by L. K. Hill
The man hesitated, frowning, then slowly took his hand away from his waist.
It was something Kyra learned quickly. Mirelings behaved differently than other people. Their choices were criminal, immature, sometimes downright ridiculous, but generally it was because they were lonely, or didn’t feel in control of their own lives, so they lashed out any way they could. Their feelings didn’t excuse their behavior, but the key to surviving the streets was to understand the mentality of the type of people who voluntarily entered into this lifestyle and exploit it.
Men like these two sought out derelicts like themselves so they didn’t have to be alone in the dark. They harassed people who were smaller and weaker than they because it made them feel powerful. Kyra had taken away their power trip, and they’d reverted to the mentality of the scared little boys they’d once been.
With both of them stunned and frozen, Kyra backed slowly away from them, bringing the knife from the first one’s throat. “Look,” she said quietly. “I have no problem with you. In fact,” she nodded to their pipes, “I may even be able to supply you someday.”
When she backed away, the second thug relaxed his shoulders, though the first one still seemed to be in shock. A trickle of blood where her knife had pricked his skin slid lazily down his neck. He wiped it away with his fingertips, then sat staring at it as though he’d never seen blood before.
The second one snorted. “You’re not a dealer.”
“No I’m not,” Kyra kept her voice quiet. “But I will be soon. Let me come visit my friend here whenever I want, and I may be able to hook you up someday.”
They both stared at her warily. Kyra sensed the first one—the more dangerous of the two—coming out of his stupor. Before they could respond, she turned and marched calmly—and quickly—down the stairs.
The men didn’t follow her.
Chapter 7
The rest of Gabe’s shift the previous night had been uneventful. He’d headed home at dawn, arriving at his small house just as the sky began to light in earnest. His neighborhood was considered a good one, if a bit old. Many of the houses were made of red brick and had shabby carports attached to them. His house was just such a one: very small, but perfectly suited to his needs.
Like most houses in the neighborhood, Gabe’s mailbox was mounted right beside his front door. Crammed in it were two days’ worth of envelopes and mailers. He scooped them out and stuffed them under his arm before jamming his key into the lock.
He’d always thought the floor plan of his house was weird. Though it fit perfectly into the neighborhood on the outside, none of his neighbors’ houses shared the same inner layout. He’d always wondered if his house was a screw-up. Someone tried something, it didn’t work, so they just did the best they could with it.
A wide, central hallway ran uninterrupted from the back door to the front. On the left was a ridiculously small parlor—he couldn’t even fit a couch in it; it barely held his desk and chair. On the right, a bigger living space held a couch and TV. Beyond that, as one moved down the hallway, was the kitchen. In rambler style, it connected to the living room, which went from carpet to linoleum without a pesky wall to divide them. On the right, beyond the parlor, was the one bedroom. Beyond the bedroom door, the hallway stretched uninterrupted to the back door, making it look like his bedroom was enormous. Really the size was because a full bathroom hooked onto the room, and wasn’t accessible from the hallway. You had to go through the bedroom to get to it. Strange floor plan.
And, across the hall from the invisible bathroom was another invisible room. This one you could get to by threading around a corner just before reaching the back door. It was a laundry room, furnace room, storage room, and half-bath all in one. Not very spacious, and therefore very crowded.
He dumped his mail on the table, took a deep breath, and began sorting through it. To his surprise, the package he’d expected wasn’t there. Only bills, advertisements, some meaningless coupon, but no little boxes.
He sat down hard on the only chair at his kitchen table. His furniture was all second-hand, and none of it matched. Why hadn’t the package come? It came every year on this day. He was almost as disturbed by its absence as he would have been by its presence. Ironic, considering how much he dreaded receiving it every year.
It worried him, though. First the woman in the alley, then the dark feeling he’d gotten at the crime scene. Now this. They said things always happened in threes. Hopefully the weirdness was at an end for him. A bizarre day, nothing more.
