Pound of Flesh_An Urban Fantasy Novel

by J. A. Cipriano

  I delegated responsibility to my imp.

  Gary was now tailing the Assistant to the District Attorney while I followed up a lead on my next meal.

  What’s more, he was better at staying hidden than I had any chance of being. I sincerely doubted Renee believed in imps, my (green) main man could stomp along behind her if he wanted to. Hell, he could shout her name at every corner and-given the magic surrounding imps- she’d never be the wiser. It was perfect.

  Meanwhile, I had to sate this pain in my chest.

  Fortunately, I had found Lester Sherman while digging through the police files a few days ago. What can I say, I was building a queue of dirt bags.

  Two kids, both little boys, had gone missing a couple of months ago and (while the cops around these parts could never come up with enough evidence to charge him) there was little doubt Lester had been the one responsible.

  He had just moved into town, lived across from the school both boys attended, and multiple witnesses saw both boys enter his house at strange times of the day. Still, they never pulled the trigger with an arrest warrant. I wouldn’t have the same hesitation. As I walked up to his front step, Bible in hand, I aimed to prove it.

  Knocking on his door with the flat of my palm, I did my best to keep my disgust in check. Often times, when I researched these dirt bags, I also ended up researching their victims. This time was no different. The boys he had abducted were six and nine. They left behind two little sisters, a twin brother, and a black lab puppy along with two pairs of grieving parents who would never get to see justice served.

  Lester Sherman opened the door slowly. He was a small, pathetic man, with dishwater brown hair, a pencil-thin mustache that screamed “perv” and a pair of glasses so thick his eyes looked three times their size.

  Just looking at him turned my stomach, imagining that this was the last face those boys saw when they were so heartlessly shoved off this mortal coil made my blood boil.

  “Can I help you?” he asked in a bad English accent while half-hiding behind his door.

  “I’d like to speak to you about Jehovah,” I said flatly, halfheartedly holding up the Bible. “See. I’ve got a Bible.” I shook the book at him for emphasis.

  He cringed away. “I-I’m not interested,” he said and started to close the door.

  I stopped it with my hand.

  His already huge eyes got even bigger, making me think of an oversized bug.

  “You sure about that? A lot of people say no when what they really mean is yes.” I glared at him. “That’s what I hear anyway.” I stepped forward, and he tried to push the door closed again.

  Even if I hadn’t had my demon strength, overpowering this demented dickhead wouldn’t be an issue, and we both knew it.

  “In this case, I’m afraid it does mean no,” Lester said, eyes darting around like he was trying to find help. I wasn’t sure why, but it was strangely satisfying.

  “Are you,” I asked, clearing my throat. “Are you afraid, Lester?”

  “That’s-that’s not my name,” he lied, shaking his head so hard I was surprised his glasses didn’t come flying off.

  “I think you’re lying to me, Lester,” I answered. “Why are you lying?”

  “No! He moved,” he said, his English accent lilting up even further.

  “He didn’t move. He’s standing right in front of me, about to piss his child murdering pants.” I leaned in even closer. “Let me in, Lester. Don’t make me do this the hard way.” I bared my teeth into a cruel smile. “Although I almost want you to give me an excuse.”

  He looked me up and down, weighing his options and coming up with the only one that made sense. He backed up, letting me push the door open and step through the threshold.

  “See, wasn’t that easy?” I replied, glancing around the open and very clinical looking room.

  There was no personality here, like a squatter had just dropped in yesterday and contented himself with bare walls, bland shag carpet, and the most boring, minimalistic furniture the basement of a rent-to-own store had to offer

  “That-that should be the book of Jehovah,” he stammered, closing the door behind me.

  “What’s that?” I asked, folding my arms over my chest and leaning against the wall in his foyer.

  “If you were going to teach me about Jehovah, you should be carrying the Book of Jehovah.” He gestured weakly at the Bible in my hand.

  “Yeah,” I conceded, realizing that the gig was up. Oh well. I was getting tired of it anyway. “Except this is what was in the gas station bathroom. Sometimes you have to take what you can get.”

