Shoot to Thrill Read online

  Shoot To Thrill

  D.V. Wolfe

  Lightning

  Copyright © 2020 D.V. Wolfe

  All rights reserved

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Cover design by: Lightning Strike Press

  Printed in the United States of America

  For Jimbo and Glenn, who rode shotgun on this crazy train.

  “Faster, faster, until the thrill of speed overcomes the fear of death.”

  - Hunter S. Thompson

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  Join the Hunt!

  Other Books In The Midnight Rider Series

  Acknowledgment

  About The Author

  1

  “This is an all-time low for us, Bane,” Noah grumbled. He jumped when I stabbed him in the eye with the eyeliner for the fifth or, maybe it was the sixth time. He glared at me with one bloodshot eye as the liner began to run down his face. I swiped with my thumb at the drizzle and smeared it.

  I sighed. “Sorry, I never really got the hang of make-up.” This was a lie. I’d never actually attempted makeup in any form. I just didn’t want Noah to chicken out if I admitted that I’d never held an eyeliner-wand-thing before.

  “No shit,” Noah said, jerking away. “Explain to me why I’m the one wearing the make-up?”

  I rolled my eyes. “Because, when I tried to get intel from those kids, they called me...whatever it was and wouldn’t talk to me anymore.”

  Noah grinned. “They called you a narc.”

  “Yeah,” I said dipping the eyeliner stick in the pot thing again. “What is that?”

  Noah’s grin widened until I pulled the eyeliner stick out and leaned toward him again. “It means they thought you were a cop. Like you look old. Ow!”

  “Whoops,” I said. “Guess I had too much on the stick thing.” Noah grabbed the eyeliner from me and twisted the rearview mirror towards him. “No offense, well some offense, but you suck at this.” He was awkward holding it but I had to admit, he was much better than me at getting it on his eye instead of in his eye.

  “How do you know how to do this?” I asked.

  “I think the bigger question is ‘how do you not know how to do this’?” Noah grumbled.

  I shrugged. “I went to Hell when I was fifteen. And before that, money was tight and new pants were a luxury. I kind of skipped the eyeliner phase.”

  Noah glanced at me and then refocused his attention in the mirror. “But what about when you came back?”

  I leaned back in the seat and stared out the windshield at the empty side street. “Well, when I first came back, I was too busy trying to figure out how the ‘hunting without dying’ thing worked to give it any thought. Then, the second time I came back, I was a seventy-year-old Black man, so I got a pass. Again, I had enough on my plate with just trying to stay alive and figure out what a prostate was.”

  “And now?” Noah asked, raising an eyebrow.

  “Well, I know what a prostate is now.”

  Noah heaved a weary sigh. “You’ve managed to stay alive in this body for a while and you’re a young-ish female. What’s your excuse now?”

  I shook my head. “Why bother?”

  Noah snorted and licked his thumb to clear off the smudge I’d made on his cheek.

  “So how do you know about this makeup stuff?” I asked, watching him.

  Noah’s face clouded over. He gave his eye a final swipe and then screwed the eyeliner back together. “My mom. I used to sit on the bathroom sink next to her when I was a kid while she did her makeup.”

  “You miss her?” I asked.

  Noah paused and then he glanced at me and snorted. “Well, while we’re getting all touchy-feely, do you miss your mom, Bane?”

  “Alright, alright,” I said, shoving Lucy’s door open. “Moving on.”

  “Seriously, Bane,” Noah said, the teasing tone leaving his voice. “You never talk about your family.”

  I shrugged. “What’s there to say? My ma died when I was young and my dad hung himself. Are you ready to be bait?”

  Noah narrowed his eyes at me. “Bait? Again? I thought I was a mole.”

  I grinned. “But ‘bait’ seems to be the role you star in.”

  Noah shook his head and kicked the passenger side door open. I could hear him muttering darkly as he came around the cab. He paused just as I was about to slam my door shut.

  “Wait! Do you have the keys?”

  I stopped and looked down at my hands. Empty. We’d had to start locking Lucy’s doors since we were in a big city and we were carrying around a bunch of guns in the truck cab. I still wasn’t used to it. Add that to Noah and I being strung out and sleep-deprived from the multiple hunts we’d had before hitting town, and it was a miracle that there had only been three times today when I’d almost locked my keys in the truck.

  We’d been on the road for a week and this was our fourth...no fifth hunt. Luckily the first three were just vengeful spirits and spending our evenings digging them up, stealing their corpses, and picking some crematorium locks had fixed those problems. They weren’t worth much if anything as far as the soul-exchange-rate, but they were the hunts that had been available. The fourth hunt was a little messier. I could kind of see where Noah might be a little hesitant to play bait again. We’d been in the woods outside of Kalamazoo, Illinois where a Didko was abducting boy scouts that were out camping. I’d tied Noah to a tree as bait, not far from where the Didko had taken the first boy. I hadn’t tied Noah up because I thought he would cut and run. He knew I would give him infinite shit for that. I did it because I figured if the Didko had to waste time cutting the rope, I’d have more time to kill it. The plan had kind of worked. The Didko had sprayed Noah with some kind of hell juice that made him puke for an hour after. Also, when I cut its head off, there had been some arterial spray that smelled like roadkill and we’d both gotten sprayed by it. We’d found a truck stop with showers a half-hour later and after a quick clean out of Lucy, you almost couldn’t smell it anymore.

