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“Shit—hey!” the guy exiting Laredo’s building swore as he almost tripped over the body curled up on the stoop. “You dead down there?”
In response to his words, Jess moaned and curled in on herself further, a well-honed impression of a bum sleeping off whatever they took to get them through the day.
The man sighed in disgust. “Someone’s gonna trip on you, asshole. You can’t sleep here,” he said, and kicked her legs out of the way as he descended the steps as if to prove his point. “If you’re here when I get back, I’m calling the cops!”
Like they’ll come out here, Jess thought, watching him go through the cross-hatched hair she’d let fall over her face.
Either way, she’d be long gone by then. The guy didn’t look back, exactly what she’d been counting on, leaving her hand free to shoot out and grab the bottom of the door right before it slammed shut. Unfolding her body from the cold cement, she slipped from the autumn night into a hallway that smelled of mingled pot and cigarette smoke. Jess kept her shoulders hunched and her hood pulled tight around her face for the same reason she’d play-acted a homeless person instead of sweet-talking her way inside: plausible deniability. No one could know she was here.
Like most sloppy drug dealers in walk-ups with a revolving door, Tom Laredo didn’t always keep his locked. A thin beam of light and the throaty sounds of heavy metal cut into the fourth-floor hallway, vibrations Jess could feel through the soles of her boots. She pressed her back flat against the wall next to the door and peered through that opening to the peeling, yellowed wallpaper and moving shadows inside.
If she were smart, she wouldn’t be here. She’d stick to her usual M.O., follow this bastard around for a few days and deliver the results the client paid for. She’d be at home right now, curled up on the couch in her husband’s arms, sharing popcorn over a terrible movie and cuddling Dani.
The thing was, she’d never really been that smart.
The shadows moved away from the wall. Jess held her breath, let her head drop to her shoulder and her limbs go loose like just another stumbling junkie, but they moved deeper into the apartment rather than into the hall where she waited. Somewhere inside, a door shut and muffled a frenzied guitar riff.
Well. Now or never.
Jess nudged the doorknob with her elbow and let herself inside.
And into what passed for Laredo’s living room. Faded, fleur-de-lis pattern on the old wallpaper. Water-stained ceiling. Carpet that stuck to her boots slightly as she walked. (Ew.) Overstuffed, sagging furniture around a television and coffee table, the latter of which held a scale and some residue that not even the dumbest cop would believe was salt and oregano.
Most importantly, no one in sight. Heavy metal still blared from a hallway to her left; a dark entrance to the kitchen opened on the other side. Directly in front, Jess’ reflection made a blurred outline against the closed window. Fists clenched, she shot a glance into the hallway that must lead to the bedroom and bathroom and then let her breath hiss out between her teeth. In her first semi-intelligent decision of the evening, she ducked into the kitchen, forming a half-assed plan to wait until Laredo emerged rather than kicking the door down to his bedroom when she had no idea what might be on the other side.
Something flashed in her periphery. Moving on instinct, Jess caught her attacker’s wrist and stopped the butcher knife a few inches from her face. The wide, scared eyes of a young woman, barely more than a girl, met hers. Digging her nails into the pressure point, Jess smacked the handle of the knife out of the woman’s hand and caught it as it fell, depositing it on the counter and then covering the woman’s mouth before she could scream.
Blowing hair out of her face, Jess quirked an eyebrow at the woman, distinctly unimpressed as she struggled and couldn’t break free of Jess’ grip. What was this, fucking Psycho?
“Hi, Georgie, right? Your mom sent me,” Jess said, nice and friendly. “If I let you go, do you promise not to scream?”
After a tense second, Georgie bounced her chin in a quick nod. Chancing it, Jess let her go and leaned casually against the fridge while Georgie stood opposite to her, hips pressed to the edge of the stove and arms folded protectively across her chest.
Jess used the vantage point to look her over as best she could in the dim kitchen: curly brown hair cut short, eyes that flicked warily to her every few seconds a cornflower blue. Sports bra and loose-fitting, plaid pajama pants that left visible her glinting belly button ring and the thorny rose tattoo curling up her stomach. She wasn’t hurt, at least not physically.
That wary gaze returned to Jess, narrowing in suspicion. “You a cop?”
“Nope,” Jess said, biting back a laugh. “Private detective.”
“I’m eighteen. She’s got no right to do this,” Georgie told her, an angry set to her jaw.
Yeah, Jess remembered being that age. It made her want to smack the kid and take her out for ice cream and life advice, in no particular order.
“She’s worried about you.”
Georgie huffed. “Tell her I’m fine.” She tossed her head and added, “You should go before Tom notices you’re here.”
There it was, the thread of something she could pull at. “Why? What’s he gonna do?”
“He doesn’t like people in his space without his permission,” Georgie said, not a real answer, and Jess looked at her, for any hint, any involuntary tic that betrayed fear, into the murky depths of her eyes for any screaming thing, trapped.
As she did, Georgie’s eyes went suddenly wide. She gasped, her gaze fixing just past her, and Jess didn’t have time to turn. Something hard and heavy collided with the back of her head. The pain of it came distant, consciousness she struggled to hold onto weaving in and out. Jess felt her feet leave the ground, the support of arms carrying her, the motion of it swaying, nauseating.
Voices warbled, angry, anxious, their words vague and meaningless. She fought to regain control over uncooperative limbs and didn’t manage much more than aimless flailing and the dubious accomplishment of staying awake. Then, a scraping sound that she only placed as an opening window when the night air hit her face.
The arms holding her up suddenly vanished, and her stomach swooped with falling.
*
Sunlight came through the tall windows behind Jess’ desk and glinted off her client’s watch. She squinted against it, hoping she looked thoughtful rather than hungover.
“Ms. Roth—” she began.
“Please, call me Barb.” She shifted her weight in her chair, crossing her legs at the ankles and fortunately moving her watch out of the sun.
In her forties, crows’ feet puckering her eyes and blonde hair already shot through with grey, Barb hid her sleeplessness poorly behind a dash of pink lipstick and mascara gone slightly stale and sticking her eyelashes together in black clumps. A gaudy necklace hung around her neck, cut glass pretending to be stones hanging from a thin, gold chain against a Jackson Pollock-esque paint-splatter shirt. Somehow, she made it all work. If Jess looked for it, she could see the ghost of her as a younger woman, imagined a homecoming queen, a classic beauty complete with 80s-style feathered hair, now faded in the watery way some blondes went, like a pair of jeans run too many times through the wash.
“I know how this sounds,” Barb was saying, and Jess snapped back to attention.
Like a fretting mother turning her empty nest syndrome into something it wasn’t. Like a job Jess should turn down, if she didn’t need the money so bad—or good excuse to ignore the cell phone in her drawer and the two a.m. text from Luke, I guess you’re not coming home tonight.
Jess put on her best serious face, because smiling in her condition would just look pained. “It sounds like you need help,” she said, piling on the bullshit sympathy. “Please, continue.”
“My girlfriends keep telling me it’s normal for teenagers to have a rebellious phase, and she’ll see the error of her ways and come crying back to me before I know it, except for Alanna, who says I ought to drag her back by her hair, but that’s Alanna for you.” Barb laughed nervously, and when Jess didn’t join her, let her smile shrink. “But I know my Georgie, and this isn’t like her.”
Oh, of course not. Not my daughter. God, if Jess had to try any harder not to roll her eyes, she was gonna pull something. She folded her hands on her desk and said, “Why don’t you start at the beginning?”
“About six months ago, Georgie started acting different,” Barb dove right in, like she’d been waiting for the invitation. “Sneaking around, staying out late, falling behind in some of her classes. I tried talking to her about it, hell, I tried grounding her a couple of times, but I’m a single mom and I work late at the hospital—I’m a nurse—and I just couldn’t keep up.”
“Hmm,” Jess intoned, knitting her eyebrows into the appropriate level of concern.
“I figured it had something to do with a boy,” Barb went on. “I’ve never been that strict about dating, but our rule was always that if she wanted to date, she had to bring the boy home for dinner first so I could meet him and make sure she wasn’t getting into any trouble. But any time I asked, she wouldn’t tell me anything, and when I finally saw who he was—hold on, let me show you.”
Digging around in her purse, Barb pulled out a phone and began swiping through it, manicured nails clicking around the screen. “Georgie turned eighteen back in June and moved out a week later. I was furious, and I said some things I regret,” Barb told her. “I figured everyone was right and I just had to let her get it out of her system, but then I found these online.”
