Noir Fatale

by Larry Correia

  I had a busy day of client meetings. A historical society wanted me to raise a civil war soldier so they could question him on a particular battle. The note with it read that I was putting him back in the ground after a two-hour question-and-answer session. I’d stopped letting anyone take any zombie off-site for in-depth interviews. I’d had too many things go wrong that way, so now I kept watch over them and made certain they went back into the grave ASAP. The waiting around and putting them back cut into how many clients I could have in a night, but for safety’s sake I thought it was worth it.

  A lawyer wanted to double-check a last-minute will change, there’d be a full court for that one complete with court reporter and judge. Thanks to new laws, a zombie could say which will was the real one, but only with a judge to decide if the zombie was together enough to make the decision. At least the family wasn’t allowed at graveside for will disputes anymore. I was all for no family watching their loved one rise from the grave. I didn’t do resurrection, I raised zombies. The family did not need their last vision of dear old Dad or Mom to be the shambling dead.

  One witness to a homicide had died of natural causes and again the law allowed for post-death testimony with lawyers and court reporter present. You didn’t need a judge for that one. Judges were for legal decisions not evidence gathering. There were two requests to bring back the recently dead for a last good-bye. I turned them down. There were other animators at Animators Inc. that could do the jobs and, like I said, I don’t believe a family’s last view of their loved ones should be as a zombie. Either it’s horrific and ruins their memory of the loved one, or the zombie looks too lifelike and the grieving relatives think they’ve risen from the grave and want to take them home. Sometimes my zombies are so lifelike they don’t remember they’re dead. It can be truly heartbreaking all around, and I was done with that shit. I had enough emotional anguish attached to my own mother’s death when I was eight, I did not need to add anyone else’s grief to my own.

  I dressed up a little today, probably to make up for going into the office dressed like one of the guys last night. Sometimes just knowing you have the issue doesn’t fix it. The trick is to recognize that you have an issue and be kind to yourself while you work through it. So, my therapist tells me, I was trying to honor all that good advice; some days I was better at it than others.

  If I hadn’t had to worry about carrying my sidearm, I’d have worn a dress, but when outside my house, I had a badge and that meant that legally I was supposed to be ready to do my job at a moment’s notice. I’d made a lot of enemies over the years executing people. Just because someone is a murdering psychopath doesn’t mean they don’t have people who love them and will hunt you down and exact revenge later. You’re not paranoid if people really are out to get you.

  A royal blue skirt that was a little shorter than I normally wore to see clients, paired with a matching jacket that hit just enough below my waist to hide the gun and badge. I’d had to have the skirt reinforced around the waistband by a tailor so that I could tuck an inner waistband holster complete with gun and badge on my right side, and a holder for one extra magazine on the left side. If I’d been wearing the pants from last night, I’d have had multiple pockets for extra ammo and I wouldn’t have had to change from the Springfield Rangemaster to the smaller-framed Springfield EMP, which was a 9mm. But honestly, I was lucky to be able to fit even that much around a suit skirt. I was wearing sheer stockings with high heels that were about two inches taller than I’d usually wear to work. A slightly paler blue silk blouse made the outfit as much of a dress as my paranoia and job could manage.

  I even put on eye makeup and lipstick, which was about as girlie as I got. Did I feel shallow that I dressed up because two strangers had made me feel insecure the night before? Yes, yes, I did, but I still did it. The staff at one of my favorite lunch places acted as if they’d never seen me dress like a girl before. It started to make me feel grumpy and then I got a call from our daytime receptionist, Mary, that I had several calls from Mrs. Robert Chadwick. I was about to tell her that wasn’t my problem and that I’d met my obligations for the meeting last night, then she mentioned a money amount. It wasn’t quite as much as last night, but it was enough that Mary had called me at lunch.

  “It’s a nice chunk of change, but what does she want me to do for it? I told her last night that wayward grandsons falling in love with the wrong women isn’t in my job descriptions.”

  “The client says she’ll pay you just to go talk to the temptress.”

  “Did she actually call her a temptress?”

  “She did,” and I could hear the smile in Mary’s voice.

  “Tell Mrs. Chadwick that I looked over the file she left me last night and her grandson seems happy. I didn’t see a temptress in any of those pictures, just an ordinary woman in love.”

  “I’ll tell her, Anita, but she’s convinced that if you would just meet the temptress in person, you would know that she’s bewitched the grandson.”

  “I’m just finishing up lunch, and then I have another potential client meeting.”

  “Bert says he’ll find someone else to cover your next meeting if you’ll do this for the current client.”

  “If it was just for Bert, I wouldn’t do it,” I said.

  “I know, but it will help out everyone at the firm, even us lowly desk staff.”

  “Your grandkids needing new braces or something?”

  “The grandkids have parents to pay for their orthodontia. I’m saving up for a romantic trip with my husband.”

  I laughed. “That’s the spirit. Okay, I had salad and soup for lunch. I guess I could get dessert.”

  “Dessert. Is that your way of refusing to do this, or am I missing something?”

  “Didn’t the client tell you? The temptress owns a bakery.”

  “Well, if it’s tempting stuff, bring a piece back for me.”

