Deuce

Most of the people that walk through my door look skeptical, call it an occupational hazard, but this one was different from the start. Most people stop and check the nameplate on the office door to make sure that they have the right person, and then they look at me with one eyebrow raised and say, “You’re a private eye?” and they manage to make my job sound like a question.

They all seem so goddamned disappointed that I’m not wearing a fedora and carrying a hip flask full of whiskey, living out the Sam Spade dream life. Hell, the only person that looks like a private investigator ought to look is Humphrey Bogart, and he’s dead. Ever since Bogie died, nobody’s been able to call themselves a P.I. without the customers double-checking themselves. From the moment he walked in I watched his eyes, never broke contact. He had fascinating pale grey eyes, like ancient weathered stone tumbled from castle walls.
Or at least, that’s what I tell myself. Maybe it’s just me; maybe I just don’t look like a private eye. But this customer opened my door, stepped inside, and closed it behind him. And then he had a seat. And he did look me right in the eye, and said, “You’re a private eye?” But he didn’t say it like it was a question. He said it like he needed the answer. He believed that I was what I was, but he had to be sure. When I nodded, he relaxed slightly. “I have a problem, Miss Monroe, and I don’t know where to start. I have lost something, or rather it was stolen, just a few hours ago, and I need it back immediately. I need it back intact, with no questions asked, and the longer it is out of my hands the worse the repercussions.”
“Have you reported it stolen to the police?” I interjected. I could ask him about repercussions later. One of the first rules of being a P.I. is not to step on the cop’s toes, don’t go solving crimes. I try to keep myself with civil matters, but in this recession I’ll take any job. But even still, I had to at least ask him if his whatchamacallit had been reported stolen. Already I had pulled my pad and pen over, ready to start taking notes. This guy wasn’t going to call the police in; anyone that winds up in an investigator’s office a few hours after the crime is not going to report anything.
He reached up to smoothe his lapels with his long, bony fingers. “I cannot report this crime to the proper authorities, they would want to ask too many questions about my property, perhaps even hold it as evidence. I cannot take that chance.” This is the part where I should be arguing for him to go to the police. If his ‘property’ is stolen, smuggled or illegal, then I could make myself an accessory by helping him recover it without bringing the cops in. But it wouldn’t work, and he wouldn’t go to the police. So I might as well skip the argument. Instead I quoted him my price, which was reasonable if not quite bargain-basement. He didn’t blink, just started writing a check out.
I nodded. “Okay, you won’t tell me what was stolen, and we won’t bring the police into this, I need to at least know where and when it was stolen.” I held him with my eyes, at he looked back at me with a pale grey gaze. He had not blinked since he had walked into my office, and his weathered grey eyes kept shifting around my office, flickering like a snake’s tongue. His eyes looked so old, so wise, but the rest of him was very much alive, young, vibrant. But it was not a healthy energy that possessed him; he looked almost feverish with it. Though his voice was cultured and pleasant, his hands kept fidgeting with his dark grey suit and black silk tie. One of his polished black wingtips waggled in the air, as if trying to keep time to phantom music. His cheeks were pallid, though his rich brown hair and prominent veins showed that he would look best with a darker complexion.
Sorry, it’s in my nature to look at people’s clothes and hair and makeup. It’s a long-standing habit, ingrained from my time as a model and reinforced from my time as a sleuth. Nothing major, a couple of magazine covers and some fashion spreads, not like runway modeling or anything. But when modeling stopped paying the bills, a friend of mine offered to teach me investigating, and helped me get my papers and everything. He’s dead now, he got shot in the back, but that’s how I went from high school homecoming queen to European fashion shoots to a rented office with my name on the door.
He nodded to me, and reached into his pocket and pulled out a folded wad of papers that had been ruining the line of his tailoring. He started unfolding them with sharp delicate motions; his hands moving like pigeons going after breadcrumbs. “It was stolen from off the docks at the ship channel, right next to the ship. Nobody saw anything at the time, I already asked. Here’s the bill of lading,” he said, pushing the mess of papers across my desk. “The box number and everything is right there, you can keep those.” I looked over the papers for the delivery of a sealed crate, eight feet by three feet by three feet and change. There were photographs of the box, crinkled and creased from my client’s pocket.
