Wicked Creatures

by Jessica Meigs

  He drove aimlessly for over an hour, losing himself in the rumble of the motorcycle underneath him, and it wasn’t until his legs had begun to ache and the throb behind his eyes had reached uncomfortable levels that he angled the bike toward his neighborhood. He drove up his driveway and cut the engine then sat there, still straddling his bike, and stared at the darkened house.

  Something wasn’t right. He couldn’t put his finger on what it was, but something about his house felt…off to him. He dismounted his bike, drawing the pistol from under his suit jacket and fishing a second one from inside the small storage space under the motorcycle’s seat. He looked up and down the street; there wasn’t a soul in sight. Thank God for that. The last thing he needed was his neighbors—who had always been very kind to him, despite his weird hours and antisocial behavior—getting caught in the middle of a firefight. Then he approached the front door, trying to stay casual, like he had no idea what he was walking into.

  The foyer was dark, just like the rest of the house, but the barest of pale moonlight filtered through the windows alongside the front door. He scanned the room, and once he realized it was empty, he eased toward the living room to his left.

  The creak of a floorboard upstairs drew his attention to the second floor. He lifted the pistol he’d taken from his motorcycle, returning the other to its holster, and started up the stairs, skipping the third and seventh steps, since they squeaked and creaked worse than floors in a century-old house. He aimed his pistol up the stairwell, searching for the source of the noise, but he couldn’t see anything, both because of the darkness and because there just wasn’t anything or anyone there.

  He reached the top of the stairs and swept the landing then began moving down the hall. The master bedroom—his inner sanctum, he liked to think of it, the place where he retreated whenever he could to decompress and not think about the world—was at the end of the hall, its door ajar. He squinted at it, trying to remember if it’d been that way the last time he’d left the house, and he took a step toward it.

  A figure burst out of the first door on the right, the hall bathroom, and slammed into him, driving him backward into the wall. He didn’t let out a sound, even as the black-clad man grabbed his wrist and twisted, pulling the pistol out of his grip and tossing it down the stairwell. Damon heard it clatter down the steps, but he tried not to focus on that, instead delivering several short, hard punches to the man’s gut. His attacker grunted and recoiled but didn’t let go of him, just delivered a solid punch to the side of Damon’s head.

  It was like getting smacked in the head by a pork roast. The blow made Damon’s entire world spin, and he’d have staggered sideways if the man hadn’t had such a firm grip on him. He was still trying to get his brain going again when he was lifted off his feet and slammed to the floor in a move that was pure WWE—only, unfortunately, not so fake.

  He’d just begun to recover when his attacker picked him up off the floor again. He expected to be slammed back down to the floor or maybe against the wall and tried to brace himself for the impact again, but that wasn’t what happened.

  No, the man threw him down the stairs like a sack of potatoes.

  Damon was ninety percent certain that he hit every step on the way down. When he reached the bottom—which felt like it took an eternity rather than just the handful of seconds it actually did take—he barely waited to assess any injuries he might have sustained before grabbing the holstered pistol under his jacket. He started to get up, making it halfway to his feet before his attacker reached him at the bottom of the stairs and gave him a solid kick to his chest, knocking him flat on his back. He was promptly disarmed, his pistol skittering into the living room. He stared up at his assailant, struggling to breathe, as the man aimed a gun down at him.

  “Oh, hell no,” Damon said. “I’m not dying like this.”

  “No,” the man agreed. “Not like this.” Then he shifted the pistol’s aim and squeezed the trigger. A bullet tore through Damon’s right lower leg, and he let out a sharp, involuntary yelp of pain. He was still trying to get a handle on the pain when the man held up a small black object with a switch on it. Damon knew exactly what it was; he’d built dozens of them in his time in the Agency.

  A detonator.

  “My boss has something a little more spectacular planned for your death,” he said, and then he turned and walked through the house, heading to the back door. Damon heard it shut behind him.

