The Shadow Box: Paranormal Suspense and Dark Fantasy Thriller Novels

by Travis Luedke

  I never knew for sure how he did it, but Nicky was a walking encyclopedia of Vegas gossip. If anyone worthy of a back-page newspaper article had lunch in this town, Nicky knew what they talked about, what they ordered, and how much they tipped on their way out. I figured he had a world-class seer on the payroll keeping astral tabs on people he considered worth watching. Interesting, though, that he only mentioned our lunch meeting and not my visit to Jud’s motel room a couple of hours ago. Even he had his limits.

  Even so, I made a mental note to redouble the wards on my bedroom.

  “What about him?” I said, knowing it’d be a waste of time to deny meeting with Jud.

  “It’s sad, what happened to his grandkid. I feel for the guy. I want to make a donation, cover her funeral costs and get him home safe and sound. Maybe put a little something extra in his pocket. Guy that age should be retired and living it up, not working a farm, you know?”

  “That’s really nice of you,” I said, but I knew better. I smelled the hook waiting inside that bait.

  “He needs help moving on. And I don’t think it’s right, you know, that people are holding out false hope, keeping him going like that. That poor girl, she was getting high down in the storm tunnels, a flood came in, end of story. Just a terrible accident.”

  A low-budget porn director like Artie Kaufman didn’t have the juice to get a couple of corrupt cops to do his dirty work.

  Nicky Agnelli did.

  On the other hand, Artie was a sadist with a motive for murder, and Nicky, for all his faults, didn’t go around killing young girls for kicks. He would have been just as sickened by Artie’s movies as I was. One man had the motive, one man had the means, and neither one had any reason to be in the other’s orbit.

  Justine massaged my shoulders, but I wasn’t feeling any less tense.

  “You want me to drop the job,” I said. It wasn’t a question.

  “I want you to give the old man some peace of mind.” Nicky’s forehead creased with phony concern. “Tell him that what you found matches the police report, that it was all an accident. Send him home. He’ll grieve, but he’ll move on. Right now, it’s like his granddaughter never died. He can’t put her to rest. That’s not right.”

  He apparently didn’t know about the Stacy-thing lurking under the city streets. Did he know what I’d discovered about Artie? What I told Jud before sending him packing? I rolled the dice.

  “You and I had the same thought,” I said. “I just told Pankow to get out of town, that there was nothing I could do for him. You can have your guys check it out. He’ll be flying back to Minneapolis tonight.”

  The second part was true, if Jud did what I told him. Nicky nodded, leaning back in his chair. He couldn’t keep the relief from showing in his body language, and that was more troubling than anything. Stacy’s murder had him worried. Nicky Agnelli didn’t get worried. Ever.

  “I looked into it,” I said, “didn’t find anything but a hinky autopsy report with nothing to back it up. It was a bust, so I sent him home.”

  “There you go, see?” Nicky said. “You and me, on the same wavelength. Just like old times.”

  “Now I’ve got a question for you,” I said lightly, thinking back to my encounter with the cambion outside the Tiger’s Garden. “What’s ‘the hound’?”

  Justine’s nails dug into my shoulders like ten tiny knives.

  8.

  Nicky took off his glasses and plucked a gray silk handkerchief from his jacket, polishing the lenses. Not looking at me.

  “Where’d you—what do you mean? What hound?”

  “Ran into a cambion last night. He told me ‘the hound is gone’ and there aren’t any rules anymore. Apparently that meant it was open season on my crowd.”

  “And you think I should know?” Nicky scrubbed his glasses like he was trying to blot out a bloodstain. “What else did he say?”

  “Nothing,” I said. “I figured you’d know because, well…” I nodded at him and Juliette as if that said it all.

  Nicky blurted out a sudden peal of laughter. Justine’s fingernails relaxed, leaving my shoulders stinging.

  “Christ, Dan,” he said, grinning at me and putting his glasses back on, “that’s not racist or anything, is it?”

  “I figured you’d have your finger on the local community—”

  “And if a black guy steals your wallet, do you grab the closest brother and demand to know where it is, because they all must know each other? And all Asians hang out in dojos practicing kung fu, right, just like Bruce Lee?”

