Contained #3
Only a heavyset man who’d risen from a leather armchair reacted, his frown flicking from Henry to the speaker and back again. He knew, Henry noted. Both who and, more importantly, where.
The speaker smiled, a smile he probably considered dangerous, and the two sets of heartbeats approaching along the hall arrived at the door.
Henry reached back as the door opened, grabbed a heavy jacket in each hand, and slammed the two men together in front of him.
Blood sprayed from noses shattered in the impact, and he felt the man in his right hand die, bone shards shredding his brain.
Henry dropped them both, stepped over a twitching leg, and let the Darkness rise.
The only man who might have had a chance to stop him had died first. Four of the five who’d been lounging on expensive leather furniture drinking cheap beer died quickly.
He broke the speaker’s neck and used the second man as a shield, bullets shattering ribs and shredding organs.
In the pause when panicked fingers fumbled to reload, he went up and over the back of the sofa, drove thumb and forefinger through the third man’s eye sockets, and, holding him by the skull, used his gun to shoot the fourth.
Then he broke the third’s neck and wiped the blood and brains off on his jeans.
“Who and where?” he whispered to the fifth man, drinking in his terror.
James Chin lived in a second-floor flat on Sixteenth Avenue West, an upper-middle-class residential neighborhood. The surrounding houses held children. And pets. And people who’d never suspect that on one of the lower mainland’s rare bright and sunny days, he’d skinned someone alive.
In spite of his name, he wasn’t Asian. He was a white man in his early thirties with a receding hairline and that ridiculous unshaven look favored by so many.
He wasn’t what Henry had expected. He’d expected a skinny man of indeterminate color wearing a stained T-shirt and grimy sweatpants that rose high above bony ankles, squatting ghoul-like in a filthy room in a crap hotel in the worst of the ungentrified parts of the Downtown Eastside.
He’d expected a man wrapped in tics and twitches and slack-jawed manifestos.
A man balanced precariously on the edge between sanity and madness.
An edge Henry would have enjoyed pushing him over.
James Chin slept on his back, alone under a pale blue duvet in a medium blue bedroom in a pleasant apartment that smelled faintly of bleach. Although, Henry acknowledged, it might have been the lingering memory of a smell.
The dichotomy between expectation and reality stopped him at the foot of the queen-size bed.
And then he remembered that this man, this clean, well-fed, comfortably housed man, had taken and tortured Kevin Groves.
Henry reached out and closed his hand around the man’s ankle.
And moved so that when James Chin flailed awake, he was there to grab a handful of thick, white, fabric softener–scented T-shirt and throw him to land half-reclining against the headboard.
“What…? Who…?” His eyes widened and picked Henry out of the shadows thrown by the streetlight. “What are you doing here? Hel…”
Henry closed a hand around his throat before the “p” could emerge. “Who hired you,” he growled, “to kill Kevin Groves?”
He felt James Chin’s Adam’s apple bob under his palm. Felt him breathe. Three fast and shallow. One long, released slowly. Felt the fingers clawing at his arm relax, the hands fall away. He saw, to his astonishment, the beginning of a smile.
“You’re him, aren’t you?” James Chin said gleefully, and Henry felt his rage slide off the other man’s total lack of concern.
“The one the message was for? He said you’d come in the night, but I didn’t think he meant tonight.
You got here a lot faster than I thought you would.
You know, I usually don’t get to meet you guys—I get a contract, I fulfill the contract, life goes on.
I don’t suppose you’d be willing to let me know how you found me?
I mean, either way, I’m going to have to reemphasize the point of an NDA, but the details will save me some time.
” His nose wrinkled. “You smell like blood. I’m going to have to crack a window and air the place out after you go and, in case you’ve forgotten, it’s December out there.
Man, my heating bill will be vicious this month. ”
Henry tightened his grip, feeling the steady beat of James Chin’s pulse against his palm.
“Hey! Loosen up, I’m cooperating here. There’s an envelope on the mantel under my TV that has all the information you’re looking for. You know, information about the guy who actually sent the message, because me, I’m just the messenger.”
