Supernatural Noir

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EDITED BY ELLEN DATLOW

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| CONTENTS |

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Introduction — Ellen Datlow

The Dingus — Gregory Frost

The Getaway — Paul G. Tremblay

Mortal Bait — Richard Bowes

Little Shit — Melanie Tem

Ditch Witch — Lucius Shepard

The Last Triangle — Jeffrey Ford

The Carrion Gods in Their Heaven — Laird Barron

The Romance — Elizabeth Bear

Dead Sister — Joe R. Lansdale

Comfortable in Her Skin — Lee Thomas

But for Scars — Tom Piccirilli

The Blisters on My Heart — Nate Southard

The Absent Eye — Brian Evenson

The Maltese Unicorn — Caitlнn R. Kiernan

Dreamer of the Day — Nick Mamatas

In Paris, in the Mouth of Kronos — John Langan

Blood Is Not Enough

Alien Sex

INTRODUCTION |

Ellen Datlow

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Noir is an attitude, a stance, a way of looking at the world. Paul Duncan, in his concise book Noir Fiction, defines it as a term “used to describe any work, usually involving crime—that is notably dark, brooding, cynical, complex, and pessimistic.”

Noir fiction has been popular since right after World War II and has maintained its popularity over the years. The world of noir is thick with criminality, rife with betrayal. But the main characters in noir are not necessarily detectives or criminals, hence the hard-living guy with a chip on his shoulder, a cold affect, and something painful (and tamped down) in his past, and the sexy dame with a middle name spelling “trouble” in capital letters.

The supernatural has taken a parallel path to the present but is an older form of literature, originally known as the gothic. There have been a lot of supernatural detective stories published, but relatively few supernatural noir stories. There are a few detectives of the supernatural in this anthology, but they’re not very traditional, and they don’t always succeed in their quest for the truth—for the facts—and those who do are sometimes very sorry.

The noir form of fiction and film has been one of my favorites my whole life, as has supernatural fiction. So it seemed perfectly appropriate for me to edit an anthology of stories combining two of the genres of literature I love.

I asked for smart, edgy, complex, harder-than-nails stories of the supernatural with at least a few of the trademarks of noir. Some of the stories within feature women as the main characters, and at least one oddity only becomes a tale of detection quite late in the game. But whatever changes the evolution of mores and sensibilities have wrought on traditional noir, I think you’ll recognize the characteristics of noir and be entertained by these sixteen writers’ interpretations of the genre.

| THE DINGUS |

Gregory Frost

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All Meyers wanted to know was how Kid Willette, that he’d personally educated in the ring his last two years as a trainer, had ended up dead—and not just dead, but beaten, mangled, and dismembered dead. It didn’t make sense. It shouldn’t have been. Nobody could put a glove on Willette unless he wanted them to. Unless he’d been bought. That was the only time he’d ever gone down. Meyers knew that better than anybody.

So when he walked into the Sixth District station to find Detective Bulbitch, he just wanted a simple explanation: Kid had been doped; Kid had been drunk; Kid had been wounded. He thought he would hear an answer that would let him go home from his night shift in the taxi, hoist a farewell shot of bourbon in commemoration, and then go to sleep untroubled by impossibilities.

He found Bulbitch at his desk, sharpening a pencil with a pocketknife. The shavings were sprinkling down onto his belly. His pink skull, graced with all of seven remaining hairs, glistened as if the pencil was giving him a very hard time.

Meyers drew the folded Inquirer from his armpit, opened and tossed it in front of the detective. Bulbitch looked up. For an instant Meyers saw fear—the same fear he glimpsed in people all the time when they first got a look at him. Then Bulbitch’s face widened into amusement. “Well, if it ain’t my most favorite pugilist. How you been keepin’?” Meyers made a nod at the paper, where the front-page headline proclaimed, “Roadhouse Horror.” It was so big that even the national story following up on Truman’s kicking MacArthur out of command had been squeezed into a sidebar.

Bulbitch didn’t bother to look. “You still driving the cab?” he asked, and when Meyers persisted in saying nothing, he folded the knife and sat upright. He brushed the shavings like crumbs off his shirt and tie. “Yeah, all right,” he said. “Okay. I figured you’d hear about it. Expect the word’s out everywhere from Jack O’Brien’s to the Christian Street Y by now.”

And so the story unfolded.

Red’s Roadhouse out in Paoli was one of those two-story places slapped together with boards that had probably started life as a barn. The main hall had sawdust on the floor and a bar that was big enough for a catered wedding party to circle. On the second floor and in the back were the rented rooms, one of which they even had the chutzpah to call a “suite.” It was to this suite that Cody Aldred and his three enforcers had retreated for some R&R after a few weeks of breaking legs. The owner of the place, amazingly enough named Red, swore up and down that he didn’t know that Cody had brought in any working girls. How was he to know the women weren’t the men’s wives? It was a question that nobody answered as they were too busy laughing, seeing as how Red employed a half-dozen chippies of his own in the second-floor rooms.

So, a little past midnight the night before, in the main room, at least two dozen people had been lounging in various states of blur. Those who still remained in the aftermath—including ever-reliable Red—agreed that no one else had come in. Nobody at all had entered Cody’s suite.

And yet, in something like five minutes, according to everyone in the place, Cody and all three of his boys had been butchered. Torn to pieces. The three chippies were unharmed, and not one of them could explain what had happened.

There’d been noise, something that howled like a gale and rattled the brass knob and shook the door on its hinges. The screams, someone said, were the screams of men being slid quick into hell. Only when it was over—and silent—did Red work up the gumption to go look. He didn’t even reach the door before the three chippies in there started their own caterwauling. Red paused with his hand on the knob, and that was when he noticed that the sawdust under his feet was turning wine dark, the stain spreading outward. The shrieking went on and on, but Red backed all the way to the bar, where he grabbed some change and hurried to the pay phone on the outside wall. Nobody else went for the door in his absence, although maybe one or two sidled on out of the roadhouse.

“Tough guy, old Red,” said Bulbitch. “Uses himself a little baseball bat with a rebar center when somebody acts up in his establishment. But even he wasn’t gonna open that door. And, Meyers, you ought to leave it closed, too.”

Meyers kept his hands shoved deep in his pockets. He rocked like a punching bag, his mind sifting the details. Bulbitch grabbed a pack of Camels off his desk, jerked one cigarette out, and put his lips around it to draw it from the pack.

“So,” Meyers finally, casually said, “Kid was with Cynthia, huh.”

“Yeah.” Bulbitch’s fingers had just scissored on the cigarette, but stopped. He scowled with the realization that he’d been played, and he stared up at Meyers without lifting his head. “And you have now got all the information you’re getting, Mr. Meyers.” He rose up, his head even with Meyers’s neck. “You listen to me now. Leave it. This isn’t Montgomery versus Mouzon at Shibe Park. Ain’t any rules here. This is somebody did something so awful we’re gonna have to invent a new word to call it. And anyway, Kid Willette ruined you in the fight biz, so what in hell is it you think you owe his ghost?”

Meyers pulled the newspaper to himself. The picture on the front page was of a pile of trash beside what might have been a body under a sheet. “Nothing,” he said. “Not a goddamned thing. I was just curious, was all.” He took the paper and left.

——

The following night, whenever he had a fare that dropped anywhere close to Third and Race Streets, Meyers trolled over to the DR Bridge and drove the Crawl. He had no idea where Cynthia lived, but he knew where she worked when she hadn’t been hired for a night and hauled out to Paoli.

The third time through the Crawl that night, one of the working girls hailed him and told him to take her to Spruce and Twenty-Second. On the way he asked if she’d happened to see Cynthia.

She told him, “Not tonight, I ain’t, on account of her pimp dragged her over to South and Second till things settle down. And you didn’t hear that from me.”

After dropping her off, Meyers cut over to South and then drove straight down toward the Delaware; about the time he crossed Broad he remembered to turn off his light.

He parked the cab and got out, then strolled north along Second. This was the turf of old money, and a hooker had to blend a bit. He knew he might not find her—she might have scored a john already. But he got lucky.

Cynthia had a little dog on a string, a Pekinese, and she was walking it up and down the sidewalk between South and Lombard. Her platinum hair all but glowed under the streetlights. Meyers wondered what she did with the dog.

As he came nearer, she paused and made a show of taking out a cigarette. He shook his head in the darkness as he drew up. “You know, I still don’t smoke,” he told her.

Her pose relaxed, and she stared hard at him. “Oh, you. I mighta known.” She pulled out a lighter and torched her own smoke. Her hand might have been shaking. “You looking for a tumble tonight, Pants-on-Fire?”

“Not really.” He held out his hand as if inviting her to dance. Between two fingers was a folded ten-dollar bill. “I need to talk to you, Cyn.”

“You think so?” Her jaw clicked, and she shifted it from side to side. Cynthia had suffered at the hands of a boyfriend, a psychopathic fighter, back in the days Meyers had been training Willette. The boyfriend had dislocated her jaw, and whoever had fixed it hadn’t set it right, with the result that it clicked sometimes when she spoke. If it hurt, she never said. Meyers had been on hand the night the boyfriend had tried to murder his opponent in the ring, and the opponent’s trainer had taken a three-legged stool to him. One leg had driven right into his brain, almost immediately making the world a significantly better place. Somehow, Cynthia had ended up going home with Meyers that night. She’d stayed till morning. Mostly, they’d gotten drunk while she tried to figure out why she was crying her eyes out over “a rotten dead bastard,” and Meyers had insisted on paying her like any john. It was some strange matter of protocol and respect that made sense only to him. In the end, as a compromise, she’d charged him for an hour of her time. He still didn’t know what to call what had happened between them.

He said, “You gotta talk to me a little bit. You were with Kid.”

She flicked the cigarette away and lit another. “I didn’t think this was no social call.”

“Who did it, Cyn?”

“Jesus, Meyers.” She drew herself up, and for a moment he felt like she was bigger than he was. “Do you know, I got bounced to three different cells in three different station houses last night? Wasn’t allowed to sleep and damn near not to take a piss, and they just asked and asked and asked, but they got nothing for their trouble. Ten-dollar bill buys you the same as they got, but it’s your money, honey.” She snatched it from between his fingers.

“Well, at least tell me the way it happened. I know you liked Willette.”

She took a deep drag. The dog pulled her a couple of feet along the sidewalk so that he could sniff around a skinny tree. “Yeah, he was nice, for a handsome boy with a wad of bills and no sense.” The dog whimpered then, and she said, “Come on, Johnny, I gotta walk.”

They strolled side by side, like two old friends in no hurry to get anywhere. “What happened is, I don’t know what happened. They was three back rooms made up that suite—suite, like they’s a big luxury hotel and not a hole you could raise pigs in. I was, you know, doing Kid. And then all of a sudden, somebody’s screaming, and I mean screaming like their legs was being sawed off. It was Cody. Kid pushed me off him, snapped up his braces and charged right outten that room. No shirt, and he was stuffin’ himself back in his trousers with one hand and picking up his gun with the other.”

“He had a gun?”

“They all had guns, honey. Anyway, he charged out of that room like a bull, and the screaming, it stopped just for a second. Couple of doors slammed. And then it was back, but it was some other voice, and some shots, and then even more screaming. Kid that time. You got no idea how awful it was. I crawled under the bed with the cockroaches and the condoms and the mouse shit, and I stayed there.

“And then it just stopped, ya know? Everything went quiet. Some time passed. I got up and put on Kid’s jacket and snuck out to see. I woulda bolted, but Dottie come out of the next room. She’d been with both of Cody’s other guys, and I don’t know whose turn it was, so don’t ask. You probably know Dottie. She stayed home tonight like I shoulda.”

“What about the third girl?”

“Her.” She shook her head at some memory. “Cody had her with him already. She just got off the boat. Acted like she only spoke enough English to order a sandwich maybe.”

“Off the boat from where?”

“Estonia—is that a place?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay, then.”

The dog wrapped himself around a light pole. Meyers asked, “What are you not saying here, Cyn?”

She pulled the dog backwards to untangle him. “Dunno what. You’d seen her, you’d understand. Big, shiny eyes. Crazy eyes. Course, we all had ’em right about then, didn’t we?” She met his gaze as if his calm perplexity could answer for everything. “Cody said her name was Yuliya, like Julia but with a Y. He was gonna hand her over to Mr. Drozdov later.”

“Cody pimping for the boss?”

She shrugged. “Hey, it’s a business, isn’t it? You get paid and go where you go, same as a cabbie.” He ignored that. “And maybe with Drozdov’s reputation, ya gotta go all the way to Estonia to find somebody who don’t know any better.”

He chewed on that. “So she was with Cody the whole time?”

“Me and Dottie found her sprawled in a chair, covered in blood. Didn’t have a stitch on.”

“Then she saw what happened.”

Cynthia waved one hand around in a little circle. “What she told the cops was, the two of them was playing, you know, the way Cody liked it.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“He’d tied her to the chair. I been with him once or twice. It’s like he’s tryin’ it out ’cause the boss does it. Only nobody’s afraid of being tied up by Cody, ya know?”

Meyers knew. Drozdov had dipped into the fight game awhile, hadn’t he, and more people seemed to get hurt on those occasions. Somehow Drozdov and the mob accommodated each other, kept to their respective territories. He must have had connections they appreciated. There were stories about how Drozdov liked to inflict pain, in particular how he liked to play with a boys’ wood-burning set. He’d been arrested two years back after a couple of mutilated hookers had been fished out of the Delaware. They’d been tortured, burned and scarred with an iron of some kind, and somebody had fingered Drozdov, or maybe the cops had just heard the same stories as everybody else. Either nothing could be proven or he’d bought the right people to make the charges go away. Hookers and hired muscle—nobody cared about either one.

Meyers shook himself back to the present. “Okay, so Cody tied up this dame.”

“Said he blindfolded her and the second she tugged it off, she was hit in the face with blood like out of a fire hose—and that’s how it looked, all right. Feet was still tied to the chair. We seen her and we ran into the room before we knew what was . . . what all the lumps on the floor was.” Her chin trembled and she clamped her lips together and shot him an accusatory glance. After a minute she went on. “Dottie started screaming, and then this doll comes around, and she starts screaming, too.”

“You were in shock, all three of you.”

“Sure.” In the streetlight glow he watched her revisit the moment, watched her face pulled by awful currents of memory. “There was four bodies in there, John. The stink. And you couldn’t look anywhere at all. You just . . .”

He tried but could not fathom how it had happened. How could nobody have witnessed Kid Willette’s demise?

“I’m cold,” Cynthia said abruptly. “I think I’m sick, you know? Probably oughta go home, like Dottie. Stay in bed.”

“I’ll give you a lift,” he said. “On the house.”

“You let Snuffles in there, too?”

Meyers and the weepy-eyed dog considered each other. “So long as he’s done his business,” he said. They walked over to his cab.

Somewhere around Fifteenth and Walnut, Cynthia suddenly spoke out of the back. “I know where she is, you wanna talk with her.”

He glanced in the mirror, realizing what she was saying. “Where?”

“Cost you another ten.”

He laughed that she’d got her nerve back. “And here I am giving you and your mutt a free ride.”

“Fine, take it outta my fare. You got a pen?” she asked. “I’ll write it down for you.”

He took out the pocket notebook he used as a log and opened it to the back page, handed her a pencil.

While she wrote, she said, “Cops interviewed the three of us in the same room. She gave up an address. Might be phony, but it’s up in the Fairmount. Brown Street.”

In the mirror he watched her scribble in the notebook. “Why in the name of God did Kid go to work for him?” he asked.

She looked up at the gaze of his reflection, her eyes bright and wet. “If you don’t know, then nobody does, honey. Didn’t tell me nothin’.”

He focused on the street again. Yeah, he knew. A lot of dollars and no sense.

——

Fifteen minutes later, Meyers pulled the cab into a space on Aspen Street, then strode on up the hill to Brown at the top of the ridge. This woman lived within spitting distance of Eastern State, and he wondered if she had maybe some relationship to the prison. Or maybe it was just cheap rent.

Kennealy’s Bar stood on the corner of Twenty-Second and Brown, and as he rounded the corner, a couple of women came out of the ladies’ entrance at the back. They were babbling happily at each other in Polish. He’d worked with enough Polish fighters in his time to know the sound of it. He slowed his pace and strolled up beside them. “Evening, ladies,” he said. “How are you this fine night?”

The duo laughed a little nervously, and Meyers smiled. He chatted about nothing, and they kept walking. They soon passed the address Cynthia had given him. Without appearing to look, he noticed the glow of a cigarette in a doorway across the street.

Meyers walked another block with the women, then tipped his cap and turned away. He crossed the street. After a minute he started back the way he’d come, but at double the pace now, feet hitting the pavement with the sound of someone in a hurry. The doorway lay just ahead.

He barreled along and at the last instant as he was passing the door he pivoted on one foot and punched a short jab straight into a solar plexus. The man in the shadows didn’t even have time to raise his hands in defense. He folded around the fist, spitting the cigarette past Meyers, who swung his right into the man’s jaw so hard that the body bounced off the door and against the brick around it. Meyers was ready to hit him again if necessary, but he slid down onto the step and tipped onto his side. Meyers yanked him upright and pushed his legs back into the shadows. He patted the body down and reached into the coat. He drew out a wallet—and a badge.

This was not good.

He stuffed the possessions back inside the jacket. The cop groaned. Meyers turned and walked quickly across the street.

Beside the door was a panel with three buttons, no doubt one apartment for each floor of the row house. The first two had names beside them. The third-floor label was blank. He pressed the button. Even as he did, he realized how stupid it was. She had no reason to let him in, and if she was hiding from trouble, she wasn’t going to let anybody in at all. To his surprise, though, the door buzzed and clicked on its latch, and he pushed inside before she could change her mind. He took the stairs two at a time.

The door at the top hung ajar, and he hesitated then, feeling a little too much like a fly visiting a spider. He looked at the name Cynthia had written down. “Miss Luka . . . chova?” he called.

“Come,” she answered as if granting him an audience.

The apartment had a short, narrow foyer that opened on a living room, with a kitchen off to the right and another doorway, presumably the bedroom, at the back. One low-wattage wall sconce—a fake candle under a little paper shade—lit the room a diseased yellow.

The woman was sitting on a ragged love seat against the wall. Her legs were crossed at the knee. She had long black hair and wore a gray dress and a jacket that had an almost military cut to it. She was smoking a long, odd-shaped cigarette, and her large eyes glittered behind the stream of smoke. She leaned forward and tapped her ash against a glass ashtray on the small white coffee table in front of her. A scattering of tarnished coins or buttons lay strewn across the tabletop. They had an oily sheen. Meyers stayed in the doorway, his hands balled into fists in his pockets, but nothing else in the place seemed to be moving.

“Who are you?” she asked in a voice that sounded like it didn’t much care. “You are not from Drozdov.”

“You’re right on that score. My name’s John Meyers. I was a friend of Kid Willette’s.”

“Who?” She seemed genuinely perplexed. What she didn’t seem was frightened. Cynthia, out in the open, had been more edgy than this. The woman seemed tired, as if she’d run out of gas well back down the road.

“He was one of the boys who worked for Cody Aldred.”

“Cody, yes. He was blond man?”

“Yeah. He was a blond man.”

“Ah. I am sorry for your loss. I did not have opportunity to know him.”

“What happened, Miss Luka . . . What happened at the roadhouse?”

