by Richard Hein
“That’s why I bought you this one. I’m keeping the receipt, Samuel, and you’ll pay me back.”
She paused a second, checking herself in the reflection of the glass in the entrance. “Besides,” she said, “you look good in it. Respectable, even.”
Our footsteps echoed on the clean tile of the entry hallway. It was elegant in its understated aesthetic, a higher caliber of decor without dipping into ostentatious. Recessed lighting, white flooring, a hint of stainless steel for accent.
Dining on the souls of the homeless seemed to pay well.
Kate straightened her jacket as we found the door marked Manager just past the elevator and stairs. Even apartments had managers these days it seemed. I gave her a glance over, but she looked far better than I did. She’d skipped on the usual paramilitary look in favor of a smart pair of slacks an off-white button-up shirt beneath a black leather jacket. She looked like a detective in a television show, which fit our narrative rather well.
It looked nice on her.
With a nod to her I hammered on the door.
Soft footsteps approached, and the door opened a few inches, stopped by a chain. A thin face peered out from behind wire-rim spectacles. A man of perhaps sixty regarded us.
“May I help you?” the man asked.
I fished my fake badge out and held it up in one palm, long enough for his eyes to take it in. It vanished back into a pocket.
“Detective Walker,” I said, my voice carrying a hint of hardness and formality, “and Detective White. We only need a moment of your time.”
The man stared, internal wheels clearly grinding. After a moment, he nodded, closed the door and unhooked the chain. He opened once more, though I noted he didn’t invite us in.
“Reginald,” the man said, offering a hand. I gave it a firm shake. Kate did as well. “Reggie.”
“We’re here regarding a missing person,” Kate said. “Apartment four nineteen. Simon.”
Reggie crossed his arms and straightened, a man that had just gone on the defensive. The cataloging eyes swept over us again, recalculating his initial assessment of the two of us.
“I haven’t seen him,” Reggie said at last.
“Which is why we are here,” I said in an even tone I reserved for annoying retail employees, “and why Detective White mentioned the words ‘missing person’. What can you tell us about him?”
Reggie glanced past us toward the front door. When he looked back at me, he seemed tense, ready to slam the door in my face. I slid one shoe forward, hoping to block the door if he tried it. “He pays his rent on time. Anything else?”
“We’d like to see the apartment,” Kate said. “See if we can find anything useful that might help in the investigation.”
“Who called it in?”
“Excuse me?”
“You said Simon is missing,” Reggie noted. The door closed a few inches. “Simon keeps to himself. Never has guests, never has friends over that I’ve ever heard. Far as I know, the bloke has no family. No one ever shows up for him. So, who called in a missing person report on him? Maybe he’s on vacation. Maybe he isn’t answering his phone. Point is, who says he’s missing?”
“The point is,” I said, letting my annoyance seep into my words, “we’re asking to see his apartment. Politely. Please.”
“No.”
I blinked. “No?”
Reggie grinned. “No. Unless you’ve got a warrant? Nah, I can see by the look in your eyes you don’t. Privacy is very important in this world, Detective…”
“Walker,” I grated.
“Detective Walker,” Reggie continued. The door slid another few inches closed, stopped by my foot. “You can’t just show up and expect to be let into someone’s home just because you ask.”
“You could just let us in out of the goodness of your heart,” Kate ventured.
“I could, but I’m not going to. Imagine how you would feel to come home and find that some police officers had traipsed through your house without your knowledge or permission, without the backing of the law behind them. I’m not trying to cause any troubles; you see, I just believe the law is the law for a reason.” His grin widened. “It protects you and me both.”
I wanted to rip my tie off, wrap it around his throat, throttle him with it, and force feed him my badge.
“That’s understandable,” Kate said with far more grace than I could have managed. “Thank you for your time. We’ll be in touch if we need anything else.”
Kate turned, hooked me under an elbow, and dragged me away. The door clicked closed behind us.
“Well, that’s a bust,” Kate breathed. “I’m all for personal rights, but that’s a pisser.”
