Redemption Alley-Jill Kismet 3

by Lilith Saintcrow

  “Hey, Hutch.” Leon grinned. “How you doing?”

  “Not you too.” Hutch backed up to give both of us plenty of room. Chatham’s Books, Used and Rare, was painted on a weathered board out front as well as in peeling gilt on the front window, and he did a good trade in repairing old texts. Most of his business is done over the Internet, which is the way he likes it. Still, the place would’ve probably gone under if it wasn’t for the back room. That room gets Hutch a subsidy from the resident hunter and resident law enforcement—a room with triple-locked doors, long wooden tables, and high narrow bookcases stuffed with leather-jacketed tomes on the occult, the theory and history of sorcery, accounts of the nightside, and just about every useful book a hunter needs. Hey, we’re not savages. Sometimes research is the only thing that keeps a hunter’s ass from being knocked sideways by the unexpected. Ninety percent of solving any nightside problem is figuring out exactly what you’re up against.

  And if it wasn’t in books, Hutch could still probably find it for you. He’d discovered computers in the dark ages when they still used floppy disks; they were still talking about his raids on government databases in law-enforcement classes.

  He hadn’t wanted to use the information, Hutch always pointed out. He’d just wanted to prove it could be hacked.

  Nowadays he collects information the resident hunter might need—enough of an exercise for Hutch’s skills to keep him out of trouble. If he did anything more, at least he didn’t get caught. Which is all I or Mikhail ever really asked for. In return, we kept him out of trouble with the law when he went a-fishing and ahacking on our behalf. Today Hutch wore a Santa Luz Wheelwrights sweatshirt and a pair of khaki shorts, his thin hairy calves exposed. His beaky, mournful face twisted as he locked the front door and flipped the sign to “closed.” “I really hate it when you do this. What is it now?”

  He isn’t one for excitement in the flesh, our local nightside historian. Wise man.

  “Internet trace, Hutch. Find me the vitals on one Alfred Bernardino. He’s in the Precinct 13 Vice squad. Hack if you have to, but don’t leave any fingerprints.” I barely broke stride. “And make yourself some tea, we’re going to be here a while.”

  “Why aren’t you asking Monty to do this? Or someone else?” Hutch pulled all his angles in, from his thin elbows to his knobby knees, and I considered telling him we had a scurf infestation and all sorts of trouble boiling into town.

  I erred on the side of mercy, for once. “Because this time it’s the police that are the problem, Hutchinson. Find the cop for me, and we’re spending some time in the back room. I need to know about something.”

  “About what?” He didn’t quite perk up, but any chance of poking through dusty old books brightens him considerably, even if he’s allergic to the idea of seeing anything abnormal up close. I’m not the only one with personality quirks.

  “Something called Argoth. And something about an airfield just outside of town.”

  The milky pallor under his freckles deepened. “Argoth?” He actually squeaked. I halted next to the counter with the antique cash register. A brand-spanking-new credit-card reader sat next to the old brass machine. I turned, on the balls of my feet, my coat swaying with me, and met Hutch’s eyes, swimming behind their thick lenses. “You know something about Argoth?”

  “Only that he’s a hellbreed, operated mostly in Eastern Europe. The last time he surfaced was 1929, he went back down in 1946.” Hutch’s thin shoulders came up, dropped. The bookstore breathed all around me. “You can guess where he was stationed.”

  And indeed I could. Both World Wars created enough chaos, pain, and horror to blast the doors between here and other places wide open; the battlefields and camps were playgrounds for all sorts of nastiness. Some places on earth still haven’t recovered—like Eastern Europe, the hunter population out there is still scrambling to get a lid on some of what was let loose decades ago.

  “Christ.” Leon sneezed twice. It was dusty in here.

  I’d heard rumors about the war before, but this was unexpected. “Pull me the basic references on Argoth, then get me that cop’s vitals. And I need you to find me everything you can on an airfield out of town, possibly called ARA.”

  Hutch had produced a small steno pad, a mechanical pencil, and was scribbling furiously. “And after that I change water into wine, right?”

  If you could, I’d ask for a bottle or two of a nice pinot noir. “Don’t get cute. After that you’re going to Galina’s while I poke around in here some more.”

  His eyebrows shot up and his pencil paused. “Again?”

