“Excellent as usual. So, what’s the long version gonna cost me?”
“I got a pest problem.” He points over to a table where a man in a rumpled suit is being generally obnoxious to a cigarette girl. He’s pretty hammered.
And dead.
“You’re kidding me,” I say. “You let a ghost in here?”
“He wasn’t dead when he showed up.”
Darius likes to entertain. I don’t know where all his doors are and he’s not about to tell me, but about half the people in here are real. Some of them are really here and some of them are just dreaming that they’re here.
The rest, like the cigarette girl, probably the singer and the band, too, are all products of his imagination. This is his kingdom, small though it may be, and he’s got complete control over it.
He’ll randomly open doors and let people in. Some of them stay a long time, some are out in less than an hour. Most of them don’t remember they’ve been here except in dreams. I guess one of them died before Darius could get rid of him.
“I can’t get him to go,” he says. He sounds almost desperate. “I’ve tried everything. Banishings, exorcisms. Tossed his body out into an alley. Hell, I tried to pick him up and throw him out.”
“Master of your domain, huh? Couldn’t even get a grip on him, could you?”
“No, and goddamn it, it’s driving me nuts. Get rid of him. That’s the price.”
“Done and done,” I say. “Any of those bottles of hooch real?”
He looks at the rows of booze behind him, selects a half-empty bottle of Stoli, hands it to me.
“Be right back.” I grab a couple of whisky glasses from behind the bar, walk over to the drunk’s table, pull up a chair.
“Hey, buddy.”
“Hey buddy, yourself,” he says, his voice slurring. I’m thinking he kicked from alcohol poisoning. I’ve never known Darius’ concoctions to get anyone drunk. Darius’ place is about as sealed an environment as you can get. I’m betting that when he died his soul couldn’t get out. He’s not a Wanderer or a Haunt, or even an Echo. He’s just stuck.
“It’s last call,” I say.
He blows a raspberry, leans on a spectral arm. “Been last call for—Hey,” he yells, “how long I been tryin’ to get a drink outta you?”
“Eight years, two months and fifteen days,” Darius says. I can see why he’s so desperate to get rid of this guy. A weekend with him would be enough to drive me nuts.
“Well, one last drink and then I’ll take you home.”
“Screw you, I like it here.”
“Wasn’t a request.” I pour a measure of the vodka into a glass, put it in front of him.
He reaches for it and his hand passes right through. Tries again. No go.
“Man, that sucks,” I say. “Try mine.” I pour a measure into the second glass. Same result. I flip out my straight razor under the table, nick my wrist just enough to get a little blood going.
“Maybe you should try the bottle.” I set it down in front of him. “Might have to get real close, though.”
As he leans in I get a drop of blood on my finger and pass my hand down through him, flicking my blood into the bottle. His eyes widen. He starts to shake. He tries to pull himself away, but it’s too late. His face and body stretch and thin out as he gets sucked into the bottle.
A couple seconds later it’s done and I screw the cap back on. I etch a rune on the bottle cap. Even if it’s opened he won’t get out without my say so.
I shake the bottle and peer inside. Hard to see, but he’s in there.
I feel a little sorry for him. He doesn’t know what’s happened. Sure as hell didn’t ask for it. Stuck in his own little hell with no idea how he got in there or how to get out.
Just like the rest of us.
Chapter 9
“I’ll take him out when I leave,” I say, sliding the bottle of Stoli into my jacket pocket.
“You do that,” Darius says. He wipes at a non-existent stain on the bar with a towel. “All right. So, the long version.”
“If you wouldn’t mind.” I’m starting to get antsy. I don’t know how much time is passing in here. It’s really up to him. I don’t want to lose any more than I’ve already lost trying to track him down.
“She’s got a sweet gig. Lot of the old gods, they either bailed or turned into tiny things. One guy, old Chumash feast god, I hear he’s got himself a drum circle in Santa Monica that keeps him going. Best he can do is get a bunch of New Age wannabes to follow him around as their guru. Nobody believes anymore. In any of them.”
