reading glasses, and a tube of L’Oréal lipstick. I twirled the lipstick up. “Coral. An interesting shade. Sedate, maybe just a little bit saucy. A good choice for a woman who’s looking less and less like Angel Tit’s best pal.”
I held the purse up, inspecting it closer, and accidentally slid my fingers through the side panel. I pushed on the panel and held it up to her. “Nice. Very nice. I like. You can be walking along, an office clerk on her lunch hour, maybe getting close to a guy on a park bench, shove your hand into the purse through here”—I showed the guys the panel, which was hinged with tiny brass jewelry hinges—“aim this little gun, swiveling it in the coupler, give a two-tap through this small hole on the other end”—I tapped my finger on the barrel—“and walk on.”
I looked at Derek and Angel. “The handler sent someone to take Angel out. Seems he’s become a problem, somehow. Let’s drive.” I handed Derek the purse, turned off the radio system, and took off the headpiece.
“You know who I am?” I asked the woman. She nodded once, jerkily, angry eyes above the tape. “You know what we’ll do to you if you don’t volunteer the info we want?” Her pupils dilated and her sweat smelled of fear, but she didn’t look away or shrink back. She had moxie, I’d give her that.
To Derek I asked, “Who is she?”
He was going through her bag now and held up a respiratory rescue inhaler. “That’s it. Except for—” He snapped open a side pocket on the purse and pulled out a set of keys. One was an electronic key with a remote engine start. Derek grinned. It was a rookie mistake. “Circle the block,” he instructed the driver. “Then if we don’t find what we’re looking for, we’ll widen the search perimeter.” We circled back and drove around for ten minutes, Derek pressing the key, looking for lights blinking on parked cars. We found the woman’s car in a small private lot on a side street up from Decatur.
Derek pulled off his T-shirt to reveal another one underneath and jumped out. I watched as he tossed the stoner watching the lot a twenty, climbed into the running car, and drove it away. We followed. The stoner went back to sleep.
Derek wove slowly through the Quarter, through traffic, and pulled into a hotel on St. Charles Avenue. He tossed the keys to the valet and went into the hotel. Moments later he jogged around from the back and jumped into the van. He pulled on the original T-shirt and hat and grinned, handing me the contents of the car and its glove box in a grocery store plastic bag. Derek was having fun. The woman we had kidnapped, however, was not, and I could see why. There were three different .22 handguns in the bag—two pistols and one semiautomatic. Twenty- twos were the weapons of choice for made men and contract killers. I was betting on contract killer for our tiny, not-so-efficient hostage. Our enemy liked hit men. If he had sent a hit man to take out Angel, then we could no longer use the former marine to draw him out. Checkmate. Dang it. I’d never gone up against someone who was always one step ahead of me.
I gave the driver an address on South Broad Street, suggesting that he ride around some more and get there in fifteen minutes. He looked at me funny, but I ignored it and pulled on nitrile gloves to open the bag. “So. Sophia,” I said, paging through the papers Derek had lifted from her car. “Sophia Gallaud.”
“Guh-lode,” Derek said, correcting my pronunciation.
“Gallaud. Sorry,” I said. Seemed like Derek was going to be good cop to my bad. “Local address on a Louisiana driver’s license, local dry cleaning stub.” I held it up. “Local shooting range membership. I’ve been to that one. I like the black-painted floors. It’s easy to police your brass. Goodness, congrats on the nephew’s Catholic thingamajiggy.” I passed the invitation to Derek.
“Confirmation,” he said. “It’s a Roman Catholic rite of passage. Like laying on of hands.”
“Like a special Mass or something?” I asked.
“Seems so.” To Sophia he said, “I was raised Baptist, myself. None of that Latin stuff or rolling in the aisles either. Now, Yellowrock, here, she’s Cherokee. They practice blood rites. The Injuns ever use human sacrifice? Scalping or stuff?”
“We didn’t scalp. That was a white man thing. And no sacrifice in religious practices. Cherokees were known to use knives to great effect in other ways, however, like killing enemies. Yeah, we were real good at that.” If I sounded bitter, no one called me on it. I handed him my biggest vamp-killer, a new knife to replace the eighteen- inch blade destroyed in Asheville. “Like this one.”
