First Digital Edition
Smile No More © 2012, 2010 by James A. Moore
Artwork & Illustration © 2012, 2011 by Alan M. Clark
Published by Morning Star
An imprint of DarkFuse
Morning Star
P.O. Box 338
North Webster, IN 46555
www.darkfuse.com/morning-star
Copyediting by Leigh Haig
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without the written permission of the author.
This one is for James Shimkus, who foolishly told me he was afraid of clowns, and for Chris Golden for suggesting that Rufo needed to spread his wings and fly.
Special thanks go to Larry Roberts for being a pleasure to deal with, and to Alan Clark for helping Rufo put on his face and to Devin Roberts for the wonderful book trailer. It’s good to have friends.
Prologue
The natives were restless. He could feel it in the air, hear it in the impatient shuffle of programs and the murmured voices of families gathered together to see a special show.
He checked his tie again, feeling the first flutter of nervous excitement come to him. It was infectious, that thrill of waiting for the good times when they were only moments away.
His tie was perfect. He had to accept that it was time and there was no longer any reason for delays. His shoes tapped smartly on first concrete and then hardwood floors as he made his way toward the stage. He rolled the top hat from one hand to the other and finally placed it on his head at a jaunty angle. Style counted, no matter what anyone had to say about the matter.
The music started, a full orchestra worth of musicians, all of whom had played the same notes too many times to count. He hoped they could keep their professionalism in place. Oh, there was a back up sound system for emergencies, but that wasn’t quite the same as the real thing.
The curtain parted before him, and the first few patrons of the show noticed, sending a subtle ripple through the audience. The excitement grew stronger until it was nearly a physical wave, and he felt his lips part in a smile that he no longer even tried to hold back.
Adrenaline kicked him in the chest and rocketed his pulse into the stratosphere. No matter how many times he was on the stage, that part never changed.
“Layydieees and Gennnntlemeennnah, Girls and Boys! If I could have your attention please!” His voice boomed through the auditorium, carried to the farthest points by the acoustics of the building. He waited a moment, let them adjust to him, to where he stood, dwarfed by the massive curtain that still stood closed behind him. “Welcome one and all to the Alexander Halston Carnival of the Fantastic!”
For one moment the orchestra faltered, weakened, but then they caught on and started playing again. A change of venue: they’d been through worse before.
The audience applauded, but weakly. The name was wrong. The show they were here to see was called the Carnivale de Fantastique and no one named Alexander Halston had anything at all to do with that.
Just the same, he bowed to their applause as surely as if they had given a standing ovation.
“My name is Rufo the Clown, and I’m your master of ceremonies tonight.” He paused, just for a moment, as he looked at a tyke in the first row. The boy smiled at him and he fired off a quick wink. “You are, I promise you, in for one hell of a show!”
Chapter One: Looking for Millie (Part One)
When I was a kid, I wanted to be just like Harry Houdini, the greatest escape artist there ever was. I even wanted to meet him, but he’d been over twenty years in the grave before I was born, so that wasn’t going to happen.
I practiced, you know. I studied everything I could learn about Houdini and all of his secrets and then I practiced whenever I could. My parents scoffed at me; well, my father did. My mom just shook her head indulgently and warned me not to talk too much about my dreams in front of my dad. Seems she knew even then that he didn’t like it when people got too ambitious around him. Life on the farm was good enough for him, and it had to be good enough for everyone else. Later, when the farm went broke, life was good enough in the factory for him and it was for everyone else. You get the idea.
My number one supporter was my sister. For some crazy reason, Millie believed in me, even when I lied. She was half my age, maybe ten when I left home, and through everything that happened, she managed to have faith that her big brother would never do her wrong.
I told her I’d be home for the holidays, but I never made it. I swore I’d buy her a pony…another lie, and still she trusted me and believed. I never wanted to lie to Millie. That was the last thing I wanted to do. Sometimes you have no choice. Sometimes the world makes a liar out of you and there’s nothing you can do to stop it.
That doesn’t make you feel even a little better about the lies though, not if you have a conscience, like I did back then. These days? Well, let’s just say that whether or not I have a conscience is up for debate and leave it at that, shall we?
Life changes you, whether you want it to or not. The only escape from that particular fact is death and, believe me, death is no guarantee.
Have you ever seen a ghost? I don’t mean the floating sheets and graveyard type, or even one of the floating trumpet gimmicks the so-called mediums like to use. I mean the sort that can really haunt you.
I was in a Starbuck’s of all places—in a little upscale community where I would have never fit in as a kid—eating a breakfast with my overpriced latte and reading the Times when I saw Millie’s ghost. I hadn’t thought about Millie in years. I maybe even went out of my way not to think about her, because too many decades had passed without contact and she was better off without me in her life.
