Cry me a Murder (conclusion) Otherkin, my Demonheart
#10 of Cry Me a Murder
I left the seaside town of San Blas, driving east towards El corral and the convent of Iuna's sisters. The sisterhood, and with them Nurse Richards were sworn to protect the innocent and the weak. If Richards had fled the hotel with Chris Tell, the convent was the safe place to hide the kid. The road led from the coastline, across the Nayarit plains to the city of Tepic, which gave me a two hour drive ahead of me and four short hours left of daylight. The monotony of passing sand-dunes and sagebrush soon made my mind wander.
I could not stop thinking about the Loewenmensch statue and its disappearance from the museum. Quinn had made little progress in its recovery, and for some reason the director didn't seem to care either. Maybe he was too polite to be pushy about it, or maybe he didn't want us to find it, which struck me as odd. For a 40.000 year old artifact, the insurance would sure put a dent in their budget. Even though it was discovered in Europe, I had a strong feeling it was connected to the events I experienced here in Mexico. The statue was a feline-human hybrid, possibly a Balam - a Nahuatl deity, with a popularity that washed across the world, like some prehistoric rock god.
I made a stop at a gas station outside San Carlos, to stock up on soda and to make a call to Steffie Dathe, the director of the museum in Ulm.
"The Loewenmensch is one fine piece of prehistoric art," she said, pointing her phone camera at a statue, twice the size of the replica Quinn had bought from the gift shop. The detailing was much better than the $50 replica, and a true prehistoric masterwork, even on screen and in low resolution.
"Just imagine," Dathe said. "40.000 years ago, an unknown artisan carved this out of ivory, so that he and his tribe may worship their god."
"But that's an animal" I said. "I thought the people back then would worship... you know... human like images?"
"Not at all," Dathe replied. "The Egyptians worshiped animal gods, 4000 years ago. So did the Minoans, a thousand years later. Along came the Babylonians, the Vikings, and Aztecs with the Nahuatls. It seems animal-hybrid gods and vengeful demons spawn into our culture, once every thousand years."
"And now, the missing statue has suddenly returned out of the blue?" I said with some surprise. Quinn never mentioned anything about the theft being solved. And Dathe seemed keen to write off the whole incident, as if it was no more than a footnote in museum history.
"When did that happen? Who stole the Loewenmensch?"
"Stole?" Steffie Dathe said, grinning.
"The statue never left our museum."
The young Chris Tell was both innocent and vulnerable, but he was also dangerous. So dangerous Mr. Tejon thought the world would be a safer place without Chris in it. He had tried to warn me against the boy, but I did not understand the gravity of his concerns, when I saved Chris from tumbling over the cliff-side in his sabotaged wheelchair. But that didn't make him any less dangerous or less innocent. Chris was just a kid who cried when he got hurt, and hurt him they did; his father beat him to tears. But his tears dried into rubies so desirable to the criminal underbelly of society, that mobsters killed each other over them in a mad scramble of violence. Something that made Jack Tell the fortune he so desperately desired, with no regard to his own flesh and blood. Tell's cold heart had crystallized like one his own gems. Dry, hard and inhumane.
But the force that crystallized the tears was pulled from the wrong side of the abyss. The more Chris father made him cry, the more he siphoned energy, until the point where the abyss demanded something in return to settle the balance. Mr. Tejon tried to warn us, but he didn't understand the mechanics of the abyss. Neither did I, but I was connected to it, and just as dangerous as Chris.
Humans don't interest me when I shift, and their lives have little value to me. The more I shift, the more the abyss tugs at me, and it beckons me to return to the place, the dark half of me calls "home". When the MI-16 sent a hit-man after me [in: a Fall From Grace], I shifted so hard I was caught in a limbo between the two worlds and it took all my strength to return to human form. I'm strong, powerful and comfortable in my demon form, but staying like this is an impossible act; I can't walk the streets without drawing attention. Yet, returning to the abyss with its multidimensional, mile-long creatures was a terrifying experience I didn't want to go through again.
I wondered if Slater went through the same problems as I. He was the first person to welcome me to San Blas. He bought me beer and offered me friendship, because he recognized my true nature the moment we met. In me, he had found an rare ally. Someone who was much like himself. Someone he could share his secret with.
