Detonation Boulevard

by Craig Schaefer

  There was already a corpse inside.

  He’d been beaten, face pulped, stripped to his undershirt and boxers. His wrists and ankles were bound with electrical cord. One look at the trooper’s leather-jacketed ID card and his photograph told the rest of the story. Marie’s stomach sank like she’d swallowed a lead weight.

  “He murdered him,” she said. “Took his uniform, his badge, his car, just to hunt us down. He knew I wouldn’t hurt a cop. Knew I wouldn’t fight back. I can’t believe—I can’t believe how stupid—”

  Nessa’s finger pressed against her lips.

  “Don’t,” Nessa said. Her finger pressed a little tighter. “Don’t you dare. He took advantage of your sense of honor. There’s no shame in that. If it’s a weakness, it’s a weakness to be proud of.”

  The second body joined the first. Marie kept his revolver, a snub-nosed .45 with a textured walnut grip that weighed heavy in her hand. Nessa scooped the fallen syringe off the pavement.

  “Something nasty and swift in here, no doubt. He would have killed me behind your back, then taken you at his leisure. Let’s check the car. Maybe he left some other goodies behind for us.”

  He had. A folded cream envelope rested on the passenger seat, with a letter printed on sturdy gray-flecked parchment inside. Marie unfolded it, Nessa leaning in at her shoulder to read, and her lips parted.

  “Nessa,” she breathed, “who the hell was this guy?”

  Thirteen

  Crisp type lined the stiff page in thick black ink. Some of the letters, the Ts and Qs and Ls, were dropped a fraction lower than the rest, as if the whole missive had been rattled off on an antique typewriter.

  GREEN LETTER CONTRACT

  Urgent/payment by accelerated schedule/contact CHACCT for details.

  Target #1: Vanessa Roth

  Target #2: Marie Reinhart

  Dissemination: U.S./WIDE. Targets are known to be traveling west from New York State, possibly en route to Nevada. All Chainmen in good standing within the theater of operations have a green light. This is a death writ: no added bounty for living captives will be offered. Both targets must be eliminated in order to receive payment.

  “It’s a contract,” Nessa said. “He wasn’t working alone.”

  Vanessa Roth is an untrained magical talent and may be dangerous; CHCENTRAL recommends neutralization from long range. Reinhart is trained in hand-to-hand combat and small arms. Detailed psychological profiles on both subjects are available from dispatch, contingent upon authorized request.

  “Wait. Wait.” Marie tapped her short-cropped fingernail against the page. “Magic? Who are these people? How do they know about that?”

  “They’re not the Mafia, that’s a solid bet.” Nessa pursed her lips tight. Her eyes narrowed to slits behind her glasses. “But I smell Alton’s fingerprints all over this. ‘Possibly en route to Nevada.’ And why would we go there?”

  “To kill him, before he can kill us,” Marie said.

  Nessa folded the letter along a razor-sharp crease.

  “I think that’s a splendid idea. I’ll have to thank them for suggesting it. Oh, wait, it was already on my to-do list.”

  The hit man’s wallet didn’t yield any new clues: he didn’t carry any identification, no cards, just a fat wad of cash. Nessa fanned it out with a smile. Marie figured there was a good eight or nine hundred dollars there, mostly in fifties.

  “On the plus side,” Nessa said, “finders keepers.”

  She slammed the trunk shut.

  Marie got into the cruiser, killed the dome lights, and drove off the side of the road. The car rolled down a steep incline, bouncing on the rough, until it came to rest against the trees in a thick patch of muddy ground. It was still visible from the road, but just barely.

  It’d be found come daylight, but that was all right. Marie wanted someone to find it. The trooper in the trunk—the real one—had friends, a family, and they deserved to know what happened to him. It was the best she could do for him under the circumstances.

  And he died because of me. He died because this scumbag needed a disguise, one he knew would work on me. If I was harder, if I was colder—

  “Stop it,” Nessa said.

  Marie blinked. Nessa leaned back against the Eldorado, head tilted, eyeing Marie like a bird of prey.

