All the Inside Howling (Hollow Folk #2)(131)

It was the way he said those last words, the chilly certainty, that convinced me. I nodded, and at a gesture from Lawayne, I unbuckled the belt and got out of the car. Lawayne led us up the bluff, and, true to his word, we crawled the last hundred yards. Lawayne grunted with pain, and sweat rolled down his face in spite of the cold, but he moved almost as fast as I did. When we got to the bluff’s crest, he dropped his head onto his arms and sucked in a shuddering breath. Our position allowed us to look out over a long stretch of bare ground. No range grass or cheat grass or buffalo grass. Not even sage or tumbleweeds grew here.

“What am I supposed to see?”

“Just wait,” he said in a short, pained voice.

We waited almost a half an hour, and I was shivering against the cold, crumbling dirt when a cloud of dust showed from the direction of the road. The cloud resolved into a black sedan, which came to a stop at the end of that expanse of bare dirt. At that distance, I couldn’t make out the plates or the driver, but a knot of worry had formed in my stomach.

“What is this? What’s going on?”

“Just wait.”

At least another half hour passed. Maybe more. But then I heard it: the buzz of propellers. A black speck showed to the west, and it grew steadily until the silhouette of a plane appeared. Then, faster than I had expected, the plane banked. It was coming here, I realized with a thudding in my chest. It was going to land, that’s why they had that stretch of dirt cleared.

The plane skidded and bumped and settled to a stop right at the end of the improvised runway. The noise from the propellers battered the ridge, and I decided it was loud enough to risk asking Lawayne who these people were, but when I turned, he snapped a finger and pointed back at the view below us.

From the plane emerged a small figure. In the distance, it was hard to tell, but I was guessing it was a woman. Then Lawayne jammed a pair of binoculars into my hands, and I took another look. Yes, it was a woman. She was well-proportioned—not slender, but not big either—and had tight blond curls with enough product in them that you could have snapped one like an icicle. Her face turned in my direction only once, as she scanned the area, and for a moment I was certain that her attention had settled on me. I fought the urge to drop the ground and scuttle backwards. That moment seemed to drag out, and I took the opportunity to study her face. She had the kind of healthy good looks that made me think of Minnesota farmers or outdated Disney princesses: rosy cheeks, creamy skin, a small cleft in her prominent chin. Then she climbed into the sedan, and the car pulled away as the plane wheeled around for take-off.

The whole scene took less than five minutes, but when both the plane and the car were out of sight, I realized I was drenched in sweat. The wind hammered at us, freezing the damp patch that had formed between my shoulder blades, and I followed Lawayne back down the bluff. Not until we were safely in the Nissan, with the heater cranking out a pathetic measure of warmth, did Lawayne say, “Get a good, long look?”

“Who is she?”

“That, my boy, is the Biondi’s new agent in town. And we’ve got to get back so I can meet her and shake and roll over, maybe fetch when she says fetch.” Following his words, he eased the Nissan back towards the road.

“What’s the rest of it?” I asked.

“Hm?”

“You said you had something impossible. Quit being coy, I want the rest of it, because otherwise I don’t care that the Biondi have a new agent in town. That’s your business.”

“Even though Lena was so determined to kill you?”

“Lena didn’t like me. The Biondi don’t give a fuck about me.”

“Gemella called this morning. She asked me what I knew about a boy named Vie Eliot.”

It took a moment before my heart started beating again. “You’re lying.”

“Cross my heart. I told her I didn’t know anything, but I’d look into it. Gemella said don’t bother.”

“That was Gemella? The woman from the plane?”

Lawayne’s explosion of laughter made me jump in my seat. “No,” he said, the laughter vanishing as quickly as it came, his face settling into grim lines. “No, the queen bee is not here. Not yet. She just sent a drone.”

We eased onto the cramped road, and Lawayne clamped down on the accelerator. The Nissan streaked towards Vehpese. An uncomfortable feeling was settling over me, a strange awareness that something wasn’t right. It was the way everyone has felt at some time, that moment of putting your hand on the doorknob, of tensing those tiny muscles to turn it, and knowing, a fraction of a second before the door opens, that something terrible is waiting on the other side. Just a feeling, I told myself. People just have that feeling, and ninety-percent, ninety-nine percent of the time, they’re wrong, because it’s just a feeling.

“What aren’t you telling me?” I managed to ask.

Lawayne fished something from his pocket and handed it to me. It was a paper rectangle, a small photo with unevenly trimmed edges. A school picture, I realized, the kind that parents buy every year and then don’t know what to do with. The girl in the picture had different hair, but she was the girl from the plane, although maybe a year or two younger. My thumb trembled under the tiny block letters that spelled her name.

“That’s . . .”

“Impossible,” Lawayne said grimly.