the cast time. You’ll only have to put up with it awake for two more weeks. How fortuitous is that?”

I smiled back, but the thought of trying to dredge up a returning laugh made me want to weep. I wondered if I would ever laugh again. All I could think about was Spence lying cold in the ground in a grave I had yet to see. Was a stone up? Were there flowers lying on the freshly turned earth over his head? Did he wonder why I hadn’t come to visit?

The nurse’s name was Charles. His hands were big and strong and gentle. When he spoke his words carried a faint lisp, as if he had purposely softened the consonants so as not to jolt his patients.

“I think we’d better sit you down,” he fussed, seating me on a horrendous orange sofa in the hallway outside my room. “The detective will be here soon. I’ll be watching. If you feel you need to go back to bed, just give me a nod, and I’ll try to cut the interview short.”

“Thank you,” I said. And I watched him walk away. In another life I would have found him handsome. Now I just found him kind.

I looked down at my arm. The IV line was gone. They had removed it that morning. There were puncture marks above my wrist where they had tapped my vein, and the puncture marks were beginning to itch. I raised my hand to touch the scar in my throat where they had performed the tracheotomy. It felt rough and pebbly against my fingertips. Unfamiliar. That wound was also itching. But neither battle wounds itched as much as the plaster cast around my arm. That fucker drove me crazy. Still, what with all the itching going on, I supposed it meant I was on the mend.

And my heart? That was another story altogether, for an overwhelming sadness seemed to weigh down on me every minute of every day. I wondered what would become of the child Spence and I could not now adopt. Would that child find another home? Would he or she find someone to love them as much as Spence and I would have loved them? Or was that just one more life ruined by the three men who came at us in the dark? Did those three men know the misery they had caused? Did they even care?

Every time I thought of them waiting in the darkness, luring Spence and me forward, an anger took control of me that made all my physical problems seem like nothing. I realized I had never known hate before. Not really. Not like the hate I knew now. I seethed with it. I burned. For the hundredth time that day, I closed my eyes against it, trying to rein it in. Slowly, in the darkness behind my eyelids, I felt my anger wane. I felt my one good hand unclench in fury.

My fingertip continued to stroke the trach scar at my throat. It would be there for the rest of my life. All the scars would be with me from this day forward. Every fucking one of them. Inside and out. The only thing that wouldn’t be with me was Spence.

We had to let him go, baby.

My thoughts were interrupted by footsteps approaching. I clutched my hospital gown more securely around me and readied myself for my first interview with the police. It was already a month after the fact, but I had only fully awakened two days before. I wondered if there was anything I could tell them they didn’t already know. My memories of that night were so fractured. I remembered almost nothing.

Only the feel of congealing blood against my aching, broken fingers. The ring of metal on concrete—and on flesh and bone. Those memories were still in place. I suspected they always would be.

“Hello, Tyler. I hope I haven’t kept you waiting.”

It wasn’t what I had expected to hear. On the cop shows, they weren’t that polite.

I tried to ignore the tremor in my voice. The tremor was from weakness—I was still weak—but it was also from fear. This interview scared me. I wasn’t sure why.

“I think maybe I’m the one who’s kept
you
waiting,” I said. “For almost a month, I guess.” I stuck out my hand and made a motion to stand up, but he waved me back onto the sofa.

“Let’s not stand on ceremony,” he smiled. “Instead of you coming up here, why don’t I just come down there.” And he plopped his ass down beside me. Once he was comfortably situated, he took my hand just as I had been about to do to him.

He gave my hand a good shake. “Detective Martin. Glad to meet you, Tyler. There now,” he said, “wasn’t that easier?”

“Thanks,” I mumbled. “I guess I’m still a little puny.”

Detective Martin was lanky and gave off an air of competence. A tall beanpole of a guy, he studied me with honey brown eyes tucked between long black lashes. He looked tired. There were dark smudges under his eyes, and his brown hair was sort of a mess. He needed a haircut, for one thing. The back of his neck needed shaving. So did his cheeks, but not as badly. He wore a suit so rumpled I was tempted to ask if he had slept in it. Smiling at me, he rested his hands on his knees. Those hands were big and capable looking, with a brush of dark hair sweeping across the backs of them and in between the first and second knuckles of the fingers. His fingernails were cut blunt, and one knuckle was scabbed over as if he had been in a fight. Occupational hazard, maybe.

He couldn’t have been much older than me, and I suppose that’s what surprised me most about him. That and the fact he was really quite handsome, in a careless, unintentional, loosely jointed way. Sort of like a big kid who hadn’t yet grown into his body.

But the brown eyes were kind, and that, more than anything, eased my fear.

He cleared his throat, as if he thought he should get the basic stuff out of the way first. “I’m sorry about what happened to your lover. I know this can’t be easy for you.”

Something about the way he said it rubbed me the wrong way. “Spence wasn’t my lover. He was my husband. We were legally married.” I said it with a certain amount of in-your-face bravado, as if daring him to say something homophobic.

But I knew immediately I had taken the wrong tack.

He shifted around on the sofa to better face me. His hand came to rest on my shoulder. “Tyler, I understand the two of you were married. I’m not trying to belittle what you guys had. I understand you loved each other. I’m not judging you for that. My job is just to help you get through this by finding the men who took Spence from you and who left you like this.” He nodded at the cast on my arm, the crappy hospital gown I was wrapped up in. “Don’t think I’m one of the haters. I’m not. I’m here to help you.”

