Under the Bones Read online

  Konstantine.

  She recognized the dark energy now. Konstantine was in trouble.

  Go, go, go, the pull begged again. No more time.

  Hadn’t she warned him the last time they spoke that he’d better hope he never saw her face again?

  He must be very desperate then.

  And ready to pay the price.

  3

  More guns, the better. Lou removed Monet’s “Waterlilies” which hung to the right of the Picasso, and opened the much larger safe behind it. She grabbed a shoulder holster from its metal shelf. She put it on and holstered her twin Glocks, one on each side. Then twin Berettas on each hip. And she kept one Browning at the small of her back and more ammo at the belt.

  Safe closed, picture in place, she stepped into the closet. It was midnight in Florence, if that was where she would find him. The cover of darkness would be on her side.

  Even with the three walls bare, her converted linen closet wasn’t large. Her back pressed against the wall as she pictured Konstantine in her mind. Those infuriating brown eyes. The perpetual pout of his lips.

  The world shifted. The steamboat’s horn was cut short as the world thinned. Lou felt herself falling through the darkness, the wall at her back disappearing.

  A stone floor rushed up to meet her, unyielding as it pressed the guns into her palms.

  She stared at her pale hands on the stone, reorienting herself. The gash between her knuckles began to bleed again. No matter. She felt nothing. She turned her attention to the laughter. Cruel and deep. The rolling purr of Italian echoed off the walls.

  She was in a church. Some ancient construction that smelled of crushed bone dust and the souls it was built on.

  Flesh struck flesh. A foot or fist connected with the meat of another man.

  Someone groaned.

  She inched forward slowly, between the pews toward the center aisle and the sound of violence, until the clear outline of leather clad feet could be seen in the swimming candlelight.

  Konstantine was on his back in the center aisle. At least three circles of blood had bloomed through his shirt, small bullet holes torn in the fabric. And when he rolled away from the kicking feet, a dangerously deep cut spread on the side of his neck, revealing far too much corded muscle beneath.

  They were going to kill him, whoever these men were.

  Probably crime lords like Konstantine himself. Rivals perhaps? Old enemies?

  A man pulled a gun from his waist and pointed it into Konstantine’s face.

  Konstantine said something in Italian that she didn’t understand. A presto, amico mio.

  Lou was in a crouch, a Beretta in her hand, before she’d fully decided she wanted Konstantine to live. She pulled the trigger. One shot and the side of a man’s head ruptured. The skull cap lifted like a divot from a golf swing, up into the air while the body itself hit the ground. Brains spilled into the center aisle, cereal sloshing from the rim of a dropped bowl.

  The man closest to her turned immediately. Their eyes met over the church pews between them.

  He fired, but she’d already rolled beneath the pew and slipped, falling through the stone floor and reemerging behind a pillar on the opposite side of the church, with all four backs to her.

  Konstantine’s enemy found her again, easily and his second bullet bit into the stone column three inches from her head. Dirt and grit sprayed across her face, coating her lips with salty earth.

  A third shot hit her square in the chest, knocking her back. Even with the vest, it stung. A fourth bullet grazed her upper arm. It burned.

  The bastard was a fast shot.

  But she was faster, already falling through the shadows and rising up between two pews behind the man’s right shoulder.

  Her re-entry wasn’t clean and he must’ve heard it, the pew shifting under her sudden weight. He was halfway to turning toward her when she fired. The bullet slid along the side of his face, grazing the cheek and cutting through the flesh beneath the eye. A curtain of blood now cloaked that half of his face.

  He rolled out of sight, seeking shelter in the opposite pews. She emptied the Beretta into the wood, splinters flying into the air like confetti on New Year’s Eve.

  The Beretta clicked, empty.

  She pulled the Browning without stopping to reload. Two of the hiding men popped up from between the pews.

  A round was already chambered and she dropped the second man with a bullet between the eyes. He hadn’t even hit the floor when she put a bullet in the third’s throat. Blood spurted between his fingers as he tried to compress the wound.

