FSE

Furry search engine

formerly SoFurry search engine

"Carter?"

"Speaking."

"Quinn here."

Quinn? I reached for the remote and put Kind of Blue on pause. Quinn is one of the few people outside of my family who knows about my condition. He's also chief inspector of the Oakenford Police, and possibly just as crazy as I am.

"Are you still hearing voices?" He asked.

"Always."

"What are they telling you right now?"

"They're saying I should put the CD player back on. We may have our differences, but we all dig Davis."

"Listen, are you on meds these days?"

I'd given up on medication since I investigated the murder of a games designer named Kendall Duran [*]. For the past seven years I'd been through every prescription drug in the book to mute the voices in my head. But during the Duran case, I'd learnt to appreciate them. They saw the world in their own unique way, and that helped me crack the case. I'd stayed off the meds since then.

"So, your senses are not dulled in any way?"

"No, for fuck's sake! Will you get to the point?"

"Point is, I need your help."

"You need the help of some random schizo, half past eleven on a Thursday night? Jeez, you've lowered your standards," I laughed.

"You're more than that," insisted Quinn. "You and I know as much."

"Bullshit!" I snapped. "I'm a schizo with finely tuned senses, That's all."

I know I'm crazy; I've known it since I was seventeen. I hear voices, I see things. But Quinn is not much better off himself. He's convinced that I'm an otherkin -someone who is part human and part demon.

While investigating the Duran case, my sister and I were threatened at gunpoint, and I went berserk. I tore into two armed men with my bare hands and ripped them apart in a cascade of quivering limbs. In my delusion, I believed I was a demon from beyond the abyss.

Paranoid psychosis, that's what the shrinks call it, and that's what makes me dangerous. But my fit of rage had put a gory conclusion to the case and earned me the friendship of the local police force.

I also earned the questionable reputation of being a bad-ass, but Quinn remained convinced of my demon side. He could tell, he insisted, believing himself to be a werewolf.

So, there you have us: Carter Wolf and Amari Quinn, nutcases extraordinaire. Only, Quinn is a nutcase with a job.

"You need my help, huh?"

"I need your sight," said Quinn. "It'll only take thirty minutes, forty-five max."

Maybe he was right, or maybe we were both crazy. But the Duran case had granted me a substantial reward that I'd lived off ever since. But by now it was almost depleted and I couldn't find work; not all employers welcome schizophrenic demonspawn from hell. Besides, that case had been the most excitement I'd had in seven years.

"Great!" said Quinn. "I'll dispatch someone to pick you up in fifteen."

"Wait!" I cried. "I never agreed to..."

But he'd already hung up.

---

Officer O'Leary drove me to the downtown hospital of Saint Mary's Grace. Halfway across the city, he pulled the patrol car into a Twenty-Four-Seven service station.

"Be right back," he said and left the vehicle to do some late night groceries, while I toyed with the police radio.

"Breaker breaker, we have a situation here. Lt, O'Leary has gone AWOL. Last seen entering a twenty-four-seven and craving live donuts."

"Is that you, Carter?"

"It's me Alice."

"Get off the horn, Carter."

"Love you too, Alice."

Once we reached the hospital, we found Quinn kneeling by something that vaguely resembled a human body. In its current state it looked mostly like a collection of meaty chunks inside a lab-coat. And everything smothered in a layer of crimson tar.

Quinn nodded at me, then tilted his head upwards.

"He took the dive from up there; eleven stories."

"Who is he?" I asked.

"Tracy Gill. He WAS a surgeon at St Mary's Grace, right until he flew out of that window."

"Suicide jumper?"

"That's what you're here to decide," said Quinn and put his nose to the corpse.

"Do you smell anything on his mouth?" he asked.

I winced, wouldn't even know where to look. The corpse was so mutilated from the fall, only a few tufts of hair suggested where the head had once been.

"There's no goddamn way I'm sticking my nose into that."

Quinn sniffed the air. "Can't you sense it - there's no scent of bourbon."

