The Neon Boneyard

by Craig Schaefer

  I walked to my rented car and came back with a duffel bag. Just the essentials inside: handcuffs, duct tape, a foursome of beeswax candles with brass stands, and two tubs of Tupperware. One held a few fistfuls of coarse white sea salt. The other, fresh blood from a butcher’s shop, syrupy and thick. Removing a geas was essentially a kind of exorcism, and a good exorcism had two key objectives: to make the host’s body an unpleasant place to live, and to give the creature under his skin a more attractive option.

  I crouched down in the back of the van and waited, like a trapdoor spider.

  * * *

  It was around five o’clock when Todd got off his final shift at the Burger Barn. The autumn sky had gone dirt-brown dark with streaks of grimy clouds, cars casting cold shadows across the parking-lot asphalt. He was a tall guy, gangly, with arms and legs that seemed a little too long for his body. He clambered into the front seat of the van and tossed his yellow-and-red paper hat onto the passenger seat.

  Todd was sliding the keys into the ignition when I put the muzzle of my nine-millimeter against the back of his skull. He turned to stone. The only part of him that moved were his eyes, flicking to the rearview mirror.

  “You scream, you die,” I told him. “You try to run, you die. If you do exactly what I tell you, when I tell you, you have a very good chance of living through this.”

  I was lying about that last part. He was desperate enough to believe me, though, and that was all that mattered. I tossed the handcuffs into his lap.

  “Put ’em on,” I told him. “Nice and tight.”

  He almost dropped them, but with time and some gentle coaching, he managed to lock the steel bracelets around his wrists. I stepped back. I nodded my head where I wanted him to go, keeping the gun fixed and level.

  “In back. Not one word.”

  He had to brush past me, closer than I ever wanted to get to a desperate hostage. If he was going to try to jump me, wrestle for the gun, that was when it would happen. I kept my finger firm on the trigger and braced for it.

  Todd didn’t even try to make a move. He was cowed enough to plod right past me, into the back of the van.

  “Lie down on the bed,” I told him.

  That got a reaction. He turned to face me, his wrists flexing against the cuffs.

  “H-hey,” he said, “you don’t want to do this. I’ve got AIDS. Swear to God, I’ve got full-blown AIDS. And syphilis. And the mumps.”

  I stared at him. “I’m not going to lay a hand on you. Relax. Lie down.”

  He stood his ground until I thumbed back the hammer on the gun. The universal symbol for “this is your last chance.” He lay on the bed and stared at the roof of the van, his sweaty face turning pale.

  “I need to ask you some questions,” I told him, setting up my duffel bag on the narrow ledge next to his hot plate, “but the thing inside you isn’t going to let you answer. So getting that out, that’s the first order of business.”

  He stared at me like he thought I was crazy, and his eyes only bulged harder when I took out the Tupperware.

  “Thing?” he stammered. “Inside me? What…what thing?”

  “You might not remember it going in, but your employers—and I do not mean the Burger Barn—implanted a fail-safe to keep your lips shut. The bad news is, the next fifteen minutes aren’t going to be much fun for you. The good news is, I have done this once before, and the guy is…well, he was still breathing when I got finished with him.”

  “What employers? Man, I flip burgers for a living, that’s all! I mean, yeah, I do some dealing on the side, but that’s just to pay for my own habit. I’m nobody, swear to God!”

  I barely heard him, too busy sinking into my preparations for the ritual. Years of occult practice had left me with layers of mental shortcuts, mnemonics, patterns of breathing and thought that eased me into a waking meditation like I was sliding into a warm tub of water. I focused on symbols, following jagged curves and flashes of color, forcibly rerouting the neurons in my brain. Electric impulses woke old, sleeping nodes, buried knots of gray matter whose purpose was lost in the primordial.

  My senses stretched out, glimmering in my third eye like violet sea anemones, their stalks brushing and tasting everything around them. I drank in the remnants of a life that failed to launch, fragmented memories of empty beer cans and Todd’s father’s belt curled around a hairy-knuckled fist. Hopes broken, dreams he stopped bothering to reach for. The van’s tires were mired in an oily residue of this is good enough.