She set the phone on the desk and slid it across. There on the screen, Georgia Roth stood in a crop top, pointing to the freshly bleeding, red rose tattoo on her stomach and the faux-diamond belly button ring hanging from her navel.
“My Georgie is terrified of needles,” Barb said gravely. “Just back in the spring, she had to get blood work done at the doctor’s, and she had her eyes closed the whole time and held my hand so hard my fingers hurt. And now…” She trailed off, shook her head. “This sounds crazy, and I know it sounds crazy, but I’m here because people say you deal with that sort of thing. With”—she lowered her voice—“special people. Georgie’s an adult and as much as I don’t like it, I’ve got to let her make her own decisions, but I need to know they’re her decisions, and not—”
Reaching over, she swiped her finger across the phone’s screen and brought up the next picture. In it, Georgie stood beside a man. She looked up at him all dewy-eyed like nothing else existed in the world, but he looked at the camera, all smirking confidence. Brown eyes, black hair, tanned skin.
“His name’s Tom Laredo. She told me he’s only twenty-two, but I don’t believe it,” Barb said.
Neither did Jess. She’d seen that look before, on asshole poachers that spent a fortune shooting big game on the African savanna just so they could feel something. Just because they were big, rich men who could do whatever and mow over whoever they wanted. The cocksure, Look what I caught.
Maybe he’d charmed Georgie the old fashioned way, and maybe she’d suffered those needles in her stomach because she had something to prove, and maybe she’d come around when either Tom or life smacked her around enough.
Then again, maybe she wouldn’t.
Jess looked into Tom’s eyes staring out of the phone screen and tasted the echo of sick, drowning panic crawling up her throat.
“Ok. I can help you,” she said. She pushed the phone back and started talking about rates.
*
Her body shook, rocked back and forth like she lay in the backseat of a car covering rough terrain.
“Jess!” A hand on her shoulder, the weight of it painful.
She grumbled and shoved it away. “Five more minutes.”
“Ok, but I can’t promise the roaches won’t start to eat you.”
That wasn’t—Jess sat up groggily, nearly sliding off the shifting plastic beneath her. Trash bags, the reality of them hitting her at the same time as the smell of the dumpster. Again. Lovely. On its ledge perched the masked, devil-horned vigilante alter ego of the man who was simultaneously her favorite and least-favorite lawyer.
He held out a hand. Jess sighed and took it.
A few blocks away, Matt stood guard outside a restroom in a public park while Jess ran water over a wad of paper towels and held them to the back of her head. They came back dark and clotted with blood and she grimaced as her scalp began to sting, held her head under the faucet like it could wash the night’s stupidity away from her brain. Super-strength gave her an edge and let her recover faster, let her climb out of that dumpster under her own power rather than getting dragged off to the hospital or morgue, but she wasn’t unbreakable like Luke.
She turned off the tap and wrung her hair out in the sink. The water spun down the drain clean, mostly. Pushing the wet strands out of her face, she joined Matt outside. Wind rustled through the leaves like the phantom sound of footsteps in the dry grass, setting tension in Jess’ shoulders, but Matt and his human wiretap senses would pick out anyone before they got close.
“So,” she said, faux-casual. “How much do I stink?”
“No more than usual,” Matt said lightly.
Vindictively, Jess punched him in the arm, and he laughed.
“Were you following me?” she asked, tried to keep it neutral and the accusation out of her tone.
“No,” Matt said, and he probably wasn’t lying. “I was patrolling nearby and heard you yell.”
She’d yelled? Jess reeled back her hazy memory of falling until her head throbbed and forced her to stop. “Ok,” she said. “Thanks.”
“You wanna tell me what happened?” Matt prompted.
Not really. “Work,” Jess said shortly.
“Jess.”
“Ugh, fine,” she muttered, but only because he’d get what he wanted sooner or later, like a dog with a fucking bone and twice as annoying. “Walk with me,” she told him, and, as she headed back in the general direction of Alias Investigations and the bottle of whiskey in her desk, gave him the short version.
When she finished, Matt spent a few seconds ruminating in silence, the gears in his head turning. Sweat pricked between Jess’ shoulder blades; she wondered if this was how people felt when he put them on the witness stand in court.
“Let me get this straight,” Matt said finally. “You broke into this guy’s apartment—”
“The door was unlocked!”
“—with no idea of the layout, what kind of weapons or powers he might have at his disposal, or even whether he was alone in there? Are you trying to get yourself killed?”
Jess rounded on him, stopping on the sidewalk across the street from her office. “You don’t get to lecture me on that, Murdock,” she said scathingly. “How many times have I dragged your half-dead ass away from a bunch of assholes trying to stab or shoot you while you fight them off with sticks?”
“Pot, meet kettle,” Matt admitted, self-deprecating camaraderie that always thawed Jess out a little, no matter how hard she tried to stay mad at him. “But I’m not wrong, and this is becoming a pattern.”
Oh, great. “You’ve been talking to Luke.”
“No, I’ve been talking to Danny,” Matt said.
Because whenever she and Luke had trouble in paradise, Matt got her and Danny got Luke like a goddamn tag team, and the band got back together. It’d be embarrassing, but they all had their moments. Unlike Matt, at least when she needed an intervention, it didn’t usually take the other three combined to beat some sense into her.
“I’m fine,” Jess said flatly, checked the street for passing cars, and stepped off the sidewalk.
“So you’ll be sleeping at home tonight?” Matt called after her.
She flipped him off over her shoulder and kept walking.
“Here I thought you might want to go after them.”
That got to her to stop, half-turn to face him in the middle of the street, still miraculously empty of vehicles. “Yeah, because that worked so well the last time,” she snarked. “Laredo’s long gone by now if he has two brain cells to rub together. God knows where they’ve holed up.”
“You’re right. I heard them running down the stairs when I was trying to wake you,” Matt said. “You wanna know what else I heard?”
Jess glared at him hard enough that she hoped he could feel it. “If you make me ask, I will hit you, and it will hurt.”
“Laredo uses speech-to-text,” Matt told her.
“And?”
“And he told the GPS exactly where they’re going,” Matt finished.
A car turned the corner. Swearing under her breath, Jess jogged back over to the sidewalk on Matt’s side of the street. “And you didn’t mention this earlier because…?”
“Because it’s in Queens, and you’ll need your car,” Matt said pragmatically, nodding at the beat-up, old sedan curbside parked across the street.
“Ok,” Jess allowed, made a calculated effort to not punch him while he still held information she needed. “What’s the address?”
“I’ll tell you on the way,” Matt said in the exact insufferable tone that meant he was going to dig in his heels.
“Matt.” Jess clenched her hands into fists and began to rethink punching him. “This is work, not Defenders shit. Just give me the address.”
But if anyone could out-stubborn her, it was Matt. “Laredo almost killed you once tonight already. I’m not letting you go after him alone,” he said. And, more gently, “What do I tell Luke if something happens to you, Jess? What do I tell your daughter?”
“Don’t—” Jess squeezed her eyes shut until she felt less like coming apart at the seams. Opened them again and said, “I’ll play it smart this time, ok? I keep my distance and wait to get him alone.”
“If you’re right about him, this can’t wait,” Matt said.
“If I was right about him, why did he try to bash my head in instead of just making me leave and forget I was there?” Jess countered, brushing away her own suspicions centered around the drugs on his table. That didn’t matter; this was her job and her life, and she didn’t need a fucking escort.
“You fought off Killgrave before. Maybe he recognized you and didn’t want to take his chances,” Matt pointed out. “He might not be as strong.”
Jess groaned, kicked a loose bit of asphalt down the sidewalk. “Is this the part where you remind me that you fought off Killgrave, too?”
“You have to admit, it does make me ideally suited to provide back-up,” Matt said and grinned all dimpled and pleased with himself.
Yeah, she probably shouldn’t have tried arguing with a lawyer. “Come on,” she said, jerked her chin in the direction of her car, and Matt followed.
At her insistence, he traded his mask for a hoodie that hid his suit from the waist-up—if they ran into shit, she could explain a blind lawyer in her passenger seat a lot more readily than Daredevil. Matt caught on quick, pulled the hoodie over his head and settled into the passenger seat, tucking his gloved hands into the pocket. Just like that, he was a civilian again, the transformation always a little fascinating to watch: the subtle way he carried himself, the carefully maintained secrecy she’d never bothered with in her short-lived career as Jewel. Turning her attention back to the road, Jess pulled away from the curb and drove in the direction of the bridge.
