I Kill Monsters: The Revenants (Book 2)

by Tony Monchinski

  Thing was, the guy was a known associate of one “Goose Gossitch,” better known to Gritz as his friend Frank.

  The hell was Frank? Gritz hadn’t heard from him since…since he’d seen him that night the suitcase pimp did his swan dive from the twentieth floor. Was Frank avoiding him? Was he mixed up in whatever his guy got himself involved in over there in the Bronx, gone to ground? Gone to ground or worse? Frank could take care of himself, had been as long as Gritz had known him. Thing was, even a cat that jumped out a tree enough times wasn’t always going to land on its feet. It was bound to happen.

  Gritz smiled to himself, knowing he sounded crazy. A cat was always going to land on its feet. The hell was he thinking. Knew it wasn’t him, knew it was the vodka. Frank’s whereabouts were just another diversion from his own case load.

  “How’s the case going?” Jason had asked him. A lot of people were asking Gritz that lately. And the truth was, he had nothing to tell them, because the case wasn’t going anywhere. For a few weeks over the summer, bodies were turning up, dismembered, mutilated. Sure, there were clues—the feathers, the cigarettes—but clues were only good if they led you somewhere, and here was Gritz sitting in Jackie’s, staring at the bourbon bottles on the top shelf as Jackie filled his glass.

  That last night Gritz had seen Frank, the jumper had gone splat on the sidewalk. Barely missed an old lady. Landed on her dog.

  Mephistopheles had come into Faust’s den in the form of a poodle. Faust and his buddy Wagner were walking through the streets, talking. The dog runs up to them and starts running around their legs and Faust notices something is out of sorts with the pup: It spirals all around us, as you see/…and if I do not err, a fiery eddy/Whirls after it and marks the trail. Wagner doesn’t see a trail, tells his friend the doctor it just looks like a dog to him.

  So what does Faust go and do? He brings the dog back home with him. And the dog isn’t acting right there either, it’s still running around, sniffing at the window, snarling and moaning. The poodle morphs into some kind of demon and then a mist and Mephistopheles steps out of that cloud.

  Or so it seemed to go, if Gritz was reading it right.

  The translation he had had the German on one side of the page, the English on the other.

  “True Gritz.”

  “Foley.”

  The coroner sat himself on the available stool and ordered a drink.

  “Where you going to be for tomorrow’s game?” Foley asked Gritz.

  “Probably right here.”

  “Joe Torre is a god.”

  “I won’t argue with you on that,” Gritz agreed.

  “Still, I’d feel better about it if Strawberry was in the game. You know they took twenty-four inches of colon out of him?”

  Gritz liked Foley. The coroner wasn’t NYPD, he clocked in at 520 First Avenue, the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner. But Gritz knew Foley from innumerable crime scenes. Foley was one of the best at what he did, had a good rapport with the police, with Gritz. Foley shared some of the same interests as Gritz, like the both of them showing up at the Rockefeller Overlook the other morning.

  Foley said something about David Wells having an arm on him.

  “Guy deserves a Cy Young,” Gritz concurred.

  “This is the first time the World Series and the Super Bowl played in the same place,” Foley was telling him and Gritz knew he was right, Jack Murphy Stadium or whatever they were calling it these days.

  Foley’s head was full of trivia like that. Gritz pegging Foley as one of those guys could probably make a killing on Jeopardy. Foley a repository for all sorts of trivia, human body facts being his specialty, which only made sense given his occupation. Some things everyone knew: like it was impossible to sneeze without closing your eyes, or how the human body was eighty percent water. But Foley had a command of that and other, more esoteric things: like that the skull was made up of twenty-nine different bones, or there were forty-five miles of nerves in the skin.

  Sometimes Foley got carried away with it, wanted to play stupid little games like name the ten body parts that were only three letters long: eye, arm, hip, etcetera. Got lost in details like Darryl Strawberry having two feet of his asshole removed earlier in the month because of his colon cancer.

  “What is this?” Foley said. “New hangout for a Hundred Blacks in Law Enforcement?” He referred to the music, a rap song filling the bar. Caught up in his reverie, Gritz hadn’t noticed.

  “Hey, they care.”

