Diana put in her password for a fake profile she’d created. Dwayne6669.
She repeated this until she’d joined all the available feeds.
Box after box appeared, each containing a live video stream. Three, four, five…
Winter had eight feeds running tonight. Each with a different child featured.
It was the one in the bottom right that caught Diana’s eye. The girl was seven, maybe eight, with bright eyes. The leather dog collar around her throat was connected to a chain on the floor.
A man, black t-shirt, no pants, stood over her. His erection in full view.
A rough knock came at the door. “It’s Blair.”
Diana opened the door and found her on the other side.
“Did you see the feed?” Blair asked.
“I’m watching it now.”
Blair came into the room, crossing to the desk. “No, not this one. The one from the apartment.”
“What—” Diana began, but then remembered the bugs she’d planted.
I need some sleep, she thought. I’m borderline useless.
Blair’s fingers hovered over the keys. Her face was scrunched up in disgust. “Can I close this? Pedophiles sick me out.”
“Yeah.”
A few furious punches and a new screen showed the angled interior of the apartment. Diana had researched the place after she’d left it. There was no listed tenant for that address. The detective agency, apartment included, was listed in King’s name. But mail she’d seen for Piper Genereux had told her a bit. Piper was a student at Delgado Community College and her official place of employment was Madame Melandra’s Fortunes and Fixes, an occult shop around the corner.
Diana had yet to figure out if King had the girl holed up above his office like a live-in girlfriend—a girl fifty years younger than him, a nice lunchtime fuck before getting back to the task of investigation—or if he’d rented her the apartment because she worked for his landlady.
She wasn’t yet sure how all these people connected to one another. It seemed clear that Louie Thorne was the daughter of King’s long-dead comrade, but what about the others? How did they fit together? What did they do?
And were these lives just covers for a larger operation?
Or was Louie’s life, her secret life, a mystery even to these so-called friends?
Diana wanted answers.
“Why are you splitting the screen?” she asked, watching Blair’s fingers fly over the keyboard.
“It’s the live feed on the right, and the recorded feed on the left.”
On the right all Diana could see was two girls sitting on a sofa. One had a mug of something in her hand. She looked Latina, maybe, with thick brown hair and coppery skin. The other was blond, a blanket draped around her shoulders. At their feet was a pile of luggage and…beach chairs? Had they had a beach day today?
Diana wasn’t even aware there was a beach in New Orleans. Then again, she hadn’t been in the city long.
“Look at the left. I want to show you something. Here.” The laptop’s fan clicked on. Its soft whirring filled Diana’s room.
The feed on the left had been rewinding, and now it showed an empty apartment with bare floors and no girls on the sofa.
“What am I—” Diana began.
“Shh, just wait.”
This amused Diana, who enjoyed when Blair’s intensity showed. It was good to know she wasn’t the only one invested in this operation. To Diana, it often felt that way.
“There!” Blair froze the frame, then let it roll forward at half-speed.
Diana saw it. One minute the apartment was empty, the floor bare. The next, Lou stepped into the frame, arms full, and deposited armfuls of crap onto the floor.
“Is there a door there?” Blair didn’t take her eyes off the screen. She pointed at the dark corner of the room where Louie had entered.
Diana stared into the deep pocket of shadow. It took her a moment to review the layout of the apartment, but no… no, she hadn’t seen a door there.
“Keep watching,” Blair said.
Diana did. After dumping three bags on the floor and rotating her left shoulder, Lou disappeared through the pocket of shadow again.
Only to reappear, this time with the beach chairs.
“You’re sure there wasn’t a door there?” Blair asked, her voice high with excitement.
Diana hadn’t inspected that corner of the apartment thoroughly. Could there have been a false wall? It had seemed like an outer wall, and a story off the ground. Could something have possibly been behind it?
“I didn’t look close enough,” she admitted. She sat forward. “I want to hear the audio.”
Blair furiously punched a few buttons.
“I wasn’t even thinking about your shoulder. I’m sorry, man. I was just thinking I didn’t want to carry the chairs up those steps.” It was the blonde talking.
“I’m fine,” Lou said.
The blonde looked up from the pile on the floor and frowned harder. The other was tapping pills into Lou’s hands.
Lou threw them back with the ease of a junkie. Hell, maybe she was. Diana didn’t know nearly enough about her to rule out a history of addiction.
Lou bent and picked up one of the bags from the mix, a small duffel, as the other two prattled on about nothing.
Diana took everything in about Lou. She looked the same as she had months ago in the all-night diner in the middle of nowhere, Ohio. But she was holding her shoulder differently.
It was Lou’s voice that broke the spell. “I’ll be gone for a while.”
Diana leaned even closer to the screen, until she began to see the pixels of the image in front of her.
“No,” she murmured. “Don’t go.”
The blonde seemed equally unhappy to hear the news. “What do you mean?”
“I’m going to La Loon.”
“Alone?”
“With Konstantine.”
The blonde pouted. “For how long?”
“I don’t know. A few days. But if you try to reach me—”
The dark-haired one laughed. “I highly doubt a page or text would go that far.”
