Devil’s Luck Read online

  Diana and Lou remained unmoved.

  Diana ended the silence first. “I didn’t realize how alike we were. Louie Thorne.”

  Lou waited for her to elaborate. After all, who knew what conclusions she’d drawn about Lou in the five months since they’d last seen each other.

  “Did you kill them all?” Diana asked. When Lou didn’t answer, Diana pressed on. “The Martinelli family was blamed for your parents’ execution. I’ve got few connections in the criminal world, but the ones I have all say the Martinellis are dead. Even the one your dad put in prison disappeared.” Here Diana smiled. “Or did he?”

  Lou said nothing.

  Diana was undeterred by this. Somewhere in the back a pan flared to life with the hiss of oil against heat. “Then there was your dad’s partner. Gus Johnson.”

  Lou’s right hand twitched imperceptibly beneath the table.

  “Marked missing, but suspected foul play. There was blood on his recliner and carpet. But no body. His front door was locked from the inside. But you would’ve been only seventeen or eighteen when this happened.”

  Lou had still been seventeen when she’d gone to Johnson’s house with her father’s blade in her pocket. Johnson had been her first kill, payback for giving the Martinellis her father’s address in order to save his own skin.

  “Did you know King has a missing partner too? Ex-partner? He wouldn’t have had anything to do with all of this, would he?”

  Chaz Brasso? Sure. Lou had finished him too.

  The cook with the greasy apron appeared. His hands were wrapped in surgeon’s gloves as he put the basket on the table in front of Lou. He smelled like grease and fried meat.

  “There’s hot sauce and ketchup on the table. Napkins there. You need somethin’ else?”

  “No, thank you.”

  He frowned at Diana’s untouched fries. “You don’t like yours?”

  “I’m letting them cool,” she said with a forced smile.

  The guy nodded, but he didn’t look convinced. “You girls let me know if you need anything else.”

  Lou started in on the food, intending to leave nothing behind. Lucky for her, the sandwich was delicious, a perfect marriage of sweet smoked meat and vinegar.

  Diana continued talking. “If Gus was your first kill, and he’s the earliest one I could find, then I’m way ahead of you.”

  Lou let her talk.

  “You’ve been doing this for eight or nine years, I figure. I’ve been at it for over twenty-five.”

  As if this is a competition, Lou thought, taking another big bite.

  “I must have a hundred and fifty to my credit,” Diana went on, finally putting a fry in her mouth. She left out the word bodies, but Lou understood. “Not that I count.”

  Of course you don’t.

  “What about you?” Diana asked.

  Lou had stopped counting in the high two hundreds, and that was years ago. She was sure she was well over three hundred now, possibly four. Mostly because she’d specialized—no, thrived—in large firefight shootouts for a while. Ten minutes of action could put as many as thirty bodies on the ground.

  “Well, you got the ones that hurt you,” Diana said, as if to cheer her up. Here her eyes took on a wolfish glean. “That’s what matters, right? Those are always the ones that matter most.”

  Here it comes. The pitch.

  Diana laughed to herself as if she’d made a joke only she could understand. She put her hands on the table, on either side of her oily food basket.

  “It’s just crazy to me how alike we are. We both saw some horrible shit, lived through some horrible shit, but decided to fight back—good for us. We were both a bit famous for a minute, both disappeared…”

  So Diana knew about the first slip. The one that carried Lou from the family bathtub to a pool hundreds of miles away, not without a tangential stop in La Loon.

  The manhunt for the missing daughter of a DEA agent hadn’t lasted long, but it had hit the local news nonetheless.

  “And here we are!” Diana held up her hands as if she marveled at her own assessment.

  “Here we are,” Lou said flatly.

  It was the mania in Diana’s eyes she didn’t like. She’d seen that look before. In Angelo’s eyes before Lou had made him drive his car into the Baltimore bay. In the Russian mob boss Dmitri’s eyes when they were finally face to face and he wanted her to atone for the sin of murdering his son.

  “The only problem is I haven’t killed everyone who’s hurt me.” Diana leaned forward. “I have tried myself, many times, to corner this bastard, but he’s a snake. But with someone like you, with your resources, I think it’ll be possible. Together, I think we can take this bastard down.”

  Lou understood now.

  The compulsion to avenge. It was why she hadn’t been able to stop after Gus Johnson, or Angelo Martinelli. It was why Lou had torn her way through every man who’d been a part of the wreckage of her childhood, including Chaz Brasso and Senator Ryanson. Even Konstantine had found himself at the end of her gun.

  Lucky for him, things turned out differently.

  And yet, she also understood something that Diana did not. That once this man was gone—whoever this final target was—she wouldn’t be free of the hunger consuming her now.

  Worse, something darker, more desperate, would replace it.

  Lou had learned this lesson all too well.

  “He’s the last one,” Diana insisted, clutching the basket in front of her. The plastic warped in her hands.

  That’s what you think, Lou thought. “You weren’t hunting him when I met you in Ohio.”

  Because she’d been hunting Lou’s target—Jeffrey Fish. A serial killer with a penchant for pretty blondes like Diana. Though he seemed to prefer them about ten or fifteen years younger.

