Cross fire, p.7
Cross Fire, page 7
My hands still shook a little as I poured the coffee, but doing something normal helped to ease my nerves. I puffed out a breath as I picked up both cups and walked carefully back into the squad room.
Don’t trip, don’t trip.
Marx gave me a small smile that didn’t reach his eyes as he took the mug I offered. “Thank you, Holly.”
I offered one to Sam, and he hesitated before Marx gave him a look. “Um, thanks,” he said, accepting it begrudgingly. He stared into the murky liquid as if it were poison. Well, in all fairness, I had served him roofied punch once, but that hadn’t exactly been my fault.
Marx took a sip, grimaced, and swallowed with some difficulty. “That’s”—he cleared his throat—“flavorful.”
Sam choked on his sip and pounded a fist against his chest. He set the mug down on the desk. “Flavorful is one way to put it.”
I slid my hands into the back pockets of my jeans and sighed. “It’s awful, isn’t it?”
“It tastes like battery acid,” Sam confirmed.
“Sam,” Marx scolded.
“What?”
Marx forced down another swallow of his, but I suspected it was just to spare my feelings and not because he enjoyed it. “It’s a little bitter,” he admitted. “But it was very thoughtful of you to make it.”
I bounced on my toes as I stared at the folder next to his coffee cup. “About your case. I heard . . . a rumor, I guess you could call it, that your informant was killed because he talked. I assume because he talked to you.”
There was a silent moment of surprise before Marx asked, “Where did you hear that?”
“At the crime scene.” When you told me to stay in the car.
“From whom?”
I lifted one shoulder in a shrug. “I don’t know her name. It was a Latino woman who lived on the street. If it helps, she went into the house two sidewalks to the left of where the snake guy was standing.”
Sam frowned. “Snake guy?”
“One of Holly’s afternoon admirers,” Marx muttered as he flipped the folder closed and dropped the pen into a cup on the desk. “If we drive through the neighborhood before headin’ home, can you point out the house to me?”
The trace of anxiety in my stomach expanded at the word “home,” and I shook my head.
“No, you can’t point it out?” he asked with a puzzled frown.
“No, I can’t go home.” If sending me home was his plan of protection, I couldn’t stay. I wouldn’t be safe there.
The two men exchanged a look, and then Marx clarified, “Not your home, sweetheart. Mine.”
Stunned, I asked, “You’re . . . inviting me into your home?”
“That’s the idea,” he replied with a shadow of a smile. “I know you practically live in a bunker and you’re the only one with keys to it, but I’m not comfortable entrustin’ your safety to a few dead bolts and panes of glass. Not with Collin knowin’ where you live.”
The thought of him rekindled my instinct to flee while I had a chance, and I found myself staring at the stairwell door as possible escape routes raced through my mind.
“And I don’t want you disappearin’ again when he tries another surprise visit,” Marx said, drawing my attention back to him. His gaze flickered to the door and then back to me, letting me know that my thoughts hadn’t been as private as I would’ve liked. “I’ll feel better if you stay with me. I have a guest room and it does have a lock on the door. You think you’ll feel safe enough?”
I knew what he was asking: would I feel safe enough not to run? Truthfully, I didn’t know, but I was too tired to run anywhere tonight. “Maybe.”
“I’ll take it. Let’s call it a night.” He shrugged on his coat and grabbed his gun from his desk drawer before the two of them escorted me out of the building.
7
We gathered a few essentials from my apartment and then drove through the neighborhood where Marx’s informant was found. I pointed out the house of the woman I had spoken to, and then we headed to his place.
His home was a second-floor apartment in an old brick building. I followed him quietly up the steps and waited in the long hallway as he unlocked his door.
This scenario reminded me too much of my childhood. The State of Maine had shuffled me through twelve foster homes, and each time I stood on the doorstep of someone else’s home, bag clutched in my hands, I wondered how long they would let me stay.
I might not be a little girl anymore, but my well-being was still contingent upon how long Marx would let me stay. He hadn’t specified how long this invitation would last, but I had packed my emergency bag—a few changes of warmer clothes, hygiene necessities, some money, and some food—in case the situation changed and I needed to leave the city quickly.
I wasn’t as confident as Marx and Sam that they could find a quick and easy resolution to my foster brother’s arrival. Marx pushed open the door, flipped on the light, and moved aside to let me enter.
I took a few tentative steps inside, then stopped. I studied his impeccably clean apartment. A leather couch, a coffee table, and an entertainment system occupied the first room. There wasn’t a trace of clutter, unless the open car magazine on the coffee table constituted clutter.
“You’re very, um . . . neat,” I said.
He smiled at the surprise in my voice. “I don’t like chaos.”
The next time I was in his immaculate car, I was going to leave a straw wrapper on the floorboard just to see what he would do. I bet he would freak out.
“Am I allowed to touch your floor with my shoes, or is it like the dashboard of your car?”
He narrowed his eyes. “Are you gettin’ smart with me?”
“It’s my natural disposition.”
“Cute,” he said with a faint smile. “Yes, you can wear your shoes, but don’t put them on my couch. If you do, they might just disappear the next time you take them off.”