  Yes, again. Because if they know I’m alive and they know I go to Galina’s, they probably know I come here too. “Yes, again. Unless you want to get a severe case of lead poisoning.”

  “What have you gotten me into now?” But he went back to scribbling. “Okay, come on into the back room. Christ on a crutch, why did I ever take this job?”

  “Because you thought it would be interesting, Hutch, and Mikhail saved you from being locked in a six-bynine.” I really must have been feeling savage, because for once even mild-mannered Hutch shot me a dirty look and I realized that was a really, really bitchy thing to say to someone who had risked his ass over and over again to help me. “I’m sor—”

  “Oh, shut up. Get into the back room. I just got a new machine, best way to break it in.” He made little shooing motions with his hands, for all the world like a farmer’s wife herding chickens. “Come on, kids. Let’s go see what Uncle Hutch can dig up.”

  It’s certainly something to see an underweight, glorified librarian poke and prod two fully trained and armed hunters around like a chicken herder. If I was less tired, I might even have been amused. Hutch left about an hour later. I should have taken him to Galina’s, but there was precious little time. The next half-hour passed slowly, both Leon and I up to our eyeballs in reading material. He’d taken the Argoth references; I took Carp’s file and Bernardino’s stats as well as whatever Hutch could dig up on the airfield.

  “We are looking at some serious shit,” Leon said quietly.

  I glanced up from Carp’s file. “How bad?”

  He tapped the thick, dust-choked leather-bound tome sitting open in front of him. “Bad enough that I’ve got the heebie-jeebies, darlin’.” Copper clinked in his hair, and he took a pull off the only beer Hutch had stocked—a brown-bottled microbrew Leon wrinkled his nose at but took down three of. “Says here that Argoth surfaced earlier than Hutch thought. First recorded instance of him is in 1918, something involving a batch of three hundred shell-shocked soldiers in a hospital ending up with a serious case of dead and halfeaten.”

  “Charming.” I didn’t quite shudder, but it was close. “Any verification?”

  “Some British hunter thinks it was him, anyway. Then he shows up in Germany in 1924. A couple of Alsatian hunters living in Munich ID’d him hanging around with an Austrian wannabe rabble-rouser who came to power a little later.”

  I let out a slow whistle, air bleeding between my lips. Ugh. Nasty. “A talyn? ” I hazarded. It certainly seemed likely. When they come out of Hell, they come hungry. And shell-shocked, vulnerable humans would be a nice snack.

  “Could be. Sources ain’t specific enough. Went through the hunters in Germany like a hot knife through butter all the way through the war; the Allies had to bring in their own hunters attached to the armies just to stay afloat of all the nasty.” Leon’s mouth pulled down like he tasted something sour. He probably did. I dimly remembered hearing about that time from my own training, one of the long sessions with my head on Mikhail’s chest and his fingers in my hair, his voice tracing through the history of what we know—and even more important, what we suspect. “Mikhail mentioned that.”

  It was a bad time all around. Here in Santa Luz there had been the great demonic outbreak in ’29, and the few hunters remaining stateside during the war years had been overworked almost to death. The Weres suffered high casualties too, and pret
ty much the only thing that kept any kind of lid on the situation was the Sanctuaries letting hunters move into their houses and training halls, quietly taking sides even though they were supposed to be neutral.

  Patriotism isn’t just for normals, you know.

  Leon looked down at the page, tapped it with one blunt fingertip. “Says here Jack Karma—the second one, that crazy fucker—takes credit for killin’ him, in February of forty-five. In Dresden. That must’ve been a goddamn sight.”

  “Jack Karma, huh?” I eyed the book speculatively. “He moved to Chicago after the war, didn’t he.”

  “Think so.” Leon didn’t need to say any more.

  I had Jack Karma’s apprentice ring, blackened and vibrating still from the incident that had killed him, tucked safely away in the warehouse on a leather thong with five other silver rings. Each one was a story, passed along the way family history is.

  Mikhail hadn’t spoken much of his teacher, and I supposed it was normal—as normal as a hunter ever gets. Losing your teacher is much worse than losing a mother or a father. It’s almost as bad as losing an apprentice.

