The Spider Thief (27 page)

Graves’s pulse quickened. “Brewer, something’s up.” He pulled out his phone.

“Yeah.” Brewer kept honking. “This moron’s in my way—”

The van in front of them slammed on its brakes, taillights bathing them in a red glow. Brewer braked, but not fast enough. They rammed into the van’s bumper with a crumpling sound.

The white airbag exploded in Graves’s face before he even realized it had happened. A moment later, they were stopped dead on the highway. He’d lost his phone. He fought to get the burning-hot balloon out of his way so he could pull his pistol.

Someone rapped on the window.

Graves looked up into a black ski mask and the distinctive muzzle of a Sterling submachine gun, its magazine curving out to the side like a black steel raven’s wing. It was an old-school British military gun, the kind with holes punched in the shroud around the barrel. The gunman pointed at the door lock.

“Brewer,” Graves snapped, “whatever you do, don’t—”

Brewer unlocked the doors.

Graves didn’t get a count of how many gunmen there were. They yanked the door open and grabbed him, then threw him down to the asphalt and pinned him there. He heard doors opening, gruffly spoken commands.

“We’re Federal agents,” Graves managed, despite the knee in his back.

The man with the Sterling leaned down close to his face. The eyes inside the ski mask looked Asian, but he couldn’t tell any more than that. “Shh,” the gunman said. “Watch.”

A moment of odd silence fell as Graves lay on the oily asphalt, listening to the sounds of engines idling, people breathing, and traffic swooshing past. Without moving his head, all he could see was the front tire of Brewer’s car, and past that, Ash’s cowboy boots and jeans surrounded by the black military boots of the gunmen.

A single gunshot ran out. Graves jumped, involuntarily, and whoever had pinned his arms tightened their grip.

The gunmen lowered Ash’s body to the ground. The front of his shirt was soaked with blood.

Graves stared. This couldn’t be happening.

They picked up Ash’s limp, blood-stained body and held it there at the back of the van, as if they wanted to be sure Graves saw it. Then they opened up the doors and heaved him in.

Graves’s heart thumped in his chest. “Tell me your demands,” he choked out. “What do you want?”

“I want your attention,” the man with the Sterling said. “Your prisoner is dead. You see that?”

“What?” Graves struggled to stay focused. “Yes. Yes, I see.”

“Good.” The gunman lifted the Sterling high above Graves’s head and brought it down with a sharp crack.

*

Cleo checked her watch. It had been twenty minutes since she’d gotten Snyder’s cryptic message. She hustled through the hospital, dodging staff wearing plum- or teal-colored scrubs. She was still formulating her apology to Graves when she found him sitting alone on the end of a bed, holding an ice pack to his head.

He looked up when she walked in, and his gaze washed over her with the worst kind of pity. She didn’t know why, and that set her on edge.

“Hey.” She rushed over to him. “You okay?”

“Just a concussion. I’ll be fine. Did Snyder tell you what happened?”

“Not much. Just that you’d been injured. I came straight over.” She glanced around the empty room. “Nobody else is with you?”

Graves stared at the floor, oddly quiet. After a moment, he said, “Snyder didn’t tell you anything about Ash?”

“Ash? No. Why?” A wave of worry rose up inside her. It was just like Ash to make a bad situation worse. And now Graves was injured because of it. “Snyder said there was more, and that I needed to call her, but I just came over. I wanted to make sure you were okay.”

“Yeah, I told you, I’m fine.”

“Good.” She blew out a breath, and the tension started to ebb. “So what did he do this time?”

Graves didn’t answer at first. He just kept staring at the floor. “Snyder should be back anytime now. She just went out for coffee.”

“Graves, you’re starting to freak me out a little here. What’s wrong?” When he didn’t answer, she started to pace the room. “Is Ash okay? Did he say something? Is it about Andres?”

“Look, you should really talk to Snyder. She’ll be right back.”

“That’s not going to work. You need to fill me in. Right now.” She waited. “If Ash had something to do with this, anything to do with you getting hurt, I’ll—”

“Cleo.” Graves looked up at her at last. “Ash is dead.”

“Well, he will be, after I get a hold of . . .” It sunk in, what he’d just said. “What?”

“They shot him. I saw the whole thing happen.” He paused. “I’m sorry.”

