Soul Meaning (A Seventeen Series Novel: An Action Adventure Thriller Book 1) (2 page)

Chapter Two

A
 persistent ringing brought me out
of a deep sleep. I blinked away dreams of avenging angels, rolled over, and peered at the clock on the bedside table. It was ten am. Sunlight streamed into the room between the curtains opposite my bed. The sky beyond was a vivid cerulean blue.

I slid to the edge of the mattress and picked up the new cell from the floor.

‘Yo,’ said Reid.

‘Uh-huh.’ I rubbed my eyes.

‘The address Haus gave you was a dead end. So was the phone number. I did however find someone by that name staying at the Parker Hotel.’ Cain Haus was the immortal who had contacted our agency two days previously, and who more recently had stuck a sword through my heart. ‘How do you wanna play this?’

I yawned. ‘Pick me up in twenty.’

Thirty minutes later, we were sitting in a corner booth in Betty’s Cafe.

Betty’s opened forty years ago in what is now a prime location in Roxbury. It was around the corner from the Mission Hill station and had become the unofficial haunt of the cops who worked there. Betty’s husband was a retired member of the Boston PD. Eight years ago, the couple retired to Florida and left the coffee shop to their son, Joe. Apart from adding a fresh lick of paint to the front of the building, Joe never changed the decor; the honey-colored wall paneling still contrasted nicely with the linoleum floor, while the weathered black and red Formica tables gleamed in the soft light of the lamps hanging from the wooden-slatted ceiling. Even the menu had remained untouched; these days, if you asked for a latte in Betty’s, you still got a funny look.

Reid nodded at old acquaintances while we waited for our orders. ‘So, what’s the plan?’ he asked.

I dragged my gaze from the busy street beyond the window and studied my partner. Despite living through a divorce in the time that I had known him, Reid had not aged much in the last ten years. There were a few more wrinkles around his eyes and a deepening of the cynical twist that hovered almost constantly near his lips, but he had otherwise retained the sturdy build that had made him such a good Marine and cop.

‘I think we should tail him first, find out whether there are others with him,’ I said with a shrug. ‘Hunters normally work as a pack.’

‘And how do you intend to kill him?’ said Reid.

I avoided his stare. We had had this conversation enough times for me to know exactly how the next few exchanges would go.

‘You need to get a gun,’ said my partner.

‘I don’t like guns.’

He scowled. ‘You’re a first-class shot.’

I sighed. ‘That doesn’t mean I have to carry a gun.’

There was a calculated pause. ‘What about a sword? You’re good with swords.’

I looked at him steadily. ‘Where do you propose I keep it? Besides, I’ve told you before: I don’t like violence.’

‘Unfortunately, violence likes you,’ said Reid doggedly. ‘How many people nursing a bottle of whisky on the end of a pier and grieving the death of their best friend get accidentally shot in the head by a random gunman?’

Another sigh left my lips; my partner was being unusually vocal today.

‘And what about that drug dealer in New York, the one who stabbed you in the back?’ His eyes narrowed. ‘Oh, and let’s not forget Rudy.’

I grimaced. Rudy Lomax was a fifty-year-old accountant who used to work for a large international merchant bank in Boston’s financial district. Despite owning a penthouse in Back Bay with views over the Charles River and wearing thousand-dollar suits, Rudy had defaulted on his alimony on more than one occasion. When the collection agency retained by his ex-wife hired us to tail him, the accountant became enraged at this breach of his privacy and ran me over with his Lexus.

‘To be fair, he only broke my leg,’ I muttered into my coffee. ‘And I was fine by the end of the week.’

‘Really?’ Reid countered with a sneer. ‘What about Louisiana?’

I looked away from his accusing gaze and shifted in the seat.

Even I had to admit Louisiana had been an ugly affair. We had gone looking for a missing fourteen-year-old girl called Carly Jennings, a bright-eyed and vivacious child. Jennings had met a man through an internet chat room a few months before her disappearance. The trail led us to the southern state of Louisiana via New York and DC, where we uncovered a child prostitution ring with connections to South America and the Far East.

Things started to go wrong when the Feds got involved. By the time the gun smoke cleared, two agents had died, and I had been shot twice. Jennings was found scared but unscathed at the bottom of a ship’s cargo hold bound for Mexico.

‘Louisiana was a fluke.’ I looked at the pancakes that had just landed before me, thanked the waitress, and reached for a fork.

