Redemption Alley

Twenty seconds later I found what I was looking for—a long slit in the fabric sheathing. I held my breath and reached in as Leon rummaged under the hood.

My fingers closed on something. Hard plastic, book-shaped, and thick. “My God,” I whispered.

“What? What is it?”

I yanked the ledger free, tearing the tough material. It must have taken some doing to get the goddamn thing into the mattress, but the hiding place had done its job. “Leon, my dear, we have a break.” I ripped it the rest of the way free and flipped it open, riffled through the pages, then fished around again inside the mattress and yanked another one free. “We’ve just found Jacinta Kutchner’s account books. Cooked and uncooked, I’m betting.”

“Is that so. Looks like this car will run, too. I ain’t no mechanic, but nothing seems wrong with it.” He dropped the hood.

“Let’s find the keys, then. And get the hell out of here.” Something stopped me, looking at the Mustang. For some reason I wasn’t even considering taking it—for one thing, it was too red. We’d left Leon’s truck behind for the same reason—it was too conspicuous a vehicle.

And for another, the Mustang reeked of hellbreed. Or Trader.

My instincts tingled again, and I looked for license plates. Nada. Not even a dealer tag. The Charger was registered to Bernardino, all its papers in order. “Someone’s lying to me.”

“You think?” Leon sighed. “The shit’s just getting deeper. I’ll look for car keys.”

I wasn’t looking forward to it, but we had to go to Micky’s. I expected to see the regular Were waitstaff and I expected Theron at the bar. What I did not expect was to be almost-mobbed by Weres as soon as I set foot in the door. It looked like a regular lunchtime crowd, but it was full of cat Were and bird Were, and I was hugged, slapped on the shoulder, fingers brushing over my face and touching my hair. A very big, very angry Theron came pushing his way through the humming, thrumming crowd.

Even the framed pictures of film stars on the walls vibrated, glass and wood chattering. Theron grabbed me by the shoulders, gave me a once-over, and shook me twice, sharply, so my head bobbled and my ears rang a little.

I let him. A tide of sound rose through them, swirled, and Leon was clapped on the shoulder a few times. A bird Were breathed in his face, greeting him, and he nodded and gri

“Goddammit, Jill!” Theron shook me again. “What am I going to tell Saul about this, goddammit? Where have you been? There’s hellbreed all over your house—”

“Settle down.” My tone sliced through the hubbub. I shifted Carp’s file and the ledgers under my left arm. “There’s not much time.”

The rumbling swirled down, and I caught sight of an anomaly—a human face among the Weres.

Gilberto Rosario Gonzalez-Ayala leaned over the counter, watching the Were cooks as they moved around the kitchen. Amalia passed him, handing off a bottle of microbrew the kid looked far too young to drink, and the kid turned around, his eyes sweeping Micky’s interior and stopping on me. “What the hell is he doing here?”

“Showed up. The 51s sent him to check with us, since you got firebombed on your way out of their territory. Then the guys that blew up your car moved into the 51 slice of the barrio. Things have been hopping down there.”

Shit. How was I going to sort that out too?

Priorities, Jill. As much as I hated it, gang warfare wasn’t my problem. I had bigger fish to gut and fry.

Someone flipped the “closed” sign and Weres crowded close as I commandeered a table near the back of the dining room, away from the windows. “Pipe down, everyone.” I took a deep breath as they settled, eyes shining expectantly. “What we have here, ladies and gentlemen, is a situation. We have a hellbreed operating inside Santa Luz, shipping in scurf with the help of several members of the police force, and using them as the cleanup crew after a nasty little organ-stripping campaign. Illegal immigrants are being shipped in by coyotes, parted out like junked cars, and the remains disposed of. The organs are sold—and the scurf are not just here for cleaning up what’s left. There’s experiments.” The quiet had become dead heavy silence, pressing against my skin. “Experiments on scurf, with scurf tissue, and funded by this organ operation.”

“What kind of experiments?” Amalia balanced her tray on spread fingers, tense and alert, not even the feathers in her hair stirring.

“I don’t know.” I set down the ledgers and Carp’s messy, stuffed-to-the-gills file. Taken together, they were a pretty damning picture of corruption, at least from the organ-theft side of it. Looking below the surface, there was another shape, something looming over my city like a hand about to crush a struggling ant. “Corruption in the police department goes high up. I’m not sure how high just yet. The cop we thought put out the hit on me down in the barrio’s been dead for a few days.” I let my eyes travel past the Weres to the fringe of the group, to where Gilberto stood, leaning hipshot against the long lunch counter where truckers sometimes sat—or anyone who didn’t mind their breakfast slid to them along the counter like a hockey puck. His dead eyes narrowed.

I held his gaze for a long moment. “Señor Gilberto?” What does this kid know about the nightside? He knows about Weres, that much is certain.

Gil stepped away from the lunch counter, and the Weres parted to let him through. Leon took in the kid with a swift glance and sucked another long gulp off his beer.

“He’s representing the 51s,” Theron didn’t twitch, but he was tense at my shoulder. “They… feel bad, that you were attacked.”

And they don’t want to piss off a witch allied to the Weres. “It wasn’t their fault. I wasn’t on 51 territory. I’m worried about them catching flak from associating with me.”

“They had you marked the minute you crossed off our turf, chiquita.” Gilberto paused, took a sip. He was sorely out of place, a human kid with bad skin and the smell of neglect hanging on him like mildew amid the crackling hum of perfection from the Weres. “Now how you suppose they did that?”

I shrugged, my tattered coat flapping. “I’m a gringa?”

It was the right thing to say, because he laughed, a reedy little sound. “Si, bruja. But nobody knew you come down to see us but el gato here. Right?”

And Carper. “There was one other person—the cop that gave me the lead on Ay. Gil, your brother’s partner killed him.”

Gil’s utter stillness might have fooled a human, but not a roomful of Weres. Theron sighed. I held the boy’s dark soulless gaze, watching the color bleed out from under his cheeks until he was sallow instead of Hispanic.

“His partner’s dead too,” I continued. “His house was torn apart, but I’ve got a rough timeline. He had the widow’s ledgers, and—”

“Hold up, bruja. Ay. His partner, you say? Bernie kill him?”

Silver clinked and shifted in my hair as I nodded. “It appears that way. I’m going to keep digging, though. Until I find out everything about this, I’m still on the job.”

“Then the 51s stay on the job too.” He darted a glance to Theron, sweat sheening his forehead and upper lip. He’d lost the hairnet, and his hair was surprisingly soft-looking, with a hint of childhood curl. “I go to Ramon. Es un traidor en nuestra casa, bruja, because there was no way they should know you visit us.” Another silence rose, uncomfortably, between us.

I had to say it.

“The traitor may not be among the 51s, Gil. Because if Ay’s partner was dead, my contact sent me into the barrio. But he’s not fat. The name el pendejo gordo mean anything to you?”

The kid thought it over. “Lot of pendejos gordos in el barrio, bruja. Lot of them.”