Black Ice - Part 2

[kittydesade]

I.

"Why are you lying on your desk?"

Cherry's lips were two inches from mine. Could have been because she wanted me. Most likely because she thought I was drunk and she wanted to scream in my face. She hadn't yet. Small favors.

I closed my eyes and felt her breath crawl up my nose. Red peppers. "It helps me think."

She sniffed my breath when I talked. "You're not drunk."

"No." I sat up and she drew back fast enough to avoid getting clocked in the face by my forehead. "What do you want?"

"There's been another murder."

I swung my legs over my desk and sat on the edge, looking over my shoulder at her. She was still in her court outfit and had her hips cocked like a TV ADA. Not a good sign. "Aren't you a prosecuting attorney?"

"Yeah, but..."

"Not a police detective?"

"Are you done?"

I shrugged, hands up and spread. I could be done.

She threw the file on my desk. Paper slapped all over. "I didn't give you this. You never saw it, it doesn't even exist. My boss hasn't even seen some of what's in that file."

Okay, that got my attention, considering she and her boss were tight in it together. I didn't know if it had anything to do with corruption in the department or in the prosecutor's office, or if it was just their similar backgrounds. Or their drive for justice or what. If she was showing this to me and not him, something was up.

I flipped through the photographs. They were blood in gloss, not the kind of thing I wanted to look at before or after lunch. There was witness testimony, which was a first. The lady and her dead client hadn't had any witnesses to their murders. Scuse me, accidental death and suicide.

"And all these witnesses said the same thing?"

Cherry shrugged her pretty little shoulders. "Guy lurched out into traffic, stepped right into the bus, suddenly all he's fit for is hound chow or someone's science experiment."

"Messy." I shook my head. "What makes you think this is the same guy as the other two?"

"Just a feeling. A hunch. Plus, one witness says the guy tried to hug the bus as it hit him."

"Hug the bus?"

She pointed at the photograph, blood all over the front windows and bits in the radiator grill. There were also claw marks in the front of the bus. Wide claw marks, digging in. Like someone had tried to...

"Hug the bus..."

"Uh-huh."

We both frowned. Me especially. Two Hellhounds and a necromancer, whoever this guy was, the kill count was impressive. Necromancers weren't easy to kill either, you had to get them quick or they grabbed onto their own impending death and used it to choke you with. She hadn't been as smart as she tried to make people think she was, but she'd been sharp enough to get the bastard before the killer got her.

And two Hellhounds. You had to get them with a bus or a shotgun to the face or they'd get back up and show you what color your spleen was.

"This isn't good, Cherry."

"No shit, Sherlock."

I closed the file and tapped the edge on my desk, leaning my hand against the edge. Cold metal, salvaged from an office building where it had been salvaged from a government office, and who knew where before that. "I thought you were going to tell me to stay away from this."

She folded her arms over her chest and dug her heels in. "I changed my mind. You in?"    

"You paying?" Still had bills I needed to pay, after all. She nodded.

"I can pay you. Don't think..."

"I know you can afford my rates, just asking if you'd remember to. I don't give out a friends and family discount."

"You're an orphan, and you have no friends," Cherry retorted, uncrossing her arms and turning towards the door. "I'm due back in court in twenty minutes. Let me know what you come up with."

"Other than a bad case of death?"

The door slammed, but I could see that gesture through the glass. Not nice, Cherry. Not nice.
 


II.
One murder made to look like a suicide was a murder. Not much to it. Someone wanted the guy dead, he was dead. Two murders, well, that one was a cover-up. The necromancer wanted the guy's fake suicide investigated and wouldn't tell me why, that was dicey. Could be any of a handful of reasons. No one was investigating Hug The Bus Guy, Cherry was paying me because she didn't want something worse than a Hellhound running loose on her streets. And because people told me things. I wasn't sure they'd tell me things about this, though.

First things first, figure out who the bus-hugger was. A guy who lurches out into traffic is a politically incorrect joke at best, a News of the Weird item, not much more than that. Put a name to him, a history, and suddenly he's a person with a whole unholy host of enemies and motives and possible leads and connections to my first dead Hellhound.

There was a name in the file, no way of knowing if it was his real name. I flipped through the phone book and wrote down all the names that matched. They had to come home sometime, unless they were resting in a comfy morgue drawer downtown.

He didn't have much on him. Some coins, some paper, a battered old picture of a bar that had been in his wallet. Matchbook that matched the bar, heh. Bubble gum wrappers.

Matchbook and bubble gum.

