Dirty Deeds Read online

  “Do you want to be the pot or the kettle, Bane,” Noah said. “It’s not my crotch that smells like a pizza parlor ‘walk-of-shame’.”

  I snorted and kicked my door open. “I’m surprised you even know what a ‘walk-of-shame’ is.” I grabbed my duffle bag out of the bed of the truck. Noah was still in the cab.

  “Noah?” He was looking up at the hotel sign but he didn’t say anything. “Look, I’m sorry. I’m sure in your eighteen years, you’ve tied one on and had to walk back to your house in the morning with lipstick smeared all over your shirt collar and only one shoe.”

  Noah looked at me, his face creased in confusion. “What?” Then he realized what I’d said and he shook his head. “No, whatever. I wasn’t listening to what you said earlier.” He looked over at the glowing lights in the main office and the dark identical windows and doors of the hotel. “You’re not doing this because of me, right, stopping for the night?” I opened my mouth to speak but Noah blurted out, “Because I can sleep in the truck while we drive. I can sleep just fine. I can stretch out in the cab. You don’t have to get a room for us every time because I can…”

  I held up my hand. “Noah, you’re babbling. The fact is. I want a shower and you need a shower. So get your ass out of that seat.”

  He glared at me but kicked his door open and grabbed his backpack off the floorboards.

  From the look on the face of the night manager, under the sickening hum of the fluorescent lights, we must have looked like Hell’s missionaries. I glanced down at my once-white a-shirt which was smeared with black grime and brown dried blood and other stains I wasn’t sure about. Pizza sauce mixed with the blood and dirt and grime on my jeans and the duffle bag I carried was army surplus issued. I cut my eyes to Noah. His cargo shorts and tie-dyed shirt had seen better days and he had a neon orange backpack that was also grime-stained. I tried to give the night manager a reassuring smile. “One room please, two queens.” The digging feeling in my gut almost made me dizzy as I handed over three twenties to the manager in exchange for a room key card. The room was on the second floor. I dumped out the contents of my duffle bag onto one of the beds and handed Noah the roll of salted tape, so I could go back to the truck for the guns.

  I tucked the sawed-off and the .45 into my now empty bag and I was considering bringing in the knife set when I heard the tinny buzzing of my cell phone. Another annoying feature of having friends and people you care about in your life was being expected to carry around this piece of plastic that buzzed and dinged whenever one of them wanted to talk to you. I fished around in the seat and pulled it out. I squinted at the screen and flipped it open with a grin.

  “Miss us already, Rosetta?”

  “What do you mean, ‘us’, Bane?” I closed my eyes and gritted my teeth. “Don’t tell me you’re still dragging that poor boy around.”

  I sighed. “I keep bringing up sending him home on a Greyhound, but he keeps shouting me down.”

  “Bane, you’ve been to hell. Surely you can handle an eighteen-year-old throwing a tantrum.” Rosetta had pulled out her Southern Baptist Sunday School teacher voice. “Do it tomorrow. Do it fast. The winds are changing.”

  I snorted. “The pirate flies at midnight?”

  “What?” Rosetta barked.

  “You were just being very dramatic there for a minute, ‘the winds are changing’,” I said.

  “It’s not a damn metaphor, Bane. The winds are fucking changing.”

  The smile fell off my face. Rosetta usually didn’t make a conscious choice to cuss. It slipped out so often when her brain wasn’t watching the store that I found it endearing. There was nothing accidental in what she was saying now. I’d only heard fear in Rosetta’s voice a handful of times in the ten years I’d known her.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “I was talking to the other side,” Rosetta said. A seance. It tickled me to no end that the best medium in West Virginia just happened to also be the favorite Sunday School teacher in her congregation. “And I met someone who is trying to claw their way out of the rubber room.” The rubber room was purgatory.

  “Claw their way out?” I asked. “You don’t just ‘claw your way out’ of the rubber room. Believe me, while I was on trial, I tried. Many times. There are only two directions you go in the rubber room and it’s usually down.”

  “You eventually made it out,” Rosetta said.

  “After a fifty-year court case,” I said. “Did this person get a trial?”

  “No,” Rosetta said. “Apparently since your trial, there hasn’t been another.”

  “So how are they…?” I began.

  “I said they’re trying, not that they’re succeeding. But that’s not important right now. Apparently, everyone downstairs is all riled up about something that’s going on up here and your name keeps getting tossed around,” Rosetta said. “Something is coming, Bane. The soul didn’t have specifics but it’s bad enough that the demons are at each other’s throats and you’re somewhere in the middle.”

  I snorted. “So clowns to the left of me, jokers to my right?”

