Hunted (2 page)

Reed understood. He’d been there himself. Sometimes, although with lessening frequency now, he found himself back there. He was pretty sure that that was one of the reasons he’d bonded like he had with Holly and Ant over the last few months: he knew what it was like to lose the person you loved most in the world. He knew what it was like to feel like you were slowly bleeding to death inside.

Three years before, he’d lost his own young son in a car accident that had also killed his ex-wife. The world had been a different place for him ever since. What had once been brightly colored and full of warmth and life was now gray and cold and dead. From the time of his son’s death until Magnolia had died, nothing and no one had been able to penetrate the icy barrier of grief and regret that had encased him. But in Holly’s and Ant’s anguish, he’d seen a reflection of his own. Those boys had needed someone, and for lack of any alternative, that someone had turned out to be him. The three of them had somehow managed to grab hold of one another in the darkness, and now, for better or worse, they were connected.

He didn’t particularly like it, but there it was: they turned to him when they needed help, and he looked out for them when he could.

Since Magnolia’s death, Ant had been placed in a foster home, from which he’d promptly run away to rejoin Holly (nobody in officialdom seemed to care), who crashed with his girlfriend Edie’s large family in a tiny apartment on Port Street when they would have him, and on various friends’ couches when they wouldn’t. Several times lately, Reed had gotten home in the middle of the night to find Holly and Ant sacked out on his front porch. He’d taken them in, let them sleep out what was left of the night in his spare bedroom, fed them breakfast in the morning, and then, the daylight and full stomachs making them cocky, the boys had been on their way.

So far, Holly had even managed to refrain from stealing anything from Reed, which, given his predilection for small electronics and the fact that Reed’s house contained a lot of them, was something.

To Reed’s mild surprise, Grandma’s House—a seedy storefront on the wrong side of Elysian Fields—was dark as a grave. Nobody on the sidewalk out front. Not a wino, not a punk, not a pusher, not a hooker. No activity at all. No sign of Holly or anyone else. Just mist wafting like smoke down the sidewalk, illuminated by a fragment of moonlight from the not-quite-full ghostly circle hanging high in the onyx sky. The narrow mouth of an alley yawned black as a tar pit to the building’s left. Cursing under his breath, Reed parked and got out.

No sign of Holly. Too much to hope that the kid had listened to him for once and left the scene. No, Holly was down that alley, in the thick of whatever he’d summoned Reed to see. Reed knew it as well as he knew his own name.

Goddamn it
.

He could smell the dampness of the river, the smoky, boozy essence of the Quarter, and a hint of ripe garbage, too, as, gun drawn, he headed down the alley. He moved fast but cautiously, his footsteps quiet on the uneven cobblestones. A couple of paces in, and the darkness swallowed him up. Two- and three-story brick buildings formed a solid wall on either side of what was a narrow, uneven canyon. As his eyes adjusted, he saw that the walls were windowless. Metal garbage cans, most of them missing their lids, stood in clusters around recessed doorways. All was quiet except for the hum of distant noise from elsewhere in the Quarter and a steady drip of water somewhere nearer at hand. It made Reed think of the swamp he’d grown up in, how you could always tell when a predator was nearby because all the birds had flown away.

Something’s wrong
. His pulse rate quickened along with his step. He was on high alert now, scanning the shadows with care even as he focused on the lessening of dark at the end of the alley, which, if memory served him correctly, opened onto a small church with a surrounding cemetery.

Whatever’s going down is probably going down there
. Even as he had the thought, he caught a glimmer of movement out of the corner of his eye. A split-second later, something leaped out of a doorway and rushed him.

His heart jumped.

“Dick!” The cry was no less heartfelt for being scarcely louder than a whisper.

Not Holly: Ant. Jesus Christ, a man with less steady nerves would have shot the kid. Unlike Holly’s, Ant’s usage of Dick was entirely without malice: it was simply what he’d learned, from a young age, to call the police detective who’d been a fixture in his life for as long as he could remember. Thirteen now, skinny and undersized, black hair buzzed and big eyes shining in the darkness, he grabbed the sleeve of Reed’s sport jacket and bounced up and down on the balls of his feet with agitation as he pointed toward the end of the alley.

