Lightspeed Magazine - September 2016

by John Joseph Adams [Ed. ]

  I sat up, twisting my shoulder to stretch out some of the pain. Keith had draped me in a spare shirt from his office, left it dangling open and undone. My numb fingers fumbled with the plastic buttons, trying to close it up. Eventually I gave up; there were stitches in my chest again, so it wasn’t like I was hiding anything. Modesty seemed stupid after Heath had removed and weighed my lungs. “Another fucking autopsy?”

  My stomach rolled. The novelty of breathing wore off and I noticed how my lungs hurt. I coughed up dry blood, spat it into a tray Heath shoved in front of me. He put it down amongst the scalpels, secateurs, and rib-spreaders. I wiped my mouth with the back of my sleeve. Heath threw me a jacket and I pulled it on, shivering.

  “I didn’t think you were coming back from this one.” Heath shook a steel tray and two bullets rattled inside it. “And I wanted the bullets.”

  “Forceps,” I croaked. The stitches in my chest stung, but they hurt far less than they should have done. I was healing fast, but that would end soon enough. “Pull them out like I’m an injured person.”

  “It’s not like you’ll notice another scar.”

  “I notice the first one, Heath. Trust me, I’ll notice a second.”

  “She didn’t call to tell me.” He looked away, embarrassed. “Hell, Miriam, I didn’t think she still had the power to do something like this. Not without, you know …”

  “I don’t love her.”

  “You’re back from the dead,” Heath said. “She’s an exile. She doesn’t have that kind of power anymore, not on her own.”

  “We’re taking her word on that,” I said. I lay back on the slab, closing my eyes. My head hurt. “I don’t love her, Heath. Not anymore.”

  “Yet here you are.” He handed me a cigarette and lit it. “So. Kesey?”

  “I was thinking we didn’t need to tell him.”

  “You were shot.” Heath rolled his eyes, slapping both hands on the slab. “Hell, you were DOA, Aster. Homicide cops tend to hear about that, and you know he was waiting for this the moment you signed up for the case.”

  “Kesey doesn’t want to know,” I said. “You wouldn’t have a job if he did. Neither would I.”

  “Even Kesey has limits.”

  That was true enough, and I figured we were coming up against them fast. “Get the slugs to the lab.” My hands were steadier, so I tried my shirt again. “They come from a nine millimetre carried by an arsehole named Slick, works for some big shot who runs a club by the river—The Hot House—a guy named Drabble. It’ll keep Kesey distracted.”

  “The strip joint?” Heath’s grin went snarky. “I thought you were looking for a unicorn.”

  “Fuck you too,” I said. I could stand up, but my legs were shaky. Heath had to help me through the first few steps. I lit a second cigarette, trying to drown out the taste of being dead. “I need a drink,” I said. “What you got?”

  “Coffee, tea, half a bottle of scotch, and some beer.”

  “That’ll do for starters,” I said. “Start with the tar and use the scotch for flavour. We’ll get to the beer soon enough.”

  We drank. Whatever magic had me back together after Heath had cut me open left me feeling anxious, and the whisky took the edge off the discomfort of my internal organs settling back into their proper places. When Heath suggested going home and getting some sleep, I sent him out for more beer instead. “Death’s sobering,” I told him. “I’m drinking my way back to normalcy.”

  He wasn’t happy about it, but he went. I marked it up as an improvement. The last time I died, he’d insisted on checking me into a hospital and the questions the doctors asked got awkward. The morgue was empty in his absence, the cold room devoid of new deliveries. It made me nervous. A unicorn in heat wasn’t stopping at one victim, so there’d be another body showing up before the night was over. I thought about ringing Anya and decided against it. It was bad enough, owing her a favour this big again. I didn’t want to talk about it. Instead I made a list of the various ways I was going to take last night out on Hobb’s hide when I found him.

  By the time Heath came back, I was puking up blood, making a mess of the sink in his office, and clawing at the stitches in my chest. He made a point of ignoring the tears, just cleaned me up and handed me a fresh beer. “You should get some sleep,” he said. “Sooner or later.”

