I found the borrowed meat wagon parked in that same alley behind the Chandler, found the keys still in my pocket. I couldn’t remember how it had gotten back here and I really didn’t care. I climbed in behind the wheel, slammed the door and locked myself in. I was too drunk to drive and too tired and didn’t have any clue where I was going, but none of that mattered, either. I felt like a shark, like I had to keep moving or drown in everything that’d happened the last few hours. I closed my eyes a minute and rested my head against the hearse’s oversized steering wheel.
A heavy tapping on the window beside me brought my eyes snapping open again. I took an instant’s sideways glance before I turned my head. A beat cop stood staring in at me, his arm cocked so he could lean on the top of the door frame. His knuckles still rested against the glass.
Everything in me went cold. How long had I been out? I gathered from the angle of the shadows it was late afternoon already. So it’d been a few hours at least. All that time, sitting here waiting for the law to find me. I wondered what their line was right now—we just want you to come in, answer a few questions for us … Or were we already at the cuffs and mugshots stage? All I knew was any time I spent sitting in a box or a cage while the cops beat their gums at me was time I wasn’t out on the streets, time I wasn’t moving. I thought for a second of cranking the engine and putting the pedal to the floor, but the keys were still in my hand and just how far was I likely to get in a hearse, anyway? I’d be the funniest thing the radio dispatchers had heard in ages.
So I cranked my window down, slowly.
“Hey, buddy, ya can’t park this thing here. Gotta keep the alley clear.”
I figured it was best not to open my mouth, not to let the fella smell the booze on my breath or catch me in some clumsy lie, so I just nodded and started up the car. The cop nodded too, and walked away and didn’t look at me again. I saw him turn right out of the alley. I pulled out and headed left.
Later on when that poor cop realized he’d let a murder suspect drive off, he’d have a hell of a story. I’d be the best damn fish tale of his career—the big one that got away. In a hearse.
I wasn’t sure how long I’d been out, but sleep had sobered me up almost too much. The ice in my veins had begun to thaw and if it got too thin I’d have to stare down what I’d let happen to Cass, and face the idea that the woman I’d slept with—the one whose case I’d insisted on sticking with after all the times Cass begged me to back off—was a brutal killer, a creature every bit as nasty and bloodthirsty as that maneater Damia Nyx. I didn’t much like dwelling on either of those things, so I focused on driving. Driving west, of course.
A steady, tired gray rain was falling, but it couldn’t blot out the stink of the river. The odor of sewer-sludge and dead fish was stronger than usual today. I smelled it from two blocks away and it churned my guts like a warning. The scar over my left eye itched constantly now, maddeningly, but I gripped the wheel tight and drove on. The slender gray towers of the West River Narrows Bridge poked up in front of me, their crowns lost in the low, roiling clouds. I urged the old car onward, ignoring the coughing coming from under the hood, not thinking about much of anything but getting to the other side, building up all the power the rumbling hearse could manage—then slammed on the breaks and shuddered to a stop. There was a car parked in the shadow of the bridge abutment, next to a payphone.
I knew that car, and the lanky man behind the wheel.
He must have been waiting on orders from one of the bosses, Radamanthus or some other player in the Red Circle gang—or hell, maybe from the big man himself, if the big man could be bothered to make his own phone calls.
I swung the hearse around, bouncing the passenger side wheels up over the sidewalk and coming down hard, the hearse’s shocks protesting, and in a second I was parked beside that familiar car and jumping out of the hearse, the Harpe .38’s muzzle surprisingly steady on the shadow behind the windshield.
The driver’s window was open and I shoved the gun in, up against that bony skull.
“You’re gonna take me to Evelyn Night,” I told the chauffer.
He said nothing, but, moving slowly, stuck out one hand, palm up. He twitched two long knotty fingers in a “let’s have it” gesture.
I thought the fella must be a nutcase—was he asking me to put a bullet in his brain? One tremor of my trigger finger and that bald head would have a .38 caliber hole in it. Then I realized what that finger-wave meant. It didn’t make the man seem any less crazy to me, but it meant there was a chance he’d take me where I wanted to go—something he couldn’t exactly do with his brains blown out. So I dug into my pocket and pulled out two bits and dropped it in that outstretched hand. The tarantula-leg fingers wrapped the coins up and vanished into the car. Then the back door swung open like maybe he’d pulled some hidden lever inside the driver’s compartment, and I climbed in.
The seat still smelled a bit like Damia Nyx, but I tried not to notice.
The driver started the car and pulled onto the bridge. I kept the gun where he could see it in his rearview mirror, so he’d know its deadly stare was still trained on his chalky dome. Funny thing was, I couldn’t see his eyes in the mirror, just shadow under the shiny black bill of his driving cap. For all I could tell, he didn’t have any eyes.
“We’re gonna play this straight,” I said, squinting at that blank face. “You take me where I wanna go and I don’t turn your brains into oatmeal.”
Myles Ferryman drove on in silence, without any hint of reaction to my threat. I slumped back in the seat, keeping the gun raised as we drifted off the bridge and started wending our way through the meandering streets of the west side, the Tartarus neighborhood. Menace’s domain. He was there, somewhere, hiding away in some basement or back room, pulling all the strings, hearing anything anyone said, seeing anything anyone did. I could feel him, just like Evelyn had said. I could feel him like a chill in the air, a slime on my skin. I wanted to spit the taste out and take a good long shower. But I wasn’t about to turn around.
I watched faceless buildings roll past, and faceless people, whores and dope pushers and wasted hopheads and petty crooks who had no idea how small they were. We passed Club Erebus and turned down a narrow street, and after that I lost all track of where he took me. And it struck me that maybe he hadn’t been waiting for orders from Mr. Dapper or the Big Man or anyone else.