  “Correction,” Diana said. “I’d just finished hunting him. But he got away. He has a habit of packing up and running whenever he smells trouble.”

  “No,” Lou said.

  Diana started as if slapped. “No?”

  Lou had no problem saying it again for the sake of clarity. “I can’t help you.”

  Diana’s cheeks darkened, the red spreading out toward her ears and neck. “Do you think I can’t pull my own weight? You don’t know the bastard. He’s slippery.”

  What could Lou say? That it wasn’t Lou she needed? That Diana could manage the job just fine without her and that wasn’t the problem? The problem, Diana would discover, was what happened after. When there were no more targets. When there was no way to scratch the itch in a way that truly satisfied. When every makeshift target that followed would seem like the ghost of a meal for a long time to come.

  That’s when the madness came. A death unlike any she’d known before.

  Lou had no interest in shepherding her toward it.

  Instead, she stood, pushing back the chair. She took her empty basket to the counter and put it by the register. She slipped a twenty into the tip jar, not foolish enough to leave it on the table for a second time. The cook gave her a solemn nod, which she returned.

  “Maybe now is a bad time,” Diana said. Her voice was pitched for amiability, but the derision was clear. “When you get back from La Loon. We’ll talk then. But think about what I said. Think about it.”

  There was the hint of a threat to those words.

  Lou hesitated at the door, but she didn’t look back. She simply pressed forward, stepping out into the bright day.

  13

  Konstantine stood in his living room, watching the shadows grow long on the cobbled floor. He considered the two bags at his feet. One had a couple outfits, a washcloth, soap, a pop-up tent, and a tightly rolled sleeping bag. The other held slim packets of freeze-dried and dehydrated food, enough to feed them both for four days. There was also his gun, ammo, two lighters, and a firestarter brick as well as the compact sample kit with its little tubes and tools for collection: latex gloves and tweezers.

  He wondered if he shoul
d bring more than a gallon of water.

  Did he want to carry it?

  He wouldn’t let Lou shoulder any of the burden. He was determined that she rest her injury for the full six months at least, though the doctor who’d put her back together mentioned it wouldn’t be unheard of for her to need a year or longer to heal.

  And even then, on bad days, the muscles and nerves might bother her all her life.

  He wasn’t foolish enough to remind her of this possibility, given how much resistance she’d posed to the minimum six months.

  He lifted the bags and found they were manageable, one for each shoulder. He hoped the one gallon of water would suffice.

  The pressure between his ears popped.

  Lou stepped into the room. Her glasses were pushed up onto her head. She frowned at the luggage.

  “What’s all this?”

  “Specimen collection kit and our supplies.”

  “For what?”

  “For La Loon.” And now fearing she’d forgotten, he added, “For our trip.”

  “We enter through a lake,” she said.

  He smiled. “These bags are waterproof.”

  “Yes, but you will have to swim to the surface once we get there.”

  “That’s what this is for,” he said, and turned one of the packs on its side so she could see the flotation device fixed underneath. “When I activate it, it will rise to the surface.”

  She arched a brow. “If you get eaten, I’m not bringing any of this back.”

  He smiled, stepping toward her. She smelled like food, something salty. He kissed the side of her throat.

  He moved to her lips.

  “I thought you wanted to go,” she said, her breath warm against his mouth.

  “I do. But I also missed you.”

  Lou wrapped an arm around his waist. “You have to stop kissing me if you want to go.”

  “Do I?” he asked. “Have you tried kissing and…” He didn’t know the word for what she did.

  “Slipping,” she offered.

  “Kissing and slipping before?” His stomach knotted as he realized he might not like the answer. He didn’t want to think about her kissing someone else.

  Lou pressed her body against his until he could feel the notch of her hip bone against the top of his thigh. He adjusted the weight of the packs until they felt steady.

  She took his mouth with hers.

  Then darkness, a shift where all the air left him.

  It was as if a belt had tightened across his chest. Or perhaps she was sucking all the air, all the life from him.

  When she pulled back they stood at the edge of a lake.

  She was grinning. “Breathe.”

  This startled a laugh out of him. He hadn’t realized he’d been holding it. “So this is it?”

  “La Loon? No. This is the first stop.”

  She stooped at the edge of the water and scooped up a small leather backpack that he hadn’t seen before.

  She saw him looking at it. “I brought it earlier.”

  Konstantine wasn’t sure what he’d expected her dumping ground to look like, but this was quite mild compared to his imagination. For him, it had been built to mythical portions. He’d imagined something like Lake Avernus, an entry into the underworld. The gates of hell.

  But this lake was much smaller, placid with a thin mist hanging above the water. Frogs croaked out a hoarse melody. Something with wings buzzed past his right ear.

  From where he stood he could see a herd of deer drinking on the other side of the water. Small rings formed where their snouts touched the surface.

  A doe lifted her head and regarded him with cautious eyes. The others twitched their ears too, but they didn’t seem all that surprised to see Lou.

  The water was dark, but held the purple sheen of an approaching dawn. And it was much cooler here than in Italy.

  “We’re in Nova Scotia,” she told him, as if reading his mind. “I have another lake in Alaska.”

