Better Off Undead: The Bloodhound Files Read online

  “That was your idea, remember? Which was pointless, anyway, since there is no it.”

  It’s true—golems are sexless, or at least lacking any visible equipment one way or the other. “I have a delicate constitution.”

  “Yeah, and the heart of a young girl. Mounted on a plaque over your desk.”

  We’ve arrived at the Mix and Match. It’s just before noon, so there’s no one around. I park across the street and stare out the window at the front door.

  “What’s on your mind?” Charlie asks.

  “A little piece of charred wood.”

  “Right, that splinter Eisfanger found. He come up with anything?”

  “Not yet …” There’s something nagging at me, something other than a golem with a maternal complex.

  Something about the boots.

  Mob guys are greedy. Iggy found a way to double his profits by doubling his smuggling. I can understand him not wanting to damage the lems by marching them across the seafloor in their bare plastic feet, but heavy-duty footwear costs money. He wouldn’t let the lems keep them, he’d reuse the same ones over and over as long as he could. So why didn’t we find a pile of dirty, muck-encrusted boots in the Black Port?

  Because they were back at the lem factory, waiting for the next batch of lems to tie them on. “Hey, Charlie? In that lem factory that we never found—you think it was possible there was a large pile of waterlogged, muddy boots lying around?”

  “It’s possible. But I never saw such a thing.”

  “Of course not. How could you, if you were never there?”

  So they were either in transit or stashed in a closet. But wherever they were, somebody had to have transported them from the Port, and transferring a load of a hundred or so filthy, foul-smelling leather boots from a sealed environment on the seafloor up to the surface and into a boat would be a major pain; the best way to do it would be to use a fishing trawler with nets and a winch—

  No. I’m not thinking like a wise guy. The best way to do it is to send the boots back the same way they came: on somebody’s feet.

  I dig out my cell phone and call the lab. “Damon? The tread marks you found—were they headed toward or away from the large air lock?”

  “Uh—I’m not sure. Just a second, I’m sending you all the photos from the site.”

  The phone chirps, letting me know they’ve arrived. “Thanks,” I say, and hang up. I flick through them quickly, until I find what I want. There are a lot of tread marks, many of them overlapping, but most of the ones I can clearly distinguish have the toes pointing toward the air lock. Not lems coming in; pires waiting to go out.

  My phone beeps at me. Eisfanger, calling me back. “Jace? You didn’t give me a chance to tell you what I just found.”

  “Does it have to do with pires wearing the boots the charred wood came from?”

  A long pause on the other end. “That would make sense,” he says slowly. “I interrogated the wood. It had been crushed by something both heavy and organic—not a lem. It was telling me the boot itself—the leather—was unnaturally heavy.”

  Which makes perfect sense. The boots doing double duty again: use them as foot protection for the lems until they get to the Black Port, then zap them with a spell to increase their weight before strapping them on the women. After all, you don’t want your merchandise making a break for it in open water, right? At night, in the darkness and swirling murk, a good swimmer might just be able to get away.

  Unless, of course, she’s wearing concrete overshoes.

  An old Mob trick from way back, with a supernatural twist. You’re marching with the fishes now; use steel cables and a padlock instead of laces and you can’t get them off, either. Like chaining your bike to a lamppost. Keep your possessions safely stuck in the mud, where it’s a constant struggle to move and they’d never even consider running away.

  I didn’t think I could get any angrier about this, but I was wrong. I’m starting to understand a fundamental truth about Thropirelem, and it’s an ugly one: Being tougher and stronger than human doesn’t mean you suffer any less. It just means that the pain and hardships that get thrown at you get worse in direct proportion to how much more you can stand. There’s an old saying that goes God doesn’t give you any more than you can handle. In that case, whatever God’s in charge of this universe either’s a real bastard or has a great deal of confidence in the endurance of his subjects.

  What I’d really like to do is take the Crown Vic I’m sitting in and ram it straight through the front doors of the club—but that won’t solve anything. So instead I put it in gear and pull out with a screech of tires.

