The Lethal Bones Page 6

  “He and his goons chased me all over this neighborhood. I’m pretty sure I’m only not dead now because I snuck into a storage facility and climbed up on top of one to hide there.”

  Her grim face lightened a little as she smiled. “That’s smart. I knew you would be good at this.”

  “Good at what? Running for my life?”

  “Look at me, Ben.”

  He did.

  “This — me — I wasn’t born this way. Does that make sense?”

  Ben shook his head. “You mean you weren’t always in perfect shape?”

  “Right, that. But also what I know. What I can do. I wasn’t born an… assassin. It’s something you’re trained to do. And you —”

  “You think you can train me to be one?”

  “I think you’re a better fit for it than you know.”

  “I think you’re out of your mind.”

  She paused again, looking around and shifting her position once more. “Look, I can’t tell you much about the Club now, Ben, but you have to believe me when I tell you that what I do — what we do — is good for the world. I take on contracts to get rid of some real scumbags. People the government can’t go after for whatever political reasons. Last year, I took out a Nigerian warlord who had been kidnapping kids and turning them into soldiers for over a decade. One bullet to his forehead while he was sleeping, and the kids in his camp are all free now. That’s the power of what we can do.”

  “I don’t really care about your 'save the world' crap.”

  “There are a lot of other assholes out there who deserve a bullet to the head.”

  With his hands on his hips, Ben swallowed hard. “I’m sorry, but that’s not my problem. If you can’t take me to my car, then take me to the bus station. I’ll get a ticket out of town and have Lucas bring me my car later or something.” He reached to his back pocket for his wallet to check if he had enough cash for a ticket, and his heart stopped.

  No. His wallet wasn’t there.

  “What is it?” she asked. “You got totally pale.”

  “My wallet. It’s gone.”

  Ember's eyes flashed with something Ben assumed was anger, then her eyebrows fell, and she lowered her voice. "You didn't drop it back there, did you?"

  “I… don’t know. I might have.”

  Ember ran a hand through her raven hair. “This is not good, Ben. I have to be honest with you — this is not good at all. Is there anything important in there, aside from your ID?”

  He started to shake his head when a creeping sense of dread fell on him. “Oh shit. Yes. Contact info for my family. My brother’s phone number. Shit, I even have pictures of him and my mother. Can they find my family based on just a phone number?”

  “Yeah, I’m sure he can, if he wants to.”

  “This Dalton guy, will he hurt my family?”

  She paused a second, then slowly nodded. "Most definitely. If he can find them, he'll kidnap them both. He'll kill one of them to make sure you know he's serious, and then he'll use the other one as leverage to make you turn yourself in."

  Ben squeezed his eyes shut. “Then what?”

  “Then your life is over.”

  11

  Ember parked outside the building in the northeast end of Boulder, Colorado. It was in the industrial district of town, a place filled with self-storage lots and trailer parks and machine shops. Literally three or four miles from downtown, but a world away from the opulence of the compact heart of the small city.

  The four-story building was nondescript, and that’s how the Branch liked it. At one time, it had been home to a software startup with a meteoric rise and an equally chaotic downfall. Now, the cubicle farms sat dormant, the building forgotten. A cheap real estate buy. Also, a perfect place for the Boulder Branch of the Denver Assassins Club to have meetings and train.

  In the passenger seat, Ember watched Ben vibrate. His shoulders hadn't stopped pumping up and down for the entire thirty-minute drive from the Five Points neighborhood of Denver. He'd said little, and his jaw had been flexing for most of the ride.

  “You okay?” she asked.

  He shook his head and didn’t reply. Understandable. Leaving his wallet behind for Dalton and his people to find had been a stupid move. Careless and absent-minded. But, she should have expected as much from Ben, since he was only raw talent. He’d had no proper training, no lessons in common sense. No, she thought. That’s not fair. Ben had plenty of common sense — that’s how he’d gotten onto her radar in the first place, and how he’d stayed one step ahead of the Five Points assholes.

