Black Widow (15 page)

More and more cops surrounded me, creating an unbreakable ring, before the two officers still holding on to me shoved me forward.

I looked over my shoulder. Silvio, Bria, Xavier, and Sophia surged forward, but Dobson dropped his hand to his gun, a clear warning that he would start shooting if they tried to interfere or help me in any way. So my friends were forced to pull up short. Even if they'd gotten past Dobson, there was no way they could have fought their way through the rest of the cops flanking me.

“Gin! Gin!” Bria started yelling, standing on her tiptoes to see through the crowd that separated us.

“It's okay!” I yelled back. “I'll be all right!”

Her panicked gaze met mine for a split-second before the cops pushed me through an archway set into the back wall, and she disappeared from sight.

*  *  *

The archway opened up into a long hallway, with more wooden benches lining the walls, and rooms and jail cells branching off either side. But instead of stopping, opening one of the cells, and shoving me inside, the two cops tightened their hold on me and marched me to the far end of the hallway and through another archway.

Deeper and deeper we went into the station, twisting and turning through one corridor after another, with more and more members of the po-po coming out from their posts to join my parade. They didn't want to risk my making a break for it. Hence all the muscle. Couldn't blame them for that, since that's exactly what I was thinking about. Slamming my fist into the face of one of my handlers, grabbing somebody's gun, and shooting, fighting, and magicking my way out of here.

But it wouldn't work. There were too many cops with too many guns and far too many itchy trigger fingers. No, right now, I needed to bide my time and see exactly what sort of game this was. Because I had a sneaking suspicion that Madeline wasn't through playing with me yet. Otherwise, Dobson would have shot me in the middle of the station right after I'd tripped him, not ordered his men to cart me off to places unknown. So I would be patient and endure whatever torture was coming until I could figure out a way to turn the tables on Dobson and the rest of the cops.

Finally, we reached the end of this particular hallway, where a steel door was set into the wall. One of the officers plucked an old-fashioned skeleton key off a ring of them clipped to his belt, inserted it into the lock, and opened the door. The two officers pushed me forward,
and I was forced through to the other side, where a short hallway opened up into a large room with one singular, striking feature—an enormous jail cell.

The cell itself was about twenty-five feet square, far larger than all the others we'd passed. Two long wooden benches squatted inside it, pushed up against the bars, while two dirty, grimy toilets were set into the back wall, jutting out from the gray marble. The rest of the room was completely bare and empty, except for dozens of wooden chairs that had been arranged outside the bars. Stairs led up to a second-floor balcony that wrapped around and overlooked the cell, almost as if it were a stage. But the most telling thing was that there were no security cameras anywhere. The cops didn't want anyone to see what went on in here.

Even though I'd never before been here, I knew exactly where I was.

The bull pen—a place that prisoners went into and never came out of again.

But all I could do was stand there and wait while the officer used that same skeleton key to open the cell door. The second guy patted me down, but I'd left my knives, jewelry, and cell phone in Silvio's car, so there was nothing for him to take away from me. When that was done, hands pressed on my back, shoving me forward into the middle of the empty space.

I righted myself and turned around. The officer quickly swung the cell door shut and locked it again, lest I try to make a break for it. Once I was secure, some of the tension eased, and the cops looked through the bars and smirked at me, as if I were a tiger caged in a zoo. But
I wasn't the animal here—they were, for what they did in this place.

“I wonder how long she'll last.”

“The bitch is supposed to be tough.”

“We'll see just how tough when she goes against the group that Dobson picked out.”

“Who's got the book on it?”

“Osborne, I think . . .”

I tuned out their sly murmurs, instead studying their faces, and memorizing as many of their twisted smiles as I could. I wasn't dead yet, and if I lived through this, well, they were going to wish they hadn't.

I thought whatever cruel thing they had planned might start immediately, but after making sure that the cell door was locked, the cops trickled out of the room and shut the main door behind them, probably off to report to Dobson that I was all squared away. I wondered if the captain would come back here to gloat, or if Madeline herself would show up, now that I was finally, exactly, where she wanted me. I didn't know, but I had more important matters to think about right now.

Like escaping.

So I did what anyone stuck in a cell would do—I started trying to figure out how to get out of it.

But the thick, solid bars were all made of silverstone, and I couldn't so much as rattle them. I might be a powerful elemental, but even I didn't have enough juice to get through that much of the metal, and the bars would simply absorb any magic I threw at them. The floor was useless as well, since it was a solid slab of gray marble. Plus, we were on the ground level. Even if I cracked open
the floor with my Stone magic, I had nowhere to go but down into the dirt. So I moved on to the back of the cell and splayed my hand across the cool wall.

The marble hummed with low notes of despair and desperation, the emotions of everyone who'd been locked in this cell. But mixed in with the somber chorus of doom were also high-pitched shrieks, the sharp, piercing, agonized cries of everyone who'd been forced in this cage before me and had left a bloody, tattered, broken mess.

If they'd been lucky enough to leave at all.

I shut the sound of the stone's cries out of my mind and examined it more closely. The marble was at least a foot thick, with silver flecks sparkling like diamond chips in the smooth, glossy surface. It was definitely a wall designed to keep people in, even elementals like me. Oh, I could blast through the marble, but it would take too long, make too much noise, and use up far too much of my magic. It wouldn't do me any good to bust out of the police station only to get shot in the parking lot because I didn't have enough energy left to run.

But it was an exterior wall and the only part of the cell not lined with silverstone bars, so I forced myself to look at it again. There had to be some way to get through it, even if there wasn't a window, and the only things attached to it were the two toilets—

My gaze locked onto the toilets. At one time, they might have been clean white porcelain. Now they were so filthy that they were grayer than the floor and spattered with blood and other things I didn't want to look at, much less smell. But I breathed in through my mouth to lessen the stench of vomit, urine, and blood, squatted
down next to one of the toilets, and looked at how it was attached to the wall.

