Immortal (3 page)

‘What the hell happened to you?’ she whispered to the corpse.

Suddenly, the lights in the morgue went out and plunged her into darkness. A wave of panic fluttered through Lillian as she struggled to maintain her balance in the complete blackness. She
cursed the fact that, like all morgues, there were no windows.

It was a hell of a time for the power to go out. She stood for a moment, waiting for the emergency generator to cut in, but nothing happened. Then the door to the morgue slammed violently shut,
the crash sending a lance of terror through her.

‘Hello?’ she called out. At two in the morning she should have been alone in the building.

Nobody responded in the absolute darkness looming around her.

Slowly she backed away from the gurney until she felt the edge of the worktops behind her. She felt her way around the edge, past the sinks and the polished steel scales until she located her
handbag, fumbling inside until she found her cell phone. She lifted it out, hitting a button – any button. To her relief, the screen glowed with bright blue light, illuminating the
morgue.

A horrific skull-like face lunged toward her from the gloom. She screamed with primal fear as hands grabbed her with vicious force. As the light from her cell phone was smothered so her
consciousness slipped away.

14 May

Keep running.
Don’t quit
.

Ethan Warner’s heart pounded in his chest and his lungs burned as he ran down the sidewalk, dodging past pedestrians who had already leapt clear of the teenager in the gray hoodie dashing
past them on West 27th Street.

Ethan focused on the target, lengthening his stride and trying to control his labored breathing. Several weeks of circuit training had improved his fitness, but he was still nowhere near the
level he’d been in the Marine Corps and right now the kid ahead of him was running with the added benefit of fear coursing through his blood.
Semper fi
, Ethan chanted to himself over
and over again as the kid sprinted across St Louis Avenue with casual disregard for incoming traffic.

A distorted voice sounded in his ear.

‘Where you at?’

‘Heading west, 27
^th
on South Central,’ Ethan wheezed into a Bluetooth earpiece and microphone. ‘Where the hell are you?’

‘Stand by,’ came the affronted response. ‘No need to get yourself agitated.’

Stand by, my ass
, Ethan thought as he struck out across South Central Park Avenue, an SUV honking its horn at him as he swerved around the front fender, staggered onto the sidewalk again
and almost collided with a woman and two children leaving a convenience store.

The kid ahead of him suddenly turned right, dashing into an alley that cut between rows of buildings and stores lining the streets.

‘He’s off the main, heading north toward West 26th!’ Ethan shouted, hurling himself into the alley in pursuit before seeing the kid standing facing him not twenty yards
away.

A gunshot shattered the air in the narrow alley, and Ethan hurled himself down onto the asphalt, rolling sideways and slamming into a large trash can.

‘He’s got a piece!’

‘Copy that.’

Ethan peered round the side of the dumpster and saw the kid was running through puddles toward the end of the alleyway, which was half blocked by an unoccupied black jeep. Ethan leapt up,
shouting as he ran.

‘Don’t make me shoot!’ he bellowed, hoping to hell that the kid didn’t look back and see that Ethan wasn’t carrying. ‘Lose the piece!’

The kid ducked sideways to dash past the parked jeep. Ethan accelerated and was about to follow him when the jeep’s door suddenly opened. A deep, solid thump echoed down the alleyway as
the kid hit the door at full speed, staggering backwards and toppling to the ground. Ethan slowed as he saw his partner, Nicola Lopez, leap from the jeep and stride toward the disorientated kid who
staggered to his feet and whirled, striking out at Lopez with the butt of his pistol. Lopez blocked the blow with a fluid movement of her left arm, batting the pistol aside and following
immediately with a roundhouse right that smacked into the kid’s jaw. The boy slammed onto his back as Lopez, drawing a black T-baton tonfa, placed one booted foot on his wrist to prevent him
from using his gun and jabbed one end of the baton into his throat.

‘You have the right to remain silent, else I kick your sorry ass further,’ Lopez snarled down at their quarry. ‘Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of
law. You have the right to speak to an attorney. If you cannot afford an attorney the state will appoint one to you who will most likely be goddamn useless. Do you understand?’

A weak voice squealed up at her as Ethan approached.

‘Who the hell are you?’

Lopez flashed a badge at the kid on the ground, a silver shield with ‘Bail Bondsman’ emblazoned beneath it.

‘You jumped bail, Mickey,’ Lopez said as she turned him over, knelt on his back and cuffed him. ‘You’re going back to jail.’

