by Russ Linton
“Could be Garfield Sykes.”
“Wait, what? You know this Garfield?”
She set her drink down, still facing the tearoom. “Only crazy white guy with a monocle I’ve ever met. He’s done some recovery work for my firm. Eccentric but discreet.”
“Recovery? Do you know where his office is?”
She turned and planted her elbows on the table, leaning far forward so her loose blouse puffed open exposing the swell of her breasts. She’d come prepared for this here negotiation.
“It depends. If I tell you, is this date over?”
We were locked in a staring contest, my job the more difficult one. “You’re the one who ordered the coconut shrimp.”
“And you’re the one who brought me somewhere that had it on the menu,” she said with an accusatory finger. “I said I’d pick you up. I never said we even had to leave.”
My hand shot up in the air, my gaze unwavering. I spotted the waitress in my peripheral and I beckoned her madly. Without looking away from Sheila’s rich brown eyes, I asked for the check.
“Your food will be out soon.”
“Keep it,” I said, sliding a few bills her way. “We’re going straight for dessert.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
I woke up sprawled across Kitterling’s fancy four-posted bed. Sheila was in the bathroom. I could hear water running and cabinets opening.
“Where’s your shampoo?”
“Hell if I know,” I mumbled.
Did I feel guilty about not rushing out to find Sykes right away? Track down the leads, get the scent of his trail? Yeah, I guess I did. But rolling up into the driveway with Sheila’s skirt riding high on her thighs and her hand gripping that stick shift, well, my brain made all the right excuses.
He’d already been out of pocket for weeks, what’s another night? Araceli says he might already be dead. And then the final bit of rationalizing — no reason to take her above the garage and let that creepy ass Sasquatch watch.
Embarrassed about where I lived? Naw. I’d grown up around worse. But a Mercedes girl deserved a Mercedes bed and she had been all about the crib when I opened that bedroom door.
“You sure you live here?” she’d asked, breathless and clearly calling my bluff.
I answered with a kiss. We hadn’t come here to chat fireside. This morning though, that conversation was getting difficult to avoid.
“These yours?” she asked, leaning out from the bathroom with a pair of electric nose hair clippers in one hand and a towel pressed lazily against her body with the other.
“Stop questioning my grooming habits and get your bath on, or whatever,” I said, throwing a pillow her direction. She laughed and disappeared into the bathroom.
Domestic bliss. I mean, that wasn’t what this was. This was a booty call, pure and simple. But since Keandra passed, those had been rare and any actual connection even rarer. Sheila felt comfortable. Real. Waking up with her cracking jokes on me felt like we’d been that way all along.
Could I let that happen? Could I have bliss before Izaak was safe, back under a roof with a father who wasn’t going to leave him a tombstone?
I hopped out of bed and started searching for my clothes. I snatched them off the floor, piling hers neatly on the bed so she could find them. “I’ll be downstairs making some coffee. Then we got a necromancer to talk to.”
Her head poked out again. “Excuse me?”
“Sykes. The investigator.”
“I thought you said—”
I finished pulling on my shirt and grabbed my shoulder holster off the floor where I’d dropped it by the nightstand. “I did.”
I left before she could cross-examine. We’d handle that over coffee.
SYKES’ OFFICE WAS RIGHT off the public square where statues to confederate soldiers and plaques to slaves existed in a granite and bronze stasis. The lower floor of the building had a lobby with an art gallery off to one side. Swank.
The old, grizzled security guard must’ve been a cop whose pension wasn’t paying the bills. The two of us were about to go toe to toe over the metal detector. When he saw Sheila come in from parking the Benz, he stepped off.
“Morning, Ms. Abraham.”
“Morning, Charlie. He’s with me.”
He buzzed us through and we went to the elevator banks, no trouble.
“Everybody knows the girl,” I said. “You got pull here?”
“Clients,” she replied, stepping into the arriving elevator and punching a button.
The doors slid closed. I noticed she’d pressed the third-floor button. Not much time to talk.
