Michael Prescott - In Dark Places

Wisps of smoke drifted from the kitchenette. The smoke had an oily smell. She guessed he had poured cooking oil on the stovetop's electric burners and turned them on. The heat of the burners would ignite the oil. No doubt he'd put down paper towels and paper plates as kindling. It wouldn't take long for the fire to grow and spread.

Wolper emerged from the kitchen. "Clock's ticking, Doctor. But you already knew that."

He clapped his hands, a man satisfied with his work.

"To be honest," he added, "you should've been dead already. Would be, if Brand had come through. I told him to take care of you when you left Parker Center. Problem was, he wouldn't give me a commitment. Didn't have the stones. So when you went sightseeing, I had to play chaperon, make sure you stayed out of trouble. Then, surprise, Brand shows up at the arcade. Doesn't shoot you, though. He cuts and runs. And when I frisk him, what do I find? His off-duty gunand nothing else. No throwdown."

He paused as if the significance of this statement were obvious. She just stared at him.

With a sigh, he explained. "You don't carry out a hit with a gun that can be traced to you. So if Brand wasn't planning a snuff job, what kind of bullshit game was he playing? I think he intended to warn you. He wanted to be a hero. I talked him out of that. Still, it was a close call. Too close. Lots of things have gone wrong tonight." He smiled. "But now I'm going to make everything right."

She spoke slowly, her voice dull and faraway. "They'll know it's arson."

Wolper shrugged off the remark. "That's not a problem."

He checked to be sure the windows were tightly closed. Already the smoke was getting dense, making her eyes water and her throat burn.

"Meg amp;" she whispered. She couldn't frame it as a question, but he understood her meaning.

"Don't worry about your daughter," he said. "She's a corpse."

The words made sense, but she wasn't able to take them in.

"We stashed her in an old bottling plant on South Central Avenue. I sent Tomlinson to take care of her."

Tomlinson. The detective who'd tried to talk her out of treating Brand.

Wolper looked briefly concerned. "Hasn't reported back. But he must've done it. She's a kid. How hard can she be to kill?"

So he wasn't certain Meg was dead. It hadn't been confirmed. There was a chance.

He read her thoughts. "Always hope, huh, Doctor? Good for you. Keep the faith. Me, I'm a realist, like I told you all along. You and your daughter are dead. Both of you."

He left, shutting the door to the waiting room, sealing her in to ensure a quicker suffocation.

The heat wasn't too bad yet, but the air was already fouled with smoke.

She still couldn't move. She would never move again. She would die in this metal chair. And Meg amp;

Meg was probably dead already. Even if she was somehow alive, Wolper would see to it that she didn't survive for long.

There was no hope for either of them, not anymore.

Gray steered the Crown Vic onto the Santa Monica Freeway, eastbound, keeping one hand on the wheel. The other hand held the gun pointing at Sergeant Brand in the passenger seat. He was pretty sure Brand had been whipped into total submission, but it didn't hurt to be careful. A guy like him could come up with a surprise or two, especially if he had nothing to lose.

"Your file says you got, what is it, post-dramatic stress?" Gray asked over the hiss of the road surface.

"Post-traumatic. How the hell did you see my file?"

"I'm everywhere. I see everything. I'm like Santa Claus or God. I see when you are sleeping; I see when you're awake amp; You never had no post-trauma stress, did you, Sarge?"

"I had the symptoms."

"Symptoms. Like what, as a for-instance?"

"Insomnia, anxiety, fatigue."

Gray glanced at him, then looked away. The guy was tough to look at, what with the circular scar of the lighter on his cheek and the oozing mess of his left ear. The right side of his face was untouched, but the left was a horror show. He was like that Batman comic book bad guy, Two-Face.

"Sounds like a case of the shakes to me," Gray said. "You were shitting your diapers 'cause you thought you might get found out or maybe turned in by your good buddy Wolper."

"I was scared, yeah. I knew about what he was up to for a long time, but I was never, you know, directly involved."

"Till recently."

"Yeah."

"So it wasn't no post-traumatic whatchacallit. It was plain old fear."

"And maybe guilt."

"Ooh, your conscience doing a number on you, huh? You mean to say you ain't a complete scumbag?"

"I'm not sure what I am. At the arcade, if Wolper hadn't been there"

"Yeah, you said something about that before. What would've happened if the lieutenant hadn't been hanging with the doc?"

That face of his was sort of fascinating, Gray decided. Two-Face wasn't precisely the right reference, though. It was more like Brand had partially melted. The Incredible Melting Man, that was it.

"I followed her and Wolper over there," Brand was saying. "I thought that maybe I'd come clean with her."

Gray smirked. "Maybe?"

"I'm not sure what I would've done. I mean, the thing is, they've got her kid, you know? I don't want that on my conscience. Not a kid."

"Who took the kid? Wolper?"

"No, I don't think so."

"So there's other cops in on this?"

"There are others, yeah. I don't know how many. I don't know how far it goes."

"This is a big fucking deal you got yourself mixed up in, Sarge. You really think you're smart enough to outfox all these other players?"

"No. I don't. I'm not smart."

"Gotta agree with you on that one."

Come to think of it, he wasn't sure there was an Incredible Melting Man. It was the shrinking man, right? Not melting. So maybe Brand was Darth Vader with the helmet off. Or the Phantom of the fucking Opera.

"I tried to stay clear of it," Brand said. "I never wanted to be part of the action. I'm still not really part of it. I mean, Wolper figures I won't sell him out, but that doesn't mean he lets me in on all the details."

"Did you know what was going down today?"

"Snatching the kid? No. I'm not even sure they knew. It might've been improvised."

"How about the hit on Doc Robin?"

"I didn't know for sure."

"But you kinda knew, am I right? Be straight with me, Sarge."

"I suspected."

"And you let it happen."

The scarred head turned in Gray's direction. "What, are you lecturing me, for Christ's sake? I don't need any goddamn lessons from a guy who snuffs high school girls"

Gray lifted the gun in his right hand, just enough to remind Brand of its existence. "How about from a guy who snuffs cops? You willing to hear a lecture from him?"

Brand settled down, cowed once more. "Fuck."

"So you were gonna come clean to the docmaybe."

"I knew they still wanted to hit her. Wolper even called me at home, tried to get me to do it. I let him think I might play ball. But like I said, what I really wanted to do was"

"Confess. Bare your soul. I got that. But you didn't."

"Cameron and Wolper saw me. I ran. I didn't want to face Wolper. But he chased me down. He frisked me, found my off-duty piece but no throwdown. So he knew I wasn't there to whack her. I couldn't use a traceable gun for that job. He must've figured I was gonna double-cross him."

"Which you were."

"Yeah, maybe. If Cameron and Wolper had separated. And if I could've figured a way to do it so that I could warn her and amp; well amp;"

"Save your own ass." This guy was a piece of work; he really was.

Brand seemed to hear the contempt in Gray's voice. "Survival is what it's all about," he said belligerently.