Deal with the Devil (Withrow Chronicles Book 3)

by Michael G. Williams

  Spying on him in secret, I felt dirty and voyeuristic and I couldn't even have begun to look away. It didn't hurt that he still smelled like a million bucks.

  The kid slipped the blouse over his head and down his perfectly sculpted bare chest until it rested flawlessly along his waist. He gently tested the fit of the trousers, just on one leg, to make sure he wouldn’t do anything bad to the fabric or the stitching by putting them on. I was surprised the outfit’s component parts had held up this well, but a bunch of grad students probably fought for the chance to spend each semester curating them. Maybe there was some modern stitch work under there, where no one would notice, to keep the seams together.

  The trousers seemed to withstand his initial probing so he very, very tentatively slid the other leg into them and then pulled the elastic waistband up around his midsection. Christ, the outfit did look like it was made for him. It fit him almost perfectly. I could tell it had been tailored for someone else, but the fact it had been tailored at all and yet it fit him this well was noteworthy. The shirt and trousers both fit him better than anything sold in any store ever would.

  He lifted the cowl and gazed at it, eye to eye. His breathing was very shallow.

  I thought he might have something to say, another slogan to try on for size, something, but he surprised me: he slipped the cowl on without a word. He did so almost hurriedly, like he knew doing it – putting on the actual mask – was a line he wouldn't be able to un-cross once he'd done it and he was afraid he'd lose his nerve. The cowl went on with just as perfect a fit as the rest. He toyed with the way it sat on his head for a moment, tied the chin straps under his jaw and wobbled his head around to make sure it would stay put. It did, and he let out a breath I don't think he realized he'd been holding.

  It's worth noting I don't love a thief but neither do I hate one. Glass houses and all that, and I know it. I’ve certainly trespassed more times than I could possibly begin to count. This kid smelled like sleeping late on a Monday morning and despite the cameras, despite the Twitters or whatever, the appetite at the core of my being wanted to step up to the ice cream cone and take a lick. That was extremely worrying in light of having just found out a stranger was on my turf and visiting the hospital next door when he wanted a snack. Even though I knew I was going beyond what I would normally do, and was way over the line into bad ideas, I stood up and cleared my throat. Apparently what I aim to spend forever doing is introducing myself to the absolute worst choice of mortals I can make in any given situation.

  The kid was tying the laces of a pair of black leather jump boots, squatting down with his back to me, and when he heard me he stood and turned to face me in one long, graceful movement that was not what I expected. He was an athlete and he moved with confidence but the way he stood and turned was beyond human capability. He moved with a ripple of leonine elegance, and the suit! I marveled again at how great it looked on him. I could see his musculature shift under the fabric. He was actually a little bigger, a little better built, than the person for whom the clothes were made and it made them work even better by modern fashions.

  I drew a breath and spoke. “Listen, I don't know what all you're trying to be about with this, but you're in real danger.” I let a hand sweep take in him and the busted display case and the opposite thumb jutted towards the propped open front door. “There are some electronics that just came on a few seconds ago. I would guess those are a silent alarm, from the door being propped open for some predetermined period of time. That's pretty common with physical security systems. More importantly, though, there's this, um.” I struggled to find a way to phrase it emphatically but discreetly. “There's this really bad dude who's around. He’s just, you know, around? Somewhere? I'm not sure where. Anyway, he's probably really, really interested in you for reasons I shouldn’t bother to explain and you wouldn’t believe anyway, and all that’s to say -”

  A disturbingly serene smile broke out on that part of his face visible under the nosepiece of the cowl. It made me slow down and peter out but he interrupted outright before I ran out of steam. “The Bull’s Eye? I know. A bad dude, indeed.” He gave this snorting little laugh, a kind of a strangled guffaw. I think he hoped it would be menacing or maybe indicate that the topic was but a trifle to him, I don't know, but he pointed at me and did that finger-like-a-gun thing of used car salesman and other psychopaths. He went on, saying, “But do you know who's a much, much badder dude?” He grinned now. “Me. In fact, I'm the worst of them all. I'm –“ His voice caught for a second. “I’m El Diablo and I am going to destroy this school, this town and The Bull’s Eye with them if he gets in my way!” Then El Diablo, without irony, lifted his chin and gave me an honest-to-gods villain laugh, like something out of a Hanna-Barbera cartoon, before growing abruptly serious. “But who are you? A campus cop?” His face got a lot less friendly. “One of the fenced-in pigs come to shut me down? Some dressed down security guard?” He was snarling the words now and his face had grown grim. His hands were flexing open and shut. He wanted to use them on something. I wasn’t scared of him, of course, but I didn’t want to hurt him either.

  “Now, listen kid, I ain't nobody's cop so just take it easy.” There are a lot of little tricks of body language one can use to calm someone else down and they mostly involve broadcasting calmness on one's own part. People don't chill out when someone shouts at them to chill out. They relax when they see others relaxing. I stuck my left hand into my pocket as I gestured with the right: my hand out, flat, palm down. It was a pose of ease, a gesture that is neither commanding nor supplicating. I’ve had decades to practice this, and I know what works.