“You might want to wait outside when we get there.”
She studied me with a skeptical frown. “Why?”
“Because I might do some things which could jeopardize your standing in the community.”
She squinted. “Maybe you need a negotiator? Less kicking in doors, more mediation?”
The elevator doors dinged open and she strode out ahead with me struggling to catch up.
“This guy could be dangerous in an unnatural way. He may not even know what he’s capable of, you feel me?”
Her confident stride faltered and I saw her shoulders droop. What I’d said had had the right effect. She’d remembered the scene in Mississippi, all those demons. Cruddy thing for me to bring up, but it had to be said. She didn’t continue the fight, just slowly nodded.
“I’ll be right back,” I said. I couldn’t help myself and kissed the back of her head. I was playing into that dangerous familiarity too hard. She sighed and didn’t look up.
I left her by the elevators and started down the hallway. The rich maroon carpet and mahogany-paneled doors gave off the look of an upscale hotel or apartments. Land at a premium around here, they might have been both that and an office building.
Sykes’ place was around the corner, near the emergency stairs. A faux gold plaque had his name in cursive: Garfield Sykes, Esq. Purveyor of Things Lost. Yeah, he and Kitterling must be BFFs. I knocked and pressed my palm over the peephole.
“Pizza delivery.”
No answer. I knocked again, doing my best not to make it into the typical cop knock — zero courtesy, maximum noise. Home or not, I didn’t need him spooked. No answer.
I’d been good at avoiding unnecessary spells but I didn’t have time to stand around. The room had no other exits without scaling the building. But if he wasn’t home it was prime time to toss his place.
Spirit walking into a necromancer’s den could be bad. Kicking down the door might take a couple strikes and alert security. A swig of magical strength, I could blast it off the hinges.
First, I tried the handle.
The door clicked open, nice and easy.
Never a good sign.
I drew Atofo’s knife. A slow push and I peered through the widening crack into a pitch-black room. Sykes must’ve had blackout curtains up. After the battle at Fortune’s, shadows put me on edge.
I gave up on conserving magic and bit into my cheek. Spitting on the owl feather of Atofo’s blade, I brushed my eyes and muttered the ritual to grant a little night vision. The simple spell should’ve gone right off. Instead, it sputtered into being, dark and light, dark and light. A bad connection somewhere in the spirit realms.
The front waiting area was furnished with a coffee table, couch, and a few chairs, all nondescript, modern design. A water cooler burbled in the corner, dark and out of place. A smell of rot, dense and hard to breathe hit as I stepped inside. I covered my mouth.
“Where’s the corpse?”
A closed office door filled with frosted glass was on the left. To the right, a smaller door that had to be a closet. I checked the closet first, putting away the knife and drawing my firearm. Swiping the door open with my foot, I glanced low then high, using the door for cover. Vacuum cleaner, some old coats, a few boxes, no surprises. I turned, crouched, toward the office door.
Even with the equivalent of night vision, clearing a room n
ever got easier. Blood pumping, weapon raised, you had to find a place somewhere between anxiety and routine. Too hyped, you could put a bullet in the wrong thing. Too relaxed, you miss the guy under the couch with a gun.
There wasn’t one. I checked.
The stench got stronger near the office. I thought about tearing open the curtains again but decided not to spoil my possible advantage. The water cooler gurgled in the corner, a dark mass. I looked closer.
Was that...blood?
My attention swung back to the office door. Water coolers full of blood were nasty, not a threat. No lights shone through the frosted glass. In my head, I went through a three count.
I flung the door open and stepped through, raised gun following my eyes. Single room, no exits, two antique armchairs sat across from a hardwood desk. Behind that desk, Sykes slumped in his chair.
His collar torn open and head lolled back, blood streamed from his mouth and onto his button-down shirt. The hat and the monocle had both been neatly set aside on the desktop. Next to them was an open book. Emptied dixie cups, mottled with red stains littered the floor.
“What the fuck,” I muttered, still on high alert.
