by Stacia Kane
“What does that have to do with her?”
Speare set down the now-empty glass, hard. “What the fuck is your problem with her? You asked me to do something for you, and I’m doing it. Who I bring in to help me is my decision.”
Laz didn’t appear to agree, at least not entirely, but he didn’t argue. “What has she told you?”
“I’m getting to that,” Speare said. “The men, the creatures, who were at my house last night. I think they’re after a demon-made item, too, one that might—might be connected to this whole thing.” Shit, he’d almost said “one that might help me get rid of my demon.” He really was fucking exhausted and out of it, to come so close to letting that slip.
Or maybe his subconscious just wouldn’t stop rolling that idea around, obsessing over it, no matter how much he tried to pretend it wasn’t. “It’s a mirror. They—”
“Goddamn it.” Laz looked almost angrier than Speare had ever seen him. “I want to know who’s killing my men, and you’re supposed to be finding out for me. Instead you’re dicking around with some woman, telling her my—”
That was it. He felt like utter shit, he couldn’t go home, his secret had been revealed in the most humiliating way possible, and he was getting yelled at by some Bizarro Laz who seemed like a stranger. Worst of all, that yelling was waking up the beast. “Hey, Laz? Whatever your problem is right now, I think you need to take it somewhere else.”
“Guys,” Majowski said. Shit, he’d forgotten Majowski was still there, and apparently Laz had, too, if the way he jumped was any indication. “Can we not do this? I need to call in the department soon, and this isn’t getting anyone anywhere. Laz, for what it’s worth, Ardeth seems perfectly trustworthy to me. I think she’s been helpful.”
A long moment passed, during which Laz seemed to be warring with himself over something. Then he relaxed. “Yeah. Okay. I’m sorry, Lazaro. This unhappy business…I’m too old for this, you know. It’s too stressful. You’re a good boy. You always have been.”
As apologies went—at least, as apologies from Laz went—it was pretty good. One of the best Speare had ever heard, in fact. But something in him wasn’t satisfied. Stress didn’t explain why Laz had such a problem with Ardeth—such a personal problem, apparently, since his issue didn’t seem to be so much that she was there or that she wasn’t a man but that she was Mickey Coyle’s daughter. Stress didn’t explain why he didn’t want to hear about the mirror, or the men who’d been at Speare’s place.
And Speare didn’t want to ask. Something told him he ought to keep those observations to himself, and that something wasn’t fear. Instinct, maybe.
Or just the fact that he wanted the conversation to end as soon as possible. His head was screaming at him. The beast was wiggling around, still sleepy, but the anger in the air was waking it up more every second. And Ardeth was standing by herself several hundred feet away. “Sure. No problem. But listen. Ardeth set me up with the guy who asked her to procure a sword. He told me the client called himself Mr. Dunhill.”
As he’d expected, the name made Laz’s eyes go cold with anger. “Mr. Dunhill? He told you that?”
“Yeah.”
“Good.” Laz nodded. “Good, we can follow up on that. How do you know this person—who was it?—told you the truth? Thieves don’t give out that information.”
“I was persuasive.”
Laz’s thin smile cleared the air a little. “I imagine you were. That’s my boy.”
Speare ignored that. Cleared air was all well and good, but he wasn’t a child, ready to forgive because of a couple of compliments. “Nielsen’s his name. Nielsen—”
“Pollard,” Laz said. Did he look paler again, or was that the sun dipping behind one of the few small clouds in the sky? “Nielsen Pollard. Of course. One of Coyle’s buddies. She’s got you meeting up with all of them, has she? Letting them all get a look at you?”
So much for the air quality. “One more word,” Speare said, and was almost but not quite surprised to discover how serious he was, “and I’m fucking out of here, and you can get your own men to help you with this.”
“Damn it.” The basset hound was back. “Okay. Okay, listen. Let me tell you something. I knew Mickey Coyle. I knew his friends. You understand, there’s some bad blood there.”
