“Handling it how?” Salvador said, meeting his pale stare.
“We’ve got some of our best people on it.”
“Oh, Christ—” he began.
“Eric, drop it. Right now,” the chief said.
He’s scared too.
“Hey, Chief, no problem,” Cesar cut in. “It’s not like we haven’t got enough work. Right, drop it, national security business, need to know, eh?”
The two suits looked at each other and then Salvador. He nodded himself.
“Okay,” he said. “I wasn’t born yesterday. Curiosity killed the cat, that right? And unless I want to go meow-oh-shit as my last words . . .”
“You have no idea,” the woman said, looking past him. “None at all.”
Then she turned her eyes on him. “Let’s be clear. There was no fire. There is no such thing as a Brézé family. You never heard of them. You particularly haven’t made any records or files of anything concerning them. That will be checked.”
“Sure,” he grinned. “Check what? About who?”
Salvador waited until they were back in the office before he began to swear; English, Spanish, and some Pushtu, which was about the best reviling language he’d ever come across, though some people he’d known said Arabic was better.
“Let’s get some lunch,” Cesar said, winking.
Yeah, Salvador thought. Got to remember anything can be a bug these days.
“Sure, I could use a burrito.”
When they were outside Cesar went on: “How soon you want to start poking around, jefe?”
Salvador let out his breath and rolled his head, kneading at the back of his head with one spadelike hand. The muscles there felt like a mass of woven iron rods under his hand, and he pressed on the silver chain that held the crucifix around his neck.
“It’s fucking Eurotrash terrorists now, eh?” he said.
“Yeah. Eurotrash vampire terrorists. Maybe Osama bit them?” Cesar said, still smiling.
“Or vice versa.”
“What sort of shit is going on?” Cesar said, more seriously.
“Our chances of getting that from those people . . .”
“. . . are nada.”
Cesar looked up into the cloudless blue sky. “Maybe these Brézés are just so rich they can shitcan anything they don’t like? Call me cynical . . .”
“Nah,” Salvador shook his head. “You can’t get that just with money. Not with those people, the spooks. You need heavy political leverage. Whoever they were, they were feds, and not your average cubicle slave either. They’re not going to tell any of us boondockers shit. The chief didn’t know any more than we did; he was just taking orders.”
“You sure?”
“I’ve known him a long time.”
“So . . .” Cesar said.
He leaned back against a wall. “How long do you want to let it cool before we start poking in violation of our solemn promise?”
“Couple of months,” Salvador said. “First thing, get all the data on an SD card and make some copies and let me have one. Scrub your notebook and anything you’ve got at the office. None of this ever goes on anything connected to anything else.”
Cesar grinned. “I like the way you think, jefe.”
DREAM.
The sense of sick dread got worse as the flames erupted through the door and he was flung back to lie helpless. This time he could see the figure who walked through the fire.
It was a woman, young, naked, her face doll-like and pretty with slanted eyes, hair piled up on her head in an elaborate coiffure that looked Asian. If he’d seen a picture like that, he’d have gotten horny. Instead, he felt as if giant fingernails were screeching down slate everywhere in the universe, as if he should run and run and run, and there was a stink that wasn’t physical at all, and he retched hopelessly.
“Who’s been a naughty boy?” she crooned.
Then she knelt by Johnson’s body, only it wasn’t Johnson anymore, it was Cesar, and he was naked too. They rolled in the dust, coupling like dogs, but Cesar was screaming. When she raised her head, blood masked her mouth and dripped from her chin and poured from Cesar’s throat. Yellow flecks sparkled in her dark-brown eyes.
“I just love brave men,” she said. “They’re delicious.”
“CHRIST!”
This time there were cigarettes under his searching hand. He fumbled the lighter twice. The dark coal glowed like eyes as he sucked in the smoke. Salvador fumbled for the light switch and sat with his feet on the floor. He pulled the smoke into his lungs again, coughed, inhaled again. After a while his hands stopped shaking, and he looked at the time. It was just three o’clock, which meant he’d been asleep a bit less than two hours. The air in his bedroom smelled close, despite the warm breeze that rattled the Venetian blinds against the frame of the window. Sweat cooled on his back and flanks.