  “That’s about the size of it,” Rosetta said. “And all of them are demons. It seems that now besides a bounty on your head, there’s a wager as to which demon is going to get the bounty.”

  “That’s a lot of information from this supposed source,” I said. “How do you know a demon isn’t posing as this ‘soul attempting to escape’, just to yank your chain?”

  “Gray hair doesn’t make me stupid, Bane,” Rosetta growled. “I also performed a tarot reading. The cards say the source is telling the truth. Now that alone doesn’t make it bulletproof but just on the off chance that the soul might be right, I thought I’d tell you to watch your back.” We were both quiet for a moment, thinking.

  I knew I was going to regret it, but I cleared my throat and asked, “Did the soul have anything else to say?”

  “Just that the demons were talking about your demise as if it was days away,” Rosetta said quietly. “Like I said, the winds are changing. Something bad is coming, Bane.”I could almost hear her twisting the kitchen phone cord around her hand as she talked.

  I glanced up at the motel room window to see Noah move the curtains aside and place the salted tape along the window ledge. He glanced down at me and held up his hands as if to ask me what was up.

  “Bane,” Rosetta barked and the no-nonsense voice was back. “You drop that boy off at the nearest station at first light. This is gonna get bloody, fast. Do you even know how many you have left to save?”

  “I can’t know. Not until I find Festus,” I said. “I’m hoping those seven demons we killed in St. Louis are worth something. I probably should have let Scratch finish the ritual and raise his big daddy demon and then if the pike worked on him...”

  “And if it hadn’t, he would have smeared you and the kid all over the walls like finger paint,” Rosetta snapped. “Count your blessings. You stopped him from rising. Move on.” Rosetta sighed. “Well, you better go find that shifty accountant of yours. I suppose it’s too much to hope that he just skipped off on you. I mean, disappearing just before the final showdown in St. Louis does sound like something he would do.”

  I felt a tiny stab of annoyance. Yes, Festus was a turd on most occasions. However, Rosetta hadn’t seen all the times he’d been beaten to a pulp by his fellow demons for doing his job and how he had, unwillingly, but still allowed us to use him to figure out the Solomon’s Spices, which led to the seven demons being taken down. “Rosetta, he didn’t leave on his own,” I said.

  “Yeah, I know,” Rosetta said.

  I didn’t wait for her to make another comment about my assumptions. “Sister Smile and her crew have him.”

  “Bane,” Rosetta said. “Put that boy on a bus.” I sighed. “Do you have a lead on her?” Rosetta asked.

  “Her campground,” I said. “I went there to ask her for help with pinning down that Rawhead. It’s just south of Lancaster. I assume they took th
eir ‘war trophies’ back there, after St. Louis. I still don’t know why they came to St. Louis in the first place.”

  “Hard to say,” Rosetta said. “Maybe they wanted some St. Louis gooey butter cake after so many courses of long pig. Of course, the more unnerving possibility is that they’re tracking you.”

  I snorted. “Right now, I would be ecstatic if that was the case. It would save me the trouble of having to go to Pennsylvania.”

  “Bite your tongue,” Rosetta said. “Just be thankful that they seem to have lost your scent for the moment.” She cleared her throat. “Let me talk to the kid.”

  “He’s in the room upstairs,” I said. The line was quiet.

  “You actually stopped and got a room?” The disbelief in Rosetta’s voice was annoying, to say the least.

  “I’m not an animal,” I said. “We both needed to shower.”

  “Well that’s a given,” Rosetta said.

  “And,” I continued. “He’s slept sitting up so much in the truck over the last week, I was worried it might start causing medical problems and it’s not like Hell’s got an HMO I can use to get him help.”

  “You’re getting soft,” Rosetta said and I could hear the taunt in her voice.

  “I hope your church pew is extra splintery on Sunday,” I grumbled.

  “Where are you right now, anyway?” Rosetta asked.

  “Louisville.”

  “Why’d you stop there?”

  “Heard on the radio that there was ‘fog rolling in’,” I said. I held my breath, waiting for the screaming to start. I watched a man hold the hotel office door open for a woman coming out as she dug in her huge white purse. She crossed the lot from the office to a red car, one row in front of me and I counted the seconds down from ten, waiting for Rosetta’s reaction.

  “Damn it, Bane!” Right on schedule. “You took that poor boy on another hunt with you?”

  “Like I said,” I raised my voice to try to make her hear me over all the derogatory comments she was making about me and my sanity. “I tried three times today to get him to let me take him to the Greyhound station and send him home.”

  “There’s your problem,” Rosetta said, changing tactics from shaming to shoving in a single sentence. “You don’t ask. Tomorrow, just drive straight to the station before he can argue with you. Buy him a ticket and boot him out of the cab.”

