by Wen Spencer
They parked in the hotel's underground parking lot and rode the elevator up to the lobby. There it stopped and Kyle stepped off.
Atticus stuck his hand out to catch the doors before they could close. "What are you doing?"
"There's a business center here. I'm going to connect to the Internet and do some searches on the cult."
"You can do that after we talk to Sumpter."
Kyle fidgeted in place. "I don't want to talk to Sumpter."
"I don't want to talk to him either," Ru said.
Atticus gave Ru a hard look. "Neither do I, but we have to."
"You two talk to him. I don't need to be there. I'm just backup."
"Yeah, we're a team," Atticus said. "Come on."
Kyle shook his head, getting his mulish look. "No."
Atticus sighed. "Fine, fine, we'll talk to him. We're going to make this quick, twenty minutes tops."
"I'm just downloading stuff to my laptop for later." Kyle patted his shoulder bag.
"Ten minutes." Atticus let the door shut.
"I don't blame him," Ru murmured as the elevator started up again.
"Sumpter is an asshole," Atticus agreed.
He and Ru rode the elevator to the top floor and found Sumpter's room.
"Yes?" Sumpter called from within the room when Atticus rapped on the door.
"It's Steele and Takahashi."
Footsteps neared the door, there was a pause to use the spyhole, and then the door opened. The wave of air brought out the reek of Sumpter's cologne, Old Spice put on heavy.
"Come in!" Sumpter murmured. He glanced beyond them. "Where's Rainman?"
"Who?" Ru chose to misunderstand him.
"Johnston," Sumpter said.
"Kyle isn't autistic," Atticus stated as calmly as he could.
"Well, there's something wrong with the dweeb."
Atticus stepped close to Sumpter. "Don't . . . insult . . . my . . . backup."
"Did you make the deal?" Sumpter ignored him, heading back into the hotel room. It was a large suite, with windows overlooking Boston Harbor. The door they came through opened to a living room with a sofa, desk, easy chair, and coffee table. A door into a second room revealed a king-size bed, slightly rumpled.
"Yes." Atticus examined the plastic bag containing the backpack a second time, looking for the drug's telltale glitter. He'd checked it downstairs in the garage while writing his name on the tape sealing it shut, but he was feeling paranoid. "We've got some information on the drug. It's a lot more dangerous than we've been led to believe. It's possible that it's lethal with one dose."
"And it's transparent—nearly invisible," Ru said.
"Invisible?" Sumpter frowned, eyes narrowing. "Are you sure you weren't gypped?"
"This is the real stuff." Atticus held out the bag. "It should be handled only while wearing plastic gloves."
"Check." Sumpter took the bag and added his name to the seal.
"We set up another buy on Saturday, but we changed the location to here."
"Here?" Sumpter asked.
"Lasker's beach house is too exposed. Also the sellers won't deal out there."
"You've made contact with them; that's all that matters." Sumpter disappeared into the bedroom with the bag. The closet door slid open, and a moment later slid closed. He returned with a DVD in hand. "The case and circuitry of the digital video recorder's hard drive were trashed, but the platters were salvageable. A few hours in a clean room and the boys in the lab managed to recover most of the drive. They burned about ten days of data onto this DVD for us." He loaded the DVD into the laptop set up on the desk. "I've scanned through the disk, and it looks like the last few minutes is the only thing worthwhile."
The Buffalo team had used a standard eight-camera system, recording the last minutes of their lives. One camera focused on the desolate parking lot in a mostly abandoned industrial park, carefully set to pick up license plates and faces of people sitting inside the cars. Four others covered different angles of the staged "office" area, well lit and painted a sharp white for better contrast. The last three cameras had been scattered through the shadowy warehouse with motion sensors and silent alarm systems attached.
Sumpter started the video with the team waiting for the buyers as caught by camera four.
The kid, Jason German, juggled while telling a joke; he arced four small cloth sacks through a continuous graceful loop. Tracy Scroggins sat on a battered desk, still and patient, quirking his mouth into a smile at Jason's nervous antics. Walt Boyes, the backup, wasn't visible, most likely stationed at the monitors in the concealed room, judging by how the camera zoomed in and out on the kid. The time stamp ticked off the seconds until they died.
