by M. D. Massey
“Shit!” I slammed the bat on the conference table, breaking it in two. The guy in the corner looked at me like I was nuts, making me thankful I was still wearing the surgical mask. He stood, shakily, and stared at my handiwork.
“My boss is going to be so pissed about that table. It’s brand new—we had to special order it from Canada.”
I blew a fuse.
“Seriously? I risk my life to save your ass, and you’re worried about the furniture? First off, why the hell would the local government spend my tax dollars on furniture made in another country, when they can buy perfectly good tables here in Texas? Second, I believe a thank you is in order.”
I stared him down, resisting the urge to menace him with the club in my hand. Temper, temper, Colin. Remember, he’s not the bad guy. And it’s not his fault you let the ghoul escape.
“Um, thanks?” He brushed himself off, grooming being a common affectation brought on by emotional shock. “But someone needs to pay for the table and window. We’re working on a very limited budget around here, you know.”
I was a hair’s breadth from throwing him out the window, when a mousy-looking guy with stringy blonde hair and a bad complexion walked in. He wore a dark blue Travis County Medical Examiner windbreaker, and the pale-skinned look of someone who had worked the night shift for—oh, the last few decades. He took in the scene, then looked at me and the man in the corner and sighed.
“You just had to let a mundane see, didn’t you? Damn it, druid, I’ll be here all night mind wiping him now.”
The ghoul’s intended victim looked relieved to see the new arrival. “Brandon, I’m so glad you’re here. I was just attacked by a zombie. Holy shit, that just came out of my mouth. A freaking zombie tried to eat my face off.”
He righted a nearby office chair and sat down, dazed. The adrenaline had finally washed out of his system; now he’d be easier to deal with. A cool breeze rattled the vertical blinds on either side of the window frame as the man stared out into the night.
Brandon walked over to him and snapped his fingers in front of his face, getting his attention.
“Sam. Sam. Sam!”
Finally, the shell-shocked man acknowledged him. Brandon squatted before Sam to get at eye level with him. He snapped his fingers a second time, then wove his hands in complex patterns while muttering under his breath.
“Sleep,” he whispered. At that, Sam went out like a light.
“I take it you’re Maeve’s fixer.”
He ignored me and performed a quick physical assessment of Sam. It made sense. The guy might have had internal injuries, and the death of a medical examiner’s assistant would be much harder to cover up than a break in. Finally, he glanced my way, disapproval and irritation written all over his face. He crossed his arms and glowered at me.
“This is some mess you’ve left me. Bad enough I have to wear this disgusting glamour all the time, but cleaning up after someone else’s fuck up takes the cake.”
“Oh, so it’s my fault that you guys brought a live ghoul into the medical examiner’s office. If you’d have been on day shift, this never would have happened.”
Brandon’s eyebrows drew together as he clucked his tongue.
“Unfortunately for both of us, I’d agreed to cover for that dreadful vampire who works for Luther. Ugh, such manners he has. Can’t say I blame him, though. None of them want to be out right now, what with…” he swept his hand around the room, “…this going on.”
He took another look around, then waved his hands at me in a shooing motion.
“Well, scurry along now. I’ll handle this. All you’ll do is get in the way, and with this mess that weak little see-me-not spell you’ve cast on yourself isn’t going to fool anyone. Go show yourself out. And do try to avoid being seen as you go, hmm?”
He abruptly turned away from me, resting his chin in the crook of his thumb and forefinger, examining the scene as if figuring out a particularly difficult puzzle. As far as Brandon was concerned, I no longer existed. Not that I cared what the fae thought of me, but it did sting a little to be dismissed so handily.
This is why I detest working with the fae, I reflected.
I sighed and stuffed my club in my bag, leaving through the back way before the cops showed up.
