Secrets and Fries at the Starlight Diner Read online

  And then I realised.

  They were bullets. Somebody was shooting at us. No… They hadn’t shot at Jack. They were shooting at me. They’d waited until I’d come to the window. Lured me. How the shooter had shot at the glass before without breaking it, I don’t know. And right now I didn’t much care. Not when bullets were firing across the apartment and burying themselves in the wall next to the kitchen doorway. I’d heard gunfire, of course, growing up on the outskirts of Detroit, but I’d never been shot at before and with every crack of every shot my heart galloped faster and my tummy clenched tighter.

  ‘Oh my God!’ I screamed, as the shattering of glass sounded out overhead, but worse than that, and louder, I could hear Jack crying out in pain. I wanted to ask if he was OK but splinters of glass were raining down on us – the priority was moving, not talking.

  ‘Jack, we need to crawl or we’re going to get cut to pieces, come on,’ I said to him, trying to ease him off of me so we could move. He was sucking air through his teeth, trying to deal with whatever pain he was in. The shots had stopped now, but for all I knew the shooter was just reloading and getting ready for round two, so we had to move and we had to keep low.

  Sure enough another round of shots sprayed across the apartment as we crawled over to where the sofa was. There, me and Jack lay on the laminate flooring next to each other, me pressed down on my front and Jack lying on his back, panting. As I looked at him, I realised he was clutching his stomach and his arm was bleeding through his pale blue shirt.

  ‘Oh my God, are you shot?’ I screeched over the clatter of more bullets.

  ‘I think my arm is grazed, it sort of feels like it’s burning,’ he said, his eyes wider than I’d ever seen them.

  ‘What about your stomach?’

  ‘Oh. That’s just… an old wound. Still healing from a couple of months ago. I’m not really in peak physical condition. Definitely shouldn’t be throwing myself around like that.’ He tried to smile but was in too much pain and ended up wincing instead.

  About ten seconds later, the bullets stopped.

  Swallowing hard, and breathing heavy, I waited for the next round to be fired. But all was quiet. Well, almost quiet.

  It was then I noticed it, the faint sound of my father’s voice, saying my name, over and over again.

  The phone!

  I crawled over and reached a tentative hand up to the table the phone was resting on.

  ‘Bonnie?’ My Dad was half-screaming. I don’t think I’d ever heard him scream like that, out of fear rather than anger.

  ‘Dad!’ I replied, closing my eyes in some strange relief at hearing his voice.

  ‘What the hell is going on? Are you alright?’

  ‘Dad, no. I think…’ I trailed off.

  Could I really be about to say these words? Even with everything that was going on, I could hardly believe them myself. How had my life come to this?

  ‘I think someone just tried to kill me.’

  No, not someone.

  Frankie.

  It had to be him. Who else? I choked back tears at the realisation that seeing me rot in jail for the rest of my life wasn’t enough to satisfy him after all. He wanted me dead, and when a guy like Frankie wanted you dead, there was a strong likelihood it would become a reality.

  ‘Jesus Christ. Are you hurt?’ asked Dad, his voice gentler than I’d ever heard it before.

  ‘No, but I think Jack is. Dad, I’m sorry but I have to hang up. I have to call the police and probably an ambulance for Jack, OK? I’ll call you back as soon as I can.’

  I didn’t even wait for my Dad to agree, I just hung up and redialled.

  ‘911, which emergency service, please?’

  ‘Hello? I need the police. Someone just tried to shoot me.’ I swear, these sentences were coming out on some kind of autopilot setting. I said the words but couldn’t latch on to the true meaning of them.

  ‘OK, ma’am, are you hurt?’ said the woman at the other end of the phone, her voice too calm to be human. It was almost robotic.

  ‘No, but my friend is. I think a bullet grazed his arm.’ I glanced over at Jack, the poor guy. He was putting a brave face on it but you didn’t have to be a doctor to see he was in nerve-shattering pain.

  ‘OK, ma’am, where are you?’

  ‘Uh… It’s Flat Twelve, 217 Ludlow Street, Manhattan,’ I said, surprised I could remember my own name let alone the address I was staying at.

