The child who looked oldest said: “It’s you!” She jumped to her feet and came toward me. It was Shannon, the girl who had apologized for hiding from us. Staring up at me, her expression hidden in shadow, she grabbed hold of my wrist. “Did you kill it?” she asked. “Did you?”
“I’m sorry, but no. It got away from me. But I haven’t given up. I’ll keep after it.”
“Please,” she said. “Please kill it. I want my granma back. Please kill it.”
“That’s enough now,” Sherisse said, and pulled me out of the doorway. “Shannon, this is the last video, okay? I need you to be the big girl and get the rest of them to sleep a little. Okay? Will you do that for me?”
“Please,” Shannon said to me. “There’s no one else I can ask. No one is listening. Please.” She looked at Sherisse then, without saying anything else, and went back into the darkened room. Sherisse shut the door.
Ford’s phone rang. He answered it, moving away from us.
I lowered my voice so no one but Sherisse could hear. “How many kids are in there? Is Shannon the oldest?”
“She is. There are nine in there right now. Most of them, their parents just vanished. They don’t answer their cells, and no one knows where they are.”
I was about to tell her to prepare for more when Ford cut in. “All right,” he said in a sharper tone than I’d heard before. “That was Steve. You and I have to go right now.”
I shrugged and followed him out to the cars.
We drove back toward the fairgrounds yet again, but well before we got there, the pickup turned onto a feeder road. Fallen trees made it looked blocked and abandoned, but Ford led me around a sudden turn and I followed him uphill.
The pickup was big enough that I couldn’t see the road ahead, just a high back fender and cargo net. We turned sharply and drove up a switchback trail for another fifty yards or so before pulling into a small field. Steve’s Crown Vic was parked at the far end, and there were two burgundy BMWs and the Maybach beside him. Ford pulled in behind Steve, blocking him in, but there weren’t many other spaces left. I parked at the entrance, blocking everyone in.
The field wasn’t very large, but it was tremendously muddy, even by Washaway’s standards. To the left was a large log cabin with a shake roof. I’d have called it rustic if it hadn’t been painted fire-engine red. A few dozen yards behind the cabin the mountains rose straight up for several hundred feet.
The front door swung open and Steve strode out. He moved quickly, but he looked tired. I was already walking toward him when he waved me over. As I slipped between the BMWs, I glanced inside. They were empty.
Before he could say anything, I called: “I don’t know if they told you, but I found more dead bodies at the campground, and one woman who was near death. I haven’t heard an ambulance, so you might want to have it checked out. One of Regina Wilbur’s people, a woman named Ursula, shot up the place.”
“Thank you for telling me. After we finish here, I’ll head over there to look into the mess you … found.”
For a moment I thought he was going to say made. I kept my mouth shut and took a deep, calming breath. “What did you want me to see?”
“Before we get to that: Why were you in the campground?”
“I was looking for the pastor, obviously.”
“Who did you take away from the scene?”
Damn. He knew more than he’d let on. Well, to hell with him. “No one. I did have Catherine with me, though. Why?”
Steve turned to Ford. “Did you see a third person in his car?”
Ford’s face flushed and he looked at the ground. “Um. I didn’t see everything.…”
Which meant he’d been waiting for me at the Sunset and had fallen asleep. I sympathized with him. Steve looked even more irritated than he had been. “Ursula said you took a man out of the trailer and drove off with him.”
“Maybe she thought Catherine was a dude. She never seemed all that sharp to me. Or maybe she’s lying. I did knock her down and cuff her, after all.”
He rubbed his chin. “She didn’t mind admitting to mass murder. I find it hard to believe she’d lie after being honest about that.”
I shrugged. “I did …” Hit her pretty hard, I was about to say. I felt dirty just thinking it.
“What about her gun?” He stared up at me squarely.
“Oh, you mean the handgun I took off her?” I laid my hand against my jacket pocket, then moved it away when I noticed Steve’s sudden tension. “Do you want it?”
He held out his hand. “Please.”
