We swung round a kink in the lane, grabbing at the hedge for balance, and skidded to a stop at a crossroads. In the moonlight the little lanes stretched out in every direction, bare and equivocal, giving away nothing; piles of stones huddled in the fields like spellbound watchers.
“Where’s he gone?” Rafe’s voice was a cracking whisper; he whirled around, casting about like a hunting dog. “Where’s the bastard gone?”
“He can’t have got out of sight this fast,” Daniel murmured. “He’s nearby. He’s gone to ground.”
“Shit!” Rafe hissed. “Shit, that little fuck, that vile little-God, I’ll kill him-”
The moon was slipping away again; the guys were barely shadows on either side of me, and fading fast. “Torch?” I whispered, stretching to get my mouth close by Daniel’s ear, and saw the quick shake of his head against the sky.
Whoever this man was, he knew the hillsides like he knew his own hands. He could hide here all night if he wanted to, slip from cover to cover the way centuries of his rebel ancestors had done before him, nothing but narrow eyes watching among the leaves and then gone.
But he was cracking. That rock through the window straight at us, when he had to know we would come after him: his control was slipping, eroding to dust under Sam’s questioning and the constant hard rub of his own rage. He could hide forever if he wanted to, but that right there was the catch: he didn’t want to, not really.
Every detective, in all the world, knows that this is our best weapon: your heart’s desire. Now that thumbscrews and red-hot pincers are off the menu, there’s no way we can force anyone to confess to murder, lead us to the body, give up a loved one or rat out a crime lord, but still people do it all the time. They do it because there’s something they want more than safety: a clear conscience, a chance to brag, an end to the tension, a fresh start, you name it and we’ll find it. If we can just figure out what you want-secretly, hidden so deep you may never have glimpsed it yourself-and dangle it in front of you, you’ll give us anything we ask for in exchange.
This guy was fed up to the back teeth of hiding on his own territory, skulking about with spray paint and rocks like a bratty teenager looking for attention. What he really wanted was a chance to kick some ass.
“Oh my God, he’s hiding,” I said, light and clear and amused into the wide waiting night, in my best snobby city-girl accent. Both of the guys grabbed me at the same time, but I grabbed them back and pinched, hard. “How pathetic is that? Such a big tough guy at a distance, but the second we get up close and personal, he’s under some hedge shaking like a scared little bunny.”
Daniel’s hand loosened on my arm and I heard him exhale, a tiny ghost of a laugh-he was barely even panting. “And why not?” he said. “He may not have the guts to stand and fight, but at least he has enough intelligence to know when he’s out of his depth.”
I squeezed whatever bit of Rafe was nearest-if anything could flush this guy out of cover, it would be that lazy English sneer-and heard his fast, savage catch of breath as the penny dropped. “I doubt there’s any intelligence involved,” he drawled. “Too much sheep in the bloodline. He’s probably forgotten all about us and wandered off to rejoin the flock.”
A rustle, too faint and too quickly cut off to pinpoint; then nothing.
“Here, kitty,” I crooned. “Here, kitty, kitty, kitty…” and let it trail off into a giggle.
“In my great-grandfather’s day,” Daniel said coolly, “we knew how to deal with peasants who got above themselves. A touch of the horsewhip, and they learned their place.”
“Where your great-grandfather went wrong was letting them spawn at will,” Rafe told him. “You’re supposed to keep their breeding under control, the way you would with any other farm animal.”
That rustle again, louder; then a tiny, distinct click, like one pebble hitting another, very close by.
“We had uses for them,” Daniel said. His voice had a vague, abstracted note, the same note it got when he was concentrating on a book and someone asked him a question.
“Well, yes,” Rafe said, “but look what you ended up with. Reverse evolution. The shallow end of the gene pool. Hordes of drooling, half-witted, neck-less, inbred-”
Something exploded out of the hedge, only a few yards away, shot past me so close that I felt the wind on my arms, and crashed into Rafe like a cannon-ball. He went down with a grunt and a hideous thud that shook the ground. For a split second I heard scuffling noises, wild rasping breath, the nasty smack of a fist hitting home; then I dived in.
