Edward Lee - Grimoire Diabolique

“Uh, yeah,” Frankie replied, scratching himself. “I need to take a bang.”

Nick dropped his coffee when he reached to open the car door. It splashed all over his shoes.

“Nick,” Frankie asked. “What’choo drop your coffee for?”

Nick didn’t answer. Instead his eyes rolled up into his head and he fainted, toppling to the pavement.

Frankie looked into the back seat and noted at once that the suitcase was gone.

“—two grand slams in the bottom of the ninth inning against the generally automatic Mariano Rivera,” the tinny voice announced. “Yes, folks, it’s a record-setting comeback as the Baltimore Orioles beat the New York Yankees, 16 to 15!”

Callused fingers, tinged in green light, snapped the old Philco radio off. Spooky wasn’t dead, by the way. This might seem beyond belief, but in truth she hadn’t actually broken her neck against the edge of the coffee table, nor had she suffered any manner of vertebral fracture or spinal-cord-transection. The impact had merely pinched her seventh and eighth cervical nerves, resulting in a reduced heart and respiratory rate and temporary neuromuscular paralysis. The tourniquets had prevented death from blood-loss. Hence, Spooky was alive.

And not in a very good mood when she regained consciousness.

Those motherfuckin’ tube-steaks, she thought. Goombah morons can’t do any-fuckin’-thing right.

She lay in the front footwell of a vehicle whose suspension springs creaked mercilessly over the back road’s potholes and dips. At first Spooky couldn’t see—er, well, she could see enough to note that her legs had been summarily amputated, but that was about it. Above her, she made out faint green light, which she presumed were dashboard lights, but her vision was still too blurry to see the driver.

The driver, incidentally, was possessed of a very complex belief in providence. Twice a year he made these aimless drives all the way up the east coast and all the way back, not to visit relatives or to see sights, but simply to be . To contemplate himself. It proved a very self-actualizing experience. He’d merely pulled over at the Kwik-Mart, purchased a bag of Beechnut chewing tobacco, and had been walking back out of the store when— poof! —the inclination had struck him to look into the back of that big Cadillac. He’d seen the suitcase there and had simply taken it. It was providence, see?

Providence had told him to do that.

“Why, hey there,” the driver said when he noticed the head on the torso moving. “How you feelin’?”

“What kind of a dick for-brains question is that, you old fuck?” the torso replied in the softest voice. “I’ve been armless for eleven motherfuckin’ years and tonight the mafia-version of Laurel and Hardy cut my legs off in a motherfuckin’ Howard Johnsons. How the fuck do you think I feel?”

“I understand your plight, hon, and there really ain’t no cause fer profanation. Not now. See, I’se savin’ you from yer travails. Gettin’ diseases, smokin’ the drugs, gettin’ cornholed by fellas… it’s the negertive forces’a the universe that’s has caused you to veer from the blesséd path that yer supposed to take. I’se’ll help you, missy—help you git’cherself back on the path.”

“Huh?” Spooky said.

“Jus’ you wait’n see, child,” the driver said, his grizzled face eerie and green in the dash lights. He looked down at her through the darkness. “What’cher name, darlin’?”

“Spooky,” Spooky said.

“Well, I’se pleased as punch ta meet’cha, Spooky.” The driver smiled. “My name’s Lud.”

“I have this… problem,” he admitted.

“Believe me, everyone who’s ever sat in that chair has a problem,” related Dr. Marsha Untermann. “Not a typical problem but a grievous one. A problem so incalculable—and so aberrant —that it rocks the imagination.” The woman’s gaze thinned. A long elegant finger traced a graceful chin. “You’re here for a reason—your own rehabilitation. You’re scared. You’re scared that I might find your ‘problem’ so deviant or absolutely appalling that I will insist that you leave my office at once and never come back.”

Nougat-brown eyes leveled at him.

“Yes,” he croaked. “I’m… very afraid of that.”

“Because if that happens, you’ll have nowhere to go?”

“Yes,” he said.

“You probably think that there is no one else in the world like you. That’s why you’ve refrained from seeking help in the past, correct?”

“Yes.”

Dr. Untermann leaned back in the chair behind her desk. She smiled as thinly as her gaze. “Then your fears are without foundation. I do not turn patients away, however foul their problems—or their crimes—may seem. It’s my job. I do my job. And I think I can safely say that this ‘problem’ of yours?” She lit a long cigarette and shook her head. “I’ve heard much worse.”

The smoke spewed from her lips like a ghostly fluid. Her eyes opened wider, inquisitive, coldly promising.

“Tell me about this problem of yours,” she said.

Barrows’ suit cost more than the average resident of Seattle earned in a month. As an investment banker for Jenkins, Harris, & Luce, he could afford it. He could afford the Aston Martin Zagato with the turbo’d 5.3-liter V8, he could afford the Movado gold watch, and he could afford the waterfront penthouse suite on Alaskan Avenue.

One thing he could not afford, however, was to allow anyone of import to see him—

Well…

Better to put it this way. If Barrows made $500,000 in one year— that was a bum year. Investment banking involved a certain alchemy of which Barrows possessed the cabalistic necromancer’s wand. Objectively, his profession entailed moving clients’ money from one bank to another, which sounded simple. In truth, though, knowing where and when to move the money, and for how long, was what made his clients and himself preposterously wealthy. In other words, William Barrows had a reputation to maintain, a reputation upon which his financial solvency depended.

Already out of place in the Armani suit, he walked slowly down the sidewalk past the county courthouse on Third Avenue, right alongside the bums and drug addicts wandering in their plight to a stinking nowhere. Yet Barrows scarcely saw them. He walked steadily onward, his eyes roving the sidewalk’s cement for…

His heart jumped when he heard the sound…

The sound of a man clearing his throat and expectorating loudly.

The ever-familiar splat on the sidewalk came next, and next after that came Barrows’ nearly full erection. Up ahead, he saw it. A derelict in filthy beard and rotten clothes had coughed up a wad of phlegm from his homeless-roughened lungs, and spat it on the sidewalk.

Oh, God, Barrows thought just as a normal man would think upon entering the bedroom of a beautiful woman for the first time, or watching that risky bond fund skyrocket and split.

Barrows caught the glint: a lumpen gem. It lay there waiting for him, freshly green, savory and mystical. Barrows’ Guccis clicked up and stopped, and now he was standing there, feet apart, over the treasure.

He was discreetly protecting it from haphazard trample.

For someone to walk on it would be vandalism. It would be yanking the needle from an addict’s vein and cruelly emptying the syringe out the window. Barrows was guarding it, in other words, while at the same time trying to appear normal.

He glanced at his watch, frowned like a Straussberg method actor waiting for a bus; he was Hitchcock in a phone booth. He had to be careful. He could not allow himself to be seen doing what he was about to do.