Black_Tide (11 page)

"Yes. She's resting still, but vitals are back to normal, no sign of lasting damage. Her parents are there. Quarantine is lifted."

"Good. How's Kazuko?"

"Resting. Why?"

He filled her in, emphasizing what Brute—Joe Klippelt—had said about "demon-spawn." "The only other person I know that fits that bill is Kazuko."

"Probably others. Many Augs have children, but Adam is the only one post-augmentation. ICAP kept excellent records."

"Do we trust these guys to know the difference?" Humans for Humanity ran the gamut from neo-Nazi to fundamentalist Christian to hard-left anti-GMO conspiracy theorists. Only a hatred for Augs united them.

"No," Sakura said. "But I've seen many strangers around the ward and hotel today. I think I'll go to the hospital, sleep on a cot tonight."

"Want backup?"

"I wouldn't turn it down."

"All right. Let me tie things down here, get Monica some protection, and I'll be up."

He booked a flight two hours later, just in time to miss the storm.

*   *   *

Sakura walked through the hotel lobby, scanning the unfamiliar faces for anyone paying too much attention. Two men and one woman, all Caucasian, sat at a corner booth and paid too little, looking at anything and everything other than her. They'd stopped talking when the elevator had opened, though, and resumed their murmurs with too much haste.

Rowley couldn't get here fast enough. She stopped ten feet from their booth and looked at her phone, and not one of them looked up at her, even after she coughed.

The front door slid open in a blast of frigid air. Sakura had never felt Minnesota cold, except on high-altitude jumps, and the locals assured her the worst had yet to come. She slid across the ice-slicked parking lot, already bathed in orange streetlights despite the time. Visiting hours on the oncology ward ended at six p.m., but the night nurses had made her a permanent exception.

She shivered in the cold until the bus arrived, paid the fare, and sat in the back behind a small man eating pungent green shrimp curry which reeked of grass, citrus, and coriander. A silver Cadillac SUV followed the bus four blocks, then split off west toward the hospital. She ground her teeth through the ride, got off in front of the main entrance, noted the silver Cadillac in guest parking, and stalked into the eighteen-story building.

The lobby smelled of astringent shit, antiseptic and unchanged diaper.

Forty seconds later she walked out of a side entrance, took a picture of the license plate, and uploaded it to Janet LaLonde. Sakura took the stairs. Her phone blipped as she reached the eighth floor.

The Cadillac belonged to Rocky Sweetman, whose daughter Onnoleigh had poured tens of thousands of dollars of her trust fund into Humans for Humanity on her eighteenth birthday two months prior. Onnoleigh's face matched the girl in the lobby, cute and blonde with too much makeup. A quick scroll through "Ona's" Facebook found the other two: David Gerrold, retired policeman, black hair and round face, and Samuel Burns, a bald, surly-looking former gunnery sergeant in the US Marine Corps, now a self-defense instructor in Fairfax, VA.

She took the remaining six floors two steps at a time and hit the landing sweating and breathing hard. Eschewing the dramatic entrance, she listened at the door. She heard nothing, so she cracked it open.

Gerrold sat at the bench in front of the nurse's station, reading manga. How children's entertainment became an American pastime she'd never figured out. His eyes twitched upward when the door moved, and his hand slid into his jacket. She couldn't fight a gun at thirty feet, not anymore.

She let the door close, stood just to the side, and counted. The Psychology of Security Forces textbook she'd penned for the Tokyo Police Department put a curious guard's investigation time at anything under two minutes. After that, they lay in ambush.

A hundred and seven seconds after she'd jostled the door, Gerrold opened it. She put one knife under his chin, just hard enough to draw blood, and the other against his eye. He blinked and winced as the razor-sharp blade sliced his eyelid, deep enough to hurt but not enough to bleed, a paper cut from five inches of steel.

"Step out."

He stepped into the stairwell, eyes wide.

"Remove your firearm with your left index finger and thumb, and drop it on the floor."

It hit the tile with a metallic clatter.

She pulled the blade from his eye a half centimeter, enough to let him blink. He did, eyes watering, and she took the opportunity to body-block him against the wall opposite the railing. The knife remained under his jaw. These Americans stood so damned tall.