  “Son of a bitch,” he breathed. “Son of a bitch.” He rolled over and levered himself to his feet, grimacing as he put weight on his injured leg, and he hobbled further into the house. He didn’t have time to get to the front door. Besides, he was sure all the exits would be guarded. Which left…

  He threw the door for the space under the stairs open—it was heavier than it appeared—and tumbled inside, dragging the door shut behind him. It slammed closed with a clang just as his house blew up around him.

  Officer Greg Tate of the New Orleans Police Department stood in the middle of a hotel suite with a bloodstained carpet, a dead—naked—body with several bullet holes in it, and no sign of the suite’s original occupants anywhere. His supervisor, Detective Butler, was already doing a slow prowl around the suite, and Tate joined him, looking for anything that appeared unusual or out of place. It was obvious there’d been a struggle: the coffee table was broken, and there was a crack and indentation in a nearby wall, accompanied by two not-quite-insignificant splotches of blood on the paint, roughly shoulder-width apart.

  He went to the suite’s attached bedroom, stepping inside to see even more evidence of a struggle. A suitcase had been overturned on the carpet and clothes from it flung everywhere; a bloodstained t-shirt was on the floor at the foot of the bed; and a medical kit had been dumped out onto the comforter, its contents pawed through. Scraps of plastic packaging from sterile gauze littered the floor nearby.

  Someone had clearly been hurt and had taken the time to tend to the wound before fleeing. Which, to him, spoke of an incredible amount of efficiency to be able to deal with injuries so quickly and still get out of the hotel without being seen.

  He went to the suitcase and crouched beside the pile of clothes, using the tip of his pen to nudge them around a bit. As he did so, he heard a shoe scuff on the carpet beside him, and then Detective Butler asked, “What do you see?”

  “There was a fight,” Tate answered. “I think there were two people staying in this room. I’m not sure that the vic out there is one of them.”

  “What makes you think two?” Butler asked.

  Using his pen, Tate hooked a bra from the pile by its strap and held it up for Butler to see. “Woman,” he said. “A rather small one by the looks of it.” Then he set the bra down and did the same with a pair of jeans, using one of the belt loops. “These are men’s jeans, but they look too big for a woman who’d wear that bra size, and they also appear too long for that man out there.”

  “You know a lot about bras, Tate?”

  He shrugged. “What can I say? I grew up in a house full of women.” Which was the understatement of the century: four sisters, a mother, and an absent father would teach any guy anything he wanted to know about the opposite sex—and plenty he didn’t want to know.

  “What do you think happened here?” Butler prompted. “Sex party gone wrong?”

  Tate sat back on his heels, studying the room again, thinking back on what he’d seen in the living room area of the suite and the hallway before he’d entered. “No, I don’t think so,” he said. “The fight started in the hallway. If it had ended there, I think the body would be in the hall. Whoever was involved carried the fight into the suite, and I think this is where the guy was killed. Any word on who is staying in this suite?”

  “Yeah, I just got a call from the manager,” Butler said. “It’s registered to a Mr. Thomas Mead and his wife Rachel. He described them as a very quiet couple that hadn’t caused him a bit of trouble and was generous with spending money in room ser
vice. The employees liked them because they were extremely good tippers. He’s working on getting us security footage from when they checked in.”

  “How long have they been staying here?” Tate asked.

  “About two weeks.”

  “Huh.” He stood and looked around the room again, spying a prescription pill bottle that had rolled halfway underneath the bedside table. He slid on a pair of disposable gloves and took a knee, picking up the bottle with two fingers and turning it to read the label. He raised his eyebrows in surprise. “What did you say the tenants’ names were?”

  “Thomas and Rachel Mead. Why?”

  Tate held the bottle up. “This says Scott Hunter,” he said. “Think that’s the vic out there?”

  “Maybe. What are the pills for?”

