The Wolf, page 4
Rio glanced around, and heard the warning she’d hung up on haunting her. “I’ll contact you at the number I have—”
The man snapped a hold on her arm. “Don’t fuck with me. I have options you don’t even know about.”
Before she could react, he released his grip and walked off, his dark clothes helping him blend into the shadows.
“Dammit,” Rio whispered as she ducked and disappeared herself.
Sticking to the club’s flank, she took out her gun and measured the windows across the alley, the lane behind her, the lane ahead of her. The patrol cars screamed by one block over, and she caught sight of the lineup with their flashing lights as they crossed an intersection she could see through.
Her legs were killing her, her left one below the knee in particular.
A streak of lightning gave her eyes more than the ambient light of the city to go on—and also revealed her. As she sank into an inset doorway, she frowned and leaned back out. A moment later… there was another of the storm’s strobes.
“Where did you go?” she said under her breath.
The supplier had somehow… disappeared. Unless he’d snuck into one of the buildings? Maybe. That was the only explanation. In the direction he’d gone in, away from the river, there were no corners, no cut-throughs, no going any way but forward for two blocks straight.
Maybe he’d broken out into a sprint—
She couldn’t worry about it. Not right now.
Checking the clip in her gun, she relowered the weapon to her thigh and continued on. She found the body about forty feet ahead, crumpled facedown on the pavement behind a dumpster. It was a man, going by the build and the hair, as well as the size of the boots. As she knelt beside him, her brain connected the dots.
The jacket. She recognized the black leather jacket because of the red stitching that crisscrossed the shoulders and ran down to the bottom hem.
“Erie.”
One of Mozart’s lieutenants.
Had he been shooting at her? Or the Charger?
As she looked at the spreading red pool under the man, she thought about a killing down in Manhattan the weekend before. Johnny Two Shoes, an associate of Mozart’s biggest competition in the state, had been executed and rolled into the Hudson. The word on the street had been that revenge was imminent.
Maybe Erie had been protecting her, protecting the deal being made. Had the driver of the Charger been trying to kill her in retaliation?
Rio stretched an arm out and put her fingertips to the inside of Erie’s still-warm wrist. Feeling around… no, there was no pulse. Making the sign of the cross, she straightened—and left the area so that she could call in the shooting details to HQ from greater safety.
That she was walking with just a limp was better than she could have hoped for.
Good thing, too, as she wasn’t done with her to-do list yet tonight.
CHAPTER FIVE
Lucan re-formed at right about the place he’d scared off those two boys with their ghost-hunting equipment. Lifting his face to the rain, he let the light drops fingertip his forehead and cheeks. On the backs of his eyelids, he saw that human female getting hit fair-and-square by the car. Then pictured her rising to her feet afterward, brushing herself off, and giving him the what-for.
She’d had a strong face, her features bold, her lips full, her dark eyes big under declarative brows. Her skin had lost all its color as she forced her weight onto what had taken the impact, but she had refused to give in to the pain.
He couldn’t decide whether the grit was sexy or stupid.
Well… he supposed it was stupid, but he found it sexy.
Wiping the rain through his hair, he leveled his head and stared straight ahead. If she didn’t call him sometime during the rest of tonight or tomorrow during the day, he was going to go out to the streets and find her.
And then what? the malest part of him demanded.
“None of your business,” he muttered.
You want her.
“Yeah, to get the Executioner off my back.”
Aware that he was arguing with himself, he started for his new home—and by “home,” he meant involuntary servitude with a roof over his head. “Prison camp” had been the old term, when they’d been underground at the old site they’d abandoned. This was the new world order, no more cells, though still underground, those tracking collars ever present.
Funny, how you could control people when, with one press of a remote, their brains were vaporized. There also weren’t a lot of options for most of the vampires being held.
He was one of the few without a collar. But he needed to be able to dematerialize back and forth to Caldwell to make this deal, and there was no ghosting around when you had a band of steel around your throat.
And the Executioner wasn’t worried about him bolting. The fucker had leverage over him, the kind of thing that was just as good as an explosive necklace. But it wasn’t going to last much longer so he was biding his time. With one death, he was free—and he was of half a mind to take care of the Grim Reaper’s work himself. It would be a mercy killing at this point, anyway, two liberations for the price of a single slit throat.
Cheap, all things considering.
