The Neon Boneyard

by Craig Schaefer

  He didn’t take long to think about it.

  “Yeah, deal.” He paused. “Uh, the—the first choice, the good one, not the other one.”

  “Good thinkin’,” Jennifer said.

  * * *

  I wasn’t sure if Grimm was legitimately crazy or not, and that bothered me. He’d shown up with a bevy of made-up titles and a ridiculous legend to go with it, along with his pointless vendetta. Did he actually believe any of it? Was it all a smoke screen? And why did he want me dead, anyway? There’s no opponent more dangerous than one you can’t predict, and as it stood, Grimm was the deadliest kind of wild card. I needed to find out who he really was, what made him tick, where his lines were.

  I only knew one thing for certain: the man was sloppy. If that bomb had been on a timer, he had no way of knowing I’d be anywhere near the sedan when it went off. If he triggered it remotely, that was even worse; he’d talked, and gloated, and given me just enough time to get clear of the blast, when he could have vaporized me with the push of a button. He needed attention more than he needed victory, and that was a weakness I could exploit.

  More evidence of his sloppiness was right there on a flickering screen. We’d narrowed the footage down easily, starting from when I’d parked the car up to when Grimm had made his appearance at the party, and the security camera had caught a perfect shot of his arrival. He rolled in five minutes after I did, riding alone behind the wheel of a dirty white panel van.

  “Okay,” I said, “so let’s jump it ahead an hour or so and see if we can catch him on the way out, too.”

  He obliged us at one hour and fourteen minutes on the dot. I froze the frame on a still of his license plate number.

  “Gotcha,” I said. “Well, maybe. If he’s any kind of professional, that car is stolen—”

  “But from what you’ve been tellin’ me,” Jennifer said, “he ain’t any kind of professional.”

  “My thoughts exactly. I’m going to shoot the plate number over to Pixie. She can run a search and pull the registration info for us. Who knows? We might even find out Hunter McChucklenuts’s real name.”

  I tugged out my phone. I was about to copy the plate down when a text pinged in. Then a second, and a third.

  “Good man,” I murmured. “You might hate yourself in the morning for this, but you made the right call.”

  Jennifer tilted her head at me. “Whatcha got, sugar?”

  I turned the phone so she and Caitlin could read the messages, straight from Gary Kemper.

  Santiago is a cop

  at the Starbucks on n rancho dr, keeping him distracted

  come pick him up before I change my mind

  30.

  “I really appreciate this,” Santiago was telling Gary. “I mean, I got potential, you know? I could really make an impact if I got my detective’s shield. All I need is a mentor to help me get there. Somebody who can put in a good word for me.”

  They were nestled in a two-seater by the window, talking shop over paper mugs of coffee. Both in plainclothes. I figured it was either Santiago’s day off, or Gary had convinced him to call in sick. Either way, he was off the clock and nobody was going to come looking for him until tomorrow at the earliest.

  “And that’s why I offered,” Gary told him. He didn’t make eye contact. He did with me and Jennifer, though, when he saw us coming. Then he stared at his cup. Santiago had his back to us.

  “You…you okay, man?” Santiago shrugged. “You look down all of a sudden.”

  Gary curled his lips in a bitter smile.

  “Just wondering how to do this right. I think this is the part where I’m supposed to kiss you on both cheeks.”

  I clamped my hand on Santiago’s shoulder. He looked at me, then at Gary, and I saw the pieces click together in his eyes.

  “Don’t make a scene,” I told him.

  “You son of a bitch,” Santiago breathed. “You’re with them?”

  Gary’s hand tightened around his cup. The cardboard started to buckle. Now he looked Santiago in the eye, cold and steady.

  “I’m not with them, no. I’m with the dozen kids who died because of the tainted drugs you put on the street. And whatever these two do to you, it’s probably better than you deserve.” Gary looked to me. “Get him out of my sight.”

  Jennifer nudged Santiago to his feet. “C’mon,” she said in a low voice. “We want you alive, but we don’t need you alive. And if you don’t think I’ll put a bullet in you right here and now, think twice.”

