Dirty Deeds

by D V Wolfe

  What if it wasn’t demons they were going after? What if it was something else? Someone else? I guessed that I was the obvious choice since Festus could always track me to do his job. Maybe he’d given them a heading and they were heading to Louisville. I’d been a meal that had escaped. Twice now.

  My heart started pounding in my chest. If it wasn’t me, there could be others at risk. He’d been with me from the start of my hunting career. He’d seen so many supernatural creatures and met so many of the folks that hunted them. What if he’d sold out other hunters? There were so many of them that had helped me from time to time with lore or supplies or just had a shot with me at Pitch’s Flask in Crossways, the hunter bar smack in the very middle of the U.S. And several of them had had a brush with Sister Smile’s tribe.

  As we rounded the last bend of the off-roading trail, back towards the main road, I gave myself a little shake. I’d been running down roads of panic. There was no way that Sister Smile would lead her tribe there. Sister Smile knew what Pitch’s Flask was and that it would mean trouble for her tribe. No, she’d head for lower hanging fruit. The problem was, there was so much around, it was hard to know where to start. Rosetta would tell us to come back to her house to regroup. That felt like a backward step. We needed to start searching for the tribe. We got to the edge of the paved road and I looked at Noah. “Right or left?”

  Noah looked at me. “Why do I have to choose?”

  “Left it is,” I said. We turned and headed down the road.

  “What do we do now?” Noah asked.

  I was quiet. I didn’t know what to do next. My only plan had been; find cannibals, get Festus, and hunt shit. A three-step program and we’d slipped on the first step, bumped our asses on the second, and now we were lying on the third step with no way to get up.

  “Bane?” Noah said again.

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “Why don’t you call Gabe or whatever his name is?” Noah said. “He’s been tracking them. Maybe he has new info.”

  “I’m not calling Gabe,” I said. “And that’s final.” I was barely holding the wall steady inside me as it was. I didn’t need another side-kick to the foundation from hearing his voice. I kept having flashes of mental images of Festus screaming as they tore him apart while he was still alive.

  Noah made an irritated noise and threw his hands up. “Fine, then what do you want to do? Just drive around forever until we trip over the cannibals? Or until we hear on the news about a massacre?”

  I blew out a sigh. He was right. “Fine,” I said. “I’ll call Rosetta back. Will that make you happy?”

  “Ecstatic,” Noah said.

  I would rather take a brow-beating from Rosetta about hanging up on her than have to talk to Gabe or ask for his help.

  “Well now that you’ve had your little temper tantrum,” Rosetta began when she answered. “Are you ready to join the adults?”

  I closed my eyes and forced myself to breathe. “I’m sorry,” I muttered.

  “I called Gabe,” Rosetta said, and I felt an annoying jerk in my stomach.

  “And?” I asked.

  “It went to voicemail.”

  Typical. We’re out here trying to actually find the tribe and where is he? Probably getting his gun polished by some gal he met at a bar.

  “I left him a message to call me back,” Rosetta sighed. “As soon as I talk to him, I’ll call you.”

  “Thanks, Rosetta,” I said.

  “What are you two going to do in the meantime?” she asked. “You could just come back here and we can regroup.” Called it. I looked around at the sweeping farmland in every direction. We could have been driving in the exact opposite direction of the cannibals right now and we’d never know it. I blew out a sigh.

  “I guess so,” I said. “Seeing as this trip was little more than a scenic tour of southern Pennsylvania. We’ll see if Walter’s got any updates that might clue us in to where the tribe is headed, if not, we’ll head back your way.”

  I hung up and Noah turned on the radio.

  6

  We were almost to Morgantown when Noah spoke up.

  “Does Walter take days off?”

  I’d been off in my own thoughts, worrying what poor community the tribe was bearing down on now, mentally calculating how many creeps I’d have to gank a day to finish the job, and losing the battle with keeping my mind away from Festus’ dying agony and a certain bearded guy with a neck like a tree trunk and thirteen stitches in his left butt cheek. So, I didn’t hear him right away.

  “Bane?” Noah asked.

  I turned to look at him. “What?”

  “Walter,” Noah said, nodding at the radio. “Does he take days off?”

  “No,” I said. “His house is the station, he’s pretty much on the air as soon as he sees something.”

  Noah scratched his head. “Well, we’ve been on the road for what, four hours now?” I nodded and he continued. “I haven’t heard Walter make a single ‘weather report’. Is that odd? Always before it seemed like it was every hour he was announcing something going down somewhere.”

  I turned up the radio and the volume of the Hollies’ song that was playing. When it ended, there was a short pause of dead air and then an AC/DC song started. I frowned at the radio. “Maybe he’s in the can.”

  “For four hours?” Noah asked. “Should we send help?”

  I rolled my eyes. “I’m sure he’s probably just...doing...something.” I actually didn’t know what else Walter did besides the weather report. Harbingers weren’t all that social.

  After another hour and a half, I wasn’t sure anymore. I dug my phone out of the seat and punched Walter’s number on the speed dial.

  “Hello,” Walter said, more cheerful than I’d ever heard him before. I wasn’t sure why, but all the hairs on the back of my neck stood up.

