Detonation Boulevard

by Craig Schaefer

  “Take out their competition, blame someone else for the deed.” Marie gave him a nonchalant shrug. “I saw it happen plenty of times when I was on the job. Usually didn’t work.”

  “That was my working theory, but I don’t do business in Texas. And after the frame-up, an old dance partner of mine ‘just happened’ to catch the case. What’s it been, half an hour since I called?”

  Nessa checked her phone. “Just about.”

  “Wait for it,” he muttered. “She is nothing if not punctual.”

  A rapid response unit from the Chicago PD was first on the scene. They hustled down the platform steps two by two, faces shrouded under black balaclavas, rifles shouldered and ready for a fight. A pair of women strode in their wake, one with an electronic bullhorn raised to her lips and her badge held high.

  “This station is being evacuated due to a potential gas leak,” Harmony’s voice boomed. “All trains in and out of this station are canceled for the remainder of the day. Please leave in an orderly fashion, immediately. This is for your own safety.”

  They had more than local cops on their side. A swarm of black suits hit the station, spreading out, shining bulky flashlights up and down the train tunnels as they covered every angle. Nyx’s men faded fast, caught up in the human wave as an exodus surged toward the stairs.

  “Well, shit,” Daniel said. “Here we go. Let’s get this over with.”

  Nessa grabbed his sleeve and yanked his hand back from the door.

  “Are you insane? Marie is wanted in New York for my husband’s murder! We can’t go out there.”

  “It’s okay. Forget the badges, and don’t believe what you see. These aren’t real cops, not like you’re thinking. I’m pretty sure you’ll be fine.”

  “What about you?” Marie asked.

  He took one long, last look through the cracked door.

  “I’ll be pretty far from fine.”

  He pushed it open and stepped out with his hands up.

  * * *

  Nyx stood in the heart of the evacuation, stone-still, like a pillar in the middle of a white-water flood. Her lips pursed into a trembling and bloodless line as Harmony and Jessie marched straight toward her.

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” Jessie said. “Did we interrupt something?”

  Harmony nodded back over her shoulder. “You heard me, Nyx. Evacuation. Out.”

  Nyx stood her ground. Her hands curled into fists.

  “I wouldn’t,” Harmony said. “See, this place is crawling with CCTV cameras. Change into your real form, and you’ll be in more trouble with your people than you will be with ours. Also, I brought Chicago SWAT, our own tactical team, and we’ve got two more elements staged just outside the station entrance. I’m really, deeply curious to find out how much physical trauma—in the form of several thousand rounds of high-velocity ammunition—an incarnate demon’s body can take before you drop. Want to help me with my research?”

  A door, set into a tunnel alcove, squeaked open. Daniel emerged with his hands open, empty, and raised to heaven. So did the two women following right behind him.

  “Well, praise Jesus and J. Edgar Hoover,” Daniel shouted, breaking into a smug grin. “It’s the all-American red-blooded men and women of the FBI. I can’t tell you how happy I am to see you. We surrender, by the way.”

  Nyx slowly bent one elbow, like she was getting ready to throw a punch. One side of her mouth twitched into a grimace. Her entire body was a coiled, razor-edged spring, tensed and ready to explode.

  “Do it,” Jessie told her.

  She tugged down her dark glasses. Her irises, inhumanly turquoise, gave off a faint and radioactive glow.

  “Do it. I want you to do it.”

  They froze that way, for the space of a held breath—then Nyx unclenched her hands.

  “This one,” she told them, “does not forgive.”

  She shoved her way between them and joined the exodus, storming out of the station and into the sunlight.

  A pair of suits wrestled Daniel into handcuffs and patted him down. As another agent turned to Marie and Nessa, Harmony held up her open palm.

  “Not them. They’re not under arrest. Yet. You two, walk with me.”

  Topside, the street had been cordoned off on both ends, blue and white police units turned lengthwise with their emergency lights flashing. A row of black Explorers with tinted windows lined the curb, with a growing crowd milling behind wooden police barricades.

  “Someone very much wanted us to find you,” Harmony said. “Good to see you again, Detective Reinhart. It’s been a while.”

