The first trick you learn

19Oct

Other that a few wisps of cotton, it was blue skies as far as the eye could see, and even bluer ocean. It was a little bit warmer than it had been, but the wind coming off the waves more than compensated and the beach was mostly empty. In fact, there was only a single couple walking on the sand. I sat on a slat-wood bench, one of a long row of them that looked out over the railing toward the water. Although the beach was mostly deserted, there were quite a few people on the boardwalk behind me. It wasn’t a summer crowd, but there were more than I expected for a brisk October day. Not many were sitting, though. It was too chilly for that. But as long as you kept moving—walking or riding a bike—the sun made for a pleasant afternoon.

I’d parked at the nearest precinct and walked down, so it was a good twenty minutes before my body cooled off enough that I felt the chill. I pulled my coat tighter and lamented the fact that it was both illegal to smoke there and too windy anyway. That’s how I sat, my butt slowly chilling on the cold wood slats, for the better part of an hour, before I saw her. She was sitting further down the boardwalk on the same row of benches, a good three hundred yards from me. I got up casually and strolled with the pedestrians, dodging the occasional biker. As I got closer, I could see her two orderlies-cum-bodyguards waiting on the opposite side of the boardwalk, near the stairs to the parking lot. One of them stood next to a wheelchair. They were motionless and their frosted eyes stared ahead like zombies.

I sat down on the far side of the same bench.

“Oh, Christ,” she cursed with a scowl.

She was knitting, and she set her needles in her lap and clutched her hands together like she was ready to give me a Captain Kirk karate chop.

“What do you want?” She spat on the boardwalk in my general direction.

I looked down. A gust of wind had blown and knocked her spittle to the ground within an inch of my shoe.

“Hiya, Granny.”

The first time I saw her, she was wearing a worn calico dress, scuffed faint brown at the sides from years of wiping her hands. And of course those heavy unlaced boots. I was hiding behind a stack of boxes on a pallet inside a meat distribution depot. Beyond the plastic flap behind me was a room full of dangling pigs and the corpse of something I’m not even sure I could describe. The fluorescent lights above us reflected off the pale green walls and gave everything a sickly, depleted color, like the whole world was battling some horrible infection. Her two goons had a Lebanese man in a dirty white smock on his knees in front of her. She had his tongue in her hand. She hadn’t cut it. There was no blood. She’d simply reached in and taken it out, and it squirmed in her palm like a giant bumpy leech. The man before her grunted and groaned incoherently, all shock and vowels.

“Detective Chase,” she muttered. “The fly in my ointment. Or is it on my windshield? I can never remember which.”

“Nice to see you, too, Gran. How long’s it been? Couple months?”

“Has it?” She picked up her needles again and resumed knitting. “Doesn’t seem that long. Not long enough.”

She was in worse shape than the last at our last encounter. She was frail. Her white hair seemed a little thinner. She didn’t even bother to pin it back anymore, and tangled tufts of it moved with the breeze. She wore a flower-print smock over a farm dress with a modern winter coat pulled over both, the kind with a line of fake fur around the hood. She had dirty work boots on her feet. The laces weren’t tied. Except for the lack of a shopping cart, she almost looked like a bag lady.

“Yeah, I missed you, too,” I said, turning from the waves to smile at her. “What’cha makin’?”

I couldn’t make it out, but knowing the old witch, it wasn’t a wee doily.

She kept her eyes on her work. “How’d you know I’d be here?”

I shook my head. “I didn’t. A little birdie told me I should come at the turn of the tide, when Fate hangs in the balance.”

She snorted in disgust. “Word on the street is you had a run-in with a particularly nasty ghoul recently and that it got it’s pound of flesh.”

I shook my head. “It wasn’t a pound. Just an ounce or two. I don’t suppose you’d know anything about that, now would you?”

She kept knitting.

“Thought so. Fucker was too old and powerful to be free range. What happened? That old witch doctor refuse your protection?”

She nodded without turning from her work. Her hands shook. “He ’shore did. And just look. He darn near lost his life, too. Just think what woulda happened if you hadn’t showed up outta the blue like that. So, where’s he hiding? With that little bird you know?”

