“I’ll see you in hell,” Cleo said, in a voice she didn’t recognize as her own. She threw the door open and marched out of the room.
“Cleo,” Snyder called after her. “Cleo!” She followed her out into the hall and caught up with her. “What the hell was that? Do you have any idea how hard I’ve gone to bat for you?”
“Don’t bat for me. Bat for Andres. In fact, why don’t you bat for Mauricio, who’s out there right now, scared out of his mind?”
“We don’t have any evidence that there’s been an actual abduction. All we have is the statement made by your ex-boyfriend. And let’s face it, he’s not exactly a Boy Scout.”
And just like that, the ice that Cleo had felt frozen inside herself all this time shattered. She leaned close to Snyder, close enough to smell the mint on her breath.
“I quit,” Cleo said softly. With those words, her anger evaporated, leaving nothing behind.
Snyder shook her head as if she honestly didn’t understand. “Excuse me?”
“You heard me. I should’ve quit a long time ago, but I always held on. I always told myself, I need to toe the line, I need to follow the rules, like Graves. And if I do that long enough, I can work inside the system to bring Andres to justice.”
“Cleo, don’t—”
“I’m not finished. I know you’ve stuck your neck out for me, Snyder. But not when it counts. Because getting Andres, right now, is the only thing that matters to me, and you’re just going to roll over and give up. So thank you. Thank you for making this all so clear to me now.”
Snyder went motionless, thinking. “You’re not serious. Cleo, don’t do this.”
“This is the only thing left I can do.”
Snyder stared at her, speechless.
“Keep the badge,” Cleo said, patting her softly on the arm. Then she turned on her heel and marched to the end of the hall, kicked open the door and kept going, out into the burning sunlight.
Chapter Thirty-four
Legacy
Mauricio hadn’t been to the ghost town since he was in high school. Even then, with Ash taunting him, he’d been afraid to set foot inside the sagging, half-toppled buildings. Now that he was sitting on a warped wood floor, listening to the long-abandoned house creak in the wind, his fear ran through him like a constant electrical current.
As night fell, scattered candles lit the small room. Salvador had guarded him for a while, but now it was Lazaro, who sat with his massive revolver balanced on his lap. He had swung open the cylinder, big enough to drink coffee out of. One by one, he filled its chambers with brass-capped red shotgun shells.
Lazaro noticed Mauricio’s stare and grinned. He was missing a lower tooth. He shut the cylinder with a remarkably soft click. “The Judge,” he said, holding up the gun with no small amount of pride. “This gun, he use to belong to Ramiro. Now, he is mine, an’ with him, I protect you.”
From what? Mauricio thought. He nodded from where he sat, his back pressed against the crumbling wall. “Thanks. I guess.”
Andres came in then, humming a haunting melody, and dismissed Lazaro. He studied Mauricio with a critical eye, like a chef checking on dinner. Then he went over to a pile of gear in the corner and squatted, balancing on his toes so that the tall heels of his shoes hovered inches off the floor. He tended to something inside a small plastic case with a carrying handle. The candlelight was too dim to make out what was inside.
“Your mother, she was kind to you?” Andres said suddenly.
Of all the things Mauricio expected to hear, that was not one of them. “Um, I guess. I don’t really remember her.”
Andres gave him a disapproving stare, then went back to his plastic case. “You should remember her more. Out of respect.”
“I was really just a toddler when she passed away. My dad remarried and had Ash.”
“Selena, your mother, my sister, she was so beautiful. So innocent. She believe his lies, help him steal my spider and run away. It was many, many years before I find out where she go. And by then, she was already gone.”
“I’m sorry.”
Andres didn’t seem to notice. “Your father, he steal my sister, and La Araña, in the night. When I wake, they are gone. I was a broken man.” He let out a long breath and opened the plastic case. “Many years later, I have no one, nothing. I live on the streets, in filth. But then, La Araña send me a sign.”
