Blood and Fire

by McKenna, Shannon

  Hobart hesitated. King exerted effort not to call Hobart’s Level Ten command sequences and make him stop using oxygen he did not deserve to breathe, since he had no brain cells to nourish.

  “She was at the Justice Center, at Southwest Third Avenue,” Hobart said. “Her tag is moving now. I imagine she’s being transported to the county medical examiner.”

  Another body in the ME’s office, keeping Reggie, Cal, Tomartin company. No way to clean up. No damage control. Again.

  “Show me the satellite shot over Zoe again,” he said.

  Waving conifers filled the screen. King stared at them in silence, as if he could find some pattern, some plan in the wintry forest.

  Then he saw it. A torso, barely visible in camo fabric, emerging from under an overhanging cliff. Crawling out onto tumbled rocks.

  Zoe struggled to her feet, stumbled toward the creek, and waded into the water. King winced as she lost her balance, splashing full length. She struggled upright, swaying. Lifting her face to the sky, her big, dark eyes imploring. She held the com. She lifted it to her ear.

  “Patch her through to me,” he commanded.

  The sound quality changed. He heard the static buzz, and beyond, birds, water, wind rushing in the device’s microphone.

  “Zoe?” he asked, and then yelled. “Zoe! Do you hear me?”

  “I’m ready.” Zoe’s voice was barely audible, a froglike croak.

  “Ready for what?” he snapped, irritated.

  She blinked up at the sky. “I failed you,” she said. “I’m ready.” She closed her eyes, waiting for her Level Ten death command.

  The martyred look on Zoe’s ravaged face made King’s teeth grind. As if she could have it so easy. Watching Zoe die was a luxury he could not afford. For now. “No, Zoe,” he said sharply. “Get out of the water.”

  She gaped at him, stupidly. It infuriated him. The one tool he had on the ground was blue-lipped, standing in icy water like a shit-brained lump. “Move, Zoe,” he commanded. “You must fix this.”

  She stepped forward, fell to her knees. Icy water sloshed over her chest, her shoulder. She half crawled, half swam to the bank. Hold the com to your ear, bitch. Do it. She crawled onto the rocks, lifted the phone. Her ragged panting became audible.

  “Zoe, listen to me.” He used the deep voice he’d assumed in DeepWeave audio, which Zoe had absorbed for hours every day as a child. “Take out the Melimitrex and inject it into your thigh.”

  He was repeating instructions that had been drilled into her already, but he needed any excuse to keep her bound to the sound of his voice. Her hands shook violently, but she managed to pry the syringe out of the foam case. She flicked a drop from the needle. Tap, tap. She’d worked as a nurse, after all. She stabbed it into her thigh, through the waterlogged cloth, and flung her head back, baring her teeth.

  He watched her vital signs. Melimitrex VIII was always a gamble, albeit a better one than it had been in the previous seven generations of the drug. It was the result of decades of trial and error. Calibrated to the individual’s height, weight, and body chemistry, each dose stimulated the glands with a brutal kick. Other components included a powerful painkiller and a mood enhancer similar to cocaine. He only administered that drug in the most dire of circumstances. Its success rate hovered around 60 percent. The fate of the unlucky 40 percent, well, suffice to say that it was painful to watch, and blessedly short.

  Not that he had any choice. Zoe would be unconscious in minutes without an intervention. He saw the moment that the drug started to work. Her breathing deepened, her heart rate steadied.

  She flung her head toward the sky again, nostrils flaring. Trust Zoe to make a fuss and carry on as if she were on stage.

  He made his voice solicitous. “Do you feel better, my dear?”

  “Oh, yes,” she told him. “I feel wonderful now.”

  “Excellent. Listen, Zoe. I will recite a verse to you now. It will give you strength to do it. Are you ready?”

  “Yes.” Her voice quivered with emotion. “Oh, yes. Please.”

  He slowly recited Zoe’s Level Ten endurance verses. King was very proud of his Level Ten endurance commands. They unlocked hidden reserves of energy and mental acuity, releasing endorphins that had the same effect as a passionate emotion. The strength one read about in Reader’s Digest articles, say, an eighty-year-old crone lifting a car off her stricken grandchild. But what was the difference between chemically simulated passion and real passion? Nothing. It was all chemistry.

