Chapter Club: The Shadowrunner Chapter 19
Happy Valentine’s Day! I’m excited to bring you another excerpt from The Shadowrunner.
Want to start from the beginning? You can find Chapter 1 here!
Last Time
Luke is the chief police officer in a small Arizona town called Abeja
His daughter, Lucy, has magical abilities that she is keeping secret from her parents.
A Texan named Silvia Montes was murdered not far from Luke’s house. Lucy both met Silvia prior to her murder and saw the murderer on the night of the crime. She has come to call the murderer a dragon
One of Lucy’s friend disappeared shortly after the murder. In the course of investigating the disappearance, Luke met three ghostly children at the local park. He tasked his secretary with finding out who they are / were
Luke has been collecting strange lights from the locations where the dragon attacks. Rebecca, the forensic technician, has been investigating them.
Luke turned at the sound of his office door opening. Sally stood in the entry, staring at the mess of paper, pins, and rubber hanging on his wall. It was his attempt to make something sensible out of everything that had happened so far. Note cards filled with descriptions of events were linked to each other with chains of rubber bands he had found in his desk. Where he could make them, he had pinned up guesses in the middle of these chains relating how the two events were connected.
“You’ve been busy,” Sally said.
“I’m glad you think so. It doesn’t feel very productive to sit in your office all day.” Luke turned to his desk and grabbed a sip of water. Sally stepped forward, laying three manila envelopes on the tabletop.
“There haven’t been any sightings of the suspect, but I was able to track down the three kids.”
“Really?” Luke said, flipping open the top folder to reveal a dossier on Spencer. At least, that was what the name at the top said, but the picture was of a boy in his twenties.
“You’re good.”
Sally allowed herself a slight smile. “Two of the three families still live in the addresses you provided. One of them moved to Texas back in 2015.”
“Thank you, Sally.”
She nodded and exited his office, pulling the door shut behind her. Luke flipped open each of the envelopes in turn, noting that the current ages of the children from the vision varied wildly. Spencer was the youngest of the bunch, and the girl was only a few years younger than Luke himself.
He glanced at the board and the note card on it with his messy handwriting. Lights = memories?
There was a chain of rubber bands to another note card that said, Owen’s imaginary friend = lights x 4. At least, he assumed it was four since five had appeared after he added the blue light containing Owen’s memories of the attack. Something about adding that memory had made whatever was in the slide unstable, and the image had collapsed. Now it was clear that the image wasn’t a singular memory, but the combination of several.
If that was the case, where had the memories come from? He glanced over at another card saying, Lights left over from suspect’s attacks. If that was true, then Owen’s imaginary friend must have come from an attack before Owen’s.
He didn’t like the thought. How long had the man with the scarred lip been here? How many people had he attacked? And how had it stayed so quiet for so long?
Luke sat back at his computer and pulled up the incident log. He scrolled back to the months before Owen’s attack, scanning the entries for disappearances or anything like they had seen the past few weeks.
His eyes fell on an incident back in July and stopped. A family had called about their grandfather’s passing. Personnel had been dispatched, but they had also alerted the morgue. Luke opened a window and navigated to The Daybreak Bulletin website, pulling up the obituaries. A moment’s scrolling later, he found the obituary that matched the incident report.
Arthur Wright, 71 of Abeja, passed away unexpectedly on the evening of July 17th. He was a long time resident of the city, and was known and loved by his neighbors.
Luke looked back at the address and compared it to the map hanging over his desk. It was one of the houses bordering Serenity Park. If this man was the source of the memories, they wouldn’t have needed to go far to end up in the playground. Which meant their suspect had been here since July. He pulled out another note card and wrote Arthur Wright killed by suspect? before placing it on the board.
As he looped another chain of rubber bands around the push pin, Luke considered the time line. If he was right, the suspect’s first victim was an old man and his second was an unrelated eight-year-old boy. What had driven him to attack the two of them?
