Limbus, Inc. Book II

by Brett J. Talley

  “Jesus Alexander Christ.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Now the third thing that can influence the value of an item is provenance. You know what that is?”

  “Sure—who owned it, when they owned it, how it moved from owner to owner. Like that.”

  “Like that, yes. In the case of the 1934 Five Hundred Dollar Bills, there is a sequence of them that were part of a private collection of rarities. The entire collection, by the way, was appraised in 1973 and at that time valued at just under nine million dollars. It would be worth considerably more now.”

  “And these bills?”

  “They are all from the missing sequence. There were ten bills in sequence. One turned up in Lambertville, New Jersey, in 2006. The rest have remained completely off the radar since the owner of that collection died.”

  “Who was he and when did he die?”

  There was a pause. “Excuse me, Mr…?”

  “Hunter,” I said. “Sam Hunter.”

  “Excuse me, Mr. Hunter, but would you be willing to engage our firm to handle any auction for these bills? I can assure you that no one else would be able to get you a higher price for them, or a quicker sale.”

  “If I decide to sell them,” I said, “we can talk. Right now I need to know more about the bills. That’ll help me decide what to do.”

  “I understand.”

  “What’s your name?” I asked.

  “Milton Peabody,” he said. It seemed about right. He had a Milton Peabody kind of voice.

  “So who owned the bills?”

  “They were part of the private collection of a foreign gentleman who moved to Eastern Pennsylvania in the late nineteen sixties. His name was Ubel Griswold.”

  That name rang a very faint bell. Not a nice bell, either, but no matter how hard I scrabbled for details there was nothing in my memory. I wrote it down so I could do a search later.

  “And where did this Griswold guy live?”

  Mr. Peabody said, “He lived in Pine Deep. And that is where he was murdered.”

  Chap. 11

  The killer got slowly to his feet. He stumbled once in the dark. The man could see less than the beast. He longed to revert, to stay in the other shape. Always.

  Always.

  Always.

  But that other mouth was not made for speech, and he needed to speak.

  He was naked, but around his neck was a small metal disk on a sturdy chain. The chain was painted a flat black so that it caught no light. The disk had a single button.

  He caught it between thumb and forefinger that were sticky with blood. He pressed the button.

  “I…,” he began, then coughed and spat out a wad of clotted blood. “I need a cleanup team.”

  He did not speak in English.

  Chap. 12

  So, yeah, I took the case.

  Cricket told me that an email with some case details would be in my inbox. It was. Somehow, though, Cricket had blanked out his own return email address. Like most P.I.s, I know some tricks about tracing emails. I hit a dead end right away. Whoever these Limbus people were, they were very tech savvy. They left me nowhere to go.

  So, I opened the email. There was no text, just an attachment with five photos. I opened them and sat for a long time looking at the pictures. Five people. Two men, two women, one child.

  They were all dead. They had all been torn up.

  These were morgue photos rather than the more useful crime scene photo. Two of the victims were in pretty good shape—relatively speaking. They had massive chest and throat wounds, but were otherwise intact. Whole.

  The other three were not.

  Whole, I mean.

  Each of them had been torn to pieces. Actual pieces.

  “This was no boat accident,” I said in my best Richard Dreyfus, but there was no one around to get the joke.

  I zoomed in on the photos and studied the wounds. I’m no forensic expert, but I know how to read wound patterns. To guys like me, they tell a very clear story. Flesh torn by bullets and flesh torn by knives tell one kind of story. Friction injuries of a certain pattern can indicate a motorcycle accident or a fall down a mountain. There are distinct differences in dog bites, rat bites, and snake bites. You simply have to understand human tissue and bone, something of physics, something of anatomy.

  What I was seeing told a very specific story. Maybe a coroner might have some problems with it because of the angle of certain wounds, the depths of the bite marks, the apparent bite strength needed to crush bones like the humerus and femur. Me? I could read this like a book.