“Was worth a shot,” I said, counting backward from ten mentally and stabbing the elevator button. Huh. Maybe Sanctuary’s meditation tricks were helping. I felt… maybe not sanguine, but less volcanic. “Now we get to do it the fun way.”
“Was that badge real?”
“No idea. There’s a whole box of them back at base for such occasions. Like the prize in a Cracker Jack box. Ever want to be a parking attendant? I can make you a parking attendant.”
“You have low ambitions, Samuel. Dig me out something with more glamour.”
“Katherine White, I hope you are not maligning the dignity of being a parking attendant. All jobs are important and you shouldn’t make fun of them.” I paused. “Except for apartment managers. Fuck those guys, yeah?”
A minute later we exited out onto the appropriate floor. Unlike the downstairs, they'd spent little money on aesthetics. Flat, neutral colors occupied much of the wall space, with a few prints of old photographs depicting Seattle at the turn of the century to break up the monotony.
Simon’s apartment sat at the end of the hall, abutting a tiny window that looked out onto another brick building across a too-narrow alley. I fished a hand into my jacket pocket and slipped out a couple of pairs of neoprene gloves, handing one set to Kate. I doubted the police would show up to investigate this missing person, but it paid to be careful. I slipped my gloves on with a rubbery thwack and wiggled my blue fingers at Kate theatrically before trying the handle.
Locked.
That suited me fine. I took a knee before the door and pulled a flat pouch from my inner pocket. Flipping it open, I showed Kate a variety of delicate picks, flourishing a hand like a game show hostess displaying the prizes.
“You carry lock picks,” she said, eyebrows rising.
“Only when I'm breaking into a house I don’t have a key for,” I said, selecting a torsion bar and a slim pick with a pointed, curved tip. “Or for that far right cupboard in the break room at Sanctuary.”
“Why not leave it unlocked?”
I peered into the lock and saw little. I'd need to do it by feel.
“Because we keep the cleaning supplies in there, and I have a dumb sense of humor about sealing away bleach wipes and sponges. I picked a set up on a lark forever ago. It felt like the sort of thing an agent with a clandestine organization should know.”
My fingers moved with slow, methodical probing as I counted the pins with the tip of the pick. Five. Kate crossed her arms and planted against the wall.
“Aren’t they illegal?” she asked.
I felt one pin give as I bumped it up, freeing a little of the pressure on the lock. “Owning them? No. It varies state to state, but in Washington you have to have malicious intent for it to be illegal.”
Kate snorted. “Like breaking into an apartment of a missing creature of human-like form from another dimension?”
The final pin slipped up and the torsion bar twisted sideways. The door popped open. I rose and grinned at Kate.
“Exactly like that,” I said, slipping the tool away. “I promise not to tell if you don’t.”
“Would now be a good time to tell you I spied a fire escape on the way in and we probably could have gone in that way?”
“Let me have this one, Kate. I need to feel like a spy on
ce in a while.”
Kate snickered. “Bland. James Bland.”
I rolled my eyes and entered the apartment.
You know those documentaries about ancient shipwrecks? The footage from remote-operated vehicles showing a field of detritus scattered across the sea floor, deposited there as the ship twisted into the inky blackness? Dolls, chairs, the occasional shoe?
Simon’s apartment was like a messier version of that.
I stepped in, trying not to disturb the mayhem and failing. It looked as if a nine-point-seven earthquake had swept through the front room. Nothing could have been in its original home. A long floral-patterned couch lay on one end, the other arm wedged against the ceiling. Papers and books littered the floor, like a library had vomited its contents into the apartment. The overhead lamp hung by naked wires, bulb broken. Paintings were torn from walls, the shattered remains of a television were spread across a ten-foot area, and even bits of the carpet had been pulled up.
Kate gave a low whistle.
We navigated to the far side of the room, where a small hallway branched into a bedroom, bathroom and kitchen. More of the same. I noted the bedroom lacked an actual bed, and wondered if it was because Simon didn’t sleep on account of not being human, or if it was lost under the toppled wardrobe and tidal wave of clothing torn and scattered about.
