Black Water: A Jane Yellowrock Collection (5 page)

I met no one else outside. The house was a two-story mansion on pylons. This close, I could smell people. Humans, lots of them, came and went all the time, but for now, the numbers were few. The night went silent, the voices I had been hearing stopped. I tried the door. I texted Eli:
unlocked
.

Instantly I got back
Go
.

I opened the door and stepped inside, into the shadow of a fake ficus tree. Warmth and sensory overload hit me simultaneously, and I looked around, first for people—none—and then for cameras. None also. Which was smart in a way. If you were doing something illegal, you needed to make sure nothing was filmed or recorded. Of course, if you were under attack, the lack of cameras was stupid.

I took a breath. The air reeked of cigars, expensive liquor, pain, fear, sex, and blood. And young females. Beast slammed into me.
Kits!
she thought at me.
Hurting.

She wanted to run straight for the scent, but I clamped down on her.
Stealth,
I thought at her. Beast snarled but held still. I stepped to the side and took in the foyer. Cypress-wood floors, rugs, smoking lounge to my right, bar to my left. Large-screen TVs in each room. A game room was ahead with pool tables, dartboard, comfy chairs. I moved cautiously into it. And found a stage with a brass pole. No people. Stairs going up and the stink of fear coming down.

A moment later, Eli appeared from the shadows at the back of the house, wearing night camo and loaded for war. He was carrying a pistol with a suppresser screwed on the end, legal in Louisiana. He could fire and the sound, while still loud, was unlikely to carry far. He held up three fingers to indicate how many he had taken down outside, then one finger to show how many he had taken down inside. There was no stink of gunfire or blood, suggesting that he had used nonlethal methods, just as I had. I extended one finger, then used it to point up the stairs. I mouthed,
Prison
.

My partner’s mouth turned down. He mouthed what I thought might have been
No mercy,
and he moved up the stairs. I followed. I was halfway up when I heard a woman scream.

Eli ducked right, toward the sound, moving fast in a bent-kneed run. I covered him, seeing a wide hallway running left and right, doors along it, and floor-to-ceiling windows at each, two recliners in front of each window. Which was odd. Until I looked in the closest one and saw a man curled up on a large, four-poster bed, facing away from the glass. Asleep. There were chains on the bedposts and bruises on the young man’s back.

Movement caught my eye and a human-shaped Sarge appeared, coming from the end of the hallway. He carried a shotgun and wore black cotton pants and a T-shirt, his hairy feet bare. PP trotted by his side. There was blood on her muzzle. Sarge began to check all the rooms on the far end of the hall, the scent of his anger strong.

Satisfied that he had my back, I slipped from room to room up to Eli. The recliners in front of the window on the end room both held incapacitated bodies, their heads at odd angles. Not breathing. Very dead. One of them was John-Roy’s cell pal. The other I didn’t know. Sarge had been at work.

Inside the room were two men and two women. The show the men had been watching was ugly. Real ugly. Eli opened the door and said, softly, “John-Roy.” When the man rose, a gun in his meaty hand, the barrel moving toward the door, Eli fired, the sound not much louder than a dictionary dropped flat from shoulder height. John-Roy fell, screaming, a hole in his abdomen. Eli’s next two shots hit the back wall; suppressors made hitting a target at any distance problematic. The second man grabbed a woman and backed from the bed, holding her as a shield.

Eli raced inside. Fast as a big-cat, I followed and centered the sights of my nine-mil on the standing man’s forehead. I didn’t recognize him except for the tattoo of the penis. This was Elvis Clyde McPhatter Lamont, king of the forced sex trade. He wore gold on his wrists and hanging around his neck, but otherwise he was naked, holding a woman, also naked, bleeding, and bruised. But not broken. She looked enraged, her eyes telling me she was ready for anything. Elvis pulled her to the wall.

On the floor, one hand pressing on his belly wound, John-Roy was looking at me. He yelled, “You!” and turned the gun toward me. TV shows where the bad guy always drops his gun are stupid. In real life, it doesn’t happen all that often. Eli shot him, again in the abdomen, off center. Not a miss, a deliberate target. Eli wanted him alive.