Mauricio was about to ask him what he meant when Andres stood up and turned around holding a giant gray tarantula. Its hairy legs spread the width of his cupped hands. Its dark body had eight gold bands that radiated out from the center of its body, framing its glittering eyes and thick fur-covered fangs. Just the sight of it made Mauricio want to bolt out the door.
“She was a messenger,” Andres whispered, his hushed voice quivering with energy.
The spider stirred and picked its way carefully up onto his forearm. Every little movement it made told Mauricio to run.
“One day, I wake up before the sun rise, no clothes of course, and this spider, she is on my chest. Light as a feather, I cannot even feel her touch. Right here.” Andres stepped close and touched the fingers of his free hand to Mauricio’s chest.
Mauricio, gaze riveted on the tarantula, forced himself to stay put. It was hard to breathe.
“She stand there, on me,” Andres said. “No moving. She jus’ look me in the eye. I know then, she is mine. She was send to me.”
Mauricio’s voice came out a squeak. “That didn’t, you know, freak you right the hell out?”
“Oh, I was very worry. I could have roll over, crush her in my sleep. That would be a tragedy. Such a beautiful creature, she is.” The spider climbed a few more inches, stopping at Andres’s elbow. “She come to tell me, my life have a purpose. To rebuild the lost city. To make a new world for La Araña. You father could have join me in this destiny, but no. He betray me in the night, flee to America.” Andres’s voice dropped to an angry hush. “He leave a note, not even man enough to speak to me. Say if we stay in the lost city, we will die, La Araña makes us sick.”
“Sick?” Mauricio said. “Is that true?”
“After a time, the body withers, yes. But the spirit will grow stronger, live forever. The body is only a prison for the spirit.”
A chilling thought occurred to Mauricio. “So it’s like a drug, the spider’s effects. You were all strung out in the jungle.” He tried to visualize it, a group of Colombian hippies worshiping the gold spider. “Oh God. No wonder my dad never talked about it.”
“The traitor? No. But I, always, I will tell you the truth, mi sobrino. This, you can trust.”
“Well, that’s comforting.”
“Good. Is good you should be comfort. You will not fall to the curse, the wrath of La Araña. No, you have a destiny now.”
Mauricio tried to fake a smile, but that failed as Andres took his arm in a bone-bruising grip and coaxed the tarantula to climb onto it. The spider glowed in the candlelight. Its legs moved across Mauricio’s skin like molten gold. Its touch was feather-light.
Mauricio felt himself slipping past terror into a sort of trance. He felt like he was outside his own body, watching it happen from a great distance. The tarantula climbed up his arm, one hairy leg at a time, its thick abdomen held high.
“You are my blood,” Andres whispered in his ear. “I will teach you the ways of La Araña, so that like me, you will live forever.”
Chapter Thirty-five
Unmarked
As they hurtled down the dark highway, the only positive thing Graves could say about his new partner, Brewer, was that he didn’t waste time. Brewer sat in the driver’s seat in a way that suggested the seat belt was only barely restraining him. He managed to curse every driver in front of him without breaking the stream of his own conversation. And he drove like a baboon.
If there was any plus side to letting Brewer drive, it was that they’d be able to deliver Ash to the Secret Service that much faster, and Graves could fi
nally wash his hands of this whole foul business.
Ash, for his part, sat morosely in the back.
“Moron!” Brewer barked, as a white cargo van cut him off. He planted his fist on the horn. “You see that?”
Graves didn’t bother to answer. He dug in his jacket pockets, hoping for a forgotten vial of Dramamine. He found something and held it up to the dashboard lights, but it was only a roll of Tums. He took a couple anyway.
“All I’m saying is, think about it,” Brewer said, tailgating the van. “A striped red and white Ford Torino, in broad daylight, and nobody sees where it goes. Nobody. You believe that?”
“Somebody knows,” Graves said absently. “They’re just not talking.”
“Yeah, but think about it. Nobody? Gimme a break.”
While Graves tried desperately to ignore him, Ash rapped on the partition.
“What’s with the escort?” Ash said.
