The Dead Withheld, page 5
Dizzy was perhaps less sober than she should have been as she muttered her runes. A more devout witch would have been in this circle all day, praying for guidance or clarity until her knees were cut to bleeding on the hardwood floors or the ghosts returned, whichever came first. But over the years she’d discovered her power worked the same whether she gave thanks for it with every breath or none at all. She preferred efficiency to humility.
She centered herself in the circle and closed her eyes. When she opened them again, she was seeing through I’s eyes, watching a poker game through a dusty basement window. She checked the faces of every suited, drunken man present and found none of them were Tommy or any of the brujos she recognized. She closed her eyes again and reopened them inside II staring upskirt beneath the stairs of some side-street brothel. She groaned, and with a swipe of her hand, the doll’s body slammed into a wall.
Presumably, he’d gotten the point.
When she opened her eyes in III, she was in an alley, dark and barren but for a blue-white light over an otherwise unremarkable door in a brick wall. Nothing happened for nearly a full minute. She was about to jog his memory for him when none other than Tommy walked into her field of vision. He approached the door and something from his pocket. A key, perhaps. A high-pitched beep suggested a key card. He disappeared inside. III looked around for landmarks and Dizzy recognized a cluster of billboards off an adjacent street high overhead.
Excited, she closed her eyes again, and opened them in her own body just long enough to step outside the circle before she was swept off her feet, banged into her wall and held there by a ringed skeleton hand.
“Well, if it ain’t Dizzy ‘I Don’t Know When to Quit’ Carter,” said the undead witch, Uma. If deadwalkers had covens, Uma’d have been a High Priestess. She taught Dizzy everything she knew before dropping dead of a gunshot wound at a blackjack game about a decade ago. What was left of her skin stretched smooth over the bones of her face. There was still a little brown to it. The one indomitable mole once high on her cheek had migrated southward toward her neck but tattooed eyeliner still rimmed her white eyes. And she still knew how to dress. All things considered, the old girl looked good.
“Uma, darlin’, how are you?” Dizzy choked.
“Better than you from the smell of things, and I’m dead. What are you now? 70, 80% brown liquor?” Uma grinned, revealing one of her gold teeth was still intact.
“62?”
“And still so funny. Well I’ll tell ya Dizzy girl, I wish your comedy was why I’m here.”
“Yeah, I thought not. Can you put me down maybe, and we can talk?” Dizzy asked. For all her own formidability, she knew better than to raise a hand to the dead, least of all one who had been like a mother to her in a few ways.
“I think we’re fine where we are,” Uma purred. “See you owe the dead a debt and I come to collect. You got them talking shit about me because the girl I raised don’t pay what she owe and I gotta tell ya, I’m feeling real disrespected on both sides of this line.”
“The ghosts are not here right now.”
“Oh I know. I see you was just talking to ‘em. So we gon’ wait til they get here and I’ma collect the shit out of all y’all at the same time. How that sound?”
“It’s not my time, Uma. You know that.”
“You say that, but...” Uma’s voice dropped to an ethereal growl and her hand started to squeeze vice-like around Dizzy’s throat.
“What if I can deliver Lonnie’s soul, too? And her murderer?”
“See that’s what I’m talking about, Dizzy. We gon’ talk about these games you play when we get home…”
“Uma, I’m serious.” Dizzy’s eyes ached but she looked as sternly as she could through them. “That’s what I was just talking to the ghosts about. A man named Tomas Pascal is in league with some demon Hagenti and this guy the Magician. They knew Lonnie and I’m not sure but I can feel it in my bones they did something to her. They did something.”
She didn’t mean to croak that last bit out. It wasn’t as if crying would help her here but a tear squeezed out anyway. Lonnie did not die peacefully. She was tortured. Her tongue cut out and her mouth sewn shut elsewhere. These men did at least part of that to her and Dizzy felt like her heart was being ripped from her chest every time she thought about it.
