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  Copyright 2010 by Grand Mal Press. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written consent except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address grandmalpress.com

  Published by: Grand Mal Press Forestdale, MA www.grandmalpress.com

  Copyright 2010, Grand Mal Press

  ISBN 13 digit: 9780982945957

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Grand Mal Press/ Faith Kauwe

  p. cm

  Cover art by Stephen Bryant

  DARKER THAN NOIR

  Edited by Faith Kauwe

  Table of Contents:

  THE KNACK FOR LIVING  by Patrick Flanagan

  BACK-UP MAN by Justin Gustainis

  BLOOD RIGHT by Dagny Macallan

  DEVIL IN 206 by Randy Chandler

  MASKS by J. T. Seate

  WED MAN WALIKING by Er ik T. Johnson

  THE KITSUNE by A.K. Amesworth

  WINE AND SPIRITS by Gregory L. Norris

  THE CUNT NEXT DOOR by Zoot Campbell

  FRANK ‘N’ JOHN by Manny Frishberg

  THE BOX OF THE SEVEN SONS by Kent Alyn

  MY SUBJECT by Justin Pollock

  THE FURRY CON MYSTERY by Alan Loewen

  GHOST IN A BOTTLE by Frank C. Gunderloy, Jr.

  STRESS CONTROL by Gustavo Bondoni

  MYBURGH by Paul L. Bates

  SHARDS OF THE BROKEN by R. Thomas Riley and Roy C. Booth

  THE THIEF OF SOULS by Vincent L. Scarsella

  THE KNACK OF LIVING

  By Patrick Flanagan

  Thump-thump. Can you hear that? That’s the beating of your heart. No, of course you don’t hear it—all it does is give us life, after all. We only ever notice it when it’s beating so fast we can scarcely breathe. Or when it beats its last. Did Renzer say that? He might have. He was a wordy guy. I can’t taste the Scotch I’m drinking. Pretending to drink. Pretending to forget. Only I can’t forget…

  ***

  Thump-thump. She tapped her foot nervously against the leg of the chair, waiting for me to pronounce sentence. Being at the bottom of one’s profession affords you a certain freedom; when you don’t have a reputation worth protecting and simply don’t give a damn, then you can be selective in your choice of clientele in a way that the merely incompetent can’t. If I didn’t take her case, she had nowhere else to go, and we both knew it. I turned the necklace over in my hands, examining it studiously.

  “Do you know what it is?” she asked. Her name was Grove. Susan Grove. No femme fatale, sorry; she had nice eyes, limned with sleeplessness and tears, but otherwise she was pleasantly forgettable. The necklace she’d handed to me, retrieved from her purse with trembling hands, was a slender chain that held an amulet of familiar design. A crooked heptagram, flared with jagged horns, and dominated by a single open eye in its center. It had the double pupil of a goat’s eye. “Hmm,” I said.

  “Yes?” Susan said. “Yes? You know what it is?”

  I handed it back to her. “It’s a badge,” I said. “Colgate Cavity Patrol. Do you brush after every meal?”

  She took it from my hands, unsure to be angry or disappointed. “I…no, Mr. Webb, this is an occult symbol. I had been told you had some expertise in these matters. It’s the sign of the Order—”

  “The Order of the Blood-red Star,” I cut her off. “A better term would be ‘cult,’ and a better term than that would be ‘scam.’ These guys were nothing more than extortionists and frauds. Peddled psychedelics and hookers to the rich and gullible, then took naughty pictures of them participating in their rituals—which is what they called their orgies—so they could blackmail them. The occult thing was just a cover, really. I doubt the guys running it even bought into it.” I looked into those eyes, wondering how much of it she believed. My lips felt dry. “They’re long gone, anyway. The ones that survived might be coming up for parole sometime in the 2020s, if they hang in long enough.”

  She leaned closer, absorbing every word. “Survived what?”

