Reapers (20 page)

After her third ring, a man emerged from the side door. He wore glasses and clean jeans but his fingernails were crescents of black. He smelled like motor oil. "May I help you?"

"We're looking for someone," Ellie said.

"Does he work here?"

"We think he may have been brought here."

The man wrinkled his forehead. "Brought?"

"I represent an interested client," Ellie tried. "Discreet. Wealthy."

The man reached for a sheaf of papers. "I'm not sure I take your meaning."

"Light-skinned African-American, twenty years old. Farmboy build. If you've seen him, I have an offer."

The man looked up from his papers. "Young black male?"

"His name is Quinn," she said.

"I don't think I can help you."

"Bullshit. You know him. I saw it in your face."

The man's gaze rested on hers. Unknown gears clicked behind his eyes. "Who did you say you represent?"

"I didn't."

"Hang on a minute." He left the desk and exited through the same door he'd come in.

"What's happening?" Dee said.

Ellie glanced around for cameras. "Stay quiet."

"Suppose he's bringing someone back?" Hobson said.

She touched the butt of her gun. "Dee, if something happens, you run. Meet us on the highway at the Clavans' sign."

Dee stuck out her jaw, lips parted. "You want me to leave you? What kind of plan is that?"

"The one that saves your life. I made this very clear: do as I say or go home now."

Dee tipped back her head and shook it, as if concluding a conversation with the ceiling about how stupid Ellie was. The door opened. Ellie tensed. A woman with white curly hair walked inside and smiled. Her back was bent, but she moved smoothly enough.

"James told me why you're here." The woman's eyes moved between the three of them. "What's the nature of your relationship to the boy?"

"Like I told James," Ellie said, "we're agents of an interested party."

"No need to get testy. I ask so I know how to break the news." The old woman showed a fragile expression that could have been a smile or a frown. "Yesterday, a body was found in the woods. Young black male."

"What?" Dee screeched. She swayed into Ellie's shoulder.

Ellie found Dee's hand and squeezed. "I'd like to see it."

The woman folded her hands in front of her stomach. "Ma'am, it's a
body
."

"And right now, it could be anyone's."

"It's been in the woods. The animals. There won't be much left to see."

Beside her, Dee's shoulders shook. Ellie leaned over the counter. "She needs to know."

The old woman sighed through her nose. "Excuse me."

She went back through the door. Ellie expected to have to console Dee, but except for her shallow breathing, the girl seemed to calm down. The old woman returned less than a minute later.

"State park west of town. About ten miles. Take Thacher Park Road in, then follow the trail where it meets Beaver Dam. James said it's a couple hundred yards from there. On the left."

Hobson scribbled notes. Ellie nodded. "Thank you."

"Be careful," the woman said. "Bears. Dogs. Night's coming. Might be best to wait till tomorrow."

Ellie nodded. Dee stared at nothing. Ellie took her arm and led her toward the doors. Outside, the cold hit them like it had been sprayed from a hose.

Ellie got out her map from the phone book and traced a route. "Need to ride hard if we're going to beat the sunset."

Dee got on her bike, keeping pace without complaint. To Ellie's right, Hobson watched the trees fronting the highway, keeping his thoughts to himself. His cheeks and nose were red with cold.

The highway crossed a downtown of sedate brick storefronts. A few towers rose from the trees near the river. They exited the highway to a long two-lane road that stretched through wooded subdivisions, then fallow farms. The sun arced to the west and they chased it up into the hills. Clouds overtook them, and then the sun, too. The air grew as sharp as sheared metal.

The road was swallowed by pines and rough-cut trunks. Twilight swept over the woods. Where the roads met, Ellie dismounted, lit two lanterns, passed one to Hobson, and found the trail. The lanterns flickered. It smelled like spent oil and pine needles. Ellie spaced them twenty feet apart and walked parallel to the trail, with Dee closest to it, Hobson in the middle, and herself at the outer edge.

Fine white dust sifted through the pine needles. It had begun to snow.

