Death Blows

by D. D. Barant

  And wonder what the hell has happened to Dr. Pete.

  NINE

  The food goes in the trunk, Galahad in the backseat. When I get in the passenger side, Charlie and Galahad are sizing each other up in a cautious but nonconfrontational way. “Just drive,” I say. “Sure. Dog park, pet store, or the zoo?”

  “My place.” Galahad apparently decides that Charlie is all right, but his fedora needs further investigation. Charlie deals with the wet snuffling that follows by pulling out in traffic and lowering the rear window a few inches. Galahad succumbs to the lure of the open road and jams his head as far out as it can go.

  “We’re stealing Dr. Pete’s dog?” Charlie asks. “More like caretaking. The Doc’s taken off and left me holding the doggie bag.”

  “Sure. Because of your copious spare time and carefree nature.”

  “You forgot my tendency toward nurturing.”

  “Sorry. Don’t shoot me, okay?”

  “Not in front of the dog, anyway.” It’ll be dark soon. I’m in the middle of two ongoing murder investigations, Dr. Pete has vanished under mysterious circumstances, and now I have to take care of a large, hairy, and no doubt curious beast who’ll shortly be transforming into a large, less hairy one with opposable thumbs. God, I hope he doesn’t like to drink out of the toilet. Or the liquor cabinet.

  I’m not sure how I feel about Dr. Pete disappearing. Worry and frustration are neck and neck. I don’t know if he abandoned Galahad because he’s genuinely in trouble, or if it’s just a way to slow me down. Neither one seems like Dr. Pete’s style.

  But then, neither does working for a blackmarket lem factory. “Charlie—what do you know about the illegal lem trade?”

  “Too much. You get a lead on that amulet Stoker bought?” Stoker. The guy I’m supposed to be chasing, the guy who’s my one guaranteed ticket home—and apparently the guy I’m now too busy to hunt. Of course, if I don’t find Ahasuerus, too, I’ll be going home in a walker to a world that’s forgotten all about me. Frustration puts on a burst of speed and pulls ahead of worry. “No. But it might be pertinent to one of the other cases.” Not exactly a lie, though the Dr. Pete situation isn’t an official case.

  “Ugly business,” Charlie says. “Lem activation is regulated internationally to prevent anyone abusing the system for cheap labor or soldiers. Countries that don’t abide get hit with sanctions, but there’s always someone willing to look the other way.”

  “So this happens primarily in other countries?”

  “Who said I was talking about other countries?” Charlie looks even grimmer than usual. “Plenty of illegals get used in the U.S. Drug labs, mostly—if the lab gets busted, it’s easier to just destroy the whole workforce and start over.”

  “Mass murder? That’s extreme, even for drug cartels.”

  “Maybe where you come from. Here, it’s just seen as the cost of doing business—besides, nobody really cares about a bunch of lems who have only been around for a few weeks. Most of them can barely talk.” Charlie’s voice is getting colder and colder, as if he has to distance himself from the subject to talk about it at all.

  “So someone illegally activating lems would essentially be creating disposable slaves,” I say. “That about it?”

  “That’s about it.” I wonder where Dr. Pete’s gone.

  And where he’s been. Galahad seems more than happy to explore my apartment. While he does, Charlie and I discuss what to do next.

  “Can you stay here and watch him for a while?” I ask. “So you can search for new and exciting ways to get yourself killed? Not going to happen.”

  “I can’t leave him here alone.”

  “Obviously.”

  “Then we take him with us.” Right about then Galahad finds something that fills him with either joy, surprise, or anger—it’s kind of hard to tell. But his reaction is heavy on the bass, repetitious, and loud. “That’s gonna go over well on a stakeout,” Charlie says.

  “Maybe he’ll be less vocal in human form.”

  “Maybe he’ll be just as loud, but with a broader vocabulary. What’s that? Look at me! Hey, are you a bad guy?” I groan and slump backward on the couch. “So we can’t take him with us. You won’t dog-sit. He can’t go to the shelter. Which means I have to look after him?”

