Deadworld

by J N Duncan

  “I’m sorry,” Jackie said, wiping at the tears streaming down her face. “I couldn’t help it. I’m sorry. Please, Laur, forgive me.”

  “Jackie!”

  She awoke finally, sitting bolt upright in the bed, the frightened scream dying as quickly as it had come out. The bedside lamp was still on. She had fallen asleep, lying there contemplating the inevitable conversation she would have to have with Nick. At the foot of the bed, shifting in and out of existence, was the gauzy shape of Laurel’s ghost.

  Jackie clutched the blanket up to her chest and swallowed the tight ball of fear back down. Her voice, despite the effort, was barely audible. “Laur.”

  Laurel smiled. Then her brow furrowed in concentration, and her image nearly faded out before growing brighter again. Her voice sounded like it came from the other end of a long corridor, hollow and distant. “Hi, hon. No time… talk.”

  They both turned as the bedroom door swung open. Nick poked his head in, and his eyes grew wide in surprise. “Well, hello, Ms. Carpenter.”

  “Shut up,” Jackie said in a harsh whisper.

  Nick stepped in and said nothing. Laurel turned so she could see both of them. “Drake… North Shore,” she said, bring her hands up to her temples. “Sorry… hard. Shelby on the way. Go.”

  “On the way?” Nick reached into his pocket for his cell, and it began to ring before he pulled it out. “Shel? What the hell… Yeah, she’s here now. Okay, I’m heading up now. I’ll call in a few.”

  Jackie stared in silence at Laurel. Her brain had shut off. No words came to mind. She tried to blink away the tears filling up her eyes. Laurel did not seem the raging spirit some part of her mind had envisioned when Shelby had told her she would show up again. It was just her. Laurel. Jackie’s friend. And working the case while she slept it away in some stranger’s bed.

  Laurel turned back to her as Nick pocketed the phone. She smiled. “Go… talk later.” She stepped forward into the bed, reaching out to Jackie, and then faded out completely.

  Jackie reached up to grab her hand and found nothing but an icy-cold breath of air in her grasp. She wiped at the tear that had spilled down her cheek. “Shit.”

  “I know you’ll shoot me if I leave you here, so let’s go.” Nick stood at the door, standing aside as though waiting for her to go ahead.

  She took a deep breath, letting it out in a rush, and swung her legs out of bed. “Give me a sec to throw clothes on.”

  He nodded. “I’ll have the car out front.”

  A minute later, Jackie stepped out into the cool, misty night air and found herself staring at the open door of a dark purple Porsche 911. The vampire cowboy drove a purple Porsche. She walked over to the driveway and got in, the leather bucket seat snuggling up behind her. “You drive a purple Porsche?”

  “It was my wife’s favorite color,” he said.

  “Why don’t you drive this thing all the time?”

  He shrugged. “Don’t generally need to.”

  “So when do you generally need it?”

  Nick backed out onto the road and gave her what she thought might actually be a sly look. “When I want to go really fast. Buckle up, Agent Rutledge.”

  She just managed to get the strap across her body when her head was forced back into the seat, and the Porsche launched down the road toward North Shore.

  Chapter 45

  Jackie stared straight ahead in silence while Nick had them weaving in and out of late-night freeway traffic doing about ninety. Gamble had everyone heading up into North Shore, but she knew it would be Shelby and Nick who found Drake. They just needed to be ready to pounce when they did.

  Worse, though, was Nick’s silence. It made her unable to focus. What was he thinking about earlier? No big deal? Who the hell is this slut? Why had Shelby not mentioned the side effects of whatever she had done? Unless of course she wanted the result. Presumptuous bitch.

  He downshifted onto an off ramp, slowing enough at a stoplight to make sure no traffic was coming, and turned the corner doing fifty. “About earlier,” he said.

  Great. Here we go. “Do we have to talk about it now?” Or ever?

  “No, but I just wanted to say you shouldn’t worry yourself over it. It was Shelby’s doing.”