Dark magic had gone down here. Blood rituals, but not any I recognized. I wasn’t about to put up with any tentacles creeping out of the shadows. I moved to the window and yanked open the curtains.
Sykes looked more pathetic than terrifying in the full brilliance of the mid-morning sun. No visible wounds, his expression was of shock and surprise. Almost comical except for all the blood which had dried and caked. A day old, the crimson spatter had turned into a rusty splotch on the verge of black.
I heard the sludge-filled water cooler gurgle. Behind the desk was an open cardboard box filled with empty IV bags, streaks of blood trapped in their folds.
All those details I could file away as crime scene evidence. Wouldn’t bother me except later when I came out of my meditation in cold sweats. The real horror show was the book splayed open like an autopsied cadaver.
He’d pinned down the pages like it had tried to escape. Dried pools of blood around each pin suggested he’d performed the operation with messy hands or the book itself had bled from the wounds. The pages were thick vellum and scrawled with the hand of a madman, letters rushed and off-kilter, notes and symbols running into the margins. What I could see of the cover was black and flaking leather.
Kitterling didn’t deal in books. I would’ve remembered this motherfucker. Question was, where did Sykes get it and what was he doing?
He didn’t have a computer but the desk had plenty of drawers. A curio cabinet on the wall held a mixed collection of figurines and memorabilia like signed black and white photos and even a baseball glove.
Some of the odder stuff, I did recognize. Those had gone through Kitterling’s shop. There was a crystal ball I’d recovered, supposedly one used by Alistair Crowley. Not a swig of mojo on that piece. But this book...
I tucked my hand in my jacket sleeve and started going through the desk. Supplies, normal office junk — one drawer had a carton of cigarettes and an ashtray, though I hadn’t smelled stale smoke. The next drawer was locked.
I grimaced. Hand still covered, I dug around in his pockets until I heard the jingle of keys. Carefully sorting through them, I found the one that fit the desk drawer.
Files. Too many to go through here.
With the rancid blood on the air and the fresh bite on my inner cheek, I couldn’t tell how much I was tasting had come up from my lungs. Going for a seance with Sykes would be risky. I’d have to leave this to old-fashioned detective work. I emptied the box of IV bags and replaced them with the files out of the drawer. Next, I’d need that book.
I hesitated, watching it for any movement. “You snap closed, you so much as flutter in a breeze, you get a forty cal through your spine, understand?”
I’ve seen enough freaky shit in my day that I almost expected an answer. When none came, I reached out, hands yanking pins as quick as I could. When the book stayed nice and still, I slapped it closed using my jacket-covered hand.
Shutting the book caused a deep, roiling thud that quivered against the golden breastplate like the shock wave of a distant mortar shell. Not wasting time, I dumped it in the box. Thankfully a lid was close by.
The cleaning crew was in for a surprise tomorrow morning.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Sheila and I made it through the lobby without a pat-down. Not that he had reason, but had I walked out alone, Charlie there would’ve been all up in my business.
The owner of the art gallery barely glanced up from his paper as we passed. Mostly paintings and seascapes, he looked happy about the lack of traffic. If his business was anything like Kitterling’s, he didn’t bother with small fish, he waited to spear the whales.
Outside, I could see why the gallery didn’t have any lost tourists admiring art they weren’t about to ship home to Nebraska or wherever. The crowd was all on the plaza.
The Plaza de la Constitución split the city right where the Bridge of Lions fed into the streets over the Matanzas. During tourist season, the intersection needed constant traffic duty from the local PD. Anybody who lived here knew to avoid this area nine months out of the year. Even in off months, you didn’t bother unless you’d made a wrong turn.
The Plaza had been here since the Spanish founding. Reconstructed town wells were at the center. A collection of monuments to the Spanish, the Confederates, Civil Rights protesters, and even Ponce himself all fought to tell their side of history.
The biggest building? That was the Slave Market.
Some “experts” argued whether the sale of slaves actually took place under the pavilion or if all that happened across the street where the government offices used to be. I’d leave those arguments for Caleb and anybody who cared. Right now, the long six bay pavilion looked like it had been dragged backward into one of those competing pasts.
