Брайан Макклеллан - Uncanny Collateral

“Five hundred grand.”

Maggie let out a low whistle.

I said, “I’m looking for the people who sold this to you. Did I get them all?” I certainly hoped not. If I had, I’d just killed everyone who could tell me where to find the rest of Ferryman’s missing souls. I was pretty sure I was in the clear, though. Imps rarely act on their own.

“No, no,” Judith answered. “At least, I don’t think so. I don’t actually recognize any of those… gentlemen. I only let them in because one knew that I was sick and claimed he could help me.” She scowled into the distance, her eyes hopeless. “They were going to kill me.”

That was interesting. “How do you know?” I asked.

“They talked about it. I could barely fight back. They said they were going to repossess the soul they sold me, then slit my throat. They would have killed Robert, too – gotten rid of us and then sold the soul to the next poor sap.”

I assumed Robert was her secretary. “Imps are gossips,” I told her, “and they’re savage little bastards who tend to be low on the food chain. Whenever they get a chance to lord over others, they do. Do you know who their boss is?”

Judith shook her head. “I paid in cash. Dropped it off at a warehouse in the Flats.” She tried to get up, and I had to help her to her feet. She teetered over to a filing cabinet and came back with a scrap of paper. “That address.” She leaned heavily against the wall, staring at the covered corpses, and I thought I saw a flicker of life – of anger – in her eyes. “I’m going to leave town for a while.”

“Probably a good idea,” I answered. “People will be here to clean all this up in ten minutes. You’ll want to make sure that your secretary – Robert, was it?”

“Yes.”

“That Robert doesn’t tell anyone about this. It’s best if he keeps thinking I’m OtherOps, but if OtherOps does show up for some reason… well, I was never here.”

“I understand.”

“Good.” I felt around my lower canines with my tongue. I could still taste some blood from where they’d split the gums. It was painful, but a good kind of pain. The berserker in me enjoyed the sight of the bodies in the corner, relishing the memory of putting down five of those creepy little fuckwits. The human part of me felt vaguely ill. I’m a good reaper partially because I’m dangerous, yes, but I’m not an assassin or a thug. Without Maggie’s urging and that troll blood in my veins, I would have moved a little more cautiously – maybe even left an imp alive for Maggie to question. I felt foolish.

I exchanged cards with Judith and stepped outside just in time to see Ferryman’s cleanup squad enter the office. There were over a dozen of them – all human, as far as I could tell, and the group included janitors, a butcher, carpet men, and even a couple of guys wearing the shirts of a local glass company, here to replace the one frosted glass wall I’d shot out in my little rampage. I stepped around them and headed into the hallway, where I wished, not for the first time, that I followed in the footsteps of almost everyone else at Valkyrie and smoked. It might have relieved some of my tension.

You don’t seem too hot right now, Maggie said.

I just killed five people.

Imps.

Yeah, imps. They’re not human, but I’d still feel bad if I hit a dog with my car. Besides, I should have left one alive.

Move too slowly, and that one might have gotten the drop on you.

I snorted. She was right, of course. Always shoot first and ask questions later when it comes to a room full of hostile imps. But I still didn’t feel great about it. I’m taking the rest of the day off. I’ll call a friend of mine at OtherOps and find out who owns this warehouse. Then we’ll hit it first thing in the morning.

The warehouse at the address Judith gave me was empty.

I stood just inside the open door of a truck loading bay and gazed across thirty thousand square feet of breezy concrete lit by morning sunlight streaming in through broken pane windows near the ceiling. Taking a quick walk around the open space, I found a bit of trash, plenty of dust, and no evidence that anything of substance had been stored here for some time. I returned to my truck and dialed Judith, who picked up on the second ring.

“I’m at the address you gave me,” I told her. “When you dropped off the money here, did you actually go inside?”

“I did.”

“Was the warehouse being used for anything?”

“I’m not sure. I just went up to the office on the left.”

I spotted a small staircase off to one side of the truck loading bay. It led to a windowless manager’s door. “Hold on for a moment, please,” I told her. I ran up the stairs and tried the knob. It was unlocked. I flipped on the lights. The room inside was just as empty as the warehouse. “Any other details you can remember?” I asked Judith.

“I gave them the money. They used one of those mirrors to give me that damn soul, and I left. I think there were three or four imps inside having lunch at the time. There really isn’t anything else.”

That’s all she knows, Maggie confirmed in the back of my head.

“Understood. Thank you.”

I hung up and called my friend at OtherOps. Justin and I go back longer than me and Maggie. I like to call him a desk jockey because he hates leaving the office, but he was a capable agent and third in command at the Cleveland OtherOps office. My call went to voicemail, but he rang back almost the instant I hung up the phone.

“Alek,” he said, “you get anything at that warehouse?”

“Nothing. Everything is unlocked, and the place is empty.”

He snorted and said, “I got in touch with the owner this morning. Turns out she rents to anybody willing to pay cash up front, no questions asked. Her last tenant was human, but she doesn’t have much of a description: male, six feet, blond hair.”

“That could be me,” I said flatly.

“Yeah, she wasn’t very helpful. She did say that they still have three months prepaid on the rent. Someone was there, but it sounds like they cleared out before you could reach them.”

Human, huh? Maggie said. So the imps definitely aren’t working alone.

Sure sounds like it. We just need to find out if this human is another henchman or the big boss.

You make it sound like a video game.

Don’t shit on the ways I keep my life interesting, I told her.

I said to Justin, “Any word on who hired that necromancer to rough me up?”

“Nothing,” Justin replied. “The kid won’t say a damn word to anyone at the station. I’ve got our sorcery specialist talking to him right now. Hopefully I’ll get a little more out of him at some point.”

“I appreciate it.”

There was a pause from the other end of the line. “You, uh, gonna tell me who you’re after this time? Is it teeth? You’re always chasing teeth.”

“I don’t actually do that many teeth these days. The Tooth Fairy is semiretired, and Jinn Enterprises has scaled back their Midwest operations.”

“Blood?”

“Nope.”

“So are you going to tell me?”

“Sorry, client confidentiality. But I’ll buy you a beer next week if you’ve got the time.”

“Deal.”

I hung up and stared at the warehouse, feeling more than a little annoyed. Ferryman was wrong about one thing: that souls didn’t have any value in this life. Judith had paid half a million for that secondhand shit. I had plenty of smoke – five dead imps and a half-dead lawyer – but no actual fire. Someone in town was running a very lucrative scam with Ferryman’s missing souls, and if Judith’s run-in with the imps was any indication, people were going to start turning up dead sooner rather than later.