Game Of Cages (2010) (27 page)

"Stay as low as you can and keep out of sight. You're safest if no one knows you're here."

Catherine nodded and I climbed from the car, walking quickly away from it. I took the ghost knife from my pocket.

The closest trailer was dark and all the curtains were drawn. I didn't get any closer than ten yards as I trotted past. The second trailer was not lined up with the others--someone had hooked it up to a Yukon and tried to pull away. There was a bullet hole in the driver's window and blood on the windshield, but I couldn't see a body. I didn't look for it, either.

I did see the red-and-white card on the dashboard. It was a parking permit for the campgrounds. Damn. I'd told Regina exactly where to find them.

The last of the trailers was parked beneath the trees. It was also dark, but the curtains were open. Everyone still alive must have fled. Then I heard a woman shout a warning, saw movement in a darkened window, and heard the shot.

Strangely, I felt something tear at the front of my shirt before I saw the window burst open. It took a moment to realize I'd been shot in the chest and should play dead. I toppled sideways, letting my right hand fall across my chest to hide the spot where the bullet hole should have been.

I tried to stay completely still, although my heart was racing--in fact, my heart was speeding up as I lay there. Some asshole had just taken a shot at me, and if he'd gone for my head, I'd be as dead as Stork Neck.

It scared me, and being scared pissed me off. The freezing mud soaking into my clothes pissed me off. Somebody was going to have something unpleasant happen because of this.

For now, though, I put that out of my mind. I heard a thin screen door smack shut and the squish of approaching footsteps. I held my breath and kept still. Through my half-closed eyes, I could see the trailer. A figure with a white ski mask and a white sleeve peeked around the front of the RV and aimed a rifle at me. My arm was curled and ready to throw the ghost knife, but the gunman was twenty-five or thirty yards away. By the time the spell reached him, he'd have put two or three bullets into my brain.

After a few seconds, the figure decided I was dead and aimed at the car. I hoped Catherine was still keeping low.

The sniper stepped out from behind the truck. Despite the ski mask, I recognized her. It was Ursula. She was wearing the same clothes she'd had on when she held a gun on me in the guesthouse behind the Wilbur estate. I could even see the cuts the ghost knife had made in her white jacket.

I'd been thinking of the shooter as "he"; I should have learned better by now.

She walked directly toward the car, rifle to her shoulder like a soldier. She stepped around my feet and out of my line of sight. I counted four squishy, muddy steps after she'd passed, then a fifth and a sixth before I decided I was being a coward. I rolled over and threw the ghost knife.

She turned toward me, swinging the rifle around. The ghost knife cut through it, and the weapon came apart in her hands.

She gaped at the broken rifle for a few precious seconds while I rolled to my feet. Then she threw the halves aside and reached into her waistband.

There was no time to be gentle. I charged her and hit her once in the same spot I'd hit Esteban. She staggered but didn't go down. I did it again.

She fell into the mud, arms waving vaguely in the air, still trying to defend herself even though she was out. I pulled her handgun out of her belt and dropped it into my pocket.

She also had a knife, which I threw onto the top of the nearest trailer. Then I took her wallet and keys, just because she was annoying. In her inside jacket pocket, I found three pairs of handcuffs with keys.

I dragged her by the heel to the nearest trailer, wrapped her arms around a tire below the axle, and cuffed her.

I pressed my ear against the wet, freezing shell of the trailer. Someone had shouted a warning to me, and it sure hadn't been Ursula. I didn't hear anything, so I circled around to the door. One of the tires was flat. I knelt and saw a bullet hole in the rim. It was almost the same spot as the one on the tire of the overturned delivery truck on the estate. Ursula was quite a shot.

The trailer door was wide open. I reached in and felt for the light switch, flicked it on, and stepped back.

No gunshots zipped by me. I looked in, leaning farther into the doorway until I saw a woman's fur-trimmed leather boot and the leg that went with it.

I went inside. The boot belonged to Professor Solorov; she was slumped against the wall in the little booth that served as a dining area. Her eyes were half closed and her mouth was hanging open. Blood had soaked through her blouse on the lower left side. She did not look like the same woman who had taken Kripke at gunpoint, or who had threatened to kill his whole family if he didn't turn over his spell book.

