by Anna Roberts
“I’m sorry.”
“Fuck sorry,” he said. “I’m already sick of hearing it. Even the cops are saying it, like it means anything. I’m sorry, I’m sorry. Like it’s gonna do anything, like they’re not going to be up both of our asses forever.” He took a long swallow of beer and shuddered. “Jesus, Ruby – I know you think we’re amateurs but even you and the Cletus family would struggle choking down the kind of body count we’ve racked up lately. Reese, Joe, Eli, Gloria. And Eli wanted to be respectable, you see. All this...” He waved a skinny arm around the apartment. “All this has property deeds and liens and white collar nonsense all tied up in it. All in Eli’s name. Can you see the problem here, Ruby? Can you see how this is all going to get a little bit fucking messy when the nice policemen come calling and start asking where the fuck Mr. Keane has gone and where can we reach him?”
Ruby ground her teeth. “I’ve thought about that,” she said, with exasperated patience.
“And? Because I’m not seeing any kind of solution here, honey. This is the kind of thing Gloria knew how to deal with, and she’s gone. She’s definitely, categorically, one hundred per cent not coming back this time.” He was shaking from head to toe. “They had a whole special pillow thing going on at the morgue, you know? So I wouldn’t see that the back of her fucking head was missing.”
The last three words came out in a sort of beery, teary choke. She wrapped her arms around him and held him tight through the storm of his sobs. “Shh. It’s going to be okay. Everything is going to be okay.”
She hated Gloria. Couldn’t help it. The old lady had cut him adrift, and Ruby was sure it hadn’t been the first time. Everyone talked about Gloria like she was some big deal, but it was becoming more and more obvious to Ruby that the legendary Keys wolf witch was – as Charlie had once said – not that much more impressive than the guy behind the curtain in the Emerald City. She’d picked Eli over Charlie, for a start. That had been a mistake.
And there were other things. Little things between the lines of the book that told Ruby that Gloria hadn’t known it all. All that dicking about with grandma’s ashes, for one. Ruby had never had any need of such things.
She nearly said she was sorry, but she bit her tongue just in time. “Listen to me,” she said, when Charlie had caught his breath, his drool and tears all over her bare shoulder. “Honey, listen – it’s okay. I can fix this. We can fix this. It’s all going to be okay.”
Charlie swallowed hard and swayed back on the balls of his feet. The pain in his eyes was almost more than she could stand, making her nipples itch and her lips tingle with the desire to soothe him in the best way she knew how. Men were such babies really, poor little things. In his worst tempers even Ro could be settled when she opened her legs for him and gave him her breasts to suck on.
“We’re going to be fine,” said Ruby. “Me, you and our baby.”
He wiped his eyes on the back of his arm and sighed. “Seriously?” he said. “Still with the baby?”
“I’m pregnant, Charlie.”
“Yeah, I know. I heard you the first four hundred fucking times you told me,” he said. “No, don’t give me that look, Ruby. Let’s just face the facts, shall we? Stop setting yourself up for more hurt. You’re a werewolf; it’s a miracle you managed to keep it as long as you have.”
“Exactly,” she said. “It’s a miracle. This was obviously meant to happen.”
Charlie blinked red-rimmed eyes.
“Think about it,” she said. “Don’t you think it’s weird? We both thought we couldn’t have babies, and here we are. We’ve made one all the same.”
He pinched the bridge of his nose. “Oh boy.”
“Charlie –”
“– no, please. Don’t worry about it. I’m convinced. You got me. You’re carrying the werewolf messiah or something. Congratulations.” He sighed, looked down at her and then smiled, a lopsided smile that was almost like his old self. “Goddamn,” he said, kissing her on the mouth. “It’s a good thing you’re pretty.”
He left her standing beside the kitchen counter and fished his car keys out of the fruit bowl where he’d tossed them last night.
“Where are you going?”
“Out,” he said. “To get drunk. And maybe try and hook it up with something a little stronger.”
