Dying for a Living (A Jesse Sullivan Novel) (7 page)

“Two whole days,” she said. “The database doesn’t have any entries for decapitation, but you weren’t completely decapitated anyway. You just lost too much blood.”

I lost blood all the time, so my AB+ blood type came in handy.

Replacement agents started an online database where we could log in and input what kind of death we experienced and how long it lasted and what sort of recovery time it took. With new entries coming in all the time, we can crosscheck a whole bunch at once, which keeps the estimations pretty accurate.

If Eve’s replacement had been normal, asphyxiation typically cost four hours. Decapitation or any kind of brain damage isn’t listed since Necronites don’t usually survive, but if it was a proper entry, Ally, Kirk, and Brinkley would’ve known what to expect and how to help me recover the quickest.

“Let me see.” I took the compact mirror Ally offered. I pulled the gauze down enough to see underneath. My skin was purple and bulging through little black stitches along my throat. Blood crusted and flaked between the black strings.

“Damn, I’m like Frankenstein’s monster,” I said, pouting.

She made a half-hearted gesture toward my chest. “It won’t scar like your autopsy.”

“Why would she try to cut off my head? Who cuts off peoples’ heads?” I asked. What was this growing void in my mind? Shock?

“Maybe she’ll confess,” Ally said. “Lane knocked her out with one punch. She’s in custody.”

I was genuinely surprised. “He hit a girl?”

“He said he believes in gender equality,” she answered, her voice cold. Clearly, they’d not become friends in their joint hall duty or in their efforts to save me.

I tried not to picture myself bleeding to death and failed. I imagined just what it might look like with my body in Lane’s arms, blood trailing all over the hotel’s cream-colored carpet. In my imagination, my head flopped all over the place, barely attached, as Lane stepped through the sparkly glass doors onto the sunny street.

“What about the guy?” I asked.

“He got away. It wasn’t until Lane replayed the tape that we saw him duck into the bathroom as soon as he heard us at the door. We ran right past him and he slipped out.”

“I want to see that tape,” I said.

“Too bad, the cops took it,” she replied and wiped my sweaty bangs off my forehead. “I’m just glad Lane installed the camera and stole Eve’s key card.”

“What, why?” I took a sip of water that she offered.

A rough knock at the door drowned out whatever she said next. A man entered with quick, purposeful steps. He wore a suit and his hair was slicked in a good-boy part across his forehead. His face was shaved. I bet he was older than he looked, which couldn’t be more than forty. Then again, I look like a Girl Scout on most days.

“Ms. Sullivan, as long as you’re coherent, I need to speak with you.”

“I’m heavily medicated.” No one had actually told me I was medicated, but I’d have guessed from the thick paste feeling in my mouth and how my eyes felt a bit too wide and slightly off-centered.

“This will be brief,” the suit replied. He came to the end of my bed, looking at Ally with a stare that certainly said ‘get the hell out of here.’ Instead, he said, “Can we have a moment alone, Ms. Gallagher?”

Ally didn’t look the least bit intimidated by this guy. When she stood up from her chair I realized she was half a foot taller than him.

“I’ll be outside if you need me, okay?” All the tenderness had returned to her voice. Eve’s attack must’ve really scared her if she’d forgiven me for screwing Lane already.

Once alone, the suit took Ally’s seat by the bed, scraping back the chair to a less intimate distance. He did extend his hand. “Agent Garrison,” he said. “Ms. Sullivan, if you can answer a few questions, the bureau would appreciate it.”

“Which bureau?”

“Your bureau,” he said. He said
your
as if to imply ownership, like we were in the same club. “FBRD.”

“Where’s Brinkley?” I asked.

Something dark danced behind his eyes. “Let’s come back to that. Can you tell me what happened today?”

“I just watched,” I said, blushing. Or at least I thought I was blushing. I certainly felt the heat rise in my face. “I don’t have any fetishes, if you’re asking about that. Most of my jobs have nothing whatsoever to do with sex, just death. This is the first sex job I’ve ever taken.”

