Kiss Her Goodbye (A Thriller) (21 page)

 “It’s almost twenty-four hours,” he said. “If I give up now—”

 “For God sakes, Jack, nobody’s asking you to give up. Just get some rest. Let Sidney take over for a while.”

 “You don’t understand. There are things going on here. Things I can’t explain.”

 “What things?”

 “Oh, brother, here we go again,” Waxman muttered.

 Rachel glanced in his direction but he looked away, studying the ground. Frowning, she returned her gaze to Donovan, concern giving way to puzzlement.

 
“What
things?” she repeated.

 At the periphery of his brain, Donovan saw a turbulent sky, dark craggy mountains. A crowd of people marching like lemmings into the darkness.

 He considered telling her about it, but held back. He didn’t want her looking at him the way Waxman had. What little he’d related to his friend had been greeted with a heavy—and entirely reasonable—dose of skepticism.

 Actually, that was putting it mildly.

 Waxman thought he was nuts.

 “Later,” he said. “Right now we’ve got a suspect to track.”

 Rachel started to protest, but he cut her short by turning to Waxman and gesturing across the street to the parking lot. A small group of people were gathered outside Reed’s warehouse door, watching them. Reed’s cast and crew.

 “Get a canvass started. See if somebody knows that asshole’s name. And get Al working the F-150. Maybe the guy was stupid enough to drive his own truck.”

 “Wishful thinking,” Waxman said, pulling out his cell phone. “You see Reed over there?”

 Donovan squinted at the crowd and shook his head. “Nope.”

 “I’ll check inside.”

 “Wait for me.” Donovan got to his feet, but his legs were as weak and rubbery as month-old celery sticks. He grabbed the door to steady himself.

 Rachel took his arm. “Jack, let Sidney handle this.”

 “I’ll be fine.”

 “Not if you keep going at this pace.” She clearly wasn’t happy, but he wasn’t about to budge, either. She sighed. “At least let me get some food in you. You haven’t eaten since yesterday.”

 She was right. He hadn’t even thought about food. Now that he
was
thinking about it, he realized he was famished. The tap dance in his chest had nearly subsided, but a bit of nourishment might make him feel better.

 “She’s making sense,” Waxman said. “You keep running on empty, sooner or later you won’t be running at all.”

 Donovan felt the heat of Waxman’s gaze, judging him, the flicker of doubt in his eyes.

 He wanted to resist, but he knew full well that Waxman could handle Reed as well as he could. Probably better at this point.

 It was his turn to sigh. “Someplace close,” he said to Rachel. “A quick refuel and that’s it.”

 She squeezed his hand and started across the street. “I’ll get my car.”

 Donovan watched her go, feeling as though he’d just escaped a lynching. She was as stubborn as he was.

 “You sure you’re okay?” Waxman asked.

 Donovan looked at him. “I know you think I’ve lost it, Sidney, but I saw what I saw.”

 “I don’t doubt that, old buddy. But you
are
under a lot of stress.”

 “Just get me a goddamned name.”

 Waxman nodded. “Consider it done.”

T
HEY FOUND A
deli about three blocks over.

 Donovan thought the short ride might rejuvenate him, but when he stepped onto the curb, the world started to sway and he nearly lost his balance.

 Rachel came around the car, took his elbow, and guided him inside to a table.

 “Déjà vu,” she said as she sat him down. “Only in reverse.”

 Donovan had no idea what she was talking about and didn’t have the energy to try to figure it out, so he forced a chuckle and left it at that.

 She waved a hand toward the menu mounted over the counter. “What are you hungry for?”

 Donovan scanned it. “Pastrami. Mile high.”

 Rachel mumbled something he didn’t catch and headed for the counter where a stout, round-faced woman waited to take their order. It was long past lunchtime, but still too early for dinner, and the place was nearly a ghost town. All but two of the remaining tables were empty.

 Donovan watched as Rachel put in their order, but his mind was on a different plane, thinking of Waxman and Reed and Ski Mask.

 And the dark place. The road to Yaru.

 He thought about the stark landscape, remembering what A.J. had told him. That we bring our own baggage to the place, our minds filling in details to help us cope with something we don’t yet understand.

