The Devil's Only Friend (7 page)

“Yes, that’s a thing. You don’t have your laptop?”

“I leave it at work.”

“That’s not the point of a laptop.”

“Do you have one?” I asked. “Or a phone?”

“Not a smartphone.” He stepped backward into the hall. “We’ll post an ad tomorrow. I’m closing this so he can’t get back out.”

“Okay—” I started, but he shut the door, and I heard his footsteps walk away. I looked at the dog. “Hey.”

It didn’t respond.

“I don’t want to hurt you, okay?” I’d had him here before, and he’d been fine. It was only a few hours, though, and this would be all night. I sat back down, watching Boy Dog like I expected him to attack, or turn into a bowl of flowers. He looked back, mouth open, panting softly. “How’d you get your name?” I asked. “Why Boy Dog, instead of … anything else in the entire world? Everybody has a reason.”

What did Mary Gardner do that she didn’t have to do?

4

I caught Agent Ostler in the lobby of the building where we rented an office. “Children are weak.”

She looked at me a moment. “Is this something you need to talk to Dr. Trujillo about?”

“No,” I said, “it’s about Mary Gardner. She targets children because they’re weak. She needs somebody weak.”

“She kills the terminally ill; they’re all weak.”

“But children are weaker,” I said. “Not just physically, but their immune systems. They haven’t been exposed to as many diseases as adults, so they haven’t built up the antibodies to fight them off. Children recover from disease more quickly because they’re resilient, but they’re also far more likely to get sick in the first place. That’s how she does it.”

Ostler started walking again, forcing me to hurry to catch up. “Are you suggesting that she’s the one putting these children in the hospital in the first place? That would mean contacting them months or even years before they die; we have no evidence for that kind of behavior.”

“That’s not what I’m saying at all,” I said, following her into the elevator. “I’m saying we have it backwards. We thought she was taking something from the children, whether it was their health or their healing power or whatever, which is why she gets healthy and they die. But why does it have to be so complicated? How do you take ‘healing power’ from someone? It doesn’t make sense.”

“None of it makes sense,” said Ostler. “They’re supernatural creatures who don’t follow any rules.”

“But they do,” I said. “They always do, whether we understand those rules or not. And the simpler answer is always the best. Mary Gardner isn’t stealing some kind of healing power, she’s targeting already-sick children and giving them her own illnesses.”

Ostler turned to me, paying real attention for the first time that morning. “That would mean…”

“It explains everything,” I said. The elevator stopped on our floor, and we stepped into the hall. Potash was already there, telling the same thing to Kelly, but they stopped to listen to me. “It explains why she targets kids,” I continued, “because it’s easier to give them her sickness. It explains why the deaths all appear to be natural causes—because they are natural causes, just like any other disease. It explains why they die on such a weird schedule—because she’s not the one killing them. She’s just giving them a disease and then
that
kills them.”

“But the timing is too close—the correlation between her health and their deaths is too close to be random,” said Ostler. “There might be a variance of a few days, but that doesn’t account for some of the seven-week gaps we’ve seen in the timeline.”

“This theory explains that, too,” I said. “The Withered are defined by what they lack, and we know from Brooke that Mary Gardner lacks health. We thought she had to steal it from other people, but then why steal health from sick children? That’s like … eating gum off the bottom of a table: it might help a little, but it’s the most inefficient way of getting the job done. Our problem is we didn’t think it through: if she doesn’t have any health, what is she going to do? Think about it. What’s going to happen to her
all the time
?”

Ostler closed her eyes, in an expression that said she felt as stupid as I did when I finally figured it out. “She’s going to get sick.”

“Exactly,” I said. “We were so worried about the gun in those photos, we didn’t pay attention to the real clue: she’s wearing a paper face mask in almost all of them, even at home. If she has no health of her own she’s going to get sick all the time. She wears a face mask and slathers herself in hand sanitizer and does every other precaution she can think of, but sooner or later she’s going to catch something and it’s going to hit her hard. A cold could kill her. Those seven-week gaps are just the times she caught an innocuous disease that wasn’t lethal to anyone else when she gave it away.”

“Then why does she work in a hospital?” asked Ostler. “She’d be exposed to all kinds of pathogens in there.”

