Abby
Abby wasted two hours at the hospital the next evening, hanging around and waiting to see the nurse that was on duty the night before. But despite how hard Abby searched, she couldn’t seem to find her. “Hey, new girl!” one of the other nurses shouted after her. “Mind taking this food over to room thirty? I’ve got my hands full down the hall.”
“Sure,” Abby said, accepting the dinner tray and taking it over to the patient in room thirty. She should have just explained that she didn’t fucking work there, given that her masquerade hadn’t paid off at all after two hours of concentrated effort. Her brain wasn’t wired that way. She couldn’t refuse help to someone who needed it, even if it was only getting somebody’s dinner to them on time.
She had just delivered the food and was walking back out into the main hallway, heading in the direction of the hospital’s exit, when somebody grabbed her by the shoulder. Adrenaline flooded her entire body all at once. “What the fuck?” she asked as she turned around.
Jagger. Of course, it was. He pulled her into a corner next to a water fountain, looking over his shoulder to make sure that nobody was watching them.
“What are you doing here?” Abby hissed, her voice irritated and rude. “I told you not to come.”
“The autopsy report came in,” Jagger replied, his eyes still darting around rather than meeting hers.
“What does it say?” Abby whispered, surprised that the results had come back so quickly. The anger faded from her, slowly but surely, like water draining out of a sink.
“Nothing,” Jagger said. Abby just stared at him, her brows furrowed in frustration, wordlessly demanding that he elaborate. “The coroner didn’t find anything. They just, they said it was natural causes. I don’t know what they were looking for, but there’s nothing in the report that suggests he was murdered.”
“Except the fucking reality of the situation,” Abby spat in frustration, walking over to the nearest trash can and kicking it. There was instant regret as pain streaked throughout her toes.
“Hey, hey, hey,” Jagger said, walking over to grab her by the shoulders, pulling her back from the trash can so she couldn’t hurt herself anymore.
“Don’t try to fucking talk me down, okay?” Abby said, a warning tone to her voice. “It’s not going to work. I know what I saw. He was fine. He was fine!”
“I know,” Jagger said softly, still holding on to her arms. His grip was firm but gentle. In the back of Abby’s mind, despite how angry she was, she couldn’t help but wonder what it would feel like to have him grab her little harder, hurt her a bit, maybe even throw her around. The idea helped her calm down, imagining what it would be like to be hurt by him. She knew it was fucked-up, even sick, but it soothed her nonetheless. She imagined fresh bruises popping up all over her body. Once again, she had failed Robert. She left him behind in the hospital and made him vulnerable to an attacker she had refused to believe in. She fucked up medically and let him die before his time. Either way, she had earned her punishment and she needed to be hurt.
Jagger looked straight at her, his wide dark eyes bearing down as hard as they could, intensely staring into hers. “I believe you, okay? I believe you,” he said slowly. And the thoughts of self-harm left her brain as quickly as they had arrived.
“You think somebody hurt him, don’t you?” Abby asked in a soft whisper, looking from side to side to make sure that none of the hospital staff were listening. For all she knew, someone who worked there would be involved in Robert’s death, even if it had been an accident as a result of negligence. She couldn’t risk letting anyone know that she knew and give them a chance to cover their tracks before she could discover them.
“I do,” Jagger answered her, nodding slowly as their eyes met again. “I believe you, Abby.”
The words hit her like a shot to the chest, causing her blood to freeze in her veins. “You do?”
Jagger didn’t say anything, just communicating silently with his eyes. She couldn’t detect any doubt on his face, no matter how hard she searched. It meant so much, more than he could even begin to understand, to have someone believe in her. You know why. You know why it feels good to listen to, she thought to herself, but she cut off that train of thought as quickly as possible, not wanting to follow it to its natural conclusion. She wasn’t ready to go down memory lane and trace the traumas of her teenage years right now. So, what— No one listened to her when she complained about symptoms as a teenager, and she’d gotten sicker and sicker as a result. It was about time that she got over it. It was in the past, right? Besides, she had bigger fish to fry.
She opened her mouth to say something in response, not exactly knowing what was going to come out of her mouth ahead of time. “Thank you,” she mumbled as softly as she could. “Thank you for…. Yeah. You know,” she said.
“So, what are we going to do about it now?” Jagger asked, and his gaze turned intense, almost fiery as he stared hard at her. She knew what he wanted. He wants me to lie, she thought to herself. She bit down on her lip, the pain more comfortable than the uncertainty that swirled around in the pit of her stomach.
“I don’t know. I just don’t,” she said. “I wish I could help.”
“You can help,” Jagger argued. “You know you can.”
“Just let me think,” she started to say, but then out of the corner of her eye, she saw a familiar face walking down the hallway. “Wait, wait, there she is, there she is!” Abby whisper frantically before chasing after the nurse from the night before. “Excuse me, excuse me,” she said, trying to get the nurse’s attention as subtly as she could. “Excuse me, can I talk to you?”
The woman turned around to face her, sighing deeply, clearly overworked. “What?” she asked.
“Um, you probably don’t remember me,” Abby began, quickly formulating a lie to use. “I came here visiting my dad last night, um, before he passed away…”
The nurse’s face changed, softening immediately. “Oh, I’m so sorry,” she said sympathetically.
