He pointed his Uzi at me. “You,” he said, “you’re coming with us.”
I half-lowered my arms before his muzzle-enhanced sign language persuaded me to raise them again. “Robbery,” I observed, “bad enough. Kidnapping? Far more serious crime. You might want to rethink—”
Lupé interrupted. “I’d make a better hostage.”
“What?” There was an echo to my response as the goons with the guns chimed in.
“I’m a woman,” she elaborated. “More emotional value as a hostage. The police are less likely to put my life at risk.” She gestured without actually lowering her arms. “I’m smaller, weaker, more easily controlled. It makes more sense to take me.”
“What?” I said again. “No.” I knew that she felt safe in going with them. Once they were away from witnesses, they’d get the chance to see how weak and easily controlled a werewolf was as a hostage.
But I wasn’t about to let that happen. “She’s lying,” I argued. “She has a black belt in karate and a photographic memory. I’m the better hostage.” At least I wouldn’t get overconfident while in close proximity to a pair of Uzis.
“He’s lying,” she countered. “He’s depressed and suicidal. He’ll force you to shoot him so he can go out looking like a hero.”
I glared at her. “She’s lying!”
She glared back. “He’s lying!”
“Shut up!”
“You shut up!”
“Both of you shut up!” gravel voice shouted. “We’re taking Cséjthe.”
We both shut up and stared at him. How did he know my name?
It was beginning to dawn on us that the robbery might not be the main plan but only a bit of misdirection for something else—something like a kidnapping or assassination. And, with the dawn, the front door opened and two black women entered the store.
They were a study in contrasts. The first woman was immense. She wore a tent of gold lamé overlaid with a pattern of flowers done in iridescent greens and blues. A matching turban wobbled atop her head which was framed by a pair of gold, tinkling wind chimes that doubled as earrings. The outfit was so garish that I didn’t recognize Mama Samm D’Arbonne until she spoke.
And almost not then.
“I’m just not comfortable walking around in public with all this cash in my purse, Pearl,” she said in a voice that was louder than necessary for a personal conversation. “If these gennelmens would just take my check, I wouldn’t have had to go to all this trouble of withdrawing the five thousand dollars from my account and carrying it around in public!” She patted a huge satchel of alligator patterned leather that hung from her left shoulder. I think it was supposed to be a purse.
“Pearl’s” purse was much smaller—as was the woman, herself. The white clutch purse complemented her white top and green tailored skirt and matching jacket. “You should just keep your mouth shut, Luella!” she answered. Luella? “Nobody needs to know that you’ve got five thousand dollars in your handbag exceptin’ you keep blabbin’ about it! Leastways we’re here, now. No one’s gonna reach in and grab it now!”
I glanced at Lupé who looked back. “Pearl’s” real name was Olive Purdue, my former secretary and now partner in my part-time detective agency, After Dark Investigations. She worked the day shift, now, and should have been in the office a half hour ago. Why she was here and doing this “Pearl and Luella” act with Mama Samm eluded me for the moment. Maybe I was back home in bed and still dreaming.
Mama Samm seemed to notice us for the first time. Her eyes grew wide and she screeched: “Oh my Jesus! There’s mens with guns! They’re gonna rob me!”
As wide as her eyes were my eyes were probably wider: it was as if the serene and unflappable psychic’s persona had been scooped out of her mammoth body and she was possessed by some evil spirit from the Amos ‘n’ Andy circle of Hell.
“Hush up, Luella!” Olive said. “I think they’re here to rob the jewelry store. They’re not interested in what’s in your purse.”
“Of course they’re interested in what’s in my purse, girlfriend! I got five grand in my purse! You think they gonna let me walk back outta here with all that money?”
“Not if you keep yakkin’ ‘bout it! So shut up, Luella!”
“Yes,” said gravel voice, “shut up the both of you!”
The other cloaked robber, who had remained silent till now, leaned in and murmured something to his partner.
He shrugged. “Cash is cash,” gravel voice answered. “You don’t have to fence it. Besides, we’re not bein’ paid enough for this job anyway. Go ahead.”