  “I don’t need to read your mind to know what you’re thinking,” Nessa told her.

  They drove away together, with two dead men in their wake and the lights of Columbus glowing soft in the distance.

  “You look about as tired as I feel,” Nessa said.

  Marie rubbed an eye and stared at the strobing white lines on the highway. They slipped by like sand in an hourglass, flowing in a steady stream.

  “I can keep driving.”

  “No,” Nessa said. “Let’s find someplace to stop for the night. Someplace nice. We’ve earned it, I think. Our would-be assassin will pay the tab. Besides, no sense rousting our author friend before dawn, and I think we should both be at our best when we face her. No telling if she’s on our side or not.”

  LeVeque Tower—half office building, half hotel—rose above the city skyline like a towering cathedral. The outside resembled a Byzantine palace, with crenellations rising from the skyscraper’s central spear, and the lobby doubled as an art-deco shrine. The walls were beige marble polished to a mirror sheen, beneath an arched ceiling adorned with elaborate ’40s-era motifs in sea-foam green and coral red. The night clerk, a hipster in his twenties with a septum piercing and a soul patch, greeted them with a smile.

  “Looks like we do have a couple of vacancies,” he said, checking at Nessa’s request. “Would a king suite work for you?”

  She laid a stack of fifties down on the desk between them.

  “We do need a credit card, for a room deposit,” he said.

  She added another two fifties, to the left of the pile.

  “Do you really?” she asked.

  Nessa cradled a plastic key card in a slim gray cardboard sleeve as she and Marie rode the elevator up.

  The suite door opened onto a long, open sitting room with dark hardwood floors and stormy carpets. A marble-topped counter and sink took up one end of the room, alongside a glass dining table, while love seats and an armchair gathered around a flat-screen TV on the opposite side. An open archway looked in on a bedroom where a gold-rimmed mirror hung over the broad sweep of a king-size bed. A storage display along the sidewall, glass cubbyholes set into a steel frame, had a nautical theme. Sextants, almanacs, a tiny replica spyglass.

  Marie stood in the adjacent doorway and stared.

  “It’s…the size of my old bathroom in Queens,” she said.

  “Smaller than I expected, given the size of this place.”

  “No.” Marie pointed. “Not the bathroom. Just the shower.”

  Nessa leaned in behind her, blinking at it. The shower was more of a second room, one wall in glass and the other three ringed in ivory tile, with a long marble bench along the back. A rain-shower head dangled over three individual jets set into the wall.

  “We are definitely going to run their water bill up tonight.” Nessa’s fingertips slid along Marie’s collarbone. “First, though…would you like to try something new?”

  “Trust me, everything about this situation is new to me.”

  Nessa took her by the hand. She led her back out into the parlor, to the open floor in the heart of the room. Then she tapped at her phone and sorted through a playlist.

  “I’ve been studying my book,” Nessa said. “There’s something I’d like to do, if you’re willing. Only if you’re willing. It’s called the Knot of Venus. The text says it’s an old lovers’ game among witches. Supposed to bring us closer together.”

  Marie was gun-shy, her body language tight. Most of her encounters with magic, so far, had ended the same way: in blood and screaming.

  “You don’t have to,” Nessa said.

  “I want to.” Marie pushed her shoulders back. She l
ifted her chin. “I want to. What do I have to do?”

  “Your part is easy.”

  Nessa rested her phone on the glass table and gave it a tap. Music welled from the speaker: the strains of violins, horns, a big band waltz warming up. Nessa turned to her and held out her open hand.

  “Just come over here and dance with me,” she said.

  * * *

  When Alton Roth wasn’t in Washington, he usually made camp in his home office in Carson City. And he hadn’t been back to DC since he buried his son. He spent most of his time behind closed doors, sullen and silent, staring at his phone like he could make it ring by sheer willpower.

  Calypso had his own office just up the hall from Alton’s. The name on the plate beside the door read Webster Scratch: Campaign Management. It wasn’t much, a windowless beige box with a workstation and a high-backed leather chair, and a walnut credenza with a stand for his beloved cherry-and-vanilla Telecaster. Tonight he cradled the guitar in his arms, picking at the strings now and again, but the stray notes dissolved on the air like a sugar cube in water.