“You are not policeman?”

“No. I drive a cab. Willette used to be a boxer. I used to be a trainer.”

“Like father and son, no?”

Meyers leaned against the jamb. “Not really, no.”

She nodded solemnly. “But you feel you have duty to his memory.”

“Something like that, I suppose.”

“I understand. I even share your sentiment. If you would like a drink, I have vodka in icebox.”

He shook off her invitation. “How’d you end up at the roadhouse?” he wanted to know.

She hissed smoke. “Circumstance. I am wanting to meet a man I’ve heard of, but to do so I find I must first entertain this Cody.”

She didn’t look at him, but off across the room as she spoke. He decided Cynthia was right—something boiled just beneath this dame’s cold surface. She spoke more English than she’d pretended, too. “So you came all the way from Estonia to work for Drozdov?”

Her look stabbed him, but just as quickly she covered herself by leaning down and tapping her cigarette on the ashtray again. “Mr. Drozdov, he promises to help young women to escape Eastern bloc. Promises job. Promises life.”

“You know he’s selling you into prostitution, right?”

Her lips curled. “Oh, yes, I know. I have no illusions.” Again she stared at him. “None. My sister, however, she did not understand this.” This time when she leaned forward, she smashed the gray cigarette into a blob.

Hair prickled on the back of Meyers’s neck. All of a sudden, he knew she’d killed Cody Aldred. Killed all of them. She must have accomplices, must have let someone in—he couldn’t figure it any other way. He also had a pretty good idea what had happened to her sister. Glancing into the doorways again, he tried to figure how it was she’d been left by herself. Maybe her pals couldn’t get near her now. “You know the police are watching your house?”

“What? They mustn’t. They mustn’t interfere!” She got to her feet. She was tall as a coat rack.

Bingo, he thought. He replied, “Interfere with what?”

A buzzer went off beside the kitchen doorway. Meyers saw the metal switch plate on the wall, but the woman walked to it and pushed the black button on the plate before he had time to react. That would be the cops, and they would not be enthusiastic about his presence. In fact, chances were, he was in trouble. “Maybe I will have that vodka,” he said and pushed past her into the kitchen. A big tin icebox stood beside the doorway. He found the vodka on its side in a small compartment directly below the half-melted block of ice. He grabbed it by the neck, hefting it. Just in case.

Footsteps came up the stairs and into the apartment. Meyers leaned back against the kitchen wall, listening. The woman said something and then a man answered, but he wasn’t speaking English. His voice sounded pleasant, even friendly. Not cops, then. He had a pretty good idea who it was instead.

There was a back door to the apartment off the kitchen, and as the voice got louder, coming deeper into the apartment, Meyers crept around the icebox and very cautiously opened the door.

A man was standing there. He and Meyers looked at each other. The man’s hands were deep in his coat pockets, and he smiled as Meyers took this in, said, “How about we go back inside, pally. Nothing down in this alley but rats.”

Meyers nodded and closed the door. When he turned around, two other men stood in the kitchen doorway. He walked back to them, and set the vodka onto the counter next to the fridge.

In the other room a third man, with thick features and a large mustache, stood beside the woman. He beamed at Meyers. “Very nice work on that copper—you have excellent skills,” he said, his accent subtle. “All we had to do was tap him to keep him dreaming a little longer.”

“Sounds like it’s not his night.”

“Indeed. Now, you will please accompany us and Yuliya.”

“Why?” she said sharply. “He’s nobody to do with this. He is wanting to buy my time.”

The man glowered at her. “You know that is a lie, my dear. What casual john eliminates police officers for a trick? Mr. Drozdov will want to hear what he says, as do I, even now.” His eyes slid back to Meyers, who tipped his head as if to say that it was all fine with him. The mustached man held Yuliya Lukachova’s coat for her. Then two of the men led the way out and down the stairs with Meyers and her sandwiched in between.

——

The Packard drove into a loading bay in a warehouse on Front Street. The air reeked of sour refinery, so the wind must have been blowing in from the west. At least it masked the fish stink of the Delaware, which wasn’t more than a quarter mile away past the warehouses. They walked by shredded cardboard cartons, broken pallets, and piles of newspaper that were probably used as packing material. Meyers wondered what they manufactured and shipped out of here.

The first time he’d ever seen Pankrat Drozdov was the night he’d fought Mickey Darren at Convention Hall. It was one of Herman Taylor’s bouts, a clean fight. He’d KO’d Darren in the seventh. At the time he didn’t know he just had three fights left before his inner ear went. That night he had only the memory of a dark-haired man with the face of a shark and an entourage of six, which included a woman on each arm. Drozdov had stood out, as he intended.

The next time was after Kid had thrown his fight. Meyers knew the Russkie had been behind it—some kind of bet had been placed. He supposed he should have credited Drozdov for picking Kid up afterward and giving him the job with Cody. Except Drozdov was the reason Kid needed the job, and the job was the reason Kid was dead.

Drozdov had some gray at his temples now, but he was still lean and hatchet faced. This close to him, Meyers realized it was the eyes that made him like a shark. They were black and empty, eyes that calculated how you were going to taste.

He sat at the end of a large, scarred wooden table surrounded by oak chairs, the kind Meyers remembered from high school. The table had leather straps nailed to the side of it at all four corners. The men sat the woman down beside Drozdov. One of them walked off into the back. The other two flanked her. Meyers wasn’t offered a seat. A new man, nibbling a toothpick, sidled up out of the shadows and stood next to him.

“Well, well,” Drozdov said. “A long time it’s been since Darren went down. How have you been, Gospodin Meyers?”

“Well enough.”

“Vasily here tells me you’ve taken up our cause against the police.” Meyers shrugged. Drozdov leaned forward and took hold of Yuliya’s chin. His fingers closed on her jaw like a vise. “What is it you want with our lovely sister here?”

“Sister?”

Drozdov chuckled. “Oh, not my sister, Meyers.”

The look in her eyes wasn’t just from pain, but fearful recognition. Drozdov was letting her know that he knew everything. He drew his hand back. She reached up to rub her face.

“I was asking her about Kid,” Meyers said. “Because she was with Cody at the roadhouse.”

“You see?” Drozdov waved at Vasily. “A simple explanation. And it’s true. You can tell when someone’s telling the truth, you know?”

Vasily’s gaze shifted to Meyers noncommittally.

The man who’d walked into the back returned carrying a large wooden box. An electric trouble light hung off the side, the cord slithering along behind it. The flat blade of a large wood-burning iron also poked up above the side of the box, looking like the tip of an enormous screwdriver. Meyers tensed. He thought of the hookers fished out of the river.

“So,” Drozdov said, “I’m inclined to send you home. Unless you would like to stay. I hope to learn something about the fate of Cody and Kid Willette, myself.” His thug set two of the irons, one small like a pencil and the larger one the size of a leek, down on the table beside him.

Yuliya Lukachova implored Meyers with her eyes and shook her head. He read the look as a plea: She must be shaking her head no, that she didn’t want him to leave her here. He couldn’t see a way out for her, though, and much as he wanted to, he couldn’t walk away. Maybe he could help her, but maybe—and the thought unsettled him—he would hear finally what he wanted to know. “Yeah,” he said, “I’ll stick around.”

“No!” she barked. Everyone looked at her, but she stared at Meyers. “You leave here. Now.” Turning to Drozdov, she said, “Get rid of him and I tell you what you want.”

Drozdov casually picked up the smaller burner, touched it to the table. After a moment a tiny curl of smoke rose from the tip. “Not ready,” he said to no one and put it down. “Yuliya, believe me when I tell you, you’re going to give me everything anyway. I have found out some interesting facts about you since my dear friend Cody Aldred met you and his fate. And you know what I’m talking about.” He waited then, to see how she would answer.

Her eyes closed as if she’d dozed off. But then she drew a deep breath, and quietly said, “Liisu.”

“There. That’s what I like—when you tell me things.”

Still not looking at him, she replied flatly, “You killed her.”

Drozdov’s bonhomie peeled away like a mask; the face of the shark returned. “Actually, I didn’t.” He raised the large iron. “This did. Would you like to know where I applied it? Ah, you know, I think I won’t tell you. But I will let you find out.”

Meyers’s body was pumping adrenaline. Unable to act, he flexed his muscles, shifted his feet. The guy next to him eyed him sidelong, alert to the pent-up energy.

Yuliya Lukachova bowed her head, and her lips moved as in prayer. Drozdov frowned with disgust. Her breathy syllables grew slowly, steadily, into words, phrases, all of them alien to Meyers. Drozdov’s brow creased. The words perplexed him as well. He looked as if he had run out of patience with her, and his hand closed around the larger iron. She snarled strange words at him, and her hand came out of her pocket and flung blackness into his face. Small objects struck him and rained down onto the table, rolling, some of them, onto the floor. Meyers recognized the odd oily coins he’d seen in her apartment.

Drozdov began to laugh. One coin had stuck to his face, and he flicked it away.

The woman started to rise, and the goons behind her grabbed her by the arms. Drozdov sneered at her and picked up the iron.

The spill of coins didn’t settle. They jittered and rolled, off the table, across the floor as if downhill. In seconds they’d collected in a single spot and begun to spin in place. Only Meyers and his guard seemed to notice. Everyone else was watching the red-hot iron.

Drozdov plucked hairs from her head and touched them to the iron’s tip. They vanished in a puff of smoke. “She wants to be on the table now,” he told the men.

A breeze erupted through the huge space. From all around, loose objects started to skitter across the floor. They flew to where the black lump spun—broken splinters from the pallets, broken glass, papers, empty bottles, cardboard and tape, baling wire and small stones, mousetraps drawn out of corners, bricks that crumbled as they reached the spot. The box on the table flipped and the tools in it shot away from Drozdov. A trash container crashed. Its contents sailed across the floor. The air howled like something alive. The cage of the trouble light collapsed, and it whipped across the room. Drozdov reacted an instant too late, and the iron snapped from his grasp and flew behind it. The cord on the light whipped like a tail, and by the time the irons joined it, the thing had formed.

It stood like a man. For hands and fingers it had pliers, screwdrivers, nails, and the wood-burning irons that smoked and glowed. Black buttons punched the crumpled material of its face into eye sockets. The woman growled, “Nuku-surnud,” and the thing lunged at the table.

Vasily had his gun out. He fired repeatedly at the creature. It rammed the arm ending in the large iron straight into his skull. Flesh and brain sizzled. Its other arm buried in the chest of the second man holding Yuliya Lukachova, spinning, bursting out the back of him. It cut up and down, splitting him in half, and then went for Drozdov. He squealed and dodged aside. Meyers’s guard had run forward to help, and Drozdov grabbed him and threw him in the creature’s path, then barreled around the table.

The creature tore the man apart like it was opening an envelope.

Yuliya Lukachova screamed at Meyers. “Get out of here, idiot!” she yelled. “It won’t stop now. Run from here!” She stood proud, tall, as pitiless as stone.

Drozdov clawed at him and Meyers punched him, smashing his nose. Drozdov fell against the table. He lunged for Meyers again, but jerked back so fiercely that his neck cracked. The creature had caught his collar. It slammed him onto the table. The large iron swept once around his throat, and suddenly his head was flying back into the depths of the warehouse while the body kicked and spasmed.

Meyers ran.

He dodged past the car and down the ramp to the open lot. He hesitated for only a second before racing toward the river—long enough to glance back and see the thing wedge itself around the Packard. It left a wet smear on the car.

He bolted across the open lot. The thing lumbered after him undeterred.

Soon he was in the grass, up a gravel slope and over the rails of the tracks that ran past the warehouses. When he looked back next he could feel the creeping edge of vertigo from his ear injury. He listened instead of looking back then, sure that swinging his head once more would tip the world over on him, and for certain if he fell the dingus would catch him.

It crashed noisily through the brush behind him, and that propelled him ahead. He thundered out onto the disused loading dock made of old wooden ties as the creature crossed the tracks and descended the bed.

Reaching the edge, Meyers dove into the blackness of the Delaware. Ships had taken on cargo here. It had to be deep enough to dive. He was depending on it.

He hit the icy water and swam for his life. The current clutched at him but he kicked furiously out into the river, refusing to be dragged under. He thought of the girls Drozdov had tortured and dumped, their corpses down below. He swam harder.

The creation of wood and glass and paper and metal leaped in after him. He heard the splash, dared a look back as it vanished into the black water. It surged up once, thrashed like a crazed animal at the surface, and then sank. This time it did not reappear, but Meyers turned and kept going, driven by the fear that any second, monstrous hands would snag him from below and pull him to his death.

He didn’t stop until he’d crawled up on the rocky Camden side. He was shivering. His breath steamed. He made himself get to his feet and go on, up and into the weeds. He stumbled and shuffled and kept moving, and maybe half a mile up found a service station by the side of the highway that was open and pumping gas. He went inside, pulled out a sodden five-dollar bill and begged the most expensive cup of coffee he’d ever had. The attendant eyed him as if debating whether to call the cops, but Meyers told him to keep the bill, and that settled that.

He held the stained mug in both shaking hands as he drank. Two other men, truck drivers, stared at him as they might have stared at a raccoon that had wandered in for a pack of Luckies. Nobody asked him what had happened, as if they knew the answer would be impossible to reconcile.

He drank a second cup before he set down the mug and headed out. The Delaware River Bridge wasn’t far. He took the footpath up alongside the cars passing from New Jersey to Pennsylvania. Every few feet he was compelled to glance back to confirm that the dingus wasn’t pursuing him. Dingus. That’s right. He laughed at the word, making a joke of the horror, and the fact that he’d escaped it.

The events rolled around in his head like marbles. The woman had created it, called it into being somehow. He’d seen it with his own eyes. Some kind of witch. She would’ve done the same at the roadhouse. Those coins, buttons, whatever they were. How many did she throw at Cody? Why was he wondering this? It was crazy. Coins that brought trash to life.

He was cold and tired, and he’d just escaped from a goddamn dingus that nobody was ever going to believe in.

Back in Philly, he rode the Third Street Trolley to Fairmount Avenue and caught the Fairmount Trolley up past the prison. He sat away at the back of both by himself. It was coming up on seven in the morning. He smelled like the river; his clothes were damp; his hair was crazy. He looked like someone who’d gotten falling-down drunk in a fountain.

He was never so happy to see his cab as that morning. Tumbling into it, he spent a moment breathing in the stale, wonderful smell of Rosario’s cigars. A fit of laughter burst from him. He pounded the steering wheel and yelled and yelled until he’d worn out the terror. Then he started the cab, drove back to the depot and parked.

Rosie would be showing up any minute for the day shift, but Meyers didn’t wait. He walked the few blocks home, stripped out of the wet clothes, and then, in dry shorts and undershirt, he opened a tin of beans, heated them up on the stove, and ate ravenously out of the pan, mopping up the red sauce with a hunk of bread. He wanted a pot of coffee and a steak.

The night’s events were bending into some warped dream. Meyers furiously scratched his cheek. He kept turning it all over in his head. Had everyone been killed? He tried to remember, but he wasn’t sure. Maybe one of the goons had escaped into the warehouse. And the woman, the witch, she’d gotten away, oh, yeah.

Getting away seemed like a very good idea. If any of Drozdov’s guys were still loose, they’d come after him to find her. Or maybe think he was part of it, in with her from the beginning. Sure. He’d been out for revenge for Kid. They’d think that, wouldn’t they? And what about the cops? The one he’d punched. He couldn’t be sure he hadn’t been recognized. And Bulbitch—imagine trying to sell him this story: a dingus that killed four armed men? Twice? Bulbitch had warned him to stay out of it, and unless the cops could buy into witches and papier-mвchй monsters conjured from coins and buttons and crap, they’d hang this on him. If he hadn’t been there, hadn’t seen it himself . . .

San Francisco sounded awfully good. Bound to be a morning bus—get him as far as Pittsburgh before anyone knew to look for him. Arnie Slocum had moved out to Frisco to train fighters two years ago. Arnie would hand him a job right away.

As he collected his whirling thoughts, he moved about the apartment, got out his suitcase, filled it with clothes. He needed a bath, but maybe not right now. Some clothes, some cash from the bank on the way. He grabbed his tip box out of the back of the closet and tossed two rolls of bills into the suitcase under the clothes. He’d call Rosie from the bus depot, tell him to hang onto the cab, he’d be in touch to work out the details later. Rosie’d find somebody to take the night shift for now.

Winter in California, that wasn’t such a bad fate. Let everything blow over and all the monsters wash out to sea.

That was the plan congealing as he hauled the suitcase into the foyer. He paused to pull on his pea jacket, then grabbed the door handle in the same moment he heard his feet splash and looked down to see dark dirty river water pooling as it trickled in over the threshold. Meyers thought of Red in his roadhouse reaching for a brass knob, blood soaking into the sawdust below him, as the door of the apartment came off the latch.

——

Gregory Frost is a writer of fantasy, horror, and science fiction who has been publishing steadily for more than two decades.

His latest work is the fantasy duology Shadowbridge and Lord Tophet, published by Del Rey Books. His earlier novels include Fitcher’s Brides, a World Fantasy Award and International Horror Guild Award finalist for Best Novel; Tain; Lyrec; and Nebula-nominated science-fiction work The Pure Cold Light. His short-story collection Attack of the Jazz Giants and Other Stories was called by Publishers Weekly “one of the best fantasy collections of the year.”

He is one of the Fiction Writing Workshop directors at Swarthmore College in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania, and has thrice taught the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers’ Workshop.

His website is GregoryFrost.com; his blog, Frostbites, lurks at Frostokovich.LiveJournal.com.

| THE GETAWAY |

Paul G. Tremblay

—

There’s this thing about living in Wormtown that my older brother Joe doesn’t get, or he does get it and doesn’t want to admit it. We live in Worcester, stuck like a dart in the middle of Massachusetts. This isn’t Boston. No ocean, just a river. No quaint historical bullshit that attracts tourists. Just hills, colleges, hospitals, and churches, making the urban decay look a little prettier. It’s not a good place to be, right? But Joe and the rest of the local artsy types, so desperate for the recognition they’ll never get, they pump up and promote the nickname Wormtown like it means Worcester is some legit big city that people would actually choose to live in, like Worcester is somehow important or any less damaged than it is because of a fucking name change. They brand themselves Wormtowners like they aren’t as doomed as the rest of us. So I still use their fun little nickname, but only because it makes me bust a gut laughing.

It’s five a.m. I’m sitting in the driver’s seat of Henry’s rusty Ford Explorer, tucked behind Ace’s Pawn Shop, which is on the corner of Main and Wellington. Engine on, tailgate up, interior lights off. Sitting here waiting for what’s next.

Joe always says I never think ahead, that I only use my lizard brain. Right. He’s a thirty-year-old painter who doesn’t sell any paintings. But he’s really a busboy at some restaurant over by Clark U, a trendy place that just opened and will probably close within the year. He cleans tables and gets no tips from the rich college kids and their yuppie professors. Joe has two maxed-out credit cards and lives with a between-jobs girlfriend and her five-year-old kid in a one-bedroom apartment. So much for thinking ahead, Joe. I’m the one pointed somewhere with both hands on the goddamn steering wheel.

My window is down when it doesn’t need to be. There’s nothing that I can’t see from behind the glass. Mike asked me to do it. He said pretty please before leaving the SUV and going inside.