  “Listen carefully,” he told her. “Go to the vehicle, and—”

  “I have no weapons,” Zoe blurted. “They disarmed me. Ranieri—”

  “Is gone,” he cut in. “Ranieri is no longer your concern. They rolled the vehicle off the road. Take what you can carry, hide the rest. Hide Hal’s, Jeremy’s, and Manfred’s bodies as best you can. I don’t want them found before our cleanup crew arrives. Mark the spot with a tag. We’ll calculate the best route for you to the rendezvous point. No one will be able to meet you for a few hours yet.” On account of your bad planning, you cretin.

  She hemmed and hawed. “But what . . . but I—”

  “You must be strong, Zoe,” he told her. “When the extraction team comes to get you, they will put you on a plane and bring you to me.”

  She blinked rapidly as she stared up into the sky, eyes welling full of tears. “They will?” Her voice was that of a lost, hopeful child.

  “Of course. You’ve been very brave. You’ll be rewarded. I promised.” There was only so much a satellite could pick up. But he fancied he saw Zoe’s eyes dilate, her cheeks flush. “Now go!”

  She leaped to obey, climbing like a mountain goat. The promise of a Level Ten reward series could move mountains.

  Whatever worked. At the moment, he could not afford to be fussy.

  19

  Lily glanced around at the people gathered in the room lit with m

  ellow lamps and crowded with big squishy couches. She felt shy and on the spot.

  “He has to lock it,” Lily repeated. “That’s what Howard said. That Bruno has to lock something. That he’d understand when he saw it.”

  “But you didn’t. So what the hell are you supposed to lock?” Sean gave Bruno a look that was almost accusing.

  Bruno shook his head. “Not a fucking clue.”

  “Strange,” Sean mused. “It would make more sense if he was supposed to unlock something. A code, a door, a safe, a password?”

  “That’s all Howard said.” Lily felt as if she’d failed them somehow. “I didn’t get it, either. Then the nurse interrupted us. The one who murdered him.” She hugged her knees, sunk deep into the plushy couch. After weeks spent trying to avoid notice, the relentless, concentrated attention of this group of people made her feel like she was going to collapse in on herself, twitching and babbling.

  Their attitudes didn’t help, either. Not that they were rde. Far from it. They’d saved her ass, patched her up, fed her, clothed her, given her painkillers and antibiotics and anti-inflammatories, plied her with caffeine and sugar. But even so, she sensed a wary wait-and-see feeling in the air. The vote was still out on Lily Parr.

  Bruno sensed it, too. It made him defensive. He sat right next to her, his arm flung possessively across her shoulders, daring them all to disbelieve a word she said. Touching, since yesterday he hadn’t believed her, either. Who would? She wouldn’t, if she were them.

  All of the McCloud brothers except for Kev were there, Davy and Con and Sean, as well as Sean’s wife Liv. Their hostess, the terrifyingly beautiful Tam Steele, was the owner of the house perched on the cliff over the Washington coast near the coastal hamlet of Cray’s Cove.

  Aaro was there, too, looking sullen and traumatized after his ugly morning adventure. His eyes were haunted shadows. He wouldn’t meet anyone’s gaze. There was an ethereally beautiful, dark-haired girl named Sveti who sat in a corner, listening. She had sad eyes, a faint accent. Lily hadn’t yet puzzled out her
relationship to the others. And Miles, a muscular, shy guy with a big nose. And Zia Rosa dominated the room like an out-sized Paleolithic goddess. Bruno’s great aunt resembled a huge bulldog, with black bouffant hair and a shirt with fuchsia polka dots and a pink plastic-bead necklace. Zia Rosa scrutinized Lily with an expression that could only be described as avid. It was unsettling.

  “Lily’s exhausted and injured,” Bruno said. “She needs sleep—”

  “Your father said that Bruno would understand.” Sean’s older brother Davy broke in, his gaze inwardly focused. “But what was he supposed to understand? What was ‘it’? An object? A place?”

  Lily laced her fingers together, examining the memory again. She hoped she hadn’t revised it herself in having thrashed over it so many times. She addressed the oldest McCloud, a lanternjawed guy with the same keen, bright green gaze as his brothers. “He said Magda told him that her son would understand when he saw it. But Howie never had a chance to say what ‘it’ was. That was when Miriam interrupted us.”

