Into the Shadows

by Carolyn Crane

  Hack looked at Thorne as though he was crazy. Thorne shut the door. A piece of truth was all he had to give; it was far more than he would have given before.

  Stealthily he moved down the stairs, alone, outnumbered, and hated.

  Relieved to be back in his comfort zone.

  The strangeness of a potential ally had really put him off his game. Trusting and making allies—he’d work on that later. He got into the environmental controls, killed the lights, and shut down the panel. The house was black as night.

  He didn’t give himself great odds in this fight—he wasn’t invincible, and Jerrod wouldn’t be moving on him if he didn’t have an unfair advantage. It could be technological—gas or sound. Or maybe they’d do a slow siege. Isolate him, and then hit him with something.

  He set up a few sound traps around the arched openings of various rooms. Seemingly endless stretches of silence were punctuated by creaks from above and the occasional crack from below. Trying to get at him from the lower level and the roof. Good luck. The lower level was reinforced with steel, thanks to Victor’s paranoia. And the roof was so locked down, they’d never get in without power tools. Even with tools, it would take at least an hour to get in.

  At two in the morning, the power tools started up. They’d succeed now, but the noise provided cover to set up more booby traps—hurting ones. What’s more, nobody in the neighborhood would say boo about power tools running. The neighbors were that far away.

  Thorne felt increasingly tormented by his inability to trust Hack, to accept him as an ally. Yes, Thorne fought better alone, but alone was what Jerrod was expecting. Why couldn’t he do it?

  He couldn’t stop worrying about Nadia, either. His history with Nadia was secret, but Skooge had observed them together. Skooge could tell his idol, Miguel the executioner, who would go right to Jerrod.

  What if they grabbed Nadia to draw him out?

  That would be his nightmare scenario.

  Nadia and her little boy, he amended. She wouldn’t be separated from that kid—she had a protective streak a mile wide when it came to that kid; he could tell from the way she’d picked him up in the hallway. She’d cling so tenaciously to the people who were important to her. Hell, she’d used to defend her father to the ends of the earth, even at his scummiest.

  He was glad she’d found a photo of her mom. She’d wanted so desperately just to see her mother’s face.

  He dialed her number. “Nadia,” he whispered. “If you don’t hear from me, you need to assume this house isn’t clear, okay? And you stick close by Richard.” He paused and considered giving her something real. He’d given Hack something real—a piece of truth—and the world hadn’t imploded. It actually felt okay.

  What if he told Nadia he loved her?

  He could die now—he really could. He’d take out Jerrod, no question about that, but he could die after.

  “Nadia.” He shut his eyes. She’d never wanted his love, but she had it all the same. With Nadia, he’d felt love for the first time since he’d gotten his sister killed.

  Tell her.

  But somehow, the prospect of going up against a dozen of the toughest fighters on the planet scared him less than saying three stupid words to Nadia. He considered blurting them out, just forcing his mouth to say it, but it would be a lie, forced like that. He wanted to tell her from his heart, not from his mind—or as an exercise in cutting through resistance. “Nadia,” he breathed. “Nadia…” Then he clicked off.

  Well, that would be a hell of a message. Tools droned on from above.

  He made the next call. “Dax,” he whispered.

  “Thorne. I’m here.”

  More sounds. The west side of the house. Thorne listened. Dax would wait until he was ready to say something. He’d caught Dax up on things before he’d arrived.

  Thorne closed his eyes. “I’m about to have a house full of Hangman coming after me. We haven’t found the CD, but we’ve only been in one room for it.”

  “We? Are the other guys with you? Are they standing with you?”

  “No. One guy who offered to help, but…”

  “Yeah? An ally? Can you trust him?”

  Thorne hesitated. Sighed. “I don’t know.”

  “What did he say?”

  “He wanted to stand with me.”

  “And?” Dax tried.

  “I tied him up in the safe room.”

  “What? If Hangman’s coming after you, they’re coming after you dirty,” Dax said. “They expect you to be alone. An ally would be an element of surprise.”

  “I know.”

