The Love-Haight Case Files (30 page)

“I can quote
Star Wars,
too.” Dagger scowled. “Don’t consider me really ‘here’ then. I’m just passing through.” He paused. “Dagger McKenzie. I’m an investigator looking—”

“—for trouble.” This came from a second dog-head, who likewise did the melting routine and in an instant appeared wholly human. This one was younger and had a handsome chiseled face, the eyes slightly hooded.

Dagger studied the face a moment; he’d seen it briefly, in the e-mail materials Pete had sent him. The dog-head’s name was Fahim Yar’Adua, and suddenly everything made crystal clear sense. Fahim, the D.A. witness, had set up Dimitar Vujetic. Was it part of a turf war?

“You should leave, wolf. Only purebreds are allowed in this place.” The third dog-head didn’t bother with a human visage, and so the words were harder to pick through, sounding guttural. Maybe alcohol blurred them, Dagger thought. A line of drool spilled from his snout to the floor. “Leave before you get hurt.”

Dagger grinned. “How about nobody gets hurt and you tell me why you set up a harmless overweight vampire to take the fall for stealing blood.” He directed this to Fahim, and he saw the man’s hard expression break for a second. “We can settle this peacefully. How about we talk outside, where it’s a little easier to hear. This disco music is so … so yesterday. Hurts my ears.”

Fahim opened his mouth to reply, but the pack leader took another step forward. Dagger noticed that the man’s human ear was also missing a notch, and he had a scar running down the side of his neck, ugly and crooked like it came from a fight. “This has nothing to do with you, McKenzie. The Tenderloin is ours, all of it, and this bar is our territory—”

“—clearly marked. I picked up on that out front. Smells like you’ve pretty well marked the whole place.” He sniffed and made a sour face, and then he stepped aside just as the leader drove his fist through the air where Dagger’s stomach had been. It might have been a mistake, coming in here, taking this approach.

“Fight!” one of the girls on the pole hollered. “Dog fight!”

The pack leader’s dog-head returned, fast as a light being switched on. That was one of the differences between the Hounds of the Tenderloin and Dagger’s ilk. Dagger’s change was more gradual, and he hadn’t been born with the ability.

It wasn’t a full moon, and so Dagger had to put some serious effort into his transformation. It was painful, like being pulled through a knothole. His heart beat faster, finding a rhythm that matched the music pulsing through the floor: appropriately “Le Freak” by Chic. He dodged another blow from the pack leader, but took a kick to his right knee from a heavy-set dog-head. Dagger hadn’t anticipated a fight in the middle of the bar; rather had figured he’d be “taking it out back” with one or two of them. It was rare for his expectations to be proven wrong, and this time he’d have bruises—or worse—to show for his lapse in judgment.

He felt the change expanding his chest, pressing at the seams of his shirt, his arms lengthening, straining the confines of his jacket, a snake exploding its skin, his palms broadening, fingers elongating, nails turning into claws. Coarse black hair grew everywhere. His pelt was thick and parts of it looked fuchsia and blue reflecting the neon lights.

Patrons whipped out cell phones and snapped pictures.

“Dog fight! Fight!”

“Fifty on Okar! I’ve got fifty on Okar!”

“I’ll put twenty on the werewolf!”

Dagger’s face changed too, and that was the most painful part. He swiped forward with a paw, his razor-sharp claws cutting through the shirt of one of his attackers. Dagger’s facial bones popped and moved, rearranged themselves as he grew a snout. His ears shifted and he screamed against the agony, even as he pummeled the closest dog-head. The scream turned into a howl as he dropped to all fours, slavering jowls closing around the leg of Fahim, biting hard, and watching the man drop and crawl back.

From a corner of his mind, Dagger watched the beast rage, finding it all compelling and disturbing. He wasn’t wholly in control of himself, and when he spoke he had to repeat himself for the words to come out clear enough.

“Why set him up?”

“Because it was easy, wolf.” This came from a dog-head behind Dagger.

“So very easy.” The pack leader howled, and two of his fellows swooped in and started kicking Dagger. They darted in and out, all eight taking turns. “We don’t care about a fat vampire. It’s his brother we send a message to! And there’ll be more messages after Dimitar.”

One of the dog-heads doing the kicking added: “We do it because his rich brother won’t pay! We send a good message.”

