Chapter 15
Zade covered her hands, stopping her from frantically rattling the doorknob.
“Shhh,” he soothed. “Calm down.”
“How? He’s on the floor! He must be sick, or hurt!”
“I can see that,” he said.
“So? Let’s get in there and help him!”
Another thing he knew but could not share. No heart was beating in that house. There was no thermal cloud of body warmth. That guy was long past help.
But whatever. He shattered a pane of glass with his leather-clad elbow, hoping that the neighbors weren’t watching, and reached inside to turn the knob.
Simone slid in behind him before he could extricate his arm and stop her.
He hurried in after her. They both stopped at the kitchen door.
Dr. Gregory Fayette was most definitely dead and had been so for several hours. His balding scalp was pale. He lay on his back, eyes wide, mouth open as if gasping for air.
A bespoke business suit. Shined shoes. A broken coffee cup lay on the floor near him, a dot of brown residue still inside. Splattered coffee had dried over the floor tiles all around him.
Zade and Simone kneeled on either side of him. Zade touched his throat.
Fayette’s flesh was cold, his skin gray. The room was chilly. There was no scent of human decomp that an unmod would be able to sense.
They stared at each other over his body, speechless and dismayed.
Things were moving fast. Simone was not on board. He couldn’t make her see the danger until she understood about her mods and Obsidian and the rest of it. The truth stood between them like a towering wall, and ignorance was deadly.
“Simone,” he said. “You need to disappear now.”
She looked up, confused. “Me? What could this possibly have to do with me? I didn’t know him! I only met him that one time, at his office!”
“I know. But finding him dead, right after that bizarre scene with Kenner … what are the odds?”
She put her hands to her temples, her face contracting. He felt a twinge of sympathetic pain himself. He was all too familiar with the sensations that gripped her.
“It doesn’t make sense,” she whispered. “Oh God, the poor guy. We have to call someone.”
He winced inwardly. Fuck. “Guess so.”
He hated being caught on time-and-date stamped public records, like all the other skittish, paranoid Midlanders. They had good reasons for being so private, but he couldn’t share any of those reasons with Simone. Not yet, at least.
Simone rose up and gazed around the room, a remote look in her eyes. She’d gone into data-processing mode. A defense mechanism. He could relate.
Her gaze swept the rigidly neat kitchen. Then she started opening drawers. The first one held two stacks of perfectly aligned dishtowels, snowy white and ironed flat. The next had a single place setting laid out on a placemat. A third held meticulously folded white linen tablecloths and napkins. The cupboards were full of perfectly placed plates, cups, and bowls. So far she hadn’t opened a junk drawer with the usual jumble of rubber bands, paper clips, twist ties, and takeout menus.
She moved around the kitchen, peering into a porcelain double sink, icy white and spotless. No coffee cup. No sugar spoon.
She opened the fridge. The food inside had been divided on the basis of color. Reds, whites, greens, browns. Spinach and grapes together, tomatoes and prime rib, cauliflower and parmesan cheese. Corners were squared. Beverages in the refrigerator door were organized in descending order of height.
She crouched back down to stare at Fayette, the data-buzz still in her eyes. “His shoes are wrong,” she said.
Zade looked at Fayette’s shoes. “What’s wrong about them? They look expensive. Shiny. I’d say they’re in keeping with the rest of his outfit.”
“No, they’re not. This guy would not be psychologically capable of falsifying test results. The stress would kill him. He’s obsessive. But look at those shoelaces. One loop is a third bigger and one tail a third longer than the other. A man who likes that much starch in his shirt collar wouldn’t leave his shoelaces this way. He’d notice it, and it would drive him nuts until he fixed it.”
“Meaning?”
She shrugged. “If we’re doing conspiracy theories, why not another one? Somebody could have staged all of this.” She gestured at Fayette, the kitchen.
Zade looked at the shoelace. Huh. It was a good sign that she was already starting to think along these lines. “You missed your calling,” he told her. “Should have been a detective.”
Her mouth tightened as she looked down at Fayette’s rigid face. “I don’t think so,” she said unsteadily. “I wouldn’t want to have to get used to this.”
The look on her face made him nervous. “Let’s get out of here.”
“We can’t just walk away,” she said. “We have to call the police. And probably wait for them.”
He took a deep breath. “I know you want to do right by him,” he said. “But we can call the police from the car.”
“It doesn’t feel right to just walk away.”
“I know. But he’s gone. You’re still alive, and I want you to stay that way. And this place is not safe. I feel it on my skin.” He had to summon all his self-control to keep his voice low and calm. “Please, Simone.”
She closed her eyes. He held his breath for a long moment.
