“And O’Malley?”
“Nellie’s staying with me, his wife is visiting their older son in Vancouver, and you know Paul. No daughters. Basically, Tremaine’s wife or Anna would be the logical targets unless he just decides to shoot the remaining execs, like he did with Ruiz and Weeks.”
We took a trip over to my house so I could pick up some clean clothes. I simulated Anna’s wardrobe, but I couldn’t actually wear most of it. It was nice to see Nellie and Mike again, too. It had been a boring and lonely week.
Two hours later, we were notified of an attempt to assassinate William Fisher. Fisher escaped, but one of his bodyguards was killed. An hour after that attack, two of Georges Bernard’s bodyguards were shot while protecting him. Bernard took a bullet in the arm, but DS Spencer told us all three were expected to survive.
“In both cases, the bullets came out of thin air. Pong has put all of their executives in lockdown,” Spencer told me over the phone. “He’s taking steps to move them all out of the city.”
“Paul Renard,” I said. “He and Tremaine’s wife and son are the only family members left in town. You probably want to evacuate them, also.”
“I’ll suggest it to Pong,” Spencer said.
“So, what’s next?” Wil asked me with one of his raised eyebrow expressions.
“We put Devon in Anna’s apartment in case Grenier tries for her, and send me out as me for bait. We wouldn’t want him to break into Anna’s without someone there to greet him.”
He looked as though he’d taken a bite of something awful. “I was afraid you were going to suggest something like that.”
“If you have any better ideas, I’m happy to listen. I’ve tussled with Grenier three times, and I haven’t won yet. He may be a coward and a psychopath, but he’s a tough son of a bitch.”
“That chameleon thing you do,” Wil started. “Does it matter what you’re wearing?”
I shook my head. Since we were at my house, with only Nellie and Mike besides us, I projected myself dressed in a floor-length sexy red evening gown, complete with diamonds, heels, and a fancy hairdo.
“Hell, you saw me don a troll image. Clothes don’t matter.”
“So if you were wearing a complete suit of armor, you could completely disguise it?”
“Sure.” I laughed and let the dressed-for-the-evening image drop. “But I have to be able to move. If I’m walking like a robot and clanking like Henry the fifth, it’s not going to look natural.”
He was obviously thinking so hard I was afraid smoke would start coming out of his head.
“Look, Ace, before you sprain that muscle between your ears, let me show you something.”
I led him to my bedroom and opened the closet. Along the back wall, all the clothing was either black, or different shades of camouflage.
“I have bullet-proof clothing out the butt. Kevlar corsets, shirts and pants of ballistic cloth, coats, hats, whatever. I can layer them if the weather isn’t too hot.” I turned and found he was a little closer to me than I was comfortable with, and it took an act of will not to step back. Or maybe step forward. I never could think straight when he got too close.
“I’ve been wearing protective clothing ever since this thing started,” I said. “The business suits I wear to meetings are made of ballistic cloth. Getting shot is not something I take lightly.”
“Grenier likes to shoot people in the head.”
“Yeah, he does. To go back to your plan, yes, I can wear a combat helmet and make it look like I don’t have anything on my head. Just don’t ask me to teleport food through a facemask, because that’s not possible. And when I take it off, it’s going to be visible.”
“I just don’t want anything to happen to you,” Wil said while staring into my eyes. When he looked at me like that, I wanted him to happen to me. But as much as the idea of Wilbur Wilberforce appealed to me, he also scared the crap out of me.
“You’re in my closet,” I managed to say without stammering or my voice shaking too badly. “Out.”
He took a step backward, but also let his gaze travel around.
“You know that the inside of a woman’s closet can cause a man to go blind,” I said. “If you see something that permanently damages you, don’t say you weren’t warned.”
He chuckled and walked out.
Paul Renard was ordered to take a vacation. Wil and I took him to the airport for his flight to San Francisco. Francois Renard shipped Chantelle off to her family in France and then joined his wife in Vancouver. Bernard and his honey went to Dallas, Latour to Atlanta, Fisher joined his wife in Chicago.
Richard O’Malley cancelled Nellie’s performances at The Pinnacle and booked her into the club in Chicago that had the same name.
“Thank you, Libby,” O’Malley said when he came to pick Nellie up at her apartment. We were standing in her living room, and he glanced at the front door—the direction of Olga Raskalova’s apartment. “We probably should have done this a couple of months ago.”
Since he and I were on the friendliest terms we’d ever been on, I didn’t mention that I had been talking to him for months about getting out of town. I figured that was the closest Richard would ever come to apologizing or admitting I’d been right.
“I never dreamed Peter was capable of this, or that he’d continue to pursue things this far. He really is crazy.”
“Yes, he is. Richard, I wish that Donofrio and Pong had called you and the others out to just one of the crime scenes. If they had, you would’ve all left town after Weeks died.”
He shook his head. “Don’t bet on it. People at our level tend to be very stubborn. Remember, I did see Carleton Weeks’s house when his family was killed.”
We shook hands, and I watched as Pong’s men ushered them up to the roof and loaded them into an aircar to take them to the airport.
“What do we do now?” Wil asked.