He considered the other cards. Silvia had known about Owen’s lights and therefore about the attack. Based off his experience with the creature, Luke guessed Pejito had shown her the seen just like it had showed him the bridge. He couldn’t avoid the conclusion that his suspect had also killed her. If he was right, and if Pejito had shown him the truth, that meant his suspect was also responsible for the man he had found comatose under the bridge.
He shook his head. So many ifs. In prior cases, they had felt like a components of a great machine that roared to life when all the pieces fit together. Now the machine felt dangerous. How was he supposed to capture a man who could disappear without a trace and was apparently immune to bullets?
That was the most important question now. If Pejito had been able to show him the suspect, it could also show him where Owen was. But even if it did, there was no guarantee that he would be able to do anything to help him, not when all of his tools might end up being useless. Silvia would have had a better idea of how to tackle this than him. Maybe Morrison—
He squashed the thought. He didn’t know that Morrison had any idea about any of this. And if she did, he had already decided he was not going to work with her. It was stupid, yes, but he couldn’t shake the feeling that she would be more dangerous if she knew the whole picture.
At this point, limiting potential new sources of danger seemed to be the best he could do. There were still so many loose ends to this case. In three out of the four attacks, there had been lights left over, so where were the lights from Silvia’s attack? Were they hiding somewhere, just waiting for another unsuspecting child like Owen to run into them?
Like Lucy?
It seemed like the thought stilled his heart. At least two of the man’s victims knew something about the lights. That made him, Rebbecca, Bradley, and the one groundskeeper a potential target, yes. But Lucy had also seen and touched the lights. And the man with scarred lips had already shown he was willing to attack children.
Luke stood, sending his chair flying backwards. If he didn’t have any hope of rescuing Owen, he didn’t have any hope of protecting his daughter either.
He went to the evidence locker, as if he could forget the thought just by leaving the room, but it stalked him every step of the way to the room in the back of the forensics lab. The new lights were in water bottles he had pilfered from the ambulance. They filled the interior of a second cardboard box with an incandescent glow.
All four of these lights were the same color, while the ones Silvia had gathered were all different. And none of the colors matched between the two. Without thinking, he unscrewed the cap and tipped the bottle so that the light spilled out, then reached his own hand into the center of the light.
He braced himself for the sudden flood of emotion and was surprised when it didn’t come. Instead, his nose was overwhelmed with the scent of marijuana. As soon as he pulled his hand away, the scent faded, even more quickly than the emotions had.
After grabbing a sharpie from his desk and noting the scent on the bottle, he turned out the next one and touched that one, possessed by the need to feel anything other than the terror of knowing he couldn’t protect his daughter.
This time, his entire frame was bitten by cold. It reminded him of when he had gone camping and the only thing separating him from the cold night air had been his sleeping bag. The third light brought the sound of the creek to his ears.
When he touched the last orb, he found his vision transformed. He was no longer looking at the interior of the evidence locker, but at a makeshift fire contained in the metal grill at one of the state parks nearby. There was no sound and there was no smell, just the dance of the firelight. Luke looked to either side and found two others standing next to him. One was a woman he could tell had done drugs from the thinness of her hair and the sallowness of her skin. The other was a teenager with a forelock dyed blue and a backpack slung across his shoulders.
Luke drew his hand away and the vision vanished. He wrote the word “image” on the bottle and scooped the orb back into it.
This was all that was left of the victims. Just shy of a dozen fragments of memories was all that had escaped the man with the white hair and scarred lips. If he didn’t do something, there would be more.
The door to the evidence locker swung open and Rebbecca walked in. Luke put the bottles back into the cardboard box and closed the lid on top, only to find that Rebbecca was looking at him.
“You came in here looking like something was chasing you,” she said.
“I… uh,” he ran his fingers through his hair. “I just got overwhelmed.”
