Urban Enemies (Cainsville 4.5)

The woman turned on him, and I was glad I wasn't on the receiving end of that look. "I don't murder innocent people, Thomas. And neither do you."

"He ain't innocent," Mason muttered. One of those white figures got too close to him, and he spat out the liquor. "Keep those fuckin' things away from me, Marie, will ya? They make me irritable."

She turned to the creature and made a shooing motion, snapping at it in a language I caught maybe every third word of. "The question remains, Mr. Grey--what to do with you?"

"Untie me and let me go?" I suggested. She laughed, and I realized she was younger than I'd thought.

"No, I think a man like you is more useful to me tied up. You can stay down here. The creatures have no taste for dead flesh."

"What are they?" I craned around Tom Mason. One a man, older, probably not bad-looking in life, one a woman--a girl, really--blond and naked and very, very dead. I could practically count the veins under her dirt-smeared skin.

"Surely you've encountered those who walk the shadow world, Mr. Grey," said the woman. "After all, you are, to poor Tom at least, the boogeyman."

"I ain't scared," Mason insisted, plucking at his piss-stained pants.

"Never seen anything like that," I said. "They're . . . alive?" I'd seen dead men get up and walk before--hell, for that, all I had to do was look in the mirror--and I'd dealt with vampires, demons riding a corpse's skin, but never had I seen a human corpse dig its way back to the surface. After all the time I'd spent in my position, it was nice to know some things could still surprise me.

"Enough questions outta you," Marie said. "I got a few of my own." She retrieved a shiny red purse from out of my line of vision and drew a photograph from it. It was faded and stained, one corner folded over. A girl just as beautiful as Marie grinned out at me, a high-collared school uniform pegging her as the little sister.

"I've never seen her," I said. Marie snorted.

"Oh, so now you're psychic, too?"

"No," I said. "But if you're looking for a pretty teenage girl in a city like this, there's a dozen holes she could've fallen into. If she's been gone from home more than a month, then she's probably on dope, turned out, or dead. I'm sorry, but that's how it goes out here."

This time, it was Mason who smacked me in the head. His fist was hard and knobby as a desert outcropping, and it set the bells in my skull to clanging all over again. "Back in my day, we knew what to do with men like you," he said. "All it took was a sturdy tree and a piece of rope."

"They tried that once," I said, staring up at his red-rimmed eyes, not blinking. "It didn't take."

"Thomas." Marie put a hand on his arm and guided him away from me. "Give me a moment alone."

"Ain't leaving you alone." Mason gave a deep, wet sniff. "Don't you see we can't let him leave this place? Ain't pretty but it's got to be done."

Marie's grip tightened. "A moment," she said. "Go upstairs, Thomas."

He grumbled and stomped up the stairs. The Santa Ana howled like something alive and hungry as he opened and shut the bulkhead.

Marie pulled up another chair. The creatures had taken to leaning against the walls. One, the man, scraped listlessly at the dirt walls with broken fingernails.

"Listen," I said to Marie. "I can help you. I don't know what you've gotten yourself into, but I'm not a stranger to this."

"I thought you were a mere thug, Mr. Grey," said Marie. "Shackled to Louie Montrose."

"He's not the only one footing my bills," I said. "I do what I want, and this is way more than what I signed up for. You want to find that girl, I know every flophouse, gin joint, and opium den in this town." I tested the ropes again, but the knots were good. Probably Mason's handiwork. "You can't kill me," I told Marie, "so you might as well take me up on my offer."

"And what will you take in return?" she said. "I know men, Mr. Grey, and not one of them gives favors freely."

"I want to go home and forget I ever saw this goddamn basement," I said. "If finding some wayward kid is what it takes, then fine."

Marie tightened her lips and then reached into the purse. She extracted a switchblade and cut me free. I sat for a minute, waiting for feeling to come back to my hands. The girl in the corner turned to watch me. One of her eyes was cloudy.

"Those things really aren't going to chew on me?" I said.

"No," Marie said. "They're poor work. I am only caring for them, waiting for the curse to wear off so they can pass on peacefully. Come."

We left the basement for the marginally more hospitable confines of Tom Mason's kitchen. Flies were everywhere, hovering over spoiled food, glasses of bourbon and cigarette butts, and a sink full of what once might have been dishes.

I lit a smoke of my own to cover the stench. It didn't seem to bother Marie, but I was getting the sense that not much bothered Marie. "Where'd you last see your sister?"