  He had a point. I would have had the grace to feel ashamed of myself if their reactions hadn’t already given the game away.

  “Look,” he said, “me and the ladies, we’re what you might call exemplary specimens of our kind. Do I know of other halfbloods living in the city? Yes. Do we get together for a regular knitting circle and black mass on Tuesday nights? No. Between you and me, buddy, most of those guys are batshit crazy. Not dependable, and not our kind of crowd.”

  “Sorry.” I faked an apologetic smile. “You’re right, that was pretty dumb of me. No offense intended.”

  “None taken,” Juliette said. She flicked a forked tongue across her pearly white teeth.

  Nicky shook his head. “My advice to you is to not worry about it. You probably met some lone crazy out there, flapping his gums about nothing. Now, if you’ll excuse me, my mahjong partners are waiting outside, and I haven’t finished taking all their money. Think about my offer and get back to me.”

  “Do come back soon,” Justine whispered in my ear.

  #

  The evening light show heralded my return to Fremont Street. The canopy over the pedestrian mall blazed with neon synchronized to a medley of Beatles songs. I hummed along, letting the music move my feet, feeling the street’s energy pulling me—

  —and then I was inside the Tiger’s Garden, still moving, brass bells jingling behind me. Bentley and Corman waved from their table.

  “We knew you were about to arrive,” Bentley said, holding out a glass of whiskey. Two fingers, poured over a single ice cube. “Amar just brought it over for you, said you were going to order it.”

  “Right as usual.” I took the glass and tossed back a swallow to ease my nerves. It wasn’t the quality of the drink I refused in Nicky’s backroom mahjong game, but it did the job. “Does anyone else think that’s weird, by the way? Anyone at all?”

  “It all makes sense if you study quantum mechanics,” Jennifer Juniper drawled with a thick Kentucky accent, her chair tilted back on two legs and leaning against the wall.

  That was her real name. Her parents were heavily into peace, love, and psychedelics. The only hippie thing about Jennifer was her ubiquitous, blue-tinted Lennon glasses. That, and her pot-growing operation, which she kept hidden from the cops with the aid of some high-quality witchcraft. A sleeve of tattoos sheathed her left arm, the centerpiece a spray of rainbow rose petals around an image of Elvis as the Gautama Buddha.

  “This is it?” I asked, looking at the three of them. “Where is everybody?”

  “Margaux’s coming,” Bentley said, ticking off names on his fingers. “Spengler’s coming. The Hernandez brothers are on a job in New Orleans. Jorgensen’s living off the grid in a cardboard box somewhere. David has a prior engagement—”

  “Not that he’d come anyway,” I muttered.

  “What is it with you two?” Corman asked.

  “He knows what he did.”

  “Brother K is in a cell in the county jail for drunk and disorderly conduct,” Bentley continued, ignoring us both. “And Sophia is hiding from what she claims is the vengeful ghost of Merle Haggard and she won’t leave her house until the new moon.”

  “Merle Haggard isn’t dead.”

  He shrugged. “It’s Sophia.”

  Magic is not, as a general rule, the healthiest of passions or the gentlest of muses.

  The jingling of bells heralded Mama Margaux’s arrival, and Amar appeare
d just long enough to pull out her chair and offer her a tall hurricane in a smoky glass. The last guest to the party showed up a few minutes later. Dressed to the nines in a Brooks Brothers suit, Spengler was big. Big shoulders, big gestures, a big voice, and big ambitions.

  Everybody in the scene knew Spengler. Not for his reputation as a magician, seeing as he was so inept none of us could figure out how he even got into the Garden, but for a web of connections that stretched from Chicago to Calcutta. If you needed a powdered fossil or a bone from a saint’s finger, he could have it for you in a week. More importantly for some of us, he was always happy to take questionable merchandise off your hands in exchange for clean cash.

  “I’m back from the big sandbox,” he said with a wave, “so everybody line up and tell me how much you missed me. I will accept presents in lieu of praise if you’re feeling tongue-tied.”

  “You were gone? Didn’t notice,” Jennifer said, though she couldn’t keep the affection from her voice.