"Why bourbon?" I too sniffed, but soon regretted it as my nose filled with the stench of exploded entrails and stomach contents.

Quinn frowned. "Doesn't the other side grant YOU a heightened sense of smell?"

I didn't want to start an argument at this time of night, so I humoured him. "It's mainly visions and sound. You're the nose of the team."

I looked to the moon peeking out from behind a stray cloud.

"Actually, it's not even a full moon."

"To a werewolf," he said. "A full moon is like a bright summer's day to humans. It's inviting, but we can transform at any time." He lost interest in the mutilated remains of Dr. Gill and looked to the moon.

"I always miss how I darted through the woods near Badger's Rest under a pale moon." There was a sense of longing to his voice.

"I was only a cub and my parents taught me how to howl. Those were the days, my friend."

He took a deep breath, and I was convinced he would let out a long and mournful howl, had I not yanked his arm.

"Not HERE!"

"Then come along," said Quinn. "I need to show you something."

We rode the elevator to the eleventh floor, where Dr. Gill had his office. It's unusual for hospital staff to have their own office, but the sheer size of this one was overwhelming. It was almost the size of my apartment, and sported a desk, two leather couches and a panoramic view over the Oakenford city skyline.

I whistled. "This is not an office; it's a penthouse."

"I spoke to a nurse," said Quinn. "Apparently Gill was a popular man. He'd treat the poor and the homeless for free. I guess an office space was somebody's way of showing appreciation."

The window was open and a slight breeze sent waves through the thin curtain. I envied him the view over the cityscape from here. It must have been one of the most desirable offices in the hospital. Still, far below, the paramedics were busy wrapping up his remains, while police officers were keeping the press at bay.

"Do they scream when they fall?" I asked.

"Only in the movies," said Quinn. "The reflex is to inhale and gasp."

I took out a quarter dollar from my pocket and let it drop. An eternity later I heard the sound of coin hitting asphalt.

Those would have been the longest and loneliest four seconds in a man's life.

A half-empty bottle of Farvale Bourbon sat on the desk. The screw-cap was off and a tumbler contained a few drops of remaining liquid.

"So, he drank half a bottle of bourbon before committing suicide?"

"Someone did," said Quinn. "But it wasn't Gill. When you down half a bottle of booze, you can smell it on that person."

"-and you didn't pick up anything. Not even with that werewolf nose of yours?"

"Not a trace," said Quinn. "So if Gill didn't drink it, then who did?"

I shrugged. "The murderer? Had a few drinks before sending the good doctor flying?"

Quinn stared at the bottle like it was some disobedient kid.

"I'm gonna have this baby dusted for prints."

My friend seemed to have it all under control and I was growing confused about my involvement.

"So, why did you bring me here?"

Quinn turned his attention from the bottle and looked at me. He was trying to say something, but wavered as if he feared I would pop a fuse.

"Listen... I'd like to draw on those visions of yours, to see what happened. Maybe somebody gave Gill a little nudge while he was admiring the view."

Quinn always refer to my hallucinations as "visions". True, they had helped us solve the Duran case, but I have no control over them.

"You know I can't will them to happen," I objected.

"Remember the way you exposed Burris, when he pretended to be a psychiatrist? [*]" hinted Quinn.

"He made a professional screwup; he offered me a drink without knowing alcohol is a trigger for schizophrenic episodes..." I cut myself off. "Wait a minute, you're not suggesting..."

Quinn grinned broadly and produced a bottle from the bag O'Leary had carried from the Twenty-Four-Seven.

"Farvale Bourbon?"

"Very fitting for the occasion, don't you think?"

I stared at Quinn, speechless. "Are you seriously suggesting I trigger an episode right here?"

"Please, Carter. If your visions can show what happened before Gill took the dive, we'll know if we're dealing with a murder or suicide. Just help me on this one, and I promise to drive you home myself."

