Hair of the Wolf (14 page)

“Tony, I need you to deal with the mortal detective. The wolves should not have dragged him into this and risked the involvement of mortal authorities. Hiring him is one step shy of breaking the treaties and just calling the police themselves. It would seem the Magyari family has not changed.” She looked at the minion standing by the television.

Like all of her followers, he was wearing an outfit that complimented her normal wardrobe. She viewed her goons as fashion accessories. In his case, this meant an outfit consisting of tight slacks and a wide-collared blue shirt. An unlit cigarette hung from his lips.

Elizabeth rolled her eyes as Tony patted his pockets. Reaching over to the end table, she grabbed a pack of matches and tossed them to him.

“Yes, Mistress.” Tony snagged the matches midair. He glanced at the Capitol V.D. on the cover of the matchbook and tried not to laugh. Elizabeth Bathory was not one to forgive uninvited emotion outbursts. He lit the cigarette. “How do you want I should deal with him, Mistress?”

“Really? I’m an immortal blood-sucking Goddess of the Night. How do you think I want him dealt with?”

“Yes, Mistress. I just figure that usually you likes to go out and, you know,
do
them yourself.”

Elizabeth glanced at the puzzle box that hid the shears of Fate. She and Vlad had taught the sisters the lesson to never expose yourself when weakened. If a god could be killed just being in the wrong place when weaker …

“Creating one of those beasts weakens me, Tony. Part of my power is invested in creating a newborn. Either the power grows back, which can take years, or the newborn dies and my power snaps back to me. Right now, though, I’ll not risk exposing myself. Should I fall, none of you will ever get your reward.”

“I understand, Mistress.” Tony pulled a deep drag off the smoke and walked towards the door. “I’ll kill the Dick.”

***

Ian Stone

Ian tossed his Burberry trench coat into the passenger seat. He mopped some sweat from his brow, then unbuttoned the top buttons of his shirt.

Tossing the notepad on top of the coat, he started his Jeep then blasted the fan.

He sighed happily as the air started circulating in the Jeep, and pulled out his digital recorder. As he started the drive back to his office, he hit “resume file” and talked, recording his day …

***

It took a few to find parking on the Hill. Luckily, my beat up early ’80s Jeep can magically fit into parking spaces that I’m pretty sure a Mini Cooper couldn’t. Mind you, part of that is my willingness to get behind double-parked people and push them forward. Consider it my own little crusade to gently nudge people into social consciousness. Or at least into parking better.

What? Don’t look at me like that. You know you’ve always wanted to, I just went ahead and started doing it. So I walked a block up to the corner of Thirteenth and Logan, where Travis’ truck had been found, pulling out my notebook while walking. When I got to the corner, I built a mental map of the area and started scanning it, thinking through what would be in easy walking distance and what wouldn’t.

With a quick sketch, I had my target area. If I haven’t mentioned it before, there are times—many times—when the life of a Private Detective is one of sheer mind-numbing boredom. This is one of those times. Now that I have a target area based on where he was parked, I get to walk it to investigate the potential nightlife and attempt to piece together where he was when he went missing.

So, let’s assume that he would comfortably walk about six blocks or so from where he parked, then assume that he had to push it on a club night out to eight blocks. So our target area runs eight blocks in each direction. Doesn’t sound too bad, right? Think again. Maybe sixteen square blocks doesn’t sound too bad, but that’s 256 individual blocks that yours truly was going to have to walk to check for likely spots.

I know, why wasn’t I just using Google maps, right? Well, a lot of the seedier dive bars don’t necessarily show up on Google maps. Especially not the type that switch locations every few months because their clientele have trashed the previous one.

The second reason is the naked eye. There’s a lot of things that you can’t, or don’t, notice when you’re just sitting on a computer. An actual visual spot check will pick up on those things. I needed those nuances of subtlety if I was going to have a chance at figuring out where this kid vanished.

