Kill the Raven: A Thriller (Raven Trilogy Book 3)

by Kurt B. Dowdle

  Nyx watched in a stupor, brought on in part by being hit in the face but mostly because her world had crumbled again.

  A sob rose in her throat, and she stifled it. To stand there and cry would be call attention to herself and to admit defeat. As she pondered whether and how she could proceed, she saw the boss, Thaler, climb in his fine carriage. And then she felt a tug at her sleeve.

  She turned and saw it was Short Pinky.

  He said, “Ready?”

  “For what?”

  Nyx stared at the fine carriage which had started to roll.

  “Ach, to go back to work.”

  “Not today,” Nyx said, and she followed Thaler’s carriage.

  THE HUNTERS REMAINED on Kamp’s property, walking the perimeter, scanning the tree line, hiding in the forest. Kamp stayed put, silent and invisible. He kept his gaze trained on the house, watching, waiting.

  After four hours, he heard one of the hunters say, “This is goddamned bullshit. Let’s go.”

  The other said, “They ain’t gonna like that.”

  “Next shift starts soon anyhow.”

  Kamp waited until they were gone, then stood up, stretched his legs, scattered his blind and walked back over the mountain.

  OFFICER FALKO STIER WATCHED two of his fellow officers drag themselves through the door. They wore heavy wool shirts, trousers and work boots. Hunting clothes. Under normal circumstances, their attire wouldn’t have caught his notice. Everyone hunted. But his world had shifted, and he no longer trusted it.

  To the first man through the door he said, “Where ya been?”

  The man bristled. “Not how ya been? Not wie gehts?”

  “Where,” Stier said, surprised at the tension in his own voice.

  “Yah, well, I don’t answer to you, no how.”

  Stier felt as if he might lunge for the man’s throat, but he couldn’t locate the source of his hostility. He’d worked alongside this man for six months and never had an issue with him. He turned his attention to the second man and said, “What were you hunting?”

  “Huh?”

  Falko Stier looked directly at the man. “I said, what was it you was hunting for?”

  “Rock dove.”

  The High Constable Sam Druckenmiller, sat at his desk, boots off and feet up.

  He said, “Christ, Falko, what got up your ass?”

  Stier looked from Druckenmiller to the first officer and then the second, trying to discern whether they shared a secret.

  Stier said, “Where’s Clutch and Fenstermacher?”

  Druckenmiller said, “Who?”

  “They’re supposed to be here now, according to the schedule.”

  “They’re on special assignment.”

  “Special assignment?”

  “Yah.”

  “What’s special assignment?”

  Druckenmiller cocked his head to the side and scratched his ear. “I don’t know that these are the type of questions you need be asking.”

  NYX WONDERED where Thaler’s carriage was going, and that was partly the reason she followed it. More than that, she realized she wanted to say something to this man. She needed him to know what Aodh meant to people, what he meant to her.

  Nyx walked along the side of the road, keeping the carriage in view. The horses picked up the pace as they approached the bridge over the river, and Nyx thought she’d lose sight of the carriage.

  But it turned before it reached the bridge and began to wind its way up a mountain road. She saw that it was headed for a brick mansion that overlooked the town.

  The closer she got to the mansion, the more aware she became of her dirty clothes and face. If asked, she couldn’t pretend she just happened to be strolling through the neighborhood. Anyone who saw her approaching the mansion would know she didn’t belong there, so Nyx left the road and slipped through the tree line.

  KAMP KNEW. In the moment between the Minié ball making contact with his skull and the chunks of his brain blowing out, he knew he would never be himself in the way he was before.

  BARTHOLOMEW H. GRIGG walked into the train station. The bandages on his wrists and ankles felt good, and the suit, the hat, even the socks and ankle boots fit just right. He went to the ticket window.

  The woman behind the counter let her gaze linger on him a moment, then said, “How may I help you?”

  Grigg felt for the wad of cash in his pocket and said, “Virginia, please.”

