The Best Paranormal Crime Stories Ever Told (20 page)

Marlon drowned in the engulfing presence of Merlin, a Merlin cursed to live and die looking exactly as Marlon had not allowed himself to look, and happy for that.

Where Marlon went he couldn’t say. It was dark. And narrow. And he heard and felt nothing and knew he’d go mad if he was kept here.

And then . . . slap! Snap! A sharp small sound and the world exploded again with light and applause. He gulped a deep, anxious breath of light-heated stage air, lifted his head and almost sniffed the sound of the applause. It was thunderous. Better than ever. He’d survived whatever nightmare the mirrored box had put him through.

Then, it became too much. The continuing racket crashed on his sensitive ears. He shrunk again, cowered, even as Majika lifted her arm the better to display him to the admiring audience.

His heart pounded against the palm of her hand.

His long white hair was full and thick again, luxurious, and she stroked it with her other hand.

Majika’s giant face stared down with piercing eyes. His sensitive ears flattened at the horrid screeching of her voice in the microphone as she displayed her triumph of illusion: him.

Her face came close, smiling.

“You’ve been such a good boy tonight, Marlon,” she whispered giddily as if to a confrere, “you’ll have extra veggies in your aftershow supper, and maybe even a big carrot from Mr. MacGregor’s garden.”

While his ears and tail drooped with self-recognition, he spied his former form, now bent and shuffling, hastening out of the theater before the crowd began its rush for the exits.

MIKE RESNICK

I have just given 75-to-1 against Lowborn Prince, who has not finished in the money since G. Washington chopped down the cherry tree, and I am wondering what kind of idiot puts five bills on this refugee from the glue factory when Benny Fifth Street walks up to me and whispers as follows:

“I saw you take that bet. Lay it off.”

“What are you talking about?” I say. “Booking five hundred dollars on Lowborn Prince is as close as a bookie can come to stealing.”

“Lay it off,” he repeats.

“Why?” I ask.

He looks around to make sure no one is listening. “I just got word: the hex is in.”

“Not to worry,” I assure him. “I paid my hex protection to Big-Hearted Milton not two hours ago.”

“You don’t understand,” says Benny Fifth Street. “Don’t you know who made that bet?”

“Some little wimp I never saw before.”

“He’s a runner for Sam the Goniff!” he says. “And you know the Goniff. He’s never bet on a fair race in his life.”

The horses are approaching the starting gate. It’s too late to lay the bet off, so I just make the Sign of the Pentagon and cross my fingers and hope Benny is wrong.

The bell rings, the gate opens, and Lowborn Prince fires out of there like he’s Seattle Slew, or maybe Man o’ War. Before they’ve gone a quarter of a mile he’s twenty lengths in front, and I can see that Flyboy Billy Tuesday has still got him under wraps. He keeps that lead to the head of the stretch. Then Billy taps him twice with the whip and he takes off, coming home forty-five lengths in front. By the time Billy has slowed him down and brought him back to the Winner’s Circle the race is official and the prices have been posted, and Lowborn Prince pays $153.40 for a two-dollar bet. But I didn’t book a two-dollar bet. I pull out my pocket abacus and dope out what I owe the Goniff, and it comes to $38,870, and I know that I have to pay it or the Goniff will send some of his muscle, like Two Ton Boris or, worse still, Seldom Seen Seymour, to extract it one pint of blood at a time.

I hunt up Big-Hearted Milton, who is sitting at his usual seat in the clubhouse bar. As he sees me coming he pulls a dozen hundreddollar bills out of his pocket and thrusts them at me.

“Here’s your money back,” he says. “I didn’t deliver, so I won’t keep it.”

“That’s fine, Milton. Now give me another thirty-seven grand and we’ll call it square.”

“That was never part of the deal,” he says with dignity.

“Neither was letting a hex get by you.”

“I
tried
to find you and give it back when I heard what was coming down,” says Milton. “It’s not my fault you were ducking out of sight because the cops were making the rounds.”

“You
knew
Lowborn Prince was going to win?” I demand.

“I knew the hex was in. I didn’t know who was going to win, because I didn’t know who the Goniff was putting his money on. There were three other longshots in the race. It could have been any of them.”