 Did this mean that some of the walking dead found themselves in a field of lilies or on a beach at sunset? Were others cruising through a Vegas casino, slot machines spitting out shiny silver dollars?

 What did it say about Donovan’s state of mind that
his
chosen deathscape was as bleak and as cold as the far side of the moon? Had the dark world he’d conjured up always been there at the periphery of his brain?

 He thought about the job, and about the death and destruction he’d witnessed over the years. He thought about his parents, both gone, lost to a plane crash in the Bahamas just months before his divorce.

 And he thought about his sister. The
other
Jessie.

 Jessica-Anne Donovan, as smart as she was artistic, a scholar, a painter, a terrific pianist—and a victim of suicide just three days before her nineteenth birthday. She had suffered a nervous breakdown during her freshman year at Sarah Lawrence and come home to recuperate. A week later, Donovan—still in high school—trudged in from a long afternoon of football practice to find her hanging from a ceiling beam. A lavender robe tie was cinched around her neck, her once beautiful face an unnatural shade of blue.

 Donovan was devastated, but he wasn’t surprised. Nobody was.

 No matter how cheerful she might have pretended to be, Jessie-Anne had always worn sadness like an accessory. It shaded her eyes. Colored her speech.

 And Donovan had never known why. Wasn’t sure
she
had, either.

 All these years later, he didn’t often think about her. He usually pushed such distractions aside, refusing to allow himself to succumb to sentiment. And to the guilt he felt, the feeling that if only he’d come home earlier he could have stopped her.

 Maybe he had paid for that. Maybe he was a fraud. Maybe, like his sister, he had never been as happy or content as he pretended to be. Could her death be the reason he’d so often ignored his wife and kid in favor of work? Was he afraid to get too close?

 That bleak world he’d visited last night might well be a reflection of a bruised and battered soul. And now, with Jessie gone—
his
Jessie—he wondered if he’d ever have a chance to heal.

 Rachel came back from the counter and sat across from him, her eyes immediately registering concern, as if she sensed the depth of his mood.

 “What is it?” she said.

 Donovan shook his head, dismissing the question, afraid to say anything. Afraid she, too, would think he was nuts. But what was the point? Sooner or later he’d have to spill it. Better for her to hear his version now than Sidney Waxman’s later on.

 “Tell me something,” he said. “You ever think about life after death?”

 Rachel looked surprised. “Maybe you should ask my grandmother. She’s got a whole boatload of theories on the subject.”

 “I’m asking you.”

 Rachel sobered. Touched his hand. “Jack, if this is about Jessie, you can’t start thinking like that.”

 “This is about me.”

 “What are you saying?”

 Donovan shook his head again, having second thoughts. “You’ll just think I’m crazy.”

 “And that would be different how?”

 Vintage Rachel, he thought, but it sounded forced. Unnatural. She shifted in her chair, but he sensed her discomfort was more than physical.

 At the table next to them, a man in a gray suit was finishing up the last crumbs of a corned beef on rye as the fingers of his free hand toyed with the seal on a pack of Marlboros. The guy was obviously trying to quit and couldn’t decide whether to succumb to his addiction.

 “Jack?”

 Donovan returned his attention to Rachel, but said nothing.

 She prodded. “Earlier you told me there were things going on. What things? What did you mean?”

 Donovan hesitated, glancing again at the pack of Marlboros. Fingers scraped the cellophane. “You remember what the paramedics told you at the hospital? That I was dead?”

 “You think I’d forget?”

 He thought he saw a flicker of dread in her eyes, as if she was anticipating where he was headed and wasn’t quite sure she wanted to go there with him.

 “I wasn’t just floating in the river, Rache. I went somewhere.”

 “Went somewhere,” she repeated.

 “At first I thought it was just some screwy dream, but now I know it was real. As real as you are. And this place.”

 “You’re telling me that when your heart stopped …”

 She didn’t finish, so Donovan finished for her. “Tunnel, bright light—the whole ball of wax. And that wasn’t the end of it.”

 Rachel fell silent for a long moment and he was sure that once she’d processed his words, she’d give him that same look Waxman had. Then her gaze steadied and she reached across the table and grabbed both of his hands, holding them between hers.