  She looked over at Nick, his features calm, mood unruffled, weaving them through traffic like it was a Sunday drive in the country. Was he truly so unflappable? He had responded to her, hadn’t he? Sure, he had stopped, but there had been some response. Or was it that he didn’t want to be bothered with the possibilities of what had happened? He was going to let her cop out for him.

  “You don’t want to talk about it either, do you?”

  The phone rang, and Nick slowed to answer. “Anything? What? Already?” The car picked up speed. “Where? Wellington. Got it. We’re five minutes away.”

  “What’s going on?” Jackie grabbed the door handle to keep herself from slamming into Nick as he slid around a corner.

  “Drake’s got her already,” Nick replied, mouth set in a grim line.

  “What!” Jackie dug up her phone. “Where? I’ll call it in.”

  “One-ninety-first and Wellington, heading south on Wellington. Black Cadillac Escalade.”

  Jackie called up Gamble, who relayed the information out to everyone on patrol. “Maybe Laurel has him acting sooner than he wanted.”

  “Maybe, but I doubt it,” Nick said. “He’s had this planned for a long time, and we aren’t really off his timetable. We just may have lucked out. Laurel might have seen what he was doing from the other side. I don’t know. And no,” he added, “I don’t really want to talk about what happened earlier.”

  An unmarked car with a red flashing light on top went flying through an intersection, and Nick just missed clipping the rear bumper. Two lights farther down, he pulled a hard left, sliding onto the shoulder of the road. The Porsche fishtailed a bit getting back in line on the road.

  Jackie glared at him. “Not going to help much if we’re dead before we can catch Drake.” After Nick failed to say anything, she added, “Don’t want to talk about it for my sake or because the whack job of a federal agent turned you on?”

  He did look at her this time, and Jackie gave him an innocent, wide-eyed stare. “You aren’t a whack job, Jackie.”

  At the next intersection, a black SUV went sailing through, easily doing ninety to one hundred miles per hour. Right behind was a now very recognizable BMW motorcycle with a black-clad figure hunched low over its handlebars.

  “There they are!” She was going to point but found herself slammed up against Nick when he turned across into oncoming traffic, sliding into the opposite shoulder. For a moment, Jackie figured Nick was going to lose it. They slid a good fifty feet sideways, churning up grass and gravel, before he got it back in line with the road, cutting across the opposing lanes again to join the chase. They were two blocks behind already. “God, somebody is going to get killed at this speed.”

  “I imagine that’s his plan,” Nick said. “He’d lose us easily enough if he wanted to.”

  “Can you give us a little fucking credit, please? We aren’t amateurs around here, you know.”

  Nick gave her a sidelong look. “No, but you aren’t pros at chasing vampires either.”

  “Look out!” She cringed as three cars piled into each other at the intersection Drake and Shelby had just passed through.

  Nick geared down and turned down the street right before the accident. It was a residential street, and even at the late hour, Jackie could just see someone crossing a street while the Porsche came barreling through at eighty.

  “Where’re you going?” she wondered as they cut out to a main street, now six blocks off of where they had been.

  “Hitting the freeway on-ramp over here.”

  “You think he’s getting on the freeway?”

  “He was running out of road going the way he was, and the on-ramp there was six blocks away. I just hope I picked the right direction.”
<
br />   “Hope? You better know what you’re doing, Nick.”

  “Instinct,” he said. “He’s been messing with me long enough that I have a general sense of what he likes to do.”

  “And you think he’s going to head toward downtown instead of away?”

  He nodded, pulling them onto the on-ramp, building up speed. As they climbed up to the level of the freeway, the black Escalade went by, followed once again by Shelby. Nick was up to speed with them in a couple seconds, and just like that, they were right back on Drake.

  Jackie shook her head. “Okay, that was good.”

  Nick gave a little half shrug. “The kiss was better.”

  Huh? It took a second to register what he had said, and then she felt heat rising to her cheeks. For the moment at least, Nick had gotten the last word in.