The blonde sighed, visibly unhappy. “Be safe, I guess. I’ll tell King.”
Then Lou was gone, again through that strange patch of darkness in the far corner, half cut off by the edge of the screen.
I’ve got to go back, Diana thought. I have to look at that wall again—if it is a wall.
“Show me the feed from now,” she said.
A few more furious punches and real-time video feed came into full screen, along with the accompanying audio.
“Babe, you’ve been going on about this for hours.”
“I know.” The blonde dragged a hand down her face. “I just worry about her. She’s supposed to be resting her shoulder and taking it easy, and she’s doing a great job.”
Sarcasm dripped from the girl’s words.
The other one laughed. “You’re one to talk. When’s the last time you had a day off?”
“Touché.”
“And besides, at least she’s trying. She did sit in the back of a car both ways.”
“True,” the blonde said.
“And now she’s going to La Loon, which is sort of like a holiday for her.”
The blonde asked, “Do you need to get home?”
“I thought I’d sleep over.”
“Oh.” The blonde sat up straighter. “What about Tavi?”
Is Tavi her kid? Diana wondered, always looking for connections and pressure points.
“She’s with my parents.”
“Do you think we’ve found Lou’s home base or what?” Blair asked.
“There might be a problem with the tech, maybe the camera has a blind spot or something. Otherwise, there’s a false wall there that I missed.”
“Or maybe she can walk through walls. A literal ghost.”
Lou had seemed real enough when she sat across from Diana, drinking coffee.
Her eyes flicked back to the screen.
“Is it okay?” the dark-haired girl asked tentatively, visibly fidgeting with the mug in her hand. “If you’re tired, I can just—”
“No,” the other girl said eagerly. “No, I want you to stay.”
Then she was shrugging out of the blanket and coming across the sofa to kiss her.
“Ooh la la,” Blair said. “What do we have here?”
Diana barely noticed the make-out session developing on the screen. Her mind kept wandering back to Lou, stepping from the shadows in the apartment.
There has to be a door, she concluded. That building must have a secret passage or something.
Did Lou have a secret apartment there? Beneath the agency? Or behind a wall? Or perhaps she made her home somewhere else in the city?
Despite the shadows, it had been Lou, unmistakably. Lou in the leather jacket and her mirrored shades. Lou with a duffel in her right grip.
But who the hell was Konstantine? He must be somewhat important if Lou would take off with him for a few days.
“Did you put a camera in the bedroom?” Blair asked hopefully as the girls rose from the sofa.
“Not a video feed, just audio.”
Blair pouted. “Shame.”
And La Loon…She’d never heard of it. Was it code for a hideout? An island in the Pacific or something? Diana had the impression that wherever it was, it was remote. Isolated.
Blair turned away from the video and regarded Diana’s profile. “About tomorrow…”
Here we go, Diana thought, groaning inwardly.
“Are you still going?”
“Yes,” Diana said, keeping her eyes on the feed without seeing it.
“Do you think she’ll come?”
Did she? She had until Lou’d mentioned this so-called La Loon. Maybe Lou couldn’t spare the time now. “Maybe. Unless she has to go to La Loon right away.”
“And then?”
“Then I’ll talk to her.”
“And then?”
“Then hopefully she’ll give me what I need to take down Winter.”
“And then?” her sister pressed.
“And then what?” Diana snapped back. “Spit it out.”
“When will it be enough? If you find Winter, kill him, then what? Is it going to be enough for you? Can we quit then?”
“Not this again, Blair. It’s late.”
“So what if it’s late?” Blair sat back in her groaning chair. “You never sleep. You hardly eat. And I’m worried this won’t be enough for you. Ever. You’ll get Winter and then what? I want you to tell me what your life—our life—will look like after you kill him.”
Diana looked at the screen without really seeing it.
“What’s going to fix this for you? Can you really let all this go after Winter is dead? Or will it be like this forever? You running yourself into the ground and me watching you do it?”
“I don’t know,” Diana said, and knew with certainty this was a lie.
12
Lou stood at the window of her St. Louis apartment and tried to understand the queasiness in her gut. It wasn’t unlike the feeling she had when someone stood behind her. It was accompanied by an itch in the spine and the impulse to turn.
And Lou kept turning, but there was nothing there. The apartment was bright with morning light. It was quiet, undisturbed. A crow passing her window called out then was silent.
There was no one lurking behind her, ready to swing.
Why do I feel like I’m being watched?
She shrugged in her shoulder holster, noting the two guns press into her ribs. The coffee maker beeped, signaling that her brew was ready. She drank it black, enjoying the sweet smell and bitter taste on her tongue.
She was unhappy. She recognized this distantly, with some cold, detached part of her mind that regarded feelings as strange, inconsistent phenomena.
This comprehending part of her mind also understood it was because she was not hunting. She was not doing what it was in her nature to do, and that made her unwell. Melancholic.
Why aren’t you hunting? she asked herself. Why aren’t you out there killing some kingpin or wife beater or—
She knew the answer. It wasn’t the flaring pain in her shoulder which came and went like a tide. It was the terrifying suspicion that everyone was right.
