You got teeth marks on your heart!
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.
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The next chapter is: He promised!
cover image by Will Elder
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