Hell's Detective

by Michael Logan

  “My name will go down in heavenly history,” Franklin said, his voice weak but more even than it had been. “Yours too. I’ll make sure every soul in every remaining realm knows Kat Murphy was the one who made it possible to exterminate the human scourge. You should be proud.”

  I now had enough breath to speak, but I said nothing. He truly believed he was doing the right thing. Words would be wasted on him. They always were on fanatics. Instead, I concentrated on gathering my strength. He still had to get the doors open and maneuver his broken body and the box inside the elevator. As he tried to do so, I hoped he might be distracted enough to lose his hold on the Torments. Maybe I would have a chance to snatch the box and make a break for it. I tensed my legs, one eye on the dark shape gliding above, and prepared to run. It was a futile course of action, but I had to try.

  Franklin twisted, reaching behind him with his good arm. As his finger settled on the button, I burst into life. My lungs rebelled, but I pushed past the dizziness and the searing pain in my chest to close the distance. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the winged shadow plummet to intercept me. I braced myself for impact, wildly imagining that I could punch the Torment out of the air and keep going but knowing I was fooling myself. The world was screwed, and it was all my fault.

  A single shot cracked, repeating up and up into infinity. I skidded to a halt. Franklin hung slack in the claws of the Torment, blood pumping from a hole in the center of his forehead. The Torment overhead swept past and arced back up into the darkness. The other one released its hold on Franklin. His lifeless body crumpled to the ground as, with no one to pull its strings, the second Torment followed its friend back to roost.

  “Lucky shot,” a sluggish voice said.

  I turned to see Danny swaying in the doorway. He took three steps forward and collapsed. I hurried over to the box and, kicking it before me like a football so it wouldn’t try to convince me that helping Franklin would be an excellent idea, ran back to him. We needed to be out of there before Franklin came back. If I’d counted right, that was Danny’s last bullet, and I didn’t have time to ferret around for my lost gun. When Franklin woke up, fully in control again, he could send dozens of Torments against us. The only option was to kick the box into the moat, where it would sink to the dark depths, and flee. I reached Danny and saw he was unconscious again. I slipped my arm under his body, ready to drag him out and gain as much distance as possible before the Torments came.

  Before I could heave him forward, the door shook. I looked up to see the Ammit squeezing through the opening, its broad back pushing the door upward. With the gap now bigger, there was nothing to hold my Chevy. The trunk tipped up and, with a squeal of undercarriage on the road, the car slid out of sight. A loud splash told me I would never see it again. Even though I’d lost my pride and joy, my legs were weak with relief. I sat down hard on the floor, keeping my arm around Danny. It was over.

  Once the Ammit was free, it stood tall and shook off its flanks. Laureen came through next, moving so fast that she almost tripped over my outstretched legs.

  “You took your time,” I said.

  She surveyed the scene—Franklin still dead by the elevator door, the box lying by my side. She let out a long, hissing breath and ran her fingers through her messy hair.

  “Traffic was murder,” she said, to her credit doing a good impression of nonchalance. “Anyway, looks like you had it under control.”

  “Something like that. Don’t worry, I left you something to do.”

  I nodded at Franklin just as I blinked hard. He sat up gasping, hands slapping the ground around him.

  “Looking for this?” I shouted, pointing at the box.

  He didn’t even glance in my direction. He now had eyes only for the Ammit, which was stalking toward him with Laureen in his wake. Franklin screwed his eyes shut. No Torments swooped to the rescue. The Ammit kept on coming.

  “Won’t work,” Laureen said. “I outrank you. Hierarchy’s a bitch, isn’t it?”

  Franklin let out a piteous mew. Again, I had to dampen a wave of pity. I was scared enough looking at the creature, feeling its aura cloak me in dread, and it wasn’t coming for me.

  “Don’t take me—take her, take them!” Franklin yelled. “They’re evil!”

  “There’s no such thing as evil,” Laureen said softly. “There are only broken souls. And yours is broken beyond repair.”