And every fiber of my model-sense was tingling, telling me that this guy rang false; he was as off as a ten-cent counterfeit. I spent a minute considering, and then I leaned forward and put my elbows on the desk. His eyes flickered to me and almost held, then slid away and across my desk. I let my breath out slowly, then I said, “Have you considered getting out of this? Whatever you’re doing, it’s not healthy and it’s obviously getting to you. There is still a way out, you know. You can still separate yourself from whoever is hurting you or whatever is controlling you.”
His breath caught, and his eyes squeezed shut for the first time since he’d walked into my office. He shook all over once, like a fit of palsy, and then opened his eyes. They swam blue for a moment, like summer skies, and then that ancient grey was back, older than man and older than life, and his mouth quirked into a rough grimace, like he’d never seen a smile before but had one described to him once. He shook his head and his eyes slid away. “No, I can’t get out. I’ve tried, but it wasn’t possible. Will you take the job?” And I let the issue drop. He was not a drug smuggler or a fence for hot cars, he was into something very deep and very dangerous, and he was in way over his head. There was nothing I could do for him; he wasn’t going to help himself.
“Yes, I’ll take the job, mister-“ I looked down at the papers on my desk, found the name on them. “Mister Runfeldt.” I looked at his pale, gaunt features twist into a more sincere smile as he stood and reached across to shake my hand. “And I’ll need a number to contact you at, if this is as urgent as you say it is.” His grip was clammy, but from the way he’d been fidgeting I would’ve been extremely surprised if his palms hadn’t been damp with sweat. He pulled a business card from another pocket and pressed it into my hand.
“Thanks so much for helping me, Miss Monroe. I have the utmost confidence in you. I can’t tell you how important this is to me.” His forehead was shiny with perspiration, I realized, and when he moved his arms I could see that his shirt was stained with sweat under the armpits.
“You don’t have to tell me,” I replied. “This has obviously been tearing you apart, you look like you’ve been hit by a truck. Go home, get some sleep, wait for me to call you.” I looked down at the photographs again, at the box that sat eight feet long, three feet wide and three feet tall. In the picture the box sat on a concrete dock, with choppy black water and huge ships in the background. The writing on the sides of the ships was Cyrillic script, maybe Russian or Ukrainian, maybe something else from that region.
“Sleep?” he chuckled wryly, running a hand through his choppy black hair. “I slept all day, Miss Monroe. If I’d been there on time, I might not have missed the drop-off, and none of this would have happened.” His smile showed a row of large white teeth, a smile made for toothpaste commercials. He was lying about having the utmost confidence in me. He was desperate, and he needed help immediately, so he came to me. He’d slept all day and he couldn’t go to the police, so he needed the only private investigator that was answering the phone at eight o’clock p.m. That was me. You meet the real crazies when you work nights.
“I don’t think you should blame yourself, Mr. Runfeldt. And call me Deuce.”

I went to the ship channel immediately, after calling my answering service to let them know that I was out of the office. Runfeldt hadn’t been kidding, nobody there had seen anything. Of course, the theft had been six hours ago, and there’d been a shift change since then. So I got ahold of some phone numbers and made some phone calls. I lucked out on my first call, the guy supervising the loading of that pier was a relic of the MacCarthy era, and he’d been part of the Cold War before there was a Cold War. Yeah, he remembered the ship with the Cyrillic script, and the “damn Russkis” that had come with it. That was a gold mine to me.
To hell with the impartial witnesses, give me an antagonistic witness any day. All else being equal, people give better after-action reports of things they hate, fear, or regret than the pleasant things. Ask a man to tell you about his high-school sweetheart and the kid that used to beat him up for his lunch money in the third grade, and see which one of those gets you a better description. I never want to marry a man that can describe me to the police.
Yes, he remembered that ship, and he could tell me about it. A whole bunch of sailors had been on board, but no passengers at all, this was strictly a cargo run. Almost all of the cargo had been loaded onto trucks to go to the railyard for long-distance hauling, but there had inevitably been a few exceptions to the rule. And the smallest of those boxes was just a crate, eight feet by three feet by three feet, or so. Too small to go on a train, too small to go on a truck, and too big for someone to come by and load onto a pickup truck and drive away with. Yes, he remembered that box. But he did not see what happened to it.
