First Grave on the Right

CHAPTER 12

“You knew him?” Neil asked me over an hour later. I’d been reading. We’d been chatting. Garrett called. I ignored.

And I learned. Approximately one month earlier, a fight broke out in the yard, and the prison immediately went into lockdown. Everyone was supposed to get on the ground. When one of the inmates, a large childlike man Reyes had befriended, got confused and didn’t go down, a guard in one of the towers prepared to fire a warning shot. Reyes saw this and tackled his friend to get him down, thinking the guard was going to shoot him. Instead of burrowing harmlessly in the dirt as intended, the bullet found Reyes’s skull and pierced his frontal lobe. He’d been in a coma since.

I glanced up and refocused on Neil’s question. “Just from that one incident when I was in high school,” I said. I’d told him about the night I first saw Reyes, the physical abuse he’d suffered at the hands of the man he supposedly killed. Neil didn’t seem surprised. I closed the file and looked into his gray eyes. “Just between us,” I said, leaning forward to make the statement more intimate, “between old friends,” I elaborated, “what did you know about him? What did you think of him?” I tapped the file with my fingertips. “What’s not here?”

Neil sat back in his chair, adjusted his collar, and dragged in a long, deep breath. “If I told you, you wouldn’t believe me.”

That was promising. “Bet I would,” I said with a wink.

He stared at me a good minute before he spoke. And when he did speak, it was with a reluctance I understood all too well. He truly doubted I would believe him. If he only knew …

“Something strange happened when Farrow first got here, about a week after he’d been released into gen-pop,” he said, glancing down to study the clasp on his watch. “South Side sent three of their soldiers to kill him. Why, I don’t know, but when South Side attacks, people die. Period.”

My chest tightened and I ground my teeth together, trying hard not to react, not to show what the thought of Reyes in that position did to me.

“It ended almost the minute it began,” he continued, his face growing dark as he reconstructed his memories, pieced together what he knew. “I was just a guard then, fresh out of training, positive I was hot shit. I almost pissed my pants when I saw those men heading toward Farrow, not that I knew who he was at the time. I called for backup, but before I even finished the request, three South Side members lay on the ground in pools of their own blood with this twenty-year-old kid … I don’t know … crouched on a table, ready to spring at anyone else who came near him, eyeing the inmates with absolutely no emotion, no fear whatsoever.”

I sat stone still, barely breathing as I watched the events unfold in my mind.

Neil shook his head and looked up at me, his expression a mixture of relief and reverence. “He wasn’t any more winded than I am now. I just barely caught a glimpse of what happened, but…”

“But?” I nudged, barely able to contain my curiosity.

“But … he didn’t move like a normal man moves, Charley. He was a blur, so fast it was impossible for my eyes to follow him. Then he was crouched on the table like an animal, powerful, dangerous.” Neil shook his head again, as if still not believing his own eyes. “That’s how he got his name.”

“His name?” I asked, even more intrigued.

“No one ever touched him again,” he continued. “In all the years I’ve been here, I’ve never seen anything like it. He’s a legend to these men, almost godlike.”

I scooted closer to his desk, almost drooling. “You mentioned a name?”

“Right,” he said, snapping to attention. “They call him El Aliento del Diablo.”

“The devil’s breath,” I echoed in English.

“Told you it’d be hard to believe,” he said with a heavy sigh, clearly expecting me to balk at his story.

“Neil, I don’t doubt a single word you’ve said.” When his expression turned to one of surprise, I added, “I saw something similar the night I met him as well. The way he moved. The way he walked.”

“Exactly,” Neil said, pointing at me repeatedly. “Not quite … not quite…”

“… human,” I finished for him.

He glanced at the file in my hands. “I guess he’s human enough, though.”

I couldn’t help but hug the file to me, to hold on to every nuance that was Reyes Alexander Farrow. “I guess.” He was such an enigma, surreal and mystical.

“You know, I never really liked you in high school,” Neil said, pulling me back to the present.

Um, okay. Least he was being honest. “I know,” I said apologetically. “I didn’t really like you either.”

“You didn’t?” He seemed shocked.

“No, I’m sorry.”

“Yeah, me, too. I used to think you were such a nutcase.”

“And I thought you were an arrogant bastard.”

“I was an arrogant bastard.”

“Oh, right,” I said, suppressing a sad giggle.

“But you weren’t a nutcase, were you?”

I shook my head, grateful for the validation.

“I can let you see him, if you’d like.”

My heart skipped a beat and seemed to rise physically in my chest.

“But I have to tell you, Charley, he won’t pull through. He’s brain-dead.”

Just as quickly, it plummeted to my toes and the floor seemed to slip out from under me. Brain-dead? How could that be?

