Blood Of Angels (30 page)

It skidded to a ragged halt. The door opened and Brad climbed out. He was all over the place. He looked like he couldn't even walk properly. He was shouting something. And he was headed straight for the front door.

Hudek walked quickly out into the hall and had the door open before Brad had a chance to bang on it. Brad's face was red and wet and his hair was sticking out all over the place.

'You fucking,' he shouted. 'You fucking…'

Then he burst into the house and was on top of him. He just went postal. It was like being attacked by a tiger on meth. You didn't always remember it but Brad was two inches taller than Lee and had maybe an extra five to ten per cent of strength at his disposal. He was screaming, his voice rasping out so much it was impossible to hear what he was saying.

Lee tumbled backward into the hallway and was battered quickly down onto his back. However out of control Brad was, it wasn't stopping him piling blows into Lee's face and neck and chest. He punched back as best he could, all the while trying to push out with his knees and roll out from under the bigger boy, trying to get out so he could restart this whole thing at less of a disadvantage: and also before Brad grabbed his head and smashed it on the floor, which he showed every sign of being willing to do.

He managed to gasp out a single sentence, panted out word by word: 'Brad —
what the fuck is your problem?'

Brad wasn't saying. Brad was all about causing damage right now.

Finally Lee managed to connect a fist hard enough to get him to rear back, just for a second, and Lee shoved him hard to the side and kicked him again and then struck out hard with his arm. Brad's head connected with the wall and that was enough for Lee to pull himself out and up onto his feet.

He'd hoped maybe that would be enough to earn a time-out, but Brad just lunged straight after him.

Whatever this was it was
serious.
Lee turned and ran back through the house. He made it into the living room and saw he'd left the doors to the yard open. He'd never tried climbing the fence down the end and it would freak the hell out of neighbours he'd trained to think of him as a very nice young man, but it could be they were just going to have to deal with it…

Then from nowhere Brad tackled hard from the side and brought him down in the middle of the living room. Started whaling into him again, punches less and less accurate but still very, very hard.

Lee managed to roll him off again and reconsidered — on a straight run Brad could always catch him.

He turned and ran back towards the kitchen, still shouting at Brad and trying to get him to tell him what the hell was going on in his head.

And that was when he got a glimpse of Brad's eyes again and heard the growling sound coming out of his throat, and knew this was non-negotiable. He wasn't screwing around: Brad really was trying to fuck him up, and trying to fuck him up for good.

He turned around the corner and headed down the corridor. Yanked open the door at the end and stepped quickly into the double garage. He could hear Brad coming on fast behind him but knew if he just kept his head and got to the storage unit…

He got there. Grabbed the drawer open and pulled out the gun.

Turned around and pointed it straight at Brad's head.

===OO=OOO=OO===

Brad hesitated. For just a moment it looked like he was going to come on anyway, as if he was just going to run straight at the gun.

Lee was now panting heavily. 'Brad, what the fuck?'

Brad was a mess. He was crying and snot was running out of his nose down over his mouth. He didn't seem to realize or care.

'You killed her,' he said. His voice was a croak.

'What are you
talking
about?'

'Don't fucking lie to me. You killed her. You got her killed.'

Lee kept the gun trained firmly on Brad's face. There was only about six feet between them. If Brad lunged, he was going to have to shoot very fast. 'Brad, I have no idea what you are talking about. Got
who
killed? Who's dead?'

'You know who. Kar…'

Brad's face crumpled and his speech was lost to comprehension for a moment, stretching into a long, moaning sound that finally resolved into a recognizable name.

Lee stared at him. 'Karen? Karen's dead?'

Brad screamed at him. 'Of course she's dead, you prick! You think she was going to survive that? Or didn't they tell you how they were going to do it?'

'Brad, you have to calm down and tell me what you're saying because right now I have no fucking clue what this is about.'

Brad pulled his hand viciously across his eyes, sniffed hard. Blood had started to run out of one nostril.

'You told them.'

'Told them what?'

