What he didn’t know, until he’d dug it up that morning, was that Fields had been investing his dirty money. Investing it with Martin Goreki, who “lost” it when he needed cash to buy the bearer bonds. Fields smelled a rat, got tight with Ivan, and that was when they hatched their plan. And it would have worked, flawless, if I hadn’t survived the ambush.
The kid leaned on his shovel, out of breath. Standing in a shallow grave, six feet long and two deep. I reached under my coat and took out my pistol. I held it loose in my hand.
“And that’s the moral of the story. You break the rules, you cross the line, you reap the consequences.”
Louie chuckled. He could smell the kid’s fear, same as me. He liked the aroma.
“Shoulda learned that lesson sooner. Maybe we wouldn’t be here right now. Dan, you wanna do the honors?”
I raised my gun in a slow, steady hand…and swung it around, aiming it in Louie’s face.
“Yeah,” I said. “I do.”
He took a startled step back, hip thumping against the sedan door. “Whoa. Whoa, Dan, what the hell are you doing?”
“You almost got away with it, Louie. Almost. Hell, you skated for two years, that’s pretty good. Thing is, I was pulling a job up in Reno last week. And the wheelman on that job? He was Fields’s brother. We got to drinking, and got to talking. He confirmed every bit of that story, all the pieces he knew. Yeah, Fields invested his money with Goreki, Goreki ripped him off, and he was definitely tight with Ivan. Just one little problem, Louie…Fields didn’t go in for any heavy stuff, as a rule. He didn’t own a gun.”
“That’s…that’s crazy. That doesn’t mean anything. Dan, I was shot—”
“I know. And I thought it was weird. I mean, nice building, nice neighborhood. A hand cannon goes off, and nobody calls the cops? Hard to mistake that sound for anything else. Now a twenty-two with a suppressor? That sounds like a door slamming, a backfiring car. I went and talked to Doc Savoy about that bleeder I brought you in with. Been a while, but Doc’s got a memory like a steel trap.”
I took a step closer to him, sighting down the barrel of the gun, aiming for a kill shot.
“He didn’t pull a three-fifty-seven slug out of your side, Louie. It was a twenty-two, just like the two bullets the coroner dug out of Fields’s chest. There were three men pulling the bearer-bond scam: Ivan, Fields, and you. You murdered Fields to shut him up and cover your tracks. Then you shot yourself someplace nice and nonlethal. Gave yourself a war wound and instant deniability.”
“You’re crazy. You’re just—that’s not proof. None of that is proof—”
My free hand slipped into my breast pocket and came out with a single slip of colorful paper.
A bearer bond.
“I went to your house last night, Louie. You were smart, not cashing these in. Keeping ’em nice and hidden for a rainy day. Stashing it all in a bag in your crawl space, though? Not so bright. First place I looked.”
He knew it was over. I saw his face fall, bluster turning to despair turning to ice-bladder fear. He opened his mouth, started to say something. I knew this part. This was the part where he would beg, bargain, offer me anything he could think of in exchange for his life.
I didn’t need to hear it. So I pulled the trigger and shot him between the eyes.
Louie’s corpse hit the sand, silhouetted in the sedan’s headlights. The kid froze. He stared at me, then at Louie, then back to me. I holstered my gun.
“So,” he said, barely louder than a whisper, “what now?”
“Now? Now you roll his body into that grave and fill it in. Tamp it down nice and tight.”
He blinked. “Are…you going to kill me?”
“Nah. Thing is, Louie had a bad back. If I made him dig his own grave, I would have been out here all fucking night. I’ve got better things to do.”
He climbed out of the trench, then stopped again, uncertain.
“What…what about the dead kid who overdosed? And his dad, the cop?”
“See, you weren’t paying attention. I said hypothetically those things happened.” I raised my hand and pointed west. “You’re gonna want to walk that way, about twenty minutes. Should be able to find a ride once you reach the highway. You can either keep going, all the way to Salt Lake City, and try your luck there, or you can come back to Vegas and follow Jennifer’s rules. This was your warning. You only get one, kid, so think hard.”
