by Kevin Wright
Maggie was passed out at their table, her hair matted in a puddle of drool and half-dissolved painkillers. Kade Valentine picked up his black hat and placed it on his head.
Then he left.
* * * *
Journal of Occult History 1969-70 February 16, 1970
…since the night of November 12, 1969. Benjamin Salazar is not dead. He stood outside city hall as Mayor Perry was sworn in, once again, in yet another outlandish ceremony. Salazar left in disgust once the ceremony was complete, according to eyewitnesses. No interview was obtained.
Salazar’s return to the public eye was brief by necessity, as the price placed on his head, by the Aces and Eights headman Mr. Azban Sklar, months ago, doubled after his disappearance, and tripled, and has reportedly quadrupled in recent months. The same happened with Terrence Brudnoy, who has made no appearance in public.
The name “Lord Brudnoy” has been whispered by the street people in the past month, though. They speak of him with awe…
* * * *
“So, let me get this straight.” Sid looked over his shoulder at Peter huddled on the floor. “Here.” He handed him the envelope. “You want to go to River and Bruce?”
“Yeah, Sid.” Peter snatched the envelope and stuffed it in his pocket.
“Cause Azban Sklar told you to?”
“Yeah, Sid.”
“The same Azban Sklar who put a contract on your head last week?”
“Yeah, Sid.”
“And increased it today, because you shot and maybe killed one of his Big Boys?”
“Yeah, Sid.”
“In front of him?”
“Yeah.”
“While he was trying to kill you?”
“Yes.”
“This doesn’t strike me as a particularly smart move, Pete,” Sid said, “and I’m not particularly smart.”
“No, you’re not, Sid.”
“So this place is more than likely going to have not only vampires that want to kill you but also a large number of hit men who want to kill. Not to mention the cops are still looking for you.”
Peter nodded.
“Think you might be walking into an ambush, Pete?”
“Sid, just shut the fuck up and drive.”
“It’s just that—”
“Pussywillow’s a vampire,” Peter said, “and she has to stay inside during the day. She can’t move around now, so she has to be there. She has to be. And I have to get to her before she moves. She knows where my dad is. She’s my only connection.”
“But if you just waited?”
“I don’t have much time, Sid,” Peter said. “I have to do this. I have to. Sun’s going to set in a couple hours. When it does, I’ve lost, and my dad’s dead, if he isn’t already. Now, I’m not asking you to come with me. You’ve done enough, Sid, you have. Just drop me off near River and Bruce. I’ll do the rest.”
“Sure you don’t want to go to Cha Chi’s?” Sid asked.
“I’m sure.”
Neither said anything for some time.
“Look Pete,” Sid broke the silence, “I’ve been thinking.”
“About what?”
“Couple things,” Sid said, “Maybe you oughta change your coat and stuff. I mean, they’re gonna be looking for a guy of your description and stuff. You know, a disguise.”
“Yeah, what else you been thinking of, Sid?”
“I’ll take you there, Pete,” Sid said, “and I’ll … I’ll wait for you. I promise.”
* * * *
Faintly, within the Colton Falls Historical Society building, beneath the kaw of a murder of crows, the sharp clack of typing could be heard.
The crows had gathered upon and around the many downcast statues in the yard out in front of the building. Every day at dusk it was their routine.
The statue faces were worn smooth and unrecognizable with age, with decay, with vandalism. Faces of history unrecorded and unremembered. Men and women who had performed great deeds, heroic deeds, deeds of valor and sacrifice in the name of something as intangible and oblique as the greater good. Men and women, who once had performed these deeds, now forgotten, forcibly disgorged from memory by necessity.
The door to the building burst open.
As one the crows took flight, kawing angrily as a man in a charred gray suit burst from within the building, his face hidden by the long gray shadows of dusk.
Chapter 35.
