by J. D. Brink
Grit & Shadows Boxed Set
Urban Fantasy and Horror Collection: Volumes 1 - 3
J. D. Brink
Copyright © 2019 by J. D. Brink
BrinksChaosTheory.com
All Rights Reserved
Published by Fugitive Fiction
Cover copyright © 2019 by Fugitive Fiction
Cover by J. D. Brink
Original stock art by Martin Kawalski, arman_zhenikeyev/Dollar Photo Club; Rawpixel.com, lukszczepanski, Stocksnapper, zimmytws/Adobe Stock.
“Mime” first appeared in Ascent Aspirations, October 2009
“Lonely” first appeared in Cemetery Moon #6, 2010
“Unfeeling” first appeared as a podcast on Pseudopod.org, 2012
“Moondance” first appeared in the e-zine Crimson Streets, March, 2016 and also appeared in the anthology Crimson Streets #1: A Story a Week, 2017.
“The Proposal” also appeared in Weirdbook #41, June 2019.
A Long Walk Down a Dark Alley published by Fugitive Fiction, 2012
Kiss of the Maiden published by Fugitive Fiction, 2018
One-Eyed Jacks published by Fugitive Fiction, 2016
This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. Under copyright law (and common courtesy), this book, or parts thereof, may not be copied or reproduced whatsoever without the author’s permission. All characters and events in this book are fictional and any resemblance to real people or events is purely coincidental.
Contents
Your Free Book
Reading Guide: The Grit & Shadows Collection
A LONG WALK DOWN A DARK ALLEY
I. Eating in the Underworld
II. Mime
III. Lonely
IV. Unfeeling
KISS OF THE MAIDEN
I. Epidemic
II. The Proposal
III. Kiss of the Maiden
IV. Snake Eyes
V. Moondance
ONE-EYED JACKS
I. Rails End
II. Fire Above, Mountain Below
III. The Abyss
IV. Proceeding Humbly
APPENDICES: AUTHOR’S REFLECTIONS
Waking in the Dark
A Kiss Is Just a Kiss
Mystery
What’s Next?
Sneak Preview: Hungry Gods
The Many Worlds of J. D. Brink
About the Author
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Reading Guide: The Grit & Shadows Collection
Hard-boiled detectives. Mob enforcers. The restless dead.
The stories and novel of the Grit & Shadows Collection do not share a common reality—they each take place within their own grim, moon-lit worlds—but they do have a common gut feeling, a chill of the spinal nerves, and a strange taste for blood.
This collection blurs the lines between your favorite genres of urban fantasy, crime noir, vampire horror, and more. These are tales of darkness, bravery, and terror told with a sharp noir edge. They feature wise guys and private eyes, black magic and bleak futures, your deepest desires and the road to damnation.
A Long Walk Down a Dark Alley - Four tales of temptation and terror.
Kiss of the Maiden - Five stories of gritty heroes and bloody resolve.
One-Eyed Jacks - A novel of urban fantasy, crime noir, and Asian myth.
A LONG WALK DOWN A DARK ALLEY
Part One
Eating in the Underworld
One
It takes a bastard to find a bastard. And I’ve found plenty.
Toys help: bugs with filament transmitters in their wings, cyberspace robins following binary breadcrumbs, but these can only get you so far. A real detective’s feet are flatter than his ass, and his eyes are as cold as his heart. You want to do the job right, you have to walk the trail yourself, go look the suspect in the face and see if he blinks.
That’s what I’ve come for today, though I don’t tell Gene’s secretary that.
She gets a more polite version: that I’ve come to see the big man himself, good old Gene Sizemore, the one the Libra Foundations bigwigs just can’t stop talking about.
She smiles and politely invites me to have a seat.
Vel is the girl’s name—it says so on the neon-blue nameplate of her translucent plastic desk. She’s got long slim legs, dark hair, a nice chest, full lips. She’s damn near perfect. So naturally I figure her for a doll.
That’s Gene’s business, after all.
I sit on a gaudy purple couch and pretend to appreciate the erotic crystal sculpture screwing itself on the coffee table. The waiting room is small with yellow walls to contrast the purple furniture.
Gene’s never had very good taste.
There are three vidscreens mounted in a column up one wall, one on top of the next. The top and bottom screens are smaller and showing a gravball game and stock market scores, respectively. On the big central screen is a vid made to look like paparazzi footage: some bald-headed corporate-type pushing his way through a crowd of admirers, a sexy woman on his arm and a broad-shouldered bodyguard at his back.
It’s a doll ad running in twenty second loops.
Attention spans these days.
I watch it more than a dozen times, then clear my throat, check my old-fashioned pocket watch, and give Vel a smile.
“It should be just a few more minutes,” she says, pleasantly smiling back. Her lipstick’s lavender, like her dress, like this factory-dead cow I’m sitting on.
I let the ad roll nine more times, then stand up and remove my trench coat. I work a finger in behind the knot of my skinny black tie and drop my fedora on a purple chair.