  “Until you can get someone else to do it, yeah.” I’m already running through a list in my head. Pregnant pire probably not a good idea, Cassius out of the question—“Hold on,” I say, and dig out my phone. And stuff it back in my pocket a minute later, dejected. I was sure Eisfanger would be available, but he surprised me—he’s out on a date. Which leaves only one option I can think of.

  “Hi, Alexandra?” Galahad comes bounding into the room with a quizzical look on his face, apparently looking for her, then starts barking enthusiastically to make her leap out of her hiding place. “I can’t look after Galahad for you,” Alexandra says. “That’s—how—”

  “Uncle Pete told me he had to go away for a few days. He tried to get me to do it first. No way.” Teenagers sometimes respond to threats. “Please, please, please,” I threaten. “I’ll buy you a pony.”

  “Ew. I don’t even like horse meat.”

  “Look, it’s just for a day or two. I can’t haul him around with me, and I can’t just sit in my apartment looking after him.”

  “Oh, you’ll be doing more than sitting. Galahad needs to be walked at least twice a day. Then there’s the bending and the scooping.” I sigh. “Name your price.”

  “Hmmm. I’ll call you back.” She hangs up. “Sounds like that went well,” Charlie says. “Shut up.” Galahad trots into the living room with a greasestained paper bag from a fast-food joint in his mouth.

  He lies down at my feet and begins to patiently tear it apart.

  “Hope you haven’t spilled any food on your furniture lately,” Charlie says. “Or your clothes. Or your rug—” The phone rings. “Hello?”

  “You have to call me Xandra.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “That’s my first condition. I want to be called Xandra instead of Alexandra, but my parents refuse to do it unless I can get three adults to agree to it first. You’re number two.”

  “Fine.”

  “Condition Number Two: You pay me. Same rate as the shelter does, which isn’t much. But I think that’s fair.”

  “Sure, no problem.”

  “Condition Three—”

  “Should I be writing these down, or will you e-mail me the entire thing?”

  “Calm down, this is the last one. I can’t start until tomorrow night.” I take a deep breath. “Deal. Can you be here before sundown?”

  “Yeah, easy. I’m gone at sunup, okay?”

  “Done. Thanks, Al… uh, Xandra.”

  “See you tomorrow. We’re still on for the flea market on Saturday, right?” The way things are going I really don’t know, but I hate to bail on a friend—especially one that’s just agreed to do me a favor. “Absolutely.”

  After I hang up, I turn to Charlie and say, “Looks like I’m in for the night. You don’t have to hang around if you don’t want.”

  “I don’t mind. You get cable, right?”

  “Rrrable,” Galahad says. I stare at him. “Oh, no. My life is already one step away from being a Scooby-Doo cartoon… Charlie, if you tell me you’re thinking about buying a van and growing a goatee I will shoot you both and throw your bodies off a bridge.”

  “Sun’s down,” Charlie says.

  So it is. And over the next thirty seconds or so, I watch Galahad go from being a bulky, brown-andwhite dog to a bulky, naked man. When the transformation is finished, he gets to his knees and smiles at me uncertainly.

  “Pants,” I say. “Pants!” A word that Galahad apparently knows, because he immediately starts looking around for the item in question. I dig out the large pair of jeans that were packed with the food and hand them over. Galahad slips into them with only a little clumsiness—I have to help him get them buttoned. “Pete
?” he asks me. He has the weirdest accent I’ve ever heard, kind of like a Swede who learned English in the Deep South. “Pete’s not here,” I tell him. I point at myself. “Jace. Understand? Jace.”

  “Jayuss,” he says. “Jayoos?” Better than Race Ralchek, I guess. I point at Charlie. “Charlie.”

  “Charrrlay.”

  “I can see we’re in for a stimulating evening of intellectual discourse,” Charlie says. “Maybe I should go home, get my dictionary.”

  “Home?” Galahad says. He sounds hopeful. “Not yet, big guy,” I say. “You hungry?”

  “Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!”

