Hotter Than Helltown: An Urban Fantasy Mystery (Preternatural Affairs Book 3) (9 page)

SUZY AND I MET the hospital’s head of security upstairs, leaving Nurse Sullivan’s body behind. The change of scenery wasn’t much of an improvement. Sure, there was no blood, but the security manager only had bad news for us.

At this point, I would have been a lot more surprised if he’d known anything useful.

He informed us that Bubba Tanner’s body hadn’t been transferred to any church that actually existed in Los Angeles. They’d checked for us. In fact, there was no Compassionate Heart Ministry anywhere in California.

Equally unsurprising: The hospital’s security footage was blank for the entire hour leading up to the power outage. The tapes weren’t missing. They had just been wiped clean, as though someone had yanked them out and gave them a vigorous magnet rubbing.

“Do you ever miss the days of physical media?” Suzy asked, putting all of the tapes into a padded briefcase. The hospital’s security manager watched us from the doorway, silently disapproving.

We were still going to attempt to recover the footage. Officially speaking, the tapes were wrecked. Unofficially speaking, the OPA had some pretty cool spells that might be able to recover images.

“No,” I said. “Not at all.”

“Really? But there’s something so satisfying about this old stuff. It’s solid. It’s real.” She hefted one of the tapes in her hand. “This really looks like something important.”

The last twenty-four hours of camera footage throughout the hospital had been backed up onto high-density tapes, but they still took up three cases. They were solid all right. Solid enough that we probably could have killed someone by dropping all the tapes on his head from twenty feet up.

“I really like flash drives,” I said, taking all three of the cases from her. “There’s something to be said for being able to carry terabytes in your pocket.” Suzy fought me on the last case, but I managed to wrench it from her grip.

“I can carry those.” A combative spark flitted through her eyes. The one that drove her to prove she could be as good at anything as a man, even if it was something physical and the man in question was at least twice her body mass.

“I know you can,” I said. “You’ve already helped me a lot today, Suzy. Let me carry the tapes.”

Surprisingly, she let it go.

We walked to the parking garage and loaded the cases into the SUV. Suzy wasn’t big on sleep in the middle of the case, so she’d be heading into the office to analyze them. I planned to head home.

The magic had wiped me out. I didn’t just feel physically exhausted—I was burned out to my core.

It was kind of a good ache, though. Like the DOMS I used to get when I first started lifting weights.

Suzy slammed the trunk shut, but I didn’t immediately climb into the driver’s seat. I leaned against the door in a way that I hoped looked more casual than exhausted. “Thanks for everything today. I wouldn’t have been able to do that ritual without you.”

“Don’t wimp out on me, Hawke. What are you up to tonight?”

It was already eight o’clock. Time flies when you’re dealing with murder victims. “Working from home? Watching TV? Sleeping?”

“All wrong answers,” Suzy said. “I’ll be at Canyon Creek at ten waiting to get trashed, and you’re buying.”

“It’s Sunday. Nobody from work is going to be there.”

“Nobody but us,” she said.

“I don’t drink.”

“Awesome, because I need a designated driver.”

I could tell when Suzy had gotten her mind set on something. Considering that she had probably just saved my job—and my life—that afternoon, she could insist on a week of foot massages at her desk and it wouldn’t be thanks enough. Buying drinks was nothing.

“All right,” I said. “Canyon Creek at ten.”

Since sleep was off the menu, I took my laptop home to work. I’m not a workaholic like Aniruddha or Suzy, but it felt irresponsible to kick back when a serial-killing demon was circumcising men in the greater Los Angeles area. Even if it was just for a few minutes.

Home wasn’t fancy, but I didn’t have to wear pants there, so it was better than going into the office.

I’d been forced to move into a new apartment after killing a half-succubus at my old one. After all that blood, I hadn’t been able to get the cleaning deposit back, and my landlord definitely hadn’t written me a referral. Renting gets tough when you slay demons and wreck the carpet at one apartment. Apartment managers are so damn picky about tenants.

So my new place wasn’t as nice as the last one. That said a lot because the last one had been kind of a dive.

