Raptor: Urban Fantasy Noir

by Bostick, B. A.

  The Corbin’s neighborhood was more down scale than the Morgan’s. The houses were smaller and the upkeep not as good. Lawn cutting had been ignored by some residents; others used their front yard for extra parking. The Corbin house was neater on the exterior, but it had a solemn, internal look to it as if the residents seldom came outside to enjoy the fresh air. Bishop knocked.

  Behind him, Ariel was giving the neighborhood a once over, her eyes flitting from one house to another, taking in the cars parked at the curb, the toys and trash in the yards.

  “Stop that,” Bishop told her. “You’re making me nervous. I don’t want to spook these people.”

  The door opened a crack. Just above the doorknob Bishop could see one bright blue eye and a tangle of light brown hair.

  “Is your mother home?” he asked. “She’s expecting me.” The door opened wider.

  “She’s in the kitchen with Jen’fer,” the child informed him. “Jen’fer was hungry. She won’t wait when she’s hungry.”

  “Can we go back and talk to her?” The five year old led the way, her dirty flip flops making sticky flop, flop, flop noises on the scuffed hardwood floor of the hall.

  The kitchen was in the back of the house, a window over the sink looked out into a small backyard, and a door to the outside opened onto a chipped, cement driveway that ended at the fence.

  Mrs. Corbin was a harried-looking woman in her late thirties. She was just putting a small plate with a sandwich on it in front of a girl of about ten or eleven sitting in one of the four chairs at the small kitchen table. The child’s back was ramrod straight, feet firmly planted on the floor, hands folded in her lap. She was dressed in a red cotton skirt and a neat white blouse. Her mother looked up when Bishop and Ariel entered the room, but the girl ignored them.

  “Milk, please.” The girl said, in a flat voice that made it sounded more like an order than a request

  “Of course, of course.” Her mother hurried to the refrigerator.

  “Mrs. Corbin?” Bishop started.

  Mrs. Corbin waved an arm in their general direction. “Millie, take these people back into the living room. I’ll be right there.” Ariel and Bishop followed the flip flops back down the hall.

  The living room furniture, like the house, had seen better days, but the room was neat and clean although rather stuffy. The little girl turned on the television. It was tuned to the cartoon network. “Do you like cartoons?” she asked Ariel.

  “I like to play outside,” Ariel told her. “It’s more fun than cartoons.”

  “I can’t go outside without Momma,” The girl told her. “The bad people might come and take me away.”

  “What people?”

  “The people that took Jen’fer. They might come back an’ take me.”

  “Where did they take Jennifer, Millie?”

  “Church.” Millie nodded. “Jen’fer had to go to church for a long time.”

  “Millie!” Mrs. Corbin bustled into the room. “Turn off the television and go back into the kitchen. I put a sandwich for you on the table.”

  “I don’t want to go back there. Jen’fer doesn’t like me to bother her.”

  “Jennifer’s your sister, she loves you. Go on now.”

  Millie plodded off down the hall. Flop, flop, flop, flop, flop.

  Mrs. Corbin looked tired, but tightly wound. Her slacks were wrinkled and her shirt only partially tucked in. She pushed a stringy hank of hair behind her ear with impatient fingers. Her eyes looked like she expected trouble but was too harried and beaten down to fight it. “What’s this about? My husband’s at work and I don’t remember why you had to come talk to me right away.”

  Bishop and Ariel took seats on the edge of the couch, while Mrs. Corbin took the matching chair. Her hands gripped her knees.

  “If you’re from the school or Child Protective Services you can see Jennifer is just fine. I don’t know why that happened, that boy must have been bothering her. She was just defending herself. He probably fell. It’s only a broken arm. She’s just a girl.”

  “Whoa, Mrs. Corbin,” Bishop said. “I just came to ask a few questions about how Jennifer is doing. She’s been through a traumatic event and we’d just like to wrap this up.” Bishop was carefully vague about who the ‘we’ were.

  “She’s fine, just fine. You saw her in the kitchen, she’s better than fine, she’s perfect. She makes her bed and picks up after herself. She’s quiet and polite. Doesn’t have the mouth on her she used to. Maybe being away did her some good.”

