Chapter 3

Tony

 

“Shit.”

“Had to be done, sugar.”

I didn’t take my eyes off Chrissy, willing her to come to, willing her to be lucid and give me more information even though she’d done great and had given me a solid lead.

“How’s she holding up? Give it to me straight, no bullshit,” I told Merlyn and she sighed.

“You love this girl?” she asked frankly, and I smiled, smoothing some of Chrissy’s dark hair off from where it was plastered to her forehead. I loved her hair. Thick and silky, like it was some kind of living thing of its own. She was still rocking it long, but it was a different style than the last time I’d seen her.

“No, we just went out a few times a few years ago… She ain’t got nobody.”

“Mm-hm,” she sounded like she didn’t believe me, and I huffed a bit of a laugh but what she said next was pretty profound and one of the reasons she made one of the best foster moms this city had ever seen. “Looks like she has you, baby.”

Fuck.

I guess she had me there. I didn’t answer, instead I put one hand against the thin hospital mattress by her head, glad she was propped up in a sort of sitting position and I leaned in, pressing a light kiss to her forehead. Merlyn left the room, sliding the door closed behind her.

I knew that Chrissy wouldn’t know I’d done it and that it could be considered creepy, but I seriously couldn’t help it. My heart went out to her. She’d sounded so scared and so lost as the drugs had taken her under with her pleading, “Tony, don’t leave me!” but I had to leave. I had to catch whoever had done this to her; before he could to it to anyone else, sure, but also to bring him to justice. Although, I didn’t think for a minute that whatever the criminal justice system did to him would come close to making him actually pay.

“I’ll be back, I promise,” I murmured to her and just took a moment to listen to her strong, deep and even breathing between the blips and beeps of all the monitors and shit they had her hooked up to. I made sure her oxygen tubes were on and comfortably tucked up and over her delicate ears before I straightened up and went back out. I waited for Merlyn who was with another patient and when she came out, I made her promise to let Chrissy know I’d be back with more questions and to call me when she was awake again.

“Might be hours, might be a couple of days before you get any kind of coherent outta her, honey. Morphine is a hell of a drug.”

I nodded and asked her point blank, “She gonna make it, okay?”

“Surgery was rough, but they got it all. Her body’s under some serious stress and everybody reacts differently. You never can tell with these kind of injuries, baby. Anything could happen, secondary infections, all manner of complications. The way she looks now, I wanna tell you she’s gonna be fine, but I can’t tell you how many patients I thought that and we lost them the next day. All you can do is what any of us can do, wait and say those prayers.”

I leaned in conspiratorially and said, “That’s why I like you Merlyn, you always give it to me straight.”

“I know you cops, there ain’t any other way to be with your kind.”

“Smart lady.”

She smiled and said, “Go on and get that animal. I’ll call you if there’s any change.”

“You’re her guardian angel,” I said walking backwards towards the ICU’s exit.

She looked me up and down, her brown eyes sparkling, but still full of criticism, “Huh! Looks to me like that position is already filled, but I know something else about you cops.”

“Oh yeah, what’s that?” I asked stopping.

“You never can have too much backup.”

I barked a laugh and she shooed me off, fingers sparkling with rings, her long purple nails with rhinestones. The woman sure had some fabulous class to her. God love her.

I went down to the garage and got onto my bike, replaying the video of Chrissy that I’d taken with my phone. When someone was in that bad of shape, you video documented everything – thankfully cellphones made that possible – because if they died, the video could still be admissible as evidence and even testimony if you had the right district attorney who knew the ropes and could get it past the defense.

She looked both sallow and wan, which was a feat; and spoke of just how fucked up on the inside she was. Her eyes were sunken, haunted, and exhausted, her expression hampered by drugs and pain, but she was a fighter. A real fighter, trying to give me everything she could.

“They put my address up on the internet.” I watched as she swallowed hard. “Jim. Jim Parsons from my office found it. They put my address on the internet, told them to come to my apartment. Sam, Sami said that it was nothing, but I asked her to come over –” Her face crumbled and it was a different kind of pain. Even if she didn’t remember with the front of her brain, her subconscious knew what’d happened to her friend. “Oh god, is Sam okay? Where’s Sami Lynn?”

