Jack Kilborn & J. A. Konrath (11 page)

“Chirp,” went the nest.

My first shot blew the nest in half, and two more severed the branch from the tree.

“Dammit, McGlade. Stay cool. You just assassinated a bird.”

Which saddened me greatly. Magnum rounds were a buck-fifty each. Plus, I didn’t have any extras on me. I needed to stay cool.

“Chirp,” went the nest.

BLAM! BLAM!

By heroic effort I didn’t shoot the nest a sixth time, instead walking briskly in the opposite direction. I was in a state that might be called “hyper-awareness,” which was a lot like being the lone antelope at the watering hole. I could feel the stares of flying insects, and hear the grass growing. It was freaking me out a little bit, so I began to run, tripping over something on the ground, skidding face-first against a tombstone. A damp tombstone.

Mary Agnes Morrison.

I scurried away, palms and knees wet, and saw the bright red object that caused me to fall.

The empty can of Super Berry Mix energy drink.

So my paranoia wasn’t really paranoia after all. It was just an unhealthy amount of caffeine in my veins. Which would have been kind of funny if I wasn’t soaked with my own piss. Along with the taurine, the drink apparently contained a full day’s supply of irony.

I stood up and shook out my pants legs.

“Get a grip, McGlade. And stop talking to yourself. You always know what you’re going to say anyway.”

I took three or ten deep breaths, holstered my weapon, and then set out looking for George.

I had no idea that in just two minutes I was going to die.

I
didn’t actually die. I’m lying to make the story more exciting, because this part is sort of slow.

It starts to pick up in Chapter 8. Trust me, it’s worth the wait. There’s sodomy.

I
t was a fruitless search, but that didn’t matter—I wasn’t looking for fruit. After a few minutes, I’d found him. He’d given me the slip by cleverly disguising himself as a group of three bawling women. Closer inspection, and some grab ass, revealed they really were women after all. I did my “pretend to be blind and deaf” act and stumbled away before any of them called the police or their lawyers.

Luckily, I caught sight of an undisguised George heading into the mausoleum. I never liked mausoleums. Burying the dead was bad enough. Putting them in the walls was just begging for mice to move in. And not the kind of mice who wear red pants and open up amusement parks. I’m talking about dirty, vicious, baby-face-eating mice, the size of rats.

Actually, I’m talking about rats.

Speaking of non-sequiturs, I really needed to take another leak. The mausoleum was decent-sized, with a few hundred vaults stacked four high. Well lit, temperature controlled, silk plants next to marble benches every twenty feet. It was the kind of place that would have a bathroom, I thought, while pissing on one of the silk plants. The pot it was in wasn’t any realer than the plant, because all of my piss leaked out the bottom. I stepped over the puddle and commenced the search.

One of the techniques they teach you in private eye school is how to conduct a search, I bet. I have no idea, because I didn’t go to private eye school. I wasn’t even sure that private eye school actually existed. But it did in my fantasies. All the teachers were naked women, and wrong answers were punished with spankings. And the water fountains were actually beer fountains. If they had a school like that, I’d go for sure.

George wasn’t down the first aisle. He wasn’t down the second aisle either. Or the first aisle, which I checked again because I got confused.

“You do this?”

I spun around, wondering who spoke. It was some little old caretaker guy, clutching a mop. He pointed at the puddle on the floor.

“It was that other guy,” I said, thinking fast. “You see him anywhere?”

“I only seen you, buddy. Did you go to the bathroom on my floor? There’s a bathroom right there behind you. What kind of man does a thing like this?”

“That’s what happens when you don’t go to college.”

“You piss on the floor?”

“You get a job cleaning up piss on the floor.”

I left the guy to his menial labor and peeked down the second aisle again. Still no George. That led me down the third aisle, and I caught a glimpse of George crawling into a hole in the wall.

Closer inspection revealed it wasn’t a hole. It was a vault. He’d crawled into someone’s open tomb. I didn’t even want to think why he’d do that, but my mind thought of it anyway, and then started thinking of it in enough detail that made me nauseous, yet oddly disgusted. Maybe a necromancer was someone who got his freak on with corpses. It was certainly a cheap date—only a few bucks for Lysol and Vaseline—and unless your game was really weak you’d pretty much always score. Still, I liked my women partially awake, and aware enough to be able to fight me off and tell me no. Because
no
means try harder.

I crouched down, peering into the blackness, and saw nothing but the aforementioned blackness. I fished out my keys, which had a mini flashlight attached to the ring, and illuminated the situation.

This wasn’t a grave after all. In the hole was a slide, like you’d find in a children’s playground, if the playground was in a mausoleum, and the children were all dead. Probably wouldn’t be a lot of kids begging to go to a park like that. Not the dead ones, anyway.

I gritted my teeth. There was only one way to find out where this slide went.

“Hey, old caretaker guy!” I yelled. “Where does this slide go?”

“Go to hell!”

“I told you, it wasn’t me. I had asparagus on my pizza. Does it smell like asparagus?”

“Go to hell!”

