The Magpye: Circus

by CW Lynch

  "I'll make some calls," replied Taylor, reaching for his mobile phone. "Make sure the story gets lost."

  "I don't care about the media, I am the media," spat King. "Killing the story there doesn't end it, not something as big as this. Vic Chase has got a big mouth, he'll tell the other bosses. Cops will tell other cops. He burnt it to the ground, Jack. People are going to notice and maybe people are going to start to think that you can go up against me and get away with it after all, that maybe they should pull on a mask and burn something of mine down. It starts on the streets, Jack, not in the papers."

  "So, what about your plan?"

  King sighed. "Exactly. My plan. It's time to move that up a gear, don't you think?"

  King strode out of the office, leaving Taylor behind. He stalked down the corridor. The King family mansion had been completely redecorated and remodelled to his exacting specifications. Every heirloom and antique had been packaged, indexed, and shipped to storage. Every portrait and photograph too. There was nothing in the building, save the bricks and mortar, more than a year old. It was a statement in modernity, homage to progress. The King mansion had been dragged, kicking and screaming, into the now. Except that the past was still out there, hammering at the doors, clawing at the windows. The past wouldn't leave Cane King alone.

  King rapped hard on the door of one of the many guest suites and waited.

  "In my own damn house..." he muttered, waiting impatiently to be admitted. Finally, with a soft click, the door opened. Cane took a breath. Calling in the specialist was one thing. Meeting her face to face, that was the final threshold. Once he crossed it, he knew he could not return, not entirely. She would have her price.

  "Come in, Cane."

  Cane pushed the door and walked in, stopping short when he saw the corpses on the floor. Emaciated, desiccated, they gave off no odour, their grey skin like paper over their still bones. They looked impossibly ancient, little more than husks, empty cocoons long abandoned by any life. They were dressed smartly, and Cane knew that he recognised at least one of the suits.

  "My apologies for the mess, Mr. Taylor was good enough to send me some of your men. They have left me feeling quite invigorated."

  Grace Faraway was standing in front of a full length mirror, admiring her naked body. Her dark skin was covered in tattoos, a trace work of strange symbols that seemed to shift whenever Cane looked at them, as if they held secrets they guarded jealously from him. Shorter than Cane, Grace's lithe figure was somehow otherworldy, its proportions all slightly off. She should have been beautiful, alluring, but there was an inherent wrongness to her that Cane couldn't ignore. She turned to face him, her nakedness masked by a swirling of tattoos.

  "Put something on, witch," said Cane flatly "And you owe me three men."

  Cane had seen magic before. His father had been able to do things, strange and magical things, and had told Cane stories about his grandfather and his great-grandfather and the things they had been able to do too. As a child, Cane had assumed they were just parlour tricks and stories to send him off to sleep. He hadn't believed it.

  As he'd grown older though, the evidence was harder to ignore. The King family were steeped in magic, in the occult, and most of all in the dead. His father held séances, entertained mystics and psychics of all flavours and denominations. Cane had quickly learnt that these were no garden-variety charlatans either. They were the real thing; powerful and terrible and haunted by knowledge that was beyond other men. Some nights, the house echoed to their screams. The King family were steeped in magic and in the occult indeed, but most of all it was steeped in the dead. In the mansion, there were endless rooms given over to the dead. Kept as shrines, their former occupants' belongings were left in place as if they might return at any moment. In every hallway and on every staircase there were portraits, one King after another, a bloodline that seemed almost endless, stretching away from Cane into the dark past. He hated it. He felt belittled by it, as if his every achievement was being measured against those of his forebears, dead judges casting their verdict on him. That was why, the first chance he had, he'd expunged every trace of them from the house.

  Grace, however, had been harder to get rid of. She was family.

  "A girl has to eat," Grace replied, affecting a coy tone of voice as she shrugged on a gown. "Your food here is so... flat. Lifeless."

  She stalked across the room, stepping over the desiccated corpses daintily, and sprawled onto the bed.

