Dirty Deeds

by D V Wolfe

  Rosetta turned to me, looking like she was about to split railroad spikes with her teeth. “That woman is an expired blue-light special. There’s no telling what she’d do.”

  “And Tags?” I asked, trying not to laugh.

  “He’s a man that’s lucky there’s a zipper on the front of his jeans, otherwise, he’d suffocate.”

  Noah had wandered back into the room while Rosetta ranted, and he stood stock-still, staring at the pair of us. “What did I just walk into?”

  I shook my head at him. “Just some girl talk. We were about to pop popcorn and talk about boys. Might give each other a mani-pedi. You in?”

  Noah backed slowly out of the room.

  “You better look after him,” Rosetta said. Her voice was soft and grim and I knew what she meant. There was a very good reason that hunters, hunted alone. Casualties. The life expectancy of the average hunter wasn’t good, to begin with. You add in a partner that they’re worried about saving in addition to the hunting and the odds of survival get cut in half, for both of them.

  It was late that night when I saw them. I was staring into the dark, listening to Noah saw logs on the couch beside me when the first flickers of fire and black smoke illuminated the mirage of bodies. The pills had been working for the last week and I hadn’t been visited with the burning, screaming specters of the citizens of Ashley. Now they were back in full force. All six hundred and seventy-nine of them. They sharpened into existence around me. Children screaming and trying to roll on the ground to put the fire out. Old men and women standing still with looks of horror on their faces as life fled them and their skeletons collapsed in on themselves. Mrs. Abertson stood directly before me, big pregnant belly and a baby on one hip, trying to slap out the flames crawling up her dress as she screamed and tried to find somewhere that wasn’t on fire to set down her toddler. I sat up and stared around at all of them. The guilt felt like a belt around my waist and every time I saw them, I had to gouge a new hole in the leather, making the belt tighter. I felt the wave of panic crash down on me. I had to get moving. Time was running out. I glanced at Noah who was snoring with his mouth open. How pissed would he be if I woke him now and made him get in the truck so we could head off for Lancaster? Then another thought hit me.

  What if I just left? I could be gone before he or Rosetta woke up and I’d just turn my cell phone off. I got to my feet and picked up the .45 from the ground beside the sleeping bag I’d been laying on. I tucked it into the back of my jeans and picked up my sneakers, tip-toeing across the living room and into the kitchen. If I could just open the screen door wide enough to slip out but not wide enough for it to squeak…

  “Where in this house’s root cellar, do you think you’re going?” A voice growled from the kitchen table. I dropped my shoes and my hand was on the grip of the .45 before I realized it was Rosetta.

  “That’s a good way to get shot,” I hissed at her, moving to the wall and flicking the light on. She was sitting at the table with a glass of water in front of her. The black ski cap she wore to bed, instead of a hairnet, was askew and some of her iron-gray hair was escaping. She kicked the chair across from her and it slid out a few inches.

  “Sit.”

  I tugged the chair out further and collapsed into it. I noticed Big Joe was sitting on the table next to her water glass.

  “I didn’t hear you get up,” I said. “And I’ve been awake.” I did my best to ignore the crowd of flaming figures that had followed me into the kitchen and now stood around us, screaming and crying.

  Rosetta sniffed. “Guess I’m not so old and creaky, after all. Either that or you’re just losing your touch. It used to be hard to get the drop on you. Well, at least in this meat suit,” Rosetta waved a hand briefly in my direction. “It was easy to sneak up on you when you were wearing that old man.”

  I rolled my eyes. “I had a pacemaker and hearing aids in both ears, Rosetta.”

  “And an unreliable bladder,” Rosetta snorted. “If I do recall.”

  I shook my head. “Yeah, Depends on a stakeout is something I never want to do again.”

  We were quiet for a moment.

  “So you were going to leave?” Rosetta asked. “Without saying boo to the kid or I?”

  I sighed. The citizens of Ashley were shuffling around, trying to get closer to me now, their mouths open in soundless wails and screams. “I’m running out of time, Rosetta.” I looked just to my left where Maggie Jacobs and her little sister Onyx were standing together, holding hands with their pigtails on fire.

  “Are they back?” Rosetta asked softly. “The people from Ashley?” I nodded. “Damn,” Rosetta said, more to herself than to me. “I thought those new pills would do the trick.”

  I shrugged. “They did for a week. Tonight’s the first night I’ve seen them.”

  Rosetta leaned back in her chair, her expression annoyed disappointment. “Maybe I didn’t use enough Angelica root.”

  “Isn’t that the root that gives me diarrhea?” I asked, narrowing my eyes at her.

  Rosetta huffed. “It also helps purify the blood going to your ocular nerve so you don’t have six hundred screaming souls in the bathroom with you every time you have to relieve yourself.”

