Redemption Alley jk-3

by Lilith Saintcrow

  Leon hauled himself up. “Never knew you was an optimist. What you gonna do about this Argoth character?”

  Pray? Hope he’s not hungry? “I don’t know yet. But it might be time to visit the a few hellbreed dives and twist some arms—after I find out who’s shipping scurf into my town.”

  “Sounds like a plan. I’m gonna piss.”

  “Thanks for sharing.” I didn’t say what we were both thinking. If hellbreed were connected to the scurf, and a major hellbreed’s name was being bandied around, and one of Shen’s Traders said a “higher-up” wanted me dead…

  Well, it wasn’t looking good. But at least we had something to look at now, instead of a maddening half-baked mass of weird occurrences with no rhyme or reason.

  I sat staring at Carp’s file while Leon vanished. Shut my eyes, breathed deep, and tried not to think of Carper lying in bed, his mind at the mercy of suffocating terror. Or of Jacinta Kutchner’s body hanging like a rotten fruit from a blue and white nylon rope. Or of Saul and how much I wished it was him I was bouncing ideas off.

  It was looking like the Kutchner case was my sort of case after all.

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Bernardino lived on a quiet little street, not quite suburban but close enough. He had a nice ranch-style, freshly painted, and his yard was greener than many of his neighbors’. I wondered if he had a landscaping service staffed with illegals out to take care of it, and spent a good few moments wrestling with nausea at the thought as we slid through a neighbor’s yard and up to his front door, seeking maximum cover. It wasn’t easy, with a high-noon summer sun beating down.

  He had no alarm system on his house, and he was probably at work in the Vice department.

  Dear God, the irony.

  I held my right palm in front of the doorknob and concentrated, a thin thread of etheric force snaking out and bifurcating. One thin thread slid into the doorknob, the other quested blindly and found the keyhole for the deadbolt. A moment’s worth of the fierce, relaxed concentration peculiar to sorcery, and the deadbolt eased back, the doorknob lock clicking as it cleared.

  “You’d make a great housebreaker,” Leon mouthed.

  Yeah, that’s just one of the many career options open to a hunter. “You think?” I whispered. I eased aside, toed the door open while Leon covered me, and slid into Alfred Bernardino’s home—only to recoil and straighten, the reek so intense it scorched the back of my throat.

  Dead, decomposing human tissue. “Goddammit,” I whispered, my eyes watering, and plunged into the house. Leon swept the door shut behind us, and we cleared and checked every room, working through a place that had obviously been searched. Drawers were pulled out, cushions slit, paper scattered everywhere—and that horrible, nose-eating stench.

  And the smell of hellbreed or Trader, a subtle, sweetsick corruption. “There’s been ’breed here,” I whispered. The kitchen was torn to shreds, a drift of takeout containers and cheap dishes. The living room was a shambles, the dining room smashed too. Bernie’s taste had run to cheap mismatched bachelor furniture, but the huge state-of-the-art plasma flatscreen on one wall was new, and the stereo system still smelled of its packaging. That is, through the fume of smoky violence—even these toys bought with blood money had been broken.

  I don’t know if it was a fight or a hell of a search. Leon covered me down a hallway, we checked a bathroom and a room that had been left empty and bare except for a stain on the carpet and a silver tangle of handcuffs. The reek of sex fought briefly with other varied stenches; Leon’s eyebrows went up and I shrugged, moving on. I pushed a door open softly with my foot and saw the source of the worst smell.

  Alfred Bernardino lay spread-eagled on his bed, his body bloated by several days’ worth of decomposition. His ribs had been torn free and wrenched back, the lungs carefully pulled free and shriveled by exposure to dry outside air. His legs were flayed and his belly opened; a feast of insect life swarmed in the cave of his entrails.

  If I’d had any gag reflex left on this case, the sight would have done it.

  “Jesus,” Leon breathed.

  Another fucking dead end. “This is ridiculous.”

  Leon moved past me, checked the closet. Neither of us put our guns away. Bernardino’s clothes were tumbled off the hangers, his cheap white-painted dresser drawers pulled out and disemboweled, and I leaned against the wall, silver tinkling sweetly in my hair.

  “You think…” Leon glanced at me. “How long would you say he’s been dead?”