“He has been since it happened,” he added. He stood and walked around the desk to put a hand on my shoulder. “I’m sorry to have to tell you this, but the state plans to terminate care in three days.”

“You mean pull the plug?” I asked. A wave of panic washed over me. I tried to swallow, but my throat was suddenly parched and raw.

Neil’s lips thinned in regret. “I’m sorry, Charlotte. With no relatives to contest it—”

“But what about his sister?”

“Sister? Farrow has no living relatives. And according to his file, he’s never had any siblings.”

“No, that’s not right,” I said, reopening the file and tearing through the pages. “He had a sister that night.”

“You saw her?” Neil’s voice was filled with hope. He didn’t want Reyes to die any more than I did.

Knowing there would be nothing about his sister in the file, I stopped and closed it again. “No,” I said, trying not to let disappointment swallow me whole. “The landlady told me.”

With a disappointed sigh, Neil collapsed into the chair beside me. “She must have been mistaken.”

As I drove to the Guardian Long-Term Care Facility in Santa Fe, where they were keeping Reyes, my head swam in a sea of information, trying to fit each piece into neat little folders, to organize what I’d learned. Reyes had continued his education, and one year after his conviction, he’d received a degree in criminology. Then, surprisingly, he’d switched to computers. He had a master’s in computer information systems. He’d bettered himself. He would have been a productive, taxpaying member of society when he got out.

Yet now they were going to kill him. Neil had explained that the only way to stop the state would be to get an injunction, but I’d have to have a damned good reason. If I could just find his sister …

As I picked up my phone to call Cookie, it rang with her personal ringtone, Rod Stewart’s “Do Ya Think I’m Sexy?”

I flipped it open, and Cookie asked, “Well?”

“He’s in a coma.”

“No stinkin’ way.”

“Stinkin’ way. And they’re going to take him off life support in three days, Cook. What am I going to do?” The emotions I’d held at bay in Neil’s office threatened to break free. I fought hard to tamp them down with the deep-breathing techniques I’d learned on my Yoga Boogie DVD.

“What can we do? Did Mr. Gossett tell you?”

“I need to find Reyes’s sister. She’s really the only one who can stop this. Not that I’m giving up. I’ll blackmail Uncle Bob. Maybe he can do something.” I was not going to lose Reyes without a fight. Finding him after all these years … there had to be a reason.

“Blackmail is good,” she said.

The world turned green as I pulled my car into a parking lot that resembled an English garden. Before hanging up, I gave Cookie yet another job. According to the article I’d read the night before, Reyes had spent three months at Yucca High. Maybe his sister did, too. I needed those transcripts.

Cookie went to work on the transcripts as I headed inside the gorgeous health-care facility. This was certainly better than the prison infirmary. I figured they couldn’t have cared for a comatose patient in prison, so they moved him here. Neil had called ahead and told the corrections officer watching Reyes that I would be paying him a visit.

When I walked down the hall to the nurses’ station, the officer stood in an alcove off the main hallway, flirting with an RN. I couldn’t blame him. Watching a comatose prisoner could hardly be exciting. And flirting was fun.

He straightened when I approached, and the RN hastened off to see to her duties. “Ma’am,” he said, tipping an invisible hat. “You must be Ms. Davidson.”

“I am. I guess Mr. Gossett got ahold of you.”

“He did, indeed. Our boy’s in there,” he said, gesturing to a sliding-glass door across the hall with a pale blue curtain covering the opening.

A little surprised the officer didn’t ask for an ID, I headed toward the door. Well, most of me headed for the door. My boots were cemented to the floor. What would I find when I went in? Would he look the same? Would he have changed much in the ten years since the mug shot had been taken? In the twelve years since I’d seen him? Would he have the look of prison about him? The hardness that seemed to saturate people who’d done such a substantial amount of time behind bars?

The officer seemed to recognize my distress. “It’s not bad,” he said, sympathy softening his voice. “He has a breathing tube. That’s probably the worst of it.”

“Do you know him personally?”

“Yes, ma’am. I asked for this duty. Farrow saved my life once during a prison riot. I wouldn’t be standing here today if not for him. Felt like the least I could do, you know?”

My throat tightened and I wanted to ask him more, but something was suddenly pulling me toward Reyes’s room, like the gravity in that one spot had just increased exponentially. I finally took a step, and the officer tipped his invisible hat again and strolled away toward the coffee machine.

When I crossed the threshold, I scanned the area, just in case he was in the room incorporeally. I was a little disappointed when he wasn’t. He did incorporeal well.

Then I glanced at the bed. He lay there, Reyes Farrow, solid and real, his dark hair and skin a bronze shadow against the white sheets. Gravity took hold again; only this time, it was centered on him as I stepped closer, walked to the edge of the bed, and saw utter perfection for the second time in my life.