". . . and she says, 'Whatever you gave me, Doctor, didn't work.'" Jason was midjoke as the video started. "'While my farts are still perfectly silent, they now smell awful. Thank goodness that no one can tell it's me farting, because they could peel the paint off walls!' 'Good,' shouts the doctor, 'now that we cleared up your sinuses, we can start to work on your hearing!'"
There was an odd noise from off camera.
"I think you just killed Walt," Scroggins said. "You okay back there, Walt?" A muffled laugh was the only answer. "You've heard that one before, haven't you?"
"It's funnier this time," Walt Boyes called from his concealed room.
"I don't know whether to be complimented or insulted." Jason sent one of the balls looping over his shoulder and deftly caught it.
"Heads up!" Boyes announced the buyers' arrival.
Jason caught the cloth bags he'd been juggling and put them aside, saying, "It's about time."
Tracy nervously checked the draw on his pistol.
The door opened. Four men entered dripping slightly from rain, just as the Iron Horses had claimed. Atticus had seen the bodies of the other three bikers, so he focused on the missing man. He was a big black man with a sleepy look to him. He leaned against the back wall, tucked between two support columns. Nothing about him suggested that he knew what was coming. While Jason and the lead biker exchanged presale banter about the heavy rain outside, Toback literally picked his nose out of boredom.
"Who gives a fuck about the rain?" Scroggins gave the banter a shove toward real business. "Are we going to do this, or talk ourselves to death?"
"Tracy! Jason! Incoming!" Boyes shouted. "Incoming!"
Sumpter reached down and slowed the playback, murmuring, "This goes too fast to see otherwise."
The door flew open and a man walked in, shotgun at his shoulder. He fired as he walked, shooting the bikers even as they turned. Others filed in after him, six in all, faces set and emotionless as they fired. The bullets slammed the bikers' bodies around like puppets with their strings randomly jerked. In the slowed replay, the blood splattered gruesomely. Scroggins and German had flung themselves behind the steel desk. The camera showed only the tops of their heads as they returned fire, pinned behind the desk. Two of the shooters went down, but the other four rounded the sides of the desk and fired point-blank. The police would find later that Scroggins had tried to shield German with his own body.
The time stamp had ticked through twelve seconds.
But the shooters had missed Toback, who had cowered between the support columns. While they started to reload, he charged, a long steel pipe in hand. The foursome glanced up, and one, handing his gun to another, stepped forward to engage Toback hand-to-hand.
The shooter ducked the steel pipe casually, and then caught hold of it. There was a momentary contest of strength that the big man should have won, but the shooter wrestled the pipe away and struck Toback down with it.
The other three stepped forward, guns now loaded, and aimed down at the prone biker. They checked, apparently reconsidered killing Toback, and turned away. They turned toward Boyes's hole instead, leveled their guns, and opened fire. They systematically shifted their fire, visibly working left to right. Atticus recalled the line of bullet holes, how they ran with machine precis
ion across the back wall; he thought that only one marksman had made them. He watched now, stunned with the knowledge that three men had acted in unison. How were they coordinating their shots? He realized then that so far they hadn't uttered a single word.
Behind them, the impossible happened. The two dead shooters scrambled to their feet. One picked up the bags containing the money and the drugs. The other stooped down to grab Toback by the ankles and dragged him outside, leaving the swath of clean floor that would later puzzle Atticus. The shooters' clothes showed bloody bullet holes and gaping wounds, entrances and exits indicating paths through vital organs, but they seemed unhampered and unperturbed by the massive damage done to them.
Walt Boyes started to scream, a wordless howl of anger and pain, like a wounded animal. The guns thundered, and the screaming stopped, and then the video ended.
Sumpter took the DVD out, put it in a jewel case, and held it out to Atticus. "That was the best angle to view the shooters. You'll want to study all the angles."
