by Lumen Reese
“You don't think this is SHEEP?” Jericho asked.
“If he were, he would have let me die, wouldn't he? I'm the company's pawn, I'm trying to find him. He used me to find the girl's body, he knew someone was coming to kill me and came to save me, and now he's giving me the chance to leave before anything else happens. Which makes me think something else is going to happen.”
“Well, maybe he just loves an underdog,” Spicer chimed, smiling. “Everybody loves an underdog.”
I gritted my teeth and asked, “What about the man who tried to kill me?”
Spicer offered me the file he was holding, and we traded.
“His name was James Gordon Green, and he was an extra in this place for four years. He had no known transgressions since entering the Four Quarters, though he did have an assault charge from when he was twenty-two. He was from Chicago, and we found an account belonging to his wife had been credited with ten thousand dollars yesterday morning.”
Spicer whistled, then nodded to me. “Someone thinks pretty highly of you, to go through all that trouble.”
His tone, once again, made my feathers ruffle, but I forced down my annoyance, knowing the type to push and push just for your reaction. “Should definitely watch your back, then,” I said, politely enough. “There is definitely something going on inside your company,” I said, addressing Jericho then. “And the fugitive knows it.”
“Might have been a coincidence,” Dr. Foster said, and his tone seemed to be warning me.
But I was not accusing Jericho, this time. I was only laying out facts in front of us all. “It's not a coincidence that a man broke into your world and started going through caves and basements, and found a girl who had died only a day before in one of those places. And in a place none of the locals knew about, because no story lines ever run through it. That place was built to hold people, there's no other explanation. More than just one girl.”
The table went silent and everyone seemed uncomfortable, which baffled me. It seemed everyone was happier discussing dead victims than live ones. Jericho finally said, “You're talking about human trafficking?”
I nodded.
“No,” he said. “It's not possible. People moving under the company's radar for years, with hostages? The kind of organization, the influence over the company that would require? -I guess I understand now, why you're looking at me.”
“It's why I was looking at you,” I said. “Now I'm telling you, and now it's your problem. I'm here to find the fugitive. I'm going to do that, today. Come on, Henry.” I stood, moved around the table and headed for the door, and he jumped from his seat to follow.
“That was bad ass,” he murmured, as we stepped out into the street. “What's the plan?”
“We're not going to be able to find the fugitive, carrying on like this. But maybe we can arrange it so that he comes to me again.”
“How?”
“I get into trouble.”
“Your specialty,” he proclaimed, “But there's no way I'm just going to let you maybe get yourself killed so this guy can maybe save you or maybe kill you himself. No way.”
“It's all we've got.”
“I don't care. It's too dangerous, I'm sticking to you like glue.”
I sighed, airing all my grievances with one breath. “So we just keep checking around the spots we picked, and hope we stumble across him?”
“Sounds better than using you as bait.”
“You suck. Let's go.”
“Where first?”
“The warehouses on the south side of town.”
*
The sun was sweltering overhead, heat beating down as Henry and I rested behind one large brick building in a line of large brick buildings, all of which had been filled only with what they ought to be. Offering him an apple from my satchel, I took a bite of my own. Henry began pacing, munching, and peered around the corner of the building, down the alley that led back to the street. It was quiet and shaded where we were, but still hot. I wiggled my shirt to cool down.
“This was a waste of time.”
“Try to be patient.”
My eyes drifted. Sun glinted over the high rooftops on the three buildings that surrounded them. I could see nothing but shingles. A cloud passed in front of the sun, and turned everything a shade darker. Maybe more rain.
There were old, wooden crates from the docks stacked along the warehouse's wall, cluttering the alley and separating our space from the street. I dragged one over and sat for a minute.
There was an almost inaudible thump, and I turned. My heart jumped up into my throat, and I almost called out for Henry, where he was leaning opposite me on the next building, still looking out toward the street. But I remembered myself and turned to look the other way, watching him from the corner of my eye. The fugitive was standing in the tiny gap between the stacks of crates and the wall. The darkness made it impossible for me to see his face, but I was sure. He held up one finger to his mouth. Quiet. Then he motioned for me to follow.
My stomach gave a twist. It was my old friend, fear, reminding me that the old Stella was not gone. But inside I knew it was the only opportunity I was going to get to find out what was going on.
I had only a second. I ran, stopping just before I made the alley, when I heard Henry call, “Stella?”
Indecision tugged at me.
The fugitive only had to take one step closer, and reach out into the open. His hand clenched down on my arm, dragging me the rest of the way into the dark. I ran with him, then, not stopping even as Henry called for me, sounding frantic.
“Stella!”
Together we hit the busy street, and he was still leading the way. We ran up the cobbled road, and then turned off onto a tributary street on the other side. I didn't look back.
The fugitive stopped along one building. It looked like a fort, made of stone and with cannons perched on the upper walls. The way it sat on a hill, with sloping grass on either side, there was a dip towards the middle. In the back, there was a different layer of darker stone acting as a base for the whole structure, and below it was a tiny window that the fugitive kicked open, then slid down into the empty gap.