  “Is it this beautiful?”

  A rustling in the trees above drew his gaze skyward in time to see an osprey open his wings and glide. Its cry echoed as it soared over the lake, heading in the direction of the brightening forest.

  Something moved through the trees off to the right, making a small chirping sound unlike any that Konstantine had ever heard.

  “Racoons,” she said, smiling.

  “Racoons,” he repeated, committing the word to memory. He had no image to accompany the word.

  “Have you ever been out of the city?” she asked, obviously amused.

  “Once,” he said. The night he and his mother were dragged from their beds by his father’s rivals. The night his mother was executed.

  The sky began to shift from purple to pink. She lifted the backpack and strapped it to her shoulder. He caught her wince.

  “Let me,” he said, extending his hand.

  “I can do it.”

  “It doesn’t look heavy. Let me take it.”

  “I don’t need you to carry things for me,” she said, her irritation spiking.

  Konstantine laughed. “I am well aware. But there is nothing wrong with letting someone help you. You’ve helped me plenty of times.”

  When Nico had nearly killed him, putting enough metal into his body to end his life, it had been Lou who had picked his ravaged and bullet-ridden body off the stone floor.

  Again in New Orleans, when Konstantine had used his considerable wealth and power to outmaneuver Dmitri Petrov, it had not been for the purpose of saving Lou. In his mind, Dmitri stood no chance against her. He understood that Lou was more than capable of protecting her own life and overcoming such a man.

  That aid had been in service of her friends, the ones Dmitri could very well have killed.

  “If Piper had a hurt shoulder, would you carry her bag?” Konstantine asked, hoping to shift her view on this.

  “I carry her bag anyway.”

  Konstantine nodded as if his point was made. Then he saw the blank expression on her face and realized it hadn’t been made at all.

  We take care of the ones we love, he thought. Because we care, not because they are helpless.

  He couldn’t bring himself to say it aloud.

  Not when she was regarding him as she was now.

  He let it go, giving her a slight nod. He didn’t want to begin their adventure with quarreling.

  She stepped into the water. The deer on the other side of the lake lifted their heads, watching. But they did not run.

  This was the part Konstantine wasn’t entirely excited about, but he followed her in.

  The water was cold. The chill pressed against his legs and groin. He hissed.

  Lou looked over her shoulder at him, smiling. She continued walking backward. “Too cold?”

  “No.”

  “You sure?” she teased, seeming to relish his discomfort.

  “I’m fine,” he said. I have warm, dry clothes in the bag.

  She stopped when the water was chest high, waiting. She removed her sunglasses and slipped them into the pocket of her leather coat, buttoning the pocket closed.

  When he reached her, she slid her arms around his waist.

  The intimacy surged through him. He wanted to touch her back. He wanted to coil his body around hers like a snake, but he had all these bags.

  “You’ll know we’re across because the water will turn red,” she said.

  His heart began knocking in his chest. He felt his pulse in his throat and temples.

  “As soon as you’re across you need to swim to the surface and get to shore. There are things in the water that will eat you if you linger too long. Or go too far out.”

  His fear spiked. “What?”

  But she was smiling.

  “Are you kidding?”

  Her smile widened. “I’m not kidding. Get to the shallows as quickly as you can, but let me get out first in case Jabbers is there. If the water things grab one of your bags, let it go. Don’t hol
d on.”

  His heart was pounding so hard he found it difficult to breathe.

  “Just give me a minute,” he began.

  “Take a deep breath.”

  “Okay.” He inhaled. “How long does this—”

  Lou swept his feet. He sank into the water with his bags. The cold dark overtook him, but her hands were still on his body, holding him close. This was a small comfort.

  Then, imperceptibly, he saw the waters lighten, turning from black to red. The cold water warmed.

  Lou tugged at his shirt, urging him toward the surface. But this reminder was all that she gave him before separating from his body and propelling herself toward the shore.

  She was right about the bags.

  Immediately they began to pull him down into the water. He sank, groping for the inflation strings on each side.

  Then his boots connected with something and his heart jolted. He shifted, near panic, trying to regain his balance.

  A car. He was standing on the roof of a car.

  He pulled the first inflation string and the pillow expanded. He was pulled toward the surface slowly. Then he pulled the second string and really gained velocity.

  Ahead of him, a dark shape shifted in the water, revealing a long serpentine body.

  Don’t stay in the water, she’d warned him. Her grin had made it seem like a joke, but now he suspected that it hadn’t been. Whatever he’d seen—or had almost seen—he didn’t want a closer look.

  He broke the surface. Lou was already in the shallows, shaking water off her leather coat, flapping the front against her chest. She pushed her hair back from her face and turned to see him swimming toward her.

  Her eyebrows raised. “You’ll want to swim a bit faster.”

  He followed her gaze and saw four dorsal fins, pointed and black like those of killer whales, cutting the water ten yards away.

  He needed no further incentive.

  When he was within reach, she bent and grabbed his bags, tossing them onto land before he could object. But she didn’t flinch at the task. In fact, she no longer guarded her shoulder as she had moments before. Her posture had improved and her shoulders squared.

  He pulled himself from the shallows and looked at the strange world.