The Man Who Crossed Worlds (A Miles Franco Urban Fantasy) Read online

  “I will.”

  His legs were a little unsteady as he walked back toward the stairwell. Mine were too. I took a shaking step into the room, careful to stand in a patch not covered in sticky brown blood, and played at being a detective.

  I started with the two men. One lay to my left and one to my right, as if they’d been guarding the door against whoever had come for them. The one to my left had managed to draw his pistol before being killed, but the other one had fallen with his gun still holstered, his hand flopped a few inches from the butt.

  I crept closer to the one on the left, breathing through my mouth to avoid the smell as much as possible. His round face was set in a permanent expression of shock, eyes open wide. Something about him tickled my memory. Was he a cop that’d picked me up a few years ago? He had the police look about him, a previously fit man that’d gone to seed with too many donuts.

  I gave him a cursory search. The driver’s license in his wallet told me his name was Elwin Major, which struck another bell in my head. I recalled a story in the papers a couple of years back about a bunch of cops that got kicked out of the force on brutality charges.

  I returned the man’s wallet to his pocket and checked out the other guy. His face looked familiar as well. Had Todd been calling in his old ex-cop buddies to work for him?

  Searching the two men turned up nothing else of note, just a couple of spare clips for their sidearms and some house keys. The guy on my right had a picture in his wallet of himself with a good-looking woman and a young girl at some beach. I got a bad taste in my mouth staring at it, so I shoved it back in his pocket. Stupid bastard. Why the hell had he got mixed up in this shit when he had people waiting for him at home?

  I settled back on my haunches and stared at the hole ripped in the center of his shirt. The skin beneath it looked almost burnt. A Tunneler had killed these men, and he’d done it in a very personal, intimate way. He hadn’t just brought the building down on them.

  I went to O’Neil last. She hadn’t been killed by Tunneling; it was obviously a gunshot that’d splattered her brains across the wall. Stupid bloody woman. I thought she was supposed to be smart, one of the better Tunnelers in the city. And now she was lying twisted and bloody in some anonymous office building in a city that was tearing itself apart.

  “What promises did Todd make to you?” I whispered. I went through her handbag, feeling like a grave-robbing ghoul. A wallet with several hundred dollars in cash and the usual assortment of plastic. Some fancy electronic key for her BMW. A tube of lipstick. A handful of assorted Pin Holes etched into brass. Nothing else. Any Kemia she’d been carrying was gone.

  “Goddamn it,” I said. “You gotta have something.” A signed confession fingering Todd would be nice, but I’d settle for anything that’d link them. The bank account records Rob had got his hands on wouldn’t be much use, considering how illegally they’d been obtained. I needed something hard, something I could give to Vivian and point to and say: “Here’s your proof, now go arrest that asshole.”

  But there was nothing. If she’d had anything incriminating, it’d been picked clean.

  I clenched my hands into fists and ground my teeth together. I wanted to punch something, I wanted to pull out my nightstick and beat her body until something useful came out. Everything was just one dead-end after another. It was hopeless.

  I was about to turn and go when I caught sight of her hand. It was clenched in a fist, but there was a corner of black plastic poking out. Her cell phone.

  I crouched back down by her hand. For some reason, I couldn’t take my eyes off her painted fingernails and the three rings that adorned her fingers.

  Come on, Miles. Just a dead body. Just a dead woman’s hand. You barely even knew her, and she would’ve killed you as soon as look at you anyway, probably.

  Her flesh was cold, though not as cold as I expected. More like a cup of coffee that’d been left out on the counter for an hour or so. I forced myself not to cringe as I took her fingers in hand and pried them apart. The worst part was the stiffness, the way her fingers resisted me. I got them apart just far enough and snatched the cell phone away. My stomach churning, I rubbed my hands on my jacket as if I could wipe away what I’d done, but I could still feel her dead skin beneath mine.

  The phone was some fancy smartphone, the sort of thing you could use to reprogram a nuclear missile and unite quantum mechanics and relativity while you check your emails. By some miracle, there was no passcode to unlock it. I spent a few minutes trying to work out how to drive it. Goddamn, you’d need a Master’s degree in computer engineering to work the thing.

