The Getaway God (Sandman Slim 6)

She gives me a push.

“Shut up and go to work, drama queen.”

I lean against the bedroom door and pull on my boots.

“I have to spend the day with cops and you get to hang out in bed.”

“Sucks to be you,” she says.

“Maybe I should call in sick.”

“Maybe you should go and get us some money and find out more about what was going on in that meat locker. Don’t you sort of wonder about that?”

“Not really.”

“Well, I do. Don’t come back without some answers and ice cream.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

She turns the light off and I shut the bedroom door. I’m going to have to trust that she isn’t bullshitting me when it comes to the Jade stuff. I want to know more about it now, but if I ask her about that she’ll want to talk to me about Doc Kinski, my real father, and I’m not ready to do that. Maybe if I can get her talking first she’ll forget about my crap.

And what the hell is an Ommah? The Shonin is supposed to be Mr. Wizard. Maybe he’ll know.

I step through a shadow and come out in the Vigil HQ across town.

I HEAD INTO the Shonin’s room, but the place is empty. There’s a note taped to the door with a map and a red X over a nearby room. I find it around the first corner. There are heavy curtains over the window in the door. Someone has left a drawing on the clipboard attached to it. It’s a clipping from a newspaper. A butcher-­shop ad with a cow sectioned into the different cuts of meat. Someone has drawn a little headstone and Xs over the cow’s eyes. I never knew feds had a sense of humor.

The inside of the morgue is almost as cold as the meat-­locker freezer. Wells and the Shonin are there. Wells is reading aloud from the report I sent in last night. Both men look at me and Wells stops reading.

“You took your sweet time getting in today.”

“But it looks like I haven’t missed brunch.”

The room smells of incense. All thirteen bodies from the meat locker are laid out on stainless-­steel tables, with their heads propped up next to them. The top of each head has been sawn off, revealing the gray brain matter. Each brain sports three incense sticks jammed right into the head meat.

I look at Wells.

“You give me a hard time and this guy’s one step away from turning these ­people into bongs.”

“Very funny. This man has been doing real work while you’ve been lying around at home.”

I walk between the tables, checking out the bodies. It’s like a weird corpse maze. Each head has a sigil painted with a brush a little below the hairline. Over their third eye. My guess is that the Shonin has been poking around in some of these dead ­people’s memories.

I say, “How did you get the bodies? You scoop them up before the cops get there?”

“No such luck. Local law enforcement arrived just as we were removing the physical evidence.”

“Dead ­people, you mean.”

“Among other pieces of evidence, yes. I’m afraid there was an ugly scene. I don’t enjoy territorial clashes, but I suppose with a crime this large local authorities are bound to be . . .”

“Emotional?”

“Clingy. However, when I explained the gravity of the situation to the commanding officer, he was happy to allow us to assist in the investigation.”

“You pulled rank, didn’t you? Got all federal. Maybe threatened to bring in Homeland Security.”

“I didn’t have to. As I said, the commander was a reasonable man.”