Goddamn, it’s cold out. Didn’t wear the right clothes for this. Just a brown flannel and some black jeans, steel-toed boots laced to the ankle. No jacket, and I left my black hoodie at the apartment. If that’s my only fuckup, we’ll be okay. Winter is coming early. The black gloves don’t keep my hands warm. I take my hands off the wheel and rub them together, then I slouch into the seat.

Gunshots. A quick burst of two. I think. Then a third, after a pause long enough to be uncomfortable for everyone. The shots are all muffled, coming from inside the pawnshop, but still, somehow, they sound like city-sized phonebooks hitting the floor after a big drop. There weren’t supposed to be any gunshots. Gunshots mean big trouble. There wasn’t supposed to be any big trouble.

I suddenly have to go to the bathroom even though I did what Henry said and skipped my morning coffee. I stop breathing so loud. I can’t see anything through the pawnshop’s cage-covered windows. Still alone in the SUV and in the empty lot, I shift from park to drive. My foot is heavy on the brake, and I put my hands back on the wheel where they’re supposed to be. Ten and two.

The back door flies open and they all come running out at once, a group of shadows, arms and legs everywhere. No one shouts; they’re not dumb enough to be human alarms, but they hiss and whisper orders at me, their humble driver, subtle shit like “Go, go, go,” and “Let’s get the fuck outta here.”

Yes, sirs. I calmly roll up my window and watch them in the rearview mirror, everything happening slow and fast at the same time. They’re circus clowns going backwards, getting into the car instead of jumping out. Mike sits his heavy ass in the seat behind me, shaking the car. Greg slides in on the other side and rips off his ski mask like it’s burning him, and he throws it on the car floor. He better remember to pick that up later and dump it. Greg isn’t exactly known for paying attention to the details, for paying attention to anything. He shouldn’t be on this job at all, never mind getting to go inside. Yeah, he grew up on the same street as us, but he’s loose with everything, you know? Christ, he was just fired from his bartending gig at Irish Times because he was caught skimming on back-to-back nights. Henry was nuts to use him, but you can’t tell Henry anything. It’s his show. And Henry, his ski mask is still pulled over his ham-sized face. He throws the duffle bag in the trunk, jumps in after it. I take my foot off the brake, start inching forward, still watching Henry, and he kind of flickers in the shadows. He pulls his little jerry-rigged rope and shuts the tailgate behind him.

I roll out of the pawnshop’s rear lot, and they’re all yelling at me. Mike actually says, “Step on it, Danny.” Christ. I turn around to say something smart-ass, something to calm everyone the fuck down, because the truth of it is, them all yelling go-go-go has got me on tilt. So scared I feel it in my fingers and toes and my tightening chest. Mike cuffs me in the ear with an open hand, turns me back around. My head rings and everything goes white for a second. Mike hitting me doesn’t make me feel any better, but I manage to turn left on Main Street without crashing.

They’re trying to talk over each other in the back. My ear burns, and I’m looking all over Main Street for blue and white lights, trying to stay focused, and trying to think ahead. I yell over my shoulder, and have to yell it twice, “You assholes gonna tell me what happened?”

Mike says, “Everything was going fine, got the cage open no problem, and then the tough guy over here decides to chuck the old man over the counter.” Mike pauses, daring Greg to say something different. Greg is smart enough to keep quiet.

I can see it happening even if I wasn’t there: The three of them jumped the old man at the back door, right? Henry knew the old guy was going to be there. This was Henry’s gig. They’re always his gigs. So they jumped him and went inside, persuaded the old man to open the front counter’s cage. Henry talked to him slowly, calmly, hypnotizing the old man into believing everything would be okay. That’s what Henry is good at. When we were kids, he’d talk us into stealing cigarettes and porn mags. So Henry was telling the old man that all was well, no one would get hurt, that he was going to go behind the counter with him, go to the register and then to the jewelry and watches kept in the lockboxes. It was then that maybe the old guy said something and Greg didn’t like it, or the guy gave Greg an odd look because Greg was always getting odd looks, with his too-small-for-his-face eyes and a mouth like a cut, or maybe Greg got some wild itch he had to scratch, or he was trying to prove how tough and crazy he was to Henry, and I won’t say it to Mike right now, but it’s still Henry’s fault for taking Greg, for not planning for what Greg might do, which is throw a semiretired old man over the register counter.

Mike says, “And when the old man got up, he was holding—”

Greg cuts Mike’s bedtime story short, and yells, “Hey! Hey!”

I’m looking through the small screen of the rearview mirror again and can’t see much, only Greg turned around, kneeling, hands on top of the back seats, and he’s looking into the trunk. He moves left, right, dancing around like a dog excited to go for a ride. Or maybe he just really has to go to the bathroom like I do.

Greg says, “Where the fuck is Henry?”

Great. The kid is bat-shit crazy. Why doesn’t Henry say something to him? Maybe Henry is waiting for Greg to stick his head over the seat so he can sucker-punch him, knock loose a few Chiclets.

Greg starts bitching at me about leaving Henry, about me fucking everything up, and he bounces off the car walls and seats like one of those superballs you can get for a quarter. Now I’m yelling too, saying, “What do you mean?” and telling him to shut up, telling Mike to shut him up. No one answers me. I wish they would. Mike turns around next, but he’s too big to turn completely around. Mostly he twists in his seat and cranes his melon-sized head toward the trunk.

Mike says, “He’s not in here.” He says it like it’s the last line in a movie.

More Greg: “You left him there? You fucking left without him?”

Mike repeats himself. “He’s not in here.”

“Wait, wait, wait.” I say bullshit to all that. “Henry? Henry, quit fucking around!” No answer. He’s still fucking around, right? Hiding in the trunk, the duffle bag on top of him. It’s something he’d do. He isn’t answering me, though.

“What did you do?”

I say, “I watched Henry throw the duffle bag in, and then he climbed into the trunk. I watched him. I swear to fucking God. He used the rope, pulled the tailgate shut behind him.”

Greg jams his head between the front seats and screams into my ear, the same one that got cuffed. The ear isn’t having a good time. “You didn’t see shit. He isn’t there.”

“Enough,” Mike says, and pulls Greg back and sticks him into his seat. “We need to think this through.”

Oh goody. I’d do anything for Mike, but he’s more of a brute-squad kind of guy, more of a cuff-you-in-the-ear kind of guy, not the thinker. Thinking just makes him more mad, more likely to start breaking shit.

“Turn around, Danny. We can’t just leave him behind,” says Greg.

Everything I got inside me drops into my shoes. Goddamn

Henry. Him really not being in the car with us sinks in. Henry isn’t here and it’s my fault. But we can’t turn around. “Yeah, brilliant idea, right? We’ll just swing by, pick him up on the corner, no problem.” Then I say to Mike, “No going back, but I’m pulling over.”

“Why?”

“I want to see what’s in the trunk.”

Greg says, “We can’t leave Henry, man.”

Mike is looking at me. Or the me in the rearview mirror. Maybe that me is different somehow. Mike says, “We’re not turning around. You’re not pulling over. We can’t stop, not yet. Keep driving.”

I nod. Maybe I’m wrong and Mike always was our thinker, not Henry. Mike’s right. About everything. But if Mike told me to turn around, I would. He’s known Henry as long as I have, and we both owe him everything.

We pass hotels, the local arena, and UMass medical center. Highway ramps all around us. I should probably take one, head out of Wormtown. I put on the interior lights instead. “Is the duffle bag there?”

Greg roots around the trunk. “The shotgun and the duffle are here.” He lifts the bag up, and it sounds like a pocketful of change. “There’s a ton of blood. Oh man, what the fuck?”

“Did Henry get hit?” Never did hear the end of the pawnshop story, what happened after the old man went over the counter, and then the three gunshots.

Mike says, “The old man got off a shot, some semiautomatic piece of shit, but I didn’t think he hit Henry. I was right next to him and he didn’t say nothing about getting hit.”

I don’t ask about the other shots I heard. I see now what I didn’t see before. I say, “All right. How did the tailgate get shut, then?”

“Huh?” Mike has his ski mask off. He rubs his shaved, bald head and the thick stubble around his goatee. His eyes closed, arms folded across his chest. Greg sits back down, holding his hands out. Showing off the wet paint. It’s red.

I say, “The tailgate. How’d it shut? While I was waiting for you guys, it was open. Like it was supposed to be. So I’m thinking I didn’t see what I thought I saw, right? Henry was hit, got in the trunk, but because of the blood loss he wasn’t strong enough to pull the tailgate closed behind him, and maybe I started moving before it was totally shut and he fell out onto the parking lot. But that doesn’t seem right. How’d the tailgate get shut? I mean, what, did Henry get up after he fell out and shut it for us, tap the back twice and wish us bon voyage?”

Greg says, “Oh fuck. Nah, that ain’t it. Henry ducked his ass out and he’s gonna turn us in, pin the robbery and shooting on us. That blood came off the duffle bag, man. He didn’t get hit. That bag was sitting in the old man’s blood after Henry took care of him, right, Mike?”

Mike says, “I don’t remember. I don’t know.”

Greg says, “That’s gotta be it. He dumped the duffle bag and his shotgun back there to pin the whole thing on us while he slinks away. That fucker.”

Mike turns to look at Greg, and looks at him like a kid staring at a real ugly bug about to get squished. “If he did, I don’t blame him. It all went to shit because of you.”

Greg doesn’t fire back. He’s scared of Mike. So am I. I drive into a residential neighborhood and early morning commuters are starting to fill the roads. Maybe that’s good. We can lose ourselves in the everyday traffic.

Greg says, “So what do we do now, boys? Where we gonna go?”

We’re supposed to drive across Wormtown, into Auburn, to Henry’s old girlfriend’s farmhouse. Seemed like a good plan at the time. Now I can see all the gaping cartoon mouse holes in everything. Maybe my brother Joe was right. I don’t think ahead.

Mike says, “We’re not going to her house. We’re gonna play it like Henry is ratting us out.”

“What if he isn’t?” I say. I mean it too. Because it doesn’t feel right. It doesn’t feel like Henry. Even with Greg blowing it all up like he did, Henry wouldn’t play us. Henry has always taken care of us. He’s fifteen years older than me, and he worked at the Mobil just a few blocks from where I grew up. Him and his early gray hair. He looked like someone’s dad. He saved us a couple of times when me and Mike were walking home from school and got jumped by these kids. The second time they jumped us, he busted their heads open with a bike chain. So Henry kept us safe, took us for rides around Worcester, would sit and watch as we bent car antennas and broke windows near the Holy Cross and Clark campuses. Henry would sell us weed, and eventually, we helped him sell to our friends. By we, I mean me and Mike. My brother Joe didn’t like or trust Henry, wouldn’t come out with us ever. I tried telling him that Henry was a good guy, that he was fun, that he was one of us, but Joe didn’t care, wouldn’t listen to me. He never listened to me. Stubborn ass would pull the oldest-in-the-family bullshit about knowing what was best. So I went out with Mike and Henry, and Joe, he just stayed home with Grandma and painted his goddamn pictures while she watched TV.

Mike says, “Even if he isn’t, we still can’t show up at that farmhouse without him.”

Greg starts swearing and crying into his hands. Like that’ll help. Then he gets back into his old tune. “Fuck. What if we left him? We can’t just leave him. Maybe he’s hiding in a dumpster or something, back near the pawnshop, waiting for us to come back. Someone call him. Mike, you call him.”

“We can’t. No calls.”

Mike is right again. Especially if we left a bloody Henry in the parking lot. Cops or an ambulance would definitely have him by now. We can’t be on any phone records today.

Then it hits me, suddenly. Where we can go. Good a place as any for a half-assed getaway, or some kind of last stand.

I say, “I know where we can go, boys.”

——

The trip is going to be longer than it has to be. Need to avoid the Mass Pike and its tollbooths and cameras. So we go north on 190, then we’ll hit Route 2 West, then 91 North, then over the river and through the woods to my grandma’s old lake house in Hinsdale, Vermont, a one-cow town just outside of Brattleboro. It’s not her place anymore, but it’s no one’s place anymore, either. My great-grandmother had the tiny two-bedroom bungalow built next to a private lake. I don’t even remember the lake’s name. Something long and with a lot of consonants.

It’s not Grandma’s place anymore because her family never really owned the land. They got the place on a ninety-year lease. Grandma died two years ago, and so did the lease. The state took the land back over, wouldn’t offer a new lease, and talked about using the house and lake for some electric-company outpost or some shit like that. I didn’t take that estate meeting well and left Joe to the room and the lawyers. Two years ago is the last time I was up there with Joe. The two of us and a dumpster. Didn’t save anything.

Far as I know, nothing has been done with the rundown place, and I can’t imagine anyone would use it, completely out in the boonies with only a five-mile-long, one-lane dirt road as access to the property. I guess we’ll find out.

We’ve been on 190 for almost half an hour. Finally turning onto Route 2. We’ve left our cell phones on in case Henry decides to call or text us. Nothing. Same kind of nothing on the radio, too.

I pull my cell out of my pocket and stare at the screen. I kinda want Joe to call, too. Not that I could answer his call or anything. Not that we’ve talked to each other in a month or so. Not after the last time I called him, and he bitched me out for having no real job and still hanging around Henry.

Greg can’t be quiet for too long, so he starts in on another of his cute little rants. Mike’s gonna pop Greg’s head off like he’s a dandelion if he keeps it up. Greg says, “This is a big mistake. Going to a place that we don’t even know we can go to. Great fucking plan.”

Mike says, “It’ll work out.”

Greg rubs his head and face. “I feel like shit, and you two idiots are making it worse.” He’s lathering himself up, breathing heavy, blinking like his eyelids are hummingbirds, in total freak-out mode. He says, “How about we pull over at a rest stop, dump the shotgun and bag, instead of carrying the shit around with us? Might as well be driving with ‘we did it’ painted on the windows.”

We should think about dumping that stuff. Mike won’t have any of it, would never admit that Greg was right about anything.

Mike says, “We ain’t stopping. We’ll dump the stuff when we get up there.”

Greg closes his eyes, holds a hand to his mouth almost like he’s going to puke. “Dump it at the lake house? That’s fucking retarded!”

I say, “Easy, Greg.”

“Even if we get there, which we won’t, and find the place empty, which we fucking won’t, we’re gonna do what? Set up a happy house and then dump the shit in the lake? At the same lake we’re staying at? Nice. They’d never find that shit, right?” Greg’s voice goes higher and louder, getting shrill, his face turning red.

I turn around because I want to actually see Mike punch him instead of watching it in the rearview mirror. And then Greg’s voice cuts out, mid-rant. He looks at us, mouth open, eyes wide, and his face crumbles, slides away, like something broke, and I turn back around fast, because, that look on his face, I can’t watch that, can’t, and whatever happens next will be better seen from the safety of my rearview mirror.

So now I’m looking in that glass and I’ve lost Greg. Can’t find him. Then he’s there again, and he flickers. In and out of the mirror. He’s not moving. He flickers like a goddamn light bulb.

I turn back around. Greg’s throat is gone. It’s all just red pulp. Blood leaks out of Greg’s eyes, nose, and ears, and his mouth is open and keeps opening, a silent scream, and how does his mouth keep going like that? And his eyes opening too, the whites gone all red, then worse than a scream, this horrible whisper from his ruined throat, a hiss, a leaking of air, and he winks out. No more flickering light. Blood mists the rear passenger window and Greg’s seat, but he’s not sitting in the back seat. He’s not there. He’s gone.

Mike screams Greg’s name and kicks and punches the back of my seat, the door, the ceiling. I turn back around and I’m doing ninety, didn’t realize it, and am about to plow into the back of a tractor-trailer. I brake and swerve onto the shoulder, rumble strip, then grass and dirt, and manage to stop the SUV. Mike is still screaming. I look at the dash, the speedometer reading zero, the road, but don’t really see anything other than Greg’s face, before . . . before he what?

I yell to Mike: “Before he what? Before he what?”

“I don’t know, Danny. Just go. Just keep driving.”

“What?”

“Keep fucking driving. Just keep driving, keep driving . . .” Mike repeats himself and keeps on repeating himself.

I want to dive out of the car and run away and keep running. But I don’t. I listen to Mike. I drive. Pull off the shoulder and onto the highway. I keep driving, and try not to look into the rearview.

——

Overcast. The clouds are low and getting lower. North on I-91 and Mike sits in the middle of the back seat, filling my rearview. He watches himself. Making sure he’s still there, maybe. I’m watching him too, him holding Henry’s sawed-off shotgun. Every few minutes his hands get to shaking. The gunmetal vibrates in his hands.

I’ve tried slowing down, pulling off the road or into seemingly empty rest areas, but Mike won’t have it. He threatens to shoot me in the head if I stop. Says that I have to keep driving. Keep going. I keep going, more because I’m scared, and don’t know what else to do. I know Mike won’t shoot me, would never shoot me. Still.

“Hey, Mike.”

“Still here.”

“Need to think about this. Back at the pawnshop. Did that old guy shoot Henry?”

“It happened so fast. He jumped up with that gun pointed at us and . . . I can’t remember, Danny.”

“Did he shoot Greg, too?”

Mike shakes his head, and it turns into a shrug of the shoulders, and that turns into his hands shaking all over again.

I don’t ask Mike if he thinks what happened to Greg happened to Henry. I don’t ask Mike about the three gunshots I heard. I don’t ask Mike if he thinks what happened to Greg will happen to him. I know Mike’s answer to the questions. And I know mine.

We cross the border, into Vermont. Things feel kind of funny in the car. The air all wrong. Too light. Or too heavy.

Mike says, “Remember that one summer your grandma let me come up to the lake house?”

“What? Yeah, of course I remember. Grandma never called to run it by your mom and you didn’t tell your mom you were going and by the time we got back the cops had put up posters on half the telephone poles in Wormtown.”

Mike breathes through his nose. Almost sounds like a laugh. He says, “That was the first time I’d ever been in Vermont. This is my second.” I watch Mike talking in the rearview mirror. Maybe if I focus hard enough on watching him, he won’t disappear.

“You need to get out more often.”

“Henry or Greg ever go up?”

“Fuck, no. Greg would’ve burnt the place down just trying to make toast. Just you, man. And Grandma didn’t know about Henry.”

“She knew. She told me we shouldn’t be spending time with a stranger in the neighborhood that much older than us. She told me it wasn’t right.”

“When did she tell you that?”

“At the lake house. It was the only time she talked to me the whole week up there.” Mike laughs for real this time. “I loved it up there, Danny. I really did. But man, it was really weird too. Your grandmother would cook us meals and make our beds, but I remember her not talking much at all and spending most of the week by herself, smoking her Lucky Strikes on the dock, going for walks by herself, leaving us alone.”

I say, “She did the same shit back home.” Grandma fed us but would kick me and Joe out of the apartment until it got dark out, and Joe would usually go off on his own, not let me come with him. If it was raining or something and we couldn’t go out, she’d stay in her room with a book or her little black-and-white TV. Away from us.

“I’m not feeling right, Danny.” Mike rubs a forearm across his forehead. Doesn’t let go of the gun. His voice sounds smaller, farther away, coming from another room.

“We’re almost there, Mike.” I say it without thinking. I don’t know what to do.

“I know your grandma ignored us all at your home. But it was different up there, all by ourselves, away from the city and everything. Up there, I really noticed it. I got up earlier than you and your brother a couple of mornings and spied on her. She’d just stare into the mountains or into nowhere, really. It was like we weren’t even there, Danny. I’m getting fucking worried; maybe we were never there. Oh shit, Danny, I don’t feel right.”

