Authors: Rhys Ford
“And to answer your question, Detective,” JoJo piped up. “We sell the curious and the macabre. Didn’t you see that on the sign outside? The very best in death, decay, and delightful.”
“But people… really buy this stuff?” Dante studied what looked like a toothy pair of silver tongs in a glass case, reading off the placard set on the blue velvet in front of it. JoJo’s round spectacles flashed purple starbursts as they caught the light. “I mean, who doesn’t need a… Victorian testicle massager? With knobby teeth to gently stimulate blood flow?”
Hank held his hand up above his head. “Me. Don’t need it. I’m good.”
“No one uses….” Janet laughed, adjusting a string of beads she used to leash her eyeglasses around her neck. “Okay, some people might use that. But most of the things we carry are decorative only. For instance, we have a prototype of an electric chair, but a salesman’s sample, so no wiring. A conversation piece only.”
“Or something a kid would use to fry his sister’s Barbie doll,” Hank muttered, walked away from the display case, then lay the wrapped flat on the counter. “Not to cut this Addams family attic tour short, ladies, but we’ve a case to move on.”
“Of course,” Janet acquiesced, moving to stand in front of the antique cash register taking up one corner of the sales area. “Let’s see what you’ve brought us.”
“Rook always has such nice things.” JoJo’s silvery laughter jingled as bright as the bell over the shop’s door. “Every once in a while he runs into something he thinks we’ll like and gives us first bid.”
“So he keeps you in dead baby sharks?” Hank muttered, giving Dante a piercing glance. “Good to know that’s what you’re in bed with.”
“Let’s just crack this open and let the ladies take a look at what he gave us. I was busy with… other things when he brought this up from downstairs. I didn’t see what it was.” Dante cut the package’s string, then peeled back the waxy paper wrapping. Two thick cardboard flats lay beneath, sealed at the corners with metal clips. He popped them open, lifted the top board, then stepped back, letting the two collectors take a look at what was inside.
“Oooohhhh, a Houdini playbill from the Argyle.” JoJo’s whisper was steeped in an awe Dante usually only heard when little girls saw a rock star for the first time. “Oh, Janet, look at this.”
“Gloves,” Janet admonished.
Pairs of white gloves suddenly appeared on the counter, and Dante waited as they were donned, then the poster inspected carefully. Janet’s cunning gaze shot out over the edge of her glasses, pinning Dante with a fierce challenge.
“And he’s just letting us have this?”
“Someone’s trying to kill him. Rook thinks you might know how we can find her. Consider it a preemptive thank you on his part.” Dante briefly sketched out what they’d gathered, then took out a set of mug shots they’d gathered on Madge. “Do you know this woman? Have you seen her lately? Do you know where she might be?”
It was a risk interviewing the women. Either could be friends with their suspect, and despite Rook’s assurances they would never betray him, Dante’d seen people turn on one another at the smallest slight. He and Hank were going to have to take what JoJo and Janet said at face value, hoping a lead would bring them to Madge’s front door. Too much was riding on trust, and he didn’t have enough evidence of anything other than Rook’s promises and intuition.
“Ah, that’s Madge… oh, what the hell was her last name? I can’t remember.” Janet took her glasses off, then chewed absently at an earpiece. “She used to work for Deb. In that twin scheme she ran. She quit that. Deb, I mean.”
“A long time ago, I think now,” her partner piped up. “At least two years? She hooked up with Jane to run the Betty scheme. But Madge’s had a few partners. Not for long, though. She’s not a very nice person.”
“Most of the Betties aren’t, dear,” Janet tsked. “Difficult to be a nice person if you’re busy scamming people. I heard from Rook about the two they found all cut up in the bin.”
Hank took out the tightly focused shots of the three people murdered and left at Potter’s Field. “We suspect Madge had a hand in killing Dani Anderson, our first victim. And we’re guessing she somehow got the other two to work with her. Then she killed them too.”
“Or at least that’s what we speculate.” Dante stepped in. “Can you name any other Betties? Maybe Madge contacted them.”
The names JoJo rattled off meant nothing to him, but Dante recorded them in his notebook, nodding when JoJo spelled one out.
“You say she’s trying to kill Rook? That seems kind of weird,” Janet murmured, closing the playbill back up in its wrapper. “I mean, considering….”
