The Kip Keene Box Set: Books 1, 2 & 3 Page 5

  Instead he said, “Call go okay?”

  “I have to go to the office for a bit. Paperwork for some murder busts.” Strike began to walk over, and Keene’s heart sank. A pair of handcuffs dangled from her index finger, swishing back and forth with each ominous step.

  “Come on.” He looked at her with pleading eyes. Strike jerked his arms back and cuffed them to the display case. “I told you what it said.”

  “Never trust a thief.” She slammed the door shut with a loud bang, locking it tight.

  Keene wouldn’t be leaving anytime soon.

  5 | Thieves

  After a few futile minutes of straining against the cuffs, Keene let loose a great sigh and slumped forward in his chair. It would just be him, the study and these maps for the foreseeable future.

  That’s what he got for being sloppy: an extended date with a psychopathic, revenge-fueled agent and a study turned jail cell threatening to choke him to death in dusty artifacts. Maybe it was a good thing he couldn’t walk around. Any sudden movements and he could be buried beneath an avalanche of ancient pottery and swords, never to return.

  Keene shifted in his seat, sliding the heavy chair against the pristine hardwood with a loud screech in order to get a better view of the strange map. What was real? Strike was already convinced of the artifact’s existence.

  History was a fluid affair, more fiction than truth.

  What the maps had to do with matters was still shrouded in confusion.

  The chair settled in front of the glass case with a loud thump. Keene leaned over and read the script again. The characters, these were a much more curious affair than anything else. His eyes flitted to the last part of the message. The Lost City.

  Perhaps that’s what Strike was so surprised about.

  Although if that was the case, she was concerned with the wrong thing. Because, as far as Keene could tell, the main question at hand was simple.

  How the hell did a language from light years away and 200,000 years in the past end up at the bottom of these maps?

  Not that Keene had an answer. Even with an hour of alone time that quickly segued into two, three and then four more, he couldn’t come up with anything. The ticking of the grandfather clock was about to drive him insane when he heard stirring in the hall.

  Thank goodness Strike was back. He could use a glass of water, maybe a sandwich.

  He pricked his ears up at the faint sound of glass cracking and tinkling against the floor.

  “Strike?” No answer and no further noises. “Come on, this isn’t funny.”

  After a minute, Strike still hadn’t entered. It was an old lock, sure, but a key was a damn key. Even the idiots on this planet could figure out how to work such a technology, and Strike was certainly no fool.

  If only he could hear what was going on outside the door over the infernal ticking. After he got free, that clock was going to be privy to a dropkick from his foot.

  The door suddenly burst open with a thunderous bang, slamming against a thin wooden table and vase, sending them to pieces. Keene would’ve leapt up, had he not been shackled to the heavy chair. Instead, in his surprise, he tipped over, crashing to the ground on his shoulder.

  Wispy tendrils of smoke wafted in, disappearing before they could reach the ceiling.

  A shadowy figure stepped into the doorway, smoke swirling around a lean form. Night had fallen in the hours since Strike had left, shrouding the house in darkness. Keene squinted to make out the form, but one thing was damn sure.

  It wasn’t Strike.

  “I’m not with the girl,” Keene said. “Feel free to let me go.”

  The person stepped into the room, her face coming into the light.

  Keene studied the wrinkles, the horizontal scar running across the bridge of the woman’s nose. She still possessed a certain beauty, even after the passage of time. Her utilitarian clothes—ill-fitting slacks, a lab coat suggesting an occupation as a scientist—weren’t doing her many favors.

  “I know.” The accent was Spanish, thick, but each word was uttered with precision. The voice stirred some faint memory within Keene’s mind. This sense of familiarity refused to dissipate—or materialize into something more concrete than a strange feeling. He tilted his head to get a better view of the intruder.

  “You do?”

  “I came for the maps.”

