Throw me a bone flint an.., p.1
Throw Me a Bone (Flint & Co Paranormal Investigations Book 2), page 1
Throw Me a Bone
Flint & Co Paranormal Investigations, Book 2
By Rachel Ford
Chapter One
“Crypt coin,” he declared, nodding his skull. “I’m telling you. Skull Tokens. That’s the way to go.”
He was Jack Flint, my partner at Flint & Co Paranormal Investigations. Flinty Jack to his friends, of whom I was one.
Maybe the only one.
“I’m not investing my life savings in a bunch of imaginary coins.”
“Right, because the stock market is so much more tangible.”
He had a point. But I still wasn’t sold on crypt coin. And no, crypt isn’t a typo. Crypt coin had originated as an undead alternative to crypto currency, and currency in general in a world that proved hostile to their existence. It was one-part bad pun, and one-part survival mechanism.
In the last year, though, influential tech bros had taken note, and crypt coin exploded onto the wider market. Prices on Skull Token, Bone Bits, Eternal, and a dozen others skyrocketed.
The currency that had been invented so the undead classes could barter in a world that only half-recognized their existence was suddenly the investment scheme du jour. And I was inherently mistrusting of anything flavor of the day.
Especially if it involved my life savings.
“I think I’ll stick with my current 401k options,” I decided. I was trying to figure out what to do with the rather sad retirement account I’d accumulated during my time with the New Boston Police Department.
Now that I’d struck out on my own, as the Co in Flint & Co, I had to decide whether to keep my money where it was, in slow growing, safe stocks, or whether to transfer or invest it elsewhere.
Flinty Jack glanced over my shoulder, scanning the figures from hollow eye sockets. “Good idea. If it keeps growing like that, maybe you’ll be able to afford coffee in your old age.”
Natalie snorted with laughter, but urged, “Now, don’t go teasing Jill. You know how you two get when you fight.”
Natalie Lyons was my fiancée, and far more successful than myself, being a celebrated civil rights lawyer with a career of landmark wins already under her belt. She was not, however, any wealthier. Because for all the fame her cases earned her, they didn’t bring in money.
“I wouldn’t laugh too hard,” I said. “Unless you start taking paying work, we’re both going to be living off that coffee fund.”
She pecked me on the cheek. “I told you: once I finish my current case load, I’ll look at what else the firm has. But I won’t take anything I don’t believe in.”
I myself was a big believer in eating and being able to afford the utilities, but I kept that to myself. As long as we managed to stay out of the red, I was okay. And so far, we had.
“Speaking of,” she went on, “I need to get into work. So: Flinty Jack, bills are over here. Do not forget the rent.” She tapped a pile of correspondence.
He nodded, his skull bobbing on the bare vertebrae of his neck. That was the thing about Flinty Jack: unlike Nat and myself, he wasn’t human. Not anymore. He was a sentient skeleton, who had risen with all the other undead that fateful night, August 13th, 2030, when the dead walked.
The same night I’d discovered powers I never knew I had.
He grunted. “I told you: I got it covered.”
“And Jill, inquiries are here.” She tapped another stack of envelopes. Always a sucker for lost and pitiful causes, she’d volunteered her ample legal and organizational skills to overseeing our first few weeks of transition. She’d verified that our legal filings were in good order, and made up daily checklists for us.
“Read through them all. And make sure you respond to everyone. Even the cases you can’t or won’t take. You never know who may be a client in the future.”
“Yeah, yeah,” I grumbled.
“Well, until you can afford a secretary, someone’s got to do it. And it’s your week.”
Flinty Jack and I had divided this much hated task into alternating, week-long shifts. He’d completed his, complaining daily – hourly. I figured I’d get through it with about as much grace.
She reached for her purse and grinned at me, her brown eyes twinkling, her curly auburn hair bobbing with her movement. “I’ll see you tonight. Love you.”
I kissed her, this time on the lips. “Go on. Go save the world.”
“That’s your job,” she declared. “Mine is changing it.” Then, with a goodbye to Flinty Jack, she was off, the overhead bell tinkling after her.
I sighed, staring at the door to our ramshackle office. I’d been a detective with the New Boston Police Department for years, so I was no stranger to paperwork. But we’d had a whole staff to process it then.
“Well,” Flinty Jack said, “I suppose we better get to it.”
“Yup,” I agreed.
He trained his eye sockets on the dreaded bills, and I stared at the letters. Neither of us moved.
“It’ll be better when we can afford a secretary,” I said.
“And an accountant,” he agreed.
We still didn’t move.
He sighed. “I suppose.”
“Right.”
The bell tinkled again, and we both glanced up – away from the yet untouched paperwork. I half expected to see Nat, racing in to grab something she’d forgotten.
The smell alone told me I’d got it wrong, but the shoulder span blocking out the daylight beyond would have been a close second. A huge, gray-skinned, red-haired figure reeking of whiskey stepped in, closing the door after him.
“Big Z,” I said in unison with Flinty Jack.
We had both worked with Big Z in the past, me during the Vandermeer case, and Flinty Jack before that. During his first life, he’d been Jimmy O’Brien, a petty criminal and gangster.
