Fiddleback Trilogy 1 - A Gathering Evil Read online

  "Please, tell me, Mr. Caine."

  "End product." I looked up and out the window. "I think you'll find your problem has just dropped off the edge of the earth."

  She smiled appreciatively, but kept a note of caution in her voice. "The world is round, Mr. Caine."

  "Only to those who don't know how to find the corners." I patted her hand and gently disengaged it from my arm. "I should not monopolize your time, for you have many other guests."

  "You are an interesting man, Mr. Caine. I had not expected to actually meet you. If not for the men who recently left my employ, I would not even know what you looked like." Her eyes narrowed as she looked me up and down. "The cost of a professional specialist is very high."

  "But the cost of an amateur is yet higher. Don't worry, your money was well spent."

  "As I expected, based on Fiddleback's excellent recommendation." She opened her hands and encompassed the entire party. "Please, enjoy yourself—despite your unfortunate choice of companion—and if you choose to bid on anything, I would find myself in debt to your generosity."

  I brought her right hand to my lips and kissed it gently. "It has been my pleasure to be of service to you."

  She answered with an elevated eyebrow, then she withdrew and quickly greeted those individuals she had snubbed when she saw me. Their resentment melted like wax beneath a blowtorch, or their spirit died beneath one of her withering stares. Within 10 seconds she had vanished from sight and part of me wondered if she had been there at all.

  "La Bruja took to you like a vampire to a hemophiliac." Alejandro sipped a slender glass of champagne. "Did she say anything useful?"

  My eyes half shut as I concentrated. "Whatever I was here to do, it was because she was paying the freight. She'd put the two guys from Ernesto's on me, but she made no apologies for their having tried to kill me. I wonder if they weren't working for another faction within Lorica as well?"

  "I don't know." He fingered the buttons on his double-breasted, navy-blue pinstriped suit jacket. "I do know there is still some factional fighting within Lorica. There have been a couple of purges."

  "Is there any chance you can find folks who knew her father before the ouster? Long-time aides who got booted after he was gone?"

  The art dealer nodded. "That's easily doable, I should think. Some of them even live in City Center."

  "Any in Eclipse?"

  "I can find out."

  "Excuse me, Mr. Higuera?" A middle-aged woman touched Alejandro on the right sleeve.

  He turned and smiled broadly at her. "Mrs. Rosson, what can I do for you?"

  She smiled and mouthed the word "Hello" to me, then spoke to Alejandro. "I don't recall ever seeing other surrealist work by Elizabeth Turner in your gallery before, but the piece being auctioned here is being offered by you. Is she another one of your exclusive discoveries?"

  Alejandro nodded conspiratorially to her. "I found her two months ago. She's been doing these pieces for years and just sticking them away. I've convinced her to part with some of them."

  Mrs. Rosson smiled sheepishly. "I must confess the piece she has here is already too much for me, but I would be interested in other examples of her work. Shall I call on your shop tomorrow?"

  Alejandro nodded solemnly. "I have two other pieces I've not yet framed. I will look forward to your visit." As she walked away, he looked back at me. "Sorry, that pays the rent. Anything else from Loring?"

  "She used the word 'Fiddleback' as if it were a code-name for someone. Sound any buzzers?"

  "No, I'm afraid not."

  "Maybe it will with some of those ex-employees, if you can find any."

  "We can hope."

  Marit came walking over and restaked her claim to my left arm. She wore a big grin on her face, and I sensed her mood had shifted greatly since she departed. "This is wonderful!"

  "Yes?"

  "There is the most ghastly piece over there—no offense, Alejandro—called 'With a Not in my Stomach,' by Elizabeth Turner. It's, well, it's . . ."

  Alejandro pointed toward the place where the painting had been set up. "You have to see this thing to believe it."

  Marit nodded in agreement, so the three of us cut through the crowd to look at this picture. It was a painting of a human form, but it was done in necrotic flesh tones with hints of the green-gray of dead skin. The figure's flesh appeared to be more rubber than skin and had been tightly wrapped up into a ball at the center of the piece. The contorted body's face was hidden in shadows, but it had a mouth, complete with clenched teeth, situated at the figure's right heel.

  I shivered. It was truly a horrible vision, yet I could sympathize with it because I saw myself in it. The hidden face was my lost identity, and all that it would take to unlock the mouth to spout the truth would be some trigger memory. The flesh being sloughed off was how I felt about trying to shed whatever I had been. Nerys Loring clearly felt she had hired me as an assassin to kill her father, and I might have actually come to do that, but I had no desire to be a murderer.

  "It is definitely an expressive piece," I offered.

  Alejandro smiled. "It spoke to me when I saw it. Hideous image, but excellent technique and command of anatomy."

  "But could you live with it in your house?" I asked him.

  He shook his head, and Marit giggled. "That's what is so delicious." She herded us back away from the piece before she said anything more. "I think it is morbid and creepy, but I've placed a bid on it. Nerys immediately topped my bid, so now I have a little war going on with her. She'll win, but it will cost her."