  “How long was Jennifer away, Mrs. Corbin?” Ariel asked.

  “Don’t you have that in her file? Why are you asking me these questions all over again? You’re not the police officers I talked to when she went missing.”

  “My associate is new to the case, Mrs. Corbin,” Bishop said, smoothly. “You’ll have to forgive her if she’s missed some of the details.”

  “Five months and three days,” Mrs. Corbin said. “I was so worried, but . . .”

  “But you were told they’d bring her back?” Ariel asked.

  “Yes, yes. They told me they would if I’d just be patient.”

  “And not go public with her disappearance?”

  Mrs. Corbin looked down at her hands, they were twisting in her lap much like Sarah Elizabeth Morgan’s mother’s hands when she talked about her missing daughter.

  “They brought her back,” she whispered. “They did, just like they said they would, even though I told. But they said you’d soon get tired of looking and that was true.”

  “Did you inform the local precinct that she’d come back?”

  “Them!” Mrs. Corbin’s voice was full of contempt. “No, why should I? They didn’t care what happened to her. I put her back in school, that should have been good enough.”

  “Is she adjusting well to being back?”

  Mrs. Corbin fidgeted in her chair, looking at the floor rather than at Bishop. “I’ve decided to home school her. Her teachers just don’t understand what she’s been through.” She looked up defying him to disagree. “I can teach her everything she needs to learn right here.”

  “May I talk to Jennifer?” Ariel asked her. “Just for a minute?”

  “I, I don’t know. She’s not in trouble is she? Is that why you’re here? The school . . .”

  “She’s not in trouble with us, Mrs. Corbin,” Bishop said. “We just wanted to be sure she was okay.”

  “I guess it’s okay. I don’t think she’ll mind.”

  Ariel and Bishop exchanged a look. “I’ll stay here with you, Mrs. Corbin,” Bishop said. “My partner will just say hello to her.”

  * * *

  Ariel went down the hall into the kitchen. Millie was at the table eating her sandwich. Jennifer was standing at the sink looking out the window at the yard but without much interest.

  “Jennifer?” The child turned and looked at Ariel with flat, distant eyes. “My name is Ariel, I just wanted to ask you some questions.”

  “He pushed me,” Jennifer said.

  “The boy at school?”

  “He pushed me, so I pushed him back. He got what he deserved. Everybody gets what they deserve.”

  “Do they? Who told you that?”

  “They did.”

  “The people who took you?”

  “They helped me. I’m fine. Everything is fine now.”

  “Where did they take you Jennifer? Where did you go?”

  “Church,” Jennifer said. “They took me to church, and now I’m back and I’m fine.”

  She turned back to the window, cocking her head to look at a bird scratching in the grass as if she’d never seen one before and didn’t much care about seeing one now. “Go away,” she told Ariel. “I know who you are.”

  “You better go,” Millie whispered shifting her eyes quickly between Ariel, her sister’s back and the rest of her sandwich. “Jen’fer doesn’t like people in the house.”

  “No problem,” Ariel told the child. “I was just go
ing, anyway.”

  When she went back into the living room Mrs. Corbin leaped to her feet, rushing to open the front door and put a stop to any further conversation. “See Jennifer’s a perfectly normal, happy child. But I’m going to have to ask you to go now. I have a lot of things to do today and my husband likes his dinner on the table right at six thirty sharp.”

  “I’m very glad to hear that about Jennifer, Mrs. Corbin.” Bishop took her reluctant hand in his own for a perfunctory shake. “We appreciate your time and hope everything works out for your family. Say good bye to Millie and Jennifer for me.”

  The door closed behind them with a soft, almost imperceptible thud.

  * * *

  They’d parked in front of the house, a short walk from the Corbin’s front door. Bishop popped the locks with the remote as he stared absently over the roof of his car at the closed front door. Ariel got in on her side but followed the direction of Bishop’s gaze as the detective slid into the driver’s seat. She thought she saw a curtain twitch in the front window as they drove away. Jennifer Corbin’s homecoming hadn’t turned out to be the joyous occasions it was expected to be.

