Cherry Bomb: A Siobhan Quinn Novel (11 page)

“This is Jodie,” Selwyn said, nodding to the woman. “Jodie, this is Quinn.”

Jodie said it was good to meet me and offered me her hand. I shook it, and her skin felt very, very hot. Everyone alive feels hot when I’m hungry. Her skin was almost as dark as Selwyn’s was pale, but her eyes were a startling, unexpected shade of green.

“You’ve made the news,” she said, just before leading us upstairs. “But no one has any idea what happened.”

“No shit,” Selwyn muttered.

“The police aren’t saying anything yet, but the most popular rumor is that a drug dealer’s pet grizzly bear got loose and went on a rampage.”

I couldn’t help but laugh.

Jodie’s apartment was bigger than Selwyn’s, and it wasn’t cluttered. It was furnished with pricy-looking antiques, and there were real paintings—not prints or posters—hanging on the walls. Real fucking art. Oh, and a stereo system I once would have done murder for. I wondered what she did for a living. I mean, Selwyn was making a small fortune peddling her junk, but you’d never have known it from the way she lived.

I caught Jodie staring at me. It was more a curious stare than a worried or frightened kind of stare.

“I’m your first?” I asked her.

“Yes,” she said softly. Jodie said everything softly. “You’re my first.”

Right then, I caught a peek at myself in a mirror hanging in the hall. It was a miracle a taxi had stopped for us. Between the bruises and scrapes, the dried blood on my chin and cheeks and forehead, and the wet, dark splotch on the blanket from the seeping bullet hole that hadn’t yet begun to heal.

“I need a shower,” I said.

And Selwyn said, “You need three or four.”

“The bathroom’s just past the kitchen,” Jodie told me, and she pointed down the surprisingly long hallway. “You’ll find everything you need. Soap, clean towels, shampoo. If you need it, there’s disinfectant and a needle and silk thread in linen closet. And gauze bandages.”

I thanked her and said I could use the gauze, yeah, but there was no need for the rest of it.

Undead girls don’t tend to get infections. It’s one of the perks. No matter how much it hurt—and hurt it did—if I could get some sleep, by sunrise my body would spit out the slug, and there wouldn’t even be a scar.

I stood under the hot spray of this Jodie woman’s showerhead, letting the water hammer my chest, shoulders, my buttocks and face. I didn’t want to be remembering anything at all. But I couldn’t stop remembering the forest and the field, the blonde girl and her black wolf. I knew full well who they were. The
loup
was me, and they were also me. Me knock, knocking, knocking on my so often slow-on-the-uptake conscious mind.
Do you get the gist now, Quinn?
Yeah, I got it. I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to
do
with the knowledge, but I got it.

While I dried, I took stock of my reflection in the mirror above the sink. My shark-black eyes, my waxy skin, my piranha mouth, me more naked than any absence of clothes could make me. Me without the makeup, contacts, the grille that hid my teeth. All that shit was something else trapped back at Selwyn’s cordoned-off apartment, unless they’d also been confiscated as evidence. I’d have to find replacements, but I could worry about that later. After sleep. I could also worry about who the fuck Jodie was and whether there was any chance the cops could get any leads on Selwyn. I knew I was likely safe from any investigation, but she had a paper trail—her lease, just for starters. Shit knows how much else—identifying documents and shit. Truth be told, I’d been inconvenienced; she’d been screwed over good and proper.

There was a time I wouldn’t have given her situation a second thought. There was a time my attitude would have boiled down to,
What’s any of that got to do with me?
But she’d changed me. In less than a week, she’d changed me.

Which scared me bad, more than I was willing to admit.

I’d figured out long ago how dangerous it was allowing anyone to get close to you, forming emotional ties to the living. Or much of anyone else. Vamps aren’t pack animals. Doesn’t matter how lonely the isolation might be, it was a lot safer than the alternative. For me and for whoever found themselves the object of my affections. Maybe you’ve read shit about vamps and werewolves as guardian fucking angels. That’s wishful thinking, ignorant fantasies. You may as well snuggle up to a leaky nuke.

