Night's Black Agents (Paxton Locke Book 2)

by Daniel Humphreys

  His partner spread his hands and offered him little more than a shrug. “Fine,” Valentine said with a growl. “I’ll be ready in ten minutes.”

  He stepped away from the door and realized that Eliot hadn’t moved. “You in a hurry, hoss?”

  “It’s bad.”

  He caught the tone in his partner’s voice and turned. The look on Eliot’s face said it all. “Five minutes,” Valentine amended.

  CHAPTER 3

  Paxton

  Joplin, Missouri—Monday afternoon

  I’d never been a resident of a jail cell before. All in all, I wasn’t impressed. The floor paint was a light green color halfway between puke and lime. The bed and the stainless-steel toilet were the only decorations in the cell, and heavy bolts secured both to the white cinder block walls.

  I sat on the thin mattress and looked through the bars across the hall. They hadn’t put Cassie and me in the same cell, but at least we were neighbors.

  Maybe they figured we’d talk. They hadn’t liked the answers I’d given them in the interrogation room. Doubtful—there are only four cells in the place, after all. The deputies who’d conducted the interrogation had made comments about moving us elsewhere at some point. Once they figured out what to make of us and our story, I guess.

  Cassie sat up on her own cot and forced a smile. “This is not what I’d call heroic derring-do.”

  I scratched my head and shrugged. “Welcome to the exciting world of Paxton Locke. Sheer moments of terror followed by hours of law enforcement shouting.”

  The smile got a little more natural. “What’d you tell them?”

  “The truth. Dude was trying to kill me, said something about a body in his trunk, we fought him off.”

  “That’s true—from a certain point of view.”

  I mock-groaned. “Now who’s dropping the movie quotes? You’ve been holding out on me, you undercover nerd, you.”

  “I’m shocked that you’re shocked. I’m pretty sure I saw you and your dad in line for the midnight showing of Phantom Menace when I went with my parents.”

  I gave her a faint smile. “I guess I never thought about it. We didn’t exactly run with the same crowd.” Cassie and I grew up in the same small town, and our fathers had been co-workers and friends. but up until a week ago the extent of our relationship had been passing each other in the hall at school and the occasional barbecue. Mike Hatcher taught shop at the local high school, and he’d been the closest thing to an uncle I’d had, growing up. Which might have made Cassie a pseudo-cousin and our current ‘it’s complicated’ relationship even odder, but she hadn’t been around much during those times. “You and your mom, you didn’t think much of my mom, did you?”

  She cocked her head to one side. “That’s a bit out of the blue, but I can see where it came from. Yeah, pretty much. The few times she did show up, mom bit her tongue. She wanted dad to have his friend.”

  And now her dad didn’t have either. Mother had killed my father over a decade ago, and Cassie’s mom had died from cancer when we were still in elementary school.

  Guilt surged through me. To add insult to injury, I’d shanghaied his daughter into a life of crime and left Mike by himself in an empty home. It was a pretty good bet this was Cassie’s first time in a jail cell, or I’d have heard about it. That was the great thing about small towns—everyone was up in your business.

  “You didn’t call him, did you?”

  Cassie rolled her eyes. “Are you nuts? He’d insist on driving down here and bailing me out to protect me from your evil influence.”

  That made me laugh. With the exception of magic, the only real talent I had was taking a beating. Though, I guess I had to admit that the magic helped there, as well. “No worries. I left Kent a message. Knock on wood, he’ll be able to straighten things out.”

  Kent Sikora was a homicide detective for Phoenix PD, now. Back when dad died, he’d been assigned to the investigation in Wisconsin, and ended up taking me under his wing. On top of being a surrogate father, he was ‘read-in’ on the real story of what went down the night my dad died, and what Mother and I could do.

  Before the magus-eater deterred us, we’d been heading west to consult with Kent on a case that involved my sort of weirdness. I hated calling him, but I didn’t have anyone else in the world that officialdom would listen to. It wouldn’t be the first time he’d gotten me out of a tight spot with the local yokels, though like every other time, I hoped it was the last.

