Better Off Undead: The Bloodhound Files

by DD Barant

  “Well, thanks for dropping by. Anything else I can do for you? Let you set my dog on fire, maybe?”

  “I’ll see you back at the office.”

  “Mmmpph. Diz uh guh sanwish.”

  After I demolish my own creation—and yes, I eat the whole thing—I get a call from Charlie telling me that Xandra spotted him in the car and abandoned Gally with him. “She seemed upset,” he tells me.

  “No kidding. I’ll be right down—I just talked to Gretch and she’s got some new information.”

  I bring Charlie up to speed as I take Gally to finally do his business. “So we’re on the right track,” I say.

  “Yeah. Right between the rails with a freight train coming.”

  “You want to back off?”

  He chuckles. “Hell, no. Last argument I got into with a big chunk of moving metal was the first decent scrap I’ve had in years.”

  It takes me a moment to realize he’s talking about the time I shot him. “Excuse me? I almost wound up catatonic after that, and now you’re saying you enjoyed it?”

  “Enjoyed would be going a little far. It was … challenging.”

  “I can’t believe this.” I shake my head. “You think you know your partner … Well, at least now I know what to get you for Christmas. I’ll just hit you over the head with a shovel a few times.”

  “Better get someone else to do it. You can barely press two hundred pounds.”

  “Maybe I’ll use a pickax, instead. Or should I save that for a special occasion, like the birthday of the guy who invented duct tape?”

  Charlie shrugs. “Nah. I like to spend that with my folks.”

  “All right, to the morgue we go. Remember what Gretch said: We have to tread lightly. If this is political, the people involved will be extremely jumpy. As soon as we make our presence known, they’ll be destroying evidence and trying to distance themselves.”

  “Sounds like a good argument for going in heavy to me.”

  I think about that for a second. “You know, you’re right. Screw it, let’s hit ’em with everything we got.”

  “I hear you’ve got a shovel.”

  “Quiet. You’ll ruin the surprise.”

  We park in the lot for the King County medical examiner’s office, better known as the city morgue; long black vehicles flank us on either side, meat wagons for the coroner. The morgue deals with suspicious deaths for the city of Seattle and King County and employs around two dozen people, who handle everything from violent homicides to unclaimed bodies. The building looks like an old factory, made of whitewashed brick and several stories tall with an enormous smokestack looming over it. On-site crematorium, of course. We get out and locate the employees’ entrance, a gray metal door with a small sign over it and a battered intercom. I hit the buzzer and somebody lets us in without talking to us.

  “Terrific security,” I say. I yank open the door, and we step inside.

  My breath catches in my throat and my heartbeat stutters. The place is chilly and damp and smells of formaldehyde, but that’s nothing new; I’ve been in morgues before.

  But this is the first time I’ve ever smelled death.

  I don’t mean decomp. That’s repulsive, but it’s really just decaying packaging. Rotting plants can stink just as bad as rotting flesh. No, what I’m talking about is death itself. The presence of absence. The impression that something whose only reason for existing is to oppose life is nearby …

  “Jace? You okay?”

  “Do you smell that?”

  He sniffs the air. “Disinfectant?”

  “Never mind.”

  We walk up to a bored-looking security guard, who checks our ID and then goes back to his magazine. I’m going to ask him for directions to the coroner’s office, then decide against it; sometimes you can find out more by just wandering around and poking your nose into things than by following protocol. So I just march off like I know where I’m going, with Charlie at my side.

  It’s a big, spooky place. Long hallways, lots of doors, walls covered with so many layers of gray industrial paint they seem like geological formations. Doorknobs made of brass that probably date back to the 1920s. Overhead globe lights with drifts of dead bugs at the bottom, tiny graveyard eclipses at the fixtures’ south poles. The air is cold and still.

  “You have a plan?” Charlie asks. “Or are we just gonna jump the first guy we see?”

  “Thought we’d look around a little, get a feel for the place. Then we go knock on the coroner’s door and see what we can dig up.”

