Sympathy for the Devil

by Justin Gustainis

  "Person or persons unknown, again?"

  "The very same - or, at least, I'm betting it is. Anyway, Lunsford's apparently got a history of plagiarism."

  "That sounds like something else from college days," Morris said. "Ancient history."

  "Some of it is, some isn't. True, he seems to have lifted parts of his senior thesis out of some guy's book. But the other instance is a lot more recent - like last year."

  "Even so, I wouldn't think too many people outside of academia give much of a damn about plagiarism, Bat."

  "They do when it's in the speech announcing that you're gonna run for President."

  "Guess I can see how that would make a difference."

  "Apparently, big chunks of his speech are identical to one that was given by Glenda Jackson."

  "The actress? Elizabeth R, and all that?"

  "That's the one. She quit acting and ran for Parliament about twenty years ago. Been there ever since."

  "Yeah, I guess if you're going to rip off somebody's speech, it would be better to use one from another country, especially an old speech. Folks over here probably wouldn't even notice."

  "Except for 'person or persons unknown.'"

  "He does get around, doesn't he? Or they do."

  "All the way down to New Mexico, too. Looks like he found some bimbo who used to bang Ramon Martinez on a regular basis, back when he was a state rep."

  "That's right, I saw something on TV last week," Morris said. "Slipped my mind completely. I'm trying to think - there's some kind of smoking gun, isn't there?"

  Masterson nodded. "Looks like Martinez was paying her rent for a while, and a couple of times he wrote out checks. The bimbo made photocopies."

  "Did she? And kept them all this time? My, my. Well, it's not quite as good as having the guy's jism on a dress hanging in your closet, but it ain't bad, either - unless you're Ramon Martinez, that is."

  "Martinez isn't dead yet, and neither is Lunsford - politically, I mean. But they've both dropped in the polls, big time. And guess whose numbers have been looking better and better?"

  "Wouldn't be Howard fucking Stark, by any chance, would it?"

  Masterson nodded slowly. "You got it in one."

  "Okay, Bat, I admit it looks like a pattern. But apart from the first guy, who might have just been a freak accident, it looks like nothing but old-fashioned dirty politics. You don't need the Forces of Darkness for that. Or if you do, then they've been at it for a hell of a long time, no pun intended."

  "Yes and no. Sure, coming up with dirt on political opponents probably goes back to ancient Greece, if not farther. But where did this particular dirt come from? All these guys have been in politics a long time, which means they've made a lot of enemies. But nobody has found this shit, until now. Nobody."

  Morris sat there, staring at his now-empty tea mug without really seeing it. Finally, he said, "All right, let's say that this pattern of nastiness is so unlikely that we'll put a question mark on it. We'll add it to the other things we know, which include a voice you overheard that didn't sound human, Stark's face undergoing a momentary change that may have been unnatural, Stark receiving an apparent burn from contact with the consecrated hands of a Catholic priest, the burn healing unnaturally fast and said priest dying shortly thereafter, in a particularly gruesome fashion. Is that a fair summary?"

  "Yeah, more or less."

  "Okay, then." Morris leaned back in his chair. "So, my question for you is, 'What do you want me to do about it?'"

  The demon calling herself Ashley leaned forward until she was looking over Peters' shoulder. The computer monitor in front of them contained the schedule of Republican primary elections for the next month.

  "How're we going to do it, Peters?" She spoke in the same matter-of-fact tone she used when suggesting delightfully perverse sexual acts. "How do we off this cocksucker?"

  Without taking his eyes off the screen Peters said, "How can somebody so beautiful also be so vulgar?"

  She went over and flopped into a sitting position on the edge of the bed, the winter sunlight turning her hair golden. "I suppose you could say that I come by it honestly. And only in this stupid Puritanical culture are the two things considered mutually exclusive."

  Ashley was dressed in tan yoga pants and a loose-fitting gray sweatshirt that said 'All Souls Parish Choir' on the front.

  "No argument from me," he said, scrolling down the page in front of him.

  "But my question remains - how do we do it?"