  By the time Adams figured out where Grigg was going, he’d already boarded the train, and by the time she ran across the platform, hand curled around ivory handle of the pistol in her muff, finger on the trigger, the train had left the station.

  NYX SKIRTED THE FRONT of the mansion when she saw a gang of well-muscled men laboring on a sandstone patio and insulting each other in a language she didn’t know was Swedish.

  She swung around the side, picking her way through the brush and staring up at the impressive, brick edifice. Apart from the workmen, she didn’t hear anyone until she reached the back, where Thaler’s carriage sat parked. Another carriage, a lorry with a padlock on its door, pulled alongside it.

  The driver climbed down from his seat, produced a skeleton key on a chain affixed to a chain on his belt, and unlocked the carriage doors.

  Immediately, the Swedes appeared and started unloading the carriage on the orders of their squat foreman, a bald fellow with thick arms and a heroic beard.

  He said, “Skynda på!”

  The men hauled crate after crate, carrying each one through the service doors at the back of the kitchen. Nyx drew as close as she dared, but she couldn’t see what was stamped on the crates. One of the men unloaded a box, set it on the ground next to the carriage, then grabbed another one and took it into the mansion.

  As soon as they’d emptied the carriage, the men hustled back around the front. The driver snapped the reins, and the carriage disappeared down the hill.

  All that remained was the box the workmen forgot. Nyx stepped from cover to get a closer look.

  The box was stamped, “U.S. Army.”

  Nyx wanted to go in and find Thaler, because she knew he was in there and because she wanted to make him know her mind.

  But first she wanted to look in that box.

  A shotgun blast thundered close by, and Nyx looked up to see the squat foreman glaring at her.

  In his thick Swedish accent, he said, “The second shell won’t be no warning.”

  FOR A FLEETING MOMENT when he stepped off the train, Grigg considered assuming a new identity, starting a new life. He’d outrun the Order, and he had enough money to get started. He could simply become someone else and be done with the past.

  Then he remembered the silver coin they’d put in his desk. They’d driven him from his home and his profession. They’d had him tortured and driven mad at the hospital, and they’d kept pursuing him once he’d escaped. He’d never outrun them, because they’d never stop.

  And Grigg thought about Kamp, a man he himself had pursued. Now, he thought, he could see the world through Kamp’s eyes.

  KAMP WALKED on the tracks back to Bethlehem. He’d learned nothing from spying on the impostors living in his house, nothing except that armed men prowled the woods, waiting for him.

  He focused on the railroad ties at his feet, letting himself fall into a trance while he walked. Memories ticked past his mind’s eye with the click-clack rhythm of train wheels. A thin, bare branch of a maple tree, the freckles across the bridge of Shaw’s nose, Autumn’s fingers reaching for him. His father’s cold knuckles across his cheek, a hard march across frozen fields.

  Night had fallen by the time Kamp reached the edge of town. He pulled the brim of his slouch hat low and looked at the ground as he walked. When he turned into the alley behind E. Wyles’ store, his belly let out a plaintive growl. He dreaded the thought of having to go back out and pilfer.

  But when he reached the back door of the pharmacy, he breathed a sigh. A light burned inside.
r />   TWENTY-EIGHT

  KAMP COULDN’T SEE who was in there, and it could have been someone who meant him harm. After all, this was the same back door he’d stumbled out of a year before, kerosene-soaked and vomiting after Officer Falko Stier threatened to set him on fire.

  But the exhaustion, the frustration, the scars and the years it took to accumulate them—all of it had whittled Kamp’s will to a sharp point. He rapped knuckles on the door.

  Locks turned, the door opened, and Wyles’ face, beleaguered as his own, stared back at him. She didn’t smile but simply stepped aside and let Kamp enter before shutting the door and locking it again.

  “This light should be out,” she said and turned the flame on the lamp all the way down. “Are you all right? Are you hurt?”

  “Wie gehts, Emma?”

  “It goes. What do you need?”

