Nocturn City 4 - Witch Craft by Caitlin Kittredge

Author:Caitlin Kittredge
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Published: 2009-08-31T08:00:00+00:00

Seventeen

Bryson’s house rested on the last lot of a dead-end street—somehow appropriate for him.

“Seven-seven-one Mulberry Way,” he said. “Home sweet fuckin’ home.”

I gazed out the windshield of his Taurus. The house was nondescript, a boxy two-story with blue asbestos shingles and planter boxes on the windows. Some late-blooming flowers were still in evidence.

“Well, come on,” Bryson grunted. “I ain’t getting any younger.”

“Could you just give me a minute?” I said. “Go ahead and put potpourri in the guest bathroom or something.”

“Fix us both a drink is more like it,” Bryson muttered. “You take Scotch?”

“Double,” I murmured. “No ice.”

After Bryson stumped inside I got out of his car and walked around his little yard, gnomes peeking at me from behind overgrown shrubbery with accusing ceramic eyes.

Of course I’d known dirty cops—this was Nocturne City, after all. Narcotics detectives were notorious for their “overtime bonuses,” a hundred or two hundred here and there for looking the other way while street dealers did business. There was a bathroom on the third floor of the Eighteenth Precinct that was a favorite spot of vice cops and their complimentary hookers. Nolan Dexter, a burnout homicide cop who’d been around my first year wearing a shield, took a fifteen-grand payout from a husband who beat his wife to death with a piece of his home gym in their Cedar Hill mansion.

Dexter never forgot the crime scene photos, and eventually that woman’s red, pulpy face and her blood-darkened eyes came to him in his sleep, while he drank his morning coffee, over and over again until he took an overdose of Percodan. He didn’t even have the panache to eat his gun.

I’d never liked dirty cops and I’d never considered being one myself. There was something fundamentally weak about crawling into bed with the people we were supposed to be keeping off the streets, something two-faced and parasitic about the whole situation.

And now someone under me, someone I trusted with my life every time we went into the streets, was working with the Thelemites.

I felt like I was going to vomit on one of Bryson’s tacky gnomes.

Instead, I went inside, up the cracked front steps, past the bank of junk mail in Bryson’s box, and into a small hallway wallpapered with yellow flowers and shepherd girls in green dresses.

The front room was crammed with overstuffed pink furniture done in thick shag, a console TV, and a mountain of laundry taller than I was.

“This isn’t the Hilton,” said Bryson, coming down the stairs and rattling the faded photographs on the wall. One of them was of a much younger and less muscular Bryson in a blue and white satin tuxedo—which I would have expected from him—standing next to a pretty round-cheeked woman in a wedding dress.

“It’s fine …” I said. “Is that your wife?”

“Ex, in the big time,” said Bryson. “That’s Annie. We got married in Las Vegas.”

“I’m shocked.”

Bryson took me by the elbow and pulled me away from the row of photographs. “Your room’s in the back, up the kitchen stairs.

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