by Martha Wells
The good news is that I’m not a stalker or a creep. I don’t judge people. If some schmo wants to watch Italian midget biracial porn with golden showers, then God love ’em. I don’t give a shit. On the other hand, if that same guy is embezzling money from his employer or buying dirty pictures of little kids, then yeah, we may have a problem. Depends on who’s hired me, and it depends on what pushes my buttons. If I’m hired to get the goods on a cheating spouse, I’ll get those goods, hand them over to the client, cash the check and forget about it. No judgment. If I’m hired to find actionable evidence on, say, a group of pornographers who are making fuck films of tweens? I may become more directly involved than just turning in a report. I might pay a visit to the video team and have a meaningful discussion with them. I’ve done that in the past. Like I said, I have buttons.
This thing with Boots wasn’t pushing any of those buttons, but it was giving me a bad itch between the shoulder blades. Israel Bohunk was a very, very bad man and I had no desire whatsoever in determining which of us was the baddest dude in Philadelphia.
So I did some research to determine just what in the twinkly chartreuse fuck I’d gotten myself into.
I researched Boots first. There wasn’t a whole lot. No birth record, no school. His name began appearing in articles related to the rare art and antiquities world. He was quoted in a few pieces—never with accompanying photo—in several magazines like Aesthetica, Parkett, Tate Etc., Art Business Today. Like that. And The Journal of Conservation and Museum Studies. Plus a bunch of incomprehensible trade journals for universities, religious groups, and purveyors of objet d’art. So, professionally at least, he seemed legit. Odd that he had no background data. It suggested that he wasn’t born as ‘Oliver Boots’. I wish I’d thought to ask for a look at his driver’s license. From that I could have backtracked to get his Social Security number and maybe found his birth name.
The one thing I did verify is that he belonged to a group called the Dreamland Conservancy. So maybe he really did believe in the stuff Lovecraft wrote about. Truth to tell, I kind of lean toward believing, too. As the saying goes, I’ve seen some stuff.
Weird, weird, stuff. Over the last few years I’ve seen things that have made me a whole lot less likely to dismiss the things that go bump in the night as figments of my—or anyone’s—imagination. After all, look at who I am. At what I am. I’m one of the things that bump around in the dark. The fact that I happen to be a good guy—or, good-ish, at least—doesn’t change things.
After I ran dry on Boots I switched to Bohunk.
There was a lot about him on the Net. Turns out his name is, no joke, Israel Bohunk. I’d always thought it was a South Philly nickname. Like Nickie Grapes and Harry the Spoon. Nope. Israel Stallo Bohunk is the name on his driver’s license and Social Security card. And on the copy of his birth certificate I found a scan of. At fifty-three he was older than I thought. He looked midthirties. I found some photos of him online and studied them. He is conspicuously large, with bodybuilder biceps, a massive chest, and a head that looked like a beer keg dressed up in a Halloween mask. Lots of coarse dark hair on his head, face, chest and forearms. And his complexion was, in its own way, as strange as Boots’s. Where the tall skinny guy was pitch black, Bohunk was the color of stone. Gray as slate.
His criminal record was cleaner than I expected. He was picked up twice for questioning but no charges ever filed. That did not mean he was innocent. My guess was he was careful and had good lawyers.
Bohunk spent eight years as a private military contractor, which is a sanitized euphemism for ‘mercenary’. Bohunk worked for Blue Diamond Security, a company that made Blackwater look like the Campfire Girls. They had ties to all sorts of shady groups including the Jakoby family, Hugo Vox and others. Bohunk spent time in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere. The ‘elsewhere’ part was buried under some ‘need to know’ seals and even nosy private dicks don’t need to know some things. Didn’t matter. What I did find confirmed what I suspected. Bohunk was smart, well-trained, dangerous and very experienced.
