Sin Eater (7 page)

It made you angry. She laughed at you.

Then the memories jolted back to him like a nightmare of lightning. Her face as she took him in upon seeing him at first. Him clumsily trying to kiss her. She jerked back, and it made him jump. When she saw she’d startled him, she actually laughed.

Yeah, he remembered that. Her sneer. That’s when he noticed she had lipstick on her teeth, which were sort of yellow. And her skin was bad. But her hair was nice. He had punched her right then. Her nose has given way under his fist, and her head snapped back. She wobbled back into the alley behind her, stumbling on bare feet as blood gushed down her chin. She had been totally startled. He would have laughed, but the sight of the blood infuriated him first. It was her own fucking fault, the whole thing.

A few more shots to the face and she was out like a light. He carried her up to his apartment
without anyone seeing them, using alleys and the fire escape of his building. Well, hopefully no one saw him. Actually, it would be a miracle no one saw him.

She came around while he was hefting her through the window. She hit the floor of the living room, and that’s when she came to, crying. Since her nose was crushed breathing was proving to be difficult for her. She sputtered and was
gasping as she wept.

But at least she was awake. It gave him strength when she fought him. He held a hand over her mouth to cover the screams, although in this building screaming of many different kinds were par for the course. As long as she was squirming he was aroused, and the longer she fought the more he liked it. She fought until she was exhausted, and that’s when he fucked her, on the floor, half unconscious. Likely from blood loss, or maybe she was concussed. He’d beat her head against the floor a few times, so who knew what had knocked her out.

As usual, there was no orgasm for him. His erection withered, unfulfilled, and he was furious at his own impotence. So he strangled her with his belt, then dragged her to the shower. She was still slowly leaking blood from her head as he moved her, he remembered that, too.

You wanted her, I let you have her. It’s not my fault you’re a fucking pussy.

Shut up, he wanted to scream. Then he set about finding a plan to get rid of her corpse.

“I thought I’d bring you back a latte,” said the new girl sunnily, putting a cup on the table behind her in the control room.

Iola smiled, tilting her head. “Aww, that’s so nice. You didn’t have to do that.”

The new girl shrugged. “You’re kind of trapped in one place at night, it’s no trouble. Like I said, I was stopping there anyway.”

Now what the hell is your name?
Iola wondered, offering a nod of thanks. “Well, I definitely appreciate it.”

The girl just waved as she left the booth, taking her own sleeved cup with her out to the hall.

Iola took a sip of the new girl’s offering, happy to see it was still piping hot. She knew the new girl had just been at the scene of an apartment fire, and the fact she’d stopped
anywhere
on the way back to file her report was probably not a good thing. But … as long as she brought caffeinated gifts Iola was so
not
going to tattle on her. And really, it was one o’clock in the morning. Who listening at this hour expected up to the minute news coverage?

“All right folks, you’re still with Iola Day on KLCD Late Night. It’s about time to start mellowing out for the evening, so pull someone you care about close and enjoy a little Miss Joan Baez with me.”

As she brought up Joan Baez a few notches she took another sip of coffee. Man, that was hitting the spot. New Girl was becoming her favourite reporter for sure. She’d have to listen to the one-thirty news report to get her name.

Iola went back to her previous train of thought before New Girl had brought the coffee in and felt morose once again. She’d never seen anyone die before. That was … an awful experience, no matter how serene Mister Horn had seemed at the end. She couldn’t shake the sludgy, thick and incredibly
sad
feeling she had. She was mourning him and had barely known him.

Hit by inspiration, she got on the computer and did a search of the digital music library. She went back to the music they saved just for November 11
th
, and scanned through the titles, looking for one particular song. Sure it was a German song, written during the First World War, but it was perfect.

As Joan Baez trailed out, she flicked her mic to life and began the music at a low volume. “This is a bit different, but I wanted to play something for a friend of mine, a World War Two veteran of the Royal Canadian Air Force, a survivor of D-Day. He passed away today, and this song is just for him. Here’s Vera Lynn.”

And then she brought her head down to her arms and cried.

The Sin Eater turned his head to the top floor windows of the KLCD building, where a few lights were on, illuminating a hallway where a tiny woman was carrying a take-out cup of coffee from one door to another.

