Watcher of the Dark: A Jeremiah Hunt Supernatual Thriller (The Jeremiah Hunt Chronicle) (17 page)

“But he stormed in that night, visibly upset. He told me there was trouble brewing and that it was best that I got out of town for a few days. I didn’t want to leave him, especially if something was happening, but he told me it was related to things ‘beyond the normal’ as he liked to call them and it was best if his enemies couldn’t use me as a target.

“When I still refused, he had his bodyguards forcibly remove me from the house and take me to a hotel in Palm Springs for the night.”

I could see where this was going. Without his bodyguards present, Durante had been much more vulnerable than he might otherwise have been. His enemies had gotten to him because he’d been more concerned about Bergman’s life than his own.

I could practically taste Bergman’s regret. I’d been there, done that, and knew the special kind of hell such regret truly was.

“Before I left, I heard Michael on the phone with someone, ranting that he’d rather burn in hell for eternity than give the Key to Fuentes. That letting him take control of the Key would be a nightmare on earth.

“That was the last time I saw him alive. And the only time I heard him mention a Key. I’m sorry.”

“No, I’m sorry,” I replied, surprising myself. And I genuinely was. The more I heard about Fuentes, the less I liked. I still didn’t know what the Key was or exactly what it did, but it was quickly becoming apparent that it must be an artifact of considerable power if Fuentes was putting this much effort into recovering it.

If that was indeed the case, I had no doubt that Durante had been right—letting Fuentes get his hands on the Key would, indeed, be a nightmare.

“Any idea who he was talking to that evening?” I asked, as gently as I could.

“None. I’ve been trying to figure that out for weeks now.”

And just like that my great lead came to a stuttering halt. If Bergman didn’t know what the Key was or where Durante might have hidden it, I was pretty much out of luck.

“So now what?”

“Now I suggest you find a different hiding place. If I was able to track you down, I’m sure those less pleasant than I can do the same.”

“But I don’t know anything.”

I felt bad for the guy. “I know that,” I told him, “and you know that, but Fuentes’s thugs don’t. If I were you I wouldn’t take the chance.”

I thanked him for his time and headed for the door. Just before I reached it, I turned back to face him.

“One last thing,” I said. “Where the hell are we anyway?”

22

Dawn was edging its way over the horizon when I stepped back inside my bungalow. I was exhausted, mentally and physically. Apparently sleepwalking—and sleep-driving—required more than a fair bit of energy. Combine that with the heightened level of tension that seemed to be the norm here at Casa Fuentes and you ended up feeling the way I did now: like I’d been hit by a truck, only to have it back up and run over me a second time.

I walked into the bedroom and collapsed on the bed, still fully clothed.

Sleep must have come instantly, for the next thing I knew Grady was standing over me some indeterminate time later, poking me with the tip of my cane.

“Wake up, Princess. We’ve got work to do.”

I mumbled something about shoving that cane somewhere uncomfortable if he touched me with it again, but apparently my threat wasn’t all that convincing for he went right back to jabbing me with it.

“Come on, Hunt.” Poke. “Get your ass out of bed.” Poke. “Rivera’s waiting.”

It was the mention of Rivera that got me moving. Even in the short time I’d been here, I’d learned that it was best not to irritate the fiery Latino sorcerer if you could avoid it.

I sat up and looked around. It was dark enough that I could see Grady standing there in the shadows, but he must have left the front door open because I could see a little bit of light leaking in through the doorway behind him.

Shaking my head to clear it, I asked, “What does he want?”

“How the hell should I know?”

Grady folded my cane up and tossed it on the bed beside me. “Get up and ask him yourself,” he said, as he turned and left the room.

Always the pleasant one, that was Grady all right.

I took a few minutes to change my clothes and splash some water on my face before making my way outside and over to the main house to look for Rivera.

I found him waiting for me in the foyer, along with Ilyana and Grady. Tension was in the air and I had a hunch I wasn’t going to like whatever came next.

Turns out I was right.

