Hostile Takeover (Vale Investigation Book 1)

by Cristelle Comby

  “Let’s say forty-eight hours,” Bran proposed. “If you don’t get back in touch by then, I’ll just assume the answer is ‘no’ … fair?”

  “More than fair,” I agreed. “I’ll be in touch.”

  We rang off and I started up the car. I didn’t turn towards home, I was betting that a look over Kennedy’s apartment might help me find where the curse originated from.

  ***

  There was an apartment complex just across the street from Mountain Shade so I stashed the Stingray there. Once the busy four lanes of traffic gave me a break, I went across.

  Most of Kennedy’s neighbors were gone for the day to whatever job paid their rent here. The duped key Zian had made slid in just as easy as if it had been the original. I walked in and started searching.

  One common feature of most curses is personal possessions. The cursing party gives the person they’re cursing something that acts as an active link to the spell. Touch it once and you’re done for. It could be nearly anything, depending on the tradition. While it was possible that Kennedy was carrying that item on her right then, something about that mention of chipped nails was telling me that it was here.

  In the twenty minutes I was looking the place over, I found out a little bit more about Kennedy. Like a lot of kids who’d clawed their way out of hardscrabble backgrounds, she’d been an academic dynamo. Valedictorian of her high school graduating class, an AA in some community college I’d never heard of, a magna cum laude BA in Communications from UC Berkley … she had a solid enough record to show that she’d never gotten by on just her looks.

  I found a lifetime membership card in the NRA on her bookshelf, but I also found plenty of Democratic memorabilia from various campaigns of the last twenty years in a hope chest at the foot of her bed. That collection ranged from paraphernalia from President Obama’s two successful campaigns to a folded-up old picket sign that read “Remember Ann Richards.”

  Oh, and about that bookshelf … plenty of hardboiled fiction populated that space. She seemed to have every book Mickey Spillane ever published in his lifetime and complete collections of the work of Robert E. Howard, forgotten Texas son and creator of Conan the Barbarian. Scattered here and there were some books by another Texan writer, Joe R. Lansdale, and one of my personal favorites, Max Allan Collins.

  Well, while it would be interesting to know all this if I was going to be dating her—not that I was thinking about that … much—I was no closer to finding anything that would help me figure out what was attacking her. I knew it would come to this but I’d been putting it off by trying to find what I was looking for in more conventional ways. But there was no other option, so … I turned on my sixth sense.

  Even though I was bracing myself for the usual unpleasantness, I got knocked off my heels a bit. There was a force in this apartment that was magical, active, and ready to deal out death. That last part was what I had been counting on. I forced myself to keep my psychic sight on. While it was good for finding evidence that vanilla eyes would miss, it was not the best of tools to track magical links. The way it feels—it’s as if magic has its own protection around it, which also acts as a repellent. The stronger the magic, the harder it pushes back.

  Fighting my reluctance to go closer to the source of the necrotic energies, I followed its trail to the kitchen counter. At that point, however, it got too much and I shut off my sixth sense.

  I spent another minute or two convincing my stomach that it could hang onto its breakfast. That’s when I noticed that the only thing in front of me was a pharmacy receipt. I looked it over, turned it over, and found nothing remarkable on it that the naked eye could ever make out. Which meant that there was only one thing left to do.

  Apologizing to my stomach in advance, I turned my sixth sense back on. Fighting to keep my concentration up, I spotted a sigil scratched on the front side of the paper. It was barely there, and I knew it would become invisible the instant my body made me shut off my extended sight. Pulling out a pen, I did my best to trace it. I’d just finished the last mark when my sixth sense decided time was up.

  I collapsed on the counter from the strain. It took several deep breaths to get a modicum of control back, reminding me that this was important. Once I felt steady enough, I pocketed the receipt and the pen, and left.

  ***

  I spent the next two hours after getting back to my apartment poring over my books for a match for the sigil. While several of them were close, none of them were an exact enough match to be helpful.