Several more calls, and finally I gave up on it. There had been just too much going on, too much to do and too much to see for anyone to notice that one distinctive crate, sitting amongst the larger loads like the runt of the Transatlantic litter. So I gave up on the dockworkers and went for the gatekeeper. I ducked under the articulated arm and tapped on the window of the little cubicle, getting the gate guard’s attention. He opened up his sliding window, and the air conditioning puffed out onto my face while the July heat crept in after him. “Can I help you?” he asked, polite in his air-conditioned safety. He was either an actual gentleman or gay; he stared at my face. Two fans were clipped to his half-desk, with little ribbons tied to the spokes of the wire safety guards; the ribbons danced like happy drunken children in the breeze from the fans.
“Is there a chance that you keep track of what vehicles go in and out?” I asked him. The question was a feint, I could see the clipboard from where I stood, and I could make out a couple of license plate numbers, as well as a list of makes and models.
“As a matter o’ fact, I do,” he said with his polite smile intact. I guess July hadn’t penetrated into his cubicle yet, even this late after sundown it was too bloody hot. He reached over and patted the clipboard proprietarily, like it was a dog or a small child. “Every car and truck in and out, and its license plates.”
“So, have you been here since four this afternoon?” I asked, pulling out the photographs. The question was another feint, I could see six coffee cups in his little trash can, and smell the coffee on his breath. This man was at the end of his shift, not the beginning.
The guard grimaced, and surreptitiously turned up the power on his desk fans. The happy drunken children got a shot of ephedrine, a sure sign that July was creeping in to him. Good, now he wanted me gone. I smiled winningly, letting my eyes twinkle and everything. “Yeah,” he said, “I work three to eleven, and tomorrow I have to work a double. My replacement has to go to a funeral, so I have to work till dawn.”
“So,” I said, throwing tact by the wayside, “seen any unusual trucks today? Somebody that doesn’t belong, or somebody that stands out?” I leaned forward onto the little counter outside of his window, bringing my face close to his. I held his eyes steady with my own, letting him stare deeply into that icy grey. He broke away first, and reached for his clipboard. Some women seduce men by leaning forward and breathing deeply, but that’s how I intimidate them. Sure, I could doll up my hair and put on lipstick and play the dumb blonde, but then again I can wear a ponytail and a blazer and stare at them until they break. Besides, it’s hard to be a dumb blonde with ginger-colored hair.
He looked down the list of cars, and said, “Well, there were two pickup trucks I’ve never seen before, both dark blue, and a white Mazda Miata.” He looked up at me. “We don’t get many sports cars around here, ma’am.”
I sighed. “Let me guess, the Miata’s license plate number was nine-eight-six-vee-ay-enn, right?”

I had to borrow a truck from a friend of mine in the lawn-care business, but I managed to get the box back to my office. Jacob Manuel, my buddy with the truck, chattered the whole time about these three guys he worked with that day, apparently all three were named Paco, but at least he didn’t ever ask what was in the crate or why we needed it moved. Let Jake talk without interruption and he’ll do anything for you; my kind of friend. We got the box out of the truck bed and manhandled it over to the door of my building, and I managed to get the door unlocked without dropping my end. Would’ve been a damn shame to drop my end. But it was a good thing that my office is on the ground floor, Jake was wheezing so hard that he could barely keep up the stream of conversation. Once the box was safe in my waiting room, I thanked Jake and gave him a little kiss on the cheek to shut him up and get him out. Then I sat down and gave Runfeldt a call, told him to come retrieve his “property”.
Then I got into my inner office, where I’d met Runfeldt the first time, and opened the locked dresser drawer on the bottom. I pulled out the small metal chest and unlocked it with a different key, and opened it up. A double handful of small knickknacks filled the chest, items of childhood. My momentoes, my scrapbook. And a reminder of my Catholic upbringing, a small crucifix made for tiny hands. A gift from my priest when I was ten years old, before… well, before a lot of things. I took that cross, locked the rest of the items away, and walked out into the waiting room, closing my door behind me. There was a coatrack on the inside of the door of the waiting room, and it was on that coatrack that I hung the cross.
