Page 94 of Prodigal Son

He was scared.

“Carl.”

He lifted his head again, and the light glanced off eyes that had gone wide and glazed. Not just scared, but terrified.

“You saw something,” Albie said, not even guessing at this point; he knew. “What was it? You’ve never hesitated to spill all kinds of dirt on all kinds of lowlifes.”

“This is different. I’ve never seen anything like this.”

“Maybe I have. Try me.”

Carl exhaled noisily. “Shit. This is how people end up dead in an alley, talking about this shit.” He cast a glance around his sleeping quarters for the night and snorted. Dropped his voice to a rough scrape. “Alright, so it was about a week ago. I’ve been seeing lots of cops around lately – not unis, but detectives, you know. Trench coats, and bad suits, and lots of tensed jaws.” He demonstrated, turning his profile to Albie and clenching his own jaw, the effect mostly disguised by his beard.

At another time, Albie would have laughed.

“Someone’s been selling prescription meds the last six months or so,” Carl said. “Name-brand narcotics. Only, the usual dealers, they said they got it from a new supplier. Somewhere fancy, yeah? When the cops started closing in, I thought they were about to make a bust. Only, there was one night…” He shuddered, and closed the foil up over his falafel. Reached for his whiskey and took a gulp, breathless afterward. “One night, there’s these two detectives, and they happen to be in the alley I was in, and they told me I ought to clear out because they were about to ‘apprehend’” – he made air quotes – “someone, and I wouldn’t want to be in the way. I said I’d leave, but I stopped at the edge of the alley, in the dark, you know, and got real still and quiet, and I thought I’d wait them out. I looked back, and then this – this – thisshadow. It comes flying down out of the sky. Out of nowhere! Only it isn’t a shadow at all, but a man, dressed all in black. And he killed those cops. Wham! Bam!” He mimed a sequence of sloppy karate chops. “With his bare hands! Snaps their necks, like. And they fall down, and don’t get up, and he lights out of there. Climbsup the wall, Albert. On this cable, and with his feet on the building.” He mimed that too. “Like bloody Spider-Man!”

Albie’s pulse tripped. “You’re sure they were dead and not just unconscious?”

“Oh, definitely sure. I walked down there. They didn’t get up for about twenty minutes, so I went to look. I didn’t touch them, no, but I could tell they were very dead. You get that look about you, you know? The empty eyes. And not a drop of blood spilled.” He shrugged a few times, like he was fighting a chill. “Right terrifying.”

“What happened after that?”

“I got out of there. The cops might not care if I lie about in dark corners, but how was I to explain two dead detectives to them? No. I walked half the bloody night to get away from that. But people were talking about it after.”

“Yeah? What’d they say?”

He looked at Albie with a kind of seriousness he’d never shown before, gaze haunted. “Everyone said it was a ghost that done it. But the ones who really know – say it was agovernmentghost, if you catch my drift.”

Fox’s words, tinny and tight over Phillip’s phone, came back to him. “Morgan thinks they’re trying to reboot Project Emerald.”

Albie was pretty sure they’d succeeded.

Twenty-Seven

On a regular day, Fox had to mainline coffee to stay alert, descending otherwise into a lazy fog of indifference.

When he was working, though, adrenaline cycled through him at regular intervals, keeping him sharp and focused, and, surprisingly, calm.

He didn’t feel so calm now, though.

It was taking forever to get back.

Cass was missing.

No,taken.

“–lie.” Eden’s voice from the passenger seat. “Charlie.”

“What?”

“You’re going eighty-five!”

The long stretch of empty dark road, his too-fast heartbeat, panic closing in – it had all conspired to lend a surreal, underwater feeling to the moment. His extremities tingled with numbness, and he knew that was shock setting in. He was outrunning the van’s headlights, but that didn’t alarm him. He glanced down – disorienting sense of everything tilting around him, vision slip-sliding – to the glowing speedometer. He’d been in the States so long that it shocked him a little to see KPH rather than MPH. Eighty-five…kilometers?

Whatever.

Eyes back on the road.

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