IT DIDN’T MATTER how many times I’d been there; I would always feel like I was being stared at the moment I stepped foot into the police station. Like everyone thought I should be locked up but was slipping by because I had a friend to help me out.
They maybe wouldn’t be too far off from the truth.
The last time I’d been in the station was the night of the Tesori Antico incident, after I’d been told to leave the hospital and go give a statement. I was barely even coherent. Fortunately, Chris had called it in before he’d walked out of the antique shop, so they had a pretty good idea of how all those bodies ended up not breathing inside that store.
What they didn’t understand—and what I couldn’t help them with—was how their officer ended up mangled on the street. They were surprised to hear about the bullet holes in his car. Whatever he’d been mixed up in, he hadn’t even told his colleagues. He’d been doing something off the record, and it had ended up almost killing him. And none of us could help him, as he lay on the operating table getting screws put into his pelvis and getting his collarbone reset.
They hadn’t treated me like a criminal then, but I still felt like one. My hands had held the gun that killed Vanessa Hollis. I had taken a life, and I didn’t know how to feel about that, especially since I mostly felt relief.
I didn’t tell them about shooting Vanessa. Chris had taken the heat for it. For me.
And probably most of the officers I walked past suspected as much. And being the only one who knew for sure was making me crazy. I wished more than anything that Chris could remember. I wished I could tell him.
“He’s in his office, waiting for you,” the woman up front said, gesturing for me to head on back. This was the first time I’d walked through the station by myself. I tried to imagine doing it every day, on my way to my own desk, mulling over my own open cases. Yellow and brown pulsed in my temples, a relentless mix of determination and depression. Instant headache. No way could I work in this place. Never.
Martinez was standing behind his desk, sifting through a stack of papers. His cane was leaning against the wall, abandoned.
“Hey,” I said, knocking lightly on the door frame.
He looked up. “Oh, hey. You’re here. I was just trying to catch up.” He shook his head. “Don’t know if I ever will. Do you see this?” He gestured to the several piles of papers on his desk. Normally, his office was stark and overflowing with paperwork, but he’d seemed to know where everything was, even if it all looked like never-ending stacks of confusion to me. Having someone else dump a bunch of random things on his desk undoubtedly stressed him out.
“You’re not technically back on the clock, are you?” I said, stepping through the doorway. “You don’t have to catch up today.”
“It’s not going to get any better next week when I am back.”
I raised my eyebrows. “Next week?”
He nodded. “I’m getting around without the cane. And I’m sick of hanging out in my apartment. If I can sit on a couch, I can sit at my desk. As long as I can concentrate.” He narrowed his eyes at his computer, as if trying to remember what it was. Or maybe trying to remember what he’d been doing on it.
“Heriberto somebody,” I said.
He shifted his gaze to me, eyes still narrowed.
“You were investigating someone named Heriberto. I can’t remember his last name because words in other languages come to me in gr—” I caught myself again; felt my face flush. I tried out a shrug that felt fake as shit. I hoped it didn’t look as phony as it felt. “It was an unusual last name,” I said.
“Heriberto,” he repeated.
I pointed to the stack of files on top of his filing cabinet. I’d seen him set open cases there before. “Maybe he’s one of these?”
He shook his head. “I’ve been through those already.” He sank into his chair and held his head in his hands. “This is so frustrating. I can look through those files and remember the names on most of them. But what I can’t remember is exactly where I was in the investigations before . . .” He gestured weakly.
“You should have a partner,” I said. “I mean, besides yours truly. Because we seem to get into some real shit when we partner up.”
He turned his eyes to me. “I remember you getting into shit. Constant, unending shit. You telling me I got dragged into that nonsense with you?”
I pointed to my arm. “You have a scar there, right? That’s from getting dragged into nonsense with me.”
He held his palms out to his sides. “I got hit by a car. I have scars everywhere.”
True. I had forgotten what a bloody mess he’d been—scraped everywhere, it seemed. Kneeling on the road next to him, it had been impossible to figure out where the blood was coming from and how bad the wounds were, especially with my own colors going crazy. I just had to go on the assumption that the wounds were bad. Really bad. And they were. But he was not dead, and that was what mattered the most.
“Fine. You want to know about what we were doing?”
