Spell Blind - eARC

by DAVID B. COE

  There were only about ten cars in the gravel parking lot and about the same number of people inside. A few of them tore their gazes from their gin and tonics and beers as I walked in, but they showed little interest in me and were soon focused once more on their glasses and bottles. I didn’t recognize any of the customers. It had been a while since I’d been there.

  I stepped to the bar and sat. The Diamondbacks were on TV, getting clobbered by the Giants.

  “Jay Feahsson, as I live and breathe.”

  I smiled, as much at the New York accent as at the greeting. Sophe Schaller was about as unlikely a candidate to be tending bar in a place that catered to weremystes as a person could imagine. She was a Jewish grandmother from Brooklyn, who had moved out to Phoenix for the warm air and sunshine. She had to be in her late sixties; maybe even older. Most weremystes her age were already crazy, or they were dead. But she’d once confided in me that her phasings were milder than most, and I believed her. Her mind still seemed as sharp as the day I met her.

  “Hi, Sophe,” I said, leaning over the bar to give her a kiss on the cheek. “How are you?”

  She shrugged. “Eh, not bad.” She had white hair, warm brown eyes, and a smile that could melt glaciers. Like all weremystes, she had that slightly blurred appearance, though the effect was pretty weak on Sophe, probably because she wasn’t a powerful sorcerer. I imagined that the Blind Angel killer would have looked like little more than a smudge.

  Sophe’s face was lined and she wore too much makeup, but I could tell that she’d been a great beauty as a young woman.

  “What’ll you have, dear?” she asked me.

  “Beer. The darkest you’ve got on tap.”

  She grinned, her eyes twinkling in the dim light. “We just got something new in. I think you’ll like it.” She had to use a step stool to get a mug down, and then she walked to the tap and started to fill it. “You here on business or out for a drink?”

  “Business.”

  Sophe nodded, but didn’t say anything more until she’d filled the mug and put it in front of me. “Whaddya wanna know?”

  “You heard about the Deegan kid?” I asked in a low voice.

  “Oy.” She grunted the word, as if she’d been punched in the stomach. “‘Course I have. Who hasn’t?” She narrowed her eyes. “You still think those kids are bein’ killed with magic?”

  “Yeah, I do.”

  Sophe shook her head. “People around here didn’t like it when you were saying that a couple of years ago. They won’t like it any more now.”

  “I know.” I stared back at her, waiting for her to tell me something, knowing that she’d give in eventually. Sophe had always liked me, and whatever the rest of the magical community thought of my efforts to find the weremyste responsible for the Blind Angel murders, she wanted this guy caught.

  At last she sighed and began to wipe up the bar with a white towel. “Luis is in back,” she said, her attention on her cleaning. “He’s playing cards, but he’ll talk to you. I think.”

  “Thanks, Sophe.” I tasted the beer. “That’s good.”

  She grinned. I dug into my wallet and threw a ten spot on the bar before walking to the back room. It was filled with cigarette and cigar smoke, which barely masked the smell of stale beer. Five men sat around a table playing poker with those old chips that always reminded me of Necco wafers. Luis Paredes sat at the far end of the table behind a wall of chips, chewing on a stogie and staring hard at his cards. He was a short, barrel-chested Latino, with a scruffy beard and mustache, and dark eyes that were hard and flat, like a shark’s. I saw that heat-wave effect with him, too, and with the other guys at the table. It was strongest by far with Luis.

  The other poker players were all Latino, and they turned to stare at me as I stood in the doorway. I can’t say that they made me feel welcome.

  “Fearsson,” Luis said. “You want to sit?”

  “I want to talk.”

  Luis said to his friends, “El gringo no tiene el cajones jugar con nosotros.” The gringo doesn’t have the balls to play with us.

  They all laughed. I kept my mouth shut.