  “Thorne. You have to trust somebody sometime,” Dax said.

  “I know.”

  Silence. As though Dax knew it wasn’t any use to tell him to trust. Then, “One hour, and I could have guys roping down. You’re not without brothers.”

  Yeah. Nothing would blow his cover faster than Associates coming to the rescue. “Guys roping down from helicopters,” Thorne whispered. “I’m not some pussy operative.”

  Dax sighed.

  “You want me to take this outfit over, or not?” Thorne asked, moving into the shadows. “This is how I work.”

  “Okay,” Dax said. Dax got things.

  Thorne semi-trusted Dax only because Dax had shared information about himself and his work that Thorne could use against him—if he chose to. The man had made himself vulnerable as a way of gaining trust. It was extreme, but then, Dax was extreme. Thorne liked that.

  A creak on the far back stairs.

  Game on.

  Thorne went over to the fireplace mantel and set the photo of Nadia, Kara, and Benny facedown, sliding it to the side. He didn’t want Hangman guys even looking at them. “I come out right, or I don’t come out at all.”

  “So take them down,” Dax said.

  He gazed up at the vaulted ceiling, at the massive, Western-style wrought iron chandelier that hung way high at the center of it.

  He climbed onto the top of a nearby hutch and leaped upward, grabbing on to the light fixture. He swung wildly back and forth as he pulled himself up onto the top of it. Then he tucked his legs and head, so that he looked symmetrical. The swinging stilled.

  He could jump down on them if they spotted him.

  Jumping down from the ceiling tended to be a bit Ninja-flash for his tastes, but never doing something—for whatever reason—was a form of rigidity. Rules and rigidity had no place in a fighter’s world. This, too, he had gotten from Bruce Lee.

  “What’s happening?” Dax asked.

  “Getting into a perch,” Thorne whispered. “I’m going to fuck them up, stow them all in the safe room, and then I’m going to search this place on my own until I clear my name.”

  Dax said nothing. He never said all he was thinking.

  But Dax was right. Hangman wouldn’t be coming after him if they didn’t think they could take him.

  Footsteps.

  “It’s a nice day for a fight,” Thorne said. He waited, holding his breath.

  This was the first part of the Associates’ “all-clear” secret handshake. Dax told him about it once, and Thorne had been intrigued by it: one guy would say, Nice something for something, and then the other would reply, Clears the mind. When both parts were said, they formed a verbal all-clear signal.

  He’d never actually done it as a proper exchange, and he had always wanted to.

  It’s not that he wanted to be alone. Well, he did, but he didn’t. He was fucked up that way.

  A beat, then, “Clears the mind.”

  A click. Dax was gone.

  “Thank you,” Thorne whispered to his shadow brother in the dark.

  Chapter Eight

  Zelda sat in front of her laptop, fingers poised, but she’d been listening to the call, which Dax had put on speaker. They were in an overnight work session at his place, overlooking Central Park. Almost three in the morning, but she’d thought it best to switch them both from scotch to coffee and bagels. She’d quickly lost h
er appetite, hearing Thorne in trouble.

  Dax had a soft spot for Thorne. He had a soft spot for the really fucked up Associates.

  She had a soft spot for Thorne, too, but more on a strategic level. She’d identified him back in her CIA days, coming up in the Hmong gangs, of all things.

  Dax clicked off the call.

  Zelda raised her eyebrows.

  “I don’t know,” Dax said in response to her unvoiced request for his opinion. “Jerrod’s not stupid. He wouldn’t go after Thorne unless he thought he could win.”

  “But you didn’t really press him on sending backup.”

  “He wouldn’t have accepted. Telling a guy who’s determined to fight a battle on his own that he doesn’t have to fight it on his own, or that he shouldn’t, is not helpful to him in the moment.”

  Zelda adjusted her glasses.

  “I don’t want to lose him,” Dax said.

  “Then believe in him,” she said.

  But Dax had that dark look, like when he was seeing the truly dire cascades of cause and effect.

