Seam glanced at the secondary headline for about the ninth time since he’d arrived at the Bad Cow, hoping something else to talk about cropped up soon.
MANHUNT CONTINUES FOR L.A. RIPPER, the headline blared. Underneath that was a tastefully-edited photograph of a trashed hotel room, and a subheading that read MAN & WOMAN KILLED IN RITUAL SLAUGHTER. Below that: The search for the perpetrators of grisly slaying enters third month; investigators are not ruling out organised crime or related motives.
Lawyer Alfredo ‘Alf’ Haussman and girlfriend Candice Benson were found dead in a motel room in Los Angeles on Monday the 25th of June, butchered in a manner that the Los Angeles Chief of Police has described as “gross.” Authorities and forensic experts are comparing the crime-scene to a number of occult ceremonial slaughters laid out in writings like The Satanic Bible, and older works from the Aztecs…
“Shit eh,” Tommo summarised with his usual succinctness. The little black and white picture, if you looked closely enough, showed a room sprayed luridly with what looked like ketchup but probably wasn’t, and decorated with five-pointed stars and pentagrams and slogans written in a foreign but obscene-looking dialect. Nothing that a twelve-year-old who had seen the tamest horror movie would raise an eyebrow to, but nevertheless a pretty graphic picture for the front page of a Friday paper. And as Little Phil had complained, not a single mention of the Bulldogs to be seen. “Wonder who’d do something like that.”
“Isn’t alfredo a kind of spaghetti?” Little Phil asked.
“They reckon the experts are saying that whoever wrote all that stuff and drew those diagrams–” Nutter gestured too-casually at the photograph, “–reckoned they were the Devil. Or thought they were a Demon.”
After their discussions with Barry in his early weeks as an Angel, the Sheepbreezers were far more inclined to take that sort of stuff seriously. And yet, murderers who thought they were Demons still outnumbered actual Demons by … ooh, several hundred to two.
Seventeen-year-old Troy Haussman, son of Alf Haussman and his estranged wife Henrietta, committed suicide just a few weeks prior to the brutal murder. Allegedly killing himself with a fountain pen and leaving a fragmentary suicide note blaming his father’s affair with Miss Benson, investigators are not ruling out the possibility that Mrs. Haussman hired a person or persons to commit the murder as revenge. Accountants are checking the couple’s finances…
“Shit eh,” Tommo said again.
MISSION ACCOMPLISHED
Nails stepped into the smoky late-night atmosphere of the Bad Cow. The cigar lounge was emptying as the night hit its lull period when most of the customers moved on to one or another of the nightclubs elsewhere in Fremantle, or headed into Perth. They might be back later on when the nightclubs closed, but generally speaking the Bad Cow didn’t recover its midnight crowd.
Seam was sitting alone at their usual table. One by one Tommo, Nutter and Little Phil had given up, offered their excuses, and gone home to sleep. Seam raised a hand, entirely unnecessarily, and Barry hurried over to him.
The Angel looked no more flustered than he had when he’d left a few days earlier. His clothing was the same op shop stuff he’d picked up over the past month or so, though Seam noticed he’d changed his boots. His new pair was bigger and bulkier and higher-up-his-leggier, ingrained with greasy grey dust at the lace-holes and tongue.
And the empty satchel he’d been carrying when he left was now full. By the shape of the bulge, it contained a coconut with two railroad spikes sticking out of it. Seam was under no illusions that this was what the bag actually contained.
Accompanying the Angel was a huddled figure wrapped in a great black trench coat.
At a nearby table, a spotty-faced teen in a red cardigan lurched to his feet, looking as if he’d had one black Sambuca too many, and dressage-walked off towards the toilets, tottering widely around Barry without seeming to notice him. Barry, likewise not seeming to notice the boy, picked up his chair and offered it to the figure in the trench coat, which seated itself shakily and bundled itself up even more. All Seam could see was that it had long, curly chestnut-coloured hair, with what were either bleached-blonde or unsettling-white highlights.
