Redemption Alley jk-3

by Lilith Saintcrow

  “What am I supposed to do?” He dragged me further into the alley, swearing under his breath. “Jesus Christ. Who wants you dead this bad, Jill?”

  “How the hell should I know? It’s someone different every fucking week.” I had to suck in breath, burning muscles starved for oxygen and complaining.

  Shadows moved at the mouth of the alley. Theron pulled me behind a dumpster and shoved me down. We both crouched there, my ribs flickering with deep hard breaths and the hot explosive reek of garbage climbing down my throat. “Where are we?”

  “Shush.” He waved a hand and cocked his head, a cat’s inquiring movement. His eyes glowed orange, swords of sunlight piercing the high blank wall of a ratty old tenement across the alley. There were still screams and spatters of gunfire and a low harsh tearing sound—my car, burning.

  Oh, my God, I swear I am going to kill whoever is responsible for this. I softened my breathing, drawing silence over myself. More movement at the mouth of the alley. A fire-escape jagged up on our side further back, but it looked rickety and rusted; both of us were probably too heavy for it. It’s the price you pay for heavier muscle and bone—less vulnerability, but more mass in the ass.

  Still, if they come through we’ll either have to kill or flee. There’s no third option, we can’t vanish here. And it’s the middle of the goddamn day.

  Quick liquid streams of Spanish, tossed back and forth. I listened hard. “Acqui?” someone asked.

  “Nada, ese. Caray.”

  More voices. Men’s voices, and the piping of boys. Their heartbeats were so high and fast I heard them even though the cuff half-blinded the scar. I smelled them—sweat, cordite, beer, and grease, along with the deep brunet scent of dark-haired men.

  Theron’s hand tightened on my shoulder. My hand had curled around a gun butt.

  My car. Goddammit.

  Then it came, at the tail end of a string of expletives. “You better tell el pendejo gordo. He said you had to see the body.”

  My skin chilled. Think, Jill. Think.

  Someone asking for kill verification was someone serious about murdering me. And el pendejo has two meanings.

  One is fool, or stupid idiot. A looser translation is son-of-a-bitch.

  Not very PC, you know. Because the other meaning, in Santa Luz, is cop.

  Chapter Sixteen

  The blue Chevy Caprice smelled of sourness. It was clean enough, despite the bottle of bourbon shoved under the passenger’s seat and the funk of burned and mashed cigars. It was hot, but the heat was bleeding away as the sun retreated and shade fell over the parking lot.

  He parks out here because it’s the only time he gets alone. The insight was unwelcome. I lay in the back seat, still and quiet as a stone. Of course I was pretty much in plain sight, except for the thin thread of sorcery running through my aura. Complete invisibility is expensive, energetically speaking. It’s much easier, and cheaper, to simply avert the gaze. To hook onto that quality of the repeatable in the physical world that lulls most people into sleepwalking.

  It makes them good prey. Even cops, who notice more than most.

  Dappled shade from a tall anemic pine tree clinging to life at the edge of the lot fell over the car, yet another reason for him to park here.

  I waited.

  Shift change swirled through the lot, snatches of conversation, car doors slamming, engines rousing. My quarry opened the driver’s door and dropped in, pushing his battered briefcase carefully over into the passenger’s side. I waited until he buckled his seatbelt and sighed, reaching over for the bottle tucked under the folded newspaper in the passenger-side footwell.

  I curled up into a sitting position, glad for the liquid shadows. I clapped a hand over Montaigne’s mouth and poked the gun into his ribs. “Drive. Take your usual route home.”

  I was sorry about the gun. But I had to make sure. Completely sure.

  His eyes got really, really wide. But he didn’t question me—just twisted the key to grind the starter, got the Caprice running, and pulled forward through an empty spot, taking a right and sliding through pools of orange as the lamps in the lot tried ineffectually to light the gathering dusk. Once I was sure he wasn’t going to yell, I eased my hand away from his stubble.

  Monty kept quiet, but sweat dewed the back of his neck. His tie was loosened and his jacket rumpled. He was still chewing a mouthful of Tums, a chalky undernote to his tang of heavy maleness, not at all clean and musky like a Were’s smell.