I didn’t have the heart to answer her as it was happening. Now, I didn’t have the heart to watch that bit over again. Instead, I stopped the video, clutching the phone in my hand and bracing it on top of my leather and denim clad thigh while I thought some things through.

She needed time enough to heal before dealing with all of that shit. I felt bad as it was that I’d had to push her right after she’d woken up, like that. My reasons may be noble and justified, but I still felt like a steaming pile for doing it. The job at hand wasn’t always a bowl of roses and this case was going to be even uglier than what I typically dealt with. Survivor’s guilt was a hell of a thing.

I shook my head and put my phone inside my jacket before firing up the bike. It was just after six in the morning. I had just enough time to ride back to the precinct, take a shower, and use some of the clean clothes I had stowed in one of my saddlebags for just one of these occasions. When I got off the elevator on my squad room’s floor, my partner was waiting for me with a cup of coffee that he shoved into my hand.

“The Lord bless you and keep you,” I muttered testing it carefully before taking a sip.

He ignored my Mick blessing and said, “Y’know, I was thinking about something. Had me up all night.”

“How did the shooter know it was Chrissy’s apartment?” I supplied.

“Yeah, great minds think alike,” he said and I shook my head and took another careful sip of the coffee. Still too hot but it’d be just right after I got done in the locker room.

“Yeah, well, Chrissy woke up long enough to supply us with an honest to god, solid goddamn lead. C’mere, I’ll get you up to speed.”

“Heh, your momma raised you right,” he commented. “Praise the lord one minute and use his name in vain the next.”

“Shut up,” I groused and went over to his desk and sat my happy ass on the corner of it, digging out my phone. He sat down in his chair and waited me out and I cued up the video and handed it to him.

“Gonna grab a shower and a change of duds, be right out.” I set the offering of the sacred bean down at my desk and hitching the knapsack I’d dragged up here out of my saddlebag higher onto my shoulder, I headed for the detective squad’s locker room.

A quick, cold shower to wake me up, and because the pipes in this building were old as fuck and the hot water heater as far away as it could get, and I was halfway ready to start the day.

I had detective casual in the knapsack. A crisp pair of jeans, devoid of any holes or wear on the cuffs and pockets, came out right after a pair of clean boxers and a tee shirt.

“Jesus Christ, gimme that.” I smirked and handed the button down shirt and tie over to Jaime. “This is why you should drive that truck of yers instead of that moped,” he said shaking it out and pulling down the ironing board from the wall.

I laughed and pulled on my boxers under the towel I had around my waist. I dropped it and pulled on my clean socks and jeans, next.

“So what’d you think?” I asked and Jaime tsked.

“I think she’d better live so we can nail this bastard dead to rights. You know a breathing witness is always the best witness.”

I snorted, “There are no ‘good’ witnesses; you know that.”

He picked up the shirt after whipping the iron over it, squinted at it, and laid it another direction resuming bullying the wrinkles out of it with the steam.

“Woah, aren’t you two all domestic and shit.” Riley Adams, another detective from the squad walked in to drop his shit at his locker.

“Man, fuck you,” I said laughing.

“Mm, no… that’s all your partner,” he said shutting his locker door and backing out of the room.

Jaime ignored the exchange like it never happened and sighed saying, “You need to leave this cynical cop shit to me.”

“So, you were thinkin’ what I was thinkin’ last night,” he looked up at me and I said, “That this Jim Parson’s needs to be our first stop.”

“Yeah, I think that’s about right.”

I tucked in my tee and threaded my belt through the loops of my jeans. He handed over my light blue shirt and I shrugged it on, buttoning it up and tucking it in. By the time I was done with that, clipping my badge to the front of my belt, and holstering my duty weapon after checking the serial to make sure it was my duty weapon, he had my tie pressed and was holding it out to me. I flipped up my collar and looked into the small mirror held onto the inside of my locker door by magnets to get the damn thing right.

Jaime put the iron in its rack on the wall by the board and made sure it was unplugged. When he folded up the board into its upright position, I had my locker door shut and the lock latched, my keys around one finger and tucked into the palm of my hand.

“Grab yer phone and yer coffee, meet you by the elevator.”

