Black Ice - Part 1

[kittydesade]

I.
She was a pretty girl, for a necromancer.
 
I watched her light her cigarette like it meant something, left foot bouncing over her right. She had on the perfect little black dress and kept pulling down the hem over her legs. Crossed one over the other, so that even if it hiked up I wouldn't see anything. She did it to make me look at her perfect legs. The best pair money or magic could buy.
 
We were both waiting for me to ask the obvious question, so I chewed my gum and spat it out and took another minute to ask. "So, what do you need me for? Can't you just raise the guy and ask him yourself?"
 
"It doesn't work that way," she smiled. Pulled at the hem of her dress. "Half his jaw's missing. Even if I could raise him I couldn't get anything out of him like that."
 
Fair point. He'd died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head, and maybe I should have acted like I knew that.
 
"So you're doing this the old fashioned way."
 
"Actually, I'm the old fashioned way. Policemen have only been around…"
 
"Yeah, I know. I've heard it before."
 
"Sorry." There was that toothpaste-commercial smile again. Ting, goes the sparkle. "Didn't mean to hit a nerve."
 
Yes you did. Necromancers were always special; you had to be a certain kind of person to study death magic. She was a real piece of work, though. Perky tits and pointed nipples under her tight black top. She wasn't wearing a bra, and with a chest like that she really should have been. Then again, I noticed her bouncing when she walked in the room, and she meant for me to.
 
Sex and death. It wasn't supposed to go together literally, ma'am.
 
"You didn't." I ignored her pointy nipples and the cigarette smoke she was trying to blow into my face. It only made her seem young. There was too much distance between us for her smoke to make it to my face; a more experienced femme fatale would have known that.
 
"So, can you do it?"
 
I smiled. "You already knew I could do it, that's why you came here. The question is, can you afford me?"
 
She smiled. "The question isn't, can I afford you. I'm a necromancer. The question is, will you do it?"
 
Will, not can.
 
"Cash up front, the usual retainer plus two days for this. Plus major expenses, if there are any. I'll give you an update at the end of every week, and you don't call my office every day to ask me if I know anything. I ask you, you don't ask me."
 
"All right."
 
"I don't usually do this kind of job…"
 
"That's why I came to you. You're elite. You play the game, but you don't have the power. And somehow everyone says you're the one to go to."
 
"Just lucky, I guess."
 
She sat forward, and this time I caught the whiff of her genuine tobacco cigarettes hitting my upper lip. "No, I don't think so. You're not just lucky. You're something, but you're not just lucky."
 
"That's true."
 
I didn't think I was going to get to wait until she fidgeted, but she did. Which made me smile. Necromancers are supposed to be as cool as the corpses they deal with. That's the image, if not the truth. The fidgeting made her even younger than the smoke at my face had done.
 
"So, will you take the job?"
 
"Cash up front."
 
She almost threw the wad of bills at me, blood red manicured nails at the end of splayed fingers. I didn't count it. Well, I'd count it later, but I didn't count it right in front of her. "I'll see you on Friday. I want my report in person."
 
"Yes ma'am." It didn't pay to argue with a pissed off necromancer. It really didn't pay to argue with a client.
 
I did get a kick out of watching her try to slam the unslammable door, though. Her high heels stalked down the stairs when she found that out.
 
 


II.
I made some calls.
 
She was right. I wasn't just lucky, but I hadn't figured out what I was yet and didn't see a point to telling my clients that I didn't know how I did what I did. Whatever my trick was, it worked. People talked to me. They told me things, I kept my mouth shut and listened. I guess they figured I was safe. Things worked out. 

I went over to Cherry's place after midnight. Well after dark, and steel string noise was still blasting from her brightly-lit windows. You couldn't tell she was the only one home.

"You call this crap music?" I yelled at her, coming in the screen door and past the thick oak she never locked.

"This is music, man! These are the classics."

"My classic ass," I told her, before she turned the music down so she wouldn't hear me and get shirty. "Why do you listen to this crap?"

Cherry stared at me like I was the crazy one. "This is Hendrix. How can you not like Hendrix?"

