by A. J. Aalto
I nodded. “And today?”
“Just wondering where your limits are,” he said. “What can’t you do?”
Keep a living boyfriend? Kick the booze? Solve this case? Sleep without nightmares of fangs and blood and loss? “I don’t even know what I can do, never mind what I can’t. Bust out the Klondike bars. It'll be like the gnarliest game of Never Have I Ever, uh, ever.”
Morgan was removing his sparring gear. “Can I ask how?”
“How to which?” I said.
Morgan made a soft heh heh noise. “Witch. Exactly.”
“Anyone can learn the witchy stuff. I’m just better at picking it up because I’ve already accepted that magic exists and seen how psi can be manipulated. That comes with being a psychic.” I was immoderately proud of myself for not adding the “duh.”
“And that comes from…” He left that hanging, though I Felt he didn’t need me to fill it in.
I did anyway. “Being a DaySitter. To a revenant.” A second not-Duh! Point: me.
He nodded, like I was merely confirming what he’d heard before. He didn’t say the V-word or clarify that I meant the undead. “And how did you… I mean, how does that even fall into someone’s lap?” He used a towel to wipe sweat off the back of his neck and his shaved head.
Hood started packing his things while I debated getting into my history with the chief deputy. I gave him the quick version — the will, Grandma Vi, the family upset. I could tell Morgan had a million questions trapped behind his teeth but Hood sent him to the showers and he went without complaint.
When the deputy was out of ear shot, Hood said almost casually, “So, Your Buddy didn’t show here today.”
“Who?” I said, feigning innocence. “Oh right, that cop. Dunwin or something?”
Hood wasn’t fooled. “Haven’t spotted him yet.”
“No?” I swapped my sweaty leather gloves for a fresh, dry pair. “Huh. Weird.”
“Is he buried in your yard?” he asked.
I made an insulted guttural noise. “Hey! I’ll have you know, I haven’t killed anyone since, um, I invoke my Fifth Amendment rights, you sneaky asshole.” Because, yeah, I'd kinda-sorta directly-and-indirectly killed an ancient revenant, blown away Hood's former deputy after he'd been turned into a zombie, sweet-talked The Overlord into dragging a ghost into Hell, and... jeez, I was a menace.
“Didn’t you stake Jeremiah Prost in Egypt?”
“Well, sure, if you’re counting dead guys,” I scoffed.
He smirked. “So… January.”
“That’s right,” I said with an indignant sniff. “It’s been almost a whole two months since I made a single solitary person dead-dead.”
“Gee. Proud of you, Mars,” he drawled. “Let’s try to make it to three months, yeah?”
“That will depend on how much you intend to keep sassing me, buster.” I playfully shoved his shoulder.
He shoved mine. “Oh, I’m next, huh?”
“On my radar, sheriff,” I warned, but the teasing smile died on my lips as soon as I recalled Mitch Dunlop’s visit. (“Got a thing for cops, huh?”) I hastened to collect my stuff and clipped, “Hittin’ the sauna before my shower. Don’t wait for me.”
His eyes showed a flicker of confusion that didn’t make it further across his face. He said, “Sure thing. Good work today. See you in the morning.”
I felt weirdly guilty for heading to a sauna visit I hadn’t planned on taking, like I was escaping some unnamed development that I had no intention of looking at too closely. I lingered in the steam, feeling like I was just barely tolerating the heat while I was hiding, until finally, I gave my head a shake and went to shower and dress. Checking my text messages, I found three from Umayma, all regarding herb purchases for the office. I thumbed in my answer while pushing through the gym doors and into an unseasonably early thunderstorm sweeping sheets of rain across the parking lot. I loitered under the overhang for a moment, grateful I’d found a parking space close to the gym doors.
Hood’s green Hummer was still in the lot. I heard the doors open behind me.
Someone cleared their throat and I turned, fully expecting Rob. Deputy Morgan flipped me his card and said, “Something I want to show you later. Think you’ll be interested.”
“If it’s your man-pipe, I’ll pass.”
“Funny,” he said. “Shoot me a text and we’ll set it up.”
He re-secured his hat and hustled to his car just as Hood exited the building behind us with a noisy rush of the heavy doors. “What’s that about?”