The Angel thumped the bag down on the table and sat heavily at his own chair, which had been left vacant by common agreement every time the team had gathered at the Bad Cow since his departure. Nails looked about the same as always, but there was a look in his eyes that would have translated as tiredness – perhaps even exhaustion – in a lesser being.
“It’s done,” he said simply.
“Done?” Seam asked in relief.
Barry Dell reached out and opened the buckles of the bag.
PRESTON POINT ANGLICAN CHURCH
I
Barry was sitting near the little black coffin trimmed with silver lace when the young bloke stepped through the doors of the church. He looked about seventeen years old – a pair of shades atop his head, a brown drawstring bag hanging on his shoulder. Barry smiled at the lad, quelling a surge of envy at the freedom human beings had. Barry had rid the world of a millennium-old mass-murderer and made Sydney safe, or had at least returned it to its background level of unsafeness. He should have been given the key to the city.
Instead, here he was. House arrest for, oh, let’s say eternity. He could go out into the yard, he could stand in the sun, but he couldn’t leave. Not after dawn. Whichever consecrated ground he ended up on, there he was trapped. Every day. Forever.
The young visitor walked slowly up the aisle between the pews, turned and sat at one of them. He had a sour expression on his face that made Barry smile. Sometimes people came to church when they didn’t want to, he concluded. But maybe it was still good that they came. Maybe that was the point. It seemed weird that, as an Angel, he still didn’t think he was in a position to say for sure. But that was life for you.
He returned to his examination of the coffin. He had carried Laetitia all the way from Sydney in it, with a few day-stops along the way, and she hadn’t come out, hadn’t made a sound, hadn’t moved as far as he could tell. Even though Barry knew that ‘larval’ Vampires were quite capable of walking in the sunlight, she hadn’t stirred. In fact, she’d been so quiet, he’d been forced to open the lid and check that she was still in there a couple of times despite the fact that he no longer slept and the coffin hadn’t been out of his sight. Being in the box had seemed to calm the girl, and the Angel needed a little peace – not only to lug her three-and-a-half thousand kilometres across mountains, outback and freezing nighttime desert, but to decide on a plan of action concerning what he was going to do with her once he got back to Fremantle.
He still hadn’t figured it out.
“Not a loved one, I hope.”
Barry gave a start and looked up. It was the young bloke from the pews, standing suddenly behind him and speaking with an incongruously cool American accent, like some sort of surfer dude from a movie. It didn’t go with his face, or his bearing, or his clothes…
It hadn’t happened to Barry since his return to Earth, but this kid had actually caught him unawares. He must be preoccupied if this gangly teen could sneak up on him. He smiled again. The American was skinny, pimple-spotted, and was wearing a red cardigan – probably at the urgings of his mother, who had decided it was cold outside, in spite of the sun.
“Oh – no, it’s empty,” Barry easily assured the boy, who was leaning against the wall with forced, awkwardly self-conscious casualness. Above his head was a shelf, and on that shelf, under a thick piece of cloth, was a shiny black object that looked like a museum employee’s practical joke. Barry had discovered that, once the sun came up, the Vampire’s skull had begun to lose its gloss and flakes of powdery ash had begun to drift off it even though the interior of the church wasn’t particularly bright. Wanting to preserve this little trophy of his first victory over the forces of evil Barry had covered it with the cloth, which seemed to provide sufficient protection from the rays of the s
un. The youngster didn’t seem to notice the cloth-covered object anyway. “The vicar who works here had to get it for a funeral that’s happening tomorrow. Nobody I know though,” Barry ran his hands over the intricate lacework. “It’s lovely work, isn’t it?”
“Yeah, pity it’s gonna be buried or burned, right?” the kid said, then lost interest. “But sure, it’s real nice. Well, I’m gonna take off. Just popped in to … you know.”
The Angel nodded. “Good for you,” he felt obliged to say.