He crossed the room and pulled the curtains shut to block out the night, or anyone who might be inclined to watch us through the window.
Fresh unease crawled through me. “You think he’s watching?”
He glanced at me as he pulled the last drape shut in the living room. “He’s not gonna get to you here. Even if he could scale the side of the buildin’, the windows are always locked, and the front door is sturdy.”
I glanced over my shoulder at the flimsy-looking door; I wasn’t sure we were thinking about the same door. Maybe I was just unfairly comparing it to my metal barricade with three dead bolts. His door only had one lock. But then, Marx was a trained cop, so he probably wasn’t worried about intruders.
“If by chance he does manage to get inside, I’m gonna be standin’ between you and him with a gun. He might be immune to pain, but he’s not immune to bullets.”
“I don’t know about that,” I muttered. Logically, I knew Collin was only human, but he had haunted me for so long that it was easy to think of him as something more.
Marx’s eyes clouded with sympathy as he approached. “I know you’re scared, but you’re safe here.” He took the travel bag from my stiff fingers and carried it to the kitchen peninsula. “Try to relax and make yourself at home. You don’t have to hover by the door.”
I rubbed my sweaty palms on my jeans and took a few steps inside. I didn’t know how to make myself at home in someone else’s home. I always felt awkward and out of place.
“So . . . did you do the cleaning when you were married?” I asked, examining the unnatural tidiness.
“My wife was not what one might call”—he considered his words carefully as he closed the curtains over the kitchen sink—“domestic. If she tried to vacuum, she destroyed the vacuum by runnin’ over rubber bands and bobby pins. If she tried to run the dishwasher, I had to unload it and reload it when I got home because it looked like an explosion had gone off inside and nothin’ was clean.”
I arched my eyebrows as I walked to the counter. “What happened when she did laundry?”
“We had to go shoppin’ for new clothes.”
A small, surprising laugh bubbled out of me.
Marx smiled. “It’s good to hear you laugh, even if it is at my wardrobe’s expense. Come on, I’ll show you to your room.”
He grabbed my bag and led me down the narrow hallway to one of the two rooms. He opened the door across from the bathroom. “I’m sorry about the size.”
The space was the size of an average walk-in closet, with barely enough room for a bed and nightstand. I felt a claustrophobic flutter in the pit of my stomach as I stood on the threshold of the room, but I tamped it down.
This was infinitely better than where I would’ve slept if I had succeeded in running away. Condemned houses and closed factories weren’t exactly warm and cozy, and then there were the rats.
“It’s wonderful. Thank you.”
Marx set my bag on the end of the bed and looked around the sparsely decorated room. “If I’d known you were comin’, I would’ve gotten an eggplant pillow for the bed.”
A faint smile touched my lips.
Eggplant purple was my favorite color, something I had only mentioned once in passing, but it was a fact he had apparently committed to memory.
I slid my hands into the back pockets of my jeans and surveyed the small room. New places made me nervous, which seemed odd considering I spent so much of my life on the move. But new meant unfamiliar and unpredictable.
I could maneuver through my apartment with my eyes closed, but I would stumble into everything in this space.
I walked slowly through the room, familiarizing myself with the dimensions and looking for anything I might be able to use as a weapon.
I unplugged the ceramic lamp on the nightstand and slid it closer to the bed so I could throw it if I needed to. The drawer would be a good place to stash a kitchen knife. Just so happens I brought mine.
I heard a sigh from the doorway and flicked a brief glance at Marx, who was watching me with a shoulder propped against the door frame.
“You’re doin’ that thing you do.”
“What thing?” I asked, mentally counting the steps from the end of the bed to the door where he stood. Four steps, not unlike my front door to the invisible boundary of my living room.
I could remember that.
“Takin’ the measure of your environment. I didn’t notice it until we were in Kansas and everythin’ was new to you. I watched you do it in the diner, and I’m pretty sure you did it at the Inn.”
I looked up at him in surprise. I hadn't realized my behavior was so transparent.
“He’s not gonna make it into your room, Holly. You don’t need to plan an exit strategy.”
I knew, inevitably, Collin would come for me, and I couldn’t risk being unprepared when he did. My only advantages against him were my speed and my knowledge of my environment.
A hint of sadness touched Marx's voice. “I suppose after livin’ in fear for so long, it becomes ingrained in who you are and everythin’ you do.”
Fear had kept me one step ahead of Collin for most of the past ten years. It provided me with an edge of constant awareness, and I had spotted him coming more than once.
I shifted my feet, uncomfortable with the direction this conversation was taking. “Not unlike being a cop.”
He perceived and reacted to the world like a cop, even when he was “off duty.” It was just a part of who he was.
“The difference bein’ I chose to live my life as a cop. You didn’t choose to live the past fourteen years of your life in a constant state of fear.”
I forced a shrug. “Life doesn’t usually ask us what we want.”
Sometimes life fired one bad experience at you after another, and all you could do was dodge the bullets and hope you come out in one piece on the other side. I had a lot of scars—inside and out—but I was still mostly intact.
Marx rested his head against the door frame. “You deserve to feel safe, Holly. What can I do to make that happen?”
