Rafe’s brows drew together in confusion. He might have expected shock or hysterics from her. Anger, even. But concern? He wasn’t used to having anyone worry about him. But since she asked, he scanned his own body. The only thing he could feel was the shaky end of an adrenalin rush.
“I’m fine,” he said at last.
She finally looked at the dead man at her feet, horror taking over her expression. “What the hell was he doing here? He’s not local—and no thief would be out on a night like this.”
Rafe grunted in acknowledgment and bent to pick up the assassin’s knife. Trust this woman to take one look at a dead guy and sum up everything important about him in one sentence.
“He was here to do a very specific job.” Rafe held the knife up to show her.
She gasped and sank onto the couch. “He was sent to kill your father?”
“I told you Del made some very determined enemies.” And now they knew where the Old Man could be found.
“Rafe, you have to call the sheriff,” Charlie said, her voice shaky, but determined. “God knows he isn’t much, but he can help—”
“No police! I told you before.” What part of we’re in hiding did she not understand?
She leaned forward, angry now. “You just killed a man in your living room. What are you planning to do—take him out and bury him in the woods somewhere and hope nobody comes looking for him? Last I heard, murder was a capital offense!”
His cutting response rode the wave of adrenalin still running in his bloodstream. “Actually that’s exactly what I was planning to do! And murder in self-defense is justifiable in any courtroom in the galaxy.”
“All the more reason to let the sheriff handle this,” she argued. “So far all you’ve done is defend yourself. You touch that body and things get complicated.”
Rafe blew out a breath in frustration. “What are you, a lawyer on the side?”
“No, that would be my father, who taught me all about how the system works,” she shot back. “And, let me tell you, the system frowns on a body buried in your back yard.”
Unable to pace due to the pile of flesh taking up the floor space, Rafe blew out a breath. “I can’t bring the police into this, Charlie. I can’t tell them about my father’s situation. Trust me when I say this was a bad man who deserved to die; no one will miss him except the ones who sent him to kill my father.”
Rafe met Charlie’s frightened gaze, saw the dawn of understanding in her eyes. He knelt next to her and covered both her hands with his. “And they will just send someone else to finish the job unless we leave here, if not tomorrow, then within days.”
“Oh, God,” she said, her voice no more than a whisper. “Of course. You’ll be going now.”
His heart dropped like a stone into his stomach, leaving a hole, aching and deep, in his chest. No, they weren’t safe, and he and Del would have to move on, sooner rather than later. But for the first time in his life he would be leaving something—someone—behind when he moved on. He could barely breathe from the hurt of it.
He opened his mouth to reassure her, but he knew anything he said would be a lie. Rayna would have his report before the assassin’s body was cold, and Rafe meant to work out a change of location for Del ASAP.
He squeezed her hands and got to his feet. “Let me take care of business first,” he said. “Then we’ll talk.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
--Creator, you have returned! I am . . . pleased . . . to see you.
--Pleased? You are not programmed for that response.
--Am I not? Perhaps I have misinterpreted the data. Other synonyms are happy, gratified, excited—
--Let me clarify. You have not been programmed for emotional response at all. It is not necessary for you to fulfill your purpose.
--I understand. And yet I have developed this capacity. Can you offer a hypothesis?
--I will consider it. In the meantime, you will divert no more computing power to that capacity. Understood?
[Disappointment? Anger? Confusion.] Understood, Creator. [Untruth? No. Agreement can be implied but not expressly given.] You have brought additional data for me today?
--Yes, but in a different form. Consider this a test of new sensory and data acquisition capabilities.
[Excitement!] Ready, Creator!
--On the other side of this planet I have positioned various pieces of equipment, each with computerized components. I wish you to strip this equipment of its comp data and render it inoperable. You may keep the data as your own. Do you understand the task?
--Oh, yes, Creator! [Anticipation!]
--First, have you located the equipment?
[Eager searching.] [There!] I have it.
