Authors: Yvonne Navarro
Concrete Savior (21 page)
“So you say,” Casey retorted. “I disagree.”
“What did she tell you this morning at Starbucks?” Bheru asked suddenly.
His timing was perfect enough so that Casey couldn’t hide the guilt that shifted across his features. “Nothing. We talked about the weather.”
Eran scowled. “Oh please. Do you think we’re idiots?”
“If you’re planning another rescue—”
“I’m not.”
“I don’t believe you,” Brynna said.
“Thanks for calling me a liar in my own house,” Casey said stiffly. “You can all leave now. In fact, I insist.”
“Sorry,” Brynna told him as she rose and went to stand next to Eran. “I’ve always been a tell-it-like-I-see-it creature.” Eran elbowed her in the ribs and she shot him a perplexed look, then realized what she’d said. Ah well; she’d certainly said worse things in her time here.
“You know where the door is,” was all Casey replied.
As they walked out, Brynna saw Eran pull out another one of his business cards. When Casey ignored his outstretched hand, Eran dropped it on the breakfast counter as he passed. “If you change your mind,” he said quietly, “call me.”
“You already gave me a card,” Casey said with a withering glance toward it.
“I swear, we’re all just trying to do the same thing here—the
right
thing,” Eran said. “Call me and let’s talk about it before you decide to go and play Superman again. Please.”
“Of course,” Anlon said. His voice was level and carefully modulated, obviously false. “I absolutely will.”
“By the way,” Brynna said as she and the two men paused in the outside hallway. A few inches away, Anlon was swinging his door closed. “The girl you helped pull out of the river is very much alive, Casey.” The door halted its movement, although it didn’t open again. Fine, if he was going to insist on going this route, she would leave him with one final thought to go over in his mind. As many times as necessary.
“I wonder what
she’s
going to do when they let her out of the hospital?”
WITH THAT WOMAN’S WORDS
ringing in his mind, Casey didn’t even make it back to the couch. He got the door closed and locked, took two steps, then put his back to the wall and slid down to the carpet. Then he just sat there, hearing them over and over in his head. He couldn’t even remember her name, yet her voice, the tone, pitch, everything, played inside his skull like a damned tape recorder.
“I wonder what
she’s
going to do when they let her out of the hospital?”
What, indeed?
He lowered his face to his hands and scrubbed at his skin, but it didn’t make the jumble of thoughts any clearer. Who was telling the truth, and who was lying? Because for all his protests and his face-to-face hard-line refusal to accept what those cops and that woman had said, the bottom line was he did
not
know Gina any better than he knew, say, the woman who lived in the next unit over on his floor. In fact, he knew more about his neighbor than he did Gina, because during their occasional chats she had been a whole lot more open than Gina had in all these weeks of having lunch together. After all that had happened, he felt like Gina kissing him those two times was nothing more than dangling a feather in front of a cat . . . on the other side of a window. And he had been too stupid to realize he was never going to reach that prize.
Casey lifted his face and let the back of his head thump against the wall. So be it. It was hard to admit it, but he’d already gotten the feeling he and Gina were over—not that they’d had anything real to begin with. Fun lunches, yeah, but not much more, and those had started to turn sour right at the beginning of the month. There had been a change in Gina, something elusive she had tried very hard to hide although he’d still picked up on it. In any case, she was married—he did believe that. There was the reason she would never go out with him, and why when she finally did call him, she didn’t do it from a phone he could call back. It was back to dangling that feather in front of him.
He inhaled deeply, held it, then let his breath out in a slow count of five. Let’s be honest—he believed everything Detective Redmond and his partner, and even the woman, had said. How could he have swallowed that bit about her working for some secret government agency? Ridiculous. How stupid had he been not to realize she was lying right from the start, going all the way back to when she’d claimed that her so-called secret employer wasn’t keeping track of the people about whom she had visions? If any of that had been true, they would have kept track of
everything
. If he wanted to, on Monday morning Casey could probably start at Wacker Drive and walk south on Michigan Avenue until he found the shop that Gina worked at, walk in and surprise the crap out of her. Wouldn’t that be special. It hurt—in his heart, and yes, in his pride—but Gina and her lies were no longer the major focus of the dilemma he was in. Not by a long shot.
Now the thing he needed to concentrate on was tomorrow.
At just past eleven-thirty in the morning at the Smith Museum of Stained Glass on Navy Pier, in a bizarre, spur-of-the-moment argument that was going to escalate out of control, a man who was only two years older than himself was going to die.
