The Price

by Joseph Garraty

Stiff turned to me. “Come on!” he yelled.

  “Has everybody lost their fucking minds?”

  “Can’t worry about that now!”

  He had a point. He ran to catch up with the others, and I ran after him.

  I experienced an intense sense of disorientation when I stepped into the club. Nobody had heard the gunshots or the subsequent stampede over the throbbing bass, and the party continued unabated inside. Couples ground into each other on the dance floor, the DJ yelled some incomprehensible shit into a microphone, and everywhere people shouted slurred inanities at each other.

  Away from the dance floor, the place was all chrome and glass and subdued lighting in shades of yellow and blue. You couldn’t make out a face from twenty feet away, but that wasn’t going to stop Benedict. He brushed rudely past a handful of people and shoved a drunken couple aside. “Hey!” the woman yelled, but Benedict didn’t turn, and the rest of us were already following. She got one look at Lazzaro’s bat and Stiff’s gun, and, weirdly, she shut up. I’d expected the screaming to start, but who knew? Maybe this kind of shit happened here all the time.

  I’d be lying if I said I didn’t feel a nasty bit of satisfaction at our invasion here. This was the kind of place where rich assholes paid five hundred bucks a seat to drink bottles of perfectly average vodka, secure in the knowledge that the riffraff were being kept outside. I didn’t want to be here, but I was quickly warming up to the idea of breaking some shit.

  We attracted stares from the crowd, and a few people drifted into our wake, but nobody said anything until we reached a particularly exclusive area in the back, roped off with lengths of silver chain. Another giant thug blocked the path there—same suit, same sunglasses, same steroid-fueled physique. Lazzaro, in what I was coming to recognize as his modus operandi, stepped past Benedict and swung his bat. He was incredibly fast, so one second the bat was at his side and, faster than I could follow, it smashed dead center into the thug’s forehead. The bat cracked halfway up the barrel and snapped off, the heavy end spinning into the air and landing on a nearby table, sending drinks and glass in every direction. The thug staggered back a step, but he didn’t fall.

  Now somebody screamed.

  Before the big guy could regain his wits, Benedict snatched up a nearby bar stool and swung it two-handed into the guy’s face. He stumbled and went down on one knee, and Benedict hit him again, then again.

  Some hero from the crowd, probably trying to look good in front of his girlfriend, shouted something at Benedict and tried to rush past me. I grabbed his elbow. He turned, and I gave him a long look, shaking my head.

  “You don’t want any of this, buddy,” I said, but he was already drawing back his fist.

  Stiff smashed him in the head with the butt of his pistol, and he collapsed. I stepped over his body.

  Benedict had finally beaten the security guy into a state where he didn’t feel the need to get up and keep fighting—and that’s when the shooting started. Small-caliber pistol shots, not even all that loud compared to the music, but I definitely heard the popping sound, and I could see the muzzle flash ahead. Stupid bastard managed to miss Benedict, Lazzaro, Stiff, and me, but I heard screams of pain from behind us.

  What a clusterfuck.

  There were six guys, in addition to Kelsen and the maniac shooter, and they got up from a long table, turning to see us. I could see Kelsen between them, still sitting, arms crossed, feet on the table. It was dark, but I could have sworn I saw a black slash across his face, a sadistic grin that said he was going to enjoy this.

  He didn’t enjoy it long. Benedict, Lazzaro, and I, in a move that we couldn’t have timed better if we’d choreographed it, all whipped out Benedict’s favorite blinding spell at the same time. The combined blue-white glare seemed to sear my eyeballs, and I wasn’t even on the business end.

  Exactly one of the guys dropped, hands pressed to his face. The others reached for their weapons.

  “What the fuck?” I heard Lazzaro say, and then the sound of Stiff’s gun drowned him out. Two of the guys fell before Stiff caught a bullet in the chest and crumpled to the floor. I threw myself to the side, knocking over a table in the hope that it would provide me some scant cover. Bullets seemed to ricochet off every flat surface, though I knew that must just be the panic talking.

  Fire. I needed fire. I had nothing else I could slow these guys down with, and we were all fucked if we didn’t stop them. I peeked around the table. More gunfire, and wood chips sprayed my face as holes started appearing in the table.

