Carole Douglas - Silver Zombie

“Sorry, miss. Of course I know that. I just don’t know what to do with them. Yet. The tribal casinos have been hit harder than Las Vegas with this Millennium Revelation thing and the economic crash. I got a lot of Indian money riding on this. Not your Native American charity stuff. This is our investment for the new century.”

“We see that,” Tallgrass said. “This is a major and impressive construction, Ben. And it’s Kansas grown and bred. But you haven’t been honest with us, and that’s a bad start.”

“Honest?” Beads of sweat appeared on Ben’s brow as if dowsed up by an invisible crown of thorns. “Tallgrass, you’re the consortium’s ally. If you—”

“Consortium, Ben?” Tallgrass sounded angrier than I’d ever like to confront. “You had the dream and the tribes gave you the money. Now we want an accounting. Who’s been blackmailing you and who have you paid off and how much?”

“That’s what you’ve been doing?” Ben asked bitterly. “Sniffing around with your slick FBI friend and this woman and that dog?”

“Look the dog in the eyes when you ask that,” Tallgrass said.

Hey, what about Ric and my totally righteous histories?

Quicksilver lifted his clawed paws onto the desk edge and thrust his big, fur-aureoled head nose to nose with Hassard.

Ben Hassard wiped the back of his hand across the sweat streaming down his forehead.

“Every contractor pays extra here and there,” he said. “If not to the union, then to what’s left of the mob or to meet some government regulation a crooked congressman put in for his local lobbyist. We know that. That’s the way things run.”

“That is not the Indian way,” Tallgrass said. “We dealt with honor.”

“Honor was a European myth and our stupidity, Tallgrass. You know that. I had to pay off some people. That’s all.”

Ric and I exchanged a glance. We were the “White Eyes” in an old argument.

I realized it was best we keep our mouths shut and our ears open. Quicksilver and his wolfish heritage had more cred here than we did. We could say the Irish and the Mexicans had as many bones to pick with history as Native Americans, including genocide, but this was not our personal risk or our showdown.

“Who did you pay off?” Tallgrass wasn’t leaving here without an answer.

Hassard just looked scared.

“Wait,” I said.

Both men glared at me. Ric shook his head slightly, warning me to back off. This was an all-male, all Native American powwow.

Quicksilver pulled his paws from the desk to my knees and regarded me intently.

I wrapped my hands around his collar and went, like Tallgrass, with the dog.

“Mr. Hassard, I filmed something the other day at my old workplace, WTCH-TV.”

Hassard froze like an ice sculpture. For some reason, that TV station was not only familiar, but an object of fear.

“Let me dig out my phone. Ric, while you, Tallgrass, and Quicksilver were off on rural investigations, I was delving into my history here in Wichita … which included this bitchy local weather witch, Sheena Coleman and … the station’s vampire anchorman I call Undead Ted.”

By then I’d got the film on-screen. The familiar had become a wrist bangle etched with an Egyptian Eye of Horus symbol, all the better to peek.

“A contact of mine at the station downloaded some … personal film to me, including the footage we got at the first cow mutilation site a few months ago. Before I left, I filmed Sheena and Ted returning from what looked like a payoff lunch meeting. They were chauffeured with a likely suspect, aka an ugly customer. I’ve never seen, not even since the Millennium Revelation, a man who walked more like a snake. Anybody recognize Mr. Rattlesnake-skin Briefcase?”

I ran the first part of the sequence by Ric and Tallgrass and, finally, Hassard.

“That’s her,” Hassard finally admitted. “That blasted local TV weather witch has been hitting our construction site with out-of-season rainstorms and hail and threatening lightning strikes to bring the entire structure down unless we pay up big. We’re at the breaking point, Tallgrass. I don’t dare stop paying or all the tribes’ money is kaput.”

He put his head in his hands and shook it. “We’re so close to launch time and to EC making enough to get these blackmailers off our back.”

“You’ll never get blackmailers off your back unless you become the worst bucking bronco around,” Tallgrass said.

“And here’s the money man,” I said.

Tallgrass and Hassard shook their heads at the paused scene.

Ric got my phone screen last and stared in silence. He kept so uncharacteristically still I began to feel like I’d goofed.

“I should have uploaded this to all your cell phones right away,” I said. “I was distracted by Sheena’s parting weather volleys and … visiting some sentimental spots in town.”

“Not what’s bothering me,” Ric said.

He licked his lips, maybe nervous or maybe getting ready to confess.

“I recognize the man with the money. The less he’s on our radar the better for us. He might have some way of tracking his presence on neighborhood networks, and he’s the kind of bastard you really need to get the jump on.”

“Ric?” I asked.

He looked me hard in the eyes. “It’s the drug cartel kingpin, El Demonio. Torbellino is his surname.”

“Your scumball kidnapper and zombie smuggler from years ago in Mexico? A kingpin now? Here in Kansas? Why? No … it can’t be.”

“Think I’d ever forget his inhuman face, Delilah? If El Demonio has expanded his foul drug smuggling and zombie-running operations from the crime cesspool of the border up into Kansas heartland, where he’s allied with weather witches, we have to grab the chance to take him and his cartel down before the whole country is fouled.”

“‘We’?” I asked incredulously. “Without backup or state troopers or the Reserves? He must have a ton of really fast zombies, not to mention his usual crime-lord army of gunmen.”

Tallgrass objected in his low-key way. “We must find Torbellino’s base of operations first.”

“We didn’t have the bastard’s stink before,” Ric said. “We’ll start tracking at the WTCH-TV parking lot. When El Demonio made the mistake of setting shoe sole on asphalt, he made himself Quicksilver meat.”

Quick had already leaped up to view the film. Now he was lunging for the office exit, ready to track and tackle.

“Delilah.” Ric turned to me. “Stay with Ben in case he gets fresh contact from the blackmailers.”

I was about to object to being left out of the track-down my minifilm had made possible, but I knew I’d blown it by regarding Sheena and Ted’s unsavory connections as part of my personal history instead of something bigger.

So I nodded.

Ben lifted the Old Crow bottle to me with a questioning look as a peace offering. We’d both failed to recognize and report something important to our best friends.

I watched Quicksilver’s thick, plumy tail flash out the office door, Tallgrass and Ric right behind him.

After a moment of mentally bemoaning being left behind, I pulled my chair up to the desk just as Ben, his hand shaking, poured amber whiskey into the water-spotted glass that had been mine.

“Miss Street prefers a smoother and costlier blend of poison,” a beautifully resonant but all too recognizable voice said behind me.

My silver familiar turned tail and slipped down my clothes to wrap itself around my right upper thigh like a garter as I gulped down two fingers of Old Crow straight anyway.

Then I turned to confront the unexpected newcomer.

BEN HASSARD WAS on his feet, nodding and bowing like a bobble-headed doll.