“Yes, same,” she said. “Shall we?”
“Oh, yeah,” Mayhew said. He chugged around the car and picked up Pete’s bag, noticing Jack for the first time. “Hey, man,” he said. “Thanks for coming, both of you.”
“Wouldn’t miss it,” Jack said. He held out his rucksack until Mayhew took it. “Cheers,” Jack said, and slid into the back seat. Pete shot him the look, the one that meant he was being a cunt, but Jack ignored it.
The interior of the car smelled slightly sour, whether from Mayhew’s sweat or the plethora of fast food wrappers crushed under Jack’s boots, he didn’t care to speculate. Plush dice dangled from the rearview mirror and a small plastic hula dancer undulated her hips from the dash when Mayhew pulled away from the curb.
“So,” he said to Pete, “first time in LA?”
“For me,” Pete said. “Jack’s been.”
“Oh yeah?” Mayhew hooked a look back at him in the mirror. “You like it?”
“Not particularly,” Jack said, and fished a cigarette out of his pocket.
“Oh, sorry,” Mayhew said. “Can’t have you smoking in Lucille. The upholstery is original.”
“You can’t be serious,” Jack said, and got the look from Pete again.
“’Fraid so,” Mayhew said. “Believe me, I understand. I polished off a pack a day when I was LAPD. Quit a year ago and I’ve never felt better.”
As they drove past warehouses, used car lots, and cheap airport motels and merged onto a freeway roughly the width of the Thames, Jack felt a marked urge to reach over the seat and bang Mayhew’s head against the steering wheel.
He stabbed his fag out against the car’s door panel instead, then rubbed the sooty mark in with his finger. Small and petty, yes, but Mayhew was already up his nose and he’d barely spent ten minutes with the man. Jack bet with himself that Mayhew’s “problem” would involve teenage Satanists in store-bought robes and missing neighborhood pets.
“You named your car?” Pete said, sliding closer to Mayhew on the sofa-sized front seat. Mayhew immediately forgot about Jack’s existence.
“Sure did. This is my baby Lucille. Sixty-five LeSabre—restored her myself.” He ran his hand across the dash in the proprietary manner with which most men touch women’s thighs.
“Really,” Jack said. “You pick out the color?”
“Hey, this is LA,” Mayhew said. “Land of big tits, good teeth, and primary colors. Takes some getting used to if you’re from a place like London.”
Pete twitched but she jumped in front of the bullet again. “It take long? Fixing this thing up?”
Mayhew shrugged, an aw-shucks gesture that clearly implied yes, normally, but not when you were a special sort like him. “A while. Supposed to do it when I retired in twenty years, but what the hell? Being a PI is a lot of waiting around, and I like to keep busy.”
Jack slid down on Lucille’s slippery plastic seat and shut his eyes. Mayhew was trying to do the civilized equivalent of pissing a circle—his car, his city, his eyes all over Pete’s tits. Jack wished him good luck with the last one. Pete didn’t need white knighting—Mayhew would find out soon enough, with a knee in his balls if he was especially unlucky.
As to LA, he could have it. The sun penetrated Jack’s eyelids and made his head throb, and he threw his arm up as Lucille crested a rise and revealed a glimpse of the downtown before Mayhew veered off onto another freeway. Who needed a concrete-covered, haze-choked hellhole full of women with silicone sacks in their chests and men like Mayhew, whose biggest concern was his motor and getting into a dick-measuring contest with everyone he met?
“You’ll need a car,” Mayhew said to Pete. “I set it up with a friend of mine who runs a garage—you can drive American-style, right?”
“I’ll manage,” Pete said.
“Great,” Mayhew said. “We’ll go back to my office and talk business. I really am glad you’re here.”
There it was, the hook. Jack had no doubt that Mayhew’s real reason for gladness was that whoever was pulling his strings wouldn’t immediately peel his skin off his fat form and put it on toast. He’d actually gotten Pete to show up and proven himself a useful underling. Jack could put up with the git just as long as it took to see the big picture, the puppeteer rather than the puppet, and then he was going to give Mayhew a real reason to be glad for American dentistry.
