Brightblade

by C. T. Phipps

  “Ah hell,” Jack muttered. “You can’t disable one little old lady, Bryce?”

  “She’s a tough little old lady!” Bryce shouted.

  I telekinetically shoved the gun to one side before it went off. I then proceeded to give her a sock across the jaw and pulled out my all-purpose criminal detainment object.

  “You think duct tape is going to hold her?” Bryce asked, watching me bind her legs and feet.

  “Nope,” I said, pausing. “However, this is really strong duct tape and will hold her until we get away from here.”

  Meredith cursed me and promised that she’d bring down the wrath of seven gods on us before I duct taped over her mouth too. From there, I hefted her up over one shoulder with the aid of my TK and dumped her on her couch. It was time to get out of here and figure out what our next move was.

  Arthur was alive and in New Detroit again, at least if Peter was telling the truth. That just opened a bunch of new questions, though. If he was alive then why hadn’t he contacted me in eight years? What was his relationship to the vampires? Why had he decided to use Peter as an intermediary? There was just too much to think about and the fact I might have been an accessory to kidnapping wasn’t helping. Maybe I was closer to the monsters than I liked to admit.

  I saw Jack looking at the side of the van. “Well, this is a complete mess. Not to mention we’re on the hook for $200,000.”

  “Uh, did we just break like ninety different laws?” Bryce asked, looking to the sky. “I mean, I’m pretty sure we did. A bounty hunter’s license only covers a certain number of activities and I’m pretty sure turning bail jumpers over to vampires isn’t one of them.”

  “You’re going to find it’s the Wild West out here,” Jack said, taking a deep breath. “Well, the Wild Midwest. The authorities want nothing to do with cases that have even the slightest whiff of the supernatural to them.”

  “But—” Bryce said. “I mean there’s agencies.”

  “The supernatural takes care of its own,” Bryce said. “Our bigger problem is that we’ve probably ticked off all sorts of shifter elders. We’ll need to keep an eye out for werebears coming to enact revenge in the future.”

  “That sounds like a B-movie,” Bryce muttered.

  “Lions, tigers, and bear shifters, oh my,” Jack replied. “You still haven’t explained how you’re going to cover all of this, Ash.”

  “I will,” I snapped. “You know I’m good for it.”

  “Said every drug dealer, gambler, and deadbeat ever,” Jack muttered. He pulled out a pack of cigarettes and lit one up.

  He was disappointed in me.

  I hated that.

  “I thought you quit,” I replied.

  “I did,” Jack said. “I only make an exception when I’m fucked over by one of my partners. The one I like too. Jones is going to have a cow.”

  “I don’t think anyone has said that since the Nineties,” I replied. “Quincy will just have to deal with it. You know I had to do it.”

  Quincy Jones was the third partner of JP Morgan (Dammit, now I couldn’t get it out of my head). He was the money man of the group and utterly uninterested in the actual bail enforcement or P.I. part of the job, save how it turned crooks into dollars and cents. As far as I knew, he was a mundie and had no supernatural abilities but extensive contacts with the super community of the city. Rumors attested he was involved in organized crime before deciding to fund our group, but I doubted that. Organized crime in the city was way too classy for him. Maybe he ran a used car lot or cash for gold business. That was more his speed.

  “Yeah, I know you had to do it,” Jack said, puffing away. “Unfortunately, I also know you’re just getting started.”

  Chapter Four

  Meeting with my partner who thinks he’s my boss

  The van worked, so we drove it to the shop. Well, I drove it with Bryce in the passenger’s side. Jack seemed to think it was an important lesson that he got to drive my car back since I was the one who cost us the bond.

  It was almost 8:00 p.m. when we got there, but the mechanic gave it a once over and declared it in need of too much bodywork to be worth fixing. Just the news we needed. Apparently, ripping the door off the side had left the entire body of the van warped and several other mechanical terms that translated to busted beyond repair. I tuned out about a tenth of the way through the list of things gone horribly wrong with it. He promised a full workup of just how ruined it was tomorrow. With end-of-day traffic, it was almost 10:30 p.m. by the time we got to the office on the other side of town. The night was business hours in this town anyway.