“Is it macabre if I say there’s a chance Simon is buried under all of this?” Kate said. With one gloved hand she picked up a shattered fragment from a large dinner plate, now lying atop thawed TV dinners.
Both were in front of the bathroom, a good fifteen feet from the kitchen.
“Question is, was this Simon, or someone else?” I said with a shake of my head.
Kate’s response was a thoughtful frown.
Are you getting anything? I asked Lauren. Magic residue, the sense of an Entity, a crushed Simon pinned beneath a clothes hamper?
So, you’re just going to ask for help when it’s convenient, Lauren said, and chastise me for being an evil demon monster when I offer to keep you alive? That’s a shit deal, Samuel.
I bit down a response. Fine. The old fashioned way it was. My eyes wandered over every surface, hoping for a clue of some sort. Had Simon gone insane and trashed the place? The Twins had said Simon was missing, and that didn’t leave me much to go on. Could someone have broken in and kidnapped the Entity? I checked the door again. Someone had locked it with no sign of forced entry. If someone had broken it in, they’d done it as smoothly as I had and locked it on their way back out.
At the end of the living room nearest the hallway to the bedroom lay a toppled bookshelf. I hunkered down and rocked it up, peering underneath. A small pile of books lay beneath, each with exquisite bindings. A few looked like personal journals, hardcover Moleskine. Another dozen sheets of loose paper jutted from beneath. I grabbed a few and slipped them free. Most had a corner or two torn, but each sported writing in a neat, looping penmanship.
“Huh,” I said, flipping through a few. “Check this out.”
Kate glanced up from sifting through another small pile of books beside a toppled recliner and crossed over to me. I handed her the top sheet. Two corners had ripped free, and a dozen lines crisscrossed its surface, going from sentences to the edge of the page. Most of the lettering seemed to be names.
“‘Hannah Dale, long-term possession’,” Kate read. “There’s an address beneath it, and a line going off to the edge. ‘Victor Gerald Troutman, Outsider’. Another line.” She glanced up. “Outsider?”
“Corporeal Entity?” I wondered aloud. I handed her a few of the other pages. “The rest look the same. Names, some addresses, lines going off to…” I frowned and snatched the first sheet back from Kate. On the wall next to the window I spotted a fleet of push tacks, some with fragments of paper still stuck beneath them. I held the sheet up to the wall next to a couple of ragged edges.
They fit.
Kate matched paper to tacks. The lines overlapped, going from one page to another. I kicked around under a pile of pens and markers dumped from an end table, found a roll of tape, and fastened everything back to the wall once more.
“This means something,” I intoned, gesturing at the whole.
“A whole lot of crazy, I think,” Kate said. We scrutinized the mural in silence.
Every name had a line. Some led to other names, others to locations. I noted The Odyssey on one page, with a dozen lines pointing to it. Some listed ‘possession’, most listed ‘outsider’.
I tapped one page in particular.
“‘Stefan Klein’,” I read. A line connected another name beneath it. “‘Dieter Huber’.” I saw both listed as ‘long-term possession’, and connected to their magic shop’s address. I shared a look with Kate.
“Okay,” she said slowly. “So, Simon was… what? Tracking Entities?”
I nodded. “Kinda looks that way, doesn’t it? Neat trick, if it’s true. I wonder if that’s an ability or just deductive reasoning.”
Kate chewed a lip and frowned at the restored pantheon of pages. I swallowed and scanned each, searching for my name, hoping I wouldn’t find it.
My name was absent. A flood of relief washed through me, followed by annoyance. I’d been possessed for over three years at this point. Why wasn’t I on the list? Was it not a census of all the Entities in Seattle, or was there another detail I was missing?
A soft whisper of wood on wood brought my head around. Just five feet away sat that window I’d noticed earlier, sliding upward. A dark shape stood beyond the glass. I motioned for Kate and we both pressed up against the tacked and taped pages, frozen as the window crept up. A leg slipped in, dark jeans with a brown shoe at the end. A hand crept through and palmed the sill, pulling the form behind it.
