by J. R. Rain
“Don’t matter if you’re dead, too.”
“You make a lot of threats for a man who just got his nose broken.”
He glared at me, then at Camry, then down at my desk. What did my desk ever do to him?
“If you killed a guy, you’re going to jail. If you didn’t, I’ll let you walk. So which is it?”
“Are you fucking serious, man?”
“As serious as the headache that’s going to be setting in soon.”
“I didn’t kill nobody, asshole.”
I turned to Camry, who was still sitting on the couch and still looking away.
“What do you have to say about that? He sounded serious enough to use a double negative.”
She didn’t move or blink. She was afraid of him, but there was something else, too.
Ah, hell. She still loves him.I studied her body language… she hadn’t lied about him killing someone. And she was afraid of him. The fear trumped the love, but there was still enough of the latter there for her to text him her location.
I drummed my fingers on my leather-tooled desk. The drumming didn’t create noise of any real significance. I considered what to do. Then nodded to myself, because I like to be reassuring, even to myself.
I pulled out my cell and dialed a number. Sanchez answered on the first ring. “That’s more like it,” I said.
“You got lucky, Knighthorse. What do you need?”
“Biker gang. Eleven of them. Most armed. My office.”
“Be there in ten. Don’t piss anyone off.”
“Too late.”
“Shit.” He hung up.
They came in six minutes.
Steel Eye spent the six minutes glaring at me while holding an increasingly bloody wad of tissues to his face. I didn’t glare back. Indeed, I glanced whimsically with flashes of amusement and mild interest.
The sirens continued blaring outside even as the choppers all fired up. One by one, I heard them leave the smallish parking lot.
“Looks like you’re alone,” I said.
“They’ll be back,” said Steel Eye.
“So will my guys.”
“You hide behind the cops?”
“A show of force never hurt anyone, until it does. You taught me that.”
“Where I go, my brothers go.”
“Makes the bathroom kind of crowded,” I said, “I would think.”
“We’ve got each other’s backs.”
“And they’ve got mine.” I jutted a thumb toward the sirens. “Seems like we’re even.”
“Until we find you alone.”
“Or until I find you alone.”
He glared some more. I tossed him another tissue. Tissues don’t toss very well, unless you do it right. I did it right. I made the ball of it and tossed it. He snatched it out of the air and applied it to his broken nose, dropping the other one to the carpeted floor, where the hemoglobin transferred immediately to the fibers. Oh joy. Another bloodstain. My office now looked like a crime scene. Many crime scenes. Yeah, I was definitely not getting my deposit back.
He dabbed some more while I sat back in my chair and steepled my fingers under my chin.
“Michael said you were hardcore.”
“Michael should know,” I said.
“He suggested that it might be a bad move to come and see you.”
“And, was it?”
Steel Eye shrugged. “People don’t fuck with Michael.”
“Not even you?” I asked.
He shrugged again. “Anyway, you got Michael’s respect…” His voice trailed off.
“Which means?”
“Means you have my respect, too.”
“Now, I can sleep at night.”
We were silent some more after that “bro” moment.
Finally, Steel Eye said, “Well?”
“Well, what?”
“Where are the cops?”
“Outside waiting.”
“Waiting for what?”
“For me to call them up.”
“You that tight with the cops?”
“Tight enough.”
“And you ain’t scared?”
“Been a while,” I said, “since I’ve been scared.”
“Me too.”
“The cops scare you?” I asked.
“Nope.” Then he added, “Since neither of us is scared, what do we do about it?”
I said, “We can fight to the death.”
He looked at me from over the tissue and his swelling nose. “For what purpose?”
“Pride?” I said. “The love of a good woman? Street cred?”
He shook his head. “You always like this?”
“Spirited?”
“I was thinking more along the lines of idiotic.”
“That too,” I said.
“You going to call the cops up here or tell them never mind?” he asked.
I shook my head. “The way I see it, you haven’t done anything wrong. Unless you hurt Camry.”
“I ain’t ever hurt Camry.”
“Her bruises suggest otherwise.”
“Fine, so you caught me. Big deal. You gonna arrest me for slapping around my girl?”
“No, but I’ll beat the shit out of you and have Camry film it and we’ll put it on YouTube.”
“Bullshit.”
“Try me.”
He gave me the hard stare, or tried to.
Then nodded. “Fine, whatever.”
“Camry,” I said, without looking at her. “Will he keep his word?”
She didn’t answer. Not at first. I glanced at her. She continued staring ahead, unmoving.
“Or I can call up the police. Tell them Steel Nards killed a guy, based on your story. They may not get him for murder. But they’ll probably find something, especially with me on the job.”
“Hey,” said Steel Eye. “I thought, you know, we was cool.”