He looked at the phone. “I’m not going to call. Cesar puts up with a lot, but he’s not sleeping alone. I can’t tell him I had a bad—”
The phone rang. He picked it up.
“Jefe ?
“There’s anyone else at this address?”
“Get over here. I’ve got something you need to see.”
SALVADOR KNEW SOMETHING WAS WRONG. HE COULD FEEL IT, A PRICKLING along the back of his neck. The house was completely dark except for the light from the streetlamp, which was very damned odd even at three thirty, since Cesar had just called him. His partner’s new Chinese import was parked in the driveway; the ground between the road and the house was gravel with a few weeds poking through. The neighborhood was utterly quiet, and the stars were bright. A cat walked by, looked at him with eyes that turned into green mirrors for an instant, and then passed. Nothing else moved.
“Shit,” he mouthed soundlessly, and pulled his Glock 22, his thumb moving the safety to off.
Then he touched the door. It swung in. He crossed the hallway, instinctively keeping the muzzle up and tucking his shoulder into the angle between the bedroom door and the wall. Then the smell hit him. He looked down. It looked black in the low light, but the tackiness under his foot was unmistakable.
“WELL, THAT’S UNIQUE,” THE CHIEF SAID.
The forensics team moved around the room. Most of them had more than one hat; Santa Fe’s police force didn’t run to elaborate hierarchies.
Salvador felt a surge of anger, and throttled it back automatically. It wouldn’t help . . . and he’d said the same sort of thing. You did, it helped you deal with what you were seeing. Usually.
Cecile was on the bed. Usually bodies didn’t have much expression, but usually they weren’t arched in a galvanic spasm that was never going to end. They’d have to break her bones to get her into a body bag. The look on her face was not quite like anything he’d ever seen. He licked his lips, tasting the salt of sweat.
Cesar was naked, lying on his face between the bed and the window. His pistol was in his right hand; the spent brass of fourteen shells littered the floor around him. Most of them were in the coagulating blood, turned dark red now with brown spots. In his left was clutched a knife, not a fighting knife, some sort of tableware. A wedge of glass as broad as a man’s hand at its base was in his throat, the point coming out the back of his neck.
“This is a murder-suicide,” the chief said quietly.
Salvador stirred. The older man didn’t look at him. “That’s exactly what it is, Eric.”
He doesn’t call me by my first name very often.
“Probably that’s what the evidence will show. Sir,” Salvador added.
I’ve seen friends die before. I didn’t sit down and cry. I did my job. I can do it now.
He hadn’t been this angry then, either. He’d killed every mouj he could while he was on the rock pile, and that had been a good round number, but he hadn’t usually hated them. Sort of a sour disgust, most of the time; he hadn’t thought of them as personal enough to hate, really.
This is extremely personal.
“Chief.”
; That was one of the evidence squad. He walked around the pool of blood to them. “We got something on the windowsill, going out. Sort of strange. When did you say you got here, Salvador?”
“Three thirty. Half an hour after . . . Cesar called me.”
The night outside was still dark, but there was a staleness, a stillness to it, that promised dawn.
Baffled, Salvador shook his head. The man held up his notebook. The smudge he’d recorded on the ledge turned into a print. A paw print.
“You notice a dog? Or something else like that?”
“No,” he said dully. “Just a cat.”
“Well, that’s not it.” The print was too large for a house cat. “Probably just something drawn by the smell.”
“Time of death?”
“Recent but hard to pin down, on a warm night like this. Everything’s fully compatible with sometime between the time you got the phone call and the time you called it in.”
The chief put a hand on his shoulder and urged him outside. He fumbled in the pockets of his jacket and pulled out a cigarette and lit it.