Graves snorted. “Don’t give yourself too much credit. There is no escort.” Granted, the van in front of them was moving pretty slow. And oddly enough, it was missing its license plate light.
And there were identical white vans on either side of them, pacing them, boxing them in.
As Graves watched, a fourth van pulled up behind them, its headlights uncomfortably close.
Brewer planted his fist on the horn again. “You see this? I can’t get around this jackass.”
The dark highway vanished as the windowless white vans edged closer.
Graves’s pulse quickened. “Brewer, something’s up.” He pulled out his phone.
“Yeah.” Brewer kept honking. “This moron’s in my way—”
The van in front of them slammed on its brakes, taillights bathing them in a red glow. Brewer braked, but not fast enough. They rammed into the van’s bumper with a crumpling sound.
The white airbag exploded in Graves’s face before he even realized it had happened. A moment later, they were stopped dead on the highway. He’d lost his phone. He fought to get the burning-hot balloon out of his way so he could pull his pistol.
Someone rapped on the window.
Graves looked up into a black ski mask and the distinctive muzzle of a Sterling submachine gun, its magazine curving out to the side like a black steel raven’s wing. It was an old-school British military gun, the kind with holes punched in the shroud around the barrel. The gunman pointed at the door lock.
“Brewer,” Graves snapped, “whatever you do, don’t—”
Brewer unlocked the doors.
Graves didn’t get a count of how many gunmen there were. They yanked the door open and grabbed him, then threw him down to the asphalt and pinned him there. He heard doors opening, gruffly spoken commands.
“We’re Federal agents,” Graves managed, despite the knee in his back.
The man with the Sterling leaned down close to his face. The eyes inside the ski mask looked Asian, but he couldn’t tell any more than that. “Shh,” the gunman said. “Watch.”
A moment of odd silence fell as Graves lay on the oily asphalt, listening to the sounds of engines idling, people breathing, and traffic swooshing past. Without moving his head, all he could see was the front tire of Brewer’s car, and past that, Ash’s cowboy boots and jeans surrounded by the black military boots of the gunmen.
A single gunshot ran out. Graves jumped, involuntarily, and whoever had pinned his arms tightened their grip.
The gunmen lowered Ash’s body to the ground. The front of his shirt was soaked with blood.
Graves stared. This couldn’t be happening.
They picked up Ash’s limp, blood-stained body and held it there at the back of the van, as if they wanted to be sure Graves saw it. Then they opened up the doors and heaved him in.
Graves’s heart thumped in his chest. “Tell me your demands,” he choked out. “What do you want?”
“I want your attention,” the man with the Sterling said. “Your prisoner is dead. You see that?”
“What?” Graves struggled to stay focused. “Yes. Yes, I see.”
“Good.” The gunman lifted the Sterling high above Graves’s head and brought it down with a sharp crack.
*
Cleo checked her watch. It had been twenty minutes since she’d gotten Snyder’s cryptic message. She hustled through the hospital, dodging staff wearing plum- or teal-colored scrubs. She was still formulating her apology to Graves when she found him sitting alone on the end of a bed, holding an ice pack to his head.
He looked up when she walked in, and his gaze washed over her with the worst kind of pity. She didn’t know why, and that set her on edge.
“Hey.” She rushed over to him. “You okay?”
“Just a concussion. I’ll be fine. Did Snyder tell you what happened?”
“Not much. Just that you’d been injured. I came straight over.” She glanced around the empty room. “Nobody else is with you?”
Graves stared at the floor, oddly quiet. After a moment, he said, “Snyder didn’t tell you anything about Ash?”
“Ash? No. Why?” A wave of worry rose up inside her. It was just like Ash to make a bad situation worse. And now Graves was injured because of it. “Snyder said there was more, and that I needed to call her, but I just came over. I wanted to make sure you were okay.”
“Yeah, I told you, I’m fine.”
“Good.” She blew out a breath, and the tension started to ebb. “So what did he do this time?”
Graves didn’t answer at first. He just kept staring at the floor. “Snyder should be back anytime now. She just went out for coffee.”