  The phone on his desk chimed. Alton calling, demanding a status update on the hunt, just like he’d been doing once an hour all day long. He ignored it and strummed another note, hoping it turned into a song. It didn’t oblige him. He had the technical skills but not the spirit tonight; the music wouldn’t play for a bluesman with no heart.

  He’d earned his reputation as a wheeler of deals and a maker of bargains. When he heard a musician boasting that he could outplay the devil himself, Calypso was on the spot with a golden fiddle to wager. When Robert Johnson made his way down to the crossroads, Calypso was waiting to take him under his wing and teach him the Delta blues. Sure, he’d bought human souls for money, power, sex, but those were never the stories he enjoyed telling.

  A good story needed a good bargain behind it. And when he’d been drawn to Alton Roth’s plea, and his half-assed sacrifice of the family dog on a sweltering Halloween night, he’d seen some real potential there. Making a rich man richer was easy. Taking a no-account grifter from a failing political career all the way to the White House, though…that had the makings of a tale to sing about.

  The only problem was, he had to deliver. The contract was simple and clean: as long as Roth did exactly as he was told, when he was told to do it, he’d get everything he ever dreamed of. If Calypso failed, if outside forces intervened, if anything kept Roth from his shot at the presidency, their deal was null and void. And the great bargainer would fall from a legend to a laughingstock.

  A whole hell of a lot of outside forces had been intervening lately.

  He strummed a chord. Then another. The music rolled and he sang to his empty office in a fit of inspiration, voice deep and rich and thrumming off the walls.

  “Best heed my warning,

  This could happen to you.

  Better heed my warning,

  Say it could happen to you.

  Sat me down to a five-course meal…

  Bit off more than I could chew.”

  He stopped strumming and lightly drummed his fingers against the neck of the guitar.

  “I’ll workshop it,” he said.

  He wasn’t ready to throw in the towel. Not yet. If his hunters could deliver the vengeance Roth was aching for, it might be enough to haul the man out of his funk and get him back to work. Not to mention covering up any last trace of scandal linked to his son’s untimely death.

  Too many maybes, too many moving parts. And then there was the big question mark around Vanessa Roth and her ladylove. He didn’t deny a sense of regret, giving the order to take them off the board.

  Regret was a short-lived thing when it came to eternity, though. And this would all be over by sunrise.

  Fourteen

  The music from Nessa’s phone swelled and blossomed in the hotel suite. A big-band waltz spiraled around Marie until she thought she could read the notes on the air. The walls vibrated in time with the basso horns, and the chandelier lights danced to the plucking rhythm of the strings. She snuggled against Nessa, her lover taking the lead with her hand on the small of Marie’s back, and they moved together in a slow dance. Nessa’s perfume smelled like musk, like amber, like a predator from the primeval mists. She was chanting. Her words tumbled out as the tap-tap-tap of a snare drum, setting their pace. She spoke the rhythm and Marie’s feet followed her, spelling out ancient letters where they fell and turned and slid along the hardwood floor.

  The day she met Nessa—the moment their eyes first met—Marie had a hallucination. A fleeting vision of a French ballroom, white marble and gold. She wore a gown of copper silk. Nessa wore nightingale blue. The tailored brocade was soft and warm under Marie’s hands, here and now, and the feathers lining Nessa’s masquerade mask tickled her cheek.

  “Nessa, are we—”

  “Shh. Enjoy the moment.”

  They whirled across the floor together. The other dancers were phantoms, figures of smoke that burst as the women spun through them. Marie laughed and Nessa rested her head against the taller woman’s chest. The beaked nose of her mask nuzzled the hollow of Marie’s throat. They lifted from the earth in each other’s arms, rising up, their slippers leaving the marble and dancing on air.

  The image faded, rippling, the magic too good to last. They still spun, though, as the ballroom broke away and their silken gowns dissolved in threads of oil paint that rained down and pooled beneath their dangling feet. They still floated, three feet above the hotel-room floor.

