Pay Dirt Read online

  I handed the phone back. “If you see Habi, give me a call. Let me know he’s okay.”

  “You don’t think he’s okay?”

  “I’m beginning to have my doubts.”

  “Yeah.” She nodded. “Me too.”

  “Thanks for the talk, kid.”

  I got to my feet and shuffled along the top of the freight car toward the ladder. But as I reached the end of the car, I paused, my hand reaching into my pocket to touch the fetish of magpie feathers I’d created. I glanced back.

  “Did Habi have any friends outside the ghoul community?” I asked. “Any humans he interacted with?”

  She chewed her lip for a second. “Actually, yeah. A little while ago I saw him talking to this human guy. Just the two of them, talking away. Looked pretty serious. I didn’t know he had any human friends.”

  My palms felt suddenly damp. “What did he look like, this human?”

  “I don’t know. All humans look the same.”

  I frowned at her, and she shot me a tooth-filled grin. “Okay, okay. I don’t know, he was kinda young, I guess. Not young young, like in his twenties. Small for a human. Not much meat on him. He looked like he’d be chewy. Big nose, though, and big ears.”

  “Red hair?”

  “Yeah, I think so. You know him?”

  I touched the wax ball at the center of the magpie-feather fetish. I didn’t say anything. I didn’t know what to say. I thought I knew him. But now I was starting to wonder if I ever did.

  The girl didn’t ask again. I guess she got the picture by the look on my face. She looked back out over the train graveyard, then made a noise.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “I think Habi’s back. Look.” She pointed toward the repair yard.

  I squinted into the dark. “Look at what?”

  “You humans really are blind, aren’t you. Look, over there. Habi’s box car. I just saw someone leave it. Looks like they’re heading for the old workshop.”

  She pointed at the building where I’d lost track of Habi. I could almost believe I could see a shadow crossing the repair yard.

  “You really think it’s him?” I asked.

  “No one else hangs around there.”

  I grunted. That wasn’t much of an answer. I turned away.

  “See you later, Sal. Hope you find some better friends.”

  I climbed down the ladder and hurried off in the direction of the repair yard.

  4

  Someone had tossed Habi’s box car.

  Both side doors were open when I got there. Habi’s few possessions were scattered around the interior of the box car: a pack of cards held together with a rubber band, a few clothes, and an open tin spilling out a small amount of cash onto the box car floor. The mattress had been thrown up against the wall, the side sliced open and the stuffing ripped out.

  I licked my lips and unhooked my truncheon from my belt. Call me crazy, but I didn’t think Habi had been the last person in here.

  I climbed into the box car and shone my light about, nudging Habi’s stuff around with the tip of my shoe. My eyes lit on the cash lying on the floor. This obviously wasn’t the work of some ghoul desperate enough to steal from his own kind.

  But whoever they were, they were obviously looking for something. Had they found it?

  I jumped back out of the box car and had a closer look at the ground outside. Gravel covered almost everything. I couldn’t spot any dirt soft enough to leave a footprint. There was nothing.

  Except…the sheet of roofing iron that’d fallen on my head was still lying on the ground. But it had been moved, flipped upside down. And on the pitted, rusted, newly exposed side was something odd I hadn’t noticed before.

  There was a streak of electric blue on the surface of the iron—like the scraping of paint that remains on your car after someone rear-ends you. Where the hell had that come from?

  I glanced around, looking to see if any of the debris or freight cars near me were the same color. Maybe the sheet had just struck something on the way down. But nothing was the right color.

  I bent down to look at the plate more closely, scratched at it to see if I could loosen some of the paint. As my finger touched the metal I hissed and recoiled. That streak was as cold as ice. And it sure as hell wasn’t paint, either.

  “The hell?” I muttered. This whole business was getting weirder by the second.

  The sheet of iron was too big to fit in my bag and too unwieldy to carry with me. I tucked it under Habi’s box car instead. It would be safe enough there in case I decided to have another look at it later. For now, I had more pressing matters to attend to.

