Heaven's Door (Quincy Harker, Demon Hunter Book 6)

by John G. Hartness

  “Under the sink.”

  She went back into the bathroom, leaving the door open this time. I followed her in, assuming the open door was something of an invitation. I grabbed my own toothbrush and proceeded to chisel the remnants of the day before out of my mouth, then put a little gel in my hair to tame the bedhead and gave my stubble a quick glance and promise to tend to the thicket as soon as we caught the murderer.

  “What’s the plan?” Flynn asked, sitting on my bed to put her shoes on.

  I grabbed a fresh pair of Doc Martens from the closet and sat next to her to put them on. If there’s anything running around the world with Dracula for a mentor will teach you, it’s to have spare clothes around. The bootful of tweaker piss I got in my boot the night before wasn’t even on the top ten list of most disgusting things to ever happen to my wardrobe.

  I looked over at Flynn. “We’ll grab a quick breakfast, then call Smitty and see if the junkie we found at the church has told him anything.”

  “Do you think we can use that guy? He was pretty nuts, and he didn’t actually see anything.”

  “Remember, Becks, we aren’t looking at a burden of proof that will stand up in a court of law. We just need to figure this shit out beyond our reasonable doubt, and then put two in the Cambion’s head.”

  “I don’t like this vigilante shit, Harker. We’re the good guys; we’re supposed to be better than this.”

  I turned to her and put on my serious face. “No, you’re the good guys. I’m the guy who gets shit done. Sometimes I work with the good guys, and my endgame is always tilted toward the side of the angels, but a lot of rules either don’t apply to me or can’t be applied to the things I hunt. This is one of those things. A Cambion with the knowledge to open a portal to Hell? Even if we had evidence to get an arrest and a conviction, we can’t put that thing in the general population in prison. And we sure as hell can’t send it to a psych ward where it will have all that disturbed mental energy to feed off of. No, Becks, this is one of those black and white times when it’s kill this motherfucker or a lot of innocent people die.”

  “Doesn’t mean I have to like it.”

  “You wouldn’t be the woman I fell in love with if you did. We all need a moral compass, Becks. You’re mine.”

  “Great, I’m Jiminy Cricket.”

  “Could be worse, you could be my fairy godmother. Now let’s go grab some breakfast and then find this asshole. By my reckoning, the Cambion only needs one more Nephilim and then a couple other sacrifices for the ritual, which is probably scheduled for some time in the next three nights.”

  “Why the next three? I thought the Solstice was tomorrow?”

  “Solstice is like the full moon. It’s more a rough period of time than a specific date on the calendar. Astronomically, it’s about when the sun and Earth are either at their nearest or farthest points. That’s a very specific moment, but magically, there’s a little gray area on either side of the exact moment, basically because ancient druids and wizards and witches didn’t have much in the way of high-tech astronomical tools, but they could feel the strengthening of our connection either to the lands of light or the lands of shadow. The summer solstice is specifically better for casting lighter spells, but all magic is strengthened. The winter solstice, which we’re fast approaching, is one of those times when the physical plane is in much greater contact with the shadow planes, so it’s easier to cast darker magic.”

  “Like opening a portal to Hell,” Flynn added.

  “Exactly. So since we’re more closely contacting the shadow planes right now, there’s a period of about seventy-two hours that our Cambion has to work with.”

  “So how did you know when to catch him last time?”

  “I got lucky. I read a bunch of Dark Ages bullshit about how the ceremony had to be done at midnight, and I bought it one hundred percent. Fortunately for me, Sponholz bought it, too. Otherwise I don’t think we’d be having this conversation.”

  “So you saved the world just by getting lucky?”

  “Happens more often than you’d think,” I said. I stood up and held out my hand. “Come on, chickadee, let’s go get some breakfast. This pile of sexy requires coffee to function. And bacon. Then we can go visit our ear-witness at the safe house. Smitty texted me the address while we were asleep.”

