mechanism in it?”
“Uh, no.”
“It does not. But it could have.”
So much for me being smart.
Tchekhy reached into the cooler and pulled out a bottle of authentic Russian (meaning cheap and crappy, much like their cigarettes) vodka. He took a long swig of it, then capped the bottle and tossed it to me.
“This will take some time,” he said. “I will order pizza.”
I took a swig of my own. It made my hair follicles tickle. Russian vodka does that to me. “Don’t let me get in the way,” I said, finding my way to the couch.
Two hours later, the vodka was gone and I wasn’t anywhere closer to any answers. I was half-drunk however, so at least I had that going for me.
Tchekhy was doing his mad hacker thing with at least four different computers, pausing occasionally to light another of his foul brand of cigarettes. I considered breaking into his reverie to see if he’d actually found anything yet, but I held off. Something I learned a very long time ago was to never interrupt a genius when he’s in the middle of something. Did that to Newton once. God that man had a temper.
The police report and I were getting along okay, but I was seriously contemplating calling lead detective Caldwell and asking him where he learned such abysmal penmanship. I mean just awful. Before the printing press people gave a damn about their handwriting, you know? Thank goodness there were lots of pictures of the crime scene to work with.
The door to Gary and Nate’s apartment had been kicked in rather efficiently, the impact removing a portion of the door jamb. Detective Caldwell called this “signs of forced entry.” (Or, “songs of foreign entree,” depending on one’s interpretation.) Gary and Nate were both found in the living room on the floor. Contrasting the way the room looked in the pictures with what I remembered, they’d put up a pretty decent fight. The futon was upside down and the coffee table had been broken in two by something large. A fist had gone through the TV screen. Above the wall near the upset futon was a bloody splatter. Detective Caldwell thought one of the “victims” (or “vicms”) had been thrown there, which was scary because the mark was more than halfway up the wall. It’s not easy to throw a guy that far with that much force, no matter what you may have learned from pro wrestling.
The autopsy photos left me seriously reconsidering my vodka-and-pizza dinner. Neither of the guys was recognizable. Frankly, if Nate hadn’t been black I would have been unable to distinguish between them. It was, as the good detective pointed out, a classic case of “overkill.” As in, the guy—or guys—who killed them kept hitting them after they were clearly no longer alive.
Caldwell ran through possible blunt objects (“blond opreds”) that could have served as a murder weapon, leaning toward an aluminum baseball bat. He also figured on at least two bad guys, just because no one person could have done so much damage to two healthy young men like Nate and Gary. The good news was this almost entirely ruled me out.
He was wrong about there being two guys. I thought again about calling him to tell him this, but that was just the vodka talking. He would never believe me.
Two things had caught my eye. One was the coffee table. It had been splintered by a strong horizontal blow across the middle. A baseball bat could maybe do this, but it would have taken a while, and I was pretty sure that Gary and Nate wouldn’t have waited around to watch. No, the blow to the table had to be collateral damage during the struggle. The weapon had been a very strong forearm.
The second thing was Gary’s face. It had been caved in by a powerful blow administered while he was either pressed up against the wall or on the floor. It was the kill shot and it hadn’t been done by any bat. I could clearly see the indent of three knuckles, the middle one raised slightly to a tapered point.
It was obvious what had done this. I didn’t blame the police for not recognizing it. They’d probably never seen a demon’s handiwork before.
Chapter 12
Demons are not—as has been so often assumed—supernatural minions of some higher (or lower) evil deity. They are not supernatural at all, any more than pixies, iffrits, or vampires. Or me. They’re just another race—or underspecies, as my unnamed nemesis called them.
This is not to say demons are in any way capable of being nice. Not at all. Demons are the worst combination of big, strong, and nasty on the planet. Worse even than dragons, because dragons were just animals and animals don’t have enough self-awareness to be evil. Demons do. They understand money and they understand violence and they don’t care about much else. Also, unlike dragons, they managed to avoid extinction, possibly because something deep in the cavernous recesses of most demon brains is the understanding that survival and secretiveness go hand in hand.
But keeping a low profile is only one reason demons still walk the Earth. Another is usefulness. They’re the ultimate mercenaries and really come in handy during wartime. Alexander the Great had ten demons on retainer when he conquered most of the known world. Hammurabi had twenty-five. Genghis Khan had thirty, and rumor had it he was one himself. (I don’t believe the rumor—a demon would make a lousy general—but I never met Genghis Khan, so I could be wrong.) The biblical Goliath was also a demon, which should tell you plenty about the accuracy of that little story, because it’d take a hell of a lot more than a stupid slingshot to take out a demon. (David actually lured Goliath under a cliff face and had some friends drop a big rock on him.) I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if a few of today’s governments had one or two demons on the payroll, although with modern weaponry their talents are more useful to drug cartels and the like.
It is notoriously difficult to kill a demon. Their skin is much thicker than human skin (but not as hard as dragon hide), they don’t burn easily, and if they have a heart, nobody has been able to figure out exactly where it is. At the Battle of Troy, I saw a demon run through with a pike three times in three different places and keep on coming. It took twenty men to hold him down and two working with heavy battle axes to cleave his head from his shoulders.
You’ve probably seen one. I don’t know how they move about in today’s world because I haven’t laid eyes on one for over a century, but I know they usually favor baggy clothes and hats to obscure their obviously non- human features. You might be thinking professional American football would be a good place to find a few, but I don’t think it’s violent enough for them.
The extraordinary thing about demons is that they don’t rule the world. They reproduce normally—I’ve never seen a female demon, but I know they exist—and they were around back when it really wasn’t all that hard to take over the world. Pretty much everyone took over the world at least once back in the day. I even thought about it a couple of times. For some reason, it just never seemed like there was enough of them to truly dominate.
Why there are so few demons in the world was one of the questions I posed to the only demon I ever had a face-to-face conversation with. Unfortunately, he was not all that forthcoming.
I was living in Carthage at the time, in one of my occasional incarnations as a wealthy man. By modern reckoning this was around the third century BC, and I was making a fine living as a merchant, shipping goods— mainly ivory, but also a little gold and silver—mined or hunted in the more savage sections of middle Africa. I had customers from Tyre to Corsica, three boats to move product, a couple hundred employees, a few dozen slaves, and one of the largest houses in Carthage. (Don’t get on me about the slaves. It was expected. Besides, I’ve been a slave myself, on four different occasions.)
Business was pretty cutthroat back then, as things always are when money is involved. (As a side note: I thought money was a bad idea way back when it was first invented. I remember the moment very clearly. This guy owed me a sheep, but instead of giving me an actual sheep he gave me five coins he said were worth the same as a sheep. “But I can’t eat round pieces of metal, asshole,” were my exact words.) I always had somebody trying to edge in on my business, much as I had done to others when I first built my little empire. My trump card was always
