Limbus, Inc. Page 26

In real life, not so much.

  Sure, there’s rage.

  Sure, there’s a lot of animal urges. Lots of subliminal kill-kill-kill impulses.

  And, sure, there’s a big temptation to chow down because we’re predators and humans are tasty prey. Yeah, that’s gross, I’m well aware of that. And I’ve had a lot of next-day puke sessions after I’ve done some chomping. Less so these days because I have more control. At first, though, I went after the bad guys like they were blue plate specials. Live and learn.

  It was Tall’s good fortune that I had that control now. And that I’d eaten a couple of quarter pounders on the way here. Otherwise he might have been missing some juicy parts.

  Instead, all I did was slam him against the wall over the sink. Kind of hard.

  He crashed down onto a row of three filthy sinks, ripping two of them off the wall. He crashed to the floor in a quivering heap, covered with porcelain debris, bleeding from a lot of little cuts. Alive, but not enjoying it.

  That’s when Big pushed through the door.

  The first thing he saw was his friend. I was off to one side. He didn’t see me until I got up in his face and made him see me.

  He started to scream.

  I threw him into a toilet stall. He hit the back wall hard enough to turn his eyes blank and knock him all the way to the edge of la-la land. I got to him and caught him before he fell.

  Even as I grabbed him I shifted back. I jerked the chain on the wolf and made him go away before he did something we’d all regret. Takes a lot of effort to do that, though. The wolf does not like to go back into the kennel. Not one bit.

  It was with human hands that I shoved him onto his knees and stuck his face in the unflushed toilet.

  I held him there until my personal disgust told me to stop. Maybe three, four seconds. Then I pulled his dripping head out, spun him around and stuffed him down into the corner between the toilet and the wall.

  I squatted in front of him, watching a piece of toilet paper slide down his cheek. He coughed and sputtered and stared at me in total confusion. This wasn’t the face he’d seen a second ago. His eyes shifted to find the big bad wolf, but he couldn’t know that the monster had already left the building.

  Oh, yeah … that whole cycle of the moon thing? That’s mostly fiction. During the three days of the full moon we’re a little more aggressive, our rages are harder to control, but that’s all. We can make the change anytime we want. Into the wolf and back to our own skin. Just like that. On a dime.

  A few seconds ago there was a snarling monster with black hair and lots of fangs. Now there was a skinny guy in a baggy Viking’s windbreaker. If you don’t come from a home life like mine, that’s pretty hard to process, and Big was blowing a lot of mental circuits trying to make sense of it.

  I crossed to the door and locked it, then squatted down again in front of Big. He was borderline catatonic with fear.

  “What’s your name?” I asked.

  He started shaking his head. Either refusing to answer or in denial of what was happening.

  “Your name.” I said it slower, but got nothing.

  A slap across the chops would probably have helped unscramble his grits, but, y’know, he was just bobbing for turds, so … no thanks.

  For his part, he started flapping his arms around. At first I thought he was trying to fight me or fend me off. But that wasn’t it.

  He made a half-fist, extending his index and little finger so he could fork the sign of the evil eye at me.

  Fair enough. Even though he looked more German than Italian, I figured what the hell. He had just seen a monster. Besides, I’ve met wiseguys and wiseguy wannabes who did that sort of thing. They were every bit as superstitious as cops and ball players.

  Then he began mumbling something. It first I thought it was Italian, but it wasn’t.

  It was Latin.

  “ … defende nos in proelio; contra nequitiam et insidias diaboli esto praesidium. Imperat illi Deus; supplices deprecamur: tuque, Princeps militiae coelestis, Satanam aliosque spiritus malignos, qui ad perditionem animarum pervagantur in mundo, divina virtute in infernum detrude…”

  Unfortunately I don’t speak Latin. I mean, who needs to? Even priests don’t use it much anymore. But you can tell when something is Latin. It doesn’t really sound like anything else. Sounded like church stuff. Sounded like stuff you hear in movies.

  “Hey,” I snapped. “Hey, asshole.”

