be her Emissary. But for that to be true, she had to have done it hours ago, at least a little while before the first crew of gruffs had attacked me at the Carpenter place.
And that had happened several hours before the bad guys grabbed Marcone.
Someone was running a game, all right. Someone was keeping secrets.
I had a bad feeling that if I didn’t find out who, why, and how, Mab would toss me into the trash like a used paper cup.
Right after she crushed me, of course.
Chapter Eight
A wide-axled, full-of-itself, military-wannabe truck crunched through the snowy streets and came to a halt outside the little grocery store. The lights glared in through the doors. I squinted at it. After a minute the Hummer’s horn blared in two short beeps.
“Oh, you’ve got to be kidding me,” I muttered. I hobbled to the door and out to the truck, which blended seamlessly with the background and the foreground, and with most of the air.
The driver-side window rolled down and revealed a young man whom fathers of teenage daughters would shoot on sight. He had pale skin and deep grey eyes. His dark, slightly curly hair was long enough to declare casual rebellion, and tousled to careless perfection. He wore a black leather jacket and a white shirt, both of them more expensive than any two pieces of furniture at my apartment. In marked contrast, there was a scarf inexpertly crocheted from thick white yarn around his neck, under the collar of the jacket. He faced straight ahead, so that I saw only his profile, but I felt confident that he was smirking on the other side of his face, too.
“Thomas,” I said. “A lesser man than me would hate you.”
He grinned. “There’s someone lesser than you?” He rolled his eyes to me on the last word, to deadpan the delivery, and his face froze in an expression of absolute neutrality. He stayed that way for a few seconds. “Empty night, Harry. You look like…”
“Ten miles of bad road?”
He forced a smile onto his mouth, but that was as far as it went. “I was going to go with ‘a raccoon.’”
“Gee. Thanks.”
“Get in.”
He took the monorail to the other side of the Hummer’s cab to unlock the passenger-side door. I showed up eventually, and noticed every little ache in my body on the way—especially the throbbing burn centered on my broken nose. I tossed my staff into the back of Das Truck, half expecting an echoing clatter when it landed. I got in, shut the door, and put on my seat belt while Thomas got the truck moving. He peered carefully into the heavy snow, presumably looking for some runty little sedans he could drive over for fun.
“That’s gotta hurt,” he said after a moment.
“Only when I exhale,” I said testily. “What took you so long?”
“Well, you know how much I love getting called in the middle of the night to drive through snow and ice to play chauffeur for grumpy low-life investigators. The anticipation slowed me down.”
I grunted in what might have been construed as an apologetic manner by someone who knew me.
Thomas did. “What’s up?”
I told him everything.
Thomas is my half brother, my only family. I’m allowed.
He listened.
“And then,” I concluded, “I went for a ride in a monster truck.”
Thomas’s mouth twitched up in a quick smile. “It is kinda butch, isn’t it.”
I squinted around the truck. “Do TV shows start an hour later in the backseat than they do up here?”
“Who cares?” Thomas said. “It’s got TiVo.”
“Good,” I said. “It might be a little while before I return you to your regularly scheduled programming.”
Thomas let out a theatrical sigh. “Why me?”
“Because if I want to find Marcone, the best place to start is with his people. If word gets out that he’s gone missing, there’s no telling how some of them might react when I come snooping around. So you’ve got my back.”
“What if I don’t want your back?”
“Cope,” I said heartlessly. “You’re family.”
“You’ve got me there,” he admitted. “But I wonder if you’ve thought this through very thoroughly.”
“I try to make thinking an ongoing process.”
Thomas shook his head. “Look, you know I don’t try to tell you your business.”
“Except tonight, apparently,” I said.
“Marcone is a grown-up,” Thomas said. “He signed on to the Accords willingly. He knew what he was going to be letting himself in for.”
“And?” I said.
“And it’s a jungle out there,” Thomas said. He squinted through the thick snow. “Metaphorically speaking.”
I grunted. “He made his