by J. R. Rain
Considering all that’s happened, she’s handling it rather well. Seeing her happy is heartwarming. I bet this girl’s going to be okay. She’s tough, smart, and keeps her head in terrifying situations. How many kids her age would’ve thought to steal the life raft before the killer?
“Ugh! You’re squeezing me too hard!” Hannah gurgles.
I ease off on the hug. “Sorry.”
Her giggle fades to a smile, then a serious face. “Are you gonna catch the bad man?”
“You bet. Right now, I’m doing everything I can to make sure the police get him.”
“But, what if they can’t?” She sniffles. “Another man tried to kidnap me, and the police didn’t do anything.”
I subconsciously continue rocking her side to side. “The police have to work with rules. They can’t put people in jail because they did something wrong unless they can prove it.”
Hannah gives me a heart-melting stare. “What if they can’t prove it? Will he try to hurt me again?”
“No.” I look her straight in the eye. “If the police don’t get him, I’ll drag him straight to the bottom of the sea.” Hopefully, if the cop sitting outside hears me, he’ll think I’m humoring a child. Little does he know, I’m serious.
She perks up, raising her fist like she held a javelin. “So King Triton sticks him wif’ his trident?”
There’s no… Oh! That cartoon movie. I can’t help but laugh. “Yeah. And he’d do it too.”
Hannah grins.
he Stricklands drag themselves into the room a few minutes after three, palpably beat. I set Hannah back down so I can stand. She runs over to hug her grandparents, nearly taking Gerald off his feet. After Lorraine gives her a hearty embrace, the child darts back to the bed, scrambles up onto it, and grabs her game unit.
“Can I get you something from the cafeteria?” I ask. “You both look exhausted.”
Gerald waves dismissively after sinking into one of the large cushioned chairs. He lets out a long, labored moan of relief.
“Oh, you’ve done so much already.” Lorraine sounds winded. “Do all private investigators go so far out of their way for their clients?”
I pat the back of her chair. “This wasn’t ‘private investigator,’ this is helping because I want to. Are you sure you don’t need anything?”
“Thank you, but we just need a moment to recover from walking around so much.” Gerald waves his hand back and forth as he continues. “Go here, go there, wrong form… go to another office, up the stairs, down the stairs. It’s so damn exhausting to die, I swear I’m going to live forever so no one has to deal with this for me.”
He’s torn apart over David; the emotion’s shining off him like a modern lighthouse. Some men don’t get sad, they get angry―at everyone and everything around them. I’m about to worry when Hannah runs over to him so she can show him how far she got on the game. His rage and grief fall away in an instant. When she smiles at him, he breaks down, scooping her into his arms and crying.
The child appears confused for a few seconds, but forgets the game and hugs him.
“It’s okay, Pop. Gran’pas can cry when they’re sad. I miss Mommy and Daddy too.”
I face the window and wipe my eyes. Lorraine sniffles into a tissue.
A minute or two later, when I’m sure I can speak without giving in to emotion, I turn back around. Gerald cradles Hannah while she plays her video game. Lorraine leans back, almost asleep in the chair.
“I still need to track down who sent that unwanted visitor. I’m happy to stick around if you could use the help, but as long as that’s left unanswered, there’s risk.”
“Of course.” Lorraine yawns, stands, and walks with me to the door. “It doesn’t matter how much time it takes. Whatever you need to do, you do it.”
The cop on a padded bench outside the room leans around the doorjamb and smiles at us. Cripes; he radiates boredom like the sun throws off heat.
“Look.” I glance back at Hannah with her grandfather. “I’ve been doing this sort of work for a while now, and I don’t often say what I’m about to say. A few years ago, I had what you could call a rather lucrative divorce. Before you ask, no, it wasn’t hostile. He felt bad and offered it. Anyway, I’m not hurting for money. You’ve got a granddaughter who needs you more than I need your check.” I grasp Lorraine’s shoulders. “Don’t worry about my fees, all right?”