  She was bluffing, but he bought it. Santiago rose and walked with us, a lamb to the slaughter.

  “Faust,” Gary said.

  I looked back at him.

  “Never ask me to do this again,” he told me.

  “Might not feel like it right now,” I said, “but you did the best thing you could do, under the circumstances. You’re still one of the good guys, Gary.”

  He drank his coffee and looked out the window.

  * * *

  We took him to the fortress. That was the nickname for Jennifer’s place out by the airport, a U-shaped tenement block she’d bought up on the cheap and converted into a modern-day castle of crumbling stone and sheet-draped windows. Rusted cars parked along a side street formed a makeshift barricade, and corners in every direction were manned by Calles foot soldiers in brown and yellow. Up on the rooftops, more shooters stood with binoculars and hunting rifles, keeping a silent watch over her tiny kingdom.

  Caitlin had gone ahead of us to get the room ready. When we marched Santiago inside, he knew what it was for. You don’t lay plastic sheeting across dusty floorboards, let alone tack it up over the peeling floral wallpaper, unless you’re planning on making a serious mess.

  We cuffed his hands behind him, sat him down in a chair in the middle of the plastic tarp, and that’s when he started to cry.

  My kit was all laid out on a sawhorse on the side of the room. Tupperware containers of sea salt and cow’s blood, white candles, all the fixings to purge his body of the Network roach in his guts. I could see it with my third eye, a black blotch like a fist-sized tumor in his abdomen.

  I took the salt and started to trace a circle around his chair in glittering crystal lines. I focused on the spell-work to come—I had a fifty-fifty shot of pulling this off—and tried to ignore his blubbering.

  “Have some damn dignity,” Jennifer snapped at him. “All we want to do is ask you some questions. You tell us what we wanna know, maybe give up some of your buddies, you got a real good chance of walking out of here.”

  Of course, she was lying. After what Santiago had done—dancing to Elmer Donaghy’s tune, sending Todd into the streets with a baggie of tainted ink and causing a massacre just to get my attention—there was no chance he was ever leaving this room alive. We were going to wring him dry, and then we were going to kill him, and that was that. The only question was how much he was going to suffer between those two points.

  He should have known that, but desperation makes people stupid. He got himself under control and bobbed his head at Jennifer like an eager puppy. A blob of snot glistened in his mustache.

  “Anything you want to know,” he stammered. “Anything! I can help you. I can be real helpful!”

  I finished the circle, tapped off a few last grains of salt from the Tupperware, and went to get the candles.

  “Not yet,” I told him. “Keep your mouth shut until I get this done.”

  “You want to know about Elmer, right, and phase two? I can tell you all about it. The dude is sick, you don’t even know the half of it.”

  Santiago wrenched to one side, his words cut off in a choking sob of pain. I saw the hazy image of the roach stir inside of him—and bite, a punishment for his disobedience.

  “Stop talking,” I said. I laid down the candles as fast as I could, forming the points of a star around the circle of salt. Caitlin was right behind me with a book of matches. Wicks sizzled to life one by one, filling the air with the faint, musty scent of
smoke. Sweat beaded Santiago’s face. He was too desperate to think straight, too afraid to understand what was happening to him or connect his treason to the sudden pain in his belly.

  “You didn’t stop shit,” he stammered. “Those pits were just where he keeps the roaches, not where he makes ’em. Oh God, what—”

  He lurched forward, his spine bucking, and vomited a gout of blood. It splashed across his slacks and spattered the plastic sheeting. I ran and grabbed the plastic bucket of cow’s blood, an offering to draw the geas-roach out.

  “Jennifer,” I shouted, “put something in his mouth to shut him up. Gag him with your belt or something!”

  Santiago wheezed his words out. He was trying to save his own life by giving us something we could use. He didn’t realize he was committing suicide by doing it.