"You know who I am?"

"Yes," he said through clenched teeth.

She lifted his chin a little further with the blade. "You know how quickly I can kill you?"

"Yes."

"What is your intent with my daughter?"

He hesitated, so she drew a line down his cheek with the other knife. He hissed as blood welled along the cut, and tears flowed from his eyes.

"What is your intent with my daughter?"

He blubbered. "It's not about you. You're just means to an end."

She lowered the other blade just enough to let him speak clearly. "Continue."

"Ona doesn't care about you. Rowley's the end-game. You're just a stepping stone."

"What are your plans for Kazuko?"

He closed his eyes, hard.

"What are your plans for Kazuko?"

He swallowed. "We . . . we're going to kill you both."

Sakura jammed the knife up through his mouth into his frontal lobe and yanked it out before he had a chance to twitch. He gave her a confused, pained look. She wiped the blade on his arm as his eyes glazed, then she stepped back, letting him tumble down the concrete stairs.

She called Matt. It kicked to voicemail without ringing.

She picked up Gerrold's weapon and racked the slide, snatching a round from the air as it flew from the chamber. A Sig-Sauer P229, the .40 caliber had more kick than she liked, but it beat a knife nineteen times out of twenty. She didn't bother checking the body for extra magazines and instead shouldered through the door, weapon raised.

The head nurse smiled in recognition and then screamed. She ducked behind the desk as Sakura stalked toward her, clearing corners on the approach to Kazuko's room.

Burns poked his head out of Kazuko's room, a confused look on his face. Sakura pulled the trigger twice and the weapon boomed. Red mist puffed out the back of his head and he crumpled to the floor.

Ears ringing from the too-loud reports, she approached the room on the balls of her feet, careful to make no sound.

"Isuji Sakura!" Ona's young voice shook with nervous energy. "I have your daughter."

"Is she alive?"

"For the mom—"

Sakura rounded the corner and took in the scene. Ona half-crouched behind the bed, holding her daughter in a headlock, cheek to cheek, a shaky hand pointing her pistol at the doorway.

"—ent."

Sakura shot Ona twice in the face, the pinprick holes marring her cheek and eye almost simultaneously. Kazuko screamed. Blossom closed the distance, took one look at the gray matter and blood splattering the heating unit in front of the window, and turned the upraised gun to the door.

She picked up the phone left-handed, but before she dialed she looked at her daughter. She spoke in Japanese to avoid any confusion. "Get in bed, keep your hands in sight. The police will be here soon, they will have guns and will be brash and loud in the American fashion. You must not make sudden movements. Understand?"

"Yes, Mother."

Sakura ran her hand over her daughter's head, clumsy with the phone. "Are you all right, my Kazuko?"

"Yes, Mother. They scared me, but I will recover."

"Good."

She dialed 9-1-1 and sat in the guest chair, pistol still in hand.

Hospital security broke into the ward three minutes later. She set down the pistol, pushed it out of arm's reach, and spoke to them around the corner. Eventually a black-haired kid in a uniform too large and too wrinkled drew up the courage to step into the room.

Fingers laced on top of her head, she explained the situation twice, and twice again for the police. They arrested her pending an investigation, but cuffed her out of her daughter's sight, a courtesy Sakura admired and appreciated.

Given one phone call, she dialed Janet LaLonde.

*   *   *

Matt gripped the armrest and looked at white nothing out the window, his stomach unable to settle in the incredible turbulence. The sixty-seater bucked in the driving winds, and the little girl right behind him shrieked in terror, a continuous keening that made the difficult landing downright intolerable.

Her scream took him back to the Atlanta rooftop, as Bravo Squad slaughtered one another with ruthless efficiency in response to the banshee's wail. Sakura had been right, of course. Nobody believed the report she'd kicked upstairs, that they'd defeated a supernatural threat by giving a mummy a jacket, and a possessed girl three states away had woken up in response.

The terrified shrieking intensified as they slid down the runway, the sloppiest landing he'd ever experienced. He turned on his phone before the seatbelt light clicked off, eyes on the screen to keep from glaring at the still-hysterical child. A message popped up from Janet.

