Redemption Song (Daniel Faust #2)(32)

His eyes bulged. He fell, clutching his throat with one hand while dark blood guttered down the front of his concert T-shirt. He tried to shoot me, but his gun arm flopped like a fish. I plucked the pistol from his grip, easy as taking a rattle from an infant. Tyler’s legs kicked spasmodically as he stared up at me. He was just lucid enough to understand he was dying. Maybe he hoped I’d change my mind. Maybe I’d grab some of those robes, bandage up his neck, stabilize him, and call for help. Maybe he’d survive this.

I shook my head.

“Sorry, kid,” I told him. There wasn’t anything else worth saying. I left him to die.

I forced my feelings into a little box in the back of my mind. Guilt was a luxury for later. Right now, I couldn’t afford to think about anything but survival.

The corridor outside the cell rounded a bend in either direction. Coin toss. I remembered the way they’d brought me in, but that would take me out into the courtyard. I’d be a sitting duck out there. Besides, I needed wheels to get back to Vegas. If I ran out into that desert on foot, I’d be vulture food by sunset. I jogged the opposite direction from the courtyard, hoping I’d spot something useful.

I ducked into an alcove and pressed my back to the hot adobe wall when I heard voices coming my way. The gun was an equalizer, but only when it came to the cambion. Sullivan would just swallow the bullets and spit them back out at me.

“—think he’ll really help us?” one of Sullivan’s followers said, lugging grocery bags down the hallway. Her companion nodded.

“The father’s a good man. He’s been in the chapel with Sullivan all night, talking. They’re in there right now.”

Damn it. There went my hopes of a rescue operation. The demon was keeping Alvarez close to his side, which meant I didn’t have a hope of stealing him back. I might have felt better if I knew exactly what Sullivan’s scheme was.

Then again, maybe not.

The translation had to be the key. If I could reach the church before any of Sullivan’s minions and get my hands on that text, at least I’d have some kind of bargaining chip. I hoped Alvarez had kept his mouth shut.

Once the coast was clear, I cut through an empty sitting room, keeping to the shadows and under an overhanging balcony. It could have been the common room in a college dorm, right down to the scattered books and magazines and a video game console hooked up to a big-screen television. Most colleges, though, didn’t have assault-rifle cleaning manuals or guides to the proper care of plastic explosives on the syllabus.

Sullivan had a hell of a racket going on here. Find vulnerable cambion who didn’t have families to turn to, teach them to hate themselves down to the very core, and then put guns in their hands. They’d do anything he told them to, as long as he kept dangling the promise of salvation over their heads. I’d seen this song and dance before.

Now I had two good reasons to keep this escape from turning into a gunfight. I couldn’t take Sullivan down by myself, and I wasn’t looking for a fight with his followers. They’d sure as hell kill me, though. I found a back door adjacent to a parking lot, just a cluster of cars in ragged rows near the edge of the mission’s outer wall. I kept my head down and ran for it. One of the locals drove a pickup truck, an old F-350 with some muscle under the hood. I broke out the driver’s-side window with the butt of the pistol, let myself in, and popped the plastic panel under the steering wheel. About three minutes later, after a few false starts as I struggled to remember how to hot-wire one of these models, the ignition throbbed and the radio turned on.

I sat up and looked at the dashboard. Half a tank of gas. That should get me back to Vegas.

I pulled out of the lot nice and slow, not wanting to attract attention from the villa. I thought I was free and clear until the tower bell rang out, a shrill and endless peal that set my teeth on edge. They must have found Tyler’s body. I cursed under my breath and stomped on the gas, gunning it up the dirt road toward the iron gate.

One of the cambion ran out of the guardhouse next to the gate. He clutched a hunting rifle like he’d just picked it up for the first time in his life. I hit the brakes and leaned out the window, dropping a bead on him with my stolen pistol before he could line up a shot.

“Drop it!” I barked. The rifle fell to the dust.

I nodded to the heavy latch on the gate. “Open it.”

“I—I can’t let you go,” he stammered. “I’ve got orders—”

I shot a round into the dirt at his feet. He jumped back.

“Now!”

He unlatched the gate. I gave him just enough time to jump clear before I launched the pickup truck into full gear, crashing through with a screech of twisted metal and flying sparks. Hitting the highway with the speedometer kissing eighty and the engine dancing on the redline, I left the mission in the dust.

I aimed the pickup southbound, flying past a sign that read “Las Vegas–80 Miles.” Once I’d gone a good distance and figured nobody was following me, I eased off the gas. Getting pulled over for speeding in a stolen car, with a recently fired pistol on the passenger seat, was the last thing I needed.

I reached for my phone, then remembered I didn’t have it anymore. They’d taken it from me at the mission along with everything else in my pockets. I’d have to track down Caitlin and Emma the hard way. As for Nicky, I wouldn’t call him if I could. By now he’d know that Father Alvarez and I had never showed up at the safe house last night. I hoped he could put two and two together and realize he had a snitch inside his gang. In any case, next time I talked to him, it’d be face-to-face in a room swept for bugs.