“Why is that?” The question was more idle curiosity than anything else, but as soon as it was out of his mouth he realized it might actually be important. He’d assumed Ardeth’s low opinion of Laz came from a general dislike of his business, but maybe it was more than that. Maybe Nielsen had some kind of grudge—maybe there was a reason Fallerstein’s man Dunhill had called Nielsen instead of some other dealer when he started looking to target Laz and his men.
And maybe the mirror had more to do with the demon-sword than he’d originally guessed.
“Doesn’t matter,” Laz said, derailing Speare’s train of thought. Damn it, he didn’t have the energy to focus on more than one thing, not then. Later. Later he’d think about that, too. “Personality issues, let’s say. But you’re right. The girl isn’t her father. It’s this Paulie business. I just can’t believe it.”
That much was clear. He’d never seen Laz like this. Ping-Pong balls in play had better stability. “You think they got him here? Maybe something on the security camera?”
“I’ll have a look,” Laz said. “But I don’t know. I doubt it. Did Pollard give you a description? So we can be sure.”
“He didn’t have one.” Then, as Laz’s mouth started to open, “Voice on the phone was all he had.”
For the first time Laz reacted the way he normally would, nodding with a what-can-you-do sort of expression. “Well, you look into it. Find out if he’s truly involved. Then you call me, you come over, and we’ll discuss it. Make a plan. Tonight.”
It was obviously not a request. Speare nodded, despite his inner groan. Track Dunhill down, find out what he and Fallerstein were up to, and do it all when he was so exhausted and dragged-out that he could barely stand.
“Don’t bring the girl,” Laz said.
Like he would. He didn’t bother replying to that one; he just gave Laz a flat stare.
Laz nodded. “You look out for her, though. Her father was a liar and a cheat and you know what they say about apples and trees. You stay away from her. She’ll lie to you and cheat you, too.”
Yeah, Speare knew. He also knew—would have known even without the beast’s pleasure—that Laz wasn’t telling him everything. Lies of omission were still lies.
Part of him thought that wasn’t really a big deal; so what if Laz wanted to lie to him? Since when did the old man always tell the truth?
But to lie about Ardeth, to be so angry when he saw her…something wasn’t right there.
And something was definitely wrong on the face of Jimmy Chambers when the elevator delivered him to the roof. Jimmy was one of Laz’s men, a new guy Speare didn’t know very well, but he didn’t need to know him well to be sure that his expression didn’t say anything good and that Jimmy had been sick at least once.
“We found a head,” Jimmy said. His voice shook. “In the trash in Room 703. It’s Paulie, Mr. Doretti. I’m sorry.”
Silence fell, while all four men absorbed the news. Confirmed, then. It was Paulie. Bad news.
Not as bad as what was apparently coming next. Jimmy lifted his right hand, from which hung a cloth laundry bag, in which something lumpy obviously resided. Oh, no. Oh, no…
“I brought it up,” Jimmy said.
“You what?” For the first time that afternoon, Majowski sounded pissed. “You moved it?”
Laz waved his hand. “We’ll take care of it. We’ll get it back down there. I want to see it first.”
Jimmy plunked the bag down on the ground, right next to Speare’s empty glass. If only he had another of those. He really needed another of those. It seemed to him that if someone was going to go delivering decapitated heads to people, a bottle ought to come with it for free.
But there was no bottle. There was only the cloth bag and then the plastic bag inside it falling away from Paulie’s head, his slack mouth, his unseeing eyes. There was only the beast’s triumphant joy. It hadn’t thought it would get a chance to play with something so twisted so soon.
And there was the scent of incense, a weak blast of it that hit him a second after the bag opened. The same incense. He glanced up at Majowski, ready to say something, but he didn’t need to. That Majowski noticed it, too, was plain from the faint wrinkle in his nose, the knowledge in his eyes.
“Is the mark there?” Majowski asked. “Maybe you want to get a picture of it?”
No. He did not want to get a picture of it, or touch it. “Sure.”