  “I said... I. AM. EL. DIABLO.” Then the kid – El Diablo – went from standing still to an open sprint much faster than most of the humans in the world and maybe some of the newer, weaker vampires. He shot past me in the blink of an eye and was out the door.

  My mouth was still open. OK, so the body language usually works but not always.

  As I stared at the space where he’d been when he disappeared from sight, a third presence made itself known. A rumbling bass voice said, “Wow. Don’t see that every day.”

  I turned around, very slowly, expecting the interloper to be standing there. Instead there was a guy who would have been extremely handsome if he weren’t covered in blue scales like an exotic fish. His eyes were the color of honey if it could go bad and he had little black horns with very sharp tips erupting from the flesh on his forehead. “I’m Ross,” he said. His voice was apple butter and dark chocolate. The weird scales stopped mattering. He was gorgeous. His voice reached right down into my stomach and chased butterflies. “I bet you’re Withrow.”

  I started to ask something real smart, I’m sure, but he waggled a finger. “No, no,” he interrupted. “No questions just yet. First we meet-cute, then we get to know each other.”

  I blinked.

  He lifted one hand, snapped his fingers and was gone in a puff of yellow smoke.

  I walked nearly an hour to get back to my car, drove back to Raleigh and pretended it had never happened just as hard as I possibly could.

  4

  The Bull’s Eye was on patrol on a new route when she found The House.

  Ann read the stories about her ridiculous exploits on that one lucky night of neighborhood patrol and never looked back. The next time she went out she thought of herself as The Bull’s Eye without consciously deciding about it. The identity was a full-body disguise so natural she didn’t even need to spend time adapting to it. Everything shifted into place for her when she put that name on. Even her walk changed a little. It was as close to an experience of magical transmogrification as she was ever likely to experience.

  Ann had felt dead inside for so long. When she went out as The Bull’s Eye she could feel her soul breathe.

  Ann told herself she had taken to that identity because it sounded good and she needed something other than her life as a janitor at Durham Technical Community College, something more li
ke the blank slate of a completely new identity. She'd gone out every night since catching the burglar and busted up a couple of other smallish crimes: she chased off a car thief, for instance, then left a note of sorts under the windshield wiper. On the slip of paper were three concentric circles drawn in red marker to make sure she got the credit. The paper was only too happy to emphasize that detail. Ann later learned the car’s owner had offered the note for sale to the newspaper and a couple of local stations as though they would pay for something on which she'd doodled.

  She bought herself some new clothes for patrol: black cargo pants, a black cap, a black head wrap to hide her shoulder-length hair and black fleece tops that were reversible so that she could turn them inside out and they would be various extravagant colors: easy to see and hard to square with a description given by a witness. She could, in seconds, go from a panther stalking the night to being any other woman out for a walk, if needed, and that was exactly what she wanted.

  The House was just a normal, two-story structure in the mill town style: wider than it was deep with white clapboard siding, a metal roof and a satellite dish bolted to the railing on the front porch, pointed at an unlikely angle. There were a few thousand just like it scattered around Durham's oldest neighborhoods, at least in the places where they hadn't been razed by highway projects or “renewal.” They were historical artifacts now, but many of them were also still someone's home.

  The street in question was an otherwise anonymous row of working class homes built across several eras and with varying degrees of optimism. There was absolutely nothing about The House, casually viewed at driving speed, to make it stand out as special or to distinguish it from the half a dozen others just like it dotting the surrounding blocks. The Bull’s Eye had been trained to spot the little things someone might haphazardly hide. She saw things of interest where others would not: broken down cardboard moving boxes sitting by the recycling bin, for instance. They had the logo of a truck rental place on them and they were emblazoned with the words WE SELL BOXES. In a world already full of unused cardboard boxes, these people had gone and bought new ones with which to tote their junk across town – the truck rental place was local, not a chain – only to fold them back up and dispose of them again.

  There were other signs of things being slightly off: windows with thick double curtains drawn shut over an additional layer of sheers and four prominent NO TRESPASSING signs posted at the edges of the front yard. Whoever had moved in was scared of the people around them. She wondered if they marked some new front line in the ongoing gentrification of neighborhoods just outside downtown or if the people who’d moved in were simply new to being upper lower class. There were certainly plenty such people in the post-recession economy: people whose jobs went away and would never return or whose industries fled somewhere less interested in a living wage. Maybe it had been a bad divorce or a sudden death. Maybe there had been a fire at the old place. Maybe a child had died. Those no-trespassing signs were sometimes the last refuge of a person who had been shocked by something and retreated into their living room – well-appointed or poorly so, white or black, invested in fantasy or indulging in it – in hopes the world outside would change to their liking without them having to get too involved.

  Of course, sometimes they simply served to announce a meth lab. The Bull’s Eye slowed down as she walked past it, then stopped. She dawdled and watched it casually, just giving it the once over.

  One of the curtains inside twitched aside for about half a blink of an eye, then closed again. If she hadn't been looking at the house, Ann would have missed it.

  She stood stock still for a few seconds – she had slowed between two trees, on a block where there was no working streetlight, and she was clad in the discount store equivalent of a cat suit. She should be effectively invisible to anyone inside the home – they had lights on, glass windows and no light on her – but someone inside had looked right at her and then hidden again.