So off I set, walking the streets like a grid, hunting for likely hangouts for a 23 year old junkie. And here we have the fundamental reason that the human eye, and brain, beats the computer every time. Take the bar Bent. Sounds like a guy going on a bender, right? Or maybe something a little worse than that even. Party central for the right type of person, yeah? It’s actually a country themed beer bar. In fact, it has a giant picture of Johnny Cash on the side of the building. Not really a good place for a young stallion to find his mare.

On I continued, walking. After several hours, I had it narrowed down to just a couple possible bars. We have, amongst the illustrious candidates on our finishing list, the following gems.

One, the Cathedral. Built out of the remains of a 19th century church, it was remodeled into a vast den of supposed depravity, catering to the dark side in everyone (that has an extra hundred bucks to drop on a night at the club.) Dark yes, but come on, they serve sushi there.

Next on our list is the Cave. This dark den of iniquity is a basement club mostly filled by Goth and emo kids bemoaning their tortured dark lives and threatening to end this existence, all while watching pretty lights flash. Beware, you are likely to hear the word ennui bandied about a lot here.

Lastly, we have The Viper’s Den. It’s a Goth and raver club (gravers). It has lots of light shows, fog machines, and bouncers who are renowned for an inability to notice fake I.D.s.

Of all the clubs within walking distance of where Travis was parked, my gut was telling me it was one of these. All three clubs had huge parties the night that Travis vanished, all three had the club kid vibe, and all three of the managers were not only uncooperative, but downright hostile to my questions.

So I did the traditional P.I. thing and leaned on all three managers until they kicked me out of the clubs. I have a fairly good contact network, but I don’t have the power that the cops do to just pull the information I need out of a system. So one of my tactics is to lean on people until someone retaliates, which points me in the direction I need to be going.

So, where to proceed from here? Back to the office to start checking the Social Networks for Travis’s list of friends. If I can start putting faces to names, then I can go check the clubs and see where he was most likely hanging out. Maybe even get some questions answered. Since people are so likely to answer questions random P.I.s ask, you know?

Anyway, time to head back to the office and start doing all my corroborative research. Exciting life, right?

***

Travis Blake

Sunlight burned its skin, puncturing the dark passage from a small hole in the ceiling. It scurried back a bit, clinging to the shadows. Shadows meant protection.

It clung to the walls, claws slicing into the concrete like butter, moving around the deadly light, eyes fixed hungrily on the man working there. Licking its lips the creature inched forward. Food was there, just out of its grasp. It howled in frustration.

The sanitation engineer froze. What the hell was making the blood curdling noise?

“Hello?” He quietly asked the darkness.

Flicking on his flashlight, he gazed down the passage, barely lit by the Maglite. He flicked it the other way. The weird howl had sounded like it was right next to him, but you could never tell in these tunnels. Echoes bouncing around the Machiavellian maze of sewage and pipeworks had a way of distorting sound.

He shuddered, then clipped the light back on his tool belt. “Dispatch, this is Martinez, I’m at the site.” He spoke into the mic clipped to his shoulder.

Travis pounced. The sunlight immediately burned its skin as it darted through the patch of brightness. Knocking the engineer off his feet, the two bowled back into the shadows and Travis immediately started shredding the prize with its claws. Like a bloody Christmas present, it tore at the clothes and skin till the food stopped moving.

Once it was prone beneath him, he bent over hungrily, lapping up the blood.

“Martinez. This is dispatch. Are you there? Hello?” The radio squawked forlornly.

***

Loki the Coyote

Loki shifted the ParcelExpress cap and tucked the package under his arm. Whistling, he strode casually down the office hallway. The building was older, at least so far as modern constructions went, and he could see micro-fissures and age seeping along the walls.

He held up a thread, studying it carefully. Pearlescent shimmers radiated from it as he rotated it between his fingers. Looking closely at the life thread, he muttered under his breath. Technically speaking, no one was supposed to have these but the Sisters. The entire basis for the power trade game was that Divinities couldn’t access the threads of Fate. Loki grinned. Tricksy bitches shouldn’t have tried to poach his man. The second she did, he had been able to sneak onto the great pattern and snake away a couple of threads. He had to be careful not to overuse them outside of emergencies.