The carpet smelled like decades of cigarette smoke and cat piss, the holes in the walls had been patched with the wrong color of paint, and I was becoming convinced that the drywall was actually rice paper. Furnishing it all in the very best from IKEA didn’t do much to distract from the constant thumping of music, the arguments from the lesbian couple that lived upstairs, the screaming of children in the parking lot.

But it was as good as it got now that nobody else wanted to let me rent.

So here I was in my personal shithole, sitting on a hard couch that was named something with a lot of umlauts, trying to relax in my Batman boxers while people screamed on the other side of the wall.

At least I was saving a lot of money on rent.

Shithole or not, the first thing I did when I got home was make another sweep for cameras. The OPA kept surveillance on all of its staff. Not officially—nobody talked about it. But I’d seen footage from Suzy’s apartment and I found a new camera in my apartment every week now that I knew to search.

Today, I found the camera tucked under the kitchen counter. They weren’t getting lazy. They wanted to make it easy to find so I’d stop looking after that one.

I stood in front of it and scratched my balls for the benefit of the guys watching on the other end. I really dug around in there to get that itch. Felt good after a day with Los Angeles’s summer heat adhering my testicles to my leg. I hoped that my voyeurs were enjoying it.

Then I smashed the little black box under my thumb.

The second camera was sneakier. They’d put it in a light fixture. I dropped it down the garbage disposal.

Now with some semblance of privacy, I got a stockpot of energy potion brewing. It bubbled cheerfully on the stove, occasionally belching smoke tinged a faint shade of rose that stained the walls behind it. I might have cared about the discoloration if I hadn’t lived in an apartment that was only a slight upgrade from a cardboard box.

“Anyone watching in here?” I muttered as I moved into the bedroom, making another camera sweep.

I didn’t find anything. Either they hadn’t bothered because they expected no action in my bedroom—sad, but probably true—or they’d just gotten really good about tucking them away.

Fortunately, I didn’t need to find this one to blow it away.

With a wave of my hand over the wards on my door, I blasted all the electronics in the room. The lights went out. I waited three seconds before allowing the electricity to return—well after the wiring on the cameras would have fried.

I really didn’t want the OPA seeing what I had in my bedroom.

“All better,” I said.

I lifted the mattress to make sure my supplies were still in place: the suitcase I’d packed with a couple outfits, a lot of extra-strength poultices and energy potions, some emergency herbal supplies. The more mundane stuff was a Camelbak, dried food, first aid kit. Everything I needed to leave the country if Lucrezia de Angelis decided to kill me.

There was a matching evacuation bag at my brother Domingo’s house, and another I’d buried at a rest stop south of town.

If shit hit the fan and I had to bug out, I was ready for it. Very ready.

By the time I returned to my laptop, the data recovery team was emailing me updates on the security tapes. I kept Outlook open in the background while I poked around in the OPA databases.

“Demons and witches,” I muttered. The pot on the stove hissed and burped another pink cloud.

Why would a demon and witch work together?

There were a few unlikely possibilities. It wasn’t easy for demons to get to Earth, after all. If they weren’t corporeal, it took a witch to evoke them. Witches could also facilitate demonic possession. But the demon we’d glimpsed had obviously been physical, so it didn’t seem likely to be evocation. With the cloven hooves, it probably wasn’t possession, either.

Since I knew exactly jack and shit about demons, I decided to research the witch side of things. I was good with witches.

I also knew that the magic used to attack me in the hospital wasn’t easy. I could sometimes block spells cast by other witches, but I couldn’t set a trap that would shatter spells in advance. And controlling demons wasn’t exactly Magic 101 material, either.

Whoever I was looking for, he would be strong. That meant he was probably already on the OPA radar.

Once upon a time, I’d been forced to call around local covens to get an idea of which witches might be strong enough to cast the spells I was investigating. Now I had access to OPA databases with security clearance nearly equal to Fritz’s. That meant I could look through our ranking system instead.

We had records of literally thousands of witches throughout North America. Anyone that the OPA had ever investigated, had under surveillance, or knew existed.

