Rick Wayne's Blog, page 86

A great oblivious god

23

I visited the little boy’s grave. I prayed, though I don’t know why. I can count on my fingers and toes the number of times I’ve been to a church, always for weddings and funerals. But going seemed like the right thing to do. And after everything I’d seen, I figured it couldn’t hurt to hedge my bets.

I went back to my hotel. Turns out no one was looking for me. Not yet, anyway. Ollie figured I was off brooding somewhere, as much about my career as the little boy. Marlene thought I was mad at her for not mentioning the whole work thing sooner. She thought I was ignoring her out of spite, which made her mad as well, so she ignored me in return.

We got a long way to go, she and I.

I quit my job. I walked into Sowell’s office and told him before he could open his mouth and fire me.

Oliver and I spoke once more. On the phone. He warned me to stay away from the chef. The way he said it, it was like he had personal experience, like he knew way more than he’d said. On a whim, I sent him an email the next day and told him what I’d discovered. I didn’t say it was a ring. I just said that there seemed to a pattern — something non-random — and he might think about getting permission from the Park Service to go out to Hoffman Island, if he wanted to dig into it. I’d be surprised if he did. But who knows.

I wrote my paper. Only the fourth yet on Mycena lucifera. I even gave a short talk at a local university. I didn’t lie. But I don’t feel like I told the truth, either. After stepping up to the lectern, I stood in front of my colleagues for a long moment, completely unable to speak. They looked so confused. And I realized how all those people must feel — the ones who’ve seen lake monsters or ghosts or been abducted by aliens.

Not crazy. Just alone.

Terribly, terrifyingly alone.

I tried to talk to Marlene about it, but she didn’t want to hear my theories on the occult. She wanted to hear how I was going to pay the mortgage when I didn’t have a job. I said I’d figure something out.

Mostly I spent time with Mom. As much as I could. It’s funny how fast everything changes. I’d been so angry at her for so many years. And after the anger, I just wanted her to leave us alone. But knowing she was never likely to leave that hospital room —

I dunno. She was still my moms.

After a couple weeks, she took a turn for the worse, and when doctors said the end was near, I finally got the nerve to ask the one question that had never left me my entire life.

“Ma?” It came out almost like the bleat of a baby sheep.

She was lying in bed, doped up to her eyeballs. She grunted through the haze.

“Can I ask you something?”

A nod.

“What happened to Alvin?”

She shut her eyes and tried to shake the question off with her head.

I took her hand. Her eyes were closed. Minutes passed and I thought she was asleep. I bent over in my chair and rested my cheek on the bed. I hadn’t been sleeping well. I was so tired . . .

I woke to the sound of her voice.

“They found him in the shed,” she said.

I had no idea how long I was out.

“Out back of your Aunt Susan’s. Out by the corn field.”

I didn’t sit up. I didn’t look at her. I didn’t want to do anything to make her change her mind. I stayed there, bent over the sheets, and listened.

She put her hand on my hair, like I was fourteen again and crying ’cuz Curtis Wilson killed my little brother. And I couldn’t stop it. Crying ’cuz it turned out I was just another punk after all, like BeeGee and all the rest.

“Your brother was . . .” I heard her shake her head against the pillow. “He was naked. And the tips of his fingers were bloody. Worn to the bone. He’d done it to hisself. The inside of that big wood door was all scratched. And bloody.” I could hear her lips quiver with the word. “Like he was trying to dig his way out. From that place. Like he just wanted to get home to his mama.

“And he had these . . . marks all over his body. Like insect bites. All over. Long ones. Short ones. And some round ones, too.”

She paused.

“They said he died ’cuz he ain’t had water. Like he was trapped in there for days and days. But Susan said he wasn’t gone but a afternoon. Otherwise she’d’a’ called. But the doctors said that couldn’t be.”

Another pause.

“Your uncle had the only keys. So he went to jail. They couldn’t say he’d done nuthin’ but lock him in the shed. Child endangerment. But your aunt swore it wasn’t true. He got out on parole, ’ventually. And she wouldn’t ever talk to me again. None a’ them would.”

I hadn’t thought about that. How Mom had lost more than her son. She’d lost the last of her entire family, including me. What was I by then but a punk teenager disappointed by everything she did?

I took her hand. I squeezed. I didn’t say anything. I just held on.

She had so much guilt. Like it was her fault for sending him there. She thought my uncle had locked Alvin in the shed. And done things to him. What other explanation was there? And she blamed herself. All these years. The drugs. The gambling. Everything.

What the hell could I tell her? My dying mother. That ghosts and bogeymen were real? That there were different gods? That whatever killed Alvin had a thousand eyes and had slithered into this world from a place of darkness? That the only justice he’d ever get was if someone sent it back?

I held my mother’s hand until the medication kicked in and she slept in earnest. I kissed her forehead. I rode the elevator down and sat on the steps at the back of the hospital, in front of the staff lot.

I could see downtown Atlanta in the distance. Everything seemed so normal.

I wasn’t fair to her. I mean, she wasn’t a great mom. Terrible, even. But I wasn’t fair. Alvin wasn’t just her son. He was her baby. I was fourteen and doing everything I could to show what a man I was. Alvin was the only one who needed her. I can’t imagine what it would be like to have Marigold taken from me. Especially if they’d found her like that. Naked. Fingers worn to bloody nubs.

I realized then that Granny Tuesday was right. Ain’t no good comes from knowing some things.

In 32 years, it had never once occurred to me that truth — not the naming and ordering of things, but real Truth — might sometimes be terrible. Legitimately terrible. That it isn’t a virtue, like wisdom. Or compassion. That Truth is like Nature — neither good nor evil. It just is. It doesn’t care what we think of it, and like a great oblivious god striding the universe, crushing worlds underfoot, it’s just as likely to strike us down as offer enlightenment.

I heard a flap and a squawk.

I looked up and saw a large raven, like the one from the park, balancing itself, wings extended, on the branch of a nearby tree. It was looking at me, turning its head from side to side.

I knew then that he was standing behind me. Hands in his fantastic coat.

“How the hell did you get to Atlanta?” I said without turning.

“The bus,” he said.

I heard the staccato of a large engine. Sure enough, across the parking lot on the far side of the street was a small bus depot — so folks from all over could visit the specialists at the hospital. A Greyhound was just pulling away. I watched it.

“Long way,” I said.

“Many interesting people on the bus.”

“Did those interesting people tell you what you needed to know?” Something told me that there’s more to the weirdos of the world than the rest of us knew. “Are the rats fleeing the ship?”

“Yes.” He sat down on the step next to me with a groan. It was the most human thing I’d seen him do. He rested his elbows on his legs. I could see the marks on his palms. They were intricate.

“Little warm yet down here for a coat,” I said.

“It will be cold soon.”

“I saw on the news where they’re predicting an unusually harsh winter this year.”

I heard the raven’s wings hit the air and saw its shadow move over us as it flew away.

“We didn’t stop them,” I said.

He took a moment to answer. “That’s how the world is, most of the time.”

I nodded in silence. That was true. “What’s next?” I asked. “In the book?”

It took him a moment. “Something worse.”

“You wrote it,” I accused. “Didn’t you?”

He nodded.

“So what is it? The end of the world or something?”

“Not the end,” he said softly. “Although people will wish it to be.”

I probably should have gone home right then. Called Marlene. Promised to do whatever it took. If I didn’t, there’s no telling what would happen to my family. I’d be just another punk who didn’t stick it out. Didn’t take care of his own. Like Big Goon.

That burned.

But my only thought was of my daughter. Her smile. Her frizzy hair. And my little brother. And Etude’s question. In the car.

I’d hedged a little.

Before.

I turned to him. “Without hesitation,” I said.

End of the first mystery!

I’m posting the chapters of my forthcoming urban occult mystery in order until the book is released in early 2018. You can start here: I saw my first dead body the summer we moved to Atlanta.

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The next chapter is: The alligator man

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The problem was me

22

The residential street was upscale but not posh. Recently gentrified. It was also quiet, especially that early in the morning. I was leaning against a tree when she came out, box in hand.

“Dr. Alexander.” She stopped in shock on the stairs of her upscale three-story condo building. “Jeez. You surprised me.” She stepped down slowly with a bemused smile. “What are you doing here?”

“Going somewhere?” I nodded to the car parked at the curb. The trunk was open. There were suitcases and a couple boxes, just like the one in her hands.

She lifted it as if to show off and smiled. “After what happened to Alonso, I figured it was finally time to get on with my life.” She nodded. “Not exactly the best circumstances, but I’m pretty excited actually.” Her smiled faded. “Are you okay? You don’t look so well.”

“We didn’t talk about the fieldwork I did in Africa, did we? For my dissertation.”

“I’m so sorry,” she interjected as she walked to the trunk. “I know it’s rude, but I really can’t talk right now.”

“I never thought I’d see that many dead people again.”

“Dead people?” She set the box with the others and turned. “What are you talking about? Are you sure you’re not sick?”

“I couldn’t figure it out,” I said. “I knew I had all the pieces. But I just couldn’t figure it out.”

“I’m going to call an ambulance,” she said and turned back for her purse.

“No one was supposed to care, right? Half a dozen junkies die every day in this city. Every day. Plus a couple homeless people. No one gives a shit. It’s not like they get an obit in the paper. You said it yourself. No one would have cared about a bunch of dead illegals, either. Not if I hadn’t sent out that health alert. Just like no one cared about Jayden Cavett.

“But Alons . . .” I raised a finger. “He was the one that didn’t fit. And of course the little boy.”

“Dr. Alexander, you’re worrying me.” She had her hand on her purse. But she hadn’t bothered to get her phone. Hadn’t dialed that ambulance.

“There are more out there,” I said. “Aren’t there? Bodies. Dozens, I’ll bet. In a ring of death. Glowing with dark light. Light that doesn’t come from the sun.”

She just looked at me. Not like I was crazy. Not like she was confused. There was just nothing. She had no expression at all.

“When we spoke on the phone, you said I needed to have someone I could talk to about the little boy. But I never said he was a boy. I still have the texts. All I said was that there was another victim who was seven. I never gave a gender.”

I thought she might protest then, pretend that she had heard it somewhere she couldn’t have or that it was a lucky guess. But she didn’t.

“He didn’t hit the news until later. There’s no way you could have known. I blew it off at first. But my mind wouldn’t let it go. I must’ve read our texts hundred times.”

A car passed on the quiet street. I watched it disappear. “My guess is Jayden was an accident. Something went wrong. She got out. She was a tough one. Had a hard life. But then, you all had to expect a couple of them would be found. Sooner or later. That wasn’t the problem. Nooo. The problem, as you so eloquently put it, was me.”

She stepped up onto the curb. But still her face was blank.

“It must have taken a lot of planning. That means you couldn’t have done it by yourself. Those wealthy investors you mentioned. The ones who liked to use the Outreach Center as a tax write-off. Have offices downtown, do they? How many similar places did they fund? It’s a good way to exert influence over who gets hired into key positions, right? Like a clinic ‘director’ who runs a Meals on Wheels program.

“Three years and still waiting on your license to show up from the city. Something tells me it isn’t coming.

“The trays in the corner. The ones with the pink lids. Is that how it worked? You and your colleagues across town spend a few months casing the neighborhoods. Get to know all the usual clientele. Identify the candidates. Poorest of the poor. Runaways. Homeless. The mentally ill. Folks desperate for something to eat. In a metropolis of 18 million, I bet you were spoiled for choice. And when the time was right, you slipped them a different tray. The one with the mushrooms baked into a pot pie.

“I bet it was going great, too. Until I sent out that health alert, right? Suddenly, you panicked. All that planning. No one was supposed to notice. No one was supposed to care. They never had before. You couldn’t just sit by and hope for the best. Not after all that work. Preparation. You couldn’t just leave it to chance. You had to know what we knew, how close we were. You needed a way to keep tabs on the investigation. You had to get close to me, to know if your plan was in jeopardy.

“That’s why they picked you, right? To come forward. The pretty southern girl with the heart of gold trying to do good in the big city. You practically threw yourself at me. Of course, killing me would only raise questions, make it look like I was onto something. But, if you could discredit me . . .

“The Alonso file wasn’t lost. It wasn’t lost because there never was one. Because Alonso White was never sick. You made it up. But the best lies have just enough of the truth to be convincing. My mom taught me that. That’s why you picked a real person, one who’d really gone missing weeks before. A neighborhood saint whose shocking disappearance had even made the local papers. Someone we had to care about, at least enough to show up at your door. But someone we’d never find. Because your people had already taken him.