I sat, kicked my legs in and followed, knowing I was in too deep to turn back. Under the fort, it was cool and dark. Only a small beam of light fell on a stone floor below my feet. An orange glow suddenly sprang to life from further in. The fugitive had flicked on a lantern. Around us were shelves, filled with hundreds of leather bound books, even some scrolls of parchment. And where the light didn't reach, there were vague shapes of more and more shelves. It was a library of some kind.
Over head, there was a mosaic, stained-glass sphere set in what would be the floor of one of the rooms in the fort. It was just a simple rose with a background of yellow.
The two of us stood in silence, him with his back to me.
The fugitive turned. Recognition hit me like ice water. He was tired looking , though I supposed he had always seemed a little tired in the eyes. His brown hair was disheveled and a healthy beard dulled his otherwise razor-sharp features, but I knew him. Miles Corso was standing before me, and he held up a finger for silence. He moved towards me in the dim light with quick steps. Up close I found the square corner of his jaw under the stubble, and he leaned in so near that I could smell the woodsy hints of earth and smoke on him, and a dwindling splash of something fresher. It had to have been days since he'd bathed, but someone as arrogant as Miles Corso wouldn't be caught dead smelling bad.
His hands swept down my arms, then went back up to skim my sides, from along my breasts down to my waist. I flinched, my hands went up to shove him back but he caught my wrists, and I froze. His eyes had gone dark, a silent warning that he had lost his patience. A tiny part of me had always been scared of him, and was even more so now. There was a kind of anger behind his eyes that even when hidden was always there, waiting to strike, like he wore a mask of red death.
He released me and I stayed still. He trac
ed a single finger down the center of my chest, over my belly, then, grabbing a fold of my shirt he tugged me closer, so my body came flush against his. Keeping clinical, though, his hands slid down over my shoulders and to the small of my back. I was tense all over, and realized only then that he was checking me for a recording device.
He pushed my satchel off of my shoulder and flung it aside, sending it sliding far away from us between the rows of shelves. Then he took a single step back.
“Now...” His mask was back up, his eyes were less cold. He gave a sensual smile with just the corners of his lips, looking at me like he was starving and I was something to eat. “Hello, Stella.” His voice was still the thick, raspy drawl that I remembered, with roots from the bayou down in Louisiana and a naturally inviting huskiness.
My tension dissolved into a full-bodied shiver. I sucked in a breath I hadn't realized I had been deprived of.
Chapter Twelve
“What the hell is going on?” I asked.
Corso, though, was smiling a sort of crazed, exasperated smile. “They send you in to find me, I can't believe it. The odds are just astronomical.”
“Not that astronomical. Joey and Stacey can't pay their taxes, and you disappeared when they needed you, so I had to do something drastic. Joey thinks you're dead!”
Corso's smile faded. “I'm sorry about that. Come and sit down.” He turned and pulled a chair out at the table behind him, then moved around to the other side and sat. I did as he said, and waited a moment as he collected his thoughts.
“Look, this all started a couple of months ago. My sister, Alex, she wants to be a journalist. She has an internship at News One. And she noticed a pattern in some disappearances, of girls who went missing out of New York and Chicago over the past few years. Some way or another, eight girls had connections to Four Quarters. They weren't extras, just a secretary, a typist, an intern and a page. Stuff like that. One girl was taken with an entire delivery of drilling equipment meant to be shipped to them. One way or another, a dozen girls had contact with Jericho Sullivan within a month of being taken.”
“You think he had something to do with the kidnappings?”
Corso ignored me. His voice turned hard and full of regret. “I told her it was dangerous. To leave it alone, and let me take over. But she started doing surveillance on him. Following him around. She tried to hide it from me. Then one day she didn't come home. I took up the search myself. I told a few guys from the station and they were helping me. They all ended up dead.”
I blanched. “You didn't... you didn't tell Joey?”
“No. I couldn't put him in danger. Messing with a CEO gets people killed. They own the whole city.”
“So your sister was kidnapped?”
“Along with at least a hundred other girls between the ages of thirteen and thirty, since 2142.” A period of five years. “All of the research Alex did was cleaned out of her apartment. Other people -Jericho's guys- have been tracking me like you have. They get the chance, they'll leave me in a shallow, unmarked grave. They can't do the same to you, people know you're here, but they want you dead, just the same.”
“Jericho hired me, why would he hire me just to kill me?”
“I'm sorry to be the one to have to tell you this, Stella, but they never wanted you to find me. They don't want me brought to light, because I'd bring the story with me. They want me disappeared, and they want you to fail, that's why they hired amateurs. The wolf attacked you in the first quarter, it broke your arm, but you know it was supposed to kill you. That could have been made to look like a malfunction, an accident, but once I led you to the girl under Sickness Island, all bets were off. -And I didn't know until last night that it was you, or else I would have found another way. You know, now. They won't let you leave this place, anymore than they would let me leave.”
