by Heskett, Jim
Serena sighed as her eyes darted over Isabel’s face. “No.”
“What?”
“No, Agent Yang. I will not stop my mission, I will not become your partner, and I will not ignore my mandate. Not without something concrete.” Her gaze flicked down to the foil-wrapped burrito in Isabel’s hand. “Enjoy your dinner.”
Serena turned and slinked away.
Chapter Thirteen
BAM
Bam licked the joint closed and then sparked up the fat end. Standing in his kitchen, he took one puff and then inserted the unlit end into the open mouth of a plastic straw. He stuck the straw in the corner of his mouth so he wouldn’t lose track of it, then he opened his freezer. A mist of foggy chill seeped out.
Bam grabbed the tumbler glass from the bottom. Since he had rinsed it with water prior to inserting it in the freezer fifteen minutes ago, it now had a thick coating of frost inside and out.
Bam set the glass on his kitchen counter and then carefully turned the joint around, so the lit end was in his mouth and the straw protruded. He stuck the straw end to the bottom of the glass and gently blew out through the joint and through the straw. A coating of white smoke billowed out of the straw and stuck to the frost on the glass, making a milky base. He moved the straw in a circle as he continued to breathe out, filling the glass with smoke that stayed in place.
Out of breath, Bam took the straw out of his mouth and set it on the counter and held up his glass. Filled to the brim with dense smoke, he squinted at it. Such a beautiful creation.
The singular time he had convinced his deceased mentor Niles to smoke pot with him, it had been a “milkshake,” just like this. It had been quite interesting to see Niles all stoned, eyes as slits, a cheshire cat grin on his face persisting for hours.
That would never happen again. No more grins for Niles.
Bam tilted the cup back and inhaled the smoke like guzzling a frosty milkshake. It went in smooth and cold, and he held his breath to the count of five before blowing out almost nothing at all.
It made him feel nothing.
The joint—still sticking out of the straw—had gone out, sitting on his table. Half of it had already burned down. That was fine. Bam didn’t even feel much like smoking the rest of it at the moment, and he wouldn’t need to in a few minutes, anyway, once the already-consumed weed took hold of him.
He opened the fridge to grab a bottle of water and then walked it over to the couch. Just about to sit and pick up the TV remote, a knock came at his door. Bam gritted his teeth. He should have heard footsteps outside, but he hadn’t been paying attention. He was too distracted tonight.
Bam skulked across the room. He picked up his Sig Sauer from the table next to his front door and placed the barrel against the wood as he closed one eye to squint through the keyhole. Finger on the trigger. Before his vision had adjusted well enough to see, a voice lurking in his head begged him to pull the trigger and get rid of this visitor. It told him how satisfying it would feel to blast a hole in the door.
But he didn’t. Payton was standing out there on the walkway. Not someone Bam had any reason to shoot.
He pursed his lips and put the gun back, then opened the door. Bam could feel pressure behind his eyes, the first sign he was about to become a citizen of Stoned Land. “Sup, Payton?”
“Hey, dude. I have good news.”
Bam let him in and then shut the door behind them. “Want to smoke?”
“Thanks, but I can’t stay.”
“That’s fine. I don’t really need any more, anyway.”
Payton sat on the edge of the entertainment center, his back up against the TV. “I just came by to tell you what I found out.”
Bam picked up his water bottle from the coffee table, then let out a grunt as he plopped down on the couch and put his feet up. “Go ahead. I just smoked about a nickel bag of creeper weed in one hit, so you’ve got about three minutes before my brain turns to mush. Make it snappy.”
“First, I thought you should know something. Elias definitely knew you were high as hell during the Branch meeting last night.”
Bam thought about this. Elias was an older member, maybe mid-thirties, real surly bastard. He had broken his collarbone about a month ago. He’d claimed it was on a contract in Minneapolis when he had slipped and fallen on a patch of ice, but some people in the Branch hadn’t believed that explanation. Either way, it didn’t matter. With an injury, he couldn’t go out on jobs, so he hung around the Post Office, being a curmudgeon and generally just taking up space.
“How do you know this?” Bam asked.
“A few of us went out for coffee after, and he got to running his mouth. You know how he is. He thinks you’re grieving wrong about Niles and your work is suffering because of it.”
“Grieving wrong? What the shit does that mean?”
Payton shrugged. “I don’t know, dude. That’s what he said.”
Bam didn’t feel like he was grieving wrong, or grieving at all. He didn’t understand what that word meant, actually. “Elias can eat a dick. How I grieve is my own business. What I really want to know is: was the Historian at coffee with you guys to hear all this?”
Payton shook his head. “Elias didn’t say anything to anyone else, as far as I know.”
“Then I don’t give a shit about what he thinks or what he says. What’s the thing you wanted to tell me about?”
“Okay. You’re going to love this. You told me you wanted me to find you some bombs, right?”
“That sounds like something I would say. Three of them is what I asked for, I think. That’s how many I promised Ember I would have, and if I don’t deliver, I’m hosed.”
“I know where we can get bombs and more. All kinds of shit. It’s like gangster Christmas morning.”