“Thank you. Yeah, um, I was just wondering. My siblings live nearby, but we don’t have a good relationship. Did either of them come by to visit him after I left last night? His name was Robert Sharp. Do you remember him?”
The nurse rolled her eyes to the ceiling, obviously trying to think hard to remember the previous night. “I believe there was a man who tried to come by after you,” the woman said a minute later. “But I didn’t let him in. Mr. Sharp needed to sleep.” She finished, a sad smile touching her lips.
“Thank you. That must have been my brother,” Abby said, faking a smile as best as she could. “I’ll give him a call.”
There it was. Somebody tried to get in to see Robert. It’s not proof of anything, her inner voice argued, but she didn’t give a fuck right now. As far as Abby was concerned, this was clue number one, and she was going to follow the trail until she found out what really happened.
# # #
Jagger
Jagger waited next to the water fountain, trying to look as inconspicuous as possible while Abby talked to the nurse from the night before. He figured it was better to let them talk by themselves, nurse to nurse, woman to woman. A few moments later, Abby walked back to Jagger, grabbing him by the elbow to lead him toward the waiting room. “A man tried to visit him last night. Maybe he found a way to get in when the nurse wasn’t on-duty and slipped something into his tubes. Is there any way we could get our hands on the security tape, do you think?”
Jagger was at a loss for words for a few seconds, absorbing what Abby had said. He was a little taken aback by how energized Abby suddenly seemed, how passionately she was talking to him, completely different from what she was like the night before on the phone. “I—I don’t know,” he finally said. “I wouldn’t know where to start.”
Abby’s eyes unfocused, staring off into the distance, obviously lost in thought. “It must be the responsibility of the security team, at least that’s what it’s like at my hospital. I have—” She paused, staring down at the watch wrapped around her wrist and frowned. “I have like an hour before I’ve got to go visit one of my patients across town. Do you think you can help me get into the security office? We’ve got to look at the tapes before someone erases them.”
Jagger nodded slowly, trying to come up with a plan. “Who would they listen to? Like would they let a nurse in to see the tapes? If they think you work here, they might let you in to review them.”
“You don’t know a whole lot about hospitals, do you?” Abby said, a smile appearing on her face. Jagger wasn’t sure if he’d ever seen her smile before, at least not genuinely. “Nurses get no fucking respect. If I try to get in, they’ll shout me down or threaten to report me, and then we’ll get kicked out.”
Jagger chewed on his lower lip, pulling it hard between his teeth. It was a nervous habit that helped him think. “What if you weren’t a nurse, though? What if you were a doctor? What do you need— A lab coat? A stethoscope?”
“Essentially,” Abby agreed. “But I don’t know if I can pull that off. There’s not a lot of female doctors in this hospital; not that I can see, at least,” she said, looking over her shoulder.
“Right,” Jagger said, biting his tongue until his thoughts came together. “They’d notice a female doctor, is what you’re saying. They’d know you aren’t from this hospital.” He looked around, scanning up and down the hallway for a bathroom. “But a male doctor… That would blend right in.”
“You thinking of stealing some scrubs and playing dress-up?” Abby asked, her eyebrows raised so high that they almost disappeared into her hair.
“I can fake it. I’m a paramedic, I know at least some medical shit,” he said, feeling weirdly defensive. “I can do this. I know I can.”
Abby pursed her lips a little, clearly skeptical, but a second later she sighed and nodded. “Okay, I can help you pull it together. We’ve got to get you into some scrubs and a white coat, and then we’ve got to find the main security office. I’ve got to leave in like half an hour though, so let’s get moving,” she said before breaking into a brisk walk, so fast that Jagger felt a little spark of panic in his chest before he broke into a light run to follow after her.
“Yo, slow down,” he said as he trailed behind her. “You’re drawing attention to us by going too fast.”
Abby just shook her head and scoffed at him. For some reason, it made Jagger smile and chuckle a little bit under his breath, rather than offend him. She was so fucking sassy. Most people around him acted submissive when they were with him, both in the fire department and in the motorcycle club, because he’d done so much for so long and earned the respect. It was almost refreshing, being around somebody who so obviously didn’t give a single fuck about his ego.
“You don’t know shit about actual hospitals, do you?” Abby said, her voice almost teasing. It was nice, seeing her relaxed enough to make fun of him. Jagger wanted to hear more of that. “Doctors and nurses run everywhere they go. Otherwise, nothing would ever get done. Hold on, stop here,” she said, suddenly freezing in place. Jagger almost skidded as he slid to a stop behind her, looking as she pointed to the far corner. “There. That’s a locker room. Go in and steal some scrubs and a coat.”
“Where?” Jagger asked, trying to find the room that she was pointing out.
Abby groaned and rolled her eyes, sticking her hand out again to direct him toward a room four doors down. Again, Jagger couldn’t help but to be amused by her, despite the intensity of the circumstances. He complied with her directions, casually walking across the hall and into the locker room as covertly as possible. He held his breath as he walked into the lover area and looked around to see if anybody else was inside. There was one male doctor, shrugging out of a T-shirt before changing into a set of scrubs, but if he noticed Jagger, he didn’t appear to care. Jagger walked over to an open locker, grabbing a pair of scrubs and changing into them as quickly as possible without looking frantic or panicked. There was a stethoscope, but no lab coat. He figured he’d just go ahead with what he had rather than wasting precious time.
