In the Garden of Rusting Gods

by Patrick Freivald

  In this line of work you couldn’t be too careful.

  9

  I walked up the stairs, revolver in hand, and rolled my eyes when I got to the second-floor landing. My door lay ajar, glass shattered, safety screening torn through. The hall lay silent, but my nose told me they’d left me a surprise.

  Great.

  I stepped inside to a catastrophe. Laptop smashed to pieces, desk contents scattered, filing cabinets overturned with the papers scattered everywhere. Whatever they’d been looking for, they didn’t find—all this crap was just for show, to make it look like I dealt with bees and ants and things, fifteen years of paperwork for jobs never done, invoices never paid.

  Extermination was a cash business.

  You ever seen a mouse turd? They’re shaped like an elongated football about the size of a grain of rice, brown-black, real solid. Wererat turds are much the same, only the size of your thumb. This explained the thumb-sized football shapes on my desk, floor, and paper-piles. Stupid.

  I leaned over one, breathed in real deep, let the body-processed fast food and dumpster garbage fill my nostrils. All things considered, it wasn’t quite as bad as Duncan’s Dew. I sampled a few more, careful not to touch them.

  And now I had two clues: the scent of three rats, and a dark, beat-up coup, license plate STS-3951. Shouldn’t be too hard to find.

  Now I needed some clothes.

  10

  The extermination business has certain hazards. And I’m not just talking about careening off an overpass into traffic while some crazy broad is chewing your arm off. Turns out people don’t much like getting killed, and tend to take it personally. That whole “it’s not personal, it’s business” thing is for the movies, and having a home address isn’t a great idea.

  So Mike Symanski’s apartment isn’t rented out to Mike Symanski, it’s rented out to Chris Picknett. Chris is the best kind of roommate—dead. He doesn’t eat much and keeps the vermin out, and doesn’t have the corporeality to be much more than an amusement. He flicks the lights and rattles the cupboards now and then because he doesn’t like company, especially when that company shot him in the face fifteen years earlier.

  Don’t worry, he deserved it.

  After making sure I wasn’t tailed, I made it home, took a nice long shower to wash off the disinfectant from the morgue and made myself the breakfast of champions—a Pop Tart and a half-dozen cigarettes. Chris unplugged the toaster halfway through, so I ate them luke-warm.

  Any excuse for a party.

  11

  Now you might expect me to have some beat-up desktop computer, with a big, chunky monitor circa 1995. It fits the stereotype, sure, but the demands of my work require something with a little more oomph.

  In 2009 I traded my iPad, twelve thousand dollars, and a phial of a virgin princess’s tears for a sleek, black machine of unknown provenance. You know how a genie in a bottle will grant wishes in exchange for its freedom? Well, it turns out that an Ifrit in a motherboard is right at home, as long as she’s helping you kill people. She calls herself “Saffak,” which almost certainly isn’t her real name, but it didn’t matter to me either way.

  I typed in the license plate and found the car reported stolen, found, and impounded waiting release; a dead end. So I exhaled the scent of the idiots who trashed my apartment into the USB port. Two seconds later I had dossiers on siblings Tim, Gina, and Danny Bianchi—and their sister Mindy, RIP—and a home address for Danny in Olgilvie Moor, one of the newer McMansion clusters off the interstate, a maze of cul de sacs and half-million-dollar homes backed up to state forest. Weird, a family of rats living in a wolf neighborhood. Really weird.

  Saffak purred, her fans whirring in that pleased, someone’s-gonna-die way she had.

  I don’t think she cared whether or not that someone was me.

  12

  Stake-outs are boring as death. Three days of stake-outs in the state forest behind Olgilvie Moor are boring as death and itchy. Between mosquitos and horse flies, I must have lost a pint of blood, but there wasn’t any world in which I’d have been dumb enough to storm the place, or even get close enough to trip an alarm—given the number of security cameras dotting the place, there had to be alarms. And wolves weren’t the types to call the cops.

  Nah. An amateur astronomer’s telescope and a wood blind told me everything I needed to know.

  One: the Bianchi’s were total slobs, denning up in piles of old clothes, half-eaten takeout cartons, cheese-encrusted pizza boxes, and Genny Lite cans, but all the mess was restricted to the inside of the house. The outside remained immaculate, maintained by a truckload of landscapers and gardeners that worked their way through the entire development.

  Two: they were on friendly terms with the owner, a wolf named Carl Murray who lived next door. Ex-military, three-piece suit, gold rings and gold chains, he drove a mint Genesis G90 in lime green and wore four thousand dollar shoes. Worked for Lisee Pharmaceuticals, a multinational outfit famous for curing latent vampirism in the early teens. Those bastards cost me a lot of business.

  Three: They didn’t bother to feed the four girls caged in the basement.

  13

  I got sick of waiting. These idiots spent all day wallowing in their own filth, smoking blunts and playing video games, and if they cared about Mindy at all it wasn’t enough to go to her funeral—closed-casket for what was left of her, municipal lot, no stone.