I snatched out and locked a hand around the wrist.
The figure gasped and stumbled back, wrenching the hand from my grip. I lunged half out the window just in time to see a man hit the back of the railing on the emergency stairs and pivot over it, tumbling four stories to the alley below.
Chapter 14
Peering down through the rusted lattice of metal making up the fire escape, my heart hammered in my chest. The body lay sprawled in the alley, amid muck and trash. A horrific and ignoble end, and I’d caused it. My stomach turned, threatening to empty. I squeezed my eyes shut and tried to breathe.
“Huh,” Kate said. I felt her nudge me out of the way and lean out the window. “Looks like he’s fine.”
I blinked my eyes open and peered back down. Sure enough, the man rose. Sweeping grime from the tweed jacket he wore, the man glanced up at us. We made eye contact.
He turned and bolted.
The tension and anxiety that had gnawed into my muscles vanished in an instant. I hadn’t killed someone! A moment later, white fury flooded my veins.
That meant that this wasn’t a man at all, but either someone possessed and thus mostly immune to damage in our world, or a physical Entity.
“Shit,” I said, flinging myself out the window. My feet hammered on the rattling steel stairs as I rushed downward. An Entity breaking into Simon’s home? That screamed suspect at me, or at least an ambulatory clue. I heard Kate’s frantic steps behind me as we descended. My feet hit grime, and I sprinted down the alley after the target, tie flapping out behind me.
The figure hooked a sharp left at the sidewalk along the street ahead. I waved at Kate to go around the block by hooking around behind us, hoping we’d flank the creature. Her footsteps retreated, assuring me she got the gist.
I took the corner as hard as I could, veering wide and nearly hammering into a green steel trash bin. My target was half a block ahead of me, loafers slapping pavement as the figure ran. I couldn’t make out much detail from here. A tweed jacket billowed out above a pair of faded blue jeans, and I could see a white crop of wild hair surrounding a bald spot that shone in the afternoon sun.
Maybe a shitty guidance counselor.
We weren’t anywhere near dow
ntown, so there were only a few people out on the sidewalks. There was, however, still plenty of traffic, and the creature veered between streaming cars. Horns blared and tires squealed. I dodged past a couple pushing as stroller, stumbled off the curb, and almost tasted steel as I sprawled across the hood of a Prius.
Swearing, I pushed up and dashed around the end just as the figure I was chasing ducked into the end of another alley. The thing glanced over a shoulder. I saw the eyes widen behind thin wire glasses a moment before the air between us warped and twisted. Dust danced into the air and trash swirled from the gutters, driven by a gale-force wind that the creature had brought into our reality. I twisted, but the wind clipped my side. The sky and street swirled through my vision as the spell battered me from my feet and sent me tumbling back into the street.
I landed hard. The cut across my stomach announced it had broken open again with a screaming pain that was second only to the red agony that erupted across my left arm. More tires squealed as cars tried not to turn me into a road bump. With a groan I pushed up, wincing at the burning across my arm. My jacket had come up as I’d landed and I was sporting a wide patch of road rash, complete with gravel embedded in it.
Growling, I rose and stumbled after my target. I saw Kate dash through a crosswalk half a block to my left, not sparing a glance as she raced to get to the end of the block and around to the alley first. I gulped air as I tried to push into a sprint once more and found that I could only manage a fast jog. The figure ahead of me was outdistancing me, feet splashing through puddles as the Entity dashed past enormous garbage bins and fire escapes.
Without thinking, I reached out with my will as I ran, forcing my thoughts into another reality. I took my cue from the blast that had rocketed me from my feet. The air rippled in the alley, just ahead of my fleeing target. Trashcans detonated upward, springing at the fleeing figure on jets of concentrated wind, battering in from both sides. A hail of garbage rained down, marring the tweed jacket. Each blow rocked the creature’s stride. It dodged the fourth trash receptacle, but failed to notice the wooden pallet I hurled with will and wind, hammering in just above those stupid loafers.