  Marie looked down at the pavement. Pigeon droppings smeared the stone like splashes of white paint, baking in the afternoon heat.

  “I’m not a detective anymore. They took my shield.”

  “So I heard. Just so we’re clear, there’s two ways this situation can end. One option, I turn you and Ms. Roth over to the NYPD for prosecution.”

  Marie looked up. She held Harmony’s gaze.

  “And the other?”

  “You give us your full cooperation, you help us get to the bottom of this situation and…we decide from there. No promises. No threats, either. Our flight’s waiting in Springfield, so you have a couple of hours to think about—I’m sorry, excuse me one moment.”

  A pair of agents were marching Daniel over to a waiting Explorer. Harmony stepped in, turned him around, and leaned him against the hood. Her fingers ran along the back of his belt. They snagged on something and pried away a hidden prize: a generic handcuff key, fixed in place with a tiny blob of putty.

  “He studied under an escape artist,” she told her men. “Always read the target profile.”

  “This one can ride with us,” Jessie said. She took Daniel by the shoulder and led him to the next SUV in the line.

  “Wait,” Marie said, “if we’re not under arrest—yet, I mean—what about him?”

  Jessie flashed a sharp-toothed smile at her.

  “Oh, he’s under all the arrest.” She clamped her hand on his head, ducked him down, and pushed him into the back seat. “He’s going to Special Jail.”

  * * *

  The convoy left Chicago. They headed southwest on I-55, leaving the urban expanse behind, full speed toward Springfield. Soon they left the interstate, too, cutting a path between the endless cornfields and postage-stamp towns.

  Harmony, Jessie, and Daniel rode together in the second car. Harmony drove. The occasional crackle of radio chatter, the convoy’s lead car warning about upcoming turns and coordinating the route, did its best to fill the chasm of silence.

  “Go ahead,” Daniel finally said. “What are you waiting for? Go ahead and gloat already.”

  Harmony thought about that. She flicked her gaze to the rearview mirror, studying him for a moment.

  “Do you really think that’s the kind of person I am?”

  His shoulders slumped. He didn’t answer her. Jessie turned around in her seat.

  “Well, I only have Harmony’s stories and your rap sheet to go by, but seeing as she’s the bigger person in this partnership and I never claimed to be a dignified adult…” She snapped her fingers and pointed at him. “Son, you are busted. Booyah.”

  “Yeah, thanks. Did your partner ever tell you I captured the ghost of a serial killer and tried to turn him in?”

  “I read that report,” Jessie said. “As I recall, the bottle he was trapped in broke; then the spirit got loose and possessed a DEA agent.”

  “Well, yeah, that happened, but…I fixed it. We exorcised him.”

  “Uh-huh. And he’s been in and out of a mental hospital ever since.”

  “Oh.”

  Daniel stared out the window. Another nowhere hamlet rolled past, rusted plows and ramshackle barns on the edge of a one-schoolhouse town.

  “I saved the world once,” he said.

  “You really thought I’d be gloating right now,” Harmony said. Her voice carried an angry edge to it, faint but rising.

 
“Figured you’d be happy,” Daniel replied.

  “I am not happy, Daniel. This isn’t an achievement to be proud of. You know what this is? It’s a waste. You are one of the most skilled magicians I have ever met.”

  If he was expecting anything from her, it wasn’t a compliment. He blinked. “Uh…thanks?”

  “You’re smart. Creative. You’ve done impossible things. And this”—her hand waved at the air, then slapped back down on the steering wheel—“this is what you do with all that talent. You steal. You kill. You spend half your time running errands for the Vegas Mob, and the other half doing dirty work for the courts of hell.”

  She stared straight ahead, into the distance. Clouds parted and the late morning sun glowed against her cheek.

  “And here we are,” Harmony said, “and it’s a beautiful day, and we’re going to get on a plane in Springfield and you’re going to a place called Site Burgundy, where you’re going to spend the rest of your life because you’re too damn dangerous to be allowed on the street. And it didn’t have to be this way.”

