| |
ROAN wondered why anyone bothered with razor wire.
It was so easy to defeat. If you had a thick enough coat (leather preferred), you just threw it on the stuff and could climb over it quite easily. It might rip the shit out of your jacket, but you were fine if you were careful. That’s what Roan did, even though he had other options. He could have used bolt cutters to cut the chain around the rusty gate, or even just attempted a jump over the chain-link fence, as he was hardly a normal human. But that would have been a bit too Six Million Dollar Man for him, and he honestly didn’t know if he could jump that high.
The rest might have ruined any sense of surprise. He didn’t kid himself—there were probably CCTV cameras out here, hidden somewhere in the fourth of a mile of desert scrub up to the house, and the element of surprise was one he couldn’t count on for long—but he wanted to keep it for as long as humanly (or inhumanly) possible. He didn’t know how many people were there (although judging from all the scents he was picking up, many), and he didn’t know how well armed they were, but he knew these weren’t men who cared much for laws. They had killed before, and what was one more body?
But if he could get in close before they knew he was there, if he could get to the main house, he had a better-than-average shot of taking them down. In close quarters, he had all the advantage.
It was a time of day he usually tried to avoid—the cusp of morning, the sky gently cycling through many shades of indigo and blue as the sun started lighting the edge of the horizon. It was not proper morning, just frighteningly early, the chill bite in the air enough to raise goose bumps on his arms. In a handful of hours, it would be so hot out here it would be a nightmare (especially to one with as much Scottish blood and genetic paleness as him), but right now Roan was shivering as he walked along the ocher sand, scanning creosote bushes and tenacious Scotch broom for any hiding crepuscular snakes or any signs of cameras or electrical gear. Snakes had no smell—not really, not unless they were poisonous—but electrical equipment often had an ozone scent. He saw faint tire tracks, guessed they were from a jeeplike vehicle, and he was still studying them when he caught the scent of exhaust on the wind and heard the faint hum of a motor.
There wasn’t a lot of cover out here—this location was picked specifically for that reason, for the fact that if anyone came for them, they’d have a good half-mile head start—but there was enough scrub brush clumping together and enough lingering darkness that he figured he had some temporary cover as long as he didn’t move. He was wearing all black, his ninja gear as Paris would have called it, but here it had a very specific purpose. In full daylight, he’d stand out in a desert, but right now, in the ass crack of dawn, he was just another shadow. He crouched down behind the sour-smelling scrub in a hybrid kneeling/runner’s crouch, one leather-gloved hand flat against the sand. He would probably have surprise on his side here, but he would have to move fast—he didn’t want to risk gunshots until he absolutely had to. His muscles were thrumming like wires, ready to go, as he’d been priming his own adrenaline since before he reached the fence. His rage was a cold, constant variety, murderous and yet strangely clinical, and sometimes that actually made it harder to keep the cat out. It worked best in sudden, emotionally homicidal bursts, but who was the boss here? If it wanted to keep surviving, it would work with him.
The jeep pulled up about twenty feet away from the scrub—the open-topped kind with no side windows, Army surplus jeep, the kind that gave you better views and more angles at which to shoot at people out of your vehicle. The man who got out was pudgy but had a kind of utilitarian heft, part muscle and part fat. He was wearing a T-shirt that advertised a local titty bar and worn jeans that hung in a way that suggested he had french fry legs holding up his potato-shaped body. In spite of his leather jacket, he was also visibly wearing a gun, what looked like a .45 S&W in a worn belt holster done up in cowboy drag, and a hunting knife in a camo holder on the opposite hip. He was smoking a cigarette, holding a battered old red plaid thermos, which he poured out onto the sand—smelled like coffee, and since it didn’t steam, he assumed it was cold and disgusting. What Roan initially took for a cell phone on his belt appeared to be a walkie-talkie on second glance.
He had a nothing face, the kind you forgot while you were talking to him, soft and doughy, eyes as empty and glassy as potholes filled with rain, a ratty beard and mustache combo that looked from a distance like he painted his face with mud. He looked like he should have been wearing a cowboy hat, if only to cover up the bald spot in the direct center top of his scalp. He smelled like stale smoke, body odor, cordite, and arrogance.
The man glanced at the fence line, a casual look, routine, but he froze when he saw the coat over the top of the razor wire. He was about fifty yards away from the fence, and it could have been a person strung up there from this distance, at least if you didn’t look too hard. He squinted at it, hand reaching blindly for his walkie-talkie, and that’s when Roan decided to make his move. He felt the power gathering in his legs, coiling like springs, before he charged out of the brush, sprinting toward him as straight as an arrow.
It was all a blur really, although he saw it in slow motion, as he did often when the lion came out to play. The guy turned instantly toward him, reaching for his gun instead of his walkie-talkie, but he didn’t make it. Roan crashed into him like a bullet train, shoulder to the sternum, and the man didn’t fall back so much as get thrown back hard into his jeep, making it rock, his air leaving him in a pained grunt.