“I’ve been thinking,” Matt said a few minutes in, because when wasn’t he thinking. “You took on the case this morning and went out tonight because the girl’s mom thought she was acting suspicious?”
“What about it?” Jess asked guardedly.
Matt made a noncommittal noise in his throat. “A month after I left St. Agnes, I was going to house parties, getting drunk, and having sex in the bathroom,” he said. “If Sister Maggie found out, she would’ve had a conniption, but that doesn’t mean I was being mind controlled. There’s more, isn’t there?”
That was Matt, so sharp he just might cut you. Jess sighed through her nose. “There’s more.”
*
A morning’s work and three strong cups of Irish coffee got her Tom Laredo’s real age, public record, and home address. Thirty-two, a full ten years older than the lie trickled down from Georgie to her mother, and Jess felt her stomach roll. He’d been arrested a few times—drug possession, drunk and disorderly—but never convicted. No rape charges, statutory or otherwise, which meant precisely nothing. He’d been smart or lucky, but this was nothing new.
If Laredo was the monster she thought and feared he might be, he shouldn’t have been arrested at all, but...Jess circled back to the drug charges, tapped her index finger against the page. That could be something. She stacked the papers and evened their edges, tucked them neatly into a fresh manila folder. Next, she coaxed her cranky computer into pulling up the social media accounts Barb had sent her and started digging.
The timeline delineated Georgie’s before and after as clearly as a continental divide. Jess clicked through the pictures and watched Georgie transform from a normal-looking high schooler who hung out with her friends and smiled with her teeth to a sultry, pouting face that wore makeup designed to paint her into someone older as her clothes grew tighter and her friends disappeared.
Sometimes, you grew out of your friends. You felt better in different clothes and experimented with makeup. Jess had been there, in a place that told her to stop being paranoid and give Georgie the benefit of the doubt. Then, she clicked to the next picture and brought up Laredo’s face, grinning and winking into the camera, a look in his open eye like he wanted to eat the person holding it alive. Jess’ heart flipped in her chest, and she set the phone down.
She’d been there, too.
One face showed up recurring from both the before and after, a thin girl with medium-brown skin and hair dyed a light-eating shade of black. Clearly in some sort of goth phase, thin loops pierced her eyebrow and lower lip, and she dressed almost exclusively in clothes dark enough to match her hair, often featuring the spiky letters of band names Jess couldn’t even read. And, in one picture, the girl stood on the other side of a service counter, wearing a red apron and passing Georgie an iced coffee.
Beneath the picture, a caption read: Visiting my girl on her first day of work!
A logo peeked out from the corner of the girl’s apron. Jess zoomed in and just made out the words before they got too blurry: All-Nighter Café. And, just below it, a name tag reading Tina. Sitting back, Jess rubbed at eyes that ached from squinting at the screen and typed the café’s name into the search bar. The pinwheel turned, and the address popped up a twenty-minute walk away. Jess drummed her fingers against the surface of her desk, considering the possible lead, then copied the café’s number into her phone.
On the sixth ring, a voice answered, distracted and breathless. “All-Nighter Café, this is Tina, can I help you?”
“Sorry, wrong number,” Jess said and hung up.
Standing for the first time in hours, Jess stretched and cracked her neck, snagged her wallet and a pair of sunglasses on the way out the door. They helped with her hangover about as much as the hair of the dog in her Irish coffee, which was to say, not at all. Wincing against the sounds of traffic and a jackhammer shaking the ground of a construction site she passed, Jess fought the urge to wave down a cab. Exercise was good for you, or whatever, and she was a mom now, should maybe get into the habit of setting good examples and ignoring how much that sucked.
The tinted panes of the café’s door threw Jess’ reflection back at her as she approached (sunglasses, jeans, leather jacket, hair a mess from the wind) and only hints of what lay past it. She let herself in, winced at the sound of the old-fashioned bell tinkling over the doorway. Bad memories: one of the last things Killgrave ruined for her, just by virtue of being there, by walking through a door.
Inside, the fall sunlight shone hazy through the windows, illuminating dust mites and warm-toned walls. An older woman sat reading in an armchair in the corner; otherwise, the dining room was empty. This was the kind of place where college kids fell asleep over their textbooks, Jess thought, and worked to suppress a yawn.
“Be right with you,” Tina said as Jess sidled up the counter, rinsing out a carafe in the sink.
“Take your time,” Jess said and pretended interest in the white light of the pastry case, picked out a water bottle and a slice of lemon cake because another coffee today would probably make her puke.
She watched Tina as she rang up the order, punching buttons on the old cash register. “Hey,” Jess said, eyes sharp for every microexpression, every tic on Tina’s face, “Sorry, this might sound weird, but do you know Georgia Roth? Goes by Georgie?”
“Oh my god,” Tina groaned, hung her head and braced her hands on either side of the cash register’s open drawer. “Are you one of her mom’s friends?”
One of Barb’s friends? How old did she look? “Not exactly,” Jess said. “But I know Georgie’s mom, and she’s worried about her.”
“Ms. Roth needs to chill,” Tina said definitively as she handed back her change.
“Thanks,” Jess said, taking it. “She’s just worried.”
“She’s just nuts,” Tina shot back.
Jess shrugged equivocally. “Have you met her boyfriend? Tom?”
Before answering, Tina glanced around as if checking for eavesdroppers. “Once or twice.”
“And you think he’s good for her?”
Tina sighed. “What do you want?”
“Just a few minutes of your time, and I’ll be out of your hair,” Jess told her and flashed her best salesman’s smile.
“What are you, a detective or something?” Tina asked dubiously.
“Nope. P.I.,” Jess said, because sometimes honesty was the best policy, and dug her business card out of her pocket for Tina to read.
“Fine. Mario!” Tina called, loud enough to make Jess jump, and a skinny kid with his first hint of peach fuzz poked his head out of the back. Waving him over, Tina said. “Watch the register. I’m gonna take my break.”
With a jerk of her chin, she signaled Jess to follow and led her over to a table by the window and plopped down in one of the rickety chairs. Jess took the one opposite and, in between bites of her lemon cake, got Tina to mostly corroborate Barb’s timeline, plus a few salient details.
Six months ago, Georgie dragged Tina along to a friend’s older brother’s party, and there in the smoke-filled, bass-thumping rooms, Georgie met Tom. She hadn’t left with him that night, if only because Tina dragged her away, but there were plenty after, sneaking out to meet him away from the watchful eyes of her mother. Sometimes, she’d show up to class pupils wide and body shivering with suppressed movement. Georgie climbed somewhere reckless, diamond-coated and impossible to reach.
“He’s a drug dealer?” Jess asked, a spark of relief immediately dampened by guilt. It might not be Killgrave, but it was still manipulation, still a type of control. Still enough to ruin a pretty, naive girl’s life.
“I guess so.” Tina looked out the window, impassively watching the multicolored traffic. “I’d call the cops if I wasn’t worried Georgie would go down with him. Ms. Roth doesn’t even know about that and she did try to call the cops and report her as a runaway, but Georgie was already eighteen then, so they just laughed at her.” She shook her head slowly. “I told Georgie that guy was a creep.”
“You’re a good friend,” Jess said. A line, but she meant it.
For a second, Tina’s eyes flicked to her, back out the window. “I used to be.”
“What happened?” Jess asked.
“A couple weeks ago, Georgie said she couldn’t talk to me anymore because Tom doesn’t want her to,” Tina said, spitting out the name like something rotten. “So, I guess we’re not friends.”
“Sorry.” Jess offered a quick smile. “You’ve known Georgie for a long time, right?”
Nodding, Tina said, “Since like third grade.”
“Could you—” Jess paused, braced herself before asking. “When you think back, is this something you could’ve ever imagined her doing? Or does it, I don’t know, seem like she changed into a completely different person overnight?”
“Uh, not overnight,” Tina said thoughtfully. “But she’s definitely not the same person she was a year ago. I wouldn’t have thought she’d be this stupid, but hey, people can surprise you.”
“Right.” Jess snorted and pushed her chair back to stand, already planning ahead towards Laredo’s timely arrest, rehab clinics, and a satisfied client. “Thanks. You’ve been a big help.”
Tina gave a mock-salute and said, “Yep. I miss her, y’know? I don’t know what your deal is, but I hope you can talk some sense into her.”