  "I don't have time for games," Cane said firmly. "You might have seduced my grandfather with these games, but they won't work on me. I called you here to fix a problem, nothing else."

  Grace smiled. It was a barracuda's smile, all sharp teeth and cunning. "And what makes you think that it's my kind of problem?"

  "Because the guy's a freaking ghost," said Cane scornfully, hating the words even as they came from his mouth. "Because he does things that no-one should be able to do. And... because of Adam."

  Grace laughed. Cane tried to ignore that the mirrors in the room glazed with ice as she did so, or that the hairs on his forearms and the back of his neck were standing on end. Some part of him, some very old part of his brain that understood what a predator was, the part that woke up in the middle of the night sometimes, was telling him to run.

  "Ah yes, your brother. Your poor, dead, brother. Well, you're not the first King to think that he could solve all of his problems by killing their brothers and sisters."

  "I don't want a history lesson," said King.

  Grace sat up on the bed. "But that's what this is all about Cane, that's what you have to grasp. This is bigger than you and Adam. What's happening here started generations ago. You're just the next in line."

  Cane turned away. "No. Adam bought into all this occult nonsense, that was his thing. The family, the bloodline. He was obsessed with it. That's not me."

  "So why did you kill him?"

  "Because of that fucking woman!" Cane snapped, smashing his fist into one of the frosted mirrors. "Her and her fucking kid! Do you know what that could have done to us? To the business, to our future, to... to..."

  "To the bloodline?"

  Grace raised an eyebrow and another icy smile spread across her face like a frost. Spirals of strange symbols danced up her neck and flourished on her face, making her look even more unreal than normal. She watched as King nursed his bloodied knuckles. The fire was there, she thought, the fire that made a real King. It just needed to be fuelled. He needed to burn.

  "I'm not taking this family back to the dark ages," King said firmly. "I don't deny what you can do, but I want no part of it. I'm dragging this family into the 21st century by its balls. Just do this one thing for me, take care of this guy, and then we are done. Name your price, whatever it takes, but then we are done."

  "You know my price, Cane," Grace said seductively, "And you're not getting any younger. It's past time you fathered an heir."

  Grace's hands slid across Cane's shoulders, moving like ice cold worms on his flesh. He shuddered involuntarily.

  "How do we catch him?" he asked, his voice hushed.

  "With bait," whispered Grace in Cane's ear. "With something he can't resist."

  ASHES

  There should have been rain. That was the only thought that Rosa Blind could muster as she watched the coffin slowly descend into the ground. Instead, there was an unseasonable heat that made everyone uncomfortable in their dress uniforms, that scorched the grass and made the ground hard underfoot. She was sweating, she hated sweating. There were no tears behind her sunglasses as her fellow officers lined up one by one to scatter dry earth on the coffin, just inexorable calculations of her machine-like mind. The result? There definitely should have been rain.

  Rosa hated the cemetery, jammed in behind one of the city's remaining churches. She had thought they were lucky to find a plot, until she found out that the church kept a special allocation for police. What the hell kind of town was this, she'd wondered, where even in d
eath the police needed to keep a low profile?

  Low profile, that was the exact opposite of what they were supposed to be. The incorruptible super-cops, dropped into failing police departments all over the country, all part of the presidents "Clean up America" campaign. It was ridiculous. A cowboy policy for a cowboy president. She'd thought it from the beginning, but she'd still signed up. To be incorruptible you couldn't have anything, or anyone, in your life that the criminals could reach. You had to have nothing to lose.

  What the hell did they think would happen, rounding up all the people like that and giving them bigger guns and shinier shields and telling them to clean house?

  Rosa looked at them one by one, her analytical mind churning out vital statistics, facts and figures.

  Reginald, the book worm. Near photographic memory and a competition speed reader. In as much as she was capable of liking anyone, Rosa liked him. Owen said he couldn't shoot for shit though. That was probably why he'd been partnered with Cooper. Ex-Navy, the guy could fight like a pirate and busted up bar brawls for fun.