  “I will.” We hung up and I googled the address for Violet and Hearts bakery. I put it into Waze, left a tip, and went to meet Violet Carlin in person.

  There was a line at the bakery that stretched nearly to the door. They were in a prime spot for the lunch rush and I wasn’t the only one in office clothes. There were also men in work boots, mothers with children in tow, one father with a baby strapped to his chest, a woman dressed to go to her waitress job, teenagers with their phones and earbuds in, and people that I couldn’t guess what they did. It was a nice cross section of the city. A little boy in front of me started to squirm, but when his mother told him she’d get out of line and he wouldn’t get a cookie, he stopped. Apparently, he’d had the cookies here before and he didn’t want to lose a chance to have another.

  A woman wearing a black suit skirt asked me, “Which flavor of cupcake are you getting?”

  “I’ve never been here, so I’m not sure.”

  She beamed at me. “Oh my god, they are the best.”

  “I heard good things about Violet and Hearts,” I said.

  The man behind me with his hardhat tucked under his arm said, “We’re doing a job just up the road and I come down here on my breaks. If I don’t get assigned to a new job site soon, I’m going to have to buy bigger pants.” He laughed and the woman laughed with him; apparently, we were supposed to be okay with eating enough sweets to go up a pants size.

  “I know that look,” the woman said. “Trust me, it’s worth the calories.” She was thinner than I was, but then she was also about four inches taller and less curvy, but still…“No, really, everything here is amazing. But I don’t come down here every lunch hour, more like once a week.”

  The man laughed again. “I’ll be moving to a new job soon, so I’m sampling as many flavors as I can, while I can.”

  “I work nearby permanently; I have to show more restraint than that,” the woman said.

  Everyone in line was like that, as if we were all five years old again and eating cake was just a given, not a carbohydrate and calorie guilt fest. It was relaxing j
ust to be around so many adults who all seemed relaxed about eating sweets. It made me begin to wonder if there was some magic in the bakery goods, because Americans didn’t enjoy calorie-rich foods like this. Where was the guilt, the excuses, the pledges to do better next week? No one even said the four-letter word—diet. Damn, maybe the crazy grandmother was right and Violet Carlin was a witch. I was going to be disappointed if I had to tell her she was right.

  I had to step partially out of line to see through the crowd to the counter. I got glimpses of Violet Carlin. Since we were both short I couldn’t see that well, but what I did see was her smiling, chatting up the customers. She knew most of them by name. She remembered who was gluten-free, or had other special needs. She seemed to have something for everyone.

  I started trying to look at the baked goods behind the glass rather than at the baker because I’d be having to choose soon. There were tiny cupcakes, full-size cupcakes, cakes that were only a little bigger, and then full-size cakes that they sold by the slice. Cookies came from little larger than a quarter to bigger than my hand. Then there were pies. Again, they came in small like one-to-two-person servings, or full-size. The icing on the cakes was there, but it wasn’t piled on, so that the cakes were stars of the show, not the icing. I liked that a lot. I’d had too many cupcakes over the years where a so-so cake was hidden under too much sweet icing. Or a cake that was decorated as if pretty was more important than how well it tasted. There was none of that here. There was a display wedding cake to one side that showed she could do fancy, but the stuff in the main counter was simpler and all the more appetizing because of it. Maybe one of the reasons I’d stopped being a sweets person wasn’t about calories, but about presentation. I didn’t want a ton of icing, I wanted a good cake or cupcake. Wasn’t that what everyone wanted if they were going to indulge? Maybe cupcakes had become like Mrs. Chadwick, all about outward appearance and not substance.

  “Having a hard time deciding?” Violet Carlin asked from behind the counter.

  I looked up and couldn’t help but meet her smile with my own. Her eyes looked much greener in person, or maybe hazel eyes were like some people with blue-gray eyes and they changed color with her moods. Her hair was a rich chestnut, almost an auburn, tucked up under a dark green cap. I realized that the uniforms were all a rich, pine green, maybe the color brought out the green in her eyes. Whatever the reason, she looked much better in person than any of the pictures had shown. Was it charisma, or was it magic?

  “Everything looks so amazing, I don’t know what to choose.”

  She beamed at me, happy with the compliment. It made me want to compliment her more. That wasn’t normal for me. Damn it. Was crazy grandma not so crazy?

  “Are you getting a snack just for you?”

  “I’ll definitely get something to try here before I go back to work. I was going to wait and see how good it was before deciding if I should buy some to share at home, but I don’t want to brave the line again.”

  She laughed and just the sound of it made me happier. Fuck, she was using some sort of charm or mind games. The trick was…did she know she was doing it? I’d met one or two people who had some natural abilities and used them without knowing it. It wasn’t her mind games that made me want her to be innocent. It was not wanting Mrs. Chadwick to be right, but just because someone is unpleasant, doesn’t mean they’re wrong.