  “See, I knew you had a shovel.”

  “Shut up.”

  The hallways are all deserted. Maybe everybody’s taking their coffin break at the same time. We find a stairwell and take the flight going down; there are always more interesting things in the basement.

  The drop in temperature as well as altitude tells me that the bottom floor is where they actually store the cadavers. More hallways, more doors, with signs painted in gold script over pebbled glass: AUTOPSY ROOM ONE and X-RAY ROOM and FORENSIC PROCESSING.

  And then I smell it.

  Not death—that’s still present, but by now has become a kind of constant background scent, like the subliminal hum of a machine. No, this is a scent I recognize, though I can’t quite place it. My brain associates it with other smells: tequila, sweat, makeup, and … gunpowder?

  It’s strongest right outside FORENSIC PROCESSING, so I grab the knob and open the door. There’s a young woman in a lab coat with long dark hair pulled back in a ponytail sitting on a stool, who looks up from the bone she was peering at on the stainless-steel table before her. She recognizes us as soon as we walk in, though she tries to hide it. “Yes?” she says.

  “I’ll have a scotch on the rocks,” I say. “My partner will just stick with the rocks.” I give her a mock frown. “Whoops. Sorry, for a second there I was confused about where I was. This is your day job, not your night gig.”

  The woman looks at me with resignation in her eyes. Her nameplate reads FARADAY, but I know her better as my friendly neighborhood bartender.

  The one from the Mix and Match.

  TWENTY

  She doesn’t bother trying to deny it. “Yeah, I have another job. So what?”

  “So your other job is working for a mobster named Iggy Prinzini.”

  “I don’t work for him. He just owns the bar.”

  I give her a second to realize how stupid that sounds, and let her try to fix it. “I mean, I guess technically he’s my superior, but I don’t work for him. I don’t—whatever else he does, I’m not connected to any of that. I’m just a bartender.”

  I nod. “Sure. Hey, that sounds kind of familiar, doesn’t it, Charlie?”

  “What, I’m just a bartender? Yeah, sort of. That’s not quite it, though.”

  “No. It was more like, I just something something.”

  “I just pass the buck?”

  “No …”

  “I just walk the duck?”

  “Not quite.”

  Charlie taps his forehead with one shiny black finger. “I got it. I just drive the truck.”

  Faraday goes just a touch paler. Her heart rate accelerates. She smells scared.

  “That was it,” I say. “I just drive the truck. Where did we hear that, Charlie?”

  “From that lem we busted. You know, the one working for Iggy Prinzini.”

  Faraday looks trapped. Her eyes dart right, then left. No place to go.

  “Funny kind of coincidence,” I say. “See, this lem had two jobs, too, and both of them involved working for Iggy. How about you?”

  “Am I under arrest?”

  “Do you want to be?”

  She swallows. “No.”

  “Good, then pay attention—there will be a test later. Now, where was I …”

  “Two jobs,” Charlie says.

  “Right. And one of these jobs, Ms. Faraday, you and a certain truck-driving lem did together. He dropped things off, and you picked them up. Right
here, in this building.”

  She doesn’t admit it, but she doesn’t deny it, either.

  “Now here’s the interesting part. Doing one job for a guy like Iggy can be explained a number of different ways. Maybe you were threatened, maybe you didn’t know what was really going on, maybe you planned to go to the cops. Doing two jobs, though—that opens you up to charges of conspiracy. Makes you look like you were in on planning the whole thing. A good prosecutor can really rip you a new one with information like that.”

  “But—but all I did was pour drinks!”

  I shake my head. “All Billy Beta did was drive a truck. But he knew what was going on, what he was part of. And so did you.”

  “Okay, so I knew something was going on upstairs. Some kind of gambling deal. But what was I supposed to do? This is the Mob, okay? I say anything and I wind up on a table in here, instead of beside one.”

