The Devil in Gray

by Graham Masterton

  “So you do know,” she said, at last.

  Decker nodded.

  “You will find these accusations impossible to prove in court.”

  “That doesn’t matter, as far as I’m concerned. I’m satisfied that you killed both Cathy and Junior Abraham, and that’s good enough for me.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  Decker took his Colt Anaconda out of its shoulder holster, opened the cylinder, and ejected all of the shells into the palm of his hand. One by one, he kissed the tip of each shell and pressed it back in.

  “I do this every day,” he told her. “I bless these bullets. And do you want to know why I bless these bullets? I do it because once I accidentally shot a fellow officer because I was too jumpy and too quick and I didn’t make absolutely sure that I was shooting at the right person. So I promised myself that I would never do that again. If I had to shoot anybody, each bullet would be blessed, and each bullet would be fired with forethought. Not out of fear, or panic, but because it was right, and because I had no other choice.”

  Queen Aché didn’t say anything, but she didn’t stop staring at him.

  “I have a serious problem,” he said. “You’ve heard about this recent spate of homicides, people getting beheaded, people having their guts cut out. I’m pretty certain that they’re connected with Santería, and that the perpetrator is possessed by Changó. I’m also pretty certain that there are going to be more. Up to eight more, at least.”

  Queen Aché frowned. “Why should that be any concern of mine?”

  “It isn’t, not directly, but I’m going to make it your concern. You see, you’re the only person in Richmond who has the power to deal with this joker, and in spite of the fact that you’re a killer and a racketeer I’m going to ask you to help me to track him down and put him out of business for good.”

  Queen Aché closed her eyes and tilted her head back and said, “Ha!”

  “Ha? Is that a no or a yes?”

  She came up close to him. He was almost overwhelmed by the musky perfume of Esencia Pompeya. “You have wasted too much of my precious time, Lieutenant. If you are going to arrest me, then you had better arrest me. My lawyers will have me released before you can say ‘insufficient evidence.’ Don’t think for a moment that you can play games with me.”

  Decker raised his revolver and pointed it straight between her eyes. “I wasn’t really going to arrest you, Your Majesty. You see this warrant? This is only a search warrant to check through your accounts. But I wanted to tell you face-to-face that I am completely satisfied that it was you who killed my Cathy.”

  “And what?”

  “And if you don’t agree to help me I’m going to do to you, with two or three of my blessed bullets, the very same thing that you did to her. I don’t give a shit for the consequences. You killed the only woman I ever loved and I’m going to blow your fucking brains all over this room.”

  Queen Aché stared at him, her eyes glittering, her bosom rising and falling as she breathed, as if she had just finished running, or making love.

  “You’d actually do it, wouldn’t you?” she said at last.

  “Oh yes. You can be totally sure of that.”

  “And if I do agree to help you? What then?”

  “Then my witnesses conveniently forget to remember that it was you who shot Junior Abraham.”

  “And you?”

  “Me? I try to accept the fact that at least one good thing came out of Cathy’s death.”

  Queen Aché touched her face with her fingertips as if she were making sure that, in the afterlife, she would always remember what it felt like. Decker pulled back the Anaconda’s hammer.

  “Aren’t you going to count?” Queen Aché asked.

  “You want me to? Okay, five.”

  “The death penalty is almost guaranteed in Virginia.”

  “I know that. But at least my ancestors will recognize me. If you don’t have a head, how’s King Special going to know that it’s you?”

  “Don’t mock my religion, Lieutenant.”

  “Four.”

  Queen Aché stood up very straight and flared her nostrils. She wasn’t used to dealing with people who weren’t afraid of her, and Decker could sense her rising uncertainty.

  “Three.”

  She was still staring at him as if she were trying to hypnotize him, but Decker knew without any doubt at all that if she didn’t ask him to stop, then he was going to shoot her. The So-Scary Man was going to get him, anyhow, one way or another, and he was probably going to suffer the Nine Deaths, so what did it matter? From whatever limbo it was that her spirit still lived on, Cathy had done everything she possibly could to save him, but if she couldn’t, she deserved avenging, at the very least.