This time the jolt was worse. This time the beast was awake, ready. Anticipating the dark magic that would invade Speare’s body as soon as he touched the head, anticipating the power it could pull from such things that humans couldn’t.
All the progress he’d managed to make in the previous twenty minutes or so disappeared. It wasn’t as bad as it had been at Nielsen’s place—the beast wasn’t escaping—but it was bad in its own way. He was too tired for this. He couldn’t do it, not then.
Especially because it was worse than it had been with the leg, and worse than it had been with Mercer’s one-armed torso. Whatever the killers were doing with that demon-sword, it was working. It was absorbing the evil of their acts and the evil of their intent; they were strengthening it with every use, and all of that strength made the beast chuckle and wiggle.
“Who rented that room?” he heard Doretti ask. “What name was on it?”
“Ingram. Val Ingram.”
That name registered with him even over the horror he felt touching the head. Val Ingram was another of Fallerstein’s higher-ups.
Before he had a chance to say anything, Doretti spoke again, his voice low with rage. “Why the fuck aren’t those bastards banned from my places? How did he manage to get a room here? What the hell are they up to?”
The other men mumbled something Speare didn’t bother to pay attention to, and he didn’t want to stand there and listen to them squabble all day. He stood up.
“I think—” How to put this, so he didn’t let on that some of his information came from a source inside his head? “Ardeth says last night’s victim was a lockpick, and a lefty. They took his left arm. They took Theo’s right. We were thinking they’re taking the most talented parts of their victims. Maybe even building themselves some sort of monster.”
Majowski was the first to catch the implication of what they found. “And now they have a torso. They have two legs, two arms, and a torso.”
“Right.”
“So all they need is a head,” Jimmy said.
“Yeah.” Something even more unpleasant hit him. “But why would Ingram register here under his own name? Why not make one up—at least try to conceal his involvement? Why don’t they care if we know what they’re up to?”
None of the other men spoke. Even with the murderous glare on their faces, it was clear the thought bothered them as much as it did him. If Fallerstein and his men weren’t bothering to hide their involvement, if they weren’t afraid of being found out, then what they had planned must have been terrible indeed. And Speare knew—he just knew—he was going to be the one who dealt with it.
—
Ardeth pressed a plastic cup into his hand as soon as he sat down in the passenger seat of the Dart; she was driving again, because once again he couldn’t do it. “Whiskey. It seemed to help before.”
He downed it. Warmth trickled back through his limbs, not much, but some. Enough to make him feel a little more alive again. Not enough to sit up, but better; he could keep his eyes open, watch the city roll past. “Thank you.”
“Don’t mention it.”
He sighed. Any second now she’d ask the question. Any second. And he was going to have to answer it. He couldn’t refuse, not after what the beast had done to her, the way it had grabbed her. She deserved to know.
And suddenly he wanted to tell her. He watched a strip mall go past, all sandy stucco in the high bright sun, and thought about the people in the stores, the people around them in their cars. All those lives. All so isolated. He didn’t want to be isolated at that moment, not then. He wanted something more than that. Something he’d never had, and he wanted it with her.
“It lives in my head,” he said, without realizing he’d actually made the decision to speak. “The beast. The demon, I mean—it’s a demon, but that’s all I know. It won’t give me its name.”
“How did it get there?” She was so calm, it seemed. At least, he didn’t detect any sort of anxiety or excitement, even, in her voice. And the beast had blessedly gone back to sleep once Speare had gotten it away from the body parts and angry men. It needed more time to recover, too.
“I don’t know. I don’t know if I was born with it, or what. I only know it’s there.” He was suddenly glad she was focused on the road, and that he still had his sunglasses on. It was easier to talk without her looking at him, watching him; easier to talk when he didn’t have to look at her, when he could just stare out the window or down at the whiskey in his cup, or close his eyes and watch the memories play like movies against his eyelids. “I started hearing things, feeling things, when I was about thirteen. It started moving in my head, and I felt that. I still do. It got louder and louder, it put images in my head, horrible images. Then one night I woke up—I came to—downtown, with blood on my hands and no real memory of how I got there or what I was doing, and I could hear it laughing at me.”
