by Jim Butcher
My lungs sucked when I tried to breathe, and I felt the weight of blood as they tried to inflate. The asshole who’d taken his shot stopped feeling me up and regarded me, bloodshot blue eyes buried in a mug that was more furrows than face. Ugly son of a bitch.
I sat up and head-butted him, square in his bulging, vein-riddled nose. There was a crack, and a scream, and he crab-walked backward, screeching.
“You son of a bitch,” I said. I felt the front of my shirt. Blood, and underneath, hamburger. “This was my favorite suit.”
“Jesus!” Tom Mason screeched. “Jesus fucking Christ!”
The big cannon was still in his hand—a Colt Peacemaker, the same kind Wyatt Earp had carried. Single-action, six chambers full of pure destruction.
I got up, even though it hurt. Tom Mason pissed himself, and the sourness tickled my nostrils.
“Relax,” I said as I took away the Colt. The weight was good and familiar. I missed strapping on the iron, but fashions change, and you can’t exactly stroll through the gates at Paramount with a holster on your hip.
Tom Mason had clearly not gotten the memo.
“Who . . . what . . . ,” he started.
“Lee Grey,” I said. “Louie Montrose sent me.”
“You . . . how . . .” His eyes were bloodshot and glassy. He was fighting the dope, trying to understand.
“It’s a long story,” I said. “Mind if I sit?” My chest hurt like hell. It was going to take some time to knit that mess back together.
Tom Mason stumbled up, rattling the collection of bottles on his table until he found one that had an inch of liquid left. He drained it, never taking his eyes off me. “Few days ago, I would’ve said you were the devil himself.”
“Not even close,” I said. I could feel the slug sitting under my shoulder blade, a small dull flame that I’d have to cut out sooner or later. Now, though, I needed to find out what had Tom Mason so jumpy that he was unloading on anyone who walked up his steps.
“Louie sent you,” he said.
“So you were listening.”
“You tell that son of a bitch I’m not afraid of some cheap hood in an expensive suit,” he snarled, and through the saggy skin around his eyes, the sores at the corners of his mouth, and the last stubborn wisps of hair clinging to his freckled skull, I saw the kind of man Tom Mason must have been back in the day when you carried a gun on your hip instead of in your pocket.
“I don’t need you to be afraid of me,” I said. “I just need you to tell me you ain’t going to go blabbing whatever story Mr. Montrose is concerned about you blabbing.” Tom Mason snorted, and I drew out the bottle. “He told me to give you this, but I don’t want you to take it. A loopy old junkie is a lot more chatty than some ornery cuss with a forty-four.”
His eyes lit up at the sight of the thing, and I sighed and put it on the table between us. Tom Mason snatched it, rolling it in his fingers. Then, surprising the hell out of me, he shoved it back at me. “I can’t. I promised her.”
Here was something. A junkie will do whatever it takes to get his next shot. He can justify anything, and if the worst of it is shutting his mouth about some bigwig roughing up some bit player fresh off the bus from Nowhere, Indiana, then he’s getting off light.
Whatever was happening to Tom Mason, it had spooked him. Spooked him clean and mostly sober. “So who are we talking about, Tom?” I sat back and waited. At least the bleeding had stopped.
“No.” He stood and opened the door. “You need to go.”
Threatening men like Tom Mason gets you nowhere, and cajoling them only a little further, so I stood up, pulled my jacket over the bloody hole as well as I could, and left.
Tom watched me, and then pulled the curtains tight. I slipped through the neighbor’s yard and over the back fence. The basement bulkhead was locked with a chain, but dry rot had claimed the sash. Since it was ruined anyway, I threw my jacket over the spot to muffle the noise and dislodged the lock with one good kick.
Blackness trickled out, and cool air, stale from a long time underground. Around me, dust whipped through the fences and overturned one of the rusted lawn chairs that populated Mason’s backyard.
I flipped the top of my lighter and sparked a small pool of bright in the darkness. The stairs were half-rotted and sounded like gunshots when I descended.
