Salvage: A Shadow Files Novel

by A. J. Scudiere

  The problem was, no one was out here but herself and Walter. For the briefest of moments, she imagined letting him walk away. She thought about all the times they'd spent together. She remembered going on digs and finding a human skeleton of her own. Looking back, she'd been all of eight. She understood now that her grandfather and Shray had pointed her in the right direction and surely had already known the skeleton was there. But they let her claim the find, and she'd spent all day carefully brushing away the dirt and sifting for finger bones exactly as she'd been taught.

  With clearer insight, she understood what a very odd thing that was for an eight-year-old to know—but it didn't matter. It was what she had known. She still couldn’t say for certain if her parents had foisted her off on her grandfather and he'd willingly taken her, or if they'd simply let their constantly begging daughter finally get on a plane and go see the man that she'd probably loved best all her life, and now he was here in the woods.

  She knew who he was even without being able to hear his voice. Without being able to see his face. She could understand by the outline of him, the shape of him, the way he gestured. There was no doubt in her mind that it couldn’t be anybody else. If she stood up and let him see her, he would have no doubt to who she was either. It was something she considered. The way the two men were talking, gesticulating off in the distance, illuminated slightly by the moon, GJ understood Shray was telling her grandfather that he'd found her inside the compound.

  She could see her grandfather shaking his head. The hat he always wore, apparently even now into the deep of woods at night, made it very clear what his motion was. She could almost hear Shray saying, "Not only was GJ here, but she is now a member of the FBI. A card-carrying agent, and she was here for them."

  Walter tugged on her again, and GJ realized she'd risen up ever-so-slightly to get a better glimpse of the two men. Shit, she thought. She needed to keep her training foremost in her mind before Walter took it upon herself to remind GJ of the same. Training said you trusted your partner. Training said you let the partner with the most experience in the situation lead the way. Training said you recused yourself if you were too involved in the case.

  Well, she was at least going to recuse herself from making some of the tactical decisions. She turned to Walter and whispered, "Your call."

  47

  Walter took a deep breath. There was absolutely no way this wasn't going to suck monkey balls. They were about to arrest her partner's treasured family member and if they didn't arrest him, then it would suck worse.

  However, she had to make a plan. She had to stop and think that this wasn't GJ's grandfather, this was just a man in the woods talking to another man in the woods.

  The second man had already been identified as a leader of a group coming to kill a family at their own home compound. The new man was identified as higher up than the one they'd already interrogated.

  Stopping for a moment, she decided to be dead certain before she moved forward. And she asked herself: did she have any doubts as to what was going on? Unfortunately, even when Walter thought about it in every possible light, she didn't. She wished GJ could have put a microphone on Shray; she heard little now but could see was the two men gesturing wildly. She wanted to wait, so for now, that was the plan.

  For any subject, she should make sure that she had ample evidence before she moved in for the arrest. If she arrested him and he could state that he hadn't yet done anything illegal, then she couldn't yet get him into jail by way of a court of law.

  She still had her doubts about how courts of law would be useful in her dealings via the NightShade division. Or what would happen if anybody had to say anything in court about the fact that the de Gottardi-Little family was known for shape-shifting into werewolves. That trial would devolve very quickly, but she was still interested in getting this man out of here, getting him in jail, and breaking up his band of merry men with silver-bulleted hunters.

  She was waiting for him to make a move.

  She and GJ sat like that, crouched, silent, beyond the line of sight of the two men there in the woods. Sadly, they were slightly too far away see anything useful.

  Walter made a motion to GJ and they scooted slightly forward. It took a while. The two men talked animatedly as the women moved in. In Walter's imagination—by the time they were close enough to hear—the two men would likely say, "Great plan," and walk off and she and GJ would have gotten nothing, but she had to try. So slowly, step by step, GJ and Walter crept forward through the woods, headed for the two men.

  Walter's goal initially was to get close enough to hear. By the time they arrived, it appeared the men were done with the preliminaries. Walter assumed they had already had the discussion about GJ. The way that Murray Marks reacted at first, it appeared that he hadn’t liked what Shray had to say. Walter did hear at least a few final snippets.

  "Do they have any of our people?"

  "Not that I'm aware of," Shray said. "Though we do have a couple who haven’t yet checked in."

  Walter wanted to pump her fist in the air. Good, because they'd sure gotten a couple of good shots on some of the family members. They'd fired live rounds at her. And silver bullets or not, Burt de Gottardi was correct: it would kill you as well as any other bullet would. She'd taken out one of their people and probably one of the howls in the distance had been another one or two going down. She listened.

  "Can we gather who we have?" GJ's grandfather asked. "We need to decide on our next move."

  That turned her plans immediately upside down. She didn't know why she hadn't thought of it except maybe just that this was a shit situation. If the hunters gathered the troops, if they reorganized and came back again, there was going to be another live-round gunfight and that wasn't something either side could afford. Even though she didn't like these people, even though they were the perpetrators and she had gladly returned fire when fired upon, she was not going to let another showdown happen if she could avoid it.

