Noir Fatale

by Larry Correia

  The orchestra in the pit began Pachelbel’s Canon in D. Bang on cue, Isis Lavender appeared at the distant end of the auditorium’s center aisle. For the last time. After today, she had chosen to disappear, and my wife would be known by her birth name, Mary Elizabeth Baker.

  Everyone in the place stood, then stared at my bride.

  Even from where I stood, I saw that Mr. Baker, whose arm she held, had been right. He wasn’t holding it together.

  Ice and her teary-eyed father glided down the aisle toward me as I stood there in my tux.

  From way back in the cheap seats, she smiled at me. And we were, once again, the only two people in the Moon.

  Then I couldn’t hold it together either.

  Bombshell

  Larry Correia

  New York City, New York

  1955

  The body had been mutilated and then left out with the trash. It was so mangled that he couldn’t even tell if it had been a man or a woman. It was just…parts.

  “What’re you gawking at, Rookie?”

  Henry looked up to get a flashlight beam right in the eyes. He squinted. “I was just assessing the crime scene.” He couldn’t see the speaker, but he’d spoken with authority, so Henry added “sir” onto the end just to be on the safe side.

  “That’s my job. You should be over there with the rest of the flatfeet shooing off the lookie-loos.”

  It was after midnight. There weren’t that many bystanders to chase off. The light moved from him to point toward the pile of garbage bags, which was when he saw that the homicide detective who’d caught the case was Jeff Richards, one of the hard cases out of the 69th Precinct. Richards had a problem with Actives, so it was a good thing he’d tacked on the “sir.”

  “You’d better not have messed with—” Richards froze when he saw the mess. As his eyes widened, he whispered, “Dear lord. Not another one.”

  That got Henry’s attention. For four months he’d walked this beat and never heard a peep about anything this grisly. The city had plenty of murders, but you’d think someone getting rendered into chum would at least make the morning briefing.

  But before he could ask, the detective composed himself and got back to business. “Give me the lowdown.”

  Henry rattled off the pertinent details, as matter-of-fact as he could. “I was on foot patrol nearby. When they found the body, I heard the commotion clear down the block. One of the cooks at the diner had been taking out the garbage. He entered the alley, stepped in a puddle, realized what it was, and started hollering. I used the booth on the corner to call it in and then secured the area.”

  “Witnesses?”

  “Just the cook who found it. The poor guy’s back in the kitchen now, hyperventilating into a paper bag. I told him to stick around until detectives could take his statement.”

  “That it?”

  “Yes, sir.” He’d been staring at this horror in the dim, flickering light for the last half an hour, while listening to the buzzing of flies and the scurrying of rats in the dark waiting for him to leave so they could have a nibble. All that considered, his report had been remarkably composed and succinct. His goal was to make detective in record time, so he couldn’t ever let anyone see him rattled.

  But even Richards, who was in his fifties—and you didn’t make it that long as an NYPD homicide detective without seeing some awful shit—looked like he was trying not to be sick.

  “If you don’t mind me asking, Detective, what did you mean ‘another?’ You’ve seen this before?”

  “Afraid so, kid. Fifth one this month, spread across the city. Bodies like they got turned inside out, but you didn’t hear that from me. The brass is keeping it hush-hush but they’re forming a task force. They don’t want to cause a panic over a magical psycho killer on the rampage.”

  “You think this is the work of an Active?”

  “Our vic is splattered all over the walls. What do you think?” Then the detective scowled as he realized who he was talking to. “You’re Officer Garrett, right?”

  The shift in his voice warned Henry which direction this was heading. “Yes, sir.”

  “You’re one of them.”

  He didn’t like the accusatory tone, but he was used to it. “If you mean an Active, no, sir. I’ve got no magical abilities to speak of.”

  “Not a magical yourself, but friendly with a bunch of magical vigilantes. You’re that famous Mouth’s kid. The Mouth and the Healer’s rich boy. I heard about you.”

