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Cry me a Murder, Part 4

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Demon

Agent Phelps scooped the gemstones back into the plastic vial he took from Tell's pocket.

"Tell singled out the rubies and sold them to the criminal underworld," said Phelps. "The leftover pretties are nice, but nobody's going to retire on them."

"Natural gemstones could wash down from the mountain and end up in the fish farm," I suggested. "You found a ruby in your fish last night, so maybe Tell was going legit."

Phelps unwrapped the napkin around the ruby from the night before. The stone was cut and polished smooth like a drop of frozen blood.

"There's nothing natural about this stone," said Phelps. "It's been cut by an artisan."

"So, we need to track down a jeweller?"

Phelps leaned over and looked me straight in the eye. "Mister...Wolf..." he stressed each word as if reprimanding a child. "This case is classified under MI-16. My job is to investigate; your job is to keep your nose out. You dig?"

"Yeah, I dig."

Phelps gave me a short stack of printed photos of me in different situations: at the Oakenford Games Convention, leaving the Police station with Quinn, outside my shrink's practice. The last photos were troubling, as they showed me in the company of Irene. We were holding hands strolling down Main Street.

"Why are you showing me this?"

"The MI has you and Miss Sapere filed under trouble; and troublemakers get shut down."

"Are you... threatening me?"

"I'm telling you to leave this investigation to the professionals." Agent Phelps packed his collection of printouts and left me behind, sitting alone in my hotel room with a strange sensation of relief and unease. Relief because the death of Mr. Tell was no longer my case. I was nothing more than an inconvenience to the MI- a fly in the soup of death and diamonds. At the same time, my stomach knotted up from unease, knowing the feds kept a record on me. Of course they did; how could I be foolish enough to believe the MI-16 would turn the blind eye when I killed three of their agents? I'd been too happy receiving checks from the Burris and Gill cases to pay any attention to what went into their journals. Did they have on record that I was a monster? Or a schizo?

I looked at my reflection in the mirror. What am I? I wondered. I'm not even sure.

_ There are only two possibilities: one, you_'re one delusional motherfucker who kills government agents. Two, you're a half-demon from hell who kills government agents. Take your pick.

Finding out was easy. All I had to do was shift and take a walk in public, then watch the reaction of the Ragassans. That ought to make a few headlines in the local rag. It was so tempting to get it over with; a single change - a simple exercise in shape shifting. But doing so would forever change the way I perceived myself in this world and it frightened me, and so did a future of being locked up in some MI-16 lab and analyzed to pieces.

The stench of bad plumbing was getting to me, so I left my room and paced the halls of Hotel Kisanti. I found Fernando in the kitchen installing a CCTV camera. "It'll monitor everything," he said. "Nobody's going to sneak around in my hotel - not while I'm sleeping." He was strung out, shaking and sweating. People die in hotels all the time; they have cardiac arrests from excitement when fucking a prostitute, sniffing coke or masturbating to streamed porn, but they don't scream in horror and fire their nines before keeling over and cacking it.

"Dude," I said. "Nobody's going to sneak into the kitchen. They'll just call for room service."

"Some service!" fumed Fernando and pointed at the room service panel on the kitchen wall. "The log shows Tell rang for room service four times last night before he died." Fernando paged through the log-book but found no notes of what Tell wanted.

"It was Catalina and Miguel's job to keep an ear out for the buzzer until eleven.

"So they were on call duty when he died?"

"Miguel was probably down by the fish farm, he complained about the pump."

Fernando went back to installing the CCTV. "There!" he said finally. "That's one down. Smile for the camera."

I looked into the brown eye if the CCTV. Somewhere in the back room, a hard drive was silently recording my every move, chopping them into fifty frames a second and reducing my face to zeroes and ones, light and dark, man and monster. I didn't smile.

---

Later that night I went down to the hotel bar. The other guests seemed to stay clear of each other and I was alone in the hall. I poured myself a pint of lager and sat down with my guitar, playing and improvising, but without Ray to accompany me, the sound echoed eerily through the empty hall, entertaining no one.

I'll leave tomorrow; I decided and drank half a beer in one gulp when my mobile rang.

"Hello?"