  Luis met my gaze again, his smile fading. I’d busted him years ago for possession of pot, and he’d managed to get probation and community service. Later, after I’d opened my business, I helped him track down an employee who had stolen from the bar. So he had as many reasons to like me as not. And he knew that I wasn’t someone who would have shown up here without good reason. At last he muttered “Maldita sea,” and put his cards on the table, face down. “Nos dan cinco minutos.” Damn it. Give us five minutes.

  The other men eyed me again, with even less warmth than before. Then they put down their cards, stood, their chairs scraping on the wood floor, and filed out of the room.

  Luis indicated the chair nearest his own with an open hand. “Mi amigo,” he said. “What can I do for you?”

  I sat and sipped my beer. “You’ve heard about Claudia Deegan?”

  Luis’s expression hardened, if that was possible. “No tengo nada hacer con eso.” That’s not my problem.

  “I know that, Luis. But I think she was killed by magic, like all the other Blind Angel victims. So that makes it a problem for all of us.”

  He scowled, but after a moment he nodded for me to go on.

  “You know of anyone in town who’s been playing with dark magic? Maybe showing signs of power that he shouldn’t have?”

  Luis shook his head. “No.”

  I would have preferred that he give the question more thought, but I didn’t sense that he was hiding anything from me. Even if I had, I wouldn’t have been fool enough to call him a liar in his own place, with his friends in the next room. Luis was as skilled with his magic as I was with mine, maybe more so. And I didn’t think the weremystes listening from the barroom would be siding with me if it came to a fight.

  “Can you think of any reason why someone would kill with magic on the night of the quarter moon?”

  He sat forward. “The first quarter?” Clearly I’d gotten his attention. “El Angel Ciegos?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Every time.”

  He sat back again, rubbing a hand over his mouth.

  I took another sip, watching him. “What does that mean, Luis?”

  “No estoy seguro.” I’m not sure. “The first quarter—that’s a powerful night. Not like the full, but strong, you know? If I was doing magic and I needed it to be just right—perfecto, you know?—that’s when I’d do it.”

  “I think he’s using these kids to make himself stronger,” I said. “I have no proof, and I don’t know what kind of magic he’d have to do, but that’s what I think. Call it the hunch of an ex-cop. I’d appreciate any help you can give me.”

  “I don’t talk to cops, Jay. You know that. And private eyes are no different in my book. But this * * *” He shook his head. “Esto suena mal.” This sounds bad. He stared at the table for several seconds, seemingly deep in thought. “You talked to Quinley yet?”

  “Brother Q?” I said with genuine surprise.

  Luis laughed. “Yeah, Brother Q.” He said it in a way that made me think he didn’t like Q very much.

  Orestes Quinley was the weremyste Kona and I arrested after my first conversation with Namid. He was a minor conjurer then, still new enough to his power that a jail would hold him, and he served a couple of years at Eyman State Prison.

  Within a few months of his release, he started getting in trouble again; small time offenses primarily. He’d never been a violent guy, and for the most part he was accused of stealing esoteric stuff—strange pieces of jewelry, unusual gems and stones, rare herbs and oils. On several occasions, the victims dropped the charges as soon as they recovered the stolen goods. Many of them seemed reluctant to tell us too much about why Orestes might have wanted them, or why they were so anxious to have them back. Even in those cases where the charges weren’t dropped, it never seemed that we could find enough evidence against him to get a co
nviction. And since I was the one guy in the PPD who could track magical crimes, after I left the department he stopped getting caught at all. Those twenty-six months at Eyman still represented the only time Orestes had ever done.

  To this day, whenever something strange happens in town—strange in a magical sense—Kona will ask me to go around and speak with Orestes. On a few occasions he had been able to help us out, but always for a price, and, of course, never in any way that implicated himself. To be honest I was glad I hadn’t been able to prove anything against him. I liked Orestes, and despite the fact that our friendship began with me arresting him, I believe he liked me, too. But I hadn’t talked to him about the Blind Angel case since I’d left the force, and before then he hadn’t been particularly helpful.

  “You think he has something to do with this guy?” I asked.

  Luis gave a noncommittal shrug. “I just said you should talk to him.”

