Limbus, Inc.

by Anne C. Petty

  I knocked.

  The man who opened the door was a burly forty-something, probably Greek face with a bald head, Popeye forearms, a thick mustache and wary eyes. He gave me a quick up and down and apparently decided I wasn’t a cop or someone from L and I. I was dressed in jeans and a Vikings windbreaker over an Everlast tank top. Cops and license inspectors all dress better than me.

  “George Palakas?” I asked.

  “What if I am?” he demanded, unimpressed.

  “Need to talk to you.”

  Palakas narrowed his eyes. “About what?”

  “I’m looking for Denise Sturbridge.”

  The manager gave me a slow three-count of silent appraisal, then he said, “No.” He turned away and started to close his door.

  I got a foot out and blocked it. The edge of the door hit the outside sole of my Payless running shoes and rebounded.

  Palakas wheeled on me. “Yo, asshole,” he growled. “The fuck you think you’re doing?”

  “I told you,” I said mildly, smiling.

  “Get your ass out of here before I have you—”

  I shoved him. Quick and light, but it caught him off guard and sent him running backward into his office. His ass hit the edge of the desk, the impact spun him and he fell onto the floor, dragging a desk-light and a coffee cup full of pencils with him. He landed on his knees hard enough to make me wince. The lamp and coffee cup shattered.

  I closed the door and leaned my back against it.

  Palakas looked up at me. His knees had to hurt and his face was turning from a fake tan to brick red.

  “You stupid motherfucker,” he whispered through teeth that ground together between curled lips. “I’m going to—”

  “No,” I said, “you’re not. Stop trying to scare me to death.”

  He cursed some more.

  I kept smiling.

  When Palakas paused for a breath I said, “You hired a fifteen-year-old girl to strip in your club. We could start there and see how fast I could get you shut down.”

  “Bullshit,” he said, but suddenly his voice lacked emphasis.

  “Right now that’s all that I know she did here. It’s enough for me not to want to take any shit from you.”

  “Who’s she to you?” he asked as he got heavily to his feet.

  I shrugged. “Maybe I’m her father.”

  He actually laughed. “Her old man’s a methed-out schizo up in Easton.”

  “Then maybe I’m her brother.”

  “She doesn’t have a brother.”

  There was a pack of gum in my pocket. I took it out and popped a couple of pieces out of the aluminum blister pack, put them into my mouth, crunched through the candy coating and chewed the gum. Palakas watched me do all this.

  I said, “Does it really matter who I am?”

  “It’s going to matter when I—”

  “I already told you, stop trying to scare me. I want to have a conversation with you and I really don’t want to have to wade through a bunch of lines cribbed from old Sopranos reruns. I’m going to ask you some questions. You’re going to answer my questions. If I’m satisfied with the answers then I’m done and you can forget I was ever here.”

  “Why should I tell you a god damn thing?”

  “Ah,” I said, “this is the part where I threaten you. You see, if you don’t tell me what I want, or if I don’t like what you tell me, then I will kick a two-by-four so far up your ass you’ll be spitting toothpicks.”

  “Think you could?”

  “We can find out,” I said mildly. “And afterward we can have this conversation while we’re waiting for the paramedics.”

  Palakas tried a sneer on me. It was supposed to look fearless and defiant, but this wasn’t a movie and he knew that if I was telling him I could hurt him then that’s how it would play out. Even if he had my legs broken later on, it wouldn’t stop him from taking the full weight now and very few people want to play it that way. Besides, the door was closed and I think he was actually curious.

  “The fuck you want to know?” he said, playing it out, though. That was okay. He could posture all he wanted as long as he talked. What he didn’t know was that I could smell his fear. Beneath the deodorant, the residual smell of his soap—Ivory, I think—and his cologne—Axe—I could smell the fear stink.

  “Denise Sturbridge,” I reminded him.