“We’re cool, unless you hurt her. Then we’re very much not cool.”
“Okay, fine.”
I studied him, then looked at Camry. “You want to go with him, or do you want protection? Or better yet, do you want to press charges?”
She shot me a look that suggested she’d had enough.
“Just leave him alone,” she said.
“There it is,” I said, sitting back.
“You’re being mean to him.”
I looked at Steel Eye. He shrugged. Camry got up and went over to him and hugged him deeply, bumping his nose. He yelped, and she touched it gently, kissing the tip and now they were both apologizing, followed by careful kissing and tears from them both.
I sighed and sat back, then called Sanchez.
“What’s going on up there?” he asked.
I looked at Camry and Steel Eye kissing deeply. I said, “We may need an ambulance.”
“For who?”
“For me,” I said. “I think I’m going to be sick.”
Sanchez first appears in:
Dark Horse
Available at:
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Spinoza stars in:
The Vampire With the Dragon Tattoo
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Detective Sherbet first appears in:
Moon Dance
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Aaron King stars in:
Elvis Has Not Left the Building
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Amazon Kindle
Numi appears in:
Silent Echo
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Nick Caine stars in:
Temple of the Jaguar
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Monty Drew stars in:
Ghost College
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Roan Quigley stars in:
Dragon Assassin
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Max Long stars in:
/> Bound By Blood
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Jack Carter stars in:
Zombie Patrol
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And Samantha Moon stars in:
Moon Dance
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here’s sunshine, and there’s moonshine. Orange County, California, where I’m from, averages around two hundred seventy-eight sunny days a year, and since there isn’t that much in the way of nightlife, most business is conducted in broad daylight. But in New Orleans, no matter what your business is, the nighttime is the right time for it.
And the shadier that business, the better.
Which makes it my kind of town. Like me, the Big Easy only comes alive after dark. I could feel it the moment I walked out of the main terminal building at Louis Armstrong International Airport and stood waiting for a cab. There was something not quite right about the air, I mean, something besides the dark, sullen, blood-streaked sunset sky and the hot, humid mix of sulfur, swamp-grass, and river water, that let me know I was a long way from sunny Southern California.
It smelled like… voodoo weather.
The feeling got even stronger downtown at the city morgue, a one-story cement funeral home sandwiched between a pair of old brick slum buildings painted bright red and yellow. One had a big peeling sign across its front that said ‘We Cash Paychecks.’ I guess I’d been subconsciously expecting the building they’d used in American Horror Story: Coven when they revive Zoe’s dead boyfriend from spare body parts. This definitely wasn’t it.
Automatically, I checked the doorway and the lintel overhang for security cameras. My skin doesn’t show up on video, which was why I still wore so much foundation makeup under my Jackie O sunglasses, left over from airports and my hotel. It made travel a bitch, especially in this heat.
“Bet you’ve never set foot in a coroner’s office like this one, Miss Moon,” said the Medical Examiner, Dr. Bernardo Willard, after he unlocked the front door and I introduced myself. He was a thin gray-haired Boomer in his sixties; in Fullerton, he’d have been retired.
There was one thing I was already learning about Louisiana–nobody retired. Not peaceably, anyway. Around here, they carried you out straight from your desk chair to your grave. My cabbie had been about a hundred years old.
“It’s Mrs. Moon,” I told Willard, following him inside. “But please call me Samantha… or Sam.”
Speaking of graves, that was exactly how the place smelled, and I should know. My boyfriend back home, Kingsley Fulcrum, tended to rob them during full moon. Which reminded me, I needed to text the big guy and at least let him know I’d landed safely. Not that I had much to worry about in a plane crash…
“And thanks for meeting me here at this late hour.”
The morgue kept bankers’ hours, and it was long past closing.
“My pleasure, Sam. It may be after business hours, but to tell you the truth, I’m still hard at work here. Or hardly workin’. The US government recommends an office like ours only handle two hundred fifty postmortem a year–with our murder rate, we do nearly one a day, on just the one autopsy table. City Hall dumped us here after Katrina, then a fire wiped out half our records and equipment, and things got so bad we have to store our cadavers out in the back parking lot in refrigerated trailers.” He made a beckoning gesture at me. “She’s in here.”
A holstered sidearm peeked out from under his soiled white lab coat, which reminded me that New Orleans was the only major American city that still had an open carry law on the books. I hadn’t brought my Siggy with me; it would have been too much trouble to try to broker it through the airport TSA scanners–and besides, I didn’t really need it, did I?
