Dead to Rites (2 page)

“Oberon. Mick Oberon.” No sense in
not
telling him. I might look a tiny bit different to every mortal, but still basically like the same guy. Wouldn’t take someone with Shea’s resources more’n a few minutes to dig up my name once he knew I was a private dick, and I
was
trying to get the gink to trust me some. “And that’s what I do. I find people.”

“In other words, somebody spilled.” His tone of voice didn’t leave a lotta doubt as to what’d happen if he found out who the pigeon was. Somehow, I didn’t think that me tellin’ him the poor sap didn’t have a choice, that I’d pushed myself into his head and
made
him sing, would go over real well.

“I’da waited until you weren’t in the middle of work,” I said instead, “but I’m kinda in a bit of a hurry here. All I need to know, Mr. Shea, is where I can find Phil Peppard.”

“Who?” He didn’t even
try
to sound genuine.

“C’mon, Mr. Shea. I know he hangs his hat somewhere in Uptown territory. I know you keep tabs on every worker who operates in your kingdom. And I know he’s freelance. He ain’t one of yours, so you got no cause to wanna protect him.”

“Maybe I just don’t like nosy bastards askin’ questions. Maybe I don’t rat on principle. I think it’s about time for you to dust, Mr. Oberon, before something ugly—”

“Mr. Shea, you really wanna rethink that.”

Wasn’t as if we’d been having a calm, friendly chat already, but now the tension got so thick you hadda chew around it to get a word in edgewise.

“You threatening me, pal?”

“No, you got me all wrong. I’m tryin’ to do you a favor. The folks I’m workin’ for, Mr. Shea? They don’t want the coppers involved, see? That’s
why
they came to me. But if I can’t get ’em their property back, they
will
turn to the cops. And I been keeping ’em in the loop, so right now they know almost everything I know.”

That last bit was more fulla horse shit than the back lot at a racetrack, but whatever works, yeah?

“So if
I
don’t come up with Peppard, the bulls are gonna go poking around for him next. And whether they find him or not, that’s gonna be a lotta uniforms all over your neighborhood. Since my clients are rollin’ in dough, the cops are gonna take ’em real serious, which means a
long
search. I don’t pretend to know your business, but that can’t possibly be good for it.

“We can prevent all that, right now, Mr. Shea. All you gotta do is gimme an address, or at least the alias he’s livin’ under. Then we can all go home and not worry about career repercussions.”

It took some hemming and hawing, some discussion with his boys, a few face-saving threats, but eventually he gave me an address offa Belmont, not too far from Logan Square.

“Oberon!” he called after me as I was just startin’ to step back into the trees. “I don’t enjoy bein’ put in this sorta position. Don’t let me see your face again. Ever. Or I might just put a slug through it.”

He probably would, too, or try to. I was already pretty well sure it was only the risk of lettin’ the cops or the Outfit know about his interests here on the south side that’d kept him from it in the first place.

“Don’t worry,” I told him. “I’ve had more’n enough fun dealing with you trouble boys over the last year. I don’t mean to get mixed up with you lot any further.”

Yeah, yeah, I know. Go ahead and laugh at me.

* * *

“…knew where to find him,” I was explaining to Mr. and Mrs. Marsters, sitting on a velvet-cushioned sofa in a room that probably cost more to decorate than my office cost to build, “it was duck soup to dig up not just your figurine but a whole heap of other hot goods. Once he knew I had him dead to rights, he sang like a canary. I dunno if your cousin’s gonna do any time for hiring him—Peppard ain’t exactly a sterling witness, and it basically comes down to who the jury believes—but I figure he’ll be too scared to try anything like this again.”

My clients, an older couple so pasty and upper-crust they resembled a pair of unbaked pies, and the younger black fellow who worked as their butler, hung on every word of my story. Well, every word I gave ’em, anyway; I left out a lot of the details, things about the underworld or, y’know, magic that they didn’t really need to hear. All they hadda know was that, yes, I’d gotten ’em their stupid little crystal wren statuette back—it was sitting on the coffee table in front of me as we spoke—and yes, just as they’d suspected, it’d been their crumb of a cousin who’d had it snatched.

On the square, though, I was barely even payin’ attention to my own tale. Whole thing’d been a minor diversion at best, something I’d taken on solely for the fee: a little bit of folding green, just to pay the bills, and an old Swiss pocket watch. No idea why I’d asked for it, but then, that was usually the case with the gewgaws that made up the bulk of my fees. Fae urges and instinct and all.