“And sure enough. You sent your report to the DoH and I jumped. I showed up at the Outreach Center that same day. And now you knew who was running the investigation. Alonso was your colleague, you said. Your patient, even. So you had legit reasons to ask all kinds of questions. You were good, too. Really good. I never once suspected. And why wouldn’t I share? We’re all on the same team, right? That’s how science works.”

I shook my head. “Jesus. Ollie tried to warn me . . .” I said softly. “And you found exactly what you needed. You found out you had nothing to fear from me. I told you straight up that the investigation hadn’t even been opened. That I was acting on my on time. So it all looked cool. You were safe.

“But then ICE found the illegals, and the DoH got a call. That damned health alert was linking things together that should’ve stayed separate. The case was officially opened, and you had to shut it down quick. Throw us off the scent. Shouldn’t be that hard, right? I mean, what sane person will believe a story about a carnivorous jungle fungus? All you had to do was give the nice, reasonable city managers over my head a genuine reason to doubt.

“Most people don’t even have a clear idea of what chemotherapy is, let alone where to get the cocktails. But a doctor would. Wouldn’t be too hard either, if she was bold and unscrupulous. And pretty.”

“You’re deranged,” she said softly. “Listen to yourself. You’ve been working too hard. You should get some rest.”

“What’d you do?” I asked. “Camp out on the street until you found the cutest little made-for-TV face you could? He was groggy when he got home. Passed right out. Because you sedated him. Not enough to put him under. Nothing that would show up on the labs. Maybe just a whiff of ether. Wouldn’t take much with a seven-year-old. He didn’t tell his babysitter he’d been injected with something because he didn’t know — through his back into his abdomen where it would mimic the symptoms of a tummy ache. I bet you even waited with him for a bit. Just to make sure he came out of it okay. Did you walk him home? Hold his hand? Ask him questions about school? Send him upstairs so he’d be sure to be found when the time came? Yeah. I bet you did. Such a nice stranger lady. It’s never a woman, right? Stranger danger. It’s always a dude.

“Jesus . . .” I shook my head. “You killed a little kid just to drag a red herring across the trail. But I gotta hand it to you. I really do. It was brilliant. It fuckin’ worked.”

I stopped, mouth open. I didn’t know what else to say.

“What are you gonna do?” she asked calmly. “Call the police with this fantastical tale?”

“And tell them what? That you’re part of some cult or something that’d growing a toadstool ring thirty miles wide? That you ritually slaughtered an innocent man so you could open a doorway and summon the devil?”

“Ha!” She laughed. Genuinely. “Is that what you think? That we’re some kind of devil worshipers?” She shook her head. “There are older gods than devils. Before The Masters. Before Christ. Before Moses. Before the high priests of civilization tried to take it all for themselves. Real gods. Powerful gods. Who don’t hide in some distant heaven. Gods who move over the world and reveal themselves to us. With agony. And delight.” She ran her hands up her arms.

I knew I was right when I showed up. I’d figured it out the night before. Lying awake. Trying to make sense of it all. But there was still some part of me that wanted to believe I was wrong.

Seeing her face then, it made me sick.

She could tell. “You’re right. Junkies and homeless die in droves. Every day. And no one cares. You know why? Because they’re not worth caring about and the righteous know it. They’re filth. Parasites. Dozens of them just went missing and there’s not a single story on the news. So go back to Atlanta, Dr. Alexander. Go back to your wife. Beg her to forgive you for whatever stupid thing you did. Raise your child. For as long as He allows. Because that’s the best you’re going to have.” She stepped close to me. Her face was within inches. I could smell her toothpaste. “There’s nothing for you here. We’ve been here since the beginning. We’ll be here at the end. And the world belongs to us now, and there’s nothing you can do. You’re just like the rest of them, an insignificant little worm,” she breathed. “An insect on the back of something so large and mighty, you can’t hope to comprehend it.”

She had me there. I used to think I was a pretty smart guy. But now it felt like I barely knew anything anymore.

“You’re right,” I said with a slow nod. “I am.” I shrugged once.

She smirked at me sarcastically. She looked at my lips.

I nodded toward the sidewalk behind her. “But he’s not.”

Amber spun and saw the chef standing stone-faced with his hands in the pockets of his fantastic coat. He was pale. He looked worse than I did in the greenhouse, in fact. But he was alive.

She stepped back toward her house, right as Mr. Dench stepped through the front door. He’d gone in from the back and made sure it was empty. Next she tried to get past me, but I stepped into her path as Milan, in the Jaguar, slowed to a halt in the street. The big engine growled.

I glanced to Dr. Massey’s neck and saw the symbol on a chain, the same one I saw on the wall in Jersey — an upside down triangle with swooping ends tipped in tiny circles. I guess there was no reason for her to hide it now.

Dench came down the stairs and she eyed him defiantly. I could see the bulge of his gun in his coat pocket. I’m sure she could too.

She gripped the amulet around her neck, closed her eyes, and whispered softly in fervent prayer. She was serious, too.

All I could do was stare as the wackest shit I have ever heard came out of her mouth.

Dench took her arm. “In the car,” he said.

Dr. Massey turned for the black Jag, but Dench stopped her.

“Not that one.”

He meant her car.

She looked at him again. I think she understood then. She understood that Amber Massey, MD, had quit her job the day before. She’d told everyone she was moving away and said her goodbyes. She’d packed up her belongings early one morning and drove off from an empty apartment. She wouldn’t be missed. Not for months.

The chef approached her. “You will tell me everything you know about a man named Lyman Sinclair.”

“Go to Hell,” she sneered.

“I have been to Hell,” he said. “You may give them my regards.”

She pulled. But Dench held on. He pushed her into the car.

Étranger looked at me. Like he was waiting for me to come.

“I don’t wanna know,” I said.

He nodded and got in.

Milan was smirking at me playfully from the driver’s seat of the Jag. “Don’t look so dour,” she said through the open window. “We found them. Finally. Thanks to you.”

I stood in the street and watched the others drive away. “What are they gonna do to her?”

“You were right the first time. You don’t wanna know.”

My face flushed with guilt. And shame. And anxiety.

I thought about Alonso White. And the Chinese couple, who wanted nothing but a better life, holding hands in death. I thought about little “Alvin” with the cherub face and the dimpled smile.

I got in the car next to my new friend.

“Maybe it doesn’t feel like it yet,” she said. “But you were a soldier today.”

“Soldier?”

“In a war. A very, very, very old war.”

“I thought the war ended.”

She looked down the empty road. “A wise man once told me that civilization is a boat that sails on a sea of war. You picked a side today.”

I didn’t know what to say.

“Where to?” she asked.

“Cemetery.” I sighed. “Then the airport.”

I wanted to pay my respects. Then I wanted to get the hell outta New York.

 

I’m posting the chapters of my forthcoming hardboiled occult mystery in order until the book is released in early 2018. You can start here: I saw my first dead body the summer we moved to Atlanta.

Sign up here to be notified when the book is released.

The next chapter is: A great oblivious god

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It was a night effect

21

My legs felt stronger, or at least less of a nauseating burden to operate. Part of it, I’m sure, was the water I drank, which was slowly being absorbed through my GI tract, increasing my blood volume, in addition to the tireless efforts of my bone marrow, which cranked out red blood cells as fast as it could. But most of it, I think, was the sense of excitement and purpose as the three of us departed the sanctum. We were off to face some kind of evil, I knew not what, and I felt significantly better than I had an only a few hours before.

It wasn’t until we were halfway there that I began to seriously engage with all of the possibilities that might be waiting for us, things I had never and would never have contemplated even a few days before but which now seemed so palpably real that I very quickly began to lose the confidence I’d carried around with me ever since that summer in Atlanta, when I first faced evil and terror.

I watched from the back of the Jag as Dench cleaned and loaded his revolver.

“Shouldn’t we all have weapons?” I asked.

We had found the Jag right where it should have been, parked in a private spot around the corner, and we drove straight downtown. Milan was again behind the wheel. I got the impression that was never up for debate. The big engine roared and we caught every green light and made it to the bridge in what had to be some kind of record, which only quickened the uncertainty that gripped me.

Dench locked the cylinder and clicked the safety with well-practiced speed.

“No, seriously,” I said. “Shouldn’t we all have weapons? What are we walking into?”

“A town in Poland,” Milan teased.

“Funny.”

“You scared?” she asked.

“Actually. Yeah. A little.”

“Good,” Dench said. “You should be.”

“Do we know what we’re up against?”

“A warlock,” he replied.

I mouthed the word to myself. Warlock?

Milan saw it in the rear view mirror.

“Tell me, Doctor,” she asked, “do you believe in saints?”

“Saints?” I had to think for a second. I’d never considered the possibility. “I’m not Catholic, if that’s your question.”

“It’s not.”

“You mean like guys who can walk on water and heal by touch and all that?”

“Not necessarily,” she said. “Whatever they may do, a saint is human. Probably the most human of any of us. And no human is all good or all bad. But some people at least try, genuinely an in difficult, often painful ways, to stoke the light inside them, just as others seek the dark. The difference is that saints rarely know what they are, whereas one knows is one is a warlock.”

I looked down at the gun. “Are we getting to the part where we all have weapons?”

“This isn’t gonna do much good,” Dench said, slipping the big revolver into the pocket of his leather jacket.

“It did plenty at Granny’s,” I suggested.

“Just stay behind us,” Milan advised. I think she was frustrated — partly at me and partly at herself for not being able to explain things like the chef. “Do exactly as we tell you.”

Milan hit her blinker and went to turn right, but a patrol car with flashing sirens was parked at an angle in the road, blocking enough of it to let everyone know they weren’t supposed to go that way. It looked like some kind of terrorism thing. I saw another set of flashers at the other end of the block. But it was damn near two in the morning, and while the roads certainly weren’t deserted, there weren’t many cars. Milan navigated a no-turn lane and merged back into traffic and headed to the south side of the block. The building we wanted faced a pedestrian square, along with two others, which would be easy enough to cross on foot.

At the first chance, she double parked and hit the hazard lights.

“The cops are right around the block,” I objected.

“Don’t worry,” she said as the both of them hopped out. “We won’t even get ticketed, let alone towed.”

“Wait.” I leaned far over the driver’s seat until my head almost hit the wheel and popped the trunk. I climbed out and walked around to it and lifted the bat from the side, the one studded with bent nail heads. I gripped it like I was getting ready to take the plate.

“Happy?” Milan asked.

I nodded. “Oh yeah.” It was hefty. I’d played a little ball in high school. I figured I could do some real damage with that.

Dench shut the trunk and the three of us walked across the wide sidewalk and up the steps to the elevated square. There was a fountain at the center, although it was silent then. At the edge of the space on two sides were a pair of corporate sculptures, part of a set apparently. They had swoops and angles and didn’t seem to stand for anything at all, but they were confident in that, which seemed to me about right symbolism for where we were.

The buildings around us were mostly dark, the workers having gone home hours before. But a few dedicated souls were still there, and the sporadic lighting made the towers look like giant oblivious servers, doling fate in bits and dollars. My eyes ran to the top of the skyscraper across from us. The top was obscured by a deep violet fog backlit by floodlights on the roof. I’d read about it once. It was a night effect. It happens in the city sometimes. Refraction of light from the water droplets creates a violet glow. I knew it was just optics. It wasn’t anything sinister. But that’s not how it looked.

I was a few steps ahead of the others before I realized they had stopped. The far side of the square was cordoned with yellow caution tape.

“Shit.”

It stretched around the entire front of the building in a hundred-foot arc, which seemed excessive. I saw a couple uniforms milling about, including a portly guy just past the far stairs. He was nearly as wide as he was tall and his arms swung out a little as he walked.

Dench looked at me as if he was waiting for something.

“Right,” I said and handed him the bat.

He took it and I walked across the square and past the fountain and stood at the top of the wide stairs down. Yellow tape was wrapped around the railing at the center and stretched away at an angle in both directions. Something had definitely happened in our building. I saw what looked like a couple detectives, and there was a mess of TV vans parked irregularly on the street, the same street the patrol cars were blocking.

“That’s something else, huh?” a voice asked behind me.

A man in an expensive suit and dark overcoat stood from his seat on the edge of the fountain. I saw no reason why I shouldn’t have noticed him before, but I hadn’t.

“What’s that?” I asked.

“The sky.” He nodded.

“Oh. Right.” I looked at it. “It’s a night effect, I think. Something about droplets in the fog and all that.”

“Looks damned creepy to me. You with the police?”

“Not exactly. Why do you ask?”

He shrugged. “It’s just, you don’t look like an investment banker.”

I may not have, but he certainly did. He had the coiffed hair and leather gloves and tie pin and everything.

“You work there?” I motioned to the building across the square.

“I did,” he said with exaggeration. “But this is the kinda thing that makes you wanna move to a new office, if you know what I mean.” He paused. “Or at least bargain the landlord way down on the lease.” He smiled in jest.