  “Hmmm, a man that runs on caffeine and bacon. That’s my kind of guy.” She stood, gave me a quick kiss, and swooped past me out the bedroom door. I stood there for a second, wondering if I’d ever get used to having a woman that ridiculously pretty, smart, and badass interested in me. I decided the answer was “probably not,” and that I was completely fine with that.

  Chapter 14

  I was on my second helping of bacon when he walked in. He was disheveled, looking like he hadn’t slept in a couple days, and his eyes were red. I was sitting in IHOP with my chair facing the door, and I pegged him for trouble the second he pushed through the door. His shirt was untucked, and his socks didn’t match, but that wasn’t what gave it away. No, it was the air of frantic emptiness he carried with him like his own personal cross. This was a guy that had nothing left to lose, and that made him very dangerous, even if he was completely human.

  I held up a hand to interrupt Flynn talking about a new DNA report that Paul just sent to her phone. “Becks.” I kept my voice low but put enough force behind it that her head snapped up.

  “What’s wrong?” I don’t know if she read my voice or felt the concern through our mental link, but her phone was instantly forgotten.

  “The guy that just came in. He’s trouble.”

  Flynn nodded, then said loudly, “Okay, honey. Let me just go wash my hands and we can go.” She stood up and walked past me to the restrooms. That not only got her out of the line of fire if something went to shit, it also put her on her feet and mobile enough to deal with a threat if one arose.

  Her movement caught the man’s attention, and he called out to her. “Are you Detective Flynn?” I felt her freeze right behind me and turn. My attention was divided between the man and the inertia-dampening spell I was muttering under my breath.

  “I’m Detective Flynn,” Becks said, not moving any closer. That kept her out of my way if I needed to do something and still kept the guy’s attention on her. “What can I do for you?”

  “You can tell me why you’re in here eating breakfast while my son is lying the morgue, for one thing.”

  The man’s voice shook. So did his hands, and I could see that he was barely holding on. Shit. It hit me then. He was the altar boy’s father. What the fuck was he doing here? And how the fuck did he know we were here?

  “Sir, I assure you, the department is doing everything we can to find out what happened to your son, and as soon as we know anything—”

  “Don’t you lie to me, bitch! I see you in here, eating fucking pancakes with your asshole boyfriend instead of out there figuring out who killed my boy!”

  “Sir, Mr. Harker is an investigator with Homeland Security. He is assisting in our investigation. We believe that your son’s death may be connected to others in the area, and we are putting all our resources—”

  “Goddammit, bitch, I said shut up!” He pulled a pistol out of his pocket, and I realized I probably wasn’t getting that refill on my coffee.

  I got up and held up both hands, palms toward him so he could see that I was unarmed, at least as far as he probably considered “armed.” “Calm down, sir. We don’t want anybody to get hurt here.”

  “Hurt? HURT?!?” he screeched. “You didn’t see your little boy lying dead on a table in the morgue. No, you were here having breakfast with this idiot cop, chatting about the goddamn weather like nothing bad ever happened!”

  No, I saw your little boy hanging from a chandelier with nails in his hands, but we spared you from that. That’s what ran through my head. What came out of my mouth was some nonsense meant to be reassuring but really only intended to give Flynn enough time to get her hand on her serv
ice weapon.

  Whatever I said, it didn’t calm him down one bit. I suppose nothing could, and I didn’t really blame him for that. He looked back to Rebecca. “What are you doing here, bitch?”

  “Sir…Sir!” This time I shouted, and I covered most of the distance between us in two quick steps. Sometimes having Dracula’s blood in your veins is really handy.

  His head snapped to me, and he stepped backwards, just out of my reach. He trained the gun on me. “Stay back, asshole.”

  “I’ll stay back, but you call Detective Flynn a bitch one more time, and one of us is going to shoot you. I don’t make any promises about which one it will be, but watch your mouth.”

  “Fuck you,” he spat at me. “My boy is dead, do you hear me? Dead!”

