“You just lied to a roomful of Weres.” Leon took another hit off the can. “Jesus, Jill.”
“The shipments should stop now that we’ve hit their distribution center.” My fingers moved restlessly, Mikhail’s apprentice-ring glinting on my third left finger. In other words, Leon, you can go home. You don’t have to see this through.
Yeah. Right. Like he was going to go for that. I shouldn’t even have thought it.
“I been curious all my life.” He shrugged, finished off the can with a long slurp and a massive belch that threatened to fog the windows. “Ain’t gonna stop now.”
The unspoken lingered just under the day’s heat. And if this Argoth is closer than we think, I’ll need all the help I can get. Since neither of us is Jack Karma. Not even close.
I twisted the key. The Charger roused, nowhere near my Impala’s sweet purr. Bernie hadn’t taken care of this car. I could fix that, if I hang onto this hunk of metal after the case ends. Have to clean it out, too. “We need ammo, but I don’t want to draw any more attention to Galina’s. I’ve got a cache in the suburbs. We should get to the airfield in about two hours.”
The sun would be past its highest mark, the day hot and still in its long afternoon; blessed, safe sunlight everywhere. With a bit of luck, we could disrupt anything going on at the airfield and be home in time for dinner.
I was hoping I’d finally be feeling hungry by then, too.
“More ammo.” Leon nodded sagely. “And I’ll be praying my ass off, Jill. This is suicide.”
You don’t think I know that? “It beats sitting in front of the TV.” I checked traffic and pulled out, sedately for once. I didn’t know how far I could abuse this engine, and I didn’t want cops marking this car. Not for a while, anyway. With Bernie’s partner dead and me driving like Granny Weatherall, there shouldn’t be a reason for anyone to run the plate number either.
If we were lucky.
“Amen.” Leon belched again, dropping the can on the floorboard, and I rolled my window down.
26
The Anabela Rosenkrantz Memorial Airfield sits about twenty miles outside the city limits. It’s a dusty, claptrap place, hangars set on one side of a long strip of pounded-down desert, leveled by a wheezing bulldozer after every gullywasher. Hutch had done his digging well, and now I knew all about it. ARA was where prop-plane enthusiasts stored their machines and the Santa Luz Police Department trained their two or three helicopter pilots. The county fire department trained out here too, sometimes, rather than at the bigger airport situated halfway between Santa Luz and the state capital. All in all, the dusty little place saw a lot of activity. That is, until last year. Hutch had discovered ARA had been “closed for repair” last winter, and never reopened. The amateur enthusiasts had moved closer to the county seat, and the cops hadn’t been out here at all this year. At least, not the honest ones.
Which is why I wasn’t surprised, when we crested the rise on a Forestry Service road cutting off the highway at an angle and heading into the canyons, to see more tin roofs throwing blinding spears of sunlight at the sky. It was the eight-by-ten I’d found in the Cherry Street warehouse. That picture had been taken recently, for some reason—probably to familiarize a pilot with the layout so the cargoes could be flown out. The drug runners move through further east, trucking things up through the border, carrying them through with illegal immigrants, and paying flyboys top dollar to play tag with Border Patrol. The last time I tangled with serious drugrunning into Santa Luz had been that hellbreed motherfucker selling tainted E, but most of that had been cleaning up the pipeline for ingredients, since the actual drug had been made in the basement of an apartment building at the edge of the barrio.
“What?” Leon glanced up through the windshield as we rolled to a stop below the top of the rise. I gestured briefly, switched the radio—AC/DC moaning about the highway to hell, since we’re both classic rock fans—off. Heatwaves blurred the distance and poured in through the open windows. “They’ve built more onto the airfield.”
We exchanged a long meaningful look. Rosita was in the back seat, out of sight but close at hand should he need her. “Shit.” He leaned over the seat to grab her.
