Hard-Boiled Immortal (The Immortal Chronicles) (5 page)

“That sounds pretty bad already.”

“Doesn’t it, though?”

“Yeah. I’m beginning to suspect me too.  But
Al wrote a lot of things on a lot of napkins, pretty much anybody in the bar could have kept one.”

“I talked to the guys in this bar all night, and I’m pretty positive none of them have the smarts to figure out what to do with those formulas.  But you clean up the place, and you und
erstood what he was explaining, and I’m thinking one of the mooks in this dive was your contact.  Why don’t you ask me why it gets worse?”

“Why does it get worse?”

“Because you resisted me.”

“I’m… that wasn’t easy.”

“Well I appreciate that.”

I couldn’t figure out if she was insulted or something.  I was basically one lull in the conversation from ripping her jacket off, but I wasn’t about to
say so.  “I apologize, I guess, I mean…”

“
No, no,” she laughed.  “My feelings aren’t hurt.  I’ll be honest, you got me wound up like nobody’s wound me in a long while. I’m gonna start ticking soon.  But that ain’t it.  What I mean is,
nobody
resists me, not for this long.  That’s not normal, and it also ain’t really possible.”

“Maybe you’re not my type.”

“I’m everybody’s type, baby.  Even the Nancy boys give it up for me eventually.  Plus I put a little something in the whiskey and the same stuff’s in my lipstick.  It should have you telling me everything from your birth name to the color of your Momma’s hair.  As much as you’ve had I should be able to get you barking like a dog if I want.”

“Or
just getting that jacket open and taking you right there in that chair.”  Yes, I was facing potential life imprisonment or death and this was what was on my mind.  Draw your own conclusions.

“I didn’t think I’d need the drug to get you to do that to me, but yeah, that too.  So either you took an antidote pill beforehand like I did, or you have some kind of training I’ve never seen before. 
Both of those options mean you’re bad business.”

“Then we have some sort of problem, don’t we?”

“
You
do, for sure. I got the gun, and there’s a button in the pocket of this coat I can push and get a whole bunch of g-men down here lickety-split.”

I was pretty sure that was an exaggeration, some kind of Dick Tracy gizmo that wasn’t going to actually exist any time soon.  But the rest of what she had to say was true enough. 

“Maybe we can work out something that doesn’t involve g-men ruining our night,” I suggested.  I was thinking my way out of this might have been to talk to her as one impossible person to another.

“Yeah, they do
that.  What do you have in mind?  I probably won’t believe anything you have to tell me and I’m leaning toward shooting you, just so we’re on the level.”

“
It so happens drugs don’t work on me.”

“No kidding
?”

“It’s the truth.  I also don’t get sick.”

“Well, you’re a regular superman.”

“Yeah, kind of.  Let me ask you something: did you ever meet your father?”

She looked significantly taken aback.  “What’s that gotta do with anything?”

“Let me guess.  You grew up in a
well-to-do family, maybe even a happy one, except that your mom had a little fling on the side once and ended up with you.  Nobody talks about it, but everyone knows when they look at you, because you don’t look like anyone else in the family.”

“You’re about three seconds from
losing some teeth, mister.”  She was no longer smiling or making any particular effort to look appealing.  This had no negative effect on her appeal at all.  “That ain’t anybody’s business and I wanna know what makes you think you know a thing about me.”

“I know
, because I know what you are.  I know whatever your real name is it was given to you… fifty or sixty years ago, probably.  Were you born here?”

“Yeah
, I’m an American.”  She hesitated before continuing, because this wasn’t something you just spit out.  She also had to decide whether to keep on being angry with me or to admit I was onto something.  “It was round about 1890.  But only me and five or six boys in the bureau know it, cuz I don’t look much like an old lady.”

“You don’t look at all like an old lady.”

“Yeah, thanks.  So what the hell are
you
?  You the same kind of thing?”

“No, I’m something else.  There’s only one of me.”

The fundamentals of incubus/succubus reproduction are pretty simple.  Succubi can’t get pregnant regardless of whether they are mating with a human or an incubus.  They don’t want to have anything to do with incubi either way though, largely due to a massive, species-wide Daddy-issue thing.  Basically, in order to make an incubus or a succubus, an adult incubus needs to impregnate a human woman.  Since incubi hold no particular interest in sticking around and raising a family, what they do instead is seduce women in enviable situations.  This means rich women, or women with rich husbands, or some combination of those two.  That way the offspring are taken care of, and the incubus can be free to grift his way around to another advantageous arrangement.

N
obody liked incubi, including other incubi, who after all were fathered via the same arrangement.  I’d met a few and thought they were raging jerks, but in their defense they almost had to be or the species would end up extinct.  Unless that’s a huge rationalization, in which case forgive me.

It
made for a lot of unhappy childhoods, is my point.  And if I were the “same kind of thing” as her it would have meant I was an incubus, and then she probably would have shot me.

“You’re the o
nly one, huh?” she said.  “Until about two minutes ago I was pretty sure I was the only one of me, so how can you be so sure of that?”

Succubi
also tend to steer clear of each other, mostly for territorial reasons, but usually there’s some sort of mentoring program. I was surprised she’d never met another, but I didn’t say so.

“I saw the only other
immortal I knew about die in a fire about fifteen years ago.  Beyond that, you’re going to have to take my word.”

“Yeah I don’t think that’s gonna happen. 
Immortal, huh?”  Her bravado returned somewhat.  I’d knocked her off-balance with the questions about her upbringing, but it wasn’t enough.  “What I think, I think maybe you met someone like me before and now you’re trying to flim-flam your way out of trouble.”