“Copy, that.”

I swung into my blazer I left hanging in the back of my locker and shoved my feet into my street shoes, a pair of good, old fashioned, sturdy Rockport Oxfords in black. I went out into the squad room and swept my phone and my coffee up off my desk and made it to the elevator just as the doors shushed open for Jaime. He stood aside and waved me in and I said, “Age before beauty,” before sucking down some more of the elixir of life he’d brought me.

“See if I buy coffee for you ever again, Youngblood,” he grated.

I grinned behind my cup and got onto the elevator behind him. “That was self-preservation and you know it,” I cracked but I damn sure wasn’t feeling it. The coffee wasn’t even coming close to making up for a night of shitty sleep in a shitty chair at Trinity Gen’s ICU.

It was going to be a long fucking day.

 

***

 

It was almost a relief to get back to the hospital and that shitty chair to put my feet up after the amount of pavement pounding, warrant gathering, and hurry up and wait we’d had to pull. The problem was, we didn’t know if a crime had necessarily been committed when it came to Chrissy’s personal info having been published online. We’d had to do some research. Lo and behold, there was actually a name for it. It was called ‘doxxing’ whatever the hell that meant, and it was a crime, but typically at a federal level.

Parsons, a paralegal at Reardon, Colfax & Price, the firm that Chrissy worked for, was something of a computer geek and ran the firm’s Facebook page. That’s where the hateful explosion over the verdict had started. He said that it began as a bunch of one star reviews of the firm full of a bunch of typical angry keyboard warrior bullshit. But then, this one guy let slip in one of those reviews that the whole thing started on some fanboy forum for Skip and the Indigo City Anglers, our baseball team.

Parsons followed the proverbial rabbit hole down into a fucking sewer of the worst kinds that humanity had to offer. Page after page of angry fucking diatribes and threats of everything from torture to rape, to gang rape, to murder. Some of it the grisliest shit I’ve ever read. Enough that Jaime had to bust out the Rolaids all the while Jimmy-boy sat to one side and wouldn’t make eye contact with either of us.

It’d made me damn uncomfortable too, but my visceral reaction? It’d been more along the lines of being torn between wanting to do two things. Find the son of a bitch who’d done this to her and deliver some street justice by way of a wood shampoo, and the other? Go to Chrissy and never leave her side again, because I don’t give a fuck who you are or what you did or did not do – no one deserved what she’d gotten or what she was getting by way of this fucking bullshit.

I stared at her and was grateful that she looked better already, her complexion less pale than it’d been before and the ghastly sallow brown shadows beneath her eyes diminished. She was sleeping peacefully now, the line of pain between her eyebrows smoothed out. She was on some seriously good shit, and I was afraid of what that might be like for her when she had to come down off of it. The last thing she needed was to cross the circle of hell that was an addiction to painkillers. Good Catholic boy that I was, I prayed for her, crossing myself.

Anyways, our next stop had been across town to the precinct that housed Indigo City’s TARU, or Technical Assistance Response Unit. We needed their brain-trust to get our warrants for the information from the forum owners on the ISP belonging to screen name ‘H0M3RUN_H3R0’ which then had to spawn another warrant to the Internet Service Provider themselves to cough up the information on a real name and address for whoever was behind the screen name. It was a convoluted mess for sure, and was seriously grinding my gears.

We’d gotten our warrants, and lucky us, dude was in the city – which we’d figured – but him being in the city took the doxxing charge out of the fed’s hands and put the ball in our jurisdictional court. We just had to figure out what to charge him with on a local level. We had until tomorrow to figure it out, and I wasn’t worried about it. I figured between me and Jaime sleeping on it one of us would have one of our strokes of genius, I don’t think that there’d been a precedent set for this kind of a thing. I could always run it by Yale, one of the prosecuting attorney’s for the city who happened to be a Knight like me, before pulling any triggers on making an arrest.

Chrissy whimpered and shifted slightly and I sat up. She sucked in a long, deep breath and opened those dark eyes of hers and I stood up and went over to the side of her bed, where her arm wasn’t in a sling and propped up on pillows.

“Hey,” I murmured and her gaze finally fixed on me.

