Broken Souls, page 3
“You can tell where I’m calling from, right? Some GPS thing? Then you know I’m at the observatory. You’re probably going to need dental records or something, because seriously, the guy’s got no skin left. His name is Harvey Kettleman. I don’t know where he lives. You’ll figure that out. Oh, and if you talk to him it might not really be him. Just so you know.”
“I’m sorry?”
“Not half as much as I am, lady.” I hang up the phone. I delete the history, though I’m sure they can pull it out of the phone, anyway. That’s fine. It’s a burner and the only numbers I’ve called on this are MacFee and the nice lady at 911. MacFee’ll be pissed, but come on, if he can’t get out of a couple uncomfortable conversations with the police then the guy shouldn’t be in a business where he routinely sells body parts.
I wipe the phone down on my coat, check it for stray hair, fingerprints and all that, and dump it in the bushes a couple feet from the corpse. Even if the Not-Kettleman comes back to grab the body before the police do at least there will be some evidence for them to grab onto. It’s not like they’ll catch the guy or lock him up, but it’ll cause him some hassle and word will get to the rest of the mages in town. The more people who know Kettleman’s dead, the better.
Might help keep some of them alive.
___
We are creatures of habit. Like it or not we fall into ruts, wear our preferences like comfortable shoes. Even when we know we’re doing it we’re drawn to those things whether they’re useful to us or not.
I pull into the parking lot of the Westbourne Inn, a fifties-era motel in need of a major overhaul off of Pass Avenue in Burbank. Googie lettering on a faded plastic sign in front of the building declares Color TV, Reasonable Rates and Checkout at Noon.
But it says nothing about the ghosts.
I’m drawn to these places the way the ghosts are drawn to me. Rundown and out of the way, forgotten and forlorn. Temporary ports in a storm. Hard to chalk this one up to temporary. Been here a month now. Longest stint in any place since I left home in the nineties. Well, I did spend a couple years in jail, but that was by choice. I was learning some things from the ghost of another necromancer in a cell in Arizona. Long story.
I keep telling myself I’m only in L.A. to get shit sorted out, get out from under that sword Santa Muerte’s got hanging over me. But I think it’s time I own up to the fact that that’s all bullshit. I’m still here because if I don’t dance to Santa Muerte’s tune I’m going to lose more than just Alex.
When I saw Santa Muerte last at Alex’s funeral we left things at an impasse. Sure I can fuck with her plans if I absolutely have to, whatever the hell they might be, but that just puts the people I care about in her sights. People like Vivian.
If she tries anything to hurt Viv, at least if I’m in L.A. I’m close enough to deal with it. Last time I was gone, Santa Muerte murdered my sister to get this whole ball rolling. I won’t let her do that again.
Ideally, I’d kill Santa Muerte, but I haven’t figured out how to crack that particular nut, yet. How do you kill a death goddess? That was part of what I was hoping to get from Kettleman.
The ghosts of the Westbourne Inn flit in and out of my vision as I walk to my room, their passing on the other side invisible to everyone but me. Some of them notice me, most don’t. A cluster of them hang out by my door, stopped by the palindromes I’ve carved into the doorjamb, counting the sunflower seeds I left on the doorstep.
Those alone will keep them out, and I have more powerful wards scrawled on the room’s walls in ink I’ve mixed with goat’s blood and ground-up bone that I got from a local carniceria. Between those and the psychic camouflage the presence of so many ghosts gives me I’m not too worried about being caught unaware if anything nasty decides to come calling. If anything’s coming into this room it’s because I let it in the door.
The Westbourne’s surprisingly full, at least of the Dead. Haunts and Wanderers left over from the motel’s heyday in the fifties. Starlets who missed their big break, washed out second-string actors, men and women trying to get in the door at the nearby Warner Brothers lot and never quite making it. An unsurprising number of them are suicides. Then there are the usual overdosed addicts, beaten prostitutes, a couple dead johns who had coronaries doing the nasty on a Saturday night.
The motel still has a thriving late night business and makes most of its money on an hourly basis. Fine by me. I don’t bother the locals, they don’t bother me. Sure, the place is a rathole, but that just makes it easier to leave when I need to pick up stakes.