  “Where we headed?” Charlie asks.

  “I don’t know. I’ll tell you when we get there.”

  I focus on the boots again. They travel in a loop, from the lem factory to the Black Port to wherever the women are being kept to the lem factory. “Charlie, does the lem-making process involve burning anything?”

  “No.”

  So the charred wood must have come from wherever the women were stashed. Someplace private, someplace controlled. Not too isolated, because they have to get the women to the club and back. Not in the club itself, because that would be too risky—the club’s a dispatch point, where they can shuffle the women in and out. But they wouldn’t be holding the women too far away from the club, either, because long transit times cut into profits.

  I shouldn’t be obsessing about this. I should be concentrating on finding Tair, not searching for a prostitution ring. But I just can’t let it go; I’m so close, I can practically smell it …

  I’ve been circling the block the Mix and Match is on. Suddenly my nose is full of the odor of old smoke, even though the windows are rolled up.

  On the far side of the block, directly across the alley from the club, is a burned-out tenement.

  I slam on the brakes. “The hell?” Charlie blurts.

  I’m already halfway out of the car. “Sorry,” I call over my shoulder.

  He catches up to me before I reach the front door, or rather the sheet of plywood nailed over what used to be the front door. “You think this is where the wood came from?” he asks.

  “I’m thinking that pires, being daylight-challenged, are awfully fond of tunnels.” I draw my gun.

  I hear a thin susurrus of metal on metal as Charlie pulls his Roman-style short sword from the scabbard inside his jacket. “Front or back?” he says.

  “Let’s try the back.”

  It’s not hard to get in. There’s a blackened fire escape that Charlie boosts me up to and I let down for him. We enter through a broken window on the second floor.

  The inside is a mess. The stench of a burned-out building hangs heavy in the air. The charred corpses of furniture lay strewn about, some of them barely identifiable. Pigeon droppings streak the blackened floor with random splotches of white and gray. The structural integrity of the upper floors seems seriously in doubt, so we carefully make our way down what’s left of the stairs.

  More recent trash litter the rooms on the main floor. A rat scurries out of the corner at our approach, disappearing into a hole in the wall.

  “Nothing here,” Charlie says, his voice low.

  “Didn’t think there would be. We need to go lower.”

  A little searching and we find the door to the basement. It’s made of metal, it’s set into the concrete foundation of the building, and it’s locked.

  Charlie sighs. “You’re going to shoot it, aren’t you?”

  “No way to get it open without making a racket, is there?”

  “Not that I can think of.”

  “Relax. I had Eisfanger whip this up for me.” I pull a long, thick metal tube out of my pocket and attach it to the muzzle of the Ruger. It takes a minute and involves three different clamping screws. “It’s called a silencer. Makes the gun less accurate, but the sound-dampening material it’s stuffed with has been mystically enhanced. Eisfanger claims it’ll make less noise than a door slammi
ng—if, you know, it doesn’t explode and take my hand off.”

  Charlie takes a discreet step backward. That’s one of the things I love about him: No matter how protective he is of my safety, he still lets me take chances he doesn’t approve of. Then he complains about it afterward.

  I aim at the lock and pull the trigger.

  A real silencer is nothing like what you experience on TV, and makes a heckuva lot bigger bang than that little pffffft! you always hear in spy movies. The noise this one makes is like neither; if the genuine article is a sudden cry of “Hey!” and the fake one is a loud “Psssst!,” then this is an “ahem,” a polite little cough by an old lady who really doesn’t want to cause any fuss. Which is doubly weird, because the bullet tearing the guts out of the lock should have made quite the racket all by itself—I guess that little heart-to-heart chat Damon and his creation had was really effective.

  The door swings open.

  We creep down the concrete steps. Not much light, but I can still make out the general shape of things. Big furnace to our right. Bare cement walls, black iron pipes, tin heating ducts. Silvery electrical conduits. Something that looks like a gigantic water heater and probably is.