A breathing tube had been inserted into his trachea, and he had a bandage wrapped around his head. His mussed hair, thick and dark, swept over the bandage and brushed his brow. Three days’ worth of stubble framed his strong jaw, and his lashes, long and thick, cast shadows across his cheeks. And then my gaze landed on his mouth, sensual and sculpted and impossible to forget.

The ventilation machine made the only sound in the room. No beeps of a heart monitor, though one had been hooked up, its lines and numbers in a constant state of flux. I stepped closer, brushed a hip against his arm that lay beside him. The sleeves of the pale blue hospital gown were short and afforded a generous view of sinewy muscles, hard and lean even in slumber. He had a tattoo that flowed along his tanned biceps, lending to its beauty and fluidity. A tribal work of art with graceful lines and sensual curves, lines and curves that had meaning. I’d seen them before. They were ancient, as old as time. And important. But why?

My heart and mind were having difficulty grasping the fact that it was truly Reyes Farrow in the bed, lying there, vulnerable and powerful at once. My knees had liquefied, and I wondered how long I’d be able to stand in his presence without falling. After all this time, he seemed even more surreal than in my dreams. More beautiful than in my fantasies.

His wide chest rose and fell to the rhythm of the machine. I ran my fingertips along a shoulder that scalded. A quick glance at the chart hanging from the end of his bed confirmed his temp to be a perfect 98.6, yet his heat was as real as if I were standing in front of a furnace.

Even at rest he looked wild and untamed, something impossible to domesticate, to restrain for very long. Enduring the heat of his touch, I placed a hand in his and leaned over him.

“Reyes Farrow,” I said, my voice cracking with emotion, “please wake up.” I didn’t care what the state said; Reyes was no more dead than I was. How could they even consider taking him off life support? “They are going to turn this machine off if you don’t. Do you understand? Can you hear me? We have three days.”

I glanced around the room, hoping he’d show up in another form. I still didn’t know exactly what he was, but he was something more than human. I knew that now beyond a shadow of a doubt. I had to find his sister. I had to put a stop to this.

“I’ll be back,” I whispered. But before I could leave, I lowered my head and put my mouth on his. The kiss scalded my lips, but I stayed for several miraculous heartbeats, relishing the feel of his mouth beneath mine.

I tried to rise, to end the kiss, but images started coming at me in a rush. I began to remember our nights over the past month. His hands gripping my hips, my legs wrapped around him as if holding on for dear life as he pushed inside, sending waves of unimaginable pleasure crashing into me. I remembered the kiss in Cookie’s office, how he guided my hand, how he held me when my knees gave beneath my weight. Then I remembered that night so long ago. When his father hit him, when he lost consciousness for that split second. I remembered the look in his eyes when he snapped back. The anger. Directed not at his father but at me! He had looked at me. For a split second, he saw me and anger washed over him.

Then I remembered a cup at my mouth, a warm towel at my head, an arm holding me in place as I swam back to reality, wondering where my bones had run off to.

“Are you okay? Ms. Davidson?”

“Here,” a female said, “drink this, sweetheart. You had quite a fall.”

I sipped on cold water and opened my eyes to see the corrections officer and the RN standing over me. The officer held a wet towel at my head while the nurse tried to coax me into drinking more water. They’d dragged me to a chair outside the room and were trying to keep me in it despite my limp body’s insistence on eating floor tile.

“Oops,” the nurse said. “Got her?”

“I had her the first time. She just keeps slipping out of my grip. She’s like really heavy spaghetti.”

“What?” I shrieked, jerking to my senses. “How heavy? What happened?”

Glancing up into the grinning eyes of the officer, I took another sip as he explained.

“You either fainted or you wanted a much closer look at the cracks in the tile. Either way, you hit hard.”

“Seriously?”

He nodded. “Maybe you shouldn’t have been trying to make out with him,” he suggested.

How did he know that? “I was kissing him good-bye.”

He snorted and exchanged glances with the nurse. “That’s not what it looked like to me.”

Probably not. But what happened? Could Reyes Farrow take control over me even from a freaking coma? I was doomed.

“Oh my gosh!” I said, jumping out of the chair. After a woozy moment that reminded me way too much of the night I celebrated my high school graduation — in a pool of my own vomit — I stumbled back into Reyes’s room, marveled at his beauty a few seconds more, gave him a quick kiss good-bye — on the cheek — then hurried out of the hospital with a thank-you and a wave to the officer and the nurse. I had to find Reyes’s sister, and time was running out.

“You fainted?”

I sighed into the phone and waited for Cookie to get over her surprise. Why anything should surprise her at this point was beyond me. “Did you get a hit on Reyes’s high school transcripts?”

“Not yet. You passed out? Kissing him?”

“Is there anything else I should know?”