  What I didn’t sense from Todd was the one thing I was looking for.

  He didn’t have a geas.

  My psychic tendrils pushed their needle-thin feelers under his skin, peeled back the layers of his mind like skinning an onion, and found…nothing. I squinted my physical eyes at him. Then I took my roll of duct tape, sliced off a strip with a box cutter, and slapped it over his mouth.

  “Either this just got a lot easier than I thought it was going to be,” I said, “or a lot more complicated. And given the way my week is going so far, smart money is on ‘complicated.’ Sit tight. You and me, we’re going for a little ride.”

  * * *

  I took his keys and took the wheel, making phone calls on the road to set everything up. Our destination was on the west side of town: the Rosewood Funeral Home. Doc Savoy, everybody’s favorite off-the-record patch-up man, ran his operation out of the back room. He had, anyway, until the Chicago Outfit decided they didn’t respect the rules of neutrality and pitched a firebomb through his window.

  The Doc and his nurse got out fine; we were in the process of finding them a new place to hang their scalpels. For now, the van’s headlights swept across yellow strands of police tape and shattered glass, wooden walls charred black. The fire had destroyed the front of the house, but the rooms in back survived just fine. Specifically, the one room I needed.

  Half an hour later, Todd wasn’t a happy man. I didn’t blame him. I’d laid him out in a pine box, not even a pillow to rest his head. Cocoons of duct tape looped his ankles and his wrists and bound his arms to his sides, so he couldn’t do much more than wriggle like a pinned bug. I left him there while I went downstairs to find the circuit breaker.

  The power came on with a rattling thrum, and stark white light gleamed across a speckled tile floor. I loomed over the box, reached in, and tore the tape off Todd’s mouth.

  “So,” I said, “about those questions I need answered.”

  “I’m telling you, I don’t know anything—”

  I held up a finger for silence.

  “First, let’s establish your situation. You’re in a coffin. That coffin, though you can’t see it from where you’re at, is on a conveyor belt. Now pay attention, Todd, this part is important.”

  I held his gaze, stepping back toward his feet, and reached up to rap my fist against a shell of black iron.

  “That conveyor belt,” I said as a grate clanked open, “feeds into this crematory furnace.”

  I flicked a few switches. The gas jets hissed to life.

  “So that’s your situation,” I told him. “Let’s chat.”

  10.

  “Man, I swear, I don’t know anything—”

  I pulled a lever. The conveyor belt rattled and the pine box lurched toward the open grate. Todd screamed like he was on the world’s deadliest roller coaster. I stopped the belt.

  “The ink, Todd. Where do you get it?”

  Beads of greasy sweat ran down the side of his face. He had his eyes squeezed shut, tighter than his mummy wrap of duct tape, and he mouthed a prayer with no breath behind it.

  “You’re about…I’m going to say eight feet from the furnace door,” I said. “Oh, hey, speaking of, it’s not a coincidence that you’re going in feet-first. See, first thing that’ll happen is, the rubber on your shoes is going to melt. It’ll be like…hot tar, searing the soles of your feet.”

  I knew what he was wrestling with. I’d seen it before: he was asking himself if his bosses would do w
orse things to him, if he talked, than I would. My job was to convince him that they couldn’t. He had to believe this was his worst-case scenario, here and now, and giving me what I wanted was his only way out.

  “The skin is next,” I told him. “You ever see a chicken rotisserie with the oven set too high, Todd? The flesh chars, then it just…sloughs off the bone.”

  “Santiago!” he yelped.

  “Pardon?”

  “S-Santiago. That’s the name of the guy I get my shit from. That’s the name he gave me, anyway.”

  “And he’s tight with the Network?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “I don’t know what that is. I swear, please, I don’t know!”

  I believed him. There comes a point when a man is too afraid to lie, and Todd was about ten feet over that line. It was looking more and more like I’d netted a guppy; he’d been played, too dumb to realize what he’d done. I wanted the people who were playing him.

  Hell, I was starting to think Todd might live to go back to the Burger Barn. I wasn’t done wringing him out yet, though.

