Читать книгу Karma III - Sabrina Eubanks - Страница 4

L ucas Cain was stuck in a nightmare that made no sense. He was caught in a funhouse that was full of twists and turns, but no discernable exits. There were dogs chasing him. He could hear their low growls and their pattering feet. Worst of all, he could smell them. Lucas hated dogs. No … that really wasn’t true. He was terrified of them. He had been since he was a little kid.

He was winding his way through a contorted hallway, holding a TEC-9, with his detective’s badge hanging from his neck. A door popped open on his left — a door that hadn’t been there a second earlier — and Simone Bainbridge stepped out. She was naked, sultry and beautiful. Simone smiled at him and beckoned to him with her finger.

“C’mon, Lucas. You know you want it,” she said, enticingly licking her lips.

Lucas frowned at her and pulled the trigger. Lucas probably hated the memory of Simone more than he hated dogs. She disappeared with a puff of smoke instead of a splash of blood and gore.

Lucas wasn’t surprised. He was a rational man, and he was dreaming, after all.

Oscar Tirado, one of the dirtiest cops in NYPD history — and the bastard who’d blown their cover — staggered across Lucas’s field of vision, holding his own head in his hands. The Trinidad brothers, Tate and Troy, had decapitated him when he gave them up to the feds. Oscar was a ghastly apparition, with his bloody stump of a neck glowing eerily in the strange light of this bad dream.

Lucas raised his gun to send him on his way. The head in Oscar’s hands looked at him with dead and doleful eyes.

“I didn’t mean for things to go this far,” the lifeless mouth said, and then smiled a gruesome smile. “Guess I lost my head.”

“Blast him, Luke,” Noah said from somewhere behind him. Lucas pulled the trigger of his gun and sent Oscar to meet Simone in the hell they shared.

“Nice shot. Keep movin’, Luke. Hurry up and get us outta this place. I can’t stay here,” Noah said, from just over his shoulder — like he was right behind him. Lucas turned quickly to check for him … but Noah wasn’t there. There was nothing behind him but pitch blackness.

Lucas turned a buckling corner and was faced with two sets of short, weird stairs. One way went up, the other went down. He hesitated for a moment.

“Up, Luke. We gotta go up. Down’s no good,” Noah’s disembod-ied voice said, urgently. “Hurry up, bro. You’re wastin’ time. Move, Luke.”

Lucas trotted up the stairs. There was an open doorway at the top, just as dark as the blackness behind him. Troy Trinidad popped out of it, unexpectedly, like he was spring-loaded, wielding that fucking machete he used to scalp people. The same machete he’d tried to attack Noah with after he’d shot him three times.

Lucas blew his ass away without a second thought. Again, he wasn’t surprised when whatever Troy’s ghost was made of dissipated in a funky curl of green vapor. He was what he was, Lucas guessed.

Lucas kept moving. He walked up a rickety, spiraling staircase.

The boards didn’t seem quite solid. They threatened to give way with each step he took. He faltered at the top as his foot sunk three inches into the riser. He grabbed the railing and pulled his foot out of the soft, unrealistic wood. It made a small sucking sound that gave him the creeps.

“That’s nothin’, bro. Can you deal with the shit at the top of the stairs?” No sooner than that scary, bodiless Noah-voice asked the question, a door at the top of the stairs was thrown open. A light shone out of it, so bright it almost blinded him.

Justine stepped out of the light. She was smiling at him and holding something in her hand. Lucas took a step back and tucked his lips in. He ran his hand over his beard and stared at her. He hadn’t seen her in a long time, not even in his dreams. Lucas figured this wasn’t the day for surprises — because he wasn’t surprised to find he still loved her. He probably always would.

“Justine.” Her name felt strange on his lips. He hadn’t said it in so long. Nicole was his love now. Why wasn’t she here? Where was she?

“She’s hurt, but she’s alive, Luke. All these people here are dead.

Can’t you see that?” Noah’s voice spoke plainly.

The hair stood up at the nape of Lucas’s neck. “Yeah? Then where are you, Noah? How come I can’t see you?”

“I ain’t really here, Luke,” Noah replied. Irritation was edging into his voice. “Stay focused, bro. She’s got somethin’ I need. Get it away from her. Don’t let her keep it, or I’m stuck here. Hurry up, Luke!”

Lucas looked back at Justine. She was beautiful. She always was.

But her smile abruptly turned into a frown, and suddenly she wasn’t so pretty.

“I hate what you did to us, Lucas. It was all your fault. Look what you did to me.” Her face changed in an instant, from lovely to decay-ing like paper. Her beautiful eyes shrank back into her skull and her lips stretched grotesquely over her teeth.

“Oh, God,” Lucas said in horror. He took another step back, but someone who wasn’t there pushed him forward like a strong phan-tom.

“Fuck that! Don’t let her keep it. I ain’t stayin’ here. Go get it! It’s mine!” Noah yelled at him.

Justine held the object in her hand high over her head. It swung on its chain and glittered in the bright light, snug in its leather case.

Lucas knew what it was immediately. It started to beep like a small gold bomb.

Lucas reached for it. “What are you doing with that? It’s not yours. Give it back!”

Justine laughed, and it was like nails dragging across a chalkboard. “Come get it, Lucas!”

She flung it over the railing of the stairway into nothingness. Lucas dropped his gun and leapt after it instinctively. His fingers closed around it, and now it was beeping louder. He fell into the void, falling fast, clutching Noah’s badge in his hand.

Lucas came awake with a disoriented jolt. The first thing he felt was the tendrils of agony in his forearms and the crisp pain in his neck. It took him a moment to remember that he was hurt. His mind wasn’t as sharp as it should have been, because they’d given him something for the pain.

Leah Wheeler was standing over him, still pretty in her heart-break. Her hand was on his shoulder. “You okay, Lucas?” Lucas sat up in the chair he’d been sleeping in and looked around. He got up and sat at the foot of the bed that held Nicole. She was asleep with an IV drip in her right hand. A machine that monitored her heart rate beeped sharply in the corner. That’s where the sound from the dream had come from.

Everything came crashing back all at once. Oscar Tirado had blown their cover with the Trinidads. He’d paid with his life, but it had cost them plenty. Nicole and Tony Colletti had gotten shot up pretty badly in Tate Trinidad’s last-ditch effort not to be defeated.

They’d set their dogs on Lucas, and Nick had shot him in the forearm trying to get them off. He also had a graze on his neck from an errant bullet.

Noah. Noah had gotten the worst of it. Troy had shot him three times: once, point blank in the chest. Lucas vividly remembered Noah crashing right before his eyes, and him feeling utterly helpless. He stood up and realized he was holding Noah’s badge in his hand.

“Lucas?” Leah was looking at him, her brow creased with worry.

Lucas looked down at Noah’s badge. He’d gotten it away from her, he thought, with a certain knowledge he was being irrational.

Maybe Noah would be okay. He slipped Noah’s badge around his neck and it laid there with its little dots of Noah’s blood next to his own.

“I’m okay,” he said, looking at Leah. “Any word?” “They’re bringing him up from surgery.”

Lucas sighed deeply and looked at Nicole, who seemed to be holding her own. He put his arm around Leah’s shoulders and led her out of the room. It was time to go check for Noah. Lucas was scared for his old friend. Scared to death.