The Neon Boneyard

by Craig Schaefer

  I had a feeling I was going to need both. For now the house sat dormant, rusting in its sleep, like an elderly tiger that might spring awake to claw and bite at any moment. Caitlin stared at me, waiting for an answer to her question.

  “It’s just a building,” I said and got out of the car.

  We circled the property on foot. No sign of the panel van, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t inside, waiting. All the doors were secure, fixed with extra padlocks on the outside, and the windows were boarded up tight.

  “This one,” Caitlin said. She had been appraising the windows with an architect’s eye and singled out one for her personal attention. She hooked her fingers around a board and heaved. Nails popped free from the groaning wood one by one, until a board wriggled loose. She tossed it aside, letting it clatter to the dirt at her back, and reached for the next in line.

  Eventually she cleared an opening big enough for us to invade. The window beneath the boards was long broken, nothing left but a ring of jagged glass teeth. I broke out the shards with the butt of my pistol one by one. I wasn’t worried about the noise; if the cambion was inside, waiting for us, he already knew we were here.

  I pulled myself over the window frame. My feet touched down on rough floorboards, coated in twenty years of dust and neglect. I gazed across an old industrial kitchen and memories flooded in. In my mind’s eye the stark overhead lights—shattered and dead now—were buzzing and bright. The chipped particleboard counter, host to cobwebs and mummified flies, was lined with corroded, moldy cans of bulk-bought green beans and generic potted meat.

  We both took out our phones and turned them into flashlights, with the outside light fading fast. Once we left the open window behind, there would be no light at all beyond what we brought in with us.

  I stood still for a moment, ears perked, listening to anything the Wellness House wanted to say. It kept its secrets. Nothing stirred in the bottomless gloom, not even the rats.

  We weren’t its only recent visitors, though. As we walked along a narrow corridor, my phone’s beam trailed across smears of dust on the floor. There were footprints, signs of shuffling, dragging.

  “He’s been here,” I said.

  I poked my head into a half-open doorway while I tried to get my bearings. It was strange returning after so many years; some halls I knew by heart, down to the detail of the striped wallpaper or a particular crack in the baseboards, and others seemed utterly alien to me. My memory had reshaped and twisted this place, altered it under the weight of over two decades of nightmares, and being confronted with concrete reality again was jarring. We passed a dorm room I knew—absolutely knew—was on the second floor, not the first. I expected a pair of bathroom doors on the left wall, and they were actually on the right.

  I pushed open another door and froze.

  “Pet?” Caitlin asked. She looked between my face and the cramped room, barely big enough for the wire-frame bed inside and its rotting, yellowed mattress. And the old, dangling hospital-grade restraints with their white buckled straps.

  “You know those cigarette burns on my back?” I asked her.

  I went inside. I had to. I don’t know why. Some bone-deep command pulled me over the threshold, to stare at my teenage ghost on the mattress.

  “This is the ‘segregation and discipline’ hall,” I told her. “Six rooms, all just like this, but…it was this room. Once a week, twice sometimes. This was where they put me.”

  Caitlin put her hand on my shoulder. She didn’t speak, letting me process whatever I needed to. I think she wanted me to know I wasn’t alone.

  “The abuse that got this place shut down,” I said, “it wasn’t…deliberate, if that makes sense. It was born out of neglect. They had too few doctors, too many kids—the state funding paid them by the head, so they packed us in like sardines. Their solution was to hire minimum-wage ‘orderlies’ with no training, most of them barely a year or two older than we were. Kids watching kids. And when kids get frustrated, they lash out.”

  “That doesn’t excuse what happened to you,” Caitlin said. Her voice was barely a whisper.

  “No. It doesn’t.”

  I didn’t have anything else to say. There was nothing else to see. We backed out of the room and kept moving.

  We climbed a wide staircase, the runner rotted to scraps of vaguely floral fabric. A musty odor, like old books and mothballs, hung in the air and tickled the back of my throat. I wasn’t sure what I was looking for. A hunch pushed my footsteps, or maybe I was just feeling masochistic and wanted to wallow in the bad old days.