  ‘OK, a police officer is on his way. Will you be safe until the officer arrives?’

  I looked at Jack, then over at the bullet holes in the wall and back over at the shattered window, through which a sharp winter breeze was now blowing.

  ‘Ma’am?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I don’t know if we’re safe, but the shooting has stopped.’

  ‘Would you like me to stay on the line until the officer arrives?’

  ‘No, no, it’s OK.’ I said. ‘We’ll just lie low until help gets here. Thank you.’

  ‘Alright, ma’am, thank you.’

  I crawled back over to Jack and took hold of his hand.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ I said to him.

  ‘For what?’ he frowned.

  ‘This wouldn’t be happening to you if it wasn’t for me,’ I said, thinking about how quick he’d been to risk his own neck to save mine. Esther was so lucky having a guy like that to protect her, and even though he didn’t know me that well, he’d protected me too. He couldn’t know what that meant to me right now, when there were people out there who wanted me dead.

  ‘It’s not your fault,’ Jack said, squeezing my hand.

  I nodded at him, but it wasn’t the most convincing of nods. It was true, I hadn’t pulled the trigger. Not just now and not back in Atlantic City, but for whatever reason, darkness followed me everywhere. No matter what I did, I couldn’t shake it.

  Glaring back at that window, the shards of broken glass looked more like jagged teeth. The gullet of the night waited beyond, set to swallow me up into the blackness.

  Chapter Seventeen

  ‘Oh my God, Jack,’ Esther wailed as she hurried through the door of the apartment, still in her diner uniform and carrying the old, deep green leather satchel she seemed to take everywhere. The one weighed down by whatever paperbacks she was reading that week.

  ‘Esther.’ Jack turned to her and his face, which had been heavy with a deep frown the whole time the medic had been bandaging his arm and examining his stomach, relaxed as his girlfriend sped towards him, throwing her arms around his neck. He coiled his arms around her waist and pressed his lips against her right ear, then her neck, then her shoulder.

  I didn’t take her lack of interest in my wellbeing too hard. I’d already assured her about twenty times when I called her at the diner that I was fine – physically, anyway. Besides, Jack was the injured party. He’d been injured in the act of saving my life.

  In an attempt to let them have some sort of private moment, I looked at the medic who’d introduced herself as Carly. She was a young black woman with neat braids that kept her hair out of her face as she worked. She parted her lips in a forced smile, trying, as I was, to ignore some of the things coming out of Jack and Esther’s mouths and, soon after, the fact that their mouths were connected.

  ‘Well,’ Carly said, packing away bandages and antiseptic into a large blue bag she’d brought with her, ‘he seems all fixed up now. If you’re sure you’re alright, I’d best be on my way.’

  ‘I am, not a scratch on me by some miracle,’ I said, smiling. ‘Thank you for all you’ve done here.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Esther said to the medic, disentangling herself from Jack. ‘Thank you for what you’ve done.’

  ‘That’s no problem, ma’am. He’s gonna be just fine. Just had a fright that’s all. Got himself into a bit of a scrape.’

  ‘He is a bloody nuisance at times,’ Esther said.

  ‘That’s not really what she just said,’ Jack argued.


  Carly smiled. ‘I’m sure you’re not a nuisance, Jack, but don’t be throwing yourself about no more. Not till your healed, you hear me?’

  ‘Yes, ma’am,’ Jack said, shaking her hand. ‘Thank you.’

  Carly nodded before picking up her bag and making her way out the door, closing it tight behind her.

  ‘Do you have to go round telling people I’m a nuisance right after I’ve been shot at?’ Jack said to Esther.

  ‘Truth hurts,’ Esther said, but her arms enveloped him.

  ‘It does when it follows right after a bullet wound, yes.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Esther murmured into his chest. ‘You know it’s just how I deal with stuff.’ Jack looked down at Esther and began kissing her again.