TIED ROUND HIS NECK by a thick leather shoelace was a fragmentation grenade. Absently poking his finger through the pin as though he might pull it, Kade Valentine sat watching, thinking. His thoughts were bent this evening on death, which was the status quo. Tonight, though, it was not his death that was the focus. The suicide hotline call takers would receive no call this evening. They would not have to debate, beg, make up ridiculous reasons for living. They would wonder, and they would joke, nervously.
Kade laughed; it was a wheezy, gurgled noise.
Even with the car heat on full blast, the hot dry air blowing in his face and on his feet, Kade Valentine shivered. Sweat trickled down his cheeks slowly. A quick swig of whiskey from the glove box and he warmed considerably.
His long duster was wrapped around his body tight, and his wide-brimmed hat was pulled down snug over his sweat-matted hair. The butts of his two pistols nestled at his hips were uncomfortable, yet comforting. He wiggled in his leather-bucket seat to settle them.
As the sun plummeted, he sat there in his green Mustang, heat blasting full, sweating, smoking, shooting whiskey and then gin and then whiskey, the sawed-off shotgun upon his lap. He waited and watched and waited outside the apartment complex, watching until dark as men and women entered and left the building.
The wind kicked grit and trash past him as he pulled himself from his car and crunched across the sand and blacktop to the phone booth. The man in the booth stood casually within, laughing as he spoke. Kade swaggered to the door, change in his pocket jingling with each step he took. Two quarters he placed in his palm and then pressed against the glass.
The cold circles mirrored his eyes.
The man inside paused, squinted, focused; his eyes dropped; he said a quick word into the phone and left.
Kade Valentine dropped the two quarters into the slot, punched ten numbers, then waited.
“It’s me,” he said. “Yeah … a lot of people … bald guy just went in a minute ago … fit the description … probably your boy, altered his appearance … you want I should go in? … No? That’s sweet of you … Discretion? I don’t do discretion … but I’ll do the job.” He hung up the phone and stepped out, gazing at the huge tenement looming ahead of him.
The wind was picking up.
* * * *
“Hello? Eric…? Jay? Hello, is anyone there?” he called. “Alex? Anyone, is anyone there? I can’t feel my legs.”
The basement floor of the apartment building was not dank. It was not dark, as you might expect the abode of a vampire to be. No stalactites hanging from ceilings, no satanic symbols or cauldrons boiling with blood, no rats scurrying underfoot, no screeching of bats or baying of wolves. In fact, the humble abode of this vampire was noticeably lacking in the creatures- of-the-night department.
It was in fact, quite comfortable, homey even. It smelled of potpourri. Perhaps it is a testament to the strength of this vampire’s will and character that her home did not degenerate into the post-modern-quasi-gothic/medieval sort of torture chamber one might come to expect. It happens to so many ghouls.
“Hello, is anyone there?”
The most alarming thing a casual perusal about the lair itself would reveal were the heads mounted on the walls. There were many of them, and their many dead eyes glazed out with sorrow into the pantry, the guest bedroom, and if you left the bathroom door open when you were sitting on the toilet, into your eyes. Rams mostly, one deer, and a moose, and not a particularly large moose. A large moose might have overwhelmed the room, might have made guests refer to it as the moose ro
om, which she did not want. She had chosen a smallish moose, an unobtrusive moose, for this very reason.
Out of respect for the dead, she dusted the heads on a regular basis, polished the eyes, and spit shined them, and never, ever allowed anyone to hang their coats on them. She had respect for the dead. It was for the living that she let her morals slide.
* * * *
Everything was blurry. How long had he been here? Where was here? Even without his contacts, his vision was never this bad. Hangover, Tim the frat boy thought. It was dark inside, and he could still see. The pounding in his head was getting worse, pulsing with every beat of his heart. He gave up calling for help. Hell, the bed was comfortable, more comfortable than his bed at the frat house, and this was definitely not the frat house. Definitely not. He looked around.
