The Case for Jamie (Charlotte Holmes #3)(77)

“I got that,” he snapped.

I went to him and put my hands on his shoulders. He shrugged them off, clutching his boots to his chest.

“Lucien’s here,” he said. “Somewhere. Anna is here. Call Detective Shepard. Call Leander. Do whatever you need to do.”

“And what will you do?”

“I’m going to think about some of my life choices,” he said.

This was not an unreasonable response to the situation. Still, I swallowed. The room was cold and dark and bare, and Watson was in sock feet on the concrete floor. If I were him, I’d be looking for a metaphor. Instead I said, “I’m sorry.”

Watson turned to stare at me, my phone still in his hands. The light from the screen made me flinch.

“You’re sorry for a lot of things, aren’t you?” he said.

WE ONLY HAD TEN MINUTES UNTIL WE WERE MEANT TO meet Elizabeth, and if we’d had a plan before, we didn’t now. The worst was knowing that this betrayal of mine was fairly small, in the grand scheme of recent betrayals, and that given the proper amount of time (a few days, perhaps a week) Watson would no longer be mad at me. It made it difficult for me to take his anger seriously, as its timing was so inconvenient.

He was being a bit of a monster. He was doing that by being human.

In short: I did mean my apology; I would not have done anything different; I thought it very stupid for Watson to go thundering out into the darkened access tunnels, and yet he did.

And then I wondered if these were the thoughts a horrible person would have, if perhaps I hadn’t changed in the slightest, that any development I’d made as a human being had been in a vacuum and not in the more demanding arena of my day-to-day life, or that perhaps it was Watson, my indispensible Watson, who brought out the very worst of me—the part of me that loved someone, and then I thought aegres cere medendo, I have come looking for my heart only to be broken by it, and, how pathetic, I am quoting proverbs in a grungy empty room while my idiot best friend is stomping off to get his idiot self killed, and there was no real way to rid oneself of oneself, there was no real way to imagine it, Watson dead, myself dead, or Watson gone, and his mother—his mother and her faith that she had found herself a partner. My veins burned. They burned horribly, and my head was a broken steam valve, and it was like I was under the porch at Watson’s family home, dug into the snow to preserve my own body prematurely—it would be less work in the end—and really I had put my oxycodone in my bag as a challenge to myself, I carried it as a challenge, it would be the sane thing to have been rid of it months ago, and I threw the pills on the ground and crushed them under my heel.

There.

If Lucien Moriarty was in these tunnels, I would find him, and I would deal with him myself. I found that, right then, I had a need to break someone open.

I would see his blood spilled all over the floor.





Twenty-Nine


Jamie


I’D DONE SOME STUPID THINGS IN MY LIFE. SELFISH THINGS. The occasional well-intentioned thing that still nearly got me killed.

That made this a hat trick, then.

The issue wasn’t Holmes. Or the issue was Holmes, and the issue was also Elizabeth. And fear. And sleep deprivation, and being utterly in the dark and out of control while also knowing that (a) she’d been keeping things from me, again, when not two hours ago she was apologizing for that very thing while (b) my now very firmly ex-girlfriend had the sort of bickering session with Lucien Moriarty’s illicit daughter one would expect from a pair of divorcees while (c) my kid sister was somewhere held captive and who knew what was happening to her and (d) Lucien Moriarty himself was probably stalking these corridors, looking to end me, while (e) I, the utter idiot, couldn’t think clearly about any of this, couldn’t make a plan, could only hear the heavy beating of my blood and (f) lash out at Holmes out of fear (because nothing had changed, nothing) and then I’d wanted to do the thing my old therapist had told me about walking away and calming down, and (g)—I was at (g) already, wasn’t I, I had frittered away minutes in this hallway when I could have apologized and been done with it already, and still, even when I turned to put my hand on the doorknob, I knew it was already too late.

By now, I knew the sound a gun made as it was being cocked.

“Going somewhere?” Lucien Moriarty said behind me.

Some distant part of me thought, He’s been waiting years to say that to someone. The rest of me was screaming.

“Hands up,” he said. He’d lost the Welsh accent in favor of his own, and it was unnerving to hear a voice not unlike August’s arranging my execution.

“Okay,” I said, obeying. Like a fool. How could he even see me? The hallway was pitch black.

“Dad,” Anna was saying, somewhere farther away. “Dad, what do you need me to do?”

“A flashlight, girl.”

The cinder block wall in front of me went fluorescent.

“Turn. Slowly.”

I did, flinching as my eyes adjusted. Lucien, in silhouette, and still I could see his cut lip, his two black eyes. His hands around a pistol. An explosion of light from behind him that had to come from his daughter’s phone.

“On your knees,” he said, and I lowered myself painfully to the floor.

“Dad?” Anna said, and this time, she sounded terrified.