  Franklin jumped to his feet and lunged for the elevator button, but the Ammit was already streaking across the floor. It butted him in the back with its skull, knocking him to the ground. Franklin screamed and thrashed, but the Ammit swatted aside the feeble blows with a powerful paw and, almost tenderly, closed its jaws over his head. Franklin’s last screams echoed as his body slid down the creature’s throat like a coffin trundling into a crematorium furnace. When he was gone, silence filled the tower. There was no dust, nothing for the remnants of his soul to snatch around itself. There was only the empty air. Laureen’s shoulders sagged. When she turned around to walk back to me, I thought I saw sadness flicker across her features. As much as Franklin had been an insane, homicidal prick, I hoped she was correct in her assumption that the dust devils didn’t really feel anything.

  I prodded the box toward her with my toe. “As promised.”

  She blinked and bent over to touch it with one finger. She snatched her hand away instantly. “Not exactly low-key, though, was it?”

  “You can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs.”

  “You didn’t break a few eggs. You drove a tractor through the whole chicken farm.”

  I shrugged. “I got the job done, didn’t I?”

  “Yes, I suppose you did, even though you had a few wobbles along the way. Unfortunately, I’ll have to tell Mr. Stanton about this mess. Half the bloody city saw the Ammit chowing down. Plus we’re an Administrator light now. Still, at least I got it back.”

  “At least I got it back, you mean.”

  “True. Which means I owe you one Torment-free existence.”

  I licked my lips. I hadn’t had time to bargain, and now the box was as good as back in her hands. All I could do was appeal to her better nature, which despite my initial impressions, she did appear to have. “About that. I think I, we, deserve a bonus. How about two?”

  Laureen raised an eyebrow and glanced at Danny. “For him? I don’t think so. He’s the one who stole the box in the first place. I’m not sure we can even do business any longer. It may be time for him to stand down.”

  “He didn’t steal the box. He diverted it. And he didn’t do it for himself. He did it for me, to make amends.”

  “Amends for what?”

  That surprised me. I’d assumed that Laureen knew what I’d done. “You don’t have files on us?”

  “There’s too many of you to keep records. The system sorts all that side of things out. We keep the wheels turning, give you what you need to be naughty. That’s why we’re called Administrators.”

  “Well, we’ve got history. Look, when he found out what it really was, what Franklin wanted, he did the right thing, didn’t he? He was the one who stopped him in the end. Shot him as he was about to get in the elevator. That has to count.”

  Laureen massaged her temples. “Fine. He can stay in his job. Mainly because I’m too exhausted after this debacle to deal with any more upheaval. But our deal stands. One free pass.”

  My gaze flickered to the elevator. If the Ammit hadn’t been there, maybe I could have overpowered Laureen and dragged Danny behind me, hoping to carry us both to freedom. I looked up at the endless chambers. In one of those cubby holes, Danny’s Torment was slumbering. Later it would stretch out its wings and take flight across the city to claim him. The punishment would be worse this time. I’d given him hope of a better life, and I hadn’t delivered. I couldn’t let that stand.

  “Then I want you to give it to him.”

  “No.”

  “You were giving it to me.”

  “You�
��re different. I’ve never seen much contrition from him. He’s been keeping a man in a jar for years, for Christ’s sake.”

  “He let him go.”

  “Very forgiving of him. Let me guess—you asked him to do it, right?”

  “Does it matter? He did it.”

  “The why matters, Kat. I’ve already told you that. The deal was for you only. Do you want it or not?”

  I looked down at Danny and stroked his cheek. I could take my payment. But what then? I couldn’t bear the thought of lying beside Danny as he suffered, watching him retch and tremble when he came out of it. And he might grow bitter at my enjoyment of the freedom I’d been unable to secure for him. I didn’t want that between us. We had enough to deal with already. Besides, even though Bruno had set us up, in the end my sin had brought us here. It was like Laureen said: actions had consequences. My action, the pulling of the trigger, and so my consequence. I’d been kidding myself to think I could escape so easily. “No, I don’t want it.”

