Game Of Cages (2010) (3 page)

"It looks like we're too late," she added. "It looks like the owner of this truck won the auction, then had an accident while they were driving away. The battery mount broke, the lights went off, and whatever was inside escaped. Seem right to you?"

"Sure, except about the accident. That left front tire was shot out. You can see the bullet hole on the metal rim."

She nodded. I had the impression I'd passed the first IQ test. "Okay. If the gunfire has already started, then we should gather up what information we have and get out of here. But what do you think about these discolored holes?"

"I think I don't want to get in this predator's way."

She handed me the flashlight, then stepped outside. I could hear her texting someone, probably reporting to the society.

I shone the light around the enclosure. There were small stones at the front of the truck bed. I got down close and saw they weren't stones at all. I picked one up. It was half a dog biscuit.

I climbed out of the truck just as Catherine shut off her phone. "Well?"

"They'll be on their way as quickly as they can. It'll take hours, though. Probably not until tomorrow night or later. Did you find anything?"

"Just this." I held up the biscuit. She frowned at it.

"Weird. Do you think they fed a dog to the predator?"

"What are the odds that this predator eats doggy treats?"

She gave me a look that told me I'd failed my second test. She held out her hand and I gave her the flashlight. As she stooped below the hanging door to enter the truck again, she said: "No offense, but I'm going to check your work. I'm the investigator here."

She was? That was useful information. I'd never met a society investigator before, but I knew they were supposed to look into suspicious situations, file a report, and get out. It was up to the peers--and their wooden men--to do the fighting.

She was inside the truck for just a minute or two, but it seemed much longer. Someone was going to catch us here if we didn't move on soon.

I looked at the third vehicle and stopped short. No wonder it had caught my attention: it was a Maybach Landaulet, roof closed, naturally. Christ. Someone was rolling in the cash.

Finally, Catherine climbed out of the truck. "I have an idea," she said. She walked around the truck to the hole in the roof, then began searching the muddy slope. "Look."

She pointed to an indentation in the mud. It was perfectly round and flat, as if someone had tamped down the earth with a big soup can. There was another nearby farther up the slope, then another and another. They were spaced out like footprints, and there seemed to be a lot of them.

"Are there two predators?" I asked.

"Either that, or it had more than two legs. And look at this." She shone the flashlight onto a separate set of tracks, this time made by men's dress shoes. They headed up the small rise and over it, the men chasing the escaped predator.

"Which way do we go?" I asked. "Do we follow the tracks or continue toward the house?" I nodded up the slope at the house lights.

"Can the spell you used to cut the chain out front kill a predator?" she asked, her tone making it clear she didn't have that sort of weapon.

"It has in the past," I admitted. To push away the memories that statement churned up, I kept talking. "Whether it will work on this one or not, I don't know. I don't even know what we're facing."

"Neither do I," she said.

We trudged through the mud after the footprints. At the top of the rise we saw a long, even, tree-lined slope headed downward. And four bodies.

"Oh, shit," Catherine said as she backed away. I moved toward the dead men, more out of a sense of duty than common sense. Apparently, searching the dead wasn't part of an investigator's job.

The three men whose faces I could see--one was facedown in the mud--were Asian, and they were all dressed very well. They wore wool three-quarter-length coats and dark suits. One suit had pinstripes, which was a stylish touch. Their hair was neatly cut, and they were all closely shaved.

The nearest man had been shot in the side of the head from very close range. Two others farther down the slope had been shot in the chest; they lay on their backs, Glocks in their hands. The fourth man, the one lying facedown, had at least eleven exit wounds in his back and one in his neck. He also held a gun, but the slide was back. His gun was empty.

There was a little white mark on the side of his face. I crouched down to look at it more closely. It actually looked like the end of a mark, as though someone had rubbed bleach on his face with the pad of a thumb. It ran from his temple down toward his cheek; the rest, however much there was, was covered by mud. I could have seen more if I'd wanted to move the body, but I didn't.