  100 Hundred Blacks in Law Enforcement Who Care.

  “Who cares?”

  “Who else cares these days?”

  “Good point.” Foley knocked back a quarter of his rum. “These young guys,” he indicated the cops in street clothes around them, “they like this kind of music. My kids listen to this shit at home. Drives me crazy.”

  Gritz, who prided himself on being a detail man, hadn’t noticed the music until Foley pointed it out.

  “Give me Mountain, some Foghat any day,” Foley was saying.

  “Those were the days, my friend.” Gritz and Foley had this little game they played when they were together, quoting rock songs in their conversations, see if the other got it. “We thought they’d never end.”

  “Let me tell you, my friend,” Foley departed slightly from the lyrics, “we’re older but no wiser.”

  “For in our hearts,” Gritz raised his glass to Mary Hopkin, “the dreams are still the same.”

  “Well said.” Foley drank his rum. “Better than this shit,” referring to the rap song. “You know what this guy is singing about? Cocaine. Cocaine, Gritz. This song was all over the radio this summer. My kids listen to this shit. How I know it.”

  “Like you listened to Clapton.”

  “No. Not like Clapton.”

  “Like Casey Jones.”

  “What?”

  “Like Buck Cherry.”

  “The hell is a Buck Cherry? You mean Chuck Berry—I don’t see the connection.”

  “Buck Cherry. Don’t keep up much on modern rock, huh?”

  “No. And what are you getting at. Don’t equivocate.”

  “Hate to break it to you, Foley, but rap’s the new rock and roll.”

  “Okay. Bullshit.”

  “Cocaine Blues.”

  “The fuck sang that?”

  “Dylan. And Cash.”

  “Bullshit, Gritz.”

  “She don’t lie-she don’t lie-she don’t lie—”

  “Yeah, have fun with your fucking—” Foley lifted the cover of Gritz’s book to get a look “—Faust. My Christ, is your life that boring or what?”

  “‘preciate it.” Gritz saluted him with his vodka and Foley left grinning.

  The rap song cut off abruptly and someone in the bar cheered, whether it was for the end of the song or because the band was taking the stage Gritz couldn’t tell.

  He gestured to Jackie as the opening chords filled the bar. A group of burnt out, Grateful Dead wanna-be’s were on stage.

  “Although you knew you'd never get away…”

  Gritz thought he could get into this. The band’s sound reminded him of the Eagles and the Grateful Dead, the tall guy singing sounded like Henley doing Sunset Grill. He figured Foley was digging this if he’d stuck around. Could see now why Jason Smith would bring his girlfriend to Jackie’s, to hear—Gritz leaned back on his stool, got a look at the name of the band on the bass drum—Phantom Redemption.

  “Well fading memories only build up fear friend…”

  Thought Cathleen would like this, yes she would. Gritz thinking maybe he’d find out if they were playing here again or where’d they be locally, he’d give Cath a call, see if she wanted to see them with him. Cath used to like this kind of music when they were younger. Gritz didn’t know what kind of music she was into now. He figured Celine Dione on account of the Titanic, probably those Goo Goo Dolls or whatever they called themselves too, had that song in City of Angels.

  “And a drowning man c
an never scream…”

  Yeah, that’s what he’d do, give Cath a call.

  That talk of Clapton before led him to Buddy Guy and Robert Johnson and Gritz remembered reading somewhere—where? A book or Rolling Stone?—about Robert Johnson at the Crossroads, making a deal with the devil, swapping his soul, the devil tuning his guitar. Made a pact with the devil, like Faust. Like another Mississippi bluesman, another Johnson, Tommy. Guys like Tommy and Robert Johnson poor, coming from nothing. Then there was a guy like Faust, established, renowned, still primed for what was coming when Mephistopheles walked into his room. And here I am, for all my lore/The wretched fool I was before. The doctor feeling that for all our science and art/We can know nothing.

  When Mephistopheles shows up, Faust recognizes him for what he is and still asks him to stay.

  And then comes the bargain, right there on page one hundred and eighty one: Here you shall be the master, I be bound, pledges Mephistopheles, And at your nod I’ll work incessantly;/But when we meet again beyond,/Then you shall do the same for me. Faust walks right into it, and maybe walking right into it was the right metaphor, because the doctor understood what he was pledging.

