The Devil's Elixir (35 page)

And she slid to the ground, holding her neck, blood spurting relentlessly through her fingers, her terrified gaze locked on her father—

He was on her in a flash, cradling her, pressing down against the cut on her neck, caressing her hair, telling her she was going to be all right—

His wife, sobbing and out of breath, now alongside him, desperately trying to do something to stem the life gushing out of her and bring some measure of comfort to their daughter—

“Help us,” Corliss shouted, tears streaming from his eyes. “Help us, damn you.”

Navarro and his men just stood there and watched as, in a few brutal seconds, Wendy lost consciousness. Then her breathing stopped and she just lay there, in Corliss’s arms.

Dead.

He looked up at Navarro, drowning in fury, sorrow, and confusion.

“Why?” he mumbled between breathless sobs. “Why? I told you . . . I told you we didn’t have it.”

And in that instant, he thought Navarro finally believed him. But it was too late.

It didn’t matter anymore.

“I told you I didn’t have it,” he wept. “Why did you have to do this?”

“Perhaps you’ll understand,” Navarro replied, coolly. “In another lifetime.”

Three words that Corliss would never forget.

He roared as he leapt to his feet and launched himself at Navarro.

He never made it, never even laid a finger on the Mexican.

The bullets had stopped him.

Twenty-three of him.

He didn’t remember much else about that night.

He’d spent days in a coma. Weeks in intensive care. Months in a hospital. Years in rehabilitation. Three months into his ordeal, he’d been told that his wife had taken her own life. Which hadn’t surprised him. He’d seen how Wendy’s death had affected her, how she couldn’t live with the memory of that night. And now she was gone, too.

They were both gone.

But Navarro was still out there. Roaming the land, carefree, no doubt causing more horrors, inflicting more pain and suffering wherever he went.

A monster on the loose.

At first, Corliss couldn’t understand why he’d survived. He couldn’t understand why he hadn’t died from the hailstorm that had ripped through his body. After leaving the hospital, he’d considered ending his own life and joining his girls in the hereafter. He’d thought about it a lot. He’d come close to doing it a few times. Then, one day, he understood.

He understood that he’d been spared for a reason.

He realized he was still alive to do what had to be done.

To put the monster down.

To make sure his evil was extinguished.

To make sure he paid.

And right now, it seemed like there was a chance that the monster was finally out in the open. Not just out in the open, but here. In America. In California.

Within range.

Corliss’s arm slid down to rest on the couch, the empty tumbler slipping out of his fingers and rolling into the cushions. And as he drifted off to sleep, he held onto one thought: that if the monster were ever caught, that he’d be the one to slit his throat and watch him die, one slow breath at a time.

Hasta la vista
, motherfucker.

O
n the smooth timber deck of the stucco-and-terracotta-tile pool house, the monster was busy scouring the deep folds of his consciousness for some answers of his own.

The day hadn’t gone well.

He was now one man down. His target was nowhere in sight. And he couldn’t see a clear way forward that would bring him what he was after.

He needed a more enlightened view.

An epiphany.

The blind Peruvian’s brew would see to that. It always did.

He needed to find Reilly, but that wasn’t going to be easy. He couldn’t have his men tail him as he left the only location he was sure to go to, the local offices of the FBI. Not after the fiasco of the last attempt. Not after the bikers had been eliminated. The enemy was on high alert. They’d be looking out for anything suspicious. And the last thing Navarro needed right now was to lose more men.

Guerra and his techie snoops wouldn’t be useful either. Reilly’s phone, like that of any FBI agent, had sophisticated anti-hacking software installed on it. There was no way to track him through it. And his woman’s phone was also no longer an option. That door had been slammed shut at the museum.

He sat there, naked, cross-legged, and completely still, as he dived and soared through breathtaking landscapes and rapid-fire sequences of imagery, some he recognized, others he didn’t, the real blending with the surreal as his synapses burst into unexplored territory and linked up through previously unmapped connections.

And then it came to him. The simple realization that his answer was well within his grasp.

In fact, it lay within the walls of his gated villa.

A living, breathing answer that was calling out to him, beckoning for his attention.

The sorcerer’s face broadened into a peaceful smile, and he shut his eyes.

