Detonation Boulevard

by Craig Schaefer

  Tony’s dark fingers rubbed the stubble on his chin. “Can’t argue that. So, this ‘quest’ she says she’s on…”

  Janine showed him her phone. Her fingernail, painted in glittery bronze polish, tapped at the call log.

  “Caller ID says she was calling from a payphone in Indiana, and I could tell by the noise that she was next to a highway, probably a rest stop. Interstate 70 is a straight shot from New Jersey, that’s the best bet, and they’ve been heading more or less due west since they fled New York.”

  “Sure,” Tony said. “You ask me, they’re headed for Nevada. We know Alton Roth brought the law down on Marie’s head, as payback for killing his son. If Marie and Vanessa are determined to go out in a blaze of glory, stands to reason they’d want to take Roth with ’em.”

  “That’s logic. Forget logic. Use your intuition. What’s Marie’s state of mind right now?”

  Tony shrugged. “I’d love to figure that out. Love to know what the hell kind of craziness Vanessa Roth’s been pouring into her head, too. Doc Chen says the two of ’em have their own little shared delusion going down—one of those, what do you call it, a folie à deux.”

  “I’m not sure they’re delusional. But think about it. Marie didn’t say she was on a hunt. She’s not out for vengeance, she’s on a quest. Her own words.”

  “Right. She’s convinced she’s some kind of knight, like in her books.”

  “Her favorite book. Swords Against Madness. It’s about a knight and a witch on a quest together.” Janine’s fingers tapped her phone with rapid-fire precision. “And when the heroes of a fantasy novel are on a quest, where do they go for help? What’s the hero’s journey?”

  “Little out of my wheelhouse. I mostly read murder mysteries and biographies.”

  She showed him her screen again, her web browser cued up to an article titled “Get Off My Lawn: Fifteen Minutes with Carolyn Saunders.”

  The elusive fantasy author makes her home in Bloomington, Illinois, but she’s not looking to land on any celebrity tour maps. She’s known for driving people off her property at the point of a shotgun, in a manner befitting her literary idol Hunter S. Thompson. Fortunately, she agreed—grudgingly—to an interview, in celebration of a new release in her series The Valor Cycle…

  “The heroes,” Janine said, “seek the advice of a mentor figure. The old man or wise woman who has all the answers. That’s the hero’s journey. That’s what happens next.”

  Tony leaned back in his chair. He looked at Janine. Then back to the screen. Then at Janine again.

  “I really hate to say it,” he told her, “but if you look at this situation like a totally crazy person, that makes sense. Okay, so what happens when they find out Carolyn Saunders doesn’t have any answers to give them?”

  “How do you know she doesn’t?”

  “Because this isn’t a fantasy novel,” Tony said. “Marie isn’t a knight. And Vanessa Roth isn’t a witch. She’s a college professor from the West Village who married a psychopath, and she’s not too stable herself.”

  “You sure about that?”

  “Am I sure there’s no such thing as magic? Yeah. I’m pretty clear-eyed on that point.”

  “Before she died, Helena Gorski told you that Richard’s friends, this cult he belonged to, they used magic to cure her son’s cancer.”

  “People under duress say a lot of crazy shit. Doesn’t make it true. Even if she believed it, doesn’t make it true.”

  Janine jumped off the edge of the bed. She had too much energy to sit still, and the highway was calling to her. She pointed an accusing finger at the medical examiner’s records, spread out on the table like tarot cards.

  “You’ve been reading these all night, haven’t you?”

  “Most of the night.”

  “Trying to make them fit,” Janine said. “Trying to make them make sense.”

  “What about it?”

  “You know why they don’t fit,” Janine told him. “Because you’d rather twist yourself into a pretzel looking for an answer that fits your worldview than accept the truth.”

  Her hand rested on the pages. She shoved them closer to Tony’s side of the table.

  “These men kidnapped Marie and brought her to the Vandemere Zoo, to murder her. Vanessa followed. And then she killed them. All of them, just like she told me she was going to, the last time I saw her. And the wounds on the bodies don’t match any weapon anybody has ever seen. No human weapon.”

  “What do you think happened?”