He casually walked back out into the hallway, shutting the door of the locker room behind him to look as natural as possible before heading over to Abby, who was playing on her phone. “I’ve found a map of the hospital,” she mumbled, trying to keep her voice as low as possible. “It’s not labeled, but there’s a big room on the top floor that I think might be what we’re looking to find. Let’s go.” She immediately began moving again, heading toward the stairs at the end of the hall.
“There’s an elevator, you know,” Jagger said, gesturing in the opposite direction. He saw it on his way in, a little over twenty minutes before.
Abby shook her head. “Everyone’s going to use that. We don’t want anyone to see us, right?”
Jagger was a little lost for words, shocked at how quickly Abby had adjusted to a secret investigation. He’d been doing this for months now, sneaking around, but it was immediately obvious that she had a mind for it. At least when it came to hospitals, she keenly observed her surroundings to form the best strategy to find out the information that they needed. He followed her lead, letting her walk him toward the stairway and quickly took the steps until they hit the very top of the building. “Okay,” she hissed in a low whisper, gesturing toward the door to the top floor. “Go there and look for a security center. Tell them you need to monitor the patient in room one-three-three. That’s the room that Robert was in last night.”
“Aren’t you coming with me?” Jagger asked, and he must have said it too loudly, as Abby frantically waved her hands in the air, wordlessly telling him to shut up.
She opened the door a little and stared out of the crack to the top floor. “Okay,” she said in a barely audible whisper. “There’s nobody coming. Get out there and ask for the security room if you can’t find it yourself. They’ll listen to you. Male doctors get whatever they want.”
Jagger almost smiled at that. Abby’s resentment toward doctors in her workplace was incredibly obvious. “Okay,” he whispered back, opening the door and walking into the top floor, leaving Abby waiting behind him in the dark stairwell.
The top floor was a ghost town. The entire hallway was devoid of any sign of life. Jagger looked around, searching for the security room or something that could point him in the right direction. His eyes landed in the center of the ceiling a little way down the hall. There it was, but the door looked closed. Jagger approached slowly, sweat beginning to form on the back of his neck as he tested the doorknob. It was locked. Shit. There was no way he could find the key to this door. It could have been anywhere in the entire hospital. His only shot was if there were people already in there, but that was risky as hell. Jagger leaned his head against the door, sighing a little to summon up some courage. Fuck it.
Jagger rapped his knuckles against the door lightly, trying not to seem overeager. “Excuse me? It’s Dr. Pataki. Can I come in?”
“What?” A confused voice on the other side of the door said. There were some muffled sounds, and then a moment later it swung open, revealing a short chubby male security guard. “What?” he said again.
Jagger feigned impatience, staring the other man down with as much arrogance as he could muster. “Let me guess. The night shift guy didn’t tell you.”
“Josh?” The young security guard asked, his brows furrowed up in confusion.
“I don’t know his name,” Jagger snapped. He figured the meaner he seemed, the more this innocent-looking guard would yield, not even knowing that he had all the power in the situation. “Well. Are you going to let me in or not?”
“Um, well, regulations say that you have to get a pass first…” The security guard said, scratching the side of his face nervously.
Jagger just stared at him, calculating the best strategy to press this poor guy’s buttons. “Why do you think I talked to what’s-his-face? I already got the permission I needed. Now move aside.” The guard twitched a little, almost jumping up in alarm at how Jagger raised his voice, but he didn’t move out of the way. Dammit. “If you make me wait around for hours until Josh is on shift again, I’ll report this to your supervisor, for wasting a doctor’s time. Do you understand me?”
“Shit,” The guard murmured, blowing out his breath in frustration. “Okay, five minutes, all right? I have to take my break soon.”
“Security guards taking breaks, no wonder this hospital is in fucking shambles,” Jagger muttered as he pushed his way into the room, walking over to a stack of tapes. Each one was labeled with a different day of the week. They must have had a system in place: taping over the footage of a certain day seven times a week. Yesterday was Wednesday, so Jagger quickly grabbed that case of tapes, rifling around between the different options until he found the right room and popped it into the main computer to view.
Jagger fast-forwarded through the bulk of the footage. Bobby was only there in the room for two, maybe three hours before he died. He quickly clicked through at regular intervals, checking every five-minute chunk of the video for anyone other than a nurse or a doctor visiting Bobby’s room. He finally landed on the chunk of time where he and Abby were in the room. Shortly after, there was a period where the nurse from the night before walked in and out of the room several times, after which a male figure dressed in all black appeared in the doorway. The door was so far away from the camera in the corner of the room that Jagger couldn’t make out any details of the man’s face. In any case, the nurse pointed out into the hallway, and the figure retreated. Jagger sighed deeply and clicked ahead in the video, looking for a point when the nurse was gone. But after thirty or forty more minutes of footage, static overcame the images on the tape, a blur of grey and white overtaking all the furniture in the hospital room surrounding Bobby’s sleeping body. “Fuck, fuck!” Jagger muttered under his breath, clicking forward to the last few minutes of the tape. All static, all the way through. There was no way to tell if anyone had reentered the room after the nurse left. “Shit.”
