Tony’s shoulders had dropped, but his eyes had come up. “What?”
“Well, if you don’t come here, I won’t be able to tell you without Mom hearing in the next room and it won’t be a secret anymore, will it?”
“S’pose not.”
“So, come here.” Nathan had held out his arms with that, and Tony had come across the room, arms folded across his chest since he wasn’t ready to take the proffered hug yet. But he’d gotten close enough for Nathan to lean forward and whisper in the boy’s ear. “I need you to be my guy on the inside.”
He’d moved away then and put a finger to his lips to convey this was deeply secret stuff. “Mom’s gonna be busy with the committee and Brandon. But I need someone who’s going to keep an eye on them. Normally, I’d go myself—you know I would, but I can’t. There’s important stuff out here for me to do. But you… you, Tony, can help by not only looking after Mom, but also keeping an eye on what they’re doing in there. You, Tony. You’re my guy.”
“I’m not a stupid kid, Dad. You’re just bl… bl… motional blank-mailing me.”
Another line he’d pick up off Syd? Probably. She had more than enough reason to recognize all the tricks adult used to get kids to do what they want. “No, of course I’m not, son. Cross my heart. I really do want you to look out for Mom. I need you to be my eyes and ears. Can you do that for me?” Nathan had whispered again.
The boy had considered that.
Perhaps, Nathan thought, caught between wanting to please his father and what Syd had told him about the motivations of adults. And perhaps because the hormones weren’t yet coursing through his body, and he wasn’t yet seeing his father as a rival for the affection of his mother. There was still enough of Tony left after the way things had gone for him to accept what Nathan had been saying. But Nathan had been able to see the boy growing up right in front of him, there and then. So, he’d just reached out, pulled the boy in for a hug, and kissed the top of his head. The smell of his hair and the warmth of his skin, and the bony elbows digging into his broken ribs, had brought out tears in his own eyes that had been formed both by physical pain and overwhelming love.
“I love the bones of you, Tony Tolley.”
“Love you, too, Dad,” the boy had said into his father’s shoulder, and the acceptance had been made. “I’ll look after her for you, Dad.”
“I know you will, son. I never doubted it.”
And now they were heading down the steps of the Detroit Masonic Temple into the bright chill. Cyndi holding Brandon, and Tony walking with Nathan.
The others followed them out, Lucy clinging onto Freeson’s arm like her life depended on it, Dave and Donie eyeing the five Detroit PD officers avariciously as they lugged their equipment out of the back of the second Humvee and dumped the crates and bags in the snow. Saber took up the rear with Syd and Stryker. The mood was solemn, and there wasn’t an ounce of celebratory promise in the faces behind Cyndi or in her own. She passed the blanket-wrapped Brandon to Nathan and climbed up into the Humvee. Nathan kissed his youngest son on the forehead and then passed the precious bundle inside. The cops took Cyndi’s two rucksacks around the open back of the truck and put them inside.
“Dave and Donie should have the comms set up soon; maybe we’ll be able to get together by webcam—you never know.”
Cyndi smiled thinly at Nathan’s optimism. He knew her well enough to see that there were a million pent-up words between her mind and her lips, but she wasn’t going to let the dam burst now. This wasn’t the time or the place. But similarly, she wasn’t going to give him the affirmation he so desired from his attempt at positivity.
Tony hugged Nathan. “Don’t worry, Dad. I got this,” he said, and it damn near broke Nathan’s heart to hear the boy say it; it was as much as he could do to put a hand on Tony’s back and draw him close as his eyes remained locked on Cyndi’s.
Tony climbed into the Humvee next to Cyndi and smiled back at Nathan. And then, as if he thought his father needed it, he gave him a double thumbs-up.
“Enjoy the vacation,” Stryker called out from the steps, with just about every sense of inappropriateness he could find. Nathan turned to tear several strips off him by telling him it wasn’t a damn vacation, but Lucy had already lifted her leg and kicked him in the ankle.
“Ow!”
“Not the time or the place for levity, Stryker. Next time, I’ll aim for somewhere softer. And I’m not talking about your brain.”