  “Bambi. Yeah, so what? What about her.” He stepped over the debris on the floor and sat down behind his desk. I came and stood close to him and we both knew that it was because I wanted to make sure he didn’t get cute and pull anything unfortunate from a desk drawer. Small office. Even with a loaded gun I could get to him before he could take a shot. We both knew that.

  “I’m looking for her.”

  “She’s not here.”

  “I know that, numb-nuts. That’s what ‘looking for her’ means. If she was here I’d have already found her.” I tapped him on the forehead with my index finger. “I want you to tell me where she is.”

  Palakas gave a half-hearted swipe at my hand. “How should I know?”

  “She works for you?” I suggested.

  “No, she don’t. She missed three shifts in a row. That’s her ass as far as I’m concerned.”

  “You’re saying she’s missing?”

  “I’m saying she ain’t here. I don’t know where she is and I couldn’t give a hairy rat’s ass. She stiffs me on three shifts, am I supposed to give a wet shit about her? Am I supposed to keep her on the schedule? Fuck no.”

  “I need to find her.”

  “Then go to her damn apartment. What are you bothering me for?”

  I shrugged. “Last known whereabouts.”

  “Look,” he said, taking a breath, “who are you? I mean really.”

  “I’m nobody,” I said.

  “You’re not a cop?”

  “No.”

  “You’re not with Vice?”

  “I said I wasn’t a cop.”

  “You look like a cop,” Palakas said. From the sour shape his mouth made you’d think the word ‘cop’ was smeared with dog shit.

  “Used to be a cop.”

  “What are you now?”

  “Private.”

  He stared at me. “You serious?”

  “As a heart attack.”

  “Bambi a bail skip or something?”

  “No. She’s a kid who should be in school, not showing her boobs to a bunch of degenerate jerkoffs.”

  Half a laugh burst from him before he could clamp it down. I edged closer.

  “You want to tell me what’s so funny? Maybe we can both get a good laugh out of it.”

  Fear flickered in Palakas’s eyes. I am not a big guy—pretty ordinary, really. Five nine, one-seventy; but I’ve been told I have a quality. Even people who don’t know what I have under the skin say that. A quality. When I wore the badge, it must have been there in my eyes. It made some pretty serious thugs back off and back down.

  Palakas licked his lips for a moment.

  “I don’t know where she is,” he said. “You want her home address? I can give you that.”

  “I have that. Give me some names. She have a boyfriend?”

  “She has a—.”

  He almost said something smartass. Probably something like ‘she has a million boyfriends’. He stopped himself in time. Two or three more syllables and I’d have belted him, we both knew it.

  “Do I need to repeat the question?” I asked quietly.

  “She don’t have a boyfriend,” he said. “Actually I don’t think I ever heard of her going on a…um…on a real date.”

  He didn’t have to explain what he meant.

  “But…?” I prompted.

  “But there was this kid she hung out with.”

  “A girl?”

  “No. A boy. Works in the kitchens. Black kid. Queer.”

  “They hung out together?”

  “Pretty much all the time. Name’s Donny Falk.”

  “Is
he working today?”

  “No.”

  “Know where I can find him?”

  “Same place as Bambi. Windsor Apartments on Red Lion Road. Same building and floor. His apartment’s two doors down from hers.”

  “You have a phone number for him?”

  Palakas licked his lips again. “Yeah,” he said, and he very carefully opened the top drawer of his desk and removed a sheet of paper. I leaned over to look at it and saw that it was a list of employees—bar staff, bouncers, kitchen staff, cleaners, dancers—along with contact numbers and email addresses.

  “You have a copy of that?” I asked.

  “Yeah, but—.”

  I plucked it out of his hand.

  “Hey!”

  I turned to him.

  “Hey… what?”

  Palakas gave me a long, disgusted look. “Hey, I guess help your fucking self to whatever you want. You got a P.I. license, which isn’t worth the toilet paper it’s printed on, but sure, go ahead, knock around a guy who’s got a heart condition. You kick dogs, too?”

  I folded the paper and slipped it into my pocket.