“We find the bastard and blow his head off. The objective hasn’t changed.”
For the first time in months, I had my house to myself. It felt kind of empty. I was still sleeping at Anna’s, but wasn’t sure whether it was wothwhile to continue. Pong seemed to think it was a plan that hadn’t worked. LeClerc felt the same way. Wil got a call from his boss wanting to know how much longer the SWAT teams would be tied up in Toronto. Everyone was tired of the game except Peter Grenier.
I got a call from Amanda Rollins two days after Nellie left.
“Libby, there are a couple of lycan kids here. They say they have a message for you.”
Wil and Devon drove me over to the orphanage. Two lycans in their early teens sat on the front steps with their new skateboards.
I got out of the car and walked up to them. From their demeanor and the expressions on their faces, I could tell something was wrong.
“What’s up?” I asked.
“Weird dude killed Lady Viv,” one of them answered.
“When?”
“About two or three hours ago.”
“It’s really bad,” the other kid said.
“Did anyone follow him? Does anyone know where he went?”
“He did that disappearing thing.”
“That’s not what I asked,” I said and touched my nose.
They exchanged glances, and one kid told the other one, “See? I told you. She’s smart.”
That was greeted by a sour expression.
“Yeah, he went to The Old Store,” the first kid said. “We’re watching him. If he moves, we’ll know it.”
I pulled out two payment cards and my bank card, transferred twenty creds to each payment card, and handed the cards to them.
“Thanks.” I turned to Wil. “Up for a rat hunt?”
He pulled out his phone and started giving orders.
Meanwhile, I turned back to the boys. “Tell your friends who are watching that I have creds for them, too, as long as they stay on him until I get there.”
They jumped on their boards, and I watched them roll away. A l
ot of the kids at the university had motors on their skateboards, but that required electricity to recharge them. A lot of people in the ghettos stole electricity, but that sort of activity could also get you killed.
We ran to the car and I said, “Let me drive.”
The two men stopped, looked at me, then looked at each other.
“I know how to get there. It will be a lot easier than trying to give directions.”
Wil tossed me the keys. As soon as they were seated, I took off. There wasn’t a hard boundary between the corporate part of the city and the slums. In between were areas where independents and corporate temps lived. Such areas had electricity and potable water, even decent streets in places. The difference was each home had to pay a bill for each service, whereas the corps provided such services for their employees.
An outsider probably couldn’t tell where such neighborhoods crossed over into the slums. The mutant enclave spanned the worst of the slums all the way into some of the corporate areas. It was like that in Chicago, but more like a patchwork. In Toronto, the farther east you went, the crazier it got, until suddenly everything turned green and you weren’t in the city any more.
The orphanage was in one of those boundary areas. Instead of heading back out to the main streets and going around the ghettos to reach the staging point of our previous assault on The Old Store, I took a more direct route.
“You might want to have your pistols handy,” I said as I squealed around a corner and accelerated past an ancient stop sign. “You never know where someone might decide to throw up a barricade.”
“Lovely part of town,” Devon observed from the back seat. “Spend a lot of time down here?”
“Farther east of here is a great lycan meat market,” I said. “A lot of wild meats brought in from outside the city. My dad and Dominik can both do some really incredible things with rabbits. Venison, too.” I dodged pieces of fallen-down building lying in the street by driving for a block with the right wheels on the sidewalk, then took a hard left at the end of the street. “The lycans out in the wilds bring it in to earn credits.”
“Doesn’t eating road kill concern you?” Devon asked.
I laughed. “It’s not road kill. But I understand your concern. They sell the cheap stuff that doesn’t test clean to the small stores scattered throughout the enclave. Hell, if you can’t afford filter masks, you’re not terribly concerned if the only meat you ever eat glows in the dark. Do you think anyone’s testing whether the rats they eat are toxic?”
Wil had his phone to his ear. “The drones are in place,” he announced. “Monitors report they can see your lycan skateboarders on a roof.”
“Smart kids,” I said. “They don’t want to get caught in the crossfire.”
Wil’s head was swinging back and forth. “Where the hell are we?”
I took the next corner in a slide and slammed on the brakes. “This is where we staged the last raid.” Unbuckling my seat belt, I pulled my pistol out of my bag and got out of the car. “Make sure you lock it,” I said, tossing the keys to Wil. “If we’re lucky, it’ll still be here when we get back.”
That got me looks from both of them.
“If you’re that worried about it, tell your people to station one of your drones over it.”
We’d gone less than a hundred feet when Wil said, “The drone monitor says Grenier’s on the move.”
“They can see him?”
“Yes. Well, they can see someone. He fits the description.”
Devon stepped up beside me and showed me the screen on his tablet. It was Grenier. I couldn’t see his face, but I could tell by his posture and the way he moved.
“He’s heading northwest,” Wil said. We were directly west of the store.
“Let’s see if we can head him off.” I turned north at the next street and picked up my pace.
We closed within two blocks of Grenier when I heard Wil curse.
“What?”
“He has a car. Damn! He had it in the garage of an abandoned house. He’s gone.”
“Can’t your drones follow him?”