Uma froze and inspected Dizzy for lies but her hand stayed where it was. At least it was no longer squeezing.
“I ain’t teach you nothing about chanting down no demons. How you figure you might pull that off?”
“You know me. You know I’ll figure it out. It was you who got me on hell’s bad side in the first place, remember? So any delays are on you.”
Uma chuckled. “Mm-hmm. That Madam probably gassed you up. What if you wrong?”
“I’m not.” Dizzy replied with all the confidence she could muster with her feet dangling in the air. “You tell the dead they can have the ghosts, Lonnie, Tommy, the Magician, even me if they want when this is over but I have to see it through, Uma. Time’s wasting and you have to let me go. I have to go right now.”
After what felt like forever, Uma relaxed her grip on Dizzy’s throat.
“The only reason I don’t drag you to hell is because I loved Lonnie, too,” she said to the doubled-over Dizzy. “But I tell you what: you find this demon, you call us. Brawlin’ your way out of this one will get you killed.”
“What do you know about trapping demons?” Dizzy groaned.
“Don’t you worry about that. And don’t make me come back here, either.”
“People keep saying that…” She stood back upright long enough to see Uma walk into a wall and disappear into wisps of black smoke.
The list of things she’d only half done to keep these sorts of visits from occurring ran on a ticker tape in her head as she grabbed her keys, gun, and phone and hurried out the door.
Nightlife traffic wasn’t nearly as thick on the weekdays, so she made it to her destination beneath the cluster of billboards in fifteen minutes instead of forty. From there, she circled blocks in the vicinity of where III had been, which took considerably longer. Her mouth was still dry from the day’s bourbon but few things were more sobering on the mind than a visit from Uma. She caught the bruises on her throat from where the woman had held her in the rearview mirror. Just when her head started pounding, she turned down a block of closed-up shops and rolled past an alley with a blue-white light.
She parked and checked the skyline for the right angle on that cluster of billboards to make sure she was in the right place. The door was on the side of a dark building with warehouse windows on its face and a HEATING’S TECH sign on its roof. She knew the company well. Its alarm systems dominated the city but this building appeared dilapidated at best. She checked her corners before heading down the alley, hoping Tommy was still behind the door.
The dolls dropped from a fire escape where they’d been waiting for her.
“Has he left yet?” she asked quietly.
The dolls shook their heads.
Relieved, she tugged on the door. Locked, of course. She’d have missed the thin magnetic strip beside the handle if she hadn’t seen Tommy use it. She tapped the black card against it, the beep sounded, and the door released.
The card back in her pocket, she pulled her gun and stepped into the dark, the dolls following close behind her.
She stood on a mesh metal walkway in a hall with painted cinderblock walls and little else. The only light came from the red exit sign over her head. The walkway angled off into stairs going upward forever but only downward for a story or two. She listened for any sound that might tell her which direction to head first.
There were voices, warbled and indistinct as if they came from a television or radio somewhere. She peered over the railing and caught a thin strip of blue light beneath another door on the floor below.
She moved quickly and silently down the stairs and pressed her ear to the door until she was certain the TV behind it had been abandoned and she wasn’t about to be surprised.
“Stay here,” she whispered to the dolls as she turned the knob and opened the door slightly. The business end of her gun got the first glimpse into the room. As she peered in cautiously behind it, her eyes adjusted to the blue-white light of hundreds of tiny screens that covered the walls inside it.
“The fuck…” she muttered as she emerged fully inside. No one was there, not now anyway, but an empty swivel chair and a sweaty Big Gulp near a keyboard indicated that might not last long.
Each screen in the neverending grid was about the size of a hand, but these weren’t television channels. As Dizzy inspected them, she found entirely regular people walking along sidewalks and through the hallways of their own homes. They ordered at drive-thru windows and stumbled out of bars and after-hours affairs at the office. They folded laundry and snuck cigarettes on balconies and tucked in their children before resuming arguments with spouses in the kitchen.