  I bolted out from behind the table, looking for any other cover. There wasn’t shit. I slid under the rail surrounding the dance floor, dropped the two feet or so to the floor, and pressed against that short wall. That would give me a few moments, I hoped.

  I couldn’t remember the fire spell. The words had gotten slippery somehow, and every time I got started, I smelled smoke and felt grit on my fingertips, and the spell slid away.

  More gunfire. More shouting.

  I tried to put the words in some kind of order, but they slipped to the back of my mind, just out of reach, like the name of a third-rate actor you can’t remember when you’re trying to describe a movie. I pounded my fist against my thigh.

  “Come on come on come on,” I muttered. Nothing.

  Suddenly the light in the room turned orange. The gunfire stopped, and more screaming started. I popped my head up.

  Apparently, Lazzaro hadn’t forgotten the fire spell. The whole table in the middle of Kelsen’s guys was ablaze with flames the height of a man, and the guys were running everywhere.

  Kelsen waved a hand and Lazzaro fell to the floor, clutching his stomach and vomiting.

  Benedict pointed at Kelsen—no spell, just a simple threat.

  Kelsen grinned, pulled a piece of paper from somewhere, and made a few quick motions. He grabbed one of the running guys by the wrist, whipped out a knife from somewhere, and slashed it across the guy’s wrist. His own fucking guy. Blood dripped over the table, onto the floor—onto the paper. The hair on my arms came to stiff attention, and a familiar feeling, that of rushing, filled me.

  Oh fuck.

  The thing that appeared in a cloud of stench and smoke was the older brother of the two-headed dog-thing Kelsen had produced at our last encounter, and the look in its eyes suggested it hadn’t eaten since the Mesozoic Era.

  Benedict pulled a stupidly huge Dirty Harry revolver from his jacket. Why he hadn’t pulled the fucking thing before, I didn’t know, but he was too late, and anyway I knew from terrifying experience that the bullets wouldn’t do any good.

  The thing charged him.

  Benedict, proving that he had more balls than Fenway Park, actually ignored it. He leveled the gun, steadied it with both hands, and shot at Kelsen instead. He missed, but the look on Kelsen’s face was something I would have loved to frame and put up on the wall in my living room.

  I vaulted the railing, already mouthing the words to the banishment spell. I pulled one of the diagrams from my pocket as the thing lunged at Benedict. He darted away, but one of the heads snagged his overcoat in its teeth and yanked him brutally back. Benedict fell backward toward its snapping jaws.

  The paper in my hands burst into flame, and Benedict fell onto blank floor.

  The creature was gone.

  I slid to a halt beside Benedict, glancing over at Kelsen to see what new mischief he was up to. His face was a still mask. Only his glittering eyes hinted at a deep rage. He pointed at me, and I had the unmistakable sense of being marked.

  Then he ran.

  Benedict shoved himself up, half-crawling and crouching for a few steps before he found his feet. “Come on!” he said, and he ran after Kelsen, long coat flapping behind him. I hesitated, looking from Benedict’s departing figure to Stiff, who lay on the floor gasping, a bright bubble of blood swelling at his lips. He reached toward me, a silent plea for help.

  “Come on!” Benedict yelled again.

  I tore myse
lf away from Stiff’s pitiful gaze, and I ran. There’s nothing I can do for him, I told myself. Maybe it was even true.

  Moments later, I stumbled out into the back alley. The cold sucked all the air from my lungs, and I suddenly felt way more tired than I should have for such a short run. Part of the price, I guessed. Between trying to blind a small army of thugs and sending a big angry demon back to Hell, I was spent. Nonetheless, Benedict saw the fleeing form of Kelsen turn at the end of the alley, and he ran after. So I ran.

  We turned the corner, Benedict first with me just behind, skidding on ice and spilled trash. Ahead, Kelsen ran like the Devil was behind him. Given the amount of energy he must have spent conjuring up demons all the fucking time, that probably wasn’t far from the truth. Benedict fired four more deafening shots from his hand cannon, but even I could have told him to save it. He hadn’t been able to hit Kelsen when they’d both been standing still, twenty feet away from each other, so he didn’t have a prayer while both he and his target were running, and the distance was long and getting longer every step. He missed, of course.

