The Man Who Crossed Worlds (Miles Franco #1)

by Chris Strange

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  As promised, Desmond was waiting for me when I pulled up at his apartment around 5:30. He was wearing a trench coat over a T-shirt, with a bag slung over his shoulder. Rob stood beside him, holding an umbrella over their heads. I pulled the car to a stop and Desmond opened the back door, tossed the bag in, then got into the passenger seat.

  “What’s in the bag?” I asked. “Is it a shotgun? Please tell me it’s a shotgun.”

  “It’s not a shotgun. Besides, you hate guns.”

  “Yeah.”

  “It’s just a bunch of stuff I thought might be useful. A couple bottles of Kemia, a few Pin Holes, a can of mace, my old knuckleduster.”

  “You’ve still got that thing? How have the cops not taken it off your hands?”

  “I’m more careful than you.”

  I had to concede that. At least it looked like he was taking this thing seriously. I didn’t expect O’Neil to go down quietly. Hell, maybe it wasn’t such a bad idea having Desmond at my back after all. I just didn’t think my conscience could take it if he caught a bullet.

  Rob bent down and leaned against the open window. “You know where you’re going?”

  Desmond nodded and patted his coat pocket. “Thanks.”

  The concern in Rob’s eyes was as plain as day. He gave Desmond a peck on the cheek, probably refraining from more for my benefit, and muttered something in his ear. Trying to be polite, I pretended I found the steering wheel intensely interesting until they were finished. There was something strained in the way they spoke. Maybe they’d been arguing. I guess Rob would see this as me dragging Desmond back into the old days of danger, and to be fair, I saw it that way myself. I tapped on the steering wheel, trying to swallow my impatience. I wanted to get this done before the whole city was leveled.

  Thankfully, they cut their conversation short before I was forced to make an ass of myself. Rob took a step back and raised a hand at me. “Don’t keep him out too late, Miles.”

  “Sure thing, Mrs. S. Any chance I can convince you to do another favor for me?”

  Rob sighed and made a face, but he nodded. “What do you need?”

  “The girl, Tania Phillips. Can you check the hospital records and see if she’s okay?”

  “All right.” He gave me a hard look, then returned his attention to Desmond. “Don’t get killed.”

  “See you in a few hours,” Desmond said with smile. I gave the two of them one last chance to say their good-byes, then I started the car and pulled back out onto the road.

  “So where we headed?” I asked.

  “Nearest we can pinpoint it’s a low-rise office building out west, not far from the Bore.”

  “Gallow family territory? The hell’s she doing out there?”

  Desmond shrugged. “Gang violence hasn’t spread that far yet. Maybe she’s going to wait it out there for a while. Gives her a getaway if she needs it.”

  “And if she’s already gone to Heaven to hide out?”

  “It’s a possibility, but I got a feeling this Detective Todd of yours will want her round. She’s one of the better Tunnelers in the city.”

  That she was. She had a bit of a reputation in Tunneler circles, she was the one you went to if you had a tough job with tough people. I wondered why she’d thrown in her chips with Todd. Was he promising her cash? He’d have plenty of that if he got his way. Or did she buy into his psycho talk, thinking they could bring Bluegate peace through violence?

  Our route took us away from the worst of the gang fighting, but I could still see the smoke rising over the city from a dozen smoldering ruins. The car’s air-conditioning filtered out the worst of the smell, but it was still there, soot and blood and death tickling the back of my nose. We had to hurry, while there were still people left to save. I hoped Vivian was having some luck.

  A siren whirred to life in front of us. My heart responded instantly, hammering against my ribcage, and my knuckles tightened on the wheel. Jesus, they’d found us.

  “Easy, man,” Desmond murmured. “They’re not for us.”

  He was right. A pair of police cars came skidding around the corner ahead of us and sped past, back in the direction of the nearest fire. A rumbling explosion echoed across the city in response. I forced myself to relax. This paranoia would be the death of me.