  New Detroit was a mixture of Las Vegas, Old Detroit, New Orleans’ French Quarter, and a perpetual Halloween. The center of the city was the Boulevard that was a collection of themed casinos that were where the bulk of the tourists lived out their adult fantasies of vampires, shifters, and literal magic shows. Surrounding it was a veritable metropolis of strip clubs, bars, nightclubs, themed restaurants, blood banks, loan offices, specialized gift shops. Beyond that was the Halo, where all the people who worked at these places lived as well as those businesses that catered to the spooky.

  JP Morgan’s Bail Bonds, Security, and Detective Work was located in a two-story building that was next door to an empty department store and a smoke shop that sold CBD oil along with actual pot (that it seemed almost ashamed was legal now in Michigan thanks to vamp money). Across the street was a boarded-up building with discreetly armed guys that I was sure either were a local criminal gang or an anti-vampire hate group. I probably should have investigated but they tended to scare off our less persistent creditors.

  The sign on the front door read “Draper and Sons, Private Investigations” on a plate of glass with those little metal wires all through it. This, of course, wasn’t our agency but the previous private detective agency that had moved out when its members had gotten in-between two feuding vampire patriarchs and decided to move to some place with more sunlight. Yuma, Arizona gets eleven hours of it a day I understand. Quincy Jones had not changed the sign because it was cheaper that way and because it prevented people from mistaking us for the other JP Morgan.

  The interior of the office looked like something out of a film noir with old time desks, lamps, retro computers, and lots of paper on the desks. That was because the place was old as dirt rather than ambiance. Most of the computers didn’t work anyway and were only there because Quincy didn’t think they warranted throwing out. The tiny secretary pool of Tracy and Rose mostly did all their secretary work on their cellphones.

  I was still wearing the torn blue business dress and a layer of sweat and dirt from the fight, not to mention waiting in the garage. Would it kill them to air condition those places? Bryce looked even worse and Jack was sitting behind his desk with a newspaper in hand. He had his feet propped up and was looking amused with the fact he’d been here the entire time we’d been gone. There was no sign of Quincy since he controlled the entire upstairs floor, and had it modernized. I was half sure he planned to install a jacuzzi, but I figured he didn’t trust the plumbing around here. Probably a wise choice.

  Any hope that I didn’t look that bad was dashed when Tracy declared brightly, “You look like hell!”

  Tracy was a beautiful five-foot-four olive-skinned woman with wavy black hair that reached down to her soldiers. She was dressed in a blue jean jacket with flair, a red tank top that accentuated her modest bust, and a checkered skirt. She looked like her fashion sense was stuck in the Eighties and acted like it too. Sometimes, I wondered if she was a vamp but given she was walking out in the daytime as often as the night, I didn’t think it was the case.

  “Hell is stylish this year,” I said weakly to our receptionist. “What are you still doing here? You were here in the morning too.”

  Mind you, the job tended to demand unusual hours sometimes. I tended to work parts of the day and night shift of our 24-hour business. Sleep was never comforting for me anymore and I survived on power naps, c
offee, determination, and more coffee.

  “Boss is having a bad day. Mrs. Conover came by to yell at us for not finding any proof her husband is cheating on her,” Tracy said.

  “I’m glad I missed that,” I said. “He isn’t cheating on her.”

  I knew that not just because of the extensive surveillance we’d been doing, but because I’d read his emotions and Mr. Conover was loyal to his core. Mrs. Conover was just projecting her own personality flaws onto him. Not that I could exactly explain all that without explaining how I knew. Besides, Quincy was very clear our purpose was not to satisfy our client’s quest for the truth but get as many billable hours as possible from their paranoia. I had to admit, I sometimes admired Quincy’s honest dishonesty.

  “H-hi Tracy,” Bryce said, looking like he was a (were)deer in the headlights. “H-how are you doing?”

  “Fine.” Tracy shrugged, as uninterested in Bryce as a coat rack. Sadly, Tracy’s dates were all Goths with a better than fifty percent chance of being in a band. “Honestly, I think your surprise ursine problem was probably the better afternoon.”

