Killing Frost (After the Shift Book 2)

by Grace Hamilton

  Nathan had been played like a two-string violin and he knew it—he knew it right now. Hard and hot and sick in his heart.

  Nathan turned from the window, placed his back against the wall, and sank down to rest his head on his knees. His breathing was rapid, his head a cloud of panic. What should he do? Stay here, help Dave, or drive as fast as he could to the Greenhouse and rescue Cyndi?

  What should I do?

  What should I do?

  What. Should. I. Do?

  The slap from Freeson came hard against Nathan’s cheek and it shocked him from the crazy panic loop in his head and back into the room. There was a line of dribble coming out of the side of his mouth and his cheeks were wet with tears.

  “Nathan! Nathan!” Freeson’s harsh whisper cut through as the mechanic shook Nathan’s shoulders. “Snap out of it, man. Come on! You’re having a panic attack, and we need you in the room, man. Come on. Back in the room.”

  Freeson stopped shaking Nathan and pulled his head up by the cheeks and looked directly into his eyes. “Breathe, fella… Breathe. Slowly. Big breath in. Long breath out. Slow it down. Come on, slow it down.”

  Nathan tried to do as he’d been told, but it wasn’t easy.

  Cyndi.

  Tony.

  Brandon.

  “Breathe, fella. Come on. That’s it. Slower, slower.”

  In a minute and a half, Nathan’s breathing was back to something approaching normal and he could think through the panic again.

  He put his head back and thumped his skull against the wall, twice. The pain gave him something else to focus on, at least. Freeson let go of Nathan’s cheeks and rocked back on his haunches.

  “Geez, fella. You good? You okay?”

  Nathan wiped his wet cheeks and the drool from his mouth and shook his head. “No, I’m not. But I’ll be okay. Thanks. Where did you learn to do that?”

  Freeson looked at the floor, avoiding eye contact. “I don’t tell you everything, dude. After Marie was killed… I had some problems. Problems up here.” Freeson tapped the side of his head. “Still do sometimes, but I had to speak to someone about the panic attacks I got. They told me what to do. Concentrate on the breathing. Focus. The slap… well, that was my own thing. But, yeah, man. Panic attack.”

  Nathan couldn’t have felt more connected to Freeson than he did in that moment. Marie, Freeson’s wife, had been killed in a car wreck when Freeson had gone with her to upstate New York to visit her rich and snobbish sister and surgeon husband. The car had left the road and Freeson had gotten only a busted hip, but Marie had been killed outright in the seat next to him. Freeson hadn’t driven because he’d been angry, and ever after that, he’d had to live with knowing that if he hadn’t been so stubborn, then Marie would have lived and he would have died. Nathan had always felt he’d understood how Freeson could feel so guilty, but it wasn’t until right now that he could have said he’d walked in the thirty-six-year-old’s shoes. He’d sent his wife and kids into danger, and that revelation had sent him over the edge.

  Nathan outlined the whole situation to Freeson. The mechanic’s expression upon seeing the agonizing dilemma perfectly matched what Nathan was feeling on the inside.

  “Not a word to Stryker,” Nathan finished.

  That widened Freeson’s eyes. “You guys have ancient history…”

  “Don’t care. He put that aside to trick us into coming to Detroit. And something I’ve just remembered from when we were first jumped by Tasha and her crew tells me he might not be all that he seems. Still.”

  “What?”

  “He picked the route to and from Trash Town, so that it would go by that building and…”

  The words stuck in Nathan’s throat, and he so wanted not to feel the rush of betrayal coursing through him now, but he did. He finished, “…Tasha knew his name. She used it.”

  Freeson blew out his cheeks. “You think this whole thing was a setup from the start?”

  “I don’t know, man; I just don’t know, but the more I think about it, the more it feels like it.”

  Parka’s crew started the business of filling the trailer with the goods from the secret store. It was hard, backbreaking work since the crates and boxes were big and awkward. And there were a lot of them. Even Tasha was helping.

