Hostile Takeover (Vale Investigation Book 1) Page 3

  “I wasn’t expecting to see you tonight,” I said as I shrugged the clothes on. My sore shoulder protested and I winced.

  “Why would you?” she replied with a slight accent that was impossible to place.

  I glanced at her for clues. Her hair was loose and dark brown again. She had a little makeup on, looked to be anywhere between twenty-five and forty. Her feet were bare and she wore a long and oh-so-thin black dress.

  I recognized the look. It was the one I’d dubbed “the Mediterranean” and I knew what it meant. She sat up and her gaze darkened to a coal shade as she took a good, long look at me.

  “I’m not in the mood,” I said as I finished pulling down my shirt. I tried hard not to notice the movements her dress made against her feminine curves. But I was a man and no straight man in his right mind could resist giving the attention demanded by that oh-so-perfect cleavage.

  “You do not get to choose, mon Bel-Ami,” she said.

  Hearing her use my name like that did things to me that no human being could have ignored.

  “Or have you forgotten how this works?” she added.

  “I haven’t, but no amount of French-silver-tonguing will make me like it,” I retorted. It was a weak protest and we both knew it.

  She laughed, a deep, throaty, sultry sound that did things to me I wish it didn’t. Then she moved again, seeming to undulate as she stood to her feet. In two steps she was in front of me, ripe for the taking, temptation personified. She was beautiful, every man’s dream, and she knew it.

  “What do you want?” I asked, throat dry.

  “A man died tonight,” she murmured. “I want you to investigate.”

  The change of topic helped me get my mind off … other things. “For God’s sake, why? Certainly, you would know what happened.”

  She remained stock still. It was as if I hadn’t said anything, and maybe I hadn’t as far as she was concerned. She sure had a tendency to only hear what interested her.

  I glanced at the clock and saw that it was just past three a.m. “Look,” I told her, “I’ve had a lousy day that doesn’t seem to want to end. I’m more banged up than a crash test dummy right now. So why don’t you and I make an appointment for next Thursday, when I’ll—”

  That would be the part she heard clearly. She was on me in a second, swift as a viper. Her cold fingers laced themselves around my throat, pushing me backward until my back hit the wall. The pain of the injuries, which I kept finding new ways to aggravate, registered this time. Must have had something to do with how I felt my feet lift off the ground as she kept me there, pinned like an insect.

  “You signed a contract with me, Bellamy Vale,” she hissed. “Your life for a favor. It was granted to you, thus I get your life.”

  Her gaze bore into me and her vice-like grip did not relax. I tried to struggle, but she was as immobile as a statue.

  “You are mine,” she said. The sexy accent was long gone, replaced by something darker and deadlier. “I see the tapestry of life and I hold your string in one hand and the scissors in the other.”

  I’d have swallowed if I could. Instead, I started to suffocate, spots clouding my vision as my heartbeat took up a staccato rhythm. In spite of all that, her arm remained rigid.

  “I will cut it when it pleases me,” she continued. “Until then, you are mine and you will do as I command.”

  Blood thumped in my ears and I could feel my heart slowing down. I nodded; it was all I could do.

  “The man’s name was Ethan Nicholls,” she informed me.

  Nicholls … I’d heard that name before, hadn’t I? Where, though? The world was starting to look very hazy and a lot of things weren’t making sense anymore. Pressure was building behind my eyes and it felt as if they were going to pop. One thing couldn’t be denied though. My heart had stopped beating.

  I should have died then and there, but I didn’t. She had my life in her hands, literally. And she couldn’t have found a better way to spell it out for me.

  “He was but the first of many and you will put an end to these killings,” she said. “It is my command.”

  Darkness spread in her eyes until it consumed all of the white. “Disobey me, Bellamy Vale, and I will let death take you next time.”

  She let go of me and I fell to the floor like a rag doll. My heart started pumping blood again and pain ripped through my chest. I coughed as I struggled to remember how to breathe.

