The Voodoo Killings (7 page)

“Not mine, Lee, and you won’t believe where I found him. Outside Catamaran’s.”

Cameron cleared his throat. “I’m sitting right here.”

“Yes, but I have to explain it to Lee as you currently have the memory of a goldfish—”

Lee cut me off. “And who are you?”

He pushed his mind to pull the detail up. “Cameron Wight,” he said.

Wonders never ceased, he remembered his name.

Lee flashed Cameron a smile. “Somehow that strikes me as appropriate,” she said, and continued to ignore me as she studied his bindings. I wondered if Cameron could see Lee Ling’s bindings yet and, if he could, what the hell he’d make of them.

At last, Lee turned her attention back to me. She inclined her head towards Cameron and lifted a frozen draft glass.

I nodded. “Yeah, on my tab—and top shelf, Lee, no formaldehyde. He’ll need more than one glass.”

“He’s new. Best to start slow. It is also less intimidating than a pitcher,” she replied.

“Just keep them coming,” I said. I polished off the remainder of my whisky sour.

As she stepped out of the cooler carrying a grey, frothy concoction reminiscent of a milkshake and topped with a red umbrella, I asked, “Hey, have you seen Maximillian lately?” Lee liked to make all of the zombie and ghoul mixtures look like tropical drinks. She placed the glass in front of Cameron, who leaned as far back from it as he could without toppling off the stool.

“No, I have not seen Maximillian Odu in quite some time,” Lee said.

I slid two twenties across the bar. The bills disappeared into Lee’s dress. Without another word or glance at me or Cameron, she left to handle the other patrons. Sparse as they were tonight, they still expected something resembling service.

Cameron eyed his brains.

“Cameron, there’s an easy way or a hard way to do this.”

He still didn’t touch the glass.

“Right now, you’re doing it the hard way.”

His nostrils flared and the muscles in his throat contracted as he involuntarily began to salivate. A big part of the new Cameron wanted to drink it.

I shook my head. “Stop thinking.”

He closed his eyes, grabbed the glass and slammed the drink back, forcing the grey liquid down his throat with the commitment—if not the enthusiasm—of a frat pledge. He made it halfway through before something between a gag and a whine escaped him, but he finished it all. He set the glass back down and wiped the remnants off his mouth with his hand, then coughed as he began to breathe again. “That was disgusting,” he said, staring at the glass.

“Less chugging, more sipping: this isn’t a kegger.”

He coughed again. “You try sipping it, then.”

I’d have come up with something witty to say, but just then Lee stepped back behind the bar well and began mixing drinks. I caught a whiff of formaldehyde. I’d been right: only zombies putting up with the fumes tonight, probably ones who couldn’t pass for human anymore.

I figured Lee would offer her opinions about Cameron when she was ready to, so I switched topics. “Care to tell me what the redecorating is about? And don’t tell me you found the undead, Chinese version of IKEA.”

She glanced around, as if seeing the lanterns and paint for the first time. “I had a premonition of bad luck. Red and white will help to change that.”

I looked around the bar. Considering what happened the last
time Lee had a premonition, luck was something she had to take very seriously.

Lee Ling Xhao had died during the summer of 1889, the year the great fire destroyed most of Seattle. An entire city built of lumber on wooden stilts—even the drainage pipes were made of wood. Add to that the driest summer in fifty years and a carpentry shop full of turpentine. The surprise wasn’t that the city burned down; it was that no one had seen it coming.

Lee didn’t die in the fire, though. She had been murdered three weeks before the carpenter had the bright idea of downing a bottle of whisky and striking a match.

At the tender age of fifteen, Lee had had a flourishing career as a high-end courtesan in Shanghai. Known for her gold-coloured eyes, a coveted symbol of freedom from worldly cares, she expected to have a long and illustrious career…until her twin brother, Lou, was exposed as a practitioner of the dark arts. Perfectly acceptable in China at the time, but not so much so with her predominantly foreign and very Christian clientele. A witch hunt ensued, and the two fled to San Francisco, where they once again set up shop, Lou selling his talents and Lee selling hers. They eventually followed the gold rush up the coast to Seattle.