He had enough presence of mind to slam a meaty fist into Roan’s back, which hit near the small of his back and hurt like fuck, sending an electric thrill of pain down his spine, but that was his first stupid mistake: pain made the lion come out stronger, faster, harder to control. He snarled as the man gasped, “Faggot freak—” confirming he recognized him. Roan suspected they knew his face, that the guy in charge of this operation had made sure everyone knew it.
Roan jammed a knee hard into the guy’s balls, and as he doubled over in reflex pain, punched him square in the jaw. He felt the bone shatter beneath his fist—too much strength in the punch (the muscles of his forearm and hand were twitching, liquid steel hardening to stone)—and the guy hit the edge of the hood of the jeep so hard on his way down he left a dent in the metal. He was out long before he hit the sand.
Roan checked to make sure he was still breathing—he was, but holy hell, a flap of his scalp was hanging off his head like a poorly glued toupee; there must have been something sharp where he hit the hood—and then took his gun, his knife, and his walkie-talkie. He turned him over onto his side so he didn’t choke to death on his own blood, which was now sluicing out of his misaligned mouth at a healthy (but not life-threatening) pace, and then threw the knife far away, close to the fence. He wouldn’t need the knife in any scenario—if he got close enough to use a knife, he could use his hands instead, or even the fangs that were aching to spring through the soft meat of his gums. They were far more deadly weapons than that dull-edged piece of metal.
He considered taking the jeep, but then decided it wasn’t smart. They could clearly see he wasn’t the man who had left driving it; it would have to be pitch-black with zero visibility for him to even momentarily pass as the man he’d just beaten to unconsciousness. Different complexions, builds, hair color, clothes—nothing fit, and in a jeep with nothing but a windscreen, there was no place to hide. No, it would just draw attention to him. Better to continue on foot.
He did and ate up about twenty-five more yards before he scented the dogs.
They were pit bulls, about eighty pounds of muscle, teeth, and ugly, bred to be vicious and stupid—stupid enough to come after him even though he didn’t smell right. They were all the same dull brown color, probably from the same litter, and all trained to kill and do nothing else. One lunged ahead, and as it jumped he kicked and caught it hard in the stomach, sending it flying backward. The second had launched itself higher, possibly going for the throat, but he punched it right in the side of its head in midair. He felt something burst beneath his knuckles, and the dog was dead before it smashed down to the ground, its head oddly flat on one side, blood and other fluids oozing out its nose and ears and out the hole where its left eye used to be. The third pit bull had pulled up short, confused by the whimpering of the dog he had kicked (it was trying to get up, but kept falling over—a hip had been dislocated or a leg had been broken, possibly upon landing) and the smell of death coming from its other companion. Roan snarled at it and said, in a half roar, “Come on, if you’re hard enough.” He met its growl with a growl of his own, flashing the teeth that now filled his mouth with pain and blood, lips pulled back, and the attack dog faltered, ears swiveling back in obvious confusion. Roan roared, the sound ripping up his throat like aural vomit. It took a couple steps back, still snarling, drool dripping from its mouth, but Roan took a couple of steps closer, growling louder, and that was enough. The dog took off running, sand kicking up like smoke in its wake. It was a shame, because he was salivating at the idea of ripping out its throat with his teeth, finding out what its blood tasted like.
The pain radiating throughout his jaw, spreading up his scalp and down his neck, was nuclear, but it was also oddly cleansing. He could focus now; he could see the very lip of the ground almost two hundred yards away where the desert gave way to an indent too tiny to call a valley—a depression?—where the main house probably was, hidden away from immediate view. Total privacy in a stretch of land not too far from the “down-winder” area, where waste from the nuclear plant had tainted the land and most people had cleared off, save for those too poor to move or too dangerous to be interested in leaving. These were not poor people with no options. They wanted to be here, where no one could see what they were doing.
The wounded dog cowered as he stalked by, but he had no interest in it. “Don’t feel bad. You don’t send a dog to fight a lion.” The dog simply whimpered. Roan thought about putting it down—one punch and it was done—but it could probably survive the injury, and he hated to kill an animal when he didn’t have to. In the aftermath, some animal association could pick it up and nurse it back to health and see if there was any way to love vicious killer out of a dog. It wasn’t its fault—that’s what it was trained to be.
Not the case with him. He was born this way, caught between human and virus, lion and man, a hybrid compromise between two incompatible states. The fact that the perimeter guard knew who he was suggested they knew he would probably be paying them a visit, but there was no way they’d expect him to come like this: alone, in the dead of dawn, creeping up like a thief. You’d have to be crazy to attempt such a thing.