His eyes go distant and for a moment I can see the sands of the Sahara reflected in his eyes, the red and gold of the Brass City. I’ve never known Darius to get maudlin, but after hundreds of years stuck in here, maybe he’s getting a little cabin fever.
“Never like the good old days,” he says. “Anyway, Miki. Party girl. Not as big on the whole vengeance, retribution thing like she is now. More a guardian. Took the souls to the underworld and watched over their bones.”
“What happened to her?”
“The fucking Spanish happened. That Cortez fuck. Before I came over here. Drove her believers underground, enslaved her people. For a while I heard she was scraping together an existence in Xibalba, chewing on scraps of the dead.” He shakes his head. “Couple hundred years of that shit’ll twist your head around.”
“Can I trust her?”
“Oh, fuck no. Especially not now. Like I said, her head’s twisted around. Batshit crazy. From what I hear she’s running angles and schemes, short and long cons. You’d think she was fucking Coyote or something.”
“Will she try to break the laws?”
“No, she won’t lie to you,” he says. “She’s got that much going for her. She keeps her promises. Death always does. But like the best grifters she knows how to fuck you with the truth.”
“So I’m pretty much back at square one,” I say. I give him the lowdown on her clue and the job I’m doing for her.
“Yeah, that sounds like her. Wish I could tell you more. She and I, we don’t talk. Not since her husband took himself out, what, 1800’s?”
“She was married?”
“Yeah. They shared the underworld together. Real badass but he couldn’t take the pressure. Some gods do that. They just sort of give up. That on top of everything else and she went off the deep end. Hey, there’s a cheery thought.”
“What?”
“She said, what, champion? That’s what she’s looking for? Sure it wasn’t ‘consort’?” He makes air quotes with his fingers, waggles his eyebrows.
“Oh, dude, don’t even go there.”
“Just sayin’. Could be she’s looking for a replacement.” Darius slaps me on the shoulder. “Could be worse. She doesn’t have to do the skeleton thing, you know. When I knew her she was smokin’.”
Great. Now I’ve got a crazy death goddess making googly eyes at me.
“I know I probably don’t have to tell you this,” he says, “but watch your ass. Miki’s not somebody to fuck around with.”
I tap the side of my head. “Not something I’m likely to forget. Thanks. Appreciate it.”
Darius has a wicked sense of humor and who knows what time it will be when I leave, but he’s acting weird. The way he spoke about “the good old days” makes me think he could use a little company.
So I stick around for a couple more drinks, listen to some more jazz. He tells me about some new hotshot he’s been hanging out with. A girl running a flophouse in Skid Row for wayward supernaturals. Vampires and shit. Weird. I think he’s got the hots for her. God help her.
When I finally leave only about an hour has gone by outside. Twenty bucks gets my car out of the parking lot. Rush hour traffic has the freeway backed up and the surface streets are a crawl. I pull the bottle of Stoli out of my coat pocket and look at the drunk ghost inside. Poor bastard. I should let him loose, but I’m not about to do it here in the car. Christ knows what he’d
do.
I haven’t run into too many stuck ghosts before and they’ve all been unpredictable. I put it back into my coat pocket. Besides a drunk in a bottle of Stoli and the terrifying idea that a death goddess might be looking at me for a boyfriend I’ve gotten fuck all from the trip.
One thing, though, at least I know she’s telling the truth. Or at least Darius thinks so. Which makes it even harder to wrap my mind around her saying to look for Boudreau’s ghost. What if it’s not his ghost, not literally? There’s a thought. Maybe it’s something else. Something he left behind.
Alex might know something. You run a bar you’re going to have connections, right? All that business isn’t entirely legit. Somebody from Boudreau’s old gang must still be around.
When I asked Alex earlier if he knew Ben Duncan, Boudreau’s right hand, he said he’d never heard of him. If he’s gone I’ll have to track someone else down. I drive until I find a payphone on Broadway near the Orpheum Theatre. At least that place hasn’t changed. In the land of iPhones and Blackberries a payphone’s a rare breed. I tap the side of the phone and get a dial tone. Who needs quarters?
