by R. J. Jagger
Then he bounded down the stairs two at a time.
Halfway down he turned and trotted back up.
Senn-Rae jumped when he opened the door.
“You’re impressed, right?”
She smiled.
“Yes.”
Then she got serious.
“Be careful, Wilde, just in case you’re right.”
“Okay.”
“What I’m saying is, if you have to get shot be sure it’s not between the legs.”
He pictured it.
“Trust me, if he’s pointing there I’ll drop so he gets the heart instead.”
100
T his was the worst idea Fallon ever had but she couldn’t live another minute without knowing if the man Jundee fought with was dead or not. She was the reason that encounter came to be, meaning if Jundee was a killer then it was her fault.
She fired up the engine, shifted into first and pointed the front end towards Vampire’s house.
When she swung by, the lights were out and no activity appeared.
Did the woman—Vampire—make a police report?
She’d seen Fallon, not only earlier tonight but also from the wreck. She could describe her with particularity. She’d also seen Jundee, albeit for only a moment, but the moment would be fresh in her mind. If the police were looking for her then they were looking for him. There was nothing she could do about it.
Screw it.
She didn’t know exactly where the fight took place but had a pretty good idea from Jundee’s description. It wasn’t on a sidewalk. It was several steps off in a yard next to some bushes. She drove down the street where it happened according to her best guess and didn’t see anything unusual.
She went by Vampire’s house again.
It was the same.
Dark.
Inactive.
No other headlights were anywhere in the area. All the sane people of the world were sleeping. She parked two blocks over and headed back on foot, hugging the shadows where she could and trying to not look suspicious.
She realized she was wearing white shorts.
Brilliant.
Underneath she had black panties.
Should she do what she was thinking of doing?
She chewed on it, then slipped the shorts off and tucked them up her T-shirt into her bra.
There.
Better.
She was pretty sure she had the correct street, which was the one behind Vampire’s. Starting at the first house, she ducked into the yard fifteen steps and walked parallel to the sidewalk.
She saw no body.
Suddenly headlights came around the corner.
Damn it!
She looked for cover and ended up flat on her belly behind a grouping of junipers in the front yard.
The car motored past without slowing.
She poked her head up just enough to take a quick look after it swept by.
It was a cop car.
Two cops were inside.
Her heart pounded.
Were they trolling the area because of a murder or was it just a normal routine?
She headed for the next yard.
No body was there, at least that she could see. It was too dark, though. She could be almost on it and not even know.
She kept going.
There was no body in the next yard.
Wait.
Bushes were coming up.
A black shape was next to them, not much darker than the ground but discernable nevertheless. Fallon swallowed and headed that way one careful step at a time.
The shape was a body.
She shook it and got no response.
It was hard and muscular, like Jundee described. The head was tilted at a strange angle.
She felt for a pulse and got none.
Then she wiggled the head.
It moved freely as if the skull was no longer connected to a spine.
Suddenly headlights swung onto the street from around the corner several houses down. It came from the same dark area that the cop car disappeared into.
Fallon laid on her stomach next to the body.
A second passed.
Then another.
Her arms shook.
Her instinct was to move.
She couldn’t.
Her chest was tight.
She couldn’t breathe.
101
T oday was the day Shade would die. She could feel it in her blood. It would be violent which wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. Violence was quick. The adrenalin would weaken the pain. Wilde would carry on with Visible Moon. He said he would and was telling the truth. What they hadn’t discussed, though, is whether Wilde would kill the man if it turned out that Visible Moon was already dead.
He probably wouldn’t.
He’d beat the daylight out of him.
He’d turn him over to the police.
He wouldn’t kill him though.
Wait, what needed to happen was for Wilde to give the information to Mojag.
She was two blocks away from Wilde’s office.
She turned back.
She needed to be absolutely sure that Wilde got the information to Mojag. She needed to get his promise that he’d handle it like that.
She was just rounding the corner onto Larimer Street when a cab pulled next to her and screeched to a stop. London rolled down the window and said, “Get in!”
The woman’s stress was palpable.
Something was wrong.
She hopped in.
London hit the driver on the arm and said, “Go!”
The vehicle pulled away with a stiff acceleration that sent Shade falling back into the seat. A car honked, cut off and not happy about it.
“What’s going on?”
“Not now,” London said.
She turned and looked out the back window.
To the driver she said, “Make a left at the next corner.”
“You got it, lady.”