But any impression of impatience is wasted on Vel, as is my classic private dick look. It’s custom fashion these days, but worth the price. Style’s important if you want to be professional yet intimidating. And I do.
“You think he’s doing any work in there?” I ask.
She gives a polite chuckle. If she is a doll, she’s at least been given a sense of humor.
Not that I was joking.
I’ve been watching Gene’s work habits. He never puts any effort in past 3:30, and it’s 4:33 now.
Just like in college.
Gene was one of those brainiacs that could screw off and still get the grades.
One more reason I never liked him.
Another was that he somehow managed to get nice looking girls. Take the pink-haired number I saw down stairs. I watched her elevator stop at this floor, Gene’s floor, before I came up.
She’s in there now.
She’s what he’s doing.
The intercom lights up her plastic prism of a desk like a back alley emerald.
“Mr. Celeste,” says Vel in her angelic voice. “Mr. Sizemore will see you now.”
“Thank you, dear.”
I collect my coat and hat and go on in.
The walls of the inner office are veneered in polished black glass. There’s a real leather couch set before a large two-piece desk made to look like slabs of granite. The pink-haired girl I saw downstairs is on the couch. She could be Vel’s twin, but for the hair. She’s wiping her mouth with the back of her hand while Gene’s standing with his back to me, pulling up the zipper on his metallic-green suit.
The girl looks first, flashing her bright blue eyes at me.
I admit, I’m frozen there for just half a second.
Then Gene turns and shoot
s his big mouth at me, ruining it.
“Hey, Harry! Long time, no see!” His hand jams into mine, grip soft, like his belly. Old Gene’s put on a few pounds, and lost some of those blond locks he used to sculpt just so.
“Sit down, sit down,” he says. “Seph, slide over.”
The pink-haired girl scoots her skinny ass to one side and I sit.
She smells good, like a woman.
“Seph?” I ask. “Like short for ‘Seraph’?”
“Ha! Hear that, baby? Harry thinks you’re an angel! No, it’s short for Persephone.”
He takes his seat, a BodCradle 1200X, its spidery legs crouching between the two slabs of plastic granite. The chair alone speaks of his success. The throne of any office kingdom, the ad says, fingertip interface with all your office goodies while molding to and massaging your ass.
All the chair doesn’t do is blow you, which Gene seems to have covered.
He gives me his damn salesman’s smile. Some things never change.
“So, Harry, what are you up to these days? Still working for the company? Sorry I’ve never come by to visit.”
“No, I don’t,” I tell him. “And don’t worry about it, we’ve both had busy lives. Didn’t exactly part as the best of friends, either.”
He shrugs at me, bygones being bygones and all that.
“Besides,” I say, “when I was working for Libra full-time it was across town at the Pyramid. Wouldn’t expect to see you over that way.”
“The Pyramid, huh?”
He’s jealous. Gene works for a satellite division of Libra Foundations called BioFacture. He’s not big enough to get into the Pyramid.
I play it modest for him though: “Don’t worry, I only had a third-floor cube. Just a resource tracker, not an executive-type, like you.”
Resource tracker is polite corporate jargon for fraud investigator. Gene pales a little and his BodCradle sputters under his nervous squirm.
“Out on my own now, though.”
“Freelancing, eh?” There he finds something to bolster his confidence again. “I always wondered what that liberal arts degree would get you, Harry!” He laughs it up.
Twentieth century film, actually, but I don’t bother correcting him. I just smile and flatter: “We couldn’t all be scientific geniuses, buddy boy. Here, I brought something for you.”
I reach into my trench coat and pull out a gun.
He gets to his feet pretty damn quick.
The girl beside me takes a sharp breath.
“Whoa.” My turn to chuckle. “Wrong pocket.”
Though I know damn well which pocket is which.
“You carry a gun?” he squeaks.
“Sometimes, but this isn’t a real gun. It’s a spacer, a stun gun.” I put the weapon away, flip my folded coat over, and produce a fifth of vodka.
“Rasputin Number Five,” Gene says, sitting back down. “That’s good stuff.”
He fingers a button on his fancy chair and a tray of crystal tumblers rises from one slab of desk.
I glance at the girl next to me. She’s eyeballing me with those beautiful blues, licks her lips, but not seductively, not for me. More like a starved animal.
Seph wears a moody blue dress, spaghetti strapped, no makeup. Her pink hair is short but wild.
He and I get three fingers of liquor. The girl gets nothing.
I inquire, but Gene says, “Nah, she doesn’t drink—not that anyway,” then laughs that annoying damn noise of his.
I steer the conversation toward college stories for a while, giving him time to loosen up on my laced vodka. Magenta Nail relaxes a target five times faster than drinking alone. My liver plugs filter it out.
At one point a story heads dangerously close to Gigi, but I manage to dodge her, reminding him instead of a party the campus cops had to break up.