“You came back.”

“I promised you, didn’t I?”

“I… I don’t remember.”

“You’re on a lot of drugs, that’s to be expected.”

She tried to shift and gasped and I told her, “No, don’t move. I’ll get the nurse.”

“No, wait!” I stopped and she breathed in through her nose and out through her mouth a few times, getting a handle on her pain. “She’ll give me more and I won’t be able to answer your questions.”

“You gave me quite a bit the last time I was here. A solid lead.”

“Good, that’s good, but you need more, right?”

“Yeah,” I rolled the doctor’s stool over and sat down, reaching between the bed rails, and holding her hand on her good arm, careful of the IV running into the back of it. “What can you tell me about the guy that broke into your apartment?”

She started to shake her head and gasped, “He had on a red hoodie, white, um… brown hair, I think.” She winced and sighed out, frustrated. “I can’t remember everything. I want to, but it’s like it’s just not there.” She looked at me, a pleading look on her face and in her eyes and asked, “What’s wrong with me?”

I didn’t have to call a nurse. Something about Chrissy’s monitor must have tipped them off at the nurse’s station because one came in all on her own and went around me to the IV stand, punching buttons on the front of it.

“I don’t know,” I answered her truthfully. “Maybe because of the trauma or something, I’m a cop, not a doctor but it’s okay that you can’t remember, you just take it easy now and rest.”

She closed her eyes and pressed her lips together and it was pretty clear the nurse had upped her drugs. She turned to me, a blonde girl probably fresh out of nursing school, young and determined and said, “You might want to try in another day or two. It might take longer than that. Sometimes, when something this traumatic happens they never get their memory back but only time will tell.” I wondered if she was Nurse Jr., but didn’t comment.

“She doing good?” I asked, swallowing hard, and the nurse smiled.

“As well as can be expected. The doctor could probably tell you more.”

“Thanks.”

“You’re welcome.” She smiled and went back out into the ICU’s hub. I wanted to stay with Chrissy, but I was out of clean clothes and needed my own damn bed tonight.

“I’ll be back tomorrow,” I promised quietly and looked at her tray of uneaten food. “And I’ll bring dinner.”

I think she heard me, letting out this broken little whimper, but her eyes didn’t open and her hand was lax in my own.

It came to me on the ride home, what charge to pick up and hold H0M3RUN_H3R0 on. Inciting violence, possibly with a hate crime qualifier. It was barely into felony territory, but even a third-degree felony carried some scary time out here; about five to ten max. Add the hate crime qualifier it made it even scarier, upping things to ten to fifteen years if convicted. Maybe one of his internet homeboys had done some bragging to him after the fact, if he had, and we could get H0M3RUN_H3R0 to give them up, well then jackpot – that qualified the internet troll for a hefty charge of conspiracy to commit murder and attempted murder.

If he were the reason someone had beat down Chrissy’s door, then I would work with the DA to get everything needed to nail his ass with that conspiracy to commit murder charge and slap a hate crime qualifier on that, too. With how much the happy bastard had waxed eloquent about his pure, seething fucking hatred of women, getting the hate crime qualifier added on was going to be a breeze.

I was feeling pretty good about myself by the time my garage door was trundling open and feeling even more confident than that by the time I got off the front of my bike to head in. As always, my paranoid-self waited for the garage door to completely close before I went inside.

Roscoe, my cat, came trotting up like he always did yowling loudly and rubbing up against my legs demanding pets and food. I never could figure out which one he wanted first.

“Hey, buddy.” I bent down and scooped him up and went into the kitchen, setting my helmet on the countertop. I pulled out a can of his favorite cat food out from under the sink and he started squirming in my arms so I set him down. He ran back and forth in front of me as soon as I peeled back the lid, losing his goddamned kitty mind.

I laughed and shook the gelatinous meat-glop onto his clean, waiting plate by his gravity feeder and water bowl.

“I promise, it was a good reason this time.” My thoughts drifted back to Chrissy lying in that hospital bed back at Trinity Gen’s ICU and I sighed. I don’t think I’d ever seen anyone so alone, so afraid, or just so hurt before in my entire career. That being said, though, I have to say I was over the moon; just fucking glad it wasn’t the usual dead that I did see.

