The Invoker: A Lawson Vampire Novel 2 (The Lawson Vampire Series)

by Jon F. Merz

  And I didn’t like it.

  The lit room beckoned and I advanced toward it, still keeping the pistol ready to go. As the doorway opened in front of me, and I cut the pie, clearing the room of any potential threats – pieces of the room gradually revealed themselves.

  The wide-screen TV probably cost at least $1200 and looked out of place next to the faded yellow pinstripe wallpaper that peeled away from the corners and edges of the room. The pockmarked maroon rug showed holes of hardwood flooring in places. Yellowing newspapers littered the corners. Bloody bandages turned brownish from dried blood sat in a pile as a blue plaid recliner came into view its back to me.

  I moved into the room now, sniffing the air.

  I could scent the old cooper smells of the bloody bandages but they were mixed with a fresher smell as well.

  That didn’t make any sense, unless…

  I swung the recliner around.

  Derby’s vacant eyes stared at me from behind the veil of death.

  I sighed – lowered my pistol.

  Shit.

  I stooped closer and got a look at him. The entry wound looked neat, probably a .22. Whoever’d done it had put one clean into the middle of his forehead. I could tell from the discoloration on the chair behind his head that what few brains Derby’d once possessed had been blown out the back and now mixed with the blue material of the chair in some vague melange of grisly color.

  The shooter’d been close, too. Derby’s eyebrows had powder burns on them.

  From the look on his face and the somewhat rigid state of his body, he might have been dead almost twelve hours. That meant whomever he’d worked for had rolled-up the operation and gotten that much of a jump on me.

  And that wasn’t good at all.

  My one lead was sitting in a pile of his own shit and piss and blood and not telling me anything except that he hadn’t chosen his employers very carefully.

  I could have told him that.

  Standing in that crappy apartment, I doubted Derby would have been smart enough to write anything down. Even dead, he didn’t look like he and the alphabet had been on speaking terms.

  But there might be something in the joint that could help me make a jump to the next possible lead. I’ve known professional trackers who use the same principle in their business. They follow a trail for as long as they can. If the tracks disappear, they cast around for a new track to continue the search. They start small and expand, hopefully finding the trail again. In the dog world it’s known as casting for scent.

  In my world it means I’m shit outa luck and damned desperate for anything fresh to go on.

  It took me another twenty minutes to determine that most of Derby’s worldly possessions amounted to the TV set, an imitation brown leather wallet made in Taiwan, a cellular phone and a set of keys to a Ford Escort.

  Both the TV and the cell phone were new. That told me old Derby had recently done some shopping. I found the receipt for the TV in the kitchen by the newspapers. Unfortunately, it had been paid for in cash. I hadn’t been far off the mark in what the damned thing cost, either. Bully for me.

  The cell phone held some promise, though.

  Good old Benny the Phreak could probably hack the records and tell me who Derby had been calling or receiving calls from. For a price, of course.

  I wiped the place down for my prints as much as possible. It wasn’t really necessary – I’m not listed in any computer files – but it old habits keep me alive.

  I turned off the light as a courtesy on the way out. I don’t know too many dead folks who like to sit under the light like fries at a fast food chain and bake away in a putrid mess.

  According to my watch and it was closing on eleven o’clock. Time enough to grab Jack and get home for some much needed sleep.

  It had been a long day and until Benny the Phreak had a chance to get up close and personal with the cell phone, things didn’t show much hope of looking up anytime soon.

  Still, it could have been worse.

  I could be sitting in some crummy apartment in a recliner with the back of my head blown off.

  Just like Derby.

  Chapter Nine

  Jack asked me the question the next morning over cereal, orange juice, and juice.

  "When can I go home?"

  I’d known it was coming. Hell, anyone in the kid’s place would have asked it a thousand times before then.

  But the question was a difficult one to answer. In part because until I got to the bottom of this thing and figured out who the bad guys were, Jack was still in a lot of danger.