  No, he didn’t lack common sense. What he lacked was the training to know how to use it. To know what her kind would look for, to know how he could be exploited. Those were the sorts of things that had to be taught. She could teach him, and he’d learn, quickly. She had no doubt of that.

  But that was a problem for the future if they both made it that far. He'd made a mistake, and that mistake had been her responsibility. Now Salty would tear into her over her impulsive decision to send Ben in alone, and she would have to take a deserved dressing-down.

  “Most people would have fallen to pieces after seeing what you saw today,” she said.

  “It’s not the first dead body I’ve seen. And trust me, I was tempted to fall to pieces. But I also wanted to live, more than I wanted to curl up into a ball and cry.”

  “Sometimes that’s the only difference between a hero and a victim.”

  When he didn’t respond, Ember pointed at the building. “I need to go see someone in there.”

  “What is this place?”

  “It’s our place. The Boulder Branch.”

  “You live here?”

  “No, I have a condo close to campus. This is where we meet and train and handle business. We call it a ‘Post Office,’ because it’s like a hub.”

  Ben stared at the building, a frown etched onto his lips. “Is it safe?”

  “Yes. It’s against the rules to attack anyone in or near a Post Office. You’d be in deep shit if you broke a rule as sacred as that one.”

  He rubbed the sides of his temples, his jaw working back and forth. "‘Your rules.' None of this makes any sense. Are you guys like those live action role-playing people, like the ones you see in the park with the tinfoil swords and shields?"

  “I’d hope you have a little more respect for me than to accuse me of being a LARPer. Honestly, I should be offended, but I’m not one to quibble over the details. You can trust me when I say no one here is pretending.”

  “Believe me, I understand that. I saw it in realtime, in front of me.”

  “I get it,” Ember said. “You have every right to be mad. I didn’t know it would go bad like that, but I should have assumed it would. I should have known better. I didn’t want this for you, Ben. I really do feel awful about what happened back there.”

  He faced her, glowering. “And now, my family is involved.”

  “Sorry, but I didn’t tell you to leave your wallet behind. That’s on you.”

  With a deep sigh, he scratched his fingernails along the legs of his jeans. “You’re right. I just don’t know… this is so crazy.”

  She pursed her lips and opened her mouth to speak, but stopped short. After a deep breath, she continued. “My brother wasn’t actually mauled by a bear.”

  “Yeah, you said that already.”

  “He was killed. I was twenty-two, he was fifteen.”

  “Oh, shit. I’m sorry to hear that.”

  Ember nodded. “I was away at school. He was walking over to a friend’s house, minding his own business. A car full of gang bangers drove by, and they thought he was someone else. Some guy they were beefing with. They shot him twelve times and left him to bleed out on the street. My mom called me about it, and when I first heard, I laughed.”

  “You laughed?”

  “Yeah,” she said, shrugging. “It was a nervous reaction. Obviously, I didn’t think it was funny. The laugh just came out of me. I
t’s almost a decade later, and I still think about that laugh, the day I heard. I was walking out of class. Phone up to my ear, my backpack slipping down my shoulder. Mom told me he was dead, and I laughed.” After a beat, she pointed at the Post Office building. “I take on contracts for the Boulder Branch. I kill people, yes. And I only take on contracts to kill assholes who deserve it. To kill the sort of people who would gun down a kid in the street without bothering to look closely enough to make sure it’s the right person they’re about to murder.”

  She wiped the moisture out of the corners of her eyes and cleared her throat. “This won’t take long.”

  “You’re going to do something in there?”

  “Like I said, I need to see someone. My… boss, I guess you could say. He’s my mentor in the Branch. He’ll know what we should do next and can help sort out all this mess. He’s a grizzled old guy named Salty. You’d like him.”

  “I would like him?”

  “You can’t come in with me, Ben.”

  “What am I supposed to do?”

  She opened the car door and took a pair of Nighthawk Enforcer pistols from her waistband and hid them under her seat. “Stay here. I’ll be back in fifteen minutes. I promise you’ll be safe until I get back. Nobody would be crazy enough to try to hit you here, but… those are under the seat if you feel like you need them.”