  Nathan and Free hadn’t seen Dave for nearly an hour; apparently, he was still inside with Parka. Limping Frank was assisting as much as he could, but this mostly amounted to him calling up to the guys who were already in the trailer and telling them how to stack the crates.

  The weather wasn’t assisting things, either. Sleety snow fell steadily from a dark, cloud-fat sky. There was no light left in the street other than the swinging flashlights of the crew bringing out the boxes.

  Nathan had made the decision not to run off and extract Cyndi from the Greenhouse. Conversely, because of her usefulness to Brant, she was probably the safest of the lot of them at the moment. Also, Nathan didn’t want to risk showing Brant he’d discovered the game he was playing with the people of Detroit. Just now, he was more concerned with Syd, Lucy, and Donie back at the Masonic. For all he knew, they could have been taken hostage at the very moment Nathan and the others had driven off in the Humvee. Could they risk going back there now? There’d be too many questions from Harmsworth about Dave’s disappearance, and Nathan absolutely felt he couldn’t trust Stryker as far as he could throw him.

  In the last hour, whenever he’d felt the constant knot of anxiety climbing up from his gut and affecting his breathing, he’d brought the sensation of a brewing panic attack down with the breathing exercises Freeson had taught him. Nathan didn’t think he’d be taking up yoga or meditation any time soon, but he sure was able to feel much calmer when he needed to.

  And meanwhile, Stryker was waiting two blocks away with the Humvee while he and Freeson watched the tenement. Although Nathan half-expected to find the Humvee gone or on fire when he was ready to make the trip back there, such was the amount Stryker’s stock had fallen in his eyes—coming down from an admittedly low base.

  “They’re done,” Freeson whispered. He was still watching, crouched against the window ledge. Nathan had sat back down after he’d needed to check his breathing a couple of times, and was still down there now. At Freeson’s word, he got up and peered over the ledge.

  Frank was closing up one door of the trailer, and had half-pulled the other, but he needed a hand from someone inside to get back inside himself. Once in the trailer, he pulled the door closed and Tasha appeared around the side of the trailer to slam home the bolts. Then, Tasha jogged to the front of the cab of the Mack and met Parka coming down the steps alone.

  Alone.

  No sign of Dave, and Parka was wiping a wet smear of what looked like blood down the front of his anorak.

  “Where’s Dave?” Freeson asked with redundant and obvious excess.

  “I need to get in there and see. Free, go to Stryker and you guys follow the truck; find out where it goes and then meet me back here. If I’m not here when you get back, I’ll have made my way back to the Masonic.”

  “Follow?” Freeson echoed. “Are you crazy? We’re the only two vehicles out there.”

  Nathan clasped Freeson’s stubbly cheeks and patted them, like he was explaining something obvious to Tony. “You’re in a Detroit PD Humvee. Drive like you’re on patrol and follow them from a distance. If you think they’ve made you, take off, and we’ll try and find them another way. Okay?”

  Freeson nodded and pushed Nathan’s hands away with the ghost of a grin. “You sure you want me to leave you?”

  “Yes. Keep an eye on Stryker, and don’t tell him anything about Dave—say we’re following some of them on foot, or anything. But don’t tell him anything other than that they came for their stuff and we want to know where they’re taking it. As far as Stry knows, we’re still following the plan.”

  Freeson nodded and shook Nathan’s hand. “I hope that boy’s okay.”

  “I don’t thin
k I’ll be able to look myself in the mirror if he’s not,” Nathan said, and Freeson gave another grim nod of acknowledgement.

  They went out of the room together, moving down the stairs quietly and in silence, and then they split on the ground floor. Freeson went to the back of the building and Nathan to the front.

  Nathan hung back until he could no longer hear the engine of the Mack rumbling down the snowy, almost echoless streets. When the quiet descended again, he went through the door and out into the bitter night. Although the sleet had stopped and the sky was clear, the severe cold was turning the wet snow to lumpy sheets of ice, so Nathan had to be extra careful as he crossed from one sidewalk to the other. His heart was beating hard in his chest at what he feared he might find inside of the tenement now that Parka, Tasha, and the others had gone, but not taken Dave with them. Reaching the stairs, Nathan drew his colt from the shoulder holster beneath his anorak and took off the safety, and then he loaded the chamber. He clipped up the steps, which had been almost cleared down to the stone by the traffic of footfalls through them as the trailer had been filled.