  “Gosh,” I said, “I’m really embarrassed that you think I’m a bully. You think I’m being mean? I certainly don’t want to convey that impression.”

  He glared at me, not falling for it.

  So I put a button on it for him. “It’s just that I’m pretty sure you knew that girl was underage. I’m actually showing a great degree of restraint here, ‘cause my real instinct is to wail on you until I feel better. The only reason I’m not is because you’re cooperating—after a fashion. And,” I added before he could say anything, “because I don’t know for a fact that you’re her pimp. If I knew for sure that you were making a fifteen-year-old girl sell herself, then I think we’d have to explore how really mean I can get. Believe me… neither of us wants to let that dog off the leash. You reading me here?”

  “Yeah,” he said. He meant to say it tersely, but it came out like a wheeze.

  I patted his cheek. “Good.”

  I could feel George Palakas’s glare of hatred as I turned and left.

  *

  As I passed through into the bar toward the exit I saw the two men in dark suits watching me, and I saw their eyes flick from me to the hallway that led to the office. They stood up. The guy on the left was about six foot but had to go two-fifty, most of it in his chest and shoulders. The guy on the right was slimmer but also four inches taller. Big and Tall were not giving me friendly looks. Then Big crossed to the hall and disappeared in the direction of the office while Tall stood there and kept his eyes on me.

  Not good.

  There were too many people around in the bar, so I began walking toward the exit. Tall saw me and started heading in the same direction. My choices were these —I could wait for them to do something here in the bar, which meant risking injury to civilians. Nope. Or I could let them chase me outside, which opened this up to witnesses with cell phone cameras. Also not good.

  Or…

  The door to the men’s room was closer than the exit door. I gave Tall a smile and ducked through the door.

  It took Tall about four seconds to come bursting through. He had an old fashioned blackjack in his right hand. You don’t see them much anymore. It’s a big slug of lead sitting on a spring and wrapped with thick leather. You use it with a snap of the wrist. In skillful hands it can brush the skull and send a person into dreamy land and when they wake up they’re sick, disoriented and tractable.

  Used wrong it’s a skull crusher.

  Tall was already starting to raise his for a heavy overhand swing before he was all the way into the bathroom. He was going for the full impact.

  I stood with my back to him and saw all this in a mirror.

  The blackjack whipped up and was just starting the accelerating drop that would end me when I turned.

  I don’t just mean that I turned around. Sure, I did that, too. But when I say I ‘turned’, what I really mean is that I changed.

  He swung the blackjack at a man.

  It wasn’t a man he hit.

  His eyes flared wide and his mouth opened to scream in total, sudden horror when I crashed into him and dragged him down to the floor.

  The music outside was so loud, nobody heard him scream.

  Nobody heard me snarl.

  *

  I was thirteen the first time I changed.

  The first time took almost half an hour. I thought I was being torn apart. Guess I kind of was. Torn apart and put back together beneath the skin. Muscles melting into jelly and reassembling; bones reshaping, hair jabbing like needles through my flesh, mouth reshaping, new teeth bursting through the gums. And all of it in a paroxysm of screaming, inarticulate agony. Maybe it feels like dying. Maybe it feels like being tortured. While it was happening I begged God or whoever else is at the help desk to kill me right there and then.

  My grandmother was with me through it.

  She’d been making that change for nearly seventy years, since she was eleven. Almost everyone on her side of the family had been through it. And, yeah, it actually killed some of them. Depends on your blood line, or maybe if you have the right genes. There are several families like ours and whenever possible we’ve interbred. Not enough to go all Arkansas back-country, we’re not looking to turn out a bunch of moon-faced, slack-jawed brother-cousins. Just enough to strengthen the DNA.

  What are we?

  There’s a lot of folklore out there. A lot of legends. Lots of stories about things like me.

  Lot of names.

  Lycanthrope.

  Berserker.

  Vargulf.

  Loup-garou.

  Werewolf.

  We call ourselves the Benandanti. That’s an old Italian name that means ‘good-walker’. It can also be translated as ‘those who go well’. Or even those who ‘do good’.