Dagger lashed out at the lead dog, his claws ripping through designer jeans and finding the flesh beneath. Blood sprayed in an arc. More cell phones flashed, and he thought he heard someone calling the police. “You’re expanding your territory! To the businesses on O’Farrell.”

“Duh! One day all of the city will be ours! One day!” The lead dog balled his hands into one big fist and brought it down on Dagger’s head. The blow was strong and for a moment the room’s neon spun. Dagger felt like he was floating in one of the bar’s lava lights.

“But for now it’s just all of the Tenderloin, right?” Dagger crouched and shot forward, opening his jaws and closing them so hard onto the calf of one of his attackers that he heard a bone snap. The dog-head yelped and dropped, and one of the dancers pulled him back.

“Forty on Kalu? Anyone take forty on Kalu?”

“The Tenderloin, all of it. And everyone in the territory pays!” the pack leader snarled. “Everyone!”

“Why Dimitar?” Dagger repeated. He wanted to keep them talking, needed to hear them clearly admit to the frame. There could not be any room for interpretation. “Why frame Dimitar?”

“The fat vampire?” Another one howled. “Like we said, we framed Dimitar because we could. Because we could. The stupid, fat vampire has no clue. He does not know it is about his rich brother. And that is just the start, wolf. We will pick apart Javor’s family until he pays. Everyone pays!”

“You’ll pay!” This from yet another dog-head. “You’ll pay with your life.”

Dagger’s mind whirled. The Hounds knew better than to strike at Javor directly. Threatening loved ones always worked better and could avoid a direct all-out war Hounds-versus-vamps.

“Dog fight! Dog fight!” a patron shouted. “Dog fight!”

“A hundred on Kalu!”

Patrons clapped and cheered.

“Fight. Fight. Fight.” The chant was a wave that broke over the room and hammered against Dagger’s eardrums. An image came to his mind, from the movie
Rocky.
He saw himself as the cow carcass Sylvester Stallone’s character pounded into at the meat locker.

Over and over and over.

Chapter 3.14

Pete had managed to get his troll shaman to third level and figured out that “berserking” let him cast spells faster. His character—Grimsnot, Pete had named him—could regenerate and was seriously kick-ass. But it was just the free trial, and if he really wanted to do something with the game, which he noticed had some addicting qualities, he would have to buy a full, downloadable version.

Maybe he’d ask for that as part of his salary. And maybe if the law firm really got rolling Evelyn would buy him a computer and his own desk.

He closed down the game and decided to tackle Dagger’s request for information on the recent Hound activity in the Tenderloin. Probably should’ve done it right away, but there were some beasts that needed slaying in the game, and then a quest to follow. Good thing Pete didn’t pay attention to the clock. He suspected maybe he’d devoted a little too much time to
Warcraft.

Geez, that whole
Mists of Pandaria
thing looked awesome.

He Googled various angles of Hounds and San Francisco, discarding some sites and bookmarking others, printing out a few pages, and wondering if his next character should be a shape-shifting druid with dog-like abilities. That might be cool.

“Interesting.” Pete stretched a hand toward the phone and touched the #3. It rang several times before going to Dagger’s voicemail. “This is Permythius. You there? Yo, Dagger, you there?”

Maybe the private investigator had gone to bed. It was black as pitch out. The bars across the street had closed down. Evelyn had come back from her revival quite some time ago. She’d jogged up the steps, run a bath, and then, he figured, she’d called it a night.

“Dagger? Well, hey, I’ll just leave a message then. I’ve found out some things about your Hounds. All recent rumors. Gonna send it through e-mail.” Pete clicked the button again, and then called up Evelyn’s Hotmail account. He selected the files to send to McKenzie, reading them a second time.

The Tenderloin’s Hounds traced their roots to Libya and other parts of Africa. In the late 1700s they settled in New York, and a group of fifty or sixty later provided the muscle for Tammany Hall’s corrupt politicians. The United States Army recruited the Hounds during the war against Mexico, and after the fighting concluded, they moved into San Francisco. Even though the unit had been disbanded, the Hounds wore their uniforms and patrolled the streets, persecuting Mexicans and Latin Americans trying to build lives here.