Stryker looked wounded and mouthed “Sorry” to Nathan. Nathan refocused on the Humvee, but the Detroit PD officer—dressed in full black uniform, SWAT helmet, and mirrored shades—was thumping the door closed. Before Nathan could speak, the Humvee roared to life, bit into the snow, and skidded away back the way it had come.
Nathan watched the Humvee for as long as he could, until it turned at the intersection, its widows glinting in the sunlight, taking his family away.
6
“Captain Harmsworth.”
The leader of the five Detroit PD officers Brant had sent to defend the Masonic Temple while Nathan and the others went in search of Tasha and the rest of her gang was the same cop who had greeted Nathan three days before at the Greenhouse. Out of his parka and in his winter SWAT fatigues, Harmsworth was an impressive figure. Middle-aged, but with muscle not yet turned to fat, his eyes were clear and his jaw was set. Nathan took the proffered hand and shook it.
Harmsworth looked up at the building. “I’ll need some intel on the exits and entrances, and what security systems you’ve already put in place.”
“We’ve been covering the door on a rota and have lookouts on the top floor beneath the roof.”
“And?”
“And that’s it,” said Nathan.
Harmsworth’s face said that if he could have reached his hand beneath the Kevlar SWAT team helmet he wore, he would have scratched his head. “Okay, who’s available to show me around to get a feel of the place?”
Stryker stepped forward. “I’ll do it.”
“Ah, the otherwise engaged Mr. Wilson. Glad to see you’re stepping up to the plate at last.”
Stryker’s face reddened at Harmsworth’s sarcasm, but he offered nothing to counter the comment.
After bellowing to his four men to secure the perimeter, Harmsworth followed Stryker up the steps and into the building, flicking his chinstrap and pulling off his helmet as he went inside.
“Well, he seems to know what he’s doing, at least,” Freeson said, falling into step with Nathan as they went up the steps behind the other men.
“I hope so, Free; I really hope so, because we’re not going to be here to make sure.”
Freeson drove the Humvee with Nathan up front, Stryker and Dave behind them. Lucy, Syd, and Donie hadn’t been too happy about being left behind, especially as Syd and Lucy knew how to handle themselves in a fight, but Nathan had been adamant that he wanted them back there keeping an eye on the Detroit PD and Harmsworth—he wasn’t completely in the thrall of Brant, and there was still enough doubt in Nathan’s mind for him not to see this as a done deal. One day at a time. Neutralize the gang, capture them if they could, and deliver them to Brant, and after that… who knew? Get the satellite uplink working, find a new place to go, and get the hell out of Detroit before the winter weather worsened—hopefully. It was late August now, and Detroit should have been basking in long hot summer days, but the streets were clogged with snow, storms still blew blizzards in with alarming regularity, and the wind could gut you like a slaughterhouse knife. Who knew what would happen when the real winter came, assuming there’d be one? Two years without spring had been bad enough, added on to the shortening of the days as the crustal displacement had caused the U.S. to slide up the side of the planet into the Earth’s Artic Zone. The shortened days were bad enough on their own, actually, but were they just an indicator? Perhaps the Earth’s crust had been displaced so far now that the winter months would start to bring months of complete darkness. At the moment,
night only lasted a few hours as it was, but as September and October approached, what would happen?
The thought of months of almost permanent darkness terrified Nathan. Who knew what kind of people would try to take advantage of such a state of affairs? It didn’t bear thinking about.
But they had other things to take care of before they could think that far into the future.
Their first destination was the tenement block on the way to Trash Town. It was where Tasha had ambushed Nathan and Stryker with Frankie and the now dearly departed Billy.
In the room where Tasha had explained to Nathan the nature of the deal they’d tried to make, they found evidence of occupation. Someone had lit a fire, and although it was out now, the ashes weren’t completely frozen. There were bloody rags in the corner that looked reasonably fresh. It seemed some rudimentary first responding had taken place, and that Frankie’s leg wound had likely been tended to.
While Donie and Stryker searched the rest of the ground floor, Nathan and Freeson took the upper levels.
The stairwells, like everything else in the place, had seen better days. The first-floor landing’s wooden banisters had been kicked out and taken for firewood, Freeson surmised, as had some of the doors.
