Lisa Unger - Sliver Of Truth

No one likes their own philosophies thrown back at them. Though I had to admit that he was right in certain respects. I had made some questionable choices. I had been guilty of putting myself in the path of harm when I could have easily crossed the street. But sometimes turning away just isn’t an option.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I have to think.”

“Well, I bet I know where to find you tomorrow night at eight.”

I thought about the text message, about Jake. The fear in my chest made my breathing shallow.

“Ace?” I said, remembering suddenly what it felt like to be a kid, needing my big brother to chase nightmares away.

“Yeah?”

“Will you come with me?”

“Shit,” he said, drawing out the word softly. I thought of how he never wanted me to crawl into bed with him when we were little, but that he always shifted over to the side to give me room.

“Will you?” I said, surprised at how scared my voice sounded.

I heard him sigh. “Okay.”

I DRIFTED OFF into a fitful sleep on the couch, the cell phone in my hand. I woke up a couple of times, sure I’d heard it ringing, expecting to see Jake’s number blinking on the screen, only to find I’d imagined it. When it did finally ring, I answered it without even looking to see who it was.

“Jake?” I said.

“No. Not Jake.” Agent Grace.

“What time is it?”

“Three A.M.”

“What do you want?”

“Your boy is O negative, right?”

I thought of the pool of blood, how dark and thick it had been.

“Yeah,” I said. I knew this only because the time we’d been in the hospital together, I’d peeked at his chart. He is what they call a universal donor-he can give his blood to anyone but can receive blood only from another type O negative. This seemed so unfair to me. And Jake is most definitely a giver; he never asks for anything in return.

“The blood in his studio is AB positive.”

I felt something release its grip on my heart, let relief wash the tension from my muscles. Whatever had happened there, it hadn’t been Jake bleeding out on the floor. That was something. Then I wondered: Was it Jake who sent the text message?

“I thought you’d want to know.”

I didn’t say anything. It was uncharacteristically nice of him to call. But I figured he had another agenda.

“Did you happen to look at his laptop while you were there?” he asked me.

I thought about lying but couldn’t seem to force the words out.

“Don’t bother answering,” he said. “Your fingerprints are all over the keyboard.”

I found it fascinating that he could carry on an entire conversation without my having to say a word. It was a real skill.

“That website with the streaming video of London-does it mean anything to you?”

“No,” I said, just to feel as if I was part of the conversation. “I have no idea what it is.”

“Have you ever seen it before?”

There was a knock at my door then; I heard it on the phone, too.

“Can I come in?” he said.

I walked over to the door and opened it for him. He looked tired. His hair was a mess, and there was some kind of grease stain on his shirt.

He ended the call and put the cell phone back in his pocket. “One of your neighbors let me in downstairs. Must have been coming in from a late night,” he said, answering a question I hadn’t asked.

“Where’s your partner?” I said, shutting the door. I was starting to get used to these little intrusions, found that tonight I didn’t even mind. Now that I knew it wasn’t Jake’s blood on the floor, I was feeling less tense and had my sense of humor back. All the other things seemed far away, almost like a vanishing nightmare.

“He’s in the car.”

“Aren’t you supposed to go everywhere together? How do you run the whole good cop, bad cop thing without him?”

“We don’t get along very well.”

“Imagine that.”

He gave me a dark look. “Believe it or not, I’m not the bad guy here. I may be the only friend you have.”

I thought again about how he didn’t look or act like any FBI agent I’d ever seen. The agents I’d dealt with during the Project Rescue investigation had been all about rules and procedures; they’d been clean-cut and officious, bureaucratic and precise. In other words, the exact opposite of Dylan Grace.

“Where did you first see it?”

“What?”

“The website.”

I sighed and sank into the couch. Ace’s words rang in my ears. You have the chance to turn all of this over to that FBI guy, but you’re not going to. What was it? Was I just being stubborn? Did I want to get myself deeper and deeper into trouble until I couldn’t get myself out again? Maybe I was on some kind of self-destructive jag, acting out because of this low-grade depression that permeated my world. I decided to prove my brother wrong.

“At my parents’ house,” I said with a sigh. “I saw it on my father’s computer.” The admission felt like a failure on my part. It was like saying, “I can’t handle this alone.” It also felt like a betrayal of my father. I didn’t know what the website was or who was using it. But it couldn’t be good.

“But when I saw it there, it was just a red screen, no video,” I added.

He pulled up a chair at the table, straddled it in that way he had, rested his arms on the back of it. He had an odd look on his face. I might have thought it was concern if I believed he was capable of it. Maybe I was being too hard on him. Then again, Trust no one. I should have had it tattooed on my arm.

“I tried to access it again from my computer here with the same results. Just the red screen,” I said when he didn’t say anything.

He nodded uncertainly, kept his eyes on me. He looked at me like that a lot, as if he was trying to figure out if I was lying to him, as if he might be able to see it on my face. I turned away; there was something about that gray gaze that made me nervous. There was a lot more I could tell him. But I didn’t. It was like flirting-give a little, keep a little. Maybe Ace was right about me after all.

“Do you have any idea what that site is?” I asked, my curiosity getting the better of me. I didn’t want to have a conversation with Dylan Grace, and yet here we were again.

He shrugged. “The best I can figure at this point is that it’s some kind of encrypted website. A place to leave and retrieve messages. There must be a way to log in, but I couldn’t figure it out.”

“And the video?”

He shrugged again. “We have some people working on it. We’ll figure it out soon enough.” His voice went low at the end of the sentence, as if he was issuing a warning.

I lifted my feet onto the couch, made myself comfortable. Fatigue was pulling at the lids of my eyes. Now that I knew Jake was okay, or at least that it wasn’t his blood on the floor of the studio, everything else seemed less terrifying and urgent. But that was just one of the many things I’d be wrong about in the next twenty-four hours.

THE NEXT THING I was aware of was sunlight streaming in my east-facing windows. It took me a second to orient myself, then everything of the day before came back at me with sickening clarity. Had Agent Grace really been here? Did he really tell me it wasn’t Jake’s blood on the floor? I felt nauseated that I might have dreamed it all. Or that I had fallen asleep while he was sitting in my apartment. How weird was that? I noticed then that someone had taken the chenille throw from my bed and covered me with it. A dull pain throbbed behind my eyes as I sat up. There was a note on my coffee table. We’ll talk tomorrow, it threatened, signed with the initials DG. It was the handwriting of an arrogant pain in the ass if ever I’d seen it-big looping letters, huge initials. I had to smile. I still hated him but he was starting to grow on me.