He had a wallet bulging in his back pocket. It ruined the line of his suit, so I pulled it out for him and opened it up. It contained American greenbacks along with a number of foreign bills. There was an identity card, but it was written in some kind of kanji and I couldn't read it. The picture showed a very serious Asian man with a crooked nose but no white mark.

Damn. Seeing him with his eyes open, even if it was only on a driver's license or whatever, gave me a chill. Images swirled in my mind--food, laughter, booze pukes, fucking, boredom in line at the bank--all the memories I imagined would make up his life, all reduced to this lump of dead meat on a muddy hillside.

Catherine was watching me. I held the wallet open to her. "Can you read Japanese, or Thai, or whatever?"

She shook her head and folded her arms across her chest. I closed the wallet and slid it back into the man's pocket. I didn't take the money, not even the U.S. bills. I wasn't going to pick a dead man's pocket in front of Catherine.

"Who shot them?" she asked.

"I think they shot each other," I answered. "I'm no TV detective, but this dude was shot at close range, and ..." I opened the first man's coat. His weapon was still in the holster. "Yeah, he didn't even get a chance to draw his gun. Those two were shot from farther away, and they have their guns in their hands.

"And this bastard is lying here with an empty weapon and a good dozen bullet holes in him. Are there more footprints going down the hill?"

Catherine went around the bodies. The starlight was pretty dim, but our eyes had adjusted. "Yes," she said. "But there are fewer of them."

"I think Mr. White Smudge here shot the others. The ones who killed him probably stood around what-the-hell-ing for a while, then took off after the predator."

"Wouldn't they want to carry their friends back to the car? Or call the cops?"

I shook my head. These guys had expensive suits and identical weapons. I figured them for somebody's hired muscle--a crew. I'd been part of a crew once. We'd done everything together, but we hadn't been friends. Not really.

I looked at Catherine. "Do you want to turn around?"

"Let's keep going," she said. "We decided to chase the predator, and this doesn't really change things, does it?" Her arms were still crossed. I didn't suggest she take one of the dead men's guns. Her body language made it clear what she thought of the idea. Besides, it hadn't done them much good. She glanced at White Smudge as though trying to figure out what had turned him on his buddies. Then she looked away.

We followed the footprints down the hill, through a stand of trees into a meadow. Some of the bark was scorched black as though from a fire. The damage looked months old, though, and the forest was rebounding.

The weird soup-can footprints didn't pass through any of the trees. At least, there were no dark circles on the trunks. I wondered why the predator didn't take shortcuts through them. Were they too thick? Too alive? Something else? I had no idea.

"Look at this," Catherine said.

The soup-can footprints headed straight across open ground, then clustered together as though the creature had turned to face its pursuers. Then the trail split apart.

One set of prints continued ahead down to the meadow. Another went to the right. A third led off to the left. The shoe prints also split up to follow the three separate trails.

"It's not cloning itself, is it?" I asked. Catherine shrugged.

I followed the trail of prints to the right. After about five feet, they vanished.

Catherine waved to me. "The prints stop here," she said. She was standing about ten feet away on the trail that led to the left. A quick check showed the same thing on the center trail. After about five feet, it vanished.

The shoe prints milled around, then split up and led away in those three different directions. What the hell was going on?

"Maybe it cloned itself and flew away," Catherine said.

I felt goose bumps run down my neck. The night sky above me was empty, as far as I could see. It gave me the willies to think that the predator might have been above us all along.

"What do you think?" she asked.

"I think I don't want this thing to swoop down on me."

"I meant what do you think we should do next."

Was this another test? I looked around. By the starlight, I could see trees, underbrush, uneven ground, and far, far down the slope ahead I saw a single burning bluish streetlight. I reminded myself that I was here with an investigator. A peer would have hunted the predator to kill it--a single predator on the loose could, in the long run, lead to the extinction of life on this planet. Investigators, though, collected information for the peers.

