For the young homicide detective who took my statement this was open-and-shut murder/suicide. The second bullet in the shooter’s mouth was nothing more than a dying twitch, not the sign someone else was operating Jim’s hand. And this young man was confident his career was not going to end like Toomey’s or mine.
What I wanted to tell him was, “The creature that had James Toomey in its control used Toomey’s own hand to eliminate him and cover its tracks.” My actual statement stuck strictly to the facts with nothing more than a brief mention of the Culpepper case.
Father Dineen drove like a cop—that is, as if he owned the road. He knew something was up but not even a couple of belts from the ecclesiastic flask made me talk. An image of Anne and Jimmy dead in their house was burning a hole in my brain.
It was very late afternoon that the chaplain dropped me off in front of the Main Post Office, told me to go home and get some rest.
On the ride back from the Toomey’s I’d thought about the dream and Bertrade. Usually dreams are vivid when you wake up but as you try to grab them they turn to nothing and disappear. This one started out vague but seemed to linger.
Climbing the post office stairs I remembered another fragment. Bertrade, lovely as I’ve ever seen her, wore nothing but a silver moon on a chain around her neck and touched my arm. So slippery was the memory that I began to wonder if this dream might have been something planted in my head by an enemy.
The little unmarked window was where I always picked up mail from the Kingdom Beneath the Hill. And I wanted to talk to that clerk and find out what he knew. The window was shut, which had never happened before.
The guy at the Overseas window didn’t know what I was talking about when I asked about the window next door. He said this wasn’t his regular assignment and that I should try the next day.
Walking slowly across that lobby, I thought of the ice-cold knife racing up my leg like I was a letter being sliced open and I felt real small and insignificant. But I started to put things into some kind of order.
The elves had set up Jim and Anne Toomey as bait for me. First they invented the Culpepper job and hired Jim, who needed the work. Then they made sure he couldn’t function and put it in his head and Anne’s that they should ask me. And I was the bait to lure Bertrade.
Taking my seat in the coffee shop across from the Van Neiman Building, it occurred to me that maybe on our first encounter Bertrade and Darnel had used me as bait to catch the elf. Knowing the ways of the Gentry, that seemed quite possible.
The waitress and counter man didn’t notice that I was a repeat customer. I figured that the elves wouldn’t probe as long as I was doing what they wanted. They didn’t have to worry. My memory of Anne and Jimmy had burned a hole in my brain. And that may have been what the elves expected when they killed them.
That they were keeping me in play, letting me stay alive, could mean they’d made Bertrade aware that I was in danger. And it would also mean they weren’t sure where she was or what she was going to do. That Bertrade avoided direct contact with me was a sign that she relied on me to play my part, walk into the trap, and ensnare the trapper. It would also mean she knew that the spell that shielded my thoughts could be broken by the enemy.
Just then Culpepper, whoever he was, came through the doors of the Van Neiman Building with his briefcase. I got up and followed him. It went like before. He walked west and I followed on the other side of the street. I wondered how much Culpepper knew, what promises and rewards had they made to him?
Seeing him go through this routine reminded me of seeing the enemy in France, just before we saw action. I saw a couple of German prisoners, starving, flea-bitten men, cramming army rations into their mouths while our guys stared like they were exhibits in a zoo. That sight took away all of the enemy’s mystery.
I stopped on the east side of Tenth Avenue, watched from a doorway when Culpepper crossed and went into the apartment building. As I waited, a light went on in the third floor window.
A rhythmic pounding came from over on the river. It sounded like they were driving piles. The earlier drizzle had become rain. Workers headed home at a brisk pace. The streets were getting empty.
Stake-out work is fine, outdoor labor, good for the health and spirits. But I’d noticed a bar on the corner with a clear view of the apartment house.
It was a Wednesday night with a moderate-sized crowd and a cowboy movie on the TV above the bar. The guys drinking spotted a cop and looked away when I stepped inside. I ordered a rye and water and kept my eye on the apartment house doorway.
