Desperate Souls

by Gregory Lamberson

  Without missing a beat, Jake scooped up her pistol and tossed the Remington into the car and popped the trunk. He threw her handgun into the trunk, then collected those of her companions as well. He had already decided not to use Edgar’s Glock, so as not to implicate him in any of this, so the more firepower he obtained the better.

  He removed two glass liquor bottles filled with gasoline and dish detergent from the trunk, which he closed, and set the bottles on top of it. As he lit the cloth fuse on the first bottle, the black SUV that had chased him over the Brooklyn Bridge raced around the corner, its tires screeching. Touching the unlit fuse to the one already burning, he walked into the street and spread his arms wide.

  The SUV bore down on him, and he hurled the first Molotov cocktail at the oncoming vehicle’s windshield. The bottle shattered and splattered the chemical mixture across the glass, and an instant later, blue flames danced across the windshield. The SUV stopped beside him, and he threw the second cocktail through the rolled-down window before the zonbies inside could fire their automatic weapons. The chemicals ignited, transforming the interior into an incendiary hell. Fire consumed the occupants, which continued to move without making a sound. Two of them fired their AK-47s, and Jake ducked behind the SUV’s hatch as the Monte Carlo’s windows exploded across the sidewalk.

  Hearing one of the SUV’s doors open, he ran around the vehicle, crouching low to the ground, and came up behind a zonbie staggering around in a ball of fire. Presumably blinded by fire, the zonbie fired his AK-47 in random blasts. As Jake approached the burning figure, he felt intense heat on his back from the vehicle burning beside him and on his face from the zonbie hunting for him. Aiming his Glock at the smoldering and blackened head, he squeezed the trigger, and the zonbie pitched forward to the asphalt.

  Maneuvering around the crackling flames, Jake kicked the AK-47 aside. He didn’t bother to watch the dead thing’s soul rise through the blue flames. Facing the SUV, he saw that the figures inside had stopped moving. He knew he could not free their souls; hopefully the fire would accomplish that.

  Turning back to his car, he glimpsed the fires reflected in the darkened windows of abandoned buildings. Then he discerned silhouettes separating from shadowed doorways and alleys. Half a dozen figures crawled out of the darkness on their hands and knees, their desperate countenances ghostly in the firelight. They did not care about the twin bonfires or the man in their midst holding a machine gun. They only cared about taking free Black Magic off the corpses on the ground.

  Seven down, Jake thought. But these six look half dead already. They probably will be dead by sunrise, and then they’ll rise again. He felt tempted to shoot them now and spare himself a return trip, but he couldn’t kill them in cold blood. I’ll do that when their blood is cold.

  He got into his damaged car, popped four Tylenols, and drove back to Manhattan.

  It’s going to be a long night.

  Jake circled the Polo Grounds twice before parking in an illegal spot with a clear view of zonbies dealing Black Magic from a park bench located between two enormous housing projects. He saw no police and knew that the housing cops could not contend with the level of crime occurring now. Scores of scarecrows traversed the walkways. Jake didn’t see a single healthy human being in the vicinity.

  Leaving his car, he penetrated the parkway, scanning the haunted faces around him. Once upon a time, his white features would have elicited automatic suspicion among junkies and dealers alike, but neither zonbies nor scarecrows paid any attention to him now.

  A line of scarecrows twenty deep extended from the park bench. Three zonbies sat on the bench, the one in the middle sitting high on its back. He seemed to be the supervisor. The zonbie on his left collected cash, and the one on his right dispensed packets of Black Magic.

  Jake walked straight to the bench and drew his Glock.

  “Hey, get back on line!” a woman with a strangled voice said behind him.

  The zonbies stared at him with dead eyes.

  Jake fired a round into the supervisor’s head at point-blank range. The kid fell backwards off the bench, and his soul rose. Jake shot the second zonbie in the head as the third drew his own Glock. Jake swung his Glock in that zonbie’s direction and fired first. The zonbie’s head absorbed the hit, and he fired a shot into the crowd behind Jake.

