CHAPTER 5
CURSES
OK, so she didn't look human, but of course she had to be. Elves are just in fairy tales and cookie factories, right? But I had a bad feeling about her; I don't like anyone sort of looking like a woman that might not really be a woman. I don't like there to be any question of gender for instance, like when you approach a broad in a bar and she turns out to be a fruit in drag. Yuck! Not that I got anything in particular against fruits or other weirdoes, but I don’t like being tricked that way, as it makes the normally wonderful art of picking up broads in bars a nasty business.
In this case the confusion was about species, not gender, and I didn’t like that either, in spades. It looked like this freaky dame had mutilated her body to the point where she didn’t even look human. She looked more like a rock star. It made me want to puke. Life is too damned complicated already without that kind of shit; seriously.
She traded stares with me for a few more long seconds, and then she finally opened her thin lips to speak. “I am Loranda; and you, shifty eyed one with the hideous hat, are the cursed human Jake Simon, as has been foretold,” she said with certainty, using better English than any of the rest of us put together could have said. She made a funny face, like she smelled something nasty. “And you also have hideous black cat hairs all over you. Don’t you know that is bad luck?”
Her voice had an odd pitch to it, I noticed, like the tinkle-tinkle of little bells in the wind or something. I don’t know how she did that. Worse, she flashed those weird, sharp pointy teeth. And hell, if anyone had shifty damn eyes it was her. “You've been reading too many comic books, lady,” is the best comeback I could manage, which was really lame. Ever notice how you always think about niftier things to say to somebody only after it’s too late?
She stared into my eyeballs for a few more seconds and then closed her own huge weird silvery ones and shook her silver-haired head. “Your curse is too strong for me to overcome, but at least I know for certain what we are up against: a troll. The same troll that escaped police capture last week."
"A troll? You mean just one troll?" asked Marks. "The same one in both cases? The bank caper is mixed up with that screwy shrunken billionaire story Kebony told us, the one that you're interested in also? The one where Kebony’s two prisoners turned invisible or something?"
Kebony grimaced. "They disappeared boss, like I reported. They don’t just turn invisible; they totally weren’t there anymore at all."
Marks looked at Joe like he was crazy. Crazier than usual, I mean.
The Elf lady turned her delicate head towards Kebony and smiled, showing the pointy teeth that gave me the shivers. "Teleportation is an easy enough trick for a troll, human. Be comforted that the troll curse was directed at this poor lost soul, rather than at you." As she said it she returned her gaze to me, while slowly shaking her head as though in pity. Her skin was more pale then that of those vampires you see in the movies, and her teeth sharper. This skinny little weirdo bitch gave me the creeps.
"Now wait a minute; what gives with this curse thing?" I asked, not that I believed the mumbo-jumbo she was spouting.
"I am not able to see the details of your curse, human," she said. "But it is not to be taken lightly. I suspect that you are doomed."
Doomed? Why that didn’t sound good at all! Despite my feeling that this was all hooey, her saying that I was doomed left me speechless for the moment. Just what the hell did ‘doomed’ mean, anyway? My head would fall off? I’d get holes in my socks? My fedora would blow away?
It didn’t faze Kebony though, who shifted gears a little, back to his own selfish concerns. He had never had a prisoner escape from him before and he was still really spun up over it. "You say one of my escaped prisoners is a troll?" he asked. “Why is that?"
"The feel of the Jake Simon curse tells me it was an evil troll. Also the shrinking of humans that was done suggests troll magic. The slashing of the auto tires was also within the power of such a one, and there is a stench of troll magic in the tires I have examined."
"So you claim that all of that was troll magic?" I asked, disbelieving. "Including all the shrinking?"
"Shrinking is a common troll magic; and a magic that a troll would need perform on himself, to pass for human, though a monstrously hideous human. His curse on you must have been revenge for your foiling of his evil schemes. The tires are still a puzzle though. Much of the magic done seems to be pointless. If I knew the troll's name, perhaps I could tell you more."
"They called themselves Mick and Grog," said Kebony. "No last names."
"Those are mere human names," complained Loranda.