“You know you can’t be on this investigation, Eric,” the older man said. “Go home. Get some sleep. Crawl into a bottle and get some sleep if you have to. Take a couple of days off.”
Salvador nodded, flicked the cigarette into the weedy gravel of the front yard, and walked steadily over to his car. He pulled out very, very carefully, and drove equally carefully to St. Francis, down to the intersection with Rodeo and the entrance to the I-25. Only then did he pull over into a boarded-up complex of low buildings, probably originally meant for medical offices or real estate agents, built by some crazed optimist back in the late aughts or early teens.
“Okay, Cesar, talk to me,” he said aloud, and slid the data card he’d palmed into the slot on his notebook; nobody would notice, not when he’d left his shoes standing in the pool of blood. “This better not be your taxes. Tell me how to get the cabron.”
The screen came on, only one file, and that was video. Salvador tapped his finger on it.
Vision. Three ten in the carat at the lower right corner. Cesar was sweating as he spoke, wearing a bathrobe but with his Glock sitting in front of him within range of the pickup camera; the background was his home-officecum-TV-room, lit only by one small lamp.
“I’m recording this before you get here, jefe, ’cause I’ve got a really bad feeling about this. I was on the net tonight and I got a query from the Quantico analysis lab we sent the puke and blood to back when, you know? They said there were some interesting anomalies and did I want any more information on the Brézé guy, and they attached the file. It looked like a legit file, it was big enough.”
Cesar’s image licked its lips; Salvador could see that, but his mind superimposed how he’d looked with half his face lying in a pool of his own blood.
“Okay, it was stupid. I should have asked them Who dat? or just hit the spam blocker. We weren’t getting anywhere, creeping Adrian Brézé’s house is desperation stuff, so I downloaded. Here’s what I got, repeated a whole lot of times.”
Letters appeared, a paragraph of boldface:
—youaresofuckedyouaresofuckedyouaresofuckedyouareso—
“I—”
“Cesar!” A scream, a woman’s voice, high and desperate. Then: “Don’t—don’t—please , don’t—”
Then just screaming. Cesar snatched up the pistol and ran. Salvador heard himself screaming too, as the shots began. Then more sounds, for a long time. Then another face in the screen.
It was the woman he’d seen in the dream; he could tell, even though her face was one liquid sheet of dull red. Only the golden flecks in her eyes showed bright, and then her teeth were very white when she licked them clean.
“You are so fucked,” she crooned, and the screen went black.
THE ROAD TO ADRIAN BRÉZÉ’S HOUSE WAS TEN MILES NORTH ON THE I-25 and then east. The empty highway stretched through the night, cool air flowing in through the open windows as the tires hummed. He was going to his death—but maybe he’d learn something. Maybe the world would make sense again.
Since when has it made sense anyway? I’m thirty-two years old, no wife, no kids, and my best friend just died because I couldn’t figure out what was going on. The only thing I’ve ever been any good at was killing people and frightening them. Cesar had twice my brains and now he’s dead and his girl’s dead.
East, and then north again on a dirt road. The Sangres low on the horizon in the light of the three-quarter moon. That and the stars were the only light as the last gas station fell away, and only a few distant earthbound stars marked houses. The road turned, winding in the pitch-dark night, and then a steep drop to his left, a hundred near-vertical feet; this was the edge of the plateau. He forced himself to stop when the wheels skidded and a spray of gravel fanned out and out of sight. He clenched his hands on the wheel.
“Am I trying to kill myself?” he murmured. Then: “No. Not yet. I’ve got to find out what this all means.”
Instead, he got out and walked down the last stretch of road. The night scents were strong, the sweaty leather of chamisos, the strong resin of the bleeding pines. Gravel crunched under his feet—it was nearly six months since Adrian Brézé had vanished, and the housekeeper came in only once a month to clean. The house itself was built right into the edge of the cliff; the final dip in the road left him looking down on its fieldstone walls. The high copper-surfaced door swung open to his touch, and a few soft lights came on under the high metal ceiling.
