Authors: Yvonne Navarro
Concrete Savior (13 page)
Then he smacked feet-first into the cold, nasty-colored water and forgot about everything that had happened above the river itself.
He shouldn’t have been surprised at the temperature but he was. Today’s unseasonably cold weather had nothing to do with his expectations—those came from the previous couple of weeks, the tail end of summer where the thermometer had climbed into the low nineties. None of that was relevant. The source of the Chicago River was Lake Michigan, and the water temperature was maybe in the mid-sixties—damned
cold
. The impact, even feet-first, forced water into his mouth and nose with astonishing might as his own body weight drove him deep beneath the water. He clawed his way back to the surface, choking and spitting out the foul-tasting liquid, then jerked around in the water as he tried to find the young woman.
Nothing—she’d gone under and not come back up. Maybe she couldn’t swim, or because of the way she’d been positioned, maybe she’d been knocked unconscious when she’d hit the water. Casey dove beneath the surface and opened his eyes, then slammed them shut again when he saw nothing but dark shadows and his eyes instantly started burning. He’d never find her by sight.
Something splashed into the water behind him—a life preserver, tossed over the railing by someone on the bridge. He ignored it and dove again, keeping his eyes closed this time but extending out his arms in first one direction, then another. Nothing, but he wouldn’t give up—she was just a young woman, probably still a teenager. He would give everything he had to try and find her.
He came up, gulped for air, then went back under, again and again. Every time he came back up with his neck stretched and his face pushed toward the overcast sky, he shook the water out of his eyes and got a stinging vision of more and more people gathered at the railing so far above. A few more times and there were lights, red ones from a fire truck, blue ones from police cars—he could see them twinkling as they cycled. The cops were leaning over the edge and shouting at him; even though he couldn’t hear the words, Casey knew they were telling him to grab the life preserver and give up on the woman.
But Casey couldn’t, not until there was just no more of a chance, no more hope. He dove again and again, losing count, but finally he thought his hand brushed something off to his right. He was almost at the end of his breath but he lunged for it anyway; his reward was tangling his fingerin something long and silky—hair? It had to be. He closed his fist in the mass and dragged it up to the surface with him.
He came up and got hit in the face by the wake of a Chicago Police boat. It took the captain only a few seconds to spot him and bring the boat around, about the same amount of time it took Casey to realize that he really
had
found the woman. The current had pushed the life preserver out of reach, so Casey hooked one forearm under the woman’s chin to keep her face out of the water and began pulling himself backward toward the vessel. When it angled alongside him, he turned and helped hoist her out of the water as the officers on board reached for her. In another minute he was also onboard, standing and watching as they laid her out on deck and began CPR and the boat began speeding back toward a docking area where an ambulance was waiting.
The two policemen working over her seemed to be trying their hardest, but she wasn’t moving. Casey stood there, bruised, out of breath and shivering under a blanket he hadn’t even realized someone had tossed over his shoulders. When the boat was at the side of the river, it took less than a minute for the paramedics to clamber down with a stretcher, get the woman loaded and strapped on, then take her off the boat.
When Casey started to follow, one of the officers, an older gray-haired man, stopped him. “Let them handle it, son. Do you know her?”
Casey watched them go and shook his head. “No. I just tried to save her.”
The cop nodded. “Okay. I’m going to need some information from you, then we’ll get you off the boat and find someone to take you home, or wherever it is you want to go.”
Casey nodded and cleared his throat. The river water had left a bad, oily taste in his mouth. They had pulled up next to a mini-park area, where lots of the downtown workers came to eat their lunches and enjoy the noontime sun. The ambulance was still there, the red, white, and yellow lights flashing almost hypnotically across its front. Instead of loading the woman into the back, the medics had stopped the gurney and were working over her just behind the vehicle’s open rear doors.
“Is she going to be all right?”
The police officer followed his gaze but didn’t say anything for a moment. “It’s not looking good,” he finally told Casey. “They’ll keep at it, but I’m pretty sure she was already gone when you pulled her out of the water.”
Casey’s hands clutched at the blanket. “She’s dead?”
“Yeah, I think so.”
Disbelieving, Casey stared at the motionless wet body on the gurney.
He’d
missed
.
ourteen
E
ran was waiting for
her when Brynna finished with her latest job. There’d been nothing special or complicated about the two-hour meeting, which had been a simple home purchase by a newly married Arabic couple; the husband’s father, who barely understood English, had kicked in the down payment and was a cosigner on the loan, so the seller’s attorney had insisted on an impartial interpreter. Everything had gone smoothly once the elder man had gotten over his reluctance at having a female translator; now their papers were signed and the deal was closed, and Brynna was looking forward to the weekend. She didn’t exactly work nine to five every day, but somehow she’d acclimated herself to the very human routine of Monday to Friday, even when Eran’s hours didn’t match hers. It was kind of amusing that in an existence spanning thousands upon thousands of years, only a few months among mankind could alter her outlook so much.