  Dax could hold an encyclopedia’s worth of facts and scenarios in his mind and see ahead to the hundreds of ways they might play out, like a turbocharged chess player. His foresight could seem magical at times, but there was nothing magical about it; he was just that smart.

  And he wasn’t seeing a good outcome for Thorne—that much was obvious.

  Dax had been one of Zelda’s sources when she’d worked at the CIA. He’d started with small things: anonymous calls suggesting that so-and-so would be shot, or that a certain diplomat’s child would be kidnapped. His stuff had always panned out—so much so that he became a person of interest in connection with the crimes he was predicting. She had suspected him, too, until he called telling her that fishing boats congregating in a certain isthmus between China and Japan would lead to a flash conflict that would spark a nuclear exchange. He had suggested a simple measure to redirect the outcome, but nobody had taken him seriously.

  Except Zelda. She heeded his suggestion. The flash conflict happened, and it got redirected.

  It was then that she saw what Dax truly was—a man who understood cause and effect on a level that other people didn’t. After a few more such incidents—a few where his advice had gone sadly unheeded—she left the agency to start the Associates with him.

  Zelda knew about managing spies. She knew what it was like to be in danger out in the field—she’d been a field operative for seven years before the CIA desk gig, and she had worked some of the most extreme cases.

  She’d never planned to work as an agent in the field—she’d originally joined the agency as a forensic botanist, in charge of analyzing the leaves, seeds, and pollen at crime scenes. Zelda loved plants; she knew how to look at them, how to listen to them. The plants spoke to her. Especially leaves. Zelda was a leaf woman.

  It wasn’t until her forensic team was attacked and chased in a hostile region that her higher ups came to understand that their botantist had serious field smarts and nerves of steel.

  They started bringing her in on live cases that had nothing to do with botany, and the ease with which she’d taken to spycraft surprised everybody.

  None more than her.

  She spent seven glorious years in the field, a rising star. She’d felt like she’d found her calling. Until the night her mindset got blown.

  Yeah, Zelda knew all about blown mindsets. Once your mindset was blown, your spying days were done. That’s how she’d ended up behind a CIA desk, with the occasional foray back into botany. She came across Dax after that, and they’d started the Associates soon after.

  The Associates were a private force for good—however the hell she and Dax cared to define good.

  “It’s been so nice to have Thorne on board,” she said. “He’s talented as hell.”

  Dax slathered cream cheese on a bagel.

  She wanted to know what Dax saw, yet she didn’t.

  She and Dax had been trying forever to get an Associate inside one of the Southeastern gangs, somebody who could climb up high enough to take one over; that was the only way to get the names of the corrupt government officials protecting those gangs. Only the gang leaders had contact with the high-level officials.

  The protection was effective and powerful, making it impossible to destroy some very heinous criminal operations. The protection was coming out of the FBI, the ATF, and possibly even the judicial branch.

  Zelda and Dax had identified Jerrod as the easiest of the Southeast leaders to topple. They’d had an Associate climbing the Hangman ranks, but he’d been outed and killed.

  Slowly.

  They learned it too late to help.

  After that, Zelda and Dax had done deep checking on other candidates already in the life to see who they could control; they noticed Thorne at that point. They quickly put together what he was after…or more, who he was after: Jerrod, the last surviving member of the group who’d killed Thorne’s sister.

  Lucky for Dax and Zelda that Thorne didn’t recognize Jerrod at the time. Jerrod was hidden from the world in plain sight, thanks to plastic surgery and a name change.

  So they made the deal—they would give Thorne the identity of the last of the Slater brothers who’d been involved in his sister’s killing, but he couldn’t just go out and kill Jerrod; in exchange for the information, Thorne had to promise to do what it took to take over Hangman for them. Which meant letting Jerrod stay alive as he climbed the ranks. Even when he reached Hangman Two, he couldn’t just kill Jerrod; Hangman’s rules of succession were as tangled and arcane as the gang itself, but there were ways.

  Weapons, money laundering, human trafficking—once Thorne headed up Hangman, they would get the people shielding the perpetrators.

