Harmony Black (9 page)

FOURTEEN

H
eadlights strobed as the Crown Vic slammed over a pothole, tearing through the ghost town.

“We need details on anyone filing an FAA flight plan for Los Angeles,” Jessie told Kevin over the phone. “It’ll be a private plane, leaving tonight, if we haven’t missed it already.”

“Hold on, hold on,” I heard him say, fingers rattling against his keyboard. “I have a hit. Got a Buck Wheeler, filed a route from Willow Run Airport to Van Nuys in the San Fernando Valley. He’s due to leave in about twenty minutes.”

“Shit,” she said. “That’s him. How far?”

“Willow Run is in Ypsilanti. You want to get on I-75, then take exit 41 to I-94 West.”

“How
far
, Kevin?”

“It’s, uh . . . about thirty minutes away.”

“Drive
fast
,” Jessie told me. “Kevin, get on the phone to the tower at Willow Run. They need to stall him. I don’t care what they tell him, but they are
not
to give him permission for takeoff. Give them my number if they have any questions.”

She hung up. I focused on the road, white lines flashing past like daggers in the dark. The Crown Vic bottomed out as I hit the on-ramp, speedometer needle kissing seventy, and we launched onto the highway.

I slid through the sparse late-night traffic like I was threading a needle, weaving and drifting. Every passing minute, every click of the dashboard clock, was another pound of weight on my shoulders.

Jessie’s phone buzzed. She put it on speaker.

“Special Agent Temple.”

“Yes,” a hesitant man’s voice said, “um, this is Miles Stanton, in the tower at Willow Run? Your supervisor, Special Agent Finn, said we should call you.”

Out of the corner of my eye, Jessie arched her eyebrow at the phone.

“Yes,” she said. “What’s the situation? Is Buck Wheeler’s plane still on the ground?”

“Well, that’s why I thought I should call. We told him we had to delay takeoff due to unexpected air traffic overhead. Well, that was fifteen minutes ago, and he’s not answering his radio anymore. We’ve hailed him twice, and nothing. I’m about to send a security guard over to his hangar—”

“No,” she said sharply. “Don’t do that. This man is dangerous. We’ll take care of it.”

She hung up and looked my way. “He knows something’s up.”

“I know what I’d do in his shoes,” I said.

“He’s going to run for it. And if he thinks we’re onto him, he won’t land at Van Nuys. No second chance. We’ll lose him for good.”

And the Gresham brothers with him. The Crown Vic’s engine roared as I laid the hammer down.

The lights of Willow Run came into sight. I pulled a hard right, veering down Airport Drive, just as the phone rang again.

“Uh, Stanton again—”

“What?” Jessie snapped.

“He’s . . . leaving. He’s ignoring the radio, and I can see his hangar from here. His plane just taxied out onto the tarmac.”

“What’s it look like? What kind of plane?”

“It’s a Cessna model 206,” he said, “white, with a blue tail.”

Jessie hung up on him. “You thinking what I’m thinking?”

“If I am,” I told her, “you’re crazier than I thought.”

“Good. We’re on the same wavelength.”

The Vic shot through the open gate, turning a second too slow, and I winced at the shriek of steel against steel as the edge of the fence gouged a furrow in the driver’s-side door. Up ahead was a forest of blinking cherry-red runway lights and brightly lit hangars, jets sitting silently on the tarmac, and canary-yellow carts ferrying pilots and passengers back and forth from the front office. I hit the brakes to veer around a sleeping Learjet, hooked a hard right, and punched the gas.

Buck’s Cessna was up ahead, making a slow, lumbering turn as it rolled out of its hangar and onto the runway. We blazed past him, running parallel, and I gave it another hundred feet before slamming on the brakes, hauling on the wheel, and spinning the car out in the middle of the tarmac.

We jumped out and crouched behind it, using the car for cover as we drew our weapons.

He didn’t stop. The Cessna picked up speed as it rolled toward us, faster by the second, propeller slicing the air with a high-pitched whine.

Jessie and I opened fire at the same time. The night erupted with short, sharp reports as we unloaded on his engine block, the front of the plane blossoming with bullet holes. Another round smashed into the tinted glass canopy, rupturing the windshield. He kept coming. We were locked in a lethal game of chicken, irresistible force against the immovable object, and I could feel the air tremble as the Cessna’s wounded engine strained for power.

“Down!” Jessie shouted, grabbing my shoulders and dragging me to the tarmac. The Cessna wobbled, groaned, and took to the air, its fixed landing gear slashing just inches above the hood of the car. We watched as it seemed to hesitate, the airframe shaking . . . and then it plummeted.

The plane slammed back down to the tarmac, bouncing off its nose and snapping the propeller. The engine ignited in a shower of white-hot sparks. Landing gear rattling, the plane veered to one side and headed straight for the nearest hangar. We were already on our feet and running, breathless, as it crashed head-on into the hangar wall.