I had been aware this whole time that Ford was standing somewhere behind me and to the right, but I’d mostly ignored him. I felt his presence keenly as I took Ursula’s pistol from my pocket. I handed it over slowly.
Steve accepted it. “This weapon has been fired.”
I wouldn’t be able to hide the bullet hole in the back of the Neon. “Yeah. I thought the safety was on.” I shrugged again. “I’m not really a gun person.”
“What about Ursula’s rifle?”
I should have ditched it after I cut it apart. “What about it?”
“Ray, if I find you’ve been playing games with me—”
“Oh, for fuck’s sake!” I shouted, my voice echoing off the mountains around us. Steve flinched, but I couldn’t hold it in anymore. “Games? You think I’m having fun here? You think I want to hang around some strange town, tripping over gut-shot people? Over corpses?”
And yet, this was what I wanted. This was my part in the society. I’d sought it out and now it made me sick.
“Chief,” I said, trying to give Steve a little respect because I wanted him on my side, “when all this happened to me that first time, it ruined my life. I can’t sleep right anymore, can’t focus at work, can’t … I sit in my room with a book in my hand and stare out the window for hours. I think about this stuff all the time. I’m constantly on the watch for it, in the faces of people on the street and in the newspaper and … and now here I am again. I found it here and I’m trying to stop it, because it absolutely has to be stopped.”
“I understand what you’re saying, Ray. But that doesn’t mean you’ve told me everything you know, does it?”
I saved you, I wanted to say, but I didn’t. I hadn’t saved him to earn a marker I could call in. Still, it would have been nice to have a little more trust, even if he was right.
Steve sighed and turned away from me. “I believe you’re trying to do what’s best, son, but if you hold back on me, I’ll see you in jail, you hear?”
I nodded. I’d been in jail before and I’d expected to be back already. It wasn’t much of a threat.
Steve led me into the log cabin, and Ford followed. For a moment I thought they were flanking me, but they were too relaxed for that.
Inside was a store, with racks of skiing, climbing, and camping gear, along with flyers promoting climbing lessons and kiddie camps. Yin’s bodyguards lay around the room, handguns in their fists, their guts and brains all over the floor and walls. There’d been a gunfight. They’d lost.
Steve’s voice was shaky. “Ford found a .32 slug in the wall, but these fellows are all carrying .45-caliber weapons. They fired them, too. See the casings all over the floor? Doesn’t look like they hit what they were aiming at, does it?”
And I’d heard them, too, but I’d thought it was thunder. “What were they aiming at?” I asked, although I was pretty sure I already knew the answer.
“I was hoping you could tell me.”
“Sorry. I can’t.”
“Then come look at this.” He led me behind the counter, through the back office, past a very interesting little goosenecked desk lamp and out onto a weather-beaten wooden deck. There were three more bodies out here. Two were burned and shriveled, lying on scorched sections of the deck. The third was Yin himself. His thick tongue stuck out of his mouth, and his face was purplish. He’d been strangled.
Lying on the deck beside him was his soul sword. It
had been broken into three pieces.
The smell of blood and burned flesh became too much. I stepped off the deck and vomited into the bushes, making a mental note not to eat greasy grilled cheese when I was on society business.
When I turned back, Steve and Ford were giving each other a significant look. I wasn’t sure what it meant, and I didn’t care.
Steve cleared his throat. “Don’t feel bad, son. I did the same thing. Just I knew where the bathroom was.”
I didn’t answer because I didn’t feel bad at all. I’d feel bad when a building full of burned and head-shot corpses didn’t make me puke. I went back onto the deck.
“Do you know him?” Steve asked. It was a simple, dangerous question.
“Not personally,” I said. “You know who he is, too.”
“Sure, but I want to hear what you have to say.”
“I already told you this. His name was Yin, and he was rich. He won the auction but let the sapphire dog get away. The people at the campground were some of the losers.”
Steve’s mouth was a thin, tense line. “Any other bidders I should know about?”