It was western motif as far as the eye could see. The walls were painted a light tan, and pictures of mountains and saloons and cowboys covered them. Outside the bedroom door, animal heads stared in. Outside the windows were cacti, mountains, and buttes and rivers. Except that they weren’t windows at all, they were paintings made to look like windows. The sun shone in them all.
Tim struggled for a moment against the bonds that held him in bed. Then he gave up, tired, tired and weak. Thinking hurt; moving hurt; Tim took a deep breath, and nonetheless, tried both.
A door closed in the animal head-room, and Tim looked up.
Odd, he thought to himself, looking past the half dozen lawn gnomes with red hats that jostled into his room. They crowded around his bed, smiling.
They weren’t the odd part. Behind them She stood. He had seen Her before, the woman, the angel, the demon.
* * * *
Rivulets of mud now beaded and coursed down his gray charred suit. At the bottom of the embankment, he slid to a halt, grunting; his oxford quality hat flipped off his head.
Frowning, he picked it up, poured the water out, and after one last glance up at his car, disappeared beneath the Joyce Bridge.
Cars streamed by overhead, and the river ran near. The water was high today, and it roared endlessly. Through the murk and the trash and the junk, he waded, pushing back deep. He was not quiet.
At the gateway to the subterranean realm of Tara, the Lord Brudnoy’s abode, Detective Winters stopped, studying it. It was still the same. Thick rusty bars stood before him and beyond, in the pitch, men, four of them. He could smell them, their fear, their confusion, their desperation. Dangerous. Strangers they were to him.
Detective Winters placed a hand on the cold rusty bars. “I need to speak with Lord Brudnoy,” Detective Winters said, his voice a strained whisper that cut through the roar of the river and the vroom of cars tooling by overhead.
Uneasy shuffling in the darkness and dripping water answered him.
“Open the gates, or I will,” Detective Winters warned.
“Scram, freak, or get a lead facial.”
“Freak, eh?” Detective Winters said. “You know me, then?”
“We know you, Defective,” cut in another voice. “We know all about you.”
“Open the gates or by Nodens’ spear—” Detective Winters said, his knuckles white in the dark.
“Screw off.” A wide face appeared in the dark behind the bars; it frowned. It was attached to a wide body. A shotgun barrel slid between the bars and pressed into Detective Winters’s stomach. “You got five seconds to boot.”
Detective Winters glanced down at the barrel. He slid his hands down the bars.
“One,” the man with the shotgun said.
Detective Winters met the man’s eye.
“Two.”
Detective Winters could smell the man’s breath, close.
“Three.”
Detective Winters pressed in closer.
“Four!”
Detective Winters grinned.
“Five!” He squeezed the trigger, “What the—?” He yanked on it.
Behind the shotgun trigger, Detective Winters had slid his finger. He held on for dear life. His own pistol was out, loaded, dug into the man’s ample belly. “I would like to speak with Lord Brudnoy, now.”
The man let go of the shotgun, and Detective Winters ripped it through the bars and tossed it away.
Blam!
Rats scurried in the dark.
“If you kill me, they’ll get you,” the man said, his pale moist face pressed between the bars. His breath was rank.
Detective Winters glanced left and right at the close walls of the tunnel. “You make an awful good shield.” Detective Winters glanced down at the man’s bulk. “What are they feeding the homeless nowadays?”
The man sweated audibly in the cold.
“Kielbasa?” Detective Winters asked. Then a new scent struck his nostrils, one more nauseating, one he recognized. “Salazar.” He craned his neck past the fat man.
“Let him go, Winters,” Salazar said, behind, from the darkness. “He’s on guard duty. Just doing his job.”
“He still is,” Detective Winters said, “my side now.”
“What do you want?” Salazar’s voice echoed.
“Brudnoy,” Detective Winters said, “I need to speak with him.”
“It’s Lord Brudnoy,” Salazar said, “and you can’t.”
“Time presses,” Detective Winters said.
“He doesn’t like you,” Salazar said.
“No one does,” Detective Winters said.
