“Hiya, Dizz,” they’d wink at her.

  “Hey darlin’,” she’d reply.

  She followed the vixens and their overnight clients to the bar nook across the posh lobby. A line of colorful, sweet-smelling elixirs in shot glasses lined the countertop and each man took one. Their color returned in a wave along with the spark in their eyes. The little brews would keep them vital at least until their next visit.

  And there would be a next visit. Some stayed for coffee or fruit and small plates of cooked things. Their sense of self restored, they carried on as if this were a normal morning they were spending with a normal mistress before heading off for their work day. Eventually, they would waste away altogether, and the sirens would devour their bones for the marrow.

  Dizzy took a seat at the bar where Carmen flirted and made stiffer drinks for the master of the universe types in tailored suits who didn’t begin or end a day without a finger or two of top-shelf booze. Carmen was an experience they insisted they were meant to have. They had to settle for her laugh and a few precious moments of witty banter. Dizzy admired the regality she had about her.

  “You made it,” Carmen said, turning to Dizzy. “Coffee?”

  “Whiskey and a water,” Dizzy replied. “I gotta take the edge off this thing.”

  “You sure you know the difference?” Carmen winked. She’d started pouring the whiskey before Dizzy even asked and slid the glasses over in front of her. “What’s the case you’re behind on?”

  “Missing husband,” Dizzy said with mocking enthusiasm. “The wife’s on my ass. But to be fair, it’s been four days.”

  “Four days? He dead?”

  “Don’t know. I need to make a trip to the desert.”

  A girl appeared through the kitchen doors bearing a plate and Carmen gestured with her head that whatever was on it was Dizzy’s. Chorizo, rice, and a fried egg. Dizzy dug in and then paused when she noticed Carmen was still standing over her.

  “You’re seriously going to watch me eat?”

  “Yes and you’re not getting up until it’s gone. I’m serious. Death’s one of those things I do here and you look like I’ve been working on you.”

  A succubus named Ash joined Carmen behind the bar. She was a leggy dark-skinned girl with wide, brown eyes and a beatific smile. Her face lit up when she saw Dizzy.

  “Dizzy Carter!” She leaned over the bar to kiss her cheeks. “You’re never around this long.”

  “I was commanded,” Dizzy replied.

  A hulking giant of a man she recognized appeared a few seats down and leaned on the bar, waiting for a drink. He had a heavy, brooding brow and about a day’s worth of beard on his stony face. Tattoos covering scars Dizzy’d put there the first time they met peeked above the collar of his work shirt. He tapped a crushed box of clove cigarettes on the bar.

  “Tomás. Howzit?” Carmen smiled at him.

  “Carmen. Carter.” He nodded at the women but avoided Dizzy’s eyes.

  “Tommy,” Dizzy muttered.

  Ash served him. He thanked her and slugged his drink and ducked out of the building with a cigarette between his lips. Dizzy watched him go.

  “So tell me what you’ve been up to?” Ash insisted. Her lips and the lids of her eyes were painted gold and nearly distracted from the faint scales beneath her skin as the sun angled through the front windows. “Any progress on Lonnie’s murder?”

  “Not for a while. Not unless you’ve got news for me.” Dizzy hid her grimace behind a mouthful of rice. “Not even the dead can find Lonnie Baxter.”

  “I think it’s romantic you’re still trying,” Ash mused.

  “And stupid,” Carmen added with a piteous smile as she poured herself a drink. “I understand love. Human love. Eternal love. But walker or not, Desdemona, the living ain’t supposed to spend this much time with the dead.” Carmen clinked Dizzy’s glass with her own then turned to Ash.

  “Make sure she eats,” she added pointedly and moved away to tend the clients.

  Ash let out a long, low whistle. “Was that a lovers’ quarrel?”

  “I don’t know what that was.” Dizzy stared after her, hoping, dreading, their relationship hadn’t just turned a corner. She changed the subject. “You’ve been working Tommy for what? Three years now? How is he not dead yet?”

  “Five. I think he’s protected.”

  “By what? Craft? I didn’t think Tommy got down like that.” Dizzy watched him through the glass front windows.

