Vampire Uprising

Chapter Nine

Cole stood with Paige and Prophet, watching Raza Hill burn from a distance. The police scanner in Prophet’s van wasn’t the best, but it was good enough to pick up the chatter going back and forth between the dozens of units that had been sent to put out other fires throughout the city. Robberies were in progress. Shootings had taken place. A gas station had been put to a torch and threatened to blow up part of a city block. Almost twenty minutes after getting away from the burning ruins of a once mediocre eatery, the wail of an approaching fire truck reached Cole’s ears.

“About damn time,” he said while squinting at a rising column of black smoke.

The three of them sat in the parking lot of a nearby White Castle on Cicero Avenue. It seemed fitting since Cole had been on his way home from that same burger joint months ago when he first spotted Rita and Sid in a part of town the Nymar had been warned to leave alone. Now, that warning seemed almost as silly as an old lady wagging an angry finger at an invading army.

Paige sat on the hood of the Cav, eating fries from a rectangular cardboard box. “They should let it burn,” she said.

“That’s our home! How can you want to see it burn?”

“I don’t want to see it burn, but that’s what it should do. There’s bigger things for the cops and fire department to worry about.”

“Yeah. Bigger things like tearing down that Blood Parlor over on Rush Street.”

Prophet sat behind the wheel of his van, tapping the police scanner as if he could somehow coax it into telling him more. Although he wouldn’t say it out loud, out of risk of offending his vehicle, he obviously missed the truck he’d rented after being ferried to Philadelphia. “Sounds like the cops are shifting into clean-up mode,” he said. “That means any bad guys out there either took off or were brought in. This other stuff that’s going on may have been a distraction. Makes sense, if those Nymar wanted as much time as possible to take a crack at you.”

Wheeling around to look at Prophet, Cole said, “Let me guess. You dreamed this would happen so that’s why you’re here?”

“I did have a dream about fire!” he said. “It could have been this one too.” The enthusiasm died down when he paid more attention to the looks he was getting from both Skinners. “But Paige got ahold of me while you were still in Philly. I got zapped back over here and was keeping an eye on your place.”

“You mean the place that’s burning to the ground?” Cole snarled. “Great fucking job!”

The bounty hunter put the scanner down and got out of the van so he could stand toe-to-toe with Cole. “Those assholes just rolled in and lit a match. I called you the second the fire started, but you wouldn’t answer the goddamn phone!”

Unable to dispute that without losing the angry roll he’d gotten onto, Cole snapped his eyes over to Paige. “So what’s your excuse? You called Prophet. You came back after telling me you were leaving. Think you could have let me in on whatever was going on before I might have been cooked alive in that shitty freezer of mine?”

“If I’d have told you, that would have ruined the surprise.”

Her joke didn’t go over well, even with her. Despite the steady stream of junk food going into her mouth, Paige simply didn’t have the energy to feign a smile. Setting her sights on something in the general direction of Raza Hill, she said, “Daniels called while I was in Miami. He’s doing some minor work for one of the Nymar running Steph’s newest Blood Parlor. Apparently, she’s expanding even further than we thought.”

Tossing a quick wave at the smoky horizon, Cole grunted, “No shit.”

“Seems Steph was keeping tabs on us through some sort of surveillance. Daniels said he’d heard about it a while ago but wanted to find out more before calling us.” When Cole dug his phone from his pocket, she added, “Those Nymar must talk a lot of shit about us, Cole. Daniels can’t tell us every little claim they make. He got ahold of me as soon as he heard something more concrete, like the fact that they had the car bugged.”

Cole looked at the car. Then he looked at Paige. He looked toward the smoke and then looked at Prophet. After all of that head turning, he needed to get off his feet, so he sat down beside Paige. “That’s why you said you were leaving? To make them think you were out of the picture?”

“Yeah.”

“Couldn’t you have written me a note or something? Maybe a hand gesture?”

“I haven’t picked out a suitable gesture for, ‘Look out. The car’s bugged and I’m pretending to leave.’”

“You know what I mean!”

“Yeah, I know. It’s just that, if I was going to force Steph’s hand, whatever I said needed to be convincing. You’ve got some real promise as a Skinner, but I’m not sure about your acting skills. That’s why I wanted Prophet here to back you up until I made it back. And before you ask, I already found the bug and got rid of it. It was tucked behind one of the loose door panels.”

“That’s not to say there aren’t more,” Prophet said. “I got some equipment that’ll sniff out anything transmitting from your car.”