  “Two.”

  At that moment, the doors on the opposite side of the throne room were thrown open, and Hicks came back in. He held up his cell phone, and said, “Lieutenant—the captain wants a word with you. Like, you know, now.”

  “One,” Decker said, without blinking.

  “Lieutenant? The captain says that—Lieutenant? Lieutenant? What the fuck are you doing, Lieutenant? Lieutenant!”

  Hicks struggled to get his gun out, but Decker shouted, “Don’t!”

  “What’s going on?” Hicks said, in a panicky voice. “You can’t just—”

  “You want to say a prayer?” Decker asked Queen Aché.

  Queen Aché breathed in, breathed out, breathed in. Then she said, “I will say just one thing. Yenya orisha obinrin dudukueke re maye avaya mi re oyu ayaba ano rigba iki mi iya mayele. An invocation to Yemayá, to fill me with her strength, as I go to face Changó.”

  Decker lowered his revolver, eased the hammer forward, and slid it back in its holster.

  “Where is this man who is possessed by Changó?” Queen Aché asked.

  “Not far. Somewhere in Main Street Station.”

  “And when do you want me to help you?”

  Decker checked his watch. “Sooner the better.”

  “Very well. But only because my orisha wills it, and because I wish to confront this man.”

  “Whatever you say.”

  Queen Aché said, “I have to change. You can wait for me.”

  “Just one thing, before you go. What does irosun oche mean?”

  “It is one of the patterns of the cowrie shells. It means ‘the dead are circling to see who they can seize.’”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  Decker and Hicks waited nearly a half hour for Queen Aché to make herself ready. Decker and Hicks sat at the bottom of the stairs, sullenly watched over by George and Newton. People came and went: family members and friends who had been invited to the asiento, all dressed up in their best clothes and carrying baskets of fruit, jars of honey, rum, cigars, chickens, and flowers. When they learned that the asiento had been delayed, and why, they looked across at Decker and Hicks with restless hostility, and one elderly man came over and said, “You are not the law. The orishas are the law. You have ruined my grandson’s asiento.”

  Decker said, “Sorry about that, sport. Nothing personal.”

  “Something bad will happen to you today because of what you have done here. You will know justice and blood.”

  “Thanks for the warning, but that’s part of my job description.”

  Eventually Queen Aché descended the staircase, no longer a crimson-eyed white-faced ghost in muslin, but a tall, athletic-looking black woman in skintight black leather pants and a dark brown sleeveless suede top, with six or seven silver armbands on each arm. Her head was covered by a dark brown silk scarf, tightly knotted, with a silver medallion dangling over her forehead. She carried a large leather bag over her shoulder, with fringes and beads.

  One of her heavily bejeweled henchmen came down with her, a shaven-headed man with mirror sunglasses and a neck like a tree stump. “You listen to me, Mr. Detective. This is Queen Aché here and Queen Aché is the queen of all she survey. Any bad shit come to her,
then a hundert times more bad shit is going to be happening to you.”

  “I’ll take care of her,” Decker assured him; although he knew that, in reality, Queen Aché was coming along to take care of him.

  In the car, with the two squad cars following close behind them, Decker gave Queen Aché a brief outline of who they thought they were looking for, and why. He told her all about the Devil’s Brigade, and Major Shroud, and all of his nightmares. She listened, and nodded once or twice, but said nothing.

  “You don’t seem particularly surprised by any of this,” he told her, when he had finished.

  “Nothing in Santería surprises me, Lieutenant. I have known people whose dead ancestors are still walking the streets after two hundred years. You forget that Yoruba beliefs not only gave birth to Santería, in America, but Candomble in Brazil and Shango in Trinidad; and in Haiti, Yoruba traditions were mixed with those of the Fon people from Dahomey, and resulted in the creation of voodoo.”