  Or did he?

  Of the beyond I have no thought;/When you reduce this world to naught,/…What happens is of no concern.

  Gritz looked into the glass in his hand. Robert Johnson was twenty-seven years old when he drank poisoned whiskey, died of the strychnine. A lot of other musicians followed in his footsteps, dying when they were twenty-seven:

  The Stones’ Brian Jones.

  Hendrix and Joplin, both in ’70.

  Morrison a year after them.

  That Cobain idiot four years back.

  Gritz wasn’t at the end of his book yet, so he wasn’t sure what was going to happen to Doctor Faust, though he had ideas.

  Tommy Johnson, at least, dropped dead at sixty from a heart attack.

  Gritz was still staring into his glass when a guy leaning over the open stool on his left with money in his hand said, “Ace, innit? The music that is.”

  “Yeah. That they are.”

  The man told Jackie what he wanted.

  “Hey. Aren’t you…” It was the way the guy was going about it, like he was only now recognizing Gritz. Feigning ignorance. “Detective Gritzowski? True Gritz?”

  “The one and only,” Gritz played along, being friendly. Aside from his British accent, the other guy was nondescript, looked like a dozen other white guys Gritz ran into every day. Guy come up to him in a cop bar, Gritz didn’t peg him for a troublemaker. Maybe one of the ones needed some time to work up the nerve. There’d been those like that the last twenty-five years, fewer these days. Gritz rarely doubted his intuition, but he knew its limitations.

  “Man, you were my hero when I was in the academy.”

  Were my hero. Gritz noted the tense. Told the younger man thanks.

  “This one’s called Ghosts in the Garden,” a man on stage announced before Phantom Redemption broke into a new song.

  “Me and me mates are right over at that booth,” the man motioned but Gritz didn’t turn to look. “Buy you a drink?”

  “Maybe some other time. I finish this, I gotta go.”

  “Yeah. Hey,” holding out his hand, “Brian,” telling Gritz his name as they shook, saying “it’s a pleasure to meet you, really,” not identifying his work or position. Brian gathering his longnecks, saying almost to himself, “William ‘True Gritz’ Gritzowski. Wait until I tell the boys. Cheers.”

  Gritz let him go, focusing his attention on his vodka.

  “When you saw how hard I tried and still I failed,” the lead singer asked, “did it turn you off from trying?”

  What was it led Faust to his downfall? He was a bright guy, maybe the brightest in his day. Goethe had Wagner remarking to him out on the street that crowds revere you like a mighty lord. That when you walk, they stand in rows to see,/Into the air their caps will fly… So what is it this Faust guy wants? Faust admitting to Mephistopheles, I gathered up and piled up high/In vain the treasures of the human mind…./My stature has not grown a whit,/No closer to the infinite.

  His stature?

  Is that what Faust wanted—greater fame?

  Was that it?

  Gritz couldn’t imagine.

  Yeah, maybe he’d give Cath a call. Who the fuck was he kidding?

  Saturday

  17 October 1998

  13.

  10:15 A.M.

  He dreamed of a bleak landscape, bereft and forsaken, burnt and ash. Human bones pooled thigh deep, layered atop one another, brittle. Dun clouds against a darker sky, a red sun burning. Something reared up from the bones, exploding in a shower of skulls and vertebrae, rising into the air and blotting out the sun as its wings unfolded and enveloped the firmament. Its mouth parted to reveal row upon row of razor sharp teeth, its head undulating from its body on a serpentine neck, fire bursting from its maw to obliterate the world—

  Boone woke up with Pomeroy and Halstead standing over him.

  “Do you know you whimper in your sleep?” Halstead had its arms crossed, chin in its hand.

  “No, I don’t.”

  “Yes, you do.”

  “No. I don’t.”

  “You do,” Pomeroy confirmed. “Troubled conscience?”

  Boone opened his mouth with a comeback, but before he could utter a word Halstead had uncrossed its arms and stuffed a ball gag in place. Boone roared “You fuck—do that again I’ll bite off your fingers!” at it, which came out sounding like “Mmm fmmk—mm mm ahmm mmm mmm-mm mm mmm!” He couldn’t believe the sneaky bloodsucker had fooled him, got the gag in his mouth like that.