Reid grunted. ‘Lots of things in your life are flukes.’ The conversation was thankfully cut short by the arrival of a serving of artery-clogging fried food. He ignored my disapproving tut-tut and dug into his eggs.

We left the cafe a quarter of an hour later and drove across town to the Parker Hotel. The sky remained bereft of clouds. A few seagulls circled high above, white shapes flecked with gray. The Hancock Tower gleamed in the distance to the left.

Reid pulled up behind a hot dog vendor and went inside the building. He returned within minutes and settled in the driver’s seat.

‘Haus is still inside. Doorman said he arrived two days ago. Alone.’

I frowned at his words. This was unusual behavior for a Hunter; from the multiple attempts on my life over the centuries and inside knowledge provided by a couple of very close friends, I knew the minimum number of assassins assigned for an execution-style mission was normally two. Both the Crovir and the Bastian Orders had strict rules on these matters, and any member going beyond their remit was severely punished, usually by a death. Was Haus acting by himself?

I had wondered briefly that morning which side he belonged to. Then again, it hardly mattered. I was only surprised that the immortals were after me following almost a century of silence. It was becoming apparent that at least one faction still wanted me dead.

At four o’clock, Haus had still not left the hotel. The hot dogs had proven to be sickeningly greasy, and three cups of coffee were burning a hole in my stomach. Reid was on his fifth cigarette. At this rate, I was going to die from second-hand smoking.

The sudden purr of the engine finally jolted me from a semi-comatose state.

‘Is that him?’ said Reid.

I looked across the street. A pale, thin man with ash-blond hair and a black overcoat had walked out of the hotel and was hailing a cab.

‘Yes,’ I murmured. ‘That’s the man who murdered me, all right.’

Reid twisted the steering wheel and merged into the peak-time traffic. Twenty minutes later, we had barely moved two blocks. The cab finally crawled onto Interstate 93 and headed toward the Zakim Bridge and the Charles River. It soon pulled off the highway and turned onto a side road. Reid slowed the Chevy and followed.

We drove through a series of increasingly rundown neighborhoods. Snatches of hip hop music drifted in sporadically through the car’s half-open windows. Hobos scoured the alleys behind shops and stores, some of them pushing their worldly belongings in broken shopping carts. We stopped at a set of traffic lights and earned a battery of hostile stares from a group of teens standing next to the intersection.

Less than a mile away, sunlight glinted on the steelwork of the Tobin Bridge. We were not far from the water.

The roads became deserted. Stretches of disused land appeared on our right, graveyards for the corpses of burnt-out cars and broken white goods. By the time we entered the maze of derelict buildings that bordered the Mystic River, Reid had put the Chevy into a crawl.

Red taillights flashed up ahead. The cab pulled to a stop next to an abandoned warehouse. Haus climbed out and stood watching as the car drew away. He spun on his heels and disappeared in an alley at the side of the building.

The Chevy rolled to a standstill. Reid turned off the engine. We glanced at each other before exiting the car.

Sandy loam crunched softly beneath our boots as we made our way toward the alleyway. The blares of car horns carried on the wind from the toll bridge. In the blue skies above, a seagull screeched and whirled smoothly on invisible currents.

I heard the crack of the bullet a heartbeat before it hit the ground next to us. Reid swore as I yanked him into the lee of a building.

‘I thought you said he had a sword.’ He took the Glock out.

‘Hunters are trained in the use of a range of weapons,’ I replied quietly.

Another bullet whizzed out of the alley. It was followed by a wild cackle.

Reid raised an eyebrow. ‘Why is he laughing?’

‘I don’t know. I asked him the same question last night. All he did was laugh louder and call me a half-breed.’ I grimaced. ‘It doesn’t sound like healthy laughter to me.’

‘I know what you mean,’ muttered Reid. ‘It kinda reminds me of that Jack Nicholson movie.’

‘“One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest?”’

‘No, “The Shining”,’ said Reid. Another cackle followed. ‘Now what?’

Before I could muster a reply, Haus’s words drifted on the breeze toward us. ‘Come out, come out, wherever you are!’ he shouted from the alley.

Reid pursed his lips. ‘He does a bad Nicholson impression. Just for that, he deserves a bullet.’