  We hit Balanciaga Avenue from the lot, and he began to work his way toward the residential section. He still didn’t ask any questions.

  I decided it was time. “Someone’s been trying to kill me, Monty. Someone not on the nightside, someone who doesn’t know you need special bullets and a lot of luck to take me down. A real execution-style hit uptown, and then just today a whole bunch of gangbangers took exception to me and started talking about cops wanting kill verification on my sweet little behind.” I kept the gun steady. “You want to tell me why you wanted me to look into Marv’s death so much?”

  “Jesus.” He was still sweating, and it smelled sour. “Put that thing away, Jill.”

  I wish I could, Monty. “Not a chance, not yet.” I paused as his eyes flicked up to the rearview mirror, then cut longingly over at the passenger side. “Bourbon in the car, Montaigne? What the hell is going on with you?” Leather creaked now as I shifted my weight, he was keeping nicely to the speed limit.

  Drinking in the front seat on the way home from work is a Very Bad Sign.

  Score one for him, he sounded dry and academic. “It’s the stress of putting up with you, goddammit. Your car was reported firebombed in the fucking barrio. They’re whispering you’re dead. Everyone’s nervous.”

  “Well, as far as the Santa Luz PD is concerned, I’m going to stay dead. You’re not going to tell anyone you saw me. But before I go deep and silent to flush this one out, Monty, you’re going to level with me.” I took a deep breath. “You knew Kutchner was dirty.”

  More sweat beaded up on Monty’s neck. He leaned forward—slowly, slowly—and flipped a switch. Hot wind blasted into the interior—the engine hadn’t been on long enough for the air conditioning to do much. “It didn’t feel right. I just suspected something, I didn’t know what. Goddammit, he was my partner.”

  You must have done a lot more than suspected, Montaigne. What, you think I’m stupid? “His widow’s dead and so is Winchell. And so is Pedro Ayala. How many other cops are dead, Monty? Was I supposed to end up one of them?”

  “Ayala? What the fuck?” Monty sounded baffled. But he was sweating.

  But it was hot as hell in the car. What precisely did I suspect?

  Not much. Except who else would know where I was likely to be, if not my primary contact on the force?

  And the whole betting pool, who would be tracking hunter sightings. I didn’t bother hiding from the police; they were my allies.

  Or at least, most of them were. It looked like not all of them felt the same way. “Ayala over in Vice. Got himself taken down a bit ago, shot on gang territory—but it wasn’t a gang hit, it was because he uncovered something.” I slid the gun into its holster, he wasn’t going to do anything silly now. “Listen to me, Monty. You need to keep your head down and stay away from all of this. I don’t want you catching any flak. Who did you tell?”

  “Tell?”

  “That you’d called me in on the Kutchner case. Who did you tell? Anyone?”

  He took a hard right on Seventeenth, still driving like a prissy old maid. “Not a fucking soul, Kismet. Jesus, you think I’m stupid?” His eyes flicked up to mine in the rearview, returned to the road. Traffic was light. “How big is this?”

  “You’ve got some suspicions, don’t you. You did from the start. Goddammit, Monty, you should have told me. I don’t like to go into something like this with my ass hanging out.”

  He looked just the same—an aging fat man, with haunted eyes and a stained tie. “So Marv was dir
ty? How dirty?”

  When I didn’t answer, he stared at the road. After a few tense seconds he slammed his palm on the steering wheel and let out a string of curses, finishing with, “And I didn’t have a fucking clue, Jill. I woulda told you, for fuck’s sweet fucking sake!”

  Christ. Monty had never held back on me before, I didn’t think he had it in him. Still, I had to be sure. If there’s one thing I hate, it’s someone supposedly on my side sitting on the information I need to pursue a case. I still hadn’t forgiven Father Gui over at Sacred Grace for that episode with the wendigo and the firestrike spear, and I wasn’t sure I ever would.

  I wasn’t sure I should, either.

  “I know. But something here stinks.” Who would guess you’d ask me to look into the Kutchner suicide? Or was it showing up at the widow’s house that did it, I wonder? Jesus, twenty people must have seen me there. I stared thoughtfully through the windshield as cold air spilled through the vents. The car rapidly became more comfortable, but didn’t smell any better. “You can go ahead and smoke if you want to.”