  “You’re in luck,” Keene said. The clock was now a reminder of how agonizingly slow time could move, each second longer than his entire journey to Earth. He wasn’t looking forward to being dissolved in battery acid, or however Strike would disavow herself of his corpse when she found him here, brains blown out across a copy of Politics Today: The Shifting Global Climate, 1962 Edition.

  “Luck,” the woman said. “I don’t believe in such things any more.”

  “Sunny disposition,” Keene said. “My host shares our lack of whimsy. Cigarette?”

  Escape wasn’t an option, and his silver tongue had never been his strong suit.

  “A cigarette, yes,” the woman said. “I suppose that would be nice.”

  He jiggled his hands against the back of his chair, but found no give in the cuffs. “In my pocket.”

  The woman moved with a deliberate gait. She knelt down and took the pack from Keene’s pants. Before rising, she placed one between Keene’s lips and lit it.

  The smell on her fingers. What was it? So familiar. Gunpowder?

  “Menthols,” she said, sounding almost wistful about it, and tossed the pack on the floor.

  The woman flicked on the overhead lights, throwing brightness into every dim corner of the study. Keene squeezed his eyes shut, more accustomed to the soft glow of the desk lamps seated nearby.

  “Why’d you go and do that,” he said, opening one lid as an exploratory testing measure. Finding that it no longer brought him tremendous pain to see, he followed suit with the other eye. The woman was gone. “Hello?”

  Maybe the clock had driven him to hallucination. That was a possibility.

  “Exquisite, no?” The voice came from behind him.

  “Shit,” Keene said, jerking forward in his seat. With nowhere to go, the reflex just resulted in hurt wrists and a rising heartbeat. “You shouldn’t do that.”

  “It’s no way to treat an old friend.”

  “No, it isn’t.” Keene moved his head to the side, to escape the hot torrent of breath in his ear. “Take the maps. They’re not mine.”

  “A most generous offer.”

  “I’m a generous guy.”

  “That was true, long ago. Is it still?”

  “You tell me, honey.”

  “Still lacks the right ring, after so long.” The woman let loose a laugh that triggered yet another wave of déjà vu. She stepped around the other side of the case, so that she was now face-to-face with Keene.

  His heart rocketed around his rib cage. In the brighter lights, it was obvious.

  “Catarina,” he said, the cigarette dropping from his lips. “You’re—”

  A bullet rang out, and a dash of blood whipped across Keene’s face. Catarina crumpled against the case, shattering the glass. In the doorway, straight ahead, Keene saw Strike, smoking gun in hand, staring dead at him.

  “Miss me?”

  Keene flicked his focus back to Catarina, not moving, blood dripping down onto the soft velvet lining the inside of the display, staining the creases of the map a pinkish crimson.

  “About the cuffs—” Keene said.

  Before he could finish lodging his complaint, a ball rolled up against his foot, causing him to stop. He looked down to stare, wondering what strange piece of ancient memorabilia had fallen from the shelves to interrupt his train of thought.

  But it was no ball or plaything.

  It was a grenade.

  He glanced back to where Catarina
had been. But she’d vanished.

  Keene braced for impact, feeling a strange panic wash over his body. This was it. He was really going to die, and it was all because of some stupid maps and a diamond he stole during a bender.

  What an epitaph for a gravestone.

  “Relax,” Catarina said, her voice floating over his head like an angel, “it won’t kill you. But it will hurt.”

  Then a massive burst of sound tore through the room, a violent dizziness seizing Keene as the force of the sonic boom blew him back against the bookshelf, showering him with papers and a deluge of thick, musty volumes that, upon connecting with his head, sent the world into darkness.

  6 | Wake Up

  “Wake up.”

  Strike brought her fist down on Keene’s chest, but it had little effect. He remained unconscious, and what had looked like a promising day just a few hours prior had turned into an unmitigated disaster.

  The strange woman was gone, leaving a nasty trail of destruction in her wake.

