Ghost Key (32 page)

“What would you like to know?” Kate asked.

“Why did you set fire to everything?”

“Didn’t you hear what the mayor yelled? ‘Seize them all.’ What do you think he was referring to, Agent O’Donnell?”

“I honestly don’t know. We were hoping you might enlighten us.”

Shit.
O’Donnell didn’t strike her as the type who would believe anything she said. But she wasn’t in the mood for lying. Kate walked over to the table and leaned in so close to O’Donnell she could smell the mint he sucked on. “Some people refer to them as demons. I don’t believe in demons, so I think of them as evil ghosts. If you don’t believe in demons or ghosts, then I suppose you can call them
bad fucking karma,
Agent O’Donnell. They crave all the sensory pleasures of physical life, so they seize the living for that purpose. That’s what they’ve been doing on Cedar Key. One of them is in the mayor. In fact, all the people seated on the right side of the room in that video were hosts to these abominations. Fire annihilates them.”

O’Donnell just stared at her, sucking harder on his mint. “Excuse me, but if ghosts are already dead, how can fire annihilate them? Where’d they come from? You’ll have to be more specific, Ms. Davis.”

More specific? Really? “Well, it’s like this, Agent O’Donnell,” and she started talking.

She went through the events in February, talked about the changes in Bean, Rich, others in town whom she had known for years. She didn’t mention the shapeshifter, but told them about Zee Small’s theories. And when she finished, O’Donnell pulled out the other chair and sank into it. Delaney remained standing, but the two of them exchanged a glance that probably didn’t bode well for her immediate future.

“Look, I don’t know how long you’ve kept me here, but my son disappeared the night of the fire at the café and I need to look for him. So please hurry up and decide whatever you need to decide.” She looked over at Delaney. “You don’t say anything. Why not?”

O’Donnell leaped in. “He’s not here in any official—”

“Cut the crap, Tom.” Delaney’s response was quick, sharp. “She deserves an honest answer.”

The man’s eyes were the same rich, dark chocolate color of his skin. His intense gaze unnerved her. Kate felt as though he were strolling around inside of her, scrutinizing her soul, her psyche, the terrains of her heart. She looked down at the floor, away from him. “Honesty. Now there’s an honorable place for the government to start.” Then she raised her eyes and met Delaney’s gaze. “So what’s the
honest
answer?”

“You’ll have a tough time convincing anyone in FEMA or Homeland Security or the CDC that
ghosts
are taking over the island. But at some level, many of them sense that an unknown virus has nothing to do with what’s going on here. And that’s why no one has gone into the quarantine area.”

“Good thing. You’d be seized very quickly if you walked through downtown.”

“We could call in ghostbusters.” O’Donnell snickered at his own joke.

“Who took that video?” she asked. “How’d you get it? If there were security cameras inside Annie’s—which I seriously doubt, it’s just not that sophisticated a place—then they probably burned along with the building. That video looks like it came from a cell phone.”

“It did,” O’Donnell replied, and glanced at Delaney. “An agent went rogue and entered Cedar Key against orders. He was at Annie’s the night it burned. But we also had another agent install security cameras at various spots on the island before the quarantine was imposed.”

“So charge me or let me go, gentlemen. And if you’re going to charge me, I’d like to call my attorney.”

O’Donnell leaned forward, hands clasped against the tabletop. “You don’t have an attorney, Ms. Davis. You can barely afford to pay your bills. We know that your houseboat was moored behind Richard’s place and then you moved it to the marina, and then you left Cedar Key. Why?”

Okay, this guy was beginning to piss her off. “I told you why. Rich changed. One of these evil ghosts claimed him. And one of them is in Sam Dorset, the editor of the paper, and that’s the reason he tried to rape me. After it happened, Rich advised me not to call the police, ‘not to make waves,’ as he put it. And when I called the police chief—Frank Cole, another guy I’ve known practically my whole life—he told me he wouldn’t arrest Sam until he’d slept off his drunk. Drunk or sober shouldn’t make any difference. Frank was one of the first who got taken.”

O’Donnell popped another mint in his mouth, pushed to his feet, and retrieved the iPad. “We appreciate your candor, Ms. Davis. We’ll be back later with further questions.”