The cellar smelled like earth, like a greenhouse that had died. Like a hundred other dark and shut-up places I’d been in my lifetime. I knew what I’d find before the flame searched them out—two indents of freshly turned dirt. A little scraping revealed a hand, pale and blue veined, presumably attached to an arm and the rest of the poor bastard buried in Mason’s basement.
I sat back on my heels, considering what I’d found. This would account for Mason’s performance up in the living room, but not for Montrose’s sending me over here. Unless Louie’s friend had gotten a lot friskier with the starlet than I’d imagined, there was no way he’d send me solo to clean up two bodies.
Lost in thought, I almost jumped out of my shoes when the hand moved. Twitched, clawed at the earth. The other dirt pile heaved, giving birth to a form that gave out a low moan.
A shadow dropped across the cellar stairs, and I managed to catch a glimpse of a pair of hands gripping a shovel before a flashbulb exploded inside my skull and I went dark.
“He’s awake.”
I floated slowly back to consciousness, a soap bubble rising and bursting in my brain. The scent of the cellar still clung to my nostrils, and the brick and dirt told me I hadn’t gone far.
Tom Mason regarded me. He took a pull from a fresh bottle and spit on my shoe. “Told you he was a tough nut.”
The woman who’d clocked me was a looker. Dim light and a concussion didn’t change my opinion on that.
“Is he one of Drago’s boys?” she asked. Her accent was soft and nubby as old velvet.
“Nah,” said Mason. “Said he was with Montrose.”
“Merde,” the girl said. She leaned in, arms on either side of me. I did a little experimenting and found I was tied to the chair they’d sat me in. Behind the girl’s bare brown shoulder, pale things moved in the dark.
“So what are you, dead man? Montrose doesn’t have the kind of juice required to make something like you.”
“That’s ’cause he didn’t make me,” I said. “He just pays me, and not well enough to put up with this shit.”
She leaned into my neck and inhaled deeply. Her perfume was light and airy, a direct contrast to her golden eyes and the dress that wrapped her so tightly it might as well have not been clothing at all.
“Saw him get right up with my own eyes,” Mason said. “Reckon he’s one of them?”
“Of course not,” she snapped. “Don’t be an idiot. Drago can barely keep his zombi walking, never mind make a dead man stand up and talk like this one.”
Mason hefted his gun. “I still say we plug him. Montrose is no joke.”
The woman turned on him, and I was glad I wasn’t on the receiving end of that look. “I don’t murder innocent people, Thomas. And neither do you.”
“He ain’t innocent,” Mason muttered. One of those white figures got too close to him, and he spat out the liquor. “Keep those fuckin’ things away from me, Marie, will ya? They make me irritable.”
She turned to the creature and made a shooing motion, snapping at it in a language I caught maybe every third word of. “The question remains, Mr. Grey—what to do with you?”
“Untie me and let me go?” I suggested. She laughed, and I realized she was younger than I’d thought.
“No, I think a man like you is more useful to me tied up. You can stay down here. The creatures have no taste for dead flesh.”
“What are they?” I craned around Tom Mason. One a man, older, probably not bad-looking in life, one a woman—a girl, really—blond and naked and very, very dead. I could practically count the veins under her dirt-smeared skin.
“Surely you’ve encountered those who walk the shadow
world, Mr. Grey,” said the woman. “After all, you are, to poor Tom at least, the boogeyman.”
“I ain’t scared,” Mason insisted, plucking at his piss-stained pants.
“Never seen anything like that,” I said. “They’re . . . alive?” I’d seen dead men get up and walk before—hell, for that, all I had to do was look in the mirror—and I’d dealt with vampires, demons riding a corpse’s skin, but never had I seen a human corpse dig its way back to the surface. After all the time I’d spent in my position, it was nice to know some things could still surprise me.
“Enough questions outta you,” Marie said. “I got a few of my own.” She retrieved a shiny red purse from out of my line of vision and drew a photograph from it. It was faded and stained, one corner folded over. A girl just as beautiful as Marie grinned out at me, a high-collared school uniform pegging her as the little sister.
“I’ve never seen her,” I said. Marie snorted.
“Oh, so now you’re psychic, too?”