The silent partner strode over to “Luella” and yanked the bag out of her grasp. She tried to retrieve it but “Pearl” held her back. That was the most surreal part of this little impromptu sketch: the sight of Olive Purdue restraining a woman more than three times her body mass.
“Luella” started shrieking as the bandit stripped off a glove and plunged his hand into the cavernous depths of the leather shoulder bag.
“Shut! Up!” gravel voice demanded, waving his Uzi in a threatening manner.
Mama Samm shut up but the shrieking continued because the silent partner was no longer silent.
As he dropped the bag he appeared to sprout tentacles from the end of his arm. His hat flew off as he began to dance and whirl about. Now that I could get a good look at his face, it was obvious why he hadn’t spoken before: robber number two was Archie, the other half of our security detail. His hand was obscured by a quartet of water moccasins who had sunk their fangs into his wrist, palm, and thumb.
Olive fumbled her clutch purse open and produced a .22 pistol. Mama Samm pulled two enormous hat pins from her turban and brandished them like meat skewers. “Drop the weapon!” they both shouted.
Gravel Voice was caught off guard but not ready to surrender. Perhaps he thought the Uzi negated our advantage in numbers. As he swung the barrel around to point at Olive, Lupé and I both launched ourselves with preternatural speed.
She hit him low and I hit him high. The Uzi went off as we all went down, throwing a spray of bullets around the room like a demented water sprinkler.
Somebody punched an alarm button.
We rolled once, twice, and a second and third burst was muffled by the press of our combined bodies. Either one of us would have taken him down and stopped it right then and there. Unfortunately there were three people in the mix making our efforts confused and uncoordinated.
And it was taking way too long. A white-hot poker stabbed me in the thigh as I rolled and then jabbed me again in the left buttock. Lupé cried out and I knew that our time was up. I grabbed his throat with my left hand and squeezed. Correction: I suddenly closed my left hand. Gravel Voice was human so he didn’t discorporate and go all dusty.
But he was still very dead.
I rolled off and tried to rest on my right side; the wounds in my left leg and—ahem—hip made any other position untenable for the moment. Lupé just huddled in a ball.
“Honey?” I reached out to touch her and groaned with the effort. She didn’t move. Just a little quiver and an abbreviated whine told me that she was still alive.
“Need some help here!” I yelled.
One of the store employees announced he was calling 911 as Mama Samm knelt between us. “Baby, are you okay?”
“Fine as frog hair,” I grunted. “See to Lupé!”
As Mama Samm turned to my fiancée I looked over at Archie, who was down on his knees, now. Olive stood just out of his reach, pointing her gun at his head but I don’t think he even noticed. The venomous water snakes were still clamped to his hand and wrist and the flesh of his arm was already starting to turn dark and swell.
Mama Samm spoke. “Miss Olive, you think you can hold the fort a few minutes?”
“This bad boy ain’t going nowhere!” she said with unaccustomed vehemence. “You okay, boss?”
“We’re partners now, Olive. I’m not your boss.”
“You’re okay,�
� I heard her mutter.
“Well, I’m gonna need some help getting Miss Lupé out to the car,” the huge fortune-teller announced. “And we got to get moving.”
“Shouldn’t we wait for the ambulance?” I asked, trying to turn over and get to my hands and knees.
Mama Samm shook her head. “Uh-uh. I wouldn’t send a dog to any hospitals ‘round here.”
There was nothing wrong with any of the nearby hospitals but I caught the nod of her turbaned head. I followed the motion to gaze at the nape of Lupé’s neck: dark hair was starting to sprout along her spinal column. Pain and shock was triggering a lycanthropic transformation. We couldn’t take her to any human hospital.
“I know someone,” Mama Samm was saying. “Why don’t you ask these fine gentlemen to help me get Lupé out to my car?”
I looked over at the frightened faces of the store’s staff. “Them?”