  I switched over to the Internet for information, typing up “Celtic runes” in Zian’s private search engine out of the Indigo. If this curse was fae in nature, investigating the Celtic angle seemed a natural place to start. It sent me to the Ogham alphabet, sometimes mistakenly called “Celtic runes.” Certain letters in that alphabet were a near-perfect match for the lines on the sigil and, when put together, were all about turning the Wheel of Fate against the affected party. With this new information, I went back to my reference books.

  Now, I’m no magician by any means. Any knowledge I’ve got of the art comes second to third hand at best. Still, I had managed the occasional ritual to help me out in specific situations like this. An hour later, I’d managed to come up with a counter-ritual to break the curse. But whether it would work or not was anyone’s guess.

  After lighting candles at the four cardinal points of the compass, I started off the ritual with a classic: cutting myself at the juncture of my thumb so that it would bleed on the sigil. Once the drips started to hit the paper, I recited Celtic phrases I’d culled from my books, calling upon the Morrigan to cleanse the accursed of their bad luck. Maybe the Morrigan answered my call. Maybe something else did. All I know is that I felt … something … rise from the sigil after I’d repeated the summons enough times.

  Bracing myself for a headache or worse, I took a peek at the paper with my sixth sense. The levels of death energy had been intense before, but now they were starting to spike, driving a psychic ice pick into my skull as I looked at it. It took all I had to keep the sight switched on. Digging into my last reserve, or possibly reserves that weren’t even mine, I kept reciting the Celtic summons, the mark on my shoulder itching under my skin.

  Though there were no flames, the paper burned in my hands. I could feel the heat pouring out through my fingers. The summons wasn’t enough to break the link: I was losing the battle. As a last resort, I pulled the bident Lady McDeath had given me from my pocket. I had just enough time to muse that this would be the first time I had used this on a living target when it happened.

  I got a feverish rush of images, as I usually do when using the bident. A lot of them were almost too fast to follow, possibly because this was a living being I was tapping into. But some images and impressions bled through with perfect clarity—Kennedy checking out at a drugstore while a kid manned the cash register, and the kid drawing the sigil on the receipt while Kennedy was looking at some cosmetics on display.

  Then I got a final, definite image: my friend running for her life through an open office layout with her .40 S&W in hand. I followed her around the corner of a desk, which she ducked behind, only to get a bullet to the face. Then the picture cut off.

  That gunshot snapped me out of my reverie with a start. It left me flat on my back, breath erratic. Both bident and receipt had fallen out of my trembling grasp. I knew I wasn’t moving, but the world sure did spin a dance around me.

  I hated how long it took me to get my bearings back, grab my Sig, and be out the door. Praying I wouldn’t be too late, I ran out to the Stingray in order to get where I’d seen Kennedy in that vision … the offices of AN.

  Chapter twenty-two

  Domino effect

  Maybe it was some of Mad Mao’s magic rubbing off on me from the charm. Maybe it was Lady McDeath’s protection on the Stingray. Maybe it was the fact that I’d spent so much time on the st
reets of this city, I could navigate the quickest route from Point A to Point B blindfolded. The end result was the same. Despite keeping way over the speed limit all the way, I got from my place to the Ditko Building without trouble.

  The parking lot was nearly full when I rolled up, typical of an office building during a workday. Looking up, I noticed broken windows on AN’s floor. I found Ramirez standing by her car and talking into her cellphone. There were no other cops around her, not even her partner … I gathered she must have been off-duty when she spotted the first sign of trouble.

  I slid into a parking slot a couple of spaces down from her. She had closed her phone and was wearing her contempt face as I clambered out of the car. As she opened her mouth, I held up my hand.

  “Before you say anything that you’ll regret later, Mel,” I said, “the only reason I’m here is because I got a tip, same way as with the Thricins the other night. I’m just here to help; it’s your show.”