Grog didn't sound too human to me, but I let it pass. "That Grog guy called his ugly buddy Mickahl at one point," I recalled.
The Elf broad's eyes bulged broader and a wicked smile appeared for just a moment, before disappearing. "That is poor news, humans, for Mickahl Al Calger is the most ruthless, powerful and cunning of all the invading trolls. The one with him was taller, but also unpleasant to look upon?"
I shrugged as I nodded. "They were both super ugly bastards." I didn’t add that she was nearly as bad.
"Grog would be the Giant Grogorath, the troll’s partner in recent centuries. They are the leaders of the evil invasion that we have come to your world to stop. Using their great evil magic, they could destroy your world. With our own magic we will defeat them and take them away."
"Right," I said, humoring her. I turned to the Lieutenant. "You actually listening to this magic mumbo-jumbo Marks? Where'd you find this crazy little broad anyway? In a box of cookies? Elves? Trolls? Giants? Invasions? I don't have time for this crap. I think I'll just go home now and wait for the tooth fairy." I grinned, showing some gaps where I was missing a few, but at least my teeth were normal, what was left of them.
"Simon, you owe the lady an apology," said Marks, steaming.
Lady? "I owe the city taxes, to pay your stinking salary Marks, and that's about it. I'm out of here."
As I stood up to go, Kebony answered his phone. "Holy farking shits!" he exclaimed loudly, as he hung up. You have to love the man’s colorful command of the language. "That was Elaine, out at the Bank. There's been another incident there, and it's a Lu-Lu."
We all urgently made for the door and headed for the bank, with Kebony and me pausing only briefly en-route to pick up some lunch-time burgers.
At Margie Wainwright's bank branch, a media circus was in the making. For more than a week the employees of the branch had been trying to put the tire incident behind them, but when Stacy Land left for lunch today she quickly returned in tears. “My brand-new car is destroyed,” she kept blabbing.
Damn right it was; it was turned inside out. Seats, steering wheel, dash, carpet, engine, etc. were on the outside; tires, muffler, fenders, headlights, etc. were on the inside. Elaine wasn’t amused, but I actually thought it looked kind of neat and funny as all hell. The gathering crowd thought so too, as there was a lot of laughing going on, along with the slack-jawed gawking. Stacy could probably sell this freak-show of a car for a huge bundle on the internet, I figured.
The so-called experts that the cops and the Feds called in were of course stumped. Lots of times experts just fake being stumped for a while, so us non-experts are led to believe that they're tackling some really hard shit, but I had a feeling that this time they actually were stumped for real.
Only Loranda the Elf dame wasn’t impressed. “A trivial spell for a troll, though as with the tires and the shrinking of people, I do not see the purpose. Of course, trolls are evil, and do evil things with no purpose other than to do evil.”
The cops cleared the joint of gawkers, including Elaine and me, while they questioned bank employees and customers, especially Margie. Loranda was clearly in charge; she had the cops jumping through hoops, even the pair of FBI goons that showed up. They all acted like she was top cop of the city, though she had just blown into town. I didn’t like the pushy little bitch.
Finally, as
everyone cleared out, Margie let Elaine and me into the Bank to talk with her while she locked up. At that point Grisim phoned and blamed her for everything. Margie put the whole thing on speaker-phone. “It’s like being captain of a ship, Wainwright," he told her. "You take the blame for anything that happens under your command. This plague is on YOUR house, it looks like to me. Besides, the Board and I have our own problems.”
After his call, Margie was closing the vault shut as Elaine and I spoke with her. Margie said that what happened to Stacy's car was no big deal; the woman's husband made good money and they could get another car. “He spoils her rotten,” she said. “It’s not fair that some people can have just about anything they want. I got sick and tired of hearing her gabbing about that car today. But Grisim is the real bastard; I can picture him now, sitting on his fat hairy ass. Him and the rest of the Board, all with fat, hairy asses.” Her eyes seemed to become black pits for a few moments, but after the vault door was completely closed, they were OK again, and she seemed to be in a better mood.
