Crossfire

by Dale Lucas

  Jimmy wheezed, already winded and not even out of the alley yet. His breath was ragged in his chest; his shoes beat time on the rain-slicked pavement; his pulse thrummed in his temples like twin marching drums. He wasn't really paying attention to where he was going—just flying on instinct—so he wasn't too shocked when he ran face-first into a big, dark wall, reeled backward, and went sprawling into a broad puddle of rainwater. After wiping the cold, filthy water from his eyes and sitting upright, he realized he hadn't run into a wall at all.

  The Cemetery Man stood in his path, blocking his escape from the alley.

  "Aw, hell no," Jimmy whined, and tried to scramble to his feet. His plan was to bolt back in the opposite direction, the way he'd come.

  But then the Cemetery Man had him by his shirt-collar. He hauled him up onto his feet, slammed Jimmy into the brick wall like a rag doll, then spun him round. Jimmy tried to touch the ground with cycling feet but found himself lifted right off the ground and pinned to the wall by the Cemetery Man's iron grip. In the faint, guttering light of the alleyway, he could see very little of his attacker's famed skull-face paint and mane of braids. He could only see his eyes, burning under the brim of that top hat like two small jewels with bloody fire smoldering at their centers. Worse, the Cemetery Man smelled like old cigars and hot iron—a smell like the gates of Hell yawning wide.

  Jimmy bucked in the Cemetery Man's grip. He begged, pleaded.

  "I ain't done nothin'," he insisted. "I swear, no matter what anybody told you! I ain't done nothin'!"

  He was doomed.

  "Don't lie to me," the Cemetery Man growled. "You lie to me, Jimmy, I'll know."

  "I swear—swear on my mama's grave—I ain't lying! I ain't lying about nothin'!"

  "You poisoned the Reverend Farnes this morning."

  Jimmy shook his head so hard he thought it'd fall right off his shoulders. "No sir! No! See, that ain't right! I didn't poison nobody!"

  The Cemetery Man shook him. "Then what did you do?"

  "She gave me a packet is all!" he bawled. Did he just wet himself? It certainly felt like it… "She gave me a packet and told me to dust his eggs with it! Said it was a hex! Just something to put him under the weather! That's all!"

  "Who did?"

  Jimmy's feet pinwheeled in the air, seeking solid ground. His hands squeezed and yanked at the Cemetery Man's grip, but it was no good. The man's grip was ironclad, his stance unshakeable. "Please, mister…"

  "Who? Give me a name!"

  Yep. It was official. He'd wet himself. "It was Miss Rae! The hoodoo lady! She said somebody owed the reverend and she was trying to make it even-steven with the old fart! I had nothin' to do with it! I just done what she asked me!"

  The Cemetery Man yanked him closer, burning eyes boring right into the center of him. Jimmy thought the center of his brain might melt like a cream-filled bon bon in the sun under the avenger's dread gaze. God, there were such depthsin that stare! It was like staring down a black well with no bottom…

  "What did she offer you?" the Cemetery Man demanded through gnashed teeth.

  Jimmy had to lower his eyes. He couldn't look the Cemetery Man in the face anymore, he was so ashamed of what a fool he'd been. "She offered to be sweet to me… she knows I'm sweet on her… mister, I swear, I wasn't trying to hurt nobody…"

  "And what would you say if I told you that you did?" the Cemetery Man asked. "You did hurt somebody—bad—whether you meant to or not. And there may not be an easy way to undo what you did. What would you say then?"

  "Aw, hell," Jimmy said. He didn't have any strength left. He felt like a dead, floppy fish in the Cemetery Man's grip. "Aw hell, mister …"

  The Cemetery Man pulled him close. He was an inch away now, hot iron breath threatening to blister Jimmy's face, whispered voice like rusty iron in his ears.

  "Next time somebody asks you for a favor has to do with a hex," the Cemetery Man began.

  "I ain't gonna be part of it!" Jimmy blurted. "No more hexes, no more pranks, no more short cons, no more long cons… I'm done! Mister, I'm done doin' wrong, I swear!"