At any rate, he was too tired to dwell on it now. Thinking he’d get Shaun’s advice when he returned to the precinct, he trudged into his room. He slept most of the day away, awakening in early evening. After exercising and eating, he got a call.
“Can you stop by a crime scene and take some evidence into custody for day shift?” Shaun asked.
“Uh, sure,” Gabe said, frowning. It was an odd request. “Why?”
“All the other detectives on day shift are busy. This evidence is sensitive and it kind of got left behind.”
“Nice.”
“I know, I know,” Shaun muttered. “Idiot day shift. They’re busy and bogged down. You can sign it over to one of them when you get here. It’s really their problem to handle, not ours, but they asked if someone on the nightshift could pick it up on their way in.”
Gabe nodded. “Okay. What’s the address?” He jotted it down as Shaun read it off to him. “Got it..”
“One more thing, Gabe.”
“What’s that?”
“We sent a SWAT team into the Sons of Ares’ warehouse today.”
Gabe froze. “The one we were supposed to raid last night?”
“The very same.”
“Why didn’t anyone know about it? What happened?”
“After what happened last night, they didn’t want anyone to know about it. We don’t know who the leak is yet, and the higher ups wanted to see if what your blue-eyed alley girl claimed was true. They went in around noon, the most sluggish part of day. No one was there. The gang had abandoned the building.”
“Oh. Well, did they…find anything?”
“No scum bags. No drugs.”
Gabe sensed Shaun’s hesitation. “But…?”
“C4. In the walls. Enough to take out the entire city block. No one would have survived.”
Gabe’s knees gave out and he sunk onto his couch. He’d believed the woman in the alley, but hearing the truth of the ambush confirmed took his breath away. He couldn’t make his voice form words. “Whoa,” he finally managed.
“Yeah.” The reverence in Shaun’s voice wasn’t something Gabe had heard very often in the three years he’d worked for the man.
“So, what’s happening now? With the building, I mean?”
“Bomb squad’s dismantling everything. They found the detonator. When we didn’t show, the gang just left it all behind.”
Gabe rubbed his face. “So the woman from the alley. She was right.”
“Yeah. I’d like to find her as much as Tanner. Hopefully we’ll hear something soon. We’ve already got UCs and CIs looking for her. They’re not circulating images—that’d be too obvious—but they’re asking discreet questions, and they know what she looks like.”
Gabe nodded. “Good.”
It occurred to him after he hung up that he’d neglected to tell Shaun about the absence of the package, but there would be plenty of time for that when he actually made it to the precinct.
By the time he arrived at the address Shaun had given him a few hours later, the sun had set and twilight was fast fading to darkness. The scene had been largely cleaned up, only a single squad car remaining, waiting for CSU to finish.
The crime scene was a small, ma-and-pa general store in the basement of an old, brown-bricked building. Most of the buildings in this part of town had small businesses on the ground floor and people living above. Apparently this was a robbery gone wrong. The shop’s middle-aged owner had been shot.
He’d been rushed to the hospital, but it didn’t look good.
Upon entering the store, Gabe’s practiced eye ran over all the tell-tale signs of burglary: the messy aftermath of a struggle, the open cash-register, fingerprint powder covering everything. Two CSU workers looked up when he entered. He didn’t recognize either, but he didn’t know the day shift very well. One was a dark-haired woman about his age. The other, a smooth-faced guy who might have been all of sixteen years old. Probably fresh out of college.
“You the detective from the night shift?” the woman asked.
“Yeah. Gabe Nichols.”
She crossed the store and shook his hand. “Sandy Torrens. It’s over here.” She’d already packaged and labeled everything—Gabe didn’t bother to look at what it actually was—but Shaun was a stickler for paperwork so Gabe filled out and signed a transfer sheet. “Sorry to be brusque,” Sandy said when he’d finished. “But we have two more scenes waiting on us, and our shift is over in an hour. We’re done here—just waiting for you. Can you get this into your car by yourself?”
