The Lady in Pink - Deadly Ever After 2 (5 page)

A
few minutes later I was standing on the street outside our office building, Right and Left standing a few feet behind me. Since I was a great detective I quickly realized the obvious; Izzy had wanted me out of the office. I knew this because she said, “Have a nice night.” Then she proceeded to walk me out of her office, slamming the door behind me.

Like I said, I’m a hell of a detective.

I looked at Right and then Left, debating. I could give them the slip now, but what was the point? If Izzy wanted to waste her dough by hiring these clowns, I’d play along. For now. It wasn’t like it would be too hard to ditch them; after all, their legs were fewer than ten inches long. Not like they could run after me.

I smiled at the image and then reached into the pocket of my jacket to pull out a pack of cigarettes. I lit one up, blowing out a stream of blue smoke in a small act of rebellion. While I was enjoying the toxic burn of smoke entering my lungs, my cell phone rang. For a second I wondered if Izzy had slipped some sort of smoke detector into my clothes. Not completely out of the realm of possibility, since she had bugged my phone on more than one occasion. To say we had trust issues was an understatement.

When my phone continued to ring I pulled it from my pocket and checked the caller ID. “Unknown number” flashed across the screen. I’d learned long ago nothing good came from an anonymous number. Or anonymous sex, for that matter, unless one liked telemarketers and STDs.

“Reynolds,” I answered reluctantly.

Static crackled, and then a mere whisper of a voice drifted through the line. “Drop your investigation.”

“What?” I said, cupping the phone tighter. The stench of burning smartphone tickled my nostrils, so I reluctantly eased up my grip.

“Stop investigating now or else.”

“Who is this?”

The line went dead.

I stared at the unknown number flashing on my screen and then slowly put the phone back in my pocket. I smiled, for the first time all day feeling as if I was finally making progress. On what, I had no idea. The caller should’ve been much more explicit about what I was supposed to stop investigating. After all, I was currently juggling ten open cases, not to mention James’s murder, Peyton’s missing-fairies case, and the mystery surrounding my own birth.

My stomach growled, reminding me that I’d forgotten my promise of a large lunch and it was now closing in on late-night-snack territory. I flagged down a passing taxi, and the three of us got inside, Right and Left flanking me.

As we drove through the city, darkness claimed the night and a chill settled in the air. The moon hung a mere sliver in the sky. As we drew closer to my apartment, I shivered in my suit jacket; not from the cold, but like someone had just walked across my grave. Most people went happily ever after without ever seeing a corpse outside a funeral parlor. I wasn’t that lucky.

My job all but guaranteed I’d see things others wouldn’t. Maybe it was time to reevaluate my life goals.

Of which I had two at the moment.

The incredibly large lunch I’d promised my stomach about twelve hours ago.

And a very big glass of whiskey.

No ice. Not only did ice water down a perfectly good buzz, but the damn things always brushed against the metal filling in my right back molar, shocking the shit out of me.

I took a deep breath of semi-exhaust-filled air as we exited the cab, feeling the energy pulsing through the city. It was as if the city knew something the rest of us didn’t. Was it a warning or the rush of Fey Trains beneath my feet?

I motioned to the darkened street that led to my apartment. “I’ll be fine from here,” I said to my winged stalkers/molar guards. Apparently they didn’t get the hint. Right flanked my left, and Left did the same on my right. I rolled my eyes but didn’t press the issue. It was late, and I was too tired to deal with fairy dramatics. After a nice dinner of pudding, pickled peppers, and pie, I’d toss the short bodyguards out.

My mouth watered just thinking about the next hour, which said something about the current state of my love life. With a sigh I walked up the four flights of dimly lit stairs to my apartment. Surprisingly enough, when I entered, no one and nothing out of the ordinary greeted me. No dead intern. No fairies with demands.

And most surprising of all, no one intent on a Blue barbecue.

“Huh,” I said, wiping my loafers on the electrostatic mat on the floor just inside the door. Sparks crackled from my body to the mat. When the buzzing stopped, I headed forward, not too surprised to find Right and Left conducting a military-style search of my apartment for intruders. I decided to let them have their winged way. For the moment.

