Shrouds of Darkness (13 page)

“Can you get a copy of these for me?”

“Sure. Do you have a thumb drive?”

I look at Raj as if he had just asked me if I had a tail.

“You do know what a thumb drive is?”

“Sure, it’s how you pop some guy’s eyeball out of the socket,” I reply with a miming gesture of jabbing my thumb at Raj’s head.

“I’m afraid to ask this, but do you have an email address?” Raj asks with a sigh.

“I don’t think I even have a mailbox.”

“Jesus, Leo, what planet are you from? I would burn them onto a disk but something tells me you do not own a computer. Do you even have electricity?”

“Off and on,” I reply with a shrug.

“Fine, I’ll print them out,” Raj says resignedly.

A few clicks and Raj’s printer started spewing out hi-resolution color images. He slides them into a large, manila distribution envelope and hands them to me.

“So what do you do now, start hunting it down?”

“The problem with hunting weres is that it’s real easy for them to start hunting you and that’s not particularly healthy,” I tell him.

“If you don’t hunt it down then what are you going to do?”

“Oh I’m going to hunt him down, but first I need to make sure I’m hunting the right werewolf. It’s bad enough hunting the right one, but if you jump the wrong one it creates another level of pain in the ass best avoided.”

Raj gives me a grin. “You ever hunt the wrong one before?”

“Once, and it was succinctly unpleasant. It left me even more unpopular with the weres than the rest of my kind.”

“What are you going to do when you find it?”

I sigh and shake my head. “I have no idea.”

“Can’t you just kill him, like a rabid dog?”

“Not only is that terribly insensitive of you, Raj, it’s a political goat screw. There are other complications attached as well. It is just now dawning on me that there is no way I’m going to get paid enough for this.”

“You told me you have had to put people down before. Why’s this so different?”

“If it was a vampire it would be easy. He’s in my ward breaking the law. Since it’s a werewolf, there’s sort of a jurisdiction thing involved. When one kind kills the other you can expect a huge shit storm, and that’s when it’s justified.”

Raj furrows his brow as he asks me, “Can’t you just hand it off to whatever werewolves handle this sort of thing?”

“It’s complicated. Not only are werewolves unsubtle, they tend to act first then think later if at all. I also have a client that has a vested interest in concluding this without folks getting torn to pieces.”

If I went to the weres and told them about the bodies and that I am looking for Mr. Goldstein then the wolves might also start looking for him and that had a high probability of not turning out well for him or my paycheck. Unfortunately, weres are a close-knit bunch of fur balls and if I hope to find out anything about Martin, I have few other options.

By the time I leave Raj’s office, I know where I need to go and that does not thrill me at all. I will definitely need to pick up a few things from my office first. The cab I called from Raj’s office pulls up to the front of the medical examiner’s office a few minutes later.

It is a short ride and within a few minutes, I’m home. I disable the alarms, heave open the steel security door, and step into the largely empty, cavernous chamber that I call home. They say a man’s home is his castle. Anyone looking at mine would think I only got the dungeon, which is fine with me. No one ever tries to rob a dungeon.

I step into my hidden arms room once more and begin transferring some tools of my trade into various pockets and straps of my
custom-made Miguel Caballero
bullet resistant trench coat. At over three grand a pop, it reminds me of one of the reasons I’m perpetually broke.

The first thing I grab is my sword and I slide it into the sheath built into the inside left breast of the jacket. Next is a can of bear spray and not the kind you pick up at your local sporting goods store. Federal regulations limit the maximum CRC to two percent. Mine is custom made at five percent.

Then I drop a few small explosives with remote detonators into my right pocket because you just never know when you might need to blow something up. Like the old saying goes: better to have explosives and not need them than need them and not have them.

I save my favorite for last. Opening the padded plastic case and looking upon the beauty inside is the closest thing to a sexual experience I’ve had in a very long time.

I cannot help but smile as I lift the Smith and Wesson .500 magnum. It too is custom-made just for me. I sawed the barrel down to svelte five inches, down from the standard length of nearly nine. Anyone with less than superhuman strength would probably get their wrist broken if they fired it.

In the movies, cowboys always had names for their favorite guns, usually something stupid like Betsy. I named my gun Shalonda because she was big, black, and when she shot her mouth off someone was going to have their day ruined.

I named her after an unfortunate encounter with a woman at the DMV. I had been standing in line for the better part of the morning to renew my driver’s license. Sometimes I have to play chauffeur in addition to bodyguard and getting in trouble for something stupid like an expired license is just dumb.

