All Souls: A Gatehouse Thriller Page 9

  “Hope is fewer Sacks in the world.”

  “If there’s a way to do something besides kill them—at least some of them—why not find out?”

  “So now you have a problem with killing the bastards?”

  “If I did, I wouldn’t be a hunter. I don’t get quite the kick out of it you do, but I have no problem with it.”

  “Kick?”

  I’d said too much. My words were unkind, but Kath’s insistence that not a single Sack was salvageable was the last thing I needed to hear tonight, even if she was right.

  “Do you know what Festals and Elations do to reach their levels?” she said.

  Kath was ticked off now, and I had the feeling I was about to hear a lecture on Sacks, as if I didn’t know all about them. “Of course I do,” I said gently, trying to soften my tone.

  “Forget Embodiments—I mean, we can hardly imagine what evil they’re capable of—let’s just stick with Festals and Elations for a minute.”

  “I know about them, Kath. Almost every hunter knows firsthand.”

  “And you’re going to trust that some Elation scum has been restored?”

  “I never said I trusted her. I’m just open to the possibility she’s been restored. But if she was standing here right now, I’d have this on her.” I jabbed my thumb at the Seecamp. “I wouldn’t turn my back for one second.”

  “I hope you mean that.”

  She took a long gulp of coffee, and I, in Pavlovian response, downed half my tea. I took my time drinking, foraging about as I did for other topics of conversation, anything but Sacks. Or Connor. Both Kath and I had avoided saying his name since leaving him in the parking lot, a gutless dodge that only added to the tragedy of his death. We both knew him and yet his name would never pass our lips again. With Nathan I might talk about Connor, but Kath and I, though for years we would call to mind his empty eyes and the rivers of blood that left his body, would never talk about him with each other. We were hunters too, and we saw ourselves, and our futures, in Connor.

  “Isn’t it interesting that Gatehouse won’t tell us Hall’s Sack name?” Kath asked.

  She was like a Rottweiler with Hall, clamping down with 320 pounds per square inch and refusing to let go. Though considering the devastation one Sack had brought to her family, I couldn’t blame her.

  “They want to protect her from other Sacks,” I said. “She’s a target.”

  “Don’t you think Sacks know her Sack name?”

  I considered this. “You’re right. They must know.” I filled a pan with water for the pasta, set it on the cold stove, and began to open a can of peas. “I think they don’t want hunters to know what she did as a Sack.”

  “That’s what I’m thinking too.” Kath took her coffee into the living room and settled into the couch, reclining chaise-lounge style. “If we knew what she’s done, we’d kill her, restored or not.”

  I put down the can opener and pried the lid from the peas. “Kath,” I said, waiting for her to stop rearranging the couch pillow and look at me, “you worry me when you talk like that.”

  She shrugged nonchalantly, as if she hadn’t just suggested that she and other hunters might get together and assassinate Hall.

  “Like it or not, she’s in Gatehouse,” I said. “You can quit, you can break the rules and get fired, but I’m pretty sure if you murder a member of Gatehouse, your ass will be in a mile-high shithouse sling.”

  Kath gave me her unconvincing no-worries smile. “I’m just blowing off steam.”

  I smiled back, in an equally unconvincing way, I’m sure. I found a large bowl in a cabinet, emptied the drained peas into it, then set about opening more peas and a can of carrots. If I hadn’t been so hungry, the idea of pasta, dried sausage, and canned vegetables sharing one bowl would have turned my stomach. As it was, I could have devoured an entire can of those yellowish, overcooked peas in sixty seconds.

  “I tell you, though,” I said, “there’s a traitor in Gatehouse. Maybe more than one.”

  “For a while I suspected Brent. But now, you know ...”

  “Nothing’s changed.” Kath wasn’t going to like what I had to say, but it needed to be said. Just because Vogel had been killed by a Sack didn’t mean he hadn’t put my name on a kill list or wasn’t involved in helping Sacks in some other way. “Sacks kill their own all the time, especially to divert attention. You know that. It’s possible Brent was a loose end. He’d served his purpose and he had to go.”