“An easy betrayal…”
“What? You think I’m betraying him? Hell no, it was his idea. ‘Jimmy,’ he said, and I hate being called Jimmy, he said, ‘Don’t be a hero. When he’—that’s you—‘shows up, and he will show up, give him this. It’s me he’s after. Not you.’ ”
James Chin had turned on the bedside lamp and had rearranged himself into a more comfortable position when Henry returned with the envelope. “You know it’s a trap, right? I’ll give you that for free.”
The envelope held a single piece of paper folded around a name and an address. “What do you assume is going to happen now?” Henry asked, stopping just outside the circle of light.
The answering eye roll was epic. “I assume you’re going to go away so I can get the blood stink out of my apartment and get back to sleep.”
“Because you’re just the messenger?”
“Don’t shoot the messenger, right?” He grinned, showing the kind of perfect teeth that in this century meant his parents had had the money for dentistry.
“You killed Kevin Groves…”
“Ah, ah, ah.” He raised a hand. “Technically, Kevin Groves died while I was doing my job.”
Both Reynolds and the man who’d spoken for the Pride had referred to James Chin as a crazy fucker. They hadn’t been speaking euphemistically; the man was insane.
“Look…” He sighed. “He said you won’t care about the gun…”
“You?”
“Yeah, me. I’m the gun. It’s a metaphor.” The pale blue duvet rose and fell as he crossed his legs at the ankle. “He said you’ll only care about the man who pulled the trigger. Guns don’t kill people. People kill people. Right? He said, once you have the information you’re after, you’ll leave.”
“And you believe him.”
“I’m a businessman, and there’s a certain amount of trust required in order to be able to do business. Particularly our sort of business.”
“I’m not in your sort of business.”
“Really? Because I somehow doubt that the people who bled all over you were into it.” He held up both hands. “Not kink shaming, mind, I just doubt it. Now, since you have what you came for, go away.”
Henry had come here to make James Chin suffer.
He’d intended to make him pay and keep paying for the pain he’d inflicted.
He’d intended to bury him so deeply, wrap him so tightly in Darkness that his screams would echo long after his flesh had decayed.
But James Chin would not come face-to-face with his personal demons in the Darkness because he had no personal demons. Nothing lingered behind his eyes.
He’d be found eventually, his heart having stopped while he slept. Depending on timing, if corruption allowed, he’d look mildly annoyed and have a bruise on one ankle and another just under his right ear.
No marks of teeth.
No missing blood.
Henry would rather feed from a rotting corpse.
With three hours to dawn, Henry walked up and stopped in front of a gated drive.
If the size of the lot was any indication, acreage being at a premium in the Lower Mainland, Robert Alistair Kenwick had made a great deal of money in publishing.
A quick search had linked his name with multiple newspapers in multiple countries, newspapers that took cash from the credible and had, for the most part, only a passing association with the truth.
The house shouted, Look at what I am able to do! as loudly as his father’s palace at Greenwich.
Robert Alistair Kenwick, middle-aged and a little plump, sat in a recliner tucked into a comfortable corner in a second-floor library. He held an open book, no mythic nor modern way to take out a vampire visible. No garlic. No mustard seeds. No holy symbols nor holy water. No stakes. No sunlamps.
There were, however, a great many bits of antiquity sharing the shelves with the books.
Not enough to give the British Museum a run for its money, but amulets, rings, carved stone and bone, small idols, and pieces of larger statuary filled every empty place.
Asian artifacts, including broken and unbroken jade, covered over half of a huge teak desk.
Not unexpected; in that same quick search, Henry had found an article about Kenwick recently returning from “a trip to the Far East with the intention of expanding his empire.”
When Henry stepped out of the shadows, Kenwick looked up from his book and sneered. “I see you got my message, Nightwalker. Took you long enough to get here.”
Henry curled his lip, exposing fangs.
“You don’t frighten me,” Kenwick scoffed. “You came when I called.”
Henry allowed the Darkness to show in his eyes.
“That Chin boy does lovely work, doesn’t he?” Kenwick closed the book and picked up a glass of amber liquid from the small round table beside him. “I wonder how long Groves screamed for you, for rescue, before he died.”