by Bruce Talmas
“I have to go out for a while,” I told her. I was ready for her to fight me or insist on tagging along, but she said nothing. She took a quick glance around the house instead, probably planning out her explorations that would commence the moment I walked out the door.
“Okay,” she said. “Be careful.”
Ha.
The sun was shining when I left the house, but the threat of rain draped itself over the landscape in dark, billowing clouds on the edge of the horizon. It fit my mood. Things were going as well as could be expected, all things considered, but they could take a turn for the worse at any moment.
Shaking those thoughts from my head, I focused instead on the address I’d memorized from Rose’s driver’s license. I’d made Barney ditch the hot Camaro a few blocks from the church since Vickroy clearly had a stick up his ass about stolen cars being on church property. Now I was driving Barney’s Audi A8. I could tell he wasn’t happy about it, but he didn’t have a say in the matter. I had to admit, it was a nice ride. He had better taste than I’d given him credit for—at least when it came to cars.
After about twenty minutes of driving in a mostly easterly direction, I found Rose’s neighborhood. It was at the far end of a drearily middle-class housing plan, the type that had slowly grown from a small group of houses on a cul-de-sac to a sprawling jumble of loops and ribbons with overpriced homes stuck randomly throughout and no sense of design apparent anywhere. He lived on a road named Memorial Drive, which made me wonder what they were memorializing: The end of inspired architecture? Of civil engineering? Or maybe just the American Dream in general.
There were no lights on at the Rose residence, but I rang the doorbell anyway. I waited a while and then buzzed again. I wasn’t expecting someone to suddenly come running on the second attempt, I just didn’t have anything better to do. To my surprise, a faint rustling noise answered the second ring of the doorbell. An attractive but sad-looking woman in her thirties opened the door. She was smart enough to keep the chain bolted, I noted. A cop’s wife.
“Hello?” she said, more a question than a greeting.
“Is Thomas in?”
“No, he’s not. Can I help you?” There was a healthy amount of suspicion in her tone.
“I’m afraid not,” I said. “It’s about a case he’s working on. Do you know if he’ll be home soon?”
“He should be home any minute.” She was lying. She may have wanted him to be home any minute, but I could tell from her voice that she didn’t expect him anytime soon. Maybe at one time he would get home like clockwork, but not anymore. He had a new obsession to indulge, and besides, there was no son to help with his homework or to play catch with. Just a sad wife in a house that was suddenly too large. I may have been part demon, but I’d been around enough grief to understand what it could do to people. Granted, I'd caused most of it, but at least I recognized it.
I didn’t push the issue. The woman had just lost a son. There was also a slight slurring of her words that suggested she too had found other ways to pass her time.
“I’ll just wait in my car for a little bit, if you don’t mind. It’s important.”
I could tell she wasn’t in love with the idea, but she relented. “Okay, Hopefully he’ll be home shortly. You never know with a cop, though.”
She smiled for the first time. It took way too much effort for her, but it looked good once she tried it on. I smiled back and handed her my card.
“Could you give that to him? I’ll wait here for a few minutes, but if he doesn’t come by then I’ll leave. I don’t want to camp out all night in front of your house.”
She took the card. It had my name and number on it, along with the title of ‘Consultant.’ I had the cards made years ago thinking they would come in handy from time to time. This was the first time I’d ever given one out.
I turned to go wait in the car and the front door closed behind me, but then I heard the chain rattle and the door popped open again.
“You know what, that’s ridiculous,” she said. “You can wait in here just as easily.”
I put my hands up innocently. “No, it’s fine. It’s getting late and you don’t know me. I don’t want to make you uncomfortable.”
“Nonsense. My name’s Lori. Now we know each other.” She stepped out of the house and literally pulled me in by the arm.
“I’m Jacob. Nice to meet you.”
“It’ll be nice to have someone to talk to for a change. Tom’s away all day and usually most of the night. All I do is sit and watch this stupid television all night long.”
She seemed like a smart woman: smart enough not to let the likes of me into her house on a whim. But sorrow and grief could make solitude unbearable. Being alone with your own thoughts when your thoughts were constantly betraying you, always going over the things you least wanted to think about, could be exhausting. But nothing can ever keep your mind from going back to the source of the pain. I knew something about that, too. In her case, it was also overriding her natural and perfectly rational fear and good sense. A part of me felt guilty about exploiting this woman’s grief, but I needed to talk to Rose. Plus, a lifetime of practice had taught me to ignore the guilty voices in my head.
“Thank you,” I said as I stepped aside to let her close the door.
“Of course. Would you like something to drink? Coffee? Beer? I’ve been drinking wine myself.”
“Wine is fine,” I said.
“A wine drinker? Perfect. Tom hates the stuff. I always end up drinking it alone.”
She went to the kitchen to get another glass, and we sat down in the living room. It was a nice house. It felt lived-in, like a home should. A far cry from my house, which felt more like a museum. Or a mausoleum. Someplace the dead would go.
A fire was burning in the fireplace, even though it wasn’t all that cool outside. It provided the only light in the room aside from the muted television. The room was comfortable even with the fire burning. Having lived in Hell, I could handle heat pretty well.