  I cleared my throat and diverted my eyes over to Detective Erin Rivera. She was a good few inches taller than I was and wore her long, black hair in a plait at the back of her head. Since she’d arrived, about ten minutes ago, she’d hustled about the apartment in her camel pantsuit, taking photographs of the window and the wall that the bullets had buried themselves into. She’d also scraped what was left of the bullets out of the wall into a small plastic bag and instructed the officer who’d responded to the 911 call to knock on the doors of the other apartments in the block to see if anyone saw the shooter.

  ‘Can I ask you a question?’ said Rivera.

  ‘Oh, yes, please,’ I replied, making an awkward, sidelong glance in the direction of Esther and Jack, who were back in their own little world again.

  The detective’s eyes followed mine but snapped back to my face in an instant. She wasn’t smiling or nothing, but there was no mistaking the twinkle in her blue eyes, kindled, no doubt, by the way Esther and Jack were carrying on with each other.

  ‘You said when you looked out of the window, before the shots were fired, you couldn’t see anybody?’

  ‘That’s right. We heard a noise at the window but we couldn’t see anybody out there,’ I replied.

  ‘Did you look at the street?’

  ‘Yes. Why?’

  ‘Because there’s a chance you were looking in the wrong place. The bullets struck that far wall, rather than the ceiling. Now, it’s not impossible to do that from street level if you’ve found a spot where you’ve got the right angle up to the fourth floor, but it’s a risk.’

  ‘So, if they weren’t shooting from the street, where were they shooting from?’ I said, scrunching up my face in the effort of coming up with a theory.

  ‘The easiest place to shoot at you would be from one of the apartments in the block opposite,’ said Rivera, her voice so gentle I almost couldn’t hear it. She was speaking like this, no doubt, to play down the fact that one of my neighbours could be trying to kill me.

  I looked from the calm of Rivera’s deep blue eyes across to the broken window and then out to the brown-bricked apartment block that stood beyond it.

  ‘Do you know anyone who lives in that building?’ asked Rivera.

  I shook my head. ‘I’m new in town.’

  ‘Do you have any idea who might be behind tonight’s attack?’ Rivera asked. I looked at her as she crossed her arms over the white shirt she was wearing under her pantsuit.

  ‘I do, but you’re not going to like the answer,’ I said.

  Esther disentangled herself from Jack and came over to stand by me. It was clear she wanted to give me a hug after what I’d been through, but she could also see I was in the middle of a pretty serious conversation, so she settled for rubbing my arm and giving it a squeeze.

  ‘What do you mean by that comment?’ Rivera arched a dark eyebrow.

  There was no getting around this: I was going to have to tell her. She was going to be investigating this crime, after all, so it wouldn’t take her long to uncover who I was and what was going on in my life just now.

  ‘I’m out on bail under house arrest,’ I said, keeping my voice as even as I could.

  Rivera’s expression didn’t change as she asked, ‘For what charges?’

  ‘Murder,’ I said. ‘But it’s all messed up. I didn’t commit the murder. I witnessed it and the guy who did commit it is trying to frame me for it. I don’t know why he’d suddenly want me dead, and I doubt he did it himself, probably hired somebody, but he’s the only person I know with the power to arrange what happened here tonight.’

  Rivera stared at me but it wasn’t the same stare of judgement I’d had from my legal aid attorney, Ms Lange. There was a small kink in the skin around the corners of her eyes that told me she was figuring something out – most likely whether to believe me or not.

  ‘There may be other people with resources who want you dead, Ms Brooks,’ Rivera said.

  ‘What do you mean?’ Esther frowned.

  ‘Well, if Ms Brooks is up for a murder charge that means somebody’s dead. And every dead body was once a person. And every person has family and friends. Tonight’s attack could just as easily be an associate of the deceased seeking revenge.’

  ‘Great,’ I said, my voice flat. ‘So people could be lining up to put an end to me.’

  ‘We don’t know that,’ Esther said, taking my hand. ‘It’s just a theory. One that the detective has to take into consideration otherwise she wouldn’t be doing her job. But my guess would be Frankie too, or someone on his payroll.’