  The Cemetery Man snarled like a hungry lion, then let go of him. Jimmy hit the pavement like a sack of yams. His rubbery legs couldn't hold him upright and he fell in a heap, crying and struggling for every breath in his fear and desperation. For a moment, the Cemetery Man lingered over him. Jimmy wondered if he'd get a load of those famous pistols now… or maybe those magic grenades that swaddled their victims in hellfire… or maybe the Witch Doctor would just draw that flaming cane knife and split him like cord-wood…

  But the Cemetery Man just studied Jimmy where he lay for a moment or two, while Jimmy sobbed and huffed and tried to get a grip on himself. Finally, the Hoodoo Man reached into his coat pocket, tossed something toward Jimmy, then turned and marched away before it even hit the pavement. Jimmy watched the object arc up into the air and back down again with a combination of puzzlement and fear.

  Then it hit the pavement between his spread legs and its ceramic shell broke.

  Hellfire consumed his soul.

  Jimmy Frame screamed.

  XX

  Doc Voodoo ran all the way to Rachel Gooden's botanica, traversing the alleyways that ran behind the buildings of Harlem like darker, narrower twins to the city streets they paralleled. He supposed he wasn't surprised to hear that someone who trafficked might be responsible for the reverend's hexing… he was simply surprised that Miss Rachel Gooden had the power and the efficacy to pull it off. Getting horsed for a few short minutes during a vodou ceremony was no great challenge for an experienced vodouisant. But drawing down infernal powers for an in-dwelling, powers that took up residence in an unwilling subject and refused to vacate? That was no mean feat.

  It was costly too. Such an act meant calling in favors, offering tribute, promising oneself as a sort of future errand-boy or –girl for the lwa petitioned. No one in their right mind undertook such operations lightly. While Dr. Dub Corveaux wasn't the best of friends with Mambo Rae Rae, he knew that she was neither an evil schemer nor an adventurous fool. So what had made her willing to do such a thing? Was she out for some personal revenge against the reverend? Or had someone else contracted her? The magical equivalent of a paid hit?

  Doc didn't know—but he'd have answers, he was sure of that.

  Still, something ate at him as he neared her botanica, something just at the back of his mind. It was tender and insistent, like a finger picking at a scar, knowing there was blood to be drawn beneath.

  Was it that the reverend was a target?

  Not precisely.

  Was it that Mambo Rae Rae was willing to compromise herself so dearly for either personal satisfaction or a stranger's money?

  No. It wasn't that, either.

  No… it was the circumstance itself. Someone laid a hex of terrible power and potency—the sort of thing seldom attempted or achieved outside Haiti. Bizango societies made zombies of their self-marked criminals, outcasts and enemies all the time, the same way the forests of Europe and the bush of Africa were still rife with frightening and potent unseen powers and preternatural dangers that the unwary—or the unlucky—could run afoul of.

  But this was Harlem. New York City. The twentieth century. Who'd ever heard of someone calling down such powerful hoodoo hereabouts for criminal purposes?

  He had an answer the moment the question bloomed in the center of his brain.

  He called on such powers regularly.

  And already, he'd had to deal with one gangster using powerful dark magic against another, escalating the weaponry and potential stakes of what should have been a simple money-driven turf war.

  Now, here he was again, not just gunning down bootleggers or saving some wayward businessman from his potentially-violent associates, by trying to undo a terrible, magical crime, undertaken not for some spiritual or religious slight, but because of the dictates of business. For money.

  That's when he realized just what troubled him.


  It wasn't that anyone in Harlem—or all of New York City—was using magic.

  It was that maybe, just maybe, they wouldn't be using such powers—might not even believe in the efficacy of such powers—if they hadn't seen him at work first.

  Stop thinking that way, Ogou growled. You started this thing. Stay focused and finish it.

  "You know I will," Doc said, then stepped out of a dark alleyway onto 131st Street. Mambo Rae Rae's botanica was just across the way.

