by Emby Press
It’s no-frills, my digs. A desk that looks like it was kicked here from Purgatory, a creaky office chair for me and a couple of wooden ones for my clients, file cabinets, an Ecto-Radio, and a coffee pot so old Noah could have used it to get his morning java brewing on the Ark. Finishing touches? Assorted bullet-holes and head-sized divots in the bone plaster walls, and a graffiti of numbers from past cases scribbled on the desk blotter—XIabalba 6-5000, ERebus 12, GEhenna 666.
Matt Brimstone, P.I.
As for the man himself? I haven’t changed all that much since relocating to a neighborhood that makes Tijuana look like Shangri-La. Narrow face, narrow eyes, narrow build. Brick-red hair cropped short. The pointed beard’s new, blame a dame, she said it’d make me look devilish, how do you argue?
I’ve managed to keep my spirit-body in decent condition so far. Only the hands aren’t the original models, but I can’t blame a dame for that. For that, I can blame Rico the Chopper. Misunderstanding at the hellhound races.
“Take your hands off my dog, Brimstone,” he says to me, “or I’ll take them off you at the wrists.”
I’d tried to explain how the damn mutt jumped the rail and tried to rip my throat out, but there’s no reasoning with some people. The replacements cost me an arm and a leg, but the Transfigurationist was happy to accept Rico’s arm and leg instead of my own.
They’re strong, these paws of mine. The rust-colored fur is almost a match to my own hair. They pack more of a punch than I ever did before. And despite the claws, they handle Cain and Abel as well as the ones I was born with.
Cain and Abel, don’t even ask how much they set me back. Worth every cent, though. If I could have got hold of a pair of hellfire pistols that never run out of bullets when I was among the living, maybe I wouldn’t have ended up here among the dead quite so soon.
Time’s a screwball thing here in the Mephistopolis. It goes by, but it’s perpetual high-noon-midnight. Clocks and watches have no numbers, and fewer hands than I did right after my run-in with Rico the Chopper.
Boiling red-black sky. Charcoal hunk of moon hanging there looking down on the city like the eye of a corpse. Unsanitation Department street-cleaners grumbling their way up the block, spraying blood and bile into the gutters, followed by cawing and shrieking flocks of carrion-crows.
I woke up like I all-too-often do…alone.
Ah well. There had been a spicy little number of a demigorgon I’d had my eye on over at the Helldorf-Asmodea, but she’d strolled on out of there with some rich high-pillow galoot who could’ve played xylophone with my ribcage and not even busted a sweat.
Not that I’d been there chasing skirts in the first place. I’d finally wrapped up a case I was glad to see the end of; my going rate plus expenses wasn’t nearly enough for the filth I’d had to wade through. I should have charged ten grand and a vat of penicillin. But, for once, I had the cash to flash for a nice thick pink fleshsteak running with juices, and a few martinis dry as a mummy’s handshake.
A few too many martinis, as it happened.
Another eternity, another hangover.
Felt like my brain was trying to gnaw its way to freedom from the inside of my skull. I had a mouth that tasted like the bottom of a mortician’s shoe, and the infernal light from the window met my eyeballs like a skewer of needles.
Hair of the dog time, but literally.
I keep a flask of Cerberus popskull in the nightstand drawer for just these occasions. Along with a switchblade, a clutch-gun, an inverted Seal of Solomon, a sprig of Moly, a pill-case of alchemical antitoxins and a box of Trollskins…those last for other occasions, few and far between though they’ve been lately.
Once the hangover was pacified to a dull roar and I’d gargled and spit enough to corrode the drain and dissolve two centi-roaches in my chipped porcelain bathroom sink, I made myself as ready as I was going to get. I waved a straight razor over the stubble on my cheeks to scare the bristles into submission, splashed my face, slicked my hair, squinted into the mirror to check my bloodshot eyes and called it adequate.
Presentable enough, I made my way to the outer office. The place looked like it had been tossed, but then, what else was new? Paperwork and bookkeeping were unnecessary evils that I liked to put off as long as inhumanly possible.
