Etched in Bone by Adrian Phoenix

Author:Adrian Phoenix [Phoenix, Adrian]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781439137307
Amazon: 1439137307
Publisher: Bill
Published: 0101-01-01T08:00:00+00:00

20

HARD NEWS

NEW ORLEANS

CAFÉ DU MONDE

March 28

TAKING A SIP OF his café au lait, Field Agent Richard Purcell folded back the front page of the Times-Picayune and scanned the headlines. A smile stretched his lips when he spotted a paragraph on page 4 detailing the blazing conflagration that had destroyed the home of local rock musician Dante Prejean the night before. One life was lost—that of Simone Martinique.

Purcell remembered how the scene had looked when he’d arrived about an hour after the fire had been doused and the fire trucks had finally left.

The plantation house has burned down to its foundation. A couple of fire-blackened walls poke up into the night like fingers scorched to the bone. Several huge old oaks look like torched skeletons—leaves gone, gnarled and twisted branches crisped black. Smoke hangs in the air, a lung-coating reek of incinerated wood, molten metal, and irretrievable loss. The wet street gleams in the moonlight.

The newspaper stated that witnesses had mentioned hearing shattering glass and explosions, suggestive of Molotov cocktails. The survivors denied hearing anything.

Of course the bloodsuckers denied hearing anything, Purcell mused. They would take care of the problem on their own, leaving blood and ruin in their wake.

And Prejean—the little fucking psycho codenamed S—would bathe in the shit, a knowing smile curving his lips, his pale, pale face incandescent with a devastating beauty.

A beauty Purcell’s heart had hardened against years before. S’s sexy spell wouldn’t work on him. Never had.

The chug-chug-chug of powerful ship engines echoed from the Mississippi, and the cool morning air smelled of river water and mud and sweet pastries as Purcell sat back in his chair, eating his beignet with its liberal dusting of powdered sugar, and watched the pigeons hopping around the café’s covered terrace, heads cocked to one side as if they hoped to force crumbs to the pavement with a hungry pigeon’s version of the Force. Pigeon Jedi mind tricks.

Breaking off a couple of pieces from the beignet, he tossed them in front of the optimistic pigeons. Well, look at that. It worked.

Chuckling, he polished off his beignet and brushed sugar from his hands. He scooted back his chair, scraping it across the pavement and causing a few pigeons to hop away madly. Just as he stood, his cell phone vibrated in his trouser pocket. He pulled it free and looked at the caller ID. Unknown. Frowning, he answered the call.

“Purcell. And who is this?”

“It’s Díon, Purcell. Are you sitting down? I have some hard news.”

The fact that a field interrogator was calling him with hard news instead of SOD Underwood shuffled unpleasant possibilities through Purcell’s mind with all the faster-than-the-eye speed of a deck of cards in the hands of a Vegas blackjack dealer. But the ace of spades in that deck was the most likely possibility: Underwood’s little plot had been discovered and she was in deep, deep trouble.

And, maybe, just maybe, so was he. The beignet in his belly turned to stone. He planted his butt back in his chair.

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