Addison hurried down Emerald Street, her breath hitching with each step. Damp scrubs clung to her back, the fabric sticking to her skin. Every step sent a dull, crawling pain through her bones, but she couldn’t stop.
Not now.
Ahead, the sidewalk lay deserted. Most businesses along this stretch of road were shuttered, their roller doors heavily tagged. Missing persons posters were tacked to the windows. A ribbon of yellow crime scene tape fluttered from a nearby utility pole like a grisly party streamer. To the north loomed the elevated tracks of the Market-Frankfort line.
Addison stumbled on, growing ever more desperate. Finally, she spied the light at the end of her tunnel. The Emerald Street underpass.
The empty sidewalk became dense with people. They were huddled under sleeping bags and slumped down in plastic lawn chairs along the damp wall of the underpass. Some lay curled up in sagging tents.
She slowed her walk, frantically searching their faces. Most looked through her, pupils blown and empty. But then, a pair of lucid eyes met hers. A man hunched forward in a wheelchair, a black beanie pulled low over his ears. Ricky Somes. Her breath left her in a shaky exhale, her knees nearly buckling with relief.
When he spotted her approaching, he nodded like he’d been expecting her. He rummaged in the pocket of his hoodie and produced a glassine baggie. It contained a single glorious gram.
Just the sight of it made the knot of anxiety in her stomach loosen.
He held it out to her, gesturing with his other hand for the cash.
Addison swallowed and tried to adopt a casual tone. “Yeah, uh, I’m a little strapped for cash right now, Ricky.”
The corner of Ricky’s mouth twisted up like she’d said something funny. “You know the deal, sweetheart. No freebies. No samples. No credit.” The baggie disappeared from between his fingers like magic. “I feel like I should get that tattooed on my fucking forehead.”
“Please,” she said. “You know I’m good for it.”
Ricky wheeled his chair back and angled it away from her. “Look, lady, I don’t know shit about you. So pay up or fuck off.”
Addison let the desperation show in her voice. “I’ll pay you back Ricky, I swear. It’s just…it’s been a terrible week, you know? My landlord’s about to kick me out over the rent. And it’s my kid’s birthday tomorrow -”
He interrupted her in a tone that made it clear he didn’t want her life story. “Yeah, we all got problems, sweetheart. The difference is, I’m not making mine yours.”
His face showed no signs of softening, and she knew it wouldn’t. Ricky didn’t do feelings. He was numb from the waist down and, apparently, the neck up. And she could understand why. Kindness wasn’t a currency. And in this world, anything you couldn’t spend wasn’t worth shit.
She hesitated for a moment longer, then pulled the wad of cash out of her pocket. It was money she was supposed to be spending on Noah’s birthday present. She’d promised him a Harry Potter Lego set and had been putting a few dollars aside for months now. She pictured the look of disappointment on his face when he woke up tomorrow to nothing. It felt like a needle stab to her heart.
But the pain was insignificant compared to the agony awaiting her if she didn’t get the contents of the baggie into her bloodstream immediately. She’d rather saw off her own arm with a dull knife than go through the torment of withdrawal again.
So, with trembling fingers and a pit of guilt in her stomach, she handed over the money.
Ricky made a big show of counting it, passing the singles from hand to hand like he was shuffling cards. Satisfied she wasn’t short-changing him, he finally parted with the packet. She buried it deep in the pocket of her scrubs and hurried away from the underpass.
A light rain was falling. It cooled nothing down, just made the sidewalks steam and heightened the stink of diesel fumes and uncollected garbage.
As she moved east down Emerald, the back of her neck prickled. The weight of unseen eyes pressed against her, tightening her shoulders, quickening her steps.
She glanced behind; a man, nearby, wearing an Eagles jacket, pushed a shopping cart. It was loaded with electrical junk: old microwaves, a cracked computer monitor, and a stack of dirty keyboards. His gaze was fixed on her. She quickened her pace.
A few yards on, she crossed the street and headed east down a narrow lane. On either side were crumbling brick row houses. Most looked abandoned, with rusted metal bars over their ground floor doors and windows. Their upper windows were boarded over like they caged in violent animals. The only fresh paint was graffiti. She was no expert on gang tags, but she recognized the spray-painted symbols of LMN-13: an all-seeing eye topped with a crown. That gang ran all the streets east of the railway tracks and south of Kensington Avenue, right down to the expressway.
