Darkness Returns (8 page)

Lockman took another fist to the gut, then a right cross to the chin. He staggered backward against the brick wall in the alley behind
Chopper Haven
, which smelled of rotten trash and kudzu. Thick vines of the stuff covered the face of the wall he leaned on. He grabbed at the vines to steady himself, ripping some free in the process.

The four guys that took to beating him for asking the wrong questions closed in on him in a half-circle. Three of the four had meaty arms exposed by the leather vests they wore, more flab than muscle under their matching eagle and American flag tattoos. The fourth had real muscle coiled around his wiry frame. The smallest of the crew, his hits hurt the most.

He came up on Lockman’s left and tried to take a kidney shot.

Lockman deflected the blow with a forearm, but before he could follow up with a counter punch, the other three started hammering him with their fat knuckles, forcing Lockman to curl up, elbows tucked as low as possible while keeping his fists up to protect his face.

They started adding kicks with their heavy boots to the punching.

The wiry one threw in some precise jabs to Lockman’s softest parts in between the random pummeling from his buddies. The guy boxed like an Irishman, but Lockman knew from before they dragged him out into the alley that he had a Cajun accent.

The only light in the alley came from a buzzing fluorescent bulb under a cage mounted to the wall beside the bar’s back door. Lockman’s attackers’ shadows leaped and lurched across the pavement. From the corner of his eye, Lockman thought one of those shadows didn’t move the same as the others.

A second later, one of the beefy assailants flew off of his feet, crying out in surprise as he sailed through the air in a wide arc and landed on the closed lid of a Dumpster twenty yards down the alley. The plastic lid collapsed under his weight and he sank out of site into the bin.

Too caught up in their assault on Lockman, the others didn’t notice their missing friend until another of them went flying in the opposite direction down the alley. Only the shiny wet pavement was there to break his fall. He landed face first in a rain puddle with a moist slap.

The last of the flabs and the wiry one stopped hitting Lockman and spun around, looking for what happened to their companions. Their eyes went one way, then the other, then came to rest on the small, black-clad figure that seemed to have come out of nowhere.

Jessie grinned in a way that showed off her fangs.

“It’s one of those fuckin things,” the last flabby fella said. “I told you, Renee. I fucking told you.”

“It’s just a little girl, you stupid pig,” Renee replied and moved to take a swing at her.

Jessie caught his fist in her hand. “You want this one, Dad?”

Lockman spit out a gob of blood and ran his tongue over his teeth to make sure they were all there. “Yeah.”

Flabby had frozen. Jessie threw a side kick into his round gut and knocked him across the alley, into the wall. He bounced off like a deflated basketball and flopped to the ground where he stayed put.

Renee tried to strike with his free hand. Jessie caught that one, too. The wiry Cajun grunted as he struggled to pull free, but there was no chance of that.

“My dad has some questions for you,” Jessie said. She tilted her head to look around him at Lockman. “Take it things didn’t go so well inside?”

Lockman pressed at a tender spot on his side. Didn’t feel like he’d broken any ribs, thankfully. “They were a little reticent.”

“Nice word.” She turned her attention back to Renee. “Easy way or hard way.”

Renee gave one last hard yank to try and get free, then went limp, the fight drained out of him. “What the hell are you?”

“What do I look like?”

“But it ain’t possible.”

Lockman crossed the ally and clapped a hand on the Cajun’s shoulder. “You have no idea what’s possible.” Then he jabbed Renee in the kidney.

Renee dropped to his knees, coughing. Jessie kept her grip on his hands, making the two of them look like they were in the middle of an awkward marriage proposal.

Lockman leaned down so he could talk directly into Renee’s ear. “What’s with the matching tats?”

“Me and some guys,” Renee said, still wincing from the shot to his kidney. “We like to keep the Quarter tidy. Cops can only do so much, you know.”

Jessie wrinkled her face. “You’re vigilantes? A bunch of fat, biker Batmen?”

Renee’s lip curled. He looked like he wanted to say something nasty. Wisely, he kept it to himself.

“What happened at the mansion?” Lockman asked.

“Are you cops or something?”