Up ahead, the old human hospital building loomed like something out of a John Carpenter movie where everyone but the virtuous girl who didn’t have sex with her boyfriend died in creative, bloody ways.
God, he missed the eighties. Then again, the last time he’d been able to watch a TV or listen to a radio had been right before he’d been thrown into the prison camp. So, yeah, he was current as of the spring of 1983. And maybe he didn’t miss the era; he missed… life and the simple freedoms he had taken for granted.
Lucan stopped at the worn stone steps of the sanatorium’s entrance. The central core of the building was a tower of closed windows, the floors rising up like a blocky spear, the tip of which was a tower topped with a lightning rod. On either side of this torso, there were two five-story wings of open porches, each extending at a wide angle to catch the prevailing breeze for failing lungs.
The place had been built to treat the human tuberculosis patients who suffered such cruel, suffocating deaths through the 1800s and into the twentieth century. Back then, the treatment for the bacterial infestation was fresh air, and as much of it as you could stand, no matter the season. Well, that and hacking pieces of your lungs out, or cod-liver oil, or inhaling hemlock.
Until streptomycin and other drugs came to the rescue in the late forties.
Why did he know all that about those rats without tails and their coughs? He liked his trivia, even if it was about shit that didn’t affect vampires. Or vampire-wolven half-breeds.
The New York Times crossword puzzle had been his favorite.
Looking down the south wing, he measured the open porches that ran all the way to the far end. The patient rooms were behind the loggias, the rusted frames of the old hospital beds cluttering the tight spaces, all kinds of debris down the hallways and graffiti marking the stained and rotting walls. The north wing was the same, as was the administrative core that anchored the structure.
Everything abandoned and decaying, only the ghosts of dead patients remaining now.
Above ground, that was.
In a way, prisoners like him and the others belonged here. They’d been discarded, too. Forgotten. And most were rotting as they shuffled around beneath the earth, their only use cutting and portioning drugs to make money for yet another despot.
“One death,” he said grimly as he reached for the tarnished brass pull. “One death, and I’m out of here.”
There were advantages to having been excised from your family.
No more leverage when it came to your bloodline ’cuz you didn’t care if the fuckers were smothered in their own beds.
The old place still had some electricity running through it, and a dusty light bulb hanging from a wire cast sad light over what had been the reception, waiting, and check-in area. From what he’d read on a plaque on the wall, the hospital had stopped treating tubercular patients in the early fifties and switched to housing the mentally ill. That had lasted until the seventies, at which point, everything had been deserted.
He didn’t think anyone was going to add a bronze plate honoring the coda that included vampires.
Diverting from the open area with its moldy, toppled chairs and chipped, cheap-wood tables, he headed to the right. The north wing’s hall was marked “North Wing”—surprise!—and there were administrative offices on both sides, missing doors allowing views into rooms with ceiling collapses and broken windows that had let in the weather as well as years’ worth of fallen leaves. In a few spots, weeds had set up shop and started to inch ascents over the stained walls.
As he went along, he didn’t bother to hide the sounds of his boots. The sentries who were watching expected him—well, maybe not back this early, but he was a known commodity, allowed to go in and out.
The farther away he went from that single bulb, the darker it got, but his eyes were even sharper than normal vampires’, his wolf side giving him a night-vision-goggle effect, everything going shades of red.
Which was how he’d known exactly where to shoot back in that alley. What a clusterfuck—
“You’re home early.”
Lucan stopped. Well, shit. Another twenty yards, he’d be down into the basement complex. So close.
He kept his eyes on his prize, refusing to turn away from the steel reinforced door that had been an installation of the new owners.
“What’s the matter, wolven. Someone take your kibble away down in Caldwell?”
“That’s right,” he said smoothly. “At the same time they removed your soul.”
The chuckle in the darkness was like a switchblade traveling across a jugular vein. Well, it would have been, if Lucan gave a crap about being alive.
“You know I’d trade places with you if you can’t handle it.”
Now Lucan glanced over his shoulder, in case this verbal poking was going to elevate to prodding—and hey, he’d be good with that. He wanted to hit something.
“Too bad the Executioner won’t allow that,” Lucan murmured. “You can’t be trusted, can you, Apex.”
