The Mysteries of Holly Diem (Unknown Kadath Estates Book 2) (15 page)

“What the fuck?” Neil pointed in my direction. “Are
you sure about this guy?”

“Nah. Preston is an asshole,” Jenny grumbled, taking a
handkerchief from her back pocket and then blowing her nose loudly. “Neil, I
want you to tell Preston what you told me.”

Neil’s mouth hung open wide.

“The blue pills, Neil?” Jenny rolled her eyes and
snuck the safety razor out from between Neil’s fingers. “Tell him.”

“Yeah?” Neil didn’t look convinced that he understood.
“I guess. They’re five milligrams each and I can sell you five for…”

“He doesn’t want to
buy
them, idiot,” Jenny
said curtly. “I want you to tell Preston about that customer you were telling
me about. The one who comes once a week to buy the blue pills from you.
Remember?”

Slow realization crept across Neil’s pockmarked
features like the dawn after a long night.

“I’m not saying anything,” he decided, eventually. “I
don’t trust this guy.”

“You don’t trust Preston?” Jenny appeared delighted.
“I don’t blame you.”

“Look, you have the wrong idea,” I said, not sure what
the idea was. “I’m nobody special.”

“Whatever. I’m not saying shit until I know he isn’t a
cop.”

Jenny rolled her eyes and tittered.

“Okay,” she agreed mildly. “Give him some Azure,
then.”

“Wait, wait,” I said, holding up both hands. “What the
hell is that?”

“You see?” Neil cried out. “This guy doesn’t belong
here, Jenny.”

“Preston, shut up!” Jenny snarled, kicking me beneath
the table. “Neil, give him some Azure. Then we can all trust each other.”

She smirked at me, daring me to disagree. Neil shook
his head for a very long time, and then turned back to his desk, availing
himself of a waiting pile of purple-green ground herb.

“Jenny, what the hell?” I whispered, leaning close to
her. “What is this shit?”

“You need to know what he knows,” Jenny said vacantly.
“And Neil has to trust you, first.”

“But what the hell is Azure? I don’t want drugs,
Jenny.”

“Relax. It’s like pot or something,” she said
contemptuously. “Boring. You can handle it. Makes you sleep.”

“Makes you dream,” Neil corrected, offering me a small
stone pipe, shaped like a coffin, the bowl packed with ground herbs. “Only way
to dream, in the Nameless City.”

It was distinctly possible that Jenny was screwing
with me. I wondered if it would be simpler to beat it out of Neil, and glanced
at Jenny pleadingly, but she was having too much fun. She gestured for me to go
ahead, while Neil watched suspiciously.

I hit the pipe and then coughed for a solid minute.
Jenny whooped with laughter and pounded me on the back, while Neil cackled and
helped himself to the pipe. I waved Neil off when he offered me a second hit,
my eyes watery and my lungs well seared.

“The story,” I wheezed. “Tell me the story.”

“Story?” Neil blinked and looked confused. I considered
strangling him in a moment of passing mania, the Azure worming its way into the
back of my mind like an uninvited guest sneaking into a party. “What do you…?”

“The customer,” Jenny prompted, laughing. “The one who
buys blue pills.”

“Oh yeah,” he said, running his hands through his
extensively coifed hair. “That guy. I forgot you bumped into him, Jenny. He’s a
weird one.”

“Yeah,” Jenny agreed, grinding her teeth with
agitation. “Tell him the story you told me.”

The telling took a few minutes, and a great deal of
assistance and prodding from Jenny. It wasn’t a linear thing, and I can’t say
for sure exactly how much of it I believed. Braced for the worst, I relaxed
gradually as the effects of the Azure failed to set in more dramatically than a
barely noticeable pressure in my temples and occasional bright spots in my
vision.

