by Rhys Ford
One of the bikes teetered and hit something hard on the ground. Its riders tumbled, and the impact of their bodies striking the mesa echoed loudly through the dusty air. The bike skidded to a stop, and one of the men lurched to his feet and grabbed at its handlebars. Cari’s shotgun trained down on him, prepared to let loose a blast if needed, but he climbed onto the machine and tore away, leaving his passenger behind.
“We do not want to kill you,” I called out, hoping the guy on the ground would stay there. It didn’t look like he was moving. “Don’t make this shitty. It can go really badly for you.”
“Too late for that,” the bald guy yelled back at me and began to fire.
Most of the time when I’m getting shot at, it’s not personal. I was either in the wrong place at the wrong time… or maybe the right place at the right time, because more often than not, if anyone’s pointing a gun at me, it’s because they’re on the other side of the law. While a Stalker is technically a bounty hunter, we’re allowed to arrest people and bring them in. This guy knew me, knew my name, knew my face. The chances were, he also knew I could drag him back to San Diego and throw him into a courtroom without much trouble.
I was wondering why he was so resistant about being taken in, considering the only thing I could really charge him for was perhaps attempted murder if the judge was particularly elfin-tolerant. I would’ve had better luck if they’d fired on Ryder, seeing as he was an official diplomat of the Sidhe court, but it would’ve been harder to make it stick. I was fair game. Caught in a no-man’s-land of races and societies, I fell between the cracks of practically every legal system except for the Stalkers. We didn’t like people who came after our own. We usually let the law deal with things, but I knew for a fact there were some who believed that vigilante justice was best served by the people who’d been trespassed against.
Hell, Stalkers even stood up for Dempsey when a couple of wheat farmers ambushed him because he had me riding along with him. I’d heard one of the men finally learned to walk without too much trouble, but the other would never fully use his right hand again.
That was the only thing I could think of that would make a man reluctant to throw himself on the mercy of the law—until I saw his face clearly and the remaining moonlight filtering through clouds washed everything in a sea of blue.
His button-down shirt and cargo pants were crisp despite the desert trek he’d made. Considering where he and his clients were, I guessed they’d left nearly as soon as I’d seen him last… standing in the middle of Duffy’s garage, his stern face softened by what I now knew had been fake concern. He’d probably been jumping for joy inside of his tight little mask, reveling in her death as he shook my hand while her blood still clung to his skin.
That’s why he was so close to the scene and probably why Duffy let him in. In that neighborhood, who wouldn’t open the door for a cop, even one as nasty-looking as the asshole in front of me?
“You killed Duffy.” I came out from behind the boulder where I’d taken cover. “For what? Money?”
“Whore got in the way. She already fucked up one of my last trips. Lost me a hell of a lot of easy cash.” His grin sickened me. It was a bone-white slash beneath his hooked nose. “I’m not going to let you take me in. You know that, right?”
I circled around him, keeping Cari in my sight as well. The motorbikes were long gone, and the rattling growl of their engines faded in the distance. “I don’t remember your name, but I know Davies. He works out of the same house you do.”
“Don’t try to connect with me, bastard,” the cop snarled at me. “You’re what’s wrong with this world now, all of you. San Diego used to be a decent place to live until you showed up. And then more came with you. I didn’t even mind that bitch screwed up my side business, but bringing them into our city—my city—that’s too far. Too much.”
“But you used Unsidhe magic to blow her place out,” I reminded him, edging closer.
I could probably take him down if I was lucky. There was a lot of muscle beneath his massive chest, and he was used to carting around fifty pounds of gear while running in a full sprint. It would be close. Keeping him talking seemed like the best idea, but I didn’t know where it would take us. I did want answers, and he seemed like a talker. Zealots were like that. If I could just keep his tongue wagging, I would find out who led him to Duffy, because the guy on the ground Cari was dragging into the transport didn’t look like he was going to be talking any time soon.