People don't think much about detective work. They might think they know, but they don't think. A lot of detective work is just making connections, that's all it is. Right now I was connecting the matchbook and the bubble gum to a former smoking habit held by one former Hellhound. Which was more than I had two seconds ago.

I flipped open a phone book and started going back and forth, anti-smoking clinics, drug-stores, everything that went with former smoking habits near to their houses. People are creatures of habit, they don't often go outside their comfort zones. Hellhounds, doubly so.

Which might have something to do with the fact that they're animalistic vicious killers. Or not. Don't know much about Hellhounds, everything I know might be a rep. Or it might be true.

I try not to find out for sure.   



III.
The apartment stank of piss and stale beer. Gross.

No one had been there for a few days. Apart from a few dishes in the sink from a morning meal, everything was pretty well picked up. No sounds of a dog, no signs of a cat. More evidence in favor of this being my Hellhound's apartment. Animals didn't like Hellhounds.

No one had called this guy in missing. Didn't mean anything by itself, this kind of place paid by the week and preferred cash. He didn't have friends, didn't have family that anyone could find. Least, not any family that paid attention to him day to day. He might have contacts who wondered where he'd gone, but they were filling the gap already. If I could track them down they might be able to tell me when they'd last seen him.

I copied down the numbers from the fridge. Opened it. Then puked into the sink.

Piss, stale beer, and rotten meat. Meat took longer than a few days to go rotten, he hadn't been back here in longer than that.

Maybe he had been running from something when he shook hands with the city bus. Maybe that was why he hadn't come back here. But that didn't explain why the rent was still paid and the landlord hadn't let his room yet. Someone had to be coming back here and putting down the cash.

Somewhere between the bathroom and the bedroom was the secret. Things that shouldn't be there that were, things that weren't there that should be. There wasn't any mess. No cigarettes, no ash trays, no sign that this guy ever smoked even though I could see the cigarette burns in the carpet and in some of the furniture. If I stuck my nose good and in it I could smell where the smoke had been. The Hellhound didn't seem like the kind of guy who would take care of that. There was chapstick in the bathroom, and under the bed I found one high heel. Not something a hooker would leave. Shoes were expensive.

So, that was a first for me. The Hellhound had a girlfriend. A bitch girlfriend like him, or a real human woman? Or not. Maybe not.

More important, where was she? And was she still alive?

Did she have an idea who killed him or was she running scared? Inquiring detectives wanted to know.


IV.
I went to the bars in the area. A few of them recognized him, a couple of the bartenders recognized her. We talked, and they gave me a couple other things. She liked her coffee, and she liked her daily walks. Sometimes he'd meet up with her after she'd been walking, and she was sweaty, but she was pretty, so no one minded.

I asked around and ran up alongside her as she was jogging in the park one post-rain afternoon. Slick black pavement and water dripping from the leaves. Everything was heavy with moisture. I hate sweating.

"You want to slow down a bit?"

She looked at me like I'd popped up out of nowhere. "Who are you?"

I smiled and hoped it helped. "I just want to talk, okay? I'm here to help. I'm here about..."

That didn't help. Maybe just that second part. She turned all kinds of pale and ran faster.

I could run further than she could. Wasn't going to help her much if it came to running for whatever killed her Hellhound boyfriend, but it helped me catch up to her. 

"Seriously, I promise, I'm not going to hur--" I stopped because I almost ran into someone, and then I stopped talking because she hadn't.

But it explained why she was dating a Hellhound.

The girl was a Shade. She ran through the wet leaves and branches, through the other joggers like they weren't even there. They just moved around her without seeing her, more than most people do in the park. Not a nod hello or a watch where you're going glare. Now that I was looking at her, she had that pasty pale gray tone on her skin, like cheap paper towels wet down and held up to the light. Her eyes had no color of themselves but reflected the amount of whatever light was hitting them at the moment; since the sun wasn't out, they were deep gray, the color of the shadows.

A Shade could survive a Hellhound if anything could. No one really knew if Shades were even alive. If they'd been people once and were dead now, or if they'd never been people to begin with.

But she was scared someone was going to hurt her. So what was she so scared of?

What was this thing?

"When did you last see your boyfriend?" Routine questions. If I started that way, I could keep going and maybe trip and fall into a clue. Stranger things had happened.

She slowed down to a walk and we started talking. It felt like a political thriller serial. We kept walking, I kept asking questions.