“Any idea what happened?”

He shook his head. “Just that someone met a very messy end, judging from the crew and equipment that just went up the elevator.”

“Crew?”

“Hazmat and all that. Are those friends of yours?” He nodded to Dench and Milan, hanging at the ends of the square.

I wasn’t sure how to answer that.

“None of my business,” he said. “I know. It’s just, you guys don’t look like reporters either.”

“We met a few days ago,” I explained. It was the most honest answer I could give that didn’t make me sound completely insane — way better than “They sold me out to a witch. But it’s cool. They got me out before she was able to plant me in her blood garden.”

“Really?” he said, as if surprised by the concept. “That’s great. I can never find time for that kind of thing. Bit married to the job, I guess.”

“You don’t have friends?”

His eyes turned up in thought. “People in my line of work have two kinds of others in our lives: potential clients and potential adversaries. Not much room between.”

“What work is that?”

“Hey!” The portly cop suddenly noticed us. Apparently we were too close for comfort because he started up the stairs with an air that suggested he was gearing up to exercise his authority.

“Hey there.” I walked down and lifted the plastic tape over my head.

He raised a hand. “Come on, pal. You guys know the rules. No reporters past the line without an escort.”

“I’m not a reporter. We were just — ” I turned to the man behind me, but he was gone. I didn’t see him anywhere in the open square.

The cop put his hand on my arm. “Why you guys always gotta make things difficult? Is that part of the job interview or something?”

“Hold up.” I kept my feet and pulled free of his grasp. “I’m with the feds, hoss. Working with DoH.” I handed him my identification. “We’re investigating some recent illnesses. You might have heard about it.”

He squinted at my credentials. “That thing on TV?”

I nodded. Down the steps near the front of the building, a news crew began recording a segment. A bright light on top of a heavy camera lit a solemn young African-American woman in too much makeup and a staid coat.

He handed my ID back to me. “Got something to do with this?” He motioned to the building.

“Well.” I glanced back to Milan and Dench, who had retreated back down the stairs on the far side of the open square. “It might,” I said. It was the truth, but it felt funny all the same.

“Well, good luck, buddy. It’s a total mess up there.” He waved me off with both his hands, like he wouldn’t want my job.

“Mess?”

“Some guy. One of them 99-percenters. Tried to blow up the offices of a capital investment firm. You know, ‘take back the economy’ and all that. Left a note and everything. Only he cocked it up. All that waste of space did was embarrass his family and make a lotta work for everybody else. Bits of him are hanging from the goddamned ceiling. The EMTs can’t even find all the pieces!” He shook his head. “I feel sorry for the poor schmuck down at the ME’s office who’s gonna have to put little Humpty Dumpty back together.”

“I hope it’s Pratt,” I said.

“Huh?”

I shook my head. “Nothing. I don’t suppose you have a name on the vic.”

“Yeah. Alonso White. Some do-gooder from Spanish Harlem.”

I turned to look at my companions, but they were no longer in sight.

He saw my face. “You okay?” he asked.

“Yeah. Just fighting a little food poisoning.” I’m sure I looked pale. I motioned to the building. “You know what, sounds like you guys have your hands full. I’ll get the details at the office in the morning. Thanks.”

“Wait!” he called to me as I walked back the way I came.

I stopped, wondering how fast I’d be able to run with a dodgy stomach.

The cop took a few steps toward me. “You guys gonna find the bastard who killed that kid?”

I smiled. “You bet.”

A cold breeze whipped across my legs and reached under my shirt with icy fingers. I got goosebumps as I walked back to the car.

We were too late.

Just like that, our adventure was over.

Milan pulled her jacket around her as I approached. She read it on my face. “It’ll be long gone by now.”

I assumed she meant the doomsday book. The three of us looked up at the fog-shrouded building together for a long minute. I didn’t know what to say.

“We should get back,” she said.

I nodded. I’m certain she was worried about what they might find in Etude’s bed when they got back.

“Can we give you a lift somewhere?” she asked.

“Actually. I think I’m gonna go for a walk.”

“Really?”

“Yeah.”

“Are you sure you’re up to it?”

I nodded again. “Yeah. Thanks.”

I turned to the building again as the engine started. What had happened up there, I wondered, in that violet glow? Had he been surprised? Or had they explained to him what was coming? Had he begged for his life? Had he struggled? Were there candles and dark robes, or were they all dressed in Armani suits, stopping in the conference room for a snack between late night calls with Tokyo? Had they simply killed him? Or had they eaten him, too? Had they joked about women and talked sports as they rinsed the blood from their hands in the executive washroom? Were they picking him out of their teeth as they drove home? Did they feel full? Powerful?

I started walking.

“Dr. Alexander,” Milan called.

I stopped.

“Take care of yourself.” She said it like she meant it.

I heard the car roar and pull away as I turned up the street. I don’t even know how far I walked. I just kept going. I stopped at an all-night diner and had half a burger and two milkshakes. I called Marlene to let her know I was okay. It was the wee hours of the morning so she didn’t answer. I was glad. I called Ollie and left a voicemail on his work line. I said I was fine and they could call off the dogs, if there were any, and I’d catch him up later. I crossed the Manhattan Bridge as light broke over the horizon. I stopped halfway and watched the sunrise.

I hadn’t saved them. Any of them.

I went back to my hotel. I tried to sleep, but I could do little more than doze. There was something sharp nagging my mind, like a tiny splinter. I knew I had all the pieces. I just couldn’t figure it out. Somehow I just knew. A poking, pricking, mosquito of a feeling.

I’d missed something.

 

I’m posting the chapters of my forthcoming hardboiled occult mystery in order until the book is released in early 2018. You can start here: I saw my first dead body the summer we moved to Atlanta.

Sign up here to be notified when the book is released.

The next chapter is: The problem was me

[image error]

He promised!

20

I awoke lying in the back seat of the Chevy pickup into which I’d been placed. I think it was Dench’s. It was older, or so the smell and the squeaking brakes told me, but it ran well. Milan was behind the wheel and driving fast. There was some trash on the floor in the back — a fast food bag that still smelled of burger, and some chip packages and things. But I didn’t get the impression the man was a slob. More that he’d been waiting somewhere for a long time, like a stakeout.

The engine revved and I felt the truck pull hard to the right and around a slower vehicle, which was just about all of them apparently, because barely three seconds later, Milan repeated the same move, only to brake hard again. That was presumably at a light, given that we came to a hard stop, which nearly sent me to the floor. I was pretty sure that exact maneuver was what had woken me.

I saw a half empty water bottle in the center console between the front seats. I swallowed dry. I was about to damn etiquette and ask for someone else’s drink when Milan struck the steering wheel hard several times.

“Shit shit shit shit!”

She gunned it a moment later and wove back and forth and back again.

I opened my mouth to ask for the water, but she beat me again.

“He promised,” she breathed.

Dench didn’t respond. He just nodded obliviously, as if merely confirming the authenticity of her remark. I was sure then that he’d never been married, or if he had, it hadn’t lasted long.

“He promised me he’d stop using the chair,” she added after a moment. “He sat right in front of me at Martin’s funeral and swore on the world tree that he’d never use it again. Ever. Not for any reason.” She braked hard and I almost fell again. I braced myself with an arm, but pulled it back quick when I realized it might give away the fact that I was awake.

Dench stared out the windshield. Whether he was ignoring her or deeply contemplating her words, I couldn’t tell.

“He’s going to get himself killed,” she continued in a whisper before gunning it again.

Out the window, I saw lighted a green road sign pass overhead announcing the upcoming freeway.

“Sometimes I wonder if that’s even possible,” he said without a hint of concern, as if it were a purely academic question and he genuinely had no feelings on the man’s death one way or the other.

“Of course it’s possible,” she objected.

“Can’t he just come back again? Like the last couple times?”

“Her protections only work here. They don’t convey when he crosses over.”

Dench nodded slowly as if considering that for the very first time. Then he scowled. “So why now? We’ve gotten this close before.”

“I’m not sure we have.” She leaned forward to look up through the windshield. “He thinks it will be out in the open tonight. Our best chance in years.”

“And this one?” Dench nodded back to me and I shut my eyes quickly. “If that’s true, it would be a lot easier if we didn’t have to keep dragging him around with us.”

“He got closer to the book than anyone yet.” She glanced back to me. She saw me looking then. She turned straight and slowed a little.

“I don’t suppose I could have — ” I had to clear my throat. I coughed as well. “I don’t suppose I could have that water.”

Dench handed it back to me and I unscrewed the cap and drank just about all of it.

“Slowly,” Milan urged.

She was accelerating cleanly now. Must be on the freeway.

“So what’s this about a book?” I asked.

My companions stayed quiet.

“Come on, guys. I could hear you talking.”

“It’s nothing,” she said.

“It’s nothing,” I parroted. “Is that like a town in Poland?”

She didn’t say.

“What’s in this book?” I asked.

“Recipes,” Dench said, stoic as always. Then he turned to Milan, as if absolving himself of any further reply and waiting for her explanation.

“It was stolen,” she said. “A long time ago.”

I waited. “And?”

“And we’ve been trying to get it back. Or see it destroyed. When you and Oliver showed up talking about the mushrooms, we were scared and encouraged.”

I had the sense that was only half true, but I didn’t know which half. “Scared I get. Why encouraged?”

“Because we had a lead. For the last several years, it’s been . . .” She hunted for the right word. “Hidden from us.”

“Hidden? By who?”

“Whom,” Dench corrected.

“Gesundheit,” I said, finishing the last of the water. “So what happens tonight?” I added the empty bottle to the trash on the floor.

“You need to rest,” Milan accused sternly.

I couldn’t argue with that. Now that I had a short nap and some water in me, my blood was flowing again, which sent a fresh a headache hammering the back of my eyes. I shut them. I laid back and wondered to myself if I really believed any of the stuff I was hearing — doomsday books and bargains with old witches and everything. While weighing the merits of both sides, pro and con, I passed out again with my elbow draped over my eyes to block the passing street lamps.

The truck stopped hard and the motion sent me into the trash. I pushed myself up and saw ee were at the restaurant. That didn’t seem possible. It didn’t seem like I’d had my eyes closed for more than a minute. Maybe two. But here we were. The place was closed for the evening, which meant it had to be sometime after 11. The Jag was nowhere in sight. I had the sense that Etude had beaten us there by more than just a few minutes, although I didn’t see how, given the way Milan was driving. She didn’t wait for us. She hopped out and ran around to the back of the building while Dench helped me to me feet.

“I’m fine,” I said, even though I wasn’t. I asked where she was going.

“To let us in,” he explained.

Only he didn’t meant to the apartment, which we entered with ease. I don’t think it was even locked. He meant the sanctum, whose stacked-stone doors were shut and sealed. We waited in the hall for several minutes before they finally swung open, slow and silent. Must be a back door. Right away I smelled smoke, but not like from a fire. More like someone had burnt the pot roast. I leaned against the wall and didn’t move right away. Not until I saw the body.

The big room was no less impressive for seeing a second time. In fact, it seemed even more full. But this time it was uncomfortably warm, and the tips of a couple branches of the tree were on fire. It wasn’t much. The tree was alive and full of water and not in any danger of bursting into flames, but the dry tips of a couple small branches were burning like candle wicks. And the Japanese screen, the one that had covered the central alcove, rested at an odd angle as if leaning against something big on the other side. I still couldn’t see what it was hiding, but I caught the end of a taut chain, bolted through a steel loop to a square slab. The rock around the bolt was charred, as if the metal — both chain and loop — had been red hot and casting off sparks.

The chef was on the floor, face down, wearing his feathered garb. He wasn’t moving. His mask was upturned several feet away. Milan was leaning over him, feeling for a pulse.

“Doctor!” she called.

I moved as quickly as I could. “I’m not a real doctor,” I said, kneeling.

Étranger’s bald head was covered in running sweat, like he’d just spent eight hours in a sauna. I didn’t hear or see him breathing, but with his face down, either option was possible.

That’s when I noticed the books on the wall of shelves. It looked like there’d been a massive earthquake. Almost every single volume had fallen from the shelves to the walkways. Those that hadn’t laid sideways on each other.

“Jesus . . .” I said, turning my eyes over the mess. “What the hell happened in here?”

“Get some water,” Milan ordered.

She and Dench turned the chef over and worked the brightly feathered parka over his head. His arms were completely limp. His armpits were drenched in sweat. I could see his breath was very shallow and his eyelids fluttered like he was asleep. Or delirious. Milan pressed her ear to his chest and listened.

I stood in the semi-circular kitchen and I tried to remember where the chef had gotten the glass he had given me earlier. I opened one cupboard and a tarantula hawk — a wasp as large as three of my fingers — buzzed at me from inside a jar. I heard a clink as it tried to sting my hand through the glass.