  “That woman’s so tightly wound up her head is about to spin off her shoulders,” Bishop said.

  “Really? If anyone’s head is going to start spinning I think it’s Jen ‘fer’s.” Ariel looked over her shoulder, a little chill settling on the back of her neck.

  “You think she’s possessed?” Bishop asked, perking up. “Like the Exorcist.”

  “Something’s going on. Her sister’s afraid of her and I think the mom is too.”

  “Yeah. Sounds like something happened at school recently. It’s too early for her to be home if she was still going. When does school get out?”

  “You didn’t go to school?”

  “Not here.” Ariel was dammed if she’d tell him she didn’t remember going to school. Hell, she didn’t remember Christmas or birthdays, a childhood or anything. Raptors didn’t have that.

  “With all these demons supposedly on the loose, why couldn’t it be possession?”

  Ariel sighed. She had to give Bishop points for trying to understand the strange mess he’d stepped into. Either that or he was pulling her chain. She knew he didn’t quite believe any of it was real yet. He kept looking for the wires, and the man behind the curtain.

  “Demons that possess humans are sly, but not very subtle. They take a body because it’s cruel and destructive and they think it’s fun to make the body perform disgusting acts of humiliation, but I don’t think that’s the situation here. A demon like that can’t wait to show off. It wouldn’t be able to resist an audience. But something has happened to that kid. She seems much older than eleven, bored, demanding and she seems to have the ability to hurt someone if she’s provoked.”

  “Well, if she’s come back maybe some of the others will too, just like Mrs. Corbin said. We can see if they act the same way. In the meantime we’ll keep an eye on the Corbin’s.” Bishop turned right.

  “Where are you going? I thought we were going to go back to the Caf’ to check on Mouser.”

  “I saw a school down this block on the way in. It’s almost three, I thought I’d ask if anyone knows about a kid who got his arm broken by a girl.” Bishop jockeyed with soccer moms in cars for a place at the curb.

  When the school doors burst open and kids piled out. He opened his door. “This’ll just take a minute, you can wait in the car.”

  Ariel slouched in the passenger seat watching kids in jeans, shorts, t-shirts, and barely butt covering skirts mill around, teasing and laughing and flirting, the boys dropping their books and punching each other in the arm while mothers honked impatient horns, wanting to whisk their darlings off to lessons and sports and other things that modern life used to fill up kid’s lives. She saw Bishop catch a few kids that looked about the same age as Jennifer. He was back in the car in five minutes.

  “Well?” she asked.

  “Little Miss Muffet broke an eighth grader’s arm.”

  “No shit?”

  “He started hassling her about where she’d been and why she seemed so stuck up since she’d been back, showing off for his buddies. He got too close to her and she took him down. Twisted his arm until it popped. He’s got a torn rotator cuff and a spiral fracture of the humerus. Sounds like the church taught Jen’fer some moves.”

  “This is not good,” Ariel said, wondering if this had something to do with the whole Tesslovich problem. She needed to find Mouser, then get Tesslovich taken care of before the Guardian found out he was still alive. Ariel had never blown an assignment before and she wasn’t going to blow this one, especially now that Tomas knew about it.

  Maybe too much time had passed already. Tesslovich was going to be looking out for her. He’d had time to build his defenses, get more body guards, put in alarms. There weren’t going to be too many unguarded moments. Success was going to take, subtlety, finesse. Luck. Ariel hated to rely on luck, it always got you back in the end.

  - 22 -

  Bishop had barely bumped the curb when Ariel jumped out of the car, slammed the door and hurried down the steps to the Caf’. Bishop slowed to a stop and turned off the ignition. “It’s okay,” he said as he watched her retreating back. “Don’t wait for me, I’ll be right there.”

  He sat for a minute savoring the quiet. He really hoped Mouser was down there, otherwise it was going to be a very long night.

