Primacy of Darkness (11 page)

If it is personal, then she will certainly try again. I’m not too worried about it. She got the jump on me and still got the receiving end of an ass whooping. She will need time to recover before she can even think about trying for a rematch. Still, I don’t need an obviously trained killer on my back when I’m trying to hunt down and kill another accomplished murderer.

I’m confident I can take Jack, if I can fight him on my terms. I’ve fought stronger vamps than him, although he is smarter than most. The hard part is going to be finding him before he finds me. I challenged him tonight, and being challenged is something he is not accustomed to. Part of him probably enjoys the rush, but his ego is fuming and will demand retribution. That means he will probably seek me out, and that is not how I want to fight him.

There isn’t much I can do about any of it right now. I just want to go home and relax. I took some shots tonight, and I need to feed again to be at the top of my game, but with everyone licking their wounds, I can put it off until tomorrow.

CHAPTER 15

Castillo clenched and unclenched her fists, fighting the impulse to draw her weapon and shoot Malone in the back of the head as his slimy lawyer led him away. She knew she did not have enough to hold him for long, but someone had called his lawyer and gotten him released before she could even check for gunshot residue.

She shifted her glaring eyes to Captain Starks and let the full weight of her fury wash over him. “It was you, wasn’t it?”

The captain furrowed his brow. “What?”

“You brought that scumbag in here. You called Malone’s lawyer to deliberately undermine my arrest.” She took a step back. “You’re one of them, aren’t you?”

“One of what?”

“Whatever the hell he is, and whatever he is, he isn’t human.”

“Look, I don’t know who called Stepanek. He came into my office and demanded that I take him to where you were interrogating his client, a client whose only wrongdoing was being attacked in the street, and even that got muddied with this bullshit about an energy drink commercial. What I do know, is that if you keep going around talking crazy shit about monsters and thirty-year-old World War II vets, you are going to be spending your vacation in a padded room!”

“You think I’m crazy.”

“I think you are exhausted and need a very long rest. I know I do, but I have a psycho running around out there who just upped his game from murdering hookers to killing cops. I had hoped you had gotten your shit together enough to help me stop him, but I was wrong. Go home, make an appointment with the counselor tomorrow, and come back as soon as you’re ready.”

Angel withered beneath her scowl. “Don’t look at me, Sarge. You know I have your back even when I think you’re being crazy.”

Castillo rolled her eyes. “Gee, thanks for the support, Angel.”

“You got it.”

Castillo stopped mid-storming-off and turned back to her superior. “You have rats on your ship, Captain.”

“Tell me something I don’t know. I’m just happy when they don’t shit in my food.”

***

Castillo left the precinct and got her car from the yard. With any luck, she did accomplish something by bringing Malone in for questioning. Pulling out her phone, she called her contact in the IT department.

“Hey, Geek Squad, this is Sergeant Castillo. Did you do it?”

“Um, my name is Harold, not Geek Squad.”

“Fine, Harold, did you do it?”

“Yes and no.”

“What the hell do you mean yes and no?”

“I mean yes I did it, but I will lie and say no, all the way to my grave.”

“Super. What’s the phone number and SIM PIN?”

She wrote down the digits Harold recited. Pulling a laptop out of its case, she set it on the passenger seat atop the stack of photos and documents and turned it on. She launched the tracking program, entered Malone’s phone information, and waited for the cell towers to fix his location. She took a second to plot the direction of the blip on the screen and tore out of the police yard.

Castillo flipped on the red strobe light she kept in her car to speed past traffic and run through red lights. She could not let this go. Malone might not be the killer they were looking for now, but she knew in her heart that he was tied to it in some way. She simply could not let him go unchallenged while people in her city died, especially cops.

It looked as though Malone was going home. She increased her speed, not wanting him to reach his fortress of solitude before she could intercept him. Tires squealed and horns blared as she threaded her way through the sparse traffic. They say New York is the city that never sleeps, but at 5 a.m., at least most seem to still be tapping the snooze button.

She spotted the glaring red eye of a motorcycle’s taillight ahead and romped the gas. Her car rocketed past Malone’s bike. Castillo mashed the brakes and spun the wheel, turning the car sideways in front of Malone’s motorcycle. Both vehicles skidded to a stop at the outer edge of the large open area before Leo’s loft.

“What the hell are you doing, Castillo?” Leo shouted.

Castillo leaned through the open window, the interior light illuminating the black and white photos she clutched in her hand. “I want you to explain these pictures! I want you to tell me how the hell you have a military record dating back to the Second World War!”

“I can’t. You’re insane, Castillo. Do as your boss says and go get therapy.”

Leo gunned the engine and sped the short distance to his loft. Castillo cursed and stabbed the button to release her seatbelt. This was the last chance she was going to have to confront Malone without violating a restraining order.

***

“I got something,” Carol said as she caught the glow of an approaching motorcycle’s headlight.

“Is it Malone?” Trinh asked.

Carol gazed through her thermal rifle scope and checked the blip on her tablet PC. “Has to be, but there is someone else coming in behind him. Looks like a cop.”

“Shit! What are they doing?”

Trinh hid in the crumbling ruins of a building not far from Leo’s loft while Carol kept overwatch from the fifth floor of an abandoned building two hundred yards away.

“I can’t say for sure. The cop car pulled in front of Malone, and the two appear to be talking. Wait, Malone is moving. He’s in front of his loft now. Trinh, we need to abort.”

Anger and frustration raged within Trinh’s heart. Passion burned her soul and incinerated logic.

