A Perfect Machine(46)

“Well, since he’s got his phone still, if he can get away, he can at least try to call one of us, right?”

“Sure.”

“So maybe we just go back to the warehouse and wait.”

“No, Cleve, we do not just go back to the warehouse and wait.”

“You know, I’m not just some fucking idiot you can talk down to like this.”

Marcton grinned. “You kind of are, Cleve. Sort of. Maybe a little bit, you know?” He held up his thumb and index finger, moved them very close together. “Just this much.”

Cleve knew Marcton was just winding him up. His smile showed it, and it helped cut the tension. “Seriously, though, why not just wait? What can we do out here? The weather’s getting shittier by the second, and we’ll be useless if we get stuck.”

“In a Hummer,” Marcton said. The guys in the back chuckled.

“Alright, fine, fuck you all. Do what you want.” Cleve settled into a sulk. “Just trying to do what’s best.”

“What’s best is to keep looking for Palermo. Let’s just think about this for a minute. Now, where would he go, if he had any choice in the matter? Would he try to stall the guy? Yes. Alright, so what’s a good stall tactic? What’s a good way to buy time? Better yet,” Marcton said, snapping his fingers as an idea occurred to him. “Where does he know we’ve got guys?”

Cleve just stared at him.

“The nurse’s place,” Marcton said. “That’s the only other operation going on right now besides the regular Runs – speaking of which, if we’re still on lockdown at the warehouses, will there even be one tonight? And if not… well, shit, let’s not even think about that. Let’s make sure we get this sorted so that there can be one. Anyway, Palermo would try to get him to the nurse’s place. He’d be a fool not to.”

“So, we let our guys there know to watch out for him, yeah?” Cleve said, finally catching on.

“Yes, we do, Cleve. Yes, we do. You take care of that; I’ll drive.” He turned in his seat. “You ladies in the back just keep holding hands. We got this.”



* * *



“Adelina was my girlfriend.”

Palermo met Krebosche’s eyes and knew he wasn’t lying.

“For a little over two years. I gather she didn’t tell you.”

Once Palermo had stopped his mind from flying off in several thousand directions at once, he said, “Not one word.”

“Thought not. And I know you’re her father.”

A nod. Eyes cast down. Palermo applied pressure to his wound. A bit of blood burbled up between his fingers.

“She said you wouldn’t want her with anyone but ‘her own kind.’”

“True.”

“And what kind, exactly, is that?”

Palermo looked confused. “You don’t know about us?”

“I know you’re up to some shifty shit, but right now I’m lucky I’m remembering why I’m even in this car with you. Five minutes away from you and we both know it’d start to haze over.”

“Interesting. I thought you knew more than that. Well, good, then. I’m not telling you anything else. You’re going to kill me, anyway. Why would I tell you anything else about us?”

“How about because I loved – still love – Adelina?”

Krebosche was playing dumb to see what information Palermo might give up. He knew if Palermo thought Krebosche knew all about them, he might not give any him further info.

A car went by slowly on the street, headlights cutting the shadows back. Palermo and Krebosche both tensed up. The yellow shafts carved deeper into the darkness. Moving on. Gone.

“So did I. And…” Palermo struggled with whether to tell him anything else, decided that if he had loved Adelina, then he deserved to know at least this – some truth mixed in with a lie: “I didn’t kill her. No one did. She just… ascended. Or something akin to that. We don’t know what to call it, exactly. People have various words for it. It’s only happened once.”

Palermo had already tipped one of the cards in his hand – a damn big one, at that. He wasn’t about to tip them all by telling Krebosche about Henry Kyllo.

“But I saw you and another man go into a house. I followed you there. You went in, with Adelina. A while later, after a woman showed up, you left that house – without Adelina – and a good portion of the house was destroyed by something – something that demolished it from the inside. And I never saw or heard from Adelina again.”

“When we went into that house, it was to witness her transformation.”

“Into what?”

“We didn’t know.”

“So what happened?”

“We still don’t know. She just –” he motioned upward with his hands “– disappeared.”

More lies. “How? Like in a fucking magic show? What destroyed most of the house? And what’s this ‘ascension’ horseshit? What the hell are you talking about?” Krebosche’s anger rose quickly in his chest. “You expect me to believe this?”

With Krebosche’s outburst came a sudden wave of lightheadedness in Palermo. He was losing blood. Not fast, but fast enough that it needed to be stopped very soon, or he’d pass out.