  She closed her mouth and looked at me a little stunned. Just then another window broke upstairs. Someone, presumably the idiot who was doing the breaking, started shouting. “My magnificent mongoose screams beige dreams in Skylar!”

  I had just enough time to think “What the hells?” when a dozen people burst out the front door, running like the Reaper was right on their tails.

  “So what’s the situation?” I asked Ramirez as I waved the escapees over to us.

  “Mal … and getting worse by the minute,” Ramirez said, looking up at the windows. “I was on my lunch break when I saw the first of the windows shatter.”

  “Wait, you’re here because of a broken window?” I asked, arching an eyebrow at her.

  “Five broken windows,” she countered, her voice sounding like an old-fashioned teletype. “Different points at once, way too many to be an accident. When I got close, I started hearing the screams from upstairs. That’s when I put in the call for back-up.”

  Our fleeing office workers had gotten close enough to stop us talking.

  “What’s going on?” Ramirez asked, flashing her badge.

  “These … these people,” a guy in his fifties in casual office wear stammered. “They just … just started … shooting, beating, punching—”

  “Easy, Phil,” a woman in her mid-thirties, dressed in a sensible office dress, said, putting her hand on the man’s shoulder. “Your heart …”

  “Did any of you see how many of them there were?” I asked, feeling my nerves go coma calm.

  “Once the guns started going off, we didn’t care,” a young black guy in his mid-twenties told us. “After that, it was just put as much space ’tween us and the bullets.”

  “I’ve called for help,” Ramirez said. “Why don’t you all get to the far side of the parking lot, just in case? We’ll send people as soon as we can.”

  Our refugees were in no mood or shape to argue, especially when two or three of the attackers started spouting more word salad at the top of their lungs. I pointed the shaken-up workers in the general direction they needed to go and they went along without any complaints.

  As more windows were broken upstairs, I turned to Ramirez. “How long since you put in the call for back-up?”

  “Just finished it when you rolled up,” she said. “ETA fifteen minutes.”

  More people started coming out of the door in a panicked hurry. It went from a trickle to a flood tide in seconds. A couple of shots went off above our heads and Ramirez ran to the crowd to help steer them. I was about to join her when my smartphone rang. Recognizing the ringtone, I yelled, “Not a good time, Zian.”

  “Yeah, I know,” my friend said on the other end, the tip-tap of his fingers on some keyboard just audible. “Ditko Building’s under siege and it’s not your usual terrorists either.”

  “How do you even know about this?” I asked, waving stragglers from the crowd towards the evac area.

  “Got a 911 text from Kennedy,” Zian explained, his calm voice a counterpart to the frightened cries of the people around me. “Just hacked into the building’s security cams … looks like you’ve got between five and seven assailants inside. What I’m seeing on the cams tells me that this isn’t as random as it looks, Bell. All those people I’m hearing in the background are being herded outside.”

  “Why would they want everybody out of the building?” I asked.

  “Not everybody,” Zian corrected me. “There’s still a couple of people that our mystery assailants are chasing deeper into the Argo Nautilus offices: Kennedy and … some other guy.”

  “Describe him,” I said, already knowing who it was. A few quick words later confirmed my suspicions: Ian Townsend.

  By then Ramirez had noticed I was on the phone. I hung up as she came over.

  “Who was that?” she demanded.

  “Kennedy,” I lied. “She’s inside with Ian Townsend right now, cornered by our local terrorists.”

  “But why would—”

  “I don’t know and neither does she,” I said, using the truth to cover for me. “She had to hang up before I could get any more out of her. How much longer on that back-up?”

  Ramirez checked her phone. “Not soon enough. Sounds like at least a few of those cabrones are armed.” She pulled out her nine. “Going to back me up?”

  “All the way,” I affirmed as I pulled out my Sig.

  Ramirez stuck up a finger. “Just remember who’s in charge.”

  “Hey, didn’t I say it was your show?”