If the Cerberus hadn’t killed off the lingering germs, the first mugful from the coffee pot was sure to take care of any survivors. I brewed it so strong the spoon turned black, and down the hatch it went.
I sorted through the pile of mail on my desk as I scalded down another few swallows of java.
Bills. Mutilation threats. Overdue rent notice from the landlord, with a flayed rat stapled to it as a courteous reminder. A gadget catalog from Caligula and Sons, which I dropped in the trash can. Another from Titania’s Secret, which I kept for later perusal. More bills. A take-out menu from a new deli promising “Elysium Fields quality at City of Dis prices!” A hush-money envelope from an old devil whose tail I’d gotten out of a knot recently.
Another what-passes-for-a-day in the afterlife of Matt Brimstone, P.I.
A shadow fell across the murky frosted-glass pane in my door, blotting out the stenciled letters. There was a rap, the knob turned, the door opened.
Then in walked trouble in the shape—and what a shape!—of a dame.
*
I spit blood and a tooth onto the warehouse floor and tried again to get through to the goons—this was a mistake, a big understanding…they had the wrong guy, someone had set them up, set me up, set us all up, was playing us for patsies.
And, again, I got a faceful of barbed brass knucks for my pains.
Someone else sauntered into view then, and the sight of him made any further attempts at witty gumshoe patter dry up and blow away.
He was slick and reet-complete, with the widest and pointiest shoulder pads to his pinstriped zoot that I had ever seen. His shoes were not just shined to an obsidian gleam, they were obsidian, the tips honed sharper than the Aztec daggers his bloodthirsty priests used to use to carve the beating hearts out of their human sacrifices. They made brittle clinks on the floor as he walked.
Ixquitil stopped in front of me, twirling a gold watch chain, though the bauble at the end of it was not gold and no watch. It was something dull-bronze, uneven, lumpy, double-bulging and pendulous…something I couldn’t immediately identify.
The twirling stopped, and the dull-bronze pendulum swung in decreasing arcs until I could identify it. Well, not identify it in a sense of having seen it before and knowing who it belonged to…but it had belonged to some poor lost soul, all right. Now it was cut off, bronzed, and hung from the end of Ixquitil’s watch chain.
And I’d thought I was the one left holding the bag?
I squeezed my knees more firmly together, with a silent promise that I’d do what I could to keep from ending up donating a second scrotal bauble to Ixquitil’s collection. Whatever happened to just carving someone’s beating heart out?
Sometimes even I had to wonder how I got myself into these spots. As if I didn’t know.
*
“Hello, Matt,” the dame said, poised in my office doorway and giving me the sultry look.
She had a voice like velvet smoke and a body that’d make a bishop kick a hole in a stained glass window. I would have known she was trouble even if we didn’t have ourselves a history.
“Cinnamon,” I said, casually easing my hand to the open top-right desk drawer. “Didn’t think I’d be seeing you again before Judgment Day.”
“You look well.”
“Liar.”
“You’ve looked worse.”
“You’d know.”
“That I would,” she admitted, swaying her way over to one of the wooden chairs I kept for clients. She passed it by, and leaned her hip on the corner of my desk. Her gaze flicked, amused, to the drawer, and my fingertips resting on Cain.
“Going to shoot me?” she asked. “Again? Tsk, and I didn’t think you were the type to ho
ld a grudge.”
“More the type to watch my back.” I fished out a crumpled half-pack of Vicedukes and a box of sulphur-tips instead, tucked one of the first in the corner of my mouth and scraped one of the second along the sandpaper strip.
As I lit up, I rocked in my chair—it went skreeeeeak—hiked my feet up onto the mess of papers, and gave her the old once-over.
Then the twice-over. Then the third-time’s-the-charm-over. Hourglass figure like that, a man wants to count every last grain of sand even when he should know better.
Trouble. She’d been big trouble before, and she was big trouble now.
Not that I needed any reminders.
New Year’s Eve. Two minutes ’til midnight. The Chateau Marmont in Hollywood, California. Champagne. Tuxedos. Evening gowns. Caviar. Cuban cigars. Diamond stickpins.
