Soul Song (6 page)

The interior velvet of the case, purple as a summer iris, was still dry. Thank goodness she had insisted on a waterproof construction, and a custom tight fit. The fiddle lay in its soft foam bed like an amber jewel, fit for the hand of a queen. And when Kit played her music, she felt like one. She removed the instrument, made herself comfortable, and laid it on her stomach. Plucked a tune while she stared at the ceiling.

So. Men had tried to kill her. Men who worked for corrupt police officers. Corrupt police officers hired to murder and kidnap. She wondered if Officer Yu and her partner knew who she was. If they would come looking for her once they found out she was still alive.

Of course they’ll come. You saw everything.

And there was M’cal to think of, as well. What he had told her. Someone else wanted her dead.

Trust yourself. Trust him.

Him. M’cal. Kit recalled her dream, her vision: a hole in his throat gushing blood; his eyes, burning with heartbreak; his body, transformed.

He breathed underwater,
said a little voice.
He breathed for you both.

Kit still wore his coat. She buried her nose in the thick wool collar, caught a scent, strong and masculine; but it was nothing she could identify. Only, it was warm and dark, and made her think of the sea.

Kit set aside her fiddle and curled deeper inside M’cal’s coat, surrounding herself with the shadow of his presence, once again pretending it was his arms, his long, lean body. It made her feel safe. And stupid. The man was a killer. No matter his reasons.

Trust him,
echoed her grandmother’s voice. Easier said than done.
If
he was the man she was referring to.

Kit forced herself to sit up and went searching for her jacket, which was still wet. She rummaged through the pockets and found the soggy remains of the business card Alice had slipped her. The card was simple and white. It belonged to an Alice Hardon, Youth Counselor, at 300 Templar Street.

A youth counselor worth killing over? Worth paying cops to break the law?

Kit blew out her breath. Alice had given her the card for a reason. Perhaps someone at her workplace would know what kind of trouble she was in. Maybe even how to find her. Not that Kit could go to the police with that information. She wasn’t sure she could trust any cop now.

Kit drummed her fingers against the bed, weighing her options. There were only two: run or fight. Both were poor. She was no Rambo Tomb Raider Amazon who kicked ass on her days off.

But she was no coward either. Not even close.

Kit grabbed the phone. Hesitated, then dialed a number. Held her breath. Because when times were tough, it was good to have a best friend. Maybe her only friend, given that Kit socialized about as much as a rock. Delilah Reese was another fine artist, but her medium was metal, not music. Not that it mattered. Their grandmothers had been friends, and had introduced the two girls at the tender ages of twelve and thirteen. No looking back after that.

But Dela was more than a good friend; she was a friend with connections. The kind that carried guns.

She answered on the third ring, sounding calm, alert. Probably up to her elbows in hot metal. She had an art exhibit soon.

Kit exhaled. “It’s good to hear your voice.”

“Hello to you, too,” Dela said slowly. “But why do I get the feeling this isn’t a pleasure call?”

“Because it’s not,” Kit replied, and after making sure her friend was sitting down, told her entire story. Mostly. She left out the part about how she knew Alice was going to die. Nor did she mention how M’cal had breathed for her underwater, or forced men to kill themselves with nothing but his voice. That was too . . . strange. And disturbing. Something Dela would never believe. Something Kit did not want to explain. She had secrets, just as Dela, she suspected, had her own.

Her friend remained silent for a very long time. Kit said, “Hey.”

“Hey. Would it be impolite of me to say that you’re screwed?”

Kit rolled her eyes. “Anything else?”

“You need to get out of town?”

“I wish.”

“Well, wish your way onto an airplane. I’ll even spring for the ticket.”

“It’s not that easy, Dela. I can’t go until I know this woman is safe.”

“Bullshit. You’ve done your duty with this phone call. The agency will handle the rest. They’re the best, Kit.”

