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“Jimmy,” Nurse Francine called after knocking on the door, her irritating singsong voice driving his drowsiness away. “You have a visitor.”
Jimmy sat up in bed. He never had any visitors, and to come on a Saturday morning when he was allowed to sleep in was just rude. The clock on the wall read eight in the morning. Breakfast hour had just ended, which left him with no solid reason to get out of bed. Still, his curiosity nagged at him like a toddler tugging on his sleeve. But the hollow pang in the pit of his belly told him that no good would come from it.
My parents? His mom had come to see him once after he’d been arrested and without his father’s knowledge. She told him how he’d embarrassed the family, soiled the Rafferty name. As if the Rafferty name had ever stood for more than domestic violence, alcoholism, and degenerate gambling—things they could hide behind closed doors, mouthwash, and revolving credit cards. But she’d cried as she’d spoken the words—his father’s words, reiterated in a letter that practically disowned him after the Suarez mess—and he knew she still loved him. His baby sister, too young to even understand what Jimmy had done, was kept away from him entirely. It was as if his sole act of violence, retaliation against a boy who’d done terrible violence to him and so many others, was infectious and could corrupt sweet innocent Tabitha with its poison. He hoped he’d see her again someday, probably aged well past her crescent pigtails and deeply dimpled pudgy cheeks. Smiling but only for a moment, he touched the divot in his own face before it could fade. Then again, maybe not.
He changed from his pajamas, pretty much a T-shirt and sweatpants, into his day clothes, another T-shirt and sweatpants—the kind with an elastic stretch-band waist. Jamming his feet into slippers, he headed for the door.
“Jimmy?” Nurse Francine knocked again. “I’m coming in.”
The door opened and the raven-haired nurse entered, looking quite beautiful that morning except for the sharklike quality of her smile. She gave him a once-over. “You need some time to get ready?”
He’d thought he was ready but nodded anyway as he bounced on his feet. “Just gotta brush my teeth and... you know.”
She smiled and nodded back. “I’ll wait for you here.”
Jimmy hurried to the restroom and let out a stream so pleasant his eyes rolled back. Finished, he flushed, washed his hands, then doused cold water on his face and neck. Drying off, he tried to flatten his curly, reddish hair, which was deeply in need of a razor or maybe some hedge clippers. He was starting to look a bit like Ronald McDonald.
After brushing his teeth, he met Nurse Francine in the hallway. “Come on,” she said, putting an arm around his shoulder.
Though her touch was gentle and kindly, he flinched a little before he could stop himself.
“He’s waiting in one of the private meeting rooms,” she continued without seeming to notice his apprehension. “Right this way.”
He wanted to ask who his visitor was but thought better of engaging a possible threat to his existence. His brow furrowed, and he glanced back down the hall behind them. No one was following. The hallway was empty, eerily quiet except for the sound of his and Nurse Francine’s footsteps.
What if she’s bringing me to the same doctor that fixed Tessa? His shoulders stiffened, the nurse’s touch no longer seeming so warm. What if I’m one of the ones who doesn’t come back?
He could run, break away from Nurse Francine and raise a huge stink up and down the halls, but that would probably only result in getting himself tackled by Link and poked with a thick needle. They’d probably still drag him knocked-out to the doctor and do that old-fashioned lobotomy-thing for the mentally ill to make him into a drooling obedient dog.
Nurse Francine buzzed them through a door. The hallway on the other side looked pretty much the same—faded, snot-colored carpet, hotel-like walls lined with doors with square windows. The windows were lined with what looked like chicken wire, but he could make out the rooms on the other side. In the second one on the left, a tall man in a dark suit with short graying hair stood with his hands in his pockets, back to the door.
Nurse Francine ushered Jimmy into the room, and the man turned. He buttoned his suit jacket as he did, then extended his hand. “Jimmy Rafferty? Special Agent Frank Spinney.” He glanced at the nurse, then added, “I’m doing some follow-up on the Suarez case and was hoping for a moment of your time.”
Jimmy sensed this last bit was meant more for Francine’s benefit than his own.
“Well—” Nurse Francine smoothed out her uniform and winked at Jimmy. “I’ll leave you boys to it. When you’re finished, just hit the intercom by the door and someone will come get you.”