  Then there was the fact that the kid was growing on me.

  I’ve been a loner most of my life. Never had any brothers or sisters. I grew up fending for myself – given the finer points of leading a worthy life by my father and mother – and that was it. Jack reminded me a lot of myself, just without the glasses.

  I made an executive decision I hoped I wouldn’t regret. "We’ll go back to your house after breakfast. But just to get some of your things. Until I can nab the guys who did this, you’re still in danger."

  "Because of my gift?"

  I nodded. "Yeah, pal. Looks that way."

  "Some gift," he said and went back to munching his flakes.

  I sighed. "You’ve got something a lot of people seem to want. I don’t know who yet and I don’t know what for, but I promise I’ll find out."

  He looked back up at me. "Then what?"

  That one stopped me cold. I hadn’t thought that far yet. The way this thing was unraveling, I felt like I playing catch-up the entire way. The future was just that – a long way off. And right now, it was the last thing on my mind.

  "How about we take that as it comes?"

  "I guess." He chewed for another minute. "Are we going to see Mr. Dulton again?"

  "You mean Arthur?" I smiled. "Sure, I don’t see why not. You guys had fun last night?"

  Jack nodded. "Yeah. He’s not such a great cook, but he told me a lot of very cool stories about the old times. Some legends I never even heard of before."

  "You probably heard some I haven’t heard before either."

  "Mr. Dulton says most folks in our society don’t know the old tales. He says that’s one reason why people like you and him are needed. He said that if people respected the old traditions, they’d know the right thing to do all the time."

  "Maybe they would, Jack. But unfortunately we can’t change everyone. Some folks will just go and do what they want with little concern for anything but their own personal gain. They’ll do anything for any price. What makes us good is concern for others. We need to work together, help each other out."

  He considered that. "I’d like to hear more stories about the old days. It sounds like a good time to have been alive."

  I smiled. I felt the same way. Somehow Fixers and Elders like Wirek always felt like we were born at the wrong time. While the rest of our society wanted to move into the future, we were the holdouts. The preservers of the old ways.

  In a lot of ways, the newer generations wanted nothing to do with the traditions. Some of the young folks even went so far as to have their canines ground down so they wouldn’t look so pointy. It reached the point where it was almost a denial of our heritage. I shared Arthur’s concern about it.

  We washed the dishes together and then jumped in the Volvo for the ten minute ride to Brookline. Jack spent most of the ride filling me on some of Arthur’s exploits as a Fixer. I wasn’t quite sure if Arthur had embellished them for Jack’s sake, but if the stories were half true, Arthur had been one helluvan operator.

  Jack’s house looked a lot different in the daylight. The trees that had yawned great shadows over the lawn the other night seemed friendlier now. And even the house itself didn’t look nearly so deserted as the sun danced through clouds and brightened the melting snow.

  "We’ll park the next street over and then walk. We’ll go in through the back door, okay?"

  "I don’t have the
key."

  "Not a problem. I can pick the lock."

  "Really? Cool."

  I looked at him. "Just remember, we’ve got to be quick. If the humans who live around here see us, they’ll call the police and then we’ll be in serious trouble."

  "I won’t be long."

  I nodded, pulled the Volvo around and found us two-hour parking spot on the next street. We got out, crunching ice and snow under foot. Jack fell in beside me and we walked together, neither of us saying much.

  We cut across the backyard and came up to the back door. I tried the doorknob on a whim but the cops must have locked it. I pulled out my picks and went to work. Two long minutes later we were inside.

  While Jack ran around gathering some things in a small gym bag, I looked the place over. Several indentations in the walls marked where the hit team had fired at us the other night. There must have been shell casings on the floor because small chalk circles were all that remained from the crime scene investigation unit.