"Step outside Mr. Carter," said a voice in the other end. It was a man's voice, but strange and muffled, like someone holding a scarf to their mouth.

"Huh?"

"Outside where I can see you."

I left the hall through the double doors and stepped outside. I halfway expected to be gunned down by an MI agent, but I trusted Phelps enough to advance a few steps into the night. It was almost dark, but Miguel was still down by the pond, fishing out plastic refuse with a grappling hook.

"Enjoying the view?" asked the stranger.

"Just get to the point."

"There's more than fish in that water, something beneath the surface."

"Don't care, it ain't my case anymore. Who is this anyway?"

"A friend."

"No friend of mine talks into their fucking sweater!"

The line went quiet as the stranger hung up.

I went back to my table and finished the beer. I checked the caller's number in my call log. It was a mobile number and the caller had made no attempt to mask it. What a jerk, I thought; if you take the trouble to muffle your voice, at least have the common decency to hide your number. I decided to ask Slater if I could use his laptop to trace the number, but I only made it as far as the lobby when my head began to spin. Had one too many, I thought and leaned against the wall. The hallway swayed and took on strange proportions while I staggered towards my room and collapsed on the bed. Either I needed to sleep really badly or an episode was brewing. I'll call that number tomorrow, I thought while the room was spinning madly. I fell into a long, feverish sleep, haunted by nightmares I couldn't wake from. I was running and shifting, going on a hunt and chasing a desperate prey that stood no chance as my claws tore into his flesh. My prey screamed and bled and I wanted to stop murdering him when I realized - I enjoyed the chase and the kill too much to stop.

---

The nightmares were still echoing when I woke up the next morning with a metallic taste in my mouth and a knocking sound in my ears. The knocking came from the door.

"There's been an accident!" rasped Fernando, "I think it's Mr. Phelps."

"What do you mean, you think?"

"I recognize his clothes, the rest is..." Fernando pressed his palm to his mouth to prevent himself from puking. "Mr. Wolf," he cried. "Something terrible has happened again."

I followed Fernando around the hotel to the lawn that faced the rye fields. He pointed to something that looked like a random pile of clothes, but on closer inspection they were smeared in gore.

"That's Mr Phelps," whispered Fernando and pointed into the rye field. The corpse of agent Phelps was lying a few feet into the field. He'd been torn open from neck to bellybutton and greyish pink entrails were piled around him.

"Somebody really did a number on him."

"Or something!" said Fernando. "Maybe a mountain lion?"

"Miguel mentioned wild cats stealing his fish until he had the fence put up."

"There's a paw print," Fernando pointed enthusiastically at a paw print next to the corpse. It was as large as my open hand and showed clear, feline paw pads. Only, this cat didn't have retractable claws; they had cut four deep grooves into the soil, four grooves I knew well. Months ago, Quinn asked me to shift to stop me from hallucinating. I was in alone my kitchen, and I discovered my hind-paw had carved scratch marks just like this into the linoleum floor [**].

"Did you put up CCTV in the garden yet?" I asked. Fernando shook his head and covered the remains of Phelps with a linen sheet. "I don't want the boy to see this mess from the window."

Only two rooms in the hotel faced this way: mine and that of Chris. From where we stood, you could just make out the upper body of the boy, as always sitting motionless by the window.

---

He's not a mute, said nurse Richards. He just doesn't say much. She sat down by Chris, stroking his hand and talking to him quietly.

"Did you see anything from your window last night?"

Chris made a slight movement of his head, which nurse Richards interpreted as a "yes".

"Then tell us, Chris."

Slowly, the boy began to move in his wheelchair. His movements were stiff and jerky at first. It was like watching ice melting and turning into slurry.

"Cat!" said Chris finally in a thick, throaty voice.

"Maybe he saw Mr. Whiskers from there," Said Fernando. "That's Catalina's pet."

"Large cat." This time the words came out fluent and confident. "Large cat chased the shoe-man. He screamed once."

"Strange you didn't hear anything?" Fernando looked at me puzzled. "Your window faces the same way."

"I'm a sound sleeper."

"You!" said Chris. His head turned and for the first time his eyes focused on something closer than infinity; he was looking straight at me.