“Yeah, no problem.” Gabe waved his hand dismissively. “I got this. You can get going.”
She gave him a relieved smile. “Thanks. The unie out there will lock up the scene when you’re done.”
Twenty minutes later, Gabe had everything in his trunk and the uniformed officer from the squad car locked the store, plastering caution tape over the door and putting a Crime Scene; Do Not Cross sign on it.
Gabe’s car was parked in the alley beside the building, nose facing toward the dead end. The unie backed his squad car into Gabe’s path, and Gabe waited for him to leave before he could back up. He raised a hand as the officer pulled away, then put his car in reverse. His car rolled back all of ten feet before he glanced in the rear view mirror and slammed on the breaks, gasping.
The blue-eyed woman from alley stood like a glaring statue in the path of his car.
Slamming the gearshift into park, he lunged out of the car, afraid she’d disappear as quickly as she’d appeared, but when he emerged, she simply stared at him. Her face was tranquil, her electric blue eyes penetrating, discerning. She wore the same baggy black clothing and spikey hairstyle as before. All her paranoia had disappeared, though, and her demeanor was grounded. Even authoritative.
Gabe didn’t know where to start.
“You been looking for me?” she asked in a husky voice. Had her voice been that deep in the alley? It took him a moment to register what she’d asked. He shook himself. “Yes. We have been. We’ve had our networks trying to find you.”
She barked a mirthless laugh. “Yeah, I’m gonna need you to cut that out.”
He couldn’t help but smile, and took a tentative step toward her. “Why?”
“Because,” the look she gave him was emphatic. “The kind of work I’m trying to do…I can’t have people asking questions about me. I mean,” she shifted her weight to one foot, “I’m sure your people are being careful, but…the people I’m trying to work with, they don’t like questions of any kind. They’ll just walk away from me. And that’s the best case scenario.”
Gabe nodded, forcing himself not to ask the obvious questions about what kind of work she did. He needed to know more about her in general. “Okay,” he said. “Well we can tell them to stop looking for you now, because you’re here.” He took another tentative step forward.
Her look turned wary, but he didn’t think it had anything to do with his advancing steps. “What do you want me for?”
He let out his breath. “To thank you, for one thing. You saved a lot of cops by doing what you did—coming to warn us about the ambush.”
She was quiet a moment. “So it was true then? They would have killed you?”
“Didn’t you already know that? You told us.”
She nodded. “Like I said, it was all over the street, so I was sure it was. I haven’t heard anything about it since. What were they planning?”
Gabe pressed his lips together, not sure he should answer. But he couldn’t see how it could hurt. It was over and done with. The warehouse would have been relieved of its cache of explosives by now, and it would probably make the eleven o’clock news.
“They’d rigged the warehouse with C4; we’d all have been blown to kingdom come.”
Her eyebrows climbed to her hairline. “Really?” She jutted her chin out thoughtfully. “Huh.”
He watched her expression carefully. She was surprised by the news, but not in the way others would have been. It just made the gears in her head turn, and he wished he knew what she was thinking. “What?” he asked.
She shrugged. “Just always thought they were more of an AK-47 kind of gang.”
More information to file away about her. She knew something about the most dangerous, homicidal gangs in the country. Considering they controlled the city she lived in, maybe that wasn’t strange by itself, but she spoke more like a sociology professor than a junkie. And she spoke of weapons with ease. It wasn’t uncommon for a Mireling to know guns, but it was still interesting.
“Regardless,” he said. “You saved a lot of lives. We wanted to thank you.”
The wariness receded from her eyes and she shrugged. “It’s what any decent person would have done.”
Gabe chuckled again softly, and she arched an eyebrow at him. “Maybe,” he said, “but it’s not what many people in…your position—” he indicated her clothing, hoping she understood his meaning, “—would have done.”
She dropped her eyes and gave a little self-conscious laugh. “Yeah well, it…is what it is.”
