Black Magic Woman (Morris and Chastain Investigations)

by Justin Gustainis

  “The whole process took about two minutes, I’d guess,” Randall said. “I suppose we could have used the time to run. Hell, we might even have gotten away.” He shook his head ruefully. “But we were just... transfixed by what we were seeing.”

  “Like we were paralyzed,” Carleton said, nodding. “Leastways, until the fucking thing came at us. Looked more animal than human by that time, and seemed like it was about ninety percent teeth and claws.”

  “It must have been terrifying,” Libby said. “Were either of you armed?”

  “Yeah, I had this ten-millimeter Glock that I keep on my belt around back. Lots of folks carry the nine, but I like the extra stopping power. Lex doesn’t carry a piece most the time, and he didn’t have one that night. Can’t blame him for that, really. Hell, we was just running down some rich boy with a bad habit or two, or so we thought. No need for heavy artillery.”

  “Did you reach your gun in time?” Morris asked quietly.

  “Yeah, I did, for all the difference it made. I got a shot off, and I hit the sumbitch, too, I’m sure of it. Square in the chest.” Carleton shook his head. “Didn’t even slow him down. And a second later he was on me. Knocked me to the floor, the Glock went flying off somewhere, and then he’s doing his best to tear my throat out with his teeth. I was able to get my forearm under his chin, and that gave me some leverage. But I knew I wouldn’t be able to hold him off for long. God he was strong. Then, all of a sudden, he kind of rears up and lets out this howl—not a scream, understand, but a howl, just like you’d expect from an animal.”

  “That was because I’d noticed an axe on the floor when we came in,” Randall said, “along with all the other junk that had been left there. So, I grabbed it up and then did my best to bury the blade in that thing’s spine.”

  “Did that kill it?” Morris leaned forward in his chair.

  “Not even close,” Carleton said. “The damn thing rolls off me, jumps to its feet, reaches back, and just yanks that hatchet right out of there. Throws it aside like it was a toothpick. And then it starts toward Lex.”

  “I’d about run out of options,” Randall told them, “so I figured that I was looking at the last thing I’d ever see. But then the shooting started.”

  Libby looked at Carleton. “You’d found your pistol again?”

  The big detective snorted in disgust. “Hell, no,” he said. “At that point, I’d have been lucky to find my head with both hands. No, I wasn’t the one doin’ the shooting. That was the fella who’d just burst through the door.”

  “He must have come up the same stairs we had used earlier,” Randall said. “We hadn’t heard him—not surprising, really, with all the commotion going on. He had a revolver, and he put three rounds into that werewolf, or Amos Gitner, or whatever you want to call him, in as many seconds.”

  “And he must’ve been doing something right,” Carleton said, “because that thing did nothing but rear up, fall over and die. Right then and there. Next thing that happened was right out of the movies, I swear. The transformation reversed itself, and pretty soon we were lookin’ at the naked body of Amos Gitner. Same as before, apart from the bullet holes. And the blood, o’ course.” Carleton shook his head at the memory. “After a little while, I manage to sit up, and I ask this fella, you know, ‘How the hell’d you stop him, when we couldn’t do diddly-squat?’ He just shrugs and gives me this crooked kind of smile. Then he says, ‘Silver bullets.’”

  Randall, still leaning against the doorjamb, said, “He told us that he was a private investigator from New York. Apparently one of the homeless men who had disappeared had a brother up north who was worried about him, and who had heard wild stories about some creature that was preying on the street people down here. This investigator told us that he sometimes took on cases involving what he called, ‘the unusual.’ So he’d agreed to come to New Orleans and try to find out what was going on.”

  “Sounds like he found out just in time,” Morris said.

  “Yeah, for sure,” Carleton said with a slow nod. “He gave us his business card before we all left the warehouse together. We’ve called him on the phone a couple of times since then, sort of on a consultant basis. But we haven’t set eyes on the fella since that night.”

  “This investigator,” Libby Chastain said thoughtfully. “What did he call himself?”

