Precinct 13

by Tate Hallaway

  I clicked it on.

  And turned it off instantly when I heard garbled hissing.

  Bad batteries—or messed-up magical shit?

  Either way, I decided it was better to focus on the immediate concern, the necromancer…or whatever he was.

  Shoving the tape recorder into my pocket, I marched determinedly out the door, leaving behind what remained of the necromancer as evidence. I was comforted by the blood congealing on the table and the spatters in the scale where the liver had been.

  Mrs. Finnegan’s new conversational skills would be my little secret.

  THREE

  My resolve weakened as I climbed the concrete stairs from the basement to the main floor. Leaving behind the comfort of the morgue, I passed the office suite I’d ignored since the election. My predecessor had procured a fancy section of the first floor. There were gilt letters on the glass door. It belonged to a career politician—someone confident, unafraid, and powerful. I felt none of those things, especially not while clutching my phone like a talisman to ward off danger and insanity.

  The higher I rose, the more cops I saw.

  Police stations made me nervous. I avoided the cops’ curious glances as I threaded my way through their desks. In no time, I found myself standing in front of the chief’s office door.

  Everybody knew Chief Stan Krupski because he was an avid fisherman and a collector of classic cars. He was a politician’s politician—handsome and charismatic. People told me he was a pretty good cop, even though he and my predecessor had conspired to make their lives more comfortable. I knew he didn’t like me much. He’d called me a blue-haired freak when we first met, but I figured it was still my duty to inform him that there was a corpse wandering around town. In case, I don’t know, they needed to put out an APB for a gutted guy carrying his liver.

  Okay. Keep the nervous laughter to a minimum, Alex. That was going to be the hard part: telling.

  I had trust issues with the truth.

  Sensing me hovering nervously on the threshold of his office, the chief looked up. Stan was in his forties, but still looked boyish. If it wasn’t for the salt in his pepper hair, he could pass for a guy half his age, easy. The only thing wrong with him as far as I was concerned was his fondness for Texas-style gigantic belt buckles. I found them disconcerting because they drew my eye to his crotch. Of course, he stood up to usher me inside. I focused on his face, which was currently smiling, but I could see it falter around the edges.

  “Something wrong, Connor?”

  “You could say so, sir.” I didn’t know him well enough to call him by his first name, and was not nearly cool enough to get away with “Chief.” Technically, he was my colleague, not my boss, since he worked for the city and I for the county. I shouldn’t be deferring to him, but I didn’t know who else to go to with something like this.

  He leaned over and shut the door, before propelling me into one of the uncomfortable chairs he kept in front of his desk. “You’d better tell me what’s going on,” he said.

  I gaped for a moment as I tried to decide how to broach the subject. How did you explain something like this without sounding insane?

  A little laugh escaped before I could stifle it. If I knew how to talk about magical goings-on without sounding insane, I would never have spent time in a locked psych ward and Valentine wouldn’t have gone to prison.

  I opted for just blurting out the truth. “The corpse is gone. He got up and walked out. With his liver.”

  Stan leaned against the edge of his desk, so I couldn’t help but blink stupidly at the gaudy silver buckle. Seriously? A steer’s head? At least it wasn’t a skull. I couldn’t take anything vaguely spooky right now. I gripped the edges of the seat, like I was trying to literally hold on to reality.

  His arms crossed in front of his chest as he waited for me to say more. “You misplaced a corpse? Are you talking about Mrs. Finnegan?”

  “No,” I said, dragging my eyes away from the steer horns. “I should start at the beginning. Uh, you know Stone and Jones, right?”

  I was relieved to see him nod. I never knew at what point in the story people would stop believing me.

  “Okay, well, they brought this body in, some guy they said was…” I couldn’t say “necromancer,” it was just too weird. “…dead.”

  God, of course he was dead, Alex. You’re the damn coroner! I looked up at the chief nervously, but he just nodded encouragingly.

  “Anyway, I was in the middle of the autopsy when…something happened.”