Ethan glanced at the vehicle from which Lopez had leapt.

‘How’d you get into that jeep?’

Lopez flashed him a dazzling smile as she jerked Mickey onto his feet.

‘Door was unlocked,’ she replied with an innocent shrug.

Ethan shook his head as Lopez guided Mickey ‘Knuckles’ Ferranto out onto West 26th Street and along the sidewalk to where she had parked their black SUV. He waited until she’d
shoe-horned Mickey into the vehicle and shut the door before speaking.

‘You broke and entered?’ he said in disbelief. ‘Jesus, we’re supposed to be
finding
criminals, not becoming them.’

‘Got the job done,’ Lopez replied without remorse. ‘I’d left it to you, you’d both be halfway to goddamn Ohio by now.’

‘I was getting there,’ Ethan said defensively. ‘He hotfooted out of the mall the moment he saw me.’

‘The job’s done,’ Lopez said, brushing a strand of black hair out of her eyes. ‘Who cares about the small print?’

Ethan blocked her path as she made her way toward the SUV’s passenger door.

‘The police? The attorney’s office? You can’t keep doing things this way, Lopez. What the hell happened to going by the book?’

‘It got me nowhere in the force.’

‘Yeah, and breaking the rules got your partner killed.’

Lightning flickered behind Lopez’s dark eyes as they locked onto Ethan’s, and he forced himself not to take a step back.

Since they had begun working together, Ethan had found out about what had befallen Nicola Lopez’s former partner in the Metropolitan Police Department in Washington DC the previous year,
crumbs of information that had slipped out during conversations. Detective Lucas Tyrell, a long-serving officer, had been shot and killed by his own superior in an apartment way down in Anacostia.
To say that Lopez had taken the hit badly was something of an understatement. Now, despite their partnership, Ethan often felt as though he were running a poor second best to Tyrell. Lopez seemed
unwilling to share directly with him what had happened, as though she hadn’t quite moved on yet. Her casual disregard for the law was a direct and, for Ethan, somewhat unsettling
manifestation of that.

Ethan had since watched Lopez abandon the moral principles with which she had conducted her work as a detective in favor of bagging the perps by whatever means necessary. Lucas Tyrell had been a
liability to the Metro PD, but he’d gotten results, and Lopez was emulating her fallen mentor just as closely as she could.

‘Corruption got Lucas killed,’ she shot back. ‘Justice got him revenge. You gonna get out of my way or do I have to put you on your ass too?’

Reluctantly, Ethan took a step back. Lopez had a reputation as a short fuse, but since losing her partner she seemed to have relinquished whatever remaining grip she had on her temper. The last
time he’d seen her lose it was when they hunted down a bail-runner to a shabby roadside diner in Battle Creek, Michigan. Three heavyweight bikers from the local chapter of the Devil’s
Disciples had taken a liking to the fugitive and were vaguely amused to see Lopez arrive with her badge, nightstick and bad attitude. It wasn’t their deliberate obstruction that had set her
off, just their idle dismissal. Two broken noses, a severed knee tendon and one fractured collarbone later, fugitive James Watson sheepishly surrendered and was dragged by Lopez over the groaning
bodies of his would-be protectors. It had been over before Ethan had even got through the door.

‘Just looking out for you,’ he said finally, raising his hands and making for the driver’s door. ‘We’re no good to each other if one of us is in jail.’

‘You’re the one with history,’ Lopez remarked as they climbed into the SUV. ‘My record’s pearly clean.’

‘You’s a jailbird?’ Mickey Ferranto muttered from the back seat, looking at Ethan.

‘Can it, Mickey,’ Ethan snapped as he started the engine and looked at Lopez. ‘I’m a reformed character.
You’re
the one on the slippery slope into shameful
lawlessness.’

Lopez shook her head and laughed as they pulled out into their lane.

‘We set ourselves up to catch bail-jumpers and fugitives. They don’t obey the law, we have to bend the rules to pick them up.’

‘That how it is?’ Ethan asked rhetorically.

‘That’s how it is.’

‘That
really
how it is?’ Mickey Ferranto complained.

‘Shut up,’ Ethan glared over his shoulder. ‘My point is that there’s plenty of competition out there and we can’t afford to get ourselves busted.’

‘We can’t afford much at all,’ Lopez muttered and jabbed her thumb over her shoulder at Ferranto. ‘We’re not bagging enough of
these
losers to make ends
meet.’