Neil sold stimulants for a wide variety of clientele.
A substantial portion of his business came from the sale of prescription
amphetamines – the blue pills – to students, office workers, and the Nameless
City’s countless librarians – particularly those unlucky enough to be assigned
to Derelith Manuscript Collection, every piece of which is purported to be
unreadably dull. Naturally, the Carter Academy accounted for a notable
percentage of those sales, given the stressful academic environment, the
rigorous study and exam regimen, and the near constant threat of the summer
reading list driving the reader mad. Neil didn’t seem to find his role in their
distribution any different than that of an average doctor, and from experience,
I was inclined to agree.

A regular customer dropped by unannounced a few weeks
earlier, interrupting a desperately needed nap. Not long after he grudging
allowed the man into his room, Neil noticed that beneath a heavy overcoat that
he refused to take off, the clothes his customer wore were liberally splattered
with something that looked an awful lot like blood to our friendly neighborhood
amphetamine addict.

“How could you tell it was blood?” I didn’t raise my
voice, and I waited for one of the long pauses in his monolog, but Neil still
reacted as if I had lunged at him unexpectedly. “It’s not easy to tell, is all
I’m saying.”

Neil stammered and pointed. It took a minute for him
to regain the ability to speak.

“It dripped,” he muttered, his swaying from side to
side in a little unconscious dance. “On the floor and on the comforter. You can
still see it.”

I stood up and checked the spot beneath my thigh where
he was pointing.

It was blood, all right. Smeared and dried, days old
at least. Could have been from a nosebleed or a bad period, for all I knew, but
it was the real deal.

“Okay. Go on.”

“He would have, if you’d just shut up.” Jenny grinned
at me and went back to restoring the remains of the line her coughing had
scattered across the glass table. “Let him talk.”

Neil gave us the look of a child pained by his
parent’s argument. The image was so grotesque I couldn’t help but laugh.

The regular wasn’t just apparently wearing
blood-covered clothing – he was excited. Not about the blood or its potentially
nefarious sources, or even about the drugs he came to buy, or even the drugs
that he was obviously under the influence of at that very moment. He was
excited about a
mask
.

The customer was a student at the Academy, and also
worked for an eccentric rich old lady who lived somewhere up Prospect Hill. He
worked long hours and often stopped by Neil’s in the early morning, and was generally
taciturn, only occasionally making vague and ominous statements about the
nature of both his work and study. I got the feeling that Neil didn’t care much
for this regular, even before he left blood on his bedspread. This particular
visit, though, he was animated, full of enthusiasm. He had rendered his
employer a service, the customer explained, patting a leather messenger bag
cradled against his stomach, one that he was certain she would appreciate.

“Drugs? There were drugs in the bag, right?”

“Shut up, Preston.”

Neil never found out what was in the bag. The customer
wasn’t that forthcoming. What he did discuss, at some length and to Neil’s
obvious impatience, was his new tool, a reward from his employer.

“What the hell?” I gave Jenny a hard look, but she was
too busy trying to gather every single miniscule grain of poison on the glass.
“The Pallid Mask? I think I heard that before, somewhere, but I don’t really
remember…”

“One more detail, and you’ll understand,” Jenny said,
with a contradictory yawn. “Neil; tell him the customer’s name.”

Underneath the dirt and grease, his skin got pale, and
his eyes narrowed.

“I can’t do that, Jenny.”

Apparently satisfied with the reconstituted line,
Jenny tapped the safety razor against the glass, and then proceeded to run the
flat sides along her tongue, her eyes fixed on Neil the whole time. He ran his
hands through his oily hair, stammered, and then repeated the gesture a moment
later.

“You told me already, asshole.”

“But I didn’t mean to!” Neil was sweating profusely,
hands clasped as if in prayer. “I was wasted, okay? That was a mistake.”

“So? Make the same mistake twice. I do that all the
time.”

“Listen, Jenny…it’s nothing personal, it’s just…”

“You sure?”

“Jenny…”

“You’re totally sure, right?”

“I
can’t
! It’s just business!”

Jenny’s free hand darted out, seizing one of the laden
ashtrays from the bedside table, a heavy ceramic piece with indentations in the
shape of a child’s fingers, and hurled it. The ashtray struck Neil on the
forehead with the sound of a cask being tapped, followed by a moan as he
covered the point of injury. Jenny leapt across the table, obliterating her
hard work on the way, and tackled Neil, knocking him from his chair to the
floor.

