that, or there was a pack of wolves running loose on the west side, but even a pack of wolves couldn’t have worked that fast—and they wouldn’t have left the arm in the alley.
So what the hell else could it be, if it wasn’t a guy like him juiced to the next plane, where humanity took a backseat to violence? He’d seen it in Souk’s lab, when the good doctor’s mistakes stretched the bounds of the imagination—twisted experiments gone wrong, like Shoko.
“No,” he said clearly, meeting Jane’s gaze again. “When I went back, both men were exactly as we’d left them. One of the cooks had come out into the alley, but he was small and old, not big enough to do that kind of damage.”
“Something was.”
She had that right.
“Your ghost,” he said. “How good of a look did you get at it?”
“Not very,” she admitted. “What I saw was a pale blur in the darkness—something big, moving fast, maybe with long white hair, or maybe that was just a trick of the light.”
Big and fast he understood. A lot of the LeedTech warriors were big, and they were all fast. The long white hair—he didn’t know about that. He’d never come up against a LeedTech assassin with long hair, white or otherwise, and he didn’t want to tonight, not when he was heading toward his own personal Three Mile Island, a meltdown at his core, and not when Jane was within a hundred miles of him.
“Come on,” he said. There were enough people on the street now, enough chaos to cover their escape, and they needed to move out. Somewhere up there on the hill, in that old neighborhood of winding roads, was a place where they would be safe. He could almost hear it calling to him, like a siren’s song.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Creed had seen some pretty wild things in his life, some real bad stuff, but nothing quite like this.
Standing in the alley behind Mama Guadaloupe’s, a few things were immediately obvious. First, a lot of people back here in the alley hadn’t seen much bad stuff. Two of the cops and a fireman had upchucked their suppers, and it looked like one of the EMTs was going to be next. Second, typically, there were at least four versions of the truth in two languages being tossed around. Last, but far from least, there was one bad motherfucker out there somewhere. King Banner’s arm had been twisted clean off at the shoulder and been tossed aside.
Amazing.
Shades of Beowulf came to mind, and the monster Grendel. He was also thinking about Red Dog, and what a man juiced like her would be capable of doing—a man like J.T.
It was a lot to think about.
“You got enough light?” he asked Hawkins, who was photographing everything with his cellphone. The detectives were going to be there any second, and they were traditionally territorial about their crime scenes. But Loretta had given Superman the go-ahead, and they were running with it under her firm command not to touch anything.
He was good with that—except for one thing. He sure would like to take the syringe hanging out of the arm still attached to King. He’d seen others like it. He knew what it was, and so did everybody else on SDF: a Thai syringe, strange stuff that the forensics lab here in Denver was going to have a helluva time deciphering.
“This place is lit up like the inside of a klieg light,” Hawkins answered.
Yeah, it was.
“You might want to get close-ups of their faces,” he said. “In case there’s family somewhere. If we can come up with a match in the LeedTech files Dylan snagged, somebody might get called down to a cop shop someplace to identify them.”
“Thank you, Mother Teresa.”
Yeah, yeah. Whatever. It was damn nice of Loretta to let them in on this, but he doubted if Dylan was going to be sharing the LeedTech files with her. That was going to be their piece of the puzzle.
He lifted his face into the night air and closed his eyes.
“There’s a lot of blood,” Hawkins said.
Yeah, he could smell it. Carnage.
He turned his head a few degrees to the south. Three more shots had been heard coming from that direction, and according to Geronimo, Jane had run into the parking lot on the other side of the fence.
He looked back at the two corpses and let his gaze trail over them and to the loose arm lying two feet from King Banner’s