The database included Black Jack, a witch that I had apprehended the previous year. He was ranked as a five. Stronger than me, but not strong enough to keep me from arresting him. I felt a little smug about seeing that.

I sorted the list by highest to lowest ranked and started skimming.

At the top, there was a cluster of Faulkners, most of whom were located in Colorado or had no address at all. The best of them was a freaking twelve. I hadn’t even realized the numbers went up to twelve. The notes said that he was most likely “stronger than we are capable of measuring.”

Someone that strong probably wouldn’t waste time murdering random blond men in LA. Call me sexist, but I didn’t think a male witch would help a demon circumcise other guys, either.

I worked my way down the list, ruling out witches that hadn’t traveled to the United States recently, or had unrelated magical specialties, or just because my gut said it wasn’t them. I’ve got a pretty damn good gut. Saved me from a lot of big trouble in the past.

And now my gut was telling me that this witch wasn’t in our database.

I’d only gone through a few pages, but I clicked over to the sister list of kopides anyway. It was much shorter. There weren’t many kopides in the world, much less in the United States; we were talking global numbers in the hundreds rather than the tens of thousands of noteworthy witches.

There was no reason to think that a demon hunter should be involved, but I still took a quick look at kopides in the Los Angeles area.

Predictably, most of them worked for the Union. But there was also one kopis—labeled “retired”—named Roberto Tanner.

Bubba Tanner?

Outlook popped up with an alert from the data recovery department.

At the same time, my phone rang. It was Suzy.

“Bubba Tanner was a kopis,” I said as soon as I answered it.

At the same time, she said, “We got a couple images off of one of the tapes. I’m sending them to you. We’re running them through the facial recognition database, but tell me if you recognize anyone.”

Another email.

I clicked on it, enlarging the attached images. They were from a camera facing the hospital’s entrance.

“All I see are a bunch of patients,” I said. “And a few nurses.”

“Check the last two,” Suzy said.

Skipping ahead, I found a figure wearing a black hooded sweater approach the entrance—the same hooded sweater that I had seen on the witch in the reconstruction spell. But this time, the face wasn’t concealed. Her head was tipped back and I could make out blurry features.

Features that looked an awful lot like Sister Catherine’s.

SUZY AND I DIDN’T make it to Canyon Creek.

“I’ll add those drinks to your debt.” She zipped up her bulletproof vest. It was matte black and unmarked. The Union was happy to emblazon their logo on everything they used, but the OPA was slightly subtler than that. Slightly.

I threaded a hip holster through my belt and buckled it. “Are you keeping accounts on how much I owe you now?”

“I have a spreadsheet. I’ll show you next time we’re at the office.”

“Gotta be honest with you, Suze.” I checked the magazine on my handgun, a Desert Eagle, and slid it into place with a satisfying
click
. “Sometimes you really creep me out.”

She grinned. “I’ll work on that.”

We arrived in Sister Catherine Reilly’s neighborhood like ghosts. Her house wasn’t all that far from the soup kitchen, but our research had shown that the nun liked to have some of the “parishioners” help with upkeep, using her meager retirement fund to compensate them. The attentiveness showed in the fresh blue paint on her siding and the well-trimmed bushes lining her cracked path.

She wasn’t a rich woman, but what little she had went straight to those poorer than her.

Working so hard to employ homeless people didn’t seem like the kind of thing that a crazy murderer would do, but crazy murderers came in all shapes and sizes. I tried not to judge.

I parked my SUV around back and Aniruddha parked up front, covering both entrances to her house. It looked like she was either asleep or not home. All of her lights were off.

“You good?” Suzy asked as I killed the engine, leaving absolute silence in its wake.

“Oh yeah,” I said. “I’m fine.” And I actually meant it this time.

This was the part of the job I liked—when we closed in on the bad guy. I’d spent many boring hours sitting outside motels, abandoned warehouses, office buildings, and restaurants to catch suspects. That part was boring.

But it was hours of tedium punctuated by sheer adrenaline when I finally moved in for the arrest.

Those moments of adrenaline made all that tedium completely worthwhile.

“Don’t suppose you thought to pick up donuts at any point,” I said.