When Slater found out Mr. Tejon's wanted Chris dead, he flew into rage and shifted into demon form. He dragged the screaming Tejon into the view of the CCTV camera, and butchered the old man for me and the world to see. Maybe as a token of gratitude, or just to let me know I wasn't alone. Tejon pleaded for his life, explaining how Chris' powers were dangerous in the wrong hands, but Slater wouldn't listen. He was a murderer, just like me.
Or was I?
I had been drugged the night agent Phelps was murdered and my memory was hazy. I remembered flashes of shifting, the scent of blood and the frantic panting of agent Phelps and his breathless shouts of "oh God, oh! Jesus" as he fled, stumbled and died at my hands.
But something was wrong.
His human eyes and nose were useless in the night and he crashed through the forest, clumsy and out of shape from too much desk-work, from too much good food and soft hotel beds. To my ears, his dying screams were sweet music, like works of Monteverdi and Miles Davis in the key of blood. The taste of human flesh was like fine wine when I tore into his throat.
But his throat had not been ripped out! And there were no woods anywhere near the hotel. Only fields of rye.
When I left his convulsing body, his head dangled only by strands of skin and sinew. He stared at me with eyes that bulged, his tongue lolled from a mouth half open.
Wait! He was never decapitated. Sure, his corpse was a mess, but none of these wounds were for real.
I pulled the car over and rested my head on the steering wheel, waiting for the world to stop spinning.
Damn my memory - or lack of same!
How much of this was real, and how much was false memory? Chris had seen the murder from his window, but he didn't recognize the killer. All he had seen was a large feline tearing into the agent.
"You're a cat," he stated plainly, with little concern or particular interest when I spoke to him. With both of us having one foot in the abyss, he recognized my true nature fast, but he had no understanding of it. Or maybe he just didn't care.
I was about to drive on, when something metallic glinted in the sun, half a mile up the road. It was a stationary object about the size of a van, parked by the roadside. I knew something was very wrong so I drove the last half mile in first gear, never exceeding 10MPH.
I recognized nurse Richard's van from quarter of a mile away. The rear doors were open and strangely bent out of shape, so I pulled over and walked the last hundred feet to the vehicle, preparing myself for what I'd find. Judging by the skid-marks, Richards had been in a hurry to get to the convent when something made her slam the brakes and bring her escape to a sudden stop, a lousy ten miles from the convent. Something with claws. The rear doors had been ripped open and bent like a cheap tin of tuna. Chris' wheelchair was still in the back and fastened with leather straps so it wouldn't slide all over the place, but it was empty.
Of course it was.
The engine was still warm, hissing and making ticking noises under the late afternoon sun. The desert was strangely quiet, as if an ungodly hand had put a glass bell over the place to seclude it from the rest of the world. Living in the city, I'm used to having noise around me at all times. Even when things quiet down after midnight, I still have voices in my head to keep me company. But the silence of the desert was aggressive, even the crickets held on to their legs, too scared of attracting attention to themselves.
The door on the driver's side was half open. I held my breath as I looked inside. The corpse of Richards was in the driver's seat, sitting half upright, held in place by the safety belt like a string puppet made out of flesh. She was dead and cradled most of her own entrails in her lap. Blood poured from the gaping wound in her abdomen where she had been slashed open by the single swipe of a clawed paw. Her arms hung limp down by her sides, palms facing up. Her eyes, once lively and blue were glassy and looking towards the sky. Maybe she died, praying for a blessing from Iuna. But not even the matron saint of protection could save her from the fury of a demon. Her blood was fresh and sticky, and the scent told me death had set in no more than twenty minutes ago.
He was close.
I kicked at a pile of refuse I thought was a bundle of soiled rags, when I recognized the lettering "Keep Calm and Hang Ten" on Slater's abandoned T-shirt. A pale green bundle of rags next to it were the remains of Slater's swimming trunks. He had stripped out of his clothes before shifting into demon-form. I'd made the mistake of keeping my clothes on, the first few times I shifted. The shirt is the first thing that rips, but it's painful when you grow too large for your jeans and your shoes, and it costs you a new set of clothes every time you forget. That's why he arrived barefooted, both when meting with Tell and with Professor Altschuler. He knew he would have shifted before the visit was over. I expected him to lay low, in demon or human form to avoid attracting attention with Chris and Darleen in tow, naked and with the blood of an innocent all over his paws. Looking at the map, Slater's whereabouts were obvious. He was hiding in the Nahuatls. excavation site.
