The Lost (Celestial Blues, Book 2) - By Vicki Pettersson Page 0,8
flit around looking for his old, dead wife, and his old, probably dead killers. So he could just use them to reach Jeap at his appointed time of death, too.
However, Kit was determined to get there well before that.
Traffic was steady as she raced toward North Las Vegas, adjacent to Las Vegas proper, but far from the lights strung like jewels along the neck of its more famous cousin. She had to cross the main drag to get there, but it was almost five A.M., the night close to fading, and even the world’s most sleepless city was taking a small breather before the morning joggers and buffet crowd brought it crawling back to life. Still, neon and LED lights burned the sky, giving it false heat and an irregular throbbing pulse.
Kit had never been to Jeap Yang’s neighborhood before but found it easily, using her navigation app. Yet she frowned as she wheeled her classic Duetto into a subdivision pitted with dying lawns. Yellowing newspapers littered the crumbling driveways, and bright orange stickers lay like pockmarks on empty windows and locked doors. The overt urban decay suddenly made her mission feel all the more futile.
Boomtown turned doomtown, Kit thought, sighing. It’d happened all over the valley in recent years. In the beginning, there’d been degrees of separation between the people she knew and those who’d lost their homes. Yet, before long, Kit’s newspaper had been forced to rotate the phrases “financial crisis,” “housing bust,” and “bailouts and recession.”
The hopeful FOR SALE signs never made it into neighborhoods like these. Here, people just left their homes to the banks and the squatters . . . which was probably how Jeap Yang had ended up here. She pulled in front of a house that was unstitched at the seams, though it couldn’t have been more than a half-dozen years old. Silencing the car, Kit stared up at the second level and shivered. She’d been in a similar position four months earlier, staring up at a room where her best friend had just been killed, and where she’d first seen Grif.
This was different, Kit thought, forcing herself from the car before she had a chance to overthink it. This time she was here to save someone from death. This time she knew about the Everlast and Centurions. And although Jeap’s predestined death was traumatic, he wasn’t the victim of a homicide, so surely Kit was in no danger by simply trying to help him.
All she needed to do was knock on the door before Jeap’s final, fatal hit—or so she thought. Her scant knowledge of drugs came from television dramas and the cold facts of black-and-white newsprint. She didn’t know the difference between blow, hash, heroin, or whipit. Sure, she had vices. Smoking was one of them. Her stubborn appearance at a foreclosed and abandoned home in the predawn hours against the wishes of her angelic boyfriend was probably another.
As she climbed the stairs leading to a truncated porch, Kit’s fingers trailed the pebbled wall while she searched for life within the darkened window. She was surprised to find the window curtained, and was wondering if she should just try the door, when a voice boomed behind her.
“Yo, princess.”
Whirling, she found the drive empty and silent, but she finally spotted a man with a dark-eyed squint leaning against a lamppost across the street. He was barefoot and shirtless, and the door to the house behind him was wide-open.
“You got business up there?” he called, jerking his head at the top floor. She wanted to tell him to hush, she didn’t want to alert Jeap or any of the other neighbors, but the man kept talking. “Cuz you look like a nice girl and I can tell you. Ain’t nothing nice waiting for you on the other side of that door.”
Kit let out a slow sigh, and stepped to the edge of the porch. “I’m here to save a man,” she replied, sotto voce.
“Man want to be saved?” the guy called, still too loud.
Kit frowned. What did that have to do with anything? “Doesn’t everyone?”
He continued to stare up at her and, seeing she was serious, began to laugh. When Kit didn’t move, he bent over and laughed harder. Then he turned back to his home, which stood out because its lawn was still green, the structure still well-tended, and he disappeared inside. Sighing, Kit put the laughing man out of her mind and turned as well.