  Murray left his house every day at six a.m. to go for a jog, ran the same route every time tailed by a black SUV loaded with goons, and got home by six forty-five to shower and eat breakfast with his wife—a smokin’-hot brunette whose pre-shower routine involved a couple lines of powder and Cuervo pre-mix chugged from a bottle she kept stashed in the back of their bedroom closet.

  I guess margaritas are an anytime food.

  Anyway, Mrs. Murray had made a name for herself in the pole-dancing business circa twenty years ago, and by “made a name for herself” I mean “managed not to meth out like everyone else she shared a stage with and retired with all her teeth.” Along the way she might have met a dashing young policeman by the name of Mike Szymanski, maybe before his first marriage, before he died the first time.

  Back then she went by Starlett Showz, two T’s and a Z, but I knew her as Naomi.

  14

  Fuck it. I rang the bell.

  My toe tapped as I waited, and I’d love to say I was keeping the beat with a song in my head, but unless the drummer of that song was a methed-out ferret, I’d have to admit to nerves.

  You only get so many true loves, and I’d ploughed through my share.

  She opened the door with a sleepy, my-husband-just-left-and-I’ve-already-chugged-another-quart-of-discount-margaritas-and-done-two-more-lines-of-coke smile. I gave it back, trying to keep the disappointment from my eyes—not at the crow’s feet, the thirty extra pounds, the bags under her eyes … everybody gets old. Well, almost everybody. She wanted to be a singer, a dancer, a diva, a star, and here she was, Mrs. Carl Murray, queen of tract housing for rich assholes.

  “Hey, Nayo. How’s dancin’?”

  Her eyes widened, red lips opening in an ‘O’ of shocked recognition.

  “Mikey?”

  I pushed past her into the entryway, something I’d done a hundred times under very, very different circumstances, and grunted in surprise at the little .38 revolver she pushed into my gut.

  “What are you doing here, Mikey?”

  “Me?” I brushed my knuckles across her cheek. “Ain’t that the wrong question?”

  15

  She jammed the gun deeper, cold and hard through my shirt. Her hair smelled like strawberries, her skin like Oil of Olay.

  “You still kill people for a living?”

  I nodded, once. “A man’s got to eat.”

  “And you’re here for Carl.”


  With a shake of my head, I reached down and put my hand on the gun, closed my warm fingers around hers, cold and papery with years of smoking, drugs, and, well, years. Makeup can hide a lot, but hands always betray you.

  “I don’t care two shits about Carl. I’m here for the rat problem you got next door.”

  Her mouth twisted in distaste. “Oh, them.”

  “Yeah, them. And you know you can’t hurt me, so why don’t you move this,” I said and pushed the pea-shooter down and to the side, stepped into her so that when I looked down our lips almost touched, “and tell me what you know about them.”

  Her breath mingled the faint brightness of peppermint with fake lime and cheap tequila, but I loved her pouty scowl, and all the other things she could do with that mouth.

  “Why don’t I just shoot you anyway and feed you to ’em? Could you come back from that?”

  I shrugged. “I’ve had worse.”

  “Than being eaten by wererats?”

  “You bet,” I said. “I once had my heart broken by the most beautiful woman in the world.”

  A hint of a smirk turned up her lips. “Point me at her. I’ll kill the bitch.”

  I kicked the door closed with my heel.

  “Nah, Doll, don’t do that. Suicide’s a sin.”

  16

  Naomi turned on her heel and virtually stalked into the open living room as her flimsy robe fell away, fully exposing the fluorescent green skirt and too-tight red halter that barely contained her curves. She flopped down on the white leather couch and crossed her legs just lazily enough to give a glimpse between—nothing I hadn’t seen before, but well worth the look even twenty years later.

  Her lazy smile told me she’d caught me, and had been fishing.

  “You know Carl will kill you if he finds you here. He doesn’t like … competition.” The pistol had disappeared during the walk—in a cushion or down her shirt, I had no idea.

  Neat trick.

  “So he’s a legitimate businessman?”

  Her slow blink told me nothing. “I thought this was about the neighbors.”

  I shrugged. “You brought him up.”

  “Then let’s stop talking about him.”

  “Okay.” I sat on the matching loveseat kitty-corner to her, ran my hands across the creamy white leather. “Nice digs. So what’s the deal with the rats?”

  A tiny quiver shuddered through her, and she tried to hide it with a nonchalant shrug.

  “Why do you want to know, Mikey?”

  “They tried to kill me.”

  “Did you deserve it?”

  “Probably. But that doesn’t mean I’ll take it lying down. What’s their deal?”

  Another shrug. “They keep to themselves.”

  “Then how about the girls in the basement?”

  “What girls?”

  “C’mon, Nayo.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “You can’t play stupid. Not with me. I know you way too well.”

  “It’s been twenty years.”

  “Yeah, but people like us don’t change. What am I dealing with, here?”

  Her head lolled back on the couch, almost popping her jugs from her top—too bad on the almost—and she groaned, mouth open, eyes wide at the ceiling.

  “Why are the men in my life so freaking aggravating?”

  I grinned. “Ever tried picking one that ain’t a delinquent?”

  She snorted.

  “Nope.”