Unlike Jack Tell, Slater wasn't driven by greed, but by a strange obsession with the Balam tribe of the Nahuatl. He was alone in his beliefs, and in his existence. And he was desperate to find someone to confide in. As a last resort, he drove Professor Altschuler into hopeless alcoholism and early retirement to prove his point. Yet he had not shared his terrible secret with anyone, not even with Darleen or Chris, although the boy would have understood. Nurse Richards died protecting the boy, but not from his father or from the mob. All this time, she had protected him from Slater.
The gate to the excavation site was wide open, as if I was an expected visitor. I took my flashlight from the glove compartment and descended the short flight of stairs to the main chamber of the Nahuatl cave.
Slater stood in the center of the room, staring into a purplish-black rift of swirling clouds that floated mid-air. Its shape was elongated like a two-foot ethereal vagina, pulsating and bleeding wispy flames of darkness. He was in his human form but naked, dirty and bloodied. He had painted his face with blood from nurse Richards, all crimson dots and wavy lines across his forehead and cheeks that made him look like some deranged chief on the warpath. All he needed was a damn feather in his hair.
Chris sat on a folding chair ten feet away, and I could tell from the layer of crystalline debris on his clothes he'd been crying. At first I thought they were alone. But then I noticed a slight movement in the dark. Darleen sat propped up against the wall, with her hands and feet tied up with a length of thick rope, blue like the mascara that melted and ran down her cheeks. Either they got turned on by some seriously kinky shit, or Slater had done a 180 on her.
"Hey, that's no way to treat a lady."
My voice echoed softly off the painted walls. Slater took a step back from the black void.
"You're carrying a flashlight," he noted quietly. "If you had only stayed true to your inner self, your nose and ears would lead the way."
I moved closer to Slater. Panting and trembling, with blood-shot eyes and his member half erect from excitement, he was a long way from the laid back surfer who bought me a beer on beach.
"My inner self is what scares away the few friends I have," I replied. "That's why I don't go demon on them."
"Speaking of making new friends," asked Slater and flashed me a warm smile.
"Did you kill her, yet?"
"Kill who? The nurse? I can't take credit for that."
Slater laughed. "Agent Dakota of course." He patted my shoulder, leaving a smear of gore on my cheap T-shirt. "Word gets around when a government helicopter lands in front of a tourist hotel."
"The killings stop here," I said. "I've killed more MI-16 agents than either of us wants to know. There will be no more tears tonight."
Slater snorted. "The MI-16 are our enemies. You've grown soft among humans."
"We're both human," I replied, "and I'm not the only one here with a soft spot." I nodded at Darleen, motioning I was going to untie her.
"Go ahead," said Slater.
"She won't run."
Darleen massaged her wrists where the rope had left dark imprints.
"Bastard," she cursed, but she wasn't talking to me.
"You did a good job," I said. "The criminal underworld is at each other's throat over industrial rubies, and you used Darleen to get close to Jack Tell and the kid."
"And you're a better detective than they give your credit for," said Slater, chuckling. His plan had worked, and he was quietly proud, almost satisfied that I had figured it out, because we both knew I could prove nothing. No judge or jury in the world would believe in murder by transformation.
"Jack Tell, Phelps, Dakota. All fully human," growled Slater. "Under-evolved, single-cell organisms. They are at the bottom of the universal food chain."
Darleen flinched at this sudden outburst and a frown formed around her eyes. She couldn't make out if Slater was joking, but I knew his rage too well. This was the rage of someone who had shifted one time too many, someone who had tasted the sweetness of other-human power. Someone who had felt human flesh surrender to his claws, and enjoyed the sensation.
"Tell him it isn't true," begged Darleen. "Tell him you love Chris and me."
