I Kill Monsters: The Revenants (Book 2)

by Tony Monchinski

  “I have invited you here to extend an olive branch.” Rainford stepped from the dark, wearing a black silk smoking jacket with a red velvet shawl collar. Boone didn’t see any smokes, no pipe. Instead, the vampire had a brandy snifter in one hand.

  “A what?”

  Rainford settled itself in the upholstered chair, one leg crossed over its other. “I come in peace.”

  “You’re in a good mood you undead fuck.”

  Boone felt one of the vamps behind him move in close—figured it for Halstead—heard Rainford say, “Please,” felt it shift back into the shadows again.

  Rainford gestured with the brandy but made no move to drink it. “I have cause for optimism.”

  “What the fuck do you want?”

  “I assure you, it is not what I desire. All that in due time. Today there is something you will want, and I am in the position to deliver it to you.”

  Boone didn’t take the bait. Over the speaker system, Jeannie C. Riley was confronting the Harper Valley PTA.

  “Not interested? Very well, then, I suppose—”

  “Oh just come out and say it already for fuck’s sake. The fuck do you want?”

  “Again, I assure you, it is not what I—”

  “Okay, whatever. Shit. What do you have for me?”

  “I want to give you the vampire that made Kreshnik aware of your friends, thereby sealing their doom. I want to give you the vampire that was in league with the man you called Santa Anna. He calls himself Enfermo.”

  “Enfermo.”

  “It means sickness, disease.”

  “Great. Now I know its name.”

  “You are here that I may impart an address as well.”

  “You give me that—you know I’m going to go there and kill that thing, right?”

  “I would certainly hope so.”

  “Why?” Boone looked at the Dark Lord, looked at him hard. “What’s in it for you?”

  “I have my reasons.” A screen saver of a winged demon over a city skyline had popped up on the laptop. “Which I choose not to disclose at this time.”

  “What is this bloodsucker to you?”

  “He is nothing.” Rainford held the snifter up to its nose and sniffed the brandy. “Less than nothing.”

  “What do you want in return?”

  “Only to talk.”

  “Only.”

  “Later I will have a request, one I sincerely believe you will be eager to comply with.”

  “Don’t fuck around with me, Rainford.”

  “Said the fly to the spider.” The Dark Lord smiled at him, bemused. Boone grumbled and looked down. The fuck had a point.

  When he looked back up, Boone put it out there: “How do you know I won’t just cut and run?”

  “I do not. Which is why I am not sending you alone.”

  “Great. I gotta listen to more of your Russian stories today?”

  “No.” The Dark Lord lowered the snifter, still smiling. “Not today.”

  14.

  12:00 P.M.

  Dickie was in the line at the dining hall, Carlucci standing next to him, Bianchi and Nicky close by, other guys with them too. Dickie heard one black guy say to another, “Hey dawg, I catch a ride?” knowing the guy was asking for drugs. Dickie catching on, picking up on the slang.

  He was still drawing looks, from the C.O.s, from the cons. Nothing hard, just respect, like, hey, you know who that is…? Because people did know who he was, what he was. Not just any other fish. A big man on the outside, big man on the Inside too. Dickie inside not even a week and already back to doing prison like he’d never left it.

  Only Werner standing there, a smug look on the screw’s face.

  Dickie had pegged the guard from day one, noticed how he didn’t have any friends, even among the other hacks. Guy might be on the payroll, but Dickie knew they couldn’t trust him.

  “This is the fourth time in six months it swelled up on me like this,” Bianchi was telling Romano and Palumbo, “doctor don’t want to aspirate it no more,” the younger men listening to him tell it, “don’t want to put too much hydrocortisone in it or somethin’. That’s when they stick a needle in, drain it,” Bianchi clearing up what aspirate meant in case the other two didn’t know.

  “Doc says can’t I just live with it like this?” Bianchi talking, Dickie and Carlucci exchanging looks, amused. “Sure I can live with it but thing is I don’t want to. I’m a make another appointment, go see him again, he won’t do it, I’m a do it myself, with a needle,” Bianchi looking to Nicky, “maybe you help me?”