  “Two weeks in Saudi, baby, and don’t pretend you didn’t count the hours ‘til my return. I did it this time. Really did it. I hit the score of a lifetime.”

  “You always say that.” She rolled her eyes.

  “This time I mean it. This thing I found? People are gonna be breaking down my door trying to throw money at me. You just wait, ye of little faith. Hey, Faust, where is everybody? I thought this was a party.”

  “Hey, Spengler,” I said. “It’s just us. Apparently everybody else is drunk, in jail, or temporarily insane.”

  “So, it’s a day ending in the letter y then,” he said, pulling up a chair.

  “That’s about right,” I said and gave everyone a quick recap of my encounter with the cambion.

  “Hound?” Jennifer peered at me over her glasses. “Like a dog?”

  “That’s what it sounded like. I didn’t ask him to spell it for me.”

  Corman shook his head, leaning back in his chair and contemplating his glass of gin like a philosopher. “This has happened before.”

  “That’s right,” Bentley said. “Back in the eighties, when Cormie and I first moved here from California. It was a different crowd in those days, you have to understand. Wilder souls. When the nature of the city changed, most of them either drifted away or met their unhappy ends.”

  Corman snorted. “What he means is a bunch of coked-up, pentacle-waving cowboys butted heads with the casinos’ new management and ended up dead in a gutter. The corporations make the old Vegas mob look like pussycats.”

  “It was one August,” Bentley mused, “a bad one. The kind of summer where the sidewalks blistered and the air smelled like gasoline. That’s when the attacks started. Cambion—well, creatures we eventually figured out were cambion—hunting down magicians. A friend of ours was…devoured in his bed. Literally devoured. Not just our crowd, either. They started attacking random citizens. An entire string of missing persons and mangled bodies.”

  “What did you do about it?” I asked, leaning forward.

  “Nothing.” Corman shook his head, picking up the story. “We planned to, all right. Had a beauty of a plan, but the attacks just suddenly stopped. And I mean stopped overnight, like turning off a faucet. Couldn’t even go looking for payback, because you couldn’t find a cambion in this town for a good five years. It was like something scared them all into going underground.”

  “Scared them,” I said. “Or gave them rules. Rules about who they could hunt.”

  “That’d be your hound dog,” Jennifer said. “Gotta be one of us, right? Somebody in our little community. Who else would be able to regulate those critters? Anybody go missing lately who’s been around since the old days?”

  Corman waved his glass in a circle toward himself and Bentley. “Kid, we are the old days.”

  I took a deep breath. “I talked to Nicky Agnelli today.”

  The looks from Bentley and Corman could have stripped paint from the wall.

  “Wasn’t by choice, believe me,” I said quickly, holding up one hand.

  “What did he want?” Bentley asked, a winter chill at the edges of his reedy voice.

  “Not important. What matters is I asked him about his community, for obvious reasons. He says they don’t have a community and even if they do, he’s not in charge and doesn’t want to be. Thing is, I dropped the word ‘hound’ and everyone in the room went stiff. He played it off with a laugh, but Nicky’s spooked about something.”

  “Nicky don’t get spooked,” Jennifer drawled.

  “You know that’s right,” I told her, “but it was written all over his lying face.”

  “We need to hit the books,” Bentley said. “Cormie and I will start researching anything remotely related to hounds and the underworld. If any of you have a chance to drop by the store, your help would be appreciated and rewarded with essential nourishment.”

  “Pizza and beer,” Corman said. “And if you want something with weird toppings, you’re paying for it yourself. No goddamn pineapple this time.”

  “I’m in,” Spengler said. Jennifer just nodded.

  Mama Margaux looked at me. “You should come, Daniel. Get your mind off that girl.”

  Jennifer adjusted her glasses. “Holy shit. Roxy? You two broke up?”

  “I don’t want to talk about it.” Thanks, Mama.

  Jennifer looked at Spengler. “You know, Daniel and I dated for a couple of months, once. Now I mostly date women.”

  I leaned back and pantomimed pulling a dagger out of my heart. “Ow. Twist the knife, why don’t you? Truth is, I gave you the most thrilling fifteen seconds of your life. Ruined you for all other men.”

