Currency of Souls (9 page)

Here's where the whore's going to get planted, in rocky unblessed earth that smells like the men's room.

The fire's close. If I stood up right now, turned and took a dozen strides I'd be right on the edge of it feeling what little hair I have left shrivel up. It dries my back as I lay the girl down and set about finding a rock with enough of a point to work as a tool. I'd use my hands but it would take me until this time tomorrow to get it deep enough that the coyotes and other scavengers would let her be. Takes me a minute, but I find what I'm looking for. It's a spade-shaped rock half-buried in the wormy earth, and though it takes some persuading, I eventually get it free and start hacking at the earth.

Nothing here to say it's a graveyard. No markers, no lumps in the ground where the dead have pulled the covers up over themselves, and no flowers. There's a reason for that. Anyone planted here isn't meant to be mourned, and so far they haven't been disappointed. Looks like a damn vegetable patch that's been let go to seed, but under all that stone and dirt and weeds, there are a number of folks I used to know and don't miss. Among them is 'ol Eddie, a rat-bastard of the highest order and, I'm guessing, another reason this patch of ground reeks of piss.

You're a real asshole, you know that?

Kyle's got a girl. She's not much, but she's company. Used to be she ran a pretty good store out of one of the old buildings on Winter Street, selling clothes and trinkets and such. But in Milestone, the days of prosperous business for all but bartenders, undertakers and whores has ended, and Iris Gale knows that well, which is why she's now self-employed in the latter trade. I figure she doesn't charge Kyle for her services, on account of how he's got no money, or at least none that I know about outside of the odd jobs he does for those willing to open their doors to him. Maybe that's why he was so concerned about Carla. Maybe Iris has changed his opinion on whores and the like.

Doesn't matter.

He's gone, and now it's just the dead girl and me with her boyfriend sulking in the passenger seat of my truck.

Or maybe not, because all of a sudden the back of my neck's cold and that's not right at all, not with the fire still fighting its blazing fight against the wind and rain. Someone's watching me. I'm sure of it, and I cast a quick glance at the whore before standing, both knees crackling loud enough to make me wince. "I'll get you there in a minute," I let her know by way of an apology. "Just hang on." That damn spied-on feeling grows stronger, until it makes my skin crawl. I have to wonder if it's the rain after all. Maybe it's just gotten colder. Maybe the fire's finally admitting defeat. Maybe Brody's throwing daggers at me from my truck. Maybe, maybe, maybe. It's all bullshit. My way of trying to pretend I've gone through all I'm going to for one night.

I start to turn around and I'm full sure I'll see Cadaver coming back out of the tavern, or studying me from the inferno. But it isn't Cadaver.

The fire's getting a little lower as it runs out of fuel to feed on, the heads of those flames whipping hungrily to the left, toward town, but with no way to get there, I reckon in an hour or two, they'll be nothing the rain can't handle. It's still hotter than hell though, except here near the back, where I'm standing. The cold is coming from the almost perfect circle that has appeared through the smoke and the flames, forcing them to bend around it. Goddamndest thing I've ever seen, but sure as I'm standing here with a dead girl at my feet there's a tunnel, tall enough to step into, drilled into the fire and stretching about ten feet into the tavern, like someone just stuck a great big glass tube right into the blaze.

At the end of that tunnel, brass foot rails reflecting the shunned fire, sits the bar itself. It should be a charred hunk of nothing right now, but there it is, untouched, and as always, unpolished. And behind it, busy fixing a couple of glasses of whiskey, and looking equally untouched and unpolished, is Gracie.

Chapter Eight

For a moment I just stand there, nudging my right foot against Carla's cold body to make sure I'm really here. The cold air wafting from that tunnel makes me shiver. The combination of temperatures is going to leave me with one raging bitch of a head cold on top of everything else, so I do what I guess I'm supposed to do, and make my way toward the bar.

It's like stepping into a freezer, or jumping into a lake of ice.

"Jesus Henry," I moan and rub my arms like a worried housewife. The cold makes me instantly aware of every spot on my body the fire didn't dry, and my breath turns to mist. I have to question why it needs to be
this
cold. If Gracie's dead, then she's dead. Keeping her on ice can only be someone's idea of a sick joke. Or maybe it's freezing because if it wasn't, I'd be one crispy critter right about now, given that I'm at least four feet past the threshold of fire. It laps at the invisible walls around me, spreading out across the surface like some kind of amber marine creature desperate to suck me out of my shell.

Strange, but I figure it's better not to analyze too deeply something that's keeping me from being roasted alive, so I focus on Gracie, who for all I know might at any moment give me a little finger-wave and vanish, along with her little invisible asbestos test tube. I speed up my approach, and the closer I get, the less cold it becomes.

Gracie looks up at me. She doesn't smile, but nods a greeting and tucks that rogue lock of hair behind her ear. If she's dead, it's been kind to her, but the drab unflattering outfit she supposedly burned to death in hasn't been improved any.

"Sheriff."

"Gracie."

I test the reality of the bar by brushing my fingers across its surface. They come away black with soot, but underneath, the bar is there.

"Sit," Gracie says. It's not a request.

There's only one stool, and I'm about to take it when it occurs to me to ask, "This wasn't Cobb's, was it?"

"Weren't anybody's."

I sit. Gracie slides one of the glasses in front of me. I look at it, wondering how I'm sitting here in a bar that's all but burned to the ground, about to enjoy a whiskey that doesn't exist with a woman who died in the fire. It's a couple of questions too many, so I figure maybe I can tackle them later. "For Blue Moon." I sink the drink. It burns, scalds my throat on the way down and sends fumes rolling back up that I vent through my teeth. It's real all right, and the conclusion forces me to accept that everything else is too, even as the fire dances around us.