I know I should get a cell phone, but it feels too much like a tether. I don’t want to be tied to anything. I dial Alex. He picks up after a few rings.
“It’s me,” I say.
“Where have you been? I’ve been trying to get hold of you since this morning. Is this your cell phone?”
“Payphone.”
“You’re kidding.”
“I don’t own any credit cards, either.” I start to tell him what happened to Lucy but I can’t do it. I’m used to gruesome death scenes, but my brain seizes on this one. The image of Lucy being used as a gruesome paintbrush flashes in my mind and the words die in my throat. Just thinking about it makes me sick all over again. “Killer left a message,” I say instead. “For me.”
“What? Where?”
“I—Later, all right? I’ll tell you later. It’s tied in with Boudreau, somehow. Something he left behind, maybe. You said things have changed. Things have calmed down. Did anyone take over when he died?”
“I heard people tried, yeah. But everybody just sort of petered out. Are you all right? Head over to the bar. Let’s talk about this.”
“Hey, buddy. You gonna be long? I gotta use the phone.”
I turn to see a guy in a tailored gray suit behind me, a Mercedes with tinted windows parked in the lot next to the Eldorado.
“Give me a minute,” I say. I turn back to the phone and stop. Why would a guy in a tailored suit driving a Mercedes need to use a payphone?
I step back into him and duck just in time to see the taser stab over my head where my neck would have been. I reach up, grab his wrist. Pull forward as I twist myself up and back, throwing him over my shoulder into the payphone. Hand still wrapped around his wrist, I shove my foot on his throat. Anger flares up inside me and I want to kill him, just because I want to kill something and he’s a damn good candidate right now, but I rein in the impulse.
I start to pull in the magic around me with a lightning spell that should knock him out long enough to stick him in my trunk when I hear, “Hey, asshole,” behind me.
I let the spell loose in a sphere around me instead of at the guy at my feet, not sure exactly where or how close the second guy is. The guy I have on the ground jerks as the wattage pumps through him and I hear his buddy drop to the ground. The payphone throws off sparks, starts kicking out quarters and dimes.
I turn around to see another suit, this one sporting a Sig-Sauer instead of a taser, twitching on the ground. I kick the gun out of his hand.
“Guns and tasers? Whoever sent you after me gave you some bad intel,” I say. Two more suits exit the back seat of the Mercedes, blue flames of magic ringing their hands.
“Or maybe not.”
I bolt past them, jumping and sliding over the Eldorado’s hood as they let loose with bolts of plasma the size of melons. The fireballs pass by as I get the door open, shielding me from the heat, but cracking the windshield, bubbling the paint on the hood. A tap on the steering column and the engine roars to life. I slam it into reverse, spinning out of the parking space. I miss the guy on my side but clip the Mercedes hard enough to shove it out of its spot.
It blows the mages’ next shots. Instead they take out a parking meter and the top of a concrete street lamp from the forties.
Cars swerve to miss my ass end as I throw the Caddy into traffic. In the land of Beemers and Priuses nobody knows how to deal with a boat like the El Dorado. They almost kill themselves getting out of my way.
I cut down Broadway, scream past the 10, cut right on Adams. Almost take out a couple of bikes.
Dammit. I’ve been so distracted I let a guy with a taser get the drop on me. The two mages I can understand, but a taser? What is this, amateur hour? And who the hell were they?
Guys with guns, spellslingers with money. I was asking Alex if anybody had taken over the reins of Boudreau’s old organization. Guess I got my answer.
I figure they’ve been following me since the cemetery. Otherwise they could have taken me at Travel Town. Probably had the mausoleum camped to see if I’d show. Which means they don’t know where my motel is. Yet.
It’s time to do what I do best. Take a runner. I’m not skipping town, but I’ll be goddamned if I won’t stay mobile enough to not get trapped. I pull into the motel lot, scanning for cars. There’s a beat up Civic and a Jetta that have been there since I got in. I park in front of my room.