The thread pulsed. Loki nodded to himself. He wasn’t an expert at reading these things, no one but the Sisters were. But that pulse … for just a moment it seemed like there were two threads. One that ended here, and one that kept going.

Time.

Stepping forward, he knocked on the door.

No one answered.

Frowning, he knocked again and loudly stated, “ParcelExpress! Delivery for Mister Stone.” He jammed the thread under the lid of the box and waited.

The door creaked open an inch, a suspicious eye barely visible in the crack. “What you want?”

Loki gave his most charming smile. “Package for Mister Stone. Can you sign please?”

“He ain’t here.” Replied the man behind the door.

“Not to worry. It’s an office delivery, anyone can sign.” He pushed the box forward.

“One second.” The man sounded upset. The door opened another foot, just enough for Loki to shove the box through.

Loki pulled a signature sheet and a pen off his clipboard and pushed all three through the gap. “Here you go. Just sign on the bottom there and you’ll be good to go, sir.”

Hands grabbed at the bundle and a few seconds later shoved the paper and pen back out. Loki grinned. “Thank you muchly, sir.” With that he strolled away.

One of the givens of humanity was that if you offered them a piece of paper and placed a social context around it, they would just sign instead of reading it. It worked ninety percent of the time. Having bought Stone about thirty seconds of distraction, Loki felt he had done as much as he could to hand the boy his own Fate, so he strode out of the building. By the time the door had swung shut Loki had vanished.

***

Ian Stone

Ian gripped his digital recorder tightly, staring down at the blood on his shirt. The other customers in the pharmacy stared at him as he sat trying to ignore the pain while he waited on his OxyContin prescription to fill.

He knew that he had been stupid earlier, and was paying the price for it, but there hadn’t been a lot of options. Shifting his foot as he dug in his pocket drew out a grunt of pain. He pulled out his recorder and hit “resume file,” talking to himself in the pharmacy waiting room, recording his day …

***

The thug’s fist slammed into my jaw as I opened the door to my office. Heck of a hello, I know. Even rolling with the punch, I felt one of my molars shatter and cut the inside of my left cheek. That type of hit … it’s like getting smacked in the face by Superman wielding a city bus sized baseball bat. Doesn’t matter how little the guy is. And what happens when you get clocked in the face hard enough to split a tooth? You get your lights put out, that’s what. My vision started to swim and darkness pushed at the edges of everything I could see. Say goodnight, Gracie.

And my world went black.

Goodnight, Gracie.

***

I resurfaced into the waking world with a splitting headache. Ye gods, what fun. My vision started to sharpen up a bit, until I could see my office around me. Very nice. The place was trashed and I was cuffed to a chair. This was promising to be a very fun day. I looked up into the eyes of the thug looming over me. When he saw my eyes open the thug grinned and spit his toothpick into my face.

I looked up to him and smiled coyly. “So, why the hell are you here?” I looked around at my trashed office. “Are you the new cleaning service?”

“Shaddup!” he snarled and fed me another knuckle sandwich. Tasty.

This time my shattered tooth cut me badly enough that I had to spit out the blood or choke on it. I looked back up at him, working my jaw and trying to stretch some of the soreness out of it. The guy was wiry as hell, maybe six feet tall, and wearing a wide collared blue silk shirt with the top half of the buttons undone. He looked like he was right out of a 1970s cop show.

He was rubbing his knuckles, trying to massage some of the pain out of them. It doesn’t matter how strong or experienced you are, if you shatter a guy’s tooth with a hit, you’re taking some damage to your fist. His lips pulled up into a sneer. “You’re not so tough now are you, huh, Mr. Private Dick?”

Tilting my head up until I could look him in the eyes, I grinned and let the blood spill out of my mouth. Well, I say spill, but it was more like I was drooling. Despite the cut cheek, I was still in pretty good shape.

And I love a good straight line. So, with blood dribbling down my chin, I delivered the punch line. “Thanks, pal. You just saved me the seven hundred bucks that getting a root canal was gonna cost me. I’ve got a bad one on the other side, too, think you could get that one next?”

He grabbed my throat and leaned in really close. “Mr. Clever, you think you’re so tough, I’m going to make you scream.”