His brow furrowed.

“Okay, that came out wrong. I wasn’t having any kind of sex. Actually she didn’t even have much sex—I think she was one of those dominators.”

“A dominatrix?” he asked.

“I was just trying to do a replacement. I did not pay her for sex if that’s what you’re wondering.”

“Let me be specific.” Clearly, he wanted me to focus. “Why did Eve Hildebrand try to kill you?”

My feelings hurt, along with everything else. “I don’t know why. I think I’m a pretty okay person. Will her review count? Since she tried to kill me, I don’t think her review should count.”

He shifted in his seat. “Did anything strange happen in that room?”

I arched my eyebrows. “Everything strange happened in that room.”

He touched the bridge of his nose as if I were stressing him out. Hello? I was the one who’d just been attacked here.

“Look,” I began. “One minute I was holding her hand to replace her, the next minute she’s on my chest with a machete.”

“An actual machete?”

“Well, no, but a really big knife.” I made a chopping motion with my hand.

“Have you ever met Eve before?”

“No.”

“Would you consider yourself suicidal?”

“What? No.” I frowned. I didn’t see any connection between those two statements. Maybe I was higher than I thought. “Not at all.”

In case he thought I was of low moral fiber I added, “And I didn’t even want her to be choked, but I let it happen because that’s what I was taught.”

“Yes, we don’t challenge fate,” he said. “But you see, you didn’t tell me anything about her being choked, only that she was having sex.”

I backed up and told him the whole story from the beginning, starting when the last guy showed up. I finished my statement by asking, “Why would she do that? If she wanted to kill me, couldn’t she just put a bullet in my brain?”

“Not if she wanted it to look like a replacement gone wrong,” he replied.

“It was definitely a replacement gone wrong.”

“Ms. Sullivan, remind me how you came to be an agent,” Garrison said. He leaned his weight into the armrest.

And I wasn’t high enough on painkillers to overlook this out-of-nowhere question. The smell of smoke and burning flesh threatened to overtake me again. Why was Eddie’s death so horribly vivid for me? Thinking about it around this agent made my teeth ache. How much did Garrison know? Surely Brinkley hadn’t ratted me out, right?

I decided a half-truth was safest. “I died in a barn fire. When I woke up two days later, Brinkley was there to recruit me. He’d brought me a cherry coke.”

Garrison nodded like he already knew this. “And your autopsy scar?”

“The jerk coroner freaked out and made a phone call when what he should have done was close me up.”

“Why did you accept his offer to be a death-replacement agent?”

“I love cherry coke.” And because I didn’t want to go to prison. “I also had medical bills and no job prospects. I needed to do something with myself.” The taste of ash flooded my mouth.

“Did he tell you why he chose you?”

“I’m rare,” I said. Duh. “We aren’t Cabbage Patch kids. You can’t just grow us.” The military tried that with AMPs and failed horribly.

“Didn’t you want to go home?” he asked.

I chose another half-truth. “I think it would’ve been too hard for her to look at me without thinking about what happened.”

“Your mother?” It wasn’t really a question. Garrison leaned forward. “Because her husband Eddie died in that fire too.”

I traced the cross-stitch pattern of my blanket with my eyes.

“Yeah, her husband died too.”

I didn’t dare say anything else. Brinkley had taught me that when in doubt, keep my mouth shut. This just so happened to be one of the first times I felt the pressing need to execute that right. Garrison finally broke the silence. “I have just a couple more questions. Why did you leave St. Louis?”

“What does this have to do with Eve?”

“Did something happen in St. Louis? Did something happen that made Agent Brinkley relocate you?”

I didn’t answer immediately and he shook me.

“What happened, Ms. Sullivan?” he asked. He thought using my name so much would make me pay attention. Frankly, it just annoyed me. He shook my shoulder again.