Most of my gear is in the car. Just have a suitcase with some clothes in the closet. I spelled the Do Not Disturb sign to keep people and various supernatural riffraff out of the room. From the feel of it the ward hasn’t been disturbed.
In, out and I’ll be on my way to the other side of the city before they can track me down. I throw the door open, run in. Turns out it is amateur hour.
The guy sitting on the bed fires two barb-tipped wires from his taser right into my chest before I can react. Everything locks up and I hit the floor. My muscles spasm to the rapid ticking as he pumps me full of voltage.
The thing about a taser is you have to keep it going if you really want to keep somebody down. I guess it’s a good thing he doesn’t want to keep his finger on the trigger, too much and my heart might stop.
He lets up on the voltage but I’m not thrilled with his choice of alternatives. He kicks me in the head until I black out.
Chapter 10
As bad men go Jean Boudreau wasn’t the worst. He was just more ambitious than most.
From what I hear he started small. Dealt a little weed, diversified. Heroin, meth. Kept it pretty clean all things considered. Toss some magic into the mix and you can throw shit together that makes crank look like Nyquil. Instead he used his magic to keep the customers coming. A little influence got the word out, got some attention, gave him an advantage.
He pulled together a crew. Normals and magic types. Held his own and kept his head down. When the bigger guys came sniffing around wanting a piece he negotiated where he could, threatened when pushed, killed when he had to.
He had magic. Most of his competition didn’t.
Drugs led to prostitutes, some legit businesses as cover. But the real money was in his own people. Get enough magical muscle and the rest of the community’s got no choice but to pay protection. At least until somebody stands up and says fuck you. Like my parents did. Told him to take his threats and shove them up his ass.
And that’s when he summoned a host of fire elementals to burn the house down with them in it.
—
I come to with no idea where I am. When my vision clears and I can take in the scene, I still don’t know. It’s a plush room, wherever it is. An office with green walls and dark wood wainscoting. Old English hunting prints, shelves lined with leather-bound books, lamps on the walls that wouldn’t be out of place in the nineteenth century. A desk with a heavy leather chair and old-style ledger books. I’m sprawled in
one of two high backed Victorian chairs.
I’ve been kidnapped by Charles Dickens.
It’s a bad sign when you wake up longing for the days when all you had was a bruised rib. My nose is definitely broken. Every breath through it is like sucking in fire and it feels about the size of a casaba, dried blood crusted all over my face. Lip split and swollen, body screaming in bruises.
I pull myself straighter in my seat, ignore the pain, try to stand up. Before I can get my legs under me a heavy hand clamps down on my shoulder and forces me back down. I feel familiar cold steel against my throat.
“You should stay in your seat, buddy,” says the man with my straight razor. “Wouldn’t want to do anything premature, ya know?” He takes the blade away from my neck.
That thing is so sharp it barely touched my neck and still drew blood. I hope he slices off a couple fingers folding it back up, but no such luck.
I can see five guys behind me reflected in the glass of one of the hunting prints. The four from the Mercedes, one of them looking almost as bad as I feel, his nose taped up and his arm in a sling. Didn’t think I’d yanked on it that hard. I look up at the fifth guy holding me down.
“You’re the fucker who tased me.” Guy’s built like a gorilla. Nice suit though.
“Yeah, what of it?”
“I think I’ll kill you first.”
The room erupts into laughter. Thank you everybody. I’m here all week. Don’t forget to tip your waitress. I shift in the chair, feel the weight of what’s in my pockets. Gorilla boy’s got my straight razor, but my watch, the Illinois Sangamo Special, is still in my coat.
They clearly don’t want me dead yet, though from the firepower the two mages were packing in the parking lot I don’t think they’d mind too much if I was.
I’m not going anywhere for a while. Might as well make the best of it. I start to tap into the local pool. Just a little. Sip at the power. I might need a boost. I can’t draw too much too quickly or the two other mages will know.
People don’t walk around with badges that say Magic Boy on their shirts. But we can tell when somebody’s pulling a bunch of juice out of the local pool. Feels like a tug on the back of your mind. I have to be careful or this won’t work.
Dead Things Page 7