“Now that you’ve built it all up, don’t keep me in suspense, Payton. Spit it out.”
“Day after tomorrow, a couple of guys from Westminster are meeting two Mexicans down in Centennial to buy guns, bombs, vests, and a bunch more stuff. Tens of thousands of dollars for the whole exchange.”
“How do you know this?”
“I’m doing research for the thing, you know?”
Bam knew Payton was talking about the “revolution,” or whatever they wanted to call it; the civil war about to jump off. Taking advantage of the existing chaos in the Club to neuter the other Branches and get more power for Five Points. Possibly, depending on how well they could execute it, dissolving the Branches and the Review Board and starting the whole DAC over from scratch.
Niles had talked about it. Bam had never been sold on the idea. He’d felt indifferent toward it, actually. At one point, Bam had felt actively resentful toward the concept, when it took up too much of Niles’ time that Bam felt could have been better spent mentoring him.
“Okay,” Bam said, his head now already buzzing from the weed. “The thing. Sure.”
“One of the Five Points computer guys found out Westy members were meeting off site to discuss things not kosher to talk about on the message boards, and so he bugged the spot of their meet. We had shifts monitoring these off-sites. I was on the clock to listen in and I found this conversation on the tapes. I was supposed to go tell the Historian and whoever else about it right away, but this is exactly what we’re looking for, right?”
“Yeah, it is. I need bombs. And I need them, like, right now.”
“So we hijack their shit after they meet the Mexicans, kill these Westminster punks and keep whatever we want. And then we tell everyone at Five Points about it, minus our haul. We’ll be heroes, dude, and no one has to know we didn’t deliver the whole inventory.”
Bam tried to keep his head together as he considered the plan. It seemed like it would work, so he nodded. “Yeah. I’m in. As long as we can escape clean and no one ever figures out we were there. Sound good?”
Payton stood up and rubbed his hands together. “Hell yeah. Day after tomorrow, we wreck some shit.”
Chapte
r Fourteen
EMBER
DAY THREE
Ember checked the address of the house on the street against the message Fagan had sent. The numbers and street names matched, but it didn’t seem right. She looked again at the cross street signs next to the intersection. Early this morning, Fagan had finally delivered two former addresses where Niles Thisdell used to live. It had been tricky, since Niles had used oodles of different aliases over his career.
Two potential places where Bam’s next bomb could be. One address was in Glendale, the other in Greenwood Village. Since Glendale was closer to Five Points, Ember had chosen this one to investigate first. She had less than twelve hours to find and defuse the next bomb—if Bam’s timeline could be believed. His unpredictability meant Ember would be a fool to take anything for granted.
Ember parked on the street, five houses past her target. She angled the rearview to get a better look. No cameras outside, at least none she could see. The neighbors didn’t appear to have any, either. This house was much nicer than the previous place. At least three bedrooms, and probably a basement. Wind chimes on the front porch. There were no beer bottles sitting out, and the front door had a regular screen door, not the steel cage Ember had seen on the sorts of houses people who valued privacy lived.
And a car sat in the driveway.
Maybe Niles used to live here, but someone else lived here now. That made reconnaissance a challenge. The sun had barely risen above the buildings to the east, and there were no lights on inside the house. A couple of the neighbors were out and about, warming up cars, scraping remnants of snow from their windshields. This felt like the sort of neighborhood where someone would notice her poking around.
Ember sighed as she gripped the steering wheel and kept her eyes on the house’s windows, waiting for something to change. A light flicking on, a shadow moving, a dog barking, anything. She wanted proof someone was home before she had to change her strategy.
A couple of minutes passed, and nothing changed. Ember was starting to question if there was anyone actually home. Of course, she could walk up and ring the doorbell, but long distance confirmation would be preferable.
But something about this house didn’t feel right. Not in the same sort of way the hairs would rise on the back of Ember’s neck before she knocked on the door of a house with drugs and guns and bad intentions inside. This simply didn’t feel like a place Bam or Niles or anyone from the DAC had been recently.
Would Bam leave a bomb outside the house? Ember didn’t see a toolshed in the backyard or anything like that.
A homeless man meandered down the sidewalk, a ratty knitted wool cap atop his head and a blanket wrapped around his body. Old and worn tennis shoes poked out of the bottom of the blanket, shuffling on the icy pavement. His eyes turned toward each house he passed, looking longingly into the windows as he took his time moving onto the next. Ember’s trained and tested instincts told her the man was casing these joints, maybe looking to smash a window and find a warm spot to wait until the sun could rise high enough to make living outdoors bearable again.
But upon further inspection, she changed her mind. She didn’t think he had a home invasion on his mind. He was coveting. Looking at the things he didn’t have, wondering why he didn’t have them, letting the melancholy of his life consume him.
She cleared her throat. “What the hell is wrong with you?” she said to her reflection in the rearview mirror. Ember wasn’t one to wax philosophical about the state of homeless people. Maybe it was another sign that exhaustion from more than a month of assassins on her tail had taken its toll.
Ember whipped out her phone and opened the maps app to check the other house’s location. She wasn’t sure what she could get by looking at it on a map, but maybe there would be something. A clue about why she should check out that house instead of this one.