“I’m pulling over, Mike. You relax. Keep talking to me.” We’re only ten miles from the exit, not that it matters. I slowly pull over onto the shoulder and I want to believe that if we just get out of the car, then we’ll be okay; he’ll be okay. But there were three shots.

Mike’s eyes are closed and he’s concentrating hard on something. Brow folding in on itself, upper lip shaking like an earthquake. He says, “Don’t know how she could ignore you and Joe fighting the way you did. You fought over everything. Made me feel really, I don’t know, uncomfortable. That probably sounds messed up coming from me. But, I don’t know, man, it just didn’t feel right. Wanted to kick both your heads in by the end of the vacation.”

“Wish you were here, send us a postcard, right? Mike, listen, the car is stopped. We’re going to get out. Just walk around. Get some fresh air, all right?” I say, then I lie to him: “It’ll help.”

“What was the name of the card game you guys always played?”

“Cribbage. Joe always tried cheating me on the counts.”

“Nah, you were just too dumb to count the points right and Joe would call you on it and . . .” Mike stops talking and slow fades out.

I scream his name and he comes back. He looks like Greg did. Bleeding from everywhere. There’s a dime-sized hole in his forehead, and it’s growing. He opens his mouth but can’t speak.

I call his name, not that his name works anymore, right? I ask him if he’s still with me. I ask him to say something.

Mike whimpers like a goddamn dog that just had his leg stepped on, and he slides across the back seat, out the door and onto the shoulder of the highway, carrying the shotgun.

I get out, sprint around the front of the car, my own ears ringing, but not because of the cuff in the head he gave me forever ago. Mike stumbles, turns around aimlessly, his feet lost in a circle. His eyes are rolled back in his head. He puts the barrels of the sawed-off in his mouth. He pulls the trigger and disappears. He disappears and pulls the trigger. Which came first? Fuck if I know, but there’s nothing left of him but a fog of blood, and the shotgun drops to the pavement after hovering in the air for an impossible second.

——

Earlier, after telling Greg and Mike my getaway plan, I was more than a little worried that I wouldn’t remember how to get to the lake house. But I remember. Every turn.

I’m not feeling so great. Don’t know if it’s because I watched Greg and Mike (and goddamn Henry, I saw him flicker in the rearview, in the dark too, you betcha) and I only think I’m feeling what they were feeling. Joe always said I was nothing but a follower. Fucking Joe.

So there’s that, and now I’m thinking about the shots I heard. Did I hear three? Or was it four? The first two came in a quick burst, one right after the other, piggybacking. Then a pause. Then a third. But it could’ve been three shots in that quick burst. And how long was that pause? I really can’t remember now.

I drive down the long dirt road. I’m the only one out here. Within sight of both lake and house there’s a small chainlink fence across the road. I plow through it and park next to the house. The white shingles have gone green with mold. The roof is missing tiles and tar and is sunken in parts. The screened porch is missing its screens. If a house falls apart in the woods and nobody’s there, will anyone miss it?

This is where I spent so many quiet and solitary summer weeks with Grandma and Joe, but not really with them. Joe painted, and she smoked and walked. This place here, this is where I learned to hate them.

In Wormtown, it was different. I had Mike and Henry. I kept busy and didn’t have time to think about how fucked up it all was. I miss Mike. Really miss him already, like he’s been gone for years instead of minutes.

Now that I’m here, I’m afraid of the house. Like if I stare at the porch too long, I might see Grandma there, sitting in a chair, looking out over the lake, seeing whatever it was she saw, and smoking those Lucky Strikes. And what if now, right now, she finally turns to look at me, to see me?

I spin the car around, and park it so I’m facing the lake instead of the house. It doesn’t help. I feel the house and Grandma somewhere behind me.

Not sure if I’ll get reception out here, but I take my cell out and call Joe. It goes through. He picks up, says, “Hey.”

“Hey.”

We don’t say anything else. We sit and stew in the quiet. It feels, I don’t know, thick. Like it always has. I’m thinking Joe maybe feels it too. What’d Mike say? Being around me and Joe was uncomfortable. Sounds about right.

He says, “What do you want now, Danny? You want to borrow money that I don’t have? Bail you out of jail again? Go call Henry if that’s it.”

“Joe,” I say. “Hey, Joe. I got something to tell you. It’s important.”

I pause and imagine what Henry, Greg, and Mike felt after they were shot, and before they disappeared. “Hey, Joe,” I say again. “Listen carefully. I’m up in Vermont, at the old place.”

I roll down my window. Goddamn, it’s cold out. Like I said earlier, didn’t wear the right clothes for this. Just a brown flannel and some black jeans, steel-toed boots laced to the ankle. Still no jacket, and I left my black hoodie at the apartment. Too bad all that stuff I left behind won’t just disappear like they did. Like I might. Three shots or four.

Winter is coming early.

“What?”

“Yeah. I’m here, by myself, Joe. The place looks fucking terrible. Rotting away to nothing.”

“What are you doing up there?”

“I don’t know. Trying to get away, I guess. Can’t, though. Doesn’t matter. I’m here, and I decided to call you. Because I’m thinking I should’ve told you something a long time ago. You listening? Here it is: Fuck you, Joe.”

I drop the phone. It disappears somewhere below me. The black gloves I’m still wearing don’t keep my hands warm. I rub my hands together, and I slouch into the seat. I’m not feeling good at all. Things getting heavy. Lake getting blurry.

The shotgun is on the seat next to me. I might pick it up, and then fade away.

——

Paul G. Tremblay is the author of the novels The Little Sleep and No Sleep till Wonderland, both of which feature narcoleptic private detective Mark Genevich; the short speculative-fiction collections In the Mean Time and Compositions for the Young and Old; and the novellas City Pier: Above and Below and The Harlequin and the Train. His stories have appeared in Weird Tales, The Last Pentacle of the Sun: Writings in Support of the West Memphis Three, and Best American Fantasy 3. He served as fiction editor of ChiZine and as coeditor of Fantasy Magazine. He is also the coeditor of the Fantasy, Bandersnatch, and Phantom anthologies with Sean Wallace, and of Creatures! with John Langan. Paul is currently an advisor for the Shirley Jackson Awards. He still has no uvula, but plugs along, somehow. More information can be found at PaulTremblay.net and TheLittleSleep.com.

| MORTAL BAIT |

Richard Bowes

—

When I think of death, what comes to mind is the feel of an ice-cold knife racing up my leg like I’m a letter being sliced open. When that happens in my nightmares I wake up. In real life, just before the blade of ice reached my heart, the medic got to me where I lay in that bloody field at Aisne-Marne, tied and tightened a tourniquet above my left knee and stopped the flow before all my blood ran onto the grass.

——

That memory of my war came out of nowhere as I sat in my little office in Greenwich Village on a sunny October afternoon. It felt like someone had riffled through my memories and pulled out that one. Beings that my Irish grandmother called the Gentry and the Fair Folk walk this world and can do things like that to mortals. A shiver ran through me.

My name’s Sam Grant and I’m a private investigator. Logic and deduction come into my line of work. So do memory and intuition. My grandmother always said a sudden shiver meant someone had just stepped on the spot where your grave would be.

I could have told myself it was that or a stray draft of cold air. But I’d felt this before and knew what it meant. Some elf or fairy had shuffled my memories like a card deck. And that wasn’t supposed to happen to me.

At that moment I was writing a letter to my contact, Bertrade le Claire. It was Bertrade who had worked a magic to shield me.

An intruder would see her image, her long dark hair, beautiful wide eyes—a face that seemed like something off a movie screen. She wore a jacket of red and gold and a look that said, “Step back!” She was a law officer in the Kingdom beneath the Hill.

The letter I was writing concerned new clients, the Beyers, a couple from Menlo Park, New Jersey. He worked for an insurance company; she taught Sunday school. In my office, she talked, he studied the photos I keep on my wall, and they both clung to hope and the arms of their chairs.

They were the parents of Hilda, a junior at Rutgers and currently a missing person. Hilda, who, according to her mother, was a sensitive girl who wrote poetry, was due to graduate in June of 1952 and become an English teacher. She’d had a few boyfriends over the years, but nothing serious as far as anyone knew. Not the kind of young lady to run off on a whim. But four months back, it seemed that she had.

While his wife talked, Mr. Beyer looked at the signed photo of Mayor La Guardia with His Honor mugging for the camera as he shook my hand and thanked me for civilian services to New York City during the Second War to End All Wars.

The one where I’m getting kissed by Marshal Foch, I leave in the drawer, because some guys in this neighborhood might get the wrong idea.

But I display Douglas MacArthur, executive officer of the Rainbow Division in 1918, pinning a Distinguished Service Cross on the tunic of a soldier on crutches. I’m not that easy to make out. But Colonel MacArthur, with his soft cap at a jaunty angle and a riding crop under his arm, you’d recognize anywhere. I figure it’s got to be worth something that I served under Dugout Doug and lived to tell about it.

Mrs. Beyer told me how the New Jersey cops couldn’t find a lead on Hilda. After other private eyes struck out, my name came up.

Mrs. Beyer paused, then said, “We have heard that she could have gone to another . . . ,” and trailed off.

“. . . realm,” I offered and she nodded. “It’s possible,” I said. Mr. Beyer’s eyes widened at hearing a man who’d been decorated by MacArthur say he believed in fairies.

After that we closed the deal quickly. My initial fee is $250. It’s stiff, but I think I’m worth it, especially since I wore my good suit and a fresh starched shirt for the occasion. I didn’t promise them their daughter back. I did promise I’d do everything I could to find her. On their way out, I shook hands with him. Put my left hand on hers for reassurance.

Playing baseball as a kid, I was a switch hitter, and I could field and throw with both my right and my left. I even learned to write with either hand. These days, the left’s the only thing about me that still works the way everything once did. And I tend to save it for special occasions.

In the Beyers’ presence I walked tall. But I still have metal fragments in my knee. With the clients gone I limped a bit on my way back to the desk.

I took a sheet of paper and a plain envelope out of the desk, stuck in a high-school-yearbook photo of Hilda, scribbled a few lines about the case, dated and signed it. Then I felt the intrusion and added the P.S.: “Some stray elf or fairy just got into my memories.” On the envelope I wrote Bertrade’s full name and her address in the Kingdom.

The phone rang and a woman said, “Sam,” and nothing more. She sounded tired, flat.

“Annie.” Anne Toomey is the wife of my buddy Jim. He and I were in France together. “How’s Jimmy?” Since she was calling I knew the answer. Knew what she was going to ask.

“Not feeling great, Sam. We wondered if you could handle the Culpepper case today.”

“We” meant that Anne was doing this on her own.

“Sure I’ll do it. Nothing changed from Jim’s report yesterday, right?”

“You’re a saint, Sam.”

I picked up the phone and dialed the Up to the Minute Answering Service. Gracie was on duty. Behind her I could hear half a dozen other girls at switchboards.

“Doll,” I said, “I’ll be out for most of the afternoon. Anyone wants me, I’ll be back after six.”

Under her operator voice, Gracie talks Brooklyn like the Queen speaks English. “Be careful, you,” she said. She gets her ideas of private detectives from paperback novels.

We’ve never met. Going down in the elevator, I thought of Gracie as being maybe in her midthirties—which seems young to me now. I imagined her as blond and nicely rounded, sitting at the switchboard in a revealing silk robe.

I imagined the other Up to the Minute ladies sitting around similarly dressed. This is the privilege of a divorced and decorated veteran who once got kissed by a French field marshal.

My office is on the fifth floor. With a couple of errands to do, I crossed the vestibule and stepped outside. They tore down the elevated line before World War II, but better than a decade later, Sixth Avenue still looked naked in the October afternoon sunlight.

Across the way, the women’s prison stood like a black tower as all around it, paddy wagons unloaded their cargo. Some parents find out their daughters have run off to Fairyland. Others discover them at the Women’s House of Detention.

They use the old Jefferson Market courthouse next door to the prison as the police academy now. Sergeant Danny Hogan was showing a couple of dozen cadets in their gray-and-green uniforms how to write out parking tickets. Hogan and I did foot patrol in the old Fourteenth Precinct back when we were both starting out. He spotted me and rolled his tired eyes.

As I headed towards the subway, I saw the headlines and front pages of the afternoon papers. My old pal MacArthur had landed at Inchon a couple of weeks before. Maps of the Korean Peninsula showed black arrows pointing in all directions.

On the subway stairs, I felt something like the opposite of forgetting. A stray sprite with nothing better to do had tried to probe me. The mental image of Bertrade appeared and whatever it was immediately broke contact. I continued down the stairs, stuck a dime in the slot, and got on the uptown A train.

Early in life I heard about fairies. My mother’s mother saw leprechauns in the coal cellar and elves under the bed. Mostly I ignored her once I turned into a hard guy at the age of eight.

My mother was born and raised in the Irish stretch of Greenwich Village. She learned stenography, got a job in an import-export office, and married late. Sam Grant Senior was part Irish and not very Catholic. He had been on the road as a salesman for many years before my mother forced him to settle down. I was the only kid.

I remember my old man a little sloshed one night, telling me about having been on the night train to Cincinnati with “the crack women’s-apparel salesman on that route.” This guy was very smashed and told the old man how he’d gone down the path to Fairyland when he was young, stayed there for a few years, learned a few tricks. My father told me, “He said some of the ones there could read your mind like a book.”

I heard about the Kingdom beneath the Hill a few more times over the years. As a legend, it was slightly more believable than Santa Claus and a bit less likely than the fabled speakeasy that only served imported booze.

Then almost ten years ago, an elf almost killed me, and a couple of fairies saved my life. One of them was Bertrade.

The two errands I had were within a few blocks of each other. I rode the A train up to Penn Station and used the exit on Thirty-Third and Eighth. First I went to the General Post Office. The place is like a mail cathedral. I climbed the wide stairs, and my knee complained.

Inside under the high vaulted ceilings were big posters commemorating the pilots who had died flying mail planes thirty years back. I walked past the window that said Overseas Mail to the small window that said nothing.

It was there that I always mailed my letters to the Kingdom. The man on duty had a slight crease on the left side of his head—a veteran of something, I thought. I’d spoken to him a couple of times, asked him questions, and never got more than a shrug or a shake or nod of the head.

He took the letter. Right then, another mind touched mine, saw the image of Bertrade that I flashed, and bounced away.

The clerk’s eyes widened. He’d caught some of it, too. I took back the letter, picked up a pen, and wrote, “Urgent—contact!” on the envelope. The clerk nodded, stuck on a stamp I’d never seen before—one with a falcon in flight on it—turned, and put it down a slot behind him.

“They’ll have it by midnight,” he said in an accent I couldn’t catch. “Keep your head down. Tall elves are questing today.” Then he stepped away from the window.

I waited for a minute for him to come back. When he didn’t, I turned and walked the length of the two-block-long lobby all the way to Thirty-First Street. Maybe it was just an elf, lost and a stranger in the big city, who kept trying to bust into my head, and I was overreacting. Maybe I was lonely and wanted to see Bertrade.

Going down the stairs was tougher on my knee than going up them. I walked two blocks south on my errand for Jim and Anne. Thinking it was good to have a simple assignment to occupy my mind, I bought a late edition of the Journal American. It was four thirty-five. Some people were already heading for the subway.

Just west of Sixth Avenue on the south side of Thirtieth Street stood the Van Neiman, a nondescript office building. Across the street was a luncheonette. The only other customer was hunched over his paper; the counterman and waitress were cleaning up.

I ordered coffee, which was old and tired at this time of day, and sat where I could await the appearance of Avery J. Culpepper, CPA. His wife, Sarah, a jealous lady out in Queens, was convinced that he was stepping out on her.

Private investigators in one-man offices, like Jim Toomey and me, need to form alliances with other guys in similar circumstances. For the two of us it went beyond that. In France I was the one who got to smell the mustard gas, take out the machine-gun nest, and get my leg chewed up. For me, the real war lasted about two weeks. I got decorated and never fired another shot for Uncle Sam.

Jimmy passed unharmed right up through Armistice Day, won few medals, got to see every horror there was to see. I was hard to deal with when I got back, and my marriage to the girl I’d left behind only lasted as long as it did because she was very Catholic.

But Jim still woke up at night screaming. It drove Anne crazy and it broke her heart, but she stuck with him. For a while things got better. Lately they seemed to have gotten worse.

I thought about that as Avery J. Culpepper, wearing a light-gray suit and a dark felt hat, carrying a briefcase, and looking just like the photos his wife had supplied, came through the revolving door of the Van Neiman Building. A punctual guy, Mr. Culpepper, in his late thirties and in better shape than your average philanderer.

This was the first time I’d tailed him. Twice before Jim Toomey had followed Culpepper and ended up riding the crowded F train all the way out to Forest Hills. When Jimmy talked to me about it on the phone, even that routine assignment had him ready to jump out of his skin.

The time with me was a little different. Mr. C. came out the door and headed west along Thirtieth Street. I followed him for a few blocks through the rush-hour crowds pouring out of offices and garment factories.

He turned south on Ninth Avenue then turned west again on Twenty-Ninth. These blocks had warehouses and garages, body shops, but also some rundown apartment houses. Here, the crowds heading east for the subways were longshoremen, workers from the import-export warehouses. I stayed on the other side of the street, kept an eye on him, and watched the sky, which was getting dark and cloudy.

Culpepper crossed Tenth Avenue. A long freight train rolled over the elevated bridge halfway down the block. On the north corner of the avenue was an apartment house that must once have been a bit ritzy when this was mostly residential but now looked rundown and out of place. That’s where he turned and went in.

I glanced over as I passed to make sure he wasn’t lingering in the entryway, waiting to pop out and give me the slip. As I did, a light went on, up on the third floor. I noted it and wondered if that’s where he was. Then I continued walking till I was under the train tracks. Already the streets and sidewalks were getting empty.

At the end of the next block, beyond Twelfth Avenue, was a pier with a tired-looking freighter moored, and beyond that, the river. A string of barges, each with its little captain’s shack, went by pulled by a tug.

It was growing dark and all the warmth had been in the sun. I paused and turned like I’d forgotten something. Culpepper had not come out of the apartment house.

I crossed the street then walked back to the building he’d gone in. I spotted no one watching me. The outer door was open. One side of the entry hall was lined with mailboxes, twenty-four of them. I took out my notebook and copied the names. Many times when the husband strays it’s with someone the wife already knows.

The third floor was where I’d seen a light go on. So I gave those mailboxes my special attention. Number fifteen in particular had a recently installed nameplate. Mimi White, it read. If that’s where Culpepper was, the name seemed too good to be true.

Somebody upstairs had the news on the radio. In the first floor back, the record of “If I Knew You Were Coming, I’d Have Baked a Cake” got played a few times.

As I finished copying the names, an old lady came in carrying an armload of groceries. Like the building itself, she looked like she’d seen better days. I held the door for her, said my name was Tracy, that I was from the National Insurance Company and was looking for a Mr. Jameson, who was listed as living at this address in apartment number fifteen.

She thought for a moment, then said number fifteen had been occupied for years by an Asian couple. They had moved out, and it had stayed empty for a while. A young lady had moved in just recently. I thanked her and noted that.

As she headed upstairs, I heard footsteps and voices coming down. I went outside, crossed the street, turned, and walked slowly back towards Tenth Avenue. I noticed the third-floor light was off.

