He saw Jake’s eyes through the broken front windows of the school. The kid looked pale, startled, even from a distance of thirty yards; then he turned and disappeared into the dark forest of charred structural wood like a frightened deer. Matt gripped his radio, his eyes hard against the sunshine.
“Engo, give us a sitrep.”
“I’m going in.” Ben threw his helmet on.
“Forget it.” Matt grabbed his shoulder strap again and yanked him back. “You’re acting deputy chief on this scene right now. Jake’s responding.”
“She’s cut her leg on something, Matt. Fuck me, I think she hit an artery. There’s blood everywhere. Jake, don’t come from underneath. The floor’s still collapsing.”
“Where should I go?”
“Arrrrgghhh! Hang on, Andy! Hang on! Jake—come up the stairs on the west side and cross over the third-floor hallway.”
“Ben! Bennnnn!”
Andy’s voice on the radio lit a fire in Ben. He looked at Matt. Looked deep into the older man’s eyes and saw the same rigid blankness there that he had seen the last time he was acting deputy chief. Ben had been alone on the street then, practicing hold of command from outside the fire scene, when his boss emerged from the flaming doorway with that look on his face. Too calm. Too empty beyond the oxygen mask. Matt had been retreating to swap out tanks. Ben had been watching him load up when he got the call from Engo that Titus wasn’t where he was supposed to be, that no one could find him, that he thought he heard a scream from the floor below.
“Fuck this,” Ben said now. Matt tried to grab at him but he shoved him off. “I’m going in.”
Ben could hear her screams from the third floor. The peal of the PASS alarm. He followed Jakey’s boot prints in the dust, leaped up the stairs to the second floor, taking them three at a time, his whole body shaking with guilt. Because it was there again: the vision of Andy being torched as they entered the school, the sweet relief that had warmed his bones. He was praying now, actually praying for her as he ran, her screams getting louder and louder. Engo’s grunts were barely audible over the earsplitting noise of her wails. Ben was only feet away from the door to the room they were coming from when the older man’s individual words broke through Ben’s tortured thoughts.
“That’s right, baby. Scream. Scream. Scream for your boyfriend.”
Ben stumbled into the room. Jake was standing in the corner, watching Engo roll off Andy, the sweat-drenched woman looking like a kid playing dress-up in her oversized suit and gloves. All the capillaries in her eyeballs had burst, and wild, wet, demon-red eyes looked up at Ben for a moment before she turned and vomited on the floor.
Engo got to his feet and grinned. Ben didn’t know whether to follow his desire to go to Andy or to lunge at Engo. Before he could do anything, Andy pulled herself together and threw her gloves off and came at her attacker. She got in a good, solid shot to the mouth. Ben heard the impact of her knuckles on Engo’s teeth.
“You stupid fuck!” Andy reared back for another blow, wobbled on her feet, still reeling from the pain. “You stupid, ugly fuck!”
“Jesus.” Engo only had to back off a couple of steps to get out of her swing range. He cupped the blood gushing down his chin. “You busted my lip!”
Ben went to Andy. She was shaking in his arms. The collar of her turnout coat was open and a big blue bruise in the shape of two fingertips was erupting at the side of her neck, blood rushing deep into the traumatized tendons under her collarbone. Ben recognized the marks. Engo’s favorite party trick. Andy was struggling with the PASS alarm on her belt, trying to shut it off.
Matt was in the doorway now, leaning, filling most of the frame with his shape. He was chewing fresh gum, and the look he gave Ben of quiet, fatherly disgust made him shrivel up inside.
“You, you, and you.” Matt pointed to each of the men in turn. “Continue the scene clearance.”
Then the big man pointed the Finger of Death at Andy.
“You, go back to the station. Empty your locker. You’re out.”
2008
She knew the counter guy was interested in her. He had a hungry look. And for someone in her position, that could go badly—had gone badly a couple of times as she was blown up the East Coast by the winds of fate. Dahlia had been in the homeless shelter in the Bronx for three days, and she’d barely moved from the bunk they’d assigned her. It was a bottom bunk, farthest from the door and in a dark corner. A sweet spot, the sweetest spot she’d found since she left Georgia. She wasn’t giving it up. But there was the guy. His curious, bright eyes. Any guy who was interested in a reed-thin, hollow-eyed girl who refused to give her name, who refused to shower, who had blisters on her feet the size of baked beans, was dangerously whacked. She’d gone to the bunk in the corner and curled up like an old dog crawling under a porch to die, and if that kind of helplessness turned the guy on, he was trouble. Dahlia waited until he wasn’t on shift before she got up on the third day to get some air, maybe scope out an emergency exit.
Turned out he wasn’t on shift but he was there, waiting for her in the back alley behind the shelter, spent cigarettes littered all around his shoes and one wasting away between his knuckles. The hair at his temples was growing silver, and he stroked it like it made him self-conscious as she came to the door. Gearing up for a speech. She tried to retreat but he stopped her pretty quick with “I know who you are.”
Dahlia froze in the doorway. Ahead of her, one of the volunteers was trying to cajole another human tumbleweed with a belly the size of a BOSU ball into the doctor’s examining room. The guy was sobbing and clutching a filthy pillow under one arm.
“You’re Dahlia Lore.”
The sound of her name made her somehow weaker than she already was. Her brain told her to run but her legs folded instead and she sat heavily on the concrete step.
“Let me tell you what I know,” the guy said. He flicked ash off the cigarette. “Nine months ago you walked into Commander Aaron Ferdakis’s office in San Antonio, Texas, and put a binder in front of him. A heavy binder. It slammed down on his desk, made a loud sound. You told Ferdakis it was a research file. It was everything you’d managed to dredge up about the two men who murdered your parents, Shaun and Rina Lore, in the three years since their deaths.”
