Fade To Midnight (42 page)

“They're not, but I just gave you a reason to look there,” Edie said. “Kev sent us a text. He saw the library. He saw the pile of boxes.”

Des dropped his head into his hands. “Edie. Don't make this harder than it is. There were no boxes of files. There never have been.”

“Send someone.” Edie directed the plea at Houghtaling, ignoring him. “Please. Send someone to check. Right now.”

“I'll put someone on it, as soon as possible,” Houghtaling said.

Edie got to her feet. “Thank you,” she said.

“One moment.” The detective dug in her pocket, and handed her a card. “Just in case anything else comes back to you.”

Edie stuck it in her pocket, and stumbled through the house like a sleepwalker. Ronnie was no longer in the solarium. She went up the curving staircase, down the corridor to Ronnie's suite.

Her sister lay on the antique four-poster bed. Edie sat down on the bed, stroking her sister's tangled hair.

Edie kicked off her shoes, and climbed onto her sister's bed. Uncomfortably aware of the weight of the Ruger around her ankle, the mud spattered jeans leaving brownish smears over Ronnie's pure-white eyelet lace coverlet. She breathed in the scent of Ronnie's hair, taking comfort from the closeness. Reminding her heart of its own truths.

She'd drawn Kev. She'd seen inside him. She'd been inside him. There was no faking that frequency, that vibration. No possibility of lies.

But how many levels to Kev might there be? She had no idea what was hidden behind that barrier in his mind. He might not know, either. There might be a good part of him, utterly sincere and honest, and at the same time…there might be something else. Something different.

She shivered.
No.
She had to trust herself. And him. If she let them shake her faith in Kev, she was finished.

She nuzzled Ronnie's hair, tried to make her mind blank.

She failed, of course, but the effort kept her busy.

K
ev was buried under a ton of crushing rock, but someone was worrying his feet. Kicking, scratching. Driving him mad.

Fuck this. If he was going to be buried in rock, let him die in peace, at least. Maybe he'd died, and this was hell.
Nudge. Scratch. Shake.
Like rats, at his ankles. A whimpering, muffled, squeaking sound. Desperate. He clawed his way closer to consciousness. Tried to open his eyes. Failed, the first hundred times.

Brutal fluorescent lights blazed. The world was tilted wildly askew.
Nudge, nudge.
What the fuck…?

He tried to see who was tormenting him. Ava Cheung was sprawled on top of him, body rigid, face a frozen grimace. Eyes blazing with unabated malice, inches from his own. Paralyzed, but conscious. Her face was striped with dark, dried rivulets of blood from her nose.

It was like waking to find a scorpion on his chest. He tried to move. His most violent efforts yielded feeble twitches.

After an interminable interval, the twitches were forceful enough to shove Ava's body off of his own. He rolled her onto her back. She gazed up, eyes glittering. The syringe still poked out of her leg.

Her finally saw who'd been worrying his feet. The girl in the wheelchair. The Latvian girl. He cudgeled his brain for her name. Yuliyah. She'd stuck one foot out just far enough from its ratcheted plastic cuff to kick at his feet. Her ankle was bloody and raw from her efforts. He wondered how long she'd been at it.

Their eyes met, and she writhed, mewled against her gag.
Hurry up, you goddamn slug
being the clear nonverbal message.

Right. Yeah. Good thing she'd wakened him. Ava had only taken one dose of the X-Cog. She'd given him two. He was roughly double her weight, but she could easily have come back to life before he had. And he and Yuliyah would have both been meat.

Not that they were out of the woods yet. By no means.

He rolled over, tried to get to his hands and knees, but he wobbled like a newborn foal. He stayed down, crawled to retrieve the clippers. Dragged himself over to the wheelchair. It took for-fucking-ever to remind the muscles in his hand how to contract again, they were each so busy trembling individually.

He went at Yuliyah's bonds. The bloodied leg, then the other one. Then her arms. He peeled the gag out. She spit out a rubber ball, coughed, and launched herself out of the chair. She yanked the clippers out of Kev's numb hand and flung herself on Ava with a shriek of rage.

His reaction time was so damn slow, the blades of the clipper were already flashing down toward the woman's carotid artery by the time he caught her wrist. “No,” he said.

Yuliyah looked betrayed. He didn't understand the stream of words, but her eyes asked the question clearly.
Why the fuck not?

Damn good question. He didn't really have an answer. Just a vague sense of it being wrong, to execute a drugged, helpless woman, no matter how much she deserved it. Plus, he was in a shitload of trouble, and Ava's death would not necessarily help him out of it.

On the contrary. They'd already fingered him for Parrish's murder. Watch them accuse him of slaughtering a beautiful young female neuroscientist, too. He'd spend his life on death row.

Besides, a quick death was too good for her. But he couldn't explain that to Yuliyah. He pried the clippers from her hand. Yuliyah burst into tears, spit in Ava's face, and slugged her.