I was pretty sure they wouldn’t leave without me. There was a good chance I’d be dead before long. But death hadn’t yet happened and I’d given it several very good chances.
In the dark, a long freight train ran south on the elevated tracks. When I looked further west beyond Twelfth Avenue the pier at the end of the street seemed lit up.
About the time I began to wonder if I was crazy and Culpepper really was just a guy stepping out on his wife I saw through someone else’s eyes. They were moving uptown along the river’s edge, I saw a pier and a big yacht all lit up. Suddenly that disappeared. Was this skirmishing between elves and fairies?
Like it was a signal, the one called Culpepper came out the door of the apartment house. He carried an umbrella and held it over Mimi White. The game was on. They headed west and I followed them.
A good detective recognizes a pattern. Once more I was heading onto a pier at night to encounter one of the Gentry.
As we crossed Eleventh Avenue a big ocean liner sailed up the Hudson with every light on board shining. It looked like a floating city block. The tugboats guiding it honked at each other. I saw the liner and then for an instant I saw it again from the viewpoint of someone down at the river. The pile driving paused briefly and all was as quiet as Manhattan ever gets.
Approaching Twelfth Avenue I saw that the old freighter from the day before was gone. In its place was the ocean going yacht with lights on deck that I’d seen through another’s eyes.
At certain moments time gets fluid. At Aisne-Marne, the platoon was pinned by machine gun fire. The gunners had waited until we were within a hundred yards. The lieutenant was dead. Someone was screaming. Later I found out the whole company was pinned; the battalion had gone to earth. The minutes we were down went by like hours.
The machine guns fired a short burst right over me; fired a burst to my left, another further along. I knew that it was rat-like little guys going through the motions. It would be a bit before they’d come back my way.
I pulled a pin with my right hand. I jumped up with a grenade in my left. The Krauts were firing from a gap in an embankment a hundred yards away. I’d hurled dummy grenades in practice, knew their weight. I judged the arc and tossed. “Get down,” someone yelled. The grenade hit the side of the gap, bounced in the air.
As I dove for cover I was knocked flat and the cold knife raced up my leg. A muffled bang sounded, a man screamed, another cried out, the machine gun fire stopped and my war was over.
Crossing Twelfth Avenue, walking into the trap, I told myself that all I needed was a few seconds of clarity, like I’d had thirty-two years before.
Maybe Bertrade had given me up. But I was going to deal out payment for Jim and Anne. All I needed was those few seconds.
Culpepper and Mimi stopped just inside the gates at the end of the pier. A couple of hundred feet beyond them the yacht had lights on the gangplank, atop the cabins, shining through the portholes.
A figure—tall and thin, wavering slightly—stood on the deck leaning on the rail. He was faced away from me. But I could recognize one of the Fair Folk, whether elf or fairy. He was too far away to hit with a hand gun. I wished I had a grenade.
A scream in the night came from downriver. At almost the same moment the pile driver started up out in the water. Distant sirens sounded but they were on fire trucks and going the wrong way. The Fair Folk didn’t want any human interference.
<
br /> A breeze blew the rain in my face as I crossed the Avenue with my raincoat open. My arms were at my side. The .38 in my hand was hidden by the coat flapping.
The ones I knew as Culpepper and Mimi faced me as I approached. I was going to tell them to get out of my way before they got hurt.
But their eyes were blank. For an instant I saw myself from their viewpoint as I walked past them. Someone was looking out through them like they were TV cameras. Someone was in my head.
Figures moved in the darkness beyond the lights. Fair Folk were out there. For an instant I caught an image of long, thin figures on a small power boat.
The lights on the yacht flickered for a moment. The tall elf on the deck looked my way. He seemed amused. Bertrade’s image telling intruders to stay out got knocked aside like it was cardboard. He was in my mind. My feet moved without my willing them and my body shambled forward to the foot of the gangplank.