I hollered, “Seriously, it better not be your dink, Sally.”
Hood gave me the side-eye, but it was his skeptical-sympathetic one, lacking blame. “Is my deputy being inappropriate?”
“I don’t think so. I’m just being upfront so there’s no confusion. If I expect scones, I don’t want speckled skinflute.”
“Nobody does,” Rob assured me, scanning the parking lot for a silver Nissan or any other signs of a Mitch Dunlop infestation. “Working any good cases lately?”
“Depends what you mean by ‘good,’ I suppose. I’ve got a real doozy on deck.”
“Is this another Trollpocalypse-type thing?”
I wrinkled my nose unhappily. “Could be.”
“Well, if you need help,” he said, fishing out his car keys, “don’t call me, okay? I’m a small town sheriff. I don’t do monsters.”
We shared exaggerated smirk-grimaces, pairing his dorky hyuk-hyuk fake laugh with my goofy har-har-har, and the weird discomfort that had cropped up earlier retreated. In his short term as sheriff of Lambert County, Hood had already dealt with ghouls, revenants, dark witches, a werewolf dragging a revenant under a transport truck, and his own zombie chief deputy, whom I had blown to rotten chunks on my lawn. I’d exploded into Sheriff Hood’s quiet, small-town life and given him a crash course in paranormal kookiness. Monsters were a given these days.
“Hey,” I said, “I didn’t call you about the spriggans.”
“Yeah, leave me out of it,” he grumbled, and I knew he didn’t mean it. Hood plunked his Stetson on and tossed his gym bag over a shoulder as he hoofed it through the rain to his Hummer.
It did not escape my notice that he lingered in the lot until I was safely in my Buick and pulling away.
Chapter 14
Jim Solmes squirrel-fucked my expectations. He fit Hood’s basic description (65 White male, 5’7”, 150, brown and brown), but that hadn’t begun to capture the essence of the man. I thought cops should start adding words like “schnazzy” to their reports, because Jim Solmes was no regular dude. The brown and brown should have tipped me off; sixty-five and not grey, white, or salt-and-pepper. The chestnut dye wasn’t just for his hair, but his eyebrows and goatee as well. I suspected that the carpet matched the drapes, too. The pride extended to wardrobe; a black silk shirt with a high Mandarin collar paired with a vest richly adorned in gold embroidery. The brown eyes were warm, knowing, and sensual under a heavy brow and a fedora canted jauntily. Peeking under the cuff of stylish black pants were dark Oxfords polished to a high shine.
I was surprised to find myself instantly at ease under his gaze, and when he flashed a perfectly white smile at me and gave a cheeky snap of his cinnamon chewing gum, I was further surprised to admit, Harry would like this guy. Hell, I liked this guy on first impression. This was a bad boy who, after six decades of practice, was dangerously good at it. He swept me with practiced, professional, and nearly predatory assessment, and the Blue Sense reported that he recognized a facet of himself in me, something shady; I didn’t know whether to be flattered or insulted. It wasn’t the first time I’d been sized up by someone looking for a mark or sucker, but at least today the hunter was mortal.
“You must be Marnie,” he said warmly, a voice crafted to stimulate trust with just a touch of seductive jeopardy; my estimation of his character swung from criminal tendencies to charming sociopath.
I knew Harry would still like him, but he wou
ldn’t like that I was anywhere alone with the guy. The pressure of my gun at the small of my back reassured me, as did the phone in my jacket pocket, actively recording audio. I dropped my backpack at my feet and showed him my I’m-totally-buying-your-act smile bookended between eyelash flutters.
“Mr. Footer mentioned me?”
“Mr. Footer always mentions beautiful women to me,” he said. “Beautiful women are my hobby.”
“A hobby is something you do,” I told him, since he seemed confused. He just smiled, but his mask slipped and something oily swam across his eyes. “Oh. I see. Um.” I had to break eye contact, examining the things in the display case while gathering my wits. “Anyhoo, yeah, I’m looking for someone.”
He let his silence stretch, and if he meant to knock me off my toes, he was going to be disappointed. I'd been stared down by things who thought sixty-five years was a single hand-clap. I met his gaze again, and his nostrils flared.
