A Bone to Pick, page 24
Lucy pressed the ring against Poe’s wrist. “Alright, Detective. Come on...” Mrs. Weems leaned back from them, with what looked like slow understanding dawning on the old nurse’s face.
The first police car came into view along the road. Now I could make out other sirens farther away, as this one drew up toward us. Dom Duval was gone—he must have slipped away as they approached.
Poe’s eyes opened.
“What... when did the van... you were—” his gaze fell on Mrs. Weems, then— “you!”
He stared right past Lucy, to me. There was nothing dazed about that attention now.
“Um... what do you remember?” Sure, I don’t sound guilty at all.
“Enough.” Poe rolled his shoulders, shook out his legs. “And I...” He coughed. “I used to have you down as a small-time nuisance.”
I forced a smile. “I’m just trying to keep them alive—”
“We can talk later. And I mean talk.”
He hauled himself up from the seat—a stiff motion that had him clenching his teeth to steady it. Lucy and I helped him to the ground.
Then he was waving his badge at the approaching cops.
“Detective? This vehicle was stolen—”
“A getaway ride. The victims need medical attention...”
I stood back and watched Poe go to work blunting their demands with a combination of brief, vague answers and attention to Ian. But there were questions he steered them so far away from, I wondered how much of the ride he’d missed after all.
Poe always had read like a cop who cared about the people behind the routines. Maybe this time we could talk.
A footstep sounded behind me, behind the corner of the vehicle, where not one person had been.
I turned to see Maya leaning against the bumper.
She looked at me—and away, just past me, like she always did. Her mouth opened to speak.
And she stopped, froze, with no words to say.
Then she shook her head, a wry smile on her lips. And she was gone.
I gaped, looked at the empty space... Then I felt a smile growing. Why not? I wouldn’t be sitting through interrogations either, if I could just be away. And her Duvals were long gone.
And my people were here. I watched Poe covering for me, Lucy, and Jason, and showing the officers to Ian and Mrs. Weems.
When they shooed Lucy away from Ian, she walked over to me.
“Ian’s still in... it seems like deep shock.” With a heavier voice she added “I think when I tried to dull the pain I—”
“Don’t even start blaming yourself,” I cut in. Easy to say—maybe this time one of us would listen. “You did what you could with a tool you’d never used before. And you’ll keep at it until he gets better, you know?”
“Yeah. I do know, it’s the only choice that makes sense to make.” She drew herself up straighter.
I nodded. “Remember, he chose to come. He could have stayed with his patients, like he always did. Instead he came to help save me.” And you were the one he was calling out for. But she didn’t need a reminder about that.
The two of us stood silent, watching the others.
Poe was going to need answers soon... Ian might have found too many... Lucy was just starting to use what she’d learned... and Jason was still stubbornly, quietly, nudging them along.
And Maya was... whatever she meant to do, she was in deeper than ever. But I might be starting to understand her.
Was she still watching nearby? One search with the Pulse could tell me.
But Jason was turning away from the cops and Ian, and trudging toward us.
“So this is how it goes in this town?” He looked at us, at me. “You saved your people.”
“Not yet.” Lucy’s words drew her up a little taller as she said them.
“We have so far,” I said. “I’ve still got some explanations to give.”
Jason sighed. “And so do I? Yeah, I do.”
The police were halfway to the other car, but he still looked back at them before he went on.
“I’ve got some people I need to check in with. And, you can call me James.”
AND THEN...
Thank you for following the second of the Corbin Cases.
If you enjoyed A Bone To Pick, would you please take a moment to leave a review so other readers can enjoy it too? Just the first sentence or two that comes to your mind. It would really mean a lot to me.
And, you can learn more about upcoming books, the characters and their abilities, and other supernatural tricks of the trade at www.KenHughesAuthor.com
Now, if you’re wondering what else magic can do, keep reading for a look at the start of my Spellkeeper Flight trilogy, The High Road.
PREVIEW from THE HIGH ROAD
This time it couldn’t be hide-and-seek.
Nine-year-old Mark Petrie trotted across the grass when he saw Angie break from the trees and run toward the park’s edge. The way her father had dragged her out of the park that afternoon, he’d thought he’d never see her there again.
So he went straight after her. He barely gave a glance back to the picnic table where his uncle was arguing about that “politics” stuff with his grumbling friends, their dinner still not unpacked.
When the grass changed to hard street-side sidewalk under their feet, Angie glanced back at him, her face just level with his. “I’m not stopping. I’m not waiting for him to catch me.”
“Your dad? But we were only—”
She rushed on up the street, dodging between the scattered people in her path. Mark followed her red hair in the deepening twilight, still trying to work out why Mr. Dennard—a cop, as much a hero as any of Angie’s other relatives she talked about—would have turned so angry at their playing with some of the family’s old coats and belts.
Mark twisted around an old couple and their yapping dog, trying to keep Angie in sight. He passed sizzling burgers at the food stand, and his stomach clenched, reminding him the day was late and his uncle had been putting off their dinner. He tried to hold the emptiness down by thinking of the fun they’d had that afternoon—
Playing Defend Sha Ta Ruath—wherever that was—and letting their make-believe tell him anything could be about to happen—
But he was just hungry, and confused.
