“Bullshit.” The word was little more than a whisper. “The VWs claimed the kill.”
“They lied. Dez has been working with us in New Mex for the past year. He took off two days ago, and we need him back.”
“He . . . ” She trailed off as the numbness grew teeth and bit in.
Dez. The nickname had been reserved for the inner circle. And three years ago, Strike had called him “Mendez,” just as she had used “Snake,” trying to remind herself what he really was. Poisonous. A manipulator.
Hearing the nickname now meant . . . Jesus, she didn’t know what it meant. But her instincts said Strike was telling her the truth.
They lied.
Her breath rasped in her lungs and the world took a big spin around her.
Dez was alive. Holy. Shit.
The blond cop said softly, “He was more than a paycheck to you, wasn’t he?”
Strike glanced at her, surprised, then looked back at Reese more closely. “No shit. What were you? Friends? Lovers?”
“We were . . .” What? She didn’t even know anymore, couldn’t think, could barely even breathe. Shock loosened her tongue and she blurted, “We knew each other as kids, as runaways. We watched each other’s backs. At least we did until that night in the storm. After that . . .” Getting dizzy now, she pressed the back of a hand against her mouth. “Could I . . . Shit. I need a minute.” Heart hammering sickly in her ears, she gestured back the way she had come, toward the restrooms she had passed on the way in.
“Of course.” The cop shifted on her feet, like she was going to offer to go with her.
Reese waved her off, swallowing hard. “I’ll be right back.”
As she headed for the ladies’ room, struggling to hold it together, she felt twenty-some pairs of eyes follow her across the tacky-assed chapel and through the door to the hallway beyond, which took her out of their line of sight. Then, with tears blurring her vision, she bolted past the restrooms. And straight out of the hotel.
Fresh air. She gulped it, feeling like she was drowning while pedestrians skittered around her like rats, glaring and squeaking when she interrupted their flow. Then, blindly, she headed for the nearest alley.
She might not know Cancún that well, but she knew cities. She knew the taste and smell of them, knew their dark underbellies, and the creatures that ruled them. She also knew that if Strike and his crew went looking for her, they would start with the airports, buses, and hotels, all the normal places that normal people went. So, heart thudding in her chest, she headed for what her gut told her was the bad section of town, moving through a warren of narrow streets that rapidly dwindled to alleys, losing layers of respectability in the process, and coming to look like a thousand other alleys in any one of a hundred cities she’d worked in over the years.
Scrawny cats and lean, hard-eyed mutts of both the human and animal variety slunk in the shadows. And, as she worked her way deeper into the maze, moving fast but not too fast, she was aware of beady eyes watching her from shadows, and the way they shifted, sending a silent message flashing ahead: Grab her, we’ll share.
A minute and three alleys farther in, a lean-hipped youth with shark-dead eyes and a four-inch blade dangling from one hand moved out from behind a Dumpster and gave her a spittle-flecked “Hey, baby, you looking for me?” in English rendered almost singsong by his thick accent.
She rattled back in varrio Spanish, “Get these cops off my ass and you can have whatever you want.”
“Fuck that.” He disappeared, and the shadows melted away. They wouldn’t stay gone for long, but the threat of the cops had bought her a few minutes, a little space to think.
Not that she wanted to think. It hurt too damn much.
Dez. God. Throat so tight it hurt to swallow, she kept going until her gut told her she had gone far enough, and then picked out a narrow, open-ended alley that smelled pretty much like every other alley on the planet—a mélange of piss, body odor, and rot—with a spicy overtone that said she was far from home. Putting herself about halfway down the alley, she scoped out her exits, both horizontal and vertical, and leaned back against a padlocked doorway hard enough that her .38 dug into her lower back. Then she braced her hands on her knees, let her head hang for a second, and concentrated on not losing her shit.
Dez was alive. Which meant... “Nothing,” she told herself, hating that her voice cracked on the word. This didn’t change anything.
