Smoke and Ashes (7 page)

“Welcome to the thrilling and exciting world of syndicated television.”

Peter half turned. “What was that, Mr. Foster?”

Oh, shit. Had he said that out loud?

“I…um…was just…”

“Why don't you go make sure Raymond Dark's office is ready?”

“Right.”

The next scene would be one of the first scenes in the episode, the scene where Padma's character arrived to hire Raymond Dark, someone or something in an advanced state of decay having been lurking about her windows at night. People who worked in the entertainment industry got very blasé about the dead walking.

 

“This isn't
just
a stalker, Mr. Taylor. Stalkers don't shed parts of their body…Sorry.”

“Don't shed body parts behind the hedge,” Peter called from behind the monitors. “I like the emphasis on
just
and we're still rolling.”

“This isn't
just
a stalker, Mr. Taylor…”

Tony let the words wash over him. And over and over, and the moment Peter called lunch, he dropped onto the office couch and closed his eyes.

“Late night?”

No mistaking that crushed-velvet voice. He opened his eyes to see Lee gazing down at him from a little over an arm's length away. For one damn-the-torpedoes moment Tony thought about asking,
Afraid I'll drag you down here with me?
—but sanity prevailed and he said only: “Very.”

“Hot date?”

Been there, done that, had the conversation once already today. “Not even remotely.”

“Hey, too bad.”

Oh, no. You don't get to be all happy my love life sucks.
“Bite me.”

“Pardon.”

Oh, shit. Had he said
that
out loud, too? So much for sanity prevailing. Miss a few hours' sleep and his sense of self-preservation took off for parts unknown. He shoved his fist in his mouth to block a yawn and, when he could talk again, said, “Sorry. I'm so out of it, I don't know what I'm saying.”

“Sure.”

What was that supposed to mean?

“Pleasant dreams.”

Or that, he wondered as Lee walked away.

Worrying about it probably kept him awake for all of three or four minutes. He tossed. He turned. He realized he was probably dreaming about the time Lee suddenly acquired an impressive and familiar set of antlers. Usually, that kind of awareness woke him up but not today. He heard Leah's voice say something about feeding on sexual energies, and he settled back to enjoy the show.

“Tony!”

No.

“Come on, wake up.”

Not going to happen. Not now. Not when…

“I haven't got time for this shit.”

He didn't have a whole lot of choice about waking up when he hit the floor. Rolling over onto his back, he glared up at Jack Elson. “What?”

“I've got a body I want you to look at.”

“What?”

“They found a construction worker just down from where you lot were shooting last couple of nights, torn to pieces.”

Tony took the RCMP constable's offered hand and allowed the larger man to drag him up onto his feet. “Sucks to be him, but what's that got to do with me?”

“Something bit his arm off.”

“C
OUGAR. DIDN'T THEY HAVE
one in Stanley Park a couple of years ago? Probably ran out of house pets to eat out in the suburbs and wandered into the city.”

“Coroner ruled it out.”

“Bear, then.”

“No.”

“Really big raccoon.” When Jack took his eyes off the road long enough to glare across the cab of his truck, Tony shrugged. “Raccoons can be pretty damned big. I saw one once about the size of small dog.”

“You sure?”

“About what?”

Jack downshifted and accelerated through a changing light. “About what you saw. Maybe it wasn't a raccoon.”

“You think I saw a small dog?”

“Don't tell me what I think.”

“Fine.” Tony sighed. “If you don't think I saw a raccoon, what do you think I saw?”

Another glance across the cab. “You tell me.”

“Oh, for fuck's sake; sometimes a raccoon is just a raccoon!” He sank down as far as the seat belt strap would allow.

Tony hadn't wanted to go look at a dead body, particularly not a dismembered dead body, and he'd half hoped that CB would refuse to allow him the time off. Although CB hadn't been happy about losing his TAD for the afternoon, he was well aware of the benefit of remaining in the RCMP's good graces and he'd waved off Tony's protests that he was needed on the soundstage with one massive hand.
“As difficult to believe as it may be, Mr. Foster, I believe production can continue for a few hours without you.”

“Boss, there's no PA out there yet. I'm it.”

“So if an errand needs running, someone on the soundstage will have to run it.”

Tony'd opened his mouth to point out how unlikely it was that grips or electricians or carpenters would do any such thing and then closed it again when CB added:
“They'll do it for me.”

