by J. P. Rice
That was why I hadn’t mentioned the business with the death cards to Jonathan. Taking clues from an untrustworthy source was a recipe for disaster. The duel needed shoved to the back burner for now while I concentrated on finding my father’s killer.
First stop. The depths of hell.
Chapter 8
We entered Hades’ man cave, deep in the bowels of hell. His lanky assistant took us through the game room and back to the Greek God of the Underworld’s office. Hades sat behind his desk with Cerberus on his right. His meaty arm hung over the chair, resting gently on Cerberus’s middle head, scratching the hell hound’s scalp.
He slapped Cerberus on the back twice and leaned back in his chair. The hound bolted through an oversized doggy door and out of the room. The toasty stone room had three carved-out fireplaces, one on each wall except for the side with the door. Ancient landscape paintings hung from the wall behind him, above the roaring fire.
Dressed in a dark blue pinstripe suit, Hades loosened the knot of his red tie and opened the top two buttons of his dress shirt, his salt-and-pepper chest hair poking out. I stared at his face, and despite the bald head and haunting blue eyes with pinpricks of pupils, I saw a stark resemblance to his brother, Zeus.
Hades scratched his dark Fu Manchu sprinkled with notes of silver, then pointed at the two chairs across his desk. The Morrigan and I sat down. We’d buried the hatchet so to speak and agreed to work on this case together. I planned to let her take the lead down here.
His assistant exited and slammed the door shut.
“Ladies,” Hades said and dipped his head, the flames of the fires reflecting off his gleaming dome. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”
The Morrigan got right to the point. “You know what’s going on with the cards. What have you heard?”
“I’ve heard a lot. Most of it is bull, though. You ladies want a drink while we talk?” he asked and picked up a rocks glass with a little golden liquid in it.
He downed the rest of the drink, and I said, “I’ll take a Sazerac.”
Hades pointed at the Morrigan, and she ordered, “Bloody Mary for me.”
The God called in his assistant and relayed our drink orders to him. As soon as his assistant shut the door, Hades leaned forward and steepled his fingers in front of his chin, his elbows resting on the giant obsidian desk. “I understand magic. Better than almost anyone. But this is outside my realm. I can’t understand what type of spell would allow someone to replicate the cards without a merchant present.”
The Morrigan opined, “It has to be a spell from the dead. Or some sort of necromancy. If they could figure out a spell from a powerful dead practitioner, they could siphon that power and use it for the death cards.”
Hades pursed his lips and tilted his head, pondering the possibility. “Considering we talk to the dead on a daily basis that would make sense. It would take a powerful entity, extremely powerful, to channel a dead spirit capable of performing that act. God or devil, I would think. With that said, it could be anyone here. I’m not about to go question every soul on every level.”
“Do you have any leads at all?” the Morrigan questioned.
The fire behind him crackled, and Hades squirmed in his giant seat, beads of sweat forming on the crests of his wrinkled forehead. He appeared uncomfortable with the question. “Not reliable ones.”
I understood his reluctance to peddle in rumors. Nobody wanted to get blamed for sending someone on a wild goose chase.
I sat by silently, and the Morrigan said, “Well, considering we have nothing to go on, we have to start somewhere. What do you know?”
Hades’ assistant came in with our drinks on a silver platter. My mind flashed back to the servers’ trays on the cruise ship where I’d seen Zeus. It was mentally healthy to look back on big life decisions and question them, right?
I could have gone right back to Hilton Head instead of going to Pittsburgh. As a result, I found myself in the depths of hell trying to figure out another supernatural mystery and avenge my father’s death.
Hades tasted his drink, pulled the lime garnish off the rim and added a healthy squeeze to his clear, spritzy beverage. He turned to the side and mumbled, “A few people have said that Gareth knows who’s running this operation.”
The Morrigan stopped chugging her Bloody Mary and wiped the red liquid from her lips. With wide eyes, she asked, “Gareth the dagger? That stupid ass is still around?”
Hades nodded in confirmation, and I asked, “Why do they call him the dagger?” I naturally assumed he was a badass immortal with that nickname.
The Morrigan turned to me, shaking her head. “No. He is a dagger. A talking dagger. A drunken, foul-mouthed dagger who practices more trickery than Loki would be a better way to describe Gareth.”
I’d heard of inanimate objects that talked, but it was always a sword or morning star or one of the bigger weapons. This Gareth sounded like a real card and I was surprised I’d never heard of him. I naturally wondered how he drank.
Hades added, “He gets so drunk, so often, that he is extremely unreliable. Several people said he’s told a drunken story about someone replicating the death cards. Chase him at your own peril.”
The Morrigan leaned over and adjusted the red laces of her black leather boots. “Well, I’m not just going to sit on my ass and let this happen.”
“Great.” Hades chuckled and swirled his drink around, staring at it intently. “Let me know how that all works out for the two of you.”
“Who had possession of Gareth last?” I asked, unable to hold my tongue any longer.
Hades set his drink down and pushed his chair back. “Man goes by the name of John Jenkins. Lives in your city,” he said and tilted his gleaming bald head at me, referring to Pittsburgh. He opened a desk drawer and pulled out a little scrap of paper with some writing on it. After some hesitation, he finally slid it across the desk.
