Black Dog

by Caitlin Kittredge

  “Yeah,” I said. “Some guys will literally sell their soul for magical roofies.”

  “I’m beginning to understand why your boss was so cranky,” Leo muttered. He flipped the pages. “Your name is on a lot of these.”

  I crumpled the burrito wrapper in my fist, turning it into a hard little rock of paper and grease. “I was one of his best.”

  Leo shut the book. “Nothing before 1920, I noticed.”

  I fixed him with a stare. I needed to set some clear boundaries with this guy before he started thinking we were friends, or even friendly, and then put up an electrified fence around them. “Just because I still remember what it was like to be human doesn’t mean we’re doing group therapy, Leo.”

  I opened the car door. “I don’t care about anything before the last few days, and neither should you.”

  His face drooped, and I almost felt bad for a second before I reminded myself this was a guy who’d tied me to a chair and burned me with the exact same expression on his face.

  “Suit yourself,” he said, sitting beside me. “Are you at least interested in hearing what it says about Clint Hicks?”

  I shrugged, pulling back onto the highway. “Other than that he has a stupid name from a cowboy movie?”

  “His last address is in here,” Leo said. “Although what are the odds of him still hanging around?”

  “If it’s all we got,” I said. Whether he was part of a ploy to get me killed for good or not, at this very moment, Clint Hicks was the only thing keeping me alive. While most days I didn’t exactly greet my continued existence with a parade, things felt different now. It was like I was unmoored, tossed from one wave to another on a stormy sea. All of Gary’s tethers had been sliced, emphatically.

  I should feel lucky—­I was probably the only sorry hound in existence to cheat Death twice over. But I just felt a shiver on the back of my neck, from more than the wet hair plastered there. Why me? I was barely fit for one second chance, never mind two.

  Leo turned on the radio, his thin fingers with their dark ink marks spinning the dial back and forth until he tuned in something other than static. Normally I would have objected to twangy guitars and twangier singers, but I let Merle Haggard’s nasally whine fill up the car, glad I didn’t have to talk.

  Leo sang along softly under his breath, and I thought that if the rest of the trip to Wyoming went like this, I might actually exit the car with my sanity intact.

  “See if there’s a map in here,” I told Leo. He’d ditched his cell phone back at the Mushroom Cloud and I had never had one in the first place. GPS wasn’t in the college kids’ budget, but there was a shiny new road atlas in the door compartment.

  Leo read the map for a while, scribbling down turns in the margin, and I tried again to shake off that cold feeling, like Death had passed me by, but in doing so, he’d turned around and touched me on the shoulder.

  “This place is a hike,” Leo said at last. “Almost in South Dakota. Maybe Clint Hicks figures he’ll stay hidden in the Black Hills long enough, your boss gets bored or forgets and he’ll be free.”

  I snorted. The idea of Gary ever forgetting or forgiving was not one based in reality. “I don’t think this Hicks is that stupid.”

  Leo sighed. “Me either.” After another mile marker he put the seat back, lowering his head. “I just hope he’s not too pissed off when we find him.”

  I gripped the wheel. “I guess we’ll find out.”

  CHAPTER

  12

  We arrived at the Wyoming address a little after midnight. It was a flyspeck on the road between Hulett and Aladdin, once you’d gone past all the neat green Park Ser­vice signs pointing to Devil’s Tower, past the false-­fronted shops and galleries in Hulett, past everything except pavement, scrub pine, and a single lamppost floating up out of the darkness like a passing headlight.

  Leo squinted out the windshield as I rolled to a stop. Gravel and broken beer bottles crunched under the Volvo’s wheels. “Somehow I don’t think this is home sweet home.”

  I looked past the pool of light at the building. It was weathered gray, silver in the illumination of the neon lights. Aside from a snarling coyote head painted across the roof peak, it could have come straight off the back lot of a western TV show. Replace the line of dusty road bikes lined up in front of the hitching post with horses and you’d have the complete picture. Underneath the coyote blocky letters almost as tall as I was spelled out ROAD DOGS.

