Spider's Lullaby by James R. Tuck Read Free Book Online

hesitate.”
    The girls nodded.
    I looked up at the windows high up the wall. “Charlotte, you go topside and work that angle. We’ll take the ground. Everybody’s phone is on vibrate; if you find the egg sac or Ronnie, buzz us.”
    Without a word Charlotte turned and began scaling the wall using the four spider legs that jutted from her back. Her body looked like it was levitating as she rose up the wall. Reaching the top, she pulled away one of the plywood sheets and slipped inside.
    I turned to Tiff. The Kevlar vest was a bit big on her, bulking under her coat. It made her look ... delicate, downright damn dainty. The urge to tell her to wait in the car clawed its way up into my brain. She was too innocent, too small, too fragile. She hadn’t had a transfusion of Angel blood. She wasn’t a lycanthrope. She wasn’t anything besides stock-from-the-factory human. I didn’t want anything to happen to her. Not on my watch. Not at all. The urge lunged forward and tried to scratch its way out of my mouth.
    I bit it back. She was trained. I had trained her. She could group bullets in a one-inch pattern and stand up pretty well against me in hand to hand. For all her pleasant exterior, she was tough.
    Still.
    â€œYou ready for this, little girl?”
    She held up her baton. It spat out a small blue arc of electricity that skittered and glittered bright in her blue irises. “Hell yes. Let’s quit wasting time and go get Ronnie. I’m ready.”
    I turned to the door and prayed she was right.

8
    The door swung open to a stack of wooden crates. They made a hallway that ran left, the right cut off by a stack of them. They were plain, cheap pine gleaming yellow-white in the overhead florescent lights. Block letters six inches high ran across each of them in different languages. Some were a Cyrillic alphabet; some were in an Asian language. The hallway they formed was so tight that the acrid chemical burn of the spray paint used to stencil the letters crashed over the scent of wood.
    I leaned in, putting my nose as close as I could without getting splinters. I pulled air deep into my lungs through my nose. Coffee. Under the wood and the spray paint was the warm roasted scent of coffee.
    These crates were full of drugs. I didn’t know what kind, but coffee is used by drug smugglers to throw off drug dogs used by the DEA at the border. According to Ivan, the Blood Ghosts ran two things through that warehouse: guns and drugs. Now I knew that these crates wouldn’t be in any danger of exploding if the bad guys started shooting. They also wouldn’t be cover either.
    Bullets would slice right through the crates and the drugs inside them.
    I glanced at Tiff just a few steps behind me, glad I let Ivan talk me into taking the Kevlar vests. I side-walked quickly to the end of the row of crates. My ears strained to hear, cheek pressed against rough wood. Music sounded hollowly into the open air above the stacked crates. Some wannabe thug rapping about his bitches and his hos over a crap bass line. I will never understand why real gangsters want to listen to some jackass from the ’burbs cash in on their lifestyle, but they do.
    I peered around the last crate. The stacks filled in toward the middle, making a hallway of sorts between rows of stacked crates. At the end stood a tiny gangbanger.
    He was about the size of Tiff. His back to me, greasy black hair spilled straight over the collar of a jacket that looked like it would fit me. Big, baggy khaki pants sagged down below them, bunching up over gleaming white sneakers. He would have looked like a joke except for the AK-47 that was slung in front of him, barrel showing over one shoulder, stock showing under the opposite elbow. I motioned for Tiff to stay put and slowly stepped around the corner.
    The stun baton was tight in my hand. Body tense, stepping carefully, I put my heel down on the concrete and rolled the bottom of my boot