The bartender was a college kid, his tank top soaked in a river of sweat as he made his way up and down the bar. He looked like he’d rather be anywhere but here. He brightened up a little as Harmony and Jessie stepped up; they were the only women in the near-empty taproom, and Harmony suspected that wouldn’t change much when the nighttime regulars arrived. His tentative smile turned to a frozen, uneasy mask when they flashed their FBI credentials.
“Special Agent Black, Special Agent Temple,” Harmony said. “And you are?”
“Dave?” he said, like he wasn’t entirely sure.
Jessie gave him a casual smile. “Hey, Dave. First things first, you aren’t in any trouble. We’re not here about that baggie of pot in your pocket.”
His cheek muscles rippled through contortions. He was riding in the front seat of a roller coaster now, soaring high and diving low in the space of a sentence. Harmony gave Jessie a sidelong glance. She didn’t even see a bulge on his hip. Jessie caught her question and subtly tapped the side of her nose.
Jessie’s father had raised his little girl to follow in his footsteps. He’d taught her the essentials, from wilderness survival to hunting and fishing to the best methods of smuggling a naked, bloody victim across state lines. He had inducted her into his one-man cult, his service to the alien King of Wolves, and ritual ordeals left Jessie with the turquoise eyes that only hinted at the corruption burbling in her toxic blood. Her transformation had given her a nose sharp enough to smell fear—or, for that matter, a stray baggie of cheap weed—perfect night vision, and her constant companion: a craving for brutal violence, along with the muscles and speed to inflict it.
The Dixie Butcher was dead, but part of him would always be with her.
“It’s…I’m just holding it for my roommate,” the bartender said. “It’s not really mine—”
“Were you working here last night?” Harmony asked.
His head bobbed. “Yeah, till two. Usual night guy called in sick, so I had to pull a double shift. I closed up.”
Jessie had her phone out. She’d pulled up a pair of pictures: candid, everyday shots of Cooper and Dominguez, tight on their faces.
“Did you see either of these people in the bar?”
He studied the photos, rubbing his chin.
“The guy, no,” he said. “I mean, maybe? But I don’t think so. It was a quiet night, and he’s definitely not one of my regulars. Now, her, she was definitely here. That was the only interesting thing that happened all night.”
“Interesting how?” Jessie asked.
The bartender pointed to the far end of the room, where a clutter of sad-looking tables stood shoved to the wall under a long strip of dirty mirrors.
“She came in around ten, grabbed a chair in the back. Ordered a club soda, nothing else. That’s not too weird, you know, we get some twelve-steppers who come in to meet their friends sometimes. But she stood out, younger than the usual crowd. A couple of guys, they weren’t regulars either, hovered over her table and talked to her for maybe ten minutes.”
“Don’t suppose you have security cameras in here?” Harmony asked.
His response was an incredulous stare and a wave of his hands, inviting her to spot anything worth stealing.
“What’d they look like?” Jessie asked.
“Maybe in their mid-twenties, one white guy, one Latino. The white guy was all tatted up, full sleeves. Cheap ink, too. He came over, said he and his buddy needed to take her out the back, and was that okay.”
“And you let them?” Harmony said.
The bartender shot a look at the screen door and dropped his voice, like he had some hot gossip to dish out.
“Way he explained it,” he said, “his buddy had a thing going on with the lady. The lady’s husband was in his pickup out front, waiting for them to come outside so he could catch ’em in the act.”
“Photographs for the divorce lawyer?” Jessie asked.
“A shotgun,” the bartender said. “Way he explained it, the husband had a jealous streak, a violent temper, and a loaded weapon. I’d love to say nothing like that has ever happened here, but they weren’t the first couple who ever left by the back door. I don’t need my bar turning into a country-western song.”
“And the woman?” Harmony asked. “She went along with that story?”
He shrugged. “I didn’t talk to her. Just the guy with the tats. But I looked right at her, made eye contact, and she didn’t seem worried or like she was having any kind of problem. She walked right along with ’em, totally chill.”
