Game Of Cages (2010) (2 page)

"So here's the deal: you keep quiet and do what I say, or you get out right now. I have a long night's work ahead of me, and I don't need you getting in my way. So, which is it going to be? Because if following orders is going to be too much for you, you need to be out of my car and have yourself a nice day."

She stared at me, waiting for a response. It had been a while since anyone had spoken to me like that. If Catherine had been a guy ...

Not that using my fists had ever turned out well for me. Old habits don't just die hard, they make living hard, too. "You must be part of the diplomatic wing of the society."

She sat back, rolled her eyes, and sighed. "What the hell did I do to deserve this?"

"I'll tell you what you did," I answered. "You talked to me like I ran over your dog. Whatever your problem is, it has nothing to do with me."

"Oh no?" She turned the key, shutting off the engine. "Bad enough to have a peer or an ally along. Then I would spend all my time praying the collateral damage doesn't hit me. But every wooden man I've ever met was either a stone-skulled thug, terminally ill, or a terminally ill stone-skulled thug." She made sure to look me straight in the eye as she said it. She had guts. I would have liked her if she wasn't so obnoxious. "Which are you?"

"Well, I'm not terminally ill."

She frowned. I'd lived down to her expectations. "Well, that's just dandy."

"If you order me to get out of your car," I said, "I'll hop out right here. I'm not going to ride with someone who doesn't want me. But that's the only way I'm getting out. When the friendly guy from the society turns up to debrief me, I'm not going to tell him I chose not to go. Understand?"

She turned away from me. The society had kept me out of jail, somehow. I had no idea what would happen if I refused to take a job. Would they kill me? Would they lift whatever spell kept the cops off my front door? I had exactly one person handy who I could ask, and she was trying to kick me out of her car.

Pizza-delivery guys carried red cases across the lot. They didn't seem happy about the way we were parked. I wondered how much they made a month.

"All right then," Catherine said. "We go on the job, and you take your orders from me."

"That ain't going to happen, either," I told her. As Annalise's wooden man, I went when she said go and I did when she said do, but that didn't mean I was going to take orders from everyone in the society. Not unless Annalise told me to. "If you have a good idea, I'll be happy to go along with it. If not, then not. That's the only deal you're going to get. If that's not good enough, you can explain why you gave the boot to the guy the society sent you an hour out of your way to pick up."

She chewed on that for a while, then pulled into the street and drove onto the ramp to the highway. We weren't talking, apparently, but I could bear it. At least she didn't want to kill me.

We drove to 520 and headed east toward the Cascades. Two hours and several increasingly narrow roads later, we turned off just before we came to a pass. We drove north for a short while, following a winding two-lane highway through the mountains.

It occurred to me that Catherine might have a report or a file about the job we were on. I asked, but she shook her head. Either she didn't have one, or she wasn't sharing. They came to the same thing for me.

We changed roads a couple of more times, weaving and winding through the Cascade foothills. We didn't play music. Catherine was a very good driver, although I doubted most people would recognize it; she had complete control of the car, held the same steady speed, and had excellent lane discipline. Nothing flashy, but she knew what she was doing. I wondered how much time she spent behind the wheel every day.

We skirted a small town, passing along a road in the hillside above it. It was late, but Christmas lights still burned in the town below. It felt strange to be traveling several hundred feet above a star, but I was probably just tired.

I didn't see the name of the town and realized I had no idea where we were. It didn't matter. By my watch, it was just past eleven. The road and rain forest looked fake in the headlights, like a TV show. I felt adrift in the darkness.

We curved south and quickly came upon a high black iron fence on one side of the road. Catherine pulled to the shoulder and checked her GPS against a slip of paper in her pocket. "This is it. The gate should be up ahead."

"I can cut through the fence," I told her. The long drive had eased tensions between us. "We could hide the car and sneak onto the property."