We left the house and piled into the Charger. It felt odd to have so much room, and I wondered if anyone else in the car was thinking of Perkins’s absence. Not a single word had been spoken about him since Grady had carried off his corpse two nights before. I wondered what had happened to it and then decided that I really didn’t want to know. There were just too many things that fed upon the dead; pretending that he’d been given a decent burial or cremation was much better. Who knew? Perhaps he had.

The sky was clear, the sun was shining brightly, and I couldn’t see a damn thing, even with both pairs of shades. So instead I sat back and waited to hear what we were up to.

When, after ten minutes, no one volunteered any information to that effect, I leaned forward and said, “So where are we going anyway?”

“To talk to some people,” Rivera replied from the front passenger seat. “Keep your mouth shut and your eyes open. We’ll do the rest.”

I refrained from commenting on the wisdom inherent in telling a blind man to keep his eyes open—Rivera wouldn’t appreciate the irony, I knew—and instead concentrated on the implications of what Rivera had just revealed.

Fuentes had obviously expected to find the third and final piece of the Key at Durante’s, and our inability to do so—along with what seemed thus far his inability to find Bergman—must have left him scrambling for new options. He was no doubt betting that someone in L.A.’s supernatural community knew where it was and was sending us to shake a few trees and see what fell out. It was a scattershot strategy, at best, and told me what I needed to know about how close Fuentes was to finding the remaining portion of the Key, which was not close at all.

That gave me a little breathing room, it seemed.

Unless, of course, something actually fell out of one of the trees we were being sent to shake.

We got on the highway for a short distance and then left that behind for a variety of back streets, as evidenced by the constant starts and stops we made along the way. Eventually, maybe twenty minutes or so after we’d left Fuentes’s, we pulled over and stopped.

“Remember what I said, Hunt,” Rivera said, as we got out of the car. “Keep your eyes open for anything like that thing we faced the other night but otherwise let us handle things.”

Right.

The scent of beer and stale sweat that met my nostrils the minute we stepped through the door told me we were in a bar. The sudden explosion of movement and a shouted “Get him!,” followed by the crash of furniture and several grunts of pain, told me someone, most likely the bartender, had made a bid for freedom and failed.

I didn’t think that was going to sit well with Rivera and I was right.

“Just where the
fuck
do you think
you’re
going?” Rivera asked.

The reply was too mumbled for me to understand, but the voice was clearly male.

“I don’t give a damn what you thought; I’ve got some questions and you’re going to answer them. If you don’t, I’ll make you wish you’d never been born, understand?”

Another mumbled reply.

There was too much light in the bar for me to see anything. I didn’t dare borrow the sight of any of my companions—I’d pushed my luck far enough in that area already—so I cast about looking for a ghost I might entice with my music.

No luck.

The bar was empty of apparitions, though whether that was because it was normally that way or because the ghosts had fled at the first sign of our arrival, I didn’t know. Either way the result was the same; I was still unable to see.

“Have you seen this man?” Rivera asked.

“No.”

The squeal of pain that erupted thirty seconds later told me that Rivera didn’t believe the man’s answer.

Perhaps it was better that I couldn’t see after all.

“Look again. Are you sure you don’t recognize him?”

The response this time was quick and clear. “It’s Durante’s gopher. That Bergman guy.”

I nearly froze at the mention of Bergman’s name, and it was only my heightened sense of self-preservation that kept me from doing so. If they knew I’d been out doing research on my own there’d be hell to pay, of that I was certain. I kept a bored look on my face and pretended not to know what was going on around me, all the while listening closely.

“Word is he used to drink here pretty regularly?”

“Yeah. Every Wednesday, like clockwork.”

There was no attempt to hold back information now. Whatever Rivera had done to the guy, it had certainly impressed on him the need to cooperate.

“Was he here this week?”

“No.”

Another scream, longer this time.

“Whadd’ya do that for?” the man said, after he’d stopped screaming and regained his breath.

“To remind you that I’m not fucking around. I want to know where this guy is.”

“I don’t know. I swear to you; I don’t know.”

“Verikoff?”