  She buried her face in her hands. “It’s true!” she cried, breaking into hysterical giggles. “It’s all true!”

  I said my goodbyes after the next round of drinks, and Jennifer followed me to the vestibule.

  “Seriously,” she said softly. “I’m sorry about Roxy. You were cute together. You okay?”

  I started to make something up, but instead I just slumped against the wall by the door.

  “Ah, shit, Jenny. I will be, all right? Not today, but maybe tomorrow. This helps. Being with friends. Gets me out of my own head for a while.”

  She leaned in and kissed me on the cheek, leaving behind the faint scent of strawberries.

  “Come by my place some night this week. We’ll get high, eat popcorn, and watch some bad movies together. Cures all ills.”

  I saw Bentley lurking a few feet behind her and knew we were about to have “a talk.” Sighing, I gave Jennifer a quick hug. “Deal.”

  Bentley waited until she went back to the tables, and I held up a hand to forestall him.

  “No,” I said, “I am not working for Nicky again. That’s not in the cards.”

  “But he asked you.”

  “Of course he asked me. And I said no. On that note, he’s connected to the Stacy Pankow murder. I just don’t know how yet. He wanted me to drop it, pretending he was just worried about poor old Jud.”

  Bentley frowned. “What did you say?”

  “I said it was already dropped. Which is a big, fat lie. Problem is, he’s doing his creepy ‘I know everything about everyone’ act, and I need to watch my ass if I keep digging into this case.”

  “You could walk away.”

  I arched an eyebrow at him. “You know I’m not going to do that.”

  “Daniel, it’s one thing to work around a creature like Nicky Agnelli. It’s another thing entirely to work against him. If he’s connected to that poor girl’s death—”

  “Then I deal with him. I gave my word, Bentley. You taught me how important that is. Don’t worry, I’ll be careful, but I need a helping hand. Can I borrow the Eye?”

  He gave me a long look, concern etched in his faded blue eyes, and nodded. “I’ll bring it over first thing in the morning.”

  Back out on Fremont, the night young enough for the crowds to keep churning, the party in full swing, I stepped into a doorway and ch
ecked my phone. I had a message from Paolo.

  Call me asap, Kaufman wants 2 meet u.

  “Showtime,” I whispered, my spreading smile cast in the glow of a neon light.

  9.

  The next morning Bentley brought me a present: a tiny, lacquered casket, like something from a Chinese fairy tale. I opened it and took out the package inside, wrapped in rumpled black silk. A spike of cold shot through my palm and up my arm, fading as fast as it came.

  The Black Eye was one of Bentley and Corman’s collected curiosities, a small pewter pendant depicting a half-lidded eye with its iris scratched and pitted, dangling from a thin silver chain. Egyptian hieroglyphs adorned the back, but half of them were chiseled away. According to Bentley, the Eye was originally dedicated to a god of forgetfulness, who was in turn forgotten by history.

  “What we can read of the back,” he told me, “says ‘He dwells in spaces between spaces. Name him not, for he craves no name. He is silence.’”

  I don’t know if I believe in gods, but I do believe in power, and the Black Eye has a kick like a mule. I took a deep breath and draped it around my neck, letting the pendant rest against my bare skin.

  One moment, the universe around me was alive and humming with information, with magical potential and the flow of energy, all the invisible conduits and symbols I’d trained for years to recognize and master. The next, my mind’s eye was wrapped in cotton gauze, deaf, voiceless, and blind.

  That was the blessing of the Eye and its curse. It made you invisible to the world of magic: as far as the unseen world was concerned, you simply didn’t exist. Seers couldn’t find you, and divining spells washed over you like dewdrops. On the other hand, you were about as mystically powerful as a newborn baby. You were cut off from the tap, pure and simple, like a drunk at last call.

  I took deep breaths, struggling not to panic. I lasted almost thirty seconds before I yanked the Eye back over my head, twitching uncontrollably, trying to keep myself from hurling it across the room. I dropped it on the bedspread and sat there, trembling, feeling the hum of the universe wrap its loving arms around me once more.