Lethal Control, page 2
part #3 of The DuPage Parish Mysteries Series
Turning slowly, Eli gave me a look, but Posey nodded and whispered, “Nineteen.”
Because that was so much better.
More details were starting to filter in. I remembered the aluminum trailers behind the juke joint. I remembered Lanny talking about a boy they kept there, a boy with eyes like a husky. You could pay, Lanny had told me.
“Why don’t you tell us,” I said, “instead of us trying to guess?”
For a moment, Posey looked like he was bracing himself. He dashed off a drink of the Sugarfield, which was wasting it, in my opinion. Then he scooted forward in the seat. He took a breath. “Reb’s—Reb and I—” He put back the rest of the Sugarfield, and when he brought his chin down, his face was flushed and he blurted, “I love him.”
Eli smiled and nodded.
“It’s not the way people think. It’s complicated.”
“Lots of things are complicated,” Eli said after a moment. “Dag’s complicated.”
“Not really,” I said.
“I’m complicated,” Eli said. “I’m very complicated. Ask Dag.”
“No comment.”
A hint of a smile flickered on Posey’s face. His death grip on the tumbler relaxed. “Reb’s real quiet.”
“How’d you meet Reb?”
“The Stoplight. Nelda Pie brought him.” His voice sounded tight when he added, “The way she brings all of us.”
I opened my mouth to ask about that, but Eli said over me, “I remember seeing you together. You and Reb looked like you care about each other a great deal.”
“He can’t have a boyfriend.” Posey rushed through the next sentence, stepping on his own words: “You’re supposed to call it sex work now. He can do it if he wants. It’s his body.”
I wondered how many times Reb had said that before Posey learned the lines by heart.
“Is that why he can’t have a boyfriend?” Eli asked.
Posey gave a miserable shrug.
“I still don’t know why you’re here,” I said. “If your friend ran off, I’m sorry. If you think he’s in trouble, that sounds like a matter for the police or the sheriff.”
“Dag—” Eli began.
“I’m not trying to be unkind, E, but it doesn’t make any sense. I’m sorry, Posey, but I’ve seen you twice in my whole life, and both times were over a year ago. Heck, buddy, I didn’t even know your name. I don’t know why you thought we could help—”
“Because you know.” The last word burned with intensity, and Posey looked up, his dark eyes fixing on Dag. “You know this—” He gestured around him with the tumbler. “You know there’s more.”
I did my best not to look at Eli. Over the last two years, we’d bumped into things that were—well, supernatural was a word people used to describe things they didn’t understand yet, so maybe that was the right word, because I sure as heck didn’t understand much of what had happened. We’d fought creatures with abilities and powers I’d never imagined. We’d met witches and seen magic. We’d run from crazy monster hunters who wanted to kill anything that wasn’t human. Posey wasn’t wrong; there was so much more.
“No,” I said.
“Dag—”
“No, E.” To Posey, I said, “I’m sorry.”
“I’ll pay.” Posey set the tumbler on the floor and drew a wad of crumpled bills from the Levi’s front pocket. “It’s a couple of hundred, but I’m good for more—”
“No.”
“Dag—”
“I hope Reb’s ok,” I said, “and I hope you find him—”
It was his eyes that gave him away. His hand dipped to the small of his back, and then he lunged out of the seat, three inches of steel coming toward Eli.
I was ready for him. It was stupid to try to grab a knife, so I kicked him in the leg. Posey stumbled sideways. Eli let out a shout and scrambled backward. I launched myself at Posey, and I hit him as he was righting himself. I got hold of his wrist with one hand, and with the other, I grabbed his Cowboys tee—I didn’t think he could grapple with the prosthesis, so I ignored it for the moment.
It was the wrong move; I was trying to force him to release the blade when he grabbed me with the prosthetic hand. But the thing was, it didn’t feel like a hand. It didn’t even feel like polymer. It felt soft at first, then densely firm, and a moment too late, I realized he was much stronger than I’d expected. He threw me across the room. Literally.