“Okay,” she whispered.
“Great. Come on.” He looked around the kitchen. The drawer to the napkins still hung open. He reached inside and snagged one, and proceeded to quickly wipe down all the handles in the kitchen that he had seen her touch.
He herded her gently toward the door and wiped down the inside doorknob as he opened it. Simone glanced back at Fayette’s gleaming shoes, lingering there until Zade was on the edge of shoving her forcibly through the door.
He didn’t do it. She finally yielded to his tug and came out onto the porch.
He shoved the napkin into his pocket. The wind had picked up. It whipped the tree boughs, making the shrubbery sway and bend, whining around the eaves. Stray locks of hair fluttered around Simone’s face as she went toward the stairs.
He didn’t know what alerted him but his arm shot out suddenly, shoving her backwards. She hit the door with her back as two men dropped off the porch roof.
One landed right where she would have been standing.
Zade kicked him in the teeth. That one reeled backwards as the other one came at him. He blocked a punch, landed an uppercut, an eye jab. The guy howled in protest and grabbed Zade. They rolled head over ass down the porch stairs.
He landed on top. An elbow to the face stunned Guy Two, but Guy One had recovered. Zade leaped to his feet just in time to block a flurry of blows as fast and hard as any no-holds-barred sparring he’d ever done with the other Midlanders.
Modifieds. Very fast. Very strong. Shit.
He blocked a slashing blow to the head, landed a punch to the throat, lurched to avoid a knee to the groin. ASP jacked to the absolute max but he could barely stay ahead of this guy. And this was only one of them.
These two together would wear him down if he didn’t finish this fast.
No time to think. Protect Simone. The only thought in his conscious mind, flashing like neon. The guys were huge. Crew-cut, lantern-jawed behemoths, modded to the teeth. Younger than him. New and improved. He was used to being the baddest of the bad, but Obsidian research kept churning onward.
Simone shouted a warning. He whipped up his arm to deflect a club, twisted his hand around to grab it. No guns. So Obsidian wanted to talk with him before they killed him.
Not today. He jabbed the club into his opponent’s throat. The guy swept his leg. They pitched to the ground, their bodies tangled. He took a hard knock to the head. Fuck.
When his sight cleared, he saw Simone hefting a wooden deck chair. Her downswing was too slow; Guy One swatted it from her hands before she could land the blow. It hit the recycling bins. Cans and bottles scattered everywhere.
Guy One grabbed Simone around the waist and carried her off, twisting and thrashing. Zade was stuck here fighting off the other fucking bozo.
Had to end this. Right now.
He ducked a punch, seized the guy’s thick wrist and twisted until agony bent him over, then rammed him headfirst into Fayette’s wrought iron fence.
He flung the guy senseless to the ground between two bushes and sprinted after Simone. When he rounded the house, her captor was trying to get the van open while holding onto a writhing, scratching, flailing hellcat. His nose was bloody, his face scratched.
The guy’s eyes barely had time to widen as Zade barreled into him.
He caved in the side of the van with the asshole’s head.
He pushed Simone into the clear, flung the guy’s limp body down, and delivered a couple of vicious kicks to his spine at neck level, just to be sure.
He stared down at the guy, air rasping heavily in his chest.
Simone was curled against the van’s wheel, eyes frozen wide. He grabbed her under the armpits and hoisted her up. “You okay?” he demanded. “Hurt?”
“N-no. What was—”
“Later.” He spotted her purse on the lawn. Scooped it up, grabbed her hand.
They sprinted through the neighborhood, between houses, down alleys, aiming for the tall trees waving over the spot where he’d parked. He was grateful for the paranoia that had prompted him to leave the car some distance from Fayette’s house. Maybe Obsidian didn’t have a bead on his vehicle yet. He hoped not.
It took twenty minutes of frantic driving before Zade could let himself believe that they’d gotten away clean. He found an out-of-the-way street and parked, needing a moment to get his hands to stop shaking, his heart to stop thundering, and his ASP to chill out. That ninety-mile-an-hour scroll in his field of vision drove him wild.
They sat there in appalled silence. Finally, he reached out and grabbed Simone’s hand. It was icy cold, but her grip was strong. She squeezed back.
“We still need to call the police,” she said. Her voice was thin but steady. “I have no idea what the fuck is going on, but Fayette’s family needs to know.”
“Oh yeah?” He let out a harsh laugh. “We’re running for our lives, Simone.”
“From the people who murdered Fayette, no less,” she said. “We have to tell someone. They must have attacked us because we found him.”