With great interest I headed to the kitchen and my refrigerator. I pictured the bounty of goodies inside, all bought and paid for with my own money. Money I’d made through a semi-honest living. It wasn’t bad to be Blue.

Until I opened the fridge door and remembered two things—first, my maid had done all the grocery shopping, and second, she’d quit more than two weeks ago, which explained the day-old coffee and moldy bread from this morning. I slammed the refrigerator’s door, nearly toppling it in the process. “Damn it,” I yelled as a bolt of low-blood-sugar-induced electricity shot from my fingers, burning a hole in the cheap kitchen countertop. I smacked out the burning embers and then blew on my now aching hand.

So it wasn’t good to be Blue either.

Tossing open the cabinet under the sink, I yanked out a bottle of relatively expensive whiskey and poured a healthy dose in an eight-ounce glass. I downed the first glass and poured a second. I vowed to savor this one, mostly because the first nip had gone straight from my very empty belly to my now even emptier head. I sat down on a chair, waiting for the effects to pass. When they did I pulled out my cell phone and dialed a number I found myself calling much too often in times like this.

“Fairy of India, how can I help you?” a guy answered in a distinctively nonaccented voice.

I sighed. “I’d like three orders of beef
saag
and a steak. Rare.”

“You got it, pal,” he said, adding to my already growing suspicion that Fairy of India wasn’t as authentic as one might suspect. After giving him my credit card number I hung up and started sorting through a week’s worth of mail. The Internet made two things more easily ignored—snail mail and normal pornography. Neither of which appealed to me much. I liked shock value.

And I got it as I read the envelope addressed only to “Reynolds.” Not uncommon, but something about the fancy scrawled handwriting bothered me. The return address was the clincher, though—101 Police Plaza, New Never City Jail.

The implanted tooth that replaced the one viciously torn from my mouth last year by a violent psychopath started to ache. I tossed the envelope and whatever evil it contained into the trash. Then, merely as a safety precaution, I staggered to my feet and to the kitchen sink to wash my hands again and again until my doorbell rang thirty minutes later. I quickly dried my chapped palms with the nearest dish towel, which turned out to be an undershirt I’d worn two weeks ago, and went to answer the door, my stomach now much less excited by the heavenly scent rising from the hallway.

I opened the door to pay the delivery guy, who wore a red bindi in the center of his forehead and a shapely pair of wings on his back. Considering the red dot was traditionally worn only by women and symbolized love and honor, neither of which were my strong points, I decided to keep our interaction as short as possible. I just wanted my steak and spicy creamed spinach.

Once our transaction was complete and my hands were full of take-out containers, I kicked the door closed and dropped the food on the coffee table in front of my couch. I sat down, kicked off my loafers, and flipped on the TV with a slightly melted remote. Picking up the closest lukewarm box, I inhaled the scent of curry and spice, sighing happily before stabbing it with my index finger. Thirty seconds later the
saag
was piping hot. Who needed a microwave when one could conduct electricity? I grinned, and for the first time in two days, I started to relax.

T
he next morning I shot awake with a silent scream. Acid rolled in my gut thanks to vivid images of James’s charred corpse and the three-fourths of a fifth of whiskey I had consumed before bed. I took a shallow breath, suppressing the urge to jump out of bed and run to the toilet to puke. My longing to toss my steak-laden cookies increased when I caught sight of the two winged dudes on either side of my bed, silently standing guard while I slept.

The very thought creeped me out to no end.

“What the fuck?” I said, throwing my pillow at Right, who stood on the left of my bed, next to my nightstand. “Don’t you guys sleep?”

Left, apparently the spokesman for the two, answered in a surprisingly deep voice for a guy barely thirty-six inches tall. “Not while we’re on the job.”

“Easy enough to remedy,” I said. “You’re fired. Now, get the hell out of my apartment.”

He shook his chubby head. “You cannot fire us. Only the Tooth Fairy holds that power.” His eyes narrowed on my face as his lip lifted into a smirk. “And
she
wants you alive; therefore, we will keep you that way, by whatever means necessary.”