  “I don’t have to hear you,” I said. “I saw. I saw it, and I’m sorry. No parent should ever have to go through that. But we are only human, and we have to eat. And we have to sleep. Because if we don’t, we can’t do our jobs, and then nobody finds the son of a bitch that killed your boy.”

  He looked like he was wavering, and I thought I had him. I thought I was reaching him, but then somebody pushed through the front door, and the door chime rang out, and his eyes went wide and paranoid again, and he lost it.

  “You’re just trying to distract me! You don’t care about my boy! You don’t care about anything!” He raised the pistol, and I went for him. I slapped the gun out of his hand, but not before he got a shot off. It was a little gun, maybe a .22. It sounded more like a loud handclap than a gunshot in the restaurant. I slapped his hand, the gun went to the floor, and I punched the distraught father in the jaw. He was out before he hit the ground, and I turned around to make sure the errant bullet hadn’t hurt anyone.

  “Is everyone okay?” I asked. A room full of people nodded back at me. “Was anyone hurt?” The same room full of people shook their heads. “Does anyone really have to pee right now?” Half the room got up en masse and bolted for the restrooms.

  “Detective, will you get some uniforms in here to take this gentleman to the station? And they’ll probably need to get statements from everyone here. As soon as they get here, we’ve got to go. As he so vehemently reminded us, we have a murderer to catch.”

  “Actually, I think you’re going to the hospital,” Flynn said, pulling out her cell phone. “Call 911,” she said to the nice lady at the cash register.

  “Why would I…oowwwww!” I looked down at my left arm and saw the shirt sleeve soaked with blood. “Did that son of a bitch shoot me?”

  “If not, then you really need to see a doctor because you’re bleeding out of your skin for no reason. Which might be even worse than getting shot,” was Flynn’s response. That’s my girl, always helpful. I felt her concern, though, so I sent reassuring feelings to let her know I didn’t think it was all that serious.

  I moved my arm around. It hurt, but really not too bad. A lot less than any of the other times I’d been shot, even wearing a Kevlar vest. “I don’t think he hit anything vital, but I’d like to get the bleeding stopped.”

  Flynn knelt to the unconscious man, checked his pulse and his pupils to make sure I hadn’t accidentally killed him. Satisfied with what she found, she rolled the man over onto his stomach. When she was done, she waved me over to a nearby table.

  “Come here,” she said. “Sit.” I sat. Flynn reached into her pocket and pulled out a small pocketknife. She cut the sleeve off my shirt and rolled up my t-shirt.

  “I could have taken that off, you know.”

  “It was ruined anyway,” she replied, not looking up from my arm. “Bullet holes and bloodstains are the end of most clothes.”

  “Some of my favorite shirts have bullet holes and bloodstains,” I protested. She ignored me, which was probably safer for me anyway.

  “This doesn’t look too bad. The bullet just grazed you, but you should still have it cleaned and bandaged, so you don’t get an infection.”

  “I don’t get infections,” I said, keeping my voice down.

  “Can we skip the part where you’re all macho and don’t want to go to the hospital and go straight to the part where you do what I say?”

  I took a second to think about it, then said, “Yeah, that’s fine, but I’m driving myself.”

  “Take a cab. You’re losing blood. But there is this nice ambulance right outside.”

  I looked out the big windows, and sure enough, a pair of EMTs were running for the front door. I let out a sigh and waited for them to fuss over me and eventually load me into the ambulance for the three-minute ride to the nearest hospital.

  *****

  At least they didn’t make me wear a stupid gown once I got to the hospital. The nurses just sat me back in an exam room with a big bandage on my arm waiting for an ER doc to get loose and deal with me. I had run through all my emails, checked my Facebook twice (doesn’t take long when you only have a dozen friends and half of them are scam accounts) and read the opening of a new Rick Gualtieri novel by the time the doc came in. He was a hefty Asian dude with a big smiling round face and a lab coat that probably never met in the middle.