“Considering what?” Dante leaned on the counter.
“That Madge’s mother
works
for Rook,” JoJo replied. “Has for a bit now.”
“We went over Rook’s employees. They’re all part-time, and none have access to….”
Dante and Hank exchanged weighted looks. They’d been careful, tracking down as much background information as they could on the people surrounding Rook. Only one seemed to defy tracing, and Dante’d put that down to the transient nature of the lives she and Rook led.
“Fuck. No. Not… shit, she’s been under our noses the whole damned time.”
“I am completely lost,” Hank grumbled. “Who the hell are we talking about?”
“Charlene Canada.” JoJo gently patted Hank’s hand, as if to console him. “
She’s
Madge what’s-her-name’s mother.”
“Fucking hell,” Rook spat, ducking down to the floor.
He’d been seen. No doubt about that. Madge—or at least he thought it was Madge—flashed a gun in her hand, and he fell right back into old habits. Survival at any cost. Running his hand along the edge of the shattered glass cabinet, he cupped what he found, then tossed it at the woman’s face. In the nova-brightness of the front room’s overhead lights, the broken glass and metal fragments sparkled and glittered as they flew into Madge’s face, a rainbow spray of edge and pain.
Rook didn’t stick around to see if he hurt her. Turning on his heel, he was off, heading for the docking bay door set into the right corner of the building. It was hard going. His feet were being sliced up by the damage left on the shop’s floor, and his toes were growing sticky with blood. Madge’s screams chased him, her swearing peppery and profane amid his panicked gasps for air. A gunshot went off, and a corner of a cinder-block column he’d just ducked past exploded into a hail of dust and cement fragments.
The seemingly practical design of back rooms and showcases had somehow become a deadly maze, one where placing his left hand on the walls would only lead him further into trouble. There were too many cut-throughs, ones he’d chosen to make it easier to move large collectibles into but now were blocked by crates and boxes filled with what used to stock the front room so repairs could begin.
“Too damned efficient. Fucking movers. Why didn’t you leave me a way out?” Rook muttered, having to backtrack again. He and Dante’d gone straight up to the loft or he’d have seen the mess.
The back room was a disaster, and he couldn’t find a clear path to the bay. He needed to get something on his feet. If the sound of his panting didn’t draw Madge to him, the trail of bloody footprints he was leaving behind were as plain as a dotted line in an old Family Circus cartoon.
He missed the soft beeps and whirs of toys and collectibles, mostly because the low sheet of noise would have masked his movements. Only the air-conditioning units on the cold displays rattled about, barely a whisper of buzzing to keep him company while he hunted for something to put on his feet.
Most of the common things he kept in the storeroom were things he could place in the Potter’s Field display cases up front to catch a tourist’s eye. Rook didn’t need flashy and pretty. He needed solid and serviceable. He found a pair of gold-sequined moccasins worn in an old Flash Gordon movie, much too small to get his toes into even if the bells dangling from the shoe’s laces weren’t bad enough.
There were even less practical things, mostly feminine in nature, and for the first time in his life, Rook wished he hadn’t said no to the pair of platform boots someone tried to pass off as wardrobe from a bad ’70s rock star movie.
“Okay, what do I have in here?” Keeping an ear out for Madge, he slowly pulled out a box on one of the bottom shelves. His feet were beginning to ache, and panic was making Rook’s pulse race, but he took a breath. “Get a hold of yourself, Stevens. Just like a job. This is
just
like a job. Focus. Oh, fucking bless you, Charlene, for your label machine fetish.”
Rook found a pair of black leather hi-top Converses tucked into a box marked
robot movie shoes
. A half size too big for him, they were roomy on Rook’s feet, but he tied them up tightly, wrapping the excess laces around his ankles. He squished about in the soles as he took his first step, but there was no pain.
“Got everything out, then,” he murmured. “And for fuck’s sakes, stop talking to yourself.”
It was a bad habit, one he’d picked up when he’d done his first job. Keeping up a constant monologue helped push his fears back when he’d been dangling forty feet in the air off the edge of a balcony after the owners of the mansion he’d just robbed came home. Talking to himself made him feel less alone then.
Now it would only get him killed.