“Holly’s down there. Some guys came—I think he’s watching them rob some people.” Ant sounded breathless.

Doing his best to tamp down the curses that crowded to the tip of his tongue, Reed was already moving again—faster but still deliberate—in that direction, with Ant, having let go of Reed’s jacket, trotting beside him.

“You follow him here?” he asked Ant in a growly undertone, because to Holly’s credit, Reed knew that if he’d thought something bad was going to go down, he wouldn’t have brought his little brother anywhere near it. Ant shrugged guiltily. Reed had his answer:
yes
. “My car’s out there on the street. Go crawl under it and wait for me.”

In Reed’s experience, even in the deadliest of street confrontations, even if the bullets were flying and the bad guys were mowing each other down like weeds, nobody ever looked under a vehicle for potential targets. Therefore, especially at night and for a kid Ant’s size, having him take shelter beneath a vehicle was way safer than, say, passing over the keys to the Explorer and telling him to hide in the backseat. Everybody always looked in the backseat.

“What?”
The look Ant gave him was disbelieving.

Reed’s answer was short. “Do what I tell you.”

“But I don’t—”

The rest of Ant’s words were lost as a woman screamed. The terror-filled sound sliced through the darkness like a knife, making Reed’s muscles tense and the hair on the back of his neck catapult upright as his gaze snapped toward the sound. A split second later the sharp
pop pop pop pop
of gunfire exploded through the alley. It was close, loud, and almost certainly coming from the cemetery just a couple of dozen yards ahead.

Shit
.

“Go get under my damn car,” he barked at Ant as he broke into a dead run and, at the same time, yanked his radio from his belt. Out of the corner of his eye he watched Ant melt back into the shadows. Damned pain-in-the-ass kid—would he do as he was told? “Officer needs assistance at—”

He had just finished giving the address as he burst out of the alley into streaming moonlight, then pulled up to orient himself, pressing his back against the flat wall of the side of the last building. Juiced by adrenaline, blinking against what felt like a sudden onslaught of brightness, it was all he could do to stop himself before he possibly got in trouble, to give himself time to let his eyes adjust and conduct a lightning survey of the scene. An ancient wrought iron fence edged the cemetery that was just a couple of yards away. The fence surrounded an overgrown lot, which housed a church in the middle—equally ancient, no more than a chapel really, a one-story brick shoebox with a crooked steeple. Behind it—he had exited the alley at the back of the church, which faced out on a narrow residential street—monuments ranging from knee-high marble arches to six-foot-tall stone angels leaned mostly out of plumb and cast long shadows over weed-infested plots. A slamming of doors and a squealing of tires made him look sharply toward the street in front of the church, although he couldn’t see the vehicle in question because the church itself was in the way. The buildings across from the church were dark and deserted: not a soul in sight. A whooshing sound, and he knew the vehicle was gone.

Movement nearby brought his focus instantly back closer at hand.

Holly stepped out of the shadow of one of the stone angels. Five ten, lanky in the way of a kid who hadn’t yet filled out, wearing his uniform of jeans and a hoodie, he impatiently pushed his too-long black hair back behind his ears as he struggled with a small object that he was holding up in front of his face. A phone, Reed identified a second later. Elizabeth Townes’ stolen phone, almost certainly. Holly was focusing the phone, as well as every bit of his attention, on something that appeared to be on the ground in front of him. Something that the darkness, and the shifting shadows, and the monuments that semiblocked his view, prevented Reed from seeing.

Holly was taking pictures with the phone. Of what? Reed couldn’t yet tell, but the quick answer was, it couldn’t be anything good.

Reed thrust the radio back into position on his belt, tightened his grip on his gun, then took a running step and vaulted the thigh-high fence.

“Holly.” His footsteps were soundless in the overgrown grass. His voice was quiet as he came up to the kid. Holly cut a glance at him. Visually probing the darkness all around, Reed identified no threat. But danger and violence hung in the air: like any good cop, he could feel them in his bones the way some people feel rain.

