San Diego Noir

“Not yet.”

“I ain’t being searched by nobody,” Chango announced.

The BP man wagged his finger in Chango’s face.

“I’ll break that shit off and jam it up your ass,” Chango hissed. “You think some wetback would say that?”

“We ran your license,” the cop said. “Your address seems to be an abandoned gas station in San Diego.”

The cops and the BP agent smirked at each other.

“Goddamned right I live in a gas station!” Chango bellowed. “My dad owned it!”

“Uh-huh.” The cop turned to Junior. “I have to insist, Mr. Petrucci—you need to leave the scene. Now.”

Junior stared at Chango and got into his Buick as the cops tossed the guys against the side of the panel truck and he saw, or thought he saw, just as he pulled into traffic, the Glock fall out of Chango’s pocket and the cops draw and squat, shouting, and he hit the gas and was shaking with adrenaline or fear or both and didn’t know what happened but he never slowed until he was in front of the old station. He was stiff and sore and scared out of his mind. He ran into Chango’s bedroom and tore open his Dopp kit and took his roll of cash. He thought for a minute and went out, locked the door, and slipped into the GT. The wires sparked when he touched them and the big engine gave a deep growl and shout, the glasspacks sounding sweet, like coffee cans full of rocks. He was going to go. Going to go. Just get out. Break the ties once and for all. Never look back. He was in the wind. Junior rubbed his face three or four times. He revved the big engine and put his foot on the pedal and stared. Night. Streetlights shining through the palm trees made octopus shadows in the street. Junior rolled down the window. He could smell Burger King. Two old women walked arm in arm, speaking Spanish. He could hear a sitcom through the open window of a bungalow above Chango’s station. Junior knew if he headed down toward the old Ducommun warehouse, he could find La Minnie’s mom’s house. It was funky twenty years ago. With its geraniums. Minnie could be there. Or her family could tell him where she was. She used to like a nice ride like this. Maybe she’d like to feel the wind in her hair. They could drive anywhere. He thought he could talk her into it, if he could find her. The way things had changed around town, the old house might not be there at all. Probably not. Probably gone with all the things he remembered and loved. But … he asked himself … what if it wasn’t?

He shifted and moved steadily into the deeper dark.

A SCENT OF DEATH

BY MARIA LIMA

Gaslamp Quarter

It was an alley, just like all the other back-of-hotel alleys downtown. Nothing to distinguish it, especially after the Clean City initiative had turned most San Diego alleys into something that more resembled Vancouver. Not that this part of the city had been all too bad. The almighty tourist and convention dollar tended to keep things cleaner than, say, Chicago or Manhattan. Bonus for us, really.

After all, this was the back of the Leaf, one of the Ivy Tree chain, originally just one hotel, but now several boutique hostelries run for the sole purpose of pampering the wealthy. Everything at the scene reflected the Leaf’s exclusivity, the green of the kitchen door matched by the swirling green leaves painted on the sides of the two dumpsters. The beige awning over the door was the same fine fabric and design as those facing the street view. No one came back here but delivery trucks, the city trash haulers and other similar workers. No matter, though, the Leaf kept up its branding behind the scenes too. This was a true sign of either class or just pure stinking rich.

Admittedly, the stench wasn’t what I expected. I’d done my share of investigations in hotel alleys, and no matter how clean, they stank. Not here; like my native Vancouver, there was no real smell, unless you counted a light air of lavender and vanilla, the hotel’s signature scent, distributed as hand lotion, soaps, shampoo, and conditioner. Only here in a place so uniquely itself that a receptacle for trash smelled like flowers, did this scene seem so incongruous. Disturbing anywhere, but even more so here.

Just one thing disrupted the relative peace and quiet in the depths of the four a.m. darkness. The thing that was the reason for all our lights, for a police photographer’s flash snapping through the still night air, its strobe punctuating what I saw, the one thing that kept me there, even though every part of me wanted to be elsewhere.

One small hand, pale, fingers curled, clutching at a few leafy weeds poking through a tiny crack in the asphalt as if needing to hold on to the closest thing to earth it could reach in this sea of concrete and steel. Earth, living, growing things—the one avenue he could have had to safety. The tiny bedraggled weed hadn’t been enough. Whatever had tracked him down and killed him had either known that, or taken its chances. Yeah, its. As in not human. Just like the most recent victim of what we were calling the Rentboy Ripper, though the MO had little resemblance to its predecessor. The only thing in common was the profession of the victims—children of the night, Licensed Professionals, once known as hookers, prostitutes. My victims were all of the profession older than human—all male, all fae, all in the Gaslamp. Which is why I was here.

Nothing like the hint of a serial fae killer to drop a spark in the very dry powder keg that was political relations between us and the human races. San Diego had always been a fairly easy, laid-back town. Tourists, convention- goers, Navy and civilian residents—all mingled with some semblance of polite disdain. I mean, for humans, the color of their skin or the weight of their bank accounts mattered very little nowadays. After all, until recently (as far as humans knew), every sentient being shared one thing: death. Or rather Death—the grim reaper who visited young, old, middle-aged alike, and no matter who you were, how much you were worth, eventually, the final score leveled everyone’s playing field.

Not us. We didn’t die like they did—do, would. Oh sure, we could be killed, any living being can given enough effort, but we didn’t just die. Old age? Yeah, well, my cousin had seen the turn of the millennium—the first one—and was still performing as a dancer at the Gaslamp Strip Club. Yeah, yeah, it used to be a steak joint, but a lot of things changed. Family restaurants became bars; steak joints with bars became stripper clubs—with a higher cover. And strip joints, well, let’s just say that the Moral Majority didn’t win this one. Can’t say this happened all over the world, but it did in most of the sea and ocean ports and destination cities. Orlando? A heck of a new version of the Magic Kingdom. The one in Anaheim just got boarded up for lack of interest. I never really understood why. Maybe it’s because I’m a halfling. Thanks to my promiscuous mother who, a whole lot of decades ago, had decided to relive her heyday, this time in Haight-Ashbury, I was the product of a Beltane ritual gone wonky. What Mama never knew was that she herself was a halfling. Wood nymph, most likely, I was never sure. She’d gotten herself killed in a nasty hit-and-run when I was twenty. I never learned which of the several men she’d banged on that particular Beltane had contributed his sperm to my making. He’d been full fae, no doubt about it. My own genetics proved that. But he could have been anyone. Never really worried me. Mama and her sister June raised me and I turned out okay. By the time humans knew of us, I’d been an adult for a lot of years and able to figure things out on my own … like why, when I touched certain objects, I knew their history. June was the only