“No,” I said. “But if you’re looking for a pretty teenage girl in a city like this, there’s a dozen holes she could’ve fallen into. If she’s been gone from home more than a month, then she’s probably on dope, turned out, or dead. I’m sorry, but that’s how it goes out here.”
This time, it was Mason who smacked me in the head. His fist was hard and knobby as a desert outcropping, and it set the bells in my skull to clanging all over again. “Back in my day, we knew what to do with men like you,” he said. “All it took was a sturdy tree and a piece of rope.”
“They tried that once,” I said, staring up at his red-rimmed eyes, not blinking. “It didn’t take.”
“Thomas.” Marie put a hand on his arm and guided him away from me. “Give me a moment alone.”
“Ain’t leaving you alone.” Mason gave a deep, wet sniff. “Don’t you see we can’t let him leave this place? Ain’t pretty but it’s got to be done.”
Marie’s grip tightened. “A moment,” she said. “Go upstairs, Thomas.”
He grumbled and stomped up the stairs. The Santa Ana howled like something alive and hungry as he opened and shut the bulkhead.
Marie pulled up another chair. The creatures had taken to leaning against the walls. One, the man, scraped listlessly at the dirt walls with broken fingernails.
“Listen,” I said to Marie. “I can help you. I don’t know what you’ve gotten yourself into, but I’m not a stranger to this.”
“I thought you were a mere thug, Mr. Grey,” said Marie. “Shackled to Louie Montrose.”
“He’s not the only one footing my bills,” I said. “I do what I want, and this is way more than what I signed up for. You want to find that girl, I know every flophouse, gin joint, and opium den in this town.” I tested the ropes again, but the knots were good. Probably Mason’s handiwork. “You can’t kill me,” I told Marie, “so you might as well take me up on my offer.”
“And what will you take in return?” she said. “I know men, Mr. Grey, and not one of them gives favors freely.”
“I want to go home and forget I ever saw this goddamn basement,” I said. “If finding some wayward kid is what it takes, then fine.”
Marie tightened her lips and then reached into the purse. She extracted a switchblade and cut me free. I sat for a minute, waiting for feeling to come back to my hands. The girl in the corner turned to watch me. One of her eyes was cloudy.
“Those things really aren’t going to chew on me?” I said.
“No,” Marie said. “They’re poor work. I am only caring for them, waiting for the curse to wear off so they can pass on peacefully. Come.”
We left the basement for the marginally more hospitable confines of Tom Mason’s kitchen. Flies were everywhere, hovering over spoiled food, glasses of bourbon and cigarette butts, and a sink full of what once might have been dishes.
I lit a smoke of my own to cover the stench. It didn’t seem to bother Marie, but I was getting the sense that not much bothered Marie. “Where’d you last see your sister?”
“I didn’t,” she said. “I got a letter back home that she’d been offered a small part, and she was terribly excited. That was two months ago. When the letters stopped, I came here. I also started looking for work, hoping I’d run across the person who’d done her harm. That’s when I met Mr. Mason.”
“And the two of you shacked up to open a home for wayward zombies?” I dragged and felt the smoke scald the still-raw parts of my lungs.
“Mr. Mason told me where she’d been staying, and when I went there I discovered the poor creatures,” Marie said.
I took out my notebook and pen, poised, while she looked me over. “You’re not the usual sort of thug, are you, Mr. Grey?”
“What tipped you off?” I said. “Surviving a slug to the chest, or my rugged good looks?”
She sniffed. “The Deluxe Hotel on Fountain Avenue.”
I put the notebook away without writing anything and stood, causing a horde of flies to swarm along with me. Marie frowned. “Don’t you want to make a note of that?”
“No need,” I said, going and retrieving my hat from the living room floor. I swiped a hand through my hair and clapped it in place. It’d been a lot of years since I’d needed to wear one to keep desert dust and sun out of my eyes, but I felt a little naked without it.
“I know the place,” I said to Marie, going back down the creaking porch steps to my car.
