The girl sat between them, reading whatever she was reading, or playing a game or something. Oblivious, anyway.
A new icon, a snowflake, flashed onto his screen, the word “conference” blinking in the corner. He tapped the button to accept, wondering.
“Too much for you. Get it?” the message said. The snowflake turned into a curvy twentieth-century poster girl who blew a kiss before winking out.
Landrum shot a look at the girl, who had a small quirk at the corner of her mouth, and just about fell out of his seat laughing.
“Something wrong?” the kid asked, pushing the bridge of her nose like someone used to wearing glasses.
“Nope,” he said.
On the other side of the car, Tramp Michaels looked a lot less cheerful and a bit more glum. Luke just couldn’t resist throwing him a big grin.
They drove through the night, stopping to change cars twice before getting to Asheville. It had been a bit of an experience for Kerry and Michaels to insert by something as prosaic as a road trip. So much so that they’d joked along the way, calling it the frat-boy hit.
Between one thing and another, it was the wee hours when they pulled into Knoxville. The weather was fine, and the roads dry, with forecast of more of the same. Operational necessity frequently required doing without sleep, but contrary to popular belief, proper rest was something you planned for if possible. The best guy in the world still performed better rested than fatigued. They found a cheap hotel and he sent Cargo in to set them up.
The hotel was a grayish brown, not intentionally, but because its white bricks and doors had been without a fresh coat of paint for so long they were grimy and stained. It was the kind of dive where half the “guests” rented by the week and could more accurately be described as residents.
It was the kind of place where it was safe to stay — if you were twenty-something, one-eighty-something pounds, male, and made of muscle.
It was Landrum’s turn driving, so he looked at Privett when he came walking back out across the cracked and faded parking lot. “Where’s the room?” he asked.
“Rooms,” the other man said shortly. “Around the other side, ground floor.” He pointed, turning to the back seat to toss the girl a key. “Here’s yours, Deni,” he said.
The kid took it without comment, and since he couldn’t see her face, Luke had no idea what she thought of it. What he thought of it was that he was uneasy putting a thirteen-year-old girl in a room by herself in this kind of shit heap even in broad daylight.
“You’re not staying in a room alone, Reardon. I’ll take the floor,” he said.
Being on the floor would suck, but there was no way he was going to stick Tramp or Kerry in there ignorant of the girl’s age. He’d still rather not pass on that bit of information; the only other guy who knew was Cargo, and putting him in with the girl was a no-go for obvious reasons.
She looked a little nervous. No, make that a lot nervous. Make that as if she expected to be a virgin sacrifice in the name of the job. Eew. If he didn’t know her age, he might have been fooled by the way they’d fixed her up, but knowing it, he looked at her and saw “kid” and… um… fuck no.
After shooting him a suspicious look that Landrum returned with his own patented “don’t be stupid, asshole” expression, Cargo just looked relieved.
As Luke carried her pack and his inside, the kid was looking anywhere but at him, and clearly trying to look as if she went into sleazy hotel rooms, alone, with an adult male, every day of her life. He shut the door behind himself and set the bags down by the chair.
“Quit worrying. I know you’re thirteen, and my baby sister is older than you. Get some sleep, Reardon,” he said. “Mind tossing me a pillow and the bedspread first?”
The look on her face was priceless.
They went in at night.
Leaving Knoxville in the late afternoon let them get through the mountains before it was quite dark, but by the time they hit Asheville, their headlights led them along a highway almost deserted after dark.
Asheville’s geography left many areas that could support homes unsuited to the kind of flat clusters of houses that squatted throughout midwestern suburbia. Towering ridges and folds in the Earth — huge to a man who’d been raised on the Great Plains — were sprinkled with a dusting of lights like stars, shining from the windows of rows of houses along the switchbacks.
Reardon was in the driver’s seat. She’d driven from Knoxville, putting her foot down and explaining that she would not get anything but an ulcer from riding in the car — she patted the hood of the drab-bodied old Crown Victoria possessively — with any of them driving. Her tone said, with the disdain only an adolescent girl can muster, what she thought of their gifts in the area of ground vehicle operation.
Landrum and Privett, afraid that her attitude would make Kerry and Tramp twig to her age, readily agreed that of course she could drive. Besides, with Luke riding shotgun, both other men were out of arm’s reach of her. They were starting to favor him with knowing looks, though, and he didn’t like that at all.
The house they were looking for was about halfway up one of the mountainsides. Vacant neighboring house, empty lot, terrain unfavorable to clusters of homes. It was nicely isolated.
Reardon pulled into the driveway of the vacant house and cut the lights, leaving the engine running. As they got out, they could feel the cold wind scraping against their tilted faces, not buffered much by winter-bare trees. The cold bit them with all the fierceness they knew from winter trips into Chicago, but Luke hadn’t expected to find in one of the Southern states.
At shortly past midnight, the lights were off in the Tyler household. Landrum thanked God that they had somehow managed to loot their own gear and take DAG’s supply of such nice items as modern night vision goggles with them. He knew from other gear that there was no telling what shit the Bane Sidhe were sticking operators with these days. Genuine DAG goggles meant everybody was seeing like daylight in a black and white movie. Luke’s dad had lots of those. This was like “Leave it to Beaver,” if the Beave had lived in a big, falling down piece of shit house that had obviously once been a nice place, probably for someone wealthy.
He had heard houses referred to as “falling down” before, but this one actually had the porch roof propped up on one side by a series of warped, hammered-together two by fours. The only thing to indicate the windows had once had shutters was the one window that had one shutter. Two other windows were boarded up. The very small front yard sported a scattering of toys and junk.
They kicked in the front door and went in two by two, clearing the building according to their training, just as they would have in any other hostile environment. They heard the screaming of the mother and child.
Tramp and Kerry found all three cowering back in the parents’ bedroom. The wife and boy were on one side of the bed, the scumbag du jour on the other.
“Wait, wait! Not in front of my wife and kid! Okay, I’ll go, I’ll go if you want, but not here, not like this…” the man pleaded.
Still in the process of pleading for his life, he moved suddenly to bring a shotgun to bear on the DAGgers. At least, he tried. Kerry nailed him before the gun had even cleared the top of the mattress.
The screaming of the wife and kid sounded far away and horrendous, and the mother fought viciously, gouging Luke’s arms deeply with her fingernails as he pulled her onto the bed and pinned her. The boy was pounding on his back as he fished a loaded syringe out of a leg pocket and hit the woman with a shot of Recalma Plus.
Behind him, he felt the boy go limp and get peeled off his back, turning to see Privett laying the unconscious kid out on the bed beside the mom.