  “All I know is, I believe in magic.” Janine pulled her hand from the pages. “You should too.”

  “Tabling that discussion for a later date, or maybe never. And you’re wrong on one count. Not everybody died. I’ve been doing some digging. Did Marie ever mention a guy named Scott Pierce?”

  Janine shook her head. “No. Who is he?”

  “Well, according to their social media, he was Richard Roth’s best buddy before Richard ate a bullet. Inseparable. And he’s been missing since the massacre, but the ME identified all the bodies and he’s not one of them. The locals initially reported making an arrest at the scene, when the first responders hit Vandemere. Now they’re saying they ‘made a mistake’ and there was no arrest. The suspect vanished and so did the paperwork.”

  “That doesn’t sound like the kind of mistake cops usually make,” Janine said.

  “It does if you find the right kind of wrong cops and have a lot of money to throw around.”

  “He was there,” she said. “And he got away.”

  “And if you think Alton Roth has a motive for wanting Marie dead…well, I think the senator might have competition in that department.”

  * * *

  A hellish screech of static drove iron needles into Scottie’s eardrums. His driving gloves clenched the BMW’s wheel and he hunched down hard.

  “Damn it,” he snapped. The squeal broke on a wave of digital noise, fading to silence. “Does it have to do that?”

  Savannah Cross sat in the back seat, huddled in her veils and rags, and clutched the shattered shell of her life-wave detector. The rubber-wrapped grip nestled in her palm and the buckled steel box at the end displayed a broken, flickering readout. Occasionally, random words would flash on the screen—catalyst, house, defenestration—or Egyptian hieroglyphs mixed with inverted Sanskrit letters. Sometimes Savannah would hmm at the results, making notes, and sometimes she’d unscrew the box and cut her pale wrist with the jagged tip of her fingernail.

  She fed the machine her ink-black blood like a mother bird feeding her young. In return it pointed the way with its screams, and she translated for it.

  “Take the next off-ramp,” she told her unwilling chauffeur. “And yes, it does have to do that.”

  You stupid cu— He clamped down on the thought, fast, and his eyes darted to the rearview mirror. Praying she hadn’t heard him.

  They ended up parked on South Front Street in Columbus, idling outside a Jimmy John’s fast-food place, one block down from LeVeque Tower. The box twitched in Savannah’s hand like a dowsing rod, trying to pull them closer.

  Closer wasn’t an option, not with every open spot at the intersection blocked by black Ford Explorers with tinted windows and government plates. Six in all. Under the steel awning reading Hotel LeVeque, a pair of men in matching suits and earpieces stood sentry. More were inside, moving like servants of the grim reaper beyond the lobby windows.

  “Well, that’s not good,” Scottie said.

  “They were here.” Savannah’s inky eye focused on the broken screen. “Recently.”

  “Looks like they might have dropped a few bodies on their way out, too. Whose bodies, though? And those aren’t local cops. Got fed written all over ’em.”

  “A minor wrinkle. Barely a setback.”

  Scottie jumped as knuckles rapped against his side window. He rolled it down. Mr. Smith, face as bland and forgettable as his gray wool suit, stood next to the car. His hands cradled a cardboard t
ray with a foursome of coffee cups from Starbucks.

  “Word from the top,” he said. “And a word to the wise. You need to hurry it up.”

  Savannah leaned forward. “Quality work takes time.”

  “Adam is not a patient man, and he’s still fuming over the loss of the Network’s New York investments. He wants Roth and Reinhart captured and brought to him, and he wants it done yesterday.”

  “Hey, some of your ‘investments’ were friends of mine,” Scottie said, “so maybe ease off a little. We’ll find them, and when we do, I get the first round with ’em.”

  Smith’s nose wrinkled like he smelled something foul.

  “You’ll get whatever Adam deigns to give you, Mr. Pierce. And you’ll say please and thank you when he does. As the sole surviving member of the failed Vandemere Lodge, your position in our organization is precarious as it is. The only reason I haven’t closed your account is because you’re apparently useful to Dr. Cross.”

  Savannah’s lace-gloved fingertip played at the nape of Scottie’s neck. He tried not to flinch.

