A Friend in the Dark - Gregory Ashe Page 0,1

office desks, a chair listing to one side on broken wheels, and a few obsolete Apple computer monitors. The floor was littered with the garbage of a hasty office move—pencils, crumpled papers, dust bunnies, a stray power strip. Rufus got down on the floor of the elevator car in order to see beneath the small gaps of erratically placed desks.

No one hiding.

He sat up on his knees.

No one waiting.

The elevator door began to close. Rufus thrust his hand out and forced it back.

Rain pelted the bay windows on the right. Gray shadows, fragmented and erratic, crept about the floor in time with the clouds rolling across the sky.

The elevator door tried to shut a second time. It let out a loud beep when Rufus blocked it. Getting to his feet, Rufus took a cautious step into the unoccupied space.

The door groaned shut behind him, leaving Rufus alone.

Except that was a problem.

Because Jake had texted him.

Where was he?

Rufus tilted his head and studied the linoleum at an angle. Whatever business had vacated the seventh floor had done so recently. There hadn’t been enough time for dust to settle and pick up any sort of shoe tread impressions after the fact. No splotches of wet either, which meant Jake had arrived before the rain.

Right?

Rufus walked on the balls of his feet toward the only visible door—back right—faintly illuminated by the overhead windows. His Chucks, so worn out, didn’t even leave a whisper in his wake. He counted the windows as he moved—one, two, three—six in total. Rufus pressed himself against the wall as he reached the far corner and studied the crack under the door.

No light.

And no living sound except the beating of his own heart in his ears, and to be honest, Rufus was only half-alive on his best days.

He felt that suspension in his gut again. That brief weightlessness and freedom again. Then the world grabbed Rufus by the throat and threw him to the asbestos-ridden linoleum of PS14 again and he was sobbing and vomiting and cradling a broken arm.

Rufus took a deep breath, wiped his palms on his jeans, then pushed down on the door handle with his knuckles. It opened noiselessly. He nudged the door with the toe of his shoe and peered into the darkness within. The initial smell to waft out was that of chemicals and waste, like sewage backing up into a safety shower. But then Rufus was hit with a stink that, once experienced, could never be mistaken for anything other than the inevitability of mortality.

Rufus’s hand shook as he felt the inside wall for a light switch. Finding it, he flicked it up.

Jake was sprawled in the basin of the emergency shower, his head reclining where the corners came together at a ninety-degree angle. His face was a mess of broken bone and torn tissue—entrance the third eye, exit the entire fucking back of his head. A bright splatter of blood and brains painted the wall, giving Rufus a rough idea of how Jake had been sitting before a trigger was pulled.

Rufus dropped into a crouched position to hug his knees. “Jesus Christ,” he choked out.

Jake was dead.

Just like that.

A finger snap.

Here and gone in the space of a breath, a heartbeat, a crack of thunder over Manhattan.

Rufus gasped and shuddered, inhaling a soggy breath. Heavy tears burned his eyes. His hands shook too much as he tried to wipe his face.

I know you’re smart, Rufus.

That’s what Jake would say. And Rufus could feel the other man beside him—not dead in that basin—but squeezing the back of Rufus’s neck with one of those big, capable hands. Jake would move his hand a bit lower, settle it between Rufus’s bony shoulder blades—that contact searing through his jean jacket and T-shirt, offering a starved body barely enough touch to survive another episode.

I need you to take a breath. I need you to be smart.

Pallor mortis, Rufus thought. That was the first onset of death. It occurred within the first thirty minutes, as a result of the collapse of capillary circulation in the body, and led to livor mortis. Livor mortis was Latin. It meant “bluish death.” Named for when blood settled in the body and discolored the skin. It typically wasn’t visible until a few hours postmortem.

Forensic Pathology, Third Edition, copyright 2008, Richard Stewart, M.D.

Rufus had checked out the textbook from the New York Public Library last summer. It’d been 618 pages on determining cause of death in sudden, violent, or suspicious circumstances. In