“You have a lovely home,” I told her.
“Thank you very much,” she seemed generally pleased that I mentioned it. “It’s perfect for us. Just enough space for…”
She trailed off. I understood.
She was still thinking of her family as the three of them, not two. I noticed there were still toys lying in the corner of the room, despite it clearly having been recently cleaned. They would continue to keep signs of Alexander clearly visible everywhere, until they knew for sure. Maybe even after they knew for sure. I could feel the pain radiating off her in waves. A tear rolled down her cheek. She probably thought I couldn’t see it in the dim light. To her credit, she kept going on in a friendly tone, not even bothering to wipe the tear away.
“Maybe we’ll move one day, but for now, this place is perfect for us.” It was the second time she’d said it was perfect. I figured she was already thinking about moving somewhere else. There were too many reminders here. Too much pain. Pain was one of the reasons I left this city all those years ago, so I could only imagine what it felt like for her.
I heard a car pull into the driveway, but Lori was too lost in her own thoughts to notice. She didn’t react to anything at all until her husband came into the living room, only to see me and his wife sitting in the light of the fireplace, drinking wine. I imagine it didn’t look all that good to him. It didn’t help that the first thing she did when she saw him was to wipe the tear from her eye.
“What’s going on here?” he asked his wife, even though his eyes were glued to me. I admired him for keeping any hint of what he must be feeling from his voice. It sounded completely neutral.
“Hi honey,” Lori said. I stayed silent, figuring it was best to let her explain. “I was just talking with your friend Jacob.”
“He’s not my friend,” he said coolly. “I just met him yesterday. I saw him…” he trailed off. I thought he was about to say he saw me slit a guy’s throat. That wouldn’t have been the best wa
y to keep his already-frazzled wife calm. He opted instead to say, “I saw him about a case I was working on.”
Good call, I thought.
He kissed his wife absently, refusing to take his eyes off of me. It would have been unnerving, if I was the type to get unnerved by a little eye contact.
He took off his coat and handed it to Lori. “Could you give us a minute, Hon?” he asked her.
“Sure,” she said as she took the coat from him. “It was nice meeting you Jacob.”
“Nice meeting you, too.” I was still sitting on the couch. Body language is important. I wanted Rose to feel he was in charge, but only of the situation, not of me. I kept my legs crossed and leaned a bit against the arm of the couch.
“You better start talking,” He said quietly once his wife left the room.
“I need you to come with me.”
“What the fuck are you doing in my house?”
“I need you to come with me,” I repeated.
“How come when I had all those questions earlier, you wanted to play Mr. Mysterious?” he asked. “But you feel it’s okay to come into my home and have drinks with my wife when I’m not around.”
I sat forward. I wanted to look like I was taking this seriously. “Look, Officer Rose--”
“Detective Rose.”
“What?”
“It’s Detective Rose.”
“Oh,” Why was everyone correcting me about their names lately? “Well, a Rose by any other name, right?” The joke fell flat. I shrugged.
“Anyway, Detective Rose, I had to think through exactly what I was going to do. More importantly, I had to decide just how much I wanted to share with you. I’m on very precarious footing here. Everything is kind of hanging in the balance right now.”
“What do you mean everything?” he asked. Valid question. I honestly didn’t know what the stakes were. I assumed they were high. They always were when angels and demons were involved.
“I don’t know, exactly.”
“For someone who claims to have all the answers, you don’t seem to know a whole lot about what’s going on,” he replied.
“Maybe not, but I know more than you. And you need me. You’ve gotten this far on cleverness and luck. That’s not going to get you the answers you need. If anything, it’s going to get you killed.”
“I’m not talking about this anymore. I should be taking you to jail, but I owe you one. So I’m cutting you a break: just get the hell out of my house and don’t ever come back.”
I sighed. I was afraid this would be his reaction, and I’d hoped to avoid what I had to do next.
“Shoot me,” I told him.
“What?!”
“Could you please shoot me?” He just stared. “With your gun?” I added, and pantomimed pulling a trigger with my finger in case he needed further clarification. "Just not in the face."
“What are you talking about?”
I leaned forward. “In order for you to trust me, you need proof. In order to give you that proof, I need you to shoot me.”
“What?” He asked again. The reality of the situation was slowly dawning on him. It was a three-step process. The first was confusion. The second, denial. The third was acceptance—or just a willingness to shoot me. I never found out, because he stopped just short.
“Fine,” I said, seeing that he wasn’t willing to go the distance. I reached into my coat and pulled out my knife. Rose drew his gun, but it was half-hearted. He already proved he wasn’t going to shoot me unless I gave him a damned good reason to.
I placed my left hand palm-down on his coffee table. “Do you have a towel?”
“Why?”
“This is going to be messy.” He didn’t move to get a towel, so I shrugged and went about the business of cutting off my thumb.
There was the normal stunned silence. I’d done this enough times that I could follow the progression on the witnesses’ faces.
