by AnonYMous
‘Name it,’ Cromwell smiled, heading for the door.
‘You know anywhere I can get my hands on a copy of Weekend at Bernie’s 2?’
Nineteen
Breakfast cooked by someone else was one of the few things in life that Sanchez cherished. The Olé Au Lait was renowned as the best place in Santa Mondega to get a decent fried breakfast. Even better, the food was brought over to you by the delightful young waitress, Flake. Today she had even been kind enough to place a newspaper by the side of Sanchez’s plate. He knew, though, that she treated him well only because there were no other customers in the café at that time of day – eight o’clock – anyway. The rest of the city folk were probably all hungover; in fact, Sanchez was one of the only early risers in the place.
‘I’ll have a good tip for you later,’ said Sanchez, winking at Flake. The sweet young brunette winked back at him but said nothing, heading back behind the counter to wait for the next order. Sanchez was moderately sure, too, that as she walked away from his table she was deliberately wiggling her butt for his benefit. So he made a point of staring at it, just to be sure her efforts didn’t go to waste.
When he’d finished staring, he looked down at the items on his table. A rapidly cooling cup of coffee that had arrived ten minutes before the food he’d ordered, a newspaper and an oversized white plate crammed with bacon, sausages, fried eggs, giant mushrooms, grits and home fries. Where to start?
He began with a swig of coffee, then picked up his knife and fork and dived into the nearest sausage. Picking it up on the fork he took a giant bite out of one end. Mmm delicious, he thought.
The front page of the newspaper had a rather dull article about a local priest being involved in some sort of choirboy-buggery scandal. An all too familiar story, and one that held no interest for the likes of Sanchez. Like many tabloids, this one featured a photograph of a nubile young woman on page 3 of every edition. He turned the front page over, ready to feast his eyes.
And when he did, he damn near choked on his sausage. As his jaw dropped open, the half-chewed bits fell out and onto the table next to his plate. Staring back at Sanchez from page 3 of the Santa Mondega Universal Times (or SMUT, as the locals preferred to call it) was a picture of Jessica. Fully clothed, mind you, but it was definitely her. When he looked more closely, he saw that it wasn’t so much a photo, but a photo of a painting of her, with a caption underneath:
Missing. $500 reward for information leading to whereabouts.
Shocked, the bartender looked around him suspiciously. He was still the only customer in the Olé Au Lait, so it was a safe bet that no one had seen his sausage fall out. Apart from Rick, the chef behind the counter.
‘You okay, Sanchez?’ he called over. His big floppy white chef’s hat was hanging over the front of his face, but in any case he bore an uncanny resemblance to the Swedish chef from The Muppets. He had big bushy eyebrows, tiny, almost invisible, beady eyes and a thick brown moustache. ‘Something wrong with your sausage?’
‘Nah,’ Sanchez shook his head. ‘Just felt a sneeze comin’ on, is all. Seems to have passed now.’
‘Okay.’ Rick nodded, and turned back to the paper he had spread on the counter.
Sanchez returned to his own newspaper. In the picture, Jessica was wearing an entirely black outfit, which, from what the bartender could recall, was the only outfit she actually owned. The brief wording in the copy printed beneath the picture requested that anyone who knew her whereabouts should contact the paper. There was no mention of who had placed the advertisement, not who was offering the reward. Now Sanchez was not averse to getting his hands on the five hundred dollars on offer, but he much preferred staying alive. If word got round that he had Jessica, in a coma, tucked away safely in an upstairs room of the Tapioca, then there was a darn good chance he’d get a visit from the Bourbon Kid. And he sure as shit didn’t want that. Maybe it was the Kid who had posted the missing-persons ad? One thing was certain – Sanchez needed to know who was looking for Jessica, and why. But he couldn’t risk calling the SMUT himself and having it known that he was taking an interest in the situation. Distractedly, he picked up the half-chewed piece of sausage from the table, slipped it back into his mouth and started chewing again. After swallowing it and washing it down with a mouthful of coffee he shouted back over to the chef.
