“Phase two is canceled,” I said.
His face contorted in sudden, feral rage. I braced myself, expecting him to come at me. Instead, he took a deep breath.
A cloud of bilious yellow gas burst from between his lips, streaking through the air on a howl of anger. I leaped to the left, diving clear, as it blew past me. Iron turned to pitted, rusted ruin as the cloud washed over it, and the concrete sprouted a carpet of fuzzy black mold in its wake.
“He’s movin’!” Jennifer shouted. I saw him scramble up a boiler, flipping like an acrobat, and leap clear to the other side.
By the time we rounded the corner, he was gone.
Caitlin had a flush in her cheeks and a faint smile on her lips. Not many people could give her a workout. She leaned against me and I slid my arm around her waist.
“You both okay?” I said.
Jennifer dangled her empty pistol from her fingertip. “Little embarrassed I didn’t even wing him, but there’s always next time.”
“The breeder?” Caitlin asked.
“Dead. A couple of roaches might have gotten loose, but there’s nothing we can do about that now. We have definitely overstayed our welcome.”
*
Evacuating an entire hotel takes a while, and while it felt like we’d been battling in the basement for an hour—that’s what my aching muscles told me, anyway—we’d barely been down there for fifteen minutes. There were still lines of stragglers making their way to the parking lot, hotel employees scurrying in all directions, enough confusion to cover our escape. A couple of fire trucks had parked right out front, responding to the alarm. At least a hundred civilians were standing outside the hotel, milling around aimlessly or breaking into knots of conversation, and we used the edge of the crowd as a shield.
“Low profile,” Jennifer muttered in my ear, slinking alongside me. “That cop you punched is out here somewhere.”
“Probably right next to the cop whose gun you stole.”
“I’d like to not have to bail either of you out,” Caitlin said, “so step lively and keep your heads down.”
I caught sight of Teddy, moving fast between a couple of parked limos with his phone to his ear.
“Grab the car,” I said, “I’ll be right back.”
I circled around, waving to catch my brother’s attention. He blinked. “Gotta go,” he said and hung up his phone.
“Get Seabrook and Harding out of here, right now,” I told him. “You too. Do not go back inside that hotel.”
“Dan? What—what are you even doing here? And what happened to your forehead? Did you get hurt?”
“Listen to me very carefully. You know what I told you, when you asked why I was having a meeting with the mayor?”
He nodded, wary. “Using a bad guy to catch another bad guy. That fire alarm—”
“This particular bad guy might still be around. Grab the mayor and the commissioner and leave. Go back to Vegas. Tell Seabrook I said so. She’ll take my word for it.”
“Okay.” He took that in, and I watched his uncertainty slowly turn to steel. “I’m on it. I’ll call ahead and make sure the Metro escort meets us on the highway, and I’ll ride with the VIPs myself. Don’t worry, they’ll get home safe.”
“Good thinking. Hey.” I squeezed his shoulder. “You got this.”
“You know, someday you’re going to have to tell me the whole story here.”
“Someday,” I said.
*
We were crossing the Vegas city limits, home again, and I couldn’t unclench. Jennifer leaned forward in the back seat and her hands worked at my shoulders.
“They’re fine, sugar. We won. I mean, stalemate, Elmer’s still out there, but we gave him one hell of a black eye. It’s over.”
I wanted to believe that, but I couldn’t make it stick in my head. Maybe it was because my brother was involved. Maybe it was because Elmer Donaghy had been a step ahead of us since this sick little game began. We’d taken out two of his fronts, killed his science project, stopped him from infesting the mayors’ conference…so why didn’t I feel like it was time for a victory lap?
“You’ll feel better with a stiff drink in you,” Jennifer said. “Cait? Come with us? Drinks on the town?”
“With relish,” she said. “I think we’ve earned a bit of pleasure.”
Elmer’s plans had all fit the same format so far. The feint, the real plot, and then one last layer. A fail-safe. He always had a fail-safe.
My phone buzzed. It was Seabrook.
“Mayor?”
“We’ve got trouble,” she said. “We’re halfway between Boulder City and Vegas. The Metro escort just left.”
“Wait.” I hunched forward in my seat. “Left?”
“Earl is calling HQ and shouting up a storm, but nobody claims to know anything about it. The entire escort just peeled off onto an exit ramp. We’re all alone out here.”
“Turn around,” I told Caitlin. She gritted her teeth and swung hard into the left lane, angling for an open divider on the highway.
“Okay,” I said. “Tell your driver to keep moving. We’re coming to meet you, but do not, for any reason, pull off that road. Keep moving.”
The only answer was a crumpled bang, then dead silence.
40.
I knew what we would find before we reached the scene. One limousine pulled off to the side of the highway, with a front tire shredded down to the battered rims. We hooked another U-turn and came up behind it. The back doors hung open, nothing inside but a few tiny spatters of dried blood on the leather bucket seats.
I opened the driver’s-side door. The chauffeur sat slumped sideways with a forty-five-caliber hole in his face and the back of his head splattered across the privacy divider.
Teddy. Mayor Seabrook. Commissioner Harding. Gone. I punched the side of the limo. My knuckles stung as I stomped back to the car.
“Drive,” I said.
We headed back to the fortress. Jennifer kept an operations room ready to roll, if we ever needed one. It wasn’t much, just a long and rickety table salvaged from one of the tenement’s abandoned basements and a whiteboard stained with marker-trail ghosts, but it was a convenient place to rally the troops in a hurry. Jennifer stepped out to make a few calls. I paced, mostly. Pacing kept the walls from closing in.
“This isn’t your fault,” Caitlin told me.
I stopped in mid-stride. She was leaning against one wall, arms crossed, watching me.
“This is absolutely my fault,” I said. “We should have stayed with them. We should have rode convoy all the way back to Vegas.”
“And give the Network a bigger target? And what about when we returned? Would you babysit them for the rest of their lives? Donaghy clearly had a contingency plan in place. If he didn’t strike at the mayor today, he would have done it tomorrow.”
She was right. I knew she was right, but I was desperate to be furious at someone for losing Teddy and I was the only candidate in sight. I didn’t have anything to say, so I started pacing again. I reached the far wall, turned—and Caitlin was standing in my path. She put her hands on my shoulders, stopped my stride, held me fast.
“This,” she said, “is not productive.”
My nervous energy didn’t have anywhere to go. I stood there while it knotted up my stomach.
“Help me,” I said.
She pulled me into her arms. It was the best place to be right now.
Jennifer came back, brandishing her phone. “Y’all need to see this.”
She’d cued up a news report, a breaking bulletin on KTNV. Helicopter footage swirled across the city streets and hovered over a sprawling lot of vintage casino signs. The dead neon sat out under the afternoon sun, unlit and rusting away, while police lights flashed in the distance.
“—and gave pursuit,” the anchor said. “One of the suspect vehicles crashed into a lamppost near the Neon Museum, at which point the gunmen in both vans, with three confirmed hostages including Mayor Seabrook, made entry into the museum itself. At least one employee was shot in the attack. Police have cordoned off the surrounding area, and residents are advised to avoid North Las Vegas Boulevard, North Encanto Drive, and East Wilson—”