I close the door on the yammering ghosts outside. The room is pretty standard for this sort of place. The sheets are clean, at least, and I have a couple spells that help with the cockroaches.
I leaf through a book from a stack on the floor. Mostly folklore and archeological textbooks about Meso-American gods. Brundage’s Fifth Sun, Townsend’s Aztecs, looking for anything that might give me an idea of what Muerte wants from me. Dry reading, to say the least. I haven’t been able to finish any of them without nodding off. I’ve scoured websites from a computer at the library. Trawled through online forums. All useless.
Case in point, before she got her hooks into me Santa Muerte already had a husband, Mictlantecuhtli. King of Mictlan. Ruled by her side. According to an ex-friend of mine who’s been around long enough to know, Mictlantecuhtli killed himself after the Spanish invaded the New World, which is something I didn’t know gods could do. That’s not something you’re going to find in a textbook.
I hang up my jacket, inspect it for cuts. There are a few spots I didn’t notice before where the Not-Kettleman tagged me with that knife. The fuck is up with that thing, anyway?
I have an idea where to start looking for that, but not until daylight. I need to at least get a couple hours’ sleep before I fall over. But that doesn’t mean my brain isn’t working overtime trying to figure out the other weird thing from the evening. Alex’s voice.
I’d like to think I’m not hallucinating. For normal people, when their dead friends start talking to them it’s because they’re having a psychotic break. But when it happens to a guy who sees ghosts for a living it’s just par for the course. Unless there’s no ghost there.
And that’s the problem. Alex was dead before I put a bullet in his head. That ghost I ate, Jean Boudreau, had taken up residence in Alex’s body and chowed down on his soul.
No soul, no ghost. It’s not like I haven’t been wrong about that before, of course. I thought I had destroyed Boudreau’s soul, too, fifteen years ago, only to have it come back stronger than before.
But this doesn’t feel the same. When I finally ran into Boudreau I knew it. I could feel him as a ghost. An unusual one, sure, one who broke the rules as I knew them, but still a ghost. Around spirits I get a feeling like I’m being watched, only with Boudreau it was cranked up to eleven.
I get a thought I like even less. Could this be Alex in my head? With all of the other ghosts Boudreau had consumed, did I get him, too? I’m pretty sure that when Boudreau consumed him he destroyed him completely. Of all the bits of memory I got from Boudreau and the ghosts he built himself up with, none of them seem to have been Alex’s. I’ve never had flashes of his memories like I’ve had with the other episodes. And if I were going to start talking to any of the ghosts I’d consumed, I would expect it to be Boudreau.
So, if I break it down, my options appear to be Alex is back, but he’s not a ghost. Or I’m going crazy. Awesome.
Let’s put aside the crazy idea for a second. If Alex isn’t a ghost then what the hell is he? There aren’t a lot of options for an unmoored soul. It’s pretty much ghost or gone. I pace the room, feel the buzz of the ghosts on the other side of the door, hovering in the other rooms.
Maybe I’m looking at it wrong. Assumptions have fucked me before. Thinking something isn’t possible didn’t do me any favors the last time. So let’s assume that he’s back as … something. If that’s true then maybe I’m not the only one he’s tried to contact. I got the guy killed, I can’t imagine I’m at the top of his list of folks to hang out with. But I can think of a couple people who might be.
The obvious one is Vivian. They were going to move in together. Hell, they were probably going to get married one day. That would make her a hell of a lot more important to him than me. I consider tracking her down and ditch the idea. I know she won’t talk to me.
But there’s Tabitha. Waitress at Alex’s bar. Turned into an apprentice of sorts. Found out she was a talent and he started training her in how to use her magic.
Of course, talking to her has its own pitfalls. We had a bit of a thing for a while. Hardly more than a first date, really. Then the shit hit the fan and I haven’t spoken to her since. For the first couple of weeks after Alex died she called or texted me every day, but I never picked up, deleted all her messages without listening to them. Then I threw the phone away. Do I know how to burn a bridge, or what?
