Streets of Shadows

by Tom Piccirilli

See, my family has a long and storied relationship with the Courts. We’re not liminals, since we’re not strictly tied to anything that the Courts control. Belief and worship don’t change us. But we’re not danies either, thanks to a little disagreement with the man who made the diamond in Phillip’s hand. What we are is somewhere in the middle, in-between, where man and mystery meet. Where the wolves are. So I huffed, and I puffed, and I blew the wind that Phillip’s cheap attempt at chicanery was generating right back into the Star.

  Phillip yelped and dropped the diamond, which hit the table with a sweet, crystalline chiming sound. I leaned forward and grabbed it before he could react. The pistol in my other hand probably had something to do with his sudden stillness, but I’ve never been one for splitting hairs. I smiled at him, showing all my teeth.

  “Run,” I suggested again. “Pretty sure she won’t go after you once I give this back to her. I’ll even give you a head start.”

  He stared at me. “Why would you do that?”

  “Because, lover boy, I get paid by the day.” The diamond disappeared inside my jacket as I continued smiling. “Now run.”

  He ran.

  * * *

  The blizzard had died down by the time I returned to Jack’s, two days later. That was about as long as I’d been comfortable dodging the Winter Queen’s calls. I could call the lady a lot of things, and most of them weren’t positive, but I couldn’t deny her dedication to her Court. When I’d handed her the Star, she’d burst into tears that froze on her cheeks like silver glitter. She’d offered me anything I wanted—anything in the world. I’d asked for a book of coupons for Lucy’s.

  Hey, a girl needs a good steak every now and then.

  Cindy was on the stage again when I stepped through the door and into the perennially underpopulated dining room. I nodded to Jack behind the bar before winding my way through the tables to the piano, where I sat down on the bench next to the silent pianist.

  “Thanks for the tip,” I said.

  She kept playing, but I saw her smile, just a little.

  “How did you know?”

  She switched songs. Cindy, who was apparently accustomed to this sort of behavior, switched with her, going from an old torch standard about broken hearted women to a bouncier, more modern tune about keeping an eye on everything.

  “I thought watching people was supposed to be my job.”

  A shrug.

  “Well, if you ever decide you’re tired of sitting here all night, drop by.” I set one of my business cards on the edge of the piano. “I’m pretty sure I owe you a steak dinner.”

  Then I got up and walked out of the bar, back into the cold night where the winter can walk as a woman and a wolf can watch from the fringes, but where a beautiful dame in a downtown office never means anything good.

  Some archetypes, after all, will never die.

  * * *

  Seanan McGuire writes books. It is difficult to stop her. When not writing books, she likes to visit Disney Parks and haunted corn mazes, and sees no real difference between the two. One day she will summon her vegetable armada and conquer all mankind. Until then, keep up with her at www.seananmcguire.com

  Toby’s Closet

  Jonathan Maberry

  A Sam Hunter Adventure

  1

  The place wasn’t a dive.

  Dive is an active word.

  This was past tense.

  Dove.

  There was enough neon left in the sign outside to give you a clue about the name.

  Heaven Street Diner.

  They didn’t do what some diners try, where they call it a ‘family restaurant’ so they can jack up the dinner specials to twenty bucks for crab cakes that tasted like they were padded with mulch. Nobody would bring the family into this place. No-fucking-body. Not unless they started out with bad directions and took a few wrong turns along the way. And even then it would be to use the bathroom, grab some road coffee and get the hell out of here.

  I kind of liked the place.

  It suited my personal economy.

  And the coffee could defend itself. Tom Waits wrote a song about that, but I forget the words. Point’s the same. You don’t want the taste of a plate of eggs or a Salisbury steak kicking your coffee’s ass. There’s already enough heartbreak and disappointment in the world to give up on coffee. My coffee. Real goddamn American boiled, black and bitter diner coffee.

