“Elmer’s got another site where he runs experiments,” he said. “That’s where he keeps the breeder. The breeder is a—”
His last words ended in a howl of agony. He threw his head back, shoulders quaking, and thrashed hard enough to bring the chair crashing down onto the plastic tarp. His throat swelled, rippled—and then burst, muscle and skin tearing as the roach, half a foot long and its mud-brown shell smeared with streaks of scarlet, dug its way out of him. Santiago was still alive, still trying to scream, his breaths coming out in a wet burble as his eyes bulged wildly.
Jennifer’s hand cannon roared, and a copper-jacketed bullet put him out of his misery. It tore into Santiago’s throat, shredding the roach, splintering vertebrae and splashing the remnants of two lives across four feet of plastic tarp. I stood over the carnage and waited for my ears to stop ringing.
“Swear to God,” I told her—still barely able to hear my own voice, like I was standing under five feet of water—“do not fire that thing indoors.”
“What?” she shouted. I think she was shouting.
Eventually we were able to communicate again. Caitlin nudged Santiago’s cheek with the toe of her shoe. The head lolled, only clinging to his body by a Swiss-cheese scrap of cartilage.
“That’s new,” she said lightly. “I’ve been half-convinced that certain people might talk me to death, given the chance, but I’ve never seen a man talk himself to death before.”
“Next time, we gag ’em first,” Jennifer said.
“Next time,” I told her, “you warn me before you start shooting.”
“Hey, you’ve seen how fast those critters move. I didn’t want that sucker getting loose and escaping into the vents. Not in my house. I’d have to start sleepin’ with a helmet on.”
She had a point. My ears still stung, but she had a point.
“Well, we got…something before he croaked,” I said. “Not much, but something. We know there’s another Network hideout in town. Which is good news, in a way. If we can track it down and take it by surprise, we might get the data Pixie needs to work on her decoder thingy.”
“As far as that last bit,” Jennifer said, “you know what he was about to say, right?”
“‘The breeder is a—’” I replied.
“Giant cockroach.” She pushed out her bottom lip and stared at Santiago’s dead body. “You know it. I know it. Caitlin knows it. It’s gonna be a giant roach. Let’s just prepare for that right now so we’re not surprised when we see it.”
Caitlin considered that and gave an agreeable nod. “The only question is…cow-sized? Truck-sized? House-sized? Now I’m curious.”
“Well,” I said, “on the bright side, it’ll keep. Anything in Elmer’s second hideout is staying in Elmer’s second hideout until he comes back from Paris. I don’t imagine the flunkies he has left are going to move forward on this ‘phase two’ thing without him.”
“Somethin’ to be said for striking while the iron’s hot,” Jennifer told me. “If we hit the streets and hunt this place down, maybe we can make sure Elmer doesn’t have any safe haven to come back to.”
She was right, but I could only fight so many fires at once, and that meant picking my priorities.
“Problem is,” I said, “we might end up chasing our tails all over town. Meanwhile, I’ve got a psycho cambion who’s here right now, he’s hot to kill me, and he doesn’t care if civilians get hurt in the process. I’ve got to focus on that.”
“Can’t argue with that,” Jennifer said. “Where’s your next stop?”
I didn’t know until an hour later, when Pixie got back to me with the registration info on Grimm’s license plate. We were half-wrong earlier. As it turned out, my would-be killer was professional enough to steal a car instead of using his own wheels.
Not just any car off the street, though. And he hadn’t made a mistake by letting us see his plates. He did it on purpose. He’d chosen his ride to send a very special message, just for me, a message that rocketed me straight back to the past.
31.
Jennifer stayed behind to supervise the cleanup. Officer Santiago would disappear, a new and eternal resident of the missing persons registry. I stopped at home to change my clothes; then Caitlin and I headed northwest on the 95. Her snow-white Audi roared up the open road, desert flats stretching to the rustred mountains on the horizon, as we chased down a ghost.
“Sometimes cars just drop off the grid,” Pixie had told me. “You know, they get mothballed, rust away outside a farmhouse somewhere. Maybe, eventually, somebody comes along and restores ’em.”
“Barn finds,” I said.
“Exactly. That’s when the chain of custody gets spotty. The plates belong to a white GMC panel van, which lines up with the description you texted me. Technically, it’s not stolen, but its registration has been expired since the late nineties and there’s no record of a sale—the paper trail just ends. So my best guess is your guy found it abandoned in a garage somewhere, fixed it up, and helped himself.”
“Great, so it’s a dead end after all. Out of curiosity, who owned it?”
“Not a who, a what. It was a company van. Belonged to an outfit called the New Transitions Wellness House. Looks like they were a state-funded halfway house for ‘youths at risk,’ sort of an alternative to juvie. They got shut down after an abuse scandal—”
She said more, but I wasn’t hearing her, too lost in the warrens of my memory. I didn’t need the details. I knew that house. I used to live there.
“I don’t like this.” Caitlin lightly drummed her fingers on the steering wheel. She’d said that once when I told her where we were going. And now, after I’d told her about the pre-bomb part of my day.
“I know. I run into Teddy at the same time this psycho is digging into my teenage years and throwing my past in my face? That’s too much memory lane in one place.”
“I know he’s your blood,” Caitlin said. She left the but unspoken.
She wasn’t wrong, and I was having the same suspicions. I hated this. The last thing I wanted, after a surprise reunion with my kid brother, was to think he was mixed up in this mess. All the same, I took out my phone and made some calls while she drove.
I’d already heard of Tall Pines Security; they had a solid rep, solid enough that I wouldn’t want to go up against them in the middle of a heist. That said, I poked around and made sure Mayor Seabrook had contracted the real Tall Pines. Maybe paranoid, but considering I’ve been a ComEd repairman, a Polymath Security alarm installer, and a FedEx driver on various jobs—plus another baker’s dozen of past disguises—it was worth verifying.
Next I pulled my job-recruiter routine and had a chat with the Tall Pines human-resources department. My brother was a solid employee, with the company for over a year. I was as satisfied as I was going to get, at least until I spent more one-on-one time with him.
“I hate to say it’s a coincidence,” I told her, “generally because there’s no such thing, but…it really does look like a fluke. Seabrook hired a solid security firm, no surprise there, and Teddy’s one of their reliable operators. Simple as that.”
Caitlin frowned her response. She wasn’t convinced. I don’t think I was, either, but I was working overtime to tell myself otherwise.
“All right,” she said, “leaving your brother’s reappearance out of this, we’re still heading toward a confrontation. Grimm stole that van as a direct challenge to you; he’s telling you that he knows your history. That he knows what he hopes are your weak points.”
“And he’s telling us where to meet him. I’m fine with that. If he wants a showdown this bad, he’s going to get one.”