Darkening Dawn (The Lockman Chronicles Book 5) (11 page)

Earl sighed. He understood the boy’s enthusiasm. Just sometimes he didn’t know where to focus it. “He looked like a king, dressed in royal purple, with a massive belt buckle that would make any Texan weep.”

Roddy’s teeth showed through his dopey grin. Kid looked like he had discovered his daddy’s porn collection for the first time.

“What’s the next move, then?”

This came from Art, to Earl’s right. The shadows from the clip lights they had attached to the exposed rafters in the rotted out ceiling made Art’s pockmarked face look like the dark side of the moon. He had deep eye sockets, which had dark circles under them as if he was always tired. But Art had the sharpest reflexes Earl had ever seen in a man. The slack way he carried himself hid the snap in his tendons. He could slit a throat with his bowie knife before you blinked.

This was why Art sat at Earl’s right.

“It’s complicated,” Earl said as honestly as he could. He tried to never lie to his team. Keeping your crew in the dark might give a commander an advantage in the short term, but it would always come back to bite you in the ass. Better to suffer the gripes and doubts up front so they knew what they were getting into.

“Complicated how?” Lazarus asked.

Laz had the second chair to Earl’s left. Rumor was Laz used to do some street preaching in New York City before traveling to Chicago after he killed a man for telling Laz God was a lie. Wasn’t till later, when Laz met his first vamp, that the preacher realized the man had been right.

Poor Laz wore that disappointment like a scar across his face. He had a resigned look about him, as if just waiting to die and discover nothing but darkness.

Only there was more than darkness after death. The master, Mr. Dolan, proved that. Even the obliteration of your soul couldn’t always destroy you. Sometimes, if you were special, a piece of your soul would survive in the Inbetween. A prison, maybe, but still eternal life in a way.

Real eternal life.

And, according to Mr. Dolan, even some could escape the Inbetween and become whole again.

Earl looked at Laz straight. “It involves a ritual. A big one.”

Laz narrowed his eyes. “Not a one of us is a sensitive.”

Earl curled his lip. Not this doubt again. Just because Laz’s precious God turned out a lie, didn’t mean everything he couldn’t see was a lie too. But that was all right. Laz’s skepticism kept the team sharp.

“You know I’ve got a touch,” Earl said. “How else could I talk to the master?”

“How do we know you actually did?” Laz looked around the kitchen, mouth set as if it was full of a bad taste. “We’ve been camped in this condemned house for almost a month after we got evicted from our last headquarters. We got a generator growling in what used to be this place’s living room, stinking up the place with exhaust. We live on noodles cooked on a hot plate.” He closed his eyes and paused.

Earl sat back and let Laz say his piece. Funny, Earl had gotten used to the sound and smell of the gennie. He hardly noticed it anymore. Now that Laz mentioned it, though, Earl caught the scent of gasoline and heard the guttural rumbling.

Laz was right. They’re straits had gotten dire. But as a former preacher, Laz should have had an easier time of keeping the faith.

Laz opened his eyes and stared up at the ceiling as if speaking to God. “The black mold creeping up the walls in the bedrooms? I lived better when I was on the streets.”

Roddy jerked his chin up. “Then maybe you should go back, you ungrateful bitch.”

Earl slapped the table. “No. We ain’t having any infighting. Laz has a right to air his grievances. You all do.”

“In that case,” Tony said. “I got a few myself.”

Tony sat on Earl’s left-hand side. He looked down at the table, picking at a threadbare piece of the felt, his nail making this annoying click each time it scraped the wood underneath.

Tony was the only black on the crew. Boy had muscles on his arms as big as a baby’s head. He had the best aim out of all of them too. Could fire any kind of weapon you handed to him. Handled the supernatural laser beam thing Mr. Dolan had helped them find in one of Earl’s dreams as if he’d carried such a thing back in his Desert Storm days.

Negro or not, he had skills this team needed.

Tony pointed across the table at the fella who went by Whisper. He had a build to match his name, all elbows and knees, and an Adam’s apple that jutted out like a warhead. He wore tiny little John Lennon glasses and a sad excuse for a goatee as patchy as a bed of weeds. Hell, Roddy could grow thicker facial hair.

“Whisper Boy here jacks off so hard he shakes the bunk. Snores like a motherfucker too.”