King. Piper. Konstantine.
Everyone who kept trying to remind her about her shoulder, her so-called limitations—that chorus of nagging voices plagued her. But she’d yet to think of a better way to scratch that itch under her collar.
She could still ambush, sure. She could appear behind anyone and simply grab them and put a bullet in the back of their head. She could do it with ease.
But that wasn’t hunting. It would hold no release for her. No challenge.
Lou took another drink of her coffee before setting the mug on the island counter. Then she pulled a stopwatch from a drawer and laid it beside the mug. She turned the stopwatch over and activated the voice command setting.
She took a deep breath. “Go!”
The stopwatch started its timer at the sound of her voice, and as quickly as she could, she pulled the left gun, the one governed by her good, right shoulder.
0.05 seconds.
She tried again, but this time pulled from her weaker side.
0.2 seconds.
She grimaced. Too slow. And worse, just that one pull had her shoulder throbbing.
She pulled again.
0.4 seconds.
Because pain slows you down, she thought.
Realistically, she suspected she could get only one or two pulls on that side before her arm was useless. Leaving the gun in her hand also posed a challenge. The weight pulled on her shoulder, irritating it.
She wanted to try again from the hip. She took a break, giving her throbbing shoulder a chance to relax.
She refilled her coffee and thumbed through a paperback she’d found at a thrift store that day. In it, the hero hunts the man who betrayed him. When she finished the coffee, she began again. She put on a hip holster, fitting guns into their designated slots.
She pulled from her good side first. 0.03 seconds.
She restarted the stopwatch and pulled from the left. 0.13 seconds.
That was better. Maybe because the shoulder wasn’t quite as hitched from its starting position.
But what are you trying to prove? To whom?
* * *
Lou stepped from her linen closet into the stone casing of a crypt. Startled birds shot from their nests at her sudden appearance. The stone floor scraped against her boots, the walls thick with cobwebs and dust.
A little warm for a nest, she thought, stepping over the broken stone slab that might have once been the door and into the open air. A breeze caught in her hair as her boots adjusted to the uneven ground.
The cemetery spread out in all directions. Coping graves and ledger stones lay interspersed with the vaults and a few crypts. Through the wrought-iron gate, Lou saw the po’boy shop King had spoken of.
She crossed the street carefully, waiting for a white sedan with a donut tire to pass before she approached.
The bell dinged.
Four of the five patrons looked up.
One was Dennard. Her blond hair was pulled back in a severe ponytail, her blue eyes bright with unhinged excitement. Her leg began to bounce under the table as she clutched a basket of fries between her hands.
Behind her a mother pushed battered shrimp into a toddler’s mouth as he stood precariously on the seat beside her.
Across the aisle, Lou made eye contact with a man in his forties. What was left of his wispy hair had been smoothed back from his face. His mouth was ajar, as if he’d just heard terrible news. Lou thought he should be wearing a lab coat—something about him seemed…scientific.
The fifth patron had already turned her back to Lou as if uninterested in the new arrival.
A man in a stained apron ap
peared behind the counter.
“Mornin’,” he said with a jovial smile. “What can I do you for?”
Lou walked down the center aisle to the counter. She passed Diana without acknowledging her.
“The fish and shrimp,” Lou said after a cursory glance at the menu.
He pulled a pen from behind his ear. “Fully dressed?”
She wasn’t sure what that meant, but she was far from a picky eater. “Sure.”
“Fries? Pickles?”
“Yes, thank you.”
“Anything to drink?”
“No.”
He tore the sheet of paper off the notepad and pounded the register keys. “It’s cash only here. That okay?”
Lou didn’t bother to explain that cash was the only thing she carried. She’d never had so much as a credit card in her name. She simply handed over the bills and thanked the man.
“I’ll bring it out to ya,” he said, and flashed her a smile. “Sit where you like.”
Lou barely noticed the smile. She was watching the parody play out behind her, courtesy of the large mirror stretched behind the register.
The woman in the leather pants sitting alone at a table was making frantic eyes at Diana. Diana waved her off. The man too was watching the exchange, glancing from Lou to Diana and back.
They’re all together then.
She suspected the woman with the child and the cook behind the register weren’t part of the stakeout, but she wasn’t prepared to write either of them off. Should this come to a shootout, or some other altercation, it was better to assume everyone was an enemy.
Dennard had chosen this place. For all Lou knew, she owned it.
Lou pulled out the chair opposite Diana. The screech was terrible and made the woman flinch in revulsion.
She seemed even more shocked that Lou had chosen to sit so close. The small table between them was an insufficient barrier. It was so small, their knees touched beneath its top.
Dennard pushed her chair back as if this would spare her.
Lou said nothing. She left her shades on. It was easier to keep her eyes on the room when she wasn’t expected to look directly into someone’s eyes.
The silence stretched between them, Diana’s partners growing uneasy. When the child suddenly broke into a wail, pushing back at an offered piece of shrimp, both of Dennard’s companions jumped in their seats.
Devil’s Luck Page 7