The rooms without doors were empty, but there was one room at the end of the corridor where the door was shut. Nathan tried it, but it was locked. He placed his ear against the peeling blue paint of the door. No other intact doors that they’d so far tried in the place had been locked.
Freeson pointed at the lock on the door. “New.”
Nathan nodded. Everything else in the tenement building was decrepit with age, but this lock was shiny and new. The blue paint of the door had been chipped away when the mechanism had been fitted.
“Why would you have a locked door in a deserted building?” Freeson asked.
“Shall we find out?”
Freeson drew his Beretta and put a round in the chamber, covering Nathan as he raised his boot.
It took three kicks to get the door open and splintering out of the woodwork, squealing and protesting as the bottom of the door scraped across the floorboards within.
Dave called up from below, “You guys okay?”
“Fine,” Nathan called back as Freeson went first, flicking on his flashlight and beaming it into the room because it was so dark.
Nathan followed, and immediately noticed that the smell of the room didn’t feel right. It wasn’t unpleasant, but it didn’t jibe with the rest of the tenement. It smelled… new… fresh. There wasn’t the attendant smell of damp and decay. He could see edgings of light around the drapes at the window, too, and as Freeson’s flashlight danced across the walls, the beam alighted on a large wooden packing crate. Nathan edged forward and made his way towards the bright thin lines of light illuminating the edges of the drapes. As he pulled the heavy velvet material aside and let the sunlight flood into the room, Freeson was already saying, “Wowsers, Nate. Wowsers.”
The room was big, perhaps forty feet long by the same again wide. The ceiling was high, and if there had been any furniture in the past, it had all been removed. The space was filled with cardboard boxes and crates.
Nathan looked at Freeson, and Freeson looked at Nathan. This was no accidental find of stuff; this was a concerted effort to store these boxes in a place where people would perhaps not think to look. Inside a derelict building.
There must have been two hundred or more of the containers. They hadn’t been there long, either; they weren’t dusty and there wasn’t any sense that the elements had gotten to them. When Nathan examined the window from which he’d pulled the drapes aside, he saw there were fresh marks of putty smeared around the edges of the glass. The room had been recently prepared for this influx of stuff.
“You first,” Freeson commented, hanging back and looking out into the street to see if their luck had run out and someone was coming to safeguard their storehouse with maximum prejudice.
Nathan pulled up the top of the nearest cardboard box. It was full of tins of corned beef. The next held dried milk and flour. The next, jellies and tinned fruit. The next, packets and packets of cigarettes.
“I don’t believe this,” Nathan breathed out as he approached the first crate they’d seen again. It was longer than it was wide, and he needed to use his knife to pry the lid up. Inside was a cache of A-15s, wrapped and oiled—and Nathan recognized this as the smell that had first told him that not everything in the room was as they might have expected.
They had found Aladdin’s cave.
But who did it belong to?
The tent over Trash Town was again illuminated by braziers and filled with the aromas of cooking and harsh alcohol. It was like a frontier outpost in a gold rush town, the outer city dwellers coming here for companionship as much as to trade. It was good to be inside and out of the cold, too. Stryker and Nathan had left the others with the Humvee a quarter of a mile away and walked in. The Humvee was police issue, and if they’d arrived in it, then mouths would have closed for sure. Especially the mouth they wanted to be open, their next call after the tenement.
Rose acknowledged them from across the stalled market and seemed genuinely pleased to see them. She was roaring with laughter at something a wizened, white-haired black guy had whispered in her hair, and her dreads whirled as her body shook. As Nathan reached the stall, a violin jig broke out a few yards away and people, their cheeks ruddy with cheap booze, began to dance, clap, whistle, and sing.
“An’ what is it that bring you two fine gentlemen back here to see me, ’n so soon. The inverter worked fine, boys. It was a goodly trade.”
“Is there somewhere we can go to talk, Rose?”
Almost immediately, the seriousness of Nathan’s enquiry piqued Rose’s interest. She led them to the back of the tent, past the crackling braziers, through a flap in the canvas, and out into the cold air.
“This way.”