  It didn’t save him. He sank to his knees and bled out in seconds. His own puddle meeting Konstantine’s halfway.

  Only two men were left of the original five. Konstantine’s amico mio and the man closely watching his back.

  Three more rapid fire shots hit her chest like three hard punches. She fell, but her back never hit the ground. The shadows swallowed her up, spitting her out on the right side of the large wooden doors. There was Konstantine, still lying in a heap in the center aisle, breath labored. If she didn’t move this along, he wouldn’t make it.

  At least the men had forgotten about Konstantine. She proved to be very distracting.

  Amico mio scanned each dark corner, eyes wide. One hand pressed a torn purple cloth to his face, soaking up the blood she’d drawn.

  A purple cloth. The mark of a Ravenger.

  Was he in Konstantine’s own gang? Or had he simply taken the cloth from someone?

  Questions she didn’t have time to think about. Amico mio was on to her. He wasn’t inching toward the row where she’d fallen. His eyes were searching the room, ready for her to appear anywhere.

  His comrade bent down to examine the space between the pews. When he rose, she blew out his brains with a double tap from the Browning.

  Amico mio was already turning toward her when she stepped from the darkness.

  Their eyes locked as both guns raised. She emptied the clip into his chest. He got off two more rounds into her vest. He fell backwards over the pew behind him, Italian leather boots pointing skyward before his head cracked against the stone floor on the other side.

  She waited for him to rise. To pop up and seek revenge like the villain in a horror story. But the church was quiet. The scent of blood and sweat bloomed bright in the cool air.

  She holstered the guns and knelt beside Konstantine.

  His eyes fluttered, seeming to see her for the first time. He murmured, “La mia dea. La mia regina oscura.”

  “You’re welcome.” She grabbed the bloody lapel of his shredded clothes and pulled him through the night.

  4

  Robert maneuvered his enormous body down the crowded corridor of NOLA’s Cancer Center, a white paper bag of beignets clutched in his right hand. He flashed polite smiles at every nurse he passed, most recognizing him and returning the smile. They were a perpetual carousel of movement, in and out of rooms like drones in the hive.

  Georgette, a blonde beauty queen of a nurse, stepped out of Room 716, carefully closing the door behind her. She brightened when she saw him. “Good morning, Mr. King.”

  “How’s she doing?” Robert asked, reaching up to smooth his hair out of his face. It didn’t matter that he saw Lucy every day, that there were a million things on her ailing mind besides his misplaced hair. He stood as nervous outside her hospital room as he had on their first date. Back when he was still a seasoned DEA agent and she the head-turning sister of his brightest mentee.

  Something flashed in Georgette’s eyes before she could mask it. She tried to hide it by picking at a clump of mascara tangled in her lashes. The black smearing across her thumb.

  But the damage was done.

  It wasn’t Georgette’s fault. King had decades of interrogation experience. It was all about the microexpressions, those hints of real emotion laid bare before a formal façade could conceal them. He didn’t need her to tell him this was a bad day and it would
be best to lower his expectations before stepping into the room. The flash of sadness that pinched her face told him so.

  But Georgette’s painted red lips projected only kindness. “She’ll be happy to see you.”

  Robert thanked her and stepped inside the room.

  The woman confined to the bed was rail thin. It was as if the breast cancer that had started in her chest before moving into her bones was liquefying her from the inside out. Only a husk remained, like the cicada husks he’d found as a child. The shape of the insect remained intact, but paper thin, and vulnerable to disintegration under the slightest touch.

  “Hey baby,” he said, quietly closing the door behind him.

  For a terrible moment, only silence filled the room.

  She was dead.

  She’d left this world while he’d stood in the hall with the nurse. She’d slipped right out from under him, the way a few dealers had slipped right out the back door of their haunts as he’d kicked down the front.

  Then Lucy turned toward him, repositioning her head on the white pillow.

