Page 70 of Saint of the Shadows

Marisol shook her head. She couldn’t let him give up. Not “the nice shot.” Not the guy with thebest clearance rate in the SPD. She charged into the bathroom and flicked the light on.

“What are you doing in there?” he called after her.

She opened the medicine cabinet and found a bottle of ibuprofen. Although the expiration date was cutting it close, they were good. After shutting the cabinet, she noticed in the mirror’s reflection a hole in the wall behind her. It was the size of a large fist.

Tobias stumbled into the doorway. Marisol eyed the hole. Dad had plastered the holes he punched in usually a day after a drunken bout. When he had sobered up, he sanded away the lumps. Yet, she always found them. New paint never caught light the same way. She poked at the wall, and a fragment dropped away. Tobias rubbed the back of his neck. “I was planning on fixing it.”

She handed him the ibuprofen and darted past him into the kitchen, getting him a glass of water. “Do you have eggs? You need a decent breakfast.”

“All I got is mustard.” He leaned against the refrigerator and swallowed back the pills with a gulp.

A school picture of a teen girl dangled from a magnet behind his shoulder. Marisol studied it as the upturned corners bristled against Tobias’s back. The girl had long, curly brown hair and lightly freckled skin. “Who’s the girl?”

“You weren’t supposed to see that.” His gaze shifted to the bottom of the glass.

Marisol sensed his embarrassment and dug her teeth into her bottom lip to hide a smirk. “Some advice, Quinlan? If she’s giving you her school picture, she’s too young for you.”

He moved the magnet and put the picture in a nearby cabinet. “You’ve never called me that—Quinlan.” The wrinkles in his forehead and the slight turn of his mouth hovered between pain and amusement.

Marisol released her lip. Her smirk faded.

He sniffed. “You’ve got a good hunch, kid. He wouldn’t send you here if things were hunky-dory.”

“What do we do?”

“I don’t know.” He wiped his hands over his face. “He programmed his motorcycle to find you and me. Maybe we can use it to find him.”

In the alleyway next to the apartment building, Tobias finished chugging a neon yellow electrolyte drink and chucked the empty bottle into an open recycling dumpster. He bit a giant chunk from a breakfast taquito that had spent the morning on the corner store’s roller grill.

Marisol put her hands on the handlebars. The motorcycle was dead, no longer searing in response to her touch. “I don’t get it. It worked this morning.”

Tobias wiped his greasy fingers on the lapel of his trench coat and gripped the handles as Marisol had. The scaly shields folded into themselves. Aserpentine-shaped blue light beamed behind the fenders and wheel spokes. Staci’s oddly modulated voice said, “Detective Quinlan recognized.”

Tobias’s eyes widened. “It’s like a video game.” He stuffed the last bite of his taquito into his mouth and chewed it as if it was a piece of leather.

Marisol, brimming with two parts alarm and one part jealousy, shoved Tobias out of the way. “Can you take us to him?”

After Staci said, “Mi espíritu recognized,” then it repeated, “Destination determined.” An abstract grid of a map appeared on the screen, with a bold blue line tracing a path from point to point. The seat opened automatically and elevated another helmet from its recesses.

Marisol put on her helmet and mounted the bike. She flicked her head back and inched forward to make space for Tobias behind her. He strapped on his helmet that looked like a white overturned bowl. The motorcycle rocked under his weight as he took his spot behind Marisol. She said, “I’d hold on tight if I were you.”

Tobias hugged around her waist. “Tell me how you really feel, kid.”

“Figured I should let you know. I don’t have a motorcycle license.” Marisol flipped down the helmet’s visor.

“I’ll report you to the cops.”

The motorcycle carried them farther south along the river. They entered a neighborhood ofskeletal abandoned homes. Plywood shuttered some doors and windows. But rot and gravity dragged down most of the hollowed-out homes. The road gradually became dirt as time and neglect returned the pavement into something more primitive. They stopped at a faded orange and white dead-end barrier surrounded by tangles of naked, drooping tree branches and bushes. The right turn signal flashed before it powered down again. Marisol and Tobias took off their helmets.

Tobias hung his helmet off the handlebar. “I’ve worked a couple of cases around here. Practically a goldmine if you’re murder police.”

Marisol flipped up her visor and huffed. At least Vincent couldn’t be a dead body, but he had warned of becoming—how did he say it?—permanently affected. She hooked her helmet on the other handlebar. “The signal pointed this direction.” She stepped into the thicket behind the barrier. The brambles snagged at her jeans.

Tobias charged past her, swatting the branches away from his head. In a few more swats and snags, they reached a clearing—a knoll blanketed in dead leaves. A tall chain-link fence bisected the hill overlooking Shadowhaven’s crumbling former meatpacking district. The brick building at the base of the knoll was the former Clark Slaughterhouse. Thirty years battered the logo into an impressionist outline. If Marisol squinted enough at the abstraction, she could make out the coyly posed cartoon pig with coquettish eyelashes. The placeappeared like any patronized business on the Westside except for the brilliant chrome of the cars set against the dead weeds that wedged apart the broken service road.

Tobias hooked his fingers through the links in the fence. “Could he be in there?”

Marisol nodded, an uncertain feeling knotted into her belly. The motorcycle led them to a location that came with a rusty torture-chamber of possibilities for Vincent. Her intuition and that stupid computer needed to be wrong.

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