And I thought of something that might actually get me out of here.

It was a long shot, but it was the only chance I had. So I used the toe of my boot to flush the toilet, cocking my ear to the side and listening to the gurgle of water in the pipes. When I was satisfied, I did my lady business, flushed the toilet again, placed my hand on the cleanest spot of porcelain I could find, and reached for my magic. Elemental Ice crystals formed on my palm, then spread out, climbing up over the rim of the toilet and then down into the bowl of water below.

I kept my power at a low but steady level, feeding more and more Ice into the toilet, until I was satisfied that it would do what I wanted it to. When I finished, I waited three minutes, wondering if someone might have sensed me using my power and would storm into the room to check on me. But Dobson thought that he'd finally trapped me, and I didn't hear the slightest sound of movement beyond the bull pen. So I felt safe enough to repeat the process on the second toilet.

Once I'd set my plan into motion, there was nothing to do but wait until Dobson or someone else came back here. Besides, I needed to rest to help replenish the magic I'd used. I might still be breathing, but this was just a temporary respite, and I'd need every scrap of power to survive what was coming.

So I curled up on one of the hard wooden benches, made myself as comfortable as possible, and drifted off to sleep.

*  *  *

I wasn't really all that tired, since it was only about four in the afternoon, but the roller coaster of the day's events and emotions had taken its toll on me, and I quickly dozed off, especially given the unnatural silence in this part of the station. But it wasn't long before the blackness receded, and I started to dream of my past, the way that I had ever since Fletcher was murdered last year. . . .

We were in trouble.

Fletcher and I ran side by side, trying to get out of the warehouse. But no matter how hard we pumped our legs or how fast we sprinted, it didn't seem like we had moved at all. No wonder, since the enormous shell of a building covered the better part of three acres. Bare bulbs dropped down from the ceiling, casting out more shadows than light, while old, empty wooden crates covered the concrete floor, along with odd, loose bits of metal, long snakes of stripped wires, and rusted lengths of pipe.

Crack! Crack! Crack! Crack!

But what really concerned me were all the bullets zipping through the air in our direction.

Whoosh! Whoosh!

Along with the balls of elemental Fire.

Zing! Zing! Zing!

And the razor-sharp crossbow bolts that further splintered the wooden crates as we darted past them.

Oh, yeah. The old man and I were in serious trouble.

And to think that the evening had started out so well.

As the Tin Man, his assassin code name, Fletcher had been approached about taking out Liza Malone, a crooked cop who liked to strong-arm protection money out of small-business
owners over in Southtown . . . and then do absolutely nothing in return when some real danger came calling. Like, say, the three gangbangers who'd deliberately crashed their stolen car through the storefront windows of a mom-and-pop grocery and then stormed inside and shot up the place, including the owners' thirteen-year-old son.

The kid had died in his big brother's arms. A news photographer had captured that heartbreaking sight, and the image of the guy clutching his baby brother's bloody,
lifeless body to his chest had run on the news for days.

According to Fletcher, the Colson family had demanded that Malone find the people responsible for killing their boy. She told them that she would—for another fifty thousand dollars. Up front, of course. The Colsons didn't have that kind of cash, but they'd scraped together what they could and given it to Malone. In return, the cop had done nothing but sit on her ass and jack up her prices for everyone else in the neighborhood who was paying her protection money.

Through his various cutouts, dead drops, and back channels, the Colsons had reached out to Fletcher to get what justice they could, and the old man had handed things off to me, since I was twenty-two now and far more spry than his aging bones. I had found and taken out the three gangbangers a week ago. The fools had been bragging all over Southtown about how tough they were, robbing a family and killing a kid. I didn't even have to bribe anyone to find them. Easiest job Fletcher had ever sent me on. One of the most satisfying too.

But the gangbangers had told me all sorts of interesting things before they died—like the fact that they'd been paying protection money to Liza Malone too. As long as they slipped the cop a cut of their take, she was perfectly happy to look
the other way as they went about their reign of robbery in the neighborhood. Now, double- or even triple-dipping was nothing new in Ashland. More like a long-standing tradition and a favorite sport. But this time, it had cost an innocent boy his life. The Colsons wanted payback, and I'd been dispatched to get it for them.

So I'd started following Malone on the sly, tracking her movements, analyzing her habits, and learning every single thing I could about her. When I had a plan of attack I thought would work, I took the final step and talked things out with Fletcher, the way I always did now, even though I'd moved out into my own apartment and was doing most of the jobs solo. The old man had agreed with my assessment and plan, and he'd even tagged along with me on this one, since taking out a cop—even a crooked one—could be tricky.

I'd learned that Malone liked to host an after-hours poker game for cops, lawyers, and whoever else had enough coin to buy in at her ten-thousand-dollar, cash-only minimum. Fletcher and I had decided to do the hit here at the abandoned warehouse where the game was played every couple of weeks, since plenty of bad folks would be around who would be sure to blame each other for killing Malone. Besides, the warehouse was out in the sticks, miles away from anything, so there would be no one around to hear any gunfire, should things come down to that. So we'd locked and loaded up our supplies, driven out to the warehouse two hours before the game was supposed to start, and gotten into position, waiting for our target to arrive.

The hit itself had been easy enough.

I'd been waiting in one of the stalls in the grungy space that passed for a bathroom when Liza Malone finally got up
from the poker table to take a potty break. She was washing her hands in the cracked, stained sink when I slithered up behind her, clamped my hand over her mouth, and slit her throat. She was dead before I lowered her body to the dirty concrete floor.