Lethal Control, page 20
part #3 of The DuPage Parish Mysteries Series
ELI (2)
It took a perhaps unsurprising amount of dissuading to get Fen to abandon the idea of shooting the RPG directly at the Stoplight, end of plan.
Instead, later that night, after hours of frantic preparation, Dag and I crouched in the tall weeds, watching the back of the juke joint. A miniature compound had been set up behind the juke, consisting of a few aluminum pull-behind campers arranged around a firepit, a barbeque grill made out of an old oil drum, and tracks through the weeds that led to plank privies.
In the camper closest to us, a man cried out, the sound a mixture of pain and pleasure.
“They need signs,” I said, tugging on the work gloves to make sure they hadn’t slipped. I caught myself doing it, and I thought of Posey, and I wondered where he’d gone with Lurnice and Dutch and why he’d been so stupid. Then again, if it had been Dag instead of Reb…
Dag made an unhappy face that was supposed to mean, Be quiet.
“Like, ‘If this camper is rocking, don’t come a-knocking,’” I whispered.
“E.”
The man squealed. It was impossible not to recognize the sound of a guy getting his nut, and the juxtaposition to the kitchen noises from the back of the juke—pots clanging, voices calling out orders, zydeco on a staticky radio—made me feel weirdly voyeuristic. A moment later, the door to the camper opened. The man who stumbled out was Latino, fortyish, holding up his trousers with both hands while his white button-up hung from one hand. He stumbled down the camper’s folding steps, throwing backward glances. He spat, as though trying to clear his mouth, and when he twisted around again, I caught sight of his back: deep scratches had been raked into the flesh there, and blood stained his button-up. He was so busy staring over his shoulder that he crashed right into the grill, and the old oil drum fell over with a clang. A cloud of ash rose into the air, and the man hacked and coughed as he righted himself and shambled down a path that cut around to the oyster-shell parking lot. His trousers were still hanging off his ass.
The camper door stood open to the chill October night. I caught a whiff of either really cheap perfume or really frou-frou air freshener. When a lull came in the kitchen noises, I could have sworn I heard purring.
“Uh,” I whispered.
Dag shook his head, his face grim. He checked his phone.
The grass and weeds were wet from the rain, soaking my tennis shoes and jeans and sweatshirt, and when the breeze picked up, I shivered. I’d felt warm—really warm, the way humans are supposed to feel—for a while, but the cold was creeping in again. The smell of the camper perfume-slash-air freshener faded, and a cold, greasy meat stink wafted off the overturned grill.
“This is the longest wait of my life,” I whispered.
Dag didn’t answer, but he did check the Sig holstered at his belt. I was carrying the harvest knife—an ugly, ancient piece that we’d taken off Fen the year before. It was cold iron, and it would fuck up anything supernatural. Or, at least, I hoped it would. My experience was still kind of limited with these things. I touched the blade, and maybe it was my imagination, but the iron was so cold it burned. I drew my fingertips back and settled it more firmly in its sheath.
“Now,” Dag whispered, and he grabbed my arm, pulled me up to stand straight, and started us walking. The wet grass clung to my jeans until we passed between two campers and reached the clearing around the fire pit. Through the open door of the camper the man had left, I saw movement—a shadow the size of a human but moving in a way that wasn’t human at all, with eyes that caught the light and glittered.
Then something exploded.
I whipped my head around in time to see the column of fire flare into the sky and then sink back down. The thundering crack of the explosion reached us a moment later, dampened only slightly by the bulk of the juke joint. I blinked, trying to clear my eyes, as people screamed. Panicked shouts rose in the kitchen. Dag released my arm, but he kept moving toward the juke’s back steps. I followed. Above the Stoplight’s roof, dark, oily smoke eddied up, barely visible as a smudge of deeper darkness in the night sky. And then a second explosion lit up the night.
“Was that the RPG?”
Dag shook his head. “She’s saving that one; count on it.”