  “Gee, thanks.” But he pulled a Swisher Sweet from his breast pocket and champed, lighting it while he steered with one hand. I glanced away from the flash of the lighter, a star in the darkness. Orange streetlight bounced off the road’s hard paleness. He rolled his window down a little and exhaled oddly scented smoke.

  I suddenly, completely, missed Saul like there was a hole in my chest. Again. It was like missing a hand, or a leg. I’d grown so used to working with him, having his quiet presence clear up any mess in my head.

  “So you think I should leave this alone?” Monty sounded uncharacteristically uncertain.

  No shit, Batman. “Let me put it this way. I don’t want to avenge you too. I like you breathing.”

  “That bad?”

  I let the silence answer him.

  “How dirty was he?” He braked, we were fast approaching a stop sign at Tewberry and Twenty-Eighth. I coiled myself for action.

  “Don’t worry about that, Monty. Worry about keeping out of this. Don’t go anywhere alone. Be careful. And for God’s sake don’t tell anyone I’m still alive.”

  “That’s going to be rough. What if someone else shows up missing on the east side?”

  That’s more likely than you can possibly know. I wish we knew we’d gotten all the scurf. “Don’t worry about me doing my job. You just keep yourself out of trouble.” The car rolled to a stop, I hit the door, and was gone before he could even curse at me. I watched his taillights vanish from the roof of a convenient apartment building and hoped like hell he wouldn’t do anything silly.

  Theron was waiting in the darkened doorway of a bakery, doing the little Were camouflage trick. If my blue eye hadn’t been able to look under the surface of the world, I would have had to depend on the thin thread of wrong touching my nerves, and really looked to see him. I also would have had a gun out while I did it.

  Theron’s eyes fired orange in the gloom, like and unlike the streetlamps. “Is he clean?”

  “Squeaky.” Or if he isn’t, I haven’t given him anything to go on other than I’m alive—and if word gets out I’m still breathing, I’ll know where it came from. “He suspected something was wrong, that’s all. Intuition still happens.”

  The Were shrugged. My back prickled—other Weres were still out running sweeps, but they hadn’t found any trace of scurf.

  Yet.

  And I’d lost a full day.

  It was enough to turn anyone into a pessimist.

  “What next?” He moved restlessly.

  “You stop by Galina’s and pick up some ammo for me, drop by the barrio and squeeze your gang friends for the word on why a cop would want me dead, and I’m going home to change clothes.”

  Predictably, he decided to argue. “Like I’m going to let you out of my sight.”

  This isn’t negotiable. I need a few minutes to myself and some hard thinking. “Everyone thinks I’m dead, Theron. There aren’t many cops who know the amount of damage I can really take, or what it would take to kill me. Nobody is going to be looking for me just yet. Besides, the longer you wait to go talk to your friends in the barrio, the more chance they’ll ‘forget’ something.” If you were Saul we wouldn’t be having this conversation; you’d be doing what I told you. Goddammit. I rolled my shoulders in their sockets, a habitual movement easing muscle strain.

  “I don’t like it. I promised Saul I’d look out for you.”

  “I’m just going home, Theron. I promise not to talk to strangers and to look both ways before crossing the street.” I stepped out of the doorway, smoke taunting my nose. It drifted up from my coat, the smell of burning vinyl, cooked leather, and gasoline.

  What a reek. I’m never going to be able to wash it out.

  The Were shrugged. “You’d better,” he muttered darkly, before easing out of the shadows himself and taking a few steps in the opposite direction. Then he gathered himself and blurred, running with fluid finicky feline grace.

  I strangled the urge to get the last word in. It would take me about a half-hour to get home, longer if I had to wait for a cab. I might as well use my own share of preternatural speed.

  What I hadn’t said hung in the air. Hunters depend on the police, they are our eyes and ears. What we do is law enforcement, in its strictest sense. And as Carp had pointed out, we didn’t have some of the restrictions ordinary cops had. No hunter was ever hauled into court.

