Page 11 of Fire
Significantly more awake, but still yawning and bleary, Alice pulled on jeans, a clean shirt, and coat, then hit the road. This crap was her least favorite part of the job, and she really needed to prioritize hiring trusted assistants to be on call for the emergency service line. She wished she had time to swing by an all-night convenience store for an extra-large coffee, but it hadn’t sounded like an option.
Her destination was a quaint suburban two-story, unremarkable except for the worried hunter pacing the porch, watching the road like he expected the hounds of hell.
“You Alice Dixon?” he demanded, as soon as she was close enough he wouldn’t have to shout. He was somewhere in his late thirties, early forties, with weather-beaten skin and long claw scars down his neck partially hidden by his overgrown hair. He stared her in the face but didn’t quite meet her eyes. She wondered what kind of freak had taught him that particular habit.
“You called me,” she said coolly. “What do I call you?”
“If you ask me, you should put these assholes down,” he said, ignoring her question. With a few more hours of sleep, Alice would have bristled and pushed until she got her answer. But for all that experienced hunters were hard to read, she could see something distraught in this man’s face. “But you probably won’t. Look, I hunt because—well, everyone’s got his reasons, and I’ve got mine. It ain’t a pleasure, it’s a necessity: us versus them. But this—” He pulled himself together, took a ragged breath. “This ain’t that.”
“Right,” Alice said. “I’ll take care of it.” Or if she didn’t have the clout—it still happened sometimes, though less and less often—she’d make sure that Jonah knew, and he would take care of the problem.
“You do that,” he said, and stepped aside.
The door was unlocked (it had been kicked open), and the rooms beyond smelled like blood and death. Boot prints tracked through the bloodspray in the entryway.
“The wife was coming to answer the door,” the hunter said flatly. He stood just behind and to the left of Alice, about two paces back.Watching my non-dominant hand,she thought,and out of easy striking range.“Jackson shot her.”
Alice swallowed. She didn’t have a weak stomach, but his tone... she didn’t like what she heard underneath it.
She followed the bloody footprints, and he followed her.
The main room of the first floor was a combined living and dining room, with the kitchen visible over an island. Each section of the house was delineated by different flooring: tile kitchen, pale living room carpet, massive throw-rug in the dining room.
From the entrance, Alice could see three bodies. A woman (presumably the same one who had been shot through the door), a man, and a teen who had been halfway into some kind of transformation when he died. By the way the bodies were clumped together, the man had probably gone down trying to protect him.
Two hunters were digging through shelves and cupboards. One tossed books casually onto the floor after shaking them out, and the other was opening the kitchen drawers, occasionally dumping a tray of utensils or a pile of plates. It looked like they were tossing the place for the damn family silver.
“What the hell happened here?” Alice said, her voice loud. It did not shake, did not reflect her growing horror.
One of the hunters jerked and went for the knife at his hip. His eyes flickered from her, to the hunter behind her, and then back to her.
“Who’re you?” he asked testily. “Max, what the hell you doing? Who is this bitch?”
“Excuse you,” Alice said, cold fury clenching her teeth together. It was easy to focus her disgust and fear and horror into anger. “My name is Alice Dixon, and I represent ASC headquarters. I work directly with Director Dixon. I asked you a question, and you had better answer me without bullshit if you want to keep your hunting license another hour.” And your kneecaps intact, she didn’t add.
The hunter glanced over the destruction and death sprawled over what had once been a very nice home. “It was a mess from start to finish. Sorry about that.” He didn’t sound very sorry. “Sometimes the fucking freaklovers get in the way and it just goes south, you know?” He picked up a knife from the counter area, tested its weight, and dropped it in a bag at his feet that she hadn’t noticed before. “You didn’t have to take the trouble to come down. Max there didn’t have to call you. We were gonna take care of it.”
Two dead civvies, one dead freak, and a couple of hunters robbing the place after. If she hadn’t known what was going on, Alice would have called it a triple-homicide robbery. Even knowing, she could feel the rage building in her chest that she usually reserved only for politicians who slashed veterans’ cars or for stupid assholes who didn’t believe in monsters. “How exactly were you going to take care of it?”
“Torch the place,” he answered.
She could feel her face tightening. That was a logical solution to an awful mess, and she didn’t like how it sounded like one he had taken before. “Who saw you in town?” she asked brusquely. “Who did you talk to?” She continued with all the questions that she was paid to ask, figuring out how deep a hole these disgraces had dug for themselves, and gradually working out how to get their sorry asses out of it again. Who would remember they had been sniffing around this family? Had they left their prints anywhere? Had they used weapons that could be traced back to them or the ASC?
Jackson, the first one to talk and the ringleader, did most of the talking. They’d had solid leads before they arrived in town and hadn’t (as far as they remembered) asked any pointed questions that might make them stick in someone’s mind. Alice would have taken that with a grain of salt, but Max agreed, and she was inclined to accept his assessment.
After grilling them for another fifteen minutes and a careful fingerprint sweep of the outer doors, she fixed them with a look that had made tougher men than these do what she said. “Put all this shit back where you found it,” she said, indicating their loot bags, “and drag the bodies over to the couch. Don’t take your gloves off until you’re a hundred miles away. This is never going to look like an accident, but we can make folks ask the wrong questions, and if we’re lucky, no one will ever know we were here.”
Freaks died (that was pretty much the point of the ASC, no matter what the C technically stood for), and sometimes there was collateral damage, but it wasn’t supposed to be like this. It wasn’t supposed to be easy, and casual, and a good excuse to rob a house before you lit it on fire.
She was going to get these thugs (“hunters” was too damn good a word for them) out of the field and somewhere they couldn’t take human life so damned casually. Alice wasn’t sure she had the authority to force that and make it stick, but she could talk to the Director. He might need some kind of frame to justify the step, but she could help him put together something about bad publicity and dead civilians and make it work. If he were here, in this house with a slaughtered family and two shitbags profiting from it, he would be as outraged as she was. But for all her advances in the family business, Alice wasn’t yet as effective as he was. He could take care of this problem without breaking a sweat.
“This doesn’t happen again,” she repeated. “Do you know what would have happened if the press got here before I did? Can you imagine?” It was hard not to shout.
“Never happened before, did it?” Jackson said with a sneer.
An hour later, Alice Dixon drove away from that town, the glow of the burning house a distant haze in the rearview mirror. She stopped for that coffee as the first tentative edges of dawn began to creep over the horizon. Espresso cradled in one hand, she walked to the edge of the deserted parking lot before calling Jonah’s personal number with her cell.
He answered on the third ring. “Director Dixon.” He sounded as alert as though he’d been up and working for an hour already, which of course he had been.