  No. Something was significant about this place, outside my own checkered past. Grimm had taken the Wellness House van—and I assumed he’d would have had to put some elbow grease into making it run, after it had been sitting under a tarp or something for twenty years—and gotten his plates caught on camera. He wanted me to see it, wanted me to follow him here.

  So where was he?

  I strobed my light across an open doorway. I didn’t find the cambion, but I found his lair.

  32.

  “He’s living here,” Caitlin said.

  He had been, anyway, if the missing van meant he wasn’t coming back. This side room had been swept more or less clean, broken furniture shoved to the corners, and he’d carved out a little sanctuary for himself. A down-stuffed sleeping bag and a pillow lay near a hotplate and a can of Sterno. He had a battery-powered camping lantern, the green plastic hood pulled down tight, and junk-food wrappers spilled from the half-open mouth of a garbage bag. From the food debris and empty soda cans, I figured he’d been here for a week, at least.

  A black plastic case sat at the foot of his bedroll. I crouched down, ran my fingertips across the grainy surface and unclasped it. Inside, foam had been cut to securely carry a single pistol and a couple of magazines. Empty. Wherever he was right now, he had the piece on him.

  “Only one firearm?” Caitlin asked.

  I shut the lid. “Only need one bullet, if you know how to aim. This doesn’t make any sense. Why would he camp out here?”

  Caitlin glanced to a boarded-over window. “He would have had to fix the van up to get it running again, yes? If he was working alone, and not familiar with that kind of engine, it could have taken him a few days.”

  I pushed myself back to my feet.

  “Hell of a lot of effort. Too much effort.”

  “The man is clearly insane,” she said. “You heard him at the party.”

  “Sure. I heard him say he was, what, the great-grandson of the king of vampires or something?” I poked my head into the hallway, looking both ways before I stepped out of the room. “One of the first things anybody learns, coming into the occult underground, is that vampires aren’t real. No, he looked ridiculous because he was trying to look ridiculous. It’s an act.”

  “To what end?” Caitlin asked.

  “Once we figure out why he wants me dead, I imagine we’ll know that too.”

  Of course, even if he was putting on a show at the party for reasons we couldn’t puzzle out yet, it didn’t mean he wasn’t crazy.

  We made our way to the administrative offices. Now I was definitely playing tourist. Patients—inmates—weren’t allowed in this part of the house. I hadn’t missed much, just a jumble of bulky desks, a few swivel chairs on rattling casters, and pile upon pile of old, yellowed record boxes. A row of file cabinets stood with their drawers open, empty, and gathering dead flies.

  “Looks like they were getting ready to move all the records off-site,” I said, gazing from the cabinets to the stacks of cardboard boxes. “Maybe the funding got pulled, the paychecks stopped coming, and they just…left it like this.”

  Curiosity sent me thumbing through the nearest box. Caitlin opened another and did the same. They were patient files. Each label bore a set of initials and a registration number. I grabbed one at random. Inside was a fragment of a life, treatment and discipline reports and a staff assessment on pink carbon paper.

 
; “I just realized I never asked,” Caitlin said. “What’s your middle name, pet?”

  “James, why?” I figured it out as she pulled my file from the box and opened it up. The label read DJF / 882.09. “Oh, hey, c’mon.”

  She flashed an impish smile. “I want to see your mug shot.”

  “It wasn’t a mug shot, technically.” I walked over to stand at her side. “The point of this place was to be a kinder, gentler alternative to juvie hall. We were patients at risk, undergoing treatment to become productive members of society.”

  There I was, paper-clipped to the edge of the folder, all acne-pocked cheeks and thin, hard angles and unfocused anger. I looked like I wanted to grab the world by the throat and squeeze. I remembered feeling that way pretty much all the time, and nobody was in a hurry to give me a reason not to.

  “You matured nicely,” Caitlin murmured. One scarlet fingernail stroked my photograph’s cheek. “Filled out, but not too much, cleaner skin, better hair.”