Whisper glared at Tony over the tops of his circle lenses. “I have apnea.”

Tony rolled his eyes and ran his hands over his kinky hair that always looked like a rat’s nest to Earl.

“It’s true,” Roddy chimed in. “I can hear Whisper spanking it from my bunk across the room. It’s gross.”

Whisper crossed his arms and leaned back. “You’re both just jealous that I’m man enough to express my sexuality without shame.”

This time Earl hit the table with a fist. The table cracked under the felt. Another strike and the blasted thing might collapse. A far cry from the metal cafeteria table they had at their last place. The old missile silo had worked perfectly for them. Plenty of room. No need to crowd six men into a single bedroom because the other room’s floor had rotted out, making it utterly useless.

Funds had run out fast once Earl got fired as shift manager at the metal shop. Fuckers didn’t want to give him the sick time he deserved.
Excessive tardiness and absence,
the pink slip had claimed.

They had no idea the importance of what he was working on on the side.

Now they lived off the meager scrapings from the few part-time jobs his men held, including the paper route Roddy still had from when he was in middle school. The kid, bless his heart, gave everything he earned toward the cause. On the other hand, Earl suspected Tony and even Art were holding back some of their salaries, though he couldn’t prove it so couldn’t call them on it.

The snap of the table cracking won the crew’s attention. All eyes flicked to Earl.

He trailed his gaze around the circle, meeting each of his men’s eyes before moving onto the next.

“If you’d all stop bickering, you could listen to what comes next. Things are about to turn around for us.”

Tony leaned his elbows on the table. It wobbled on its legs, but held up the Negro’s bulk. “You finally come around to my idea? With that weapon we got, we could storm any bank we wanted and blow the vault right open. We’d be set for years.”

Earl pointed a finger in Tony’s face. “We ain’t criminals. So just get that idea out of your head.”

“If we ain’t criminals, why we got to hide out in ratholes like this?”

“We ain’t hiding. Jesus pissing in a pot, won’t you all stop blabbing and listen?”

Tony sucked air through his big nostrils.

That boy never would have dared act so uppity back home in Tennessee. Earl had half a mind to move the operation south just to keep the black boy in his place. But a dream had told Earl that he needed to stay close to Chicago. Some kind of resource was supposed to be nearby. The dream hadn’t been all that specific.

Didn’t matter. Earl trusted Mr. Dolan. He would travel straight to hell if the master asked.

Ain’t that kind of what he’d done visiting the Inbetween?

After Tony backed down, Earl sat a little straighter. He finally had their attention and he could ease their minds about their current situation.

“First of all, Mr. Dolan has given me a location to one of his old safe houses. We’ll find a stash of cash there that will lift us out of our hard circumstances.”

Tony’s bright eyes lit up. “How much we talking?’

“It don’t matter. It’ll be enough.” He gave Tony a chance to gripe, but the boy stayed quiet. Though Earl could hardly hope the Negro had learned his place. “We’re also gonna find some things to help with our ritual.”

Roddy started fidgeting like a coon in a trap again. “What’s the ritual gonna do?”

Earl smiled. “It’s going to bring our master back.”

Art slowly leaned in toward Earl. He placed a hand on Earl’s forearm. The shadows across his face shifted like a dark spirit, the kind Earl’s momma used to threaten would get him and his brother if they didn’t go to sleep at night.

“You sure about this?” Art whispered.

“Why? You scared?”

Art’s deep set eyes gleamed. “Sounds impossible, is all.”

“Have any of my dreams been wrong?”

Art didn’t have nothing to say to that. He took his hand off Earl’s arm, nodded.

See? Art knew his place. Another reason he sat at Earl’s right side.

“We’ll get the stuff for the ritual from Mr. Dolan’s stash,” Earl continued. “But we still need the fucking girl.”

Whisper snickered.

Earl shot him a look he hoped reminded the skinny punk of the last time he crossed Earl, putting moves on Kit. The nose holding up Whisper’s tiny glasses was a still a little crooked. Earl had no stomach for pedophiles, especially when they tried to prey on his niece. The only reason Earl hadn’t kicked Whisper from the group was because of his computer skills. Pasty freak had skills with electronics equal to Tony’s way of handling weapons.

“Something funny?” Earl asked.

