by Faith Hunter
Derek dropped his head, then looked up at me under his brows. “I was hoping you’d say something stupid so I could hit you.”
I chuckled. “Sorry to disoblige. But I need you healthy and not laid up in the hospital.”
An unwilling smiled pulled at his mouth. “Someday we’re gonna fight, Princess. For real.”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah. Big words from the tough guy. So, how do you want to play this?”
“Straight up,” Derek said. “Him and me. We’ll talk. Then I’ll kick the crap outta him. And then we’ll use his contacts to draw out our fanghead.”
“Works for me. Do all the talking where there isn’t any electronic surveillance that could be compromised. Let me know when you want me.”
* * *
Later that afternoon, Derek called. “We’re coming over, Injun Princess.”
I was waiting in the kitchen when their car pulled up and they knocked on the front door. “Come in,” I called. Angel and Derek walked in, Angel in front. He had a puffy lip and the beginnings of a black eye. Angel stood in front of me, not meeting my eyes. “Teeth?” I asked.
Angel touched his lip. “A few a little loose.”
“You deserve that and more. People died because of you. But now you’ve got something we want. A connection. If you work with us, I’m happy to tell no one, even Leo, even your buddies, about your little indiscretion. You want to start on the road to recovery or be locked up?”
Angel glanced back at Derek, who looked none the worse for wear. Apparently Angel hadn’t put up much of a fight. “Recovery.” He shook his head, but not in disagreement, more like resignation, and drew to attention. “Hi. I’m Joran Stevens and I’m a fuckup.”
Kid yelled from upstairs, “Watch your language. There’s a lady present.” Derek and Angel both laughed, whether at the timing or idea that I might be called a lady, I didn’t know.
* * *
Alex and Angel were working out the basics of a scheme to draw out the unknown subject who had turned him. The condition of his face was the ace in the hole of the plan. Angel typed in a text on his phone, showed the text to us, and hit SEND. I took his cell back to my bedroom. There was no way to detect if someone was listening in through the phones, so we had to keep the cells we were known to use in one room together. Derek had purchased a dozen throwaways and some other low-tech electronics for us to use until this was all over. Luckily, I had five thousand in cash on hand—my runaway money, I hadn’t used, so if someone was keeping tabs on credit usage, they couldn’t see what we had bought or done.
“Now what?” Angel asked.
“Now we wait,” Alex said.
“And eat,” I said. “I’ve ordered pizza.” Alex grinned like the teenaged boy he was.
Halfway through the pizza, we heard the tone Angel had assigned for the mystery man. The tone came over the baby monitor we had set up on the phones in my bedroom.
Derek raced in and grabbed the cell, showing Angel’s text to the small group. The text said “Moonwalk bench 2pm.”
Which made no sense to me whatsoever, but the others seemed to understand.
When he came back to the kitchen, after putting the phone back in my room, Derek said, “We’re on.” At my obvious confusion, he said, “The Moonwalk is the scenic boardwalk along the Mississippi.” When my confusion didn’t abate, he said, “It’s called that after Moon Landrieu, a former mayor.”
It was perhaps telling that my first thought was the Moonwalk was the place where I’d taken Rick down on our first sort-of date. “Ducky,” I said. I hadn’t been in New Orleans long, but it already had its share of painful memories. “Okay. Let’s do this.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Landed on a Limo Floor
Angel asked his handler to meet him to pass along some hard copies of the location of the New Orleans vamps’ lairs that Angel claimed he had stolen from me. He asked for five thousand dollars for the pages, not such a high number that the anonymous person might have to go to a higher-up for approval, and not so low that the handler would think the pages could wait. The handler took the bait, which told us something about him. He had some autonomy, he had ready access to funds, and, because it was still daylight, he wasn’t a vamp, which made our plan much less dangerous and much more feasible. If he showed.
Minutes before we left the house, I dialed a number I hadn’t called recently. “NOPD, Jodi Richoux,” she answered.
Jodi was my contact with the New Orleans Police Department’s supernatural crimes unit, in charge of all things paranormal and woo-woo. We were friends of a sort, but like most of my pals, we were going through a tough patch. My job was hard on friends. Or I was. “I might have a package for you soon.”