Yeah, about what I expected, he thought.
The whole of the opposite wall was glass, right at the edge of the cliff. It fell in crags and gullies washed pale by the moon, until the rolling surface of the semidesert stretched eastward to the edge of sight. There were a couple of pictures on the walls, ancient and beautiful.
“Why did I think I could find something here?” he said aloud.
“Maybe a little bird told you.”
The voice seemed to come from behind him. He wheeled. Nothing. Back again . . . and the woman was there. A spurt of dreadful joy filled him. This wasn’t a dream, or pixels. That was an actual person in front of him. There was even an appendix scar.
He raised the Glock in the regulation grip, left hand under right.
Crack. Crack.
The ten-millimeter bullets punched into her belly and she folded backward.
Crack.
Two in the center of mass, one in the head; the last snapped her head around in a whirling of long black hair and a spray of blood and the bullet starred through the glass behind her. He felt his teeth begin to show as he walked toward her. The gold-flecked eyes were already beginning to glaze.
Then her head came up. “Oooooh, that hurt,” she said. “That can be sort of hot, you know? For starters. Then I get to hurt you. You like that, lover?”
Salvador leaped backward, almost fell as he half-sprawled against a malachite-surfaced table of rough-cast glass, then wrenched himself into a crouched firing position.
Crack. Crack. Crack—
Ten shots. Five hit. Five more punched the great window behind, starring it, then collapsing it out in a shatter of milky fragments.
“Ooooo, ooooo, you’re so rough,” the thing laughed as it advanced on him, laughing.
A hand reached out toward his neck. Then jerked back as she hissed:
“We really have to do something about those silver chains. Maybe we could make people think they cause cancer?”
She dabbed at the blood on the side of her head and stuck the fingers in her mouth for a moment, tongue curling around them.
“Mmmmm, tasty! But you want to take that stupid chain off, don’t you . . . that’s right . . .”
The eyes grew, the yellow flecks drawing together like drops of molten gold, running into two lakes of fire. Depth, depth, drawing him into a whirling—
She screamed, pain and rage. The great ten-foot wings beat behind her as the talons slammed home and the hoo
ked beak drove into her neck. The snow-leopard rolled over and over—
—leopard?—
its paws striking in a blur of speed and claws. The eagle dropped out of the air into a huge tawny something and the big cats rolled over and over shrieking and striking and lunging for each other’s throats as furniture smashed and broken glass crunched under their weight. Then the man was standing with his back to Salvador, every muscle in his lean body standing out like static waves as his thumbs dug into her throat. She was making the same bestial snarling sound as she reared back with a knee braced against his chest and her hands driving up between his forearms—
CRACK!
Much louder this time. The double splash of impact and her skull started to deform under the huge kinetic energy, and then a sparkle, and she was gone. Blood fell to the floor, with a sharp, sour, iron-salt smell. The man went to one knee for a second, panting, then rose and turned.
“You’re Adrian Brézé,” he said, trying to make his mind function again.
The gun came up, almost of its own volition. The slim dark man pointed a finger at him.
“Don’t. Just don’t. It’s been a long day.”
He cast a glance over his shoulder; the first paling of the night sky showed that dawn was coming, and he winced a little.
“I’d better go corporeal. Right back, Detective Salvador.”
Salvador looked down at the pistol. Why the hell not? he thought, and began to bring it up toward his mouth. That’s safer. Only amateurs try to shoot themselves in the head . . .
“I wouldn’t do that if I were you.”
“Why don’t you kill me? Why don’t you kill me?” he screamed. “Why don’t you just fucking kill me?”
“That’s why don’t they fucking kill you,” the man said. “I can tell you, if you want to know.”
“You’re one of them.”
Brézé was slight, a bit below medium height, pale olive skin and dark hair and gold-flecked brown eyes . . .
“You’re Adrian Brézé!”
“Yes.”
Down These Strange Streets Page 17