Still, there were alarms for these. There was never any warning for the dark poison that sometimes drifted in from Brooklyn when the wind swung around. The only hint that you were breathing in poison was the green tint the clouds would sometimes get, and the noxious smell that shriveled the lungs and made you feel as though you were losing weeks off your life with every breath.
Cole pulled his fedora down lower as he ducked and dodged the early night crowd hurrying home to continue their dull lives. He wasn’t late picking up Corrina, it just felt like he was. When he wasn’t personally watching over her, Corrina had a tendency to go feral. She was apt to do anything. It’s why he approached the orphanage with such reluctance.
“At least it’s still standing,” he muttered upon seeing the ramshackle building. As always, its scrounged-up, slapped together, corrugated tin walls leaned out over the street, looking as though a stiff breeze would send all seven stories crashing to the ground. More than once, Corrina had threatened to give it a last push, and if she had known the first thing about engineering, she probably would have.
Ignorance alone kept the building standing.
Wearing his black working uniform, Father James greeted Cole at the door with, “This isn’t working.” He added a grave shake of his head for emphasis, his patchy stubble making a rasping sound on the white collar at his throat.
“What’d she do now?” Cole asked, peering over James’ tight afro and into the main hall. There was no fire damage as far as he could see.
“She’s been teaching the other kids how to gamble. Cards, dice, all of it. You of all people know this is the wrong road to go down.”
Cole was secretly relieved. “Gambling is a fact of life these days, Jimmy. I know you think your kids are going to leave here little angels, but we both know that isn’t going to be the case for most of them. And either way, they should have an understanding of the world early on.”
“She was cheating. I confiscated loaded dice and a marked deck. We don’t teach cheating here. It’s the same as stealing. Speaking of which, she took thirty-seven cents off the boys and won’t give it back.”
“Well…that right there is a valuable life lesson,” Cole answered. “You don’t want your boys gambling and look what happened. They get rooked right off the bat. I think she’s right to keep the money. What kind of lesson will your boys learn if they think they can run to momma every time things don’t go their way?”
James’ dark eyes went wide in anger. He pushed Cole back through the doorway, stepped out into the night and slammed the door behind him. “These are orphans, Cole. They don’t have mommas to run home to. And besides, she threatened them if they told. She said she had a blade and would quote: ‘cut them up’ end quote, if they tattled. If I hadn’t caught a few of the older boys trying to cheat the younger ones, I wouldn’t have known at all.” He stepped closer. “You see how it is? This is how that sort of filth spreads.”
“She threatened them? Yeah, that isn’t so good. I’ll talk to her.” He tried to reach around James for the doorknob, but the priest swatted his hand aside.
“She’s not here. She ran off and that was for the best.” He let out a long, harried sigh. “I don’t think she should come back. She just doesn’t fit.”
Cole turned away to keep from punching the priest, something he’d had to refrain from doing pretty much every time he looked into James’ double-dealing face. Six months before he had backstabbed Cole, turning him in to the police and nearly getting him killed in the process. Cole had laid him out for that. Since then Cole had done his best to forgive James. Cole wasn’t all that good at forgiveness.
He tried to force his rock-hard fist to unclench and failed. “Is it more money? Is that it? Twenty dollars a month is steep as hell already, but maybe I could go a little higher.”
James rubbed his chin, feeling the sandpaper bristles. “Thirty-five might be acceptable for me to put up with all of this.”
“Ah, good, thirty-five is a good number,” Cole said through a hard grin. “I like it. I’m not going to fucking pay it. No, there’s no fucking way I would ever pay it, but I like it. It’s one of those numbers that tells a story. It tells me you think you can shake me down.”
James frowned, the scar running from his mouth creased his face as neatly as a fold in a piece of paper. Cole had given him that scar twenty years before when they’d both been kids in this very same orphanage. “No one is shaking you down, Cole. She just doesn’t fit. She’s more than half wild and the boys don’t know what to do with her. You do remember that this is a home for boys, right?”
“You knew she was a girl when you agreed to take her in. That hasn’t changed. And you knew she’d be a handful just like every new kid you get. I told you right off the bat that you could give her a smack if you needed to.”
The priest threw his hands up. “I have! She just glares at me and tells me she’s going to cut me in my sleep. You know what the problem is? She’s too much like you. Neither of you have any respect for authority and you both resort to violence as if it’s the answer to all your problems.”
Cole was very aware of the fist now. It wanted to crack James upside the head. He shoved his hands into his pockets to keep from proving James right. “And thirty-five a month would fix these problems?”
“Here’s the thing. Twenty isn’t worth the hassle. You asked for a number and I gave you one. If we weren’t scraping just to get by here, I wouldn’t have entertained any price. Sorry, Cole.”
Before Cole could say anything, James slipped back inside. For just a moment, Cole was so angry that he wanted to shove the seven-story building over. It would take some doing and would require leverage at a high angle, but it could be done. He glanced up with a growl in the back of his throat, but as he did, he paused as a queer sensation came over him.
He was being watched.