I laughed, the sound a register lower than my human voice. It carried menace, fury, and delight, and it was all Beast. From behind me, PP leaped into the room, straight to the woman still on the bed. The huge dog lay down next to her, protecting. Ignoring the man and his hostage, Eli secured the room.

Behind me, Sarge walked in, the grizzled man taking in everything. He closed the door behind him, the sound soft and final. “Son,” Sarge said to Elvis, “I can’t allow you to get away with this. You let the lady go and I’ll let you die easy. You keep her, and I’ll make sure you die slow.” Which sounded pretty generous to me.

But Elvis disagreed. A door I hadn’t noticed opened behind him and before I could react, he was gone. Sarge leaped across the room, a distance a human couldn’t have covered. Sarge rammed into the door as it closed, splintering wood and revealing a steel core. He bellowed.

I ran out of the room and down the stairs, catching a glimpse of Eli dragging John-Roy by the hair. There was no way off the island tonight, in the fog, except by boat. There hadn’t been a land-based boathouse on the sat map—which could have been sadly out of date—but I was trusting that it was up to date and that the men had arrived in the boats that been tied to the docks. I raced that way, out of the house into the black fog of night. Beast, still close to the front of my mind, guided me, her balance assisting mine, her vision lighting the night world. I let her take over.

Can smell nothing new, no female-prisoner smell, no man-predator stink
, she thought.

As I reached shore, the lights in the house went out. All of them. “That’s because we got out in front of him,” I murmured, certain. “We’re between him and his getaway boat.” I dropped to a crouch and faced the house.

He came from my right, the woman silent, stumbling, her breath shaking. I heard her take a breath and start to scream, the faint hiss followed by a thump and the sound of a falling body. The reek of fresh blood was strong on the air. One pair of running footsteps came toward me. He’d hurt her to keep her quiet, and then had to leave her when he’d been too harsh. Which just made my job easier. When he appeared out of the fog, I rose fast. And let him rush onto my blade. It caught him low in the abdomen, and I yanked the blade up, severing everything in its path. Hot blood gushed over my hand, and still I lifted the blade, tilting it to the right so it would miss his aorta and his heart. He went limp and I let him fall, taking my blade with him.

Around me the heavens opened and a deluge fell. The lights came back on in the house, showing me not much of anything but shadows and a dying man at my feet. Sarge strode up, picked up my prisoner, and flipped the body into his own airboat. PP jumped up beside him, tongue lolling. “Keys,” Sarge demanded.

I tossed them to him and moments later, the airboat vanished into the mist, the powerful prop roaring. Eli came from my left, through the rain, carrying the woman Elvis had dropped.. “I need to get her inside, into a safe place. She doesn’t need to wake up with a man near her,” he said. “Call this in. Get medic and the law.”

“Yeah,” I said, trudging back to the hell-house. “Sarge took Elvis. What happened to John-Roy?”

“He ran off into the night,” Eli said. “I heard a splash. I think he fell into the moat.”

I thought about that for a moment. A gut-shot man
accidently
falling into a moat full of gators. Maybe they’d eat him. Maybe he’d drown first. Maybe not. “Good,” I said.

***

The rest of the night was chaos. Nadine and a sheriff from the parish to the north vied for jurisdictional control of the scene, and the FBI showed, kicking them both out because of the human trafficking. Eli and I were allowed to leave at ten the next morning, free to go after long interrogations. Sarge met us at the shore in his airboat. Together we went back to Chauvin. The media circus onshore was unimaginable, but they ignored us, looking like locals with nothing to say, the reporters too busy trying to hire, bribe, or buy a way to the island in the middle of the black water.

***

A month later, I got a package in the mail. It was my vamp-killer, smelling of cleansers and oil, the blade freshly honed. There was no note. No explanation. I didn’t need one. The blade was explanation enough.

Author’s Note: Fans are always asking me about Jane’s early life and training, about how she went from the children’s home to rogue-vamp hunter. Well, here’s a small insight into how.