  She helped me pick out a trio of tiny cupcakes so that I didn’t have to choose between chocolate-chocolate, cookies and cream, and caramel butterscotch. I told her I’d pick out a cake to match the cupcake I liked best and took them along with a bottle of water to a tiny table that opened up just as I was needing it. Good that something was going right. I hated, hated that Violet Carlin was mind-fucking people, but I was ninety-eight percent certain she was, and that meant that maybe Elgin was right. William wouldn’t have dumped her for Violet without the magic whammy. The real problem was that if she was using magic to sway people to buy her cakes, that was illegal. You weren’t allowed to use magic to make your merchandise more appealing. It could get you everything from a warning, a fine, to jail time. But if we could prove she’d bewitched William into loving her, proposing to her, that was a potential death penalty. I’d come here to placate a mean-spirited, overprotective grandmother. Now I had to decide how to report Violet Carlin to the regular police. How I worded what I’d seen here would determine if she might end up on trial for her life. Fuck.

  I thought it would ruin my appetite, but it didn’t. The tiny cupcakes were like two bites apiece. The chocolate wasn’t overwhelmingly sweet, but it wasn’t too bitterly dark either. Cookies and cream was my least favorite—good, but I’d tasted similar things. The caramel butterscotch on the other hand was like butter pecan ice cream met a caramel sundae and then brushed up against the peanut butter in a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup. I had my cake flavor to take home and then I realized that the cupcakes might all be bespelled to taste better, but if that had been the case, then wouldn’t they all three have been equally as good? Shit, this was too complicated for me. I was more an aim-me-at-the-bad-guys-and-pull-the-trigger kind of cop. What I needed was the supernatural fraud division. It was a new subdivision of regular fraud, because people got more upset about us executing humans with psychic or magical gifts than they did about wereanimals or vampires. So, the law had to change to give us another option besides a court order of execution for witches, voodoo priests, Satanists, psychics, etc., that used their powers against others. The one exception to the rule was love or lust spells: that was still seen as rape and that was still under death penalty for the supernaturally gifted.

  William Chadwick walked through the door as if just thinking it had conjured him to me. If our happy baker had used her powers to bewitch him into sex, then it was rape, but how do you tell the difference between true love and magic?

  He smiled at her and she beamed back at him. She took off her plastic gloves and apron to come around the counter so they could kiss hello. It was a good kiss, the kind of kiss I was still giving my sweeties after years of living together. Like all happy couples, I liked seeing other people happy, but was it real or was it magic?

  I had two choices: turn her into the metaphysical fraud division or talk to them together and see if I was psychic enough to figure this out. I might still turn her in to Fraud, but first I needed to know if it was only fraud. Rape, no matter how voluntary it felt to the victim, was considered a violent crime, which was a very different division.

  I caught up to them as they were headed back out the door. I flashed my badge at them. They looked surprised, even a little scared. I didn’t count that against them; a lot of people react that way when you flash a badge at them out of the blue. They didn’t even try and read the badge to see that it listed me as Preternatural Division, or even that it was U.S. Marshal not regular local cops. They also acted as if I had every right to stop and question them. Innocent people who haven’t dealt much with the police usually act that way.

  We ended up sitting at a larger corner table near the back of the room. It had a sign on the wall over it that read “Baker’s Tasting Table.” Violet was nervous and that made her talk more than she probably should have. “It’s like a chef’s table: sometimes for VIPs and sometimes I let people try out new recipes and give feedback.”

  “I thought chef tables were in the kitchen,” I said, smiling and trying to put her at ease. Whatever had been happening while she was waiting on me in line was gone. She was still pretty and pleasant, but I didn’t feel happy. That little-kid happy, before the world teaches you about cruelty and loss. It had been that kind of excitement in line for the other customers, too.

  “Usually, but I like being out here with the customers. It’s about sharing, you know.”

  “I felt some of that in line,” I said.

  Her smile brightened then, and there was a hint of…what? Was it magic, or just charisma, a type of star power? Except that her star was all about baking and making
people happy instead of being in movies or on the stage.

  William was silent, watching me as they held hands. He’d gained more weight in his face since the last pictures I’d seen of them together. The perfect cheekbones weren’t quite so stark and model-like. He was still handsome, but it wasn’t as startling. He was softer around the edges and it wasn’t just weight. Even nervous, talking to me, he seemed more at ease than he had in any of the pictures. Or maybe he was like Violet and some things only showed in person.

  “Why do you want to talk to Vi and me, Marshal Blake?” Then he frowned and seemed to be thinking harder. “Wait a minute, are you Marshal Anita Blake with the Preternatural Branch?”

  I nodded.

  He drew Violet closer to him, so that she fit under his arm near his heart, where he could protect her. Her natural blush paled and she looked sort of gray. “I told you, Will, your grandmother wouldn’t give up until she got someone to believe her.”

  “Violet is not a witch,” he said, voice low and hissing.

  “Being a witch isn’t illegal, Mr. Chadwick.”

  “She has not bewitched me, or whatever my grandmother told you.”

  “I’m here to get your side of things. I don’t want your grandmother to be right. I like both of you better than her, and I just met you.” That got a weak smile from Violet. William continued to glare at me.

  “Help me understand how your relationship got started, how you fell in love, and maybe I can talk some sense into William’s grandmother.”

  “It won’t help,” Violet said, sitting up a little straighter. “She hates me.”