  And then, of course, there was Grice. He was the social one. He'd always said they should get together more, be more of a unit. He was always trying to organise dinner, or drinks. He didn't get that forming friendships would make them weak. Rosa suspected that that was another factor that had been taken into account. They hadn't just chosen people without family and friends, they had chosen people who chose not to have family or friends. That made Grice the wildcard, and a liability. Maybe whoever had killed him had known that too. Maybe they wanted to cut the heart out of the unit, and Grice was the closest thing they had to that.

  "No family," said Owen. "Just like the rest of us."

  "Not for want of trying, I think," replied Rosa. "He doesn't fit the profile, you know."

  "He's dead, Rosa," replied Owen flatly. "You can stop profiling him now. Somewhere in this god-damn city someone cut him up into pieces and put him in a bag to deliver to us. You ask me? I'm glad he didn't have any family. How the hell do you explain something like to someone's wife, to someone's kid?"

  "That was the point wasn't it? No family, no friends means no leverage, sure, no way to get to us. It also means that if one of us gets killed, well, who's going to make a fuss?"

  "I am," said Cooper, pushing his way in between them. "You say there's no leverage? That's bullshit. That's your leverage right there, in a fucking pine box! Someone finally realised that there's always a way to get to someone. You just get them. I always said we should just go straight at these guys ourselves."

  "You're drunk," said Rosa.

  "What if I am?" sneered Cooper. "What difference does that make? We're paying our respects to a good soldier today, a man who died on the line."

  "We're police, not soldiers," interrupted Reginald, pulling his partner away. "Your way works in a bar fight or on a street corner, but if you want to go to court, if you want to put these guys away, then you have to think like a lawyer. You need to make sure you're unimpeachable. And you need to sober up."

  "This town ain't like that," said Cooper with a shrug. "This town is like the fucking old west. The gun is the law here, nothing else. Grice is dead because we all thought we were bigger than it, thought we were special. Well, surprise surprise folks... we're not. Like it or not, we are all soldiers now, because this just got turned into a fucking war!"

  Cooper stalked off before any of them could reply, kicking out at the old gravestones on his way. Reginald wondering how many of those gravestones told stories just like theirs, down over the years. Cops who died doing what they thought was right, cops who couldn't turn a blind eye to what went on in this cesspit of a city.

  "Reg, you want to go after him?" asked Owen.

  "Someone has to," replied the bookish cop. "But not everything he said is wrong, White. If this is a war, we all know who fired the first shot."

  Owen didn't answer. He just clenched his fists and held back the part of him that wanted to punch Reginald right in the face. They couldn't turn on him, not now. He wouldn't, couldn't let them. He just watched Reginald jog out of the cemetery in pursuit of Cooper, his blood boiling. On the other side of the open grave, the others were watching.

  "Any of you got something to say?" barked Owen. "Because now's the time, you understand?"

  "Nobody blames you," said Rosa.

  "Bullshit! You all blame me. Well you were all happy when I was putting us on the front of the newspapers with the big busts. So guess what guys? The bad guy hit back. And yeah, they hit back harder and more bloody than we thought they would, but that's the god-damned job. That's why we're here. They picked us because we had nothing to lose, no reason to back down. If that's changed for you, you need to walk away now!"

  Rogers, Hartley, and Nutt all looked at each other. There was no answer. When Owen had first told them about the Magpye, some lunatic in a mask and big coat who was going to go the places that they couldn't, had they even believed him? If some mental patient wanted to put himself in the line of fire instead of them, what did it matter? That was the gap in the plan, the reason for wildcards like Grice. People who don't have people don't tend to have much in the way of compassion either. That made Owen White a wildcard too. He cared about this city, he cared about his team. He'd come here as a man with nothing to lose, and found himself with a cause and with a family not of his choosing.

  It was Rogers who spoke, breaking the silence. "We're still with you boss, for Grice if nothing else."

  "Me too," added Rosa.

  Owen smiled. "Well then, I guess we'd better do what Grice would have wanted."

  "What's that?" asked Burns.

  "We go and find a quiet bar and we drink until we pass out. For Grice."

