Catacomb (21 page)

D
an’s phone buzzed twice in his pocket, breaking the paralysis that had descended over all three of them as they neared the safer part of town close to Uncle Steve’s apartment. Dan was relieved to find they were texts from Sabrina.

“Funerary home, Dan. Bodies, Dan.
Bones
, Dan.”

“Yes, thank you, Jordan, I know,” Dan said, locking eyes with him.

“No, I mean seriously. What the hell? Tell me we are not being followed by freaky bone doctors.”

“Sabrina says Oliver is okay, in case you were wondering. Just shaken up, and he might have dislocated his shoulder firing the rifle so much,” Dan reported. His hands were still shaking, but at least none of them had gotten hurt.

“Screw them. We were attacked by masked crazies because we were at that damn store. There’s no way that’s a coincidence!” Jordan sliced his hand through the air, but Abby remained silent, still clutching her files. “And God! What if they track this back to us through Oliver and Sabrina? This shit with them has got to stop. They are nice but toxic.”

“They were attacked, too,” Dan pointed out quickly. “And it’s Oliver’s shop that got the worst of it.”

“Yes. Exactly. Oliver’s shop. None of this terrible crap started
happening until we met those two! From now on we are staying far, far away from them. The councilman tried to warn you, Dan. They’re bad news. I don’t know if they’re bad luck or into some bad stuff or have bad juju or what, but I’m done.” With that, they lapsed into silence again.

Dan didn’t expect Abby to come to his side. He wasn’t even sure he had a side. Was it Oliver they’d wanted or him? That was maybe the only thing he knew for sure—that one of them was the target. Sweaty, miserable, and still trembling, he glanced surreptitiously at his friends; yet again he had gotten them in danger. Maybe it was time to follow Jordan’s advice and cut Oliver and Sabrina out of his life.

But they still have that box.

Damn it. Would one more day really make the difference? He could go alone to Oliver’s shop and get the box, say his good-byes, and that would be that. At least then he would feel like less of a coward for leaving Oliver to deal with Micah’s relentless messages alone, when Dan had had way more to do with Micah’s death than Oliver had.

Dan felt exhaustion dragging his head down as they finally reached Uncle Steve’s block. Police sirens blipped and chirped, blue and red lights reflecting in alternating patterns along the buildings. At first, Dan assumed they were just holdovers from the break-in at Oliver’s, but the lights weren’t going anywhere. The trio circled back to approach the building from the north, watching traffic clog the road as everyone tried to maneuver around the police cars parked on the sidewalk.

“No,” he heard Jordan murmur. “No, that’s not his house. It can’t be his house.”

Jordan pushed Dan and Abby aside, darting between them and sprinting down the sidewalk. Three police cars vied for space in front of Uncle Steve’s door, and worse, an ambulance was parked just a few yards away. Exhaustion forgotten, Dan ran after his friend, Abby close behind.

“Dan, if anything’s happened to him . . .” She grabbed Dan’s wrist hard and squeezed.

“God, I know. What do we do?”

“Just stay strong for Jordan. That’s probably the only thing we can do.”

“That’s my uncle!” Jordan was shouting. One of the officers had intervened to keep him from crossing the flimsy barricade of police tape. “Let me through! That’s my uncle and I want to see him!”

Abby tried a different tactic, calmly putting a hand on Jordan’s shoulder and smiling up at the police officer. “Can you tell us what happened, officer? We’re staying with Steve Lipcott. Our things are inside if you need to verify that.”

The officer, a short, stocky man with a sallow complexion and beady eyes, stared at them for a long moment from under his cap. He scribbled something on the clipboard in his hands and then nodded to the space behind him. “You’ll have to wait a moment. Can’t let you through without checking that out.”

“Of course,” Abby said, using that same calm voice. “We understand.”

“No, we don’t!” Jordan shrieked. “Is he okay? Jesus, just tell me if my uncle’s okay!”

“He’s fine. A little roughed up, but he’ll make it. Ambulance is taking him to Ochsner Baptist. You can get a lift over
there after answering a few questions, all right?”