Ilyana spoke up for the first time since entering the building. “He’s telling the truth, I think.”

What? She was some kind of human-demon lie detector now?
I made a mental note to remind myself to watch what I said in her presence.

“Who’d he come in here with?” Rivera wanted to know.

“Nobody.”

“No one? Ever?”

I could hear the frown in Rivera’s tone.

Apparently, so could the man he was addressing, for he began pleading with him. “Don’t look at me like that. I’m telling you the truth. He always came in alone. I swear, man, I swear. Don’t touch me again. Please!”

I started to feel sick to my stomach and turned away, unwilling to listen to any more. I could sense Ilyana’s presence nearby, but she didn’t say anything as I walked past. The questioning went on for several more minutes, with predictable results. The guy didn’t know anything and we left there with our souls a little darker for what we’d done but with no information to show for it.

And so it went, for the rest of the day.

We’d pull up to some location, question whoever we’d come to see, and then move on to the next. From time to time I was able to borrow the sight from a nearby ghost and take a look at those Rivera was bracing for information. They ran the gamut—men and women; Mundane, Gifted, and Preternatural; young, old, and in between. By late afternoon word had apparently spread and many of those we went looking for were not in their usual places. We kept at it though, scouring the streets until well after dark, for Rivera was loath to return to Fuentes without anything new, but eventually we were forced to do just that. Continuing to bang on doors and windows was just going to send those we were looking for deeper into hiding and that was the last thing Rivera wanted.

The ride back was passed in silence and Rivera stalked off before the engine had even finished ticking. As I got out of the car, Grady said, “I could use a drink. Anyone else?”

I was about to decline, not wanting to spend any more time in the company of these sociopaths than I had to, but Ilyana grabbed my arm and answered for us both.

“Make that three,” she said.

It seemed I was having that drink after all.

23

We retired to the poolroom where Grady had found me talking with Perkins a few days before. Ilyana led me over to a seat at the bar and climbed onto the stool beside me. Grady must have moved around behind the bar, for I heard glasses being knocked about and then something being poured.

“It isn’t the best whiskey Fuentes’s money can buy, but I’m sure you’ll agree that it’s a damn sight better than you’re used to drinking, Hunt,” Grady said as he clinked a glass down in front of me.

I wrapped my hand around the glass and raised it to my lips, intending to take a drink, but a hand on my arm stopped me.

“Hang on there, Princess. We’ve got to make a toast first.”

“A toast?” I asked. “To what?” It didn’t seem like there was all that much to be toasting lately.

But Grady surprised me.

“To Perkins,” he said. “May his Gift guide him well in the afterlife.”

“To Perkins,” Ilyana said.

“To Perkins,” I echoed.

Grady was right: Fuentes’s whiskey
was
a damn sight better than anything I’d ever had. It burned pleasantly on its way down.

“Hit me again,” I said, putting the glass down on the counter, and Grady complied. By the time he and Ilyana began playing pool a few minutes later, my head was just starting to buzz.

Which might explain why I asked my next question.

“So what’s Rivera’s story? Why’s he so gung ho to please Fuentes all the time?”

The clacking of the pool ball stopped and silence fell. It hung there for a long moment, a wet curtain dropped over the festivities. I was about to tell them never mind when Ilyana spoke up.

“Sons typically like to please their fathers, don’t they?”

I was in the midst of taking another sip and choked at her reply, spewing that fine whiskey all over the bar in front of me.

“Rivera’s his son? Seriously?”

I just couldn’t see it. There was no familial resemblance, never mind not a large enough spread in their ages. Unless Fuentes was a lot older than he looked, he would have had to father Rivera in his early teens.

“Well, not by blood,” Grady said. “But blood has little to do with it in this situation. Fuentes plucked Rivera out of an orphanage when he was a teenager. Brought him up in his household, treated him as if he were his own child. It was Fuentes who identified Rivera’s particular penchant for the Art, who trained him and set him on the path he’s on today. Without Fuentes, I have little doubt that Rivera would either be in jail or dead at this point.”