  Someone screamed as the scarecrows scattered in all directions.

  With his Glock held loosely at his side, Jake returned to his car. He heard the scarecrows stampeding to the corpses he had left on the ground.

  Three down with twenty soon to replace them, he thought. I need to kill Katrina fast.

  His cell phone rang as he got into the car. Checking the display, he took the call. “Hi, Maria. What’s new?”

  “Edgar’s been missing for twenty-four hours now, so Missing Persons is taking over the case. I’m being shut out. The only way I’m allowed to help is from my desk. Can you believe that shit?”

  He started the engine. “Has anyone spoken to Joyce?”

  “Yeah, she and Martin are worried sick. Everyone knows this isn’t like Edgar.”

  He pulled into traffic. “What can I do to help?”

  “Well, you’re a PI, right? You must know a thing or two about finding missing people.” She lowered her voice. “And you’re a free agent, so the department can’t interfere with your operation.”

  “I’ll do everything possible to help you find him,” he said as he sped through a red light.

  Jake drove downtown to Battery Park located on the southern tip of Manhattan. He saw a crowd gathered near the waterfront, mostly white people in casual attire.

  Yuppie scarecrows, he thought as he pulled over to the curb. Black Magic doesn’t discriminate.

  He got out of the car with the AK-47 held in both hands, and as he approached the crowd, he raised it over his head and fired a burst into the air that sent panic-stricken scarecrows scattering. He approached the trio of white-faced zonbies with his machine gun lowered.

  With their baseball caps backwards on their heads, they stared at him with dull, lifeless eyes. One pulled a revolver from his waistband, and Jake blasted all three of them, strafing their chests. As their bodies jerked on the ground, sawdust pouring out of their wounds, Jake fired a short burst into each of their heads, decimating them. He continued to fire until the AK-47 made a clicking sound.

  The zonbies stopped moving, and Jake returned to the car, where he checked the luminous clock.

  Almost midnight. Plenty of time to make more stops.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  Peering through her Toyota’s windshield, Maria approached the caravan of RMP cars, unmarked detective units, and other assorted emergency response vehicles with a growing sense of unease. Multicolored strobe lights illuminated the Grant Street neighborhood like a rock concert, silhouetting the uniformed POs who stood interspersed along the yellow tape that surrounded the crime scene.

  As the last detective called in, she had to park almost a block away, and she checked her hair and makeup before getting out. Ordinarily she didn’t worry about such things, but ordinarily she wasn’t awakened by a phone call from Night Watch Command in the middle of the night ordering her to a triple homicide site. Answering the call, she had feared that Edgar’s body had turned up somewhere and felt relieved to learn that three hoppers had been killed instead. Without time for a shower, she had pulled her curly hair into a ponytail and dressed in jeans and a short-sleeved sweater.

  As she followed the sidewalk to the crime scene, she saw light blue breaking up the gray sky and sunlight outlining the brick-faced apartment buildings on either side of the street.

  Nothing like a little dawn to show the city’s garbage, she thought, wondering when the sanitation workers’ strike would end. She flashed her gold shield at a sleepy-eyed PO and ducked beneath the crime scene tape.

  “The cavalry has arrived,” Bernie Reinhardt said, holding a Styrofoam cup of coffee in one hand. His eyelids drooped as much
as his blond mustache.

  “You’re the primary?” Maria said.

  “Thanks for the vote of confidence. The department’s suffering an extreme shortage of murder police tonight. Since I’m on your Black Magic Task Force, they pressed me into service until you could get here.”

  Maria looked at the Crime Scene Unit members photographing three corpses on the sidewalk. Teenage boys, from the looks of them. “Why the shortage?”

  “There were seven similar incidents tonight in Manhattan and Brooklyn. Someone’s finally declared war on whoever’s running Black Magic.”

  “A rival gang?”

  Bernie nodded. “Twenty-four stiffs in groups of three. With our current manpower shortage, the bosses are looking at a hell of a lot of OT.”