  I glanced at the window. It was suffocatingly hot in here, and the bedroom window was open a crack, the screen slit. Easy enough for insects to find their way in. The air conditioning wasn’t on, and a cool bath of dread touched my spine, working downward from my nape. “With that window open and the critter buffet sign out? Couple days to a week. But we have his credit card run by Irene…” A Trader, the last known contact we have with this man. Huh.

  “Four days ago,” Leon supplied.

  Looks like there’s more here than meets the eye. My brain gears turned, meshed, caught. “It could fit with the widow’s death. We have someone killing the cops to cover this up. Jacinta’s account books are missing. Bernie’s having second thoughts…” I sighed, then winked, shutting my dumb eye. The smart one, the blue one, showed me a room swirled with the etheric contamination of violent death and desperation. But nothing for me to latch onto, no thread that I could pull to unravel the mess.

  Leon let out a gusty sigh, one he probably immediately regretted because he had to take a breath. “Someone tore this fuckin’ place apart. And I don’t like it—why hasn’t anyone come by to check on him? He’s a cop.”

  “A cop with a dead partner. If there weren’t cops trying to kill me I could call in and find out if he was on administrative leave or something. Though if this is el pendejo gordo they were talking about, he can’t have called in the gang hit on me.” I lowered my guns, thinking, and my attention snagged on something.

  On the bed, actually. It was stripped down to bare mattress and boxspring, but both of them were new, blue with pink flowers, a matched set of Sealys. Intuition tickled under the surface of my brain, and I stared at the mess of Bernardino’s body, unseeing, for a long half-minute before Leon moved, checking the master bathroom again. Copper chimed in his hair, a deeper sound than the silver in mine. “Screen’s slit in here, too. Window’s open.”

  “The screen was cut in the widow’s place. But the window wasn’t open.” I replayed the Kutchner scene in my head, walking through mental rooms taken in by a hunter’s ground-in, thorough training in observation.

  Yes, there above the bathroom window, two patches in the paint.

  Curtain rod, ripped down. The screen hurriedly cut. The space between the screen and the window, just the right size to hold…

  I let out half a soft breath, opened my eyes. “Come on.”

  The garage held two cars—a puke-green 1971 Dodge Charger that had seen much, much better days and was drifted with fast-food wrappers inside, and a brand new red Mustang with none of the grace or fluidity of the old models. A fiberglass piece of shit and a horribly mistreated piece of heavy American metal. There was detritus stuffed everywhere; Bernie had been a terrible slob.

  But leaning against the wall next to the Mustang was an old mattress, dingy yellow and broken-in.

  “Pop the hood on that and check the engine.” I indicated the Charger with my chin and slid between the Mustang and the wall, reached the mattress, and started looking.

  Twenty seconds later I found what I was looking for—a long slit in the fabric sheathing. I held my breath and reached in as Leon rummaged under the hood.

  My fingers closed on something. Hard plastic, book-shaped, and thick. “My God,” I whispered.

  “What? What is it?”

  I yanked the ledger free, tearing the tough material. It must have taken some doing to get the goddamn thing into the mattress, but the hiding place had done its job. “Leon, my dear, we
have a break.” I ripped it the rest of the way free and flipped it open, riffled through the pages, then fished around again inside the mattress and yanked another one free. “We’ve just found Jacinta Kutchner’s account books. Cooked and uncooked, I’m betting.”

  “Is that so. Looks like this car will run, too. I ain’t no mechanic, but nothing seems wrong with it.” He dropped the hood.

  “Let’s find the keys, then. And get the hell out of here.” Something stopped me, looking at the Mustang. For some reason I wasn’t even considering taking it—for one thing, it was too red. We’d left Leon’s truck behind for the same reason—it was too conspicuous a vehicle.

  And for another, the Mustang reeked of hellbreed. Or Trader.

  My instincts tingled again, and I looked for license plates. Nada. Not even a dealer tag. The Charger was registered to Bernardino, all its papers in order. “Someone’s lying to me.”

  “You think?” Leon sighed. “The shit’s just getting deeper. I’ll look for car keys.”