Atticus took it numbly. Two images chased through his mind: the shooters standing up, ignoring their wounds, and Ukiah coming back to life. His brother had known about the drug, known the bikers, and they found him on I-90, a straight shot from Buffalo. It was the cultists who manufactured the drug and killed Ukiah. Who were the bad guys here? Was it the cult who hit his brother with a car and then shot him? Or was it the Pack, who might have staged the shooting in Buffalo? He was going to get answers from his brother, even if he had to beat them out of him.
***
Ru talked them out of Sumpter's room. There was an older couple waiting for the elevator, so they rode in silence, watching the floor numbers count downward. They found Kyle in the business center, downloading information to his laptop.
"That was not twenty minutes," he grumbled, typing furiously on the keyboard.
"Change of plans," Atticus said. "You and Ru are staying here."
"What?" Ru gave him an angry look.
Kyle glanced up to eye them standing over him and then bowed his head back over his keyboard. "So the video was that bad? I, for one, would rather not see it, but I know I'm going to have to digitally enhance it until my eyes bleed."
"There's no reason for all three of us to go," Atticus stated, answering Ru and ignoring Kyle because he was completely right.
"And we'll be safer here?" Ru added, as if he were finishing Atticus's statement.
Yes.He knew what Ru would say to that, so he didn't say it aloud, not that it mattered. Ru knew him well enough to guess what he was thinking.
"I'm going with you," Ru said.
"I'm just going to pick up Ukiah and come back," Atticus said.
"Don't get stupid because of what happened to the Buffalo team," Ru said.
"The Jag only seats two comfortably," Atticus said.
"We can take the Explorer," Ru countered.
"It needs gas," Kyle interjected the information quietly into conversation.
"I'll be fine alone," Atticus said.
"We don't even know if there are rooms available here." Ru waved his hand to indicate the hotel.
"Two rooms." Kyle paused in his typing. "Should I reserve them?"
Atticus glanced at the screen and saw that Kyle had the reservation form for the Boston Harbor Hotel up, the request for two rooms already filled out, his hand hovering over the enter key. "Do it."
Kyle tapped downward. "You two fight it out." He shut down his computer and unhooked it with swift efficiency. "I'm checking in."
Ru sat back on the desk as Kyle escaped. "I'm coming with you. This is different this time. These people know what you are. They know what it takes to really kill you. The playing field is level here, and I'm not going to let you go without backup."
Atticus sighed, recognizing the pattern. He was being overly cautious, and Ru was asserting his right to put everything on the line. If Ru didn't want danger—and the accompanying adrenaline rush—he'd have been a lawyer like his father had wanted him to be. "Fine."
***
Atticus decided to take the Jag, as it was faster. Ukiah would have to suffer in the cramped space pretending to be a backseat—if the Dog Warrior was even still at the beach house. It was possible that he had woken up, found them gone, and left. Atticus funneled his anger and fears into the car, and they roared down the highway at speeds that made it more low-altitude flying than driving.
They were nearly to the house when the car phone rang.
Ru answered it, putting the call on speaker. "What is it, Kyle?"
"It's the house security," Kyle said. "The front door has been triggered."
Atticus glanced at the GPS system showing their location. They were still twenty miles from the house, nearly fifteen minutes at the speed they were going.
"The door down to the basement just tripped," Kyle said.
Atticus swore. If it were Ukiah leaving, the doors would have opened in the opposite order.
"The bedroom door is open," Kyle reported. "Should I call 911?"
"Shit!" Atticus considered all the messy entanglements that calling the police would involve. It would jeopardize their whole operation.
"Atticus?" Kyle asked after a minute's silence.
Chances were that Ukiah could survive any attack until they got there. They owed him nothing. But if it was a normal human Atticus had just put in harm's way, wouldn't he do something?
"Call the Hyannis police."
There was a pause. "And tell them what? That we have a man that was shot five times locked in a dead man's basement?"
Atticus glanced at the GPS system again. "No. Forget it." He and Ru would be there before they could talk Kyle through a safe report.