  When you couldn’t depend on your backup, where did that leave you? Fucked was the only term that applied. And until I knew more about who was trying to do me in, I couldn’t even answer my pager. If someone else went missing or a new case popped up…

  Then you’d better finish this quickly, Jill. Start thinking about how you’re going to do just that.

  Chapter Seventeen

  I hate having guests. Especially uninvited guests.

  And most definitely, especially, uninvited guests who barely wait until I’m through the door before they try to kill me.

  Word of advice: If you are looking to catch a hunter by surprise, don’t do it in her house, for Chrissake. Any place a hunter sleeps is likely to be well-defended, and if it’s easy to break in you should be wondering how hard it’s going to be to escape. A hunter does not sleep somewhere without knowing every crack and creak in the walls—which includes knowing when some sloppy-ass hellbreed has slithered through a window and is breathing heavily behind your door.

  So I was ready when I stepped through and dropped down into a crouch. The dirty-blond ’breed hesitated, flew over my head and smacked himself a good one on the jamb. Wood splintered and I drove upward with the knife, the silver laid along the blade hissing with bluespark flame as it met Hell-tainted flesh.

  The ’breed twisted on himself in midair with that gut-loosening spooky agility they all have. The hardest thing to get used to is how they move, in ways human joints can’t and human muscles never would. I spun a full one-eighty, bootsole scraping the linoleum just inside the door, and went down flat on my back in the entry hall.

  Come to Mama, you stupid fuck. The bleeding ’breed didn’t disappoint, dropping down with claws outstretched, face twisted into a grinning mask of hate. Maybe he thought I was vulnerable, since I was on the floor.

  I spend half my fighting life on the floor. Judo’s not just fun, it’s a lifesaver. Once you ground a ’breed or, say, a Possessor, their advantage in speed is gone and their edge in strength is halved if you know anything about leverage. But I had no intention of wriggling around with this jerkwad.

  No, I shot him four times, punching through the shell of hellbreed skin, and flicked a boot up to catch his wounded belly, deflecting his leap by a few critical degrees so he sailed over me and splatted, screaming like a banshee, onto the hardwood floor.

  I was on my feet again in a trice, knife dropped chiming to the floor, kicked away so the ’breed couldn’t reach it, and my fingers closing around the bullwhip’s handle. A quick jerk
, a flick of my wrist, and braided leather snapped through the air, the tiny sharp bits of silvery metal tied on the end of the whip breaking the sound barrier and scoring hellbreed flesh.

  This is why hunters use whips. It gives us reach we otherwise wouldn’t have. I was already pulling the trigger, firing twice more, the reports booming and echoing through my silent house. I was only a half-inch off on the right shoulder, but my first shot took him right through the ball-joint of the left. That took some of the pep out of my unwanted visitor—but not all of it.

  The whip flickered again, like a snake’s tongue weighted with razorblades. It tore across the ’breed’s face, and by now I’m sure both of us had figured out I wanted him taken alive.

  I wanted answers.

  He still put up a fight, but when I broke his left arm in three places and got him down on the floor, the silver-loaded blade of another knife to his throat, the squealing from him took on an animal sound I was more than familiar with.

  I didn’t recognize this chalk-skinned scarecrow of a ’breed. He was definitely male, catslit blue eyes glowing even in the wash of electric light. Fucker left my lights on. How stupid can you be? “Do I have to cut your throat?” I whispered in his ear, knowing he would feel the brush of my breath through the matted fringe of blond hair. He was bleeding thin black ichor, a wash of the stinking stuff all over my dusty wooden floor.

  Once the hard shell is broken, the bad in a hellbreed leaks out. Once that shell is breached with silver, an allergic reaction sets in too. The blade ran with blue sparks, reacting to the brackish foulness of Hell the scarecrow exhaled. He wore a black silk button-down and designer jeans, but his battered, horn-callused feet were bare, the toes too flexible to be human and graced with curling yellow nails.

  He went still. I bore down with all my hellbreed-given strength. The scar pulsed, sensing something akin to its corruption. He whined, right at the back of the throat, and went limp, the subvocal groaning of Helletöng rattling in my ears.