“Wait,” he called out as I opened the driver’s-side door. I paused, looking back at him. “Can’t I get a ride with you?”
“Nope,” I said. “Car’s full.”
He stood dumbstruck in the headlights as I reversed out, tires rumbling into a three-point turn, and drove down the access road. I glanced in the rearview mirror.
Tyrone and Paddy sat in the backseat, silent, their sightless eyes staring back at me. Desi sat beside me. Her long black hair flowed behind her, the faintest hint of a smile on her black-painted lips. A long, sad smile. Her luminous hand reached toward mine, almost touching. Almost.
I wasn’t lying about the car being full. Just like I never lied to myself, believing that revenge would make my ghosts go away. I didn’t feel good about killing Louie, didn’t feel much of anything at all. And the dead were still with me. I was their wheelman now, all the way to the end of the line.
All the way to the gates of hell.
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About the Author
Craig Schaefer's books have taken readers to the seamy edge of a criminal underworld drenched in shadow (the Daniel Faust series), to a world torn by war, poison and witchcraft (the Revanche Cycle), and across a modern America mired in occult mysteries and a conspiracy of lies (the Harmony Black series).
Despite this, people say he's strangely normal. Suspiciously normal, in fact.
Schaefer lives in Illinois with a small retinue of cats, all of whom try to interrupt his writing schedule and/or kill him on a regular basis. He practices sleight of hand in his spare time, though he's not very good at it.
Contact Craig here:-
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Chase The Dark - Pippa Dacosta
A Soul Eater Short Story
New York’s sewers are infested with gators. As Ace Dante investigates, it becomes clear that there’s something far worse beneath the streets, and it’s out for revenge.
I eyed the sewer gator side-on, careful not to stare him down. Looking too long in his reptilian gaze would reveal his soul and probably piss him off. I couldn’t risk either if I wanted to leave the sewer with all my limbs attached.
Most of the gator’s body was submerged beneath the slow-moving water, but occasionally, ridges along his tail broke through the surface as he swept it back and forth, keeping himself steady in the stream. Gators had the patience of the gods. Some gators were gods, but not this one. The background hum of magic I’d used to track it here radiated from his body, but also from our immediate surroundings. The chill and stink of mildew, stale urine, and worse did a grand job of hiding the gator’s magical resonance, but the magic saturated the sweating walls of his makeshift home. He’d probably been roaming the sewers for years.
“Yah know, we have a lot in common …” Sounds of swirling water drowned out my words. I wet my lips, tasting something gritty that must have splashed there during my descent into New York’s storm water drainage system. “Not the digs, although I’d wager yours are more spacious than mine.”
The gator drew back his set of clear eyelids to get a better look at the guy who’d crashed into his pad. I didn’t look like much. I was drenched from the thighs down, and pushed by the current, my duster coat clung to the backs of my legs. But like all river beasts, the gat
or might be incapable of seeing the wrongness in me, but he would sense it. “We’re both urban legends.”
I slowly—so slowly—reached my hand behind my shoulder and curled my fingers around Alysdair’s grip. Once I revealed the sword, Snappy would either turn tail and dive or go on the offensive, in which case our little standoff would get primitive real fast.
“The problem is, one of us needs to stamp out rogue magic in New York, and the other is a pest.”
Inch by inch, Alysdair slid free from its back sheath. Glowing spellwords along the blade cast a liquid green light down the concave tunnel, rippling over decades-old brickwork. Now that I could see without the aid of a spell, I noted where the water flowed over a weir behind Snappy’s snaking tail. If the gator bolted, that’s where he’d go—deeper into the maze-like drainage system.
I mentally cursed Shu. She was sitting in a warm, dry office, pushing pencils and crunching numbers. One of these days, I’d drag her ex-demon ass on a job and force her to wade through four feet of shit in her expensive fur coat.
“If you could just roll over and let me stab you in the gut, that’d be grand.”
