by Jordan Dane
Burbank
“Where the hell have you been?” Boelens bellowed as he stood at the threshold of O’Dell’s office in the underground operations bunker. He had a file in his hand. “You look rough.”
Boelens had his unblinking reptile stare back. O’Dell would’ve taken that as a good sign that the guy was back to normal, except that he was on the receiving end of that unrelenting glare. Normal wasn’t any way to describe his man Boelens.
“Shit happens. Get over it.” O’Dell had downloaded the extra file information he’d been sent from the head cheese, Mr. Roboto. “I got more intel on that Darby kid.”
“Good. That kid pissed me off.” He plopped down into a seat in front of the desk. “Think I found the girl, too.”
O’Dell narrowed his eyes at the man until he remembered what girl Boelens was talking about. He’d ordered him to look for her in their database of targets. She had a face he said he’d recognize. He guessed he hadn’t lied.
“You mean the girl who hijacked our boy out from under your nose? That little girl?” He smirked. “What about her?”
“Found her in our archives. She was a target that got away. Guess no one went after her. She got lost in our system or maybe she wasn’t important.”
“Until now.”
“Yeah, until now.” Boelens twitched his lip, his version of a smile. “I ran a report on her known associates, too. Only one name came up. Raphael Santana. Some punk with a rap sheet and a sealed juvie record, but he earned a spot on our hit parade. A loser and a head case.”
Boelens tossed a file folder on O’Dell’s desk. A photo spilled out, the face of a Hispanic kid and a young girl.
“He should be in a casting call. This kid could have a future in the movies with a face like that. Too bad.” When he looked at the girl, he shook his head. “What a waste. She’s smokin’ hot.”
As O’Dell printed out the information he needed, he said, “Load these kids into the Tracker. If they help us find Lucas Darby, we rank them with him. They’re top priority now.”
“Already ahead of you, boss. With you being on vacation, I figured you’d appreciate me taking some initiative.”
O’Dell saw no need in explaining why he went missing. Getting tapped by the big boss was no one else’s business.
“Vacation, my ass. Since when? I’m not a plaid-shorts, flip-flops jerk.” He swiveled in his chair and grinned at Boelens, glad to have his number-one guy back in the saddle. “So spill it. Tell me what’s in that file.”
Boelens told him that traffic cams caught Santana, and some little kid not in their system, hoofing it between a health-food store and a small grocer down the block. Since they’d been caught doing both locations more than once, odds were they’d do it again. Weaknesses. Everyone had them.
“Put these locations on a city map. A big one. I want it in my office pronto, like how they do it on cop shows on TV.”
“Speaking of cops, they found our stolen van. Not far from these stores.”
“Put that on the map, too.”
Boelens shrugged and stood. Before he headed out the door, he turned and asked, “What are you looking for?”
“Patterns. These kids think they’re mixing things up to throw us off. They figure no one’s paying attention and that they’re smarter than us, but they make mistakes. When they do, it’ll be in the patterns they keep and we’ll be there when they screw up.”
“Promise me that I’ll be the one to look that Darby kid in the eye again.” Boelens glared. “I got a score to settle with his girlfriend, too.”
“You’ll get your chance. Our job is to find them and turn ’em in for money. No one says they’ve got to have all their moving parts.”
After Boelens left, O’Dell picked up the photo of Raphael Santana and smiled.
“Everyone’s got a weak link. Looks like you’re it, Raphael.”
Downtown L.A.
Afternoon
Rafe served Benny a steaming bowl of potato stew from a kettle in the commons area of the tunnels. As he watched the boy head to a table to sit with other kids, he saw Benny’s pants were hanging off his little butt. They didn’t fit, but the way he’d sprouted, the kid wouldn’t be the runt of the pack for long.
Any kid who outgrew their clothes got to pick from hand-me-downs hanging in the commons on old metal garment racks. Whenever they ran low on sizes, Kendra had him buy things at a surplus store, but she had him barter for what they needed, too. The stuff she grew in the garden had a value to folks, and Rafe knew how to hustle a good price.