  Desmond grinned at me, the bastard. “Like old times, eh?”

  “No, Des. This is nothing like old times.”

  “Remember that job to Alona we took about a year after we graduated?”

  “Where the crates of English language books we took turned out to be stuffed with heroin?”

  “Yeah, those were the days.” He put his arms behind his head. “Those Customs officials really beat the snot out of us, didn’t they?”

  “Nah, only you. I just gave myself the black eye so you didn’t feel singled out.”

  He nodded. His glasses were so rose-tinted the thorns must’ve been poking him in the face. “What’d Anna say when you went home with a mug like that?”

  My smile slipped. “Jesus, Des, why you got to bring her up again? Can’t we reminisce about someone else?”

  “Come on, guy, that was years ago. You can’t still be sore about it.”

  I gripped the steering wheel tighter and gave a passing motorist the death stare. “To hell with you. You’re no expert on women, in case you hadn’t noticed.”

  “But I know a thing or two about relationships. I know that sometimes they end, and you just gotta get over it.”

  “Des, if we live through this and I don’t get thrown in prison, you can buy me a drink and ask me about my daddy issues. Until then, this conversation is done.”

  He put his hands up in a “fine” gesture, slumped back into the seat, and stared out his window. Bringing up shit like that at a time like this. The hell was he thinking? My demons were better behaved when they were left undisturbed.

  The streets were unusually quiet, giving the whole place a ghost-town vibe. Desmond directed me down a few streets until we came to a district of small office buildings for a few hundred small- and medium-sized businesses. I’d put money on most of them being fronts for one gang or another. Lights were only on in a few of the offices. Presumably everyone else decided to take the day off. Or maybe it was just the weekend. I had no idea what day of the week it was anymore.

  “That’s the one,” Desmond said, pointing to a low-rise office building on a narrow road just off the main street. The exterior was all boring gray stucco, with a sign saying Jackson and Leifield that conveniently revealed absolutely nothing about what the company did. A sloping driveway led down to the basement parking area, shuttered off with a roller door.

  I pulled into a parking space across the road and switched the car off. “Curtains are closed and lights are off,” I said. “It don’t look like it’s seen much use lately.”

  Desmond studied the building and tapped his chin with his finger. “Plan?”

  “Why you asking me? You were always the planner.”

  “You have a better idea what we’re dealing with here. You think Todd would’ve left some people with her?”

  “It’s possible. I don’t have a clue who he’s got working with him. Best to play it quiet until we know what we’re dealing with.”

  He nodded, his neck jerking a little unnaturally. I knew Desmond well enough to tell when he was nervous. That was good. Hell, I was scared out of my freaking mind.

  We got out of the car and jogged across the empty street. I kept my eyes on the windows all around me, but there were too many to keep track of. We didn’t eat any sniper’s bullets. Hell, the whole district looked as deserted as the salad bar at a pizza joint.

  I was already breathing hard when we pressed ourselves against the outer wall of the office building. Desmond wasn’t doing much better; his eyes leaped around in every direction, but he had a nervous grin plastered to his face. The son of a bitch was enjoying himself. I suppose selling electronics to Vei gets old after a few years
. He’d probably already forgotten the fear of doing a Tunneling job with people who’d poke your eyes out as soon as look at you.

  Desmond glanced at me and jerked his head toward the main entrance. I shook my head. “Let’s start at the bottom, make sure this car of hers actually is here,” I whispered.

  The rolling door to the parking lot would’ve been a pain to deal with, but there was a side door for pedestrian access. The lock didn’t look too tough to deal with; this was just an office building, after all. I pulled my lock-altering Pin Hole from my pocket and readied my bottle of Kemia.

  “Wait,” Desmond said, glancing up at the windows above us. “She might sense the Pin Hole.”

  “It’s only a small one.”

  “If I was her, I’d be on high alert.” He pulled his backpack from his shoulders, unzipped it, and stuck his hand inside. “Let’s do this the old-fashioned way.”