  But it’s not what I’m seeing that’s important. It’s what I’m smelling.

  “Over there,” I whisper. I point at the furnace. We approach it slowly, carefully. There’s a big metal hatch in the side, probably meant for maintenance.

  “When’s the last time you saw a locked door on a furnace?” Charlie growls.

  I use the same key I used on the last door, and it fits just as well. Charlie yanks the door open.

  The furnace is just a shell, concealing a rough-edged hole in the concrete floor. I can see metal rungs inside, leading down. Charlie goes first, not giving me a chance to argue, and I follow.

  The sub-basement is one big, echoey chamber. I can see a closed metal door at the far end, no doubt leading to the tunnel that connects this place to the basement of the Mix and Match.

  The rest of the room is taken up by cages.

  The cages are roughly seven feet square. Each one holds exactly two things: a cot, and a naked female pire.

  It’s daytime, so they’re all out cold. Pires don’t lapse into comas while the sun’s up, but they aren’t exactly light sleepers, either.

  “We found them,” Charlie says.

  “No. No, we didn’t.” I keep my voice low as I head across the room. “Because then all these women would go into the system, and get deported. Which would mean everything they’ve gone through would be for nothing. And some of them—more than you might think—will wind up doing it all over again, just for the chance at a new life. Or unlife, I guess.”

  I reach the door on the far side of the room and try it. Unlocked. It leads to a tunnel, just like I thought, but there’s another door in the tunnel itself, to another room. It’s open, too.

  I’m hoping for a guard. Maybe even Iggy himself. What I get when I yank the door open, gun in hand, is a dressing room.

  The room is maybe twenty feet long by ten wide. It’s got four vanity tables with mirrors, the tables crowded with makeup. The walls are lined, floor-to-ceiling, with racks of clothing. Lingerie, leather, rubber, fur. Every kind of uniform and costume a kinky customer might want, from naughty nurse to stern librarian, plus outfits to wear to and from the club.

  But the pires themselves they lock up naked. What’s the point in dressing your Barbies when no one’s playing with them?

  Charlie walks in behind me. He looks around, then looks at my face. “Oh, boy,” he sighs. “Okay. Before we get started, I want to make one thing absolutely, crystal clear.”

  “What?” I snarl.

  “You’re doing the paperwork.”

  “For what?”

  “For whatever rage-induced mayhem we’re about to inflict.”

  I take a deep, deep breath. “We?”

  “Yeah.” One word, but the weight Charlie gives it almost makes me smile. It’s a weight that crushes any sort of doubt as to where he stands.

  Right by my side. No matter what.

  “Yeah,” I say. “Let’s go do some inflicting.”

  We march down the tunnel. It’s a nice tunnel, or at least one with potential. Fluorescent lights, concrete floor, raw plywood for walls, with that freshly built, new-home smell. Some drywall, a little paint, maybe some carpet, and you’ve got yourself a cozy little half-block stretch of heaven.

  With hell on either end.

  The tunnel leads to a ladder, and at the top there’s a concealed door. It comes as absolutely no surprise to me that the door opens into a stall in the ladies’ room. The door to the stall is self-locking, with a sign that reads OUT OF ORDER on the front and spring-loaded hinges so it closes automatically. The toilet is full and disgusting and there’s no paper, just to make sure no one’s tempted to use it anyway.

  Charlie and I pause at the door that leads into the club itself. I can’t hear anything, but there may not be anything to hear; the club is closed right now, after all.

  But there’s probably somebody upstairs.

  I stop and consider my options. I’ve got enough to bust Iggy right now, but not without sending the women back where they came from. That’s not going to work for me.

  So I do the only thing I can think of.

  I tell Charlie what I have in mind, and then we walk out of the ladies’ room. I stride over to the bar and grab a bottle of 151-proof rum from the well. I start to splash it around, and when that bottle’s empty I find another one and repeat. I’m on bottle number three before the door in the back opens and Iggy walks out. “What,” he says pleasantly, “the hell are you doing?”