  I swiveled my chair around, absently scratching my chest through my shirt. “There was a fire,” I said. “This was, I don’t know, forty, fifty years back. One of their rituals got out of hand and they were probably too drugged up to know what was happening. They burned their little clubhouse down, and the ones who hadn’t been there that night got picked up the next day by the police. Conspiracy, extortion, criminally negligent homicide, all the makings of a Broadway smash, or at least Off-Broadway.”

  “I had never heard of them,” Susan said.

  “The surviving cultists came clean, pled guilty, cut a deal, and quietly went away,” I said. “A cynic might suspect a lot of pressure had been brought to bear on them. Lots of powerful, wealthy people with gullible relatives, who wanted this dealt with quietly. Maybe they were paid to keep their mouths shut and go to jail quietly. I can’t say I followed it all that closely.”

  “I see,” Susan said. She chewed her bottom lip.

  “What had you been told about the Order?”

  Her eyes went to the desk. “I hadn’t been told anything,” she said. “You’re the first detective I’ve been to who seemed to know about it.”

  “The other ones are too busy solving present-day cases,” I said. “But you said, ‘I had never heard of them,’ as opposed to ‘I have never heard of them.’ And you had a certain look on your face.”

  She tried to dismiss my comments with a smile. Pretty, but fake. “What kind of look was that, Mr. Webb?”

  I leaned back in my chair and stared at her. “The look I get from a client when I tell him his wife is not cheating on him,” I said. “Why don’t you tell me where you found this, and why you brought it to me.”

  Susan mumbled something. I asked her to repeat herself.

  “‘Stop reading,’” she said. “That’s what they keep saying to me. ‘Stop reading.’” And she began her story, fumbling with it as if it were a jar she couldn’t open, picking it up and trying again and again. I let the words tumble out of her mouth, waiting for it to make sense in my mind. Outside my office window, it began to drizzle.

  ***

  Thump-thump. “I was so nervous, that first time he spoke to me. My heart was racing. He’s so—he was—so handsome. It’s, well I guess it’s a funny story; we were both stood up. Sarah, a girl I work with, had set me up on a blind date, and there I was, waiting, for a half-hour, forty-five minutes, an hour. It was this little place on Sylvan, Greek place. Anyway the guy never showed up, never called me to say sorry. Sarah was so embarrassed…

  “I was at a booth table, and he was at the bar, and he, I noticed he kept looking over at me. Not too obvious, but just enough for me to catch him doing it. It made me blush. Maybe it was the wine. I’d had a few glasses while I was waiting. I couldn’t believe it when he came over to talk to me.

  “His name was Reggie. Reggie Darman. He told me his date had never showed, and could he buy me a drink…such a funny coincidence. He put his hand over mine as we both laughed about it, and I blushed again.

  “It was one of those nights. When everything he said, everything he did, was just…it was perfect. I couldn’t believe it.

  “We went out every night that week. By the end of the month he’d moved in. It was perfect, really perfect. And then, then the calls started.”

  “Tell me about the calls.”

  “…he was secretive. I never liked that part of him, I accepted it, but…he would get calls, business calls and his face would change, and he’
d go into another room and whisper. He seemed worried, those last few weeks. I don’t know if it was money or what. I thought maybe he was in some kind of trouble, something…it sounds stupid, but something illegal.”

  “Was he a criminal? Not judging, just asking.”

  “H-he was a book dealer. Rare books. H-he was very knowledgeable and good at his job and I, I only got suspicious because of the calls, he would go off and he wouldn’t tell me, he wouldn’t tell me anything, and when he came back he didn’t want to talk about it, and I loved him, a lot, and I didn’t want to pry, didn’t want to be the girlfriend w-who, who…”

  “…it’s okay. Take your time. Don’t be embarrassed, please.”

  “No, I never cry in public like this, I’m sorry. Talking about it…it’s still hard.”

  “I can imagine.” Not really.

  “…sorry, sorry…yes…well, the last call I remember, this was right before…I’m sorry…yes, thank you…this was right before the, the accident. He looked angry. Reggie was the sweetest man I’ve ever known, but that day, he looked furious. Bright red. Something was really bothering him, and he wouldn’t let me in. I tried to talk to him, but he just told me he’d take care of it, he’d take care of it.

