Streets of Shadows

by Tom Piccirilli

  * * *

  Augustus de la Croix is everything you’d expect from the silk lining his pockets. His haircut costs more than most suits I used to own, his suits more than any car I paid for, and any one of his cars would set me back ten-years rent. He’s younger than I figured, in his late twenties, with blond hair and a London herringbone suit that looks like someone stitched it on him. He shakes David’s hand with a polite but firm grip while the old butler stands by the door like a statue.

  The entrance hall is big with a grand marble staircase, domed ceiling, and enough alabaster and columns to make the Pope jealous, but something about this place fills my stomach with worms. It’s plain obvious that Augustus doesn’t intend to keep David long and I’m feeling like we should be twelve shades of gone.

  “This yours?” David asks, fishing out the money purse embroidered with Augustus de la Croix’s initials. He’s blunt that way, never realizing he’s pissing off people.

  “Better late than never,” Augustus says, all friendly. He examines the purse and pours out a couple of gold coins. “Although it’s much lighter than I recall.”

  “You fired me, remember? After my partner got killed.”

  “Yes, unfortunate business, that. Do the Police have any leads?” He asks the question in a way that makes me want to wipe the smug off his face with my elbow.

  “Not yet,” David says, “but maybe I’ll give Columbian’s finest a new lead.” He shows Augustus a gold coin that he’d kept palmed. I know that most men aren’t worth the pennies it took to put them in diapers, but Augustus’s smile goes feral faster than any back-alley Dillinger. David doesn’t see or feel it, but the room goes cold and shadows creep into the corners. This isn’t a good place, and the worms in my stomach are trying to get out.

  “That would be my property,” Augustus says, holding out his hand.

  “This would be property of the American Government,” David says. “President Roosevelt recalled them. In fact,” he says eyeing the coin, “I don’t think these 33’s ever made it into public circulation.”

  The walls shift, and something mean is coming outta them on all sides; four Umirta goons and three chained hounds that are snapping and angry at being pulled through the wall. Now, I’m not caught up on my algebra, but I’m pretty sure seven bad guys and five bullets don’t divide up in my favor. Maybe they don’t know math neither, so I pull my piece and point it at the goons, the mutts, at Augustus. One of the Umirta pulls out a Mauser 1910 pistol in response, and the hounds slip an inch off their leash. It’s a damn standoff, and I’m outgunned.

  “Exemptions were made for collectors,” Augustus is saying. “And I’m a well-connected man.” He glances at me. “Very well connected.”

  “You can see me,” I say in surprise.

  “You should leave,” Augustus says. The butler moves forward on cue, but David doesn’t budge.

  “Leave you dumb schmuck,” I mutter.

  “My partner died trying to track down your stolen coins,” he shows the gold coin again. “Now my office gets torched and these things turn up. Why am I thinking the two things are connected?”

  He’s actually waiting for an answer, I realize. He won’t let this go, but I’ve got the answers I need. David doesn’t see the whole picture; he isn’t standing where I’m standing.

  “Mr. David Prescott,” Augustus says. “Why do I get the impression you’re about to become more trouble than you’re worth?”

  “Leave him be,” I say, cocking the hammer of my snubby at Augustus’s head. “I can turn the bullets real enough.” It’s not an easy trick, but it was one of the first I learned.

  “And why do I get the feeling you killed my partner,” David says.

  “Shut up you Goddamn mook,” I say. “Augustus, you kill him, you’ll never get your coins back.”

  Augustus considers this before he says, “Greed killed your partner, Mr. Prescott.”

  “Maybe he was greedy,” David says, and I can feel the knife rooting around in my guts, “but he didn’t deserve a .22 to the head.”

  “Mr. Prescott, if he’d involved you, it might have been a pair of corpses in that alley.”

  The goons are waiting, barely holding back the mutts on their chains. The Mauser’s got a steady eye on me, and I can tell David’s starting to feel something’s wrong. He always had a good gut, better than mine.

  One of the hounds lashes forward; no telling who it’s after, and I let him have it with a shot to the head. The mutt drops, its skull half mist. My gun is back on the goon with the Mauser, but the other hounds want my balls.