  “Depends on your definition of homey,” I said, setting the brake and turning the car off. Once the clatter of the engine faded, I could hear hillbilly rock music, clanking beer bottles, shouting, and the sudden, explosive rattle of a Harley turning over. A big guy on a fat-­tired bike roared out of the lot, spraying gravel that plinked against the Volvo’s windshield. His leathers sported the same snarling coyote.

  Leo grimaced. “I miss my gun.”

  I opened the door and swung my legs out, working the kinks from my shoulders and knees. “You afraid of a few outlaw bikers?”

  “A few, no,” he said. “Fifty, yeah. We don’t get many One Percenters in Brighton Beach.”

  I wished I still had my jacket. I was going to stick out like a flower child thumb. “You’re a long way from Brighton Beach,” I told Leo.

  “No shit,” he muttered, lighting one of his cancerous-­smelling cigarettes. I watched the figures move in and out of the clubhouse across the lot, wondering if Clint Hicks was among them. He was smart, hiding out with a shifter pack. They didn’t like Hellspawn any more than we liked them. But when your ass was on the line, you’d make friends with the Devil if he’d keep you hidden. Look at me and Leo.

  “Hey,” he said as I started toward the clubhouse. I stopped, looking over my shoulder.

  “Problem?”

  “I know you’re very good at your job and you probably don’t need my advice . . .” Leo said.

  “You’re right,” I said, staring him down. “I don’t.”

  “I have done collections before,” Leo said. “Back in New York. Clint Hicks has avoided Gary for what, twenty-­five years and change? Guys who give this much trouble are either incredibly lucky or roll heavy.”

  “Guess it’s good I’ve got you with me, then,” I said. “Wait here, and if I’m not back in fifteen minutes, come in.”

  Leo sucked on his smoke until the ember glowed crimson, clearly not happy at this turn of events. I resumed my long walk, not trying to act like I belonged. I wasn’t Wilson, throwing my weight around and getting mouthy until someone peeled my skin off, but they needed to know I wasn’t afraid of them.

  I paused for half a step on the sagging porch, the splintery barn door before me rolled open like a throat, exhaling darkness and smoke and earsplitting music. Another step and I’d be swallowed, churning along with the backlit shadow figures inside.

  Was I afraid? It wouldn’t matter if I was. Fleeting fear of the shifters inside the clubhouse was nothing compared to the very real possibility Lilith would taxidermy me if I didn’t collect Clint Hicks.

  I stepped inside. Music washed over me, turning into an insect drone over a shitty set of PA speakers, along with the chatter and body heat of a hundred drunks shoved into too-­close quarters. Keeping my back to a wall, I let my eyes adjust to the dimness, little better than the night outside. Barn lights caked in dust hung randomly from the rafters, spilling irregular pools of light onto the bikers below. None of them noticed me, that frictionless invisibility I experienced going full force.

  That, and everyone I could see was fucked-­up beyond recognition, on their way to passing out if they hadn’t made it already. I watched two burly guys, shirtless except for their club vests, roll a smaller guy’s body off the pool table so one of them could rack up. By dawn, this place would look like Jonestown.

  Moving away from the wall, I skirted the pool table, the bar th
at was really just a bunch of nailed-­together crates and tubs full of ice and beer that went beyond cheap and verged on “glorified piss.” Things crunched underfoot, bottle caps and peanut shells. More than once I felt the brittle crack of a disposable syringe. I breathed in the mixture of stale hops, sweat, and skunky pot that rolled over me like a gentle, pungent ocean current.

  There was something else too, something tangy and sharp, like animal urine. Hot unwashed fur under a desert sun. The scent of something wild, something that wasn’t content to stay within four walls, swilling beer until it passed out.

  “Hey, baby.” A hand swiped at my ass. I looked into the bleary eyes of a blond man who’d been all-right looking until somebody took a shovel to his nose. “Who’d you ride in with?” he said. The hand tightened its grip. I waited. I’d been around these types of places, with this type of man, way too long to lash out every time somebody helped himself to a handful of flesh.