Gigi was Gene’s best girl, a little French number who ended up in my bed on more than one occasion. I still say I did him a favor, that she’d have just broken his fragile little heart, but Gene never saw it as a heroic act on my part.
No, this topic would ruin the drunken camaraderie we’re building and likely derail everything I’m working toward.
I take another sip and am suddenly aware of the body heat next to me. Seph feels closer, but I dare not look, not with the threat of Gigi just a story behind. Still, I can’t help but wonder what kind of a furnace the doll’s got, and what kind of heat it can kick out.
Eventually, after a few more laughs and another glass, I let him get back around to asking me why I’m here.
“Were you just feeling nostalgic,” he asks, “or were you thinking about getting a doll?”
I shrug.
His glazed eyes narrow, all sly.
He fingers his chair. One shiny black panel on the wall lights up.
A girl, Vel and Seph’s triplet sister, appears on screen, this one a red-head in a naughty little schoolgirl uniform.
“No, wait, wait,” he slurs. “You’re in the private investigator business. Maybe you need a partner?”
The wall screen changes. There’s a thick-necked man in a yellow suit, dark skin, shaved head, shades.
“The Aegis Crown 4-Charlie,” he says. “Bodyguard model. Best thing about a doll bodyguard, they don’t mind taking a bullet for the boss, you know?
“Or maybe you want someone more subtle? Someone that blends into the underbelly crowd?”
The screen blinks to a muscled white guy with a goatee.
“Aegis Crown 5-Alpha. The Bravo model is coming out soon with hidden weapons built into its hands. Slightly different look, too. Police buy these to do undercover work, or blend into the background on raids, then pop out on their side. Big contract.
“Best part is,” more annoying laughter, “we need to keep making new ones so the bad guys won’t recognize them, you know? So soon there’ll be AC 6’s. Going to look Asian.”
“I didn’t realize the doll biz was so big.”
“Oh, yeah, buddy. Bank. Bank!”
He takes another big swallow, then spins away for a refill.
I feel a warm touch on my leg. The girl’s hand is there, then gone.
Gene turns back around, the cup at his lips.
“I’ve already started laying designs for our next big hit: the Venus and Adonis lines. Hollywood’s been clamoring for us to make doubles of actors and actresses, for stunts and such, you know? But the Actors’ Guild is fighting it. The big stars don’t want to be replaceable. Then anyone would be able to make a Stone Wagenborg movie, you know?”
I’d heard of doll doubles being made for foreign officials, to act as bullet magnets for assassins and attend meetings while the diplomat is off screwing someone other than his wife, things like that. But those aren’t the dolls I’m interested in today.
“What about her?” I ask, nudging the girl next to me. I feel those blue eyes on the side of my face again.
Gene’s big mouth spreads into a sloppy grin. “Our most popular model. The Velvet Rose.”
The naughty schoolgirl returns on the wall screen.
“The latest version available is 6-Delta, like Vel out in the lobby there. I sell four or five a month! Bank, buddy, bank!”
The pink-haired girl gets up and walks around to the back of the couch, out of sight.
“And this one, here?” I say. “She’s a Velvet Rose 6-Delta?”
Gene starts laughing, then shushes loudly—himself or me, I can’t tell. He sets his tumbler of vodka on the desk, leans down toward me.
“Buddy...” His hand is on my knee now. “Let me let you in on a little secret.”
He looks behind me and motions to her.
Persephone struts out from behind me, her perfectly tailored ass twitching like a cat in heat. He leans back to let her sit on his lap. The chair whirs in stereo as it adjusts to the new weight.
“My sweetheart, here, she’s unique.”
His hand strokes her leg.
The girl doesn’t seem to notice; her
eyes are on me.
“Harry, you’re looking at the only Velvet Rose 6-Echo in existence. Made her special, just for me.”
That’s what I’ve been waiting for: Gene’s drunken confession to his old college chum.
I take another sip of vodka, looking at her over the rim of my glass. “What makes her so special,” I ask, “besides the obvious?”
“Well, you knew I was a genius, old buddy, but not like this…
“I redesigned her nutrition-impulse system, see. Most dolls eat baby food and have a natural hunger for it, meets all the nutritional requirements for their pseudo-parts. Persephone here, though...”
Big shit-eating grin.
“Her brain has two items on its menu, but she’ll always prefer filet mignon over hamburger, caviar over crawfish.
“And what, you may ask, is this delectable, gourmet must-have dish? Are you ready for this?
“Semen! Male seed, my friend!
“And being the charitable guy that I am, I keep her from starving, if you know what I mean!”
More laughing. Hungry-hyena laughing. I-screwed-the-girl-and-the-company-and-I’m-getting-away-with-it laughing.
That’s why I’m here.
His hands rub either side of Seph’s ass, rocking her back and forth on his lap.
She just stares at me.
I try not to feel sorry for her. That’s not why I’m here.
So I play out the rest of the scene, tell him he’s a goddamn Leonardo da Vinci, congratulate him on reinventing Eve and all that.