“Graves, you’re starting to freak me out a little here. What’s wrong?” When he didn’t answer, she started to pace the room. “Is Ash okay? Did he say something? Is it about Andres?”
“Look, you should really talk to Snyder. She’ll be right back.”
“That’s not going to work. You need to fill me in. Right now.” She waited. “If Ash had something to do with this, anything to do with you getting hurt, I’ll—”
“Cleo.” Graves looked up at her at last. “Ash is dead.”
“Well, he will be, after I get a hold of . . .” It sunk in, what he’d just said. “What?”
“They shot him. I saw the whole thing happen.” He paused. “I’m sorry.”
Her hands covered her mouth. A hundred questions crashed inside her, all at once, drowning each other out in a white noise that gagged her tongue and made it impossible to speak.
“I’m really sorry,” Graves said, more than once. But his words didn’t register. “Sorry” didn’t even begin to cover it. “Sorry” was what you said when you forgot someone’s birthday, or when you raised your voice in the heat of an argument.
But it didn’t apply when a piece of you was ripped away, leaving a raw hole where there should have been something solid and dependable and constant.
Cleo didn’t mean to sit down, but suddenly she was sitting in a hard plastic chair, feeling the world turn hollow and unreal around her. “Why?” she whispered to herself, over and over, until it had no meaning anymore. “Why?”
She was distantly aware of Graves sitting down next to her. He put his arm gently around her shoulders and tried to draw her closer, but she resisted. Eventually, he gave up and let go, only to sit quietly beside her, hands folded in front of him.
She felt her mouth form words. They came out on their own. “You were supposed to protect him,” she said.
And she honestly didn’t know if she was talking to Graves or to herself.
Chapter Thirty-six
Kung Fu
The worst part about being dead, Ash decided, was definitely the food. He sat cross-legged on the metal floor of the van, swaying with its movements. His shirt, covered in fake bloodstains, sat rolled up beside him. He held a white Styrofoam tray in his lap, trying not to spill its contents, but somehow he just couldn’t bring himself to take a bite.
“What is this?” Ash said, making a pained face. “It looks like Ch
inese spaghetti.”
“Not Chinese,” the Asian man across from him said, using chopsticks to pick mussels out of their black shells. “Pad Thai.”
“Tie what?”
“Rice noodles.”
“It smells like fish.” Ash fought down the gagging sound that tried to escape from his throat. “Here’s a better idea. We stop for a burger. Any burger. I’m really not that high maintenance.”
The man shrugged and kept eating. So far, he was the only one of his abductors who had spoken to him. He had his ski mask off now, no weapons to be seen anywhere, but still dressed all in black.
They had kept him locked up in here in the van, alone, for hours. Ash didn’t know exactly how long. They’d told him to relax, then let him cool his heels with nothing to occupy himself except the brand-new white T-shirt they gave him. His old shirt was ruined, soaked through with fake blood.
Or maybe it was real blood. Ash tried not to think about it.
After a while, the nameless Asian guy had climbed in with food—if you could call it that—and from that moment on it seemed like someone was just driving them around aimlessly while they ate. Or didn’t eat, in Ash’s case.
Finally, he worked up the nerve to take a taste of the noodles. It had shrimp and shredded carrots in a transparent red sauce he could never hope to identify. The noodles burned his lips with a blackened taste like fresh horseradish. He dropped them back on the tray and pushed it aside.
The man looked concerned. He offered up his soupy, ginger-smelling bowl of broth and mussels.
Ash waved him off. “Not a big fan of shellfish.”
“Why is that?”
“I forget.”
The man’s eyes glinted with amusement.
Ash folded his arms. “This is funny? I’m so glad.”
The man shook his head and chewed, looking off to the side for a long moment. “I was once airdropped into a remote area of South America. We had to live off what we could find along the shoreline. We fished, ate plants, one time harvested mussels much like these and cooked them on the sand. Only, we did not know the mussels were contaminated. Do you know what an algae bloom is? A red tide?”
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