  “I don’t know. This fell out of his pocket.” Ash turned a black card over in her hand. An emblem like the bones of outstretched wings was etched into a corner. Ash handed it to her.

  “Hotel key card?” Dizzy suggested, even though years of tracking cheating spouses and secret drug habits had familiarized her with every hotel in San Guin. This was no key card. But it was familiar...

  “Not likely. He’s got a brand that matches it on his chest.”

  “You ain’t ask him what it meant?”

  Ash shrugged. “His money’s good. That’s brujo business.”

  Dizzy’s phone vibrated. Mrs. Underwood’s number.

  “Damn it.” She slugged the rest of her whiskey and stood up. “I have to go.”

  “Want me to apologize to Carmen for you?”

  Dizzy thought a moment about whether or not she’d actually done anything requiring an apology. “Just tell her I’ll see her later.”

  She grabbed a few bottles of water from the elixir table and headed out into the sun.

  Her car was a gift from Lonnie. It was black and impossible to keep clean with the desert dust that attached itself to everything here; modeled after one of those vintage bad boys that sounded like a lion when you turned the engine over. They called them muscle cars over a century ago. Loud, environmentally irresponsible. Powerful. A fitting relic of the Former United States. She’d swapped out for a better fuel system, sure, but no one could drive a stick anymore so it was hard to steal.

  She donned her sunglasses and tried not to think about Carmen as she carved her way out of the city east into the desert. Towering, congested architecture overflowed with massive billboards and signage in muted colors. Almost everything here was styled to be most alluring at night. Glimpses of back streets revealed pop-up marketplaces and people seeking refuge in the shade. Bustling city streets finally gave way to small, even dustier homes, garages, and trading posts. An old, defunct gas station marked the forty mile point beyond the city limits where all the rest was brush and rocks and unforgivable dry heat.

  Dizzy’s loose curls whipped in the wind and her fingers mocked the plucking of guitar sounds on her radio. She hadn’t lost the music. She simply didn’t love it the way she used to. She’d given it up to investigate Lonnie’s death and the Fallen Angels Killer in ways the San Guin police wouldn’t, combing the vice-riddled other-life of San Guin and threatening the dead for answers. The drinking habit that sustained her sleep now was far from the worst thing she’d done in the name of vengeance. Before going to the dead for guidance, she’d taken lives of her own.

  And kept them.

  She was a dangerous, reckless witch.

  About the 66 mile marker she turned south off the paved road and took to the dirt. Dizzy’s tire tracks weren’t exactly well-worn into a trail, but she’d been out here enough to know where she was going. She stopped twelve miles clear of the main road and before a rocky eye formation of an arching land bridge joining two mesas. No one who wasn’t looking for it would notice the fifty-foot circle of spiraling stones on the ground here. Their surfaces were marked forever in her own bloody fingerprints but the desert wind had covered them in a layer of dust.

  Dizzy grabbed a small brush from her glovebox and got out. The sky darkened and storm clouds were collecting just over the horizon through the eye but the scent of rain wasn’t carrying this far on the wind just yet. It took an hour, but she made her way around the circle, brushing off each rock until her prints were once again visible. And then she went to her trunk for a wooden bowl into which she poured the bottles of water and placed it in the center of the circle. Water was life and her offering. The dead would see her as long as the water was there.

  She sat on the hood of her car to collect herself, to leave Carmen and her nightmare here on the edge of the circle before lighting a caapi cigarette. The smoke she exhaled as she muttered the start of her incantations streamed into the air over the circle, impervious to the wind. She walked the outer ring, still praying, still chanting, tapping ash over the stones until it stopped hitting the ground and joined the gathering fog. Caapi was a troubling thing. Maintaining lucidity was always a challenge by the end of the third lap. She was not so much exhaling the smoke anymore as it was being drawn from her and the chants became commands for the dead to take no more than what was theirs. Her breath was her own and she had not come to give it to them.