Jimmy O’Brien had met his end in a whiskey vat in the mid-1930’s, compliments of the rival O’Malley gang. He’d stayed there, dead and pickled, for a hundred years. Until the meteorite hit, and changed everything.
These days, he ran the Old-Timers, a strictly undead gang out of Big Z’s Undead Pub.
In my old life, when I’d been a detective with the department, the appearance of a gang leader might have given me pause. I wasn’t wearing the badge anymore, though.
And as gangs went, the Old-Timers were alright. They’d saved our lives in the last case. They broke the law, sure. But they didn’t hurt people. Not unless people hurt them first.
“Well, well,” Flinty Jack said, getting to his feet. “Look what crawled out of the woodwork.”
Big Z cast a critical glance around the place. “You still in business, Flinty?”
“What are you talking about? Business is booming,” he said. Which leaned closer to a lie than the truth. The Vandermeer case had given us a useful boost of publicity and brought plenty of queries.
But half of our prospective clients expected steep discounts since we were the firm with the Freak and the skeleton, and expected we should be grateful for the business.
And of the other half, far too many were plain old bonkers: people who wanted us to find proof the government had concealed UFOs, folks who wanted us to track down their imaginary friends or enemies to prove that they weren’t really hallucinating, people who wanted evidence that their exes were up to something nefarious – anything, as long as it ruined them.
Big Z sniffed, his eyes roving the ancient industrial carpet, the sagging ceiling and the dim fluorescent lighting. “Sure, looks like it. Love what you’ve done with the place. Especially the bullet holes.
“Really classes the joint up.”
The bullet holes had been a token of the last case, one of several brushes with death. They were on the list of things to fix.
Eventually.
When the money started coming in.
“Look, not that it’s not always a delight to see you – and smell you – but is there some reason you decided to grace us with the sunshine of your presence this morning?”
Now, at last, Big Z cracked a grin. He glanced my way. “Good to see you again, Miss Wallace. He’s still an uptight bastard though, isn’t he? Well, some things never change.”
Then he clapped Flinty Jack on the shoulder blades, rattling his bones with the force, and gestured to the back office. “Can we talk in there?”
Flinty grunted. “Suppose so.”
“You want coffee?” I asked. Despite their prior acquaintance and standing habit of banter, our reception of a possible client hadn’t been one for the record books. I figured a little hospitality might pair well with the biting sarcasm.
“Prefer whiskey,” he said. “As long as it isn’t that dreck the O’Malley’s sell.”
A century in the stuff would be enough for anyone, I suppose. “Sorry. No whiskey.”
“I’m good, then.”
Flinty Jack ushered us both into his office. He settled behind the desk, and I pulled a chair up beside it. Big Z plunked into the seat across from us.
He stretched his legs out in front of him and sighed, a long, dank whiskey-laden breath. “So it’s like this, Jacko. I’ve got a problem, and I’m thinking you may be able to help me sort it out.”
“Tell us about it.”
“You’ve heard about Pestilence?”
“As in, Biblical pestilences? Plagues of locusts, earthquakes and diseases?”
Flinty Jack seemed at a loss, so I interjected, “I’ve read about that. Some kind of serial killer, isn’t he?”
“That’s the piece of garbage I’m talking about.”
“A serial killer?” Flinty Jack asked, confusion in his tone. “That’s more the purview of the cops.”
Big Z snorted contemptuously. “Those useless breathers?” Then, with a glance in my direction, he added, “Present company excluded, of course. You think they give a shit about finding him?”
“He’s been targeting the undead,” I explained. “Exclusively. Zombies, bone men. But no Freaks and no Normies.”
Freaks were people like me, people in whom the arrival of the asteroid had triggered an awakening of magical powers. Normies were regular folks – human, in their first life, and with no supernatural or otherwise unusual abilities.
What everyone of us present had been once upon a time, and were no longer.
“I see,” Flinty Jack said. He didn’t need further explanation, and I didn’t offer it. The problem was obvious.
A killer who targeted the undead would be about as high a priority with the PD as jaywalkers and shoplifters.
No priority at all.
If they stumbled upon him at work, they’d slap him in cuffs. But short of catching him in the act, they wouldn’t do a damned thing.
“So what’s your connection to this?” Flinty Jack asked. “He get one of your men?”
“Not yet. But I’d prefer not waiting for it to come to that. Someone’s got to find this guy, and teach him a lesson. Now, my men – they want to find him and deliver some street justice.”
“But you don’t?” I asked.
Big Z spread his hands slowly, thoughtfully. “Look, if I knew who he was, would I stop my guys? Not for a second. But I don’t, and neither do they. And that’s dangerous. They’re jumpy. We’re all jumpy.
“Jumpy people do stupid things. They leap to conclusions and disappear the wrong people. Before you know it, you got a gang war on your hands. I don’t want that.”
“I suppose not,” Flinty Jack said, adding dryly, “Bad for business.”
“Damned right.”