I rubbed my chin. Maybe old caretaker guy was trying to tell me that this slide went straight to hell. I didn’t really believe him. First of all, I didn’t see any flames, and there wasn’t any smoke or brimstone or screams of the damned. Second, hell doesn’t really exist. It’s a fairy tale taught by parents to make their kids behave. Like Santa Claus. And the death penalty.

Still, going down a pitch black slide in a mausoleum wasn’t on my list of things to do before I died. My list was mostly centered around Angelina Jolie.

“This
does
smell like asparagus, you bastard!”

A glanced over my shoulder. Old caretaker guy was hobbling toward me, his drippy asparagus mop raised back like a baseball bat—a stinky, wet baseball bat that you wouldn’t want to use in a baseball game, because you wouldn’t get any hits, and because it was soaked with urine and stinked.

I decided, then and there, I wasn’t going to play ball with old caretaker guy. Which left me no choice. I took a deep breath and dove face-first down the slide.

W
hen I was ten years old, my strange uncle who lived in the country took me into his barn and showed me a strange game called
milk the cow
. The game involved a strong grip, and used a combination of squeezing and stroking until the milk came. I remember it was weird, and hurt my arm, but kind of fun nonetheless.

Afterward, we fed the cow some hay and used the fresh milk to make pancakes. When we finished breakfast, we watched a little television. It was a portable, with a tiny ten-inch screen.

Many years later, my strange uncle got arrested, for tax evasion. So I have no idea why I’m bringing any of this up.

The slide was a straight-shot down, no twists or curve. The dive jostled my grip and my key light winked out, shrouding me in darkness, like a shroud. I had no idea how fast I was going or how far I traveled. Time lost all meaning, but time really didn’t matter much anyway since I’d bought a TiVo. Minutes blurred into weeks, which blurred into seconds, which blurred into more seconds. When I finally reached the bottom, I tucked and rolled and athletically sprang to my butt, one hand somewhere near my holster, the other cupped around my boys to protect them, not to fondle them, even though that’s what it might have looked like.

I listened, my highly attuned sense of hearing sensing a whimpering sound very near, which I will die before admitting came from me, even though it did.

I’d landed on my keys. Hard.

When I stood, they remained stuck in me, hanging from my inner left cheek like I’d been stabbed by some ass-stabbing key maniac. I bit my lower lip, reached back, and tugged them out, which made the whimpering sound get louder. It hurt so bad I didn’t even find it amusing that I now had a second hole in my ass, and perhaps could even perform carnival tricks, like pooping the letter X. That’s a carnival I’d pay extra to see.

I found the key light and flashed the beam around, reorienting my orientation. I was in some sort of secret lower level beneath the mausoleum. Dirt walls, with wooden beams holding up the ceiling, coal mine style. To my left, a large wooden crate with the cryptic words
TAKE ONE
painted on the side. I refused. Why did I need a large wooden crate?

Noise, from behind. I spun around, reaching for my gun, and a dark shape tumbled off the slide, ramming into me and causing my keys to go flying, blanketing me in a blanket of darkness.

The ensuing struggle was viscous and deadly, but my years of mastering Drunken Jeet Kune Do Fu from watching old Chinese karate movies paid off. Just as I was about to deliver the Mad Crazy Hamster Fist killing blow, my attacker got some sort of weapon between us and smacked me in the face. The blow staggered me, and I reached up and felt the extensive damage, my whole head bathed in warm, sticky liquid that smelled a lot like asparagus.

Then a light blinded me. A real flashlight, not the dinky one I had on my keys. I squinted against the glare, and saw him. Old caretaker guy. A light in one hand. His mop in the other.

I spat, then spat again. My mouth had been open when he hit me.

“I’m a private detective. My name is McGlade. I’m on a case.”

“Does your case involve pissing on my floor?”

I spat again. I could taste the asparagus. And the piss. It tasted like I always guessed piss would taste like. Pissy.

“Listen, buddy, you’re violating federal marshal law by interfering with my investigation. Climb back up the slide and go call 911. Tell them there’s a 10-69 in progress, with, uh, malice aforethought and misdemeanor prejudicial something, rampart.”

My knowledge of cop lingo didn’t galvanize him into action.

“Climb up the slide? How?”

“Hands and knees, old man.”

“I’ll get all dirty.”

“You’re a janitor.”

“I’m a caretaker.”

“You clean up in a cemetery. Dirt shouldn’t bother you.”

The flashlight moved off of my face and swept the area.

“What is this place? Some sort of secret lower level under the mausoleum?”

I spat again. “No duh.”

“Look, there’s a crate.”

Old caretaker guy waddled over to the wooden
TAKE ONE
box, opened the top, and pulled out a brown robe.

“I guess we’re supposed to take the robes.”

“Obviously.”

I walked over, grabbing a robe for myself. It was made out of felt, and had a large hood. A monk’s robe. Or rather, a store-bought Halloween monk’s costume.

Old caretaker guy put his on, and as he was tugging it over his head I gave him a Crazy Hamster Elbow to the chin. He went down, hopefully in need of some facial reconstructive surgery. I scooped up his flashlight, located my keys, and limped down the tunnel.