  “You could, you know. Tell them to let us go.” Cassie’s voice was low and cautious.

  I squirmed a bit, uncomfortable with the thought. We’ve never talked about it, but there are promises I’ve made to myself about the use of my abilities. For the most part, I’ve kept those promises, even when it might have provided me with an easier road. I tell myself that shortcuts are the best way to get where Mother did, using people for her own purposes, but sometimes I wonder how true that is.

  Sometimes, I think about taking those shortcuts, and I know that if I started I might not be able to stop. You’re not a villain if you don’t cross the line, but I don’t think you can consider yourself a hero when you’re only staying on the right path because you fear the consequences. Me? I’m just a coward trying to do the right thing.

  “I could,” I agreed. “But that doesn’t fix things, not really. Eventually, they’d find out, and we’d be wanted as escapees, which would just make things worse. And what about the poor guard I’d have to whammy to do it? You think they’d let him or keep their job?” I shrugged. “It’ll work out. Just going to take a little time, I guess.” My stomach growled and reminded me that I’d failed to finish breakfast. “Hopefully they feed us at some point.” I eyed the thin mattress and settled into it. Springs creaked. “Until then, I guess we wait.”

  “Worst date ever.”

  I smiled at the featureless white ceiling and replied, “Give it time.”

  Deputy Director Newquist—Monday afternoon

  Washington, DC

  The main offices of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives sat near the corner of New York and Florida Streets in the nation’s capital. From above, the concrete structure seemed a whimsical coliseum of curves, arcs, and glittering glass surrounded by tasteful landscaping. At this time of the day, the departing employees cared little for the beauty of the architecture. They rushed out of the personnel gates or parking garages intent on hitting the highway or public transit of their choice, all in an effort to beat the traffic to wherever they called home.

  The workday was over for many of the occupants of the Ariel Rios Federal Building, but not all.

  In any modern bureaucracy, prestige is displayed in terms of office size and location. In general terms, the higher you were in the building, the more important—and worthy of respect—you were. Someone working in the basement of the building would thus be of a much lower caste, as things went, and worthy of disdain.

  The ATF agents and employees who had to deal with the group in the basement office had many terms for them, but they held more superstition and fear than derision. Regardless of what their fellows called them, the employees in the basement office referred to themselves with the name emblazoned on the frosted glass of the door leading into their domain.

  Division M.

  The administrative assistant’s desk sat right inside the door and served as a de facto gatekeeper for the half-dozen offices spaced along both sides of the hallway beyond. Subtle lighting and tasteful earth tones gave the office a warm feeling, and it was possible to spend enough time in these offices to forget about being underground.

  The front desk and most of those beyond sat empty now, though light still shone from the rear left office. Inside, a balding but powerfully-built man bent over a stack of paperwork. The old-fashioned fountain pen he delicately clutched in his left hand made intermittent scratching sounds as he crossed out words or made notes in the margins of the document he studied.

  T
he phone on his desk chirped, shattering the cool stillness of the moment.

  Pen hanging in mid-air, the man behind the desk peered over the tops of his reading glasses and noted the series of numbers on the caller ID. All sevens.

  Cute, Deputy Director Russell Newquist thought, with the slightest roll of his eyes. He set his pen down and picked up on the second ring. “Yes?”

  “Don’t roll your eyes at me, Russell.” There was an amused air to the tone of the voice on the other end.

  “How can I help you, Michael?” Newquist kept his own voice patient, though his knuckles had turned white on the receiver when he received confirmation of his suspicion as to the identity of the caller.

  “I need you to make a call and have young Paxton and a companion released. Newton County Sheriff’s Department, in Missouri.”

  “You’re kidding me. That’s twice in one week.” There was no response on the other end of the line. Newquist rubbed his forehead in frustration. “This would be a lot easier if I could just give him a badge, you know.”