I touched his shoulder and silently indicated the roof of the adjacent building. He nodded. We turned and headed for the broken side door we had walked past earlier. There was a tortuous creak of metal as we squeezed through the gap between the frame and the doorjamb.

The inside of the warehouse was unusually warm. The air was fetid and smelled of death. We strolled past the rotting carcass of a raccoon and moved toward the rickety stairs at the southwest corner of the building. Broken bottles, crushed cans, and dirty syringes littered the corridors on the upper floor. Beyond a roomful of damaged mannequins and rust-covered sewing machines, a door opened out onto a fire escape. It was a short climb to the roof.

The wind had picked up. It brought with it a range of smells: the organic stench of the river, the rank odor of oil from a nearby refinery, the chemical stink of the tannery half a mile away. The acrid reek of gunpowder.

I pulled Reid behind an air vent just as the bullet ricocheted off the hot asphalt yards from our feet.

‘He’s a smart bastard,’ grunted my partner.

‘Uh-huh.’

‘Northeast corner of the roof?’

‘Yes,’ I murmured.

‘I can smell you, half-breed! You stink higher than a skunk!’ shouted Haus from the neighboring rooftop.

Reid looked at me and cocked an eyebrow.

‘I showered this morning,’ I said, deadpan.

He shook his head, rose to one knee, and fired two rounds at the opposite building. An answering volley scored cracks in the rooftop five feet from where we crouched.

‘He’s either a crap shot or he’s playing with us,’ muttered Reid.

‘I’m pretty sure it’s the latter.’ Neither Order forbade their Hunters from playing with their prey. In fact, the Crovirs were quite famed for it.

‘If we sit here any longer, he’s gonna shoot us like fish in a barrel,’ said Reid. ‘What say we get the hell out of here?’

I nodded. He let off another five rounds. Before the last bullet left the muzzle of his gun, we were up and running toward the next vent.

‘Why isn’t he shooting—’ Reid started to say as we neared the metal tower.

The ground suddenly gave beneath us as a section of the roof collapsed. In hindsight, it had been a pretty obvious trap.

We landed in the room with the mannequins with a thunderous crash. Above the noise of the falling debris, I heard a harsh grunt from Reid. I dug my way out of a pile of inanimate figures, wincing at the sharp stabs radiating from several cuts and bruises, and turned toward him.

He was lying stiffly next to the bank of industrial sewing machines. A forty-inch-long steel rod rose through his left thigh and pinned him to the floor.

Alarm darted through me. ‘That’s not good,’ I said, meeting his eyes. He gritted his teeth in response.

A dull thud drew our gazes to the ceiling. Haus had cleared the gap between the two warehouses. Rapid footsteps sounded above our heads and a shadow appeared against the patch of blue sky visible through the jagged hole in the roof.

‘Found you, you dirty half-breed!’ hissed the immortal.

My eyes widened as I looked past the barrel of an M9 Beretta pistol into the face of a madman.

‘Go!’ shouted Reid.

The deafening noise of the semi-automatic filled the confined space. I sprinted across the room, deadly shards erupting around me. Blood bloomed on the back of my left hand. I reached the far wall, hit the fire door with my shoulder, and emerged into bright sunlight. Haus’s wild cackle reached my ears as I sailed over the railing of the fire escape and dove into the river.

Bullets riddled the water behind me when I cleaved the dark surface. I swam further into the murky depths and twisted around until I floated in the eddies. Shots scored the choppy currents above once more; by the look of things, Haus had loaded another magazine into the Beretta.

A dull roar echoed in my ears as I debated my options. The Hunter would not kill Reid. This I was certain of. Instead, he would use my partner as bait to lure me out.

That’s what I would do if I were in his shoes.

I turned with the faintest of misgivings and let the current carry me north.

It was two hours before I got back to the apartment. Night had long since fallen across the city. The driver of the cab that I eventually managed to hail sniffed at me suspiciously before allowing me into his car. His disposition did not improve when I handed him a wad of soggy dollar bills at the end of the journey.

After checking the rooms for signs of forced entry, I showered and redressed my wound. I then did something that would have surprised Reid had he been able to see me.

I headed for the painting of Monet’s 1906 “Water Lilies” that hung above the mantelpiece in the living room.

I stopped beneath the canvas and gazed at the mesmerizing shades of blue for silent seconds. Of all of Monet’s works, this was the one I found the most soothing. It had taken several years and a considerable amount of money to convince the artist to make another copy for me.