He dozed on the drive, the rank air doing little to replace his need for a fag. When they finally bumped to a stop, he realized he’d been somewhere else, the freeway turning into a long, black road made of smooth obsidian, and the smog cloud becoming the ashes of things burnt alive, drifting down to catch in his hair and eyelashes like charnel snow.
Jack didn’t have many memories of his time in Hell. When the Morrigan had led him back from the Bleak Gates, she’d smoothed his mind over, picked out with her beak all of the time that Jack had lost when he went down to the Pit, and left plain gray nothing in its place.
He’d seen a few flashes in dreams, which was par for the course for a psychic who couldn’t shut out the feed on his best days. But nothing concrete. No flashbacks, no coming awake and screaming.
He still didn’t know the extent of what the Morrigan had done to him, besides the markings. He felt better than he had before he went to the Pit, but that wasn’t saying much. He’d been sick, using whiskey as a food group, and battered by his sight. It wasn’t as if he could suddenly lift cars and run five kilometers without hacking.
Pete stuck her head in his window. “You coming?”
Jack shook off the dream. That was what you did with dreams—his weren’t prophetic, as Pete’s had a tendency to be, and they certainly weren’t worth remembering. “Yeah,” he said. “Right along the yellow brick road.”
CHAPTER 4
Mayhew lived in Venice, so named by its city fathers in a startling fit of originality because Venice, California, also had canals. “You know, just like Italian Venice. Was a big tourist spot in the fifties.”
Jack could hear the swish of the ocean when he stepped out of the car, and the air was sticky with salt and carbon monoxide. Mayhew had parked in an alley, and he let them in a side door. “One of the guys on the force owned this pad and let it go for a song,” he said, flicking a light to life. “Got the hell out of the city, moved to Montana. I guess he’s a sheriff now or something.” Mayhew shrugged. “Miserable fucking existence, if you ask me, but some people can’t hack LA.”
Not feeling any hexes or other sort of protection on the place, Jack stepped in after Mayhew. The “pad” ended in a T-shaped hall, one end leading to an office that looked out onto a street full of similar small bungalows and semi-detached flats, the other leading back into a living room done up in rattan with bright cushions, tiki idols on most surfaces, and a sort of 1950s clock above a bubble-shaped telly with rabbit ears. A small fireplace was crowned with a glamor shot of Jayne Mansfield and an array of framed movie posters for flicks like The Hellcats and Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!
“Fuck me,” Jack muttered. “Did Dean Martin’s corpse projectile vomit this shit into his sitting room?”
Mayhew continued through a kitchen done entirely in powder blue, including appliances, and showed them into a small back bedroom.
“You can crash here,” he said. “Sorry about the one bed situation. Maybe Jack would be more comfortable on the sofa?”
“Being stared at by a headless movie star and fifteen tiki idols?” Jack said. “Yeah, don’t think so.”
Mayhew’s neck swelled a little, but he wouldn’t take it up with him. Not in front of Pete. “You’re not a fan of kitsch, I take it.”
Jack dumped out his rucksack on the bed. “What gave me away?”
“Anyway,” Pete said. “I think we’re both interested to hear what’s got you in such a lather, Benjamin.”
“Call me Ben.” Smile, smile, smile. “Everyone does.”
Pete did not call him Ben, just went into his office space and plopped herself in the vi
sitor’s chair. Jack made sure Benjamin-now-Ben walked ahead of him. There was more than the obvious convenience of Mayhew’s timing. He stank of flop sweat, and he kept shooting nervous glances at all the doors and windows. It could be that whoever had convinced him to set Pete up wasn’t the type to take tea and biscuits, or it could be something else. It was the off chance of “something else” that had Jack’s teeth grinding.
Mayhew’s office was a far cry from his frenetic tribute to tacky acid trips of a flat. The furniture was from the same vintage, but it was dull metal painted in varying colors of Piss, Vomit, and Hairball. Papers crowded every surface and the blinds were broken over a painted front window. Mayhew & Co. Investigations, Jack read backward. The letters were bisected by spider cracks where somebody had chucked a small, heavy object at the glass.
“‘And Co.’?” Jack said, taking the second client seat. The vinyl was sticky with some long-ago spill. Dust motes flew up in a flock when he sat.
