The Blue Blazes (12 page)

“And to make it worse, your Boss is dying. And everyone knows it. You know how everyone knows? Because I told them. They’re going to come for you guys. And they’re going to tear your little Organization apart, limb by limb.”

“The Organization is all you piss-ant gangs have protecting you from the–”

“From the Underworld?” She snorts. “Please. I think you’re keeping us
from
it. Keeping us from
all the awesome
. We want to get rich and you won’t let us.” She fakes a pout.”You’ve gotten fat and comfortable in your beds and didn’t see the rats in the walls, Werth, but the rats see you.” She mimes a rat gnawing and nibbling. Then laughs.

“From sailboats to rats. Now you’re mixing your metaphors.”

“I’ll assume you can keep up.”

“You’re father doesn’t know I’m here. Just so you know.” He clears his throat. “This is all me, little girl.”

“My father can go fuck a duck.”

“Interesting image. He loves you very much, you know. He shouldn’t. But he does.”

Another laugh, this one loud and echoing and hollow. “Right. Love. Like he loved my mother? The only thing Mookie loves is you and your Boss. He loves the work so much it’s not even work.
I
was always the chore. The hard work wasn’t going down into the dark. The hard work was just… sitting with me. Playing dollies. Listening to my stupid stories. Pretending we were cooking food for princesses and presidents.” She sighs. “After he left us, I asked him to stay… I don’t know how many times. He never did. Not once. So don’t sell me on his love. It’s a lie, a scam, a joke.”

“If you say so.”

“I do.”

“You said you needed a messenger.”

“Yup. I want you to send a message to your Boss and all his people. Actually, I want you to tell everyone.”

“Tell everyone what?”

“That I killed Casimir Zoladski. And I’m just getting warmed up.”

 

As if the fall wasn’t enough, they worked him over pretty good. The one called Lulu picked him up. Got a belt around his neck. Held him as the others brought the gauntlet to him – Skelly clubbed him with her skates. Another chick in a slashed-up mint-green poodle skirt whacked him in the face with an old-timey sap – he didn’t even know they
made those
anymore. The rest just got him with fists and elbows and feet.

Then they dragged him up the ladder by a pulley. A pulley system on an old track high up in the warehouse ceiling – way they moved things around before forklifts.

Skelly patted him on his head, and then stole his tin of Blue. That crafty twat. He could’ve used that to feel better – a temporary fix, but a fix just the same.

After that, she tossed him out onto the sidewalk. Wound a chain around the broken lock and then popped a fresh padlock on it. Then: she was gone.

Now: everything hurts.

His head pulses like a balloon someone’s flicking with an annoying finger.
Thwump thwump thwump.
He tastes his own blood. Spits it out – with it comes a tooth that clatters into the street just as an off-duty street sweeper truck passes by. He hopes that it’s his dead tooth, but it’s probably not. His luck it’s probably one of the still-good ones.

He can barely stand. His leg is shaky, the pain almost liquid now. Sloshing up and down from heel to hip. He’s not sure anything’s broken. But something’s torn.

Into the car. Glove compartment. Got a bottle of Vicodin. Pop the cap. Dry-crunch a couple like they’re Tic-Tacs.

His phone rings.

Haversham.

Werth answers, starts to say, “You wouldn’t believe–”

“Things have changed,” Haversham says.

Werth listens, and it feels like the floor is dropping out from under him again – falling, falling, his guts, his heart, his head.

“OK,” Werth says. Voice raw.

“We need you back. Come to the house.”

“The house. Yeah.”

Haversham ends the call.

Werth sits for a few minutes. Staring at the center of his steering wheel. Like it’s an eye staring back, or a mouth trying to draw him close in order to eat him.

Finally he breaks the spell, starts the car, and gets the fuck out of there.