Man, that was a rough talk from a broad, even if she was pissed at everything. Women can be cold as ice, especially when they get their monthly. I voiced that opinion while Elaine and I drove home in the Ford, and she wasn’t very amused. Maybe it was that time of month for her too.
That night Kebony and I met at Sam’s Bar and exchanged notes on the case. Actually he did most of the talking but in return I had to buy most of the beer for the cheap son-of-a-bitch. He kept trying to hit me up for fifty bucks he said that I owed him but I wasn’t having any of that.
“That Loranda dame has taken over the whole damn thing,” he complained. “I can’t take a piss without her permission.” Poor Joe. What a baby.
“That’s why I quit the Force, Joe,” I told him, playing the sympathy card. “I could see lots of that shit coming. Computers, DNA, geek cops, women bosses, the whole works. Being a cop used to be a man’s job, for lugs like you and me. Mostly, we’d just go out and roust punks into squealing on other punks.”
“Yeah,” he said, smiling and staring off into space.
I bought him another brew, the cheap bastard. “Guy-guys like us; we gotta stick together, Joe. I bet we could solve this thing between us, me and you Joe, like in the old days.”
He was smiling more and nodding his head between chugging down beers. My beers, the bastard. We should have gone to an even cheaper joint, though there ain’t many joints cheaper than Sam’s.
“I could help you solve this case, Joe; that would show them what a real cop can do. This should be YOUR case.”
“Yeah,” he agreed. “Show them. Show them all!” I bought him yet another brew.
“No more women bosses then,” I said. “They’ll make YOU the boss.”
“Yeah,” he agreed. “Make me the boss. Lieutenant fucking Ke-bo-ny. Hell, Captain fucking Ke-bo-ny.” He grinned. He was even uglier when he grinned.
I knew that I had to grill him some more now before the big lug passed out. Besides, I was running out of dough. The bastard could sure put away a lot of beer. I might have been ahead if I’d have given the fifty to Joe in the first place, and let him buy his own brews. “Where does Loranda come from?”
“Never-never land,” he laughed. “She’s tinker-damn-bell, Jake, with a fucking attitude. I think even Marks hates her, but then when any of us talks with her we fall all over the place doing what she wants, she's so fucking beautiful. It's like she cuts off our brains at the balls; you know what I mean?”
Sure, I’d know what he meant, what guy wouldn't, if she was really beautiful. Maybe he meant that she was beautiful in some artsy sort of way, like a coral snake or a black Widow spider might be to a freaky geek, but not like a human female, not after you got a close look at her. Joe hadn’t even mentioned her freaky features though. "So you think she's attractive?"
"Attractive? You got to be shitting me, Jake. Instant hard-on for every guy in the Precinct."
I didn't think even my cop buddies were so perverted. "The ears I could maybe get by, but don't the chalky white skin and the big silver bug-eyes and the pointy teeth bother you just the least little bit?"
"Hah?" he said, with a puzzled look on his face. "What the fuck are you talking about Jake? What pointy teeth? What white skin and big silver bug-eyes?"
There was a spark of anger there, for sure, and I decided to shift lanes. “Not important. How did she get involved with the bank case?”
“The Feds brought her in. They got some kind of thing going on, to work with elves to catch trolls and other dudes that escaped from never-never-land or someplace like that there in far off Arizona, where they came from. They're especially interested in our troll. The elves are our friends, the Feds say. They’re here to help us with the bad damn trolls, the damn Feds say.
“Marks first said that the whole thing was crazy, that he wouldn't cooperate. But then she shows up and takes one look at him and she has him wrapped around her cute little finger.” Kebony chugged down more brew. "Every damn guy in the office is hot for her. You don't think Marks is boffing her, do you?"
“What does she say about the bank case?”
“She don’t tell me Jack, except to stay out of her fucking way, when I ain’t jumping this way or that way like she says. But she did say that you’re cursed, Jake, and she says that your client is too.”
“What?”
“She says that the Wainwright broad is glowing with magic and that the tires and that inside-out car have troll magic fingerprints all the fuck over them.”