“Any of you tunnel rats want more?” he said. “Raise ’em up.”
The Effin brothers raised their bowls with a grin. They always ate like they had a tapeworm. One of them had a front tooth out, the only way Rafe could tell them apart. He grabbed their bowls and served them more.
Whenever he had kitchen duty, the little ones always ate first. Too many times he’d gone to bed hungry. That wouldn’t happen here, not on his watch. When the tables got quiet and everyone had their faces in their bowls, he served himself and found a spot with a view.
The commons were close to Kendra’s garden. That made cooking easy, and they used the light from the surface to give them a break from the dark when the sun was shining. Rafe watched Kendra pack up supplies from her garden as he ate alone, sitting near the stew kettle. He knew the drill. Soon she’d ask him to make a run to sell whatever. She let him feel a part of running things, but it was all on her.
Kendra did everything.
He would have helped her, but she already had her new toy working it. Lucas. That kid looked messed up when he came in—bloody and wearing clothes that stunk like a homeless dude had stepped in it—but he cleaned up real good.
Too good.
“Yo, Benny. Mind the store. I’ll be back.”
Rafe left his stew on the table and took off down a dark corridor. He knew what he was about to do would be wrong. He felt like shit, but he didn’t stop. When he got to Kendra’s room, he searched through her stuff, careful not to mess things up so she’d notice. It didn’t take him long to find what he looked for. Kendra had a special box he’d given her before. She kept important stuff there—like the scrap of paper with a phone number on it, the one she’d taken off Lucas when he first got there.
He didn’t know why the number had burned like a laser into his brain, but it had from the first moment he’d seen it. The number was Lucas’s tie to the world he’d left behind. It meant he had a life outside the tunnels. He didn’t need to belong here.
A guy like Lucas didn’t understand kids without options, kids like him and Benny. He had a bad feeling that this new kid would screw things up for all of them, but he didn’t know how or why. He’d learned to trust his gut. It had kept him alive.
He stuffed the scrap of paper into his pocket and headed back to the commons. He had no idea why he’d taken the number instead of memorizing it. He guessed he wanted to feel in control of something.
Lucas wasn’t like them. Kendra was too blind to see it, but Rafe felt it in his bones.
Haven Hills Treatment Facility—L.A.
Dr. Fiona Haugstad received an encrypted report at her office at the hospital. She’d gotten several hits off the database for known targets, and the results of her Tracker scans were uncanny. The sketches she’d found at the museum library were perfect matches. That couldn’t be coincidence. She’d seen too many of these gifted kids do amazing things. Drawing a vision or connecting to another Indigo through a sketch didn’t seem out of bounds. Quite the opposite—the discovery of the sketches thrilled her.
But a flag on her report grabbed her attention, and not in a good way.
“What the hell?”
Someone had pulled two records, similar to her search results. The file on Raphael Santana and Kendra Walker had been retrieved a day ago. The boy had a sealed juvenile criminal record and the girl had been a target on their database before, but they’d lost her. She went off the grid. Fi
ona looked closer at the date and time stamp for file retrievals. Such information was only reported and flagged at her level of security clearance. Her inquiry would be kept confidential, except if Alexander had been monitoring her activity. She didn’t think that was likely, but she’d have a perfectly good explanation for her search.
But who had pulled the files before her?
She found a numeric code on the inquiry and had to run a search on a separate employee-authorization database. What she found surprised her. O’Dell’s man Boelens had searched for the information a day ahead of Alexander assigning Lucas Darby to O’Dell as his top priority.
How could O’Dell and his people be a step ahead of her? What did they know?
She should have been pleased that Alexander had found the right man to head up the hunt on Darby, but an inferior man like O’Dell had no right to be ahead of her. She had to know how he’d done it, but making contact directly with the man would break all their rules of protocol. Alexander would not be pleased, no matter what her justifications would have been. She’d already gone against his express orders by continuing to pursue this other boy.
But perhaps there was be another way.
