Grim Tidings (7 page)

“Ava.” Leo's voice made me look at him. He smiled at me, one arm hooked over the edge of the tub. His tattoos covered every square inch of skin, all the way down to his first knuckle. He wriggled his fingers at me and I scooted across the tile and hooked mine with his.

“I never imagined I'd die at home surrounded by thirteen grandkids,” Leo said. “I know when you got brought in you didn't really want it, and what Gary did to you was a violation, but it wasn't like that for me. When I got this chance, I wasn't upset. I'm glad I get more time, even if it is in a shitty farmhouse in the middle of a frozen wasteland.”

“We can't do this if you take over,” I said in a rush, letting out the thought that had been slowly crystallizing, since before we flipped the car over on the snowy road. “Nobody will accept a reaper and a hound. It'll make the other reapers not trust you, it'll make me have to watch my back constantly . . .”

“The other reapers are pawnbrokers from Hades who dupe assholes out of their immortal souls with a little magic talent and a copy of a necromancy text, Ava,” Leo said. “Same as any other small-timer in any other syndicate. Nobody trusts anybody and
everyone always has a knife aimed at the next guy's back.” He leaned his head back and slid down in the water, closing his eyes in the steam. “You want the truth, being a reaper is just like when I was alive, except instead of blow, strippers, and cutting up dead bodies with power tools it's black magic, whiny middle managers, and collecting on souls.”

“When you put it like that . . .” I muttered, feeling the tightness in my gut relax a little.

“Either way, I'm the boss now,” Leo murmured. “And what I say goes. And what I say is you're not going anywhere.”

“You're not going anywhere.” Jacob Gottlieb stretched out a hand to me, his slender fingers spread.

The forest where I'd last seen him was still dark, still muffled in snow but now the fat, wet flakes didn't touch me and Jacob's voice echoed and buzzed like a bad connection.

“Phyllis,” Jacob said to me. “Phyllis, you're stuck. You need to forget about what's happening there and come here.”

“Where is . . . here?” Even talking was an effort. I felt drugged, like Owen had shot me up with another dose of ketamine. Was I still in the basement? Had everything since just been a trip?

“You're not in a k-hole!” Jacob shouted at me, and I stared at him. Granted, we hadn't spent much time together, but I could never picture the good doctor using that phrase. “Here!” he shouted, gesturing around him. “Kansas City. Look for me!”

“This is Germany,” I slurred. “And you're . . . you're not . . .”

“Kansas City!” Jacob said again, slowly, like he was trying to order a steak in a foreign language. “Come find me! You're stuck
there. We need you here!”

“Why?” I murmured, trying to catch a few of the snowflakes and blinking as they passed right through my palm.

“The Walking Man!” Jacob bellowed as everything started to flicker and melt like the end of an old film reel. “The Walking Man is out and none of us are safe—”

I snapped conscious,
smacking my head on the dusty bed frame that was the centerpiece of the granny nightmare Viv called a bedroom. I was pinned under a number of musty afghans, Leo snoring softly beside me.

This hadn't felt like a dream a warlock or a demon could push into your head, quiet and subtle as a sharpened blade to the kidney. This felt more like a crazy person at the bus station screaming in my face and then hitting me with a stick when I ignored him.

“Wha's goin' on?” Leo muttered into his pillow. I lay back down and wrapped my arms around his waist, his stomach hard and warm under my hand.

“I had a dream,” I said.

“Oh yeah?” Leo sighed. “Was it sexy?”

“They called me Phyllis,” I said.

“Why the fuck would somebody call you Phyllis?” Leo said.

I stared at the blackness where the ceiling should be, and lied. “I have no idea.”

KANSAS CITY

JANUARY 1947

The rambling old house popped up out of the flat fields like a mushroom, looking like it had been growing there forever. The gray clapboards and mossy roof weren't anything special—the only thing that made the house unique was that it was a stop between Kansas City and wherever customers' next destinations lay. It was a place you'd forget as soon as you left. The girls working were equally forgettable. That was what I needed.