Mostly I tune out the people around me when I’m in a place like that. If I look at them or notice them, it starts me wondering about who exactly I’m looking at. We all have secrets, right? Well, some of us have darker secrets than others and there’s a part of me that always wants to know what a person is thinking and hiding. And sometimes that same part of me feels like punishing them for whatever they might be hiding. I’ll admit it: I have a few issues when it comes to unpunished crimes. I’m not exactly a vigilante, and I’ll never be a cop, but now and then I feel a need to get a little payback, even if it’s second hand. So, not really my thing to notice the people around me when I’m trying to relax.
I heard laughter and turned my attention to the door where a woman and her kid were just walking out. The girl carried a small sack of pastries and her mother balanced two carrying trays full of drinks to wash them down. It wasn’t a school day, so all I can do is guess they had a group they were meeting with. The woman had on too much make up and enough perfume to blind anyone with allergies. Her glory days were gone and she was desperate to keep them. She hadn’t gone into the latter stages of her curse of faded youth, where she got bitter and started drinking too much, but she was definitely heading in that direction. Her daughter was a different story. She was too young for makeup and didn’t need any. She had her ears pierced but everything else about her was, well, enough to make people notice that she was a kid. The girl was dressed in a light sweater and a skirt that was knee high or so. Scandalous back in the day, but conservative in this age of immodesty.
I don’t know what the mother said to her kid, but I looked up just as the girl was opening the door with a smile on her face. I heard her laugh. The way she sounded, the tilt of her head, the way her fingers idled through her hair: for just one instant, she could have been Millie.
A kid, ten years old, tops, too young to be my little sister, but enough like her to bring back all the feelings I’d tried to forget. I shivered, absolutely absorbed in memories of my little sister, and haunted b
y her as surely as if her ghost had whispered in my ear.
Here’s the thing, that kid at the coffee shop? If I saw her on the street right now, I probably wouldn’t recognize her. Another face in the crowd, you know?
She didn’t look all that much like Millie; she just set off all the memories with her laugh, her smile. Just enough like my sister to haunt me.
I went a long, long time without letting myself think about my family. I left behind a loving mother, a father who was a good provider, if stricter than I’d have liked and a little too comfortable with a bottle of wine. I left behind the family dog and my little sister. For all I knew they were all dead and gone, but catching a glimpse of a stranger was enough to start me on my search.
I wanted to see her again. I wanted to know what sort of life she’d made for herself after her lying brother disappeared from her world. The decision didn’t happen just like that. I didn’t drop my breakfast and run off into the cold hard world or anything. I just couldn’t get the idea out of my head. I couldn’t escape the guilt of doing Millie wrong, you see. I could look back at my life and never regret forsaking my parents, but not my little sister.
After mulling the idea over for close to a month it was decided. I had to find her. If she was dead, I had to know it, and if she was alive, I wanted to see my little sister again and maybe let her know that I never meant to lie to her. Maybe even explain what had happened to me that made me a liar. If it’s possible to really explain that sort of thing.
Was it an obsession? No, not really. Believe me, I know all about getting fixated on a person or a notion. I’ve done it before. I can definitely tell the difference. No, I think it was more about redemption. I’ve hurt a lot of people in my time, and I don’t imagine I’ll stop anytime soon, but I hated that somewhere along the way, through circumstances that I caused and that simply befell me, I’d let down the only person I think I ever really loved.
I guess for a lot of people there’re too many obstacles in the way. There are families, obligations to employers, to loved ones. I didn’t have any of those burdens. You could say I’m something of a free spirit.
The work I do, well, it leaves me a lot of free time. I’m not exactly in demand, not that I ever really was. No family, except Millie, no girlfriends to leave behind, or even a goldfish. I set aside the few cases I was thinking about looking into and I got my affairs in order. As for the work I did back in the day, the stuff that led me to where I am now, well, most of the good outfits are long since gone and the few that are around wouldn’t know what to do with me.
There was only one place where I could really start, wasn’t there?
I had to go home.
That thought was almost enough to scare me, and believe me when I say this: I do not scare easily.
***
It was a living. Julio Regaldo told himself that as he walked along the street and looked at the people around him, hauling the latest batch of boxes into his van. No one bothered him, but he could feel their eyes on him, like cockroaches with an attitude.
They could be called people, technically. Mostly he thought of them as wastes of breathing air. The homeless, the desolate and the wretched, plus those who fed on them; the predators who found whatever they needed by taking it from people in worse condition than they were. A bad side effect of working for a delivery company that had their offices in the low rent district.
He unlocked the back of the battered metal van and started sorting boxes by the road where they’d be delivered. Next to him, Lou Harper kept an eye out to make sure no one got too close.
Ten minutes later he was riding away, breathing a sigh of relief, because even with the burly security guard who made sure he didn’t get mugged on his way out with a large shipment of other people’s shit to deliver, he didn’t like going down to central processing to handle a package delivery. Most days he worked from the satellite office and that was a sweet deal, but now and then some asshole called out sick and who do you think got stuck taking his route? That’s right, Julio, who was always willing to go the extra mile to make sure he got noticed and got one of the sweet deals out in the ’burbs. You had to pay your dues, and whether or not his old man had worked for the company, he had to pay them, too.