“Don’t bother,” Paige said through a mouthful of fries. “If they were still listening in or tracking me, I don’t think I could have caught Ace by surprise like that. We’re getting the hell out of this city anyway, and we’ll notice if anyone follows us that far.”

Cole watched her for a few seconds until he was certain she wasn’t going to take back what she’d said. “Hold on now. We can’t just leave! That’s probably all Steph wanted.”

“No,” Paige replied. “She’s after something more than just putting us in our place. They all are.”

“All the Nymar in Chicago?”

“All the Nymar in the country. Maybe more.”

“Aw, hell,” Prophet sighed. “Last time I tried to lend a hand to you two, I was pulled into a massacre in the boonies of Wisconsin. Now this?”

“Janesville isn’t exactly the boonies,” Paige said. “More like the Edge of Nowhere.”

“Why the hell did you even get me involved in this?”

Showing enough intensity to send a chill down the bounty hunter’s spine, Paige said, “Because you owed me after going behind my back to bury Henry when you knew damn well I’d come looking for him.”

“Oh yeah,” Prophet muttered. “I suppose there’s that.”

“Plus,” she added, “we should only deal with people we trust after what happened in Philly. I don’t want to speak to anyone unless I know whose side they’re on.”

“I can see why Cole wanted to fly under the radar to bury that body,” Prophet said, “but are you tellin’ me you’ve got something against those others too?”

Cole looked over to Paige and got a reluctant nod from her. “Something’s going on with the rest of those guys in Philly,” he said. “I don’t think it’s all of them, but there are some Skinners who are up to something on their own. We think they may even be working with Nymar.”

“How the hell could that happen?”

“Some of us work with Nymar,” Paige explained, “but Daniels isn’t a Skinner. Some of the other groups have been bringing Nymar in even further to make them official. There’s no ruling body or anything like that among us, so we run on tradition. It’s how we’ve always done things. It’s who we are. We work independently, but together, you know?”

“It’s a lot like that in the bail bonds business,” Prophet said. “We’re our own companies with our own ways of doing the job, but there’s always been an understanding of how that job should be done.”

“Sounds about right,” Paige said as she hopped off the hood of the car, then brushed off her hands and tossed her fry box into the Cav. “We’ve always spoken to the others, helped each other out, shared information. Well … most of the information. The Toronto Skinners started working with a few Nymar who weren’t on board with the Canadian bloodsuckers when they started getting into slavery rings. Feeding’s one thing, but I guess they weren’t ready to work hand in hand with the kind of scum that steals babies from hospitals or ships girls around to appear in underground porn before disappearing to be sucked dry.”

“So what the hell do we do now?” When the Skinners looked at him, Prophet said, “Hell yes it’s ‘we.’ I may not know your secret handshake or whatever, but I’m in on this. Or did you wipe out every one of those Nymar that may have seen me shooting that asshole with the Molotov cocktail in his hand?”

“I’m going back to Miami to follow up on a lead,” Paige said.

Cole couldn’t look at the smoke coming from Raza Hill anymore. For now it was easier to just turn his back on it and think about anything else. “I thought that Miami stuff was just to convince Steph you were leaving town.”

“It was, but I still need to go. It’s not about Steph. I doubt she’s got any connections that far away from Chicago that we need to worry about.”

“And what if she does?”

“Then worrying won’t do us any good. I need to get back to Miami and that’s all there is to it. Whatever is happening with the Nymar is connected to the ones I followed out of Philly. They’re getting bolder. Not just here, but all over the place. Reports are coming in from across the country that Nymar are running wild and hitting Skinners left and right.”

“Sounds like they’re marking their territory,” Prophet said. “Just like any other goddamn bunch of criminals. When they’ve been locked up or held down for too long, they come back like a nightmare. It builds up in their systems. I’ve seen it too many times with regular fugitives. They just ain’t wired to sit still, otherwise they’d be able to keep an office job. They get anxious and when they finally do cut loose it’s an event. I’ve nabbed a whole lot of fugitives during parties like that. They’re dangerous, but careless. After being away from their home turf for too long, they need to remind everybody that they’re still around. If they don’t, they either lose their contacts or settle at the bottom of the pool where they can get swallowed up.”

“There,” Paige said to Cole. “See why I insist on keeping him around?”

“What else have you heard about the Nymar that you haven’t been telling me?” Cole asked.

“The last I heard from Rico, he was still in Toronto. He meant to check in on those guys before he got sidetracked to St. Louis when all that Lancroft business hit. He’s already heard about what happened and wants in. After we get out of Chicago, you’ll meet up with him.”