“Jane Yellowrock. Why should I accept anything you throw my way?”
“Because you want to avert a vamp war in your town and I don’t have a place to store a high-ranking enemy blood-sucker.”
“War?” she said, half question, half demand.
“Yeah.”
I filled her in, and when I was done, Jodi said, “I wish I’d never laid eyes on you, Yellowrock,” and hung up the phone.
We left the house at different times, took three separate vehicles, and arrived at the rendezvous site from different directions. I was the most conspicuous of us—six-foot-tall Cherokee women are not common even in a city where racial and ethnic markers were all over the place—so I stayed in the van that Derek and his crew used for security gigs. I didn’t like being out of the action, but I knew the others could handle a human.
Only, the handler didn’t show. A woman did. And Angel didn’t know her. As she approached, his spine straightened and his fingers curled under, the telltale actions of a trained fighter facing the unknown. I watched through the smoked windows as she approached Angel Tit, who was sitting on a bench, away from the tourists, on the Moonwalk. She was tiny, efficient, and brisk: all of five feet, business suit, rapid walk, and when Derek and Eli—both wearing ball caps with the brims pulled down low—raced in to take her, she put up a serviceable fight, though her defensive measures were no match for two guys trained by Uncle Sam. They picked her up, whisked her to the van, dumped her inside, secured her limbs with zip strips, taped her mouth shut with clear surgical tape, and flipped her over, all in the seconds it took us to pull sedately away from the curb. The woman, who was maybe forty-five and matronly, inspected the blade held under her nose, which was sucking breath so hard it whistled.
“Any lookouts, any witnesses?” I asked into the mic.
The three lookouts responded, “Clear Alpha.” “Clear Beta.” “Clear Delta.”
I opened the woman’s pocketbook to find a .22 with an illegal suppressor. The end of the barrel was attached to the end of the purse with a swiveling coupler like nothing I’d ever seen before. I maneuvered the gun. It didn’t come lose. The .22 was hooked in, but attached in such a way that she couldn’t have gotten her hand around the grip. Which was just plain weird. The only other things in the bottom of the purse were an extra magazine, a pair of reading glasses, and a tube of L’Oréal lipstick. I twirled the lipstick up. “Coral. An interesting shade. Sedate, maybe just a little bit saucy. A good choice for a woman who’s looking less and less like Angel Tit’s best pal.”
I held the purse up, inspecting it closer, and accidentally slid my fingers through the side panel. I pushed on the panel and held it up to her. “Nice. Very nice. I like. You can be walking along, an office clerk on her lunch hour, maybe getting close to a guy on a park bench, shove your hand into the purse through here”—I showed the guys the panel, which was hinged with tiny brass jewelry hinges—“aim this little gun, swiveling it in the coupler, give a two-tap through this small hole on the other end”—I tapped my finger on the barrel—“and walk on.”
I looked at Derek and Angel. “The handler sent someone to take Angel out. Seems he’s become a problem, somehow. Let’s drive.” I handed Derek the purse, turned off the radio system, and took off the headpiece.<
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“You know who I am?” I asked the woman. She nodded once, jerkily, angry eyes above the tape. “You know what we’ll do to you if you don’t volunteer the info we want?” Her pupils dilated and her sweat smelled of fear, but she didn’t look away or shrink back. She had moxie, I’d give her that.
To Derek I asked, “Who is she?”
He was going through her bag now and held up a respiratory rescue inhaler. “That’s it. Except for—” He snapped open a side pocket on the purse and pulled out a set of keys. One was an electronic key with a remote engine start. Derek grinned. It was a rookie mistake. “Circle the block,” he instructed the driver. “Then if we don’t find what we’re looking for, we’ll widen the search perimeter.” We circled back and drove around for ten minutes, Derek pressing the key, looking for lights blinking on parked cars. We found the woman’s car in a small private lot on a side street up from Decatur.