I doubt she’ll be happy to see me, but I don’t really know how angry she’ll be. I do have a pretty good idea of how pissed off Vivian is, though, so in this case Tabitha’s a better bet. But first I have to have a conversation with MacFee, and that’s not happening until the morning.
Every city has a Shadow Market, those places you go to buy things Walmart’s never going to carry. Luck charms that really work, low-grade curses that’ll give your enemies warts or a bad case of the clap, protections and wards for all and sundry.
Some of the markets are hidden. Some are out in the open. New York’s got five, from the one in an abandoned subway tunnel that hasn’t seen a train in a hundred years, to the group-run stoop sale spread across half a dozen brownstones in Brooklyn.
New Orleans’ sits within Metairie Cemetery in waterlogged passageways shored up by two-hundred-year-old lumber with an entrance through a Confederate soldier’s mausoleum. One in Downtown L.A. is hidden in plain sight, selling love potions and bullet-ward charms alongside the Skid Row hustlers selling knockoff Prada and Louis Vuitton. Whether it’s a collection of street vendors selling from blankets out in the open or a hidden complex in an abandoned sewer, every city’s got one.
Used to be a drive-in movie theater down in Torrance. You know, back when everything was drive-in; A&W stands, Tiny Naylors’ car-hop diner, Bob’s Big Boy in Burbank. Big lot, huge screen. Cram five kids under a blanket in the back of your van to see some Disney flick for a buck.
Then in the eighties, they fell apart. No money in drive-in movies with tinny car speakers when you’ve got a metroplex down at the local mall. So it closed down as a drive-in but opened up as a neverending swap meet.
It’s the perfect cover. So many people selling so much crap the normals never suspect some of it’s magic. If you know what you’re looking for, usually a variant on an old hobo sign for somebody who fences stolen goods, a hook on its side with a line through it, you’ll find them.
Most of the stalls are full of crap. Luggage, clothes, computers, cookware, rugs, food, bootleg DVDs, sex toys, knockoff iPods. You want it, somebody’s got it. Probably break on you inside of a week, of course. The magic gear is a lot more reliable. Has to be. You sell some kid a busted iPad that’s one thing, you sell a mage hemlock that turns out to be salad greens you might not live very long.
I thought about setting up shop here myself when I was a kid. Seemed like a good gig. Somebody’s always trying to talk to their dead grandmother or their murdered husband. When you can get them to talk, ghosts have a lot to say, though most of it’s just bitching about the life they don’t have anymore. But then the shit hit the fan and I took that show on the road instead.
I recognize a few of the vendors moving magical crap from when I used to come here as a kid. Amazing that they’re still in business. I pass a stall run by an old Vietnamese woman, face burnt brown, carved with deep wrinkles like she’s made out of wood. She’s selling thimble-sized caps of liquid magic alongside bootleg USB drives and knockoff computer parts. Wouldn’t know it to look at them, though. They’ve got some minor do-not-touch charms on them. I doubt the normals even know they’re there.
The liquid in the thimbles is something to give you a little extra oomph when you need it. Pricey stuff, but for some mages it’s the only way to go. Not everyone who can cast can generate much power on their own. That’s where the local magic well comes in. Shit’s like the Force. Surrounds everything, permeates everything. There’s no light side or dark side. That’s like calling electricity good or evil. It just is.
I pick up one of the caps, the stall’s proprietor watching me carefully. Roll it around my fingers, get a sense for it. Magic doesn’t have a taste or a smell, exactly, but that’s what it feels like. It changes from place to place, season to season. New York is heavy like hammers and brass. San Francisco is ornate and complicated. L.A. is all over the map.
The stuff in the cap’s got the sewage stink of industrial waste, the rancid tang of malt liquor.
“Wilmington?” I say, thinking of the nearby city of oil refineries and shipping companies near the L.A. Harbor. Good for curses, I’d bet, though you could use it for anything. It’s like how some wines go better with some foods, but it’ll all get you drunk.
“Beverly Hills,” she says, not happy with my assessment.
“Right,” I say, putting the cap back. I know Beverly Hills magic. Has the tang of steel, the bite of cocaine, the stink of burning money. But there’s no point in antagonizing her.