  He kept rattling on with the Latin. I yelled at him again. No change.

  If I hadn’t destroyed the sinks I might have belted some sense into him and then washed my hand. Instead I reached around and under him and took his wallet. He didn’t try to stop me. He was totally freaked out, kept pointing the horns of his fingers at me, kept muttering church stuff at me.

  The driver’s license in the wallet told me that Big’s real name was Kurt Gunther. German, like I thought. Or German heritage. All his I.D. was American. There was about four hundred in mixed bills in the wallet, a bunch of credit cards, membership cards from everything from Sam’s Club to the library in Doylestown. I smiled. Am I prejudiced because I don’t expect thugs to have library cards? Not sure.

  There was a glassine flap that had something that really caught my eye. There were two items in it. One was a card the size of a credit card, but it was blood red and had no markings on it except a magnetic strip on the back. But as I turned it over I caught a flash of something. I held it close to my eye and turned it over more slowly, and this time I could see a symbol hidden on the front. It was very subtle, a hologram, like they put on driver’s licenses. Only this one was red upon red, with but the slightest 3D effect. It was too small to see clearly, but I could tell that it was circular, with a symbol in the center and lots of radiating spokes. There were other symbols between the spokes, but I couldn’t make them out. It reminded me of one of those astrological wheels, but there were more than twelve spokes. Although it was difficult to count, I think there were eighteen symbols around the edge.

  The other item was a business card. It had the name, business address, email and contact phone number of a broker at one of the big-ticket national chains. Dunwoody-Kraus-Vitalli. The broker’s name was Daniel Meyers.

  That’s not the thing that made me go ‘hmmmm’; it was what was written in blue ballpoint on the back.

  A single word.

  A name.

  Bambi.

  I leaned toward Mr. Gunther and showed him the card.

  “Bambi,” I said. “Where?”

  “ … hostium nostrorum, quaesumus, Domine, elide superbiam: et eorum contumaciam dexterae tuae virtute prosterne …”

  “Stop that,” I said, “or you’ll get to meet your lord and savior sooner than later, capiche?”

  He stopped the chanting.

  I wiggled the card and repeated, “Where?”

  He looked from the card to me and back again. His eyes, which were already pretty well bugged out, bulged nearly out of their sockets. The steady stream of Latin dribbled to a stop.

  He said, “N—no …”

  Behind me Tall was starting to groan and move sluggishly among the rubble.

  Outside the music was still pounding, but who knew what Palakas was doing. Calling the cops. Calling more thugs. Loading a gun. I could hear a big clock ticking in my brain.

  “Talk,” I said. “Or should I let the dog out to play?”

  *

  Turns out, he didn’t want to see the dog again.

  Didn’t really want to talk, either, but we crossed that speed bump without anyone losing a wheel.

  Kurt Gunther and his partner, Salvatore Tucci—Mr. Tall—were bouncers. Not a major surprise there. But they didn’t work here at ViXXXens. They worked at a place called Club Dante. I’d heard of it but had never been there. It was one of those so-called ‘gentlemen’s clubs’. Lots of girls with almost nothing on and lots of booze, but they don’t consider themselves a titty bar. The girls are prettier—or have more expen
sive cosmetic surgery—the booze is all top shelf and over-priced, and lap dances cost more than most of the customers here at ViXXXens make in a week. Places like that are usually fronts for the sex trade, but proving it is a bitch. You have to be a member, and anything hinky happens behind closed doors. The clientele are the local rich and powerful, which means the place has a lot of money and a lot of juice. Places like that don’t get raided, or if they do, word has already come down and when Vice breaks in everything is a-jay squared away.

  “Is Bambi out there?” I asked him.

  Gunther started to tell me that she wasn’t, that he didn’t know who she was, but I reminded him that if I had to show him the wolf again, then the beast was going to take home a trophy. Gunther clearly didn’t want to sing in a high squeaky voice for the rest of his life.

  He told me that Bambi was hired to work a special party out at Dante’s. They had lots of small rooms for parties.