  Personal experience is a great teacher.

  I saved the images to my computer and thought about the money.

  The money would go into my bank, but not riding a deposit slip. Before I did that, though, I ran a high-res scan of each side of each bill and sent the files to myself via DropBox.

  I also sniffed each bill.

  I do that. I’m not weird the way it sounds. I’m weird in a different way. My sense of smell is better than most. Better than most dogs, if you want to make a point of it. Sniffing the bills told me a lot.

  First, I could tell that they’d been handled by someone, but not recently. It was an old scent, just a trace. And that’s really interesting because it meant that no one had handled that money recently, and by recently I mean in years. The scent was really old, barely there. How had those bills then been placed in the envelope? The hundreds were mixed bills, most of them relatively recent. Late nineties into the early 2000s. Stuff that’s still in circulation. The same human scent was on them, too.

  That scent and no other.

  “Curiouser and curiouser,” I said to the empty room. I did not for a moment believe that the scent was that of the mysterious Mr. Cricket. There was also no residual smell of latex from gloves. What had they used to stuff the envelope? Plastic tweezers?

  I spent some time going over the envelope, but if there was anything to find, not even my senses could pick it up. That was very disturbing.

  And, also…intriguing.

  Before I left for Pine Deep, I spent a few hours on the Net reading up about Ubel Griswold and the troubles in the town. A lot of it was new to me. I used to live in Minneapolis and Pine Deep is a rural suburb of Philadelphia. Griswold, according to the news reports, had been a foreign national who’d moved to America in the 1960s. His name was German but one reporter implied that the man was either Russian or Polish. Or, maybe from Belarus, from back when that little country was known as the Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic. Either way, Griswold moved to the States, bought some land, and set himself up as a small-time cattle farmer in a section of Pine Deep known as Dark Hollow. In 1976, the area was rocked by a series of particularly savage killings. There was a whole slew of them and it was believed they were the work of one man, whom the papers nicknamed “the Reaper.” Reporters love titles like that.

  The manhunt for the Reaper was intense and the leading suspect in those killings was an itinerant day laborer and blues musician named Oren Morse. Known locally as the Bone Man because he was as thin as a scarecrow.

  Ubel Griswold vanished on a—you guessed it—dark and stormy night, and his body was never found. The locals apparently ran Morse to ground and lynched him. The killings stopped at that point, so it seemed pretty clear they’d killed the killer.

  If the story ended there, it would be weird and sad enough, but there was a second part. Thirty years to the actual day of the Reaper killings, another psychopath came to town in the person of one Karl Ruger. He was a real piece of work. A former mob button man who’d gone way off the reservation into Hannibal Lecter territory. Apparently Ruger had ties to a local group of radical white supremacist militiamen and they put together a terrorist attack that still stands as the worst example of domestic terrorism on U.S. shores. You read about it in the papers, maybe saw the movie they did. Or read the books. The Trouble. That’s what they call it.

  Ruger and the other assholes spik
ed the town’s water supply with hallucinogens during a big Halloween festival. Pine Deep was wall-to-wall with tourists. Everyone went apeshit nuts. Eleven thousand people died.

  No matter how many times I read and reread that number, it still hits me in the gut.

  Eleven thousand.

  Three times that many were injured, and more than half the town burned down.

  The Trouble.

  According to the Net, the town was trying to come back. Some of it was already back, though it was no longer a Halloween tourist spot. It was settling back into being a blue-collar farming community with a scattering of craft shops and some galleries.

  That’s what I learned from web searches.

  So, while I drove out there, I tried to make sense of those events—forty years ago and ten years ago—and how they might connect with recent murders. There was damn little about the new killings in the press, and every story I read suggested that each of the victims died in a violent car crash or farm-related accident. Not one word of anything criminal. The news stories didn’t mention anything about animal attacks either, which means either that was squashed or the reporters out there are dumb as fuck. My guess was the former.