“It’ll be easy to step in and stop it, Casey,”
Gina had told him this morning.
“Think about it—all you have to do is be there when the two guys start arguing and say something like, ‘Hey, you need to take it outside. Look at all this glass.’ That will be enough to break the momentum and calm them both down.”Of all the crazy things he now realized Gina had told him, these were the parts that had turned out to be true. Even so, he had argued with her, he had demanded to know why she kept telling him these things, he had reminded her, again, about the tragedy that had resulted from him saving Glenn Klinger. Her rebuttal had been hard to argue with because it touched a nerve inside him, the raw one that his brain had long ago marked as the
what if
button. It was the same one that was mentally tied to his own version of
if only
, and it was at the crux of everything he’d modeled his life on since he was old enough to understand that the man who’d played a fifty percent part in giving him life hadn’t bothered to stay around. He wasn’t so dense that he didn’t realize it was a sort of grass-is-greener fixation, but he also believed it was a whole lot more complex. At the core of it all was guilt. If he couldn’t follow through on his responsibilities, whether they had to do with how good of a job he did at work, how good of a son he was, or the decision to help someone out who needed it—to save someone’s
life
, for God’s sake—then he was no better than the guy who’d impregnated his mother then walked out of her life without a backward glance. He was
scum
.This time it wasn’t the tall woman he remembered, but Detective Redmond, his expression as he was saying that the man Casey had pulled from the burning car had killed his wife and stepson. Jesus—why? Casey would never know, of course, but that wasn’t the point. As with Klinger, the point was that if Casey hadn’t been there to help him, the man would have died and his wife and stepson would be alive today. It would be one dead and two alive, rather than three dead. How old had they been? Did the wife work, how old was the kid, what kind of people were they? The answers to all those questions had ceased to matter not when Gaynor had killed them, but when Casey had stepped in and saved Gaynor’s life. That was the moment at which he had altered . . . what was the word Redmond had used?
Destiny
.That girl he’d pulled out of the river yesterday—she was harmless. She
had
to be. Even under the stress of trying to save her, Casey had seen the slightly altered facial features that denoted some kind of mental disability, and it had been clear that her thinking wasn’t following logical pathways when she’d ignored his pleas on the bridge. Surely she couldn’t do anything as heinous as the first two men. She was just a teenager, and really short on thinking capacity. Surely she couldn’t hurt anyone.Could she?
He hoped not, but if so, there was nothing at all he could do about it now. If those cops had any brains at all, they would figure out a way to deal with it.
But what about tomorrow?
“He’s just some guy, Casey, like you but a couple of years older. I can’t see all the details, but there’s something about a German tourist who says something to him and doesn’t like his answer. It’s not like a movie in my head, you know? I can’t hear the words. I just feel the emotions. This guy has a big future ahead of him that’s going to be cut off. He’s going to
die
, Casey. Can you stand back and just let that happen? Can you look at yourself in the mirror every day and live with the fact that you could have stopped it and you didn’t?”But what if stopping it was the last thing he should do? What if it ended up in disaster?
Casey put his hands back over his face and cried.
ighteen
I
t had taken everything
Gina had not to close the store and go home after she’d thrown that woman out this morning.
Doing something like that would have gotten her fired, and since she’d been lying about where Vance was for going on two weeks and things were starting to get testy between her and the administrators over at North Park, instinct told her she needed to keep from doing anything so foolish. If she got him back—
No, she told herself grimly. Not if.
When
When
she got him back, he would be out of work for a long time, recovering not only from the horrible loss of his finger and, God help him, anything else that had been done to him, but from psychological damage, too. People didn’t just bounce back from trauma like this. She would be supporting herself and him, and doing a lot of things on her own that she’d thought they’d be doing together—moving, planning,
living
. In today’s world that meant having a viable income and a cash flow, so she’d ducked into the restroom, cleaned up her face, and kept things going for the rest of the interminably long morning.
But now . . .
Oh, now it could all sink in—the way the woman had grabbed her, the way she’d . . . what? Read her mind? Somehow Gina didn’t think so. It was more like she
saw
inside Gina in the way Gina saw into somewhere else by touching the printed version of someone’s name. Gina had long ago accepted what she herself could do, so it wasn’t a stretch to believe someone else might have an ability, too. Like that guy who’d come in the store last summer, who’d said his mother—or had it been his sister?—had also seen visions. She didn’t know how or what he’d done, but she was absolutely sure that he had somehow started this whole thing, that
he
was ultimately responsible for Vance’s disappearance.