  ***

  One or two stragglers came out as we went in. Ramirez told them to join the others and we continued on our way. The whole place was as dead as a Russian civil rights meeting—nothing but deserted desks and empty spaces that echoed back our footsteps as we headed towards the stairs. I covered the door to the stairway while Ramirez opened it. All clear, except for some crashing noises higher up. She swept the corners, waving her pistol like a spotlight, then gave me the nod and we started going up the stairs. It was a spacious stairway, broad enough for two people to go up at the same time. We kept looking and aiming as we climbed the flights up to the fifth floor.

  We were just passing the third floor exit when the door from the stairs slammed open behind us. A guy in a three-piece suit who looked like he was in the middle of a PCP high ran at us screaming, “Thus forever for peasants who break!”

  As Ramirez and I swung our guns over to him, somebody dropped down on us from above, yelling similar insane nonsense.

  This second assailant landed smack on top of me, damn near causing me to crack my head on the stairs. I felt my bones protest as I slammed into the concrete. While I was thus dazed, my attacker—who I now saw was a woman in what had once been a classy pantsuit before it got a landfill makeover—jumped off me and went to help her partner fasten Ramirez in a squeeze play.

  Ramirez smashed her elbow into the crazed woman’s face a second before shooting the rep from the Barmy Business Bureau in the foot. The man howled as the nine mil hit home and Ramirez capped it off with a knee to his groin. Meanwhile, Psycho Sister had landed right next to me and I still had a hold of my gun. At that close a range, it was a simple business putting two bullets through her kneecaps.

  “Nice covering me,” Ramirez grumbled as she helped me up. As soon as I was on my feet, I put one more bullet through the uninjured foot of the male assailant.

  “The hell, Bell!” Ramirez exclaimed. “He was already down!”

  “And now he’ll stay down,” I told her.

  Ramirez gave me a disgusted sigh but went back to taking point on the stairs. I didn’t take my eyes off the fourth-floor entrance until we had gone up the next-to-last flight of stairs.

  I opened the door to the fifth floor very carefully. I could hear a lot of things being broken, along with the occasional insight like “Furry mocha is time to die!” But the only thing there to greet us was a corpse
.

  Ramirez stepped inside to examine the dead guy while I swept my Sig around the office spaces. I spotted a couple of the attackers turning the place over but nobody had noticed us yet.

  “Vale,” Ramirez whispered. Her tone told me that she wanted my eyes on the deceased. She took over standing guard while I looked him over.

  I pegged him as between forty and forty-five and his clothes were in the same disarray as our attackers on the stairwell. From the state of his clothes, he looked like he’d gone swimming in some toxic swamp. The cause of death was easy enough to spot. The blood that had spread over his gut was fresh and very red. It’d been a slow death.

  Then I saw two things that gave me pause. First, I found a duplicate for the Ogham sigil on Kennedy’s receipt drawn in ink on his forearm. Second, I found the necklace I’d given Kennedy clutched in his hand by the chain.

  “So … mean anything to you?” Ramirez hissed, her eyes and her gun waiting for the bad guys to figure out that we were there.

  “Kennedy was wearing this necklace the last time I saw her,” I said, pulling the chain free of the death grip.

  “Which was …?”

  “This morning.”

  Before Ramirez could respond we heard a flurry of gunshots, evidently an exchange of gunfire. They sounded like cannon booms but that was probably just the acoustics of the place. The noise was coming from one of the managers’ offices on the right.

  “How did these idiots get weapons into this building?” Ramirez asked as she started running towards the sound, with me right behind her.

  We heard a yelp as one of the shots got a little too close to a nearby desk. The pitch of the voice told me it was Ian Townsend, who was apparently trapped in his office. I looked to see where the shot had come from and made out three assailants firing handguns from behind desks at the far end of the office space. Closer to Townsend’s office someone was firing back at them with a handgun from behind another desk. A flash of blonde hair told me it was Kennedy.