“Charlie, no. You can’t.”
“I can,” he said, glancing back at the crate and the candles. “Enjoy your hoodoo or whatever it is you’re planning. Just don’t let that chicken shit all over my clean kitchen. And don’t wait up.”
He kissed her again before he walked out, a peck that was somehow twice as insulting as any of Ro’s hardest punches. “Asshole,” she said, when the door slammed shut.
The sun was setting outside the big window in the dining area, the golden light winking between the masts in the marina and glinting on the gently stirring water. She opened the door that Charlie had closed, wrinkling her nose at the size of the collection of butts on the balcony. He had a death wish when it came to those things lately.
Ruby listened, the way she’d learned to listen as a child, to the mud and the water and the trees and the million stirring living things in her native swamp. There was a breeze blowing, clanking the rigging against the masts, but she strained her wolfish ears beyond the sound, searching for the one that Gloria had tried to maroon out there on the ocean.
The old girl hadn’t been entirely full of shit. On several pages of the book Ruby had found the word WHY written in large capitals, often underlined. Ruby knew about why. She knew about want. You had to want things to make them happen. Really want. Not just like The Secret or whatever that dumb thing was for bored rich townie ladies who wanted sixty dollar yoga pants or lower mortgage rates. You had to want a thing right down in the roots of your hair and your toenails and your soul, and Blue had never got that. Blue didn’t think it was enough to want a thing, and that was one of the many reasons why Blue would always be a shitty witch. Too practical. Too afraid to reach out and grab the kind of power that could fix things.
No doubt Gloria had whispered in her ear and told her that it was dangerous, and that pack spirits were deadly and all that chickenshit crap.
“No guts, no glory,” said Ruby, aloud. Sometimes you had to say fuck the danger, especially when it came to protecting those you loved.
Gloria had tried to take out Yael when she blew her brains out, but that just proved she didn’t know a thing. You couldn’t kill a spirit. Not one that was big enough to and bad enough to eat up poor Clementine in one big gulp.
“Thou art lost and gone forever,” said Ruby, the old tune starting up in her head the way it always had, ever since she was a little girl.
She had always had a fine voice – everyone said so, a round, rich alto that seemed impossibly huge coming from the lungs of such a small woman. Everyone said she should have tried out for American Idol, but she knew it would have been no good. Didn’t want it enough. She knew her voice was just a tool, a means to a bigger end. Besides, she feared that performing would take away the joy of singing her song.
“...herring boxes without topses...” She turned back to the kitchen, the window still open. “Sandals were for Clementine.”
They loved music. Blood, music and the promise of flesh. Ruby chalked a line on the counter and took down the big meat cleaver from the wall.
“Drove she ducklings to the water, every morning half past nine...” She opened the crate. The chicken – poor, dumb clucky thing – turned its head at the sound of her swelling, ringing voice.
“...oh my darling, oh my darling, oh my darling Clementine...”
Heart beating. Lungs open, notes singing past her throat and out through the window. Out over the water. I know you’re out there, Yael. I can feel you on the water, tumbled on the foaming brine...
“...Ruby lips above the water, blowing bubbles soft and fine, but alas I was no swimmer...”
She brought down the cleaver with a thud. Blood in t
he water. The dead chicken twitched under her hand and she took a half beat, a breath...
“...neither was my Clementine.”
Her voice quavered as the nerves slowly stopped jerking, beak opening and shutting, feathers flapping to a permanent halt. Ruby swallowed, tasting the tang of death in the room, knowing Yael’s palate was a thousand times keener than hers.
“Come on,” she said, and listened.
3
There were a lot of reports about what happened that morning, but in between the handwringing and the drug rumors and the gifs of Bugs Bunny sawing off the panhandle, the only person who really knew what happened was Ramon Fernando.
And he wasn’t talking.
On that day, Ramon Fernando woke up from bad dreams. It wasn’t unusual. A combination of policework and Celexa had cranked his sleeping imagination into overdrive, and he often tossed and turned to the point where his wife reached out and shook him awake.