  She was gone by the time I looked up. I got back to my feet on shaking legs. She’d meant every word of what she’d said. One day, she would be the death of me, just as she’d promised a long time ago. Until then, however, she wouldn’t let anyone else have me … that was the contract. Death would keep looking the other way, what with guns jamming, three-story falls being broken by beds of pretty flowers, and my heart beating no matter what happened. But one day … or one night …

  I crashed onto my bed, too cold to stop shivering, too tired to pull up the covers. Yeah, Death Incarnate really was every man’s dream. They call ’em femme fatales for a reason.

  Chapter three

  Something rotten

  At first light, I headed out to the Cinema Leone. By the time I woke up, my brain had connected the dots between the news report I’d caught last night and what my boss of a dubious nature wanted me to do about it. I was battered, aching all over, and feeling every bit like I’d fallen from a three-story building just the day before. Don’t get me wrong. The doc had done a good job patching me up. Nothing was bleeding anymore and the swelling in my bad eye had gone down enough for me to open it, even if it was an ugly shade of purple. Just the same, I looked like a victim from a Freddy Krueger movie and felt just about as lively. I wanted to get this job over with so I could sleep for the next month.

  With my car still parked next to the SeaVenture building (assuming Morgan hadn’t done something pissy like have it towed while I was being processed), I walked down to the crime scene, working out the kinks as I went.

  A cold wind was coming in from the ocean and up the streets, chilling my skin wherever that icy gust could touch it. Summer was over, making way for what local meteorologists and residents alike called “not-summer.” Not-summer was an uneven mix of icy winds, rain, fog, and the rare hail storm, that lasted three to four months. It was a major let-down after the rest of the year when summer ruled with a perfect combination of sun, cool breeze, and the occasional gray cloud. Whoever had named this burg Cold City had a sick sense of humor, but most of us had all long since stopped wondering about it.

  I fell in love with Cold City the first time I ever laid eyes on it. Back then, I was in the Navy, serving on the Arleigh Burke-class guided missile destroyer USS Ramage. After an eight-month deployment into the US Navy 6th Fleet we were finally heading back for Norfolk, but technical issues forced us to port in Cold City Bay instead.

  We’d docked in the morning and I got a first view of the city I’ll never forget. The arc of scrapers glistening in the rising sun and the shining beams over the long golden sandy beach left an impression on my mind that forty-eight hours of leave and a lot of booze couldn’t erase.

  Cold City had been constructed in a bay area, sandwiched between the ocean and a range of tree-covered mountains at its back. It was first colonized in the eighteenth century when it was little better than a fishing village. The town fathers had concentrated on the port first, building docks along the shore, before developing backward from there. By the mid-nineteenth century, they’d stopped referring to it as a village or even a town and had started calling it a city. Half a dozen villages sprang up around it, nestled near the foot of the mountains. By the end of the twentieth century all of the villages were long gone, swallowed up by a city which had reached the limits of its growth.

  It took a little while, but people came to grips with the idea that Cold City was never going to get any bigger than it was.
The mountains were too steep for anything more solid than raccoon nests and hunting cabins. There were talks, once or twice, of blowing up the mountain or carving deep sections into its base, but that had always seemed too complicated and expensive, especially after the Great Recession sank its teeth into the city economy in ’08. But entrepreneurs don’t give up easily and they found other ways to keep the pipe dream of expansion alive. All they wound up accomplishing, however, was the constant remodeling of what was already there, destroying the old buildings to make room for the new, which would get destroyed themselves in a few years if the pattern held. As the local saying goes, “Nothing changes like Cold City.”

  The sky was looking ominously gray when I turned into Anglia Street. I’m no weather expert, but it seemed to me like the clouds were minutes away from pelting rain. The street was empty, save for a car or two driving by. The cops had all gone and so had the journalists.