“How about dinner?” Eran pulled his Mitsubishi away from the curb after they were both seat-belted. “And a movie.”
“A movie?” Brynna considered this. Eran had an extensive collection of DVDs and VHS tapes, and she’d watched plenty of them at his apartment since she’d moved in. They were an excellent and fast source of cultural education, and it was fascinating to see the way humans had evolved creatively as well as what they considered entertaining. “You mean in a theater?”
“Sure,” he said as he jockeyed for position in the heavy Friday afternoon traffic. Even in his personal car he had a police scanner, and he reached over automatically and flipped the switch to
ON
. “Just like a real date.”
“Is it safe?” She was talking about Hunters, but she didn’t need to tell him that.
Eran tapped the steering wel as he thought about her question. “I think so,” he said finally. “We’ll go to one of the mega-theaters, where there are a bunch of screens and lots of people. Hunters aren’t big on being seen by the general public.”
“All right,” Brynna said, although she still had her doubts.
Before she could get into it further, Eran tensed and reached to turn up the volume on the scanner. “Hold it—I think our guy is at it again.” He leaned sideways and pulled a light bubble out of the glove compartment, then slid it onto the dashboard. In another moment, a revolving red light, coupled with him leaning on the horn, began to cut a path through the downtown traffic. “But this time I think we have a chance to get our hands on him.”
BRYNNA FOLLOWED ERAN AS he moved with admirable speed down the stairs that led from Wacker Drive to the concrete park area bordering the river. There was a crowd of people down there—cops, ambulance personnel, a couple of bystanders. Off to one side was a woman whose red-rimmed eyes were stark contrast against skin gone white with shock; clustered around her were a handful of children of various ages, most of whom seemed to have physical characteristics pointing to some kind of mental disability.
About ten feet away from her and flanked by two police officers was the rescuer. Had his height and healthy stature not already clued her in, Brynna knew he was a nephilim the instant she got close enough to pick up his scent; even the river’s trash and greasy residue couldn’t cover the clean, fresh ocean scent that emanated from his skin. As she always did any time she was around a nephilim, Brynna thought it was a damned shame humans couldn’t enjoy their fragrance as she could.
Someone tried to stop Eran but a flash of his detective’s star-shaped badge took care of that. He dragged her forward and headed for the nephilim; at the last second Brynna pulled free and veered off, her attention caught by the ashen-faced young woman on a gurney just to the rear of the ambulance. She was hardly more than a girl and her facial features were slightly abnormal, like those of several of the other children. Her dark hair was fouled by the river water and her eyes had the dark shadows of death beneath them above lips blue with oxygen deprivation, enough so the color showed through the contraption over her mouth. The medics were working diligently on her, and Brynna was impressed with their stubbornness; one methodically compressed her chest while the other kept squeezing a sort of rubber balloon attached to a cup over the girl’s mouth. There was a lot of scurrying back and forth and a lot of talking, but everyone seemed too busy to notice her, so Brynna stepped up to the end of the gurney and touched the young woman on the ankle.
She’s angry, very angry at Miss Anthony and she doesn’t want to sit down and be quiet. She’s tired of being told to act like a grown-up because grown-ups don’t have any fun and she doesn’t want to be one. She’s really upset and she stomps her foot and screams right in the middle of the classroom. Some of the other kids—they are so stupid—are so surprised they start crying, and then the rest start shrieking with her, their voices getting louder and louder as they try to outdo each other and her, too. It makes her even madder that they’re doing this because they’re taking all the attention away from her, it’s
her
time to get Miss Anthony’s attention and to let her know that she’s not going to do what she doesn’t want to do. She’s so mad that she snatches at the thing closest to her. It’s a pencil cup, and when it tips over she scoops up the pencils and, still hollering as loudly as she can, heads toward the noisy, bratty bunch of kids. Miss Anthony is hurrying across the room but not fast enough to stop her from grabbing one of the boys and ramming the pencil into his eye. “Shut up!” she screams. “My turn, not yours!” But the others are making even more noise now, and Miss Anthony tries to catch her and turn her, so when she does, she pokes Miss Anthony in the side of the head with a different pencil, and it goes in and in and in—
“Miss, if you’re not a relative, please step back,” someone said. “They need to load her into the ambulance.”
Brynna jerked when she felt someone’s hand on her shoulder but managed to stop herself before she did anything unpleasant. Thankfully her days of responding badly to an unexpected touch were over; she did as she was told and watched in silence as they hoisted the gurney through the open doors. They hadn’t quit working on her, but Brynna could tell that both hope and energy were starting to lag. She wanted to tell them to quit now, because the only way she saw a flash of anything in the future when she touched someone directly was in the “would have” realm—what “would have” happened if the person had lived and Brynna got her hands on him or her in that oh-so-short window of the just-demised time. This young woman was dead, and this time the nephilim-rescuer had failed.