We slept in the guest room, me and Selwyn. I don’t know if I’d ever in all my life slept in a bed that comfortable. The room smelled like lavender and citrus, aging fabric woven before my grandmother had been born, old wood and Murphy’s Oil Soap. My clean body and Selwyn’s clean body, and the blood in her veins. Before I nodded off, she offered herself, and I almost refused. It was dangerous, drinking from her in the state I was in.

“You need it,” she said. “I can see how much you need it, Quinn.”

What else can this pale child see?

She didn’t have to twist my arm. But I managed to take only a couple of mouthfuls. And then we slept. I had no dreams, not of the girl by the field, not of the
loup.
Nothing, just the bliss of oblivion.

Jodie didn’t wake us until after three in the
afternoon. She knocked lightly on the door. I lay blinking at the ceiling, but Selwyn told her the door was unlocked, to come in. Then she kissed me on the forehead. She smiled sleepily, looking way more refreshed than I felt. She looked . . . what? Relieved? Certainly not much like someone who’d lost all her worldly possessions the night before and had to put a bolt through a man’s head to save the nasty she was shacked up with.

I sat up. Our host was standing in the doorway with a breakfast tray. If she cared that we were both naked, it didn’t show in her face.

“I thought you should have a bite to eat,” she said to Selwyn.

“I’m not going to turn it down,” Selwyn replied.

There were also several newspapers tucked under Jodie’s left arm. She brought the tray over and carefully set it on the bed in front of Selwyn. There were eggs, toast, some bacon, OJ, and a big-ass glass of Guinness. Them pretty blood dolls need their vitamin C and iron, right? Selwyn thanked her and wasted no time getting to work on the food. The sight and smell made me a bit queasy.

“I’m sorry, Quinn,” Jodie said in that soft, silky voice of hers. She had an accent I hadn’t noticed the night before. Haitian maybe. Or Jamaican. “I don’t have anything on hand for you. I’ll have something by this evening, though. I put out feelers.”

She dropped the papers in front of me. The
Post
was on top, its cover-page headlines every bit as lurid as you’d expect:
MYSTERY CREATURE’S ORGY OF BLOOD
. Selwyn was reading over my shoulder.

“An orgy?” she mumbled around a mouthful of egg.
She washed it down with Guinness. “Jesus, lady. You get to have all the fun.”

SEVEN DEAD

BEAST STILL AT LARGE

“One of those is mine,” said Selwyn, pointing at the page. “They better not give you credit for all seven.”

“Actually,” said Jodie, “the body count’s now at nine. They found two more after the papers went to press. They’re still trying to figure out what to make of the security guard.” She looked at Selwyn. “Is that the one you did?”

“Damn straight.”

“Where did you even get a crossbow?”

I cleared my throat. “She can lay her hands on ghoul skulls and Hell merch, and you wonder where she got a crossbow?”

I was assuming Jodie knew all about the source of Selwyn’s income.

Selwyn tapped me on top of the head. “It’s Quinn’s,” she said. I swear, she was getting her rocks off on the mayhem and pandemonium. What was it I said earlier about how she’d have probably become a serial killer if she hadn’t found me?

“It’s in that gym bag I brought in with us last night, with all her guns and stuff.”

“Fuck me running backwards.” I sighed. Or something to that effect. There was a garish color photograph of a body beneath a bloodstained sheet.

Selwyn ate, and I read. The
Times
had a photo of the flipped-over Volkswagen, cops and paramedics crowded around it.
ESCAPED COUGAR SLAYS SEVEN
. There were
quotes from eyewitnesses and exactly the sort of vague, noncommittal statement from the chief of police. On page two there was another photo, this time of Selwyn’s building. The doors hung crooked on their hinges, what was
left
of the doors. Yellow crime-scene tape and plastic sawhorses were up to keep the looky-loos at a distance.

I tossed the papers to the floor.

“Hey,” Selwyn protested, “I wanted to read those.”

I glared at her. “Why don’t you shut up and eat?”

Jodie sat down on the foot of the bed, where, by the way, she’d laid out some clothes I could wear, jeans and a Yankees sweatshirt.

