by Kirk Dougal
Shadows in a Dark City
Short Tales of Urban Fantasy
Kirk Dougal
Copyright © 2020 by Kirk Dougal. All rights reserved.
The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious or fictitious recreations of actual historical persons. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the authors unless otherwise specified. 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.
Worldwide Rights
Created in the United States of America
Edited by Stacey Turner
eBook Formatting by Tim Marquitz
Cover by STK•Kreations
Audio Narrator Kevin Theis
**Rev – Previously published in Manifesto UF, 2013**
Books by
Kirk Dougal
A Tale of Bone and Steel
Legacy of Bones
Black Shadow Rising
Wings of the Storm
Joiner of Bones (Forthcoming)
The Dowland Cases
Reset
Quest Call
Gemini Divided
The Beach (Forthcoming)
The Fallen Angels
Dreams of Ivory and Gold
Valleys of the Earth
The Ring of Solomon (Forthcoming)
Young Adult
Jacked
Collections
Shadows in a Dark City: Short Tales of Urban Fantasy
Table of Contents
Rev
Help Wanted
The Bike
Draghunt
About the Author
Rev
I remember the first time I died.
The bullets hurt like hell when they slammed into my body, each one leaving a trail of pain and fire as they ripped through muscle, shattered bones, and sent rivers of blood down my skin. At some point, I had hoped one would find my heart or blow out the top of my head, ending it all in one final shot.
But my killer had been too good at his profession. Although he was jerking the trigger on his gun as fast as he could, screaming obscenities loud enough to be heard over the roar of the Glock, his aim had stayed true. Slugs dug into my shoulders, legs, stomach—and more than a few hit me in the groin.
Jayson had always been a better shot than me, and the groin thing, well, I had been pumping away at his wife when he walked in on us in their bedroom. Still, it was a helluva way to go out since he and I had been partners for almost five years. I'd have thought I deserved one in the back of the head, out of professional courtesy, instead of letting me bleed out.
I'd have done it for him if our positions had been reversed.
Thoughts of that afternoon rushed through my mind as another bullet sprayed chunks of plaster near my head.
“Are you the best the old man could find?” Gunfire drowned out the laughter that followed. “Maybe he really can't afford to pay the merchant fee.”
I risked a peek around the corner. I'd only seen three bagmen show up for the meet, and the last one was lying on the floor in a growing pool of blood after he caught my first shot. The other two men had dived in opposite directions, and from where I was standing, I could see the front of the shop, so I knew neither one of them had escaped.
“Maybe I'm working for fifty bucks and food,” I shouted. The baggers were snot-nosed twenty-somethings so I doubted they'd get the Magnificent Seven reference. But none of this mattered. I'd shaken the leader's hand last week, and I knew he'd be dead in the next ten minutes.
That's one of the bastard things about having died. Press the flesh with someone else, and you could see when dying was close to them. The farthest out I'd ever been able to see a death was two weeks. Just damn bad luck that it had been one of my clients. I made sure to cash his check right away, though.
A guy's gotta eat. And besides, there's no fighting death. I know.
I heard the man on my right moving before I saw the blur. He pushed over a rack of clothes and was running fast for the door, hunched over with just a few inches of his back showing above the store's counter. It'd have to be enough.
I leaned out to the left to get a better line and squeezed off two rounds. The first shattered the top of the display case, but the second hit home, sending chunks of muscle and blood spraying along with bits of a thousand-dollar suit. His scream still filled my ears when a bullet bit into my shoulder.
Damn it. Getting shot still hurt like a son of a bitch.
The last bagman had taken advantage when I moved out into the open. But I was already moving before his second shot whistled past my head and into the wall behind me. At least, I thought it had missed. A second later it felt like someone had laid a hot poker on top of my ear. I reached up and discovered about half an inch of my ear was gone, and blood was running down the side of my neck like a warm waterfall. That mark would play hell with wearing sunglasses for a while, and ever since I'd come back, the sunlight hurt my eyes.
Now I was pissed. My shoulder hurt like hell, my ear was on fire, and my t-shirt had blood all over it. It was time to end this dance before the little shit actually did something that would make me start my tally all over again.
I puffed harder on my cigar, and the cherry glowed hot while I pulled an M-80 out of my pocket. I always kept a couple of flashbangs back at my office for this kind of problem, and they would have worked better than this popper, but Morales probably didn't want me to save his store from the local racket only to lose all his inventory in a fire. Ever since that job down on the wharf, I'd been reluctant to use grenades if I cared the building was standing when I was done with the job. The firecracker would need to do the trick.
The fuse sputtered and caught. I stared at it as the hot spot worked its way down the fuse toward the tiny explosive, my right hand gripping a pistol tight. I was ready to go.
Except I forgot about the bullet in my shoulder.