  He wasn't surprised when he found it shut and locked. It was late, after all—getting on eight o' clock—not a time when most privately-owned businesses would be open. Nonetheless, something worried him. Through the front window of the shop, he saw a dim light burning in a back room. Although there were shades that could be drawn down at the end of the day to block the windows, those shades were not presently down. Anyone could meander by and stare in, see the empty shop, and the corridor to the lit room at the rear of it.

  He went around back. The back door, though shut, was unlocked.

  Not a good sign.

  Doc slipped into the building, drew a govi grenade from his pocket with his left hand, then loosed one of his .45s with the right. The back door led into a small, cramped storage room rife with the trappings of Mambo Rae Rae's business—votive candles, powders and potions, little plaster saints, even stranger items like mummified cats, dried out toads and bundles of crow-feathers. There was a Saturday Evening Post calendar on the wall, stuck in December 1924—almost three years old—as well as stacks of old gossip magazines choking the storeroom's dark, dusty corners. Seeing the hoodoo woman nowhere—and more importantly, feeling her nowhere—Doc continued into the narrow corridor that led upstairs to her apartment.

  He found her in the parlor, slumped in a shabby old wingback chair. She looked peaceful at first glance—as though she might have just fallen asleep. Closer inspection revealed a nearly-empty coffee cup lolling about on the floor under one limp hand, and stains on her blouse, her skirt, the arm of the chair, the floor itself. One of her shoes lay some distance from where her feet rested. Her eyes were half-lidded and already clouding—as though the end had come upon her quickly and unexpectedly.

  Or suddenly—after a struggle.

  Doc knelt, re-pocketed the govi grenade in his hand, and picked up the coffee cup. Its contents—a few drops of chicory coffee—were still damp, as were the arm of the chair and Miss Gooden's blouse. That meant that whatever happened couldn't have happened too long ago. An hour. Two at the outside.

  Horsed, his senses were far more acute than when he was merely awake, merely human. He smelled almonds among the bitter smokiness of coffee beans and chicory.

  "Arsenic," he said aloud.

  Nasty business, forcing that down her throat, Ogou said. Reasonable men would've just shot her.

  "They've made too much noise," Doc said. "They wanted her out of the way but they also wanted to keep it quiet. So they poisoned her coffee and held her down while they made her drink it. Cops might call it suicide, just because they don't care to look any closer."

  Or they've been warned not to, Ogou offered.

  Doc felt a fury rising in him. Rae Gooden was no angel, but he never would have wanted an end like this for her. The big question was, why did she believe that dealing with criminals would buy her any other sort of end?

  Simple enough, Ogou said, answering the question that the Doc had only posed in his mind. They offered her something… something she was in dire need of. In her desperation she thought they'd deliver.

  "Well, I can't let this stop me now," Doc said. "We need answers and she had them. Can we still call her back? Even for a moment?"

  Ogou was silent for a time. I ain't Ghede, he said. The dead ain't my jurisdiction. You're on your own if you're gonna try necromancy.

  "On my own," Doc growled, not without bitterness. "Don't I know it."

  He got to work. He fetched potent sands from the botanica below, along with some herbs and incenses, then created a small ritual space right where Rae Rae's body slumped in her coffee-stained easy chair. With the sand, he drew a summoning veve on the floor at her feet, lit candles in a configuration all around her, then immolated his offerings—jasmine, lavender, rosewater, and myrrh—in a little saucer set in the center of the veve.

  He stitched out a rhythm with an asson rattle left lying on a nearby shelf and sang to call her back from beyond.

  On his third repetition, Rachel Gooden—Mambo Rae Rae to everyone in the neighborhood—appeared as a diaphanous, non-corporeal form from beyond the grave.

  The dead mambo wore a look of stunned surprise. She stared at her own corpse, saddened and frightened by the sight of it. Then, she saw who had summoned her. Her dead eyes grew wide.

  The Cemetery Man, she intoned.

  "The same," he answered.

  The doctor, she added.

  "Let's keep that between us," he said, then asked his question. "Who did this?"

  It wasn't supposed to turn out this way, she said.

  "But it did," he answered. "Who did this to you?"