Derek pulled off his T-shirt to reveal another one underneath and jumped out. I watched as he tossed the stoner watching the lot a twenty, climbed into the running car, and drove it away. We followed. The stoner went back to sleep.
Derek wove slowly through the Quarter, through traffic, and pulled into a hotel on St. Charles Avenue. He tossed the keys to the valet and went into the hotel. Moments later he jogged around from the back and jumped into the van. He pulled on the original T-shirt and hat and grinned, handing me the contents of the car and its glove box in a grocery store plastic bag. Derek was having fun. The woman we had kidnapped, however, was not, and I could see why. There were three different .22 handguns in the bag—two pistols and one semiautomatic. Twenty-twos were the weapons of choice for made men and contract killers. I was betting on contract killer for our tiny, not-so-efficient hostage. Our enemy liked hit men. If he had sent a hit man to take out Angel, then we could no longer use the former marine to draw him out. Checkmate. Dang it. I’d never gone up against someone who was always one step ahead of me.
I gave the driver an address on South Broad Street, suggesting that he ride around some more and get there in fifteen minutes. He looked at me funny, but I ignored it and pulled on nitrile gloves to open the bag. “So. Sophia,” I said, paging through the papers Derek had lifted from her car. “Sophia Gallaud.”
“Guh-lode,” Derek said, correcting my pronunciation.
“Gallaud. Sorry,” I said. Seemed like Derek was going to be good cop to my bad. “Local address on a Louisiana driver’s license, local dry cleaning stub.” I held it up. “Local shooting range membership. I’ve been to that one. I like the black-painted floors. It’s easy to police your brass. Goodness, congrats on the nephew’s Catholic thingamajiggy.” I passed the invitation to Derek.
“Confirmation,” he said. “It’s a Roman Catholic rite of passage. Like laying on of hands.”
“Like a special Mass or something?” I asked.
“Seems so.” To Sophia he said, “I was raised Baptist, myself. None of that Latin stuff or rolling in the aisles either. Now, Yellowrock, here, she’s Cherokee. They practice blood rites. The Injuns ever use human sacrifice? Scalping or stuff?”
“We didn’t scalp. That was a white man thing. And no sacrifice in religious practices. Cherokees were known to use knives to great effect in other ways, however, like killing enemies. Yeah, we were real good at that.” If I sounded bitter, no one called me on it. I handed him my biggest vamp-killer, a new knife to replace the eighteen-inch blade destroyed in Asheville. “Like this one.”
He took it gingerly. “You ever killed anyone with it?”
“Not yet.” The words brought me up short. They said awful things about my job, but it was the truth. “But the blade that one replaced . . .” I looked away, unable to hide my reaction to the memory of the silvered blade sliding into Evangelina’s belly. The feel of the hotter than human blood pulsing out. “That was a bad one,” I said more softly.
“Anything else in there?” Derek passed the knife back.
I sheathed it. “Cell phone. Let’s see.” I paged through the text messages, and then through the received calls, jotting down numbers, names, times and frequency of calls onto a paper tablet with a regular pen. “Our Sophia has been a bad girl, as well as a stupid one,” I said a moment later. “She took a gig from someone. They put five K into an account for her just two hours ago. She gets another five K when the gig is finished. Our Sophia is a hired killer. Which means she knows nothing. Now that we have the phone, we can dispose of her.”
Sophia started to hyperventilate in earnest, her nostrils whistling high and fast. I smiled. I bent forward and peeled off the tape over her mouth. “You want to talk to us? Give us a reason to keep you alive?”
“You’ll let me go? You’ll leave my family alone?”
“Your family is safe. I won’t kill you,” I said. “Talk.”
Sophia knew little except that she was between a very jagged rock and a very sharp blade. She told us everything. Sophia—if that was her real name—had been contacted two days ago to be available at a moment’s notice to take care of three problems, two high-ticket problems—George Dumas and Jane Yellowrock—and one floater, fees to be discussed later. Unfortunately for her, she didn’t have my freebie house address, and the address she had for George was now a lump of soggy charcoal briquettes. What she did have was Katie’s address.