  “You wouldn’t think that if you’d known Brent.”

  “Maybe, but there aren’t many people I’m willing to trust right now.”

  “What about your porter?”

  “I trust Nathan.”

  “You didn’t last night.”

  She was right about that. Last night I hadn’t trusted anyone. A friend puts a gun to your head and the world turns upside down. “If Nathan wanted me dead, I’d be dead by now.”

  “Maybe you haven’t served your purpose yet.”

  I turned away, flung the empty cans into the trash, then spun back on her. “Screw it, Kath.”

  “I’m just—”

  “God, I hate it when you’re like this.” She started to speak again and I cut her off, telling her she could wait for dinner. Right now, I said, I needed a good long shower.

  Ten minutes before Nathan’s five hours was up, I heard the shower running. Kath and I had already eaten—an awkward dinner until we mutually but silently agreed to bury the knife—so I started to take the leftovers out of the refrigerator to reheat them. The sausage, once I’d sliced it up and drowned it in a jar of Alfredo sauce I’d found, wasn’t half bad.

  Before Nathan sat down to eat, he peeled back the drapes in the living room, just enough to see through the opening, and scanned the fifteen or so acres behind the safe house, though he couldn’t have seen much in the dark. I’d taken a peek before sunset, and even then you couldn’t see clearly more than ten yards from the house for all the ponderosa pines and the shadows they cast.

  He still wore his old suit jacket and his tie was gone, I noticed, but he had on a fresh shirt, and between sleeping and showering he’d somehow managed to shave. I almost laughed at that. Was it habit? Straight-laced stuffiness? At times I didn’t understand him. We were running for our lives and he thought it was important to shave. I was in the same jeans I’d worn yesterday and a wrinkled but clean sweater I’d stuffed in my backpack.

  He ate quickly then strode to his armchair in the living room and called for us to join him. I was hoping he’d come up with a plan because I was at a loss. We couldn’t stay in this safe house forever, maybe not even one more day, but who could we trust on the outside? All three of us were targets, and someone was aggressively, ingeniously hunting us down.

  “We have to leave in six hours,” he announced. “Do what you need to do before then and try to get some more sleep.”

  I groaned. Just the thought of sitting in Nathan’s SUV again, the road rumbling beneath the tires, our eyes necessarily scrutinizing every car, building, and human being in sight, made me want to curl up and sleep another few hours.

  “Can I at least take a shower?” Kath asked with a petulance that almost made me chuckle.

  “Yes, in a minute. The first thing we’re going to do, as soon as the rental place opens at seven, is get another car.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Do you know where Zack Lowell lives?”

  I nodded, suddenly wondering if Nathan had listened to Kath and me talking earlier, when I’d mentioned Zack. He wasn’t Nathan’s hunter, but I’d probably mentioned him before, and Nathan seemed to know every hunter and porter from Montana to New Mexico. “He’s in Laramie.”

  “I want you and Kath to head up there. Keep your eyes open all the way. I’ll let him know you’re coming.”

  “Where are you going to be?”

  “I’m going to talk with someone in Colorado.”

  “Who?” Kath asked.

  I didn’t chi
me in. I knew Nathan well enough to understand that if he’d wanted us to know who, he would have said so and not left it an open question.

  “I don’t know how long it will be before I can join you, so don’t try to contact me,” he went on. “It’s important that at least one of you stays on alert at all times. Remember your training, stick together—”

  “You’re just abandoning us?” Kath moved to the edge of her seat. “How can you do that?”

  Nathan shook his head. “You’ll be in a fresh rental, and Laramie’s only an hour and a half from here. Don’t stop on the way and you’ll be fine.”

  “How do you know?”

  “You’re going to have to be more careful once you get to Zack’s house. Fill him in on everything. If I remember right, he has surveillance cameras.”

  “If he’s still alive,” Kath said with a sneer.