If O’Dell had Lucas Darby in his sights, she could shift her focus onto this new boy, a Crystal child with equal or greater potential. That would please Alexander more once he saw her point. He had told her to follow her instincts. That was precisely what she intended to do.
If O’Dell made the hunt for the Darby boy into a race, she’d give him real competition. Why should he get all the credit? He had sole authority now, but the prize of capturing another boy, even stronger and different from Lucas, would give her the recognition she deserved. Fiona wanted to be more to Alexander than merely a credentialed doctor who identified these abominations.
She wanted him to see her as an equal—a partner.
Alexander was always talking about chess moves and playing a strategy that kept him many moves ahead. That was how she saw her role now. She had an edge on O’Dell with this new boy. She also had a library book that she knew still held significance. Fiona grabbed the book and her copies of this new boy’s sketches. They would be her new priority.
If she couldn’t stay one step ahead of a man like O’Dell, she didn’t deserve to be Alexander’s equal.
Downtown L.A.
Rafe Santana liked mixing it up when he picked his route out of the tunnels. Sometimes he came up through the county buildings near Temple and Broadway, but today he hit the streets near the King Eddy Saloon at 5th and Main. That part of the tunnel had been sealed off, but he’d found a way around it that no one knew about. The night his old man nearly killed him, that rat hole had been his home until he healed up.
He never told Benny that story. The kid had enough of his own.
Benny made good company. He could tell the kid anything and he believed it. Benny didn’t look at him like he was a loser. Rafe almost forgot that part when he hung out with the kid.
“You could use a belt. At least for a while,” Rafe said. “You wanna hit the surplus store later?”
“Nobody wears a belt. You don’t.” Benny shrugged.
The kid carried a pillowcase over his shoulder, filled with Kendra’s stinky plant stuff in plastic tubs. It made him look smaller. Their stash for cash was practically dragging behind him. Rafe had given up offering to help the runt. Benny liked carrying it for Kendra.
“But my booty ain’t hangin’ out like yours.” Rafe grinned and nudged Benny. “Unless you’re trying to strut your stuff in front of the ladies. Now, that’s different. If that’s the look you’re after, I got your back. Just say the word and I’ll shut up about that belt, for real.”
“Aw, man. Give it a rest.” Little man scrunched his face, pretending to be mad. Rafe knew better.
As they walked to the health-food store, Rafe looked for a pay phone, someplace different that wasn’t a beeline between the tunnels and their usual route for a “cash run.” He never paid much attention to phones. He didn’t have anyone who’d want to hear from him, but the phone number in his pocket—the one Lucas had brought with him—felt like a piece to a puzzle he needed to figure out. If it turned out to be nothing, no big deal.
Yeah, no big deal.
After they scored the cash for Kendra from the health-food guy, Rafe made sure he had coin to make the call and figured out a place to go. He’d used the phone before. It had a video arcade near it. That would keep little man busy while he dialed the number. When they got there, he handed the kid a few dollars.
“Here, take this. Knock yourself out, but stay where I can see you,” he said. “And no hitting the john without me. You got that?”
Benny never asked why he always told him that about public toilets. Some things a kid didn’t need to know. When little man got busy, Rafe took the number from his jeans. He tried not to think too much about what he was doing. He just did it. When the phone rang too long, he almost hung up, until a recorded message grabbed his attention like a stab in the gut.
“You’ve reached the Church of Spiritual Freedom, the office of Mia Darby. Please leave a message and—”
A woman’s frantic voice interrupted the message.
“Rayne, is that you? Are you with Lucas?”
Rafe swallowed, hard. Darby, same last name. Lucas had a direct connect with the Believers. Damn! Rafe hung up the phone without saying a word. He didn’t have to.
He’d heard enough.
His mind reeled with conspiracies. Kendra thought she’d linked to Lucas, but what if golden boy had earned a get-out-of-jail card in exchange for taking Kendra and her crew down? Maybe she’d pissed off the church enough for them to fight real dirty.