They, meaning Dirk & Steele, the detective agency Dela’s grandparents had founded and run for the better part of sixty years. According to her, it had one of the finest reputations in the world; and Kit believed it. She had even dated one of its agents—Blue Perrineau, a real boy scout. All of the agents were to some degree, best as she had seen. She doubted Dela and her family would settle for less. “I have to be involved,” Kit said.

“You’re in danger. On more than one front.”

“Doesn’t matter. I feel responsible for Alice. You’d feel the same if you had been there. They were brutal, Dela. Ruthless. But she still tried to help me. Those men were forcing me out of the car, and she ...” Kit stopped, swallowing hard. “I have to do this.” Had to help one person, as if it would make up for all the others. Though if Alice, then why not M’cal as well? Why had she resisted telling him?

He said he was going to kill you. What do you owe hint for that?

Easy answer. She owed him her life. Kit counted heartbeats. Listened to the wind howl outside the hotel window. A storm was coming.

Dela finally sighed. “We need to find out what Alice Hardon and her uncle were into.”

“Hope you’re not planning on involving the cops,” Kit said.

“No. Not yet. Just the Gunslingers.” That was Dela’s pet name for the men and women of the detective agency.

M’cal’s coat collar still pressed against Kit’s cheek. She did not push it away. Inside her head, a passage from Mussorgsky’s
Night on Bald Mountain
pounded, keeping time with her heart. The music reminded her of M’cal’s eyes. She inhaled, tugging the coat closer.

Crazy. You are so damn crazy to still want his scent.

But it was a shield; better than thinking about those men, what they had done to her. What they would have done. Better to remember M’cal and his scent. His mouth. His arms. His hands.

Hands that had broken Dutch’s neck. Hands that belonged to a man who could sing others to death, who had impaled another with a long steel pipe.

Kit closed her eyes. “I appreciate your help, Dela. More than I can say.”

“You’re my friend,” Dela said quietly. “I would come myself if I could, but Mahari is sick, and even if I could find someone to watch him, I shouldn’t travel right now. I shouldn’t even be at the forge.”

“Three months left, right?” Kit smiled, feeling wistful. “I’m surprised you can walk.”

“I think I’m having a litter,” Dela said, with so little humor Kit bit back a joke that sprang to mind. “Just you wait until it’s your turn.”

“Never,” she replied, making her voice light, breezy. “Never going to happen.”

Dela, thankfully, was a good enough friend not to give her the obvious lecture. Like,
It won’t happen if you don’t make time for it,
or,
It’ll happen when you least expect it.
She left it alone. Moved on.

“It just so happens that Hari is in Seattle for the weekend,” she said. “He’s with some of the other guys. They’re, um, having a reunion of sorts.”

Hari was Dela’s husband, a giant of a man who looked like a warrior out of a fairytale but who held his wife’s hand like it was made of snow and glass; precious, delicate. Dela had met him in China under mysterious circumstances—which she had
still
not shared—and dragged him home, willing that he was, like a prize from war. The two had been joined at the hip ever since.

Kit could only imagine the trouble those other guys were getting him in. “Did the big men bring teddy bears and matching pajamas?”

“You have no idea.”

“Darn,” Kit said. “My world for a camera.”

Dela snorted. “They can get to you in less than three hours, maybe two. Think you can stay put for that long?”

“Sure.”

“Kit.”

“Relax,” Kit replied, fingering Alice’s business card. “Where could I possibly go?”

She took a shower after she got off the phone with Dela. Washed away the night. Touched her neck, prodding the skin. There was no sign of any wound, not even on her scalp where she had been hit. A chill settled through her. She pretended it was her grandmother, and the cold turned warm.

Her hair remained a soft mess—more frizz than curls—but Kit tied it back with a red scarf that draped over the collar of her denim jacket. Shades of Jazz Marie. Thinking for a moment, Kit slipped on her reading glasses with their thick tortoiseshell frames, trying to pull a fast Clark Kent. Secret Identity 101. She looked into the mirror and studied her face. She imagined her grandmother staring back; she had the old woman’s eyes.