“It seems to me no one has any clear idea what really went down last night,” she said. “And no one’s going to swallow the monster angle. But whatever was in your apartment, Selwyn, you’d best consider all that a complete write-off. No way you’re getting back inside, and even if you did, well . . .” And she trailed off.

Selwyn stopped nibbling at a crispy strip of bacon.

“Fortunately, it wasn’t much,” she told Jodie. “Tuesday was a payday. I got lucky.”

“And none of the safe-deposit boxes are in your name?”

Selwyn laughed and took a sip of Guinness. “Hell, no. No way they can trace those back to me.”

“You hope,” I said and lay down again. I wanted to go back to sleep. No, I wanted to feed again, then fuck, and
then
go back to sleep.

“Nothing comes with an ironclad guarantee,” Jodie added. “You should not be so confident.”

“Listen, the both of you. Don’t sweat the damn safe-
deposit boxes, okay? Jesus. I’m going to clean them out before anyone’s the wiser, just in case.”

Jodie clicked her tongue against the roof of her mouth. Not just once, but several times. For a moment I considered the possibility that she and Selwyn had worked out some sort of secret tongue-clicking Morse code.

“Regardless,” said Jodie, “you may have bigger problems than the police.”

Selwyn kissed me on the forehead. I gently swatted her away.

“How’s that?” she asked.

Jodie looked at me, and then she looked back at Selwyn. She pointed at me.

“Does she know?”

“Shit, lady.” I laughed. “I know she used to have a tail and that her mama wasn’t exactly altogether totally human.”

Selwyn nodded. “If you’re about to say what I think you’re about to say, yeah, she knows. How did he find out so fast?”

Jodie scowled.

“Dear, he’s in Boston,” she said. “Not on the moon. They do have newspapers, television, radio, and the internet in Boston.”

Selwyn did that tapping at the end of her nose thing. Maybe their secret code involved tongue clicking
and
nose tapping.

“Yeah, okay. Shit,” she said and tapped her nose again. I waited for Jodie to click her tongue and was disappointed when she didn’t.

“Said the girl who didn’t know poisoning a
loup
with wolfsbane was a terrible idea.”

Selwyn punched me in the arm.

“I wasn’t trying to poison you, you ass. Wolfsbane is supposed to guard against werewolves,
not
trigger their transformations.”

I think I glared at Selwyn skeptically.

“Wait,” Jodie said, and her scowl had turned into an expression of disbelief. “
That’s
how this happened?”

“Pretty swift, right?”

Jodie shook her head and stood up.

“Quinn, our Miss Throckmorton there, she’s resourceful. A pity she suffers these lapses in judgment.”

Selwyn flipped her off. “I need to piss,” she said.

Okay, I’m getting sick of the
she said, she said
blow-by-blow. I’m sure you are, too. Anyway, we lay low for a couple of days. Turned out this Jodie woman—Jodie Babineaux, and she was from Sierra Leone—was a halfway decent witch. You don’t find many of those. The wards and shit she had erected around her apartment kept us off the radar just long enough for me to get my bearings. Selwyn got her hands on a cloned phone and made a bunch of calls, sussing out her predicament and trying to keep tabs on what Isaac Snow did and didn’t know. We hardly left the building.

The
Post
’s headlines got weirder and weirder. They talked to a cryptozoologist at some university in New Hampshire who claimed the cougar attacks had actually been the work of a chupacabra.

Because, you know.

PICKMAN’S MADONNA & GHOULS ON A TRAIN

W
e did go back to Selwyn’s apartment. Despite what she’d said about there being nothing important there, nothing worth the trouble and the risk to retrieve, after three days of hiding out in the witch’s safe house, Selwyn began to grow antsy, and she started to let on that there might, after all, be something worth going back for. Surely, she reasoned, the cops weren’t keeping the place under surveillance. Now, if I was an NYPD detective, and I thought I knew the starting point of the “cougar” rampage, and if that place was full of bizarre and valuable books and gewgaws, you bet your fanny I’d keep my
eyeballs on it. As I have often said, people are stupid. This includes people who keep dangerous wild animals locked up in Manhattan. Stupid people do stupid, sloppy, ill-advised things, like go back to apartments the PoPo have staked out because they probably have fuck all in the way of leads.

