The Price

by Joseph Garraty

  I slid along the wall to the door and stopped, wondering how many bullets I had. The gun was some kind of nine-millimeter, I thought, a Ruger or a Beretta or a Browning. I had no idea. I didn’t even know how many bullets it held, and I found myself wishing I’d been into gun porn like some of the other guys. I’d started with a full clip, I knew that. A lot more than ten bullets. More than fourteen, I thought. How many had I fired earlier?

  No idea.

  Fuck.

  The distraction of mentally counting bullets calmed me down despite not giving me an answer, oddly enough, and I felt ready to go in. I dropped to my knees, knowing from experience that people were more likely to see—and shoot at—things at eye level. I peered through the glass pane and wire mesh of the door. A pair of feeble fluorescent bulbs lit the hallway and stairwell, casting a crazy profusion of dim, half-assed shadows. Nobody lurked inside.

  I went in, padding softly up the stairs. The familiar burned smell lingered here, but it clung to me always now, so that didn’t tell me anything. I didn’t even know for sure that that . . . thing had been with Lazzaro, I told myself. I’d been badly scared, and I hadn’t been able to see much of anything clearly down there. It didn’t even make sense for the goddamn thing to have been there. I was just freaking out. Just freaking out.

  At the first landing, I turned and froze. Just freaking out, I tried to remind myself, with all the efficacy of throwing bricks at a fighter jet. Maybe I had been freaking out, but that didn’t explain the faint, greasy black smudge on the gray rubber of the first riser. Nor did it explain the spatter of blood droplets, purplish-black under the fluorescent light, on the second and third steps.

  Somebody was here, or had been. Probably still was, I thought. They had every reason to think I’d come back here eventually. They were probably sitting in my apartment right now, waiting for me to come in, after which they’d . . . They’d what? And who were they? The apparition from my dream? Lazzaro? Whose blood was it? Had to be Lazzaro’s, right? I mean, I’d shot him three or five times. It stood to reason he’d be kinda leaky, didn’t it? It stands to reason that he’d be dead, I told myself. It didn’t take.

  If it had been just Lazzaro, I told myself, I’d have taken my chances. Kick down the door and waste the fucker for the third time, and make sure it stuck this time. That sounded good, though I wasn’t sure I really believed it. I didn’t know what the fuck he was anymore. Was it Lazzaro in there anymore, or had he been hollowed out, paying the final price Benedict had described to me so long ago? Regardless, there was no way I was going up there if there was even a chance he’d teamed up with the creepy burned creature from my dreams. Unh-uh.

  I turned around and went down the stairs, glancing back over my shoulder every two steps. Once I made it to the door, the evening’s fatigue was lost in a tide of terror, and I somehow found the strength to run again.

  Chapter 26. Tactical Error

  I huddled in an alley, taking stock of my situation. While I was at it, I counted my bullets. I popped them out of the clip one at a time and stood them up on the pavement as I enumerated the ways I was fucked. Bullet points. Ha.

  One. Lazzaro wasn’t dead. No, scratch that. Start over.

  One. I had killed Lazzaro. Or, rather, I’d tried to kill Lazzaro and fucked it up twice. He wasn’t the kind of guy to take that lightly.

  Two. I had killed Big George.

  Three. I had also killed Patsy. At least, I was pretty sure I’d done for him and George. I’d shot them each a couple of times, though apparently I was such a phenomenally unlucky shot that I could put four or five holes in somebody and not kill them.

  What if I did kill Lazzaro? He came back somehow, right? What if he just keeps coming back? Or what if he can’t be killed now? I shook my head. “Don’t even go there. Nowhere near there,” I whispered. “Where was I?”

  I put down a fourth bullet with shaking fingers.

  Four. It was only a matter of time before Lazzaro filled the Slob in on my treachery. I guessed he hadn’t already, because of George and Patsy, probably because he had some kind of sick revenge fantasy built up. He’d already gotten bawled out for going overboard on Tink, and he wouldn’t have wanted anybody to mess up his fun. But he’d talk sooner or later. Then instead of just one (two?) revenants returned from Hell and gunning for me, I’d have the Slob, Benedict, two dozen made guys and their crews, and every miscellaneous slimebag in the city looking to pick up the bounty the Slob would surely offer. This was not what I’d had in mind for getting out.