  I was on my third cup, perched on the corner stool of the wraparound counter. Four or five other people in there. Sitting alone. Wrapped in their aloneness. I can’t call it ‘loneliness’ because I don’t know them well enough. But they are pointedly, even aggressively, alone.

  As was I.

  Though, I was waiting for someone and I doubt any of them were.

  I’d been waiting for about an hour, but that was cool. The coffee was good. I had tomorrow’s newspaper and was working my way through the crossword, trying to figure what eighteen across was. Eight letter word for trouble beginning with a ‘V’.

  It’s how I pass the time because when you’re a P.I. you have to learn to wait. Surveillance eats up whole days. Waiting for a timid client is another way to kill some minutes. You can’t always choose where the client wants to meet, either. I mean, sure, if I was a big ticket firm then they’d come to me. I’d make them. We’d sit in a big air conditioned office and I’d have a secretary take notes. But that’s not me. My office is a shithole that currently has no air conditioning and a problem with flies. Temperature inside is three degrees hotter than the surface of the sun. Window fans won’t touch it. So, when a client sends an email and asks to meet at a diner that has air conditioning and coffee, I go. You wouldn’t believe the kinds of places I’ve waited and the kinds of people I meet.

  In my line you don’t meet the pillars of society or the cream of any crop. Nope. You meet the kind of people who wash up against the counter at Heaven Street.

  The dinner special was chalked on the board but it was almost midnight. Bacon-wrapped chicken legs, two veg and soup. I had maybe half a pinhole of flow left in my arteries, so I passed. Had a salad.

  An actual salad.

  The waitress –her name is Ivy—gave me a long five count while she waited for the punch line. When she realized I actually wanted a salad she looked crestfallen.

  “You sick, Sam?”

  “No,” I answered. “Why?”

  “Every time you’ve ever been in here you ordered a steak. Rare steak. Like you wanted it to moo when you stuck a fork in it.”

  “I like rare.”

  “There’s rare and then there’s steak you have to chase around the room.”

  “You walking toward a point, Ivy?”

  She looked down at her order pad and then raised disappointed eyes to me. “Salad?”

  “My doctor tells me that my cholesterol numbers are too high.”

  “Ah.”

  “She has me on those statin drugs. And I’m taking a water pill, too. My blood pressure could blow bolts out of plate steel.”

  “Ah,” she said again.

  “So, yeah…salad.”

  “And…what? You want light dressing on that?”

  “Balls, no. Ranch.”

  Her smile returned like I was not a completely lost soul. When she returned with the salad it was covered in bacon bits. Big, fresh bottle of Hidden Valley next to it. More coffee. Couple of hot rolls and butter.

  Hey, it’s not steak. Most of it’s green. It’s healthy.

  I ate it while I read the paper and waited. Occasionally throwing looks at Ivy, who was a cutie. Maybe five years younger than me, though her eyes were older. Way older, like she’d already seen too much before she wound up here. A medium-height dishwater blond with a good smile and great legs. I was thinking of asking her out, but the tattoo made he wonder. Around her third finger, left hand, where a wedding ring used to be she had a band of tiny skulls wrapped in barbed wire. As statements go that kind of thing tends to give a man serious pause.
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  I sat. I finished the salad. Drank more coffee. The diner emptied out.

  Figured out that crossword clue.

  Eight letter word for trouble beginning with a V.

  Vexation.

  Ivy came over and leaned on her side of the bar. The sound system was playing a Leonard Cohen song. Sisters of Mercy. One of those songs that walks the alley between hopeful and sad. I guess bittersweet is the word.

  We were the only two people in the place.

  “Sorry to make you wait so long,” Ivy said. “I thought they’d never leave.”

  I set down my cup and looked into her deep green eyes.

  Troubled eyes.

  I said, “Oh.”

  And she said, “I’m glad you came. I didn’t sign the email.”

  “Oh,” I said again. I’m sharp as a razor.

  She said, “Can we talk?”

  I looked around. There was nothing in any of the booths except shadows.

  “Talk about what?”

  “I need help,” she said.