“Yeah, that’s just to make me sound more trustworthy,” Mayhew said.
Jack rubbed the dust from the arm of his chair between thumb and forefinger. “Does it work?”
Mayhew kept that slightly nauseous smile on his face. “Most of the time.”
“Your problem,” Pete reminded Mayhew. “The sooner you tell us, the sooner we can get to solving it.”
Mayhew got up and dug through a file cabinet, dislodging a stack of duplicate forms and old gun magazines from the top.
Jack sat and rubbed the grit between his fingers. You could learn a lot from dust. Places picked up the psychic leak of whoever’d stood in them, glass and iron and stone and wood. Mayhew’s dust stank of magic. Not a human, not the kind of residue left by a talent or even by black magic. It was dry and harsh and tasted of ash and hot wind in the back of his throat.
He rubbed his hand on the leg of his jeans. The dust scattered, and the sensation faded.
“I was a homicide cop for ten years,” Mayhew said, dumping a bulging file of photocopies and blurry photographs onto his desk. He nudged a container of takeaway into the trash and spread the photos out. “This was my last case.”
Pete obligingly drew the photos closer, handed them to Jack one by one. They were gruesome, he supposed, but nothing that garden-variety humans couldn’t do to one another. Four people, in various stages of defenestration, lay on a tile floor. A door stood open to the outside, and blood dribbled over walls and various other surfaces.
“Somebody decided to redecorate?” Jack said, holding up a close shot of a woman who’d been opened from sternum to pelvis, her blood feathering across the tile under her in a spidery, winglike halo.
“That was Mary Kay Case, the homeowner,” Mayhew said. “She was eight and a half months pregnant.” He sat back, and waited for Jack’s scrabbling apology.
Jack tossed the photo back on the desk. “Yeah? Unless the baby was a flesh-chewing mutant Hellspawn that ate its way out, grew tentacles, and joined a traveling circus, what’s this got to do with the Black?”
“Jesus, man,” Mayhew said. “You really are a block of ice, aren’t you?”
“Look,” Jack said. “You were a cop. You know that perfectly plain human beings are capable of doing this and worse to each other. So I can sit here and wring me hands, or you can stop wasting our time with the suspenseful fucking buildup.”
Mayhew pointed at the photo in Pete’s hands. “Recognize that?”
Pete displayed a close-up of the door. The word PIG had been scrawled with a fingertip, in blood. “Copycat?” she asked Mayhew.
“I wish,” Mayhew said. “Manson family fanboys would’ve been a lot easier to close up than whatever I’ve got.”
“Manson’s people murdered a pregnant woman, too,” Pete said. “This one—her baby didn’t make it, did it?” She shifted in her seat, and Jack reached out without thinking and put his hand over hers.
“Honestly, we don’t know,” Mayhew said. He rubbed his thumb across his forehead, drawing beads of sweat. It was claustraphobically hot in the little office, and Jack itched to get up and throw open a window.
Pete laced her fingers with his, though, so he stayed where he was. “How can you not know?” she said. “It’s not as if you can lose an infant down the cracks in your sofa cushions.”
“We don’t know because when the first responders came on the scene, the Case baby was gone,” Mayhew said. He sat back, digging in an overflowing drawer and bringing out a bottle of bourbon. “Snort?” he said, dashing a bit into a glass.
“None for me,” Pete said. Mayhew tossed the drink back without offering Jack.
“The medical examiner said the kid could have survived,” he murmured. “You know, if they cut it out instead of just cutting. But I could never think that. Why take a baby and murder its parents and their dinner guests? What the hell would the point be of keeping that baby alive?”
“And you think they were involved in the Black?” Jack cut in. “The doers, I mean?”
Mayhew collected the photos, keeping his hand on top of the one of Mary Kay Case’s dead body. “We found evidence that the Cases were in the life, yes,” he said. “More than that, they didn’t have a single enemy on the daylight side. Larry Case was a tax accountant and Mary Kay was a real estate agent. Good people. Good people don’t deserve this shit.”
“So naturally you assume it’s some baby-stealing nutter from beyond the beyond,” Pete said.