  The stones began to bleed in vein-like jags over the sand until a perfectly circular pool formed. She fought the parts of her mind that told her snakes and scorpions were being summoned here, that the sky had turned black and the sun had cracked open and was dripping its gold onto the mesas. The fog of caapi smoke and ash solidified into an orb before she closed her eyes.

  “You again.”

  Dizzy opened her eyes to find the sky was blue, the day was hot and breezy. Everything was normal, right down to the familiar skeletal visage of Nico, one of her regular informants, standing on the edge of the circle before her. He’d been buried out here maybe ten years ago, a mob casualty like countless other bodies, and any spirit to take her call took it in the form of his body. His living eyes were white and his skin still clung to his frame in places but the rest of him had wasted away. The bowl of water in the circle began to steam.

  “Me again,” she replied. The cells of her body felt like soda bubbles, fizzing and popping as the caapi worked to keep her tethered to the living world.

  “You come to pay what you owe?”

  Dizzy ignored the question. “I need a little help with a case.”

  Nico held out a hand kept together by more magic than tendons. Dizzy tugged a cigarette from its case, handed it over and lit it for him. He had no lungs. He barely had lips, so she imagined this affectation was more a creature comfort.

  “What’s the case?”

  “Missing husband,” she said, pulling up a picture of the dapper Mr. Roger Underwood on her phone. “Underwood. Disappeared about four days ago.”

  “Well the wife ain’t a widow. The dead don’t know him. Not unless he’s pulled a Lonnie Baxter,” said Nico. He waved the cigarette in loops for its dancing smoke.

  Dizzy bit her tongue to keep from saying something stupid and cut her eyes at him from behind her mirrored sunglasses. At least she could tell Carol for sure that her husband was running out on her again.

  “So when do you plan to settle up?”

  “I haven’t found the Fallen Angels Killer yet.” Dizzy frowned and looked southward toward nothing.

  “It’s been six years.”

  “I know how long it’s been,” she snapped. “Time is a real thing on this side.”

  “Hey, I’m just the messenger, girl. You’ve owed the dead them three goons you got stashed for a long time. They clearly ain’t doing you no good so I would suggest you turn them over before the dead come looking.”

  “Yeah alright.” Dizzy fidgeted.

  “That it?” Nico asked, picking at the crumbling collar of his dingy purple shirt.

  “Yeah, that’s it.” She sighed and leaned back against the car. Something in her back pocket settled wrong against the metal. She pulled out the black card Ash had given her. “Friend of mine showed me this. It looks familiar but I can’t place it. She says it’s brujo business.”

  Nico took it from her, inspected it, and handed it back.

  “What’s it to you?”

  “A dangerous man was carrying it and has the same symbol branded on his chest.”

  “Yeah?” The flesh of Nico’s remaining cheek went up in a smirk. “You sure the demon shit keeps just finding you and you’re not going looking for it?”

  Dizzy sighed frustration at the sky. “No, I promise it keeps finding me.” She’d had a run-in some years ago with a familiar demon, but it’d been personal, on behalf of her mother and not something she’d considered a bigger deal if she resolved the issue by killing and maybe robbing him a little.

  Nico sucked his teeth, not buying it for a second. “Either way, looks like San Guin’s got a demon problem. And not them girls you hang around, either. Your buddy with the brand can tell you more about who it is and why they’re here though. We don’t know that.”

  “A demon problem?” Dizzy muttered to herself. She ran her fingers over the symbol on the card, racking her brain for where she’d last seen it.

  When Nico chuckled, it sounded like three voices at once. “Don’t do it.”

  “Don’t do what?”

  “I know you like to dabble but demons are not your thing. You don’t do nothing in moderation and this is just something new to obsess over. That’s not your world.”

  “Look, I just asked you what it was.”

  “Ain’t none of us new here.” Nico flicked the caapi roach toward the water boiling away behind him. “You will pull this thread and kill or be killed by whatever’s at the end of it. And if you die, we’ll never be rid of you.”

  “Alright, Nico.” Dizzy rolled her eyes as the sound of the last of the water began to sizzle out.

  “Stay in your lane, Dizzy Carter.”

  “Bye Nico.”

  He tipped a hat he didn’t have and turned back to the circle just before his bones settled to dust again and were swallowed up by the earth.