The powder fell with the sound of hushed surf. At once it was as dark as midnight. Hobson veered toward Dee to share his light. Leaves crackled underfoot. Beyond that, there was no sound or sight of life. After a quarter mile of walking, Ellie stopped and turned around for another pass back toward the roads, putting some distance between herself and the trail. The ground froze and the snow began to stick, frosting the grass and leaves, gleaming white in the light of the lanterns. Ellie tried to keep her eyes open and her mind quiet, but the silence of the forest invaded her with visions of Quinn's upturned face, gawking and blind, sight stolen first by death, and then by crows.

"Ellie," Hobson pointed.

The body lay in the leaves, shirtless, shoeless. Little was left of its face. Dee fell to her knees and screamed.

13

"I must warn you," Lucy said to Duke, "I have an umbrella."

Duke lifted his brows. The knife remained near his hip. "You do! What do you intend to do with it?"

"If I hit you too low, I might make you wish you'd never been born. But I'm probably just going to kill you."

He laughed with little humor. Lucy faced a couple of problems. First off, Duke and his boys added up to three, and she only had two shells in the umbrella. Beau had tried and tried to rig up more, but she knew she was lucky to pack more than one while retaining the illusion that it wasn't in fact an operational firearm. If she was clever, she might maneuver to wing two of them with one blast, but whatever she did, she was going to have to take at least one hand to hand. And they were bigger than her. Surprise and resolve were great equalizers, but they'd only take you so far.

And second, she was supposed to be getting in bed with the Kono. If she started planting them in graves instead, that threw Nerve's whole use for her out the window. Not a great way to convince him to fast-track her request to see Tilly.

"Don't make this any worse for yourself," Duke said.

"God was kind to men like you," she said. "For his most venomous creations, he stamped them with a bright red hourglass, or gave them a rattling tail so you'd know better than to poke at them. Well, he forgot to give me a stamp or a rattle, so you need to listen to my words instead: put down that blade and walk away."

He titled his head. "I know you from somewhere, don't I?"

"I doubt that."

"Brian, how do I know her? This whole time I'm trying to put my finger on it but it keeps slipping away."

One of the two men across from Lucy—Brian, presumably—rocked on his heels. He had a buzzcut and looked like he ate a lot of sausage. "I don't know. Maybe she's got one of those faces of the world."

Duke glared at her, as if his misfiring memory were her fault, and took a step forward, tapping the tip of his knife against the side of his jeans. "Whatever. I'll have all the time I need to figure it out when you're working for me. Times are tight, you can't turn down a good job like that."

Lucy had the impression most people used it as a figure of speech, but when she got mad, it was like a red sheer curtain dropped from the sky and shaded the whole world. Later, she could say exactly why she did it—people using their power to take it from others drove her ten kinds of crazy—but at that moment, the "why" wasn't exactly foremost on her mind.

She leveled the umbrella and pulled the pin that functioned as its trigger.

The shot crashed across the courtyard. Duke didn't have time to look shocked or scared or sorry. The blast pounded him in the chest and he dropped in the kind of heap that doesn't get back up.

She whirled on the other two. They were more experienced than the boys she'd taken the car from; the third man already had a pistol rising toward her chest. She fired at the same time he did. Her arm went hot; his bullet whined off the brick wall. Her shot took him in the middle of the body and he fell with a high-pitched moan. She sprinted at him and aimed her now-empty shotgun at Brian.

He hesitated with his hand in his armpit. The man on the ground was fumbling with his pistol. Lucy flipped her grip on the umbrella and bashed his wrist with its reinforced handle. The gun skidded away. She cocked back golf-style and smashed the handle into his head. As soon as she felt it connect into his skull, she dropped and snatched up his pistol.

"You aren't too fast, Brian," she said.

"You shot them!"

"I did. And I'll shoot you, too. But I got a deal for you."

"I got friends in there." He jerked his chin toward the bar. "They won't think that was a firecracker."

"Could be, but they disarmed me when I came in. Anyone who heard the shots would guess they were Duke's way of taking care of me."

Sweat popped across his pale face. "What do you want?"

"Duke saw me at the docks, didn't he? Your little raid on the Chelsea Piers. Were you there with him?"

"I'm dead as soon as I tell you what you want to hear."