“Yeah, I used your own shit against her.” He laughed, a mocking deep rumble nearly lost in a roll of thunder. A drop of water hit my face. It was as cold as the pond in that canyon we stopped in. “Unsidhe detonation spells are a dime a dozen, especially right on the border near Tijuana. They’re desperate for anything. They’d sell their own mothers for a month’s worth of food, because those animals are starving each other out. Makes business really good. They run up here looking for someplace safe to live, and I get a couple of coyotes to feed them through the canyons.
“Then it’s just a matter of finding a bunch of traditionally minded guys who want to balance the world out. All it costs me is some gas and the price of a few bullets. But you had to go and fuck that up.” He lifted his gun, and I tensed and raised mine in response. “You’re crazy if you think I’m going to let one of your kind take me out. And I’ll be damned if it’s some half-assed cat bastard Stalker like you.”
The single gunshot was lost in the storm as it broke above us. The weather systems in the canyons moved swiftly, and wild winds and pounding rains were ushered in with a clatter of lightning and booming thunder. He dropped where he stood, landed on his knees, and then rolled back to rest on his haunches, his sightless eyes pinned to the horizon. Sighing in frustration and disgusted by his stupidity, I stood in the deluge, dropped my gun down, and slowly walked toward his swaying body. I got about halfway when gravity toppled him over, and his slack face splashed in a muddy puddle forming over the dirt of the mesa. The rains would carry away his blood, the ground too hard and dry to soak up any moisture, and I was still standing there when Ryder approached.
“Why?” The Sidhe lord’s befuddled expression was nearly comical, and I would’ve laughed if I weren’t standing vigil over a dead cop. “They live such short lives. Why would he do this?”
“Same reason why moths fly into open flames,” I offered as I slid my Glock back into its holster. “He was a cop, Ryder. If I took him back, he would’ve lost everything. There was a good chance he’d be stripped of his pension and tossed in jail, not the best place for a corrupt cop. And even if they only gave him a slap on the wrist, every single Stalker in the area would have made his life very uncomfortable. So, instead of backing away, he took a dive into the fire. Can’t say I blame him.”
“How can you think that?” Ryder’s anger rode his voice like the thunder rolled through the storm. “Is that a choice you would make? Because I would not want that for you. And I demand you tell me—you promise me—you will never ever consider that as a way out. I need you with me. I need you by my side.”
I stood and stared at the Sidhe lord I’d dragged on more than a couple of runs. We weren’t pretty. There were cuts and bruises on our faces and arms, and the cold rain had plastered our hair and clothes down. Still, his emerald-shard eyes shone with a compassion and an optimism I never had. Ryder was something I never would be—someone who believed the world could become a better place if only he worked at it. I didn’t share that optimism. Hell, I didn’t think people would do the right thing even if somebody paid them. I’d been turned away by Medical too many times, so I knew that was a truth.
But there he stood, with a man’s blood trickling around his feet, demanding loyalty from me.
I laughed and then winced when my arm began to ache. “Don’t forget the promise I made you, lordling. I’m not going anywhere, because somebody needs to kill you if ever you become your grandmother. So expect me to be your shadow for however long this whole thing la
sts. Now, if you don’t mind, this rain is really cold, and we’ve got a few kids to take back home.”
Twenty
“I COULD have done the dead-eyes thing,” Cari argued under her breath and poked at me between my shoulder blades. “I have all the stuff with me. We could have learned something.”
“Yeah, you would have learned what it looks like to blow your head off while staring at me.” I shifted to my right, hoping to avoid another jab. My back was bruised, much like a lot of my body, and her index finger seemed to have the uncanny ability to find a particularly painful spot each time she prodded. “Not worth the risk. Doing that wipes you out, remember? Anything you might have learned isn’t worth you not being able to shoot straight for a couple of hours.”
“Still….” She wasn’t willing to give up the argument, even though she knew I was right. “How often do I get to do it? A hibiki gets better the more she uses her powers.”