 “Tell me everything,” she said.

T
WENTY MINUTES LATER
, her cell phone rang.

 Donovan was halfway through his story, delivering it in fits and starts, remembering new details as they came to him, and hoping she wouldn’t run screaming from the place once he’d finished. At one point, the stout woman brought their sandwiches over, but Donovan barely noticed her.

 Rachel answered the phone, listened a moment, then passed it across to him.

 It was Waxman.

 “The F-150’s a bust,” he said. “Stolen off a dealer’s back lot. They didn’t even know it was missing until we called them.”

 “Wonderful. What about Reed?”

 “Turns out our boy’s been riding his ass for weeks. Reed’s so terrified of the guy, he threatened to lawyer up and take his chances. Once I promised him a night in a cell with Bobby Nemo, he got very cooperative.”

 “A name, Sidney. Give me a name.”

 “Luther Dwayne Polanski. Like the movie director. Twenty-eight years old, did a six-year stint at Danville Correctional for armed robbery and aggravated assault.”

 “Let me guess. He was there the same time as Gunderson.”

 “Their sentences overlapped by about a year. Luther was released six months ago.”

 Donovan thought back over the weeks immediately following the Northland First & Trust heist. Gunderson’s sheet had revealed a short stint at Danville for weapons possession, and Donovan and A.J. had been out there a half dozen times, looking for possible associates of Gunderson’s. Neither the warden nor the guards had ever mentioned the name Polanski.

 “I talked to his PO,” Waxman said. “Says Luther’s been a model parolee. Shows up twice a week like clockwork, has a job washing dishes at a place called Millie’s Diner. They told me he hasn’t been to work for a couple days.”

 “Where’s he living?”

 “His mother’s house in South Deering.”

 Donovan stood up, feeling the room sway only slightly this time, the news giving him a renewed sense of energy.

 At the table next to them, the man in the gray suit crumpled his napkin, then rose and headed for the door, leaving the unopened pack of Marlboros behind.

 Attaboy, Donovan thought. He’d never been a smoker himself, but at this moment he could almost understand the guy’s reluctance. There was something alluring about that little red-and-white box. Something … familiar.

 “Jack? You still there?”

 “I’m here,” Donovan said. “Give me the address.”

37

T
HEY SAT ON
the house for close to an hour before they saw any sign of life.

 It was typical South Deering working-class, a two-story, rust-colored box with a neatly trimmed yard surrounded by a waist-high chain-link fence. An old Chevy Nova sat on blocks in the street out front, looking as if it hadn’t gone anywhere in decades.

 Marilyn Polanski hadn’t either. According to Luther’s parole officer, his mother had been living in the place since the late seventies. A single mom, she’d been witness to the gradual change in the neighborhood makeup, from predominantly white to black and brown and even a few Vietnamese.

 Luther had grown up in the house and immediately come home to roost after his stint at Danville. But unless the guy was a complete fool, Donovan didn’t figure he’d be returning anytime soon.

 Unfortunately, the house was all they had.

 They were parked half a block down, Waxman behind the wheel, Donovan riding shotgun. Al Cleveland and Darcy Payne—the lone female agent on his team—were nested in their beige sedan across the street.

 Donovan had sent Rachel home. He didn’t want her in the line of fire in case things got hairy. She’d agreed, reluctantly, but insisted on getting their sandwiches to go and left them both behind for Donovan.

 One veggie, one turkey breast.

 Not a pastrami in sight, mile high or otherwise.

 Donovan devoured them both, feeling like Popeye sucking down a gallon of spinach. As usual, Rachel had been right. The food was a tonic, a cure-all that pulsed through his body like an electric charge. The legs that had been so rubbery an hour ago suddenly couldn’t stay still. They felt cramped inside the car, wanting to
move.
 

 Add that to the ticking clock in his brain, the constant reminder that time was wasting, that those cylinders of oxygen Gunderson had buried along with Jessie could only last so long … and Donovan was ready to scream.

 Waxman, however, had other things on his mind. Eyeing the half-crumpled take-out bag, he said, “You got any more of those?”

 Before Donovan could answer, his radio crackled. Cleveland’s voice. “We may have movement inside the house.”