  “So you think that it’s perfectly possible that the So-Scary Man could be Major Shroud himself, risen from the dead?”

  “Why not? A lead-lined coffin would preserve his body—as well as all the herbs and spices that were buried along with him. And if he was really possessed by Changó, that would preserve his soul. Changó, like all of the orishas, is immortal.”

  “You think you might be able to call him off? Like, appeal to his better nature or something?”

  “Changó is Changó. He is the most popular of all orishas. But when he wants revenge, he will never rest until he gets it.”

  Hicks’s cell phone rang. He said, “Yes—yes, Captain. I’m afraid he’s driving right now.”

  “That Cab again?” Decker asked.

  “He says he wants you back at headquarters, no arguments.”

  “How does he sound?”

  “Enraged.”

  “Not apoplectic yet? That’s good. Tell him to give me twenty minutes.”

  They parked on East Main Street, right outside the station entrance. Over to the west, the sky was growing gloomy, even though it was only a few minutes past midday, and the clouds had a strange bruised appearance, purple and red.

  They pushed their way through the swing doors. Inside it was dark and unexpectedly chilly, and they all took off their sunglasses. The steep stairway was coated in concrete dust and the whole building echoed with hammering and drilling and shouting.

  They climbed the stairs until they reached the arrivals’ lobby.

  Mike Verdant saw them and gave them a wave. He crossed the floor of the lobby, stepping over hydraulic hoses and lengths of timber, and held out his hand.

  “Come back for another look, Lieutenant? You’re in luck—we’re just about to reinstall the decorative railings.”

  “Actually we want to pay another visit to the crawl space.”

  “Really? I don’t think there’s anything down there, only debris.”

  “All the same.”

  Mike looked dubiously at Queen Aché. “You want to take this lady down there too?”

  “That’s the idea. She knows what we’re looking for more than we do.”

  “Well … okay. But you have to wear hard hats, and I ought to lend you some coveralls. It’s pretty slimy down there.”

  He came back with hard hats and three bright-yellow coveralls with CRDCD lettered in red on the back—City of Richmond Department of Community Development. They stepped into them—Hicks almost overbalancing as he caught his shoe in the leg hole—and buttoned them up.

  Mike said to Queen Aché, “Pardon me … but do I know you?”

  Queen Aché looked down at him haughtily. She was at least four inches taller than he was. “Give thanks to God that you don’t.”

  Mike turned to Decker, pulling a face. Decker shrugged as if to say, That’s the way she is … don’t push it. Mike said, “Here … you’re going to need these flashlights.”

  They went back down the staircase to the East Main Street entrance. As they did so, they heard a bellow of thunder, and through the dusty glass of the swing doors they could see spots of rain on the sidewalk outside.

  Mike led them to the break in the wall that led to the lower level. “I’d come with you but I have to put in those railings. One half inch out of line and we’re screwed.”

  “That’s okay,” Decker said. “I think we can manage from here.”

  When Mike had gone back up to the arrivals lobby, Hicks said, “Lieutenant—do you really think this is a good idea?”

  “No, but what else are we going to do?”

  “I don’t know. But we know how powerful this So-Scary Man is. Think of the way he pushed us both over, in the hospital. Maybe we should try smoking him out of here with tear gas, or knocking him out with nitrous oxide.”

  “Hicks, we don’t have the time, and I can’t see Cab authorizing a SWAT team, can you? Besides that, I’m not sure whether tear gas or nitrous oxide would have any affect on this joker at all. For Christ’s sake, he’s dead, or the living dead, or whatever you call it in Santería.”

  Queen Aché said, “Egun, the ancestors, who are dead but still live. That is why I call my followers the Egun.”

  Hicks said, “I still think this is too risky. Either that, or we’re wasting our time.”

  Queen Aché pointed her finger directly at Hicks, as if she were picking him out in a lineup. “You believe, don’t you? You’re a believer. You pretend that you’re a skeptic, but you know that the dead can walk amongst us, and that spirits can talk to us from beyond the grave.”