But something was wrong. When I looked up info on his office I saw that he was no longer in a seedy hole like mine. He was now operating in style. Real style. He now had a large suite of offices in a respectable building on Market Street near City Hall. Wow. I hacked his tax returns and found that he employed twenty people. Way more than I thought. Two secretaries, three computer research specialists, a receptionist, and the rest were listed as ‘general support staff’. When I ran some of them I found that this was another euphemism. In this case ‘general support staff’ meant ‘hired muscle’. Some of them had criminal records. All of them had military backgrounds. A few belonged to wacko militia groups who are preparing for the day when the American government invades itself. Or something. I’ve never been able to sort out that kind of conspiracy paranoid bullshit.
My sense of unease about this case deepened the more I studied Bohunk’s organization. I mean… I’m pretty tough but he has actual trained soldiers with combat experience and lots of guns.
My last search before heading out was to find out about the Gogol Building, which was on Walnut Street and Fifth. It was a big, brown and tan monstrosity of a place that reminded me of Dana’s apartment in the original Ghostbusters movie. An ugly, overly ornate thing left over from the excesses of the art deco era. Lots of unusual angles, pitches, arches, and gargoyles. Not the tallest building in Philly, but in the top ten. It was once the world headquarters of the Gogol Trust, a banking and investments corporation, but it had changed hands twenty times in the last century. The current owner was—surprise surprise—the Dreamlands Trust. Oliver Boots had a suite of offices one flight down from the top.
The good news was that there were half a dozen banks of elevators and twenty stairwells. Bohunk could not watch all of those. The trick would be to find out which routes were being watched and then take one of the others. I figured the elevators would all be watched because who in their right mind would want to run up fifty-six flights of stairs?
Who, I ask you?
Sigh.
I’m not as young as I once was, and my body is a prime example of the phrase ‘it’s not the years it’s the mileage’. The odometer on my knees and lower back has been around the dial way too many times. Which means that to do this right it would have to be the wolf and not the middle-aged dumpy man who made that climb. That came with its own set of problems.
I got up from my desk and prowled my office, nervous and jumpy. I paced for a few minutes, thinking it through, imagining all of the ways this could go wrong. All the ways I could fail. All the ways I could get killed. It was a dishearteningly long list.
I locked the door, went into my phone booth of a bathroom, changed into one of the sets of clothes I keep on hand for jobs where I need to blend in. I chose a set of khaki shorts and shirt that bore the embroidered patch from one of the world’s foremost delivery companies. I added rubber-soled shoes and a billed cap. I slipped a heavy blackjack into my right front pocket. No gun, no knife. If things got that complicated I had other weapons. The sap was for persuasion of the obstinate. Useful in certain circumstances and, in a way, a kindness. The alternative was less pleasant.
I futzed around the office until I realized that I was stalling. I didn’t want to take this job. It felt weird. Wrong in some way I couldn’t quite describe. But there was an envelope in my office safe with a lot of very nice money in it. Money I needed. I had bills. I had alimony. I wanted to buy myself that putter, god damn it.
“Get your ass in gear, dickhead,” I said to my reflection in the mirror next to the door.
So, yeah, I got my ass in gear.
-5-
I drove to Center City and parked three blocks away, and walked toward the Gogol Building. I had pictures of most of Bohunk’s people on my phone—lifted from their service records online—and I had a lot of data about them memorized. Pretty sure I’d know them on sight. Wish I had something from each so I could have mem
orized their smell. Even in normal form I have a killer sense of smell. My spider-sense, more or less.
It was a blistering hot day in Philadelphia. Temperature and humidity both locked at 96. I felt like I was melting into the sidewalk. It was the kind of day that makes your whole body feel heavy and slow and stupid. There was a cart selling Italian water ices and I bought a cherry snow cone and ate it while I cased the joint. It’s hard to look threatening while eating a snow cone. Only way to look less threatening is to go out walking a golden Labrador puppy. The vibe I was projecting was delivery guy trying to find a slice of chill on a day when the furnace doors were all open.