Rafe had to warn her—if it wasn’t too late.
Chapter 14
Downtown L.A.
Minutes Later
“Come on, Benny. We gotta book,” Rafe said. The hair on his arms stood up like it was cold, but it wasn’t.
“But I’m killin’ it here.” The kid didn’t take his eyes off the video game. The display flashed a bomb explosion, and the sound of machine-gun fire got on Rafe’s nerves.
“Forget it.” Rafe shot a look over his shoulder. His gaze shifted fast, from the faces of strangers to dark corners where he couldn’t see much. “We gotta ditch this place. Now!”
Benny stopped and did a double take. He scooped up his coins, stuffed them into a pocket and fell in step with him, trying to keep up.
“What’s up?” the kid asked. He’d taken to looking over his shoulder, mirroring what Rafe did.
“I gotta talk to Kendra. That’s all. Can’t wait.” Rafe ran a hand through Benny’s hair. He didn’t want to worry the kid. “Sorry to slam your mojo, little man.”
Eventually Benny relaxed and jabbered about kid stuff and his best zombie kill shots, but Rafe had his mind on Lucas...and Kendra. Always Kendra. He didn’t know what to make of Lucas having a direct connection to the church that had been hunting them. Screw coincidences! He didn’t believe in that shit. Only suckers did.
He rubbed his arms. That weird chill wouldn’t go away. He glanced over his shoulder again. Nothing.
That woman on the phone really spooked him. He still heard her voice in his head. It felt like Lucas had played them, and even though Rafe couldn’t figure out why, that didn’t mean it wasn’t the truth. He felt sick. He liked the tunnels. Kendra had made it their home, the first real one he ever had. Walking away from what they had—’cause some loser kid with money screwed it all up for them—made him want to puke.
What would he tell Benny? If it was only him, he might risk staying with Kendra, even if it meant a fight. She had given him something to care about, but he had the kid to think about, too. Damn! How did things get so messed up? The tunnel entrance wasn’t far. They’d be home soon, but instead of picking up his pace, Rafe slowed down.
Something isn’t right.
The pit of his stomach tingled, in a bad way. He couldn’t shake it.
Rafe kept his feet moving. Even slowing down, he knew Benny had a hard time keeping up, but something felt...wrong. This time it wasn’t about Lucas or Kendra or any of that.
Someone had their eyes on them. Rafe knew it for a fact.
Without warning, he ducked into an alley and pulled Benny with him. He dragged the kid to a metal Dumpster and they hid behind it.
“Hey.” Benny almost fell. If Rafe didn’t have him by the arm, he would have.
“Sorry, dude. Change of plans.” Rafe grabbed Kendra’s cash from his pocket and knelt down in front of Benny. His eyes darted back to the alley entrance, but no one came. He stuffed the money into the kid’s pocket and grabbed him by his shoulders.
“No questions, okay? You gotta do what I tell you.” He fixed his eyes on Benny. “Hide behind this Dumpster and count to a hundred. Don’t come out for anyone until you’re done. You hear me? You can count to a hundred, right?”
“Like, duh. Yeah.” The kid smiled, but that didn’t last long.
“Go straight home, the way I told you. No cheating on the rules, little man. We got rules for a reason.”
He’d taught Benny how to be real careful coming back to the tunnels. Once he got in the dark, it would be hard for anyone to find him the way he crawled through the underground maze and squeezed through broken brick walls where he barely fit. Benny would be okay, but if someone had followed them, Rafe figured they hadn’t come for Benny.
He had to lead them on a chase—one he hoped he’d win.
“What’s happening?” the kid asked. “You’re scarin’ me.”
“Not my intention, Benny. You’ll be all right. I promise.” He hugged the kid and said, “Just do what I say. I’ll see you real soon. Somethin’ I gotta do.”
When Rafe stood, the kid asked, “What do you want me to tell Kendra?”
He took a deep breath and thought about it. “Tell her I got my lucky eight on. I’ll be okay. We’re family, right?”
The kid only smiled and started counting.