Before Hades pulled his hand away, the Morrigan jumped up and snatched it off the tabletop. She turned to me, “He lives in the South Side.”
“Do you know anything about this guy?” I asked Hades.
He responded immediately, “He supposedly has Dank Artistry tattoos all over his arms. As far as the reports say. Is any this to be trusted? Who knows? No one I know has ever heard of him before.”
The Dank Artistry was the form of magic practiced by the demons of the Red Cavern. Drawing from demonic spirits made sense since they had a wealth of power and knowledge.
The Morrigan said, “I’d bet they are drawing on dark and pure spirits.”
“I won’t take that bet,” Hades said with a reserved smile as he tapped the rim of his drink glass. “You might not get Gareth to talk, but I think you can squeeze some information out of this Jenkins fellow.”
“Perhaps we’ll stop by his house for a nice, friendly conversation,” the Morrigan said, capping the statement with an evil, drawn-out laugh.
I wasn’t ready to believe some random guy that no one had heard of was the driving force behind this. If the Morrigan and Hades didn’t understand what was going on, someone at the top of the food chain had to be pulling the strings. John Jenkins was nothing more than a puppet. He had someone else’s hand up his ass, as Owen would say. A puppet could always be made to talk against his or her will, though.
Or it could be someone running a distraction to set up a larger plan. Which was a scary prospect. You never knew. However, this was the only clue we had, so it would be a dereliction of duty to sit on our hands with this info. My hopes weren’t exactly sky high on this one.
I also had to be careful around Pittsburgh. The Morrigan had told me I was in the clear with the Celtic Gods regarding my father’s murder. However, I wouldn’t put it past my mother to continue blaming me. If she could convince a few Gods it was me, my days would be numbered.
Running scared wasn’t in my blood. Plus, I couldn’t hide from the Gods if they really wanted to find me.
It was time to pay Jo
hn Jenkins a visit.
Chapter 9
The Morrigan and I didn’t detect and living beings inside the apartment. Titania picked the lock easily and pushed against the door, slowly cracking it open. I held my nose with my gloved hand upon entering. The Morrigan and I were wearing gloves to avoid leaving fingerprints, although I doubted ours were in any human database.
The pungent body odor laced with an unctuous gaminess intensified and made my eyes water. It was the kind of funk that got stuck in your nostrils, making your stomach constantly churn. The three of us entered a messy living room, and as I looked around, it appeared as if someone had robbed him. Had someone already found Gareth?
“Little funky in here. Let’s open some windows,” I said, and we popped open a couple of windows in the living room.
“It’s not that bad, you baby.” The Morrigan smirked. I’d almost forgotten she was the Goddess of Death.
I went into the kitchen. The smell wasn’t as strong in there. Still a sloppy mess, though. Titania landed next to me and walked under the table, looking for clues.
“Come check this out,” the Morrigan called from the bedroom.
I walked through the small living room, entered the bedroom and gasped. A man had been hanged in the center of the room. The noose dangled only a few feet from the ceiling. He had either been hanged naked or his clothes had been removed after he’d died. The tall man’s toes scraped the floor as he swung gently back and forth, occasionally spinning in a circle. The overpowering funk from the body caused me to gag and back out of the room.
It differed from most dead human bodies I’d sniffed before. Either he wasn’t human, or I’d never encountered a body at this stage of putrefaction.
This stuff didn’t bother the Morrigan, who strolled leisurely out of the room. She asked, “So what do you think?”
“Let me catch myself so we can go back in and check out the tattoos Hades mentioned.” I pulled my shirt sleeve out through my coat and held it over my nose. In a nasally tone, I said, “All right. Let’s go back in.”
We entered the room again, and I located the tattoo on his right biceps. Oh, and there was one on his other arm too. I held my breath and moved in close. Even on a dead body, I could tell that the tattoos were new because of the raw skin around them.
Both matching tattoos had the cursive words, Dank Artistry, with the symbol in the middle. There was a big problem though. “You see this,” I said to the Morrigan pointing at the tattoo.
She squinted and said, “That is not the right symbol. No crossbones.”
I backed away from the body and said, “It looks like whoever killed him, also tattooed him and then went the extra step to make sure he was naked so that everyone would see his tats. He doesn’t look like Lee Majors, but we found our fall guy.”
The Morrigan gestured to the door, and I followed her into the living room. She commented, “It looks like this John Jenkins got in over his head.”
“You can see right through this staged suicide too, right?” I asked and dropped to my hands and knees.
The Morrigan cleared her throat and spit on the floor. As I searched under the couch, she said, “Seems like people always kill themselves right after they find out some juicy information. Strange how that works. I guess we should look around for the dagger, but I’m pretty sure that’s why this guy lost his life.”
I wanted to include my new friend, so I suggested, “Titania, why don’t you check trash cans? Let’s see if these murderers left us any clues to go on.”
“You got it.” Titania zipped into the kitchen.
The Morrigan closed one window and stopped the arctic blast. “I can use the Raven’s eye that I embedded in you to run a check on fingerprints. I’d bet their prints are all over this guy’s clothes. We just need to find them and then scan them through the raven’s eye.”
