Known Devil

by Matthew Hughes

  “Oh,” I said. “You don’t know, either?”

  I got through the rest of the day somehow. I wouldn’t have minded going out on some calls, even though I felt beat to shit, but McGuire said he couldn’t authorize the overtime for half a detective team. He didn’t mind if I hung around the squad room, though, so I spent a lot of time at my desk.

  Lieutenant Crestwell, the squad’s day-shift commander, came on duty at some point. McGuire must’ve asked him to leave me alone, because Crestwell didn’t acknowledge my existence all day, beyond a nod when he first entered the squad room. That was fine with me – I was busy thinking about the return of Patton Wilson. I wish I could say that some brilliant idea occurred to me as I sat there, but brilliant ideas seemed to be in short supply for me lately.

  That bastard Wilson was angling to be the power behind three thrones – the local Mafia family, the city government, and the Scranton supe community – assuming you want to dignify any of those positions with a word like “throne”. Well, you couldn’t fault Wilson for nerve – the guy had the balls of a brass ape. Unfortunately, he also had both brains and bucks in abundance – maybe enough to make his twisted ambition a reality. Unless somebody stopped him. Somehow.

  I realized that Christine would be rising at sunset, and she’d expect to find me at home. If I wasn’t there, she might assume the worst, so I called and left a message on her voice mail.

  Hi, honey, it’s your old man. Listen, I won’t be there when you get up tonight, and I’m not sure if I’m gonna get home at all. Some crazy stuff’s going on at work – I’ll tell you about it when I see you, which may not be until tomorrow night. But there’s nothing to worry about.

  I hoped that last sentence didn’t turn out to be a lie. I didn’t know what, if anything, Christine had going on with my partner, but I still didn’t relish the idea of telling her Karl wouldn’t be coming around anymore – ever.

  Apart from a shower and quick change of clothes in the locker room, I spent most of the day at the station house. But as the sun finally lowered over the city, I was in another part of town, standing behind my parked Toyota Lycan, with the trunk key in my hand – waiting.

  Today’s Times-Tribune and Weatherwitch.com both agreed – sunset was scheduled for 6.07. I checked my watch – it was coming up on 6.00. Of course, the jury was still out on whether vampires rise and sleep at meteorological dawn and dusk, or whether they’re obeying some other, more fundamental, impulse.

  6.04: No sounds or stirring from inside my trunk, where Karl Renfer slept. Whether his current state was going to last a couple more minutes or go on forever was the question that had my guts feeling like a tightly clenched fist.

  6.06: I found myself wondering what kind of funeral Karl would have wanted, and pulled my mind away from that thought as quick as I’d yank my hand from a hot stove. I’m not one of those nitwits who think the “power of positive thinking” ever changed one goddamn thing, but I was not going to stand here and think about Karl being dead forever. I was not going to do that.

  6. 07: Full dark now – at least, it seemed that way to me. The interior of the trunk remained as quiet as the grave, a metaphor I banished from my mind the instant it showed up. I thought about Rachel and wondered what she was doing right now – as if I didn’t know. Wherever she was, she had the face of a clock or watch in view. She’d probably be trying not to stare at it, to distract her mind with other stuff – and failing, just as I was.

  6.08: I was going to have to tell Rachel, eventually. After all, I’d promised. “Call me, either way,” she’d said. McGuire would want to know, too. I wondered how long I should wait before deciding to make the call that both of them were dreading. It seemed that I should–

  “Hey – what the fuck is going on here?”

  That pissed-off voice came from inside my trunk, and it was the voice of Karl Renfer – loud, and clear, and alive. Well, undead, anyway.

  “Just a second, Karl!” I yelled. I nearly pounded my fists on the trunk lid in relief, but had enough sense to realize that Karl might misinterpret the sound, not knowing where he was. “Everything’s fine – just give me a second!” I started patting my pockets for the car keys, then realized that they’d been in my left hand the whole time.