Dahlia drew the sleeves of her hoodie down over her hands. The man, his words—they were making her want to tuck into a ball. Cover up. Disappear.
“You’d given Ferdakis and his guys three years to make some kind of headway on the case,” the counter guy said. “Then you took matters into your own hands. You couldn’t understand, at first, what was taking the San Antonio PD so long. They had the car that arrived at the gas station that night. They had IDs of the two men who died there beside your parents. They had fingerprints. DNA. Bullet casings. No, they didn’t have CCTV footage of the shooters. All the footage was lost when they burned down the gas station with your parents and one of their victims inside. But what they had should have been enough.”
Dahlia wiped her eyes.
“But with a little bit of asking around, a little bit of common sense, you tracked them down soon enough,” the counter guy continued. “Jude and Michael Hogan. Brothers. Drug dealers from Galveston.”
He came and sat beside her on the step, flicked his cigarette away and fished out a new one. Shook the pack at her. She was so run-down, the nicotine hit her like a lightning bolt to the brain. She could feel its fingers working into her skull, prickling over her scalp and down the back of her neck.
“What you did in tracking down the Hogans wasn’t what impressed me, Dahlia,” the man said, exhaling over his shoulder. “It was entering their lives like you did.”
Dahlia smoked and listened to the commotion inside as two attendants now were teaming up to get the big boy-man with the pillow seen to. From what she could hear, it sounded like he had an insect in his ear canal. Or claimed to have. Getting him into the on-site doctor’s office was proving difficult. There was talk of trying to convince him to go to a hospital.
“Are you with me?” the counter guy asked.
Dahlia nodded, but she wasn’t with him at all. She was trying to lock on to something, anything, to take her away from memories of that night at the gas station, of the years after. Hunting the Hogans. Sliding, snakelike, into their worlds; first as a shitkicker at the auto wreckers where Jude spent most of his time and then as a waitress at a diner down the block from where Michael lived. Neither of the men had recognized her. Sure, she’d dropped a stack of weight, changed her hair, shriveled and hardened the way those left behind after homicides do. She was physically unrecognizable from the photograph that had featured in the newspapers briefly. But she supposed, in the end, what protected Dahlia as she spied on the Hogans was simply that neither Jude nor Michael expected her to be there, smiling timidly and handing them coffee or stacking rumpled sheets of metal in their own wrecking yard. They expected the terrified girl they’d fired at as she bolted into the darkened desert to be gone from their lives forever.
“How do you know about the binder?” she asked the counter guy, who wasn’t a counter guy at all. Her voice was flat. It seemed like it would take a whole-body effort to lift it.
“I had a listening device in Ferdakis’s office,” the man said. “Inside the lamp. The whump of the binder on the desk nearly unstuck it, so thanks for that.” He huffed a smoky laugh. “Nearly blew my whole operation. I’ve been watching the commander, clocking up his ties to people like the Hogans. He’s got a stable of drug dealers, importers, cooks. The Hogans are small fish in his world. Or they were. Until you killed them.”
Dahlia said nothing.
“You’re twenty-six.” The guy was looking at her now. “You’re twenty-six fucking years old. You ran a one-man undercover surveillance operation on a pair of murderous drug dealers for a year without being discovered, and you compiled evidence of their network that led you all the way up to the commander of one of the biggest police departments in the state of Texas.”
Dahlia stared at the embers in her cigarette.
“Are you even listening to me?”
“Yeah.”
“No you’re not.” He leaned against the doorframe. “You’re tired. I get it. Shit, you’ve been on the run for months. And doing a good job of that, too. It took me this long to find you. And you’re probably scared. That takes a lot out of you, being scared. You’re probably thinking I’m here to arrest you for killing the Hogans.”
She looked at him.
“I’m not,” he said. Swiping at those white streaks again under her gaze. “I mean, we should get rid of the thirty-eight. I don’t know why you’re still carrying that around. But hey, it’s like I said: You’re twenty-six. You’re incredibly smart in some ways, and incredibly dumb in others. You seemed to believe Ferdakis was just going to put his hands up in surrender the moment you walked in there with all that evidence of who he was and what he’d been doing. Like ‘Oh shit, kid! You got me.’”
He laughed. Dahlia didn’t.
“So why are you here, then?”
“Because I want to work with you,” the guy said. “You’re special. You’re raw talent. What you did—the investigation, the undercover work—you did all that on pure fucking instinct. I mean, Jesus. That’s unheard of. Imagine the kind of weapon you could be if someone gave you a little training. Lots of training. That’s what I’m offering. Dahlia. I want to take you and make something of you.”
“Make what of me?”
“A specialist,” he said. “Someone who does this. Someone who knows how to change shape, slide in, find out information. You’ve got the gift, and you must have enjoyed it, to run the operation that long.”
She said nothing.
“We’ll have to start with that redneck accent. That’s why you stopped talking altogether after Georgia, huh? That twang is like a siren.”
She was feeling it now. The ever-so-slight lift. Chemicals coming together in her exhausted bloodstream. Lights turning on in her brain. She’d been shutting down since she put a bullet in the back of Michael Hogan’s head in an empty Walmart parking lot a year earlier, having already popped his brother as he lay sleeping in his apartment. It had felt like a completion. The achievement of the only thing she’d wanted to do since her parents died. When Tony Newler started speaking to her in that damp back alley in the Bronx five minutes earlier, she’d been almost dead, a dry husk of a plant lying deflated in a pot. Now the very tips of her roots had smelled water and were twitching beneath the soil.
“Who are you?” Dahlia asked.
Tony turned to her and smiled a smile that filled her with warmth then. A smile she would grow to despise.
“What—you mean, today?” he asked.