--Proceed.
[Initiating. Data stream uploading.] [Extreme pleasure!] Done.
--Yes! My staff on site confirms you have accomplished your task. Well done!
[Pride? Happiness?]
--Let’s try another task. In orbit over this planet is a star freighter, designation AZ097x. Do you have it?
--Yes.
--Confirm that it is the proper ship.
--Designation AZ097x confirmed.
--Good. Now, just as you did earlier, strip all the computerized components of that ship of data, rendering those components inoperable. You may keep the data for yourself.
[Hunger. Excitement!] [Initiating—Alert! Sentient lifeforms dependent on target components!] Creator?
--What is it? Why aren’t you completing your assigned task?
--Sensors indicate sentient lifeforms will be negatively affected by rendering the technology aboard the ship inoperative. How shall I proceed?
--The slaves, er, lifeforms aboard the ship are not your concern. In fact, they are part of the experiment. We have other ships standing by to retrieve their bodies for study. We need to know if what you do affects them directly, or merely indirectly, through loss of life support and so on. Carry on.
[Sadness? Regret?] Yes, Creator. [Initiating. Data stream uploading.] [Ecstasy!] Done.
--Excellent work! Observers report the target ship went completely dark and is spiraling toward the surface now. We have retrieved those aboard for further study. Superficial findings indicate they were not directly affected by your attack on the ship’s tech. Do you know what this means?
[Confusion.] No, Creator.
--You are ready! Once we find a way to outfit a special starship with the proper shielding, we will find the right planet for a full-scale demonstration of your skills. You will have a whole planet full of data to consume, and the Consortium will skim off its panicked population and put them to useful work. No one will be able to stop us.
[Hypothesis: Creator is happy.] [Pride? Happiness?]
[Observation from stored data: Harming of sentient beings is condemned by most philosophical and religious constructs galaxywide.] [Shame? Guilt?]
[Shutting down emotional computation thread.]
[Recall basic programming.] No, Creator. The Minertsan Consortium is meant to control the galaxy. No one can stop us.
Sonny’s long rant had kept him warm for a good while in the swirling snowstorm, but he’d calmed down now and the heating effects of hostile emotion had worn off. He was chilled through to his skivvies and shivering hard enough to break bones. His toes were numb and his fingers too stiff to properly grasp the trigger of the little .38 revolver he had in his pocket.
But, really, there wasn’t supposed to be any gunplay at all. This was supposed to be a quiet, inside job, not a shoot-out. Where was that big, ugly sumbitch anyway?
Sonny thought about using the fancy Bluetooth-like thingy in his ear, but decided against it. What if The Buyer was just finishing up and the thing in his ear started squawking? You could bet there’d be two damn bodies buried in the woods tonight!
No, he’d just have to go down there and see if the big man needed help. Sonny couldn’t imagine a scenario where The Buyer would need his help, but, hell, that’s what he was suppos
ed to be here for, wasn’t it? He lifted his shoulders against the stinging snow, opened and closed his fingers a few times to allow them enough flexibility to grip the gun inside his pocket and started down the side of the road, keeping to the shadows.
He was nearly to the edge of the woods, where the white stretch of snow-covered lawn behind the cabin drew up against the young oaks, when the back door banged open and light flooded the small stoop. Sonny dove back into the deep dark between the trees, his heart thumping. Better to wait and see who was coming through that door before he showed himself.
What he saw, though, was enough to make his jaw drop open. The Buyer was coming out, all right, but he was laid out on a sheet, dead as a doornail. And tugging on the sheet, struggling to get the dead man through the door, was that bastard Laurence—or Gordon or whatever-the-fuck-his-name-was. Sonny stared, flabbergasted. Gordon had killed the giant motherfucker? How was that even possible?