I stared at the box, which an hour before I’d been nailing closed again. I don’t know why VanTaine had stolen it in the first place, or why he’d opened it, but now it was sealed up again and waiting for the pale, gaunt and haunted Mr. Runfeldt to return to collect his property. I hoped he thought to bring a truck of his own, because getting that thing out of my waiting room again was not my responsibility. I sat in one of the chairs, and realized for the first time why customers never wanted to wait for me; the damn things were really uncomfortable. So I got up and sat down on the box instead. Sure, it was uncomfortable being so close to that… the contents of the crate, but it would be worth it to see Runfeldt’s face when he came in. I could hear a window opening in my office, behind the frosted-glass door; that would be VanTaine letting himself in. I heard a clump of heavy feet on my windowledge, and I amended that earlier thought. That would be VanTaine and Dietrich letting themselves in. Even when he was young and strong, Dietrich was not stealthy or graceful.
I leaned down towards the box and whispered. “We could have just put a stake in you, you know. We could have let you suffer through that, and let your man ‘Runfeldt’ suffer as well. But we’d rather just end this. Tobias, you sought refuge in the wrong damn city.” I straightened up, and I could almost feel Tobias struggling inside. But of course it was my imagination, the creature inside could not be moving at all, could not have heard me.
The creaking from my office would be Dietrich sitting on my desk; ordinary furniture did not easily bear his weight. VanTaine could be dancing on the filing cabinets; he never made a sound unless he wanted to. I checked my watch, then turned patiently towards the door to wait for my client. I hoped Runfeldt had taken my advice and gotten himself some sleep, because I had very bad news for him. I kept hearing his voice in my head, talking about the repercussions if he did not receive his property back to him. He had no idea about repercussions.
A shadow came up under the door, somebody standing outside the door in the well-lit hallway, and there was a knock. “Come in, Runfeldt,” I called out, and I didn’t bother candy-coating it. I was ticked off and I didn’t care if he knew about it. The sallow man opened the door, and he gaped at the sight of me lounging on the crate, half-reclined; it was the look one gave to blasphemy, desecration. I had taken off my blazer, leaving only the starched white blouse and the acid-washed jeans over the white leather ankle-boots. With my pale complexion and orange-brown hair, it must have made a striking image; Runfeldt certainly looked like he’d been struck. The door hushed closed behind him, and I grinned at him. “I found your box, Runfeldt,” I purred. I let my eyes fade from ice grey to stone grey, the color of ancient weathered walls. And I could see in his eyes that he knew what that color meant.
He backed up, reaching for the door. For the first time he held my eyes, and the look in them was panicked, desperate. He touched the doorknob, and flinched back with a wild shriek, clutching at his burned hand. Smoke curled in a lazy spiral from the festering flesh of his palm, even now bubbling red and black. “That must have hurt like hell,” I said, sliding to my feet. “But then, they really don’t make crosses like that anymore, do they?” I could hear the door opening behind me, and I could feel VanTaine and Dietrich moving up behind me like a pair of deadly threats whispered in darkness. “Imagine what Tobias must be going through, with communion wafers sealing his coffin. Of course, it’s only because he’s sealed in there that this cross will ward you. His essence is reaching out for you, and that makes you susceptible.”
Runfeldt was bathed in sweat, fear falling off of him like smoke from dry ice. The terror he felt added to the blood loss he’d sustained, it looked like he would dehydrate himself to death right there. Every human sweats more after they’ve been bled, take my word for it. He got control of his throat again, and started to speak. “What is it.. what do you want? I’ll do anything!”
“I know you will, Runfeldt. That’s what makes you so good at what you do, such a good judas. You’ll do anything. Anything you’re told to do, anything you have to do. Runfeldt, did you know that Tobias is exiled from this Kingdom of the Night? Are you, perhaps, aware that your master was banished from the North American continent for his crimes? Ah, but I can see the fear in you, you do know this.” I walked slowly towards the shaking man, holding my hand towards his face as if I could touch his fear, mold it how I liked. His eyes and mine were mirrors, dull grey older than man, older than life.