Chapter Eleven
Hemi was waiting for me at the club, hanging out at the bar drinking a beer when I walked in. The place was busy, which wasn’t a shock considering how many people came into town this time of year. Most of them were at Zilker at the music festival, trampling grass and getting high, but quite a few always seemed to end up here on Sixth Street, braving the frat boys and serial muggers in order to get their party on.
I was surprised that the police would arrest Hemi on suspicion for a mugging that had just happened to occur behind his place of work. Sure, Austin had a very politically savvy chief of police, and he was known to pressure his detectives into closing cases quickly—especially when the risk of scaring tourists off was high. But the evidence seemed kind of thin. I figured it was just Hemi’s bad luck to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. It seemed unfair, but once we had proof to clear his name we could be done with the matter.
He waved me over as I entered. I took a quick look around the place, and it failed to impress. The fading sunlight streaming through the front windows revealed the interior for what it was: a glorified juke joint, well past its prime. Scuffed wooden floor, scarred and battered tables and chairs, discarded swizzle sticks nestled in corners keeping dust bunnies company, and the smell of sexual desperation and misspent youth undergirding it all. I’d been inside a lot of night clubs during daytime hours while on investigations, and they were all the same. If people knew how nasty they really were, they’d probably choose to drink at home most nights. I found both options equally depressing.
The big Maori slugged down his beer and stood, towering over me. Most people had to hop or step down from a barstool, but with Hemi it looked almost like he was stepping up.
“Been waiting here a while. Did something turn up at the park?”
“Had to make a stop along the way to check something out—I’ll tell you about it later. Right now, I just want to get a copy of this video to Borovitz so he can clear your name.”
“Office is this way. C’mon.”
I followed Hemi through a door at the end of the bar, into a storage room stacked with boxes of no name whiskey and cases of cheap beer. We exited into a short hall and hooked a right into an exceptionally tidy, cramped office. Hemi sat behind the desk, and the old wooden office chair creaked and groaned under his weight. He clicked something on the desktop and pulled up a live feed of the interior of the club and the alley out back. The screen was split in four sections, with two views of the lower level and one of the upper level. The final view showed the alley from a camera above the rear exit.
I looked at the feeds on the screen and felt a glimmer of hope. If we were lucky, we could track the victim’s movements before his death, and possibly get a lead on the real killer while we were at it. Still, I found it surprising that the cops had arrested Hemi without pulling up this footage. The whole situation just wasn’t making sense.
“Hemi, are you sure the cops didn’t look at this footage before they hauled you in?”
“Said they’d pull the feed later. Why?”
“Something doesn’t add up. Before you show me the footage from last night, run down the events of the evening.”
He swiveled to face me and shrugged. “Not much to tell. I showed up for my shift around eight, hung out for a while on door duty until the place got busy. Then I switched out with one of the other doormen so I could go on roving duty. Some fella looked a bit suss—just the way he was looking around the club, all nervous like. So I kept an eye on him for a while, then a fight broke out among some others and I had to throw a few of them out. They were completely pissed, but nothing out of the ordinary. Pretty much a regular night here.”
“What happ
ened to the suspicious guy you were watching?”
“He was gone by the time I got back from kicking those fellas out. The detective who arrested me said one of the fighters was the guy that was killed. I remember him, because he looked like he had money, like he was used to getting his way. He gave me the hardest time of them all—took a swing at me, but I was never in any danger. Head of security called the cops, but it was a busy night and they were tied up elsewhere. So, I escorted him out and left him on the front walk.”
I shook my head. None of this made any sense. “Play the footage for me. Start with the nervous guy, and work forward from there.”
Hemi pulled up the recording from the night before, pointing at the screen. “There—that’s the guy who was acting jumpy.”
The angle was bad and the lighting wasn’t great, but if I didn’t know any better I’d have said it was my friend Elias from CIRCE. It was possible he’d just been down here to get drunk or hook up, but he didn’t seem the type to me. Besides, he wasn’t talking to anyone in the video; he was just leaning up against the wall and nursing a drink, looking around the place like he was up to no good.