  They were so close now. If only Thorne could stay alive.

  “Tell me,” she said, finally.

  “He can’t take down a dozen Hangman playing dirty,” Dax said. “And he won’t kill them, that’s the thing. He’ll try to take them out of commission first, because he’s got his eye on leading. Much harder way to go. The man wants to keep his word.”

  “Even in a fight to the death?”

  “Oh, yes.” The emotion in his voice cut her.

  She swallowed. And he’d tied up his one ally. An ally could’ve made the difference. Jerrod wouldn’t be expecting an ally.

  Dax broke his bagel apart. “He’s so fucking bereft. I wanted to tell him he’s worth more to me than taking over Hangman. I wanted to tell him he’s one of the most tenacious Associates I’ve known. But I’d lose his trust if I told him that. Assuming he comes out alive.”

  “What about his abilities?”

  Dax scrubbed his face. She hated that hopeless look he sometimes got.

  “What?” she pressed. “You said Thorne had the most amazing fighting abilities you’ve ever seen, and they’re almost entirely unrealized. Maybe this is where he realizes them, where he pulls them out. Where he steps up a level.”

  “He can’t be that great fighter until he’s emotionally whole. Until he learns to trust.”

  She looked at her coffee. She knew that Dax saw himself in Thorne. Amazing abilities. Emotional basket case. Did Dax even realize it? “Well, there’s always a chance, isn’t there?” she said. “A ghost in the machine.”

  Dax grunted and tore into the bagel. One of his all-purpose grunts meaning maybe yes, maybe no. “It’ll need to be some fucking ghost.”

  Chapter Nine

  Baypointe Industrial Park. Nadia crouched in the dark behind the boulder that sat to the right of Rendall Industries’ front door. She had Arty out and ready. It was just after three in the morning.

  They had two vehicles hidden on the side—the hired guys’ souped-up truck for hauling loot, and a van. If things went well, the mercenaries would leave in the truck, and she and Richard would take the women in the van.

  The noisy whop-whop of a helicopter sounded in the distance—probably a traffic pileup. Something
for the morning news.

  Her phone vibrated, meaning that the guys had breached the place. She checked her watch. It would be between two and five minutes until a guard came running out; that’s what Richard had estimated from the floor plan on this one. They were entering through the skylights this time. Shaking things up.

  The hired guns had been up for hitting this co-op a night early. Richard had caught Gold just before he was about to smoke a lot of pot—after which, he’d assured them, he wouldn’t have been worth shit for a raid.

  They’d been watching all the co-ops for weeks. They had a plan for each one. The guys liked the idea that it was so soon—less time for the Quartet gangs to arrange alternate storage venues, meaning better looting.

  “Maybe this time,” Gold had said. Meaning, finding her mother.

  Nadia would recognize her mother, of course, but she had this secret hope that her mother would recognize her, even without the proof of her birthmark.

  She’d looked into Benny’s eyes enough in the first days after his birth that she felt she’d recognize him across time.

  She’d hired a Russian tutor from Craigslist so that she could communicate with her mother. They met once a week, and though Nadia wasn’t much good at languages, she was learning. She sometimes taught Benny Russian words. She had a room for her mother ready at the mansion and an immigration lawyer ready to go. She would find a way to make up for everything.

  She sucked in a breath, watching the moths swirl in the glow of the light next to the door.

  Richard hadn’t known about the sweatshops—he’d assured her of that right at the beginning. He’d heard the rumors over the years, but he’d thought that’s all they were. Richard drew the line at that sort of thing. A lot of the guys did. Probably why Victor had kept that part of his business so secret.

  She and Richard had used the CD to determine that there were seven major sweatshops in Florida and Louisiana. Together they figured out about the movement of goods through her father’s networks. Everything was on that spreadsheet program. They could bribe just one low-level clerk deep in the New Tong’s network for one simple arrival date, plug it into the central spreadsheet, and see the route the drugs would take from there. They could do the same with money and guns. By triangulating, they could figure out which co-op would be the fullest when. The way Victor had it set up was kind of magical.