Supernatural Noir (8 page)

“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 Craving
s,
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.

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.