  Five—

  Something moved in alley behind me, the scrape of a trash can sliding on concrete, and I jerked my head up and my hand away, knocking the bullet over. The iridescent green eyes of a stray cat glared back. I looked around for something to throw, came up empty, and turned back to my work.

  I righted the bullet and placed it in line with the others.

  Five. The thing from my dreams. The burned man. The innocent bastard I’d torched on a street corner back in prehistory, thinking he was some fiendish archwizard. He was pissed, sure, just like anybody would be, but what was he doing here? He was fucking dead, practically a figment of my imagination, and now he was out running around with Lazzaro and leaving soot stains on my stairs. I had little doubt he’d like nothing better than to wrap his bony, charred fingers around my throat and choke the life out of me—but I sure didn’t know how the hell he was able to do that. Another mystery, another problem.

  Six.

  I sighed. Time to be honest about this one.

  Number six. My soul was a wreck. That was the pisser, right there. I’d have given myself even chances of evading the mob and taking down Lazzaro, if I could just use my magic. But, Jesus. I hadn’t been able to work so much as a tiny cleaning spell without feeling nauseous, thinking of Kelsen’s hollowed-out, worm-eaten body, and thinking of my own legs, ending at mid-thigh and swarming with fat demon-worms. It was one thing for Benedict to tell me there was a price for consorting with demons. Big fucking deal, I’ll pay at the register. It was another thing to lay eyes on the price, to feel it. Could I be sure that that whole horrifying vision hadn’t been a hallucination brought on by stress and fear? No. But I didn’t much care. It hadn’t felt like a hallucination, and it was as vivid a description of my eventual fate as I needed. Was I already doomed? I had no idea. Benedict hadn’t told me shit about how this worked, and I doubted he knew much more than I did. But I sure as Hell—ha-fucking-ha—didn’t feel like messing around with it any more than necessary. Yes, I could still feel the magic pulling at me, but all I had to do was close my eyes and I was back there, or near enough. Maybe I couldn’t avoid working any magic. That didn’t mean I wanted to work enough to take on the whole goddamn mob. That was a sure path to damnation.

  I might be damned already, I thought. In which case, there was nothing to do but live as long as possible, hoping to find some way to undo it, or at least postpone it. Great.

  I put the last bullet down.

  Seven. Seven bullets. I chuckled. That I had just seven bullets was a problem in itself, plenty bad enough to count as Reason Number Seven I Was Fucked. I wasn’t even sure how to go about getting more without tipping off somebody who knew somebody, who’d probably have a car out front of the shop before I managed to swipe any ammo. There’d be pictures of my bullet-riddled body on the front page of the paper by tomorrow.

  I had a handful of bullets, magic was unsafe, and I stank like the fumes coming out of a sewer grate in Hell.

  “Fuck it, then,” I said. “Time to talk to Kit.”

  * * *

  Kit’s family’s house was a little white clapboard saltine box, the kind cobbled together from cheap shit for returning soldiers after World War II, and it would have fallen over twenty years ago if it hadn’t been for the obsessive attention lavished on it by Kit’s dad. No incipient mold was allowed to linger on anything, the paint was always a flawless white, and the gutters were clean enough to drink from. I think none o
f the house’s original construction material was left—it had slowly been replaced, piece by piece, over the years.

  I hesitated before knocking. I didn’t know if Kit was home, or if I’d wake her parents and have even more explaining to do. I wished I had a phone, but then I realized I couldn’t remember Kit’s cell number anyway.

  I walked around the side of the house. It was a one-story box, so if I could figure out which room was hers, I could knock on the window. The curtains were drawn, though, and there wasn’t a light on in the house. I put my face to the window to see if I could glimpse anything helpful through the slight gap in the curtains.