  “Let’s see what we can find for a growing, middle-aged man in my kitchen.” I make him a couple of ham sandwiches, which he eats with a great deal less mess than I thought he would. He does have the habit of taking enormous bites, but very little goes on the floor. He licks his fingers clean when he’s finished and looks at me hopefully. “More?”

  “Maybe later,” I say. I pat his protruding, hairy gut. “You’re not exactly starving.” I find an oversize T-shirt I sometimes sleep in and convince him to put it on. It’s pink and has a big yellow flower on the front, but it’s still an improvement. He doesn’t seem to mind.

  Charlie’s already found an old black-and-white movie on TV. I show Galahad where the bathroom is and hope he knows how to use it—if not, the evening is going to go downhill fast. Galahad wanders into my room, lies down on the bed, and curls up with his knees bent. He goes to sleep almost immediately—if I’m lucky, he’ll stay that way.

  I return to the living room. “What are you watching?”

  “Over the Moon, with Danny Kaye. It’s about a thrope who wants to be a song-and-dance star, but he keeps transforming when he’s nervous and then he can’t sing.”

  “Sounds hilarious.”

  “Hey, you haven’t seen a pratfall until you’ve seen Kaye fall down the steps of the Statue of Liberty.”

  “All of ’em?”

  “Yup. They did three takes, too.”

  “Guess the occupation ‘stuntman’ never really caught on here.”

  We watch Kaye clown his way through an audition and a job as a singing waiter. I’ve always thought he was funny, but watching what seems to be late-twentieth-century transformation effects in black-and-white—to comedic music, no less—makes me feel more like I’m watching the Twilight Zone than a comedy. And I don’t mean watching an episode—I mean staring at a little window into the Zone itself. While a plastic-skinned golem animated by the life force of a T. rex chortles beside me on the couch.

  Then things get weird.

  Okay, so I have my vices. One of them happens to be chocolate, the darker the better—and I keep a stash in the drawer beside my bed. I guess I should feel lucky Galahad didn’t get into the other drawer, but a disaster is a disaster. Even I know dogs aren’t supposed to eat chocolate.

  I catch him sitting on the edge of the bed, what’s left of my 93% Pure Cocoa Indulgence Bar smeared across his jowly face. His look of bliss becomes one of guilt immediately.

  “Oh, crap,” I say.

  The first thing I do is hit the Internet. It tells me that the ingredient in chocolate that dogs find toxic is called theobromine, and the darker the chocolate, the higher the dose. Uh-oh. On the other hand, Galahad masses more as a man than as a dog, and according to the chart I find he hasn’t eaten enough to kill him—not in his present form, anyway.

  But theobromine has a half-life of over seventeen hours, and the sun will have come up long before then.

  Of course, we’re also dealing with magic. Could be that were dogs in human form are immune to chocolate poisoning, or maybe they are while dogs. It takes me ten tortuous minutes of searching before I find a site that tells me it varies from breed to breed, but large breeds are more susceptible. Symptoms include hyper-excitability, hyper-irritability, vomiting, diarrhea and increased urination.

  Oh, joy. This would explain why Galahad has decided to turn my small apartment into a racetrack. He races from room to room, bounding over and slamming into furniture at a breakneck speed, yelling “Bark! Bark! Bark!” at the top of his lungs. Not barking, you understand, just yelling the word over and over. My neighbors probably think I’m some kind of tree pervert.

  Charlie finally tackles him and we lash him to a kitchen chair with some bedsheets. He doesn’t really seem to mind this, but as soon as we have him restrained he changes his chorus to a more whiny “Pee! Pee! Pee!”

  We untie him. He runs for the bathroom, where he demonstrates a surprisingly developed understanding of modern plumbing, and a complete lack of aim.

  I’m not going to talk about the diarrhea.

  It’s a long and hectic night. By the time the sun comes up, I feel like I’ve been wrangling the Son of Kong in a live-action remake of Monsters Run Amuck.