  She seems like she’s telling the truth, which is definitely a point in her favor. Maybe she is; maybe she had no idea about the prostitution ring and honestly thought all Iggy had going on was a betting parlor. It makes a certain amount of sense—for a really good cover, you need some people on the inside to believe it, too.

  “Let’s say you’re telling the truth. If you were only truly involved in one operation—this one—it would go a lot better for you. But do not try to convince me that you were working for Iggy at two different locations and didn’t know the score at either of them. That would be like calling me a moron, and I get enough of that from my partner.”

  “I mean it in a loving way,” Charlie growls.

  “So Billy Beta delivered the crates, and you received them. That much we know. But we’re a little sketchy on details about what happened after that. If you want to help yourself, a little information about the next step in the process would go a long way.”

  She looks around the room, as if there were something on the shelves or lying on a stainless-steel counter that could help her. No luck. She looks back at me, thinking so hard I can almost hear it.

  I hold up one finger as she opens her mouth. “Before you say anything,” I add pleasantly, “I should clarify. A little sketchy on details means we know some things for sure, there are a few things we’re not sure about, and a couple more that we’re guessing on. But here’s the important part. If you lie to me about something we know for sure? That’s your first, second, and third strike. You don’t get any more chances to play me. You’re done. Okay?”

  Her mouth closes. She nods. Whatever spin she was about to put on the truth, I just smacked it down into the dirt. She doesn’t know what to do next, but I sense she’s a little too scared to gamble. She’s either going to lawyer up, keep her mouth zipped, and hope the Gray Wolves don’t kill her anyway, or tell me what she knows and hope I can protect her.

  Her eyes flicker from me to Charlie and back again. This time I notice something off about it; it’s not that she’s looking for something, it’s more like she’s trying not to look at something. And the one place she’s very carefully not looking is right in front of her.

  I glance at the bone on the table. Too long and heavy to be human. Cow, maybe?

  “Hey, Charlie?” I say. “What’s the best kind of medium for storing golem life force?”

  “Astral plasma. It’s like a super-condensed, mystically enhanced kind of blood. Highly unstable, needs constant attention from a biothaumaturge or it’ll degrade.”

  “And what do they store this astral plasma in?”

  “Trees, mostly. Specially grown ones with hollowedout storage space—you need a dense but living container to embed all the protective wards in or the life force will just kind of bleed away.”

  I lean down and peer at the end of the bone. It’s got what appears to be a large hole drilled in it, a hole I’d guess goes almost all the way to the end. “How about a nice, dense bone that used to be alive? Think that might work?”

  Charlie considers it. “It might. Probably leak a whole bunch and wouldn’t last that long, but you could use it for a few hours.”

  “Long enough to transport it from a restaurant to a lem factory, I’ll bet.” I straighten up. “But you’d need a professional to put together the right kinds of wards—someone with training, and access to equipment. Right, Ms. Faraday?”

  She looks subdued now, but she doesn’t answer. Not good. I’ve got her, but I need more than a prisoner. I need a willing source of information.

  I look around the room. Lots of shelves, lots of equipment, the usual weird assortment of science and sorcery: an autoclave, a comparison microscope, a Shinto shrine with several ashen cones of burnt incense in front of it, a stack of reference books that range from the mystic to the technical. Also a waist-high, glassdoored fridge with a can of Beefy Fizz and a paper bag visible inside—her lunch, no doubt. There’s a paperback lying on top of the fridge, with the shiny, solid appearance of a brand-new purchase. Wolf’s Eye, by Margaret Atwood. I’m guessing that on Thropirelem, Atwood’s a thrope, but I’m going to go out on a limb and assume she’s also still as much a feminist here as she is on my world. And that, finally, gives me the lever I need to tip Faraday in the right direction.

  “You know what?” I say. “I believe you—about the bar, I mean. Not that you were completely innocent—you’re obviously not stupid, you must have known something was going on—but I don’t think you knew what was actually happening. You weren’t part of it.”

  “I wasn’t. I really wasn’t.”

