by James Hunter
I thumbed through the various artists and albums—a time like this called for the perfect sound track.
I pulled up B.B. King’s 1968 “I’ve Got a Mind to Give Up Living.” A tune so gritty, dark, and down-and-out that it’d make a guy want to head over to Tombstones R’ Us, pick up something big and heavy, and promptly cave his skull in with it, just to get life over and done with.
An organ wailed as the track kicked on, crying out its misery like a child who’d lost its parents. King’s guitar followed, his fingers dancing up and down the strings with that twangy funk only he could manage; the sound was the shouted lament of a scorned lover. Guy was a genius. The interplay of soft and loud notes blew me away every single time. A pair of saxophones joined the fray, offering up a snippet of Chopin’s “Funeral March.” The overlay—dancing and twirling together like water and oil, like yin and yang—made me want to throw myself into the ocean.
I pulled out a pack of baby wipes—the poor man’s shower—and slowly, delicately began wiping dirt, sweat, and blood away from my aching flesh. Systematically cleaning my body as the music washed my soul. As I let B.B. and the gang say what I couldn’t. I let that music be my catharsis. It carried me away, until King faded, replaced by Mississippi Fred McDowell’s “Been Drinkin’ Water Out of a Hollow Log.”
An acoustic guitar and slide guitar worked in concert—the beat occasionally manic, wild, and crazed, followed by dips of profound melancholy. My heart sank as Fred, one of the greatest Delta blues men to walk the planet, belted out his woe in a smoky, hard-knock voice. He was the real deal: a black Mississippi cotton picker who played the slide guitar with genuine beef-rib bone. If there was ever a man to know the pain in living, it was ol’ Fred.
I bent over and rummaged around in a small drawer beneath my cot, liberating a half-full handle of shitty, corner store, get-me-plastered whiskey. I unscrewed the cap, put the cool glass to my lips, and tilted my head back, chugging down a stream of flame until the last drop of amber liquid vanished down my throat. I gasped for air, belched long and loud, and dropped the empty bottle to the floor with a clink.
“Fuck!” I screamed, yelling my anger into the lonely night, purging it from my system.
I lay back onto my little bed and closed my eyes.
My phone woke me up about six hours later, its shrill ring bouncing off the inside of my aching skull. I blinked open bleary eyes. Early morning light trickled into the camper through the windows, stabbing at my pupils like a makeshift prison shank. I rubbed at my face for a moment before swinging my legs over the edge of the bed, sitting up, and pulling my phone free. I glanced at the time. 7:18 AM. Too friggin’ early.
It screamed again: Pick up, pick up, pick up, it commanded. You’ve got a pile of shit to wade through today, so stop being a lazy slacker. Dickhead phone.
I pressed the green talk button and held the phone to my ear as I stifled a yawn with my free hand. “Yeah,” I said, though the word came out muffled and barely intelligible.
“Did I wake you up?” Ferraro asked, sounding concerned.
I pulled the phone away from my ear with a wince—it was like having a friggin’ loudspeaker next to my ear. “Yeah, you did actually,” I mumbled, arching my back and flexing my muscles, getting my post-wake-up stretch out of the way.
“Good,” she said. I could practically hear her sadistic grin through the phone. “I’ve been driving for seven hours solid, so that makes me irrationally happy. Where are you?”
“In the Camino on the outskirts of town—not exactly sure where. You?”
“Pulling into Lolo, now. I’m starving and I need coffee. A lot of coffee. There’s a bar up ahead, the Feed Trough—says they do breakfast. Can we meet there? We’ll catch up, you can fill me in, then we’ll get moving.”
Coffee. Breakfast. Feed Trough.
My stomach growled like an angry dog who’d just caught the scent of a postal worker convention. Coffee, pancakes, maybe an omelet? Hell yes to that, multiplied by a factor of a gajillion, then smothered in sugary-sweet maple syrup. Chow and coffee wouldn’t set everything right, but it’d be a step in the right direction.
“Yeah, sounds good.” I tried to stifle another yawn. “I’ll be there in a few.”