“Is the patient doing badly?” The security guard asked from behind him.
“Yeah,” Jagger said. “Really bad. Thanks for letting me look.” He quickly got to his feet, walked out of the security room, and headed back into the stairwell.
Abby was waiting for him, jumping the second he reappeared in front of her. “Well?” she asked, her voice strained and intense even at a low volume.
Jagger shook his head sadly. “There was somebody in there, but it was too blurry. I couldn’t make it out.”
Abby groaned and rocked her body back to lean against the wall, practically cracking her head on the hard surface. Jagger knew that it wasn’t a good idea to ask if she was okay when it was obvious to him that she wasn’t. It almost worried him, seeing how invested she was in this investigation. Maybe this is how other people have felt about me, Jagger thought. For months now he’d heard muffled whispers and murmurs as he approached a group of firefighters before everybody would go silent when he asked what they were talking about. It was clear that his passion had eroded others’ trust in him, making everyone think he was an overly-invested weirdo. Most of the time, he didn’t care. The safety of Satan’s Blazes came first, always. For his job, he depended on trusting his coworkers with his very life, and it made things considerably more difficult when they were talking trash about him behind his back. It was refreshing and illuminating at the same time, seeing his past behavior reflected in Abby.
“Well, that’s that, I guess,” Abby finally muttered after a long moment of silence.
Jagger’s fingers itched with some urgent desire to do something, to pat her on the back or grab her shoulder and shake her out of her despair. “Hey,” He said softly, conscious that they were still in a restricted area with a possibility of someone overhearing them. “Hey, it’s not over yet. There’s still more to discover here.”
Abby shrugged a little, but the pain was evident on her face, her eyebrows looking like they were glued together as she frowned. “What the hell do we do now?”
“Square one,” Jagger said. “We’re no worse off than we were an hour ago. Somebody did this, and they left a clue somewhere. We’ll figure it out.”
“In time?” Abby said, finally looking up from the floor to meet Jagger’s eyes. “They could get away, leave the goddamn country for all we know if they think we’re on to them.”
“He,” Jagger corrected. “If he thinks we’re onto him.” Abby’s expression changed for a second, a mere glimmer of hope sliding across her face before fading away just as quickly. She got his point: They knew something about the perpetrator that they didn’t before. He was a man.
But Abby was still unconvinced, groaning a little beneath her breath as she rocked her body back and forth on the wall, painfully banging her lower back into the concrete over and over again. “So, we’ve reduced the search from everybody in the entire world to about half of it. That’s not a great start.”
“No,” Jagger agreed. “You’re right. But it’s something. It’s enough to keep going.” He paused, searching her face as he waited for her to answer him. “If you want to, keep going,” he added a moment later, his voice dropping to a whisper.
Abby remained silent, staring down at her own hands, which clasped together so tightly that her veins popped up like they were trying to escape from her grip.
“Okay,” Jagger said, seeking to keep his voice steady so that his disappointment didn’t show through. “I get it. Take care of yourself.” He turned and headed back down the stairs, but a second later he heard footsteps following him.
“Wait! Wait up!” Abby cried out behind him, going faster until she could grab his shoulder and push him back against the wall. “I’m in. I’m still in,” she said urgently.
Jagger couldn’t fight the smile that quickly spread across his face like wildfire. “Okay. Good. I’ll check in with the MC, see if anybody’s been in touch with Bobby recently. He hasn’t associated with the club in, like, a decade. Whoever targeted him must have been following us for a long time, or otherwise, they did a fuck-ton of research. That type of shit leaves a trail. It has to.”
“Can I come with you?” she asked as they began walking, this time at a reasonable pace, back down the steps, heading for the exit at the lowest level.
Jagger shook his head. “Not yet. Let me figure out how risky it is first.”
“It’s pretty fucking risky, Jagger,” Abby said. “I mean, a man is dead. I don’t think you’re going to find out it’s actually just a path of sunshine and rainbows and candy unicorns.”
“That’s a very specific image,” Jagger said with a laugh, smiling wider at the sight of a blush staining Abby’s cheeks. “But anyway, I think you should go home and get some rest. When was the last time you slept for more than five hours at a time?”
“Jesus, like six months, maybe,” Abby replied, but a small smile appeared on her face. It was as though she was so tired, and she no longer had the energy to be angry about it. “I’ve got a patient to see anyway.”
“Well, afterward, then. Go home. Sleep. You’ll need to be fully charged to help me out later,” Jagger said, opening the door for Abby as they walked into the parking garage.
Abby took a small wallet out of her back pocket and began rummaging around inside, searching for something. “My fucking metro card…” She muttered to herself.
“You’re taking the train home? Do you have a car?” He asked her.
“Used to,” Abby said. He waited for her to elaborate, but she didn’t offer any other information.
“Bad accident or something?” Jagger asked, genuinely curious.
Abby laughed a little, but the sound that left her mouth was humorless. It was bitter and hard. “You could say that, yeah.” Jagger just stared at her. Abby sighed deeply and just shook her head. “Don’t worry about it. I don’t have one anymore.”
Jagger sensed that it would be the wrong move to push her at this point, but his curiosity had been piqued. There were so many battle scars he knew were there but couldn’t see, so many stories to tell, and none of them seemed particularly happy. He wanted to open her head up and discover all her secrets, even if it was none of his business.
