Dark Time: Mortal Path (14 page)

There could have been several people waiting for her as she descended the rope.

Diane Harvey couldn’t fail to make a connection between the impudent “reporter” in her office in the afternoon and a break-in that night. Security cameras in the building had captured her image during that earlier visit, and as a bestselling novelist, she wouldn’t be difficult to track down.

She watched for Amaro to arrive, and when he did, she sank glumly into the passenger seat. They drove in silence to the hotel. Amaro’s hand crept over and gently covered hers. As an Ageless woman, she’d been utterly alone, in spite of her lovers. She kept her hand under his, thinking how good it was to have friends.

Replaying her escape, she focused on the shape in the woods, trying to glean more from her memory.

Could it have been the stalker? Just my luck: I’m being stalked by Bigfoot.

When they were back at the hotel, Amaro dug out the bullet. She took a shower, slapped a 4 x 4 pad on her thigh, and held it on with gauze. Wrapped in one of the hotel’s plush bathrobes, she went out to talk to Amaro.

“You okay?”

“Sure. It’s going to hurt to sit down, but that will be gone in a few hours.”

Amaro asked her about evidence left at the scene.

“DNA for certain. No fingerprints inside. The climbing cord, launcher, and vacuum cup were left behind, but those weren’t custom. Pieces of a glove. The vague possibility of a palm print on the cord, but I doubt it.”

“I’ll scrub out all the info on the DNA, or at least mess with it as much of it as I can,” Amaro said.

“It’s going to be tricky. I have to make it look like you checked out of this hotel and flew back to Chicago right after the interview at Advanced PharmBots. That way, you would have been out of town at the time of the late-night break-in. I can alter all those records. It’ll look like you arrived back at your condo, let’s say four P.M. so we can get the story straight. The doorman?”

“No problem. Arnie can arrange that even if he’s not on duty then. I can’t let anyone see me, though, for two or three days. This hand is in rough shape and the bullet wounds will have to be gone. The shoulder’s no problem, but my thigh is going to take a while. My skin heals first, though, and then whatever damage is underneath it, so the thigh wound is going to look better than it actually is in a few days. My best alibi is to show no wounds. I’ll have to go on a writing trip somewhere, and I’ll make sure my editor doesn’t know where I am. That’s not unusual.”

“Okay, it’s all shaping up. You need to get some sleep while I get all this started.”

Maliha’s eyes were closing. She needed rest—she healed faster when she slept or meditated.

Amaro patted the cushion of the couch next to him. “Over here.”

Maliha was too sleepy to argue. She went over to the couch and he put his arm around her. She snuggled next to his chest.

The steady warmth of his body felt good. Amaro tenderly kissed the top of her head. She drifted into sleep and back in time.

46 z 138

2009-08-25 02:50

1994

I
n the Cidade de Deus, a
favela
in Rio de Janeiro, most people were poor. Sex and drugs were sold on every street corner, and the police were reluctant to patrol the streets because of violence by well-armed gangs—violence that could turn against them in moments.

It was not on the Top Ten list of places for tourists to go.

That didn’t deter Maliha. Concealed in a leather sheath around her waist was a flexible sword, wrapped twice about her waist, its hilt disguised as a decorative buckle on a deadly belt. The whip sword had two double-edged blades that uncoiled when she tugged on the hilt. The blades were sharp-edged bands of thin steel that weren’t as floppy as a whip or as rigid as a typical sword blade. As Maliha swung them around, the blades flicked at a throat or a wrist. The whip sword was dangerous to its operator as well; one misstep in its use, and the blades could slit her own throat.

Maliha bristled with edged weapons, and she gave off vibes that it wasn’t a party costume. Patrolling by law enforcement was light to nonexistent in the
favela
, and no resident would alert them to her armament. Most people she encountered gave her a wide berth. The ones who didn’t, who gravitated to her out of a kinky attraction, rapidly learned to keep their urges in check.

She was heading to a meeting with a man and a mandolin.

Davi Luiz Guterres was a descendant of a Portuguese artisan highly skilled in mandolin making.