“Well, honey,” she said, “you sure as hell in no condition to carry her. Or yourself, I’m thinking. Besides, I think you need to be talking to them about what they’ll be remembering afore we leave.”
She had a point. When the cops arrived, they’d want to know where we went. The last thing we needed was an APB for two gunshot victims fleeing the scene of a crime.
“What about Olive?”
“It’s okay, baby. She knows.”
I felt dizzy. “She knows?”
Mama Samm nodded. “You need allies. She can’t help you or protect herself if she remained in the dark.”
“So you told her?”
“A couple of months back. She had her suspicions.”
“And she knows everything?”
“Not everything. She doesn’t know about Jamal.”
“Shit.” That was the one thing I’d rather that someone else would tell her.
I eased myself around and looked at the trio of white-faced humans behind the glass counter. “You three—
“—come here and look into my eyes . . .”
Chapter Five
We lay in the back of a 1956 Chevrolet Beauville 210 station wagon while Mama Samm drove—no pun intended—like a bat out of hell.
The adrenaline had worn off somewhere around the city limits. Pain was making a serious attempt to get my attention while shock kept wrapping a fuzzy blanket of disinterest around my mind. Somewhere in between, I felt bad about getting blood all over Mama Samm’s car. Despite being a half century old, its two-tone, blue-and-white paint job gleamed like new and the face chrome and bumpers reflected the streetlights like funhouse mirrors. The interior, however, was going to need some serious detailing once we were patched up.
I wasn’t supposed to worry about Lupé. Anything that didn’t immediately kill her should have been a minor annoyance: her lycanthropy would regenerate any wound short of a stopped heart or missing head.
But I was growing more concerned as we sped away in the storm’s backwash and headed south toward thinning cloud cover. My wounds had stopped bleeding almost before I finished crawling across the tailgate to flop. Lupé was still unconscious, however, and her side wouldn’t stop leaking blood. I raised her shirt and checked her wound for the tenth time in as many minutes. At least it was a clean “through and through,” the bullet apparently entering just inside the iliac crest of her pelvis and exiting just above her hip. Lucky her, I still had two slugs in me: the fun would begin when they had to be dug back out.
“What were you and Olive doing at the jewelry store?” I called to the front seat. A little conversation beyond “Are we there, yet?” was a welcome distraction.
“Saving your ass,” Mama Samm answered with a cackle. “But, from the looks of your pants, it done got shot anyway.” She craned her head around. “How’s Miss Lupé?”
“You’re the fortune-teller,” I snapped, “you tell me.”
“I tried calling your house but you had already left. Couldn’t get through to Miss Deirdre, she was on the other phone. Just had time to call Olive and load my purse.”
“You’re telling me what; you’re not telling me how.”
The original 235 inline six with its three-on-the-tree and automatic overdrive kept the ride smooth as silk while we were on the highway but now we were on a side road and headed in-country. The wagon’s jewel-like suspension couldn’t compensate for bad roads once we went rural.
“I had a dream last night . . .” she began.
I shivered—whether from fending off shock or the reminder of last night’s dream encounter with Jenny and Kirsten, I couldn’t say.
“ . . . I saw you at the jeweler’s. You and Miss Lupé were trying on rings. A strange man came up and gave you both a pair of real nice ones. When you put yours on, the diamond turned dirty looking. I looked real close and saw it wasn’t no diamond after all. It was a bloodstone!” She stopped as if that explained everything.
“So you called Olive instead of alerting the police?”
“You think the po-lice gonna put any stock in the dreams of an old, black fortune-teller?” I couldn’t argue the point seeing as I wasn’t much on sharing my own dreams these days.
“’Sides, when the papers tell how Miss Olive foiled a jewelry store holdup—her little .22 pistol against two automatic weapons—your detective business gonna make more money than you know what to do with!”
“I already have more money than I know what to do with. And I’m not really keen on a lot of publicity—” My cell phone warbled. “—even if the witnesses have no memories of our part in what happened.” I pulled it out and flipped it open.
She chuckled. “You sure are getting good at that mind hypnotizing stuff.”
