The Iron Bangle: He Owns The City That Betrayed Him

Chapter 3: The Wrist.

Jace fell asleep holding his dead mother’s bangle, and woke to it counting down.

Small blue numbers glowed in the black iron where nothing had been before.

365 DAYS

Under them, a line of tiny letters crawled past. He brought his wrist up to his face to read it.

Heir must claim each property in person. Unclaimed property passes to the surviving partners.

Jace stared at the cracked ceiling. Cael Sterling’s breath was still in his ear, warm and pleased.

Finally.

He shut his eyes and tried to find his mother’s laugh. He tried to see her at a stove, or in a car, or bending over his bed to turn off a light. There was only the smoke, and her screaming his name. He pressed the bangle against his mouth and held it there until the iron was warm.

Three knocks on the door. Slow. Heavy.

The clock on the nightstand read 4:07.

“Mr. Carter?” A man’s voice, low and friendly. “Front desk. Got a message for you.”

It was not Hale’s voice.

Jace slid off the bed and put his eye to the peephole. Under the yellow walkway light stood two men. One had a shaved head and a leather jacket. The other filled the whole lens: black suit, thick neck, a clear wire curling from his ear into his collar.

The man from the fireplace.

Jace’s heart slammed against his ribs. The gash in his scalp throbbed with every beat. He backed away and looked at the bathroom window above the toilet. It was a narrow frosted pane, too small for a child.

“Come on, Carter.” The friendliness was gone. “Open up, or we open it.”

He did not move.

The door burst inward on the second kick. The chain ripped out of the frame and rattled against the wall. The big man ducked in under the doorframe, and the bald one followed and shut the door behind them.

The big man held up a thick white envelope.

“Divorce papers. You sign tonight. Then you get on a bus and you never come back to Chestnut Hill.” He smiled. “Do that, and you leave this room with both hands.”

“Who sent you?”

“Sign, or I break your fingers one at a time until you can’t hold a pen. Then I hold it for you.”

“No,” Jace said. His voice shook.

The big man sighed. He dropped the envelope on the bed and reached for Jace’s left arm, for the wrist with the bangle.

The bangle burned.

Jace watched his own hand catch the big man’s wrist. He watched his hip turn and his body step in close. Then his elbow drove up and back, smooth and fast, like something rehearsed a thousand times.

Something snapped like a dry branch.

The big man screamed.

For one second there was a concrete floor under Jace’s feet and hot white lights above him. A crowd roared behind a chain-link fence, and a fist in a taped glove came at his face. Then the motel room was back, and the bald man was charging him with something silver in his hand.

Jace stepped aside before the knife arrived. His palm hit the bald man’s chin with a crack like a slammed door. The man flew backward over the bed into the wall, and the knife spun away under the radiator.

The bald man scrambled up. He looked at Jace with white, terrified eyes, then ran out the door. His feet pounded down the outside stairs and were gone.

The big man was on his knees, holding his wrist against his chest. His hand hung at an angle that turned Jace’s stomach. Tears ran down his broad face.

“I didn’t know,” he gasped. “I swear to God, I didn’t know who you were. Nobody told me what that thing on your arm was.”

“The fireplace.” Jace was breathing hard. “Why?”

“It wasn’t my call. It was set up before the dinner. He told me exactly where to put you. Aim for the corner, he said. It had to be your head. It had to bleed.”

Ice slid down Jace’s spine.

“Who?”

“He’ll kill me.” The big man’s voice cracked like a boy’s. “If he finds out I talked, I’m a dead man.”

“Who?”

“It was...”

The television on the dresser was off. In its black glass Jace could see the room: the kneeling man, the broken chain, and a stranger standing over them.

The stranger’s fists were clenched so hard the knuckles shone white. His weight had settled onto his back leg, and his shoulders had rolled forward. His right foot slid back one inch on the carpet, lining up with the kneeling man’s throat.

It was Jace’s own reflection.

Terror hit him so hard his knees almost buckled. That was not his body. He had never stood like that in his life. He was a man who folded napkins into swans. He saved strawberries in his pocket.

He threw himself backward until his shoulders hit the wall.

“Get out,” he said hoarsely.

The big man blinked up at him. “But you wanted to know...”

“Get out. Before I...” His voice broke. “Please. Just go.”

The big man staggered to the door with his ruined wrist pressed to his stomach. In the doorway he turned. Under the walkway light his face was gray and wet.

“They’re going to kill me for this,” he whispered. “You know that, right? Either way now. They’re going to kill me.”

Then he was gone.

Jace slid down the wall to the floor. The divorce papers lay on the bed, spattered red. Cold air poured in through the open door, and he sat in it, shaking.

Across the parking lot, a light was on in the motel office. A man stood in the doorway with the light behind him. His face was in shadow, but one gray-gloved hand rested on the frame.

He stood there a long time, watching Room 9.

Then the office went dark.

Jace’s phone buzzed on the carpet beside him.

Clara, 4:31 AM:

Lily collapsed. They took her to Boston General.

He was on his knees, the phone gripped in both hands. A second message came while he was still reading.

Mom says if you come anywhere near the hospital, she’s calling the police.

Then a third.

She keeps asking for you. Don’t come.

She keeps asking for you.

He saw her small gray face on a white pillow, and her lips moving around his name. He saw her thin arms reaching out from a hospital bed, the way they had reached for him from that dining chair while Evelyn held her back.

A sob came up out of him so hard it bent him over. He pressed his fist against his breastbone, where Lily’s strawberry had been, and held it there until he could breathe.

Then he lifted his head.

There was blood on the carpet. There was a knife under the radiator. The divorce papers on the bed were spattered with the blood of a man whose wrist he had snapped. In a few hours that man would be in an emergency room, telling someone in a uniform exactly who had done it.

Jace looked at his wrist.

365 DAYS

He pictured a cell door, and the blue numbers still falling on the other side of it. 364. 363. 362.

He stood up.

He pulled on his wet shoes and folded Ray’s three hundred dollars into his pocket. He tugged his sleeve down over the glowing bangle and left the divorce papers where they lay.

A cab was crawling along the empty harbor road with its light on. Jace stepped into the street in front of it and raised his hand.

“Boston General,” he said. “As fast as you can.”