He was trying to come up with a smooth goodbye line when her phone rang, loud and shrill. “Jesus, that’s a fucking scary ringtone,” he said, plugging his ears.
“I need it to make sure I wake up in the morning,” Abby explained before pulling her phone out of her other pocket, her forehead wrinkling in confusion as she stared at the screen. “I don’t know this number…” she murmured before clicking a button on her phone and bringing it to her ear. “Hello?”
Jagger watched as her face changed, her eyes growing wide before she pulled the phone away from her ear and turned on the speakerphone. “You better back the fuck off,” a deep, gravelly voice said. “I’m warning you, cunt.” Then the line went dead. Jagger saw Abby’s fingers trembling as she put the phone back in her pocket.
“What did they say before you turned the speaker on?” Jagger asked without hesitation, his heart throbbing in his throat as the words repeated on a loop inside his head. You better back the fuck off. You better back the fuck off. You better back the fuck off.
“Uh, um,” Abby said before exhaling shakily. “Just that… they know I’ve been poking around the hospital, and I need to stop if I know what’s good for me.”
Jagger watched as Abby pulled her hair down from the tight ponytail on top of her head, her long waves cascading down around her chin. She pushed her fingers through her hair, tugging on it so hard it looked like she was intentionally hurting herself. Jagger’s hands itched to reach forward and pull hers down, to keep her from doing any harm to herself. He knew that it would be inappropriate to touch her at all, let alone in such an intimate manner.
“Shit,” Jagger finally said, at a loss for words to say. His heart was thumping incredibly hard inside of him, sending shaky vibrations throughout his entire body. He was fucking terrified, he realized in a vague, distant way. His brain and his body seemed removed from one another as his fear grew more and more intense. All he knew was that he wanted to crush Abby into his body, shield her until they were out of sight, invisible to all other people on the planet.
“Yeah. Shit,” Abby agreed, blowing out her breath. She seemed to recover before Jagger did, straightening up and clearing her throat as if nothing had happened. “Well. I guess teenagers have to have a hobby, too.”
“You think it was just a prank?” Jagger asked.
Abby shrugged. “It’s my best guess anyway. Right? That’s got to be what it is?” There was a desperate edge to her voice, so subtle that the casual observer would have never noticed it, but Jagger could hear it: The doubt. The uncertainty. The fear.
Jagger didn’t know what to say at first, but somehow, he knew that he couldn’t lie. It didn’t feel right, even if the point of it was to make her feel better. He couldn’t say anything other than the truth. “I don’t think so. It doesn’t make sense.”
“What do you mean?” Abby asked, her voice increasing in pitch with each syllable coming out a little squeakier than the next. Her terror was growing, and Jagger’s stomach sunk with guilt, but he pushed forward anyway.
“How would some random teenager know that you were hanging around the hospital? Even if you have a stalker or something, they wouldn’t know that you were here to do anything other than work. It’s got to be him, the man in the suit.”
Abby rubbed her bare arms before crossing them tightly, hugging herself against the cold of the parking garage. “It can’t be, right? How could the guy on the tape - how could he know that I was here? Unless…” She trailed off, staring down at the floor, but Jagger could see the terror in her eyes grow bigger and bigger.
“Unless…” Jagger continued. “Unless he was at the hospital today.”
Abby sucked in air, like she was about to leap underwater, and her face suddenly looked pinched, drawn-together like all her features were trying to hide. “So, you’re saying… that they might be here… now?”
Jagger swallowed thickly, trying to clear his throat so that none of the fear he was feeling could seep into his voice when he spoke. “Yeah. Yeah, I think so.”
“Fucking hell,” Abby muttered before breaking into a brisk walk, heading for the entrance of the parking garage. “Jesus Christ.”
“Slow down, wait, where are you going?” Jagger asked, beginning to jog a little to catch up with her. “Stop.” He grabbed her shoulders and pulled her back.
“What?” she demanded, her tone sharp and hard as she glared up at him.
“Just tell me where you’re going,” he said, keeping his hands on her shoulders but loosening his grip.
“Home, duh, where else am I going to go? I’ll have to cancel my appointment with my patient. I can’t lead anyone to their house. I need to get out of public right now. That’s the smart thing to do,” Abby said in a rush, looking over Jagger’s shoulders, trying to see if there were any dark figures waiting in the shadows to attack her.
“And, what, you’re going to take the bus? The train? Walk? It’s not safe, Abby,” Jagger said. Abby clicked her teeth and looked away from him. She couldn’t hide the fear that remained in her eyes. Jagger decided to push the issue some more. “It’s safer if you’re with somebody, somebody you can trust.”
“Yeah? And who’s that?” Abby said in a harsh tone, but a second later her façade melted, her hand coming up to rub her eyes furiously as if she were waking up from a long sleep. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I don’t mean to be a bitch. Or maybe I do, I don’t know. But it’s not right. I’m just - sorry. I don’t want to take it out on you. You’re just trying to help.” She looked back up at Jagger, her eyes wide and full of regret instead of fear. She looked beautiful still, but Jagger wished he could just see her smile again, see those eyes lit up and glowing rather than weighed down with worry.