  When I found I couldn’t say more, he prompted: “Something?”

  I nodded mutely.

  “What?” he asked. The chief was watching me carefully, waiting for the rest.

  Crazy shit, I thought, but couldn’t quite bring myself to say.

  Yet this was the moment, wasn’t it? I had to say something.

  I held up my arm to show the snake. “Do you see this?”

  Again, the nod came.

  “Okay. This was in his chest cavity, only three-dimensional and squirming, but somehow it’s on me now. At least it’s not alive anymore. I think.”

  “Uh-huh. Jones, you said?”

  Was the chief about to tell me this was all a joke and that Jones was known for pulling off real kickers? My throat was dry and scratchy. “Uh, yeah, he and Stone brought the body in.”

  “Stone. Right.”

  Oh no. I’d heard the skeptical tone in Stan’s acknowledgment far too many times before. “Is there some kind of problem with them?” I asked far too quickly.

  But he’d turned his back to me already. He was walking behind his desk and pulling out a notepad.

  Even as I watched him scribble something down, I was trying to make myself believed. “You know, I have pictures,” I said, pulling my phone out. “Those tattoos on the body were definitely not normal.”

  Stan looked up at me then, but didn’t say a word. He just reached his hand across his desk, offering me the note he’d written.

  I took it. “What’s this?” I asked.

  “I want you to talk to these people. They can help.”

  Oh great, more psychologists. I didn’t need that. “I already have a therapist.”

  “These aren’t shrinks,” the chief said. “They can really help.”

  I felt miserable. I didn’t want any more help; I wanted all this to be normal and okay. “I swear this is true this time.”

  Stan shocked me by saying, “It’s not that. I believe you. It’s out of my jurisdiction is all.”

  He believed me? “Oh.”

  I looked down at the note. He’d written an address and the words Precinct 13.

  I wandered out into the melting snow of the capitol grounds in a daze. I used my cell to call the courier service to come pick up the lab work I’d done on my AWOL patient, and nearly told the receptionist I loved her, I was so happy.

  Coming to South Dakota hadn’t been a mistake; things were different. Someone believed me. Or at least pretended to. I supposed Precinct 13 could be code for “the guys with little white coats” that would take me to the padded room, but the chief had shaken my hand pleasantly and wished me good luck. That didn’t seem like the actions of a guy setting me up. I decided to remain cautiously optimistic.

  Even though it was mid-April, spring was returning slowly to Pierre. Patches of snow still covered the lawn in front of the capitol building. Meanwhile, the branches of the tall maples had begun to green with buds. I walked along the sidewalk that led along the riverfront. Whitecaps flashed on the Missouri, which had swelled with snowmelt.

  I pulled the collar of my coat up against my ears to ward off the chill. The pavement was wet with slush, and the sky was gray and heavily overcast. A group of life-sized bronze soldiers saluted me from where they stood on a wooden dock. Seagulls circled overhead.

  My foot slipped, but I managed to catch myself before I stumbled. I looked down, expecting a patch of stubborn ice, but found a cardboard rectangle. Picking it
up, I recognized it instantly as the necromancer’s toe tag. He’d come this way!

  Though I knew it was probably useless, I looked around for other signs of his passage. Hardly anyone was outside. I could see someone sitting on a wooden park bench closer to the capitol, but otherwise I was alone. Clutching the toe tag in my hand, I headed that way. As I drew closer, I could see that the person was an older woman and probably homeless, given the matted state of the gray hair that frizzled out from under a knit hat. She wore an oversized parka that had been patched in places with silver duct tape. A large army pack sat beside her. Though I was less than a foot behind her, I hesitated, especially since I could hear her muttering to herself about the government and space aliens.

  I turned away. Shoving the toe tag into my coat pocket, I continued toward the address on the slip.

  Even if the old lady had any information, I wasn’t prepared to do anything with it. Let’s say I had caught up with the reanimated corpse; then what? I wasn’t even sure what a person did when confronting a naked dead guy. This was the sort of thing I desperately hoped that the people at Precinct 13 specialized in. Best to let the experts deal with it.