  “Who hired her?” I asked.

  “Meyers,” he told me. “Daniel Meyers.”

  The stockbroker.

  “Where is she now? Where’s Bambi?”

  Gunther said he didn’t know. He and his partner picked her up at ViXXXens and dropped her at Dante’s two nights ago, but the manager over there said that she split. They’d come back here looking for her but had so far come up dry. They were hanging around the place hoping she walked in.

  I can usually tell when people are lying to me—it’s a smell thing—but Gunther was telling the truth. Or, at least as much of the truth as he knew.

  I left him there and got out of the bar pretty quick. I caught a quick glimpse of Palakas across the bar talking on the phone. Didn’t wait to find out what kind of heat he was calling.

  Bambi’s apartment building was close, so I headed over there and parked outside of the Windsor South Apartments. It was a six-story block built like a slab, with balconied apartments front and back. Cheap but not squalid. Lawn out front needed mowing but it wasn’t full of crab grass or weeds.

  There was no doorman. The lobby had an intercom, but no one answered at either Bambi’s apartment or that of her friend, Donny Falk. So I loitered around until someone came in. When they used their key to open the inner security door, I went through with them. I gave a grunt and a nod like I knew them, and busied myself by pretending to look at something interesting on my BlackBerry. We got in the elevator. He got off at four; I went up to six, then found the fire stairs and went down to three. The apartments on the right-hand side were odd numbers, left side were even. Bambi’s apartment was 309. Falk’s was 307.

  I knocked on 309 and heard nothing but echoes.

  The hall was empty, the door was locked. I sniffed the door and smelled only those things I expected to smell. Wood, old cooking smells, a little mildew, and dust.

  The place even felt empty. It had that kind of vibe. Like a dead battery.

  The other doors along the hall stayed shut, so I bent to study the lock. Every P.I. worth his license can bypass a lock without much trouble. The really good ones require a set of lock-picks and maybe three minutes work. This one was a cheap-ass lock, and I opened it with a flexible six-inch plastic ruler I carry for exactly this kind of thing. It pushed the tapered bolt back on its spring and the lock clicked open. I glanced up and down the hall and then stepped inside.

  Denise Sturbridge’s apartment was neat and small and clean. And empty. I ghosted my way through it. There were dishes in the dishwasher, leftovers in the fridge, some trash in the cans that told me nothing, the usual stuff in the bathroom, and exactly what you’d expect in the bedroom. Drawers filled with cheap but attractive clothes. Dance stuff. Shoes, but not too many and most of them inexpensive. A hamper with soiled items in it. Twin bed, pink sheets, a stuffed turtle.

  I touched very little, but I sniffed it all. And, although that sounds intensely creepy, think of it more like a dog and less like a thirty-something adult man.

  I catalogued the scents of Denise Sturbridge as a living person. I added that to the already-logged scent of her blood.

  There was nothing of note anywhere. A work schedule was posted on the side of the fridge, held in place by a magnet from a pizza shop. There was a TV and DVD player, and most of the disks she had were romantic comedies or Disney stuff.

  Girl stuff.

  Kid stuff. Like the stuffed turtle.

  My heart hurt looking at it.

  “Where are you, kid?” I asked the empty apartment. “Give me a little help here.”

  But there wasn’t even a whisper of anything useful.

  I wiped off everything I touched and left her apartment. I drifted down to Donny Falk’s door and froze in my tracks.

  There were splinters on the carpet and when I peered at the frame around the lock I could see where the wood had been cracked. Someone had forced the door and then pushed the splinters and twisted metal back into place as far as it would go. You had to look close to see it. I was looking close.

  Which is when I caught the smell.

  Faint.

  But there.

  Sickly sweet and gassy.

  Only one thing smells like that.

  I put my ear against the wood and listened for any sound of movement. Anything at all.

  Nothing.

  Shit.

  I leaned my shoulder against the door and pushed it open. There wasn’t much resistance beyond the friction of the broken lock and torn frame. I stepped inside and immediately pushed the door shut.

