“This is horrible.” People were dashing in here and there, grabbing foodstuff that they thought would last and getting out before a real gang showed up. Everyone who saw us walked in the other direction. I sometimes found it amazing how, after so many years of living in a civilized society, people still instinctually knew a threat.
“I know. It’s worse than a weekend.” Fate sounded disgusted for his own reasons. He moved confidently through the aisles, clearly more irritated about having to shop for himself at all than the manner in which he was being forced to do it. “I can’t believe my shopper disappeared. It’s impossible to get good help anymore.”
I grabbed a jar of kosher dills and put them in my bag, wondering if we should’ve searched for a cart.
“What happened yesterday with Paddy?” he finally asked. I’d been waiting for him to revisit the subject since I’d seen him.
“Nothing much new to report other than your relatives are crazy. As to that, are we talking cousins? Siblings?”
He stopped in the middle of the aisle. “Don’t go there again,” he said, ignoring my question.
I stopped with him, wanting to hash this out as well. Better in the middle of a bunch of crazies in the grocery store than the bunch of crazies at the house.
I stiffened my spine and prepared for battle. “I have no desire to go there again. But you need to know—I’m not going because I don’t want to. Not because you told me not to.”
“Fine.” He shrugged and started walking again, as if the subject were no big deal and it hadn’t been a huge fight last night.
“Fine?”
“Yes.”
“Because you’re still getting your way?”
“Yes.”
“Only this time and because it’s what I want.”
“We’ll see.” He picked up a can of black olives. “Do you like Puttanesca?”
“So, how are you linked to them?”
He stuffed the can of olives into the duffle bag on his shoulder along with another one. “I think that’s what I’m going to make tonight.”
“Why do I even try?” I asked, looking upward, more to myself than him.
“Good question,” Fate answered anyway.
“Where have the guys been, by the way? What was the emergency last night?” I asked, seeing if I could get him to crack somewhere else.
He stiffened just the tiniest bit, and if I hadn’t been staring at his back like a lovesick teenager I would’ve completely missed the slip.
“Minor incident with some humans. Not a big deal.”
He was lying and I was going to grill him over it as soon as I got past my shock. Why, after all this time, was I able to read him when I never could before? I’d always been able to read people but never Fate. Unless it wasn’t me. Maybe it was such a whopper that even he slipped a little?
“What happened exactly?”
“Nothing major.”
Oh yeah, this was a biggie. Picking up my pace, I dodged in front of him, out past the end of the aisle. I wanted to make sure I could see his lying face when I hit him with my next question.
“Shit,” I said, instead of my planned inquisition.
I yanked on Fate’s arm and tugged him deeper, back into the aisle with me.
“What?”
“The guy I saved on the yacht, the one we couldn’t find for my bucket list? The one Malokin had already gotten? He’s here.” I motioned to the right of where we were.
Fate eased forward slightly and then ducked back. “And he’s leaving.”
My response was immediate. “Let’s go.”
“Agreed.”
With everything going on, I’d forgotten that there was one bright point. My bucket list was back on, and this time I wouldn’t hesitate.
Chapter Twenty
We’d managed to track the guy ten blocks. The entire time I wondered why Malokin didn’t supply cars to all of his people. Not that I cared about their convenience; it was just that destruction was hard enough to look at when you were whizzing by at sixty miles per hour. At walking pace, it was too much to take in. Broken windows, burned buildings, looting—I was watching my home town fall apart piece by piece, my childhood memories slowly being torn down.
There was also the issue of other foot traffic. We’d gotten into it with a gang on the walk over when we’d had to duck into an alley. Watching Fate kick the shit out of five guys at the same time didn’t help my crush one little iota. I felt myself slacking off just to see him in action.
He’d given me a look after the fight that had me making excuses about not sleeping well last night and contradicting my earlier story of a great night. This crush I had on him was really screwing up my credibility. Fortunately, he hadn’t had enough time to dwell on my lack of performance, since we’d had to catch up to our target.
We followed the guy to a run down building, with no signs or markers that claimed the place other than a for rent sign that looked like it had been hanging there with no takers for quite some time. It looked like it might have been a strip mall at some point but had lost its purpose during an economic downturn because it was too far off the beaten path to sustain itself in anything less than a booming economy. The steady flow of humans walking in and out was probably the most foot traffic it had seen in years, possibly ever.
We got as close as we could without anyone seeing us before having to duck behind a partially broken brick wall. From there I watched the craziest and most degenerate of our current population enter and exit. “What is this?”
He pointed to the flow of people leaving. “They’re all armed. See the way some of them are testing the weight of their guns? It’s because they just got them. This place was empty a couple of days ago. Malokin must be setting up pop-up armories.”
“I guess we know where everyone is getting their guns these days.” Almost all of the people leaving were brandishing smaller arms. I was thankful that at least they weren’t arming them with automatic rifles and the heavy stuff, like we had.
“This doesn’t make sense. Why not keep the guns?” I answered my own question before Fate did. “Unless you want complete anarchy. You want the world to hit a point of no return, or at least be so far gone that you have such a steep climb back it could take decades. A world of such chaos and disorder it would be easy to step into the gap if you have even a modicum of planning and resources. He wants to be a dictator.”
“Some of the most horrific dictators rose to power amidst chaos.”
I surveyed the building again, taking in all the possible access points. “We’ve got to give it a try. We might not get a better chance. Even if we don’t find any information on Malokin, worst case, we take out some of his people. It certainly isn’t going to hurt our cause.”
Not often are Fate and I on the exact same page with things but when we both turned and looked at each other, in that moment we were utterly in sync. I could see the muscles tensing already and bloodlust in his eyes.
His hand lay on top of where mine was over my gun, holstered at my side. “Before we do this, just know it could amp up this fight. The official truce might be over, but neither of us has pulled the trigger since the condo burning down. I killed his people. He retaliated. We do this, we might be inviting direct open warfare.”
“Open warfare is coming whether we do this or not. It’s simply a choice of whether we wait for it to come to us or we meet it head on.” Even as I said the words, I knew he was probably more aware of it than I was. His statement had been for my benefit. My next words were for his. “I’m going into this with eyes wide open. I get it.”
“This was one of those things I was hoping you’d miss,” he said, looking straight ahead at the building.
It was another one of those honest moments that seemed to be sneaking up more and more often, and the effect wasn’t lessening per exposure.
“You ready to do this?” he asked, snapping out of whatever glimpse I’d just seen.
I nodded my head and tightened my ponytail.
“We get as close as we can without being seen. Anything iffy, we leave. If we can take a shot, we do. Agreed?”
I grabbed my gun from its holster and gripped it. “Sounds good to me.”
“If something goes badly, the other one gets out.”
Now I paused. “We just leave the other person there, knowing Malokin’s propensity for torture? You want me to agree to possibly leaving you in a pool of your own blood?”