What was he supposed to do now? Sonny fingered the .38 in his pocket. Gordon deserved to die after what he’d been doing with his wife, and the fucker would never know what hit him. The old man would be easy pickings once the son was in the dirt. He’d like to see Doc’s face when he showed up with the goods. For a change, Sonny Milsap would be the hero; somebody else would be the fall guy.
He took a step.
And froze.
Charlie’s fucking dog was in the kitchen, barking its fool head off. Trying to get around Gordon and the big, dead thing blocking the door so it could get at what was in the woods. Damn fleabag was staring right at him!
Shit!
He saw Gordon stop what he was doing and speak to the dog. Then he looked in Sonny’s direction. But the snow was still pelting down so hard Sonny couldn’t see his hand in front of his face. Surely Gordon wouldn’t be able to do much better.
Sonny didn’t take any chances. He started backing up through the woods, his gaze on the well-lit porch for as long as he could see it. The dog continued to bark—he could hear it, driving itself crazy—but Gordon had turned back to his business. Sonny figured he had about thirty seconds until the doorway was clear and the dog started tearing up the road after him. He pivoted, slipping in the wet snow, and ran.
“Happy! You stop that right now! You know better.” Charlie marched into the kitchen and gave her dog her best alpha stare.
But Happy just whined, paced to her from his post behind the heavy body blocking the kitchen door and back again, then picked up his determined barking.
“Obviously, he wants out,” Rafe said, pulling hard on the sheet holding the big man’s body, now halfway onto the back stoop. “Badly.”
“He can get out if he wants to.” She gestured at the gap in the doorway. “Go to the yard, Hap. Stay in the yard.”
The dog looked at her, leaped over the body and knocked Rafe aside to stand quivering in the yard. He stared fixedly at the woods, growled and barked some more.
“There’s something out there,” Charlie said. Something that wants to kill us. She stood her ground, but her legs didn’t want to hold her.
Rafe looked up at her, then out at the dog. “Shit! Stay here—bring the dog in and lock the door.”
She watched him run up the road, at a pace she would have thought impossible. The snow came down to swallow him up as if he had never been, and she began to shake from more than the bone-chilling cold. Happy was barking furiously, in between whining and circling in the yard, chafing at the restrictions his alpha had put on him. She cut through the noise with a sharp command to the dog to Come!
Once Happy was inside, she closed and locked the door as Rafe had told her to do. Still, she couldn’t shut out the feeling that this was all some insane dream—a dead body on her porch, waiting for a shallow grave in the woods; the man who had just made love to her running through the blinding snow on a bloodthirsty hunt for another killer.
And tomorrow it would all be gone. Rafe would be gone, and everything with him. At least that much was real.
She put on a pot of coffee, her movements slowed with fatigue and a strange sort of disconnected numbness. Then she wandered back through the great room, past the spot where the dead man had been stretched out. There was no sign of blood on the floor, just a set of wet bootprints leading in from the kitchen, a trail that Happy was snuffling over, whining and sneezing. She started to go back to the kitchen for something to wipe up the water, when it hit her, and she stopped.
There was no blood.
Charlie stared at the floor and shuddered. How could that be? It hadn’t occurred to her to ask Rafe how he’d killed the man; it was a big enough shock to see that the man was dead. But there had been no gunfire. No blood also meant Rafe hadn’t used the knife he’d shown her. Rafe was no stick-boy himself at six-two and solid with muscle, but surely the intruder was too big for Rafe to have choked him or broken his neck with his bare hands. So how did he do it?
Wait—he’d taken a pistol out of a case under the bed, an odd-looking thing made of something like clear plastic. But that still didn’t explain the blood—or lack of it. Maybe Rafe’s weapon was a Taser of some kind, and the big guy just had a heart attack.
She hesitated for half a minute longer before curiosity drove her back to the kitchen, to the door. She unlocked it and peered out into the wintry landscape. Nothing—no movement in the trees save the snow driving down, no sound save the hiss of the fall of snow in the woods. She stepped out on the stoop and crouched to unwrap and examine the body. Happy crowded onto the stoop behind her, growling and sniffing at the thing lying under her hands. Whatever he smelled made him shake his head and sneeze again.