It was pretty easy to find the first five of Bohunk’s team. They were sitting in cars with the motors running, windows up, air conditioning blasting. Any one person like that and you think he’s waiting for someone to come out of the building. But when you see five big guys who might as well be wearing THUG t-shirts sitting at precise positions near entrances, you start to see the pattern. I risked walking past a couple of the cars so I could take a sniff. Sweat, testosterone, cheap cologne, inadequate deodorant, Coca-Cola, some residual weed, gun oil, and…
Incense?
That was weird. Smelled like temple incense, the kind they use at yoga centers. And I smelled it on two different of Bohunk’s men.
It was a weird enough thing to jolt me. Plans are made based on an analysis of information. Intel, they call it in the military. Most things in life are predictable, which allows you to draw a plan of action even in the absence of total knowledge. When you encounter an anomaly it tends to make you pause, step back, and reconsider. Sometimes the anomaly is nothing, a momentary and unrelated weirdness. Had the incense smell only been on one of the thugs, I’d have noted it but not thought much about it beyond that. Maybe the thug did yoga. Or, more likely, he was sleeping with a woman who did yoga. But on two of them, though?
So I risked it and cased the other three cars with close walk-bys.
Incense. On all of them.
Exactly the same kind, and it wasn’t a faint trace, not like you’d get if you stepped inside a head shop or a store selling New Age stuff. This was a heavy hit of it on all of them. They’d been inside a room with a lot of incense in the air, and they’d been in that room for a considerable time. My guess was at least an hour. It was soaked into their clothes and hair.
Yeah, I can tell. I told you already.
I fell back and went into a Starbucks to reconsider my plan of attack. Under what circumstances would these guys be exposed to incense? Boots had said that Bohunk was employed by the Thule Society to obtain the artifact. The Thules were a semimystical organization, and that suggested rituals. Rituals and incense go together like Philly cheesesteaks and high cholesterol. Did that mean that Bohunk was part of the Thule Society? If so, was it possible these thugs were more than Bohunk’s muscle? Maybe they were all part of that relic-grabbing Hitler-worshipping crew of scary ass-hats?
Sure, that’s a jump based on smelling incense, but a private investigator without gut instincts should consider another line of work.
Did that change my plan?
No, not really. I was pretty sure I hadn’t been made, which meant that my FedEx cover was probably still good. I stayed in the Starbucks—which was cool and had a nice view of the Gogol Building—until one o’clock. That’s when all of the employees who had flooded the streets for lunch began to trudge back in. Crowds make great protective cover. I left the café, crossed the street without hurry, carrying the faux package I’d been toting around all morning. It’s an empty box with a false spring-loaded bottom that I’d taken away from a shoplifter once upon a time. Very smart, and there was enough tension on the spring that you could handle it and not realize there was a false trapdoor in the bottom. High tech for a guy like me.
I heard the crowd utter a collective sigh as they moved from the furnace heat of the streets to the mortuary cool of the lobby. They swarmed into the elevators and I went with them, looking nonchalant, but keeping alert. I saw two more of Bohunk’s men in the lobby and there was one on the elevator with me. More incense smell. I left the elevator on the fifteenth floor because there were still plenty of office workers in the crowded car. I didn’t want to wind up as the last person sharing the car with the Thule lackey.
The fifteenth floor was shared by a dozen small firms. Patent attorneys, accountants, and an actuary. I walked with purpose toward whatever office was at the end of the hall, conscious of being visible to the people on the elevator. When I heard the doors close, I turned around and ran back to the entrance of the fire stairs, which were on one end of a T-junction close to the elevator bank. No guards. No alarms on the doors. I eased the door open and spent ten seconds letting my nose do my reconnaissance for me. I had to shift a bit to maximize that. Half human, half wolf. I’d have gone all the way but I would have had to strip out of the clothes, or tear them. Didn’t want to do either.
