The Ninth Dominion (The Jared Kimberlain Novels) (12 page)

Talley pictured it in her mind and shuddered. “We knew he was big, but …”

“Can you type his blood from what’s left on the glass?”

“At the very least, if there’s anything still there.”

“Blood type, size, military background somewhere, knowledge of sophisticated electronics.”

“Don’t need a lot of knowledge to wedge home a suction cup.”

“You do to build one yourself.”

“You think that’s what he did?”

“Tiny Tim wouldn’t have used it otherwise. Too easy to track down suppliers, follow a trail. I’d imagine he’d love to have you wasting your time following it up anyway.”

“You haven’t said anything about his malformed foot.”

“Because it won’t help you find him. Forget about it being congenital.”

“Why?”

“No branch of the service would have taken anyone with such a defect, especially the kind of people that trained this boy. It happened postentry.”

“In the field?”

“Could be. But you’ve checked the records and found nothing of the kind, right?”

“The search is ongoing.”

Kimberlain was looking at the ground now, trying to imagine Tiny Tim doing the same thing three nights back. “He doesn’t walk with a limp, does he?”

Talley gazed at him in amazement. “Lab people can find no evidence that he does but feel, given his handicap, he must.”

The Ferryman shook his head. “He doesn’t. He might have once, but he doesn’t anymore. Having a limp is weak, and this boy would never accept weakness of any kind. For him strength is crucial because strength means power, and power—well, power is everything to him.”

Kimberlain looked up. The window held not the slightest reflection in the night.

“He shot the ones who could still threaten him, who were awake,” he went on. “Used gas on most of the ones who were sleeping.”

“But he always entered the house.”

“Man like this would need to watch his victims die one way or another.”

“And he used a knife,” Talley reminded. “A few times, anyway. One in particular.” She flipped madly through the pages and then went back when she realized she had passed the one she wanted. “Family on the other side of town. He mutilated them.”

“On his first pass.”

“No. He got to them near the end.”

“Doesn’t figure,” Kimberlain told her. “Something like that he’d do early to a family he came in on while they were awake. You’re saying there were no other mutilations?”

“None.”

“What about Dixon Springs?”

“No, but …”

“But what?”

“He burned some of the houses. We thought it was to attract attention to what he had done. Maybe it wasn’t.”

“Have your lab people head back up there with the best equipment they’ve got. Tell them to focus on the remains found in the burned houses. Tell them to look for evidence of mutilation on one of the families.”

“You think that might be a pattern?”

“It might be too late in Dixon Springs to find out, and even if it isn’t I don’t know what it means. All I know is it may be something.”

“More than we had when we got here.”

“There may be more. Let’s keep going.”

Two hours more of reconstructing the last night in the life of Daisy, Georgia yielded no further clues. Talley had been to the town on several prior occasions, but never at night. Worse, as their tour lingered it seemed Kimberlain was drifting further and further away. A few times she gazed over and imagined it was Tiny Tim himself she was seeing. Their return to the car came none too soon for her.

The mobile phone started ringing even before she turned the key.

“It’s for you,” she said, handing it to Kimberlain.

“Hello, Captain,” he said, since Captain Seven was the only person he had told how to contact him.

“Where the fuck you been, boss? Been trying you for hours.”

“Looking for ghosts.”

“Find any?”

“Don’t know yet.”

“I did, and eighty-four of them had plenty to say.”

“The Locks?”

“Get your ass up here, Ferryman. I got this son of a bitch licked.”

The Third Dominion
Renaissance

Sunday, August 16; 1:00
A.M
.

Chapter 12

“IS IT YOU, HEDDA?
Is it truly you?”

Hedda accepted the hug of the diminutive man who might now be the only one who could help her.

“Ah, excuse my manners. Come in out of the rain. You’re soaked.”

Hedda stepped into the restaurant, and its tiny owner Jacques, half-Vietnamese and half-French, slammed the door behind her. She cringed at the sound.

“You’re on edge. And you’re starving.”

“I can’t stay.”