  “I’ll be holding on to this,” David says, flipping and catching the coin. “For damages.” He turns and walks out, leaving me surrounded by goons, hounds, and hostile looks.

  I’m backing out, covering David’s ass, when Augustus starts yapping at me.

  “I never should have hired you.” He walks over to the liquor cart and pours himself a brandy. He motions a shot glass to me and smirks. “No, I suppose you drink something else these days, don’t you.”

  “The case stank the minute your man walked through the door,” I say. “But David said we needed the money.”

  “So you helped yourself?”

  “No,” I say. “I’m not that greedy. I found your second story man in a basement occult shop, trying to sell them. That’s when I found the coins were fakes. Not the gold, but the mint. So I was just wondering what a big to-do like you wanted with a bunch of fake coins when someone introduced me to the wrong end of a bullet.”

  “Those final thoughts can be pesky, like an echo that you can’t stop hearing? Tell me where you hid our gold and all is forgiven.”

  ‘Our’ he says, but I’ll leave that for later, if there is one for me. “How about I hold on to them as insurance for David and me?”

  “You’re overestimating your value.”

  “All I know is that when I died, I could touch the coins. They got no echo. So I gotta wonder if the gold’s special or if they’re hiding something inside them?”

  “You’ve touched them? For a dead man, you certainly don’t learn your lessons,” Augustus says. He’s got an edge to his voice, the kind that separates killers from murderers. He’s not stopping me either. We don’t have a deal as much as we got a temporary arrangement.

  I move to the door, the hounds snapping at the end of their leashes. Nobody’s gonna stop me from following David, but I can’t let this go. The problem with killers is that the arrangements are always temporary. Temporary is just a word for, ‘not in my favor right now.’ And didn’t this joker kill me once already? Fool me once….

  So what the hell. I probably would’ve wasted the last four bullets anyways and having that third strike hanging over my head was gonna get on my nerves as sure as bible study at Sunday school. I fire at the goon holding the Mauser, winging him in the shoulder and spinning him around. I swing on Augustus, and put some push behind this bullet just as I pull the trigger, desperate times and all.

  Augustus’ head takes a punch and I redecorate the soft yellow of the wall with blood and brain just as his goons let go of their mutts. Augustus hits the ground as I’m taking a fourth shot at one of the hounds. The Umirta goons dive for the floor, and I take my cue to exit through the curtained window with the last hound at my heels. There’s more resistance than I figured there’d be, but I’m through as David starts to pull away. I beat my heels to catch him before that mist catches me.

  * * *

  The Slab is noisy today, filled with live and dead slobs alike, taking up stool space, moving through one another. The ghosts are quiet, listening to the living drink before the breathers head out to dance or to the pictures.

  Me? I just sit at my stool, tuning out the living until I barely see them, turning this over and over again in my head. So what do I know about all this?

  I know Augustus de la Croix was tied up with the Umirta, but he wasn’t running the show, not all of it. He said ‘our gold.’ Men like him do
n’t use polite words like ‘ours.’ They don’t share unless there’s bigger fish out there to worry about. All I know is that I found another rung in the ladder, but I’m damned if I’m supposed to be climbing up or down right now.

  I know they want their gold coins back and that nobody’s come after me yet. Maybe the gold’s the only thing keeping me from being husked. Why or how they’re on both sides of the veil is the big question.

  I also heard they found Sugar all beaten up. I warned him that gold coin was trouble.

  And I know that I’m way past third strike right now, but Augustus had it right. When you die, your last thought is left rattling around in your skull, and what I want to know is, what exactly got me killed?

  * * *

  Lucien Soulban is a BAFTA nominated writer living in Montreal. He’s written five novels including two for Warhammer 40K and two for Dragonlance, as well as various horror anthologies including Blood Lite 1, 2 & 3, and Dark Faith. Lucien has worked on Warhammer 40K: Dawn of War, Deus Ex: Human Revolution, Rainbow Six: Vegas, and he’s a senior scriptwriter for the Far Cry brand at Ubi Montreal with Far Cry 3, Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon, and Far Cry 4 under his belt.