Yes, they would. Because no one who worked for Chester Bane would be suicidal enough to refuse although they'd tell themselves they were doing it because it never hurt to do the boss a favor.

Which was also true.

As Jack pulled into the underground parking at Vancouver General Hospital, Tony's stomach growled. “You made me miss lunch,” he muttered.

“You may thank me for that,” Jack told him, turning off the truck. “Come on.”

The city morgue was in the basement near the end of a long hall made narrow by line of gurneys, wheelchairs, and a locked filing cabinet. Cramped conditions along the outside walls of the outer office made the reason for outsourcing the filing cabinet clear. A middle-aged Asian woman, wearing the end-of-her-rope expression common to professionals who fought with bureaucracy on a daily basis, sat at one of the cluttered desks forking noodles out of a Styrofoam bowl.

“Dr. Wong.”

She waved the fork in Jack's general direction and continued chewing.

“This is the witness I mentioned earlier. Should we just go on in?”

Fork tines pointed toward the set of double doors in the back wall.

“Thanks. We won't be long.”

A large hand between Tony's shoulder blades got him moving again in spite of his brain locking things down by suddenly repeating
dismembered dead body
over and over as though it had just realized what that meant.

“Elson.”

Jack paused in the doorway, leaving Tony staring into a harshly lit room at a bank of stainless steel drawers familiar to anyone who'd ever turned on a television set.

“If he pukes, you clean it up.”

Jack snorted. “If he pukes, he cleans it up.”

“Hey!” He turned just far enough to glare back through the open door at the doctor. “I'm not going to puke.”

“Yeah.” She plunged her fork back into the noodles. “That's what they all say.”

And then the door was closed and Jack was walking across the room and opening a drawer.

Pulling it open.

Exposing the dead body.

The dismembered dead body.

For him to look at.

Look at the dismembered dead body.

“Oh, for Christ's sake, Foster. You've seen bodies before.”

“I know.”

“So get your ass over here.”

It wasn't so much the body, it was the morgue and the drawer and the smell—the place smelled like the grade ten biology lab just before the whole fetal pig fiasco; he'd dropped out a week later—the combination made it creepier than he was used to.

Creepier than a dead baby in a backpack, its life sucked out by an ancient Egyptian wizard? Creepier than a man bouncing off a window, every bone in his body broken? Creepier than watching a wardrobe assistant gurgle out her last breath through the ruin of her throat?

Well, if you put it that way…

At least this guy was likely to stay dead.

Fingers crossed about that whole staying dead thing, Tony walked over to the open drawer.

He didn't recognize the construction worker, but then he hadn't seen any of them naked so that might be a factor. The left arm was missing about ten centimeters below the shoulder, the edges of the wound ragged, the end of the bone crushed. “Where's the arm?”

“No one knows.”

“Nice.”

“Probably not. Losing the arm didn't kill him; whatever took it also broke his neck. What do you see?”

“Dead guy missing an arm.”

“Tony.”

“Seriously. That's all I…”

“What?”

Frowning, Tony walked around the drawer and stared at the construction worker's other side. Head cocked, he spread his fingers and tried to match the tips of the first three and his thumb into a line of gouges ending in deep punctures. “Is there a set just like this on the guy's back?”

“Why?”

Wizards saw what was there. “Because if there is, it's how it held on while it bit the arm off.”

There was a set of identical punctures in the guy's back.

“It?” Jack demanded.

Tony shrugged. “Your guess is as good as mine.”

“Probably not!”

Yeah, okay. That was valid. He took another look at the body. Something with three fingers and impressive claws had definitely bitten the poor bastard's arm off. And that was all he had.

Not an imp, though. Not unless the Demonic Convergence imps were bigger than the regular kind, and Leah's attitude had implied they weren't. She'd said he wouldn't have any trouble dealing with them and, although his ego was plenty healthy, he suspected he'd have a little trouble dealing with whatever the hell had been snacking on construction workers.

Worker.

So far.

Great. This meant there was something going on in Vancouver besides the Demonic Convergence. And Henry.
Yeah, we're a happening kind of place.

“If you've got something, Tony, spit it out.”

He rubbed the edge of the stainless steel table with his thumb. “It's not about this.”

“For Christ's sake, try and stay focused. I've got a dead man here, and…” When Jack's voice trailed off, Tony looked up to find the constable's pale eyes locked on his face. “It's more weirdness, isn't it? There're two sets of weird going on. This…” He waved a hand over the body. “…and whatever you decided didn't do this.”