  “Hiya Walter,” I began, trying to put as much cheer and goodwill into my voice as possible. One of the last times he’d talked to me, Tags had had a gun on him, and his pants had been down. All because Tags was looking for information on where I was. To say I was probably Walter’s least favorite person to talk to, might be the understatement of the century.

  “Bane?” Walter asked and then he laughed. Now I had goosebumps from a cold shiver that raced down my back. “Is that you? Shoot, I didn’t expect to hear from you this evening.”

  I decided to play along. “Why’s that Walter?”

  Walter chuckled again. “Well, it’s so darn quiet. And I only ever hear from you when the shit is clogging the fan.”

  “It’s quiet huh?” I asked. “I was wondering why I hadn’t heard a weather report in the last couple of hours.

  “The last couple of hours? Hell, the last day, I haven’t seen anything brewing or even percolating. It’s clear skies and rainbows today,” Walter said with a sigh.

  “Well, I guess that’s good to hear,” I heard myself say. I tried to sound pleasant but inside my guts were twisting themselves into knots. A tribe of demon-fueled cannibals was on the loose, possibly hunting more demons to top off their tanks, and Walter hadn’t heard anything? Not to mention what a bummer it was for my little predicament, to not have any leads on hunting when I needed to gank supers to hit my number. How many baddies did I need to kill a day to get my body count before the buzzer? It was two a day last I looked and I was at a big ole goose egg for today. That’s two more I’d need to make up for tomorrow on top of the two tomorrow, so four tomorrow and the day before...I could feel myself beginning to hyperventilate. I struggled to take a deep breath.

  “So why is it quiet, do you think?” I asked Walter, trying to sound casual.

  “Don’t know and I don’t care. I’m going to take myself out of this rat hole with an antennae and treat myself to dinner,” Walter said.

  “Sounds...sounds like a good plan,” I said. “Well if you see anything…”

  “Bane,” Walter snapped. “Don’t jinx me.”

  I nodded. “Und
erstood. We’re just looking for Sister Smile’s gang and they’ve broken camp, south of Lancaster, and last we knew they had several demon-infested party houses in tow as their own personal Lunchables. So I was kind of hoping you might have seen some kind of bloodbath that would point me in the right direction to find them.” The line was silent. “Walter?”

  “Fuck you, Bane,” he growled. “I can’t even enjoy a day without being plagued by horrific nightmares and scenes of ritual mutilations, hauntings, disembowelments, hearing the echoing screams and cries of pain on repeat in stereo without you riding in and fucking it up? Great. And now there’s a blood-thirsty pack of demon-munching, cannibals tear-assing around the eastern seaboard?”

  I pulled the phone away from my face to look at the time. “Well, they could really be anywhere by now. From the looks of their old place and the one leave-behind who was feeling up to chatting, they probably headed out about twenty-four to forty-eight hours ago, so depending on whether they stopped much along the way, they could be to the west coast, Canada, Mexico…,” I said.

  “Great,” Walter growled. “Just fucking great. Thanks for ruining my one day off, Bane.” And he hung up.

  “So?” Noah asked. “How did it go?”

  “Walter was... puzzled,” I said.

  “Really? I thought he sounded pissed,” Noah said.

  I cut my eyes to him but didn’t say anything. Where the hell were they? A demon-fueled cannibal caravan rolling down the street like something out of Mad Max didn’t just go unnoticed. Were they using something to shield themselves from Walter? As a Harbinger, he was able to see at the very least outlines of bad shit on the horizon. But to see nothing? In all the years I’d known Walter, I’d never heard of him seeing a clear horizon. I realized the hair on the back of my neck was still at attention, the nerves almost painfully aware of everything. Something was very, very wrong.

  “Are you going to get that?” Noah asked, his voice annoyed and breaking into my thoughts.

  “What?”

  “Your phone’s ringing,” Noah said.

  I dug in the crack of the seat, where it always seemed to end up, and found it just in time for it to go to voicemail. There was no number. And no voice mail. I dropped the phone back onto the seat and it immediately started dinging again. I snatched it up this time and flipped it open.

  “What?!” I spat.

  “There’s the elegant wildflower wrapped in lace that I’m so fond of.”

  All the air was caught in my chest. That voice. Flashes of blue eyes and a thick, wiry beard. A black t-shirt on a barrel chest stretched across wide shoulders that were eye level with me. Mental snapshots flipped through my memory like a stuttering old film projector, accompanied by the smell of leather and bacon and some weird, pine-smelling beard hair product that he was actually pretty vain about.

  “Don’t hang up!” He knew me too well. I’d actually been on the verge of doing just that. I didn’t say anything. Best to just let him say why he’d called and then hang up on him. “I know you’re headed for Lancaster,” he began. “So I wanted to throw whatever ‘hail mary’ pass I could to try to keep you from going there or at least meet you…”

  “We’ve already been there.” I couldn’t help myself. Screw him for trying to tell me what to do.

  “Shit,” Gabe said. “Do you have a tail? Are you hurt?”