The stairwell was clear, but not all the way to the top.
There was a man up there. I could smell the meat of him. And the incense.
Bohunk was smart. He’d positioned a guard near the top floor. Not sure why he didn’t just kick his way into Boots’s office and crack the safe. Even with modern alarm systems there are ways. I know a couple of safecrackers who could probably steal Donald Trump’s toupee collection without rousing Donald from his dreams of avarice. Boots said that there were alarms, and had given me the code, but he hadn’t said they were anything special.
That had been niggling at the back of my mind all along.
What was keeping Bohunk’s team outside of the office? What was making this so hard for them?
I seriously considered bagging this whole thing, going home, calling Boots for more information and trying it again tomorrow.
But…
Fuck it, I was already here.
I began climbing the steps from floor fifteen to floor forty-five.
-6-
First rule, cardio?
I know, I know. Go fuck yourself.
-7-
I went slowly. Partly to save my breath and avoid a coronary and partly to keep Bohunk’s minion from hearing me. Even in human form I know how to move without making noise. Actually honed that skill set back when I was a cop in the Twin Cities. Noisy, clumsy cops get shot a lot more often than stealthy, careful ones.
I stopped on the fortieth floor to catch my breath and reassess. The thug was up there on forty-three, pacing in the narrow confines of the landing. He must have had an earbud in, listening to AC-DC. My ears are good enough to catch the spill from one of the earbuds, so I figured he had one in and the other bud dangling. He probably thought that was a smart move because it didn’t totally block his hearing. It’s not a smart move. The placement of one creates a confusion for human hearing. It reduces perception of what is being heard, especially if you’re bored and if you like what you have on your iPod.
Stupid mistake.
He never heard me coming.
Not until I whipped the heavy lead blackjack across his ankle tendons. I was four steps down and he was looking at the closed fire door and not down the stairs. I caught him as he was pivoting for a turn in his pacing cadence. The blackjack is one of the old-school cop varieties—a heavy wafer of lead sewn between two paddle-shaped pieces of thick leather. Heavy and brutal, and apart from the crushing weight of the lead there is a stiff edge running around the business end of the weapon. Hold it one way and you have very precise blunt force trauma; but held at an angle you can rip an ugly trench through skin.
I gave him a little of both.
You don’t man it out when you get clipped by a blackjack in the hands of an expert. You go right fucking down, and you go down hard and you go down hurt.
I caught him as he fell and helped him fall harder by jerking him face-forward toward the concrete landing. Things broke. Chin, cheek, teeth.
The thug never had a chance to make any sound louder than a grunt before he w
as out. He’d need some reconstructive work on the face. Maybe later I’d try to dredge up a little regret about that. Maybe, but probably not. Bohunk was a scumbag and I doubt he hired saints. This guy was one of the faces I memorized. A former soldier who had been thrown out of the army for messing with underage Afghani village girls. Hired by Blue Diamond because they only hired assholes like him.
So… sweet dreams, lumpy.
The smell of his blood, fresh and hot and reeking like freshly sheared copper, hit me hard. If I focus my senses on it I can get high, like someone getting second-hand stoned by being in a room where someone’s smoking a blunt. I had to force my mind to focus as I patted him down.
He was armed to the teeth. A Sig Sauer with two extra magazines, and a small-frame .32 pistol in an ankle holster. A Buck lock-knife with a four-inch blade in his right front pants pocket. I sniffed it and smelled blood on that, too. Four, five days old. Female. Young. The wolf beneath my skin wanted to take a bite out of this shithead. His throat looked yummy. But now was not the time.
He wore a stone on a silver chain around his neck and I tore it off and held it up. At first I thought it was just a chunky lump of unshaped turquoise, but when I bent to study it I saw that it was a figure of what looked like Neptune. Or some similar kind of burly sea god. Heavy bearded face, fish tail, trident and attitude.