The Vaults by Toby Ball

but you need to be very careful tonight, okay?”
    Poole had the feeling he had stepped off a precipice with no idea of the distance to the bottom.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

    He’s a scary little bastard, Red Henry thought, which was as high a compliment as anyone was likely to receive from him. Henry leaned against a concrete stanchion, sucking on an unlit Cuban, casting an enormous shadow in the empty warehouse deep in the Hollows. Facing him, standing relaxed, with his feet shoulders’ width apart, his knees and shoulders loose, was Feral Basu. Feral was fully a foot and a half shorter than Red Henry and a third of his weight, but if the mayor didn’t fear anyone, he also didn’t relish the thought of Feral coming after him.
    “Know who Arthur Puskis is?” Red Henry asked.
    Feral shook his head. His skin was dark and smooth, and even in the dim light of the warehouse, his eyes were somehow arresting.
    “Everyone on the force does,” Henry explained. “He’s the police Archivist. Works under City Hall. Something of a legend, in truth.”
    Feral waited.
    “He’s trying to find Reif DeGraffenreid.”
    Again Feral said nothing, though Henry noticed a subtle tensing in his slender frame.
    Henry said, “So, we tipped him as to where DeGraffenreid is.”
    “You did?”
    Henry was always perplexed by Feral’s accent. He thought he detected a trace of the Carpathians or maybe the Muslim south of Russia, which might have explained his coloration. He looked as if he might be from India.
    “Yes. We need to discourage him from
continuing
this line of inquiry.”
    “What do you mean, exactly?”
    “I mean that you need to make him understand that looking for Reif DeGraffenreid, or any other actions he plans to take regarding DeGraffenreid and/or Prosnicki, is folly.”
    “Don’t kill him?”
    Red Henry had considerably more patience with Feral than with anyoneelse. “No. Don’t kill him. Two things are important. The first is that he understands that his pursuit of this inquiry will have consequences for him. The second is that he does not talk to DeGraffenreid. That something you can take care of?”
    “Yes.”
    With that, Henry knew that it would be taken care of, that he did not need to think about it further.

CHAPTER TWELVE

    Puskis turned the unmarked Nash borrowed from the police pool off the pitted road that ran through what there was of Freeman’s Gap and pulled into a petrol station. Three men sat on folding chairs around a card table playing rummy. Their clothes and skin were the color of the dust that blew through the street. They were war vets, Puskis thought.
    He got out of his car and approached them. A perimeter around the table was discolored with tobacco spit. Two of the men projected streams of the brown juice and looked up from their cards.
    “Excuse me. I was wondering if you could tell me how I could get to this address.” He read them the address the caller had given him. The men exchanged brief glances with each other, then looked back at him.
    Puskis tried again. “Do you know where this address is?”
    The man closest to him, whose hair had come out in patches and whose hands could have belonged to a man forty years his senior, tore a piece from the pad they were using to keep score. He drew a map with a grease pencil, his filthy hands staining the paper where they occasionally touched it. When he was done, he handed it to Puskis and let out a wheezing cough, his lungs ravaged by gas. The map was precise and easy to read.
    “Thank you. Thank you so much,” Puskis said, and retreated to his car, never quite turning his back fully on the three men. As he drove off, he noticed that they were once again engrossed in their game.
    Toward dusk Puskis rumbled down the dirt road where he would find Reif DeGraffenreid. The low sun shone red, turning the tops of the seemingly endless fields of corn an orange, and the wind moved the plants in waves so that it looked like acres of inferno. It was, Puskis