  Donny Falk was kitchen help in a strip club, and he clearly lived small. Mismatched Salvation Army furniture, plastic milk crates and boards for shelving, posters thumbtacked to the walls, a threadbare rug over worn linoleum.

  Maybe that had been enough for him. Maybe he kept the place clean and filled it with music and friends and his own hopes and dreams. Some people cruise along that way. If they don’t have much then at least they have some measure of freedom. They make genuine friendships, and they’re loving and loyal to anyone who shows them respect and kindness.

  Now, though, the place was a wreck.

  It looked like a storm had blown through it.

  The couch and chair were overturned, cushions slashed, stuffing pulled out, posters torn down, CD players smashed, CD’s crushed underfoot, baseball bat rammed through the TV screen, flowers torn out of pots, cereal boxes torn open and spilled, toaster-oven crashed onto the floor, refrigerator door open and everything pulled out and smeared onto the cheap linoleum and carpet. I moved carefully through the debris, careful not to leave footprints in anything sticky or powdery. There was a short hallway leading off from the living room, with a bathroom door on one side and a bedroom at the end. I peered into the bathroom to see the same kind of destruction. Everything that could be smashed had been, everything that could be cracked or spilled or torn was in ruins. I caught a glimpse of fifty different angry versions of my face in the fragments of the shattered mirror. None of those faces looked happy. This wasn’t wolf face, but it was every bit as dangerous.

  The bedroom door was closed, but the smell was coming from there.

  For a moment I felt so old and depressed that I wondered if I should leave the door closed, turn around and go home. I wasn’t a homicide cop anymore—not since they asked me to turn in my badge back in the Cities. I was a P.I. with no legal reason to be here, and I couldn’t prove that I hadn’t been the one to kick in the door and trash the place.

  If I walked into that room then I would be tampering with a crime scene.

  They could and probably would put me in jail for something like this.

  Best thing in the world for me to do was get the hell out of there. I had other leads to follow—the stockbroker and Club Dante. It was a better, smarter choice to walk away.

  But then if I was a better or smarter guy I wouldn’t be working this job.

  I opened the door.

  And stood there.

  I didn’t enter.

  Everything I needed to see I could see from w
here I was.

  Donny Falk was about twenty, maybe five-six, one-thirty. I could tell that much.

  George Palakas had said that Donny was black and gay. The posters on the wall were all of good looking men in skimpy outfits, so I could make the case for him being gay. As for black?

  You’d need to look at his skin to make that call.

  And he didn’t have any.

  The whole room was painted in his blood. Not artistically, but from arterial sprays. He seemed to float in the midst of it, but that was an illusion. His arms and legs were spread wide. Someone had driven big iron nails through his wrists and shins. I would like to think they’d done that after the kid was dead, but I don’t think mercy was really any part of this scenario.

  I could see why his screams didn’t alert the neighbors. You need a tongue for that. His was nailed to his forehead.

  And…the killer had torn open Donny’s chest and removed his heart.

  I forced myself to look around the room, but there was no sign of the stolen organ. The killer had taken it with him.

  But the killer had left something behind. Something I recognized.

  On the wall, drawn with care in Donny’s blood, was a large circle. There was a small symbol in the center, and eighteen spokes radiating out to connect with the big outer circle. Between each circle was another symbol. Each symbol was unique. Each was entirely unknown to me. I removed the Club Dante card from my jacket and held it up at an angle where I could see the hologram.

  Same symbol.

  If it was astrological, then it was from some philosophy other than the normal one I knew about. Eighteen symbols.

  The pattern was strange, alien to me.

  Looking at it made my heart hammer and my skin crawl.

  Was this killer hunting according to some crazy religious thing? Was this part of some ritual he was acting out? While on the cops I ran into religious maniacs before. Some of them had this view in their heads that they were on the verge of becoming something greater than what they were; that they were about to ascend, and that it only required blood sacrifices and an adherence to specific rituals to open that door.

  Is that what I had here? Was Bambi waiting to become a victim to the grand designs of someone who wanted to become God?