"Easily. Never mind, I got something I want to show you."

We spread out over her dining table, crime scene photos and witness reports. She didn't ask how I'd gotten this out of the cops and I didn't tell. Some things the local ADA didn't need to know, and as long as I didn't tell her where I'd gotten them she could pretend I still had all the right licenses. Or that some of the stuff I had you could only get with a shield on your belt.

She popped a licorice vine into her mouth and chewed on it like it was a wad of tobacco. "This is all wrong. The powder evidence, the angle of the gun considering the type of weapon used, what'd he do, blow his brains out with his big toe?"

"A shotgun barrel between the teeth does kind of seem like overkill."

"Well, depending on what it was, might be just enough kill."

Cherry's lapdog walked into the dining room like belonged there even with the wet fur smell. Maybe he did. Last time I'd been around she hadn't let him up on the couch, and today he put his paws up on her table. She didn't scratch behind his ears or anything though. Just gave him the sideways eye.

"You see something?"

His ears popped up. "Patterns don't look right for a human. Might be it were somethin' wearing human skin, but it weren't human. Take a trick to know a trick, that were somethin' disguised as somethin' else, might be the shotgun did the trick." He turned his head over to me, tongue dangling out of his mouth and dripping on her floor. "Your client come to you with this and didn't tell you? Might be she's in deeper than she thought."

 

 
III.
Corpses don't come cheap. Necromancers buy them off for their apprentices to practice on, trade them with junkies and alcoholics so the dead don't have the strength to fight them when they rise. The people who keep things like whitehounds and chimera buy them for feed so they don't get caught on manslaughter charges.  People donate them for science, for research, people get themselves cremated so they can't be brought back to give evidence or be somebody's plaything. It's hard to find a corpse these days that hasn't been claimed before the tag's even tied.

This one hadn't been claimed by next of kin or donated. I got the name of the manager of the morgue he'd been routed to and outbid two whitehound breeders and a woman with too many teeth in her mouth for the body. They could tear each other apart for the next two unucky stiffs to come rolling in.

"What am I supposed to do with a body?"

She sounded angry. I didn't smile. That would be crass. "Do your stuff."

"I told you, he can't talk. He's missing most of his ..."

"Lower jaw, I know. He can still write, right? Or point at a picture in a lineup. Just do your thing, and trust me. I know what I'm doing."

The necromancer gave me the stink eye,  but at least she wasn't blowing smoke in my face anymore.  Her lips and nails were black today, inverted from the deep burgundy satin pants suit she was wearing. When she bent over the body on my desk I could tell she wasn't wearing panties. Did she always have sex on her mind or did she just want people to think that about her? I had to admit, on someone else, it might have worked. She had done all the right things to push all the usual buttons for someone who liked women. But she was a necromancer.

There was a whisper of dead flesh when she raised him. People say it's all in the mind, but I'm not the only one who's heard it. Like crumbling leaves when you pick them up, brushing dead skin off your arm. It's a sound that makes you uncomfortable no matter who you are, and it's part of why people don't like necromancers.

I got other reasons, but that's just me.

I did what Cherry's friend told me to do. I grabbed his hand and massaged it till the claws popped. The arm moved, pulling closer into its chest as it tried to protect itself from whatever was playing with its livelihood. I snapped open a vial under what was left of its nose and then jumped back as it lunged forward, claws waving and canines descending.

The necromancer hadn't expected that. She even screamed. We both pretended she hadn't.

"What the hell was that?" she breathed, one hand pressed to her heaving bosom or whatever she called the front of her suit. I called it a neckline plunging to the ocean depths when I told Cherry later.

I took a couple of breaths myself. "That ... I could be wrong. I haven't met one of those before. Not that I knew at the time, anyway."

"But?"  

"I think it's a Hellhound."




IV.
Cherry stretched out on the couch and tucked her feet under the cushion at the opposite end while I told her what had happened. She had a mug of tea between her palms that she hadn't touched since I started talking. I didn't know if she was scared or just listening and distracted.

"And she really didn't know?"