  “He is,” she said, “more useful than some people I could mention. The situation has changed; new information has come to light. These women are tied to my original research, my work with my former employer. I need to study them.”

  “You need to obey Adam’s wishes,” Smith replied.

  “This is more important than vengeance. Ink was just the beginning. Do you have any idea what kind of scientific breakthrough we could be looking at here?”

  “Weigh that against the price of Adam’s displeasure,” Smith said, “and decide which one tips the scales.”

  “It’s fine.” Scottie held up his hands. “It’s fine, okay? We’ll find them, and we’ll work it out from there. Is that coffee for us?”

  Smith jerked the cardboard tray away from the window and gave him an offended glare.

  “These are for my colleagues in the legal department,” he said. “Coffee is for closers. You’d do well to remember that, Mr. Pierce. Good day to you.”

  He turned and strode away. Scottie glanced to the side mirror. Nothing moved. The lawyer was gone, as if the car’s blind spot had swallowed him whole.

  “Prick,” Scottie muttered under his breath. “Still, maybe we shouldn’t antagonize the guy, seeing as he’s got a direct line to the boss.”

  “There’s only one boss you need to worry about. Now let me recalibrate the detector and we’ll be off. Besides, the pursuit of knowledge is worth any—oh, this is interesting.”

  He glanced back at her. Then forward, following her pointed finger. They weren’t the only people camping out and watching the show at the Hotel LeVeque. Up the block, on the opposite side of the street, a woman in riding leathers sat astride a jet-black Suzuki. Her helmet rested on the handlebars, her white-gold hair bound in a Viking braid.

  “Goddamn,” Scottie said, “she’s a hottie. Who is she?”

  Savannah’s neck crackled as she tilted her head, like dice rolling against a wooden box. She leaned forward in the back seat and her ink-black eye narrowed to a squint. The woman put her helmet on and revved the chopper. Her opaque visor turned their way as she cruised past their parked car. Scottie couldn’t see her face, but he still felt the heat of her eyes as they locked onto him.

  “Not a who,” Savannah said. “A what. And now I have a fair idea of what happened in that hotel last night. If I’m right, the powers of hell are throwing their hat into the ring.”

  “So what’s our next move?”

  “Same as it was,” she told him. “I calibrate. You drive. It doesn’t matter how many hunters are on this road, so long as we’re the first ones to reach the finish line.”

  Eighteen

  Every occupant on the ninth floor told the same story. They’d fallen into a deep sleep, woken up at 9:33 on the dot—several of them dozing through wake-up alarms that rang for an hour or more—and found a massacre in the hallway outside their hotel rooms. Most of the guests had already been sent home with veiled warnings about what might happen if they talked to the media; the rest were still in the lobby, being debriefed.

  Harmony stared at the carnage through the camera on a thin tablet PC. She snapped pictures, circling the bodies, then crouched low to the carpet. The stench of blood caught in the back of her throat. It tasted like she’d swallowed a fistful of dirty pennies.

  “One, two, three…” She counted bullet impacts, her finger drawing lines in the air. It fell upon a rupture in the ice-white wall and an arc of spatter that had dried the color of rust. “Four.”

  Phantoms moved in her mind’s eye, bodies made of water, reenacting the scene as she built it from bits and pieces. Every time she hit a dead end or a combination that didn’t make sense, the figures broke down and splashed into puddles on the blood-soaked carpet. She’d take a breath, reimagine them from scratch, and start again.

  Jessie came up behind her, from the elevators. “Manager can’t get hold of the night clerk. He’s not answering his phone.”

  “He’s dead,” Harmony said, staring at the floor. “We’ll find his body someplace nearby. Dumpsters out back, maybe. They questioned him, probably bribed him, to get the room number. Then they killed him so he couldn’t identify them later.”

  “You sticking to your current theory?”

  “About?”

  Jessie stepped around her. The tip of her black leather brogue wriggled at one of the dead men and the three playing cards jutting from his throat and chest. All of the bodies bristled with cards, the entire deck sprouting from their ruptured skin like porcupine quills.