  “Six hundred and seventy-nine,” I said.

  Rosetta let out a whoosh of air. “And how many do you have left to save?”

  I shrugged. “Without Festus, it’s hard to say for sure.”

  “Well,” Rosetta said, squinting around the room as if she was trying to see them too. “You’d think that the number of people in the visions would decrease as your number went down. I mean, give you some relief since they’re already saved.”

  I shook my head. “If I don’t save all of them, you know they all stay in the pit.”

  “That’s ‘fine print’, for you,” Rosetta grumbled.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Festus loves to remind me of that, any chance he gets.”

  “Speaking of,” Rosetta said. “If he isn’t cannibal skat, how’s he going to know what your total is? I mean, he wasn’t at the final showdown in St. Louis.”

  “He explained it to me, the last time he was ‘called home’ for some big staff meeting or something,” I said. “Apparently, his boss keeps a general tally downstairs, like a set of shadow books. He checks counts with him and is up top really for my benefit, he says.”

  Rosetta snorted. “Well thank Hell for being redundant and bureaucratic.” We were quiet for a minute and I hoped that she wasn’t about to bring up…

  “So what do you want me to tell Gabe when he calls again?” she asked.

  Damn it. “Tell him you haven’t seen me, don’t know anybody by my name, and that you’ll report him as an indecent prank caller if he calls you again.” Rosetta rolled her eyes. I tried to keep my focus on her and not the vision of Miss Prince who was standing behind Rosetta, ripping her long blonde hair out by the roots because it was engulfed in flames.

  Rosetta turned to look behind her, noticing my gaze. “Who’s behind me this time?” Rosetta asked.

  “Miss Prince,” I said, watching the young woman tugging on her hair and crying, trying to smother the flames with her arms.

  Rosetta pushed her chair back and I watched it move through Miss Prince’s body. “Let’s get to the shed.” I stood too and followed her out the back door and down her porch steps. I was doubly thankful; one for the possibility of not seeing and therefore being distracted by the Ashley townsfolk dying over and over in front of me, and also because it had changed the subject away from Gabe.

  Rosetta tugged the potting shed door open and plugged the hanging light into the frayed extension cord she’d looped over a nail on the outside of the shed.

  “I’m gonna have to tell him something, Bane,” Rosetta said. And I was instantly half as thankful as I had been a moment before.

  “Tell him you need him to install some actual wiring in your hoodoo shed before you burn the place down,” I said, fingering the ripped casing on
the extension cord, avoiding her gaze.

  “It works, doesn’t it?” She snapped as she rooted around on the shelves. She stood on tip-toes, raising up to her full five feet, and stretched an arm to try to reach a burlap pouch on the top shelf. I sighed and reached in to get it down for her. “Bane, he cares about you. A lot.” Her voice was soft now. The pointy-toed shoes were back, kicking me in the chest. That was the problem. It was a lost cause.

  “He’s delusional,” I said to Rosetta.

  “Being old doesn’t make me blind,” Rosetta said as she dumped a handful of root into her mortar and pestle. “You cared about him too. I’ve never seen you act around anyone else the way you act around Gabe.”

  I felt heat rushing to my face. “I was delusional too,” I said. “It was just piss-poor timing he didn’t meet me when I was in my previous Empty House. Then he wouldn’t have looked at me twice.”

  Rosetta shook her head. “He knew you in the Empty House before that, didn’t he? When you were that tarted up…”

  I rolled my eyes. “Yeah, I remember how you felt about me then.”

  “Well if he could like you when you looked like that,” Rosetta began. I had to nip this line of questioning in the bud.

  “It doesn’t matter, Rosetta!” I snapped. My voice was a little harsher than I’d meant it to be. “It can’t ever be...anything. He’s got his family legacy or whatever to deal with, not to mention ‘The Order’ crawling up his digestive tract and I have a job to do. Mutually exclusive on all fronts. Our...my feelings don’t matter. Remember? I’m on borrowed time. No time for extracurriculars. I’m in, get the job done, and I’m out.”

  Rosetta nodded slowly, a sad little frown on her face.

  “What can I do to help?” I asked on a whoosh of air, looking around at the shelves for anything to move the conversation back to solid ground.

  She pointed me towards the Dead Sea salt and rosewood ash. We worked in silence for a few minutes. I was busy putting all the thoughts about Gabe and life back into their carefully labeled and sealed boxes in my head and trying to steady the wall around them. When I finally felt ready to talk, I said, “You can tell him anything you want. The kid and I are going to Lancaster as soon as the sun’s up. We’re going to get Festus, check on our totals and then go do some hunting. And if I hear from Nya, and she has some intel, we’ll see if she’s heard anything about anyone else trying to raise the king dickbag who is just drooling to punch my ticket.” I held a hand up when I heard her inhale next to me, already knowing what she was about to say. “If it gets too hairy, I will stash the kid somewhere safe or bring him back here.”

