Page 31 of Red Boar's Baby

“It’s dark, so that helps. I’ve been getting a lot better since Gilly and I have been practicing targeting. Give me a place to center on. Do you have any pictures on your phone? And a map would help too.”

Costa floundered briefly at the realization that he didn’t have a picture of Diana’s house, or any pictures in her house either, that he could think of. “What about street view maps?”

“Uh,” Caine said as Costa pulled up the map app on his phone. “I’ve never tried that.”

“Well, if it works, you’ll have a fun new toy in your toybox.” Costa navigated to Diana’s address, zoomed in, and switched to street view. “There. That’s her house.”

“And if it doesn’t, we’ll be lost in shadow forever. Zoom out, I need to see where it is relative to where we are.”

Costa did, then added the driving direction overlay. Caine stared at it for a moment, then glanced up at him.

“The baby’s here?” he asked.

“Yeah, in the bedroom, asleep. Leaving her for a few minutes won’t be a problem. She’s down for a while.” He couldn’t imagine what might happen to her in just a few minutes, and getting someone here from the SCB would take time he didn’t have. “Caine, come on, let’s go.”

Caine shrugged a little. “You’re the boss.” He touched Costa’s arm, giving him a little push. “Bathroom.”

Costa shut them inside, and they were plunged into darkness. Caine’s hand was still on his arm, fingers clamping tightly enough to hurt.

“Hold your breath,” Caine said. “I don’t know how long this’ll take. You don’t want to try to breathe where we’re going.”

Following that not exactly reassuring statement, Costa felt a prickling chill sweep over him as the stripe of light under the door disappeared. There was a sense of vast space around him, vague movement in the dark. He had just been drawing in a breath, and he clamped down on it, but his lungs tickled as if he had inhaled smoke or ice-cold air. He fought it briefly, then lost control and was coughing violently when the world stabilized around them and the darkness became slightly less complete.

“I said hold your breath,” Caine said.

“I tried,” Costa wheezed. “Give a guy more than two seconds’ warning next time.” He coughed again, violently. Caine still had a hand on his shoulder, steadying him.

“Let’s hope no one’s around,” Caine said. “Because if so, we’re not precisely being stealthy.”

Costa wiped his watering eyes, which made little difference to whether he could see. It wasn’t fully dark; there was light filtering in from somewhere up ahead, but not enough to give him more than a vague sense of space. He couldn’t touch a wall in any direction, but his fingertips brushed a canvas cover over something large.

“Where are we?” Costa asked.

“Storeroom, I guess. It was a big, empty, dark space and that’s good enough for me.”

Caine swayed a little as he took a step, and it was Costa’s turn to steady him. “You okay?”

“Two long trips back to back.” Caine rubbed his forehead; Costa’s eyes had adjusted well enough to the dimness now that he could see the pale flash of Caine’s hand. “Let’s go find your girl.”

“She’s not my—shut it.”

“Yeah,” Caine said, moving through the darkness ahead of him as if he could see where he was going; possibly he could. “Because you always drop what you’re doing and come running whenever anyone else’s house burns down.”

“Has your house burned down lately? No, so you don’t know what I’d do.”

“My house is a bunker,” Caine said.

“Shut up.”

Talking helped keep him from freaking out about Diana as they found the door and let themselves out. It turned out that the building where they had emerged was some sort of large garage or workshop behind a neighboring house on Diana’s street. It was a pleasant small-town neighborhood of widely spaced adobe houses on large lots. Flashing blue and red emergency lights strobed across the front yards and the neighbors standing around in small, confused clusters. The air reeked of smoke.

Costa pushed forward, heedless of Caine behind him. “Diana!”

He found her almost immediately, as if some part of him had homed in on her by sheer instinct. She was standing behind a fire truck, watching her house burn. She was wearing a T-shirt and jeans, her hair pulled back in a fat, sloppy braid. Costa called her name again, and she turned, and then she was falling against him and he pulled her into a tight hug before he could think about what he was doing.

She was warm and strong and wonderfully alive, clinging to him, her body pressed against him.

“I went out to the store,” she gasped against his shoulder. “I needed milk and coffee. And I came back and—and?—”

---