“It’s okay,” Jagger said, slowing rubbing his thumbs in small circles on her shoulders, willing her tension to disappear. It appeared to work for a minute, as Abby’s eyes slid shut and she rocked back into his grasp, but then a moment later she shrugged out of his arms, stepping back away from him.
“I should go, I should…go sleep,” she said, rubbing her forehead and screwing her eyes shut. “I’m gonna fucking collapse soon if I don’t.”
“Let me drive you home,” Jagger said. “If only for my peace of mind.”
Abby huffed out a laugh. “No, no, it’s okay. I’m a big girl. I can get home on my own.”
“Listen, I know you’re used to taking care of everything and everyone by yourself, but I can help. It’s dangerous here. Please, just let me give you a ride. I’ll leave you alone, once you’re home safe. Okay?”
Abby exhaled heavily, biting her lip a little as she stared up into Jagger’s eyes. “Okay,” she said softly, her voice so low that Jagger suspected she was embarrassed to agree to his offer.
He turned on his heel and gestured in the direction of his car, allowing Abby to follow a pace behind him so that they weren’t walking side by side. He got the sense that she was buzzing with anxiety and needed space around her body to diffuse the fear that naturally followed because of the threatening phone call.
After getting into Jagger’s truck, they pulled out of the hospital’s parking garage and out onto the main road. They were silent for a little while before Jagger coughed a little, puncturing the silence before speaking. “Um, so, where do I turn? To get to your place?”
Abby pointed physically before answering out loud. “Left at the next light.”
“You live far from here?” Jagger asked.
She shrugged. “It’s on the edge of town, but I don’t mind. My place is cheap. That’s all that matters.”
Jagger nodded a little. He wondered how somebody who seemed to work so much appeared to be so poor, but he figured it would be rude to ask so he didn’t. “My MC is stationed out in that direction anyway,” he said casually, trying to lighten up the mood.
“So, do you guys run drugs or what?” Abby asked bluntly a second later. Clearly, she was far less concerned with politeness than Jagger was. When he hesitated to answer, she spoke again. “Oh, right, you can’t tell a non-member. Okay, blink once for cocaine, twice for heroin.”
He laughed, the effort of it almost hurting his stomach. It had been so long since he felt genuinely amused. Abby was such a grumbly, stressed-out person; he wouldn’t have guessed that she was funny. “No, no, it’s nothing like that. We used to do stuff like that, like twenty, twenty-five years ago,” he said, rolling his eyes back in his head as he mentally calculated. “Years before I joined up, anyway.”
“So, what do you do, just drink and ride around and pat each other on the ass and stuff?” she asked, triggering another laugh out of Jagger’s throat.
“Basically,” he replied, the smile still stuck on his face as he followed Abby’s nonverbal instructions, taking several turns until he hit the highway.
“Male friendships are very intense, aren’t they?” she asked.
Jagger shrugged a little. “I guess. Not so much for me anymore,” he said without thinking. He hadn’t meant to introduce his personal relationships as a topic of conversation, but he slipped into it anyway, and Abby didn’t hesitate to grab onto it.
“What’s that mean? Are you growing distant with your brothers or something? Do you guys call each other brothers, by the way, or is that just a pop culture stereotype?”
Jagger laughed again, probably disproportionately loudly, but it just felt nice to be joking around for once. “Yes,” he replied.
“To which question?” Abby asked.
“Both, actually,” Jagger said, the smile slowly fading from his face. “I’ve been…You know, I’ve spent less time there, since I’ve been searching for this arsonist. Doesn’t leave me a lot of time to drink and hang out and flirt with women.”
“It’s hard to imagine you just flirting and hanging out,” Abby said, her voice barely above a murmur. He wondered if she was just thinking out loud.
Jagger took the next exit, slowing down as the car entered Abby’s quiet, almost bare neighborhood. “I guess I just don’t do stuff like that anymore.” I’m not the same person I was, Jagger thought, but he didn’t necessarily feel sad about it.
“Me neither,” Abby said softly, turning to stare out of the window as they approached the parking lot of her apartment building.
He was tempted to ask why, to ask what happened to her that changed everything. It couldn’t just be Bobby. She was the same person today as she had been yesterday. Something about her suggested a massive transformation as if there were long emotional stretch marks etched all over her personality, thick scars that silently told her story without delving into specifics. Something bad has happened to her, Jagger couldn’t help but think. Something awful. He wondered what she was like before, what kind of lighter, sweeter person she could have been. He guessed that version of Abby was gone forever, and if he asked where that person went, Abby probably wouldn’t answer. It wasn’t like he could blame her for it. Our current selves depend on our past ones staying dead. I wouldn’t want to wake up my younger self either, he thought. Better to just stay quiet. Better to stay dead.
Jagger parked as close to Abby’s apartment building as possible, getting out of his car before she did. He figured if he waited she would try to say goodbye and get out of the car without him, and for some reason, he felt like he had to walk her to her door. Anything else would leave him unsatisfied. Maybe there was some part of him that just wanted to feel like a gentleman, but it felt more urgent than that. He walked up the front pathway a couple of paces ahead of Abby, scaling the steps up to her apartment number and waiting by the door as she caught up.
“Geez, are you training for a marathon or something?” Abby sarcastically asked as she removed a set of keys from the little pocket inside her wallet.