  I walked into Henry Watterson’s study. A heavy oak desk squatted in the center of the room, like some foreboding brown monument. I jimmied the top drawer open and rifled the contents. Stacks of overdue bills from the electric, cable, and phone company clogged the drawer. Notices of imminent shut-offs vied for space with bounced checks.

  Obviously, there’d been some money problems.

  Something about that didn’t strike me as right.

  According to the information I’d received from the Council, Watterson had been selling drugs and plenty of them. A man with that much money doesn’t get letters threatening shut-offs.

  I heard Jack thumping back downstairs from the second floor and went to meet him. He’d added another bag to the one he’d filled already. I grinned. "You got enough stuff there?"

  "The important stuff," he said. "I’ll get the rest later."

  I nodded. "Okay, let’s get out of here."

  We left the way we came, out the backdoor and through the yard over to the Volvo. A bright orange ticket flapped in the wind under my right windshield wiper. So much for two-hour parking. I slid it into the glove compartment. I’d mail it to Larazo later.

  Once we were back on the Jamaicaway, I cleared my throat. "Did your father ever give you an allowance, Jack?"

  He put his head down. "No."

  I glanced over. "Sorry, I didn’t mean-"

  "We couldn’t afford it." He shrugged. "I mean, dad had the house but he never seemed to make enough money for us."

  "Business wasn’t good?"

  "I guess not. He used to sit up a lot at night in his study. I think he was just trying to figure a way to make more money. I used to lie in bed and listen to him sigh a lot."

  "He couldn’t get any help from anyone?"

  "I don’t know that he even asked," said Jack. "I think he was embarrassed."

  "Yeah," I said. "That’s understandable."

  "My dad was a hard worker. But he never forgot to tuck me into bed." Jack sniffed and turned away. "I miss him a whole lot."

  Watching Jack try to make peace with his father’s death, one I was personally responsible for, didn’t make me feel very good. In

  fact, I had a crummy feeling in the pit of my stomach that I didn’t think was going to vanish any time soon.

  I’d had that feeling before and every time, my instinct was right. Not that being right was liable to make me feel better.

  Not now.

  And probably not for a very long time.

  Chapter Ten

  That evening, I dropped Jack off with Arthur again. Arthur seemed glad to see Jack again and Jack made me promise not to tell Arthur we’d stopped off for burgers down on Commonwealth Avenue beforehand.

  Back in my car, I punched up Benny the Phreak on the cell. He answered quickly.

  "Yo."

  "It’s me again. You busy?"

  "Been expecting your call."

  "Yeah?"

  "See the paper today?"

  "No."

  "Derby had a small blurb in the Irish sports pages."

  "That’s not very politically correct of you Benny."

  "Fuck that, man. I’m Irish. I don’t mind. Why should anyone else?"

  "Anything unusual in the obit?"

  "Just that he was dead. I figured it must have been a dead-end. Figured you’d be calling if you’d found anything you needed me to run down for ya."

  "You figured right. Can I swing by?"

  "If you can stand the smell, man, help yourself. You know the address."

  "Fifteen minutes."

  Benny lived in a loft down near where Congress Street stopped looking financial and started looking old-abandoned-textile-warehouse-turned-expensive-condominium. Benny owned five such buildings. He kept the four surrounding him vacant and lived in the fifth.

  I asked him once why he kept the other four empty when he could have made a fortune renting them out. He told me he liked knowing who his neighbors were. Or in his case, weren’t.

  The Big Dig, Boston’s bogus construction project that seemed to be taking longer than a walk to Pluto and had more cost overruns and corrupt officials than ants at a picnic in July, had scarred the waterfront section of town. Where once there were roads, now lived detours, dead-ends, and the ubiquitous presence of cops on over-time. Trying to thread your way around down there took a lot of time and a lot of patience.

  Boston drivers usually possessed neither.