  “They called me the next day, at home. A policeman. There’d been an accident. Head-on collision.”

  “I’m truly sorry, Miss Grove.”

  “S-susan. Please call me Susan.”

  “Truman,” I said. “Yes, really,” I added, noticing her expression. “Hey, at least it’s not Eisenhower.” She smiled politely at that oldie-but-goody from the Webb Archives. After a few minutes, she’d regained some of her composure and continued:

  “I didn’t even get to say goodbye. He was so badly burned, his face was gone. I looked at the body, and I felt sick, but it was…it was abstract, you know? This wasn’t Reggie. Reggie was still the handsome guy who was overdue getting home for a few days, maybe gone on business. He wasn’t dead.

  “When I dream about him…when he’s there, he’s not burned up. He’s the Reggie I knew.

  “I knew that the body was him, I knew he was gone, but without seeing him in the coffin, without seeing that face…that’s the hardest part, I think…”

  “I’m sure.” Not really, but she went with it. I checked my watch out of the corner of my eye.

  “It was about a week, I think…a week after the accident, that I got a call. ID blocked. No voice, no message, just a hang-up. But it kept happening. Five, six times a day. I figured it was a telemarketer.”

  “You didn’t recognize the number from Reggie’s calls?”

  “N-no.”

  “So whoever it was, said nothing.”

  “Yes.”

  “That didn’t last.”

  “No.”

  “Describe the voice.”

  “Whispery. Kind of hoarse.”

  “And what did it say?”

  “‘Stop reading,’” she said, and there were tears again. She was shivering. “They told me to stop reading. If I kept reading, if I read too far, I would die.”

  “Stop reading what?”

  She shook her head. “I don’t know,” she mumbled, looking down at her lap. “I don’t know.”

  ***

  Thump-thump. Pounding the pavement makes up most of the job. Hell, the whole profession’s nickname refers to comfortable footwear. I spent the next few days chasing down strangers and stealing five minutes from their lives:

  Police report confirmed Grove’s story. Killed instantly in a head-on, both Reggie Darman and the other driver. Darman’s body was charred, face and fingertips destroyed, but the body was “identified” as being a Caucasian male of his approximate age, height and weight. Cost me a few beers with my friend in the PD’s records division.

  Closest thing to a local authority, an ancient city college professor of anthropology with a working knowledge of occult studies, shed some more light on the Order of the Blood-red Star. Their “writings” had been a laughable mishmash of Egyptian, Sumerian, and Persian mythology and symbolism. Absolute gibberish. The professor, who had followed the case closely at the time, was of the opinion that the group wasn’t so much an obvious fraud as a fraud that aspired to be real, and that was what had led them to meddle with matters beyond their understanding. I laughed and asked him if he believed in any of this nonsense. He smiled, slowly finished his drink, and wished me a good day. Gave me a strange look as he showed me to the door.

  A friend at the NJDOC answered some questions about the old Order, emphasis on “old.” Two of them still wheezing—one Jason Frawley, at 77 the baby of the lot, still a guest of the state up in Rahway; and one Orson McMoneagle, 89 years young, taking up space at a Federal detention center for inmates needing hospital care. What a name on that guy.

  A few more calls. It’s not strictly ethical to investigate your own client, so I do it anyway. Susan Grove didn’t have any debts to speak of, which in 2011 meant she had a mortgage, bad health insurance, and was paying way too much for cable—nothing outrageous. No criminal record. The standard handful of traffic tickets that usually crops up to show someone isn’t perfect, but is decent enough, and harmless. And worthless. Thump-thump. Thump-thump. I sat in the empty office, drumming my fingers against the desk, as twilight crept into the room.

  Susan was lying about the whole thing. Unlikely. (Otherwise, why would I be wasting your time telling you this, right?)

  Susan was holding something back. I had to consider it. Fear made people act against their own self-interests sometimes, if the alternative seemed worse to them.