“Ah!” I jumped back, which made me dizzy. And my movement was exaggerated, which meant my brain was working slow, probably from a shortage of oxygen due to not enough blood to carry it.

Why would he keep a wasp like that?

“Doctor!” Milan called.

I found the glasses on the other side of the sink. Fine mist rose from the tap as I filled one. It wasn’t until a moment later, when the heat penetrated the wall of the cup, that I realized it wasn’t mist. It was steam.

“Ow!” I dropped the glass and it broke in the sink.

“Doctor!” Milan yelled angrily.

“Fuck.” I had my fingertips in my mouth. “It’s hot!” I said.

“Please hurry!”

I scowled. She clearly didn’t understand what I meant. It wasn’t hot like when you let it run too long. It was hot like it was just poured from a boiling pot.

I grabbed another glass. I had lifted the handle of the faucet straight up, rather than to either side, yet what came out was instantly hot, which meant the water had boiled in the pipes. I let it run for a moment before I risked dabbing a hand in the stream. It was still quite warm, but it was approachable. I filled the glass and carried it over, fighting the urge to gulp it myself.

“What happened?” I asked again.

“A fight.”

She took the glass from me. “This is hot water.”

“You said to hurry.”

She lifted the man’s head to help him drink. I don’t think he was conscious. His lips pursed from the movement and smoke came out. I caught a whiff of sulfur. I turned to the Japanese screen. But I couldn’t see anything. Just a calm scene of a songbird on a branch.

I grabbed his limp wrist and felt for a pulse. His fingertips were dark, as if covered in charcoal ash. “He needs to go to the hospital,” I said. I switched from his wrist to his neck, hoping for a different result.

Dench shook his head. “No hospitals.”

“You don’t understand. He has a serious arrhythmia. Right now his heart is deciding whether it wants to keep beating or not. He could literally die at any moment.”

“No hospitals,” Milan repeated sternly but softly.

Étranger’s left arm started twitching and Milan pushed me back. “Benjamin.”

Dench helped him to his feet.

“Get him to the bed,” she ordered.

I was going to follow, but I wasn’t sure what I could do. I was still too weak to help carry him. But when the body was lifted, I saw something unexpected on the floor. When the others had turned him, they had covered it, but now it was clear. A symbol. Dark and powdery. Like it had been drawn in charcoal ash.

“Shouldn’t someone put out the burning tree?” I asked. But they were too busy grunting as they carried the limp chef in shuffling steps.

I went back to the sink and filled another glass — the water was much cooler now — and drank it. Then I filled it again and used it to snuff the smoldering branches. I washed the glass, filled it again, and drank. I leaned against the counter, cup in hand, and realized my hands were shaking, and my legs too, and my fingertips were tingling. I looked at the mark on the floor, near the discarded, upside down mask. It was a circle. There was a kind of crown shape in the center, but it was small. There was lots of space all around.

What the hell was it?

I looked up at the leaning Japanese screen. I walked to it. I reached up to slide it out of the way. But I stopped. My weak and trembling hand lingered inexplicably in midair as if, in being the closest body part, it was aware of some danger the rest of me was not.

Dench appeared in the door and asked if I’d like to wait up front. I took that to mean I wasn’t to hang around in Étranger’s private sanctum while the man himself lay near death in the other room. I followed him down the hall. Milan was nowhere to be seen.

I put my water on the carved stone table and collapsed on one of the couches. It felt great. I could’ve slept ten hours right then.

Dench just stood by the windows and looked at the floor. Motionless. Like a zombie.

“Is he gonna be okay?” I asked.

“Hard to say,” he mumbled.

That’s when I saw my bag. It was resting in the corner. I sat up with a grunt and walked to it. My phone was just about dead, and I found a nearby outlet and plugged it in.

36 hours.

That’s how long I was out of it. I’d missed the little boy’s funeral. I wondered if Marlene had called the police and what kind of shitstorm I was going to walk into at the office. If I hadn’t already been fired.

It was petty, I supposed, but the fact that the chef was possibly on his death bed in the other room washed away every last bit of anger I had. He’d risked my life, it was true. But he’d risked his own as well. That suggested whatever was set to happen that evening was a big deal, and that in his opinion it was worth both our lives to stop it. And to be fair, he had asked for my consent, in a sideways Étranger sort of way. In the car together, he’d asked if I would sacrifice myself to save my daughter.

Without hesitation, I’d told him.

I sat on the floor next to the plug with my bag on my lap and leaned my back against the wall. “So,” I said to Dench after a moment. “You can smell things.”

“Emotions,” he explained.

I raised my eyebrows. “No shit. What’s fear smell like?”

“Burnt hair.”

“Really? Huh . . . I wouldn’t have thought that.” I thought about Marigold. I would’ve given anything for a hug right then. “What about love?”

He just scowled. Like it was something truly nasty.

Milan came into the room from the hall. She stopped and put her hand to her forehead. “He’s resting,” she said with exhaustion.

She sat down and everyone was silent. It was the first moment we’d had to catch our breath. No one spoke.

“Make no bargain,” I said to myself. Neither of them asked my meaning.

Make no bargain, the chef had said. And yet he did. Granny said you could buy lots of things with a Moirai Penny, including time. And she ended up with a pocket watch. That seemed oddly significant.

A clock chimed. I’m not even sure where. From one of the rooms in the hall maybe. It was midnight. Somewhere in the city, I figured, something was happening that was worth my life and his. But none of us seemed to have a clue, save one.

A circle with a crown in the center.

But what did it mean?

I knew of a circle. I’d spent quite a lot of time recently constructing one.

I took out my tablet and brought up the map I’d made — the toadstool ring, a giant circle 30 miles wide — and zoomed in on the center.

Downtown. The financial district. Wall Street.

“Just a second.”

The others turned to me.

“What is it?” Milan asked.

To plot my dataset, I’d used the API of a publicly available map website. I wrote a quick script to make a best-fit circle and mark its exact center. I zoomed in on the dot. It fell directly over a public square that filled a gap between three high-rise towers. But the names of some of the prominent businesses were scattered around. One was called Royal Capital Management. I tapped the name, which brought up a website. Their logo was a crown.

I turned the screen around. “Mean anything to you?”

She stood. “We need to go.”

But she didn’t say it to me. She said it to Dench. I think they intended to leave me, but I wasn’t having any.

“Oh, hell no.” I stood.

 

I’m posting the chapters of my forthcoming hardboiled occult mystery in order until the book is released in early 2018. You can start here: I saw my first dead body the summer we moved to Atlanta.

Sign up here to be notified when the book is released.

The next chapter is: It was a night effect

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You got teeth marks on your heart!

19

The barn doors burst open.

Granny fired the shotgun and the recoil knocked her to the ground. The first man through the door took buckshot to the chest. His smooth white shirt made the circles blood easy to see. It was Virgil, the second orderly who had dragged me from Granny’s room. It wasn’t until he slumped to the ground that I realized Dench had been using him as a human shield. He had a large gun in his hand, but he was still at the other end of the garden.

The first orderly, Horace, picked up the shotgun as Granny moaned and tried to right herself. He cocked the second hammer and raised the weapon just as Dench fired the pistol, a .357. Big sucker. Even at thirty paces, the bullet ripped clean through Horace’s chest and broke a pot at the back. He crunched and went down, almost like he’d been punched in the gut. His hands clenched as he fell, pulling the shotgun trigger. Buckshot from the second shell ripped through the glass in the roof and the pieces fell over me.

Milan strode forward and tugged at my bonds as Dench kept the Magnum leveled at Granny Tuesday. He walked slowly to the spent shotgun, which had fallen under one of the planter’s boxes, and kicked it out of the way just as the chef walked in, hands in his fantastic coat. He looked at the body near the doors. Virgil’s white shirt was riddled with buckshot holes. Leaking blood now covered most of his white shirt.

“Don’t you worry none,” Granny said to me from the ground. “Ain’t the first time them two fools got themselves kilt. They was dead when I found ’em. I’ll raise ’em again later.”

Étranger walked through the poison garden toward his host. “Hello, Livonia.”

I couldn’t keep it in. The mere sight of him sent me into a rage. “You knew what would happen!” I barked at him from atop my tiny cross. “You were counting on it!” One of my hands fell free and I had just enough strength to shake it.

But he didn’t even look at me. He was watching Granny Tuesday. Intently.

“Look at me,” I demanded. But there wasn’t much force in it. I was still too weak even to stand, and my voice was cracked and hoarse.

Finally he turned his head, hands still in his pockets.

“You wanted her to use the coin. To spend some fate. You were counting on it.” Milan tried to calm me, to tell me to rest, but I wasn’t having it. “It gums up the works, right? That’s what she said. Turns everything upside down. All she had to do was flip it a few times and you’d be able to force your way in. Tell me — ”

I fell forward, over the lip of the planter’s box and onto the floor, taking quite a bit of soil with me. My bonds had been loosed enough that my weight did the rest. I groaned. It hurt.

“Very good, Doctor.”

“And what if she didn’t?” I demanded from the floor. I was turned awkwardly and looking at him upside down. “She was gonna kill me!”

“That was unlikely.”

“Unlikely?” I started coughing.

Milan leaned me back against the table by force. I was too weak to resist her. “He needs fluids,” she said to the chef.

Etude nodded to Dench, who walked to a sink at the back and got me a glass of water.

“Wash it out first,” Milan ordered. She glanced to Granny. “You don’t know what was in it before.”

Granny Tuesday sat up on the moss and dusted her hands off. She squinted one-eyed at the chef. “Had to try.” She motioned to the chair. “Have a seat. Take a load off. Give your dog a break.” She nodded back to Dench.

But the chef didn’t sit. He walked to Granny Tuesday and held out his hand.

She sat with her butt on the moss and didn’t budge.

“We all have our time, Livonia,” he said. “We must each make the most of it.”

It was only then that I realized the coin was missing. I thought it must have fallen to the floor in the melee. I wondered how it had landed, heads or tails.

Granny Tuesday scowled deeply. “Aw, hell.” She reached under her fat worm of a tongue and produced the silver Moirai Penny. But she hesitated. “I took it off him fair and square,” she objected, nodding to me. “Least you can do is trade me for it, rightwise.”

Étranger neither argued nor relented.

“There was a pocket watch,” Granny plead. “It was a gift from Mister Tuesday, inscribed with a little message. It were about the only nice thing he ever said to me, the sonuvabitch. I lost it. Years ago.” She motioned to the pockets of the chef’s fantastic coat. “Tossed it out after the bastard left. It means nothing to nobody but the world to me. Whaddya say? A fair trade’ll keep the Three Sisters happy.”

That seemed to persuade the chef. I could see his hand move inside his coat, like he was feeling around for an old receipt or something. He removed a closed hand. He held it out. He opened it.

In his palm was a brass pocket watch and matching chain. Granny Tuesday dropped the coin into the man’s tattooed hand and snatched her prize. She didn’t even look at it. She snuck it right into the pocket of her smock like she didn’t want anyone to see.

Étranger put the coin, and his hands, in his own pockets and sat. “A circle burns around the city,” he said. He looked around at the greenhouse. “I can’t help but notice that this place is not inside it.”

Granny stood slowly on shaking legs. “You’re a pox on two legs, you know that?”

“You know what will happen,” he said. “They have already found a saint. They need only scourge him until he renounces the light, to crack his soul and to cast it into the abyss and a new bridge will be forged.”

Granny Tuesday pulled another chair from under the workbench. It had snails on its legs. “Don’t patronize me.” She sat. “It ain’t my fault they found your precious book. And I ain’t the one what wrote it. I’m a businesswoman. I provide a service and I’m paid well. I don’t get involved in my clients’ affairs. And I don’t take sides. Certainly not with the likes of you.”

Dench leaned in then and sniffed. Right over Granny’s head. And not like he was checking out her rosewater cologne. It wasn’t a whiff like when I pick a shirt up off the floor and try to decide if its dirty. This was deep, like two dogs greeting.

He looked at Étranger and shook his head in the negative, as if he knew the old woman was lying.

“Christ,” she cursed. But she didn’t seem too worried, despite the pair of dead men on the floor. She leaned back and locked her fingers casually over her belly. “If you’re gonna shoot me, you heartless bastard, then do it quick.” She was talking to Dench. “And for fuck’s sake, don’t cock it up like you did with that Arab fella.”

“Keep it up, Granny,” Dench warned, gun in hand.

The old woman looked to the chef. “IF I had heard anything. IF. Then I’d have heard rumors he was a right proper warlock, too. Understand? Not some bored rich fella with too much time on his hands, if’n you know what I mean.”

“Where?” Étranger demanded.