Delaney, she noticed, wasn’t as quick to get up. “Excuse me,” she snapped. “Time is of the essence here. My son has been missing for … I don’t know how many hours … and you’re telling me you’ll be
back later
? Do you have children, Agent O’Donnell?”

His blank look told her he didn’t.

“What about you, Mr. Delaney? Do you have kids?”

“Yes. But I don’t see what—”

“Put yourself in my shoes.” She was nearly shouting now. “Your kid is missing in a quarantine zone, evil ghost shits have seized the locals—”

“And we saw those giant crows over the island,” Delaney finished, his voice quiet, tense. He impaled O’Donnell with his eyes, just daring him to issue an order to shut up.

He didn’t. O’Donnell looked like a man perched at the edge of an abyss, his eyes sort of wild as he sucked hard on his mint. “We don’t know what those crows are about. We don’t even know if they
were
crows. They were too big for crows. Enough about the crows, Bob.”

Crows?
Kate didn’t know what he was talking about. It didn’t matter. Delaney seemed to be in her court, but apparently couldn’t say much with O’Donnell around. “I’d like to make the call to which I’m entitled. Immediately. Unless you charge me with something—or unless you plan to Baker-act me and send me to a padded cell—I have the right to an attorney.”

“Cedar Key is under FEMA and CDC jurisdiction now,” O’Donnell said. “Martial law. And that means that your civil rights are suspended.”

With that, he headed for the door. Delaney held back, his eyes locked on hers, and reached into the pocket of his jacket. He withdrew something and pressed it into her hand. He seemed to hold her hand longer than necessary to pass her a slip of paper, his beautiful, dark fingers a shocking contrast to her pale skin. She slipped the piece of paper into the back pocket of her jeans and Delaney moved swiftly after O’Donnell without looking back.

When the heavy door shut again, the lock clicking into place, Kate ran over to it and hammered her fists against it, shrieking, “Hey, assholes, I’m entitled to an attorney…”

Her voice echoed. Useless, it was useless, she thought, and pressed her fists to her forehead, then began to walk again, faster, faster, her meditative state just beyond her or behind her, a shadow, out of reach. Didn’t matter. She just needed to walk, to move, to find a spot in this little space where the video camera mounted inconspicuously in the corner couldn’t see everything she did.

Could they hear her, too?

She assumed they could. She assumed they could peer through her clothes at her naked body, too.
TSA, hello. I am not your local terrorist. The terrorists have arrived and guess what? They look like us, they could be us when we’re dead.

Kate slid under the cot, lay there on her stomach, and dug out the slip of paper Delaney had passed her. She unfolded it, smoothed it out against the floor. “Rocky safe. Liberty will find you. Wayra”

She squeezed her eyes shut and held the note against her heart. “Rocky safe.” But how had Delaney gotten this? Kate pressed her forehead against her hands, the note crumpled in her fist.

*   *   *

A
long
time later, a noise awakened her. It took her a moment to realize she was under the cot, hiding from the security camera, the piece of paper wadded up between her cheek and her hand. She quickly shoved it down inside her sock and turned her head, watching the feet of the man who entered her room. Large feet. His shoes, a pair of worn dock shoes, looked to be a size eleven or larger.

“Kate?”

“It’s not a locked-room mystery, Delaney,” she said. “There’re only so many places in a room this size where I might be.” She slid out from under the cot, brushed the dust bunnies from her jeans, sat back on the edge of the cot, and just glared at him.

“We can speak freely,” he said softly.

“Yeah?” She gestured at the supposedly hidden video camera in a corner of the room. “Stupid is as stupid does.”

He laughed. “It has a new loop.”

“Why?”

He grabbed the back of one of the chairs and jerked it over closer to the cot. He flipped it around, sat down, rested his forearms along the back of it. “Because a hawk dropped that note at my feet.”

Liberty.

“Help me understand what’s going on, Kate.”

“Excuse me, Agent Delaney. You’re probably a really smart guy, but you wouldn’t be able to grasp what I’m talking about, okay?”

“Really? Well, let’s put that to the test. You and Richard, or Rich, as you’ve called him since grade school, became lovers when his marriage fell apart. He’s basically a nice guy, but you aren’t in love with him. He was company, the sex was good. When you were a kid, your mother worked at the hotel. Your old man was local color, an interesting guy whose passion was fishing. It wasn’t catching the fish that mattered to him, but the ritual—alone in a boat, beneath a glorious sky, a Hemingway moment.”