He let out a doubtful grunt. “If Fayette was murdered, whoever did it went to a lot of trouble to make it look like a natural death. This attack is about us. Not him.”
“But there isn’t really an ‘us,’ Zade,” she said. “We’ve just met, and our meeting was random. All we have in common is last night. And you keeping me company this morning. When have we ever pissed anyone off together?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “But call the cops with your burner phone. I don’t want to be logged on any more databases than we have to. And then we disappear.”
She blinked at him. “We do?”
“With your consent, obviously,” he said through clenched teeth. “I’m not kidnapping you. I’m trying to protect you.”
“Yeah, I noticed. That was … words fail me. I have never seen or imagined anything like that. I didn’t know human beings could move that fast.”
Yeah. Because they couldn’t. He shifted uncomfortably. “I’ve had a lot of combat training,” he muttered.
She pulled out her burner phone and tugged and wrenched at the plastic shell until he took pity on her and passed her his pocketknife. “My place is close,” she offered, prying it open. “If you want to hole up for a while. I gotta get my electronics and some fresh clothes. I’m covered with mud and blood. His, not mine.”
Here it was again. The rock and the hard place.
Simone’s home was the worst idea ever. And getting inside it was exactly what he’d been working toward since he started his surveillance. This was his first and probably only chance for physical access to her networked hardware. He had Sisko’s ghostbot on a flash drive, ready to plug into her computer. He wouldn’t get a chance like this again. Certainly not after he told Simone about Obsidian.
But going to her house after what had just happened—it was insane. A screaming clusterfuck in the making. He should take Simone away from here.
Keep it simple. Keep her safe.
Even though it was five days into week nine from the day his brother’s captor died. Five days into week nine that Luke might have started starving to death in a cage.
“Zade? Are you okay?” Simone’s tone was worried.
He looked around. “Ah, yeah. Fine. We’ll drop by if you want. You should be quick, though.”
“I just hope Kruger hasn’t staked me out there,” she said. “But that’s bound to happen. And it drives me even more crazy when I fight it.”
He grunted. “Assassins just tried to abduct you, Simone. Please. Fight it.”
“My stepdad’s people can’t be involved with this,” she said stubbornly. “I never saw those thugs who jumped you before. No one’s that pissed at me except Rand. And Rand wouldn’t have me attacked. I make too much … ”
He waited for a moment. “Too much what?”
She didn’t answer for moment. “Money,” she said finally. “I make him too much money. It’s not in his best interests to have me killed. I’m more profitable to him alive.”
Zade absorbed that information. “So it’s like that with him?”
“Pretty much.” Her voice was bleak.
After a moment or two, she shook that thought away and returned to the burner phone, tapping in codes to activate it. Plugging it in to charge on the car’s battery.
As soon as it worked, she called 911 and told them about Fayette’s body. She gave the address and hung up while the dispatcher was asking for her name.
“How do I get to your place?” he asked.
“Turn right here.”
When they got to her modern townhouse, he drove right on past and circled around, parking a few blocks away. All his senses were extended in every direction all around them as they walked the short distance, ASP madly churning and scrolling with full-on combat readiness, but nothing seemed out of the ordinary. It was just a quiet residential neighborhood on a working day.
She disabled the alarm to get them in, and led him up the stairs over the street level garage. Strange to see the place he knew so well from these unfamiliar angles.
The place was neat, comfortably furnished, and bland. Hardly decorated at all. No art, no photos, nothing personal. He would never have associated it with her.
She closed the door after him and gave him a look that was almost shy.
“I’d offer you something to drink, but I don’t really have anything worth offering in the fridge,” she said. “I could make some coffee.”
“I don’t need anything,” he told her. “Pack your stuff.”
“Um … okay.” She kept looking at him.
“What’s the matter?”
“It’s just that I’ve never had anyone here like you. The place looks strange with you in it.”
“Strange how?”
She looked perplexed. “I don’t know.”
“Whatever,” he said grimly. “We have to leave. I mean it.”
She nodded and ran lightly up the stairs.
He stared up after her, the feeling of neck-prickling wrongness growing stronger. This place was so fucking dangerous. For her, for him, and for all the other Midlanders. If Obsidian got him, they would pry him open with drugs and control codes, and he would expose all his friends.
No choice. Game over. For all of them.
The tiny flash drive was ready in his hand, loaded with Sisko’s ghostbot. He’d been too busy last night wildly screwing. Hadn’t even spared a thought to load the ghostbot onto his implanted auxiliary database so he could use the direct brain interface.
No, he had to do it manually, like an asshole.
When they were out of this deathtrap, he was coming clean with her, but for now, he’d do what he had to do.
Act now and clean up the mess later.