I flew through the air high enough to clear the couch, and I hit the wall. It was lath and plaster, and I felt it flex under my weight. The whole house shivered. I slid to the floor. And for a moment, it was like I had stopped but the world kept flying. Then I got to one knee.
By the time I was on my feet, he had Eli: the arm with the prosthetic hand wrapped around Eli’s waist, trapping Eli against him, and the knife against Eli’s throat. I still hadn’t gotten my breath back, so I shook my head.
“I won’t hurt him,” Posey said, the words fraying. “I just need him.”
“No,” I croaked.
“Stay there.” He took a step back, hauling Eli with him. “We’re going out the back. Stay there, and I won’t hurt him.”
“Posey,” Eli said. “You don’t want to do this.”
“Let him go,” I said, the words still choppy.
“We want to help you,” Eli said. “You’re scared. I get it; I’m scared all the time. You’re scared for Reb. And you’re scared if you don’t do this, something terrible is going to happen to him. And you’re scared it’ll be your fault. But this isn’t the way.”
Posey stopped when he reached the hallway. He was breathing hard. His eyes were glossy with tears, and the tip of the point made tiny patterns in the air as it trembled near Eli’s throat.
“Be smart,” I said. “Put it down.”
He made a tiny, despairing noise.
Slowly, Eli reached up. His fingers closed lightly around Posey’s wrist, and he brought his arm down slowly, the knife drifting away from his neck. He eased the blade from Posey’s grip, and then Posey started to cry—huge sobs shaking him.
“It’s ok,” Eli said, turning to hug him. He held the knife out behind him, and I took it, and he pulled Posey tighter. “It’s ok.”
ELI (3)
“It is definitely not ok, Eli,” Dag said.
We were in the kitchen. Dag had finally allowed me to drag him away—but not until after patting Posey down to make sure he didn’t have any more weapons. Then Dag had to get his gun from the safe under the bed, and then he had to give me lots of wounded glances when he saw that I’d topped up Posey’s Sugarfield.
I loved my kitchen, although admittedly, I loved it less when I was in the middle of a fight with Dag. It probably didn’t look like the kind of kitchen anyone would love: nickel-and-dime pots and pans from the Salvation Army, a total lack of any built-ins, the ancient, rattling Amana, the two tables—one with a skirt to form an improvised pantry. My pride and joy, and the single greatest thing Dagobert LeBlanc has ever done for me, possibly excluding all the times he’s saved my life, was the countertop dishwasher. Right then, we were sitting at the drop-leaf table, Dag with his own Sugarfield in front of him, which he was making a point of ignoring. Well, all right. It had been a good try.
“Dag—”
“He tried to kill us.”
“He didn’t try to kill us. He tried to kidnap me. And, um, stab you? Or maybe just throw you through the wall, which was actually kind of amazing—” Dag’s thick eyebrows were climbing, so I hurried to add, “Anyway, it was all misdemeanor stuff.”
“No. It wasn’t.”
“Dag, he’s terrified. And for whatever reason, he thinks he needs my help to find Reb.”
“I said no, Eli.”
“Can we please hear him out? I’m not trying to be contrary—”
“You’re always trying to be contrary.”
“Only when it’s cute! Only when I know you’ll like it!”
For a moment, his face stayed stone. Then a smile flickered, and he sipped some of the bourbon to cover it.
“I still don’t understand what happened to me,” I said. “When Richard—I mean, when the hashok—” I had to start again. “He might know something.”
I stopped myself. There was something problematic in hearing myself say, out loud, any variation of When that swamp-style vampire-type monster we called a hashok, you remember, the one I was living with, tried to rape me to death, oh yeah, and he bit me a bunch of times and injected some kind of venom, and I think it’s like a virus because sometimes I can feel it, and I’m always cold now.
Dag, because he was Dag, understood. He rubbed his eyes, and while he was still rubbing them, he nodded.
“Thank you,” I said.
“If he tries anything, I’m going to shoot him.”
“That’s the sweetest thing anyone has ever said to me.”
“I’m serious, Eli. I do not need a smartass right now.”
I took his hand across the table. He squeezed my fingers.
“Are you ok? It looked like you hit the wall pretty hard.”
