Underground

CHAPTER 20

Swimming in the dark and the residual pain with Lass halfheartedly cursing me made the bed very uncomfortable. I didn’t like the bed: it had too many pillows and it smelled of too much bleach and something metallic. A discomfiting languor had fallen on both of us—Lass and me—and I felt I would never surface from the wreck of sleep. It was the way my fingers tingled and burned that got me to open my eyes.

The room was a soft mint green and my heart jumped with fear. I remembered the room. The last time I’d been in such a room I’d just finished being dead. I jerked up—or, rather, I didn’t, as my left arm twisted and yanked me to a stop with a yelp. Someone’s hands pressed against my right shoulder.

“Shhh… Don’t jump around like that. You’ll hurt yourself.”

That was Quinton’s voice. I blinked grit and gummy tears from my eyes and turned my head toward him. With no hat or coat and his long hair brushed down around his shoulders, he didn’t look himself. A battered and jury-rigged palmtop computer sat on the side table between us, and he put a stylus down on top of it as he leaned toward me.

He gave me a thin smile. “Hi.”

I tried to bring my hands together to rub my tingling fingers, but the left one didn’t move more than an inch and that with a sudden stop and a steely clank.

The right had an IV needle in the back and a patch of tape holding the feed line in place. I rattled the other hand again, still a bit disoriented. This was Harborview… wasn’t it? A hospital bed… So why couldn’t I move? I hadn’t broken anything…

“They handcuffed you to the bed,” Quinton explained. “The cops are a bit upset about Ben and… the other guy, and Fish wasn’t making a lot of sense. Detective Solis just thought it was better to hang onto you as a material witness—or a suspect—until he knew what happened.”

“What—” The sound that came out of my mouth didn’t qualify as speech. I had to swallow and try again. “What are you doing here?”

“I said I’d keep an eye on you, didn’t I? So I am. You were a little scary there before you passed out, but once you were unconscious you looked normal, so the medics weren’t freaked out by that. They weren’t happy though—you give really strange vital signs. I don’t know what’s up with Ben yet. He was in surgery earlier and I’ve been—”

The room door swung open and admitted Solis, cloaked in a violent boil of red and orange. He glowered at us and walked to the other side of the bed to do it up close. He shot a sharp glance at Quinton.

“You can go, Mr. Lassiter,” Solis said.

Quinton looked at me, a line forming between his eyebrows. I rolled my eyes back to Solis. “I prefer he stay,” I replied, fighting the feel of slipping deeper into the Grey as other words tried to push into my mouth.

The detectives lips tightened in a hard line. Solis simmered but finally shrugged ungraciously. “As you like. Residue on your hands shows you have recently fired a gun. Multiple shots. At whom were you shooting?” he demanded.

“At whom do you imagine?” I asked. I didn’t mean to be flippant, it just came out on the drift of whatever drugs the hospital had given me. Reality seemed terrifyingly remote, especially with Lass struggling inside my head. “Has someone been shot?”

Solis’s expression was volcanic. “No. But shots were fired and one man is dead, another critically injured. Previous bodies in the historic district are dead of similar wounds, and you at the scene of the last three—imagined I didn’t spot you? Do I care that they are not shot? No! I care that this coincidence cannot possibly be a coincidence. There is a linking cause and you know what it is. Of this I am sure.”

“What… did Reuben Fishkiller tell you?” I asked, fighting Lass who screamed in my head about dogs and snakes and monsters. “I only remember something big… from the fog… and trying to drive it away.”

“Mr. Fishkiller says”—Solis paused to snort in derision—“a monster attacked you all. Throughout this investigation I hear ‘a monster came from the sewer.’ Now its a monster from the fog.”

I shrugged, one-sided, tilting my head and raising my eyebrows. “That’s what it was!” Lass blurted through me. I pushed him back down, feeling sweat start on my face. “But maybe… a dog?” I added. “Or a bear? A bear ran amok in the University District last year…”

Solis snorted. “Where is the body if you shot it? Why is it that where your cases touch mine, hell breaks loose and the mysterious becomes common?”

I shrugged, choking Lass’s shrieks of terror.

“Bad karma,” Quinton suggested.

Solis retrained his gimlet stare on Quinton. “Is that your explanation, Mr. Lassiter?”

Quinton shrugged also. “Don’t know. Maybe its just that Ms. Blaine attracts strange things.”

Solis nodded and looked sour. “Indeed. You were there? You saw this monster from the fog?”

Quinton shook his head. “No.”

“What did you see? You were there when the Medic One unit arrived.”

