Right to the Kill (Harmony Black Book 5)

by Craig Schaefer

  “Hey there, pal,” he said, taking a disaffected-IT-guy tone of voice and slouching back in his chair for extra effect. “It’s Tom Nelson, from the home office. Hey, I’m seeing that you guys haven’t installed the new patch on your Apache servers.”

  “I…didn’t hear about a patch,” said the confused voice on the other end.

  “Typical, they probably didn’t pass the memo down. Yeah, they’re rolling out the new XL-4 camera modules next month. I think you guys are…third on the upgrade list? You’ve got to have this update installed or they’ll just conk right out. I’ll tell you what, why don’t we get this fixed right now so you can get on with your day? I’m just going to need you to let me remote connect and mirror your screen…”

  * * *

  Harmony held out her wounded arm, her soggy and torn sleeve rolled up to her shoulder, while Neptune dabbed her cut with ointment.

  “Sorry,” Neptune said. “This probably hurts.”

  “Everything hurts. I’ll live.”

  “You have a lot of scars.” She reached for a bandage.

  “I fight a lot of monsters,” Harmony said.

  “I keep looking at that…thing.” Neptune shot a glance at the mermaid’s corpse. “It shouldn’t exist.”

  “Can’t argue with that.”

  “No.” Neptune’s eyes flashed as she looked back to Harmony. “I mean, anatomically. Look, marine biology is my life. This is my field. I know how animals fit their habitats, how they evolve…that thing isn’t biologically possible.”

  The Greek coin thrummed on its chain, an insistent hummingbird under the knot of Harmony’s tie.

  “It’s not from here,” she said.

  “Where, then?”

  Harmony listened to the silent phone line, waiting for Kevin to come back with results. Minutes were slipping by while Dominguez got farther and farther away. Then there was Neptune. She was in this now, too deep to turn back.

  “This isn’t the only Earth,” Harmony told her. “There are…there are a lot of Earths, okay? Parallel worlds. Some look just like ours, and some are…different. And a lot of them are dangerous.”

  “So how does a mermaid from a parallel world end up in Judah Cranston’s basement?” Neptune folded her arms. “Why does she end up in his basement? What was he doing with her?”

  “Those are all excellent questions, and I plan on asking him in person.”

  Kevin came back on the line. “I’m in. Back-doored myself into their network, and we’ve got full access.”

  “Good,” Harmony said. She looked to Neptune. “Which way did he go when he drove off?”

  Neptune closed her eyes, pointing her finger in the air and picturing the street.

  “He went…west.”

  “West from Parkland Estates,” Harmony told Kevin. “Get on the cameras and try to spot him.”

  It didn’t take long. Dominguez was driving reckless, and a camera had already flagged his license plate running a red light.

  “Got him heading westbound on West Kennedy Boulevard.”

  “I’m mobile,” Harmony said. She slapped a fresh magazine into her gun.

  “I’ll drive,” Neptune said.

  Harmony shook her head and reached for her jacket.

  “No. I want you to go home. Go home, lock your doors, and don’t talk to anyone from Nautilus Research. I’ll call you as soon as—”

  “Hey,” Neptune said. “You need to get your friend back. I live here. I know these streets, you don’t. One wrong turn and you could get lost. Trust me, I can drive.”

  “It’s going to be dangerous.”

  Neptune took her hand. Harmony blinked at her.

  “Did you mean what you said back there?” Neptune asked.

  “What part?”

  “That you fight monsters for…for people like me. To keep us safe.”

  “That’s why I do it,” Harmony said.

  Neptune squeezed her hand.

  “Then I guess I owed you, all this time, and never knew it. Let me pay you back. Just a little. Please.”

  Harmony looked into Neptune’s eyes, reading her intentions, making her choice. Seconds slipped away in the silence.

  “You do what I tell you, when I tell you,” Harmony said, “and you stay behind me at all times. Understood?”

  Neptune jangled her car keys. “Got it. Let’s go.”

  * * *

  Jessie’s muscles ached, a dull throb that slowly built as her cage rocked from side to side. She felt the trunk slide on something rough, back and forth, and listened to the sounds of traffic through the air holes Dominguez had drilled for her. Truck bed, she thought. Probably a pickup. Sunlight streamed through the tiny holes.