To hear her tell it, Lee had quite the distinguished clientele, all of whom she and her brother planned to extort and blackmail into comfortable retirement. Things probably would have gone exactly the way they’d planned if it hadn’t been for Isabella, the wife of one of Lee’s more ardent customers, who got wise to where her husband’s money was going.

Stories of Whitechapel’s infamous Jack the Ripper murders had reached the northwest coast by then, and had inspired Seattle’s own copycat, who was attacking crib girls—indentured Chinese prostitutes—by the Seattle docks.

I shivered, remembering how Lee had described for me the way the merchant’s wife had drugged her with chloroform in the dark of an alley, her single scream muffled by the noise of the crowds out enjoying an unusually warm summer night.

She’d still been lucid when the woman began slicing into her beautiful porcelain face with a paring knife. The last thing Lee saw before she died was the knife coming towards her golden eyes. She’d been found in pieces the next day and carried to Lou. Lee’s brother did his best to stitch her up before raising her as a zombie. The grey china cracks running over her beautiful face were what was left of his handiwork.

I asked her once why she hadn’t found a pair of golden eyes, like the ones she’d lost.

“I like green,” she’d said. “It is a good reminder that I am not free from worldly cares. And Isabella had such beautiful green ones.”

I know when not to push for details.

I lifted my empty glass. Lee mixed me a second and then held it just out of my reach. “Quid pro quo, Kincaid,” she said, and nodded at Cameron. “You want your drink, you tell me about him.”

“That’s why I’m here.”

I told her everything, including my suspicion that Cameron was either one of Maximillian’s or a botched murder cover-up…or, however strange it might sound, both. Lee listened intently, stopping me only for the odd clarification. This time Cameron made no protest, but listened as if it was all news to him.

“The amnesia and slow regeneration is the strangest part, along with how he reacts to Otherside.”

Lee nodded. “As if his bindings are tentative at best. Are you certain Max is involved? It seems…” She tilted her head to the side and chose her words carefully. “Unlike him.”

“I know. But who else would it be? Unless you know of any other practitioners hanging around Seattle, down here or otherwise, who could rig those symbols. Have you ever seen anything like them? I mean, they look like a clock.”

She pursed her lips, considering. “With the lines set so precariously over the anchors, I’d say they were meant to destabilize, which doesn’t sound like Max. But there are traces of his work. If you were not telling me this story, I would have added you to that list of who could have done this.”

“Why would anyone want to set up a zombie like that?”

Lee eyed Cameron. The muscles around her eyes twitched with indecision and I realized she knew more than she was letting on. “Lee? What are you not telling me?”

“It is none of your concern, Kincaid.”

“
Lee
, I have an unstable zombie here—”

But she only shook her head. “It is irrelevant and of no value to your current predicament.”

Like hell it wasn’t relevant.

“My advice to you, Kincaid, is to find Max and soon. Cameron’s bindings are unstable. If he didn’t raise Cameron himself, he will know who did. That is all the advice I can offer.”

“Bullshit.”

I didn’t get the chance to press my argument. With more grace than most professional dancers, Lee picked up another tray of formaldehyde-laced drinks, pivoted and headed over to the corner-pocket zombies.

“Great. Back to exactly where we started,” I said. Find Max, who wasn’t returning my phone calls.

I sipped the whisky sour. If Lee wasn’t going to part with the information, there was no chance anyone else in the underground city would, whether I was willing to pay or not. Zombies are worse than a secret society that way.

I checked my watch: 11:45. I glanced around the bar on the off chance I’d missed Mork toting his metal cooler. Nope. It was usual to wait a few minutes for him…just not this long. I also didn’t like holding this much cash down here. I think Mork knew that—probably why he was late.

“Is Mork back there?” I asked Lee as she came back around the bar. Cameron had finished his brains, so I slid his empty glass towards her.

“Hold on a sec, I’m not drinking any more of…” He trailed off when both Lee and I shook our heads at him.

“No, I haven’t seen Mork,” Lee said, taking a fresh glass and filling it with a mixture that matched the blue umbrella she
decorated it with before passing it back to Cameron. “And with luck, I won’t,” she said, retreating to the cooler.

I snorted. Mork, Lee’s business partner, was many things. Zombie was not one of them. I wondered if that’s what led to all the strife between them. On the other hand, it could just be Mork: he had that effect on people.