He studied me for a moment, chewing on his lower lip. “Maybe not,” he said. “I can only handle so many of your emergencies at a time.”
“Fair enough,” I said, coming around the desk to stand beside him. The computer was on, but resting on the wallpaper screen. “But eventually we’re going to have to address this whole someone-wanting-you-dead thing.”
“Not we,” he said. “Me. I have to figure this out. Myself. Since when does it involve both of us?”
Since I kissed you and you didn’t pull away? Since I told you about my synesthesia and cried by your bedside just as Dru did at Peyton’s? Since I came to you every time I needed help with anything, so I clearly came to trust you without even meaning to? Since I saw goddamn magenta almost strong enough to block out the crimson every time I walked into your hospital room? Since I agreed to believe in myself because you believed in me? Since I knelt next to your body in the street with tears streaking my face and terror coursing through me?
Since it hurts like hell to know that the rebooted version of Chris Martinez feels nothing for me. For us.
“Yeah. You’re right,” I said bitterly. “I was just offering. I’m not forcing myself onto you or anything.”
“Well, I’ll let you know if I need help,” he said. “But don’t hold your breath.”
“Gosh, what will I do with my time? Actually live my own life?” I asked, trying to sound deadpan, but probably only sounding as sore as I felt. “Can we do this now?” I leaned over him and jiggled the mouse to wake up the computer. He turned and poised his fingers over the keyboard.
“So tell me what I’m doing exactly,” he said.
“I need you to look up a license plate with the letters VP. If we can find out who owns that truck, maybe we can find Luna.”
“We’re back to ‘we’ now.”
“Well, we were a ‘we’ the night she got away, which I would tell you, if you’d let me. I know you’re the police, but I have an interest in finding her, too.”
“Obviously. She shot at you.”
“Right. And . . . she’s done a lot more since then.”
He was quiet for a minute. He leaned back in his chair; it squeaked under his weight. “Okay,” he finally said, sitting forward and pulling up a database. “VP?”
“Right.”
He did some more typing and then leaned back again. “There is no plate that’s just VP. You sure there weren’t numbers with it? Maybe more letters?”
I eased down on the corner of his desk. Candy cane and mustard. That was it. Candy cane and mustard. V and P. Nothing else. “That’s not possible,” I whispered.
“You sure it was a California plate?”
California. A radiant gold word with peach highlights. I hadn’t realized I’d seen that—I was in too much of a panic—but now that I thought about it, it was there. The radiant gold with peach highlights, framing the V and P.
“Yes. It was definitely a California plate. Look again.”
He turned his palms up near the keyboard. “I don’t need to. It’s right here. You must have seen it wrong.”
I shook my head, disbelieving. Had I been seeing what I expected to see? Had my synesthesia gotten jumbled up, mixing the photo of the man with the VP belt buckle I’d found in my dad’s desk with Luna’s getaway car? It was possible. My synesthesia had steered me wrong before. But I had started to trust it—to really trust it—and it had been working for me. Was there nothing I could trust?
I closed my eyes. I had been trying to avoid remembering that night as much as I possibly could. It tried to push in on me during every quiet moment—my dreams, my shower, driving in my car, reading a book, watching TV. It was always there. The only times I even kind of let it in was during the few brief therapy sessions I’d gone to. When it became obvious that the therapist really wanted me to deal with that night, I quit going. I dealt by ignoring. That was how I did things. Who said you had to bawl into an entire box of Kleenex in order to come to terms with something horrible? Maybe your best way of getting over something was to push it away until it actually went away.
If only everyone would let that night go away.
God, I hated it, but I was going to have to try to remember.
“Well, I can’t help you if I can’t find—”
“Wait,” I said, my eyes still closed. “Shhh.”
I could hear my heartbeat, louder and louder, as I lifted the fog away from that night. Luna, holding me in a headlock. Bill Hollis’s slithery voice and dead eyes. The noise, my God, the noise. The smoke and the smell and the yelling and the glass shattering. Vanessa, on the floor, crimson closing in. And Luna, running across the parking lot. Jumping into a truck. Candy cane and mustard. VP. Radiant gold with peach highlights. The truck fishtailing as it drove out of the parking lot.
