Then footsteps. Light flooded in, harsh and morning-bright, and Grainger's face appeared on the other side of the bars.
He was smiling. Of course he was smiling. The cold expression from hours earlier was gone as if it had never existed, folded away and stored in whatever compartment Grainger kept it in. What was left was the warm, gentle, grandfatherly face that Amani had come to understand was not a mask over the cold but a partner to it. They coexisted. They were both real. And the warm one was worse because it was the one that reached through the bars and unlocked the cage and said, "Good morning, little cub. How did you sleep?"
How did you sleep? As if the cage were a guest bed. As if this were room service.
Amani uncurled himself from the cage and tried to stand and couldn't. His feet, which had been screaming through night, had settled into a deep, pulsing throb that spiked into agony the moment he put weight on them. The gauze was stiff with dried blood. His left heel, where the cactus spine had been, felt hot and swollen.
He made it upright by holding the kitchen counter, his weight on his hands, his feet barely touching the tile. Grainger watched him with the concerned expression of a caretaker observing a patient.
"You'll need to stay off those feet today," Grainger said. "I'll bring you breakfast. Then perhaps you can read to me from the couch. You don't need your feet for reading." He chuckled at his own observation, and Amani's jaw clenched so hard his teeth ached.
The day passed in a haze of pain and compliance. Amani read from the couch with his feet elevated on a cushion that Grainger placed for him. The collar burned its steady low burn against his throat, and his voice came out flat and hoarse and nothing like the voice that had once filled a club. The old crane brought him food, toast and eggs, prepared by Grainger himself, which were perfect because everything Grainger did was precise and controlled. He brought water and ibuprofen and fresh gauze for the bandages. He changed the dressings on Amani's feet with the same careful, practiced hands that had washed them the night before.
Amani let him. There was nothing else to do. His escape route was gone, his feet couldn't carry him across a room, let alone across a desert. The front door might as well have been a wall. The windows might as well have been painted on. Everything he'd cataloged and planned and calculated over three days of careful observation had been reduced to nothing by a single failed attempt and a pair of ruined feet.
He read. Grainger didn't seem to notice… or maybe didn’t care, that his voice had gone dead. He sat in his armchair with his blanket, his water, and his eyes half-closed as he listened to Amani read about English manor houses. He was content.
In the late afternoon, Grainger took his nap. Amani sat on the couch with the book in his lap and the desert visible throughthe window and he stared at nothing. He had stopped planning. He had stopped calculating. For the first time since the van, his mind was quiet, not calm, but empty, the way a room is empty after you've taken everything out of it. There was nothing left to plan with. No moves to make. No angles to work. Just the couch and the pain and the silence and the slow understanding that compliance was no longer a strategy. It was becoming who he was.
He thought about what he'd said to Sero, months ago, when the bat was at his lowest.What you felt was real. What he took was wrong. Both things are true.
He wondered if Sero would say the same thing to him, if Sero could see him now. If anyone could see him now.
Outside the window, something moved in the scrub. A rustle of dry brush, quick and low to the ground. Probably a lizard. Maybe a rabbit. Probably nothing.
Amani watched it until his eyes blurred, and then he turned back to the book and waited for whatever came next.
Chapter Nine
The traffic camera footage came through in the afternoon of the second day, and it was exactly as damning as Nero had hoped.
The image was grainy, municipal cameras weren't known for their resolution, but it showed a black van parked under a streetlight at three forty-seven AM. At four oh eight, three figures emerged from the alley between the warehouses. At four eleven, a fourth figure appeared from the direction of the club, walking alone, shirtless in the warm night. At four twelve, the fourth figure stopped. At four thirteen, he charged. At four thirteen and six seconds, he was on the ground.
Nero watched the footage three times. The quality was too poor for faces, but the van was clear enough. Black panel van, older model, no rear windows. The plates were partially obscured by mud, deliberately, probably, but the analyst managed to pull a partial: first three characters, enough to run against DMV records then compare those records with known shark shifters in the Shifter Enforcement database.
There were only seven hits for sharks with criminal records. Three of those were already in custody from the Playground bust. Two sharks were confirmed out of state. That left two possibles, and one of them, a shark named Dale Reeves, had a van matching the general description registered in his name. The partial plate also matched.
Nero ran Dale's known associates through the Playground files. The network maps the task force had built were dense and tangled, but names connected to names connected to names. Within an hour, Nero had a list of six sharks who'd beenbanned from Kinky Kritters, who'd been loosely connected to the Grizzly's operation, and who were currently unaccounted for.
Three of them had been flagged for possible involvement in prior kidnapping-for-hire schemes. Small stuff: debts collected, people moved from one place to another for money, work that sharks did when someone else was paying and they didn't have to think too hard. But the pattern was there. These weren't sharks who'd acted on their own. Someone had hired them. Someone with money and a specific target in mind.
The crane. The caller had said "sold him to a crazy old perv out in the desert." A buyer. This was a commission job.
Nero needed the buyer's identity and location, and the fastest route to both was through the sharks themselves. The two who'd been tackled and arrested at the Playground weren't going to talk. Sharks in custody lawyered up faster than any other species, a survival instinct that translated neatly from ocean to courtroom. But the caller on the tip line was a different animal. Whoever he was, he'd called in the kidnapping within hours of it happening. He felt guilty. Guilty people talked.
Nero looked at his list of six possible sharks and started eliminating. The caller had been at a casino with a pool audible from the gaming floor. He'd been alone, no background voices suggesting companions. He'd been nervous but coherent, which meant he wasn't drunk or high. And he'd known details: Amani's name, Lady Leo, Kinky Kritters, the desert, the crane. That was inside knowledge. The caller had been part of the kidnapping crew.
Three of the six sharks on his list had known gambling habits. One of those three, a shark named Jack Morrow, had a pattern of frequenting the Palermo, a mid-range casino on the south end of the Strip known for its rooftop pool. The Palermo's pool was on the third floor, directly above the gaming floor, withan open-air design that would carry splash sounds down to the slots.
Casino with a pool audible from the floor.
Nero pulled Jack Morrow's file. Twenty-six. Low-level muscle. No violent priors. Known associate of the banned sharks. Last known address: an apartment complex off Tropicana, nothing fancy. He'd been on the periphery of the Playground network but had never been directly linked to any of the Grizzly's operations. A follower, not a leader. The kind of guy who went along with things because saying no to sharks was harder than saying yes.
The kind of guy who called a tip line afterward because he couldn't sleep.
Nero grabbed his keys.
Jack's apartment was on the second floor of a stucco building that had been beige once and was now the color of surrender. The hallway smelled like carpet cleaner and someone's burnt dinner. Nero knocked and waited and listened with his ferret ears for movement inside.
