The Broken Room Read online

  Praise for The Broken Room

  “It’s Jack Reacher meets Stranger Things with American Elsewhere vibes. Heart-racing adventure with highly motivated characters in truly horrific supernatural circumstances. Clines sticks the landing on this one. It’s one hell of a ride and not for the squeamish or faint-hearted.”

  —Jennifer Brozek, author of Never Let Me Sleep and Last Days of Salton Academy

  “A full-throttle thriller that deftly fuses superspy heroics and paranormal weirdness, The Broken Room is relentless, its nonstop action intensified by author Peter Clines’s compelling portrayal of childhood trauma, adult regret, and the redemptive power of familial love.”

  —Marshall Karp, #1 New York Times bestselling author, cocreator/coauthor of the NYPD Red series

  “With The Broken Room, Peter Clines weaves a genre-crossing tapestry of compelling storytelling. Characters—living and dead—you care about, and plot twists you could never see coming. Absolutely brilliant!”

  —Jonathan Maberry, New York Times bestselling author of V-Wars and the Joe Ledger thrillers

  “The Broken Room is one of Clines’s best books and captures that same magic that made King, McCammon, and Koontz household names.”

  —Stephen Blackmoore, bestselling author of the Eric Carter series

  “The Broken Room is a delightfully unpredictable ride! It was a roller coaster made entirely out of curveballs, but Clines makes it look easy.”

  —Brian Clevinger, writer and cocreator of Atomic Robo

  “A dark thriller with lovable characters, a dark mystery, and a blood-curdling horror element, The Broken Room delivers a fast-paced thriller with Peter Clines’s signature lovable characters and knack for Lovecraftian mystery.”

  —Craig DiLouie, author of The Children of Red Peak

  “At once brutally relentless, darkly unsettling, and strangely touching. This is a straight-shot pedal-down road trip with Elmore Leonard driving and Robert Aickman working the map. It’s a cosmic horror John Wick.”

  —Robert Brockway, author of Carrier Wave and Rx: A Tale of Electronegativity

  “Equally heartracing and heartrending, The Broken Room is a must-read for thrill-seekers longing for spooky season.”

  —Sam Maggs, author of The Unstoppable Wasp: Built on Hope

  “The Professional meets Stranger Things for a heart-stopping ride through Clines’s America.”

  —Scott Sigler, New York Times bestselling author of Ancestor and the Infected series

  “It’s rare to find this blend of pulse-pounding action and tremendous heart, but somehow Clines gives us a perfectly balanced narrative. Anchoring the twists and turns are the unlikeliest of duos, two lost souls you will find yourself falling in love with over and over again.”

  —Madeline Roux, author of the Asylum series

  “With a nod to Lone Wolf and Cub, The Broken Room is a rare mesh of horror and thriller that leads with its wit and heart and follows through with tremendous action. Cline takes the reader on an exhilarating ride to dark and unexpected places, and brings them back mostly in one piece. A fantastic read.”

  —Wesley Chu, #1 New York Times bestselling author of the War Arts Saga

  Copyright © 2022 by Peter Clines

  E-book published in 2022 by Blackstone Publishing

  Cover design by Luis Alejandro Cruz Castillo

  All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced

  or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the

  publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  The characters and events in this book are fictitious.

  Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental

  and not intended by the author.

  Trade e-book ISBN 979-8-200-86198-9

  Library e-book ISBN 979-8-200-86197-2

  Fiction / Thrillers / General

  CIP data for this book is available from the Library of Congress

  Blackstone Publishing

  31 Mistletoe Rd.

  Ashland, OR 97520

  www.BlackstonePublishing.com

  PART ONE

  A GIRL WALKS INTO A BAR

  ONE

  If a dive bar had family, the Pharaon would’ve been the redheaded stepchild. Or the black sheep. Possibly both. The story went that, sixteen years ago when it first opened, it was supposed to be the Pharaoh. But the sign painter messed up and the original owners just didn’t care enough to go back up and add a vertical line with some red paint. The Pharaon was on its fourth owner now, and each one had cared about the name a little less than the last one.

  Hector didn’t care about the name at all. He’d chosen the bar for the same reasons he chose most places. Cheap booze. Low lighting. Limited entrances and exits (probably a fire code violation, but Hector didn’t care about that, either). At least three booths shallow enough not to get trapped in, which also gave direct line of sight to the main entrance and the back room’s swinging door.

  And right now, out of those things, the only one he cared about was the cheap booze.

  Over the past two and a half years Hector’s days had fallen into a nice, simple schedule. He got up with the sun, showered, grabbed a breakfast burrito from one (chosen at random) of the four hole-in-the-wall places within a block of his studio apartment. Then he sat on a bus or train station bench (also chosen at random) and ate the burrito. Sometimes, if said form of public transport came while he sat there, he’d pay cash and ride it for an hour or two.

  Hector paid cash for everything.