Point is, run of the mill, everyday case, kinda job you don’t ever hear about ’cause there’s nothin’ about ’em worth telling. Except things’d been goin’ just a touch hinky since right about the same time I started in on it. Stuff like that bit with the tree branch, when I was eavesdropping on the Uptown Boys. Or a few days before that, when a hinge stuck and I bashed my nose walking into a door that didn’t open. Never anything major, never anything that woulda been at all suspicious by itself. Only the fact it kept happening had made it stand out. I still couldn’t tell if it was a “natural” run of bad luck—if that ain’t an oxymoron—or if there was some kinda hex or other mystical cause. If it was the latter, it was a damn subtle one, but I didn’t wanna take steps until I was sure. Some of the remedies for normal bad luck can make it worse if the source ain’t “normal.”

And more even than that, it was makin’ me paranoid. (All right, fine,
more
paranoid.) I’d been jumpin’ at shadows for days by this point, sensing danger where there wasn’t any. The Marsters lived on Burton Place, real swanky digs in a real hoity-toity neighborhood. You didn’t get random street crime here, but I couldn’t shake the notion thatsomeone’d been shadowing me on my walk over. I kept a good slant on my surroundings—eyes, ears, senses you never heard of—and I made a buncha quick turns and detours. Even drew on a bit of extra luck, despite bein’ nervous about it. Shoulda been close to no way for anyone to tail me after that, and definitely no way for ’em to do it without me spotting ’em. There’d been nobody I could put my finger on, but dammit if I still hadn’t felt peepers on the back of my neck.

So yeah, that’s where my noggin was during all this, why I was only halfway there at best when I returned the Marsters’ dingus to ’em, and why I only got dragged back to myself in that fancy sitting room when the old lady started getting deep into the “effusive gratitude” part of the visit.

I hate that part.

“…thank you enough, Mr. Oberon! My grandfather had to leave all his glassworking tools behind when he came to this country. This figurine was the first thing he made once he could finally afford a new set.”

Of course it was. And I assume he left it to you on his deathbed?

“It was the last thing he gave to me before the tuberculosis took…”

We were all damn lucky in that moment that I basically can’t vomit.

“You’re welcome,” I said. Or interrupted? I dunno; I’d stopped listening, mostly in self-defense. “If I could just get the rest of my fee, I’ll be outta your hair.”

It was Mr. Marsters who answered this time. “Of course, of course! Barry, if you’d be so good as to fetch my checkbook? And a bottle of the Avize Grand Cru, while you’re at it.”

“Of course, Mr. Marsters.” I’m not even sure how, but I’d swear the butler reached the door without actually turning around first. The magic of the domestic servant, I guess.

“Kind of you, Mr. Marsters,” I told him, “but really not—”

“It’s quite legal, I assure you. Everything in our wine cellar was purchased prior to Prohibition.”

“I’m sure it was, but it ain’t necessary. I—”

“Nonsense!” You ever hear a guy actually
harumph
? Marsters
harumphed.
I think it actually requires a certain amount of wealth before you’re legally permitted to do it. “I insist!”

So how exactly was I gonna tell the man that if it wasn’t milk or cream, I not only wasn’t interested but actively revolted.

“Look—”

“I insist!” he again, uh, insisted.

He’d also gotten himself good’n riled up in his determination, so that he tried to lean forward and thump a fist on the table in emphasis, all at once. The lunge outta his chair drove his hip into the furniture with a hollow
thump
, an impact that managed to lift the two nearest legs off the carpet and set the whole contraption to rocking.

Not a lot. Just enough.

If he’d hit the table just a few inches to one side or the other, it wouldn’t have jolted up that way. If the cushions on the sofa had been a little less deep, or the couch itself a couple feet closer, or I’d been a touch less preoccupied, I mighta reacted fast enough to save it. If the thing itself had been a bit farther from the edge, or landed base-down on the thick carpeting instead of at an angle…

If, if, if. “If” and a dollar are worth about 90 cents.

There was a muted
crack
and then silence as we all stared at the scattering of chunks and slivers and powder that had just been a crystal wren and now made the carpet glitter like a starry night.

Not that it was a
long
silence. Mrs. Marsters began to wail like a deflating zeppelin, her husband gawped and gasped like an asthmatic grouper, and I cursed and mumbled under my breath as it occurred to me that, through no fault of my own, I probably wasn’t gonna see the remainder of my fee.