  “Sure. We can talk.”

  I held out my cup for a refill.

  We talked.

  2

  “It’s my landlord’s son,” she said. “Toby.”

  “Is he bothering you?” I asked. “Hitting on you or—?”

  “He’s six.”

  Ivy said, “So, that would be a no.”

  “He keeps getting hurt.”

  “Old man knocking him around?”

  “His father’s gone. Bugged out when Toby was still a bun in the oven.”

  “’Kay.”

  “His mom, my landlord, is Gail. She has a four-story place over on Dover Street. Six apartments. Not much of a place, but she keeps the hot water running and keeps the roach population down.”

  “Better than my landlord.”

  “Gail’s okay,” said Ivy. “We’re not friends, exactly. Veterans of the same war, if you know what I mean. We bonded over the fact that men, as a rule, suck.”

  “I’ve heard. That’s why I don't date them,” I said.

  “Yeah. Funny. Anyway, we’ve had a few beers, you know? Killed a couple bottles of tequila and talked about why all men are scum.” She paused and gave me a low-wattage smile. “Almost all men.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “I think.”

  She shrugged. “You never try to grab my ass and you aren't obvious about looking down my blouse when I bend over to pour coffee.”

  “Ah.”

  “And,” she said, “people talk.”

  “About?”

  “About you. You have a reputation. People can go to you.”

  “That’s my job. Private investigator and all. I have cards.”

  “You know what I mean, Sam. They say that if the cops can’t help –or won’t—sometimes you can do stuff.”

  “’Stuff’,” I echoed.

  She shrugged. “Stuff.”

  I drank some coffee. “What’s happening with the kid? With Toby? Who’s hurting him?”

  “That’s just it,” she said. “We don’t know.”

  “He won’t tell his mom?”

  “He says he doesn’t know who’s doing it.”

  “You mean it’s a stranger?”

  She shook her head.

  “Then you lost me. Who’s thumping on the kid?”

  Ivy took a while on that. It shouldn’t have been the kind of question requiring this much thought. She folded her arms and leaned a hip against the counter and looked at me through the filter of what she knew and maybe of what she was willing to say.

  I waited her out. Push too hard and you can chase the timid ones off. Some people need to get to it in their own way and time. I wasn’t double-parked; my coffee cup was full. So I waited.

  She said, “It happens when he’s sleeping.”

  I waited some more.

  “He goes to bed without bruises,” she said. “When he wakes up he’s hurt.”

  “Every night?”

  “No. Some nights. If there’s a pattern Gail hasn't figured it out.”

  “How bad are the injuries?”

  “Not bad. But bad enough. Like I said, he’s six.”

  “His mom take him to the E.R.?”

  “Sure. Guess what they said?”

  I sighed and nodded. “They think it’s her.”

  “Yes. A caseworker’s been to the house twice. There’s paperwork on it now, and even though they haven’t come out and made actual threats, Gail knows that she could lose her kid to the system. Unfit mother and all that. Child abuse.”

  “Which makes me have to ask…”

  “No,” Ivy said firmly. “It’s not Gail.”

  “And you know this how?”

  “I know.”

  I shook my head. “Sorry, kid, but that’s not good enough. I’ve met a lot of sweet-faced, innocent-as-a-lamb people who did some pretty extreme stuff when no one was looking. Appearance doesn’t count for much when you’re talking the way the personality is wired. Ted Bundy was a charming guy.”

  “It’s not her. I’m telling you.”

  “And I’m telling you that I don’t know you well enough outside of this diner to know if you’re any judge.”

  Ivy cocked her head to one side and her eyes hardened. They got even older, if that’s possible. “When it comes to child abuse, Sam, I know what I’m talking about. I can look in someone’s eyes and I know.”

  “You know,” I said, flatly. Nailing it to the air between us. A challenge, maybe.

  “I know.”

  “So, if you’re so sure, and if you know the other people in the building, who do you think looks good for this?”