  “Yeah, all right.” I drained my beer and stood. “Thanks, Luis.”

  A sly grin carved across his face. “You sure you don’t want to play a few hands?”

  “Weremyste poker, huh? I don’t think so.”

  He laughed. “By the time we’re done for the night, the cards are glowing with so many colors you can barely tell which suit is which.”

  “Yeah, I’ll bet,” I said. “Goodnight, mi amigo.”

  “Jay.”

  I halted in the doorway. His expression had grown deadly serious.

  “This guy—this killer * * * he loco peligroso. Crazy dangerous, you know? Watch yourself.”

  I nodded once, and left, pausing at the bar long enough to give Sophe my empty mug and wish her goodnight.

  Once outside, I had to resist the urge to jump in the Z-ster and drive straight to Q’s place in Maryvale. But it was late and I’d had a long day. I’d find him soon enough, and if it turned out he’d been lying to me when I was on the job and asking him about the Blind Angel case, he was going to wish he’d never left Eyman Prison.

  CHAPTER 7

  I woke up early, not because I was so eager to see Orestes Quinley, but because after working for the PPD for eight years and getting to work first thing in the morning, I was no longer capable of sleeping late. Besides, this was Tuesday, and every Tuesday morning I drove out to the desert north of Wofford to see my dad.

  I started doing this several years ago, when I was still on the job. It had become clear to me that while he could take care of most of the day to day stuff—cooking his own meals, getting an occasional load of laundry done, keeping his trailer somewhat clean—he couldn’t handle anything that involved interacting with the rest of society. The way the shifts worked after Kona and I moved to homicide, Tuesday mornings were my free time, and since Dad had no one else, I gave them to him.

  I went to the market first to get his shopping done. He still received a small pension from the department, and that paid for his place and some of his food. We also had some family money—from my mom’s side. It went to my dad when she died, although ultimately I think it was meant for me. These days though, I made enough to get by, and my dad needed the money more than I did.

  He liked steaks, New York strips mostly, and chicken salad, the kind that came in cans like tuna. He ate raisin bran for breakfast every day, but only one particular brand. And, man, could he tell if you tried to slip in the wrong one. He loved ice cream at night before he went to bed, and he didn’t care much what kind, so I liked to surprise him with something different most every week. I also picked up basic supplies for him as he needed them: paper towels, toilet paper, laundry detergent, soap; stuff like that. And I usually brought him a six-pack of beer. Two, if I intended to stay with him for dinner. He no longer drank the way he had in the years after my mom died—though of course he’d quit many years too late—and his doctors said an occasional beer wouldn’t hurt him, as long as he didn’t have too much. The funny thing was he never did. For a guy who’d accelerated his own psychological decline by boozing, my father was now pretty disciplined. He allowed himself one beer a night. No more.

  He was funny that way, a study in contradictions. I never knew from one visit to the next what I’d find when I reached his place. Some days he was sharp as a tack; other times it seemed like his brain and his mouth weren’t connected, so that he’d be carrying on a normal conversation, except that nothing he said made any sense at all. There were times when he was jovial and talkative, and times when he acted so depressed, so withdrawn, I was afraid to leave him alone, and I’d end up spending the night curled up on his couch. And sometimes he’d have what he called his “piss and vinegar days” when he was ticked off at the world. Those days were no picnic.

  The tricky thing was there were endless combinations with all of these moods. He could be pissed off and incoherent, or lucid and utterly cheerless. Each visit was a crap shoot.

  For the first several years, I resented every second I spent with him, every mile I drove to get there and every mile I had to drive to get away again. He hadn’t been the best father in the world. It was tough on cops to begin with, what with overtime, schedules that were less than family-friendly, and the occasional stakeout. Add in a difficult personality and the effect of the phasings, and my dad was never a nominee for Father of the Year.