“Well I’m not your guy.  I never kept any of those napkins, and I’m telling you everybody else in the bar heard the same stuff I did.  Maybe one of
them’s playing dumb.  I’m also a whole lot older than you are, which is why I don’t have a last name or a legal record.  I’m not an American because I’m older than this country.  And the reason I know German, and Italian, and French and Spanish and damn near every other tongue you can name off the top of your head is that I was there when they became languages.  But I
have
met your kind before all right, and I know your storyline because you all have the same one.  I might even know more about you than you do about yourself.”

Uncertainty flickered across her face again as s
he let all of that sink in.  Then she pulled a cigarette case from one of her inside pockets and lit a new smoke for herself.  It was something that involved putting the gun down on the bar first, so it felt almost like a decision on her part to take me seriously.  I stepped behind the bar and had new shots poured for both of us before she had a chance to recognize that I’d gone where she told me not to.

“
Let’s pretend all that is true,” she said.  “Tell me something. You can’t get sick and it sounds like you’re saying you don’t get any older than you’re looking right now.  Are you also bullet-proof?”

“That I’m not.”

“Can you fly?”

“No.”

“And you ain’t working for nobody, nobody’s working for you, and you have no idea what this business with the napkins is about?”

“That’s what I’m saying.”

We both heard the sound of a car driving up in the lot.  It wasn’t a tough thing to pick out because it was all gravel out there.  The headlights went across the front of the bar from right to left as the driver parked, and then they went out.

Lucy
slid off the stool and took two steps toward the door.

“Yeah,
if all that’s true then we got a problem,” she said.

“Those aren’t your
g-men?”

“Nope.
  Thing is I did a lot of talking earlier to see if I could flush out your contacts.  I figured they answered to you.”  There was a loud
click-click
sound near the front door.  “Oh geez.  Duck.”

I dropped to the floor behind the bar at around the same time Lucy managed, in
those heels, to spin around and vault over it, landing next to me smoothly and untouched by the hot lead that was by then tearing through the thin wall separating us from the parking lot.  She even grabbed her gun on her way over.  It was pretty damn sexy.

Me, I managed to save the whiskey
bottle but that was about it.

“So these guys, they
ain’t with you?” she asked. 

There was one
person firing a Tommy gun into the front door, and a second one shooting through the wall next to the door.  I could hear the place being turned into splintered remains around us, with about the only thing in our favor the fact that I’d put away the glassware and locked up most of the alcohol already.  The liquor was kept in a wood cabinet above us, and while the wood wasn’t keeping any bullets out it was keeping shattered glass in.  More importantly, the bar we were hiding behind was the heaviest and thickest thing in the place and it was doing a fine job of keeping the bullets away from us.  It was so sturdy I had a theory that the place was built around it.

“I don’t even know what’s going on,” I
shouted.  Who’s out there?”

“I’m guessing they’re the guys that actually sold Al’s notes.
You got a phone back here?”

“Why don’t you push your magic button?”

“Right, I made that up to keep you trying for the gun.  How about that phone?”

I
crawled over her and to the far end of the bar, reached up and pulled down the house phone.  I handed it over.

“Try and call some real
g-men, not someone you made up,” I said.

She was still dialing when the shooting stopped.  If I’d known any better at the time I’d have cursed how long it took to get a number completed on a rotary phone.

“Frankie,” she whispered into the receiver.  “Yeah, it’s me.  I’m at the place, and I’m pretty sure I got our guys but I’m gonna need a white horse or three… Yeah, I’m serious.”  She looked at me.  “I never needed a rescue before, he’s laughin’.”

“You want me
to tell him we’re about to die?   Maybe he’ll believe me.”

“Yeah,
get some guys down here, before local P.D. finds our bodies… Never mind who’s here with me, just do it.”

She hung up.  “We
gotta buy about forty minutes, I think.” 

It was possible the local
cops she was talking about would show up before that forty minutes, but that was unlikely.  Jimmy’s was still a mob bar, even if only just barely, and the cops knew better than to show up while the shooting was still going on.  Better to turn up an hour or two later to see who didn’t make it and sweep up the broken glass.

I heard the door get kicked open.  “How do you feel
about thirty seconds?” I asked her.

Someone had just walked into the bar, with at least one other someone behind
them.

“Too bad you do
n’t have a gun back here, huh?” she whispered.

“
It’d have to be a bigger gun than the ones they have.”  I whispered back.  “Who’d you get me tangled up with?” It probably wasn’t all that necessary, the whispering, since the guys inside had been firing really loud guns for a little while.  That’ll wreck your hearing.

She shrugged. 
“I talked to a lot of fellas earlier, and I knew someone followed me here but I figured they were with you.”

“Except they’re not with me
, so I can’t exactly order them to stand down.”

“
I get that.  If it helps, I think I might believe you now.”

At the edge of the bar was a white dishtowel, which with a little work I was able to grab and wave in the air in sight of the armed guys.  “Hey fellas, no guns back here, just me.  I’m gonna stand, all right?”

No answer.  I stood anyway, and saw two men I didn’t recognize.  Admittedly the lighting was now even worse due to all the dust and gun smoke kicking around the room, but I was pretty good with faces and names at the time, because that was half the job.  These two had on nicer suits than most of the guys who came around the bar, and the guns weren’t the sort of thing that showed up there too often either.