We reached the kitchen at the same time as the terrified crowd, and Dag pulled me to one side on the shallow gallery. Men, almost exclusively men, forced their way through the kitchen, fleeing the barroom at the front of the juke, trying to find an exit that didn’t take them straight into the path of the explosions. I glanced back at the aluminum campers, where lights were going on. A flabby old white guy half-fell out of one of the campers, stuffing his willie into his shorts and shouting, “What is this? What is all this? Somebody tell me what’s going on?” The only answer he got was when a huge man in a Tulane jersey crashed into him and bowled him back inside the camper.
As the stream of bodies thinned, several people who were obviously staff also hurried out of the juke. I recognized them because, now that I knew what to look for, they were easy to spot as chimeras: a white lady in a long skirt who moved with clomping, hoofbeat steps; a heavyset Asian man with iridescent scales climbing his neck and disappearing under his hair; a scrawny white boy in a wifebeater, his pecs and arms covered in tattoos that, as I watched, stuttered across his skin like someone running a projector at half speed. Chimeras, all of them. A pair of women in biker leathers headed the opposite direction, toward the front of the juke, where Fen was still busy blowing things up. I swear to God, I was pretty sure one of the women was breathing fire. Witch-style security, I figured. How much did that cost?
Then nobody. Dag risked a glance, beckoned, and headed inside. I followed. I had a glimpse of the kitchen: the checkerboard linoleum, the white-enameled appliances, the walk-in freezer. A crawfish boil bubbled in a pot on the stove, and the wall of steam made my hair frizz and left the skin on my face slick. The radio had gotten knocked onto the floor and was silent now. Someone had been smoking clove cigarettes, which seemed like a big no-no for kitchen staff, but I figured if any health inspectors complained, Nelda Pie probably just ate them.
Dag stopped to check the walk-in freezer, and then we were moving again. He had the Sig out now, held against his thigh, and his knuckles were white. We pushed through a swinging door into a hallway. Nelda Pie’s offices were one way, and the barroom was another. Music played over speakers mounted overhead, rockabilly stuff, a song about the devil doing ninety-nine. The stale, yeasty smell of spilled beer was buried under the stink of the explosions—stinging, chemical, like hot metal and burning electronics. From where we stood, the barroom looked empty, and after a quick scan, Dag started down the hall.
Nelda Pie’s office was here; last year, Fen and Lanny had gotten the drop on her, and she’d obviously learned her lesson. The door was steel, the frame reinforced, and it had so many locks I figured she spent half her time just getting the door open. We kept moving, and as the rockabilly song faded behind us, new sounds filtered in: snapping jaws, snarling, an injured yelp.
“Fuck me,” I said. “Don’t they know we’re blowing this place up?”
“She won’t care about that,” Dag said. “Not until she has to. Tonight’s the night; she has to make it work, which means making an offering out of Reb’s blood.”
“Let me guess: it’s not as simple as bringing in a phlebotomist. No, that would be way too easy, way too sane.”
Dag checked a door. Utility closet. He checked the next one. A supply room. “I don’t think so.”
“No, because we’re dealing with a dark sorcerer-spirit-demigod lwa, I bet the blood has to be fresh, has to be taken by force, has to be ripped out with teeth.” I could feel it, almost like a memory: the sweetness of tearing flesh, the density of muscle fibers shredding, surrendering to overwhelming force, the richness of the blood like velvet.
Dag stopped, hand on the next door, and looked at me.
I bit the inside of my mouth until I tasted the bright, coppery hurt of my own blood. Not velvety, I thought. Not thick and rich. Just pain, and it’s going to make it hell to eat pizza for the next week.
“E?”
I nodded. “Come on; we’ve got to hurry.”
When Dag tried the door, it was locked. He kicked the door, and then he made a face and hopped on one foot. “Darn thing is solid.”
Drawing a breath, I took his place at the door. “Don’t say anything,” I told him.
“Don’t say anything about—”
It was like ice water running through me. Like I could turn the tap, and it roared out like a flood. I grabbed the handle and yanked.
Metal screeched. Then, with a series of sharp cracks, the door came free.
Like, totally free.
Like, the hinges had torn in half.
The door wobbled, and I caught it before it could fall. Then I dragged it out of the way, revealing the staircase behind it. When I risked a look, I couldn’t read Dag’s face.