“Nonsense. Jacques can tell you are famished. I have stew, venison, chicken, all fresh. Please, it will take me only a minute to prepare a splendid meal for you.”

“I’ll have no more of this protesting. Sit. Warm yourself, while I prepare your meal.”

With the boy safely back in his father’s hands, Hedda was free to chart her own course. Her own people, The Caretakers, were part of something that had called for her death. Her only chance for survival lay in tracing down what they were up to and how Lyle Hanky’s TD-13 toxin was part of it. Her lone hope in this regard was to find Deerslayer. After all, he had been the one who kidnapped Christopher. He would have to know something, and that was more than she knew.

She reached Paris without incident and drove directly to Le Jardin D’Amber. Located just outside the wall of the palace at Versailles, Jacques’s small restaurant catered almost exclusively to “soldiering” types as he put it. The building’s facade was stucco, with more than one missing chunk attributed to German shrapnel in World War II. The interior was only about fifteen by thirty feet, allowing Jacques, who doubled as the cook, the freedom to roam about his seven tables greeting most of his patrons by name.

He had been making his rounds when Hedda arrived early Sunday morning. She found that, as always, most of the tables were occupied, at this hour by drinkers rather than diners. The inevitable stares cast her way were now receding, the men returning to their glasses or cards secure in the knowledge she was one of them.

Jacques emerged from the kitchen with tray in hand. He set it down on a stand and placed a thick bowl of soup in front of her.

“I need to speak with Deerslayer,” Hedda said softly, as he leaned over her to put a basket of bread on the table.

“I saw him just the other day.”

“Then he’s in the city?”

“As far as I know.” Jacques wiped his hands on his apron. “Trouble?”

“Bad trouble.”

“How can I help?”

“Make sure no one finds out I was here.”

“Of course.”

“And tell me where I can find Deerslayer.”

Deerslayer’s latest residence was located on a dingy back street called
Rue du Chat qui Pêche
on the Left Bank in Paris’s Latin Quarter. Hedda slid past block after block of the decrepit buildings, wondering why on earth Deerslayer had chosen such a place to base himself. She could hear babies crying through the open windows, screams and shouts, too. Kids roamed about in packs even at the late hour. A few regarded her briefly, then shied away as if jolted by an electrified fence.

Deerslayer lived on the fifth floor of an apartment building with no lights outside it or within the entrance way. Where a lock had been there was only a hole. The inner door’s window was missing. Hedda held it so it would not squeal upon closing and began her way up the dark and dingy steps. Light from a single bulb spiraled down from the fourth floor, barely enough for even her well-trained eyes to see by. She found Deerslayer’s door and froze; the latch had been shattered. Shards of thin wood hung from the useless door. Hedda eased it open with a hand pressed against its ruined frame.

She stepped through the doorway and pushed the door shut behind her. The room’s only illumination came from the sputtering beams of a neon light across the street sliding through the half-drawn blinds. The room was a shambles. Furniture had been tipped over and shattered. Pools of drying blood soaked the floor, and splashes of it decorated the walls. Hedda leaned over and touched the blood. Barely an hour or two old by the feel of it. She moved on.

The room was a perfect square, unpainted and poorly furnished. The acrid stench of spilled blood became stronger in her nostrils. The blood was thickest in a splotchy line across the floor toward the rear wall, where a single inner door led into a bathroom. That door was open just a crack. She found the knob and pulled it toward her. The invading rays of the neon sign reached inside the bathroom.

Deerslayer was lying on the floor, right hand clinging to the soiled toilet bowl in a death grip. The volume of his wounds was incredible. Drying blotches of blood painted his midsection. A portion of his throat was torn, and the arm still by his side had been shattered.

Hedda backed out from the bathroom and inspected the room more carefully, seeing it all happen in her mind. There had been between four and six attackers. They’d crashed through the door and come in firing. Taken by surprise, Deerslayer had still been able to make a fight of it. The trail of blood near the bed she identified as the first to be spilled. He must have lunged for a gun with the enemy’s bullets slamming his midsection. One had caught his neck and sprayed scarlet across the bedspread. Deerslayer would have emptied a clip, and now Hedda’s attention turned to the ink-blotch patterns against the front wall. He’d killed two and probably wounded another, lunged into the rest with knife in hand when his bullets were gone. He’d been too weak to use it, though, and one of the killers had turned it on him, after a desperate struggle had left Deerslayer’s arm shattered. That’s where it had ended, and then for some reason the killers had dragged him into the bathroom.