I unstrapped my helmet and sat, straddling the beat-up Yamaha and taking in the storefront. It didn’t look like much. The dirty display windows were covered on the outside by steel bars, and on the inside by cheap, bent, bowed metal blinds. In the creases of the blinds I could make out wood studs and wallboard on the other side, as if the business wanted to make sure no one could see in. E
NDERS
S
ECURITY AND
P
RIVATE
I
NVESTIGATION
S,
I
NC.
was stenciled on the door. My place of internship and on-the-job training for the next six months. I was eighteen and on my own, after spending the last six years in Bethel Nondenominational Children’s Home. I couldn’t decide if I was excited at the thought of finally being here, or dismayed at the dingy storefront.

Using a steel chain and keyed lock, I attached the Yamaha to the pitted and scored aluminum bike post that was situated near the storm drain. It wasn’t my dream bike, but it would do until I could afford the one I really wanted. And there was no point in making it easy for my only transportation to be bike-jacked. This neighborhood looked anything but safe and secure. Lucky me. Not knowing anything about Asheville, I’d picked Enders out of a list of possible PI and security businesses to take my paid internship for my private investigator’s license. From the broken-down look of things, I’d picked wrong. Closed businesses, run-down buildings, little traffic, and what traffic there was consisted of pimp-mobiles and rusted, dented, kidnapper-style paneled vans.

Eyes on the guys watching me from the street corner, I patted my saddlebags, checking the latches. The teal compartments were secure, held in place with leather straps and small locks. Everything I owned was in the compartments, my toothbrush, shampoo, and a few changes of clothes—jeans and T-shirts. Boots I hadn’t been able to pass up in the “gently used clothing” consignment store.

The August heat had laid a slick of sweat down my back and I unzipped my vintage leather riding jacket, freeing my hip-length braid. I touched the gold necklace that I still wore like a talisman and headed for the door.

The guys on the corner started toward me, both with street swaggers meant to intimidate. Hands lose at their sides. One had a bulge at his navel. Gun, I was guessing. The other slid a hand in his pocket and back out. A short length of rope. Metal on his other fingers. Brass knuckles.
Really?
I thought.
Really?
Two armed teenaged boys, younger than me, tattooed, Gun Boy with blondish dreadlocks and Brass Knucks Boy with an Afro, like from the seventies.

I reached the door and twisted the knob. Locked. Some small part of me wasn’t surprised. A slightly bigger part was delighted.
Funnnnn,
it whispered. I ignored it, as always.

Using the storefront windows, I checked behind me. No one watching. No one approaching from behind. Just me and two gangbangers on the street, in view of the security camera of my new place of business. Which was locked. Yeah, really. Was this a test of some kind? An unlucky accident of timing? I retucked my braid, shrugged my shoulders to relax, and came to a stop, my back to the door. The guys separated, coming between me and my bike, a pincer move that cut off my retreat.

Fun,
the crazy part of me murmured again. The crazy part of me that I had just discovered turned into an animal. Like my own personal werelion, except not. The crazy part that had been penned in for years in the children’s home, and wanted out now, to play with the humans,
play
being in the eyes of the beholder, like a cat playing—with a couple of stupid rats. Yeah. The crazy part of me, the part that the Christian children’s home had worked so hard to knock out of me. It rose and glared at them through my eyes, and I chuffed with laughter, showing my teeth. Wanting them to try something. I couldn’t help it.

Knucks Boy hesitated at my grin, just a slight hitch in his get-along, as Brenda, one of my housemothers, would have said. A tell, as my sensei would have said.

I set my bike-booted feet on the cracked sidewalk, the worn treads giving me good traction, much better than the fancy new boots in the saddlebags. Stupid thoughts for a skinny teenage girl facing two armed men. I should run, bang on the security office door, and scream a little. But I didn’t want to.
I wanted this
. I pulled in air through my nose and out through my mouth, relaxing further.
Fun,
the crazy voice panted
. Fun . . . fun . . . fun
.