  "For Grice," they all replied in unison. Owen's smile stayed fixed on his face. Maybe this was what they needed. Men who had nothing to lose were dangerous. Men who had lost something, men who were looking for payback... they were deadly.

  "I'll catch you up, Rosa," said Owen, sending his partner on her way with the others. He watched as they filed out of the cemetery, one by one. Seven of them. If it weren't for the Magpye, it would be a suicide run now no matter they chose to do. The only option would have been to quit and to put as many miles between them and this forsaken city as possible. But with the Magpye, Owen thought there just might be a chance. He'd seen him do impossible things.

  The cemetery was silent for a moment, just the sound of Owen breathing. And one other.

  "You can come out now Garrity," the cop said calmly.

  Mick Garrity stepped out from behind a tree, hands in his coat pockets.

  "What are you doing here?" asked Owen.

  "Paying me respects," replied Garrity, looking down into Grice's grave. "He was a cop and no cop should go like that, no matter what."

  "You're no cop, Garrity," growled Owen. "You're a lackey and a hood for whoever's lining your pockets."

  "Prove it."

  Owen grabbed Garrity and slammed him against the tree he had been hiding behind. Nose to nose, he snarled at Garrity.

  "I've spent my life in and out of departments like this and there's an easy way to find the dirtiest guy... you just look for the guy with the cleanest sheet. No cop works a city like this for as long as you have without collecting a little dirt, Garrity, but your file is the most pristine I've ever seen. Clean sheets mean dirty cops, every time."

  Owen only stopped talking when he felt the sharp nudge of Garrity's gun in his ribs.

  "Then why don't I kill you here and now and toss you in with your boy there?"

  Owen let go of Garrity, shoving him one last time against the old tree.

  "Not your style," he said dismissively. "You don't get your hands dirty, do you?"

  Garrity straightened himself up, took his hands from out of his pockets, holding them up for White to see.

  "Look, we're all friends here, OK?" he said, "You don't like me, fine. But I meant what I said, Grice was a cop and a cop is a cop no
matter what. Dirty or clean, good or bad, you put on a shield and you're one of the brotherhood until the end. You might think that's old fashioned, but that's how it is here."

  "So what is this?" asked Owen, "You here to say you're sorry that nobody had my guy's back?"

  Garrity pulled a pack of cigarettes from his back pocket, pulled one from the packet.

  "Nobody's got any of your backs," he said grimly, lighting the cigarette with a match. "You guys rode into town with a presidential seal and expected everyone just to roll over. Fucking super-cops, getting your faces in the papers, calling out every scum-bag and lowlife you could name. We tried to warn you. What's going on in this city, it's different to anything you've ever seen, I don't care how many places you've worked. The Kings own this town and everything in it and nobody goes up against the Kings. I mean nobody."

  Owen frowned. "The Kings? As in Cane King?"

  "Cane King," replied Garrity, taking a long drag from the cigarette. "Our lord and master and the guy who told the guy who told the guy who pulled the trigger on your friend here."

  "Then it's true..." muttered Owen. Rosa hadn't believed Magpye when he'd named Cane King as the one behind it all and Owen, well, he'd only entertained the idea because he thought feeding Magpye's delusions kept him on side. But here was Garrity, the dirty cop among dirty cops, naming names.

  "You're either very confident or very scared, telling me this," said Owen.

  "Neither," replied Garrity. "What I'm telling you ain't no secret in the department. Ain't no secret most places in the city, if you take the time to ask. That's the trick, see? He hides in plain sight, so big and so loud that nobody takes anything they hear about him seriously. What's he doing, playing both sides like that, it's impossible... right? That's what everyone thinks."

  Not everyone, thought Owen. There is someone who's got Cane King right in his sights, someone else with a stake in doing impossible things.

  "So why tell me?" asked Owen.

  "Because of this," said Garrity, jabbing his cigarette at the open grave. "It's a step too far. Over the line. King runs this town, sure, but a cop is still a cop. If that stops meaning something then we're all going to hell a lot faster than I'd like."