TEN:
Reunion
I pulled up to the Feed Trough fifteen minutes later. The joint looked exactly the way you’re probably thinking, given it had a name like the Feed Trough. The building was a sprawling single-story fire hazard made entirely of old wood, which appeared to have been built sometime before the civil war and renovated approximately never. It looked like exactly the kind of place I wanted to have breakfast—I’d bet dollars to doughnuts that whoever was the spatula-slinger in this greasy spoon could cook one helluva breakfast. The kind of breakfast so packed with delicious cholesterol that it’d take a year off your life. My mouth was already watering at the notion.
Maybe I’d do steak and eggs. Seemed like a fitting breakfast for a guy who’d recently survived an attack from a cannibal Bigfoot. A celebration meal.
I pulled into a sparsely filled gravel parking lot populated by a trio of vehicles. There was a pair of motorcycles—one a beefy Goldwing bigger than a small car, the other a slim QLink Legend with studded leather seats and saddlebags—and a charcoal, nondescript sedan. Ferraro opened the driver-side door of the sedan and gave the Camino a long, hard look as I pulled up next to her.
She wore a pair of dark aviator sunglasses, shielding her eyes from the bright glare of the new morning. She slid them down onto the tip of her nose, eyeing me over the top of the wire frames. “You had the window down, huh?” she called. A nearly invisible smirk graced her lips as I crawled out of the gaping hole where my door had once lived, back in the happy days before Kong-ageddon.
“I don’t wanna talk about it.” I pocketed the keys and trudged to the front door before she could offer any more sass. She followed behind, wisely heeding my desire not to mention the Camino, though that damn smirk was still tarrying on her face. I just knew she was dying to say something else.
The inside of the Feed Trough was all slick wood, neon signs, and firearms. Seriously. Must’ve been twenty shotguns and assorted rifles hanging on the walls, damn near encircling the room with steel. Interspaced between the guns were a few trophies from all the things those guns had killed: a mounted elk head, a whitetail deer, a pair of moose antlers, the head of a humongous big horn sheep, a whole friggin’ black bear, and—oddly out of place—a record-holding pike. I didn’t see bullet holes in the fish, but I had my suspicions.
A polished, well-stocked bar ran along the right-hand wall, which made my head throb just looking at it. I led Ferraro to a square table bordered by a couple of burgundy-colored chairs and plopped down with a sigh. A lean waitress with a mess of brown hair and tired eyes moseyed over a minute later, walking with an I-got-time-to-kill gait. She offered us glasses of water and a pair of menus.
“Steak and eggs with a big ol’ pile of hash browns,” I said, not bothering with the laminated paper, letting my stomach take the lead on this one. Trust your gut, I always say.
Ferraro considered only for a second. “I’ll have the same,” she said, “and coffee. Bring a pot if you wouldn’t mind.”
“Sure thing, honey,” the waitress replied, offering us a lopsided, unenthusiastic flash of her teeth and a quick once-over, before turning away and heading for the kitchen. I’d wager they didn’t get a lot of outsiders like us passing through these parts.
I picked up my water and took a sip, eyeing Ferraro over the rim. She looked good, better than I remembered.
Tall, just shy of six feet, with medium-length black hair tied back into a tight ponytail. Strong features, Mediterranean complexion, chestnut eyes, sharp as daggers, and enough athletic muscle to give me pause. She wore black tactical cargo pants, a practical white T-shirt, a lightweight sage-green fleece, and a Glock on one hip, offset by a golden FBI badge on the other. She also had attitude through the friggin’
roof. Hell, Aretha Franklin should’ve been following her around, belting out “Respect” whenever she entered a room.
“Seriously, what happened with the door?” she asked. “You said there was a murder. I’m assuming you killed whoever did that, then stashed the body somewhere?”
“I see you finally discovered your sense of humor,” I replied. “It was locked up in the evidence locker, am I right?” I set my glass down and leaned back in my bar chair. “And, as a matter of fact, I didn’t kill the assbag responsible for that. It was Bigfoot.”
“Wait, is this one of the flesh-eating Bigfeet you mentioned earlier?”