“I don’t know! And if I ever did, I woulda cast it outta my mind.” She waved a shaking, arthritic hand over her white hair. “Ain’t nuthin’ good can come from knowin’ some things.”

“He asked you to bring something into the country.”

“I don’t know nuthin’ about that. But it seems to me a feller did ask for some smuggling recently.”

“Mushrooms,” I said.

“Weren’t mushrooms,” Granny corrected.

Etude actually seemed surprised. So much so, he didn’t have an immediate retort.

“How do you know?” Dench pressed. “If you cast it out?”

“Because whatever it was, it were heavy.” She was talking to the chef. “I didn’t ask what fer. I did the job and collected my fee. That was all. Your dog can sniff me now if he likes.”

Dench did and nodded in the affirmative.

Étranger didn’t like that. “Who was the buyer?”

“Lemon something or other. I don’t rightly know. Paid well for it, though. I remember that.”

Dench must not have liked that answer because he made a disgusted face.

Granny harumphed. “Lymon,” she corrected herself. “That was his name. Lymon Raimi. Rich fella. And no, I got no idea where to find him, just like I told ya. But I hear good things about them websites. Maybe you should check them.”

Dench nodded in the affirmative.

I could tell the chef wasn’t happy. He seemed lost in thought then. His eyes glanced up, but he wasn’t looking at the ceiling. He was looking out to the night sky.

Granny Tuesday cackled at the sight of it. The sound rippled through the room like the snap of wet logs on a fire. “Yup,” she said. “You noticed that, too? Gettin’ dark.”

She was right. The light throught he opaque glass was much dimmer than before.

“New Moon tonight, too,” she went on. “Seems to me, if’n you’re right about that circle, then you’ve run out of time.” She leaned forward to gloat. “Only one thing left to do, I say. Ain’t no way round it now.”

Étranger stood and strode for the door.

“Help me get him to his feet,” Milan said to Dench.

Granny removed the pocket watch and looked at the face, as if it were still keeping the correct time. Then she called after the chef. “Down to your last few hours!”

Etude didn’t stop.

Granny Tuesday cackled as her quarry reached the broken doors. “He’s gnawing on your soul, you old fool!” she called. “Every time you use his chair. I can see it. You got teeth marks on your heart!”

Milan jerked her head at the word chair. Her face turned pale. “Nononononono,” she chanted, struggling with her partner to get me out the doors.

We all heard the Jaguar start.

“No, no, no!” Milan let go and ran as Dench hobbled with me to the door.

But the chef had already driven away. I could see distant red taillights.

“Fuck!” she screamed.

 

I’m posting the chapters of my forthcoming hardboiled occult mystery in order until the book is released in early 2018. You can start here: I saw my first dead body the summer we moved to Atlanta.

Sign up here to be notified when the book is released.

The next chapter is: He promised!

cover image by Will Elder

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The Legal Tender of Fate

18

The first thing I realized was that my head hurt and I couldn’t move. After a grunt and a stab of panic, I remembered to open my eyes and found myself in an old wood-framed greenhouse. It was big — about sixty feet long and twenty wide — and looked like it dated from the last century. The panes in the gabled roof were stained and opaque and they let in just enough light to let me know it was daytime, but that was it. The panes on the sides sat atop a stacked-stone foundation and were equally unhelpful about anything that mattered, such as where the hell I was. I doubted it was in the city.

I looked around weakly. Someone had built rafters under the glass and they were overgrown with white-flowered ivy whose red-fringed leaves had woven themselves like thread between the dried strands of their forebears. A trellis at the back dangled bunches of herbs for drying. It arched over a long wooden table covered in potted plants of all sizes, from rows of tiny sproutlings in rectangular beds to a giant speckled monstrosity whose green tentacles spilled over its tub and swept the ground.

The floor seemed never to have been cleaned. Soil was left wherever it spilled and was slowly taking over the stone-slab floor. Velveteen moss covered every open patch and kept the tiny curling ferns at the margins. A faded bag of mulch, dropped in a corner and forgotten, had long since split down its length and given birth to a four-foot sapling.

And then there were the snails — on the ground and poking sideways from table legs and glassware. They were small enough to fit three on a quarter and so numerous you might be forgiven for crunching a few underfoot and thinking they were seeds.

An antique French valet with a Jacobean-patterned inlay imposed itself on everyone from the east wall. Its doors were open and its shelves stuffed to opulence. It gave the appearance of a shrine, although I couldn’t see an idol or altar, just a menagerie of vials and beads, twigs and crackly flowers, incense and figurines, baskets and boxes. A strand of Christmas lights was draped over it, as if hastily removed and left for next year.

My host stood next to her workbench, tending the six-foot-tall wire-framed aviary whose occupants hunted and pecked, flapped and hopped. A flew even flew free. She didn’t seem to notice them. Or me.

The rest of the space — except for the central path to the barnlike double doors at the far end — was filled with planter’s boxes, waist-high on stilts, two feet deep and four feet on a side. Compared to them, everything else in the greenhouse was an afterthought. I saw a cluster of rare orchids next to a shrublike beach apple tree — quite possibly the deadliest plant in existence. There were purple monkshood flowers, several species of henbane, a tangle of nightshade, and more. All the boxes were neatly organized, their inhabitants grouped like with like, and they were full to overflowing — probably because of how they were being fed. Each raised box sported an IV stand, which stood in its soil like a scarecrow. The bags at the tops trailed clear tubes all the way to the dirt. There were a dozen at least, stretching from one end of the greenhouse to the other, and every one was full of blood.

That’s where I was planted — in one of those boxes. I was kneeling such that the crumbly brown soil reached mid-thigh. My arms were bound at the wrist and shoulders to a wooden T-frame, like you might use to hang tomato plants. There was an IV stand next to me. It was filling from my brachial artery. My neighbor, a full wisteria, was blooming and kept my nostrils full of fragrance, which was good. I was so weak and queasy from the henbane that if I’d caught so much as a metallic whiff of blood, I would’ve puked over myself.

Granny Tuesday wore a different calico dress than before and had replaced her apron for a dirty smock. She was barefoot now and seemed to prefer it. Her toes wriggled joyfully on the moss as she hummed some old country tune.

“When I was a youngin’,” she said to me without turning from her birds, “my momma’d mix up some soapy water in a dish for us to play with.” She closed the cage and shuffled a few steps to her cracked-wood workbench. “She’d turn up a clothes hanger like this.” She’d made a ring from a stiff wire. She poured half the foamy contents of a bottle into a flat dish and made circles in the liquid with the wire. She took it out and blew bubbles. Most of them popped immediately.

“As beautiful and as fragile as a life,” she said. “It was a lesson. That’s how Momma was. Even when we was playin’, we was learnin’. It’s the same lesson them men learned, the ones what passed you in the hall the other day.”

The other day.

“Which men?” I asked weakly. My throat was hoarse. It felt like someone had run an onion slicer over my vocal cords and left them to dry. I coughed. I was so thirsty.

“Them fellers in suits who come out ahead of you. Know who they was?”

I shook my head. I fought the urge to pull against my bonds, which dug into my skin and cut the circulation to my tingling hands. I struggled to make fists, but I was weak. I figured I only had one or two half-strength tugs in me before my muscles gave out and I decided it was better to save them for when I had some chance of escape. If one ever came.

I wondered then why I had even agreed to walk into the John D. Bailey Senior Center. Was it because I’d hoped for a lead in the case? Was it because I’d been asked by a beautiful woman? Or was it something else?

“Them fellers own a bunch of websites. You know those? Even one that will tell your fortune. They got a whole buncha ladies in a office somewhere, and you call up or go on the website and they’ll pull tarot for you or look at your palm. There’s a program for it. Can you believe that? A computer to read the stars.”

Granny swirled the wire again and blew bubbles with tiny refractive rainbow swirls. “I sent them a nice note and told them bad things happened to folks who read the heavens but don’t pay the right honors to the ghosts and spirits, but they didn’t believe me. I even went out to their offices one day to warn ’em, and they laughed. Their PR woman patted me on the back and even went so far as to suggest, without sayin’ of course, that the whole thing was a scam.” She scoffed. “Well, weren’t long before that bubble burst.”

She blew again before dropping the wire in the dish. “Seems like one of them feller’s daughters had a terrible accident recently. She’s in the hospital with a rare infection. Might not survive, poor thing. And the other fella, he found out he’s a cuckold. The boy he’s been raising as his son in right truth came by another man. Painful.

“I told ’em. I told ’em both that was just the beginning of their misfortunes, and that there weren’t nuthin’ that could be done about it now. That seemed to upset them mightily. ’Specially since I’d told them before that I could protect them.”

I snorted. Protection.

“Fortune tellers give you a cut, Granny?” I coughed again.

“Every darn one. From here to Niagara. Healers and exorcists, too.” The old woman with the arthritic hands picked up half an apple and a knife and sliced it one-handed, dropping the slivers into her mouth. “You don’t sound so good, Doc.”

My host pulled one of three wooden chairs from under the workbench and turned it around to face me. She took a seat with a long groan. “Doc, Doc, Doc . . . I didn’t want any a this. You know that?” She turned her lips down and shook her head. “After I lost Mister Tuesday — in the war — I didn’t want nuthin’ to do with nuthin’. And I did alright for a time. But then old age come, like it do for all of us, and I couldn’t go driving round the hills and dells ministering to country folks like I used to. Hard life in the mountains.” She nodded to me. “You know. It was time to settle down.

“So I come to the city. Lots of folks in the city. All close together-like. Makes it easy for a old woman. And then I met this . . . this black woman — ” She emphasized the word. “Bethula Hatchie, she were called. She had the nerve to tell Granny she couldn’t do none of the palming and growing she’d done all her life — not without paying her some of my take.

“It never occurred to me before, that folks could tell other folks what to do like that. But she did. Folks listened, too.

“She said I had a choice. She said it in a nice way, but I knew her meaning. It were an easy choice, to tell the truth. I never knew how to do nuthin’ but what I do.”

She stood by pushing up from her own knees. She shuffled to the nearest planter’s box. It held six odd-shaped rose bushes. And of course an IV stand. The bag was almost empty.

“Bethula Hatchie was the first person I planted in this garden. I remember when she went in. She couldn’t believe it. None of them ever can. Like this fella.” She ran a gnarled hand over one of the rose bushes. “This here is the right Reverend Elmore Garrity. From Harlem. Baptist minister and pain-in-the-ass.” She spoke each word distinctly. “He said we was takin’ ’vantage and he come with the power of Jesus to shut ol’ Granny down.”

I didn’t see any evidence of a man in the box.

“Lookit him now. All bloomin’ and peaceful.” She turned to me. “But I gotta be fair. The reverend was a fighter. We couldn’t quite get the flowers to take, so we had to dig him up and cut him down smaller and replant all the bits. Then he took just fine.”

After she said it, the shapes of the bushes made a little more sense. A head. A torso. Couple arms and legs.

I looked down at myself, buried thigh-deep in potting soil. Thorned vines were already touching me.

Granny went on. “His eyes were as wide as turnips when we went in, like he never once figured the world could be that cruel. It’s the same look some of my clients get when Granny has no more chances left to give them. Some people expect you’d drain the ocean ’fore runnin’ out of second chances. They prey on that. Take advantage.”

Seemed to me then that Amber had told me the exact same thing at dinner.

“But ya gotta pay your debts in this world,” Granny said with a nod. “Granny don’t like to be taken ’vantage of. So tell me, Doc. Do you know that look? The one folks get when they realize for the first time just how nasty a place the world really is?” She studied my face. “You ever gave anyone that look? Or have them give it to you?”

I nodded.

“Good!” she said with genuine glee. “I’m so glad. It’ll make all this so much easier if we don’t have to start from scratch.” She held up the silver. “You don’t know what this is, do ya?”

I shook my head weakly. I didn’t see the point in lying. I was too weak to play the chef’s game. It didn’t seem to matter anymore anyway.

“I didn’t think so. If you did, you never woulda come. Nothin’ I have to trade is worth this silver. Not even my own life. This is a genuine, certified Moirai Penny,” she said. She ran her thumb over the face. “A rare thing. Doesn’t happen but once a King’s Moon, a coin like this — all tangled in chance and destiny. This here is the silver that Robert E. Lee flipped on his retreat from Richmond. Did you know that?”

I shook my head, mostly to clear it so I could contemplate my options. There didn’t seem to be any.

Granny sat down again with a groan. “Lee knew Sheridan and his army were comin’ up from the south, but he didn’t know quite where or when. The question was whether to turn north and try to outflank Grant, who was on hard chase, or to follow the Appomattox River in an attempt to outrun ’em both and hold out for the possibility of fresh men and supplies.