I agreed. Coming in this way we had some cover, but the airfield was… well, an airfield, and out in the middle of nowhere where you could see somebody coming. We would raise a roostertail of dust into the stratosphere, and if they had assault rifles—
We’ll deal with that when we get there. I tipped my shades down my nose, looking over them and memorizing the layout. Light stung, water wrung out of both my smart and dumb eyes. And yes, friends and neighbors, wasn’t there a plucking in the fabric of reality around the airfield? Little dimples of swirling corruption lifting like pollen on the air, rising with the heat, and a brackish well of contamination centered right over the airfield, welling up like crude from a deep, dark secret place. Leon eyed it too. “Gives me the willies,” he said finally, a world of hunter’s intuition boiling down to four little words.
“Contamination. Can’t tell what it’s from, yet.” Baking, sand-smelling wind scoured the inside of the car. Junkfood wrappers rustled and blew. Thank God we’re downwind.
“Yay.” His blunt fingers touched Rosita the way they would touch a lover’s hand. “This ain’t gonna be pretty, darlin’.”
“I know. If half of what Hutch has archived is true we’re stuck hoping he hasn’t found a door yet.” That’s a hell of a run of luck we’re expecting. “This bothers me, Leon. It bothers me a lot. ”
As usual, he took refuge in understatement. “You get the feelin’ we’re bein’ led by the nose?”
“All through this goddamn thing. I just don’t see how anyone would think Monty would call me in to look at his ex-partner’s ‘suicide.’ And I don’t see how anyone could expect me to find scurf and take them out, even if I was looking into disappearances on the east side. Those were probably escaped stragglers, unless the
’breed was outside to watch over them. It was probably luck pure and simple, and…”
“And anytime we get that lucky, someone has to be planning something.” He shifted uneasily in his seat. “So what we gonna do?”
“We find out what’s going on at this airfield, and what those new buildings are. And with any luck, they won’t be expecting us to hit them here. ” Luck. Again. Never a substitute for proper planning, ammunition, or intelligence, as Mikhail would point out to me. The nagging feeling of something missing, of a trap about to spring, hovered over me again, retreated. “Fuck.”
“My sentimentals ’zactly. So what’s the plan?”
“What would you do?” Since you’d do exactly what I’d do.
He sniffed, tasting the air. Made a face. “Drive this piece of shit straight in and keep my eyes open. Then I’d send you out to draw their fire, darlin’, while I bulwark myself in and Rosita covers you. That’s assumin’ they have guards.”
“I don’t see anyone moving, but that’s no assurance.” Headache pounded behind my eyes, and I slipped my shades back up my nose. The world took on a better contrast, but I’d have to take them off for the last few miles of approach. “This baby’s heavy metal, like my Impala. Should be good as long as nobody hits a gas tank. After blowing up one car already on this case, I don’t think I want to blow up another.”
“Amen, darlin’.” He sighed, copper clinking as he settled himself in his seat. The look on his face told me he was wishing for another beer.
I waited for him to add more, but he didn’t. So I dropped the car into “drive” and hit the gas, glad to have him with me.
Dust rose in a choking swathe as I worked the steering, swinging the rear end out and standing on the brake. I bailed out as Leon did, and we both scrambled for the defensible angle between the back of the car and the farthest hangar. From here we had a straight shot down the runway or a good chance of cover while bobbing and weaving to the new buildings.
When no shots rang out and nothing happened
, it was absurdly anticlimactic. I crouched, my coat hanging behind me. The copper in Leon’s hair chimed. “Go,” he whispered, Rosita socked to his shoulder, his keen eyes alert down the alley for any muzzle flash. I moved, etheric force pulled through the humming scar on my wrist, almost faster than I could control. It’s acting up. Dammit, Perry. The thought was gone in a flash. I reached cover, pointed my guns down the way, and found no breath of anything stirring. It was as quiet as a grave.
Get it, Jill? Quiet as the grave? Arf arf.
I whistled, and Leon tore down the same path I’d taken. We covered each other, leapfrogging, because it was goddamn evident there was nobody here. I couldn’t even hear a heartbeat. Just the rasp of sand sliding over the desert, carried on the back of an oven-hot wind.
Just like scales moving in a dark hole.