I shrugged.

She studied me with an odd look—a mix of curiosity, amusement, and disgust. “Seems to me there’s been a few incidents like that these last couple years. You sure you’re alright, Detective?”

“Worried about my health, Granny?”

“It’s a dangerous line of work, what you do—the kinda life that takes a toll.”

“Oh, don’t worry about me. I’m just getting warmed up. There was a helluva learning curve there for awhile, but now I’m hitting my stride.”

“Maybe. But I have to tell ya. There are some real terrors out there. There are things buried under this city that you don’t know—can’t contemplate, even—and will never see coming.”

“That a threat?”

She shook her head slowly. “Just a fact, Detective. Just a fact.”

We sat for a minute, neither of us caring to speak. I tried to make sense of the crescent shape she worked back and forth with her needles, but it meant nothing to me. I couldn’t even tell if it was the same thing she’d been working on before I sat down, or if my presence had prompted her to make a change. Either way, I figured the longer I sat there, the more I put myself as risk of winding up in the garden.

She sighed in frustration and dropped her needles in her lap again and clutched her shaking hands. She stared at the water. Then she lifted an arthritic finger to her face and pulled down the lower lid of her left eye. She kept the other eye closed as she scanned the people around us, up and down the boardwalk. When she was done, she let go and blinked several times.

“The old Evil Eye,” she explained. “One of the first tricks you learn.”

“That so?”

“Everyone thinks its power is sending evil—curses and all that—but for me the real value was always seeing it.” She pointed. “The bearded fella leaning against the railing down the way, the one in the striped jacket with the plump face and the big smile.”

“Yeah?”

“He’s a doting husband and father of three. He tests software and likes to set fires. He’s razed several old buildings and fantasizes about burnin’ folks alive. He’s already torched the family pet—told the kids it ran away—and he has detailed but unfulfilled plans for a few folks at the office. He dreams about watching their skin bubble and flake and fly into the air with the heat.”

Granny pointed past me. “That there nigger woman, the one reading poetry, she’s a liar and a thief. Shoplifting mostly, but she’s taken from her employer and gotten someone else fired for it. Justified, in her mind, ’cuz she thinks life’s unfair.”

“Isn’t it?”

“And then there’s her,” Granny said, watching a young woman with cut bangs as she walked toward us along the railing. “She had sex with her sister’s husband two nights before the wedding. That was several years ago now, but she likes to think about it still while pleasuring herself. Ain’t that somethin’? The best sex ’a her life was that which secretly humiliated her big sister.”

“And what about me?” I asked.

Granny smiled at me. “You got more black in your heart than anyone here.”

“Except you.”

She cackled just as the young woman started past her. She looked upset. Her eyes were cast down and she had a powder blue coat pulled over some kind of green-and-black server’s uniform.

“You always wear a little blue, don’t you?” Granny said to her out of nowhere.

The woman stopped in surprise, but her face melted when she saw who spoke. Granny Tuesday dressed a little like the old grandmother from The Beverly Hillbillies, except without the glasses. She looked harmless, especially with those gnarled hands, like the roots of the crooked tree that grows at the crossroads of life and death. Random strangers could never have any idea what she was capable of.

But I did.

“How did you know?” the young woman asked.

Granny lifted an arthritic finger to frame the girl’s chin. “Because it makes your skin glow.”

The woman flushed red before resuming her walk. I watched her pass. Her eyes were on the ocean now and not the boardwalk.

“You see what I did there?” Granny asked.

“I don’t need a lesson in magic.”

“I just made her feel good. With nothing but words.” The old woman’s fingers followed the breath from her mouth. “So tell me, what’s the spell that will make you go away?”

She went back to her knitting.

“Information.”

“Information is expensive.”

I took wrapped the plastic bag from inside my coat and set it on the bench next to me. Inside was the chain-wrapped wooden figurine, the spirit totem that I’d taken off the old witch doctor.

She scowled in suspicion.