She couldn’t let it change anything. He wasn’t her cowboy or her white knight, wasn’t her best friend, wasn’t her partner, wasn’t anything. She had saved his life by putting his ass in jail long enough for Fallon to get the guys who were gunning for him, and then cutting the deal that had gotten him out again. Word had it that he’d even straightened up—to a point—while he’d been inside. She doubted he had found God, but she had hoped he had found some perspective, and maybe even a few shreds of the guy he’d been at twenty.
That had evened them up. A life for a life. Which meant she didn’t owe him anything.
Her stomach rumbled. Some people snacked when they were bored. She binged when things got out of control.
This isn’t your problem. She didn’t need to get involved—hell, she shouldn’t get involved. She should pass along the info, and let the task force decide what—if anything—to do about it. And if the thought brought a twist of grief and regret, she made herself ignore them both as she dug into her carryall, going for the false bottom where she kept a second set of IDs and a credit card that ought to keep her off the radar unless Strike and his people had major clearance, or a big-assed back door into the system.
Given that they were looking for Dez, the latter seemed a far stronger possibility. He hadn’t been—wasn’t?—an acronym kind of guy.
Dez. God. Could he really be alive? Her throat closed and a sob rattled in her chest, but she made herself keep going, her fingers shaking as she popped the bottom of the carryall. But then a strange tickle shimmied down the back of her neck and her instincts kicked hard.
Her heart lunged into her throat as she spun in a full circle without seeing a damned thing out of place. But then an electric crackle laced the atmosphere, displaced air whoomped, and Strike freaking materialized right in front of her.
As Reese stared in shock, he glanced around, locked on her, and looked profoundly relieved.
Relieved? What the hell?
She went for her .38 as her mind scrambled, but before the gun was clear of her waistband, his expression shifted to one of fucking-get-it-done determination. Moving fast, he grabbed her wrist, twisted and chucked her gun, and then said, “Sorry about this.”
Sudden vertigo slammed into her, tunneling her vision.
“What . . . ?” She reeled, tried to run, and staggered drunkenly instead.
Her brain went fuzzy and she felt herself falling, felt strong arms catch her in an impersonal grip. And the world went dark.
CHAPTER THREE
Some immeasurable time later—maybe a few minutes, maybe a few days—Reese struggled back to consciousness. But instead of making it all the way there, she found herself caught, vulnerable, in the woozy dream state between asleep and awake, where she knew she should be afraid but couldn’t muster the energy for panic.
Even more disconcerting, she wasn’t alone inside her own skull. There was a strange presence there with her, controlling her. An unfamiliar voice echoed in her head, saying: Show us.
She was dimly aware that she was lying on a couch in a room that smelled spicy, like scented candles or incense. Strike was there, along with a younger, sharp-faced man who stared down at her, his gray eyes so intense they seemed silver. He was the presence inside her, she knew, without knowing how she knew it. Show us the night of the storm, he whispered in her mind.
She didn’t want to go back there, didn’t want to remember. But without meaning to, she did.
The images unspooled: She saw Dez, his eyes hot and wild as he kissed her and carried her to his bed, saw th
e lightning, heard the thunder, felt her body go cold as he headed for the door. Then things sped up in a scatter shot of images and sensations: She heard Jocko’s warning; felt herself racing through the storm, only to arrive too late. She saw the mad glee in Keban’s scarred face as he leaned over Dez, gloating; felt the pain as he turned and shot her. Then there was Dez’s rage. Chaos. Lightning. Thunder. Screams. Things happening that couldn’t be real.
The memories sped up, becoming a blur of the weeks that followed and the growing pain that came, not from her healing injuries, but from the way Dez had changed, how he kept trying to call magic that didn’t exist, and how each failure had pushed him further over the line. His temper sharpened. He quit his job, then got pissed when she cornered him about it.
Show me, the inner voice said. And she did.
“Don’t you get it?” he snapped, boots thudding an angry staccato as he paced the apartment like a caged animal. “The ‘work your way up’ thing is a fucking pipe dream. The only way people like us can get what we deserve is by being creative.”