"He can't," I said, "because he never loved you or your son. When you healed his shark bite, he was watching you draining power from the abyss. He supported you in using your healing powers because he needed you to unsettle the fragile balance. But when he met Chris, he found a much more powerful source to help him crack open the abyss."
Darleen fell silent and stared at Slater with a mixture of disbelief and repulsion.
"You're lying," she screamed at me. "Slater is a good man; he takes care of me and Chris. Why are you doing this to us?"
Darleen rubbed the rope burns on her wrists to make the marks go away. All she wanted was help to wrestle her son out of Tell's claws. When the paramedics carried the good-looking but shark-bitten slaterinto the hospital, she healed him and nursed him back to life in more than one way, hoping he might be the one to team up with. She took care of his every wound. She even removed his scars, until she was too exhausted to finish her degree. Eventually, she spent her savings on hiring Mr. Tejon to negotiate with Tell. But Tell was too damn stubborn and too damn greedy for even the talented Tejon to convince. On the night of Tell's death, Slater offered to give it a go, to have a friendly chat with the estranged father. He never wanted Tell dead, because he needed his help with Chris. Tell knew how to hurt the boy just enough to make him cry rubies, and Slater wanted to learn that trick. But Tell didn't want to play along, so Slater shifted into demon to scare him, just like he did with Dr. Altschuler. But Tell had two aces up his sleeve: a happy trigger finger and a bad ticker, and both came into play that night. He shot Slater at point blank before the transformation was complete, and would have killed him if Darleen hadn't shown up. Then Tell's heart gave up.
"Tell was a fool," sneered Slater.
"He believed he could inflict pain by hitting the boy. But Chris grew used to the abuse and cried less with every beating."
Slater took a handful of rubies from his pocket and fed them into the rift. The flames grew higher, licking the perimeters of the rift like blackened tongues. The opening pulsated and expanded a foot in height.
"But emotional pain," continued Slater and waved his pistol at Darleen. "Emotional pain never grows old."
"I believed in you," cried Darleen. "You told me how much you were in love."
"Oh, I'm in love alright," said Slater. "That wasn't bullshit; but I'm in love with MY people - the Balam. The proud cat-people of San Blas left the abyss an eternity ago. They entered the human world through this gate, and they brought two of their gods with them into this world.
Tonight is when the two missing gods return home. Me and Daniel, my brother and I."
Chris let out a quiet sob. A single tear of blood rolled down his face and landed in his lap with a crystalline tinkle. The response was immediate, pink, boneless appendages appeared out of the rift like uncooked sausage links. They stretched out, darting side to side and trying to locate the single ruby. Darleen had proven useless to Slater because she drained energy from herself, but Chris sucked energy straight from the abyss. When Tell beat him in room 203, his tears caused a rift to appear and tentacles to shoot out making a grab for Catalina.
"You were in Tell's room that night," I said. "Only, you didn't negotiate custody over Chris. You wanted to use the boy."
"I tried," said Slater. "I really did. I offered Tell to keep the boy and the rubies if he would only lend me Chris for a single day or two."
"But he believed you'd double cross him so he refused, and you decided to prove it to him. It was Tell who screamed out in terror when he saw you changing into demon form, and then he shot you. Darleen arrived before Fernando and I, because we were busy in room 203, which left her plenty of time to let herself in. She found you wounded, and she used her powers to heal you, once again. When she collapsed from exhaustion, you carried her back to your room, leaving naked footprints outside the window."
Slater grinned and held out his hands. "Nice work, Sherlock. Now, what are you gonna do? Arrest me for being a God, just like yourself?"
"If I had the proof, I'd arrest you for killing Agent Phelps," I said. "But Why did you kill him?" I asked. "His investigations died along with Jack Tell?"
"I did it to save YOU, dumb-ass!" Slater sounded almost hurt. "Don't you understand, we're two of a kind?"
"Killing Phelps didn't exactly save me," I objected. "It put me on the MI-16 kill-list."
"You were always on their kill list, and your would-be killer was no one else than the friendly agent Phelps. When he called your phone and lured you outside to drool all over the moonlit pond, he spiked your beer with a lethal dose of atropine. Remember how Phelps stole your bourbon? He knew damn well you wouldn't be needing it back."
"You're lying!" I cried. "We were making peace between our kind and the MI-16."