“No! I let him get away once. I can’t do it again.”

“Trinh, the cop is getting out of the car. You have to abort!”

***

With the folder full of photos and military documents in her hand, Castillo opened her car door and made to step out. Leo looked over his shoulder and tried to get his door unlocked so he could escape inside. He had just turned the key when the world vanished in a thunderous explosion.

Leo had a moment of comprehension where he knew he was airborne, yet he was still gripping the door handle, and it felt as though a very large man was pushing him against the steel surface from behind. The force of the blast had torn the door, frame and all, out of the wall and sent it and Leo flying across what was once a parking lot.

The concussion slammed Castillo’s car door shut in her face. Another second, and it would have caught her leg between the door and car body, which almost certainly would have broken a bone. The window shattered, sending tiny cubes of safety glass pelting into her face.

Castillo’s ears rang, and tiny rivulets of blood tracked down her face. The force of the blast not only stole most of her hearing, but several seconds of her life. She remembered a deafening boom and a concussive blast then nothing. It took her several seconds to realize that she was still in her car and several more to remember where she was parked.

The explosion obliterated the fog and replaced it with choking dust and smoke. Looking through the glassless window, through the cloying haze, Castillo made out a dark shape halfway between her car and the wreckage of Malone’s loft. The car door gave off a protesting squeal as she opened it and stumbled toward the form.

The detective recognized the steel door once attached to the building. She gasped when she got close enough to make out an arm sticking out from beneath it.

“Malone!”

Her voice sounded muddy in her ears and was barely audible over the incessant keening. She leaned down, grabbed the edge of the door frame, and tried to lift it off Malone’s body. The door must have weighed a quarter ton and refused to budge. Castillo shuffled back to her car, opened the trunk, and returned with the car jack.

She placed the jack beneath the edge of the door being propped up by Leo’s body and worked the small handle. The door raised up a couple of inches before the jack reached its maximum length. Castillo grabbed Leo under his shoulders and was able to slide him out from beneath the slab of steel.

Tortured metal shrieked and the remains of the loft’s roof collapsed atop the wreckage. The walls had contained most of the blast, sending the force of the explosion through the windows near the top, but enough energy remained to create considerable damage to the interior structure. The internal supports began falling in a domino fashion, collapsing inward. One wall toppled and crumbled outward, kicking up a fresh cloud of dust. The rest of the roof immediately followed.

Castillo pressed her ear to Leo’s chest but felt no movement and heard no heartbeat. She touched her fingertips to his throat, but felt only cold flesh. She dropped onto her backside and held her head in her hands. Could the source of her deepest nightmares really be dead? She started to reach for her phone, but she could already hear the approaching sirens.

Leo’s body jerked and he bolted upright with a grating snarl. Castillo yelped, rolled away, and sprang to her feet with her gun drawn.

“Fucking Christ!”

Leo rolled onto his hands and knees and moaned. “Sonofabitch.” He raised his head and gazed at the shattered remains of his loft. “Sonofabitch!”

He took a few staggering steps toward the ruins of his home. He sensed Castillo’s presence, stopped, and turned. Leo took in the gun she held in her shaking grip and curled his lip in a sneer.

“I hope you don’t plan on shooting me. It is the only thing that could possibly put me in a worse mood.”

Castillo’s eyes were wide with fear. “What the fuck are you?”

***

“Goddammit, Trinh!” Carol shouted into her headset.

“Do you have eyes on Malone?”

“To hell with Malone, you almost killed that cop!”

Trinh cursed herself in her head. “Is he okay?”

Carol watched the thermal luminescent shape get out of the car through her rifle scope. “Yeah, he or she is moving.”

“What about Malone?”

“You are like a dog with a bone. Forget Malone!”

“What about Malone?” Trinh shouted.

“I can’t see him. I can’t see anything other than the cop and the blast site. I can’t believe you set off the explosives with that cop here.”

“I didn’t have time to let Malone get inside the building. The cop would have been too close and gotten killed for sure if I waited. I had to set them off when I did. I didn’t have a choice.”

“Yes, you did! You could have aborted like I said.”

“Then Malone would have seen the explosives and known we were onto him. I never would have had another chance like this again. Do you see him yet?”

Carol bit her lip to stifle any further rebuke and peered through the scope. A vampire’s natural body temperature ran at about eighty-five degrees Fahrenheit, but they could raise or lower it at will. It was doubtful that Malone was bothering to expend even the slight effort to change it, so his heat signature should stand out against the background.

Carol watched the cop struggle with something on the ground. A new thermal image emerged as Castillo dragged a body out from beneath an object.

“I see him.”

“Do you have a shot?”

“No.”

“Carol. Kill Mode…”

“Call me whatever you want, I am not shooting Malone right in front of a cop. You have already exposed us too much. I am aborting. You do whatever you want. I signed on to kill vampires, not blow up cops.”

“You know what he did to me, Carol! You know what he did to my family!”

“And you know what his kind did to mine! Do you think I hate them any less than you do just because you have more bodies to mourn? They took my family too, but I will not let them take my identity, my humanity, too!”

Trinh mentally berated herself again. Carol was right. She had gone too far, let her hatred of Malone and his kind strip her of her sense of right and wrong. She almost killed someone, and she had no problem justifying becoming a murderer. The one thing Malone had not taken from her when he slaughtered her village she nearly gave him of her own free will—her sense of self.

“You’re right, Carol. I’m sorry. Let’s get the hell out of here. I really screwed up this time.”

“We’ll get him next time.”

“Damn right we will.”