I saw myself in his eyes, an old man—stunned and confused in a trench coat and battered hat—staring up at him. He sent that image out in all directions. The elf knew I had the gun and knew I was in his power.
Then the lights flickered fast. Out in the dark amid the noise of the pile drivers there were cries and gunshots. Suddenly Bertrade was inside me, “My lefthand man!”
Under a spell my arm moved. The elf couldn’t stop it. The left arm was magic. He blocked my breath and sent a bolt of pain through my head, stopped my eyes from seeing. But the arm rose. I couldn’t see him but I fired. Nothing. My head spun.
For an instant my sight cleared. I saw the elf. I squeezed the trigger as my sight went dark. Nothing happened.
Blind, I fired to the left and there was a scream. My breath came back. My sight returned. Up the gangplank the elf grasped his shoulder. I felt him stop my heart. But I blew his jaw off and my heart started again. I shot him in the head before I passed out.
The morning was long gone and done when I came home. Mrs. Palatino had actually turned off her television, put on street clothes and was headed out to Thursday afternoon bingo at Our Lady of Pompeii Church. She gave me a look full of disapproval and shook her head.
I needed to go upstairs and change my clothes, stop around at the office. In my jacket pocket was a letter to the Beyers from Hilda, saying she was alive and well and thinking of them.
Bertrade had brought that with her from the Kingdom Beneath the Hill. Our business relationship was still intact.
We’d parted half an hour before. That night was spent at the Plaza: part of our reward for smashing the elf and his espionage crew. After he went down, three of his fellow Gentry came out of the dark and surrendered to Bertrade and her friends.
Culpepper and Mimi and a couple of other mortals the elves had recruited bore the body into the back of a panel truck.
That dream I’d half-remembered had been sent by Bertrade. In the game of cat and mouse she and the big elf had played, some of his magic was stronger than hers.
“Askal is his name. We met in the Kingdom,” she said, “and he was able to read me enough to know how I felt about you. He wanted to use you to draw me. I wanted to use that magic arm Darnel and I gave you to do away with him.”
It seemed to me like the kind of game in which mortals were just breakable objects. Bertrade winced when I thought that.
Askal, of course, didn’t completely die. I heard him shrieking; saw his shadow moving around the pier after his corpse had been taken away in the truck.
It isn’t likely I’ll ever go back to that spot on the Hudson. And it isn’t likely I’ll ever completely trust Bertrade. What I feel for her may not be love. But I know that when I’m with her this mortal life of mine gets torn open by magic, and when she’s gone that’s all I remember.
But when we parted outside the Plaza that morning and kissed, she told me she’d be back before long. And I look forward to it.
Tomorrow evening Jim and Anne Toomey will be waked out in Brooklyn. Their connection with me is what killed them, and I’ll think of that.
My life may not run out of me into a big red puddle, but someday my life will run out. And before that happens in this world of bait and traps I’ll see Bertrade again.
Richard Bowes has won two World Fantasy, an International Horror Guild, and Million Writer Awards. His new novel Dust Devil on a Quiet Street will appear on May Day 2013 from Lethe Press, which is also republishing his Lambda Award-winning novel Minions of the Moon. Additionally two short story collections will be published in 2013: The Queen, the Cambion and Seven Others from Aqueduct Press and If Angels Fight from Fairwood Press.
Recent and forthcoming appearances include: The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Icarus, Lightspeed, and the anthologies After, Wilde Stories 2012, Bloody Fabulous, Ghosts: Recent Hauntings, Handsome Devil, Hauntings, and Where Thy Dark Eye Glances.
The Case: Sixteen-year-old Devonte allegedly wrecks his foster parents’ home. The damage is far more than one lone human boy could inflict. The kid’s not talking, but Stella Christiansen, whose agency placed Devonte, senses he is in danger.
The Investigator: David Christiansen, a werewolf and mercenary, as well as Stella’s estranged father.