And a civilian bartender, Harmony thought, already stressed and tired from pulling a double shift, wouldn’t notice if the “totally chill” lady had the barrel of a gun pressed to her back. Something occurred to her, another possibility.
“Did either of the men have a case with them?” she asked. “A briefcase, suitcase, rolling luggage? Anything like that?”
He shook his head. “Nah, not that I saw, anyway.”
Harmony and Jessie shared a glance.
“We’re going to need to take a look out back,” Jessie said.
9.
There was nothing behind the Rusty Nail but a desolate patch of scrub and gravel looking out across more vacant lots. Tract houses and bungalows squatted in the near distance, on the far side of a tangled chain-link fence. The gravel strip curled around the side of the bar, meeting up with the lonely road. A generator chugged along, making wet coughing sounds, and a dirt-encrusted sedan with two flat tires and a broken back window rusted away under a vinyl overhang.
“So they didn’t bring the goods,” Jessie said. She took her sunglasses off. Her nose wrinkled as she tasted the stagnant air.
“Two possibilities,” Harmony said, studying the gravel.
“I’m all ears.”
“They knew ahead of time that Cooper was a double agent. They didn’t bring the case because there was never going to be a handoff. They showed her a gun, walked her out back, shoved her into a car, and left.”
“And the other?” Jessie asked.
“They didn’t bring it. They told her—truthfully or not—that it was somewhere else. Either out here or a short ride away.”
Jessie’s eyes glinted, her brows tight. “Motive?”
“Whatever is in that case, it’s most likely a weapon and definitely dangerous. They might not have been comfortable walking around with it. Especially if they thought there was any chance things weren’t on the up-and-up.”
Jessie stood at the edge of the gravel, looking out across the vacant lot. A stray, hot wind picked up a scrap of crumpled newspaper. It rolled like a tumbleweed along the yellowed grass.
“Where the hell was Dominguez?” she said. “He had one job.”
“We don’t know if he made it this far. If Cooper’s cover was blown, they could have picked him off anywhere. For that matter, they might have spotted him.”
“The ‘jealous husband with a shotgun,’” Jessie said.
“Sure. So they hustle Cooper out the back, where Dominguez can’t see, and slip out right under his nose. But that doesn’t explain why he hasn’t reported in. No. We have to assume somebody snatched him, which brings us back to the blown cover theory.”
Harmony was seeing ghosts. They walked out the back door, luminous and blue in her mind’s eye, as she reconstructed the scene of the crime. The two men flanked Agent Cooper, staying close, walking her to a car that shifted and rippled with static—not enough data to picture it clearly.
Fresh tire streaks, black and thick, curved where the gravel met the pavement of the road and veered sharp north. Recent. They left in a hurry. They hadn’t been hurried inside the bar, though, taking their time to talk to Cooper and ease her out back.
“What changed?” Harmony murmured.
She crouched low to get a new perspective. Jessie was midway across the lot, studying divots in the gravel.
“Got some blood here,” Jessie said.
She showed Harmony the spatte
r. Rusty flecks, a small rain of dried crimson in a short, hard flurry.
“Fresh?”
Jessie’s nose twitched. “Recent.”
Sunshine glinted off crumpled metal, halfway buried under a mound of stray gravel. Haphazard, like it hadn’t been deliberately concealed; more likely it had been kicked aside under a sliding shoe. Harmony took a pen from her breast pocket and nudged aside the stray rocks until it came loose.
“Spent brass,” Jessie mused. “Twenty-two. Small gun.”
“Even without a suppressor, a twenty-two can sound like a lot of things. Do me a favor—pop your head in and ask that bartender if he heard something like—”
“Like a car backfiring, a minute or two after they took Cooper out back,” Jessie said. “On it.”
Harmony studied the spatter, how it ended right against the sunken impression of tires. The rest of the blood ended up on your car, she thought. But how did it get there? Who had the gun, and who took the bullet?