  I finally got the Lycan’s trunk open, and the light came on to reveal the body bag, bent at a sharp right angle. We’d had to bend Karl at the waist in order to get him into my trunk, which isn’t exactly roomy. Most Toyotas are compact cars, unless you want to spring for the Hexus, which is the luxury model, and I’ve never had that kind of money.

  I could see slight movement from inside the body bag. Karl could have torn his way out of that thing in about a second, but I’d asked him to wait, and that’s what he was doing.

  I grabbed the tab of the big zipper and yanked it down all the way to reveal my partner, who was looking a whole lot better than when I’d zipped him in there six hours earlier. For one thing, his eyes were open.

  He blinked at me a couple of times. “What the fuck, Stan?”

  “I’ll explain in a second,” I said. “But first, let’s get you out of there.”

  It took a little while to get him straightened out and completely free of the bag, but finally Karl was standing on the sidewalk next to my car, making a futile effort at brushing out the wrinkles his suit had developed during the day. He gave up after a few seconds and raised his head to look around.

  “Hey, we’re in front of my building,” he said.

  “I figured once you were out of there, you might want a change of clothes, maybe a shower and something to eat.” Like any self-respecting vampire, Karl had a supply of blood in his fridge.

  “You figured right,” he said. “But what the hell was I doing in… oh.”

  “Remember what happened now?”

  He slowly ran a hand through his hair, which was pretty mussed up from getting in and out of the body bag. “I’d just used some Influence to slip what’s-his-name, Slattery, a question, right?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “I remember he answered, something about helter-skelter. Then all the PP guys walked out in a huff. I went over near the door, hoping for another shot at Slattery when he passed, but then his pet gorilla started waving a cross at me.”

  “How’d you feel, when he did that?”

  Karl made a face. “At first, it was the same as always – I saw the cross and had the urge to be someplace else – fast. But then the stuff I’ve been working on with Doc Watson came back to me. I used one of the relaxation techniques he’d had me practicing, and, shit – it worked. I was able to look at the cross, and then…” Karl shook his head in wonderment.

  “And then you took it away from him, remember? You grabbed his wrist, made him let go of the cross, and then you caught it. You held it in your hand, Karl.”

  He lifted his right hand and stared at it, turning it back and forth as if checking for damage. “Shit,” he said again. “No burns, nothing.”

  “Guess Doc Watson was right, after all,” I said, and we just stood there for a minute, grinning at each other like a couple of idiots.

  Karl’s grin slowly faded, then he said, “That’s the last thing I remember – holding the cross.”

  “I’m not surprised,” I said. “You kind of flaked out on us after that.”

  I told him what had happened, and explained how he’d ended up in a body bag inside my trunk for the last five hours or so.

  “And you drove here just before sunset,” he said.

  “Yep.”

  “You must’ve been pretty confident that I was OK.”

  “Of course I was,” I said. “Never doubted it for a minute.” He looked at me for a second or two, not speaking, then gave me half a smile. Vampires are good at detecting lies, but the one I’d just told didn’t seem to bother him very much.

  Karl made a head gesture toward his apartment building. “Let’s go inside,” he said. “You can bring me up to speed while I clean up a littl
e and get into some fresh clothes.”

  “Good idea,” I said. As we headed up the sidewalk toward his building’s front door, I pulled out my phone. “But I’ve got a couple of calls I need to make first.”

  What with one thing and another, we were over an hour late reporting for our shift. But McGuire didn’t seem inclined to dock us for the time.

  “Good to see you, Detective,” he said to Karl as we walked in. “I was pleased to learn that I won’t have to dig my dress uniform out of the closet again just yet. It was a little tight, the last police funeral I attended, and I haven’t lost any weight since then.”

  Fucking McGuire – sentimental, as always.

  “Sorry I flaked out on you, boss,” Karl said as we sat down. “But at least we got something good out of Slattery. It wasn’t a wasted effort.”

  McGuire twitched one side of his mouth. “Depends on what you mean by ‘good’. It was interesting – I’ll say that much. The only problem we’ve got now is what the hell to do about it.”