  "Better question: how do we get away with it?"

  "Well, yes, that too."

  "'That, too'," he repeated. "Easy for you to say. You can probably discorporate at will, leaving me to face the guns of the U.S. Secret Service alone."

  "Peters, listen to me," she said. Some exasperation had crept into her tone. "This body I have created is solid flesh and blood, as you have reason to know. If somebody shoots me in the right spot, the body will die, and my essence will be returned summarily to Hell, a journey I am in no hurry to make."

  He held up a pacifying hand. "Okay, no offense, I didn't know."

  "Well now you do, and you'd better know this, too: the same thing is true for you."

  "Yeah, I figured that."

  "So, if we don't succeed in this little mission of ours, getting shot dead by the Secret Service is going to be the very least of our worries."

  "It's not like I need any more motivation, Ashley," he said. "Astaroth gave me all I could ever want, my first night back on Earth. But can we agree it would be a very good thing if we could assassinate Stark, and not get killed ourselves, and not get sent to prison for 99 years? Sound reasonable?"

  "Of course it does, sweetie - which is why I keep asking how best it can be done. How would you have managed it back in the old days, when you were the CIA's answer to 007?"

  "Not me, I was never that suave. And I never was assigned a target anywhere near as important as Stark is over here, or as well-protected."

  "How about a bomb?" she said. "It shouldn't be hard to determine where's he's going to be speaking a few days in advance. His PR people would probably be happy to tell us. A couple of pounds of Semtex, in a shaped charge, maybe. The technology they have these days, we could set it off from a half mile away, and then go out to lunch. You're buying, since you've got the magic wallet."

  Peters was shaking his head before she'd finished speaking. "No - no bomb."

  She looked at him, one elegant eyebrow raised.

  "Two reasons," he said. "One is, they've got dogs that can sniff out explosives, and if those poochies aren't trained to recognize Semtex, then somebody's not doing his job."

  She made a face. "I hadn't thought of that." Then she brightened a little. "See? That's why Astaroth picked you for the job. What's the other reason a bomb's no good, by the way?"

  "I was sent here to kill Stark. Fair enough - Stark isn't even human anymore, not really. And if he gets into the White House, some real bad shit's going to happen. But a bomb will most likely take out a bunch of innocent people, and I'm just not gonna do that."

  "You're serious," she said, as if she didn't believe he was. Or maybe she just didn't want to.

  "Damn right, so to speak."

  "Peters, you and I have both been in Hell. And if there's anything we should both know down to the marrow of our borrowed bones, it's that there are no innocent people."

  "You can split semantic hairs any way you want, Ashley. I don't know what role I'm supposed to play, in the ongoing battle between Heaven and Hell. Astaroth says I'm here to do Hell's bidding - well, the bidding of one faction. But he's a demon, and I hear they lie a lot, no offense to present company. Or, could be that's what he thinks is going on, but it's more complicated than that. Maybe I'm not here on Hell's business, after all - or not exclusively. Maybe I've actually got a chance at, forgive the expression, redemption."

  The look she gave him was pitying - or would have been, were she capable of pity. "Peters, we're both damned
souls, each in our own way. Redemption just isn't an option for us, sweetie. Get it out of your head. That train left the fucking station for both of us, a long time ago - years for you, millennia for me, but the fact is that it's gone."

  "Maybe the thing that puts it out of reach is our belief that it's no longer possible. You ever think about that?"

  She rubbed her forehead with the fingertips of one hand. "I never thought that there was a human, alive or dead, who could confuse me. But I think you may have just managed it."

  "Then let's break it down to the essential facts. One: I'm gonna kill Stark, because that's what I was sent here to do. Two: If I can help it, I'm not gonna kill anybody else - and I'm pretty sure I can help it."

  She looked at him with open curiosity. "You are one piece of work, I'll say that - although what precise kind I'm not really sure. I don't know if I want to break your neck, or give you a blowjob."

  "How about you forgo the first one, postpone the second and instead help me figure out a couple of things."

  "Such as?"