  I didn't think I had a choice, she said, phantasmal eyes still drawn to the body she used to inhabit. Doc imagined that was a terrible place to be—just across the line that separated life from death, filled with terrible regret, like a child who'd done something horrible to a playmate in a moment of awful ignorance realizing that—whatever it was—it could never be taken back.

  Mambo Rae Rae had just used up her last chance. She would never have another. Just like she would never have words with a loved one again, never taste boiled crawfish or funnel cake again, never know what a good night's sleep or a good day's work felt like again…

  She had choices before. But now, she would never, ever have a choice again.

  That was the big difference between living and dying: once you crossed over, you were part of a great, unseen world where everything moved according to need and mandate and power and purpose, where everything and everyone was playing out a role in an enormous cosmic chess game, but where no one and nothing had a choice.

  That's why everything and everyone on the other side worked so hard to get mankind under their sway: only living, breathing human beings could make choices. That was a gift that even angels and demons—both slaves to their natures and their divine or infernal mandates—didn't have.

  And of course, there was the matter of where she was off to. That was a question above and beyond Doc's own ken. He could only question her now because she was so recently departed. At present, she was like a traveler in a station awaiting the arrival of her train. That train would arrive soon, and after that, she'd never pass this way again.

  But he needed answers. Her sadness and regret couldn't be allowed to stop him now.

  "I'm sorry it turned out like this for you," he said, trying to snap her back into the moment. "Now tell me who did this so I can make them pay for it."

  The ghost kept staring. Without a word, she stepped forward and reached out. Her hand—more or less solid to the eye but completely without corporality—reached out and tried to touch her own dead flesh. Her fingers sank into her cooling body. The ghost seemed troubled that it could not truly feel the body it had been forced from, as though her lack of substance now somehow negated her entire existence.

  Then, the ghost raised its head. It heard something. Its eyes were wider now, its mouth hanging open in baleful realization. At first, Doc thought that it became whiter—paler—but then he realized it was a trick of the phantasm in his vision. It didn't grow paler… it thinned.

  In fear.

  I hear them, she said.

  "Who do you hear?" Doc asked.

  Hounds. Baying. Calling. They're getting closer. Oh God…

  Hellhounds. That wasn't good. They'd chase her down then drag her away to her reward. Doc didn't have long now.

  "Mambo Rae Rae," he demanded in his best booming, growling avenger's voice. "Tell me, here and now, who did this to you!"

&
nbsp; Two men, she said. Oh God… I can hear them coming. They're just up the street now.

  She seemed to search the world around her for an escape of some sort. But of course, on her plane, there was no escape. She saw the same surroundings that he saw—a small apartment, windows, doors, a stairway. But it didn't matter where she went now or how fast. The hounds were on the same etheric plane that she lingered upon. They could find her no matter where she went, or how quickly she went there.

  "Who were these men?" Doc demanded. He was starting to think he could hear the hounds now too. They bayed and snarled as they approached, and their feet fell heavily on the paving outside, terrible claws clicking on the asphalt and cement as they bounded nearer. He didn't care for that sound. It almost put such fear in him as to drive him out of the apartment.

  But they weren't coming for him. He had to stand his ground.

  "Tell me their names!" Doc urged. Their time was short.

  Mambo Rae Rae's ghost turned and searched the world around her, seeking signs of her imminent seizure on all sides. She was nothing but smoke and air and a trick of the light, but she was terrified, a woman staring down the barrel of a dark eternity.

  I didn't know their names, she said. Oh God, can't you help me? Can't you get me out of this? I didn't mean it. I didn't mean for things to end like this…

  "Who did they work for?" Doc asked. "You must know. There's no time left and I can't set this right if you don't tell me!"

  Even horsed—invulnerable—he felt the tiny hairs on his skin stand on end as gooseflesh pocked the nape of his neck, his back, his arms. The sound was not meant for his ears, true, but he was keyed into it nonetheless, because he could hear what unfolded on the ghost's plane. He heard the hounds below now, bursting the bonds of Rae Rae's magically protected doorway, stalking through the botanica, and tromping up the stairs toward the little apartment.

  "Rae Rae," he begged. "Please, talk to me—"