“Stop that!”

“Tell me what happened in St. Louis and I’ll let you sleep. Why did Brinkley move you?”

“A few agents died and Rachel got sick,” I told him. The room looked funny and dis-proportioned. Was the morphine kicking in? “Rachel got sick and Brinkley said—”

“Said?” He was on the edge of his seat.

“He said we needed to leave St. Louis before I got sick too.”

“Do you mean Rachel Wright?” he asked. He barely waited for me to nod.

“I don’t want to talk about that.”

“You realize you’ve broken the law, don’t you? If you don’t cooperate, I can make this much harder for you,” he warned.

“If I had a dollar for every agent who threatened to make my life miserable,” I muttered. The heat of my anger made my face hot and pushed the dulling effects of the drugs back a bit. Bringing up Rachel was a low blow. Now he wanted to threaten me? “I was told to do a job and I did it. I can’t help it if the client was a prostitute. I didn’t break the law just by being in the room with her. I didn’t pay her for sex or anything illegal.”

“When you agreed to become a death-replacement agent, you signed a contract agreeing to abide by our laws. You broke the law when you contracted an unauthorized replacement,” he said. “The rules we’ve established regarding death-replacing are specific and necessary. Disregarding them carries steep consequences.”

“We have the paperwork, and I know my contract,” I said. “In no way did I violate it.”

“There was no paperwork,” he said. “That’s $100,000 and a year in jail. At least.”

“Yeah-huh,” I said. “Brinkley wouldn’t break the rules like that. I know because he’s been shoving them down my throat for the last seven years. Eve was the one who’d tried to cut off my head,” I said. I tugged at the gauze, but accidently scratched the wound with a fingernail and cried out against the pain shooting all the way to my toes.

“Our division is working very hard to repair our image. We can’t have any replacements that would compromise the efforts of thousands of people, Ms. Sullivan.”

$100,000. Where would I get that money? “I told you, there is paperwork. Ask Ally. She’ll have it. And you shouldn’t doubt Brinkley.”

“Don’t you?” he asked.

I hesitated, which I’m sure was real convincing.

“No.”

“When was the last time you spoke to your handler?”

“We tried to call him just before Eve’s replacement, but he didn’t answer.” Because this is a test. This whole big mess is a test.

“Then I find it interesting that you do not doubt him,” Garrison said. He gestured at the length of me stretched in bed. “Here you lie in a hospital bed, wounded. You almost died and yet your handler isn’t even here to check on you. Don’t you find that strange?”

Please let this be a test. “He isn’t here?”

“Did you think he was?” he asked, curious.

“I thought he was in the hall or something.” I really did.

Garrison pulled a business card from his back pocket and shoved it in my hand. I could barely lift my arm to take it.

“Until we clear this up, you are suspended. You are no longer authorized to commit -replacements, but you may continue your other duties. You are not to leave the area and you are strongly advised to contact us the moment you hear from Agent Brinkley.”

“What? Why?” The heart monitor beside me wailed again. I have to talk to Brinkley if these guys were going to investigate me. We needed to get our stories straight about Eddie and Rachel.

“If you are telling the truth,” he began and he stood to announce his departure. “If he really gave you this replacement and he isn’t here to verify your safety, you should assume he is the one who wants you dead.”

Chapter 6

D
r. Stanley York removed the stethoscope buds from his ears. I liked Dr. York with his snow-white hair, bright eyes and thin smile. Unlike other doctors, he made me feel like a person, not a test subject.

The blood pressure cuff’s Velcro made a ripping noise as he pulled it free. “The blood we’ve drawn shows no abnormalities. It’s been properly re-oxygenated and is flowing just fine. The calcium in your muscles has stabilized, but you can expect the usual soreness. Your body temp and blood pressure are still a little low, but they’ll come up.”

Ally entered my ICU with one of those paper cups from the cafeteria.