  Strike brought her shirt sleeve to her mouth and breathed in deep, tasting burning paper and drywall. The silver-haired woman’s blast might not have been fatal, but the chemicals it had released—in combination with the sonic blast—had reacted poorly with the voluminous amount of paper in the study.

  The large room had been choked with smoke in under a minute, and Keene showed no sign of stirring.

  Strike was pretty sure she was going to lose her job over this. Maybe go to jail. Aiding and abetting a suspect, unlawful imprisonment. Manslaughter at the least, after he burned to a crisp. She tugged at his arm, trying to drag him across the floor, but part of his body was still buried underneath a sea of smoldering books.

  Not to mention he was still cuffed to the chair.

  He wasn’t going anywhere.

  Strike stumbled to her feet, trying to see amidst the smoky murk. Her attempt to survey the situation was ill-fated, however, and she dropped to her knees, choking and spitting up her lunch.

  Another poor idea in a series of horrible ones. It just wasn’t her day.

  Lying flat on the floor, eyes clutched tight, Strike worked to wriggle out of her jacket. She’d cover up his mouth, then make a dash downstairs. Get some buckets—or an extinguisher. Was there even an extinguisher in this place? That had to be against fire code, but something told her Daddy wasn’t too concerned with red tape like that.

  As she freed her second arm, Strike felt something tumble to the ground. Her hands, by instinct, stopped what they were doing and scraped along the ground, locating the object. Somewhat blocky, like a Rubik’s cube covered in bumps and short, stubby antenna.

  It was whatever she’d yanked off Keene during the bust. Bastard wanted to get the jump on her, probably send her to an early grave. A weapon, in other situations, might have been useful, but here it proved less than useless.

  She went to toss it, but then it whirred and a chime rang out amidst the crackling, swirling chaos.

  “Activate safety mode,” the device said in an unknown language.

  “What?”

  “Fire detected,” the device said, in a matter-of-fact, robotic tone that now spoke impeccable English, “safety mode recommended.”

  Strike ignored the prompt, instead clawing to her knees and starting towards the door, Keene be damned. She’d cover it up, somehow, once the smoke cleared. But she collapsed halfway to the door, colors swimming as she crashed downwards. The device slipped from her sweaty palm and bounced out of reach.

  Her head began to float away from her shoulders, a familiar feeling—just not from smoke inhalation—her body becoming light, as the fires swirled around her, spreading across the bookshelves.

  Today was a hell of a day. And it looked like it was coming to an end.

  “Safe….” Strike managed, before the words devolved into a fit of coughing.

  “Safety mode activated,” the device said. “Please cover eyes and mouth. Thank you.”

  A light whooshing noise, like that of an aerosol can, flitted above the sound of flame and destruction. Even as her vision faded into kaleidoscopic closed-eye blackness, Strike could still see the orange flames through cracked eyelids.

  This wasn’t going to save anything.

  The whooshing stopped, the flames continued to crackle and Strike waited to die.

  Until the room, a few seconds later, went silent, as if deep in the vacuum of space. Strike, unsure whether this was the gateway to the afterlife, or if everything was okay, opened one eye in tentative exploration.

  The room was blackened by smoke and flame, and it still smelled terrible.

  But she was alive, and the fire was out. The heat was gone, like the fire had burned out twenty years before, instead of half a minute ago.

  Strike crawled on the charred carpet towards the stack of ruined volumes that entombed Keene. Lucky her—she got to survive only to face the rap for her poor decisions. Maybe all those guys had been right, not taking her out on the case. Look at what a shitstorm she’d caused in under six hours. Give her a week and she could bring the entire Bureau crashing down.

  “I…” she heard someone say, and her thoughts snapped back to the problem at hand. Her fingers tore through the crumbling books, scraps of singed paper flying through the air as she dug Keene out from under the debris.

  “Just hang on,” she said. “Don’t die.”

  “Stop,” Keene said. “Just…”

  “You’re fine. Don’t talk. You’re gonna be fine—” She kept going, chucking a 19th century dictionary against the far wall.