When I paused on the corner, I saw the couple. Mr. Culpepper had left his briefcase upstairs. The lady he was with wore a short camel-hair coat, a nice black hat set on her blond hair, and high heels. She looked like her name could easily be Mimi and like you could take her places.

Culpepper glanced neither left nor right as they walked to the corner and he hailed a cab. In my experience, a guy stepping out with a good-looking woman usually wants to see who else notices. Culpepper apparently was made of sterner stuff.

Walking back across town, I was amazed at how easy this assignment was and wondered why that bothered me. I’d detected no presence of the Gentry in the last couple of hours. That probably meant the one or ones I’d felt earlier had found whoever they were looking for.

Or maybe they had discovered I was right where I was supposed to be and doing what they wanted me to. Being involved with the Fair Folk had always left me feeling like a dollar chip in a very big game.

I remembered a face, elongated and a little blurred, that I’d once seen. It was a tall elf with a smile that said, “How stupid these mortals are.”

On the A train downtown, I got a seat and thought over that first time I felt an alien presence and how close I came to dying from it.

In ’41 I did undercover work, none of it strictly official. My old regiment was the Sixty-Ninth, “The Fighting Irish,” and our colonel was Donovan—the one they called “Wild Bill.” Later he was the guy who started the OSS and became the US intelligence chief in World War II. But even before that war, he had connections in Washington and an interest in foreign espionage in New York City. He got to do something about it.

The colonel remembered me. I got called down to his office on Wall Street. Right then, my marriage was over and there was a limit to how long the wedding of the police department and me was going to last.

So I got seconded to Wild Bill along with half a dozen other chewed-up old vets on the force. Most of what we investigated turned out to be minor stuff: crazy little Krauts up in Yorkville who wore Kaiser Wilhelm helmets and sent out ham-radio reports about freighters leaving the port of New York; German bars out in New Hyde Park on Long Island where the neighbors reported the patrons said “Sieg Heil,” gave the Nazi salute, and had pictures of Hitler up above the bar.

Rumors and stories about mysterious strangers came in from all over the city. We went crazy trying to keep up with them. Then we stumbled on a sleeper operation out on the Brooklyn waterfront. They were accumulating operatives, waiting for the great day when we’d be at war and they could start blowing up bridges. We nabbed a couple of them. But the rest melted away.

Right after that, a call came in one night about activity on a pier in Red Hook. We were stretched thin. I had no backup. Maybe I was tired and that made me careless. Maybe part of me wanted to use up whatever leftover life I had. But I went out there without even a driver.

The one who’d made the call must have dreamed about someone like me showing up: a dumb asshole with plenty of information about Wild Bill and his band of veterans. The gate on the street was open. A long wooden shed stood on the pier. A dim light shone in a window. I knocked. Nothing. I tried the door and it swung open. A light shone somewhere at the end of an empty two-hundred-foot shed.

I took a step inside. Someone had me by the throat and started to choke me. I spun around. No one was behind me. I drew my .38. Something knocked me flat, and the gun fell on the floor. My arm might as well have gone with it. I couldn’t feel it, couldn’t make it move.

That long face with that amused smile flickered. It wasn’t a thing I saw with my eyes. It was inside my head. And I felt every bloody memory get sucked out of me: Colonel Donovan, the other cases I’d worked on, friends and family, the telephone number of a waitress I was seeing, my batting average when I played twilight baseball as a kid in 1914.

When the one that had me found all it wanted, my lungs stopped, my lights started going out. I wasn’t coming back and thought I was stupid enough that I probably deserved to die. But to go like this pissed me off royally.

A little later I came to and found myself in a movie. The light was dim and this woman and guy, tall and slim, who looked like the stars of this movie, crouched over me, elegant and seeming to flicker slightly around the edges.

As that came into my mind, they looked at each other and smiled. I realized they knew what I saw and thought. Her name was Bertrade and his was Darnel. I knew all that without being told. Still being mostly numb probably made everything easier to accept.

“You’ll be well,” she said. There was an accent I couldn’t place. “We have taken care of your friend.”

Bertrade turned her head, and somehow I had a glimpse of what she saw. The one who’d attacked me, a tall guy with his head shaved, sat on the floor, leaned against the wall, glassy eyed. I understood they had him under a kind of spell.

“An elf on a mission,” Darnel said, “and a mutual enemy.” I knew without them speaking that they were Fey, loyal subjects of the King beneath the Hill. They were lovers, tourists in the city. Even half in shock I knew that the first was true and the second was a cover. They were operatives.

Things weren’t good between their people and the King of Elfland. My city, my world, was a kind of buffer between the two countries. Elfland favored Germany in the war going on in Europe.

They’d been watching our elfin friend when I showed up and they nailed him as he smothered me. From thinking this was a movie, I gradually decided it was a dream, and a crazy one. I tried to push myself up.

As a kid I’d thought I was right handed. Then I broke some fingers when I was maybe twelve and learned I was better with my left. Now it was like the left arm was gone. I fell back and banged my head. “I’m useless,” I said.

They touched my memories of my short, bad war and long, lousy marriage. She frowned and shook her head at my misfortunes. “I’d want you to be in any unit where I served,” he said. First Darnel and then Bertrade touched my dead arm, quietly spoke words I didn’t understand. The two said goodbye and that we’d meet again. Then they were gone, and the elf with them.

Feeling came back, and my arm was better than new. I never told anyone else what had happened that night. Walking up Sixth Avenue to the Bigelow Building ten years later, it felt like a movie and a dream.

I let myself into my office, sat down, and called the answering service. It was night now and Gracie was off duty. The young lady who answered gave me a few messages. A call about a case that was going nowhere, one from somebody who wanted to sell me things, a couple of calls from people who wanted me to pay them: all calls that were going to wait.

Then there was a message from Anne Toomey asking me to call. I looked over my case notes, scribbled a few more details, and dialed the Toomeys’ number. I let it ring three times, and three more to be sure. They didn’t have an answering service, and I decided they could wait until tomorrow.

Instead I went out and had a bite to eat, and a drink or two, at McNulty’s, where the cops go. After that I spent some more of the Beyers’ fee at Moe’s on Third Street, where the cops and the hookers go. I finally settled in at the Cedar Tavern over on University Place, because Lacy Duveen, who tends bar there, would rather talk to me than listen to painters arguing.

Lacy got his nickname for working over Tiger Shaughnessy’s face with the laces of his gloves after Tiger hit him in the groin during a preliminary bout at the Garden. He and I go back to when we played pickup ball games on the East River as kids.

We talked about the time he was catching, and all the way from deep center I tossed out a skinny Italian guy at home plate. It was twilight baseball. The light was fading, and the other guy claimed I hadn’t thrown anything, and that Lacy had pulled a ball out of his pocket. In fact I’d thrown a perfect left-handed strike right over the plate. Naturally, it ended in a fight, which we won.

——

Next morning I woke up in my room with that throw on my mind. I’ve awakened in worse shape, and there was still a bit of the morning left. I’d had a dream of Bertrade that got away from me as I grabbed for it.

Out the window I saw it was a chilly, drizzling day on Cornelia Street. When I had washed and shaved and dressed, I put on my trench coat and wide-brimmed fedora.

When I came downstairs, Mrs. Palatino, the landlady, had her door on the first floor open and her television on as usual. She liked to show off that TV. Some guy in a chef’s hat was chopping celery and talking in a French accent.

Mrs. Palatino knew my late mother from church, and that’s why she rented to me, even though I’m not Italian. She sat on the couch in her robe and slippers and looked at me long and hard. This was a woman who thought the worst of everyone and never saw anything that made her doubt her judgment.

“You decided to dress like a detective today,” she said, like she couldn’t decide why this was wrong. I nodded and tipped my hat. Mr. Palatino had died. Some years ago. I pegged him as a coward who took the easy way out.

On the way to my office I thought about Bertrade and the dream and how in it she had told me some things I couldn’t quite remember.

For some years after that encounter in Red Hook in ’41, I didn’t see Bertrade. When she reappeared, she was still beautiful and young despite being a couple of decades older than me. But she looked maybe frayed, and Darnel wasn’t with her.

They had both served in something called the War of the Elf King’s Daughter—fairies versus elves. At one time, the idea would have made me laugh. But not after Bertrade let me see a bit of what she’d gone through.

Her war occurred at about the same time as World War II and looked in some ways just as bad. Spells and magic, getting tortured to the point of suicide by hideous nightmares, seeing friends—minds invaded by the enemy—tearing out their own throats. Darnel hadn’t come back. He wasn’t dead, because the Fair Folk never die. “Lost to this world,” was how she put it, and I knew it made her sad.

For other guys, maybe it was Garbo or Hayworth they thought about. For me, ever since that first encounter, it had been Bertrade. And whenever she came back here and wanted to be with me, it was like a daydream became real.

She knew more, had seen more, than anybody I’d ever met. Something she once showed me, which I thought about as I walked to work that day, was a whole unit of trolls, ordinary soldiers like I had been, if you ignored how they looked, caught by tall elves. Rifles fell from their hands as their minds were seized and twisted by the Gentry. They fell dead, wiped out without a sound made or a shot fired.

Weapons were beneath the Fair Folk, she told me. You could walk up to one, pull out a gun, and shoot him, provided you could somehow keep all thought of what you were about to do out of your mind.

At the Bigelow Building I went into the big pharmacy on the first floor, got a few black coffees to go, and took those upstairs, drinking one on the elevator. It was still just short of noon. My energy and purpose amazed me.

The mail had already been delivered: a couple of bills, a few fliers, and a report on the whereabouts of a bum who had skipped out on the alimony and child support he owed a client of mine. All but the last got tossed in the wastebasket. I’d had nothing from Bertrade except maybe that foggy dream.

I called Up to the Minute and got Gracie. “You have six calls, including four so far this morning from Anne Toomey.” She paused. “Mr. Grant, this is none of my business. But a couple of times a man—I think it was her husband—was yelling at her. It sounded bad.”

“Thanks.” This time Jim must really have jumped the rails.

I hung up and made the call. Anne answered halfway through the first ring. She spoke softly, like she didn’t want someone to overhear. “Sam, I’m sorry I didn’t get back to you.” She did sound very sorry. “And I’m going to have to ask if you’ll do it again today. I promise I’ll get—”

“I was going to volunteer. How’s Jim? The operator says he was shouting at you.”

“He’s quiet right now. Sam, this whole case is strange. I’ve tried half a dozen times to call Mrs. Culpepper, you know, while her husband’s at work. No answer. They’re not listed in the telephone book. Jim’s the only one she’s talked to. And he’s . . . not good. Last night he was talking, yelling at someone who wasn’t there. And he told me someone was in his head. He’s been saying that for the last couple of days. It’s never been this bad.”

“Was it more than just shouting at you, Anne?”

She said, “This is what I’ve been afraid of.”

“Anne, I’ll be out there as fast as I can. Is there some place you can go meanwhile?”

“My aunt’s a few blocks over.”

“Go there right now. Don’t talk to Jim. Just leave. Understand?”

Anne said she did. I doubted her.

Then I made a call to Police Chaplain Dineen. Young Private Kevin Dineen had served as an altar boy in France for the famous Father Duffy of the Sixty-Ninth. He came back home and found a vocation. It was said that Father Dineen spiked the sacramental wine with gin, and he was reputed to get a bit frisky with the widows he comforted. But it was Dineen who got called when O’Malley at the Ninth Precinct, a fellow vet, was at the Thanksgiving table eating mashed potatoes with the barrel of his loaded revolver while all his children looked on. Dineen got O’Malley to hand the weapon over and had the kids smiling at the game he and their daddy were playing.

When I explained as much of the situation as he needed to know, all Dineen asked was, “Do we need an ambulance or a squad car?”

“Both,” I said. Before going downstairs to meet the chaplain, I took my service .38 out of the locked drawer, cleaned and loaded the revolver, buckled on the holster. I remembered doing the same thing in my dream the night before.

I called Up to the Minute and told Gracie I wouldn’t be back until late and not to wait up. She laughed. As I adjusted my hat and went out the door, I remembered something from the dream: Bertrade, lying among pillows and bedclothes, had looked right at me and spoken about bait and traps.

Ten minutes later, Father Dineen and I were in his brand-new Oldsmobile four-door, headed through the drizzle for Windsor Terrace in Brooklyn. His car had a siren and a flashing light. We went through red lights; traffic cops waved us on at intersections. Dineen was on the radio to a squad car out in Park Slope as we crossed the bridge with a motorcycle escort, and he cursed because we weren’t going faster.

Anger was what I felt: anger at the one who had maybe screwed around with Toomey’s mind and caused Anne pain. They weren’t even the object of this operation. I probably wasn’t either. It struck me that they and I were just bait in some game the Gentry were playing.

When we arrived at Sixteenth Street, a crowd had gathered in the drizzle, and homicide was out in force. Anne Toomey must have tried one last time to talk to Jim. She was at the bottom of the stairs. Jim had stood halfway up and shot her twice in the face before pumping two shots into his open mouth.

For the young homicide detective who took my statement, this was open-and-shut murder-suicide. The second bullet in the shooter’s mouth was nothing more than a dying twitch, not a sign someone else was operating Jim’s hand. And this young man was confident his career was not going to end like Toomey’s or mine.

What I wanted to tell him was, “The creature that had James Toomey in its control used Toomey’s own hand to eliminate him and cover its tracks.” My actual statement stuck strictly to the facts, with nothing more than a brief mention of the Culpepper case.

——

Father Dineen drove like a cop, as if he owned the road. He knew something was up, but not even a couple of belts from the ecclesiastic flask made me talk. The image of Anne and Jimmy dead in their house was burning a hole in my brain.

It was very late afternoon when the chaplain dropped me off in front of the main post office and told me to go home and get some rest.

On the ride back from the Toomeys’ I’d thought about the dream and Bertrade. Usually dreams are vivid when you wake up, but as you try to grab them they turn to nothing and disappear. This one had started out vague but seemed to linger.

Climbing the post-office stairs, I remembered another fragment. Bertrade, lovely as I’ve ever seen her, had worn nothing but a silver moon on a chain around her neck and touched my arm. So slippery was the memory that I began to wonder if this dream might have been planted in my head by an enemy.

The little unmarked window was where I always picked up mail from the Kingdom beneath the Hill. And I wanted to talk to that clerk and find out what he knew. The window was shut, which had never happened before.

The guy at the overseas window didn’t know what I was talking about when I asked about the window next door. He said this wasn’t his regular assignment, and that I should try the next day.

Walking slowly across that lobby, I thought of the ice-cold knife racing up my leg like I was a letter being sliced open, and I felt real small and insignificant. But I started to put things into some kind of order.

The elves had set up Jim and Anne Toomey as bait for me. First they invented the Culpepper job and hired Jim, who needed the work. Then they made sure he couldn’t function, and put it in his head and Anne’s that they should ask me. And I was the bait to lure Bertrade.

Taking my seat in the coffee shop across from the Van Neiman Building, it occurred to me that maybe on our first encounter Bertrade and Darnel had used me as bait to catch the elf. Knowing the ways of the Gentry, that seemed quite possible.

The waitress and counterman didn’t notice that I was a repeat customer. I figured that the elves wouldn’t probe as long as I was doing what they wanted. They didn’t have to worry. I was coming after them.

That they were keeping me in play, letting me stay alive, could mean they’d made Bertrade aware that I was in danger. And it would also mean they weren’t sure where she was or what she was going to do. That Bertrade was avoiding direct contact with me was a sign that she relied on me to play my part, walk into the trap and ensnare the trapper. It would also mean she knew that the spell that shielded my thoughts could be broken by the enemy.

Just then, Culpepper, whoever he was, came through the doors of the Van Neiman Building with his briefcase. I got up and followed him. It went like before. He walked west, and I followed on the other side of the street. I wondered how much Culpepper knew. What promises and rewards had they made to him?

Seeing him go through this routine reminded me of how in France, just before we went into action, I saw a couple of German prisoners, starving, flea-bitten men, cramming army rations into their mouths while our guys stared like they were exhibits in a zoo. That sight took away all of the enemy’s mystery.

I stopped on the east side of Tenth Avenue, watched from a doorway when Culpepper crossed and went into the apartment building. As I waited, a light went on in the third-floor window.

A rhythmic pounding came from over on the river. It sounded like they were driving piles. The earlier drizzle had become rain. Workers headed home at a brisk pace. The streets were getting empty.

Stakeout work is fine, outdoor labor, good for the health and spirits. But I’d noticed a bar on the corner with a clear view of the apartment house.

It was a Wednesday night, with a moderate-sized crowd and a cowboy movie on the TV above the bar. The guys drinking spotted me for a cop and looked away when I stepped inside. I ordered a rye and water and kept my eye on the apartment house doorway.

I was pretty sure they wouldn’t leave without me. There was a good chance I’d be dead before long. But death hadn’t come yet, and I’d given it several very good chances.

In the dark, a long freight train ran south on the elevated tracks. When I looked further west beyond Twelfth Avenue, the pier at the end of the street seemed lit up.

About the time I began to wonder if I was crazy and Culpepper really was just a guy stepping out on his wife, I saw through someone else’s eyes. They were moving uptown along the river’s edge. I saw a pier and a big yacht all lit up. Suddenly that disappeared. Was this skirmishing between elves and fairies?

Like it was a signal, the one called Culpepper came out the door of the apartment house. He carried an umbrella and held it over Mimi White. The game was on. They headed west, and I followed them.

A good detective recognizes a pattern. Once more, I was heading onto a pier at night to encounter the Gentry.

As we crossed Eleventh Avenue, a big ocean liner sailed up the Hudson with every light onboard shining. It looked like a floating city block. The tugboats guiding it honked at each other. I saw the liner, and then, for an instant, I saw it again from the viewpoint of someone down at the river. The pile driving paused briefly, and all was as quiet as Manhattan ever gets.

Approaching Twelfth Avenue, I saw that the old freighter from the day before was gone. In its place was the oceangoing yacht with lights on deck that I’d seen through someone else’s eyes.

At certain moments, time gets fluid. At Aisne-Marne, the platoon was pinned by machine-gun fire. The gunners had waited until we were within a hundred yards. The lieutenant was dead. Someone was screaming. Later I found out the whole company was pinned; the battalion had gone to earth. The minutes we were down went by like hours.

The machine guns fired a short burst right over me; fired a burst to my left, another further along. I knew that it was ratlike little guys going through the motions. It would be a bit before they’d come back my way.

I pulled a pin with my right hand. I jumped up with the grenade in my left. The Krauts were firing from a gap in an embankment a hundred yards away. I’d hurled dummy grenades in practice, knew their weight. I judged the arc and tossed. “Get down,” someone yelled. The grenade hit the side of the gap, bounced in the air.

As I dove for cover, I was knocked flat, and a cold knife raced up my leg. A muffled bang sounded, a man screamed, another cried out, the machine-gun fire stopped, and my war was over.

Crossing Twelfth Avenue, walking into the trap, I told myself that all I needed was a few seconds of clarity, like I’d had thirty-two years before.

Maybe Bertrade had given me up. But I was going to deal out payment for Jim and Anne. All I needed was those few seconds.

Culpepper and Mimi stopped just inside the gates at the end of the pier. A couple of hundred feet beyond them, the yacht had lights on the gangplank, atop the cabins, shining through the portholes.