  “Miriam, the nurse. Who then morphed into Miriam, commando warrior,” Connor McCloud said.

  Bruno bristled. “What are you implying? I saw that bitch in action, and believe me, she was bad news.”

  “I’m not implying anything. I’m just getting this all straight.”

  “We’ve got it as straight as we can get it tonight,” Bruno said. “Sean was there. Rehash it all with him if you’ve got doubts.”

  “Hey.” Lily patted his tense, knotted forearm. “It’s OK,” she told him. “I’m not sleepy after all that coffee. Chill.”

  “I don’t want them hounding you,” he fretted.

  “There’s hounding, and there’s help,” said Tam quietly.

  Lily turned to the other woman, whose arms were draped over her very pregnant belly. “That’s for sure,” she said. “Hound away. Finally I have other brains to work with besides my own. It feels good.”

  It was difficult to hold Tam’s gaze. A trait that many people in the room shared. These people had been through a lot, and survived. Their eyes saw past masks to the cringing stuff she would rather hide.

  Tam Steele was so beautiful, one’s eyes got sucked to her like a magnet at first, but soon after came a strange desire to let one’s eyes skitter away from that golden laser slice of comprehension.

  The paneled sliding doors opened. Another man she hadn’t met walked in. Good-looking, with raven hair, chiseled features, dark eyes with an exotic gypsy slant. He gave a nod of greeting to everyone, eyes resting on Lily and Bruno for the X-ray once-over that she was almost getting used to, and then he wove across the room to crouch behind Tam.

  He slid his arms around her, cradled her belly, nuzzling her neck.

  Lily noticed Bruno’s sidewise stare. “What?” she whispered.

  “Just wondering how you’d react,” he said. “To Val, I mean. Most straight women drop their teeth when he walks into a room.”

  The off-the-charts weirdness of that statement rocked her back.

  “Are you kidding me?” she hissed. “You think I have enough functioning neurons left in my head to ogle strange guys? Now?”

  He shrugged. “You don’t need a lot of neurons to ogle,” he said. “I’m not overloaded with extra neurons, and I ogle all the time.”

  She poked him in the ribs. “Stop it! I can’t believe you even have the energy to be a pinheaded, insecure asshole at a time like this!”

  “Me, neither,” added Liv, the voluptuous brunette who was married to Sean. She cuddled a baby to an opening in her loose denim shirt and peered sternly over the tops of her horn-rimmed glasses at Sean, who was slumped beside her, exhausted, his hand clamped around his son’s chubby leg. “I’ll add that to a long list of unbelievable things. Like, how you told me you were going down to the Gorge to do Kev’s other brother some innocuous favor that involved a lot of driving. And now, I find out about gun battles and dead bodies exploding.”

  “Hey! It was an innocuous favor! I was planning to pick them up and drive them here!” Sean looked wounded. “What did I know about the gun battles and the exploding bodies? You’re wronging me!”

  “Hah. So innocuous you had Miles load his Jeep with eight different firearms, artillery rounds, stun grenades, blasting caps, Tovex, and tear gas?”

  “You can’t blame me for being prepared!” Sean protested. “I can’t help it. It’s on account of my upbringing.”

  Tam flapped her hand at them. “Have this argument later, in bed. So, a recap. This started six weeks ago, when your father began to—”

  “No,” Lily broke in. “It started eighteen years ago, when my father went from being a successful research physician to being a drunk and a heroin addict, in a matter of days. Something bad happened to him. I never knew what. He was finally starting to tell me, and they killed him for it. All I know is that it involved Bruno’s mother, who died a violent death at about the same time. I find that a very odd coincidence.”

  Tam spoke up after a moment’s reflective pause. “And let’s not forget Aaro’s fabulous self-destructing sex toy, who also had one of these exploding phones in her purse. Another odd coincidence.”

  Aaro shot her a dark glance but was clearly too drained to radiate true malevolence. Zia Rosa, who sat beside him, clucked her tongue and patted his thigh. “You know what your problem is, Alex, honey?”

  He looked trapped. “Don’t tell me. Please.”

  “Your problem is, you ain’t picked out some nice lady. Look at all these people here. They’re happy, see? They all got somebody. You don’t got nobody. If you had a nice girl to go home to, you wouldn’t have got caught with your pants of that nasty puttanella, eh?”

