The Old Wheel, page 36
part #2 of The Adventures of Holloway Holmes Series
“Even if you’re worried,” I whispered. “Even if you’re scared. It’s good practice.”
It took a moment. Then he offered me one of those tremulous, uncertain smiles.
We bonked foreheads gently, and I said, “Still a dork,” and then I kissed him and sent him on his way with a pat on the ass.
Who says I’m not a gentleman?
We were merging onto I-15, where traffic was steady with minivans and crossovers and SUVs—anything big enough to hold a baseball team’s worth of children—when Holmes said, “It’s Paxton.”
“I thought you said he couldn’t be the mastermind.”
“Yes. I mean, he isn’t.” Holmes let out a frustrated breath.
“Would it help if we kissed some more?”
“No.”
“I can pull over.”
“You are—” He set his jaw.
“Adorable.”
“Yes.” Then, as though he regretted saying anything, “But not as much as you think.”
“Delightful.”
“In your own peculiar way.”
“Sexy.”
Those circles of color darkened, and the muscles in his jaw tightened, and I thought for sure he wouldn’t say anything. But then he said flatly, his gaze straight forward, “You have an appeal.”
I burst out laughing. Holmes didn’t, of course, but his face relaxed, and when I squeezed the back of his neck and left my hand there, I could feel the coiled anxiety in his muscles loosen in response.
“Mischievous,” Holmes said. “And insatiable. And…and single-minded.”
I smirked.
“It’s not a good thing,” Holmes said as he leaned into my touch. His eyes half-closed. I wondered if he’d slept, really slept, since the accident in the canyon. More likely, his nights had been full of his stimulants of choice, pushing himself until he collapsed and then, in his dream, pursued by terrors. The shadow of it lay across his face. We had learned a word for it. Eighth-grade Language Arts, Mr. Scholz. A caul. “Stop worrying, Jack,” he murmured, his eyes still half shut. “We can’t spend all day worrying about each other.”
Clearing my throat, I squeezed his neck again. “That’s kind of what this is all about. Sorry to break it to you, but I’m going to be doing lots of worrying.”
He made a noise that could have meant anything. For a moment, his face was almost childlike as he let himself relax. Then the locks clicked shut, the bolts drove home, and he sat up, opening his eyes as all his defenses fell into place again.
“Paxton turned on Kazen’s phone.”
“What?”
“Kazen Bates. His phone. Paxton has it, and he turned it on.”
“So many questions. How do you know Paxton has it?”
“Because Kazen’s clothes had been rifled, and the phone was missing, and the window of Kazen’s room was open. Someone took the phone and exited the house. Precipitously.”
“But how do you know Paxton has it? He didn’t kill Kazen.”
“Because Emma doesn’t, and Aston doesn’t, and Camdyn didn’t.”
“Ok, but—”
“Abduction. The most likely possibility.”
“Fine. Let’s say you’re right. How could you possibly know that he turned it on? And why does it matter?”
“Because,” Holmes said, and he opened the bag between his feet to take out a matte-black laptop. “I have Kazen’s laptop, and I’m using it to track his phone.”
“Jesus Christ.”
“It was the simplest way.”
“H, he had bombs all over that place!”
“Landmines and other traps, not bombs.”
“Excuse me?” I asked. Loudly.
Holmes’s eyes got wide, and he shrank down in his seat, hands tight around the laptop.
“Not to mention—” Like I said: loudly. “—the fact that the police are looking for that, and it’s a key piece of evidence.”
“It’s not a key piece of evidence for anything that concerns them,” Holmes said. “And they don’t need to build a case against Camdyn because she’s already confessed.”
“It doesn’t matter. They should still have it. Why would Paxton want Kazen’s phone anyway?”
“I’m not sure, but I imagine he wants that video—the one we saw synced to his laptop.”
The tires thrummed beneath us, and I listened to that until I felt capable of speech. “You know what really pisses me off? You did it without telling me.”