  She couldn’t kick with her knees balled up to her chest and feet flat against the wood. Couldn’t punch with her arms pressed to her sides. She breathed, slow, focusing on the shallow rise and fall of her chest. Losing her cool wasn’t going to help anything.

  When she closed her eyes, she heard her blood singing.

  The wolf was always inside her. Her constant companion. It wanted to come out. It wanted to come out and take over and shove her thinking parts deep down below, like an iceberg capsizing. It wanted to rip and tear and hurt and eat until it was full and then eat more just for the taste of it. The wolf didn’t like being kept in a box in her head. It didn’t like the skin it wore being kept in a box either.

  I know, she told it. She stroked its gray fur in her mind’s eye, to keep them both calm. But I can’t get the leverage to force this crate open, and if I frenzy in here, I don’t know what’ll happen.

  Sometimes, rarely, the wolf spoke back. A voice of winter frost that gusted up from her pounding heart to her ears.

  But you want to.

  Of course she wanted to. She always wanted to.

  * * *

  “Okay, so he passed the intersection at West Kennedy and South Howard,” Kevin said. “Another camera flagged him at South MacDill Avenue. He’s been running west in a dead sprint.”

  They were sprinting, too. Neptune’s Jetta tore down the boulevard, weaving in and out of slow-moving traffic, closing in on Dominguez’s trail.

  “Found him again. Another camera caught him at West Kennedy and South West Shore. He turned left. He’s southbound.”

  Neptune flicked her turn signal, glanced over her shoulder, and then veered left, crossing two lanes of traffic as a horn wailed behind her.

  “I know a shortcut,” she said, hands tight on the wheel.

  “What’s in that area?” Harmony asked her. “What’s it like?”

  “Beach Park, Culbreath Bayou, Stoney Point…it’s near the bay, mostly residential.”

  Kevin’s voice cut in. “We’re at the edge of the red-light camera network, boss. Those neighborhoods don’t have ’em. I’m looking for police cams, helicopters, anything I can use, but no promises.”

  Where are you going? Harmony thought. Dominguez had a destination. A purpose.

  “If he keeps going south,” she said, “is there any connection to the mainland?”

  Neptune’s brow furrowed. “One. He could take the bridge, cross on 92, and head toward St. Petersburg.”

  “But if he wanted to leave the state, that’s not the fastest way, right?”

  “Not remotely. If he wanted to leave, he should have taken a right turn fifteen minutes ago.”

  “Remember,” April said on the line, “Dominguez has had the same briefings as any other Vigilant agent. He knows who he’s dealing with.”

  Meaning Nadine. Harmony put herself in the traitor’s shoes, envisioning how she’d try to make this deal.

  “He’s not going to Nadine,” she said. “He’s read the threat profile. He knows there’s a good chance she’ll take him, too, and interrogate him for intel on Vigilant. And Nadine doesn’t do soft interrogations. Even better chance she just takes Jessie, puts her hands on him, and convinces him he doesn’t want to get paid.”

  “He’ll demand to make the
trade through intermediaries,” April said. “And on neutral ground.”

  Harmony flicked her gaze toward Neptune. “Are there any airports around besides Clearwater?”

  “TPA. It’s north of here.”

  He wasn’t going to the airport. No train lines nearby, and public transport was out of the question anyway: all Jessie had to do was start shouting and she’d draw attention. He needed private transport, isolated, where no one would hear Jessie scream.

  “The water,” Harmony said. “Head for the water. Nadine is sending a boat.”

  27.

  Dominguez parked his truck at the southern edge of an old marina. Seagulls squalled in a tangerine sky, early sunset painting the waters of Old Tampa Bay in oil-paint streaks. Sailboats coasted across the gentle waves and sails crackled in the hot summer wind.

  The docks were half-empty, everybody out at sea, and no civilians in sight. Just old wood and water under the glow of the dying sun. Dominguez dropped the pickup’s tailgate, hauled out the hand truck, and started wrestling the steamer trunk down.

  “Damn, Temple,” he grunted. “Ever think about going on a diet?”