I felt a blush rise to my cheeks. “I—I’m sorry. I know you are here to help. I don’t know why I’m being so defensive.”

Detective Martin gave me a frown, as if he couldn’t quite believe what I had just said. “Tyler, you have every right in the world to be defensive. You have every right in the world to be angry. But what I need you to do for me now is focus some of that anger on helping me find the ones who did this. Think you can do that?”

I sucked in a deep breath. “Yes. I can do that, Detective
Martin.”

His face softened. “I think this will go faster if you knock off the Detective Martin stuff. Just call me Chris. All right? I’ll call you Tyler, you call me Chris.”

I nodded. “All right. Chris as in Christopher?”

He smiled. “No. Chris as in Christian. Okay?”

“Okay.”

He pulled a notepad from his inside jacket pocket and plucked a pen from his shirt pocket.

“Let’s get started then, shall we?”

And once again I nodded.

A
N
HOUR
later, Chris flipped the notepad closed.

“When do you go home?” he asked.

“Tomorrow, I hope.”

“Is there anyone there to help you?”

“I don’t need anyone to help me. I’ll be fine on my own.”
On my own.
The words echoed through my head. Out of nowhere, tears started flowing. I tried to cover my embarrassment by jabbering questions at the man who was sitting beside me and trying, for kindness’ sake, to ignore my tears.

“I guess I didn’t help you much,” I said, dragging the sleeve of my robe over my face.

Chris smiled kindly at me. “If you did guess that, your guess would be wrong.”

I sniffed. “Really?”

Again he flipped over his notepad. “You’ve given me several facts we didn’t know before. The most important is the partial description of two of your assailants. The fat guy with the mole on his face and the tall, skinny guy with the ratty little moustache. And by the way, the fat guy probably smokes, that might come in handy too.”

That took me by surprise. “How do you know he smokes?”

Chris tapped the notebook with a fingertip. “Why else would he be carrying a cigarette lighter?”

“Oh, yeah.”

“But most of all, Tyler, you told me about the rings that were stolen. The wedding rings. That was news to us, and they may be the very pieces of evidence we need to tie things up. If they try to hock the rings, we’ll know about it within twenty-four hours. You’re sure neither of you was carrying anything else on you besides the house key, which we found on the floor by your feet?”

“I’m sure,” I explained again. “We ran out of the house so quickly we didn’t even grab any money. At least I didn’t, and I’m pretty sure Spence didn’t either.”

“One more thing,” he asked. “Is the dog microchipped?”

“Yes.”

He nodded sagely, as if the fact that Franklin was microchipped was the most important piece of evidence there was. But I didn’t buy it for a second.

“So what are the chances of your finding them?” I asked. “The killers. What are the chances of your bringing them in?”

The detective didn’t seem too happy with my question. I guess I couldn’t really blame him.

“Almost a month has passed since the crime, and that’s never a good sign. But now that you’re awake and have given us a little more to work with, I think we’ve got a shot at cracking this. I hate to break this to you, but I’ll need more cooperation from you than this one little interview. I have books of mug shots for you to go through as soon as you’re up to it, and I want you to try to remember everything you can about that night. Everything.” He dug in his coat pocket again and extracted a business card, pressing it into my hand. “Here’s my card. You can call me any time you want, day or night, if you think of something. Or even if you just need to talk.” He chuckled. “I don’t sleep much, so it’s not like you’d be keeping me awake.”

I looked at the card. Detective Christian Martin. Homicide. The lettering blurred when my tears started burning again.

I reached out and took his hand, expecting him to pull away from such a personal touch, but to my surprise, he didn’t. He simply sat there beside me on that god-awful orange Naugahyde couch, holding my hand and waiting for what it was I wanted to tell him.

I finally got the words out. “I want you to get these guys for me, Detective. Spence was a wonderful man. If you had known him, you would have liked him. I know you would. Please don’t let these animals get away with killing him like a dog in the street. Please. Please don’t let that happen.”

Detective Christian Martin, Homicide, held my hand between both of his and soberly studied my face. If he was horrified by my tear-filled eyes and my snotty nose, he didn’t let it show.

“Don’t worry, Tyler. We’ll get it done. I promise.”

I exhaled a long shuddering breath and gently pulled my hand away. “Thank you,” I said.

And before the silent tears turned to racking sobs, embarrassing me even further, I heaved myself to my feet and walked away.

At the door to my hospital room, I turned to wave good-bye, but the detective was already gone.

I wondered if he would keep his promise.

Home

I
STOOD
in front of the wide walk-in closet in the master bedroom and stared at Spence’s clothes hanging there. Spence’s side of the closet was neatly arranged. Even his shoes were perfectly lined up, toes out, heels to the wall, as if the photographer from
Closet World
was scheduled to pop in for a photo shoot.

As always, my side of the closet looked like someone had tossed a hand grenade in it.

It was only my third day after waking from a twenty-four-day coma to find myself a widower, and I was already cried out. As I stared at Spence’s clothes, I wondered where the rest of my tears had gone. All I felt was empty. My throat was still raw and sore from the tracheotomy. My broken fingers and wrist still wailed every time I moved the wrong way. My legs and back still ached from being immobile so long. My brain was stuck in reverse, continuously recalling everything about the past and registering almost none of the stimuli bombarding me in the present.