“So I can't convince you to turn yourself in?” I mumbled.
He gave that tired, corner-of-his-mouth smile again. “'Fraid not, honey. We'd both be dead before we reached civilization. Did they try to convince you that I killed the girl?”
“It was our first thought, but the autopsy showed she was dead before you got there.”
He gave a small nod, and his eyes turned down to the table, where his finger was tracing a groove in the wood. “I was too late. They moved the girls somewhere else, probably the day before.”
I remembered suddenly that the place was off the radar, and asked, “How did you find that chamber, anyway?”
He put his smile back on. “The same way I've been avoiding the cameras, and the same way I knew someone was being sent to kill you. I broke into Four Quarters before I ever came here, and a friend at the precinct helped me hack their system with some fancy virus. I've got duplicates of everything, and I receive transmissions that come from a private server in real-time. I don't really understand the half of it, but Matthew did.”
“If you have all this, why didn't you take it to your boss, or straight to the news?”
“If I had, the girls would have all become liabilities. This is the only chance I have to save Alex, and the rest. Do you understand?”
I nodded.
“Then you might as well help me. You see where we are?”
She looked around again, blinking to clear her foggy eyes. “Some kind of library?”
“It's an abandoned part of a story line. A person is searching for some valuable chalice or... holy grail or something. They figure out through a series of clues that knowledge is the only thing worth protecting, they come to the fort and they find that rose on the floor, it's all very complicated. Nobody is ever assigned to this storyline because nobody cares about knowledge anymore. There are hidden passages and secret rooms all over the four quarters that don't get used. I'm checking them all. Probably, they took them out of this quarter. But I need to rule everything out, and with the warehouses all empty, there's only one place left to look.”
“What do you want my help with? I'll do anything.”
Corso stood and with sweeping steps he crossed to the corner by the open window they had come in. His small backpack was sitting there, and he pulled out a thick file, leafing through it. The picture he presented was of a rickety shack on a hill, the boards broken in some places.
“This place is empty. There's an elevator that'll take us down into an underground facility, large enough to store the kidnapped girls.”
“Take us down?”
“You said you'd do anything. ”
I shivered again. He slung his bag over his shoulder, turning to me. “Alex is t wenty-nine . When you get in, you find her. We might not be able to get all the girls out, but we're getting her out, then we'll go for help for the rest and blow this whole thing open. Understand?” I nodded, but he leaned in close, talking softly. “I'm trusting you with this, Stella.”
“How will I find her? Do you have a picture?”
Corso reached out and set his thumb flat on my cheek. “She has a birth mark right here.”
I suddenly lost my breath, though I forced myself not to shrink away from his touch. “Okay. Where is this place?”
“East.”
“And after we do this, we'll go to the police?”
“Yeah.” He started for the window we had entered by, and stopped when I didn't move to follow. “What?”
“I've got a contract that says I get fifty thousand dollars if I bring you in. If Jericho is responsible for this, I don't know what happens, next. And we need that money.”
“ If he's responsible? You really don't think he is?”
I felt foolish for trusting my instincts where he had so much evidence, but I managed the word, “No.”
“Well, then, put your money where your mouth is. We save my sister, and expose the whole thing, I'll let you slap some cuffs on me. If he's not behind it all, he should still pay you.”
“You'd be alright with that?”
I was thinking about what would come of his arrest. Four Quarters was sovereign, and s
o they might be the ones to try and sentence him. It could mean a slap on the wrist or a death sentence, there was no telling which. Or, considering that he had committed crimes in New York as well, he could be given over to his own precinct, or the charges could be brought on a federal level. Either way, a conviction in the United States would see him sent back down south, to the same kind of place that had ruined him so completely; made him hard and made him hollow.
He seemed to know it, too. But when he lifted his gaze from the floor, his eyes were clear, his words were true. “We save Alex, I accept whatever happens next. And, like you said… Joey needs the money.”
“Let's go.”
“Get your gun.”
*
Corso led the way east, to where the buildings grew less thick and instead of mud off the streets, grass grew as we climbed higher. We stayed on side streets, in back alleys.
We had been walking for an hour when Corso suddenly held out an arm, blocking me from moving any further. I flinched when we collided, backed up, and shook my hands to ease some of my tension. He looked at me funny, but didn't say anything.
The shack across a small stretch of flat marsh was one of the last before the town gave way to empty plains. There were only a few people outside back toward town, nothing like the busy dock or Main Street shops.
Corso pulled a handgun out of his bag, and I did the same, checking that it was loaded and that the safety was off. I didn't know for sure that I could pull the trigger when aiming at an actual human being, but they didn't need to know that, and neither did Corso.
I didn't have time to gather my thoughts. He stood and began moving forward, half bowed over with his legs bent, eyes focused the way I knew only his could be. Deadly focused.
I followed, surely looking less graceful than him as we approached the little shack. The hair on the back of my neck stood on end. I was expecting bullets to start flying at any second. We moved to separate sides of the door.