Green light flickered in the gator’s slitted eyes, illuminating a sliver of intelligence. That was all the warning I got.
The gator exploded out of the water, launching his five-hundred-pound bulk missile-fast, like something straight out of a wildlife documentary—and I was the dumbass wildebeest who’d wandered too close to the water’s edge.
I had a second to realize that Snappy was less gator and more Nile crocodile before instinct shied me to the left in a hail of water and jaws. I spun, reversed my grip on the sword, and plunged it straight through Snappy’s armored hide. He roared, and in the cramped tunnels, the thunderous sound rattled the bricks and my bones.
A split second was all I needed to jump onto the croc’s back and wrestle him under control, but as I adjusted my weight, about to leap, his tail whipped in and swept my legs out from under me. My back hit the water hard. Foul water flooded into my throat and burned my eyes, but that would be the least of my worries if Snappy got his jaws around me and rolled. I didn’t plan on winding up as croc food—not today. I kicked out, thrashed around, and found the floor. Pushing up, I burst through the surface, Alysdair aglow in my hand, and spotted Snappy’s ridged back disappearing over the weir.
“Oh no you don’t!” Diving forward, I snagged the croc’s tail in one hand just as he plunged over the edge. Under I went, dragged along by the gator and the current. My shoulder cracked against something hard and unforgiving, but I had him—or maybe he had me, depending on your perspective.
I snatched a gasp of air and twisted to keep from losing my grip. Brickwork blurred by and water rushed—black bubbles obscuring my vision.
“Easy job,” Shu had said. “Just another sewer gator sighting. You can sit here and help with the accounts or make yourself useful and check it out.”
Right. I should have taken the accounts. It wasn’t like the gators were harming anyone. If anything, they kept the sewers clear of rats and cats; two things New York could do without.
“Hurz—” As I tried to fling out the spellword, sewer water spilled over my tongue. The word twanged back, slapping me upside the head for shoddy casting. I’d had better days.
I saw flickers of floating debris and heard the torrential rush, and then I slipped over the edge of something high enough to lodge my heart in my throat and plummeted into the dark.
Snappy’s tail slipped from my grip, then I hit the plunge pool with a back-cracking thwump and sank like a stone. The churning waters spat me out. Gasping, I clawed at a nearby service platform like a drowned rat.
Snappy cut through the water, torpedoing for me with the single-minded focus of an apex predator about to chow down on man-steak.
“Hurzd!” I yelled and flung out a hand, directing the spell at the gator, then crumpled into a spasm of coughs. But the croc froze, suspended at the surface of the pool as water gently lapped against his scaled hide.
The spell beat at my head, releasing waves of heat and draining my strength with each passing second, but I had enough juice to know it would hold.
I turned, bracing my elbows on the platform. Alysdair glowed in my right hand, illuminating a chamber that was easily the size of my modest apartment. Three tunnel mouths gaped, and high above, to my left, the waterfall plunged in, roaring endlessly. I wasn’t getting back out that way, but Snappy had made it out, so there had to be a way to circle around. The water was rushing toward somewhere—hopefully the Hudson and not a sewage treatment plant. I’d worry about my escape later. Right now, I had an angry dinosaur castoff with his sights zeroed in on me.
“I’m just gonna lay this out. It’s nothing personal, peaches. I know you’d rather be—” The coughing started up again. I hacked and spat, trying not to think about what I’d swallowed. “Rather be cruising the Everglades. I hear that …”
Something shiny and white caught my eye.
Shiny, white, and oval—suspiciously egg-shaped. I heaved myself out of the water onto the rickety service platform and landed in a soaked heap next to a nest of garbage.
“Sekhmet’s ass.”
The clutch of eggs were eight strong, each the size of an exercise ball. No way those eggs had come from Snappy. He was big, but not prehistoric big.
What else was patrolling these tunnels?
I wiped my face and rubbed the grit from my eyes.