  I didn’t think I looked any different. Maybe I’d just taken my face off at some point and flipped it inside out, so all the acne and hate were on the inside now. I didn’t want to look at my file anymore. My eyes drifted to the box, to the parade of initials and numbers.

  HMG / 796.88

  “Hold on a sec.” I tugged out the folder and opened it up. As soon as I did, I felt a momentary flash of disappointment. The name inside wasn’t Hunter MacGregor Grimm, it was Harry Michael Grimes. But then I leafed over a pink carbon page and found his photograph underneath. Younger—too young to be trapped in the justice system, he’d been twelve at the oldest when it was taken—with smoldering eyes and baby fat on his cheeks. The eyes were what drew me in.

  “Cait, look at this. Age him up by twenty years—you think this could be our guy?”

  She tapped her finger against her lips, brow furrowed as she studied the picture.

  “Same facial structure, jawline is identical…if it isn’t him, he could be his brother.”

  The staff had done half their job before they’d packed up and moved on to greener pastures. Whatever crime he’d committed to land himself in the caring hands of the Wellness House had been expunged from the file. What remained didn’t tell me a damn thing, just a smattering of incident reports and—

  My finger froze on a single line. “HMG remanded to Seg/Disp for time-out after fight w/ other patients. Patient DJF initiated altercation, claimed to be defending HMG.”

  “Cait,” I breathed, “I knew him.”

  * * *

  I needed fresh air. There wasn’t anything left to find inside the musty, stifling halls, so we took the files—Harry Grimes’s, in case there was more to see, and mine, so I could burn it later—and climbed out the first-floor window. It was dark now, and the desert sky was a cold onyx slate streaked with wispy gray clouds.

  I sat on the porch steps. Caitlin perched beside me. I paged through the file by the light of my phone one more time. I had just been given a lesson in the fallibility of memory, the halls and doors of the Wellness House rearranging themselves to defy my expectations, and I wanted to be sure I hadn’t confused some half-remembered nightmare with reality.

  But I remembered. I mostly remembered feeling helpless. All the time. Powerless, trapped, bound by pointless rules and the orderlies’ casual brutality. My hands were shackled, even when they weren’t.

  It’s good to know the things we fear most, the Lady in Red whispered in my ear.

  There had been a pecking order among the patients, a hierarchy of wolves and sheep, and I wasn’t having that. Syd and his boys had just cornered a new patient, this chubby kid, couldn’t have been more than twelve. My first swing cracked Syd’s chin open and split my knuckles, and the pain was like a blessing. I was angry for myself and I was angry for this kid who didn’t deserve the shakedown, and I only knew one way to let all that anger out. So I punched and punched and the entire world became a beautiful chorus of broken skin and blood and I tasted copper in my mouth, and I think I was screaming but by then the orderlies were dog-piling us, dragging me away, shouting at me to stop resisting.

  I would never stop resisting.

  “So…you helped him,” Caitlin said. “Tried to protect him.”

  “I think so, yeah.”

  “Then why is he trying to murder you now?”

  I didn’t have an answer for that.

  I needed more intel on Harry Michael Grimes. I suspected Gary wasn’t in the mood to do me any favors right now. I’d let him cool off some, and come to grips with the Santiago situation, before I darkened his doorstep again. That left one other contact with inside access.

  “Is this good news?” Mayor Seabrook asked.

  I shifted on the rough porch step, phone loose against my ear. “I have a suspect who might pose a credible threat. I’m not sure if he has a police record, but if he does, I need to know where he’s been and who his known associates are.”

  I didn’t say what kind of credible threat. If she took my words to mean that Grimes was connected to the ink trade or that he was dangerous to her personally, well, I didn’t technically lie.

  “I can put in a request through Earl’s office,” she said. “How does this help me?”

  “Well, he’s in Vegas with a stolen van, a gun, and some real bad intentions.”

