“I’m sorry,” Casey said to her former boss. “I just can’t do this job any more.” It was three days later, and the owner of the convenience store stared at her in dismay. Marco leaned against the wall beside her, his neck unscarred save for a few faint and fading marks. He kept rubbing them. Casey understood. Her cheeks still burned where Tony’s blood had fallen. Some marks, she thought, could never be erased.
“They caught the guy,” her boss said. “They’re gonna catch the girl. Can’t you just come back?”
Lyrene McHally and Antonio Benavidez were, without a doubt, the Corpus Christi Sniper. Antonio’s apartment held the guns, the equipment for casting silver plated rounds. Lyrene had the maps, the photographs choosing their next victims, the evidence that all of them—the two gangsters, Amaya, Nicole, even Lily Adams, the hooker killed to draw attention away from Casey—had been selected, stalked and dispatched with obsessive attention to detail. It was enough to convict both of them, though neither would go to trial.
Tony had survived his wounds, though he would have fifteen BB rounds in his body for the rest of his life. The doctors decided removing them was too great a risk. Casey’s last minute weapon had been confiscated as evidence, but not before half the police force, including Arthur Ramirez and Thomas Banks, had shaken her hand.
But Tony had been babbling about mermaids and fairies and magic. Until these were accepted facts, he would never stand trial. As for Lyrene…
When Casey and Marco talked to police, they stuck close to reality. Lyrene had tried to lure Marco away from Casey so Tony could kill her. When this failed, she persuaded Marco to take them all to Casey’s home, where Tony had been waiting. Then, according to the official reports, Tony had rushed Casey and she had fired. And fired, and fired, until Tony stopped trying to kill her. By then, Lyrene had jumped into Tony’s Mustang. The image of a glamorous red-head riding a black bullet down the highways had captured America’s attention. Everyone was looking for her.
Good Luck. Both the Mustang and Lyrene’s body were gone.
“You’re going to be hard to replace,” Casey’s former boss said.
She shrugged.
One second, Lyrene had been glaring down the barrel of Casey’s BB gun. The next, the projectile entered her eye, her brain, and she turned to sea water. Casey, Marco and Tony had all been soaked with it. That was how the Faerie died, Marco said. Only the Immortals left a body behind. While Casey summoned an ambulance for the would-be-murderer, Marco had taken care of the Mustang. By the time the police arrived, there was a pile of rust bits and hydrocarbons from disintegrated plastic no one noticed at all.
"What are you going to do now?" her former boss asked.
Casey closed her eyes. The last time she’d been here, she’d had nothing. No family. No worthwhile work, and no future. Now something beautiful lay before her like a newborn rose. There were ugly places too, a possibility of rot at its very core…but it was there. The prospect of tomorrow morning wasn’t so hopeless anymore.
And the thing was, people with a future didn’t belong on Leopard Street.
“I don’t know,” she answered. “But I’m going to find out.”