  The SUV swayed, lumbering along a stretch of bad road. The radio squawked.

  “Fueling stop ahead, two miles, copy?”

  Jessie plucked the receiver from the dash. “Two miles, copy.”

  “You’re going to miss me when I’m gone,” Daniel warned her.

  “I’ll miss the man you could have been, if you cared enough to try,” Harmony told him.

  Daniel slid forward on the back seat. His voice went harder, mirroring Harmony’s.

  “No. You’re going to miss me. Because you’re going to figure out just how much of your job I was doing out there.”

  “Oh, this I’ve got to hear,” Jessie said.

  “I could tell you where to find the remains of an incarnate demon buried out in the desert under a few tons of rock. It’s not too far from the spot where I emptied my gun into a serial killer at point-blank range. The Mancuso family had a cannibal shape-shifter on their payroll. Know what they have now? Nothing. Because me and my crew rolled in heavy and we wiped them right off the goddamn map.”

  “And that wasn’t done out of self-interest,” Harmony said, “not at all.”

  Daniel snorted at her. “Of course it was self-interest. I am a criminal. I operate a criminal enterprise. And that is the point. I have avenues of information you’ll never get access to. I do the things you can’t. I get my hands dirty out there, every single day, and yes. Yes. I do it so I can get paid. And if the end result is fewer people like me or worse running loose out there, are you really going to complain because my motives aren’t pure?”

  Harmony didn’t answer him. He wasn’t sure if she didn’t want to or just didn’t have anything to say. The convoy rolled through a small-town canyon, a main street lined with shops and awnings and signs that hadn’t been updated since the fifties. A lonely stoplight dangled over the intersection ahead, swaying in the breeze.

  A white minivan cruised past the convoy in the opposite direction. A little fast for this road, its belly low to the ground like it was carrying heavy cargo. Harmony’s fingers tightened on the steering wheel.

  Daniel suddenly realized why she’d fallen silent, and the source of the low-wattage warning buzzer he’d been feeling in the back of his mind.

  “Illinois plate,” Harmony said. “X-ray, yellow—”

  “Saw it ten minutes ago, going the opposite direction.” Jessie snatched up the radio receiver and raised it to her lips. “Lead car, do not stop for refueling. Repeat, do not stop. We may have a bogey. Pass the word down, then stand by for a license-plate check.”

  The light up ahead turned green. The lead car cruised through the intersection.

  Then air horns blared like a trumpet on judgment day. A semi truck headed east crashed through the intersection at sixty miles an hour, T-boned the SUV, and turned it into a crumpled ball of steel, blood, and bone.

  Twenty-Eight

  Tires ruptured and drew long black streaks on the pavement. The semi screamed to a stop, fishtailing as it pushed the shredded debris of the lead car on its front grill. Its forty-foot trailer turned into a grimy white wall across the intersection. Harmony spun the wheel, hard. The SUV went sideways, still skidding toward the trailer at high speed—and then it lifted off its wheels. Momentum carried it into a roll and it slammed down on its side, throwing Jessie and Daniel against the windows as the glass shattered into fistfuls of glittering buckshot.

  Harmony leaned against her seatbelt, suspended by the nylon strap, and gulped down air. She heard more horns blaring, metal buckling, the convoy spinning out of control.

  Then, gunfire.

  “Jessie,” she gasped. “You okay?”

  She shoved hard against the driver’s-side door, swinging it upward and open like the turret hatch on a tank.

  Jessie rolled her head in a circle, joints cracking, and popped her seatbelt. “Ready to fuck somebody up. Let’s go.”

  “Daniel?” Harmony said, craning her neck to look behind her.

  Daniel groaned, his arm slipping against the shattered side window, one sleeve torn and bleeding through. “Nothing broken. I think. Nice driving, slick. You get your license from the same place you got your junior detective badge?”

  “Stay put. You’ll be safe in there.”

  Even as she said the words, she wasn’t sure she could back them up. No time to think about it. She heaved herself up and out the open door, climbing up onto the side of the flipped SUV, and reached a hand down to pull Jessie out.