Her hands covered her mouth. A hundred questions crashed inside her, all at once, drowning each other out in a white noise that gagged her tongue and made it impossible to speak.

“I’m really sorry,” Graves said, more than once. But his words didn’t register. “Sorry” didn’t even begin to cover it. “Sorry” was what you said when you forgot someone’s birthday, or when you raised your voice in the heat of an argument.

But it didn’t apply when a piece of you was ripped away, leaving a raw hole where there should have been something solid and dependable and constant.

Cleo didn’t mean to sit down, but suddenly she was sitting in a hard plastic chair, feeling the world turn hollow and unreal around her. “Why?” she whispered to herself, over and over, until it had no meaning anymore. “Why?”

She was distantly aware of Graves sitting down next to her. He put his arm gently around her shoulders and tried to draw her closer, but she resisted. Eventually, he gave up and let go, only to sit quietly beside her, hands folded in front of him.

She felt her mouth form words. They came out on their own. “You were supposed to protect him,” she said.

And she honestly didn’t know if she was talking to Graves or to herself.

Kung Fu

The worst part about being dead, Ash decided, was definitely the food. He sat cross-legged on the metal floor of the van, swaying with its movements. His shirt, covered in fake bloodstains, sat rolled up beside him. He held a white Styrofoam tray in his lap, trying not to spill its contents, but somehow he just couldn’t bring himself to take a bite.

“What
is
this?” Ash said, making a pained face. “It looks like Chinese spaghetti.”

“Not Chinese,” the Asian man across from him said, using chopsticks to pick mussels out of their black shells. “Pad Thai.”

“Tie what?”

“Rice noodles.”

“It smells like fish.” Ash fought down the gagging sound that tried to escape from his throat. “Here’s a better idea. We stop for a burger.
Any
burger. I’m really not that high maintenance.”

The man shrugged and kept eating. So far, he was the only one of his abductors who had spoken to him. He had his ski mask off now, no weapons to be seen anywhere, but still dressed all in black.

They had kept him locked up in here in the van, alone, for hours. Ash didn’t know exactly how long. They’d told him to relax, then let him cool his heels with nothing to occupy himself except the brand-new white T-shirt they gave him. His old shirt was ruined, soaked through with fake blood.

Or maybe it was real blood. Ash tried not to think about it.

After a while, the nameless Asian guy had climbed in with food—if you could call it that—and from that moment on it seemed like someone was just driving them around aimlessly while they ate. Or didn’t eat, in Ash’s case.

Finally, he worked up the nerve to take a taste of the noodles. It had shrimp and shredded carrots in a transparent red sauce he could never hope to identify. The noodles burned his lips with a blackened taste like fresh horseradish. He dropped them back on the tray and pushed it aside.

The man looked concerned. He offered up his soupy, ginger-smelling bowl of broth and mussels.

Ash waved him off. “Not a big fan of shellfish.”

“Why is that?”

“I forget.”

The man’s eyes glinted with amusement.

Ash folded his arms. “This is funny? I’m so glad.”

The man shook his head and chewed, looking off to the side for a long moment. “I was once airdropped into a remote area of South America. We had to live off what we could find along the shoreline. We fished, ate plants, one time harvested mussels much like these and cooked them on the sand. Only, we did not know the mussels were contaminated. Do you know what an algae bloom is? A red tide?”

“Is that what’s on these noodles?”

“When the ocean becomes sick, everything within becomes sick. Some of the men grew very ill. Some even suffered brain damage, memory loss.”

“Lot of that going around these days,” Ash said. After an awkward moment, he added, “And? Everyone survived, I take it?”

The man shook his head.

Ash held up one finger. “Just a sec. So today you’re still eating shellfish because why?”

“It reminds me.” The man’s gaze was ferociously intense. “Life is precious. It must be lived deliberately.”

“Hmm.” Ash thought about that. “I’ll stick to burgers, thanks.”

“Ah. But what of mad cow disease?” The Asian man went back to his shellfish and chewed thoroughly. “You may call me the Sweeper.”

“
The
Sweeper?” Ash struggled to keep a straight face. “Let me guess. You have your own action figure. Comes with kung-fu action shellfish.”

The Sweeper gave him a questioning look.

