Weird Detectives (50 page)

“Ironic that she’s probably going to end up better off,” Mick said.

“ ’Less she goes to the electric chair.”

Mick shook his head. “She’ll be found insane, and they’ll put her in Leabrook.”

“You sound awful sure.”

“I was . . . well, I wasn’t in her head, exactly, but something like it. The reverse of it, maybe. She’s insane.”

“And four people are dead.”

Mick raised his eyebrows. “You sound like you think your halo’s a little tarnished on this one.”

“Fuck off, Mick.” He couldn’t leave—they wanted to keep him under observation overnight, and Lila’d had a fit about that, too—but he got up to pace. Up and back, the room not really long enough to accommodate his stride, but it was better than sitting still with Mick sneering at him.

“Jamie?”

He swung round to give Mick a glare, and maybe a piece of his mind, but Mick was looking at him wide-eyed, solemn and a little taken aback, and Jamie’s anger drained out of him.

“I’m sorry,” Mick said. “You wanna tell me what I did?”

“You were just being your usual charming self. I’m sorry. Shouldn’t’ve flown off the handle like that.”

“I don’t mind. Except you usually don’t. It’s more my speed, isn’t it?”

Jamie thought of some of the tantrums Mick had pitched and grinned reluctantly. “I just . . . she’s not a nice old lady, you know.”

“Parker gave me the highlights,” Mick said, rather dryly. “But I don’t see why that’s got your tail in a knot. You caught her, you know. Justice will be served.”

“Yeah, but she was right.”

“I’m sorry?”

“All those people walking past her every day. Probably most of them ain’t nice, either. Who says they have any right to good clothes and a warm place to sleep? Who says they deserve it more than her?”

“Nobody,” Mick said. He was eyeing Jamie cautiously now. “You still feeling like yourself, Keller?”

“It ain’t that,” Jamie said and started pacing again. “It’s just, how come she ended up the villain here?”

“Because she started killing people.”

“You said it yourself. She’s crazy. And she’s crazy because somehow she got fucked over and spat out in little pieces. Blame The Victim isn’t a nice game, Sharpton.”

“Nor is Pin The Blame On The Donkey.” Mick slid off the bed, gawky and angular in the clinic’s ugly gown. He approached Jamie slowly, put one bony hand on Jamie’s biceps. “Jamie, it isn’t your fault.”

“I know that. Nobody’s fault, really. Or everybody’s. Just another clusterfuck of modern life.”

“We do the best we can, instead of the worst,” Mick said. “That’s all we can do.”

“I know,” Jamie said, not turning to face Mick, because he knew the particular kind of courage it took for Mick to offer comfort and just how fragile that courage was. “I just hate it that that’s not enough sometimes, you know?”

“Yeah,” Mick said, his hand warm and heavy and vital on Jamie’s arm. “I know.”

Sarah Monette
lives in a 106-year-old house in the Upper Midwest with a great many books, two cats, and one husband. Her first four novels were published by Ace Books. Her short stories have appeared in
Strange Horizons
,
Weird Tales
, and
Lady Churchillís Rosebud Wristlet
, among other venues, and have been reprinted in several Year’s Best anthologies.
The Bone Key
, a 2007 collection of interrelated short stories, was re-issued last year in a new edition. A non-themed collection,
Somewhere Beneath Those Waves,
was published in 2011. Sarah has written three novels (
A Companion to Wolves
,
The Tempering of Men,
and the soon-to-be-published
An Apprentice to Elves
) and several short stories with Elizabeth Bear. Her next novel,
The Goblin Emperor
, will come out under the name Katherine Addison. Visit her online at www.sarahmonette.com.

The Case:
A man who believes he’s sold his soul has, for ten years, received just what he bargained for: success. But now the decade is drawing to an end, he’s in despair, and needs some professional help
.

The Investigator:
Quincey Morris, occult investigator and great-grandson of Quincey P. Morris, who had a hand in destroying a certain Count Dracula in the nineteenth century
.

DEAL BREAKER

Justin Gustainis

“You’re not an easy man to find, Mr. Morris,” Trevor Stone said. “I’ve been looking for you for some time.”