  I didn’t much feel like it. “Last time I didn’t lie down for three days. Hell, I barely even sleep anymore. Bad dreams.”

  “You can’t just wait around for a body, Aster. And you can’t run on booze and fumes.”

  “I’m not. I’m thinking.” I drank my beer. “On a scale of one-to-ten, Heath, on a scale like that, what’s the odds that Her Majesty knew nothing about this?”

  Heath looked away, hiding behind his fringe. He opened a beer. “I don’t know her that well,” he said. “It’s just phone calls, favours. Don’t ask, don’t tell.”

  “What’s your gut say?” I glared at him, forcing him to answer. It took a while before he broke.

  “Pretty good,” he said. “On a scale of one-to-ten, I figure the odds are pretty good.”

  I hauled back on the dregs of my beer, my stomach churning. “Me too,” I said. “Fuck it.” I wobbled back over to the sink and let loose. Eventually I passed out and he set me up on a couch in the foyer.

  I didn’t wake up until four a.m., when my phone started blaring in my ear. The hangover was there already, a sharp headache and a queasy feeling that wasn’t just caused by liquor. Heath had given me a lab coat as a blanket but I was still cold and shivering. I checked the display and saw Kesey’s name written in block capitals. I groaned, answered it anyway. “Yeah?”

  “Get moving,” he said. “We found a new body.”

  Seven

  Twenty minutes later, I was back on the waterfront, not far from where Slick had dumped my body the day before. You couldn’t miss the cop cars, the yellow tape stretched out to mark off the empty stretch of shore. My stitches itched like crazy. I scratched and smelt lilac on my fingers, the telltale stink of magic. Bored uniforms swarmed along the police line, protecting the crime scene from the occasional seagull. One of them recognised me from the search at the alley, waved me through before the others could ask for ID. I ducked under the tape and wandered in, weaving through the yellow spotlights and their whining generators. The light was cold and clinical, filling the crime scene with long shadows. No sign of Kesey, but there was a team setting up a winch by the riverbank. I ambled over and took a look.

  The corpse lying in the mud might have been the unicorn we were looking for, but it’d seen better days. There was pale blood spread across the unicorn’s forehead, just below the pale stump that used to be a spiralling ivory horn. Black mud streaked the dead beast’s fur, soaking in like ink stains. Heath was a pig in shit, merrily prodding and poking his way through a virgin crime scene. I stood at the top of the riverbank, trying not to throw up, trying not to shudder when I saw the revolver sunk into the mud next to the corpse. “What you got?”

  Heath turned and looked up, squinting into the long shadow I cast under the spotlights. “Iron bullets,” he said. “Someone wanted the damn thing dead. No track marks through the mud, so I figure someone just dumped the body over the edge.” He stood up and cocked his head to one side. “Know many people who carry cast iron bullets in their gun, Aster?”

  I ignored him. “Where’s Kesey?”

  “Out interviewing locals.” Heath shrugged and went back to his corpse. “You know Tim. He hates seeing this shit up close. He’s not open-minded and adaptable like you and me.”

  “That’s because you’re both freaks.” Kesey appeared out of the darkness, lurching up and looking over my shoulder. He let out a slow breath between the gaps in his teeth. “So that’s a unicorn,” he said.

  “Not quite, but it’s close.”

  “What’s the difference?”

  “About twelve inches of horn and a mean look in its eye,” I said. “Someone did a number on the
poor bastard.”

  Kesey gave me a look, trying to work out if I was kidding. “You look like shit,” he said.

  “I had a rough night. You can ask Heath for the details, if you really want to know.”

  He looked away, studying the skyline. “Do I want to know?”

  “Shit, Tim, I’d rather not know.”

  “Damn.” He folded his arms, blinked a few times as though that would change the scene. “Damn it. I really didn’t want to believe in this shit.” He walked back to the police line and I tagged along behind him. I offered him a cigarette as soon as we were clear.

  “The unicorn’s dead, you can let this slide now.”

  Kesey stared, trying to read my face. “I guess you’re done then,” he said. “I’ll clear your fee in the morning and leave it with Heath. You can pick up the cheque at the morgue.”

