The Thief (Black Dagger Brotherhood #16)(63)

The punch was perfectly placed on his jaw, a floater that hit him like an atomic bomb. Instantly, his body and brain went limp, although he was still conscious as his head lolled on his neck, a school yard’s tetherball.

His will came back online immediately, his need to ahvenge his love a force too great to be denied—but those arms and legs of his refused to follow any commands. He just hung there like a scarecrow in the arms of one of his brothers, lesser blood dripping out of his mouth, his clothes torn, his breath so hoarse and loud it sounded like a windstorm.

At that moment, he realized what the fuck was up with losing his mother.

He didn’t mourn the female. He didn’t even think she had been particularly good for the race. No…it was more that she was the one who had given him his Jane back.

With the Scribe Virgin gone? He’d been terrified that the magic or whatever the fuck it was that kept Jane in her state of ever-existence was going to be compromised. The shit failed and who did he go to?

No more anyone to pray to. No more anyone to demand that magic keep going.

And what do you know. Fate, the little bitch, had seen fit to place him in exactly the position he had been so terrified of that he hadn’t even wanted to acknowledge its existence.



* * *



—

The dog didn’t see Vitoria.

So the owner lived to die another day.

Back in her rental car, she took her time and obeyed all traffic laws as she drove out of Miss Fortescue’s neighborhood and got back on the Northway. She was not returning to the West Point house, however.

Her old-fashioned map took her to her next destination—because GPS could be traced on car systems and phones—and she was even less impressed than she had been with her first stop in terms of architectural significance and desirability. This rough, lower-middle-class neighborhood was cut up into lots the size of index cards, the houses sitting upon them single-storied and in poor condition. Most had doors and windows covered by bars and chain-link fences around their yards with the cars inside the barrier.

Streeter’s house was seven in and on the left, and as she pulled up and stopped, she thought that both places she had gone tonight matched their owners: Miss Fortescue’s was an aspirational poseur, an outsider looking in on the world of great wealth and desperately wishing she could afford that which she sold. Streeter was a tough thug and did what he had to in order to survive.

All things considered, Vitoria would take a hundred of the latter before she crossed the aisle for the former.

After she texted him from the burner phone, she waited with little patience. He didn’t keep her long.

The man emerged dressed in black from head to foot, the hood on his parka likewise pulled down low over his head and face. He paused to lock up and then strode out toward her, his eyes fixated on the trampled path to the gate in the chain-link as if he were a man that resolutely stuck to his own business and left others alone.

Vitoria got out from behind the wheel. “Have you had any alcohol or drugs tonight.”

“I smoked a joint at five.”

“You’re driving.” She walked around and got in the passenger seat. “I will sleep on the way there.”

“Okay.”

Streeter took the seat she had been in, and then they were off, traveling out of his neighborhood and getting on the Northway.

“Tell me again the story,” she said as put her hands in the pockets of her parka and crossed her snow boots at the ankles.

“Two-Tone told his old lady—”

“Please do not refer to any woman like that. Or I shall have to start calling you Short Dick. Continue.”

He looked over, the light from a passing streetlamp illuminating his surprise. “Ah, his…yeah, whatever she is…let me in their place. She thought he been on the lam, and that I knew where he was and was keepin’ it from her. When I told her I ain’t about that shit, she let me go through e’erthing. She still thinks he comin’ home.”

“And then what.” Vitoria shut her eyes and let Streeter’s perfectly fine voice and perfectly awful diction and grammar wash over her.

“I made her try to remember the last night she saw him. See, she’d took him to the bar where I saw him later. He was real good about not drinkin’ and drivin’.”

“Noble of him,” Vitoria murmured, laying her head back and tilting it toward him.

“She said he got a phone call on the way. They was fightin’ and he took it and she got hella pissed off. While he was on with whoever it was, he was talkin’ about meetin’ up with a guy in a hour and then something on the southern side of Iroquois. She thought it was Iroquois Avenue, which is like, across town. She said she heard him say ‘half a mile’ see a drive, and that they had to pick up a package first.”

Streeter passed a semi on the right, just before the highway narrowed down to two northbound lanes. “She thought he was meetin’ up with a female, but he told her she was crazy. She dropped him off at the bar, told him to fuck off, and then she tried to call him. He never answered the phone again, and that was it. So I was thinkin’ about it. Lived here all my life. Never heard nobody talk about south side of Iroquois Avenue. What the fuck she thinkin’.” The man looked over. “But that’s what I was tellin’ you. There’s an Iroquois Mountain. And it’s got a south side for sure. Then I remembered. Back when I was workin’ for him, I overheard Mr. Benloise mention something about a safe place up north, a place where things could be hidden. He said it was almost to the border. That’s where Iroquois is.”