“I’ll try,” Jess said and turned to leave.
“Hey, hold on,” Tina said in a rush, and Jess went still.
Slowly, she turned back and waited for Tina to continue.
“The last time I saw Georgie—maybe it’s nothing, but I felt like she was trying to tell me something else, but couldn’t,” Tina said. “Like there was something stopping her.”
“Thanks,” Jess said, with a fake, forced smile. “You’re right, though. It’s probably nothing.”
She swept out of the coffee shop and into the bright afternoon, air that she suddenly couldn’t breathe. In an alley a block away, Jess slumped against the wall and gasped until her heart calmed down and she regained some semblance of normalcy.
It was probably nothing.
But she wouldn’t rest until she knew for sure.
*
Across the bridge and halfway through Brooklyn, Matt finally relented and gave her the address, now that they were close enough for him to keep up if she kicked him out of the car, the bastard. Jess punched it into her GPS with all the bitter frustration she couldn’t take out on him and peeled away from a stoplight hard enough to throw Matt back in his seat.
Suddenly, he laughed, a little, snorting sound that almost came out a choke. “You know, you got defenestrated.”
“I got what-ed?” Jess asked, watching him from the corner of her eye.
“Defenestrated. Thrown out a window,” Matt told her like that was an achievement to be proud of.
“What? There’s a word for that?”
Matt nodded, “Yeah. After the Defenestrations of Prague.”
Sometimes, talking to Matt was like trying to communicate with a space alien. “Why do I have the horrible feeling you’re about to tell me what that is?”
“Technically, there were three defenestrations in Prague from the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries, but the Defenestrations of Prague happened in 1618,” Matt said, proving her right. “So, there were these Catholic lords ruling over Protestant subjects, and—I can tell you’re doing that.”
Hastily, Jess put the hand she’d been using to pantomime a talking mouth back on the wheel. “No, you can’t. You’re blind.”
“And you’re an asshole,” Matt said fondly. “Long story short, during a dispute about building churches, the Protestants found out the Catholic lords were lying, and threw them out a third-floor window. It was one of the precursors to the Thirty Years’ War.”
“Hell of a way to go,” Jess commented, mostly to make up for her earlier mockery.
“Oh no, they lived.” Matt grinned, added, “Rumor has it they fell into a dung heap.”
The connection clicked, and Jess laughed in spite of herself. “God, you’re weird.”
A couple blocks short of the address, Jess backed into a spot where she probably wouldn’t get towed and killed the engine. “Ready?”
“When you are,” Matt said, traded Jess’ hoodie for his mask, and became Daredevil again.
“Can you hear them?” Jess asked as she locked the car and stepped up next to him on the sidewalk.
He tilted his head to listen, like a dog spoken to in a high-pitched voice, always a little funny.
“Yeah,” Matt said. If we go up there”—he pointed to a building across the street—“you should be able to see them. Want a lift?” he asked, pulling out his club.
“No thanks,” Jess said decisively; the last time she’d tried Matt’s method of transportation, she’d nearly lost her lunch. “Race you, though.”
Grinning, Matt detached the two halves of his club to reveal the cord inside and slung it around a fire escape’s railing. Jess ran for the building, bent her knees, and jumped, catching the fire escape’s ladder two floors up. Finding her footing, she jumped again.
“Let’s call that a tie,” she said as she reached the top and found Matt on the ledge.
“Sure,” Matt said indulgently, which made Jess want to smack him more than if he’d argued.
She settled for sitting next to him and looking over the balconies of the building next door. “Which one are they in?”
Matt tapped her arm and indicated a balcony a few floors from the top. If she squinted, Jess could just make out Laredo pacing like a caged lion, phone pressed to his ear.
“What’s he saying?” she asked.
“He’s trying to borrow some money so he can get out of town. From the amount of flop sweat on him, I’d say he’s freaking out. Oh,” Matt said, laughed. “He thinks he killed you.”
And Jess laughed too. “I hope he pisses himself.” More soberly, she asked, “Where’s the girl?”
“She’s in the bedroom, sitting on the bed. Her heart rate’s a little elevated, but she’s fine,” Matt said. “How do you want to play this?”
How she wanted to play this was jumping down there and punching Laredo until he coughed up the truth, a little payback masquerading as justice. “If he’s a—he won’t let her argue with him,” she said. “I need to hear her disagree with him, or do something he’s told her not to do.”
“I’ve got time,” Matt told her, and they fell quiet to let his ears focus on the apartment below.
Eventually, Laredo hung up the phone and stalked into the apartment proper, slamming the sliding glass door behind him. “He’s in the kitchen now. Getting a beer,” Matt said before she could ask, and then shoved her nose unceremoniously into the elephant in the room. “Jess, you know she can do what he says without him making her do it.”
“I know,” Jess said, watching the window of the apartment facing them, the yellow square of light. “And I know what it’ll feel like if he does.”
“And then what?” Matt asked, like a hit too fast to dodge even when you saw it coming.
Jess pressed her lips thin and didn’t answer. Not because Matt’s senses made him better than a polygraph and he’d know if she was lying, not because she knew Matt’s stance on killing (never, under any circumstances) might lead to a near-future where they fought over Laredo’s life, but because she just hadn’t thought that far ahead. Hadn’t wanted to.
Before she could fabricate a calculated non-response, Matt went stiff and his hand settled on his club. “Fuck!” he swore. “Oh, no you’re—”
And he was gone, swinging from the rooftop to the balcony of Laredo’s apartment just in time to collide with a shadowy figure as it climbed over the railing. A figure that dodged as Matt landed, threw a punch that just missed him as he ducked, and then they moved too quickly and too far away for Jess to make out any detail.
“Matt!” she hissed, loud enough for his ears only. “Matt, what the hell!”
Matt, otherwise occupied, didn’t answer. The fight down on the balcony continued silent and intense, and it was only a matter of time before Laredo emerged from the kitchen and noticed.
“Oh, shit,” Jess sighed, nothing for it. She climbed up on the ledge, took a deep breath, and jumped.
Landings sucked, and her landings sucked more than most; she’d never gotten the hang of that bent-knee superhero shit and wiped out every goddamn time. This time, it worked to her advantage as well as anything could in this rapidly devolving clusterfuck of a situation. She knocked down Daredevil and his mystery dance partner like bowling pins, and they lay there for a minute in a dazed heap.
The dance partner extricated himself first, and Jess’ mind sparked with recognition. That square-jawed face, that black trenchcoat worn to hide a small arsenal’s worth of weapons, the white skull spray-painted across the Kevlar vest covering his torso.
“Castle?”
Frank Castle, the Punisher, sat back against the side of the balcony. “Jones? You here with this clown?”
“Cute, Frank,” Matt said in a biting tone that was anything but as they all got to their feet, the two men facing each other from opposite corners like boxers in a ring.
Jess guessed that made her the referee. She turned to Castle and offered, “We’re here for Laredo. I’m guessing you are, too.”
“What’s he to you?” Castle asked, not taking his eyes off Matt.
“A case. My client’s worried about her daughter.” At the pinch of his brow, she elaborated, “The girl he’s with. She’s in the bedroom.”
“Huh,” Castle grunted. His hand dropped casually to his belt, causing Matt’s to inch closer to his club and Jess’ headache to ratchet up a few notches. “You can keep the commission,” he told her, and smirked in Matt’s direction. “You and the altar boy. What happened, you do too much pro bono?”
It had what Jess could only assume was the intended effect—Matt bristled like an alley cat puffed up to twice its original size, spitting mad. “I’m not here for the money,” he snapped. “You might have trouble understanding this, Frank, but some of us—”
“Ok, that’s enough,” Jess said, stepping between them with a hand held up to each and stopping Matt’s tirade, though he still stood there fuming. She fixed Castle with a pointed look, Did you have to rile him up?, and the unapologetic amusement in the corners of his mouth gave her all the answer she needed.
You had to hand it to Frank Castle—she’d seen Matt keep a cool head against Fisk and his scheming and Bullseye and his insanity, against world-ending disasters that sent most into a screaming panic, and yet she’d never had to humor him bitching about anyone else for a solid two hours while they got steadily more shitfaced at Jess’ favorite watering hole. Castle pressed Matt’s buttons like he owned the manual to pissing him off, got under his skin like a rash.