Jagger didn’t respond to the teasing insult, watching as she put the keys in the door and opened it. “Shit, did I leave my fucking lights on? Goddammit,” Abby muttered as she walked inside. A second later, Jagger heard her gasp, deep and hard, like something was choking her.
“What? What’s wrong?” Jagger asked, hurrying around Abby’s body to see what she was looking at.
Abby’s apartment looked like a hurricane had hit it. Her furniture was all over the place, some of the legs of her chairs and tables ripped off, lying in pieces on the floor. Articles of clothes were strewn about, mostly ripped apart. Chunks of Abby’s sweaters and dresses and scrubs made a pathway into her bathroom, where a message could be seen on the mirror, written in red smudges: BACK OFF BITCH.
Abby dropped to the floor, wrapping her arms around her knees, frozen to the ground. Jagger wanted to grab her, take her into his arms and carry her back to the car, driving away as far as possible to keep her from whoever was responsible for this mess. Instead, he ambled around the room, surveying the damage. There were other messages written on the wall in similar red print, written with what looked like lipstick they’d probably found in her apartment. “We’ll fucking kill you, cunt” was written beneath her window. Jagger licked his fingers and rubbed at the words, trying to erase them before Abby could see them. It wouldn’t have mattered anyway; she was immobile, a pile of inert limbs on the floor.
Jagger walked back over to her. “Do you have anything important here? I can look for the stuff you need,” he said softly. “Otherwise I’ll go ahead and call the police.”
Abby shrugged. “Doesn’t matter. I’m sure they got everything I have that’s worth shit,” she said, dropping her head down lower until her eyes disappeared under her arms.
Jagger walked over to the drawers, which were pulled halfway out of their hinges in the dresser next to the bed. There was a pile of documents hanging out of the bottom one. Abby’s birth certificate stuck out. Jagger leaned down to check the rest of the papers, including her Social Security card and old transcripts from her college. He dropped the papers again and moved on to the next highest drawer.
And, there, underneath a few shirts that miraculously escaped the attacks of the intruder, was a pile of cash, a thick wad of twenties that Abby had probably saved up over the course of a few months.
It was nice, Jagger thought, that she didn’t lose absolutely everything. After a second Jagger’s insides turned cold, realizing what it meant. They didn’t want to steal anything. They just wanted to scare her. They weren’t petty thieves. They meant what they were saying. This was the work of a murderer.
“Is there…?” Abby started to say, cutting herself off. Jagger turned to look at her and saw that she was still huddled up in a little ball, hiding her eyes so that she wouldn’t have to acknowledge the damage that lay before her.
“What is it? I can look for it, whatever it is,” Jagger replied, staying close to the dresser. He figured that she needed space right now, given the day she was having. It didn’t get much worse than this.
“There’s a small box in my top drawer, underneath my socks and underwear. Can you see if it’s still there and open it for me?”
Jagger nodded, even though Abby wasn’t looking at him and couldn’t possibly see anything other than the inside of her elbows. He searched the top drawer, rifling through clothes until his fingers landed on a hard box in the furthest, most hidden corner. Jagger pulled out the box and opened it, revealing a long chain with two gold letters hanging off its center: E.B.
“It’s here,” he said, holding it out so that Abby could see it if she wanted visual proof.
“Thank you,” Abby said, burying her head back into her arms a second later.
Jagger burned a little with curiosity, wondering what the piece of jewelry meant to Abby. He decided not to ask, instead dropping the necklace back in the little wooden case. It wasn’t fair to try to get to know her when she was in this state, seeing as she seemed to keep herself carefully guarded at all other times.
“Can you bring it to me?” Abby asked a second later, reaching one hand forward even as she kept her head bowed, her eyes glued to the scuffed-up floor.
Jagger did as he was told, walking over and dropping the box into Abby’s outstretched hand.
“Where are you going to go?” he asked her after a short pause, staring down at the back of her head, her wavy hair tangled up into a knotty mess.
“Nowhere,” Abby said. “I think I’m going to sleep right here.” She laughed a little, but the sound was harsh and hard. Jagger wondered if she was hiding her face due to tears, but somehow, he didn’t think she was capable of crying.
“You can’t stay here,” Jagger argued. “It’s not safe. They’ve already broken in. They can get to you whenever they want to if you stay here.”
“They— They just want to scare me. I can stay here,” Abby murmured, sounding as though she was trying more to convince herself than Jagger.
“Yeah, they want to scare the shit out of you, that much is obvious,” Jagger said, his voice coming out a little bit ruder than he had intended. His frustration was starting to show, no matter how hard he tried to stay calm rather than freak Abby out even more than she already was. He blew out his breath, trying to steady himself to speak plainly. “Look, you’re just not safe here. You know that, even if you don’t want to admit it.”
“Yeah, well, where the hell am I going to go?” Abby asked, finally looking up from her arms, glaring up at Jagger. “I can’t exactly go stay at a hotel. I don’t have the fucking money for it.”
“Do you have any friends you can stay with?” he asked.
Abby just shook her head, averting her eyes to stare at the wall behind Jagger.
Jagger bit down on his lip, struggling to restrain the words that threatened to bubble out of his mouth without his permission. Ah, fuck it. He was just going to say it sooner or later. Might as well go ahead. “You can come with me.”