STAR OF DAVID
Patricia Briggs
“I checked them out myself,” Myra snapped. “Have you ever just considered that your boy isn’t the angel you thought he was?”
Stella took off her glasses and set them on her desk. “I think that we both need some perspective. Why don’t you take the rest of the afternoon off?” Before I slap your stupid face. People like Devonte don’t change that fast, not without good reason.
Myra opened her mouth, but after she got a look at Stella’s face she shut it again. Mutely she stalked to her desk and retrieved her coat and purse. She slammed the door behind her.
As soon as she was gone, Stella opened the folder and looked at the pictures of the crime scene again. They were duplicates, and doubtless Clive, her brother the detective, had broken a few rules when he sent them to her—not that breaking rules had ever bothered him, not when he was five and not as a grown man nearing fifty and old enough to know better.
She touched the photos lightly, then closed the folder again. There was a yellow sticky with a phone number on it and nothing else: Clive didn’t have to put a name on it. Her little brother knew she’d see what he had seen.
She picked up the phone and punched in the numbers fast, not giving herself a chance for second thoughts.
The barracks were empty, leaving David’s office silent and bleak. The boys were on furlough with their various families for December.
His mercenaries specialized in live retrieval, which tended to be in and out stuff, a couple of weeks per job at the most. He didn’t want to get involved in the gray area of unsanctioned combat or out-and-out war—where you killed people because someone told you to. In retrieval there were good guys and bad guys still—and if there weren’t, he didn’t take the job. Their reputation was such that they had no trouble finding jobs.
And unless all hell really broke loose, they always took December off to be with their families. David never let them know how hard that made it for him.
Werewolves need their packs.
If his pack was human, well, they knew about him and they filled that odd wolf-quirk that demanded he have people to protect, brothers in heart and mind. He couldn’t stomach a real pack, he hated what he was too much.
He couldn’t bear to live with his own kind, but this worked as a substitute and kept him centered. When his boys were here, when they had a job to do, he had direction and purpose.
His grandsons had invited him for the family dinner, but he’d refused as he always did. He still saw his sons on a regular basis. Both of them had served in his small band of mercenaries for a while, until the life lost its appeal or the risks grew too great for men with growing families. But he stayed away at Christmas.
Restlessness had him pacing: there were no plans to make, no wrongs to right.
Finally he unlocked the safe and pulled out a couple of the newer rifles. He needed to put some time in with them anyway.
An hour of shooting staved off the restlessness, but only until he locked the guns up again. He’d have to go for a run. When he emptied his pockets in preparation, he noticed he had missed a call while he’d been shooting. He glanced at the number, frowning when he didn’t recognize it. Most of his jobs came through an agent who knew better than to give out his cell number. Before he could decide if he wanted to return the call, his phone rang again, a call from the same number.
“Christiansen,” he answered briskly.
There was a long silence. “Papa?”
He closed his eyes and sank back in his chair feeling his heart expand with almost painful intentness as his wolf fought with the man who knew his daughter hated him: didn’t want to see him, ever. She had been there when her mother died.
“Stella?” He couldn’t imagine what it took to make her break almost forty years of silence. “Are you all right? Is there something wrong?” Someone he could kill for her? A building to blow up? Anything at all.
She swallowed. He could hear it over the line. He waited for her to hang up.
Instead, when she spoke again, her voice was brisk and the wavery pain that colored that first “Papa” was gone as if it had never been. “I was wondering if you would consider doing a favor for me.”
“What do you need?” He was proud that came out evenly. Always better to know what you’re getting into, he told himself. He wanted to tell her that she could ask him for anything—but he didn’t want to scare her.
“I run an agency that places foster kids,” she told him, as if he didn’t know. As if her brothers hadn’t told her how he quizzed them to find out how she was doing and what she was up to. He hoped she never found out about her ex-boyfriend who’d turned stalker. He hadn’t killed that one, though his willingness to do so had made it easier to persuade the man that he wanted to take up permanent residence in a different state.
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