“God.” She still didn’t sound scared…but for all he knew, she was frantically planning what to pack in her getaway bag so she could take off for good, and never see him again. “You must have been terrified.”
“It wasn’t fun.” That was an understatement. He had been terrified. He’d been terrified when the beast started putting fantasies in his head, too—dark, twisted fantasies of violence and sex he still had to fight off sometimes in his dreams.
And now he could be free of it. He could get rid of it, and he could tell her—in this conversation that felt so important, that felt like stripping himself naked—that he was going to be free of it.
Except he couldn’t. He was not going to start counting his demons before they were exorcised. He was not going to let himself jump at the idea of freedom so recklessly, so eagerly. He’d done that before. He’d allowed himself to hope so much that the hope started to become reality in his head; he’d allowed himself to hope so much that it became a poison in his veins when he inevitably found that the only things he’d managed to lose were money, time, and—usually—a not-inconsiderable quantity of his own blood. Feeling that hope shatter like a truckload of plate glass windows hit by a locomotive hurt more every time.
He couldn’t do that again. He wouldn’t let himself do that again.
So he was going to keep his fucking mouth shut, and his fucking hands off. Because that was what he was thinking, wasn’t it? Yeah. It was. And he didn’t even want to imagine how he’d feel if he let himself entertain that little fantasy and it crashed. It would make the pain currently turning his body into an inescapable medieval torture device feel like lying in a hammock made of velvet and breasts, or something.
The beast had already taken his freedom from him, years before. No way was he letting it take anything else, even if that meant not allowing himself to have anything it could take.
“And you don’t know why it’s there. Like, why you.” It wasn’t a question.
“Nope. I used to wonder if my father was like this and it got passed down to me—I know what everyone assumes there, but I don’t think my mother knows for sure who he was. It might be a spell or I touched the wrong thing at the wrong time or…” Another drink, a longer one. “Who knows. I guess we all get what we deserve, somehow.”
“I don’t think that’s the case, all the time,” she said. “Not always.�
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Yeah. Easy for her to say. He knew better. He hadn’t asked for the beast and the need to sin, but he hadn’t been forced to spend so many years enjoying it, either.
And he knew what the beast thought. How it felt that he was the perfect vessel. It had made that very clear over the years, that it wouldn’t have been so comfortable and happy in anyone else’s head, that something about him made them perfect for each other. “Anyway. One day I was out wandering around and I was hungry. My mother had been gone for a couple of days, working or whatever—she didn’t usually do that, but every once in a while she’d just sort of disappear. She wasn’t cruel, you know? Just forgetful, and she figured I could take care of myself by then.”
“Sure.”
“I didn’t have any money but I was hungry, so I went into a 7-Eleven and stole a bag of corn chips.” He could still taste those corn chips, too, and how scared he’d been when he took them, how good they’d been. “And it stopped. I mean, it didn’t stop, but it stopped for a while. The sounds in my head, the feeling of it moving around, it all went away. It was still there—I knew it was still there, it’s always there—but I could ignore it. I could feel almost normal.
“At first I thought it was corn chips that made the difference,” he went on, and was surprised, and pleased, when Ardeth laughed with him. “I mean, I ate like three bags a day. But it wasn’t the food itself. It was stealing the food.”
They passed a Laundromat, a Mexican restaurant. A vacant lot, fenced in with construction signs; the city growing, rising, around them. “That was what did it. The sin. It still does. If I want to keep it quiet, if I want to keep it from busting through like it tried to do today…and I always want to keep that from happening…that’s what I have to do, is sin.”
She was silent for a few minutes, absorbing that. He dared to glance at her and found her absently chewing on her thumbnail, thinking, as she watched the road through her sunglasses and the sun turned her hair into a halo of deep fire.