I nodded. “But she’d be able to dump them off immediately, without arousing any suspicion. A hospital is dangerous to her, but it’s also the only place she can live without showing up on every epidemic tracking program there is. She’s trapped in a feedback loop, always getting sick and always getting better. She couldn’t leave the hospital if she wanted to.”

“Immortal,” said Ostler, “but only because she gives her death away, over and over and over.”

“What does this mean?” asked Kelly. “Now that we know how she works, can we move on her?”

“We move immediately,” said Potash. “She works afternoon shifts this week; surveillance suggests she’ll be at home right now, sealed off from the rest of the world, which we now know to be a defensive tactic against germs. She’ll be at her weakest, and she’ll be isolated. We leave in fifteen minutes.”

“I want heavy protocols on this,” said Ostler, though everyone was already moving, collecting the others and gathering equipment for the attack. “Cleaver on the street out front, Lucas positioned behind the house with her rifle, Potash and Ishida at the front door.” She looked at me. “We don’t need you to verify a trance, like with Cody French, and Ishida has more combat experience. You’re sure Mary Gardner won’t hulk out or grow claws or … anything like that?”

“She’ll have a gun,” I said, “but that’s it. Worst-case scenario she gives us pneumonia or something, but none of us are children with compromised immune systems, so we should be fine. We ought to hit the hospital after, though, and chug vitamins like a sewer worker, but we should be fine.”

“Pray that you are,” said Ostler. “No matter how much you think you know, never forget that these are demons.”

“I thought you didn’t like that word.”

“I don’t like killing, either,” said Ostler, “but we do what we have to do.”

*   *   *

Kelly drove again, and I sat in the back seat, breathing deeply, counting out my number pattern: one, one, two, three, five, eight, thirteen, twenty-one. We were on our way to kill again—we were on our way for Potash to kill again. They made me plan it and they made me watch, but they never let me have that moment.

Kelly Ishida had her hair up in a ponytail, showing the back of her neck through the gap between her seat and her headrest. I could see the bumps of her spine pressing up under the skin, see the tiny wisps of black hair too small to get tied up in the ponytail. The subtle imperfections in her skin, the pores and follicles and one pale chicken-pox scar at the base of her hairline. I would stab her right there, just beneath the scar, between the two tendons connecting the skull to the collarbone. Sever the spinal column with a single strike. If I did it right now, while her eyes were on the road, she wouldn’t even know what I was doing until it was too late.

Thirty-four, fifty-five, eighty-nine, one hundred forty-four, two hundred thirty-three.

“What else have we figured out about Meshara?” asked Potash. “If they’re working together, he might be at her house. We still don’t know what he can do.”

“He ‘remembers,’” said Diana. “Trujillo spent all night with Brooke, but that’s all he got. I didn’t know you could remember someone to death, but that’s what I love about this job.”

“Wait,” I said, “was Nathan alone last night? Why does Nathan get to be alone and I have to live with Potash?”

“Our surveillance has never placed Mary Gardner and Meshara together,” said Kelly, ignoring me. “I went through as many of our old photos and videos as I could last night, and he’s not in any of them.”

“Maybe they know we’re watching Mary,” said Diana, “so they’re staying out of the way to hide themselves.”

“That could mean this is an ambush,” said Potash.

“We need backup,” said Kelly.

“We don’t have backup,” said Diana. “Even if we called the local police, we couldn’t brief them in time to be helpful, and once they knew everything we wouldn’t be able operate freely in the city.”

“Then we make do with what we have,” said Potash, turning from the front seat to hand me something. “Take this.”

It was a gun.

I stared at it, not moving an inch.

Potash jiggled the gun, prompting me again to take it. “Have you ever used a gun before?”

“Once,” I said, but it wasn’t what they were thinking. The only shot I’d ever fired was a hole in the top of my car, to pour a can of gas on Brooke’s head and burn her. I didn’t touch his gun, considering this other idea instead. “We could light her house on fire.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” said Kelly.

“Is it?” asked Diana. “If it gets the job done…”

“We can’t just light a criminal’s house on fire,” said Kelly, “that’s against every—”

“She’s not a criminal,” I said quickly. “She’s a monster. Our job is to kill her by any means necessary, and if that means burning her house down then we burn it down, and it’s not against any laws or regulations because our entire team is operating beyond the law. We do whatever it takes to get the job done.”