‘Yo, Rick! How’d you like to earn yourself a free bottle of liquor?’
Rick frowned. ‘If I have to earn it, it ain’t free.’
‘Do you want a bottle of fuckin’ liquor or not?’
‘Sure. What’s the catch?’
‘Can you call the SMUT for me, and ask them who placed this missing-persons advert?’ Sanchez held up page 3 of the newspaper for the chef to take a look.
Rick wandered round from behind the counter and grabbed hold of the newspaper, studying the advertisement.
‘No way they’ll tell you who’s posted it. It’s a confidential ad,’ he said, shrugging.
‘There’s gotta be some way of finding out.’
‘Could be. I know a friend of a friend works for the SMUT. Reckon I can ask him to dig around and find out, if it’s that important to you.’
‘It is. And it’s worth a bottle of my best liquor to you if you can do that for me.’
‘Tennessee whiskey?’ the chef asked hopefully.
‘Whatever you desire,’ Sanchez replied, grandly. Anyone who knew him also knew that anything for which he was prepared to give away something that had cost him hard cash, had to be real important.
‘You got yourself a deal. Might take a day or two to find out, but I’ll give you a call, soon as I hear anything.’
‘Thanks, Rick I really appreciate it,’ said Sanchez. It sounded as though he meant it, too. ‘Top up that coffee for me, will ya?’
The chef frowned. ‘Why couldn’t you call the SMUT yourself?’ he asked.
‘I don’t want anyone knowin’ I’m interested in this girl, is all. Let’s keep this between us. Yeah?’
‘Sure,’ said the chef. He grinned, then added, ‘You know where the coffee jug is. Top up your own coffee, you tubby bastard.’
Twenty
Stephanie Rogers had been given the most exciting assignment of her entire career in the police force. True, it had sounded like a dull exercise at first. Read a book, compile a presentation based on your findings, and offer suggestions to the hotshot detectives on where to begin investigating those findings. But this was no ordinary book, and this was no ordinary police headquarters in a city that was itself far from normal.
What Officer Rogers had been reading was an untitled book by an anonymous author. The very same book that had been read by countless other folk, all of whom were now dead. All murdered. Not one single survivor. The success of her task depended upon what she discovered within the pages of the book. It was hoped that she would find the reasons for the murders. Well, she had now completed the task. It had been a solo project, and a top-secret one at that. One that she was allowed to discuss with no one other than the select few who had assigned the task to her.
And now here she was presenting her findings to that select few. Three detectives in charge of solving the great mystery of The Book With No Name, its links to the murders, and, of course, its connection with the Bourbon Kid, of evil memory.
It had been drummed into Stephanie right from the day she had been given the assignment that she should present all of her findings, no matter how ridiculous they might seem. Which was a relief to her, because the findings were, frankly, utterly preposterous, and completely unbelievable.
Captain De La Cruz and Detectives Benson and Hunter each sat at a different desk in the briefing room. It was a room with the look and feel of a classroom. Windows ran along one side of it, all with the dark blinds pulled down. The opposite wall was windowless, but for a small glass panel in the door to the left of the lecture podium at the front. There were twelve desks, set out in rows of three in front of the podium.
Micha
el De La Cruz sat in the small plastic chair at the front-row desk closest to the window. He was a good-looking Latino, always well groomed and with impeccable taste in clothes. He was probably the vainest officer on the force, but his carefully contrived appearance was a prime example of just how meticulously he approached all aspects of his life. The minor details mattered to this man.
Certainly they mattered to him more than they did to his colleague, Randy Benson, a scruffy individual with an unwashed appearance, sitting at a desk in the third row from the podium. He still lived with his mother, and it was rumoured that he’d never had a girlfriend. Stephanie believed the rumours, because this unkempt, brown-tank-top-wearing, white-haired loser had a notoriously short fuse, probably brought on by some deep-rooted sexual frustration. He was an unattractive man in just about every way possible. He was also extremely hairy. If, God forbid, she ever saw this man without his shirt on, she thought that there was every chance he would turn out to have an afro stuck on his chest.