  “I don’t guess it would do Slattery’s campaign much good if word got out about his thoughts on helter-skelter,” I said.

  “I dunno,” Karl said. “There’s folks in this town who’d think that was a reason to vote for the son of a bitch.”

  “But there’s plenty who wouldn’t,” I said. “Supes, especially.”

  “I think you can assume that Slattery’s already lost the supe vote, Stan,” Karl told me. “He wrote us off a long time ago.”

  “Anyway, there’s no video of him saying it,” McGuire said. “Nothing for the media to run with.”

  “There’s about thirty cops who heard him say it,” I said. “Including the three of us.”

  “Doesn’t matter much,” McGuire said. “Slattery would say we’d all been ordered to lie by the mayor, who wants to keep his job come election day. And there’s something else.”

  We both looked at him.

  “Maybe Slattery admits he said all that stuff about helter-skelter, OK? But then he says there was a vampire in the room who used Influence to make him say it – further proof that vampires have no place on the police force.”

  “Influence doesn’t work that way,” Karl said.

  “You and I know that,” McGuire said. “But do you think the average human living in Scranton knows it – or even gives a shit? People believe what they want to believe.”

  People believe what they want to believe. McGuire wasn’t saying anything that I didn’t already know, but there was something… Shit.

  “You’re right, boss,” I said. “We haven’t got any ironclad proof that Slattery said it. But, shit, who needs proof when you’ve got innuendo?”

  McGuire shook his head. “I’m not following.”

  “It’s simple,” I said. “We just follow the advice of Lyndon Baines Johnson, a guy who knew a few things about politics.”

  Karl looked at me and said, “If you’re waiting for somebody to feed you the next line, I’ll do it – what’d Johnson say?”

  “When all else fails, call your opponent a pig fucker – and let him deny it.”

  After a few seconds, McGuire said, “I think the light is beginning to dawn.”

  “I wish you wouldn’t say stuff like that, boss,” Karl said with a slight smile. “Especially after yesterday.” Then he looked at me and said, “I still don’t get it.”

  “Print media may be on its way out,” I said, “but it isn’t dead yet. Plenty of people still read the Times-Tribune every day. It’s online, too – so even the geeks see it.”

  “Yeah, they do,” McGuire said. “And if somebody were to leak the story to the T-T–”

  “On deep background, of course,” I said.

  “Of course. I bet they’d run with it,” McGuire said, “especially if they had the names of a few cops who were there, so they could confirm the story.”

  “I know a guy at the Times-Tribune,” I said. “He’s always pestering me for stories.”

  “Then maybe you oughta give him one,” McGuire said.

  “Yeah, I think I will.”

  “I love the idea,” Karl said, “But we’re not gonna sink Slattery’s campaign with something like this.”

  “No,” I said. “But maybe we can cause it to spring a leak or two.”

  “Then what?” Karl asked.

  “Then we’ll see,” I told him.

  Karl and I went downstairs to pay Rachel a visit – the first time either of us had seen her since early in the morning, when Karl was still defying the laws of nature by being awake after sunrise.

  The custodians had been waxing the floors at this level, and the smell of polish was strong as we walked toward the open door of Rachel’s office. We found her seated behind her desk, face buried in a big, old-looking book. Although an awful lot of written material has been turned into easy-to-read electrons these days, Rachel once explained to me that most of the old magical texts still only exist in paper form. When I’d asked why, she’d said, “Not enough of a market. The people with the skills don’t have the interest, and the people with the interest don’t usually have the skills. Besides,” she’d said with a light laugh, “there’s such a thing as tradition. Not to mention safety.”

  “Safety?”

  “Sure. I’d hate to be in the middle of a tricky conjuration and have the battery of my Kindle pick that precise moment to fail.”

  Rachel looked up as we came in. I got a quick smile, but when she turned to look at Karl, the smile faded and her expression became unreadable.