  It didn’t take me long to find the address.

  I’d walked as far as downtown. It was about three blocks up from the waterfront. The trees had disappeared as I left behind the river. Many of the buildings were box stores, unadorned concrete with big, asphalt parking lots around them. For a Chicago girl like me, the squat buildings spaced so far apart were disconcerting, as if I were exposed in all the emptiness.

  The address directed me to a group of buildings that had a more old-fashioned, frontier-town look. Built of red brick with white stone trim around the windows, they were two stories tall. On the side of one, paint peeled off an advertisement for Coca-Cola featuring a woman with a 1940s hairdo. I stopped in front of the street number that matched the one on my slip of paper.

  Considering I walked from the station house, I couldn’t quite see how this was a new “jurisdiction,” as the chief implied. In fact, the place to which he’d directed me appeared to be an empty storefront. A dusty film covered the windows, and an OPENING SOON sign was propped against the sill. I double-checked the address. This was supposed to be the place. Despite my better judgment, I knocked. The head of the snake was just visible peering out from under the cuff of my coat sleeve.

  Cupping my hand, I peered into the storefront. No one seemed to be around, but it looked as though someone were renovating the place. There was an ancient, paint-spattered boom box stereo plugged into an outlet, and one of those massive floor polishers propped up against a wall.

  My earlier euphoria began to drain. Maybe the chief was just being polite and was giving the crazy girl somewhere to go while he called in the city council or whatever it took to fire me. What if, when I went back, there really were men in white coats waiting for me?

  I shook my head. Thinking like that is real paranoia, Alex. Don’t go there. Not yet.

  “Hello?” I said to the door, knocking again. “The chief sent me!” I plastered the slip of paper up against the glass door as proof, even though there was no one to see it.

  I nearly jumped when I heard the sound of sleigh bells as the door opened. “You must be looking for Precinct Thirteen.”

  With the whole “precinct” part, I expected a cop. The guy who answered the door looked more like a—well, like he could be a friend of mine.

  He wore mostly Goth gear: a lot of black on black. Underneath his leather jacket, his T-shirt…glowed. It looked like the icon on my laptop that showed how many bars my Wi-Fi connection had. Plus, he’d accessorized with a multicolored striped scarf that was completely oversized on his slender frame, which reminded me of old-school Dr. Who. So what did that make him? Gothy geek? Nerdy Goth?

  His hair was short and either badly slept in or a carefully stylized mess. He was pretty enough that it could have been the latter, but the earrings and the nose ring made me lean toward the former.

  “I’m Jack,” he said. “You must be Alice.”

  “Alex,” I corrected.

  “I was making a literary reference,” he said with a sniff and a London accent. He stepped aside to let me in. “Because, Alex, you’re about to enter Wonderland.”

  I stepped over the threshold. The coil of the tattoo tightened slightly, squeezing my arm painfully.

  The interior transformed completely. Gone was the empty, half-painted space; people bustled everywhere. There were cops in uniform, detectives with gold badges on their hips, and people dressed in street clothes.

  The scene was reminiscent of an old-fashioned newsroom. Desks were scattered throughout the room; some had actual typewriters, others modern computers. Books were piled everywhere, like a library had exploded—a really old library. As Jack led me to the center of the room, I realized that many of the books had vellum or leather covers, gilt lettering, and…runes?

  Every desk had a potted plant, a bouquet of fresh flowers, or a mini fishbowl on it; I’d never seen such a green office space. A row of flat-screen TVs lined one wall. They showed several different channels, including some foreign ones and a video feed to the front of the shop where I’d been standing.

  “What is this place?” I asked.

  “It’s the situation room in the war against the unnatural,” he said dramatically.

  “There’s a lot of that in South Dakota?” There were a lot of other things I probably should have asked first, but, honestly, it just sort of slipped out.