  Stepping forward to take a tray from the stack, Dickie heard a commotion and turned just as Renfeld gripped either side of his shirt by the collar, jostling him, speaking fast in a whiny voice. “The master wishes—”

  “Whoa-whoa-whoa!” Carlucci making to drag the man from Dickie. “Back the fuck up buddy.”

  Dickie took Renfeld’s hands off him, saying to Carlucci, “I got it Cheeks,” to the men surrounding them, “Let him talk.”

  “Dickie—” Carlucci tried, cut off by Bianchi: “No, Boss, you don’t understand. He’s—”

  Dickie’s raised hand silenced them.

  “Say what it is you wanted to say to me.”

  “The Master wishes to speak to you.” Renfeld shifted his nervous, beady eyes to Carlucci and the others like him. Other prisoners trying not to act like they were watching. “Alone.”

  “Not a good time,” Dickie told him, Nicky literally spitting, “Fat chance of that you Jamook!”

  “You can come one night—”

  “Okay,” Carlucci pulled Renfeld by his neck, trying to draw him away from Dickie, “Hey’d you get a chance to look at them potatoes yet, huh?”

  “—or he will come and see you,” Renfeld promised before Bianchi smashed a handful of mashed potatoes into his face.

  “Know it don’t taste as good without your roaches or whatever,” Bianchi standing there with a full tray he’d snatched out of some inmate’s hands.

  Werner stood off on the side, not moving to intervene.

  Renfeld scurried away, Bianchi winging the tray at him. “Ya fuckin’ ding, get outta here,” Bianchi cupping his bandaged elbow in his hand.

  Dickie reached up, straightening out his track jacket, lifting his crucifix up off his chest, checking it was still there.

  “What’d I tell you boss?” Disgust in Carlucci’s voice. “è pazzo.”

  The guard, Werner, just standing there, shaking his head, like bad move.

  15.

  3:12 P.M.

  Gritz was stopped at a red light in his Crown Vic, the wait interminable.

  He retrieved his flask from his blazer pocket, unscrewed the cap and took a slug, looking over at the car next to him as he swallowed. Woman in there with her kids, looking at him, shaking her head. Gritz smiled at her, considered flashing his badge her way but the light changed and he had to drive.

  He’d figured a few things out about Doctor Faust.

  For one, the guy wasn’t motivated by fame. He had fame. He wanted knowledge. He’d studied philosophy,/Jurisprudence and medicine, too,/And, worst of all, theology. And still Goethe had the doctor complaining, saying here I am, for all my lore,/The wretched fool I was before. Faust feeling that for all our science and art/We can know nothing. It burns my heart. Gritz liked that part:

  worst of all, theology.

  He’d figured out that Gretchen was Margaret, that for some reason halfway through the play Goethe starts referring to the apple of Faust’s eye by a different name. The hell he’d done that for? Margaret the only one suspicious of Faust’s companion, Mephistopheles. The demon referring to her as a monkey. He’d figured out that Faust had gotten Margaret or Gretchen or whatever her name was pregnant. That’s why her brother, Valentine, had shown up. Royally pissed.

  Maybe if he was in a college somewhere, in a German Romanticism or philosophy class—wherever they’d teach this stuff—maybe then Gritz would feel some sense of sati
sfaction, some semblance of achievement. In the meantime, out here in the real world, things weren’t going the way he needed them to.

  The way they were looking at him at the precinct. Captain Rose hadn’t said anything to him since the other day, and he wouldn’t. He trusted Gritz, trusted that when his once-star detective said he was working a case, things were getting done.

  Gritz took another sip from his flask.

  Were they?

  There was the pressure they put on you to close cases and then there was the pressure you put on yourself.

  In the short term, Gritz was troubled that he couldn’t catch a lead in the Swallows murders. That’s what they were calling the bloodbath from the porn shoot, after the ingenue’s nom de porn. Also her speciality. There were a lot of her videos making the rounds at the precinct—cops never needed an excuse to watch porn, Gritz thought, then corrected himself. Men didn’t need an excuse to watch nudie flicks.