  I walked up the street until I found the Cinema Leone. Now that I was here, yet more history—this time, my own—hit me smack between the eyes. I remembered coming to this place once with my wife, Marissa, around the time we started dating. It had been for a Boris Karloff marathon, seeing him in everything from Frankenstein to Bedlam and Targets. The sweetness of that memory hurt with surprising strength … damn if I wasn’t in a nostalgic mood this morning. I guess almost getting killed twice in one night will do that to a guy.

  It’d been five years since that film fest, but the place hadn’t changed one iota. The old white billboard was the same. The entrance arcade had that red-gone-brown carpet that looked like it’d been laid in the fifties. The building’s façade still hadn’t had that paint job it so badly needed.

  The large bloodstains on the carpet were new, though. So was the line of yellow tape barring the entrance. Now I’m no more psychic than I am a weatherman, but I had a pretty good idea what would become of this place. Someone would rip the tape away at some point and, when no one came to reinstall it, people would start to forget what had happened and move on. Then, as the circle of life moved on, the entire building would be demolished by the end of the year to make room for some condos nobody in this town could afford, even if they worked 120 hours a week.

  That “someone” who’d remove the tape and initiate this town’s collective coping mechanism could be a junkie looking for something to steal or a hobo looking for a warm, safe place to spend the night—or it could be a brown-haired, six-foot PI in need of answers to questions nobody was asking. Behold the unpredictability of life.

  I ripped the yellow tape away and entered the arcade. My nose was assaulted by a mixture of bleach and cleaning products. The cleaning team must have worked through the night. It wouldn’t do for the neighbors to wake up to someone lying dead on their sidewalk. No amount of bleach was going to get rid of those bloodstains, though. And it was going to take a lot more than soap to repair the cuts in the carpet and the claw marks on the concrete walls.

  My stomach churned at the sight. Either that or it was protesting against all the painkillers I’d popped down. I heaved a sigh, knowing the next step was going to make that feel like a paper cut in comparison. Closing my eyes, I forced my breathing to slow down and emptied my mind of everything superficial. I counted down from five to one, opened my eyes, and looked at the scene in front of me again.

  The world had narrowed down, dimmed to a tunnel of sharp, laser-like focus, allowing me to make out the individual fibers of carpet even. The smells had multiplied into a rich palette of chemical compounds that I could separate and identify. Knowing I couldn’t keep my concentration up like this for too long, I hastened to get to work, taking in all the tiniest details of the crime scene.

  From the intensity of the claw marks and the pattern left by the blood splatter, I could map out the attack to the point of being able to discern the moves of the victim from those of the beast. Whatever it was that had made the attack, it had a cruel streak that would have done credit to Jack the Ripper. It had trapped the victim in a corner, pushed him further and further inside as it kept moving forward, claws digging into the carpet like some low-rent Hellraiser knock-off, ready to strike when the fear hit fever pitch.

  Sweat and fear permeated the air around the place where the old man had stood, trembling and facing a voracious, tall monster. In one giant leap, the beast was on him, claws fully extended and shredding flesh into beef strips.

  I recoiled at the thought then shook myself out of it. Despite the cold air, I’d broken into an even colder sweat. The world was spinning around me. I walked back to the street, desperate to get fresh air that didn’t reek of death. I was shaking as I fought to suppress the dry heaving of my stomach. There would be no need to revisit the scene. Everything I’d seen of that massacre was deeply etched into my mind.

  Being Lady McDeath’s errand boy brought with it a useful bag of tricks. There were a few interesting tools in there, but the one I’d just turned on was the one I least liked to use. It didn’t have a name attached to it—none of them did as far as she would tell me—so I’d dubbed it “the sixth sense.” Using it was like an out-of-body experience to the most twisted hell. It left me feeling like I’d just come down from the worst acid trip of my life, combined with a hangover and the mother of all colds. I wasn’t sure how it was even possible. She had never bothered explaining it to me and I couldn’t exactly Google it. Yet I knew, on a gut level, that it had its limits. Whatever it was, it wasn’t something a mere human like me should have had access to. Then again, tapping into resources that weren’t mine to use was all part of the gig with her.