“Okay,” Gabe frowned. What was that supposed to mean? He’d taken enough steps that he now stood only two feet from her. “Well, my superiors would really like to speak with you. To thank you themselves.”
For the first time, she stepped backward. “No. I told you, I can’t…I just can’t.”
Gabe held up his hands, hoping she wouldn’t bolt like she had the previous night. “Okay. But they also want to know if you’d consider working for the department. As a C.I.”
“C.I…C.I.” She frowned, saying it over and over, as though it was familiar to her. “Confidential…informant?”
Another piece of information she hadn’t readily known but had just figured out. She couldn’t have done that without knowing at least something of the law enforcement world. Gabe kept his face neutral and simply nodded.
“I don’t know, Detective. I don’t think I’d be interested in that. I mean, I can’t—” she glanced up and down the street, showing the first hint of the paranoia he’d seen the previous night. Upon finding the street empty in both directions, she seemed satisfied. “I can’t be seen talking to cops. So, how…would that work exactly?”
Gabe’s eyebrows hiked in surprise. She was actually considering this. “Any way you want. You’d be given a contact in the department. You can call whenever you feel safe. Or we can come to you. Just set up rendezvous points where you feel safe talking to us.”
She heaved a deep breath, studying her shoes, then shook her head. “I don’t know. I’ll have to think about it. Sleep on it.”
He nodded. That was something. “What’s your name?”
She shrugged her shoulders uncomfortably. “People out here know me as Supra.”
“Supra?”
She nodded.
“And…who are you? What do you do?”
She looked away, a soft smile playing around her lips. “I’m not anybody. Just another Mireling.”
“You are not just another Mireling,” he said, and her head came up in surprise. “You do things no Mireling I’ve ever met would do, you know law enforcement lingo, you’re more confident than I am. Who are you?”
Looking more uncomfortable than she had since positioning herself behind his car, she studied the ground, then glanced up at him, struggling for words.
“This work you talked about,” he offered. “What does it involve?”
She flashed an irritated, don�
�t-be-stupid look at him, and he was taken aback. What was that look for? Before he could ask, she glanced up at the alley wall ten feet above their heads and frowned, like she’d seen something disturbing. He followed her gaze but only saw a bare brick wall.
“What?” he asked.
“I think someone got up there and wrote entrapment on the wall.”
Gabe’s mind went completely blank for ten seconds, then he burst out laughing. She gave him a wry smile and sauntered casually backward, putting more space between them.
“See! That’s exactly what I mean,” he said. “What junkie makes that joke to a cop?”
When he said the word junkie he glanced involuntarily at her wrists. The sleeves of her hoodie weren’t pulled up to her elbows as they had been the night before, but they were pushed a few inches up her forearms. Even in the dark—the sky was the color of wet tar, now—he could make out faded lines against her pale skin.
She followed his gaze there, then tugged her sleeves over the lines self-consciously. “I’m not…actually a junkie.” She murmured it so quietly, he almost didn’t catch it.
“Well,” he said after a moment of loud silence, “that makes more sense than that you are. But if that’s the case then…” he motioned to her arms, “what’s with…all this?”
She glanced at the alley walls, up and down the street again, anywhere but at him, looking sorry she’d spoken. “Um…I…I have to go.”
She turned to leave, but he lunged forward and grabbed her arm. She whirled toward him, looking alarmed, but didn’t pull away.
“How will I contact you?” he asked. “About the C.I. thing?”
She turned her body back toward him, looking calm, then gently tugged her arm from his grasp. He let her go. “I didn’t get your name,” she said.
“Gabe. Nichols.”
She nodded. “I’ll contact you.”
He opened his mouth to protest, but she held up a hand. “If you’re so sure I’m not what I pretend to be, then trust me. I’ll contact you. I promise. I’ve already been standing here talking to you for too long. I have to go.”
She backed away several steps before turning, as though to be sure he wouldn’t follow, then retreated into the darkness.