  “Please…”

  “I know,” she said. “I’ll get help. I’ll get—”

  “Just get off my fucking leg! You’re heavy.”

  Strike stopped moving the books and looked down. The whole time she’d been digging, clawing to get him out, she’d been perched atop his leg. Like she could have known about that. And there were more pressing matters to attend to, like whether he was alive and breathing or not.

  She tried to breathe in deep and calm down, but it just brought a racking cough. Her body shook, and the 1st edition of Moby Dick clutched in her fingers trembled.

  Strike reared back and threw it at Keene’s head. He ducked just in time to avoid a full-frontal assault, causing the thick spine to glance off his forehead and skip off into a pile of ash.

  “The hell was that for?” Keene rolled over, which caused a cloud of ash to kick up in the air. Strike waved her arms in the air with a grimace more fiery than the recent blaze.

  “I’m heavy?” Strike got up, grabbed the multi-tool and left the room.

  Just as she hit the stairs, she heard him call out behind her, “You have no idea.”

  “Try me,” Strike said under her breath as she took the stairs two at a time, “just try me.” In the kitchen, she picked up the phone and thought about her options, fingers floating over the nine button. It was the right call.

  But in a day full of wrong ones, what would be another one?

  Instead, she dialed the only person at the office who wouldn’t get in her way. The line clicked open, and Strike’s breath caught for a moment as she reconsidered.

  “Who’s there,” Freddy said. “Anyone there?”

  “Freddy,” she said, “what do you know about rabbit holes?”

  “You take up smoking?”

  “In a manner of speaking,” Strike said, before realizing that maybe Freddy was suggesting she was smoking something.

  “Everything okay? Your voice sounds kind of—”

  “It will be,” Strike said, a plan crystalizing in her mind, “tomorrow.”

  “And it starts with a rabbit hole?”

  “All good things do,” Strike said. “And this one’s called Kip Keene.”

  7 | Seven Days

  His wrists were raw, and there was a nice
bruise where Strike had hit him with that damn book. But, given the way things could’ve gone, the minor injuries were a tremendous victory.

  Except that shred of glory proved short lived.

  “You’re going to get that map back.”

  “You do it.”

  “I have obligations. You have a week.”

  “So that’s how it’s going to be,” Keene said. He brushed dust and flecks of yellowed pages from a black and white photograph. Its edges had been singed in the chaotic explosion and ensuing small fire, but the figure in the center was quite recognizable.

  “Don’t moralize,” Strike said, but her voice didn’t carry any sanctimony or righteousness, just the weight of defeat. “You got a look at it.”

  “Not that good of a look.” Keene rubbed his forehead and cursed Catarina in silence. She hadn’t killed him, but she’d screwed him over well enough by snagging the map. Now he was along for Strike’s crazy ride, all the way to the end.

  “I’m going to kill the man who did it. And that map is the key.” Her cutting eyes came off the floor, focused on Keene.

  “Who says it was a man?”

  “Do you know otherwise?” Strike stared him down hard.

  Keene shrugged. “Who knows what I know?”

  His friends, his crew, they could still be out there.

  One of them was, at least. He’d seen the skeletons on the floor of The Blue Maybelle, but everything was running at hyper speed that day. That meant…

  “Hello?”

  He didn’t want to think about it, and the distress must’ve showed on his face. “I’m here.”

  “You’ve been staring at the wall,” Strike said. She shook her wrist watch out from underneath the sleeve of her blouse, revealing the edge of a tattoo. The serpent looked angry. Or was that a smirk? The details were so fine that it seemed to shift with the bending of her arm. “For twenty minutes.”

  “Didn’t know I was on the clock.”

  He rose off the floor, a cloud of dust following him. Keene contemplated trying to explain the inexplicable when her phone rang. She gave him a look, as if to say the conversation wasn’t done—and, judging from the day’s events, that single glance was good as an ironclad contract—then left the room.