The floor-to-ceiling vulnerability of the sliding glass doors behind them made Jess’ back itch like a painted-on target. She breathed out slowly through her nose and lowered her hands.
“You wanna measure dicks, do it later,” she told them, gratified by the way Matt’s mouth fell open, the fucking Catholic, and Frank blinked in surprise. In a calculated risk, she turned her back on Matt to face Frank fully. “There’s something you should know about Laredo. I think he might be—”
“Uh, Jess?” Matt asked.
Something in his tone got her, cutting through her annoyance at being interrupted before it really had time to take off. Turning back, she saw what he sensed, and her heart turned to stone in her chest. Laredo had finally left the kitchen. He gaped at them ashen-faced through the sliding glass door, at her in particular like he’d seen a ghost.
Castle moved first. He got between her and Laredo, drawing a gun that he didn’t have a chance to fire. With a wordless shout, Matt leapt from his corner and tackled Frank to the ground like a goddamn football match, like a comedy of errors as they rolled around at Jess’ feet. Fucking useless, and if it wasn’t for Laredo, she’d grab them both by the scruff of their necks like a pair of wayward kittens.
Meanwhile, the sight of a gun broke Laredo free of his shock, giving way to rage. He reached back and pulled a handgun from his belt, and his mouth opened in a scream. Jess dodged to one side of the balcony just as the first bullet shattered the pane and rained them with glass.
This, at least, proved sufficient to get the attention of the two idiots on the ground and herald a temporary truce. They scrambled to the side of the balcony opposite Jess, to the flimsy protection of a narrow strip of wall beside the sliding glass door. As Laredo kept shooting, Castle grabbed Matt from behind, arm around his waist, and fired back at Laredo over his shoulder. Jess saw the sense in it as his broad, Kevlar-covered back took a stray shot that would’ve torn right through Matt’s body armor, but if Castle expected gratitude, he’d get it around the time hell froze over. Matt was yelling something she couldn’t hear over the continued gunshots and Laredo’s screaming, and he kept trying to pull away from Castle like he didn’t care that it’d put him in the line of fire.
Everything fell suddenly, deafeningly silent, noise replaced by the ringing in Jess’ ears. Laredo’s gun fell to the ground empty, but didn’t leave time for relief before he jumped over the back of the couch. In a second, he came up again with a shotgun braced along the back and took aim at her with one eye open and full of hate.
His first shot went wide, but the balcony was only so big. Jess glanced over the side, the path down easy for someone like her, leapfrogging from one balcony to the next until she reached the ground, but Georgie was still in there. God, Jess hoped she stayed safe in the bedroom, or better yet had run out the front door and out of Laredo’s life forever.
Over on the other side of the balcony, Matt had finally managed to slip out of Castle’s grasp. Jess opened her mouth to ask him for help and maybe salvage this nightmare, and watched her last chance go belly-up as Matt pitched over the railing, taking Castle with him into a dozen-floor drop.
“Shit!” Jess swore, looking over the side again and charting the best route to the ground, and then Georgie ran into the room behind Laredo, pale and wide-eyed with fear.
She skidded to a stop a few feet behind him, eyes darting between Jess and the broken window and the gun. “Tom!” she shouted. “What the fuck is going on!?”
“We have to go!” Laredo yelled, backing up towards her and still firing to keep Jess at a distance.
“Tom,” Georgie began and faltered, her voice breaking in confusion and fear.
Half crazed and still waving the shotgun wildly, Laredo grabbed Georgie’s arm hard enough to bruise and screamed in her face.
“Now, Georgie!”
“Now, Jessica!” Killgrave shouted, when she wasn’t fast enough, when she wasn’t good enough, when light came through from the world above and she started fighting him to reach it, swimming through a sea thick with terror and shame—
No.
Jess breathed.
That wasn’t now.
Now, Georgie had a chance. Just a second’s hesitation, the smallest resistance, just enough for Jess to see the choice in her eyes—
Georgie turned with Laredo and ran without looking back.
*
They say what happened to Jess was the worst thing that happened to any hero. Mostly, Jess didn’t feel like a hero, but the worst thing—yeah. That part fit.
Killgrave, the Purple Man. The wasting disease that crept into your life like a fungus, consuming it from the inside out so slow and insidious you didn’t notice it until it was too late. Always, too late.
Someday, Jess wanted to wake up and breathe the morning air and see the sun rise and realize she wasn’t afraid of him anymore. But that wouldn’t happen unless he was dead, and even if he was dead, she wouldn’t trust it. He’d died before and come back before, stalked like a predator around her life, taking swipes at her family. She’d dread that forever. No matter how much time passed or how long Killgrave stayed gone, that kernel of fear was something she carried with her.
Fear that something would rekindle his sick interest in her, fear that he’d come for revenge against some imagined wrong, fear that he’d take it out on Luke and Dani—but that wasn’t what she feared the most. It should be. At the surface, it often was. Deep down, though, late at night and at the end of the bottle, Jess’ fear went morbid. It wove a nasty conviction that she was still with Killgrave and would always be, that her life was his fabrication fed into her mind, that she’d wake an old woman on her deathbed and find him there and know he’d consumed the whole of her life like a parasite, and every single bit of happiness she’d ever known had been a lie.
On those nights, Jess drank until she blacked out and tried not to remember it later. She’d roll out of bed with a fuzzy mouth and a pulse she could feel in her brain and splash cold water on her face. Killgrave is a narcissist, she’d think in a reasonable tone that sounded a little like her memory of her mother. When he gets into your life, he wants you to know.
Except it wasn’t just hers. It was every woman he’d had before her and every one since, every couple who broke up after what he made them do to each other, every life he casually destroyed like a child knocking over an anthill. What kept her going, past the downward spirals of depression and the panic attacks, when the thought of her family grew slippery with the oily voice in her head that said they’d be better without her, was the grim determination to stop what happened to her from happening to anyone else.
After the All-Nighter Café, Jess walked through the streets and climbed the stairs to her office without seeing anything until she was sitting at her desk. She forced her hands loose from the armrests before she broke another chair and started searching, kept searching through the afternoon until shadows grew long around her. Between queries, waiting for messages to ping back, Jess took care of other business, brusque, routine. She called the old lady down the street to report she’d found her bug-eyed chihuahua at a shelter—an easy job, clicking through pictures online without having to leave her office. Then, the guy who’d hired her to prove his wife was cheating on him with his brother, who cried when she told him they had been sneaking around together, but only to plan a surprise party for his fiftieth.
Jess hung up from that one laughing, maybe a bit of faith in humanity restored, but it died in her throat when she checked her computer and saw a message back. The lurking pit in her stomach grew like it’d been waiting for the right moment, Barb Roth and her daughter and Tom Laredo like a snake, coiled around her and ready to squeeze. She clicked on the message, read it, and felt certainty settle like a lead weight in her stomach; she knew where to go next.
Halfway there, out again on the city streets in the deepening dusk, Jess’ phone buzzed in her pocket. Luke. Jess stepped beneath the closed awning of a shop and answered with her heart in her throat.
“Hey,” she said, too fast and sharp.
“Hey,” Luke echoed. “You gonna be home for dinner? We’re making spaghetti.”
“Pasketty!” Dani’s voice crowed in the background.
Indulgently, Luke laughed. “Yeah, pasketty.” To Jess, he asked, “So?”
“Sorry,” Jess said, cringing with guilt. “I got a case today. But I’m uh, I’m gonna try to wrap it up tonight, so I should be home tomorrow.”
“Ok. Don’t work too hard,” Luke said, teasing, but she could hear the disappointment behind it. “You wanna talk to Dani?”
No, not if she wanted to keep it together— “Um. Uh, yeah.”
Soft clunks of Luke handing over the phone, and then her daughter’s voice on the line. “Mommy!”
“Hey, baby.” Jess smiled so hard her face hurt, even as fear crushed her chest. “Are you being good for Daddy?”
“Uh-huh. We’re making pasketty,” Dani told her proudly.
Jess leaned against the wall, bringing her free hand close to the phone to muffle the noise of the street. “Spaghetti? That sounds yummy.”
“Yum-my,” Dani repeated. “Mommy coming home?”
“No, I’m sorry, baby,” Jess said, bowled over by a fresh wave of guilt. “You’ll be asleep when I get there. I miss you, though.”
“I miss you, too,” Dani said in that sweet baby-voice that brought tears to Jess’ eyes. She burned with the need to keep her safe forever from the world and all the horrible things in it, and the impossibility of doing so.