Too ritzy by half for the likes of a mug of a shamus who grew up on the wrong side of the tracks.
My father came home in a box after the War to End All Wars, which, even the way the world was looking then, hadn’t lived up to its marquee billing. My mother worked long hours in a laundry, came home each night steamed as an artichoke and limp as a wet rag, smelling of bleach and detergent. If there’d been more mouths to feed than the two of us, she never would have made ends meet.
So, there you have it. Not the type you’d think to find there among the jet-set, but that night? I was. Had been there for three weeks. On a case. Railroad baron engaged to an heiress, priceless necklace gone missing from the hotel safe, hotel dick found dead in a linen closet with a wire coat hanger twisted around his throat.
Three weeks at the Chateau Marmont.
That was where I met her.
Cinnamon LaRue. Torch singer in the hotel’s Velvet Lounge. She could make your heart skip a beat with nothing but a smile.
Or she could stop it cold in your chest with one blow from a black-gloved hand.
And that was exactly what she’d done.
Killed me.
If that’s not big enough trouble, I don’t know what is.
“So,” I said, after a deep drag and a thin stream of exhaled smoke into the form of a pentagram. “What’s a place like this doing around a girl like you?”
“Mind if I have one of those?”
“Didn’t know you indulged.” I pushed the deck of Vicedukes across the desktop toward her. “Or are you taking up a new bad habit?”
“I have bad habits enough already.” Reaching past it, she picked up the matchbox.
“Could have fooled me.”
Cinnamon twiddled a match between forefinger and thumb. “Not so easy to fool you, Matt. Never was.”
“You managed.”
“Only for a while.” She stuck the sulphur-tip end of the match in the corner of her mouth, gnawing at it with a faint grinding noise.
“Just dropping in to hash over old times? I got nothing against a ramble down Memory Lane now and then, but…” I waved at the piles of bills, and the overdue-rent notice with the flayed rat stapled to it.
“Things to go,” she said, nodding. “Places to do, people to be.”
“Never know when a case will come through my door.”
“What if one just did?”
“A dame did,” I said. “And trouble. But a case? Color me skeptical.”
She bit down hard on the match. Sulphur crunched with a snap-crack, gritty nails-on-stone sound that set my own teeth on edge. There was a quick spark of flame, a thread of smoke. She puffed it out in a languid, sexy curl.
“A job offer, then. A hiring of services. Gainful employment.” She flicked the dead soldier into the waste can. “Interested?”
I looked her over again.
Not the Cinnamon LaRue I remembered from our meetings topside. In those days she’d been a dish, all dolled up in black, with the elbow gloves and a long fall of hair the color of her namesake. Only for those last few fateful minutes before midnight, when she made sure I wouldn’t live to see the new year, had I first got a gander at what now lounged with her hip against the corner of my desk.
I remembered, though. Last living eyeful you ever get has a way of staying with you.
Her hourglass shape held its sand in all the old ways, but the demoness that was her true form had crimson skin, white hair, smoldering wings, a whip-flick of a tail, and polished grey horns curving down on either side of a visage of inhuman beauty. Nisinope, they called her down here. They said she was connected, a high roller from over Tartarus way, nobody you’d want to cross. But she would always be Cinnamon to me.
I decided I’d bite. I might not take the bait hook, line and sinker, but I’d give a nibble.
“Cinnamon,” I said, leaning back and lacing my werewolf hands behind my neck, “What in the name of all the archangels makes you think I’d give you a listen?”
She dipped into the bag slung over one shoulder. “I brought a little convincer to get your attention.”
I let my fingers wander to the back of my collar where I kept a hidden little convincer of my own, something short and to the point. But I forgot all about it when she tossed a scatter wealth of bones onto the desktop.
They glowed icy blue neon, filling the room with a cold light like someone just opened Hel’s private Frigidaire. Real bones. Earthly, living-world bones. Boiled clean of flesh, smooth as the lines of a brand-new Cadillac.
“Yours whether you take the job or not,” Cinnamon said. “Call it a consultation fee, or compensation for past injuries.”