  ‘It doesn’t quite make sense though,’ I said. ‘Not when he’s the most likely person behind Larry Harris’s false statement. He wants me to go to trial, and go away for what he’s done. Why would he try and kill me?’

  ‘Well, I’m not involved in your murder case, at least not directly, but if this Frankie character has tried to kill you before a trial that he set up, then he thinks something is going to come out that will incriminate him.’

  ‘Maybe it’s what Jimmy was talking about the other day?’ Esther said.

  ‘Maybe. He did say he had a lead on where Harris really was that night. He wouldn’t talk about it much when he came back, just said all I needed to know was that he was well on his way to getting what he needed. But how would Frankie know that Jimmy had something on him?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Esther but she crossed her arms and frowned at the floor in a way that told me she had an idea. What she thinking what I was thinking?

  ‘You don’t think someone close to Jimmy – maybe even close to us – is feeding information to Frankie, do you?’ I asked, as a shiver stole down my spine.

  ‘I don’t know. Who would that be?’ Esther looked at me.

  I shrugged. There’s only one person I could think of who’d displayed any uncertain behaviour towards me, and that was Alan. Mona had said he’d taken an interest in my case because he wanted justice, but what if that was just a cover? What if by ‘helping’ Jimmy, he was really getting the inside track on the case we were building against Frankie?

  I looked at Esther, who was caught up in a deep frown. Jack sauntered over and slumped himself down on the sofa so he could be part of the circle.

  ‘I know nobody’s going to want to hear this,’ Jack said. ‘And I know it’s going to sound as though personal prejudices are playing out here, but…’ He trailed off and stared at me.

  ‘What?’ Esther, Rivera and I said, almost in synchrony.

  ‘Are we sure Jimmy is… That he’s definitely on our side in this?’

  My whole body went cold at these words. At first my brain rejected this idea outright. Jimmy wouldn’t do this. Jimmy had been there for me all along.

  All along.

  Was that too much of a coincidence?

  He’d never really given a proper explanation about why he’d been at the Starlight Diner that first night, even though it was clear he wasn’t wanted there. He’d invited me into his home when he didn’t know me at all. At the time I’d put it down to kindness – but what if that wasn’t the case?

  ‘I don’t…’ I started but couldn’t finish.

  ‘I’m sorry, maybe I shouldn’t have said that,’ Jack said. ‘It’s just,
I’m finding it hard to trust that guy.’

  ‘Who’s Jimmy?’ Rivera asked at last, since nobody had given her any clues.

  ‘Jimmy Boyle, he’s my attorney,’ I explained.

  ‘Jimmy Boyle the reporter? Is he practising law again?’ Rivera asked.

  ‘You know Jimmy?’ I asked.

  ‘That’s going a bit far, but I’ve come across him a couple of times in both of his incarnations. I mean, you meet a lot of lawyers and reporters when you’re a detective, but Jimmy is the kind of person who leaves a lasting impression.’

  Each one of us, even Jack, smirked. Nobody could deny that much.

  ‘But my instincts are pretty good and from what I know of him I’d be surprised if he was working against you if he believes you’re innocent. In the few dealings I’ve had with him, he’s been as set as I am on uncovering the truth. Though I don’t always approve of the way he goes about it.’

  At that, a knock sounded out.

  Everyone looked at the door.

  ‘That’s probably Jimmy now,’ I said, looking from the door to Esther. ‘I called him right after I called you.’

  ‘Should I let him in?’ Esther asked, looking between Rivera and Jack.

  ‘Yes,’ Jack said, after a moment’s thought. ‘We’ve no evidence he’s feeding information to anyone. I just… I had to raise it as a possibility.’ He looked at me and added, ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘It’s OK. Somebody had to say it.’

  ‘I’ll come to the door with you,’ said Rivera, pulling a handgun from her belt.

  ‘Wait, what are you going to do?’

  ‘It’s just a precaution. It might be Boyle on his own, harmless. Or he might have company. We don’t know who the shooter was – they might have followed him, they might have him at gunpoint right now on the other side of that door. A night you’ve been shot at is not a night to take chances with this kind of thing.’

  The knock sounded out again. It was harder this time.