  That was her job, first and foremost. It was an interesting shift from being a Marine, from being sent out with zero control into an area where bullets already flew to being a lone wolf of her own, able to make decisions, and sometimes stop the bullets before they happened. There was something satisfying about it when she’d completed her task in Hogan's Alley. But here in the real world, where shit was already way more fucked up than any exercise they'd run, Walter wasn't so sure.

  Turning to GJ, it was even more important now that she keep her voice low because if they were close enough to hear, then they were close enough to be heard. Walter said to her partner, "We have to get them now. I want to use you as bait."

  48

  GJ gulped. She rarely actually gulped, but this was probably the most nerve wracking thing she'd ever have to do. Sure, she'd successfully defended two theses to a room packed full of strangers while professors tore apart her ideas and made her stand up and defend all the research she'd done. But now, walking forward in the woods was far, far more difficult.

  First, as per the plan, she and Walter separated so that by the time the men saw her—when they looked back to where she'd come from—it would not appear there was another person with her. She also, as she pointed out to Walter, needed to appear that she'd walked a straight line from the compound. Anything else would look suspicious. So her path needed to appear as if Shray had escaped and she'd simply followed the man. Why no one had shot at her, she would say she didn't know. Maybe because she was Murray Marks’ granddaughter.

  Slowly and carefully, and for the first time here on her own, she separated herself from Walter and headed the opposite direction. There would have been something comforting if she could have heard Walter moving through the trees and the brush. It would have allowed her an auditory method of pinpointing her partner, but she had nothing. Though she had a tracker on Shray Menon, she had nothing on Walter, and Walter was silent as a ghost. GJ could only hope that she was half as good.

  Periodically, the t
wo women stopped and looked for each other, but by the third or fourth check, GJ had lost sight of Walter, either it was that dark or there were too many trees in the way—or maybe Walter was just that good. She saw no signal now and she was on her own. She was going to have to make the call of when to stand up and start walking toward the two men. Still, she made a few more stops and starts, getting herself to a point she was pretty certain was directly between them and the main house of the compound. Then, with several slow, deep breaths, she stood up behind a tree and slowly began casually walking toward them. She made it only five steps before her grandfather, looking over Shray's shoulder, saw her.

  "GJ!" he cried out with excitement as though he was happy to see her. But there was only a split second when she had her grandfather back, then she watched the expression fall off his face as he realized that his excitement in seeing his granddaughter was now forever altered.

  "Grandpa," she said—the name she'd always called him when she was happy. This time though, his response was much more subdued; a simple nod as he waited for her to approach. She considered putting her hand on the butt of her gun and she wondered if she'd ever really known this man. All the travels she’d had with him, the months she'd stayed with him, every summer, the breaks from school, all the phone calls during college where he kept her from giving up and giving in to demanding professors, told her how he dug in the African desert looking for human bones that were sometimes four, ten, twenty thousand years old. So when she had a bad day or a long day or a day that had simply worn her to her own bones, he'd been there. And now?

  "Grandfather," she said. This time, it was the more formal, more serious name. She was close enough to reach out if she wanted; lean forward and touch the sleeve of his coat. He wore a gray sport jacket tonight and gray pants—dark colors to blend in with the night. So even though he looked like he could have walked directly off a college campus, he also fit here. And that was something she hadn't known before today.

  She reminded herself that he hadn't been lecturing at the Sorbonne and he had lied directly to her. He had also, somehow, been in and out of the lab without Eleri or Donovan finding him, and that was something she hoped to be able to investigate later. But how many times had he lied? She held on to that thought tightly. How many times had she helped him perhaps excavate a human skeleton that he had then stolen and kept for his own collection?

  "Grandpa," she said it again. And this time when he looked at her, his expression had completely devolved to sadness.

  "GJ. Is what Shray's telling me true?"

  She shrugged, knowing better than to answer questions like that. If she hadn't been smart enough on her own, interrogation classes had trained that out of her. "What is it he’s saying, Grandpa?"

  She wanted to throw Shray under the bus. Not that she truly wanted to, but of all her choices here, that one was the easiest.

  He asked with incredulity, "You've joined the FBI?"

  GJ nodded. It was true, and she wasn't going to call Shray a liar when it would make her the liar instead. This time.

  "When did this happen?"

  "Almost six months ago, Grandpa. They called me."

  "But why you?" he asked. The disbelieving tone of his words stung, cutting her deep. She held on to it. She was going to need that pain to drive her in the harsh moments to come.

  "They called me because I have an exemplary scientific background. They like agents from all walks of life. They called me, Grandpa, because I stole bones from an FBI investigation for my own thesis. Sound familiar?" She was angry and she should have controlled it better, but she flung that one out. I am truly my grandfather's granddaughter, she thought. The only difference was they'd caught her early and converted her. It was something she didn't think she'd be able to do for him.

  He nodded a little. "Six months. You've been doing this for six months and you didn't tell me?"

  A shrug was all she could offer again.