Tomorrow, he knew, would be a far better day.

I
didn’t get much sleep. My mind had been churning away all night, scheming and plotting, stress-testing different routes forward—anything to escape thinking about Tess and where I stood with her. I hadn’t come up with anything even remotely foolproof, but some were less harebrained than others. All the paths I had explored, though, had one thing in common: They were all centered around me setting myself up as bait to flush out our Mexican aggressors.

As you can imagine, I wasn’t exactly jumping up and down with glee.

By nine, I was showered, dressed, and walking into Villaverde’s office to go over our options. Munro arrived at roughly the same time. I knew Villaverde wouldn’t be thrilled about my thinking. I wasn’t looking forward to putting myself out there as a lure for a bunch of psychos who took pleasure in snipping off people’s privates, but I couldn’t think of anything else that might work. Unless Villaverde or Munro had a brilliant alternative to put on the table, I was pretty much committed to putting my plan in motion.

Maybe it was a half-assed way of trying to make up for what I’d done. I don’t know. All I knew was, I wanted the bastards gone and I wanted to know that Tess and Alex wouldn’t have anything more to worry about.

We started off by going through a round-up of whatever updates had come in concerning the previous days’ events. There was nothing in them that led to a eureka moment. The guy Jules had taken out at Balboa Park had nothing on him that would help ID him, and his prints didn’t get a hit either. The SUV they’d abandoned there was a dead end, too. So far, all we knew was that it had been stolen a couple of days ago. Detectives were on their way to interview its owner as a matter of procedure, but I knew it would prove to be a waste of time.

The follow-up reports on the multiple homicide at the Eagles’ clubhouse the day before didn’t give us anything to jump about either, although I’d had an idea about that.

“One thing worth doing,” I told them. “The guy Pennebaker told us about, the one Navarro went to work on. Pennebaker said one minute he was fine, then he just dropped to the ground like he’d been hit with a tranquilizer dart. Only he was still awake, just paralyzed.”

“What are you thinking?” Munro asked.

“Given that I don’t believe in voodoo, I’d say Navarro slipped him some kind of mickey. Which got me wondering about Walker. He was chopped up and left to bleed out, and yet there weren’t any signs of a struggle there. Like he didn’t resist. Which doesn’t make sense.”

“Unless he was drugged,” Villaverde added, getting my drift. “Okay. I’ll get the coroner to run a full toxicology workup.”

I’d already pretty much made up my mind on that one, and I knew what the tox report would confirm.

This wasn’t some lieutenant of Navarro’s.

It was him.

I just knew it.

Villaverde was picking up his phone when he handed me a sheet of paper.

“Michelle’s phone records,” he said. “There’s a Dean there, like you thought. Take a look.”

I looked at the printout. Several calls were highlighted, all made in the last six weeks to a number that was registered to Dean Stephenson. It had a 510 area code.

“It’s not local,” I asked.

Villaverde shook his head. “Berkeley.”

“And he’s a shrink?”

“Yes and no,” Villaverde replied. “He teaches psychiatry. Runs the department up at UCB.”

Which surprised and kind of worried me. Of all the shrinks Michelle could have taken Alex to see, she’d chosen someone who was undoubtedly a big hitter, despite the fact that he was basically an hour and a half’s flight away.

I called Tess and gave her his name and number while Villaverde spoke to the coroner, thinking she could run with it while we focused on figuring out how to get the bad guys to step into the limelight, ideally without my laying down my life in exchange.

Something else was nagging at me, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. In any case, I barely got a chance to float my proposal when one of Villaverde’s men burst into his office, his face all alight with urgency.

“You’ve got to see this,” he announced as he beelined across the room to Villaverde’s desk, grabbed a remote control, and used it to turn on the TV that sat on the bookshelves.

It was a local news channel. The banner read “Armed hostage situation in Mission Valley,” and the screen was showing some grainy footage that someone had filmed using their phone. There was a guy with a gun, holding someone by the neck, shouting and waving his gun around frantically while backing away from the camera.

I recognized him immediately from the small tuft of hair under his lower lip. It was Ricky “Scrape” Torres, aka Soulpatch—the biker with the bullet wound in his shoulder who’d been yanked out of the dead deputy’s car.

In living, breathing color.