Caitlin Kittredge - Devil's Business

“You’ll need a car,” Mayhew said to Pete. “I set it up with a friend of mine who runs a garage—you can drive American-style, right?”

“I’ll manage,” Pete said.

“Great,” Mayhew said. “We’ll go back to my office and talk business. I really am glad you’re here.”

There it was, the hook. Jack had no doubt that Mayhew’s real reason for gladness was that whoever was pulling his strings wouldn’t immediately peel his skin off his fat form and put it on toast. He’d actually gotten Pete to show up and proven himself a useful underling. Jack could put up with the git just as long as it took to see the big picture, the puppeteer rather than the puppet, and then he was going to give Mayhew a real reason to be glad for American dentistry.

He dozed on the drive, the rank air doing little to replace his need for a fag. When they finally bumped to a stop, he realized he’d been somewhere else, the freeway turning into a long, black road made of smooth obsidian, and the smog cloud becoming the ashes of things burnt alive, drifting down to catch in his hair and eyelashes like charnel snow.

Jack didn’t have many memories of his time in Hell. When the Morrigan had led him back from the Bleak Gates, she’d smoothed his mind over, picked out with her beak all of the time that Jack had lost when he went down to the Pit, and left plain gray nothing in its place.

He’d seen a few flashes in dreams, which was par for the course for a psychic who couldn’t shut out the feed on his best days. But nothing concrete. No flashbacks, no coming awake and screaming.

He still didn’t know the extent of what the Morrigan had done to him, besides the markings. He felt better than he had before he went to the Pit, but that wasn’t saying much. He’d been sick, using whiskey as a food group, and battered by his sight. It wasn’t as if he could suddenly lift cars and run five kilometers without hacking.

Pete stuck her head in his window. “You coming?”

Jack shook off the dream. That was what you did with dreams—his weren’t prophetic, as Pete’s had a tendency to be, and they certainly weren’t worth remembering. “Yeah,” he said. “Right along the yellow brick road.”

Mayhew lived in Venice, so named by its city fathers in a startling fit of originality because Venice, California, also had canals. “You know, just like Italian Venice. Was a big tourist spot in the fifties.”

Jack could hear the swish of the ocean when he stepped out of the car, and the air was sticky with salt and carbon monoxide. Mayhew had parked in an alley, and he let them in a side door. “One of the guys on the force owned this pad and let it go for a song,” he said, flicking a light to life. “Got the hell out of the city, moved to Montana. I guess he’s a sheriff now or something.” Mayhew shrugged. “Miserable fucking existence, if you ask me, but some people can’t hack LA.”

Not feeling any hexes or other sort of protection on the place, Jack stepped in after Mayhew. The “pad” ended in a T-shaped hall, one end leading to an office that looked out onto a street full of similar small bungalows and semi-detached flats, the other leading back into a living room done up in rattan with bright cushions, tiki idols on most surfaces, and a sort of 1950s clock above a bubble-shaped telly with rabbit ears. A small fireplace was crowned with a glamor shot of Jayne Mansfield and an array of framed movie posters for flicks like The Hellcats and Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!

“Fuck me,” Jack muttered. “Did Dean Martin’s corpse projectile vomit this shit into his sitting room?”

Mayhew continued through a kitchen done entirely in powder blue, including appliances, and showed them into a small back bedroom.

“You can crash here,” he said. “Sorry about the one bed situation. Maybe Jack would be more comfortable on the sofa?”

“Being stared at by a headless movie star and fifteen tiki idols?” Jack said. “Yeah, don’t think so.”

Mayhew’s neck swelled a little, but he wouldn’t take it up with him. Not in front of Pete. “You’re not a fan of kitsch, I take it.”

Jack dumped out his rucksack on the bed. “What gave me away?”

“Anyway,” Pete said. “I think we’re both interested to hear what’s got you in such a lather, Benjamin.”

“Call me Ben.” Smile, smile, smile. “Everyone does.”

Pete did not call him Ben, just went into his office space and plopped herself in the visitor’s chair. Jack made sure Benjamin-now-Ben walked ahead of him. There was more than the obvious convenience of Mayhew’s timing. He stank of flop sweat, and he kept shooting nervous glances at all the doors and windows. It could be that whoever had convinced him to set Pete up wasn’t the type to take tea and biscuits, or it could be something else. It was the off chance of “something else” that had Jack’s teeth grinding.

Mayhew’s office was a far cry from his frenetic tribute to tacky acid trips of a flat. The furniture was from the same vintage, but it was dull metal painted in varying colors of Piss, Vomit, and Hairball. Papers crowded every surface and the blinds were broken over a painted front window. Mayhew & Co. Investigations, Jack read backward. The letters were bisected by spider cracks where somebody had chucked a small, heavy object at the glass.

“‘And Co.’?” Jack said, taking the second client seat. The vinyl was sticky with some long-ago spill. Dust motes flew up in a flock when he sat.

“Yeah, that’s just to make me sound more trustworthy,” Mayhew said.

Jack rubbed the dust from the arm of his chair between thumb and forefinger. “Does it work?”

Mayhew kept that slightly nauseous smile on his face. “Most of the time.”

“Your problem,” Pete reminded Mayhew. “The sooner you tell us, the sooner we can get to solving it.”

Mayhew got up and dug through a file cabinet, dislodging a stack of duplicate forms and old gun magazines from the top.

Jack sat and rubbed the grit between his fingers. You could learn a lot from dust. Places picked up the psychic leak of whoever’d stood in them, glass and iron and stone and wood. Mayhew’s dust stank of magic. Not a human, not the kind of residue left by a talent or even by black magic. It was dry and harsh and tasted of ash and hot wind in the back of his throat.

He rubbed his hand on the leg of his jeans. The dust scattered, and the sensation faded.

“I was a homicide cop for ten years,” Mayhew said, dumping a bulging file of photocopies and blurry photographs onto his desk. He nudged a container of takeaway into the trash and spread the photos out. “This was my last case.”

Pete obligingly drew the photos closer, handed them to Jack one by one. They were gruesome, he supposed, but nothing that garden-variety humans couldn’t do to one another. Four people, in various stages of defenestration, lay on a tile floor. A door stood open to the outside, and blood dribbled over walls and various other surfaces.

“Somebody decided to redecorate?” Jack said, holding up a close shot of a woman who’d been opened from sternum to pelvis, her blood feathering across the tile under her in a spidery, winglike halo.

“That was Mary Kay Case, the homeowner,” Mayhew said. “She was eight and a half months pregnant.” He sat back, and waited for Jack’s scrabbling apology.

Jack tossed the photo back on the desk. “Yeah? Unless the baby was a flesh-chewing mutant Hellspawn that ate its way out, grew tentacles, and joined a traveling circus, what’s this got to do with the Black?”

“Jesus, man,” Mayhew said. “You really are a block of ice, aren’t you?”

“Look,” Jack said. “You were a cop. You know that perfectly plain human beings are capable of doing this and worse to each other. So I can sit here and wring me hands, or you can stop wasting our time with the suspenseful fucking buildup.”