The simple knowledge that Collin was out there in the city somewhere destroyed any hope of ever feeling truly safe.
I rubbed at my arms as I turned toward the window and peered through the slitted blinds into the quiet street. I half expected my living nightmare to coalesce from the darkness and come for me, but the street was oddly still.
“Rewind time,” I said beneath my breath, wishing it were possible to melt back through the years and save my family.
I would be able to see the beautiful person my sister would’ve grown into, I could hug my dad every day, and I never would’ve met Collin.
I felt the tightening of tears in my chest and closed my eyes. It was foolish to dream of impossible things.
“I wish I could,” Marx said quietly.
It took me a moment to realize he was responding to my comment about rewinding time. I hadn’t actually meant for him to hear me, but somehow it didn’t surprise me that he had.
I cleared my throat and decided it was best to change the subject. “I assume Sam told you about our conversation in the warehouse.”
“Mmm hmm.”
His nonchalant response had me turning back toward him. “So you realize that by letting me stay here, you’re putting yourself in danger.”
“Mmm hmm,” he repeated in that same calm, unruffled voice.
“You’re not”—I grappled for the right word—“worried?”
Tiredness made his smile slightly lopsided. “I’ve put a number of people behind bars, Holly. Some of those people walk out of prison with a chip on their shoulder that has my name on it. I’m not unaccustomed to somebody holdin’ a grudge against me, or tryin’ to upset my life because they blame me for their much-deserved stay behind bars. Collin isn’t exactly a new experience for me.”
“Has that ever turned out badly for you? The grudges, I mean.”
“Once or twice, but nothin’ that caused irreparable damage. It comes with the territory. My job isn’t to make friends; more often than not, it tends to be the opposite.”
“What, the criminals you take off the streets don’t wanna be pen pals?” I teased with a weak smile.
“We both know they wouldn’t be able to read my writin’ anyway.”
His writing was nearly illegible. His ex-wife had likened it to chicken scratch. I thought it looked like something a chicken might do after a few shots of tequila.
“I, um . . .” I shifted my arms restlessly over my stomach, and Marx watched my nervous behavior without comment. “I can pay you for letting me stay here if—”
“No. What do you like on your pizza?”
I blinked at the abrupt change of subject. How had we gotten from me paying him to pizza toppings? Did I miss the transition? “But—”
“Neither of us have eaten much today, and you threw up most of what you did eat in my trash can at the precinct, so what do you want on your pizza?”
Okay then. He didn’t want to talk about money. “I’m not sure I can eat anything.”
“Please try.”
I puffed out a defeated breath and dropped onto the edge of the mattress. “Mushrooms and pineapple.”
He arched an eyebrow. “Fungus and fruit . . . on your pizza.”
“Yeah,” I replied with uncertainty. Was there something weird about that?
“Do you want me to see if they have broccoli too?”
“Well, what do you put on your pizza?”
“Meat,” he answered before pushing away from the doorway and walking back down the hall into the kitchen. Meat. Well, that was precise.
I sighed and rummaged through my bag. I pulled out a picture frame and stared at the portrait of my family. I had spent most of my life unaware of who my family was, and when Marx finally tracked them down, he discovered I was the only member of my family left alive.
They had been murdered a few months before I turned ten, and the trauma of that night had forced me to forget the first nine years of my life. The man who killed them had come after me in October. If he hadn’t, I might never have regained the memories I now cherished.
“Oh, Gin-Gin.” I stared at my twin sister’s innocent face. We might have been identical, but we’d been so very different. Complications at birth had left her permanently innocent and unaware of the evils in the world.
I missed her the most.
I set the picture on the side table where I usually kept it at home. I never went a night without looking at their faces. I knew it was probably irrational, but I was so afraid I would forget them again.
I pulled out my pajamas and toiletries next, and my gaze drifted to the open bathroom door across the hall. I wanted to wash away the slimy layer of bad memories on my skin, but I hesitated at the idea of showering here.
I set my clothes on the bed and crossed the hall to scope out the unfamiliar bathroom. It was an elongated space that was probably three times the size of my matchbook-sized bathroom and, aside from the wooden floorboards and cream cabinetry, there wasn’t a trace of color. Even the shower curtain was white.
His bathroom was as boring as his car. I thought about snooping through the cabinets and drawers, but I doubted I would find anything more interesting than tweezers and cotton balls. Maybe some dental floss. I set my purple toothbrush and tube of Crest on the counter, adding a splash of color.
I checked the security of the door, and another wave of anxiety washed through me when I realized the lock didn’t work.
“Um . . . is there a trick to this lock or . . .”
Marx’s voice drifted from the kitchen. “It’s broken and I haven’t gotten around to fixin’ it.”
I'd been afraid of that. I shot the shower a longing look. I desperately wanted to feel clean, but with my emotions so frayed, being undressed and vulnerable with no lock on the door would probably catapult me into a panic attack.
I tried to decide whether or not it was worth the risk as I paced the narrow hall between the rooms. The floorboards creaking beneath my footsteps had to be driving Marx up a wall, but he didn’t comment.
I wondered if it was strange for him to have another person in his apartment. Of course, for all I knew, he had women over regularly.
