Concrete Savior (15 page)

T
hey knew about Gina.

On the heels of that, still:

He’d missed.

As he climbed into a cab, Casey felt like there was a hurricane roaring inside his skull. The cabdriver had to ask twice before Casey could give coherent directions to his building on the corner of Larabee and Chicago Avenue, but Casey had other things to worry about besides the strange looks the guy was sending him in the rearview mirror. The four or so miles from the police station to home didn’t give him a lot of time to think things through before he had to pull out his still-sodden wallet and hand the guy a wet twenty-dollar bill. He didn’t bother to wait for change.

Because he was so wrapped up in his job and computers, Casey seldom focused much on his apartment. It was just sort of there, a place to put his belongings and watch television, where he could putter around with the latest system he was working on and play World of Warcraft online, something he did with a fair amount of regularity. But now, standing in the small entry foyer and staring at his tiny living room, it suddenly seemed very precious to him. It wasn’t that great, it wasn’t decorated very well, and it was bachelor-messy and, well, kind of bland . . . but it was
home
. This undersized city box, with its miniature kitchen and the annoying support column between the dining area and the hallway, was his space, where he lived and ate and slept and messed around with his hobbies. It was where he felt safe and it was his stepping-stone to the better life, the family life, that was his main goal.

It was something the young woman who’d fallen off the bridge would now never have a chance to get.

And it was something—or something like it—that Gina now stood a very good chance of losing.

He couldn’t do anything about the girl who’d died. There were no do-overs on this kind of a mistake, and he certainly couldn’t go back in time and grab her wrist two seconds earlier. He could feel guilty—he
would
feel guilty—about it for a long time, but she was gone, and that was that.

Gina, on the other hand . . . crap. Casey pulled his cell phone out of his pocket and pried open the Ziploc bag he’d wrapped it in before leaving work. He’d stuck a few of his ID cards in there with it, the ones he thought might be damaged in the water, but his wallet itself wouldn’t fit. The phone was dry and working, but ultimately useless—he still didn’t have a telephone number for her. On the heels of that thought came the recollection that her only call to him had been from a public telephone, but now, after all that had happened to him after the river fiasco, Casey thought he could understand her caution. She was only trying to protect herself.

He turned and trudged back to the front door, then turned the second dead bolt that he hardly ever used. He was safe enough. He was sure of it. When it came right down to it, the spooks who had questioned him at the police station—and he was certain that’s what they were, agents of some kind masquerading as city cops—weren’t interested in him beyond finding out where he was getting his information. Even more frightening was that woman who’d touched him just like Gina. Could she
see
something, too? If so, what? The best Casey could hope for was that there were other people besides Gina who were in this program of hers, so that she didn’t stand out like a big neon sign that read, “I’m the one who told him!”

If only he could get hold of her. But it was Friday, and if things kept to the predictable schedule he and Gina had slipped into, the next time he was likely to see her was at lunchtime on Monday. Unless she called him over the weekend, which was pretty damned unlikely.

He went into the bathroom and wriggled out of the still-damp clothes, then climbed into the shower. The water was hot and steamy and the scent of sandalwood filled his senses and made him want to close his eyes and breathe in. But no . . . suddenly it seemed like a guilty pleasure. He was thinking of Gina again, and the ramifications that would come with her being found out. Would she be arrested? Beaten? Tortured? He wasn’t so naive that he didn’t believe those things happened, even in America. When you factored in a clandestine government agency conducting secret experiments on its own employees, the ante rose considerably.

Was she even now being dragged out of her house?

Feeling sick, Casey turned off the shower and stepped out of the tub. As his fingers brushed the edge of his towel, his cell phone rang.

He was so startled that he cried out. His balance slipped and he clutched at the towel, which slid off the chrome rack and made him lean sideways even more. He lost it and went down with a knee-bruising
thwack,
then scrambled on the floor like a crab as he tried to pull free of the towel that had somehow gotten wrapped around one ankle. The phone was on the dining room table, and he
had
to get to it, in case it was—

“Hello?” he practically screamed as he lunged across the hall, dripping and dragging that damned towel with him. “Hello?”

“Casey?”

“Yes,” he gasped. “Gina—”

“Is something wrong? You sound out of breath.”

“Gina, listen to me. They know about you, I’m sorry, but they pulled me in and questioned me—”

“Who knows about me?”

“The
government
, Gina. I don’t know how, but they found out.”

“Did they say that specifically? Did they mention me by name?”

Casey blinked. “No, not by name, but—”

“Then I’m fine. Trust me, if they really did know, they’d have taken me in already.”

“What I’m trying to tell you is that they know I’m getting my information from someone, and so it’s only a matter of time before they connect that to you.”

“Trust me on this, Casey. I’ll be okay.”

Water dripped into his eyes and Casey scrubbed at his face with one fist. He felt soggy, like he’d been wet for hours, and the sensation just compounded his misery. Didn’t she
get
it? “Gina, how can you be so nonchalant about this?” he demanded. “After how you stressed that this all has to be a secret or you’ll get in so much trouble. What was it you said? Oh yeah—I remember now. You said you could end up in jail, and maybe I would, too.”