  “Good morning!” he proclaimed, gesturing broadly with his left hand. His right was clutching a big white-and-blue cup from WhattaBean, the snazzy coffee shop a couple blocks away. Popular with bankers, WhattaBean proudly proclaimed that it had the best coffee beans anywhere, harvested by hand from Argentina. I didn’t see any real difference in their coffee and the swill at the Exxon station, except for the four-dollar price tag, but coffee nerds like Smitty swore by the stuff.

  “I’m Doctor Cho. What can we do for you this morning?”

  “I got a little shot. I need a few stitches, then I’ve got to find a murderer. So can we move this along, Doc?”

  The doc seemed a little offended for a moment, then I could almost see him actually process the words that came before “hurry the fuck up.” He looked at my face, then at the badge I held up with my right hand, and nodded.

  “Absolutely. I can get you out of here and back on the case, as it were, in just a few minutes. Let me just clean and numb the wound, then we’ll get this stitched up and you can be on your way. Do you think you’ll need a prescription for pain?”

  “I won’t ever say no to a few Vicodin,” I replied.

  “Not a problem. You might feel a little pinch,” he said, as he turned and set his coffee cup on the table behind him. Something tickled in the back of my head, then he stabbed me in the arm with a goddamn burning railroad spike and I almost came off the exam table.

  “Jesus fucking Christ, Doc, what the fucking fuck?” I looked down at my arm, and he was just pulling a tiny needle out of it.

  “Sorry, sometimes the Novocain gives off a slight burning sensation when it goes in,” the inscrutable Asian master of understatement said. I turned my head so I didn’t have to watch him sew my flesh back together and thought about all the other scars littering my body and the interesting and mundane ways I’d acquired them.

  A few minutes later, he slapped some Steri-strips over the wound and pronounced me done. “Keep that clean and leave the strips on until they fall off on their own. Make an appointment with your primary care physician for a follow-up in a week to ten days, and good luck catching whoever you’re after,” the doc said.

  I thanked him, we shook hands, and he picked up his coffee cup and tilted it up, knocking back the last swallow. Then he pitched the empty cup in the trash can and walked out. I hopped off the exam table and stepped toward the door, then froze.

  I stared at the coffee cup in the trash, glaring up at me like a beacon. I reached down and picked up the cup, turning it over and over in my hands. The blue-and-white swirl pattern spun in my hands, undulating as I turned the cup this way and that.

  “Son of a bitch…” I whispered.

  “Excuse me?” the nurse asked.

  “I gotta go.” I pushed past her out the door and headed down the hall toward the Emergency Room exit.

 
“Sir! You have to sign this paperwork before you can leave!” the little nurse called after me.

  “National security, sorry!” I yelled back to her. I was in the hall and moving fast. An overweight security guard stood up off his stool and moved like he thought he was going to intercept me but sat back down when he saw the badge clipped to my belt. He slapped the automatic door opener, and I bolted through the double doors into the waiting room.

  I yanked my cell phone out and dialed Paul the second I was outside and away from a hundred prying ears and coughing sick people.

  “Crime lab, Paul speaking.” He answered the phone like a banker, but he was as solid a tech as I’d seen.

  “Paul, it’s Harker. I need to ask you about the scrap of paper you found at the parking lot murder,” I said.

  “I’ve processed it. What do you need to know?”

  “Were there any substances found on it?”

  “I found blood from the victim, some traces of silica from the asphalt, and coffee.”

  “What about wax?”

  “What about it?” Paul asked.

  “Was the paper coated with wax?”

  “Yes.”

  “Was it a coffee cup?”

  “It certainly could be, although I suppose there are other things it could be as well.”

  “Was there coffee and wax on the paper you found at the church?”

  “Yes, and it was an identical blend.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “The similarities in the coffee means that the beans were harvested from the same region, specifically near Buenos Aires.”

  “That’s in Argentina, right?” My education focused a lot more on Europe than South America. I could find Lichtenstein blindfolded from the Black Forest, but I was a little soft on Argentina.

  “Yes. Why?”

  “I think it may become relevant,” I said, looking down at the cup in my hand. “Thanks, Paul.” I hung up and dialed Flynn.

  “How’s the arm?”