“For a ways, maybe, but they can’t keep up. There’s a trade off on speed versus weight.”
“They can at least get the number plate. Right?”
Devon showed me his screen again. “No plate.” The car was a taxi. Stolen, obviously, and there were thousands of cars that looked just like it. I made a note to thoroughly check out the driver before I got in a taxi again.
I thought about a roadblock, but there were dozens of ways into the city from where we were. I did call Spencer and tell him.
Wil’s men showed up in two APCs, and we checked out the store, just to see if we could find a reason for Grenier’s visit. The lycan kids came down off their roof and I paid them.
I had just handed a payment card to the last kid, Esmerelda, when an explosion knocked me and the kids off our feet. Before I could orient myself, debris rained down on us, some of it fairly large. I heard Esmerelda cry out, and I crawled on top of her to shield her while keeping my arms covering my head.
When things settled down, I sat up and checked to see if she was okay, then I checked on the other kids. We were about fifty yards from the store, and other than some bruises, everyone seemed to be unharmed.
All that remained of the store was a hole with black smoke pouring out of it. A couple of bodies lay in the street, closer to the blast than kids and I were.
“Stay here,” I told the kids, and made my way toward the blast site. The first man I came to lay face down and unmoving. I felt for a pulse in his neck and found one.
“Medic!” I screamed. “We have wounded!”
I couldn’t see any obvious wounds, but he was half the distance from the store as I had been. I knew help would be coming, so I left him and went to the next man. He was conscious but had a jagged piece of wood as long as my forearm embeded in his shoulder.
Someone called my name.
“Over here!”
Wil staggered out of the cloud of dust and smoke, and came toward me. I jumped up and ran to him. I could see a cut on his left arm above the elbow that was bleeding freely. Grabbying a scarf from my bag, I wrapped it around the wound and tied it tight.
“Are you injured anywhere else?” I asked.
He shook his head, but I could tell he was as dazed as I felt.
Two medics tended to the wounded, and a helicopter came to take the men who were injured the worst to the hospital. All told, the bomb killed three and injured six, including Wil.
“It wasn’t a tripwire,” Devon told me as we watched the walking wounded board one of the APCs. “Pressure plate. I don’t know what he used as an explosive, but that was a hell of a big bomb.”
I insisted that we go to Lady Vivien’s place. By the time we got there, it had been looted. I expected that. No matter how much respect those in the neighborhood had for her, once she was dead, her possessions passed to whoever got to them first.
We found her in the surgery. The sadistic bastard tied her to the table and carved her up. I took pictures for LeClerc and Spencer.
“Cut her loose,” I told Wil and Devon. “Wrap her in some clean sheets. I’ll see if I can borrow a couple of shovels.”
“You’re going to bury her?” Devon seemed surprised.
“She was a human being. A healer. She helped hundreds of people. Don’t you think she deserves a little dignity?”
The lycan kids were hanging around outside.
“Do you know anyone with a shovel?” I asked them. “We need to bury her.”
The kid who seemed to always act as their spokesman said, “We can go ask. How much you willing to pay?”
Esmerelda walked over to him and hit him. A full-fisted roundhouse to the jaw that knocked him down.
“Oww! What you do that for?”
“Show some respect,” Esmerelda said. “Now, go, get some shovels.” She waved her arm at the boys, and they scattered. The boy on the ground scooted away
from her, jumped to his feet, and ran off down the street.
“Think they’ll be back?” I asked.
“They better.”
I figured she was about thirteen, about the same age within a year or two of the boys, and about the same size as the boys. Obviously she was going to be an alpha female.
“Have you gone to Miz Amanda?”
“Yeah. The teachers put me in classes with the very little ones. Kids that don’t know nothin.”
“You going back?”
“Hell yes. I don’t know nothin either. Teacher told me about Karen McCandless. If she can do it, I can do it.”
I smiled. “Yes, you can.” Karen McCandless was a lycan and the owner of the wild-meat butcher shop I’d mentioned to Wil and Devon. She was in her thirties and well on her way to being a wealthy woman. She also spearheaded a number of initiatives to coordinate and help the lycan community in Toronto.
Within fifteen minutes, at least a dozen men showed up with shovels, most in the company of women and children. Wil and Devon brought the body out, and the local people led us to a vacant lot with a number of other graves. Working in shifts, it took them two hours to dig the grave. We lowered Lady Vivien in, and several of the locals said a few words about her. There were over a hundred people there—lycans, vampires, a couple of trolls, and people who looked completely human.
Then we walked the mile back to our car. It was still where we left it, which was the best thing that happened all day.
On our way, Spencer called. “We have the taxi. A witness was able to identify Grenier as the driver. He abandoned it, and another man picked him up in a blue pickup truck.”
“Hitchhiking?”
“No. The pickup was waiting for him.”
Wil didn’t ask me if I wanted to drive on the way back into the civilized part of the city. Devon drove, and I just sat in the back seat like a good girl. But after his second wrong turn, I was afraid he might even get me lost, so I gave him directions after that.
Chameleon's Challenge (Chameleon Assassin Series Book 3) Page 19