I glanced at Eli and he nodded once, his eyes hard. We had to move the vamps, and safe houses were getting few and far between. I looked out the window, saw we were on South Broad Street, pulled my new throwaway cell, and hit REDIAL.
“NOPD, Jodi Richoux,” she answered.
“That package I told you I might have for you?” I said. “It’s a little different and it eats its dinner cooked, but it’s still interesting. We’ll be out front in a sec.”
“This better be good.”
“All I can do is deliver. It’s up to you boys in blue to make good on the package.” I ended the call.
Sophia closed her eyes. “Bitch,” she said around the tape that dangled from her cheek.
I showed the hit woman my teeth. It wasn’t a smile. “I promised to let you live and to leave your family alone. Free her hands and feet, Derek.” To the driver, I said, “See that woman running out of NOPD up ahead? Pull over to her.” I emptied the guns and as much info as I thought would help Jodi into a zip-lock baggie and sealed it.
When the van slowed enough, I slid open the side door and pushed the contract killer out into the street. She bounced twice and rolled a bit, probably scuffing her knees and elbows. I dropped the plastic baggie containing her little toy guns into the street next. They bounced too, but I had removed the magazines. Protecting the surfaces from my fingerprints, of course. We pulled away. My last sight was Jodi Richoux picking up the tiny woman and directing a uniformed guy to watch the guns. Oddly enough, Jodi looked irritated.
* * *
When we got back to the house, Alex was waiting, shaking like he had been mainlining espresso, like a bunny in the sights of a pit bull. “I think I found him. The fanghead you’re looking for.” He grabbed my arm and pulled me into the kitchen. A map was open on the laptop. “The problem is that we’ve been looking in all the wrong places. In Louisiana. But he’s in Mississippi, in the territory of Hieronymus.”
Big H was the vamp we had expected to be targeted next. Seems we were too late; he’d already been hit, long before our enemy targeted us. The upside? De Allyon had a power base only an hour away, and it was more than likely that he was making his forays from there. I nodded for Alex to continue.
“There’s a business in Natchez, in the old downtown, near the main street, three stories, built in the eighteen thirties. The building changed hands two months ago, and has been under renovation, and it just passed a building code check and is ready for occupancy.
“The county requires all renovations of historic buildings to submit a floor plan, and this one fits what vamps are looking for. The building was originally a bank, and the vault is still there
. The new owner ordered a safe room built, adjacent to and in front of the vault. No windows, no doors. All the internal rooms are no-window, no-door rooms too. Three stories’ worth. And the reason the building was so hard to find? It was purchased by Ramondo Pitri a week before you shot him in your hotel room. It was listed under the name of a dead man. And it just went into probate—to the new owner, de Allyon.”
Finally. We had the tie-in between Ramondo Pitri and Lucas Vazquez de Allyon. I took a breath and it filled my lungs with a fresh, blissful delight. “You, Kid, are good,” I said. And then it hit me. We had to go after de Allyon, had to beard the lion in his den in a preemptive attack, which would be either the smartest thing we’d ever done or the dumbest.
The history of the Natureleza vamp suggested he didn’t have both oars in the water, and the whacked-out old vamps were always the worst. Any vamp taking out masters of cities, infecting humans and vamps with a disease, and targeting Leo had to be crazy, meaning I’d need a plan that allowed me to take the attack to our antagonist before he got his forces realigned after the battle in Leo’s fields. And I’d need lots of backup. And maybe a tank. And air support. Derek was put in charge of vamp security by day and ordered to move the blood-suckers somewhere safer before dawn. Katie’s had been compromised. Eli was put to work gathering supplies, and I added my own gear to the equipment that would be delivered to Natchez via separate vehicle.
His work on the safe room would become a long-term project, not something to use for today’s crisis. Leo and his vamps had other places they could hole up tomorrow, like the warehouse where Leo had attacked me. I still got an empty feeling at that thought, but Beast, the pragmatic one, simply yawned and milked my mind with her claws. We are not dead. We are not caged. We will soon be free of him, she thought. Which was the truth, as cats saw it, and would be something I could live with, eventually. And if he needs to be staked, she added, we will stake him. And eat his heart.