  I leaned against the nearest wall and fought to get my breathing back under control without passing out in the process. It wasn’t just the sensory overload. I could feel the mark, her mark, on my shoulder, burning under my skin. On the outside, it looked like a tattoo. Black ink that depicted a semi-circle above a plus sign, and a smaller full circle above it. It had appeared on my skin of its own volition when I signed my compact with her. And somehow, it bound us together.

  I glanced back at the crime scene with my plain mortal eyes and swallowed hard. Contrary to the report I had caught last night, this was not the work of a hungry lone wolf. Whatever creature did this, it had chosen Nicholls as its prey. The way it had hunted him down, backed him into a corner, and torn him apart when his fear reached its peak spoke of a viciousness that couldn’t be attributed to an animal just wanting to feed.

  This was murder of a different kind.

  Rain fell from the clouds, the cool drops helping me come back to myself. I dragged my sore limbs to the nearest coffee shop and slumped into a booth. With a warm mug of tea in my hand, I went over what I’d figured out so far.

  What possible motive could anyone have had to end Nicholls’ life like that? The whole thing stank worse than a month-old corpse. Hells, I thought. It was always like this when Lady McDeath was involved.

  “I should have known better,” I muttered into my cup. After draining it, I added, “I did know better.”

  Yet here I was, dragging my sorry carcass through the not-summer streets, chilled to the bone and weary beyond words, looking for answers that appeared nowhere to be found. I stared into my empty mug, feeling as hollow as it was. I needed rest and food and that month’s worth of sleep I mentioned before. Hells, I’d have settled for a week.

  The empty mug stared back and I swear the bottom looked as black as her eyes had last night. Shit, just thinking about that made my throat hurt again. I rubbed at the sore flesh underneath my dark-green jacket collar.

  The waitress refilled my cup and brought me a new tea bag and I re-examined the facts as I knew them. None of what I’d seen this morning lined up with the popular wolf theory. Besides, Lady McDeath was involved, so that was one more reason to believe something much nastier was roaming the streets of Cold City. But what could it be? And better yet, how could I find it? Bonus question—who would be stupid eno
ugh to want to hunt down such a creature?

  A mother with her little girl walked by the coffee house window. The kid caught my attention. Her mom was hurrying, probably desperate to get out of this foul weather. But the little one looked like she was enjoying herself. She was about eight, with curly blonde hair and baby-blue eyes. She wore red wellies, a red raincoat, and she held in her tiny hands an equally red plastic umbrella. She was adorable, jumping up and down in the puddles. She made me think of a happier version of Marion Townsend.

  I watched her go until she and her mom had disappeared round the street corner. They were a good reminder that this city was filled with people who had no idea what kind of otherworldly creatures might be around one of those corners. If there was a monster hiding in the shadows, it had to be found and dealt with before it had time to go after sweet, innocent children who giggle when it rains. I guessed Lady McDeath had worked that out long ago and had then set about finding someone stupid enough for the job … only I had no idea what I was up against this time. I needed help. I couldn’t fight something I couldn’t find.

  Desperate for a better option, I reached for my smartphone and pulled up the Conclave number. It wasn’t a good idea to call them, but it was all I had right now. I dialed up the fourteen-digit number. No one answered, but a beep told me I’d ended up on a voicemail.

  “Hi, this is Bellamy Vale. I’m a PI in Cold City, USA,” I said into the phone. I wasn’t sure how much to explain, so I kept to the facts. “Look, there was an attack last night, fatal, and I have reasons to believe whatever’s responsible might be coming from the other side of the border.” I paused, wondering what else to say. “Er, could you send someone here to investigate? Or at least tell me if there’s been a breach? I don’t know what—”

  Another beep cut me off in mid-sentence, letting me know my time was up. I dropped the phone and took another sip of tea.