Tortured Spirits (15 page)

Then he hit a concrete wall. He looked around, but there was only one way out of the deep room, and that was through the corridor, where the soldiers would see him.

“Sheryl?” he said. “Abel?”

He didn't think so.

“Cain?”

No shimmering gold light, no lingering stench of sulfur.

“If anyone cares to intervene, I'd sure appreciate it.”

No way out. No one to help. He felt like a trapped rat.

Moving to the doorway, Jake took a deep breath. He estimated he had traveled half the distance to his destination. Hopefully the number of soldiers in the building meant Maria had escaped. He took comfort in that. Good woman.

Exhaling, he entered the corridor and turned right. He didn't know how many soldiers had come upstairs or what they were doing. He just ran.

To his enormous relief, he was much closer to the corridor's end than he had guessed, and he saw a sun-bleached building across the street.

Twenty more steps
…

Then he heard a high-pitched whizzing sound, like a bottle rocket being launched in a backyard, and a trail of greenish-brown smoke spiraled over his shoulder. What resembled a compact flashlight struck the dirt floor ahead of him and spun, spewing smoke out of both ends. With no other choice, he charged into the noxious cloud, shielding his eye with one arm and holding his breath.

Smoke penetrated his eyelid and nostrils, and fire scorched his lungs and brain. Staggering forward, he slammed into the cinder-block wall framing the missing window. He sucked in fresh air, which did no good. The window space sucked the smoke outside, enveloping him. His eye and throat burned and he coughed, which only forced him to breathe in more gas. Bracing his hands on the concrete sill, he considered jumping, but instead he turned to face his attackers.

Through the gas he discerned a dozen camouflage men standing forty feet away. Wearing black gas masks and clutching automatic weapons, they stood motionless, as if waiting for Jake to drop. But he lurched forward, still coughing, hot tears streaming down his face.

One soldier stepped forward with his machine gun raised. As he neared Jake, he lowered his weapon, gripping it in both gloved hands.

Jake raised his hands. Maybe they would take him prisoner if he submitted.

The soldier stopped, planted his boots apart like a batter over home plate, and held his black weapon ready to fire.

Jake realized he was doomed. He thought of Edgar, whom he had failed, trapped forever in the body of a raven; of Martin, waiting for him to bring his father home; and he pictured Maria's face.

The soldier squeezed the trigger, and the ensuing muzzle flashes lit up the smoke.

Jake took the charges full in the chest. It felt like a dozen men punching him. Falling back, he felt still more impacts as he slammed onto the dirt floor and gasped for breath, his chest on fire.

As Maria rocketed past Rue de Verger, she heard machine gun fire coming from the four soldiers who had killed Humphrey. She wove between cars that had stopped in the street, as commanded by the fire horn. She pushed the
Dodge as fast as it would go, slowing only to make a left turn, then another. Glimpsing the tall black tower, she vowed that if she survived and Jake did not, there would be hell to pay.

Civilians turned their heads as she passed them. Their stunned expressions told her no one disobeyed the fire horn. Then she heard the police siren behind her. Looking in the rearview mirror, she saw a single brown car pursuing her. Tilting her head forward, she flexed her fingers on the steering wheel, then tightened them.

Let's dance.

Maria shifted into the oncoming lane, then into the proper lane, a police car following her lead. She repeated the move, and the car remained on her tail. Waiting until she saw a motionless car facing her, she switched back into the oncoming lane. The police car did the same, and she remained in the lane until the last possible second, then returned to the correct lane. Guessing the policeman must have registered the vehicle dead ahead, Maria eased up on the gas and dropped back, riding side by side with the police car.

With no time to brake to avoid colliding with the stopped car, the policeman jerked his steering wheel to the left, driving into the curb between two parked cars, the impact lifting the police car's back end into the air. The police car slammed down onto the street and rocked back and forth.

Gritting her teeth, Maria raced out of the city and boarded the highway ramp.

Lying on his back, Jake focused on the ceiling. Peeling paint gave way to corroded steel and electrical wires dangling from holes. Tear gas swirled above him and he convulsed.

Only when the soldier who had killed him looked down at him through his gas mask did Jake realize he felt more pain from the gas than from the wounds in his chest. He knew bullet wounds caused victims to go into shock, and the pain would be unbearable in a few minutes. Was this how Dread and Baldy had felt, bleeding to death on the floor of Kearny's Tavern after Jake had plugged them in self-defense?

The soldier beckoned to his comrades, and two came over. They seized Jake's arms and hauled him up, then dragged him toward the stairway with his feet trailing him.

Jake looked down at his chest and saw no blood or bullet holes.

Impossible!

The soldiers at the top of the stairs jerked their heads forward and back, their gas masks emitting strange, muffled sounds.

Laughter.

His confusion amused them. Then it occurred to him: the lead soldier had fired rubber bullets designed for riot control. As they supported him on the way down the stairs, his cloudy mind raced. It was so hard to think with the tear gas burning the passages in his skull.