I watched the frost on the windowpane recoil from the ember of my cigarette as I looked out across the highway. Traffic was light tonight—it was too cold for all but the most hard-up johns, and
even they were mostly tucked up in bed at this hour. Most of the girls, too. Even the forced laughter and tinny music from the parlor had died down. That meant it was the perfect time to go downstairs and get to work on my fourth glass of gin. Or was it the fifth? Nobody else in this place cared, I figured as I tiptoed down the stairs, my bare feet prickling against the cheap carpet runner, so why should I?

Kathleen sat on the threadbare velvet sofa counting out bills with the crisp snap of a casino teller, her puffy pink housecoat making her look like somebody had inflated her body but left her head the normal size. She barely looked up, smoke winding up from the ashtray next to her. The corpses of twenty or thirty smokes, most stained with the cheap, waxy pinks and reds the working girls favored, attested to the night's business.

“Rough night?” she said. Kathleen—“Miss Kate” to most everyone who worked here—looked like eight miles of hard road but she sounded like the nightclub singer she'd been twenty years ago. Her voice could give the wallpaper goose bumps.

“That's every night,” I said, slumping into the chair by the window, the one where Kathleen usually sat one of the younger girls to watch for cops. I wasn't one to judge, but as brothels went Kate's wasn't half-bad—she didn't turn out young girls, she didn't let johns beat us, she didn't tolerate people shooting dope in the bathroom or selling it out the back door. Most important, she let me be Phyllis and didn't ask any questions about who I'd been before.

I didn't have to be here, unlike a lot of the girls upstairs. But I wasn't educated enough to be a nurse or chipper enough to be a secretary. I couldn't exactly furnish a driver's license or a VA card to get a government job. Hard to explain why someone with
my name and description had been reported missing in Louisiana almost thirty years ago. If they'd ever found my body, my fingerprints would show up as a dead woman's.

Aside from finding a Clyde to my Bonnie, if I wanted to stay away from Gary I had to make money any way I could. And to stay away from Gary, I'd do a lot worse than work for Kathleen.

“Nights like this remind me of Germany,” I said. Kathleen made a sympathetic noise. She'd lost her husband the first time we did this dance with the Huns, when they'd been married for less than two years.

“Shame what they did to you WAC girls,” Kathleen grunted. “Real damn shame. My girl back home in Skokie, she worked in a factory. Welded plane parts to other plane parts. Kicked her ass out the door the minute the boys came back from Europe. Can't find a job for nothing now.” She grunted again, slamming the lid of her lockbox and locking it with the key she kept around her neck in place of a cross. “Real damn shame.”

I'd told Kathleen a few half-truths, but the basic story was right. When the war was over, we all came home—Gary and the rest of us. But after that, I'd just faded away, and for some reason he'd let me. At first I wondered if it was a game, if he was waiting for me to relax so he could show up and break me down again. But I think he sensed as much as I did that I was done. What Jacob and I had seen, what I'd seen in the camp before I found Kubler . . . I didn't think that I could break into any more pieces after Gary found me, but I was wrong.

I poured the gin I'd come downstairs for. Enough of it and I could mostly sleep without nightmares. The stuff I saw when I was awake was bad enough. Like now, with the snow falling gently,
wafting down like sugar from a sifter, I could almost see Jacob's face and feel the last time we'd touched before he'd run off.

He was dead. I'd fooled myself for a while after I came back, but as more and more came out, more and more photos and film reels, and those sound recordings they played from Nuremberg almost every night during the news broadcasts, I knew Jacob was dead. The Nazis had started executing everyone they could when the Red Army and the Allies closed in. One man alone in the woods hadn't stood a chance.

The phone in the kitchen buzzed, making me jump. A little bit of gin sloshed onto my hand. “I ain't answering,” Kathleen said, picking up her lockbox the way some women carried small dogs. “Gonna be some housewife looking for her husband and I ain't going to be screamed at because she can't keep his fat ass at home.”

I padded into the kitchen and picked up on the tenth or so ring. “Kate's.”