  The convoy looked like a broken serpent. Fenders and bumpers tangled, ruptured metal fused, three cars joined in a zigzag conga line as they spat oil and radiator smoke. On one end of the street, the semi’s trailer formed an impenetrable wall. On the other, a pair of pickups screeched to a stop and disgorged yellow-eyed shooters like a kicked-over anthill. They jumped from the truck beds, breaking left and right to grab cover behind pillars and sidewalk planters, firing on the move. Harmony’s men were scattered, dazed and wounded from the crash, trying to regroup. A few were already returning fire, taking a knee behind their open doors as slugs pelted the armored SUVs in a copper-jacketed hailstorm.

  The crashed semi swung its door wide and the driver jumped down to the street. Nyx. She strode into battle as bullets whined past her, faster with every footstep, a juggernaut building up steam. As blue flames erupted down her back like a lion’s mane, she shed her human disguise. Black, chitinous scales rippled across her flesh and her leathers tore at the seams, burning and falling in tatters, her muscles bending and bulging. She was a praying mantis with the desiccated face of a corpse, trailing oily smoke as her hooves left scorch marks on the pavement. Her tail, segmented and barbed like a scorpion’s, cracked against the air as she chose her first victim.

  One of Harmony’s agents had a bead on her. His pistol shots rang out in swift precision, peppering her with bullets that sparked off her scales. The spent, crumpled slugs danced on the asphalt as she charged. He was loading a second magazine, brave but doomed, when she grabbed him by the throat and lifted him off his feet like he was weightless.

  His back buckled, then shattered with an ear-popping crack as she wrenched his head around and tore it away. It ripped from his body with a jagged stump of spine still attached, and a torrent of blood billowed like a springtime mist. She threw his head to the street and crushed it under one burning hoof. Then she tossed his mangled corpse aside while she sniffed the air, hunting for her next target.

  Harmony put her back to the SUV, bracing her pistol in both hands and calling to her magic. Raw elemental force swirled around her, invisible on the copper wind, as her mind snapped into tactical mode. Breaking down the battlefield, measuring distances and angles and resources. The air was thick with the stench of blood—blood and gasoline. She stepped back as it pooled around her feet, drooling from a rupture in the capsized Explorer’s underbelly and running in a thin trail down the street.

  Armored or not, one stray spark
and the SUV would turn into a bonfire.

  * * *

  Before the ambush, Marie and Nessa had been riding in a companionable silence. The two men in the front seat weren’t prone to conversation, with them or with each other, and there was only so much either woman was willing to say while they could listen in.

  Nessa leaned against Marie’s side. Marie put one arm around her, snuggling close.

  Nessa’s gaze drifted to the mirror bag on Marie’s other shoulder. The enchantment had held; no one had even seemed to notice it. She asked a question with her eyes. Marie nodded, patting the bag. They still had the essentials: Nessa’s book of spells, the circuitry-inlaid tarot card, her quill knife.

  And a gun.

  Nessa flicked a glance at the men. Then back to the bag. Then to Marie, with a new question.

  It wouldn’t be hard. They could take the men hostage, force the driver to break from the convoy and drive…anywhere they wanted, really.

  “This ‘Mourner’ person,” Marie said. “It sounds like she wants to help us.”

  “No such thing as a free lunch,” Nessa replied.

  “No. But with…” She paused. The men up front were listening. She had to assume every word they said would be analyzed, weighed, maybe used against them. “With the person we were going to see, you know, missing…she is our best lead right now.”

  Nessa gave another pointed look at the bag. “Agreed. Shall we go see her now, then?”

  “All units,” the radio squawked, “do not stop for refueling, repeat, do not stop. Mama Wolf thinks we may have a bogey. Please copy.”

  The agent in the passenger seat was reaching for the receiver when the semi crashed the intersection. They watched the next SUV spin into a roll, the one behind it fishtailing, tires screaming to a stop. Nessa clung to Marie as their Explorer swerved hard left, spinning out of control. Then they rocked in their seats as the SUV behind them connected with bone-jarring force, crumpled hood to mangled back fender.