I had the two pictures, the black and white stills I’d printed with Hammond a few days before, folded in my jacket pocket. I took them out and handed them across the space between us.

“I don’t suppose you recognize this man?”

She took them. I watched her face as she pulled open the folds. Her reaction wasn’t what I expected. Her lips pursed. Her expression faded quickly, but it was more than just surprise. I think I saw a little fear.

But she covered it quick. “What’s it to you?” She folded the papers again and handed them back.

I didn’t take them. “I’m told you’re familiar with that particular gentleman.”

I knew better than to take anything Granny handed me, even if it had only left my hands moments before.

“Who said such a thing? Anson? That old fool needs to mind his business and leave me to mine less’n he wakes up one day—”

“Fuck with him and you fuck with me,” I said. “Anson was his usual helpful self. I twisted his arm. You wanna take revenge on someone, you take it on me.”

She kept knitting. “You should go home, Detective. This isn’t some wayward ghoul. You’re in far over your head.”

“That’s what Anson said.”

She smiled. Genuinely. Broadly. And with more delight than I’d ever seen on that grisly old face. It stretched the deep wrinkles of her cheeks,and I could see where she was missing a tooth. I had never noticed that. In fact, she was missing the same tooth I was missing. I tongued the gap instinctively.

“I just might be rid a’ you sooner than I expected,” she said. She folded up the tangled skein of her knitting in her apron as if she was done with it. “And here I thought the Three Sisters were gonna reject my offering. But just lookee here. A turn of Fate. My day’s looking up already.”

“That why a couple of your zombies were at The Barrows the other day? To pick up those antique needles?”

“The Sisters have always smiled on my kind. We pay them the right honors.”

“Did you know they still burn witches in India?” I asked. “I read about it online the other day. One of my colleagues sent me the article. As a kind of joke. There’s actually a government department there responsible for convincing people not to burn witches. Of course, there’s only so much they can do, particularly out in the rural areas. The sad part is that the mobs don’t always get it right. Victims don’t always die. Sometimes they just end up horribly disfigured.”

She smiled again, ruefully this time. “Maybe not all of us pay the proper respects.”

“What do you know about him?” I nodded to papers on the bench jumping in the breeze.

“Plenty more than you would believe, that’s for sure.”

“Prove it.”

“Proof?” she scoffed. “Where’s the fun in proof?” She was enjoying herself. She raised a hand and the two orderlies at the back started across the boardwalk. “There was a young man that came to see me awhile back,” she said. “Doctor fella. Named Alexander. Lotsa letters after his name. You might wanna find out what happened to him.”

The first orderly came up behind her with the wheelchair, and Granny pushed herself up from the bench.

“You have a last name?”

“That were his last name. Didn’t right catch what he was called, but I think he was working for the city.”

She nodded to the orderly, who started pulling her backward and around the bench. She’d left the folded papers on the bench, and a gust came and blew them away. I watched them whip across the boardwalk and disappear. Granny looked at the first orderly and nodded at the plastic-wrapped figurine. He reached for it. I put my hand out to stop him.

“This is worth more than half of a bystander’s name,” I said.

“Don’t you worry,” she said. “I’ll be in touch. If you’re going after the Lord of Shadows, there’s a few oracles I’ll need to consult first, just to make sure some of what you’re stirring doesn’t splash on me, so to speak.”

I didn’t move.

She got very serious then. “My word,” she said.

I retracted my hand and the second orderly took the totem. His colleague started rolling Granny away. I stood and watched her retreat as the wind suddenly started gusting—hard. A passing jogger lost her balance and almost fell. I had to brace myself momentarily on the bench.

“In the meantime,” Granny called as the wind subsided, “talk to John Blymire!”

 

I’m posting the chapters of my forthcoming urban paranormal mystery, FEAST OF SHADOWS, in order until the book is released. A blend of hard-boiled whodunit and contemporary urban fantasy, it’s been described as “Tolkien meets Dashiell Hammett for dinner in the present day.”

You can sign up here to be notified when the book is released.

You can start reading in order here: The old ones are patient.

The next chapter is: (not yet posted)

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