Leaping Read Free Page A

both amazing and
very, very bad.
    I start singing the refrain:
    “Your lips are miiiiiiine, girl.
Your skin is miiiiiine, girl.
    You think you can leave, but you
don’t see
    Your heart is miiiiine, girl.”
    “So, basically he was a creeper
even before he became a murdering, crazed piece of shit,” Gabe says.
    Our jeep inches closer. I watch the
brake lights flair from the Mercedes in front of us.
    “I don’t like this,” Tarren says,
his face settling into a frown from his expansive unhappy expression collection.
“We don’t have a plan.”
    “Sure we do,” Gabe answers. “I get
us in, Maya confirms that Tucker Cartwright is an angel, we wait for an
opening, and then…” he turns his fingers into a gun and pretends to shoot. “He
won’t be causing no trouble ‘round these parts no more. Right, Sheriff?”
     “Maya, head down,” Tarren says as
we approach the guard booth. Like this is my first mission. Sometimes I think
Tarren needs to bark orders like an addict needs another hit of meth. I imagine
Tarren suffering through the shakes from severe ordering-people-around
withdrawal and smile as I look straight down at my shoes.
    Tarren puts on his cowboy hat and
pulls it low, and Gabe is safe behind his Batman mask. I hear Tarren say the
name Tucker Cartwright and the code word, “Gopher,” that Gabe somehow managed
to obtain. The gates open for us.
    We inch past huge, sprawling
estates, and I remember what Gabe told us yesterday. We’d been sitting at a
bench at a rest stop in New Mexico discussing which angel target to pursue
next. We’d all just cleaned ourselves up in the bathroom from the grit of
burying the last body, and now instead of heading to a motel for a few hours
rest, Gabe was laying out multiple options for our next set of wings to clip.
    Tucker had been an easy choice. He
was within a day’s drive and, according to Gabe, a close associate of the angel
we’d just put in the ground, Mario Sanchez. That dirty bastard had a dozen
coyotes on his payroll. Any undocumented immigrants who couldn’t pay a surprise
“release fee” after they were smuggled into the U.S. became the property of
Sanchez who then farmed them out to a close network of angels for feeding.
Angels – the irony of that name still gets me. There is nothing angelic about
the genetically enhanced creatures my brothers have spent their entire lives
fighting. I’m a relatively new addition to the vigilante game, but I’m trying
to make up for my late start.
    Sanchez’s system was as sick as it
was brilliant. Undocumented immigrants disappear in the desert all the time,
and their families are hardly likely to notify the police of a missing person. Tucker
Cartwright was only one of a dozen angels on Sanchez’s clientele list, and the
thought of it makes my stomach twist like a bendy straw. The angel population
is growing faster than we can put them down. Way, way faster. They’re getting more
brash, more out of control. How much longer before the world wakes up to this
new reality and all hell breaks loose?
    “That’s it on the right,” Gabe says.
We all stare out the window as the jeep crawls past an impressive mansion
banging so loud with music I wonder how the whole building doesn’t slide off
its concrete foundation. Beneath a curtain of fog, orange and black lights glow
across the front lawn. A shrouded tunnel leads guests to the doorway, a
mini-haunted house before they get to the real party.
    I’m not looking forward to walking
through that particular pit of humanity, but it seems we have little choice. 
We bypass the long line of posh vehicles waiting for valet parking and cruise
two blocks down the rest of the quiet, dark neighborhood. Leave it to an ass
like Tucker Cartwright to throw a Halloween party on October 1 st .
    Tarren pulls up against a curb and
frowns. “Too conspicuous,” he says. He’s right. Our jeep is definitely missing
about $50,000 in net worth compared to the shiny vehicles sitting in