  “Why hello, Robert.” Her voice was as dry as sandpaper.

  The fist crushing his heart relented. He drew a breath.

  He came to her bedside and eased himself into the plastic chair. Not an easy task given his size. He’d lost weight in the last three months since their reunion, but his nights in the gym had bulked him up.

  Exercise. Hospital visits. Paperwork. And endless cups of black coffee filled his days now.

  It wasn’t the retirement he’d envisioned. He wasn’t complaining. Only marveling at how even the most well planned, diligently laid tracks were rendered useless in the course of a life. Life, like water, cut its own path.

  He sat the oil-soaked paper bag on the attached hospital tray. Then tore the white paper to reveal the beignets.

  “I had Millie make these fresh for you,” he said, sucking the powdered sugar from his thumb.

  He reached into his duster and pulled out the card. Everyone at the café had signed it. Red, blue and black inks competed for each available inch of the cardstock. A watercolor tree painted on the outside, and a corny message—Get well soon. We’re all “rooting” for you—was scrawled in calligraphy within.

  He propped the cardstock tent on the table beside the beignets. “They miss you.”

  “I miss them too,” Lucy said, her voice weak and dry. She didn’t try to pick up the card. The first bad sign. She only turned her head slightly to regard it.

  “It’s a good thing that this room isn’t darker. Or else I might fall right into the donut fryer.” She tried to laugh and fell into coughing instead.

  Robert had wondered. When the illness got bad enough that Lucy couldn’t stay away from machines and medical supervision, he had worried how this could work. Lucy had tried to explain that her gift—what Lou called slipping—wasn’t the same. She had never slipped by water for example. And unlike Lou who seemed to step through the thinnest shadows, even this dimly lit room was enough to hold Lucy and her failing body in place—no matter how desperate her desire to leave it may be.

  Face red and chest rattling, Lucy tried to prop herself up. The plastic tubing running to her arms and nostrils trembled as her body shook with the effort. A vein stood out on the woman’s face.

  “Easy there,” he said. He put a hand under each arm—god, when had she become so light—and lifted, easing her onto the pillows.

  Then she reached for the large plastic cup and red bendy straw. He beat her to it, angling it between her cracked lips. She’d aged twenty years overnight. He was sure part of it was the hair loss, which made her face look older. And the black circles beneath her eyes amplified their sunken look.

  Lucy stopped drinking, following his gaze to the inside of her arms, to the bruises he couldn’t help but scowl at.

  “It’s fine,” she said.

  “It doesn’t look fine. What did they do? Let the new kids practice on you?”

  He scowled at the new IV.

  She rolled her eyes up to meet his. “The nurses say I’m dehydrated. When you’re dehydrated, the veins constrict.”

  Her iron was already low. Surely that didn’t help.

  “It’s all right,” she assured him again in that quiet voice. The ice shifted in the cup.

  He settled back into his seat.

  “How’s Lou?” she asked, those blue eyes searching his.

  King didn’t know. He hadn’t had a proper conversation with Louie Thorne for months. He could see her plainly in his mind. He’d climbed the stairs to his loft and had found her on his red sofa. He remembered how he had sat beside her with an empty cushion between them, saying nothing for a long time. The way her scarred shoulder had looked in the moonlight, not unlike a burn scar except for the ring of deep punctures forming, what could be mistaken for a shark bite. But it hadn’t been a shark that had gotten ahold of her. King knew that much, though he hadn’t dared to ask more.

  King tried to keep his voice level despite the anger rising. “She still hasn’t come to see you?”

  “Don’t be mad at her,” Lucy chided, flashing those big blue eyes. “She’s probably the only reason I’m still alive.”

  He frowned. “You mean you aren’t living for the beignets?”

  He got the grin he was fishing for. True enough it had been Lou who’d saved her, not him. When Lucy collapsed four weeks ago, Lou had been there in a heartbeat. Emerging from the darkness as if from thin air. She’d scooped the woman up and taken her straight to the hospital without hesitation, even though King knew Lou would rather bleed to death—had almost bled to death—than step foot inside a hospital. It was something about all the harsh, unforgiving light. A perpetual daytime.