  “Tell me about Santiago.”

  “Not much to tell, man. He’s…he’s a short guy, built like a football player, bushy black mustache. He’s—he’s Spanish. I know because I asked if he was from Mexico once and he got really pissed at me. I thought it was the same thing.”

  “Spaniards are from Spain,” I told him. “Mexicans are from Mexico.”

  “That’s what he said. I thought Spain was in Mexico.”

  I cocked my head at him. “Let’s move on. How do you get in touch with him?”

  “I don’t. He gets in touch with me. Once a month, he texts me and tells me where to meet up. Always a different place. He brings my supply, I bring his cut of the money from last month’s sales. He gets ninety percent. I keep the rest, and he kicks me a little junk on the side, you know, for personal use.”

  Ninety percent. No wonder the kid was living in a van and flipping burgers. There was something else there, though. Not a lie, but the whiff of something he was holding back, like he had an ace card squeezed to his chest under the duct tape.

  “There’s something you want to tell me, Todd.”

  I phrased it as a statement, not a question, and gave a knowing look to the crematory oven.

  “You…you aren’t going to believe me.”

  “Try me. You might be surprised.”

  He breathed as deep as the bands of tape would let him and stared at his feet like he could imagine the first kiss of the flames.

  “This dude, Santiago…he’s not human. It sounds crazy, I know, but he’s not human.”

  “I’m still listening,” I said. “How do you know?”

  “When he brought me on board, you know, he was laying down the law. How much money I had to kick back to him every month, and how he’d be checking up on me, making sure I didn’t screw him.” One of Todd’s hands jerked, pointing up to his face. “His eyes, man. The dude’s eyes…changed. The color drained out and they went all yellow and pus-white, like a couple of rotten eggs.”

  Cambion eyes. Todd’s supplier, his pipeline into the Network, had demon blood. That was interesting; the feuding courts of hell were united in agreement that the Network wasn’t their creation. The members we’d faced off against until now, as far as I knew, were human magicians.

  By the looks of it, they’d expanded their recruitment. Caitlin would want to hear about this. More importantly, if this “Santiago” was a local, she might even know where to find him.

  “I believe you,” I said. “You’re doing good, Todd. Real good.”

  “So you’ll—you’ll let me go?”

  I pulled the lever and sent the pine box rattling toward the mouth of the furnace. He shrieked at the top of his lungs. I yanked the lever back, my eardrums stinging, and the belt jolted to a stop.

  “Maybe.”

  A dark stain spread across the crotch of his acid-washed jeans. He’d survive. I’d already decided to cut the poor dope loose, but I needed to squeeze any last lies out of him.

  “Let’s talk about the house party on Eagle Glen Road. You sold a bad batch, Todd.”

  His face was slug-belly white, glistening and pale. He stared at something a million miles away.

  “That…that wasn’t my fault. It wasn’t my fault—”

  “The stuff you sold to the guy throwing the party—was that all of it? Is there more tainted ink floating around out there? I need to know, Todd. I need to gather it all up before somebody else gets hurt. This is really important, okay?”

  I put my hand on the control lever.

  “No,” he wheezed. “No, it was…I met with Santiago that morning, he gave me the ink, I sold the whole batch to Rob, and that was it. There’s no more, I swear!”

  He was on the home stretch. And if he had kept his mouth shut, he might have made it.

  “I sold it to Rob,” he said, “just like Santiago told me to.”

  I narrowed my eyes at him. I had been starting to wonder if my theory about the ink being tainted on purpose was off base. Maybe not.

  “He told you exactly who to sell it to? Does he do that a lot?”

  “N-never, but this was, you know, circumstances, and I mean, I…” He thumped the back of his skull against the coffin. “I didn’t want to hurt those kids! But Jesus, he was gonna pay me ten grand. Cash. You know how much money that is to a guy like me? I could get a new van, pay off my bills—”

  I stood over him and searched his eyes.

  “You knew. You knew the ink was bad.”