  Her tone was so persistently contemptuous that I kept expecting Nathan to tell her to sit back and shut up, but instead, his voice raw with exhaustion, he tried to calm her fears. “If I didn’t think Zack was alive and safe, if I didn’t think his house was a good place for you to wait, I wouldn’t send you there. I’ll get to Laramie as soon as I can.”

  It was then I realized that Nathan believed he was the target—not me, not Kath. By leaving, he was drawing fire away from us. I wondered if he was going anywhere at all or if he was simply taking off in the opposite direction.

  “But you’re not going to tell us where you’re going?” Kath said.

  I was used to Nathan’s reticence in all matters Gatehouse, but Kath wasn’t, and his reluctance to open up frustrated her. When Nathan didn’t answer her, she gave the arm of the couch a slap with her palm, stood, and announced she was going to take her shower.

  The door to the bathroom banged shut. Nathan remained seated and stared blankly ahead. I felt the urge to do something—something reassuringly normal, like clean our dinner dishes—but I too sat, looking at nothing, trying not to think too much. When the sound of water running in the shower hit our ears, Nathan rose and sat next to me on the couch, speaking in a lowered voice. “Are you familiar with Highway 287 near the Wyoming border?” he asked.

  “Yes.” It was a place of isolated houses, ranches, and small towns like Red Feather Lakes, a high-altitude vacation spot.

  “I want you to remember this. Take the exit for County Road 45E off 287 south. Then the first road to your right. Follow that for four and a half miles until you reach a fork. Take the right fork and drive another mile. There’s a wood gate with a black horse on the arch, but no address or name. Don’t write this down. If I don’t meet you in Laramie, or if you have trouble you can’t handle, go there.”

  Now he was scaring me. He sounded as though he wasn’t sure he’d be making it to Laramie.

  “What about Kath and Zack?”

  “If there’s trouble, take them there. Otherwise, don’t give them or anyone else this information. Have you got it memorized?”

  “Yes.”

  “We’ll need to rent you a four-wheel drive.”

  “Who lives there?”

  “Elizabeth Hall.”

  My jaw dropped. “Nathan, jeez.” Not exactly eloquent, but it was all I could manage.

  “She’s a target.” He kept his voice low but spoke with a greater intensity. “You need to know there’s not a Festal or Elation alive who doesn’t want to kill her. But only four people know where she lives, and she’s more than able to protect herself—and you.”

  “But will she?”

  “I trust her. We’ve been able to double the return list because of information she’s supplied.”

  “That’s not a very comforting—”

  He silenced me with a wave of his hand. “Every single return she’s been a part of has checked out.”

  “What is she doing, running Gatehouse now? A former Sack?”

  “She hasn’t been given free rein, not by a long shot. That will be a long time coming. For now, Gatehouse has deliberately withheld almost all of its members’ names from her, and nothing she tells us is taken for granted.”

  Us. And then it hit me—what Nathan had said about only four people knowing where Hall lived. And he must have been one of the four. Just how high up in Gatehouse was he? My curiosity was itching to be satisfied, but this was not the time to ask, and Nathan, regardless of time and place, wasn’t about to tell me. “Why do you trust her?” I asked.

  “I’ve talked to her. I think she feels deep regret for what she’s done, and she wants to try to make it right.”

  “How can you make murdering innocents right?”

  He shook his head. “I’m not sure you can.”

  “She can’t make things right, so what’s the point?”

  “She’s restored, Jane. She can’t make things right, but she has to try, for the rest of her life.”

  “Spend your life trying to do something you can’t do?”

  He gave me that look, the one that said some day you’ll understand, the one that never failed to underscore the difference in our ages. “As hunters and porters we spend our lives fighting a war we’ll never win.” He lifted a shoulder. “Is there any difference? You have to do what’s right. It’s all you can do.”

  “You think she’s a good person now, after everything she had to do to become an Elation.” It was more a statement than a question. It was clear Nathan believed Hall had genuinely been restored.

  “I think so, yes.”

  A bathroom cabinet banged shut, and I noticed the shower was no longer running. So did Nathan. I spoke quickly. “You once told me that every con starts with something believable, and the best cons start with something believable and good.”