  “Unlikely as it may sound,” Randall told her, “the card said his name was Barry Love.”

  CHAPTER 20

  THIS TIME, THE cheap motel was in Connecticut. Snake Perkins figured that being a state away from where all the shit went down might buy them a little breathing room.

  “Got us a problem,” he said to Cecelia Mbwato.

  Cecelia was ensconced in the room’s only armchair, eating salted peanuts, one at a time. She looked at Snake, who sat on the bed, with a mixture of scorn and indifference. “What problem is this?”

  “Gas stations these days, they all got cameras trained on the pumps, case somebody decides to just take off, instead of paying. They must’ve had ’em at that place in Jersey.”

  “So the authorities will have a movie of us driving away. As you would say, ‘Big deal.’”

  “The big fuckin’ deal is that they most likely got my license number. Which means by tomorrow, and maybe sooner, every cop in six states is gonna have it in the little computer in his squad car. I ain’t saying there’s gonna be some big manhunt for us. But there just ain’t a lot of cars on the road look like mine. All we gotta do is drive past some Dudley Do-Right who ain’t too busy eatin’ doughnuts to notice the car and decide to run the plates, and then it’s WBF, for sure.”

  “What means this ‘WBF?’”

  Snake gave her a crooked grin. “Lady, it means ‘We Be Fucked.’”

  Cecelia thought for a few moments. “Then you should get rid of your car, and steal another for us.”

  Snake shook his head. “Nope, bad idea.”

  “And why is that? Do you love so much that piece of junk we have been riding in?”

  Snake felt his gorge start to rise. The Lincoln meant more to him than this ugly nigger bitch ever would, but he had just enough control not to say so. Instead, after a deep breath or two, he told her, “There’s a couple of reasons. One is, I’m no car thief. Sure, I can hot-wire a car, any kid can do that. But cars these days, shit, they got alarms, and steering wheel locks, and remote ignition switches, and GPS systems, and all kinds of other shit that I don’t know how to deal with. I try to steal us a ride, I’d end up busted, for sure.”

  “How terrible that would be,” she said, her face expressionless.

  “Yeah, and the other reason is, even if I do rip off a car, there’s no way of knowin’ when it’s gonna be reported. Any car that’s good enough to be worth stealin’ is good enough for somebody to miss it. We’d never know for sure if the car was hot, until we saw them red flashing lights in the rearview mirror, and then it’s too fuckin’ late. Trying to outrun the cops is for suckers. You see that on TV all the time.”

  “Then what are you suggesting that we do?” She waved a hand around the dump of a room. “Spend the rest of our lives hiding in here?”

  “No, not hardly. I got me an idea, and it ain’t half bad. I don’t steal a car—just a set of plates. And I don’t only steal ’em, I replace ’em with the plates off the Lincoln. I mean, who goes out to his car in the morning and checks his damn license plates? The guy might not notice the switch for weeks. Meantime, we’d be drivin’ around with a nice, clean set of plates that ain’t on any cop’s hot sheet.”

  “It makes sense,” Cecelia said grudgingly. She glanced at the cheap watch she wore on her wrist. “There are several hours of darkness still left,” she said to Snake. “What are you waiting for?”

  FENTON AND VAN Dreenan were braving the traffic on the New Jersey Turnpike, thus proving that neither was lacking in courage.

  Van Dreenan broke several minutes of silence by saying, “Once we get back to New York, I have some p
hone calls to make.”

  Without taking his eyes off the road, Fenton produced his cell phone. “Here, use this if you want.”

  “Thank you, no. I already have my own. But one of the calls requires that I look up a number in my address book, which is currently in my suitcase, at the Holiday Inn.”

  “You want me to drop you there, then?”

  “If you would, please. For the other call, I know the number, but it is in South Africa. For that, I should use a landline. As you are aware, cell phones are often unreliable at that sort of distance.”

  “Yeah, for sure.” A pause. “You mind if I ask, has this got to do with our case?”