  I eventually figured out how to access her recent calls. A couple of numbers came up regularly, but no names were attached. Maybe Rob could run them with his computer, get it to spit out some names.

  I was getting antsy standing around in this slasher-film room, but I didn’t want to leave until I was sure I had something. I doubted I’d be able to come back. The room had been cleared out apart from a couch and an office chair; everything I had to work with was on this phone. I scrolled through to O’Neil’s text messages, and that’s where I hit paydirt.

  Dozens of messages were stored in there, all from a single number. She’d been arrogant, or just sloppy, and hadn’t bothered to delete them. Plans, hints of something sinister. Again, the number had no name attached, but I recognized Todd’s words, his messed up sense of right and wrong. If we could trace the messages to his number, maybe Vivian and any honest cops left on the force could nail the son of a bitch.

  SD dealt with, one of the recent messages read, but Franco slipped the net. I put out APB. He will be out of circulation soon.

  Not as soon as he’d hoped. I flicked through to another message. The vials have been shipped. Time to go dark.

  I glanced over at O’Neil’s body. She’d gone dark, all right. The idiotic woman.

  All right, I’d spent enough time here. I slipped the phone into my pocket and patted it. It wasn’t much, but it might just be enough. I allowed a small smile to creep across my face.

  Got you, you bastard.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Desmond was on his cell phone when I got back to him. He was still looking a bit pale, and his grin hadn’t returned. I gave him a nod and we jogged through the rain to the car, him still muttering into the phone.

  I got into the car and pulled O’Neil’s smartphone from my pocket to go through it again. Before I could, it started ringing.

  I was so shocked I nearly dropped it. A little animation of a ringing rotary phone had appeared on the screen, along with a number. The same number that had accompanied the text messages, if I remembered correctly.

  I exchanged a glance with Desmond, but he was still on his own phone. Heart pounding, I pressed the screen to accept the call, and put it to my ear.

  The sound of rain and muffled engine noises came through first. And then there was a voice.

  “Shirley,” Todd said. “Where the fuck are you? I lost contact with William and Natalie, and the other Tunnelers aren’t picking up. But I got the girl.”

  I clutched the phone tight to my ear, not daring to open my mouth. The girl? Who the hell was he talking about?

  “I’m nearly at the Avenues,” he continued. “I need you to meet me there. The girl’s getting aggressive, and it’s gonna be risky with so much product lying around. Something funny’s going on, and—”

  There was a low bang, and some muffled noises. Then he spoke again. “What the fuck? Oh, shit!”

  Another crackle, like he’d dropped the phone. I heard something high-pitched, something like a scream. A familiar scream.

  And then came the gunshots.

  I squeezed the phone so hard part of me worried I’d crush it. The blasts sounded distorted in the phone’s speaker, but they were unmistakable. A sound like the shattering of glass came through, and a car door opened. Over it all was the scream.

  “Get gone!” Todd’s voice was distant. “Ru
n, you stupid bitch.”

  The line went dead.

  I kept holding the phone to my ear for a few seconds, praying that scream wasn’t who I thought it was.

  “Miles?” Desmond said.

  I turned to him. He stared at the phone in my hand, his jaw clenched, and silently handed me his cell phone.

  “Miles, it’s Rob.” His voice was clipped. “I got into the hospital records for you.”

  “Tell me she’s there. Rob, tell me she’s still there.”

  “I’m sorry. I can’t.”

  A punch to the gut would’ve been less painful. I opened my mouth, but nothing came out. Breathe, Miles.

  “What… You just mean they discharged her, right? Tell me that’s what you mean.”

  I already knew it wasn’t by the tone of his voice and the look on Desmond’s face, but I didn’t let myself believe it until Rob said it. “Last time they saw her was when a nurse took observations a couple of hours ago. They ran her blood, but it came back clean. They were planning to discharge her when her mother showed up. The girl started to get agitated so they decided to keep her in a bit longer.”