  “I remember.”

  “Then how can you be so trusting?”

  I’d never told Nathan, but after my first three solo hunts, and in violation of Gatehouse rules, I’d found my targets’ real names on the Internet. A little investigative work, along with the police blotter section of the local papers, allowed me to discover who they had been outside their Sack lives. I’d expected them to reek of evil, but I found instead that they had been respectable, even honored, members of society. Septimania had run a charity for children—goodness, like a sweet blanket of honey, clung to every bend and wrinkle of her Sack body—but her last kills, just before I found her and put an end to her, were two teenage girls driving home after a late-night high school dance.

  “There are times you have to trust.”

  “Why?”

  He stood. “Because there’s not much point to life if you can’t.”

  Chapter 10

  Halloween

  For a brief moment, watching Nathan leave the car rental lot in his Explorer and head south on Highway 287, I was overwhelmed with the conviction that I was alone in the world. But it was cold, Kath hadn’t said a word since leaving the safe house, and although there was a hint of lavender in the sky, sunrise was half an hour away—all reasonable explanations for my mood, I told myself. It would pass with the rising sun.

  I took the wheel and Kath acted as lookout as we drove north. Nathan had rented us a nondescript silver-gray SUV using the single credit card he’d not thrown away the day before—his own safe card, he’d told me, not connected to Gatehouse. Trust he might, but he was still prepared for situations in which that trust could be betrayed. For me, being a hunter meant not trusting, sometimes even those I most wanted to trust. Nathan, I knew, was different. He needed to have faith in people.

  “Want some of this?” Kath asked, holding up a deflated doughnut she’d bought from Drake Café across the street from the rental place.

  “What did you do, sit on it?”

  Thank God she laughed. I wasn’t prepared for sullen silence all the way to Laramie.

  “I dropped my backpack on the bag.”

  “No thanks, I’m not hungry. When was the last time you saw Zack?”

  “About two months ago. You?” She took a bite of doughnut then lifted h
er eyes to the rearview mirror, checking for traffic.

  “A few weeks ago. He was in Colorado for a kill.”

  “I wish Gatehouse would schedule hunters’ kills closer to where we live. This traveling gets me down.”

  “Yeah, but it’s safer if hunters are unfamiliar faces.”

  A minivan passed on my left, a little too slowly for Kath, and she rested her hand on the gun in her holster. When a man in the front passenger seat looked my way, I repressed a flinch. This alertness, this readiness for the commonplace to go terribly wrong, was a new experience for me. I’d been anxious before, in the hour before a kill, but never over a sustained period of time. Dealing with pot-smoking, alcohol-dazed Desires, I’d been spoiled as a hunter. I understood now, as never before, why so many of us retired at forty.

  When the minivan passed and accelerated a safe distance ahead, we both relaxed. A few miles up the road, we crossed the border into Wyoming. The traffic was lighter here and the land sparsely dotted with pines, making difficult work for any Sack who wanted to veer onto the highway from behind a grove of trees or blend in with other cars on the road. And the closer we drew to Laramie, the more open the land became and the farther I could see into the distance.

  I glanced to the west as I drove, to the foothills of the Snowy Range thirty miles in the distance and the ranch land east of it, and remembered the map in Nathan’s office showing recent acquisitions by the Land Conservation Alliance. It was land like this that the alliance was chewing up—buying, joining with other parcels, selling and buying again. I couldn’t imagine why since there wasn’t much here, but maybe that was the point. Here you owned land. Not a tenth of a city acre, but real land. Here the world of cable television and construction zones didn’t matter. It didn’t matter who was president, mayor, or meter reader. The thought of Sacks owning hundreds of thousands of acres of this beautiful if barren land made me sick at heart.

  The highway took us through downtown Laramie to the north end of the city, where I made a right then followed East Reynolds to the far eastern side of town and Zack’s house, circling his block twice before pulling into his driveway. Nathan had been able to warn him that we were coming, I saw, because as soon as I turned off the ignition he was at his front door, and Zack awake and alert before nine in the morning was a rare sight.