The Demon Hunters (29 page)

We stepped off the stair directly into
a big square room of concrete floor and white concrete walls.
Sixteen metal-frame cots were neatly arrayed around the edges of
the room. Two square Formica tables occupied the center, each with
eight metal chairs nested beneath. It was totally basic, cold and
unwelcoming.

“
Wow. This is where they
bunk.”

He nodded “He spends a fortune on
décor for his offices, but a pittance on his men’s
comfort.”

“
Maybe they’re the sort not
used to comfort, or know how to get by without it.”

Blankets hugged the bunks with
military precision and nary a crease. We looked for personal items
and found shaving kits and hygiene products, men’s underwear and
casual attire in small leather suitcases stowed beneath each
bunk.

My hand still in his, Royal led me
across the room, around the tables and to a door in the far wall.
This opened to a smaller, more comfortable-looking room with a
queen-size bed, a big dresser against the far wall and a square of
carpet. But again, nothing personal on show. Another door led to a
minuscule bathroom with washbasin, toilet and basic shower
unit.

“
I will not believe Vance
lives in here. Must be for his second-in-command or some such,” I
suggested.

“
I do not think
anyone
lives
here.
It looks like a temporary troop billet.”

We went back to the main room and
Royal pointed at another door. It looked like steel, with an
opening bar instead of a conventional handle, and a remote entry
device affixed to the wall above. “I should think it opens to the
outside, the alley behind Murphy’s. Vance must have a remote
control in his office.”

“
So his men can come in and
out the building and to his office, and nobody any the
wiser.”

Royal turned a circle. “I think we
have seen it all.” He offered me his crooked arm. “Shall
we?”

I tucked my hand in his arm. The steel
door opened easily. It didn’t have a handle on the outside, but an
intercom was attached to the wall.

We sauntered along the alley. I felt
good, invigorated. We were finally making progress.

Chapter
Twenty-Four

“
What now,” I asked Royal
as we cuddled in my bed. I felt heavy, drowsy. I had to force
myself to concentrate.

“
We need solid
evidence.”

He was right. Vance’s sixteen thugs,
the hidden room, none of it proved Vance was the Charbroiler or the
mastermind behind the murders. It gave us something to go on, but
nothing we could take to the police.

“
We can’t tell Gia any of
this,” I said. “She’ll go after Vance and I don’t see her as the
merciful type.”

“
I would rather hand Vance
to Clarion PD in a neat little package, all the evidence in place,
nothing more for them to look at.” His arms squeezed me. “But if we
cannot, we will take care of Vance ourselves. He must be
stopped.”

I sagged. “We? You mean Gelpha and
Dark Cousins?” I said into his chest.

I felt him nod.

“
And you’d stop him
how?”

“
I do not know yet.” He
shrugged. “And not something we have to think of right now. As it
stands, Vance is an innocent man.”

I raised up, looked in his
face. “Innocent my foot
.
You mean to say, when you were a cop, you always,
religiously, considered a suspect innocent until proven
guilty?”

He smiled. “Ah, no. That was the spiel
we gave civilians.”

“
Well I’m not a civilian.”
I breathed in the scent of his skin, sandalwood and amber. “What’s
our next move?”

He didn’t answer me. He kept his eyes
closed. “Royal?”

He yawned. “I will go in tomorrow
night, plant some bugs in his office, in his phones.” He didn’t
sound at all alert. “Then, I suppose, good old-fashioned
surveillance.”

“
Besides being boring as
all get-out, how will that help us?”

“
After what his men saw at
Daven’s place, when she killed those bums, he must be looking for
Gia. If we hear something, we go from there.”

I groaned on his shoulder.
Nothing can be more boring than sitting in a parked car for hours,
or listening in on telephone conversations, on the chance
something
will happen.

I smoothed his hair with my palm. I
will never get over how it looks like thick metallic threads, but
feels like silk, like his skin. He looked so comfortable, lying
there with his eyes closed, smiling. I watched his face as his
mouth softened and his breathing became heavy and even. A soft
snore escaped his lips. He’d fallen asleep.

I had not turned the
air-conditioner on this morning, the room felt warm from the
lingering heat of a day in mid-July and the heat of our bodies. The
lamp cast a dim glow in my bedroom, creating deeper shadows in the
corners and beside my dresser. The old carriage clock
t
ock
ed away on the
mantelpiece. I wanted to turn the lamp off, but didn’t make it. I
fell asleep across his chest, my fingers tangled in his long
hair.

***

We tried to come up with a plan over
breakfast: toaster waffles, strawberry preserve and whipped cream
from an aerosol can. I know it sounds revolting, but both Royal and
I are fond of the stuff. Royal says it reminds him of the first
time he came to my house, when I would not let him have a waffle.
Now he buys them for both of us.

I racked my brains. Use Gia
as bait? Somehow arrange for Vance to find her, if that
was
his game? I played a
scenario in my mind: Vance and his goons busting in on well-known
author Gia Sabato, carrying cans of gasoline and waving swords. No,
would not work. Well it might, but could she take on sixteen macho
men while she waited for the police to arrive and witness the bad
guys attacking poor Gia for no reason?
How
to get the police there? An
anonymous tip?
The thugs who have murdered
four people in more than one state are in Clarion and about to do
it again? And how do you know that, ma’am? Can you prove it? Sorry,
all our units are tied up. We can get there in a couple of
hours.

I groaned and let my head fall in my
hands.

“
Breakfast not to your
liking?” Royal asked.

I looked at my plate from between my
hands. The cream had separated and the waffle no longer looked
appetizing. I slid the plate across the table. “You want
it?”