The car interior was lit by the dashboard, and he breathed out the
flavored cigar smoke he’d been holding in. It smelled like chocolate, so his body’s natural Pavlovian response to that was … well, venture a guess.

Her voice was completely captivating. It was lower than the majority of female voices, and when she used it over the airwaves she dropped it even lower, almost to a
femme fatale level, which was not authentic for her in actuality but it still did what it was supposed to do.

The playlist seemed strange, jumping genres and eras and tempos, all the while remaining decidedly
mellow
, but as long as she was in between the songs, tying it all together, it worked. He was sure half the city was probably in love with her, all based on that voice. And again, the very thought of anyone out there desiring her, lusting after her – even on the basis of her voice alone - made him furious.

He had to get a grip. And he
certainly
shouldn’t be out here, sitting in a “borrowed” car like some kind of news-story stalker. He should be doing his goddamn job.

He put the car in gear and slowly started away from the curb, but left the radio tuned to where it was. He knew where to find the sinners in this city, and it wasn’t hard to make his quota at all. Not that he
had
quotas, necessarily, but he liked to see how many sins he could let loose on the world in one day, always trying to better the day before.

It was the only way to job satisfaction for an employee who never had to attend staff meetings or fill out a performan
ce report. His job type fell into that No News Is Good News category. If the Boss never asked to see you in His office, you were doing just fine.

And this Sin Eater had
never
seen the inside of his boss’s office.

He headed for a bar in the heart of downtown, where drug deals were made and women were traded for cash by private contractors that all paid a percentage of their profit to the business owner. It was seedy, dirty, dark, and hardly resembled an actual licensed establishment.

He parked well away from the curb directly in front of the place, and noticed the scum of the earth that were huddled in the shadows eyeing up the Jag and seeing it as however many kilos of whatever substance they craved to their very core. And yet there was no trace of real evil in any of them. They were just weak, sad, and pathetic.

He turned back to them in the midd
le of the street, and pushed into their minds all at once like a public address system.
Make sure no one steals the car, I’ll pay you.

He felt th
eir agreement, and continued into the bar with no worries about anything happening to that ride.

Inside the crowds parted to let him pass. But a flash suit and lack of BO tended to do that in places like this. He felt the women looking him over like a meal ticket, hungry in many different ways. The men were suspect, like he was a narc … or maybe even a big dealer that no one had seen before. Their unease was a tool he could use nicely, without exhausting any of his persuasive energies. Some humans were just too easy to control.

He reached the polished wood bar as the bartender came forward eagerly, his face conveying how badly he needed good tips to pay off his child support and light heroin habit.

A
light
heroin habit. The Sin Eater was absolutely delighted by oxymorons.

“What can I get you?”

“Your best Scotch please. A double.” He laid a fifty on the bar, and the man’s eyes went wide. “In a
clean
glass, if you would.”

The man nodded, then reached under the bar for a reserve of glasses separate from the ones behind him. The Sin Eater had been here often enough to know that no dishwashers were employed during the night.

The amber liquid put before him was bottom-shelf at best, barely above “bath tub” grade, but that was hardly the barkeep’s fault. He pushed the fifty towards him, told him to “Keep it,” and then carried his glass to a table in a far corner, sitting alone behind the beer bottles some other party had left behind that no one had bothered to clean up.

The Scotch was harsher than he would have liked, but he sipped it slowly and surveyed the room. There was plenty of sinning
going on in the biblical sense,
har dee har har
, but he could find none of what he was really looking for. He could pick up a man ODing in the men’s room, slumping to the floor next to the urinal, his eyes fluttering closed as his breathing became ragged.

There was a whore up against the opposite side of the wall behind him, fucking a guy while her mind was focused solely on her next hit. The man doing her had no thoughts in his head; he was close to coming and his mind hit a blissful empty state as he did so. Dumb fuck wasn’t even wearing a condom.

Come out, come out, wherever you are
, he thought. It was only a matter of time before he spotted someone that deserved his special attentions. The other people in this place were just making him depressed.

