39. Chapter 39
Chapter thirty-nine
Lennox
Iwake up slowly, which is not how I’m used to waking up.
There’s a particular quality to hospital light, flat and constant, that makes it impossible to tell how much time has passed, and for a while I just lie still and let my body report back to me one piece at a time.
My side aches in a way that’s duller than it should be, which means someone’s given me something good for it.
My mouth is dry. There’s a cannula taped to the back of my hand and a monitor somewhere behind my head making a sound I’ve heard in a hundred other rooms just like this one, except this time it’s keeping time with my own heart instead of someone else’s.
And there’s a warmth against my hand that isn’t there anymore.
I know before I’ve even properly opened my eyes that someone was holding it.
The shape of it is still there, the memory of fingers laced through mine, and when I turn my head the chair beside the bed is empty, blanket half slid off the seat, and for one long, ugly second my chest does something it has no business doing over an empty chair.
The door opens before I can do anything useful with the feeling.
“You’re awake.” Hendricks doesn’t knock.
She’s never once knocked on anything in her life, as far as I can tell, she simply arrives, and Farah comes in a step behind her, quieter, a coffee cup in each hand that I suspect are for herself and Hendricks and not for me, which is fair, I’m probably not supposed to be having coffee.
“Apparently,” I say. My voice comes out rougher than I mean it to.
“I’ve read the briefing you gave the uniforms at the scene.
” Hendricks pulls the visitor’s chair round to face the bed properly, ignoring the blanket still half on the floor.
“I know you haven’t written a report yet.
I don’t expect you to, not until you’re fit for it.
But I want to hear the rest of it from you directly, while it’s fresh. ”
“I gave a statement.”
“You gave three sentences to a constable who had no idea what he was writing down.” She says it without heat, just fact. “I want to hear it from you.”
I sigh, and it pulls at something under the dressing, and I let it, because the ache is at least honest.
“The man who stabbed me,” I start, and then stop, because I realize, somewhere under the painkillers, that I never actually got a name. Nobody gave me one. I was too busy bleeding.
“David Smithson,” Hendricks says, filling the gap without being asked. “Forty six. No record beyond a caution in his twenties. Worked as a driver and general handler for Graham Pell’s operation for the better part of a decade, going by what we’re finding in the flat he was using.”
“David Smithson is the Vigilante,” I say, taking the name and using it, because it’s easier to build a story around a name than around a shape in the dark.
“A low-level employee. He drove the boys to appointments. Watched them.” I look at the ceiling rather than at either of their faces, because it’s easier.
“The murders weren’t about justice, not really, not the way it looked from the outside.
They were personal. Jealousy. He wanted certain boys for himself, specifically, and the men he killed were men he believed had access to what he wanted. ”
I don’t tell them how I know that. I don’t tell them that it came together with Micah’s hands pressed hard against a hole in my side and his voice going in and out of focus above me, panicked and babbling in a way I’d never heard from him before, saying Dave’s name over and over like he still couldn’t quite make it sit next to the memory of a man who used to bring him tea.
I had no idea, he kept saying, I had no idea the flowers were from him, I don’t know how he found me, and I lay there going gray at the edges and losing more of myself by the minute, and some cold, functional part of my brain that apparently doesn’t switch off even while the rest of me is dying was already doing the only useful thing left to it, which was building the story that would keep Micah safe from what came next.
Jealousy. Obsession. A grunt with a grudge and a fixation, not a man seeking vengeance, not a case that could ever, under any version of events, be allowed to circle back to Micah as anything other than a victim.
“He was also attempting to frame Micah Vee for the murders,” I go on.
“Another one of his obsessions. A former victim of the same ring. He planted his blood at the final scene and left DNA at two of the others, and I’d guess, once forensics finish going through that flat, they’ll find a great deal more that ties the two together going back years. ”
Neither of them says anything for a moment. Farah’s gone very still with her coffee halfway to her mouth. Hendricks is watching me with an expression I can’t entirely read, which is unusual for her, she’s not normally a difficult read.
I look around the room again, at the empty chair, at the door, and I don’t find what I’m looking for.
“Vee is finally having his wrists seen to,” Hendricks says. “There’s a serious infection. He’s refusing to undress for a full medical exam.”
“He’s an abuse survivor.” I say it flatly, meeting her gaze and not looking away from it. “I’d imagine that’s relevant.”
Her eyes narrow, just slightly. “Who happened to be at scene one.”