The vampire stepped out into the corridor, and he was a nasty piece of work, the kind of thing that even the actual killers and sociopaths in the camp gave a wide berth to. With black eyes that glittered with a predator’s instinct for fresh blood, and a body that was heavily muscled as well as lightning fast, he was just as he appeared: A soulless murderer who, unlike some of the people trapped in this hell, actually deserved his sentence.
And goddamn, the fact that the male had started shaving his head hardly made him look any warmer and fuzzier.
“You don’t have to come back here,” Apex said. “You could just disappear down in the city.”
“You know exactly why I come back. And I’m not justifying my rock and a hard place to the likes of you.”
The other male’s mouth lifted in what would have been a smile on another person’s puss. Considering who and what he was, the movement was merely a way of flashing fangs.
“Don’t get defensive over the death you choose for yourself, wolf. Or do you think this is going to end in another way for you?”
Lucan stepped right up to the full-bred vampire, getting so close that their pecs touched. Then he returned the smile, exactly as it was given to him.
“Since when do you worry about anybody but yourself.” He kept his voice level. “And if you’re making a threat here, how about you try something right now. I’ve had a shitty night and could use the fucking exercise.”
Apex’s gleaming onyx eyes narrowed. “You’re such an animal.”
“So. Are. You—”
“Hey, hey, now, boys. Can’t we just take a deep breath here?”
Mayhem joined the fun and games, but more as a bandleader than a brawling participant. Throwing his muscled arms around the proverbial bomb that was about to explode, he looked back and forth.
“Come on, I want you two to kiss and make up. Then follow me. I hijacked a pizza-delivery guy heading to a football party—don’t worry, I let him go, and I’ll bring back his car with the cost and tips. I got the receipt as well as his insurance card with his address on it. What was I saying—oh, right. I got hot Domino’s right out back. Come on!”
Apex punched Lucan’s shoulders, and the double hit felt good. Then there was a pause, as if he were being given the chance to fight back. When he decided not to, Apex stepped off.
“I’m watching you.”
Lucan’s upper lip twitched. “Anytime, motherfucker.”
The other male up and dematerialized, and Lucan broke away and paced around in a circle.
“He likes you,” Mayhem said. “Under all that, he really likes—”
“Are you crazy?”
“Well, no. At least I don’t think so. Anyway, pizza?”
Lucan rubbed his face. “Yeah, I’m starved.”
“Come on, I’ll take you to it.”
At that, Lucan finally focused properly on the perennial third wheel. With his black-and-white hair, and colorless eyes, Mayhem was built powerful enough, and he could back himself up if he had to, but he was too goddamn easygoing to be a primary threat.
“I need to go see the Executioner,” Lucan heard himself say.
“Food first. You’re too hangry not to get yourself in a bad situation.”
It was good advice, from a source that was better known for being annoying. But beggars/choosers and all that.
As they started to walk to the emergency exit together, Mayhem tacked on, “And the good news is that only one of the pizzas is that Hawaiian bullshit. Why anybody puts pineapple and ham together on a bed of perfectly fine mozzarella is beyond me.”
“Humans are weird.”
And a helluva lot less dangerous than the people I’m living with, Lucan thought to himself.
CHAPTER SIX
By the time Rio arrived in the vicinity of her last stop of the night, her left leg was humming a tune to the beat of her heart, boom, boom, boom…
Wasn’t there a song like that? Charlie X or something. She’d heard it on Sirius every fifteen minutes a couple of years ago.
As she continued along, favoring the opposite side gave her a pronounced limp, and did little to relieve the spikes of pain flooding her nervous system. The good news was she had only one more block to go, and this was what Motrin was for, right? There was a half-used economy bottle of the stuff in the glove compartment of her car—and, bonus, her beater was even closer now that she’d made this rerouting from that alley.
Swinging her eyes around, she double-checked there was no one following her. The walk-ups on both sides of the street were tall-and-thins, squeezed in with mere inches between mismatched sets of aluminum siding. Occupancy was fifty-fifty at best, and you could tell which buildings were legally lived in by whether the windows were covered up. If there were drapes pulled or sheets strung between nails, there were people paying rent inside. The rest of the flats were fair game for squatting, broken glass panes and dim candlelight sad testament to the lost souls seeking refuge from their demons in the very pockets of urban Hell.