I struggled to keep a straight face. Magic again. Right. “You don’t believe in that magic crap, do you?”
Joe burped, managed to stand up on shaky legs, then stumbled off to check the plumbing. I knew that wasn’t a good sign, him hitting the little boy’s room again. Sure enough, when he got back to our table he wouldn’t sit down, but he chugged down a final brew and burped again, loud enough to freak out the whole bar. “That’s three burps and three trips to the john,” he announced. “Jake buddy, you know what that means?”
Yeah, I knew. Joe promptly collapsed to the floor as limp, lumpy, and conscious as a giant sack of potatoes, and a dozen times as heavy. I got Benny the bouncer to help me carry the big lush to the Ford. Benny owns Sam’s Bar; I don’t think there ever was a Sam.
The next morning, I woke up with a splitting headache to a terrible but familiar noise and found that I was in my old private detective office. There were a couple of old sofa pillows nearby that the movers must have neglected to move, but I was stretched out on the bare hardwood floor. I must have drove us to the old office out of habit. I managed to crawl to the other room and found the expected source of the God-awful noise: Kebony, stretched out on his back on the floor, snoring. Grinding noises like an ailing wood chipper echoed through the place. It was worse than sleeping with the damn cat.
Judging by light coming through a window it was morning but I was still beat and decided to try to get back to sleep. I turned Joe over onto his stomach, pushed him into a corner, and threw the pillows over his head to deaden some of the sound. Or maybe he’d suffocate; I was too damned tired to give a shit.
That worked pretty good, but then my new cell phone rang, sending sharp shooting hangover pains through my head again. Margie was calling to tell me that that her boss Grisim was in the hospital with a yet-to-be-determined illness, and that Eric, one of her tellers, had also called in sick. Margie had actually been half expecting a call from Eric, as calling in sick was something that he did frequently. Eric was likable but not very dependable claimed Margie, and it irritated her that he cut work when it suited him.
Margie told me that this time he didn’t sound quite right. On the phone he sounded scared to her, and his voice was muffled. Concerned, she wanted me to drive her to his apartment, as she suspected something nasty and didn’t want to go alone. I would have rather gone back to sleep, even there on the hard floor with Kebony, but fifty bucks a day is fifty bucks a day. I grabb
ed my fedora and Joe and headed for the Ford.
I dropped off the more dazed than usual Kebony at the Precinct and headed for the bank to pick up Margie and drive to Eric's apartment. The kid lived in a cheap rental not very far from the bank. On the way to Eric’s place Margie told me that Eric irritated her sometimes, but that all-in-all he was a good kid.
The robe-clad dude that answered our knocking was the hairiest guy I ever saw. Eric’s roommate, I figured. Except for fearful brown eyes, foot-long curly brown hair cascaded from every square inch of his head, arms, legs, and feet. I felt all hot and itchy just to look at him.
"We're looking for Eric," Margie said, probably trying to keep the disgust from her voice and facial expressions but failing. "Is he here?"
Behind the hairy guy, the floor was covered with piles of brown hair clippings. I felt sorry for Eric and this hairy kid. This joint was no better than mine; not the kind of a dump where you'd like to try to bed some broad you were after.
"It's me, Mrs. Wainwright," spoke the hairy head. "I'm Eric."
We rushed the poor kid to the nearest hospital. Once again, the so-called experts were baffled and impotent. Eric grew hair at a rate of about an inch a minute, all over his body. Weird.
Margie said that it was ironic that it was his hair giving him trouble, since he was always messing with his hair at work, bugging her and everyone else. She figured it had to be another of Henry's magic curses. The man was after the Bank and everyone in it for firing him. Who else could it be? Margie cursed Henry out as we left the hospital, saying he’d have to have some shit slung back at him if he was going to sling it. Then we had lunch and I drove her back to her office, though she didn’t seem too happy to return there.
So I had a few questions building up for this guy Henry. Like what was his connection, if any, to all this crazy stuff? I decided to look him up after stopping in at my own office for fresh clothes. Maybe I could even find something to wear that the damn stinking cat hadn’t slept on.
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