Lyn Benedict - Gods & Monsters

Sylvie scoped the area, and sighed. “You bring your car?”

Cachita shook her head. “Took the metrorail.”

“All right. My truck. Now.”

Cachita followed Sylvie docilely enough, but her eyes were busy. Sylvie saw the moment she got it; her brows closed in over her nose. “The man from the bar’s following us. He doesn’t look so drunk now. ISI?”

The woman really was too well-informed for her own good. Sylvie needed to warn her about the dangers of knowing too much; it attracted the wrong kind of attention. But not just then. Sylvie picked up the pace, aware of the probable agent on her tail, imagined she heard the soft slap of his loafers on her shadow.

She’d seen the gun bulge under his coat back in the bar, hadn’t said anything, Cachita too much a wild card to confide in. While Sylvie had no trouble giving the ISI agents hell, she preferred not to do it around witnesses.

But she’d kept an eye on him, watched his dark-featured face grow more sober, more openly watchful as Sylvie and Cachita had talked. For an employee of the Internal Surveillance and Investigation agency, he was crap at surveillance, got so engrossed in watching that he forgot to be sneaky.

Maybe he didn’t need to be, her little dark voice suggested. Not if he was herding her toward something.

ISI tended to work in teams of two minimum, four more often. That meant there were probably others around.

Beside her, Cachita was scoping the scene. “They’re Feds. They work in teams, right? You think they’re after you or me?”

“Don’t know,” Sylvie said. “You do anything they’d be interested in?”

Cachita shrugged, a nonanswer if Sylvie had ever seen one. From a woman as casually chatty as the reporter, that twigged alarm bells. Sylvie made a mental note. Get Alex to look into Caridad Valdes-Pedraza’s history. Freelance reporter was a job description that could cover a number of sins.

“Our friend just picked up another friend,” Cachita said. “You think they want to talk to us? Or arrest us?”

“I’m not in the mood for either,” Sylvie said. “But if I had to say . . . a nice quiet talking-to in an undisclosed location.”

Cachita tottered along beside her on those ridiculous heels, moving with a quicker stride than Sylvie expected. As they approached Sylvie’s truck, a dark SUV popped its side door. It gaped blackly, an open mouth ready to swallow them up. “Shit,” Sylvie said.

“I hate them,” Cachita said. “They’ll ruin everything.” The venom in her voice surprised Sylvie, and it showed. Cachita elaborated. “They don’t care about the women, or any of it. They just want to—”

“Ladies, a minute of your time?”

“Go to hell,” Sylvie said. His face flushed beneath the streetlamps; Sylvie hadn’t bothered to lower her voice and the passersby on the street were beginning to gawk. Not interfere, of course, but gawk.

Still, maybe that was good enough. Before she could put her hasty and crappy plan into action, Cachita stamped her foot suddenly, a sharp clack like gunfire echoing into the night.

The man drew his gun, jumpy, and the crowd mood shifted.

“We’re over with,” Cachita shrilled. “I told you and told you! I’m with Sylvie now, and you’ll just have to—I got a restraining order. You’re not supposed to get this close. Someone call the cops!”

Cell phones sprouted everywhere, and most of them were probably just filming so that people’s Twitter feeds could be enlivened by someone else’s drama.

Sylvie smirked at the suddenly wary ISI; they were screwed. Demalion had had the same problem when she’d met him. Secret agencies weren’t allowed to just flash badges. She draped an arm around Cachita’s heaving shoulders, shoved her toward the truck.

Sylvie opened the passenger door, slid across, dragged Cachita in after her. Key in the ignition, and Sylvie got the hell out of there before the ISI could really regroup. Cachita had been loud. And quite a capable actress.

Cachita flung herself up onto the seat beside her, grinning. “Take a left up at the light.”

Sylvie huffed but did. Guess she was going to see what Cachita had to show her.

Cachita looked back over her shoulder. “Who would have thought?”

“‘Thought’?” Sylvie prompted, watching the traffic ebb and surge around them, a smear of red taillights and dark asphalt. She didn’t see the ISI.

“They’re not really very good at their jobs, are they?” Cachita asked.

“They’re big believers in retreating to fight again,” Sylvie said. “They’ll be back. We’re not done with trouble, yet.”

CACHITA LIVED IN AN OLD TWENTIES-ERA HOUSE, ALL CURVED stucco arches and rounded corners, and the cracked tiles were soft and sandy beneath Sylvie’s shoes. Cachita’s heels made small gritty rasps as she led the way in. Sudden movement drew Sylvie’s attention: In the tiny, overgrown garden, a cat streaked after a pallid gecko that made the mistake of touching ground.

As she watched, more sinuous forms took shape, slinking curls of shadows; every bush seemed to have a cat beneath it.

“My neighbor’s a cat lady,” Cachita said. She seemed embarrassed. “So of course, her cats use my yard as their litter box. If I were the house-proud type, I’d be on the phone to the landlord so fast—”

She flipped on the light, gestured Sylvie inside, and shut the door behind them. Paper rustled with their entrance, and Sylvie blinked.

Cachita might be computer savvy, but she loved her paper. The living-room wall was a shaggy mess of printouts stapled directly into the stucco.

Definitely not the house-proud type, Sylvie thought with a hidden grin. Then she saw the subject of the files, and her smile faded. There were easily two hundred sheets stapled on top of each other, next to each other, overlapping, underpinned, a combination of photographs and text, and one entire row seemed dedicated to Sylvie herself.

Cachita even had a photograph of her, scowling into a paper cup of coffee. Sylvie recognized that moment; she’d ordered an Americano and been given a mocha. It was the morning she’d taken Detective Lio Suarez to see what had become of his son’s killers. She’d been tense and cranky and apparently careless enough to miss someone snapping candids.

“Don’t get weird,” Cachita said. “I’m not a stalker. I just believe in knowing my subjects.”

“I thought you were concerned with the missing women,” Sylvie said. “Not a PI.”

“Hey, you’ve got a rep,” Cachita said. “You think I’d just walk up to you without knowing what to expect?” She tapped a cluster of papers, six deep, and said, “Testimonials, of a sort.”

Sylvie yanked them from the wall, folded them tight, and shoved them into her bag. “Leave me out of your surveillance,” she said.

“Paranoid,” Cachita said. “Leave that alone and look at this.” She kicked off her shoes, padded over to her laptop, and plugged in the memory stick.

Sylvie took a couple of steps toward her, then froze. A picture and a name. Jennifer Costas. A high-school glamour shot, all soft focus and dreamy smile. Sylvie thought of Jennifer screaming, burning beneath a god’s touch, and looked away.

Guess her research wasn’t that bad after all.

Sylvie moved to the next picture—unfamiliar—and the next— familiar . She compared the woman to her memory and made a match. Lupe Fernandez, one of the spellbound women. A college student at Miami Dade Community College, according to Cachita’s notes, in the nursing program. Lupe grinned in her photo, an arm slung around another girl, both of them wearing rainbow beads.