This neighborhood was incredibly dangerous after dark, a battleground for street gangs and drug suppliers, the unfortunate civilians who existed in the airspace between territory conflict and illegal commerce collateral damage in more ways than one. Thanks to the storm and all the police gathering down under the bridge, the corners were clear. But they weren’t going to stay that way for long.
And she would have come anyway, even if it had been business as usual.
As she came to the walk-up she was looking for, she glanced around again. Then she went up the chipped and stained concrete steps. No reason to knock. Mickie had guards all over the place. He already knew she was here.
Pulling open the pitted door, a waft of dank-and-dreadful hit her square in the face. There were two apartments on each floor, with a central staircase lacing up the center of the building, and as she hit the carpeted steps, the ascent put so much pressure on whatever was going on in her left leg that she ended up having to use the sticky banister. At every new level, she paused to make sure she had the bead on her surroundings right: No one behind her. No one in front. Nobody coming out at her from the abandoned flats, the doors of which were all open.
That last one was the big danger. The light of the stairwell bled into the main living spaces of the dirty apartments, but there were rooms she couldn’t see into, spaces that could hide all kinds of threats. The only thing she could count on was that if she weren’t allowed here, she wouldn’t have gotten this far.
Besides, Mickie knew that she was on his level. Which meant if anyone aggressed on her, and she were hurt? Mickie would have to deal with their boss, and nobody wanted to do that.
When she got to the topmost floor, the door on the left was closed.
So Mickie was in.
“It’s me, Rio,” she called out.
She did not go over and stand directly in front of the wooden panels. She put her back to the wall, reached past the jamb, and knocked hard with her left hand. Her right stayed deep inside her pocket, on the butt of her weapon.
“Mickie. It’s Rio.”
As she waited, she looked into the apartment across the way. Its living room had a sofa and three mismatched armchairs, the furniture arranged around an oil drum that burned wood in the winter when security had to camp out.
“Come on, Mick.” She knocked again. “Don’t fuck with me.”
There was no chance that he’d evac’d because of the police presence down by the river. Too far away. And there hadn’t been a raid scheduled. She would have known about that whether it was by ATF, FBI, or CPD, and would have put a stop to it through regular channels.
“Mickie!” She knocked again. “C’mon.”
No answer. Fine. Three… two… one—
Rio gunned up and threw open the door. The second she got a look inside, she muttered, “Sonofabitch.”
The man snapped a hold on her arm. “Don’t fuck with me. I have options you don’t even know about.”
Before she could react, he released his grip and walked off, his dark clothes helping him blend into the shadows.
“Dammit,” Rio whispered as she ducked and disappeared herself.
Sticking to the club’s flank, she took out her gun and measured the windows across the alley, the lane behind her, the lane ahead of her. The patrol cars screamed by one block over, and she caught sight of the lineup with their flashing lights as they crossed an intersection she could see through.
Her legs were killing her, her left one below the knee in particular.
A streak of lightning gave her eyes more than the ambient light of the city to go on—and also revealed her. As she sank into an inset doorway, she frowned and leaned back out. A moment later… there was another of the storm’s strobes.
“Where did you go?” she said under her breath.
The supplier had somehow… disappeared. Unless he’d snuck into one of the buildings? Maybe. That was the only explanation. In the direction he’d gone in, away from the river, there were no corners, no cut-throughs, no going any way but forward for two blocks straight.
Maybe he’d broken out into a sprint—
She couldn’t worry about it. Not right now.
Checking the clip in her gun, she relowered the weapon to her thigh and continued on. She found the body about forty feet ahead, crumpled facedown on the pavement behind a dumpster. It was a man, going by the build and the hair, as well as the size of the boots. As she knelt beside him, her brain connected the dots.
The jacket. She recognized the black leather jacket because of the red stitching that crisscrossed the shoulders and ran down to the bottom hem.
“Erie.”
One of Mozart’s lieutenants.
Had he been shooting at her? Or the Charger?
As she looked at the spreading red pool under the man, she thought about a killing down in Manhattan the weekend before. Johnny Two Shoes, an associate of Mozart’s biggest competition in the state, had been executed and rolled into the Hudson. The word on the street had been that revenge was imminent.
Maybe Erie had been protecting her, protecting the deal being made. Had the driver of the Charger been trying to kill her in retaliation?
Rio stretched an arm out and put her fingertips to the inside of Erie’s still-warm wrist. Feeling around… no, there was no pulse. Making the sign of the cross, she straightened—and left the area so that she could call in the shooting details to HQ from greater safety.