  I cleared my throat. “When they run ballistics on the bullets in the horse, they’re going to be from my gun.” I said. Kesey kept his cool better than I was expecting, but the veins still popped in his neck. “I got a lead last night; a guy named Drabble at a club called The Hot House. It was one of his boys who roughed me up and took the gun. Dollars to donuts he’s mixed up in this, somehow.”

  “Tony Drabble?”

  “You know the name?”

  Kesey grunted. “Small time thug turned big time entrepreneur. I’m sure you remember the type.”

  “Trailed Hobb to his club, they’re up to something together. His boys had a go at me when they realised I was there on business.”

  “You were supposed to be advising.”

  “I was. I am.”

  Kesey sighed. “We’ll need more than that to move on Drabble. He has lawyers, these days.”

  “Fuck, Tim, you need more than that.” My right hand scratched at my chest, right above the scar from the bullet, then went to work on the stitches. “This guy’s a bastard and I’m not quite as burdened by the need for hard evidence these days. Call it the joys of working freelance.”

  “You aren’t working freelance,” Kesey said. “You’re working for us.”

  “I’m a consultant,” I said, grinning at him. “I figure I stopped the moment the unicorn was found and I confirmed you had your killer. Unless you’re planning on going after whoever put the bullets into the white horse, I figure we’re done.”

  Kesey shook his head. “Christ, you used to be a cop, Aster. A good one.”

  “I used to be a lot of things,” I told him. “These days, I’m a little more pragmatic.”

  Kesey turned on me, giving me one of his famous looks, dark eyes blazing with barely controlled anger. The man was fifty-six and hard, the kind of detective they used to terrify raw rookies, but I was a little more jaded than I’d been back when we first met. I smoked my cigarette down to the filter and watched as they hauled the corpse up the steep incline. “You don’t get to do this one by the book, Kesey,” I said. “A rogue unicorn, that’s one thing. A rogue unicorn showing up dead, that’s something else. You’ve basically got two options; you pin this on me when the ballistics report comes in and pretend it never happened, or you go after the bastard responsible before he tries bringing in something that’s even worse.”

  Kesey simmered, trying to stay in control. “You got an alibi if I try the first option?”

  “I was busy being dead,” I said. “As alibis go, it could be difficult to prove in court, but Heath’s resourceful and I’m confident he’s up to the challenge.” I dropped my cigarette and stomped on it. “Tell me about Drabble. You said he worked small.”

  “He did, once upon a time,” Kesey said. “Now he’s your basic sleazebag success story; turned one club into a small chain. Got big into computers, I think; runs a dozen porn sites, uses the money for less legit business when he needs to. Vice wants him taken down, but Drabble’s got lawyers upon lawyers these days. His own little army of trained attack dogs with degrees. We don’t even get him to trial.”

  “What’s he doing with a unicorn, then?”

  “Aster, I don’t even fucking know what I’m doing talking about one.” Kesey closed his eyes and leaned back, turning his face to the night sky. “Hell, I don’t even want the damn thing to exist.”

  He took a deep breath. “I think you’re done on this,” he said. “The unicorn’s gone, so we play it like we should. We get Drabble for a real crime, none of this fairy shit, and we take him down proper.”

  I nodded. “If you’re sure.”

  “I’m sure,” Kesey said, “Leave it. Don’t go looking for a problem that isn’t there.”

  I took it as good an excuse as any to go home and catch up on sleep.

  • • • •

  Kesey cut me a cheque the next day. I picked it up and went drinking, blotting out twenty-four hours so I didn’t have to think about the job or Sally Crown or whatever the fuck Hobb and Drabble were doing with that unicorn. It’s dead, I told myself. No unicorn, no case. The citizens are safe and no one’s paying you to keep on poking. I dreamt of Anya. I didn’t go and see her. I spent a few fruitless days trying to track down Hobb, but the runt had gone to ground. I drank more to pass the time.

  I was still drinking a week later when Heath called me and told me to drop by the morgue. “It’s about that last consult,” he said. “Kind of. I think. You’ll want to see this. Not want, I guess, but—”

  I wasn’t in the mood. “What, you found something during the autopsy on the horse?”