In the past few weeks he had gained a good thirty pounds of pure muscle, shaved his head, and gotten tattoos to cover the handcuff scars: twin bands of strange symbols done in dark blue-green ink. He was turning into a stranger, and a scary one, but that didn’t stop her from putting herself in his path, making him choose between stopping and mowing her down. He stopped very close to her. Glared at her.
She glared right back. “And by getting creative you mean working ‘security’”—she scorned the word with finger quotes—“for the highest bidder?”
“How did—” He bit it off. “Shit. You fucking patterned me.”
It was her uniquely odd skill, an almost savantlike ability to put together seemingly unrelated pieces of information into a pattern, and from there a prediction that Fallon’s gang task force could use, like where and when a drug drop was likely to be, whether a particular drive-by was random or part of a larger whole, or—and this was something she was keeping far away from the cops—that Dez was hiring himself out as muscle for the Smaldone wannabes.
The two-bit mobster types were trying to step into the vacuum left by the demise of Denver’s once-great crime family. They didn’t seem to get that there wasn’t any vacuum; the gangs had already filled the niche. But while the Smaldone Lites were figuring that out, they had a habit of getting messily dead. Thus the bodyguards.
She shook her head. “Jesus, Dez. How could you work for those guys after everything we’ve done to clean things up around here?”
His face settled into the impassive mask she had quickly come to hate, the one where shadows darkened his eyes to an unfathomable murk. “The money’s good.”
“It’s a shortcut,” she snapped, drilling a finger into his chest. It was like poking a building. “Your job—”
“Wouldn’t have gotten me what I need in time,” he interrupted.
It was the first she had heard of any deadline. Oh, shit. Now what had he gotten himself into? Or, she had to ask herself, was he trying to buy himself out of something?
“You’re getting a place of your own.” She made herself say it. She had known he didn’t like the way she had gone from practically throwing herself at him to “let’s wait until we’re getting along better,” but she hadn’t thought he would bail.
He looked offended. “Hell, no.”
The tightness in her chest went down by half. “Then what is it? Tell me what you need the money for. Did you lose a bet? Are you trying to do something? Buy something?”
Her mind, stupid optimist that it was, flashed on the ring he had caught her trying on the other day in the local pawnshop. Not girlie—far from it—it was a finely detailed snake that curled around her finger and knotted around a polished black stone. Obsidian, the guy behind the counter had called it. She hadn’t cared that it had probably belonged to one of the Cobras—to her it wasn’t a cobra, it was a snake, like his given name. She had cared, though, that the pawnbroker wanted close to four months′ rent for it.
“I need firepower,” Dez said flatly.
That was so far off the ring fantasy that she just stared at him for a few seconds. “We’ve got guns.”
“I don’t think they’ll be enough.” He hesitated, then reached for her. This time he made contact, tracing a finger down her cheek.
But instead of heat, the move brought a shiver of dread. “Tell me what’s wrong. Please.”
He stared down at her. Then he said, reluctantly, “Hood gets out the day after tomorrow. And the word on the street is that you’re going to be his first stop.”
“He . . .” She trailed off as her stomach knotted and adrenaline kicked through her bloodstream as she flashed on sharpened teeth, scary-dead eyes, and a nose piercing that flared out to wicked points. Rumor had it that the incarcerated cobra de rey was more superstitious than ever these days, and had decided that making her his bitch would give him the power to add the VW′s turf to his own.
They had known he’d be getting out soon. They just hadn’t known when.
Or at least she hadn’t.
“Why didn’t I hear about this?” She was the one with the informants, the one with her ear to the streets.
“I paid Jocko to squelch it.”
“You . . .” She stared at him, not understanding. “Why?” She could have been finding patterns, making plans. She could have been . . . oh, shit. Cold sluiced through her as she got it. She freaking got it. He hadn’t told her because he was planning on killing Hood and he didn’t want her trying to stop him. Or if things went bad, he didn’t want her charged as an accomplice. Sick dread washed through her, bringing a new film of tears. “You’re not a killer.”