“Phyllis?” The voice was clipped and male, and I instantly went on guard. It wasn't unheard-of for creeps to find Kathleen's number once they'd moved on and become a pain in the ass, calling at all hours. “Phyllis Dietrich?” he said. “Is that who I'm speaking to?”

“I'm sorry, who am
I
speaking to?” I said in my best vapid tone,

which wasn't all that hard with four glasses of gin warming the embers in my belly.

“I'm a friend of Lady Williams,” the man said. “I'm sorry to report there's been an accident and you're listed as next of kin.”

Lady. Sweet, round, blond Lady, who'd laugh at the dumbest joke the thickest john could pull out of his hat and make you laugh too, because she was just the type of nice girl who made you want to be nice back.

“Is she dead?” I said, and the caller paused for a second. We both held our breath.

“She's in bad shape,” the caller said, his voice softening in response to mine going hard. “I'd get here fast, Mrs. Dietrich.”

“Miss,” I said. “It's Miss. Where are you?”

Lady had been driving down to Texas to see her family for the week—her dad was doing poorly, and her brother had wrapped his sedan around a tree, and they needed somebody around with a set of wheels.

“Harper, Kansas,” the caller said. “We're a little speck off SR 14.”

I leaned my forehead against Kathleen's mildewed kitchen wallpaper, pressing into the center of a purple cabbage rose. Lady hadn't even made it out of the state. “Are you her doctor?” I said.

“Harper, Kansas,” the caller repeated. “You should come.”

I didn't bother asking Kathleen if I could borrow her car. She'd just grunt obscenities at me. In a strange way, it felt good to know that the skills I'd acquired before I slipped into this life hadn't totally abandoned me. I managed to get the old Packard running in two tries and eased out onto the snowy highway. It was a little before dawn, but the sky was still all dark except for a line of flame at the horizon.

My cash lasted me to Harper, but after two fill-ups and a steak-and-eggs special at a diner that seemed to be constructed mostly of grease and stale toast, I only had change jingling in my purse by the time I pulled in to the hospital.

A charge nurse directed me down the hall to a quiet room. The curtain was pulled, and I stood in front of it, unwilling to pull it back. Lady and I were friends, but I wasn't exactly sit-at-your-bedside-during-your-last-moments close to her.

The curtain whipped back of its own accord, and another nurse, not much more than a kid, popped her head back in surprise. “This is a private room,” she snapped. “Who are you?”

“I'm her sister,” I said reflexively, the lie we used to visit each other in the hospital, jail, wherever Kate's girls might end up where they needed a fake family.

The nurse darted her eyes from my slender, dark-haired, five-foot-nothing frame to Lady's blond hair and curves that went on for days. “Right,” she said.

I should have kept lying, but the sight of Lady stopped me. Her hair was about all I recognized—her face was wrapped in gauze, both of her arms as well. The wounds underneath were bleeding through, little half-moons all over the field of cotton. The pungent, sticky smell of iodine wafted into my nose and I choked.

The nurse, fortunately, softened at my silence. “Five minutes, all right? The doctor won't be around for ten so you'd better be gone by then.”

“The doctor called me,” I murmured, flinching reflexively as Lady stirred in her sleep and her gown exposed one collarbone, deep dark purple with bruises. I'd had bruises like that left on me more than once.

“No,” the nurse said emphatically. “He has not called anyone. This girl is an unfortunate. She doesn't have anyone; therefore nobody called you.”

“I did,” said a voice from the door. It was my mystery caller, and I spun. The nurse huffed in annoyance and stormed out.

“Sorry.” The man extended his hand. “Phyllis, right?”

“You're not a doctor,” I said as I shook it.

“No,” he replied. “But to be perfectly fair I never said I was.” He
gave me a thin smile that dropped off quicker than driving off a cliff. “Hell of a thing.”

I moved to Lady's bed rail and leaned on it, squeezing it. “She didn't deserve this,” I said.