The front end of the Cessna was a mangled mess, the hangar wall buckled around a nightmare of burning slag. Billowing black smoke washed over us as we ran around to the side of the plane, and the air was thick with the chemical stench of spilled fuel and hot metal. Buck’s plane was equipped with cargo doors. Coughing into my sleeve, I grabbed one handle and Jessie took the other, struggling to pull them open.

The warped metal screamed as we wrenched one door wide, greeting us with a rush of superheated air and a choking, roiling cloud of smoke. My eyes stung as I climbed into the back of the cabin to hunt for survivors. The Gresham brothers sat slumped in their seats, belted in and still adrift in a chemical coma. Up front, all I could see of Buck was a single beefy arm. Just the arm, nearly severed, hanging from a mangled seat by a single strand of glistening muscle.

I grabbed the first Gresham, unbuckled him, and hauled him back with my hands under his armpits. Jessie helped as I clambered out of the cabin, and together we dragged him away from the plane. I heard an electric popping sound as the engine fire flared and spread to the hangar. The flames climbed higher and licked at the night sky, insatiable.

“Come on,” Jessie said, grabbing my arm. “We’ve got one. Let’s go!”

“The other one’s still alive in there,” I said, pulling my arm away and running back toward the wreckage.

Sirens shrilled in the distance, but they wouldn’t get here in time. It was all on us. I climbed into the cabin then immediately stumbled back, sputtering and choking. The brutal heat broiled against my cheeks. I could just barely make out the faint silhouette of the second Gresham brother, motionless in his seat.

I tried to take a deep breath. Smoke burst from my lungs in a hacking, wet cough, leaving me with the taste of bile in my throat. Jessie grabbed me from behind, wrapping her arms around my waist and dragging me backward.

“No!” I shouted, flailing. “He’s still
in
there! He’s still—”

The fuel tank erupted with an eardrum-shattering
crump
, flooding the compartment with fire and blasting out every window in a blinding explosion. For a heartbeat, white light drowned out the entire universe.

I remember lying on the tarmac, thirty feet from the burning nightmare, arm scraped bloody and bits of glass in my hair. Sirens shrilling and voices, too many voices. Hands lifting me up onto a stretcher. Then everything faded away, like ghosts in a burning rain.

I
woke up on a stiff, scratchy mattress. My hand stretched out and bumped a plastic railing. Hospital bed. My eyes flickered open.

“You ever pull a stunt like that again,” Jessie said, standing at my bedside, “I
will
kick your ass.”

Sunlight streamed in through a dull window, giving the tiny room a soft glow. A television, mounted on a ceiling bracket in the corner of the room, softly played a news broadcast about last night’s incident at Willow Run.

“. . . the pilot, presumed intoxicated, died in the crash along with a single passenger. No one else was hurt.”

I looked to Jessie.

“I had to try and save him.”

“That was reckless,” she said.

“It’s my
job
.”

“Laudable,” April said, rolling in through the open doorway, “but Jessie is right. A dead agent does us no good.”

“Hey, Auntie,” Jessie said, “how’s the prisoner?”

“Well secured. Double handcuffed, in a private room on the third floor with a police officer stationed outside. We’re fortunate that he was unconscious during the crash. If he’d woken up, panicked, and forgot to keep his human guise on . . . well, that could have been a messier cleanup than it already was. Speaking of cleanup, Linder’s men reported in: Dr. Hirsch has been secured for offshoring and interrogation. Good work.”

“And Dr. Carnes?” I asked.

“On the run. She cleaned out her bank accounts—those we know of, anyway—and abandoned her home. We’ll need to debrief you both with anything you might remember, for the file. She’s been designated Hostile Entity 138.”

“Oh, we’ll catch up to her
and
follow up on Buck’s little operation in LA,” Jessie said, then looked over at me. “All in good time. You feel ready to get back to work?”

“Job won’t do itself,” I said, wincing as I sat up in bed. “Hospital gown isn’t going to cut it, though.”

“Fresh clothes are waiting in the bathroom. Hope you don’t mind, I took the liberty of rummaging around in your luggage. I, uh, realized I left something important back at the motel, though, so I stopped at Carson’s on the way back.”

Jessie held out a salmon-pink necktie.

“Is the color okay?” she said. “I, um, wasn’t sure.”

I took the tie, running my thumb over the smooth silk.

“Yeah,” I said, smiling. “Yeah, it is. Thank you.”

“Go on, then. Suit up. We’ve got a cambion to crack.”

FIFTEEN

“
Where’s Kevin?” I asked as we walked through the halls of St. John Hospital. April rolled her chair just ahead of us.