  What the area did have plenty of, at least down by where Benny lived, was parking. I found a spot half a block away and slid the Volvo into it easily. I’d upgraded to the Volvo after my Jetta began to disappoint me after only three years and twenty-five thousand miles. First, the door handles kept breaking. Then the transmission took forever to switch gears. Then the rubber molding along the doors kept falling off.

  Finally, I gave in and bought myself the Volvo. Sure, it was about two times as much as the Jetta, but you get what you pay for.

  Benny lived in a brick and mortar building that at one time had lots of windows. Now they were blocked up on every floor except the second to top floor. There’d also been a few doors once judging from the archways that were also blocked up.

  Now the only way in was through a heavy steel-reinforced number with a small buzzer and intercom box to one side. Very sterile, but also very secure. Above the doorway, Benny’d installed a pinhole camera.

  As I approached and reached for the buzzer, the door clicked open. I pulled the door, feeling it give and creak as the hinges turned.

  Stairs led up immediately, giving you no other option than to climb. My footsteps echoed off the steel treads as I climbed to the second floor.

  Here, you could either climb another set of stairs or head down a hallway filled with doors. The hallway was one of Benny’s traps. He’d built a maze of cutouts and dead-ends in case someone broke in. The real path to his living quarters lay upstairs.

  The third floor stopped on a landing that had enough space for one person to stand. Anyone else would have had to stand on the steps. A blank wall stood to the left beside another set of stairs leading up.

  I stood at the blank wall and waited.

  After a second, a hydraulic hiss sounded from somewhere on the other side and then the wall slid open with the exact same sound as when Captain Kirk used to walk on to the bridge of the Enterprise.

  Ahead of me, the hallway was lit in a few places by lonely red lights in the wall. At the end of the hall, a single door waited.

  A small silver nameplate read simply: Benny the Phreak.

  It opened as I came down the hallway.

  And Benny the Phreak greeted me.

  "Heya dude."

  If you were anyone to Benny the Phreak, he always called you "dude" in person. I was glad to see I still rated.

  "Good to see you, Benny."

  He pumped my hand once. Benny’d always had himself a firm handshake. I think it came from how many times a day he got it on with himself.

  He b
acked away from the door and let me inside.

  Beyond the door, everything just exploded outward. No walls separated any of the rooms. A bank of enormous bay windows showed off the city’s financial district skyline.

  I’d once pointed out that he might have been susceptible to microwave audio surveillance but he’d shown me the triple-panes of bullet-resistant glass with white noise pumped in between them.

  He’d left the walls exposed brick for that proper urban loft feel. A few choice area rugs dotted the floor but otherwise everything was imported hardwood Benny’d ordered specifically for his pad.

  Computers covered nearly every piece of available space. Some sat in varying states of assembly or disrepair. Benny had learned all about computers the hard way: buying all the parts and assembling them by hand. It took a long time, sure, but he knew exactly how everything worked by the time he finished.

  He began playing with computers over twenty years ago. Nowadays, he still bought triples of new high-tech gadgets. One to play with, one to destroy, and one to rebuild from scratch. Schematics to Benny the Phreak were as boring as listening to a group of accountants discuss the benefits of the decimal system.

  Sheets of computer printouts filled any gaps in the hardware spaces and littered the floor, overflowing from two giant dot-matrix printers Benny still loved and a series of trash cans and shredders.

  I smelled stale pizza.

  Benny cleared his throat. "So, what’d you bring me?"

  I held our Derby’s cell phone. "I need a history on it. All calls made from and received, complete with traces, addresses, names-"

  "Jeez, you want DNA too?"

  "If you can get it, yeah. I’m stuck in a bad way and this phone is the only hope I’ve got right now."

  He nodded. "Figured it musta been serious if you volunteered to come around." He took the phone and headed over to his main computer console, a rack of four ultra-powerful consoles and servers, sat down in a captain’s chair he’d purchased off a decommissioned battleship and began typing.

  I caught a whiff of mouthwash. That was a change. Benny used hygiene products as often as politicians told the truth.