Red Delicious(39)

"Never said I want to. Said it's what we have, and we've come to that place, B, where we gotta do what we can with what we have."

"Caught between Scylla and Charybdis," he sighed, and shook his head.

"That's about the size of it. Maidstone might be all scary, scary, but he's still just a mortal bastard, and we can deal with him later."

"You can deal with him later."

"What the fuck ever."

"So," said B, and it occurred to me right then he'd not given me his name of the day. Which I don't think had ever happened once in all the time I'd known him. That realization sent a little chill up my back, which might seem silly, given everything I'd been through. But sometimes it really is the small stuff.

"So," I echoed.

"Who gets the fall guys? I don't see the angle."

I so suck at chess. "We've got one dildo, two expendable sisters, and two pissed-off demons."

"Math never was my speciality," he said.

Mine, either. I suck at arithmetic almost as much as I suck (and blow) at chess. "We gotta try to make Szabó and Harpootlian both happy, or at least redirect their ire, right?"

He rolled his empty beer bottle to and fro between his hands, all thoughtful and shit. Waiting for me to tell him I'd come up with his get-out-of-jail-free card. After all, wasn't I the son of a bitch's fixer?

And I said, "Sorta robbing Peter to pay Paul. No, that's not quite right. . . ."

"Not unless you've got a plan to simultaneously nick from Paul to pay Peter. Maybe turn that swindle Ellen Andrews pulls off in the magazine tale, and shit out a spare ivory rump-splitter."

B, he's got more synonyms for "penis" than KFC's got chicken tits.                       
       
           



       

"Not exactly," I replied. "We're gonna have to choose a side, and after what went down at the whorehouse this morning, I think you'll agree that should be Szabó. If Harpootlian was packing that sort of heat, she'd have burned us by now."

He didn't disagree.

"So, Szabó gets the unicorn," I said.

"Assuming you can get it back from that troll git."

"Yeah. Assuming that. We give her the dildo, and we give Harpootlian the sisters and convince her they're the ones stole it in the first place. That they've had it all along."

"You shot the bogle who filched it," B said.

"Yeah, I know that," I told him. "Didn't know you knew it, though."

"Hope you won't hold it against me, thinking you're daft, kitten. You thinking Harpootlian's going to settle for that-or any-consolation prize and sod off."

I took another swallow of my beer, which was getting warm. I wished there were a few Narragansetts in the cooler, because I fucking hate Bass.

"Look, B, you gave up the right to ask for guarantees when you got involved in this mess. So I don't want to hear you whining about the one and only option I see open to us at this late date. Not unless you've got something better, which you don't."

"You're growing balls," he said, and straightened his tie. I remember it was the banana yellow one that had tiny red stars printed on it. Ugly as a monkfish, that tie.

"Fuck or be fucked," I said. "Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm late for my own suicide."

"Hope you won't think any less of me if I just sit here on my arse and get pissed."

"B, I couldn't think any less of you if I tried."

"Fair enough," he said, and I stood up and left The Basement. When I was back out on the sidewalk, beneath the cloudy skies of that crappy winter day, I felt better, even if the cocksucker was probably right and I was likely marching off to my own doom. I took out my phone and called the Maidstone sisters. Berenice answered.

• • •

Yeah, so I took my leave of Mean Mr. B-he who on that day was ominously nameless. And then I was walking in a winter wonderland, just like the song says.

You don't need to hear the step-by-step trek (again, again, again) across the city. But I was surprised the Maidstone sisters were still squatting in the room above the deli on Atwells. Seemed pretty goddamn dumb to me. Might as well both draw a bull's-eye on their respective foreheads and be done with it. I'd like to say their carelessness was entirely beyond my giving half of two shits, but my plan-if I may be so bold as to actually call it that-sort of depended on the two of them staying alive long enough I could hand them over to Auntie H. I had a feeling she'd be even less happy getting nothing more than two dead bitches than getting nothing more than two live bitches.