  17

  Naomi looked up with a twinkle in her eye, that old familiar smile on her lips.

  “What are you doing tonight, Mikey?”

  “No,” I said. “You’re not changing the subject.”

  “Carl is having a little soirée at La Via. I could get you in.”

  I shook my head as violently as any head has ever been shookenized.

  “Oh, no. I don’t mess with leeches. Never have, never will.”

  She pouted, as fake as it was enticing.

  “Oh, come on. I thought you wanted to know about the girls.”

  I held up my hands as if warding off an unwanted advance—which, come to think of it, I’d have liked to have been warding off.

  “No, no. The rats tried to bump me off. I just want to know why, or who put them up to it. I don’t have any track with vampires, and don’t want one.”

  “I never took you for a coward, Mikey.”

  “I don’t have to be a coward to be smart. Nothing good ever came from that mess, and I’m not about to jump in it. The vampire-werewolf thing is way too Kate Beckinsale for my taste, and she only lived through that shit because she was boning the director.”

  Naomi smiled, bright and happy for the first time. “Do you think she knew?”

  “What? That her meal-ticket came from her marital status?” I looked around the douchey McMansion for effect. “How could she not?”

  She scowled. “No, dick. That they could get it so wrong.”

  18

  “Yeah,” I said. “Who’d have thought that two societies entirely founded on eating people wouldn’t be realistic?”

  She frowned. “Werewolves don’t eat people.”

  “Well, no more than bankers do.”

  “Is that a Jewish joke?”

  “Nah. Been a long time since I’ve laid claim to any of that.”

  “You never struck me as an anti-capitalist.”

  “Jesus, Nayo. What are you doing, stalling?”

  She laughed. “Not anymore.”

  The door exploded inward, shards of cheap wood peppering us both as a squad of goons burst through the sudden opening. I shot the first between the eyes and dove for cover, but the second opened up with his AK, tearing holes through the loveseat, my clothes, and my torso.

  I managed to punch a round through his heart before the third blew my hand to tatters.

  Ow.

  Carl Murray walked in behind a squad of black-clad goons, each uglier than the last. After he’d been shot.

  I sucked air, some of it down my throat, some of it through the holes in my chest.

  “The fuck, Carl?” I managed, more wheeze than words.

  Carl shook his head, a bemused frown on his face.

  “Only you would be stupid enough to come here after I sent people to kill you.”

  “Why?”

  Naomi answered for him. “Why are you so stupid, Babe? Nobody knows.”

  “But now you’re mine,” Carl said. “Finally mine.”

  I dragged my pistol up to my temple, and chuckled through the hurt as the goon squad dove to stop me, stumbling over the Murrays and each other in an effort to reach the gun.

  “No!” Naomi cried.

  I pulled the trigger.

  19

  Mom’s voice wasn’t half as annoying as her old-lady slaps on my cheek, too fast and not hard enough to be anything but an irritation. At least dying hurt, then ended. Her voice carried into the afterlife and beyond, dragging me back to consciousness I didn’t deserve and hadn’t earned.

  “C’mon, Mikey, c’mon. Where’s the car, Mikey? Mikey, you there? I told ya not to scratch it. Mikey?”

  I groaned, tried to roll away from the mild irritation of her attempts to wake me up and the major irritation of her too-annoying-to-be-Fran-Drescher voice. The slapping stopped; her voice didn’t.

  Alas.

  “I love that car, Mikey. What you do with it?” The slapping resumed. “C’mon, you’re almost there. Tell ya mutha, Mikey. Where’s the Benz? C’mon Mikey. Wake up, darling boy. Where’s my car?”

  I smacked her hand away, skin burning at the novel sensation over new nerves.

  “Jesus, Ma, stop it!” My throat was so dry you could shake it and serve it to James Bond. />
  “Now you yell at me, after all I’ve suffered for you? I bring you back from the dead and this is the thanks I get? Some son you are, lying here all hopeless-like. I should have gotten a puppy. At least it would have loved me. Where’s my car?”

  I groaned, licked my lips. “I’d have come back anyway, Ma.”

  “Yeah, but where you’da come back? You think they’d have morgued ya, or dumped you in the swamp again? They’re too smart for that, c’mon. Whaddaya doing messing with furries anyway? Ain’t nothing but trouble, ’specially now. I raised you smarter, didn’t I? Even if you lost my car.”

  “C’mon, Ma. How long has it been?”

  “Almost two weeks. That’s what a spleen-grow gets ya.”

  “Kidney. You only need one, so I can leave the other here. You know that.”

  I reached down and rubbed the fresh scar on my abdomen—she not only knew that, she’d already taken a new one and put it in the freezer.

  “How ’bout smarts, Kiddo, got any of them? Seems my son ain’t got none no matter how much brains he’s got. You pain me, Son, more than that day I made the mistake of getting a pap smear and a mammogram back-to-back. That was a hell of a day. Where’s my fucking car?”

  I sighed, long and slow, and imagined lighting her on fire. Just once, just to kill her a while. One glorious minute of her wreathed in golden, flickering flame, followed by a week or three of blissful silence.

  Then I returned to reality.