The third officer, Dick Hunter, sat at the centre desk in the very back row. Stephanie didn’t know him well. He had only been a member of the force for eight months or so – another of the new recruits brought in from out of town to replace the dwindling numbers since last year’s massacre. He was a South African with thinning, light-brown hair, and for the most part seemed to be well-educated and well-spoken in equal measure. Maybe just a little shy, Stephanie thought.
For thirty minutes the three of them listened to her talk about her findings, and not once did any of them interrupt or give even so much as a hint as to what they were thinking. Stephanie found it hard to tell whether the three thirty-something officers were taking her seriously or not, so that by the time she came to her summary she was feeling embarrassed and wishing she had never been given the assignment in the first place.
‘So, to summarize,’ she began, finally arousing some interest in Michael De La Cruz. She had hoped to impress him, not least because she had been involved in a brief but torrid affair with him only six months earlier, and she was rather hoping for another taste. The man was a sexual tyrannosaurus. A devil in the sack.
Hearing her announce that she was about to summarize, he sat up as though he was only now starting to pay attention. She did her best to pretend she hadn’t noticed, but it broke her concentration for a moment. She paused slightly in order not to stumble over her words as she began the summary. She had dressed in her smartest and sexiest work outfit especially for this presentation. A sharp grey suit jacket with a skirt that didn’t quite reach her knees and a white blouse that showed off just a little cleavage, and yet not one of these losers had complimented her on it. The best she had received was a slight leer from Benson, but that was nothing new. He’d leer at a woman wearing a garbage sack if he thought he could see some flesh.
Not wanting, for various reasons, to make eye contact with any of the detectives, she fixed her gaze on a computer monitor on the small side desk beside the podium as she launched into her summary.
‘The Book With No Name is basically a hotchpotch of different stories and possible facts cobbled together in one volume. It makes hardly any sense, for the most part. The grammar and spelling are absolutely abysmal and the author is clearly a moron, which might explain why he didn’t put his name to the book.’ There was a polite laugh from De La Cruz, which calmed her nerves a little. She allowed herself a brief smile before carrying on. ‘Although that could also be because there is possibly more than one writer. But the standout facts are these,’ she pointed to a whiteboard behind her, on which had appeared the first slide in a presentation she had compiled on the computer. It was a photograph of Archie Somers. ‘Detective Archibald Somers, a well-respected officer in this very department until his mysterious disappearance, was in fact the Lord of the Undead, Armand Xavier.’
She could feel her stomach tightening as the enormity of what she was saying tore into her like a bad bout of food poisoning. The three officers exchanged glances with each other. None of them gave anything away, but then, they didn’t need to. So far as Stephanie was concerned they were undoubtedly thinking she was an idiot. No use in stopping now, though, so she brought up the second slide.
‘This woman, known as Jessica Xavier, was his wife and was responsible for turning him into a member of the undead some time after he discovered the Holy Grail and drank the blood of Christ, which made him immortal … obviously.’ She tried her hardest to sound as if even she didn’t believe the nonsense she was coming out with, just in case they were about to laugh at her. Yet once again she received no reaction from her audience.
Slide three. A picture of a hooded man, his face concealed in shadow.
‘This man, the Bourbon Kid, is believed to have killed both Archibald Somers – or Armand Xavier, whichever you prefer to call him – and his wife Jessica last year, during the eclipse. Their three sons,’ she skipped to slide four, a picture of El Santino, Carlito and Miguel, three dead local gangsters, all shot to death in the Tapioca. ‘They were also killed by the Kid – probably – but their bodies were recovered and their deaths have been verified.’
Slide five. A picture of The Book With No Name, probably from an old engraving.
‘This book, the one I have been reading and researching, was allegedly made from the Cross upon which Jesus Christ was crucified. This means that it cannot be touched by the undead or it will kill them. Bit like Superman and Kryptonite, I guess.’ Again, no laughs from her audience. Shit! ‘The book positively identifies Archibald Somers as Armand Xavier, which is why he set about killing everyone who ever read it. But of course he couldn’t destroy the book, because to touch it would bring about his own death.’
