Harmony Black (14 page)

TWENTY-THREE

B
arry turned the phone on his desk, swiveling it closer to us, and turned up the volume on the speaker.

“Mayor Kite,” he said, trying to sound casual but failing, “such a pleasure. What can I do you for?”

“Need your help, Barry, pronto. No time to explain. Get out to County Line Road, near the twelve-mile marker. There should be a busted-up car there with a couple of bodies inside. You’ve got to make it disappear.”

Barry leaned forward in his chair. “How—excuse me, did you say
bodies
?”

“Yeah, and brace yourself, they’re not gonna look pretty. They’ve got to go. Burn everything.”

“Now, just hold on one second, Mr. Mayor,” Barry snapped. “This isn’t like letting your sister off on another DUI or pretending I don’t know about your nephew’s little pot farm out in the sticks. I don’t clean up
bodies
for you. I’m a goddamn
sheriff
.”

“You’re a man with access to a tow truck, and the authority to get things done. Authority you keep only so long as I
allow
you to have it. Don’t fuck with me, Barry. Not now, not today. Besides, this is covering your ass, too.”

“Really. How do you figure that?”

“Those bodies,” Mitchum Kite said, “belong to a couple of feds who were sticking their noses where they didn’t belong. You know what happens if they turn up dead? A lot more feds come to town. A
lot
more. Who knows who they’ll end up arresting, or what evidence they might find?”

“Say it plain,” Barry told him.

“I’m just thinking ‘small-town sheriff runs empire of corruption’ makes for a great headline. Somebody’s leaving Talbot Cove in handcuffs, and it
won’t
be
me
.”

I grabbed a notepad and a ballpoint pen with a chewed-up cap from Barry’s desk, scribbling a fast note:

Say you’ll do it.

I held up the note, and Barry gave me a nervous thumbs-up. “All right, fine, twist my goddamn arm. I’ll go take care of it.”

I jotted down a second line and showed it to him:

But you want to meet.

“But, uh, we gotta talk,” Barry said. “I mean, this doesn’t sit right with me, none of it does. If I take care of this, I think you owe me an explanation.”

Mitchum let out a heavy sigh. “Fine, fine, just take care of it. Tonight, six p.m. Come to the paper mill. Alone. I’ll meet you there.”

Barry squinted at the phone. “Couldn’t you just come down to the station, or I could drive by the house?”

“No! It’s . . . this is a very sensitive situation. I can’t be seen with anyone right now. The paper mill. At six.”

“All right.” He nodded slowly. “That’ll do, then. See you at six, Mr. Mayor.”

Mitchum hung up. Barry blinked at the phone, then looked up at us.

“He’s gonna kill me, isn’t he?”

“No loose ends,” Jessie said.

“Well, you two are pretty damn big ones!”

“He sent his”—I paused—“his hired guns, to murder us. Obviously, he doesn’t know we got away.”

Barry scratched his neck. “Well, won’t they tell him? I mean, he’s gotta be getting a phone call or something.”

“We took care of it,” Jessie said. “And we’ll take care of this, too.”

“Not without me,” he said. “I’m not letting you girls walk into an ambush—”

“It’s not an ambush if you know it’s coming,” I told him, “and we’re not girls. We’re federal agents.”

I pushed my chair back. Jessie did the same. Barry just watched us leave, silent, until I was passing through his office door.

“Harmony.”

I looked back at him.

“Swear to God,” he said, “I did everything I could.”

“I know. Now we’re here to finish the job.”

I
got in the car, leaned back against the cold vinyl-wrapped headrest, and stared at the police station like it was a million miles away. If I closed my eyes, all I could see was my father’s face.

Jessie’s boots crinkled against bits of broken glass on the floor mat when she got in on the passenger side. “Hey.”

“Hey,” I said.

“You gonna be okay?”

I shrugged. “Have to be, right?”

“No obligation.” She leaned back, too, mirroring my stare. “Sounds like Barry was stuck between a rock and a hard place. Still is.”

“He’s off the hook. Don’t know if I can ever talk to him again, but he’s off the hook.” I shook my head. “You know what the worst part is?”

“What’s that?”

“He’s dead.” I turned to look at her. “If I’m reading this right, Jeremiah Kite was behind the Bogeyman abductions in the ’80s. He summoned it; he chose the targets. He sent it after
my family
because my father stood up to him. And then he dies of a fucking
burst appendix
? Where’s the justice in that? He was never exposed, never punished, never spent a single day behind bars for what he did.”

“It happens,” Jessie told me. “This isn’t the movies. Lot of times the bad guy gets away, or at least he doesn’t get what he deserves. All we can do is try our best.”

I slid the key into the ignition. The Crown Vic’s engine fired up with a sickly rattle.

“I was hunting this perp in Vegas,” I told her as I backed the car up. “Daniel Faust. Sorcerer, mobster, all-around nasty piece of work. Typical sociopath occultist. Dime a dozen, right?”

“I’ve put a few down myself,” Jessie said.

I shifted the car into drive and steered out of the parking lot. Cold air billowed in through the broken window, stroking the side of my face with icy fingers.

“This was . . . different, though. Something about him just got under my skin. He was this force of raw chaos. Wherever he went, people died, things broke down,
systems
broke down. I realized, at the end, that’s what he was to me. A symbol. My order against his chaos. Taking him down should have been proof that order is better. That our
way
is better. I built it up in my head as this epic showdown. Guns at high noon.”

“And was it?”

I shook my head. “Not even close. In the end? He got handed to me on a silver platter, and I’m pretty damn sure it was a frame job. It was just . . . wrong.”