In hindsight, I should have laughed, left and hailed a cab from the lobby, but I was finding the whole situation a bit exciting. It was also a boost to my wounded ego that someone found me useful for a change.

I took the bottle from him. "You'll owe me for this one."

"Big time", he agreed.

It had been years since I'd last had a drink, and the first shot was like gurgling liquid gold.

"Smoooooth!" I rasped.

"Don't rush it," said Quinn. "We've got all night."

"You said this would only take forty-five minutes."

"Would you have come if I said we'd pull an all-nighter?"

By the time I had my third drink, I'd almost forgiven Quinn for manipulating me into following his harebrained idea, and by the fifth he was my best buddy again. The room was spinning by the seventh, I hungered after a bag of peanuts and the voices in my head were droning on incessantly. If I had paid attention to them, I could probably make sense out of it, but I was too drunk to care. My mind was racing, and my thoughts were as uncontrollable as Mexican jumping beans.

Peanutspeanutspeanuts... peas are not nuts so why call them nuts grow on trees don't they? FOCUS, DAMN YOU! Except peanuts they grow underground you pee on the ground maybe that's why they call them peenuts.

"Gotta pee!" I slurred and got off the couch. I staggered towards the door, then the room went dark, dreamlike and contrast-rich.

It's happening!

I think Quinn and I were equally surprised that his idea worked. I clenched my teeth and cursed; of course it had to happen right now while my bladder was bursting.

The ghostly outline of a male in his late forties floated through the closed door, then through me. He walked across the room and stopped before a framed photo of a sailboat. He took it off the wall and opened a safe behind it, then deposited something into it.

_Gill seated himself behind the desk and relaxed, feet on the table. That was, until he noticed the bottle of bourbon. Then he winced and examined the label, put the bottle back on the desk and pushed it away. He looked in my direction and there was a faint smile on his lips. He kept looking at me, smiling, before I realised that he saw someone else. I spun around and the oversized head of a snake poked through the door. _

I jumped back, startled, but the head remained unmoving, stuck halfway in the wooden door. Dr. Gill smiled and nodded. He rose from his seat and opened the window. He stood by the window, just taking in the air for a while, then he climbed onto the window sill and leaned out.

"No! Don't!" I cried, and the hallucination burst like a soap bubble, bringing colours back into the world.

"Did you memorise the combination for the safe?" Quinn had taken the picture down from the wall and caressed the dial knob in loving anticipation.

I shook my head. "The visions are never that clear. Imagine watching a really shitty VHS recording from some thirty feet - that's how clear it gets."

"Then we'll need a techie to drill the safe open," said Quinn and reached for his phone. I staggered towards the most inviting couch in the office and let gravity do its job for the second time that night.

---

I was awakened by the shrill sound of someone drilling into my brain. I lashed out, halfway believing I was back in the lab of Burris where he experimented with sonic weaponry, and I hammered my fist into a leather-bound cushion. A surprised looking janitor in dungarees gave me a concerned look, then returned to drilling into the dial-lock.

Quinn reached into the safe and produced a large stack of bank notes. Fistful by fistful, he withdrew piles of hundred dollar bills and stacked them on the desk. Now and then, a pile toppled over, and stacks of cash rolled off the table. The janitor and I looked in awed silence.

"There's got to be several hundred thousand here," whispered the janitor.

"Does the hospital pay its staff in stacks of cash?" Asked Quinn.

"Ha! I only wish."

Quinn grinned. "Then it looks like the good doctor had himself an extra-curricular source of income."

My head was throbbing, and I massaged my temples. "What does it all mean?"

"It means you'll get paid for working on the case with me."

A sense of relief spread through the haze of hangover; I could sure use the money.

"It also means I've got good news for you... and bad news."

"Bring it on," I moaned.

"The good news is: your powers are very real, and so are mine..."

"-and the bad news?"

"The thing about curing a hangover with pepsi and fast-food..."

"Uh-huh?"

"That one, is a myth."

• - - CONTINUES - - -

[*] That happened in My Guardian Demons.