“Smithson was stalking him. Followed him to the location when Vee first scoped it, and decided to use it.” I keep my voice level. “There’s nothing more to that than proximity and a man with an agenda.”
She studies me a moment longer, and I hold still under it the way I’ve learned to hold still under most things, and then, apparently satisfied, or at least deciding not to push it while I’m attached to a heart monitor, she lets it go.
“Are you going to give the press the real reason for the murders?” I ask, mostly to move us somewhere else. “The jealousy. The obsession.”
Hendricks’s mouth goes thin. “That’s a battle that cannot be won. Not now. Smithson’s already lapping up the attention from his cell, apparently, telling anyone who’ll listen he did it for justice.” She shakes her head once, like she’s physically putting it aside.
Her phone rings before I can reply to her. She glances at the screen, exhales through her nose in the specific way she does when whatever’s on it is going to ruin the next twenty minutes of her day, and stands. She walks out with the phone already at her ear.
The door swings shut behind her, and it’s just me and Farah, and the quiet stretches out long enough that I can feel it doing something.
“Very nice story,” Farah says eventually. She’s not looking at me. She’s looking at the coffee in her hands like it’s said something interesting. “No loose ends.”
“And?”
She sets the cup down on the little table by the bed, careful, deliberate, the way she does everything when she’s working up to something. “You’re going to take medical retirement, aren’t you?”
It isn’t really a question. I look at her, at eleven years of a person who has never once had to cover for me before this case, who never needed to, because for the whole of those eleven years I was a good cop.
Honest to a fault. A boring rule-stickler.
One who didn’t make friends but got the job done, the correct way.
Micah changed that. He’s the reason there was ever anything for her to notice in the first place, and I understand, watching her say it now, that this is new for both of us.
She’s never had a moral dilemma working with me. She’s a good cop too. Still is.
One quiet decision, offered up for the first time in eleven years, because she’s decided the men who died deserved exactly what they got.
I understand what this is costing her, and it would be far too much to ask if Micah’s freedom didn’t depend on it, so I’ll take it, and give her nothing more than my undying gratitude in return.
“Yeah,” I say. “Medical retirement. I’m out.”
Farah nods, once, short, the kind of nod that closes a file rather than opens one, and she doesn’t say anything else.
She picks her coffee back up, and for just a second something moves across her face that might be relief or might be grief or might be both at once, and then she’s gone too, the door swinging shut behind her exactly the way it did for Hendricks.
I lie there in the sudden quiet with the monitor still keeping its steady, patient rhythm, and I think about how easily that just happened, an entire career folded up and put away in under a minute, and I find I don’t feel what I expect to feel about it.
I feel mostly tired. Tired in a way that’s been building for longer than the last few days.
The door opens again, and this time I know before I’ve even turned my head, because the whole room changes shape around it.
Micah comes in fast, too fast for someone who I strongly suspect spent the whole night in that chair by my bed and only just agreed to let anyone near his own wrists in the last hour.
I don’t know what he told them to keep his shirt on, and I don’t ask, not here, not with Hendricks liable to walk back in at any second, but his color’s better than it was, and I try to take what comfort I can in the fact that a fever like his shows up in blood work whether or not anyone gets a proper look at what’s underneath it, so at least the antibiotics will be right even if the rest of him isn’t being looked after the way he should be.
Both of his wrists are wrapped in fresh white bandages that stand out starkly against his skin, while the bullet wound presumably still has my lousy dressing on it.
He pays no heed to either of his injuries, and crosses the room and takes my hand in both of his like he’s checking it’s still real.
“Everything okay?” His eyes are moving over my face, cataloguing, the way I catalogue things, except when he does it, it feels like being looked after instead of investigated.
“Everything is perfect,” I say, and I mean it more than the words probably convey. “More than perfect,” I add with a wink.
He goes faintly pink at that, and looks down, apparently unable to hold my gaze through it, and his fingers find the plastic hospital band around my wrist instead, turning it idly, reading it the way you read something you’re not actually trying to read until suddenly you are.
He goes still.
“Your first name is Wayne?”
“If you say that name out loud again,” I say, with as much menace as a man on painkillers in a hospital bed can manage, “there will be consequences.”
Micah laughs, delighted, properly delighted, the sound filling up the whole stark little room in a way nothing else in it has managed, and he doesn’t look remotely sorry.
“Your secret is safe with me,” he says, grinning, and leans down and kisses me like he’s got every intention of using it against me for the rest of both our lives.
I can live with that.