Unnatural Acts

by Kevin J. Anderson

  Standing in the gloomy alley in front of the closed pawnshop, I was so preoccupied with my personal problems that I didn’t notice the two demon goons closing in until it was too late. A private detective is supposed to be observant, picking up tiny details missed by the police or evil criminal masterminds. Even so, I did not see the hulking things before they were right up on me. For all their scales, horns, and poisonous fumes leaking from their nostrils and mouths, demons somehow manage to tiptoe quite well.

  “Dan Chambeaux,” gargled the larger demon as purplish brown vapors curled out of his fanged mouth. “We need a word with you.”

  The slightly smaller demon next to him chuckled with a huffing sound like a badly tuned engine. His breath looked like diesel fumes. “Yeah. Strong words.”

  They blocked the alley, and I faced them. “How can I help you boys?”

  The two demons were of the “hired thug” variety, certainly not management material. Large and imposing, with faces and bodies covered with scaly plates and sharp protrusions, they looked like the result of an unintended pregnancy between a porcupine and a crocodile—and that was not a porno clip I wanted to see under any circumstances.

  The foremost demon had blazing scarlet eyes, and his partner’s were orange, denoting lesser intelligence (or lesser meanness, I hoped). I was sure I would find out soon enough. “If you’re looking to rent the storefront here, I can put you in touch with the real estate agent.”

  The red-eyed demon grabbed me by the front of my shirt, wrinkling my jacket as he shoved me against the alley wall. His clawed hand was the size of my head. My fedora fell off onto the ground.

  “Careful with the hat!” I said.

  The orange-eyed demon stomped the fedora flat.

  “Stop sticking your nose where it doesn’t belong, Chambeaux.” The purplish brown fumes wafting out of his mouth stung my eyes like acid—maybe it was acid—and I couldn’t keep myself from coughing. Not exactly the most dignified response I could have made.

  “Could you be more specific?” I managed. “I’m a detective—it’s my job to stick my nose in things.”

  The big demon lifted me into the air, letting my legs dangle beneath me, then swung me around and slammed me against the opposite wall of the alley. He chuffed, “Ooh, that’s going to leave a mark.”

  “I’ve been told it adds character.” Actually, because I have embalming fluid rather than blood, bruises don’t show, and I can withstand a lot of battering, not that I enjoy it. Even if the bruises weren’t visible, however, lumps and broken bones could still be very unsightly.

  The demon tossed me to his partner, who turned me upside down and dropped me to the street, as if they had invented a new game called “Pass the Zombie.”

  I picked myself up. I knew I was damaged, some pieces broken, and my clothes were definitely torn and dirty. The orange-eyed demon stomped on my fedora again for good measure, though it was already flat.

  “Just watch yourself,” said the larger demon, leaning close and exhaling again so that I couldn’t breathe without burning my nostrils.

  “You’ve got a bad case of the vapors,” I said.

  “Stop poking into Goodfellow matters, if you know what’s good for you,” said the less intelligent thug. “The Smile Syndicate doesn’t like it.”

  “Really?” I shook my head to clear it. “Missy told me she has nothing to hide.”

  It was the wrong thing to say, but then I often do that. The scarlet-eyed demon was annoyed that his partner had blabbed the Goodfellow name. They propped me up and used me as a punching bag, hammering away at my chest and face, tearing my jacket (which was going to need several more stitches—as would I).

  “If you don’t learn your lesson, maybe we’ll go twist the head off your lawyer friend,” the red-eyed demon said. “Like unscrewing a lid off a jar.”

  His companion chuckled. “The lid off a jar!”

  They left me in a rumpled heap before strutting away, whistling a cheerful tune. “Let’s go celebrate,” said the big demon.

  The orange-eyed partner trotted along beside him. “Can we? Can we?”

  I lay there for a long time, feeling a thousand aches, hoping I could be patched up, but knowing I was no longer quite so well-preserved. I work hard to maintain my condition, but it doesn’t help when a couple of supernatural bullies target you for your lunch money. I would have preferred that they just gave me a wedgie.