That was enough to keep Jordan from barreling through the police tape. They watched the stretcher with Steve’s blanketed and still form being popped into the ambulance. Abby and Dan put their arms around their friend.

“I’m so sorry, Jordan,” Dan murmured. The knot in his stomach told him this was his fault. It seemed like the worst possible answer to his question—apparently, he and Oliver were
both
targets.

“Don’t talk to me right now. Just don’t say a word, okay?” Jordan shied away from Dan’s arm, so Dan let it drop.

“You can’t blame Dan for this,” Abby said softly.

“Oh really? I can’t? Watch me.”

“Jordan—”

“You better hope this doesn’t have anything to do with your stupid new friends,” Jordan added in a vicious whisper. “Or those bone artists will be nothing compared to what I do to you.”

“Dan, he doesn’t mean that.” Abby turned to him with a sad half smile, one he couldn’t return.

“Yes, I do.”

Rolling his eyes in disgust, Dan left his friends huddling beside the police tape, waiting for the officer to question them. He walked over to an empty space on the sidewalk and sat down hard on the pavement, letting his head droop low over his knees. Not for the first time in their short, intense friendship, Dan wondered if his friends were about to turn on him.

Jordan’s words echoed like gunshots in his head.

He wanted to get up and leave, wander, let Jordan cool off, and hope that he realized Dan never wished anything but the
best for them, even if he often ended up bringing about the worst. What had Jordan called Sabrina and Oliver? Nice but toxic? Wasn’t that so like Dan, too?

Sighing, he rested his chin on the back of his hands and gazed out blindly at the street. The clouds hanging over the city felt ready to burst, and the tension of it resonated in his back. His meandering attention fell on the building opposite Uncle Steve’s, landing on a smear of white paint. Something winked at him from memory, an image that almost went unremembered in his exhaustion. Hadn’t there been graffiti on that wall when they arrived?

Standing, he glanced to see if his friends were still on the sidewalk, then he jogged across the traffic-clogged street, inspecting the smudgy white stain left behind on the bricks. He touched it lightly, his fingers coming away with a gritty residue. It wasn’t paint at all, but some kind of heavy chalk. He remembered a skull there and some French phrase, though he couldn’t conjure the exact words. He shivered, thinking of that stark, white rabbit face staring at him through the window.

“Dan! Dan, what’s going on? The police need to talk to us!” Abby called at him from across the street, waving frantically.

He nodded and backed slowly away from the wall, reaching into his pocket for his phone. He started a new text to Oliver, feeling a lump of anxiety grow in his throat.

“I need you to check something,”
he wrote.
“Look across the street. What do you see?”

“Rooms were tossed, but just the one laptop was taken. No jewelry, no other electronics—not even the other computer. Care to tell us what was on that laptop?”

Dan’s knee bounced compulsively as he sat in the hospital waiting room. A hand grabbed him by the thigh, stopping his leg; he had been shaking the entire bank of chairs. Abby’s dark, drawn face blinked back at him as he fought the grip of her hand for a second. Then he let his leg relax.

“What are you thinking?” Abby asked quietly. A policeman was still with them, distracted with his phone in the corner of the room while they waited on news of Uncle Steve’s condition.

Jordan was a wreck, pacing nonstop, crushing a soda can in his hand. Dan could hear the quiet
scrape-scrape-scrape
as Jordan worried his lip piercing with his tongue. The sound gnawed at him, dry and clacking.

“You know what I’m thinking.” Dan let his eyes slide from the ceiling to her wan face. “They took the laptop with Jordan’s emails to Maisie.”

“I don’t understand any of this.” She sighed and rubbed at her eyes, smudging her eye makeup until it looked like she’d been crying. “The important thing is, Jordan will come around. Deep down he knows this isn’t your fault, but right now he just needs someone to lash out at, someone to blame.” She put a comforting hand on Dan’s back, rubbing his shoulders. “Give him time.”

“I plan to.” He leaned into her hand, finding it the only thing that kept him from tearing his hair out completely. “And I also plan to get some answers.”

“I don’t like the sound of that,” she said. “What do you mean?”