102
T he lawyer, Stuart Black, practiced out of a pretty nice three-story standalone building on Bannock that looked like it started life as a mid-sized mansion and then got converted. The front door was locked and the lights were out. Wilde knocked, got no response and cupped his hands on the glass to see inside. A receptionist area had a desk cluttered with papers. Gray plastic covered a typewriter. A green banker’s lamp was off.
Wilde headed around to the back.
There he found an alley but not anything private by any means. On the other side was the rear end of a four-story hotel. Two weathered oak doors were propped open. Between them was a large dumpster. Someone could come out any second. They’d be steps away.
Speed was important.
The back door was locked, no big surprise, but the mechanism wasn’t the old skeleton kind from the earlier days.
It had been updated.
It would be difficult to jimmy.
Wilde punched the glass out with his elbow, reached through and unlocked the latch.
Then he was in.
No one was in the alley.
Someone might have seen him from one of the upper windows of the hotel, but there was nothing he could do about it.
Okay.
Get moving.
Don’t dawdle.
The first floor was filled with the reception area, a large conference room that doubled as a library, restroom facilities and a kitchen.
Wilde headed up a wooden staircase with a fancy oak banister to the second level. The front half of that floor was a large office paneled with dark wood. The back was a room with an old desk and scores of boxes stacked on top of each other along three walls. Handwriting on the ends identified the client files that were stored in those boxes.
Wilde ran his eyes from one to the next until he found the one he was looking for—MACK, JACK. Inside he found four separate expandable files pertaining to the man. He pulled them out, set them on the floor at the top of the stairs and then read the
outsides of the remaining boxes.
No more were relevant to the Mack.
He headed into the lawyer’s primary office.
He didn’t like being on the second floor.
There was no way out.
He was vulnerable.
No sirens were headed his way. That was good. If someone from the hotel had seen him, the cops would be on their way by now.
Stop thinking.
Keep moving.
The desk was piled with papers, none of them relevant to anything. Pencils, pens, paperclips, junk—that’s what was inside the desk drawers.
In the corner was a gray metal filing cabinet.
He opened the top drawer.
Inside were client files, probably current cases still being worked on. He riffled through them, reading the names on the tabs.
Nothing.
Nothing.
Nothing.
He opened the next drawer.
More nothing.
It wasn’t until he got to the bottom drawer that he found something of interest, namely that it was locked. He pried it open with a pair of scissors. Inside were more client files. One of the names jumped out at him, it was so unusual.
Vampire.
Rebecca Vampire.
He kept going. The very last file was an expandable one with several manila folders inside.
The word Shadow was written on the outside.
103
T he headlights moved eerily slow as they came up the street and punched out images of curbs and sidewalks and manicured grounds.
They dimly sprayed on Fallon.
They sprayed on the dead body next to her.
The spray was indirect, hardly a spray at all.
It was enough though.
It was more than enough.
Keep going.
Keep going.
Keep going.
They did.
They passed.
It was the cop car.
Then they suddenly stopped. Fallon didn’t move, not a muscle. The driver had his foot on the brake. The taillights threw an orange mist into the nightscape.
Suddenly one of the doors opened.
Fallon scooted over to the hedges and crawled backwards, keeping her eyes pointed at the street. Suddenly the dark silhouette of a man appeared at the edge of the yard. He walked towards her.
One step.
Two steps.
Three steps.
She got onto her knees, ready to bolt, hoping beyond hope she could outrun him. He’d shoot, no question, but it was almost pitch-black. If she zigged and zagged she might live.
Suddenly the man stopped.
There was a slight motion to his body. What was he doing, pulling out a gun? Then a strange sound came. She’d heard it before but couldn’t place it.
“Ahhh.”
Pissing.
The guy was pissing.
He was pissing on the bushes.
She breathed in and out through an open mouth, as controlled and quiet as she could. The man sneezed, zipped up and left.
The taillights disappeared into the night.
Five minutes later she was back at the car.
Did she dare do what she was thinking of?
Yes.
She had no option.
She got Jundee into this mess and it was her responsibility to get him out. She fired up the car, left the headlights off and motored back to the body. There she kept the engine running but shifted the clutch into neutral. She dragged the body towards the car along the hedges, got it into the trunk and took off.
No one saw her.
Two blocks away she let her mouth smile.
She did it.
In hindsight it wasn’t all that bad.
Not bad at all.
She checked the clock.
It was 2:45 in the morning.
She cut over to Santa Fe and drove south. The plan was to keep going until she got out of the city, way out of the city, then look for a nice quiet place to dump the body.