  “Elmer’s got another site where he runs experiments,” he said. “That’s where he keeps the breeder. The breeder is a—”

  His last words ended in a howl of agony. He threw his head back, shoulders quaking, and thrashed hard enough to bring the chair crashing down onto the plastic tarp. His throat swelled, rippled—and then burst, muscle and skin tearing as the roach, half a foot long and its mud-brown shell smeared with streaks of scarlet, dug its way out of him. Santiago was still alive, still trying to scream, his breaths coming out in a wet burble as his eyes bulged wildly.

  Jennifer’s hand cannon roared, and a copper-jacketed bullet put him out of his misery. It tore into Santiago’s throat, shredding the roach, splintering vertebrae and splashing the remnants of two lives across four feet of plastic tarp. I stood over the carnage and waited for my ears to stop ringing.

  “Swear to God,” I told her—still barely able to hear my own voice, like I was standing under five feet of water—“do not fire that thing indoors.”

  “What?” she shouted. I think she was shouting.

  Eventually we were able to communicate again. Caitlin nudged Santiago’s cheek with the toe of her shoe. The head lolled, only clinging to his body by a Swiss-cheese scrap of cartilage.

  “That’s new,” she said lightly. “I’ve been half-convinced that certain people might talk me to death, given the chance, but I’ve never seen a man talk himself to death before.”

  “Next time, we gag ’em first,” Jennifer said.

  “Next time,” I told her, “you warn me before you start shooting.”

  “Hey, you’ve seen how fast those critters move. I didn’t want that sucker getting loose and escaping into the vents. Not in my house. I’d have to start sleepin’ with a helmet on.”

  She had a point. My ears still stung, but she had a point.

  “Well, we got…something before he croaked,” I said. “Not much, but something. We know there’s another Network hideout in town. Which is good news, in a way. If we can track it down and take it by surprise, we might get the data Pixie needs to work on her decoder thingy.”

  “As far as that last bit,” Jennifer said, “you know what he was about to say, right?”

  “‘The breeder is a—’” I replied.

  “Giant cockroach.” She pushed out her bottom lip and stared at Santiago’s dead body. “You know it. I know it. Caitlin knows it. It’s gonna be a giant roach. Let’s just prepare for that right now so we’re not surprised when we see it.”

  Caitlin considered that and gave an agreeable nod. “The only question is…cow-sized? Truck-sized? House-sized? Now I’m curious.”

  “Well,” I said, “on the bright side, it’ll keep. Anything in Elmer’s second hideout is staying in Elmer’s second hideout until he comes back from Paris. I don’t imagine the flunkies he has left are going to move forward on this ‘phase two’ thing without him.”

  “Somethin’ to be said for striking while the iron’s hot,” Jennifer told me. “If we hit the streets and hunt this place down, maybe we can make sure Elmer doesn’t have any safe haven to come back to.”

  She was right, but I could only fight so many fires at once, and that meant picking my priorities.

  “Problem is,” I said, “we might end up chasing our tails all over town. Meanwhile, I’ve got a psycho cambion who’s here right now, he’s hot to kill me, and he doesn’t care if civilians get hurt in the process. I’ve got to focus on that.”

  “Can’t argue with that,” Jennifer said. “Where’s your next stop?”

  I didn’t know until an hour later, when Pixie got back to me with the registration info on Grimm’s license plate. We were half-wrong earlier. As it turned out, my would-be killer was professional enough to steal a car instead of using his own wheels.

  Not just any car off the street, though. And he hadn’t made a mistake by letting us see his plates. He did it on purpose. He’d chosen his ride to send a very special message, just for me, a message that rocketed me straight back to the past.

  31.

  Jennifer stayed behind to supervise the cleanup. Officer Santiago would disappear, a new and eternal resident of the missing persons registry. I stopped at home to change my clothes; then Caitlin and I headed northwest on the 95. Her snow-white Audi roared up the open road, desert flats stretching to the rust-red mountains on the horizon, as we chased down a ghost.

  “Sometimes cars just drop off the grid,” Pixie had told me. “You know, they get mothballed, rust away outside a farmhouse somewhere. Maybe, eventually, somebody comes along and restores ’em.”

  “Barn finds,” I said.