  His eyes widened a bit, and he stared forward but didn't say anything. As she left the car, she worried about him for a minute, but it evaporated soon. Ben would be fine. She'd seen and studied enough about him to know he was a survivor. Highly adaptable, intelligent, resilient, and able to think his way through most situations in quick fashion. The fact that he'd eluded Dalton and Rennie and other Five Points hitmen said as much.

  A perfect recruit for the DAC. Not that it would matter much anymore if Ben or his family turned up dead.

  Instead of going for the decoy front door, Ember went around the back and pressed her keycard against the hidden panel to open the service entrance. This led into a dark room, full of mildew and the stink of aging plumbing. All of this was intentional and made to give the impression the building was abandoned. A home for squatters. She drew the second keycard from her pocket and pressed it against the interior door, and that opened to a clean and well-lit hallway.

  There, standing in the hallway opposite a whiteboard, was Branch member Fagan.

  She turned and smiled at Ember. Fagan had an odd smile since the right half of her face had been badly burned on a contract at least a dozen years ago. Her smile curved on the left, but the right half of her face stayed flat and still, from the mutilated flesh of her cheeks, up to her dead eye. Ember had often wondered why Fagan hadn't had the eye replaced with a glass one. She supposed Fagan liked the dead look. Most assassins wanted to blend in with the population, to hide in plain sight. Fagan was a lot more old school.

  “Morning, Fagan.”

  “Good morning, Ember. You look a little frazzled.”

  "That's fitting because I feel a little frazzled."

  “Everything okay?”

  She stopped a yard shy of Fagan and leaned against the wall to give her feet a rest. “I did something really stupid.”

  “That doesn’t sound like you. Not the Ember I know, anyway.”

  “I made an assumption about a recruit, and it went bad. I think someone from another Branch is going to use it against me.”

  “Is your recruit dead?”

  Ember shook her head. “Someone else is, though. Someone I cared about.”

  “That’s a shame, but it’s how this business goes sometimes.”

  “I wish it didn’t.”

  Fagan sighed as she took the Dry-Erase marker she’d been holding and put the cap on it. She slid it behind her ear, on the unburnt side of her face. She didn’t have much of an ear on the other side. “Maybe it can be different someday, but probably not today.”

  “Maybe so. What are you working on here?” Ember asked, nodding at the board.

  “Chore assignments. I’m tired of seeing dirty dishes in the kitchen sink.”

  Ember studied Fagan’s work. She had drawn a grid with names on the y-axis and a list of chores on the x-axis like dish duty, aluminum can crushing, trash, sweeping.

  “I applaud your organization,” Ember said, “but don’t you think you should run this by Salty and some of the other old-timers? I mean, having all of our names on a board seems like a teensy bit of a security risk.”

  She stared at Ember with her one good eye, which always felt a little menacing, or at least ambiguous. “I don’t have to run anything by Salty. He’s not in charge here.”

  "Suit yourself. Hey, some of us were playing cards last Tuesday, and we were looking for you to join."

  Fagan turned back toward the board and continued detailing chore assignments. “I was out. You have a good day, Ember. I hope things look up for you.”

  "See you around," she said as she left Fagan there and continued down the hall. She chose the fifth door on the right, another stairwell. Ember jogged up to the third floor. She paused a moment when she became lightheaded. This day had not at all turned out liked she'd planned. Ben's mental state worried her. He would be okay eventually, yes, but she hated to put him through all this chaos.

  After a few moments of rest, she made the quick jaunt out into the hallway, and Salty’s office was the first door on the left.

  She knocked, and the door creaked open. He hadn't shut it all the way. He leaned over to catch her eyes. Salty dipped his head to glance over the edges of his glasses. He was at his desk, a cellphone in one hand and a loose collection of pages in the other.