I looked over my shoulder, at Dietrich and VanTaine. The two men were nearly opposites, physically; the only commonality being their slate-grey eyes, eyes like Runfeldt’s, eyes like mine. Dietrich was huge and shaggy; any room he walked into shrank until he filled it with his looming, unkempt presence. VanTaine was small and whip-thin, groomed to within an inch of his life and dressed like a million bucks. For what he pays for those suits, he should look like a million bucks. Dietrich’s massive hands, broad and round-knuckled, stretched slightly, and sinewy muscles danced and seethed under his swarthy skin all the way to his elbows. VanTaine just smiled, and managed to make the sight of his pointy teeth just as effective a threat as all of Dietrich’s swelling and flexing.
“You see, Runfeldt, we could have just put a stake into Tobias, but then his essence would have transferred to you, and he would find another judas to bond to, and the cycle begins anew. We had to have you both.” Behind me came the sound of splintering wood as Dietrich pulled the crate asunder, revealing the coffin inside. Runfeldt took another step back, and jumped with a yelp as his hand brushed the cross-warded door.
The sweating human looked me in the eyes, and I could see him falling down a well, I could look into his eyes and see the horrible resignation swallow his terror. “Why are you telling me all of this?”
“Two reasons,” I said, smiling. “First of all, we have to make sure that Tobias doesn’t have a familiar. If there’s a bat around here somewhere with his essence in it, we have to get it as well just to make sure. And second, Dietrich needs a judas. He can’t make one himself, but he can take one from a dead master. And as I’ve said, you’ll do anything.”
Runfeldt looked over at the huge dark shape of Dietrich, and I don’t know what passed between their eyes. But it seemed to give the judas some hope, and he turned back to me. “There was no familiar, Tobias did not have that power.” I assumed that meant that he was cool with the rest of the plan, so I nodded to the boys. VanTaine selected a long slender piece of wood from the wreckage of the crate, and examined the point on it while Dietrich moved over to Runfeldt. I walked over to the coffin and took hold of the lid. The communion wafer lay right where I’d left it, guarding the rosewood box with the power and the fire of the Catholic Church. I can touch it because I’m what vampires call a crossbearer, I can withstand the power of holy items; a really useful trick but rare as hell.
I heaved the lid to the side, toppling the wafer away, and VanTaine moved like a streak of lightning. I could see Tobias already lurching upright, standing up even as I opened the lid, and a moment later ribs crackled and flesh tore, and I could see the tip of VanTaine’s stake tenting the fabric of Tobias’s heavy black jacket. Dark red stains, heart’s blood, soaked into the back of the jacket, a weak dribble. A human staked in the heart would have great spurting jets of crimson, but this was different. VanTaine stepped back, and Tobias crumpled back into the coffin, the wooden shaft impaling the dead center of his chest. Contrary to popular belief, the heart is in the middle, though the heartbeat sounds from the left. Tobias’s chest looked funny, his breastbone was cracked in half and his lungs were collapsing.
I looked back to my left, at Dietrich and Runfeldt, and saw that the huge vampire already had his fangs into the sallow judas, sipping at the wound slowly. He released the infected human, and stepped back. I nodded, and stood more firmly upright from the crouch I’d been in. I picked up the communion wafer and tossed it into the coffin, then used my toe to nudge Tobias around until he lay on his side with the stake wedged into the box with him. I closed the lid and looked around at the splintered wood. “You know, Dietrich, I was expecting you to pull out the nails to open the box, not just rip it apart. You and Runfeldt here figure out a way to get this box out of here without someone calling the cops.”
“Jeremy,” the pale-faced judas said. “My name isn’t Runfeldt, it’s Thomas Jeremy.”
“Whatever. VanTaine, come into my office and explain to me exactly why and how you stole a coffin off the docks during broad daylight.”
The wiry little man with the white-blonde hair was grinning as he moved past me into the office. “It wasn’t that hard, really, I just got …”
Back in the waiting room, I could hear Runfeldt… I mean Thomas Jeremy saying, “Isn’t she a little pushy for a judas?”
Dietrich laughed. “Deuce? A judas!? Thomas, she’s the matriarch of the city! You came to the head vampire to help track down your outlaw master!”