"He wouldn't tell me what was going on, he just got... more and more paranoid. Kept asking me if someone was following us, someone with blond hair and a blue scarf. Then it was someone with a fedora and sunglasses. I didn't see anyone, ever, but he kept asking. He'd ask people on the street. And then he told me ..."

She stopped and looked around. I looked around too, and I'll admit it, I was looking for the blue scarf and the fedora. No one within sight, even my sight.

"He said ... that there was something wrong. That they were just kids."

I didn't get any more out of her after that. "They" might have been kids killing the Hellhounds, although I couldn't think of any creature that could do that at any age that might be called a kid. Maybe "they" meant some other people who'd been killed by the Hellhound murderers. Or the Hellhounds themselves, that sounded more likely.

I didn't know. Cherry would want to hear about this. I told the Shade to stay low and call me if anything else turned up.


V.
"You're sure that's what she said, just kids?"

I shrugged. "That's what she said. Look into DCF, maybe, see if there's anything hinky going on."

She gave me the same look for 'hinky' that she did for the rest of it. "You did not just say that."

"Cope. I don't know, she's a Shade, it could mean anything. Given that it's Hellhounds, maybe they were doing something to the kids she didn't like. Maybe the murderers are doing something to the kids, but you've got a description now..."

Cherry snorted. "A half-ass description. You know how many people in this town probably have blue scarves?"

I folded my arms at her and gave her the fed-up stink-eye.  "Fewer with blond hair than just have blue scarves in general. And that's fewer than the population of the entire city. It's something. Take it or leave it."

She looked like she wanted to snap at me, but she didn't bother. "Toby's dead."

My stomach seized up like a bad set of brakes. Icy sweat dripped down my back. "You're kidding." She wasn't kidding. She didn't have her kidding face on. Toby had given her that tip on Bus Guy in the first place, he was a first responder.

"Found him in the river. Most of him."

"Ah, hell, Cher..." I put an arm around her shoulders and gave her the macho hug she could tolerate without breaking down and crying. If she cried, she wouldn't stop, and I wasn't going to make her. "I'm sorry."

"Yeah. Me too."

In the movies, someone dying means it's gotten serious. We already knew it was serious, this didn't do anything for us. It meant one more person was down. One less person we could trust at our backs. It meant someone knew that someone had seen the pattern. We were all in trouble.

She pulled it together after a couple seconds. We knew it was serious, we'd known we were putting our lives on the line for this. Hell, maybe I knew by the time I found out the first corpse was a Hellhound, but we'd all come to terms with it one way or another. She was a strong kid. Pulled herself up and lifted her chin, eyes flaring.

"Okay. I'll pick it up from this angle, you keep digging as long as you can. Don't have to work on this exclusive, but keep your eyes out, okay?"

"All four of them," I tapped the nosepiece of my glasses. "You watch your back, Cherry, okay? And tell that furball to watch it, too."

She snorted. A lesser person might have mistaken it for a laugh. "That's just an excuse for him to shove his nose up my ass, you realize that, right?"

"Don't most canines do that?"

"He's not a canine. And he does it 'cause he can't shove something else..."

I stuck my fingers in my ears. She laughed. "That's just gross."

"Wuss."

My turn to make a gesture through the glass. I heard her laugh all the way down the hall.



  
Interlude:
The rain glimmering off the streets did nothing for the smell. The pavement still smelled like a sewer; the whole damn city did. No amount of rain or street cleaning machines or scented bags of potpourri dumped down the grates could clear the air of that smell of human waste and human garbage. It colored everything underneath the sharp scents of the city's inhabitants, like sepia undertone in a painting.

Fists clenched, shoulders hunched, he walked. The rain dripped down the collar of his worn leather work coat.

This time of night, everyone was indoors or on a job. Heads bowed down and making their way through the rain, no one looked around to see what was going on. Hell, these days people did that seldom enough even in the daylight. Too many bad things happened because someone looked when they shouldn't have, because someone got involved. Safer for everyone if you kept your head down till you got where you were going. Kept yourself to yourself.

Of course, it helped if you knew where you were going. That was how you could tell a native from a foreigner. Natives had a shield of fear and uncaring around them, they didn't have to look up. They had their set paths, knew where they wanted to go, didn't deviate. Unless they were smart. Then they were unpredictable.

He liked to think he was smart. Unpredictable. After what happened the past few weeks, he had to be unpredictable. He was still alive.

"Fucking pixie bastards," the Hellhound muttered.

The rain eased off even from the drizzle it had become, giving up a little bit of moonlight through grudging clouds. Just in time for him to go indoors, but at least there was a little less cold in the air.