It wasn’t a casual thing, either. And nor was it a cautious thing. Cole’s hulking presence drew many eyes in certain neighborhoods, and the way he exuded danger on a taut spring made people wary of him, and they were smart to keep an eye on him. But this was different. There was someone watching him from the shadows. His hand strayed beneath the poly-leather trench coat to the butt of his gun. He didn’t pull it, however.
“Corrina Marie,” he whispered. Despite what his unwanted dinner companion thought of him, Cole was a nobody schmuck and worked hard to remain that way. He wasn’t a person that people followed. He just wasn’t that interesting. Which meant it was Corrina hiding in the shadows, watching, trying to gauge how much trouble she was in. There was no sense trying to catch her. The feral cat analogy extended to this as well. If she didn’t want to be caught, she’d remain just out of reach, playfully showing him her heel until he was ready to tear his hair out.
No, it was smarter to treat her as a stray. If he put a bowl of milk out, sooner or later she’d show up.
He turned his collar up against the cold mists and headed for home. The eyes followed him for fifteen blocks until he came to 10th Avenue, where the squalor spilled onto the street from the crumbling tenement buildings, and the Hudson Wall loomed grey in the background. The neighborhood was called The Pit by the people who lived there. Everyone else in the city called it the “Armpit,” which was an apt description. Still, the residents of The Pit could at least tell themselves that they were better off than the slags who lived like primitives huddled in make-shift huts and shanties in the forever damp shadow of the wall. And compared to the diseased trogs scraping out a harrowing existence in the sewers and tunnels beneath the city, they lived like kings.
Cole had chosen this part of the city because it was cheap and the people that lived there had a sad dreary sameness to them. He could pick out a stranger among them in a blink. It helped that the neighborhood wasn’t on a train line, and there weren’t any nearby “sights,” and there wasn’t any reason to pass through it to get somewhere else.
Six months before, he had been fairly certain assassins
would be coming for him. He had killed the heir to the Tinsley fortune, and it didn’t matter that it had been in self-defense, and nor did it matter that Dennis had been a zombie who had been purposely spreading the virus around the city. What mattered to rich fucking vamps was revenge. The fact that he was still alive pointed to what amounted to divine intervention in the form of Ashley Tinsley, Dennis’ sister.
For the briefest of time, she and Cole had something between them. Neither could have explained it or even labeled it for that matter. It had been unexpected and had happened the instant they had laid eyes on each other, but she was forbidden fruit, far out of his reach, and he was taboo, subhuman in the eyes of her friends and family. The barrier between them had never been tested and once Cole had blasted her brother’s brains out through the top of his head, it never would be. Cole had disappeared and Ashley had pinned her brother’s death on someone else.
Six months was a long time to live in a crumbling tenement where you could hear your neighbors fucking and fighting night and day. The building was nine stories of prefab over a sand-crete foundation. Fifty years before it had been new, just one of thousands that had been thrown up in a matter of weeks before an election. Now the floors sagged alarmingly, and the stairs kept pulling away from the walls, except between the fifth and sixth floors where they had come tumbling down years before Cole moved in. The owner of the building had been kind enough to provide a ladder.
Cole paused near the front door of the building. A shadow had moved in an alley across the street. Once again, his hand stole up into his coat—just in case. But it was a small shadow, too small to be anyone but Corrina. “You hungry?”
She emerged from the alley, slowly, warily. “You ain’t mad?” As always, Corrina was dressed in red; a red jacket that she might grow into in a couple of years over a pair of old red jeans that she belted over her skinny hips with a length of rope. Her black boots were new; however, she hid that fact beneath strips of peeling rubber tape. They both agreed that it wouldn’t be smart to stand out, and new clothes would’ve made them a target.
The only thing about her that suggested she wasn’t just another slum dweller was the curtain of blond hair that fell over the right side of her face. Although the left half of her head was shaved down to the scalp, the hair she did have was clean and smelled of lilac, a scent that was not common in The Pit.
“Yeah, I’m mad,” Cole answered. “It costs me a small fortune sending you to the orphanage. And what about wanting to learn to read and all that? You said you wanted to learn. That was your idea.”
“Not hardly,” she shot back, crossing to the middle of the street. There was no danger of getting run over. No one in the Pit had the money for a car, and a delivery truck might come down the street only every couple of days. There weren’t even many bicyclists, especially after the sun went down. “You were the one that went on and on about how great it is to read. You made it sound cool, like there were cool stories everywhere. But it ain’t nothing like that. They stick me in with a bunch of little kids and we read: cat and hat and rat all day long. It sucks.”
Stalled somewhere between anger and guilt, he frowned. He was forcing her to be someone she wasn’t—for her own good. The twelve-year-old girl he had met had been a money honey, as tunnel whores were called. She’d been strung out on Rican Mule and already showing signs of the slag. It was why she kept her hair long on one side, to hide the grey mottled scars that deformed her cheek and neck.
“Once you pick it up, you’ll have so many more opportunities. There’s plenty of good jobs for a girl who can read and write.”
“I don’t wanna do any of that. I wanna do what you do.” When he rolled his eyes, she shrugged. “Or I can turn tricks and gamble on the side. I’m getting pretty good. Those little Jesus freaks would never have picked up on the loaded dice if it wasn’t for Father James. Man, he can sniff out a lie like nobody’s business. He get that from God?”