'You told them Karen was asking questions. That she thought we knew something about what happened to Pete.'

Hudek opened his mouth, shut it again. Guilty as charged.

Brad nodded tightly. 'I knew it,' he said. 'You turned her in. You thought she was going to blow it for us, and you turned her in.'

Lee licked his lips, spoke carefully. 'I'll be honest with you, man. Yes, I mentioned it to Paul. I did mention the situation. While you were getting his coffee. I thought he should know, that's all. I told him it wasn't a problem, that she wouldn't do anything to hurt you, and he said it was fine, everything would be cool by the end of the day anyway and nothing would matter.'

'But that's bullshit,' Brad said. 'It didn't matter if the cops had been spun some other story. If Karen told them we'd lied to them, they'd have come for us anyway. They'd have come for us and the other story would have fallen apart in seconds. You knew that, and he knew that, and so you got her killed to stop her talking.'

'Brad — I didn't.'

'You know how they did it? Right in public. Right in the fucking street. Some guy in a Humvee just rams her car in broad daylight and then drives off. Her face got squashed flat. Her fucking arm came off, Lee. Her fucking
arm'

'Look, Brad, for Christ's sake, I'm nothing to do with this. I told the guy but it was just information. You don't know it's them anyway. It could just be an accident. Did you even think of that?'

'Yeah, right. Don't treat me like an asshole, Lee.'

'I didn't mean for them to do anything to her.'

'I don't believe you,' Brad said. 'And it doesn't matter anyway. You told him. You got her killed. You killed her whether you meant to or not.'

'It's not my
fault
.'

'Nothing ever is, right? What's the fucking problem, Lee? You couldn't stand the fact she was with me instead of you, or what?'

Lee laughed. 'What? Man, I didn't care.'

'Yeah you did. Yeah you
fucking
did. Ever since I've been seeing her you've been an asshole about it. Telling me you screwed her. Dropping hints all over the place. Yeah, you thought she might talk and you wanted her gone because of that but it was personal too, wasn't it? Just fucking admit it.'

Lee went light-headed. 'You were
welcome
to her, you asshole. Fucking ice queen. She couldn't blow for shit anyway.'

Suddenly Brad went quiet.

Ominously quiet. He was no longer crying either.

'You're dead,' he said, matter of fact.

Hudek could see Brad's body gathering to explode. The tendons in his neck stood out like wire. He knew if Brad came at him now, he really was going to die.

'Brad, don't make me do this,' he said, keeping the gun steady. He wished he could remember how many shots he'd fired that night in the parking lot. 'Don't you fucking make me do this.'

'I loved her,' Brad said, with eerie calm. 'That's something you're never going to understand because you're screwed up in the head. I loved Karen. And you got her killed.'

'Brad, we have to…'

And then Brad hurled himself at him.

Lee pulled the trigger like they did on television. Two quick pulls, bang bang.

The reports were deafening in the confined space and the gun was pointed direct at Brad's face and not wavering more than a degree.

Brad smacked into him like a train and threw him into the back wall. Both heads hit it hard and then fell to the ground and Lee started to struggle immediately, feeling nightmarish with the other man's body on top of him.

Then he realized there wasn't any blood.

And that Brad was still moving, not twitching but shoving just as hard as he was.

They pushed each other away, wound up sitting a couple of yards from each other on the concrete floor.

They looked at each other. There was a spray of something that looked like soot across one side of Brad's face. Lee's eyes were open wide and he still had the gun in his hand.

Then Brad started to laugh.

It was a quiet, horrible sound, the noise a mind might make if it came unhinged and started flapping in the wind.

'Blanks,' he said. 'They were fucking blanks.'

Lee just stared down at the gun.

'We don't know who the second victim is yet,' Monroe said. 'Nobody's missing that we're aware of. A picture has been shown around with no hits. There was no ID in his pockets, no tattoos or distinguishing marks left and his prints go nowhere either. His clothes are no help and the lab got nothing off them to help us with where he was kept after death. He's either a transient or a citizen from some other town or he dropped straight out of the sky and landed there on that island.'