That she was walking with just a limp was better than she could have hoped for.
Good thing, too, as she wasn’t done with her to-do list yet tonight.
CHAPTER FIVE
Lucan re-formed at right about the place he’d scared off those two boys with their ghost-hunting equipment. Lifting his face to the rain, he let the light drops fingertip his forehead and cheeks. On the backs of his eyelids, he saw that human female getting hit fair-and-square by the car. Then pictured her rising to her feet afterward, brushing herself off, and giving him the what-for.
She’d had a strong face, her features bold, her lips full, her dark eyes big under declarative brows. Her skin had lost all its color as she forced her weight onto what had taken the impact, but she had refused to give in to the pain.
He couldn’t decide whether the grit was sexy or stupid.
Well… he supposed it was stupid, but he found it sexy.
Wiping the rain through his hair, he leveled his head and stared straight ahead. If she didn’t call him sometime during the rest of tonight or tomorrow during the day, he was going to go out to the streets and find her.
And then what? the malest part of him demanded.
“None of your business,” he muttered.
You want her.
“Yeah, to get the Executioner off my back.”
Aware that he was arguing with himself, he started for his new home—and by “home,” he meant involuntary servitude with a roof over his head. “Prison camp” had been the old term, when they’d been underground at the old site they’d abandoned. This was the new world order, no more cells, though still underground, those tracking collars ever present.
Funny, how you could control people when, with one press of a remote, their brains were vaporized. There also weren’t a lot of options for most of the vampires being held.
He was one of the few without a collar. But he needed to be able to dematerialize back and forth to Caldwell to make this deal, and there was no ghosting around when you had a band of steel around your throat.
And the Executioner wasn’t worried about him bolting. The fucker had leverage over him, the kind of thing that was just as good as an explosive necklace. But it wasn’t going to last much longer so he was biding his time. With one death, he was free—and he was of half a mind to take care of the Grim Reaper’s work himself. It would be a mercy killing at this point, anyway, two liberations for the price of a single slit throat.
Cheap, all things considering.
Up ahead, the old human hospital building loomed like something out of a John Carpenter movie where everyone but the virtuous girl who didn’t have sex with her boyfriend died in creative, bloody ways.
God, he missed the eighties. Then again, the last time he’d been able to watch a TV or listen to a radio had been right before he’d been thrown into the prison camp. So, yeah, he was current as of the spring of 1983. And maybe he didn’t miss the era; he missed… life and the simple freedoms he had taken for granted.
Lucan stopped at the worn stone steps of the sanatorium’s entrance. The central core of the building was a tower of closed windows, the floors rising up like a blocky spear, the tip of which was a tower topped with a lightning rod. On either side of this torso, there were two five-story wings of open porches, each extending at a wide angle to catch the prevailing breeze for failing lungs.
The place had been built to treat the human tuberculosis patients who suffered such cruel, suffocating deaths through the 1800s and into the twentieth century. Back then, the treatment for the bacterial infestation was fresh air, and as much of it as you could stand, no matter the season. Well, that and hacking pieces of your lungs out, or cod-liver oil, or inhaling hemlock.
Until streptomycin and other drugs came to the rescue in the late forties.
Why did he know all that about those rats without tails and their coughs? He liked his trivia, even if it was about shit that didn’t affect vampires. Or vampire-wolven half-breeds.
The New York Times crossword puzzle had been his favorite.
Looking down the south wing, he measured the open porches that ran all the way to the far end. The patient rooms were behind the loggias, the rusted frames of the old hospital beds cluttering the tight spaces, all kinds of debris down the hallways and graffiti marking the stained and rotting walls. The north wing was the same, as was the administrative core that anchored the structure.
Everything abandoned and decaying, only the ghosts of dead patients remaining now.
Above ground, that was.
In a way, prisoners like him and the others belonged here. They’d been discarded, too. Forgotten. And most were rotting as they shuffled around beneath the earth, their only use cutting and portioning drugs to make money for yet another despot.
“One death,” he said grimly as he reached for the tarnished brass pull. “One death, and I’m out of here.”
There were advantages to having been excised from your family.
No more leverage when it came to your bloodline ’cuz you didn’t care if the fuckers were smothered in their own beds.