“Think about it. Maisie Moore shared those articles about my parents, and then gets hit by a car and killed. My parents were arrested for messing around in some company’s secret affairs, then they die in a car wreck, too. Now, in the same night that the Bone Artists try to kill us at Oliver’s shop, Uncle Steve gets attacked. We’re not the only ones trying to tie up loose ends, Abby. For those guys, we
are
the loose ends.” He straightened his back, watching Jordan’s feet go back and forth across the linoleum.

“Dan . . .”

Scrape-scrape-scrape.

“I won’t do anything reckless,” he said.

“Make that a promise and I’ll feel a lot better.”

Dan swiveled to meet her eyes, feeling her hand go still on his back. She really was so beautiful to him, and feeling her there next to him, long-suffering and understanding, made it that much harder to say the next two words.

“I promise.”

Scrape-scrape-scrape.

The door to Uncle Steve’s room opened and a harried-looking nurse appeared. She gave Jordan a careful smile and gestured to the room behind her. “You can go in now, but he needs his rest.”

Jordan barreled past her and Abby stood.

“Coming?” she asked.

“Just after I make a quick phone call. I want to let Paul and Sandy know what happened.”

It was the second lie he had told in as many minutes.

The thick metal instrument scraped across his teeth. The sound echoed deafeningly in his head, like the rasp of a file across steel. He couldn’t close his mouth or move his head; something held his mouth open so wide it felt like his jaw would pop and break if pushed another centimeter. Helpless. Trapped. His eyes rolled back, the tension in his head spreading to the rest of his prone body. Then there came a tugging, hard and insistent, and he felt the first tooth tear away and the fast gush of pain and blood that followed, flooding his mouth with copper.

A
speed bump knocked him out of the dream. How had he fallen asleep over such a short car ride? He must have been more exhausted than he realized. The pain lingered, and he grabbed his jaw, running his tongue anxiously around his teeth. All there. Still, it filled him with a second’s hesitation.

Then he realized the cabbie was staring at him.

“Uh, hello? You gonna tell me where to go next or just hope that I’m a mind reader?”

Dan shook the phone out of his pocket, opening the GPS again to zero in on their location.

“Right. Sorry. You want a left here, then three more blocks down Rampart. It should be on the right.”

He had waited until Jordan and Abby were both passed out cold in Steve’s hospital room. They were curled up like puppies
on the shallow chairs in there, and Dan had slinked away while he could, watching early morning shock the city awake with an orange and purple sky.

Now the cab rolled down the sleepy city block, slowing and slowing until the tires squeaked. Dan leaned into the window, another spasm of fear tightening his stomach, making him reconsider his present course.

Oliver hadn’t responded to his text from the night before, but there was no telling what had happened after the police arrived. He and Sabrina were probably busy trying to clean up the mess at the store. Either way, Dan had made his decision. There was something hidden in that old funeral home, and he wanted to know what it was.

“Thanks,” he said, shoving a fistful of cash at the driver. “You don’t have to wait.”

Outside on the curb, a final instinctive urge told him to tell someone, anyone, where he had gone.

“
Hey
,” he texted Oliver. He was the one with the gun, after all, and he was one of the few people who wouldn’t be mad at Dan upon receipt of this message. Dan sent his present address and a word that he was pretty sure he knew who was responsible for trashing the store, and he was at their base now.

He checked up and down the street, half for masked lunatics waiting to ambush him and half for any random excuse not to go inside.

The coast was clear.

He didn’t exactly have Jordan’s skills with breaking and entering, but hanging out with him had given him a few tricks. The door at the bottom of the steps was locked, but there was a
window a little ways down that looked flimsy, and it appeared to connect to the same room. Dan went over to a pile of fruit crates that had been left out with a heap of garbage in the alley, and he tore off a wooden slat, returning to jam the thin piece of wood under the window frame. At first the window wouldn’t budge, but after a few sharp jabs, the board dug into the gap, and just as he hoped, the crossbar on the inside was rotted and soft. With a few more punches down on the slat, the window jumped free and he was able to push it open the rest of the way.