Natural Evil (10 page)

The area was quiet, the mine offices dark. Luis was right; she didn’t have any trouble avoiding security guards. With any luck, they would never know she had been on the property.

A quarter of a mile in, the entrance to the mine was set into a tall, rocky bluff and was surrounded by buildings, a parking lot, and large, darkly shadowed machinery. Recon was quick and easy. She couldn’t sense the crossover passage, but that didn’t surprise her.

She took a tour of the buildings, and all was quiet, so she decided to go to high ground and find a place to watch and wait. After a careful fifteen-minute climb, she found a ledge wide enough to lie down on, and she rewarded herself by eating the MRE and downing a bottle of water.

Not long after, the sky began to lighten in the east, looking bruised and leaden. It was going to be a dirty dawn, dulled by the aftermath of the storm.

She saw the dust cloud first, and she straightened from her slouch. Two SUVs came into sight, roaring toward her.

Well. That was either good news or bad news. She took the blanket from around her shoulders, folded it and set it aside. Then she stretched out on her stomach, laid the M16 beside her, rested her chin on her hands and watched the arrivals.

It was not good news.

Both SUVs screeched to a halt and six men climbed out. Four men she didn’t recognize. Rodriguez. Bradshaw Senior.

Bradshaw had gotten here awfully fast. Too fast. Where had she gone wrong in her calculations? She frowned, her mind racing back.

Then in a flash of realization, it hit. She had estimated travel and response times from the confrontation with Junior and friends. What she should have estimated from was an earlier point in time, when Rodriguez knew that Luis was alive. He would have tried to get in touch with Bradshaw the moment he left Jackson’s. Maybe the cell and landlines were out by then. Maybe Rodriguez had to drive the information out. Maybe he had managed to get a call out, but the storm would have grounded any local flights, so Bradshaw would have had to drive in from Vegas.

They wouldn’t know Luis was no longer a badly injured, unconscious dog. They probably stopped by Jackson’s already and found everybody gone. They might have stopped by Junior’s too. Bradshaw might not even know yet what had happened to his son. Either way, he was here to take care of the mine issue himself.

The scene crystallized around her.

She didn’t have all the answers, but did she have enough of them? The events of the day passed through her mind. She thought of Luis, of Jackson, of her barroom chat with local people, of what each person had told her and of what she had surmised. She thought of Junior and his friends.

She reached for the rifle and sighted down the barrel.

One shot. One well-timed bullet, aimed at the head of this snake. If she did this, she was putting herself in the line of fire again.

She was not afraid of death. Death was a thief that always wore a mask. Accident, disease, stillbirths, old age, natural causes, war, murder. It existed in the shivering silence between tolls of a bell. It stole everything away while it left its mark, a dark knowledge that lingered at the back of smiling eyes, a hesitation between thought and action in times of danger, a heaviness that tunneled wormholes into happy memories.

She and death had danced together for a long time now. Sometimes they were partners. Sometimes they were opponents. Sometimes she might cheat him, but hell, that old thief was still bound to win some day.

She pulled the trigger.

Chapter Seven

Love

The shot took Bradshaw Senior, who spun backward and collapsed to the ground.

That just left the professionals.

Rodriguez lunged to Bradshaw’s motionless figure and dragged him behind the cover of an SUV, while the other four men pulled weapons, shouted to each other and lunged for cover as well. Two started to climb into the drivers’ seats.

No, you don’t
, she thought.
Nobody’s leaving until I say so
. She shot out the rear tires of both vehicles, four taps in quick succession.

By then they had her location and returned fire. She ducked, flattening herself as shards of rock ricocheted. Fiery pain bloomed on her back and arms. She ignored it.

The M16 magazine held thirty rounds, and her Glock had fifteen. They had more shooters, more guns, and more rounds. She was going to have to get picky.

She watched and waited as the dirty sky brightened. They tried to flush her out with a heavy rain of bullets. Yeah, that wasn’t gonna happen. More ricochets, more nicks. She stayed flattened on her ledge and listened to them expend their resources, and she kept watch, counting her rounds and using them sparingly, just enough to keep them pinned down.

While she did so, she remembered other times when she and death had danced together, the staccato rhythm of heavy artillery, interspersed with anguished screams.

This was a cleaner place. After the first flurry, the targets grew quiet as they tried to think their way out of the invisible cage she put them in. There wasn’t a way out, not until she ran out of ammo, and they wouldn’t know when that was. Still, somebody had to try to make a run for it. She was ready when he did, the guy sprinting toward the nearest building while the others laid down covering fire.

She dropped him fifteen paces out. It took him a while to crawl back behind the SUV again. None of his buddies rushed out to help. She thought about finishing him as she watched him struggle, weighing the expenditure of another round against reducing their manpower. But one more round was currency that bought her time.

That was her mission, time. She paid for it in snatches when they pushed her to it, and in between bouts of exchanging gunfire, she rested and listened to the windswept silence.

She had three rounds left when a hurricane arrived. The hurricane materialized into a star-eyed Djinn, Luis and several other tribunal Peacekeepers, and then, for Claudia, the dance was over.

The aftermath was a hell of a mess.

Over the next few days, correspondents from network, cable and a few foreign newspapers tried to fill up both motels. Several reporters were highly disgruntled when Peacekeeper officials and the FBI, including geologists and crossover experts, commandeered rooms. Then there was a great deal of squawking and flapping until everybody settled into another uneasy pattern, like birds on a wire.

Still other news crews, along with several sightseers, drove RVs in. All the local establishments were doing a booming business, especially the combination truck stop/fast-food joint/casino. Everyone else, the miners and their families, were shocked, grieving and afraid. Most of them hadn’t known what was going on and nobody knew whether or not they would have a job in the future. Operations at the Nirvana Silver Mining Company had been halted until further notice.