“If it were heads, they’d turn on Grant.

“If it were tails, they’d follow the river.

“It were tails. Sheridan come up, Lee got trapped, and he surrendered to Grant at the courthouse at Appomattox and just like that, the war was over.

“But this silver weren’t done. No, sir.” She admired it. “Some forty years later it was in the pocket of Orville Wright, who had a disagreement with his brother that mornin’ about whose turn it was to take out the flying machine. So they flipped for it.

“Of course, between then and there it did quite a few other things, too. Got a woman hung at nine months pregnant. Triggered a flood on the Missouri River. Started the Klondike Gold Rush of 1897. But those two are the ones of high note, so to speak.

“You can buy a lotta things with a Moirai Penny,” she said wistfully, before whistling. “The Three Sisters don’t like these in circulation. No, sir. They gum up the works. So they’ll take ’em in trade. The legal tender of fate. That’s what this is. Yessir, you can buy a helluva lotta things with a Moirai Penny.”

She turned to me. “So, how about you tell me how you came by such a wonder as this.”

I’d like to say that was the part where I crafted some master plan, where I lived up to my reputation as the clever man. But my head was throbbing and my hands tingled painfully and I could barely think to breathe.

“I see.” Granny nodded. “We found this in your pocket.” She unfolded a sheet of white paper and showed me.

It was blank.

She turned it around.

The back was blank as well.

“You wanna tell me what it said?”

“Not particularly.”

“Why not? Don’t you trust me, Doc?”

I laughed. She meant the words to ask whether or not I believed she would really do all the terrible things she threatened. But to my delirious mind, it sounded like a joke, especially in that garden of all places. You might have to be a biologist to really appreciate it. I saw new hybrids — crossbreeds — of wolfsbane, hemlock, monkshood, and a dozen other species. I saw red foxglove-like flowers probably loaded with digitalis-derivative beta-blockers. I saw spikes and thorns covered in ricin-class neurotoxins. I saw milky sap filled with schizophrenia-inducing hallucinogens. Who knew what else?

Most of your wild-type poisons are easily diagnosable these days, even when present in trace amounts, but only because modern science has learned what to look for. And since most people work in offices rather than on farms and don’t have the knowledge or time to grow and isolate poison, relatively few people are murdered that way. But before the modern era, before the mass production of cheap firearms when even a good sharp knife was hard to come by, poison was the first choice of thieves and assassins.

The plants Granny Tuesday was breeding were 100% organic and could’ve easily produced entirely new compounds that silently induced heart or renal failure, central nervous system shutdown, or insanity — completely and invisibly mimicking normal-onset diseases like dementia. To her victims — and their doctors — it would seem as if they’d suffered an unfortunate but natural calamity. Bad luck.

But despite all that, there wasn’t a single mushroom in sight, carnivorous or otherwise. If we’d come looking for our mysterious source, I suspected we were to be disappointed.

Granny Tuesday tossed the paper onto her workbench. “You know what’s funny? That paper was all we found. No wallet. No car keys. No fancy cell phone. That says you came ready for this here eventuality. But . . . you didn’t know what the coin was fer.” She frowned. “So who sentcha?”

I didn’t answer.

“Awww, come on, Doc. Just ’cuz you come in here a patsy don’t mean you gotta go out one. Have a little gumption. Stick up fer yerself! Tell whoever sent you to shove off and give Granny what she’s asking for and you and me’ll be all right.”

“You gonna let me go, Granny?” I coughed again. I couldn’t help it. My throat was sand.

“Not at all. But I’ll kill ya quickly.”

I laughed again. More of a giggle actually. I was so lightheaded.

I wondered how much blood I’d lost. I started to turn my eyes to the IV bag I was filling, but my stomach warned against it.

“Alright.” She stood on her spindly legs. She sighed. “Alright, alright. What do you say we test her out then?” She held out a hand. “Horace, be a dear and hand me that shotgun.”

The white-shirted orderly from before, the linebacker-looking one, stepped from behind the planter’s box. He’d been so quiet I had no idea he was even there. For all I knew, there were ten more back there with him. He handed Granny a double-barreled, sawed-off shotgun with two fat hammers, one behind and to the side of the other. The stock was snub, more like a pistol than a rifle. She grabbed the gun with both hands and cocked the forward hammer. But not without some difficulty.

She held up the silver, shotgun dangling at her side. “Heads, we kill ya right now and be done with it. Just save ourselves all the bile and headache.” She turned it around. “Tails, we letcha hang on a few days ’till them thorns start crawlin’ under your skin and you feel like squawkin’. Whaddya say?”

Before I could even raise an objection, she flipped the coin with her thumb. I watched it spin in the air and bounce off her open palm and hit the floor and roll under the workbench.

“Oh, poo!” She tossed the shotgun on the table — hard enough that I wasn’t entirely sure it wouldn’t go off right then — and carefully lowered herself to the mossy carpet like someone with bad knees and a stiff back.

Finding the coin took some time and more than a little grunting effort. I waited with pounding head.

“Ah ha!” she exclaimed. I saw her lean into a long reach. “Well, lookit that.” She struggled to her feet. She brushed her hands. Then she showed me. “Tails.”

My head dropped in relief.

Granny Tuesday stood on bare feet. Her toes were wriggling. She was giddy. “Excitin’!”

She looked at the shot gun. “Best two out of three,” she said and flipped again before my heart was even out of my throat.

I saw the coin spin in the air. She tried to catch it this time with two hands, but they shook and she missed and the silver penny bounced right over the shotgun.

My heart was pounding so hard — half from blood loss, half from fear — that I could actually feel it moving my chest.

She caught it this time and grinned like a little girl about to set her favorite doll on fire. “Heads. Well, well. Now we got ourselves a wager. Anything you wanna say before I flip again?”

I wasn’t sure who I was protecting or why, but then I’m not sure anyone ever did themselves a favor, in similar circumstances, by giving up everything they knew.

“I’ll make it easy for you,” she said. “I’ll say a name, and you nod your head, yes or no. How’s that sound?”

“Just do — ” My throat snagged on itself and I started to cough.

“Alright,” she said. “Suit yourself.”

The coin flipped again. We both watched it spin in the air. It hit her hand and slipped free and bounced hard on the work table and stopped. Just like that.

The Moirai Penny landed in a heavy groove between the slats of wood that made the surface of the workbench. Neither heads nor tails was showing. Or maybe they both were, like some cruel quantum experiment. The coin stood vertical, straight up on its narrow edge and immobile, but perched so precariously that the slightest breath could have turned it over.

Nobody moved. Even Granny was surprised. Our eyes met. I think in that moment we both knew what it meant.

She went right for the shotgun and swung it around.

 

I’m posting the chapters of my forthcoming hardboiled occult mystery in order until the book is released in early 2018. You can start here: I saw my first dead body the summer we moved to Atlanta.

Sign up here to be notified when the book is released.

The next chapter is: You got teeth marks on your heart!

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The Lord of Shadows

15

I didn’t take the chef for the vintage car type, but he was. Idling outside was a late-60s Jaguar MK10. All black. Four-door. Tinted windows. Big trunk. Perfectly round headlights at the end of a long sloping hood. Milan was behind the wheel, looking casual and graceful, as usual. And patient. She had clearly been waiting, as if she expected we would come.

I got in and glanced to the bistro. The staff was getting ready to close.

That big engine rumbled and we pulled away. It wasn’t long before we were on the freeway. That late, traffic wasn’t so bad.

I was sitting in the back, next to the chef. After a few minutes, I realized he was looking at me in the dark. I turned.

Not creepy at all.

“You didn’t answer my question,” he said.

Why public health. I shrugged again. “It’s generally not something most people care about. You know how it is. You start talking about work at cocktail parties and everyone’s eyes glaze over.”

But the chef’s didn’t. He waited.

“I don’t suppose you know much about cholera,” I said.

“It’s very unpleasant.”

I laughed. Milan smiled at my reaction from the front.

“Yeah,” I said. “So it is.”

“It took someone close to you?”

“No, nothing like that. It’s just, I read this book. In college. I had no idea what I wanted to be at the time. I was on athletic scholarship and just happy to be there. And terrified that I was expected to actually get a degree. I always liked science but I never thought I was smart enough for it. So I took this class on ‘science and society’ because it sounded more my speed, and we read this book that talked about cholera.

“The author started by saying how science wasn’t just about describing the world. It was about explaining it. Not just that it’s such-and-such a way, but why. If a person gets sick, he said, you can blame a bug. Chance, basically. That’s fair. But if a whole bunch of people get sick, and if they keep getting sick, over and over, can you really keep blaming chance? At some point, blaming the bug is just a description. Not a reason.

“Then he asked: Did all those poor folks die because they contracted cholera, or because the class structure of European society prevented access to clean water by the poor? Seems academic. I know. But at the time, it really got me thinking. I’d never thought about things that way. Guys from where I’m from, you know, they’re always complaining about this or that, institutional racism and everything, but I never thought there was a legit way to dissect society like that. Scientifically. Where it wasn’t just some folks bitching about thing they didn’t really understand. In hindsight as an adult, it seems obvious of course, but I never realized there actually were people who understood that stuff. Not just an opinion. And what that guy said made a lot of sense. It made sense of where I came from and why it is how it is and why other places are different.”

“And you wanted to fix it?”

I laughed. “I mean, yeah. I wanna do my part, same as anyone. But mostly I think I just wanted to understand. I wanted an honest explanation. Not just a description. I felt I deserved it.”

“The truth,” he said.

I nodded, and without pause, he added “Would you sacrifice yourself for your daughter? Without hesitation?”

I laughed again. “What?”

That’s how it was with him. The whole time.

But he was serious.

I looked out the windshield. I think we’d miraculously caught every single green light. We were already in Jersey.

I thought for a moment. It was an easy question, but the severity of his tone got me. It was the phrase at the end, I guess — without hesitation. I felt like I should be extra sure before answering. Like he was going to call me on it later.

“Would I sacrifice myself to save my daughter? Of course. Without hesitation.”

He nodded, like he wasn’t sure what I was going to say but that that was the right answer.

“Why?” I asked.

But he didn’t have the chance to say. We pulled to a stop in front of a dour, hulking man with dull eyes and a hairline halfway up his scalp, the kind of guy who might have played offensive lineman in school and who had to shop at the Big & Tall store. He stood on the curb in jeans and a waist-length buffed leather coat.

Milan parked and popped the trunk and everyone got out without a word. I felt like I had been cast in a play and had missed the dress rehearsal. I got out as well and stepped to the back.

“Whoa.”

The trunk of the Jag was organized like a mobile tool shed. Even the interior of the lid was covered, mostly with hand tools like pliers and screwdrivers. Two tanks of gas rested side-by-side on the floor next to a stack of folded towels, washed but stained. I saw bolt cutters and a long-handled fireman’s ax and duct tape and binoculars. Lodged along the curved interior wall was a baseball bat studded in nail heads.

I picked it up. I couldn’t help it. Between the basketball team and school work, I didn’t have much time for anything else, but I’d played a little baseball in my day. I gripped it with two hands. You could really do some damage with that thing.

The big man glanced at me but didn’t say anything. I mistook his cool demeanor for machismo at first, but that wasn’t it. He was just always flat, like day-old soda. He took the bat out of my hands and put it back.

“Sorry.”

He didn’t respond. He was busy gathering supplies. He handed me a small LED headlamp on an elastic strap.

“This is Mr. Dench,” Étranger said. “An associate of mine.”

I looked at the trunk again, just as Dench slammed it shut.

“Who are you people?”

“Plumbers,” the big man said. He lifted the gas tanks from where he’d set them on the road and followed the others toward the pit.

It was dark now. The little bit of light that had penetrated to the basement before was totally gone. Dench, Milan, and I wore headlamps, and the beams swung about like crossing swords as we moved through the darkness. Étranger walked like he could see clear as day. He stepped lightly across the collapsed floor and was the first to reach the basement. When the rest of us arrived, he was standing in the dark before the altar with his hands in the pockets of his coat.

Dench set the gas tanks down and immediately set to work trying to break the lock on the door with the bolt cutters. He was straining hard.

There didn’t seem to be anything for me to do, so I stood next to the chef. “You know what it means?” I asked.

He nodded. “The rat without its skin is a symbol of the underworld, a land of shadow and deception.” He pointed to the spires of the spent candle. “Whose Lord is crowned when light is extinguished.” He raised his finger to the deer skull. “In the time before civilization, the stag was revered as a majestic spirit. A swift and powerful animal — difficult to bring down with spears and arrows — with a coronet that rose and fell with the seasons. Chieftains and mages wore the antlers of the stag as a sign of potency.”

“So this is an altar to a king?”