“You were in the hospital—”
“Like you don’t trust me.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. Of course I trust you.”
“That’s why I caught you sneaking off to do this by yourself. That’s why I had to threaten to fuck up your plan before you’d let me come along.”
“I’m not letting you do anything,” H said, and he was getting a little shouty too. “You forced me into this, as I knew you would. I cannot be trusted to make decisions in your best interest, not when I’m in your company, not when I—I can’t say no to you. And so, the logical thing to do—”
“Finish that sentence.”
He did not.
My pulse beat in my throat.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered.
I nodded.
“You’re supposed to say it now,” he prompted.
Rolling my eyes, I managed not to choke on the words. “I’m sorry too.”
We were passing Point of the Mountain now, and as we came around it, the suburban sprawl of the Salt Lake Valley spread out ahead of us. A boner in a Tesla zipped past on the left, horn blaring. I gave him the finger, but too late.
“I’m tired of being kept in the dark,” I said. “For my own good or not. I want to know what’s going on.”
“We will follow the phone to Paxton—”
“No, dummy. I understood that part, thanks. I mean what’s this all about? What’s this game?”
Holmes was silent for a long time. He slid his fingers on the laptop’s aluminum casing, pressing so hard that the tips turned white. When he spoke, his voice had regained the buckled-down, affectless quality I remembered from when we’d first met.
“My family enjoys games. Of all kinds. Not games like other families play. Games with secrets. Games that involve taking away. Or hiding. What can you get away with.”
For a moment, the memory of Blackfriar’s breath on my face, the fish oil weight of it, overcame me. “So, you think it’s someone in your family?”
He shook his head. “The Moriartys play these games too. The Adlers play them. The three families.” Something twisted in the next words like a knife. “And their fucking games.”
I let us both have a moment. “Ok, so it’s someone playing a game. We don’t know who, but Paxton might help us figure it out. Do we know what kind of game it is?”
He hesitated.
“No,” I said.
“Jack, please.”
“No. I want to know.”
The corner of his mouth trembled, and then he broke down and bit his lip. Teeth broke skin. Fresh blood welled.
“Someone gave me something,” he said. His voice was unsteady with an emotion I couldn’t scan. “Something important. Tremendously important.”
“What?”
He bit his lip again. He was silent for longer. “On this one thing, will you please trust me? I will tell you anything else you want to know.”
“Why won’t you tell me?”
“It is something…damaging. Knowing it will place you in danger, and I will be unable to protect you.”
I screamed in my head about that for a while, using up all my swear words. Then I said, “You don’t have to protect me.”
His laugh sounded strangled. “Jack, please. You have no idea—if it were that easy, if I could simply turn it off.” He stopped. He released the laptop and pressed his face to his hands and drew long, deep breaths. When he lowered them again, his eyes were liquid and silver, but his voice was calmer. “Whatever else you want, I will give to you. Please don’t make me do this.”
A dozen different answers sprang to mind. I settled on, “And someone’s trying to take it away from you?”
“Yes.”
“But you don’t know who.”
“There are several possibilities.”
“It seems like a pretty small pool of suspects, actually. Your family. The Moriartys. The Adlers.”
“Perhaps. But unknown descendants appear from time to time. The bloodlines are far flung and tangled now. It’s impossible to know them all.”
I shook my head at that, and we kept driving.
The Intermodal Hub in Salt Lake City was, well, what it sounded like: a hub for the light rail system, Amtrak, city buses, and Greyhound. It was a long, low building with plate-glass windows and a corrugated steel awning. We had to park a block south, and as we walked to the station, Holmes carried the laptop, studying the signal from Kazen’s phone as he tracked it via his own phone’s internet hotspot. There were a fair number of people sitting outside the station: a man in a trench coat and sweats that had gone out at the knees; a woman with stringy gray hair and a dozen strands of Mardi Gras beads over a Leave It to Beaver t-shirt; a man in crisp new Wranglers and a white tee still creased from the packaging, no coat, whizzing into a trash can. I caught a whiff of urine and body odor, and after that I breathed through my mouth.