“The trumpet girl. Elyse.” He made her name sound vaguely dirty; at least now I knew the name she was using here.
“Yes, she came in looking for a man who sold you the trumpet.” It came out sounding less like a question than an accusation.
“Other way around,” Solmes said.
I tried not to look taken aback, but my poker face needed a bit of work. “How sure are you about that?”
He reached under the counter, and flipped open a plain spiral-bound notebook before slapping it on the shelf between us. He licked his fingertip, eyeballing me when he did it, and started turning pages. “Very. She sold me the trumpet, desperate to ditch it and another item. Here we are… six Fridays before he showed up looking for it. He had her name, wanted to know exactly what she touched, what she sold me, where she stood, how she looked, what she wore, even exactly what words she said. He’s a nutter.”
“Did she return to ask questions about him, to find him?”
“Haven’t seen her since.”
She’s not stalking him. He isn’t running from her. He doesn’t need protection. I felt my chest deflate and my shoulders fall. Well, shit. Morgan was right. I'm probably helping the wrong person. Boudreaux, or whoever the fuck he really was, could have been projecting his crimes onto her, shifting blame to con me. If the “stalker” was using black magic, then that would mean Beau himself was. I thought back to his first appearance, the shadowing on his face, the rash that I had thought of as a mild case of adult acne. How did I miss it? Probably, the same way I’d missed it while taking tea from Ruby Valli, I thought, feeling my lip curl with a sour sneer. Old Marnie would have admitted her screw-up aloud to whoever happened to be listening. Today, Marnie 3.0 tried to keep her cards close to the vest.
Maybe Solmes took my expression for disappointment. “And don’t even get me started on the stupid spyglass thing.”
“Start on the spyglass,” I blurted. “Dude, do it for me. I’m failing here. I don’t like failing.”
He looked me up and down skeptically. “Better get used to it, I think.”
“Is that any way to talk to a lady?”
The Blue Sense shared with me an instant flash of his shame; this guy had worked very hard to learn precisely how to talk to a lady, but it was a surface job, never felt deeply or genuinely. He was acutely aware of how fragile this careful personality gloss was, and it startled him that I’d seen through it. Now he kinda wanted to punish me. Not smart, Marnie.
“I’m sorry, that was rude,” I said quickly. “I’m not good at stuff. I’m trying to run a business, here. I thought I’d be great at it, being fuckin’ psychic and all. But I’m running around in circles and I haven’t the foggiest clue what’s going on. So please, I’m begging you, tell me about the spyglass.”
Solmes spotted that I was lamer than he’d first estimated, and it brushed away his shame to replace it with amusement, if not pity. “Creepy chick sold me a spyglass. Old pirate-looking piece of junk. Didn’t want to take it. No real resale value, and I knew it. But she was hard up for the cash, and I got a soft spot for losers.”
I didn't need the Blue Sense to catch his drift, but I managed not to do more than bite the inside of my cheek.
He pulled a shoebox from under the counter and I slipped my gloves on before opening the lid. The spyglass didn’t look like much; a darkish orb wrapped in a tight leather funnel-shaped tube; not anything close to a fine, brass nautical instrument, it was something slapdash. The shoddy stitching looked like it had been done by a child, with wide spacing and heavy thread through gaping holes in the leather. It didn’t fit well around the orb, which threatened to pop out if you squeezed the leather. There was an eyepiece, but it was cracked. Solmes wanted twenty bucks for it, and I didn’t dicker, whipping out the cash. I was careful to re-snug my gloves on my hands tightly before tucking my purchase in my backpack.
“So. Tell me about her,” I asked.
“Weak. Limping. Scrawny. Damaged.” He smiled unpleasantly. “Easy.”
Easy lay? Or easy prey? Hood’s grim warning came back to me and I wondered belatedly what this ex-con’s offenses had been. How I had survived to adulthood with this lack of foresight was beyond me.
In for a penny, in for a pound. “So, you fuck her?” I made a note to call Elian to brush up on my people skills, because, sweet jiggling fuckballs, Marnie.