 

12

 

Some say that the Underworld is the Hell of all the myths: that it is a prison. Some say that God built it, though then others ask, why would God build such a thing? How mad must God be? The easy reply is, of course: quite mad, indeed. God’s actions throughout history, if you believe in him and the purity of the Good Book, have been the actions of a psychopath. Just the same, it’s difficult to reconcile the images of Hell and the ways of a Christian God with the existence and function of the Great Below – the Great Below has very few dead, after all. Some shufflers, some ghosts. But most of what lurks in the dark are not creatures of spirit; these are no spectral entities. They are flesh and blood. Gray flesh and black blood in the case of the goblins. Stone and sap in the troglodytes, slick scale and toxic slurry in the Nagas. I have heard one theory that works toward bridging the gap, suggesting that the gobbos – and perhaps the other denizens of the deep – are reincarnated sinners. Die as a sinner, be reborn as a grub in the subterrestrial prison below our feet. If that’s true, if the Underworld really is a kind of jail, then it further explains why so many of the creatures just want to be free of it – at any cost.

– from the Journals of John Atticus Oakes, Cartographer of the Great Below

 

Werth sits. At a kitchen table at the Boss’s house – one of two kitchens, it turns out. This one has lots of white tile and dark wood, big stainless steel appliances. Two ovens. Pots hanging from a pot rack, occasionally drifting into one another –
clunk, clank, clink
. Doesn’t look like anybody ever uses this kitchen – though the central butcher block has square-shaped stains on it. Maybe that’s where they put the takeout containers.

He wants to lie down. Take a long nap. A long nap in a deep grave, with roots and worms and cold earth to keep him comfortable for the rest of eternity.

It’s not just the pain – which by now has fought past the Vicodin like a distemper-sick dog chewing through a door.

But that’s not what’s really bothering him.

Haversham said, “The Boss is sick.”

Master of the Obvious over here. But then Haversham said, “
Very
sick,” and gave a gray-faced look, the look of the tomb, a look of fear. Werth asked how long the Boss had left. All Haversham would say was, “He’s upstairs.”

And then: “Things have changed.”

Now Werth sits. And waits. Not sure what the hell comes next. Did they call Mookie? Is this whole Nora Pearl thing going to fall by the wayside? On the one hand, that’d be a good thing. But Werth wants to put that brat six feet deep.

A tired-looking Haversham rounds the corner. Hands held in front of him like he’s an old woman pinching a coin purse to her belly.

Werth’s about to speak up, but then–

Two more follow him in.

The fedora-and-beige-suit motherfucker. Candlefly. And his “associate” – the slimy one. The
Snakeface
.

Werth tries to stand. His left leg wobbles, the knee about to hyperextend. Haversham urges him to sit.

“I’ll sit when I’m good and–” He winces. “Ready.”

“Fine,” Haversham says. His fingers working against other fingers. A nervous tic?

“Who the fuck are you?” Werth asks the two men.

“I’m Ernesto Candlefly. This is my associate. Mr Sorago.”

“A Snakeface.”

Candlefly corrects: “A Naga, yes. He prefers that term.”

“I give a shit what he prefers.”

Sorago hisses. Candlefly steadies the Snakeface with the flat of his hand.

The man in the suit continues. “I’ve been brought along to handle some of the business concerns as the Boss concentrates on improving his health.”

Improving his health
. It’s terminal lung cancer.

“You. A guy the Boss just met yesterday.”

“We’ve known each other for a while. We’ve been associates at a distance.”

“Associates at a distance.”

“Yes. My family imports Cerulean–”

“You’re an addict.”

“No. Oh, no. I never touch the stuff. But I do think it has value in the… broader market. It’s becoming quite trendy.”

Now Werth’s nervous, too. He’s not a fan of change. He likes things a certain way, and it’s been that certain way for as long as he can remember. He feels like the ground is moving beneath his feet. Like the earth is going to swallow up him and crush him with teeth of stone and tongue of dirt.

Worse, he either has to sit down or fall down. The pain forces him to choose, and so he chooses to sit. The moment he does it, he’s afraid it makes him look weak. But what’s done is done: you can’t put the snakes back in the can.

“Now,” Candlefly says. “We have come across some… information. A troubling secret that was, I’m sure, kept from
all
of us. Did you know that Mookie Pearl has a daughter? Did you, Mr Werth?”

Shit shit shit
. He musters an incredulous frown. “I know he had a family. Has. Whatever.”