  I climbed back into the box car and looked out the other door, toward the repair yard workshop. The girl, Sal, had said she saw someone heading that way a few minutes ago. Maybe they were still there. Maybe they could be convinced to answer a few questions.

  I found myself wishing I’d brought my gun.

  Keeping my light pointed at the ground, I headed for the workshop. My truncheon was slippery in my grip. I didn’t intend to get into a fight. But it paid to be careful.

  It was always possible more than one person was involved here. Or that whoever had tossed Habi’s box car was more monster than man. In that case, I wasn’t too proud to run like hell.

  The dark of the workshop doorway loomed before me. Swallowing, I switched off my light, adjusted my grip on my truncheon, and slipped inside.

  I edged down the hallway, doing my best to keep my footsteps quiet. The vials in my pockets threatened to rattle if I moved too quickly. I glanced in doorways as I passed, straining to make out anything in the darkness.

  And then I heard something. A distant sound, the creak of hinges.

  The bathroom. I was sure of it. Someone was retracing Habi’s steps. Or mine.

  I crept down the hallway. The men’s room came into view, and I saw a thin line of light leaking through the crack beneath the door. It danced, like someone was moving a flashlight around.

  My heart started hammering faster. There was someone there, all right. At least if they had a flashlight they probably weren’t some fang-filled monster.

  Then again, they could be something far worse.

  I crept up to the door and listened for a moment. Someone was moving around in there. Licking my lips, I nudged open the door a crack.

  It was a woman—or something in the guise of a woman. Her clothing was nothing special: a leather jacket over a plaid shirt and a pair of jeans that were frayed at the bottom. Her hair was pulled up into a ponytail.

  She was crouched and facing away from me, so I couldn’t get a good look at her face. I couldn’t tell exactly what she was doing, but she seemed to be sifting through the glass shards and debris on the floor of the bathroom. She had her flashlight in her mouth, and in one hand she was holding a small cage woven from sticks and string.

  It wasn’t until I heard the squeaking that I realized the cage wasn’t empty. A tiny nose poked out suddenly from between two bars, whiskers twitching at me.

  She’d brought a goddamn rat with her.

  The creature began to squeal frantically. It pawed at the cage bars, waving its nose at me. The woman jumped to her feet, spinning toward me. Her free hand disappeared beneath her jacket.

  I kicked the door open, raising my truncheon at the same time she drew a long, curved knife from beneath her jacket. The point glinted in the beam of her flashlight. We both froze, a few feet away from each other.

  “Drop the knife,” I said.

  She put down the rat instead. Carefully, she lowered the cage to the floor, then took the flashlight from her mouth. The knife didn’t drop an inch.

  She was a few years older than me, I’d guess. She had a round face, but you couldn’t call it soft. Not with the deep pockmarks that ran from her right eye down to her lip, pulling her mouth into a permanent sneer. Her hard eyes studied me, never wavering.

  “Don’t make me ask again,” I said.

&
nbsp; “Who are you?” she snapped. “What are you doing here?”

  “That was going to be my next line.”

  She narrowed her eyes at me. “You answer first.”

  I offered her a tight smile. The rat was going berserk inside its cage, racing around in circles and banging into the bars.

  “I’m Ozzy,” I said. “Your turn.”

  “You didn’t tell me what you’re doing here.”

  “Come on. A little give and take.”

  She eyed me for a second. They were hard eyes, calculating and unwavering. One corner of her lip quirked up into a sneering smile. It didn’t do much to reassure me.

  “My name is Isidora,” she said.

  “Isidora,” I said. “There. Now we’re like old friends.” I glanced down at the rat. “Does he have a name?”

  “She,” Isidora corrected. “And no.”

  “You don’t name your pets?”

  “She’s not a pet.”

  “Then what is she?”

  “What are you doing here?” she asked again.

  “I’m looking for someone.”

  “Who?”

  “Someone who stiffed me. A ghoul. What about you?”