  I peered uselessly into the blackness. There might have been a slightly lighter area, though that was most likely glare from the neighbor’s porch light. I shaded the glass with my hand.

  I heard the distinctive metallic click of a gun being cocked.

  “Don’t move.”

  Kit’s voice. I froze with my face pressed to the window. Probably she wouldn’t shoot me, but I thought this was one case where it made sense to obey the strict letter of her command.

  “Hands up.”

  Done.

  “Okay, now turn so I can see you. Slowly.”

  Kit stood there, backlit by the street light. She had on a T-shirt and shorts, or something like that—it was hard to make out. It was not hard to make out the dull black gloss of her service weapon, held in a steady, by-the-book two-handed grip and leveled at my center mass.

  Kit stared at my pale, thin face for a long time, but she finally lowered the gun. “What are you doing here, Jimmy?”

  “It’s not a good time.”

  Her eyes were shadowed, but I could guess at her expression.

  A light went on in the next house over. Kit didn’t hesitate. “Inside,” she said.

  “I don’t know if that’s such a hot idea.”

  She was already walking toward the front door. Didn’t even look back to see if I followed.

  I did.

  Inside, enough light came through the curtain to illuminate the hunched shapes of living room furniture and a ghostly lampshade. I got the sense from the parallel lines and precise placement of the furniture that Kit’s mom was every bit as meticulous about the inside of the house as her father was about the outside. I was a human stain on the place.

  Fortunately, Kit didn’t seem inclined to go in very far. I closed the front door, and she about backed me right up to it.

  “What do you want?” she whispered.

  “They’re gonna kill me. Tonight.”

  “We have to go to the station, then. I can’t hide you here.”

  That still sounded like a horrible idea, but my options were getting lower by the hour. “I don’t know. Maybe—”

  A shadow flickered in front of the window, and the scent of burned flesh, my near-constant companion, hit me.

  “Oh, fuck. Kit, we have to get out of here. Now.”

  “You have to get out of here.”

  I wasn’t going to argue. I walked through the living room, tracking muck over the carpet. Of all the shit I’d done, I felt bad about that, but it was the carpet or me, I was pretty sure. If I lived long enough to make a few hundred bucks, I’d send it to her.

  “Where are you going?”

  “Back door. You’ve got a fucking back door, right?”

  “Goddammit, Jimmy—”

  I didn’t even get a moment to marvel at Kit’s blasphemy, something I thought I’d never hear in a thousand centuries of misfortune. There was a sharp pop and a crackle, and the front door blew inward in a blast of searing flame. It disintegrated into flaming ash in midair, two dozen comet tails of debris arcing across the room, and Lazzaro stepped through the hole.

  I froze. I was a veteran of a hundred bloody fights by now, waged with guns, clubs, knives, and occult forces, but Lazzaro’s face, and his cold, wide grin, froze me where I stood.

  He moved, a flick of the wrist, a second away from incinerating me, and Kit opened up on him. She’d never put her weapon away, and now she acted with a smooth, frightening fluidity. She pulled off four shots before I could convince my left leg to move. Lazzaro dropped to the ground. His grin didn’t change one bit as he flopped face-forward on the carpet. The blood, I thought, would never come out.

  Behind his body, just out of the circle of porch light, the burned man waited.

  Now I moved.

  “Run, dammit!” I yelled, and I dashed through the doorway to the kitchen. The door back there was locked and bolted, and it took me a moment of stupid fumbling to get it to open. I shot a quick glance back at Kit, who was standing over Lazzaro’s body and looking out the front door, gun at the ready. She wasn’t coming, I guessed. Too bad. I wasn’t staying.

  I ran out the back door and straight into a fist. My head snapped back, and I fell to the concrete steps.

  There was a moment, frozen perfectly in time, when I saw the faces of Big George and Patsy staring down at me, wearing identical expressions of curious malice, like a couple of nasty kids looking down at a frog they were thinking about dismembering. In that moment, I got it. I had killed Lazzaro. I’d killed Big George and Patsy, too. There was no way they’d been wearing body armor, I’d seen the fucking exit wounds, and even if by some miracle they had survived, there was no way, no fucking way they could conceivably be up and around by now. They should be in surgery still, with the doctors wondering if they could possibly make it.

