“Sure! Look, sorry about the car. It’s just that we got a reputation to maintain. We’re the hook-up around here.”
From the front room, Madman squealed and begged for leniency from the other Skinners surrounding him.
Cole lowered himself to one knee so he was the only thing the Nymar could see. “Who said we’d come running?”
“Wh-What?”
“When you had the drop on me before, you said she knew we’d come running. Who’s ‘she’?”
“I wanna see Finn.”
“Paige, bring the other Nymar in here.”
Now that things had died down, the man with the cut wrists had collected himself enough to formulate a plan. His main course of action was to wait for Cole to look away and then run straight at him. When that happened, Cole merely snapped his fist into the bloody man’s face to stop him cold.
Paige left the room, only to reappear while dragging the other Nymar along by the back of his neck. After dumping him off, she stomped away to assist the others in the living room.
“You all right, Finn?” the Nymar in boxers asked.
Finn ran a tongue along his split bottom lip. “Yeah. Madman and the rest of these stupid shits started swingin’ when I told ‘em to stay put.”
“Are there any more of you around?” Cole asked.
“Not anymore,” Finn replied. “What the hell are you doing to him?”
Thanks to a clearing head and a bit of luck, Cole was finally able to get his spear to loosen up. The forked ends split apart, but were snagged by the threadlike tendrils that had emerged from the Nymar’s wrist to stitch up the wound. He kept the spear close to his chest in a horizontal grip as he positioned himself so his back was to a wall. “Who put you two up to this?”
“It’s too late to worry about that,” Finn said. “She’s already gone.”
“Gone where? Who are you talking about?”
“The one who told us about the old man in the house across the street.”
“How long did you know about Lancroft?”
“A year or so,” the Nymar replied. “Not like it did us any good. He knew about us too. Waved at us sometimes when he left to go wherever the hell he went.”
Outside, the sirens were getting closer. From what he knew of the street, Cole figured the cops would be pulling to a stop in front of the house in less than a minute. Stabbing a finger toward the man with the cut wrists, he said, “You’re coming with us. We can get you fixed up.”
“No! I’m staying here.”
“If he wants to stay, let him,” Paige said with a resigned sigh from the doorway. “Unless Selina or any of the other locals have some good cop connections, we’ve already got enough to worry about.”
“He’s on drugs,” Cole told her.
Looking over to a bong shaped like half of a Viking’s helmet, she said, “I kind of guessed that.”
“He said there were pills too. He could be messed up.”
“Let me guess,” she said to Finn. “The usual float and flow?”
“Yeah,” the Nymar replied.
Cole looked around at the bong and several other colorful bits of paraphernalia lying around. If not for the scent of burnt cordite after the gunfire, he would have smelled the weed a lot sooner. But that didn’t answer the main question on his mind. “What the hell is a float and flow?”
“It’s a way people like to get fed on,” Paige told him as she led him from the bedroom so she could get a good look at what was going on in the rest of the little house. “They get a little high, sometimes a lot high, and then pop a whole bunch of aspirin to thin their blood. The Nymar can feed slower since the blood doesn’t clot as quickly and they both get a buzz. Float and flow. Thing is, it’s not really what we would consider a terrible offense. Weird? Sure. Worth maiming someone over? Not so much.”
In the living room, Skinners were letting themselves out through the front door as several of Madman’s buddies skulked back to their own respective corners. Between the TV and a few lamps whose shades had been knocked off, it was difficult to tell if the oddly angled light came from there or from cops closing in on them. The squawk of a radio outside put that little quandary to rest.
“There’s no time to finish this up properly,” Paige said as she shut the door to the bedroom. “We’re going to walk out of here calmly without looking any more suspicious than we already do.”
“Don’t you think these guys will say something about the way we busted in?”
Opening the door again and looking into the bedroom, Paige said, “I don’t know. Do you think these pot-smoking vampires will say anything to make the cops stay here any longer than necessary?”
“No,” Finn said through gritted teeth, “but I’d better make sure.” He shoved past the Skinners and into the living room. Thanks to the people clustered in the living room and on the porch, he made it all the way to the front door before he was noticed.
“Stay where you are, sir!” one of the cops said from the street directly in front of the house.
“I’m the owner of this place. We just had a fight after a big party,” Finn said while shooting a loaded glance over to Madman. Judging by the way the big dude in the Eagles jersey looked over at the Nymar, he wasn’t anxious to step on Finn’s toes.
Although nobody came forward to dispute the story, the cop was still wary. “Someone said they heard gunfire.”
“It’s all right, Nate,” Selina said as she crossed the street from Lancroft’s side. “We were just having a party. Remember the one I told you about?”
The cop wasn’t much older than Madman’s crowd. His clean-shaven face was cut from hard lines and marred by a few small scars, but it softened a bit when Selina came along. “I thought that party wasn’t supposed to be for a while and that it was going to be at the place across the street.”
“It got changed,” she said with a shrug.
“Great. Can we go?” Paige asked.
The front door remained open and a breeze was blowing through the little structure thanks to some other open windows. When the stench of burnt cordite drifted outside, Cole swore he could smell pot as well. If the cop with Selina or the other one directly behind him had functional noses, they wouldn’t be able to miss those scents.
“Things look all right here,” the cop said. “Everyone go on home and keep the noise down.”
Chapter Six
Paige walked calmly across the street, and it was all Cole could do to keep his voice down to a whisper when he said, “Those cops had to know there was more going on in there.”
“I know. Keep walking.” When Cole took a quick glance over his shoulder, she snapped, “Don’t look. Just keep walking. Selina and Jory know some cops around here, but it looks like they’ve got a better arrangement than I thought.”
It felt like miles before they were finally on the other side of the street. “I think they’re working with the Nymar,” he said in an overly deliberate whisper.
Paige stopped just after stepping onto the curb in front of Lancroft’s house and went against the order she’d just given. “Who?” she asked while looking back at Madman’s house. “The cops or Jory’s crew?”
“Maybe both. The Nymar doing the float and flow mentioned something about a woman telling him we’d be coming.”
“You mean Selina?”
“I don’t know,” Cole replied quickly. “He just said ‘she’ told them we’d come running and that she also told the Nymar about Lancroft being in that house. I tried to get more out of him but didn’t have time. Then that cop made it sound like he knew something was going to happen as well.”
“Why would they expect us to go over there, unless …” Paige spun on her heels so she was once again facing the Lancroft house. “Unless we were being pulled away from the only thing in this neighborhood valuable enough to convene a Skinner summit meeting.”
She strode into the house, pushed open the door and shoved past the Skinners waiting in the living room. Her mouth was pressed into a tight line and her eyes burned with an intensity Cole knew all too well. Rather than try to get in her way, he did his best to watch her back as she climbed down the stairs to the basement.