He walked into the laundromat. The sole occupant was offloading damp clothes from a washer and draping them over every tall rolling basket he could fit around him. He held up a hand for the other man's inspection that was covered in what was best described as a black woolen octopus.

"Socks."

With a look of disgust, the washerman shook excess water from the mess on his hand back into the unit and then draped each sock individually over the edge of the wire basket. The first man did not take his hands from his pockets.

"Did you check the traps?"

The Hellhound snorted. "Of course I checked the traps. There was nothing. Same as there's been nothing for the past three days, same as there was nothing before Chauncy bit it. Same as there was nothing before that."

His friend reached an arm into the washing machine and swirled it around, grimacing at the cold and the conversation and every other damn thing currently giving him fits of perturbation. "I still don't believe it."

The first man's eyebrows shot up into his bushy forelock. "Which part of it? The dead bodies? The blood on the wall? The..."

"Don't believe it's the pixies." 

He snorted. Hoisted himself up onto a washing unit and drew one knee up to his chest, leaving the other leg to dangle. "Not saying you're right, what do you think it is?"

The other man wrung his hands out over the open washing machine, spattering drops of icy cold soap-laden water everywhere. "Don't know. Necromancer, maybe, looking for the really good quality spare parts?"

"We hired a necromancer, she didn't find anything."

One by one, the carts creaked over to the dryer, followed by the muffled thump of clothes hitting the inner wall. "Maybe it's a Sidhe."

He shrugged. "Maybe, but when was the last time you knew one of them to come out of their little holes and take an interest in anything that happened topside? We don't even know who'd kick who's ass in a fight because no one's seen one in a hundred years. Hell, for all we know they're all dead down there."

His friend banged the door on the first dryer shut. "Shades. Water lilies. The government. Hell, I don't know." The next pile started disappearing into the other dryer. "Maybe it is pixies."

"As likely as water lilies. Those half-drowned whores couldn't stand up to anything, and half of them are human."

"No shit?"

He shrugged. "Had one, myself. It turned out she was a human with a real talent for holding her breath and a faerie fetish. Didn't mean much in the end."

Quarters clinked as they fell through the slots, and the dryers commenced to rocking. The two men looked at each other for a long moment, tension drawing out between them in sticky, tight-bound cords. The Hellhound flexed the fingers of his right hand, taking a breath and then letting it out again as he opened his fist. No point in satisfying a tawdry urge, or in thinking about it any further. Poor dumb bastard wouldn't know what hit him and he didn't want to tangle himself up with the guy any more than he already was.

"Shades?"

He blinked. Of course the other man didn't know anything about what he'd been thinking, but it was still strange to have his thoughts broken in on like that. "Shades. Um. Chauncy was seeing a Shade."

Now it was the other man's turn to blink. "He was seeing someone?"

"Don't look at me, I wasn't sleeping with him. She must have liked something she saw." He shrugged, not offering an opinion on the wisdom of taking up with a Shade. There were a lot of reasons any of them did stupid shit, and a lot of reasons not to take up with a Shade in particular. Listing them all would keep them there all night.

"So why do you think it's pixies? And don't say it's because Illyan thinks it's pixies."

"I won't. And it isn't. Think about it, we can't see the threat, can't hear or smell it until it's right there. It's tricking a lot of people somehow. It's in and out without leaving a trace. It's something with a huge axe to grind..."

The Hound leaning against the dryer snorted. "Pixies can't even lift a normal sized axe."

"Fuck you. You know what I'm talking about." 

He grinned. Teeth flashed. For a second, the lights in the laundromat seemed to wash the color out of everything a little bit more than usual, sharpen the focus. The air cooled. And then in the next instant everything was back to normal. Or would have been, if there was anything in the building other than them.

"So, nothing in the traps."

The other Hellhound shrugged. "Nothing in the traps. Just watching and waiting. Less you want to hire another player to try and shake something loose."

"Wouldn't be worth it. This is our business, not theirs."

"We don't even know whose business it is," he shook his head in disgust. "We're fucking blind, here, okay? We've got nothing. And we're being slaughtered in the streets like fucking humans."

"There's always a bigger predator, Gerard. We've been on top a long time. Maybe it's just ... maybe it's our time coming around."

The Hound shook his head slow and easy, rolling it side to side on his neck. "No, this is someone. Damned if I'm going to lay down and die for them."

Hadn't looked like either of the other two had laid down and died, either. At least, not on their own will. But that didn't matter too much, either way.