  She snapped her mouth closed and I could almost hear her dentures grinding on each other as she chewed on this. The sound of footsteps running towards the shed made both Rosetta and I pause and look at each other. I stuck my head out of the shed just as Noah rushed inside and knocked into me.

  “Woah there, Crash,” I said, staggering back. “Where’s the fire?’

  Noah was wild-eyed but as he looked around at Rosetta and I, the fear was beginning to bloom into embarrassment. “I-I woke up and you were ...gone.”

  I nodded, trying to keep from smiling. “We were planning a surprise party for you, but I guess that ship has sailed.” He looked embarrassed and I looked around. “Well since you’re here, you might as well work.”

  I set Noah the task of filling the capsules and I started snooping around the rest of Rosetta’s shelves.

  “Need refills on anything else?” Rosetta asked, watching me.

  I shrugged. “Honestly, I have no idea. I still need to replace my dead man’s blood.” I cut my eyes to Noah who scowled at me and went back to trying to close one of the pill capsules without splitting the gelatin.

  Rosetta turned behind her and pulled an old metal toolbox from under the shelf. She heaved it up to rest on the workspace in front of her and popped the lid open. She pulled out an old Stitch’s Whiskey bottle and tossed it to me. I caught it and looked down at the crusty, dark red substance inside.

  “How old is this?” I asked.

  Rosetta shrugged. “Maybe a year? Civ Wiggins brought that to me when he was going after a nest in Houston. He has an in with a coroner in Charleston. Traded it to me for some Devil’s Claw.”

  “Oh,” I said. “You have any more of that left? I could definitely use that.”

  We dug around and she stuffed glass jars, tin cans with duct-taped on pickle jar lids and burlap pouches of roots, and herbs into a reusable shopping bag while Noah loudly complained about how hard filling and closing the capsules were.

  “Suck it up, Sonnie,” Rosetta finally said, the annoyance loud and clear in her voice. “In about eight hours you’re gonna wish you were back here filling pills instead of sitting next to Bane in a cannibal campground.”

  That shut him up. We left the shed with a new bottle of pills and the bag full of Rosetta’s tricks. I looked back at the shed. “Rosetta, I’m not leaving you high and dry by taking all this, am I?”

  Rosetta shook her head. “Nah, we just burned and smudged, the hex bags are new, I should be good for a month or two. Now when you head back this way…”

  “I’ll be the first up the stairs to handle your pit weasel problem,” I said. “How much does this all come to?” I asked, looking back down into the bag and reaching for my wallet.

  “How about you and the kid, staying alive?” Rosetta said softly. I locked eyes with her. She knew I couldn’t guarantee either of those things.

  “I’ll try,” I said to her, slowing my pace and letting Noah beat us up the stairs and back into the house. “I’ll do my damndest to keep him alive.”

  “To keep both of you alive,” she said.

  I nodded. She seemed satisfied and then an evil grin spread across her face and I felt my stomach drop a few inches. That look was never good for me.

  “Also, you have to call Gabe.”

  I stopped and held the bag out to her. “Sorry, that’s a little too steep for me. I better return these.”

  She looked at me and when she saw I wasn’t joking, her grin faltered. “Keep the stuff. You’re going to need it. I guess I just have to get used to the idea that you’re a coward. Too scared to call an ex and…”

  “Guess so,” I said. We moved into the kitchen and I grinned at Noah’s back as he dug in Rosetta’s fridge. The clock on the wall said five am. “Hungry?” I asked him.

  Noah turned to look at us, a slice of ham in his mouth. He nodded. “Aren’t you?”

  I shook my head. “No, but you know me. I don’t usually get cravings in the middle of the night. But, you are a growing boy and all that…”

  Noah gave me the finger and turned back to the fridge. I stared around at the people of Ashley that had crowded back into the kitchen with us. I popped two of the new pills into my mouth and washed them down with Rosetta’s water that had been sitting on the table. I moved into the living room and rolled up the sleeping bag I’d been laying on. I hadn’t had high hopes of actually getting any sleep, but I wished I’d been tired enough to just pass out. I was feeling a little drained and the kid and I were going to be facing a pissed off tribe of demon-blood-fueled, super-charged cannibals by dinner time.

  I strolled back into the kitchen in time to see Rosetta marching over to Noah, who was still foraging through the fridge.

  “Outta the way,” Rosetta said, shooing Noah to one side. “We’re not a pack of stray dogs. If we’re gonna eat, we’re gonna have a proper breakfast like regular slobs.”

  By six-thirty, we were tucking into breakfast ham, scrambled eggs, hash browns, orange juice, and toast.