Brown, brown, brown.
My eyes flew open. “One, one, one,” I said. “There was brown. Three of them. One, one, one.”
“Brown? What does—”
I motioned toward the monitor. “Just type.” I was coursing with too much adrenaline to pay much attention to my slip.
He reached forward and typed: VP 111.
A result popped up, and we both leaned forward, my hair draping over his shoulder.
“Blaine Jones?” Chris read aloud. He glanced up at me, his eyes briefly pausing on my hair. He used one hand to brush it away. “Sound familiar at all?”
I had gone numb, my eyes glued to the name of the ghost on Chris’s computer screen. “That’s Jones,” I said, not even feeling my lips move. He didn’t respond, and I realized that he had no idea who Jones was if he didn’t remember the months before the accident. I stood, blew a breath to the ceiling, my hands on my hips. “Jones was my”—boyfriend wasn’t the right word, was it?—“a guy I used to hang out with.”
“Used to? So you stopped hanging out with him. What happened?”
So much. So fucking much, I shook with the effort to keep it from bulldozing me. “He’s dead,” was all I said, pushing memories of falling into his blood out of my mind. There was only so much of that night that I could let in at one time. I was beginning to wonder if avoiding telling Chris the whole story was protecting him or protecting myself.
“Oh,” he said. “I’m sorry.” There was a pause. “So if she got away with him, she’s on her own now.”
I shook my head. “No. He wasn’t the one driving. He was already gone. He was . . . he was just helping Luna, so I guess that’s why the plate was his.”
I saw something in Chris’s eyes go soft—a glimmer of a memory, maybe? I hoped so; this would be a lot easier if things just came back to him and I didn’t continually have to worry about how much information to spoon-feed him.
He blinked a few times and went back to the screen. “Looks like the vehicle was abandoned about a month ago.”
“Where is it now?”
“Impound. The family never picked it up.”
Of course they hadn’t. That wasn’t Jones’s car. There were so many things they didn’t know. Jones’s death was a tragic accident, as far as they were concerned. They were quoted in the news saying as much. Wrong place at the wrong time. Got involved with a girl he shouldn’t have. They meant me; little did they know it was Luna who’d dragged him into the middle of everything. I’d been keeping him out. Now I wished I’d kept him close; maybe he wouldn’t have betrayed me so easily if I had.
Chris clicked around a little. “Cosigner on the loan is Bill Hollis. Why would Bill Hollis help Jones buy a new truck, and why would Jones keep that truck a secret?”
I thought about it. The answer was simple. Luna wanted Jones to do her dirty business for her. She wanted him to follow me, to steal and break my shit. But she wasn’t stupid. “If he’d been following me around in his car, I would have noticed. Can we go?” I asked.
“Go?”
I pointed to the screen. “Can we get it out of impound?”
“No. I’m not authorized to do that. And if I pull out my badge and start demanding things, I’m going to have to have a reason. Do I have a reason? Am I even still on this case?” He gestured to the papers on his desk. “It doesn’t look like I’m still on this case. And, no, before you ask, I don’t know who is. I’m not technically—”
“Yes, I know, you’re not technically back yet.” I chewed on my thumbnail. “So if we can’t get it out of impound, can we get ourselves in?”
He narrowed his eyes. “What do you mean?”
“I mean, can we get into the car while it’s in impound?”
“They’re not going to give it to us without ID and registration. Honestly, I’m surprised they haven’t sold it at auction yet. Nobody coming forward to claim it—”
“Can we at least try?” He gave me a hesitant look, his mouth still open from being interrupted. I stood, paced around to the other side of his desk. “You have to understand,” I said. “I can’t just let this go. Luna isn’t someone who broke probation and took off. She’s dangerous.” I placed my hands on his desk and leaned over him. “Trust me on this. You would have agreed to do it . . . before.”
That was maybe not entirely true. Chris had never quite warmed up to my tactics. I basically had to force him into everything or do it on my own.
Like that was going to change now.
But he didn’t have to know that.
He watched me a minute longer. I could feel low-level magenta and purple pulsing at my feet, and chose to ignore them as best I could.
“Okay. We can try. When?”
I reached over and grabbed his cane, shoved it across the desk at him. “How about now?”