Lorraine stares at me aghast. It’s only been four days since I first saw her, but her hair seems greyer already and her face, older. “That’s… too kind of you, I―”
“It’s not a negotiation.” I wink. “What can I say? Your granddaughter wormed her way into my heart from the instant I saw her picture. I’m so glad I got to her in time.”
“Thank you.” She hugs me. “It’s… I don’t know if I’ll ever be at peace with losing David, but at least a part of him lives on. Get that son of a bitch.”
“With pleasure. I’ll drop by or call as soon as I have something to pass along.”
She nods and drifts back into the room. On the way down the corridor toward the elevators, I entertain a daydream of swimming deeper and deeper into the ocean with Troy impaled on the end of an antique trident. That’s really not a bad idea, but I don’t own a trident.
My warning buzz starts up as soon as I’m in the elevator, so I stare up at the ceiling. Great. Watch the cable snap. Do these things even still use cables? I can still remember when they required live operators. The humming grows in volume when I arrive on the parking level, but it’s not as intense as the time I almost wound up getting sucked into the screws of a submarine that came out of nowhere. To this day, it boggles my mind how a machine that big could’ve snuck up on me. I had to have been fixated on something else, but I can’t remember. Hitting those screws wouldn’t have killed me, but I don’t want to know what it would’ve felt like.
Worse than your first fusion.
That thought causes a shiver.
I’m on alert as I walk into the garage. Nothing appears out of place, but the buzz continues. Usually, I don’t have to wait too long to find out what’s setting it off. No more than two or three min―
Bang.
A bolt of searing agony stabs into my back, burning like a forge-hot sword. My body reacts to the sudden pain, crumpling in a heap. Everything goes white. Damn, I hate getting shot. Ouch with a capital ‘o.’
Since I’m still thinking, I know I didn’t eat a silver bullet. So, whoever shot me has no idea what they’re dealing with. Good. I’ve gone to a lot of trouble to make sure of that. At least I’ve got the better folklore. There’s vampire hunters and werewolf hunters, but no one thinks of mermaids as evil. Except, possibly sailors from long ago. Nowadays, we’ve been liberally slathered with cute. You say ‘mermaid’ to someone and their reaction is some innocent little teenage girl perched merrily on the rocks with a giant smile. I chuckle mentally. Oh, if only they knew what we can be like for real.
Two sets of footsteps shuffle over to me while I play dead. People shot like I’ve been hit don’t spring back up. I either play dead until they leave or kill these two so stories of zombies don’t start spreading. If the guy risked firing a gun, we’re probably alone enough that I can pay them back for that. I really hate being shot. It stings. Especially tracer rounds. Thankfully, this one’s not on fire.
“Grab the purse,” whispers a man above and left. “Make it look like a mugging.”
That’s a complication. Now I’m curious.
As soon as I feel a tug at my bag, I thrust my arm out and grab a hairy wrist with a cheap watch.
“Gah!” screams the guy.
The other one starts to yell, ‘Fuck,’ but I only make out the ‘Fu’ before a rapid-fire barrage of gunfire drowns him out and punts my consciousness into a landscape of agony. Everything goes white. I can’t move or even scream, it hurts so much.
My senses return after an eternity, and the washout haze dims back to the parking garage. I’m face down in a
puddle of blood. My blood. Lovely. Tires squeal on concrete in the distance, echoing around the garage.
A stream of Latin curses scrolls by in my thoughts, too fast to tell where one word ends and the next begins. Beneath the searing burn of multiple shrinking wound channels in my flesh, painful hunger wells up.
Gritting my teeth, I press my forehead into the cold ground, waiting for twelve holes to close, the bullets being forced out in excruciating slow motion. It probably takes less than a minute, but it feels like an hour. The most maddening case of the itchies imaginable finally fades away and I push myself upright. Except for two that went all the way through me, a cluster of lead slugs slides off my back and clatters to the floor. At least I’m wearing a plain wine-colored shirt, although it’s a little redder now. If I’d had my favorite angora on, I’d have gone out of my way to do something particularly bad to those two.