Cameras?
The surveillance situation in San Guin was layered. Most cameras were privately owned by the business owners who had something to protect; the detection and deterrent settings depended on what manner of being they wanted to detect or deter. But there wasn’t a network. There was barely a central anything, apart from power and light. And these were placements and angles no one with a security concern would care about. From what she could tell, no one knew they were there.
Bits of white tape sectioned off cameras monitoring parts of the city like a giant video map. She followed the tape toward her own address and sighed in relief that the closest cameras overlooked the Thai restaurant and a few of the downstairs shops.
She looked for the Rising Sun’s district and found only its exterior as part of a long shot of its street.
And then she looked for the west side apartment she’d shared with Lonnie. Rosetta Drive wasn’t exactly tree-lined but it was clean and calmer than most other parts of the city. The shadows there were different, illuminated by more street lamps and the diffused glow of bedroom windows than neon signs and traffic signals. Between her gigs and Lonnie’s newly-blossoming acting career, they could afford the studio apartment atop the pink sandstone building at the top of the street. The staggered balconies spiraled upward like leaves.
She found the cameras that monitored its entrance, the elevator with its cracked marble floor, bare-board hallways. It was hard to distinguish their old home from the others with none of the familiar trappings. But she recognized the view through their old balcony door.
Before the creeping rage overtook her body, she heard a faint clattering in the direction of a narrow corridor on the far side of the room and her gun went back up. She held her breath and waited for a threat to emerge, but none did immediately. She pressed herself against the wall beside the opening and listened as Tomas’s heavy footsteps drew nearer.
He spotted her as he stepped into the room, a startled question developing in his eyes before he realized Dizzy’s gun was drawn and aimed at his chest.
“Cart—whoa!” he yelled and slapped her hand away in a panic. The gun went off, firing into a monitor behind him. He banged her hand into the wall until she dropped it and then backhanded her across the face. Dizzy recovered in time to take a short breath before his giant fists were around her neck, slamming her into a display panel and squeezing so hard she spit.
“What are you doing?” He shook her as if she could answer.
Ordinarily now would have been a good time for some eye gouging, clawing, anything really to get free, but Tommy’s reach vastly outmatched Dizzy’s. She brought her fists down on his forearms with all the force she could muster to get his elbows to buckle and when she was within reach, boxed his ears.
Tommy roared as he released her and dropped to his knees. Dizzy scrambled for the gun and caught him one good time across the face with it, sending a small spray of his blood against a control panel.
“Stay down,” she heaved and gulped, her fury still too fresh to register the pain she’d undoubtedly feel in the morning.
Tommy nodded and gestured time out, pulling himself into the swivel chair. “Jesus, Carter,” he panted. “If this is about the Sun, tell them I got the point.”
“Tell me where ‘here is. What is all this?”
“You a cop now?” he asked, pulling a cigarette from its crushed case and lighting it.
“I’m an impatient woman with a gun and a bad fucking headache,” Dizzy growled.
He nodded slowly and spit the blood accumulating in his mouth onto the concrete floor. “They didn’t tell you I’m protected? I can’t be killed.”
Dizzy flicked the black card at him. “Yeah I heard about your little brand,” she said. She shot him in his foot and he doubled over, screaming obscenities through clenched teeth in three languages.
“I’ll settle for that. What is this place?”
“It’s a God’s Eye monitoring system for Heating’s Tech Surveillance and Security,” he spat. “I don’t know what it’s for, I just run it. Been here eight years, shut down a few years ago but I just got orders a couple months back to get it going again.”
Dizzy moved back toward the shot of her old apartment. “So all this was functional during the Fallen Angel murders. Were y’all much help with those investigations?”
Tommy glared up at her but said nothing.
“Lonnie Baxter lived right here,” she said, tapping the screen. “I know because I lived there with her. Her tongue was cut out, her mouth sewn shut, and then her spine was snapped in half when she was dropped onto our neighbor’s balcony. So am I taxing you or someone else for that?”