I sighed. If I really did want him on my side, I couldn’t exactly say no. “There was a fat guy from California and an old man from, I think, Germany. I don’t know whether they left town or are still here hunting for the sapphire dog.”
“Any reason you didn’t mention them before?” Steve’s voice was sharp.
“Because this is what they do to people who know too much about them. And how did you know about the campground? I doubt 911 dispatched you.”
“Justy found them. She talked to Ursula, then she called me and I called Bill and Sue direct. Then I called the staties. I gave up on the sheriff hours ago.”
I looked at my watch. Steve looked at his. How long until they arrived? He took out his cell. “Let me get an ETA for the state police.”
I felt a dull ache in the iron gate on my shoulder. It was a warning that someone was using a spell against me, but it didn’t seem important.
“Hi, Marlis,” Steve said into his phone. His voice suddenly sounded vague and dreamy. “Steve Cardinal over in Washaway. How’re the kids? That’s great news. I’m sorry you’ll be working through the festival. We’d have loved to have had you.” He paused a moment. I moved closer to listen. “Trouble? No,” Steve said, “we’re not having any trouble here. Just the usual Christmas spirit.”
The ache in my shoulder became very strong, and I closed my eyes against it. I heard a woman’s voice at the other end of the phone say: “Lots of you folks down in Washaway have been calling all day to wish me a happy Christmas. It’s … it’s …” She sounded a bit confused, as though she was trying to remember something important. “It’s very sweet,” she said at last.
Steve answered her in the only way that seemed logical to me: “Everything is just fine over here. You be sure to give a Christmas kiss to those kids of yours.”
He hung up the phone, and the pain in my shoulder eased. He’d said what he needed to say. He nodded to Ford. “That should get them out here right quick.”
I was glad Steve had made that call. I was glad the state cops knew about the trouble we were having.
I rubbed my face. “Where’s the woman?”
Steve looked startled by that. He turned to Ford, who didn’t have anything to add but a shrug. “Describe her.”
“Short black hair and dark skin. She looked like she was from Indonesia or something. She wore dark suits and had her hair up in a bun like a librarian. She was maybe my age, just a little under thirty. She was part of Yin’s entourage as some sort of researcher, I’d guess.”
“Does she have a name?”
His tone was getting annoying. “Yeah, but I don’t know it.”
“We searched the whole grounds and didn’t find any women. Could he have sent her home before all this?”
Steve was obviously a glass-half-full sort. “It’s more likely that she’s been reduced to a pile of greasy dust, or that she’s gone to work for the people who won the gunfight.”
Steve nodded. “There’s one more thing I want to show you.” He led me off the deck and across the muddy field. Ford was still trailing me. Now it did bother me to have him at my back.
I stopped, turned around, and said: “Hi. My name is Ray.”
He looked a little surprised, but not much. “I’m Ford.”
“Nice to meet you, Ford. This is ugly business, isn’t it?”
“That it is,” he said. He opened his jacket to show me his holstered gun. “Whoever’s responsible for all this shit is going to be shut down.” He gave me a hard stare as he said it, as though I was suspect number one and a wrong answer away from a beating.
“I agree completely,” I said. Then I turned to follow Steve.
We passed a swing set and an open sandbox. As we walked, Steve spoke to me over his shoulder. “When this Yin character rented the Johnson place over on Outpost Road, Pippa did a little checking. He’s so rich I can’t even imagine it. Who could have tempted this missing Indonesian woman away from him?”
I remembered the pirate’s expression on her face when she’d seen the tattoos on my hands. “Some things are more important than money.”
He grunted his agreement.
Steve led me down a trail, which ran alongside the cliff face. The night air was cold enough to sting. After about thirty yards, he stopped.
“Know this fella?”
We were well away from the cabin lights by now, and there were very few stars out. Steve flicked on a heavy flashlight and shone it into the bushes.
At first I couldn’t make sense of what I was looking at—it looked like a jumble of brown clothes. Then Steve played the light across a face.