A figure, tall and thin, wavering slightly, stood on the deck leaning on the rail. He was faced away from me. But I could recognize one of the Fair Folk, whether elf or fairy. He was too far away to hit with a handgun. I wished I had a grenade.

A scream in the night came from downriver. At almost the same moment the pile driver started up out in the water. Distant sirens sounded, but they were on fire trucks and going the wrong way. The Fair Folk didn’t want any human interference.

A breeze blew the rain in my face as I crossed the avenue with my raincoat open. My arms were at my side. The .38 in my hand was hidden by the coat flapping.

The ones I knew as Culpepper and Mimi faced me as I approached. I was going to tell them to get out of my way before they got hurt.

But their eyes were blank. For an instant I saw myself from their viewpoint as I walked past them. Someone was looking out through them like they were TV cameras. Someone was in my head.

Figures moved in the darkness beyond the lights. Fair Folk were out there. For an instant I caught an image of long, thin figures on a small powerboat.

The lights on the yacht flickered for a moment. The tall elf on the deck looked my way. He seemed amused. Bertrade’s image telling intruders to stay out got knocked aside like it was cardboard. He was in my mind. My feet moved without my willing them and my body shambled forward to the foot of the gangplank.

I saw myself through his eyes, an old man stunned and confused in a trench coat and battered hat, staring up at him. He sent that image out in all directions. The elf knew I had the gun and knew I was in his power.

Then the lights flickered fast. Out in the dark amid the noise of the pile drivers there were cries and gunshots. Suddenly Bertrade was inside me: “My left-hand man!”

Under a spell my arm moved. The elf couldn’t stop it. That left arm was magic. He blocked my breath and sent a bolt of pain through my head, stopped my eyes from seeing. But the arm rose. I couldn’t see him, but I fired. Nothing. My head spun.

For an instant my sight cleared. I saw the elf. I squeezed the trigger as my sight went dark. Nothing happened.

Blind, I fired to the left and there was a scream. My breath came back. My sight returned. Up the gangplank, the elf grasped his shoulder. I felt him stop my heart, but I blew his jaw off and it started again. I shot him in the head before I passed out.

——

The morning was long gone and done when I came home. Mrs. Palatino had actually turned off her television, put on street clothes, and was headed out to Thursday-afternoon bingo at Our Lady of Pompeii Church. She gave me a look full of disapproval and shook her head.

I needed to go upstairs and change my clothes, stop around at the office. In my jacket pocket was a letter to the Beyers from Hilda, saying she was alive and well and thinking of them. Bertrade had brought that with her from the Kingdom beneath the Hill. Our business relationship was still intact.

We’d parted half an hour before. That night was spent at the Plaza: part of our reward for smashing the elf and his espionage crew. After he went down, three of his fellow Gentry had come out of the dark and surrendered to Bertrade and her friends. Culpepper and Mimi and a couple of other mortals the elves had recruited bore the body into the back of a panel truck.

That dream I’d half remembered had been sent by Bertrade. In the game of cat and mouse she and the big elf had played, some of his magic was stronger than hers.

“Askal is his name. We met in the Kingdom,” she said, “and he was able to read me enough to know how I felt about you. He wanted to use you to draw me. I wanted to use that magic arm Darnel and I gave you to do away with him.”

It seemed to me like the kind of game in which mortals were just breakable objects. Bertrade winced when I thought that.

Askal, of course, didn’t completely die. I heard him shrieking; saw his shadow moving around the pier after his corpse had been taken away in the truck.

It isn’t likely I’ll ever go back to that spot on the Hudson. And it isn’t likely I’ll ever completely trust Bertrade. What I feel for her may not be love. But I know that when I’m with her this mortal life of mine gets torn open by magic, and when she’s gone, that’s all I remember.

But when we parted outside the Plaza that morning and kissed, she told me she’d be back before long. And I look forward to it.

Tomorrow evening, Jim and Anne Toomey will be waked out in Brooklyn. Their connection with me is what killed them, and I’ll think of that.

My life may not run out of me into a big red puddle, but someday my life will run out. And before that happens in this world of bait and traps, I’ll see Bertrade again.

——

Richard Bowes has published five novels, two collections of short fiction, and fifty stories. He has won two World Fantasy Awards and the Lambda, International Horror Guild, and Million Writers Awards. Recent and forthcoming stories appear in Fantasy & Science Fiction and the anthologies Wilde Stories 2010, Nebula Awards Showcase 2011, The Beastly Bride, Blood and Other Cravings, Haunted Legends, Digital Domains, and Naked City. Several of these stories are chapters in his novel in progress, Dust Devil: My Life in Speculative Fiction.

His web page is RickBowes.com.

| LITTLE SHIT |

Melanie Tem

—

A bevy of girls pushed past her, giggling obscenities, claiming the sidewalk. They smelled of sex, weed, booze, musky perfume. She was down with all that, except musky perfume, which gave her a headache. Piercings glinted in headlights and flashing signs, and their shoulders and chests and midriffs and thighs and smalls of backs were all tatted up. She went in for body art herself, but even if she’d let hers show and left the eyebrow stud in tonight, these chicks were her “sisters” only in theory.

The tall one practically stuck her tight little ass in her face, shoving her off the curb. A red snake coiled out of the butt crack up the downy spine, fresh and still hurting. Almost without thinking, she made it hurt a little worse.

One of them sneered, “Get the fuck out of our way, bitch.” They all screeched evil laughter and then they had a hilarious contest calling her things like “retard” and “runt.”

She was losing sleep and risking life, limb, and STDs to make the world safer for asshole kids like these, who didn’t even have fully developed frontal lobes—and why? She knew why. Same reason she was in social-work school. To make a difference.

She indulged in a moment of revenge fantasy. It’d be no effort at all to wriggle inside their vapid little minds and jack their thoughts, give them false memories or repress real ones, make them understand crap they couldn’t possibly understand like research statistics, or forget stuff they knew and needed like cell numbers of friends-with-bennies.

But she wouldn’t let herself be mean just to be mean. Morality sucked. Not using all your talents also sucked. But doing mean stuff just because you could was part of what made the world such a hard place. That and stupidity.

She couldn’t even journal about it for her Social-Work Skills class. That’d blow all her various covers, and anyway the stories were so outrageous people’d think she was totally psycho.

She’d just do her job here and get back to the dorm in time to finish the Policy paper tonight, never mind that she’d be totally sleep deprived for the eight o’clock class that put her to sleep anyway. A normal starvation-wage work-study job would’ve been a lot simpler. Just once in a while she’d like to do something normal and simple.

The gaggle of girls flapped and honked across the park. Although she’d learned in Human Growth and Development why part of her longed to be one of them, it still hurt that she wasn’t.

She went and sat on a swing where it was darker. Her feet dangled. She pulled Pinkie out of her Hannah Montana backpack and snuggled him into her lap. Not five minutes later the chicken hawk made his move. Already she could tell she’d hardly earn her fee with this one.

He crooned, “Not safe out here all by yourself, honey.”

It had taken her a while to learn to tear up, but now it was second nature. Or third or fourth nature, whatever. When professors talked about “conscious use of self, the basic social-work tool,” she doubted fake decoy tears were what they had in mind.

She clutched her pink bear and looked up at the man, automatically noting his squared-off hairline, black or navy-blue hoodie, bad breath, worse thoughts. Thing for girls and boys with no body hair. She whimpered, “I want my mommy. Can you help me find my mommy, mister?” The “mister” was either a genius hook or over the top.

Genius. Something perked up in his fried brain. “What’s your name, sweetheart?”

Sweetly she lisped, “Little Shit.”

He gave a surprised laugh, then got threatening. “Cut the crap. What’s your real name?” Perps thought they had power over a little kid once they had your name.

Like she’d tell him. Like she even knew. “That is my real name, mister, honest. Little Shit.”

“I ain’t callin’ you that.”

“You can call me whatever you want to, mister.” How about Trouble? Ball-Buster? Bait?

He gave the swing a hard shove that pretended—not very well—to be playful. “Pretty little thing like you,” he rasped. “Somebody might take advantage.”

She shrieked and fell against him at an angle that would keep him from having contact with the dead giveaway of her boobs. He went for her crotch. These scum were so predictable. If he got his hand inside her pants it’d out her as an adult, but she wouldn’t let that happen. Barbie and some of the other hos on her advisory committee wore baby-doll dresses with no panties, but besides the chill and the strategic issues—social workers couldn’t talk without saying “issues”—she wasn’t about to let filthy fingers that had been who knew where come into actual contact with anything personal. She’d aced that Human Sexuality class.

She did have to get close enough for long enough that he’d do something incriminating, and so she could collect identifying information: his body-dirt-cigarettes-wine odor, a ridged scar on the inside of his left wrist, a smooth bald spot fringed by almost silky hair. Auditory info was easy—his voice, the way he breathed. Easiest to gather but hardest to convince anybody by was the thought pattern, in this case a jumbled buzz with stretches of spooky purplish clarity. You couldn’t put it in a report or say it on a witness stand. A lot of the most true stuff in life you had to be careful about admitting to.

When she faked losing her grip on the swing chains, he caught her, thinking something like, “All right!” and tried again to stick his hand between her legs. Clamping her thighs to trap his forearm in the act, she pressed the button on her bra strap.

The cops materialized, only two this time, and bored, distracted, Raul wishing he was home with his new baby, Dixie with a migraine coming on. It was better when there were a lot of them and they were into it and they invited her out partying afterward and bartenders who’d checked ID a million times carded her again, and people made rude cracks about her size and she made rude cracks about theirs, and it was all good. Tonight was just business.

This would-be perp was squealing about castrating bitches as Little Shit collected her fee from Raul. His “good job, kid” was like you’d talk to a two-year-old who’d gone potty in the toilet, but Little Shit decided to take it as camaraderie and reciprocated by putting in his mind the sweet, powdery smell of his baby’s head. Best she could do right now. Might help, might make things worse. You had to take risks. Not for the first time she wondered if people could sense her messing around in there. On her way out of the park, she fixed Dixie’s headache, not because they were homies or anything, just because she could.

Little Shit wasn’t what they knew her by at school. She’d made that name up, too, for her A and A+ papers and exams and her GREs that would get her into grad school. Also what Lourdes called her, off the “Pretty Names” list she kept for when there was a possible new friend or lover. She was a self-made woman, every time, and proud of it, never mind what she was learning about how most people’s identity and sense of self were formed. She’d never been most people. Might as well make something of that.

And she’d made quite a bit of it, actually, in her almost twenty-three years. She kept working on self-improvement, but overall she was down with how her life was going. Even before she got her degree she was making more of a diff than most people did in their whole entire lives.

Sometimes she felt sorry for the perps, though. Pitiful dudes, once in a while chicks, a lot of them looking for what they called love. Some people would call just about anything love. Others didn’t have “love” at all, even in what they believed was private vocabulary. She herself had no clue what love was, but most of the time it was fun trying to figure it out.

Like spring break with Lourdes. When they’d walked on the beach holding hands people’d probably thought they were mother and daughter. Like every other social worker, Lourdes talked a lot about “boundaries,” so holding hands was just about all they did in public. It’d be funny if somebody saw them doing other stuff and called the cops on Lourdes, but Lourdes didn’t see the humor. Lourdes didn’t see humor in much of anything, and she wouldn’t find it amusing or noble if she knew how Little Shit was putting her personal strengths to use working her way through school.

It was a syndrome, what fools called a birth defect. Fools like her egg and sperm donors. They could have at least put something on her birth certificate other than “Baby Girl.” Their loss. No way did the word “defect” have anything to do with her.

If she’d ever known the name of the syndrome, she didn’t now. Some people with it were normal height, but she was short enough to be almost but not quite an official “Little Person,” a cutesy label with not nearly the coolness of “Little Shit.” Tendency toward hip dysplasia. Crooked little fingers and toes that worked fine and curled like macaroni in lovers’ mouths, in Lourdes’s mouth. Streaked hair auburn and strawberry blond and almost black, which she used to dye all one color but now she made sure to brush it so all the colors showed, gleamed. Lourdes had a thing for long hair. She also had a thing for fuzzy shaved heads—actually, for fuzzy shaved anythings.

The ability to screw with other people’s thoughts was probably part of the syndrome, too. Lourdes didn’t know about that, and it wouldn’t be in her records even if she had any. That probably wasn’t why she’d been thrown away, either, unless she’d been seriously precocious; when she used to try to figure it out, she’d usually decided it was because of her weird little fingers and short legs.

In the days after the perp on the swing, she and Lourdes had one of their big dramatic fights and big dramatic reconciliations. Both would’ve been easier if she’d poked around to find out what Lourdes secretly wanted from her, but that would be cheating.

When she got an A- on her policy paper, though, she did a quick intervention. First she shifted a few things around in the teacher’s pathetic OCD mind, and let that sit for a day or two. Then she challenged the six lost points, and the teacher couldn’t quite remember why he’d deducted them. It was really sort of embarrassing to watch, so she conceded two points and the plus, but she won back four, which made it the A she deserved.

When Raul texted her JOB 4 U, she was working with her group on the case presentation and then they went for tamales and beers. She texted back LTR but it was almost nine before she could call him. “What up?”

“Where the hell you been?” The sound of the baby crying receded and she heard a door shut.

“Um? Studying?” She’d give him that much.

“Um? This is your job?”

“My bad.”

He wasn’t letting it go. “You don’t take six fucking hours to get back to me.”

“Hey,” she said, “dude. You could always find somebody else.” They both knew how valuable and rare her particular skill set was, and there were other cops and lawyers and PIs in this town who might have an interest in what she could do. Also that she needed the money and she loved the job.

For somebody in such a hurry he didn’t seem to mind wasting more time. During the pause she did dishes, banging as much as possible without breaking something.

Raul finally got over himself enough to tell her, “Looks like we got us a social-worker perp.” She could hear his smirk.

“You’re smokin’ crack!”

“Not today.”

He always said that when she said that. This time she didn’t laugh. “I meant, ‘really’?”

“Yeah, really. Hits on underage males and females she’s doing therapy on.”

“What do you mean, hits on?”

His voice got weird—husky, a little breathless, raggedy. She felt a stirring in her own groin. Normal, she knew; occupational hazard. Still, it bothered her, made her vigilant about her own motivations. She hoped Raul was watching his. “Gropes minors,” he explained. “Tells them bullshit like it’s part of the treatment so they’ll ‘learn to trust.’ ”

“This one’s mine.” In her minuscule kitchen space, balancing a plate in both hands to keep from dropping it, she held her breath and focused her mind.

“Thought you might say that.”

“Fer shizzle.”

“Come again?”

“Oh, sorry, old dude. Yeah, sure, you’re right.”

“Any reason you can’t speak English?”

“Gotta be hip, Raul, my man. Gotta be cool.”

“High on my list.”

“Who’s the slimeball? Hopefully nobody I know.”

“Name’s Lords something.”

She went very still and repeated it the way he’d said it. “Lords?”

Audibly shuffling papers, he spelled it. “Lourdes Malone. You know her?”

“No,” she said.

She made lists and flow charts and went through the steps in the social-work problem-solving process up to “implementation.” She did not think about Lourdes’s hands, Lourdes’s laugh, Lourdes’s tongue.

The first thing she had to do was pick a fight and stage another breakup. That wouldn’t take much. The hard part was that if Lourdes was doing this stuff, they’d never make up.

Having to take a semester off school would have sucked even worse, so she was totally relieved to find out about the online option for three of her four classes. Good thing they didn’t use video, or even audio, because if she could get her voice to change enough she’d have to keep it that way until this was done. She recorded herself using higher and lower pitches, various bogus accents, a lisp, a horror-movie whisper. The cartoon squeak would be the easiest to keep going but it was also the most obviously fake. Finally she found a website with audios of voices and accents, played around with the kids’ ones until she came up with one that sounded kind of real and that she could manage, talked aloud to herself in it for days, and was happy when Raul called and thought he had a wrong number and she had to say code before he was convinced it was her. He was both pissed and impressed. Cool beans.

She dug out the rose cologne and the ginger lip gloss. In real life she didn’t love all that girlie stuff, on principle, but the job gave her an excuse and it was kind of cool, like Halloween, like a kid playing dress up.

Next was the hair. Without looking in a mirror she whacked it off—scraggly would be in character—and then dyed it what the box called “Mahogany Brown” but came out Carrot-Top Red. She told her reflection, “You are uuuuuugly, girlfriend, you know that?” She looked so different that she tried messing with her own mind, and couldn’t really tell if it worked or not, if she even got in. Could there be such a thing as autotelepathy? Probably—so far in her life she hadn’t run into very many totally impossible things.

Voice, hair, posture, gait, tics, breathing patterns, gestures—by now she knew how to do all that. A few hours’ practice to get them down, a little more time and effort when this was over to get rid of whatever she decided not to keep as part of her ever-evolving self.

Okay, all five of the regular senses were covered: she looked, sounded, felt, tasted, smelled different. But this was not exactly regular. This was Lourdes.

What would happen if Lourdes recognized her? There’d been some rough stuff, all in play, definitely consensual. But if Lourdes was really a pedophile, or if she wasn’t and she went off about being set up, what would happen? It seriously bit that this reading and screwing around with thoughts thing didn’t work worth crap from a distance.

For a day and a night she considered how much she was willing and able to do. A lot, it turned out. In a weird way she owed it to Lourdes not to hold anything back, not to underestimate either of them.

But there wasn’t enough time to lose or gain more than a couple of pounds or get Botox in her lips or get the very cool snake tat removed—after all the money and pain it had cost her she’d have hated to lose it, and Sammy’s artistic integrity would have been offended, but she’d have done it if she could. Hopefully things wouldn’t go far enough for Lourdes to find it.

Marina Abramovic, mutilating herself for art on YouTube, was one out-there chick, but fresh wounds would be suspicious. Same problem with actual surgery. She had to settle, uneasily, for blue contacts, lashes thickened and curled, a yellowy tan from hours under a lamp, a vaguely spider-shaped birthmark colored on the inside of her thigh, shaving all body hair and shaving it again for maximum smoothness, and wrestling her boobs into submission with an Ace bandage wrapped tight as a girdle. That last one was a big risk; Raul and his team better get right in there if kid nipples were what floated Lourdes’s boat.

When she showed up at the DA’s office in a lavender baby-doll dress and, just to stay in character, no underwear, Raul had no idea who she was. Even though that’s what she was after, it kind of hurt her feelings, which was weird.

To the giraffelike assistant DA at the desk, she introduced herself as Madison Smith, the preppy name she and Raul had finally compromised on. Behind her she heard Raul come up out of his chair. She probably could have just stirred up his thoughts so he’d believe her, but it was more fun to watch him do it himself. “Shit,” he said.

“Yup,” she said in the voice.

“Fuck.”

“Nope.”

“How’d you do it?”

“Trade secrets.”

“You’re taller.”

“That’s just shoes, dummy.” She showed him, careful not to lift her foot too high and expose herself.

His hand went briefly to her shoulder. Like every other time they’d touched—accidentally in passing, comradely fist bumps, brush of the hands maybe or maybe not flirtatious—she stiffened. Then he nodded. “It is you.”

“Whatever that means.”

“I take it,” Giraffe said dryly, “we’ve established that the disguise is convincing. Can we move on?” First, though, Giraffe had to brag about other child sex-abuse cases she’d prosecuted. “Sixty-nine years to life is what I got,” she told them about one particularly nasty one. The passionate, joyous pride in her voice and in her heart was really pretty creepy.

