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t information without anyone realizing she was doing it. Mercedes Cook?
In spite of myself, I was starting to make a plan.
Cormac spoke softly, adding to the clandestine feel of the conversation. “You’ll have to keep this quiet. Avoid the cops. They just mess everything up.” Cormac would know all about that. He’d saved me and five others by shooting dead the creature that threatened us. But when it was all over, the police only saw a dead woman and Cormac standing over her with a smoking rifle.
I winced. “The cops are already involved. You remember Detective Hardin?”
“Shit.” Make that a yes.
“But still . . . ” The wheels were turning. I had to think about what advantages I had and how I could use them. “She wants to treat this as a gang war. She wants these guys as badly as I do. If I can use her to do some of the dirty work”—like, shooting people—“that’ll leave me in the clear.”
“That’s a tricky gamble to make.”
“Yeah.” But I could make it work. I started to think I could make it work.
“Do you still have the Jeep?” Cormac said. “Does Ben have it?”
“Yeah, it’s at his mom’s place.”
“Go get it. Pop the hood. On the inside edge, on the left, there’s one of those magnetic boxes for spare keys. The key in it is for a storage unit at a place on 287, south of Longmont. Ben knows where.”
“Storage unit—storing what?”
“Stuff you might be able to use.”
“Cormac—”
“I’d go in and clean up the town myself if I could. But I can’t, so I want to make sure you have the tools for it.”
Cormac had his own personal armory in a rented storage locker. He never ceased to amaze me.
“Ben took me to a range. Taught me to shoot.”
“Good,” he said.
“I don’t want to be a part of this kind of life,” I said.
“Sometimes you don’t have a choice,” he said. “When you’re the only one around who can make a stand, you don’t have a choice. Not if you want to be able to sleep at night.”
I wasn’t thinking of doing this because I wanted to, or because I thought it’d be fun. I was doing this for Jenny, for Ben, for myself, to keep those of us left alive safe. I was doing this for T. J. It was what he’d have done.
Cormac was much better suited for a world where wars happened.
“Can you sleep at night, Cormac?”
“Most of the time. When I’m not thinking about you.” He grimaced. “I shouldn’t have said that. Sorry.”
“No,” I said softly. “I’m sorry.”
His voice was low, drawn from a dark place. “Sometimes, I wonder what would have happened if I’d shot him. After he was bitten. If I’d killed him like he wanted me to. And then, what if I came to see you. To tell you what happened. You’d be all sympathetic. You’d tell me how sorry you were, you’d start crying, I’d hold you, and then—”
“Cormac, stop. Stop it. You don’t actually wish . . . ” I couldn’t even say it. Cormac and Ben were like brothers, he couldn’t wish Ben dead.
“No,” he said. “Only sometimes.”
“That’s psychotic.”
“ ‘Sociopathic’ is what the prison psychologist wrote down.”