And not a revisionist past.
I stopped dead on the sidewalk, staring. “You seeing what I’m seeing?”
“Uh-huh.” Sheila had started into the street with a swagger that would’ve stopped traffic dead if it hadn’t already been gridlocked.
“Woah, woah,” I said, cutting her off and shoving the box toward her. “Get the car. Drop this off by Kitterling’s and—”
“Excuse me?” she said, her eyes going wild. “Go get the car, my ass! Get the car? Recreation permit or not, we are not having...” she stuttered, her hands shaking with rage, eyes locked across the street, “...this.”
I checked over my shoulder, just to be sure I was seeing what I was seeing. No mistake. It was him. I pushed the box toward her.
“You go. I’ll probably need you to get me out of jail later,” I said. “And this isn’t a reenactment, you feel me?”
Her eyes narrowed and she ran through the implications. “Is this part of that wizard bullshit?”
I nodded, letting the box settle into her outstretched arms. “Shaman bullshit, but yeah. Take the box to Kitterling’s. Call Caleb,” I shouted, wading into the street. “Your assistant has his number!” I kept moving, shouting louder over the idling traffic and angry horns. “Tell him to bring Araceli and check out that book!”
I didn’t wait to see if Sheila acknowledged every word. She’d call Caleb and get Araceli. Mostly, I wanted her clear of the square. Yeah, she could take care of herself. But this here scene was about to get ugly.
On the square, a group of Spanish soldiers in their fine blue coats were slinging a rope from the rafters of the market pavilion. The short end had been tied into a noose and a half-naked man stood on a box just underneath. Head hung low, his topknot flopped weakly, his intricately tattooed body as distinct as any fingerprint.
Atofo.
My knife and gun came out as soon as I hit the opposite sidewalk. People who weren’t completely taken in by the spectacle gasped and gave me space. Most were so busy gawking, I had to shoulder my way through the crowd. N
o apologies.
The scene was real enough, awkward enough, that the crowd gathered far away. The soldiers had Atofo on the wooden crate, arms lashed behind his back. He’d been beaten. Red angry welts bulged through the patterns on his exposed skin. Blood ran from his nose and he’d lost the feather he wore in his topknot. As I got closer, he raised his head and looked my way through a swollen eye.
“Ace?” Atofo said.
One of the guards called to his men and they took up positions flanking their prisoner, snapping to attention and shouldering long halberds. With a flourish, the officer in charge whipped a rolled parchment from his vest and began to read. More Spanish.
“Ace?!?” Atofo repeated, his other eye a white-rimmed orb of fear. “ACE! WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON HERE!”
Yeah, definitely Atofo. Alive. In the flesh.
I froze. He’d been buried there under the park for centuries. No veil had torn open or even lingered here. This was like the encounter at the tearoom and the fort, only I knew this dude.
“Drop your weapon!”
It took a second for the words to register. Not in some old-fashioned Spanish, but clear, twangy American. I peered to my right, slowly.
A man with a Glock clenched in shaky fists covered me. He didn’t have the look of an off-duty cop. Donut belly sure, but unless he was on the Vice squad, the mullet wasn’t regulation. I think this “good guy with a gun” thought he was going to save the day while my mentor got lynched.
I swiveled and let my jacket flop open. Slow, careful motions, I started to holster my Scorpion. He flinched.
“Relax, I’m putting my gun away.”
“ACE! DO SOMETHING!” Atofo shouted. “THEY’RE ALMOST DONE PLAYING HANGMAN ON THEIR FANCY PAPER!”
I grimaced but kept focused. No sudden movements. The guy with the gun looked more nervous than Atofo, whose neck was being fitted into the noose. The big Timucuan snarled with his filed, sharpened teeth and the crowd gasped in delight.
I could go for Great Sun’s medicine bag at my neck or a ritual. But Bubba here was twitchy, finger on the trigger, safety off.