***
The house was dark, no sign of any vehicles.
Atticus slammed the Jag to a stop and leapt out, pulling his gun.
The doorjamb of the front door was broken and the door hung open. He went in, gun leveled, splinters of wood under his shoes. The house was silent and still.
He knew he should go slowly, but he found himself moving quickly and quietly for the basement stairs. Let him be there! Let him be in the bed. Dead is fine, just be there!
The bedroom door had been smashed open. He crept to it, afraid of what he would find.
The room was empty, the bed innocent of blood.
What had happened? Who had broken into the house and taken him?
I shouldn't have left him alone. I should have found a way to keep him safe . . .
For the first time in his life, his senses failed to give him warning of an attack.
Atticus stood staring into the room, sick with fear for his brother, and someone slammed into him. In that hard collision of bodies, he lost his pistol. They smashed through the sliding glass door and tumbled out onto the sand. They rolled across the sand, the stranger growling a deep rumble.
Ukiah? But no, Ukiah would have felt identical to him, and there was an "otherness" to this man. Atticus twisted and wrenched himself out of his attacker's hold and scrambled backward.
Rennie Shaw stood grinning, teeth and eyes gleaming in the moonlight, his breath misting in the cold. Shaw topped Atticus by several inches—taller than Atticus expected from Animal's photo. Lean and fit as the Iron Horses described, the Dog Warrior wore biking leathers with savage style. With dark hair grizzled with silver, he smelled like a wolf and radiated the same prickly awareness that Ukiah had against Atticus's senses.
Pack knows Pack.
"So you are like two peas in a pod," Shaw murmured in a deep, carrying voice. "The question is, at the heart of it all, are you the same man that your brother is?"
"Where's Ukiah? Is he safe?"
"It's a little late to worry about that, boy."
What did that mean? Did the Dog Warriors have Ukiah, or had someone else come and taken him? If his brother was safe with the bikers, why had Shaw attacked Atticus?
"I want to scratch your surface a little." Shaw sneered. "See what's underneath."
Shaw lunged at him with inhuman speed, and his punch felt like being hit by a high-powered bullet. Atticus countered with two punches, both of which Shaw dodged as though the fight were choreographed, allowing Atticus to come so close to hitting that he could feel the heat of Shaw's skin.
"Come on, boy, you're thinking too much." Shaw struck him again, knocking him down the sand dune. Atticus tried to duck the next blow, but Shaw, grinning, landed it anyhow.
Shaw battered him down the hill and to the water's edge. Atticus fought with silent desperation, but his kicks and punches kept failing to land on their target. Shaw was as elusive as a shadow, always a fraction of an inch out of reach.
" If you're going to fight someone who can read your thoughts," Shaw said into his mind, " you have to fight without thinking."
Atticus went still with shock. He'd been gathering information on the Dog Warriors, watching the evidence mount up that they were much like him, but he'd somehow denied the deep truth. He wasn't one of a kind—he was part of a race that he knew nothing about. The vast shifting of his universe stunned him to his core.
With a scoffing laugh, Shaw tackled him into the surf. The water sucked them out, away from the shore, and then tumbled them back to the land.
A score of men and women lined the shore, waiting for them. Even standing still, they were sleek, dark, and dangerous in the way of poisonous snakes. The moonlight gleamed in their eyes, and the scent of wolves overrode that of humans. Over the roar of the surf, he could hear their growling, their hostility pressing against him, as irritating as his own anger.
His brother stood on the shore, flanked by Dog Warriors, wholly one of them.
CHAPTER FOUR
Hyannis, Massachusetts
Monday, September 20, 2004
Ukiah had only heard the car arrive, but he felt the Pack's arrival as they swept in behind it and broke down doors to get to him. Rennie reached him first, cuffing him lightly in rough affection. Then awareness moved through the Pack and they made way for an outsider among them. He recognized Indigo by her scent as she picked her way through the dark house to him. When he folded her into his arms, he found that she wore a plain black leather jacket, all signs of her being FBI hidden away. She clung to him hard and parted reluctantly.