  I raised an eyebrow. "How do you know she isn't just bidding you up to stick you with the painting?"

  Our male companion shook his head. "Nerys never loses, except, perhaps, when her father overrode her and let Marit out of her 'non-competition' clause in her contract. That is the soul of their animosity. She will never give in."

  "Which means she'll have that thing to look at for the rest of her life," Marit hissed.

  Up on the 91st-floor balcony, I saw Nerys staring down at the painting. She nodded slightly and a new bid went up on the tote board. With that I saw a satisfaction on her face, but I knew it came from more than her having topped Marit's latest bid.

  She, too, identified with the painting and, I felt certain, would enjoy staring at it for hours on end.

  The next morning, when the elevator doors opened, I thought it certain I had descended into hell. The heat hit me with the force of a punch. I stepped out into it, hoping, expecting that I would pass back into another cool zone, but I did not. The blazing heat remained constant and, as I breathed in through my nose, I felt the air cauterize my nasal passages.

  Natch Feral crossed the street. "Welcome back to reality, Caine-man."

  "Good evening. . . ." I started to say to her, but I realized it was noon. "I mean . . ."

  "Save it. It's always night down here in Eclipse." She turned and walked away, silently willing me to follow her. "I think we have a line on a dude you'll want to jaw with. Gotta get Bat first, though."

  I nodded at her back and quickly caught up with her. At the party Nerys Loring made short work of Marit's bidding war, and Marit, bloodied but unbeaten, made a great show of retreating. Because Nerys had spoken with me for a short but visible amount of time, Marit nibbled on my ear as we left, suggesting Nerys might have won a battle, but the war had yet to be concluded.

  We returned to her home, and she apologized most eloquently for having used me so shamelessly to get back at Nerys.

  I awoke without remembering any dreams and left Marit to her well-deserved rest. In her media room I punched up the Municipal Library's online index service and sought any information I could find on "Fiddleback." The best thing I got was a very authoritative article on the brown recluse spider, which is also known by the name Fiddleback. While they are present in Phoenix, the black widow is much more prevalent, and fiddlebacks are treated pretty much like myths.

  Like Coyote.

&n
bsp; By 10 A.M., Alejandro called and said he had worked with Jytte to come up with a list of people who fit the parameters of Lorica old guard being retired when Nero Loring was Leared by his daughter. He said the majority of them were in retirement villas around the state, with their bills and "care" paid for by Lorica. He left no doubt in my mind that they were being held by Nerys until any information they had concerning the company had lost its market value.

  He did point out that Jytte had uncovered the name of a man who had been with Lorica for as long as the company had been around. Phil Costapain was a black man who had worked as a janitor for his full tenure at Lorica. The reason she added him to the list was because he was Nero Loring's first employee and Nero himself had attended the man's retirement dinner. She noted the two of them always took their vacations at the same time and Alejandro said she thought they might have been very good at keeping their friendship quiet.

  "Natch, do you really think you know where Costapain lives?"

  She nodded. "I do, but he's real scared of something. Word's been spread that he's dead."

  "Dead?"

  She shrugged. "There's dead and there's D-E-A-D, Caine-man. Costapain doesn't want folks finding him, so outsiders hear he's dead. I just happen to know better." She glanced at the street, then nimbly darted between the cars. On the other side, she looked back at me and shook her head.

  I waited for a bit more survivable break in traffic, then joined her on the sidewalk in front of a concrete bunkerish building. "I'm dying in this windbreaker and jeans. How can you be wearing so much?"

  Another shrug elevated and dropped the padded shoulders of her oversized leather jacket. Beneath it she wore a loose striped shirt and beneath that a dark green leotard. Her jeans had been expertly slashed in parallel lines from hip to ankle, revealing black Spandex-clad legs. Her white high-tops looked new and the laces certainly had never been tied.

  "Man, I've lived down here all my life. This is only the end of June. It don't get hot for another month. Damned slush duck." She jerked her head toward the bunker door. "C'mon, in here."

  I eyed the building with suspicion. "Where is 'here?'"

  "Here is 'The Trench.'" Natch jammed her hands in her pockets and headed for the door. "Bat works here."

  That little amount of information made me very dubious about the place, and stepping through the door confirmed everything I had imagined, and more. Because The Trench lacked sufficient light, the first thing I noticed about it was the reek of sweat and smoke and blood and beer. Human bodies huddled in shadows, slumped in chairs as if they'd been lashed to them by the shoulders and had their spines removed. The Du Drop Inn was to this place what the Lorica reception had been to my encounter with the Reapers.

  Realizing my eyes would only adjust to the gloom in geological time, I followed Natch into The Trench by feel. I caught, in the backlight of a cash register, a glimpse of a bar running the length of the left wall. Avoiding waitresses who looked gorgeous except in the eyes, we plunged deeper into The Trench until we approached what looked like, to me, to be a line of people facing the absolute blackness of the back wall.

  Then the lights in The Trench went on.