I shifted my vision to another dimension so that I could detect fingerprints on the body. Pinching my nostrils, I entered the room again. Much to my surprise, I couldn’t find a single fingerprint, not only on the body, but anywhere in the entire room.
I went back out to the living room and stared at his coffee table. Completely clean. That meant the professional killers had cleansed the entire apartment before leaving. I gave up on tracking down fingerprints and searched the apartment for other clues.
I ripped the cushions off the couch. “Bingo.”
“What?” the Morrigan asked, pulling her head out of the closet.
I held up three used death cards, and the Morrigan’s eyes widened with interest. “Well, well, well.”
I handed them to the Morrigan and noticed another one jammed in the fold under the armrest. I plucked it out and tears filled my eyes. With a trembling hand, I held up my father’s death card.
Never the comforting one, the Morrigan slapped me on the back and said, “We’ll get the bastard responsible.”
It was best not to dwell on his death right now. “What if it’s a her?”
“Girls can be bastards too. Don’t be sexist.”
“I was aiming for the opposite.” We searched around more, and I found floor plans for a laboratory used for producing the death cards. “This is obviously fake too.”
The Morrigan agreed, “John Jenkins was the fall guy, no doubt about it. The people responsible are trying to make us think that it was just this guy working alone. Then they’re trying to make the cops think that it was someone mixed up with the demons. Maybe this isn’t just a couple of two-bit practitioners, because they’ve covered several angles.”
I pointed out, “They didn’t think about the future. If these crimes keep happening, ole Johnny, can’t be the perpetrator considering he’s dead. So either the framers stop the killings or it kind of blows their cover.”
“I still can’t find much to go on. It looks like we really need to dig into John Jenkins’ past and find out who he was rolling with,” she said, searching behind the couch. She popped her head back out. “He’s got the fake Dank Artistry tattoos, but I don’t think for a second that this is a Red Cavern operation.”
“I was thinking the same thing. Those tattoos are fresh and make for the perfect alibi for the cops to call him a devil worshipper. Too bad nobody expected two old salts to be on the trail.”
The Morrigan smiled wide, always comfortable around the dead. “Bloodhounds ain’t got shit on a couple of blackbirds like us.”
I argued, “I’m more of a scarlet dragon than a blackbird.”
“You can be both. Both are predatory creatures. Just like us.”
I agreed with her to avoid an argument and we went back to combing the area for clues. The killer or killers had done a good job covering their tracks. The assisted suicide was obvious, but they hadn’t left a single fingerprint or evidence for us to go on.
I was ready to give up when Titania zoomed into the room with a little piece of paper.
“I think I may have found something worthy,” she announced and flew over to me. She extended the little ticket, and I took it from her.
The Morrigan moved in closer and looked over my shoulder. It was a pawnshop ticket. I pulled it closer to our eyes and read the words.
Bam Bam Bigelow Pawn
3210 Bigelow Boulevard
Item # 213741
Locker # 4439
Processed by Jake Fletcher
I flipped it over and it had $22 Loan written in black Sharpie.
I turned to the Morrigan. “What could this possibly be for?”
“One big-mouth dagger, I would assume. Perhaps he knew the walls were closing in and got rid of the item that could get him killed. Gareth isn’t really anything special without the talking. His two ruby eyes hold the only value and they aren’t worth much. $22 sounds about right for what more or less amounts to a kitchen knife with two tiny gems. Probably just loaned out the value of the rubies.”
Titania flew right in front of our faces and hovered. “Exactly. That’s exactly what I was going to say. She just b
eat me to it.” Titania always wanted to be in the middle of everything.
I looked around at the trashed apartment, and said, “We should hurry. Who knows how safe it is in a pawnshop?”
“I was going to say that, too,” Titania added as we left the murder scene.
Apparently, John Jenkins knew some heavy hitters were on his trail. I surmised that he had tried to hide the dagger at the pawnshop, basically burying it out in the open. It would be sitting right in the middle of the city under everyone’s noses.
That left one problem. Eventually, if John didn’t pay back the loan, the pawnshop owners would sell the item. I guessed he was banking on the fact that the knife didn’t appear valuable enough to warrant prime real estate in the main display cases. In all likelihood, the pawnshop owner would pluck out those rubies to sell separately and toss the worthless dagger.
****
We cruised across town and parked in the lot behind the Bam Bam Bigelow Pawn shop. I turned to Titania in the backseat. “You wait here. I wish it was different.”
Pittsburgh had started accepting more supernatural life than I’d expected, but creatures that resembled insects were in constant danger of being swatted.
She lowered her head. “I understand.”
There were several cars in the lot and most of them looked abandoned. The rusty ones appeared as though they hadn’t been driven in a while and only two vehicles seemed operable. The beat-up cars had several inches of snow on the hoods, windshields and roofs, but I could see the rusted bodies. It appeared the pawnshop bought junkers and tried to fix them up.
The Morrigan and I got out of the car and hustled around the building to the front door. Shivering, I opened the door and passed through the security sensor that released a pleasing tone. It did the same for the Morrigan. If it only knew.