After a moment, he said, “You’re carrying in the groceries from now on.”
I pushed hair out of my eyes and tried to smile. It was as close to a thank-you as I could get; turning off that flow of rushing cold was harder, and even after I felt back in control of myself, the chill lingered. Visions carouseled in my head: cartilage crumpling under my teeth, the smell of ruptured bowels, the taut beauty of skin flayed back from muscle.
“We have to go,” I said.
Dag hesitated. But he started down the stairs.
The only light on the stairs came from above us, filtering down from the hallway. We went down maybe twenty feet, the air growing colder, thick with the smell of clay. It shouldn’t have been possible, of course; the water table was almost at ground level around here, which was why the cemeteries were all above ground. But this was the Stoplight, this was Nelda Pie, and a simple thing like the laws of physics wasn’t going to get in her way.
At the bottom, we stood in a cramped intersection: a hallway extended ahead of us, and then another hallway opened up on either side of us. A lamp hung on the wall next to us, and what seemed a long way off, another lamp broke the darkness. Soot darkened the plank walls, smudging my shirt when I brushed against it. Sawdust covered the floor, clumped with fluids I didn’t want to consider. Instead of clay, the air reeked of kerosene and piss and a hot, trapped animal smell. The snaps and snarls and growls were much closer.
Dag was squinting, trying to see into the darkness. I touched his arm and pointed overhead, where a red light blinked, betraying a security camera.
“They’ve got electricity for that,” he muttered. “I guess they like the spooky lantern touch.”
The sound of the dogfight seemed to be coming down the hallway that ran straight ahead of us, and now I could make out excited voices, so we started moving again. I walked too close to Dag, bumping into him more than once, but he didn’t say anything. Another explosion went off overhead—muffled by the earth and the juke joint above us, it sounded like a soft whump, but it had enough force behind it to send a tremor through the tunnel. The lamps swung on their hooks, spilling shadows everywhere, and boards creaked and groaned.
When the sounds faded, Dag and I shared a look. We walked faster.
The hallway opened onto a large room. We stood on a balcony overlooking a dogfighting ring surrounded by men and women—the diehards, the ones who even a series of explosions couldn’t scare off. Or maybe they hadn’t even realized what was happening. It was hard to tell in a place like this; everybody seemed crazy. In the center of the ring, Reb was naked and bloody, covered in bites and scratches. His posture was crouched, more like an animal’s than a man’s. He was facing off three dogs that clearly were some sort of Pit bull mix. The men and women watching jeered, catcalled, screamed, pounded the wooden sides of the ring. It was a cacophony, a word I’d learned from my werewolf books. Reb shook his head slightly, as though dazed; I couldn’t hear him over the shouts and cries, but his thin chest rose and fell like a sparrow’s wing. He was going to die, I realized. He was strong, and he was dangerous, and it didn’t matter because Nelda Pie was going to wear him down until one of these dogs ripped out his throat, and then she’d have what she wanted. Blood spilled by violence. The blood of a rougarou, an offering Kalfu couldn’t resist.
“We can’t go down there,” Dag said. “There’s no way to get close, not without everybody seeing us. We’ve got to figure out something else.”
“A distraction?”
He glanced at the crowd. They held glasses and bottles, cigars and cigarettes and joints, and as I watched, a busty bottle blonde did a line of coke off the back of her hand. “Maybe,” he said, but he didn’t sound convinced.
“I don’t think—” I stopped and tried again. “I mean, the way I am right now, I would probably be all right—”
“Not a chance.”
I flexed my fingers inside my gloves, trying to ease the ache, and I could hear that old rockabilly song in my head. The devil doing ninety-nine. I nodded.
We backtracked, half-jogging. Yelps chased us. A howl. And then, full of rage and pain, Reb screamed.
“We’re coming,” I said. “We’re coming.”
When we got back to the stairs, I looked left. Then I looked right.
“Flip a coin,” Dag said.
