Nightmare Party by Nic Roberts

Author:Nic Roberts [Roberts, Nic & Thorne, Ari]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2023-06-10T23:00:00+00:00

The day before the sting was due to take place, Jonesy received a call from Andrew Fallon. He looked to Leah, who simply shrugged and left him to it. He held the phone up to his ear and answered, “Hello?”

“DC Jones? It’s Andrew,” the voice came out, the uncertainty in it making Andrew sound like a lost child, as though the acid attack had made him mentally regress.

“How are you doing, Andrew?” Jonesy asked blankly while Leah face-palmed herself in the background.

But if Andrew was put off by the boilerplate question, he didn’t show it. “They took my bandages off today.”

“And how does it look?” Jonesy asked, realising how little comfort he was offering. Feeling a rushing impulse, he asked, “Do you want me to come over there and be with you?”

Leah listened in to the conversation stumped, torn between leaving Jonesy to the mess he was making for himself and pulling him away before he made everything worse.

“It looks… it looks so different,” the voice came through, sounding choked up. “I keep looking at myself in the mirror and trying to tell myself this is me now.’”

Jonesy tried to imagine the scene: Andrew sitting up in bed, the doctors carefully removing the bandages and then giving the young man a mirror at his insistence. Andrew sitting in the bed, running his hand over the uneven surfaces, the nerves scraped raw. He may not have died from the attack, but he was no doubt thinking that his life was over, and he couldn’t just go back to the way things were.

“What about surgery?” the detective constable asked, daring to sound optimistic. “Surely there are skin grafts that you can get?”

Andrew scoffed at the notion. “They’ll be an improvement. Hell, anything the doctors give me will be a step up. But they won’t change much. I’ll still be fuck-ugly at the end of it all.”

Desperate to find the young man some solace, Jonesy blurted out, “We’re going to find the people who did this to you.”

He had enough time to see Leah shoot him a warning look before Andrew commented, “I thought Gary was dead.”

“He is,” the detective noted. “But we think he wasn’t working alone. And we’re going to catch the people who did it. I promise you.”

“See that you do,” Andrew insisted and hung up the phone, leaving Jonesy alone to face his partner’s wrath.

“What?” he asked, feeling put out by Leah’s silence. “Why the stunted silence? I’d rather you broke down and yelled at me. At least then there’d be some passion to it.”

Leah spoke calmly and evenly, drawing on her years of experience. “I get that you want to help this kid,” she began, walking over to him and speaking quietly so nobody else could hear you. “I think it’s wonderful how you want to step in and fix everyone else’s problems. It’s one of the many reasons I love you. But you can’t offer false promises. You can’t tell him it’s going to be all right when you know it won’t.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.