Page 19 of The Broken Places

The little boy was walking toward him, too, and even from the distance and through the overwhelming brightness, Jett could see the tear rolling down his cheek and the purple marks around his neck.

A car came barreling forward, and Jett screamed as it hit the little boy, rolling him under its wheel and flipping the kid upside down like a rag doll. He landed on the street. Jett’s scream continued as he went down next to the kid, attempting to pick him up as more brakes screeched and two cars collided next to him in a cacophony of intense impact and scraping metal.

“What the hell? What are you doing? Holy shit!” A man’s voice. “Are you fucking crazy?”

Jett trembled so violently his teeth chattered, clutching the little boy’s body. But then there was a hand on his arm, pulling him up. He reeled and stumbled, trying desperately to get his bearings as he held on to the boy. “The boy, the boy,” he repeated, his voice a dusty whisper.

“What boy? There’s no boy, you goddamned nut.”

Jett gasped, squeezing tighter, realizing he was hugging only air. His arms dropped, an avalanche of ice joining the raging fire inside and yet somehow not extinguishing it. He froze and he burned. He was a frigid inferno. He needed rescuing, but there was no one to rescue him from himself. The world dimmed, sound rushing into the void around him.

“Call the police,” someone said. “He’s high. He’s on something.”

Jett gasped, stumbling back, looking around. So many eyes. There was no boy. He’d made him up, just like the doctor told him. But he wasn’t on something. That was the problem.Take your meds, take your meds, take your meds.Or the voices come back. The boy comes back.

But it was Sunday, so the free clinic was closed anyway. And even if it wasn’t, he didn’t want medication that made his face, hands, and feet jerk and move constantly, so that he felt like jumping off a bridge to make it stop. At least the dope he acquired on the street made him drift away. It stopped his pain, didn’t make it worse.

But he’d go to the clinic when the smack was gone. He would. He would. Because despite the side effects of the medication, he didn’t want to see the boy. It bent his brain. It hurt so fucking bad.

The people were all staring at him. He took another step back. He wouldn’t let them put him in jail. He knew what happened there, and he’d die before he’d be locked up. At least on the street he could curl up and hide. He could sleep behind the rusted, junked car next to the abandoned strip mall, or under the ivy growing along the chain-link fence near the old motel used mostly by prostitutes and their tricks. The one where he sometimes heard screams from the girls that no one answered, including him.

“Get your fucking hands off of me,” he growled to the man whose hand gripped his upper arm. Whatever was in his voice made the man step back. Behind him, another man was helping a woman out of her car. She looked dazed as she scooted past her deflating airbag.

Jett glanced back once to ensure the little boy wasn’t actually there, lying in a puddle of blood on the street as people stepped over him. But the asphalt was clear except for some broken pieces of headlight, not a drop of blood in sight.

Help,he heard, the voice young and weak. He shook his head, moving it rapidly from side to side, searching. There was no boy, but yet he’d heard him. He was somewhere. Somewhere.

He’s inside your head, Jett. You have to take your medicine. You have to remember.

Dawn was standing on the sidewalk, swaying slightly in her spiked heels, her thumb in her mouth.

A siren grew louder in the distance, and the sound propelled Jett forward, out of the street and back onto the curb.

“Hey, you can’t just leave,” the man who’d held his arm said. “You caused this. This is your fault. Get back here!”

But Jett didn’t listen. Jett ran, clutching the cash in his pocket, the money that would buy him at least a few minutes of peace.

CHAPTER NINE

Ambrose added a packet of sugar to the paper cup of coffee and took a sip, relaxing his shoulders as the hot liquid slid down his throat. The case files for the crime they’d been at two days before, including the two similar cases involving the dead men and woman who’d once lived on the streets, were sitting in the center of his desk. He didn’t want to appear too eager to read them. He set them aside as he put his cup down in front of him and took a seat.

He and Lennon had driven over to Geary Boulevard after leaving the youth drop-in center. But there had only been a couple of bedraggled prostitutes, and they’d both snatched up the money Lennon had offered, looked at the photo of the woman named Cherish, shook their heads, and turned away. Maybe he’d go back later on his own, once the nightlife started and the line of cars with men looking for a quick-and-dirty hookup started forming.

If nothing panned out there, he’d head over to the Cellar, where women let others use them to play their perverted games. The TL was a fantasyland for sickos looking to take advantage of those dissociated from their bodies. What easy victims they were. The same could be said of many other neighborhoods throughout the country. And the world too. He’d been all over at this point, and perverts came in all colors and creeds.

He pulled the case files toward him, flipped open the top one, and began reading through the evidence. Twenty minutes later, he had a more detailed picture of the first two crime scenes.

At the first scene, three months before, hallucinogens had been found in the abandoned building, next to the bodies of a man and a woman who were almost certainly homeless. Those two had gone at each other with their fists and fingernails, and at first glance, it appeared that the bloody scene was simply a case of a bad drug trip that had caused them to claw each other’s faces and then stab each other to death. And though there had been plenty of blood on both victims’ hands, no murder weapons had been found. Originally, it was surmised that perhaps another individual had come along and stolen the murder weapon or weapons. But it was strange that the drugs hadn’t also been stolen.

Then again, Ambrose thought, if the person who came upon a scene like that had any wits about them, they’d want no part of a substance that made you behave the way those two had.

The second case, a month ago, was similar to the first. Two homeless men had been found in a clearing in a park, the weird concoction of hallucinogens on the ground next to their bloody bodies. The medical examiner had determined they’d likely used a knife, or knives, on each other. But again, no weapons were found.

In both cases, no IDs had been made. Four people who had once frequented the streets in one neighborhood or another had disappeared, and no one had even noticed.

A heaviness pressed on his chest. The crimes described in the case files in front of him and the one he’d been at two days before had happened in three different neighborhoods, miles apart. And yet, the case had still come back to the TL. He wasn’t completely surprised. Something inside had known, hadn’t it? That’s why he was here. But he was even more unsettled than he’d been before. He—they—had to figure out what was going on. And if it was related to what he thought it was, they’d need to take care of it in whatever way necessary.

But he had a few leads, and he had the case files, so he’d acquired what he’d come here for. He could leave now, or he could stay and potentially collect even more. Because he had a strong feeling that whatever was going on had just gotten started.

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