  “Not quite.” Heath sounded choked up and lost. “Just, come down, okay. I need to show you something. You need to see it.”

  He hung up on me. Heath wasn’t one for hanging up on someone, and given his proclivities, I didn’t want to think about whatever had him rattled. I ignored his second phone call, and the third, but the calls didn’t stop and eventually I agreed to meet him.

  I took my time getting to the morgue and did the usual procrastination I always did before heading inside. Heath didn’t wait for me, just walked out to the parking lot with his white coat pulled tight while I was finishing my cigarette. “Sally Crown,” he said. “I lost her goddamn records, Aster. I incinerated her body and pretended it never happened.” He pushed a photograph of Sally into my hands, her dead face serene as she lay on the slab. “We shouldn’t have let this one go. She was a kid. Her parents still think she’s missing.”

  “I didn’t think you were one to care, Heath.”

  “I talked to her,” he said. He wasn’t talking about Sally anymore.

  “Your call,” I said. “But I’m done with the job. No more unicorn, no more Anya. Kesey officially called it closed and I got paid for consulting. I got rent to pay, Heath. You know that.”

  “It’s not that easy, Aster.” He fished a DVD case out of his pocket and gave it to me. His hands were shaking, and he looked a little green. “I had to give a copy of this to Kesey,” Heath said. “Had to, you got that? He’s in the loop on this one, whether you want him to be or not. He didn’t want you having a copy of it, but, you know, I just thought, I guess, that you should know.”

  I opened the case and looked at the disc inside, a silver circle with the case number written across it in Heath’s jittery handwriting. “What the hell is it?”

  “Just, you know, watch it,” Heath said. “It’s an internet thing. People have been posting it around on the fringe porn sites, real sick fuckers, you know? A friend mentioned it to me and, well … I had to pay a couple hundred bucks to get a copy, all under the table shit. And when you watch it … listen, I want these people taken down, yeah? You work with Kesey and you take them down, right?”

  “Sure.”

  “I asked her,” he said. “I mean, there are favours and there are favours, yeah? She says she didn’t know about this one, Aster. She promised. She swore.”

  Heath lingered for a moment, his eyes locked on the disc. I raised an eyebrow at him, but he turned away. “Don’t watch it on a full stomach,” he said. “Trust me, just don’t.”

  Ei
ght

  I fed the DVD into my computer. It took a couple of seconds to pull up the file—video, no file name, just a string of numbers. I double clicked and watched the footage bloom to life, a grainy shot of a girl’s bedroom done up like a doll’s house. The colours were washed out, but you could see lace and feathers and the frilly curtains over the windows.

  The camera focused in on a red-headed woman, her right hand slowly working the unicorn’s horn with a fistful of Vaseline. The beast nickered, rolling its eyes back in pleasure, its expression too inhuman to be fake. Somewhere behind the camera someone yelled, “You ready, love? Okay. Action,” and the fluffer disappeared off to the right side of the shot. My breathing stopped when the camera scrolled across, focused in on the naked girl in the background. She was sprawled out on the edge of the bed, face lost amidst a burst of static as the camera refocused. The unicorn’s horn shone, radiant in the spotlight. I could see rainbows playing off the slick surface as it approached the bed. I watched the horn lower, teasing the flesh of her inner thigh, gently forcing the girl’s legs to separate. “No,” I said, but the horn slipped in, penetrating the soft fold between her legs with a single, slow thrust.

  I try to forget that video, but I can’t. The camera glides in. Close up. Close enough to show the corn silk hair, the green eyes, the plastic tiara covered in glitter. The face of Sally Crown without the stain of rigor mortis. Her features contort. She gives the camera a theatrical gasp. The horn furrows between her legs. A real gasp, the sharp point digging into sensitive flesh. She screams, her voice filled with pain, and the unicorn’s horn starts pushing deeper and deeper.

  I could hear the director’s voice off-camera, still giving orders, taking it for granted that he’ll be edited out in post-production. No one onscreen is listening to him; beauty and the beast are already beyond the possibility of control. I paused the video, leaned in, recognised the gleam of lust and madness in the unicorn’s eyes. “Shit.”