“Fast-forward to the fight.”
Hemi did as I asked, and the video quickly advanced until the brawl, if you could call it that. Two guys who looked like they’d be more at home on Martha’s Vineyard than Sixth started a shoving match with a group of local frat boys wearing Longhorns gear. I imagined they’d probably mentioned our recent losing streak—a sore subject among fans these days. We watched Hemi and two other bouncers break the fight up and escort the two rich kids out of the club.
Hemi sighed and leaned back in the chair, interlocking his fingers behind his head. “And that was that. We walked them out, they yelled and cussed at us and told us they’d be back with friends. We ignored them, and they headed up the street, probably to find another club.”
I pulled a sticky note off the desk and jotted down the time of the fight. “Huh. What time was his body found?”
“I dunno, maybe an hour after this happened? All I know is, the cops showed up at around midnight.” The time stamp on the screen said 10:17 pm. That meant the guy had probably been killed not long after he’d gotten kicked out.
“Play the video.”
My hunch was right. At 10:53, the camera in the alley showed one of the rich kids stumble into view. He stopped by a dumpster to take a piss, then he got hit by a blur that knocked him out of the camera’s view. I checked the other camera views and spotted Hemi standing inside the club near the front door at the time of the attack. I copied down the time on screen and leaned over Hemi’s shoulder.
“Rewind that and advance it frame by frame. Let’s see if we can get a look at what attacked him.”
As the footage advanced, the blur came into view from the left. For a single frame, the figure was illuminated in a circle of light at the center of the screen.
“Son of a bitch.” I clapped Hemi on the shoulder. “Make me two copies of that footage, and make sure it includes the entire night.”
Hemi nodded. “Will do. Does this mean I’m free and clear?”
“I’m pretty sure once we get this footage to Borovitz, he’ll get the cops off your back and point them toward the real killer. The only problem is, I think the real killer is a ghoul.”
I stared at the screen, where a very large man in a dark jacket and hoodie stood frozen in mid-stride. Was it the ghoul I’d just tangled with? If so, it was hunting the downtown area right in the middle of one of the biggest festival weekends of the year. That was bad, astronomically bad. I needed to track it down before more people died. Or before it caused an undead outbreak of epic proportions.
I went straight from the bar to Borovitz and Feldstein’s offices, leaving the footage in their mail drop. I called their answering service to let Borovitz know it was there, then headed back to the junkyard to review the footage again. After watching it a half-dozen times, I was almost positive the attacker was my ghoul. I was also confident that Elias was in the footage from earlier in the evening. I should have been out combing the streets for the killer ghoul, but after running for a full 24 hours straight, I was dead on my feet. So instead I crashed out and vowed to start looking first thing in the morning.
I turned up exactly squat during my search the following day, and returned to the junkyard empty-handed. I spent the rest of the afternoon catching up on work Ed had left for me, then searched the yard for Finn to see what he thought about the whole thing. Finn was MIA, so I headed out again after dark to search for the ghoul, who I’d started to refer to as “super-ghoul” due to his size and strength. Again, I found absolutely nothing. Looked like it was time to take Maeve’s advice and visit that vodoun priestess she’d mentioned.
Madame Rousseau operated out of a converted two-story home on the I-35 access road, just south of Highway 183. I pulled up to the place after a harrowing trip up I-35 on my scooter, vowing never to take the freeway again. Austin’s infrastructure was amazingly inefficient, and unlike most large cities in Texas it lacked a loop to divert traffic around the city. That, combined with all the trucking traffic coming up from Mexico due to NAFTA—and a staggering population growth rate—made I-35 a death trap most days. I swore that next time I headed up this way I’d take Lamar, even though it’d take me three times as long. Some things just couldn’t be rushed, and my death was tops on that list.