  He noticed her sleeves were rolled to the elbows, her blouse spattered with blood.

  When Wyles took off her blouse and washed her hands, face and neck, Kamp turned away. When he turned back, she was dressed again.

  He said, “Vass geht au? The blood.”

  “What?”

  “What’s going on, Emma?”

  Kamp stood facing her and waited.

  She said, “I’ll fix you something.”

  He took a step closer. “Why is the store empty?”

  “Not now, Kamp. Come home with me. I’ll fix you supper and explain everything.”

  She put on her heavy coat and picked up her riding gloves. Kamp took her by the shoulders.

  “I can’t. No one can see me.”

  FALKO STIER HAD NEVER HEARD the words “special assignment” before, not in his training and not in his two years as a sworn officer of the law. Perhaps it was because he’d already become suspicious, but to him, those words rang false. They were meant to hide something.

  And when he’d pressed Druckenmiller for an explanation, the man wouldn’t answer and instead responded with a veiled threat.

  Just before his shift ended, Stier stuffed the police log books from the past three months in his rucksack and took them home.

  THE HALL OF RECORDS BURNED long before B.H. Grigg went looking for it, and the locals in Fredericksburg regarded him with suspicion and bemusement when he asked them where it was.

  But eventually he found a kid with threadbare pants, no shirt and a straw hat who pointed him toward the Spotsylvania Courthouse, which had somehow outlived the war.

  “It’s thataway, sir,” he’d said.

  He’d tossed the kid a sliver dollar, compliments of the Philadelphia Home for the Needy.

  Grigg talked his way past the clerk at the front desk of the courthouse by claiming to be an insurance man from a neighboring county. He’d even affected the correct regional accent. Finding the exact information he wanted proved harder than finding the courthouse, though. All of the war records were stacked in loose piles in an unlit cellar.

  KAMP HAD ALWAYS DEPENDED ON WYLES and her lifelong, staunch refusal to be shaken. Looking at her now, he realized something had changed.

  In all the time he’d known her, she’d always addressed people directly, chin out and shoulders back. It wasn’t a provocation, merely a statement. And she looked everyone in the eye.

  Now, her eyes were downcast.

  “They’re taking it,” she said and kneaded her forehead with her fingers.

  “Taking what?”

  “My practice, the store, my reputation, all of it. Piece by piece.”

  As Kamp fixed two cups of coffee, Wyles told him the tale, from the men she gunned down to losing her customers to the visit from the health inspector.

  When Wyles finished, she paused, took a sip of coffee, then said, “Where’s your family?”

  FALKO STIER FOUND NOTHING about special assignments in the log books he read. He scoured every page, searching for those two words. Hunched over his kitchen table and reading by candle flame, Stier hunted for something he’d never wanted before. He wanted to find truth in words.

  The muscles in his neck ached, and his eyes grew tired. Special assignments didn’t exist, as least not in the official police record. His suspicion grew alongside his anger.

  B.H. GRIGG DIDN’T FEEL ANGER. Irritation perhaps, and frustration. He wasn’t surprised that the records in the cellar of the Spotsylvania Courthouse weren’t organized in any fashion. Relegating something like a war to neat sheaves and orderly columns takes time.

  But what Grigg needed—a name and the person who went with it—he needed now. He couldn’t spend days riffling through thousands of pages. For all he knew, the Order might descend on the courthouse at any moment. He picked up the lantern and walked out of the cellar.

  When he reached the front desk, the clerk said, “Son, you been down there so long we was about to send a search party.”

  “Very kind of you.”

  “Hope you found what you was lookin’ for.” The man screwed up his face. “Say, what was it you was lookin’ for?”

  “A name, a man’s name.” Grigg tried to hide his irritation.

  “So you found it then?”

  “What?”

  “The name.”

  “I didn’t.”

  Grigg put his top hat on, tipped it, and turned to go.

  “Mercy me, son, you look like you got the fantods. You said you was a insurance man?”