We went left and found a series of locked doors. I didn’t want to risk the noise of forcing them, so we turned around. This time, we went right and found the kennels. The smell was overpowering—animal musk and dogshit and rotting straw. A couple of Pit bull mixes lay inside the wire pens, and they didn’t move as we crossed the room. A door on the other side opened onto a sloping hallway that led down, if I had to guess, to the pit and the dogfighting ring. They’d want some sort of direct access, rather than taking the dogs through the same hallways that the spectators used.
Doors made of steel bars opened on one side of the sloping hallway. On the other side of the bars, the rooms were small and totally empty. They reminded me of jail cells. I didn’t want to think about what Nelda Pie used them for.
A woman’s cry made both of us stop. The sound was low, frustrated, and it had a quality that, as a lifer fuck-up, I recognized intimately: I called it hanging by a fucking thread.
Dag and I traded another look. He motioned for me to stay back, which I ignored, and we moved toward the sound. The hallway leveled out, and ahead, a rectangle of light suggested a doorway. A high, shrill whimper was followed by a roar of sound from the crowd, and for a moment, I couldn’t hear anything else. It was the sound of something primal, something we, as a race, had tried to entomb under churches and laws and dinner etiquette, something digging its way out of the grave because the old animal part of us refused to stay buried. The devil doing ninety-nine.
Then we reached the final cell, and on the other side of the bars I saw Lurnice, Dutch, and Posey. Lurnice sat with her back against the wall, one leg stretched out in front of her, clutching her thigh with both hands. She was still wearing the SAUSAGE STUFFERS sweatshirt, which looked seriously worse for wear. Dutch, in her borrowed SWEET CHEEKS sweatshirt, crouched next to Posey. One of the rough-hewn timber supports overhead had fallen and pinned him to the floor. Even in the dim light, I could tell that Posey’s color was bad, and his breathing seemed irregular. Dutch hadn’t noticed us, and she strained again to lift the beam until, letting out that same helpless cry again, she sagged backward.
My brain did the quick two-plus-two, and I understood what had happened: somehow, Posey had been in contact with Nelda Pie, and she had offered him Reb. In exchange for what, I wasn’t sure, but my guess was Dutch and Lurnice. And Posey, because he was desperate and frightened and, to borrow a word from Dag’s parents, a little bit simple, had believed her. If I had to put money on it, I’d bet that’s how the three of them ended up here.
Dumbass.
Dag frowned and tugged on the cell door. It wobbled open, and the screech of the hinges made Lurnice look up and Dutch whip around. The expression in the older woman’s rawboned face softened slightly, and she said, “There was some kind of earthquake. The guard ran, but Lurnice hurt her leg, and Posey—” She gestured.
Maybe rougarous weren’t much for social niceties. Maybe there was simply no fucking around with Dutch.
“Not an earthquake,” I said. “An explosion. Dag?”
Another swell of sound made him look down the hall, where light outlined the doorway to the dogfighting ring. He hesitated. Then he nodded. “Let’s get them out of here.”
I helped Lurnice to her feet, and she hobbled out into the hall, supported by Dutch.
“It’s going to take both of you,” Dutch said.
“Depends on how one of us is feeling,” Dag said as he crouched near the timber. He glanced at me. “How about it, Popeye?”
I scooted around him to get a better position, and I got a grip on the timber. The cold was there, already rising to the surface—a fever flush, only frozen.
And then Posey blinked. He stared at us. And then he moaned, “No. No, no, no—”
The door to the cell clanged shut, and the lock snicked into place.
DAG (3)
The steel bars were still rattling as I shot to my feet.
On the other side of the door, Dutch and Lurnice stared at us. Lurnice was no longer favoring her leg—that had been part of the ruse, my brain suggested—and both women wore avid, hungry expressions. Lurnice was panting quietly. Dutch’s lips were pulled back.
“What are you doing?” Eli asked. “Hey, open the door!”
“E,” I said.
“What the fuck is this?”
“Eli!”
He shot me a look, and then he released the timber and crossed the cell in two strides. Dutch and Lurnice drew back, both women growling, but Eli ignored them. He wrapped his hands around the bars, and I readied myself. As soon as he tore the door off the hinges, all hell would break loose—