  I wasn’t looking forward to it, but we had to go to Micky’s. I expected to see the regular Were waitstaff and I expected Theron at the bar. What I did not expect was to be almost-mobbed by Weres as soon as I set foot in the door. It looked like a regular lunchtime crowd, but it was full of cat Were and bird Were, and I was hugged, slapped on the shoulder, fingers brushing over my face and touching my hair. A very big, very angry Theron came pushing his way through the humming, thrumming crowd.

  Even the framed pictures of film stars on the walls vibrated, glass and wood chattering. Theron grabbed me by the shoulders, gave me a once-over, and shook me twice, sharply, so my head bobbled and my ears rang a little.

  I let him. A tide of sound rose through them, swirled, and Leon was clapped on the shoulder a few times. A bird Were breathed in his face, greeting him, and he nodded and grinned, giving a thumbs-up, especially when someone passed him a cold, foaming can of Pabst.

  “Goddammit, Jill!” Theron shook me again. “What am I going to tell Saul about this, goddammit? Where have you been? There’s hellbreed all over your house—”

  “Settle down.” My tone sliced through the hubbub. I shifted Carp’s file and the ledgers under my left arm. “There’s not much time.”

  The rumbling swirled down, and I caught sight of an anomaly—a human face among the Weres.

  Gilberto Rosario Gonzalez-Ayala leaned over the counter, watching the Were cooks as they moved around the kitchen. Amalia passed him, handing off a bottle of microbrew the kid looked far too young to drink, and the kid turned around, his eyes sweeping Micky’s interior and stopping on me. “What the hell is he doing here?”

  “Showed up. The 51s sent him to check with us, since you got firebombed on your way out of their territory. Then the guys that blew up your car moved into the 51 slice of the barrio. Things have been hopping down there.”

  Shit. How was I going to sort that out too?

  Priorities, Jill. As much as I hated it, gang warfare wasn’t my problem. I had bigger fish to gut and fry.

  Someone flipped the “closed” sign and Weres crowded close as I commandeered a table near the back of the dining room, away from the windows. “Pipe down, everyone.” I took a deep breath as they settled, eyes shining expectantly. “What we have here, ladies and gentlemen, is a situation. We have a hellbreed operating inside Santa Luz, shipping in scurf with the help of several members of the police force, and using them as the cleanup crew after a nasty little organ-stripping campaign. Illegal immigrants are being shipped in by coyotes, parted out like junked cars, and the remains disposed of. The organs are sold—and the scurf are not just here for cleaning up what’s left. There’s experiments.” The quiet had become dead heavy silence, pressing against my skin. “Experiments on scurf, with scurf tissue, and funded by this organ operation.”

  “What kind of experiments?” Amalia balanced her tray on spread fingers, tense and alert, not even the feathers in her hair stirring.

  “I don’t know.” I set down the ledgers and Carp’s messy, stuffed-to-the-gills file. Taken together, they were a pretty damning picture of corruption, at least from the organ-theft side of it. Looking below the surface, there was another shape, something looming over my city like a hand about to crush a struggling ant. “Corruption in the police department goes high up. I’m not sure how high just yet. The cop we thought put out the hit on me down in the barrio’s been dead for a few days.” I let my eyes travel past the Weres to the fringe of the group, to where Gilberto stood, leaning hipshot against the long lunch counter where truckers sometimes sat—or anyone who didn’t mind their breakfast slid to them along the counter like a hockey puck. His dead eyes narrowed.

  I held his gaze for a long moment. “Señor Gilberto?” What does this kid know about the nightside? He knows about Weres, that much is certain.

  Gil stepped away from the lunch counter, and the Weres parted to let him through. Leon took in the kid with a swift glance and sucked another long gulp off his beer.

  “He’s representing the 51s,” Theron didn’t twitch, but he was tense at my shoulder. “They… feel bad, that you were attacked.”

  And they don’t want to piss off a witch allied to the Weres. “It wasn’t their fault. I wasn’t on 51 territory. I’m worried about them catching flak from associating with me.”

  “They had you marked the minute you crossed off our turf, chiquita.” Gilberto paused, took a sip. He was sorely out of place, a human kid with bad skin and the smell of neglect hanging on him like mildew amid the crackling hum of perfection from the Weres. “Now how you suppose they did that?”

  I shrugged, my tattered coat flapping. “I’m a gringa?”

