The Judah Black Novels Box Set

by E. A. Copen

  The Judah Black Novels

  Unabridged Books 1-4

  E.A. Copen

  The Judah Black Novels are a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Sometimes both.

  Copyright © 2016, 2018 E.A. Copen

  Cover copyright © E.A. Copen

  LMBPN Publishing supports the right to free expression and the value of copyright. The purpose of copyright is to encourage writers and artists to produce the creative works that enrich our culture.

  The distribution of this book without permission is a theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like permission to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), please contact support@lmbpn.com. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.

  LMBPN Publishing

  PMB 196, 2540 South Maryland Pkwy

  Las Vegas, NV 89109

  First US edition, December 2019

  ebook ISBN: 978-1-64202-625-2

  Contents

  Guilty by Association

  Volume 2

  Chasing Ghosts

  Playing with Fire

  Author Notes

  Also from E.A. Copen

  Get an Exclusive Story from The Lazarus Codes

  Other Series by E.A. Copen

  Other LMBPN Publishing Books

  Guilty by Association

  Book 1 of The Judah Black Novels

  Chapter One

  There was a dead werewolf in the twenty-four-hour laundromat down the street from my house. He was a young, small-framed Hispanic man, no older than twenty-five. The only facial hair he had was an uneven peach fuzz on his upper lip. He was naked when I found him, slumped over in the corner against the dryers, chin tucked against his chest.

  I paused in the doorway, a basket of dirty laundry tucked under one arm, trying to discern if he was dead or just passed out. From the door, it was impossible to know.

  I put the basket down and approached slowly. The last thing you ever want to do is sneak up on a sleeping werewolf, especially when you’re a stranger in what could be his territory.

  I hung back as far as I could, fingers outstretched toward his still body. “Come on, Judah,” I whispered. “It's only a werewolf. He might only rip your face off and feed it to you.”

  My fingers brushed against the hair sticking to his forehead. The skin was waxy and oddly stiff. A bluish tinge had crept into his lips and fingernails. He'd been there a while.

  I cursed and pulled out my phone to dial the only person who would answer at six in the morning. Two rings later, a groggy voice on the other end answered. “Detective Tindall.”

  “Got a body here. Good Coin Laundry on Willow road.” I paused for a minute before adding, “He's a werewolf.”

  “Wait a minute. Who the hell are you and how'd you get my number?”

  “Hurry up, detective. You better get your people down here to clean this up before the rest of the pack catches wind of what's happened or you're going to have a lot more bodies to deal with.” I hung up before he had a chance to respond.

  Paint Rock was a small town, one of the smallest in all of Texas. There were maybe five hundred folks there, spread out over more than three miles of empty, dead land in the center of the state. It used to be the county seat of Concho County before the federal government relocated a bunch of supernaturals to the land. As the story goes, the government paid the former residents of Paint Rock over ten thousand dollars each to pick up and move to Eden a decade ago and quietly put up the rickety old fence that marked the boundaries of the Paint Rock Supernatural Reservation.

  If I had called dispatch, it was Eden they would have relayed me to, and I would have had to wait hours for someone to sort through a bunch of government red tape before they drove all the way down. It pays to know people, especially when you live out in the middle of nowhere.

  At best, I had ten minutes of alone time with the corpse. That was enough time to go around and check for signs of a struggle or obvious weapons. I was careful not to touch anything. Contaminating evidence would not be the best way to start my new job.

  New job. I make it sound like I was a novice or something. I'd been working the supernatural beat for almost a decade by the time I got assigned to Paint Rock, but my specialty was demons and the occult, not werewolves. And this was Texas. You know what they say about Texas.

  The laundromat had an emergency exit door off to the side covered in extra thick safety glass. The safety glass flexed outward from a central point. Cracked into a million bloodstained pieces, some of which were still sticking out of the dead werewolf's head. Three washers had been dented beyond repair. One near the victim had been uprooted and tossed aside, guts spilling out all over the floor. All signs pointed to a struggle. Still, I didn't find any obvious footprints or clues. There was too much blood everywhere to determine what belonged to the victim and what might have belonged to his attackers. I’d have to wait for CSI.

  I sighed and walked away, following a trail of broken glass and blood back to where the vic sat.

  What a mess, I thought and squatted down in front of him. His limbs were all wrong, caught halfway between digits and paws. His head was on all askew, stopping about a quarter of the way into growing his nose into a snout. The rest of him was mostly human aside from all the extra body hair, and even it hadn't come in all the way. He'd stripped off all his clothes, making the scratches and cuts obvious. Some of them were still oozing. I leaned to one side and found a hole the size of a quarter an inch below his ear. Someone had gotten him in the jugular.

  I stood, cracked my back, and looked around again. The laundromat was notably empty of baskets, soap, or clothes other than the ones spinning behind his head in the dryer. I doubted my guy was the kind to wear lacy bras and pink halter tops. But then, I'd been wrong about that sort of thing before.

