10.
“Man, I swear, I don’t know anything—”
I pulled a lever. The conveyor belt rattled and the pine box lurched toward the open grate. Todd screamed like he was on the world’s deadliest roller coaster. I stopped the belt.
“The ink, Todd. Where do you get it?”
Beads of greasy sweat ran down the side of his face. He had his eyes squeezed shut, tighter than his mummy wrap of duct tape, and he mouthed a prayer with no breath behind it.
“You’re about…I’m going to say eight feet from the furnace door,” I said. “Oh, hey, speaking of, it’s not a coincidence that you’re going in feet-first. See, first thing that’ll happen is, the rubber on your shoes is going to melt. It’ll be like…hot tar, searing the soles of your feet.”
I knew what he was wrestling with. I’d seen it before: he was asking himself if his bosses would do worse things to him, if he talked, than I would. My job was to convince him that they couldn’t. He had to believe this was his worst-case scenario, here and now, and giving me what I wanted was his only way out.
“The skin is next,” I told him. “You ever see a chicken rotisserie with the oven set too high, Todd? The flesh chars, then it just…sloughs off the bone.”
“Santiago!” he yelped.
“Pardon?”
“S-Santiago. That’s the name of the guy I get my shit from. That’s the name he gave me, anyway.”
“And he’s tight with the Network?” I asked.
He shook his head. “I don’t know what that is. I swear, please, I don’t know!”
I believed him. There comes a point when a man is too afraid to lie, and Todd was about ten feet over that line. It was looking more and more like I’d netted a guppy; he’d been played, too dumb to realize what he’d done. I wanted the people who were playing him.
Hell, I was starting to think Todd might live to go back to the Burger Barn. I wasn’t done wringing him out yet, though.
“Tell me about Santiago.”
“Not much to tell, man. He’s…he’s a short guy, built like a football player, bushy black mustache. He’s—he’s Spanish. I know because I asked if he was from Mexico once and he got really pissed at me. I thought it was the same thing.”
“Spaniards are from Spain,” I told him. “Mexicans are from Mexico.”
“That’s what he said. I thought Spain was in Mexico.”
I cocked my head at him. “Let’s move on. How do you get in touch with him?”
“I don’t. He gets in touch with me. Once a month, he texts me and tells me where to meet up. Always a different place. He brings my supply, I bring his cut of the money from last month’s sales. He gets ninety percent. I keep the rest, and he kicks me a little junk on the side, you know, for personal use.”
Ninety percent. No wonder the kid was living in a van and flipping burgers. There was something else there, though. Not a lie, but the whiff of something he was holding back, like he had an ace card squeezed to his chest under the duct tape.
“There’s something you want to tell me, Todd.”
I phrased it as a statement, not a question, and gave a knowing look to the crematory oven.
“You…you aren’t going to believe me.”
“Try me. You might be surprised.”
He breathed as deep as the bands of tape would let him and stared at his feet like he could imagine the first kiss of the flames.
“This dude, Santiago…he’s not human. It sounds crazy, I know, but he’s not human.”
“I’m still listening,” I said. “How do you know?”
“When he brought me on board, you know, he was laying down the law. How much money I had to kick back to him every month, and how he’d be checking up on me, making sure I didn’t screw him.” One of Todd’s hands jerked, pointing up to his face. “His eyes, man. The dude’s eyes…changed. The color drained out and they went all yellow and pus-white, like a couple of rotten eggs.”
Cambion eyes. Todd’s supplier, his pipeline into the Network, had demon blood. That was interesting; the feuding courts of hell were united in agreement that the Network wasn’t their creation. The members we’d faced off against until now, as far as I knew, were human magicians.
By the looks of it, they’d expanded their recruitment. Caitlin would want to hear about this. More importantly, if this “Santiago” was a local, she might even know where to find him.
“I believe you,” I said. “You’re doing good, Todd. Real good.”
“So you’ll—you’ll let me go?”
I pulled the lever and sent the pine box rattling toward the mouth of the furnace. He shrieked at the top of his lungs. I yanked the lever back, my eardrums stinging, and the belt jolted to a stop.
“Maybe.”
A dark stain spread across the crotch of his acid-washed jeans. He’d survive. I’d already decided to cut the poor dope loose, but I needed to squeeze any last lies out of him.
“Let’s talk about the house party on Eagle Glen Road. You sold a bad batch, Todd.”
His face was slug-belly white, glistening and pale. He stared at something a million miles away.
“That…that wasn’t my fault. It wasn’t my fault—”
“The stuff you sold to the guy throwing the party—was that all of it? Is there more tainted ink floating around out there? I need to know, Todd. I need to gather it all up before somebody else gets hurt. This is really important, okay?”
I put my hand on the control lever.
“No,” he wheezed. “No, it was…I met with Santiago that morning, he gave me the ink, I sold the whole batch to Rob, and that was it. There’s no more, I swear!”
He was on the home stretch. And if he had kept his mouth shut, he might have made it.
“I sold it to Rob,” he said, “just like Santiago told me to.”
I narrowed my eyes at him. I had been starting to wonder if my theory about the ink being tainted on purpose was off base. Maybe not.
“He told you exactly who to sell it to? Does he do that a lot?”
“N-never, but this was, you know, circumstances, and I mean, I…” He thumped the back of his skull against the coffin. “I didn’t want to hurt those kids! But Jesus, he was gonna pay me ten grand. Cash. You know how much money that is to a guy like me? I could get a new van, pay off my bills—”
I stood over him and searched his eyes.
