Singularity (17 page)

Amanda paused her writing and glanced over at him. He averted his gaze to the brightening windows above her and had a sudden bout of self-consciousness as he realized he was still shirtless. Amanda must have read his mind, because she gestured toward a gray T-shirt hanging from a chair near the bed.

“One of the guys brought you a clean shirt.”

He nodded and moved to the chair. Had she noticed him looking at her? Had a smile been playing at her lips as she spoke? He unfolded the shirt, which looked a size too small. He confirmed the assumption as he struggled to pull it down over his head.

“Fit okay?”

Her words came from very close by. He finally won the battle with the shirt and managed to yank it down past his eyes. Amanda stood a few feet away, smiling openly at his efforts. He grinned as he smoothed out the taut material over his chest and stomach.
“Yeah, just fine.
Thanks.”

“Let’s sit back down on the bed and check you out one more time,” Amanda said.

Sullivan obeyed without complaint, looking at the flashlight she held up to dilate his pupils and following her finger while she dragged it back and forth across his field of vision.

“I think you’re going to be just fine,” she said as she stepped to the side and leaned against the bed frame. “No signs of concussion and you seem to have all other cognitive functions.”

“You’re giving me too much credit,” he replied.

She laughed. “Feeling better?”

“Yeah, still a little groggy, but better.”
Sullivan brushed back the tide of unruly hair on top of his head and looked up at the doctor as if he had been struck with a whip. “Did they find Barry … Agent Stevens?” he asked.

Amanda pursed her lips and barely shook her head. “Sorry. From what I understand, they’ve been searching the whole time you’ve been in here.”

“And how long has that been?”

Amanda shrugged, glancing at the clock on the wall. “Probably an hour and a half, give or take.”

Sullivan felt his stomach drop and tighten. Barry was officially missing. There was no reasonable explanation. He hadn’t gotten turned around on a midnight stroll through the facility or gone to follow up on an idea for the case. If Barry knew that Sullivan had been involved in a shooting this morning, he would be standing a few feet away, the concerned look Sullivan had seen a hundred times before wrinkling his face.

“I need to call my SAIC,” Sullivan said as he began to slide off the bed. Amanda put a hand on his shoulder and pushed him back to a seated position.

“You need to relax. You might still be dizzy, and I don’t want you running off down the hallway only to fall and reopen the hard work I just did.
How about some water?”
Amanda crossed to the pitcher beside the bed and poured a stream of icy water into one of the cups.

Sullivan stopped her with a hand on her arm before she turned to hand him the glass. “Do you have any orange juice? I think that would give me a boost.”

Amanda paused, giving him a strange look, and then nodded. “Sure, I’ve got a bottle in the fridge.”

She moved to the small refrigerator beside her desk and retrieved a bottle of Tropicana from within. After opening it, Sullivan guzzled the contents almost without stopping, the tangy bite of the juice sluicing through the accumulated spit and phlegm in his throat. He repressed a massive belch as he finished and glanced at Amanda.

“Sorry,” he said, setting the drained bottle onto the bedside table.

“No, that’s good. It should help with the blood loss, actually,” she replied.

A silence fell between them, and when he looked up to say that he thought he could make it to the warden’s office under his own power, he noticed she was studying the side of his head. He assumed she was inspecting her work, making sure all the threads in his stitches were holding.

Amanda reached out and touched not the most recent cut but the one below it. The one he had carried for years, its presence holding so much more than the irritating droop of his eyebrow.

“How did this happen?” she asked, brushing the puckered skin with a touch that sent goose bumps trailing down his arms. Sullivan bowed his head, and Amanda pulled her hand back and leaned toward him. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean—”

“It’s okay,” he said, stopping her apology. “It’s just not a nice memory.”

“I’m sorry,” she repeated, stepping back and giving him polite space. But as she did, he realized he didn’t want her to move farther away.

“I was a cop in
Minneapolis
before I became an agent,” he said, looking up at her. “I was off-duty one night and I ran to a grocery store to get a few things. On my way, a guy stepped out from an alley and pulled a knife.”
A broken wineglass, not a knife,
the voice in his head intoned from somewhere far away. The lie was so accustomed and polished that it flowed off his tongue like it had actually happened. “I just reacted instead of listening to what he had to say,” he continued.
She was so angry that night. You remember how she’d screamed at you, how disjointed and erratic her mind had become. You remember.
He blinked and paused, forcing the voice to stop, to relent for just a moment so he could finish. “He went for my face and I got lucky. The knife went in and slid along my skull but didn’t cut any major arteries. Now, it’s just irritating, because if I don’t do strengthening exercises, my eyebrow droops because of how the tissue was cut there.”
You remember how she lunged at you, the hatred on her face so deep and penetrating that it hurt more to look at her than the actual cut did.
He breathed out and silenced the voice. This was why he avoided telling people about the scar. It was the wounds inside that flared up and hurt like they’d just been opened that caused the real pain.

Amanda stared at him, her eyes running over every inch of his face, and he wondered if she suspected he hadn’t told her the truth.

Finally, she tilted her head to the side, a smile playing across her lips. “Scars are our closest memories, my dad used to say. Sometimes they’re good and sometimes not, but they remind us of
who
we are.”

Sullivan nodded and returned her smile the best he could. At times, he thought, it was better to forget.