Dr. Willard led me into the main mortuary, a room about the size of my basement that looked like Hurricane Katrina had hit maybe yesterday. The floors were slippery and wet, and there was something seriously wrong with the AC; even with my frigid body temperature, I’d felt uncomfortably damp ever since I’d stepped off the plane, and now it blossomed into a prickly sheen. A big clipboard hanging on the wall in front of me had the cleanup duty roster listed on it with the words ‘Reminder: Dump Brains and Bowels in Hazmat Bin!’ scrawled across the top in big block letters.
“Here’s your girl!” he said, sounding cheerful.
I guess for one horrible second I thought he meant my Tammy. But the doughy dead Jane Doe on the stainless steel mortuary slab was in her early twenties. Not my daughter Tammy, thank God, who was (just barely) a teenager.
She wasn’t the missing girl I’d been hired to fly to New Orleans to find, either.
J.R. Rain is the international bestselling author of over fifty novels, including his popular Samantha Moon and Jim Knighthorse series. His books are published in five languages in twelve countries, and he has sold more than 3 million copies worldwide.
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Moon Bayou, by J.R. Rain & Rod Kierkegaard, Jr.
(http://curiosityquills.com/kindle/moon-bayou/)
Mother, wife, private investigator, vampire - Sam Moon’s been around the block. Now, unlife brings her to New Orleans to test her mettle against a new kind of lurking evil…
The Dead Detective, by J.R. Rain & Rod Kierkegaard, Jr.
(https://curiosityquills.com/kindle/dead-detective/)
Medical-school-dropout police detective Richelle Dadd is… well, dead.
But that won’t stop her from trying to hold on to her house in a divorce battle with a bitter husband. Or keep her from digging into her own murder, to discover who put the bullet into her heart. And it certainly won’t stand in the way of finding out the reason she’s been reanimated as a zombie assassin, no longer in control of her life.
Richelle will face off against Gypsy shamans, double-crossing ghosts, a partner she can’t trust, and her own undead nature in a journey into the depths of the occult world and out the other side without losing her sense of humor - or humanity - along the way.
It’s a good thing her deductive skills - and her aim - are still up to par.
The Department of Magic, by Rod Kierkegaard, Jr.
(https://curiosityquills.com/kindle/dept-of-magic/)
Magic is nothing like it seems in children’s books. It’s dark and bloody and sexual—and requires its own semi-mythical branch of the US Federal Government to safeguard citizens against ever present supernatural threats.
Join Jasmine Farah and Rocco di Angelo—a pair of wet-behind-the-ears recruits of The Department of Magic—on a nightmare gallop through a world of ghosts, spooks, vampires, and demons, and the minions of South American and Voodoo god shell-bent on destroying all humanity in the year 2012.
The Accidental Superheroine, by J.R. Rain & Kris Carey
(https://curiosityquills.com/kindle/superheroine/)
When newly-coined physicist Mira Verborgen sprung for a cushy internship at CERN, she did not expect to end up working side by side with sensitive European hottie, Giancarlo Colombo, or the sudden-onset case of butterflies whenever he’s around.
Nor did she expect the two of them to end up the inadvertent subjects of a megalomaniac Russian scientist’s deadly energy experiment. Instead of their budding relationship being cut short along with their material existence, the pair develops a startling mutation. A mutation that puts them in the crosshairs of Swiss, French, and American governments - not to mention the dastardly Dr. Gavrilov.
With CERN held hostage by Gavril
ov and his rapidly-evolving superpowers, do Mira and Giancarlo have what it takes to own their mutation and protect the free world, before it’s too late?
The Serendipitous Curse: Reborn, by Aiden James & Lisa Collicutt
(https://curiosityquills.com/kindle/reborn/)
The soul of Solomon Brandt, an evil plantation owner murdered by his slaves, has been safely contained by the Hoodoo circle over his burial site. But construction work has disturbed the seal, and the essence of Solomon emerged at last into the modern world – but forever changed.
Will the Hoodoo priestesses that imprisoned him give Solomon a chance at redemption? A chance at true love? A chance to find himself again?
Will the good in him triumph, when his soul’s evil side comes knocking?
The Vampire Circus, by Rod Kierkegaard, Jr.
(https://curiosityquills.com/kindle/vampire-circus/)
Coco and Zuzu are twins, separated at birth and brought up in Switzerland and Kentucky. Reunited as young women in the demi-monde of Parisian nude revues and houses of prostitution, they are forced to continue in their genetic heritage of vampirism, caused by a mutation to the syphilis spirochete. Menaced by the oldest vampire still living, the shadowyMaître du Monde,and stalked by Coco’s lover Willy, a fifteen-year-old Vatican vampire hunter, as well as Johnny Durango, a formerly famous, now vengeful, “cowboy detective” fresh from an Arizona penitentiary, the two sisters together embark upon a phantasmagorical journey into international film stardom set against the vivid tapestry of 1920s Paris life.
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