“I’m not letting you go to Miami on your own, Paige.”

She took out her phone, pressed a few buttons and then put it away again. “When you find Rico, show him the picture I just sent.”

Before Cole could ask, he felt a rattle from the phone in his pocket. “No matter what’s going on, you can still send a hum through my pants,” he said with a tired smirk.

She wasn’t laughing, but her expression did get warmer around the edges.

Cole dug out the vibrating phone and saw the picture Paige had sent him. It was a hastily taken shot of Bobby and the Nymar woman that had snuck into the Lancroft house.

“Tell him where I went and to tell you about shampoo banana.”

Cole squinted as if that would somehow make things clearer. When he looked over to Prophet, the bounty hunter seemed just as confused as he was. “Did she say shampoo banana?”

“Yes she did,” Paige told him. “And tell him I know he’s got the hound dog notebook and that you should have it now. He’ll know what that means. Do you still have the Lancroft journals?”

“I e-mailed what I could to myself but … shit! My hard drive! It’s back at Raza Hill! Damn it, I knew I should’ve brought that along no matter what!”

“Calm down,” Paige said. “What about the paper copies?”

Patting the satchel he’d thrown over his shoulder on his way out of his freezer, he said, “Right here.”

“See if you can get all of that to Ned’s house. We need to keep them somewhere safe and that’s the safest place I know.”

“Aren’t you gonna check in with the other Skinners?” Prophet asked. “What if this kind of shit’s happened to them? Maybe you can get some help.”

“Our main priority is to keep things from getting any worse.” With a sigh, Paige admitted, “If we give the Nymar a chance to hit us this badly again, they’ll gain too much momentum. This is exactly why we stay in small groups and as mobile as possible, Cole. It was a mistake for me to get too comfortable in this city.”

“Great,” he said. “Living in a gutted restaurant and sleeping on a cot was your version of getting comfortable.”

She walked up to him and held his face in her hands. After pulling him down so they were close enough to bump foreheads, Paige said, “Walter, give us a minute.”

Prophet moved away to join the people who were watching the thinning cloud of smoke filling the air to the southwest.

“Something big is happening,” she whispered. “It may be something that’s been brewing for a while.”

“Why do I get the feeling that there’s a lot more you’re not telling me?”

“Because there is. I don’t have the time to get into it right now but you need to know the whole story. You deserve to know.” Lowering her eyes, she said, “After you hear all of it, if you want to get away from me and all of this shit I’ll understand.”

“Paige, with everything that’s already—”

Her hands clamped around him harder and her eyes bored right through him. The voice she used had an edge that was sharper than any weapon in the Skinner arsenal. “You can still get away if you want. You may have to lay low for a while, but you know enough now to have a chance on your own.”

“And what if that’s not what I want to do?”

“Then you can stand with me. I just want you to know who you’re standing with. What’s happened between us has been worth all the shit we’ve had to go through to get to it. If anything happens to me, just know that I had a hell of a good time with you.”

“We could still fit in another good time, you know. Just a quick one.”

When she pulled his face a little closer, Cole swore she was coming in for a kiss. Instead, she gave him a gentle, tapping head butt. “That’s just what I needed to hear,” she said with an easy laugh. “At least everything hasn’t gone to hell in the last hour. Go find Rico. Show him that picture. You remember what to tell him?”

“Yeah, yeah. Shampoo banana. Hound dog notebook.”

Paige pulled him in and kissed him on the mouth. It was a hard, lingering kiss that was over way too soon. Walking around to the Cav’s driver side, she climbed in and fished around inside the glove compartment. “Here,” she said while tossing him the .44 revolver she kept in the car.

Between wanting to keep the gun hidden and not wanting it to go off accidentally, Cole nearly tripped over himself twice in his haste to catch it. By the time the .44 was in his possession, Paige had the Cav’s motor running.

“Get your hard drive and anything else you can scavenge from Raza Hill. But don’t stay too long,” she said while pulling away.

Prophet ambled over to him as Cole was doing his best to casually stuff a gun under his belt along with the .38 he’d taken from Sid. “You need a ride?”

“Sure. There’s a bar down the street that always looked pretty interesting. First round’s on me.”

“Isn’t there something more important to do? Like something about the vampires that burned your house down?”

“Screw it. If things are just going to get worse anyway, I might as well cushion my system for it.”

Slapping Cole on the shoulder, Prophet said, “Makes sense to me.”