  It took a long while to get back on my feet, a little bit at a time. I straightened my limbs, checked the damage—mostly superficial. Fortunately, I knew a good cosmetic artist. Rather than being frightened or intimidated, as the demons had intended, I found myself growing really angry.

  I retrieved my fedora. I poked and prodded like a master sculptor, or just a kid with modeling clay, to reshape it into a semblance of a hat. Eventually it looked as much like a fedora as my suit jacket looked like a suit jacket, and I looked like a dead man walking.

  I already disliked the Smile Syndicate’s practices, the golem souvenir sweatshop, their line of overpriced and intrusive gift shops, their acquisition of the Goblin Tavern, how they had treated Francine, and the fact that they—for whatever reason—had acquired Jerry’s heart and soul. Missy Goodfellow was behind the harassment of the Full Moon, I was sure of it. Her goons must have smashed the windows, broken the cat sarcophagi.

  Missy had hired those demons to beat me up, and her thugs had threatened Robin. She had crossed a line, and I intended to expose whatever Missy was doing, whatever she was hiding, whether or not it was directly related to one of my cases.

  As a private detective, I might not have a lot of muscle, but I do have brains. Missy Goodfellow was playing dirty—and I could do the same.

  It was on.

  CHAPTER 43

  I shambled back to the office to clean myself up and change clothes, hoping to hide the most prominent bodily damage and wardrobe malfunctions from the ladies. Robin was in her office with the door mostly shut, burning the midnight oil (although it was barely 9:00 P.M.) as she went over the Unnatural Acts Act. As of that afternoon, she had gotten up to Tome-Section VII, so she still had a long way to go.

  I slipped in as quietly as possible, but there was no getting past Sheyenne. Something about her ectoplasmic ears gives her excellent hearing. “Beaux! What happened?”

  “The Quarter isn’t a nice place to live anymore,” I said. “No wonder the Pattersons and even Harvey Jekyll want to get out of here.”

  She whisked off to get a wet washcloth from the kitchenette and returned to dab my face. I could feel her ghostly hands through the moist rag. At some other time it would have been a pleasurable intimate experience, but now the main sensations came from all the new lumps around my face and forehead.

  “Who did this?” Sheyenne said. “Who do I need to kill?”

  “You want to end up in ghost prison like Alphonse Wheeler?”

  “At least I’ll be in good company, and I’ll feel satisfied.”

  A couple of my teeth were loose, and I needed to have them glued in securely. Maybe when I met with Mavis Wannovich to brainstorm about their line of zombie detective novels I could get next month’s restorative spell a little early. (Apparently she had called the office yet again, sounding even more anxious to talk with me.)

  “Missy Goodfellow sent a couple of demon thugs to complain about my digging into Smile Syndicate business,” I said. “If she’s this bothered, I must have touched a nerve.”

  “I’m going to go all poltergeist on her ass,” Sheyenne vowed. “I’ll find a piano somewhere and drop it on her head, just like the one that missed her brother. I think someone went after the wrong Goodfellow.”

  I glanced at myself in the mirror and looked at the dirty, rumpled, and damaged sport jacket and the dirty, rumpled, and damaged fedora, all of which went well with my dirty, rumpled, and damaged body.

  My thoughts and my conscience were in a spin, as if inner demons were still playing Pass the Zombie with me. T
he Unnatural Quarter had gone to hell in a handbasket, and now the handbasket was falling apart. With the Smile Syndicate expanding into the Quarter, and Balfour’s Unnatural Acts Act threatening to repress unnaturals in their most basic daily activities, it would only get worse.

  I had the sense that the windmill we were tilting at was about to collapse and fall on top of us, but I didn’t intend to stop, and Robin would never stop. We weren’t going anywhere. Even so, in a derailed train of thought, I felt I needed to do something right away, something good, for a person who didn’t have anybody else helping her.

  I went to the safe in the wall behind Sheyenne’s desk. It took me three tries with clumsy fingers (I think one was broken) to get the combination right. I withdrew a stack of bills, most of our petty cash fund. “There’s something I need to do.”

  “Where are you going?” Sheyenne asked.

  I pocketed the wad of bills. “To the Full Moon.” Presumably for the last time. I was already down the stairs and out on the street before I realized what a stupid thing that was to say to Sheyenne.