  “South Dakota. South Hampton. South Wales.” Jack shrugged a delicate shoulder. “The unnatural is everywhere. Anyway, you’re the one knocking at our door. What do you think?”

  He had a point there. I smiled. “I think it’s a pretty neat trick what you did with the storefront. How did you get it to look abandoned?”

  “Magic,” he said simply.

  My breath caught. I’d hoped he’d go into some kind of elaborate explanation of the holographic technology involved, not suggesting in such a laid-back way that he’d…

  I stumbled a bit when my knees weakened. I had to catch myself on the nearest desk.

  “What?” I asked, gulping for air. “What did you just say?”

  He stared intently into my face as I slowly pulled myself upright and tried to get my breathing back under control.

  “Are you sure you’re in the right place, miss?” His voice took on a sudden formality, and he looked around the busy office space nervously, as if searching for help.

  With shaking hands, I pulled out the chief’s note again. I read off the address carefully.

  “Right. That’s us,” Jack said, his gaze continuing to skim through the room hopefully. Not finding any relief, he shifted back to me, grimacing at the awkwardness. “You, uh, do understand what it is we do here, don’t you?”

  “No,” I admitted.

  “I see,” he said, clearly not comfortable being the one to have to explain it to me. “Um, well, you were sent here for a reason, right? Something unnatural must have happened.”

  I liked the solid, normal sound to the word unnatural. My face brightened. “Yes,” I said. “A couple of uniformed officers brought me this body this morning and the corpse, well, he—”

  “Oh, I see! You’re the coroner? Brilliant! Spense will want to hear all about whatever happened. Come on, I’ll introduce you.”

  He brought me over to where a group of people stood looking down at a map spread out at a table. “Alex, this is—”

  “Hey, I know you!” I interrupted, recognizing the police officer who’d brought the necromancer into the morgue. “And you!” I said to his stony partner.

  “—Spenser Jones and Hannah Stone,” Jack continued.

  The moment he saw me, Officer Jones’s face crumbled into a frown. “This isn’t good.” He turned to his partner. “You did tell her, didn’t you?”

  “I did,” she said very cautiously, not looking at me. “You know it can be very difficult for m
e to explain these sorts of things to humans.”

  Humans?

  “You warned her about the rib cage, though, right?” Jones barked at his partner.

  “Yeah,” I interrupted. “How did you know about that?”

  “Spense can smell a spell a mile away; it’s in his blood, you see,” Jack said. He was watching the two officers with the expression of a gleeful spectator.

  With effort, I held back another choke at the word spell. Sweat prickled under my arms. In my heavy coat, the room felt stuffy and hot. Gripping the back of the office chair in front of me, I looked down at the beady, black eye of the snake on the back of my hand. “So, uh, anyway,” I said, my eyes still glued to the snake. “Thing is,” I continued. “That body you brought in, the necromancer? Well, he got up and walked away.”

  I looked up when Jones swore under his breath. His fist crumpled the edge of the map he’d been consulting.

  His partner seemed surprised by his reaction. “We should have expected something like this. This is why we need a magically aware person in the coroner’s office. I’ve been saying that for years.”

  “There isn’t a huge pool to choose from, is there?” Jones snorted. “This is just great.” With effort, he released his death grip on the paper. Smoothing it out, he looked at me. “He walked out? Are you saying the necromancer is still alive?”

  “I was halfway through the autopsy. His liver was in the scale. I don’t know how he could be.”

  “Well, then, how did he walk out?” Jones pursued.

  Holding back a hysterical giggle with effort, I offered lamely, “Through the door?”

  Jones failed to see the humor. “I meant, by what magic?”

  I swallowed hard.

  Stone put a hand on her partner’s elbow, as if holding him back. In reality, he hadn’t moved any closer to me, but I cowered as if he loomed over me. “I don’t think she knows, Spense,” she said calmly.

  “Right,” he said, letting out an exasperated breath. “You’d better start at the beginning.”