Slater shook his head as if losing the final vestiges of hope in me.
"If you didn't spend all your time pretending to be human, you would have smelled the atropine fifty feet away. But you've grown soft and weak among humankind."
"I...I think I shifted while I was drugged."
"Drugged?" Slater laugh out loud, "You were poisoned. The MI-16 didn't dispatch Phelps to get you high. They want you dead. You only beat the atropine by shifting into your demon form while you were out cold."
"You killed Phelps while I was drugged out?"
"I showed him how we Nahuatl stick together: you mess with one of us, you mess with us all. We're like brothers, dude."
"We're not Nahuatl," I shouted. "we never were. The animal heads in that mural were costumes -a sales pitch. Underneath the costumes they were ordinary humans, just like..." I hesitated.
"You were going to say 'Like you and me', right?"
I bit my lip. Slater was right, I was trying to pretend we were all ordinary humans, pretending the abyss was a surreal nightmare, that our world wasn't rubbing shoulders with another, frightening reality.
"You are for real," he said soothingly. "I'm for real and so are our people, and right now they're back home. Alone and godless, and waiting for you and I to return. Come on, Daniel. It's time to go home and claim our seat."
In that moment, my conviction faltered. I didn't know where I belonged or if I wanted to go home -wherever home was.
"The lost library of Tamaria?" I stuttered. My mind was spinning.
"Does this look like a library to you!" Slater laughed. "This is a wormhole to the abyss. Every thousand years, the orbit of our world and the world we call the abyss overlap. The fabric between them grows so thin, it tears open at the slightest imbalance. Living things go in and living things come out. Now is our moment to step through that rift and return to our people. To take our rightful place as their gods."
"It's not the only thing you'll let through," I said. "There are monsters in there. Nameless creatures of tentacles and fangs. Monsters that wreck havoc and insanity."
Slater shrugged. "Behemoth? Leviathan? Satan? They've been here before. It's time to let the humans deal with them for once."
With each word, Slater's voice grew deeper and less human as he shifted. His skull changed form, grew feline and sprouted short horns, his brown eyes turned bright yellow, his arms extended into long clawed appendages that almost reached the ground. His entire body grew a thick layer of chocolate brown fur.
"Look a me!" Slater's voice had dropped by almost an octave and sounded like a very large cat snoring. "Do I look familiar to you?"
I didn't reply. Seeing Slater in this form was like looking into a mirror. Now I knew what the MI-16 agents had seen the second before I tore into them, and I understood the terror in their eyes during those final moments.
"Just let the boy go," I pleaded.
"The boy?" Asked Slater. "You really care about him?"
"He's taken enough abuse. First at the hands of his father, and now from you.
"Then, drop your clothes" said Slater, baring his fangs in a wide smile.
"My clothes?"
"I want you to change into your true Balam form with me," he purred. "Together we will draw so much energy, the void explodes open and our two worlds can rejoin."
"You're insane!" I cried, "-and I should know, I have a diagnosis."
"-and you're a traitor to your own people," shouted Slater. "And you're a liar to yourself."
"I'm not a Nahuatl god, and neither are you. The Balam was a tribe of peaceful tradesmen, but you and I are bastard demon offspring of abyss and Earth. Creatures who hate all things human."
"Then shift," snarled Slater and pointed his shotgun at Darleen.
"Shift, or the human gets it."
With Slater's change, the rift expanded until it reached the ceiling. The tongues of black and purple flames surrounding the blackness hissed and breathed fumes of acrid gas that smelled of sulfur and rotten onions. They materialized into short, solid tentacles that probed the air. Slater bent so far forward, his head almost touched the rift, and shouted into the abyss.
"Behold, my people! Your gods are coming home." Hundreds of pink, slug like creatures poked out from the rift, probing its sides, like boneless fingers.
"I'll give you till the count of THREE! Then the human gets it."
I looked to Chris who was quietly weeping blood into his bowl. What was I to do?
"THREE!"
"Please... don't" whispered Chris. It was the second time I'd heard him speak, but this time his voice was clear and determined, like someone waking up from a year-long slumber.
"TWO!"