  Laureen raised her eyebrows, but I thought I detected the faintest hint of a smile on her lips. “Your choice. Aren’t you disappointed, coming away from this job empty-handed?”

  “I got him back,” I said, drawing Danny closer. “That’s far more than you were offering.”

  This time, there was no mistaking Laureen’s smile. “Then take care, Kat. I hope you find what you’re looking for.”

  She patted the Ammit on the backside. It scooped the box up in its jaws. Together, they walked through the door into the rising sun.

  32

  Once they were long gone, I dragged Danny from the tower. The movement roused him, and he peered up with a look of stupefaction on his face. Lucky shot, indeed. There was no way he could have aimed accurately. Maybe God had our backs after all. When he saw me, his pupils struggled to dilate, but he shook off enough of the fog to ask, “What happened?”

  “You stopped him. The Ammit took him. Laureen got her doohickey back.”

  He was too befuddled to ask about the payment, and I didn’t have the heart to tell him we weren’t free. When I leaned in for a kiss, he puked over my chin, a sure sign of concussion. I wet my hand on the slick surface of the bridge, wiped off as much of the vomit as possible, and got him to his feet. We staggered to where Franklin’s Cadillac was waiting, the keys still in the ignition. He wasn’t going to need it any longer, and I figured that since my car was gone, I might as well appropriate his. I would sell it as soon as possible and buy something less likely to be stolen.

  When I pulled up outside the casino, the streets were quiet save for one lone figure: Yolanda, sitting on the stairs, nearly every inch of her body caked in drying blood.

  “I thought you’d be back,” she said as I climbed out. “You’re like a shit that can’t be flushed.”

  “I’ll take that as a compliment. Before you ask, I don’t have the item.”

  “Not smart. You promised it to Yama.”

  “You did see the scary monster cavorting around in there eating people, right? Tell Yama to take matters up with it and the Administrators. They’ve got the item back now.”

  “Too bad. You gave your word. Yama holds people to their word. And when I tell him what I saw here, how much your little item matters to them, he’s going to want it even more.”

  “You can’t always get what you want.”

  “Yama can,” she said, her voice matter-of-fact. “I’ll be seeing you.”

  “Not if I see you first,” I said as she sauntered off down the road, picking lumps of gore out of her hair.

  I hauled Danny out of the car and supported him up the stairs. Inside, the uneaten portion of his crew was righting tables, sweeping up debris, and sponging the blood-soaked carpet. They stopped working as I walked across the casino floor, Danny mumbling nonsense and dragging his feet. Sid hustled up, concern all over his hard face.

  “Is he okay?” he said.

  “Just a bang on the head. He’ll be fine tomorrow. If he isn’t, I guess we’ll just have to shoot him. How’d it wrap up here?”

  “Everybody left. We all ran out of ammo. Even Yolanda gets tired of breaking necks after a while.”

  “I’m not so sure about that. I think she has a few more on her to-break list. I’d advise you to pop out to the gun shops and buy some more bullets. There’s going to be blowback.”

  He darted glances left and right and leaned in to speak quietly. “Will that thing come back too?”

  “No. You’re safe.” I didn’t add, for the moment.

  On the ride through the lightening streets, I’d mulled over whether to spread the word about what I’d uncovered. The city would be rife with speculation about this previously unseen beast and what it meant. I’d decided I would tell as many people as possible that they could escape from Lost Angeles and start again with a clean slate if they behaved themselves. Laureen was wrong not to have done so. But when I saw how scared even Sid was at the thought of the Ammit’s return, I realized I didn’t want them to know what would happen if they didn’t behave. The carrot would hopefully be enough. People had enough to worry about already, and, like I’d told Sid, there would be fallout from my heat-of-the-moment ploy to draw more guns into the action. I would have to go back to Laureen and ask her to tell the Trustees—Yama in particular—that they shouldn’t mess with Danny and me. But at that moment, with my adrenaline supplies depleted, I was too exhausted to do anything. I helped Danny up the stairs and into his room, where he collapsed fully clothed on the bed. I showered, threw on one of his T-shirts, and lay down beside him.