Rumour had it that five years back Lee had hit a rough spot when the morgue technician she’d been using skipped town and her brain supply dried up. Enter Mork, stage right, with a bottomless supply of high-quality, fresh brains. A tenuous partnership was born out of desperation.

Normally I’d agree wholeheartedly with Lee’s aversion to Mork. But I needed supplies for Cameron.

I finished my second whisky sour. Two options faced me: stay here and make small talk with Cameron until Mork arrived, or try once more to make nice with Nate and get him to agree to the university gig tomorrow night.

I slid myself up off the bar stool. Time to see if the late great Nathan Cade had swallowed his pride and reached something resembling a reasonable frame of mind.

“Lee, watch Cameron for me, will you?” I said, and didn’t wait for her nod. “I’ll be back in a sec,” I said to Cameron. “Stay put. If you forget something, ask Lee. And I want that second glass gone by the time I get back.”

He swore but pulled the umbrella out and took a sip.

The washrooms were outside the back door, off a small courtyard that occupied the space between the natural rock wall of the cavern that formed the city and the back of Lee’s bar. It was a throwback to outhouse days. Lee and Mork kept generous-sized mirrors in the bathrooms, pre-set for summoning. Just another service for their clientele.

“Kincaid?” Lee called, raising her voice just enough that I could hear her. Door handle in hand, I glanced back over my shoulder. She was leaning around the cooler door.

“Tell Mr. Cade I’m calling in his bar tab tonight,” she said, and smiled, slow and wide, like a very dangerous cat.

I shook my head. It wasn’t like I hadn’t warned him.

The electric heaters—Mork’s doing—buffeted me with warm air that smelled of stale peat moss as I closed the door behind me. They were supposed to beat back some of the dampness that permeated all of Seattle and was especially potent down here. The jury was out as to whether they worked, but the smell of decaying moss drove home a crucial detail practitioners who visited the underground for too long tended to forget: the city was never meant to suit the living. It was a place for the dead to rot.

CHAPTER 5

THE LATE GREAT NATHAN CADE

Lee’s improvements had extended into the courtyard.

Christmas lights, tiny white ones, clung to everything, including the two gas lamps hanging over my head. Strings of them had been woven into a haphazard canopy that stretched all the way to the three outhouse-style washrooms along the rock wall. It was like a night garden filled with fireflies, minus the plants, which wouldn’t grow down here anyway.

I shook my head. Cheap Christmas lights were not going to scare off bad luck, only the odd drunk zombie or ghoul catching a nap behind the trash. Though I had to admit it was pretty.

I pushed open the door to the first stall, turned the lamp on and wiped the mirror down with glass cleaner I kept in my bag. Satisfied any residual stains were gone, I pulled out the red lipliner I kept in my backpack in order to contact Nate.

Nate, you there?
I wrote in the top left corner of the mirror.

I counted thirty seconds before the ghost-grey glass fogged up and letters from the Otherside etched themselves underneath my
note in a tight, slanted, capital-letter script—the only way Nate’s writing was legible.

YOUR LATE, K. WHERES MY APPOLOGY?

Oh, for the love of…Well, at least he’d had the decency not to write backwards. Just below Nate’s fogged note, I wrote:
Learn to spell and maybe you’ll get one
.

I waited. A minute passed with no reply.

I rolled my eyes. Hold a grudge much?
Nate, get out of the mirror
.

STILL WAITING
, came Nate’s fogged reply.

I glared at the mirror. “Come on, Nate,” I said, knowing full well he could hear me. Down here the barrier was thinner. Something to do with proximity to water and magnetic fields from the west coast plates.

SAY IT.

I sighed. Eventually, Nate would get bored and come out on his own. Unfortunately, if we had any hope of making rent this month, I needed him for a seance. Tomorrow.

I caved in word if not in spirit. “Fine. Seattle grunge rock reshaped the international music scene. There. Happy?”

…
AND?

I swore. “Nate—”

SAY IT
.

Oh, for crying out loud. “And grunge style had significant societal influence that reverberated through the fashion world. Truce?” I gave my grey reflection in the mirror my best stop-screwing-with-me expression. I couldn’t see Nate yet, but I knew damn well he could see me.