  The paint-peeling green doors were already open when he walked into the entrance and across the checkerboard hall. He listened intently, looking up into the murk of the stairwell. He found it difficult to edit out his hammering heart thumping against his still painful ribs, but for all intents and purposes, the house was quiet.

  The room where he’d spoken to Tasha and where they’d found Frank’s bandages was empty. As were the other rooms along the hall. The room at the back of the corridor had once been a kitchen, but the floors and countertops were smeared with dirt and rat droppings. There was no sign of Dave, and thankfully there was no blood.

  Upstairs, then.

  There was no way of doing this silently. The stairs were old, and maybe even in their original pine form. They were gray and warped with age and overuse, with ghost markings where carpet rods might have once held something beautifully woven and tasteful in place, though they were now just spearheads of dirt. The wood itself was spongy and yielded beneath his weight. And, as it did so, it sent a sharp, crackling groan up through the stairwell.

  No point in trying to sneak up them, so Nathan took the steps two at a time and led with his pistol. On the second-floor landing, where the rooms were either doorless or unlocked, Nathan checked along them systematically. Toeing open what doors he could, turning doorknobs when he had to. Every room that he tried was empty, and eventually he reached the door of the secret store room. The door had been closed, but Nathan knew it couldn’t be locked. The frame was still splintered from where he’d kicked it in. The doorknob had also come loose at some point and rolled away down the landing to rest at the base of the kicked-out banister struts.

  Nathan again listened at the door, as he had done less than ten hours before. Silence.

  He held the gun up and licked his lips. Now or never. He pushed his shoulder against the door and it creaked open onto a horror.

  Dave was alive, but he’d been crucified to the floor of the store room. Nathan felt his knees turn to jelly as he saw the six-inch nails that protruded from the palms of Dave’s pale hands. A pool of fresh blood had settled around each of his wrists. Dave’s ankles were tied together, but his feet thankfully hadn’t suffered the same fate as his hands.

  Dave’s face showed that he’d taken a terrible beating, and although one of his eyes had been punched shut, the other was swiveling in the socket above his gaffer-taped mouth.

  “Oh my God. Oh my God,” was all Nathan could manage as he ran into the room to help his young friend. Dave’s eye locked onto Nathan’s and he could suddenly hear the boy screaming beneath the tape, even as he began lifting his head and shaking it.

  The claw hammer which had been used to crucify Dave scythed through the air, and it was only the rustle of his assailant’s coat that alerted Nathan that there was someone behind him. As the claw hammer came down, Nathan was already feinting back and to the right. This caused the end of the hammer to extend beyond his skull, and for the attacker’s hand to skim past his ear and then crack into the hard socket at the end of Nathan’s shoulder.

  The impact hurt like hell, but it didn’t kill him like it would have if the business end of the hammer had found its intended target. The attacker’s hand sprung open as his wrist was shocked by the sudden blow against Nathan’s bone and the hammer spun away and clattered into the corner.

  Nathan carried on pushing back along the attacker’s arm. Still holding the pistol, he grabbed at the wrist and yanked down with all his might, trying to snap the elbow by his ear over his shoulder. The assailant was wise to the street-fighting move and kicked at the back of Nathan’s leg, bending his knee and sending him crashing to the floorboards with a yelp, taking the pressure off the elbow joint.

  Nathan still had hold of the wrist he’d grabbed, and, dropping his pistol so that it clattered to the floor like the hammer he’d pulled forward, he bent at the waist. The attacker was lifted off their feet and rolled over Nathan’s head with a despairing gasp of surprise. Crashing face first into the planks, the attacker grunted as the air was forced out of their lungs.