The old place still had some electricity running through it, and a dusty light bulb hanging from a wire cast sad light over what had been the reception, waiting, and check-in area. From what he’d read on a plaque on the wall, the hospital had stopped treating tubercular patients in the early fifties and switched to housing the mentally ill. That had lasted until the seventies, at which point, everything had been deserted.
He didn’t think anyone was going to add a bronze plate honoring the coda that included vampires.
Diverting from the open area with its moldy, toppled chairs and chipped, cheap-wood tables, he headed to the right. The north wing’s hall was marked “North Wing”—surprise!—and there were administrative offices on both sides, missing doors allowing views into rooms with ceiling collapses and broken windows that had let in the weather as well as years’ worth of fallen leaves. In a few spots, weeds had set up shop and started to inch ascents over the stained walls.
As he went along, he didn’t bother to hide the sounds of his boots. The sentries who were watching expected him—well, maybe not back this early, but he was a known commodity, allowed to go in and out.
The farther away he went from that single bulb, the darker it got, but his eyes were even sharper than normal vampires’, his wolf side giving him a night-vision-goggle effect, everything going shades of red.
Which was how he’d known exactly where to shoot back in that alley. What a clusterfuck—
“You’re home early.”
Lucan stopped. Well, shit. Another twenty yards, he’d be down into the basement complex. So close.
He kept his eyes on his prize, refusing to turn away from the steel reinforced door that had been an installation of the new owners.
“What’s the matter, wolven. Someone take your kibble away down in Caldwell?”
“That’s right,” he said smoothly. “At the same time they removed your soul.”
The chuckle in the darkness was like a switchblade traveling across a jugular vein. Well, it would have been, if Lucan gave a crap about being alive.
“You know I’d trade places with you if you can’t handle it.”
Now Lucan glanced over his shoulder, in case this verbal poking was going to elevate to prodding—and hey, he’d be good with that. He wanted to hit something.
“Too bad the Executioner won’t allow that,” Lucan murmured. “You can’t be trusted, can you, Apex.”
The vampire stepped out into the corridor, and he was a nasty piece of work, the kind of thing that even the actual killers and sociopaths in the camp gave a wide berth to. With black eyes that glittered with a predator’s instinct for fresh blood, and a body that was heavily muscled as well as lightning fast, he was just as he appeared: A soulless murderer who, unlike some of the people trapped in this hell, actually deserved his sentence.
And goddamn, the fact that the male had started shaving his head hardly made him look any warmer and fuzzier.
“You don’t have to come back here,” Apex said. “You could just disappear down in the city.”
“You know exactly why I come back. And I’m not justifying my rock and a hard place to the likes of you.”
The other male’s mouth lifted in what would have been a smile on another person’s puss. Considering who and what he was, the movement was merely a way of flashing fangs.
“Don’t get defensive over the death you choose for yourself, wolf. Or do you think this is going to end in another way for you?”
Lucan stepped right up to the full-bred vampire, getting so close that their pecs touched. Then he returned the smile, exactly as it was given to him.
“Since when do you worry about anybody but yourself.” He kept his voice level. “And if you’re making a threat here, how about you try something right now. I’ve had a shitty night and could use the fucking exercise.”
Apex’s gleaming onyx eyes narrowed. “You’re such an animal.”
“So. Are. You—”
“Hey, hey, now, boys. Can’t we just take a deep breath here?”
Mayhem joined the fun and games, but more as a bandleader than a brawling participant. Throwing his muscled arms around the proverbial bomb that was about to explode, he looked back and forth.
“Come on, I want you two to kiss and make up. Then follow me. I hijacked a pizza-delivery guy heading to a football party—don’t worry, I let him go, and I’ll bring back his car with the cost and tips. I got the receipt as well as his insurance card with his address on it. What was I saying—oh, right. I got hot Domino’s right out back. Come on!”
Apex punched Lucan’s shoulders, and the double hit felt good. Then there was a pause, as if he were being given the chance to fight back. When he decided not to, Apex stepped off.
“I’m watching you.”
Lucan’s upper lip twitched. “Anytime, motherfucker.”
The other male up and dematerialized, and Lucan broke away and paced around in a circle.
“He likes you,” Mayhem said. “Under all that, he really likes—”
“Are you crazy?”
“Well, no. At least I don’t think so. Anyway, pizza?”
Lucan rubbed his face. “Yeah, I’m starved.”