  “ ’Cause if you ain’t riding with no one,” the guy slurred, “you’re gonna be riding with everyone. ’Less you and I go somewhere.”

  His accent was rounded and melodic, straight out of some shitty backwoods in the Alabama swamp. I considered asking him what his mama would think of this behavior, but just shrugged.

  “There you go, baby,” he said, grinning wide. His teeth were crooked, so many gaps his mouth looked like a hill of tombstones. “You don’t need to be pulling no train, not with that face,” he said. “You want a drink?” He brandished a fifth of no-­name whiskey at me, and I grabbed it, cracking the brittle glass on the edge of one of the beer tubs and driving the jagged neck between his second and third knuckles, straight into the wall.

  “Thanks,” I said, and kept moving. He screamed, but he was so trashed and the music was so loud, nobody even looked in our direction.

  I kept moving, scanning each face for either a shock of recognition or a guilty flinch. Being so close to so many shifters got my skin prickling and sweat working down my spine. Fortunately, these mutts couldn’t do much beyond stare at me as I passed a sagging sofa holding a tangle of tits, bad Brazilians, and one hairy biker ass, all undulating in unison. Usually shifter packs were better organized, or less high, but they clearly felt safe here. They were the top of this particular food chain, and they knew it.

  The clubhouse had been cut in half, a crude blockade of unfinished drywall covered in graffiti blocking my way. A girl in a leopard print top leaned against it, smoking a cigarette like it had done something to piss her off. She was smaller than I was, bad dye job radioactive under the barely there light. Fresh bruises tattooed what I could see of her rib cage, and her forearms had more lanes than the interstate.

  She was the only one in the whole place who made eye contact with me. I stopped, waiting to see what she’d do.

  After a long, vicious drag, she stomped the cigarette under her steel-­toed boot and slipped through a pair of saloon doors marked with one of those naked girl cutouts. Someone had helpfully scrawled SLUTS across the cutout’s ass, just in case I was confused about where to pee.

  In the bathroom, the girl was sitting on the sink. Once upon a time, the place had had stalls, with doors, but they were long gone. Dim purple bulbs flickered in the single fixture above our heads. In the first stall, a skinny biker braced himself against the metal walls while a girl crouched on the stained tiles. He knotted one hand in her frizzy perm, eyes rolling back in his skull, as she bobbed her head like it was on springs. Neither of them paid any attention to me, so I returned the favor.

  The girl I’d followed lit a fresh cigarette, exhaled, and looked me up and down. “You need something, dog?”

  The animal-­urine stink hung heavy around her. Not even the heavy coating of vomit and sex weighing down the bathroom air could hide it. I tilted my head. “You care if I do?”

  “No, but they probably will.” She jerked a thumb at the door. “Are you stupid or what?”

  “I’m on the job.” I figured I could leave out all that stuff about Gary being long gone, Leo’s nut job father stealing his Scythe—­all the information that would convey I had no boss, no real Hellspawn backing me up.

  She blew smoke out her nose, a tiny, punk-­rock freight train barreling down the tracks. “Come with me,” she muttered finally.

  We left the bathroom and cut through an opening in the wall. It was quiet here, no music, a warren of rooms built between the old board walls. The shifter girl walked fast, past a door that opened onto a patchwork of filthy mattresses, club members snoring like hibernating bears. I saw another room, lit by bright, harsh bulbs that hurt my eyes with their sudden brilliance. Two bikers in disposable face masks and black latex gloves weighed and sealed opalescent sandwich bags full of meth, stopping to stare at us without blinking as the girl strode by.

  The Road Dog clubhouse, where the party never stopped. If Clint Hicks had washed up here, it’d be a miracle if he had any brains—­or any molars—­left at all. Though it did explain the feral undercurrent in the clubhouse, the feeling I’d come upon jackals surrounding a carcass and sinking their teeth in. Shapeshifter DNA and amphetamines weren’t a winning mix.

  The shifter girl stopped at the last door and hit it three times with her fist. “Billy,” she said. I heard three or four dead bolts snapping, then a shifter in a black T-­shirt cracked the door open. His forearm was almost as thick as my leg, and two scars slashed his bald head, like he’d been picked up by a giant bird of prey and dropped in front of me.