As much as I’d have loved to squeeze information out of the dead cop’s brain by using Cari’s witch magic, I didn’t think we could learn anything we couldn’t learn by squeezing the guy we’d picked up off the mesa floor. And since invoking Cari’s third eye meant me chewing up peyote buttons and other things—including my blood—and spitting it into her open mouth, I had to be really in the mood or desperate for information.
I also didn’t want to deal with being stoned off of arcane spell ingredients while I dealt with the local sheriff, especially in the dead of night with no sleep and very little food in my stomach.
We strapped the dead cop to the roof of the transport and loaded the still-unconscious hunter onto one of the bunks and secured him with a bunch of duct tape. The medical kits we had on board were good for injuries but crap for anything beyond stitches and splints. There was a short debate about whether to drive to the nearest farm and dump the survivor on someone else or see if we could patch into someone’s link and call in to the regional sheriff’s station.
In the end we lucked out because someone in the area amped up their signal, and we caught the edge of it, reached out to the local cops for help, and found out the sheriff himself was making rounds only a few miles away. He was willing to meet up with us at a farmer’s feed outpost—a forty-five minute detour—and I didn’t want to drag a possibly dying human around with us.
The outpost was actually an old barn attached to what looked like it had been a garage before two of its four walls fell over. Still, the structure was solid enough to serve as a carport, and the sheriff’s beat-up military rover with its regional seals sat beneath its slightly sagging roof, a thick layer of dust covering the vehicle’s boxy lines. I angled the centipede into the drive and left room for its wide doors to swing open so we could move the injured man. Flicking on the spotlights drove the damp night back so the sheriff could see, and Cari extended the canvas overhang from the roof of the transport, giving us some protection from the incessant drizzle.
Sheriff Graham turned out to be a large barrel-chested man who wouldn’t have been out of place starring in an old spaghetti western. Standing a few inches taller than me, he was as broad as a bull and moved slowly, as though he’d grown up in the proverbial china shop and had been told to always be careful. He could easily have picked Cari up by her head with one hand, but his light gray eyes beneath his bushy salt-and-pepper eyebrows were gentle. He took off his cowboy hat briefly toward her when I did a quick round of introductions.
Since we’d left our unconscious passenger on the bunk nearest the main door, it was fairly easy for Graham to peek his head in and see what kind of shape his newly acquired prisoner was in. We stood outside to give him room, but I moved in closer when Graham asked me to fetch him a scanner from the back of his rover.
I returned with the visor, and the sheriff admitted that he did double-duty as an emergency medic when he was out in the field. He spent a bit of time examining our slightly pudgy, soft-faced patient, but eventually the sheriff proclaimed him okay to travel to the nearest hospital, where he could regain consciousness while under arrest for attempted murder and other charges.
“Yeah, I should be able to move him. I’ve got a huge rover with a stabilizing gurney in the back. It should hold him.” He took another peek at the man’s eye and let the lid close back down. Graham fired up the head scanner he’d fitted onto the man’s head and then shot me a curious look. “Gracen. You came through here about three years back, didn’t you? Took out a nest of mega rattlers that were chewing up Johnson’s flock, didn’t you?”
I remembered the job. Vaguely. Mostly I recalled getting caught in a herd of nightmares by myself and having to find a replacement bumper for my truck after one of the damned things tore it off while he chased me clear back to Lakeside.
“Yeah,” I mumbled, nodding. It’d been a quick bounty, a short run out to eradicate a nest of about fifteen rattlers large enough to swallow two adult sheep, one after the other, without stopping to burp. “Johnson’s wife gave me a peach pie.”
“Yep, that woman can bake.” His eyes turned steely for a moment. “You ’bout broke my deputy’s heart, if I recall. Boy moped for days after you left. Told him not to expect a call. ’Specially not from a Stalker.”
Now I remembered the run. “Umm—yeah, about that….”