Clearing her throat, Jess said, “Can you put Daddy back on the phone?”
“Yeah. Daddy!” Dani yelled, high-pitched and right in Jess’ ear, but she smiled anyway.
“I love you,” she said before Dani handed the phone over. “Be good and don’t give Daddy a hard time at bedtime, ok?”
“Ok. I love you, too,” Dani said.
Luke’s voice came back on the line, “Well, if I let these noodles cook much longer, they’re gonna turn to mush, so.”
“I’d better let you go,” Jess finished for him. “Give Dani a hug for me?”
“Of course. You know, if you need anything, you can ask me,” Luke said, quiet and serious. “I’m in your corner.”
I need you to leave, Jess thought. I need you to leave and take Dani with you, change your names and go somewhere no one knows who you are, because maybe that will be enough, maybe next time you’ll be safe and the shit that follows me around won’t splatter on you.
Jess plastered on a smile, a brave face. “I know,” she said. “I love you.”
“Love you, too. See you when you get home,” he said. An edge to it that Jess heard: You’d better come home.
The click of the line disconnected, but she stood there for a minute, phone pressed to her ear and staring at nothing. The minute passed, and Jess wiped her eyes and merged back into the flow of pedestrian traffic.
“Hi, sorry I’m late,” Jess said some ten minutes later, settling into a chair on a patio outside a restaurant in Chelsea.
Blowing a stream of cigarette smoke out of her mouth, Cindy said, “It’s cool.”
Cindy Malone was about Jess’ age, but looked older. Rail-thin beneath an old army-jacket, she wore her bleached-blonde hair loose, an inch of brown roots showing, and her face cut a raw-boned, angular look that spoke of a life that had raked her over the coals and left behind only what bits she could scrape out. As she chain-smoked through a whiskey on the rocks and two beers, she told Jess all about her sordid history with Laredo, Tommy, as she called him. She met him in her last year of high school, a pattern already familiar, and he’d swept her off her feet only to drop her and let her land in jail.
“I took the fall for him, because I was in loooove,” she said, rolling her eyes and drawing out the O. “Said he’d get me out, the lying bastard.”
“How long were you in there?” Jess asked.
“Five years,” Cindy told her with a curt shake of her head. “Mandatory minimum bullshit. Half my twenties pissed away, and you know what I found when I got out? Tommy’s got a new eighteen-year-old floozy on his arm. He likes them high school girls, y’know, he gets older, and they stay the same age. I was already an old bag at 25, never mind that he was twenty-seven at the time.” She paused to take another drag of her cigarette. “I hope that poor girl got out sooner than I did.”
So did Jess, unlikely as it was. “I’m sorry,” she said.
“Yeah, me too. But what can I say? Ya live and ya learn.” Cindy nodded wisely and stubbed out her cigarette in the ashtray, pulled another out of the pack and let it dangle unlit from her fingers. “I got a job now, and my own place, and a boyfriend who’s never done anything harder than weed. You do any drugs?” she asked suddenly.
“Uh. I smoke a little every now and then. Mushrooms, once. I wasn’t a fan,” Jess said.
Cindy laughed the wet, throaty laugh of a smoker. “Eh, you’re a baby. Stay away from ‘em. Only thing worse is men.”
Toasting to that, Jess clinked her beer against Cindy’s and drank for a minute in silence. “This might sound weird,” Jess began, parsing her words. “When you were with Laredo—did you ever do something because he asked and then step back later and have no idea why you did it? Like you were someone else?”
“All the time. Drugs’ll do that,” Cindy said. She lit her cigarette and inhaled, then blew smoke out of her nose. “It wasn’t just the drugs, though,” she went on pensively, and Jess recognized that look, that distant uncertainty, that prickling sensation of trying to think through a thicket. “Tommy had this way about him. He’d start talking and before I knew it, I was agreeing to just any stupid thing.”
“I might know the feeling,” Jess said. The beer turned over in her stomach in time to memories she tried to keep buried, but she drank more anyway.
“Don’t we all.” Cindy let out a smoke-filled sigh. “Tell you what, though, you’ll find a good man. And when you do, you keep him.”
Jess smiled, brittle and sharp like a shard of glass. “I got one. I’m trying.”
She tipped her head back and drank the rest of her beer, thanked Cindy, and said her goodbyes. “Anytime,” Cindy said, waving her off in a haze of smoke.
Around the next corner, Jess stopped for a second and breathed against the world closing in around her, that weight on her chest, slowly caving it in. Then, she stood straight and honed all her fear and shame and rage into a point of determination. She pulled up Laredo’s address on her phone and mapped the route in her head, flipped next to Georgie’s picture. All that bright life a monster was sucking dry. Jess drew her hood around her face and stepped out to hail a cab.
The cold, cynical part of her said that if Georgie had made it this far, she could survive a few more days of Jess tailing Laredo from a distance, that Jess’ half-assed plan wouldn’t do shit except get herself hurt, arrested, or killed. But another voice thought back: wouldn’t she have done anything, even cut her arm off like an animal in a trap, to get away from Killgrave just one day sooner?
She shut the cab’s door and gave the driver Laredo’s address like loading bullets into the chamber. I won’t leave you with him, she thought at Georgie’s picture on her phone. Not for one more night.
*
“Mind control?” Castle asked, eyebrows going up in disbelief.
It hadn’t been hard to find them, down in the shadows of the alley and sniping at each other until she caught up and shoved them both into opposite walls. They stood there still, leaning against the bricks and facing each other in mutual animosity, leaving Jess at the halfway point between the buildings and in the middle of their juvenile bullshit.
“Yeah,” Jess said, nothing else left. She’d laid out the evidence for him, the bulleted list, beginning with the tattoo on Georgie’s stomach and ending with the way she’d run out with Laredo the second he spat out an order.
Even so, she hadn’t sold Castle on it. “He’s been arrested too many times.”
“But never convicted,” Jess pointed out. “Maybe he can only use it on so many people within a certain time frame, or he has to touch you first, or…”
“Oh,” Matt said, after she trailed off. “The drugs.”
“Would that do it?” Castle asked.
Jess wound her hair around her fist in a nervous habit. “Maybe. Killgrave never—he’d have a glass of red wine at most, and his powers didn’t work when he was sedated. If Laredo’s taking some of what he’s selling, it could have a dampening effect.”
“Shit.” Castle sighed, scratched the back of his head. “If you’re right, I can’t kill him. A few years back, I found Laredo and his girl dealing up in Boston. She went to jail for it, and he got away. I had better things to do than track down some lowlife. But if you’re right,” he said, turning to Jess, “and he made her do it—”
“We need him alive to prove it,” Jess said.
“Alive and in custody,” Matt agreed, and then to Castle, pointedly, “Not in the morgue.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Castle said, waving him off. “I didn’t know.”
A knife-like smile, and Matt said, “Maybe you should’ve thought about what you didn’t know before you tried to shoot him.”
“Oh, for chrissakes, I wasn’t trying to shoot him!” Castle snapped, and at Matt’s incredulous look, “I was trying to hold him at gunpoint until Jones got what she needed, and, uh…” He gave an equivocal shrug. “Then I was gonna shoot him.”
“And that’s so much better,” Matt said sarcastically.
Castle pushed off the wall and took a step towards him. “I had it under control, but you’d rather get us both shot than stop for one second and—”
“Your heartbeat doesn’t change, Frank!” Matt hurled out like an accusation. “You’re so used to killing that I can’t tell if you’re about to shoot someone or not, so excuse me if—”
“Hey!” Jess said, shoving them apart again as they tried to converge in the middle of the alley, back in the rancid gutter of their never-ending fight. “Stop it, or I’ll throw you both in a dumpster and punch it into a shape that won’t open. Your goddamn pissing contest almost got me shot tonight, and I’ve got no fucking idea where Georgie is.”
That did it; with a muttered apology from Matt and a grunt from Castle, they backed off and stood at right angles to each other, Castle resolutely not looking. Still stupid, but it’d have to do.
Then, Castle cleared his throat. “I, uh. Might have something that can help with that.”
“What?” Jess asked.
“Knowing where she is,” Castle said. “I put a tracking device on his car.”
Which was how Jess ended up driving two vigilantes through Queens at one in the morning—at this rate, she’d have to put someone in the trunk by dawn. In the seat next to her, Matt slouched like a petulant teenager. “This is a bad idea,” he said on the continued subject of Castle’s presence in the backseat.