It had stopped raining. She looked behind her again, but the Eagles fan was no longer following her. He’d probably never been following her; it was just her paranoia kicking in.
She stopped, unslung her backpack, and sat on the steps of a vacant building. Her whole body ached, like someone had injected acid into her bones. She clenched her teeth against a rising tide of nausea. She reckoned she had about ten minutes, tops, before she got so dope sick she’d wish she’d never been born.
A dirty white sedan cruised down the adjacent street, rap music blaring out its windows. It set off a dog barking somewhere in the building behind her.
She glanced around to check she was still alone. Then she slipped the glassine baggie out of her pocket. It bore a black ink stamp of a handprint with the number thirteen on its palm. Even drug dealers prized good product branding.
She opened her backpack and pulled out a plastic Paw Patrol lunch box. It was an old one of Noah’s that she’d repurposed for her kit. She opened it and took out its contents: rubber tourniquet, syringe, foil, cigarette filters, lighter. First, she prepared the dose and drew it up into the syringe. Then she tightened the rubber strap around her upper arm and let her hand hang down against the concrete step for a minute to let the blood pressure build up. Then she took the needle and rolled the skin of her forearm, searching amongst the scabs for a usable vein.
She would feel a brief stab of pain when the needle pierced her skin, but then she wouldn’t feel anything. There would be no more anxiety. No more fear. No more guilt about the myriad ways she’d failed Noah, or regret about all the terrible things she’d done that had led her to this point.
The door behind her opened. She sensed the gap at her back, heard footsteps fill it. She twisted around, saw an enormous man towering over her. He had a tattoo of a spider web covering his scalp and running down both sides of his neck.
He looked down at her and grinned. Dangling from one hand was an aluminum baseball bat. He raised it, double-handed, like a slugger about to hit one home.
Addison felt a sharp stab of pain.
And then she felt nothing at all.
Chapter One
Present
Jessica Meeks had ten minutes to pack everything she would need to start a new life into a suitcase, watched silently by the armed man in the doorway.
She yanked clothing from hangers, grabbed armfuls of makeup and toiletries from the bathroom and upended drawers onto her crumpled bed.
“Shit.” She scraped her hair back from her face. “I can’t find my phone. I must have left it at work.”
The man in the doorway stepped forward. “Leave the phone, ma’am. And all your other devices. We’ll get you new ones.”
She rolled up a pair of jeans and stuffed them in her suitcase. Then she stopped to survey the room. The place looked like a hurricane had ripped through it, and not just because of her hurried packing. Clothes spewed out of her wardrobe. Someone had rifled through her underwear drawer; its contents were draped obscenely over her dresser. The mirror on her chest of drawers was shattered.
The rest of her house was in a similar state. Nearly every possession she owned had been pulled from drawers and knocked off shelves. Someone had torn the pictures from the walls. Her TV had been kicked over, and the contents of her refrigerator spread across the kitchen floor. In the bathroom, her vanity had been raided, the mirror smashed.
Her bedroom had suffered the greatest devastation. In the fractured image reflected by her dresser mirror, she could see the wall above her bed. Red spray paint scrawled across the wallpaper. It depicted a crudely drawn all-seeing eye topped with a crown. The still-wet paint dripped down the wall from the corners of the eye like tears.
The man in the doorway cleared his throat. “Five minutes, ma’am.”
She tore her gaze from the awful artwork and swung the lid of her suitcase shut. “Just one more thing.”
Before he could object, she dashed down the hall to the kitchen. She pushed open a screen door and stepped out into the backyard.
The sun was setting, casting long shadows across the lawn. Her washing hung stiffly from the clothesline strung between two pine trees.
She glanced over her shoulder to check she wasn’t being followed, then jogged down the crushed shell path that led to the laundry room by the side of the house. She pulled the door shut behind her, flicked on the light, then reached up into the cupboard above the dryer and took down an old box of laundry powder. Lifting the lid, she found what she’d stashed in there many years ago. A little pink and silver revolver and a box of cartridges. She wrapped them in an old dish towel, then ran back to the kitchen.
She stuffed them in her shoulder bag, then returned to the bedroom. Pausing in the doorway, she took a moment to survey the debris of her life scattered about. Her fragmented reflection stared back at her from the shattered mirror.
“Ready to go, ma’am?”
She hoisted her bag onto her shoulder and faced the man. “You don’t have to call me, ma’am, you know. My name’s Jessica.”