  “Did you come to hurt me?” he asked, walking into his living room with his back turned to me in a way that only someone who had made his peace with not caring about the answer to that question could.

  “That depends,” I said, shrugging my shoulders. “Did you kill those boys?”

  “I loved them.” He didn’t meet my eyes.

  “Didn’t ask you that,” I said as he swiped an open beer can off the side table. “Did you kill them? It’s a yes or no question.”

  “Are you a police officer?” he asked, slumping into his sofa with the beer can clutched tightly in his right hand.

  “Yep,” I said, lifting my jacket and flashing my badge.

  He stared at the badge for a long time, and I could almost see the gears of his mind turning. “Are you going to arrest me if I confess?”

  “Nope,” I said. What I had in store for Lester, would be way worse than prison.

  He looked up at me, his eyes darkening as he read the honesty splashed across my face.

  “I didn’t think you would,” he sighed and took a swig of his beer.

  “The boys,” I repeated, while making a “hurry up” gesture with one hand.

  “We both know I did,” he said, slamming his beer can against the counter. It was the first show of anger, the first flash of darkness I had seen in him since coming here.

  It wasn’t enough. For all I knew, he was lying about what he’d done. No, maybe he was just some sick fuck pretending. It’d happened before. It wouldn’t happen again. At least not to me.

  “Where are they?” I asked, moving toward him. The look on his face, blank indifference mixed with a sort of aloof acceptance of the end, stoked a fire in me.

  I had seen a lot of crap in this world. When you go fishing for the worst humanity has to offer, you find your line gets covered in some pretty disturbing shit.

  And I had a soft spot for kids. Maybe it was not having a dad or maybe it was just because I couldn’t understand why anybody would look at some innocent little person and want to fuck their world up like this.

  Whatever the reason, it had always been hard for me to keep my temper in check when dealing with people like Lester.

  “The boys?” he scoffed. “Why?”

  “After you’re gone,” I said grounding my teeth together and narrowing my eyes at him. “I want to give the families some closure.”

  “Sounds fair,” he said quietly, looking out the window and not reacting to my alluding to him being gone at all. Maybe he expected me to kill him. That also wouldn’t be the first time. Sometimes these sickos were just hoping someone would come along and take them to task for what they’d done. I wasn’t sure why exactly, and frankly, I didn’t give a damn.

  “You don’t even care. Do you?” I asked, raising an eyebrow at him.

  “Honestly?” he looked back over at me. “I’m surprised it’s taken someone this long.”

  “Where are the children?” I asked again, my hands balling into fists at my sides.

  I could feel my demon half roaring to life, the promise of energy, of life, edging it toward the front of my mind. It thrived on chaos, fear, and death, and right now, Lester was all of those things.

  Lester’s eyes moved up, looking high into the sky.

  He sighed heavily.

  “I put them in the ceiling. Parts of them anyway.”

  “You sonofabi
tch!” I spit through clenched teeth.

  The world went red, meaning my eyes had gone red.

  This finally got his attention.

  “You… you…” He swallowed hard. “You’re The Devil, aren’t you?”

  I walked toward him, splaying my fingers out and laying them on him.

  “Funny. I was about to ask you the same thing.” I felt his energy pouring into me as I spoke, feeding the darkest parts of myself and opening up all the hard sections of myself, the parts I usually kept locked away.

  He stiffened, his eyes meeting mine. He couldn’t speak, of course, but if he could, would he beg me for mercy? Part of me hoped he would, but somehow I doubted it. Not that I’d have given it to him. Those boys didn’t get it, so neither would he.

  I tightened my grip on him. I could feel him shaking under my fingertips as the life drained out of him. All the anger, all the hurt, all the awful impulses and the horrific things he had done all rushed away from him in a blur of white hot energy.

  It would have been enough to make me sick if I hadn’t needed it so damned badly.

  He let out one last whimper as it ended.