She led them down an alley between two buildings and on to a wooden side door that was dark with age, dirt, and the attacking elements. She opened the door and took them inside to what they found was a warm and fragrant kitchen. It was gloomy in just candlelight, and bunches of herbs and dried flowers hung from the ceiling, swaying and crackling as Nathan walked thought them, a couple of heads taller than Rose.
“Rose, we need some… ah…”
Rose nodded to the huge black guy standing in the corner, who was seemingly as wide as he was tall. His face was an impassive mask, and he’d dressed like there weren’t enough clothes around to fit him, so that he’d started wearing the sails of a pirate galleon. “Pay no attention to m’boy, Horace. He jus’ making sure there ain’t no shenanigans going on. Sit down, boys; take de weight off. Now, what I can do for you?”
Nathan cleared his throat and, sitting down on a rickety wooden chair, tried not to look too hard at enormous Horace in case he broke his eyes trying to fit him all in at once, and continued. “We’re looking for someone.”
“Why ain’t’cha looking for me, pretty boy?” Rose giggled, showing far too many teeth. “Oh, I love it when your face does that!”
Nathan could feel himself blushing again, too. This kind of forwardness wasn’t something he was used to. “We’re looking for a specific person.”
“Spoily sport.” Rose grinned. “And who might that be?”
“We think her name is Natasha, or Tasha. Well, that’s at least the name she used when we ran into her.”
Rose’s face went excellent poker-player blank. “Lotta people with that name. What makes you think I know the pacific one? The pacific one you is looking for, that is?”
Nathan leaned forward in his chair. “Rose, you know everyone and everything around here, and you’re just getting ready to trade for the information, so shall we cut to the chase? Stryker.”
Stryker nodded and reached into the rucksack strung on his shoulder. He pulled out a small box. Nathan pointed at the container in Stryker’s hand. “9 millimeter hollow point
. We have a thousand rounds ready to send your way. Five hundred now, and the rest if you point us in the direction of Tasha.”
Rose’s eyes sparkled in the candlelight.
“When we saw her, she was with two guys; Frank and…”
“Billy,” Rose finished the sentence for Nathan. “You killed little Billy.”
The temperature in the room dropped to match the winter outside. Horace unfolded his arms and cracked his knuckles. In the small kitchen, it sounded like a tree being felled.
Stryker grunted, and then spoke out. “They were forcing us to take them back to our place. They were gonna steal all of our stuff. What exactly do you think we should have done differently?”
“I is not the moral authority around here, Stryker, but I hear what goes on. Perhaps you should have dealt with Tasha, rather than killed one of her boys and wounded the other.”
Stryker set his chin forward, his eyes blazing. “We’re not afraid of her.”
“No reasons you should be…” Rose said.
Nathan narrowed his eyes. “I sense a ‘but’ coming.”
“Very good, pretty boy. As I said, you shouldn’t be scared of sweet little Natasha, but you should be terrified of the man she works for.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means, beautiful, that I don’t want your ammunition and I don’t want no deal to give you no information. Just keep me and Trash Town out of this. Now, you both know where the door is, or would you like me to get Horace to remind you?”
Nathan and Stryker reached the Humvee and told the others what had happened. “Looks like we’re on our own, Nate,” Freeson said flatly, but then he smiled and clapped Nathan on the shoulder. “Nothing ever changes.”
“Ain’t that the truth?”
“What we don’t know is who this guy is that Rose says we should be terrified of,” Stryker said as they climbed into the relative warmth of the parked Humvee. Freeson started the engine, letting it idle so the blowers came on and breathed warm air over them. “And if he’s as bad as Rose suggests, maybe we’re building up a whole lot of trouble for ourselves. It’s been four days now, and Tasha and her cronies haven’t been back to the Masonic. Maybe what Rose said was all BS. Just to get us off Tasha’s trail. I wouldn’t put it past Rose to be Tasha’s boss, sending her out to try the protection scam on the outer city people. Probably pulls in a fair whack on top of what she makes from the market in Trash Town… hell, it’s probably where most of the things come from that she’s trading in Trash Town.”
After the Shift: The Complete Series Page 31