“Okay. Shit.” I grimaced. “I’ll wear a goddamn sweater.”
It was ninety degrees in Bridgeport, Connecticut, unusually hot, the radio said—before I kicked it. It wasn’t the kind of weather you layered for, and I was wearing a bright green cashmere Lacoste cardigan over a pink polo shirt, pleated khaki pants, white socks, and loafers. I’d also been offered a holster for my Eagle and something called a Members Only jacket to cover that. I knew the names because Goodfellow had labeled each plastic bag in which they were immaculately folded, along with a catalogue page of some blond, blue-eyed, tanned, blindingly white-toothed man wearing the same outfit while standing by a boat. With a blond woman. A blond kid. A blond damn dog…wearing a matching damn sweater.
Douche bag.
It covered the catalogue dick and Robin both.
“What did you do to piss off Goodfellow this badly?” Niko asked, edging away from me as if I were color- contagious. He was dressed in the black-and-gray clothes the puck had smugly given him. Normal clothes. The kind that didn’t make you look like someone pulled the head off a Golfing Ken doll and stuck a catastrophically pissed-off serial killer’s head in its place, which was a look I was pulling off in spades. I let my black hair hang where it wanted. Still no ponytail for me, until Kalakos was gone despite what I’d talked to Niko about in the car.
“You don’t want to know,” I said glumly.
We stood by the rusted chain-link fence at the abandoned Remington Arms factory. Despite its being early afternoon, it wasn’t a safe place to be for most. It was the typical bad part of town, but it would be more peculiar if I were in a good part of town. An industrial area near the water, no shadows, no alleys, nothing green—not a blade of grass pushing up through the sidewalk. Or what was left of the sidewalk.
Nothing but our rusty fence the armory stretched far behind, a wide street with dilapidated houses on the other side. Nik and I were waiting for the others to get out of their car, parked by ours at an empty house across the road with a battered For Sale sign. Promise climbed out of the car, her gloved hands keeping her face well shadowed by the hood of her cloak. She wanted to see this through as much as we did, if only for Niko’s sake.
Following her out of the car was Kalakos, who, as Goodfellow had said, was like a terminal case of gonorrhea with a side order of herpes. You couldn’t get rid of him no matter how hard you tried.
As the three of them were crossing the street, I looked back down at the clothes that were my punishment for pissing off Robin. “Nik, if Hephaestus kills me, strip me, would you? I don’t want my corpse seen like this.” None of the clothes had been worn before. Robin had been waiting with this vengeance bomb for a while, and I’d been the one to set it off. He wouldn’t be caught dead in any of it himself. He dressed expensive and sharp always, but he leaned more toward James Bond than whatever this crime against humanity was. I scratched my stomach, then an arm. “I think it’s burning my skin. Like holy water. I thought that was only in the movies.” I scratched again. “I’m sweating like a pig. Jesus.”
“Stupid assholes. Shitheads. Give me your money or I will fuck you up so bad your mama won’t know you on the slab.”
Finally. I didn’t think he was ever going to make it down our way with that slow shamble.
He was a mugger, gangbanger, junkie, homicidal shit with a knife, probably all four. I’d seen him stumbling down the cracked and crumbling sidewalk as soon as we’d parked the car and hit pavement. He hadn’t been an issue then. If he’d had half a brain to look past me to Niko or to look at my face instead of the opposite of camouflage I was wearing, he wouldn’t be an issue now. But I’d been hoping, and when you wish on that kick-him- in-the-balls star twinkling high above at night, sometimes you get your wish.
Another douche bag, and I couldn’t
“I’m not going to bother to ask. You need him more than I do,” Niko said. “Try not to kill him. We’re not one hundred percent certain he deserves it.”
I was already stripping off that stupid jacket. It was lightweight, though, and that could be useful at times. “Today my percentage on the curve has dropped from one hundred to twenty-five. Maybe fifteen.”