“It’s not that,” Mayhew said. “I could never close this one. It’s not easy to tell your captain that you can find the murderer based on a load of horseshit that most people think went out with the Salem trials, if they believe it at all. But the Case murders aren’t why you’re here.”
He pulled a fax off the machine and thrust it at Pete. “My buddy in the ME’s office sent this to me. They caught the bodies last night.”
Pete shared the fax with Jack. The photo was of bad quality, but he could make out the same rough outline as the Case bird. A pregnant woman, missing the center of herself, on a steel table under harsh light.
“Almost identical to the Case murders,” Mayhew said. He poured himself another shaky measure of bourbon. “It’s been ten years, and whoever did this is back in LA.”
CHAPTER 5
Jack excused himself to smoke. The street Mayhew’s bungalow occupied ended at a cement embankment, and from there it was just beach and ocean. The sun had set, and the memory of it was crimson contrails streaked across the sickly yellow sky.
Pete joined him after a few drags. “What do you think?” she said, looking at his cigarette longingly before Jack stubbed it out.
“I think it’s a sad story, but there’s nothing here to do with you, or us, or the Black at all,” Jack said. Sure, it was awful that some nutter was ripping babies out of their mothers. But no more awful than the usual sort of awful people could be.
“Oh, come on,” Pete said. “At the very least, somebody thinks they’re doing black magic with those bodies.”
“Thinking and doing aren’t the same thing,” Jack said. “Also, Mayhew’s about as twitchy as a rat on an electric fence. For all we know that case could not even be his. Just a lure to get you where he wants you.”
Pete folded her arms. “Just because you don’t like him, you’re saying there’s nothing to this. That’s a shit way to conduct business.”
“What business?” Jack demanded. He should know better by now than to try and fool Pete. “Pete, at the very least he’s a sad old lush who can’t let go of his big failure. At the worst he’s setting us up to be a snack for something we’ve pissed off that’s been biding its time.”
“Fine,” Pete said. “You can go on, then. I’m going to look into it.”
Jack blinked. “You can’t be serious.”
“I think by now you know the answer to that,” Pete said. “You want to stick your head under a rock until you can crawl back to London, go right ahead. No skin off of me.”
“Well, luv, if we’re shouting u
ncomfortable truths: You want to take on this stupid errand for Mayhew because you’re pregnant,” Jack said. “I saw your face when that picture came up.”
“Oh, fuck you,” Pete snarled. “Just because I’m knocked up, I suddenly have a deeper understanding of the feminine mysteries of motherhood?” She shoved Mayhew’s file at Jack, hard enough to knock him off balance. “Wanting to catch some depraved bastard who preys on helpless kids is not some flighty side effect of my owning a vagina, Jack. Not wanting to says a hell of a lot more about you than my having a baby bump says about me.”
“Wait!” Jack said when Pete turned to storm inside. The file fell between them and Mayhew’s slaughter porn scattered across his stoop.
Pete threw up her hands. “Why should I? You’re not going to be one bit of help. As usual.”
Stupid. He was stupid, and why couldn’t he have just kept his mouth shut? Now Pete was looking at him like he was less than dog shit on her boot, and he deserved it. “It’s not that I’m unwilling to look into this,” Jack said. “I mean, I still don’t think we should be here, but you can’t run on back to Mayhew on your own.”
“Why not?” Pete snapped. “You afraid I might get used to a man with a job who doesn’t constantly have childish fits at me?”
“He’s a liar, for one,” Jack said. Pete laughed, short and sharp.
“If being a liar was a disqualification, I’d’ve chucked you out years ago.”
“I know you’re angry at me now,” Jack said. “But Mayhew is not on the level, Pete. His office stank of demon.”
Pete stopped with her hand on the door. “You wouldn’t just be saying that to sway me into leaving, would you? Because then I’d have to hit you in the balls.”
“I’m not going to lie about something like that,” Jack said. Lying about demons was just inviting them to show up and make a truth-teller out of you. Anyone who said Hellspawn didn’t have a sense of humor had never met one.
“Why would Mayhew be having anything to do with demons?” Pete said.
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