“Very good,” said Raul. Little Shit was getting a contact high from all this moral certainty.

“I’m telling you, section 85.67 of the penal code is a wonderful tool. No judicial discretion to get in the way of justice. When I know in my gut, as a person, that somebody should get life, I pick the charges and I make it happen.”

“Enhancements,” Raul said to Little-Shit-as-Madison. “Gotta get those enhancements.”

“Enhance like what?”

“GBI’s always good.”

“Great bodily injury,” Giraffe supplied, and she and Raul laughed.

“Double my rate.”

“Mayhem works, too,” Raul allowed. “That’s just disfigurement. You already got some of that goin’ on. What’s a little more disfigurement for the cause?” She flipped him off.

“And/or torture,” added Giraffe.

On a roll now, they listed burglary during the crime, which wasn’t likely in this case, and multiple victims, which was. Felony priors would have been even better. Administering controlled substances during the crime had a certain appeal; Little Shit kept what she knew about Lourdes’s sources to herself. And there was kidnapping, which could just mean driving to more than one location or even moving from one room to another. Kidnapping was good.

“Whatever works,” she told them.

“You’re awesome.” Giraffe was doing something on her computer—researching, entering data—and she said it with no meaning, like you’d say, “Have a nice day.”

“I’m sayin’,” said Raul, meaning it.

“Innocent till proven guilty, though, right?”

Giraffe waved one long hand. “Right. Sure. Of course.”

“You going all social worky on me?”

She rolled her enhanced eyes at him, then moved to where she could see the computer screen. Giraffe was playing Scrabble and had just typed in a seven-letter word Little Shit had never heard of.

During the two and a half days it took to figure out the plan and get everything ready, she wouldn’t let herself obsess about the kids who might be getting hurt. She was in Raul’s office when he called Lourdes posing as a caseworker in a homeless shelter where somebody would confirm they had a staff person by the fake name he gave if she checked. He was able to make an appointment the very next morning for his consumer, Madison Smith. Little Shit grinned at his use of the PC word.

Lourdes called her a couple of times and then when she didn’t answer texted HOW R U? She texted back K, then ignored the MUSM although she did miss her, too.

Just for grins, she hauled out the book she’d paid a fortune for, for the class she now couldn’t take this semester, and poked around in it for a diagnosis for somebody who finally decided they loved the person they’d been with for almost a year only after they were part of an elaborate scheme to find out if that person was a serial sex offender. Depersonalization disorder and Dissociative Fugue and Sexual Deviance had possibilities. So did Reactive Attachment Disorder. “Attachment” was on the syllabus of one of the classes she’d be taking online. So much to learn, so little time.

The contacts were bothering her eyes, the boobie girdle was pinching and itching in addition to aching, and there was a burn blister on her shoulder from the tanning lamp. Eye drops, non-allergenic gauze and tape, and Solarcaine went onto her expense report with receipts attached along with the ones from the thrift stores, where she’d loaded up with outfits for a lot more days than this thing better take, including glittery capris like she’d been hunting for and a pair of purple Crocs that looked brand new, plus a ridiculous white jumper with a pleated skirt that would get recycled right back to a thrift store when this was over. There was a really short blue satin skirt she’d have looked stellar in, but Madison Smith was supposed to be eight years old. Being professional sucked.

When Raul-as-caseworker came to pick her up he had that intensely calm, focused-mind thing going on, like a gleaming tube. There was nothing in there about his baby or his wife or the Cornhuskers or the head cold coming on. Madison Smith was in there, and Lourdes Malone, and taking this thing step by step by step and bringing it on home.

He stared at her, circled her, felt her hair, told her to walk around, sniffed, told her to say something. If he’d tried to taste her, she’d have had to hurt him. It was messed up how proud she was when he pronounced, “Madison Smith.” Pride and happiness and all that crap could get in the way of doing what had to be done just like sorrow and rage could.

Madison Smith wasn’t glad to see Lourdes, hadn’t missed her, didn’t want to run into her arms. Madison Smith also didn’t want to put her behind bars for sixty-nine years to life. Madison Smith wasn’t real, but Little-Shit-as-Madison was, and she picked the chair in the dimmest corner of the dim therapy room. She’d been thinking Madison would be surly and smart-ass, like she herself had been when they tried to make her go to therapy, but now it occurred to her that if Lourdes had to win Madison over it would drag this thing out, so she went and got a baby doll from the toy box in the other room and curled up with it. This time finding tears wasn’t hard.

Raul-as-caseworker was so hip-casual when he introduced Madison Smith and Lourdes Malone that neither one of them could stand him, and the way he went through why Madison was here—sexual assault top on the list, naturally—made her feel dissed and dirty. But when he promised he’d be right outside in the waiting room she was relieved, and when he left the room she was actually kind of scared.

Lourdes had been watching her even when she hadn’t looked like she was. Now she asked if she wanted a Coke. Little Shit drank Pepsi. Madison said sure and thank you and held the can in both hands with the baby doll in her lap. Queasy from all this vulnerability, she vowed to jack something out of here today, one of the smaller toys supposed to get kids to drop their guard, the Mardi Gras beads maybe. If Lourdes turned out to be innocent, she could have them back. If not, plenty of kids on the street would like something cheap and pretty.

Lourdes settled back. Today her hair was a good color for her, yellow silk in the lamplight, and it would be nice to touch. Her hands were crossed in her lap, crisp white cuffs folded back. Little-Shit-as-Madison crossed her own fidgety hands the same way and tried to keep them still.

She’d never seen Lourdes professional like this, majorly conscious of herself and of her client. Being on the receiving end of all that was creepy and flattering and creepy because it was flattering. You didn’t have to have a syndrome to pick up on it.

“I’d like to tell you a bit about myself so you know who you’re dealing with.”

About half of what Lourdes told Madison, Little Shit was pretty sketched about because she’d never heard it before. Looking in her head to see what was true would pull her out of character, and it didn’t matter anyway.

When Lourdes asked if she had any questions, she didn’t. “Are you a checkers player, Madison?”

This must be in the Play Therapy class she hadn’t taken yet. She had Madison say, “Am I a what player?”

Lourdes showed her the checkerboard set up on a table, neat red and black squares, red and black discs like Pogs from when she was a kid. “Have you ever played?”

“Games are retarded.” Now that she got how insulting that was to the people you used as an insult, like “gyp” and “You run like a girl,” she didn’t like saying it, but Madison did.

“Sometimes it’s easier to talk when you’re doing something else besides just sitting and talking. I could teach you the basic rules.” This wasn’t working. Lourdes ought to give it up.

“I didn’t come here to play stupid games.”

Lourdes took the gift. “Why did you come here, Madison?”

“Because the judge said I had to or go to juvie,” she sneered.

“Why did the judge say that?”

“Because I’m a bad kid?” Hopefully that wasn’t overplaying it. Madison lifted her feet up on the chair and hugged her knees and buried her face, with the doll squished in the V between her thighs and stomach. This was pretty uncomfortable but it hid a lot of her and showed a lot else of her.

“You’re not a bad kid, Madison.” That was definitely in the therapist rule book. Little Shit wanted to roll her eyes and groan at how predictable it was, and Madison wanted to go sit in the nice lady’s lap.

“I do bad things.”

Lourdes didn’t say anything. That was use of silence to get the client uncomfortable enough to fill it. Little-Shit-as-Madison didn’t say anything, either.

Madison’s thoughts were babyish, full of holes and sharp broken pieces and mushy spots, mostly about fighting things off—fighting something off right now, something circling and poking and trying to get in—and about wanting somebody to love her and fighting off anything that looked like love and letting in stuff that wasn’t even close, not knowing the difference between love and danger. If there even was a difference. Little Shit knew this space.

Eventually Lourdes was the one who broke the silence and said a few more gentle, encouraging things. Little-Shit-as-Madison just sat there all curled up until her back started to hurt and she couldn’t stand the boobie girdle cutting into her anymore, and then she threw the doll on the floor and got up and left. The Mardi Gras beads in her pocket didn’t rattle or bulge.

Raul-as-caseworker was texting and she walked right past him and out the door of the office and she found the stairway and ran down three flights and was in the street before he caught up with her. “You got a problem with elevators? Jesus.”

When she got home she stripped, soaked in a bubble bath, listened to a Grizzly Bears CD really loud, put on clean pajamas. To sop up some of the longing to go out dancing with Lourdes, she read as many pages as she could stand in the social-work policy book.

The next day she went by herself. Whether Lourdes thought that made Madison more alone and vulnerable or not, Little Shit did. This time she sat on the couch so there’d be a space beside her. Pretty much the same thing went down. After a few minutes and a few words, Lourdes stopped talking.

Madison was antsy and went ahead and filled the silence but not too much, too soon. “I’m gonna be a social worker,” she said in the squeaky voice that would have been fake even if Madison had been real. “I’m gonna help kids.”

“Do you know a lot of kids who need help?”

“Well, yeah-uh.”

“Why do they need help?”

Don’t make this too easy, Little Shit warned Madison Smith. Let her think she’s God’s gift to screwed-up kids. “All kinds of stuff.”

“Like what?”

“My friend Kelsey? Her mom’s a crack ho.” Madison watched Lourdes to see if she was shocked. Little Shit knew she wouldn’t be.

“That’s hard.”

“And there’s this dude at the center? Doesn’t know if he’s gay or straight or bi or whatever. He says he’s queer.” She giggled. She had a whole list of sex-related issues to warm Lourdes up with.

“What do you need help with, Madison?”

Too fast, you idiot. I don’t trust you yet.

Madison cradled the baby doll against her almost-boobless chest and cooed to it, “It’s okay, little girl, I won’t hurt you, you’re safe with me.”

Lourdes took the hint. “It’s hard to find a safe place, isn’t it?”

Madison nodded. Little Shit let Madison nod.

Now Lourdes came to sit beside her on the couch. Madison wanted to run out of there and to snuggle. Little Shit wanted Lourdes to make a move. Make a move, come on, let’s get this over with.

Lourdes tucked one leg up under her, wedged herself against the pillows, leaned her elbow on the back of the couch, and propped her head on her fist. There was one of those silences. Madison got weirded out and threw the doll down and knocked the checkerboard off the table and left.

On her way out, Little Shit thought she’d just jump in and jump out of Lourdes’s head, not to change anything, not to give her the idea of assaulting young kids if it wasn’t already in there and not to take it away if it was, just to see what the hell was going on. She couldn’t get in at all. That had never happened before. Madison Smith might not be real, but she was really in the way.

This went on for over a week. The online classes started and she already had two papers. She had to keep shaving, and her crotch prickled and itched. Her boobs, shoulders, neck, back hurt all the time even when she unwrapped herself at home—she was going to need a serious massage when this was over, which would go right on her expense report. She wasn’t sleeping very much.

It turned out that the Madison Smith story had to spin out past where they’d planned it, and now she was making it up as she went, getting the poor kid more and more messed up, hoping she could keep it straight or if she got caught in a lie it would look like Madison’s pathology. Like a bug under a magnifying glass, she was about to burn to a crisp any second under Lourdes’s attention. And there was not a single sexual vibe.

“I think she’s innocent.”

“Nah.”

“What if she’s innocent?”

Raul was thinking. She was too tired and stressed out to see about what. She almost fell asleep. Finally he swiveled, tapped on his keyboard, sat back in his chair, leaned forward again to turn up the volume.

Voices of prepubescent girls and boys came up, seven or eight different ones, some of them hard to understand, some clear and close. Soft-spoken male and female interviewers asked carefully nonleading questions, just like in the role-play in Forensic Interviewing. At least one of the kids was crying. Another one kept making a barking sound like a goofy cartoon seal that was probably laughter. One of the interviewers had a cough.

Raul closed the audio file, peered into the coffee mug on his desk that had DADDY on it in puffy blue letters, sighed and got to his feet. “Coffee?”

She’d told him a million times that she took her caffeine cold. She said, “Uh. No.”

He missed the sarcasm or ignored it, which pissed her off more. She thought she might just get outta here while he was refilling his stupid mug, but she couldn’t quite.

When he came back she said, “Nothing was really disclosed on there.”

“Makes you wonder, though, all that disgusting stuff.”

“That wasn’t at the level of an outcry.” Using the intense word “outcry” in such a familiar way made her feel like a real social worker.

Raul patted her shoulder. “That’s why we got you.”

“Probable cause,” she said, like she knew what she was talking about.

“Something like that. So, you okay now?”

For a split second she thought he was asking if she felt okay, if she was upset, if she was sick. But he just meant was she okay to keep going with the job. She said, “I guess,” and that seemed to be enough for him. Whether it was enough for her they’d just have to see.

By about two thirty in the morning she really, really wanted to smoke a joint to help her sleep, but that would compromise her testimony if for some reason she had to pee in a cup in the next few hours. She did drink part of a beer and almost hurled.

The next morning, Little Shit had Madison sit in the chair where her feet didn’t quite touch the floor. Lourdes settled herself on the closest end of the couch. “How are you today?”

“You look terrible.”

“I didn’t sleep very well last night, but I’m fine. Thank you for noticing, Madison. That’s very nice of you.”

“You going to fall asleep?”

“No. I promise.”

“You going to die?”

“Oh, honey, don’t worry. I’m right here with you.” Lourdes reached over to pat her knee but got her thigh instead, the inside of her thigh.

“Oops,” Lourdes said softly. “Sorry.”

But the hand stayed there, very lightly, for a second or two, and something squirmed around the edges of Madison’s thoughts.

She did the clamping-the-legs-together and caught Lourdes’s hand where it was. The fingers spread, rubbed.

Then Lourdes gently pulled away and sat back. Gently she asked what Madison was doing. Madison didn’t know. Well, she sort of knew.

“Has somebody touched you there, Madison? On purpose? Not on accident like just happened?”

“Yeah.” Squeaky voice into the baby doll’s hair.

“Can you tell me about it?” A tiny shake of the head, though she could have told; she’d been practicing. “Can you tell the baby doll about it?”

“What’s her name?”

“What do you want her name to be?”

The technique to get buy-in worked. Madison smiled. “Pretty.”

“That’s a good name. Can you tell Pretty about it?”

Careful. Don’t be easy, don’t play too hard to get. There was a humming sensation at the base of her brain—the primal part, the reptilian part that took care of basic survival stuff.

“Is it too scary over there all by yourself, Madison? Do you and Pretty need to come sit by me?”

Madison did need to. This is it. Don’t blow it.

“Or on my lap?” Whoa. “Even a big girl like you needs somebody to hold her sometimes.” Hold sounded nice. Hold me.

“I don’t like it here.”

“You don’t like it here in the office?”

“This room’s ugly.”

Lourdes didn’t take offense or laugh. “Would you like to go into the other room where the toys are?”

Can you say kidnapping? Madison nodded. Lourdes led the way.

They sat on big, soft pillows on the floor. Pretty the doll went onto Lourdes’s lap first, a canary into a mine, into Lourdes’s lap, into the hollow there. Madison sat cross-legged on the floor, crotch open under the white jumper, pink flowered panties barely covered. Little Shit faced forward to fend off any gropes of her chest. Her boobs and crotch were throbbing, boobs painfully, crotch not so much. Hopefully the call button was still there inside the Ace girdle—the temptation to feel for it and give herself away was weirdly erotic, like the urge to step off a cliff that made you have to back away. Instead, she put her hand under her flared skirt and rubbed herself, and saw Lourdes smile.

“Why don’t you come over here by me?”

Madison really wanted to go and really wanted to stay right here, almost but not quite out of reach. It was like being licked in the inside folds of her brain.

What are you doing? Which of the three of them was saying that to which of the three of them?

Lourdes scooted close. She smelled like Lourdes, like somebody Madison didn’t quite remember. “Can you show me with Pretty what somebody did to you?”

Madison giggled and kissed Pretty with her mouth open, touched the plastic mouth with her tongue.

“Someone put his tongue in your mouth?”

“Her.”

“Someone put her tongue in your mouth?”

Madison nodded and licked the doll’s mouth again.

“A grown-up woman?” Madison nodded and the woman’s, the therapist’s voice got even more gentle. “Did she do anything else to you, honey? Touch you anywhere else?”

A heat was spreading in all their minds and bodies now. Madison squirmed. Little Shit tried not to. Lourdes put an arm around her. “Can you show me with Pretty?”

Madison put the doll against her crotch. Little shit really hoped she didn’t have to insert the sorry thing.

“She touched your vagina?” The word clanged like a bell. Lourdes was practically cooing. “Like this?”

It seemed to take long minutes before Lourdes’s fingers actually came into contact with the stretch of pink flowered panties. It seemed to be all one quick motion when the fingers wormed inside the elastic. The realization exploded in Lourdes’s awareness that the skin she was caressing wasn’t hairless but shaved at the same instant that Madison threw up and Little Shit went for the call button.

The Ace bandage unwound and her boobs deployed like airbags. You little shit. The call button wasn’t where it was supposed to be. Then she found it, and Raul and Dixie slammed into the room with guns drawn.

Lourdes just sat there. Madison was gone. Little Shit covered what body parts she could. When they pulled Lourdes to her feet and cuffed her, Thanks was in her mind, like a wave on a beach. Not the word, just the gratitude itself. Thank you then, and the name she’d given Lourdes to call her by. And, before she could get all the way out of Lourdes’s mind, something like I love you.

——

Melanie Tem’s solo novels include her Bram Stoker Award–winning debut, Prodigal, and most recently Slain in the Spirit and The Deceiver. She has also collaborated with Nancy Holder on Making Love and Witch-Light, and with Steve Rasnic Tem on Daughters and The Man on the Ceiling. The earlier novella version of The Man on the Ceiling won the 2001 Bram Stoker, International Horror Guild, and World Fantasy Awards. The Tems also collaborated on the award-winning multimedia CD-ROM Imagination Box.

Her short stories have been published in the collection The Ice Downstream; on E-Reads; in numerous magazines, including Colorado State Review, Black Maria, Asimov’s Science Fiction, and Cemetery Dance; and in anthologies, including Snow White Blood Red, Acquainted with the Night, Poe, Portals, Black Wings II, and Blood and Other Cravings. She has also published nonfiction articles and poetry.

Tem is also a playwright and an oral storyteller.

She lives in Denver with her husband, writer and editor Steve Rasnic Tem, where she works as an adoption social worker. They have four children and four granddaughters.

| DITCH WITCH |

Lucius Shepard

—

Late in the day, Michael kept passing little towns with deserted streets and winking caution signals, paper trash swirling in the gutters, places that reminded him of movies in which mankind had been destroyed and computers continued to operate stoplights and sprinklers and house pets feasted on the rotting flesh of their owners. Beyond them, sun-browned hills conveyed the interstate north toward Oregon. Traffic was sparse and he boosted his speed, letting the Cadillac drift wide on the turns, driving with his neck turtled and his shoulders hunched. He felt that he was burning with indefinable brilliance and menace, that he had inhabited some nihilistic fantasy and become its outlaw Jesus. Every half an hour or so the girl beside him, a skinny bottle blond in a tank top and cutoffs, would break into his baggie of coke, taking a few hits for herself, then loading the tip of her nail file and holding it beneath his nose, smiling and making meaningful eye contact as he sniffed and blinked. She had milky skin, nice legs, and sharp features that reminded him of photographs from Depression-era Appalachia and matched her hick accent. She might, he thought, remain pretty for three or four years before she began to look dried up and waspish, and that would most likely be fine with her. Three or four good years would be about what she expected.