Sakura's in jail. 101 4
th
Street. Kazuko's okay.

Might be an ambush. Call me.

He pulled her up and hit "Send," then shuffled down the aisle with the sweating, praying, grateful throng. Janet briefed him on the situation: all signs pointed to self-defense, and the Olmsted County Sherriff's office would remand Sakura to his custody as a courtesy to the Department of Homeland Security, but as a foreign national she couldn't leave the country and would have to surrender her passport until they completed the investigation.

"So what's this about an ambush?" he asked.

"Sakura said one of the dead guys mentioned you."

"All right. I'll plan accordingly."

Matt picked up his bags and glanced up at the TV hanging from the baggage claim ceiling. The polar vortex covered half the country, with blizzard warnings from the Dakotas to the Carolinas. The boards next to the TV showed flight after flight changed to "Canceled."

"Not like we're going anywhere anyway."

*   *   *

Marie rolled her eyes. "You're babbling, Steve. Calm down and try again."

Breathless, Steve Palermo gasped into the phone. "They're dead. Ona, Sam, and Dave. Total freaking disaster, man. Bitch just went psycho on them, desperado-style."

"Did they get her daughter?"

Steve didn't reply. Big K held out his hand for the phone. His soft chocolate eyes flashed in anger as she turned away from him and asked again.

"Steve, stay with me here. Did they get her daughter?"

"No, man. She's okay, I mean fucked with cancer and all, but she's okay."

She reiterated for Big K's benefit. "So Ona, Sam, and Dave are dead, and both Kazuko Sakura and Isuji Sakura are still alive. Could you have fucked this up any worse?"

"I wasn't even there. I was the fucking lookout in the goddamned parking lot."

She rolled her eyes again. "Okay, yeah. You did great, Steve. Rowley's on his way there, which is what we wanted. Pete's guys will handle the rest of this, so you can bug out as soon as the storm is clear."

"So I didn't fuck up?"

She lifted her hand and made a "talk-talk-talk" gesture. Big K kept his hand out, his eyes flashing with anger as she kept talking. "No, you didn't fuck up. You did great."

"Really?"

"Really. See you when you get home."

She hung up.

Big K snorted and wrapped his arms around her. She leaned back into his muscular embrace, rubbing her hands down his dark skin. "Mayo Clinic's a total bust. They'll see what they can do on the way out."

He chuckled. "Wasn't a bust no matter how it turns out. All we wanted to do was lead Rowley there, and he took the bait hook, line, and sinker. Now we hit him where it hurts."

She turned around and rested her head on his shoulder. "It's good of you to do this. Most people wouldn't put themselves out there like this for a friend."

"I'm not most people. You don't get payback, folks will walk all over you your whole life. He fucked with Yardley, he gets payback. It's that simple."

"Most people wouldn't see it that way. You're a good friend."

"The best, babe."

The baby monitor clipped to Monica's waist squawked, a sound more gleeful than plaintive. Monica leaned the broom against the deck and blew a stray wisp of hair out of her face.

"This is ridiculous."

The walkway down to the truck sat under a quarter inch of dense white crap, and she'd swept it off four times already. The snow fell in massive, heavy flakes, what her daddy called "heart attack snow" from his days up north at Fort Drum. The trees rocked in the roaring wind under a gray sky more uniform than she'd ever seen.

And speaking of uniforms, the pair of state policemen parked at the end of the driveway didn't lift a finger to help her.

The Rowleys didn't own a snow shovel. Nobody owned a snow shovel. White Spruce got maybe two inches of snow a year, on a bad year. Maybe a blizzard in January or February a couple times a decade, a few inches over the course of a day.

The forecast predicted sixteen inches in twelve hours. Schools and most businesses had closed in anticipation, and the local news couldn't quite settle on "Snowmageddeon" or "Snowpocalypse".

"C'mon, Ted!"

Ted looked up, his muzzle white, tail a berserk whirlwind. He ran in wide circles, flopped on his side, and looked at her, tongue lolling into the snow.

"In the house, dog. Let's go."

Ted rolled to his feet and galumphed up the stairs to the deck door. She let him in, kicked the snow off her work boots, and stepped inside to the ever-present sound of
The Wiggles
.