My mouth went dry. That consultation fee alone represented some heavy sugar, a big score, enough to leave a mortal set for life and a damned soul like me set for a cushy span of eternity.
“You killed me,” I pointed out again, trying to play it hard-sell anyway. “You sent me here. Why should I help you?”
“To be fair, yes, I did kill you,” she said, angling her horns in a conciliatory gesture. “But, to be completely fair, you did shoot me first.”
“You would have killed me anyway,” I said.
At that, she shrugged and made with a slow little smile as rich as a dollop of cream.
I finished the Viceduke, stubbed it to ash on the heel of my shoe, and dropped it in the can. “So, what’s the risk factor on this case of yours?”
She waggled one hand—comme ci, comme ca. “Depends on you, Matt. If you have the guts.”
Well, that put me in a lather. Nothing like suggesting a fella hasn’t got moxie to make him do something stupid, just to prove he was no kind of pantywaist.
Which was just the effect she knew it would have, and I knew that she knew, and she knew that I knew that she knew…
How many lugs like me have gone off half-cocked over the centuries because of the glint of challenge in some skirt’s eye when we should know to mind our own beeswax?
All of us, I suppose. Dames, damn and bless, what’s a chump to do? They know every one of our weaknesses, always have, all the way back to the Garden of Eden.
The self-preservation part of my brain spoke up and said to quit while I was ahead, keep the fee and show the dame the door.
Unfortunately for the rest of me, I had never been so great at heeding the self-preservation part of my brain.
“All right, tell me more,” I said.
*
Turns out even she hadn’t known the half of it. That someone was smuggling contraband into Hell, sure. Nothing too strange about that. Cinnamon was hardly the only one with topside connections, and hardly the one with jeopardized profits.
The size and scope of this operation, though, was anything but small potatoes. And the contraband was anything but the ordinary. Forget mortal bones, messages from the living world, and earthly information. Ixquitil’s backers had friends in higher places than that.
Olympian ambrosia. Manna from Heaven. Angelic-quality frankincense and myrrh. Saint’s relics. Weapons-grade holy water. This whole warehouse was blood-warded, hell-warded, and protected to a fare-thee-well by glyphs that would have made it
impossible for any unauthorized intruder to find the joint.
And I, Matt Brimstone, P.I., had stumbled right into it like a total chump.
“Listen, Ix…” I said. Something brilliant should have followed, but I was running on fumes.
“Yeah?” Ixquitil waited, fingering the bronzed bauble in a way that made me swallow back sour spit.
As I glanced around the warehouse, to get my eyes away from Ixquitil’s watch-chain and its ghoulish ornament, I gouged my thumb-claw across the back of my russet-furred hand.
With my wrists cuffed behind me, Ix couldn’t see what I was doing. And though they’d frisked me down good—they’d stashed Cain and Abel in a box by the door, a box the location of which I had made sure to mark—they hadn’t noticed the slight bump.
“Listen,” I said again, digging at it, gouging at it. “Maybe we can cut a deal.”
I grimaced, wishing I’d chosen some other word. After all, I was the one sitting here chained to a chair, my face battered like a fryer of fish and chips, and the prospect of involuntary surgery looming too close for comfort.
Ixquitil bared his sharp jade-inlaid teeth in a grin that would curl your hair. “Cut a deal?”
“That is to say…”
Loopholes. There were always loopholes. If I couldn’t pass the wards under my own power, I could be captured and brought in for interrogation.
And once I was in…
My thumb-claw pierced through and punctured the flattish blister-pack capsule that Cinnamon had embedded under my hairy skin before sending me out to get myself caught.
I pressed it and felt the thick liquid heat of demonic blood welling out. It ran down my fingers and dripped to the floor. Once, twice, third-time’s-the-charm.
“What is to say?” Ix looked at me like I was fresh from the funny farm. “You snoop into my business, shoot a devil’s dozen of my best men, put me behind schedule, and you want to talk deal? What could you possibly have to offer?”
“You want the cold honest truth?” I asked. “Nothing. I’m just the distraction. You’ve been had.”