  “Fuck off, Lolly,” he said. The shifter girl gave him the finger.

  “I found this wandering the clubhouse,” she said. “And silly me, I figured Billy would want to know there was a hound in his crib. You’d think they’d learn.”

  The bald guy looked me over, his nostrils flaring. I think there was something about the smell of a hellhound that scared shifters on some elemental level. Sometimes you’re just afraid of things. Your animal brain fought hard for thousands of years to pass the instincts on, the ones that kept you away from dark alleys and dogs that frothed at the mouth.

  “You,” he finally said, pointing at me. “You can come in. The skank stays outside.”

  Lolly sauntered back the way we’d come, casting one long look over her shoulder at me. It was the way you’d take a last look at a beloved pet you had to put down.

  The mountain of shifter at the door pulled it wider, grinning as I edged past him. His two front teeth were rimmed in gold. “Billy,” he said. “We got a visitor.”

  Billy stirred from his seat on an old daybed, piled with enough silk pillows and hippie print blankets to make Stevie Nicks orgasmic. “Seems we do,” he said.

  I looked to my left, catching a glimpse of two more shifters reclining on a swaybacked sofa. The vibe in here was more burnouts’ dorm room than the crank-­fueled orgy in the clubhouse, but these shifters weren’t all fucked up and lazy. They were predators, and I was in their den. My only advantage was I wasn’t part of the hive mind like the three bodyguards staring a hole through me. If I stayed calm and kept their bloodlust from cresting, I might walk out.

  I’d guess that was the part Wilson had screwed up.

  The two shifters on the sofa straightened up, their eyes shining the gold of coyote’s in the dim light. “It’s a little lost puppy,” said one, black hair falling into his face, so I couldn’t see much more than eyes and teeth and a sinewy body under black jeans and a Kevlar road jacket. “Should we eat her?”

  The other, a woman, straightened up, uncurling legs clad in black leather to lean forward, one hand weighted down with silver rings digging into the dingy arm of the sofa. I shifted my weight a little. I’d been jumped enough to know when someone was considering the merits of beating my ass.

  “Play with her first,” she purred in a throaty growl that rightfully should belong to a black-­and-­white movie actress, not a strung-­out hillbilly.

  Bil
ly raised his chin a little, nostrils flaring out. He swung his boots down to the ground and stood. I had to crane my neck to keep eye contact with him. He was at least six and a half feet tall, shirtless, jittery prison tats making his torso look like a stained shirt. Greasy blond hair brushed his neck, but his eyes were clear, and he moved to stand entirely too close to me.

  “Leave her alone,” he said. “I sure would like to know why she’s here.”

  “I’m on the job,” I said. Billy grinned. He had thin lips, almost bloodless, making his mouth all teeth.

  “And your boyfriend outside, the meat suit with the greasy hair, he on the job too?” Billy smirked, reaching out and taking my chin between two fingers, turning my face side to side. “You’re so small,” he murmured. “You look so breakable.”

  “I don’t want to do this with you,” I said, pulling away from Billy. Time was, men like him would have sent me straight into his arms, and probably his bed. That was before I knew better, but I’d willingly spent enough time in places like this to know what made Billy tick.

  “Do what?” His mouth twitched and he reached for me again. I caught his wrist. The smack echoed in the small, too-­hot room. Instantly, the other three shifters jumped to their feet, crowding behind me like we were all in line to see their favorite band.

  “If I was here on my own time, I’d be happy to have the dick-­measuring contest you so desperately want,” I said. “But unfortunately tonight I left it in my other pants. I’m here for someone, and beyond that, me and my company are none of your fucking business.”

  Okay, so I probably laid it on way too thick. The first rule of collections is stay calm. Let the guy you’re after work himself into a lather, yell and threaten to cause trouble.

  But I was tired, and this wasn’t a normal job, where I had the power of a reaper behind me. Just me, and the me that had ridden thirteen exhausted hours to Wyoming wasn’t in the mood for being felt up by any more shifters.