Lilith Saintcrow - Redemption Alley

Gooseflesh crawled up my back. Would you like the scar to start spreading, Kiss?

“He can’t do anything.” My own voice startled me. Go figure, I was talking to myself again.

But he can, Jill. If he figures out how to up the ante on this, you have no recourse except the bargain. Hellbreed aren’t known for sticking to their word.

Then I could kill him. But then I’d go back to being strictly human again, wouldn’t I.

Would I? Was it a chance worth taking?

Not yet. So shut up and get to work. I got out of the car, slammed the door, and cast an eye over the street. Deserted in the middle of the day, all it needed was a lone tumbleweed mincing down the pavement to make it a cliché. One block over I heard heavy machinery rumbling and the sound of voices, traffic in the distance, and a low moan from the trainyards stitched under every other noise, something normally only heard at night.

The scar twinged sharply, maybe because I was thinking about it. Maybe because I could still feel the scurf’s acid-drenched claws dragging through my flesh. Maybe because somewhere, Perry was thinking about me.

Worry about what you’ve got in front of you, hunter.

I approached the car, sniffed delicately. No sweet taint of corruption. Nothing except baking automobile paint and the faint fading odor of a man’s cheap cologne.

I cast around. There was another shadowed alley not fifteen steps away. I skirted the car and headed for it, my right hand easing a gun out, pulse pounding hard against the back of my throat. Adrenaline boiled copper on my palate. My coat fluttered, tattered by claws and crackling with dried blood.

The alley held nothing. Scraps of meaningless garbage, all the way back. No place for even a scurf to hide, and a locked door leading into a warehouse that didn’t move even when I applied a little pressure to it. The whiff of cordite had gone away, too.

Huh.

I slid out of the shade and into the hammerblow of southern sun again. Tested the wind direction and got another fading noseful of gunfire and something else. It was more a pheromone wash than a smell, brittle copper fear and something invisible I’d smelled before.

Death.

I tracked the flaring and fading of the scent as the wind veered, a block down and two over, turning back, zeroing in. I had to backtrack even farther to skirt the side of a falling-down building that might have held offices once.

What’s wrong with this picture, Jill?

The structure wasn’t up to code, and there was crime-scene tape over the doors. The tape was bleached and fluttering, no longer a bar to passage. The door itself had been broken in and repaired with plywood, also bleached out.

But the padlock through the hasp screwed into the plywood, holding the door shut, was so new it glittered like a diamond under the fierce light.

Huh. I touched the lock tentatively, sensitive fingertips scraping rough new-bought metal. The smell was stronger here.

I thought about it for a little bit. Then I set my heels, wrapped my hellbreed-strong right-hand fingers around the clasp, and wrenched it free of the thin plywood. I could have broken the padlock itself, but why do it the hard way?

I toed the door open and peered into darkness. Spiderwebs fluttered, and I thought of scorpions, the tattoo high up on my right thigh prickling briefly. A concrete-floored hallway vanished into gloom, and I kept my back to the wall as I stepped in and started working my way down.

There was no hint of scurf, but that reek of gunpowder and death called me. A hunter is trained pretty thoroughly not to make assumptions at the scene, it clouds your thinking and can bite you in the ass pretty hard.

Still, this was a disappearance on the same side of town that other people had been going missing in. A chill that had nothing to do with external temperature drifted down my back. I kept the gun low and ready, and my left hand curled around a knifehilt.

Locked doors frowned at me. None of them smelled very interesting, and they all had dust on the doorknobs that gritted under my fingers. The corner took a sharp bend—I covered it and swung around, found the walls and roof soaring away from me as the hall turned into the interior of the building proper. The lower floors had been converted to open space for something, once upon a time.

Seventeen steps in, on a concrete floor littered with slow-rotting cardboard junk, was Officer Winchell, a curly-headed tall young man in blues with a mask of bruising. Nylon rope knotted around his wrists, his arms pulled grotesquely far behind his back as he lay sprawled in the final indignity of death. A lake of congealed blood spread out from him, and the wooden chair he’d probably been tied to was overturned another four steps away, one of its legs sitting right in the still-wet-looking stain.

He’d been shot four times in the chest, close-range. His back was soaked through—hollowpoints can puncture and bleed you dry, sometimes even if you’re wearing a vest. Extremely close range, and he’d bled out under the Kevlar intended to keep him alive.

What the hell is going on here? I looked away from the body. Glanced at the hall. Someone had to have locked the door on the outside. Had Winchell let himself in over there, or had he been overpowered and dragged in? His gun was gone.

Four shots to the chest was serious business. The mask of horror that was his face was premortem, but only just. Tied to a chair, untied and shot.

Why do you assume he was tied to the chair, Jill? I examined the chair, then. There was some bloodspatter, and a hank of bloodstained nylon rope still clinging to it.

Blue and white striped nylon rope. I chewed at my lower lip, thinking it over.

Jacinta Kutchner had hung with blue and white striped nylon. Just this kind. The same kind Winchell’s hands were bound with.

A cop commits suicide, the widow gets killed and there’s this rope at the scene, and now this. This type of rope’s as common as a sneeze; they sell it in hardware stores—but to have it here in two out of three murders related to police officers? Something smells here indeed, Jill.

I was wasting daylight even looking at this. A scurf infestation would spread until burned out or contained; this was a stack of human murders with no inhuman agency I could see behind them. Not my problem, I was already stretched thin enough as it was.

But Jacinta’s body swung gently, her house creaking to itself in my memory, and Officer Winchell—I didn’t even know his first name—didn’t stare at me because his eyes had puffed closed. Someone had beat the hell out of him and shot him.

So we were looking at revenge or money, most probably. You don’t get beaten like that just because someone hates your haircut.

Sudden certainty bloomed under my breastbone like a poisonous flower. It just don’t smell right, Monty had said.

I agreed, one hundred percent.

I straightened, looked down at Winchell’s grotesquely puffed face. Noticed all at once how hot it was, and wondered why I’d smelled the cordite first and not the death. Maybe because I’ve gotten used to the smell of decay.

As used to it as you can get, that is.

Daylight’s wasting, Jill. Call this in to Homicide and have a word with Piper when you can. Get your ass in gear.

But first, I stood gazing down at Winchell. The lump curdled in my throat. Nobody should have to die like this. Or like Kutchner’s widow.

My voice startled me, breaking the eerie quiet over the sound of freight trains and traffic in the distance. “Monty’s called me in, Winchell. You tell Jacinta I’m on the job.” I paused. “You can let Marv Kutchner know too.”