She wondered if she should tell Jundee that he actually killed a man.
Maybe she should just keep quiet about the whole thing.
There’d be no newspaper article of a dead body found in Capitol Hill.
He’d assume the man had simply regained consciousness and gone back to his little life of crime.
What would she want Jundee to do if the situation was reversed?
Tell her, or not?
She laughed.
What a dumb-ass cop.
He was right there taking a piss not more than ten steps away and never had a clue. Before she died, she needed to find out who he was, call him anonymously and tell him look around better the next time he takes a piss.
The miles clicked by.
Suddenly flashing lights appeared in her rearview mirror.
She was the only vehicle on the road.
They were for her, no question.
She looked at the speedometer—45.
She was almost positive that was the speed limit.
She wasn’t speeding.
She wasn’t weaving.
What was the issue?
Damn it.
Okay, don’t panic.
Just stay calm.
She pulled over.
The flashing lights pulled in behind her.
Almost immediately two cops got out and approached.
104
S hade had serious questions as to what was going on but it was clear London didn’t want to talk in front of the cab driver so she kept her mouth shut and stared out the window. One of the questions related to where they were going; London was giving detailed directions, she knew what she was doing. After fifteen minutes of zigs and zags she said, “Stop here.”
They were next to railroad tracks on the west edge of the city.
“Here?”
“Yes.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes. What’s the fare?”
He checked.
“A buck thirty two.”
London dangled a ten-dollar bill in her fingers. “You never had this fare, okay?”
He smiled.
“What fare?”
She gave him the bill followed with a quick kiss on the cheek.
“Have a nice life.”
“You too.”
They watched until he was completely out of sight, then London said, “Come on,” and started walking down the tracks.
Shade fell into step.
“The cops showed up at the hotel while you were out,” London said.
The cops?
Right.
The cops.
“I got out the fire escape before they busted in. We’re going to a safe place. I have a car there.”
They walked for a half hour then cut west into an industrial area. The first structure they came to was an abandoned metal building surrounded by weeds. London pulled a key out of her purse and opened a dirty steel door at the backside.
“In case you’re wondering, this is where I was going to keep you if the need arose,” she said.
Parked inside was a newer model Packard.
“That’s how I was going to transport you,” she added. “It has a big trunk.”
Shade frowned.
“I’m claustrophobic.”
“I was going to give you the chance to sit up front handcuffed to the door,” she said. “The trunk was only a last resort, if you didn’t behave yourself.”
“I probably wouldn’t have.”
“No argument here,” London said. “There’s food and water in the back seat.”
Shade opened the driver’s door and slid in.
The seat felt good.
Her feet were tired.
The keys were in the ignition.
The front end of the car faced the street, behind an overhead door.
“Open the door,” Shade said. “We’re going to take a ride.”
London shook her head.
“It
’s too dangerous. We’ll just lay low.”
“Visible Moon isn’t laying low.” Shade fired up the engine. Carbon monoxide shot out the tailpipe and choked the air. “Open the door or I’ll bust through it.”
105
W ilde was almost out of Stuart Black’s building when he paused to decide whether he really wanted to steal files out of a lawyer’s office. That was serious business. Once done, it couldn’t be undone.
He was getting too wild.
Sure, his cases justified extreme measures and maybe even demanded them, but at this rate he’d end up in jail.
He needed to be smarter.
He needed to reduce the risk.
He should read the files right here by the back door and then put them back where he found them. If someone came in the front while he was reading he’d be able to slip out the back without being seen.
He set the Jack Mack files to the side and concentrated on the expandable file, the one from the bottom drawer.
The Shadow file.
Natalie Levine.
That was the top folder inside the file and the one he pulled out first. Inside was a single sheet of lined yellow paper with pencil handwriting:
Natalie Levine
March 7
South Platte Industrial Park, abandoned gray metal building, roof behind heating duct.
Dames in Danger, Jan. 1950, page 39.
Very strong.
Put up a sexy little fight.
Got all horny, bought a hooker that night.
A second piece of paper was also in the folder. It was a page torn out of a magazine that had a pinup painting that went along with a story called “A Slut by Night.” On closer examination, the page number at the bottom was 39 and the header at the top was Dames in Danger.
He opened the next file.
Lana Corbin.
Inside, as before, was a single sheet of lined yellow paper with pencil handwriting:
Lana Corbin
June 4
Top of boxcar at old abandoned railroad yard south of Denver, off Santa Fe
Dames in Danger, April 1948, page 17