  The crowbar he pulled out looked brand-new, still with a price sticker on it.

  “Oh yeah, great plan,” I said. “She’ll never hear that.” Still, I stepped aside and let him at the door.

  Desmond was positively beaming as he wedged the tip of the crowbar into the crack of the door just beneath the lock. I cringed at the sound of the wood snapping beneath his weight, certain we’d be hearing shouts, or more likely, gunshots. He shoved against the crowbar one more time, the wood cracked around the lock, and the door flung open.

  I had one hand on my nightstick and the other on my bottle of Kemia, but nothing attacked us. The garage looked like parking garages everywhere: dull concrete lit by long fluorescent bulbs. It looked deserted as the street outside. I took a careful step in, a bead of sweat trickling down my forehead.

  There was only one car; a silver BMW sedan that was probably worth more than my apartment. It was parked haphazardly in the middle of the garage, as if the owner didn’t expect anyone else to need a parking space.

  Desmond came in behind me, gripping his crowbar like a weapon, and we silently moved out and apart to approach opposite sides of the car. I circled to the driver’s side and slipped my nightstick from my jacket. The car looked pristine, though it still had a few drops of rain on it, and water stained the concrete underneath.

  Desmond and I came at the car in unison. I peered in the front and back windows. No one inside. Nothing inside at all that I could see, not even a blanket or a bottle of water. I met Desmond’s eyes over the hood of the car, and he shook his head. Nothing.

  A little red LED flashed inside the car, cluing me in that there was an alarm in operation. Breaking into the car to search it properly would’ve been more trouble than it was worth. Besides, we weren’t here to ransack. I was going to get O’Neil alone, and I was going to get some goddamn answers.

  “Stairs?” Desmond asked, pointing at the door at the end of the garage. I nodded and we made our way toward it. A fluorescent light flickered above us, giving the whole place a horror film vibe.

  Desmond quietly pulled open the stairwell door and slipped inside, and I followed.

  “So what’s the plan?” Desmond murmured. “We going in Scooby Doo?”

  “No. Stick together. I don’t want to be the loner at the party if she’s got friends with her.”

  We made our way up the stairs and emerged into a series of connected hallways with a bunch of cubicles down one end and the proper offices down the other. This wasn’t a modern office building with pointless glass walls; everything was closed off and walled in. The whole place had a stale smell about it, like the air-conditioning hadn’t been on in a long while.

  We searched the cubicles first, staying low and moving quietly. A thick layer of dust covered everything, and the computers looked so old they must’ve been powered by coal. No children’s drawings or family photos adorned the cubicles. By the look of it, this place had been cleared out years ago.

  We’d just finished with the cubicles and were moving onto the offices when Desmond pointed out the small, scattered bloodstains.

  His face lost some of its childlike excitement and he glanced around, fingers twitching on the crowbar, while I bent down to examine the stains.

  The blood had started to turn brown, but when I touched it, it still retained some damp stickiness. I was no expert, but the blood couldn’t have been there very long.

  I followed the scattered drops with my eyes. I could imagine they led to the master office in the corner of the room. The door was shut, but my mind was already spinning up all sorts of things I might find inside. I had a brief vision of taking Desmond and just leaving, getting back in the car and blowing town, like the Universe seemed to be telling me to do.

  But I knew I wouldn’t go. Not yet. I was already moving toward the door, stepping silently across the carpet, my heart pounding loud enough to provide the bass beat at a nightclub.

  I sensed Desmond following me. I wondered if his mouth was as dry as mine was. I reached out for the door handle, had a second thought and slipped my sleeve over my hand, then opened the door.

  “Oh Jesus,” I said.

  The smell hit me first, the same smell Spencer had when he’d been beaten to death and crammed in a wardrobe. The memory was pleasant compared to what I found in the office.

  The blood caught my eye next, mainly because there was a lot of it. I doubted I’d be able to cross the room without getting my shoes soaked. The back wall had a new piece of postmodern artwork: a splatter of red covering the white wall.