II
Father Bryant remained a bit confused as to how exactly he knew the Angel. He supposed, when an Angel arrived in your church and said he was an old friend of the flock, you didn’t ask too many questions. Especially when the Archangel Gabriel also showed up and told you not to ask too many questions. And the Archangel Gabriel looked like a monkey.
It was all a bit much, really. The whole situation called to mind the old detective movie classic, with the Good Cop and the Bad Cop who teamed up to get a witness to cooperate. Only in this case, he supposed, it was Good Angel and Cranky Archangel Whose Appearance Said Very Worrying Things About Evolution. And instead of an uncooperative witness there was just a daft old man of God who just hoped he wasn’t upsetting anyone.
Still, this daft old man of God was more than happy to let Barry the Angel sit around in his church pews day in, day out. He’d even jokingly asked Barry to put in a good word or two for him upstairs. He was a nice young fellow, Father Bryant thought. And then he worried whether he was allowed to think about an Angel as a nice young fellow.
He shuffled out into the church proper to find Barry was the only occupant. Barry and the coffin, that is – and Barry had insisted that the coffin was nothing to worry about, and so Father Bryant wasn’t worried in the least. The Angel looked up, and smiled, and Father Bryant resisted the urge to run out of the church and become a priest all over again.
“Hi,” Barry said.
“Hello there,” Father Bryant said. “I thought there was somebody else … sorry to disturb you.”
“No worries,” Barry said casually. “There was a guy here a second ago, but I think he just wanted to pop in and out again,” he gave a self-conscious little laugh. “I don’t even know if you have anything on your schedule today.”
Father Bryant smiled nervously. He’d never expected to see an Angel in the flesh, so to speak, but even so he had to admit these celestial beings were not what he’d been expecting. Barry, for example, seemed completely ignorant of Anglican Church practices and bylaws. He supposed it was a test of some kind. That made sense, if you didn’t think about it too much.
That was faith, wasn’t it?
“What happened to the … the…” he mouthed the words Vampire skull, not certain if the Angel would understand. Barry looked blank, and Father Bryant pointed at the shelf where there was now nothing but a piece of dirty cloth hanging limply. He knew that Barry had been trying to hide the truth from him out of concern for his heart, but to be honest the revelation that his Angelic church-guest was also a Vampire hunter made more sense than anything else that had happened since Barry’s arrival, and Father Bryant had been quite relieved to make the discovery. Barry had, after that, been a bit more forthcoming and had actually shown him the horrible flaky black object he’d taken as proof of his good work.
Barry looked at the shelf, and blinked.
“Oh,” he said. “It must’ve finally given up the ghost. It was falling to bits already – you know, Vampiress and sunlight,” he shrugged his great fluffy white wings. “I didn’t expect it to disintegrate that fast.”
There was something obscurely wrong, Father Bryant thought, about the word disintegrate coming from the mouth of an Angel. But if he was being honest with himself, he was quite relieved that the skull was gone. It really hadn’t been the sort of decoration he felt was appropriate, even for a church that had a Vampire-hunting Angel living in it.
III
Troy Haussman strolled along the sunlit street, the brown drawstring bag over his shoulder bulging in a way it hadn’t been before. He looked up at the sun in the clear blue sky, smiled thinly and pulled his shades down from the top of his head again. He patted the drawstring bag cheerfully, feeling its gritty layers falling away even under such gentle pressure.
“Don’t you worry about a thing, Canon,” the Demon said to the Vampire. “You’ll be right as rain by nightfall.”
Whistling a jaunty tune from one of his favourite television shows, Troy turned a corner and stepped into a deserted alley between a travel agency and a souvenir shop. He paused for a moment, mid-whistle. He knew it was a tune from one of his favourite shows, but for some weird reason he couldn’t quite remember which show it was. It was like those specific memories were obscured by static. No, not static; just a nagging blind spot, and a jumble of confusing whispers when he tried to remember. It was worse than someone reciting random numbers when you were trying to count. His dad had done that to him, Troy remembered, back when he was attempting to learn multiplication. If you couldn’t do it while you were distracted, you couldn’t do it.