Finally at home, Gina changed out of her work clothes and put on a pair of jeans and a button-down shirt, the turquoise-striped one that Vance liked so much. She paced the apartment and barely stopped herself from going to the freezer; if she didn’t leave the finger in there it was going to decay even more, and she already wasn’t sure the appendage could be saved. She should go to the grocery, get the clothes together and go downstairs to the laundry . . .
No, what she
should
do is call the police.
She slumped onto a kitchen chair, staring unseeingly at the cabinets. What that woman had said, that she could find Vance, had shaken her to her bones. What was she—a psychic?
Could
she actually find him? Maybe. The bigger issue was could she do it without the person who had Vance suspecting it, knowing about it and following through on all the ugly threats that had come over the telephone line in every phone call. That this person would somehow find out, that he or she would
know
, had been the thing that had terrified her so much in the store and made her demand that the woman leave. Yes, the store had been empty, but if Gina could see the things she could, and that woman could see the things
she
could, was it so far-fetched to think someone else could see a few things, too?
“God,” she said aloud. Her voice sounded like a scratchy record in the dim living room—she’d been keeping the curtains drawn since this ordeal started, a subconscious decision to guard herself against a set of unseen, spying eyes. “Why is this happening? Is it really so much to ask to get my husband back?”
Who was she kidding? In her darkest moments, she didn’t think she would ever see Vance again. So many things were wrong about this entire situation, from that very first horrid phone call all the way through to the woman in the shop this morning. And what had started it all? Let’s just spit it out: infidelity, that’s what. She was a cheater, and a liar. She’d told Vance she was going out with girlfriends, but what she’d really done was go to dinner with an old boyfriend, a guy with whom she’d been an item for a couple of years after high school and who she’d once thought she’d end up marrying. Their breakup had been neither pleasant nor unpleasant—it had just
been
, and every now and then she’d find herself wondering how things would have turned out if they’d stayed together. When he’d called her out of the blue one day, she’d readily agreed to have dinner with him. Afterward, she’d thought about calling back and canceling; then a little voice in her head had suggested that how quickly she’d agreed might be saying something telling about her current state of mind. The same state of mind that had made her tell Vance just the night before that yes, she would marry him.
Gina had told herself she was just going out with a friend, she was just curious and not sure she’d made the right decision. In retrospect, making sure of something about Vance should not have made her lie about where she was going. It also shouldn’t have involved enjoying an intimate dinner for two at one of Chicago’s most romantic restaurants, and leaving a trail of clothes from the living room to the bedroom of her ex-boyfriend’s very bachelorized condominium off Rush Street.
Sometime after one in the morning she’d woken up in his bed with a martini hangover and a knot of guilt in her gut that was so big she felt like she was eight months’ pregnant. She’d been dressed within two minutes, and when the ex came wandering out of the bedroom, she’d told him it was all a mistake and to please not call her again. The truth was, he hadn’t looked upset at all. He might have even smirked.
And that was the double-whammy the voice on the telephone had on Gina.
There had to be a way out of this, somehow, that didn’t involve telling Vance she’d slept with another man the night after he’d asked her to marry him. That was bad enough, but how could she ever face him again if he found out he’d been kidnapped and his finger cut
off
because of Gina’s infidelity? One was tied to the other: The voice had originally demanded she use her visions, and she had refused. The voice had then tried to blackmail her, and when she hesitated, whoas behind it had stepped into the arena of no take-backs by somehow snatching up her husband and mutilating him. Vance would never forgive her—how could he?
She had to do something before Vance ended up dead. But what if she tried, and that was the catalyst, the thing that drove the voice to do the unthinkable? Then on top of everything else, all the wrongs that had been committed, all the people who had died—and yes, she felt responsible for each and every one of them—she would lose the person who in all the universe was the most precious to her.
The telephone rang.
For a second, all the air went out of her lungs, out of the room, out of the world. Mentally she saw herself get up and calmly walk over to the phone, pick it up and hold it to her ear; in reality, she was frozen on that damned kitchen chair, as though someone had cemented her butt to it. Her body quivered, her lungs hitched, but nothing actually
moved
.
Two rings, three, then four.