“He stayed back in Talbot Cove,” April said. “Easier for him to get his research done if he stays put, and he’s listening in on the local police band for anything odd.”

A potbellied cop in uniform blues sat in a chair at the end of a long hallway, playing a game on his phone. He saw us, sat up straight, and made the phone disappear.

“He’s been moaning all morning,” he told us with a jerk of his thumb toward the closed door. “Wants to know where his brother is.”

I blinked. “Nobody told him?”

The cop shrugged.

“Well, joy to the world,” Jessie said. She opened the door without slowing her pace and strode on through.

Earl Gresham lay handcuffed to his hospital bed, one cuff for each wrist and shackled to the sideboards. I recognized him now, and the splints on his fingers; back at the Gunderson house, he was the one who’d grabbed Jessie’s gun. The one smart enough to run for it when the tide turned. In his human guise, without the cambion blood rearing its ugly head, he looked like a hundred other tweakers: rail thin, bug-eyed, and twitchy.

A sheen of sweat drenched his hospital gown and soaked the mattress pad under his back. As he squirmed, the prison-ink swastika tattoo on his left shoulder flexed. He looked at Jessie and shook his head wildly.

“No, no, no,” he stammered. “Police!
Police!
”

“We are the police, dipshit.” Jessie sighed. She pulled up a chair to his bedside, spun it around, and dropped into it. I held the door for April, closing it after she rolled in.

“I’m not even talkin’ to you,” he said, wide-eyed. He looked to me and April. “Where’s my brother, man? Where’s Tiny? Mick was a goner, I know that, he bled out on the way to Detroit, but Tiny—he just had a damn bullet in his shoulder, man! You don’t die from that!”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “He didn’t make it. I tried to save him.”

Earl threw his head back, pressing it against the pillow and arching his back. A cry rose from his throat, his pain pouring out in a strangled screech.

“Everyone said we could trust those fucking doctors! Everyone said, you ever need help, that’s who you see. Oh God, oh God, Tiny, I’m so fuckin’ sorry—”

“No honor among thieves,” Jessie said.

“He was unconscious when he died,” I told him. “He didn’t suffer.”

Tears streamed down Earl’s face, tears and sweat and snot in a glistening mess as he wept. He shook his head from side to side, as if he could make it all go away by denying it hard enough.

“It was an empty house.” He moaned. “We didn’t deserve this, it was just an empty fuckin’ house, we didn’t hurt anybody, we didn’t deserve to fuckin’
die
—”

We let him get it out of his system. As much as he could. When he’d spent his grief, left with nothing but little shuddering shakes, I walked to his bedside. I plucked two scratchy tissues from a cardboard box.

“Here,” I said, mopping at his face. The tissues came away gluey and cold. I held another couple of tissues to his nose so he could blow it. I grabbed a few more to wipe off my sopping fingers.

The whole time, I saw April watching Jessie and me. Her gaze ping-ponging back and forth, quietly measuring, assessing.

Earl’s gaze latched on to me, too. “Thanks,” he said, sniffling. “Man, we . . . we didn’t deserve it.”

“No,” I said, “you didn’t. Your brothers didn’t deserve to die.”

Jessie snorted. She gave me a quick wink before he looked her way, letting me know what she was up to. Textbook bad cop, pushing him my way.

“My partner’s a little soft,” she told him. “You ask me? You boys assaulted two federal agents. You got off easy.”

“We didn’t know you were legit! We thought you were working for—” He froze. Shook his head and clammed up.

“Working for who?” I asked.

“Worth my life, if I told you that. Nuh-uh. My brothers are gone, but I’m still breathin’. I aim to keep it that way.”

“We can protect you,” I said.

He let out a strangled laugh. “Like hell you can. You got no idea the size of the mess you stepped in here. Look, you seem okay for a cop, so I’ll do you a solid and give you some advice: Leave. Get outta here as fast as you can and never, ever go back to Talbot Cove.”

“Oh? Why is that?”

“Like I told you, you got no idea what’s going on here. It’s bigger than you can imagine.”

“We know what you are,” I told him. “You’re a cambion.”

He blinked. “A combo-what?”

“You have demon blood.”

He sagged into the mattress.

“Oh. That. Yeah, me and my brothers, we call—we called it our genetic condition? On account of it sounds a little more reasonable that way. Far as we can reckon, Dad was the one with the horns. We were triplets. Mom died pumpin’ me out, and the doctors had to go and cut Tiny out of her belly. Little guy almost didn’t make it.”

“You grew up as wards of the state,” I said. “You didn’t choose this life. You never had a choice.”

“Yeah,” he said, grabbing the lifeline. “Yeah, that’s right. We were, what do you call it, products of our upbringing.”

“Bullshit,” Jessie said, poking him in the shoulder. “Nobody
made
you a criminal meth-head bottom-feeder. Nobody
made
you an errand boy for the Court of Night-Blooming Flowers.”