  About the time I started my second pass around the inside of the building, a car pulled up, a late model Cadillac with one of those detachable police lights stuck to the top. The man driving it was a walking cliché from a twentieth-century neo-noir film. Middle-aged but still reasonably attractive, his hair slicked back in a conservative fashion. He wore dress pants, a white shirt, and a loose-fitting blue tie that accented the shoulder holsters he adjusted when he climbed out.

  Overdressed for six-fifteen in the morning, I thought, until he passed under a flickering street light.

  He wore the distinct wrinkles of having fallen asleep fully dressed.

  For a moment, the detective paused under the lamp outside, patting himself down as if he'd forgotten something. Then, he reached back into the car, picked up a dark fedora, and dropped it onto his head.

  The bell above the door chimed when he pushed it open. He took one look at me, scowled, and turned to the body. “One day in town and you're already attracting trouble. I knew you were going to be a problem.”

  “Nice to meet you, too, Detective Tindall.”

  It wasn't like Brian Tindall and I knew each other that well. I'd just moved there. Most cities in the U.S. had government agents on staff from the Bureau of Supernatural Investigations. That worked fine for big cities like Chicago and New York, but in the middle of nowhere, the law was a little different.

  Tindall drew a hand down over his chin as he beheld the body. “You’re the fed, right? What was your name again?”

  I offered him my hand. “Black. Special Agent Judah Black.”

  He stared at it. “Judah's a man's name. What, did BSI run out of decent code names for women?”

  My name wasn’t a code name, not exactly. But Judah Black wasn’t my real
name either. BSI learned early on that it was safer for their agents to carry self-assigned pseudonyms. Call it an extra layer of protection against magick. If it was easier for him to think of it as a code name, though, it didn't suit me to correct him.

  Tindall swaggered up to the corpse and squatted next to it as I had. “What a mess.”

  “That’s what I said.”

  He gave me a look that told me he wasn’t in the mood.

  “Stab wound to the neck probably did him in. Probably silver, but I haven’t seen the weapon yet.” I turned my attention to the corners of the room. Any place that had a door chime probably had a camera. A hole gaped in the wall where one might have been, but the camera itself was suspiciously absent. Damn. “They ripped the camera out of the wall. Any chance you know the owner?”

  “This is Paint Rock,” Tindall grunted at me and jerked on the dead werewolf's arm. “I know everybody, Black.”

  “Shouldn't you call someone? The coroner? CSI? Somebody?”

  He looked up at me and jabbed a thumb into the bend of the dead man's arm. “Track marks. Our guy was a junkie. Could be a deal gone bad.”

  “Hold on. You can't say that based on some marks in his arms. Those could be old.”

  “See it all the time. Drugs and booze are a common problem here, Black. We'll give him his due process. Can't close the case anyway until we have an ID on him.” He frowned at the corpse. “I don't recognize him, and I thought I knew most of the werewolves here. Maybe he's a stray. What the hell was he doing in here?”

  I gave a one-shouldered shrug. “I don't think he was doing laundry if that's what you mean.”

  “Too damn early for laundry, don’t you think?” Tindall glared up at me.

  I raised my eyebrows at him. For a moment, the two of us traded unblinking, unwavering stares.

  He lowered his eyes first, sighed, and pushed himself up to walk the room as I'd done. When he finished, he went back out to his car and came in with a body bag and a pair of bright yellow rubber gloves.

  “Well,” he said, offering me another pair. “You going to help me bag him or stand there?”

  I wasn’t squeamish. I couldn't afford to be in my line of work. Cleveland’s murder rate was one of the highest in the country while I was stationed there, and I had seen my fair share of dead bodies, most of them in worse shape than our dead werewolf. I'd never had to haul one out of a building in a laundry cart and shove it in the trunk of a Cadillac. The process made me feel dirty, guilty. Whoever this guy was, I felt like he deserved more dignity than Tindall and I gave him.

  If it had been later in the morning when I found him, Tindall informed me that he would have called his partner, Morris Quincy, and had him bring his truck, but he was sure Quincy wouldn't even come to the phone before nine. What kind of place was this where coroners and CSI didn't come out to murder scenes and ranking detectives could sleep in at their leisure?

  I turned away from the trunk of the Cadillac. “What about CSI?”

  Tindall waved a dismissive hand. “I'll call a team down from Eden, but they won't get here until later. We'll have to keep the scene secure until then. I'll put someone on it. As for the body, going to have to take him to the clinic and get Doc Ramis on it right off. You can follow me over.” He tried to close the trunk and quickly realized that the body bag wasn't all the way in and stopped to adjust it.

  I looked down at my watch. Five after seven. I was supposed to have my laundry in the dryer and be out for my morning run by then. I needed to stop by my place to update my son. Guess I was going to work after all.

  I sighed. “Can I meet you there in an hour or so? My kid's going to be up in a few.”

  Tindall cocked his head to the side. “Your superiors made it very clear that I was to let you take the lead.”

  “I bet they did.” Because if I screwed up one more time, they could sack me and not lose a wink of sleep over it.