He shrugged to himself, pushing the memory and the tune away. It didn’t really matter. He had work to do.
He headed deeper into the alley, out of sight of the poor impressionable mortals, and dived into the shadows.
He was pretty sure it was getting easier.
TWO POLICEMEN WHO REALLY DON’T GET PAID ENOUGH FOR THIS SHIT
The two New South Wales Police Force officers, Tunthorpe and Gail, looked around the shattered bedroom in disbelief and a growing horrified awareness of the situation.
“Christ,” Gail said succinctly.
Tunthorpe shook his head and kicked at a pile of brick-gravel. “What do you reckon did all this? Some sort of gun?”
“Grenade launcher, maybe,” Gail snorted. “The door to the penthouse was busted the same way, but this is brick. No sign of weapons-fire, either, no powder burns, in fact no burns at all, and no other damage to the walls. It looks–” it looked like a Looney Tunes cartoon character had run through it, but there was no way he was going to say that out loud. “It’s a bloody shambles,” he concluded, “and no reason for any of it.”
“And it’s been like this for a week, they said?”
“Probably a week,” Gail clarified. “That’s when the disturbance happened, but the neighbours didn’t see anything before that so they didn’t think there was anything strange about not seeing anything after that either.”
Tunthorpe looked around, and whistled. “Imagine just living day by day, getting up and going to work and coming home, with a bloody war zone on the floor above you.”
Gail grunted. “It’s actually a wonder we were contacted now.”
“And nothing stolen?”
“Nothing. Except for Mister Canon and his entire staff and all his associates,” Gail opened his file and looked at the information on the case – such as it was, since this was basically the first police involvement and filling the file was up to them. Even calling it a case was generous. Another fact adding to his steadily-flourishing unease. “But they’ve had all the time in the world to just pack up and leave, or make other arrangements, so there’s no way to say if they’re missing. I don’t even know what this is,” apart from a joke.
Mister Canon was rich, and strangely-unspecified European, and he owned this entire apartment building. His arrival on the 9th of August, almost three weeks before, was his first actual visit since his purchase of the property over twenty years ago, a transaction that had been carried out entirely through legal representatives.
He’d arrived in his own private jet, with a ‘staff’ of five and an unspecified number of ‘associates’, information on any of whom it was very difficult to find. And then, at some point in the intervening weeks but most likely on the previous Monday night, they’d all vanished. It was difficult to get any information about what specifically had been different about last Monday night that made it stand out
as a possible incident-date. Some residents had reported some noises. That wasn’t much to go on.
Almost as fruitless, in fact, was searching for information on Mister Canon himself. This was made even more awkward by the fact that the NSW Police had something of an unspoken, highly uncomfortable vested interest in not looking for any of the above information. The people who put food on their tables – and Gail wasn’t talking about the taxpayers of New South Wales – were heavily invested in not asking questions above a certain level.
About all they’d been able to dig up by way of preparation was that Mister Canon was Old Money, and a lot of Old Money at that.
“Mister Canon’s associates and staff all seem to have disappeared without a trace,” Tunthorpe agreed.
“Well, not quite without a trace,” Gail pointed back out through the insane hole in the bedroom wall, where a pile of expensive clothes lay against the opposite wall of the corridor beyond. The clothes were covered in greasy dust, and if they were the same as the scattered garments in the outer rooms, these ones were filled with dust as well. Once again, the clothing displayed no signs of weapons-fire or indeed of any violence whatsoever – except that their contents seemed to have been incinerated.
Tunthorpe put his hand on the butt of his old Smith & Wesson Victory, and grinned. “Say it and I’ll shoot you.”
“Say what?”
“Spontaneous human combustion.”
Gail sighed and unbuckled his holster. “Now I have to shoot you,” he said regretfully. They both laughed. “What the Hell d’you reckon it is, though? The stuff in the clothes?” Gail went on, re-securing his sidearm and going back to looking around in frank disbelief.
Bad Cow (Oræl Rides to War Book 1) Page 11