While she did so, she remembered other times when she and death had danced together, the staccato rhythm of heavy artillery, interspersed with anguished screams.
This was a cleaner place. After the first flurry, the targets grew quiet as they tried to think their way out of the invisible cage she put them in. There wasn’t a way out, not until she ran out of ammo, and they wouldn’t know when that was. Still, somebody had to try to make a run for it. She was ready when he did, the guy sprinting toward the nearest building while the others laid down covering fire.
She dropped him fifteen paces out. It took him a while to crawl back behind the SUV again. None of his buddies rushed out to help. She thought about finishing him as she watched him struggle, weighing the expenditure of another round against reducing their manpower. But one more round was currency that bought her time.
That was her mission, time. She paid for it in snatches when they pushed her to it, and in between bouts of exchanging gunfire, she rested and listened to the windswept silence.
She had three rounds left when a hurricane arrived. The hurricane materialized into a star-eyed Djinn, Luis and several other tribunal Peacekeepers, and then, for Claudia, the dance was over.
The aftermath was a hell of a mess.
Over the next few days, correspondents from network, cable and a few foreign newspapers tried to fill up both motels. Several reporters were highly disgruntled when Peacekeeper officials and the FBI, including geologists and crossover experts, commandeered rooms. Then there was a great deal of squawking and flapping until everybody settled into another uneasy pattern, like birds on a wire.
Still other news crews, along with several sightseers, drove RVs in. All the local establishments were doing a booming business, especially the combination truck stop/fast-food joint/casino. Everyone else, the miners and their families, were shocked, grieving and afraid. Most of them hadn’t known what was going on and nobody knew whether or not they would have a job in the future. Operations at the Nirvana Silver Mining Company had been halted until further notice.
Sixty-eight undocumented human workers, all foreign nationals, had been recovered from the strange pocket of Other land, along with seven more bodies from shallow graves. The survivors were malnourished, fearful and confused about where they were. Promised work and a new life, they had been driven into the mine at night and taken across the passage to the Other land where they were forced to mine silver for food.
They didn’t have any other choice—there were no animals to hunt, nor did the Other land have enough vegetation to support life. The land was literally a buckle in the Earth, little more than magic-sensitive silver, air and rock. The passageway had been buried in a vein of silver and lay inert and undetected until with a few small, controlled blasts, the Nirvana Company had blown it open. The Company blocked the area off and told the legitimate miners the area was unsafe. The passage itself kept the workers captive, since none of them had a spark of Power with which to make the return journey.
Such a lot of fuss over a piece of real estate that was destined by federal law to go unclaimed by anyone.
The downfall of the already wealthy Bradshaw family was greed. Once they uncovered the pocket of Other land and realized what they had found, they had to mine it. They couldn’t use the local pool of workers and still hope to keep their activities secret, so they imported workers. As Scott Bradshaw said when he was arrested and questioned in the hospital, one thing led to another.
Bradshaw Senior lived. He was arrested in the hospital too.
When Claudia thought of the seven graves, she wished when she had pulled the trigger that she had made it a kill shot. Instead she’d tagged him high in the shoulder, enough to incapacitate him.
When Luis and the other Peacekeepers arrived, she got to sit back and enjoy watching the take down like prime-time TV. The only thing missing was the popcorn.
Good Christ, did Luis have moves. He was all power and grace, and sex-savvy smarts. She watched him with an odd kind of pained pride. She recognized talent when she saw it, and his star was definitely on the rise. He was the total package. It wouldn’t be long before he held a Senior Peacekeeper position.
Even as he chased Rodriguez down and pinned him to the pavement, Luis raised his head and searched for her. She lifted a hand and waggled her fingers. Soon as he caught sight of her, he left Rodriguez handcuffed and spread-eagled on the ground and raced toward her, climbing up to her ledge with athletic effortlessness.