Ash shook his head. “Forget it. You want to tell me why you faked my death?”

“Cleaner that way. Nobody will be looking for you. Not alive, anyway.”

“Will they be looking for me dead?” He felt his eyebrows go up. “You think anybody will really believe that I got assassinated by some kind of ninja hit squad?”

“In my experience, FBI agents make fairly compelling witnesses. They will see what they want to see.”

“And the point of all this is . . .?”

“You will disappear. Vanish in the night. Once you get out of town, trust me, nobody will miss you.”

“Hey. I’ve got friends. I’ve got a girl.”

“Not anymore. The man you were, I am sorry to inform you, is officially dead.” He unbuttoned a bulky pocket on the leg of his fatigues and pulled out a thick manila envelope. “Look these over very carefully.” He tossed the envelope to Ash.

Inside was a rubber-banded stack of cash. “This cash is kosher, right?”

The man didn’t answer.

Ash kept digging, finding a very convincing birth certificate, Social Security card, driver’s license, and passport. The picture was his, but the information was different. “Mitch Turner. That’s a terrible name.”

“You will get used to it.” The Sweeper set his bowl aside and wiped his mouth. “Ash had many enemies. Enemies with a great deal of power. That creates problems. Luckily for you, I solve problems.”

“I’m thinking maybe that was just a teensy bit of overkill.”

“Sometimes that is necessary,” the man said. “If they refuse to cooperate, I unfortunately have to make their deaths permanent.” He held up a wax paper bag. “Egg roll?”

Ash pursed his lips and shook his head no.

The man shrugged and pulled a very thick egg roll from the bag. He bit down and chewed noisily. “When we let you go, you must get on a bus, a taxi, it makes no difference to me. Stay off of airplanes. That would start a trail. Get on ground transportation. Head out of town. I have no interest in where. Another state. Another country. Do you understand?”

“Sure. Soon as I find my brother.”

“Half-brother.” The man took another bite. “Maybe he does not want to be found. Maybe he has already found a new life, with his uncle.”

“Hmm. I’m thinking no.”

The man’s expression gave away nothing.

Ash cleared his throat. “Well, as tempting as your offer is—and I mean this in the most sincerely heartfelt way—you can forget it.” He stuffed the papers back into the envelope and tossed it at the man’s feet. “I’m not just walking away from my life.”

“What life?” The man didn’t move to pick up the envelope. “Let me see. Total assets to your name, zero. No job. No property. You have never filed taxes.”

“Taxes, seriously?”

“You do not even own the car you drive, because you stole it from a dead woman. Your entire career could best be summed up as a string of minor-league confidence scams. The ‘girl’ you’re after is none other than an FBI agent who is obligated to arrest you on sight. And if you care about her so much, how exactly did she end up in the hospital?”

“She’s a little banged up, but she’s fine.” Ash felt like he was shrinking down inside himself. He couldn’t meet the man’s gaze. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“No?” The man finished his egg roll and crumpled the bag. “Bad luck just seems to follow you around, hmm? You have excuses. You have justifications. Mistakes were made, yes, but not by
you
. Of course not. You are simply, in your mind, a victim of circumstance.”

“Yeah, you try carrying around a curse your whole life, see how you handle it.”

“Ah. Of course. The ‘curse.’”

Ash’s jaw clenched. “Having a little trouble here taking advice from a guy who named himself after a broom.”

“The Sweeper extracted you from the FBI at gunpoint, convinced them you were dead, and solved all of your problems with a single capsule of fake blood.” He folded his hands in front of him. “Care to retort?”

“You don’t know the first thing about me.”

“Apparently, I know you quite well.” The man gave him a penetrating stare. “But do you know yourself? No. And that puts you at a dangerous disadvantage.”

Ash looked down at the envelope. It looked thicker, somehow. A new life all crammed into one tidy package. Maybe it
would
be better if he walked away. Maybe the people around him would be safer without his constant interference.

Face it
, he told himself. He’d banged up Cleo pretty badly on the highway. A split second either way and he could have killed her. And now Andres had Mauricio, maybe for good. He’d let down his own brother.

And what about Moolah? He’d left him sitting in the Galaxie, alone. Abandoned. He couldn’t even take care of his own dog.