  And I still could not think of Mikhail’s death without an ache in the middle of my chest. “Huh. So we don’t know exactly how high-up in the hierarchy this Argoth is. But Jack killed him or sent him back, right?”

  “Probably just sent him back, if that blond ’breed is talkin’ him up now. Which means he’s worse news than a fuckin’ talyn. But there ain’t been anything in the news lately big enough to break anything big out of Hell. Not on this continent, anyway.” Leon sighed. “There ain’t nothin’ else of any use here. What you got?”

  In other words, Perry could be leading us down the garden path. Even though I didn’t think it was very likely. Still, first things first. “A whole pile of not very much,” I admitted. “Carp’s right. The file’s a bunch of dead ends. There’s only initials in witness statements, and witnesses have a habit of disappearing. Want to bet they all ended up as scurf chow?”

  “Now why do you want to take an old man’s money, darlin’?” Leon rolled his shoulders in their sockets, easing tension, and pushed the book away, leaning back in his chair and eyeing me.

  “There’s one common note in here—someone high up in the police structure, identified only as H. Pedro Ayala told Carp that he knew who H was, that it was bigger than Carp thought, and suspected wiretapping so bad he wouldn’t even talk on a pay phone. Then he ended up dead.” And I still have to find time to find out who took him down. Christ. “Sullivan and the Badger had four different leads who referred to a big-time cop as ringleader, but all four of them petered out, mostly with the people giving the leads disappearing.”

  “There’s an almighty big mass grave out somewheres, then.”

  And a cop so dirty he makes Perry look almost clean. I swallowed hard. “Not if it’s scurf-related. Listen to this. Twelve murders of illegal immigrants, organs stripped. Then everything stops—just when that Sorrows bitch moved in last year. Want to bet this little organ ring came to the attention of someone on the nightside once the Sorrows started putting their fingers in?” I cocked an ear, listening. Traffic on the streets outside. The shop was dead quiet. All was as it should be, hot sunlight trickling away with every moment we spent in here. Prickles of sweat touched the curve of my lower back even through the air-conditioning. Last year had been bad in more ways than one.

  And somewhere out there in the world was Melisande Belisa, the Sorrow who had killed my teacher. Free as a bird, again.

  Get it together, Jill. Belisa’s not your problem right now. Scurf are your problem, and whoever is killing your people is your problem. Even Argoth isn’t a problem—yet. Prioritize. I took a deep breath laden with the smell of paper and dusty knowledge. Forced myself to pull it together.

  “Huh.” Leon thought it over. He sneezed twice, lightly. Took another swallow of beer. It felt good to say it out loud, to string the events together. It’s always handy to have someone else to bounce things off. “The scurf we’ve found have all been too old. If they’re escapees from that warehouse on Cherry, they’re communally sharing kills. Which means the disappearances we’ve had fit a pattern. If you dropped a mature nest in the middle of a populated area you’d have exactly the sort of disappearances I’ve been seeing lately.”

  “So it’s a pattern.” He nodded. “Good fuckin’ deal.”

  “Amen to that.” If it was a pattern, it could be anticipated—and interrupted.

  “So we’re gonna go find this cop? Bernardino?”

  I gained my feet, pushing the chair back. “Yup. Let’s just hope he hasn’t gotten twitchy. Or a case of the vanishings.”

  Leon hauled himself up. “Never knew you was an optimist. What you gonna do about this Argoth character?”

  Pray? Hope he’s not hungry? “I don’t know yet. But it might be time to visit the a few hellbreed dives and twist some arms— after I find out who’s shipping scurf into my town.”

  “Sounds like a plan. I’m gonna piss.”

  “Thanks for sharing.” I didn’t say what we were both thinking. If hellbreed were connected to the scurf, and a major hellbreed’s name was being bandied around, and one of Shen’s Traders said a “higher-up” wanted me dead…

  Well, it wasn’t looking good. But at least we had something to look at now, instead of a maddening halfbaked mass of weird occurrences with no rhyme or reason. I sat staring at Carp’s file while Leon vanished. Shut my eyes, breathed deep, and tried not to think of Carper lying in bed, his mind at the mercy of suffocating terror. Or of Jacinta Kutchner’s body hanging like a rotten fruit from a blue and white nylon rope. Or of Saul and how much I wished it was him I was bouncing ideas off.