“I don’t want to stay in your apartment. No offense,” Abby said softly, rubbing her eyes roughly with her knuckles.
“No, that’s not what I mean. You wouldn’t have to do that,” Jagger said in a rush, afraid that Abby thought this was a pickup attempt. “Satan’s Blazes. We have a whole compound.”
“Your clubhouse?” Abby asked, her thumb moving over to her mouth so she could chew on her nail.
Jagger nodded. “There are lots of people there. Nothing could happen to you. I promise.”
Abby scoffed a little before getting to her feet, walking past Jagger into her bathroom to splash water on her face. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but promises don’t mean much to me.”
“Okay, don’t take my word for it. Just come to the compound and see what you think. There’s no way anybody would try to do anything to you there. If they did, they’d get caught immediately. You’d be safe.”
Abby was silent, staring up at the words that dripped over her bathroom sink. “I don’t think I’d be safe anywhere,” she said softly, and her tone was so serious, so somber, so devoid of fear, that Jagger couldn’t help but think that she wasn’t just talking about physical safety. Jagger didn’t know what to say.
“I’ll go,” Abby whispered, staring at herself in the mirror. “I’ll go with you, okay? You don’t have to convince me. But just for one night. One night and that’s it.”
“Okay,” Jagger said without thinking, although after a few more seconds had passed he realized that he didn’t truly believe he could follow that stipulation. “Come on, let’s go,” he said, deciding he’d argue for her to stay longer at a different time.
He saw Abby stuff the box with the E.B. necklace into her back pocket before she turned on her heel and headed out of her apartment, waving her hand forward until Jagger followed her back outside.
“Fuck it, it’s a shitty dump of a place anyway,” Abby said as she locked up, heading back downstairs toward Jagger’s car. The fear seemed to melt off her, disappearing like water evaporating from a hot sidewalk in the summer. Jagger didn’t know whether to be relieved or worried that she turned into such an efficient robot, walking briskly back to his car and leaping inside without a single look back at the ruins of her life.
Jagger decided not to challenge her sudden shift in disposition, jumping into the front seat next to her and rapidly pulling out of her apartment’s parking lot, heading back onto the highway toward the compound.
“Now we don’t have a choice, huh?” Abby said when they were a few minutes down the road.
“What do you mean?” Jagger asked, unsure what she meant by that.
“You’ve got to let me in on the investigation now if we’re going to the clubhouse.”
Ah. Well, there it was. Jagger didn’t know whether to be frustrated or impressed that the state of her apartment hadn’t scared her off entirely. “I’d rather you didn’t,” he said.
“Do you want my help or not?” Abby snapped, turning her head abruptly to stare out of the window rather than look at him. “Listen, again, I’m not trying to be an awful bitch, but this protective bullshit is getting old fast. I’m not your little sister. In fact, you don’t even know me.”
The car fell silent for a moment, Abby’s words hovering between them. They stung a little, but it wasn’t like they weren’t true. She was right. It was weird that Jagger felt like he had a responsibility to her at all, but he was used to feeling weird. He cared too much about everything. That was his curse.
“I’m sorry,” Abby said again. “I just want to help. I don’t want to feel…useless.”
“I can understand that,” Jagger said. “Better than you think.”
Abby sighed deeply. Out of the corner of his eye, he could see that she had turned back from the window and was now staring at him. His skin crawled a little uncomfortably, almost tingling as she continued to look at him, but he didn’t tear his eyes away from the road. Jagger kept driving, speeding up a little and taking corners a little too sharply, growing more and more anxious under Abby’s gaze. He waited, sensing that she needed to say something to him.
Finally, right before he took the last turn on the dark highway that led to the clubhouse, she cleared her throat and spoke again. “That’s what scares me,” she said, her voice soft.
“What do you mean?” Jagger asked.
“I can tell you understand. I think, maybe, we’re too alike. That’s part of what makes me so nervous,” she said with a little laugh, but it was strained, designed only to break the tension in the car. It didn’t work, the air practically crackling with nervous energy.
“You’re scared of me,” Jagger said quietly. It wasn’t a question. He already knew the answer. He understood it all too well.
“Maybe,” Abby said. “Maybe, yeah. That’s only because…” She trailed off, falling back into silence as she turned to stare out of the window again. Somehow Jagger felt like he could hear the unspoken sentence anyway. She’s afraid of herself, Jagger thought. She’s afraid of how much she cares about this. He swallowed hard around the lump that formed in his throat as he approached the clubhouse. Jagger realized with a sinking feeling that he was afraid of her, too. Together they were just a tangle of fears and bad decisions. They were both going to launch forward into this investigation at full force, holding nothing back, no matter how scared they were, no matter the consequences.
Somehow Jagger thought that wasn’t something to be proud of. Still, he didn’t think he could change. As he rolled to a stop in front of the compound and looked over at Abby, he thought: Maybe there’s a chance for her. Maybe she can escape this whole mess.
Jagger decided, then and there, that he wasn’t going to let it consume her the way it had done to him. It wasn’t going to kill her either. To keep her safe, he knew, he’d have to make her angry. He’d have to fight her. It was worth it, even if she hated him. If it meant she got out of this whole thing alive, she at least deserved that, even if Jagger didn’t.