Broken (3 page)

But the Little Doll will have to find them first
, Wolfe said, and I heard the eagerness.
Can the Little Doll do this?

“
Yes,” I said after a long pause, and my voice almost cracked. “Yes. But I’m going to need … a little more help.”

3.

The bar was dark when I walked in, and a faint neon glow from a hundred different beer signs that hung on the walls painted the room. The bouncer inside the door looked me up and down with a wary eye and beckoned. I handed him my driver’s license—or one with my picture on it, anyway, a spare I kept at my house along with an additional FBI I.D. and some other papers in case of an emergency. There was a scent of something being fried in the air, and the bouncer looked at me with smoky eyes, to my license, then back to me. He shrugged and handed it over. I walked on past him without even a breath of care. If he hadn’t let me pass, it would have been his problem, not mine.

The room I walked into consisted of multiple levels divided into sections by rails and booths. I could see a dance floor somewhere in the distance, but there were enough mirrors on the walls that I wasn’t entirely sure where in the building it was. I also did not care. The music blasting out of speakers overhead had way too much electronic noise in it for me to really consider it music, and the speaker system wasn’t doing it any favors either, at least not to my metahuman ears. Besides, my eyes had settled on who I was looking for as soon as I walked in; everything else was ancillary noise at this point.

“
Hey, pretty girl,” a guy said, stepping into my path as I made my way toward the bar. The alcohol on his breath said he’d had at least twelve beers. “How about we—”

I let my left hand loose without really thinking about it, and it arced from my side in a quick motion and slapped him open-handed in the groin. All the air rushed out of him and he hit his knees. “How about we don’t,” I said as I walked past him and turned the corner to enter the section of the room that had the actual bar in it. I heard the murmured assent of voices around me, both in my head and out of it.

I took the last few steps up to the bar and didn’t bother to take off my heavy wool coat, the one that was black and fell all the way to my knees. It was cold outside, now; the first breaths of winter infusing the air, and I didn’t even feel any desire to remove it now that I was indoors. I went to the end of the bar, to the man who sat there, drinking a beer from a glass big enough to qualify as a bucket in most jurisdictions. He watched me the whole way over, trying not to act like he cared, but he stopped watching as I turned the last corner of the bar and came to the stool next to him. “Mind if I sit down?” I asked.

“
If I say no, are you gonna do to me what you did to the last guy?” He was big, his face carried acne scars and a world of uncaring seeped out of his voice. He was chomping on a big cigar, unlit.

“
Probably worse,” I said, and took the seat next to him.

“
Have a seat, then,” he said, and pulled the cigar out of his mouth. “Welcome to my home away from home.” Kurt Hannegan stared back at me from the next barstool, his massive frame dwarfing mine. “How’d you find me?”

I didn’t answer for a minute. “He … told me you hang out here. That … he … had been here with you before.”

There was a splash of uncertainty on his already surly face. “Yeah. Once or twice he was, I suppose. What are you doing here?”

I watched him as he took a long pull from his beer. “You heard?”

He finished the mug in one long drink and made a gesture to the bartender for another. “I heard.”

“
How?”

A new glass made its way to in front of him, and the barman asked politely if I wanted anything. I shook my head and he disappeared again. “Jackson told me,” Hannegan said. “He and a couple other guys heard from Clary. Said the big man told the story loud and boisterous all the way up til the last part. Then he got quiet and needed booze and prompting to get to the finish.” Kurt shot me a sidelong look. “So do you hear him now?” He pointed to his head. “Is he … with you … right now?

“
Not so much, no,” I said. “Kinda quiet for some reason.”

There was the faintest look of amusement that vanished with his next gulp. “Yep,” he put the glass down, “I’d be quiet, too, if I was stuck in my wife’s head.” His face froze in a look of horror or wistfulness; I didn’t know which. As per usual lately, I didn’t care, either.