“Or something. Answer the question.”

He looked down at his knees. “Don’t know anything about a mansion.”

Lockman slapped Renee on the back of the head. “Give me a break. Someone hired you to hit that place. A blonde woman, right?”

“This lady came around, yeah. Sexy. Tough, too. She wanted to pay me and my
amis
to do what we already do. Only, she wanted to pick the targets. She had info about a lot of bad men. Scary.” He looked up at Jessie. “Like you.”

Instead of the glib comeback Lockman expected from her, Jessie stared silently, eyes smoldering.

The trash stink turned Lockman’s tender stomach. Time to move this along and get out of there. “Eyes on me, Renee.”

Renee looked relieved to turn his attention away from Jessie. “I wasn’t at the mansion, okay? All I know is what I heard. Some big time drug lord. If you’re here for him, I didn’t have nothing to do with what happened.”

“I don’t care about any of that. I want the woman who hired you. Where is she?”

“I haven’t heard from her in a while. I figured she got killed with the rest of them at the mansion.”

“Listen, Renee, she got some of your boys killed. She took them up against something none of your guys were ready for. You don’t need to protect her.”

“I told you, I haven’t seen her.”

Some guys got so caught up in covering their asses, they told lies out of habit. Renee needed to kick that habit soon. “I believe you, Renee. But stop being so dense. You worked with her, you have to have some idea how to find her. A phone number, maybe even an address.”

His eyes drifted back and forth. He worked his lips together.

“If you’re worried about her coming after you, think about this.” Lockman pointed at Jessie. “She doesn’t have a vampire for a daughter.”

Renee barked in pain as Jessie squeezed his fists in her hands. His knuckles cracked. “Okay. Shit. I had a guy tail her after she made her first offer. She went to an apartment somewhere outside the Quarter. I can get you the exact address. I have it inside.”

Teresa had let one of these hacks tail her? Either she had gotten sloppier than he thought, or this guy had bad information.

“You don’t have anything else?”

“Better than her address?” His voice cracked.

Good info or bad, it was all they had at the moment. Lockman nodded to Jessie.

She let go of his hands and yanked him to his feet by the front of his pants. A strained exhale popped from his mouth on the way up. When she let go of him, he cupped his hands to his crotch and doubled over.

“I’ll give you scary,” Jessie muttered under her breath.

Lockman went into the bar with Renee and met Jessie out front five minutes later with an address written on a napkin. The address was within walking distance. Jessie wore a hoodie under her jacket and she pulled the hood over her head. They strolled through the Quarter in silence.

Lockman had yet to talk to her about what happened with Ryan. He tried to broach the subject in the “Door Room” while they waited for the techs to program a route through the interdimensional network they had recently tapped into at headquarters. Jessie had shrugged it off and their door had opened before he could push the issue.

“Are you okay?” he asked as they walked.

The hood and its accompanying shadow hid her face. “Peachy.”

“Kress stepped over the line—”

She stopped. “I wanted to do it. I thought I could help him.” By
him
, Lockman knew she meant Ryan, not Kress. “But I couldn’t. Can we not talk about this now, please?”

“I’m just trying—”

“Please?”

He dropped it. They walked the next six blocks in silence.

Lockman looked up at the building as if he could determine some significance from outside. It looked the same as many of the other buildings in this part of the Quarter—old, a little ornate, and ready for some repairs. It seemed too easy. Lockman would have bet Teresa let the tail follow her to this place as a ruse, but Renee claimed his man had actually followed her into the building and saw her enter an apartment on the fourth floor.

“What is it?” Jessie asked.

Lockman shook his head. “Probably nothing. Just stay alert.”

Chapter Nine

As he jimmied the lock to apartment 4C, Lockman felt a sense of déjà vu. It wasn’t that long ago that he broke into another of Teresa’s apartments in New Orleans, looking for clues. As he crossed the threshold into the one bedroom affair, he kept his hand low by his weapon, but didn’t draw. The door opened directly onto a spare living room. A couch that looked as old as the building sat in the center of the room with a pillow and quilt on it. The rest of the room was unfurnished except for the small television set on a wooden packing crate opposite the couch.

