Try Not to Breathe, page 19
Hogan was supposed to leave, push his chair back and depart through the gloom he had entered through. But he stayed in place.
“What is it?” Combs asked.
“Is this about that cop Rogers? The one who got shot in the leg?”
“Why do you ask?”
“It’s just—if you want to get at the cop, then there are ways to do that. Maybe take a more direct approach.”
Combs shook his head. “This is much more complicated than you’re making it sound. More complicated than you know. It’s getting into family business.” Combs pointed his finger at Hogan’s chest. “You just take care of your end of things. And we’ll take care of ours.”
“Okay. But if you ever want someone to—”
Combs waved his hand over the table like a magician. The gesture shut down the conversation and made everything go away. “I need to get back to the farm. You need to find your man.”
“And the girl?”
Combs nodded. “I fully expect you to find her too.”
44
Anna left the park.
She crossed Jefferson, heading back in the direction of where she had left Rachel and Eric. To her relief, she found them quickly. Her two friends walked side by side, Rachel supporting Eric as he shuffled along like a ninety-year-old man. He moved by half steps, his right arm holding his left side.
“There you are,” Rachel said when Anna reached them. “Were you out of your mind, running back in there? Somebody was shooting.”
“Yeah, nice Wonder Woman impersonation,” Eric said.
“Nice old-man impersonation,” Anna said.
Eric shook his head. “Sheesh, after I took a hit intended for you.”
“What happened out there?” Rachel asked. “It looks so chaotic. And Eric is in pain, so we started walking. If you can call it walking.”
“I saw my sister. Avery.”
“Avery?” Eric perked up. “Can she give us a ride?”
“No. She got arrested. They threw her in the back of a police wagon.”
“Arrested? For what?”
“For getting in the middle of the shit over there. She protected me. She took the heat for me.”
“Wow,” Rachel said. “So what are you going to do?” They’d all stopped on the sidewalk, forming a little triangle. People streamed around them, and more sirens sounded in the distance. “I’d like to get out of here in case another idiot starts shooting.”
“The police station isn’t far from here,” Eric said. “In fact, it’s right up ahead. You can go in and try to bail her out.”
“Do you know how many people they’re going to be arresting?” Anna asked. “It’s going to be a zoo. Avery told me to call our family friend Charlie Ballard. He’s here somewhere, and he was a cop with my dad. I guess he and Avery both came to look for me.”
“A cop friend of your dad’s?” Eric said. “He must have started the shooting.”
“No, Charlie’s not like that.”
Anna stood still for a moment. The adrenaline of the incident in the park slowed inside her body. She’d been moving around and feeling like she was floating, but for the first time in a while she felt like her feet were on the ground. The rush of the adrenaline gave way to warmth, something that seeped through her body and calmed her. It replaced the image of the woman on the ground, her lifeless eyes staring straight ahead. . . .
“What’s the matter?” Eric asked. “You’re just standing there.”
“Nothing. It’s just . . . Avery really did come to look for me. And she found me. You know, like a real sister would.”
“Maybe it’s the other way around,” Rachel said. “You found her.”
“Still, we ended up in the same place at the same time. She was trying to help other people too, and so was I.”
“I told you Avery was a badass,” Eric said.
“All you’ve ever done is complain about her,” Rachel said. “Are you changing your tune just because she helped you run away from an active-shooter situation? Anybody could do that. A stranger could.”
“That’s harsh, Rachel,” Anna said.
“I’m sorry. But you’ve never acted like you gave a shit about her. And she didn’t seem to give a shit about you. And all you’ve said for years is how much she hurts your feelings.”
“I’m going to call Charlie. . . . Maybe you all should go on home. . . .”
“But it’s still not safe at my place, right?” Rachel asked. “I mean, we haven’t really dealt with any of this, have we? We don’t know what’s going on.”
“Just go to Eric’s for now.”
“For now. But for how long? I’m sorry, Anna, and I’m sorry about Kayla, but . . . I don’t know what to do if someone might be looking for you and they come to my place. Are we all in danger?”
Anna couldn’t think of what to say. Rachel was right—they hadn’t solved any of the larger problems. Anna had allowed the protest and all the chaos to distract her, to take her mind away from all the things she was running from. But eventually they would catch up with her. And they could catch up with deadly consequences—as they had for Kayla.
“Why don’t you call this Charlie guy?” Eric said. “If he’s a cop, maybe he knows something. Maybe he can help you get Avery out of jail. Or maybe he can tell us what to do.”
“Yeah, good.” Anna pulled her phone out but immediately felt defeated. “I’m sure I don’t have his number. I’ve never called him. Who calls their dad’s friends?”
“I do,” Eric said.
“Call your dad and get the number,” Rachel said.
“I’m not doing that,” Anna said. “I’m going to call my mom’s cousin. Libby. She called me earlier. And she knows Charlie. They used to date or hook up or something. . . .”
“Weird,” Rachel said.
“Old people go on dates,” Eric said. “My aunt’s divorced, and my mom is always trying to set her up with somebody. She got her to go to dinner with the guy next door about two weeks after his wife died.”