In the right hands, a .22 could be a hitman’s tool. She stood up and stepped back. In her mind’s eye, the blue ghosts forced Agent Cooper to her knees. One leveled a handgun, pressed it to the back of her head, and pulled the trigger. Luminous blood guttered from the pencil-sized wound in Cooper’s skull as her body crumpled to the—
No. Rewind.
The blood would have pooled where she landed, not arced, the slug trapped in her brain with no exit wound on the other side. She backed the ghosts up, a murder in reverse as the bullet slid back into the glowing muzzle of the .22.
Was it Cooper’s gun? She played it out again. Cooper’s ghost drew the .22 this time, putting it to the back of the man in front of her, opening fire—
No. That didn’t make any sense. Cooper was a highly trained agent. She never would have fired just once. She would have double-tapped, turned and dropped low, and taken out the man behind her before he could react. Harmony could see it play out, but what she saw didn’t match the evidence.
Rewind.
She took a couple of steps left, under the shade of the dirty vinyl overhang, trying to get a better angle. Her hip bumped the battered old sedan, and broken safety glass crunched under her shoe.
She paused, measuring the distance between the glass and the blood spatter. Jessie came back outside. She squinted up at the sun.
“Got a hit,” Jessie said. “He heard the gunshot, maybe a minute after they stepped outside. He thought somebody blew a tire out on the road.”
Maybe a minute. That scanned. Harmony watched the ghosts leave the bar, passing through Jessie’s body. Their lips moved in silence.
“She knew,” Harmony said. “Cooper knew it was a setup. They lured her out, promising the case was stashed somewhere close, but they came on too strong or they played their hand too soon. She wasn’t about to get into that car; she knew it was a one-way trip.”
“They killed her?”
“No.”
Harmony paced, following the motions of the imaginary phantoms. She reached out just the way she pictured Cooper doing it.
“The guy in front of her had the gun on his belt. She snaked it away from him.”
Cooper’s ghost grabbed the .22. She fired. A phantom bullet punched into the small of the thug’s back and painted the gravel in bright scarlet.
“The one behind,” Harmony said, pantomiming a grab. “He got her arm, wrenched it back before she could finish the job.”
Cooper’s ghost struggled as he pinned her. The one in front turned, still on his feet and bleeding, yanked the pistol from her hand. His buddy hauled her around and shoved her, hard. Cooper flew back and Harmony heard the abandoned car’s window shatter against her shoulders. Cooper collapsed to the gravel, out cold in a puddle of safety glass.
“She went down here,” Harmony said, pointing with her toe. “Not dead. She didn’t die here. They took her. Fast, because one of them was wounded.”
A phantom car, icy blue, kicked up a storm of gravel—burying the spent brass—and left black smears on the road as it turned a hard left and squealed out of sight.
Jessie was already on her phone, pacing as fast as she talked.
“April. Hey. Need you to check all the area hospitals. Looks like Cooper might have shot somebody. Check to see if anybody reported admitting a GSW victim after eleven last night. The vic is male, mid-twenties, either a Latino or a white guy with full tattoo sleeves.”
* * *
April toiled in the belly of the Imperator, mechanical keyboard rattling as she took in the wall of screens. She sat back in her wheelchair, glowing light glinting in her bifocals, and studied the constant streams of data. The parked plane was a sauna; they’d lowered the cargo ramp to let fresh air inside, but it wasn’t helping much.
Jessie’s voice piped in through her headset. April nodded. “On it. One thing we can’t discount: he would likely know that hospitals are legally obligated to report gunshot wounds. He might have gone to an off-the-books surgeon instead.”
“If he knows one,” Jessie said. “It’s worth a look. Call it due diligence.”
Kevin was stationed at April’s side, a few feet down the bank of consoles. He was hunched over his screen, studying dispatch feeds as he flipped between broadcast channels, listening in with a pair of big, bulky headphones. His chair rattled as he sat up with a jerk. He looked to April, waving his hand.
“Is that Jessie? Patch me in, quick!”
April tapped a couple of keys and brought Kevin in on the call. His voice, suddenly breathless, gusted over the line.
“Boss?” he said. “You need to hear this. Chatter on the police band.”
