Redemption Alley

“So we’re go

I gained my feet, pushing the chair back. “Yup. Let’s just hope he hasn’t gotten twitchy. Or a case of the vanishings.”

Leon hauled himself up. “Never knew you was an optimist. What you go

Pray? Hope he’s not hungry? “I don’t know yet. But it might be time to visit the a few hellbreed dives and twist some arms—after I find out who’s shipping scurf into my town.”

“Sounds like a plan. I’m go

“Thanks for sharing.” I didn’t say what we were both thinking. If hellbreed were co

Well, it wasn’t looking good. But at least we had something to look at now, instead of a maddening half-baked mass of weird occurrences with no rhyme or reason.

I sat staring at Carp’s file while Leon vanished. Shut my eyes, breathed deep, and tried not to think of Carper lying in bed, his mind at the mercy of suffocating terror. Or of Jacinta Kutchner’s body hanging like a rotten fruit from a blue and white nylon rope. Or of Saul and how much I wished it was him I was bouncing ideas off.

It was looking like the Kutchner case was my sort of case after all.

Chapter Twenty-five

Bernardino lived on a quiet little street, not quite suburban but close enough. He had a nice ranch-style, freshly painted, and his yard was greener than many of his neighbors’. I wondered if he had a landscaping service staffed with illegals out to take care of it, and spent a good few moments wrestling with nausea at the thought as we slid through a neighbor’s yard and up to his front door, seeking maximum cover. It wasn’t easy, with a high-noon summer sun beating down.

He had no alarm system on his house, and he was probably at work in the Vice department.

Dear God, the irony.

I held my right palm in front of the doorknob and concentrated, a thin thread of etheric force snaking out and bifurcating. One thin thread slid into the doorknob, the other quested blindly and found the keyhole for the deadbolt. A moment’s worth of the fierce, relaxed concentration peculiar to sorcery, and the deadbolt eased back, the doorknob lock clicking as it cleared.

“You’d make a great housebreaker,” Leon mouthed.

Yeah, that’s just one of the many career options open to a hunter. “You think?” I whispered. I eased aside, toed the door open while Leon covered me, and slid into Alfred Bernardino’s home—only to recoil and straighten, the reek so intense it scorched the back of my throat.

Dead, decomposing human tissue. “Goddammit,” I whispered, my eyes watering, and plunged into the house. Leon swept the door shut behind us, and we cleared and checked every room, working through a place that had obviously been searched. Drawers were pulled out, cushions slit, paper scattered everywhere—and that horrible, nose-eating stench.

And the smell of hellbreed or Trader, a subtle, sweetsick corruption. “There’s been ’breed here,” I whispered. The kitchen was torn to shreds, a drift of takeout containers and cheap dishes. The living room was a shambles, the dining room smashed too. Bernie’s taste had run to cheap mismatched bachelor furniture, but the huge state-of-the-art plasma flatscreen on one wall was new, and the stereo system still smelled of its packaging. That is, through the fume of smoky violence—even these toys bought with blood money had been broken.

I don’t know if it was a fight or a hell of a search. Leon covered me down a hallway, we checked a bathroom and a room that had been left empty and bare except for a stain on the carpet and a silver tangle of handcuffs. The reek of sex fought briefly with other varied stenches; Leon’s eyebrows went up and I shrugged, moving on. I pushed a door open softly with my foot and saw the source of the worst smell.

Alfred Bernardino lay spread-eagled on his bed, his body bloated by several days’ worth of decomposition. His ribs had been torn free and wrenched back, the lungs carefully pulled free and shriveled by exposure to dry outside air. His legs were flayed and his belly opened; a feast of insect life swarmed in the cave of his entrails.

If I’d had any gag reflex left on this case, the sight would have done it.

“Jesus,” Leon breathed.

Another fucking dead end. “This is ridiculous.”

Leon moved past me, checked the closet. Neither of us put our guns away. Bernardino’s clothes were tumbled off the hangers, his cheap white-painted dresser drawers pulled out and disemboweled, and I leaned against the wall, silver tinkling sweetly in my hair.

“You think…” Leon glanced at me. “How long would you say he’s been dead?”

I glanced at the window. It was suffocatingly hot in here, and the bedroom window was open a crack, the screen slit. Easy enough for insects to find their way in. The air conditioning wasn’t on, and a cool bath of dread touched my spine, working downward from my nape. “With that window open and the critter buffet sign out? Couple days to a week. But we have his credit card run by Irene…” A Trader, the last known contact we have with this man. Huh.

“Four days ago,” Leon supplied.

Looks like there’s more here than meets the eye. My brain gears turned, meshed, caught. “It could fit with the widow’s death. We have someone killing the cops to cover this up. Jacinta’s account books are missing. Bernie’s having second thoughts…” I sighed, then winked, shutting my dumb eye. The smart one, the blue one, showed me a room swirled with the etheric contamination of violent death and desperation. But nothing for me to latch onto, no thread that I could pull to unravel the mess.

Leon let out a gusty sigh, one he probably immediately regretted because he had to take a breath. “Someone tore this fuckin’ place apart. And I don’t like it—why hasn’t anyone come by to check on him? He’s a cop.”

“A cop with a dead partner. If there weren’t cops trying to kill me I could call in and find out if he was on administrative leave or something. Though if this is el pendejo gordo they were talking about, he can’t have called in the gang hit on me.” I lowered my guns, thinking, and my attention snagged on something.

On the bed, actually. It was stripped down to bare mattress and boxspring, but both of them were new, blue with pink flowers, a matched set of Sealys. Intuition tickled under the surface of my brain, and I stared at the mess of Bernardino’s body, unseeing, for a long half-minute before Leon moved, checking the master bathroom again. Copper chimed in his hair, a deeper sound than the silver in mine. “Screen’s slit in here, too. Window’s open.”

“The screen was cut in the widow’s place. But the window wasn’t open.” I replayed the Kutchner scene in my head, walking through mental rooms taken in by a hunter’s ground-in, thorough training in observation.

Yes, there above the bathroom window, two patches in the paint.

Curtain rod, ripped down. The screen hurriedly cut. The space between the screen and the window, just the right size to hold…

I let out half a soft breath, opened my eyes. “Come on.”

The garage held two cars—a puke-green 1971 Dodge Charger that had seen much, much better days and was drifted with fast-food wrappers inside, and a brand new red Mustang with none of the grace or fluidity of the old models. A fiberglass piece of shit and a horribly mistreated piece of heavy American metal. There was detritus stuffed everywhere; Bernie had been a terrible slob.

But leaning against the wall next to the Mustang was an old mattress, dingy yellow and broken-in.

“Pop the hood on that and check the engine.” I indicated the Charger with my chin and slid between the Mustang and the wall, reached the mattress, and started looking.