“You knew. You knew the ink was bad.”
“He told me, get it to Rob before his house party, stay cool, don’t blow it. And don’t go. I was—I was planning on going. So I asked him why. And he told me. He told me his boss needed to take somebody out, and this was how they wanted it done. I said I wasn’t gonna do that, that’s not me, and that’s when he offered me the money. All I had to do was sell Rob the stuff and walk away. It wasn’t like I had to kill anybody with my own hands. I just had to sell it and walk away.”
He knew. He’d lobbed a bomb made of madness into a house filled with kids. And he did it for ten thousand measly bucks. I didn’t lose my temper. I was too angry for that. All I felt was cold, like a sheath of ice crackling its way down my spine, frost flooding my veins. I was cold enough to do anything.
“Who was the target?” I asked, my voice soft now. “Was it Rob?”
“N-no,” he stammered. “It was this chick, Mel…Melanie something. Loomis! Melanie Loomis. Santiago said she was going to be at the party, and his boss wanted her dead. Dead in a way that would look like an accident.”
I set my hand on the edge of the pine box and took a slow, deep breath. Four seconds in, four seconds out.
“Sit tight,” I told him. “I need to make a phone call.”
* * *
I came back half an hour later, and I wasn’t alone.
“I want you to meet some people,” I told him.
Todd’s eyes flicked from me to Caitlin to Emma and back again. He was too scared to open his mouth. That suited me fine. I needed him to hear every word I was about to say.
“First of all, this ‘chick’ you were paid to kill with tainted drugs? I know her. In fact, I’m really, really protective of her. I suppose you could almost say I’m her”—I glanced sidelong at Emma—“godfather? Is that fair?”
“Against my better judgment,” she replied. Her eyes were locked onto Todd like a pair of diamond-tipped drills.
“Now, this lady on my right, her name is Caitlin. Here’s a fun fact, Todd. He might not have gone into specifics, but your buddy Santiago has demon blood.”
“Demon blood,” Todd echoed, breathing the words.
“Yep. But just a little. Just enough for a tiny kick. A little spice. But Caitlin, here? She’s the real thing.”
Caitlin’s eyes blossomed with swirling motes of copper. They gusted across her pupils like a storm of burning embers, blotting everything out until nothing remained but two seething orbs of molten metal. She parted her lips, showing double rows of jagged shark’s teeth.
“Part of Caitlin’s job is watching out for people under her prince’s protection. People like Melanie. She takes her job very seriously.”
Todd squirmed in his duct-tape cocoon, thrashing against the walls of the pine coffin like a fish drowning in air. “I didn’t know. I swear, I didn’t know—”
“Now, on my left,” I said, “here’s someone you really need to meet. This is Emma Loomis. Melanie’s mother. She also works for the courts of hell. Emma, you had the best idea just now, out in the hallway. Want to tell him about it?”
She curled her lips into a razor-thin smile.
“Absolutely. I was just saying that we’re in a mortuary filled with autopsy tools. Scalpels, saws, caustic chemicals, so much to play with…and I was thinking that unless you tell us everything we want to know, and I do mean everything, we’d take turns tearing you apart, one little piece at a time. And I get to go first.”
Emma leaned in close and dropped her voice to a whisper.
“You tried to murder my daughter. I’ve already decided what I’m going to cut off first and what tool I’m going to use. Would you like to guess, or should I make it a surprise?”
He talked after that. He talked plenty.
What we mostly got out of him—between frantic, babbling apologies—was that he didn’t know why Melanie had been targeted. All Santiago told Todd was that she’d been green-lit, they wanted it to look like a tragic accident, and the Network had no problem murdering an entire houseful of teenagers to get at a single target.
Santiago had set him up with a dedicated burner phone, for business only. He kept it stashed under the passenger seat of his van. He gave up the phone, the unlock code, and the password he always started texts with so Santiago would know it was really him. They used a custom-built app to talk, set to erase each message after it had been read, so I couldn’t get at their past chats to verify that. Still, at this point I had no doubt that every word on Todd’s lips was the purest truth. He was a drowning man, clutching at imaginary life preservers.
We also found out Todd was as incompetent a hit man as he was a drug dealer. He hadn’t gotten the money up-front. Santiago gave him the tainted batch of ink and told him he’d be paid once the job was done. I could use that.
The three of us peppered him with questions until we’d wrung him dry. There wasn’t anything left inside of him after that, nothing but fear and the faintest, most distant glimmer of hope.
I saved the hope for last.
“That’s it, then,” I told him and turned to walk away. Caitlin curled her arm around mine and followed suit.
“Wait!” he called out. “What…what now? Are you going to let me go?”
I glanced back at him, then looked to Emma.
“Not really my place to say. I mean, under the circumstances, I think that’s Melanie’s mom’s decision. What do you say, Emma? Should we let him go?”
She lingered beside a tray of autopsy tools. Her outstretched fingers glided across the implements while she thought it over. Her hand stopped. She scooped up a long pair of stainless-steel jaws, designed to crack open a corpse’s rib cage, and held them up to the light.
“I don’t think so,” she said.
Todd started to scream. Caitlin and I walked out. As the door swung shut, my last glimpse was of Emma leaning over the pine box, slowly reaching inside.