  Hicks looked uncomfortable. “Let’s just do it, shall we, if we’re going to do it?”

  “Why do you deny it?” Queen Aché persisted. “Why do you deny your roots? Do you really choose to spend the rest of your life in the soulless world of the white people? The dog has four legs but walks only one path.”

  “Come on,” Decker said. He climbed into the hole in the wall, clambering over heaps of broken brick, shining his flashlight up ahead of him. “You next, Your Majesty. Hicks, you watch our rear ends.”

  Once they had negotiated the bricks, they found themselves in a low, vaulted cellar. The walls and the ceiling were black with damp and encrusted with salt. In the far corner, the salt had built up against the brickwork in a series of lumpy gray stalagmites, which looked like a gaggle of hideous dwarves, some of them with swollen heads and others with hugely hunched backs.

  “Must have flooded here pretty often,” Decker remarked.

  Queen Aché said, “The city flooded on the day when I was born. My father always said that it was an omen from Yemayá, that I too would flood the city one day.”

  “Well, you certainly flooded it with second-rate smack.”

  They penetrated farther into the cellar, flicking their flashlights left and right, but there was no sign of a coffin, or a niche that the So-Scary Man might have used as a hiding place. No bunched-up blankets, no newspaper bedding, no discarded Coke cans. Over in the left-hand corner, however, it looked as if a large section of the floor had collapsed into the crawl space below.

  “What makes you sure that he’s here?” Queen Aché asked. Although she was standing still, and her face was serious, her shadow was dancing on the ceiling right above her, as if her spirit was mocking them.

  “His coffin was sunk right here, in Shockoe Creek, and this is the first time that these lower foundations have been disturbed since the station was built. Apart from that, the little girl I was telling you about … the one who can see him … she saw him entering the station through the same doors that we came in. Another time she saw a kind of a twisted cloud over the station rooftops, which she thought was a cloud of evil. She even drew a picture of it. For some reason she said it was the House of Fun.”

  “The House of Fun?” Queen Aché thought about that and then she shook her head. “No … not the House of Fun.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “She probably understood it wrong. She meant the House of Ofun. Ofun means
‘the place where the curse is born.’”

  “You’re serious? ‘The place where the curse is born?’ Hear that, Hicks? What more proof do we need than that?”

  Queen Aché stepped ahead of him, deeper into the cellars, occasionally ducking her head because the ceiling was so low. Thirty feet in, she stopped, and raised her hand to indicate that they should stay where they were, and stay silent.

  “What is it?” Decker asked, after a while.

  “I can smell something,” she said.

  “Me too. Dead rats and damp.”

  “No … there is something else. Close your eyes. Breathe in deeply and hold it.”

  Decker breathed in. Hicks did too, and whistled through one nostril. Decker couldn’t be sure, but he thought he could detect the faintest aroma of stale herbs, like taking the lid off a jar of dried oregano.

  “Smells like my grandma’s larder,” Hicks said.

  “That’s right,” Queen Aché agreed. “Those are the herbs they would have used to seal Major Shroud in his casket.”

  She knelt down and opened up her leather satchel. Out of it she lifted a canvas pouch, tightly tied at the neck with black waxed string. She set this down on the floor in front of her, and then she took out four dried apples, a glass bottle of pale green liquid, and another bottle containing a dark red liquid.

  While Decker kept his flashlight shining on her, she untied the canvas pouch and tipped out a handful of dull, blackened stones.

  “What are you doing?” Decker asked her.

  “These are thunderstones … stones from a building that was struck by lightning.”

  As if to emphasize their importance, there was a loud bang of thunder from outside, and even here in the cellar they could smell the fresh, ozone-laden draft that came with the following rain.

  “I cast the stones, and then I pour this liquid over them. It is made from the leaves of the alamo tree, boiled in water. This will dispel evil. Then I say an invocation to Changó, kabio, kabio, sile, and anoint them with rooster’s blood.”

  “Okay … and what will this do?”