  It was looking like the Kutchner case was my sort of case after all.

  25

  Bernardino lived on a quiet little street, not quite suburban but close enough. He had a nice ranch-style, freshly painted, and his yard was greener than many of his neighbors’. I wondered if he had a landscaping service staffed with illegals out to take care of it, and spent a good few moments wrestling with nausea at the thought as we slid through a neighbor’s yard and up to his front door, seeking maximum cover. It wasn’t easy, with a high-noon summer sun beating down.

  He had no alarm system on his house, and he was probably at work in the Vice department. Dear God, the irony.

  I held my right palm in front of the doorknob and concentrated, a thin thread of etheric force snaking out and bifurcating. One thin thread slid into the doorknob, the other quested blindly and found the keyhole for the deadbolt. A moment’s worth of the fierce, relaxed concentration peculiar to sorcery, and the deadbolt eased back, the doorknob lock clicking as it cleared.

  “You’d make a great housebreaker,” Leon mouthed.

  Yeah, that’s just one of the many career options open to a hunter. “You think?” I whispered. I eased aside, toed the door open while Leon covered me, and slid into Alfred Bernardino’s home—only to recoil and straighten, the reek so intense it scorched the back of my throat.

  Dead, decomposing human tissue. “Goddammit,” I whispered, my eyes watering, and plunged into the house. Leon swept the door shut behind us, and we cleared and checked every room, working through a place that had obviously been searched. Drawers were pulled out, cushions slit, paper scattered everywhere

  —and that horrible, nose-eating stench.

  And the smell of hellbreed or Trader, a subtle, sweetsick corruption. “There’s been ’breed here,” I whispered. The kitchen was torn to shreds, a drift of takeout containers and cheap dishes. The living room was a shambles, the dining room smashed too. Bernie’s taste had run to cheap mismatched bachelor furniture, but the huge state-of-the-art plasma flatscreen on one wall was new, and the stereo system still smelled of its packaging. That is, through the fume of smoky violence—even these toys bought with blood money had been broken.

  I don’t know if it was a fight or a hell of a search. Leon covered me down a
hallway, we checked a bathroom and a room that had been left empty and bare except for a stain on the carpet and a silver tangle of handcuffs. The reek of sex fought briefly with other varied stenches; Leon’s eyebrows went up and I shrugged, moving on. I pushed a door open softly with my foot and saw the source of the worst smell. Alfred Bernardino lay spread-eagled on his bed, his body bloated by several days’ worth of decomposition. His ribs had been torn free and wrenched back, the lungs carefully pulled free and shriveled by exposure to dry outside air. His legs were flayed and his belly opened; a feast of insect life swarmed in the cave of his entrails.

  If I’d had any gag reflex left on this case, the sight would have done it.

  “Jesus,” Leon breathed.

  Another fucking dead end. “This is ridiculous. ”

  Leon moved past me, checked the closet. Neither of us put our guns away. Bernardino’s clothes were tumbled off the hangers, his cheap white-painted dresser drawers pulled out and disemboweled, and I leaned against the wall, silver tinkling sweetly in my hair.

  “You think…” Leon glanced at me. “How long would you say he’s been dead?”

  I glanced at the window. It was suffocatingly hot in here, and the bedroom window was open a crack, the screen slit. Easy enough for insects to find their way in. The air conditioning wasn’t on, and a cool bath of dread touched my spine, working downward from my nape. “With that window open and the critter buffet sign out? Couple days to a week. But we have his credit card run by Irene…” A Trader, the last known contact we have with this man. Huh.

  “Four days ago,” Leon supplied.

  Looks like there’s more here than meets the eye. My brain gears turned, meshed, caught. “It could fit with the widow’s death. We have someone killing the cops to cover this up. Jacinta’s account books are missing. Bernie’s having second thoughts…” I sighed, then winked, shutting my dumb eye. The smart one, the blue one, showed me a room swirled with the etheric contamination of violent death and desperation. But nothing for me to latch onto, no thread that I could pull to unravel the mess. Leon let out a gusty sigh, one he probably immediately regretted because he had to take a breath. “Someone tore this fuckin’ place apart. And I don’t like it—why hasn’t anyone come by to check on him? He’s a cop.”