Selwyn was in a stupid mood.

And she badgered me until I agreed to go along.

We’d slip in and slip back out before anyone had any idea we were there. In and out, quick as a flash. No, we wouldn’t use the front door. Obviously, we were smarter than that. Obviously. We’d take the fire escape.

That’s what smart people do.

Looking back, never mind how it turned out, the way that night started off is pretty damn funny. Jodie brought us black pants and black turtleneck sweaters and versatile black ski masks, just like Tom Cruise in a
Mission Impossible
movie. Or Sterling Archer. Because that’s what smart people would do.

When I asked Selwyn what, exactly, was so important that I was agreeing to allow her to put my ass on the line, she wouldn’t tell me.

“You’ll see,” she said.

When I demanded that she tell me or I’d let her undertake this idiotic expedition alone, she said, “You’ll see” again. So I went. Why? If Selwyn was in prison, I’d have to find someone else to fuck, and I’d also lose a willing donor of red sauce.

I am a smart cookie.

I took along the Glock 17 9mm I usually pack.

Jodie had a car she kept in a garage somewhere nearby,
and she drove us. Not like we could take a taxi or the subway in our styling secret-agent, ninja, cat-burglar getups. She pulled the car into an alley a couple of blocks from the building, and we walked the rest of the way. No sense in her getting hauled off to the pokey if we got ourselves caught.

Pause a moment to consider the fate of a vamp, who’s also a
loup
—or vice versa—who finds herself in lockup. Standing next to a box where a homeless dude was sleeping off a couple of bottles of Thunderbird, staring up at the fire escape, I asked Selwyn to ponder that very scenario.

“No one’s going to jail,” she said, pulling the ladder down with a loud clank. The homeless dude didn’t wake up.

“You bet your ass they’re not, because I’m not gonna let it come to that.”

“Then what’s the problem?”

“The problem, Grasshopper, is the mess I’d have to
make
so that it didn’t come to that.”

“We’re not going to get caught,” she sighed and started climbing. I hesitated a second or two, thought about leaving her to the pissy gods of fate and heading to Port Authority and buying a ticket on the first bus anywhere far from New York City. And then I followed her.

Because that’s what stupid people do. Even vamps.

Being dead has yet to boost anyone’s IQ.

I did my best not to make noise, but the rusty fire escape had other ideas. We creaked and squeaked our way to the fifth floor and the apartment’s single window. Which had, as noted earlier, been painted shut. But, super vampire strength, right? I tugged it open, which made,
probably, only slightly less noise than breaking it would have made.

“Five minutes,” I told her. “That’s all. You ain’t done in five minutes, I’ll leave you here.”

She rolled her eyes and muttered and wandered away through the dark towards the bedroom. I sat on the windowsill, where I could keep my eyes on the door. The cops had tossed the place. At least, I assumed it was the cops. Someone had. The carefully ordered chaos had been reduced to simple, run-of-the-mill chaos.

I lit a cigarette and waited. Five minutes went by and I could hear Selwyn bumbling around in the dark. She had a Maglite, because even stupid people know better than to break into a crime scene and turn on the lights. I decided I’d give her a little extra time. So far, so good, after all. I told myself I’d been worrying over nothing. I smoked and listened to the night outside and the night inside and every other sound in the building.

And then the phone rang. Selwyn had this old avocado-green telephone that must have been new about 1970, and there in the dark, the ringer sounded at least as loud as a fire bell.

“Shit,” I heard her whisper. By the second ring, she’d emerged from the bedroom carrying a soccer-ball-sized bundle, but I couldn’t make out what it was. She shined the Maglite in the direction of the phone, perched on a stack of books, but nailed me square in the eyes instead.

“Jesus shitting Christ,” I hissed. “Get that thing out of my face.” She did, but the flashlight’s beam left a swarm of giant fireflies in my head.

“Should I answer it?” she asked.