“You wouldn’t even know where you were going if not for me,” Castle said. “Turn right up here,” he told Jess, and then to himself, “What the fuck is he doing?”
Matt turned to Jess, ignoring Castle determinedly. “He’s going to shoot someone.”
Her previously dulled headache came back with a pounding vengeance. “Yeah, and I hope it’s you if you don’t shut up,” Jess said, and smiled faintly at Matt’s open-mouthed, scandalized look and Castle’s surprised laugh.
“If Laredo grabs him, you might get your wish,” Matt said, going for another angle like he was in fucking court.
“If he was gonna grab me, he would’ve done it when we were trying to shoot each other,” Castle said. “’Sides, I can handle psychics.”
“Yeah? How many times have you fought off Killgrave?” Matt asked.
“How many times have you got skull-fucked by Ghost Rider’s penance stare?” Castle countered.
Jess’ eyes snapped to him in the rearview mirror. “How many times have you?”
“Twice. Stings like a bitch,” Castle said. “I threw up the second time.”
With all the people he’d killed, it was a miracle he hadn’t gone insane or dropped dead on the spot. Still, he made a compelling point. “Castle stays,” Jess announced, and managed not to smack Matt upside the head for what he grumbled under his breath.
At the next stoplight, Jess’ curiosity got the better of her. She looked to Frank again and asked, “Why were you trying to kill Laredo?”
“Because Frank’s a psychopath,” Matt said.
“You hear this?” Castle asked, meeting Jess’ eyes in the mirror. “Catholic lawyer who dresses up like the devil and beats up muggers, and he’s worrying about my mental state.”
Matt turned around in his seat snarling. “Don’t flatter yourself. If I’m worried about anything, it’s who you might kill in your mental state.”
“Yeah, you think you’re better than me,” Castle scoffed. “I do the same thing you do, Red, I just—”
“Dumpster. Stuck inside,” Jess reminded them, and they fell into a simmering silence.
“Up in Boston, Laredo got in a fight with some deadbeat over cards,” Frank said, and it took Jess a second to realize he was answering her question. “Ended up shooting him. I wouldn’t have given a shit—the guy he shot was as bad as him—but the guy’s younger brother was in the room. Laredo couldn’t have witnesses. Twenty years old and his whole life ahead of him.”
Matt’s mouth opened, but Jess reached over and jabbed him in the ribs before another stupid argument could come out, and he sank down into his seat sulking.
“What about tonight?” Jess asked.
“Ran into Laredo again, found out how old that girl he’s with was when he started dating her,” Castle explained in brief. “Put him higher on my list of priorities.”
Jess snorted humorlessly. “Mine, too.”
The tracker sent them winding through the city streets like a rat in the maze, seemingly aimless and finally dead-ending on the shores of the East River. Laredo’s car sat abandoned at the curb, and Jess parked behind it, swallowed, and got out with a knot in her stomach. The car’s engine still pinged with heat. Jess clenched her fists so she didn’t tear it apart with her bare hands.
“He can’t have gotten far,” Castle said uselessly as he joined her on the sidewalk.
Fortunately, she’d brought another tracking device. “Matt?”
He cocked his head and sniffed the air like a dog, nodded once. “I know where they are,” he said, and with that, shot one end of his club around a nearby streetlight and swung off down the street.
“Hey!” Jess shouted.
“C’mon.” Castle tapped her arm, and they both ran after.
They followed Matt’s shadowy form as it passed through pools of light from the streetlamps and the few windows still lit at this hour. A few minutes and blocks later, he landed in front of Jess so suddenly she nearly collided with him.
“Shit!” she swore as Castle slid to a stop behind.
“Out of shape?” Matt quipped with a little half-smile that made Jess want to hit him.
“Fuck you,” Jess said without any heat behind it. “Where are they?”
Matt pointed to a gap between buildings and the sound of waves from beyond. “Through there.”
Silently, Jess jogged the remaining distance with Matt and Castle close behind and emerged on a narrow joggers’ path, a sliver of pavement between them and the river. A long, narrow dock lay ahead, boats along its sides bobbing gently.
“Where—?” Jess started to ask, but then the distant noise of an argument drew her attention.
There, at the end of the dock. She crept closer and could just make out the words as they rose in volume, Georgie’s voice carrying back: “No! Tom, this is crazy! Do you even know how to drive that thing?”
“I don’t—” Matt began hesitantly, and then more firmly, “Jess, I don’t think he’s high on anything.”
Laredo’s voice followed, pleading and near-breaking in frustration, but Jess barely heard it because Georgie was arguing, was telling him no, and Jess’ hand covered her mouth as her vision fractaled with unshed tears. She was free, and Jess had been wrong. God, she’d never been so happy to be wrong.
Then, her relief shattered as Georgie let out a shriek. Laredo picked her up and bodily threw her over his shoulder like a monster from an old black-and-white B-movie, and tossed her into a speedboat tied to the dock. Jumping in after, he took the loop of rope with him and moved around to the controls, and he was going to start it, and she wasn’t going to get there in time—
“Jess,” Matt said, a warning barely heard and far behind her as she broke into a run.
People always underestimated her strength. Just because she didn’t look like one of the Hulks, there was always a disconnect between her size and her ability to tie a crowbar into a knot like a length of rope until someone saw her do it. The speedboat floated away from the dock, already too far for a normal person to jump. Jess ran faster, carrying the momentum up to the end, where she bent her knees, bunched her muscles, and took a flying leap into open air.
The white body of the boat rose up to greet her out of the black, lapping waters around it, and Jess landed on the front of it with her knees bent for impact and her fist braced against the prow—a perfect landing. Laredo screamed like a girl. It would’ve been funny if he didn’t immediately also try to shoot her again.
Even at his range, his aim still sucked. Jess ducked beneath the shot and took hold of the windshield to launch herself over and met Georgie’s eyes. She could see the whites of them even in the dark. In those scant few seconds, Jess tried to project the reassurance she couldn’t say aloud—it’s ok, I’ll get you out of here—effort wasted as Laredo grabbed Georgie and pulled her onto his lap in the driver’s seat.
His hand shook as he held the gun up to her temple. “Stay back!”
“Tom, what the hell are you doing? Let me go!” Georgie demanded, trying to squirm away in a show of bravery or stupidity.
“Shut up!” Laredo shouted, free hand gripping Georgie’s arm hard enough that she cried out. Over the top of the windshield, he glared at Jess in a radiating fury. “Jump off, or I’ll shoot her,” he said. “I mean it! I swear!”
“You shoot her, and what do you think happens next?” Jess asked, stalling for time.
He let out something like a scream between clenched teeth. “Damn it! Goddamnit! What the hell are you?”
“Uh, private investigator?” Jess offered. “Listen,” she said, improvising wildly. “I’m here for the girl. Hand her over, and I’ll let you go.”
“You’ll let me go?” Laredo repeated, somewhere between calculating and desperate.
“Yeah,” Jess lied. “I’m not getting paid to deal with your sorry ass, and honestly, I’ve got better things to do.”
Laredo glared at her for a moment longer, weighing the shitty options he’d bought himself. Pinned between him and the cold weight of his gun, Georgie sat very still, her chest rising and falling rapidly. Jess tightened her grip on the windshield and prepared to move.
The tension snapped, and Laredo breathed out through his nose. “Fine,” he said, and with that, twisted his body to the side and dumped Georgie into the water.
His hands went to the controls again, and Jess saw the plan—dump Georgie, throw Jess off the boat as it accelerated, but he wasn’t fast enough. In a second, Jess was over the top of the windshield and on him. She drew her fist back and felt the bridge of his nose crunch under it. He yelped in pain, enough of a distraction for her to throw him in the passenger seat and toss his gun into the water.
“Georgie?” she called, peering through the dark. For a single, terrifying second, Jess couldn’t find her, and what if she couldn’t swim, what if she hit her head on the way down—
And then her form bobbed up through the waves, swimming and already halfway to safety. Jess sighed in relief and waited until Georgie reached the edge of the dock, where Matt and Castle waited to pull her up.
Well, that was done. Jess looked over at Laredo, one hand over his broken nose and eyes darting wildly like he still meant to escape. “Try anything, and I’ll bend your arm back the wrong angle,” she said, started the speedboat, and began steering them back towards the dock.