  If Van Dreenan noticed that Fenton was now referring to it as ‘our case,’ he did not say so. Instead, he said, “Oh yes, very much so. I want to ask a colleague of mine to send, by the quickest possible means, a hair sample we have on file. It came from one Cecelia Mbwato.”

  “They found some bits of hair at two of the crime scenes,” Fenton said thoughtfully.

  “Ja, I know. A DNA comparison might be very informative, don’t you think?” He let Fenton think that was the real reason.

  “Damn right, it would. When it gets here, I’ll ask my boss to press the FBI lab, make them give it priority.”

  “That would be very helpful, I think,” Van Dreenan said.

  “Um, what about the other call? The one where you have to look up the number?”

  “That one, my friend, should be local. The lady in question used to live in New York. I can only hope that she still does.”

  “Our phone system here has Directory Assistance, you know. Just hit four-one-one and talk to the nice computer.”

  “Her number is almost certain to be in the X directory.”

  “The what?”

  “Sorry. What you call here an unlisted number.”

  “Oh. This somebody who knows Cecelia what’s-her-name?”

  “Mbwato. No, probably not. But she is someone who knows a great deal about magic.”

  CHAPTER 21

  BARRY LOVE’S OFFICE was near Ninth Avenue and Forty-Eighth Street, in a dilapidated brick building whose lobby smelled strongly of cat piss. Morris found that the structure reminded him of the Kingsbury Building in Boston, and he hoped there wouldn’t be any fires to contend with this time.

  As the self-service elevator clanked and groaned its way to the fifth floor, he quietly said to Libby Chastain, “Think she knows we’re here?”

  Libby didn’t have to ask who she was. She bit her lip for a moment before answering. “Hard to say, since I don’t know what precise magical mechanism she’s been using to keep track of us. It’s some sort of scrying, obviously, but there are lots of different ways to do that. I’ve been putting out some cloaking spells since New Orleans, but the only way to know for sure if they’re working is if nobody tries to burn us up or hack us to pieces.”

  “Or seduce us,” he said, thinking of San Francisco.

  “That, too.”

  “So, you like girls, huh?”

  “Leave it alone, Quincey.”

  Barry Love was expecting them, and within a couple of minutes they were in his office and settling themselves into worn and faded client chairs that looked like they’d been bought cheap from a bankrupt funeral parlor. The chairs fit in well with the battered old desk where the detective sat down, and with the unpainted wooden shelves that jutted from the wall behind him.

  Love had been on the phone when they’d arrived, and politely asked their indulgence for a minute while he finished with his caller. As the detective muttered into the receiver, Morris found his gaze drawn to the shelves and their unusual contents.

  Books were crammed together on the top shelf, and Morris found that he recognized several of them. There were two bibles (the Latin Vulgate and King James Version), Stone’s Practical Demon-Hunting, an expensively bound copy of the Bhagavad-Gita, Newman’s The Vampire in Victorian England, Wellman’s biography of John the Balladeer, a couple of volumes by Hegel and one by Sartre, Black’s Approaching the Millennium, and the third edition of Investigating the Occult: Principles and Techniques by Scully and Reyes.

  The other shelves contained an odd assortment of bric-a-brac, including a statuette of what Morris believed to be the goddess Shiva, an economy-size bottle of Vivarin, an ornate silver crucifix that looked like it properly belonged in a cathedral, an African witch doctor’s mask, a small stuffed toy bear with a dirty face, a bronze Star of David, a shrunken head that looked genuine, two autopsy knives, a large can of Maxwell House coffee, and several objects that Morris couldn’t identify at all.

  Barry Love was listening intently to the voice on the phone, and had begun to write notes on a yellow legal pad that rested on the worn desk blotter. The private investigator appeared to be in his late thirties, so the touches of gray in his hair were probably premature. Morris thought they might have been brought on by the same experiences that had put all those lines in the man’s face. It was a thin face, with prominent cheekbones beneath a two-or-three-day growth of beard. A broad forehead stood sentinel above red-rimmed blue eyes that looked like they hadn’t known a good night’s sleep since the Reagan administration.