  I hit Route 611 and turned north.

  Chap. 13

  The killer watched the big man in the woods.

  The man was dressed in dark clothes. Battle dress uniform, boots, a shoulder rig with a holstered pistol. A Beretta. A knife clipped to the inside of the right front pants pocket.

  The killer crouched on the thick oak limb and leaned down to watch.

  The big man walked around the wreck of the motorcycle. He touched nothing. He stood for long moments studying it. He walked the perimeter of the crash scene, then out to the road, then back.

  Occasionally the big man spoke out loud even though he was alone.

  The killer strained to hear.

  “Bug,” the big man said, “looks like we got another one.” He read the bike’s license plate number. He gave a physical description of the driver. Or what was left of the driver. He stood as if listening. “No, tell Top and Bunny to check out that car crash in Lambertville. I’ll call if I need them to come a’running.”

  He listened again.

  “No. I think I’m going to have to talk to the locals on this. Yeah, I know the chief. Ornery little bastard. Okay. Cowboy out.”

  The big man suddenly straightened as if he’d heard something. His gun was suddenly in his hand. It was like a magic trick. The man was fast.

  So fast.

  He crouched and turned, bringing the gun up into a two-handed grip, eyes tracking at the same time as the gun barrel. The man was sharp.

  Very sharp.

  He even looked up at the surrounding trees.

  For one fragment of a moment he looked directly at the killer.

  But he did not see him.

  The camouflage was too good, the intervening foliage too thick, the place of concealment too well chosen. So the narrowed eyes of the big man moved away. Reluctantly, though, as if the big man’s instincts were not in harmony with his senses. As if his instincts were sharper, more primitive. Limited by the sensory awareness potentials of the modern human.

  The killer smiled.

  He could understand that.

  He did not move at all.

  But he watched every single thing this big man did. This was a dangerous, dangerous man. This was a killer in his own right. That much was obvious. His speed, the confidence he demonstrated as he turned to face the unknown. As if he’d faced—and fought—things that came at from unexpected directions. Many times.

  He had that kind of aura.

  The killer in the trees watched the killer with the gun.

  He wanted so badly to fight this man.

  To battle with him in the most primal of ways.

  To revel in defeating him.

  To taste the blood of another predator.

  To eat a warrior’s heart.

  Chap. 14

  Pine Deep is a triangular wedge of fertile farmland and mountains in Bucks County. It’s bisected by Interstate Alternate Extension Route A-32, lying hard against the Delaware River that separated Pennsylvania from New Jersey and framed on all sides by streams and canals. A-32 wavers back and forth between the two states, across old iron bridges and up through farm country and then plows right through the town. To the southwest was the much smaller town of Black Marsh, and above Pine Deep was the even tinier Crestville. A-32 was the only road that cut all the way through those three towns. All other roads inside the triangle lead nowhere except someone’s back forty or to the asymmetrical tangle of cobblestoned streets in Pine Deep’s trendy shopping and dining district. Bigger and more prosperous towns like Doylestown, New Hope, and Lambertville were pretty close, but Pine Deep felt more remote than it was. Like a lot of farming towns in America, it covered an astounding amount of real estate for the number of people who lived there. Some of the farms had ten thousand acres of corn or pumpkins or garlic and maybe a dozen people living in the farmhouse and related buildings. Migrant workers did a lot of the labor.

  I rattled across the bridge and drove into Pine Deep in the middle of an afternoon that was hotter than the weatherman said it would be. The trees were heavy with lush growth, and the brighter greens of spring had given way to the darkness of summer leaves. Towers of white cumulonimbus clouds rose like the pillars of heaven, but the distant western sky was softer, painted with cirrus clouds in brushstrokes of gray-white. There were birds up there, and at first I thought they were hawks, but they were too big. Probably turkey vultures.

  I slowed to a stop on the shoulder of the road and leaned out to look up at them. Counted them.

  Thirteen.