Jimmy let the agent’s hand hang in the air. He circled the small desk to the seat on the opposite side, wondering why the agent hadn’t done so himself before Jimmy had arrived to make things easier on them both. Apparently, the man preferred his back to the door, where someone could sneak up on him, maybe wrap some piano wire around his neck.
Jimmy snickered, then shifted in his seat, waiting for the agent to sit down and get to it. Instead, the agent paced the eight feet or so between the side walls, apparently taking in the scenery or noticeable lack thereof. Jimmy, too, looked at the blank white walls, the linoleum floor, and those cheap Styrofoam-looking ceiling tiles like in school, wondering what the FBI guy saw in them. Jimmy had been in rooms like that many times before. Sure, they had different names—interrogation room, interview room, meeting room—but they all served the same purpose—someone wanted information. And the guy expected Jimmy to provide it.
Frank Spinney, that’s what Francine had called him. He studied the man, growing more uncomfortable with the agent’s pacing. His gaunt features—pointed nose, high cheekbones, and sharp chin—made him almost look like that Guy Fawkes dude, or the mask that was supposed to look like him anyway. Maybe Jimmy might have learned about him in history class had he not been expelled.
But there was something else about the lanky agent, something familiar. Aside from the wrinkled suit, stubble, faint aroma of sweat, and sunken eyes that made him appear as if he hadn’t slept in weeks, Jimmy could have sworn he’d met the man before. He leaned forward to study him more closely, then slapped the table, pleased with himself for having remembered where he’d last seen the agent but not so pleased with the memories that flooded in with it.
The blood of the youngest Suarez brother, Luther, not even twelve, had covered Jimmy’s hands as he’d tried to comfort him in his final moments. Sometimes, he thought he could still feel that sticky warmth on his skin. He hadn’t been remotely responsible for Luther’s death, but he hadn’t been able to stop it either. The agent and Mikey’s detective friend had found Jimmy like that, covered in blood. His reward was Detective Reilly shooting him. To be fair, I was holding a gun.
The bang Jimmy’s hand made on the table seemed to snap the FBI man out of his thoughts, and he took a seat. Still, he just sat there, staring silently at Jimmy while he scratched his chin as if the fate of the world would be determined by his next words.
At last, he leaned forward and whispered. “I am not, in fact, here to talk to you about the Suarez case.” His eyes twitched in the direction of the intercom as he pulled a small black mechanical device from his pocket and flipped a switch. “Scrambler of sorts,” he said, tapping the device. “There’s a camera in the corner that’s not supposed to be recording audio, but I am sure they’ve got this room bugged every which way to Sunday even if it isn’t. This should allow us to talk freely, but we should still keep our voices low and our mouths facing away from the camera.”
Jimmy folded his hands and slouched. “Okay.” If the agent expected Jimmy to do his work for him, he was sadly mistaken. “Why am I here?”
“Can I trust you, Jimmy? May I call you Jimmy?”
“Yes. And I don’t know, can you?”
“Right. Assuming you answered those questions in reverse order, I’ve gotta know I can trust you before I tell you what I have to say.” He tapped his fingers on the table. “When I say peoples’ lives might depend on it, people you know and may even care about, I am not just slinging bullshit.”
This is serious. Jimmy sat up straighter. “All right.” Figuring he’d throw the agent a bone, he lowered his voice. “Well, your agent inside here trusted me enough to tell me his secret.”
Agent Spinney’s eyebrows raised long enough for Jimmy to catch his surprise before he slipped back to his robotic government mode. “You see, Jimmy. That’s exactly the type of secret I wouldn’t want you to just leak to a stranger in a psych ward.”
“Interview room.” Jimmy scoffed. “Anyway, this isn’t the first time we’ve met. You’re a friend of Detective Reilly’s, and she’s done right by me. At least, she’s always kept her word, and since she owes me less than nothing, I think that’s probably just about as much as I could ever expect from her.”
“Good, you remember me, and I remember you trying to help that little boy. That took courage and showed character. A whole lot of it.” Agent Spinney tented his fingers. “What I’m going to ask you to do will take both. In addition, you help me out, and I will do everything in my power to make your stay in a place like this as short and as comfortable as possible.”