  In Vino Veritas

  Tim Waggoner and Michael West

  “Something about this doesn’t feel right, Eliot.”

  I looked over at Bill Gardner. He was Native American – what we called Indian back then. He was oldest of us, in his fifties, but he was still in fine shape for his age. A good man to have at your side when things got rough, which they did all too often.

  “It’s not like you to spook, Bill.”

  We sat in a black sedan parked on the street in one of the less reputable suburbs of Chicago. It had snowed last night, just a dusting, but the white stuff did nothing to class the place up. This area was lousy with gambling joints and whorehouses – and speakeasies, of course. That’s why we’d come here: to raid a speakeasy. But we weren’t here to bust down the door of some run-of-the-mill Juice Joint. We’d gotten word that this place was special. Very special.

  Bill sat behind the wheel of the sedan, I sat in the passenger seat, and Lyle and Paul sat in the back. We were waiting for the others to arrive. They were late, but not too late.

  “I’m not spooked,” Bill said.

  Even though the engine was off, he kept his hands on the wheel. He stared through the windshield at the supposedly abandoned warehouse at the end of the block. The warehouse – or rather, what was inside it – was our target.

  “A place like that is sure to be well protected,” Bill said. “It’s going to have steel doors for certain. So why didn’t we bring The Truck?”

  Capone was a smart sonofabitch. His speakeasies had reinforced steel doors as well as escape hatches for his customers. The lowlifes inside had plenty of time to get the hell out and scatter while agents tried to batter the steel door down with slegehammers. At least, that’s the way it had been until I decided to fight steel with steel. The Truck had an arrow-shaped battering ram attached to the front, and once we started using it, the doors to Capone’s speakeasies began falling like dominoes. No more hammers for us. But today we didn’t have The Truck, and it was obviously making Bill nervous.

  “We don’t need it,” I said. “In fact, if we tried to use it for this job, I guarantee you that not only wouldn’t it work, it might get us all killed.”

  “What do you mean?” Lyle said. “Capone started booby-trapping the entrances to his joints? What’s he using? Dynamite?”

  Lyle Chapman was, among other things, a tactician, and I could practically hear the wheels whirring in his head as he thought.

  “No booby traps, and no dynamite,” I said. “What’s inside that place –” I nodded toward the warehouse – “is way worse than simple explosives.”

  “Do us a favor, Eliot, and stop beating around the bush. Just tell us what’s going on.”

  Paul Robsky was a short guy, average-looking, not one to stand out, but he was an expert at wire-tapping, and as good as he was at the mechanics of it, he was even better at the art of it. He knew how to listen – I mean, really listen. He could hear what people said, but more importantly, he heard what they didn’t say. This skill was the main reason I’d brought him along today.

  “Sorry, boys. I’m not trying to be a pill. But to be honest, I’ve heard some pretty wild stories about this particular speakeasy, and I’m not sure I believe them myself. If I filled you in on all the details, you wouldn’t believe me. But I can tell you this much: if even half of what I’ve heard is true, this isn’t going to be like any raid we’ve ever conducted before. So whatever happens, stay on your toes and take your cues from me. All right?”

  Their scowls and mutters told me it damn well wasn’t all right, but they weren’t going to make an issue of it. I’d done right by them before, and they were going to stick with me. I just hoped this raid wasn’t going to end up being our last.

  A sedan came rolling down the street and parked directly behind us. The rest of the boys had arrived, and it was time to go to work.

  “Okay,” I said as I reached for the door and stepped out into the snow, “let’s do some good.”

  The wind off the lake was frigid as ever, and I saw bits of ice sparkle in the faint light of the streetlamp on the corner. I opened my overcoat and slipped my revolver out from its shoulder holster, checking it yet again, drawing both comfort and courage from its familiar weight in my hand. If things went sour, I knew I could count on it, just as I knew I could count on my men.

  Bill noted the lack of mobsters on guard as we approached the door to the warehouse. “Where’s all the pearl gray hats?”