Maliha had bought her first mandolin from that artisan in 1790. She’d lost it during a cholera outbreak in London in 1831, and recently had decided to commission another one from the same family of luthiers, if they were still in business. It turned out the family had moved to Brazil and still carried on the craft. Davi had moved into the
favela
when it was still a respectable neighborhood. Seventy-five years old and stubborn, he had no intention of moving his shop just because there was a little crime on the block.

Davi had had her play several different instruments to get a feel for her skill level, and then told her to leave a deposit and come back in a year. The year was up.

A noisy scene in an alley attracted her attention. The alley widened and dead-ended in a small plaza.

A group of young men had a girl of about thirteen on the ground, her blouse ripped off and her skirt hiked up to her hips. As Maliha watched, a man bent over her frightened form and sliced off her panties. She was about to be raped by one or more of the gang members. Off to the side, two muscular men restrained a teenaged boy who was screaming obscenities.

The auras of the two young people assailed her with helplessness, outrage, and fear. The mandolin would have to wait.

Maliha eased into the plaza. With their attention focused on the girl, no one spotted her, and the game continued.

A young man strutted toward the restrained boy and said something that Maliha couldn’t make out.

The words heated the captive even further, and he struggled furiously to free himself. The man doing the taunting revealed a broken beer bottle and slashed the prisoner across the arm with it. Then he went back to the girl, who was held down by several gang members groping at her breasts. The leader knelt in front of her and made in-and-out motions in the air with the beer bottle. Then he jabbed the broken neck of the bottle toward the girl’s vagina.

The bottle never even made it close to the girl’s body. Maliha was on the leader before any of the gang members could react. Her knife was at his throat, and she twisted one of his arms behind his back.

With her knee, she bumped the man’s other hand, and he dropped the broken bottle.

“Anyone moves and he’s the first to die, followed by the rest of you.” Portuguese wasn’t her best language, but she got the point across. “Let the boy go.”

The men holding the boy tightened their hold, eliciting groans from their captive. She nicked the throat of the leader, and he shouted to his gang to release the teenager. They did, and the boy ran to the girl’s side—
Sister? Girlfriend?
—and knelt next to her.

“You two, get out of the alley and then run. I’ll catch up to you.” The look on the boy’s face told her he was about to do something stupid, like punch out the nearest gang member. “Don’t even think of it.

Get the girl out of here. She needs your help.”

The pair took off down the alley. After they left, members of the gang edged closer to the exit, cutting off the only route Maliha could take. There were at least twenty of them in the plaza, and now they were being egged on by women who’d remained in the shadows around the edge of the group.

No way out without a body count.

47 z 138

2009-08-25 02:50

She pulled on the hilt of the whip sword and felt it uncurl from her waist like a pent-up buzz-saw blade, the tough, metal-lined sheath preventing it from slicing into her skin. She pictured the motion of the whip sword a fraction ahead of doing it, a trick she’d been taught to help protect her body from the strike of one of the two blades. She kept her wrist relaxed, and then snapped it to send one of the blades slicing through the throat of the man nearest her. She brought the blades down to waist level, and slashed two others across the belly. She stepped around one of the men as he fell, his hands clutching at the sudden gush of blood from his middle.

Leaving a wake of groaning, incapacitated gang members behind her with various levels of injury, she sped down the alley, the bloodied whip sword trailing behind her. A few blocks of a narrow, winding street led her to a kind of no-man’s land, a buffer zone ringing the crime-ridden community. She slowed to a trot, pulled the whip sword up, pinched its blades together at the tip, and inserted them back into the sheath. They spun into their safe position around her waist like a measuring tape retracting into its holder.

The teenagers couldn’t have gotten much farther. When she passed a corner, a hand snaked out and grabbed her arm.

“You save us,” the boy said in broken English. “I, Amaro, this sister Rosie. She…she…” He couldn’t finish that thought, so he switched gears. “We have no one, no go back there ever.”

“Come with me, then,” Maliha said, using Portuguese and a soothing voice. “We can’t stay here.

