“About damn time,” he said while squinting at a rising column of black smoke.
The three of them sat in the parking lot of a nearby White Castle on Cicero Avenue. It seemed fitting since Cole had been on his way home from that same burger joint months ago when he first spotted Rita and Sid in a part of town the Nymar had been warned to leave alone. Now, that warning seemed almost as silly as an old lady wagging an angry finger at an invading army.
Paige sat on the hood of the Cav, eating fries from a rectangular cardboard box. “They should let it burn,” she said.
“That’s our home! How can you want to see it burn?”
“I don’t want to see it burn, but that’s what it should do. There’s bigger things for the cops and fire department to worry about.”
“Yeah. Bigger things like tearing down that Blood Parlor over on Rush Street.”
Prophet sat behind the wheel of his van, tapping the police scanner as if he could somehow coax it into telling him more. Although he wouldn’t say it out loud, out of risk of offending his vehicle, he obviously missed the truck he’d rented after being ferried to Philadelphia. “Sounds like the cops are shifting into clean-up mode,” he said. “That means any bad guys out there either took off or were brought in. This other stuff that’s going on may have been a distraction. Makes sense, if those Nymar wanted as much time as possible to take a crack at you.”
Wheeling around to look at Prophet, Cole said, “Let me guess. You dreamed this would happen so that’s why you’re here?”
“I did have a dream about fire!” he said. “It could have been this one too.” The enthusiasm died down when he paid more attention to the looks he was getting from both Skinners. “But Paige got ahold of me while you were still in Philly. I got zapped back over here and was keeping an eye on your place.”
“You mean the place that’s burning to the ground?” Cole snarled. “Great fucking job!”
The bounty hunter put the scanner down and got out of the van so he could stand toe-to-toe with Cole. “Those assholes just rolled in and lit a match. I called you the second the fire started, but you wouldn’t answer the goddamn phone!”
Unable to dispute that without losing the angry roll he’d gotten onto, Cole snapped his eyes over to Paige. “So what’s your excuse? You called Prophet. You came back after telling me you were leaving. Think you could have let me in on whatever was going on before I might have been cooked alive in that shitty freezer of mine?”
“If I’d have told you, that would have ruined the surprise.”
Her joke didn’t go over well, even with her. Despite the steady stream of junk food going into her mouth, Paige simply didn’t have the energy to feign a smile. Setting her sights on something in the general direction of Raza Hill, she said, “Daniels called while I was in Miami. He’s doing some minor work for one of the Nymar running Steph’s newest Blood Parlor. Apparently, she’s expanding even further than we thought.”
Tossing a quick wave at the smoky horizon, Cole grunted, “No shit.”
“Seems Steph was keeping tabs on us through some sort of surveillance. Daniels said he’d heard about it a while ago but wanted to find out more before calling us.” When Cole dug his phone from his pocket, she added, “Those Nymar must talk a lot of shit about us, Cole. Daniels can’t tell us every little claim they make. He got ahold of me as soon as he heard something more concrete, like the fact that they had the car bugged.”
Cole looked at the car. Then he looked at Paige. He looked toward the smoke and then looked at Prophet. After all of that head turning, he needed to get off his feet, so he sat down beside Paige. “That’s why you said you were leaving? To make them think you were out of the picture?”
“Yeah.”
“Couldn’t you have written me a note or something? Maybe a hand gesture?”
“I haven’t picked out a suitable gesture for, ‘Look out. The car’s bugged and I’m pretending to leave.’”
“You know what I mean!”
“Yeah, I know. It’s just that, if I was going to force Steph’s hand, whatever I said needed to be convincing. You’ve got some real promise as a Skinner, but I’m not sure about your acting skills. That’s why I wanted Prophet here to back you up until I made it back. And before you ask, I already found the bug and got rid of it. It was tucked behind one of the loose door panels.”
“That’s not to say there aren’t more,” Prophet said. “I got some equipment that’ll sniff out anything transmitting from your car.”
“Don’t bother,” Paige said through a mouthful of fries. “If they were still listening in or tracking me, I don’t think I could have caught Ace by surprise like that. We’re getting the hell out of this city anyway, and we’ll notice if anyone follows us that far.”
Cole watched her for a few seconds until he was certain she wasn’t going to take back what she’d said. “Hold on now. We can’t just leave! That’s probably all Steph wanted.”
“No,” Paige replied. “She’s after something more than just putting us in our place. They all are.”
“All the Nymar in Chicago?”
“All the Nymar in the country. Maybe more.”
“Aw, hell,” Prophet sighed. “Last time I tried to lend a hand to you two, I was pulled into a massacre in the boonies of Wisconsin. Now this?”
“Janesville isn’t exactly the boonies,” Paige said. “More like the Edge of Nowhere.”
“Why the hell did you even get me involved in this?”
Showing enough intensity to send a chill down the bounty hunter’s spine, Paige said, “Because you owed me after going behind my back to bury Henry when you knew damn well I’d come looking for him.”
“Oh yeah,” Prophet muttered. “I suppose there’s that.”
“Plus,” she added, “we should only deal with people we trust after what happened in Philly. I don’t want to speak to anyone unless I know whose side they’re on.”
“I can see why Cole wanted to fly under the radar to bury that body,” Prophet said, “but are you tellin’ me you’ve got something against those others too?”
Cole looked over to Paige and got a reluctant nod from her. “Something’s going on with the rest of those guys in Philly,” he said. “I don’t think it’s all of them, but there are some Skinners who are up to something on their own. We think they may even be working with Nymar.”
“How the hell could that happen?”
“Some of us work with Nymar,” Paige explained, “but Daniels isn’t a Skinner. Some of the other groups have been bringing Nymar in even further to make them official. There’s no ruling body or anything like that among us, so we run on tradition. It’s how we’ve always done things. It’s who we are. We work independently, but together, you know?”
“It’s a lot like that in the bail bonds business,” Prophet said. “We’re our own companies with our own ways of doing the job, but there’s always been an understanding of how that job should be done.”
“Sounds about right,” Paige said as she hopped off the hood of the car, then brushed off her hands and tossed her fry box into the Cav. “We’ve always spoken to the others, helped each other out, shared information. Well … most of the information. The Toronto Skinners started working with a few Nymar who weren’t on board with the Canadian bloodsuckers when they started getting into slavery rings. Feeding’s one thing, but I guess they weren’t ready to work hand in hand with the kind of scum that steals babies from hospitals or ships girls around to appear in underground porn before disappearing to be sucked dry.”