  “Maybe this is payback for our Machete Massacres.” “I’d hazard a guess Prince Malachai is learning that leadership is overrated right about now. Come on. I’ve got something to show your expert eyes.”

  He led her over to the nearest corpse, a sixteen-year-old boy with cornrows tight to his scalp. A bullet hole in the center of his forehead resembled a third eye.

  “Look at his hands.”

  Crouching low to the ground, Maria studied the boy’s gun hand. All his fingers lacked third joints, and their ends had been sewn shut with black thread. She looked at the other hand and saw the same thing.

  Bernie crouched beside her. With the pointer finger and thumb of his free hand, he separated the dead boy’s cracked lips, revealing mangled gray gums. “No fingertips, no teeth, no identification. Same thing with the other two and all the bodies at the other crime scenes.”

  Maria looked at Bernie in disbelief, then took out a pair of latex gloves, snapped them on, and duckwalked to the corpse’s feet. Seizing the ankle of one leg, she pulled off the sneaker and sock covering the boy’s foot and recoiled. No toes, either! Leaving the sock and shoe beside the foot, she rose.

  “Someone went to a hell of a lot of trouble to make it hard for us to identify these guys,” Bernie said.

  “There’s no blood. If the killers messed with these corpses after killing the vics, they did it somewhere else and dumped them here.”

  “This is a known drug corner. Odds are these kids worked it. If your theory is right, they were abducted, executed, mutilated, and returned here. Why go through all that trouble? Why not just kill them and run?”

  “To send a message.”

  “Okay, I’ll give you that. But why sew the ends of their finger stubs?”

  Maria shuddered despite the rising sun. “What kind of monsters are we dealing with?” And what the hell happened to Edgar?

  As Malachai walked through the abandoned Long Island City factory, Marcus felt the walls closing in on them. They had come so far in the last year since Mal had hooked up with Katrina, and now, just when they had reached the pinnacle, they stood to lose everything, all because of one man. Corpses littered the industrial floor, each with at least one bullet hole in its head. Another dozen bodies lay unmoving upon the tables set up near the furnace. Worse, the packing area for the drugs was empty.

  “How many?” Malachai said.

  Marcus did not like giving his boss bad news. “Twenty-four here, another thirty between eight of our spots in Manhattan and Brooklyn. We got hit hard. He’s dismantling our entire operation.”

  Forty-five stood watch in the doorway behind them, his arms folded across his man boobs.

  “How much Magic did he get?”

  “At least twenty bricks.” He saw the anger building in Malachai’s face. It showed in his eyes and in the way he kept drawing in his lips.

  “How the hell did he find this location?”

  “He probably waited until sunrise, then followed some of our dealers back here. Papa Joe would have done the same thing if he’d figured out what our workers are. I told you, we need to house those things in a separate area, keep the factory workers and the sellers separate, just like in the old days.”

  “Damn it!” Malachai kicked over a stainless steel cart used to transport the kilos of Black Magic. “Okay, first things first. You need to find us a new location, so we can set up shop. Look for something in Brooklyn this time, somewhere around Prospect Avenue. Make sure you find a secondary location nearby where these things can go at the end of the night. I’m going to have Katrina send every fucking zonbie we have after Helman. He has to go down today.”

  Marcus blinked at his commander. “You mean in daylight?”

  “That’s right. Helman probably thinks he’s safe in the daytime. We’re going to keep him on his toes 24-7. Sooner or later, he’ll fuck up, and then he’s ours. I think I’ll turn him onto a little Magic, then flay him alive. Let him walk around without his skin and his soul screaming for help in a skull full of mush.”

  “But other people will see our”—he hated using the word—“slaves for what they really are.”

  “I don’t care.” Malachai’s lower lip quivered with anger. “I want Helman dead.”

  Marcus couldn’t believe what he was hearing. The zonbies were supposed to be their dirty secret. Look what had already happened in the Polo Grounds. “This will be bad for business. Can’t Katrina just do him like she did those two cops?”