“Mine and Tessa Masterson’s.”
“What?” This time, Agent Spinney didn’t let his eyebrows fall.
Jimmy surprised himself with the ask, which had sprung from his mouth without the slightest forethought. But now that the ask had been made, there was no going back. “Tessa Masterson and me. You make both our stays here as short and as comfortable as possible.”
The agent smiled briefly, the skin under his eye twitching as the smile fell away. He extended his hand again. “Deal?”
Jimmy shook it. “Deal. Now what do you want me to do?”
“I have an agent in here. You might know him as—”
“The Bandage Man. Yeah, I told you, we’ve met. Real friendly fella.”
Agent Spinney didn’t ask how Jimmy knew his colleague. Instead, he curled back his lips and gritted his teeth. “I need you to get a message to him. I’d do it myself, but I’d blow his cover. Tell him they’ve got Sam and her boy somewhere in here. We need his help. Sam needs him.”
Jimmy’s forehead crinkled like an accordion as he squinted at the table. “Sam and her boy? You mean Detective Reilly and Mikey, don’t you?”
Agent Spinney hushed him.
“Wait,” Jimmy said, lowering his voice. “How do you know this?”
“I saw them being led into the building at gunpoint.”
“And you just let that happen?” Jimmy’s nostrils flared. His muscles tightened as he leaned over the table, glaring.
“I had another boy to protect and a police officer in need of saving, and they hadn’t seen me yet.” He huffed. “It’s complicated. And by the time I’d taken one of them out and convinced the officer to get the kid to safety and not to charge into the hospital with guns blazing, they’d sealed up the entrance they took Sam through. It’s like it was never there in the first place, a hidden door or...”
When the agent trailed off, Jimmy snapped his fingers. “Who are they? What do they want?”
“Honestly, probably the less you know, the better. Needless to say, they are bad people. Some of the worst. Their ringleader is like Hannibal Lecter, Darth Vader, and Richard Nixon all wrapped into one. Anyway, we don’t really have time to go into it. They could be anywhere in Brentworth, doing all sorts of nasty things to our friends.”
“Or they could be long gone.”
Agent Spinney stroked his chin. “It’s possible, but I don’t think so. I’ve been following their leader a long time, and the one advantage we have is his cockiness. He likes to let you get close, really close, just so he can show how much smarter than you he is.” He gritted his teeth. “No, they’re here. I’m sure of it. And by now, they must surely have noticed one of their own didn’t report back in last night.”
He folded his hands in front of him and fixed Jimmy with an earnest, hopeful stare. “Sam and Michael need our help, Jimmy.” The agent’s hard features might as well have been chiseled in stone. “I’m counting on you. Michael’s counting on you.”
“Woah, hold on a second.” Jimmy pushed away from the table. He shook his head. “This is crazy! If these people are as bad as you say they are and they’ve got innocent people for hostages, why don’t you call in the National Guard or the Army or whoever else you need to sweep through this place and take them all out?”
Agent Spinney’s gaze fell, boring a hole in the table. “I can’t.” The agent seemed to deflate. “My colleagues won’t come, not without a confirmed sighting of my target. You could say my business here is... unsanctioned. And even if they did come, my guys would call Detective Reilly’s team and let them know what’s going down on their turf. But Detective Reilly’s guys are compromised. So calling them—”
“Might get Mikey and the detective killed?”
Agent Spinney nodded slowly. “Not might.” He collapsed into his chair, flopping over himself like a bouncy house that had been popped. “I wouldn’t be asking this of you if I saw any other way of getting Sam and Michael out alive. I know how this guy works. Any whiff we’re on to him, and he’ll kill them immediately, if not for any other reason than the sheer enjoyment of it all. Then he’ll disappear before we even get through the door.”
Jimmy shivered then steeled himself against the fear threatening to take hold.
Agent Spinney ran his fingers down his face. “If my man can’t find them fast enough, I’ll have to do just that, anyway—send in an army. He’s got three hours. We’ll have the place surrounded, the whole damn city blockaded, in less than two.”
Jimmy took a deep breath. A chance to save Michael was a chance for redemption. He set his jaw and nodded. “Okay. Tell me everything I need to do.”