Would’ve been better if she could have forgotten. She still had nightmares where she was back in the burned-out shell of Seventeen, breathing stale smoke as she crept up on the two men, one far too familiar, one an unknown who had a gangsta name—Strike—but wore normal duds and had shown up in a rented minivan.
With the other hunters closing in faster than she had anticipated, she had nailed her target from behind with her souped-up Taser and had her two quasi bodyguards drag his ass back to lockup. After that, she had chased the other guy—this guy—back to his rental, labeling him harmless. Then she had locked herself in her hotel room, binged on Ding Dongs, and cried herself empty. Which wasn’t the point right now. The important part was where she had filed Strike under “harmless” back then, now her instincts said that the man facing her was deadly dangerous in his own right. Which meant that either he’d changed over the past three years, or he’d been playing her before.
What the hell was going on here? And why did it have to be that day? The coincidence sucked.
A chill skimmed along her skin as a dead man’s voice whispered, There’s no such thing as coincidence. It’s all just the will of the gods. Mendez had been big on quoting his writs when they made his point, especially toward the end of their time together.
Keep your head in the real world, she told herself. That part of her life had ended long before his death. Shifting the small black carryall so she could get to the gun tucked at the small of her back, she said cautiously, “I don’t do find-and-grabs anymore.”
“All you need to do is locate him,” Strike said without a shift of expression or inflection. “We’ll take care of the rest.”
She should turn him down. Hell, she shouldn’t have come out here in the first place. She was just starting to hit her stride in Denver after moving back from LA just under a year ago. She had a string of solid—if boring—jobs lined up and ready to go. And this crew had “questionable” written all over them. But that same questionability was what had her sticking. She knew what it felt like to be lost. Now she tracked down the lost and reunited them with their friends and family . . . or, if they were better off lost, she helped them stay that way. Saving the world one person at a time, Fallon had called it. And he hadn’t even been mocking her. Not much, anyway.
“Tell me about the target,” she said. Routine question, nice and open ended.
Strike’s expression didn’t change. “It’s the same guy you bagged out from under me that day in the warehouse. Snake Mendez.”
He said something else, but she couldn’t hear him over the roaring that suddenly filled her head.
Mendez. Oh, Christ.
She had to lock her knees to keep from sagging when it all tried to come rushing back—memories, pain, guilt, betrayal, grief. Keep breathing, she told herself, struggling with her poker face. She couldn’t go there again. Not now, when she was just starting to put her shit back together. Not now, when losing him had nearly killed her before.
More, there were warning bells beneath the pain. What the hell was going on here? How much did this guy know? Who was he working for?
Her instincts chimed in with a Time to go!
Feeling far shakier than she wanted to let on, she retreated a step toward the doorway. “Mendez is dead.” She forced herself to say it, though the words tasted foul. “He was killed last year in Denver. The Varrio Warlocks got him.”
His parole officer swore that Mendez had been playing it straight, but as far as she could tell, he had died as he had lived: trying to run the world one city block at a time.
“Wait.” Strike stretched out a hand. “Don’t go.”
“You don’t need me to find a dead man.” Another step back put her in the doorway.
“He’s alive.”
The words didn’t compute at first, coming one at a time, disconnected, echoing in her ears like someone screaming inside an abandoned warehouse. He’s. Alive. He’s. Alive. He’s alive. He’s alive . . . alive . . . alive. Not dead.
“Bullshit.” The word was little more than a whisper. “The VWs claimed the kill.”
“They lied. Dez has been working with us in New Mex for the past year. He took off two days ago, and we need him back.”
“He . . . ” She trailed off as the numbness grew teeth and bit in.
Dez. The nickname had been reserved for the inner circle. And three years ago, Strike had called him “Mendez,” just as she had used “Snake,” trying to remind herself what he really was. Poisonous. A manipulator.
Hearing the nickname now meant . . . Jesus, she didn’t know what it meant. But her instincts said Strike was telling her the truth.
They lied.
Her breath rasped in her lungs and the world took a big spin around her.
Dez was alive. Holy. Shit.
The blond cop said softly, “He was more than a paycheck to you, wasn’t he?”
Strike glanced at her, surprised, then looked back at Reese more closely. “No shit. What were you? Friends? Lovers?”
“We were . . .” What? She didn’t even know anymore, couldn’t think, could barely even breathe. Shock loosened her tongue and she blurted, “We knew each other as kids, as runaways. We watched each other’s backs. At least we did until that night in the storm. After that . . .” Getting dizzy now, she pressed the back of a hand against her mouth. “Could I . . . Shit. I need a minute.” Heart hammering sickly in her ears, she gestured back the way she had come, toward the restrooms she had passed on the way in.
“Of course.” The cop shifted on her feet, like she was going to offer to go with her.
Reese waved her off, swallowing hard. “I’ll be right back.”
As she headed for the ladies’ room, struggling to hold it together, she felt twenty-some pairs of eyes follow her across the tacky-assed chapel and through the door to the hallway beyond, which took her out of their line of sight. Then, with tears blurring her vision, she bolted past the restrooms. And straight out of the hotel.
Fresh air. She gulped it, feeling like she was drowning while pedestrians skittered around her like rats, glaring and squeaking when she interrupted their flow. Then, blindly, she headed for the nearest alley.
She might not know Cancun that well, but she knew cities. She knew the taste and smell of them, knew their dark underbellies, and the creatures that ruled them. She also knew that if Strike and his crew went looking for her, they would start with the airports, buses, and hotels, all the normal places that normal people went. So, heart thudding in her chest, she headed for what her gut told her was the bad section of town, moving through a warren of narrow streets that rapidly dwindled to alleys, losing layers of respectability in the process, and coming to look like a thousand other alleys in any one of a hundred cities she’d worked in over the years.
Scrawny cats and lean, hard-eyed mutts of both the human and animal variety slunk in the shadows. And, as she worked her way deeper into the maze, moving fast but not too fast, she was aware of beady eyes watching her from shadows, and the way they shifted, sending a silent message flashing ahead: Grab her, we’ll share.
A minute and three alleys farther in, a lean-hipped youth with shark-dead eyes and a four-inch blade dangling from one hand moved out from behind a Dumpster and gave her a spittle-flecked “Hey, baby, you looking for me?” in English rendered almost singsong by his thick accent.
She rattled back in varrio Spanish, “Get these cops off my ass and you can have whatever you want.”
“Fuck that.” He disappeared, and the shadows melted away. They wouldn’t stay gone for long, but the threat of the cops had bought her a few minutes, a little space to think.
Not that she wanted to think. It hurt too damn much.
Dez. God. Throat so tight it hurt to swallow, she kept going until her gut told her she had gone far enough, and then picked out a narrow, open-ended alley that smelled pretty much like every other alley on the planet—a melange of piss, body odor, and rot—with a spicy overtone that said she was far from home. Putting herself about halfway down the alley, she scoped out her exits, both horizontal and vertical, and leaned back against a padlocked doorway hard enough that her .38 dug into her lower back. Then she braced her hands on her knees, let her head hang for a second, and concentrated on not losing her shit.
Dez was alive. Which meant... “Nothing,” she told herself, hating that her voice cracked on the word. This didn’t change anything.