  It was nearly midnight when I arrived, and Mike the door golem let me into the parlor and took my hat. Due in part to a massive coupon mailing Neffi had launched, the place was hopping: half a dozen natural and unnatural clients making nervous chitchat with the ladies. Two of the doors upstairs were closed.

  Neffi seemed pleased and relieved that business had returned to normal. The withered unwrapped mummy languidly leaned against the door to her office and bedroom. “No waiting over here, boys, if you’re looking for someone with experience.”

  Conversation in the parlor paused for an instant before everyone went back to talking with the other girls.

  Neffi saw me enter. “Mr. Chambeaux, you certainly are a frequent sight, though not much of a customer. Is that about to change tonight? Treat yourself?” She eyed me up and down with her burnt-ember eyes. “You look like you’ve had a rough day at the office.”

  “Not just at the office. I’d like to see Ruth, please.”

  The stretched, petrified brown skin covering Neffi’s skull bent back in a smile. “It’s about time you made up your mind. This is Ruth’s last night.”

  “Has she found another job?”

  “Don’t know, don’t care, but she’s on her own as of dawn.” She whistled a piercing note, like a hyperactive kid tooting on a broken flute. Ruth came out of the back room, looking small and defeated. She’d been crying, though her green eyes still caught the attention of everyone in the room. When she saw me, she brightened.

  I pulled the wad of bills from my pocket. “I’ve got something for you.”

  Naturally, that was the exact moment Sheyenne’s ghost drifted through the door, her face already angry and hurt. She took in the scene with a glance. “Why couldn’t you be honest with me, Beaux? You’re worse than Travis. At least his lies are so clumsy he might as well not even try.”

  Before she could flit away, I said, “Wait, Spooky! I want you to see this.”

  She hovered, held there by a thread of feelings for me, a thin thread that was likely to snap like a cobweb any second.

  Ruth withdrew quickly, confused. “I don’t want to cause any trouble. I’ve already—”

  I handed her the bills. “This money is for you to take a bus out of town. Leave the Full Moon, set up a new life for yourself. I want you to have a clean slate.” I turned to Sheyenne. “She didn’t mean to hurt your brother.”

  “I never blamed her for Travis,” Sheyenne said. “He’s always been his own worst enemy. But you . . . you keep coming here.”

  “Chambeaux may keep coming here, but he never does any . . . coming here.” Neffi cackled. “Never once hired any of my ladies. He might as well be a piece of furniture, like Mike over there.”

  The golem’s clay face formed itself into a grin as he stood holding my hat over one upraised hand.

  “It’s the truth,” I said. “Cross my heart.”

  At that moment, somebody called in a bomb threat, which distracted us all.

  Cinnamon had taken a break between clients. She answered the phone, then sat staring and growling until she slowly hung up. “There’s a bomb in the brothel—and it’s set to go off in fifteen minutes.”

  “A bomb?” Neffi demanded. “Which one of you brought a bomb in here?”

  “I didn’t,” said a hunchback and a ghoul in unison.

  Cinnamon’s fur stood on end. “The caller said he was sending a warning from Senator Balfour—out of the goodness of his rotten little Grinch heart.”

  Already skittish from being in the unnatural brothel in the first place, the human customers bolted out the door as Mike waved a polite farewell.

  I started yelling. “Everybody evacuate! We need to clear the building.”

  The mummy madam was enraged. “If there’s a bomb here, we need to find it right now!”

  Hemlock and Nightshade pounded on the closed doors where the two zombie girls were currently occupied. “Come on, we gotta go!”

  Aubrey’s muffled voice came from behind the door. “Just about finished!”

  I looked at my watch, saw it was almost midnight—happy hour, the busiest time at the Full Moon. Someone had planned this well.

  “We can’t risk searching the place,” I said to Neffi. “Get everyone out into the street. It’s too dangerous.”

  “Fifteen minutes is fifteen minutes, if the timer is accurate,” Neffi insisted. “We’re going to look, and you’re going to help me. Girls, all of you—search your boudoirs for anything that looks like a bomb.”