“It's nothing.”

“Oh, no. This is something so the other thing, it doesn't get to be nothing until I say it's nothing.”

Tony ran over that in his head and wasn't sure where he ended up. “What?”

“Talk. Or we stay in here until you do.”

 

“So this Demonic Convergence thing, it started a week ago but it isn't responsible for this?”

“No. Probably not.” Jack's expression suggested he be more definite and since hanging around in the morgue was beginning to freak him out, that seemed like a good idea. “Definitely not,” he amended.

“Demonic Convergence says demons to me, and a demon could have done this.”

“Yeah, but there's barely even been enough time for it to wear reality away to the point where imps could get through.” Tony was improvising now off very little information, but Jack didn't need to know that. “No way the Demonic Convergence had anything to do with this unfortunate man's death.”

Jack stared at him for a long moment and then slammed the drawer. Fortunately, the seals absorbed most of the sound. “So what did?”

“I have no idea.”

 

“Layers of hells?”

“Yeah.”

“But if hell exists, then…just, no.”

Tony braced himself as the truck briefly lifted up onto two wheels while taking the exit off Lougheed. “If it helps, it's not hell like a church-sponsored hell. It's hell like a really shitty place to be stuck in, so why not call it hell. If you live there, you probably call it something like Scarborough.”

“What?”

“It's a Toronto thing.”

“Then no one outside of Toronto cares.” Palming the wheel around, Jack hit the gas and set about trying to break the sound barrier heading south on Boundary Road. “So I can expect demons as this Convergence goes on?”

“First, demons would be a long shot even if there was no one around to take care of things. Second, I'm on it.”

“Is that a ‘no'?”

“That's a no. Although there might be a few imps.”

“Imps?”

“Sort of small, mostly harmless demons.”

“Can I shoot them?”

“How should I know?”

“You're the wizard. How long is this Convergence going to last?”

“No idea.”

Like many very fair men, Jack turned almost purple when upset. Tony took pity on him before he blew an artery. “I'll check some stuff out, okay? When I have answers, you'll have answers.”

“What kind of stuff?”

“Wizard stuff.”

“This is totally insane.”

“Don't blame me, you're the one who decided to go all Nightstalker. You know, a little denial can be a lot healthier.”

“Not in my line of work. I'm after the truth.” He narrowly missed running down a young woman pulling a two-meter-high Dutch windmill on a dolly and sighed. “That sounded inanely pompous, didn't it?”

“Had a certain Fox Mulder-like quality to it, yeah.”

The truck rocked to a stop in front of the studio, momentum fighting brakes hard enough that Tony's face nearly impacted with the dashboard. From his sudden vantage point, he could see other vaguely oily scuff marks. His face hadn't been the first. He supposed it was encouraging that Jack's driving hadn't been aimed specifically at him—he'd been starting to think he inspired a certain lunacy behind the wheel. Some kind of wizard leakage thing.

“I'm fine, thanks for asking,” he muttered as he straightened, fumbling for the seat belt.

“You're welcome. You've got my cell number?”

“Yeah.” Jack's card was in his wallet right next to Leah's. The cop and the stuntwoman. The RCMP and the Demongate. Small world. He jumped out of the truck and turned to close the door.

“Hey.” Jack leaned toward him. “If you find out what killed that guy, you call me.”

“I'll call,” Tony sighed. He closed the door and looked in through the open window. “But whatever it is, you won't be able to arrest it.”

“I can arrest anything I can get a pair of cuffs on,” Jack snarled, slammed the truck into gear, and roared off. Traffic stuttered to give him room, and Tony had an instant's unobstructed view of the other side of the street…

…and Kevin Groves. The tabloid reporter looked like he'd just won a lottery.

 

“How long until we can shoot at UBC?” Eyes rolling, Amy beckoned Tony over. “You have got to be kidding me! Who? That can't take more than a…What, them again? Right. Fine. If anyone cancels, will you call me? Thank you.” She dropped the phone onto the receiver and sighed. “Once again, UBC is standing in for every alien city in syndication. You'd think it was the only place in the lower mainland that looked science fictiony.”

He balanced half his butt on the edge of her desk. “So why do we want to shoot there?”

“Giant mutant plants escape from a genetics lab and start blinding people. Raymond Dark goes in at night when they're doing whatever plants do at night.”

“Like
Day of the Triffids
.”