“This is not an altar, Doctor. This is a totem. And a warning.” He pointed to the rat. “The Lord of Shadows.” Then to the stag at the top of the bonelike lattice. “Will rise and rule.”

“It’s been sealed,” Milan said.

The chef walked over and put his tattooed palms on the door. He held them there for a moment before whispering something. Then he stepped back and nodded and Dench cut the lock. It fell with a clatter. Milan slid the heavy door to the side with a grunt and it rumbled in its rusty groove.

The room beyond was…

Wow.

It was almost a perfect cube. Rusted chains hung from the ceiling, left from some earlier use. Neon yellow spray paint made symbols on the walls and ceiling — six of them like simple labyrinths, repeated over and over, including the one I had seen in the condemned apartment. Dead bodies slumped sideways against each of the three interior walls. Their faces had been smashed and there was very little left to identify them. Their hair was gone and seams of liquefied rot ran in spurts across their chests, arms, and legs. Their flesh had grown soft and putrid and split open like spoiled fruit. Mushrooms sprouted from the gaps.

Glowing green.

Instinctively, we shut off our headlamps and let our eyes adjust to the faint but persistent light. Almost immediately the fungi seemed to get brighter. I could see the shapes of the flowerets — whimsical and eerie. The iridescent hook-shaped stalks erupted from inside decaying bodies, which were now all but invisible in the dark, and ended in broad caps that shone brightest at their centers. In the silence, I half-expected leprechauns or demented pixies to leap from the shadows and dance their soul-stealing reverie.

Then the stench hit. It had moved slowly in the still, cool air, and when it came, it hung over us like the heavy perfume of too many flowers. It was both acrid and pungent, like a dog waste bin left to bake in a how summer sun. I covered my nose. But the silent assault on my senses, I couldn’t move from the gruesome scene. I was fixed.

“What do you know of toadstool rings?” Étranger asked me softly, eyes reflecting the green light.

“They’re an artifact of how fungi grow,” I said through my fingers. “They start at a point and move outward, depleting the nutrients in the soil and leaving a gap.” I stopped. “That isn’t what you meant.”

He shook his head. He hadn’t taken his eyes from the room. “Early peoples noticed rings that sprouted from the earth where none had been the evening before. Children were warned to stay away, lest they step into the circle and be whisked away to the fairy realms. Those who did were lost. Or returned decades later not having aged a day, all their family and loved ones gone.”

Dench and Milan began dousing everything in gasoline while the chef watched. The smell of the gas on top of the rest made my stomach boil.

“Like Rip Van Winkle,” I said.

“This is much different,” the chef explained. “Much worse. A ring of dark light. Light that doesn’t come from the sun.”

“It’s an enzyme,” I added. “Called luciferase, actually. If you can believe that.”

Etude shook his head. “This has nothing to do with mechanisms and energy, Doctor. This light is born of sickness. And suffering. And death.”

Dench threw the rat carcass and twig lattice, complete with deer skull, into the room just as Milan struck a match and dropped it. The gasoline ignited with force, and I felt a blast of heat wash over me. The mushrooms shriveled in the heat and went dark. The larger ones started popping, which sent clouds of tiny yellow embers into the air, like fireworks.

The fire grew. Flames rose and bent around the door, licking the ceiling. Smoke billowed. Étranger turned without a word and started for the stairs.

“If we had time,” he said as we followed him up the steps, “I imagine we would discover many of the properties that lie along your circle have been bought and sold recently.”

“What do you mean ‘if we had time?’”

When he didn’t answer, I turned to Milan, but she was on the phone anonymously reporting the fire to 911. I listened to her frantic voice as we walked out of the building and onto the litter-strewn field that surrounded the school.

“Hold on,” I urged.

But the chef kept walking, hands in his pockets. He didn’t even turn.

“Wait a minute!” I shuffled faster after him. When I turned to see if the others were following, I caught a glimmer from inside the school. A yellow flicker, rising and falling, backlit a few of the openings, giving the appearance of a hollow skull. I stopped.

The fence rattled as the others made it over. I turned to join them, but the Jaguar rumbled to life before I made it to the top.

Red parking lights illuminated the dark street as the chef rolled his window down. “Thank you, Doctor. Your help has been immeasurable.”

I got the distinct impression they were about to leave me on the side of the road. I jumped down.

“I wonder,” he said, “if you would permit me to call on you again.”

“Call?” Had I been called?

“There is somewhere you can go that I cannot.” And just like that, he nodded and the car pulled away and left me the sole witness to a building fire.

It was only then, as the bright red taillights turned the corner, that I realized I had just stood idly while they burned all my evidence.

“Awwww SHIT!”

 

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The next chapter is: (not yet posted)

cover image by Piotr Jablonski

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On the proper way to eat sushi

Most of Japanese TV is about food, which is odd considering that Japan consumes fewer calories per person than any of the major industrialized nations, by far. Not that there are many cooking shows. There aren’t. Unlike in America, where people learn to cook from books and TV personalities, Japanese people learn to cook from their mothers.

TV here is filled with “magazine shows” which cover all manner of topics that might appear in the Lifestyle section of the newspaper, including food. A typical segment will follow two male hosts, accompanied by an attractive and much younger female host, as they wander some local town on foot looking for a specific mom-and-pop shop that they heard makes its oyakodon in some special way. The hosts will meet the proprietors, make small talk, and sample the dish to visible delight, screaming “Oishi!” (Delicious.) Then the secret will be revealed… but censored, to entice you back after the commercial break.

Fear not. It’s almost always some minor tweak to the standard recipe that you or I would never notice: the blanching of the egg first or the addition of a local root vegetable or the use of imported Spanish chickens. The oyakodon is still oyakodon.

Orine watches a lot of these shows, which means they’re on in the background while I work. One of the male hosts we see on a regular basis is a real dandy. Something about being wealthy turns middle-aged Japanese men into right proper dandies. This fellow lightens his hair, which has clearly been replaced with surgery to combat male pattern baldness, and carries a bag indistinguishable from a purse. The other day, the producers interrupted his golf game to conduct a surprise site gag, and he was decked head-to-toe in Calloway-branded outerwear, presumably to let everyone know what a fine golfer he is.

When this guy drinks wine — which he seems to like since we often see him drinking wine — he makes the “O” face that professional wine tasters do and “breathes” a sip of wine back and forth over his tongue. Now, this is in fact something people do. However, for it to be useful, it requires two equally important ingredients: a highly complex wine and a highly refined palate. If either of those are missing, it’s a pointless affectation. (Of course, wine tasters also take only a tiny sip and then spit it out so as to keep from getting drunk, which makes all the wine taste wonderful!)

The other day, this guy was doing that with the house wine at a steak place. It was an expensive steak place, to be sure. (Realize that beef here costs 25–50% more than in the US.) But still, it was the house wine.

To be clear, if you do the wine tasting thing around me, I’m not immediately going to think you’re an ass. If, through the course of the conversation, you happen to demonstrate a deep and nuanced appreciation for fine wines, I’m going to walk away thinking nothing but “Man, that gal sure knows her stuff!” But if not — if you know no more about wine than I do, or, heaven forbid, actually less — I’m just going to think you’re a stuck up prig.

Sushi, like wine, is one of mankind’s greatest culinary inventions and capable of subtle gymnastics of flavor, which is amazing when you consider there are only three or four ingredients. (Sushi in Japan typically does not mean rolls. Rolls are cheap. Sushi is nigiri, a four-inch cut of fish draped like a wet curtain over a three-inch slab of hand-pressed rice, with or without a dab of wasabi underneath, with or without a brush of soy on top.)

You will see all kinds of “rules” about how you are supposed to eat sushi — with your hands, for example, or by dipping in soy at some prescribed angle, or by never ever ever ordering a California roll, which is not actually sushi. And yes, if you go to a really nice sushi restaurant in Tokyo, you will see people eating with their hands, and you will not see any California rolls. But they don’t all eat with their hands, and certainly not at the mid-market places, which means even polite, well-educated Japanese people eat sushi with chopsticks — particularly, I’ve noticed, if they are sharing from the same large serving plate.

But snobbery exists everywhere, and sooner or later you’re bound to run into a Japanese person — or worse, a Westerner — who says “no no no no” and corrects your horrible breach of sushi etiquette, whatever it is. I’m here to tell you that you can tell this person to go fuck themselves. The proper way to eat sushi is this: with enjoyment, and with respect for the person who made it.

That’s it.

(cover image by Toshio Saeki)

Truth is a bitter poison

14

There was no sound. But it was wide open.

I walked to it and stood. I looked up the stairs.

“Hello?” I called.

Nothing.

I walked up. The door at the top was open as well. I saw the giant shrunken head. It was even creepier in the dark of night.

“Hello? Is anyone here? You left your front door open.”

Past the couches, the French doors were open as well. Beyond was a carpeted hall. Tasteful lighting. A few single doors. At the far end, another double set, but like nothing I’ve ever seen, before or since. Vault-sized. Heavy. Made of variously protruding stacked stone cubes — volcanic red obsidian — each rough-hewn and capped in a carved symbol, sort of like a Chinese character. They looked like the doors to another world.

They swung open silently, as if I’d tripped an invisible sensor. Beyond was a chamber at least twice as big as the restaurant below, both in width and in height. It extended to the far corner of the building, so it was flanked with the same floor-to-ceiling windows on two sides. Only they were covered in something. Designs. And writing.

“Hello?”

“Good evening, Doctor.” The chef. Definitely his voice. Only I couldn’t see him.

I walked down the hall. “Hey, your front door’s open.”

I stopped at the threshold.

“Holy shit . . .”

The room was enormous, almost like it was bigger on the inside. There was a full-grown tree in the center, branches lush with leaves. They rose up toward a vaulted roof supported by curved iron girders. At the center of it, directly above the tree, was a small stained-glass dome decorated in colorful figures I didn’t recognize. At the base of the back wall, to my right, was a series of five brick alcoves — low archways really, not quite tall enough to stand up in — each locked behind a hinged metal gate. It looked like a Civil War–era prison. There was a single artifact secured inside each nook, except for the one at the center, which was obscured by a folding Japanese screen.

Above the squat alcoves was a three-tiered wall of books that rose straight to the ceiling. It was encased in slightly tinted glass. I’m sure it was polarized as well to keep out even faint amounts of damaging rays. I’d been in enough academic libraries in my career to know a rare book depository when I saw one. The only access was via a pair of flanking spiral staircases, one at each end — black and metal and very narrow. I’m sure the interior, which left just enough space to peruse the stacks, was climate controlled — cool and dry. The books inside were clearly old, like something out of a medieval castle. You could tell by the spines. And there were so goddamned many of them.

But the coolest thing was the lighting. Behind the books, the entire back wall glowed. I couldn’t see the glare of any bulbs. Just soft and evenly radiant panels.

I can tell you, that room is still, without a doubt, the coolest thing I have ever seen. It would take forever to describe everything inside, like the gilding on all the girders and window frames, which seemed to tell a story, like the carvings of a medieval cathedral. Or the odd and unusual trinkets that filled the gaps between the tomes. Or the artifacts sealed under glass. To my left was a man-sized terrarium hiding a rainbow of poison dart frogs — which are legitimately lethal and, it occurred to me, probably illegal to own. To my right, an entire ox was suspended from the high ceiling, hanging by its rear legs from a long golden chain. The chain was attached to a pulley on the vault girder, and it swung slightly, like an organic Foucault’s pendulum. The animal’s blood had drained from the cut in its neck into a giant metal pot underneath, and the carcass moved back and forth over it in a three-inch path. I glanced in the pot and stared at the blood, thick and dark, like liquid mystery, distilled and concentrated.

But it was the tree in the center that really commanded your attention. I couldn’t see the roots or the base, but the bark was gnarled and twisted and ashen gray. Around it stretched a semi-circular counter, like a kitchen, complete with flanking sinks and built-in cutting area and stove and everything. It was raised slightly and faced the windows, like it was a giant podium on which he conducted the city.

The doors closed behind me as my host pulled jars of dried ingredients from a rack. I was busy staring, neck craned, at the high windows. The upper panes were huge and filled with some kind of writing, like nothing I have ever seen, while the lower panes were smaller and covered in scratchy handwriting, some in English. It looked like the white board in my old microbiology lab. Only it wasn’t gridlike and organized. It swirled. The letters grew and shrank as if a madman had been using the panes for a manuscript. There wasn’t a spare inch to a height of six and a half feet — except for one small pane in the very center, directly in front of the tree, which had been replaced by a small, inward facing mirror. Directly back from it, inside the wall of books, a rainbow-feathered garment hung inside a clear glass case. It was a bulky pullover with no sleeves, like a parka made of bird of paradise plumes. Hanging directly above it it was a toothy, snarling mask, while underneath was an oval drum. Both were intricately carved, apparently from a single piece of wood. The drum’s membrane was cross-hatched in a geometric pattern that was worn at the center, presumably from long use.