She looked over the edge of her glasses at him. He knew she could tell that he was holding something back. But Rebbecca didn’t ask questions, so she hadn’t asked him what was on his mind.
“I ran into the man we saw in the vision at the park. I tried to shoot at him and I don’t think anything happened. I don’t know how to protect us without a weapon.”
She nodded and Luke’s mouth twitched upward in a brief smile. He was grateful to have someone else he could confide in. Someone who knew enough about the case to understand the stress it put him under to try and understand things like mysterious men who only left little bits of memory behind.
Luke glanced back at the boxes full of them. They were more than memories though. Arthur Wright was dead and the pieces of him had formed a friend for Owen. They had survived him in that way.
They had survived him.
He pulled open the box again and looked down into the four globes of spinning light. If whatever these were could survive past death, maybe they were durable enough to—.
“Do you think we could make something out of these?” Luke asked, holding one of the bottles out towards Rebbecca.
She considered the bottle for a moment, then left the locker. She returned a moment later with a magnifying glass, which she held close to the light.
“When I was a little girl, my brothers liked to terrorize the ants with these. Maybe we could make our murderer into an ant.”
Luke smiled, a full smile this time. There was something they could do now, something they could try. If all went well, he could find Owen and if he could do that—
He could protect Lucy.
Lucy was sitting on her bed, bounding her ghost light between her hands. The door to her bedroom was still closed, even though Mom was busy somewhere else. Maybe someday it would be completely normal for Lucy to open the door and let her parents see her spin her ghost light around. Then again, for it to be normal her dad would have to know. And for right now, she couldn’t tell him.
Her focus wavered as headlights passed through the window. Lucy let the light disappear as she watched her dad pull himself out of the car. She scrambled off the bed and ran down the stairs to the door so that she would be the first thing Dad saw when he walked in.
The door opened and Lucy bounced forward to wrap her arms around Dad’s legs.
“Hi Daddy!” Lucy said.
“Hello, Lucy!” Dad said, taking a heavy step forward so that he could close the door. “How was school?”
“It was good,” Lucy replied. She also figured it was a good idea not to mention the sense that someone was watching her to her dad. That would make him worry even more. “Was work good?”
“Yes it was. I learned a lot of things, and Rebbecca and I started a new project.”
Lucy paused. Daddy didn’t normally do projects at work. Usually he was dealing with bad guys.
Mom walked out of the kitchen, drying her hands on a towel. She was dressed in her hospital clothes and would leave for work soon. “Are you starting a new initiative at the office?”
“No, Rebbecca and I are trying to make a new tool that I think will be useful.”
Lucy could tell by the way that Dad looked at her mom that he was referring to things she wasn’t supposed to know about. Even though he never lied, sometimes he did talk around the things that he meant so that she wouldn’t understand them.
“That’s good,” Mom replied. “Hopefully it’ll be a big help.”
“I’m sure it will be,” Dad said. He reached down and picked Lucy up. “You know you’re getting heavy, right?”
“That’s what you said the last time you picked me up,” Lucy replied. She wrapped her arms around Dad’s neck and tilted her face so that her eyes were scary.
“It was true then too,” he said.
He let her down and Lucy scrambled back to the kitchen. As she started pulling plates and forks from their places in the cupboards and the drawers, she heard her mom in the entryway.
“You’re home early.”
Out of the corner of her eye, Lucy saw Mom wrap her arms where Lucy had wrapped hers and kiss Dad. Lucy smiled.
“I wanted to make up for coming home late the other day.”
“Not a bad way to start, though I think you’re going to have to work a bit harder than that.”
Dad chuckled and Lucy’s heart soared. Mom and Dad weren’t fighting anymore. Now she could enjoy a full night of fun with both of them. Sure, playing with her ghost light with Mom was fun, but it was better when Dad was around.
I hope you enjoyed this sneak-peak of The Shadowrunner. What did you think? Let me know by leaving a like and some of your thoughts in the comments below!