He had picked her up in a rest area near Sacramento and she had jumped in, abubble with false conviviality, saying, Hi, I’m Tracy, where you heading? Seattle? Me, too! She talked a mile a minute about her travels in Europe, the ex-boyfriend who had become a rock star, an affair with an older man. If she had done half what she claimed, she would have been older than he was, and he figured her for seven or eight years younger. Seventeen, maybe. He had told similar lies during his days on the streets and knew her story was not designed to be believed; it was like a prostitute’s makeup, both a statement of availability and a cheap disguise. She was frightened, probably broke, hoping to hook up with somebody who would take care of her. He wondered if he would let himself be hooked. It would be the stupid thing to do, the careless, impractical thing. The allure might be too much to resist.

“I might not go all the way to Seattle,” he said after driving for an hour through the empty golden afternoon. “I might head east. Hell, I might even head back to LA.”

He thought about Charlie. One kiss, he said to himself. A pathetic little kiss, that’s all it had been. Charlie wasn’t trying to seduce you, he was just fucking up the same as he did with everything else. Punishing himself for playing in a different key. And it’s not as if you were cherry, un-uh, yet here you go running through the world, fuming with outrage and clutching your torn bodice like a goddamn nineteenth-century virgin.

“This car really yours?” the girl asked.

“You think I stole it? I’m not the kind of guy who can afford a Caddy?”

“Naw, I . . .”

“You got me. I stole it from this old fag I lived with in LA.”

A pause. “Yeah. Right.”

“No joke,” he said. “He was like my perv uncle, you know. My pretend daddy. Don’t sweat it. He’ll be too twisted up by me leaving to call the cops. Time he gets around to thinking about the car . . . The guy owns a dealership. He’ll find a way to put it on his insurance.”

She stared at him, horrified.

“I told you it’s cool,” he said.

Her voice quavered as though from strong emotion. “You’re gay?”

He restrained a laugh. “I like girls, but I’ve done a few tricks. You know how it is.”

He looked sharply at her, forcing her to acknowledge the comment—she lowered her head and responded with a frail-as-sugar noise. Satisfied, he swerved around a slow-moving piece of Jap trash and leaned on the horn.

He could still turn back, he thought. Things could be mended. Charlie would fall all over himself trying to apologize, and life at home might be better than ever.

Too realistic, he decided; too humiliating, too logical and kind.

The sky grayed, rinsing the girl’s hair of its sheen—it showed the old yellow of flat ginger ale. Her breasts looked tiny, juiceless. Mouse breasts. She caught his eye and flashed one of her Runaway Poster Child smiles, rife with daffy trust and precocious sexuality. He was offended by her presumption that he would be taken in by it.

“We going to drive straight through?” she asked.

“I don’t know.”

“Might be better to stop somewhere, you know, than hitting Seattle all wore out.”

She said this with studied indifference, fishing in the glove compartment for the coke, making a production of unearthing the vial from among road maps and candy wrappers, as if that, and not the idea of cementing the relationship, were foremost on her mind.

He said, “I’ll see how the driving goes.”

“Well, if I got a vote it’d be great to catch a shower.”

As if in sympathy with her, his skin began to feel oily, itchy, in need of a wash.

She sat sulking, toying with the vial; after a mile or two she began to sing, a frail, wordless tune, something the Lady Ophelia might have essayed during the last stages of distraction. Suddenly vivacious, she waved the vial under his nose and said, “Want to hurt yourself?”

After they had done the coke, she fiddled with the radio, trying to bring in a rock station from the background static, and Michael settled back to enjoy the Cadillac feeling in his head, the Cadillac richness of the afternoon, the richness of a stolen car, cocaine, another man’s money in his pocket and a strange woman at his side.

“You look sick,” said the girl. “Want me to drive?”

“I’m okay.”

“Know what’s the best thing when you’re sick from coke? Milk. And not just milk. Cheese, ice cream. Dairy products, you know. Maybe you should stop somewheres and get some milk.” She crossed her legs, jiggled her foot. “I could go for an ice cream myself. I mean I ain’t sick, you know. I got a thing for ice cream is all. Especially the kind with the polar bears on the wrapper. Ever had one of them?”

“Oh, yeah! They’re terrific.” His grin tightened the packs of muscle at the corners of his mouth.

“I could eat ’em all night long,” she said with immense satisfaction. “Course I wouldn’t want to lose my shape.” She twisted about to face him. “I do a hunnerd sit-ups every morning and every night. I jog, too. You like to jog?”

“You bet.”

“I’m serious. You should take care of yourself.”

“Why?”

“You just should,” she said defensively.

“I’d need a better reason than that to waste my time.”

“It ain’t a waste. It makes good sense.”

“Why?”

“Because . . .” Flustered, she shifted away from him, plucked at the hem of her cutoffs. “You want to live a long time, don’tcha?”

“I’m fucking with you,” he said. “Okay?”

She tried another tack, working hard to establish what a fine traveling companion she’d make, but he tuned her out. Mount Shasta loomed against a twilight sky; the huge white cone with a single golden star sparkling off to the side had the graphic simplicity of a banner. In his mind he pushed ahead to Seattle, imagining whale worshipers and lumberjack sex cults, but those thoughts found no traction and he found himself thinking about LA. He was back on Sunset with the mutant carbon breathers and death’s-head bikers and tweaking whores and the little black kids with their little guns and little crack rocks, with the runaways he had lived among before Charlie took him in. Kids who came on with a mixture of paranoia and hard-boiled defiance, yet proved by their deaths to have been innocents with a few sly tricks. Most of them dead now, the rest just swallowed up. His memories of them were as oppressive as family memories, which was what they had been—a screwed-up family with no parents, no home, no future, no visible means of support, cooking stolen hamburger over oil-drum fires and selling bad dope and getting infections. He tried to escape the memories, to find a place in his head where they hadn’t established squatter’s rights, and wound up in a hotly lit, cluttered space that seemed familiar, but that he couldn’t identify. It must be, he thought, partly a real place and partly some pathological view he’d had of it . . . Oncoming headlights blinded him and he swerved into the left lane, angrily punching on his brights, leaving them on until the other driver dimmed his. He felt wrecked, wired. It had gotten dark and Shasta lay far behind.

The girl made a weak noise; for a second he was not sure how she had come to be there.

“Where are we?” he asked, and she said, “Wha . . . ,” and sat up straight, as if she were in a classroom, trying to give the impression that she had been paying attention.

“We in Oregon yet?” he asked.

“Uh . . . I don’t know. Maybe. There was a sign back a ways.”

He fingered a cigarette from a crumpled pack and lit up. The smoke tasted stale, but cleared his head. The radio, with its crackle of static and glowing green dial, seemed like an instrument for measuring background radiation.

“I remember now,” said the girl with sober assurance. “We been in Oregon a long time.”

Curls of mist trailed across the road, and towering into a starless sky, a group of neon signs ahead was haloed by a doubled ring of shining air. Apart from the rank grasses along the shoulder, Michael could see nothing of the land. A road sign shot past. One thirteen to Portland, twelve to Whidby Bay. On the left a pancake house with glaring picture windows looked as bright and isolated as an orbital station. The mist was thickening and it tired him to peer through it.

“Break out the coke,” he told the girl.

Dutifully, she fed his nose. His heart raced, the skin on his forehead tightened, but there was no sharpness, no shrugging off of fatigue. His skull was impacted with something that prevented all but the most rudimentary thought. He was exhausted, he stank, his fingernails were rimmed with black. At the last possible moment he swung off the interstate and sent the Cadillac squealing along the curving access road that led to Whidby Bay.

“Where we going?” the girl asked.

His mouth was so dry he could barely speak and, when he did, the word he spoke sounded guttural and unfamiliar, like troll language.

“Motel.”

——

Set at the end of the main street, capping off a row of muffin shops, gift shops, restaurants that resembled cabins and had cutesy names, and a closed-up Boron station, the Elfland Lodge appeared to be too much motel for a town the size of Whidby Bay, a three-story green-and-white structure with a wing at one end and no more than a half-dozen cars in a huge parking lot bordered by a chest-high hedge. Michael supposed that the town must have a booming tourist season, a time for macramй festivals and vegan-paloozas, and this was not that time—either that or someone was using the place to launder money. An electrified sign featuring a leprechaun-like figure in a green suit doing a jig was mounted on a pole out front. Stick-on letters applied to its facing promised free cable and welcomed the Whidby Bay HS Class of ’87 for their 25th Year Reunion—dates showed this glorious event was scheduled to begin and end the week previous.

The night man was a plump, thirtyish guy with frizzy hair and a beer gut, wearing Mother Goose glasses and a T-shirt that read ORYCON 26 and sported a cartoon of a chubby rocket put-putting through the void, propelled by little poots of smoke. He was kicked back in a swivel chair behind the reception desk when Michael entered, listening to an iPod, his head nodding as if to a sprightly rhythm. The lights in the office were dim, there was a strong scent of air freshener, and a stubbed-out roach lay in an ashtray back of the desk.

“One twenty . . . it’s out back,” the night man said, handing over a key card. Then as Michael was about to leave, he called, “Dude! Check out the elves.”

This roused a mild paranoia in Michael. “Elves?”

The night man adopted a fatuous air and a fruity tone of voice. “Those from which our establishment derives its name. The owner brought them back from the Black Forest. Believe me, they are not to be missed.”

“What are you talking about?”

“The Black Forest. In Germany, you know,” the night man said defensively. “Elves . . . little statues of elves.”

“Why the fuck should I care about some dumb-ass statues?”

“They’re artifacts. Relics. I guess some old Nazi guy owned them.”

Michael continued to glare at him, unsure whether or not he was being played in some way.

“Hey, forget it,” said the night man. “I simply thought you’d find them amusing.”

Michael parked in front of 120, a few slots away from a brown Dodge minivan, the only other vehicle on the seaward side of the motel. Heavy surf pounded close by. Salty air. Orange light bulbs ranging the breezeway illuminated a wide stretch of lawn bounded by a waist-high flagstone wall; beyond the wall, the darkness was absolute. He saw no elves.

There were, however, what looked to be a bunch of oddly shaped, painted rocks standing at the far end of the property. With the girl in tow, he strolled across the lawn toward the rocks and soon realized that these were the elves of which the night man had spoken. There were twenty of them, each about three, three and a half feet tall, carved from wood, disturbingly lifelike, and they had been arranged into groups of five, distinct within the larger grouping. They had dark brown faces, floppy caps like Santa hats but green, shirts with embroidered buttonholes and seven-league boots with sagging tops. Their laminated surfaces held a sticky-looking gloss.

“Lord help us,” said the girl. “Those things are wicked.”

Michael was inclined to agree. These were not the benign creatures of heroic fantasy, but the corrupt denizens of Grimms’ fairy tales. More like dwarves than elves. Their faces were those of long-chinned, hook-nosed, cadaverous old men with Mormon beards and hideous rouge spots dappling their cheeks. About half of them brandished axes and long knives and warty cudgels. Their gnarled hands and thick limbs gave the impression of unnatural strength. Some were hunched over, appearing to have been struck wooden and inanimate in the midst of a furious assault, while others leered at their companions as though anticipating a bloody result. In motion, Michael supposed, they would lurch and caper, tilt and wobble, but fast—they would be as fast as wolverines, clumsy yet facile, ripping bellies, slashing throats, then tripping over their victims’ bodies. He questioned the sensibilities of the man who had stationed them in such an untroubled spot.

The girl tried to drag him away. “I got to pee!”

“I’ll be in in a minute.” He handed her the key card.

“C’mon with me.”

She plucked at his arm and he shook her off, saying, “You need help to pee?”

Her lips thinned. “You stay out here, I can’t be responsible.”

He chuckled and shook out a cigarette from his pack. “I wasn’t counting on you being responsible.”

“They got evil in ’em. You’re just stirring ’em up, standing here and all. They’ll hurt you. Or maybe worse.”

“The elves?”

“Whatever you want to call ’em.”

“And you know this how? You have these amazing powers, right? Your mama’s a witch back in West Virginny and she passed them on to you.”

“Tennessee! I’m from Tennessee! And it don’t have nothing to do with my mama!”

“So you are a witch? You whup up potions out of possum guts and a pinch of geechee root? You cure warts and love troubles? How’d you get to be a witch if your mama didn’t teach you?”

She fixed him with a hateful stare.

“I bet I know.” He lit up and adopted a hick drawl. “You was standing on a corner over to Taterville one evening, waiting on the bus to Hog Jowl, when this here beam of light pierced down from heaven . . .”

She stalked off toward the motel.

“Or maybe you was in Hog Jowl! Waiting on the bus to Taterville!” he called after her. “I get them two places confused!”

She whirled about and said venomously, “You think you’re so damn smart! Well, go on! Stay there and see what happens!”

Startled by her defiance, he watched after her until she vanished inside the room. Little Missy, he thought, could serve up a side of mean. He returned his attention to the elves. He gave some of them names—Groper, Sleazy, Ratfuck, Spongehead—but became bored, distracted by the booming surf. Peering over the flagstone wall, he could see nothing, but it was apparent that the motel stood atop a cliff, a high cliff if his spider senses were reliable. The darkness beneath wanted him, drew him down, and he had a fleeting impulse to vault over the wall. Not a good sign. Almost as not-good as no longer being able to amuse oneself with one’s own wit.

Turning away from the drop, he could have sworn one of the elves had moved closer. Moved and stopped the moment he turned, once again counterfeiting the inanimate. The elf was weaponless, crouching, its swarthy, snarling face visible between upraised hands, poised to deliver a push.

“Wily little bastard,” he said. “You want some of me?”

The elf appeared to quiver with eagerness, the light trembling on its surfaces, glinting from its eyes.

“Fuck you!”

Michael flipped his cigarette at the elf, showering it with sparks. As he crossed the lawn he tried not to glance behind him, but he looked back twice.

——

Once inside 120, he stripped off his shirt, switched off the lights, and lay down, listening to the shower hissing, the shuddery hum of the air conditioner. Glare from the breezeway penetrated the drapes, spreading a sickly murk throughout the room. The blond production-line furniture and the mirror bolted above the writing desk wavered like fixtures in a mirage. He felt that he was floating off the bed. Nerves jumped in his cheek. Phosphenes drifted and flared in the dimness. Something was lumped up under his ass, and he remembered Charlie’s money. He sat up, pulled the wad from his hip pocket and counted it. Seven thousand dollars and change. The bills were cool and slick, like strange skins.

He wondered if he should give Charlie a call. It would be painful, but Charlie might feel better afterward. He would be guilty, morose. The first thing he’d say would be not to worry about the money or the car, and he hoped Michael could forgive him. He hadn’t meant it, the kiss. For four years he’d been straight with Michael, and he had fucked up once. It would never happen again. And then, he, Michael, would say . . . maybe nothing. Maybe he’d just hang on the phone, knowing that if he opened his mouth he would indict himself, because it had been his fuckup, too. Or maybe he’d get angry with Charlie for making him feel guilty and call him a spunk muncher, a pole smoker, an aging drag queen with a ring in his dick. But Charlie wouldn’t let him off so easily. If you’re determined to run, he’d say, all right, but don’t pretend it was casual, don’t pretend you’re not feeling anything. They’d trade back and forth like that for a while, and finally Michael would say he had to go, and Charlie would say, okay, but once you’ve had time to think things over, please, please, get in touch, and so what was the point in calling when he knew everything that would be said . . . And, hell, Charlie would know he was going through this process and wouldn’t expect a call, so what was the goddamn point?

“I am going to hell,” he said, anticipating a demonic chuckle in response.

The girl came out of the bathroom, toweling her hair, still wearing tank top and panties. He thought it was extremely demure of her to be clothed at this juncture—such restraint and modesty well might be considered a touch of class in their circle.

“It’s so cold in here!” she said.

“I like it cold.”

“Well.” She toweled briskly. “I guess it’s just my hair’s still wet.”

He let out a sigh and saw a shadow pour from his mouth; a sensation of calm stole over him, like the calm after the passing of a fever.

The girl pulled off the tank top; beneath a tan line, her pale breasts were luminous in the half-light, the nipples pink and childlike. She burrowed beneath the covers, drawing them up to her chin.

“You coming in?” she asked.

He skinned out of his jeans and shorts. The sheets were cold and once he had drawn them up, he could no longer feel anything below his waist. The girl’s thigh nudged his and he felt that—a patch of skin warming to life. Strands of damp hair tickled his shoulder.

“Hey,” she said softly. “You pretty whacked out, huh?”

“That’s me . . . whacked out.”

“You had a tiring day.” Her hand spidered across his abdomen. “All that driving and hardly ever stopping. You must be wore right down.”

He touched one of her breasts, let its weight nestle in his palm. It was a fine thing to hold, but he felt not even a glint of arousal. “I don’t think it’s going to work,” he said.

“All that coke’s numbing you out,” she whispered, her mouth brushing his ear, her fingers caressing, molding his limp cock. “You lie back now and let me take care of you.”

He became immersed in her fresh, soapy smell, in her breathy voice and the mastering cleverness of her hand.

“I wish it was just the two of us,” she said.

“Is somebody else here?”

“I mean, you know. Like even when you’re alone, how you can feel other people pressing in on you. People in the vicinity.”

“Uh-huh.”

She took to singing distractedly again, an aimless, wordless, off-key tune of the sort a child might sing while concentrating on a toy. She gripped him more tightly and increased her rhythm. “You ain’t still mad, are you?”

“Not so much.”

She gave a husky laugh, and it seemed there was a note of triumph in it. “You’re a funny fella. I don’t know why you strike me funny, but you sure do. Maybe it’s ’cause you like pretending you ain’t serious about nothing when you serious about ’most everything.”

“Seriously funny,” he said. “That’s me.”

“That don’t mean a blessed thing,” she said, making it sound seductive. “You can talk like that all you want, ’cause I’m onto you.”

The planes of her cheeks, her lidded eyes and half smile . . . They were so close to him, they no longer appeared to be elements of a face, but features on a map that he couldn’t read.

“Yeah? How’s that?”

“I been watching you all day. I can tell when you’re easy, when you’re worried. When you’re lying.” She peeled back the covers, checking to see what her hand had wrought. “Look at that! ’Pears it’s gonna work after all.”

She scooted lower in the bed, teased him with her lips, then slipped half his length into her mouth; he brushed the hair back from her face so he could watch her cheeks hollow. After a minute she wriggled back up beside him. Her tongue darted out, flirting with his, and her hand moved slowly, insistently.

“You keep that up, I’m going to come,” he said.

“Be all right with me,” she said. “I think that’d be kinda nice.”

He laughed, happy with her.

“Know what else I know about you?” she asked after a pause.

“What?”

“You know all about me . . . Least, more than you think you know. But you’re so busy being funny, you ain’t noticed.”

He felt a delicate shift in attitude that he hadn’t felt for a long time, that perhaps he had only told himself he could feel. The silky lengths of her wet hair gave her face a cunning sweetness like that of a nymph, a dryad, and he had the idea that her expression—rapt, yet with a trace of uncertainty—was a mirror image of his own.

“We’re the same people,” she said. “You might be older than me, and you think you’re smarter. But we been the same places, we had the same trouble. We understand each other.”