  “Yeah,” Lyle agreed. “What gives, Eliot? No pearl hats, no heaters…You sure the kid’s not sending us on some wild goose chase?”

  “The kid” was my nickname for Georgie Thomas, my best informant. He was on the fringes of Capone’s organization, and eager to help in any way he could. In fact, I think he considered himself an honorary G-man, but I knew he was working both sides, so I took everything he said with a grain of salt.

  “The kid’s not the only one with a story about this place,” I told them, and it was the God’s honest truth. “Word on the street is they brew some kind of special hooch in here.”

  Special, I thought. That’s a good name for it all right. People go out looking for a good time, legal or not, and instead they wind up patients in Cook County Insane Asylum, clawing their own eyes out and licking the walls of a padded cell.

  But not everyone.

  That was the really weird part about it. Some people drank the stuff, whatever it was, and they came away happier than they’d ever been in their whole lives. The kid’s own wife, a burlesque queen who went by the name of Le Flame, even said she’d felt closer to God than she ever had in church. They liked the stuff, and what’s worse, they wanted more.

  Other people…Capone’s people…they took one sip of the stuff and just went nuts. I heard one pearl hat, Eddie Aiello, ran screaming from this place like he was on fire, kept yelling that his skin was melting from his bones. He ran right out in front of an oncoming train, and after it smashed into him and dragged him the length of Wrigley Field, he finally stopped screaming.

  “Just…” I took a deep breath, tried to calm myself, then I glanced back over my shoulder at the boys. “Keep your eyes and ears open.”

  They looked at one another. Billy’s eyebrows rose, then he shrugged and said, “Sure thing, Eliot.”

  Paul stared at me for a moment, and I knew then that, despite my best efforts to hide it, he heard the nervousness in my voice. If he was concerned, however, he didn’t let on. He just motioned toward the warehouse entrance. “Lead the way, boss.”

  I walked up to the door. It seemed unremarkable. I took a deep breath and knocked.

  A panel slid aside, revealing a tiny window set into the wood. An eye suddenly filled the entire opening — huge, bulging — I figured the window had to be some kind of magnifying glass. And
then we heard the voice; it was deep, guttural, almost like a growl, “Password?”

  I swallowed hard and said the word that had been given to me, a word repeated again and again by the men who kept head-butting the walls at Cook County: “Olympia.”

  The eye disappeared, and the panel slid closed again. We stood there in the dark, in the cold. I began to wonder if the password had changed, or worse, if I’d been recognized, and then I heard the loud sound of metal locks being turned within.

  Bright light outlined the entrance. As the door swung inward, I got a good look at the doorman. When the kid told me this guy only had one eye, I was picturing someone wearing a black eyepatch, like a pirate. No. This man, this…thing had a single eye set right in the middle of its skull, a huge orb that now scanned each of our shocked faces.

  I was beginning to understand why the kid had warned me not to use the Truck. The place is protected by a hell of lot more than steel doors, he’d said. Only way you’ll get in – and more importantly, get back out – is by using your melon.

  The doorman had long greasy black hair and a thick beard with bits of food stuck in it. He wore a tunic belted at the waist by a length of rope, and sandals with criss-crossing leather straps that went up to his knees. He was covered with body hair so thick, it almost qualified as fur, and his tunic was splotched with dark stains that I hoped had been caused by spilled wine. The Cyclops – because really, what else could he be? – stepped aside so we could enter, but now that we had permission to cross the threshold, I hesitated. A smell rolled over us, and it wasn’t the usual speakeasy stink of alcohol, body odor, and stale cigarette and cigar smoke. The joint smelled of exotic spices and zoo animals, the odor so strong that it hit you like a slap in the face. I didn’t hesitate because the smell was offensive. Quite the opposite: it was attractive, compelling, even. It called to something deep inside me, a part so ancient that it predated the concept of human. I didn’t just want to go in; I wanted to run, and I could sense that the men behind me felt the same. But we weren’t called the Untouchables for nothing. I took a deep breath, let it out, and then stepped inside. The others followed.