  Love was wearing a wrinkled blue dress shirt with a button-down collar and short sleeves. His pale, wiry arms bore several tattoos, which Morris recognized as sigils against demons. Barry Love, it seemed, was a man who took his work seriously.

  Love completed his call and hung up. “Sorry about that,” he said to Morris and Libby, “but I thought that guy might have a line on something—somebody—I’m interested in finding, and he doesn’t get in touch very often. I can’t call him, since he moves around a lot and doesn’t trust cell phones. Now then,” he said, leaning back in his chair, “you said when you called yesterday that you were interested in some information.”

  “Information that you could have provided over the phone, if you have it at all,” Morris said. Jet lag and the strain of the last few days had made him irritable.

  Love shook his head solemnly. “I never discuss important things over the telephone with strangers. A voice on the phone—hell, you could have been anyone, even one of Them.”

  “Them?” Libby Chastain said politely.

  “From the other side.” Love’s voice was matter-of-fact.

  “You’ve had some experience of the ‘other side?’” Libby asked.

  Love nodded slowly. “More than I ever wanted. Like a guy I once knew used to say, I seem to have a knack for the weird shit. I’ve been finding it, or maybe it’s been finding me, for a long time now.”

  “What might Quincey and I do, or say, to convince you that we’re not from the ‘other side?’” Libby asked.

  “You don’t need to do anything,” Love told her. “I already know you’re not.”

  Libby tilted her head a little. “And how do you know that?”

  “I can tell, that’s all.” Love shifted his gaze to Morris for a moment, then looked back at Libby. “Just like I can tell the two of you have had some dealings with the weird shit yourselves. But what I can’t tell is what you want from me.”

  “We’re here because a couple of fellas in New Orleans thought you might be able to help us.” Morris said.

  “New Orleans.” Love smiled a little. “That would be Carleton and what’s-his-name, Randall.”

  “It would, indeed.”

  “Help you with what?”

  “The weird shit,” Morris said, and grinned at him. “What else?”

  Morris and Libby took turns telling Barry Love about the black witch they were looking for, and why. It took quite a while. Their narrative was twice interrupted by the ringing phone, but each time Love brusquely told the caller, “I’ll get back to you later,” and hung up.

  When their tale was done, Barry Love sat back in his chair. “This lady you’re looking for sounds extremely dangerous,” he said.

  “She is,” Libby told him. “That’s why we need to find her quickly, before
she manages to destroy the LaRues.”

  “Or us,” Morris said.

  “Or us,” Libby agreed. “We’ve done all right so far, but the aggressor always has the advantage—that’s true in war, football, and magic, too. If this game of cat-and-mouse keeps up, sooner or later we’re going to get careless or she’s going to get lucky. So we need to move fast.”

  Love’s thin fingers pinched the bridge of his nose for a long moment. Then he said, “I don’t know her, not personally. There have been rumors for a long time about a powerful black witch who’s descended from a long line of them, a line that extends all the way back to Salem. I’ve never heard her called by name, but I might be able to get a line on her for you.”

  Barry Love was rubbing one of the mystical tattoos on his left arm absently. He may have derived comfort from it, or perhaps it just itched.

  “I’m familiar with most of the people in the city who deal in black magic,” he went on. “The real stuff, I mean, not tourist crap. Some of them owe me favors, and the others would probably be only too happy to have me owing them one. Let me make some calls and see what I can find out.”

  “How soon do you think you might have something for us?” Morris asked.

  Love glanced at his watch then thought for a moment. “Come back around ten tonight. With any luck, I should have some news by then.”

  “We haven’t discussed your fee yet,” Libby said.

  Barry Love looked at her with his bloodshot eyes and grinned crookedly. “If I do manage to turn up this lady for you, I guess that would mean you’d owe me a pretty big favor, both of you. That true?”

  “It certainly is,” Libby said, and Morris nodded agreement.

  “Okay then,” Love said. “That’ll be enough.”

  SINCE LIBBY LIVED in New York, she invited Morris to have dinner at her condo while they waited for Barry Love to work his contacts in the occult community.