  “Zia, now’s not the time for the family-values lecture,” Bruno said.

  Zia Rosa waved him down. “Shhh. Like my old nonna back in Brancaleone used to say,” she intoned. “Attent’ a le fosse.”

  Lily leaned over to Bruno. “What does that mean?”

  Bruno sighed and translated. “Beware of the holes.”

  Aaro buried his face in his hands. “Tell me about it,” he muttered.

  Zia Rosa patted Aaro’s thigh again, palpating his quadriceps muscle appreciatively. “The time’s come, I guess,” she announced, her voice heavy. “We oughta have a talk with those Ranieri cousins.”

  “Ranieri cousins?” Lily said. “Which cousins are those?”

  “They’re second cousins, actually. We got the same bis-nonni. One of the big crime families in Jersey. Don Gaetano’s papa was a Mafia don back in Calabria. Tony, Bruno’s great uncle, he was don Gaetano’s right-hand man, back in the day. But Tony didn’t like the life. He ran off.”

  Lily waited for more. Zia Rosa just looked at her expectantly.

  “Well, um . . . what do these other Ranieris in Jersey have to do with me?” she asked. “I don’t know them.”

  Zia Rosa shrugged. “They sure as hell knew Magda.”

  Bruno shot up off the couch. “What the fuck are you saying? It was Rudy who worked for the Ranieris! Not Mamma!”

  “Don’t you use them dirty parolaccie with me, stronzetto,” Zia Rosa scolded. “Be respectful. I’m guessin’ it’s time to send Tony’s letter. Them dirty sonzabitches broke the bargain. And they are goin’ down.”

  Her words dropped into a pool of absolute silence. The room suddenly felt like it got smaller as everyone shifted forward in their seats, craning their necks to stare at the older woman.

  “What bargain, Zia?” Bruno’s voice was tight.

  She shrugged. “The letter Tony sent to Michael Ranieri, years ago. Tony chopped the fingers offa them mobster thugs who come after you, remember? He wrapped the letter around ’em and sent ’em to Michael.”

  Bruno felt his voice coming from far away. “I remember mobster thugs. I didn’t know anything about chopped fingers. Or a letter.”

  “I guess not. Tony didn’t talk about stuff like that. But he had to tell me, so I’d know who to send the letter to if they whacked
him.”

  Everyone was perched on the edge of the cushions, except for Liv, who was still nursing her baby. Even Sean had jolted bolt upright.

  “Tell us about the letter, Zia,” Davy encouraged.

  She fluttered plump, beringed hands. “Ah, well. Tony knew where a lot of bodies were buried. The hows, and the wheres, and where the money went. He dug some of them holes himself, see. You know how it is.” She glanced around the room. “Well. Maybe you don’t.”

  “I do,” said Aaro quietly.

  Zia Rosa patted his thigh again. “He wrote it all down,” she went on. “And the deal was, if them Ranieri coglioni whacked Tony, or tried to come after you again, I was to send the letters out. To the press, to the prosecuting attorneys, the DA in Newark, the curr DA, too.” She cackled. “Those guys’d come in their pants if they read Tony’s letter.”

  “You never sent it?” Connor said. “You still have it?”

  “So far. Tony told Michael that he’d left the copies with a lawyer, who was supposed to mail ’em out if Tony died. But Tony didn’t trust no lawyers. He kept ’em in a safe deposit box. I was supposed to send ’em, if anything happened. But when something finally did . . .” She shrugged, her face sagging with sorrow. “It didn’t have nothin’ to do with the Ranieris. I figured it was over. But I guess it ain’t over.” Zia Rosa dug a tissue out of her purse and blew her nose into it, sniffing.

  “Where’s the safe deposit box, Zia?” Connor asked gently.

  She dabbed her eyes. “Eh? Oh, there ain’t no safe deposit box no more. I took the letter out after Tony died. I figured, if they was gonna make a move on Bruno, it would be when Tony kicked the bucket. I didn’t want to have to worry about no stupid banking hours.”

  “So?” Val was prompting her now. His face, resting on Tam’s shoulder, was keen with interest. “Where is the letter?”

  “In my purse,” Zia Rosa said, as if it should be obvious.

  Bruno was in front of his great-aunt before being aware of having moved. He sank to his knees and held out his hand. “Let me see it.”