  There was way too much blood in the room for just one body, which made sense, because there were three of them.

  Two of them were men, tough-looking sons of bitches dressed in clothes that would’ve blended into any street in the city. They were face-up, eyes toward the ceiling, feet toward the door. Their clothes were shredded and soaked in blood, with a couple of basketball-sized craters in their chests.

  The third body belonged to Shirley O’Neil. I only knew that by her clothes and build, because her face was so thick with blood I couldn’t make it out clearly. The flesh and bone between her eyes was caved in. Her body was twisted and crumpled on the floor in front of the blood-splattered wall, the back of her skull blown out.

  I heard Desmond’s breathing go ragged and heavy behind me, and then he started retching. My own stomach groaned and squirmed, but I didn’t throw up. I didn’t even feel as horrified as I had when I’d found Spencer’s corpse. I was nothing, blank.

  Somehow, between the running and the frustration, I’d become an undertaker, turning up late and finding nothing but bodies waiting for me.

  The first thought that fought its way into my head was a paranoid one. Was this another set-up? Would there be sirens and cops and handcuffs any second now?

  The answer came just as quickly, clinical logic floating through my dulled mind. No, no one had bothered to make this look like I’d done it. Todd had made it look like I’d beaten Spencer with my nightstick, but O’Neil had been shot, and I didn’t own a gun. Barely even knew how to use one. Whatever had killed her bodyguards was a bit more fuzzy, but I’d read enough newspapers to recognize the execution-style killing. This was a gang hit. It looked like Andrews had caught up with her.

  I don’t know how long I stood in the doorway like that, breathing in the stench until the smell faded from conscious thought. After a couple of minutes the sound of Desmond’s retching stopped, and he came back beside me, his sleeve across his mouth.

  “Shit, man,” he said. “Shit. We should get lost.”

  It took a few moments before I got my head working well enough to form a response. I shook my head slowly. “I’ve got to search the place.”

  “Fuck that. What if the cops show up? Or whoever does this comes back?”

  “Go back downstairs,” I said. “Keep an eye out. This is the last lead I’ve got. I can’t let it go cold.”

  “You’re crazy, guy.”

  “Yeah, probably.” I tore my eyes away from the bodies to look at him. His face was completely pale, his eyes bugging out of h
is head. He’d seen some shit in his day—we both had—but this… “I won’t be long. Yell if anyone comes.”

  He paused, then nodded. He didn’t look at the office again. “Hurry, then.”

  “I will.”

  His legs were a little unsteady as he walked back toward the stairwell. Mine were too. I took a shaking step into the room, careful to stand in a patch not covered in sticky brown blood, and played at being a detective.

  I started with the two men. One lay to my left and one to my right, as if they’d been guarding the door against whoever had come for them. The one to my left had managed to draw his pistol before being killed, but the other one had fallen with his gun still holstered, his hand flopped a few inches from the butt.

  I crept closer to the one on the left, breathing through my mouth to avoid the smell as much as possible. His round face was set in a permanent expression of shock, eyes open wide. Something about him tickled my memory. Was he a cop that’d picked me up a few years ago? He had the police look about him, a previously fit man that’d gone to seed with too many donuts.

  I gave him a cursory search. The driver’s license in his wallet told me his name was Elwin Major, which struck another bell in my head. I recalled a story in the papers a couple of years back about a bunch of cops that got kicked out of the force on brutality charges.

  I returned the man’s wallet to his pocket and checked out the other guy. His face looked familiar as well. Had Todd been calling in his old ex-cop buddies to work for him?

  Searching the two men turned up nothing else of note, just a couple of spare clips for their sidearms and some house keys. The guy on my right had a picture in his wallet of himself with a good-looking woman and a young girl at some beach. I got a bad taste in my mouth staring at it, so I shoved it back in his pocket. Stupid bastard. Why the hell had he got mixed up in this shit when he had people waiting for him at home?