The window above her had a bullet hole in it. I was standing where Ursula had stood when she shot at me. Solorov must have shouted the warning, although I doubted she knew who she was shouting at.

She looked at me, blinking sleepily as she tried to focus. "Did you kill her?"

"No. I'm going to call an ambulance, okay? Where's the phone?"

"Right there." She didn't have the energy to point, but I did follow her gaze to the cell on the floor. It had been smashed.

"Hold on," I said. I went outside and knelt beside the nearest corpse. It was Horace Alex; I took his cellphone again. The campground got one bar, but that was enough. I dialed 911. My headache flared and I said what I needed to say. I didn't give my name, but I didn't kid myself that it would be a secret for long. My headache faded as I went back inside. "Someone will be here soon."

"Let me out," a new voice said. "I don't want to be found here." It came from the back of the trailer. Through a tiny hallway I saw Stuart Kripke handcuffed to a narrow bed.

"Yes," Solorov said. "Get out. Both of you get out."

I went into the back. His cuffs matched the ones I'd taken off Ursula. I took the keys from my pocket and freed him. He rolled over onto his wide ass and sat rubbing his wrists. He looked me up and down. "You look like crap."

Charming. I went back into the other room and leaned close to Solorov. She had ordered Biker killed and tried to do the same to me, but I still felt sorry for her. "Is there anything I can do for you?"

"Yes," she answered weakly. "Go fuck yourself. I don't need your pity. Wait! Wait." She worked her carefully painted mouth, trying to call up enough spit to keep talking. "If you kill that Norwegian cow, I'll pay you ten thousand dollars."

"Why did she do all this?"

"Why do you think? That tattooed bastard told her we had the package. Of course it was a lie, but she didn't want to hear it." Solorov raised her other hand from beneath the table. Her fingers had been smashed crooked. "On second thought, don't kill her. I want to do it myself."

Kripke squeezed through the narrow hall. "I'll pay you five hundred dollars if you can get me out of town before the police arrive." His voice was too loud and too blunt. "Everyone else here is dead."

I didn't have time to deal with him. "Just a minute," I said.

He leaned over Solorov and flipped open her sport jacket. The professor didn't like that but couldn't do anything about it. "You keep your hands off, you fat creep."

"Hey!" His voice was bullish and thick. "You don't get to tell me what to do! Not after all this. You're lucky I don't fuck you right here and now."

I grabbed hold of his shirt. "That's enough out of you! You keep running your mouth and I'm going to cuff you again."

"And give up five hundred bucks?" he said, as if he was calling my bluff. There was something off about the guy, but I didn't know what it was. He seemed like a brainy guy who wasn't very smart. It wasn't until he looked at my face that he backed down, muttering something about jocks.

I turned back to the professor. "Where can I find the tattooed man?"

"Forget him," she answered. "He's a big, bad grown-up and you're just a little boy. And his boss is something else entirely."

"Let me worry about that. Where can I find them?"

"Hah. What's in it for me?"

"She can't tell you," Kripke interrupted. "She won't ever admit that she doesn't know something or that she's in over her head. That's how she ended up like this."

Solorov sighed and closed her eyes. For a moment I thought she'd died, but when she spoke, her voice was whisper quiet. "Get out. Both of you. I don't want you near me. Just go."

I grabbed Kripke's shirt and pulled him out of the trailer. He complained about the cold and the drizzle and the mud on his shoes. The sound of his voice put me on edge, but I didn't tell him to shut up. I wanted him in a talking mood.

Ursula had come around and was working furiously at her cuffs, scraping them back and forth along the bottom of the axle. She was tenacious, if nothing else.

I put Kripke in the backseat of my Neon and climbed behind the wheel. My muddy clothes were cold against my skin. Catherine sat up and looked at me in silence.

"Before the cops get here," Kripke said. "Five hundred bucks. I'm not kidding."

I took Ursula's handgun from my pocket and gave it to Catherine. "If he does anything stupid, shoot him."

"Okay," she answered.

He was silent as I pulled out of the campground. I didn't hear sirens.