  That word stuck in her mind: hidden.

  The first question to present itself to her was whether it would be okay for a superhero to break into someone's home on suspicion they were weird. Wanting privacy wasn't a crime. Looking out your own window wasn't a crime. Still, something about it bothered her. Something she couldn't quite name was needling the back of her neck. She knew from her training and her years of service that one should listen to the Spidey senses when they go off. The gut is almost always right. She would never know the number of soldiers she’d interviewed who said they just knew not to take a certain path, to stop, to swerve. She knew many more who had not listened to that little voice and lived to regret it.

  The Bull’s Eye found herself frustrated by the certainty she had no excuse to act on what her gut was telling her: that something on the house was wrong. She wanted to find out what. It was not a desire or a curiosity; it was a calling.

  Well, she told herself, those people had just moved. Maybe someone should welcome them to the neighborhood. There was no law against looking out a window and there was no law against knocking on a door. She weighed the possible outcomes – angry, shotgun-toting neighbor answers vs. no one answers, to describe very briefly the ends of a broad spectrum of results – and decided it was worth the risk of initiating some dialogue.

  The Bull’s Eye stepped out from between the beautiful but age-gnarled, claw-fingered oaks and strode confidently across the deserted street, across the yard, onto the front walk, up the two wooden steps of the whitewashed front porch and right up to a white front door. She pressed the glowing orange button of the doorbell. A harmless and generic chime sounded inside, two thirds of a major chord, and then she heard the doorknob move and was only a little surprised she hadn't also heard footsteps.

  It was as though whoever was about to answer had been standing there waiting for her to ring.

  The door opened slowly, tentatively, and on the other side of the screen door was a tall and very thin boy. Ann had worked around plenty of kids his age when she was in the army and she knew he was technically a man but she thought of them as boys all the same. He was Caucasian with dark brown hair and thick black eyebrows in a slightly darker shade. He was clad in worn out blue jeans and a light gray sweater. He had so many bags under his eyes he needed help getting the groceries to the car. He looked like he hadn’t slept in six months. The boy was gaunt and almost gray in the dim light available to her: a TV inside, a street light in the next block and The Bull’s Eye's utterly human night vision. “We don't want any,” he said. “We're on the Do Not Call list. Doesn't that cover this stuff, too?”

  Ann blinked and said, “I'm not... Wait, I'm not selling anything.” She hesitated; she hadn't done this in a long time and there was rust on all the social hinges. It shook her a little. “I'm... the welcome wagon.” She cleared her throat. “Neighborhood watch. You know. Just coming by to say hello, see if I could help with anything.”

  The guy had only opened the door about the width of his own nose. He stood there, with most of a solid wooden door between them and she could tell he was absolutely terrified. “OK,” he finally replied. “But we're fine.” He closed the door without another word. Ann heard it lock again, and again, and again. The kid had three different deadbolts on his side and he’d thrown them all after just that little interaction.

  Ann stared at the door, at the space where he’d been when she spoke to him, and shrugged. Definitely gentrification. She didn't have any other immediate conclusions about them. Something still struck her as off but it could easily enough be dismissed as paranoia after recent events. She had spent two days “sick” from work, waiting for the cops to show up and arrest her. She had watched every newscast, in rotation, for anything other than what she got: positive buzz from every station’s usual motley crew of people on the street. Nobody quite knew what to think about her but nobody liked burglars, either. She was certainly the lesser of two evils in that one specific circumstance, which is better than she had thought it would be. The car
thief thing had sealed the deal. People loved her on the six o’clock news. That made her nervous more than reassured her. If the media loves anything more than a narrative it’s a chance to flip that narrative into a twist ending. If they liked her now they would hate her in six months no matter what happened.

  That was neither here nor there, though. The Bull’s Eye had gotten a twinge of intuition, had acted and had found nothing strange. Time to move on: there were plenty more blocks to walk in the dark of this one particular night.

  She was halfway down the front steps when the door unlocked and the guy called out to her, only he was in different clothes: khakis and a Duke University t-shirt and some of those ridiculous rubber shoes everyone was wearing at the time. She turned and then did a double take at the instantaneous costume change. “Please don't go,” the boy said. “My brother's just having one of those days.”

  “Twins.” She didn't realize that was out loud until she heard herself saying it. Ann got her hand halfway to her mouth to cover it before deciding it wasn't worth the effort. “Sorry. I... I didn't expect that. I was explaining to your brother that I'm from the neighborhood watch. I just wanted to say hi, check in, see if you need anything.”

  “No,” he said, and though he didn't look as bad as his brother he also seemed to be running on something less than a full tank. “No, I think we're fine. Thanks for stopping by.” He paused, hesitating in a doorway he’d opened farther than his brother but, Ann noticed, not all the way. He seemed to want to say something else but nothing was coming out.

  “What’s your name?” Ann knew the polite thing would have been to introduce herself but she hadn’t thought this through that far. She was suited up for patrol. Giving people her name might not be the smartest idea if they put two and two together. She didn’t even know if these parts had a neighborhood watch.