  Chapter 46

  “Why would he be going downtown?” Jackie asked while she braced her feet against the floorboard and clung to the door handle to keep from flipping across into Nick’s lap. They were losing ground again on Shelby and Drake, who continued to pull corners at speeds defying physical laws. There had been four wrecks thus far, and more to come if the bastard was going to drive like that through the heart of Chicago’s downtown. Traffic there never really died down.

  “No idea. We never detected him over here, but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t have some other place arranged to keep the girl.”

  “We’ve got him tracked on air and ground now. He won’t be pulling a vanishing act this time,” Jackie said, but she didn’t sound sure even to herself. “Someone is going to get killed with this kind of chase. You should call off Shelby. Maybe that will slow him down.”

  “She won’t listen to me. You want to tell her?” A bus slammed its brakes as the Escalade and BMW turned a corner in front of it. Sparks went up from the motorcycle as some part of it scraped the asphalt. The bus continued its skid, and Nick was forced to swerve around behind it.

  “Goddamnit,” he said, barely muttering the words. He turned a one-eighty, facing the Porsche the other way, and sent it over the corner sidewalk, behind the light posts and in front of the doorway to a corner office building.

  “Fuck! You’re going to kill someone!” Jackie yelled at him.

  He slammed on the breaks a moment later, the car coming to a halt halfway down the block. “Don’t worry about my driving. I won’t hit anyone.”

  Jackie noticed a second later why Nick had come to a stop. “Where did they go?”

  She had no time to consider the options, however. The screeching sound of tires to their left answered the question. An alleyway in the middle of the block disappeared into blackness. The Porsche backed up to where they could see down the narrow street, and Jackie saw-just as Nick did-the looming specter of red eyes rushing at them from the darkness. He threw the car into reverse, gunning the engine, but the reaction came a split second too late as the Escalade bounced across the street and clipped the front of the Porsche, spinning it back around in the opposite direction. Nick swore under his breath and continued to back up, this time toward the escaping taillights of the SUV as it gunned off down the street once again.

  When he spun the car back around, Jackie watched the Escalade turn the next corner without the pursuing motorcycle. On top, clinging to the luggage rack of the Escalade, was Shelby’s black, leather-clad form.

  “Jesus. She’s on the fucking roof.” Jackie dialed up Gamble, but aerial recon had apparently already informed him. “I’m going to arrest her after this is done. She’s a damn civilian. She can’t do this shit.”

  “If anyone has a chance to break up his plan right now, it’s her,” Nick said and gunned the Porsche back down the street after them.

  The Escalade, two blocks ahead, turned short of the next intersection and disappeared from view. Nick slowed as he approached, and Jackie noticed that the last half of the block was comprised of a large multistoried parking structure. Above, a helicopter flew low overhead, and down at the intersection, four federal cars skidded to a halt to block passage.

  Jackie keyed in to Gamble again. “Hostage team on standby?”

  “They’re coming in,” he replied. “Fifteen minutes probably.”

  “Shit, Gamble. That better be enough.”

  “Let’s keep him busy then.”

  Jackie hung up. “Could this be some kind of trap?”

  “If you want out, say so right now,” Nick said quickly. “I’m going up there.”

  “Go,” she replied before thinking about it. The three seconds of conversation could have just blown their chance.

  The Porsche wheeled into the garage even as she said it, heading in and up the spiral ramp. Above, Jackie heard the sound of squealing tires. The Escalade was still going up. She clutched the door handle while Nick had the Porsche skidding its way up the levels. She wanted to get her gun out, but she was afraid to reach for it and lose her grip. After eight dizzying circles, Nick launched out onto the upper deck and brought the car to a sliding stop.

  Halfway across the upper lot, the Escalade stood for a moment in the pale light of an overhead lamp. She noticed the back window had been knocked out. Where was Shelby? An instant later, two flashes went off inside the Escalade in quick succession. Jackie’s heart jumped a beat before she opened the door. Nick opened the glove box and pulled out a gun very similar to her own. He stepped out, crouching behind the protection of the front of the car. Jackie climbed over the driver seat and got out next to Nick, just in time to hear the tires screeching once again.