And there was. For some reason, there were red lines on the streets all around the house. Red lines in the app meant traffic.
Why was there so much traffic on that residential street?
She switched to an internet browser and looked up the Greenwood Village police’s website. Unsure of how far she might have to scroll to find what she was looking for, she was surprised to see it directly on the homepage. Right there, on the main social feed: BOMB DETONATES ON COSTILLA PLACE.
She knew without clicking, without reading the rest of the article. That had to be the house. Ember gritted her teeth. “Damn you, Bam. I had twelve hours left. Why did you detonate it early?”
She felt shades of two weeks ago, when Quinn had played her with his fake “rescue” attempts, dangling his hostages in front of her. This felt different, though.
What was Bam’s aim here? If he wanted to keep her busy and distracted, it had to be in service of some larger goal. Was he trying to keep Ember in the dark about a grand plan? But why? If Bam hadn’t agreed to take on Ember’s contract this week, there would be no reason for them to interact at all. Unless Bam was planning something specifically for her, and he needed to keep her occupied until it was ready.
It didn’t make sense.
Ember clicked on the link for the article about the bomb explosion. The chaos from the explosion was still in flux and ongoing, but they reported a current count of two dead, five injured in the house and the one next to it.
All of it cruel and unnecessary.
“That’s it,” Ember said, slamming her phone down onto her car’s center console. “I’ve had enough.”
Chapter Fifteen
EMBER
She opened the gate by the pool on the grounds of Bam’s apartment building, with a square courtyard area and a pool in the middle. Everything felt grimy. There was a trash can at the far corner overflowing with fast food bags and beer bottles. For winter, the pool had been covered with a massive tarp, with leaves trapped in a sheet of ice atop it.
She stormed across the pool area and out the other gate, then up the rickety wooden steps to the second floor. Bam lived in number 207. Ember shifted to the edge of the walkway to pass a couple of twenty-something white guys relaxing outside an apartment. They were playing dominoes, sitting on crates, with 40-oz beers in brown plastic bags sitting on a third crate between them. Weird. For twenty-somethings, they were acting more like seventy-somethings. She didn’t know why they were out here, unless they were trying to be ironic with their brown-bag beers.
Both of them paused to ogle her as she passed. The one on the right was about to open his mouth to say something when Ember flashed demon eyes at him. She had no patience for flirty white college dropouts drunk in the middle of the day.
With that one sharp look, the guy apparently decided to keep his mouth shut, so Ember continued on past them and squared her shoulders in front of Bam’s door.
She clenched her fists and rapped the base of her hand against it. The door rattled under her pressure. She wanted to shoot out his deadbolt lock and kick it in, but not with these two domino-playing witnesses a few feet away.
“Brody. Open the door.”
She banged again, then waited ten seconds, then one more time. Through the curtained window next to the door, she saw a light flick off. Then feet shuffled across carpet.
She readied herself. Legs slightly bent, keeping her center of gravity low and ready to move. One hand behind her, near her waistband.
When the door swung open, there he stood in his lanky slenderness, shirtless and wearing fleece pajama pants and dirty tennis shoes. His eyes were dim, squinting against the light outside. “What the hell? How do you know where I live?”
Ember drew one of her Enforcers and pushed it into his chest. He raised his hands immediately and took a few awkward steps back. Ember followed, keeping the gun just out of his arms’ reach, then kicked the door shut behind him.
“This is not okay for you to be here,” he said. “You can’t come to my place. Not cool at all, Ember.”
“I don’t give a shit if it’s cool, jackass. You killed civilians with
your bomb this morning.”
His head tilted, his face scrunched up. “What? I don’t even know what you’re talking about. What bomb? It’s not supposed to go off until tonight.”
Ember now noted the distinct smell in the apartment, and she saw the wooden tray on the table lined with piles of green weed, rolling papers, a glass pipe, and various other smoking implements. “You must have set it for a.m. instead of p.m., you stupid stoner.”
His eyes flashed, somehow vacant and menacing at the same time. “Do not call me stupid. And get that gun out of my face, now. You wanna know what happens if you kill me? You don’t find out where the next three bombs are. You say you’re all about saving the regular people, right? Well, that means more civilian deaths, and it’ll be on you next time if you shoot me now. You play by the rules — my rules — Ember, or you lose by default. Find the bombs, then I’ll face you one-on-one. To the death. Guns, knives, fists… whatever. I’ll let you pick. But if you keep on harassing me, then you get nothing, bitch.”
She did not lower the gun. “Call me a bitch again, and I’ll put one in your stomach instead of your chest. You’ll bleed out slowly, but fast enough that no one will arrive in time to save you.”
Bam grinned. “It’s weird to despise and respect someone at the same time. That’s a first for me.”
“I know the feeling well. If there are three more, where’s my next clue, then?”
“Easy. Patience. You still have time. I don’t know why you’re in such a rush to wrap it all up.”
“Less than four days to find three bombs scattered around Denver? You think that’s plenty of time? Where next? Niles’ favorite coffee shop?”