“
You haven’t asked me why I’m here.” I waited for him to turn and look at me but he stayed still on his stool. One hand stayed in front of him playing with a cardboard coaster that had been worn through with the perspiration from his beer. The other was anchored to his glass’s handle and he fingered it, knuckles twitching as though he wanted to lift it one second, then didn’t know what to do in the next. “Ask me, Kurt. Ask me why I’m here.”

“
Doesn’t take a rocket scientist to know why you’re here—”

“
Which you aren’t, anyway,” I said.

“
I’m not stupid—”

“
That’s open to some debate.”

He didn’t look at me. “You’re mad. I would be, too—”

“
I’m not mad,” I said evenly. “I just want them dead.”

He froze in place, his beer halfway to his mouth. “Yeah. That’s kinda what I figured.” He took a breath, holding the beer in place. “How do you figure to fit me into your plans?”

“
You don’t want them dead?” I asked him.

“
I don’t want to die,” Hannegan answered, putting the beer back down. “That’s the only answer I care about, and me up against them is suicide, so I don’t ask myself any of the other questions I might want to.”

“
I don’t care if I die so long as they do, too,” I said. There was not even a hint of reaction from him. “But I’m kinda in a rough spot here, because I’m out in the cold—”

“
Everyone’s in the cold with Winter.”

“
You know what I mean. I don’t know his plans.” My eyes narrowed at him. “Did you know?”

He looked at me sidelong for a second then went back to his beer, but I caught the hint of nerves. “What the hell kind of question is that? You think I’d be sitting in this bar from daybreak to closing every day if I knew this was coming—for you or … “ he looked around, as though someone were listening, “ … him?”

“
I dunno, Kurt,” I said, and let the ice leak into my voice, “a week ago, a guy I would have said I trusted with my life ordered his flunkies to hold me down while they used my body to kill the only man I’ve ever loved. Not exactly feeling the trust flowing for anyone at the moment.” I spun on the stool to face him. “Do you want Zack avenged or not?”

He took a long breath and pulled the cigar out of his mouth. “I got no loyalty to Winter.” He gestured toward the door. “He offered me some work, to help guard him for a few weeks, and I told him to go f—” He let himself get carried away, but caught himself just in time. “Well, you know.”

“
Can you find out where he is?” I leaned in closer to him.

“
Probably,” Hannegan said, and looked me over. “But it’s not gonna do you any good. M-Squad is still watching his back. They will pull you apart limb by limb before you get within a hundred feet of him. Which I don’t think is gonna do Zack or you any damned good.”

I reached into my coat pocket and pulled out a sheet of paper, a small one, and laid it on the bar. “Let me worry about that. I just need to know … “ I let my finger trace along the paper, “ … details. Everything you can get me. There’s no way their security is flawless. All I need is some help finding the holes in it.”

“
It’s not a piece of Swiss cheese.” He glanced at the paper, then stared, almost slack-jawed, before slowly turning back to me with a faint nod of acknowledgment. “You’re pulling out all the stops.”

“
I owe them,” I said and stood up, slapping a roll of hundred dollar bills down on the bar—some of my savings from my year of working for Old Man Winter. Blood money, all of it. “I want to pay.”

Kurt looked at me as he put the unlit cigar back in his mouth. “Don’t you mean you want them to pay?”

“
That’s going to happen, too—I guarantee it.” I stretched, my back still slightly stiff from the box I had left only an hour or so earlier. “And it’ll be fun. And satisfying.” I eyed him, the big man on the stool, and he suddenly seemed incredibly small. “But you don’t get anything for free. No, I’ll pay.” I gave him a slight smile as I turned to walk away, one that I actually felt; cold, brutal, mean. “But every one of them is going to pay first.”

4.