I couldn’t tell if he was white, biracial, Hispanic, young, or middle-aged, as he was so covered in filth, hair matted for years, teeth all but gone from meth, clothes layered rags, but what did it matter? I did know he was a son of a bitch with no bark
Any day would’ve been a wrong day, but with his knife—a kitchen butcher knife, pitiful—I would’ve given him the less humiliating “go away.” I would’ve used a round to his leg from one of my guns or put my own knife, the kind you don’t steal from your grandmother, through his hand to make sure I cut enough tendons that he’d not carry a weapon again. But today…today wasn’t any day.
I strangled him unconscious with the Members Only jacket.
It rolled up nice and tight. It wasn’t a wire garrote, but it did get the job done.
Better yet, he had a friend, a buddy, a compadre, otherwise known as the dumb ass who came over the fence to help cut us up. This one was wired on meth or crack. That meant he was snake-mean, gave him the sad illusion that he was immortal, and made him a cheetah in speed compared to his friend, who’d done a believable imitation of the living dead from an old zombie movie. My opinion about those movies had been formed from minute one: If you could trot or even speed-walk, there was no excuse for your not surviving that apocalypse.
“Give! Give it! Fuckers! Give it over before I cut your goddamn head off!” This one had a switchblade he stabbed in my direction with frenzied, wild motions. I shrugged off my holster and tossed it over my shoulder, knowing Niko would catch it. Then off came the sweater, which surprised me by rolling up as nicely as the jacket. Cashmere, huh? Shelling out the dough on expensive fancy douche-bag clothes was worth it. Who would’ve believed it?
I dodged the stab of the switchblade. Yeah, he was a cheetah next to the other guy, all right, but Niko had taught me to be the actual article, with lessons starting when I was about eight. I snared the guy’s arm with my new weapon, broke his wrist in a particularly nasty way that would never heal right, and then strangled him with the sweater until he was down and out to match his partner. That improved my mood enough that I kept going, kicking off a loafer and beating Mr. Switchblade in the head with it. It wasn’t as effective as the other pieces of clothing, but it was still entertaining.
Imitating my shoe-beating squat, Niko crouched across from me, gazed down at the drooling mugger and then at me. “You didn’t kill them. That’s something,” he said with a noticeable lack of conviction. “Should I be concerned or is this a new type of crime-fighting superpower hitherto undiscovered in those comic books you read as a kid?”
“I still read ’em.” I gave a wicked grin, able to forget about Janus and Grimm—
There was a flash out of the corner of my eye. I looked up to see Robin considering the picture on his phone. “I have the shot of the infamous Leandros penis—infamous like the Loch Ness monster: Most thought it a rumor. I have a preppy demon spawn armed by Nordstrom assaulting criminals. It’s a start to a porn site. I just need a theme.”
Kalakos spit on the sidewalk; the Vayash clan did love their saliva and sharing it. We didn’t know how Janus tracked us. Kalakos and Niko both thought it was likely the genetic signature of Vayash blood. I had a different theory: the unique chemical makeup of Vayash spittle. It had been exercised fiercely enough over the generations that it was better, stronger, faster. Steve Austin couldn’t hope to deliver the loogie that a Vayash could.
“We are wasting time,” Kalakos said with frustration boiling over the stoicism he’d worn, head to toe, since he’d arrived. “The burden needs to be returned to sleep or destroyed, and you are playing games like…” There he was stuck. Like a child? Hardly. Like a monster? Not if he wanted that apology from the basement to stick.
Goodfellow didn’t wait for him to sort it out. “The wannabe Achilles is right.” He put the phone away and tossed me the black combat boots he held in his other hand. “Time to go. You’re without a shred of doubt going to have to run for your life in there. You can’t do that in loafers.”
I caught the boots and snarled at the smirk that had been thrown with them. It was a halfhearted snarl, though. Robin was back and that made all this worth it. Almost.
“In there” was the thirteenth building of the Remington Arms factory. All thirteen were identical and connected by a massive bridge that matched the brick outside of the buildings. It loomed, the entire structure. It was only four stories high, but somehow it loomed. That this was a place that had made weapons didn’t surprise me. They sure as hell hadn’t been turning out toys. It had been built in the early nineteen hundreds to make guns,