I laughed and then instantly regretted it. My head, already pounding to a different beat, now felt like a marching band tapping double time to an eighties heavy-metal song. “Is that a threat?” I asked, once the hammering inside my skull subsided a bit. Before he could respond, the full weight of his words slammed into me and anger rocketed through me. “Izzy is
not
the Tooth Fairy. Those days are over. The sooner you guys get that through your heads, the better.” To them, once a Tooth Fairy, always a Tooth Fairy.

Until death did her wings part.

And I wasn’t about to let that happen.

Left smiled at me like I was a clueless child asking how babies were made. “If you say so.”

A flash of electrical anger zapped through my body, exiting my left foot. It shot into the ceiling, leaving a small scorch mark in its wake. I took a calming breath. It was too early and I was much too hungover for this shit.

Besides, I had work to do.

Foremost on my mind was finding out what my former Tooth Fairy of a partner had been looking for in my office the other night. Asking her would have to wait, though.

I would have to bide my time, waiting for the perfect moment to confront Izzy.

Clayton’s fund-raiser tonight seemed just right.

 

Since I had ten or so hours until the gala, I decided to scrounge up some possible leads on James’s murder. The best place to start was James himself. According to our employment records, he had resided on the edge of Fairyland with a gaggle of college-aged roommates, so as much as it pained me, and it truly did hurt, I got dressed, stopped off for an extra-large coffee and a bottle of aspirin from the local bodega, and flagged down a taxi to take me into the pit of hell also known as Fairyland.

Right and Left stayed glued to me, and yet, instead of being annoyed by their now somewhat ripe presence, I figured having the two winged guys by my side might actually work in my favor. For once. Under normal circumstances I was Blue non grata to the fairies. Since I’d nearly destroyed their entire population.

Bunch of winged, tiny, grudge-holding babies.

To top it off they believed I had somehow brainwashed their Tooth Fairy, forcing her from her rightful toothy obligation and into my world of deadbeats and lawyers. Like anyone could force Izzy into doing anything. I’d seen her with a gun to her head and she hadn’t batted an eyelash. My partner was no pushover.

Until it came to those she loved.

Then she would die to protect each and every winged one of them.

I hoped like hell it never came to that.

For both our sakes.

T
he cab pulled to the curb in front of a small row house on the outskirts of Fairyland known as Fraternity Row, Row, Row. The frat house was surprisingly easy to find. You just had to follow the yellow brick road and the stench of rotten cabbage. Luckily no one dropped a house on us, but we did run into a prince wearing skinny jeans, which was much worse.

James’s former home looked unloved, with the shutters loosely hanging on rusted hinges, slamming against the house in the breeze. Peeling, weather-worn paint graced the structure, as did beer cans. They lay everywhere, as if a part of a science experiment that had gone wrong. A lounge chair sat on the rickety porch, along with an old-fashioned claw-foot bathtub. Of course both were full of empty beer cans. Above the door was a small engraved sign with the Greek lettering of some fraternity name.

“Something tells me we’re not in Kansas anymore,” I said with a halfhearted smile to the two winged dwarfs flanking my sides. While they didn’t outright laugh at my joke, Right’s eye did give a tiny twitch, a sure sign he was laughing on the inside.

I knocked on the wooden doorframe, fearing what would happen if I touched the rotted door. When only the faint sound of coughing reached my ears, I knocked again. Harder this time. Still no one answered. For a brief moment I wondered if James’s death wasn’t an attempt on my life as I first suspected. What if, as I stood on the porch, the killer was inside destroying the evidence of his crimes and/or murdering James’s roommates?

Hell with that, I thought as I slammed the heel of my boot into the rotted wood of the door. It splintered inward, and a smell so foul I backed up a step oozed from the opening. My eyes began to water as I waved a hand in front of my face to dispel the putrid air. At least James’s roommates weren’t dead as I’d first thought. Even decaying flesh didn’t stink that bad.

Aw, the joys of college life.

“Dude,” a drunken guy with a Fairyland U T-shirt on said as he stumbled toward me. “The door was unlocked.”

Oops. “My bad,” I said with a wince. Blue’s PI rule number one—always check to make sure a door is locked first. Rule two had something to do with getting payment up front from any client with wings.