Which was exactly the point. He was crazy—he was a thing that shouldn’t have been. And whereas they had made a choice to be the brutal, heartless bastards they were, he'd never had a choice.
He flexed his hands and felt bones crack in his jaw as his vision shifted, making the landscape appear as if in bas relief, every flaw and contour of the land brightly visible. His blood tasted like pennies in his mouth.
May the best animal win.
––––––––
TEN DAYS EARLIER
FIONA came to work primed for battle.
She wore her black leather jacket, knee-high black leather boots, black leggings with black leather accents on the side, and a black T-shirt with a pile of skulls on the front. That didn’t include the riding crop with the metal tip hidden in her purse, which was also black leather with silver grommets. She wanted to send the subliminal message of dominatrix, but Roan felt she had successfully sent the message “I am a biker and I’ll kill you,” which still worked.
Roan was in average gear for their mystery, phone-phobic client, but wore his HK in a holster hidden under his jacket, in case he needed to threaten the guy. He could have just triggered a change, but he wasn’t sure Fiona had seen that (Did YouTube count? Not really, not considering the quality of the videos) and didn’t want to freak her out now. There were some things it was best to keep from your employees.
They ended up waiting a couple of hours, and during that time they made a small betting pool on who could be walking into MK Investigations. The odds-on favorite was aggrieved husband, as the caller was a man, and men were slightly more likely to react in homicidal violence if you dissolved their marriage by getting glossy photos of them with their mistress or with the girls down at the Happy Dragon massage parlor. Next up was a cat hater, as there were many of those, and the Grant Kim incident—if it taught you nothing else—taught you these guys weren’t afraid to resort to stupid-ass violence in front of armed cops. Third in line was some homophobe who was so threatened by the idea of a gay man with any power, he had to kill him before the urge to suck a dick overwhelmed him (also known as the Dan White defense). Fiona insisted it could be an ex of his, but Roan had to admit that, sadly, he didn’t have that many exes. Dee, whom he was still friends with, a couple guys he’d had tricks (one-nighters) with who probably didn’t even know his name, one who had moved to New York ages ago and didn’t hate him anyway (Evan), and the others were dead (Connor, Paris). So no homicidal exes, although frankly it would have made it easier if that had been the answer.
(Oh, wait—what about Collin? Well, he was theoretically straight, and they’d been teenagers, so it probably didn’t count either way. Wow, he hadn’t thought about Collin in ages.)
After hour two began, the call being a prank had entered the betting pool. Even though the guy sounded serious and kind of dour on the phone, that didn’t mean it wasn’t some asshole making a joke. Maybe the guys who called with their usual threats realized he was paying no mind to them and decided to get juvenile. Well, more juvenile.
Roan had just decided that if no one showed up by the time the lunch hour rolled around, he was just going to send Fi home and maybe wander home himself. He could sit on his ass doing nothing just as well there, and there he wouldn’t be taunted by paperwork, the bane of his existence. There he’d only be taunted by bills, the second bane of his existence. But most likely he’d just put on a Simpsons DVD and forget about it.
He then heard someone at the door before it opened and stood up, ready to draw if the guy came in blasting (he had no doubt he could draw faster than the other guy could pull the trigger—his cat reflexes were good for that if nothing else), but the man who appeared was unarmed, unless you counted the Bluetooth phone clipped to his left ear more of a weapon than an asshole tag.
“Hey, you look familiar,” Fiona said, just as Roan was thinking it.
He did look familiar. He was an average-sized middle-aged man, not overweight but not really slender either, remarkable instantly for his exquisitely tailored designer suit and three-hundred-dollar sunglasses. His hair, bless it, was still a bit of a mess—wavy, dun brown, and refusing to conform to whatever style seven hundred dollars could buy you. Perhaps in a bid to seem daring, he wore a dark-blue tie with a paisley pattern on it.
He took off his sunglasses and looked around the office like it wasn’t quite what he was expecting. He had sharp brown eyes over a hawk’s beak of a nose and radiated an intensity that Tank would have recognized as a kindred spirit. His gaze seemed to devour the room in two sweeps and stuttered over Fiona as if she was an anomaly he couldn’t reconcile. Well, yeah—biker babe as receptionist. Bit of a head-scratcher to most people. (And the truth was even weirder.)
Finally, Roan placed a name to his face, even though, really, it was just the intensity of the eyes that gave him away. When you saw a man with eyes like that, he was either a serial killer or a genius. Roan figured which one you considered this man to be depended on your point of view. “Robert Hatcher?” Roan asked, not sure he was right.
The man’s laser gaze fixed on him, and he gave the tiniest nod in response. “Roan McKichan. I’d heard you did things a bit differently than your average investigator, but I had no idea.”
Was that aimed at Fiona? He wasn’t sure.
But then again, he had no idea what a software billionaire like Hatcher could be doing in his office.