‘I ain’t no loser,’ Mickey complained.

‘No?’ Lopez turned round in her seat to look at him. ‘You’re a twenty-three-year-old who’s just cost his mother a couple of thousand bucks jail bond for nothing
more than possession of an illegal substance. You’d turned up in court like you were supposed to, you’d have probably been released because you’re not important enough, Mickey;
you’re a nobody. Only a loser like you could turn a nothing into a jail sentence.’

Mickey avoided her gaze and looked sulkily out of the window as Ethan turned toward Cook County Jail.

‘Maybe we should spread out more, cover more area,’ Ethan suggested. ‘Maybe even link up with some of the other bondsmen out there.’

‘Maybe,’ Lopez echoed. ‘Or maybe we just need to stop scraping around in the dirt for nobodies like Mickey here and pick up something more lucrative.’

Ethan began to answer when a black sedan pulled out in front of the SUV, passing within inches of his front fender. He was about to remonstrate when another identical car pulled alongside him,
boxing the SUV in.

‘What the hell?’ Lopez muttered, instinctively reaching for her pistol before remembering that she was no longer legally allowed to carry one. Her hand rested on her baton
instead.

‘Government plates,’ Ethan said, glancing at the rear of the sedan in front of them as it indicated it was turning off the road.

‘You gonna follow?’ Lopez asked.

Ethan shrugged, then turned to follow the sedan.

The sedans guided them north on Harlem Avenue before turning off the highway into Waldheim Cemetery. Lonely ranks of gravestones spread across several acres of carefully
manicured lawns shaded by hundreds of trees. Ethan followed the lead car until it pulled into a secluded spot off Greenburg Road in the northwest corner of the cemetery.

Ethan killed the engine and looked in his mirrors suspiciously.

‘What the hell is this shit, man?’ Mickey Ferranto whined. ‘I want to speak to my attorney.’

Lopez shot him a toxic look.

‘See all these gravestones, Mickey? You wanna join them, you just keep talking.’

Ethan climbed out of the SUV and closed the door. Lopez joined him. For a moment, nothing moved. Then two men climbed out of each vehicle, all sporting gray suits, designer shades and earpieces.
They moved to guard the SUV, one of them gesturing to the still open doors of the sedan ahead.

‘Great disguise, guys,’ Ethan said as he moved toward the car. ‘We’d never have known.’

The men ignored Ethan, instead standing rigidly to attention as he walked to the sedan and climbed into the rear seat. Lopez joined him from the other side.

‘Very cloak and dagger,’ Ethan said as they closed the doors. ‘Are we off to Tracy Island?’

Douglas Jarvis, an elderly man dressed immaculately in a dark blue suit that contrasted with his neatly parted white hair, turned in the front seat and offered Ethan a grin.

‘I see you’re back to your usual self, Ethan.’ He looked at Lopez. ‘Nicola, how’s things?’

‘Could be busier,’ she replied cautiously. ‘What’s the occasion? And why not call us instead of damn near running us off the road?’

‘Security,’ Jarvis replied calmly. ‘Calls can be monitored, and we want our little accord with you two to remain discreet, remember? The Defense Intelligence Agency has
uncovered an anomalous incident that occurred twenty-four hours ago in Santa Fe, New Mexico. The trail’s already gone cold and management aren’t keen to send agency resources in to
investigate.’

‘Which is where we come in, right?’ Ethan said.

Douglas Jarvis had once been the captain of a United States Marines rifle platoon, a post he had held when Ethan had served as a lieutenant in the Corps. Their friendship, cemented during the
invasion of Iraq, had extended to Jarvis’s current employment with the Defense Intelligence Agency and to their unusual, discreet accord with Warner/Lopez Inc.

‘Command and control won’t throw money at this, and the Pentagon’s certainly not interested,’ Jarvis confirmed. ‘It’s the perfect case, well worth your
time.’

‘What’s the story?’ Lopez asked, curious, despite herself.

Jarvis produced a glossy black file and handed it to her.

‘Santa Fe Medical Examiner autopsied the remains of a desert bum by the name of Hiram Conley, found dead after a clash with state troopers. Ten hours after Hiram Conley died his remains
were described as mummified. The examiner attempted to extract material from the body and found an intact bullet that fell from the victim’s shoulder, and another, older one lodged in his
right femur. They got the older bullet to the state crime laboratory for tests.’