Alex had a side business selling liquid magic out of his bar. His setup makes these guys look like the amateurs they are. They’ve only managed to siphon bits from a pool, but he had a thing called an Ebony Cage under the floorboards. Woven basket of living demons’ bones, their souls trapped by the magic. Ugly thing, but if you know how to work it you can milk all the power you want off the fucking thing and bottle it up. I don’t know what happened to it after he died.
Eventually I come to the stall I’m looking for. Jack MacFee. Wide, straw cowboy hat with a feathered hatband. Skin sunburnt and perpetually red, straggly ginger beard like a lazy shrub that spreads out from under his nose to the top of his prodigious gut. Not fat so much as big boned, surrounded by big meat.
His table is covered with candles for luck and wealth, dogeared Tarot decks on clearance, Chinese coins strung on leather cords, surrounded by the detritus of occult paraphernalia, cheap leavings he sells to the rubes who come by his table for a bit of good luck. He keeps the real stuff in the back.
He looks up at me from his folding chair, mouth a grim line. “Was wondering when you were gonna show up,” he says. He’s got a voice like a rockslide. “Got a call from the cops this morning. Had to do some tap-dancing. Used up a couple charms I was hanging onto for bigger emergencies.”
“You’re welcome,” I say.
He grunts, pulls himself up from his chair. “Around back,” he says, pulling aside a flap in the plastic tarp that makes up his booth. “Don’t need to go scaring the straights.” I follow him into a room put together with more tarp, red glyphs for privacy and silence crudely spray-painted on each wall, the ceiling, the black pavement floor. If anyone’s eavesdropping on him they should just hear static.
He pulls a folding chair from behind a stack of cardboard boxes sagging under their own weight. Falls noisily into it. Grabs a can of Michelob from a Coleman cooler, pops it open, chugs it fast. Doesn’t offer me one.
“I assume you pulled that stunt so I’d know?” he says, wiping his beard with the back of his sleeve. “Spread the word?”
“Between that and giving his name to the cops I figured people would hear about Kettleman faster than if I’d tried doing it on my own.”
He nods. “Yeah. Well, word’s spread. But there’s some wondering if maybe you did it.”
“If I had, you think I’d be here?”
He shrugs. “Probably not. But if you did, I’d like to know. Bad for business.”
“I didn’t kill him. He was dead when I got there.” I tell him the story, leaving out hearing Alex’s voice. To his credit he just listens. His eyebrows go up a couple of times, but he doesn’t interrupt. He pulls another beer when I’m finished, drinks it more slowly than the last.
“Huh,” he says.
“That it? Some guy does a Silence of the Lambs routine and wears Kettleman like a skin suit and you just say ‘huh’?”
“The hell am I supposed to say? ‘Gosh, that’s a fuckin’ tragedy’? Fine. It’s a fuckin’ tragedy. I’ll let people know that if they see him it’s not really him. But what—” He stops. Cocks his head. Eyes go narrow like he’s focusing laser beams at me. Now he’s starting to get it.
“You’re wonderin’ if I set you up,” he says.
“And people say you’re slow.”
“Oh, fuck you. And fuck you for thinkin’ that. That meeting took me weeks to arrange.”
“And that would have made an awfully good excuse to get him out in the open for somebody else to take him out.”
“Please. I ain’t that goddamn smart.”
“Horseshit. You’re plenty smart. No I didn’t think it was you. But I had to ask.”
He waves it away. “Yeah, whatever. So, what are you gonna do now? Way you tell it, seems whoever killed Kettleman wanted a piece of you, too.”
“Maybe. I’m on the fence there. I’m more wondering about that knife. Seems too specific to just have lying around. And there was more than just the skin. He had Kettleman’s memories. Knew shit only Kettleman would know.”
“Obsidian skinnin’ knife. Steals a person’s form, memories. But leaves a ghost?”
“If you can call it that. Never seen one like it.”
He laughs. “I doubt that little detail’s gonna help much. You know how many people I’ve met can do what you do? Three. Two of ’em are already dead. I’ll ask around. It’s not like obsidian knives are just sitting there on the shelves.”