I pulled my left arm back to throw the M-80 to the other side of the store where I thought the man was hiding and nearly dropped the firecracker on my foot. Pain rippled down my body. I let my arm drop and tried to toss the little red cylinder underhand to the far side of the room. Instead, it arched in a weak attempt that bounced off the cash register and fell on the other side of the counter.
Too late to light the other M-80 in my pocket and just too damn mad to come up with better plan, I ran out of the hallway and turned left, ducking behind a row of shelves just as the firecracker went off. Even with the last few rounds of gunfire still ringing in my ears, the little explosive left an impressive echo bouncing through the store.
The particle board shelves I was crouched behind now wouldn't stop a BB, let alone a good-sized bullet, but I wasn't about to stay in one spot long enough to let the splinters fly. I kept on moving until I reached the far end, about six feet from the front door of the shop and dropped to one knee with my gun at sight level.
But I didn't pull the trigger. The over-dressed prick wasn't where I thought he'd be, hiding behind a hat display. The spot was empty and so was the bottom of my stomach.
Only my eyes moved, sweeping the area for any sign of the man. I wanted to check my watch, see if I had the time wrong and the bagman had outlived his final ten minutes. Instead, I waited.
Sweat rolled down the side of my forehead, tickling my skin as it wound its way around the edge of my eyebrow and gathered momentum at the corner of my eye. Just as I was about to blink it away, I caught the movement.
Two shirts slowly parted, and a gun poked into the open from the middle of a circular rack. Even though I knew where the bastard was hiding now
, I still didn't move because the barrel was pointed toward the hallway where I had been standing. More importantly, I also spotted the right shoe of a five hundred-dollar pair on the carpet alongside the support brace of the rack.
My first shot exploded the guy's shin just above the ankle. He toppled into view, spreading the Hawaiian shirts like a multicolored curtain on opening night, his scream shaking the shop's walls. My second shot went into the top of his head and ended the noise.
I stood and walked to the body. I was still a few steps away when I jumped sideways, my breath stopping short. The man I'd shot in the back was still alive, spread out on the floor by the base of the shattered case in a pile of broken glass, gasping for breath and feebly moving his arms.
My .45 had severed the man's spine about a third of the way down his back and made him dead weight below the wound. His arms and hands could still move, however, and he was groping for his gun, trying to drag me into death with him. Gotta give a guy credit for fighting until the end.
I walked closer and stared down at his face, pale and sweating from whatever pain he still felt in his upper body.
“Sorry, man,” I said as I lifted my steel-toed boot. I stomped the heel down on the back of his neck, and the bones cracked.
I might have respected his fighting spirit at the end but, damn it, bullets cost money.
*******
“You look like hell, Rev,” Felisa said as I walked into the outer office. “Have you ever considered winning a fight?”
I tossed a blood-splattered envelope on her desk. It held the rest of what Morales owed me for the job. I'd carved some gang signs into the protection racket goons' foreheads and dumped their bodies in an alley where I was sure they'd be found. That should take the heat off the old man, but I'd go back in a few days to check on him for no charge. That was just part of being professional. Besides, I was pretty sure his daughter would chip in a little payment on the side if I caught her when he wasn't around.
“I could stand to go a few rounds with you later,” I said, sitting on the corner of her desk and leaning close. “I'd probably even let you pin me.”
Felisa leaned in close, the smell of lilac filling my nose. She reached up slowly, hand cupped as if she was going to caress my cheek. Instead, at the last moment she jerked her hand to the side and flicked my ear where the bullet had chewed off a chunk.
“Ow! Damn it!” I yelled, my eyes watering with the pain.
“Stop saying stupid stuff, and I'll stop hurting you,” Felisa said before tilting her head toward my office door. “Blink's waiting for you.”
I bit my tongue and walked into my office without saying anything else. Siting on the couch that doubled as my bed more often than I wanted to think about was a thin guy with black hair and olive skin. He could've passed for someone a couple of years out of college but that would have missed the mark by about a decade, assuming he'd ever made it out of high school.
“You know,” he said as I walked into the room, “a smart man would learn a lesson and stop saying shit that makes Felisa hurt you. But then, we know you're not a smart man.”
I chuckled.
“Where's the fun in that?” I asked as I kicked the door shut and shrugged out of my jacket. It stuck on my arm where the blood had soaked into my t-shirt and caked into a red-brown patch. “Make any voodoo dolls today, Blink?”
“You'd be the first to know,” he said as he stopped reading the book in his lap. Blink glanced up, and I watched his jaw drop like some two-bit actor in 70s-era porn. “Holy shit! Just because you're a revenant doesn't mean you can't get yourself killed. Well, you can't, not really, but you know what I mean.”
He bounced to his feet and walked over. I would have sworn his right hand was empty when he laid the book carefully on the couch arm, but when he reached for my shoulder, a four-inch blade glinted in the light.
“Where the hell do you hide all those knives?”