“Want to put that away?” I asked as Holmes continued to walk with the laptop open. “People are looking at you.”
“Alert me if I need to protect us.”
“Alert you?” I grabbed his elbow to steer him around what I was pretty sure was a Burger King bag full of human shit. “And hey, dumbass, I can protect us.”
Holmes let out that little huff.
“Excuse me?” I asked.
“I was simply remembering something.”
“The worst thing I ever did was let you stick your tongue down my throat. Now you’ve got all sorts of confidence.”
“It’s an unusual technique, tripping over a log while flailing with a box cutter, while your opponent has both a firearm and enough distance to operate it effectively.”
“He wasn’t supposed to turn around!”
“Very inconsiderate of him.”
“I was half-frozen, you know. My legs weren’t working right.”
“Of course.”
The guy whizzing was doing some fancy side-to-side action now, like some sort of nightmare human sprinkler, and I had to tug Holmes clear.
“I hate you,” I said.
“The gum,” Holmes said right before I stepped in chewing gum.
After that, he was on his own. It didn’t seem to bother him as much as it should have. When we got to the steps leading up to the hub, he stepped over a lady who was sleeping on a rolled-up Kroger’s bag, still studying the laptop’s screen, while I paused to scrape gum off my Cortez.
I caught up to him inside. We were in a long, open room. Exposed girders and ductwork had been spray-painted black overhead. Retractable-belt barriers created queuing lines that everyone ignored. Families waited on benches that had been subdivided with metal armrests to keep people from sleeping on them. An overweight man in a North Face coat was screaming into a pay phone (which I hadn’t known, until that moment, still existed). On the far side of the room, automatic doors led out to a platform where the salt-and-mud spattered chassis of Greyhounds rumbled.
“If you see—” Holmes began.
A familiar dark faux hawk was moving toward the automatic doors, carrying something—a small box with a handle—at his side. Paxton glanced over his shoulder, the movement unconcerned, probably automatic, and we locked eyes.
He ran.
I sprinted after him.
“Jack!” Holmes shouted.
But I kept running. As I ran, I tried to think—while, at the same time, dodging a double stroller stuffed with toddlers, a woman in a cotton-candy cloud of a coat, an emotional support dog that tried to bite me. Paxton was bigger than me, older, and as he had proven in the tunnels, clearly capable of handing me my ass. If I gave him an opening, he’d do it again. And then he’d be gone, and he’d be smart enough to ditch Kazen’s phone. We might not ever find him. So, the solution was simple. Tackle him and make sure he didn’t get up again. I wasn’t sure how I was going to manage it, but sometimes it paid to be sparing on the details.
At first, I was sure I was going to lose him. I put on the gas, but he was still faster, and the distance between us grew. Then he jinked left as he passed through the automatic doors, and I cut at an angle after him. Holmes was shouting something behind me, but I couldn’t focus on that. I lasered in on Paxton, on that stupid faux hawk, on broad shoulders under a waxed leather jacket.
When I passed through the automatic doors, the cold hit me like a slap, and my eyes watered. Paxton was maybe twenty feet ahead of me, and for some reason, he had slowed. He was turning in a circle, looking. People were staring at us. A few—an older man with a cane, a young woman with two roller bags, someone in an enormous hat—were still moving, but everyone else had stopped to watch.
I charged at Paxton. He turned, settling himself, the pose familiar: he was about to flip me or throw me or do the ultimate punch on me—something that would send me ass over teakettle and put me out of the race. And then I saw his focus change. He angled his body away from me, toward something behind me, and started running. It meant he was running toward me now—kind of.
I saw the elbow coming, and I took it on the crown of my head instead of in the face. He still rang my fucking bell, but instead of collapsing, the way I would have done if he’d hit me square, I did a tactical dive. It looked a lot like collapsing, only I wrapped my arms around his legs and took him with me. His momentum carried him another pace before he hit the platform hard, his breath whooshing out of him. I swear I heard his chin crack against the concrete, and the box he’d been carrying hit the ground and skidded away. I scrambled up Paxton’s body, clawing at his fancy coat, until I was sitting astride him. Then I locked his wrists between his shoulder blades. A pain compliance hold. One of Holmes’s favorites.