Drunk guy didn’t seem to notice my heartfelt apology. Or he just didn’t care. Either way, he took an unsteady swing at me, missing by a good six inches. The momentum of the punch carried him by me, and he ended up facefirst in the beer-can-filled bathtub. I might’ve felt sorry for the guy had his punch been aimed at someone else. But it wasn’t, so I did what any PI would do. I offered him a hand up.

As soon as his skin made contact with mine, he froze in electrified shock. Fifty thousand volts rushed through my body and into his. He jerked back, muscles constricting. I let go of his hand and he dropped back into the bathtub. Seeing as he wouldn’t be of much help for at least the next ten minutes, I took matters into my own hands. Slowly I stepped through the broken doorway and into the hallway of the house. The smell inside was even worse than outside. Urine, beer, unwashed bodies, with a hint of rotten food and fairy dust, filled the air, making talking nearly impossible, let alone breathing.

Right seemed to share my opinion, for his face turned green two feet through the door. Left didn’t last much longer. “Go,” I said to both fairyguards. “Wait for me outside.”

For once neither argued, nearly trampling each other in a race for the door. I watched them leave, a small rush of macho victory as well as bile rising in me. I wanted to throw up but decided it would only prolong my stay inside. “Hello,” I called into the dimly lit interior.

A hacking wet cough answered.

I winced, swallowing hard as I stepped in something that squished much like decaying cat. I glanced down. Nope, not a cat. A rat. One the size of a small dog. I vowed to burn my boots as soon as I left this place, as well as the rest of my clothes, and possibly shave my head. I scraped the bits of dead rat from the bottom of my boot on the steps leading to the second floor.

The smoker’s cough sounded again.

With a deep breath I charged forward through piles of debris, beer cans, and discarded undergarments. I reminded myself of why I was there in the first place. I owed James. If wading through garbage was penance for his death, then I would damn well do it with a smile on my face. Okay, not a smile, but I would do it nonetheless.

“Hello,” I called again when I reached the top floor. “Is anyone here?”

The blessed scent of burning tobacco tickled my nostrils, lessening the other terrible aromas. I pushed open the door closest to me, not too surprised to see a bunch of young guys in various stages of undress and levels of drunken comas. All but one of the men were asleep. The only one awake waved a hand in front of his face to dispel the smoke between us. “Who are you?” he asked with yet another hacking cough.

“Blue Reynolds,” I offered. “I’m here to ask you some questions about one of your roommates.”

He scratched the side of his face, seemingly unconcerned that a blue-haired guy had busted into his house and wanted information about his roommates. “Which one?”

“James.”

His forehead wrinkled. “What about him? He owe you money? You won’t be getting it. Not from him.”

I shook my head. “No, nothing like that. James interned for me. I came by to offer my condolences, and maybe check out his room?” And then get a tetanus shot, I added silently. A big one. The kind they used on the dragons they kept at the New Never City Zoo.

He eyed me up and down. “First and last months’ rent.”

“What?”

“You heard me,” he said. “You want inside James’s room, it’s gonna cost you.”

Having a guy, a kid really, shake me down wasn’t on my list of favorite things. But I did want a peek into James’s life. I wanted to know more about the kid who’d died in my place. I wanted to know if he had family, if they loved him, or if he, like me, had been alone in the world. Not that it mattered. Nothing I learned or did would bring the poor kid back. “Fine,” I said, pulling out my wallet. “How much?”

He glanced at me, then at my wallet, and finally at my boots. Most likely assessing how much he could get me to pay. My thuggish good looks paid off for once as he said, “Two hundred.”

“Deal.” I passed over a one-hundred-dollar bill along with five twenties. Some days it was nice to have an expense account to afford such luxuries as bribes to stoned college kids. “Which room was his?”

“Third door on your left.”

I nodded, closing the door behind me after I left. I vowed right there and then that if I ever had kids, they sure as hell wouldn’t go to college. The thought of bringing a child into the world scared me nearly as much as the image of the baby that flashed through my mind.

A blue-haired baby.

With pink wings.