It was what separated them from the gang. She and Dez wore guns and walked tough, but the weapons were strictly for defense, and they shot to scare, to wound. Not to kill. Never to kill.
He cupped her face in his scarred palms and looked down at her, staring like he was trying to memorize the moment. And in his eyes, she saw more darkness today than yesterday. “I couldn’t save my family,” he said softly. “I can save you.”
“You—” She broke off, knowing there was no point in arguing that one. It was why Dez had come to her rescue that first night, when Hood had cornered her, coveted her. And it was why he was willing to sacrifice himself now.
That, and because he was a stubborn ass who didn’t fucking listen.
She reached up and gripped his wrists, right over the new tattoos. “This isn’t the only way. We can deal with him legitimately. We did it before—we can do it again.”
His eyes burned into hers. “I’m not going to let him touch you.”
“I’m not arguing with you there. But there are other options.” She took a deep breath. “Let’s leave. Fallon said the offer is still open. The department will stake us to a move, help us get started somewhere else.”
For the past couple of years, Dez had wanted to bail and start over, but she had refused to be chased out of yet another home. Which she supposed made them a pair of stubborn asses, but if she had to give up on the neighborhood to save him from himself, she would do it.
He shook his head, expression bleak. “The Cobras aren’t just a street gang anymore, Reese. They’ve got a long reach. Moving to a new city won’t solve anything.”
She wanted to argue that they could change their names, build new lives—she had done it before, could do it again—but she had a feeling that was just an excuse. As far as Dez was concerned, he had let Keban beat him that night in the storm, so he wasn’t going to let Hood beat him now. Or, rather, he was going to be the one to do the beating.
Feeling suddenly sad, small, and desperate, she turned her face and pressed a kiss to his scarred palm. “Promise me you won’t kill him.”
For a second she thought he leaned into her touch, that his fingers tightened. But when he pulled away from her, his eyes were cool. “I can’t.”
Tears stung Reese’s eyes even in sle
ep, blurring the memories, which spun past faster now, mercifully showing as single images: Hood’s eyes, open and staring; a ruby pendant; a ring box sitting in a pool of blood.
“That’s enough,” Strike said, his voice breaking through the memories and bringing her back to drowsy reality.
“You want me to block it out?” That came from the silver-eyed man who held her hand, his words resonating in her head as well as her ears. Through their strange mental link she learned his name—Rabbit—and caught a trace of wood smoke, sharp and acrid, along with a sense of worry.
“Not yet,” Strike rumbled. “Let’s wait and see what she . . .” The words faded.
No! Reese grabbed for consciousness as it started to slip away again. Come back! She fought against the grayness that crept in from the edges of her dream state, but couldn’t stay awake. As she faded, another memory broke through unbidden, one that came from years earlier than the others.
“Hurry!” Fingers biting into her wrist, the stranger dragged her along the outside wall of Seventeen while rain lashed down around them. As they ran, he muttered to himself, “Mendez, what the fuck are you doing?”
Behind them, shouts sounded as the Cobras pounded in pursuit. They were cursing vilely that she had gotten away and threatening the guy who had helped her escape.
He dragged her over two buildings, to a pile of junk lumped haphazardly behind Fifteen. Then he let go of her so he could shove aside a metal sheet. Behind it, a corrugated pipe led into pitch blackness. “Get in,” he ordered roughly. “They don’t know about all of the tunnels.”
In the light of one of the few unbroken outside floods, she saw that the guy who had risked his own ass to get her away from Hood was a couple of years older than she—maybe eighteen, nineteen? He was tall but whip-thin, his fierce eyes rendered colorless by the sodium lights, his dark hair plastered to his skull as the rain poured down. He wore the ragged, mismatched clothes of a castoff, but he wasn’t anything like the other street kids she had met in the month or so that she’d been on her own. He had a presence the others lacked, an aura of capability and strength. There was a layer of menace, too, one that warned that he wasn’t someone she wanted to fuck with.
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