The corner of his upper lip peeled up. Unnecessarily, the Blue Sense reported disgust. “I don’t do meth heads.”
“What made you think she was into meth?”
“Scabby, losing her hair, hollow eyes.”
That didn’t match the description I'd been given in the slightest, but it did jibe with what the other owner, Mr. Footer, had told me. I compared my basic notes about her with Solmes, and he confirmed everything else. I described Beau, too, and Solmes nodded along with me.
“He said if I didn’t give him any info on where she could be reached,” Solmes said, “he’d make me regret it.”
“So you gave it to him?”
He grunt-laughed, chiding me with it. “Do I look like the kind of guy to get intimidated?”
He didn’t. I shook my head rapidly, remembering what Footer had said about Solmes making people dance on the blacktop. I said, “Did you have any info on where she was staying?”
His smile twisted and he nodded, showing me a little pink slip that had places to fill in customer contact information. “I torched it in front of him. Because fuck him. Then I handed that skinny little creep his ass.”
I felt my brows go up. “You punched him? Hard?”
“Not hard. Just often.”
I got a mental image of my scrawny little client and that fading bruise on his face. “Did you break skin? Was he bloody?”
“What are you, the morality police?”
“Solmes, I’d be a crap choice for that department,” I said with a snort. “Let me see your fists. Do you have a rash?”
He hesitated. “You a doctor?”
Technically, I was, just not the medical kind. I nodded without speaking. He showed me his hands. They were dry, cracked, and speckled. Underneath was a greenish hue. “You put your hands on him, but not her?”
His glare narrowed further and lost what little warmth had still been lingering there. “You sayin’ I caught something off him?”
I’d seen that rash before, or a variation of it, anyway: on John Spicer, who was using necromancy to create hybrid zombies in a mine shaft in the ghost town of Ashcroft. “Could be corpsepox, a black magic-type plague.”
“The fucking plague?”
“Not the plague. Actually, if it were the plague, it’d be relatively easy to cure.”
“What the shit?”
“You’ve just got a touch of the Blights, is all. I don’t want you to panic, Solmes,” I said calmly, taking out my phone to turn off the audio recording and text Dr. Paul Varney at the CDC.
“Then don’t say plague!”
“Yeah, probably I just should have said germs. Sorry ‘bout that. Bedside manner isn’
t my strong suit.” I offered an apologetic smile that he rebuffed with a snarl. “I need you to lock up, drive straight home, and stay there. You’ll need to talk to Mr. Footer and have him self-quarantine in his home, too.”
Solmes' face went through a very convoluted set of expressions in a hurry, which surprised me.
“What you have isn’t very contagious, but it could be serious. Can I see your hand for a sec?” I worked up my courage and said a silent prayer for protection against my own case of the Left Hand Nasties, and turned his hand over with one of mine. I got a wild ride courtesy of the Blue Sense that went from fear and shame to consternation and protectiveness, and, catching me totally off guard, was his love for Rob Footer. My clue light finally flickered with some hint of the situation. “How many people have you had contact with, uh, today?”
His confidence faltered. “None.” A lie. He'd kissed Footer goodbye when he came to work. His gaze shot up as he thought. “Just a drive-thru kid for coffee.” Acting like I was satisfied with what he'd said, I let his hands go and used a single pump of the disinfectant gel from a bottle on the counter; Solmes did likewise.
“That should be fine. A Dr. Varney will be in touch with both of you shortly. The CDC will probably ask you about a million more questions like this. Try to think of anybody – friends, lovers, some dude you fist-bumped for doing a sweet job parallel parking, whatever – you had physical contact with between the time you fought with Beau and today, OK? Make a list.” I considered what I'd learned from our brief contact. “And since Mr. Footer has also handled the merchandise and been in close proximity to you for an extended period, it's probably best if he tries to think through anybody he might have, too.”
“Yeah,” he barely whispered, nodding rapidly. “Yeah.” Then, “Plague. Fuck.”
“The CDC will send a team to disinfect the shop, so make note of what you spent a lot of time touching, too. This stuff doesn’t last long on surfaces, but, in CDC-speak, they’ll act out of an abundance of caution. And this place, no offense, is nothing but nooks and crannies.”