He took it gingerly. “You ever killed anyone with it?”
“Not yet.” The words brought me up short. They said awful things about my job, but it was the truth. “But the blade that one replaced . . .” I looked away, unable to hide my reaction to the memory of the silvered blade sliding into Evangelina’s belly. The feel of the hotter than human blood pulsing out. “That was a bad one,” I said more softly.
“Anything else in there?” Derek passed the knife back.
I sheathed it. “Cell phone. Let’s see.” I paged through the text messages, and then through the received calls, jotting down numbers, names, times and frequency of calls onto a paper tablet with a regular pen. “Our Sophia has been a bad girl, as well as a stupid one,” I said a moment later. “She took a gig from someone. They put five K into an account for her just two hours ago. She gets another five K when the gig is finished. Our Sophia is a hired killer. Which means she knows nothing. Now that we have the phone, we can dispose of her.”
Sophia started to hyperventilate in earnest, her nostrils whistling high and fast. I smiled. I bent forward and peeled off the tape over her mouth. “You want to talk to us? Give us a reason to keep you alive?”
“You’ll let me go? You’ll leave my family alone?”
“Your family is safe. I won’t kill you,” I said. “Talk.”
Sophia knew little except that she was between a very jagged rock and a very sharp blade. She told us everything. Sophia—if that was her real name—had been contacted two days ago to be available at a moment’s notice to take care of three problems, two high-ticket problems—George Dumas and Jane Yellowrock—and one floater, fees to be discussed later. Unfortunately for her, she didn’t have my freebie house address, and the address she had for George was now a lump of soggy charcoal briquettes. What she did have was Katie’s address.
I glanced at Eli and he nodded once, his eyes hard. We had to move the vamps, and safe houses were getting few and far between. I looked out the window, saw we were on South Broad Street, pulled my new throwaway cell, and hit REDIAL.
“NOPD, Jodi Richoux,” she answered.
“That package I told you I might have for you?” I said. “It’s a little different and it eats its dinner cooked, but it’s still interesting. We’ll be out front in a sec.”
“This better be good.”
“All I can do is deliver. It’s up to you boys in blue to make good on the package.” I ended the call.
Sophia closed her eyes. “Bitch,” she said around the tape that dangled from her cheek.
I showed the hit woman my teeth. It wasn’t a smile. “I promised to let you live and to leave your family alone. Free her hands and feet, Derek.” To the driver, I said, “See that woman running out of NOPD up ahead? Pull over to her.” I emptied the guns and as much info as I thought would help Jodi into a zip-lock baggie and sealed it.
When the van slowed enough, I slid open the side door and pushed the contract killer out into the street. She bounced twice and rolled a bit, probably scuffing her knees and elbows. I dropped the plastic baggie containing her little toy guns into the street next. They bounced too, but I had removed the magazines. Protecting the surfaces from my fingerprints, of course. We pulled away. My last sight was Jodi Richoux picking up the tiny woman and directing a uniformed guy to watch the guns. Oddly enough, Jodi looked irritated.
When we got back to the house, Alex was waiting, shaking like he had been mainlining espresso, like a bunny in the sights of a pit bull. “I think I found him. The fanghead you’re looking for.” He grabbed my arm and pulled me into the kitchen. A map was open on the laptop. “The problem is that we’ve been looking in all the wrong places. In Louisiana. But he’s in Mississippi, in the territory of Hieronymus.”
Big H was the vamp we had expected to be targeted next. Seems we were too late; he’d already been hit, long before our enemy targeted us. The upside? De Allyon had a power base only an hour away, and it was more than likely that he was making his forays from there. I nodded for Alex to continue.
“There’s a business in Natchez, in the old downtown, near the main street, three stories, built in the eighteen thirties. The building changed hands two months ago, and has been under renovation, and it just passed a building code check and is ready for occupancy.
“The county requires all renovations of historic buildings to submit a floor plan, and this one fits what vamps are looking for. The building was originally a bank, and the vault is still there. The new owner ordered a safe room