They reached the street corner at the edge of Rosewood Park’s huge block, before Angie slowed and looked around.
“Where’re you going? What happened?” he asked as he reached her side.
“I have something to ask my mom.” She started across the street.
The word froze Mark a moment and he had to scramble to catch up again. Angie was going to her mother, after... how had she said it once, that mothers could run out on you? He still remembered the pain in her voice then, like Angie was better off with her gone.
She glanced over at him and added, “This is the way? If we keep going it’s easy to hit Heat Street?”
“You mean Heath Avenue? The rich place? I think so.”
She only moved faster now, with the sidewalk clear of park-goers and only the thinner evening crowds to weave through. Streetlights glowed along their way, just starting to stand out as night deepened, drawing the line between them and the stream of cars on their left.
By the second block, the sidewalk was even clearer. Now and then Mark passed people wrapped in scattered conversations, wreathed in cigarette smoke that added to the stench of car exhausts. Even some of the summer laughter he’d been hearing around the park seemed to thin away, while the air cooled and his feet hurt. Again and again, he saw the people Angie raced past turning to look at her flight.
Mark had lost count of the blocks they’d traveled before he managed to catch her arm. “It’s getting dark. You can’t just—”
“He said,” and she spat the words at him like a weapon, “Dad said Grandpa died in a crazy-house! But he was my mom’s father, Dad must be wrong, he has to be lying about him—”
She stopped, looked around the street. She must have seen something behind Mark, because she slipped from his slack grip and twisted away, heading up a side street, out of sight of the main road.
Mark scrambled after her, his thoughts pounding harder than his feet. The way Angie always talked, all her games about her family and its exploration of Sha Ta Ruath, and its soldiers and leaders and all the rest, and now her father said the things she lived for only ended in something awful?
At least he’s not in jail like my dad, came an even darker thought. And her mother’s alive.
The air felt colder now. They trotted past a construction barrier in the street and on through the shadow of a tall brick shape, and their feet sounded louder as the noise of cars fell away behind them.
The buildings pressed closer here, but a block ahead Mark could see the skeleton of a half-finished building silhouetted against the night. His nose itched at the construction dust in the air.
“Mark—” Suddenly Angie was turning back, toward him, past him.
He couldn’t see what she had, only lines of darker brick pooling shadows into the slightly-paler street ahead. But that dimness, and the street traffic sounds so faded away behind them, brought a new shiver to his skin as he followed. Her footfalls were slower than they’d been all night. Hushed.
Then—
“You just keep going.”
Growling right in front of them, appearing from around a corner, a huge man with some kind of black cap and a snarl of teeth flashing—
Angie, stumbling a step to put herself between Mark and the stranger they were backing away from—
Dim streets, alone, but the cars droning by not so far away, people—
The man took a step toward them. His arm reached out.
“HELP!” Mark yelled, with all the power his lungs had.
The next second, the big man had an ugly, blocky tunnel of a gun barrel pointed at them.
“Now you done it,” he grated. “Wrong night for that. So you keep your holes shut or...”
Don’t look at the gun, Mark told himself, feeling his heart stampeding, trying to tear his chest apart. If he looked to the side he could see Angie staring around, and another man—with the same kind of black cap over his scalp—moving up from where they had been headed, with a knife in his hand. Dust, so much dry, dead dust filling the air.
The gun tilted upward, relaxing the threat for a moment, and the man behind it grinned at their helplessness and lumbered toward them.
Then the gun swung higher as something yanked that arm toward the sky and a shape that had closed in behind the gunman’s back twisted, spun, and sent the big man slamming to the pavement.
The gun clattered away. The man with the knife swore and broke into a run toward them, only to duck away inside a door as their rescuer reached inside his coat.
Angie gasped “Dad—” and there was awe in her voice.
Detective Dennard roared, “Just go!”
His tone, there was something wrong, like it was too fierce to fit inside his throat. And his hand drew back from his gun holster and brushed the belt at his waist...
In the next heartbeat, Angie’s hand had locked onto Mark’s arm and she pulled him into a run. His feet flung him along the pavement with her, toward the open streets. But he still stole a glance back, for a glimpse at her father chasing after the other thug.
Except Mr. Dennard was gone.
They ran. Ran through the night, forcing already-aching legs to carry them, with nerves on fire from the danger they’d brushed up against. In the rush of his heaving lungs, Mark at first missed the booming sound far, far behind them, until he realized it had spread and cascaded into a wild chorus of gunshots.
Blocks later they met a police car screaming toward the sound, and their shouts brought the cops over and let Mark gasp out a few words of what they’d seen. As he did, he realized Angie’s father was closing in on them, as if he’d been only a few steps behind.
Angie flung herself into her father’s arms without a word, or a single sob. Mark could only stand back, struggling for breath and watching them.