  “‘Agitated’? The hell do they mean by that?”

  “I don’t know, Miles, I’m just telling you what’s written down. It looks like she got so aggressive they called the cops. Some detective showed up and took her away.”

  I cradled the steering wheel with my free arm. “Jesus Christ.” I shouldn’t have left her. Why the fuck had I left her?

  Todd was using her to get to me. Only something had gone wrong. Fuck, she could be bleeding in a gutter right now. Who’d been shooting? What had Todd got her into?

  Christ, what had I got her into?

  Desmond had no complaints when I told him where we were going, never even asked that I drop him off home first. On another day I would have been damn near gushing with gratitude, but right then all I could think about was getting Tania home to her mother.

  I’d let her down too many times already. O’Neil’s phone felt heavy in my pocket, but I put all thoughts of that aside. Getting Todd and clearing my name was nothing if I couldn’t protect Tania. So I started the car, gunned the engine, and headed for the center of a city at war with itself.

  It didn’t take long for us to find Todd’s car. It was in the middle of the street just outside the Avenues. It’d been turned to Swiss cheese.

  We stopped, and I practically tore the seatbelt off me. But when I reached the car, I couldn’t find any blood. No sign of Todd or Tania. No nothing.

  Desmond waited while I took my fury out on the bullet-riddled vehicle. White-hot fire bubbled out of every pore of my body, from every sore and every cut. I threw myself against the car, knowing it would hurt me more than it. That was okay. I wanted to hurt.

  Finally, there was no more anger. Desmond came to me, put a hand on my shoulder, and let me back to his car.

  “I shouldn’t have—”

  “To hell with your shouldn’t have, guy,” Desmond said. “It ain’t done, yet, you hear me? We’ll find her.”

  “Fuck you. I lost her. I fucking lost her.”

  I panted, face hot, and swallowed down the pain in my chest. Damn it all.

  After a minute, Desmond put his hand on my shoulder and gently pulled me away from the bullet-riddled car. I let him lead me back across the road.

  “Look,” Desmond said quietly, “what was the last thing the cop said before the line went dead?”

  I tried to piece the call together in my head. “He told her to run.”

  “So maybe she’s not with him anymore. Maybe she got free.”

  He was right. And if that was true, that meant she couldn’t have gone far. But where the hell would a scared teenage girl go in this part of town?

  No. That wasn’t the question to ask. She wasn’t a scared little girl, not at the moment. Rob said she’d been getting aggressive at the hospital. Tania was crafty, but aggressive? That wasn’t like her. Unless…

  “The Chroma,” I said. “Christ. She’s withdrawing from it.”

  Shit. I should’ve seen this coming. It hadn’t crossed my mind that she’d be hooked after a single hit.

  I looked out the car window, down a sloping hill. Down to the Avenues. She wasn’t a scared girl. She was a junkie. And she’d do what junkies do best when their stash runs out.

  “We’re going to the Avenues,” I said.

  Desmond gunned the engine.

  The Avenues were lined with trees, but most of them were dead all year round, their roots covered in cigarette butts and empty beer cans. The place had always been a shit-hole, but it didn’t look like anyone would have to worry about it much longer. It was a goddamn warzone.

  Buildings were crumbling all around us, or destroyed already. The rain hadn’t been enough to wash the debris from the streets; shattered bricks and bits of cars lay scattered across the concrete. One building had spewed its contents across the road, and we had to abandon the car before getting far into the neighborhood.

  The people of The Avenues were scattered around in alleyways and huddling under awnings, dressed in multiple layers of old clothes covered in rain and dust. Humans and Vei hung around in about equal numbers, mostly sticking to their own species. Most of them had a shell-shocked look about them, staring blankly ahead. A few of them stared at the destroyed buildings with real emotion in their eyes, anger and grief clear on their faces.

  My blood boiled as we walked past. These were people that didn’t have much to start with, and now they were left with even less. I wondered if Todd had considered these people when he concocted his schemes.