  Yet when the moment of reckoning came, she’d done it without the slightest pause. It seemed that before Lucy’s body had fully rest on the floor, Louie had been there, scooping her up into her arms and disappearing through the dark with her.

  Lucy seemed eternally grateful for this salvation. King’s gratitude had limits.

  The straw slurped at the bottom of the cup. Lucy shook it gently to shift the ice around. “She can’t fight her way out of this.”

  King twisted off the white cap from the plastic water bottle and refilled her cup.

  Lucy went on. “There is no killer to hunt. No one to point her gun at. She knows death, but not like this. This is different. Do you understand?”

  King wasn’t sure he did, but he didn’t interrupt. Strength was coming back to Lucy’s voice and he liked to hear it. He wanted her to keep talking. And he wanted her to drink more water.

  “When I die, Jack, she won’t have anyone to blame. Then what will she do?”

  Jack.

  All the medication they had her on at times made her fuzzy around the edges. As long as she kept breathing, he didn’t care what they pumped her with—or what she called him.

  It was more than that. The drugs kept her from the worst of the pain, which he knew despite all her calm reassurances, was bad.

  “I’ll look after her,” he said, angling the straw toward her cracked lips again. He would bring Chapstick next time. And maybe some sunflowers to brighten the room. “I promise I’ll keep her out of trouble.”

  They were supposed to have six months at least. That’s what the doctors said in the beginning. But it was all moving so quickly now.

  Lucy’s eyes fluttered and King took the cup from her hand before she could drop it. He pulled a small pad of paper from his front pocket and a ballpoint pen. In black ink he wrote:

  Chapstick

  Gatorade

  Maybe Ensure

  Flowers

  He listened to her steady breath, certain she’d dropped off to sleep.

  But then she spoke. “You’ll have your work cut out for you, Jack. She’s as smart as you are, and twice as stubborn.”

  Her mouth dropped open a few minutes later, and the real snoring began.

  King didn’t mind.
r />   He had his paperback and enough cash in his pocket to wander down to the cafeteria if he got hungry. Change for vending machine coffee or a Coke if he got thirsty.

  There was nowhere else in the world he’d rather be.

  It was enough to be with her.

  He only regretted not searching for her sooner. He should have tracked her down long before she’d turned up in his apartment three months ago, begging for the favor that had sent his life careening off the tracks.

  He should have forgiven her sooner, too.

  Forgiven her for disappearing. Forgiven her for dropping him like a summer fling so she could assume the mantle of guardian to a pre-teen Lou.

  He’d been angry, sure. But it’d taken him a long time to realize he was only angry at himself. Angry mostly for not going after her.

  How many years they would’ve had together if he’d only gone after her.

  More time with Lucy. With Lou. He could’ve steered the girl toward a better life. Gotten her into legal work or the DEA. Done right by her like Jack would have wanted.

  Coulda, woulda, shoulda. Useless.

  All that wasted time—and he would never get it back.

  They’d had only two good months together before her illness had taken this turn. Two months of picnics in Jackson Square. Long nights in his bed with the French doors open and jazz music filtering in from the streets below. The sweat drying on their bare skin. Two months of pralines and red bean jambalaya and coffee on the balcony in the early morning light, her cool hand in his.

  Then the collapse. Lou’s rescue. A two-day coma to stabilize her.

  He leaned across the hospital bed and brushed the damp bangs off her forehead. He listened to the machines click on and off, measuring her heartrate, her breathing and whatever else it deemed necessary.

  He plucked a beignet off the white paper and ate it. He sucked the sugar from his fingers but it was already souring in his mouth.

  In the beginning, when the weight had begun to drop off and her bones became as light as a bird’s, he’d managed to get her to eat as many as six beignets in a single go. Then only four. Three. A bite. And this week—none at all.