  “Nessa!” Marie’s eyes went wide, torn between shock and a giggle of giddy delight. “We’re—we’re—”

  “Flying,” Nessa said with a wolfish grin. “Silly Marie.”

  She leaned in and kissed her.

  “Didn’t anyone ever tell you? Witches can fly.”

  The song—the big band gone, the music reduced to a tinny echo from Nessa’s phone—drifted to its final notes. And the women drifted down, their feet touching the earth toes-first as gravity took firm, gentle hold of them once more.

  Nessa winced. Her hands went tight around Marie, clenching, then she pulled away. She pressed the heel of her palm to her forehead. The joy of the moment shattered like glass.

  “Nessa? What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing. It’s nothing.”

  “It’s something,” Marie said.

  Nessa fluttered a hand and scooped up her phone.

  “I’ve been having these…headaches since Vandemere. Little waves of nausea. They come and go. I’m fine.”

  “Is it the magic?” Marie asked. “I mean, you’ve been using it a lot. Does your book say anything about side effects, or how much you’re supposed to—”

  “Marie. Please. I’m fine.” She put on a tired smile. “It’s already passed. See? Nothing to worry about. Besides, we have a more pressing problem.”

  Marie squinted at her, torn between her words and the impish smile on Nessa’s lips. “Problem?”

  Nessa closed the distance between them. Her musk perfume spiraled around them in invisible tendrils and Marie felt half-drunk when she breathed it in.

  “I’ve been aching for you all day,” Nessa said, “and we’ve got an entire hotel suite all to ourselves, with nothing to do until morning.”

  Marie reached for the top button of Nessa’s blouse. Nessa gave her hand a playful slap.

  “Uh-uh. Not until I say. I want you to do something for me, Marie.”

  “Anything.”

  “Careful,” Nessa said, her voice a teasing singsong as she walked away. She dropped into the armchair at the edge of the room, leaned back, and folded one leg over the other as she got comfortable. “That’s a dangerous promise to make. No, you stand right there until I tell you to move.”

  “And?” Marie asked, uncertain.

  “Your clothes are in the way of my entertainment.” Nessa wriggled her fingers at her. “Fix that.”

  With anyone else she might have felt objectified. With Nessa, she felt…adored
. Maybe it was the sapphire gleam of Nessa’s eyes behind her glasses, or the purr deep in her lover’s throat as she murmured her encouragement. “Slower—that’s it,” Nessa whispered. “Turn a little to the left. Yes. Perfect. You’re perfect.”

  Stitch by stitch Marie’s clothes draped over the arm of the sofa. Her every last shield peeled away and Nessa’s gaze drank her in. Finally she had no more secrets, nothing left to hide. She wore her bruises from her battle at the Vandemere Zoo like a warrior’s cloak. They painted her ribs and one hip in long blotches of color, swirls of oil paint in blue-black and fading yellow.

  “I’m a little banged up,” Marie said.

  “I don’t care,” Nessa told her. “You’re beautiful. Do you remember your safeword?”

  “Symmachy,” Marie replied.

  The word Nessa had picked for her the second night they made love. It meant “fighting together against a common enemy.”

  “It’s very important that you understand,” Nessa said, “there’s no shame in using it. If things are going too fast for you, or something happens that you don’t enjoy, I want you to use it. I need to know what your limits are, so I can respect them. And…play with them, just a little bit.”

  “Will I need it tonight?” Marie asked.

  She kept her chin high, her shoulders back. Nude, but a world away from vulnerable, as if her body was clad in armor that only she could see and feel.

  “Maybe. We’ll see how the evening goes,” Nessa told her. She pointed to the light switch on the wall, over by the door. “Walk over there, turn the lights off, then come back to me.”

  The switch clicked under Marie’s fingertip and bathed the suite in darkness. Nessa was a shadow in the gloom. Her glasses glinted, owlish circles carved from obsidian. Marie turned and took a step toward her, stopped in her tracks by Nessa’s voice.

  “No. Stay.”

  Nessa’s arm rose, languid. The shadow of her hand pointed a long, slender finger toward the floor.