Growling, perhaps sounding a bit too much like an enraged tiger, I storm over to my Rubi and open the back door. I always keep a spare set of clothing around for ‘mermaid issues.’ Spontaneous necessary nudity happens more often than one would imagine. Usually, it doesn’t involve bullets, but I can’t exactly run around covered in blood looking like an extra from a horror movie.
I radiate my charm at full power, though rather than intoxicating, I give off a sense of nonexistence. While I’m stripping down to nothing, a pair of security guards come running around a bend at the other side of the parking garage, chattering into their radios about ‘sounded like it came from this way.’ Both have handguns out. Huh. Guess they’re off-duty cops or something.
My bloody clothes go into one of the empty waterproof bags. The two guys stop at the puddle of blood and look around, staring straight through me at the parking garage. Neither reacts to me as I stand there wearing only blood, wiping my chest down with a towel.
“There’s brass on the ground,” says the guard on the left. “This is where it happened.”
“Whoa.” The other man lets out a long whistle of awe. “That’s a lot of damn blood. Where’s the body? Are those slugs? What the fuck happened here?”
“Like I know?” The first guard squeezes a mic on his shoulder. “We found it, but you’re not gonna believe this.”
Quick as I can move, I pull on a clean set of jeans and a turquoise babydoll top from the watertight bag. I only packed flip-flops since I wasn’t about to leave decent shoes sitting in a bag in the back of my Jeep for who-knows-how-long. Once dressed, I shut the back door, making them both jump.
The men aim their guns around while shouting, “Police, show yourself!”
I stare at them, allowing my thoughts to overwhelm theirs. They won’t see my Rubi moving, and won’t remember it was ever here. The garage probably has cameras, but I’m far too pissed off and famished to think about anything complex right now. Fortunately, my ‘don’t see me’ effect works on cameras too, similar to how vampires don’t appear in mirrors. However, my Jeep has no such luck. I’ll have to hope they don’t get a good view of the plate. Leaving the two men in stunned silence, I hop in, back up, and drive off.
By the time I join traffic outside, I’m so hungry, the steering wheel is probably trembling in fear. That’s both an upside to my new existence as well as a downside. Anything short of silver (or maybe total immersion in lava) will heal, usually in under a minute. I even got up close and personal with a sea mine once. Lost both arms and most of my tail. Amazingly, that didn’t hurt as bad as what happened to me minutes ago. Shock, I think. By the time my brain recovered from the pressure wave of the mine, my body had put itself back together.
Though, talk about feeding frenzy. That one had been so bad, I don’t even remember the first half hour of it. I’m sure if I’d have come across people at that time, I’d not have cared.
I’m not as hungry as I was after the mine, but close. The more hurt I am, the hungrier I get, like my body somehow turns raw meat into more of me. Though, I suppose that’s technically how it works for normal people too… only much, much, much slower.
Impatient, I head for the nearest mom-and-pop seafood market and buy a giant, whole salmon. It’s all I can do to stand there politely tapping my foot while the woman weighs and wraps my fish. I’m sure watching me devour the whole thing raw would make her a permanent resident of a mental hospital―or a bar.
What’s the world coming to? Not even our kind bother hunting for themselves anymore.
I chuckle. I’m hungry right now. The last thing I need is to wind up crippled and weak and get stuck on land somewhere, too far to get back to the ocean. That’s another way I can die, and it’s nowhere near as painless as silver. It takes weeks, and the worst part is, if I go more than about three or four days without spending some time in the sea, the withering is pretty much irreversible, even if I get back to water. This is one reason I’ll never travel more than a few hours’ ride from an ocean.
Saltwater lake would scratch the itch too.
Okay, fine. Never more than a few hours’ ride from a large body of salt water.
The woman smiles as she rings up the salmon and hands it over. “Thanks. Have a great day.”
I put the credit card away, take the fish, and stop breathing. If I smell it, I’m going to bite it, paper and all. “You too.”
You’re not waiting to get home, are you?
