04. sorry, we're dead: a supernatural noir.
SORRY, WE’RE DEAD: a supernatural noir
featuring:
• Virgil Meriweather, a werepanther (Idris Elba). A sharp dresser with a broad sense of humor.
• Warrenwick Gam, a vampire (Byung Hun Lee). A bit of a curmudgeon and a dead shot with a Derringer.
• Abigail LaVeau, a zombie slayer (Berenice Marlohe). Definition of a femme fatale.
• Stevie, a cabbie (Sung Kang). One of the best getaway drivers in the city, with dreams of opening a restaurant.
• Marian Underwood, a cigarette girl at a gambling hall (Kelly Reilly). Has a thing for Warrenwick, and gladly passes on information to the pair of private eyes.
• Helene LaVeau, a damsel in distress …? (Eva Green). Abigail’s half-sister, who has been kidnapped by someone with a grudge against her slayer sister.
• Christian Beauclair, a bokor (Aldis Hodge). A new mobster on the scene who practices black Voodoo to eliminate the competition.
• Osulf Sørenson, a werewolf (Mads Mikkelsen). Beauclair’s right-hand man.
Abigail LaVeau had a nice place-much nicer than anything I could afford. The building was a classy brick set-up, with a doorman on duty who didn’t so much as bat an eyelash at the state of her dress or the fact that she was bringing a man home with her the far side of midnight. The elevator didn’t stutter or creak. The lights in the halls weren’t burnt out or flickering. And as I discovered when she unlocked her door, she preferred minimalist, monochromatic interior design. Very sophisticated. Very elegant.
Shame about the blood. Such a bitch to get out of white carpet and tile.
“Careful of the glass,” she said as I began circling the lurcher corpses. I glanced at the smashed window-obviously how the creatures had entered-and then closed my eyes. When it came to dead bodies, it was always best to give my nose free rein. Sight sometimes confused smell, and the animal in my blood thought better through the nose.
Three zombies, chopped into several pieces. My nose could almost “see” the way she had dispatched them: arms lopped off first, quickly followed by the removal of the heads. These weren’t fresh lurchers-they were somewhere in the middle of their decomposition cycle. I hadn’t dealt much with these things before, but I knew the strength of the zombie depended on how rotted they were. The newly dead were the strongest, of course, but the long dead could be quite strong, too: when most of the moisture was gone and the body hardened, the fleshier areas turned into something tough and wiry like cured beef jerky, which meant they could pack a wicked wallop. Those lurchers tended to be brittle, though, and could be snapped apart with the right amount of force.
These were in between the two serious stages-too juicy to be a genuine threat. Abigail was right: the lurchers were more of a message than an outright murder attempt.
I crouched down and set to work untangling the scents. No embalming fluid and a particular type of clay-rich earth on the feet, hands, and shoulders told me that these had been transients in life, buried on the city’s penny in one of its many potter’s fields. The clotted blood carried old death with it, and the concoction of herbs and fish powder that was a necessary component in all lurcher physiology. The voodoo energy had its own scent, a deep purple to my nose that throbbed and pulsed but was now fading what with the last spark of “life” extinguished. And there was something else, very faint now… A man. He carried the perfume of the swamp with him. The sick-sweet cloying tang of wet death and mud. I filled my head with that last scent and told my nose to remember it.
“So…” I began. “You’d just come home. Barely had time to set your purse down by the door. They burst in through the window after climbing the fire escape-makes them more determined and coordinated than your average lurcher. Obviously sent here on a mission. You dispatched them rather easily with those pretty things-” I gestured at the pair of silver curved blades lying on the carpet beside the bodies, giving them a wide berth and furiously ignoring the way my skin itched just looking at them. “And then you came straight to me.”
“Yes, exactly. And those are called khukuris, by the way. Slayers have used them for centuries.”
“I wouldn’t have taken you for an old-fashioned girl.”
“Some things are better when done the old way,” she said with an arched eyebrow. “Have you gotten everything you need from this mess?”
“Yes.”
“Good. If you’ll excuse me for a moment, I have to call in the cleaners. Help yourself to a drink,” she added, gesturing the well-stocked sideboard.
Maybe I should give up the P.I. work and become a slayer. It certainly paid better. She had 75-year-old scotch in a crystal decanter. A brand of whiskey I’d only heard hushed stories about, let alone sampled myself. And the shot glasses probably cost more than my month rent for that glorified shoebox I called an apartment. I held the glass up to admire the way the light filtered through the amber liquid.
“I like a man who can appreciate his liquor,” Abigail said. I turned to find her leaning in the doorway.
“Most of my appreciation is from afar, sadly.”
“That’s a shame. My father used to have a shot of whiskey for every zombie he destroyed. You can imagine how tipsy he’d get, some nights.”
“So it’s the family business? Slaying?”
“Yes.”
“Your sister a slayer, too?”
“She’s my half-sister, actually. And no, Helene was never fond of bloodshed. She’s a singer at Dante’s. Know the place?”
“Only by reputation. Classy joint.”
“Far too sharp, in my opinion. Switchblades at every table. I’d be happier if she quit.”
“Think that’s where she was grabbed?”
“Possibly. Most nights she doesn’t leave until dawn.”
“You mentioned a boyfriend?”
“Jack Malone. He’s a musician. Plays the saxophone in her band. He’s too sharp, too. A gambler and a braggart.”
