Dead Man Walking (The Fallen Men 6)

It was a space I didn’t use, leaving it purposely in disarray so that people would think the building next to it was just as abandoned and ravaged.

It could have been anything, maybe the drain-off from the day’s earlier rainfall or the leftover of an animal passing through.

But I knew somehow it was blood.

Some people had an affinity for music and math; mine was more elemental.

They say blood doesn’t have a smell, but I could smell it. More, I could sense it. Maybe because I’d spilled it one too many times and been consequently cursed to know it intimately ever after.

I stalked over to the shed, my heart beating like a steady metronome in my chest.

There was blood on that grass then, moving closer, blood on the door, wrapped around it’s open edge like bleeding fingers had fought to open it.

My thoughts whirred.

I dropped to the ground carefully and stuck my head closer to the crack between it and the asphalt. My nose pricked, stung by the metallic tang.

More blood.

“Fuck.”

I hopped to my feet and flipped open my disposable cell. It only rang once before Zeus picked up with a laughing, “Priest, my brother.”

Children laughed in the background, the faint trill of Loulou’s voice talking to one of her babies.

Family.

The cancer inside me ate away with its vicious, poisoned teeth.

“Got a problem,” I said, cutting to the quick, careful not to get blood on my boot as I stalked around the building, looking for a forced sign of entry.

It was there at the second garage bay, the corrugated metal lipped and distorted by what had to have been a crowbar.

“Give it to me,” Zeus ordered, the humour stripped from his words. All business now. All Prez.

“Seems someone’s been into the garage on my property,” I told him calmly as I went back round to the front. My boots crunched in the frost-tipped grass, drawing my eyes to other prints that might’ve been left in its mold.

There, faint, earlier that morning before the dew froze in the anaemic light of dawn.

Wide, long footprints in running shoes of a kind. Too big for a woman, the tread sank deep in the grass. They disappeared quickly from the garage bay into the gravel drive.

“They get into the arsenal?” Z asked, shock in the question because it was me and I didn’t ever fail in my duties to the club.

“No,” I assured, my head cocking to the side as I heard the crunch of wheels on gravel followed shortly by a familiar, dreaded bleep.

The short exclamation of a police car’s sirens.

Seconds later, red and blue light spilled around the corner, illuminating the road that was more an alley where my warehouse entrance stood.

Illuminating me.

“It seems someone decided to frame me for murder,” I told Zeus conversationally as a cop stepped out of the first of two cars.

“Fucking fuck,” Zeus swore into the phone, the sound of dislodged furniture in the background as he gained his feet. “Don’t fucking kill anyone. I’m comin’ for ya.”

I made a short exhale that was as close as I came to a snort. “If I was gonna kill them, they’d bloody well be dead already. I’ll meet you at the precinct. And, Zeus, don’t tell Bea.”

There was a slight pause as the cop ordered me to put my hands in the air.

I didn’t.

Instead, I leaned against the front wall beside the warped garage door and crossed my ankles. “You hear me?”

“She’s gonna find out, brother,” Zeus finally said. “And you gotta know, Lou’s a Garro now, but she was a Lafayette, and from what I know’a those girls, they wanna do somethin’, there’s no fuckin’ stoppin’ them.”

I didn’t respond because I figured he was right. Instead, I flipped the phone shut and put it in my pocket.

“Put your hands in the air,” Officer Talbot, a newer cop on the force brought in after the cleanup, called out to me again.

His voice shook just slightly.

A rookie.

I wondered for a moment why the hell it was the rookie speaking when the second cop got out of the car and I recognized Officer Travers.

Fucking pig.

Asshole, bully who was, shockingly, not on Staff Sergeant Danner’s take, just a grade a piece’a shite to everyone.

A bully who was, notoriously, afraid of me.

“Oh, it’s my favourite copper,” I called out to him, drawing my hunter’s blade, the long curving length of it, out of its holster so I could pick under my nails. “This must be a fuckin’ social call.”

“Cut the crap, McKenna,” he shouted. “I’ll draw my gun, you don’t drop that fucking knife.”

I grinned, knowing the broken lamppost across the street would cast it in gritty yellow light. “This is private property. Thinkin’ it should be me who makes the goddamn threats here. And I would, you get me? But I don’t think that’s necessary.” I cocked my head, pinning the rookie with my stare. “You know my reputation.”