  I settled back on my haunches and stared at the hole ripped in the center of his shirt. The skin beneath it looked almost burnt. A Tunneler had killed these men, and he’d done it in a very personal, intimate way. He hadn’t just brought the building down on them.

  I went to O’Neil last. She hadn’t been killed by Tunneling; it was obviously a gunshot that’d splattered her brains across the wall. Stupid bloody woman. I thought she was supposed to be smart, one of the better Tunnelers in the city. And now she was lying twisted and bloody in some anonymous office building in a city that was tearing itself apart.

  “What promises did Todd make to you?” I whispered. I went through her handbag, feeling like a grave-robbing ghoul. A wallet with several hundred dollars in cash and the usual assortment of plastic. Some fancy electronic key for her BMW. A tube of lipstick. A handful of assorted Pin Holes etched into brass. Nothing else. Any Kemia she’d been carrying was gone.

  “Goddamn it,” I said. “You gotta have something.” A signed confession fingering Todd would be nice, but I’d settle for anything that’d link them. The bank account records Rob had got his hands on wouldn’t be much use, considering how illegally they’d been obtained. I needed something hard, something I could give to Vivian and point to and say: “Here’s your proof, now go arrest that asshole.”

  But there was nothing. If she’d had anything incriminating, it’d been picked clean.

  I clenched my hands into fists and ground my teeth together. I wanted to punch something, I wanted to pull out my nightstick and beat her body until something useful came out. Everything was just one dead-end after another. It was hopeless.

  I was about to turn and go when I caught sight of her hand. It was clenched in a fist, but there was a corner of black plastic poking out. Her cell phone.

  I crouched back down by her hand. For some reason, I couldn’t take my eyes off her painted fingernails and the three rings that adorned her fingers.

  Come on, Miles. Just a dead body. Just a dead woman’s hand. You barely even knew her, and she would’ve killed you as soon as look at you anyway, probably.

  Her flesh was cold, though not as cold as I expected. More like a cup of coffee that’d been left out on the counter for an hour or so. I forced myself not to cringe as I took her fingers in hand and pried them apart. The worst part was the stiffness, the way her fingers resisted me. I got them apart just far enough and snatched the cell phone away. My stomach churning, I rubbed my hands on my jacket as if I could wipe away what I’d done, but I could still feel her dead skin beneath mine.

  The phone was some fancy smartphone, the sort of thing you could use to reprogram a nuclear missile and unite quantum mechanics and relativity while you check your emails. By some miracle, there was no passcode to unlock it. I spent a few minutes trying to work out how to drive it. Goddamn, you’d need a Master’s degree in computer engineering to work the thing.

  I eventually figured out how to access her recent calls. A couple of numbers came up regularly, but no names were attached. Maybe Rob could run them with his computer, get it to spit out some names.

  I was getting antsy standing around in this slasher-film room, but I didn’t want to leave until I was sure I had something. I doubted I’d be able to come back. The room had been cleared out apart from a couch and an office chair; everything I had to work with was on this phone. I scrolled through to O’Neil’s text messages, and that’s where I hit paydirt.

  Dozens of messages were stored in there, all from a single number. She’d been arrogant, or just sloppy, and hadn’t bothered to delete them. Plans, hints of something sinister. Again, the number had no name attached, but I recognized Todd’s words, his messed up sense of right and wrong. If we could trace the messages to his number, maybe Vivian and any honest cops left on the force could nail the son of a bitch.

  SD dealt with, one of the recent messages read, but Franco slipped the net. I put out APB. He will be out of circulation soon.

  Not as soon as he’d hoped. I flicked through to another message. The vials have been shipped. Time to go dark.

  I glanced over at O’Neil’s body. She’d gone dark, all right. The idiotic woman.

  All right, I’d spent enough time here. I slipped the phone into my pocket and patted it. It wasn’t much, but it might just be enough. I allowed a small smile to creep across my face.

  Got you, you bastard.