The man and woman who had sat behind him and Maria at Coucher du Soleil had been planted there by Humphrey to let him know when they had arrived. The soldiers had killed them and Humphrey with live ammunition and used it to intimidate Maria and him. But they had used rubber bullets to take him down, which meant their orders were to capture him alive. Maria might still be alive as well! Unless she had issued her own death sentence by firing the Walther at them, in which case he was indirectly responsible for her death.

At the bottom of the stairs, the soldiers threw him to the floor. Glass and gravel bit into his palms. Away from the gas, his lungs and mind cleared. The soldiers peeled off their gas masks.

“Get on your feet!” The soldier who had shot him drew a .45 from his holster.

Jake got up. “There was a woman with me—”

The lead soldier nodded to another, who swung the butt of his machine gun at Jake's head, knocking him to the floor.

Seeing red flashes, Jake checked to make sure his glass
eye had not fallen out of its socket.

“Get up!”

Jake rose again, his head aching. This time he kept his mouth shut.

The soldiers led him outside, where a police officer handcuffed his hands behind his back and two soldiers pushed him into the back of a Humvee and sat on either side of him.

He counted at least two dozen soldiers, all wearing red berets. His scattered thoughts returned to Maria.

With the sun setting behind her, Maria raced forward in the Dodge, checking her rearview mirror for pursuers and seeing none. She had to assume Jake was dead; no unarmed man stood a chance against an army, not even one who had dispatched a hundred zonbies.

No more tears,
she thought.
Later, not now.

There was no way she could break Andre Santiago out of El Miedo alone, which meant Edgar was doomed to remain a raven. All she could do was try to get off Pavot Island alive.

Damn it!

Why had Humphrey contacted them in public? Malvado's forces must have had him under surveillance despite his efforts to maintain a low profile. Now he and his friends were dead, and Jake probably was, too. A simple check into Jake's itinerary would reveal she had arrived on
Pavot with him. She could not return to the resort, could not fly home, and had no other emergency contact. She was on her own.

Jake
…

Her chest quivered. Maria had been intrigued by him since she and Edgar had interviewed him regarding Sheryl's murder at the hands of the Cipher. At Sheryl's funeral, after an unknown vigilante had killed the Cipher—a man named Marc Gorman—she had felt sorry for Jake. After that, she had suspected Jake of executing Gorman, but Edgar had always deflected her queries. In time, she grew to admire Jake for cleaning up his life; he stopped drinking, smoking, and using cocaine. Before she knew it, she felt an attraction to him, one she resisted while he mourned Sheryl.

Almost a year after the murder, Edgar and Dawn Du Pre had invited her to dinner as Jake's date. The evening had gone well until she and Edgar were called to a crime scene. Then everything had gone to hell. Dawn. Katrina. Prince Malachai. Edgar's disappearance. And sixty fucking corpses stuffed with sawdust under her name in Special Homicide.

Jake.

Her life would never be the same if she survived, a prospect she very much doubted. The last rays of sunlight glinted off metal in the distance ahead, and she tensed. Two police cars were parked front bumper to front bumper across the highway, leaving no room to pass them. Four cops stood before the vehicles with shotguns resting on their arms.

“You've got to be joking.”

She turned on the radio and cranked the Latin beat up
to a deafening volume, then stepped on the gas and aimed the car straight for the point where the two police cars met. The officers scattered mere moments before she plowed into their cars.

Bracing for impact, Maria closed her eyes. The car rocked from side to side, and she heard the sounds of metal twisting and glass shattering. But the Dodge kept moving. Opening her eyes, she glanced in the rearview mirror and watched the cops scurrying around their misshapen, useless vehicles.

Maybe I'll make it out of here alive after all.

In the backseat of the Humvee, Jake looked out the windows at the civilians on the street, who watched the procession of vehicles with dread in their eyes. Through the windshield, he saw the black tower that had drawn his attention upon their arrival in Pavot City, and a sick feeling developed as he realized that was his destination.

The soldiers spoke to each other in low, mundane tones in French and Spanish. They were just doing their jobs, which happened to entail murdering civilians, gassing Jake, and blasting his chest with rubber bullets.

The Humvee followed two jeeps down a parking ramp alongside the black building and descended into a basement garage with ceilings high enough to accommodate the personnel transport truck. Only military and police vehicles occupied the garage.

The driver parked, and the two soldiers beside Jake took him out of the vehicle. His throat still ached, and the smell of gas lingered in his nostrils, but at least his eye was okay.

The soldiers' footsteps echoed in the garage as they led him to double metal doors in the gray cement wall. One soldier punched a code into the keypad on the wall, and the doors unlocked. They guided Jake inside, where they nodded to a soldier behind a counter. The man looked at Jake with curiosity but said nothing. They walked Jake down a corridor, passing a desk where two female soldiers entered data into computers. One of the soldiers flirted with the younger of the two women, who offered him a demure smile in return.