“Well, I’ve scoured these flash drives. They’re all Mr. Barber’s. There’s nothing on them but his case files.”

“Damn. I’ll have to talk to Barber about that.” Where were my lawyers, anyway? “And I’ll have to get those flash drives back before the secretary finds out they’re missing.”

Before we hung up, I asked Cookie to find out if the lawyers’ secretary, Nora, went into the office that day. Hopefully not. She wouldn’t have missed the flash drives if she hadn’t been there.

Just as I pulled Misery into the parking lot of the Causeway, aka home sweet home, Beethoven’s Fifth rang out on my cell. Uncle Bob told me they had an ID and an address on our shooter. Or the guy they believed was our shooter. I just wished at least one of the lawyers had seen the assailant so we could be sure we had the right guy. Apparently he worked for Noni Bachicha, a local body shop owner. I knew Noni personally, and he’d never be involved in something like this, so there had to be another angle. But we wouldn’t know anything until we brought in the alleged shooter. Uncle Bob was on his way to do that very thing. With half the force acting as backup.

Naturally, I couldn’t miss out on all the fun. I would be able to tell if the guy was guilty or not in a heartbeat. Part of my being a grim reaper, I figured. The problem came when whomever I was assessing was guilty of a myriad of other crimes. Guilt was guilt. Sometimes it was hard to distinguish between two crimes. Still, I had to try.

I got the address, pulled a U-ey, and flew to an apartment complex in the middle of the Southern War Zone, where one Mr. Julio Ontiveros resided.

The teams were still a block away, prepping for the extraction. Apparently they had fairly solid intel that Julio was asleep inside his apartment. He must have had a late night. I pulled in between Uncle Bob’s SUV and a patrol car, put my phone on silent — because there’s nothing worse than a cell phone going off in the middle of an extraction; everyone glares at you really mean — then went in search of Ubie.

Ninety-nine percent of the time I don’t carry a sidearm — hence the motivation to perfect my death stare. But today all the cool kids were packing. I felt like the girl who showed up at a formal dinner party in jeans and a Pink Floyd T-shirt. Probably ’cause I did that once.

Spotting Ubie beside another patrol car also brought me within screaming distance of Garrett Swopes. I tamped down the angry hornetlike sting of jealousy when I realized Ubie must have called him first. I’d been solving cases for the man since I was five, and he calls Swopes first? Aggravation coursed through me, ruffled my feathers, got my hackles up, whatever hackles were. Was a little appreciation too much to ask? A little nepotistic favoritism?

Uncle Bob was on the phone as usual when Garrett looked up at me from behind the patrol car’s open trunk, concern flashing in his eyes. With a curse, I realized the ache in my ribs and hip had me limping. I gritted my teeth, straightened my spine, and walked as normally as possible. Then I had to force myself to relax a little, fearing my walk resembled the robot dance from the eighties.

“I can’t believe you don’t have twenty-seven broken ribs,” Garrett said as I robot-walked forward.

“I don’t have twenty-seven ribs.”

“Are you sure?” he asked, eyeing my rib cage. “Maybe I should count them.”

Ridiculously ticklish, I wrapped my arms protectively around my stomach in reflex. “Only if you want to lose a hand,” I warned, though he did look rather hot in jeans and a white T-shirt with a dark blue bulletproof vest strapped around his torso. Very machismo. “But don’t worry,” I continued. “Surely that whole learning-to-count thing will pay off someday.”

He grinned, unscathed, as he checked his clip. “Surely.”

“ ’Kay, I’m going around back.”

“Why?”

“ ’Cause I can. And you’re not there.”

“Oh. Don’t get shot.”

I snorted—as if—and hobbled away.

“And don’t fall off anything,” he half whispered, half yelled.

He was funny.

I had scarcely taken up a position behind the complex with a cute cop named Rupert when we heard what sounded like a gunshot coming from inside. Rupert sprang into action. He scaled six feet of chain-link and rushed toward the back entrance, crashing to a halt against the redbrick building with gun at the ready. Rupert was young.

Being older and wiser, I chose to enter through the opening where a gate once stood several feet back. Taking Garrett’s warning about not getting shot to heart … considering … I scrunched down and eased inside the yard. Twelve seconds later, I lay sprawled in the dirt, gasping for air. Apparently, the suspect had spotted the opening in the fence as well. And for some reason, when surrounded by cops with nickel-slick badges and chambered rounds, the path of least resistance is most often through the unarmed chick, despite her attitude. I had just enough time to check out Rupert’s nicely shaped ass before a large hoodie-clad gangbanger determined to make a hole in the universe tore through me.

We hit the ground hard, and the pain in my ribs had me seeing white-hot stars … and fear. His fear. And his innocence. He didn’t shoot anyone. Damn.