Whisper shrunk back, but the smirk on his face didn’t totally fade. “Naw, just thinking of something.”

Earl didn’t bother asking. He didn’t want to know.

“Then tell me you still have that tracer thing on her?”

“It’s not on her. It’s
in
her. She swallowed it when I slipped it into her drink at that club. So, yeah, I still have a signal. Or at least, I did until she entered a black zone.”

Roddy wrinkled his brow and curled his lip. “If she swallowed it, won’t she just shit it out eventually?”

“It attaches to her stomach lining, dumb ass.”

Earl waved his hands. “Hold on a sec. What the hell you mean by black zone?” He thought Whisper sometimes talked funny just to make Earl feel stupid. What was worse was that it worked. “Do you know where she’s at or not?”

Whisper adjusted his glasses on his nose. “I have a general location. The signal dropped somewhere in the middle of Indiana.”

“Indiana?”

“My guess is the Agency has a base there. So it makes sense they have some kind of anti-surveillance system in place. All we have to do is wait until she moves and we’ll pick her up again.”

Tony leaned a little harder on the table. It creaked. Damn fool seemed to want to break it. “Why don’t we head to Indiana and storm the place? We could tear the place apart with the weapon.”

Whisper made a face and spat air. “Yeah, right. Secret government agency with a cadre of covert agents trained to kill monsters? We’ll make short work of them, I’m sure.”

“Damn right we will.”

Whisper raised his eyebrows and giggled like a girl. “Are you stupid or something?”

Earl chopped a hand through the air before Tony could respond. “Enough.” He looked to Tony. “Even with the weapon, we’d be outgunned, assuming we could get in the place to begin with.”

“Or see it, for that matter,” Whisper said. “I doubt it’s sitting out in the open with a welcome mat at the door.”

“So we have to sit on our asses and wait?” Roddy asked.

“We don’t sit on our asses. We get the stuff of Mr. Dolan’s. We prepare. We have everything ready, so when we get the girl, all we have to do is bring the master back where he belongs.”

Art crossed his arms. “And where is that?”

Earl grinned. “In the girl.”

Chapter Nineteen

“
Y
OU’RE KIDDING, RIGHT
?”

Jessie sat at the big conference table, polished oak or some other kind of fancy wood, that shined under the fluorescent lighting. Normally the table would look pretty beautiful. But not under this light. It just hurt Jessie’s eyes looking at it.

Then there was the grating voice of Kinga Kowalski as she laid out the dumbest mission in the Agency’s history using a freaking slide show on a plasma screen TV twice the size as the one in Jessie’s suite—and that one was pretty freaking huge.

The last slide showed on the TV now. Jessie stared at it, mouth hanging open. The itchy fabric on the chair’s padding made her feel like she had those proverbial ants in her pants. Again, the Agency’s budget had room for giant televisions, but skimped on the simple comforts. Typical.

“Why would you think this a joke?”

Chalkboard with nails scraping you? You are outclassed by this woman’s voice.

“This isn’t the kind of mission we do,” Jessie said. She swiveled her chair to face Ree, who sat in the middle of the table to her right. The setup reminded her of that movie gag where a couple sit at a giant dining table on opposite ends and one asks the other to please pass the salt. Under Borscht’s rule, things had already gotten weird. “Is it?” she asked Ree.

Ree took a couple seconds before he answered, Jessie could see the wheels turning and the steam coming out his ears. Jessie hated her position in this new regime, but she sure as shit didn’t envy his. She still couldn’t believe Ree was on their side. He had to come to his senses now, though, after King’s presentation. Right?

Finally, Ree spoke. “It’s a sound plan.”

“I’m not talking about the freaking plan. I’m talking about the mission.” She pointed at the map on the screen, the big red circle around some boonies village in Iraq. “This shit has nothing to do with the Return and everything to do with politics.”

Jessie might have imagined it, but it looked like Ree twitched. God, he had to know this was a mistake.

“I thought I made it clear,” Kinga said. “The group that has taken over that village is not Al-Qaeda. They are a band of vampires with a frightening new technology that could threaten humankind. How is that not in line with the Agency’s mission statement?”

Jessie quirked up an eyebrow. “We have a mission statement?”

Kinga sighed and shook her head, playing schoolmarm again. (Whatever
marm
meant. Jessie never had figured that out.)