Sixty-eight undocumented human workers, all foreign nationals, had been recovered from the strange pocket of Other land, along with seven more bodies from shallow graves. The survivors were malnourished, fearful and confused about where they were. Promised work and a new life, they had been driven into the mine at night and taken across the passage to the Other land where they were forced to mine silver for food.

They didn’t have any other choice—there were no animals to hunt, nor did the Other land have enough vegetation to support life. The land was literally a buckle in the Earth, little more than magic-sensitive silver, air and rock. The passageway had been buried in a vein of silver and lay inert and undetected until with a few small, controlled blasts, the Nirvana Company had blown it open. The Company blocked the area off and told the legitimate miners the area was unsafe. The passage itself kept the workers captive, since none of them had a spark of Power with which to make the return journey.

Such a lot of fuss over a piece of real estate that was destined by federal law to go unclaimed by anyone.

The downfall of the already wealthy Bradshaw family was greed. Once they uncovered the pocket of Other land and realized what they had found, they had to mine it. They couldn’t use the local pool of workers and still hope to keep their activities secret, so they imported workers. As Scott Bradshaw said when he was arrested and questioned in the hospital, one thing led to another.

Bradshaw Senior lived. He was arrested in the hospital too.

When Claudia thought of the seven graves, she wished when she had pulled the trigger that she had made it a kill shot. Instead she’d tagged him high in the shoulder, enough to incapacitate him.

When Luis and the other Peacekeepers arrived, she got to sit back and enjoy watching the take down like prime-time TV. The only thing missing was the popcorn.

Good Christ, did Luis have moves. He was all power and grace, and sex-savvy smarts. She watched him with an odd kind of pained pride. She recognized talent when she saw it, and his star was definitely on the rise. He was the total package. It wouldn’t be long before he held a Senior Peacekeeper position.

Even as he chased Rodriguez down and pinned him to the pavement, Luis raised his head and searched for her. She lifted a hand and waggled her fingers. Soon as he caught sight of her, he left Rodriguez handcuffed and spread-eagled on the ground and raced toward her, climbing up to her ledge with athletic effortlessness.

He went into a frenzy when he discovered she had taken damage from chips of rock that had ricocheted during the firefight. She hadn’t slept since early the previous morning, and she was too tired to fend off his fussing, so she let him do what he wanted. He bandaged three deep cuts and several nicks then he ran his hands gently down her body, dark eyes sharp with concern as he checked for further wounds.

All right, who was she kidding, she might have enjoyed that a little bit too. She didn’t even need to climb down off the ledge. Luis got his Djinn buddy to give her a ride. All in all, it was a cushy wrap-up.

He insisted she get medical treatment, and an EMT suggested stitches. Then Luis scared up a healing potion from somewhere. She never did find out from where. He would not stop harping at her until she drank it. Then more enforcement people arrived and there were the inevitable questions, a whole shitload of them.

She asked for coffee and got it, and she savored the hot caffeine as she answered the questions patiently. For the most part, Luis wasn’t present because he had his own job to do and people to answer to. But it just so happened that he was present for her full explanation of the bar confrontation, and his earlier frenzy was nothing compared to the rage that detonated in his body then.

She could feel it pouring off him in deadly waves as he sat beside her, until she couldn’t stand it. She gripped his forearm hard until she drew his attention, and she recognized Junior’s death blazing in Luis’s eyes.

She just looked at the whole great, clenched length of that splendid man, and she gave him a small smile, and she wouldn’t let go until he calmed. It took a while, and that was okay. For him, she had discovered she had all the time in the world, if only he knew it.

Then all at once the tension in his body uncoiled. He blew out a breath, covered her hand with his and let it go, and somehow it all combined to make her fall into the most impossible, complete and inappropriate love with him.

The realization was gorgeous, hellish. She drew back and felt more wounded than she had ever felt in her life. She could tell he sensed something serious was wrong, but it wasn’t an acceptable topic for discussion, so she did the only thing she knew to do. She went deep into herself, into silence.

Claudia. Was. Driving. Luis. Bat shit.

She’d dealt with the chaos at the mine entrance with the poise of an accomplished professional, answered the barrage of questions with dignity and tolerance, and she’d reacted to the news from the mine with compassion. He thought he might be able to gaze at her for the rest of his life and learn something about intelligent decency in the face of adversity.

The more he watched her, the more he couldn’t look away.

He stopped noticing other women. Once, when he paid to gas up the Jeep, it was only when he saw disappointment droop the pretty cashier’s shoulders that he realized, belatedly, that the woman had been trying to flirt with him.

But something had happened. Something had caused Claudia to stop speaking to him.

Oh, she
spoke
to him. She wasn’t rude, and she didn’t subject him to total silence. But something essential had shifted. A wall had come between them, and he could even pinpoint when the change had occurred.

She had been looking right at him. He’d seen her eyes widen as if she’d been struck a blow. Then her expression smoothed over, and she’d started to treat him with the same competent fucking professionalism as she treated everyone else.

Before, they’d shared a connection. It was open, caring and vital, and it mattered to him. He didn’t think it had just vanished. She’d buried it for some reason. He’d waited for a while because he kept expecting it to change back, that the connection would return to the surface, but it hadn’t. And then he’d grown pissed at her for taking that away from him.

After the mine shut down, the days progressed. Luis had a long talk with his grandmother. He promised to visit her soon, but for the moment he had work to do. There was always cleanup after a case, and this one was particularly messy. Jackson returned from Fresno. Claudia stayed in the back trailer, and Luis took one of Jackson’s spare bedrooms. Luis told himself he took Jackson’s invitation because he didn’t feel like sharing a motel room with another Peacekeeper, but really, he knew better.