  Things grew far worse after my mother’s death. I still don’t understand all that happened. I know she had an affair with another man, and eventually both of them wound up dead. Some people said my father killed them both, but I can’t imagine it. For all his faults, and despite all the damage to his mind, my father was no murderer. Most assumed that my mother and her lover killed themselves when their affair became public knowledge. Whatever the truth, there could be no denying that my father loved her. After she died, he started drinking all the time and his mind began to go. Soon he had lost his job as well as his grip on reality, and I was left effectively orphaned by the age of fifteen. Is it any wonder I hated him?

  I should have ended up in foster care, and who knows where I’d be now if I had? But the cops in my dad’s unit took me in. I got passed around from family to family, from home to home, but they were all good homes and good families, and they all took care of me, got me through high school, helped me get state aid to go to college. And after I went to the academy, they made sure I got a job on the force.

  It was only then, as I started to live a cop’s life and learn what it meant to be a weremyste, that I came to understand my old man. I’m not naive enough to think that I’ll ever forgive him entirely for the things I went through as a kid. Those old resentments die hard. But for better or worse, he’s my dad. And those days when I find him upbeat and clear are priceless.

  I got an early start on this day and finished most of the shopping before eight in the morning. It had been a comfortable night, but I could tell that the day would be scorching hot. It was already warm and the morning sun felt like one of those heat lamps in a fast food restaurant.

  A hard, hot wind blew out of the west, sweeping clouds of dust and tumbleweeds across the Phoenix-Wickenburg Highway and making the Z-ster shudder as I cruised past the pale, baked houses and gas stations of Peoria and El Mirage.

  Phoenix had crept farther and farther into the desert over the years, new subdivisions and shopping malls fanning across the landscape like flame spreading across paper. But Wofford remained much the same: a small, bland little town with a gas station, a post office and not much else. A single road off U.S. 60 cut through the town and one mile north of the town center, such as it was, you were back in the desert again, following an endless line of sun-bleached telephone poles and watching dust devils whirl above the sage.

  My dad lived on a small rise a short distance off this road, at the end of a rutted dirt track. His trailer had been nice once, but it was old now, and he didn’t do much to keep it up. A couple of years ago I’d rigged a little covered area for him outside the front door, using a sturdy tarp and a frame I built out of two-by-sixes. It flapped some in the win
d, but it had made it through three winters with only a few minor repairs. He sat out there every day on an old lawn chair, sipping iced tea and staring at the desert waiting for God-knows-what. He knew his birds, and he often had a pair of old Leica binoculars at his side.

  He was out there already today, his chair angled eastward, toward the New River Mountains, which were partially obscured by the brown haze hanging over north Phoenix. He was dressed in jeans and a torn white t-shirt. He’d put on his old tennis shoes, but hadn’t bothered with socks.

  My dad was a little like a scrying stone. There were signs I could watch for, portents of his mood and state on a given day. No socks was never a good sign. Neither was a mess anywhere in the house. He kept things neat when he wanted to, and when he could manage to clean up after himself. If there were dirty dishes in the sink or clothes strewn about in his bedroom I knew that he’d been out of it for a day or two.

  I got out of the Z-ster, grabbed the bags of groceries from the back, and pushed the door shut with my foot.

  “Hey, Dad!” I called.

  He didn’t answer. I could see that he was muttering to himself, his white curls stirring in the wind, his hands gripping the plastic arms of his chair. He sat slouched, long legs stretched out in front of him, his belly, once as flat as mine, gathered in folds beneath the threadbare shirt.

  I let myself into the trailer and started putting things away. The dishes and pans from the previous night’s dinner were still in the sink. I saw no evidence to suggest that he’d had any breakfast.

  “I got you Rocky Road this time. You seemed to like it when I got it for you last month.”

  Nothing.

  When I’d finished with the groceries, I cleaned up his kitchen. Then I joined him out front, unfolding another lawn chair.

  I kissed him on the forehead, then sat. “How you doin’, Pop?”

  “This wind means rain,” he said, not bothering to tear his gaze from the desert hills.

  I glanced up at the sky. There wasn’t a cloud over the entire state of Arizona.