“Do you know who this daughter is?”

“Mmnope,” Werth says. He’s a good liar. But Candlefly looks like the type who can smell a lie the way a wolf smells prey from miles away. Still, Werth continues the blustery charade: “No idea who she is. CEO of Who-Gives-A-Shit, Inc.? President and dictator of I-Give-A-Fuckistan?”

“His daughter is the girl seen on the security cameras. The one we thought killed Zoladski’s grandson. The one who calls herself Persephone.”

Werth’s no actor, but he feigns a look of shock and disappointment.

“You don’t think it’s Mookie that killed the grandson.”

“That
is
what we think. The damage done to the body is in line with the man’s… strength, is it not?” Candlefly laughs again. “He’s positively giant. I don’t know that I’ve seen any human so big.” The laugh dies on the vine. “He’s a murderer and the Boss would like his revenge.”

“I don’t buy it. Mookie’s loyal.”

“Are you sure? He’s not loyal enough to tell us that the criminal and murderer known as Persephone is actually his daughter, Eleanor.”

Now it’s Werth’s turn to laugh. “Not loyal enough to tell
us
? There’s no
us
. There’s the Organization, and then there’s
you
. You come up in here like you’re the new Boss and–”

The assassin moves. He steps past Candlefly, a gun materializing out of nowhere – a Snakeface trick for those who have learned it, for those Nagas in the killer’s caste. The gun is small, a little four-barrel derringer, and by the look of the size of those barrels (big enough for a pinky finger each), it’s a .357 or higher.

Werth winces, shields his face–

But Candlefly steps in. Eases the gun aside. With a gentle head nod, the assassin retreats and goes back to leaning on one of the stoves. Werth looks; the gun is already gone. As if it never existed.

What’s left behind, however, is a bad thought hanging in the air like a rotten stink:

Candlefly is the new Boss.

Which means the old Boss is dead.

 

The goat-man knew, of course. That Eleanor Pearl was –
is
– Mookie’s daughter. That’s fine. It irritates Candlefly a little that the man would lie, but the lie is expected. He’d do the same. The irritation is irrational, and Candlefly doesn’t appreciate irrationality, especially within himself.

The half-and-half goat-man, the satyr Werth, is about to speak up – but Candlefly holds up a silencing finger. The old goat is wise enough to heed the gesture, though Ernesto can see his ratty goat-ears flatten in anger.

“Where is he?” he asks James Werth.

“Where’s Mookie? I’m not telling you that.”

“I understand your loyalty to your soldier, but that time is done. Your loyalty goes up the chain, not down it. Does it not?”

“It does.”

“Are you Mookie’s boss? Or is he yours?”

Werth doesn’t say anything. Just stands there, smoldering.

“Pearl has left you vulnerable. Swinging in the wind, as the saying goes. By not telling you, he makes you seem complicit in all this. You’re not, are you?”

“I want to go,” Werth says.

“Can I show you something, first?”

Hesitation. “Mookie didn’t kill the grandson.”

“You seem sure.”

“I am sure. He’s not like that.”

“I want to know where he is.”

“So you can kill him.”

Now, Candlefly’s turn to not say anything.

Werth says, “Sorry. No can do.”

“Like I said: let me show you something. Then we’ll talk.”

“You gonna kill me?”

“It is not part of my plan.”

He sees that flash of uncertainty. The half-and-half doesn’t believe him. That’s OK. Candlefly smiles. Offers up both hands in surrender. “Please. This’ll only take a moment. I want to show you how I learned about Mookie’s daughter. Will you permit a stranger a moment of unearned trust?”

 

There comes a moment when Werth thinks, maybe I’ll just kill this motherfucker. Candlefly’s gotta go. I’m not a killer, but I’ve killed. I’m older now. Slower. And I hurt like I just got thrown onto the highway and hit by every truck, bus, and car driving down it – but I can do it.

Part of it is the way Candlefly moves. Something about him radiates gentility – a refinement that suggests he doesn’t have the stones for a real scrap. Sure, he can point his finger and make people do stuff. Anybody with money has that power. But the way he moves is like water following the path of least resistance. Soft-wristed gestures of the hand. The way his head rolls loose on his neck like he doesn’t have a care in the world.