  “I mean, you didn’t have any reason to suspect it was anything other than a bookie joint, right? You knew Iggy was a player, so it made sense that there were all those women around. Kind of strange, though—a lot of them were pires, and you never saw the boss with one of those. They were just around.”

  “We had a lot of regulars,” she says, but I can hear that little note of self-doubt in her voice. I’m not the one she’s trying to convince.

  “Sure. Regulars who never stuck around long. Regulars who never seemed to buy a drink, regulars who just sort of drifted through and back again. Kind of strange how they just seemed to always be there, right?”

  She frowns. Her eyes wander up and to the left as she accesses a memory. “I’m not—what are you saying?”

  “Did you ever notice that they seemed to arrive without walking through the front door? Or sometimes the other way around, that they came in through the front and then vanished? I mean, I know the place gets busy, but you’re an observant person, right? If I’d picked up on that, even subliminally, it would have bugged the hell out of me. I would have tried to convince myself that I was imagining things. I would have resolved to keep my eye on one of them and prove that I was wrong.”

  And there it is in her eyes. A flash of guilt, followed by a quick suppression of panic.

  “You did, didn’t you? You picked one out, you kept track of her, and then she just sort of disappeared, didn’t she? How’d you explain that to yourself?”

  “I—it’s a busy place. I can’t keep track of everyone.” Not quite a denial, more like a justification.

  “But you can keep track of who’s coming through the front door. And even though you were sure she never used it, somehow she was back in the club again.”

  “What’s this have to do with—with anything?”

  “There’s no bookie joint upstairs, Ms. Faraday. That was a cover, too. What Iggy was running was a pire trafficking operation, smuggling illegal female immigrants into the country and putting them to work as prostitutes. There’s a tunnel between the Mix and Match and the basement of the burned-out tenement across the alley, and it was full of women in cages. That’s what you were helping Iggy hide.”

  Her eyes widen. She doesn’t want to believe it. “Yeah, sure.” She gives a shaky little laugh. “And he was the one who killed JFK with a silver bullet, too, right?”

  I grab her arm and yank her off the stool and onto her feet. “Hey!”

  “Let’s go,” I say. I march her out t
he door, my hand on her elbow.

  “Are you arresting me?”

  “Probably. But first, we’re going to do a little showand-tell.”

  I’m half convinced that it won’t be there anymore, that Iggy will have removed any and all incriminating evidence. Turns out I’m also half right: All the clothes and other supplies are gone.

  But the cages are still there.

  The acrid stench of bleach hangs in the air, stinging our eyes. I show Faraday the tunnel, but she’s barely paying attention by then—she keeps looking over her shoulder at the long, cell-filled room.

  “Satisfied?” I ask. “Or are you one of those paranoid types that think the government builds stuff like this to con innocent civilians?”

  “Oh, my God,” she says. She looks so horrified I almost feel guilty. “I didn’t know. I didn’t—”

  “What’s your name, Faraday?”

  She looks at me like I just asked her to do some kind of complex equation in her head. “Crystal. Faraday.”

  “Yeah, I got the second part myself. Look, Crystal—maybe you didn’t know exactly what was happening, but you knew something was. Right?”

  She clutches her arms around herself tightly and nods. She looks like she might be about to burst into tears.

  “And you didn’t do anything about it. You’re going to have to live with that—but today’s your lucky day, because I’m going to give you the best shot you’ll ever have at making peace with this. You really feel bad?”

  Tears start rolling down her face. “You have no idea,” she chokes out.

  “Then let’s sit down and have a conversation. And at the end of it, I promise you, I’ll tell you something that will make you feel a whole lot better. All right?”

  “All—all right.”

  “Let’s go.”

  She stops halfway down the long room of cages. “Can I have a moment, please?”

  I nod.

  Crystal Faraday hugs herself a little tighter. She looks from one side of the room to the other. Forcing herself to take in every little detail. Not denying anything, not any longer. She doesn’t flinch, or hurry. She didn’t want to know about any of this, but now that she does, she’s not going to let herself forget. No matter how much it hurts.