Blink smiled as his left hand made an s-shaped movement in the air. Suddenly the twin to the knife was in that hand as well. He moved again, and his fingers were empty. But this time, I saw him slip the knife into his pants band.
At least, I thought I saw him put the blade there.
“Shut up and stop moving before I add another scar to your collection.” Blink pulled the ruined shirt away from my shoulder and sliced the knife down through the material.
I watched him lean in close and stare. When Anthony Giovanni Rigonelli was excited about something, he forgot to blink. I mean, stare-you-in-the-face-until-he-fucked-with-your-mind forgot to blink. That was how he earned his nickname. Word on the street was that the first time he killed somebody, Blink just stared at the other guy until the man cracked and made the first move. He cut the man's throat from ear to ear, never looking away the whole time. Now, only two things excited him: learning something from one of his books or slicing someone open. Apparently, today my shoulder qualified as something to be learned.
“Look,” he said, pointing with the knife. “The skin is starting to grow back together on both sides, but the wound is still really red.”
I craned my neck around so I could see a little.
“It hurt so damn bad when I got hit, I thought the slug had chewed up the bone.” I looked up again. “So, it went through clean?”
Blink nodded.
“Yeah. It looks like the bullet went in between your clavicle and the scapula.” I must have looked like I'd swallowed a lemon because a grin spread over his face. “Don't fry a brain cell,” he continued as he tilted his head back to stare at my ear for a moment before pursing his lips while shaking his head. “It went between your collar bone and your shoulder blade.”
“Fuck you,” I said as I ripped what was left of my shirt over my head. “I know what you meant. I'm just trying to figure out why it hurt so bad.”
The knife disappeared back inside Blink's sleeve. This time I was pretty sure I knew where it went.
“So, it hurt more than normal?”
“Yeah, a helluva lot more.”
Blink turned and walked back to his book. He flipped the pages until he found what he was looking for in the stiff pages. After a second, he nodded.
“That's a good thing,” he said.
“You can say that.” I walked to the filing cabinet and opened the top drawer. Inside were some clean t-shirts and a container of wet wipes. It wasn't the first time I had needed to clean up in the office after a job. At least I didn't need to worry about an infection. “It wasn't your damn shoulder catching the slug.”
Blink waved his hand back and forth but kept his attention on the page.
“No, really. The pain is good.” He looked me in the eye as he gestured at the book. “This is an old Welsh book of legends and myths. It talks about revenants in here.”
I turned and reached into the mini fridge beside the cabinet, pulling out two beers.
“Okay, so you've got my attention. What's it say about me?”
Blink took the beer I offered but held it away from the book, obviously afraid of spilling some of it on the pages.
“The legends say revenants lived a not-so-great life. In fact, you were such a bastard, neither side wanted you when you died. Upstairs because you didn't deserve it, and the other guy, well, who the hell knows what the devil thinks. But he didn't want you either. So, they sent you back to live a little longer to see which side you'd land on.”
I grimaced. I knew why hell had thrown me back. There was just never a good enough reason to tell Blink.
“So far you're covering yesterday's news,” I said before I tilted my head back, downing half the bottle in one go. I looked down again and wiped the back of my hand across my mouth. “I'm nothing but a zombie's pussy cousin who doesn't eat brains and can actually get hurt. At least I don't look like walking death. Tell me something I don't know.”
Blink held up his hand to stop my rambling.
“I know. But when you came back from the dead, you knew somehow that you
had to do some things right to make up for all the bad stuff you'd done before. Live your life a little better. Until then, you couldn't die forever and go up or down.”
“Wipe the tally clean,” I said with a nod. “Or at least wipe off as much of the ink as I can.”
I knew we were coming to the point. Blink stared at me so hard now, his almost black eyes remaining wide-eyed in his excitement, he was beginning to make even me a little uncomfortable.
“Right. But this book talks about a revenant that made it back. All the way back. Or, at least back far enough to get to the point where he died.” He took a breath. “And he stayed dead.”
Now he had my full attention. The second and third time I'd died, I came back and had to start all over on making good on my life—not that I was around long enough either time to really erase much. I sat down in the chair behind the desk and leaned forward on my elbows.
“I'm listening.”
Blink looked down again.
“It says here that as this guy got closer, he started to feel things again like he had before he'd been turned.” He paused for a three count before rushing back in for the explanation. “Right before he wiped the slate clean and died for good, he said he felt more alive. He felt more human again.”
I didn't give a damn what my friend did. I had to blink at that statement.
“So, what you're telling me is that since the bullets hurt more this time, I'm getting closer to being able to die?”
Blink nodded.
“There's more. You're also healing slower,” he continued, gesturing at my shoulder, “and you haven't even noticed that the sun has been shining in the window, and you haven't bitched about it once.”
He was right. I hadn't thought about putting on sunglasses or dropping the window shades. Maybe the last eighteen months since I'd rolled off the slab in the county morgue and crawled out into the night had not been a total waste after all.