  I could hear explosions and gunfire, but most of it was in the distance. It looked like the fighting had been here in the early hours of the gang war, but it had already moved on. I didn’t know exactly how many Tunnelers were in the city, but it had to rate in the high hundreds, maybe even a couple of thousand. That was a lot of destruction that could be dished out.

  Few of the displaced residents of The Avenues looked at us as we hurried along, trying to stay out of the rain as much as possible. It was Gravedigger territory, but they didn’t seem to be around. Probably off fighting somewhere else. The only people that took any notice of Desmond and I were the drug dealers.

  They were easily recognizable by the loose collections of junkies around them. My breath caught when I saw the vials they were selling from cardboard boxes and out of the back of cars. God, if all these dealers were selling Chroma…

  But no, when I got close enough to see, it didn’t have the color of the Chroma vial in my pocket. The fluid inside was black, an impossibly dark black that almost seemed to suck in the light around it. It was just Ink.

  Just Ink. That thought would’ve seemed ridiculous a few weeks ago. But compared to Chroma it was no worse than a cup of weak tea.

  “Any ideas where she’d be?” Desmond asked me when we took shelter under the awning of a mostly-intact building.

  I chewed my lip as I thought. Jesus, this was no place for a teenage girl. “These small-fry dealers aren’t selling Chroma. That’s what she wants. Todd’s probably keeping as much of it in reserve as practical. If I was him, I’d restrict distribution to certain sellers to get maximum bang for my buck.”

  “So we need to find someone besides these street dealers, somewhere a Tunneler might go.”

  “Bingo.”

  The answer ended up being a relatively undamaged bar on the corner of a pair of particularly nasty streets. The bar had a den of violence look about it, less of a speak-easy and more of a Wild West saloon. A lowly Gravedigger initiate was on guard duty outside the old stone building, a few bits of metal in his ears and a leather vest across his chest.

  I pointed the place out to Desmond. “What do you reckon?”

  “Looks like a friendly place. You think they would’ve let Tania in here?”

  I didn’t doubt it. A good-looking young girl, penniless and desperate for drugs, wearing little more than a hospital gown?
It made my throat clench to think what she might already have been through. If they’d laid a hand on her…

  “Miles? You’re glaring.”

  He was right. I was giving the bar’s bouncer the stinkeye, and that wasn’t likely to make me any friends. I smoothed my face, pressing my feelings down where they could simmer undisturbed.

  “This has gotta be it,” I said, nearly managing to convince myself. “It’s gotta be.”

  The initiate Gravedigger looked me up and down as I approached, a smirk on his face saying exactly what he thought of me. He was little more than a kid, not much older than Tania. Maybe thought he was cool, standing there in his gimp suit, or maybe life hadn’t thrown any better options his way. Whatever, I didn’t care. All I wanted was to get Tania back.

  “Hit the road,” he said, jerking his thumb at the street as if we were too dumb to hear what he said.

  The two of us stopped in front of him. I shoved my hands in my pockets and glanced at Desmond. His playful half-grin had returned. He had the look on his face he always got when he was reminiscing, a quirk in his eyebrows and his eyes off to one side. Maybe he was thinking the same thing I was: that kid would’ve still been learning his times tables when we were getting scraped off the floor of bars like this.

  Ah, memories.

  “You hear me, asswipes?” the kid said, his smirk fading into a kind of petulant anger. “Get lost.”

  “Kids these days,” I said to Desmond, and he snickered. I returned my attention to the bouncer, affecting a bored expression. “Look, son. We don’t want to cause you any trouble. We just heard there was some new dope floating around, and we wanted to get our hands on some before this whole neighborhood burns to the ground. Can you help us out?”

  He frowned, giving me another once-over. “You cops?”

  “We look like cops?” I said spreading my damp, ripped jacket by the lapels.

  “You don’t,” he said, then nodded at Desmond. “He does.”

  “I’m not a cop, guy.” He shoved his hand in his pocket, and the Gravedigger reached for his belt, but Desmond just pulled out a thick wad of cash. “Can we come in?”