  When I woke up, the sun was almost down. Danny was still out for the count. I turned on the lamp and rolled his eyelids back to check that his pupils responded to the light. I cuddled in to his warm body, drinking in the last few moments before the Torments came for us. Part of me hoped the coming nightmare wouldn’t hold the same power, but my body’s response—the lump in my throat, the weakness in my limbs—betrayed that as wishful thinking. It already had me in its grip. You never remembered who you were once the Torment took you; all my travails and triumphs of recent weeks, the knowledge that I had Danny back, would mean nothing in that motel room. The feelings of shame and hollowness would still follow me out into the real world.

  I heard the beat of wings off in the distance and squeezed Danny harder. Over the last days, I’d grown accustomed to thinking of the Torments as a natural phenomenon—bats streaming from their cave at dusk or swallows flocking in preparation for migration, something of no threat to me. Now they felt like carrion birds, great black vultures spiraling over a battlefield. And once more, I was one of the corpses to be pecked apart. I stared at Danny and tried to burn his living face into my mind so I could carry it down into the nightmare and dilute the horror.

  A loud thump announced the arrival of the Torments, and I had to look. My own face stared back at me from one of the black mirrors. I had a second to wonder why it looked so peaceful in comparison to the haunted look on Danny’s beast, before the creature hurled itself into me. It took me not to the Nimrod but back to the tower.

  I stood in front of the elevator, dizzy from the seemingly instantaneous and unexpected transition. The doors lay open, revealing padded velvet walls lit by a warm-yellow bulb. For a moment, I thought this was a new nightmare—that I’d somehow sinned by helping Laureen take Franklin and was now being punished for it. That theory didn’t make sense. The elevator hadn’t been open, and there was no sign of Franklin. I remembered exactly who and where I was and all that had happened. And I didn’t regret the role I’d played in Franklin’s fate. He was the sole author of his own misfortune. I was just his publisher. The final clue to the reality of the moment was my Torment, which crouched at my feet, putting the finishing touches on its reassembly after oozing out of my orifices. It took to the air, spiraling up into the tower until it was gone. The other nooks and crannies sat empty, which meant its pals were still at large. The Torment must have sleepwalked me through the streets to t
his place.

  “Hello, Kat,” somebody said, so close behind me that breath tickled my neck.

  I started like a skittish racehorse jumping the gun. I turned to face Laureen. “Why did you bring me here?”

  “I didn’t bring you. Your Torment did.”

  “I don’t get you.”

  “I told you: they’re largely mirrors. They look into your soul and reflect your sins. They serve another function, though. While they’re rummaging around your dirty laundry, they also notice other things. Like how well your sins have been washed. They decide if a soul is ready or beyond saving.”

  A freezing lump of fear coalesced in my gullet. My time had come, as I’d known it would. I just hadn’t expected it to be today, not when I’d saved the damn world. I didn’t know why the Torment had brought me here instead of the clearing, but I knew the Ammit would be lurking in the shadows. I wanted to rail and roar against the injustice of it all, but I knew there was no point.

  “Tell Flo what happened,” I said. “Tell him I love him. And make it quick.”

  Laureen looked puzzled for a second and then, astonishingly, laughed. “You think you’re being fed to the Ammit? It’s the other way around. You’ve been redeemed, Kat. All sins forgiven.”

  I goggled at her, unable to believe what I’d heard. “What? Why?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Putting another’s happiness before your own? Putting the fate of the world before your own selfish needs? Either way, it boils down to doing the right thing in the face of temptation.” Her index finger clicked shut my hanging jaw, and she waved a hand toward the elevator. “All you need to do is step in. Then it’s back to Earth, in a fresh body in a cozy little womb.”