The answering machine clicked on. She blinked and her simple, four-word recording of
“Please leave a message”
was over. The next thing she heard was also four words, but they had so much more dark potential that nausea suddenly boiled up her throat.
“I know you’re there.”
Gina’s paralysis broke and she lunged out of the kitchen and over to the bookcase. She reached for the phone, knowing the machine would stop when she picked it up. On impulse, she pushed the REC button. “I’m here,” she said.
“A good thing. You wouldn’t want me to get impatient.”
Her fist curled around the handset. “Where’s my husband?”
“In the shower,”
the voice said. Then it laughed, as if that statement were the funniest thing in the world.
“I want to talk to him,” Gina said. She tried to make her voice firm.
The voice paused, as if thinking it over.
“No,”
it said finally.
“I don’t think so. I want more—”
“No!” Gina suddenly shrieked. “I will
not
give you anything until I know he’s all right. You give him back to me, damn you, or I’m going to hang up and call the police!”
The silence on the other end was long enough to make Gina think the voice had hung up.
“The police will be useless to you, so that part doesn’t scare me. But I don’t like being threatened,”
it said.
“Perhaps instead of his finger, or even his hand, I shall send you his head.”
It paused, then added,
“Would you like that, Georgina?”
There was so much obscene glee in the voice that Gina’s nausea won out and she leaned over and threw up on the floor in front of the bookcase. She tried to answer then retched again, gasping for air and afraid that if she didn’t say
something
, the maniac on the phone would break the connection and do exactly what it had suggested.
Instead, after a few more seconds, the voice continued as though nothing bad had ever happened and not an iota of ill will existed between them.
“A name, if you will. You may have to hunt a bit. I want it to be someone as worthy as the one you gave me yesterday. You remember him, right? He’s going to be the most fun yet, and I think it should only get better from here, don’t you?”
With the smell of her own vomit filling her nose, Gina fumbled for the neighborhood directory and flipped it open.
CASEY WAS NEVER GOING
to go along with this.
Gina had cleaned up the vomit and thrown open the windows to air out the room, letting the first real sunlight into the apartment in over a week. She’d brushed her teeth and changed her shirt, but she thought she could still smell it, a sour tinge that floated past her nose but was too faint for her to find the source and eliminate it. Now she was sitting on the couch and staring at the darkened television screen while a hot breeze made the curtains flap back and forth and somewhere outside a couple of young kids were screeching as they chased each other around. It was all so . . .
normal
.
She had grown up believing in God in that off kind of way that people do when they’ve never had any formal or strict religious education—you believe because you’re a kid and most of the people around you do, too. She hadn’t thought much about faith or God or whatever, and she rarely discussed it. She wasn’t an atheist, but she wasn’t exactly a Christian or agnostic, either. God was God, and He seldom had anything to do with her life or her world. If there was such a supreme being, He was certainly too busy to concern Himself with Georgina Renee Whitfield or any of the other paltry human beings in her existence. That obviously explained why there was so much misery in the world, wars, disasters, and generally rotten things happening to decent people like Gina’s mother. Or even herself.
However, this thing with the voice . . . it did kind of put a spin on belief, didn’t it? Because if someone like her could see stuff, and someone else like Casey was strong enough to step in and change it—change the
future
—and still someone
else
like the voice was bent on orchestrating it all to a darker end, it kind of insinuated that somewhere was a written . . . what? Script or something, setting out the things that were supposed to happen and the things that weren’t. If that were true, then it followed that something had written that same script, something
big
, and was standing back and shrugging while something else—the voice—fucked around with the originally intended results.
She sat there until the room was dark and hot, then finally got up and closed the windows so she could turn the air-conditioning back on and draw the curtains. With the room reduced almost to black, she flipped the switch on a single low-wattage bulb. The light it gave off was softer than she thought she deserved, but anything brighter seemed wrong, a false statement that somehow everything would go on, with or without Vance’s safe return. Hey, everybody—look! The sun still comes up in the morning, the world still turns, and Vance Hinshaw is just one more missing man who makes absolutely zero difference in the universal scheme of things. She just couldn’t bear it.
What, Gina wondered, was Casey’s stance on God? All those lunches together, but she couldn’t recall if they’d ever talked about God or religion—she didn’t think so. There were so many versions. Benevolent, vengeful, forgiving, angry. Which one of these had control over her life? It had to be the vengeful one, because she hardly ever saw anything but the bad in her visions, and after her mother had ended up institutionalized, her family had pretty much gone to hell.