  Bishop pushed the grimy door open. Ariel was deep in conversation with Ez who had just passed her a grey envelope the size of a party invitation from somewhere on the other side of the bar. Its shelves seemed to be the repository of all things. Just during his short visits to the Caf’, he’d seen Ez hand out shoes, bicycle parts, tools, a computer keyboard and what was obviously a prized video game by the way its recipient clutched it protectively to his chest.

  Ariel stuck the envelope in a coat pocket without looking at it, but she didn’t seem happy about getting it. There was no Mouser in evidence.

  Ariel looked up when Bishop joined them, Ez didn’t. Bishop thought the bartender watched everything out of the corners of his eyes. He seemed to know what was going on in the Caf’ at all times, even though he never looked directly at anything or anybody. Right then he was looking down at the bar top, nodding or shaking his head while Ariel asked him questions.

  “He’s not back,” she said. “Apparently he sent all the regulars out yesterday with copies of the pictures you brought and some of the other kids who’ve disappeared over the last few months.”

  “Where’d he get those?”

  “Google.” Ez said. It was the first thing Bishop had ever heard him say. His voice was deep and growly.

  “Is everybody back but Mouser?” Ariel turned to look around the room. Bishop followed her eyes. He’d never taken a really good look at the Caf’s ‘customers’ before. He just knew they were young and scruffy. Fashion was a mixed bag: grunge, punk, geek and creature of the night. He thought that was called Goth. Normally they’d all be hunched over their computers, or deep into some kind of graphic novel. This afternoon they were all watching Ariel and Ez, poised for news or action. Bishop, didn’t know which.

  A commotion in the kitchen turned heads. A few more kids pushed through its swinging door, to slip under the bar hatch and into the Caf’ itself. This batch was older, all wore layered t-shirts, tight leggings or bicycle shorts with flames painted on the sides.

  Bishop had seen kids like this all over downtown. He’d even used them to deliver contracts a few times. They were bike messengers, or, more accurately, maniacs with a death wish. Anybody who drove through the business district had seen them cut off buses, fly through red lights, slingshot off the back of trucks when they’d hitched a ride to get up a little more speed. They had the souls of Kamikaze, but he had to admit, they got around. If you wanted to send a gang out on a hunt, they were the guys. And girls. He saw more than one female daredevil in the pack.

  A
kid of about seventeen with a bright red Mohawk, several earrings, and a collection of tattoos seemed to be the leader.

  “Speed?” Ez asked him.

  The Mohawk shook his head. “Couldn’t find him. Zoe was the last one who had him on channel, then he dropped off and we haven’t been able to raise him since.” He patted the walkie/talkie strapped to his chest like a bandolier.

  “When was that?”

  Zoe turned out to be a ninety-eight pound whippet of a girl with short black hair and a ring in one eyebrow. “Last night around eight o’clock. I was on channel two. The dispatchers never use that one, and we keep switching so they don’t wise up and listen in. He said he was near Hauptmann’s, that old abandoned department store on third. He thought he might be able to get into the building.”

  “Why would he want to get into Hauptmann’s?” Ariel asked. “It’s been closed for almost twenty years. Is it a squat?”

  “Naw. Well . . . maybe, but everybody says the place is haunted so I told him to steer clear. All I got back was static.”

  “We went back and took a look today,” Speed indicated the rest of the bike messengers behind him. “They’ve sealed the building up pretty good with gates and bars an’ stuff. I don’t know how he’d get in. People stay away from that building, man. It’s got weird noises and lights, and sometimes the ground vibrates. I don’t ride near it and nobody, but nobody walks that side of the block at night.”

  “How did you decide who went where with the pictures?” Bishop asked.

  “Mouser gave us maps. Not that we don’t cover most of this burg everyday deliverin’ packages, but he didn’t want us wasting time overlapping.” Speed pulled a sweaty piece of paper out of his sleeve. It showed a section of downtown with subway entrances circled in red. “We went into the stations to talk to the trolls who panhandle there, but not any deeper than that.”

  “Yeah,” More than one of the bike messengers agreed. “The tunnels are bad news.”

  “I got a section near the vats.” one said.

  “Barkley squats,” another piped up. “