Chapter 8

Filtered sunlight coated the lobby as Sullivan strode across it. It seemed the storm had moved on,
its
overbearing presence having forged ahead to soak other places out of sight and earshot. A smudge of gray clouds still besmirched the otherwise pleasant-looking day, and as Sullivan knocked on the brass-plated door, he wondered if the improving weather was an omen of better things to come. While he waited for an answer, his eyes stole to the doorway at the far end of the large room and his thoughts slid back to the morning and what he’d seen come out of
Fairbend’s
mouth. He shuddered as he imagined the darting tendrils reaching for him, and examined the possibility that his sanity was slipping.
Fairbend
had died the night before. Amanda confirmed this before he left the infirmary. She said she’d been unable to do a thing as the man convulsed in the throes of a seizure so powerful he had hemorrhaged internally. So who, or what, had he shot in the hallway? And more importantly, where was it now?

The door opened, startling him, and Andrews’s kind face appeared in the opening, wrinkled with a smile. “Agent Shale, come in, come in.”

The warden ushered him inside and closed the door behind them. The office looked more distinguished in the brighter sunlight, and Sullivan felt the strain of the past day’s uncertainties weigh upon him in the neat and orderly room.

“Please sit,” Andrews said
,
motioning to the same chair Sullivan sat in the day before. The other was blaringly empty.

Sullivan cleared his throat while the warden busied himself with two cups of coffee. “Agent Stevens hasn’t been located yet?”

Andrews glanced over his shoulder and shook his head before he turned and brought Sullivan a steaming cup, then made his way behind the large desk. “I’m afraid not,” the older man said, and Sullivan heard a pained grunt as he settled into his chair. “My officers have been scouring the prison ever since this morning, and there’s been no sign of him.”

Sullivan set the coffee down and scooted forward in his seat. “Sir, I need to call my senior agent in charge and notify him of what happened. My cell phone is …” Sullivan paused. “… not working correctly.”

Andrews sighed and sat forward as he leaned his elbows upon his desk. Deep hollows were carved beneath each of the man’s eyes, and after a moment of inspection, Sullivan came to the conclusion that the warden also hadn’t slept much the night before. “That’s where we’re in a bit of a pickle, Sullivan. Can I call you Sullivan?” Sullivan nodded. “We lost our landlines late last night, about the time Henry died, I’m suspecting. It’s this damn rain. I just heard on the weather radio that there’s more coming, this is just a lull. They’re saying we’ll be getting another three to five inches by this afternoon. Hopefully our power will hold, and if it doesn’t we have our backup generators, but I’m afraid we’ll have to start planning for an eventual evacuation to
New Haven
.” The warden turned in his chair and stared out of one of the high windows. The deep lines on his face became canyons in the harsher light, and Sullivan wondered again if he’d been wrong presuming the man’s age. “I think some of the main junction boxes must have washed out in the night, and now there’s nothing,” Andrews said, gesturing toward the impassive phone on his desk.

“How about cell phones?
I could borrow yours or someone else’s—” Sullivan broke off as he watched Andrews bow his head and shake it again.

“Cells are out too. All I can figure is the surrounding towers must’ve either toppled with the softened ground combined with the wind or we had one hell of a lightning strike.” Andrew dug in his pocket, and then slid a small flip phone across the desk. When Sullivan opened the device, he saw that the other man told the truth. A “No Service” message blinked at the top of the square screen and no matter which direction he turned, no bars appeared. Sullivan snapped the phone shut in anger and pushed it back to the warden.

“Do you have a shortwave radio?” Sullivan asked.

“No, I’m sorry. Before this bout of storms, we never saw a need to have an emergency backup.”

“How about the hospital?
Do they have separate lines or better service?”

Again, the warden had a pained look on his face. “No, I checked with them this morning.”

A revelation struck him that was so
simple,
Sullivan barely restrained himself from smacking his forehead.
“The boat.
We can use the boat now that the storm’s passed.” Sullivan heard the hope in the pitch of his own voice, and then felt the creeping sense of disquiet when Andrews bit his lower lip and wrinkled his brow. The older man’s eyes looked right at him, through him, pinning him to the chair.

“That’s something else I wanted to speak to you about,” Andrews finally said. “There’s been a development that I haven’t made you aware of, and I knew you’d be upset by it, so I wanted to tell you in private.”

Sullivan’s unease deepened and he reached out to grasp the arms of the chair. “What is it?”

“The prison boat was found this morning, half sunk where it had been tied up last night. Officer Bundy was on his way to town to report our phone outage and to radio the necessary authorities about Agent Stevens, as well as your, um, incident this morning, when he found it.”

“Sunk,” Sullivan repeated. “Sunk how? The storm swamped it?”

“That’s what we initially thought, but then we found this nearby on the ground where the boat was beached.” Andrews opened a drawer in his desk and pulled out an evidence bag. A black handgun poked at the confines of the sack, and Sullivan leaned back in his chair, the strength going out of his arms and legs.

“There were also a few spent casings on the ground, and after further inspection we saw that the hull had been shot several times, along with the motor,” Andrews continued. He set the bag with the gun onto the top of his desk, and the sound it made filled up the entire room like an echo in a tomb. “I’m gauging from your reaction that you recognize it?”

Sullivan barely comprehended the warden’s words. As he stared, the rest of the room dimmed, with the darker clouds outside closing in over the sun or the implications of what rested within the plastic, he didn’t know. All he could do was look at the gun on the desk.

Barry’s gun.

Sullivan licked his lips, which had somehow become numb in the last few minutes, and glanced up at Andrews, whose fingers were
steepled
before him.

“Sir, I know Agent Stevens personally, and he would never do anything like this, I assure you,” Sullivan said, finally finding his voice.

Andrews seemed to consider the words for a moment before turning toward the windows again. “And how do you know this?”

The question caught Sullivan off-guard. “I know him. He’s a good man with a family. To be honest, sir, he wanted to leave the prison as soon as possible.”