  It was the right thing to say, because he laughed, a reedy little sound. “Si, bruja. But nobody knew you come down to see us but el gato here. Right?”

  And Carper. “There was one other person—the cop that gave me the lead on Ay. Gil, your brother’s partner killed him.”

  Gil’s utter stillness might have fooled a human, but not a roomful of Weres. Theron sighed. I held the boy’s dark soulless gaze, watching the color bleed out from under his cheeks until he was sallow instead of Hispanic.

  “His partner’s dead too,” I continued. “His house was torn apart, but I’ve got a rough timeline. He had the widow’s ledgers, and—”

  “Hold up, bruja. Ay. His partner, you say? Bernie kill him?”

  Silver clinked and shifted in my hair as I nodded. “It appears that way. I’m going to keep digging, though. Until I find out everything about this, I’m still on the job.”

  “Then the 51s stay on the job too.” He darted a glance to Theron, sweat sheening his forehead and upper lip. He’d lost the hairnet, and his hair was surprisingly soft-looking, with a hint of childhood curl. “I go to Ramon. Es un traidor en nuestra casa, bruja, because there was no way they should know you visit us.” Another silence rose, uncomfortably, between us.

  I had to say it.

  “The traitor may not be among the 51s, Gil. Because if Ay’s partner was dead, my contact sent me into the barrio. But he’s not fat. The name el pendejo gordo mean anything to you?”

  The kid thought it over. “Lot of pendejos gordos in el barrio, bruja. Lot of them.”

  “Don’t declare war on the cops.” It came out harder and faster than I intended, and Gil stiffened slightly, his wiry shoulders coming up. “The last thing we need is a bloodbath in the barrio.” He shrugged, the kind of evocative shrug street kids learn early. I pressed a little harder. “Do not fire on the cops.” Why do I feel like a den mother?

  The kid seemed to feel comfortable enough in a room full of Weres, and had only given Leon the same passing glance he gave me—measuring, calculating, and not frightened at all. Curiouser and curiouser. “I take it to Ramon. He decide.”

  Good enough. Ramon’s smart enough to keep things quiet down there—I hope. “Can someone go with him?”

  Two of the Weres—a lean cub whose face looked very familiar
and a bird Were with sleek black feathers knotted in her straight dark hair—volunteered for the job. Gilberto left without a backward glance.

  “Nice kid,” Leon said, sarcasm tinting his tone.

  He’d just as soon kill someone as look at them. Nice kid my ass. Still, Gilberto was smart enough to see my point about firing on cops. And if the 51s had sent him here, he couldn’t be entirely lacking in brains or discretion. Still.… “How much does he know about the nightside?”

  “Enough, Jill. They all know enough, down in the barrio.” Theron folded his arms, leaning against a table. “You want to tell me why there’s hellbreed swarming your house?”

  I suppose I should be grateful he held off grilling me for this long. “If I knew enough to fill you in, I’d be gunning for the ’breed behind all this. So far all I know is…” I ran up against the wall of incomprehensibility, glanced outside to gauge the fall of sunlight. There was a pattern, sure, but it wasn’t clear enough. “Any more scurf? Anything?”

  “Not a whisper. We cleaned them out.”

  Thank you, God. “Did we lose…”

  “Two more.” Theron’s jaw firmed, and a rumble swirled through the assembled Weres, drained away.

  Goddammit. Futility clawed acid at the back of my throat. Two more of my Weres dead, and I didn’t even know their names. “Were there hellbreed there? At the warehouse site?”

  He shook his dark sleek head. “Not a one. We would have held back and waited for you awhile if there had been.”

  So the smell of ’breed up in the office had been after the fight? I chewed at my lower lip, considering. The cold dread had turned into a hard rubber ball in my stomach, and the smell of food taunted me. No Were strategy session is without munchies, but if they were closing down Micky’s and feeding people for free the situation was dire indeed.

  Weres can eat a lot.

  I stared at the stack of paper on the table as if it might tell me something I didn’t know instead of just taunting me with half-seen connections. “I want two or three Weres on Montaigne. Watch him, don’t let anything get to him. He’s a target now too. I also want some of you watching Galina’s house. They tried to kill me onsite before and I’ve got a wounded human and a Trader in there. Hutch will be there too, for the duration.”