  “Hydrocodone,” Tate read off the bottle. “They’re prescription painkillers. Generics for Vicodin. Prescribed about, well, a little over three weeks ago in Tuscaloosa, Alabama.” He set the pill bottle on the nightstand and, since he’d found the bottle on the floor, he peered under the edge of the bed and the nightstand. He spotted something that looked like a wallet between the bed and the nightstand, so he eased his hand into the crack and tugged it out. It wasn’t a wallet: it was a black leather ID folder. “Hey, I think we have an ID here,” he announced before flipping it open and sucking in a breath of surprise.

  “What is it?” Butler asked.

  “A set of FBI credentials,” Tate said. “For one Riley Walker. Sound familiar?”

  “Should it?”

  “Considering you met her earlier today…” He trailed off and studied the ID again. “She and her partner—Agent Hunter—showed up at that weird crime scene on Bourbon.”

  “Oh, that’s right,” Butler said, his own voice starting to load up with surprise. “But what is the badge and prescription medication for two FBI agents doing in a room that isn’t registered under their names?”

  “Undercover work?” Tate suggested. He couldn’t imagine any other reason a couple of FBI agents would kill someone and then bail without a word.

  “If that’s the case, the dead body would suggest their cover has been blown,” Butler said.

  “Or something way more complicated is going on,” Tate said. “In which case, it’s probably best if we track down these two wayward FBI agents as soon as possible. We’ve got to question them and figure out if they’re suspects or victims.”

  “I’ll put you in charge of finding them,” Butler said. “You know the city better than I do. In the meantime, I’ll work this scene and see what I can come up with here.”

  Tate nodded and glanced at the badge in his hand again, remembering the two agents approaching him earlier that day at the Bourbon Street crime scene. They hadn’t seemed wary of anything in particular, but that didn’t necessarily mean anything. They might’ve just been good at hiding their concerns from public view.

  He only hoped that, if they were in trouble, he’d get to them before someone a lot worse did.

  Seven

  It was almost noon when Ashton and Zachariah rolled into Atlanta, Georgia, exhausted after a marathon ten hours of driving down interstates as quickly as they could get away with, stopping only when absolutely necessary, and trying to stay awake as the landscape zipped past them. Ashton’s eye felt heavy, his head logy with lack of sleep, and he struggled to stay awake so he could help Zachariah remain so; despite that, neither of them had spoken in the past hour.

  It was Zachariah who finally broke the silence in the car.

  “I can’t drive anymore,” he said. “I’m too fucking tired.”

  “We’ve only got seven more hours,” Ashton mumbled, dropping his head against the window alongside him. “We could get into NOLA in time for a late dinner.”

  “Only seven hours?” Zachariah repeated. “You’re kidding, right?”

  “Not that long in the grand scheme of things.”

  “You make me want to smack you sometimes, you know that?” Zachariah said.

  “Oh, what a loving relationship I’m in,” he commented, moving his head from the window to the headrest.

  “You better believe it.” Zachariah fell silent for a moment then flipped his turn signal on and suddenly cut across three lanes of traffic onto an exit ramp. Ashton sat up straighter.

  “What the hell are you doing?” he asked.

  “Well, if we’re going to drive, we need gas,” he explained. “And we’ll need to rent a hotel room for a bit so I can get some sleep. Or…”

  “Or what?”

  “We could fly there.” Zachariah nodded to a small green sign with the white silhouette of an airplane on it.

  “Tempting, but I vote no,” he said. “I have an old cache here in Atlanta. Maybe we should play the long game, load up on as much stuff in said cache as we can, and drive to NOLA with an arsenal big enough for a small army.”

  “An arsenal, huh?” Zachariah gave him an almost cheeky grin, and Ashton rolled his eye. He could almost guess where his mind was; when it came to two things—sex and shiny weaponry—he tended to have a one-track mind.

  “We should get a hotel,” Ashton conceded. “One of those cheaper ones, maybe so we can sleep for a few hours.”

  “Make it four and we could take an hour to finish what we started in my apartment,” Zachariah said.

  “You say that now,” he replied, “but I know you. The minute your back touches a mattress, you’re going to pass right out because you’re too tired.”