“You’re gonna have to shoot me again,” he muttered, exhaling smoke through his nose.
Dizzy strode over and pressed the gun against his temple. The muzzle was still hot and the blood and sweat sizzled a bit on his head. “Again, I don’t have a lot of time,” she said calmly. “So, this might not kill you but we can find out together what it does do…”
Tommy winced at the pain and spit again before relenting.
“Mr. Heating, alright? Presidente Hagenti. He used the camera system to find his targets. Called them muses.”
“Then what?”
Tommy screwed up his face and shrugged. “Then, you know, they got hunted down, grabbed, stashed.”
“Who did the hunting?”
He was reluctant to answer. She shot him in the knee.
“Fuck! We did!” he howled. “He did everything else. I don’t know why he did all that mouth-sewing shit but he flies in his other form and dropped those people because he said it was art. It’s fucked up but that’s what he said.”
Dizzy’s head spun. All these years and the lead she needed had been under her nose or down the hall bedding a friend and she hadn’t seen it. She wanted to kill him. She wanted to scream. Neither of these things would be productive in the moment. “So you watched us? You knew who I was when we met in that alley and you let me leave you alive?” Dizzy scoffed. “Was it you? Did you grab Lonnie?”
Tommy shook his head pitifully. “Look, your girl wasn’t supposed to go like that. She was tough. She escaped and made it back to your spot but he found her. It was an accident when she fell.”
“Was it you?”
“Yes and no,” he said in a frantic stammer. “We...are legion. We take his mark, we do what we’re told, and nothing living can kill us. So did I touch her? No. But if one of the legion did, so did I.”
“You said you were ordered to start this back up again. Why? He in town? About to get going again?”
“I swear I don’t know what he wants with it but he’s back in San Guin as of a few weeks ago. There’s a…a gallery thing he’s opening on the mezzanine of the Gōrudo Theater. Vintage District, next Wednesday night. If you can get in, you can take all this up with him.”
Dizzy nodded, thinking as she stared vacantly at the scenes in the tiny screens around her. The copper smell of Tommy’s blood invaded her nose. Someone had just come home in the scene of her old apartment. A young father carried a sleeping toddler past the camera and gently placed his keys on the kitchen counter. Fatigue suddenly weighed heavily on her. Fatigue or sadness.
“You said nothing living could kill you?” she muttered. Tired, she walked back to the door and opened it again. “Gentlemen,” she called and stepped back so the three dolls waiting in the stairwell could enter.
Tommy squinted as if certain he wasn’t seeing them correctly. They were not puppets. There were no strings.
“These men are dead,” Dizzy declared.
“What is this?” Tommy frowned. Despite himself, he made attempts to stand and inch backward.
“Tommy here’s our first big break in years, which means you’re all that much closer to glory,” she told the dolls. “Finish him. I’ll be in the car.”
One by one, the dolls began to splinter as if bursting out of themselves, the bits of them linking end to end and blistering until each was transformed into a 7-foot-tall monster of fine spikes limbering up and sneering down at Tomas.
“Dizzy, I told you I didn’t touch your girl!” he said, terror getting the best of him as the dolls stalked forward.
“I know, but you’re legion. If you feel this, so will they,” said Dizzy. She stepped beyond the door and closed it softly behind her. His screams followed her up the stairs.
seven
Dizzy sat in the car outside her apartment scrolling through internet photos of the demon who owned San Guin’s energy infrastructure. Niles Heating—Hagenti; the laziness of it made her want to spit knowing how clever he must have thought it was—towered over most other people in the photos with him. He was a giant with a disgusting amiability about his facial expressions. He appeared at ribbon cuttings and symposiums and photographed so dark in stylish, heroic profiles where he stood among a hundred bright, bare bulbs that one could be forgiven for thinking there was a person-shaped void burned into the image.