“Well, that’s not going to happen.”
Her voice was firm, but somehow Casey wasn’t comforted. He couldn’t believe that he was taking this so much more seriously than she was. Her next words threw him off track even more.
“Can you meet me for coffee tomorrow? I have to talk to you.”

Goose bumps rippled across the surface of his already chilled skin. He knew what that meant—she’d had another one of her feelings or whatever the hell they were, and she wanted him to try to save someone’s life. Part of him was excited at the prospect, perhaps because the logical part of his mind felt he could make up for his failure today, sort of balance things out. Another part just wanted to slam down the phone and run. “You want to meet on a Saturday?” That stupid question was followed by the sudden hope that maybe this was something different, something better. “Where?”

“How about at Starbucks on Lake and Michigan?”
When he hesitated, she added,
“It’s just south on Michigan Avenue. I have to go into the office tomorrow but I can get with you at, say, nine o’clock.”

Casey bit his lip.
Get with you?
So much for his date hopes. After all of this, and even that kiss, now she sounded downright businesslike. “Okay,” he heard himself say, and hated himself just a little because of it.

“Great. See you there.”

Gina broke the connection before he could say anything else, so Casey put the phone down on the table and went back into the bathroom to finally dry off. He made himself get dressed and comb his hair, go through the entire routine of a normal person just coming out of the shower as he tried to keep his mind distracted. In the end, he still caved and went back to the phone. He looked at it for a few moments, then picked it up and hit
TALK
to redial the number from which Gina had just called him.

Casey wasn’t a bit surprised when a stranger answered and told him it was a pay phone.

“YOU’RE NOT THE ONLY
one who knows who the nephilim is,” Brynna told Eran the next morning. She’d brought the newspapers in while he was finishing up with changing Grunt’s bandages. The dog’s burns were almost healed and now it was just a matter of keeping her from chewing off the bandages and licking at the wounds. Eran had solved that problem by buying a dozen double extra-large T-shirts and custom-cutting them to fit Grunt’s ample frame. Every time Brynna looked at the dog she was reminded of the creature’s loyalty and the pain she was enduring as payment for it. Brynna had become so fond of Grunt that she supposed if it came down to it, she would probably do the same for the Great Dane.

Now Eran looked up in surprise. “Someone else knows he’s a nephilim?”

Brynna shook her head. “Not what I meant, sorry. Here—look at the headline.”

Eran gave Grunt a final pat on the head, then stood and reached for the paper. “Let’s have it.”

Brynna obliged, then watched him scowl as his eyes focused and he read the headline out loud: “
Chicago’s Concrete Savior
. Great,” he muttered before he continued reading. “For the third time this week, the same young man has attempted to save someone’s life on the mean streets of Chicago. Although the ‘Concrete Savior’ would not speak with reporters before leaving the scene of his latest rescue attempt, an anonymous source at the Chicago Police Department identified the rescuer as Casey Anlon of Chicago. Mr. Anlon has saved two lives since September 3 when first he kept Glenn Klinger from being run over by a subway train, then pulled Jack Gaynor from where he was trapped in his burning car on the Kennedy Expressway several days later. As reported previously, after recovering from the train incident, Glenn Klinger went on to shoot and kill ten people plus his ex-wife at his workplace before finally turning the gun on himself. In today’s failed rescue attempt, Anlon jumped into the Chicago River from the Clark Street Bridge after a mentally disabled young woman fell into the water after apparently chasing a bird. The young woman was taken to Cook County Hospital and Casey Anlon remains unreachable for comment.” Eran handed the paper back to Brynna and rubbed at his eyes beneath his glasses. “Fucking great.”

“What’s wrong?” Brynna said with just a hint of irony. “You don’t think saving the lives of your fellow humans is a good thing?”

“Of course it is. But things like that don’t happen with such amazing regularity in the normal course of the world. You know that. What is it you always say? There’s no such thing as—”

“—coincidence,” she finished for him.

“The last thing we need is some sort of superhero fever going through the city, where people start grabbing other people because they want to be the next best thing to Batman.”

Brynna’s brow furrowed. “Batman?”

He glanced at her and a corner of his mouth turned up. “Sorry—he’s a comic book figur a fantasy crime fighter. I guess we haven’t seen that DVD yet.”

“Oh.”

“I’ve given some thought to the idea that this guy is staging these rescues, doing them just for the publicity, although I can’t see how it’s actually possible for him to pull this off. There was this couple a few years ago who reported that their six-year-old son had taken off in some kind of a homemade balloon and floated away, then fallen out. The news hit the fan, so to speak, but in the end the authorities found out they’d staged the entire thing. They hid the boy in their attic and told him not to tell the truth, presumably so they could get money for television interviews and things like that. It was crazy, but that doesn’t apply here, either. Anlon is avoiding publicity . . . so far, anyway.”

“Those people do sound pretty whacked.” Brynna couldn’t imagine the parents would be so foolish as to believe a child would be able to keep a secret like that. Which was more odd—that inane expectation or that people would pay the parents to retell the experience on public media? She followed as Eran went into the kitchen and threw away the soiled bandages and empty wrappers, then washed his hands. “So now what?”