"That would take too long. The driveway from the gate to the house stretches three miles, and the terrain would be difficult. There's also a second road off the grounds that heads east-northeast toward town and a whole twisty mess of access roads and horse trails, otherwise I'd suggest we hide outside the gate and snap photos of drivers and license plates of everyone who leaves. We're going to have to risk driving it."

I nodded and kept quiet. After a few minutes we came to the gate. Catherine drove by, slowing slightly to allow us to look up the driveway. I didn't see any cars or guards, but a heavy chain held the two halves of the gate together.

She drove down the road a ways, turned off her headlights, then did a quick three-point turn. We approached the gate from the other side and stopped at the entrance. "I have a bolt cutter in the back," she said, reaching for the door.

"We don't need it," I said. I opened the passenger door and closed it as quietly as I could. The chunk sound it made was loud in the thin mountain air.

If there was an alarm system on the gate, it was hidden. There were no wires, electric trips, or warning signs. I took the ghost knife from my pocket. Holding it felt like holding my own hand.

I approached the chain snaked through the gate and laid the laminated edge of the ghost knife against it. It cuts ghosts, magic, and dead things. With a quick flick of my wrist, I slid the sheet of paper through the steel, slicing it in half.

Metal rods extended through the bottom of the gate into a hole in the asphalt. I cut those as well.

The chain came off in two pieces. They had been wrapped around the gate but not locked together. I hadn't needed the ghost knife at all.

I pushed the left gate open, making enough room for the Acura. No klaxons went off, no lights flashed, no Dobermans charged out of the darkness at me.

We drove up the driveway with our lights off. It was a winding road, dipping and curving around gullies and rock faces. I was glad Catherine had shot down my idea of crossing the estate on foot--it would have taken hours.

It occurred to me that, if the society wanted to get rid of me, this was the way to do it. Send a woman to pick me up. Dress her in bland, nondescript clothes. Drive all the way into the mountains. If this estate belonged to Annalise or one of the other peers, no one would ever find me.

I shook that off. A peer could just as easily throttle me in my bed and burn down my apartment. Or pull my head off with their bare hands. They didn't need to be clever.

Catherine and I gasped at the same time as a curve in the road revealed a pair of headlights shining from around the next bend. She braked gently. I laid my hand on the door handle in case I needed to bolt from the car.

"Don't," Catherine said. The headlights were not moving toward us. In fact, they weren't moving at all. We backed up a few yards and turned down an access road I hadn't noticed. The tires crunched on downed branches and muddy gravel. She drove twenty yards, then shut off the engine. Once the sun rose, anyone on the drive above would be able to spot the car, but I hoped we would be gone by then.

We shut the doors as quietly as we could. Catherine changed from her office shoes into hiking boots and slung a pack over her shoulder, then followed me back to the driveway. My own black leather low-tops slipped in the mud.

Once back at the driveway, Catherine laid a long pine branch across the shoulder. She then placed a pinecone in the center of the asphalt.

With the access road to the car marked, we crept along the shoulder, staying just inside the line of trees. I heard the wind blowing above me, but I was sheltered down in the hills. Unfortunately, we were heading up. My jacket was too thin for December in the mountains, but I'd be okay if I kept dry.

I reached the edge of the curve. A BMW sat on the shoulder of the road, grille facing me, but the headlights were off. The lights actually came from a second vehicle: a panel truck on its side, the windshield cracked and the low beams shining into the trees across the road. The truck was lit by the headlights of a third car that I couldn't see from where I stood. I watched for a minute or so, waiting for the drivers to show up. They didn't.

Catherine crept up beside me and peered around the trunk of a tree. I wished I knew the hand signals TV commandos use. I leaned close to her and whispered: "Let me check it out. If no one shoots me, you follow."

The reflected headlights illuminated Catherine's face clearly. I saw her nod gratefully.

I rubbed the tattoos Annalise had put on my chest and forearms, but I couldn't feel anything. That was how they worked: where the marks covered my skin I was numb, but those marks could bounce bullets.

It wasn't much. My neck, my face and head, my back, my legs, and a couple of other places I didn't like to think about were not bulletproof, but it was more than most people had.