  “What was that, Black?”

  “Nothing. I’ll be downtown by eight-thirty. I promise.”

  I walked the laundry back to my car, tossed it into my backseat, and then sat behind the wheel, trying to ignore the way my hands shook. I'd seen death plenty of times before. Seems like there's always someone or something somewhere wanting to kill someone else. We are the only sentient beings in the universe actively seeking to make ourselves go extinct.

  An old teacher of mine told me once that it gets easier to deal with death the more times you see it, that you eventually become numb to it. If that was true, I hadn't reached that point yet. Every dead body I'd ever seen was burned into my memory like a bad stain on good carpet. While I could deal with it so long as I eventually nabbed the bad guys, I had a tough time not bringing my job home. Every time I left a scene, I had to stop and collect myself before going home to pretend like the life I lived had some degree of normalcy.

  I'd seen a therapist once. He recommended yoga. Making a human pretzel out of myself wasn’t going to make all the stress headaches go away.

  I reached over and pulled a bottle of ibuprofen out of my glove box, downing three of them without anything to drink. Then, I pulled back out onto the sunbaked and sand-beaten road that cut through the reservation.

  Most of the permanent buildings on the Paint Rock Reservation were single-wide trailers with hodgepodge additions thrown onto one side or another. Broken chain length fences outlined some of them while the property boundaries of others were marked with nothing more than a couple of big stones. Two skinny dogs raced alongside my car when I passed the post office but quickly gave up the chase.

  My house was one of the few buildings that hadn't started its life out as a mobile home. A more creative real estate agent might have called it a log cabin, since the outside sort of resembled that. It was mostly plywood, chipboard, and drywall with some paint thrown on. Whenever the wind kicked up good, the whole house leaned and groaned.

  When my son, Hunter, and I arrived, we found the gutters in a pile beside the house, and I still hadn't gotten around to getting them up. I wasn't in a hurry to do it, either, since Texas was smack dab in the middle of a ten-year drought. There were three or four trailers within sight of my place, so I had neighbors. I hadn't introduced myself yet. Today wasn't looking promising for that, either.

  Hunter was already sitting in front of the television with a bowl of cereal when I came in. The pale light of morning cartoons illuminated his blank face as he chewed. I sighed, grunted, and hauled in the laundry. “Don't get up or anything, Hunter.”

  “Wouldn't have to drag the laundry everywhere if we'd stayed in Ohio,” he grumbled. “This place sucks. The air conditioning doesn't even work.”

  I went over to the tiny unit in the window and put my hand over one of the vents. The air trickling through it was maybe five degrees cooler than outside. “Seems fine to me.”

  Hunter picked up the remote and flipped through some channels, lingering on an exercise program featuring a muscular guy with an Australian accent and his two petite assistants in their skin-tight leotards. He took a bite of his cereal before switching the channel over to The New Adventures of Scooby-Doo. “Better?”

  “What? I didn't say anything.”

  He stuck his tongue out at me. “I saw your face.”

  I went back into the kitchen and started moving some dishes around in the sink.

  “How come you didn't get the laundry done?” he asked with a mouthful of cereal.

  “Don't talk with your mouth full. And I couldn't. Place was closed.”

  “I thought you said it was a twenty-four-hour laundromat?”

  I shrugged in answer.

  “You smell like death. Someone died?” He paused, waiting for an answer.

  I scribbled down a list of rules. Don't touch the stove. Don't open the windows. Check the caller ID before answering the phone. Don't give anyone your real name.

  I still wasn't comfortable with the idea of leaving him home alone while I worked, but I didn't have much of a choi
ce. Even back in Ohio, he'd given every sitter I hired a run for their money. Hunter insisted that he was old enough to look after himself, but I wasn't sure. He was only eleven for Christ's sake. Leaving him alone was more harrowing than dealing with a dead werewolf.

  “Mom?” I looked up to see him standing in the doorway, arms crossed over his skinny, white chest. “Are you going to go to work?”

  I swallowed and looked down at the dishes instead of directly at him. “You know I don't have a choice. These people need the law as much as everyone else.”

  “Why couldn't we stay in Ohio?”

  Finally, I looked up and met his eyes with a stern glare. “You know why, Hunter.”

  “Is it because of that fight I got into at school? Because, like I told you, Chad started it.”

  That made my heart sink into my toes. I went to my son and hugged him. “Hunter, this has nothing to do with you. It's...”

  I stumbled. How do you explain to an eleven-year-old boy that doing the right thing got me blacklisted from every major police force in the country? I'd had to pull quite a few strings to keep from getting fired altogether. After what I did, not even L.A. wanted me, and that was saying something. L.A. was desperate for agents.

  “It's complicated, kiddo. We got dealt a crap hand, but we're going to play it out. I promise things will get better.”

  “That's what you said in Chicago and Philadelphia, too. And Cleveland.” He sighed as I patted him on the back. “I guess there's no further down to go once you hit rock bottom, huh?”

  I gave him a playful shove back toward the TV. “Go watch your cartoons.”