  “Why don’t you try being bait for once,” Noah asked.

  I threw my hands up. “I would, but apparently, I’m a bark.”

  “Narc,” Noah grumbled. He leaned back against the side of Lucy’s truck bed and sighed. I could see the exhaustion from the week on his face, despite the eyeliner making him look like a raccoon. “Fine. So what do I have to do?”

  I turned and leaned against the truck next to him, looking out at the boarded up and shabby warehouses that lined either side of the street we were parked on. We’d followed a couple of the kids to this neighborhood the day before, but there was no sign of them today. “These kids are disappearing, showing back up as vamps and sucking their families dry.” I squinted around at the neighborhood. It was currently deserted. It was mid-day. Maybe we were too early. “I
need someone that looks like them to join their little club and find out where they sneak off to at night to suck face...and neck, etc. That’s the only way we’re going to find the colony.”

  “Colony?” Noah asked, raising an eyebrow. “Not a ‘coven’ or something?”

  “What do you want from me?” I asked. “That’s what they’re called. They’re like bats.”

  “And what are you going to do?” Noah asked.

  “Well, some dingus broke my vial of dead man’s blood a while ago and then a different dingus broke the replacement bottle I got from Rosetta…”

  Noah shook his head. “I told Stacks that the duffle bag had breakables in it.”

  I sighed and continued. “And seeing as how I need dead man’s blood to subdue these assholes long enough to cut their heads off, I’m going on a ‘low-security morgue’ scavenger hunt.”

  Noah pushed off the side of the truck and turned to look at me. “Ok, so we just have to find the group of kids again, I do some smooth-talking, and then we’re in.”

  A huge flaw in my plan had just presented itself. I looked Noah over as he stood before me, his orange frizzy hair curling around his head, like a dandelion on fire. I scanned the rest of him. His bright tie-dyed t-shirt was blood and dirt-stained and ripped in places. His cargo shorts and his red Converse sneakers continued the blood and dirt theme.

  I shook my head. “Right now, you look like an axe-murdering clown, trying to find himself. You’re not going to pass muster with those kids looking like that.”

  I had a fleeting thought that maybe that was why the kids hadn’t talked to me earlier today. I looked down at myself. My a-shirt was now a grayish-brown from grave-digging and Didko-bleeding, and my jeans were stained with the same blood and dirt.

  “It’s not the clothes,” Noah said as if he was reading my mind. “You’re old. That’s why the kids didn’t talk to you.”

  “Come on,” I said. “This Empty House can’t be more than what, twenty-eight?” After Samuel, my seventy-year-old previous rental, all bets had been off. I somehow lucked out when I fell into this one. Just one more inducement to be careful enough to make sure it made it through the job.

  “Get over it, Bane,” Noah said. “You’re too old to hang out with the cool kids.”

  “Whatever,” I said. “We need to get you something else to wear. Get in the truck.”

  We were on the outskirts of Chicago. I drove a six-block radius, looking for somewhere to get Noah some clothes. I didn’t want to get too far away from the neighborhood we’d been lurking in. Right now, it was really our only lead on finding the colony. I’d picked up the eyeliner at a bodega last night after I was shot down by the kids. But for some reason, I hadn’t even thought about the clothes. I shook my head. I was getting sloppy. And sloppy in this line of work will get you dead. I redoubled my efforts looking for somewhere, anywhere to quickly find him something black to wear. I turned down another side street and saw a bodega on the corner. Across from it was a tire shop and next to that was a shabby thrift store with a sign that just said, “Clothing Donations”.

  I turned to look at Noah and grinned.

  “No, Bane. Just no.”

  I parked half a block from the bodega. “Let’s just take a walk.”

  Noah groaned, but he got out of the car. “What’s one more bad decision? Keys!” Noah said before I closed my door. I snatched them out of the ignition and bit back the comment I’d been about to make to Noah about where I thought would be a good place to store them on his person. I wasn’t really mad at him. If he hadn’t said something, I would have just locked the keys in the truck. It was just exhaustion creeping up on me.

  We strolled down the block, doing our best to look like we belonged there, despite being dirty, four days past a shower, and Noah looking like a raccoon. It was a hot day and there wasn’t a lot of pedestrian traffic. This was both bad and good. Good, because there would be fewer people to witness and remember a dirty raccoon-eyed redhead and a purple-haired, equally dirty woman. But, it was also bad, because we weren’t exactly inconspicuous for the few people we did encounter. I glanced across the street and saw an old man with a mustache watching us from behind the counter of the bodega.

  “Let’s keep walking,” I said. “We’ll go one more block up and around the corner.”

  We really didn’t have time to deal with the boys in blue, so I detoured us around and between buildings on the other side of the block. Five minutes later, we were in the alley behind the thrift store. I pulled out my lock pick set and Noah sat down on the store’s back stoop.