“Just giving you a hard time.” Graham’s grin lifted up his rosy cheeks. “Kid was dragging his feet afterward, but he met up with a cop from Houston at a training thing. Guy moved out here about a year back. They’re married now, but I don’t think I’ll mention you came rolling back through.”
“Might be best,” I agreed.
“Oh no, I’d love to meet one of Kai’s ex… can a one-night stand be considered an ex-anything?” Cari piped up, and I shushed her with a hard dead-eyed look I’d picked up from her mother. She listened to me about as well as she did anyone else, which was to say, not at all. “Kai’s hard to pin down. Just ask Ryder here.”
“I’m not trying to pin him down,” Ryder mumbled. “I’m trying to get him to join my court.”
“Sounds like you’ve got more than enough problems to go around, boy, without adding Dwayne to the mix.” Graham guffawed. “Now how about you tell me about that dead guy you’ve got tied to the top of your vehicle and what you want me to do about him?”
“Dead guy’s SDPD with a side business of taking rich guys like the zombie over there on hunting trips. Problem is, some of his big game are Unsidhe running the border.” I watched Graham’s expression closely to see where he fell on the line of good cop or bad. His frown was immediate and fierce and wiped away any of the jovial teasing he’d given me earlier. “Killed a friend of mine back in the city to cover his tracks. This guy’s one of his clients.”
“He fired upon my cousin Kerrick and Stalker Gracen. Or at least we believe it was him. We recovered a pair of rifles from the mesa.” Ryder slid into the conversation smoothly, asserting his place as the reigning high lord of his court. Kerrick interrupted his examination of an old chicken coop and squared his shoulders, ready to interject, but Ryder continued, “We can turn the weapons over to you. They fired on the transport as well, but I don’t know if there are any bullets lodged in its outer plating to match to the rifles.”
“Picked some vid off of their rover.” I slid my hands into the pockets of my jeans and rolled my shoulders back to loosen the tightness along my back. “They had it rolling as they were shooting. Or at least that’s what it looked like. Ran through it quickly while heading over here, but the thing goes belly-up once their vehicle got hit.”
The tape would show a lot, and some of it—like the cop deciding how he was going to go—wouldn’t be there because of Cari plowing into their expensive rover, but it was all I had to offer. Well, that and the tires.
“Pulled the bubble tires off their rover and tossed them into the back of our centipede. Behind that storage wall there.” I jerked my thumb toward the far end of our segmented transport. “Expensive-as-shit pieces of rubber, and if I left them out
here, they would probably be cooked before someone could retrieve them. Pulled out as much of their gear as we could and chucked it back there as well.”
“Officer… Sheriff, if I may interrupt,” Kerrick cut in. “We appreciate your assistance in this, but we have a meeting to make. Is there anything else you need from us?”
“Not much else, really.” Graham’s gaze moved from cousin to cousin, and then he decided he’d rather deal with me than either of the elfin lords that karma had dumped in his lap. Ryder excused himself, hooked his arm into Kerrick’s, and dragged him away from the open door. They’d gone only a couple of feet away when they fell into a heated conversation, and Cari rolled her eyes and excused herself to take a walk around the property and look at the sheep huddled inside the open barn.
“Pretty girl. If I were a few years younger….” He laughed and then shook his head. “Well, she’d probably be the death of me. So, Gracen, you’re remanding the dead cop and this one over to me, right? We can process the arrest on your badge if you’d like the points at the Post.”
It was generous of the sheriff, but I knew what he was avoiding. There was always going to be someone with a badge on that would be looking for trouble, and a cop-on-cop arrest always stank to high heaven, even if the dirty cop was caught with his hand in the proverbial cookie jar. Someone would also want to sweep it under the rug, but that was a political stew I didn’t want to dish up. I didn’t know the bastard’s name, but I wasn’t going to be sad about his death.
“If it’ll be easier on you, I can take it,” I replied. “I don’t want to cause you any problems. Easier for me to take heat from a couple of the boys in SDPD.”