  She hesitated a second, staring down the blade of her knife at me. “I’m also looking for someone.”

  “Yeah? Maybe put down that knife and we can talk about it. I’m good at finding people.”

  There was that disconcerting smile again. “So I’ve heard,” she said. Finally, she let her knife arm fall, and she tucked the blade back beneath her jacket.

  “You know who I am?”

  Instead of answering, she turned her back to me and crouched down again, returning her attention to the debris on the bathroom floor. Her flashlight glinted against fragments of the broken mirror.

  Frowning, I lowered my truncheon a few inches, but I didn’t put it away entirely. This woman had my spidey sense tingling. She was deep in ghoul territory, and something told me she hadn’t been invited. She clearly wasn’t some Unaware who’d wandered into the wrong abandoned train yard.

  I didn’t know for sure who or what she was, but if I had to put my money on something, I knew what it would be.

  Witch.

  I licked my lips. “You don’t happen to know where Habi is, do you?”

  “Who?” she asked without glancing back at me.

  “The ghoul whose box car you tossed.”

  “Oh. No. But if he’s the one you’re looking for, you might as well run back to town. He’s long gone.”

  “And what’s that supposed to mean?”

  Once again, she ignored the question. One of her hands stretched out, snagging something off the floor. Before I could see what it was, she slipped it into her pocket and turned back to me.

  “What the hell is going on?” I said. “Who are you really? What are you doing here?

  “You’re a man with a lot of questions. And I’m a woman who doesn’t have time to answer them. But if I ever need the services of a cunning man, you’ll be at the top of my list.”

  She brought her fist from her pocket to her mouth, like she was going to cough. Instead she exhaled sharply. A cloud of red powder puffed out of her hand and into my face.

  I reeled back, instinctively holding my breath. But as the powder enveloped me, I felt it flowing into my nostrils, pushing itself in through my tear ducts. A hot, burning sensation began at the base of my skull.

  My vision blurred, red streaking across my eyes. A high-pitched whistle screeched in my ears.

  Through the maelstrom I saw the fuzzy outline of the witch, Isidora. I couldn’t make out her face, but I knew she was smiling at me.

  I hurled myself at her. The spell had gone to work on my muscles as well, making my movements drunken and clumsy. It was still more than Isidora was expecting. I’d never seen magic like this before, but I could feel some of the protective charms sewn into my coat growing warm as they fought the effects of the spell.

  I swung my truncheon with all the grace of a toddler with a baseball bat. Isidora stumbled back, my truncheon whistling past her, an inch short of breaking her front teeth. Her flashlight hit the floor and rolled around, casting tall shadows onto the walls.

  The swing threw me off balance, and I staggered to the side, trying to keep my feet under me. My truncheon was getting heavier by the second. With a growl, I threw another swing in her direction. She ducked beneath the truncheon, tagging me with a punch to my stomach as she went. My truncheon smashed into the wall, shattering bathroom tile.

  I shook my head, trying in vain to shake off the effects of the red powder. The red streaks in my vision began to twist and take form: spiders and centipedes and clouds of flies all tearing through my head. My heart hammered sickeningly.

  I groped at my pockets, clumsily trying to retrieve a vial that might act as a counter to the witch’s spell. But my fingers felt thick and numb. I couldn’t even get my hand in the right pocket.

  I looked around, squinting past the writhing hallucinations, but I couldn’t make out the witch anymore. Where had she—?

  Something heavy slammed into my back. All the air went out of my lungs. I hit the ground hard, biting my lip. Blood spilled into my mouth. Over the screeching tinnitus I could hear that damn rat squealing somewhere near my right ear.

  A bony elbow pressed into the small of my back. Fingers tangled in my hair and jerked my head roughly off the floor.

  “Should’ve doubled the dose.” Isidora’s voice sounded distant, even though I could feel her breath on my ear. “Of course a cunning man would have protections in place.”