Uncanny,
her father had once said.
Uncanny and beautiful.

Kit almost called her parents. She wanted to hear their voices; something warm, familiar. Someone to reassure her. Someone to say good-bye to, just in case.

She checked her cell phone. It was wet, much like everything else in her green leather purse. She tried to turn it on, and nothing happened. Busted. She tossed it back into her bag, glanced at the hotel phone, and looked away. Grabbed her fiddle case and left the room.

There was an ATM in the marble lobby. Kit withdrew as much as she could and paid for another night. Pocketing the rest, she grabbed one of the idling cabs waiting in the cramped drive just outside the glass doors.

The cabbie was a swarthy man; dark beard, sharp eyes, white turban. He had an Indian accent. He looked at the address on Alice’s business card and said, “That’s right off East Hastings. Not a good neighborhood. You sure you want to go there?”

“Have to,” Kit said. “You won’t take me?”

“No, no,” he said, handing back the card. “Just a warning. You stay in this place, you have money. People with money don’t go to that street. Not on purpose. Too much shit.”

Kit did not say anything. She knew poor. Poor did not frighten her. Finding Alice dead with a knife in her eye, on the other hand, did. Ending up like Alice, or worse, scared her even more.

The cabbie drove fast. Downtown spirited by in a rush, sleek and tall and modern. It was a Saturday, and the sidewalks were full of youthful athleticism, cool charm. Vancouver felt like a young city. Kit wanted to stand on some street corner and play her fiddle, to busk as she had on the sidewalks of New York and Nashville with her father.

Good training,
he liked to say.
Nothing keeps an artist sharper than trying to reel in folks who don’t want to be reeled.

Kit wondered what else she needed to sharpen up on. Maybe kickboxing. Swimming. Running like hell. Or better yet, shutting off her mind so she never saw another murdered man or woman in her life.

They drove through Gastown; all brick and cobblestone, buildings that reeked of the historic, spilling over with shops and restaurants; quaint, elegant, hip. Just like any other tourist-trap shopping district in any other city in the world. Kit thought it needed music to make it click.

Then the neighborhood changed. Several turns down some narrow streets and the city crumbled, right before her eyes, transforming like Cinderella’s pumpkin carriage at midnight into a street of torn façades and broken windows, boarded-up restaurants plastered in paper advertisements of indie concerts and movies. There were some signs of life: several 99-cent stores, some diners, a liquor depot. Billboards painted on tall buildings declared them to be hotels—rooms rented by the week or the hour. Nothing Kit hadn’t seen before. Or hadn’t lived in.

Templar Street appeared to be in the heart of the Hastings district, a block down from a long line of homeless people waiting to enter a soup kitchen. It was chilly out, overcast, but women trawled the street corner in short skirts and high heels, jacket collars piled high with fake fur rubbing their cheeks. Some of them were marked as dead—strangled, beaten, shot. Hard to look at; visions of murder swam hot in Kit’s head.

Kit glimpsed their pimp sitting on a folding chair just inside the old arching doorway of an apartment building. He had long blond hair, a pale skinny face, hard, narrow eyes that reminded her of Dutch. No future murder for him, but that didn’t mean much. There was a girl in his lap. He watched the cab as it drove by—Kit felt like he watched her, too.

The cabbie stopped less than a hundred feet away, beside a pale white building with a low roof and tall windows. It looked old, probably historic; a folding placard sat outside the tinted glass double doors. YOUTH CENTER, it said, but the cheerfully painted balloons, hearts, and flowers would have given that away even without the big letters.

“You want me to wait?” asked the cab driver. “Might be hard to get another ride.”

“I’ll be fine,” she said. “But thanks.”

The air outside the cab smelled like piss and vomit. A lot of piss and vomit. Kit glanced down the street. The pimp was watching her. She hardened her expression and walked into the Youth Center.