A shadow moved through the subdued blue tinge of the back storerooms. If he could get around to the front and around the right corner, it was a long sprint to the rear entrance. To the left, the stairwell was closer, and the loft was defensible, with its thick, heavy door and locks, but he’d be trapped, unable to get out or contact anyone.
“Not like they can smoke me out. So going to kill Dante for taking my phone and laptop.” Rook crouched, seeing another long shadow join the first. There was a tinge of voices, lost under the hum of a nearby compressor. “Shit, I can open a goddamn window and shout at someone down on the sidewalk if I’ve got to. Up it is.”
He didn’t have much in the way of weapons. Everything heavy and substantial was crated up and in the warehouse miles away. A hockey stick from a cancelled wizard’s show was the best Rook could do, but its length would make wielding it among the tight spaces too difficult. He got three steps out into the corridor when someone came out of the stairwell, swinging the door wide. Caught between diving back into the storeroom or attacking, Rook grabbed the first heavy thing he could find, a tiny bat from a ballpark giveaway.
“Fuck it. Attack, then run up.” He steeled himself for the sprint. Then his world exploded into a confetti of crazy and noise.
There were shouts behind him as the shadows became people. Madge’s screams for him to stop were joined by a deeper, unfamiliar bark. Booms followed his exit, and Rook winced at the sound of breaking glass and more swearing. Raising the bat above his head, he launched at the person coming out from behind the stairwell door, hoping to catch them off guard.
Her blonde high ponytail was Rook’s first hint he’d made a mistake, and then he caught a glimpse of Charlene’s look of horrified surprise as he brought the bat down. Turning, Rook tried to angle it away from the woman, but the wetness in the loose Converses twisted him about and he stumbled, slamming into the corridor’s brick wall. Pain shocked down his arm, the crenulated surface digging through his thin shirt and into his stitched skin. Something gave, tearing apart, and Rook dropped the bat, his fingers too numb to hold on to the handle.
“Shit, Char. Come on! Get upstairs!” Another shot rang out, this time the bullet slamming into a wall near his head. “Fuck… go!”
“God, Rook.” Her expression turned cruel, then pitying. “You are so stupid. So very stupid.”
“Dispatch says there’s a pileup on the Sunset ramp off of the 101. She doesn’t know if there’s anyone getting through,” Hank screamed at Dante. “Do you have the sirens on?”
“Lights and noise. Both on,” Dante shouted back. “You can’t go in with me. Can’t risk it.”
“Montoya, you can just fuck—”
“I’m serious, Camden. You can’t hear a fucking thing, and if there’s shit going down in there, I don’t want you to get in the line of fire.” He cut through the traffic, pushing cars aside in a stream of churning lights and hailing noise. “I can’t fucking believe I did this.
Canicas
, what the hell was I thinking taking his damned phone?”
“Watch out for the bus! The
bus
, Dante! Watch the fucking bus!”
Hank gripped the dashboard, bracing himself against the car door as Dante slid the sedan’s tires up over the curb to avoid a bus swerving into their lane. The car careened off the cement buffer, slamming hard back onto the asphalt, and drifted to the left, hydroplaning on a shallow pond pooling over a blocked drainage grate.
“God, you’re going to get us killed.”
“Hold on,” Dante warned his partner. The unmarked car screeched around a corner, and Dante was forced to slow down as he passed through a red light, modulating the siren to warn oncoming traffic. “We’re a block out. Just… I need you to get someone here, Hank.”
“We’re going to look like assholes if he’s up there chewing his nails.”
Hank’s grumble was nearly as loud as his shouting. Dante risked giving his partner a stern look.
“Shit, I’m just saying, he might be okay. You go in without backup, and
if
someone’s there, the captain’s going to string you up by your balls, Montoya.”
“I
called
Charlene to let him out.” Something gurgled in Dante’s insides, and fear crinkled his throat. “
Fuck
.”
“Just drive, Montoya,” Hank ordered as he tapped back into the car’s data connection. “I’m going to tear Dispatch a new asshole.”
“Five-minute monologue, or am I just supposed to stand here while you beat the shit out of me for something I don’t know about?” Rook edged against the wall, clutching his injured shoulder. “’Cause for the life of me, I’ve got no fucking clue what you’re looking for here.”