  Yeah. Werewolf. Good guy. Same package.

  They don’t make movies about my kind. You don’t see them in too many books or comics. We’re not like the Hollywood werewolves, but we’ve left claw marks all through history. One of us, an eighty-year-old guy named Thiess from Jurgenburg, Livonia, was even arrested by the Holy Inquisition in 1692 and put on trial. Not my direct bloodline, but we all know about him. He’s kind of a hero to us. The Inquisitors used every kind of torture, every manner of ‘enhanced interrogation’ to try and force Thiess to say that he was a servant and agent of the Devil. Lot of people would have cracked and said anything to stop the pain. Lot of people did, which probably accounts for every single signed confession of Satan worship those fruitcakes ever obtained.

  Not Thiess, though. That one was one tough, stubborn fucker. And he was eighty!

  He admitted that he was a werewolf. But he also told them that the Benandanti fought evil on the side of heaven. It was what we always did. It was who we were.

  That story didn’t go over too well, so they really went to town on Thiess. Thumbscrews, hot irons, the rack. All of it, the works. He should have broken. He should have died.

  He didn’t.

  And he never once wavered in his assertion that the Benandanti have been fighting the true ‘good fight’. Against monsters.

  Actual monsters.

  The Inquisitors tried and tried and tried.

  And failed.

  Eventually they got to a point where they simply ran out of shit they could do to him. It was down to kill him or let him go.

  And… they let him go.

  The church court issued a letter saying, in effect, that no servant of the Devil could endure the ‘tests’ imposed on it by the Inquisition. Thiess, having survived, must have done so with the grace and protection of God Almighty.

  Not only did they let him go, but they even gave him a nickname. A label of honor.

  The Hound of God.

  Not to say that the church was all kissy-face with us after that. The official result of the trial was exoneration for Thiess. The actual result is that t
hey were embarrassed and probably scared of us. So, in secret and way off the record, they began hunting us down. Not for trial but for quick, quiet execution. There were never many of us, and there were a lot of killers working for the Inquisition. We were very nearly wiped out, and for a while the gene pool was so shallow that whole centuries passed before the wolf once more began screaming in the blood.

  My grandmother is the strongest of all of us. Sweetest little old broad you ever wanted to meet. Most of the time. Frail-looking dame with blue hair and a bit of a dowager’s hump. But … she can make the change faster than you can snap your fingers, and when the werewolf emerges from beneath the wrinkles of the human, anyone giving her problems—or bothering someone to whom she’s offered her protection—is literally in a world of hurt.

  For me, I can get pretty cranky, too. On both sides of the skin change, but I do everything I can to keep that change from happening. I don’t trust my level of control when I’m a wolf. Bad things have happened, things have spun out of control more than once. It’s why I’m not a cop anymore.

  But there are times…

  I’m telling you all of this so you’ll understand what happened in the bathroom at ViXXXens. Tall expected to beat the shit out of some schmuck asking the wrong questions of the wrong person. He had every reason to expect to win that fight. He even scored his hit with the blackjack.

  It just didn’t do him any damn good.

  *

  The blackjack hit my shoulder as I turned. It hurt. I’m a monster but I still had nerve endings, I’m still meat and bone, and I could still feel pain.

  It’s just that as a werewolf it takes a lot of damage to slow me down. A whole hell of a lot. Decapitation will do it. Fire will do it. Maybe a machine gun, I don’t know. It hasn’t ever come to that.

  A blackjack?

  Oh, please.

  And pain is like gasoline on a fire. It dials everything up.

  I slashed at his arm and the tough double-stitched leather of the blackjack ripped apart. The lead slug bounced off the ceiling and dropped into a sink. The tips of my nails stroked his hand and wrist and blood splatted the metal toilet stall.

  I could have taken the guy’s head off.

  Easily.

  But here’s the thing about werewolves. In the movies we’re ravening, blood-mad, mindless monsters.