  The bar had taken its name from its most interesting aspect. In the back a pit had been dug that bottomed out about 20 feet below the level of the floor. The sides had been carved into narrow terraces, each being fitted with a railing that had little holders for plastic cups of beer. At either end, up at floor level, catwalks extended over pit-level corridors to let the servers get from the bar to the patrons watching the pit.

  The rectangular pit had been fitted with boards and plexiglass walls that looked to me to have been salvaged from some hockey rink. Where the glass had been shattered, chicken wire or strips of chain-link fencing replaced it up to the level of the bar's floor. Above that, secured to the bar's ceiling, more chain-link fencing formed a dome that made the pit a world of its own.

  Natch led me along the catwalk on the right side, and a bouncer at the top of the stairs let the two of us past. We descended to the level of the floor and stood in the corridor. Through the blood-streaked plexiglass at the end of the pit, I saw Bat turn and face the last two of his opponents.

  Bat had looked big when I'd met him two days ago, but in the center of the pit he looked Herculean. Blood dripped from his bare chest and washed over his bare legs, but I knew it was not his. His muscles tensed as one man came in and his whole body twisted as he smashed a pile-driver right hook into the man's ribs. I winced when I heard something pop, then cringed as Bat's left fist arced in and nearly twisted the man's head off with a solid punch.

  The last man had, at one time, been trained as a martial artist. He flew through the air aiming a kick at Bat's head. Bat, ducked his head out of the way, but held his left forearm up to split the flying man's legs. The collision of bone with groin involuntarily doubled over a number of the spectators and brought an agonized screech from the fighter. But before he could fall to the ground, Bat's right hand closed on bunched muscles at the man's spine, then he took a run at the wall and slammed the man against the plexiglass.

  Then he pulled him back and did it again and again and again. When the man hung like a limp rag in his hands, he tossed him aside and began to look around the pit for another victim. The other four men hastened their belly crawls to the door at the far arena end, and Bat encouraged them with brutal kicks. With a wicked smile on his face, he broke the outstretched arm of one man reaching for the doorway, then laughed loudly as the man begged for mercy.

  I looked at Natch, and she shrugged. "Amateur night. It's never pretty."

  Bat walked back to where the martial artist lay. He picked him up by the waistband of his pants, then dragged him face-first through the dirt before tossing him out the arena door like a sack of garbage. Then, alone in the arena, he raised his hands in triumph. Half the crowd roared in his favor, but other people taunted him and threw plastic cups of beer at him. They splashed against the wire to mix with the blood and the dirt in the arena, but left Bat untouched.

  As Bat turned to soak in the adulation of the crowd, I saw his eyes. He watched the people surrounding him like a wolf studying a flock of sheep. They were prey to him, and he'd clearly not had his fill in breaking the five who had faced him. Furthermore, and by far the most chilling of my observations, I knew he was not in the pit for the money or the praise or the need to prove himself at the top of the food chain.

  He fought because he loved inflicting pain on others.

  The lights dimmed again, and Bat left the arena. In the half-light I saw the steel mask of cruelty on his face soften when he saw Natch. It flashed back on his face as he looked over at me, and in that flash of his dark eyes I knew I had an open invitation to fight him any time I wanted.

  I shook my head. "If I want a sanity trial, I'll have it in a court of law."

  Natch looked confused for a moment, then stepped back beyond the catwalk and opened a door into a locker room. Bat cut immediately to a shower cubicle in which a half-dozen nozzles hit him with a harsh spray from various angles. The mud melted off, and the blood ran down the drain. Bat shut off the water, shook his head to flick water from his hair, then stepped out of the shower and went for a locker.

  Natch tossed him a towel that had probably once been fleecy and white. Bat doffed his boxing trunks and dried himself off, though he seemed more interested in any blood the towel absorbed than he did getting dry. That made sense in that, in the heat, evaporation would draw the water off quickly enough and summon sweat to replace it.

  The towel came away clean, but Bat looked to have a nasty bruise developing on his left shoulder. He sat on the bench beside his locker and opened the door. Whereas I expected to see the sort of pin-up pictures decorating other open lockers, inside Bat's door I saw a drawing of a winged angel bearing a spear, driving a demon off a cloud. Bat touched the picture reverently with his right hand, then crossed himself.

  He looked over at me. "Ask."


  I frowned. "Ask?"

  "What do you want to know about me?" He pulled on some underwear. "Get it over with."

  "Okay. Why 'Bat?'"

  He shrugged, but Natch answered for him. "His real name is Chwalibog Kabat. It's Polish—his parents came over just before Eastern Europe opened up."

  "Bat is easier, and folks don't get it wrong." I nodded, understanding why folks would not even want to try to pronounce his name and risk offending him. His background also made understanding the angel picture easier. "St. Michael?"

  Bat nodded.

  The patron saint of warriors. Being Polish meant he was probably raised Catholic, and that created a rather strange paradox. Here was a Christian who followed the teachings of the Prince of Peace, yet he worked as a pit fighter because he loved hurting people. Thinking back on what I'd seen in the pit, I had no doubt that whoever his confessor was, that priest got hazard-duty pay, and Bat got penance that didn't quit.