“Here.” Étranger had poured the powdered ingredients he’d mixed into a leather drawstring bag. He held it out. “Taste this.”

I took it. “What is it?” I sniffed. Nothing. I inserted a finger and felt dry powder. I dabbed a little on my tongue.

I bent and wretched immediately. I spat on the man’s floor. Part of me felt bad for doing so. Part of me was angry at him for making me. I’ve never in my life tasted anything so bitter.

I coughed. “What the hell?” I gagged again.

He retrieved the bag from my hands, pulled it closed, and handed me a napkin. I squeezed the running saliva from my mouth into it and wiped my tongue on the back side. He produced a glass from under the counter and filled it in the sink. He handed it to me and I drank as much as I could before needing breath. He motioned to a stool and I sat.

“Ugh.” I swiped my tongue against the roof of my mouth and drank again. I looked at where I spat on the floor. “What the hell did I just taste?”

“Truth.”

“Truth? It tasted like poison.”

“It is. How was your meal?”

“The meal? It was excellent. Thank you.” I glanced to the floor once more. I took another drink.

“Tell me, Doctor. May I ask you a personal question?”

“You just bought me a very expensive dinner,” I said after a long series of gulps. “The way I see it, you’re entitled to second base.”

“Why are you in public health?”

I scowled. It was as odd a question as it sounds. And vaguely insulting.

“It’s an unusual choice,” he said.

“For someone with my background, you mean.”

“You disagree?”

“No. Hard to argue with that.” I finished the water.

He took the glass. “Another?”

I shook my head. “Can I ask you something?”

He parted his tattooed palms as if they were an open book.

“Why am I here?”

“You walked through the door,” he said.

“That I did.”

He placed his palms on the counter. He looked like he was deciding what to say. “You have access to resources I do not.”

I looked up at the leaves of the tree over my head. Fuck, there was a full-grown tree in there. “How did you know? About the animals?”

“The natural world penetrates even the canyons of man.” He pointed out the windows behind me, to the New York skyline in the distance.

“You already know there’s a circle. Don’t you?”

“No.” He didn’t flinch. “But I suspected. May I see?”

I reached in my bag and brought out my tablet and showed him the data I’d collected. I pointed to the missing segment in Jersey and explained the issue. I said I had been out testing my theory before dinner.

He listened intently.

“Do the words ‘Prepare the way’ mean anything to you?” I asked.

His eyes turned to mine. “What did you find?”

“Wasps.” I squinted. “And a rat carcass. Across town. Big sucker. Skinned. With a — ”

“Crown of wax,” he finished.

I nodded.

He stood straight. “Can you show me that place?” He walked around the counter and reached for a coat draped over one of the stools.

“What? Now?”

He nodded and swung the coat around him. It was remarkable — cut like a Tibetan chuban but without the padding. The two flaps of the front wrapped around each other like a robe. The top was held shut by three large buttons — one near the neck, one at the apex of the flap, and one farther down that he left unfastened. Each button was different. The top was carved metal. The one in the middle was a dollop of polished, shining amber. I couldn’t see the third. I was a little disappointed he didn’t reach for the brightly feathered pullover hanging in the middle of the wall of books, but the chuban was impressive enough. It looked well used, as if he’d worn it on repeated trips around the world. The crooks of the elbows were permanently wrinkled and the hem was the tiniest bit frayed in spots. But the coolest thing was how the dye had faded to a mottled, splotchy gray-and-white, like an early morning fog.

I looked at my watch. “It’s almost 11.”

“Are you tired?”

I wasn’t. At all. I’d been going all day. But I felt like I could work another twelve hours straight. “What the hell was in that powder?”

The stone doors swung open.

“Please.” He held out his hand. “There is not much time.”

 

I’m posting the chapters of my forthcoming hardboiled occult mystery in order until the book is released in early 2018. You can start here: I saw my first dead body the summer we moved to Atlanta.

Sign up here to be notified when the book is released.

The next chapter is: (not yet posted)

cover image by Jack T. Cole

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The dark looked back

13

Mom drove Alvin and me from Atlanta to my aunt’s house in North Carolina. Really she was Mom’s cousin, but we called her Aunt Susan. She’d married an ex-con and reformed skinhead and they lived with their three kids — one each by a previous marriage and one together — in the foothills of Old Appalachia. The whole way in the car, I knew something was wrong. But Mom’s early 2000s Chevy Cavalier had a loud, rattling engine and no air conditioning, which meant the windows were down and it was impossible to do anything other than yell simple sentences to each other.

“Are we there yet?”

“I have to pee.”

Before we left, I’d heard my mother say something about Auntie Marie and Aunt Zelda coming up from Rose Hill with their families, so I thought we were going for a family reunion. And sure enough, as we pulled up the gravel drive, there was all the evidence of a party. There were more cars parked than could fit in the driveway and a couple kids I vaguely recognized running between them and shooting each other with water guns.

Mom was nervous. I could tell. So that made me nervous, too. Alvin wasn’t even speaking. He hadn’t said much at all since the drive-by a couple nights before. Mom and I were both worried.

We got out and I stretched my legs. My stomach growled at the smell of grill smoke. The parents rounded up all the kids and everyone gathered in the living room. Alvin and I were reintroduced to our cousins, which was good. I didn’t remember any of their names.

Then my Aunt Susan asked Alvin if he had a bag and if he wanted to take it upstairs. He looked to my mom, and she nodded. He went back to the car. I looked to Mom as well. I hadn’t brought a bag. I hadn’t been told to.

I got angry when I realized what that meant. Alvin wasn’t coming back with us.

We got the quick tour of the place, after which my uncle explained that he had a possum under the house that he hadn’t been able to clear. Not only was it getting into the trash, which was hassle enough, it was damaging the plastic lining that kept the water out of the foundation. He said he wanted everyone to know, especially us kids, that the pellets lying around the house were poison and that we should stay away from them. Not even touch them, in fact. And we should keep all food in the house, so as not to feed the creature with our crumbs, and we should restrict our play to the front yard.

To my juvenile brain, this seemed like the perfect occupation. When I was older, I escaped my cousins by helping the adults in any way I was allowed — with cooking, with dishes, with errands to the store. But this trip, I had nothing. I was fourteen and angry. The last thing I wanted was to be around kids, the oldest of which was three years younger than me. I needed to sulk. I convinced myself the poor animal under the house was nesting, which meant it probably had young, and that there wasn’t another person there who cared an ounce for any living thing they couldn’t shoot and/or eat, and that if anyone was going to save it — and its helpless babies — from painful and pointless death, it would have to be me.

It helped, I’m sure, that my aunt’s place was ripe for exploration. They had an old trailer out front and two cars with no wheels, and my uncle had a collection of barbecues, lawn mowers, and motorcycles, none of which were usable, that nearly filled the dilapidated barn in the back. Beyond it, there was a gully and a stream and a big corn field behind a row of border trees.

I excused myself to the bathroom, and when I came back, the younger kids were already out front. I took a plastic grocery bag from under the sink and used it like a glove, picking up all the poison from the sides and back of the house and putting it in the trash. Then I gathered some chicken wire and some sticks from my aunt’s garden supplies under the porch and took them to the back, away from the other children. I made a curved container I assumed would be large enough to hold an opossum, although I had never actually seen one in the flesh and in hindsight I’m sure it was half too small.

All I needed was bait, which meant risking a return to the house. Looking back, I can see that my Aunt Susan wasn’t rich by any definition, but they were without a doubt the wealthiest people I knew. There was all kinds of food. I had pulled pork and corn and stuffed my cheeks with sausages and slaw and put a few links on a paper plate and turned for the back door where my plump Aunt Susan stopped me and reminded me sternly that I wasn’t to take food outside, per my uncle’s orders. She took my plate and replaced it with her hand and led me to the front, where the younger boys were playing with action figures. My aunt convinced them to do something more to my liking, like dodge ball, and we played a few games in a patch of high weeds. Alvin got hit in the face, but he liked it. He smiled at me. And suddenly I didn’t feel so bad. Maybe Mom was right. Maybe it was better he stayed there.

Maybe I wanted to stay, too.

After a while, it started to get dark and I remembered the poor opossum and the unset trap I had left in the back yard. My cousin Shawn had some candy and I asked for a piece. I think my idea was that animals were always hungry — that’s how you always saw them on TV, chasing desperately for food — and all I had to do was put food inside my little trap and wait, out of sight, behind a stretch of leaning fence that ran along one side of the yard, until the opossum came to feed. Then I would pounce on it. How I planned to cover the twenty or so yards from the fence to the trap before the animal fled back under the house, I have no idea. But I remember I wanted to release it in the “big” woods on the other side of the corn field, which seemed like a right long ways away.

But when I went round to the back, my trap was gone. I looked all over. But I couldn’t find it. I thought maybe one of the adults had picked it up. Adults were always taking things and putting them away before you were done with them. I was about to walk back to the porch to see if there were more materials I could use to make a replacement — perhaps even one with a trigger mechanism — when a light clicked on. It was high on a pole that rose over the cluster of trees and shrubs that separated the lawn from the corn field. The whole crop had died over an unusually hot summer, and the brown stalks rustled in the breeze. A tractor path — just two dirt grooves dug through long use — ran from the yard to a work shed near the electric pole. The door of the shed creaked slowly open.

I thought that was unusual. I seemed to remember it was always locked, especially when family was over, because that was where my uncle and my cousins kept their guns. But it swung wide and rested against the outside wall. There was no voice. No shuffling feet. No calls to the house that so-and-so couldn’t find what they were looking for and where was it again? No one was there. But it swung open all the same. And resting right in the middle of the shed was my discarded trap. It was just sitting there, lit by the light cast across the floor by the open door. It was blue-dusk then, right after the sun disappears over the horizon but right before total dark, which meant I could still see the workbench and the gun rack and the tools and the lawn mower and the old motorcycle covered in a tarp, but only in silhouette.

I stared. I thought about the opossum. And the babies I’m sure were silently hungry under the house. The logical part of my brain suggested that my uncle must have figured out what that odd bundle of sticks and wire was supposed to be, and he had thrown it in the shed, where he kept all the things he didn’t want folks to find — my cousins had suggested during dodgeball that there was pornography in there — and that he didn’t want me to save the opossum.

I started down the tractor path toward the shed. The only sound was the fading cackle of the adults inside the house and the crunch of dirt under my feet. If I had been from the country, that might have been a warning — that there weren’t any crickets or cicadas or anything. But I wasn’t from the country. I was from the city, where a cricket’s chirp was a hidden nuisance and not a lullaby.

I stopped about ten feet from the door. I don’t think I even knew why. Just that the little hairs on the back of my neck were tingling. Like that feeling you get when you’re being watched.

I looked at my trap. I looked at the dark gap of the door, between the hinges.

And the dark gap looked back.

I was sure of it.

It was looking right at me.

What was wrong, it seemed to be asking. Did I not want my trap? I had worked so hard on it. Would I not take just a few more steps to retrieve it?

I stayed locked in that gaze for a tiny eternity, until my mother’s booming voice fell over the lawn. She was screaming at my uncle from the back porch. He’d left the door to the shed wide open. How could he, after what had just happened in Atlanta? Guns were the whole reason we’d fled.

He denied it, of course, and all the children were quickly gathered and there was a small inquisition in the living room. But no one would admit to anything. My trap was tossed back under the porch. The door to the shed was closed and locked. And we all had cake and ice cream. I hadn’t had cake in . . . well, a long damned time. I ate so much I felt sick after and slept the whole way home. And when I woke up, I’d forgotten all about the thousand eyes I thought I’d seen blinking behind the door of that dumb shed. That was kid’s stuff anyway.

A few days later, my uncle called our house. Mom set the phone aside and asked me sternly if I had put the poison in the trash. I was certain I was going to be in trouble. I had been told not to touch it.

I said no, which angered her. So I got angry back.

“Yeah, so what? What’s he need to kill that animal for anyway?”

Mom spoke briefly to my uncle. Then she hung up and told me my uncle wasn’t mad at all. In fact, I had solved the man’s problem for him. The opossum had completely ignored the pellets on the lawn, but by putting them in the trash, I made sure it sampled them on its next midnight raid. The animal was gone, and my uncle never thought higher of me than at that moment. From then on, I got a reputation in my family as being a very clever boy.

Two weeks later, we got another call. Mom collapsed when they told her Alvin was dead.

 

I’m posting the chapters of my forthcoming hardboiled occult mystery in order until the book is released in early 2018. You can start here: I saw my first dead body the summer we moved to Atlanta.

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cover image by Tahra

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