“Hey, baby,” Brass Knucks said, coming to a stop about five feet away. “Nice bike. How ’bout we go for a ride on that nice lil’ bike?”

“No,” I said, sounding bored.

“How ’bout we go for a ride on this?” Gun Boy asked, grabbing his crotch.

“Now, why would I want some scuzzy, flea-infested dude with BO and probably STDs?” I asked.

Gun Boy pulled his gun from his pants with a move that was all elbow and lifted shoulder. Nothing economical about it, nothing graceful. As the gun came free, I stepped up, blading my body, and kicked out. A single fluid kick that shoved his gun back into his gut, but with enough force to hurt. Hurt bad. His air whuffed out with a pained grunt and his body bent in two. My leg bent and I clocked him with a knee to the face and a quick, follow-up one-two to his nose. Messy.

I backed away as he fell, kicking the gun under the closest van. I gave Knucks Boy a little four-fingered, come-and-get-it wave and he rushed in with a roundhouse. I ducked and tripped him. Head-butted him with the loose helmet. He landed on the other guy and I followed him down to drop a knee in his back. He made a little squeal as I landed. I caught the loose helmet, and I bopped him in the back of head with it. Kinda hard.

I stole the rope and the brass knuckles from his nerveless fingers and tossed them down the storm drain near the bike. Behind me the lock clicked and the door opened. A laconic voice asked, “You want me to call the police? You know. So you can make a police report?”

I stepped away from my would-be-attackers and considered. “How long do you think they’d be in jail?” I asked. “How much time would they do?”

“Hours and they’ll be back out on the streets,” the voice said. “Then they’ll tie you up in court for weeks, and plea-bargain down to zip.”

“You got it all on camera?” I asked.

“Yep.”

“I want a copy.” I shoved the guys over, out of their pile, and patted them down, removing their ID. I checked the pictures to the IDs and handed them to the man behind me. I said, “Anton Jevers and Wayne Roles Jr.” I met the eyes of the one who was still mostly conscious. “There’s this new thing called YouTube. You can upload video onto it for the whole world to see. I ever see your faces on this street again, I’ll upload the video and everyone who knows you will be able to see you get beat up by a skinny girl in a bike helmet.”

I went for the gun and picked it up with two fingers. I handed it too to the guy at the door, taking him in with quick glance. Younger than he sounded. Blondish. Jeans and tee. Shoulder holster with a nine-millimeter. Scruffy beard. He smelled of coffee and Irish Spring soap.

“What do you want me to do with this?” the guy asked.

“Whatever PIs do with guns they accidently find on their doorsteps, dropped by inefficient muggers, unsuccessful rapists, and dumb-nuts.”

He laughed. It was a nice laugh. “Anton, Wayne, you get on outta here or I’ll call the po-lice on you. And I bet you both got a little something-something on you that the local law would like to confiscate. You,” he said to me, “come on in. I got Cokes on ice and sandwiches in the microwave. I’d have been here sooner, but I was heating lunch and didn’t realize you were in trouble until after the ding.”

It sounded satisfactory to me and I followed him inside. Closed and locked the door behind me. “My intern, I assume,” he said as he popped the tops on Coke cans and shoved a foot-long club sandwich with bacon toward me over the desk. I nodded and took it and bit in, the taste so good and the bacon so hot that I almost groaned. I ate two more bites, taking the edge off my hunger, watching him, studying the office. He was prettier than I’d expected from the half glance I’d taken outside. The office was less dingy on the inside than it looked on the outside too. Three small desks, three desk chairs, folding chairs in the corner. One of those blue plastic watercoolers. Coffeemaker. Small brown refrigerator with a microwave on top. Unisex bathroom. Lockers. Gun safe bolted onto the floor in the corner. Closet. Iron-bound back door. Not bad. It smelled of mice and bacon and gunpowder, a combo that smelled unexpectedly great.

“Power of observation is important in this business,” he said.