I'm coming to the end of this tale, which should be pretty damn obvious, right? I mean, if for no other reason than there aren't a whole lot of pages remaining in the book that you're holding. And, no doubt, what's to come will leave a lot of folks dissatisfied, because they like clever plots and whatnot. But life doesn't come with plots, not even the lives of the dead and unnatural. Literary conventions spawn literary expectations, a sad fucking fact, I know. Someone has an incredibly fascinating life, and you read about it, and you want an ending that offers resolution, ties everything up all neat and tidy. But then that someone dies in a plane crash, or gets run over by a bus, or shot by some asshole robbing a 7-Eleven for twelve dollars and sixteen cents. This is how lives go. Yeah, even the lives of dead girls who are werewolves and are all caught up in demonic, necromantic intrigues.

But, see-and I'd think this should be clear by now-I'm here to say what happened that February, not to make anyone happy. Not to provide a "satisfying read." So, you'll like it or you'll lump it.

Whichever. I don't care.

So, here's what happened.

I went to the sisters, and on the way, I had a long-distance chat with Harpootlian.

I found the Maidstones pretty much as last I'd seen them, setting around on their old-money asses, waiting for someone-who would be me-to do their dirty work. Amity was all decked out in claret velvet and enough antique jewelry to sink an ocean liner. Berenice apparently wasn't quite up to putting on the ritz. Don't remember exactly what she was wearing. Not that it matters.

"You killed Lenore," Berenice said. She had her back to me, parked in front of one of the windows and peering down at the snowy street.

"Wait. You talking about when I killed her?" I paused and pointed at the bloody dent in the wall near the door. "Or about when I put down what you made of her after I killed her?"

"It wasn't your place," said Berenice Maidstone. "She was nothing of yours."

"Put a sock in it. Right now my willingness to endure more of you and your sister's bullshit is down to the thin edge of a wedge. No . . . it's not thin. It's gone."

Amity was sitting on the old sofa. There she sat like maybe she was Señora de las Sombras herself, Queen of fucking Shadows, and who was I to have come to the end of my rope with her?

"Where's the unicorn?" she asked. "We're out of time, Twice-Damned."

"That mean I don't get so much as another uck-fay from you and the unexpected baloney pony?"

The handy euphemism, that came courtesy B. Like I said, he's got a million of 'em.

"You're crass," Berenice said, and, Jesus, I had to laugh.

"Gotta admit, Big Sis, it's a surprise to them what ain't in the know. None of my business, I know, but since our tumble, I do find myself wondering just how-"

"A summoning gone wrong," Amity cut in, her voice gone sharp as the point end of a switchblade.

"Wow. That's some wicked blowback."

"Le godemiché maudit," Amity said. "Where is it? You've had more than enough time to discover its whereabouts."

I silently stared at her for a minute or so, and she stared right back with those murky Spanish-olive eyes of hers. Maybe she'd already gotten the drop on me, and all my problems would be over in a few more seconds, courtesy some snazzy dash of wizardry. Probably, I wished it'd go that way. Sure would have simplified my conundrum. You find all your electrons and protons getting suddenly scrambled and yanked apart as every atom in your body disintegrates, at least all life's little inconveniences and the burden thereof tend to go away. Silver linings, right?

"I don't have it," I told her. "I don't have it, I do not know where it is, and what's more, I don't want to know where it is."

Amity didn't look stunned. She just looked about a hundred shades of pissed off.

"Our agreement-" Berenice began, not turning away from her window.

I interrupted her. "Is now null and void. I've had enough of both of you. I'm getting off this crazy train, right now, today."

"Then get out of my sight," Amity said, spitting the words from between her filed cannibal teeth the way I've read some cobras can spit venom. "Get out of my sight before I decide my desire to undo you outweighs my concerns of retaliation from your employer."                       
       
           



       

"Did you just threaten me? Did you actually have the gall to sit there on your pampered, privileged, deluded ass and threaten me?"