Nope. I don’t want my Rubi permanently reeking of fish, so I duck into an empty alley not too far from the market and let my shark teeth out to play. Those legends about mermaids appearing beautiful until the happy part of meeting them ended? Yeah, that’s my mug. But, beauty is not an illusion. I’m not a fanged monster hiding under a spell. It’s like my tail, or the way a werewolf can change. I’m only a razormouth when I need to be. Like… now.
The salmon’s gone in under a minute―head too. I don’t eat the paper.
I wonder if the woman at the fish market would be disappointed to learn I didn’t cook it up all nice and fancy? Maybe not. Technically, it’s still my dinner. The end result of a human buying their fish is still that fish winding up in the belly. It’s enough to take the edge off and keep me sane until I can get to the sea.
After a short while of basking in the joy of not starving, I head back to my Rubi.
‘Make it look like a mugging’ isn’t the sort of thing said at a random shooting. Maybe I shouldn’t have walked away after attempting to talk to Troy. I bet those two are connected to him. I guess it’s time I start rattling some cages, but I’m still peckish.
After arriving home, I leave a trail of clothes on the floor from front door to back, and head outside to my little private dock. I’m up to a full sprint halfway across the yard, which becomes a flying leap into the waters of Lake Washington.
Rainbow trout, here I come.
etting chewed up by bullets―rather recovering from getting chewed up―has run my batteries down so to speak. A pair of trout and two crabs took care of my hunger, and a good hour-long swim relaxed me.
I know why I’m a private investigator and not a police officer. Bureaucracy irks me. If there’s any truth to what Licinia told me about belief creating gods, then I am sure belief created the Devil, and he created bureaucracy. Maybe that’s why they call it red tape. Anyway, I have a lot more flexibility as a PI than I could with any sort of official position. Granted, I have little actual authority this way, but being ‘on the books’ would bring added scrutiny I’d rather avoid.
I’d spent the rest of the daylight hours trying to find any connection between Troy and Vernon Baker, the guy who set up a contract killing of a child, and also the most likely source of the thugs who shot me up. Speaking of which, those two could be a problem. Then again, they weren’t around to witness me get up after absorbing twelve bullets. Once their initial shock of seeing a ‘dead woman’ move wore off, they likely assumed the first shot hadn’t killed me all the way. Still. If I can’t tie Troy to Vernon with something I can hand off to the cops, I’ll need to get creative.
B
est I can figure, Troy tried to have Hannah murdered to prevent her from telling anyone she saw him kill her parents. He has to figure it a veritable certainty at this point she’s already done so. Going after her again would fall somewhere between OCD, vengeance, and idiocy. The man might decide to leave her alone, but I’m not willing to bet her life on that.
A little past nine Thursday night, I curl up on my couch half-watching a Discovery channel special on the Titanic. My mind wanders a bit since I’ve already seen it. The Titanic I mean, up close. TV doesn’t do it justice. That ship is incredible, even as a wreck on the sea floor. It would’ve been nice to have seen it before it went down. A couple of plates and glasses from the grand dining hall wound up in my kitchen. I don’t have an excuse really, except for ‘salvage.’ Finders keepers, right? One of these days, I need to head back down there and see if there’s anything else left worth rescuing.
The documentary narrator’s voice blurs into a meaningless drone while the camera view from a small remote-operated submersible glides over the seabed. It’s claustrophobic to see how normal eyes experience the ocean depths. The blurry murkiness makes me squirm the way most normal people would watching video of a surgical procedure. Most likely, it’s triggering my memory of the shipwreck at a subconscious level. When I’d first gone overboard back in 1924, I remember only being able to see a few feet away―and we’d been near the surface. Ugh. After so many years, I can’t stand the thought of being down there without the energy flows illuminating everything.
I slip into a daydream about those first few weeks of my new life in the sea cavern with Barnaby. Initially, it hadn’t occurred to me that I could breathe water, or simply didn’t need to breathe at all. Despite having been floating there, watching him eat the flesh of those who’d died around me for far longer than a person could’ve survived, I’d been convinced I’d drowned already.