  “All in good time. Trust, Russell.”

  “I do, Michael, I do. I just wish I could understand why we have to beat around the bush like this. Valentine is already suspicious of the kid. Why not let me bring him in? Morgan can help him along, develop his talent. M-Div could use him. We’re running low on personnel.”

  He waited a few moments for a response before he realized that he was speaking to a dead line. With a sigh, Newquist returned the receiver to its cradle. “Typical.”

  Report abandoned for the moment, he flipped open his laptop and searched through a database. When he found the number he wanted, he picked up the phone once more and dialed. Missouri was only an hour’s difference from DC, but it was still getting on toward the end of the day there. A few annoyed button presses finally got him past the electronic menu and to a live person.

  “Newton County Sheriff, how can I help you this evening?” The ‘I’ sounded more like ‘ah’, and he smiled slightly.

  “This is Deputy Director Newquist of the BATFE, DC office. I need to speak with Sheriff Jennings right away, please.”

  CHAPTER 4

  Valentine

  Iowa City, Iowa—Monday morning

  He resisted the urge to retch and focused on breathing through his mouth. It didn’t help. The stench of burnt flesh surrounded the collapsed building.

  “Balefyr again,” he muttered under his breath. No need for the local yokels to overhear.

  A few feet away, Eliot consulted with the head of the fire department. Their conversation was more than loud enough for him to follow as he surveyed the smoldering ruins of the frat house and stoked the embers of his own rage.

  “Any survivors from inside?” Eliot said.

  “Just one, and the EMTs don’t think he’ll make it.”

  “He have anything to say?”

  The fire chief didn’t answer for a moment, and Valentine glanced over. The man’s soot-streaked face had gone pale, and he looked to either side, wary of being overheard. “Nothing that made any sense.”

  “Please,” Eliot said, and Valentine was glad the other man was around. This was the sort of thing he had neither the temperament or patience for.

  “He said ‘vampire’, maybe,” the other man admitted. “It was hard to tell. Most of his face—” He shuddered.

  “Okay,” Eliot said. “Thank you for your time, Chief.”

  The firefighter started to walk away, then hesitated. “They tell you about the two guys on the porch?”

  Valentine raised his head and turned in his direction. “What two guys?” His question came at the same time as Eliot’s.

  “Two guys?”

  The firefighter looked back and forth between the two of them, as though unsure who to answer to. Finally, he faced Valentine and said, “Couple of the frat guys were acting as doormen. That was another weird thing. Neither one of them would move from the porch, we had to pull them away. They both had severe smoke inhalation. They’re in the hospital, too.” The man shuddered. “We had to restrain them, they kept trying to get out of the ambulance and head back to the porch.”

  “Get those directions,” Valentine said to Eliot . He turned away from the conversation, stalking forward. Unconcerned for the smell now, he stepped up onto the porch and looked inside of the burnt-out building. With the fire extinguished, crime scene technicians were stepping carefully in and out of the grid pattern they’d established with lengths of string. Cameras clicked, documenting atrocity.

  The investigators had emptied several sections of the grid, but much of it was intact. Limbs covered in blackened flesh reached up, as though pleading for mercy that had never come.

  Valentine resisted the urge to spit into the ashes.

  His partner moved up behind him. He remained silent for a moment, then said, “You missed the best part.” Valentine didn’t respond. Eliot continued. “The shack down the road, there was a security guard last night. He tried to stop the fire engines from coming in. The first one pushed through, took down the barricade. After that, he really tried to stop them. The second fire truck went right over him, but not before he emptied his revolver into its front grill.”

  “Geas. Same for the frat boys from the porch, I reckon.”

  “Yeah.”

  Valentine made a face and turned away from the crime scene. Yet again, they’d been too late, and these people—these children—had suffered for it. “We’re not going to get anything out of the survivors on our own. Call the boss. Get George and Morgan on the way. It’s time to hit this with both barrels.”