The call rang and rang. Libby finally answered. She sounded anxious. “Oh, Anna, thank goodness. I was talking to your mom.”
“Libby, I don’t want to talk about them, okay? I mean— They are okay, right?”
“They’re fine, honey. As fine as they can be. But we do need to talk.”
“Can you just do me a favor? I’m in Louisville, at this protest, and Avery is here.”
“Avery? Are you with her?”
“No. It’s a long story. Look, don’t tell Dad, but Avery just got hauled away by the cops.”
“Oh, shit.”
“She said Charlie Ballard’s here, and I need to call him. To help me get Avery out of jail. And other stuff. Things are kind of crazy here.”
“What’s Charlie doing there? Okay, never mind. Anna, we need to talk. Before you do anything else, we need to talk. Especially if Charlie is there. Especially if you’re in that part of the state. And I heard about your roommate, and I’m so, so sorry about that. Okay? I really am. But you need to know what’s going on, if you don’t already. But I guess you don’t know.”
“Don’t know what?”
“That’s why I asked about the birthday gift.”
“Libby, what the fuck is it with the birthday gift? You got me a pair of Adidas sneakers. Do you want another thank-you note or something? Can you just tell me if you have Charlie’s number so I can get ahold of him?”
“I don’t mean my gift, Anna. I mean Trevor’s gift. You told me what he got you for your birthday. . . .”
“Trevor’s gift?” Anna looked over at her friends. Eric was still clutching the side of his body. He looked like he’d been hit by a truck. And Rachel looked eager to get the hell out of there. “What are you talking about, Libby?”
45
Avery couldn’t believe how long the police had held her.
At the park, she sat in the rear of the van for a good twenty minutes while the police rounded up more and more protestors and stuffed them in alongside her. The more people they put into the rear of the van, the hotter it grew. By the time the van finally pulled away, with about twenty people crammed inside, sitting thigh to thigh on the unforgiving bench seats, sweat dripped down the side of her face and down her neck. She remained cuffed, so she could do little to wipe it away. It had been a hell of a morning.
The motion of the van jerked the passengers from side to side. Few words were spoken. Mostly her fellow passengers muttered and cursed every time the van took a sharp turn or jounced over a bump, the combined body odors forcing Avery to breathe through her mouth. At one point, someone—a guy who looked to be about fifty, with a gray beard and a baseball cap on his head—asked, “Do you know if anyone was hurt by those shots?”
“Yes,” Avery said. “A young woman was hit.”
“Bad?”
Avery nodded and thought of Charlie, who seemed to have been in the vicinity of the shooting when they were speaking on the phone. She imagined a best-case scenario, one in which they’d pull up to the city jail—which she knew faced Jefferson Street, not far from the park—and Charlie would be waiting there, having already spoken to his law enforcement contacts and arranged for Avery’s release. Her stomach grumbled, and she found that option most appealing because she wanted something to eat.
But Charlie wasn’t there at the station.
The police herded the crowd into the jail, through a labyrinth of concrete hallways under the watchful eyes of more cops in riot gear. They quickly processed the group from her van, making them all surrender their personal effects, provide some basic information, and then pose for mug shots. Avery went along, her upper and lower teeth grinding against one another. She asked for a lawyer, and the cop who took her information said in a bored voice, “All in good time, my friend, all in good time. We’ve got a lot of folks to deal with here.”
The holding cell smelled like a combination of a locker room and a portable toilet at a giant outdoor concert. The accumulated scents of years of human misery and bodily fluids permeated the cramped space. The police packed too many people into the room, the same cross section she’d observed at the rally. A few lucky protestors managed to snag seats on the benches bolted to the walls. Most, including Avery, stood. Men and women were mixed in together, which was not the typical practice, so Avery tried to stay alert. She found a space on the side of the cell closest to the iron-barred door and watched everything that went on around her.
But danger failed to come in the form of a physical threat. The enemy was boredom. Everybody stood around. And stood and stood and sat and stood. Voices murmured, and a young woman across the room cried on her boyfriend’s shoulder, her teary words reaching Avery at one point. “What is my dad going to say about this?”
Same, Avery thought. Same.
Except Avery suspected her dad would be even more disappointed in her. He had sent her to find Anna, and she had come tantalizingly close. Only to let her sister slip away at the last moment. But it had been more important that Anna wasn’t arrested—at least as far as Avery could tell. It was better that way, better to have Anna gone from the park and the vicinity of the shooting.
Anna.
What the hell was Anna doing? Out of the corner of her eye, Avery had caught a glimpse of her sister trying to drag a cop in full riot gear away from the protestors before he could inflict more damage on anyone. Feeling pride over Anna’s bravery and shock at her stupidity, Avery shook her head at the image, which was now emblazoned in her mind. My God, you never put your hands on a cop.
But hadn’t Avery done the same thing? Hadn’t she thrown herself into the mix because one cop seemed to want to use protestors’ heads for batting practice?
At least it looked like Anna had escaped. And when Avery managed to get her ass out of the city jail, she planned on going right to Rachel’s apartment. She just couldn’t be certain whether she was going to hug Anna or wring her neck when she saw her.