Julio lit a cigarette and drove, knowing full well that he could get into deep shit if he was caught smoking in the company van and not caring in the least. The window was open and he had another ten miles to drive.
He let his mind drift a little, happy that he was back in his comfort zone and well away from the sleazy bastards in Cabbage Town. Atlanta wasn’t exactly the safest place to be in the first place, between traffic and the losers on the street always looking for a fix or a quick meal the easy way, but it could be a good place, too.
It wasn’t that he was a coward, really, not as far as Julio was concerned. It was just that he wanted to have a safer life. He’d left Detroit because of the shit going down on the streets and he didn’t want to have to deal with it all over again now that he was down in the south.
He made a mental note to kick the crap out of his cousin Raul next month at the family reunion. Raul was the one that told him Atlanta was just getting a bad rap on the news.
No, he knew he was to blame. He’d listened to Raul in the past and it always ended badly.
“Fuck it all, man. Just do the job and get back home, that’s what I’m saying.”
He had a date with Terry to think about. Cute little thing from New York, not the city but the state, as she always said, and he was looking forward to it. Girl was pure class, and had looks like a model.
The first delivery was coming up on Peachtree Street, and Julio pulled the van over into the alleyway between the building and its closest neighbor, narrowly avoiding a dumpster in his way, grateful, again, that he’d gotten away from the central hub in one piece.
He killed the engine, climbed into the back of the van and sorted until he found the right package. Seeing the name put a smile on his face. He’d delivered a few other things to the recipient and she always tipped good and liked to flirt, too. He wasn’t looking and he knew she was just yanking his chain, but it was nice to get a little attention from a pretty girl now and then, especially one that was famous.
Just one delivery at the theatre. If that was any indication, the rest of the day would be easy.
He opened the back door of the van and stepped out, making sure his uniform looked presentable. It wasn’t cool to look unprofessional, not with what he was paid and sure as hell not when there might be a few tips coming in. He always made sure he looked professional and well groomed for that reason.
The alleyway almost made it a waste of time. The buildings were clean enough, but the ground was covered in sludge from the most recent rain and he had to step carefully to avoid getting it on his shoes. The heavy shadows in the area didn’t make it any easier to step in the cleaner spots, either.
Julio hadn’t taken fifteen paces before the man came up from behind him. In front of the place, he would have been fine with it—you expected heavy foot traffic in the city. But like most of the places around downtown, all the deliveries were done in the back of the building and there weren’t too many people who had a reason for hanging around in the narrow alleyway.
He nodded at the guy and tried to look confident. Back when he was a kid, he’d gotten mugged twice. Both times by single guys who looked innocent enough until they hit him. The man moving his way made him nervous because he moved the same way, like he owned the street and everyone should be grateful he was letting them share his air.
He was reaching for the buzzer on the back door when the stranger moved.
“Don’t push that button, Rube.” The man smiled. He could barely make out a face in the twilight of the alley, but he could see the flash of teeth that split the darkness. “You don’t want to do that.”
“But, I have to make a delivery.” It was all he could think of to say while the man was looking at him.
Light blue eyes considered him, and the smile on the face grew a little wider.
“I’m going to take care of that for you, my friend. I’m going to make your day a little easier.”
Julio looked at the man and straightened up a bit. He didn’t want to. The last thing he wanted was to make the man angry. He knew that deep in his heart, because that gnawing feeling of dread wasn’t getting any better. The guy sounded cool enough, almost happy, but Julio could feel sweat starting to stipple his brow and it wasn’t nearly warm enough for him to be sweating.
“I can’t do that, man. I could lose my job.”
“I won’t tell if you don’t.” The man’s voice was soft, but brooked no argument.
“Seriously, I can’t let you do that. I need the job, man. It’s all I’ve got.”
“Well, I wouldn’t go that far. I mean, you have your life, right?” The stranger stepped closer. He wasn’t much taller than Julio himself, but he seemed like a giant at that moment. The faint light in the alley let him see the face of the stranger better than maybe he wanted to. He could see the make up on the man’s face, and slight spots where it looked like the make-up was covering scars. Somebody had cut the dude in a bad way once, and whoever had done it had been stupid enough to leave him alive.
Icy blue eyes looked down from Julio’s face to his shirt and then back up as the lips peeled back again, showing broad white teeth that looked like they could maybe bite through steel.
Julio tried to step back, ready to run if he had to.
“Julio… Listen carefully. I don’t want to hurt you. I just really need to deliver that package for you.”
Julio tried to swallow but his mouth was too dry. In the end, it was pride that did him in. He had learned a lot since he was a kid and got the shit knocked out of him a few times. He’d taken courses in Judo and he’d taught himself to be brave. Cowards just got picked on more and more, but if you stood up for yourself, you sometimes got lucky.
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