  Even when it goes right, it goes wrong.

  I had just enough time to understand that Lazzaro had done something—worked some magic, brokered some deal the likes of which I didn’t even want to consider—and then Big George reached for me.

  I pushed back, scuttling like a particularly ungainly crab. Not fast enough. George grabbed my ankle in his giant hand and hauled me out of the house. I tucked my head, narrowly avoiding a heavy-duty slam against the stairs, and then I was tumbling. I rolled a few feet after I hit the ground, and Patsy was there with a pointy-ass cowboy boot that felt sheathed in steel when it connected with my side.

  Another gunshot, and Patsy dropped to one knee. He wasn’t hit, though, just getting low. He whipped a gun out of his coat and fired into the house. Answering fire came back, and he rolled to the side, away from the doorway.

  I started to crawl the other way, but Big George wasn’t having any of that. He planted a foot in the center of my ass and shoved. I went facefirst into the grass, plowing a nice furrow and swallowing three-quarters of a pound of dirt in the process.

  More shots, more flashes from my right. I hoped Kit was winning.

  Big George grabbed my ankle again. I braced myself for another brief flight and painful landing, but this time he put his foot on my back and started twisting. It took me a few moments of excruciating pain before I realized that the crazy fucker was trying to pull my leg off with his bare hands. Something in my knee popped.

  About then, I remembered a critical fact: I had a gun. With George’s foot on my spine, I couldn’t turn over to shoot him, but I could scare the fuck out of him. I thrashed some, trying to either break his grip or distract him, and in that moment I was able to slip the gun out of my belt. Still facing the ground, I fired the gun back over my left shoulder. The report was deafening in my ear, but George let go.

  I rolled over and, before he recovered his wits and, say, stepped on my crotch, I shot him twice.

  Patsy was huddled next to the doorway, ducking in and trading shots with Kit. He saw Big George drop, and a second later, the sound of sirens reached us. Dead, undead, invincible, or otherwise, Patsy wanted no part of this. He took off, jumping the fence to the neighbor’s place.

  He had the right idea. I took off in the other direction, hobbling a little, but basically whole. If Kit yelled after me, I didn’t hear her.

  Chapter 27. Running

  I ran out of reflex and terror, not because I had any real hope. Lazzaro was unstoppable, and so, apparently, were his minions—and they seemed to kn
ow how to find me no matter where I went. I didn’t know if they’d taken something from my apartment or if Lazzaro had lifted something off me when we were in the basement, but they had something, that was sure, and they were going to use the same trick I’d used on Kelsen to wear me out, run me down, and kill me. If I was lucky. Lazzaro could think of much worse things to do than kill me.

  In my favor, Lazzaro and company had hit a cop’s house, for Chrissakes, which meant the city would pull heaven down on his head. There would be a cordon, and they’d go house-to-house if they had to, but there were few measures they’d stop at now. I just hoped they didn’t give a damn about me and that I’d be able to slip through without a fuss. I gave that even odds. It could happen.

  I cut through a couple of backyards until I came to a fence with one very pissed-off dog on the other side, and then I headed back to the alley. That would take me out to the street, and then I’d see what I could see.

  The dog wouldn’t shut up as I passed the house, and I caught glimpses of white fangs and rolling eyeballs through the gaps in the wood. Moments later, a light flicked on. I picked up as much speed as I was able, limping a little on my fucked-up leg—but I was a hundred feet short of the end of the alley when a blue-and-white pulled up to block it. A spotlight about as bright as a dozen white-hot suns lit up the alley. The voice of God bellowed through a loudspeaker: “Freeze!”

  I did an about-face and bolted toward the other end of the alley, praying they wouldn’t skip the preliminaries and start shooting. Behind me, I heard shouting.

  I ran out the other end of the alley a few seconds later and turned sharply to the right, where I plowed right into a uniformed cop.

  The guy staggered back a couple of steps, and I reached for my gun.