  “That’s right.” Grigg tried to remember exactly the story he’d used to talk his way in. “I’m an insurance man.”

  The clerk’s tone went flat.

  “What kinda insurance?”

  AND THEN IT WAS KAMP’S TURN. He told Wyles about how, upon being driven from their home, he’d found Shaw and Autumn at Joe’s house and about how he had to leave. He told her about the armed men prowling the woods behind his house, waiting for him to show himself.

  He finished by saying, “And now I’m back where I started.”

  Wyles sat across from Kamp with her elbows propped on the table and fingers interlaced under her chin.

  She paused for a long moment and then said, “They can’t win.”

  Kamp looked at her across the table at his old friend who, in an instant, had recovered her resolve.

  “Yah, well, you might want to tell them that.”

  “I know you. I know why they’re coming after you.”

  “You do.”

  “The same reason they’re after me.”

  Kamp rubbed his forehead with his left hand. “But I’m not a threat.”

  “Of course you are,” Wyles said. “What you are, who you are.”

  “I’m not anyone.”

  Wyles studied him, his blue eyes and the marks of time on his face. She reached across the table and took his hands in hers.

  “Do you know what people always ask me about you?”

  “No.”

  “They always lean close and whisper, why’d he do it? Why’d Kamp try to keep the mob from killing Daniel Knecht? And I always tell them the same thing.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I tell them—”

  A pounding came at the back door and then a pleading voice.

  “We require assistance. Please open the door.”

  WHEN SLEEP BEGAN TO OVERTAKE Falko Stier, dreams mixed with reality. His mind drifted back to the moment he’d doused Kamp in kerosene, struck the match and held it above the fallen man’s face.

  In that instant before he gave himself over to sleep, Stier felt weightless and free from the burden of judging and in that instant Falko Stier saw that he’d been manipulated and deceived.

  As he put his head down on the table, he knew that words could never set things right, but actions could.

  GRIGG WANTED TO RUN from the courthouse. To answer the clerk’s question would require him to tarry, but not answering would provoke the man’s suspicion.

  The clerk leaned forward. “I said, what kinda insurance did you say you was in?”

  “Life.”

 
“Life insurance?”

  “That’s right. Why?”

  “Shoot, ain’t none of us got insurance, not in this life, no. But that ain’t the point, is it?”

  “Point of what?”

  The clerk leaned back. “Life insurance ain’t for the dead man. It’s for them that’s left behind.”

  Grigg felt sweat beads popping out on his forehead. “That’s right.”

  KAMP CRACKED THE DOOR and a man stared back at him, hat in hand, deep furrows across his forehead.

  Kamp said, “Was ist?”

  “What?”

  “What’s the problem?”

  “My wife needs a doctor. Please help us.”

  “No doctor here.”

  Kamp closed the door and locked it. Wyles tried to push him out of the way.

  “Move.”

  “Bad idea, Emma.”

  “This man needs help.”

  “You’re not a doctor. And you don’t know what this man needs. He’s probably lying anyway.”

  Wyles drew back her fist and punched Kamp in the shoulder where he’d been shot two years before. When he pulled back in pain, she swung the door open and pulled the man inside.

  IT ANGERED ADAMS that Grigg escaped from the Pennsylvania Hospital for the Insane and from the Home for the Needy. Then again, she loved things that were hard to kill.

  Even the bear, especially the bear that fixed its jaw on her wrist, taking her hand and wedding band along with it. And the girl, too. Nyx. She’d escaped along with Kamp’s cousin, the freak Angus.

  Adams loved to return in her mind to the moments she ambushed her quarry, each a consummation of desire and malice. She slowed each memory at the instant of recognition and relived the twitch and tingle it gave her.

  But they didn’t pay her to enjoy it. They paid by the kill, and they didn’t appreciate her recent string of misses. And so she had to focus on the task at hand and her anger at Grigg. Her train had pulled into Fredericksburg six hours after his, and she wasn’t certain she’d find him.