“It’s all in the car,” he said as he cut between a shiny new SUV and a just-about-roadworthy old muscle car. “You can have it. She came here, you know.”
Ledger hesitated for a second in surprise. He lost a few steps and had to stretch his legs to catch up.
“To Sutton?”
Hark nodded. He reached into his pocket as he walked and fumbled out a set of keys. They nearly slipped out of his fingers, but he hung on to them. When he depressed the button, the lights on a blue Audi a few rows back flashed as it unlocked.
“She wanted to see your dad in person, I guess,” Hark said over his shoulder. “You won’t believe who met her.”
Ledger grimly thought he might.
“Here,” Hark said as they reached the car. He pointed through the windshield with a jut of his chin. “It’s on the passenger seat.”
Hark stayed where he was, nervous and fidgety as he scanned the area. He rubbed at his wrists with nervous hands while Ledger opened the far door and leaned in to grab the thin manila envelope from the seat.
Mint. It smelled like mint.
Ledger picked up the envelope on autopilot. There was a book under it, a cheap, second-hand sci-fi with men in dubiously tight space suits firing lasers at something out of frame.
Fiends of Venus.
It was the same book that tarot-card Death had been holding. Death, who was a dead man, with a finger tucked into his book to mark his place in the chapter.
Two things dawned on Ledger at the same moment.
He knew where Earl’s death was.
And this wasn’t Hark’s car.
CHAPTER21
LEDGER DROPPED THEenvelope and straightened up. Before he could get anywhere, someone grabbed the back of his head, fingers knotted into his hair, and slammed his face down against the frame of the car. Pain splintered in black and dull red threads through Ledger’s skull. He grabbed the edge of the door and tried to push himself back, but his body was sluggish to respond. Before he could pull himself together, his head was smashed into the car again, and the world around him grayed out.
His legs folded under him despite his desperate efforts to stay upright.
Someone caught him before he hit the ground.
“You never could just take the easy road,” Syder said, his voice strained with the effort of holding Ledger’s weight. “None of this would have happened if you had.”
Ledger grabbed weakly at the door of the car and clung to it. Syder peeled his fingers up roughly and shoved him into the car ass first, leaving his legs dangling limply out of the door.
“Hark,” Ledger slurred out. “… won’t work…”
“I didn’t want to do this,” Hark said. He came around the car, and Ledger tried to track him, even when he had to close his left eye because it refused to focus. “I had to. You can’t tell it my name if you’re dead. I didn’t have a choice.”
Ledger couldn’t get his tongue—suddenly fat and uncooperative—to wrap around the “Stupid” he wanted to toss Hark’s way. It turned out he didn’t need to say it.
“Neither do I,” Syder said.
He let go of Ledger, straightened up, and pulled a gun from the holster at the small of his back. Hark stared at him, his face slack as he tried to react to a real, almost mundane fear instead of the Earl-driven paranoia. He wasn’t quick enough.
“What do you—”
Syder shot him in the stomach. The impact of the bullet made Hark grunt and take an unsteady step backward. He put one hand to his gut and stared at Syder with a betrayed expression on his face.
“You said… you could help me,” he gasped. Blood seeped from under his fingers.
“No,” Syder said. He holstered his gun and bent down to grab Ledger’s legs, folding them roughly into the car. “I said I could make it stop. Nothing has stopping power like a bullet.”