  Her voice drifted from the air holes. “It’s mostly muscle.”

  There was something off about her voice. A faint, dreamy softness he hadn’t heard before.

  “You breathing okay in there? You die, I don’t get paid.”

  No response. He tipped the steamer trunk back onto the hand truck and slammed the tailgate.

  “Suit yourself,” he said.

  The hand truck’s wheels rattled on the slats of the dock. He dragged the trunk to the water’s edge, checked the time, and watched the horizon. It shouldn’t be long. Nadine said she had people in the area already. Dominguez idly wondered how hard it would be to get in touch with the local demonic court, and how much they’d pay for intel on Nadine’s spies. If he was going to burn bridges on his way to Xanadu, he might as well burn them all.

  He spotted movement on the horizon. A cigarette boat, coming in fast, churning white water in its wake. He raised his arms over his head in a slow and steady wave.

  * * *

  Kevin found Dominguez. Found the parked pickup, at least, a silver blur in the corner of a traffic helicopter’s eye. Neptune pulled in at the opposite end of the sparse parking lot. Harmony clicked her seatbelt off.

  “Stay here,” Harmony said.

  She threaded the slender tube of a sound suppressor onto her pistol.

  “I can help—”

  “Not with this,” Harmony said. “Stay here, keep your head down, and keep the engine running.”

  There were only a handful of cars in the lot, their bug-spattered grilles catching dust in the fading sunlight. She used them for cover, crouching as she ran from one to the next, closing in on the dock up ahead. She saw the traitor, the trunk at his feet, the boat cruising in to dock.

  The suppressor made her first shot sound like a slamming door. The bullet punched through the meat of Dominguez’s shoulder and spat an arc of dark ruby blood out over the water. He wheeled around and dropped low as he brought his pistol up, teeth clenched against the pain. Harmony hit the pavement as a bullet blasted out a car window, another chewing a pothole in the rust-flecked steel door. She came up running, sprinting sideways, firing off another couple of rounds. They went high, carving air.

  Dominguez was trapped between the gun and the deep blue sea. The cigarette boat banked hard, kicking up water while the pilot veered and poured on speed, turning away from the docks. His pickup wasn’t coming. He had less than a second to decide on his next move, all the time Harmony gave him as she lined up her next shot.

  He crouched, put his good shoulder to the side of the steamer trunk, and shoved it over the edge of the dock.

  * * *

  Jessie felt herself falling. A short stomach-plunging drop, and then a bone-jarring splash as the trunk hit the water. She sank, drifting downward, as jets of cold water poured through the air holes, splashing her face and soaking her hair. She tucked her chin, trying to keep her face from the spray, shoving her feet against the wood. The trunk was turning, tumbling in the bay, and there was already an inch of water sloshing around her shoes.

  She took deep breaths.

  * * *

  Dominguez broke and ran, clutching his wound while he sprinted away. He’d given Harmony a choice: take him down or save her partner.

  That wasn’t a choice at all. She didn’t hesitate, and the cold embraced her as she hit the water in a dive. The tail of her jacket billowed behind her and the tip of her necktie caressed her cheek as she swam, pushing down against the tide. Her eyes burned. She hunted in the murky gloom until she spotted the trunk, touching down silently in a bed of silt.

  Lungs searing, she puffed her cheeks and swam after it. The chest thumped, rocking, Jessie trying to fight her way out. The current tried to pull Harmony away and she grabbed hold of the padlock, hauling herself close.

  Shooting underwater was risky. Guns could fail, and water stole momentum like a thief. She pulled the padlock as far from the hasp as it would stretch, put her muzzle to the thick steel, and fired. The bullet crackled like distant, muffled thunder. The padlock bent, metal warping and cratered, but held fast. Her second try snapped the shackle in half. She ripped it from the hasp and the trunk’s lid gusted open. She grabbed Jessie’s hand. There was light above, faint and glittering bronze, and she kicked toward it with the last of her strength.

  * * *

  Harmony crawled onto the shore, coughing, rolling onto her back and staring bleary-eyed at the candy-colored sunset. Jessie fell on top of her. Eyes closed, their foreheads touching, the curl of Jessie’s fingers shaky against Harmony’s cheek.