“You’ve been holding out on me, Snappy,” I said, raising my voice against the thundering water.
The croc grumbled and strained against the spell, stretching my control. I winced and mentally tightened the hold.
Snappy and whatever else was down here weren’t your average everglade-variety flushed pets. I had a suspect, but if I was right, it meant this little pest-control job had turned into a clusterfuck of monolithic proportions.
“Is this Sobek’s doing?” I asked the croc. Just uttering the god’s name in these dark, damp tunnels brought back memories I’d rather forget. That was the problem with living as long as I had: the skeletons no longer fit in my closet and needed their own damn apartment. “He got out, huh?”
Sobek made my wild nights look like grocery runs. Some—scratch that—most gods were sociopaths; the others were off-the-chart crazy. Sobek was the latter.
Snappy’s cold, primeval eyes fixed on me while he likely imagined all the ways he could rip me limb from limb. I wasn’t getting answers from him, not like this anyhow.
Alligator sightings had increased of late. People couldn’t tell the difference between a gator and a croc, especially not when it was slithering out of sight down tunnels and drains. In all likelihood, there were more nests down here, and more crocs, and a bunch more trouble.
“Easy job,” I heard Shu’s taunts once more. I was going to kill her.
Maybe it didn’t have anything to do with the gods. I could hope, right? All I had was one nest and one overgrown lizard with an attitude problem. It might not be a disaster—yet.
Snappy was still glaring at me. If I killed him, like I’d planned to, I’d be stuck down here with nothing to go on. This thirteen-foot-long croc was my only lead.
“Back in the underworld,” I began, shifting my waterlogged weight, “I’d patrol the River of Souls with Khuy. He was part croc and loved nothing more than a good bargain. My mother, too. Ammit, the Great Devourer. Not my real mother, you understand. She loved to barter, wager, haggle—when she wasn’t eating souls. As you probably know, she was also part crocodile. I’m betting you understand every word I’m saying and that you’re partial to striking a little deal. So how about you cut the lizard act and switch to your human alter ego?”
A few degrees of warmth fell away at Snappy’s stony glare.
“Or I could take Alysdair to your gut and turn you into a nice pair of boots for my business partner.”
Snappy’s gaze remained unchanging.
I waited, contemplating what
might happen once I released the hold spell. If Snappy came at me again, I could always throw the same spellword at him and stop him dead. I’d burned through my magic reserves, but it was that or let him get a death grip on me.
“I’m releasing the spell. I figure you know who I am. Screw with me and the next few seconds will be your last.”
I severed the spell. It recoiled with a whip-like sting, leaving a mild ache in my chest.
Snappy’s tail stroked the water. He drifted over, carving through the ripples. His nostrils, eyes, and back ridges were the only parts of him visible above the waterline. Closer, he floated. With Alysdair humming in my hand, I was ready to thrust the blade the second the gator sprang.
Just as I tensed for the strike, the croc’s body rippled, mimicking the water around it. His back ridges smoothed out, his snout shrank, and in a blur that my mind struggled to fathom, a human body emerged from the liquid quiver that had encased the croc.
Snappy gripped the platform with two very human hands and heaved. Two things became clear: Crocodile shifters retain a smattering of scales all over their human-looking bodies, and Snappy wasn’t, by any stretch of the imagination, male.
She hauled herself out of the water, onto her feet, and padded, buck naked and dripping wet, toward the eggs. Who knew reptile shifters had the kind of curves that could derail a man’s thoughts, sending them deeper into the gutter than they already were.
“I know you, Soul Eater,” Miss Snappy crooned, the words humming at the back of her throat, lending her speech a musical quality. Her accent evoked memories of warm river evenings and desert winds and was outright hypnotic to that part of me I’d left in the underworld, the part where all the memories hid—the old me. I could have listened to that voice for hours and fallen into its melody.
I grinned at my mistake. I hadn’t spoken with a river shifter in so long that I’d forgotten how seductive they could be.
Full Metal Magic: An Urban Fantasy Anthology Page 29