  “Nah, she can’t reach him. Some ‘psychic interference’ bullshit I don’t understand.”

  “Then let’s do this thing ourselves. Helman dropped so many of those things that the city’s meat wagon picked a bunch of them up before we could.” He had hoped for a better opportunity to release that piece of information.

  Malachai snorted like a bull, and Marcus anticipated another outburst. “When it rains it motherfucking pours, doesn’t it? The cops won’t know what to make of those bodies, even when they cut them open.”

  “You send those things out into the daylight, where people can see them, and they’ll figure it out. You’ll destroy everything we’ve got faster than Helman can.”

  Malachai opened and closed his fists. Marcus knew he needed to hit something. Someone. Instead, he unleashed a primal scream.

  Marcus lowered his voice. “I think we need to lay low with this supernatural shit. It’s getting out of control. We’ve already wiped out the competition, so let’s go back to selling what we used to: coke, heroin, crack. Put this Black Magic on the back burner.” He had to be careful suggesting a course of action that contradicted Katrina’s plans.

  “He’s right,” Katrina said.

  Marcus flinched. Oh, shit. He turned to see Katrina gliding past Forty-five in a short lime green dress that hugged her curves and showed off her long legs. I am? He couldn’t recall her ever agreeing with his advice.

  “I thought I told you to wait in the car,” Malachai said.

  Marcus liked that Malachai believed he was in charge of Katrina. It struck him as humorous that his boss didn’t even realize he was pussy whipped.

  “I wanted to see the damage for myself,” Katrina said with no rebuttal from Malachai as she looked around the abandoned factory.

  “Those things need to fight better,” Malachai said.

  “It’s not that easy. I can program them all with general reactions, but if you want me to actually pull their strings, I can only do it one at a time.” She cast a sideways glance at Marcus, who felt a chill run down his spine. “With the other drug operations out of business, we need to expand our horizons. It’s time to start selling the more traditional products again. Put people on the street in the daytime, pushing the old-school shit, and let the zonbies own the night.”

  Marcus saw what Katrina was doing. She wasn’t looking to curb the use of voodoo in their organization; she just wanted more money. She had only pretended to go along with his suggestion to appear cooperative. Think of something else …

  “People cost money,” Malachai said. “People can give us up to the cops. People try to take down the boss. That’s what you told me when you sold me on this shit in the first place, and you were right.”

  Katrina stepped cl
oser to Malachai.

  Work your magic, lady, Marcus thought.

  “My strategy worked. You’re the power in this city now, not Papa Joe. But we need to diversify. It makes sense economically, and by owning the entire drug market, you’ll keep our enemies from rebuilding their operations. A wider variety of drugs will also keep the cops from concentrating solely on Black Magic, and the longer we keep that on the down low the better.”

  Marcus saw the wheels in Malachai’s brain turning. A smile spread across his boss’s lips. I knew it. When it came to Katrina, Malachai had become predictable, a true weakness.

  Malachai stroked Katrina’s long hair. “I like it. But what about Helman? We can’t let him continue to cut us off at the knees.”

  Katrina smiled. “Don’t worry. I have plans for Helman.”

  Maria and Bernie sat facing Lieutenant Mauceri in his glass-faced office in the Detective Bureau Manhattan on East Twenty-first Street. Maria sipped orange juice through a straw while Bernie worked on another coffee. Wearing a wrinkled vest, Mauceri had rolled up his sleeves.

  You’re doing a heckuva job, L.T., Maria thought, still resenting that she had been excluded from the investigation into Edgar’s disappearance.

  “Cards on the table,” Mauceri said. “We got thirty DOAs in three boroughs, and there’s no question they’re linked. Each stiff was mutilated in an identical manner. Since the vics all appear to have been hoppers, this points to the biggest drug war this city’s ever seen. And since the head of the Black Magic Task Force is MIA and this department is operating with a skeleton crew, the chief of detectives has authorized me to absorb what’s left of BMTF into Homicide. Welcome aboard, Reinhardt. For the time being, you’re murder police.”