I glanced into the rearview mirror at Kripke. He was sulking. I'd interrupted my search for the pastor and the sapphire dog, and he was all I had to show for it. He'd better be worth it.

I drove by the school and beyond that the little houses and cross streets. I looked at Kripke in the mirror again. "Where have you been staying?"

He rolled his eyes. "Nowhere. I came to the auction. I was kidnapped. That's where I've been staying, with my kidnappers."

I wanted to question him, but where? Steve Cardinal might look for me at the Sunset. The Grable was a wreck. It was late enough that the bar would have closed. I wondered how Steve would react if I showed up at his house.

Kripke blew out a long, slow breath. "I shouldn't have come anywhere near this place. I just want to go home and pretend none of this ever happened."

"What about your buddy?"

"Who? Oh. Paulie. We weren't close. Besides, he was supposed to be my bodyguard. It's not my fault he blew it. Look, if you can get me out of town, I can get you two hundred dollars right away. That's the ATM limit. I'll send you a check for the rest."

I parked in front of a narrow house with a lopsided porch. A six-foot-long baby Jesus had been mounted on the siding, and it watched us with big blue eyes. I turned off the engine, then turned around, took the gun from Catherine, and dropped it into my pocket. She went back to doing nothing. I wished I had the real Catherine here. This next part needed an investigator.

"I heard you talking to the professor outside the Wilbur house. Right before the floating storm was summoned. How much of that was true?"

He ran his fingers through the hair above his ears, fluffing the frizzy tangle. His motions were sharp and annoyed. "Oh, come on. Really? Are we going to do this here, on a public street? Are you going to threaten to shoot me in your own car? Please."

"You don't have to be impressed. Just answer my questions."

"What if I don't?"

"More people will die."

He snorted. "Oh, noes! More people like the kidnappers who killed my bodyguard! Let's do everything we can to prevent that!" His voice was raw with contempt.

I'd had more of him than I could stand. "I don't think you understand the situation you're in."

"You don't scare me any more than Paulie did," he said. "You think this is still high school? You may have been King Dick among the jocks back then, but I have the money, the house, and the job. What do you have except a Walmart name tag?"

For a moment I just stared at him, astonished. If he'd given that little speech to Arne or one of my old crew, he would have gotten a beating so ferocious he would never stand up straight again. He'd lived all his life in the straight world. He had no idea how to behave in mine.

I took the pistol from my pocket and fired off a round. It passed through the back window about a foot from his head, but I'm sure it felt much closer.

Catherine shrieked. Kripke slapped his hand over his face as if he'd been shot. He rubbed at his cheek, then checked his palm for blood. A fleck of gunpowder must have landed on his skin, but he couldn't tell the difference between a burning speck and an entrance wound.

"High school?" I said. "I didn't go to fucking high school. While you were carrying your books in the halls and complaining about homework, I was on the street stealing cars and getting high. I was doing time in juvie for shooting my best friend. Don't you brag to me about your money or your house, motherfucker. If I want anything you have, I take it. Understand?"

His eyes were wide and blank, but there seemed to be a little spark of understanding in there. "Everything I said to the professor was true, but there was some stuff I left out."

"I'm waiting."

"Okay, um. The guy who baited his way into our server and gave us all that information? He was logging on from somewhere in Bozeman, Montana. And he called himself TheLastKing."

King? I knew someone named King. I hoped to God it wasn't the same guy. "What was his real name?"

"I don't know. He always logged in from a public wireless network. We could never find out who he was. We were going to ban him, but his first posts were full of great stuff, so we voted against it."

"What did he teach you?"

"Well," Kripke said, and swallowed. He lifted his hand close to his chest and pointed at my gun hand. "That's the closed way on the back of your hand."

I felt goose bumps run down my back. He knew more about the spells Annalise put on me than I did. I scowled to hide my excitement. "He taught you to recognize spells? What did he tell you about the closed way?"

"That it stops physical attacks the way a washed-out road blocks a traveler. That when a primary casts it, the marks are invisible and the skin can feel anything un-spelled skin can feel, but as you go down to secondary, tertiary, and so on, the spells become hard to hide and you lose sensation."