That night he dreamed about three young girls. They were crying in a basement prison somewhere, none of them much older than his oldest, Celia, who was sweet sixteen and doing nothing to help his blood pressure with the way she’d started stopping traffic lately. They might have been beauty queens, these girls, but now they were indistinguishable, so dirty that their hair was all the same shade of sweaty brown, their pale limbs filthy. They were huddled in a corner, clutching each other for dear life, sobbing and pleading and praying.
Horrible, but nothing that this hardened abyss-gazer hadn’t imagined before. In fact he could almost picture them stretched out on their slabs, their skins the color of pebbles and their dirty hair sleeked back damp from their quiet, empty faces. He could see how the rope burn on that ankle might mean something, or how and where their blood would pool when their hearts stopped. It was almost fascinating, like trying to do a jigsaw puzzle with all the picture sides turned face down on the table.
Just a day’s work for a detective.
No, what was unsettling was the feeling. At first his mind – hovering on the edge of the scene – identified it as lust, the kind of wrongheaded desire when you had no way of knowing whether she was twenty-one or a dressed-up thirteen. But it wasn’t. It was somehow worse, the way he wanted these girls. Something that made the darkest yearnings of a fat middle-aged man seem mildly seedy – even comical - by comparison.
He woke up hungry, with a strange taste in his mouth.
As ever he woke with the scales on his mind. It was a habit, before anything else, before so much as a mouthful of coffee could taint the reading. He did the same every morning – emptied his bladder, hung his robe on a peg and stepped naked onto the scales.
Two hundred and forty-one. He sighed, frustrated. That pound and change keeping him from two three nine just refused to disappear, and he had always felt it was a psychologically important moment when you made that middle digit go down one. Making the first digit go down was still a distant and beautiful dream, but each ten pounds brought it closer.
He put his robe back on and went to the kitchen, where Julie was already up and reading the news on her tablet, a cup of coffee at her elbow. She had just turned forty last week and the little notch between her eyebrows was deeper the way it always was when he’d been restless at night. She mumbled a hello and he mumbled right back, then opened the fridge.
“You want something?” she said.
“No. Thanks.” He caught himself at it. “Why am I staring into the fridge?”
“He who stares too long into the fridge often finds the fridge staring back,” said Julie, making him smile and find himself grateful the way she often did. Women these days got better looking with age – they got into Pilates and low-carb and discovered new ways to do their hair that made them look ten years younger. Men like him just melted into puddles of fat slob, the schlubby sitcom dad with the inexplicably hot wife.
“Funny,” he said, brushing the back of her neck with his fingertips as he passed her on the way to the coffee filter.
“You want me to make you an omelet or something? I think there’s some of that turkey bacon left.”
“No, I’m good. I’ll grab something on my way in. I gotta get down to the Keys and you know how the traffic gets.”
“The old lady suicide? I thought you were done there.”
Ramon shook his head. “Nah. There’s something else going on. I was gonna look into another disappearance connected to the same people. There is something up with them, something beyond the usual Keys trash drama.”
“Sounds straightforward enough to me,” said Julie, getting up from the table and putting her coffee cup in the sink. “I know if I was looking at a degenerative brain disease I’d sure as hell think about putting a gun in my mouth.”
“It’s one thing to think it, Jules. Quite another to actually do it.”
She shrugged. “I guess it depends on how far gone you are,” she said, and kissed him on the lips, waking the strange raw taste in his mouth and reminding him of his sad, scared dream girls. She said something – probably a teasing warning to steer clear of churros on his way into the office – but he wasn’t listening. He’d tasted the tip of her tongue in the kiss and suddenly his whole brain was alive with the flavor of meat.
Real meat. Not that shitty pale turkey bacon crap. He thought of the juiciness at the heart of a rare steak, that soft, chewy bloody caveman taste that one day the health departments or the doctors or whoever would shut down forever on the grounds that it gave you cancer or – more importantly – put businesses in the line of lawsuits.
