“Check that,” Lambert said. “He didn’t kidnap her. Just hunted her down …again.”
“What are you?” Jessup grunted. “Psychic?”
“Yeah.”
“Then tell me which way she went.”
Lambert screwed his face into a defiant, jailhouse sneer and looked to Cole. “Remember that young one the Full Blood was talking about? That’s her.”
“Take the car and get out of here,” Cole said to the inmate.
The older man seemed to be favoring his left leg, but that turned into a more pronounced limp as Jessup circled around to the driver’s seat of a pickup truck parked next to the businessman’s car. “Best get out of town altogether,” he said. “No tellin’ if those cameras are workin’ or who was watching when this one here decided to assault a paying customer.”
Cole looked up and around to find a few clunky surveillance cameras mounted to the corner of the overlap of the motel’s roof. Not even the painful hunger he’d been feeling was a good enough excuse for that kind of recklessness. Tossing the car keys to Lambert, he grabbed the passenger door of the pickup that was still swinging on its hinges.
“Where the hell am I supposed to go?” Lambert asked.
Before Cole could come up with something, Jessup said, “Raton. It’s about two hours from here, just across the New Mexican border. Just take 69 to I-25 and head south.”
Chapter Seventeen
Jessup’s pickup was a Ford. If Cole had missed the emblem on the front or the back of the vehicle, he still would have gleaned that fact from the Ford mud flaps, Ford visor, and air freshener that dangled from the rearview mirror. There was a passenger seat directly behind him that was piled high with tackle boxes, tool kits, and rifle cases that Cole guessed contained much more than tackle, tools, and rifles. Because of the air freshener, he could smell a touch of pine mixed in with the pungent varnish used to treat Skinner weaponry. Ford pine.
“What’s so funny?” Jessup asked from behind a wheel that was wrapped in a leather cover emblazoned with faded oval symbols.
Cole sat on the far end of the bench seat, with maps, atlases, and several spiral notebooks sandwiched between him and the other Skinner. His arm rested on the edge of the door, hanging partially out of the lowered window. It was getting dark, so the air was cooling down considerably. The more that blew across his face, the wider he smiled. “Nothing’s funny,” he replied. “I just never thought a Skinner could afford to be a germaphobe.”
Jessup turned to look at Cole as if he didn’t realize he was pushing the gas pedal down almost far enough for the truck to fly into orbit. The bottom portion of his face was covered by what looked to be an old surgical mask tied around his neck and ears by elastic bands. “Germ a what?”
“What’s the deal with the mask?”
Jessup looked at the road and then leaned over to stick his face partially out the window. As soon as he leaned back in, he slammed his foot on the brake and twisted the wheel to send the truck into a controlled spin that pointed its nose back toward a dirt road leading away from Highway 69. “Here,” he said while removing the mask and tossing it over to Cole. “See for yerself.”
With the mask resting in the palm of his hand, the next logical thing for Cole to do was place it on the spot on his face where it was meant to go. Before it got close enough to touch his nose, his sinuses were flooded to capacity. The scents were pleasant at first. Trees, fresh air, oil from the truck, mildew from old lawn furniture that had been dumped on the side of the road about a hundred yards back, even the gritty scent of dirt—all of it washed through him like a torrent. It wasn’t long before the combined odors were enough to make him pull the mask away.
“Takes some gettin’ used to, don’t it?” Jessup asked.
“What the hell is this thing?”
“Something I put together with a little help from a certain dead asshole we’ve both heard about.”
“Lancroft?”
Jessup nodded. “That’s one of ’em, but not the one I meant. I helped myself to plenty while we were all sifting through that house in Philadelphia, but I was more interested in the things that nobody else knew quite what to do with. I’ve always been a tracker. I love getting my boots dirty while everyone else taps away at their keyboards and checks phone records.”
“Who do you know that could check phone records for us?” Cole asked. “That would be great!”
“Nobody. That’s the point. When the power goes out or if you’re too far away to get a damn signal, all of you techie dickheads are helpless. But that ain’t the case for someone who knows their craft all the way down to the bone. That mask you’re holding there is the best thing I ever done. The main ingredient comes from the other dead asshole with whom you’re very well acquainted.”
“Don’t make me guess,” Cole said.
“In case you don’t remember Henry, he’s the Full Blood that happened to disappear on your watch, and don’t tell me you don’t know where that body’s buried.”
“Let’s not get into that right now.”
After taking a moment to steer around a pothole resembling a crack in the earth’s crust, Jessup let the matter drop. “So I found a box Lancroft had in cold storage, locked away in that secret lab of his where he did all his cuttin’.”
Just mentioning that room flooded Cole’s mind with memories of stark white lighting, dissection tables, and a carcass that was pulled apart and held open by metal studs screwed into a chrome tabletop.
“Everyone already helped themselves to all the Full Blood spit, blood, fur, and what-have-you,” Jessup continued, “but left some of the more interesting bits for me. At first I thought I’d found some kind of paste smeared onto a plastic sheet. Then I saw it was a membrane Lancroft had removed and preserved. Removed,” he added with a wink, “from Henry’s nasal cavity.”
Cole held up the mask. “This is the inside of a werewolf’s nose?”
“I don’t know if that’s exactly where it’s from or if it’s from deeper inside his misshapen dome, but yeah. Lancroft didn’t know what to do with it, but I did. It took some tricky work with preservatives and a lot of playing around with the mixture that we use to bond our weapons to us, but I got the damn thing to do something besides make my nose burn when I breathed through it. Long story short, I dumbed down our bonding agent to bridge the gap between humans and Full Bloods, sewed what was left of the membrane into that mask, and voilà! Portable Wolf Nose! Patent pending.”
Turning the mask over a few times, Cole said, “This could be huge! You bridged the gap between humans and Full Bloods? Do you know what that could mean for the ink Paige came up with?”
“You mean the stuff that screwed up her arm?” Wincing almost in time with Cole, he quickly added, “No, this was just a real simple tweak that barely worked. I wouldn’t trust it on anything that actually goes inside of you or mingles with blood. What I need you to do is see if you can pick up our young one’s scent.”
“We’ve already gone a few miles,” Cole pointed out. “Are you sure it was in the right direction?”
A sly grin eased onto Jessup’s face. “This ain’t the first time she tried to bolt. She’s new to this, so she sticks to the roads. Just see if you can narrow it down for me.”
Cole raised the mask to his face again but was cautious about drawing another breath. When he did, he was once more besieged by smells from every end of the spectrum, ranging from the candy bars piled on the dashboard to a mound of animal scat somewhere in the field outside. “How the hell did you use this to find anything specific? Do you mix in something to help weed everything else out?”
“Nope. Just good old-fashioned discipline. Concentrate on what you’re after and focus. Helps to have a sample, but most of the stuff we’re after is pretty distinctive. Turn your head that way and see for yourself.”