“Jack, hold him!” Holmes shouted as he blew past me.
I turned to watch and saw that he was chasing the person in the big hat. He—she?—looked shorter than either Holmes or I, but that could have been an affectation; it was hard to tell because they wore a long, baggy coat that came almost to their ankles. They were carrying a leather pilot’s bag in one hand and, in the other, the box Paxton had been carrying. It swung at their side as they raced toward the end of the platform with Holmes in pursuit.
Beneath me, Paxton wriggled, tried to raise his head, and then groaned and dropped back down again.
“Got you, fucker.”
“You split my chin, you cunt. And my teeth—I swear to God, if I lose a tooth, I’m going to take it out of your ass.”
“Sounds great. I still owe you for that shit in the tunnels.”
He laughed, and it sounded surprisingly genuine. Then he winced again. “Come on, bruv. Get off me now.”
“Nice try.”
His accent was thicker than I remembered. “I fink you should. I really fink you should.”
“Lighten up on the act, would you? We’re going to sit here and wait until H gets back. Or the police show up. Whichever happens first, I guess.”
“I can give it to you. The half I’ve still got, I mean.”
My mouth opened for me to say something snarky about that—and then my brain caught up with me.
“Yeah,” Paxton said with rough satisfaction. “But you’ve got to decide right now. Before the blond bombshell gets back.”
I worked on that for a minute. The best I could come up with was “Nice try.” Again.
“Spoze you wait. Spoze you let Holloway take it. Do you think he’ll let you see what it is?”
“Stop talking.”
“You didn’t ever wonder, did you? Holloway Holmes and all his secrets. Why’s he keeping this a secret from you?”
“I said stop talking.”
“What’ve you got to do with any of it, huh? Did you ever fink about that?”
A voice blatted on the speaker system, the words indistinguishable. The rattle of metal on metal suggested the approach of a train. On my next breath, I felt like all I got was the sickening sweetness of diesel exhaust. An older woman—trim and nicely dressed and with a handbag the size of a bowling ball—pranced a few steps towards us and took a swing with her bag. She missed me by inches, but she shouted, “What are you doing to him? Get off him!”
“Come on, bruv,” Paxton said in a low voice meant for me. “You’re not that thick. Front pocket. Help yourself.”
“Didn’t you hear me?” the woman asked with another menacing swing of her bag. A red-faced man in the crowd behind her cheered, and then someone else shouted something. This was my luck: I tracked down a blackmailing fuck boy, and somehow I was the one about to face mob justice. The woman lunged a few steps closer. That time, the bag almost got me. “Get off of him!”
I patted his coat as best I could. Paper rustled under the waxed leather.
“Don’t move,” I said, shifting so that my knee was between Paxton’s shoulder blades. But it was a stupid thing to say because he had to move—rolling slightly so that I could reach into his front pocket. My fingers closed around paper.
I realized my mistake too late. Paxton was still rolling, as though trying to be helpful. But the movement gave him freedom to bring his arm up, and he threw another elbow at my head.
Twisting to avoid the blow, I put myself off balance. Paxton bucked, and I rocked sideways. I kept my grip on the papers in his front pocket, and they slid free of his coat as he snaked away from me. Scrambling after him, I got one hand around his ankle. He drew his other foot back, about to give me a hundred and fifty dollars’ worth of sneakers to the teeth, but he never had a chance. That bowling-ball-sized handbag caught me on the side of the head, and the shock of it made me pull back and release Paxton.
He got to his feet and sprinted toward the buses. I started to follow, but another blow from the handbag caught me in the nose this time, and the next one barely missed taking out an eye. Shielding myself with my free hand, I scooted backward and shouted, “Cut it out!”