Unfortunately, after finally reaching the front of the line, I am not too politely informed by Shalonda that my license was expired and I would have to retest. Given my already prickly disposition, my lack of patience, and being forced to stand nuts to butt with what I generally feel are cattle, I let Shalonda know exactly how I felt about that.

She proceeded to open a verbal can of whoop ass the likes of which I had never seen much less been the target of. She reduced me to a pile of my elemental components right there in the lobby of the DMV. When she finally finished berating me like a vile child she loudly let everybody know that she was going on break and wouldn’t be back for a half hour after that “Matrix-looking, cracker mother fucker” in the trench coat was gone.

It did not help that I got the stink eye from everyone that now either had to wait for her to come back or slide over to another line. That incident left me so traumatized it was three years before I went back and finally renewed my license. I don’t know what kind of masochist resides inside of me, but I think I could have married that woman.

The gun slides comfortably into the holster built into my left coat pocket. The special construction of the pocket makes it nearly undetectable to the naked eye. Given where I have to go, nothing less than a howitzer would make me feel truly safe, but I have to talk to people to find out about Martin, and unfortunately those people are werewolves.

Another thirty-minute cab ride takes me to an alley bar on east Tremont. I step out of the cab near the end of the alley, navigate my way past the refuse that lines the tall brick walls to either side, and stride confidently but carefully towards the huge, leather-clad man guarding the door.

He does not even try to hide the sneer carved onto his face as he watches me stroll down the alley. As I reach for the handle of the steel door, he stops me with an open palm that nearly covers my entire chest.

“Where do you think you’re going, leech?”

I really hate being touched.

“Inside,” I growl as politely as I can, which means with barely suppressed hostility.

The man shakes his big, shaggy, greasy, reddish-brown, head. “Not gonna happen.”

“Fine, maybe you can help, Mr…?” I ask him with a sigh.

“Meat.”

“Meat? Oh that’s charming. Is that short for dead meat or something?”

“Ain’t short for nothing.”

I sigh again. “Fine, Meat, do you know Martin Goldstein?”

“Why the hell would I tell the likes of you if I do?”

I’m not the least surprised at his contrariness. Weres are an unpleasant lot at the best of times and me being a vampire does not bring out their best behavior, and me being me tends to bring out outright hostility with a high probability of violence so I need to tread carefully.

“Meat, it is important that I talk to someone about Mr. Goldstein. Now if you don’t want to talk to me then I will need to talk to someone inside. So you can A: answer my question, B: let me inside so I can ask someone in there, or C: continue to be an enormous pain in the ass in which case I will go through you and talk to someone inside.”

Meat gets the type of grin on his face that says he really wants to go with option C, but he surprises me by answering my question.

“Yeah, I know Marty.”

“Now we are making progress. When was the last time you saw him?”

“Yesterday, getting his dick sucked by your mother on the corner of fuck you street and kiss my ass avenue.”

Son of a bitch, I walked into that one. I don’t know what pisses me off more; getting slapped with a “your mother” joke or the fact that I just got out smart-assed by a talking dog. I have to work very hard to suppress my mounting irritation.

Meat is playing me but all I need to do is show some restraint and patience and I can get him to tell me about Martin or let me inside. Unfortunately, I have neither of those things so I shoot him dead in the face with my bear spray.

Meat immediately begins howling and clawing at his face. I step away from his wild thrashing and move around him to the door he is no longer doing a very good job of guarding. I glance behind me and see he is quickly shifting, so I nonchalantly point my arm behind me and give him another long blast as if I’m trying to put out a fire before stepping into the dimly lit hall of the werewolf bar.

I turn and throw the thick bolts of the door, securely locking it to keep the extremely pissed off werewolf outside while I ask my questions. The gloomy entry hall opens up into a reasonably well-lit interior. There are not many patrons, being only mid afternoon, but they all cease their talking and shoot me full of hostile glares as I enter.

“Don’t worry, fellas,” I tell the small crowd, “I won’t be staying long so don’t everyone start pissing on the furniture.”

Several of the patrons do stand up now and look about to do more than just glare at me, but fortunately the man behind the bar restores a  small measure peace in the room.

“Calm down, guys. Drinks are on the house as long as the bloodsucker is here—beer only.  How’d you get past Meat?”

The owner and bartender is Rick. One of the more decent weres I’ve met. I did some work for him a few years ago so I figure that gives me a shot at not being summarily torn to shreds like a cat tossed into a dog kennel. I also hope it will get me some information.

“I snuck past while he wasn’t looking. I think he had something in his eye—or eyes.”

“Leo, what the hell are you doing in here, you have a death wish?”

“I am hoping you can tell me about Martin Goldstein.”