  As we approached, Karl said, “Hey, Rachel.”

  Rachel nodded slowly. “Karl.” She pushed her desk chair back and stood up.

  The witch and the vampire looked at each other for three or four seconds, before Rachel broke the silence. “I hardly know what to say, Karl. I’m certainly relieved to see you, although Stan called me as soon as he knew that you were back among the living. Well, not the living, but…”

  “I know,” Karl said.

  Rachel brushed a couple of stray hairs out of her face. “I just… I’m sorry that my skills let you down, Karl. If it’s any consolation, I spent most of today in gut-twisting uncertainty, until I heard you were OK.”

  “It doesn’t make me feel better that you had a miserable day, Rachel,” Karl said gently. “Why would I want that? I’m not mad. You did the best you could with a brand-new spell – and, hey, the darn thing worked, didn’t it?”

  “It worked, but less than perfectly,” she said.

  Karl shrugged. “Perfection’s a pretty high standard. If everybody used that one, most of us would come up short. The spell did what it was supposed to – kept me going long enough to work a little Influence on Mister Slattery.”

  “Yes, Stan said you had been successful, but didn’t go into detail. Maybe that part’s none of my business?”

  “You’ve been with us through most of this mess,” I said to her. “No reason to keep you in the dark about the rest.”

  I told her what Slattery had said, and briefly mentioned some of the possible implications we’d discussed with McGuire. When I was done she shook her head slowly. “Patton Wilson. I should’ve known.”

  “We all should’ve,” I said. “But you know what they say about hindsight.”

  “Yeah, looking out your ass is always 20/20,” she said. “Now that you know he’s the guiding hand behind all the recent hurly-burly, what are you going to do about it?”

  “We’re still working on that,” Karl said.

  “Rachel, I agree with Karl that we oughta be grateful the spell worked as well as it did,” I said. “But have you figured out why it didn’t last the whole day, like it was supposed to?”

  “This is an area where actual data is scarce,” she said. “But I have a theory.”

  “Theorize away,” I said.

  “It comes down, in a word, to stress,” she said. “The spell was already putting considerable strain on Karl, since it had him going against his vampire nature by rem
aining conscious after sunrise. And then, on top of that, he’s confronted by that oaf with the crucifix.”

  She turned to Karl with a grin. “Congratulations on the way you dealt with that, by the way. Strong work.” She stood up and stuck out her hand.

  Karl’s grin was a mirror of her own as they shook. “Thanks – but nobody was more surprised than I was. I should call Doc Watson, let him know his therapy passed the acid test.”

  “I’d like to talk with you about that sometime,” Rachel said. “The therapeutic process, I mean.” She turned back to me. “Facing that cross, especially in the assertive manner he did, must have put more strain on Karl than even his resilient vampire system could handle. So the spell was broken, and Karl instantly reverted to his natural – or, rather, supernatural – state.”

  “I returned to life and found out that we still had the same problems as before,” Karl said. “The vampire gang war, the Patriot Party trying to take over, a bunch of Slide-addicted supes knocking over grocery stores…”

  “That reminds me, Rachel,” I said. “You were looking into ways that magic might help with the Slide problem. Any luck yet?”

  Rachel ran her hand over a face that looked like it would have benefited from a good night’s sleep. Of course, I was pretty sure you could’ve said the same about mine. The only one of us who’d had any rest lately was Karl, and his was involuntary.

  “On that front, I can report good news and bad news,” she said. “Mostly bad.”

  “I could use some good news right now, even a little,” I said. “So let’s start with that.”

  “OK. Well, since Slide is a drug that affects only supernaturals, it is particularly susceptible to manipulation by magic. I’ve been able to develop a spell which neutralizes its effects. From what you’ve told me, there’s a hallucinogenic phase, followed by a wave of euphoria, right?

  “That’s what the addicts say.”

  “Well, I’ve been able to render the small samples you gave me into something that should cause nothing but a mild headache, which is nobody’s idea of fun.”