“This is creepy,” I muttered. Then I shut up, brain working overtime. It had to be a trap. Had to be. The largest of the new buildings crouched under a shiny tin roof, and Leon and I both stopped, considering it for a moment. There was a door, a nice double-reinforced number, on the side of the prefabricated trailer. A brand-spanking-new set of wooden steps and a ramp large enough to wheel a forklift up led to the door, its latch and padlock glimmering like fool’s gold.
“Are you—” he began.
I noticed it too. “No windows.” I answered. “And locked on the outside. ” Just like the Winchell murder site. Gooseflesh rose cold and hard under my skin, and I made another one of those wrenching mental efforts to stay clear. Leon was depending on me, dammit. So were my Weres and my city. But what’s behind that door, Jill? Hm? You’re so smart, what’s behind that door?
“Yeah,” he breathed. “You go first.”
“Sure you don’t want to take this one?” Black humor at its finest, I glanced at him and Rosita. The spark was back in Leon’s eyes, and high hard color stood out on his cheeks. Otherwise he was dead white. A sheen of sweat not from the incidental heat of the day—because as a hunter you learn to regulate your body temperature pretty thoroughly—touched his forehead.
“Aw hell, darlin’, ladies first.” His attention never wavered from the padlocked door. I grinned, a fey baring of teeth Saul would recognize as my get ready face. “Age before beauty.”
“Pearls before swi—”
But I was already moving, bolting out of cover. The sun lay in a white glare like a hot sterile blanket over a corpse, and I hit the door like it had personally offended me. It gave, buckling, built to withstand more than ordinary pressure, but the extra force I pulled through the scar blazed through my arm and it crumpled like paper. I landed hard, weight on the balls of my feet, and swept with my guns. The Trader hit me just as hard, knocking me ass over teakettle down the three wooden stairs I’d just bolted up. I landed on my back, already firing, and heard Rosita roar.
At the apex of his leap, the dirty-blond Trader, wearing an eerily gleaming long white coat, was tumbled sideways by a load of silver ammo punching into his side, curling up like a spider dropped into a candleflame. His screech tore the simmering air, and I was on my feet again in a moment—pull the knees in, kick, use the momentum to jackknife and get your feet under you, then leap sideways as well, get on him Jill, take him down are there more Leon cover me goddammit—
“Mercy!” the Trader yelled, and I landed with one gun trained on him and the other on the door of the trailer. “Mercy don’t kill me Kismet don’t kill me please!”
Whafuck? I replayed it in my head and decided that yes, he had really said it. “How many more?” I shouted.
“Who else is in there?” I felt naked, horribly exposed, no cover, if they wanted to open fire on me like they did at Galina’s I was right in the crosshairs.
No heartbeats. There’s nobody here but this Trader. But you didn’t hear him, you might have missed someone else, dear God—
The Trader moaned. Bright blood welled between his fingers, clamped to his side. The white was a lab coat, now grinding into the dirt and fouled with blood. Lots of blood, only faintly tinged with black corruption.
“Mercy…” The sibilant at the end of the word trailed between a ridge of triangular teeth sharp as a shark’s.
“Irene… Irene—”
What the hell? I eyed him. Nothing happened for a long taffy-stretching moment. Hellbreed crawling all over my house and now this Trader moaning a Trader waitress’s name.
Hang on a second. Hold the phone for just one goddamn minute here.
“Fairfax?” I hazarded, not lowering my guns. Every hair on my body stood on end, quivering, scouring the air currents for the next weird happenstance. Wait a minute. I thought I killed you. But I just said blond, and Irene…
Caught assuming. Again. Goddammit. And Irene had looked relieved when I insisted the blond was hellbreed—I hadn’t said Trader.
The Trader froze. His eyes, blue under the flat shine of the dusted, half-opened. “Nobody… here,” he gasped, and took in a huge sucking breath. “Just the… the subjects. And me.”
“Jill?” Leon was getting nervous.
That made two of us.
“Subjects?” The hammer on the gun pointing at the Trader clicked up. “And how the fuck do you know Irene?”
“The subjects! ” He whisper-screamed it, losing air. “She’s my wife, goddammit!”