Cole was about to tell her that her lies were childish, and that anyone with any sense could tell when she wasn’t being honest, however just then a set of headlights turned up the block. Corrina had sniffed out the danger before Cole and was ducking back to her alley even as Cole reached once more for the Forino. What were the chances that the car had nothing to do with him? Not very good.
The car was neither a vamp-mobile nor a Rambler. It was a four-door Flatbush Special, which meant it was a city car. Cole relaxed—a little. No one from the city was coming to kill him and yet, a late evening visit from a city official wasn’t something he ever looked forward to. He didn’t bother rearranging the sneer on his face as the Special slid up, its engine hitching and coughing out blue smoke.
The back window came down and there was his boss, Shamus McGuigan sticking his long face through the opening. “Cole!” he cried, his slight Irish brogue coming through. He was a political appointment by a governor who needed the pasty-white vote. “What a pleasant surprise. I’m glad I caught you. I need a word. Get in. Get in. We don’t want to let the heat out.”
He shifted over and Cole slid in next to him. It felt colder inside the car than out of it. It also smelled of burning plastic. “Nice ride,” Cole said, letting the sarcasm drip over the words.
This dimmed McGuigan’s smile. “That’s pretty rich coming from a guy who had all of one deal closed in the last year and a half.”
“Deals? These aren’t deals. This isn’t a business, you know.”
The smile came back and McGuigan’s eyes sparked from out of deep pouches. “It is, actually. Life is a business. There are successful businesses, like mine and failing ones like yours. Look at where you live. Look at your clothes. Pff! Cole, you told me you were going to be a team player and what have I gotten out of you? One rotten little Dead-eye that looked as though it had crawled from a grave. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. It’s just that this is a numbers game and your numbers are not good.”
“It’s not something I can help. I am supposed to jump on my cases to keep them from spreading, right? That was in the training, I believe.”
“Of course. And in the meantime, DeMott closed six cases this year alone. I’m thinking it might be good if you did a few weeks of extra training under him. You know, ride along, see how he handles himself. I think you need a refresher.”
Cole’s fists bound themselves up, his knuckles straining to erupt through his flesh. He struggled to keep his voice even. “A refresher? On what? How to let a Dead-eye hang around long enough to infect half the city? You know that’s how he got his numbers, right? He was on that Throg’s Neck killer for three months. That’s how he ended up with a nest.”
“Which he took out,” McGuigan shot back, snapping his fingers three times for emphasis. “So, when should I schedule the ride along?”
“After you fuck off and die.”
McGuigan shook his head, feigning sadness. “I am looking for results that I can take to the governor. You have one kill, DeMott has six. The governor is going to ask why you have such a large territory when you’re so ineffective and I’m going to tell him not to worry because I just lopped off a part of your area and gave it to DeMott. From now on, he will have the Bronx and upper Manhattan all the way south to 135th Street. I was going to make it 155th Street, but you just had to open your mouth. Perhaps next time you’ll keep the smart remarks to yourself, or better yet, bring me some kills.”
Cole sat there, stunned until McGuigan pointed at the door. “You can get out now.”
Chapter 3
Cole didn’t know it was possible to sleep angrily. He slept in a fury, waking up every half an hour to glare at the clock. By five in the morning he was out of bed, taking his frustrations out on a punching bag that hung from an exposed beam in his ceiling. The entire building shook as he pounded on the hunk of weighted poly-leather.
“Hey,” Corrina called out. She stood in her bedroom doorway, wearing flannel pajamas that were two-sizes too big. “You said you was gonna teach me how
to fight,”
“I sure will, once you learn to read. Why don’t you go get your primer and practice your alphabet? A good bounty hunter needs to be able to read.” This brought on a fresh wave of anger. A good bounty hunter should also have more than one kill in a year and a half. In truth, he had killed seven Dead-eyes during the last year and might have had an eighth if another bounty hunter hadn’t stepped in at the last moment to claim his kill.
“Or I might’ve been dead,” he muttered, before sending a roundhouse at the top of the bag. He would’ve been dead. It’s one of the reasons why he had bought the punching bag. He had gone toe-to-toe with a hundred and ten pound zombie, a creature literally half his size, and had wound up with her on top of him pummeling him into incoherence. That wasn’t something he was going to allow to happen again.
Once he had finished his workout, showered and changed, he was ready to head out and start pounding the pavement, looking into every death in Manhattan. Corrina’s presence stopped him. She was ready to go as well. “I read my primer, I swear. A is for apple.”
“And what is B for?”
Her grey eyes took on a faraway look before she grinned showing off the gap between her front teeth, and said, “Baby. And C is for cat and D is for dog.” Her grin now grew forced.
“And E?”
She began making a straining sound from deep within her throat. When she couldn’t come up with the word, she dashed back to her room and brought out her primer. Flipping through the pages until she found the picture of a giant grey creature that was twice as tall as a man. “E is for this thing.”
Dead Eye Hunt (Book 2): Into The Rad Lands Page 2