  “Damnit!”

  “Tires,” Nick said, taking aim with his pistol braced across the top of the hood. “Shoot for the tires.”

  “There’s a little girl in there, you idiot.” She kicked at Nick, whose first shot went firing harmlessly off into the night sky. “What are…?” Her voice trailed off when she realized why Nick was shooting.

  The Escalade did not turn around. It didn’t turn at all. It just kept going, accelerating until it hit the concrete barrier another fifty yards away at the far end of the lot. It had to be going forty by then, maybe more, but that small detail was lost on Jackie as she watched the concrete wall explode outward in a shower of rock and rebar.

  For a moment, it hung there, suspended on the edge of nothing, and Jackie began to run, not truly believing what she was seeing. Then the SUV tipped forward, its back end swinging up toward the sky, and it dropped toward the street below.

  Chapter 47

  Nick let his head slump forward until his forehead rested on the warm hood of his car. The air shook a moment later with the thunderous boom of the Escalade exploding in the street below. He let out a long, slow sigh. “Shit.”

  Drake and Shelby were gone. He could no longer feel their presence in this world. Drake no doubt had popped back over to the other side before impact. Shelby and the girl, on the other hand… Why? Why kill the little girl? It made no sense. He would have wanted to drain her, show Nick the body, and drag him through the end like a long, torturous fingernail pull. Had they really ruined whatever plans Drake had? The whole chase seemed too contrived, too over the top. It had to be a show. So what had happened?

  Nick looked up and watched Jackie finish her walk to the edge of the parking platform. She thrust her hands into her pockets, looking down. She looked back toward him for a moment and then back toward the street. Don’t worry, Jackie. That should be the last bit of death bloodying these old hands.

  The sound of squealing tires came up behind, and Nick stood up, putting his gun into his pocket. One of the cars stopped beside him while the other cruised on toward Jackie. Nick didn’t bother to look at who stepped out of the car, but he recognized the voice.

  “Hey,” Gamble said. “Nick?”

  “What?” His voice came out low and harsh. He was not in the mood to discuss anything. “Need a statement or something?”

  “No. Just making sure everything was okay up here.”

  Nick turned and glared down at Gamble, who sh
runk back away from his car window. “Peachy. Unless you need me to make one, think I’m going to go home.”

  “I’ll call you if we need you to come in,” Gamble said. “Jackie all right?”

  “She’ll be okay. Don’t be surprised if Drake’s body isn’t down there.”

  “What?”

  “He’ll have vanished like before. I’m almost positive.”

  “So he’s still out there somewhere?”

  Nick shrugged. “Somewhere.” He opened the door to his car and sat down in the seat. The air had become particularly heavy. “I’ll be at home. You have my number.”

  “Um, okay,” Gamble said, unsure. “I’ll let you know what’s going on later.”

  Nick started up the Porsche and eased it down the exit ramp. He felt a desperate urge to get away. He needed to break something, destroy it into a million little pieces. Then again, did it really matter? Another day or two, and he was going to be dead anyway.

  A final glance into the rearview mirror showed the two fed cars on either side of Jackie, who stood with her small fists balled up on her hips watching his car vanish down the exit-ramp tunnel.

  Chapter 48

  She watched the red taillights of Nick’s Porsche vanish into the exit tunnel. “Where the hell is he going?”

  “Didn’t want to stay,” Gamble said. “He sounded a little bit pissed, and to be honest, I really don’t want to fuck with that guy. We can call him later for a statement.”

  Jackie glared at Gamble. “Fucking wimp. His best friend is buried down there in that pile of metal, and he’s just going to leave.”

  Gamble shrugged. “I wouldn’t blame him, Jack. Who wants a last memory like that?”

  “You know what? Be on my side for a change here.” Gamble was right, but still. It was wrong to leave. How could Nick just leave?

  “Okay. So go over there later and kick his ass. Get a statement for me while you’re at it. It’ll save me some time.”