“
I’ll take it! I’ll take
it!” Jack cried out.

“
Forget it,” I said,
grabbing the plate just as Royal reached for it. “Jack wants
it.”

Royal frowned so hard, little lines
appeared between his eyebrows. I grinned and pushed the plate back
to him. “Okay, it’s yours.”

“
My god! You are the
biggest tease since Eve!” Jack grumped.

“
Me? A tease?” I looked
sideways at him. “Eve was a tease?”

He put hands to hips and cocked his
head on one side. “Apple? Adam? Hello?”

I made a face. “Oh. I guess
so.”

Still frowning, Royal concentrated on
his waffles.

“
You heard the one about
the naked dead guy?”

Darn. No escaping him this
time.

“
So the doctor goes to see
old Mike the first Tuesday of the month, same as always. It’s
midwinter and bitterly cold, so he’s surprised when Mike’s wife
tells him her husband is out on the balcony. He goes out there, and
sees Mike sitting on a lawn chair in the middle of the snow-covered
balcony. It’s real cold. I mean to say, there are icicles dripping
off the eaves. He walks around the old guy and is pretty shocked to
see he’s stiff as a board, wearing a thick sweatshirt above the
waist but stark naked below. He can see Mike’s dead, but he gets
out his doctoring gear and checks just the same. Then he goes back
inside the apartment to Ivy.

“‘
Ivy,’ he says, ‘how long
has Mike been out on your balcony?’

“‘
The poor old coot passed
away on Sunday,’ says Ivy. ‘I figured it’s cold enough out there to
preserve him, but temperatures are climbing in the next two days,
so I thought I should get him taken care of.’

“
The doctor hardly knows
what to say, but he does his best to remain professional. ‘Very
wise of you, Ivy. But, tell me, why didn’t you call me, and where
are his pants?’

“‘
It’s like this, doctor,’
said Ivy. ‘Every time he went out there to smoke his cigar - I
won’t let him do it in the apartment - he got a stiff back. As long
as he sat out there, his back set hard as a cast-iron skillet. When
he passed over, I remembered that, and it got me thinking. You see,
he took his Viagra just beforehand.’”

I frowned at Jack for a minute, then I
got it and a guffaw broke out of me. Jack was delighted. Of course,
it didn’t register on his face, but I could tell from the way he
gave a little hop and squeezed his shoulders together.

Royal swallowed his mouthful. “All
right, tell me.”

So I told him Jack’s joke. He smiled,
but didn’t laugh.

I peaked my brows. “I thought you had
a sense of humor.” I looked over at Jack, who glared at the back of
Royal’s head. “You don’t get it. Jack can’t usually crack a joke to
save his life. This one is pretty good by comparison.”

“
Well thanks a lot!” from
Jack.

“
No one
can crack a joke to save Jack’s life,” Mel said as
she came in the kitchen.

Royal swallowed the last of my waffle.
“I’m for a shower.” He stood and left the kitchen, and headed
upstairs.

***

Sitting in the kitchen while Royal
showered, I thought over what we learned about Vance. If we were
right about the guy, he was one sick puppy and so were his
men.

Jack and Mel started in on each other.
I put my palm to my forehead. “Here we go again.”

I ignored their bickering and scraped
my leftovers into the bin. Out the corner of my eye, I saw Mel do a
swift about-turn and head for the hall.

“
You!”

She looked back, but didn’t
stop.

“
Yes, you. You stay right
here. You will not go peek at Royal.”

She did a U-turn and came back in the
kitchen.

“
You neither,” I told
Jack.

Then Gia arrived and I got serious
mighty quickly.

***

“
Have you checked your
e-mail?”

When Gia walked in, not having
bothered to knock or announce herself, Jack and Mel sidled to the
corner of the room near the back door. They went stiff. Mac went
under the table.

I don’t know what ailed Mac when Gia
was here, but I believe dogs sense what people cannot.

“
Have you?” she repeated in
a cold voice as she took off her gloves and dropped them on the
table.

She was so damned arrogant. I
struggled to keep my expression neutral. Every time she looked down
her nose at me and I thought I was mad enough to tell her what she
could do with her patronage, her expression shifted, something to
do with the set of her eyes, and I kept my mouth shut. Almost as if
she heard my thoughts, or could feel my emotions
boiling.

I bent over to stow dishes in the
cabinet. “Not yet.”

She sat at the kitchen table behind me
as I unloaded the dishwasher. She wore all black: high-necked,
long-sleeved dress, shoes; even her earrings and finger rings were
black, shiny hematite. Unrelieved black against her pale skin
should have made her look corpse-like, but instead she looked
stunning. Damn her.

“
Daven is on his way home,
but he will be several days yet.”

“
That’s your big news?”
Because the way she made her entrance, I thought she’d come to tell
me hell had froze over.

“
We think we know who
betrayed us.”

That
got my attention. I straightened with a pottery bowl in one
hand.

“
He was in a village near
Nagka and the natives seemed to recognize him. Not him as an
individual, but as a member of an ethnic group they are familiar
with. To begin with, they treated him like royalty, ousted their
mayor from his hut and offered it to Daven for the night as
accommodation, and they served a huge meal, like a feast. They
seemed to be trying to impress him. One of them mentioned his
‘brothers,’ at which the rest of them shut up. It took diplomacy
and reassurance on Daven’s part to get them to open up.

“
According to them, a
colony of people
like
Daven lived nearby. Something happened to them. From a few
words he was not supposed to overhear, he thinks the colony was
massacred, but naturally they would not admit that to visitors.
There was one survivor, an adolescent boy. He lived with these
villagers until a visiting white man, a European, took him
away.”