All this in contrast to the Boss, who for an old fucker is still a pit bull. Last year Werth saw Zoladski stick a knife in the arm of Jamarcus Kensie, a thug up out of the Black Sleeves gang. They were sitting across from each other, and Jamarcus was starting to get ballsy, dropping verbal jabs and slinging smart-ass bullshit that was about as subtle as a machete to the neck. The Boss moved quick.
Snick-click
. Switchblade. It spun in his hand. Blade up, then down, then slammed between the two bones that made up Jamarcus’s forearm.

Kathunk
.

Boss said that’s how you do it. Never stick ’em in the hand. Those two bones, you can pin anybody anywhere. Boss said, “That’s how they pinned Christ to the cross, you know.”

The Boss is a tough nut. A hard lump of coal.

Candlefly is a piece of chocolate melting in a hot hand, a long lash of tall grass swaying in the slightest breeze. He’s both a prick and a pussy.

Not impressed, Werth thinks.

So: kill him. That’s what’s got to happen. Except the Snakeface is here. But then: suddenly, he’s not. He stays in the kitchen as Candlefly leads Werth along the downstairs hall. Candlefly walks, head tall. Werth hobbles. And all the while the man in the sharp tan suit is talking, saying, “I understand that you and Pearl have worked together a very long time–”

“Almost twenty years now.”

“That kind of time forges bonds. So, I understand your reticence to give me the location your friend. Have you ever run a business before?”

“Eh. No.”

They get to a door in the hallway. Werth knows where it goes: the wine cellar. Candlefly puts a hand on the knob, but doesn’t turn it. “A business can live by men and their specialties, but it can also die that way. For instance, you have an employee who can do
one thing really well
. He’s a gifted contract lawyer. Or he knows the ins and outs of your software. Perhaps he folds laundry with great elegance. While you have him, he improves business. But if you lose him? He takes that knowledge with him. This
hurts
business. You must
spread out the knowledge
. Create a little redundancy.”

Werth clears his throat. Nods at the door. “We going downstairs?”

Thinks, Soon as he opens that door, I’m going to kick him down those goddamn steps.

But Candlefly ignores him. Keeps holding the door closed. “What we have here in the Organization is a business. But we have those with specialized knowledge. Effective while they’re here, but…”

“You mean Mookie.”

“I do mean Mr Pearl, yes, yes. He runs his own crews. He knows where the veins of Blue are. He knows and does
so much
in this business.”

“He’s just a soldier. I know everything he does.”

“Do you? Really? Twenty years… I’m sure by now he does things his own way. Without your prompting. And when was the last time you went…
downstairs
?” He doesn’t mean the basement. “Been a while, hasn’t it.”

“You don’t know that.”

“You let him handle things. That OK. It’s a scary place.”

“I’m not afraid of shit, pal.”

But he is. He is afraid. Candlefly knows it somehow. Candlefly laughs.

“Oh, I’m afraid of it, too. It’s perfectly normal to be frightened of the Great Below. You know, I have a theory. It’s because of the Underworld that we – we as in mankind – are afraid of the dark. Because down there, the dark is real. Tangible. Isn’t it? Horrible things, unknowable things, hiding down there in the shadows. Sometimes those things come up. Sometimes they eat. Sometimes they kill. Sometimes they…” A cruel twinkle in his eyes – he doesn’t have to finish the sentence:
Sometimes they rape young women who end up having little goat babies just before dying
. “You come from that place. Part of you. And you hate it. And that’s OK.”

Werth is shaking now. He’s trying not to but he is. He tells himself it’s the Vicodin wearing off, that he needs a hit of Blue to calm him.

“I come from there, too, in a way. And I am not… able to return.” Candlefly’s entire body tenses as if he’s experiencing a small moment of pain. “That’s why I want to know what Mookie Pearl knows,” Candlefly says plainly. “I want him to tell us what you and I do not know. I want to create a little redundancy. I don’t want to kill him. I just want to talk.”