“No. No, this was the good one. Well, good except for the part where he ripped my door off—his name is Chief …” I faltered for a second. What the hell was his name? “Err, Chief something or other. I can’t remember. Chankoo-koo, Chwack-wack, Chi-hua-hua—something with too many syllables, kinda earthy sounding. I just call him Kong, ’cause you know, giant, hairy ape-man with a chip on his shoulder.”
“I forgot how ridiculous your life is,” she said, shaking her head. “Okay”—she held up a hand—“I’m now more confused than when I showed up. Please, just start at the beginning, give me a brief rundown of the past few months, then walk me through what the situation in Lolo is. I’ll ask questions—try to be the professional, here—and we’ll get to the bottom of this.”
“Don’t treat me like a child,” I said. I was her senior by like thirty-five years. Whippersnappers these days don’t respect their elders.
“Stop pouting, start talking,” she said, not even a hint of a smile on her face.
The waitress came up to the table, bearing a brown plastic tray laden with a pair of plates, a set of coffee mugs, and a large pot of delicious, life-sustaining coffee. She unloaded the tray—my steak almost overflowed its plate, leaving barely enough room for the pair of eggs and the heap of hash browns crowding in around everything.
I looked at the waitress. “Marry me,” I said, and kinda meant it.
She rolled her eyes, offered me a half-grin with some actual warmth in it, then dropped off the check. “Let’s see how you tip first, honey,” she said, before walking away, putting a dash of extra sway to her hips.
Neither Ferraro nor I talked for a while, both absorbed in the near-sacred act of coffee preparation and face stuffing. That’s one of the things I liked about her: she was good with silence and knew sometimes no talk was needed. After getting down a cup of trucker-fuel and half my steak, I leaned back and filled her in, beginning slow and building up steam as I rolled on.
I told her about my lead on Doctor Arlen Hogg and the unfortunate assault on both my person and my car by Chief Kong and his daughter, Winona. I filled her in about the Wendigo, the motorhome, the slave racket, the human goons I’d tracked back to the Motor Carriage Motel, and the info the motel clerk had given me about the sheriff and the town of Lolo. I told her about everything.
Everything except the picture of James I’d found in the manila envelope. I wasn’t ready to deal with that shit yet.
There was some other explanation, dammit, but Ferraro wouldn’t see it that way since she didn’t know James like I did. The way I reckoned, we could deal with whatever was happening in Lolo, then I’d pop by Boston to visit James and, if necessary, beat a confession out of him. I was reasonably sure it wouldn’t come down to that. Probably. Maybe.
Fine, it was a total crapshoot.
Ferraro interrupted now and then, asking clarifying questions, dragging out info I didn’t realize I had, ironing out the details until I felt like I’d gone through the whole story three or four times. She jotted down notes in a pocket-sized travel notebook, underlining some words, bullet pointing others—drawing solid lines between one piece of evidence and another as her keen mind worked over the goings-on. An FBI agent settling into a case: cool, professional, efficient. I was glad she was in my corner.
She tapped her ballpoint pen against her bottom lip as I finished speaking. “Paying the sheriff’s office a visit is the next logical step,” she said, setting down the pen and notepad, returning her attention to the unfinished eggs before her.
I’d already cleaned my plate and had plopped down a trio of twenties—courtesy of the slave-trading, asshole driver—pinning them in place under my coffee mug.
“We’re going to have to play this one close to the vest,” she said, “not show him all the evidence we have so far. If the sheriff’s with this Lucis Venántium group, then he has to know something’s going on. But he hasn’t done anything, hasn’t contacted anyone, why? Could mean he’s complicit. Either that, or this Doctor Hogg and his associates have something on him—blackmail maybe, or they could be holding a hostage.
“A family member, a friend. We’ll just have to feel him out, watch for any tells.” She paused, picking up her cup of coffee and staring into the black pool. “When we have some time, I’d also like to know more about the Lucis Venántium.” She fell quiet again, absently swirling her mug with one hand.
I took the time to look at her. Really look at her, seeing the dark circles under her eyes. How her fingernails were ragged, as if they’d been ceaselessly gnawed on. She wasn’t just tired from a long drive. No, the tiredness was in her, it’d taken deep root—she was probably having dreams. Nightmares. Nightmares about the things she’d seen on our last case. I couldn’t blame her one little bit. That job had been as scary as a giant human-centipede, which, by the way, we’d actually fought our first time out of the gate. It’s not easy to bounce back from something like that, believe you me.
