Chapter Nineteen – Hunter

 

My guts twisted into knots as the subdued gunfire accelerated during my run to Kris’s front door. Feet slapping the concrete step, I desperately tried the front door, but it stayed fixed in its frame. Locked. I could get past them, given enough time, but time was the one thing I had little of.

The thing about houses is that doors are always a strong point. Hard wood, or steel reinforcements, heavy frames, and, of course, deadbolts. Windows, though, are always the weak link in the security chain.

I backtracked, circling around to the front of the house. Two large picture windows to the left of the door, and still naught but silence inside. I backed up slowly, my eyes focused on the windows, and stopped when I’d given myself ample running room.

This was not how a cat burglar was supposed to behave. We were supposed to be the shadow’s shadow, the intruder who was quieter than a secret lover’s whisper in your ear. Given the choice, I’d never go in like this.

But, just like I had no time, here there was no choice.

Before I could talk myself out of it, I was rushing forward, launching myself through the air with my flannel-covered arms protecting my head. The window’s plate glass gave a moment’s token resistance before shattering around me in a cacophony as I broke through into Kris’s sitting room, my chin tucked into my chest. On the other side, I uncoiled my arms, letting my body roll as I slammed into the ground.

I was up and running less than a second later, my heart racing to beat my feet, and rounding the corner in time to see Kris with her hands behind her head, a man with a tactical shotgun in hand, a Mossberg from the look of it, the barrel planted at the nape of her neck.

Both turned and looked at me.

I froze, my chest heaving and chuffing with pain as the glass tumbled from my hair down inside my collar. A shotgun blast at that range, no matter what it might be loaded with, was going to take her head off. Suddenly, I was moving, shouting.

“No! Not her!”

Kris was moving, too. So fast, lightning looked like an old man crossing the street with a walker. Her body dropping, her arms coming up, her dexterous, blood-covered fingers wrapping around the barrel and yanking it back in a sweep till I heard a sound like a twig snapping just before her captor screamed in surprised pain as his finger, still caught in the trigger guard, broke.

Just as suddenly, before I even had a chance to move a step closer, she whipsawed the shotgun’s stock back across the man’s jaw, planted a knee between his legs, and brought him to the ground on his back.

I let go the breath I suddenly realized I’d been holding as she flipped the shotgun around and pressed the stock against her shoulder, her shoulders and chest rising and falling with each heavy breath.

The smell of coppery blood and acrid spent gunpowder filled the air, hanging over everything like early autumn fog. Corpses adorned the house like bad modern art, twisted and contorted around the room, and a low, agonized mumbling filled the air.

“Are you hurt?” I asked, looking her over as I approached, at the blood covering her upper body.

She spared me a glance as she stepped back to a safer distance, shaking her head. “No, this isn’t mine. You get the guys outside?”

“Unconscious,” I said.

“Not dead?”

A little shake of my head as I tuned my ears to hear what the man on the ground cradling his broken finger was saying.

Spanish? No, Latin. “The blood of the line, the blood of the line, the blood of the line…”

Outside, a car started up. From the sound of it, not my BMW, and I realized that at least one of the men in the sedan must have finally come awake from the thrashing I’d given them.

A thrashing that, I had to admit as I looked around the room once more, was sorely inadequate compared to Kris’s own skills.

We both glanced streetward as the car sped off, and Kris swore.

Behind me, the sound of Velcro tearing. I turned back in time to see the man pulling his mask up enough to feed himself something beneath the black cloth. A small pocket on his left shoulder hung slightly open.

“No!”

“What’re you—?” Kris began as I leaped to my knees between the shotgun’s barrel and the man on the ground, my fingers already searching for his and trying to pull his hand free. An audible snap came from inside his mouth, like he’d just bitten into a piece of hard candy.

“He swallowed something!” I shouted, trying to keep his jaw open so I could ram my fingers in his mouth and down his wet, smelly throat. He gagged and choked around my fingers, his cavity sucking at my digits as I tried to make him vomit it up.

Instead, his whole body began to contort beneath me, to buck like a mad animal as he went into convulsions, froth forming in his mouth around my fingers and hand.

Kris was by my side, her strong limbs trying to pin him to the ground as the man’s eyes went wild beneath his mask. And still, he continued to chant around my hand and the saliva in his mouth, his tongue slathering itself over my palm as it compulsively formed the words.

“The blood of the line, the blood of the line, the blood of the line.”

His eyes rolled back in his head, his body stilled. I pulled my hand from his mouth.

Moments later, nothing. No breath. No tremors.

Kris and I both sat back on the tile, groaning as we looked at each other.

“You tried,” she said, reaching out and touching my arm with a blood-stained hand. “I lost one earlier, too.”

I put my hand over hers, took a moment just to breathe. To try and let my blood pressure return to normal, let my vision diffuse and allow me to take in the whole scene. Everything had happened so fast, and I still had no idea how we’d even come out of this so remarkably unscathed.

I looked over to the man lying on the floor. The man who’d been chanting his bizarre chant, who had taken some kind of pill which had killed him in seconds.

Now that was true devotion to a cause.

Or absolute fear of the consequences of failure.

“What’re you thinking?” Kris asked as I continued to stare.

“What kind of shit is this?” I asked, waving a hand at the corpse lying dead on Kris’s floor. “Are we in a fucking Bond film, now, where hitmen take cyanide capsules to prevent questioning?”

“That was Latin, right?” Kris asked.

I nodded.

She grinned, her lips unsheathing from around her pearly white teeth. “Sounds more DaVinci Code, if you ask me.”

A warm wind came gusting in through the rear door, rustling cloth and her auburn hair. Hair so dark it almost matched the blood on her hands.

“Any survivors?” I asked quietly.

She glanced around the room, almost as if on reflex. From where we were seated, there was no way we could see all of the bodies strewn around. “Not that I can see.”

“I should have disabled the car or something,” I said after a moment, thinking back to the two men in the sedan.

“Who’s to say they wouldn’t have pulled the same thing as this asshole?” she said, nodding to the splayed-out shooter, flecks of foam still on his lips. She shrugged as she locked eyes with me. “You saved my life, at least. That’s something.”

I chuckled, but only for a moment before I swallowed hard. “Yeah. Guess I did. Though, I think you did most of your own saving.”

“Never been much for the damsel in distress shtick,” she said, going to rise from the floor, the Mossberg still gripped loosely in one hand at her side. She surveyed the room again from her better vantage point. “I really liked that lamp.”

I joined her in standing, nodded. “Think the neighbors heard anything?”

“Heavy sleepers on all sides, and their suppressors were high quality. I think we’re fine.”

“What now?” I asked.

“Police?”

Red and blue lights flashed in my mind at the mere mention of the word. Almost violently, I shook my head. “No, not that.”

She blinked her big green eyes up at me, a look of surprise on her face. “Okay, Hunter, I get it. You and cops are like oil and water. Then, what? You wanna grab a shovel and help me pick out a spot in the backyard?”

I reached into my pocket, pulled out my phone. I began to dial a number from memory.

“Who’re you calling? Tabitha?”

“No. I know a guy with a crew who specializes in this kind of thing.”

“A guy?” She looked around the room as the phone began to ring in my ear. “He does house calls?”

“Well, not exactly a guy. And you might say he’s got a taste for them.” Someone picked up on the other end of the line, breathed heavily into my ear. “Sal? It’s Hunter. I got a job for you.”

“You? A job?”

“If you’re hungry enough, of course.”

“Starving. Always.”