“I saw ’em! I told you! They acted like they wanted to make a buy, and then they shot them!” It was an emotion-packed whisper. Holly’s hands shook. His eyes were wild. “I got pictures. I think. This damned phone—”

“Yo. Everything okay?” Ant slunk up behind them.

Holly turned on him. “I told you not to follow me!”

“I told you to get under the damned car!” Reed growled at almost the same moment. Of course Ant hadn’t done as he was told. By either of them. That was Ant.

Ant threw up his hands in a gesture meant to be placating. “I thought you all might need some help.”

“From you?” Holly countered scornfully.

Reed missed the rest of that brotherly exchange, because by then his eyes had adjusted enough to find what he was praying he wouldn’t see—victims, sprawled in the shadow of an above-the-ground crypt maybe thirty feet away.

His gut tightened.

“Fuck.” Reed felt more tired than he could remember feeling in a long time as he started toward the motionless figures. He had little doubt that they were dead, probably as Holly had said, the victims of a drug deal gone bad, just a few more casualties of the escalating, gang-related violence that was tearing the city apart. So many murders provided him with job security and all that, but truth was this shit was getting old. Even he, hardened to violent death as he was, was beginning to be sickened by all of it.

Not for the first time, he wondered if he was in danger of getting burned out.

“It’s the same thing that happened to Mom.” Holly’s whisper was urgent as, with Ant trailing him like a shadow, he followed Reed. Crouching to check each victim in turn for a pulse—there were four of them, two adult males, an adult female, and a boy who looked like he was about Ant’s age—Reed registered the raw meat smell of fresh blood with a grimace. What looked like oily black halos leached into the grass around each victim’s head. He placed two fingers beneath the ear of the youngest victim. Like the others, he had a bullet hole between his eyes. Nice and neat. Death would have been instantaneous. No pulse, big surprise, although the boy was still warm. His wide-open eyes were already glazed and vacant as he stared sightlessly up at the night sky.

Another goddamned kid
.
Two minutes earlier, and I might have been able to save him.

Reed could feel the pounding of his own pulse in his temples.

“You listening to me?” Holly demanded, and Reed frowned up at him. The teen was standing over him, waving the stolen phone practically in his face. Holly continued, “This time I saw them. For real. I even took pictures. I mean, if I did it right. Anyway, it’s like I told you: it’s the five-o.”

By five-o, Holly meant the cops.

“Would you give it a rest?” For an instant, as he held Holly’s gaze, a graphic mental picture of Magnolia’s corpse flashed in front of Reed’s eyes. A once-pretty woman aged prematurely by the life she’d led, she’d had a bullet hole drilled through her forehead, too, just like all four of these victims did. Thing was, though, as every officer who went through the police academy learned, torso shots were the high percentage shots. A couple of rounds from a 9mm pumped into a chest would stop pretty much anything. Head shots like these were the trademark of gang members, not cops. “No way in hell were they cops.”

“Way.”
Holly darted a glance in the direction of the fast-approaching sirens that were growing louder with every second, and shifted nervously from foot to foot. “What, you think I don’t know what I saw? I’m telling you the truth.”

“Give me that phone.” Reed stood up abruptly and took the phone from Holly’s hand, ignoring the kid’s indignant “Hey!” in response. The victims were beyond help: there was nothing Reed or anyone else could do for them except find out who had killed them. As an eyewitness to the murders, Holly would be invaluable to the investigation—with or without a phone full of pictures—and he would also be dead, just as soon as the perps found out about him and what he had seen. Holstering his gun, Reed slid the phone into his pocket, pulled out his keys, and wrested away his house key from the others.

“Go to my house. You and Ant. Let yourselves in, and stay put until I get there. Don’t talk to anybody about this or anything else. Do not tell anyone that you were at the scene of these murders. Hear?”

“What am I, stupid?” Holly asked with disgust. He caught the key Reed tossed him without argument, which told Reed that he knew just how deep he was in the shit. Casting another wary glance in the direction from which the sirens were shrieking now as the posse Reed had summoned closed in, Holly thrust the key into the front pocket of his jeans, then looked at Reed again. “I ain’t lying. I swear. It was a bunch of cops. Like, four.”

“We’ll hash this out when I get home,” Reed told him.
“Go.”