  Paxton

  Joplin, Missouri—Monday evening

  Somehow, I managed to fall asleep despite the gnawing in my stomach. Magic takes a lot out of you, and I’d been running on fumes for a while now. If I’d listened to the doctors, I’d still be cooling my heels in a hospital room. I’d never given much consideration to their demands. I’ve never been the type to want to stay in one place for very long, especially after dad died, and with magic, I could do more for myself than any modern medicine.

  Shapeless terrors and uneasy feelings filled my dreams. When the rattle of keys in the door to my cell roused me from uncertain rest, a sour taste filled my mouth and my skin was clammy with sweat.

  I leaned on one elbow and blinked until I could make out the figure standing in the opened door of my cell. Like the men who’d brought me and Cassie in, he wore a khaki shirt and green slacks. We made eye contact, and I got the sense that the expression on his face was the sum of equal measures of annoyance and curiosity.

  “Paxton Locke,” he announced. “Given the fact you don’t have any ID on you, I figured it for an alias.” He shook his head. “When I sat down to dinner with my wife and kids and the phone rang, I was more than a little put out. Now, I made certain before I left for the day to ask my secretary to hold all calls. You can imagine my surprise when it was her on the line.” He fell silent, and a frown wrinkled his forehead. Looking past, I could make out Cassie in her cell. She sat on the edge of the bunk, head cocked to the side. I wished I could give her a shrug, but I got the sense that it was best not to push things too far with this guy.

  His continued silence indicated he awaited a response. “I apologize,” I said. “I didn’t call you, obviously, sir.”

  His eyes narrowed. “Sheriff will do. And no, it wasn’t you. Who the hell are you, Paxton Locke? I’d have thought this whole thing an elaborate prank if I hadn’t called Washington on a public line and been transferred to the same guy that called me. Who the hell are you, kid? If you’re a Fed, where’s your ID?”

  I kept my face blank. Washington? Feds? Hell, if anything, I thought he was pissed about Kent calling him. My buddy Sikora must have broken out the big guns on this one. Were we in more trouble than we realized?

  It had been hard enough to convince Kent, back in the day. Since then I’d adopted a more circumspect approach when it came to local law enforcement. “Look, you really
don’t want to know. It’s a long story. But trust me on this, we’re the good guys.”

  “Be that as it may, this is not only highly irregular, but I just got a call from the coroner. The headless corpse that you put into the morgue dissolved into a couple gallons of slime and started leaking out of the locker. So what are we supposed to do now, secret agent man? Is this some sort of hazardous materials situation?”

  I didn’t know what the heck the cannibal salesman had been so I had no way of answering that question with any sort of specificity. But I also had the sense that admitting my ignorance would be a mistake. If anything, the sheriff seemed more pissed off about the mess in the morgue than he did about having to cut us loose. I didn’t want to jinx that.

  “Look, the guy that called you? Call him back, explain the situation.” I was digging deep here, and I hoped the obvious stuff I was shoveling didn’t smell too bad. “They’ll send someone out to take care of it. Your people should be fine. Just don’t, you know, mess around with it, too much.”

  My answer felt lame, half-hearted. The push would have smoothed things over, but I’d long ago made a promise to myself that I wouldn’t abuse the power. Staying in jail for a little bit was a small price to pay for adhering to my own system of ethics. Mother was an object example of the road that faced me if I started looking at people as chess pieces rather than individuals.

  It was a total Hail Mary of an attempt, but it must have worked, because the tension went out of the sheriff’s shoulders all at once, and he nodded. “Okay. Okay. What is this, some sort of ISIS thing?” He caught my look and added, “Of course you can’t say. I understand.”

  “Right,” I agreed. “Need to know, and all that.”

  He stepped aside and let me exit the cell, then unlocked Cassie’s. “I apologize for the inconvenience, ma’am.”

  “You were just doing your job,” Cassie said, trying and failing to keep a befuddled look off her face. Thankfully, he was so preoccupied with ushering us down the hall toward the front of the jail that he didn’t notice.