  Half the NYPD had heard about him, and not in a good way. Suspicions ran deep here, and even nowadays, when Actives were relatively common—hell, they’d elected one president—not everybody was comfortable around magic, especially the old-timers. Henry caught extra flak because his mom and dad had been all over the papers for years, lightning rods for controversy.

  “I guess I’ll go man the perimeter.”

  “You do that.”

  Out on the sidewalk he could no longer hear the flies buzzing. The air was fresh. Well, fresher. This was Brooklyn after all. Two other uniforms were holding back the crowd, but since the crowd was only a couple of curious bums, they had it well in hand. He caught a whiff of death stink, and then realized it must have soaked into his uniform. Somehow he’d gotten some blood on his Sam Browne. Damn it. So he wiped it off best as he could, lit a cigarette to drown out the smell, and waited for the coroner to arrive.

  Cops came and went for the next hour. More detectives arrived. More brass arrived, and when they showed up, then the press realized something big was up, so they began arriving too. With less than a year on the force, Henry was still a probationary officer, which meant he was low man on the totem pole. If anybody in his chain of command saw him here, they’d probably order him back on foot patrol, so he did his best not to be noticed and joined in holding the rapidly growing crowd back, repeating the policeman’s mantra of there’s nothing to see here, move along, while getting repeatedly eyeball-stabbed by camera flashes.

  The whole time he kept thinking that he’d been first on scene of a murder, more than likely committed by an Active. He knew more about magic than probably any other cop in this city. This was his shot. Not that he minded wearing the uniform, and maybe it was naïve, but he wanted to be a detective. Always had, long as he could remember.

  So he watched and waited until Richards came out of the alley. He might not have inherited his father’s magical gifts, but he’d learned from the master, so he was pretty good at persuading people even without Power. Dan Garrett’s words could reach right into someone’s brain and subtly twist their way of thinking. Henry had to get by on good old-fashioned charm.

  Richards was heading for his car. This was his chance, so Henry broke off the line and chased him down. “Hey, Detective!”

  Richards turned around and scowled. “What now, Garrett?”

  “Look, I’ve got no Power myself, but I do know a lot about it. If this killer is an Active, I can help with the investigation.”

  “Why? So you can squeal to your wizard pals about any suspects I’ve got, so they can take the law into their own hands and be judge, jury, and executioner? I’ve got no use for divided loyalties.”

  “That was a long time ago.” Henry tried not to sound defensive, but truth was, it wasn’t really that long ago, since Grimnoir knights were still doing it today. However, usually only in places that weren’t quite as civilized, or where the local authorities were corrupt, incompetent, or tyrannical when it came to dealing with people who had magical abilities.

  “So I’m supposed to believe you’re just some college boy bucking for rank, eh?”

  “I dropped out of college. It wasn’t a good fit. Come on. I’ve got connections.”

  “Meaning Grimnoir-type connections.”

  “Well, yeah…” It wasn’t much fun being a member of a secret society which wasn’t much of a secret anymore, especially when everybody figured you were probably a member of it.

  “Actives protect their ow
n.”

  “Not murderers they don’t.” That was just downright insulting. If it weren’t for the Grimnoir—including one of the men he was named after—this city would’ve been vaporized by a Tesla super weapon back in ’08. And if it hadn’t been for other knights—including the one he’d gotten his first name from—the whole world would’ve been torn apart by an outer space monster in 1934. The only reason Richards could stand there, grumpy, smug, and—most importantly—alive was because of the Grimnoir. But he was sworn to secrecy about that sort of thing, so he just tried his best to look earnest.

  “I can help you catch this killer. Just ask my captain to send me to your task force. I’ll pull my weight. If I don’t, just kick me back to patrol.”

  Richards mulled it over for all of ten seconds before he turned back to his car.

  “Beat it, weirdo. I got work to do.”

  ✧ ✧ ✧

  There were two reasons Heinrich Pershing Garrett had always wanted to be a detective. First, he’d always looked up to Jake Sullivan, literally and figuratively. It was hard not to since the man was a mountain, six foot five with fists of stone and a voice like an avalanche. In a way it was ironic that Heavy Jake Sullivan would inspire someone to become a cop, since he’d rarely been on the side of the law himself. In fact, he was an ex-con. But he had been a private detective, a manhunter for the BI, and from all the stories Henry had heard as a kid, damned good at it.