Salazar’s birch tree frame squeezed up next to the man against the bars, and he took a furtive glance past Detective Winters. He whisked off his glasses. “Jeeze, you look like sand-blasted dog shit,” Salazar said. “No offense, though. Rough night of killing?”
“I need to talk to him, Salazar.”
Salazar took a ragged breath, “He’s not here,” he whispered.
Detective Winters could smell it on Salazar, truth, a rare, distinctive scent as out of place on him as laughter in a nursing home. “Where is he?”
“Gone. I don’t know where,” Salazar said. “He … he broke the chain, late last night, early morning. I don’t know. No one knows. Our people are looking. We’re worried. Defenseless. If word gets out…”
Detective Winters peered at the bars, grasped one, and shook it. Rust fell. “Weak.” Detective Winters released the man, who backed off into the darkness.
Salazar stepped forward.
“Detective Winters, I know we’ve had our differences,” Salazar licked his lips nervously, “but that’s all in the past. I mean, that was all just a silly misunderstanding, right?”
“You hypnotized Brudnoy and told him I was a pork chop,” Detective Winters said, “and then locked me in a room with him for an hour.”
“I know.” Salazar solemnly placed his hands upon his pigeon chest. “We were both victims. No hard feelings here, though. And in light of your recent, ah, what’s the term? Career plummet? Ah yes, the Estate of Tara would be willing to provide generous compensation for any security services you might be willing to render.”
“No.”
“Then perhaps—”
“No.”
“Well if you—”
“I need Lord Brudnoy. You know him better than anyone. Where would he go?”
Salazar slumped against the bars, despair etched in the creases of his defeated face. “I don’t know,” he said. “Off raping and pillaging, I would guess. Maybe a, um…”
“His collar is off?” Detective Winters asked.
“Yes,” Salazar nodded slowly, “and his mind has been deteriorating fast lately. It’s like trying to deal with an eight hundred pound Alzheimer’s patient with fangs. Remembers what happened thirty years ago just fine, but what happened yesterday? You never know. And without his collar to keep him focused, he’ll be wild, an animal, practically. You’ll need it if you want to talk to him.” Salazar turned toward the darkness, “Romano, get Lord Brudnoy’s collar.”
Footsteps scuttled off into the darkness.
“Thirty years ago…”
Detective Winters muttered, and then he looked up. “Marduk’s balls.”
Salazar cocked his head. “What? What is it? You know something,” he said, as Romano appeared behind him, handing him a silver collar. Salazar held the collar out through the bars; then he withdrew it. “You swear you won’t kill him?”
“No.”
“Fair enough.” He held the collar out again.
“It is broken.” Detective Winters peered at the dangling broken collar. “What use is it?”
“We fixed it. See?” Salazar said.
“Duct tape?”
“Look, he could have broken it at any moment, but he didn’t. It keeps him regular, focused, sane, more or less, anyways. The burn of the silver bites through the insanity. It cools him down, somehow, usually…”
“Prozac.” Detective Winters took the collar.
“Just get it on him, and you’ve got a chance, maybe,” Salazar said. “If you can find him, detective.”
Detective Winters stuffed the collar into his coat, pulling a pistol out as he turned. “Reinforce the gates, Salazar,” Detective Winters said, sniffing the air. “They are coming.”
* * * *
Pussywillow glared down at the man, practically a boy, with distaste. She would have to wash those sheets. The scent of a frat house lay on him, a numbing bouquet of ignorance and malevolence, as satisfying as even love and charity, to the connoisseur. The dull rumble of hunger that was beginning to spasm through her stomach blazed at the sight, the smell, the scent of him. It was a disgrace even to touch him, though. He required cleansing. She sighed as she stretched dead muscles and tendons. It had been fitful sleep.
Pussywillow glanced with disdain at the redcaps hunkered around her. Chittering greedily, they clicked their teeth and iron claws together in growing anticipation of the deeds to come. Rust water oozed from their lips; they would desire meat before their slumber.