“Before we go any further,” I said, “there’s one thing we need to clear up. If we took the case – and I’m just saying if – and if we found this guy, there couldn’t be any street justice.”
I might no longer be with the force, but there were lines even I wouldn’t cross. I might work with gangsters, but not to identify targets for them.
Big Z nodded. “As long as the breathers take him in, you get no argument from me there. I want him off the street in whatever form that takes.”
“Okay,” I said. “So tell us what you know.”
Pestilence had struck four times in the past two weeks, killing two zombies, a feral, and a bone man. He’d used the same method in each case: violent, brutal destruction.
The undead didn’t die the same way humans did, because they weren’t alive in the same way. Their lungs, if they had them, functioned, but were mostly superfluous: they didn’t need to breathe. Their hearts didn’t pump, because they didn’t need regular oxygenation of their blood.
They didn’t need blood at all – or hearts.
As much as Flinty Jack abhorred the word, magic kept them going. Magic, or some kind of power our earth sciences still hadn’t figured out. Power, or magic, that had come to earth with the meteorite.
Killing the undead required more ingenuity than killing a human. But it was every bit as doable the second time around as it had been the first.
Headshots could still do the trick most times, if you used the right ammo. Silver nitrate bullets in a zombie brain? Automatic kill shot.
Of course, the ethical considerations of ammo designed specifically to kill a single life form had attracted the attention of lots of law makers and lawyers – people like Natalie, who stepped in to make sure the so-called purifier rounds weren’t available to the general public.
Cases had been filed and laws passed prohibiting their sale and use outside of law enforcement activities and military engagements. Then countersuits had been filed – countersuits still making their way through the court system.
For now anyway, short of finding a bent cop or a black-market supplier, or figuring out a formula to make their own purifiers, a member of the public would have to rely on more traditional rounds.
Not instant kill, but effective enough in their own right. The energy transfer of a large round could liquify old flesh.
And physical destruction was old reliable in the world of killing.
Bone men, zombies, ferals, human – it didn’t matter who they were. It didn’t matter how you did it – a hail of bullets, a blast of flame, a semitruck. Whatever: cause enough physical destruction, and there’d be nothing left to attack you.
Or to fight back. Which is what seemed to be the case in the Pestilence killers.
The bone man’s skull had been caved in. His name had been Cutter, on account of his penchant for knives during his first life.
Cutter had been hung in the late 1800’s, on account of knifework that left three dead. Almost two hundred years later, he’d risen from his unmarked grave, nothing but bones.
Bones and malice.
“I won’t sugarcoat it. He was a real prick,” Big Z said. “If you’ll pardon the French. He almost knifed one of my boys. We had to warn him off a few times. And if you want it straight, I’m not sorry he’s dead.”
“Then why come to us?” Flinty Jack asked. “The principle of the thing?”
Big Z snorted. “Hell with principles. It’s who might be next I’m worried about.”
Pestilence had tracked Cutter to his residence – a burned out shell of a warehouse in which the bone man had been squatting – and beat his skull in with a pipe.
Brutal was an understatement.
He’d literally fragmented his skull, leaving no fragments bigger than an inch. Then he’d stomped and snapped every other bone in Cutter’s body, either as failsafe – just to make sure they couldn’t rise again – or for the fun of it.
“This Pestilence, he’s a psycho, Flint-o.”
The next two vics were the zombie pair: the Rosso brothers, Paulie and Joey. They’d been mobsters in their first life, who bought the farm in a shootout between the Irish gangs and Italian.
“They weren’t any kind of peaches either,” Big Z admitted. “They used to run with the Reapers.”
The now mostly defunct gang had once been the bane of New Boston, terrorizing the undead and Normies alike. They admitted the worst of the worst, human or undead.
“Used to?” Flinty Jack asked.
“Till they had a falling out with some of the leadership. A falling out that involved missing drug money. They were marked men after that, until the Reapers went belly up in the Vandermeer business. All of a sudden, those two came crawling back to town or out of the woodwork, or wherever they were.”
“How do you know it wasn’t someone from the old gang getting even?” I asked.
“Because whoever did Paulie and Joey did Cutter too. Same MO: bashed them to death. Pulverized their heads.”
“Could be a feral,” Flinty Jack suggested. Ferals were the undead who came back not quite right. No one knew why for sure.
Maybe advanced brain decay. Maybe something we didn’t understand about the magic. But unlike the rest of the undead, who could reason and function like anyone else, ferals couldn’t. They clustered together, avoiding society at large, attacking at the slightest hint of provocation – sometimes, simply at the sight of another living thing.
But Big Z shook his head. “No. Ferals kill, sure. But they don’t kill like this. This was vicious. This was about destruction, pure and simple. Pestilence – the sick bastard – doesn’t just want to kill. He wants to obliterate.”
“Tell us about the fourth vic,” I said. “She was a feral too, right?”
“Right. Some of my guys knew her in first life. Name of Rosie, back then. Quite the looker, by the sounds of it. Course, looks went a long time ago, along with the brains.”
“Tell us something that’s actually going to help us,” Flinty Jack clarified.
Big Z took no offense. He just grinned and resumed his narrative.