  Growing up, Henry had spent a lot of summers at the Sullivan family’s Montana ranch, constantly bugging Jake for stories about the old days. It was a challenge to get the notably taciturn Heavy to speak more than a few sentences at a time, but Henry had always been remarkably dogged and had worn him down. Sure, there had been stories about world-saving, battling magical samurai, and even tales of fighting beings from other worlds, but Henry had gotten plenty of that from his folks. It was the stories about tracking down dangerous criminals that had floated his boat.

  The whole time, Jake had tried to warn Henry that detective work wasn’t like the pulps or the movies. He was a smart kid. He would be better off listening to his folks, going to school, and using his family connections to get involved in great things. There was nothing fancy about solving crimes. Hell, Sullivan’s most common PI work had been unglamorous strike-breaking, and he’d spent most of those years barely scraping by… But of course, despite all those warnings, when Henry had traded Harvard for the police academy, his parents had still blamed Jake Sullivan for it.

  Which wasn’t fair, because the second reason had really been the big one.

  Born without a connection to the Power, Henry had been the oddball of the bunch. When you grow up Grimnoir, it was always talk about protecting the innocent, standing up for what was right, liberty and justice and all that jazz…but it took big magic to be a knight.

  It didn’t take any magic to stop a crook.

  ✧ ✧ ✧

  The killings continued.

  The whole department was told to be on the lookout, and though the task force had sworn everyone to secrecy, word had immediately started to spread. Cops talk, especially when they were ordered not to. The NYPD leaked like a sieve and the press was a big old sponge.

  Even though he’d dropped three bodies in Manhattan and one on Staten Island, the papers had started calling the mystery killer the Bensonhurst Bomber. Reporters loved their alliteration. One headline had declared him the most powerful Boomer since Zangara, a name which still got all the rabid antimagic protesters foaming at the mouth.

  The new mayor had given a big speech urging everyone to remain calm. It hadn’t worked, but at least a riot hadn’t broken out, which was something. Henry figured that by now, New Yorkers would be blasé about murders, since they had so damned many of them. They were in year two of a crime wave that the chief had publically declared they weren’t going to allow to turn into a trilogy, but these murders were special. Good old-fashioned shootings and stabbings weren’t exciting enough to grab press anymore. Randomly explode a bunch of people and even the most jaded New Yorker was bound to get jumpy.

  ✧ ✧ ✧

  Henry spent the next few nights questioning everybody on his beat, but nobody had seen anything suspicious. He then spent the days doing research and quietly chasing down leads. He didn’t get much sleep, but he made up the difference with coffee.

  More bodies were found, and as far as he could tell, Richards’s task force was wasting its time questioning known Actives. Like they all knew each other and had a mailing list or something. Homicide was harassing anybody they heard about possessing energy-based magic, most of whom were regular law-abiding citizens who’d never exploded a fly.

  You didn’t need magic to catch a crook, but it sure could speed up the process.

  Detective Richards might be old-school, but word was he’d already tried using a Finder. The department even kept one on retainer. Problem was, without anything connected to the killer, the demon he summoned wouldn’t know who to track. They needed blood, hair, clothing, an item he’d had in his possession—something. Otherwise the demon would just float around aimless and invisible, looking for their Boomer, and since most demons were fairly stupid, and there were almost eight million people in this city, good luck with that. Sadly, their killer hadn’t left much evidence behind.

  The NYPD didn’t have a Justice on retainer. Actives who could literally see the truth of things were so rare they made Healers seem common. Despite that, Henry knew two personally. The better of them had just been appointed director of the Bureau of Investigation and was probably too busy dealing with Imperium spies and Soviet agents to worry about a single homicidal maniac.