  "You didn't tell your mother or father?"

  She shook her head again. "What would you have said, Grandpa? You would've told me not to go."

  He shrugged a little at that, the same as she had in response to his question. She didn't rehash it with him. They both understood. Being a police officer, an FBI agent, anything other than an academic scientist, was something no one in the family understood. She'd simply taken an exemplary childhood career and turned herself into an instantaneous black sheep. No wonder she hadn't told anyone.

  Truth time, she thought. "Grandpa, I have to take you in. I have to arrest both of you. I know what you're doing out here."

  "You don't know anything," he snarled the words accusingly.

  "I know all kinds of things, Grandpa. I know that you're part of this organization. I know that you've been casting silver bullets. I know that you're trying to get into the de Gottardi-Little house and I know what you're after in there."

  That made his head snap back. Shray's, too. For a moment, she watched a play between them as her grandfather glared at his assistant and Shray shook his head. No, he was not the one who'd given GJ that information, but she was not going to let him off the hook. If she could turn them against each other, this might go down a little more smoothly. So she tried to drive the wedge.

  "We got Shray. He talked to us, Grandpa. He told us all kinds of things."

  "I didn't talk to them," the smaller man insisted. "I told you I talked to you.”

  “But I told you I wasn't there. I haven't been any closer than this tonight.”

  “I saw you there!"

  In their gestures, GJ saw what they'd been saying the first time around. They were merely repeating it now and she was grateful for the insight it gave her. Another wedge to drive between them, because Shray believed that he had—according to Christina Pines and everything he’d said to her—surely seen Dr. Murray Marks stride into the room. GJ understood what happened, but again she was not going to defend him.

  "He told us so much, Grandpa. He told us that you were running this organization. He told us how many people you had out there. He told us what you were after." Okay, the last part was a bit of a lie, but GJ didn't regret it.

  Her grandfather looked more and more concerned, turning on Shray Menon as he did. His assistant began to hold his hands up and back slightly away, a position of self-defense. A position that he couldn't defend, even though he was right. "I didn't tell them," the man reiterated, the heat growing in the undertones of his voice.

  "How else could she have learned? That's exactly the things that you know."

  GJ stood there for a moment. Then she repeated in the silence that ensued, "Grandfather, Shray, you're both under arrest. I have to take you in. Please come quietly. I don't want this to get ugly."

  Her grandfather almost turned and laughed. "You can't arrest me."

  And GJ looked to Shray, letting his expression say it all. She'd already taken him down once.

  "Grandfather, we know everything.” She tried another tactic here. "How do you think we came out here and found you? We had Shray, we interrogated him, and then we let him escape. When they came for him, our people didn’t try to keep him. They fired random shots." She looked to Shray then. "Why do you think it was so easy to escape? Do you really think you just walked out of a compound that was that heavily fortified?"

  And for the first time she saw it dawn on Shray just what he might have done.

  "You led me here,” she repeated, but didn't let the idea linger. She was going to blame him for as much as she could. Every idea she could wedge between them was another point in her favor. Walter was out there somewhere and GJ was wondering just how this was going to go down. But she had to keep talking.

  "Shray, put your hand in your pocket. We put a tracking and radio device on you. We heard everything you two said. You can't get out of this."

  As she watched, the man did as he was told, finding first one empty pocket and then, in the second, the small device she’d placed on him. Only if he was very much up to
date on his spycraft would he recognize that there was no recording implement on it at all. It was merely a GPS locator, but she had her fingers crossed that he couldn't tell the difference, not on sight, not in the woods at night in the dark. He held his hand out flat while looking at the tech, inadvertently showing it off to her grandfather. He looked horrified and GJ pushed the wedge a little further.

  "He led us here, Grandfather. He led me directly to you. I walked out of the house and followed him. It's why I'm here. And I didn't bring my other agents because I'm desperately trying to have this go down as politely as possible."

  "You think arresting me and throwing me in jail is going to be polite?" Her grandfather growled. GJ understood. He was going to fight. And if he fought, she had to fight.

  That was when Shray Menon threw the tracking device into the trees and turned and bolted.

  GJ surprised even herself with the speed at which she drew her weapon, turned, and shot at the man. She hadn't necessarily made the decision. It had simply happened. Training in action, she thought as she watched the red bloom on Shray’s back as he fell. She turned back to her grandfather before she could let it sink in what she'd just done.

  The man she’d likely just killed had babysat her. He'd taught her so many things. He'd watched out for her, protecting her from the older grad students on site who wanted to tease or harass a little girl, and then a blooming teenager. Now she'd shot him in the back.

  Still there was no Walter. Now it was just her and her grandfather, the smell of the fired bullet between them. Hers was not silver.

  "Grandfather," she said, shocked by the steadiness of her own voice. It must have been bolstered by her anger; anger at what they'd done, anger that her grandfather and Shray had both lied to her for years, anger that Shray had made a bolt for it and had forced her into the position of firing on him. It wasn't her fault that she was a really good shot these days.