None of us can stay here.”

Halfway back to her hotel, Maliha gasped and clutched her abdomen. Two figures were making their way from one pan of the scales to the other, their footprints burning into her skin. She leaned against a building and moaned. Amaro and Rosie supported her, very concerned, not knowing what was wrong or what to do.

As the figures scrambled onto the good side of the scale, the pain let up a bit. The lurch came next, the yank through unpredictable amounts of time. Amaro and Rosie didn’t know what happened, but they understood Maliha had not only risked her life but also suffered to save them.

M
aliha arrived home in Chicago on a Thursday afternoon after three days in Hawaii. She had eight phone messages from her editor, Jefferson Leewood. She dialed his number, hoping to find him away from his desk so she could leave a quick message and be done with it. Instead he picked up on the second ring.

“Must you disappear like that?” Jeff asked. “My boss is giving me hell because I haven’t seen anything on the new book.”

“I’m working on it.”

“When can I see what you have so far?”

“You know I don’t work that way. You ask that on every book, and every time I give you the same answer. When I’m finished, you’ll see the manuscript.”

“You going to make the deadline? You don’t have much time left.”

Maliha sighed. “I’ll make it. Have I missed one yet?”

“No, but…”

“Then go with the flow, Jeff.”

“Can I at least give your paragraph to the art department so they can get started?”

She’d written a few sentences about
A Lust for Murder
that left her plenty of wiggle room to develop it.

“Sure. Can I get back to writing now, please?”

His voice got quieter, conspiratorial. “Marsha, I got a call from the Carey, North Carolina, police department. Something about a break-in and theft in an office building a few days ago. They wanted to know where to reach you.”

“Thanks for the warning. I’ll take care of it.”

“Well?”

48 z 138

2009-08-25 02:50

“I didn’t have anything to do with whatever it is. I was in North Carolina, but it must be mistaken identity or something. What reason would I have to break in to an office building?”

“I have to ask this.”

Uh-oh.

“Are you working for somebody else as a reporter? Some New Age journal or something? Pyramids and all that shit? You could have talked that over with me, you know. You’re not planning to stop writing the Detective Dick Stallion books are you?” He paused for a moment, and she could almost hear the next thought click into place. “Are you planning to switch publishers?”

Maliha pushed a laugh into her voice. “Oh, that! I was doing research for a character in the book who’s a reporter. I got into the role for authenticity.”

There was silence for a minute. “Oh.”

“Talk to you soon, Jeff. Bye.”

Now I’m going to have to work a reporter into the book. Sheesh.

Maliha had just gotten to her computer, coffee cup in hand and ready to do some serious damage to her remaining word quota, when her intercom chimed.

“Ms. Winters, two detectives from the Chicago PD are here to see you. They’re already on their way up to the thirty-ninth floor.” It was Arnie, and there was emphasis put on the floor number.

“Thank you. I’ll look out for them.”

She’d been expecting it. She made them show their badges at the door, and greeted them in a black silk top and tight, low-cut jeans. She knew she looked like the prize every man wanted to find behind Door Number One.

The older one introduced himself as Detective Ron Nobling. Jerking his head sideways, he indicated that his partner was Detective Ace Morgan. It was clear that they were bored with the prospect of checking someone out for a department in North Carolina and hungry for better assignments than this.

Nobling cleared his throat. “Let’s make this short. Are you Marsha Winters, the novelist?”

“Yes.”

“Did you visit Advanced PharmBots in North Carolina this past Tuesday for an interview with Diane Harvey, posing as a reporter?”

“Yes.”

“And did you return that night to break in to her office?”

“No.”

“What did you do after the interview?” Ace said. Ron glared over at him, but it bounced off like a mosquito off a charging rhino. Evidently, it was Ron’s prerogative to ask the questions.

“As you know, my interview with Ms. Harvey ended abruptly.”

They both nodded.

“I left right away for Chicago.” She provided the airline and flight number that Amaro had faked for her. “Um, aren’t you going to write that down?”