Hedda realized her breathing had become thick and rapid. Deerslayer was a link to whatever The Caretakers were involved in, and he was dead. She was a link, and they had tried to kill her.

Her mind shifted in midthought. Time must have been of the essence here. The kill had gotten messy, and the surviving assassins would have wasted no time in fleeing with their wounded and their corpses.

Then why had they bothered dragging Deerslayer into the bathroom?

The answer struck her with a chill: they hadn’t dragged him; he had dragged himself. He hadn’t been dead when they left. He had crawled into the bathroom to, to …

To what?

Had he sensed Hedda was coming? Had he understood what happened to him and wanted to leave her some sort of warning? The cleanup crew would find it if left in plain sight, the floor or wall for instance. But where in the bathroom could he have—

Hedda returned swiftly to the bathroom and looked down at Deerslayer’s corpse, strong and ominous even in death. His hand was cocked near the cracked porcelain of the toilet bowl.

Hedda edged closer. She looked down at the back of the tank. Nothing. She checked the toilet seat. Also nothing. Then she leaned over and inspected the back of the toilet bowl itself. There was blood there, long etches of it in symmetrical designs. No, not just designs—letters, numbers, a message!

Hedda had to get down on her back to read it. She eased Deerslayer slightly away. His upright hand slipped from its perch and touched her cheek. Hedda tried to read the message, couldn’t in the dark, and so chanced turning on the single dangling bathroom bulb.

Deerslayer had penned the message with a trembling hand.

17 Rue Plummet—6A

An address and apartment number. Deerslayer was sending her there for answers, for help, for vengeance perhaps. Whoever lived at the address would know something.

Thump
…

A sound in the corridor, on the stairwell perhaps. There was nothing else to hear. Then suddenly heavy, staggering footsteps and raucous laughter. Drunks were stumbling home.

No!

If they were drunks, she would have heard them earlier from the floors below. The men approaching had slipped into this guise after one of them had tripped and made the noise that alerted her.

Laughter echoed through the hall beyond Deerslayer’s apartment.

Hedda quickly smudged the blood-scrawled message and bounded to her feet. They knew she was here; they had probably been waiting for her. She charged into the living room toward the window that opened onto the fire escape. It came up with a squeak and Hedda slid through it.

Four floors lay beneath her. The steel supports were rusted and wobbly. She began to descend, holding fast to the rail with one hand, pistol in the other.

Pfffffft … pfffffft … pfffffft …

The silenced gunshots from below clanged off the steel around her. Hedda managed two rounds in their direction as she ducked low and turned her eyes upward. Through the still-open window in Deerslayer’s apartment, she heard the door crash open. The men posing as drunks would be charging for the window even now. She was boxed in.

More gunshots, from below. Shapes darted down in the street. Now she couldn’t go up or down, which left only sideways. The apartments neighboring Deerslayer’s were accessible by a second decaying fire escape.

Glass shattered above her. One of the drunks plunged onto the fire escape platform, machine gun in hand. Hedda shot him and spun round. Five stories beneath her a pair of gunmen had moved into the open. She dropped them with four bullets, which left her seven in this clip. Enough. The moment was hers, and she seized it.

Hedda fired off five more shots at the shattered window to cover her rush to the rickety fire escape rail. It nearly gave under her weight but held long enough for her to leap outward and grab hold of the neighboring rail. With bullets already tracing her again, Hedda transferred the momentum of her leap into a swing. She kicked out toward a window just beneath her to the right. The glass shattered easily on impact, and she crashed through it into an apartment over and down from Deerslayer’s.

The glass had pricked and scratched her arms and face, but she had managed somehow to hold on to the pistol. She burst into the corridor with a fresh clip jammed home and started for the stairs.