“What went wrong?” I ask. “You’ve broken lots of hexes for me.”

“Yeah, but they were from normal, run-of-the-mill mages. Not this time.”

“Who the hell does the Goniff have hexing for him?” I ask.

“You ever hear of Dead End Dugan?” says Milton.

“Dugan?” I repeat, frowning. “When did he get out?”

“Not
out
,” Milton corrects me. “
Up
. They buried him in Yonkers, and that was supposed to be the end of it.”

“So?”

“So he’s a zombie now, and my magic isn’t strong enough to counteract his.”

“Look, Milton,” I say, “this is serious. If I take one more beating like this, I’m out of business, and probably out of fingers and other even more vital parts as well. What am I going to do?”

“You need a real expert to go up against him.”

“A voodoo priest, maybe?” I ask.

“Yeah, that might do it,” says Milton.

I gather Benny Fifth Street and Gently Gently Dawkins and tell them we’re leaving the track early, that we’ve got to find a voodoo priest before I can go back to work. Benny immediately suggests we buy plane tickets to Voodooland, but I explain that there isn’t any such place, and Gently Gently says that he’s got a friend up in Harlem who belongs to some weird cult and for all he knows it’s a voodoo cult, and I tell him to offer his friend anything but make sure he brings his voodoo priest to my place, and I’ll be waiting there until I hear from him.

So I go home, and I send Benny out to bring back some healthy food like blintzes and chopped liver and maybe a couple of knishes, and then there is nothing to do but sit around and watch the sports results on my new twenty-inch crystal ball. The big news of the day is Lowborn Prince, and it is so painful to watch that I almost can’t eat my blintzes, even though I have loaded them up with sour cream and cinnamon sugar, but at the last minute I decide I have to practice a little self-denial so I only pour one container of strawberries on them, and I spread the chopped liver over little poker-chip-sized pieces of low-cal rye bread.

Finally, at about eleven o’clock, there’s a knock on the door, and it’s Gently Gently Dawkins. He walks in and tosses his hat onto a table.

“So where is he?” I demand.

“He’s on his way up the stairs,” said Gently Gently. “He’s an old guy. He don’t climb as fast as I do.”

“And you left him alone?” I yell.

“Believe me, no one’s going to bother him,” says Gently Gently, and just as the words leave his mouth in hobbles this stooped-over, bald, wrinkled, old black guy, and I would say he was dressed in rags but Ezekial the Rag Merchant would take offense.

“
This?
” I say. “
This
is what you spent all day looking for?”

“I’m pleased to meet you too,” says the old guy.

I turn to him. “You’re really a voodoo priest?”

He shakes his head. “Do I
look
like an amateur?”

“Don’t ask me what you look like and maybe we won’t come to blows,” I say. “If you aren’t a voodoo priest, just what the hell are you and why are you here?”

“I’m here because this nice man—” he gestures toward Nicely Nicely Dawkins “—put the word out that he was looking for someone who could neutralize a zombie’s hex.” He smiles and taps his chest with an emaciated thumb. “You’re looking at him.”

“Okay, you’re not a voodoo priest,” I say. “What
are
you?”

“The answer to your prayers,” he replies. “Also, I happen to be the only
mundumugu
in New York.”

“What’s a
mundumugu
?”

“You might call me a witch doctor.”

“I might also call you a crazy old man who’s wasting my time,” I say.

He makes a tiny gesture in the air with his left hand, and suddenly I can’t move a muscle.

“Oh, ye of little faith,” he says with a sigh. “I ought to leave right now, but Dead End Dugan is giving a bad name to both hexes and corpses. My name is Mtepwa.” He extends his hand, and somehow I extend mine, even though I am not trying to. “And you are Harry the Book. I am almost pleased to meet you.”

He snaps his fingers, and suddenly I can move again.

“I hope you didn’t take offense, Mr. Mtepwa, sir,” I say. “It’s been a bad day.”

“I understand,” says Mtepwa. “But tomorrow will be better.”

“It will?”

“It will, or my name isn’t Cool Jumbo Cool.”

“But your name
isn’t
Cool Jumbo Cool,” I point out.

“Details, details,” he says with a shrug.