  “Look.” Harmony crouched down, waved for Jessie to join her, and used the cap of a pen to nudge one of the cards aside. It slid from a gash in the dead man’s shoulder, coming out clean. “No blood. No leakage from the cut. This was done postmortem.”

  “So the first time, out in Dallas, the bad guys got dropped by someone using Daniel Faust’s MO. And this time…”

  “This time,” Harmony said, “it’s a cover-up, to make it look like he was with them and keep us on the trail. No. This was Reinhart and Roth, acting alone. He was never here.”

  She stood up and pointed down the corridor. Then she pointed to the ruptured ice bucket, discarded in a puddle of dried gore.

  “One of them, Reinhart, I think, was getting ice. She ambushed them from behind. Roth came out of the suite and bracketed them here in the hallway.”

  “Still, that’s what, two against five?” Jessie put her hands on her hips. She stared down at the corpse with wire cages bolted over his eyes and his mutilated mouth bound in black iron. “Correction: two against a traveling freak show. These smell like cambion to me.”

  “Not just demonic half-bloods. No. Professional hitters.” Harmony took a few steps closer to the door and snapped photos from a fresh angle. “Look. Hacksaw. Burlap sack. They came to take trophies.”

  “Proof of death,” Jessie said.

  “Mm-hmm. And it was two against six.”

  She led Jessie into the suite. Jessie tugged down her dark glasses. Her turquoise eyes glittered, radioactive, as she read the message Nessa wrote in her last victim’s blood.

  “We’ve seen that,” Jessie said. “Recently.”

  Harmony already had the article up on her tablet. The New Perspective was a tabloid rag, but its ace reporter had a nose for digging up stories he shouldn’t. He also had a knack for drawing the wrong kind of attention—like hers.

  A marketing ploy, the article read, or proof of Illuminati mind control? Over the past week, the images have spread from Miami to Houston to LA, painted by ordinary citizens who claim to have no memory of the deed…

  A photograph rode alongside the lurid text, capturing scarlet paint splashed across a dirty brick wall. Graffiti depicted a great horned owl, mad-eyed, talons slashing, and a message stood beside it: THE OWL LIVES.

  “Middle of last year,” Jessie said, “that ‘owl’ business popped up everywhere, all at once. Then nothi
ng. Until now.”

  Harmony snapped another picture.

  “I think it was a warning,” she murmured, staring into the camera. “Telling us what was coming. But we didn’t listen.”

  “What was coming?”

  Harmony looked over, locking eyes with Jessie.

  “I’m still figuring that part out,” she said.

  “Sounds like you’ve got a hunch, though.”

  “I do,” Harmony said.

  “You feel like sharing?”

  “Not yet. All I know for certain is that these women are in danger, and somebody very much wants us to find them. We’ve met Marie Reinhart. Admittedly, we didn’t share our life stories over cocktails, but I still got a sense of the woman. She’s not a killer. Not like they’re saying she is, anyway.”

  “About that.” Jessie jerked her thumb toward the doorway and the pile of bodies outside. “Far as we can tell, Alton Roth pulled strings to get Detective Reinhart thrown in the slammer. She ran instead. Now a cambion hit team shows up, out for blood and hunting heads? We know Alton has connections to the courts of hell; we’ve crossed paths with him and his buddy ‘Webster Scratch’ more than once, and Scratch hasn’t aged a day since the invention of photography. Not hard to nail the culprit here.”

  Harmony was inside of herself, standing before the corkboard of connections. She pinned lengths of string between photographs, memories captured in flat images.

  “The senator knows he’s on our radar,” she said. “And he knows he’s walking a tightrope. This doesn’t help his situation.”

  “Reinhart put six bullets in the man’s only son. People make bad decisions when they’re grieving.”

  Harmony took a few more pictures—with her tablet and her memory, capturing the message in blood—and stepped back into the hallway. Jessie followed close on her heels.

  “At least they’re resourceful,” Harmony said.

  “And if they weren’t armed before,” Jessie said, with a nod at a dead man’s empty holster, “they are now. Not sure how much that’ll help ’em if another hit squad comes calling. This one thought they were going to score an easy kill. Next team is going to be more careful.”