She shook her head. "I get good vibes off you, man. If you play it straight with me, I'll return the favor."

His eyes tick-tocked between hers. "It wasn't just a raid. It was a scouting mission."

"To do what?"

"To see how much we could take from you."

"And Distro gave it away without a fight." Lucy perched a grin on her mouth the way you'd set a pair of glasses on the end of your nose. "You're coming back, aren't you? To take a lot more than coffee."

Brian shook his head so hard his chin wobbled. "I don't know. I'm a grunt. Duke keeps me around because I helped him through the plague, but he doesn't exactly invite me to tribal council."

"Think you better get used to talking about ol' Duke in the past tense." She took a look at the door, which remained closed. "He never let slip anything more juicy?"

He slicked sweat from his beefy face, then froze again and looked at her with pure horror, terrified that he'd dared to move. When she made no move to plug him, he let out a shaky sigh. "Duke's been popping off about Distro ever since you started undercutting us on imports. No one understands how you bring them in so cheap."

Lucy was starting to get a bad feeling that "Duke" was more than a nickname. "And when exactly did this start?"

"This summer was when we noticed. July 4th, when you brought in the ice. Who has ice on July 4?"

"One more question," she said. "Any last words?"

The sweat sprouted from Brian's face anew.

"Just messing with you," Lucy laughed. "Seriously though, is there another way out of here?"

Arm quivering, he pointed past the planters at the end of the courtyard, which were overgrown with trees and grass. "Follow the hallway to the other side of the building. I don't know if it's locked."

"Thank you." She lowered her pistol. "Your friends are dead. There's nothing to do for them. If you're an honorable man, you'll give me a couple minutes' head start."

Defiance cracked the fear in his face. "And if I'm not?"

"Then think long and hard whether you want me for an enemy."

She grinned and backpedaled toward the other side of the courtyard, keeping an eye on him the whole way. He pivoted to watch. The metal door opened on a dark hallway. As the door closed, it stole the courtyard's sunshine with it, leaving her in a world of outlines and silhouettes.

Lucy jogged for the far end. She pocketed the looted pistol and touched her arm where the unnamed man had shot her. It was the slightest bit damp. A graze. She'd gotten lucky. Maybe the man with the scythe had been too busy licking his chops at Duke's blood to cast his white gaze on her.

Light glowed from the other end of the hall, which opened to another restaurant, dusty and cobwebbed. A skeleton was scattered across the floor. Despite the disuse, the front door worked fine.

If she'd circled back the way she'd come in, she might have been able to retrieve her bike without being noticed, but she didn't feel like rolling the dice on that. The Feds would just have to bill her for it. She ran west, then swung south at the next intersection. Her shoes pounded the asphalt. After a couple blocks, she eased up and pulled the spent red plastic cartridges from her umbrella, dropping them on the road with the tongue-clucking sound so particular to empty shotgun shells.

After a mile of flat-out running, it was pretty clear they weren't going to find her. She had zigged close to the shore and caught glimpses of river at each intersection. She saw a few bike chains and horseshoe locks discarded next to planters, but the bikes had been claimed long ago. The Feds must have wanted a monopoly.

That meant she had to cross the five-odd miles to the piers on foot. She was well-callused but earned some new blisters on her toes by the time she jogged in sight of the piers. She headed to the restaurant and climbed the stairs to the rotunda. Nerve looked up from the paperwork on his desk.

"Did you speak to the Kono?"

"You know, I think it went pretty well." Lucy threw herself in a padded leather chair and pulled off her shoes. "One of their people even offered me a job. As a prostitute, mind, which I wasn't too keen on. He seemed insulted when I turned him down. Long story short, I killed him and one of his friends, but here I am."

"You're joking."

"Want to smell my umbrella?"

"Are you fucking crazy?" Nerve's voice was unsettlingly level. "The Kono are violent. I don't need to launch a study to know that. What I
do
need to learn is whether this raid is the first spark of a brushfire. And you think the best way to embed yourself in their ranks is to gun them down on their home turf?"

"They made me. Recognized me from the raid. A person of lesser integrity might try to hide that from you, but I figure a leader is only as good as his intelligence."