He grabbed Yuliyah's fist before it could land again, picked up a plasticuff, mimed putting it on Ava. “We'll tie her up.”

An impassioned explosion of words burst out of Yuliyah. He shook his head, grabbed more plasticuffs, fastened Ava's ankles. Then he rolled her onto her belly, fastened her hands behind her. He cinched the loop together with a third cuff so that she was arched backward like a bow. Uncomfortable as hell, but hey, so was being a mind-raped zombie slave for the rest of his miserable life. And she'd threatened Edie.

That steeled him to retrieve the rubber ball that had been in Yuliyah's mouth. Ava's eyes bugged with horror as he tied on the gag.

He stared down at his handiwork, at a loss. Great. And now?

He peered out the door, into a larger laboratory room. Still and quiet. She hadn't been kidding when she said she'd arranged not to be disturbed. Another burst of words from Yuliyah. She mimed turning a key in a lock, then pointed to Ava. She got onto her knees, scrabbling in Ava's pants pocket. Pulled out a wad of keys. The girl was sharp.

He grabbed Ava by the armpits, and dragged her trussed body out into the other room. No windows. Various other doors. He opened them at random. One was a closet full of supplies. He dropped Ava on the floor, and went in to the back, yanking boxes away from the wall until he'd created a hole. He wedged her into it and replaced the boxes.

She might asphyxiate. She might squeak and thump for days without getting anyone's attention. So her fortune was bound to his. If he got out of here alive, he'd alert the authorities to her whereabouts.

If they killed him, they would find her when she started to smell.

It was a better death than the one she'd planned for him, or for Yuliyah. He could live with that. Or die with it, as the case may be.

Now they had to find a way out. He went back to trying the doors. Many of them were locked. He held out his hand for the keys Yuliyah had taken. Finally, one of them opened. He peered inside, and found a sealed door that looked like a huge refrigrator. A string of colored lights blinked along the top. His flesh began to creep. He turned to Yuliyah.

“Stay back,” he told her. “I'll take a look in here.”

The girl shook her head, and clung to his arm. He didn't have the strength to argue with her. He shoved the door open.

A blast of icy air and a foul odor floated out. They shrank back, gagging. Yuliyah moaned. He pushed her back toward the outer door again. She dug her nails into his arm til they broke his skin. The two of them stepped inside together.

The room was full of metal tables, the tables covered with bodies shrouded in black zippered plastic bags.

Holy shit. He stared around, his mind wiped blank with horror.

He counted. Twelve bags. He looked at the body bag closest to him, and lowered the zipper just a few inches.

A young woman. Blood-soaked blond curls. Her face was frozen in a grimace, lips pulled back from teeth, eyes staring, spotted with burst capillaries. Blackened blood from her nose streaked her face.

Yuliyah began to scream. Kev spun around, clapped his hand over her mouth. “No!” he growled.

She choked it off, shaking with sobs. Shivering in the frigid icebox, which highlighted another problem. Yuliyah was almost naked. Even if they did get out of this place in one piece, he couldn't take a girl in her underwear out into the November air. Ava's clothes would have fit her, but he'd already stowed Ava, and the thought of peeling the clothing off that horrible thing turned his stomach. It would be about as attractive as looking in those body bags. Nobody home, just the living dead. A piece of meat, animated by rage and hate alone.

He dragged Yuliyah, still sobbing, out of the charnel house, where she promptly vomited all over the floor. Kev jerked away from the splatter. Clothing. He kept searching through the lab, yanking open doors, cabinets. Finally he hit the jackpot; lab coats, clean and pressed. For when Ava wanted to dress up and play scientist.

He wrapped Yuliyah in one of them, and pulled her behind him out into the corridor. This lab had to be underground, considering the nature of the work. Windowless, airless. The hallway was painted cinderblocks, a snarl of insulation-wrapped pipes on the ceiling. A subbasement. No points of reference. A featureless maze.

He locked the knob lock of the laboratory, used all the keys til he found the one for the dead bolt. Listened again, letting all his senses reach out, open up. Nothing to orient him. He grabbed Yuliyah's arm, put his finger to his lips, and pulled her behind himself through the long corridor. Every time they reached a corner, he would stop, listen, feel the stillness of the air, the quality of the silence, before they dared to creep around the turn.

They finally reached a stairwell. They started to climb, and reached a floor that appeared to have natural light. He leaned on the push bar from the stairwell. Poked his head into the corridor.

It was a big, empty warehouse. Yuliyah grabbed his arm and started babbling. He shushed her desperately. “We have to go,” he whispered. “Shhh! We have to go! Now!”

Yuliyah pointed at herself, held up one finger. Then she held up five more fingers. “Oksana, Margaritka, Olga, Katyushka, Marya!”