“Not sleeping?” I asked, reaching a hand across the table to take one of hers. It felt weird, unnatural, but she needed a little comfort, I could read it in her face. I’d been where she was, once upon a time. Unlike most of the mage-folk running around out there, I hadn’t been born into the community, hadn’t grown up around magic and monsters, parallel worlds or alternate time-streams. Well, at least not outside of novels or movies. My first experience with the supernatural had been just as traumatic as Ferraro’s, and it’d taken me years to work through the pain.
“Honestly?” She averted her gaze for a moment, then gave a rueful shake of her head. “No. I close my eyes and it all comes flooding in. The Metus, the Hub, Shelton. I keep seeing Fast Hands put those rounds into you. Watch you fly apart in a spray of blood”—she set her mug down and ran a hand over the Glock at her hip—“then this terrible feeling spreads through me like fire. Helplessness. I’ve never been helpless, not like that.”
She looked up, her jaw clenched tight, the features of her face hard with resolve. “I want to know more—I need to know more. I can’t feel like that again.” She lapsed into silence for a beat. “You know, I never had PTSD, not even after all my tours in Iraq. But one mission with you and I have to check the closet before I hit the rack.”
“It gets better.” I gave her hand a reassuring squeeze, even though the motion and gesture were uncomfortable for me. As awkward as a giraffe at a midget convention. I’m not the guy people come to for comfort, support, or a shoulder to cry on. Mostly, I’m the guy to come to when the crying’s done and the only thing left to do is kick some ass.
“Once we put the kibosh on the business here,” I said, “I’ll put you in touch with some of the folks in the Lucis Venántium. They’ll educate you better than I ever could, since they’re all in the same boat as you. Just plain old mortals, going up against things that’re bigger, faster, stronger and still beating those bastards into line. They can teach you the tricks of the trade, give you a slot in the organization if you want it.” I paused, thinking about how I’d felt without my powers … that’d been one helluva terrible ride. “They’ll help you get your swagger back,” I finished.
“You really believe that?” she asked, a rare crack of vulnerability showing through her tough-girl exterior.
“You kidding me? I’ve walked more than a few Rubes through their first experience with the supernatural. Trust me,
you’ve adapted better than anyone I’ve ever seen. Your baptism into this wonky world was just a bit more intense than most folks deal with. But trust me, since you haven’t completely come unhinged this late into the game, you’ll weather the storm.”
She gave my hand a return squeeze, then pulled away and slid out from the table, her cool, professional demeanor already glued back in place. I offered the waitress a nod and a wave, before following Ferraro out to the parking lot.
“We should take my ride,” she told me, no suggestion implied, while offering the Camino—sans driver-side door—a distrustful look. “Definitely going to afford us better concealment, plus you won’t have to worry about falling out.” I thought her mouth almost twitched in amusement, but it was hard to tell. When Ferraro had a mind to, she could throw on a poker face that was damn tough to read.
I grumbled for a moment. She was probably right, but I wasn’t happy about it. “Fine,” I conceded after mulling it over. “We can take your car, but only on two conditions. One, you never mention what’s happened to the Camino again. Ever.” Her lips definitely twitched that time. “And two—I get to choose the jams. I’m not gonna suffer through endless hours of shitty pop music.”
She pushed on her Aviators, muttered something about me being an “irresponsible, juvenile man-child,” then consented and headed over to the car, popping the locks with an electric key fob.
I opened myself to the Vis, feeling its power burn just out of reach, and allowed myself to breath in some of its life and force, just a trickle. I wove a hasty glamour construct, a few thin strands of air and water intertwined with a great, and complex, crisscrossing pattern of willpower, which I invested into the hidden sigil built into the Camino’s remaining door panel.
I tied the working off, and its power radiated outward. The construct, coupled with the sigil, would ensure the townsfolk didn’t pay much mind to the strange and mangled vehicle in the parking lot. No parking tickets, either. Ah, the power of Vis really does seem like magic sometimes.
