Twice

“Meet you. Where the fuck are you? Where’s Lydia?”

“Jeff, man,” said Dax, his voice excited, his accent thickening, “there’s no time to explain. Just meet me as soon as you can.” He gave Jeffrey his location.

“Dax, just tell me what you’ve got. Where’s Lydia?”

But he was talking to dead air. He felt his stomach churn a bit, his heart getting in on the action, as well. He had a keen sense of danger and every nerve inside his body was tingling. He tried Lydia, first at the apartment, then on her cell. He got voice mail both places.

“Shit,” he whispered to himself. He remembered the pale, exhausted, grief-stricken Lydia he’d left behind. If Dax had taken her from the apartment, there had to have been a good reason.

He hesitated a moment, turning his eyes back to Goban, who was looking in his direction now. He cast another glance at the letter on Rebecca’s lap. If he left the apprehension of Jed McIntyre up to the FBI, played by their rules, there were no guarantees that he would ever be caught. And frankly, that wasn’t exactly the outcome Jeffrey was looking for any longer. He turned from the scene and walked toward the car. The FBI could walk the grid, gather evidence for proper identification and prosecution, do what they had to do to tow the line. In the meantime, he was going to make sure Jed McIntyre never took another life.

Stupid, stupid, stupid, careless, fucking stupid, thought Dax through the cloud of his pain. He should have known when he saw that little dwarf with Danielle that there was something up. But who’d ever felt threatened by a midget, for fuck’s sake?

Only as he’d pulled up to the doorway in the meatpacking district where Danielle had instructed him to meet her did he wonder: Why here? Usually he met her at her corner on Tenth Avenue. But he hadn’t really thought much of it. For all her chronic neediness and her pathetic whining, he trusted her. Not in the way of friendship, exactly, but just that she was predictable. She had needs that their business transactions helped her to fulfill; it was a good arrangement. It was easy money for her. Why would she fuck with that?

She stood awkwardly beside a Dumpster. She was made up for work, this time in a wig of red curls, iridescent purple hot pants, thigh-high black boots, and a leather motorcycle jacket. Some weird kind of necklace glinted in the light from across the street. Her pink T-shirt that read YOU CAN’T HANDLE THE TRUTH! in red block letters. No shit, thought Dax. Danielle was a one-person Crying Game.

He hadn’t even noticed the midget until he stopped the car. They made quite a pair. Dax had to turn away and suppress a laugh. Danielle, six feet of skanky chic, and then the little guy, who looked like a reject from a Ray Bradbury traveling carnival, barely reaching the seam of her hot pants; the street life encouraged some strange couplings, that was for certain. But this was The Twilight Zone.

He rolled down the window, smelled the snow and the stench of stale blood and raw meat. He was instantly alerted to a problem when Danielle didn’t walk over to the Rover.

“So what’s the fucking emergency, Danielle?” he said, sounding casual as he released the safety on the Desert Eagle wedged between the driver’s seat and the center console.

“This here is Horatio,” she said, motioning stiffly toward her small companion. “Says he’s got word from Rain. But he wouldn’t tell me. He only wants to talk to you.” Her voice sounded different to Dax, thick and strained. He couldn’t see her eyes in the darkness. He noticed then that a wall-mounted bulb above her head had been shattered.

“Well, let’s have it, then, mate,” he said, looking down at the dwarf. “What have you got?”

The dwarf shook his head. He hopped lightly from foot to foot, as if doing a strange ritualistic dance.

“He wants you to get out of the car. He’s afraid of you,” explained Danielle, as if she were Horatio’s translator.

“He’s going to have a lot more to fear if I get out of the car,” he said with a smile that wasn’t a smile at all. Then he gave a little laugh to break the tension that seemed to be building. “Come on, Danielle. The two of you get in and we’ll go to McDonald’s. Isn’t that what you wanted?”

“You’ve got to come out here, Dax. Or Horatio’s not going to give you the message.”

“Well, fuck you both, then,” he said, rolling up the window.

“Dax!” Danielle had a chance to yell before the razor wire that had been around her throat was pulled taught by a hand that appeared out of the darkness. She raised her hands to her throat and pulled them back bleeding; a horrible noise escaped from her mouth as blood spilled from the wound, from her lips, and down her shirt. Dax sprang from the car with the Desert Eagle in his hand.

He fired a round into the dark from where the hand had come. Its roar bounced off the buildings surrounding the empty street and he heard the bullet connect with the concrete wall, sparks flying. In the fireworks he saw a dark form.

“Say hello to my little friend,” came a voice from the darkness. As the words floated across the night air to Dax’s ears, the little bastard dwarf slashed at the back of his calves with what must have been a straight razor. Achilles’ tendons sliced, Dax fell straight to the ground, the pain like rockets up the backs of his legs, the gun launching from his hand and landing out of reach.

He looked to Danielle, who had slid down the wall to slump on the ground. Her glassy eyes had rolled back into her head and Dax could see that she had bled out already. On his forearms, he crawled after his gun, craning his neck to look behind him as he went but unable to see the midget now. As his fingers strained for the weapon, a combat boot came to rest on top of it. The midget appeared to his right, his straight razor gleaming like a shooting star, a ghoulish grin on his face. Dax fought for consciousness against the white pain that was nearly paralyzing and the weakness he imagined must be resulting from a loss of blood.

Jed McIntyre stepped out of the darkness.

“I should have killed you when I had the chance,” groaned Dax, rolling over on his back.

“My thoughts exactly,” said Jed as he brought his combat boot down hard onto Dax’s face.

“The destroyers?”

“That’s what she said before she went all Jekyll and Hyde on me.”

Lydia was one with the upholstery of the Taurus, her whole body sinking into its softness, the headrest the only thing actually holding up her head. Fatigue like this was a whole new thing to her.

“Lydia,” said Ford, noting with concern the pallor of her skin, the dark circles under her eyes. “I hope you don’t mind me saying, but you look like shit. Are you up to this?”

“What I’m not up to is lying around thinking about how fucked up my life is right now,” she said, rolling her head over to meet his gaze and placing a hand on her stomach. He gave her a sad smile and a nod.

“I hear you,” he said. “Still, you look like you belong on a gurney.”

An ambulance wailed past them as though to make a point, its red and white lights flashing, siren screaming.

“She said something else, too,” said Lydia, looking after the ambulance, which had stopped because the traffic was slow to give way. The wailing continued, seemed to get louder, and was joined by a cacophony of honking horns.

“What’s that?”

“She calls Eleanor ‘The queen’… ‘the Queen of the Damned.’ ”

“The mother-daughter relationship is very complicated,” said Ford, pulling a bad Austrian accent.

“Eleanor Ross has done a lot of lying since she hired Jeffrey and me,” Lydia continued, as if thinking aloud. “Really… she’s done little else. She never told us about her murder trial or her missing son until confronted.”

“Sins of omission…”

“And, if you think about it, she has a lot to gain. If Julian is declared incompetent, she’s most likely to become Lola and Nathaniel’s guardian.”

“So you think it’s about the kids.”

“They’ll be worth quite a bit. Daddy’s dead; Mommy’s in the nuthouse. If Julian doesn’t recover, the family estate will likely go into trust for them. There will need to be an executor.”

“Grandma.”

Lydia shrugged. It was a theory she was trying on, something she and Jeffrey had begun to discuss during their last visit to Haunted. It didn’t fit quite right, but it was something. She looked at her Movado watch.