I was. Getting the jewelry store staff to cooperate was easy. Getting them to forget our presence and part in all of this wasn’t much harder. I’ve wondered how many unknowing victims have provided a midnight aperitif to a vampire only to have the memory erased upon their parting. I hadn’t applied my own powers of mental domination to such effect—yet. I could tell, however, that I would be more than capable when my transformation to monster was complete.
“You might do well to remember that,” I growled at her.
The levity was suddenly gone from her voice. As was the uncultured patois that she affected for the crackers. “And you might do well to remember to whom you are speaking before you go talking trash.”
“Uh,” I swallowed, “yes, ma’am.” I activated the phone.
“Chris?” It was Deirdre.
“Yeah.”
“Olive called. Are you all right?” There was a hint of panic and a taste of something more in her voice.
“Been better. But we’re alive and Mama Samm is taking us somewhere to get all fixed up.”
“How bad is it? Should I put in a call to Dr. Burton?”
I looked over at Lupé. Tufts of sable hair were erupting on her face and her nose seemed longer, broader, darker. She whimpered softly. “Yeah. Not a bad idea. Make the call.” I remembered the jar on the mantel at home and Pipt’s email with Theresa Kellerman’s head serving as his sig file. “In fact, talk to Mooncloud, too. Tell ‘em that one of them should make the trip out. Listen, this is not a good time—I’ll call you back after we get to where we’re going.”
“Where are you going?”
I turned my head back toward the front seat. “Where are we going?”
“To see the Gator-man,” was Mama Samm’s cryptic reply.
“We’re off to see the Gator-man,” I repeated. “Don’t ask me, I really don’t know. I just know that we can’t go to a hospital with Lupé getting all furry.”
“I understand. What I don’t understand is what happened. Olive said there was a robbery . . .”
“No. It was supposed to look like a robbery. It was either a hit or an abduction. They knew my name and seemed set on taking me with them.”
“What do you mean?”
“Deirdre . . . Archie was one of the two guys.”
I heard the catch in her voice. “And the other one?” she aske
d after a moment.
“Didn’t recognize him. He seemed to be in charge. Archie followed his lead, deferred to him.”
“It wasn’t Marvin?”
I shook my head and hazily remembered that she couldn’t see me as I had the video turned off. “No. I saw Marv on the way out. He was still sitting in the Hummer and he looked dead.”
The car swerved but caught a bad pothole with its left rear tire and Lupé shrieked. The high keening sound cut me to the quick but at least she was awake now. “Chris?”
I eased back down next to her and gave her a little squeeze. “It’s okay, baby. I’m here.” I turned back to the phone. “Gotta go.”
“Right.” Her tone suggested that the remaining security personnel were in for a rough time of it. “Don’t go all Jack Bauer on me, Chris; keep me in the loop.”
“What happened?” Lupé asked groggily as I clicked off.
“You got shot, honey. You took a bullet in the side.”
“It hurts.”
“I know, baby. We’re gonna get you fixed up real soon.” I turned my head and yelled up to Mama Samm in the front seat. “How much longer?”
“Almost there . . .”
“You said that a half hour ago.”
“I’m getting there as fast as I dare. A fast bumpy ride’s bound to be worse than a slightly longer, smooth one. How you doing, Miss Lupé?”
She coughed and groaned. “Oh, it hurts!”
“I know, honey child. Try and be strong like Mister Chris there. He shot twice as much as you.”
Lupé gripped my arm. “Oh, Chris! Are you all right?”
I gave her my best mock scowl. “If I wasn’t, would she be doing her Aunt Jemima voice for us?”
For that comment she laid it on all the thicker. “He is grievously wounded. They done shot him in the ass!”
I grimaced and Lupé matched my expression as she started to laugh. “Ah! Ah. Oh God, oh Jesus, oh Mary and Joseph . . .”
I tried to reassure her. “I don’t think it’s that serious.”
Habeas Corpses - The Halflife Trilogy Book III Page 8