Chapter Thirty – Carter

 

I awoke with a start, thrashing my arms as I struck out at phantom attackers.

“Sir,” asked a distant voice, a woman’s voice, on my left. “You okay? You don’t look okay. Are you okay? Sir?”

My eyes snapped open, and I began to look around. Someone had hit my Jeep. They’d run a red light. I looked left, was presented with the grill of a big dually pickup truck, the aluminum and steel fixtures inches from my head, big and bright, and in Technicolor, too.

“Sir? The police are on their way, and an ambulance, too. Did you know those men the women left with?”

“What?” I snapped my head around, my teeth gritted against the sudden pain, as I looked in the backseat. Lucy and Amber were both gone. My passenger side door was torn off, ripped away with power tools of some sort. I sniffed, could smell the hydraulic fluid. I could smell something else, too. Propellant, from a firearm.

Winters. Phillip Winters. Maybe Lazarus, too. I’d be surprised if Zoey could have made it out here, though, so it was just the two of them. How had they found us?

My shoulders sagged as I slumped forward, the pit of my stomach turning sour. This was my fault. I should’ve been checking my six. My nine. My three. My everything. I got fucking complacent, especially after we had Amber with us. I was too focused on the ritual, didn’t maintain my situational awareness enough to keep them from getting the drop on us.

“Sir?” the woman asked again. “Can you hear me? Are you okay?”

I turned my head, found the young woman who was speaking peering in at me. A little heavier-set, with a thatch of straw-colored hair wreathing her face. But, the look on her face was one of genuine concern. I undid my seat belt, pulled my keys from the ignition, and began to crawl out of the passenger side of the Jeep.

“Hey,” she said, coming around to my side of the Jeep, “I don’t think you should be stressing yourself out. Isn’t that like one of those first aid things? Not to move the victim?”

“I’m not a victim,” I replied as I leaned into the car, folded the passenger seat forward, and grabbed my duffel bag from the floorboards. Glass from the shattered side window had rained down, littered the insides with sparkling, translucent shards. But, other than that, everything seemed to be in good shape. I zipped it back up, dropped the bag at my feet, glanced around, and went for the glove box.

All around us, traffic was piling up. And the sirens were getting closer and closer.

“Sir, I think you should just really relax. You really don’t look okay.”

“Did you see the car they were in?” I asked as I pulled my sidearm out of the compartment, went to check everything.

The concerned woman gasped and stepped back. “Oh my!”

“I’m licensed,” I said as I checked the safety, released the magazine, double-checked the ammo, and slapped it back inside. “Trust me, I’m a professional. Now, did you see who grabbed the women I was with? Did you see the car they were in?”

“Oh,” she said. “Oh. Oh, yes. I did.” She looked me up and down with big, round, innocent eyes. A smile tried to grow on her lips, but seemed to die on the vine. “They were in a truck, just like the one that hit you.”

“Just like the one that hit me? What do you mean?”

“Like a work truck. Same construction company name, I think.”

I stuffed the holster into the waist of my jeans, right where it had been before I’d climbed into the Jeep. I picked up the duffel bag, walked around the front of the Jeep, and went right for the big truck that had hit me.

“Their insurance rates are just going to skyrocket,” the woman said, still behind me.

Giant red letters were scrawled down the side. Draco Construction. One stolen work truck from a company—that was random chance and unconnected. I walked up to the window, peered inside. A set of keys hung from the ignition. Two from the company, using the company keys? That was odd. What were the chances they would have stolen them from the same place, at the same time, with the keys? Especially when you could just hotwire them, or use a screwdriver in the ignition?

I glanced at the address, tried to memorize it, but my brain didn’t seem to want to remember the numbers. “Dammit,” I muttered. Tabitha would be able to find the location, would be able to get me where I needed to go.

But, first, I needed a ride.

Shit, I didn’t want to steal a car. Making someone else’s day worse after all this would just be the cherry on top of a shit sundae.

Off at the corners of my perception, a phone began to ring. “Hey, mister?” the concerned woman asked from behind me. “Is this yours?”

I turned back to her. “Is what mine?”

“This?” she asked, offering me Lucy’s lit-up phone, the name Franklin Bunk printed out on the front. “It’s been ringing nonstop since the accident, since they took your girlfriends.”

“Yeah,” I said, offering out my hand. “Yeah, that’s mine.”

She plopped the phone down into my hand, and I nodded my thanks as I turned and headed away from her.

I answered the phone and put it to my ear, the smell of Lucy suddenly filling my nose. Realization settled in that this might be the last time I smelled her. That our time in the Jeep might have been the last time I saw her alive.

“Skinner? Thank God you finally answered. I’ve been calling you nonstop. Cops are saying they found your car on the east side, over in the shipping district. Where the hell are you?”

“This isn’t Lucy,” I said into the phone as I stepped out of the intersection and headed down a random road. “This is Carter, the guy who was in your office earlier.”

“What? Where the fuck’s Lucy? How’d you get her phone?”

I walked as I talked, trying to blend in as much as I could on the almost empty streets. “Somebody took her. A man named Phillip Winters, who I thought was here trying to kill me. But he’s not; he’s here trying to hunt the thing that killed all those people three years ago, at that fire you mishandled the investigation of.”

A long moment of silence. “They took her? Jesus Christ. We need to call the fucking cops. What the hell are you doing? Get on the phone—”

“Cops can’t help her now, Bunk. Only I can.” I turned into an alleyway between a paint store and a mechanic just as an ambulance came racing by, its sirens blaring and its lights flashing. “But I need one thing from you. One thing to make this all right, to fix this mistake you made. Or at least start you on that path.”

Another long space of silence. A void that seemed to suck in everything around. “What do you need? Just tell me.”

“Don’t worry,” I said. “It’ll be the easiest atonement anyone’s ever made. All I need is a ride.”

“Where are you?”

I looked around. “South side of town, about fifteen minutes from your office. I’ll call you in ten and give you an intersection to meet me at.”

“Why not give it to me now?”

“Because I can’t stay here,” I said. “Too many cops. Just look for my call, all right? Ten minutes.”

I hung up Lucy’s phone, stuffed it in my back pocket.

In that moment, I hoped more than anything that I’d made the right decision in trusting him. Because, if I was wrong, he could bring the cops crashing down on me. No questions asked.