  The younger detectives, when they weren’t “studying the evidence,” could talk about him at their desks. Gritz hoped they enjoyed it. A shit storm was brewing in this city and they knew it. The vacuum Nicolie’s incarceration left out here on the street. The mob wasn’t what it was a generation ago when Gritz was starting out. The succession wasn’t clear; it wasn’t a matter of okay-now-this-guy’s-gone-and-this-guy-moves-up-a-notch. The way these things got settled these days, there were usually bodies lying around afterwards.

  The shooting hadn’t started yet.

  So there was that.

  Cathy wasn’t answering the phone or returning his calls. Gritz couldn’t think of anyone he could reach out to to contact her. Cath’s friends were her friends, and Gritz, well Gritz didn’t exactly have friends. Guys from work and drinking buddies, like Foley, he didn’t count.

  Faust, though, Faust had had Mephistopheles to intervene in the matter of Margaret, the demon visiting Margaret’s friend Martha’s house when he knew Margaret was going to be there. Martha Schwerdtlein her full name, Gritz remembering that. Mephistopheles lying, telling Martha her husband was dead in Padua, in Italy. It was the little details like that, stuck with Gritz.

  Mephistopheles telling Martha he’d come back with his buddy, his buddy could confirm her husband’s demise: what is testified by two/Is everywhere known to be true. Mephistopheles serving as Faust’s wingman.

  That line from earlier in the poem sticking in Gritz’s craw, when Faust first sees Margaret and is enamored. Mephistopheles telling him she is well past her fourteenth year. Her fourteenth year? That the age of consent back then?

  Yanks against the Padres tonight, game one of the World Series. At Yankee Stadium. Gritz hoped his Yankees destroyed San Diego. He drank to that.

  The flashing lights in his rear view caught his eye.

  “Shit.”

  Gritz pocketed the flask and pulled his Crown Vic over to the side of the road. He reached into his jacket and got his badge ready.

  A solitary cherry light flashed on the car behind him, looked like a Mercury. Three men had gotten out of it, standing around the vehicle. Not dressed like cops. They were waiting for him to get out.

  So Gritz got out.

  He was good with little details, with names and faces. The guy in front of the car was no stranger to him, though he wore a badge on a chain now. Gritz made him for the guy from the bar the other day, guy with the accent, had offered to buy him a drink. The other two guys he didn’t recognize: a wiry white guy whose sideburns grew into his mustache and a black man.

  “Guess you didn’t pull me over for my autograph, Brian.”

  “No. That I did not.” The man smiled and held out his hand. Gritz played along, took it. Gritz feeling good but not that good, figured they wouldn’t know he’d been drinking. Figured let Brian talk, see what this was about.

  “Detective. Levon and Dec.” Introducing Gritz to the other two men. The one named Dec sporting the Franz-Josef saying, “True Gritz,” no trace of a British accent. Sounded American.

  Brian leaned back on their car, Gritz seeing he’d been right, it was a Mercury Grand Marquis. Fewer of them around on the street these days. “Let me ask you something, detective,” Brian asking, “When you were a lad, were you ever scared of monsters?”

  “Monsters?”

  “Monsters.”

  “Yeah, sure.”

  “What if I told you, you were right. To be scared.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You’re a cool one, mate. I know you want to tell me to sod off, but you’re not. I respect that. I’m going to tell you a little story. You don’t believe it, it’s like I never told you, innit? But you should believe me. Because what I’m going to tell you is the god’s honest truth.”

  “God’s awful,” offered the black man, Levon, sounding as American as the one with the mustache.

  Passersby saw four official looking men standing around two cars, one with a light flashing on top, two of the men talking to each other. One impassive, arms at his sides, doing most of the listening. The other gesticulating and animated, carrying the conversation.

  When Brian had finished, Gritz said, “Wow,” because he couldn’t imagine this guy was in his right mind.

  And he was wearing a badge.

  “So what you’re telling me—basically—is there’s this whole dark secret world under the surface of this one with vampires and monsters and—and—hey, you know? You’re right. It is kind of hard to believe.”

  “Like I’d said, you’re of a mind to tell me to sod off. I get it. If I stood where you do, I’d think me mental.”

  Gritz nodded, thinking it prudent not to comment.