“Do you have a picture of Helene I could borrow?”
“Of course.”
When she held out the photo, I couldn’t resist brushing a finger across hers. I’ve always appreciated a woman who could hold her own, who could keep it together in a crisis, and Abigail LaVeau wore confidence the way some women wore fur stoles. Then again, it might not be wise to get entangled with a client-especially one who carried so much silver on her as a habit.
“I wrote my number on the back,” she said with a fleeting smile. “If you need anything else. And I’d appreciate it if you kept me apprised of any developments.”
“Naturally. …I guess I’ll be off then. See what I can dig up on the lurchers.”
She gave me a look. “Careful you don’t cut yourself with that wit, Mr. Meriweather.”
I tapped the brim of my hat with a smile and set down the shot glass. “Hope the rest of your night is peaceful, Miss LaVeau.”
It had gotten chillier, the wind picking up and sending loose trash skittering across the sidewalk. I hunched my shoulders and tightened the belt of my coat. Ignored the barking of the dogs behind chainlink fences that had caught my scent, and turned my focus on the trail my own nose was following.
The first logical step was to trace the lurchers. Find the field they crawled out of, see if the bokor who raised them left any physical evidence behind. Then I’d swing by Dante’s, see if anyone could shed some light on when exactly Helene LaVeau went missing.
I’d gone about six blocks when the visible trail began. Smudges of red dirt on the concrete of the alley, the smeared footsteps of a shambling zombie. A muddy shoe that had fallen off unheeded, left behind in the gutter with broken beer bottles and old wads of newspaper. Soon I came to a tall wooden fence, several of the slats splintered and pulled away. I ducked through the hole to find a junkyard, hollowed shells of cars on cracked cinderblocks, rusted cans heaped around bent sheets of corrugated metal. There was a rattle of a chain and the requisite guard dog-a hulking Rottweiler-started to rush out of its box.
Most men would turn and run, or freeze. Me? I just pulled back my lips, let my incisors lengthen, and hissed a warning. The dog skidded to a stop, back legs seizing up so quickly it almost somersaulted. A second hiss and it started to slink away, whining softly in submission. I might not be able to control dogs the way werewolves can, but at least I could convince them I wasn’t something to mess with.
The fence on the opposite end of the junkyard was smashed, too, and beyond that hole was a hill. It was just steep enough to make me breathless when I crested the top and I paused to regain my bearings.
There it was. A field dotted with cheap wooden crosses, regardless of the religious beliefs of those buried beneath the grass. Where there were no names, no stories, no dates. Just a lot of moldering bodies and abandoned bones.
And a trio of gaping holes, where three lurchers had clawed their way back to the surface world.
I crouched down, stretched out a hand to touch the black candle beside the headless chicken, and froze when I smelled him. Stood and turned sharply, my hackles rising, my nails growing in instinctive reflex.
“A strange place to be, this time of night.”
He was tall, but shorter than me. Broad shouldered. A sharp face with prominent cheekbones and an aquiline nose. Salt and pepper hair slicked back over a high forehead. One of the most Scandinavian faces I’d ever seen-it wasn’t hard to imagine the man in leather and furs, carrying a broadsword and sailing the sea on a Viking longship. Now, though, he was wearing a gray pinstriped suit, a black bowtie at his neck and gloves on his hands. There was a sleek, coiled grace about him.
He was, unquestionably, dangerous. And hardly human.
“Just doing my job,” I said lightly. “Poking around in odd places is part of the territory.”
“Perhaps some things are not meant to be poked into,” he said in an accent I couldn’t quite place-Dutch? Danish? “Are you a flatfoot?”
“Not quite.”
“Closed-mouthed, aren’t we?”
“This isn’t private property. I’m not trespassing. So I don’t see that I have to answer any questions.”
He smiled. Or, at least his lips pulled back from uneven teeth. “I am not accustomed to having my questions go unanswered.”
“You must be new to this town,” I replied. “We’re not the most cooperative bunch around here.”
“If you are here looking for something, perhaps I could be of assistance.”
“Somehow I doubt that.” Laid over his own scent was another, something I’d caught a whiff of earlier tonight: the ghost of the bayou. Whoever had sent those lurchers after Abigail was connected to this stranger, and in a significant way. Was he a toady, perhaps? Or, more likely, a bodyguard? Someone sent to clean up any of the mess the bokor might have left behind? “But if you’d really like to help, you could tell me what your boss wants with Abigail LaVeau.”
The smile became an outright snarl. “Better if you break ties with that one. She’ll prove nothing but trouble for you.”
“Trouble’s what keeps money in my pocket.”
“If money is what you require, I can get you that.”
“Well, I’m also something of a sucker for pretty faces. Yours isn’t nearly nice enough to tempt me.”
“You’re very stupid.”
“So I’ve been told. Look, I’m not in the mood to bandy insults with you. If your boss wants to have a chat with me himself, have him look my office up in the yellow pages. Under Gam & Meriweather.”
“Not just a fool-arrogant as well.”
“Got to have something to keep me warm at night. You have a pleasant evening, mister.”
People liked to say that vampires and weres got along like cats and dogs-that’s not really true. I got on just fine with vamps, as my partnership with War proved. Werewolves and werepanthers, though… It took me the whole walk back and most of a cab ride to smooth my ruffled hackles and get the musk of him out of my nose.