The man said nothing, just left his post by the door to lift her suitcase from the bed and carry it out into the hall.
As she watched him go, it occurred to her that her name wouldn’t be Jessica for much longer. Soon, she’d be someone else entirely. Someone no one had ever met before.
Not even her.
* * *
Forty minutes earlier, she’d been onstage at the Femme Fatale Strip Club, wearing nothing but a pink thong and a couple of strategically placed silver stars. She was upside down, hanging onto a pole with just her knees when she spotted the man standing near the lighted exit.
He was leaning against the wall, both hands clasped in front of him. Broad shouldered, his shirtsleeves rolled up to the elbows, the veins jumping out of the tanned skin of his forearms. Handsome, in square-jawed, clean-cut kind of way.
He’d stuck out like a sore thumb among the sweaty frat boys and assorted lowlifes that frequented the club. Partly because he looked deeply uncomfortable being there. But mostly because he had a silver star of his own. His was made of chromium and attached to his belt, beside a slim black handgun. When he shifted his hips, it glinted in the light.
U.S. Marshals.
He wasn’t a customer. He wasn’t a creep. He was something far worse.
And he was here for her.
She climbed down off the pole as gracefully as she could in six-inch Lucite heels. Then she gave up on grace and fled the stage.
She pushed her way past the other girls backstage, yanking off her shoes as she went. But the man with the badge had been fast on his feet because he was already waiting for her beside her locker. He flashed his ID wallet in her face and said, “Ma’am, I suggest you put some clothes on. You need to come with me.”
Jessica bristled at the order but caught the way his gaze stayed on her face—not dropping, not lingering. Like he was trying very hard not to look anywhere else. She considered doing the exact opposite of what he said and hightailing it out the side exit. But then she thought better. You didn’t run from a U.S. marshal. Because if you did, you didn’t get very far. Hunting people down was what they did for a living.
Jessica knew that better than most.
“What’s going on?” She tried to keep her voice calm, but there’d been an audible tremor in it.
The marshal’s voice was steady. “Get dressed. There’s been a break-in at your house.”
* * *
Her house was only a short drive from the strip club, yet it had felt like an eternity. The world outside the marshal’s car appeared blurry and distorted as anxiety clouded her vision through the backseat window. It’s just junkies, she’d told herself, repeatedly. Looking for cash or valuables.
When he pulled to a stop in her street, she saw multiple police cruisers parked in her drive. Their red and blue strobe lights were bouncing off the white walls of her house.
She clambered out of the marshal’s car and ran across the front yard. Several officers had been milling about on her porch, but her attention went straight to her front door. Or to what was left of it. The old wood had splintered around the handle and lock, leaving a semi-circular hole. Someone had clearly kicked it in with considerable force.
She climbed the porch steps in a daze. “What the…?”
Waiting inside for her was another deputy marshal. This one was a petite redhead with a pale, freckled complexion. A heavily pregnant belly protruded over her gun belt.
Jessica had recognized her immediately. Her name was Inez Sharrow, and she’d been Jessica’s sole liaison with the U.S. Marshals Service for the ten years she’d lived in southwest Florida.
“A local PD unit reported the break-in,” Sharrow said, leading the way down the hall. Progress proved difficult; broken glass and soil from a shattered pot plant littered their path. “They spotted your door hanging off its hinges from the road. They entered the premises to investigate, but the intruder was already gone.”
Jessica didn’t respond; she’d been too preoccupied with the sight of her belongings reduced to rubble underfoot.
Nothing she owned was especially valuable. She lived a flatpack existence, accumulating no possessions that couldn’t be broken down or abandoned at short notice. Still, seeing what she did own abused in such a way hit her like a physical blow.
Ahead of her, Sharrow paused in the door to her bedroom. “It’s…a bit of a mess in there too, I’m afraid.”
Jessica stopped beside her. The red painted eye had stared down at her from above her bed.
Her stomach dropped, along with her hopes.
Not just junkies then.
Sharrow had been speaking and Jessica tried to tune her back in.
“-you need to pack a bag, just the essentials, and be ready to leave in ten minutes -”
Jessica returned her attention to the new mural decorating her wall. The graffiti eye seemed to watch her.
A cube of cold fear slid down her throat.
The Marshals Service had promised she was safe. That she was invisible. That no one would ever find her.
They were wrong.