  None of us was an expert in explosives, but I hoped a ticking time bomb would be obvious. We yanked red velvet cushions off the sofas, looked in the drawers of the front desk.

  Ruth and Sheyenne went together to search the back rooms. The two zombie girls poked their heads out of their rooms upstairs. “Nothing here—all clear.”

  “It could have been a prank call to disrupt our business,” Neffi said. “That’d be par for the course for Senator Balfour.”

  “Can’t risk it.” I looked at the madam. “How could someone get in here and plant a bomb?”

  “We had a big night, more customers than ever before. Too many people to watch every minute.” Neffi overturned a wastebasket, looked behind a potted cactus. “But you can ask the girls—everyone who came in tonight left a satisfied customer. Do you think Balfour’s fanatics would go that deep undercover?”

  I admitted it didn’t seem likely. Considering how much they despised monsters of all kinds, posing—and performing—as a randy client with one of the unnatural ladies did not seem like their style.

  A few minutes later, Sheyenne appeared before me, her face urgent. “I hear a ticking sound—it’s coming from back there!”

  We turned toward Neffi’s office and the bedroom beyond. “That’s just my grandfather clock,” the madam said. “Wait . . . that stopped a year ago.”

  “No, this is something else,” Sheyenne insisted. “I can hear it.”

  I did mention that she has good hearing for a ghost.

  We followed her into the office, past the metal file cabinet, past the fish tank with dead fish, the silent grandfather clock, and into the old mummy’s bedchamber. Sheyenne circled the room, pausing at the bulky gold-encrusted sarcophagus where Neffi slept, the rocking chair, and finally she zeroed in on the last intact cat-sized sarcophagus.

  “It’s here! And it’s ticking.”

  “That’s Whiskers,” Neffi said. “Whiskers doesn’t tick.”

  Then I spotted the yellowed package of a withered mummified cat tossed unceremoniously behind the rocking chair. “I think that’s Whiskers.”

  Sheyenne slowly opened the cat coffin to reveal a small bundle of dynamite sticks wrapped with wires and duct tape, fastened to an old windup alarm clock. The hands were only a few minutes away from midnight.

  Mike the golem stepped up to the office door, and as soon as Sheyenne revealed the bomb, he clomped forward and picked
up the bundle of dynamite. “Let me take that. I’m just a golem.” He plodded away, carrying the bomb as it ticked inexorably toward its midnight detonation.

  I ran after him. “Wait, Mike—when that explodes, it’ll destroy you.”

  “That’s my job. Better me than anyone else.” He stepped out the door to where the other four golem guards had taken position, keeping customers from entering.

  “I’ve got a better idea.” Sheyenne swooped after him and snatched the bomb out of the golem’s arms. “A simple explosion isn’t going to hurt a ghost at all.”

  Before I could argue with her (not that I had much of an argument to make), Sheyenne dashed through the open front door and rose into the air. I’d never seen her move that fast, but she was unfettered and motivated.

  “That was nice of her,” the golem said as we all stepped out into the night to watch where Sheyenne had gone.

  Ruth came up beside me, looking into the sky with admiration. Sheyenne had vanished with the bomb, swooping over the building tops. “Good thing your girlfriend was around.”

  Neffi agreed. “We don’t get many ghosts at the Full Moon. Can’t provide services for intangibles, other than as spectators.”

  The succubus looked away. “I think it’s best if I take this opportunity to leave. I’ll go to the Hellhound bus station, take the red-eye out of town, and ride wherever the ticket takes me. Thank you for everything you’ve done, Dan, but I don’t want to cause any more trouble. I told Sheyenne what a nice guy you are . . . but if I’m around, she’ll always have her doubts.” With that, Ruth hurried down the sidewalk, carrying a suitcase that she had already packed.

  I decided it was best not to give her any more than a quick goodbye. At the moment, I was more concerned about Sheyenne, even though I knew she wouldn’t be vulnerable to a bomb blast. Still, the thought was unnerving.

  At the stroke of midnight, a flash of light appeared far away, and a second later we heard the thump of an explosion. I wondered how far Sheyenne had made it, or where she was trying to go. Resounding cheers came from the few lingering Full Moon clients and the golem guards.