Who would be getting here soon. I hoped.

"Well," I said, shrugging, "there's nothing to be learned wandering around out here. And I definitely don't want to come up on those gunmen by accident. I say we should check out the house."

She half smiled, then led the way back up the slope. For a brief moment I thought the four dead men were gone, having been carried off into the night sky by whatever we were following, or even worse, having gotten up and shambled off. Then I saw that they were just a little farther away than I'd thought.

No one had come to check on the cars. Catherine didn't want to drive her Acura any closer to the house, and I agreed. A strange car pulling up at this time of night would attract the worst sort of attention.

Catherine insisted we hike along the driveway rather than take the direct route across the estate, and after a half mile I was glad of it. The slope was not as smooth as it had appeared. We kept to the shoulder, watching ahead and behind for headlights. We were ready to dive into the trees at the first sign of a car, but none came.

We rounded a curve in the road and saw the house up close.

I'd certainly seen bigger. In L.A., all you have to do is drive along a freeway and look up; huge houses are scattered on the hillsides. But this house was huge and isolated and completely out of place. It was three stories tall, with a high, slanted roof and tall, narrow, arched windows like a church. It had chimneys like a porcupine had quills, and I couldn't imagine the kind of person who would look around at this isolated patch of rain forest and decide it was the place to build a mansion.

There was a garland in the front windows and nets of tiny multicolored lights draped over the bushes along the front. Someone had made the effort.

We ducked off the road into the trees, pushing our way through scattered blackberry bushes and scraggly ferns.

The grounds around the front had been cleared, and the road had been widened into a little parking lot with a wide section at the end, probably to give delivery trucks room to turn around. At the moment, the lot was filled with cars, all pointed toward the gate. I saw another BMW to match the one by the truck, a pair of black Yukons, a black Mercedes, and finally a Passat, of all things. At the far end of the lot the asphalt narrowed again into a path leading to a multicar garage.

I stared at the cars, searching for movement or a human shape inside. The X6 had to-go coffee lids on the dash, and the Yukons had bright red-and-white cards in the front windows, but otherwise they were empty.

I moved close to Catherine. "Do we circle around?"

"To where?" She pointed toward the near side of the house, where there were twenty-five yards of lawn separating the tree line from the building. There appeared to be even more space around back. "Do you see any people?"

"Yeah." I pointed toward the door, where a man in a heavy wool coat and a furry Russian hat stood just out of the porch light. I thought he was dressed too warmly for the weather, but I'd been jogging up a long hill and he'd been standing around. Still, bulky coats made me nervous.

"Crap." Catherine pulled me back from the edge of the hill to a stand of trees. When we were out of sight, she let go of me quickly, as if she was afraid I'd take it as a gesture of friendship. "We need photos of the license plates."

"What if they're all rentals, like the one down the hill?"

"I still want them," she said. "But what's more, I don't want to kill anyone. Not everyone we meet is going to be part of some plot to bring predators here to eat our spleens, and I would like to kill as few of them as possible. Can we agree on that?"

I stared at her. Had the society told her what I'd done? I felt a sudden flush of shame, but not for the people I'd killed. I hadn't killed any innocent bystanders. At least, I didn't think I had. Annalise may not have cared about collateral damage, but I had been more careful.

But I still felt ashamed, because I knew the society was, at the core, vigilantes. I believed they had good reason for doing what they did, but their day-to-day work was finding people and killing them.

And not only had I taken part, I'd been eager to drop everything to come on this job, eager for the adrenaline rush, and I couldn't honestly say I didn't know what we'd be doing.

And I liked Catherine. Her heart and her head were in the right place, and if she was a little weird and distant with me, well, she was right to be.

"Agreed," I said. Standing still in this wind was giving me chills. "Around the side?"

"Not this side," she said. "I'd rather enter from the garage, in case there are more plates to photograph there."