“Damn right they did,” he told her, too off balance to stay quiet. “You don’t know what it’s like. When the hound knocks at your trailer door and tells you to do something, you
do
it.”

“What is it like?” I asked him, all sympathy. “I really want to know.”

Something between desperation and gratitude shone in Earl’s wet eyes as he looked my way. I gave him a tiny smile. Something to cling to, in the heart of the whirlwind.

“It’s like . . . well, like your partner said,” he told me. “Far as real demons are concerned, bottom-feeders is all we are. Some of the Flowers . . . they hunt people like us for fun. I guess they’ve got all kinds of rules and laws they’ve gotta follow—imagine that, laws in hell—but they can do whatever they want to us. Some of ’em . . . they call it ‘pest control.’”

“I can’t even imagine.” I shook my head. “But you survived all that. You were strong enough.”

“That was all Tiny. See, he played it smart, realized we had to make friends. Guys we could name-drop, if anyone came around to mess with us. I wouldn’t say we got in
good
with the hound, but we made ourselves useful enough that the others pretty much left us alone, for fear of pissing him off.”

“And this hound, he told you to break into the Gunderson house?”

“He just made the introduction. That was Fontaine’s call. Hound says, ‘Hey, this guy’s a buddy of mine from way back, help him out while he’s in town.’ And you know, they’re demons, so when they say way back they mean, like, back when George Washington discovered America. Fontaine is a Chainman.”

The word rang a bell. Douglas Bredford had mentioned it when he was telling us about the courts of hell.
The Bargainers and the Chainmen, they get an exemption.

“Chainman. What is that, exactly?”

Earl shifted on the mattress as much as the cuffs would let him, turning toward me. His body language telling me I’d captured his trust.

“Like I said, hell has laws, right? Well, they don’t have cops. They have Chainmen. Bounty hunters, basically. Fontaine came to Talbot Cove hunting heads, and he wanted us to be his eyes and ears. He’s the one that sent us to the Gunderson house.”

“Is he after Helen Gunderson?”

He shook his head. “Naw, nobody wants to hurt that poor lady. Well, not us or Fontaine or the hound, anyhow.
Somebody
does, and don’t ask who because I don’t know a name. I just know that’s the way this whole thing works.”

As bad as things were, I had a feeling deep down in my gut that they were about to get a whole lot worse.

Sometimes I hate being right.

“You’re talking about the Bogeyman,” I said.

His eyes widened. “You know about that?”

“That’s why we’re here. Is that who this Fontaine is hunting?”

“Not directly,” Earl said. “I think he wants the guy who’s sending it.”

Jessie leaned in. “What do you mean,
sending
?”

Earl looked back and forth between us. “I thought you said you knew? Man, that thing don’t choose who it goes after. You’ve gotta
tell
it which kid to snatch. Whoever you want gone, you know? Wanna put a serious hurt on somebody, you call the Bogeyman, send it after his kids. Why do you think it’s been gone for so many years?”

My stomach coiled in a sick knot. It was one thing when I’d thought we were dealing with a monster. Some kind of beast, born of cruelty, driven to stalk and steal. If that was true, then it was just following its nature. We’d find it and we’d put it down, like euthanizing a rabid dog. But this changed everything.

The Bogeyman wasn’t a rabid dog. It was a weapon. A weapon aimed by someone else’s hands. Aimed at Helen Gunderson’s family, by someone who wanted to destroy her entire world.

Aimed at my family, too.

Jessie gave me a look, her brow furrowed. I just shook my head. Had to keep pushing.

“How?” I asked him. “How is it summoned?”

“I don’t know, some magic . . . trinket or something. Tiny was the one who understood all that crap. You have to make it, with this special ritual, then you stash it wherever you want the Bogeyman to show up. See, Fontaine wasn’t sure if the Gunderson situation
was
the Bogeyman, since it’s been like thirty years since anybody’s called it up.”

“So you and your brothers were supposed to toss her house and see if you could find the magic trinket,” I said, feeling numb.

They were looking in the wrong place. That strange wicker ball, the one that looked like a Möbius strip on crack, spiked into the lawn out in front.
That
was the key.

“Fontaine’s really hot to get his hands on this guy before the trail goes cold,” Earl said. “See, he was last here thirty years ago, and he missed his shot. That’s the thing about demons: not a whole lot of patience, but they’ve got all the time in the world.”

I’d assumed it was a different person. That someone new had found the ritual to call up the Bogeyman, starting the nightmare up all over again. But what if it wasn’t?

What if the person who attacked the Gunderson family was the same person who attacked mine?

I guess that’s the difference between me and a demon,
I thought.
I don’t have patience or time. Just a wound, thirty years deep, that won’t stop bleeding.

It’s time to put things right.