As I approached the front entrance to Rousseau’s, I considered turning back. “PSYCHIC,” “TAROT READINGS,” “PALMISTRY,” and “FORTUNE TELLING” prominently displayed in bright neon made her establishment impossible to miss. Such businesses, if you could call them that, were considered to be beneath the notice of truly accomplished practitioners of magic. For one, anybody with any real magical skill could find much better ways to earn a living than fleecing housewives and desperate business owners. The I-Ching, palmistry, and card reading were mostly guesswork, and about as useful as fortune cookies in foretelling a person’s destiny. Just as time travel was beyond the reach of even the most powerful magicians, so was the art of seeing the future.
Thus, most wizards wouldn’t be caught dead at a place like this, and personally I wasn’t looking forward to meeting “Madame Rousseau” at all—if that was even her real name. But if she was the local expert on voodoo and zombism, I’d need to keep an open mind during my visit. Also, the last thing I wanted to do was piss off a vodoun priestess. Like Maeve had said, curses were not something to be taken lightly. I was living proof of that.
I took a deep breath and headed up the steps, pausing briefly to check my protection wards before I opened the commercial glass door and stepped into the waiting area. A chime rang somewhere in the shop as I entered, presumably to let Madame Rousseau know she had a guest. Based on that alone, I decided she wasn’t much of a psychic—and probably not much in the way of an expert on zombies, either.
“I’ll be right there!” someone called from the back of the place.
I busied myself by taking in the interior of the building from where I stood. A table off to the side held brochures printed on glossy paper, offering upsells for Madame Rousseau’s services and package deals for clients who wished to purchase readings in packs of ten or more. A glass counter to the right displayed all manner of crystals, incense, trinkets, and the like, and bookshelves lining the space sold titles on everything from alien visitations to finding your chakras to getting in touch with your spirit guides.
That last part made me shiver; people who tried to contact the other side often ended up inviting things in that were better left alone. More than a few deadly hauntings had started with nothing more than some kids messing around with a Ouija board at a party. People needed to leave well enough alone; the dangers simply weren’t worth the thrills.
Out of curiosity, I used my second sight to scan the items in the case and the various occult decorations strewn around the room. With the exception of some fairly standard wards on the doors and windows, the co
ntents of this place were completely magically inert. Shocker.
A petite, middle-aged Anglo woman with strawberry blonde hair bustled out of an adjacent room, parting the beaded curtains that blocked the door frame. She was simply dressed in jeans, sandals, and a Hello Kitty t-shirt, and wore her hair straight and parted down the middle. A crystal on a thin silver chain adorned her neck, and her arms sported various bangles and charms that were just as devoid of magic as the items in the case.
My face must’ve betrayed my surprise, because she smiled and winked at me. “Not what you were expecting, hmm? I can assure you, your reading will be both fast and accurate.”
I held my hands up. “Oh, I’m not here for a reading. I was referred to you by Maeve.”
I paused to gauge her reaction, and her eyes narrowed slightly at the name. She dropped all pretense of pleasantness and motioned for me to follow.
“I don’t discuss such matters where they might be overhead. This way, please.”
I followed her through the beaded curtains and down a hallway with several shut doors, except the first one, which revealed a table covered by a black velvet cloth with a crystal ball in the center. How predictable. But I supposed, like most things in life, Madame Rousseau’s success depended on meeting consumer expectations.
We stopped at the end of the hall, in front of a door with an electronic keypad above the door handle. She typed in a code and opened the door, waving me into a small kitchen area. “Have a seat.”
I complied and waited as she prepared some hot tea. I was growing impatient, but couldn’t really bring myself to be rude. Besides, I’d never been the type to lean on people, throwing my weight around to get what I wanted. I saved that sort of treatment for fae and other nasties.
Momentarily, Madame Rousseau sat down and poured us each a cup of Earl Grey.
“Alright. Tell me what brings you here, mister—?”
“You can just call me Colin.”
“I’m Janice, Colin. Pleased to meet you. So why did Maeve send you over? It wasn’t for a palm reading.”