“Hemingway. Totally overrated. And how the hell do you know any of this?”

“It’s my job.”

“With this ISIS agency that I’ve never heard of?”

“Right.” Delaney shrugged off his pack, set it between his feet, unzipped it, and brought out a pale blue and gray jumpsuit. “Put that on. And get this around your neck, where it’s visible.” He handed her a fed ID with a fake name on it. “We’re outta here.”

She cupped the ID in her hand, shocked to see her photo on it. “And how do I know this isn’t a trap for me?”

“When I held your hand a bit too long? That’s what I do. I read people that way. I get it, okay?”

“Get what, exactly? Spell it out, Delaney. Right now, I’m not even sure what
I
get and don’t get.”

He rubbed his hand over his face. “A redhead—Maddie—gave you something, a note, a warning. An old man came to your houseboat and warned you. He gave you weapons, too. That’s when you moved your houseboat out of the marina to one of the other islands. You had so many warnings but you just kept going along with everyone else’s agenda.”

All true. She’d had ample warnings, and kept ignoring them, hoping they were wrong. “You’re a
psychic
for the government?”

“A remote viewer.”

“Isn’t that a fancy name for a psychic?”

“Pretty much, although there’re some subtle differences.”

“And why’re you helping me?”

“Because I believe you.”

“How long have I been here?”

“Nearly twenty-four hours.”

“Shit.”
Rocky. What’s happened to you, where are you, did Wayra find you?
She quickly slipped on the jumpsuit, flipped the hood over her head, fixed the ID badge so that it was visible. “What’s this mean for you, Delaney? If you’re caught?”

“I can kiss my life and career good-bye.”

Kate followed him out of the room, into a dimly lit hallway. They were in a small concrete building with graffiti on the walls, a place she recognized that had once been used to store supplies for the fishing pier. She had played here as a kid, and somewhere on these walls, her ten-year-old self had scrawled her name.

They left through the back door, and in her first few moments outside, in a large parking lot, Kate filled her senses with the familiar smells of water, salt marsh, spring. A flock of silhouetted birds flew across the twilit sky. She didn’t see a fence, soldiers, guards, nothing to indicate martial law. Just a single-wide trailer that stood to the west of the parking lot, which held two rows of electric carts and government vehicles. Delaney chose a cart with several boxes on the backseat, a broom and mop resting across them.

“I’ve got a canoe stashed in the salt marsh about a mile from here.” His voice held a softness that seemed contradictory for a man of his height and size.

“Where’re all the guards? FEMA? The CDC?”

“Set up right where the quarantine begins.” He drove the cart out of the lot, onto State Road 24. “We’re about a mile beyond that.”

“O’Donnell didn’t buy my story, did he?”

“O’Donnell understands that some very weird shit is going on, but evil ghosts are a stretch for him.”

“But not for you.”

“Frankly, I found it much stranger that a hawk delivered a note intended for you and knew to drop it in front of me.”

“She’s a smart hawk, for sure. But I agree with you. It’s strange even for her.”

“The hawk is your
pet
?”

“Not a pet, exactly. My son rescued her last year, and ever since she just hangs around the houseboat.”

“Who’s Wayra?”

A dog that followed me home and turned into a man.
“He was helping me look for Rocky. We went into one of the houses on the runway, where Rocky’s girlfriend lives, thinking he might be there with her. But we found a naked couple dead in front of the fireplace. They had bled out. Wayra knows a lot about these
brujos,
that’s what he calls them. He’s here because of Maddie. The ghost inside of her is one of the ancient
brujos
of Esperanza, Ecuador. She and Wayra are old adversaries.”

“You realize how nuts that sounds?”

“Yes.” And she hadn’t even gotten to the part about a shapeshifter. She decided not to mention it. “It also happens to be true.”

“But how do
you
know this guy?”

“I met him when he arrived in Cedar Key.” Not a lie, exactly, but not the whole truth. “He helped me get out of the café the night of the fire. He apparently found Rocky.”

Lights hit the cart’s side mirrors. Delaney bit at his lower lip. “Shit. Another cart. Reach into the box right behind you, Kate, open the duffel bag, and grab one of the weapons and extra clips.”