ARC: Peacemaker (2 page)

Chapter Two

Still kneeling, I shone the light around. The other guy couldn’t have escaped. I was watching them the whole time.

Nothing.

As I glanced back at the dea
d guy, a shadow seemed to detach from his neck and bird’s cry cut through the night, chilling enough to make my muscles clench. Wings beat close to my ear, feathers scraped across my cheek and pain knifed across my neck below my ear.

I clawed at the shadow… or whatever it was and hauled my pistol up. Four shots at point blank range sent it spinning but rather than fall to the ground it seemed to
dissolve
.

I was left staring at empty space.

What the…?

The sting from the wound brought me back. I fumbled in my pocket for a handkerchief and pressed it against the already slick wound. Involuntary shivers started over me, as if the warm desert air had plummeted in temperature. I shoved my gun in my pocket and re-checked the man for life signs.

Nada.

I knew I should call this in, the Park would want to investigate, but my wound was seeping and I had an overpowering urge to get the hell out of there. The carcass crew would be in before me tomorrow though, removing any dead fauna, so Totes needed to warn them.

I got to my feet and ran back past the trough to the interchange gate.

Totes was waiting for me on the other side.

“Jeesus, Virgin. Where the hell’ve you…Oh, crap. What happened?”

“Not sure,” I said pushing him away and heading for the wash station.

He hovered over me as I sloshed my face and neck and examined my neck wound in the mirror. It was small but deep, and hurt as bad as a dozen wasp stings.

“What did it?”

“I don’t know. It kinda looked like a crow, but it was dark, and crows don’t attack people, especially at night. But I found a dead guy out there past the trough. I’ll tell Hunt. Search the sat feed and let the carcass crew not to touch anything.”

“What do you mean a dead g–”

“What’s the time? Crap.” I cut him off because now I was running late to meet the famous lawman. “I’ll call the cops on the way to the airport and I’ll tell you about it in the morning. Gotta go.”

I ran down the corridor to my office grabbed, a band aid from the first aid kit hanging by its strap from one of the upturned horseshoes adorning my only shelf and left the Interchange station at a run.

The transition into the city was like a face slap. Red rock, sand, desert palms and space left behind; noise, people and buildings in their place.

Night time on the Park Esplanade was fast. The road ringed the entire park circumference and a city eco-chain had birthed to service it. Motels for the tourists, plazas that sandwiched never-closing restaurants, travel agents, Net-parlors rubbed alongside each other.

The Park had saved our country’s tourism industry and the people were grateful. They were also hungry to benefit. We knew how to make a buck Down Under, despite what the international community thought.

Getting a taxi to pullover on the Esplanade was hard; none of them wanted to leave the dense traffic stream and then have to try and re-enter it.

I gave up trying to flag one and took the pedestrian underpass to the nearest plaza. The rank there was full of empty cabs, so I jumped in the lead car and told him I had to be at the airport ten minutes ago. Hunt was going to carve me to pieces over this.

Being a Park Road cabby he didn’t spare the juice, but the flyover to the airport was at crawl-pace and I got to the International a half hour after Nate Sixkiller’s scheduled arrival time.

There was no one at the gate so I sprinted down to the baggage lounge and found the right conveyer. I would have known him right away despite the fact that he was standing alone by the rent-a-car kiosk looking pissed.

His hair was seriously straight and dark, dipping below his shoulders and crowned with a Stetson you could tip upside down and take a bath in. He wore jeans and a white-collared buttoned-up shirt; his build was muscled, heavy and gave the impression of power.I knew some hand to hand moves but Nate Sixkiller had me wondering if I could handle him.

He had a presence, no denying it, and His Presence wasn’t happy.

“Marshall Sixkiller?” I said striding up with my hand outstretched.

We were almost on the same eye level and he narrowed his without responding to my handshake.

I let my hand drop. “Apologies for being late. I had a… er… problem in the park.”

His glance flicked over me then up to the plaster on my neck. “Thet yer problem?” he asked in a slow drawl.

My hand slipped automatically to the wound. Then I glanced down at my shirt. Blood flecks across my breast. “Sure. Maybe. Look let’s get you back to your apartment first. You must be tired.”

His expression stayed stony. “I don’t get tired.”

“Good for you. But you need to drop your bags off.” I turned on my heel and didn’t to bother to see if he followed.

The taxi ride back home was quicker. Hunt had rented Sixkiller an apartment in the Cloisters, a floor down from me. I wasn’t happy about it, but it made sense if I was going to be his babysitter.

I already had the key and handed it to him when we got to his room. He stood for a moment or so staring at the door.

“Problem?” I asked after the silent scrutiny started to get uncomfortable.

He exhaled and shook his head, then passed the key over the lock.

I didn’t follow him in. “My room is the floor above, number 20-20. Come up when you’re settled, or call me, and I’ll come down. I’ll take you out for a bite.”I was hoping to hell he’d say no, but his brow creased.

“Bite? What’s thet?”

“Food. It’s dinner time here.”

He nodded slowly. “I could do with
a bite
. I’ll be in the foyer in thirty minutes.”

Damn. Not only had he accepted but he was calling the order of things. I’d cut him some slack tonight, tomorrow would be a different story.

Nodding curtly, I turned on my heel and left.

Once in my apartment I stripped off, removed the band aid on my neck and stepped into the shower, running the water hot as I could stand it, letting it beat against the wound. Trails of blood swirled to the floor tiles. The wound still oozed, like the thing that attacked me had somehow injected some anticoagulant.

What the hell had I seen out there in the park tonight? It couldn’t have been a bird. Could it?