  “Your choice, detective. You believe…” Brian produced a folded sheet of paper, handed it over. Gritz took it but didn’t look at it. “…or you forget this conversation ever happened.”

  “Let’s say you’re not just fucking with me, for whatever reason you might be fucking with me.”

  “We’re not fucking with you,” said the one named Dec.

  …what is testified by two, a line from Goethe, Is everywhere known to be true…

  “Let’s say you’re not. What’s next?”

  “We’ll be in touch.” Brian and his guys were getting back in their Mercury.

  “Again—” Gritz called to him. “Let’s say you’re not just fucking with me. How do you guys know so much about these vampires?”

  “We’ve got a bloke on the inside.”

  Gritz walked back to his car. The Mercury pulled past him, Dec in the back seat saying to him out the window, “We’re not fucking with you.”

  He sat down in his Crown Vic and tapped the sheet of paper against the steering wheel, thinking. Gritz unfolded the paper. A flier. Some kind of lecture, a talk. The Promise of Prometheus: Myth in the Service of Truth. By some professor or somebody Gritz had never heard of before. At the City University in Manhattan couple days from now.

  Gritz looked up but the Mercury was already gone.

  16.

  8:35 P.M.

  He’d wired a late-80s Mustang and drove himself and the kid over the bridge into Manhattan before pulling over, switching spots with the kid. The kid with his hair done in cornrows tonight, had it in a bun the other day. Dodd could tell the boy thought highly of himself, thought he was some kind of big man among his friends, and maybe he was when he was with those little faggots.

  The kid—Luther was his name—more subdued now in Dodd’s presence.

  “Keep goin’ straight,” Dodd told him. “And stay under thirty-five, you hear me?” The kid’s foot heavy on the accelerator, the Mustang the kind of car going to respond to it. Kid had his head up behind something, Dodd wasn’t sure, probably smoke. Dodd wasn’t going to take kindly to drug use, not out in open in front of him on a job. So long as the kid could function, be where he needed to be when Dodd needed him to be there, keep it together.

  The first thing Dodd had done when the kid had gotten into the car is he had handed the kid a hundred do
llar bill, the kid’s face saying whoa, the kid playing it cool, like he was used to being handed that kind of money. You play this straight, Dodd had told him, there’s more where that came from. The kid askin’, yo and where is this comin’ from, Dodd telling him you wouldn’t believe me I tell you. Not that he would tell this Luther kid. Fuck seemed the type to talk.

  Luther, who liked to be called Luke by his friends, stopped at a yellow light going red.

  Dodd had placed a .38 revolver on the console between them, was checking the load on a second handgun, a 9mm. Luke reached over, picked up the .38, looking it over.

  “What you think you doin’?”

  “I’m a take this one.” Luther thinking it made perfect sense, thought he was being proper, deferential and all, taking the smaller piece, letting Dodd have the nine.

  “You gonna take shit, Luther,” Dodd snatched the revolver from his hand—Luke saying “Luke,” Dodd ignoring him—Dodd muttering, “Give me that shit.” Luke looked at his empty hand hanging there in space. “Green light, Luther.”

  Luke drove, asking about his lack of a pistol, “What am I going to do then?”

  “What you gonna do about what?” The .38 had disappeared under Dodd’s jean jacket, the nine on his lap.

  “’Bout a strap I’m talkin’.”

  “Shit, Luther, Luke, whatever you call yourself. Your ass gonna sit in the car. Wait for me. You take a left up there, by the light.”

  “What if they come out shooting?”

  “Shootin’ at what? You? They come out shootin’ I’m a be shootin’ right back at ‘em. You wait, let me get in the car. Then you drive. Fast. But slow down now, nigger.”

  “How’m I supposed to protect myself?”

  “Protect yourself? Protect yourself from what? You are high, aren’t you? You know what? Maybe it was a bad idea askin’ you.”

  “Nah, dawg. It’s good. My head’s straight.”

  “I ain’t your dog. And it better be,” meaning the kid’s mental state. “There it is coming up on the left.” The kid started to slow the car as they neared a skyscraper on the avenue, Dodd telling him, “No, keep goin’. Pull over up ahead there, by the pump.”