  Jessie’s hand slid down, to Harmony’s throat. Feather-light, but twitching, half caress and half squeeze. Harmony could feel the chaotic energy lancing from Jessie’s heart, burning in her blood. The wolf wanted to come out, wanted to hunt, wanted to kill, and she was holding it back with every scrap of energy she could muster.

  “Hey,” Harmony said. “Hey. It’s okay. You’re safe. I’m here now. You’re safe.”

  Jessie’s eyes flicked open. The turquoise faded from white-hot to a soft, subdued glow.

  “I still don’t know how you do that,” Jessie murmured. “You’re the only one who can make it go quiet.”

  “Dominguez got away,” Harmony said.

  “He won’t get far. And when I find him, his box isn’t going to have any air holes.”

  They fell silent, lying still, catching their breath together.

  “Hey, Jessie?”

  “Yeah?”

  “You’re lying on top of me.”

  Jessie blinked. Her forehead gave Harmony’s a little nuzzle.

  “Right. Sorry.”

  She groaned as she got to her feet, then helped Harmony up. They headed for the parking lot.

  * * *

  Kevin met them back at Cranston’s house. They needed to crack the laboratory’s systems, fast. The stairwell down wasn’t wheelchair friendly, so they patched April in on speakerphone while he got to work.

  “I’m already in contact with the home office,” April said. “I presume you’ll be wanting a full crew of cleaners?”

  “With extra mops.” Jessie’s toe nudged the dead mermaid. “Well, at least we know bullets can kill these things. That’s a plus.”

  Neptune gave her a nervous look. “There are things bullets can’t kill?”

  Kevin nodded as he brushed past her, headed for Cranston’s terminal. “Psychotic ghost-clowns. It was only one time, though.”

  Harmony had her eyes on the centrifuge and the laptop beside it with a running countdown on the screen. The timer had passed the twenty-four-hour mark. Just under a day and Cranston’s concoction would be ready.

  “I want a surveillance team on the house,” Harmony said. “Cranston’s going to have to come back here to get his chemical weapon once it’s done cooking. For that matter, so is Doming
uez.”

  “Think he’ll try?” Jessie asked. “He has to know we’ll be here.”

  “I think if he knows what’s good for him, he’s halfway to Cuba by now. All the same, April? Keep an ear on the police band. I shot him in the shoulder. If he shows up at a hospital looking for help, they’ll call it in. It’s not likely; Dominguez is a trained combat medic, he can probably patch himself up, but he might be desperate.”

  “Done,” April said. “And the weapon?”

  “We need a biohazard specialist. I’m not touching this thing until we know exactly what we’re dealing with.”

  “I still can’t believe it,” Neptune said. “I worked with Judah for years. He was always so…nice.”

  Harmony inspected the open case on the table. It had to be the one he’d commissioned from Prometheus Chemical. Slots nestled between a snake’s nest of piping, waiting for the final concoction, ready to feed the gas to discreet vents along the sides of the device.

  Neptune stood beside her. She frowned. Her index finger tapped her pursed lips.

  “What did he say he was waiting for?”

  Harmony pointed to the timer. “According to Dominguez, Cranston has to finish synthesizing the formula.”

  “And it’s some kind of poison gas?”

  “A bioweapon. We don’t know the specifics, but this is the delivery mechanism.”

  Neptune shook her head. “But…that doesn’t make sense.”

  “How so?”

  Neptune loomed over the centrifuge, studying the white metal box from all sides as it rumbled and shivered.

  “For starters, this is a liquid centrifuge. Centrifugation is a process used to separate contents of a liquid, like separating blood cells from plasma. It’s basic physics: fill a centrifuge with water and sand, and the denser particles—the sand—will all be pulled to the bottom by the spinning motion.”

  “With you so far,” Harmony said.

  “It doesn’t change states. You can centrifuge a liquid forever and it’s not going to magically turn into a gas. You have to induce vaporization for that. Also, to make it an aerosol, you’d have to pressurize it; there isn’t any equipment here that could do that. On top of that, the centrifuge is broken.”