I holstered a gun and hauled him up from the crumbling dirt by his lapels, dragged him toward the blownout door, his body in front of mine like a shield. “Move.” I prodded him, both guns back out. “Inside. And if there’s someone in there, you die first. ”
“They say you help—” He stumbled. He was losing a lot of claret through that hole in his side. When Rosita talks, she’s not to be taken lightly. “Help… people.”
They certainly say that. What they don’t say is that I’m a right bitch. “Sometimes.” I stepped in front of the open door, prodded him again. He stumbled, took two steps inside, and dropped down in a heap, his eyes rolling up inside his head.
The smell boiled out and hit me. Candied, foul, rotting sweetness. My hackles rose, adrenaline dumping into my bloodstream like pollution into a river.
“Jill?” Leon, getting even more nervous.
I scanned the inside of the building. “Jesus,” I whispered. “Jesus Christ.” Then, over my shoulder, “Come on, Leon!”
And I plunged into the smell, stepping over the unconscious Trader. I didn’t even cuff him. He was losing blood too fast to need it.
27
The tanks were huge glassy cylinders of greenish liquid. In each clear tube, a scurf floated, in varying stages of maturity. The smell was enough to make my eyes run even with the door blasted open and sunlight scouring a rectangle of yellow linoleum.
There were two rows of the green tubes, each lit with ghostly non-UV light. There were dissection tables, and a long bookcase along one wall, stacked with reference works and binders. Leon helped me drag the Trader to a table and bandage him. Leon also snapped silver cuffs on him, just in case. Meanwhile, I stared at the closest tube full of green viscous stuff, and the scurf floating, eyes closed.
“They’re preserved.” My gorge rose, hot and hard at the back of my tongue. “Jesus.”
Leon gave them barely half a glance and turned an interesting shade of pale. His amulets clinked. “What the fuck is going on?”
“Check the books.” I tipped my head at the bookcases and holstered a gun, then set about trying to wake the Trader up. It was hard—he’d lost a lot of blood, but he was tougher than the average human. Then again, it didn’t look like he’d Traded for anything good, like superstrength or invulnerability. But then, there were those teeth. And his hands looked funny, bonelessly flopping and too delicate. Strangler’s hands.
“Virology. Chemical composition of antidepressants. The Anarchist’s Cookbook, even.” Leon snagged that one, it vanished into his coat pocket. “Looks like a first edition too.”
“Kleptomaniac.” One whole wall of the trailer/hangar was taken up with che
m-lab equipment. They’d been cooking something up, out here in the desert. The Trader started to come around, his eyes rolling back down in his head. He shifted uneasily, the silver cuffs clanking, and cringed when he caught sight of me. “He’s waking up. Check that stuff over there, will you? Didn’t you take chemistry?”
“Once in m’benighted youth, darlin’. Left as soon as I figured out how to make beer and fertilizer explosives.”
“Now there’s a combination.” Both of us took care not to turn our backs to the door. The scurf floated eerily in their green tubes. They didn’t look dead, just… sleeping, caught in a moment of rare immobility, like during daylight when they pack themselves together like sardines.
I shuddered. Leon was all white now, pale even under the fishbelly of “night-walking hunter.” His eyeliner had turned garish against the new pallor. From the cold feeling in my cheeks, I probably wasn’t far behind. The smell was incredible. Fresh tears trickled down my cheeks—and the scar puckered itself up into a tiny mouth, a thrill of painful heat running up the branching channels of my nerves.
“Irene…” the Trader moaned. He woke up all the way and blinked at me, like a six-year-old coming out of a nightmare.
This is goddamn ridiculous. “Hey, Sleeping Beauty. Start talking.”
“You’re her.” He gasped in breath again. He really did sound awful, but then he’d taken a load of silver in the side from Rosita. I wouldn’t be too peppy myself under those circumstances. “Kismet. You’re actually her. ”
“No shit.” Who else would be doing this? “The question is, who the fuck are you? But that can wait. Is there anyone else here? Anyone at all? ”
“J-just the subjects.” He winced and the cuffs clanked, blue sparks running just under their surface, responding to the contamination of hellbreed on him. As Traders went he was a lightweight. “They’re in the east building, two down. It’s not due in the s-south building for another week—”
Another week? “What’s in another week?”
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