A half hour passed before his senses tingled, and he was brought upright in his chair. Across the room, moving amongst the people “dancing” on a square of hardwood, a woman moved along the fringe of the crowd, skulking in the shadows. She carried such a strong sense of menace he was stunned no one in the room could tell. Then again, people rarely suspect women of evil.

He downed the Scotch, set it on the table, and rose to follow her as she ducked to a back room beside a door that read “Manager.”

He heard raised voices beyond the fake-wood veneer, but his mind did a much better job understanding what was going on. This woman was a complete fucking mess. Her brain was addled with drugs, and she’d gone days without sleep. Hard to sleep when you’re basically trafficking children.

His blood boiled. The longer he was among humans the more he had sympathy for certain groups of people. And children were … well, they were the original innocents, weren’t they?

And maybe he was starting to blur the lines of what his actual job
was
. He wasn’t supposed to interfere … but fuck that. She was hurting kids.

He cut through her sad biography, abuse at the hands of a babysitter, turning to drugs, running away from home, living on the streets, turning tricks to make money, falling in with a boyfriend that had a strange appetite for young girls, helping him lure them and degrade them just so he’d tell her he loved her …

A Sin Eater could have no pity for a sinner, and he didn’t. The old man in the hospital was a light weight compared to this human trash. She was begging for a few more days to come up with some cash, she was going to come into some green soon and she’d be able to pay them back then. And in her mind, she saw the young girl she had locked in her apartment, tied to the drain under the bathroom sink. Not touched yet, ready for the highest bidder.

Shit. Now he had the urge to save someone, and that
wasn’t
part of his job. He was not supposed to interfere –

He’d lost track of what was going on in the room behind that shut door. That is until he sensed heightened alarm, adrenaline, and fear.

A shot rang out just after he ducked, and it ripped through the flimsy wall right where he’d been standing. Using someone else’s eyes came in handy when there was a wall between you and them. He saw the woman’s point of view as the gun was drawn on her, and as she made to run the shot sounded.

He heard panic in the barroom, bodies scurrying, sending off their fear to a degree that he could no longer concentrate with the aid of others. He had to use his own instincts.

Another shot rang out, and a weight hit the door. The door sprang open, the woman falling out into the hall at his feet. Blood just started to drain out of her chest, and was now also trailing from the corner of her mouth. She was definitely shot in the lungs. And knowing how long it took emergency services to arrive in neighbourhoods like this, she was going to die on this dirty floor. And he wasn’t going to stop that, but he
was
going to take back what he came for.

He put a hand to her forehead, the contact helping all the distractions around him fade to background. He quickly located her sins, including the killing of a john that hadn’t paid her the agreed price. That one actually surprised him; he’d assumed she was too weak to do something so bold. He lifted it out of her, setting it loose to find a new host.

It was hardest for him to allow the filth of a pedophile to linger. But whores didn’t love the men they slept with, either. It was just part of what he
had
to do.

The office had emptied behind him, and he reached out mentally to ascertain that the man who’d shot this woman escaped through a door leading out the back of the building to his car. And though he’d just shot
someone, he was still a business man, and the evil in him wasn’t as rank as it was with this sad sack lying next to him.

“Your address,” he demanded of the woman, patting her cheek to bring her around.

“What?”

“Your address.”

“What for?” Her voice was thin.

He leaned closer, and she widened her eyes in fear of him. “I am going to get that girl out of your apartment. Before she is ruined. Now give me your address.”

She knew he meant to save the girl and not rape her. The tears rose in her eyes, and she rattled off some numbers for a location he recognized. It wasn’t far from here.

He left her where she lay, heading out the doors calmly now that the crowd had scattered, and just like he suspected, his car was right where he left it, untouched.

He pulled out his money clip, handed over fifty dollar bills to the crowd of ten street people that surrounded him immediately, and with the powers of his mind he sent them the sensation they craved, the loosening of the drugs’ hold over them, a high that they would do anything to achieve. It was like a collective group sigh around him, and as he climbed in his car he hoped they might use the cash to buy themselves a meal or two.

Wasn’t he just turning in
to humanitarian of the year?

“Dispatch to Car 67.”

Claudia picked up the radio. “Go ahead, Dispatch.”