I listened to Roscoe purr and eat and decided I needed to get some sleep and hit it hard the next morning.

 

***

 

The next evening I was dragging ass up to Chrissy’s room. We’d gotten the information back on H0M3RUN_H3R0’s IP address and had it traced back to a Miriam Cohan along with her home address. My partner and I had gone there with a couple of uniforms, dragging a pretty disgruntled Officer Johns along with us after a closed door meeting with his commanding officer.

Johns didn’t have to be happy about it. He knew we’d done him a solid by keeping it in-house, so all he had to do was suck it up and toe the line. I’d been pretty sure, when we’d knocked on the old townhouse’s door that Miriam Cohan would be Mommy H0M3RUN_H3R0 and I was right. The second she opened the door, cigarette dangling between her lips, she asked, “What’s he finally done?”

“Excuse me, ma’am?” Jaime’d asked, and she’d rolled her eyes.

She’d screamed back into the house for her ‘delinquent’ son who turned out to be a fifty-two year old man well beyond the age of fuckin’ knowing better. She’d even helped us out by squealing on him that he’d been the only one home with her the night Chrissy’s address went up under his username.

Apparently, mom was sick of Kevin mooching off her social security and living in her damn basement. Kevin, on the other hand, was sick of rejection from the opposite sex, but considering his attire of sweatpants, holey tee shirt with what was probably days old food stains on it, with a grimy Skip Maguire baseball jersey over it all, I could kind of empathize with the fairer sex on that one. Dude had let himself go hard, and was pretty much all balding pate and ridiculous beer gut with a pair of glasses that went out of style sometime in the early nineties.

He kept screaming and squawking about how Chrissy deserved everything she got and he was glad she was in the hospital and mad as hell she wasn’t dead. We just Mirandized him and let him go, letting him rack up and solidify the charges against him. The damn idiot too stupid to realize that hate speech wasn’t free speech and for once, I was glad most of America either didn’t take or didn’t pay attention in their civics classes.

Still, we’d been the ones to end up flat busted for our efforts at the end of the day, the dude that’d shot our victims hadn’t done any bragging, at least not to Kevin, and we were no closer to making an arrest when it came to the perp who’d actually pulled the trigger. It was a solid stonewall dead end.

Still, at least I had a little good news and some way better food for Chrissy when I showed up. That was, until Merlyn stopped me in the ICU’s main hub.

“I’ve got all kinds of news for you, honey,” she said.

“Shit. Let me have it,” I said steeling myself for the news that Chrissy had coded or some shit.

“Bad news is, you can’t have that up here,” she indicated the bag of Chinese take-out in my hands, “Good news is, you can have it on the fourth floor, which is where your damsel in distress got moved this morning.”

“What’s on the fourth floor?” I asked.

“General care, honey. Your wounded bird is on the mend and got sprung from up here a few hours ago.”

I felt a flood of relief, “That’s good, no that’s great.”

“Mm-hmm, and I hate to rain on the parade, but I figured you needed to know. They tried bringing some flowers up here, had to reject them, not allowed, but it was a big bouquet of white lilies, pretty as can be.”

“How are flowers bad news?” I asked.

“Because this was with them,” she pulled a little white envelope from her scrub pocket and handed it over. I set the food on the nurse’s desk and turned it over, opening it up as she was saying, “Now I know I was being nosey, and I shouldn’t have opened it but I just had a feeling. I mean lilies I get, but white ones? Something was just all wrong and then I remembered why…” I read the card inside and shook my head.

For your casket. I’m coming for you, bitch.

“What tipped you off?” I asked, reading and rereading the card.

“Last time I saw white lilies was at my grandmama’s funeral.”

“What’d you do with the flowers?”

“Got everything back here, honey.” She indicated the door behind the nurse’s station leading into a supply closet or whatever the hell they had back there. I nodded.

“Hospital got your prints on file?” I asked.

“You know they do, but why?”

“Gonna need them for elimination purposes.”

I called Jaime to see if he’d left the precinct yet. He said he’d be right over and I told him; cool, and that I would be here waiting. Chain of custody in an active investigation and all that.

This girl just couldn’t get a break.