"Surprise seemed real. You know how people talk to me. She said she'd have to re-negotiate, I don't think she meant for me to hear that."

She snorted. "I bet she didn't. So, are you going to?"

I blinked. In the kitchen, the coyote's nails clacked on the floor. Mangy little shit was probably rummaging for food. "Going to what?"

"Keep investigating."

I didn't want to do this. I didn't want to lie to her or get on her bad side, either one. My head shook while I thought about all the bad things that were going to come down on everyone because of this. This was bad news any way I looked at it. "No. I'll return the rest of her money, this isn't something I want to get involved in. This is a Hellhound."

Her mouth wrinkled. "Smart, very smart. Who are you, and what have you done with..."

"That's not funny."

Her mouth smoothed again. "No. No it's not, and that's exactly my point. You know how Hellhounds work. You know what they are, and what they can do. And this bitch..."

"Cherry!"

"Excuse me. She's a lady." She made a noise better suited to the scrap of fur in the next room. "Whoever she is, she dragged you into this without telling you what you were getting into, maybe because of someone who didn't even tell her what she was getting into. This isn't shady deals or a missing boyfriend, this is for real. And you don't want to get involved in this."

I sat up against her chair, dropped my arms from the back.  "Have you been hearing something I haven't?"

Cherry gave me her courtroom look. "It's a Hellhound. They're all in the system, every last one of them."

"Weren't a one of them shat out of the earth didn't have a leanin towards doing bad things." The coyote clacked up behind me.

"Your nails need clipped," I told him, not wanting to look around to see what he had in his mouth.

"Your hair needs washed. Could maintain engines with the grease in there."

Cherry gagged. "Take it outside if you're going to do that."

A couple yips from the bastard's muzzle, and he sat down, tail thumping. "She's right, though. Hellhounds is bad news. You mix with one of them, you askin for more than you can bite off and carry out."

He was looking out for me now. That by itself was enough to start the alarm bells ringing. Cherry was putting on her ADA face, too, she didn't usually do that with me. What I did was too half-legal for her to wear that hat around me. It was a week of unprecedented things. Didn't make for a promising weekend coming up. I stuck around and shared a couple beers with Cherry before I went home to stare at the ceiling. Might as well take a night to clear my head before I popped the cork on this.




V.
The cork popped without me. So did she.

The necromancer's pretty eyes stared up at me. Long legs stretched out over the asphalt. Head injury, they'd say. Dangerous ground, heels like those, no wonder she'd slipped and fallen. Tragic accident. The odds of dying in a slip and fall even in this weather were small enough that it had me running down the line of cliches. This was as much an accident as that shotgun to the face was a suicide.

"Guess you won't be needing that money back," I commented. She didn't disagree. The cigarette she'd been smoking lay a few inches from her outstretched hand, damp. Lipsticked in purple.

Now why did that bother me so much?

"Because the angle's all wrong," I realized. Not the cigarette, her hand. It didn't lay like it would if she'd fallen and dropped her cigarette at the same time. She'd had a second, maybe two, to leave me a sign.

I looked over where the cigarette was pointing. That myth about dead eyes capturing the moment of their death is just that, a myth, but windows can do the same thing for real. If there was a good angle on them. I'd have to trust the detective in charge, though, and I didn't want to. So I wrote down the license plate. Cherry could get me a county witch I could trust, she could get an etching off the glass.

At least this wasn't Hellhounds. Hellhounds left their mark when they killed, they weren't known for restraint. This was subtle, quiet, the same kind of quiet that made that Hellhound kill himself with a shotgun to the face which, now that I was thinking about it, might be the best way to kill one of the bastards.

But subtle was worse. It left all kinds of possibilities open. A conspiracy, maybe just a couple of really good assassins, motives and means and opportunity.

I thought about what Cherry would say when I asked her to get me that witch. She'd be right. This wasn't my problem. I didn't have a stake in this, no reason to get involved.

"Hey."

Cop voice over my shoulder. I didn't turn around.

"You done here?"

I stood up, knees popping, and crumpled the piece of paper in my pocket. "Yeah. I'm done."