  Strangely enough, despite all the mayhem, I can’t find it in myself to hate Galahad. He’s really a sweet dog—it’s my fault I left that chocolate where he could get to it. I’m sure he’s nowhere near as frenzied as this usually, and despite “irritability” being one of the listed symptoms, he never gets angry with Charlie or me. Well, maybe a little annoyed when we have to hose him down in the shower. Mostly he seems pathetically eager to please, loves any attention we show him, and really just wants our approval. You could do worse in a pet.

  When the sun comes up, we both heave a sigh of relief. I haven’t stopped worrying, though—the theobromine is still in Galahad’s system, and now is actually the most dangerous time. I keep a close eye on him, but when he seems fine after an hour I’m pretty sure he’s going to be okay.

  We’ve already decided on a plan for the day: We’re going to leave Galahad locked in my bedroom, with food and water and some newspapers. Anything I think he might chew on I’ve moved to the living room.

  I kneel beside the St. Bernard and scratch behind his ears. “Okay, Gally. I’m going out for the day, but I’ll be back to check on you. You be good, all right? No barking.”

  He barks, once. I don’t know if that’s good or bad, but I don’t have a lot of choice either way. I shut him up in the bedroom and we leave.

  My work hours are kind of wonky, but I generally put in time during both the night and day shifts—I’ll check in at the office and see if there are any new developments, then follow up whatever I’m working on. I usually get some Zs in somewhere between 4:00 PM and midnight—unless circumstances dictate otherwise. I think my record for going without sleep is somewhere close to a hundred hours.

  We never make it to the office, though. Cassius calls and tells me to meet him at a storage facility in Renton. He sounds strange, more terse than usual, and hangs up without giving me any more information.

  “Yeah, nice talking to you, too,” I say. I give Charlie the address.

  “What’s the deal?” he asks.

  “Beats me. Mr. Cheerful didn’t say, just wants us to get there pronto.”

  “Huh,” Charlie says.

  Renton is a suburb of Seattle, thirteen miles southeast of the city. It’s got a lot of heavy industry—several Boeing plants are located here, as well as a big lem facility. The address Cassius gave me is at the end of a cul-de-sac, a sprawling storage-locker place flanked by an auto-parts warehouse and a trucking firm. I don’t see anything that looks like an Agency vehicle, but I guess Cassius could have parked farther away.

  There’s a pire waiting for us at the loading dock, standing just inside the raised rolling steel door out of direct sunlight. He’s in full daywear, a loose-fitting hood over a black face mask with smoked goggles. Long gray trench coat, black gloves. His body language is tensed and expectant.

  Cassius always wears the same daywear when he goes out. This isn’t it.

  We pull up and get out of the car. The pire motions us inside. I stroll right up to him and say, “Hey, Caligula. Not your usual duds.”

  “Discretion is vital,” Cassius says. His voice is as stressed as his body language—but it’s
still a language I recognize. “Follow me.”

  He leads us into a maze of corridors, wire-mesh units stacked with furniture, cardboard boxes, old appliances; people’s lives, crated up and caged like bad memories of the past. We stop at one that’s been broken into, the wire-mesh door torn right off its hinges. The interior is empty save for a single steamer trunk, the lid open. There’s nothing inside, but a faint smell still hangs in the air, something that reminds me of summertime. After a second I get it: canvas, warmed by the sun. We used to have an old army tent that would get that smell on hot July days, when we had it set up in the backyard for shade.

  Cassius strips off his mask and hood. He doesn’t look agitated, but his eyes are restless; they flicker from my face to the trunk to the fluorescent-lit corridors that stretch away on either side of us.

  “What I’m about to tell you is something only a few people on the planet are aware of,” Cassius says. “I would prefer not to—and you may share that view before long—but events have forced my hand.”

  “I’m guessing something’s been stolen,” I say.

  Cassius raises one black-gloved hand. “Jace, please. I have a lot to tell you. Hear me out before you ask any questions.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “There’s an organization known as the Hexagon. It’s a very ancient, very powerful group of individuals who have influenced the course of civilization for many, many years. Their reach is global, their power immense. As with most long-lived organizations, they eventually suffered a schism in their ranks. A serious divide over their directions and methods.”