Gracie slams her whiskey without effort, without expression, but that's Gracie for you. Woman could get shot in the ass and wouldn't blink.

"I'd be lying if I said I expected to see you here, Gracie."

"Why's that?"

"You died, didn't you?"

"I did, but you know as well as I do that the only reason I spent every wakin' hour behind this goddamn bar is because my daddy—may he burn in Hell—made sure I would. Last thing that sonofabitch said to me was "This is your place, Grace, and it always will be. Nowhere else right for you and you're not right for anywhere else. Turns out it was more'n just words."

"You don't seem too put out by it all."

"Wouldn't be much point in that, now would there?"

"Guess not."

She looks as tired as I feel, and that's somewhat discouraging. If you don't get find rest even in death, where can you find it?

"So that's why you came back?" I ask, holding out my glass. She tips the bottle, holding back a little, but I figure she's earned that right, being as how she got cooked and I didn't. "To look after a bar that's not here any more?" As I say it, I feel the solid wood beneath my elbows and shrug. "Or at least, shouldn't be."

Filling her own glass again, she says, "Lotta things none of you barflies knew about my daddy, Tom. He made promises and broke 'em just like every other fool on God's green earth. Nothin' special about that. But then there were the kinds of promises he made sure couldn't be broken. Learned ways to guarantee that there'd be a price if anyone broke their word. Some tried, of course, and ended up ass-up out where you were puttin' the whore. Others went about tryin' to find a way to have the promises dissolved, with magic and other nonsense. But my daddy, he had a little 'ol ace up his sleeve in that wife of his."

"Didn't know he married again after your Momma died."

"'Course you didn't. No one did, and that's how he liked it. His little secret. I was only eighteen at the time, and she—
Lian Su
—wasn't much older. Said he won the little bitch in a poker game on one of his trips to the Orient, but figured out after too long that he'd been the one who'd come away a loser, on account of how she wasn't...right. Saw things she shouldn't have been able to see, made things happen, could hex people and the like. Could make people forget themselves, cause accidents, summon quarrels from calm. All manner of voodoo shit."

"I'm not sure the Chinese have voodoo, Gracie."

"Well whatever it was, it wasn't natural, and it was dangerous. My daddy was afraid of her at first, tried to lock her away in the guest room upstairs, but given the kind of man he was, it was only a matter of time before he started figurin' ways to benefit from her "gift". Next thing, he's winnin' poker games all over the place and those few unfortunates brave enough to challenge him end up missin', or worse." She shrugs as if the recollection doesn't bother her, but it's plain to see it does.

"If he was winning poker games, what'd he do with the money? No offense but this place was never what you'd call fancy."

"He was a gambler, Tom. Anything he made got lost just as quick."

"Right."

"So a year later, Lian Su gets a letter tellin' her her Momma's sick, and she begs my daddy to let her go home. Not quite sure why she felt the need to get his permission. Never could figure out what his hold on her was, considering she could probably abracadabra him into a possum if she had a mind to. Whatever it was, he agreed, but on the condition that he be allowed to go with her, I suppose to make sure she wasn't scheming to leave him. I know he was secretly wonderin' if maybe her momma was rich and left Lian a fortune that he could then add to his own pocket. Lian had no choice but to grant his wish. So they went. Before they did though, she did somethin' to me at my father's request. Made sure I stayed right here tendin' to his shithole till he got back."

She steps back from the bar, her gaze hard, and slips the strap of her dress off one shoulder, letting it slip down almost to the nipple of her right breast. If she'd done this earlier, I might have been grateful for the glimpse, and eager to see more, but there are two reasons why there isn't anything even remotely sexual about this moment. First, there's the obvious fact that she's dead, and as much as I was attracted to her in life, that's a line even I won't cross. Secondly, there's some kind of symbol branded into the flesh of that breast, a large ugly pink thing that looks like a couple of wigwams behind a crooked fence trapped inside a square. Hovering above the whole mess is a couple of rough Japanese or Chinese symbols.

"What's it mean?"

She shakes her head, tugs the strap back onto her slim shoulder, and I'm somewhat disturbed to note how hard her nipples are beneath the material, and how harder still it is for me to ignore the fact. "I don't know, but it's how he kept me here," she says. "S'why I'm
still
here. Night before he took off, he tied me down, took off my shirt and had the bitch spout gibberish over me before she drew that symbol on my tit with the business end of a red hot Bowie knife."

"Jesus. You ever try to leave?"

"First time I tried stepping over the threshold of this place, it made me sterile and ejected the baby that was busy growin' in my belly at the time."

"You were—"

"No great loss. It was my daddy's child anyway, so he did me a favor."

"I'm sorry."

"I put it down to coincidence and tried again. That one gave me such a pain it dropped me to the floor and left me there for two days, paralyzed and bleedin' from every hole in my body. So I gave up, figurin' if I tried a third time, it might be the last."

"Might've been a mercy too."

"This look like mercy to you?"

"Guess not."

"So my daddy comes back. Lian Su isn't with him, and he's loonier than a goddamn fox-gnawed hen."

"What happened?"

"Beats me, but it don't take a genius to figure out what might have happened to a Western man in an Eastern house of witches, does it?"

I shudder at the thought, or maybe it's the cold, but despite how unnatural my circumstances might have become, the whiskey is once again doing its job and blunting the edges.

"He locks himself in his room for a week, and I leave him there, happy to have him starve to death, till I remember he's the only hope I have of ever steppin' foot outside this place. So I go up there and I find him curled up on the bed like a child, naked and whimperin', and I grab him by the throat." She extends her hand and throttles the air between us. "And I tell him I'm glad he's gonna die, that it should have happened years ago. And I tell him I'll help put him out of his misery if he just tells me how to get out from under the bitch's hex. And you know what he does?"