I recognized the hat and the tan coat. It was Pratt.
Oh, shit.
“Well?” Steve prompted. “Do you know him?”
“Remember when I told you help was coming? Here it is.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Pratt looked like someone had laid a burning fern leaf on his face. “What happened?”
“I’ve seen this before,” Ford said in an authoritative voice. “I spent a couple of years doing missionary work in the high places in the Congo. This man was struck by lightning.”
That startled the hell out of me. I jumped up and scanned the skies around us. I didn’t see any lights, and I didn’t hear an electric hum.
Time to get the hell out of there.
“Settle down, son,” Steve said. He shone the light in my face, blinding me. “We have a bit more jawing to do. Are you still armed?”
“I already gave you my only gun,” I said.
“You’ll have to forgive me if I don’t take that at face value,” he said. “You’ve been holding out on me from the start, haven’t you? Who is this fella, and how was he really killed?”
What I needed was a time-travel spell that could send me back to the moment just before I told Steve help was coming so I could dummy-slap myself into silence. I’d wanted to give him hope, but all I’d done was make him curious.
But I sure as hell couldn’t tell him about the Twenty Palace Society. Information shared is information leaked. “I can’t answer that. I’m sorry.”
I heard Ford pull back the hammer on a gun. I turned and saw that he was pointing a snub-nosed police .38 at me.
Steve rubbed his chin and glared at me. “I’m afraid I’m not giving you any choice, son. I’ll admit that I don’t know a thing about these people.” He waved his arm toward Pratt’s corpse and the cabin behind me. “For all I know, they’re just a bunch of gangsters and crooks. But Penny is my cousin. Isabelle nursed my wife through the final stages of cancer. I was godfather to the oldest Breakley girl. Do you understand what that means in a town like this?”
I didn’t answer. He frowned at me. “Everything. That’s what it means. Now, I want to know everything you know, and if I think you’re holding back, I’m going to arrest you for murder. I’m s
ure I can make it stick. Do you want to talk to me here and now, or through the bars of a cell?”
“I’m not the enemy here.”
“So you say.”
Enough. I liked him, but I didn’t have time to play these games. I turned my back on him.
Ford aimed his revolver at my breastbone, the way you’re supposed to. But he was too close. “Ford, you realize that if you shoot me, the bullet will pass through and hit Steve, right?”
That startled him. He said: “Uh …,” and looked at Steve.
I rushed him, knocking the gun aside. It went off, and the shot echoed against the rocky cliffs around us like the “thunder” I’d heard earlier. I hit him once in the belly. He let out a huge oof and fell sideways into the thicket. His gun landed in the mud.
I spun around and saw Steve down on one knee, his left hand over his head like a child about to be beaten, his right fumbling at his holster. I was on him in two steps. I clamped my hand over his, trapping his weapon, and drew back a fist.
Steve flinched and bared his teeth in fear. Damn. I couldn’t throw that punch.
After a couple of seconds he realized I wasn’t going to hit him. I yanked his pistol out of his hand. He lost his balance and fell back onto the path. I took Ursula’s gun from his pocket, then turned to Ford. He was lying in the thicket, moaning and holding his belly. I picked up his gun, too.
“I’m sorry, Steve,” I said.
“Son—”
“Don’t. I’ll leave your weapons on the hood of your car.” I wanted to say more—about the risk to him and to all of Washaway if he learned too much about magic—but the words wouldn’t come together in my head. I ended up saying nothing.
I jogged back up the path and went around the cabin. There was a brick barbecue pit in the side yard and a stainless steel gas grill. Between them, I saw a tarp lying over something vaguely human-shaped. I knelt beside it and caught a whiff of an outhouse.
I lifted the tarp just enough to see that it was Frail. Blood had trickled from his mouth to his ear; he’d died on his back. On a hunch, I pulled the tarp back farther and saw what I’d expected to see: he’d been stabbed through the heart by something big, like a lightning rod.
Game of Cages Page 23
