Page 26 of Boardroom Mask

“Oh my God!” I drop to my knees beside him. “Elliot! Elliot, look at me.”

He groans. His good eye finds me, glassy and unfocused.

“What happened?” I ask. I grab a wad of paper towels from the dispenser and press them against the cut on his forehead. “Who did this to you?”

Even in his daze, he shakes his head frantically and keeps his mouth firmly closed. I know that look. I fuckingknowthat look.

It’s The Fear.

And I know exactly who gave it to him.

10

JILLIAN

“Nobody loves me / It’s true / Not like you do”

— “Sour Times” by Portishead

Red and blue lights. Siren wailing. Ambulance, red, big, square, men in uniform with stretchers that look like medieval torture devices, metal and Elliot both groaning as they crank the stretcher up and prepare to raise him onto it.

“Ma’am, we need you to step back,” one of the paramedics instructs. He’s a stocky guy with a shaved head and latex gloves already on, and he’s frowning at me in a suspicious sort of way that just makes me feel that much worse.

Numbly, robotically, I move out of the way. They kneel beside Elliot and start doing their thing.What’s your name? Can you tell me where you are? Do you know what day it is?

Elliot answers some of them. He gets the location wrong—says he’s at home—and the two paramedics share a look before loading him onto the stretcher.

“Sir, can you tell us what happened?” the other paramedic asks. She’s young, ponytail, clipboard already out.

Elliot shakes his head.

“Did someone hit you?”

He shakes his head again, harder this time, and winces at the motion. Blood is still leaking from the gash above his eye, drenching the fresh gauze they just pressed against it.

“Okay. Let’s get him in.” They wheel him toward the back door and I follow, weaving past a cluster of restaurant staff and gawking diners. As I step outside, I realize I’m still holding the bloody paper towels I’d been pressing against his forehead when a hostess opened the door and found us crouched on the floor, kneeling in puddles of sticky crimson.

They slide Elliot into the ambulance. I try to climb in after him, but the stocky paramedic holds up a hand. “Are you family?”

“I’m his—” I stop and cringe. As I made clear to Elliot just before he was beaten to a fucking pulp, I’m not his anything. “I’m his neighbor. We were here together.”

The hand goes down, but the suspicious look remains. “Alright. Well, you can follow us to Mount Sinai West. He’s stable, but he needs stitches and probably a CT to scope for brain damage. Whatever hit him did a damn good job.”

“Okay. Yeah. Okay.”

The doors close and the ambulance pulls away from the curb, lights still spinning. I watch it race off down Amsterdam. Police officers finish talking to the restaurant staff and flock to me as soon as they’re gone. One of the cops is tall, mid-forties, with a salt-and-pepper mustache and a notepad. The other is youngerand shorter, built like a fire hydrant, shadowing his partner a step behind.

“You the one who found him?” Mustache asks at once.

I nod. “Yeah. Uh, yeah.”

“Your name?”

“Jillian Pierce.”

He writes it down. “And the victim?”

“Elliot. Elliot, uh, Wilkinson. He’s my neighbor. We were having dinner.”