  One way or another, at half past noon, he walked into the Pharaon just after they unlocked the doors. Then his day really began with a drink in one of the three booths with direct line of sight to the main entrance and the back room’s swinging door. Sometimes he’d let one drink sit for hours, sipping at it as all the ice turned to water in the yellowed double-rocks glass. Other times he’d kill an entire bottle before dinner. It all depended on how he’d slept the night before.

  Usually, he killed the bottle.

  Today had been a rare day so far. Almost four in the afternoon and he’d had only three drinks. The whiskey gave the bar a soft edge, rubbing at the shadows like a charcoal artist. It had been, overall, a peaceful day, internally and externally. The first one Hector had experienced in at least two months.

  He raised his hand, signaled Stu at the bar for a fourth drink, and the girl walked in.

  Hector assessed her, as he did everyone who stepped through the big swath of afternoon sunlight and paused to let their eyes adjust. He didn’t dismiss her because of her clothes. Every item was new. Superhero T-shirt, jeans, red-and-blue sneakers, sweatshirt, denim jacket, school backpack, and a sparkly, sequin-covered baseball cap declaring unicorns rule. Lower-end stuff, but all of it new, barely broken in at all. Despite the hat—because of it, really—he was also pretty sure the outfit had been picked to blend into a crowd. To let attention slide off the girl.

  His attention didn’t slide.

  He put her weight at fifty-three pounds. Four foot four. Short, dark hair peeking out from under the cap, closer to a crew cut than a pixie. A decent amount of Latino heritage, like himself. Slightly malnourished. She was twelve, tops.

  She blinked twice and looked back and forth across the room.

  Stu stepped around the bar, holding a glass of liquid amber and pointing himself at Hector’s table. “Whattya want, kid?”

  The girl looked at him and blinked again. For a moment, Hector thought she didn’t understand the man. Then she shook her head and said “Nothing,” in a voice like a stage whisper.

  “Bathroom’s for customers only, and you’re too young to be a customer.” He stepped past her and delivered Hector’s drink to the booth.

  Hector nodded his appreciation but didn’t take his eyes off the girl.

  She turned her head, pointing her eyes at each of the seven afternoon patrons. She paused at Hector, then settled on a guy at a tall table near the bar. Hector had never spoken to the man, but eavesdropping and observation had taught him that Jorge worked as a security guard at one of LA’s many film studios and was freshly divorced after he caught his wife cheating on him.

  The girl walked in a wide arc, circled Jorge, and parked herself at the table across from him. She was two-thirds turned from Hector, so he could see her jaw and mouth move but couldn’t read her lips. He watched Jorge’s expression. The security guard shook his head, then looked back over his shoulder at the bartender.

  “Kid!” Stu’s voice hit the loud, slow pitch people somehow thought translated across all languages. “You can’t be in here. So get out before I call your parents.”

  She ignored him and walked a beeline across the bar to Hector’s booth. He sipped his drink and stared at her. She stared back.

  “Hello.”

  “What’s up, kid?”

  “Are you Hector Ramirez?”

  His eyes and hands never moved, but something tickled the back of his neck. He hadn’t been Hector Ramirez in at least six years. He’d even destroyed the Ramirez passport, license, and other docs. Standard procedure.

  “Name sounds familiar,” he said. “Why are you looking for him.”

  She set her hands on the table and balled them into tiny fists. “Are you him?”

  He lifted his glass, let his drink touch
the tip of his tongue. “Didn’t your mother ever tell you it’s rude to answer a question with a question?”

  “My mother’s dead. And my father.” Her lips kept moving, forming silent words as she stared.

  He flinched. “Sorry, kid.”

  “You are him,” she said. No, not said. Stated. Whatever doubt had been in her voice had vanished like smoke in a hurricane. She knew.

  “Maybe.” He set his glass down.

  “You are,” she repeated. “You’re supposed to help me.”

  “Am I?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you selling band candy or something? Girl Scout cookies?”

  She stared at him as her head pivoted back and forth. Left side up. Right side up. Back to center. “I don’t know what band candy is.”

  There was an odd cadence and tone to the words. To all her words. Hector recognized it from a few different places around the world. She hadn’t been taught English. She’d picked it up, learning random words here and there from different people.

  “Candy for your school band,” he said. “You know, musical band. You sell the candy to pay for uniforms or trips to DC or drum skins or something.”

  “Oh,” she said, clearly not having any idea what he was talking about. “I’m not selling band candy.”

  “So what’s up?”

  The girl slid into the booth across from him and laced her fingers together on the tabletop. “I’m being pursued by two standard two-man retrieval teams with a tactical support team on standby. I think I’ve lost them, but I know they followed me here to Los Angeles. They want to take me back to the Project.”

  He’d been reaching to pick up the drink again. Instead, he set his palm flat against the cheap Formica. The tickle on the back of his neck grew into an itch that spread down his spine like a rash.

  “Hey,” Stu called out. “You know that kid? She begging for money?”

  “No,” Hector said, still not taking his eyes off the girl.

  “I have plenty of money,” she said with a nod.

  “Who are you?”