Maybe he’d been waiting for me.
Maybe it was some staggeringly simple trap and I’d jumped right in with both feet. And I was fine by me.
After what seemed like hours of aimless twisting and winding, crossing and re-crossing our path, we rolled up outside a crumbling building with a Gothic façade that might’ve been impressive in its day. The arcing letters painted in the front window against badly faded red velvet curtains said Hotel Avernus.
I got out and marched into the dingy, cigarette-smelling lobby, the humid air unmoved by the limping ceiling fan. The scrawny man behind the cracked yellow Formica desk was all wrinkles and wide black eyes and looked about two hundred years old.
I grabbed the cheap tie around his neck and dragged him about halfway across that counter to me, his flailing hand landing on the brass service bell, making it ring with absurd cheerfulness.
“Evelyn Night, good lookin’ redhead. Where is she? Which room?”
The fella looked as if he was considering saying he didn’t know, so I made the knot a little tighter.
“Two-B,” he coughed, waving one hand at the narrow staircase just off the lobby. I dropped him back onto his feet and left him smoothing out his shirt, his face all twisted up with shock and bewilderment.
“Thanks, pops,” I said, already on my way out of that sad stub of a lobby.
The whole place smelled of mildew, the wallpaper yawned with yellow water stains, and the carpet felt cheesy-soft under my feet. I found 2-B right around the corner from the second-floor landing and pounded hard, then again. I waited half a second for an answer then stepped back and gave the lock a good hard kick with the bottom of my black loafer. The bolt was cheap and the frame was cheaper, and I had all the extra strength of pure fury burning in me. Wood splintered and the door slammed inward, recoiled, jittered on its hinges. I shoved past it and walked inside with my piece out in front of me, hammer cocked.
Evelyn Night lay peaceful as a corpse in repose on a filthy bed, stretched out on her back, arms at her sides. Her smart linen suit was immaculate. Her face was virgin white, her lips the color of blood. She didn’t even twitch as I thundered into the room and put the .38’s muzzle against the pure skin of her forehead.
“Wake up,” I told her. “Wake. Up.”
Her eyelids trembled like she was dreaming, then fluttered open. I caught a glimmer of terror in those dark eyes, but somehow I didn’t think it was because of the lethal hardware aimed at her brainpan.
“Are you going to kill me, Frank?” she whispered.
“I ought to.”
“I’m already dead.”
“I can make sure of it.”
“I wish you could. I wish a bullet were all it would take to get me out of this.”
“You killed Cass. Murdered her, in cold blood.”
She said nothing.
“Why? Dammit, why her? She wasn’t anything to you.”
“Not to me, no.”
The words twisted my gut into a tight knot.
“You’re saying you murdered Cass because of me?”
“He wanted me to.” She didn’t say the name, of course. She didn’t need to.
I came close, then. I came within a hair of pulling the trigger and splashing her brain all over that stained bed. I wonder if it would’ve made any difference.
Instead, I eased off, dropped the gun to my side.
“Why not do it?” Evelyn asked, not moving except to turn her head just enough to look at me. “Why not try? It’s what I want. It’s the only thing I want now.”
“I’ve seen too much death for one day,” I said. “Anyway, killing you won’t do Cass any good. Or me either, for that matter.”
I stared out the dingy window, at the brick airshaft. I saw rats squirming through the garbage at the bottom.
“I must be crazy,” I said, with my back to that beautiful murderess, “’cause, see, I still want to get you out of this. And I still think I can.”
“It’s impossible. It was impossible the minute I gave the first little part of myself to Him. I was damned then, that very second. Maybe, if you leave here now, you can still escape. But not me. I’m in Hell where I belong. And I’ll never leave.”
“He made you kill Cass,” I said. Something about the statement tasted wrong, somehow, but I kept going. “He’s been behind all of this. This Mister—” But I couldn’t bring myself to say the name any more than Evelyn could. Somehow it felt almost poisonous forming on my tongue, and I spat it out unsaid. “Him. Radamanthus’s boss. Whatever power he has over you and all those other dumb saps and thugs, he can’t use it if he’s dead.”
“You can’t kill a thing like Him,” Evelyn said, voice stretched tight as violin strings.
“Unless he’s the Devil himself, I can.”
“What if He is the Devil himself?”
I didn’t answer.
Evelyn sighed.
“He’ll kill you, if you ever get close to Him. But you’ll never even get close to Him. His … people … won’t let you.”
“Maybe not … But they would let you get close to him. You’ve been there before.”
“I don’t remember.”
“You could get us in. You’re one of his favorites, his … chosen. You could walk right in and take me with you.”
“I don’t know where He is,” Evelyn Night said, shaking her head. “I can’t remember. And I don’t matter that much, not enough to get close to Him unless He wants me to. Not enough to get you close to Him.”
“You can do it. You can find him, you can get to him. I know it.”
“I …”
“It’s the only way to set things right. Even if he kills us both, it’s the only way.”
She sighed.
“When?” she murmured.
“Right now.”
“You’re crazy.”
“This whole thing is crazy.”
She sighed, stared up at the ceiling like she could find some sanity there. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to comfort her or kill her. Maybe both.
“Let’s go,” I said, and took her hand and pulled her to her feet. She looked at me then, looked into me in a way she’d never done before, and for a moment I forgot what she’d done to Cass, and all I saw was that lost soul who’d wandered into my office about a thousand years ago. Despite everything, I took her into my arms again and held her, tight, and kissed her on those firm red lips, long and deep. It felt like goodbye.
Then the kiss ended and we broke apart and walked out of that room together in silence.