Oh, excellent. As if saving one terrified, traumatized foreign girl in her underwear wasn't enough of a challenge. Why not six of them? If he weren't so desperate, it would almost be funny.

He slashed his finger over his throat, an international symbol if there ever was one. “Police,” he said. “We'll get the police. The police will help Oksana, Margaritka, Olga, Kat…Kat—”

“Katyushka, Marya,” Yuliyah finished impatiently. “Poleese?”

He shushed her, and dragged her out the door, into the warehouse. She was clearly unimpressed with him for being a lily-livered wuss, but fuck it, he wasn't even armed, except for Ava's clippers. They'd stripped him of his gear. He was only one guy, and he was tired, and scared, and Edie was out there, being stalked by some huge metaphorical arachnid from hell. Enough already.

A big metal door right in front of them burst open. Kev was already in the air as big guy leaped out, took aim—

Bam,
the shot went wild as a front kick to the point of the guy's chin sent him spinning, thudding against the wall. The gun dropped.

Another guy leaped out at him with a club. He ducked the swing, grabbing the man's arm and using the momentum of his swing to fling him headfirst into the door. He whirled just in time to kick the gun from the groping hand of the first guy, who had revived.

An elbow smash to the temple, and Kev grabbed him from behind and put his thumb to his carotid artery, pressing until he went limp.

Both men down. A splotch of blood on the door matched a corresponding splotch on the second guy's head. Blood poured in rivulets over his slack-jawed face. Too easy, once again. He assumed they'd been saved by the fact that the guys were under orders not to kill them, should they escape. They were worth more alive than dead.

Kev pulled out the cuffs he'd put in his pocket, and peered into the room the guards had come from. It was full of security screens, showing the corridor he and Yuliyah had been creeping through, the doors and various vantage points from outside. The author of their strange luck sat there on the table, wrapped in brown paper; two big paper-wrapped deli sandwiches.

The dickheads had been focused on their meal. The sight of all that sliced lunch meat turned his stomach, after what he'd seen downstairs.

Kev dragged the two men into the room, and used the last plasticuffs to bind them to the radiator. He gathered up their weapons. Two guns, a knife. Car keys. He grabbed an oversized black sweatshirt he found on a table for himself, and draped a leather jacket off the back of a chair over Yuliyah. It hung down to midthigh.

He grabbed her hand, pulled. “Let's get the fuck out of this place.”

 

As soon as they walked in to Lost Boys, Miles knew Con and Davy were going to be useless. They stood there, staring up, mouths open. Flabbergasted.

Even for someone who wasn't hunting a long lost brother, the Lost Boys reception area was pretty special. The room had a high ceiling with lots of glass, and the entire space was filled with kites strung on wires, wild colors, crazy designs. The walls were painted with blown-up details of the mandalas. Kev's mandalas.

Miles left the McClouds to their gawking and walked over to the cute receptionist, who flashed him an I'll-just-be-a-sec smile. He pondered his opening gambit as she concluded her conversation. It was a curious challenge.
We're looking for a guy whose name we don't know who looks like a goth comic book hero.
Hmm. Or he could hold up a Fade Shadowseeker book and say
have you seen this man?

Yeah. Right. That would go over great.

“Hi, can I help you?” she asked brightly.

“I hope so,” he said. “We're looking for information about the man who designed these kites.” He gestured toward the aerial display.

The girl's smile vanished. “Oh. I can't give you any information.”

She probably took him for a headhunter. “Who can?” Miles asked.

“Our CEO, Bruno Ranieri, I guess,” she said.

“Can we see him?”

“Nope.” She looked triumphant. “He's out of the office. All day.”

Miles groaned, inwardly. “Can we make an appointment to see him tomorrow?”

“I'll check with his assistant.” She dialed an extension, covered the phone with her hand and shot him sidelong glances as she muttered into it. A moment later, she looked up. “Sorry. She has no idea if he'll be in tomorrow. He's taking some personal time.”

Davy and Con sauntered over to the receptionist's desk, doing their silent looming routine. Her eyes got big as Con leaned over the counter.

“Personal time?” he said softly.

Davy pulled a business card out of his wallet, put it on the counter. He tapped it with his finger, and shoved it toward her. “Our business with Mr. Ranieri is very personal,” he said. “It is also extremely important. Please have him call. As soon as possible. In fact, if you have a number where he can be reached, you might call him right now.”

She stared at the card. Her eyes darted from Davy to Con. “Um. I, um…don't?” she squeaked. “Have any number. I mean.”

They gazed at each other and turned to go. Thwarted by their own macho manly code of conduct. There was only so far a McCloud guy would go to intimidate an innocent woman. Miles certainly couldn't do it. He sucked at intimidation. He couldn't even intimidate his girlfriend Cindy's jealous cat into not pissing in his shoes.