  “No and no,” I said. Apparently, he hadn’t called Rosetta back. And she must have given him my new number. Now the heat was creeping up my chest, annoyance turning to anger and trying to beat back a little withering fondness that was trying to sprout with his concern for me. I quickly smothered that. “I’m not an idiot, Gabe.”

  I heard Gabe let out a whoosh of air and without seeing his face, it was hard to tell if it was relief or if he was gearing up for one of our knock-down, drag-out, ‘friendly discussions’. When he didn’t say anything for a moment, I decided to move things along to their inevitable conclusion. “So is that why you called? To see if I’d fucked up and needed you to ride in and save my ass?”

  “As appealing as that sounds,” Gabe started and I could feel the smile in his voice. I felt the snide comments beginning to pool in my mouth. “That’s not why I called,” he continued quickly.

  “Then what?” I asked. I wanted to hang up but if it wasn’t to gloat or lord something over me, I wasn’t sure why he would have called.

  “The cannibals have been snacking on demons,” Gabe said, keeping his voice low.

  I snorted. “You don’t say.”

  There was a pause. “You already knew.” It wasn’t a question and I could hear Gabe struggling, not sure what was solid ground.

  “Yeah,” I said, deciding to be the bigger person and help him out. “They took Festus a couple of days ago in St. Louis and then wiped the floor with a bunch of pissants in Empty Houses, posing as snooty demonic insurance agents.”

  “I heard you’d been in St. Louis,” Gabe said. Whether he meant it to or not, there was an accusatory note in his voice. When I didn’t say anything, Gabe continued. “I could have made it to St. Louis.”

  “I’m sure you could have,” I said. I wasn’t going to take the bait. “Anything else?”

  “So what was the tribe up to if you were able to get away, unscathed?” Gabe asked, back to business.

  “Well, it’s hard to say,” I said. “What with them not being there.”

  The line was quiet for a beat.

  “What!?” Gabe spat.

  “Now there’s that dewy-eyed teddy bear I know so well.”

  Gabe ignored me. “What do you mean they weren’t there?”

  I shook my head. “Their shit was gone, they were gone. Do you want me to sing you a chorus of that Violent Femmes song?” I heard him sigh and decided to keep going while I was getting a word in edgewise. “They left one behind. Half-dead, half-mad. Looked like he might have been a dissenting opinion to the rest of the group and they decided to demonstrate their feelings for him with a little recreational disemboweling.”

  “That sounds pleasant,” Gabe said. “Did he have anything interesting to tell you?”

  “Only that the demon blood made them strong. And that maybe Festus or another he-demon had caused some squabbles at the dinner table. He cashed in before I could get a heading from him.”

  “Festus?” Gabe asked. “They killed him?”

  “I found his tooth,” I said.

  I heard Gabe let out a heavy breath on the other end of the line. “I’m so sorry,” Gabe said. “Is it possible they might have just knocked it out of his head in a fight or something?”

  “I found it right next to the throne where he would have been forced to pay tribute before they killed him. Maybe Sister Smile wasn’t happy with a fake tooth and took a second one, a real one, as her tribute. I learned at my last interaction with them that money doesn’t mean much to the tribe, not when they can just kill and eat anything that stands in the way of what they want.” I flexed my right bicep and glanced down at the scar. Gabe was quiet so I continued. “I guess you didn’t get Rosetta’s message. I told all of this to her not half an hour ago. She said you didn’t answer your phone.” I smoothed out some of the accusing and tried to make it sound like a tease. “Busy with your extracurriculars?” I’d seen Gabe at bars. He was just himself, all the time, whether it was stopping conversation with a belch at the bar, winning or losing at pool, or singing that old Polish folk song with the bartender at closing. Something about him drew women to him. Not all of them, but enough that I was sure he never went home alone if he didn’t want to.

  “If you mean tracking these a-holes, then yeah, I’ve been busy,” he snapped. “What about you? Since we’re getting personal.”

  I blew out a sigh and decided to try to scale back down the red alert that was escalating us quickly towards screaming at each other. “Well, we did some hunting, found some lore to ice demons with, had us a little showdown in St. Louis where we met and killed the personal assistant to
a Duke of Hell. We didn’t get to take down the main boss, but we managed to shut the doggie door before he made it out. And somewhere in the middle, we lost Festus…” I paused and took a breath. “That’s about the size of it.”

  There was a pause. “We?”

  “Yeah, so?” I asked, waiting for him to get hostile.

  “You’re working with another hunter?” Gabe’s voice was softer now.

  “Not exactly,” I said, glancing at Noah. I wasn’t going to volunteer any more information than I had to.

  “What does that mea-...” Gabe started and I cut him off.

  “Anyway, I just talked to Walter. Maybe you’ve noticed but there aren’t any weather reports right now. He said he hadn’t seen anything in a day.”

  “That can’t be good,” Gabe said.

  “Yeah,” I said. “So how have you been tracking the tribe? We need a plan b.” I winced as soon as I said it. I could almost feel Gabe do the same. Fucking terrible word choice. He drew a breath and I really didn’t want to go down this path right now... I couldn’t. “Are you using a pendulum with some kind of modification?” I asked quickly, trying to push back the stabbing pain in my gut and get us back onto safer ground.