“Why? Are you expecting a fucking phone call?”

Third ring.

“No,” she whispered. “Of course not. No one knows we’re here, and I don’t use the landline for business.”

Fourth ring.

“Don’t answer,” she said. “It’s no one.”

Which is probably why I answered it.

It’s
precisely
the sort of thing stupid people do.

I stood there, the handset against my ear, looking in Selwyn’s direction, but still seeing nothing except all those orange-white fireflies. I didn’t say a word. Well, not at first. Probably a whole minute went by, and I was just about to hang up, when the caller said, “Hello, Miss Quinn. I was so hoping it would be you who picked up.”

It was a smooth and utterly sexless voice. I mean
utterly.
A voice entirely devoid of gender. Could have been a man or a woman or anything in between. Also, and I say this as a nasty, it was a damn creepy voice. The sort of voice puts a fucking chill in you, right? And it was a
jovial
voice. If a voice could grin, that voice was grinning ear to ear.

“Miss Quinn? Hello?”

The only question in my mind was whether the caller was Isaac Snow or Isobel Snow. Brother or sister?

“Is this a bad time?” it asked.

“Yeah,” I replied. “It’s a bad motherfucking time. What the fuck do you want, asshole?”

“Only what Miss Throckmorton is holding,” the smiling voice said. “I can assure you she’s been paid well, and I merely desire to conclude my business transaction with her. I dislike loose ends.”

Usually, in situations like these, I have a snarky
comeback at the ready, drawn from my all-you-can-eat buffet of gutter wit. This time, all I had was a sudden case of dry mouth. I swallowed and licked my lips.

“A pity,” said the creepy voice, “the same cannot be said for you, Miss Quinn. It almost seems as if you take a perverse pride in leaving messes that others have to clean up. Your former employer in Providence would, I’m sure, testify to that.”

“We’re sort of in a hurry,” I said. “I’m gonna hang up now. Fuck off.” But I didn’t hang up.

“Are we not, all of us, in a hurry, Miss Quinn? Isn’t that a shame, that we rush about like ants, rarely pausing to enjoy the time given to us? Of course, some of us get more time than do others, some lucky, lucky people like yourself. Hardly seems fair, does it?”

“Hardly,” I said. “But I’ve learned not to waste a lot of time worrying over what is and isn’t fair.”

Not witty, but oh so true.

“Touché. You know, I wasn’t certain, at first, that it actually
was
you, the celebrated Twice-Dead, Twice-Damned, there in Manhattan, watching over poor lost Miss Throckmorton. But that escapade of yours Friday night, my sister heard the news, yes, and that removed any doubt we might have harbored.”

So Isaac.

Chilling or not, the guy was starting to sound like a villain in an old Charlie Chan or Sherlock Holmes movie. Or one of the cheesier James Bond films. If his voice hadn’t been so creepsome, he probably would have had me in stitches. But, you know, lots of the bad folk have
that effect on me. The line between scary and hilarious is often no wider than a bug’s dick.

“I was hoping we would have a chance to meet face-to-face,” he said, “but, alas, that’s not the way events are unfolding. My loss, I’m certain.”

Actually, he was beginning to remind me a little of B.

“I’ll give you a dollar to get to the point,” I said.

Ah,
there
I was, back to my usual mouthy self.

“Miss Throckmorton knows why I’m calling. Will you please pick up, Selwyn?”

He knew her name. Her real name.

I wasn’teven aware there was another phone in the kitchen. But in a second or two Selwyn was, in fact, on the line. I rubbed at my eyes, chasing off a few of the Maglite fireflies, just enough I could see her. She’d set the Maglite on the counter, but still held the bundle.

“There we are,” he said. “Little Lamb, smile.”

“I have it,” she stammered. If he’d unnerved me, he was clearly scaring the bejesus out of her. “I have it. I was going to get in touch tomorrow.”

“You possess fine attributes, Little Lamb, yes, but you cannot number among them being a good liar. We know that you were going to do no such thing.”

“No, I’m . . . I mean, just had to be sure it is still here. The police . . .” She trailed off and glanced towards me. I squinted. She looked as if she was about to puke.