“This isn’t the only job we have to get done,” said Potash. “We have at least one more Withered to take care of in this city, and an attack as visible as a house fire will make it almost impossible to act. Diana’s right about the police—if they know what we’re doing, if they know we’re here at all—”

“Drop me off here and I’ll walk the rest of the way,” I said, feeling more desperate than I expected at the prospect of lighting a major fire. I lit small ones now and then, when I could get away from the rest of the team, but a whole house … I felt short of breath. “I can get into the yard without anyone seeing me, and no will ever know we’re the ones who set it—”

“Even if you can,” said Kelly, “we can’t guarantee she won’t get out before it burns. She’s not incapacitated like Cody French was, she’s just taking the morning off from work. We’d have to station Diana outside to pick her off when she runs, and at that point we’re just doing the same thing we always do, just way more publicly.”

“It was a good idea,” said Diana, patting my leg. “Maybe on another project.” I wanted to shove her hand away, but I knew it was overemotional. Three minutes ago I hadn’t even thought about a fire, and now I wanted it so bad I could already smell the smoke. Three hundred seventy-seven, six hundred ten, nine hundred eight-seven, fifteen hundred ninety-seven.

Potash offered the gun again. “You said you’ve used one once. Are you comfortable using one again?”

“Not really,” I said. My breath was only slowly returning to normal. “I don’t want to shoot you by accident.”
Though if you don’t get out of my house soon I might want to shoot you on purpose.
I paused again, collecting myself. “Do you have a knife?”

He shared a quick glance with Kelly and holstered his gun. “Can you use a knife?”

“I’ve been cutting open corpses since I was ten,” I said, exaggerating only slightly.

“But in combat?” he asked. “With a Withered?”

“Do your job and I won’t have to,” I said. “If the plan goes to hell, better a knife than nothing.”

He pulled a combat knife from some hidden fold of his jacket; it was about ten inches long and wrapped in a nylon sheath. I opened the snaps that held it in place and pulled the blade about halfway out; it was five, maybe six inches of the total length, stainless steel with a nonreflective coating. I ran my finger along the groove in the side of the metal: a blood gutter, so the knife wouldn’t get caught by the suction of a deep wound. I slid it back in, snapped the sheath closed, and tucked the whole thing into the pocket of my heavy winter coat.

“It’s right up here,” said Kelly. “We’ve staked this place out before, so you all know the layout, and we’ve practiced so you all know the drill. Radio silence. Diana, this is your stop. We’ll give you five minutes.” She pulled over in front of a plain beige house behind Mary Gardner’s, and Diana got out with her unmarked duffel bag. The neighbors were gone during the day, but we’d already duplicated their key, and Diana was inside before we’d even turned the corner at the end of the block. She would wait at the top bedroom window with her rifle, to stop Gardner from escaping out the back.

Potash screwed a suppressor onto the end of his gun—not the one he’d offered me, I noticed, which meant he had at least two. Who knew how many he was carrying? I wondered if he really did have more than one at my house and where he hid them.

Mind on the job.
Kelly would follow him in and wait by the front door, cutting off the other exit. My role was to stay in the car and hope nothing went wrong. I touched the hilt of the combat knife and tried to convince myself that “nothing” was what I really wanted.

The street was quiet, with most people gone for the day to school or work. There’d be a few homemakers around, but they wouldn’t see anything. Kelly parked across the street from Mary’s house and left me the car keys as we traded seats. I put my hands on the wheel, gripping it tightly to help stabilize my shaking. Kelly and Potash did a final check of their weapons, hid them in their coats, and got out of the car. I watched them walk to the front door, pull out a duplicated key, and let themselves in. It was 10:26 in the morning. They closed the door behind them.

I waited.

Ostler insisted on a communications blackout during every project. Maybe she was worried about people overhearing us? If Meshara and whoever else was with him had radios of their own, they could listen in and warn Mary we were coming, so the rule made sense, but that didn’t make it any easier to sit in the car and wonder what was happening. I listened for the sound of Potash’s gun—even with a suppressor it would make a loud thump, like a pneumatic staple gun. Any people sitting in one of these houses might not notice it at all, but I was waiting for it and I—