  "Where I can get the kind of rifle I think I might need - and a silencer to go with it."

  "A rifle - now you're talking," Ashley said. "Did I ever tell you that I met Lee Harvey Oswald in Hell?"

  "No you didn't," Peters said. "But I can't say that I'm surprised."

  Chapter 26

  "What then, Bat?" Quincey Morris asked. "That's the question before this house."

  "House? What fucking house're you talking about?"

  "Just an expression. Assume everything you've told me is God's gospel truth. Let's posit that all your suspicions, your worst fears, are all as true as the fact that the sun's gonna rise tomorrow. What do you want me to do about it?"

  "Jesus, Quincey, I..." Masterson ran his hand through his hair, something, Morris knew, that he did when frustrated. Morris understood, even sympathized. But that didn't change anything.

  "I understand your concern. I know you from the old days, podner, and I'm well aware you're not given to flights of fancy. And in your situation, I'd be pretty worried, too."

  "They why are you giving me a bunch of shit, all of a sudden?"

  "I'm giving you shit, if you want to call it that, because I'm thinking ahead. That's something my dad taught me, and that he learned from his old man. I never knew my granddad - we Morrises tend not to live to a ripe old age. But either one of them would tell me that when you're dealing with what may be supernatural forces, it pays to think ahead, and plan ahead."

  "That's just good sense in any job, including mine," Masterson said.

  "Maybe, but in my profession the stakes can be real high - higher even than the ones in yours. So, if some fella tells me he thinks he's got vampires in his basement, I don't just drop by his place some night with a flashlight and a crucifix and ask where the basement door is. There's a word for occult investigators who do stuff like that, and the word is 'deceased'. If not worse."

  "Christ, what's worse than 'deceased?'"

  "'Undead', for one. 'Damned' might be another."

  "I'm not asking you to do anything reckless, goddammit. I'm just saying that something pretty fucking weird is going on, and investigating weird shit is what you do - as I have reason to know."

  "Okay, look - let's take the worst-case scenario. You've got a guy who sometimes talks in a voice that doesn't sound human, whose eyes change color when he's pissed off, who apparently received a burn from physical contact with a Catholic priest, a burn that then healed faster than any burn is supposed to, and let's not forget what happened to that poor priest."

  "That's Stark, all right."

  "At the risk of a stupid question, I'll ask you this: Stark's been seen in sunlight, right? With no ill effects?"

  Masterson shrugged. "Sure - lots of times. Why?"

  "I was hoping against hope that it was something simple, like vampirism, but it's hard to believe that a Presidential candidate could conceal that for very long."

  "No, this bastard's no bloodsucker," Masterson said. "I'd have staked him myself if he was."

  "Thing is, absent vampirism, there's only one other plausible explanation, and I bet you were thinking of it long before you got here: demonic possession, or some other kind of demonic manifestation."

  "Yeah," Masterson said after a moment. "I haven't been able to say it out loud up 'til now, but - yeah."

  "So - and I hate to keep coming back to this, Bat - what is it you want me to do?"

  Masterson wiped a hand across his face. "Confirm it for me. Prove that the voice wasn't really a horror movie, that the burn wasn't just a skin condition, and that some former altar boy with a grudge didn't do all that awful shit to Father Bowles."

  The workmen down the hall had apparently called it quits for the day - there was no noise in the house now. The ticking of the battery-powered clock in Morris's office seemed loud in the silence.

  "Say I manage to confirm it - me, or a friend of mine named Libby, who's good at this stuff. So, next week, or the week after, I sit you down and say, 'You were right, my friend. The Presidential candidate you're guarding is actually a demon from Hell.' Then what?"

  "Then maybe I get the chance to make up for some stuff in my past," he said bleakly. "I've done a lot of bad shit in my time, Quincey. You don't need to know about it. And I'm not sure if anybody up there is keeping score, but it seems to me that I probably could - what's the word - atone for quite a few of my many sins by drawing my weapon and putting two rounds into the head of Howard W. Stark - or whoever the fuck he really is."