  Susan was telling the truth. So far as she knew it. But maybe not all of it.

  Back to the Order. That was the weak link. This new group (the idea that 77-year-old Jason Frawley had anything to do with this was right out) wasn’t after Susan Grove’s money, because she didn’t have any. So either they thought she did, or…

  Or they thought she had something just as valuable. More valuable.

  The sun sank beneath the windowsill. I sat in the dark, staring at the wall, twirling the options over and over in my mind.

  ***

  Thump-thump. “I don’t see the point of this,” Susan said, dropping the books heavily on the table as she took them from the shelf in her living room. “Reggie didn’t have many books, to be honest. He was an intermediary. Mostly he just talked to people and found out what they had and what they needed.”

  “I’m sure it’s a total waste of time,” I said, looking at the shelf. I ran my finger over a length of it, then grimaced at the dust on my fingertip. Didn’t figure her for a slob. “But the caller’s threat, such as it is, is for you to stop reading.”

  “Yes, but—”

  “Detective,” I said, pointing at myself. “Trying to detect. Where was his office?”

  “I gave him the spare bedroom to use for business.” She led me past the kitchen (dishes in the sink, tsk) and the utility room, to a small room in the back of the house. The single-sized bed had been pushed against the wall some months ago (the carpet had been permanently indented in four spots in the middle of the room) and a desk had been stuck against the wall. Reggie Darman had kept his office just as organized as Truman Webb did. Spiral-bound notebooks were stacked sloppily on the desk, with loose pieces of paper poking out. Over the desk was another shelf of books.

  “Those are first editions,” Susan said. They looked like mystery novels to me—Leonard, Francis, MacDonald. I noticed something and reached out towards a book in the middle.

  “What is it?” Susan said.

  “This book has been read recently,” I said, lifting it straight up off the shelf.

  “No, I haven’t been…I don’t come in here that often,” she said, looking away. “I…it’s uncomfortable, still.”

  “Yes,” I said, “this place could use a good dusting. Except right here.” I pointed at the empty space where the book had been. “See? There’s a dust-free strip on the shelf, right in front of thi
s book. It’s been slid off the shelf recently. Maybe more than once.” I looked for a reaction. Evasive, nervous, but totally confused.

  “I haven’t,” she said. “Really.”

  I held the book up. “After Dark, My Sweet. By Jim Thompson. No? No bells rung?” She shook her head. More convincing. Maybe I was wrong. I carefully slid the book back onto the shelf…and stopped halfway. Pulled it back off.

  “What?” Susan asked.

  “The dust jacket is a little too big,” I said. I slid it off the book. There was no mystery novel beneath. It looked like an old-style hardcover business ledger. No title along the spine. I flipped it open.

  “‘A Forlorn Apology,’” I read, “‘by Abner…by Abner Renzer.” Huh. “Huh,” I said aloud. Might as well keep her up-to-date. “Renzer. Well, this is definitely a clue.” She sat on the edge of the bed and looked up at me. “The Order of the Blood-red Star was run by a Malcolm Renzer. Yeah, this…this makes the situation considerably…more serious.”

  Susan looked at me. How much to tell her? “My initial theory had been that Reggie had been up to something, had stolen something of considerable worth from a client, and hidden it with you. And the people he’d ripped off were trying to scare you into giving it back. Hey, sorry. People lie to me every day.

  “But now I’m thinking there’s no money at the bottom of that particular well. Whoever’s calling you doesn’t want something you’re hiding, they want something else from you. Not money.”

  “I thought you said the Order was a scam,” Susan said, accusingly. “Blackmailers.”

  “Yeah, they were,” I said, stretching it a bit. “Maybe…maybe this new Order, if it even rises to that level of existence…maybe they take this stuff a little more seriously. All the founders died in that fire.” That was more for my own peace of mind than hers. “Only a few made it to jail, and they were the hangers-on, the suck-ups and parasites. But urban legends are pretty immortal, at least for a while.” I flipped the book open. “Someone’s convinced this book is the real deal, and they don’t want anyone else reading it.”