  Exhaustion pulled at me, but I ordered my legs to hurry the fuck up, and I found a thin sliver of extra speed somehow. I pulled even with Benedict, then passed him. Ahead, Kelsen drew on his seemingly boundless reservoir of energy and pulled away. He disappeared around another corner. One of these times, he was going to gather the few seconds he needed to unleash something nasty on me, and I’d turn the corner and get blasted by Christ-knew-what—but I didn’t dare slow down either.

  I rounded the corner, and sure enough, there was a nasty surprise waiting for me. The fucking cops. Two pairs of rough hands grabbed me almost the instant I appeared and threw me facefirst to the ground.

  “Don’t move, motherfucker!” one of them yelled.

  That sounded like pretty good advice.

  Chapter 14. Jailhouse

  They cuffed me—another exciting first in my life—and threw me in the back of the car. I think they would have liked to throw me headfirst through the window, but the departmental budget wouldn’t stand for it. I craned my neck, looking right and left for some sign of Benedict or Kelsen, but Kelsen had vanished, and Benedict never came around the corner. Good for him, I guess.

  This was bad, and I fought down a panic that rose like vomit to the back of my throat. The car was parked back out on the main street, along with another dozen blue-and-whites. Red and blue light slashed across the crowd outside the club, alternately painting the faces bloody and frozen, corpselike. I wondered how many people could recognize me.

  There was only one rule that applied, now—omertà. You didn’t tell the cops anything, not ever. You didn’t rat on your own. I thought that went rather smashingly with my Miranda rights, so I buttoned up and resolved to stay buttoned.

  I hoped the Slob had a good lawyer.

  Several ambulances pulled up, and I watched them load first the wounded, then bodies draped in sheets. Two of the ambulances drove off with their lights flashing and sirens blaring. Another four left silently, taking the slow road to the morgue, I guessed. Stiff was probably in one of those, his body already cooling, his animating force or soul or whatever having leaked out through the holes in his chest. I couldn’t have done anything, I told myself again.

  The cops took me to the station after a while. I expected a bunch of verbal abuse on the way, but the only sounds were the engine and the squawk and chatter of voices on the radio.

  They stuck me in a holding tank with a bunch of career criminals who barely looked up long enough to dismiss me when I came in. A little later, I saw them march Lazzaro past, either to another cell or straight to interrogation.

  I stood, waiting. Others, dressed in their Saturday-night finest, were brought to the cell singly or in pairs and locked in. Many of them started bitching at once.

  “Man, I didn’t do nothin’!” one of them said. “I was just there, ya know?”

  “Yeah,” a second guy grumbled. “Shouldn’ta run, man.”

  “Fuck that noise. Just . . . fuck that.” He shook his head in disbelief and ran his hand through thickly gelled hair. It stood up in every direction.

  I took their conversation as a hopeful sign. Maybe the cops were snagging everyone found running from the area, out of ignorance. Maybe they’d let us all go in the morning, when they couldn’t find anything. Yeah, and maybe my guardian angel would come down from Heaven in a ray of light, bend the bars, and let me walk out of here.

  I leaned against the wall and waited. A woman’s voice, screaming obscenities, echoed down the hall. Either she was the drunkest person I’d ever even heard of, or she wasn’t actually speaking English. It took less than three minutes of that to give me a splitting headache.

  I wondered about that whole phone-call thing. A thousand cop shows told me I got a phone call, but I didn’t know if that was true or a convenient fiction, and anyway I didn’t know who to call. Not my parents. No way. Benedict? Maybe, except I didn’t know his latest phone number. It was in my cell phone, but they’d confiscated that. Besides, Benedict knew where I was. He’d send somebody, right?

  An hour went by, maybe two, and my mind wandered to a whole mess of unpleasant places. The shiny red bubble at Stiff’s mouth. The smell of burning, as always. The awful thing Kelsen had called up in the middle of a crowded club. That guy was fucking insane. Probably he knew a thing or two about controlling his monsters, but I wondered how much control he really had, other than pointing it in a given direction like a gun and pulling the trigger. I hadn’t missed the fact that he didn’t need a ritual to call these things up, either. A few words, a diagram, and a bad attitude were apparently all it took. That was something I ought to look into when I got a chance. I shuddered.