This sparse layout alone made the back of Lockman’s skin prickle. His gut told him at once that this place had belonged to Teresa. Whether she still used the place as another question. After the screw up with the vamp drug lord, she might have abandoned the apartment, maybe even New Orleans.

“Something smells funny,” Jessie said behind him.

He put his hand on the butt of his gun in its shoulder holster. “Funny how?”

“I don’t know. Familiar?”

“I don’t smell anything. Except a few days of dust maybe.”

Jessie shoved her way past him and into the center of the living room. She did a turn, not only taking the space in with her eyes but sniffing, as if trying to pinpoint the direction of whatever scent she’d caught. Her mouth curled down.

“I don’t like it.”

“I don’t like any of this,” Lockman said and drew his pistol. He came full into the apartment and shut the door behind him. He sucked a breath through his nose, trying to pull any hint of what Jessie was smelling. He got a musty stink from the couch and the dry dust on the hardwood floors that was thick enough for them to leave footprints in. Nothing else.

“She hasn’t been here in a while,” he said. “If she ever was.”

“Nobody has.”

A good point. Teresa’s apartment or not, there was something suspicious about the place. It occurred to Lockman she might have rented the space simply as a front, somewhere to lead curious tails sent by the likes of Renee for example. Spend a night on the couch if the tail decided to stick around for the long haul. Carry on the next day and lose the tail, then go back to her real dwelling.

If that were the case, odds of them finding many clues to her location dropped.

Jessie crept toward the bedroom door. The old floorboards creaked under her boots. “It’s coming from here.”

“Still don’t know what?”

“I’m a vampire, not a bloodhound, thank you much.”

“Sorry.”

She shook her head as if jangling something loose. “Never mind. I’m just feeling bitchy tonight.”

She reached the door and stopped, looked over her shoulder at Lockman. “You want first dibs on the bedroom?”

He knew she expected him to say yes, but he also heard the challenge in her voice that seemed to ask
Do you think I can handle this?
Of course she could. She had saved his ass in the alley a couple hours ago. If something dangerous was waiting for them in the bedroom, she might even be the better equipped one to deal with it.

A strange transition. Not one Lockman wanted to surrender to so easily.

“Let me take point.” He racked a round into the chamber and crossed to the door. “I know you’ve got my back.”

She stepped aside.

Lockman listened at the door. Was that a faint sound? Scratching? The building probably had rats in the walls. He also could have been hearing something from outside. He grabbed the knob, twisted, gave it a two count, then threw it open and leveled his pistol in front of him, scanning for a target, movement, any sign of attack.

The room was almost completely empty. A map of New Orleans on a corkboard hung on the wall. Red and blue pushpins marked several spots on the map, with the heaviest concentration of pins all around the Quarter. The only other item in the room sat square in the middle of the floor. A white plastic bucket, the outside edges spattered with dark, rusty stains. Dried blood.

“That what you smell?” Lockman asked.

Jessie squeezed into the room between him and the doorjamb. She closed her eyes and inhaled deeply through her nose. “Depends.”

“On what?”

“What’s in the bucket.”

She started forward. Lockman reached out and grabbed her jacket sleeve. “Wait.”

“For what? It’s a bucket.”

“Could be a booby trap.”

Her lips puckered into a tiny smirk. “Booby trap? Do people still use that term?”

“What else would you call it?” He waved a hand. “Forget it. Could be a bomb or something.”

“I don’t smell any C4, which is what Teresa would probably use, right?”

How long had Jessie been a vampire? He should have been used to these surprise insights. Still, he couldn’t hold back the tug at one corner of his mouth. “You know what C4 smells like?”

“Dude, I’ve spent enough time around you and your special ops friends to catch a whiff of C4. And vampire Jessie can smell all sorts of things. Like the fact that you are seriously sweaty right now.”

Lockman hadn’t noticed until she said something. Now he felt a drip of sweat roll down between his shoulder blades like the tip of a wet finger. His shirt collar stuck against his neck.

“I can also hear your heart rate. It’s elevated.”

“Thanks, Doc. Time for me to change my deodorant?”