“Uh, I hate to seem forward,” I say, “but what is this gonna cost me?”

“I haven’t decided yet,” he says. “But whatever it is, I promise you’ll be pleased with the price.”

The fourth race at Belmont is coming up, and I’m getting really nervous. Bilgewater, who couldn’t beat my mother around the track, even if she was carrying 130 pounds on her back and running with blinkers, is 120-to-1, and this time the Goniff doesn’t even use a runner, he comes up and makes the bet himself: $1,800 on Bilgewater.

“That’s a big bet,” I note. “I’ll probably have to lay some of it off.”

“You can if you can,” he says, and I realize that the word is out that Dead End Dugan has hexed the race and there is no way that any other bookie will take part of the bet. “I hear you’ve got a new boy working for you,” continues the Goniff.

“Boy isn’t exactly the word I’d use,” I reply unhappily.

“I just want to do you a favor, Harry,” he says. “Don’t waste your money on another mage. I guarantee you that nothing in the field can beat Bilgewater. There’s simply no way.”

He utters a nasty laugh and walks off to his private box, and Mtepwa approaches me.

“That was Sam the Goniff?” he asks.

“That was him.”

He looks after the Goniff, and nods his head. “I knew someone who looked just like him—a long time ago.”

“Maybe it was just the Goniff when he was younger,” I say.

“I doubt it,” says Mtepwa. “This was before Columbus discovered America.”

I wonder just how gullible he thinks I am, but we have more important things to discuss, and I tell him that the Goniff has admitted that Dead End Dugan has hexed the race and that nothing in the field can beat Bilgewater.

“Well,” he says with a shrug, “if they can’t, they can’t.”

“
What?
” I scream, and then lower my voice when everyone starts staring. “I thought you were here to put Dugan in his place!”

“You have undertakers to do that,” answers Mtepwa. “I’m here to make sure that his hex doesn’t work.”

“But if no one in the field can beat Bilgewater . . . ” I begin, but then there’s a cheer from the crowd and I realize that the race has started and I turn to watch it, and I immediately wish I hadn’t turned, because Bilgewater is already leading by ten lengths and as far as I can tell he hasn’t drawn a deep breath.

I look at the rest of the field. Most of them are lathered with sweat, half of them are lame, and the rest spend more time watching the birds in the infield than the horses ahead of them.

“I should never have listened to Milton!” I mutter. “Voodoo priest my ass! I need a .550 Nitro Express and a telescopic site.”

“Be quiet,” says Mtepwa. “I must concentrate.”

I don’t know why, but I do what he says. Bilgewater enters the far turn fifteen in front, and Flyboy Billy Tuesday hasn’t touched him with the whip yet, and then Mtepwa mumbles a little something that sounds like it’s right out of
King Solomon’s Mines
, and suddenly there is a big black-maned lion on the track, and he launches himself at Bilgewater, and the horse goes down and Billy Tuesday goes flying through the air and winds up in an infield pond, and the whole field circles around the lion, who is busy munching on the tastier parts of Bilgewater, and then the race is over and Benny Fifth Street and Gently Gently Dawkins are thumping Mtepwa on the back so hard I’m afraid they’re going to damage him, and I shove them away.

The stewards post an Inquiry sign, and a moment later they announce that the lion has been disqualified and placed last, and the result is now official. And two minutes after that, the Goniff comes storming up to me, blood in his eye.

“I don’t know how you did it,” he says, and he’s so hot I am surprised steam isn’t shooting out of his nose and ears, “but it had better never happen again!”

“Don’t bet on bad horses and it won’t,” I say cockily, because as far as I know this is the first bet the Goniff has lost since he was five years old (and no one ever saw the winner again).

“You listen to me, Harry the Book!” he says, shoving twenty large into my hand. “Kid Testosterone is fighting Terrible Tommy Tulsa at the Garden tomorrow night. I’m putting this on him to win by a knockout. If you pull anything funny, if you mess with my boy Dead End Dugan again, you won’t be alive to gloat about it. Do I make myself clear?”

He turns on his heel and stalks off before I can answer, which is just as well because I have no idea what to say.

“Who is Kid Testosterone?” asks Mtepwa.