It was night, and my stomach growled at me as I crawled through a patch of wet dirt outside Hastings, Minnesota. The ground had thawed after a day of sun, a day in which I didn’t know what to do with myself because it followed the night I had met Kurt in the bar. It was muddy now, as muddy as I’d ever seen it, and my elbows and hands were covered in it, thick mud that stank a little of sulfur. I kept myself low as I approached the farmhouse; I had belly-crawled through the grass all the way from the highway. I would have preferred to do what I was going to do from a distance, with a rifle, but I didn’t have one of those. I felt the weight of my gun and holster pushing against my ribcage, angrily poking at me as it brushed the ground. Kurt had gotten it for me, and like so many things the big man had introduced into my life, it brought some pain with it.

I ignored it. Pain was good. Pain was my friend. The pain kept me crawling on as the night deepened. It was after midnight, now, and I was approaching the farmhouse after crawling for hours. I was going as slowly as I dared, my patience strained but not breaking because of what I had to do. There were about a million stars hanging over me, the only light save for a porch light that was about a hundred yards away from me and getting closer as I went. I was making as little noise as possible, almost none, and there was no noise of crickets to mask my approach. I hoped I was being quiet enough, because I didn’t want this to get loud before I was ready. I wanted to get close-up. Personal.

I wanted it that way, but I didn’t want it that way, either.

This is the way it should be, Little Doll
.

“
Thanks for giving your opinion,” I whispered. “I shall cherish this advice always, and file it away with all the other fun memories you’ve given me, like that time you … oh, right. We’ve never had any good times together, only misery.”

He mercifully shut up as I kept going. I knew before I’d started that I was in for a long night of this. I had started hours ago and miles away on a back road where I left my car (Zack’s car) parked. From what Kurt had told me, I was guaranteed to find my target at home. Apparently he never left anymore, not for anything. The tire tracks in the muddy driveway told me others had been here recently. The single page Kurt had included in the package he left on my doorstep along with the gun said it was pizza deliveries, sandwiches, occasionally groceries, and booze. The booze truck came every other day, and the credit card receipts indicated some heavy drinking being done at the house I was looking at.

Good. I hoped it was still going on. Drunkards are easier to catch by surprise. It’s hard to pay full attention to the world around you when you’re busy getting hammered.

And in this case, I needed all the help I could get.

I reached the end of the tall grass that surrounded the farmhouse in all directions. If this had been a working farm at one point, it was in the distant past now. Now it was a near-abandoned house less than an hour south of Minneapolis and St. Paul, aged and damned near forgotten. That is, at least by everybody but me, the lone occupant of the place, some food delivery drivers and whoever dropped off five gallons of vodka every other day.

I peered out of the grass, trying to keep my face hidden as I looked at the windows, the lights shining brightly within. Every light in the place seemed to be on, and I wondered for a flash if that was due to drunken forgetfulness or as some sort of lure. I saw a shadow move in the window, a figure cross to the kitchen from the living room, and realized it wasn’t much of a trap if so. My target was in sight. I didn’t even deign to think of him as a person anymore, just a target to be filled with bullets, as though I were at the range.

It was how he would have wanted me to see it. It was how he trained me.

I watched Glen Parks close his refrigerator door, his bushy gray beard hanging in front of him as he plodded back toward the living room. He disappeared out of sight with a bottle in his hand, the bright yellow label obvious against his weathered hand, and I breathed a sigh of relief. He did appear to be drinking. That was good news for me.

I ignored the smell of the mud as I got to my feet. I crept forward across the driveway, sticking to the shadows as I ducked behind the old, rust-covered pickup truck that was in the driveway, parked about ten feet from the back door. I pondered entry points the way he’d taught me. Somewhere about twenty feet away from me, there was a sound of a blaring TV, loud enough that I could hear it from where I was standing. I estimated he was somewhere close to it, probably no more than twenty-five feet from where I was crouched, just a wall or two and some windows separating us. The volume of the TV was a good sign for me, likely to drown out not only my approach but also at a high enough volume to mask the sound of my entry, if I did it right.