Dag nodded. “Couple of Tylenol and a hot bath. I’ll be all right.”
With a sketch of a smile, I said, “Let’s get this over with. We’ll try to keep the shooting and stabbing and slaughtering to misdemeanor levels.”
“I know you’re joking, but do you even know what a misdemeanor is?”
We found Posey with an empty tumbler, his eyes hooded and red as he slumped in the La-Z-Boy. He’d obviously been crying some more. When we sat on the couch, he worked his jaw for a moment and offered a broken, “Sorry.”
“It’s all right,” I said.
“It’s not all right,” Dag said. “It’s felony assault and kidnapping, and on top of that, you touched Eli, which is a much bigger deal for me personally. Any more messing around, and I’m not going to hesitate.” He held up the Sig. “Understand?”
Posey nodded.
“You said you needed me to help you.” I spread my hands. “Why me?”
The blink had a slight alcohol delay. He leaned forward, touching the prosthetic hand where it was attached, not seeming to realize what he was doing. Right now, it looked like an ordinary hand—well, except for the bottle opener, which actually would have been an awesome evolutionary option for fratboyicus boozicus. But there had been a moment earlier when it had looked like something else. I had seen it out of the corner of my eye during the frenzy of the fight, when he and Dag had been struggling together and I, in true Eli fashion, had been trying to save my own sorry ass by literally humping my way backwards over the couch. I didn’t have a good word for what I’d seen—something dark, something that turned and twisted.
“You have the gift,” Posey said.
“Oh no,” I said.
Dag’s face tightened.
“I’ve heard this one before,” I said. “A very nice monster that was trying to eat me told me I had some sort of psychic gift. I’m not falling for it again.”
Posey’s brow furrowed. He tugged absently on the prosthetic hand, as though checking it without really thinking about it. And then he said, “But you do. I mean, I don’t know what you want to call it—the sight, the gift, the craft. But Nelda Pie says you do. I’ve heard her.”
I didn’t shiver, not on the outside, but I could feel my skin pimpling.
“Those don’t even sound like the same thing,” Dag said. “The sight and the gift and the craft.”
Posey ignored him, staring at me. “She says that’s how you found Roger Shaver.”
It wasn’t technically wrong. It was hard to believe now, a year later—a year of normal life, a year of normal things like cheating (food cheating, with lattes) and hiding the scale in the bedroom from Dag and running ghost tours for groups of corn-fed Kansans and then bitching about the tips with Kennedy, my supervisor-slash-personal librarian-slash-friend, but we didn’t talk about the friend part, and she strongly objected to the personal in personal librarian. But Nelda Pie was right, although I didn’t know how she knew. The year before, I’d done some sort of—ritual? spell? paranormal equivalent of a My First Chemistry Lab experiment?—and I’d summoned a spirit called a lutin. And that spirit had helped me find a man called Roger Shaver.
Outside, a car raced by, chased by the beat of banger rap. Posey’s eyes came up slowly to mine, and I forced myself to ask, “Is Reb…different?”
He cracked a smile. “We’re all different.”
“What does that mean?” Dag asked in what I’d come to think of as his cop voice. “Eli’s not different, and neither am I.”
“Dag,” I said quietly.
Posey played with the end of the prosthesis again. “Have you ever heard of a rougarou?”
I started to shake my head.
Dag burst out laughing. When I glanced over at him, he said, “A rougarou? Get serious. I want to know how you found us. Is Nelda Pie watching us—”
“What’s a rougarou?” I asked.
Posey’s gaze flicked to Dag. “You were in the news. The police asked questions. They said your names. It’s not hard to find someone if you know their name.”
“Dag, what’s a rougarou?”
He made a helpless noise. “It’s a story. My mawmaw used to tell me it would get me if I cheated during Lent. It’s not real, Eli.”
“Like the hashok,” I said. “Like the fifolet. Like the lutin.”