'The picture was shown around the Mayflower?'

'Yesterday afternoon. But people aren't good at recognizing dead faces. He certainly never made an impression like Widmar did.'

Monroe and I were sitting in the lobby of the Holiday Inn. The crowds of the morning had dissipated. Scene-of-crime teams had gone, local cops moved out, and though there were still a couple of reporters in the parking lot most had determined this was old news now and gone to find somewhere nicer to park their bags and flirt with each other while they waited for fresh and juicy developments. There were Feds present but they had retreated to the temporary HQ in the hotel's business centre. The only people around in bulk were staff, and their voices were especially perky this late afternoon, as if loud greetings and broad smiles might somehow undo what had happened in one of their suites: but it still seemed like most of the guests had checked out.

Monroe had agreed to give me ten minutes. He looked more tired than I felt. He had not changed clothes since that morning, when I'd got the receptionist to roust him out of bed. It felt like about a hundred years ago to me, and I hadn't had to deal with the stuff he had. He had a pot of coffee on the table and was drinking it steadily, crisply — only the slightly robotic timbre of the motion giving away the fact he wasn't tasting it any more.

'We're going to find her, Ward,' he said. We really are.'

'You don't even know who's got her.'

Monroe's coffee cup went back up, and back down again.

'Do you even have a clue?'

'We've started doing a house-to-house, Ward. If Nina's in town or nearby, she's got to be in a building, a dwelling. We'll find her. Her abductor has to keep her somewhere.'

'Who isn't Julia Gulicks, that's for sure.'

'You shouldn't have gone to see her last night.'

'I had to check she was there. And I saw something.'

'What?'

'She must have known what had happened. The cops in there were so freaked out she'd have been able to sense it through the walls. And she looked up through the window in the door to her cell and she gave me a look that I can't explain.'

'She's guilty of two murders and has spent the last two weeks chopping bits off people. Who knows what's going on in her head.'

'Did the search of her apartment turn up anything?'

'It's ongoing.'

'Which means no. No basement for her to keep a body in. No hunks of discarded flesh. No cleaver embedded in the stairs.'

'She evidently did it someplace else.'

'There been another case of a woman doing that kind of thing? Ever?'

'I know what Nina thought about this. You don't have to do her job for her.'

'Why'd you bring her here?'

Monroe hesitated, for just a fraction of a second.

I leaned forward. 'I just don't get it, Charles. She explained it to me and I
still
didn't understand. Maybe you can do a better job. You know about the woman in Janesville when Nina was a kid, and so you realize she's conflicted over the subject. So how come it's this case you choose to use to drag her back into the world?'

Monroe started trying to speak, but I suddenly found I was too angry to let him. 'A world where three days later she's abducted from a hotel room by someone who slaughtered a city cop with a gun? Explain that, please, and make it simple and make it good.'

Monroe shook his head, and for a passing second I felt sorry for him. He didn't have any way of undoing what had happened. All he could do was wait while houses were searched.

He looked out the big window into the parking lot, where the light was beginning to die. It had started to rain again too. I hoped Nina could hear it, wherever she was — and that the sound would reassure her that time still passed, and that if enough did, I might get to her.

'She's the best investigator I've ever known,' he said. 'She carried me. I handled the system and local protocols, she solved the actual crimes. You know how messy it got with Aileen Wuornos in the end, petitions and documentaries and the whole nine yards. I just wanted to make sure we were watertight here if it came to a media clusterfuck. Nina was going to kick against the idea of it being a woman from the get-go, which meant we had to prove the case rock hard.'

'And now Reidel's dead, and Nina's gone, and the case makes no sense.'

'It still makes…'

I shook my head. 'There's stuff going on here that none of us understands. I don't know whether it relates to Nina, but at the moment it's all I have to think about.'

I reached to the bag I'd set down next to my chair when I arrived, and pulled out a series of colour prints I'd had done from stills taken with a digital camera early that afternoon.