  “He told me, get it to Rob before his house party, stay cool, don’t blow it. And don’t go. I was—I was planning on going. So I asked him why. And he told me. He told me his boss needed to take somebody out, and this was how they wanted it done. I said I wasn’t gonna do that, that’s not me, and that’s when he offered me the money. All I had to do was sell Rob the stuff and walk away. It wasn’t like I had to kill anybody with my own hands. I just had to sell it and walk away.”

  He knew. He’d lobbed a bomb made of madness into a house filled with kids. And he did it for ten thousand measly bucks. I didn’t lose my temper. I was too angry for that. All I felt was cold, like a sheath of ice crackling its way down my spine, frost flooding my veins. I was cold enough to do anything.

  “Who was the target?” I asked, my voice soft now. “Was it Rob?”

  “N-no,” he stammered. “It was this chick, Mel…Melanie something. Loomis! Melanie Loomis. Santiago said she was going to be at the party, and his boss wanted her dead. Dead in a way that would look like an accident.”

  I set my hand on the edge of the pine box and took a slow, deep breath. Four seconds in, four seconds out.

  “Sit tight,” I told him. “I need to make a phone call.”

  * * *

  I came back half an hour later, and I wasn’t alone.

  “I want you to meet some people,” I told him.

  Todd’s eyes flicked from me to Caitlin to Emma and back again. He was too scared to open his mouth. That suited me fine. I needed him to hear every word I was about to say.

  “First of all, this ‘chick’ you were paid to kill with tainted drugs? I know her. In fact, I’m really, really protective of her. I suppose you could almost say I’m her”—I glanced sidelong at Emma—“godfather? Is that fair?”

  “Against my better judgment,” she replied. Her eyes were locked onto Todd like a pair of diamond-tipped drills.

  “Now, this lady on my right, her name is Caitlin. Here’s a fun fact, Todd. He might not have gone into specifics, but your buddy Santiago has demon blood.”

  “Demon blood,” Todd echoed, breathing the words.

  “Yep. But just a little. Just enough for a tiny kick. A little spice. But Caitlin, here? She’s the real thing.”

  Caitlin’s eyes blossomed with swirling motes of copper. They gusted across her pupils like a storm of burning embers, blotting everything out until nothing remained but two seething orbs o
f molten metal. She parted her lips, showing double rows of jagged shark’s teeth.

  “Part of Caitlin’s job is watching out for people under her prince’s protection. People like Melanie. She takes her job very seriously.”

  Todd squirmed in his duct-tape cocoon, thrashing against the walls of the pine coffin like a fish drowning in air. “I didn’t know. I swear, I didn’t know—”

  “Now, on my left,” I said, “here’s someone you really need to meet. This is Emma Loomis. Melanie’s mother. She also works for the courts of hell. Emma, you had the best idea just now, out in the hallway. Want to tell him about it?”

  She curled her lips into a razor-thin smile.

  “Absolutely. I was just saying that we’re in a mortuary filled with autopsy tools. Scalpels, saws, caustic chemicals, so much to play with…and I was thinking that unless you tell us everything we want to know, and I do mean everything, we’d take turns tearing you apart, one little piece at a time. And I get to go first.”

  Emma leaned in close and dropped her voice to a whisper.

  “You tried to murder my daughter. I’ve already decided what I’m going to cut off first and what tool I’m going to use. Would you like to guess, or should I make it a surprise?”

  He talked after that. He talked plenty.

  What we mostly got out of him—between frantic, babbling apologies—was that he didn’t know why Melanie had been targeted. All Santiago told Todd was that she’d been green-lit, they wanted it to look like a tragic accident, and the Network had no problem murdering an entire houseful of teenagers to get at a single target.

  Santiago had set him up with a dedicated burner phone, for business only. He kept it stashed under the passenger seat of his van. He gave up the phone, the unlock code, and the password he always started texts with so Santiago would know it was really him. They used a custom-built app to talk, set to erase each message after it had been read, so I couldn’t get at their past chats to verify that. Still, at this point I had no doubt that every word on Todd’s lips was the purest truth. He was a drowning man, clutching at imaginary life preservers.