  I turned to look back up at the room. I could see the soft glow of light behind the curtain. “That’s kind of cold, Rosetta. I mean, he did help us out in St. Louis, and at your house, and he’s helped me a lot. And then there’s his condition.”

  “Bane, his little flaming hands parlor trick isn’t going to mean squat to Sister Smile and her crew. They’ll tear him apart like Baptists when they see sweet rolls after a three-hour sermon.”

  I snorted. “I’ll have to take your word for it.”

  I heard her sigh. “What are you hunting anyway?”

  “A witch,” I said. “One tiny., little witch. Not a big deal.”

  “How do you know it’s a witch?” Rosetta asked.

  “Because I found the severed head,” I said.

  “Ew. A necro-witch, huh?” Rosetta said. “Any idea on who it is yet?”

  “Nope,” I said. “Another benefit of having a hotel room is having the space to spread out and plan.”

  “Sure,” Rosetta said, not sounding like she believed me one bit. “Just admit that you’re getting soft.” She didn’t wait for me to protest. “So are you going to try to pendulum to find this witch?”

  “I think that’s the quickest way. I grabbed a city map from the hotel main office.”

  “Are you going to kill her?”

  “I hope I won’t have to. If I can just break her connection to downstairs by burning her mark off, she should lose her power. Then she’ll just be a pissed-off woman with a burn scar.”

  “If you don’t use actual fire, make sure and coat whatever you use to burn her, with holy water beforehand. The water will evaporate but the blessing will hold. If it gets under her skin, she shouldn’t be able to mark herself for her demon pimp anymore,” Rosetta said.

  “Pimp?” I asked. “Since when do you know what a ‘pimp’ is, Rosetta?”

  “I watch TV,” Rosetta said, a hint of defensiveness in her voice.

  I shook my head. “You gotta stop watching those late-night cop shows.”

  “You gotta stop taking innocents on ‘ride-alongs’,” Rosetta said. “I’ll quit mine if you quit yours.” I didn’t say anything. “Remember what I said, Bane. Drive to the station. Get him the ticket. Give him the boot. And watch your back. If you hear any more intel from Nya, call me.” This was a surprise. Rosetta wasn’t a huge fan of Nya, mostly because I often took Nya’s advice and intel to heart, which constituted her ‘telling me what to do’ and that was Rosetta’s job, according to Rosetta. “Try to keep your head down on this hunt, Bane. This demon is looking for you. It doesn’t sound like it can find you on its own or you would have already had a visit from it. Probably the hex bags and protections you carry are throwing it off your trail for the moment. That’s probably why the demon had to lure you into a trap instead of just springing up behind you and cutting your head off.”

  “Well, that would have been festive,” I said.

  “My house is on the way to Lancaster,” Rosetta said. “After you’ve whacked your witch, stop on through. I was thinking about making some Huckleberry Buckle tomorrow.”

  I scowled. “You’re evil.”

  “Not according to my minister,” Rosetta said. “Now go take a shower, I think I can smell you from here.”

  I hung up and looked back down at my phone. No missed calls. Where the hell was Nya? She was the one who started the worry train about this demon coming after me. It annoyed me to no end that Nya insisted that I carry a cell phone but she refused to keep one, opting instead to communicate via payphone when the mood struck her. I loved Nya like a sister but right now, it was hard to not be annoyed at her radio silence. And, if I was being honest, a part of me was scared as hell that something had happened to her and I was helpless to do anything about it because I had no idea where she was. I blew out a sigh and hefted the bag up onto my shoulder and started across the lot. A faint sound of someone breathing somewhere nearby caught my ear and I stood still, listening. I saw a flash of movement in front of me. The woman I’d watched get into her red car was still in the lot, looking down at her phone, her car window down and a cigarette dangling from her fingers near her side-view mirror.

  I was getting paranoid. I rubbed a hand down my face. Maybe I was just tired. Too many days wound too tight. St. Louis had taken it out of me. Almost losing so many people I actually cared about had been a horror I hadn’t expected to experience there.

  The thought of a hot shower moved me forward and the feeling of being exposed in the open lot to anyone who might be out there watching me, made me pick up my speed. I climbed the stairs and turned to look out at the empty parking lot. The woman in the red car turned her engine over and flicked her lights on. I watched her cruise out of the lot and I gave myself a little shake. When it had just been me against the baddies, I didn’t worry nearly as much as I worried now. If I got the baddie, I got the points. If the baddie got me, I went back downstairs and got to wait for a new body, and then we’d play again. Now though…

  “There you are!” Noah said behind me. “I thought you might have forgotten how doors work when they aren’t attached to your truck.” I turned and saw him poking his head out of the room, a towel around his shoulders, a different tye-dyed shirt on with his cargo shorts.