  Zachariah let out a laugh, one that sounded almost shy, and gave him a small, casual shrug. “Who knows?” he said. “Maybe I’ll surprise you.”

  “Yeah, we’ll see,” Ashton said. “Let’s hit the storage unit first and see how you feel after we drag all that shit out of there.”

  It didn’t take long to get to the facility Ashton used in Atlanta; they made good time, despite the busy traffic. He directed Zachariah to the facility, just outside the western city limits, and showed him where the storage unit in question was located. He’d gotten it on what was probably considered the dark, shadowy end of the storage facility—intentionally. The better to prevent random bystanders from getting an eyeful of the arsenal he had stuffed inside.

  Zachariah looked at him questioningly as he pulled the SUV to a stop in front of the unit. “This is it?” he asked.

  “What did you expect?”

  He shrugged. “I don’t know. Something…nicer?”

  “Zach, it’s a storage unit,” he said. “You know, big metal box with a lock that you stick shit in that you don’t have room for? It’s not like it’s the Hilton.”

  Zachariah rolled his eyes. “I’m aware, okay? I just figured you’d keep your cache in a place that at least has security on it.”

  “I don’t work that way.” Ashton opened his door. “Come on. See if Damon has a tire iron in his trunk, or maybe a crowbar. I left my keys in your apartment, which means they’re toast.”

  Zachariah sighed but got out to do as he’d asked. He rummaged in the spare tire well as Ashton went to the unit to make sure the lock was still intact. It was, but it wouldn’t be for long; they needed what was inside too badly to be neat about breaking into the unit.

  Two wrenches, a little applied force, and a metallic snap later, they were able to access the storage unit. Ashton rolled the door up and grinned when Zachariah’s jaw dropped as the younger man got a look inside the cache.

  “Jesus,” Zachariah murmured. “I know you said you had a great cache, but this is just pure insanity.”

  “I’m very serious about my caches,” he said. And he was: a well-placed, well-stocked cache could mean the difference between life and death in the event of a total loss of supplies. And Lord knew they had experienced a total loss of supplies.

  Everything inside was organized to within an inch of its life, carefully crated and boxed and meticulously labeled. The crates were stacked to shoulder height, and neat pathways threaded through the unit so everything inside was acces
sible. This particular cache was Ashton’s pride and joy; he’d spent years slowly compiling it over the course of his time doing fieldwork, carefully arranging everything just so. He’d even kept inventory, and he grabbed the clipboard by the door and flipped through the pages clipped to it. There was more weaponry here than he remembered. This was a good thing; it meant they’d have more options for compiling everything they might need.

  “I don’t even know where to start,” Zachariah said.

  “I do,” he replied. “Back the SUV up to the door. I’ll start digging out the best stuff to load up, and then we can get out of here.”

  “And then?” Zachariah prompted, pulling the car keys from his pocket.

  “And then we’ll go find that hotel you’re itching for and try to get some rest.”

  Scott stood in the deep recess of a store’s entryway down and across the street from his and Riley’s former hotel, watching the activity swarming around the front of the building. Police cruisers blocked off the entire street, their blue and white lights flashing off the buildings around them. Riley was next to him, his right arm in her grasp as she fussed over his mangled cast; she’d taken the makeshift splint off to get a good look at it. She’d never struck him as the mother hen, fussy type, and despite the ache in his arm as she manipulated it, he had to fight off a grin.

  “This cast is toast,” Riley reported after another minute of twisting his arm around. “We’re going to have to get you somewhere where we can get a new one on your arm. I don’t think this is supporting anything at all.”

  “It’d probably help if you quit twisting my arm around like it’s a wet towel,” he admonished. “At this rate, you’re going to re-break it.”

  “Shit.” She splinted his arm again and let go. “Sorry. I guess I got carried away.” She peeked around the corner and asked, “What’s going on out there?”

  “A lot of cops,” Scott reported. “Including that one you were ogling on Bourbon earlier.”