I grunted and kept eating. It had been hours since my last meal, and I’d been eating light since I spent my last twenty on the boots. Stupid move, that. Girly move. But they were killer boots. I grinned at the memory.

“My powers of observation told me that you should have run instead of taking on the neighborhood bullies,” he said.

“Thought you said you were busy at the microwave,” I said around a mouthful of bacon and lettuce leaves.

He shrugged. “Whatever. What did your powers of observation tell
you
?”

“That you set me up. Most likely,” I hedged.

His brow wrinkled up in long horizontal lines that weren’t visible until he looked puzzled. Or maybe mad? I wasn’t sure. I still wasn’t real good at reading people’s emotions, but he smelled angry. Which was a really weirded-out thought. “Do I look stupid?” he asked. “Or like the kind of guy who would let a little girl get hurt? I was coming in through the back with sandwiches, and sticking them in to heat, when I saw it going down on the camera.”

“Fine,” I said. “From outside, I could see the light on through the cracks in the Sheetrock over the windows. The entry door is steel, set in a reinforced steel door casing. Over the door is a camera, the kind that moves. What looks like a water pipe runs up the outside wall in the corner and into the building through a tiny hole bored in the brick. Maybe for a retrofitted sprinkler system.

“Not that I’ve had much training yet, but the place looks like it was set up to survive attack by small-arms fire, Molotov cocktail fire, and maybe even attack by a rolling dump truck. The people inside might get smoked or crushed, but the files might survive, and the attack would be caught on camera to identify the perpetrators.”

I stopped and ate some more. The bacon was really good. The other meat was beef and turkey. Even the lettuce tasted good. I was starving. I licked mayo off my thumb, slurped some Coke, and went on.

“The neighborhood is on the way down, except for the building on the corner, which is undergoing a remodeling, probably because of the way-cool windows on the second and third story.” I set down the sandwich and held my hands out to the sides at angles. “Like this, with the whaddya call it, the cornerstone? Capstone? Like this.” I reshaped my hands.

“Art deco. Yeah. The upgrade is the beginning of the end of crime on this street. I’ll miss Anton and Wayne.”

I spluttered with laughter and held out my hand. “Jane Yellowrock. But I guess you know that, what with your mad powers of observation.”

“Charles Davidson, but call me Nomad,” he said. “Your boss and teacher for the next few months. You got a place to stay until your next paycheck?”

“Nope.”

“Money for a hotel? A furnished room?”

“Nope.”

Nomad sighed. “There’s an inflatable mattress in the closet. Towels. Sheets. Don’t let the cops figure it out—I’m not licensed for renters—but you keep your head down and you can bunk here until you make enough money to get a place. Soon as you get a stash, I know a few people who rent places. You can have cheap and dangerous in a few weeks, or more expensive and safer in a few months. We’ll do a drive-by and you can evaluate how much you want privacy. But that’s for later. Now we got a case.” Nomad stood and wiped his face, gathered up all the papers, and tossed them into a trash can. “Keep the trash emptied. Dumpster out back. Place has roaches. Mice. But you don’t look like the kind of woman who runs from either.”

I shook my head. “What kind of case?”

“Cheating husband.”

“You like domestic cases?”

“Hate ’em. But they make up about seventy percent of a PI’s business. Bring your bike inside and we’ll keep it locked up. Safer. Anton and Wayne are aggressive and stupid and they might think about revenge. You pass your CC yet?”

I nodded. I had passed the Concealed Carry permit the week before I passed my classroom training for my PI license. “No gun. No money. Do I get the internship?”

“Despite the little snafu on the street, yeah. And you won’t need a gun on this trip.” He pointed to the restroom. “Pee while you can. Female anatomy isn’t particularly well suited to long-term stakeouts.”

I nodded.

“Not very talkative, are you?” he observed, cocking his head.

“Nope.” I went into the restroom and closed the door. And smiled at myself in the polished metal mirror over the sink, my amber eyes glowing gold with excitement. “I’m in,” I whispered. “I did it. I got the job.”

It was in a little run-down storefront security and PI business. The pay sucked. And I loved it. I loved it all.