He looked down at Julie, his hand on her hair, but somehow he wasn’t looking at her. He was looking through her, through the brittle arched sockets of her eyes and into her soft, fatty brain. His stomach let out a bearish growl and she laughed, breaking the awful spell and jarring him back to the present. To sanity. To a place where you didn’t start looking at your wife as a source of protein.
“I love you,” he said, to rinse away the taste in the mouth. She looked surprised. Seventeen years and maybe they didn’t say it as often as they meant to, but he meant it then. Later that day she would say she should have known something was wrong when he said it – just out of the blue like that.
“I know,” she said, a little puzzled. “Me, too.”
His stomach growled again and she laughed and patted it. “Get something to eat,” she said. “Your belly sounds like The Forbidden Planet.”
He left the house with the taste of flesh still making his mouth water. Protein, he thought. That was it. He was probably just craving it because of how few carbs he ate these days. That or he’d spent too long reading up on old disappearances down in the Keys. There had been a lot of them at one time, and the few of them that were found were found in the smallest of fragments. The biggest one had been a shin bone found on the beach by a dog looking for a stick, and while forensics had identified it as human they had never established just who it had belonged to.
Ramon walked into the diner with murderers in mind and a hunger in his belly. Lehman was waiting there for him, shirt rolled up to his elbows, hair deliberately tousled in a way that said he’d gotten laid last night. Little shit ate like a hungry pelican and still stayed under one seventy.
“There you are. Beginning to give you up for lost,” said Lehman, spearing a chunk of waffle – blueberries, whipped cream. Chocolate chips, goddamn. The little cartoon Fuck-The-Diet devil on Ramon’s shoulder grinned and sharpened his pitchfork.
“Nah. Rough night,” said Ramon. “I shouldn’t have read all those Keys Cannibal files before bed.”
“Eesh. That’ll do it.”
“How are the waffles?”
“Off limits for you. I thought you were doing keto.”
“Jesus, man,” said Ramon. “You been swapping nag notes with Julie?” He signaled to the waitress. “Can I get the steak, hon? Rare, with eggs. Two. Sunny side up.”
He sipped his coffee and gazed back hungrily at the waffles. Side of bacon with maple s
yrup. God, he could go for some bacon. And French toast – a big, sinful serving of starch and sugar and cream, drizzled all over with more syrup. His stomach made another weird noise, loud enough to make Lehman sit up and laugh.
“So I’m guessing the diet is kicking your ass this week?”
“It’s fine,” said Ramon, impatient. His blood sugar was in his shoes and making him snappy. The last thing he wanted to talk about was food. Not when he wasn’t allowed to eat the fucking stuff. “Listen, did you find anything on that other guy? Friend of Keane’s – had some weird name, like Swedish or something.”
“You mean Lutesinger?”
“Yeah. Him. Disappeared a month or so ago. Handily left his truck in the hands of his good buddy Gabe Arnot.”
“Right,” said Lehman. “The same Gabe Arnot who owned the boat –”
“– that grandma took out to sea when she blew her brains out. You follow that up?”
“I tried, but it seems Arnot’s out of town now.”
“Huh. Who isn’t?”
“Everyone but that sickly-ass Silver guy,” said Lehman, pushing his plate over to Ramon. He didn’t have to ask if Ramon wanted to finish the bacon. “What do you think is up with him? I’ve seen cancer patients look better.”
Ramon was barely listening, his mouth full of bacon and syrup, like a million salty-sweet angels dancing on his tongue all at once. His stomach roared like a beast and he waved to the waitress again.
“Your steak is on the grill, sir,” she said.
“Yeah, I know. Thanks.” He glanced over to the counter where the pies were kept. “Is that Key lime?”
“No. Lemon meringue, I think.”
“Cut me off a piece while I’m waiting, please. And hurry.”