"You're a cat."

Nurse Richards was looking increasingly concerned.

"Look what you've done!" she complained. "He's not making sense anymore. You've exhausted the poor boy."

Chris had wrapped his arms around his knees and rocked back and forth, chatting quietly to himself. He repeated the same words over and over, like some kind of nursery rhyme.

We left Nurse Richards to mind the boy, but his sing-song voice followed me down the hall.

Cat caught the shoeman

Clawed up a human.

Think that Tell and Chris have seen'em

Tinker, tailor, soldier, demon.

---

"Dude, I'm in trouble." I'd hesitated contacting Quinn because I knew he'd blow a fuse when I told him the news, so I waited till ten thirty when he took his coffee break before I called. He was at his desk, feet up, with a latte in one hand and skimming the headlines of the Oakenford Herald.

"Trouble as in Women or money?"

"No, trouble as in I murdered someone last night."

"Who?" You could hear the old office chair creaking as Quinn leaned over the desk "...and how?"

"I kinda shifted and clawed him up - a whole lot."

"So, it's a male victim?"

"It's an agent from the MI-16."

"Carter, this is where you tell me it was in self-defence - that he tried to kill you, or he was a double agent for the Szohôd. Do it!"

"Actually, he bought me dinner... and drank my bourbon."

There was a long pause and all I heard was an exasperated sigh from the other end of the phone. "Do you have any idea how much goodwill it takes to keep the MI from shutting your ass down every time you sink your claws into one of their agents?"

I didn't.

"There's this thing called diplomacy." Quinn's voice grew frosty and I was glad there was twelve hundred miles between us, "we're on friendly terms with National Security right now, but that does not give you freedom to go demon on their agents."

"I didn't mean to," I explained. "I blacked out, and I must have shifted without knowing."

"How long can you keep this under lid?" Asked Quinn.

"Half a day tops. Phelps reported to HQ every morning and they must be growing concerned by now."

"Listen," said Quinn. "One of the top brass in the MI is one of my own kind."

"Coffee enthusiast?"

"Werewolf!"

"Oh!"

"I'll buy him a nice lunch - and that's coming out of your next paycheck buddy! I'll take him on a hunting trip up Cobbler's Dell and we'll have a friendly chat, lobo a lobo.

"You make it sound so natural, like you were hanging out with fishing buddies."

Quinn scratched his beard. He always does that when he is confused by something, and very often he's confused by my complete ignorance of his world.

"You didn't think I was the only werewolf in Oakenford?"

"Well...actually,"

"Unlike you, wolves know to keep a low profile. We don't shift in public and we don't go around chewing people up... Not anymore."

"Honestly, I didn't mean to..."

"Okay," said Quinn, his anger subsiding. "I'll explain someone like you can be a real asset to the MI, but you're still wet behind the horns and they need to cut you some slack."

"Meaning?"

"Meaning, you still fuck things up!"

"Thanks dude."

"And Carter, one more thing..."

"I know, don't investigate the case? "

"Too late, when the MI hears about this, YOU will be the case. I was going to say: Don't shift. You are entangled with the abyss, and with a foot in each world. This grants you powers, but they come at a price. The abyss is like an energy put-and-take; when you drain power from one side, the other side will claim something back to balance it out."

"Claim something? Like what?"

"Like you, Carter... Like you."

Five months ago, I stood at the gateway that separates this world from the abyss[**]. I had taken something from the abyss that day; I shifted twice and had siphoned energy into Irene to keep her alive. In return, it was damn near impossible to change back into my human form. I was stuck in the endless void where tentacle creatures eyed me over, probing and ramming into me. The same creature that punched through the barrier and attacked Catalina and drained her memory. If Fernando hadn't thrown that vacuum cleaner at the creature, it would probably have sucked every memories dating right back to her childhood. The abyss was crossing over, because someone had tapped its powers before the attack, and the tentacles reached out to settle the balance.

Finally, the terrible nature of the situation dawned upon me:

I was not the only one staying at the hotel, who had ties to the abyss.

• CONTINUES -

[*] in "My Guardian Demons."

[**]in "A Fall From Grace."