  I pulled away from him, half disgusted and half satisfied. It was like walking out of an all you can eat buffet, knowing you had wolfed down one too many pieces of pie and would pay for it with indigestion later.

  As I turned away from Lester’s husk, my phone vibrated in my pocket.

  Pulling it out, I didn’t even look at the screen before I answered.

  “Roy!” Gary’s voice screeched into the phone. “Roy! Where the hell are you?”

  He sounded frantic though I didn’t need to hear him to know something was wrong. Gary hated phones. He hated the dials. He hated the tone. He hated the whole shtick.

  If he was forcing himself to use one, it meant he had no other choice. Damn.

  “Gary,” I said, wiping my hand against my jeans and making my way out of the late Mr. Sherman’s house. “Gary, what’s wrong?”

  “This woman, Roy,” he breathed. “This woman you’ve got me watching. You’ve got to get here now! She’s in a mountain of trouble!”

  5

  Following the location pin Gary had sent to my cell phone, I hauled ass to a place I had never heard of, Lunardi’s. My heart was racing. If I didn’t get there quickly, I might lose the D.A. and the imp both. I didn’t need that weighing on my conscious.

  It was a full seventeen minutes away, even with me popping my flashers on through the front windshield of my Impala and doing that douchey cop thing where I blaze through all the stop signs and completely ignore the speed limit.

  It’s more of a suggestion anyway, right?

  As if to mock me, the minutes seemed to zoom by faster than I could count them. My mind started racing.

  My demon death gaze power, while handy, wasn’t without its limitations because while I sensed death around people, plain and simple, I couldn’t quite tell how it was going to happen. Why I remember one time I followed an old guy with a bum ticker around for a week, and you know what happened? A fucking air conditioner fell out of an apartment window ten stories up and turned him into raspberry jam.

  Still, after that sort of thing happened a couple dozen times, I’d met a weird Romanian gypsy who despite not liking to shave under her arms, had kindly taught me a few things. Now, I could tell you certain specifics about the event.

  Sickness was quiet, like a low buzzing that came whispering to the surface. If I wasn’t paying attention, I’d miss it entirely.

  Accidents were a little louder and a lot more unsettling. It came as a flash, not there one minute and in the next, it had blown everything to smithereens.

  But murder felt completely different. It was the clearest, the most easily identifiable and (because of the technical nature of what I had to do to keep my demon side at bay) the one I had the most experience with.

  Murder reminded me of an animal carcass in the sun. It made my eyes water and my gag reflex shift into high gear.

  That was what I’d felt around Renee, eye watering, gag inducing, stinking hot murder.

  But that was all I knew. I had no sense of the culprit, the motive, the timing, or even the method.

  I mean, it was soon, sure. However, for all I knew, someone was about to round the corner with a machete, readying to gut her like a fish.

  “Goddammit, Gary!” I snarled as his phone went to voicemail for the billionth time. Since the initial call, Gary hadn’t answered his phone at all. Part of me was worried he had thrown himself into whatever sort of deadly fray Renee had found herself in tonight, but I tried to clamp down my worry. I mean, it was possible Gary had spent his downtime playing Angry Birds again and forgot to bring a charger. It had happened before.

  Still, by the time I skidded to a stop in front of Lunardi’s and tossed a twenty to some kid in a valet’s jacket while motioning to my car, anxiety had practically twisted my stomach into a knot. One more sour thought would have been enough to have me vomiting the cocktail of Gummi Worms, Red Bull, and cheap beer currently churning around in my gut.

  Hence the valet. Normally, I’m not a valet type guy. I wouldn’t just trust some pimply kid with no sense of direction and jack-off stained hands with my baby. But this was an emergency and, as it turned out, emergencies came before my Impala.

  ”Wreck her and I’ll wreck you, punk,” I muttered on my way toward Lunardi’s. It loomed in the distance, all bright flashing lights and unassuming brick exterior.