“It’s true that I don’t advertise, in the usual sense,” Quincey Morris told him. “But people who want my services usually manage to get in touch, sooner or later—as you have, your own self.” Although there was a Southwestern twang to Morris’s speech, it was muted—the inflection of a native Texan who has spent much of his time outside the Lone Star State.

“I would have preferred sooner,” Stone said tightly. “As it is, I’m almost . . . almost out of time.”

Morris looked at his visitor more closely. Trevor Stone appeared to be in his mid-thirties. He was blond, clean-shaven, and wearing a suit that looked custom made. There was a sheen of perspiration on the man’s thin face, although the air conditioning in Morris’s living room kept the place comfortably cool—anyone spending a summer in Austin, Texas without air conditioning is either desperately poor or incurably insane.

Morris thought the man’s sweat might be due to either illness or fear. “Are you unwell?” he asked.

Stone gave a bark of unpleasant laughter. “Oh, no, I’m fine. The picture of health, and likely to remain so for another”—he glanced at the gold Patek Philippe on his wrist—“two hours and twenty-eight minutes.”

Fear, then.

Morris kept his face expressionless as he said, “That would bring us to midnight. What happens then?”

Stone was silent for a few seconds. “You ever play Monopoly, Mr. Morris?”

“When I was a kid, sure.”

“So, imagine landing on Community Chest and drawing the worst Monopoly card of all time—one that reads
Go to Hell. Go directly to Hell. Do not pass Go. Do not collect $200.”

It was Morris’s turn for silence. He finally broke it by saying, “Tell me. All of it.”

The first part of Trevor Stone’s story was unexceptional. A software engineer by training, he had gone to work in Silicon Valley after graduation from Cal Tech. Soon, he had made enough money out of the Internet boom to start up his own dot-com company with a couple of college buddies. They all made out like bandits—until the bottom fell out in the Nineties, taking most of the dot-commers with it.

That was how, Trevor Stone said, he had found himself sitting alone in his company’s deserted office one afternoon—bankrupt and broke, under threat of lawsuits from his former partners and of divorce from his wife. He was just wondering if his life insurance had a suicide clause when a strange man appeared, and changed everything.

“I never heard him come in,” Stone said to Morris. “Which was kind of weird, because the place was so quiet you could have heard a mouse fart. But suddenly, there he was, standing in my office door.

“I looked at him and said, ‘Buddy, if you’re selling something, have you ever come to the wrong place.’ And he gave me this funny little smile and says “I suppose you might consider me a salesman of a sort, Mr. Stone. As to whether I am in the wrong place, why don’t we determine that later?’ ”

“What did he look like?” Morris asked.

“Little guy, couldn’t have been more than five foot five. Had a goatee on him, jet black. Can’t vouch for the rest of his hair, because he kept his hat on the whole time, one of those Homburg things, which I didn’t think anybody wore anymore. Nice suit, three-piece, with a bow tie—not a clip on, but one of those that you tie yourself.”

“Did he give you a name?”

“He said it was Dunjee. What’s that—Scottish?”

“Maybe.” Morris’s voice held no inflection at all. “Could me any number of things.” After a moment he continued, “So, what did he want with you?”

“Well, he was one of those guys who take forever to get to the point, but what it finally came down to was that he wanted me to play
Let’s Make a Deal
.”

Morris nodded. “And what was he offering?”

“A way out. A change in my luck. An end to my problems, and a return to the kind of life I’d had before.”

“I see. And your part of the bargain involved . . . ”

“Nothing much.” Another bitter laugh. “Just my soul.”

“Doesn’t sound like a very good deal to me,” Morris said gently.

“I thought it was just a
joke
, man!” Stone stood up and started pacing the room nervously. “I only listened to the guy because I had nothing else to do, and it gave me something to think about besides slitting my wrists.”

Morris nodded again. “I assume there were . . . terms.”

“Yeah, sure. Ten years of success. Ten years, back on top of the world, right where I liked it. Then, at the end of that time, Dunjee said, he’d be back. To collect.”