I darted from one tree to the next. The headlights lit the accident scene pretty well, but anyone who might be standing guard was well hidden. Or there was nothing to guard. To hell with this. I climbed down the embankment and walked along the shoulder.

The BMW was an xDrive 50i in a lovely burgundy. An X6. It was also empty. The license plate holder showed it belonged to a "luxury" rental agency. Out of habit, I checked the ignition. No keys. The driver's door was unlocked, though. I had always liked stealing BMWs. They were fun to drive and valuable enough to ship out of the country. That wasn't my life anymore, of course.

I jogged toward the toppled panel truck. I was too close to creep around in shadows, and it would have looked suspicious if I'd tried. Instead, I strode directly through the headlights, trying to make my body language say I am a Good Samaritan.

The truck was lying on the passenger side, with the cab partly blocking the driveway. The mud beside it was smeared with footprints.

Standing by the roof, I pulled myself up and peered into the open driver's window. There was blood on the steering wheel and a bloody handprint on the side of the door.

Then I noticed the front driver's-side tire. It was dead flat, and there was a finger-poke hole in the metal rim.

A skid mark stretched from the middle of the road to just a few feet away. Uphill was a long, gentle slope, very unlike the terrain we'd passed on the estate so far. The trees were scant on that part of the hill, and at the far top I could see the lights of a house.

I walked around the front. There were no dents in the grille, so it was clear there'd been no collision. At the bottom of the truck, I could feel the drive train still giving off heat. Gas dripped out of a small rupture in the plastic gas tank.

Catherine jogged up beside me. "This accident just happened," I said.

"Did you notice the color on the roof?" she asked.

I followed her around the truck. Now that she'd told me it was there, I saw it immediately--there was a dark circle just under two feet in diameter on the part of the roof next to the ground. I knelt close to it. The blue paint of the truck was nearly black there, although it was difficult to judge color accurately in the moonlight.

Was this circle fresh paint? I picked up a stick and poked it.

"Don't--" Catherine said, but she was too late. One tap against the circle caused the whole area to crumble to dust, leaving a hole in the roof.

I jumped back, careful not to get any dust on me. "Holy shit," Catherine said. "What did that?"

"I was going to ask you," I said.

She took a flashlight from her bag and shined it down onto the pile of dust. It looked like fine metal filings. She turned the beam of light into the truck. "I can't tell what I'm seeing in there."

I walked to the back. The third car parked behind it wasn't a BMW. Something about it caught my attention, but the headlights were bright and I was too focused on the truck to think about it. The truck's double doors were unlatched. One door hung across the opening. Half of a bakery logo was visible on it. The other door lay open on the uneven ground. It would have been convenient if the headlights of the third car had lit the interior of the truck, but it had been parked at the wrong angle for that.

Catherine joined me but kept well back from the open door. She knelt and shined her flashlight into the darkness of the truck. Right beside the opening was a car battery. Beyond that, I couldn't see much detail.

I didn't see or hear anything moving inside. I stepped onto the open door. It groaned and bent under my weight. I knelt below the other door, not wanting to touch it in case it made more noise, and I crawled inside.

Catherine followed. Her flashlight illuminated the contents well enough. Beside me was the car battery. Only one lead was still attached.

At the far end of the truck bed was a Plexiglas cube, three feet on each side. It was still bolted to the floor, which meant it was now midway up the side of the tipped-over truck. There was a broken battery mount on it, and each corner of the cube had a floodlight aimed toward its center. With the battery broken off, presumably by the accident, the lights had gone out.

"What the hell is this?" Catherine asked. Her voice echoed off the metal panels.

"A cage," I said. I remembered something Annalise had once told me: Predators like to be summoned, but they hate to be held in place. I moved closer to it. There was a discolored hole on the "roof" of the cage.

"Don't touch that, please," Catherine said. "I have to breathe the air in here, and I don't want a lot of plastic dust floating around."

"Good idea."