An hour passed. Then another. From time to time, the cops showed up and stuffed more people into the cell. At some point it seemed like the human mass jammed inside was going to ooze through the bars, like dough spilling over the edges of a pie pan.
Avery started to smell herself. She needed a shower, a change of clothes. She needed to get out so she could breathe. She wanted something to eat for lunch.
“Hey, I know you.”
The voice rose above the low, murmuring din. Avery was conditioned to ignore random voices, to pretend shouts and taunts had nothing to do with her. Besides, no one in the cell actually knew who she was.
But the voice said it again. “I know you.”
Avery ignored it.
She sensed a person moving through the crowd. A young guy weaving his way through the mass of people, coming her way.
She risked a glance, and her heart clenched. Yes, the guy was coming for her. And, yes, she recognized him.
46
Avery tensed.
The guy drew closer. He wore an untucked polo shirt with the Gracewood logo stitched on the left breast, jeans with a giant mud stain on the right knee, and white sneakers. He reached her, and Avery remained in fight-or-flight mode, despite the fact that he appeared to be four inches shorter than she was. His brown eyes looked soft behind long lashes. Nothing about him made him seem in any way dangerous.
“Remember?” he asked. “In the street earlier today, when you were with the cop? And also at that fight Stephen started on campus?”
It came back to Avery. That dude had been the target, the one almost on the receiving end of a beating the day she rolled up to the frat house and broke things up. Avery remembered walking away from the scene after the Breckville cops arrived, and that guy chose not to thank her but instead defended the much larger guy who wanted to beat his brains in.
Nice.
“It’s coming back to me now,” Avery said. “I need something to talk to my therapist about.”
The guy flushed. He broke off eye contact. “Yeah, I’m sorry about that. When we drink, it can make for some bad outcomes.”
“What’s your name?”
“Cliff. Cliff Patton.”
“What about today’s outcomes? Drinking and guns?”
Cliff’s head jerked up. “I didn’t have a gun. And I didn’t know Stephen was bringing one. I swear.” He raised his hands in surrender. “In fact, right after we saw you in the street, I left those guys. I didn’t want to have anything to do with whatever they were going to do.”
“Why were you frat bros even there in the first place?”
“We’re here for a regional meeting. It just so happened the march was going on. Stephen heard about it, and he got everybody worked up about going by. Stephen, you know, he’s a shit stirrer. He likes to fuck with people.”
“And then, once you got there, you decided it would be fun to start chanting, maybe fire a few shots into the crowd.”
Cliff shook his head. Vigorously. “That wasn’t my brothers. They just wanted to troll the protestors. I wasn’t with them, but I saw them later. Right before I got arrested. They said it was some gang of biker-type guys. They were the ones chanting, and they were the ones who started shooting.”
“Okay, whatever. I’m not sure what you want from me. I’m stuck in here with everybody else.”
“I came over to thank you. For what you did for me the other day with Stephen. He was going to beat the crap out of me, and you stepped in. And I realize I didn’t thank you the way I should have. It’s kind of a lucky thing I ran into you here. See, I can thank you, right? So, thanks for saving my ass.”
Avery relaxed. The muscles and tendons that had tightened like wire cables lost some of their tension. “Okay, you’re welcome. Let’s hope I don’t get called to the frat house again.”
“No doubt. None of us want that, do we?”
“We don’t.”
Avery figured that was the end of their business. They’d had their tender reconciliation and, with that out of the way, they could go on with the rest of their lives. The young guy to a middle-management position or law school. Avery back to wearing her tin badge and patrolling in a Hyundai.
“What are you doing here, anyway?” Cliff asked. “You’re kind of like a cop, but you’re marching against the cops?”
“I’m not on anybody’s side. I’m looking for— As a matter of fact, maybe you can help me. I’m looking for my sister, and she’s a student at Gracewood. It’s a small enough place, so maybe you know her. Anna Rogers? Do you know her?”
“Anna Rogers?” His forehead wrinkled. “Which sorority is she in?”
“None. I mean, I don’t think she’s in one. If she is, I don’t know which it is.”
“She’s your sister and you don’t know if she’s in a sorority?”
“Look, I don’t have time for that. Do you know her?”
“What’s she look like?”
Avery reached for her phone, then realized it currently sat in an envelope in an evidence locker along with all of her other belongings. “What does she look like? Well, I guess a little like me. We have the same dad. She’s a criminology major.”
“Hmmm. I don’t know, man. It doesn’t ring a bell, but I’m bad with names.” His forehead remained wrinkled, and he stared at the grimy floor of the cell. “I did . . . I did see a girl I know from Gracewood here. Right before I got busted. But I don’t know her name. We took a class together last year. Folklore. It was boring as shit. But this girl was really outspoken in class. She liked to argue with the professor and the other students, even.”
“That runs in the family. Are you saying you saw her here today?”
“I did. When all hell was breaking loose. I went down a side street to get out of the way, which didn’t end up doing me any good, since I got busted after all. But this girl was coming toward me, and I thought she looked familiar. This was on the south side of the park, right where the cops started busting people and smacking them around.”