  I gave her a name, date of birth, all the hard facts from Harry’s partial file. Once again, vagueness saved the day. The mayor filled in the details with her imagination, and whatever she decided, she found me worthy. I gave her one of my throwaway email addresses; they were free and didn’t require any ID to create, so I always kept a couple on standby in case I needed one.

  “I’ll see if I can have it expedited.” She hung up. No goodbyes required.

  “Home?” Caitlin asked.

  “Home.”

  Nothing more we could do here, not tonight. We walked back to her car together. I turned in the driveway, hand on the passenger door, and took one long last look.

  “Are you all right?” she asked.

  “It’s just a building.”

  We drove back through the desert, two more hours on the open highway. As the hot lights of Vegas loomed up ahead, welcoming us back to the neon playground, the mayor returned my call.

  “My admin just sent the details to your email,” she told me. “This Grimes character is dangerous. Earl wanted to know why I wanted his records.”

  “What did you tell him?”

  “That he’s the commissioner, and he serves at the pleasure of the mayor’s office, which means he’s to do as I say and not ask questions. But I put that in much nicer words. I’m going to be out of touch after tonight, getting ready to head to the conference.”

  “I really wish you wouldn’t go,” I said. “Not until I’m absolutely certain it’s safe.”

  “It’s fine. Earl is coming with me, we have Tall Pines on security detail, and Metro is giving us a full escort to and from the hotel. I’ll be safer than I am at home.”

  I wasn’t so sure. A bunch of civic-minded mayors coming together in one place to discuss how they were going to tackle the ink epidemic—and with it, the Network’s cash cow—felt like a disaster waiting to happen. But Seabrook had a cast-iron backbone and she wasn’t going to bend for me or anybody. I wished her luck.

  “Anything useful?” Caitlin asked me. I was flipping through the scattered files Seabrook’s assistant had sent over. It was a haphazard collection of scanned documents, some of them nearly two decades old, tracing the edges of a hard-knock life.

  “The Wellness House was just the start for this kid,” I said. “In juvie, out of juvie. In county jail, out of county. Graduated to an assault with a deadly weapon charge two days after his twenty-first birthday. State pen for that.”

  In between the lines, a pattern started to form. Allegations, lists of known ties, suspicions. Everything came together to point a red arrow in a too-familiar direction.

  “I know what he wants,” I said. “
And I know who sent him.”

  33.

  The proof of intent came from all the crimes Harry Grimes didn’t go down for. He’d been seen at the scene of a Smaldone family hit, two members of the “Mountain Mafia” gunned down in the middle of dinner, but the feds couldn’t make a concrete connection. He was linked to the death of an heiress who committed “suicide” by diving into her soaking tub with a plugged-in toaster, but his hands were cleaner than the water. Then he’d been questioned in the disappearance of a Teamster boss. His alibi was airtight for that one, just like the construction drum that the boss’s tortured corpse turned up in two years later.

  “He’s an assassin,” Caitlin said after I read some choice excerpts to her.

  “Pay for play,” I said, “and considering these are just the killings they think he had a hand in but can’t prove, I can’t guess how many he’s gotten away with. Forget all the BS he spouted at the party, it was a smoke screen. Harry Grimes is being paid to kill me, pure and simple.”

  She frowned. Her hands flexed on the steering wheel.

  “And you believe you know who sent him?”

  “He’s a cambion, so even if he doesn’t have formal ties to the courts of hell, he’s aware of them. He moves in both underworlds—infernal and criminal.”

  “With you so far,” she said.

  “He’s legally a transient with no fixed address, but check the pattern for the last five years. Every time he’s been hauled in for questioning, it’s been in Colorado. Aurora, Fort Collins, Pueblo…”

  “Denver,” Caitlin said. She’d already put it together.

  “And who do we know in Denver? Same person who just happened to show up at the party, and threw me off-balance just in time for ‘Hunter Grimm’ to make his grand entrance.”

  “Naavarasi.” Now her knuckles were turning white. She swerved onto an off-ramp, too sharp, leaning into the wheel.