I can’t believe he just did that. No, wait, he couldn’t have just done that. It’s some kind of magic trick. It only looks like he cut off his thumb. But his hand’s right in front of me, and there’s no thumb. It’s not like he has any place to hide it…and…Jesus Christ…and there it is, lying on my coffee table.
“Oh Jesus!” he cried as he came to the end of the progression. “What is fucking wrong with you?! Holy shit!”
It was a typical reaction. I ignored him. He’d babble like this for a little until he could regain his composure. I reached into my pocket and grabbed a rag. I’d expected that it might come to this, so I came prepared. It stanched the flow of blood from the wound for a while, but it wouldn’t last long. Fortunately, I wouldn’t need it to.
Rose’s yelling had brought his wife in from the other room. She was about to ask what had happened when she caught sight of my hand. I thought she was going to throw up, but she held it together. She ran and got a dishrag from the kitchen.
“Are you watching?” I asked him when she left.
“Yes I’m fucking watching! You just cut off your thumb!”
I held my hand up so that he could clearly see that my thumb was in fact severed. By this point, Lori had come back with the dishrag and handed it to me.
“Thanks,” I told her.
I held up my left hand and began to heal it. The blood continued to pour, but instead of dripping to the ground, it attached itself to the center of the wound and began to harden into new bone. It continued to coagulate like that for about three more minutes, first forming bone, then moving outwards and forming tendon and flesh. Until, finally, my thumb was whole again.
“Cool, huh?” I wiggled it around for effect.
“How did you do that?” they both asked simultaneously.
“I’m not sure, exactly. Tissue regeneration. It’s a demonic trait. Just happens naturally. I never really thought about the nuts and bolts of it.”
“That’s not possible,” Rose said. Lori still hadn’t spoken. She looked like she was still in shock.
“‘There are more things in Heaven and Earth…’” I said. Apparently I was feeling Shakespearean.
“But not this. I mean, people don’t just re-grow their thumbs.”
"You're right, people don't,” I corrected. “Like I said, it's a demonic trait.”
I looked at Lori. The blood still hadn’t returned to her face. “Are you okay?” I asked.
She sat down on the arm of the couch. “Uh, no, not really.”
“It’s understandable. It’s always a shock when I do that. You’ll get used to it.”
“Really? I’ll get use to…that?”
“Well, no, probably not,” I said. “But it’s not like I do it all the time. Parties and such, but that’s about it.”
I turned to Rose. “So are you coming with me?”
“Why would I do that?” He was still staring at my thumb and shaking his head.
“I can cut off my other thumb if you need more convincing.”
He looked at the pool of blood on his coffee table. “I’ll get my coat.”
I held up my severed thumb. “For good luck,” I said.
He didn’t take it.
********
BOOK THREE
A Match Made In Hell
Chapter 24
We took my car. Rose kept looking around like there was a hidden ejector seat button that I was just waiting for the right moment to push. After seeing me cut off my thumb, he must have found it hard to believe that I was driving an Audi.
“Nice car,” he said.
“Thanks. It’s not mine though.”
“Did you steal it?”
“Why’s everyone always ask me that?”
“I don’t know. Did you?”
“No,” I said. “It belongs to a friend of mine. Although, now that I think of it, he might have stolen it. You’ll probably meet him eventually. He’s a demon.”
“Like you?”
“No, not like me. I’m only part demon. He’s a Full-Blood.”
Rose just shook his head. Information overload. He didn’t believe me yet, or at least not most of it, but given some time, he’d come around.
“I don’t know who or what you are,” he said, “but I can directly trace you to three dead bodies. One of which I know you killed, because I watched you do it. And I just met you yesterday.”
“Conveniently forgetting that the dead guy was going to kill you, aren’t we?”
He shrugged. “We don’t know that.” But of course he did know that. He might not want to admit it, but he knew it.
Rose had been looking out the window during the whole conversation. Now he turned to look at me. “How did you know I wasn’t going to shoot you when you gave me back my gun?”
I shrugged. “I took a chance. It would have stung, but I would’ve gotten over it. Believe it or not, I’ve had guns pointed at me before. I’ve gotten pretty good at being able to tell when someone intends to shoot. It’s a gift. I can tell when people are thinking bad things. Especially when they intend to act on them. It’s a talent that’s kept me alive on more than one occasion.”
“Which is why you knew the guy in the barn was going to shoot me?”
“Anyone would have been able to tell that.”
“Who was he?”
“Never saw him before,” I said. “Some Satanist. No big loss to the world, trust me. Most of them are completely fucking nuts, anyway.”
“How do you know he was a Satanist?”
“The tattoo on his face was a pretty good indicator. It was the mark of a demon named Belial. The guy that almost shot you was Belial’s property.”
The city came into view as we rounded the bend. We both looked up at the few skyscrapers that made up downtown Pittsburgh. After a moment, we both looked away. Downtown Pittsburgh wasn’t all that impressive from this distance. Downtown Pittsburgh wasn’t all that impressive from any distance.
“How do you know this Belial?”
“We’ve had run-ins in the past.”
Rose was running his hands all through the leather interior of the car, like he had to keep touching things to prove they were still real. Either that or he had a leather fetish. Which would be convenient, considering where we were heading.