“Come on, I’ll take you to it.”
At that, Lucan finally focused properly on the perennial third wheel. With his black-and-white hair, and colorless eyes, Mayhem was built powerful enough, and he could back himself up if he had to, but he was too goddamn easygoing to be a primary threat.
“I need to go see the Executioner,” Lucan heard himself say.
“Food first. You’re too hangry not to get yourself in a bad situation.”
It was good advice, from a source that was better known for being annoying. But beggars/choosers and all that.
As they started to walk to the emergency exit together, Mayhem tacked on, “And the good news is that only one of the pizzas is that Hawaiian bullshit. Why anybody puts pineapple and ham together on a bed of perfectly fine mozzarella is beyond me.”
“Humans are weird.”
And a helluva lot less dangerous than the people I’m living with, Lucan thought to himself.
CHAPTER SIX
By the time Rio arrived in the vicinity of her last stop of the night, her left leg was humming a tune to the beat of her heart, boom, boom, boom…
Wasn’t there a song like that? Charlie X or something. She’d heard it on Sirius every fifteen minutes a couple of years ago.
As she continued along, favoring the opposite side gave her a pronounced limp, and did little to relieve the spikes of pain flooding her nervous system. The good news was she had only one more block to go, and this was what Motrin was for, right? There was a half-used economy bottle of the stuff in the glove compartment of her car—and, bonus, her beater was even closer now that she’d made this rerouting from that alley.
Swinging her eyes around, she double-checked there was no one following her. The walk-ups on both sides of the street were tall-and-thins, squeezed in with mere inches between mismatched sets of aluminum siding. Occupancy was fifty-fifty at best, and you could tell which buildings were legally lived in by whether the windows were covered up. If there were drapes pulled or sheets strung between nails, there were people paying rent inside. The rest of the flats were fair game for squatting, broken glass panes and dim candlelight sad testament to the lost souls seeking refuge from their demons in the very pockets of urban Hell.
This neighborhood was incredibly dangerous after dark, a battleground for street gangs and drug suppliers, the unfortunate civilians who existed in the airspace between territory conflict and illegal commerce collateral damage in more ways than one. Thanks to the storm and all the police gathering down under the bridge, the corners were clear. But they weren’t going to stay that way for long.
And she would have come anyway, even if it had been business as usual.
As she came to the walk-up she was looking for, she glanced around again. Then she went up the chipped and stained concrete steps. No reason to knock. Mickie had guards all over the place. He already knew she was here.
Pulling open the pitted door, a waft of dank-and-dreadful hit her square in the face. There were two apartments on each floor, with a central staircase lacing up the center of the building, and as she hit the carpeted steps, the ascent put so much pressure on whatever was going on in her left leg that she ended up having to use the sticky banister. At every new level, she paused to make sure she had the bead on her surroundings right: No one behind her. No one in front. Nobody coming out at her from the abandoned flats, the doors of which were all open.
That last one was the big danger. The light of the stairwell bled into the main living spaces of the dirty apartments, but there were rooms she couldn’t see into, spaces that could hide all kinds of threats. The only thing she could count on was that if she weren’t allowed here, she wouldn’t have gotten this far.
Besides, Mickie knew that she was on his level. Which meant if anyone aggressed on her, and she were hurt? Mickie would have to deal with their boss, and nobody wanted to do that.
When she got to the topmost floor, the door on the left was closed.
So Mickie was in.
“It’s me, Rio,” she called out.
She did not go over and stand directly in front of the wooden panels. She put her back to the wall, reached past the jamb, and knocked hard with her left hand. Her right stayed deep inside her pocket, on the butt of her weapon.
“Mickie. It’s Rio.”
As she waited, she looked into the apartment across the way. Its living room had a sofa and three mismatched armchairs, the furniture arranged around an oil drum that burned wood in the winter when security had to camp out.
“Come on, Mick.” She knocked again. “Don’t fuck with me.”
There was no chance that he’d evac’d because of the police presence down by the river. Too far away. And there hadn’t been a raid scheduled. She would have known about that whether it was by ATF, FBI, or CPD, and would have put a stop to it through regular channels.
“Mickie!” She knocked again. “C’mon.”
No answer. Fine. Three… two… one—
Rio gunned up and threw open the door. The second she got a look inside, she muttered, “Sonofabitch.”