  I tried not to make anything of that.

  Spooky town, meaningless coincidence.

  I kept driving.

  A-32 rolls on for mile after mile and I didn’t see a single living soul. The corn was half-grown and stiff and tall. The pumpkins were only pale knobs. Way off in the distance the farmhouses looked like toys from a Monopoly set. I drove past a tractor sitting at an angle in the middle of a fallow field, the engine rusted to a bright orange. A threadbare crow stood on the curve of the seat-back, his head turning slowly to follow the passage of my car. Flies swarmed in the air over a dead raccoon whose head had been squashed flat by a car tire.

  I turned the radio on to find some music to lighten the load. Couldn’t get reception worth a damn except for some religious blood and thunder stuff. I dug a CD at random from the center console and fed it into the slot. Tom Waits began growling at me. Song about a murder in a red barn.

  “Balls,” I said and almost turned it off.

  Didn’t though.

  Drove on, listening to Tom’s gravelly voice spin dark magic under the blue summer sky.

  Chap. 15

  The highway wandered around between some hefty mountains and then spilled out at the far end of a small town. Kind of a Twin Peaks vibe to it. One main street. Lots of crooked little side streets. Low buildings, lots of trees. From the crest of the hill, I could look down and count all five of the streetlights.

  I took my foot off the brake and let the car find its own way down the hill, coasting, in no hurry to get there. As I reached the main drag, I switched the CD player off and drove in silence through the center of town. There were people here and there, but you couldn’t call it “bustling” without lying. Most of the houses and stores had been rebuilt or repaired, but here and there I could see some blackened shells. Even after ten years the town still wore its scars.

  Eleven thousand people.

  Were there eleven thousand ghosts haunting these hills and this sad little town? I sure as shit wouldn’t buy real estate here. Not at a penny an acre.

  According to the Wikipedia page for the city of Pine Deep, there were currently two thousand, one hundred and nine people living here. In town and on the farms. It was hard to believe. I’d have guessed maybe five, six hundred.


  I tried to imagine what it must be like to live in a place like this. It had been devastated by domestic terrorism. It had taken a worse hit than New York on 9/11 in terms of deaths. Maybe worse still when you considered that it hadn’t been done by enemies of our country or religious fanatics. This terror was homegrown. It was brother attacking brother. That’s some hard shit to accept, hard to get past.

  As I drove down the main street, I saw the haunted looks on the faces of the people of Pine Deep. Some looked furtively away, unwilling or unable to meet the eyes of a stranger. Fear, paranoia, shame. Hang any label on it you think will fit.

  Others stared at me, their eyes dark and intense, their attention focused and unwavering as I rolled past. I don’t think I saw a single smile. I don’t think I could blame anyone for being that grim, that detached. I sure as hell would be if this was my town.

  I passed the Saul Weinstock Memorial Hospital, but the place was only half built. Creeper vines had crawled over the stacks of building materials and there were no lights in any of the windows.

  Halfway through town, I saw the sign for the police department. It was a storefront place with big ceramic pots with dead evergreens beside the door. I nosed my car into an angled slot and killed the engine.

  The sign on the glass door read:

  PINE DEEP POLICE DEPT.

  Chief Malcolm Crow

  Turn around and go home, said a little voice inside my head.

  “Too late for that,” I murmured, and got out. As I did, a woman came out of the office. Tall, with short black hair and dark blue eyes. Slim and very pretty in a no-nonsense country way. Around fifty but fighting it and winning. A touch of makeup and a mouth that looked made for smiling, but which wore no smile. She stopped five feet in front of me and gave me an up and down appraisal. Impossible to tell what she read from my scuffle of brown hair, JC Penney sports coat over jeans, and Payless black sneakers. Probably not much.

  But something flickered in her eyes and she half turned, opened the door to the police office and called inside. “He’s here.”

  She left the door ajar.

  I pasted on a friendly smile. “Are you with the police?” I asked.