In early 1849, they named themselves the Regulators and started collecting protection money from city residents, saying they needed “wages” for keeping San Francisco clean and pure. It escalated. They robbed from stores and threatened merchants … never physically hurting those they sought money from. They became experts at extortion, and learned how to threaten their marks by going after families.

That summer things went too far, and the Hounds attacked a Chilean settlement within the city. The mayor called for volunteers, and more than two hundred citizens—many of them who’d been targeted in the protection racket—took up arms against the Hounds and caught many of them. The Hounds were stashed in a jail on an abandoned ship in the harbor, a trial was held, and all of them were heavily fined. A handful of them were given prison sentences, two of them marked for ten years of hard time. But corrupt politicians managed to free them, and they’d left the city for a time.

They were back in force now, in the Tenderloin.

Pete typed a note on the bottom: “Dagger, watch yourself. I know you’re one mean &^$%^*#@.” The gargoyle used a series of symbols in case Evelyn skimmed the e-mails sent in the morning. He didn’t want her to see profanity. “They have a pack mentality. And while it looks like they favor extortion over physical violence, I wouldn’t put that physical violence past them. They could hurt you.”

He hit “send,” got up and took another beer out of the fridge, and settled in for another session with Grimsnot, the kick-ass troll shaman.

Chapter 3.15

Thank God Javor Vujetic had caught her out on the street and that she’d subsequently taken his brother’s case! She had a law school loan to repay, and their little firm needed more clients and more income. She turned the loan payment schedule face down on her kitchen table, shoving it out of her mind for the moment. She’d write a check this afternoon when she got back, make sure she put it in the mail by the end of the week. If they ended up keeping the entire retainer, she’d get ahead on the payments and get some breathing room.

Evelyn felt a little guilty about taking last night off to attend the church revival. But sometimes a good service buoyed her, which it had. She’d even put an extra five in the plate that was passed around.

This morning her earworm was “It Ain’t the Whiskey,” a Gary Allen song she’d heard on the radio while surfing channels as the coffee brewed, and she couldn’t get it out of her head. Normally she didn’t like country music, favoring oldies rock when she ran. But this morning it was all “Whiskey.” She set her feet in time with the beat, which she’d tricked up a notch in her mind, and headed down the stairs from her apartment and up the street.

It was drizzling. She didn’t mind running in the rain, since it wasn’t a downpour. She had good shoes and was dressed for it. The cool temperature would keep her from overheating on her eight-mile trek, and she tied her hoodie tight to keep her hair dry. Maybe she should have stopped down in the office and chatted with Thomas first, let him know what she was up to. But then she might have ended up talking a while, and she had, as the saying went, places to go and people to see. She wanted to catch Fahim Yar’Adua at home before he was up and about and doing whatever.

She went north on Ashbury until she came to Waller. This early in the morning, she hadn’t expected many people out on the sidewalks, but there were restaurants advertising 6 a.m. specials, and so she slowed her pace and jogged in place when a bus from some senior center offloaded a gaggle of blue-haired ladies. She nearly joined them, the scents of fried eggs and bacon wafting out the opened door made her salivate. But she pushed on and headed left when she reached Masonic Avenue. The drizzle tapered and the next mile melted. She felt the cell phone vibrate in her pocket, but she wasn’t going to slow and answer it.

A right onto Geary Boulevard and she lengthened her stride. The damp had seeped through her sweats, but she felt warm nonetheless, the burn spreading up from her legs. Evelyn recognized that she was an adrenalin junkie, and running was her drug. She did her best to feed the habit a couple of times a week. Geary became O’Farrell, and she started to notice more OTs on the sidewalk. Goblin-like creatures, a green-skinned hag, and a ghoul that politely stepped aside as she jogged by. She’d encountered several ghouls since going to work for Thomas, and every one of them had been relatively pleasant. One had even saved her life during a shootout in a restaurant kitchen two months past.

Just past Larkin, Evelyn took a right on Hyde, having memorized the directions from checking her iPad before she left. Café Hurghada beckoned with wondrous smells, and she almost surrendered to them.

“Only a few more blocks.” Evelyn spotted Ellis and turned again, slowing to a walk and checked the numbers on the businesses and apartment buildings. 650. That was it. She slipped inside. The small lobby was warm. The lone bench by the elevators was empty. She sat, put her hands on her knees and breathed deep and even, part of her cool-down routine.