  “You can’t believe I gagged you so easily. Is that it?”

  Just to be contrarian, Boone shook his head.

  “Believe it,” Halstead told him. “You’re not as smart as you think you are.” Halstead spoke his next few words for Pomeroy’s benefit: “Or as good looking.” Pomeroy emitted an amused little titter.

  Boone told Halstead he was an ugly-dead-freak-fuck but none of that came out sounding the way he’d hoped, what with the gag. He was already immobile, fitted out in a straight jacket and strapped down flat. When they got behind him and lifted him, he found he was on a wheeled gurney.

  His whole body hurt.

  Colson had not been going easy on him in training. Each jounce of the gurney brought a new grumble through the gag.

  Pomeroy looked down on him as they navigated dim hallways Boone did not recognize. “It’s from my personal collection,” the vampire told Boone, meaning the ball gag. “You should see where else we can put it.”

  They rolled Boone through darkness and shadow to another part of the facility. Pomeroy pressed a button in the wall near a folding metal gate and they waited, the two vampires and the bound man, Pomeroy humming audibly to itself—“Hmmm hmmm hmmm hmmm hmm”—until a bell dinged and an elevator door opened. They pulled the metal doors apart and turned Boone around on the gurney, wheeling him into the elevator.

  On a raised stool in the corner of the cab sat an elevator operator unlike any Boone had ever seen. Pomeroy and Halstead greeted it with nods, drawing the metal door closed behind them. Boone couldn’t take his eyes off the thing.

  It was short, about the size of a dwarf Boone had tossed in a bar one drunken night. Its face was puckered up with an oversized mouth and a pug nose; its protruding eyes would look cute on a doll or a stuffed animal but looked downright bizarre on this thing. The creature was dressed like it was the 1940s: it wore a navy blue suit and pants with a peaked cap, blue with a gold band. Large, pointed ears jutted out of either side of the hat and the suit pants ended at its shins, pulled up further because its knees were drawn to its chest on the stool, revealing claw-like feet.

  One of its feet reached out and pressed a button on the wall.

  The elevator started its ascent.

  “Boone,” Pomeroy worked the gag free, “Say hello.”

  “Not
a good idea,” Halstead said as if to himself.

  “Where’s the cigarette girl?” asked Boone.

  Pomeroy laughed until Halstead’s stern glance quieted him. “What? You and Wells...” Pomeroy waved his hand, looking towards the ceiling. “It was funny.”

  “What are you, some kind of goblin elevator operator?”

  “I’m a Hobgoblin mate.” The thing answered with a thick British accent. “And I prefer the term liftman.”

  “Well, I think I seen everything now.” Boone looked around the wood paneled cab. “Tell me somethin’ guv’nor. Aside from bein’ one ugly motherfucker, what’s your secret power?”

  Pomeroy raised its eyes in its head and hummed out loud. The Hobgoblin remained impassive, seated on its stool.

  “You Rainford’s pet or somethin’?”

  Halstead moved fast, the way vampires could, stuffing the gag back into Boone’s mouth. “There.”

  The Hobgoblin actually thanked the vampire.

  They wheeled Boone off the elevator and into a short hallway. More wood paneling on the walls and ceiling. A concrete gargoyle statue was set in a niche in the wall next to a door. One of the vampires knocked on the door and as they waited for it to open Boone watched the gargoyle, noticing how its eyes seemed to be watching him. He kept looking at it when the door opened and they wheeled him past and Boone would have sworn its eyes followed him. He growled at it from behind the gag but they were already inside Rainford’s quarters, another hallway traversing a suite of rooms.

  Music suffused the Dark Lord’s quarters. Boone couldn’t place it at first. It definitely wasn’t the classical he would have expected. They rolled him through dark shadows and into a lamp-lit study. Bookshelves lined the walls. The furniture consisted of a settee, an upholstered chair and a writing desk with a laptop booted up to a word processing program.

  Pomeroy and Halstead set the gurney up straight, placing Boone in a vertical position. One of them removed the gag from his mouth. Boone was thinking of things to say when a voice spoke from the shadows.