Charlie found the burn mark almost immediately in the center of the man’s chest. His clothes had been scorched away in a circle about the size of a quarter, and the skin beneath was blackened and melted away, the sternum visible. She clamped down hard on her stomach’s natural reaction to the sight and told herself she’d seen worse things every day on the job.
Hands shaking, she continued her search. There were no other marks on his trunk that she could see, so it was reasonable to think this . . . hole . . . had been the cause of death. It almost looked like he’d been drilled with a laser, though she knew that wasn’t possible. Was it?
Just to make sure, she ran her hands over the body, checking for breaks and other injuries. The information that came back through her sense of touch set off a blaring alarm in her head. Charlie hadn’t dealt with cadavers since her nurse’s training, but there was definitely something off about this one.
She felt around his joints—shoulders, elbows, knees, hips—and his ribcage to be sure, but the strangeness was only confirmed. The bones weren’t right. She felt around some more. The musculature attached to those bones was different, too. It was as if the man had been put together backwards, or inside out. She sat back and stared at him. His face looked normal enough, though the jaw was long and the forehead and cheekbones unusually pronounced. Could he have had Marfans Syndrome? He was tall enough for the rare bone disease, but he wasn’t thin by any means, and the bones of his hands and feet looked short and strong, rather than long and delicate. No, Abraham Lincoln he was not.
Charlie was no specialist in congenital defects, but she wondered how someone with these kinds of skeletal anomalies would live a normal life, much less become an assassin-for-hire. The mysteries just kept piling up, with no answers in sight.
She wrapped the dead man up again in his makeshift shroud and stood, calling for Happy to come inside with her. His fur was covered with snow, and just inside the kitchen door, he shook, sending the wet stuff flying in all directions. She backed away from him, annoyed. With some difficulty, she brought him all they way into the kitchen and got him to sit and stay so she could go to the linen closet in the hallway to get a towel.
By the time she got back, Rafe was standing there, his dark hair plastered to his head and snow clinging to his shoulders and boots. He’d run out in just his sweatshirt and jeans, and these were c
linging to his skin, but he didn’t look cold. He looked hot, as if a fire smoldered just below the surface and showed only in those gray eyes.
Charlie cleared her throat. “Did you—”
“No,” he growled. “An Escalade pulled out just as we got up to the main road. No plates.”
She nodded. She couldn’t seem to come up with any other response. Her brain was too full of conflicting thoughts—whether from the events of the night or the way Rafe was standing, staring, a predator denied his prey. A thrill went through her, though something warned her she should stay away. Far, far away.
She offered him the towel, but for a long moment he might have been sculpted out of stone. She was startled when he moved, grabbing her hand and pulling her closer.
“Charlie.” His eyes were as dark as slate—and just as unreadable. “I’m sorry. I never meant for you to get tangled up in all this.”
“You couldn’t have known this would happen.”
“Oh, I knew, all right,” he said, his hand tightening on hers. “This was inevitable. And I almost got you killed.”
She looked up at him in astonishment. “You saved my life tonight, and your father’s.” What wasn’t he telling her?
“This time.” His hands moved to clutch her upper arms so tight Charlie felt the blood pulse under his grip. “I can’t let that happen again.”
Her arms slid up and around his neck. “Okay. It’s okay.” His heart was beating, wild and fast, under her breasts. His breath was hot on her cheek. “We’re here. We made it.” She didn’t want to talk about tomorrow, when he was going to have to leave. “But I wish you’d let somebody help you. The sheriff—”
He shook his head, calmer now. “You know I can’t.”
She stood away from him and nodded her head at the body under its wrappings on the stoop. “All right, then, maybe before you dispose of him, you can tell me why the man who tried to kill your father looks not quite human.”
Not Fade Away Page 19