  Salty was about sixty, with white hair the exact opposite of his dark skin. He had a collection of freckles lining his face just like Morgan Freeman. But, no one dared make that comparison to his face. Salty hated it, for some reason.

  “Good morning, sir,” Ember said.

  “Kid,” he said, sighing, “it is morning, yes, but not a good one.” Salty waved the pages at the desk opposite the desk. “Sit.”

  She did as she was told, and then crossed her legs and waited for him to speak. Salty liked to take dramatic pauses to gather his thoughts, and she was used to waiting for him.

  “I just got off the phone with the DAC President. He said Kenneth Brownie from Five Points was murdered in an alley about an hour ago.”

  Ember nodded.

  "And," Salty said, leaning forward, his voice becoming gruffer by the word, "Dalton from Five Points says he saw you kill the guy.”

  “You know that’s a bucket of crap. Kenny and I were friends.”

  Salty took off his glasses and dropped them on the desk. "I've heard more unbelievable things than an assassin getting close to someone, so they can make a hit without being a suspect. You can be honest with me, kid."

  “I didn’t kill —”

  “Then you’d better start talking to me, and explain to me why my phone is ringing off the hook with people wanting to talk to you.”

  Ember glanced at his desk phone, the little green light blinking. “I found Harvey Bennett. I gave him a little initiation test, and he was there for the meet when things went bad. Dalton killed Kenny and is using it to blame me. You know Dalton has had it out for me for a long time. But it won’t stick.”

  “Damn it, Ember, it doesn’t matter what happened. Only what Dalton can make them believe happened.”

  “Right, I can’t argue with that. So, what do I do?”

  He sat back, pinching the bridge of his nose with two fingers. After a few seconds, he retrieved his glasses from the desk and put them back on. “Did Bennett survive?”

  “He’s outside, in the car.”

  “You brought him here?”

  “I was trying to recruit him, sir. I would have brought him here, eventually.”

  "I know you don't want to hear this, but you need to ditch him. Now. He was your project; I get that. But with Kenny's death and Dalton out for you and him, it�
�s too much. I hope you haven’t told him about us. If you have, then you’ve definitely signed this poor bastard’s death warrant.”

  Ember gripped the edges of her chair. “Respectfully, sir, I’m not going to do that. I got him involved in this. It’s my fault. I have to help him. He’s like a lost puppy now, and I can’t unclip his leash and let him go.”

  Salty sighed. “I’m doing everything I can to prevent an inter-Branch war, and you want to keep working on your recruit project?”

  “I at least owe it to him to keep him alive.”

  “Then drop him off at the airport.”

  Ember shook her head. “Dalton has Bennett’s wallet. It has personally identifying information in it. Information about his family.”

  Salty rubbed his temples. “Great. That’s just great, Ember. Now it’s not just your recruit — you’re involving other civilians?”

  She considered blaming Ben, but she knew it was pointless. It was, after all, her responsibility. She had at least enough integrity to know that. She dropped her head. “I messed up. I know.”

  Salty took a long moment to think, then he sat up in his chair. “Okay, here’s how it’s going to be. The only way I can see out of this that leaves everyone clean is for Dalton to disappear. And, not only that, Bennett has to do it.”

  “You want Ben to kill one of the most dangerous assassins in the whole Club?”

  "It has to be that way. Doesn't matter who killed Kenny, really. Dalton will use this as a chance to claim he's been slighted, that his Branch had a member illegally taken out. But, if Dalton dies, the slight dies with him. And it can't be one of us. If you're seen as being involved, they'll use that to start a war, for sure. Bennett kills him, then gets out of town and never comes back to Denver. It's the only way."

  Ember sat back and tented her fingertips, considering.

  12

  Ben knocked on the door to Lucas’ house, and he had to shake his head to clear away the tension in his neck. The last couple hours of his life had been some of the most intense he’d ever experienced. Sure, he’d been in situations like this before, where he thought he was an inch away from death. There was the wildfire he’d been tasked with fighting back when he was training, before his National Park days. That intense wall of flame had somehow still seared through his protective fire suit.