Dag set his jaw and looked down. I followed his gaze, tried to see what he was seeing. This was our house. Those were our floorboards. He’d sanded them because I’d asked. He’d stained them a weathered gray because I wanted it to be cute. Days of hot, miserable work, wearing a mask so he wouldn’t breathe in the dust and fumes, undressing outside to try not to spread it through the rest of the house. I’d found dust in his ear one time. At the time, it had seemed funny.
I followed his arm to his hand and took it.
“It’s a werewolf,” Dag said quietly, without looking up. “More or less. The body of a man, the head of a wolf. There're all sorts of stories about it. It hunts down bad Catholics. They ride bats to balls. They roam the bayou, hunting for misbehaving children. A witch can curse you to become one—” He stopped and raised his head.
“A lot of stories,” Posey said. “Some truth. He’s just—Reb. It’s got nothing to do with the moon. He doesn’t turn into a wolf, but he does…change. Sometimes. And Nelda Pie didn’t make him like that. He didn’t get bit or infected or cursed. It’s who he is, that’s all. There aren’t many of them left.”
I was trying to reconcile the teenager I’d seen—the petite one, with zero body hair, the one who could have been a mail-order twink—with a werewolf. “Uh,” I said. “If you say so.”
“Something happened,” Dag said in his cop voice. “Something more than Reb disappearing. Otherwise, you wouldn’t be here right now. What?”
Posey worked his fingers around the tumbler. The glass caught needles of light from the fixture overhead. “You know Nelda Pie has dogfights? In the Stoplight, I mean. In the basement.”
I looked at Dag. “We knew that. Lanny told us. Wait—”
“You let her use your boyfriend in dogfights?” Dag asked.
“I don’t let her do anything.” Posey lurched up from the seat and began to pace. “And before you ask, she doesn’t make Reb do it. He likes doing it. He—he’s wild sometimes. It’s like somebody else is in there. He’d never hurt anybody—”
“No,” Dag said, his voice rising. “Just innocent dogs that didn’t have any choice.”
“Take it easy,” I said, squeezing Dag’s fingers.
“I won’t take it easy, E. Dogfighting is about the most barbaric thing you can find. What they do to those dogs—”
“I know. I know it’s awful. But right now, Posey needs to tell us what happened.”
“He liked it,” Dag said. “He liked being put in a ring so he could hurt animals that didn’t know any better.”
“You don’t know him,” Posey said, rounding on Dag. “And you don’t know what he’s been through!”
“Enough,” I said. “Posey, sit or pace, whatever you want, but tell us what happened. Dag, I know you don’t like it, but that’s not the point right now.”
“The point,” Dag said.
I gave him a pleading look and squeezed his hand again.
After a moment, he looked away, but he squeezed back.
Posey took a drink. When he set the tumbler on the console, the glass rattled against the wood. “She has fights on the weekend. People come from all over. They know her fights are different.”
“She’s got a werewolf. Yeah, I’d say they’re different.”
“Friday, Reb did real good. I was tending bar, but people tell me. They know I worry. And then, a little later, Nelda Pie and a guy come upstairs. They go to her office, but I can hear them arguing.”
“About Reb?”
“He wanted to buy Reb. Like he was a dog, like he wanted to add him to his kennel. At first, I thought, you know, he meant pay for his time.” Posey scratched his forehead. “After a fight, when Reb’s blood is up—a lot of people want him right then. It’s his body, and he can do what he wants with it, and it doesn’t—it doesn’t mean anything about how we feel about each other. But it wasn’t that; Nelda Pie just laughed, and that made this guy mad. Later, I heard somebody say he was in the mob, but if Nelda Pie knew, or if it bothered her, she didn’t let it show.” Posey hesitated. “I think she knew.”
“Why do you say that?” Dag asked.
“Since last year, things are different at the Stoplight. Nelda Pie’s still in charge, but the guys who come in are different. Hard guys. Mean guys. And you can tell a lot of them know each other. They’re not the coon-ass drunks we used to get. These guys, they’re from the city.”
“From New Orleans?” I asked. “That’s an hour drive, minimum. Why are they going out there?”
“Some of them meet with Nelda Pie in her office. Some of them don’t. I don’t know.”
“This guy,” Dag said, “the one who was interested in Reb, did you get a name?”