“And your ten years is up tonight, I gather.”

“At midnight, right. That’s actually a few hours over ten years, since it was the middle of the afternoon when I talked to him, that day. But he said he wanted to ‘preserve the traditions.’ So midnight it is.”

“Did he have you sign a contract?”

“Yeah.”

“Something on old parchment, maybe, smelling of brimstone?”

“No, nothing like that. He had the template on a disk in his pocket. He asked if he could use my PC to fill in the specifics, so I let him. Then he printed out a copy, and I signed it.”

“In blood?”

“No, he said I could use my pen. But then he pulled out one of those little syrettes they use in labs, still in the sterile wrapper, and everything. Dunjee said he would need three drops of blood from one of my fingers. I said okay, so he stuck me, and let the three drops fall onto the contract, just below my signature.”

“Then what happened?”

“He said he’d see me in ten years plus a few hours, and left. I told myself the whole thing was going to make a great story to tell my friends, assuming I had any friends left.”

“You felt it was all just an elaborate charade.”

“Of
course
I did. I wouldn’t have been surprised if one of my former partners had sent the little bastard, just to mess with my head. I mean, deals with the devil—come on!”

Morris leaned forward in his chair. “But now you feel differently.”

“Well . . . yeah. I do.”

“Why? What changed your mind?”

Stone flopped back in the chair he had left. “Because it
worked
, that’s why. My luck changed. Everything turned around.
Everything
. My partners dropped their lawsuits, some former clients who still owed me money decided to pay up, a guy from Microsoft called with an offer to buy a couple of my software patents, my wife and I got back together—six months later, it was like my life had done a complete one-eighty.”

“So you decided that your good fortune meant that your bargain with the Infernal must have been real, after all.”

“Yeah, eventually. It took me a long time to finally admit the possibility. Denial is not just a river in Egypt, you know what I mean?”

“I do, for sure.”

“But the bill comes due at midnight, and I’m scared, man. I have to admit now that I am really, big-time terrified. Can you help me? I mean, I can pay whatever you want. Money’s not a problem.”

“Well, I’m not sure what—”

“Look, you’re some kind of hotshot occult investigator, right? There’s a story about a bunch of vampires, supposed to have taken over some little Texas town. I heard you took care of that in four days flat. And, yesterday, I talked to a guy named Walter LaRue, he’s the one told me how to find you. He said you saved his family from some curse that was, like, three centuries old, but he wouldn’t tell me more. Christ, you must deal with this kind of stuff all the time. There’s got to be a way out of this box I’ve got myself in, and if anybody can find it, I figure it’s you. Please help me
. Please
.”

Morris looked at Trevor Stone for what seemed like a long time. Unlike his unexpected visitor, Morris was dressed casually, in a gray Princeton Tigers sweatshirt, blue jeans, and sandals. There were a few touches of gray in his closely trimmed beard, but none at all in the black hair above it. Finally, he said, “You’re probably pretty thirsty after all that talking—how about something to wet your whistle, before we talk some more?”

Stone asked for bourbon and water, and Morris went to a nearby sideboard to make it, along with a neat Scotch for himself. Although well into his forties, Morris moved easily, like someone who still likes to make hard use of his body from time to time.

Morris gave Stone his drink and sat down again. “You know, my profession, if you want to call it that, isn’t exactly well organized. There’s no union, no licensing committee, no code of ethics we’re all expected to follow. But my family has been in this business going back four generations, and we have our own set of ethical standards.”

Stone took a pull on his drink but said nothing. He was watching Morris with narrowed eyes.

“And it’s a good thing too,” Morris went on. “Because it would be the simplest thing in the world for me to go through a bunch of mumbo-jumbo, recite a few prayers over you in Latin, maybe splash a little holy water around. Then I could tell you that you were now safe from the forces of Hell, charge an outrageous amount of money, and send you on your way. You would be, too.”

Stone shook his head in confusion. “I would be—what?”

“Safe, Mr. Stone. You’d be safe, no matter what I did, because you were never in any danger to begin with.”

After a lengthy silence, Stone said, “You don’t believe I made a deal with the Devil.”