  “That’s witches for you,” I mumbled. “Never as clever as they think they are.”

  “You’re the one on the floor with your brain on fire.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I’m also the one holding your pet rat.”

  I couldn’t see her expression, but I like to imagine it was pretty amusing. Apparently, she hadn’t noticed me reach out and grab the caged rat until just that second. I clutched my truncheon in my fist, threatening to bring it down and crush both the cage and the rat.

  “And why should I care?” Isidora said after a second’s hesitation.

  But that hesitation gave her away.

  “You don’t have time to fuck around,” I slurred. “I’m about to black out. Before I do, I’m going to make your little friend here into roadkill.”

  She snarled, and I heard a scraping of steel on leather.

  “Yeah, draw your knife,” I said, lowering the truncheon an inch closer to the squealing rat. “I dare you.”

  “What do you want?” she snapped.

  “Get the hell off me, for starters.”

  The woman swore, but I felt her weight leave me. With a groan, I rolled over, still clutching the rat cage and my truncheon. Isidora had her hand beneath her jacket, but she didn’t fully draw her knife. Her glare was icy.

  “What did you do to me?” I said.

  When she didn’t answer right away, I gave the cage a clumsy shake. The rat screeched with fear.

  “All right!” the witch snapped. “I gave you a dose of powdered bloodmoss and crushed skull bone. The spell is working on your nervous system. In a few minutes you’ll be wracked with pain. Then you’ll pass out. Then you’ll dream.”

  “And when I awake, I won’t remember you or anything that happened here,” I finished, remembering the spell from some old grimoire I’d studied. “Real nice of you.”

  Without taking my eyes off Isidora—or at least the fuzzy shape I thought was her—I worked one fat-fingered hand into my pocket and drew out a vial. I could barely focus on it—I had to hope it was the right one. I broke the seal with my teeth and then held out my hand to Isidora.

  “Give me a couple of your hairs,” I said.

  She sneered. “You have to be—”

  “Crazy? I can see spiders crawling across my eyes, lady. If I’m crazy, it’s your fault. Give me some hair, or so help me God I will crush your rat and th
en start in on you again.”

  For a moment I was sure she was going to draw her knife and lunge at me. If she did, I wasn’t certain I could follow through on my threat. Not only because I had moral qualms about killing the rat. My muscles were starting to twitch and burn. I wasn’t sure I could even swing the truncheon with enough force to give the rat a headache now.

  I played mean anyway, praying the bluff would hold a little longer. Was she buying it? I couldn’t tell. It was getting hard to think.

  She studied me. I couldn’t make out her eyes through the hallucinations burning through my brain, but her initial fury seemed to have given way to something more calculating.

  Finally, she plucked a couple of hairs from the top of her head and held them out to me. I snatched them from her and flopped back onto the floor, my muscles unable to hold me sitting any longer. Clumsily, I fed one hair into the vial and heard the satisfying sizzle as it was absorbed into the potion. I let the other hair tangle around my pinky finger. In the dark of the bathroom, I hoped she wouldn’t see.

  I brought the vial to my lips and threw it back. The liquid was thick and foul-tasting, like vegetable soup that’d been in the back of the fridge too long.

  “Your little home remedies won’t counter the spell,” Isidora said.

  “No,” I agreed. “But I’ll remember you when I wake up.”

  “If you wake up,” she said. “The spell can scorch a weak mind.”

  I was finding this woman less endearing by the second. The potion had taken the edge off the worst of the burning in my brain, but I could feel my thoughts growing sluggish. My eyelids felt heavy, and I had to fight to keep them open. It would only be minutes until I was unconscious.

  “Tell me one thing,” I said. “Then I let the rat go. Does the name Holden Grey mean anything to you?”

  She hesitated. When she spoke, her voice had lost its edge. “I’ve heard the name.”

  My heart lurched. He really is involved. Even as my body and mind were fading, I felt the weight of that gold coin in my pocket, saw the word he’d written dancing before my eyes. Matchstick.