  “Morgan beat him with perfume,” Jack said, looking up from his paper. “I have to admit, it was pretty sweet.”

  “Oh, I have got to hear this,” Tracy said. “You left that part out.”

  “I-I could tell you,” Bryce started to say.

  Bryce normally didn’t become a sitcom stereotype around girls, even pretty ones, but Tracy had made the mistake of revealing she was a stripper at her other job. Worse, she’d made the mistake of inviting him to one of her shows and while I had no idea what went on there, it had permanently etched itself in his brain in a way that probably triggered blissful flashbacks every time he had some alone time. Vampire strip shows were like that. Or so I’d heard.

  Ahem.

  Yes, I hated vampires. That didn’t mean they weren’t sexy as hell. I’d even dated one at my lowest point.

  “Talk to Jack,” I said. “I’m just going to grab my real clothes, and then go home and take a shower.”

  “Actually,” Tracy said gingerly, “Mr. Jones wanted a report on the take-down and the van as soon as one of you got back. Your phone call was a little lacking in details.”

  “I called dibs on leaving you to tell him about the bail bond, the van, and the fact we’re on the hook for a lawsuit,” Jack said quickly.

  “A lawsuit?” I asked, confused. “Who the hell is suing us!?”

  “Mrs. Brooks,” Jack said. “Apparently, she called her lawyer the second she managed to get free of your duct tape. They’re associated with the O’Henry family in Bright Falls.”

  Rose Hawthorne, an Italian woman playing Solitaire on a computer older than me, popped some bubblegum in her mouth. She was our other receptionist and somehow managed to care less about the business than the rest of us. Which was impressive since our company morale was reaching an all-time low thanks to recent screw ups (only some of which were mine). “Yeah, they’ll get you for that.”

  I cursed. The O’Henry family were the royal family of puppiedom. They owned a quiet resort town thirty miles outside of New Detroit and were the only shifters I knew who played on the same level of intrigue as vampires. “Whatever happened to just sending a hit-wolf after us?”

  “Uh, it’s not like we did anything wrong?” Bryce suggested, making the situation much worse.

  That was when Rose’s phone buzzed, she picked it up. “Uh-huh. Gotcha.”

  I looked at her. “Who is it?”

  “Quincy wants to see you,” Rose said.

  I paused. “He couldn’t be bothered to stick his head out of his office?”

  “For you? No,” Rose said.

  I rolled my eyes. “For a partner, he sure does act like my boss.”

  “Keeping us from going under when someone costs us two hundred grand will do that,” Jack said, smiling. “Don’t worry, I’m sure you’re good for it.”

  “You know you can’t fire partners,” I said, walking up the stairs to the second floor.

  “I’m sure he’s going to try,” Jack replied.

  Quincy Jones’ office was the only room in the building to be recently remodeled, with kitschy wood paneling and baby blue paint ruining the Humphrey Bogart movie feel the rest of the office thrived on. Of course, so did the state-of-the-art computer on his desk. There was also a fake plant in the corner, and I had to wonder what he thought it was for since none of us believed anything living could survive in his presence for more than an hour.

  Quincy was a tall middle-aged Caucasian man dressed in a white button-down shirt, red striped tie, and purple slacks. His jacket was hanging over one of the two modern art chairs in front of his glass desk. I’d famously tried to inform him his taste in clothes resembled the Joker’s but he’d merely said something about dressing for success. Apparently, success as a supervillain was what he had in mind.

  I walked in and closed the door behind me. “You wanted to see me?”

  “Just have a seat and tell me what the hell happened today,” he said, even though I was already taking a seat. I was too tired not to.

  “The Brooks bond turned out to have powers,” I said. “Ruined the van.”

  “And there wasn’t anything about that in his file?”

  “Nothing. Which means insurance should cover it. I think.”

  “They’ll find an excuse to blame us for not being prepared.”

  He wasn’t bringing up the lawsuit. Yet. “If they do, we’re screwed. The mechanic says he thinks the van is totaled.”