“Nobody deserves this,” the man said, standing next to me. He took his wallet out of his inside pocket and flashed a shiny gold shield. “Don Tanner. Kansas State Police.”

I gave him another once-over at that. Don didn't look like most of the cops I'd run into. Then again, Kate's was rarely graced with the presence of such an august body as the state police. He was tall—almost tall enough to duck his head under door frames— and he wore his blond hair in a buzz cut that made it look almost white. He had a young face and old eyes—they were light blue, sunlight cutting through a frozen pond, and even as he looked down at Lady I could tell he was really seeing something else.

“I'm Phyllis,” I said. “What do the state police want with this?”

He sighed and rubbed a palm over his head, disturbing the severe brush of his crew cut. “It's a long story.”

I looked down at Lady's body again. I didn't know who'd done this, but I'd gladly get back in the saddle with Gary if it meant the means to track them down. “I've got time.”

Detective Tanner shot me a look. “You're not really her sister.”

I didn't look away. I was past worrying about what some human thought of me or my temporary profession. “You're very perceptive.”

“Well,” Tanner smiled. “I am a detective.” He took my arm and I jerked reflexively, pulling it back to my side.

Tanner held up his hands. “I'm not trying to give you trouble. I just want to buy you a cup of coffee and a slice of pie.”

“I'm not hungry,” I snapped.

“Everyone's hungry after a scene like that,” he said, taking my arm again. He escorted me across the street to an Automat, and I forced myself not to break his wrist and run.

He bought us each coffee and pie, and took a sip and bite before he talked again. “So how do you know Miss Williams?”

I stayed quiet, pushing my pie around my plate. Tanner sighed, tapping sugar into his coffee until it was fairly swamped. “Look, kid, I don't care what the two of you did together. I know what goes on with young ladies who can't make ends meet any other way. Trust me, I have bigger fish to fry than a couple of working girls.”

The sugar ran out, and he frowned at the empty jar. I started laughing, and he looked up. “What?”

“You calling me kid,” I said. “How old are you?” He couldn't have been much past thirty.

“Old enough,” he said sternly. “And I ask again—how are you two friends?”

“My name's not Phyllis,” I said impulsively. “It's Ava. But I want to be called Phyllis.”

“Fair enough,” Tanner said. “You read the papers much, Phyllis?”

“I have enough bad news,” I said. I figured if the pie was free I might as well take a bite. It wasn't half-bad.

“About a year ago I got a call about a dead girl on the highway west of Topeka,” said Tanner. “She'd been beaten and mutilated like your friend Lady. Not a fighter like Lady, though—she died without ever waking up.” He sipped his coffee. “Two more like that before your friend. The last one managed to tell me she pulled over
to give him a ride. He was hitching after his car broke down. I start hearing from Nebraska and Oklahoma—they got a couple dead people apiece, two men and three women.” Tanner's cup clunked against the chipped tabletop. “After the last girl papers started calling him the Walking Man.”

The door of the Automat swung open, letting in two hospital orderlies and a cold gust, and I shivered. Even wrapped around the hot coffee, my hands felt like they'd frozen in place.

“Your friend was just in the wrong place at the wrong time,” Tanner continued. “Trying to be a Good Samaritan.”

“That sounds like her,” I murmured. Tanner took out a couple of crumpled ones and some change and scattered them on the table.

“I should get back. I figured if there was somebody she really wanted to see, you needed to get the call.”

“You talkin' about that blonde who came in all tore up?” one of the orderlies said, hooking his arm over the divider between our booths.

“What about her?” Tanner cocked his head.

“She's gone, man,” said the other, floppy locks almost falling in his coffee. “Croaked right after you left. Doc came in and she was—” He made a slicing gesture across his neck.

Tanner slumped back down in the booth. “Great,” he muttered into his hand. “That's just fantastic.”

I stayed quiet, not moving. Tanner rubbed the spot between his eyes, the first hint of a furrow that would just get deeper the longer he did this job sprouting there. “I'm going to request an autopsy in the morning,” he said. “Not that we'll find anything. We didn't on any of the others.”