Don't do what? I wondered, but the boy went quiet once again. Don't change, or don't shoot my mother? I sighed. This was of no use.
"ONE!"
With a howl of pain and rage, Chris lunged forward. He threw the crystalline contents of his clay-bowl at Slater where the sharp rubies clung to his fur and burrowed into the skin of his face. Slater clawed at his eyes sweeping away the crimson gems that swarmed around him like angry bees. He cried out and staggered around, blindly firing his pistol.
"I'll KILL you!" he screamed while the bullets ricocheted off the walls and whirred past our ears. Darleen cried out in pain and clutched her chest, where a stray bullet had found a home. Chris couldn't keep himself upright and he had tumbled to the floor, looking at me. There was a determined look in his eyes I hadn't seen before.
"Your move!" he seemed to say.
"Son of a BITCH!" I shouted above the howling noise coming from the rift.
"Let's get this over with, motherfucker."
I tore off my T-shirt and dropped my jeans, so they wouldn't tear for once. Then I allowed myself to shift. It was easy to slip into my demon form; I had done it so many times before it had become second nature, to me.
Changing back, now THAT was a problem I'd have to deal with later.
With my shift, the rift to the void expanded to the size of a household window; a jet black membrane surrounded by wisps of daylight blue shifting into purple as it was sucked into the abyss. The white fingers of hundreds of tiny tentacles probed the perimeter like maggots burrowing into a ripe carcass. Bulges rose from the blackness like shark fins protruding from the sea. The other side was about to burst through.
"Hang on for just one mo'" I said. If I could drain energy from the abyss to save Irene, I could to the same to heal Darleen. I knelt before her and let the energy flow from the abyss, through me and into Darleen.
"I kneeew you would see the light, brother!" giggled Slater, giddy from the anticipation of breaking the doorway wide open. The excitement made him sport an erection like a telephone pole.
In that moment, the rift emitted a terrible tearing sound as the fabric dividing our world with the abyss tore wide open. Tentacles, ten feet in length burst out of the void, probing for prey. I charged forward and cannon-balled my full weight into Slater. If his physique was better than mine in our human form, he was even more impressive in his demon form, and pummeling into him was like crashing into a brick wall. Surprised, he took one unsteady step back.
"Hey dude, what the..." he said, staring at me in confusion. Then two tentacles, the width of a grown man's leg wrapped themselves around his midriff and started tugging at him.
"You double-crossing motherfu..." he cursed, before two new tentacles shot out from the dark and caught him by the arms.
"No!" he screamed. "Don't take ME, take HIM... He's a traitor to our kind."
He held the Loewenmensch figurine into the air, as if holding a torch.
"Look! This is the living proof to show I'm your god. I'm returning what we took with us when we left for Earth, all those years ago."
"It's a fake," I said quietly. "All the artifacts on display were fakes."
Slater lifted an arm as far as the tentacles would let him and pointed at me, but the creatures slithered mindlessly around him, embracing him with blind arms, like an otherworldly octopus, probing, sensing and tasting his flesh.
The Loewenmensch, the Willendorf Venus, the Rosetta stone, the Dead sea scroll too. All were priceless artifacts, too expensive to insure for a local museum like ours. Instead, Smythe had to settle for copies. The Loewenmensch Slater stole from the exhibit was a brilliantly handcrafted copy, that fooled the common visitor. But they didn't fool the experts, and they wouldn't fool the Balam tribe he so desperately wanted to impress.
"Putting a replica on display to save insurance is an old trick in the museum world," I said. "If you had been the real deal, your sensitive nose would have smelled the coat of paint and varnish a mile away."
Slater's eyes widened in horror, as he realized his entry ticket into the abyss was worth no more than a photocopy of a Springsteen concert ticket. He struggled against the tentacles, writhed and flailed his arms, but despite his strength he eventually grew tired, and his flailings ceased.
"Welcome me, my Balam brothers!" he shouted. "I'll join you now..." He gave up all resistance and simply leaned back, allowing the tentacles to drag him into the abyss. He locked eyes with me and I felt like a traitor to my own kind. He never broke eye contact with me until he disappeared from view into the howling blackness of the void.
Darleen knelt by Chris who wrapped his arms around his mother. They were terrified of Slater, and of me.