I changed out of my shredded, blood-soaked shirt and replaced it with a fresh one I kept behind the seat before I pulled up at the Deluxe Hotel. My jacket was done for, which meant I had to leave my shoulder holster behind, too. I shoved my automatic into the back of my waistband and hoped I wouldn’t shoot myself in the ass.
The Deluxe had drapes shut tight across every window, but knowing what went on there, I was glad. Whorehouses are all the same, really—dress them up however you want, change the time and the place, but they all smell like desperation and dead dreams. And a few other things I preferred not to think about.
In the lobby, I loitered for a minute before I started walking the halls. It was quiet. The kind of quiet that only comes right before lightning strikes.
A scream wavered from down the long hall behind me, tinkling the dusty crystals in the lobby chandelier.
I pulled out the automatic and moved without thinking—the part where I go toward the monster was second nature. Thinking about how rotten this situation was was a newer thing. I was just muscle. My days of saving people were a long way back on the road.
Plus, Marie’s innocent sister working in one of Hollywood’s biggest whorehouses? Her just happening to be there when I busted in looking to rough up Mason?
No. Something else was up here. I took aim as the door in front of me burst open, and a man in a cheap suit stumbled out, going down hard. It was one of the bouncers who should have been in the lobby, scrambling along the carpet like a crab at low tide. The guy collapsed with a soft sound, like air escaping from an inner tube. I put my gun away and turned him over, but it was too late. His throat was torn, and ruby-red arterial blood dribbled down his neck and over my hand, a warm brook soaking the carpet.
It distracted me, I’ll say. That’s my excuse for how the thing that had killed him landed on my back, nails scraping across my cheek, sour body odor overpowering the coppery blood.
The zombie hooked one finger in the corner of my mouth, letting out the kind of moan that only trapped, hungry animals are capable of.
I spun around, slamming it into a wall, which had all the effect of slapping the thing with a rolled-up newspaper. Teeth sank into my shoulder through my shirt, and I tripped over the dead bouncer and fell.
I prefer when I don’t see my death coming, like when Mason shot me. The first time I’d died was slow, had left me plenty of time to stare the reaper down, and now I threw up my arms to try to knock the zombie away. It had been one of the girls, and she was bloated and blue, like she’d been floating in the LA River for a night or two
.
A shape the size of a steamer trunk flew at the zombie and took it to the ground, snarling and shaking it by the neck until I heard a snap. A giant goddamn dog, twice the size of the wolves that prowled the Superstition Mountains back home. Black as coal, with red eyes. It let out a snarl like a motorbike backfiring, and with a final rip, the zombie’s head came off.
I pulled myself up the wall, feeling all the places I’d hurt tomorrow. The air around the dog shimmered, a bare second of heat rising off a desert floor, and in its place a woman stood. I stiffened, fighting the urge to reach for my gun. It wouldn’t do any good, much as I wanted to put a bullet between her eyes.
That wasn’t my job anymore, I reminded myself. I was calm, steady. I didn’t give a shit about monsters, unless they cut me off in traffic or tried to unionize Mr. Montrose’s production company.
“You all right, mister?” the woman asked, smoothing a hand over her hair. Her accent was pure hill country, and she wasn’t dressed like the city was her natural habitat, either.
I examined the bloody hash marks in my shoulder. “I’ll live.”
She looked me up and down. She had the sharpest gaze I’d encountered in a long while, predator eyes that didn’t miss anything. “You a cop?”
“Nope.”
She pointed at my waist. “Then why the piece?”
“You ask a lotta questions for a lady who just turned from a giant dog,” I said. She tilted her head, running my accent through her head to try to place it, no doubt.
“Texas?”
“Arizona,” I said.
“What’s your name?”
“Lee.”
She extended her hand. “I’m Ava.”
I went to shake it, and she twisted my wrist and slammed me into the wall, giving it a nice dent in the shape of my head. “Where’s Marie?” she shouted, her small hand wrapping around my throat.
She was strong and sneaky, I’d give her that much, but her approach could have used some work. I couldn’t answer if she was choking me unconscious.
She slammed me again, and this time I saw two bright spotlights flare in front of my eyes. “I know you’re helping her find Constance!”