  “What are you doing?” I asked.

  “Getting comfortable,” Noah said. “I know how long it takes you to pick locks.”

  I raised an eyebrow at him. “You got any better ideas?”

  Noah stood up and sighed. “We could go to the mall, like regular gothic slobs.”

  I’d been hoping we could avoid that, but the dread in my stomach told me he was probably right. If he was going to fit in, he’d need to look the part. Unfortunately, that meant the leather, chains, the whole works and I had my doubts we would find all of that at a thrift store.

  The week was wearing on me and I turned to face Noah who had gotten to his feet and moved up the stoop to stand next to me. I leaned back against the door to think and my weight kept traveling backward as the door gave way behind me, swinging inward. I flailed and managed to grab Noah by the front of his shirt with both hands. Unfortunately, I’d still had my lock pit set in one hand and Noah squealed in pain as the metal tool went through his t-shirt. The pain on his face quickly became fear as I pulled him backward with me and our heads banged together like cocoanuts as we fell. My head bounced off the concrete and Noah fell next to me, right on his nose, from the sound of it. We just lay there, stunned.

  “Well that was easy,” I groaned. I shoved Noah off of me and rolled to my hands and feet.

  He wasn’t moving, but he was cussing. I ignored him and looked around the room. There were bins of clothing lining the walls; red, orange, green, yellow…every color...except black.

  “Well, good news and bad news,” I muttered.

  “Oh yeah,” Noah groaned, rolling onto his back. “What’s the good news?”

  “You didn’t have to wait for me to pick the lock.”

  “And the bad?” Noah asked.

  There was the sound of a key scraping in a lock at the front of the store. Noah and I froze, staring at each other in horror.

  “Shit,” I breathed. I glanced back at the door. We might be able to scramble back out before... Footsteps approaching. Nope. We were about to be seen. There was a pile of garbage bags that looked like they were probably full of clothing donations along one wall. Noah had gotten to his feet next to me. I gave him a shove. He fell sideways into the wall of bags and hit the ground again. The wall collapsed on him. I couldn’t have planned it better myself. I dove sideways behind a folding table that was stacked high with neatly folded clothing. More bins of donations were crammed underneath it and there was just enough room behind it for me to lay on my side.

  “What the hell was that?” The voice sounded like a teenage girl. She poked her head into the backroom, clutching a cell phone to her ear. She looked about sixteen.

  She glared at the fallen bags of clothing, which were thankfully, concealing Noah somewhere beneath them, and then I saw her eyes dart to the open door.

  “Goddamn cats. Dad still hasn’t fixed that damn back door…yeah, it’s open again.”

  She stomped across the room to the door. I held my breath and tried to be as still as possible as she passed. Maybe teenage girls were like T-rexes. If I didn’t move, maybe she wouldn’t see me.

  She kicked the door closed and paused in the middle of the floor. “So what is the story of the girl they found in Portage Park? I heard like a lion from the zoo got loose and attacked her. Her throat was like ripped out or something, right? I mean that’s what Melanie said and her dad’s a cop.” Sh
e started back towards the front room. She was quiet for a moment while she presumably listened to the person on the other end of the phone. The bags twitched across from me and I saw Noah glaring daggers at me from between two of them. I ignored him and strained to listen. A ripped out throat didn’t sound like vamps. A cold shiver raced up my spine, thinking of the bodies I’d found on other hunts with their throats ripped out. There were lots of beasties that ripped throats out, but vampires weren’t amongst them. Two hunts in one city? Another wave of exhaustion rolled over me. Involuntary multi-tasking. Bully.

  “Do you think it was one of those goth losers who did it? Amber said they were total freaks! One of the girls in their group tried to bite her at the Crestwood mall once….no bite her. Yeah. Like they believe they’re vampires or some bullshit like that…Oh you know, they hang out by the empty stores in the mall. You know, down by that shop that sells incense and like the tablecloth things...Yeah, that one. Yeah, I told Amber she should get like a tetanus shot....No, she didn’t actually bite her. Amber ran away, but she tried… Well, still, I mean getting a tetanus shot can’t hurt, right?”

  I crept out from behind the table and kept my eyes on the doorway the girl had just disappeared through. I paused. The girl was still gabbing to her friend. Her voice sounded like she’d moved back towards the front door and away from the doorway. I moved toward the nearest bag of clothing and started to shift them as quietly as I could to get Noah out. Unfortunately, when I was gripping one of the bags I got a handful of his frizzy hair and he let out a squeal. The girl paused in her conversation and I closed my eyes. Visions of her chasing us down the block and getting a look at Lucy and our appearances and calling the cops flooded my mind. Of course, then the job would be even tougher and Chicago would become one more town we have to watch our asses in. Lucy had a few tricks up her tailpipe to keep us fairly low-profile, but still, we needed an APB out on us like we needed another hole in our heads. The linoleum floor in the front room creaked as she started coming back towards the backroom. I set the bag down and grabbed Noah by the arm, getting him to his feet in case we had to run.