  This was when Nathan saw that the attacker was a woman. She was thin, wiry, no older than Nathan, and had the look of intended murder hotly drawn on her features. As she rolled to a sitting position, Nathan realized with horror that the blonde murderess had come up holding his gun. She lifted it and aimed high at Nathan’s face. There was going to be no Kevlar protection this time.

  This time, it was goodnight and good luck.

  The gun fired, but the bullet blasted past Nathan and crashed high into the wall behind him. The woman’s aim had been knocked off course by Dave. He’d crashed his bound feet into the base of her spine just as she’d squeezed the trigger, and now she was sprawling forward. Nathan jumped up onto his feet, kicking the gun out of her hand, but she was committed to the charge she’d begun. Her savage momentum carried her through the door and out onto the landing. But where anyone would reasonably expect there to be a set of banisters, there was now empty space above the stairwell.

  The woman screamed as she fell.

  There was a crunch like a hundred bones snapping at once, a groan of escaping breath, and the clutter of a body, now a dead weight, toppling over.

  Nathan picked up the gun and went to make sure the woman was no longer a threat.

  She wasn’t.

  She’d fallen from the full height of the first-floor landing and drilled her head through the rotting wood below, and even if she’d survived that impact, then her unconscious body, falling over backwards, had crushed her throat and snapped her neck at the same time. Her body lay twisted like a treble clef, with a head at an angle that was completely inconsistent with maintaining life, let alone an airway. A drying froth of bloody spittle bubbled from her mouth and ran into her sightless eyes.

  8

  “He’s insane. Completely insane, and not just crazy insane, but that calm, got-it-all-worked-out insane, you know?”

  Nathan had found some bedsheets in a linen cupboard on the third floor of the tenement building and cut them into lengths to bandage Dave’s hands. It had taken precious minutes to get the nails out of Dave’s palms, but Nathan had managed it without resorting to using the hammer that had pushed them through the flesh in the first place.

  Once he’d been free, Nathan had taken Dave out of the building, past the dead woman buried in the broken stairs, and across the street to where he and Freeson had watched the Mack truck draw up and the stores be loaded into it.

  Nathan checked over the bandages as gently he could, and Dave clearly picked up the concern on his face. “It’s okay; they’re pretty numb,” the boy said with only the slightest of winces. His face was a mess of puffy bruises, and Nathan wiped dried blood away with water made from melted snow. Once he was cleaned up, he looked a lot better—apart from the plum-sized bruise his left eyelid had become and a missing bottom tooth.

&nbs
p; “He went absolutely crazy. Wouldn’t stop beating on me. But I didn’t crack, man. I didn’t crack at all. I know if I had, then everyone back at the Masonic would be dead.”

  Nathan quickly summarized what he thought he knew about Brant’s setup—how he was using the gang to terrorize the outer city dwellers in order to keep them in line and paying protection, and how his main focus had been on Cyndi and her skills, and how Brant would have to make sure Nathan’s death was a credible one if he was going to use Cyndi to full advantage.

  “I’m sorry, man,” Dave said in response.

  “Not as sorry as I am that I let you walk into that. I’m not putting anyone at risk ever again. No way.”

  “Nate. Don’t sweat it. I was the only one who could do it, and the plan worked. We found out who Tasha is working for and what’s going on. My eye and my hands will heal. We should be grateful for one thing, though.”

  Nathan was puzzled. “What?”

  “Danny—that’s his name, by the way—thinks people were crucified through their palms. He’s not the sharpest if he thinks that. The Romans did it through the wrists. Through the palms, and the body weight just rips you free.”

  “I have no idea how you can think of things like that now. It makes me sick just to think about what he did to you.”

  “If he’d killed me, you wouldn’t have come looking, and if I was obviously dead, you might not have come into the room. He only left me alive to have you or someone else in the room for the girl to brain with the hammer.”

  “I see what you mean by calm-insane.”

  “He’s the kind of kid who’d pull wings off a butterfly and go back for the legs after dinner.”

  A thought struck Nathan. “What did you say his name was?”

  “Tasha was the woman you met, yeah? She called him Danny a couple of times. Tasha and Danny. Made them sound like a bad country and western duo.”