Read Blood and Silver - 04 for Free Online Page B

and sore to the touch. Like the hole in your tooth that you just can’t keep your tongue out of. It hurts and makes you shiver, the pain tremoring, leaving that funny feeling deep below your belly button, but you just can’t leave it alone. Impressions assaulted me from the house. The same impressions I’d found in the woods but on steroids.
    Or crack.
    The feel of something fever hot and aching with dull hunger. My skin began to itch and my stomach growled at me.
    Reaching inside, my hand closed on my Mossberg 500 shotgun. It had an eight-round tube, loaded with steel-core Mini-missile slugs for the first four rounds and silver-plated buckshot in the back half. Six extra shells of silver shot were strapped to the stock, standing out green against the black. The front of the barrel was capped by a breaching shroud, a jagged tube of steel, designed to grip doors to hold the barrel steady as a lock was blown away. A Desert Eagle .357 rode under my left arm, snug in its shoulder holster, pushed tight against my arm by the Kevlar vest I had strapped to me. Yes, I was hunting something supernatural, but crack houses and gun-toting drug dealers go hand in hand like . . . well, like crack houses and gun-toting drug dealers. I wasn’t taking chances on getting shot by some low-life piece of scum. A compact Glock .40 caliber snugged into the small of my back as a backup gun.
    Before I closed the car door, I grabbed a rag out of the floorboard that I used to check the oil in the Comet. Maintenance is better than repair, my dad used to say before he left this shitty world. I stuffed the oily rag into my back pocket and wiped my hand off on my jeans so I wouldn’t compromise my grip on the shotgun.
    Locked and loaded, I crossed the street. Moving quickly, my eyes scanned the broken asphalt for anything that might trip me. The tread of my boot ground against tiny shards of glass that glittered underfoot—busted bottles and shattered crack pipes. The fever-hot hunger my power sensed thickened with each step, gelling around me, coagulating into something to wade through. I had one boot on the bottom step when a woman came around the corner of the house, dragging a stick-thin child behind her.
    We stopped, staring at each other. Her hair jutted out around a bobble head on a scrawny neck. Scabs covered her cheeks and arms. Some were thick as oatmeal. Some were picked away and dug into by dirty, broken fingernails so that the flesh showed bright pink. The sores were stark against ashy, bitter chocolate skin. Yellow, phlegmy eyes rolled at me inside sockets that sunk into the bones of her skull.
    The girl she had by the arm was as thin as her mother, but from being undernourished, not corroded away by drugs. She looked to be about twice Kaylee’s age. Black hair was pulled tight in cornrows and capped off with a rainbow of tiny plastic clips. She was barefoot despite the broken glass that littered the ground. Big brown eyes watched me carefully.
    The woman couldn’t stand still. Her shoulders and neck kept moving back and forth and side to side. She looked like a cobra somebody had jumped up on methamphetamines. Her lips were crusted with something white and flaky that cracked when she talked. I could hardly understand her through the mouthful of stubs she had. Crack had eaten most of her teeth into stumps that hung black to her pink gums.
    “What you doin’ here wid dat big-ass gun, whiteboy?”
    My left hand pulled out the picture Kaylee’s father had given me. I held it toward her. “Looking for this little girl. You seen her?”
    She closed one rheumy eye as she leaned forward and looked at the picture. “Why you think she’d be in this neighborhood?”
    “I just do. Have you seen her?”
    Her head swiveled. She squinted, one bulging eye looking up the steps to the house. “You think she’s in dat house?”
    I nodded.
    “Muddafucka!” She turned and shook the little girl at the end of her arm. The girl flopped around but