  Judging by the name, I had assumed I’d pull up to some cozy Italian restaurant on the eastside of town. What I found was a bumping club, complete with thumping techno music blaring out onto the street and a line of desperate to be cool people waiting to get in.

  This said two things to me. Though she might have been a pinned down ADA during the day, Renee had something of a wild side and, judging from the fact she didn’t seem to be standing in the loser line, she must clean up nice.

  Neither thing surprised me too much.

  “What do you think you’re doing, CW?” A brick wall of a man with a shiny, bald head, a black t-shirt that would have been too small on an infant, and a clipboard clutched in his hands asked me as I neared the door.

  “I’m CW?” I asked, looking up at him with unblinking eyes and choosing to ignore how this guy was big enough to palm my head like a basketball.

  “You are,” he grunted with all the eloquence of a boulder.

  “I’m Roy,” I corrected. “Roy Morgan.”

  “You’re CW here, your teenage drama looking ass,” he muttered. “And you ain’t getting in.” He lifted a massive hand and flicked it forward. “Back of the line.”

  “How about my friend?” I asked, lifting my jacket and flashing my badge. “Can he come in?”

  A smile flashed across the dude’s face, as greasy as an oil slick and just as messy. ”You’re a cop?”

  “I am,” I answered. This might be my trump card. This guy was big and looked rough enough for the police force. Maybe he was a former brother in blue. Maybe my connections were about to change my luck.

  “Well, that changes everything,” he said. Leaning forward, the smile disappeared from his lips. “In that case, I should have said, ‘Back of the line, pig.’”

  Yep. Not so much.

  I thought about threatening the guy, but he looked like the type who had gone through life getting into fights. While I was willing to bet I could press hard enough to get my way, I’d wasted enough time already. I sure as hell didn’t want to spend any more on a pissing contest with Magic Mike here.

  I leaned in, closing the gap between us because it tended to piss most people the hell off when I did. Part of it was the invading someone’s personal space thing, but a lot more of it was the demon. When I got close, especially in situations like this, my demonic half was more than enough to scare the shit out of even the biggest thug.

  “Decantace,” I whispered, quiet enough to keep anyone else from hearing.

>   “What the fuck did you-” He stood straight up again, his muscles contracting and his eyes glazing over.

  “Don’t worry, guy,” I said, smirking. “Give it five. You’ll be your bitter, power abusing self in no time.” I patted him on the shoulder, knowing that my spell was restricting his movements for the time being. He was lucky people were watching, and I was on a clock. If not, I might have taught him a lesson.” And for the record,” I added, walking passed him and into the club. “I thought Dawson’s Creek was pretty rad. Joey was hot as hell.”

  The inside of Lunardi’s was like a compilation of all the things I hated about the world. Loud-mouthed young people ground on each other as the music played so loud, both the words and beat were rendered completely indistinguishable. To make matters worse, it was more crowded than an orgy at the Playboy Mansion. Their bodies were pressed together so tightly together, I was legitimately afraid they were going to suck all the oxygen out of the room.

  I scanned the crowd for Renee, but it proved an impossible feat even for somebody who had spent his entire professional life spotting people. It was too dark. People were moving around too much, and it was too loud to fucking think.

  I’d have to resort to a different sort of tactic if I wanted to find Renee, assuming she was even still here. Man, where the fuck was Gary when you needed him?

  Closing my eyes, I extended a tendril of power, trying to feel my way through this cluster-fuck of hormones and cheap cologne.

  Where are you?

  I started to hum something low and steady in an effort to center myself and drown out the ear cancer these idiotic millennials used to drown out that absurd inner pain they’re always tweeting about. Well, all millennials that weren’t me anyway.

  There was a time I wouldn’t have been able to do this. As a kid, I had always been a hair trigger kind of guy, blowing off at the hilt about whatever nonsense came rolling my way.

  But time and a bunch of Tibetan monks, who owed me big-time after I purged their monastery of a particularly nasty vengeance demon, taught me better.

  Before long, the crash of music vanished and my humming was all I could hear. That, and the sound of my own heart beating.