I shivered despite the scalding water and kept on shivering until delayed reaction finally subsided. Then I toweled off. I should report it to the cops now but no one went into the park after dark, not even them, so what was the point? Tomorrow morning would be fine. I’d just have to fib a little, say it happened just before dusk.

Totes would back me up. He didn’t want any extra attention. Anyone checking too closely on his personal life might flag his obsession with buying dolls and stripping them naked. That might be awkward for a highly regarded, upwardly mobile tech guy. Totes earned three times as much as I did for sitting on his butt all day.

Sound like sour grapes? Not really. I loved what I did. And I didn’t mind Totes most of the time. But Dad had bought me up not to trust anyone, least of all the people close to you. It probably explained why I lived alone, and preferred it that way.

That circle of thoughts brought me back to Marshall Sixkiller. I wanted to be down in the foyer before him, so I grabbed fresh jeans and a collared shirt. As a concession to going out to eat with someone else, I pulled on my casual narrow-toed dress boots and took a moment to comb my hair in front of the mirror.

The face that looked back should have pleased me. Honestly, I was reasonably good to look at – brunette all the way with thick arched eyebrows and a straight nose. I didn’t carry any extra weight on account of my lifestyle and my jaw is defined and (I liked to think) strong. Not the kind of face you’d find on a commercial but not one you’d run away from either.

I usually only thought about my appearance once a year when I had to frock-up for the company ball and I wasn’t changing that routine for a visiting cowboy. So I pulled a face at the mirror, grabbed my wallet and phone and headed for the lift.

My girl, Caro, called me just after I hit the lobby button.

“I’m getting in the lift, signal is crap,” I said.

“Hi Ginny.” She was the only person in the world who could call me that. “You want to go for a drink?”

“Can’t. Working tonight. New guy in town and I have to look after him.”

“
Him?
”

I sighed. Caro had been obsessing over my single status since I turned twenty-nine a few months ago. I would have preferred that she worried about her own but she maintained it was because she didn’t want to be stuck with me in old age.

“Work,” I said.

She let it pass, though I could sense her storing it away for a future conversation. She was an investigative journalist. Her kind never let anything go. “Tomorrow then?”

“Yeah.”

“Ginny?”

“Yeah?”

“At least be nice to him.”

I was still smiling over her plea as I entered the lobby.

“Something funny?”asked Sixkiller. He was leaning against the wall mirror dressed in a thin T-shirt and denims. He could have been a local except for the narrow, high-heeled, embroidered boots and the Stetson. The local boys favoured RM Williams, and Akubras were the only hat to wear.

“Yeah,” I said noncommittally.

He studied my face for a moment and then straightened, leaving faint smudges of his body heat on the mirror.

I blinked, uncomfortable under his scrutiny. “So... I can show you a place where the steak is so big it comes on a tray.”

“I prefer vegetarian.”Suddenly the cowboy drawl had gone and he was all New York urbane.

“Oh?” Shit. “Sure.”

I led the way to the food hall, in the building adjacent to the Cloisters, figuring that would cover all food bases.

Sixkiller stopped at the soup and salad stall while I went for
All You Can Eat Meat & Noodles.

We reconvened at a slightly sticky Formica table overlooking the elevator well.

Sixkiller swept his gaze across the table surface and picked up the soup bowl, taking slow sips from a plastic spoon. The eatery was busy, even for a Friday night; people brushing past us, leaving the waft of their body scent. In most cases it was tolerable but I noticed my visitor tensing from time to time as if he didn’t find it always so.

Neither of us seemed to know where to kick the conversation off, so silence went on longer than it should.

“How did you get your neck wound?” he asked eventually. Not a man for small-talk it seemed, which was a small tick in his favour.

“You don’t start until tomorrow – you want to wait until then to talk about work?”

“Wait for what?”He gave me that steady stare again. His eyes were dark enough to be black, though his personnel file described them as dark brown. “What’s the point of that?”

I shrugged. “I dunno. Maybe you’re not ready to get into all that tonight; new country, jet lag – all that.”

He put his soup plate down and leaned back, folding his arms. “I’m here to work, ma’am. Not socialize.”

Well kick a girl for being considerate! “Fine.”

I shoveled the last forkful of noodles into my mouth and pushed the plate away. “The park has an evening curfew. I’m usually the last person out. Tonight, I was leaving just on dark and I heard two people near the Interchange gate – arguing.”

“So you weren’t the last person to leave.”

“Well, I’d done my sweep and the scans verified the south east sector was empty. I should have been the last person there,” I said patiently.

“Your scans don’t sound reliable.”

“Our scans are perfectly reliable. Something strange happened there tonight. As I said, I heard them arguing and snuck up to have a look.”

“They didn’t see you? My understanding is the park is quite barren.”

I hesitated, he was being kind of irritating and I wasn’t going to tell him I’d stayed there after dark. “It was close to sunset. The shadows were long and they were standing beyond a ring of palm trees. I planned to listen in first, but one of them drew a pistol so I had to intervene…”I had his full attention but I didn’t know how to tell the rest of it so I glanced out into the crowded plaza.

Something on the escalator barrier made me freeze. Perched only a few feet away was a large wedge-tailed eagle.

My hands became instantly clammy. Occasionally we still got snakes in suburbia, and there were plenty of rats and seagulls near the coast, but wedge-tails had been extinct for fifty years.

Besides, this one was different. And the way everyone was going about their eating confirmed it. The eagle was Aquila. At least that’s the name I’d given her when she first appeared to me. I hadn’t seen her since I was fifteen, long enough for me to think her presence was just a manifestation of my angsty adolescence.