  However, the second one might be available. Jack Moody worked for United Blimp and Freight out of Detroit, though Henry didn’t know if Moody actually worked for UBF, or if they just kept him on the payroll while his real job was secret assignments from the Society. And therein lay the problem. If he called Moody in, then the Grimnoir would find out. And as much as he tried to assure Richards that the Grimnoir would stay out of local police business, he knew they probably wouldn’t. Once they found the guy, it would be a .45 to the skull, some cinder blocks tied to the ankles, and a quick trip to the Hudson.

  Nothing wrong with that per se. The bastard certainly deserved it, but Henry really wanted to catch him the right way. The Wild West days of Grimnoir knights dispensing indiscriminate justice were supposed to be over. Hell, Dad had even told that to Edward R. Murrow on TV the other night.

  It was a tough call, but their Boomer was dropping a body every few days. The longer they dithered, the more innocents would die. The two of them didn’t really get along—Henry thought Moody was a lout—but surely a Justice would jump at the shot to help take down a maniac.

  Only when Henry used the phone number he had to make a long distance call to Moody’s home, nobody picked up. He then tried the UBF offices. He didn’t know which department they’d stuck Moody in, he assumed janitorial, but the secretary told him that “Mister Moody” was actually in something called “aerospace engineering.” He had laughed at the idea of that thug helping design rocket ships, but apparently she was serious. Only he was on vacation, gone hunting, and hadn’t left a number where he could be reached.

  ✧ ✧ ✧

  “Are you insane? Running an off-the-books investigation could get you in a lot of trouble.”

  “You came to me and asked what I was up to. Now you know. Come on, Rebecca. It’ll be fun.”

  “The killer explodes people, Henry. We’ve got a drastically different definition of fun.”

  The two of them were sitting on a bench in the park, being menaced by a gang of pigeons. That was Rebecca’s fault because she’d dropped some of her pretzel and the birds had taken it as an invitation to join them for supper. To a casual passerby, the two of them might have been mistaken for an attractive young couple having a date on a mild September evening. He had to admit Rebecca looked a lot better in a floral print dress than
in her uniform.

  They’d met in the police academy. It had only been the last three classes which had allowed women to train with men, and only two since they’d allowed known Actives to be hired at all. Lady cops were a tiny minority in the department, Actives even fewer. Rebecca Langford, or Crash as most of them had taken to calling her, was both. As his dad liked to say, “the times are a-changing.”

  “Look at this.” He opened up his briefcase and pulled out the file. He showed her the latest crime scene photographs and the typewritten notes from the coroner’s office. “I think Jeff Richards is right. The killer is using magic.”

  “That’s awful!” She blanched when she saw the photos. They were far grislier than the ones that somebody had leaked to the papers. “Hang on. How’d you get this?”

  “I stole it from the task force’s ready room.”

  “What? You’re going to get fired.”

  “Only if I get caught.”

  “Like getting caught is unlikely sneaking into a room filled with homicide dicks?” She gave him a very incredulous frown. “From that superior look on your face, they weren’t there, were they?”

  “It’s lonely on the night shift.”

  “Oh my gosh. You broke into the task force room?”

  Henry shrugged. He came from a family where children learned useful skills like how to hotwire cars, tail a mark, or fight back in case Imperium ninjas all of a sudden materialized out of thin air and tried to assassinate you. Grimnoir tradecraft was way better than being an Eagle Scout. “You’d think a police department would spring for better locks.”

  She just shook her head in disbelief. “You’re a nut.”

  “Like I was saying, Richards is onto something. The coroner said that each victim died from a series of small detonations which appeared to have come from inside their body. But there were no traces of explosives or chemicals or anything like that. Which can only mean one thing.”

  Crash stared at him blankly. “A wizard did it?”

  He had to remember that most people—even the ones capable of touching the Power in some way themselves—had very little exposure to the various types of magic. Most Actives could fudge one little part of the laws of physics, while the rest remained a mystery to them. Then their knowledge was limited to the garbage they read in the papers or the nonsense versions they saw at the movies like everybody else. Just because Crash was good at one thing didn’t make her an expert on anything else.