“Hey,” Redmond said as he came up. “It’s definitely the same young man who did those other two rescues—I recognize him from two different videos.”
Brynna looked at him in surprise. “You have videos?”
He nodded. “One from the subway security camera, the other from a kid who used her phone to record the car incident. Not top quality, but enough. I thought for sure that you’d want to talk to him, but one second you were right behind me, the next you weren’t.”
Brynna nodded absently. “Yeah.”
Eran frowned at her. “What’s going on?”
She inclined her head toward the ambulance. One of the police officers had closed its back doors and the vehicle was taking off, turning onto Lower Wacker Drive with its emergency lights still flashing. As it disappeared from sight, they could hear its siren change pitch to give the occasional warning blast. Eran stood next to her without saying anything, then finally spoke. “I can tell there’s something turning around in that head of yours, so I’ll ask again: what’s going on?”
She turned to face him. “Remember what I told you about Mireva, and how at the moment of her death I saw the task she was born to complete, and why she had to do it?” He nodded. “Well, I saw this woman’s future, too, and why she had to die.”
His eyes widened. “What?”
“She was meant to die today, Eran. Had she lived, she would have done terrible things.”
“Like what?”
“She wasn’t right mentally,” Brynna said. “I saw the school where she goes every day. Her teacher was there—the woman over there with all the kids around her, and they were all there, too. I could see everything that would have happened. Her teacher, and at least one of the kids, would have died at the hands of the girl the nephilim tried to save.” She looked at him steadily. “She would have killed people, Eran. Gone on to become a murderer.
“Just like Glenn Klinger.”
HE WAS COLDER THAN
he ever remembered being in his life.
A fireman had given him a blanket and Casey pulled it tightly around his shoulders and stared numbly at the gurney where paramedics were still working on the girl he’d tried to save. Another woman had walked up to them and was standing with one hand resting on the girl’s ankle. She was tall and oddly striking, with choppily cut chin-length hair and a deep, almost sensual shadowing to her face that Casey could see all the way from where he stood. He didn’t know her place in the scheme of this little drama, and after a few moments, the medics scooted her away and loaded the gurney into the back of the ambulance.
He shivered as he watched the doors close. He had lived in Chicago all his life and, much to the envy of his family members, the cold had never bothered him. Even the most brutal of winters barely fazed him—while others were huddled beneath heavy parkas, scarves, and winter gear and sloshing miserably through the snow, a medium-weight coat did Casey fine even when the temperature dropped below zero. The weather—hot or cold—simply didn’t sink in.
But this . . .
It chilled him all the way to his heart.
Casey stared morosely after the ambulance as it pulled out. The lights were still flashing and as it drove away he could hear the driver occasionally hit a more obnoxious horn to try to clear traffic. That meant they hadn’t given up, but he knew it wasn’t looking good. Chalk this up as another entry into the
It wasn’t supposed to be like this
file, right along with the Glenn Klinger thing.
“You need to get out of those wet clothes,” someone said. “We’ll take you home.” Casey pulled his gaze away from the now-disappeared ambulance and focused on the voice. His nerves twanged as he recognized the detective who’d just questioned him; the woman he’d seen standing by the gurney was there with him, studying him with unreadable oak-colored eyes. He wanted to refuse and just take a cab, where he could be alone with his thoughts and his failures, but he didn’t think he should.
He followed them to the detective’s car and got in the back when the man held the door open for him. Was the woman a detective, too? She was dressed well, in a business suit and high heels, and when she walked around and climbed into the passenger seat, he thought she must be. When they were all settled in, Casey cleared his throat. “I’m sorry—what did you say your name is?”
“Redmond,” the cop answered. “Detective Eran Redmond.”
“And . . . ?”
“This is Ms. Malak,” Redmond said before the woman could answer. “She’s a department consultant.”
“Oh.” It was all Casey could think of to say. He wasn’t really interested anyway.
“What’s your address?” Redmond asked.
Casey gave it to him, then realized how much he was looking forward to going home. He’d get in the shower, he decided, and stay in it for a very long time. He didn’t know if the hot water would make him feel any better, but it sure sounded good.
“So just to make sure I correctly understand what you told me earlier,” the detective said, “you did
not
know the girl you tried to save. Right?”
“Right,” Casey said. He resisted the urge to add anything when the detective didn’t respond. He’d once read that people always had the urge to fill in pauses in conversation, and that’s how a lot of criminals ended up talking themselves into incriminating evidence, or even confessions. He wasn’t a criminal and he didn’t know why he was thinking about that sort of thing right now, but there it was.
“So what made you jump in the water after her?” the woman asked after a few moments.
Casey inhaled. “I . . . guess I don’t really know. I mean, she was there and it was obvious that she shouldn’t be. When she fell, it was just automatic.”
“Witnesses say they saw you running toward the bridge while you were still on Wacker Drive,” the detective said.
