Page 41 of So Lethal

Seeing his name, embarrassment started to set in. She had lost her hearing for a few minutes and collapsed into a nervous wreck. It was just a little tinnitus, and it had just started. There was time to deal with it. She’d see a doctor as soon as she got home.

Get your shit together, Faith.

She answered, and Michael asked, “What’s going on? Are you all right?”

“Yeah, sorry,” she said. “I got a headache all of a sudden.”

“That’s not a headache. You ran from the room and down the stairs. If it hurts that bad, you need to get to the hospital stat.”

“No, it’s…” she rolled her eyes. “Look, my ears started ringing, okay?”

Michael was quiet for a moment before he said, “Your ears started ringing?”

His attitude cut her. “It was scary, all right? I couldn’t hear for a minute.” Her voice sounded plaintive and weak, and she felt a surge of anger. “I’m sorry. I made a mistake. I freaked out, and I didn’t think about what I was doing. Let me take a moment to calm down, and then we can keep interviewing Rebecca.”

“I finished interviewing her. She has an alibi for last night.”

“You finished her? That quickly?”

“She gave one to both of us,” Michael said. “You’re tinnitus must have started off when she gave us that information. When you didn’t answer my first three phone calls, I confirmed the alibi before calling again. She’s clean.”

Faith slumped forward and sighed. “Right. Okay. Let’s go talk to Wolfe.”

“Okay,” Michael replied. “No problem. Call me when you’re on your way back to the room.”

He hung up, and Faith buried her face in her hands. She didn’t weep this time, but the burning she felt on her cheeks wasn’t much better.

This was now a race to see which would break first: the case or Faith’s hearing.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Marcus Wolfe finished the last of his bourbon, tossed the empty bottle next to its companions on the couch, buried his head in his hands and wept. That’s what Marcus did most days now. Woke up, got booze, and got drunk. His banking app could deposit his disability checks over the phone, and there were cheap takeout places in this part of Campbell, so the only people he ever had to see were the Majumdars, the elderly Sikh couple who ran the liquor store. They didn’t feel a need to sympathize with him for being deaf, and they didn’t feel a need to talk to him without giving a shit that he was deaf, so he didn’t mind it so much. Plus, they sold him as much booze as he wanted, so there was that.

He hated this. His life was fucking awful now.

“Least those fucking cops are gone now.”

He sighed and wiped his tears away. He got to his feet, swaying a little, and walked to the kitchen to grab a bag of potato chips. He made the journey relatively free of incident, only bumping his knee a little on the coffee table. That would leave a bruise, but not much of one. He could handle a few more drinks.

He laughed. Who gave a shit? Why not drink until he passed out again? Who was gonna stop him?

Thirty years. Thirty years he worked for PG&E. He never realized before now how much the job meant to him, but without it, he could barely stand to wake up in the morning. Maybe he was nothing more than a gasman, but that meant something. It was his job to make sure that buildings had heat, that residents could cook their food, that city buses could refuel. All of that gone because some idiot in a budgeting office decided to gamble that a ninety-year-old gas main could handle a few more years of deterioration.

He grabbed the chips and a bottle of vodka and stumbled back to the living room. The Sharks were playing tonight. He could watch the game with subtitles. It was something to do.

He plopped on the couch, opened the vodka and drank a healthy swig. His old buddy Angel told him that there was fine vodka out there that wouldn’t burn when you drank it, but this wasn’t that stuff. This was rotgut, the cheap kind with a screw off cap that the Majumdars sold for five dollars a fifth. It seared his throat and sent fire through his sinuses.

He coughed and twisted the cap back onto the vodka before setting it on the couch. Then he popped open the bag of chips.

He couldn’t hear a damned thing. Not a fucking thing. At one point, he could have given an eloquent explanation of all the ways that hurt him, but now his alcohol-soaked mind just kept fixating on the pertinent point. He couldn’t hear a single thing.

A lump formed in his throat, but he didn’t bother to cover his eyes this time. He just sat on his couch and watched the Sharks score the opening goal against the Ducks, sniffling, sobbing and shaking.

At some point, he’d have to figure this out. He couldn’t drink himself to death. Well, he could, but even now at the darkest point in his life, he knew he would get through the pain. If he came through it with a shot liver and thirty extra pounds around his gut, he would regret that, so he had to figure something out sooner or later.

Damn it, if only the insurance company had paid for his damned cochlear implants! He wouldn’t have collapsed like this. He wouldn’t have gotten into a fight with that prissy bitch at the support group.

That was why the FBI was here earlier. He knew that. He’d seen on the news that Sarah had died. He didn’t know who the other two were, but he figured the police would eventually want to talk to him. He wasn’t sure why the FBI was here, but he wasn’t surprised by it.

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