Slide six. A still from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, showing Harrison Ford holding a wooden cup.
‘The Cup of Christ. The book says nothing of its whereabouts other than that the last people to have seen it were Armand Xavier and his friend Ishmael Taos, a monk who, we believe, was the father of the Bourbon Kid.’
Slide seven. A photo of a monk – meant to be Ishmael Taos, but actually Chow Yun Fat from the film Bullet-Proof Monk.
‘According to The Book With No Name, drinking from the Cup of Christ – or Holy Grail, as it’s also known – grants the recipient immortality.’ She paused. ‘Well, not quite.’ All three detectives looked a little more interested, just as they had done briefly when she had touched on this part of the story earlier in the presentation. ‘To drink the blood of Christ grants immortality, but Xavier and Taos had already done so some hundreds of years ago, leaving nothing over for anyone else. Drink the blood of Xavier or Taos, or their descendants, and immortality can be attained also, only to a slightly lesser degree. Drink the blood of a vampire from the Cup and the effect is much the same, except that the recipient becomes a member of the undead. I think that effectively what the book is saying is that you’ll get the strengths of whoever’s blood you drink from the Cup. So if you drank Einstein’s blood I guess you’d become a genius, or something like that. But there’s also a suggestion here that I suspect has never been tried. Drink a combination of the blood of the descendants of those who drank Christ’s blood, vampire blood and mortal blood, and there’s every chance the recipient would become not only immortal, but all-powerful. Not just King of the Undead, but King or Lord of Everything. More powerful than Somers, Jessica, the Bourbon Kid or Ishmael Taos. In fact, probably more powerful than all of them put together. The trump card, if you like.’
With that, her presentation was technically finished, and she looked around for one of the three men to offer a reaction – a positive one, she hoped. To her relief, De La Cruz began applauding.
‘Stephie, you’ve excelled yourself. This is fantastic stuff.’
‘Really?’
‘Damn right. This is exactly the kind of thing we were after.’
‘Then I ought to say that there’s one other thing that I didn’t put in the presentation. The best part.’
B
enson and Hunter sat to attention. Could Stephanie Rogers really have something, some piece of information better than what she had already provided?
De La Cruz got up from his seat and spoke for all of them. ‘Go on,’ he said, walking up to join Stephanie by the computer.
She took a deep breath. ‘I found out what happened to Ishmael Taos,’ she said, smiling.
Hunter piped up from his desk at the back of the room. ‘Give her room, let her speak.’
‘Ishmael Taos was murdered shortly after the eclipse. He was beheaded in his sleeping quarters.’
‘Ow!’ yelped De La Cruz, wincing and rubbing his neck.
‘I suspect he was murdered by the Bourbon Kid, who, as I suggested earlier, was his son. The Kid killed him, and just about every other monk on the island of Hubal, and disappeared, along with a precious artefact, the blue stone known as the Eye of the Moon.’
The three detectives looked at each other. For some reason it suddenly crossed Stephanie’s mind that they might already know this piece of information. They were probably only humouring her by acting surprised. So, then – time to surprise them one more time.
‘You already knew that?’ she asked.
‘We suspected,’ said Benson, getting up from his desk and rubbing his crotch a little to rearrange his genitals. Hunter, following his lead, also stood up. He picked up his briefcase from the floor by the side of his desk and prepared to leave. But the ranking officer, Captain De La Cruz, gestured to his two colleagues to wait a moment. He knew Stephanie well enough to know that she had something else to say, something important.
And Stephanie did have something else to say. She tried to be nonchalant about it, but her voice gave away how impressed she was with herself.
‘Do any of you know who the Bourbon Kid is, though?’ she asked with a hint of smugness. ‘Or where he lives?’
‘Nope.’ De La Cruz shook his head. ‘Nobody knows those things. And I suspect no one ever will.’