  Finally cops started taking guys out of the room one at a time. Questioning, I guessed, probably trying to get somebody to slip up before they got a chance to talk to a lawyer come morning. None of the guys came back—probably the cops didn’t want us talking to each other.

  A red-faced cop banged on the bars, waking up two guys who’d fallen asleep on the floor. “Pecatti,” the cop said. “You’re up.”

  Two minutes later, I was in the interrogation room, another first. This, too, was pulled right out of every cop movie ever made, right down to the bad lighting, cheap metal table, and two-way mirror. The movies don’t tell anything about the stink of the place, though—a residue of toxic police-station coffee and rank, nervous sweat that seemed as much a part of the room as the walls.

  The place was strangely familiar, for somewhere I’d never been, and comforting. I felt like I knew the rules here.

  They sat me down, and a new cop came in. I think they sent the scariest one they could find. The guy looked like a Marine drill sergeant somebody had mistakenly crammed into a short-sleeved white office shirt. Only the fine wrinkles around his eyes and the faint speckling of gray in his high-and-tight crewcut betrayed his age. He looked like the kind of guy who’d take a lot of pleasure in bayoneting some Huns, or whoever the fuck they bayoneted these days. He didn’t sit. Instead, he put his hands on the back of the folding metal chair opposite me and leaned forward. Cords of muscle twitched in his forearms.

  “Pecatti,” he said. “What were you doing at Forty-Four tonight?”

  Forty-Four must have been the name of the club. Funny I hadn’t known. It suddenly occurred to me that the cop might not have any proof that I’d been there. They’d picked me up on the street, after all. He was hoping I’d say “Nothing,” or something equally innocuous-seeming, and establish basically for free that I’d been there. Tricky. More reason for me not to say anything.

  “Do I need to talk to a lawyer?” I asked.

  Something pulsed at the cop’s temples. “I don’t know. Why would you need to talk to a lawyer? Got something to hide?”

  Big George had once given me instructions for occasions like this. He’d said I had to be “real pacific” with the words I chose, and not just when answering questio
ns. You had to ask for your lawyer in a specific way, or they’d just keep fucking with you, that’s what he’d said. “Can I see a lawyer?” wouldn’t cut it—they’d just say, sure, no problem, you can certainly see a lawyer, and then they’d keep asking questions. Similarly, “I’d like to talk to my lawyer” wouldn’t work either. You’d probably like to take a shit in private, too, but expressing your opinion wouldn’t get you very far. What were the magic words?

  Oh, yeah. I looked Flathead in his hate-filled drill sergeant eyes. “I want to talk with my lawyer.”

  “We’ll get to that,” he said. “For now just answer the fucking question.”

  So much for Big George’s advice. Where, I wondered, was the mythical good cop who was supposed to play opposite this asshole? “Are you saying I can’t have a lawyer?”

  “I’m saying answer the question.”

  There was a time in my life, not long before, when the terror of authority, of confrontation with the powers that be, would have swelled inside me, crowding out every thought but that I needed to answer this guy before he did something unspeakable to me. Against a backdrop of summoning demons, fighting for my life, and watching my friend die, though, it was easy to recognize the cop for what he was—a powerless bureaucrat, trying to assure his next promotion. He looked scarier than most, but that was all.

  “I want to talk with my lawyer,” I said with exaggerated lassitude.

  We went around like that for a while. I didn’t say shit.

  * * *

  Flathead left me alone for a while, presumably to stew. I knew better, or should have, but I stewed anyway. I’d felt like a big shot when I was staring Flathead down, but, perversely, now that he was gone I was getting a case of the nerves. I knew they had nothing. I knew they couldn’t touch me, not for anything serious. And I knew that, in the worst case, I’d get a few years and get out. It was a rite of passage. All part of the service.

  And still I squirmed.

  It was a relief when the door finally opened again. I looked up, ready to go another few rounds with Flathead, and there was Kit. Her eyes were buried in dark smudges, and she was still wiping sleep from the corners, but she had her cop face on nonetheless.