“Would never have seen it,” he said. “You and I both know that. My sister and I, we thought you were dependable. You came so very highly recommended. We made this deal in good faith.”

“Listen,” Selwyn said, trying to keep her voice from trembling. “Just tell me where to meet you, where to make the drop, and we can make this right.”

“How can we do that, Little Lamb, now that you’ve sold off the skull and
La Saignement de gorge.
We are, yes, rather amazed you still have the Madonna. No, as much as we would have liked to uphold our end of the bargain, you made that impossible.”

“No, if you’ll just—”

“We can no longer trust you. We’ve had to enlist the services of a third party.”

I shut my eyes, trying to clear my head.

“Miss Throckmorton’s going to hang up now,” I said. My words came out like blocks of wood. “Isn’t that right, Selwyn?” She didn’t answer me.

Isaac Snow said, “We do hope, yes, that you’ll understand with the position you’ve put us in, Little Lamb, that you left us with no other recourse. We hope you will understand it’s nothing personal, dear. Isobel sends her love.
Qqi e’ia,
Selwyn Throckmorton. Walk in the light.”

Fuck, I hate the sound of Ghul. If a turd could talk, it would speak ghoulish.

“Isaac, wait,
please
—”

But he’d already hung up.

I put down the receiver, and I opened my eyes again.

“Selwyn,” I said, “if you’ve got whatever the fuck you came for, I have a feeling we need to get out of here.” She didn’t reply. I said her name again, and she didn’t reply again. I could see myself having to carry her back down the fire escape.

The cigarette I’d lit before the phone rang had burned down to the filter, scorching my fingers. I cursed and stubbed it out on the side of the avocado phone.

“Selwyn,” I said, “
did you fucking hear me
?”

She nodded her head, and she said, “I think it’s too late.” She was staring towards the window.

The first bullet didn’t exactly miss me. It carved a deep furrow in the left side of my face. Selwyn screamed, and I dropped to the floor and rolled. Instinct kicking in and all, because it might have been stupid coming back to the apartment, but at least my sense of self-preservation was still intact. The red beam of a laser sight played across the wall near Selwyn, and the second shot almost hit her. From the way my face ached, I knew the slugs were silver. I also knew the gun was fitted with a silencer, a damned good one, too, probably metering at only 117 decibels or so.

“Get the fuck down!” I shouted at her. She didn’t get down. Instead, she picked up the object she’d been carrying. I’d guessed what it was. I have my moments. Even a blind squirrel finds a nut, every now and then.

I glanced back towards the window. There was a figure crouched on the fire escape. The adrenaline seemed to have brushed aside the last straggling afterimages from the flashlight, and I could see that the shooter was a woman dressed in a black leather blazer and black jeans, plus safety goggles. Way more stylish than our outfits. The gun was a standard-model SIG Mosquito, double action, chambered for 22LR cartridges. I had to admit she had good taste in pocket rockets.

“If you don’t get behind that counter right this goddamn minute,” I whispered, but didn’t have a chance to finish the thought. A third shot plowed into my left shoulder, shattering my collarbone. The bullet disintegrated, and the shrapnel chewed up muscle and opened veins. It hurt as much as you’d imagine it would. I howled and grabbed a dusty book from one of the teetering dusty stacks and hurled it across the room at the assassin. I missed the mark by several inches.

“Be still,” Selwyn said, raising the bundle up to her chest.

“What the
fuck
are you doing?” I whispered about as urgently and angrily and totally stupefied as I have ever whispered anything.

“You’ll see,” she whispered back, and she didn’t sound at all scared now, not like she had on the phone with Isaac Snow.

On the fire escape, the woman in black cursed. She didn’t fire again, but she also didn’t lower her pistol. The laser painted a bright red dot in the center of Selwyn’s forehead like a bindi.

“You won’t dare,” Selwyn said. “You know it, and I know it.” The tremble had vanished from her voice. The silly bitch was cool as a moose in snow.

“Selwyn, I swear to God, if she shoots you, I’m gonna fucking clap.”