  “Exactly. That’s when the chain of custody gets spotty. The plates belong to a white GMC panel van, which lines up with the description you texted me. Technically, it’s not stolen, but its registration has been expired since the late nineties and there’s no record of a sale—the paper trail just ends. So my best guess is your guy found it abandoned in a garage somewhere, fixed it up, and helped himself.”

  “Great, so it’s a dead end after all. Out of curiosity, who owned it?”

  “Not a who, a what. It was a company van. Belonged to an outfit called the New Transitions Wellness House. Looks like they were a state-funded halfway house for ‘youths at risk,’ sort of an alternative to juvie. They got shut down after an abuse scandal—”

  She said more, but I wasn’t hearing her, too lost in the warrens of my memory. I didn’t need the details. I knew that house. I used to live there.

  “I don’t like this.” Caitlin lightly drummed her fingers on the steering wheel. She’d said that once when I told her where we were going. And now, after I’d told her about the pre-bomb part of my day.

  “I know. I run into Teddy at the same time this psycho is digging into my teenage years and throwing my past in my face? That’s too much memory lane in one place.”

  “I know he’s your blood,” Caitlin said. She left the but unspoken.

  She wasn’t wrong, and I was having the same suspicions. I hated this. The last thing I wanted, after a surprise reunion with my kid brother, was to think he was mixed up in this mess. All the same, I took out my phone and made some calls while she drove.

  I’d already heard of Tall Pines Security; they had a solid rep, solid enough that I wouldn’t want to go up against them in the middle of a heist. That said, I poked around and made sure Mayor Seabrook had contracted the real Tall Pines. Maybe paranoid, but considering I’ve been a ComEd repairman, a Polymath Security alarm installer, and a FedEx driver on various jobs—plus another baker’s dozen of past disguises—it was worth verifying.

  Next I pulled my job-recruiter routine and had a chat with the Tall Pines human-resources department. My brother was a solid employee, with the company for over a year. I was as satisfied as I was going to get, at least until I spent more one-on-one time with him.

  “I hate to say it’s a coincidence,” I told her, “generally because there’s no such thing, but…it really does look like a fluke. Seabrook hired a solid security firm, no surprise there, and Teddy’s one of their reliable operators. Simple as that.”

  Caitlin frowned her response. She wasn’t convi
nced. I don’t think I was, either, but I was working overtime to tell myself otherwise.

  “All right,” she said, “leaving your brother’s reappearance out of this, we’re still heading toward a confrontation. Grimm stole that van as a direct challenge to you; he’s telling you that he knows your history. That he knows what he hopes are your weak points.”

  “And he’s telling us where to meet him. I’m fine with that. If he wants a showdown this bad, he’s going to get one.”

  I wasn’t taking chances. My cards nestled against my chest, my wand up my sleeve in its spring-loaded holster. I hadn’t just changed my clothes back at the apartment; I’d rounded out my arsenal. The velvet pouch of alchemist’s clay, Bentley’s gift, rode snug in my hip pocket. On the opposite side, a nine-millimeter in a shoulder holster under my linen jacket. Whatever Grimm threw at me—magic or hot lead—I was ready with a rebuttal.

  “Which leaves the unanswered question,” Caitlin said.

  One word: why?

  We rolled into a small town northwest of Vegas just before dusk. It was a sleepy chunk of nowhere, the kind of place you’re either born in and die in, or drive through and forget. We refueled at a no-name gas station with an awning painted like a faded circus tent, then followed the back roads until we reached the end of the line.

  “Are you all right?” she asked me.

  The Wellness House rose up to blot the setting sun behind its Victorian-styled gables. A central tower speared the sky with a sharp, steep peak and a shattered window for a heart. The white paint was peeling from the clapboard now, and the first-floor windows lay sheathed under nailed boards and signs reading CONDEMNED BY ORDER OF THE STATE.

  Red spray paint defaced the once-grim sign out front, a childish scrawl that proclaimed FOCK YOU. The misspelling gave the defiant statement more power somehow. Maybe it was hidden in the faint smile it brought to my lips. There was a reason I usually resorted to a wisecrack in moments like this. I carried two weapons up my sleeve when it came to fighting fear: laughter and anger.