“Listen to that!” one of the uniforms said, raising his voice over the gunfire. “There ain’t enough backup in the city to get me in there. That’s got to be more than one gang killing each other—and you almost walked in right when something set them off?”
Almost walked in? Right, Mark thought, the three of them must have been blocks away from where the shots had sounded like they’d started. They had to have been.
Then Detective Dennard said “I... don’t think I can be a cop anymore.”
He kept his face bent over his daughter as he said those words. But Mark heard something in his voice, something that sounded too bitter to be the fury he’d shown before. Was that—shame?
Mark felt the two pieces in his head, refusing to go together. Angie’s father had been running with them while the gangs started shooting far behind them... but that voice now... he couldn’t make them fit.
No matter how he tried.
* * *
* * *
* * *
Dammit, Angie...
Mark threw his weight on the pedals, legs pumping, fighting for any extra distance he could get from the gang closing in behind him. Through the rasp of his breathing, the Blades’ pounding feet sounded like only inches from his heels. All because even on his first day of work he’d had to stop for her call.
The alley’s end loomed up ahead, and he squeezed the back brake to slow and skid around the poster-covered brick corner. He heard one shrill “So what’s in the box?” before he swung out into the Anchor Street crowd, safe.
Easy as that.
Swerving narrowly around two lumbering dockworker types, Mark lurched to a stop to answer their shouts with a breathless, “Sorry, sorry,” before walking the bike on. His breathing settled as he worked through the crowd, maneuvering along a sidewalk full of people, probably some afternoon shift letting out—one of the thickest crowds in Lavine city. Darkening clouds thinned the light around them, and his sweat swam in the air, making him shiver in the growing cold.
Tired, but safe. “Beats telling Gene my new phone got me killed,” he muttered.
But what was the point of him learning every street in town if he couldn’t use the time he saved on a message run to stop in at Angie’s—or when she wasn’t home, pull over to take her call? That bit of slack in his day was supposed to be the good thing about this job, he’d figured on that benefit ever since his junk Chevy had died and started him thinking of options besides waiting tables.
Didn’t matter; the danger was over. Just because it was the Blades again, or they’d been near Angie’s, didn’t mean the gang had any reason to keep after either of them.
He glanced back again, and his knuckles tightened on the handlebars. The punks were still behind him.
They were just strolling along, some twenty feet back. Two silent figures with their leathers and black do-rags, already drawing uneasy glances from the workers they passed.
Still on me? But only two of them, where’d Rafe go? Mark stared up and down the street, trying to think if they’d really bother staying with him much longer. Or, he could put his knowledge of the street routes to use again and lose them, if he could find one gap in the crowd.
At that moment a car pulled out from its parking space, leaving a hole at the edge of traffic, and Mark leaped forward. A woman shouted as he twisted his bike past her, and he barely swerved clear of a wrought-iron lamppost, but he broke through onto the street. Free.
Once his tires dropped off the curb he hopped onto the saddle and began pedaling, finally able to move. Faster, faster, I’m lightning, I’m a bullet train, I’m the damn Sha Ta Ruath Express if it has one... He swept down the narrow space between the honking rush of traffic and the parked cars, eyes alert for any door that might pick just that moment to swing open into his path.
The light ahead turned red, but instead of slowing he only banked for the corner and angled onto the cross-street’s sidewalk to rush along the new angle. But just as he turned he saw the black-capped rider away to his left, roaring down at the intersection on his Harley.
The crowds wouldn’t last... that motorcycle would get closer by the second... so, he could stop while he still had some witnesses and hope he could brazen it out without the Blades remembering his face later. Unless the gang really had been lurking near Angie’s because after all these years—
Besides, he knew the streets. Another twist of the handlebars brought him up a side street, with a parting glance back that showed he’d have a few moments out of the biker’s view. The way ahead was just as empty and riddled with alleys as he remembered, and he arced to the side and ducked into one.
With a van parked squarely in its middle. A battered red barricade.
“Of course,” he spat, and jumped down, trotting with the bike toward the narrow gap even as he heard an engine thundering in behind him. He heaved the front wheel up, twisting the handlebars to make as narrow an angle as he could, and pressed in... a tip just catching and scraping on the graffiti... then his heart restarted as it squeezed free. The low box bungeed over his back tire wobbled and almost came loose, but it didn’t matter. Now he had only open space ahead.
The Harley’s roar rattled off the buildings behind him, dropping to a lower growl as it crept up the alley like a prowling beast. Mark leaned back out of sight, against the van’s rear, listening for any pause in that motor... but it only crawled slowly by and finally gathered force and roared away.
He drew in a deep breath and let it seep out. Even in the thick stormy air, he could smell exhaust from the van, still fresh—would the alley have been clear just a minute earlier? He reached down to tighten the bungees around his box. At least his old green Raleigh could wriggle past where their motors couldn’t, and foot soldiers wouldn’t bother chasing him for long. Just as he’d thought, he’d ridden rings around them.
“Mark?”
The voice from around the van was low, worse than a shout: the calmness itself told him who it had to be.
Rafe went on “Still running errands for small bills? I always said you need someone who’s got your back.”
