Kill the Dead

I park the T-bird across the street and jog over to the house. Just a few streetlights and warehouse security lights. There’s nothing else alive. Not a headlight in sight.

There’s a tarnished knocker on the door. I use it. A woman opens the door. Another marshal. She’s in the female equivalent of Wells’s men-in-black chic.

“Evening, ma’am, I’m collecting for UNICEF.”

“Stark, right? Get in here. Marshal Wells is waiting.”

“And you are?”

“No one you need to know.”

She lets me inside. The interior of the place is as rotten and decayed as the outside. She leads me into the kitchen.

“Nice. Defensiveness and moral superiority in two-point-four seconds. A new land speed record.”

“Marshal Wells said you liked to talk.”

“I’m a people person.”

“Is that before or after you cut people’s heads off?”

“I only cut off my enemies’ heads. I break my friends’ hearts.”

“So, that’s, what, zero hearts broken?”

“The night’s still young.”

She stops by the door. Where the back porch would be, if it hadn’t collapsed back when Columbus took his big cruise.

“Wells is in the study.”

“Thanks, Julie.”

“How did you know my name is Julie?”

Her heartbeat just spiked. I’m here in the middle of the night and being underpaid because of Wells. I don’t need to take it out on her. I smile, trying to look pleasant and reassuring.

“It’s nothing. Just a silly trick.”

“Don’t do it again.”

“It’d be a little stupid guessing someone’s name twice.”

Marshal Julie listens to something coming through her earpiece.

She says “Got it” into her cuff and looks at me.

“Is that your Thunderbird across the street?”

“No.”

“But you drove it here.”

“Yes.”

“You came here in a stolen vehicle?”

“Define ‘stolen.’ It’s not like I’m keeping it.”

“I don’t suppose you have the keys?”

“You’re kidding, right?”

She walks back to the front door, talking to whoever is in her earpiece.

“I need someone to evacuate a red and white Thunderbird coupe from the 6th Street inquiry.”

I head out back, pretty sure that Marshal Julie will not be my secret Santa at the Homeland Security Christmas party.

I’VE ALREADY GONE down one rabbit hole tonight at the Chateau, so it’s no surprise that the house beyond the porch door has nothing to do with the wreck I entered. The house through the door is a sprawling old-fashioned California mansion. Very western. Almost cowboy. Lots of wood. Two-story-high ceilings. Leather and animal-print furniture right out of an old Rat Pack movie. Massive picture windows look out over the desert and San Gabriel Mountains.

This, the Sub Rosa house hidden inside the other, is crowded with Wells’s people. There are at least a dozen forensic agents in the living room alone. They’re using a lot of strange gear I’ve never seen before, more of the Vigil’s weird angelic technology. The room is full of agents lost behind flashing lights, on their knees shoving beeping probes under furniture or lost behind transparent floating screens showing weird images of supermagnified carpet fibers.

“Down here, dead man.”

It’s Wells, yelling to me from the far end of the house. He never gets tired of reminding me that I’m officially dead and off the radar of the cops and most of the government. But only as long as I make nice with the Vigil. It’s a good threat. Without them, my life would be a lot more complicated.

I pass another ten agents in the hall on the way to the study and six more in the study. Between agents chattering, vacuums sucking up evidence, and probes flying around checking for aether residue, I can hardly hear my own voice.

“Why the hell do you need so many people, Wells?”

The marshal doesn’t look at me. He’s staring off at something across the room.

“You do your job and let my people do theirs.”

What Wells is looking at is worthy of some top-drawer staring. There’s an altar and above it, a six-foot-tall statue of Santa Muerte, a kind of grim reaper parody of the Virgin of Guadalupe. Despite her bony looks, she’s someone her believers pray to for protection. I guess whoever owned the statue wasn’t very good at it. It looks like half of his blood is sprayed across Saint Death, the altar, and the walls. The rest is in a nice congealed pool of rust-colored Jell-O around what’s left of his body. You can’t even call what’s on the floor a corpse. There isn’t enough of it. It looks like he tried to crawl into a jet engine, changed his mind, and tried to crawl out again.

I say, “I think he’s dead.”

Wells nods, still staring at the slaughter.

“I’ll be sure to write that down. Anything else?”

“This was no boating accident.”

Wells looks at me like he’s a trash compactor and I’m week-old bacon.

“Damn you, boy. A man is dead here and he was one of yours. Sub Rosa. And he died badly. Do you have anything to contribute to our finding out what the hell happened here?”

I want to get closer to the death scene and I have to walk around several agents to do it. Glad I’m not claustrophobic.