  Dizzy threw her bowl back into the trunk and the deadwalker fatigue settled heavily in her bones. She sat in her car, drumming the card against her steering wheel.

  In the beginning, her investigations had lacked a certain professionalism. There’d been a year of blind and reckless rage. A handful of brass-knuckled back-alley brawls with San Guin’s goons and lesser gangsters had translated into some gruesome interrogations. A few of these interrogations needed a change of venue or more time than the immediate circumstances permitted. And so she’d killed three men she knew knew something and kept their ghosts hostage beneath bell jars in her bedroom where she might find uses for them at her leisure.

  Presumably, someone was doing the same thing to Lonnie and that was why the dead couldn’t find her. The difference was they knew where to find Dizzy to collect their due.

  Dark clouds billowed closer and the wind now brought the smell of rain with it. Staying in the desert after the sun went down or hid itself behind storms invited the dead to plague her for what was theirs and what they needed from her.

  And not all of them behaved themselves. The living energy of the city diffused the dead too easily to harm her there, so she’d learned the hard way not to doze off in the desert in her post-caapi states.

  She dialed the Rising Sun and threw the car into gear before skidding on the desert gravel headed back to the city.

  “The Rising Sun, this is Sugar,” said a voice befitting the name over the subtle din of entertaining in the background.

  “Sugar, it’s Dizzy. Is Ash around?”

  “Oh hiya, Dizz. She’s...no, I don’t see her. She must be upstairs. You want Carmen instead?”

  “No,” Dizzy replied. She paused, guilt itching in her chest. Why was she avoiding Carmen? “Can you just have someone call me if Tommy shows up there? Today, tomorrow, whenever.”

  “He in trouble?”

  “No, I just want to talk to him.”

  “Uh huh,” Sugar chuckled. “I’ll let Ash know.”

  “Thanks.”

  Almost as soon as her phone hit the leather of the seat beside her, it began to vibrate. Dizzy shook her head, cleared her throat, and answered it.

  “Mrs. Underwood, hi. I have good news depending on how you look at it: Roger’s not dead.”

  three

  The apartment was blue in the dark. The alarm system buzzed in silence until she punched in the code. Their combined birth years. She dropped her guitar case by the door and rifled through mail on the sideboard.

  A shadow moved in her periphery and footprints glowing green in some cacophonous dance pattern appeared on the hardwood floors.

  She scanned the room to notice the slightest things amiss. An upturned corner of an area rug. The rumpled section of a bed she’d made perfectly this morning. Dizzy fit her footsteps to the marks on the floor to see if any sense of them could be made and they took her stumbling across the room to the open patio door. The city was black even under moonlight and the air was still.

  And then she looked down.

  Lonnie’s eyes gazed emptily off to the side as her body was folded the wrong way over the downstairs neighbor’s balcony railing. Dizzy screamed her name so loud the black buildings across the street began to crack and crumble. And then Lonnie’s head turned and looked up at her. She said nothing, but pointed a red manicured finger toward the sky.

  A feeling like electricity raised the fine hairs on her arms. She looked up into a shadow she didn’t recognize, and then...

  Thunder clapped and fat raindrops pelted her windows when Dizzy jolted awake alone in her apartment. The popping carbon sensation of her skin persisted, clear sign she was overexerting herself. She dragged a hand over her face to restore some sort of normal feeling there—smearing an errant tear on her cheek—and checked the time on her phone.

  Barely five a.m. on a Monday morning. She’d lost the weekend. When not enough time was rested between communion with the dead, she lost time like this and her living self would continue on without her mind. The last thing she remembered was the slamming of her car door when she arrived home on Saturday, but take-out cartons and a half dozen empty Coke bottles strewn about the floor indicated she’d at least eaten since then.

  She smelled coconut milk. Curry had been involved.

  Her living self always managed to eat or brew coffee it never finished or break a plate it never cleaned up. But it never seemed capable of peeing for her so bounding across her bedroom to the bathroom was always the first most urgent thing she did when she woke.

 

1 2 3 4 5 6 7