  “Renovating. I’m thinking some orange, some yellow, and a whole lot of black.”

  His eyebrows go up. “You’re going to burn down my bar?”

  “That’s right. With you in it.”

  He smiles. Iggy’s no stranger to the shakedown, and he knows scare tactics when he sees them. “Well, you do what you gotta do—”

  I shoot him in the knee.

  Blows his kneecap right off. He bellows, the impact spins him around, and he lands flat on his face. He’s a thrope, but I’m using silver-tipped bullets; that wound isn’t going to magically heal like a normal one would. I’ve just maimed him for life.

  “You—you cazzo cagna!” he gasps. “What the hell did you just do to me?”

  “I shot you. Painful, isn’t it? Not as painful as burning alive, but I understand a thrope can survive that. Usually.”

  What comes out next is just a string of Italian, but I’m pretty sure I get the gist. “Shut up and listen, Iggy. See, this is the only solution I can come up with. Because I’m not going to let those women you have caged at the end of that tunnel get shipped back to whatever hellhole they managed to escape from, and I’m definitely not letting you hold on to them. So the bar goes, you go, and the women go free. Best I can do.”

  “No! No, look, it doesn’t have to be like that—”

  I’m already looking around for a pack of matches.

  TWELVE

  “You can’t do this,” Iggy gasps.

  Matches are proving hard to find—the tobacco industry isn’t as big with the supernatural races. “Give me an alternative.”

  “I’ll let them go. All of them. They can walk away, no strings attached.”

  “That’s a nice sentiment, Iggy. How’s it going to work on a practical level? They don’t have papers, they don’t have money, they have no place to stay.”

  “I’ll sweeten the deal. A hundred grand, divvied up among them. Got it in a safe upstairs. They can stay in a hotel.”

  “Mmmm.” I pretend to consider it. In fact, it’s pretty much what I was going to ask for—but it’s always better if the person you’re shaking down makes an offer. Gives him the illusion of control. “All right. Give the safe combination to my partner, and he’ll go up and get it. But before you do, you better call upstairs and let them kno
w he’s coming—otherwise, you won’t have anyone left to call.”

  He digs out his cell phone with shaking hands and punches in a number. “Joe? Yeah, it’s me. Listen, there’s a lem coming up. Don’t argue with him, don’t give him any trouble. He’s getting something from the safe. What? Just do it, you dumb sack of shit.”

  He snaps the phone closed. “Go on up. Door’s open.”

  I take the phone from him, drop it on the floor, and step on it. “Charlie? You heard the man.”

  And that’s pretty much that. The women wake up groggy and confused, and it takes a while to explain the situation to them. But Csilla’s there—which is a huge relief—and she helps. We get them dressed in the least sleazy outfits we can find, call a hotel, then have them send a shuttle bus over to pick everyone up. I check that the bus has one of those extendable sunshields they use to get pires from building to cab in daylight.

  Charlie ensures that the wise guys behave by confiscating any weapons or phones they have. The safe, as it turns out, has twice as much money as Iggy quoted, but I only take what was offered. Wise guys are all about greed, but they like to think respect is more important. Not taking all their money might buy me a little.

  When the bus arrives, Csilla stares at me with tears in her eyes. I’m a little embarrassed, but when she hugs me I do my best to hug her back.

  “I will not forget this,” she says.

  “Do your best to try,” I say. “You’ll be happier.”

  I give her a bag full of cash, make sure she has my number, then watch her duck under the sunshield and dart to the bus. Once she’s in, it pulls away, its windows tinted too dark for me to see that there’s anyone inside at all.

  Good luck, ladies. Welcome to America.

  “Feel better?” Charlie asks as we drive away.

  “A little.”

  “Good. Now can we get back to work finding Tair?”

  “Sure. Any ideas?”

  “Not so much.”

  “Me, either.” I sigh. “Well, that bout of euphoria’s over …”