“Is it Cooper?” Jessie asked.
April studied the young man. He’d gone pale, bloodless from whatever he’d overheard.
“Jesus,” he said, “I hope not.”
10.
They weren’t dressed for the beach. Harmony’s stiff shoes sank into white sand and the sun continued its brutal percussion beat, drenching her blouse with sweat under the black shroud of her jacket. Jessie strode at her side, dark glasses on, her lips pursed in a tight and stony line.
There was a crowd up ahead. Beach bunnies squeezed in alongside men with bronzed skin and beer guts dangling over their swim trunks, all craning their necks and standing on tiptoe to see over the police cordon. Uniformed officers held the line. Evidence techs swarmed at their backs, down on the water’s edge. Harmony looked for the man with the most brass on his crisp blue shirt. She flashed her badge.
“Feds?” he said, looking between Harmony’s face and her ID photo. “Who called you?”
Harmony sidestepped his question. “We have reason to believe this situation could be connected to an ongoing investigation.”
Jessie pointed behind him. “May we?”
The cop gave an uneasy glance over his shoulder. Someone had set up a makeshift canopy, white sheets on stakes driven into the wet sand, to shield the evidence while the technicians snapped photos and took measurements. A couple of grim-faced EMTs stood at the cordon’s edge with a stretcher, waiting for permission to take everything away.
“Sure, just, ah…prepare yourselves, okay?”
“Not our first crime scene.” Jessie snapped her credentials shut and brushed past him.
The evidence. That was how Harmony tried to think of a dead body. There was no person there, no soul lingering behind. They were gone, wherever souls went, and only meat remained. That made it easier to take. No matter what condition the body was in, no matter what they’d suffered before the light went out behind their eyes, it wasn’t a person anymore. It was evidence. Evidence meant clues, and clues meant a hope for justice.
This time, she couldn’t do that.
Agent Cooper lay where she’d washed up on the beach. Down on her belly in a wet furrow, where a foamy wave lapped against her matted hair. Her bloodless face was turned to one side, glassy gaze fixed upon some distant and unknowable horizon. Her empty eyes captured the sun’s glow, illuminated; s
he had learned secrets that only the dead know.
One arm splayed out, broken, ligature bruises on her wrist and something deeper, sharper, like a predator had sawed into her flesh in a hunger to get at the marrow in her bones. Something that left long, gaping gashes from her shoulders and all the way down her naked back, gouging her skin in thin, long tears, wounds upon wounds.
Her waist was where she ended. There was nothing underneath but hamburger flesh and jutting, broken bone. Bisected— Harmony thought, then stopped herself. Too clinical. Agent Cooper had been ripped in half.
They’d seen bodies like that before. Vigilant Lock had a database of monsters capable of inflicting that kind of damage, tearing their victims to pieces with mad brute force. This was more than brutality. Harmony couldn’t see Jessie’s eyes behind her glasses, but she knew her partner was drawn to the same detail she was. The mutilation of Cooper’s back wasn’t random. The cuts were precise. Layered. Deliberate. Harmony’s gaze flicked to the wounds on the dead woman’s wrists, where she’d bruised and skinned them raw struggling to get free.
“Jessie—”
“They tortured her,” Jessie said.
* * *
“There was no briefcase.”
Jessie had been riding at Harmony’s side in sullen silence. Her hands clenched into fists, eager to pour out her frustration, but there was no one to use them on. No target, just the image of Cooper’s dead eyes, seared into the skin of her memory.
“At the bar?” Harmony asked. She glanced to the red light up ahead and flicked the Nissan’s turn signal.
“At all. Bobby knew he had an informant in his company.”
“We kept her safe,” Harmony said. “Jessie, we jumped through burning hoops to keep her cover intact.”
“He knew there was an informant, and you know what he does to people who cross him. He can’t leave his rathole, but that doesn’t mean he can’t drop a few bucks on a hired gun or two. He lured Cooper out, he set her up, and he had her killed.”
“What logical reason—”
Right to the Kill (Harmony Black Book 5) Page 7