  “Natalie Gamma Sixteen.”

  “Gamma Sixteen?”

  “Yes.”

  “What kind of name is that?”

  “It’s my group designation. There were thirty-five of us in each group.”

  He set those facts to the side of his mental desktop, somewhere he could grab them quickly if he needed them. “But what’s your name?”

  “Natalie Gamma Sixteen.”

  “Your real name.”

  “I don’t know anymore.”

  The drink called to him, but the back of his neck buzzed hard, the way it used to. “Who said I’d help you?”

  “A friend of yours.”

  “You’ll have to do better than that.”

  Her head did the side-to-side thing again. “I don’t know what that means.”

  “It means you can’t just say ‘a friend.’ You have to give me a real name.”

  “Timothy Steirs. He said you’d help me. He told me where you’d be.”

  A chill blotted the itch for a moment as he processed the name. Heat replaced the chill. Annoyance. A bit of anger. A generous amount of suspicion.

  Hector hid it all. He’d been trained to hide sudden emotions. “Really? Tim Steirs sent you?”

  “Yes. He said you’d help me.”

  He reached out with one finger and caught a drop of condensation as it rolled down the outside of the glass. His eyes had never left the girl, but his attention was on the exits now. “Did he? When did he say this?”

  “He told me about you for the first time eight days ago, just before I escaped. He said you’d be able to help me, and that you would.”

  Hector flicked the drop from his fingertip. “See, that strikes me as odd.”

  “Why?”

  “Because according to everything I’ve heard, Tim Steirs died seven years ago.”

  Across the table, the girl’s shoulders sagged beneath her backpack straps. “Yes. This is good.”

  “What is?”

  “You already know. He thought you might take it hard.”

  “Take what hard?”

  “Finding out he was dead,” said Natalie Gamma Sixteen. “We were worried I’d have to tell you.”

  TWO

  Hector sat up in his side of the booth. He took a slow breath in through his nose, let it slide out between his lips. He watched. He listened. He examined the posture of every other figure in the bar.

  “All right,” he said to the little girl. “No more jokes. Who sent you?”

  “Tim Steirs.”

  “I’m not joking.”

  “Neither am I.”

  For the first time since she walked into the Pharaon, Hector let his gaze drift off Natalie Gamma Sixteen and look up at the half-open entrance. No movement. No people, no shadows, no unusual noises coming from the four parking spaces Stu referred to as “the lot.”

  “How did you find me?”

  “Tim figured out where you’d be.”

  “Who told you?”

  “Tim Steirs.”

  “Kid . . .” He let another breath go in and out, kept processing. Don’t get bogged down in minutiae. Stay focused on the actual issues. That’s how he’d learned to survive.

  He flexed his fingers on the tabletop. “Natalie, I don’t know what they told you, but I’m a very bad man. I don’t want to hurt you, but I will if I have to. Now, who sent you here?”

  Her head went side to side again. “No, you’re not.”

  “Not what.”

  “A bad man. Tim says you’re a good man who . . .” She paused, closed her eyes as if remembering the exact spelling of a long word, and then said, “You’re a good man who did bad things so nobody else had to do them.”

  Hector stared at her.

  “He also says you owe him for El Salvador.”

  The cold chill washed down his back again. “How do you know about El Salvador?”

  “I was born there.”

  “No, I mean . . .” His eyes flitted to the drink. He mentally kicked himself. Focused his attention back on the girl and the doors again. Still no movement, even though this had to be some kind of setup. “How do you know about him and me in El Salvador?”

  “I don’t know what you mean. He said to tell you that you owed him for El Salvador. It’s a marker, and he’s calling it in.”

  “Who told you about that?”

  “He did.”

  “Who?”

  “Tim.”

  “Tim Steirs is dead! He’s been dead for years.”

  “Yes. He said you wouldn’t be this upset about it.”

  “About . . .”

  “About him being dead. He said you both knew it was just part of the job. It happens, you accept it, and you go back to work. And he said you’d help me.”

  Hector sank back into his side of the booth. The drink called to him again. This time he listened to it.

  Natalie sat on her side of the booth and watched him swallow two big mouthfuls of whiskey. Her mouth kept moving. Flexing. It seemed like a nervous habit.

  He set the mostly empty glass back down on the table. “You said there were people after you?”

  “Yes. Two standard two-man retrieval teams with a tactical support team on standby.”

  “Those aren’t terms a little girl usually knows.”

  “Tim taught them to me.”

  “Right. How do you know about them?”

  “The teams?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I escaped four days ago. They chased me for almost a full day before I lost them. I saw the first team the next day, in a town. A man and a woman wearing suits and ties with wires in their ears.” She reached up and tapped her right ear for emphasis. “The woman’s name is Ross. She was at the Project, but I’d never seen the man before. The day after that, in a city, I saw the other team. Two men. I saw the first team again this morning. I don’t think any of them have seen me.”

  “And the tac team?”

  “I haven’t seen them, but Tim says they’d be standard for this kind of search-and-retrieve operation.”