Goddamn it, there it was again!

Wasn’t too long a walk from my clients’—uh, former clients’—place to the L, but I was in no hurry to get much of anywhere, so I’d been takin’ it slow, eyeballing the homes of the well-to-do and mentally cataloging all the wonders I’d seen that were much more impressive than
they
could ever hope to be.

Whaddaya want from me? I was feelin’ petty.

The city was just startin’ to get dim as we slid on into the evening. Flivvers grumbled by in the street; radios crackled out Ethel Waters (no, thanks) or Handel’s Organ Concerto in D Minor (
that’s
music, thanks very much) or, mostly in the houses with kids, a new episode of some serial about the twenty-fifth century. All of it was quick enough, or far enough back, that the technology only gave me a mild itch insteada screaming, spike-through-the-conk pain.

It
was
distracting, though, which is partly why it took me a few blocks to realize I mighta picked up a tail. Again.

Wasn’t anything obviously hinky about her. Middle-aged dame in a purple skirt-suit and glasses so big’n round you coulda served a cuppa joe on each of the lenses. She’d been a few dozen paces behind me for a while, which didn’t prove anything in itself, but… It just
tasted
like I was bein’ followed, you know?

Well, no, you don’t. Just take my word for it.

Of course, I’d felt that way a lot lately, and I’d managed to prove bupkis, to identify exactly nobody shadowing me. So now that I’d spotted the broad, it was time for a little test.

I kept on goin’ my way without a care in the world (though I did decide that whistling would probably be pushin’ it a bit). Kept right on, keepin’ a slant on her in the reflection of every darkened window and every time crossin’ a street gave me an excuse to crane my neck around to watch for oncoming traffic.

Houses gave way to stores as we got closer to the elevated, and I decided I wanted to deal with this one way or the other before I actually reached the station. I’d tried bein’ patient, but it was taking too long.

Funny how often that happens.

Anyway, some kinda big delivery truck rumbled on by right after I’d crossed the street, and I used the opportunity to duck into the doorway of a flower shop that’d already closed for the night. Gave me a good slant on the whole block and anyone comin’ up the sidewalk while keepin’ me outta view. If Glasses
was
followin’ me, it should prove real interesting to see what she did now.

Except she didn’t do a thing. She wasn’t there anymore.

I just stood there like a lump.

What the
hell
? The street wasn’t empty or anything—I counted a couple dozen pedestrians just at a quick glance—but she sure wasn’t one of ’em. Had she ducked into a shop, same as me? Wasn’t impossible, but she must have done it soon as the truck came between us; if she’d waited until she noticed I’d “vanished,” she wouldn’t have had the time without me seeing it. And I couldn’t figure
why
she’d do that before she knew I’d tumbled to her.

All right, then. Loitering in the doorway, bathed in a mixed bouquet of florals from one side and clouds of car exhaust from the other, I tried to think. What I came up with was three possibilities.

One, I’d just gone completely crazy. Totally off the track. But given all the shit I’d seen over more centuries than I’m completely comfortable admitting, it didn’t seem
too
probable that Chicago’d finally driven me outta my noggin.

Two, I was barkin’ at shadows again. Glasses hadn’t been following me, she was just some skirt who’d been walking the same sidewalk. She’d stepped into one of the shops, not because I’d made her, but to do some shopping. It was just coincidence it’d happened right about the same time I’d made my own break for it. Not real likely, no, but possible, especially given how fond random chance is of makin’ Fae dance to tunes we can’t even hear.

Or three, magic.

You know, one of the reasons I’d been avoiding Elphame for so long was because I’d been lookin’ to live a normal life. What’s it say about my level of success for the past year or so that “magic” was up there with “some dame went shopping” on the list of probable explanations?

Any number of ways someone—or something—coulda disappeared, even with a whole swarm of mortals on the same street. You people are real good about not noticin’ what’s happening around you, especially if it don’t fit your slim view of the world. Goin’ invisible was one possibility. Lotta different sorts of Fae can do that. A rare few might’ve actually vanished, stepping Sideways or teleporting; not many of us can do it without the proper prep or the right surroundings (like the mildewed refrigerator niche in my office), but it ain’t unheard of. And of course any number of Fae and related entities are shapeshifters. I coulda been staring right at the bim who’d been tailing me, and I’d never have known it was…