She landed her elbow on his midsection. Neil groaned and
doubled over, his face white as cotton. Jenny pinned his arms beneath her legs as
she settled comfortably on his chest.

“Tough business you’re in,” Jenny hissed, running the
safety razor along his cheek. “How many eyes do you think you need to deal, Neil?”

“Jenny! Stop! I’m sorry, okay! I’ll…I’ll tell! I’ll do
it!”

“’Course you will.” Jenny looked surprised. “What else
you gonna do?”

I thought about voicing objections, but decided I
wouldn’t be fooling anyone in that particular room.

Neil struggled ineffectually, slapping Jenny’s legs
with his partially immobilized arms while she bent over his face. The position
was nearly erotic, with stray strands of her straw blond hair trailing across
his face and getting caught up in his open mouth as he bucked and struggled
desperately beneath her. Jenny grabbed his face open handed, palm against his
nose, and slammed it against the floor. Neil’s cries of pain and fear were
muffled by Jenny’s grip, her other hand raised, a crazed smile on her crude
features.

I felt the bed shift behind me, heard a creak of
springs, and turned, but not fast enough.

It’s hard to say how long the girl in the bed had been
awake. Maybe she opened her eyes at the most dramatic moment, but judging from
the speed of her movements, she was probably awake for a while. She was a blur
of bleach-damaged hair and cocoa-colored skin barreling across the room, maybe
fifty kilos worth of drug-addled anger and hot pink acrylic nails. She hit
Jenny in the back with a perfect football tackle, creating a frenetic jumble of
swearing and struggling limbs.

I waded in a few seconds later. Bed girl had a handful
of Jenny’s hair, her teeth sunk deep inside of Jenny’s neck. Jenny lashed out
wildly in response, hitting Neil as often as the girl who was attacking her.
The safety razor was nowhere obvious, and Neil’s upper half was invisible
beneath the ongoing catfight. The girl gave my arm a good scratch when I
attempted to pry her off Jenny, followed by a sudden and unappreciated elbow to
my crotch. Enraged, I hauled back and hit her in the side of the head, sending
her sprawling across the room. I clutched the skin dangling from my wounded
arm, and didn’t feel particularly good about myself.

Jenny snarled and swayed to her feet. Her lip was
split, bruising forming around her left eye, and the bloody imprint of the
girl’s teeth clearly evident on the side of her neck. One of her hands dripped
blood steadily on the floor.

“You stupid bitch!” Jenny howled, advancing on the
prostrate and semi-conscious girl. “Look what you made me do!”

I didn’t get it at first, until I realized that Neil
hadn’t moved at all since he was freed from Jenny’s grip. I took a closer look,
and realized that the safety blade was embedded in Neil’s throat. The blade was
buried in tissue to the orange plastic hilt, surrounded by a generous welling
of blood. Neil sounded as if he were drowning, each cough wetter than the last.
His hands hovered near his violated throat, as if afraid to touch the injury,
his eyes pleading for some type of aid.

“Guess he’s not going to say anything else.” I tore a
strip from the cleanest looking blanket and used it to wrap the tear in my
forearm, cursing the unexpected clumsiness of my fingers. “What now?”

“What the fuck do you think?”

Jenny gave the girl a quick, furious kick to the
liver. The girl groaned, curled up in a ball against the wall, and then
proceeded to vomit extensively.

“Oh, fuck this shit.” Jenny recoiled in disgust.
“Preston, she’s your problem.”

The girl moaned loudly and the burst into tears.

“Why? I didn’t even learn anything worth knowing…”

“I know the name, asshole. Neil already told me. I
just thought it would sound better, coming from him,” Jenny snapped. “We gotta
take care of this bitch first, though. She saw our faces, heard our names.”

I was genuinely surprised, and didn’t bother to
conceal it.

“I had no idea you cared about the sort of thing.”