  Libby Chastain lay on the hotel bed watching a movie in which Hugh Jackman was supposed to be a guy named Van Helsing, but he was behaving a heck of a lot more like Indiana Jones. At least they called him Gabriel, not Abraham, so maybe the old man isn't turning over in his grave - much.

  She was about to change the channel when the theme from Bewitched began playing. Libby clicked off the TV and picked up her phone. The caller ID showed that it was Colleen again.

  "Hey, girlfriend."

  "Hey, Libby. I talked to Rachel, and she'll pay Quincey's per diem and expenses to look into this black magic thing. Assuming you guys are going to work together again, she says she'll also pay your expenses. Your pro bono services, she says, will earn the Sisterhood's gratitude."

  "The Sisterhood helped save my life not all that long ago," Libby said. "So how about I do this job, and we call it even? I'm kidding, of course - I'd need to do a lot more than this to pay off that particular debt."

  "It's not a debt, Libby. The Sisterhood takes care of its own."

  "I know - but I still welcome the opportunity to do something useful. Speaking of which, I better ask you the question that I know Quincey is going to ask me."

  "Ask away."

  "What exactly is it you want us to do? Quincey likes to be precise about these things, and I can't say that I blame him."

  "As it happens, I asked Rachel the same question."

  "Now there's a smart little FBI agent."

  "Rachel says she wants you to identify the source of the black magic that was lingering at the death scene. I assume none of us is naïve enough to think the two are unrelated."

  "You assume correctly, kiddo. I don't figure whoever left the traces in that bathroom just stopped by to admire the wallpaper."

  "So, okay: locate the source. If you're able to determine a motive, all the better - but it's not absolutely required."

  "Well, that certainly seems clear enough. But what's Rachel going to do about it, assuming we're successful?"

  "She didn't say, and I didn't ask. But the Sisterhood can't just stand by and let somebody get away with murder - not murder by black magic, anyway."

  "No, I suppose not."

  "You'll recognize this particular strain if you get close to it, won't you?"

  "Oh, sure. It's in my sense memory. I'll know it if I smell it again."

  "So, how do you plan to proceed? Rachel didn't tell me to ask - I'm just nosy."

>   "If you left it up to me, I wouldn't know where to begin. Fortunately, Quincey does this kind of stuff all the time. I'm sure he'll have some ideas."

  "Then we'd both better hope he's not busy doing something else."

  Malachi Peters, hair still damp from his recent shower, was on the Internet trying to determine the right kind of gun for his task.

  "It's got to be a rifle," he'd told Ashley. "Even though Astaroth thoughtfully supplied me with a 9 mm Berretta and a silencer, getting close enough to do the job with a pistol would be suicide."

  "If I had to guess," she said, "I'd say he provided them as props, to remind you of your former profession. He doesn't care how you kill Stark, as long as it gets done."

  "The right kind of hunting rifle will probably do the job," Peters said. "I shouldn't have to work so far out that only a sniper rifle would have the range. Stark's Secret Service detail isn't that big, yet. Their perimeter won't extend more than a block or two."

  "So we're going shopping? Oh, good - I hear that women love shopping."

  "I don't think they're usually looking for lethal weapons when they go," he said.

  "More fools, they," Ashley said.

  "The hard part is going to be getting a silencer for the rifle."

  "Is that essential?"

  "I think so. We might get lucky enough to fire from someplace where there are no people close by, but I wouldn't count on it. And if I fire off an unsilenced rifle inside a building, everybody else in there is going to know about it. Getting away would be hard; getting away without a whole bunch of witnesses would be practically impossible."

  She shrugged. "Then buy a silencer."

  "Hard to do. They're much more tightly controlled than rifles. I've been researching it online - you need a Federal Firearms License, which costs five hundred bucks, takes forever to process, and requires a very detailed background check."

  "I begin to see the problem."

  "Yeah. The money's easy, but we haven't got months to wait - and as for the background check..."

  "'This dude's been dead for almost thirty years.' Might cause them to look at you kind of funny."