“Nothing—there was nothing to see.”

Solis shook his head in disgust. “Why were you all in the marsh to begin with?”

“My fault,” I croaked. “Following…” I cast a look at Quinton and hoped I was guessing right—and could keep Lass quiet long enough to finish. “Purlis.”

“Who is Purlis?” Solis snapped.

“The dead man. I think,” I added. “Identity was clouded. The link you wanted… may have been him.”

Solis calmed and the fire that ringed him banked to a tight, hot gleam. “Clouded… You’ll say he was part of an investigation, no doubt.”

“A tangent. Mucking in your sandbox, Solis. Sorry.”

“What do you know about him? How did he connect to this?”

I felt exhausted from my aches, from restraining the dead man raging in my head, and from trying to keep myself in the normal. “Present at the crimes. Ran when asked about them. No more than that.”

“No background?”

I shook my head; sweat stung my eyes. “Broken, blocked. Government-sealed files. Why I wanted to talk to him.”

Solis grunted to himself, the colors around him shifting more to yellow and away from furious red. “I am to turn this case over to a federal officer,” he said, as if to himself. “Classified. None of Homicide’s business.”

I wanted to tell him to leave me alone if that was the case, but I kept my mouth shut.

“I wish I knew…” he muttered, and fell silent for a long moment.

“Am I under arrest?” I asked at last.

He had seemed distracted but snapped back to a ferocious focus on me as he answered. “Not yet.” He leaned over and unlocked the cuff from my wrist and the bed. Then he straightened again. “But if Benjamin Danziger dies, its you I will come for first—Federals or no.” He looked at each of us, his eyes narrowed. He saw something that satisfied his scrutiny and left the room without another word, tucking the handcuffs into his coat pocket as he went.

I slumped into the bed, feeling Lass fall back down from his fighting and clawing now that there was no one to cry to. The Grey was thicker and more present than usual and I hoped Lass was as exhausted as I. I glanced at Quinton.

“You changed files?” I whispered.

Quinton watched Solis leave. “Yes. If they check, its officially J.J. Purlis who’s dead. I hope Fern will let it go, not try to convince someone I’m still out here. It’s the easy way out for her and once she’s retired, she may not care, so long as I never turn up to embarrass her. And I don’t plan to.” He looked at me and frowned. “You look horrible.”

“Thank you. Lass… fights.”

“Its bad, isn’t it?”

I nodded. “The sooner I’m rid of him, the better.”

“We have to get out of here. They didn’t know what was wrong with you, so they said shock. I think you can check yourself out, now that Sol is has removed the handcuffs.”

I let Quinton help me get up and get dressed. He pressed a kiss against my temple as I leaned on him. I was tired and rubber-legged, even as we crept down to Critical Care to check on Ben. It wouldn’t matter to me if Solis could hang me on a felony murder hook; if Ben died it would be my fault and I’d wish I was already dead.

We came out of the elevator and headed for CCU. I stopped cold at the sight of a figure in a black coat swishing into the CCU nurses’ station. I caught Quinton’s arm and pulled him back behind the corner to listen out of sight.

“Yes, dear. Has Detective Solis come down to look in on Mr. Danziger?”

“Naturally, it’s Laguire who’s stepping on Solis’s toes,” I muttered. I couldn’t hear the nurses reply as more than a mumble, but I’d recognized the coat’s owner, even from the back. Quinton’s face went stiff and white at the sound of Laguire’s voice.

“Really? Well, thank you, dear. I’ll look for him upstairs. And I understand the morgue is also in this building…?”

“Always tasteful, Fern,” Quinton muttered. “The coroner’s fingerprint check sent up a flare. Don’t know why I thought she’d be slower off the mark.”

“She wants to see your supposed corpse,” I hissed.

“She won’t recognize it, since she hasn’t seen me in years. It’s not a great patch—it may not hold—but for now, the file swap will keep her off me and might convince her bosses to consider me dead. They’ll recall her to Fort Meade for now whether she likes it or not. Fern may not buy it, but she can’t argue that the body doesn’t line up with the file info—Lass was actually a decent match, once they scrub off the filth. She couldn’t tell us apart if I walked up and kissed her.”

“Kiss that icicle and all bets are off.” A shudder of the ghost thrashing ripped across my frame and almost brought me to my knees. I guessed Lass didn’t like being a decoy. I could feel him trying to crack me open and escape and I didn’t think I’d enjoy the process if he did. I gasped from the twisting pain. “We need to get out of here and get rid of Lass.”