By the time she reached it and threw Laredo up on the wooden planks, Georgie sat shivering with Frank’s trenchcoat around her shoulders. It might’ve been a comfort if it hadn’t revealed several of the knives and guns strapped to his body, not to mention the infamous skull on his chest, and Georgie kept glancing at him warily and then away each time she caught herself looking.
“It’s ok, they’re friends of mine,” Jess said as she jumped up on the dock next to Laredo.
“Associate,” Castle corrected her. “We’re not friends.”
Dramatic idiot, Jess thought. “Sure, associate,” she said.
Matt crouched down by Georgie’s side. “Do you have anyone you can—?”
“You bitch!” Laredo screamed, cutting him off. He launched himself at Georgie, would’ve reached her in a second if Jess hadn’t grabbed him by his throat and Matt hadn’t dragged Georgie off in the other direction.
Where she strained against his grip, yelling, “Fuck you, Tom! You held a gun to my head!”
“I should’ve done worse, you stupid slut!” Tom yelled back. “You heard what the bitch said, she’s here for you, this whole fucking thing was because of you and you know what? I bet your crazy fucking mother—”
But Jess had heard enough. She tightened her hand around Laredo’s throat and lifted. He fell silent as she held him over the water, gasping for air, unable to speak, and finally having the presence of fucking mind to look afraid. He seemed so small now. He wasn’t a monster, at least not the kind she’d feared, but men like him were everywhere, chewing up women and spitting them out.
Blood flushed Laredo’s face. She should let go soon, though Jess wondered what would happen if she didn’t. If anyone would care enough about Laredo to miss him.
In the dim light, his skin looked almost purple.
“Jess, put him down.” Matt’s voice behind her, where he stood with Georgie and didn’t dare get closer. “Jess.”
A hand fell on her arm. “Jones,” Castle said, didn’t try to pull her back, wasn’t stupid enough to test his strength against hers. “This piece of shit ain’t worth it. Let him go.”
Shit. Jess nodded shakily and dropped Laredo on the dock, where he sank to his knees and heaved for breath. She turned away from him and looked back to Georgie, released from Matt’s grip but still standing there, shivering beneath Castle’s trenchcoat like she couldn’t move. As Jess took a step towards her, she tried to come up with something to say, unsure of whether to apologize or just get Georgie somewhere that wasn’t here.
The gunshot tore through the night and slammed Jess’ heart into her throat. She spun back just in time to see Castle kick Laredo’s body off the dock, where it splashed into the water.
At this close range, Jess’ ears rang, and she gaped for a moment in shock. “You said. You said he wasn’t—”
“He wasn’t worth it for you,” Castle told her. “Not for me.”
With that, he tucked his gun into his belt and sauntered back down the dock, all casual like a walk in the fucking park. Futilely, Jess watched him—didn’t quite feel right to let him go, but it didn’t feel right to stop him, either—and then Matt stepped into his path.
“You think you can just walk away from this?” Matt asked.
“Matt,” Jess said, catching up and, not for the first time that night, but hopefully the last, stepped between him and Castle. “Not tonight.”
Matt recoiled like she’d slapped him. “Jess, you saw what he—”
“I know what he did,” Jess said over him. “I also know you’ve had your shot at him before, and you’ll have it again. But not tonight.”
She watched him struggle with it for a moment longer, and then the fight left him as he moved to let Castle past. “This isn’t over,” he said.
“Yeah, yeah,” Castle said wearily. He stopped in front of Georgie. “Sorry you had to see that, kid,” he told her. “When the cops find him and start asking questions, don’t lie for me, ok? You tell ‘em the Punisher did it and you didn’t say anything ‘cause you were scared. Keep the coat.”
“Uh, thanks?” Georgie hazarded, probably because she was still in shock.
Castle continued down the dock, waving over his shoulder. “See ya around, Jones. Red.”
“Georgie, I’m so—” Jess began poorly.
“It’s ok,” Georgie said quickly with a tight smile. “I don’t—I can’t say I wanted Tom to, well.” She swallowed, continued, “But it’s ok. I’m ok.”
Jess nodded and looked over to Matt, his arms folded and his mouth pressed into a thin line, but at least he hadn’t said, I told you so.
“You good?” Jess asked.
He half-shrugged, said, “Yeah, you?”
“Yeah.” She tilted her head at Georgie. “I can take it from here. Unless you, uh, need a ride back to—?”
“No, thanks. I can get back on my own.” The club appeared in his hand, and he twirled it once like a baton. “I’ve got some things to think about.”
Like how quickly he could catch up with Castle, Jess thought as he ran off down the dock and, with a toss of his club, vanished into the shadows. But that wasn’t her problem anymore. She started back to shore and gestured for Georgie to follow, wondering idly how far Castle could get anyway, absent his trenchcoat and with his skull and no small amount of weapons on display. Then, she reached the curb where her car was parked, found Laredo’s missing, and got her answer.
“I can’t go back to my mom,” Georgie blurted as soon as they sat in the car, the heat on and aimed towards her wet clothes. “Not tonight.”
Glancing at the clock on her dashboard and the hour it showed, Jess privately agreed. She fished out her phone and said, “I have to take you somewhere. Do you know your friend Tina’s number?”
“Tina?” Georgie practically squeaked. “How do you know about Tina?”
“Because I’m a very good P.I.” Jess told her. A better P.I. than a hero, anyway.
Georgie rewarded her with a chuckle and stuck her hands into the trenchcoat’s pockets. Then, she frowned and pulled her right hand out, clutching a clip full of money—a thick stack and probably all hundreds. “Uh,” she said.
“If that’s in there, Castle wanted you to have it,” Jess told her.
“Oh.” Tina put it back in the trenchcoat’s pockets. “I’m not sure what to think about him.”
Jess checked her mirrors and pulled away from the curb. “None of us are.”
The rest of the night passed in a haze as the adrenaline seeped out of Jess’ body and left her exhausted and blurry. “All of my stuff’s at Tom’s,” Georgie said, so they made a pit stop there to gather her clothes and flush any drugs Jess could find down the toilet. She emerged from the bathroom to find Georgie crying silently, wet tear tracks down her face that she wiped away on seeing Jess, which Jess took as her cue to keep her mouth shut about it.
By some miracle, Tina had both answered her phone and agreed to let Georgie stay with her (after a round of profuse apologies on Georgie’s part and admittance that she’d been an idiot), so Jess drove her there and tried to hold onto a scrap of gratitude that at least it wasn’t out in the boroughs.
“Wait, you thought he was mind-controlling me?” Georgie asked, because she’d wanted to know, and Jess had been dumb enough to tell her.
Jess held back a yawn as she turned down Tina’s street. “Your mom told me you’re scared of needles.”
“Still am,” Georgie admitted with a shudder. “It’s just, Tom used to make fun of me for it, and I wanted to prove him wrong.” She laughed, said, “I only cried a little. I think—”
“What?” Jess asked when Georgie stopped, putting her car in park and idling on the curb.
“Tom is—was—good at making people do what he wanted and see things his way,” Georgie said. “I think he might’ve been a sociopath, but he wasn’t controlling me.” She leaned back in her seat and turned her head towards the passenger side window. “I wish I could say he was. I could blame someone other than myself.”
“No,” Jess told her coldly, decisively. “You don’t.”
She waited until Tina let Georgie and the few bags she owned into her building. They hugged on the doorstep and waved to Jess in the car, who waved back. God, she was tired. The thought of parking and taking a nap right here was damn Faustian in its temptation, but she didn’t need to wake up a few hours from now to some traffic cop knocking on her window.
Tomorrow, Georgie would call her mother and Jess would make her final notes on the file and close the case. Tomorrow, any manner of chaos might wait for her. Tonight, Jess drove to Harlem, to home. She parked her car and got out, cracking her neck and stretching.
Unlocking the door slowly, she let herself inside as silently as she could. Dani slept peacefully under her princess sheets, on her back with her thumb half in her mouth. Gently, Jess removed it and bent down to kiss her forehead.
“I love you, baby,” Jess said, and if only because she was too tired, she didn’t feel afraid.
A quick shower, and she pulled on pajamas and slipped into bed next to Luke. Sometimes, when she wasn’t trapped between the horrors of the past and her fear of the future, Jess couldn’t believe how lucky she was. Luke mumbled something in his sleep and rolled on his side to face her. He didn’t wake up, but that was fine. Jess kissed his cheek and closed her eyes.
She’d see him in the morning.
***