  “Do you know how expensive those things are? The custom work to make them ready for bounty hunting is….”

  I decided to go on the offensive since being offensive was what I did best. “Listen, I’ll get Gilroy back. It’s just a matter of time. Think of it as delayed rather than gone.”

  Quincy frowned. “And if he testifies that we allowed him to fall into the hands of people who violated his civil rights?”

  I stared at him. “When, exactly, did you start caring about civil rights?”

  “When they started to cost me money. Besides, you’re usually the one who objects to us going after cases that offend your delicate moral sensibilities.”

  “My sensibilities aren’t that delicate,” I replied. “I just don’t like taking cases for vampires trying to track down their fleeing slaves or doing security work for businesses we know to be dirty. That’s illegal.”

  “You mean like handing over a bond to the bellidix?” Quincy asked. He was the only person I knew younger than the age of two hundred who used the proper Eastern European name instead of saying sheriff.

  “Yes,” I said, sighing. “I know what I did.” That was the problem with doing something hypocritical, it made you look like a hypocrite.

  Quincy surprised me, though. “In any case, it’s all taken care of.”

  “What?” I asked, blinking.

  “I’ve been on the phone with both the City Council and the O’Henry family. Mr. Brooks has been released after they got what they wanted from him, apparently a parcel he stole years ago and a few fingers for their trouble. We can get him to court after you pick him up drinking the night away at some bar. I’m sure you’ll be able to find him.”

  I was troubled at the fact they’d said he was guilty of murder and yet released him casually. Then I remembered these were vamps. Murder wasn’t a crime to them anymore than speeding—yes, you should discourage it but everyone did it.

  “And the O’Henrys?” I asked, feeling a bit sick.

  “We’re taking on their private investigation work,” Quincy replied. “They used to have an in-house investigator, but he was killed.”

  “Oh great!” I said, staring at him. “What happened to him?”

  “Silver bullet to the head,” Quincy said, nonchalantly. “Which, given you’re not a shifter, shouldn’t be a problem.”

  “I’m pretty sure a bullet to the head will still kill me.”

  “Well, that’s your pr
oblem,” Quincy replied. “In any case, they asked for you specifically.”

  I narrowed my eyes. “They did, did they?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you don’t think that could be…dangerous?”

  “Nope,” Quincy said. “If they wanted to kill you, then they would have just done it. They don’t need to lure you into a trap.”

  “Can I speak with my lawyer?” I asked, feeling like I was a perp needing her one phone call.

  “Shannon is already drawing up the paperwork,” Quincy replied.

  I sighed. “Great.”

  Shannon O’Hara, unrelated to the O’Henry’s other than being redheaded and Irish, was a full-on vampire unlike Tracy’s ambiguous undead status. She was a legal shark who, nevertheless, preferred to represent humans as her clients. Vampire-controlled courts were unlikely to rule in her favor when representing a human against the undead but it was a better option than a human lawyer with human clients. She was cute too.

  Quincy reached behind the desk. “You’re still on the hook for the van damage.”

  “Oh, come on!” I snapped.

  “Just the legal fees to resolve it,” Quincy replied, putting a large scabbard of all things on top of the desk.

  “What, you want me to commit hari-kari?” I asked, not entirely adverse to the idea now. I wasn’t sure it wouldn’t be a better fate than having to work for the puppies. They weren’t as bad as vampires but that didn’t mean they were on my Christmas list either. I still couldn’t wear tank tops due to claw lines across my middle from a drunk and disorderly puppy party girl named Janice. Funnily enough, I think she may have been an O’Henry herself.

  “No,” Quincy said, dryly. “Then you couldn’t earn me any more money. One of our clients decided to pay with this instead of cash.”

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “A sword,” Quincy replied.

  I blinked. “Right.”

  “Apparently, it’s an actual 6th century Roman spatha used by one of the Byzantine Emperor’s agents to slay demons,” Quincy said, as if it was a bunch of irrelevant details. “Blessed by the Patriarch of Constantinople and everything. I’m going to get it appraised and, I dunno, maybe we can hock it on Ebay or something.”