  Her intensity wavered. “I…don’t have any idea.”

  “Ah.”

  “I mean, I was there one night.”

  “What?”

  “One of the times it happened. I was there,” she said. “I came up with leftovers from here, and I brought a sixer of Coors to split with Gail. We all watched a Disney movie on cable. One of those penguin ones. The first one. And then Gail put Toby to bed. The place was locked up, and her apartment’s small. The living room’s right next to his bedroom. We put on Grey’s Anatomy and had some beer and she told me about the people from Child Services. Then, oh I guess it was like ten-thirty, eleven –no, not even eleven because Jon Stewart wasn’t on yet—Toby starts screaming.”

  “Screaming…”

  “And Gail all but kicked his door in. I knew that this was going on so I had something in my pocket.”

  “What?” I asked.

  She hesitated, glanced around the empty diner, and then fished something out of the pocket of her waitress uniform. He held it out on the flat of her palm. It was a Stanley box-cutter with a retractable blade.

  “We get some sketchy characters in here,” she said, putting it away again. “I work a lot of nights.”

  “Glad you have it,” I told her. “So, you barge into Toby’s room, Gail’s upset, you have your blade and—?”

  “And nothing. Toby’s all scrunched up against the headboard. Sheets are on the floor. Pillows are on the floor. His pajama top is open and he’s got bruises on him.”

  “What kind of bruises?”

  “Hand marks. They were bright red, like he’d been slapped. And…you could see them starting to fade a little. You know how when you touch someone’s skin and then let go you can see the blood flow back? Like that, except these were the opposite. They were red and then they faded.”

  “Completely?”

  She shook her head. “No. He still has bruises.”

  “How big were the marks? Could he have made them himself? Kids sometimes do that. All sorts of psych problems a kid goes through. Broken home, maybe something going on in school. Mom works a lot of nights, so there’s always a stranger babysitting. Kids get confused, the world’s scary. Hurting themselves isn’t—.”

  “Toby didn’t make those marks. No way.”

  “You’re sure?”

  Iv
y gave me a strange look. “Wait here.”

  She went into the back and came out with her purse, then fished her phone out. She opened the camera function, brought up the photo stream and then pressed one of the pictures before handing the phone to me.

  “I took these. Scroll through,” she said. “You’ll see.”

  I scrolled.

  I saw.

  I said, “I’ll take the case.”

  3

  Ivy gave me the address and it wasn’t too far from the diner. Walking distance if I wanted to get the exercise my doctor said I needed.

  I drove.

  The apartment building was a pile of dirty red bricks that squatted between a five story tenement that Fagin wouldn’t live in, and a movie theater that used to show porn flicks and was now a Korean church. Gail’s building had bars on all the windows, even the third floor. I walked around back. Fire escape was rusted junk that I would climb at gunpoint. There was a five-step walkdown to a cellar door. The stairwell was half filled with trash and I doubt that door had been opened anytime since Bush senior was in office.

  If someone was getting into Gail’s apartment, they weren’t doing from outside.

  From the photos I saw, I wasn’t all that surprised.

  Didn’t look like junkies or visits from the neighborhood pedophile.

  One odd thing was what I didn’t smell.

  Dog piss.

  Not a drop of it anywhere.

  Now, understand, I have this sense of smell. It’s one of those extras that come with what I am. Great sense of smell, pretty good ears, outstanding sense of taste –which is why I appreciate good coffee. I’m particularly sensitive to the subtleties of dog urine. I sniff a few drops I can tell you everything about the dog. Breed, age, sex, whether he still has his balls. All of it.

  And in a neighborhood like this, you get a lot of dogs running around and they are very territorial. One will piss on a wall, another one who thinks he’s King Shit will come along and piss over it. Like gangbangers spray-painting over someone else’s tag. Got to say who you are and take away anyone else’s mark.

  Outside the Korean church and all around the movie theater I could make out thirty, forty different dogs. Old and new scents. Couple of alphas, lot of wannabes.