“But you
did
take him down, right? One more psycho with magic powers off the street is a pretty good deal for everybody.”

“That’s what Linder says. I don’t know. It just wasn’t what I wanted.”

Jessie smiled. “Since when does anybody in this life get what they want? You fight your hardest, you make sure you can look at yourself in the mirror every morning, and you take whatever scraps of happiness come your way. That’s my philosophy, anyhow.”

We drove for a while. I drummed my fingers on the steering wheel, trying to jam together two corner pieces of the same jigsaw puzzle and wondering why they wouldn’t fit.

“It’s not Mitchum Kite,” I said.

“What isn’t?”

“He’s the most obvious suspect, right? Back in the ’80s, his father was behind the Bogeyman case. He inherited Jeremiah’s money, power, and even his political office—why not inherit his magic, too?”

“Sure,” Jessie said, “it scans.”

“But it doesn’t. Fontaine’s in town because of the new abductions. He made it sound like he’s after whoever is controlling the Bogeyman. He also said Nyx is hunting the same target.”

Jessie nodded slowly. “Mitchum is either controlling Nyx or controlling the Bogeyman. He can’t be Nyx’s boss
and
her target.”

“Bingo. And I think we can agree, given the evidence, that he sent Nyx to kill us. So he’s not our perp.”

“I’m still kicking his ass,” Jessie said.

“Well, that’s a given. He’s just not the end of our hit list. So at some point, the secret to conjuring the Bogeyman slipped away from the Kite family. You know what else is bugging me? Revenge. Or the lack thereof.”

“Oh, what Barry said, about your dad being the only victim who crossed the Kites?”

“For starters,” I said. “Jeremiah was a pretty bad guy, right? But Barry mentioned that he used mob ties to get things done, like sending thugs after those union organizers. Now, if you had control over an undetectable, unstoppable monster . . . wouldn’t you use it
all the time
? Why risk going down with some loose-lipped mobster when you can cast a spell instead?”

“So payback isn’t the motive. What does that leave us?”

We coasted down a long forest road, across a blanket of fallen autumn leaves.

“Nowhere,” I said. “Leaves us nowhere. But I have a feeling Mitchum Kite will have some answers for us.”

W
e had a few hours to kill, so we headed back to the Talbot Motor Lodge to bring April and Kevin up to speed.

“An incarnate,” Kevin said. “An
actual freaking incarnate
, and you fought it. Badass.”

Jessie sat cross-legged on one of the queen beds. “We didn’t fight it so much as ran like hell, but I got a few shots in.”

“Yeah,” I said, pacing the room, “my eardrums have finally stopped ringing. Thanks for that. I think you pissed her off.”

“I hope so. It’s important to make a good first impression. And you’d better have some fine tricks up your sleeve, because Mitchum’s not gonna be at the paper mill alone.”

“I’m working on that.”

I didn’t want to say I wasn’t up to the challenge . . . but as far as I knew, I just wasn’t up to the challenge. I can hold my own in a duel against another magician, and I’ve cast out my fair share of demonic hijackers, but a monster from hell that can take two bullets to the face and keep on coming? I wasn’t ashamed to feel outclassed. Who
wouldn’t
feel outclassed against something like that?

Twice in my career, I’d faced an incarnate and lived to talk about it. That said, I’d survived by running away as fast as my wheels could take me.

This time, running wasn’t an option.

The speakers of Kevin’s laptop let out a faint ping. He swiveled in his chair, taking a look.

“Cool,” he said. “One of my contacts is running a search on that Cold Spectrum thing Douglas Bredford mentioned. I’ll let you know if he digs anything up.”

“Complete waste of time,” Jessie said. “Bredford’s a sad, old drunk telling sad, old drunk stories. Stay focused on
this
case, okay?”

April sat at the table by the window. Both wicker balls were sitting side by side next to a stack of reference books and a paper cup of coffee. “I’ve been studying the summoning tokens. I am . . . uncomfortable with the implications.”

“I hate it when you use that word,” Jessie said. “Your feeling uncomfortable usually means we’re about to be hip-deep in corpses.”

“These glyphs carved into the wicker strips? They’re Sumerian, circa the fourth millennium BCE. Mathematical symbols.”

“Ancient math?” Jessie said. “You’re about to make my head hurt, aren’t you?”

Kevin grinned. “The Sumerians practically invented math. Well, them and the Egyptians. Instead of a base-ten system like ours, theirs was base
sixty
. They invented quadratic equations, too.”

“Yep.” Jessie grimaced and pinched the bridge of her nose. “I knew it. Pain. Incoming.”

April ran one finger along the face of a ball, tracing the elaborately woven wicker strip. “The curves seem to correspond to the equation written upon them. It all feeds together. And the two balls do not match. They share commonalities, but the mathematics are starkly different, and the weave isn’t the same, either.”

“But they both tell the Bogeyman where to take his next victim,” I said.

“Hence my uncomfortable theory. I’ve seen work like this before, generally connected to ancient necromancy. The idea of ferrying spirits to, and from, the lands of the dead.”

“The Bogeyman’s undead?” Jessie asked.

“No. No, it’s not exactly the same. More to the point, this symbolism is tied to spells of
travel
. To the idea of forcibly sundering barriers between space and time. We’ve been going under the assumption that the Bogeyman makes its lair somewhere close to Talbot Cove, perhaps a cave or a clump of thick forest nearby.”

I nodded. “That’s right.”

“We need to consider,” April said, “that the Bogeyman’s lair may not be on Earth at all.”