"Humans!" I growled, my voice sounding like an rolling avalanche of rocks. I loathed their weakness and sense of self importance. When their type climbed onto land on misshapen fins, my own kind had been around for millions of years, and yet the humans thought themselves superior.
"Shift back... close the rift," rasped Darleen, her breathing was labored and she was very pale, but I had stopped the bleeding. Once again, I had saved a human life, but at the expense of another one. Slowly, the black disk grew smaller, the tentacles retracted into the void and the purple flames faded into a thin ring around the rift. Chris struggled to get on his feet, this time without help and he leaned heavily against the stone wall. We watched in silence as the rift closed in on itself and eventually vanished with a soft sigh. The balance having been restored.
Then everything was quiet except quiet sobbing of a young boy and Darleen's labored breathing.
"Run!" I bellowed. "Go home." I stormed up the stone stairwell and into the night. It took me hours to shift back, while the mountains echoed from my howls of rage.
"Your new friends at MI-16 sent us these." Quinn poured the contents of a sealed envelope onto the table. It contained a small handful of dark gray kernels.
"Some kind of seed?"
"They say it's rye from the fields behind the hotel. It's infested with ergot."
"That's some kind of fungus, right?"
"Ergot is how they make LSD. It releases a poison that makes you delusional and also causes pain and convulsions, like the ones Darleen described."
"And we've all eaten the rye rolls for breakfast and dinner, every day?"
"The boffins at MI-16 say you guys have been living a week-long acid trip after you ate contaminated rye."
"-so Slater was not a Nahuatl cat-god from hell?"
"Do you really believe the MI-16 would report something like that to the ministry of defense?" Quinn asked calmly.
The blackened kernels crumbled between my fingers like cane sugar, leaving a trail of dust on Quinn's mahogany desk. Maybe they were right, maybe we'd all been going through the mother of all acid trips for a week and going berserk? At least we hadn't gone blind from staring into the sun. I made a mental note to myself to read up on my Timothy Leary.
"Acid trip, huh?"
"That's what they say." Inspector Quinn leaned back in his chair and lit his pipe, waiting for me to make my own conclusion.
"What do you believe?" I asked.
"I believe there are two letters waiting for you." Quinn reached into his desk drawer and produced two envelopes. The first was from Fernando.
"I hope it's not a ruby," I grumbled while I tore into the envelope. But it wasn't a gem, it was something much better. Inside was a photo of Fernando standing in front of his hotel, next to Miguel, Catalina and Darleen, their new employee. She supported her son, who stood on his own two legs. They looked very happy.
The second envelope had Apex Curtains listed as the sender. If I was still on the MI-16 kill-list, the letter was sure too thin to contain a bomb, or maybe a needle laced with ricin. What if it was poison? Paranoid images of envelopes spilling toxic powder of anthrax into my lap flashed across my mind and I hesitated. I gave the envelope back to Quinn.
"You have the better nose of the two of us,"I said.
Quinn smiled and winked at me. "It's OK," he said. "You don't need a werewolf to tell you the contents are safe."
The envelope contained a single sheet with a database record, printed on standard office quality paper.
Kent, Daniel
Age: 26
Sex: male.
Occupation: Musician
Medical status: Healthy
Standing: 2, favorable.
Signed
Evelyn Dakota
Quinn laughed when he saw the startled expression on my face. "Take it any way you want," he grinned. "But I believe you've made an impression on the MI-16." Then his face changed expression and he grew serious.
"Before you go, I have a thing I want to show you." he said. "I don't know if I'm doing you a favor, or the greatest mistake of my life. But... "
He reached into his desk drawer and pulled out a wrist watch watch. It was a standard mechanical watch with a brass casing and a faux leather band dyed green. I recognized the piece, as the watch agent Bruckner boasted about, while he was waiting for the signal to kill me. [in Havana or Hell]. It had been a welcoming present given to him by a friend and fellow MI-16 agent, when he joined their ranks. He'd kept it ever since. A gift from a dear, nameless friend.
"Take a look at the inscription," Quinn suggested.
I turned the watch around and read the engraving on the back plate.
"Eugene Kent," I whispered.
"That's the name of my dad."
The end